Forbidden Forest

by Michael Cadnum

  John took the bridle in his hand.

  “I know where the murderess is,” said John in a low voice, when he had led the horse to the shadowy margin of the clearing.

  “The dead knight’s wench?”

  “His widow,” corrected John. He imagined how easy it would be to pluck this deputy from the saddle and slam him into the ground. But he kept his voice steady, maintaining his confiding tone. “I can take you to her.”

  Henry did not smile, and for a moment John could see the other, more simple man—a peasant’s son, eager, proud to be a lawman, and frightened now that it all might slip away.

  “Think of the silver you can extort from her,” John added. “If she’s in your grasp.”

  “Indeed,” said Henry, his eyes alight with hope and caution. “Where is she?”

  “Robin Hood knows nothing of this. He wants her treasure for himself. You understand how outlaws are.”

  Henry grunted.

  “But I am like you, Henry,” said Little John. “A simple man, but with my pride—weary of the devious ways of my master.”

  “Maybe you are a right worthy outlaw, after all,” said Henry.

  “I’ll take you to her.”

  Henry considered this. “Good Little John, how do I know you have the spicer’s daughter?”

  John withdrew the jeweled brooch from his tunic. A ruby winked. “She did not part with this easily.”

  Henry ran his tongue over his lips. John could see it in his eyes—Henry saw a future again, winters of fat beef and sweet wine.

  “How far away is she?” asked Henry.

  “Far. And we must travel alone.”

  Henry could not take his eyes off the jewels.

  John said, “Leave these men behind.”

  Henry laughed. “Pray tell me, why should I trust you?”

  “If you agree, I’ll give you this rich brooch.” John loathed the thought of the jewels falling into Henry’s broad hand. “A token of the riches to come.”

  “You do not love your master, Robin Hood,” said Henry, in a tone of awakening insight. “You chafe under him—”

  “Like you,” said John, “I weary of a deputy’s choice of table scraps and quartered pennies.”

  Henry laughed bitterly—but with growing warmth. “It’s hard to be second in command, Little John. You and I have tasted that vinegar too long.”

  Little John knew then exactly how to win the trust of the lawman. “Robin Hood does not value my skill or my good name,” said the big outlaw. “But I have a plan that will win you Margaret Lea’s silver and at the same time play a worthy jest on my master.”

  Henry gave a low, thoughtful laugh. “A jest on Robin Hood! That would be a joy indeed.”

  “Years from now,” said John, “there will be tales of how Henry the Cunning bested Robin Hood.”

  Henry savored the thought.

  “The songs will call you Henry le Sly,” John continued, “smarter than the wiliest thief who ever lived.”

  Henry leaned down from the saddle, lowering his voice. “What have you in mind?”

  John spun a plan of deception and safe travel, with Margaret in Henry’s hands at the journey’s end.

  “By Jesu, we are two men who think alike,” said Henry.

  “Very much alike,” said John, perfecting his recitation of lies.

  “But before I trust you,” added Henry, “just as proof of your honor, I’ll take that pretty brooch into my hand.”

  John climbed onto one of the spearmen’s mounts, a stoical, stout riding horse, neither the finest sort of cob, nor the worst. The horse gave a wheezing sneeze at John’s weight, but made no further complaint.

  John hated the sight, Henry’s hand closing around Margaret’s brooch.

  Part Four

  FORBIDDEN FOREST

  Chapter 41

  The two of them covered miles.

  John knew nothing of horses, but the cob was accustomed to bulky riders, it would seem, and followed the lead of Henry’s charger.

  By late afternoon it had begun to rain. Henry was outfitted in dark leather armor, with a close-fitting helmet over his head, a bowl of leather and iron. John offered his great green cloak to Henry, and he accepted it gratefully. As the rain grew heavy, and the two horsemen leaned into the wind, Henry said, “This is the sort of storm I came to Nottingham to escape.”

  “It doesn’t rain within the city walls?”

