by Karin, Anya
The old man grunted aloud as he walked around to the front of the room and faced the gallery, his back to the mayor.
“Everyone here,” he said, ignoring the mayor’s jab, “knows the story. And what Your Honor says is true. My son and daughter, who used to work my land when I couldna do it, they are gone. My grain barely grows and the few cows I’ve left can barely give milk. My horses canna work with so little food as they have, and so plowing is next to impossible.”
“Get to the point,” Willard said with a heavy sigh. “We’ve heard this a thousand times by now.”
“The point,” Gregory Morgan said, “is this. This has always been my life. Our soil, ‘tisn’t the best here, it’s rocky and sandy and hard to grow much of anything. Feed for the horses and the sheep is expensive at the best of times, and almost impossible to get during a drought or a famine. But, all that bein’ true, as it has been true for most of my seventy-six years, this year is the first I’ve not been able to pay my tax.”
A low grumble spread through those listening to him. Kenna furiously scribbled down what he said, trying to keep up. When she glanced up from her notebook, she saw Rollo doing exactly the same thing, but with the added challenge of going back and forth from an inkwell to his paper, and taking care not to smudge what he wrote.
Judging from the looks the people in the courtroom had, even if this story had been told before, it wasn’t done in quite this way.
“If you can’t pay the tax, Morgan, you-”
“If you’ll excuse me Your Honor, I remained quiet while you berated me in front of God and everyone. If you’re a man of decent manners you’ll be doin’ me the same courtesy.”
Fire blazed in Willard’s eyes and he once again gripped his podium with such ferocity that either it, or his strained fingers seemed ready to break.
“You’ll not speak to me that way, farmer. I’m a man of the Crown. The King himself put me here, and you’re just-”
“Ach, just a farmer. A poor farmer. Aye I’m well aware of what I am, Your Honor.” Morgan turned to face the bench instead of the gallery. “And yet I continue to address you as Your Honor instead of callin’ you any of the long list of foul names what I’m bitin’ my tongue to keep from sayin’.”
The fingers on one of Willard’s hands scratched the top of the podium and curled into a tight fist. He collected his quill, dipped it, and wrote something forcefully on the paper before him.
“Continue, but mind your tongue, Morgan.”
Turning back to the audience, the old man nodded.
“I’m tired, my friends. I am old and tired and canna hardly awake in the morning without thanking God that I’m not yet dead.” Several voices laughed. “But the tax – all of the taxes various and sundry – which seem to appear violently in place of the old ones paid, like a money-eating hydra, they’re killing me faster than age.”
Kenna saw the mayor begin to speak, but the old man continued his eloquent dissection.
“We’ve never seen taxes such as these.” He paused while someone applauded softly and a couple of canes were knocked against the floor. “Even a year past, we’d not have dealt with this sort of grubbing. Our Mayor Willard used to be a fair man; a man who liked his people and was liked in return. We got along, did we not?”
Many in the audience nodded assent and a few others agreed under their breath.
“That was a different time, Mr. Morgan, and you know-”
“You ate of my food, Mayor Willard. You came to my house one evening, not so long ago – scarcely a year and a half – on the eve of my daughter’s wedding and you blessed the union, brought us a gift of a goose, and ate it with us. You remember that, do you not?”
“I do, but-”
“We ate and drank,” he continued again cutting off the mayor, “until only hours before the sun rose. You were with us the whole time. Do you remember what you said then? Do you now?”
By this time, the audience was so silent that a tap of a boot heel echoed off the walls.
“I...no, I don’t, but I fail to see the point of all this, old man. That was long ago. The rules have changed.”
“We have differing opinions, Your Honor, on what makes somethin’ long ago. We remember things here. In Scotland, if you do a right, you’re always owed one in return. If you do a wrong, and you admit to havin’ done it, you’re forgiven as soon as the words roll from your tongue. But if you don’t...”
