Hood

by Toby Venables

  “Clearly your self-control is greater than mine,” muttered Mélisande.

  There was a sound from beyond the door, a ringing clatter of metal striking the floor. Gisburne knew from the sound exactly what it was.

  “Do you normally use knives in a library?” he whispered—but the old nun just stared back at him, bemused.

  They positioned themselves about the door as Gisburne drew his sword, turned the key in the lock and shouldered the door open.

  None could have been prepared for what they saw.

  A nun—the Prioress, Gisburne was sure—leapt back in shock, something falling from her hands to clatter on the stone flags with a splash of red. She stared from one to the other, and whimpered.

  Upon a table before her, Hood lay spread out, dressed only in a white linen shirt, his arms stretched out like the Christ. The veins in both wrists had been opened, and as Gisburne stepped forward he saw that his blood was draining into cups on the floor: one brimming full, one—as yet—half empty.

  A third cup lay where the Prioress had let it fall. Her quivering mouth was ringed in dripping red.

  The old nun crossed herself.

  Gisburne stepped forward, feeling the gorge rise in his throat. The Prioress whimpered again, shook her head and backed away, Hood’s blood glistening upon her hands and face. Then, as he looked about the gloomy chamber, he saw its shelves filled with horrors: mummified body parts, pieces of skin—possibly human, aborted foetuses in jars, scored bones. Weird fetishes fashioned from dead animals. If this was a religion, it was not any that Gisburne knew.

  “It is his power,” she whined, as if it explained everything. “The Lord of the Forest... We must drink of it... It raises us up... Makes him part of us!”

  “Do you not see, woman?” barked Gisburne. She jumped back at his words. “Do you not know?”

  She frowned, and whimpered, and moved her bloody hands about.

  “Upon his neck,” said Gisburne. “Look there!”

  She leaned over, poking at the slender band about his neck with a crimson finger, speaking in a pathetic voice. “But... there is nothing but a thong of leather...”

  “Look again!” roared Gisburne, and stepped forward. The woman flinched. He reached around the back of Hood’s neck and dragged the copper disc on the thong to the front.

  “See?” he said, turning it towards her. For a moment, her face was blank; then realisation dawned, and she took a step back. Behind him, the old nun uttered a cry.

  “Do you know it?” he said. She shook her head—put bloody hands to her ears. “Do you recognise it? You should! He’s part of you already, woman. Your own son!”

  Her head still shaking, she gave a wail which seemed like it would dissolve into tears, but which instead just grew and grew into a horrifying scream, and she burst past them, habit flying, out through the cell and into the cloister, screaming and screaming like some crazed animal.

  The company ran in pursuit and were just in time to see her stop within the courtyard—suddenly still, suddenly silent. It appeared she had run into the embrace of a young nun, whose presence had miraculously quelled her madness. Then she slithered to the ground, her own blood pooling about her, and the cause of the miracle became plain. The young nun, whose haunted face showed no emotion, was gripping a knife, now wet with her Prioress’s blood.

  The old nun, hobbling behind them, looked on in horror. “Oh, God! Sister Matilda!” she said, her voice quaking. “Oh, God!”

  Another cry went up—from Mélisande, this time. “Gisburne!”

  He turned; she was still by the cell door.

  “It’s Hood...”

  He ran back, his body feeling heavier than it had ever felt in his life, a new, indefinable dread growing in him.

  Hood’s body was gone from the table in the demonic chamber. The door to the gardens was now open, a spattered trail of blood leading through it.

  He followed. Up ahead, Hood staggered drunkenly through the graveyard, powered by some impossible reserve, as if somehow blessed with ten times the life of a normal man.

  Gisburne sheathed his sword, unslung his bow, and drew an arrow from his quiver. But as he placed it on the bow, watching the white figure reel into the meadow, a great tiredness came over him. His shoulders slumped. What was the point? What reason did he have now?

  And, exhausted, he walked on through the graveyard, towards the spot where Hood, his strength gone, finally collapsed.

  They stood over him as he lay, his breathing laboured, the bloody saviour of the greenwood.