  Henry was hunched forward in his saddle, water dripping off the tip of his hood. “Not the way it rains down on a farmer and his brood, in a house made of mud and weeds. In winter there was frost on the cottage floor. And when the chickens pecked in and out of the doorway they scattered floor straw, and the straw caught fire from the hearth. My baby brother Arthur had a burn that turned blue and filled with pus. It killed him.”

  It was a common problem, infants and children burning to death in house fires, usually from open coals in the middle of a room. No doubt Henry had not intended to tell such a personal story—this bitter memory silenced him for a while.

  Eventually Henry stirred himself to ask, “Do you keep holy days in the greenwood?”

  The feast days, he meant—Candlemas, Easter, Michaelmas, and the like.

  “For outlaws,” said Little John, “every day is a feast.”

  When they reached an inn situated beside a parish church, Henry said that priest-brewed ale was good enough on such a night. Some churches and abbeys ran taverns as a way of funding church repairs and furnishing almshouses, but pilgrims and merchants sometimes complained that the drink served by a vicar’s servant was little better than malt soup.

  The Mitre and Hart was a cordial alehouse. A large fire blazed in the middle of the room, the flames spitting and sizzling as rain fought with them. Ale was served in mazers, ample wooden drinking bowls. Sweet grass was strewn liberally around the floor, and it was fresh, fine yellow hay, smelling of the open fields.

  “Two horsemen such as yourself will have no trouble,” said the innkeeper, a short, wiry man with a halo of yellow hair around a bald head.

  “We’ll have trouble if we want it,” said Henry. “We’re outlaws.” Henry chuckled menacingly as he said this, but the innkeeper was neither startled nor amused. Traveling under this assumed identity, John believed, was the aspect of the journey that had most appealed to Henry.

  “Oh, begging your pardon, sirs, I meant to remark to you how well made you were, two such stout men as yourselves. Noble outlaws indeed, I said to myself as you stepped right in here, didn’t I? I was going to warn you that all the roads north are held by robbers, Red Roger and his men.”

  “But I thought Red Roger’s manor was well to the north,” said John.

  “Well to the north or not, as it may be,” said the innkeeper. “But we hear Red Roger and his men are behind every tree, if it please you.”

  Henry gave the man a gentle, almost affectionate cuff. “Give us another bowl of ale, and don’t scoop it from the bottom where all the wort settles.”

  “Outlaws are common as millers along the High Way, it seems,” said Little John as the innkeeper scurried off.

  “And about as honest,” replied Henry.

  The man returned with slabs of bread covered with hot, golden, bubbling cheese, fresh from the hearth. “No need to see a coin from either one of you, two fine men such as yourselves. Think of this as a gift from the parish of Saint Felix, and remember us if you feel the need.”

  The need for what? John wondered.

  “Look here, my man,” said Henry, sounding much like a man of the city. “We’re not outlaws at all. See this fine black leather under my cloak, and this fine deputy of mine, big as three haywards.”

  The innkeeper straightened, and showed his teeth in a cautious smile.

  “We’re sheriff’s men!” said Henry, slapping the table.

  The innkeeper retired into the flickering shadows, and returned with another pitcher of foaming ale.

  “We’re lawmen!” c
hortled Henry, looking around at the drinking men and women along the wall. “And we drink wine.”

  “If you want any coin from us you’ll have to wait until harvest,” said the innkeeper. “We’re poor folk until then.”

  “Do a sheriff’s man and an outlaw take from the same purse?” asked Henry, with something like real surprise.

  “Indeed, if you’ll forgive me,” said the innkeeper. “We of Saint Felix stay well away from both. But if you are lawmen, then I’m a griffin.”

  Henry and Little John had to share a bed, a flat pallet stuffed many summers ago with summer grass, but now worn as hard as earth. It was usual for travelers to share a bed, although not always comfortable, and John lay listening to the deep, ragged snores of his companion. The rain hammered at the shutters outside, and a trickle of water began to drum in a corner of the room. Henry had drunk currant wine, gooseberry wine, blackberry and rowan wine, and then, announcing that grape wine was all that suited him, drank a seeming hogshead of that.