“Get to the point, Morgan. We don’t have all day. What is it I said that was so obviously important?”
Both Kenna’s pencil and Rollo’s pen scratched furiously to record the exchange. People in the gallery were beginning to grumble again.
“What you said to me wasn’t complicated, nor was it profound. What you said, was ‘Greg’ – for that’s what you used to call me, if you remember – ‘Greg, there are men with honor in this world and men without. There are men who do as they say and those who talk double and go back on their word.’ Do you remember now, Your Honor?”
“I suppose so, what of it? The words ring as true today as they did then.”
“Aye, they do, Your Honor. And what else they do is show just how much you’ve changed. A man what used to be the former – an honorable, decent man who worked hard and righted wrongs – he’s become the latter. He’s now the one whose doin’ them. You’re trying to bury us, Willard, and I dinna know why but you’ve lost your honor. You’re a man shamed and disgraced, and you canna help but take out your anger on us. You’re trying to kill us, to drive us from our land.”
He said more, but the crowd roared so loudly that none of the words Gregory Morgan said were audible in the back of the room. But still his mouth moved and the one of his hands not grasping desperately the top of his cane gesticulated wildly.
“Enough!” Willard roared over top of the din of noise. “Enough!”
He banged his gavel with such vigor that the little wooden circle he struck it against bounced off of his podium and to the floor, but still he kept right on slamming. As Kenna stared with her mouth agape, the normally collected, almost menacingly cool mayor got flushed, angry, and beat the hammer so violently against the top of his podium that little bits of wood flew off.
“Morgan, I’ll not hear any more of this! You can’t manage to pay your taxes and now you’ve decided to insult an officer of the court in his very own court! I’ve had enough of this impudence. Bailiff, take that man to jail. He’ll sit for...a fortnight. Now!”
He resumed slamming his gavel over and over until Gregory Morgan had been escorted away.
“It’s under his house, you know. The jail.”
Kenna turned to see Lachlan, the lanky man from Duggan’s inn.
“What? The jail is under his house?”
“Aye, it used to be they used the one here, right outside the Hall, but when all of this happened, Willard started keeping people under his house. He’s got a guard amountin’ to a small army there too.”
Hastily, Kenna wrote down everything the lanky man said to her, and then looked up to see Rollo had left his desk and gone up to the front, where he was trying to either calm the mayor or get his attention.
“Shut up! Quiet, all of you!” The mayor shouted over top of the din. “I’m finished! You can thank Morgan’s stunt for making all you who have reasonable requests wait until next week for me to hear them. That’s it, court is dismissed, enough!”
It was a few minutes before everyone realized that when Willard had left through the back door that he meant what he said, and had no intention of returning.
“This is how it goes, lately,” Lachlan said under his breath. “We’d best remove ourselves afore things begin to fly.”
As soon as he spoke, someone threw a lap-table, and then someone else flung a chair. Kenna and Lachlan ducked out the back as quickly as they could, and emerged from the Town Hall at the same time as a desk hit the wall and shattered, breaking a window and judging by the howl that came after, someone’s hand.
“Why are you here, lass? This town’s not well. You’d be served to keep moving.”
“No,” she said shaking her head. “That’s not the way Gavin and I...we can’t just let-”
“Gavin? I thought you said his name was something else.”
She sucked an exasperated breath, irritated at her complete inability to keep her and Gavin’s aliases straight for any length of time at all. At least Gavin is terrible at this, as well, or I might be embarrassed.
“Wait a tick, lass. Gavin? He isn’t Gavin Macgregor is he? I’ve heard...you know people like us, simple people...common people, we know of him.”
“Well...aye, he is. And I’m Kenna Moore.”
Lachlan’s jaw dropped.
“I had a thought about it. Meanin’ all the news of that Laird Macdonald being disgraced and the town sheriff being carted off just a couple of days before you two showed up. You matched the descriptions given, and there was even a bit of a flatterin’ sketch of you in the paper. But him, they said he always wore a heavy cloak with a hood, just like Robin of old.”