  “Please...” he whispered, his voice husky. “A bow...”

  It was so absurd that even now Gisburne laughed. “Are you mad?”

  “Please...” said Hood. There was genuine pleading in his voice. It was the first time Gisburne had ever heard it in him. He tried to raise himself up, but slumped back. His breathing was coming fast now, his face paler than his shirt. “One... last... shot,” he said. “I lived... by the bow. Let the bow... now decide... where I will be buried.” He gestured towards the graveyard. “Not over there!”

  “No,” said Gisburne. “Do you think me a fool?”

  Hood looked pained. “Guy... Please...”

  In frustration, Galfrid stepped forward. “Give him the damned bow!” he said, snatching it from Gisburne and thrusting it and a single arrow into Hood’s hands.

  At the feel of them, the outlaw looked suddenly content, at peace. With feeble hands he placed the arrow upon the string. “Where this arrow lands,” he said, “there shall I lie...” Then, with a sudden show of strength that made the hairs on Gisburne’s arms stand on end, he drew the bow all the way to his ear—then turned towards them and loosed the arrow.

  It smacked full force into Galfrid’s chest. Eyes wide, the squire staggered backwards and fell. Gisburne cried out. Mélisande and de Rosseley rushed to him as Hood’s laughter rang out across the quiet meadow.

  “That’s where I shall lie,” he chuckled, pointing a feeble finger. “In the heart of an Englishman!”

  They were the last words he ever uttered. With a howl of anguish, Gisburne drew his eating knife and plunged its slender blade deep into Hood’s heart. He slumped to his knees, staring into Hood’s shocked, but still smiling face.

  Gisburne’s heart thumped, and his breaths came hard and fast. He looked at Galfrid. His face, though in every detail familiar, looked strange and waxy—not like his old squire at all. In the strange, numb silence, Mélisande and de Rosseley seemed to be trying to help; to remove the arrow, to treat the hurt. He wanted to go to him, to speak with him, to hear some last words.

  But there would be none. For Gisburne knew that Galfrid was already dead.

  His mind reeled. He leaned over Hood, drew close to his face. Was there still life there? He placed both hands on the end of the knife and, with clenched teeth and a growl of rage, pushed it deeper still, until the black bog-oak handle all but disappeared into the welling, bloody wound.

  A last hiss of air sounded in Hood’s throat, and the cold light in his eyes was gone.

  It was then that Gisburne saw it. The copper token—the worthless disc that had been Hood’s only link with his origins—lay upon the outlaw’s blood-drenched shirt. He had seen it a thousand times as he lived and fought at Hood’s side—in Sicily, in Thessalonika, through the Holy Land. But the crude design he had seen so often made sense to him only now. For there, in rough pointillé work, was the image of a flower.

  Rose... Hood’s horse. The whore in Jerusalem. The name he gave to every woman he ever grew close to. The secret to the enigma had been right there, under his nose, the whole time. From the very first moment he had met him in Syracuse, at the inn under the sign of the blue boar.

  Staggering to his feet, Gisburne began to laugh. Mélisande turned to him. She may even have said something, but he was only dimly aware of it. He could see only the disc clearly. Everything around it—around him—was blurring. He gripped it and yanked it free, chuckling like a f
ool, rubbing his thumb—wet with Hood’s blood—over the dirty, corroded surface and turning to the light as if there were somehow more to be drawn from it, some magic yet to be unleashed.

  If there was, it was of the darkest kind.

  For as he looked at the curious little flower, he saw that it was no rose at all. Though it bore a superficial resemblance, some of the petals were tucked and turned, stylised to fit within a circle.

  Hood had even distorted that truth. Ten thousand cursory glances had confirmed and reconfirmed what one close examination would have revealed to be false. He had seen what he wished to see, coining a legend—one told by him to him, and him alone, and all of it a mistake. A lie.

  Gisburne laughed all the harder—he wondered if he would ever stop.

  He turned the little disc between his blood-sticky fingers, and in his mind, the awkward little design started to unfurl, the petals returning to their proper shape. It began to look like something he had seen before.

  Planta genista. Common broom.