  When he spoke in his sleep he was arguing, whining, telling a dream combatant, “Put it down, please. No, please put it down—don’t hurt me.”

  John rose from the pallet and stepped softly to the shuttered window. Go back, go back, said the water streaming from the eaves.

  Henry sobbed in his sleep.

  The guttering rain warned John, but it did not say where he should go. Back to Sherwood Forest? Back to Lord Roger? Or all the way back—to York, to the streets of his childhood, where he had cured hides with his father, scattering dog dirt on the toughest ox hides to help soften them into leather.

  John opened the shutters and breathed the fragrance of wet leaves. He knew that what he had in mind was wrong, even sinful. But he considered Margaret in Henry’s grasp, and Osric in pain yet again from another beating—or dead. John knew the countryside suffered under Henry, with no one strong enough to break him.

  Forgive me, Heaven, prayed John, for what I am about to do.

  Forgive me; and whatever happens to me—keep Margaret safe.

  Chapter 42

  Rain fell over the priory roof in the darkness. It made a soothing whisper, but Margaret was not asleep.

  She knew that somewhere in the darkness Little John was hiding from Henry and his fellow deputies, and Margaret prayed that Saint Christopher—himself a giant—might protect the young man. And let her see him again.

  The sound of horses had awakened her. Two horses were somewhere outside, their hooves scuffing the gravel beyond the priory walls. Only two mounts, not enough to be a gang of deputies this time of night. And yet her pulse quickened.

  What would she use as a weapon, if she needed one? Her hand found a silver pitcher and an earthenware jug. She imagined swinging the jug, breaking it over a deputy’s head. But then she put it down, unable to breathe.

  She heard something. A voice.

  A voice from the rain outside touched her, a male query: “Are we here?”

  She was out of bed, hurrying into a mantle.

  A fist knocked on the door, and she hesitated. Surely, she thought, this was how Henry would arrive to capture her at last.

  Bridgit was awake, using a bellows on the embers in the brazier, the coals brightening. “Only a heathen would be out in such weather,” said Bridgit. “Or a devil.” She called after Margaret to wait, but it was too late.

  Something very like a familiar voice had reached Margaret yet again. She wasn’t certain. She did not want to give in to hope—fear of disappointment made her caution herself. But she could not keep her feet from racing into the dark outer rooms.

  Sister Barbara, fully dressed and carrying a smoking tallow lamp, was already at the heavy door, asking who needed Christian refuge on this wet night.

  “A knight of his word,” said a familiar foreign accent, “bringing a traveler from London.”

  Sir Marco stood aside with a smile, and William Lea stepped into the shifting circle of lamplight, his eyes searching, afraid to have faith in this unfamiliar place, and afraid to believe that what was happening could be trusted.

  And then he saw Margaret and she was in her father’s arms, his muddy cloak enclosing her, his arms wrapping her, a thankful prayer on his breath.

  Chapter 43

  When the two men left the inn the next dawn, John paused before climbing onto the heavy-boned horse. The previous day’s journey had made him stiff and sore in hip and thigh, and Little John relished a moment longer on his two feet.

  The innkeeper held the cob steady, unnecessarily—the horse was well-mannered and resigned. But the man was eager to give the best possible last impression, offering them a gift of dried fish, knotted into lengths like rope. “So you will think well of us on your way back,” said the innkeeper.

  “If anyone asks,” said John in a low voice, leaning down from the saddle, “tell them Robin Hood and Little John were your guests last night.”

  The innkeeper’s eyes grew round. But then with a sly cock of his head he said, “But I think I did guess, by my faith.”

  “Did you?”

  “Robin Hood I would not have known,” he said. “But no one in the kingdom could mistake you, Little John.”

  “How much farther?” asked Henry in a cadaverous voice.