“You’ve to keep quiet, Lachlan,” Kenna said. “We’re trying to make our way back north, but...things...keep happening. Right?”
“You’ve got nothing but my confidence, lass. He’s a hero to us, your Gavin is. I dinna what we’ve done to deserve your attention, but I promise you that anythin’ you need, I’ll do. Egan too, you can trust him, no matter what sort of foulness he spews.”
“Thank you Lachlan. You’re a good man. I’m sure we’ll need your help – or anyone’s – but to be honest with you I don’t know what we’re doing or even if there’s anything to be done.”
“Please help us,” he pleaded. “The mayor, he’s got us enslaved. We canna leave town, we canna pay our taxes.”
“You canna leave town?”
“He charges us for that, too! Road use, he says. It’s a damn shame what’s happened.”
“Alright,” Kenna said. “Nothing to be done right now, but when Gavin gets back from Edin-”
“He went to Edinburgh? Is he getting everyone else? I read that he’s got a gang runnin’ with him. A man called John with some kind of hand problem, and then a couple of others the paper didn’t name.”
Kenna sighed heavily. Lachlan took the hint.
“Ach, I’m sorry lass, I willna press anymore. I know I’ve said too much already. But just know that whatever you do, your secrets will be safe with me – with this town. We need you and Gavin and the rest of them more than you can possibly know.”
“No,” Kenna replied. “After what I just watched in that courtroom, I’ve got a right good idea of just how bad things are. But Lachlan, just keep your head down, and don’t tell anyone. Do you understand?”
“Anything you need, Miss Moore, anything at all.”
She thought for a minute, and when Lachlan made to leave, she grabbed his shoulder. “I’m famished.”
A smile crept across his lips. Kenna knew his sort. He really just wanted to help, but felt powerless. Even giving him a small favor to do, she knew, would do wonders for him.
“As luck would have it, one of the few things Lachlan knows is about food. C’mon lass, I know an inn with a fine array of sausages and a big, round bartender not far from here.”
Even with his jovial grin, Kenna sensed the pain behind his words. If there was any question in her mind about what was to be done, it faded as she followed her new friend.
What exactly to do, though, remained a mystery.
Five
Edinburgh Road North
August 17, Just Before Dawn
The sound of a horse’s hooves startled John awake.
His first move was to shield Lynne from whatever it was that had crept up on them in the dark of night, and his second was to yank the long knife from his boot and get to his feet.
“What’s wrong, John? Is someone there?” Lynne said from behind him.
“Shh! Stay down.”
Looking over to their snuffed-out campfire, Two-fingers counted the lumps. One for everyone – Ben, Olga, Elena, Rodrigo – and then Lynne was behind him. So it wasn’t one of them. In the darkness of night he couldn’t see much anything else. The moon was fat, round and silvery, but the little clutch of trees they’d picked to set up camp meant that all it did was cast shadows.
“Someone’s out there,” he said, tapping Ben on the shoulder.
“Who?”
“Well, if I knew that, I would tell you. Keep everyone here quiet; I’m going to go see if I can find them. I heard a horse, then a sound like boots crunching into the leaves, but nothing since. Lynne’s awake too and keeping her head down, right over there.” He pointed with a nod of his head.
“Right. Be careful.”
“You don’t have to tell me that. Keep ‘em quiet.”
“Aye, if there’s trouble, yell.”
“You don’t have to tell me that either,” John said with a grin in his voice. “Be right back.”
John had lived in shadows for years. Even before he and Gavin met up, he spent most of his time darting in and out of places he wasn’t supposed to be. It wasn’t for any real purpose – he had plenty of food, and his parents were of modest means but certainly no worse off than many others. He just loved going places and seeing things that most people didn’t know existed. His favorite pastime was overhearing meaningless meetings, like the time he spied on the Presbyter at his kirk for an entire afternoon and learned the intimate details of how much it cost to have the plaster and windows washed.