  Gisburne flung it wildly from him, as if it had burned his flesh—as if it were noxious poison. It flew, spinning in the air, the broken thong trailing behind, landing with a plop in the still water of the pond.

  He stood for a moment, swaying, staring after the cursed token—Hood’s final joke. The joke of which even Hood himself was not aware.

  He saw Galfrid’s dead body laid out upon the grass like a crude effigy. Mélisande’s hand reaching out to him. Her face was clear for an instant—her mouth moving slowly. She was talking to him, but he could not hear what she was saying.

  Then the world rocked and span and slipped off its axis. And the black fell about him once more.

  LXXV

  GISBURNE WOKE FROM a vivid dream on a pallet of straw, a sliver of sunlight glancing through the tiny window.

  The feelings from the dream were still with him—fresh and vital as the day—and for a moment he lay gazing at the mote-speckled air, not daring to move for fear of dissipating them.

  Galfrid had been alive, and was helping him fill the stone horse trough in the top paddock. It was sunny—he could smell summer in the air—and Galfrid was telling him a rambling, nonsensical story, which Gisburne—for reasons he could not unravel—had found absurdly funny. At some point—the passing of time was indistinct—he felt a hand on his back, and he knew it was Mélisande. Her cool fingers pressed the sun-warmed linen against his skin, and though he could not see her, he knew, with the same certainty that he knew his own name, that she was smiling.

  It was not like most dreams. There was nothing strange or disjointed about it, nothing outlandish. It had all been quite normal, quite real. But it had another quality which, in his experience of dreams, was rare indeed. For he had felt utter contentment—complete, all-encompassing joy.

  It had been real, for as long as it had lasted. He had believed it.

  Never had he felt so reluctant to wake. He yearned to return, knowing it was impossible. And now, as he savoured its lingering impressions, he was losing even those. He was returning to the hard world, unwillingly accepting that what had just passed was all illusion.

  He blinked in the light. He was in the Priory at Kyrklees. Blind in one eye. Galfrid was dead, and Asif. And Hood and Tancred too. But he—he was alive. It made little sense to him. He did not even want to try to make sense of it.

  He had no idea what day it was or who was here with him; sleep—or perhaps the dream—had made his last waking memories seem impossibly distant. He was not entirely sorry about that.

  Ross and Mélisande had been alive, last he remembered. He felt a sudden need to see them—but he had no idea whether they were in the next room or a hundred miles away. Part of him actually hoped for the latter; at least, then, he could inflict no further suffering on them.

  He dragged himself up, his body heavy, his balance uncertain. His clothes, some close to rags, were folded and in a neat pile upon a stool, his sword stood without its scabbard in the corner, and his scrip bag hung upon a plain iron hook on the back of the low door. All his battered goods had been treated with care but for his mail coat, which sat in a pile on the rush-covered floor as if those here had not had the first idea what to do with it. He stood and pissed in the pot at the end of the bed, judging the distance badly. Then, with unsteady steps, his blind eye disorientating him, threw on his clothes—all but his sword and abandoned mail—and wandered outside.

  Beyond the herb garden, in a small graveyard, an old nun stood by a new grave. He remembered her: the old nun who had welcomed them. As he approached, she turned; old she may have been, but her hearing was sharp as a cat’s.

  “You’re awake,” she said with a smile.

  “So it would seem.”

  “My name is Briga. We met before, if briefly. It would seem I am now the Prioress. For the time being, anyway; we’ll see what is decided when the dust has settled.”

  “Have I been asleep for long?” he said. He felt somehow foolish asking it.

  “Two days. Do you feel well? Rested? No signs of fever?”

  But Gisburne’s gaze was on the mound of newly dug earth. There were fresh flowers placed there—primroses, wood anemones and the first wild daffodils of spring. Briga turned her attention back to it.

  “Your squire,” she said. And with those words, the reality of it—the awful finality—suddenly hit him.

  “Yes,” he said, though to what purpose, he did not know.

  “We buried him in sight of the chapel.” Briga’s tone was neither severe nor sentimental, but had a simplicity and directness that Gisburne found immediately reassuring. “Lady Mélisande told us he would have liked that.”

  He thought to ask if she was here, but his attention was caught by two more mounds of earth some distance away—a deliberate distance, it seemed to him. Two more graves; mother and son. On these, there were no flowers.

  “And them?” he said.

  Briga glanced at them with distaste. “Those I shall not be visiting so often. But I suppose everyone deserves their plot.”

  Gisburne gazed beyond the edge of the graveyard, to the meadow where both Hood and Galfrid had died. In the spring sunshine, with insects buzzing, it seemed too idyllic to have played host to such horrors. He caught sight of the reeds by the pond, and remembered: the token, the flower. He shuddered, and pushed the memory down deep.

  The little woman reached up and felt his forehead, then touched the bandage. “Your eye is healing well. You’re lucky.”

  Gisburne snorted. “Lucky?”

  “I’ve seen plenty of men die from lesser wounds.”

  “I’m not allowed to die.”

  Briga chuckled. “You think God has a purpose for you?”

  “I don’t flatter myself by thinking that.”

  The old woman’s smile vanished. “It’s not flattery. God has a purpose for us all. The trick is working out what it is.” She stared off past the jumble of crooked stones to the fresh graves.

  “Mine was to be tested by her. Yours was to be tested by him.” She looked up into his face. “Your friends told me all about it, Sir Guy. Though I had heard your name before. In stories.”

  Gisburne shuddered again—at the thought of being the subject of stories, at what nonsense they might contain.

  Reading his expression, she waved her hand dismissively. “I took those with a pinch of salt,” she said. “And I was right to. I already suspected he wasn’t what everyone said he was.”

  “I fear we brought disaster upon this place.”

  She shook her head in dismay. “Disaster was already here,” she said. Then she turned to him, her face open and candid. “Do you know what makes me most angry? Not that she did evil; not that alone. It is that she persuaded people to believe in her. That she persuaded me. In all my years, this is the thing of which I am most ashamed. It was I who championed her, in spite of everything. I was so proud when she became Prioress. Sister Elizabeth—the Prioress before her—was never convinced. She
said she was, but in truth she sensed something wrong, from the very start. And I—through naivety or vanity—refused to see it. For thirty years...” She shook her head again. “God, what have I done? How many have suffered at her hand, while my back was turned?”

  “You cannot blame yourself for the sins of others.”

  “Can I not? It was I brought her here, Sir Guy, all those years ago. I. And it was faith made me do it. Do you know Vézelay?”

  “I do.”

  She nodded. “I was returning from there—from pilgrimage—full of all the things such a place inspires. You know the Magdalene’s relics reside there?” She sighed. “I had always loved the Magdalene... Then, passing through the Vexin, en route to the coast, I wandered into chaos. Soldiers everywhere. The land scoured. The place was on the brink of war.”

  “Old King Henry,” said Gisburne distantly. “The King of France and the Count of Blois were pointing their lances at Normandy, but the Old King was having none of it. My father gave me chapter and verse.”

  “Well, I took refuge in a wood. A curious idyll, in the midst of it all. And there was this girl, barely more than sixteen. Barefoot, standing, staring. No bag or purse. No sign of how she came to be there. Just as if she had dropped out of the sky.” She chuckled, once. “She had been used by men, I did not doubt. But when I spoke to her, she answered in English. Perhaps she had been among the camp followers. I never did know. I’m not sure she did. But then she said her name was Mary. And I... I saw it as a sign. I had come from the shrine to Mary Magdalene, and here was this ragged, lost girl... She said she couldn’t remember where she was from. So she came back with me. And that wood, I learned, was called Le Bois d’Espeir—the ‘wood of hope’—after the fresh water spring that rises there. That fuelled my faith further still. And, for want of anything better, she became Mary of Hoppewood. I took her in, protected her. She must have had the babe growing in her belly even then.”

  Gisburne thought of the copper token. The flower that Hood—impatient, oblivious Hood—had always taken to be a rose. The secret at which it hinted was hidden now in but two places on Earth: sunk at the bottom of a pond, and in Gisburne’s heart. And there it would stay.