Crouching low, he moved silently in the direction from where he heard the sound. He gripped the hilt of his knife with slow, measured squeezes of his hand. In a clearing twenty yards or so ahead, he thought he saw the shape of a horse. He leaned backwards against the trunk of an ancient oak and tightened his gloves. With his trusty long dagger in one hand, he pulled his short parrying dirk from his belt, balanced it carefully, and resumed creeping forward.
He snapped his head around when a twig broke to his left, but saw nothing. A breeze slid around him, followed by a soft whine of wind moving through the leaves. As he crept near the edge of the trees, he was able to make out that he was right about the horse. And more than that, there was a man seated on the back of it.
Man and beast stood there, absolutely still. The only sound, the only move they made was the horse shaking his head back and forth every so often. Jets of steam came out of its nose when he neighed and shook his head.
Another snap made John spin on his heel.
He looked left, then right, still seeing nothing. The man and the horse were still there, still not moving.
Snap.
It was right behind him. He turned and stuck his knife out in front, but when he struck, he hit air. The back of John’s neck tingled the way it does when someone was watching from a distance. He wanted to call out to the man on the horse and make him identify himself, but he kept quiet.
Stop spooking yourself. There’s no ghosts in these woods. Another twig cracked to his left and he turned, this time he caught a shadow moving just out of his line of sight and then he felt a glove on the back of his neck, and then cold steel on his throat.
He froze.
“Drop your knives. Now.”
He did as he was told. Two thumps followed as his daggers hit the forest floor.
“Don’t make a sound or every last one of them dies.”
“R – right, alright. Who are you?”
Whoever had him by the neck snickered.
“Who are you, cruel bastard?”
“You were wrong,” said his captor.
“Wrong?”
“About the ghosts. One of them has you by the balls.”
Gavin couldn’t help himself anymore; he slid his knife back into his boot, and turned John around with his hands on his shoulders. As soon as he did, he started laughing.
And then a fist sho
t out and caught him square on the chin.
“Ow! What was that for then? Is that how you greet your best friend?”
“You obnoxious bastard, you scared me half to death. A shot in the chin is the least you deserve. God above, it’s good to see you. I’ve been worried sick since the sheriff made an appearance in Edinburgh. How’d he get away?”
“Ach, right to the point, aren’t you?”
“Aye, and here’s another. How did you find us?”
“As to the first, he lied to a stable boy when we stayed at an inn. To the second, when Ben and Rodrigo drink, they both like to talk very, very loud. The fire didn’t hurt either.”
John held him still for a second longer. “It’s damn good to see you Gavin. And to see you’re alright. Kenna? Is she?”
“Aye, she’s well.” As Gavin answered, he got a twinkle in his eye that was plain to see even in the shadowed forest. “We’ve run against some trouble in Mornay’s Cleft. The mayor is...”
“Wait a tick,” John said, putting his hand on Gavin’s shoulder. “The others will want to hear it too. Save it for them.”
“Right, but now you have to answer me a question.”
John cocked an eyebrow.
“Why are you out here? And with everyone along as well?”
“We were going after you. We saw the sheriff and feared the worst.”
“You’re good friends, you lot. The best a man could ask for.”
“You are too, that’s why we were coming. But since we had no idea where you were, we’ve a few days of supplies. Hungry?”
“Always. Lead the way,” Gavin said, walking after his friend. “Whisky?”
“Are you offering?” John said. “Sure, I’ll take a dram.”
Gavin laughed. “I don’t often think to pack whiskey as the first thing when I’m on a short trip.”
“Oh right, of course. Aye we’ve got some. Go get your horse and your effigy. I’ll go rouse the others.”
“John, one more thing. You’re the one who taught me to make that sort of dummy. Shouldn’t you have recognized it?”
“Ghosts,” John said. “When you think you hear ghosts moaning, it’s hard to think about much else.”