  John shook his head—he didn’t know.

  “My skull is packed with gravel,” Henry moaned.

  The previous night’s rain had passed, leaving the sky empty blue. Over the hours of hard road, riding into the north wind, John felt his body grow cold to the marrow with the chilly weather and with doubt. Such wind made no reassuring murmur, and the only birds he saw were sparrows, struggling to keep a perch on bobbing ditch weeds, their feathers awry with the breeze. Henry huddled in his woodsman’s cloak, looking like any traveler—or any outlaw.

  Henry was already weighing the leather sack of wine, sloshing it, looking at John with an unspoken offer. The innkeeper had filled it that morning from a pipe of wine “shipped all the way from Honfleur, not a fortnight past.” Henry drank and coughed.

  “This good wine is fit for Holy Mass,” Henry said.

  John took a taste, and the red wine was as good as the drink Robin Hood had taken from a royal chamberlain last Saint Stephen’s Day.

  Little John tried to assuage his private fears that the trap might fail. What was John to do if Grimes had not reached Lord Roger’s manor? Or if Lord Roger was out riding the hills, not to be reached? Or—and this was very likely—Lord Roger got Grimes’s message, and did not believe it? John could imagine his laugh, and see his skeptical smile as he cautioned the outlaw to run back to Sherwood Forest before a hound lapped him off the floor. If Red Roger and his men did not mistake Henry for Robin Hood, the trap would fail.

  The sunlight was weak, each breath of cold wind harsh. The road was too empty. Congregations of blackbirds gathered along the water-filled road ruts and scattered only as the two approached. It had been a long time since John had realized how lone and bereft a traveler could feel. There were no other folk on the High Way, neither tinker nor carter.

  Dark gray sheep grazed on either side of the road by late morning, the field as close-cropped as any penitent’s scalp. A peasant near the road labored with a hack, a crude hoe with a large, irregular iron blade. The wind was growing calm, and the sky was more than blue—a deep, perfect void.

  John wished the peasant a good morning. But as he spoke he ran his eye over the hills, the line of royal forest, the green carpet of sheep-cropped field. It was the absence of life that caught his attention.

  “See what’s there,” Robin Hood had taught Little John. “And what isn’t.”

  The hedges were too silent. The starling and blackbird were still. The rooks in the spreading oaks were high up in the branches, as though something had passed beneath them, sending them scrambling higher for safety.

  The peasant wore patched leather shoes and a tattered tunic, shiny with soil. He did not speak. He lifted his eyebrows, and sent a message with his glance at
Little John: danger.

  Henry rode over to the man and aimed a kick at the peasant’s head, his foot barely missing. “Who do you think you’re looking at, you turd hoggler?” demanded Henry, knocking the peasant to the ground.

  Men of such a lowly order in life rarely looked travelers directly in the eye—it was considered impolite. Henry tried to straddle the peasant with his horse, attempting to force the animal to tread on the cowering field man. “You have no business,” said Henry, “lifting your ignorant eyes at us.”

  “No, my lord,” said the peasant’s muffled voice, “indeed I do not.”

  The horse was nearly as upset as the field man, the steed rolling its eyes, unwilling to step on the quivering human figure. John seized the bridle and pulled Henry and his mount back into the road.

  “Our apologies, good man,” said Little John. “My companion has all the sense of a goose.”

  “Why do you waste apologies on this land man?” demanded Henry heatedly. “He needs a lesson in keeping to his station.”

  There was a sound, the sort of tiny tick a blade makes grazing stone.

  The peasant had dropped his hack. Now he leaped to his feet and ran. He was careful to keep away from the puddles as he leaped low rills and culverts across the green.

  Henry observed this and gazed around at the sunny forenoon. The anger vanished from his eyes, and was replaced with a keen suspicion.

  “You believe yourself superior to me,” said Henry, “possessing a wiser heart and a keener eye—don’t you, John?”

  Little John made no response, aware of the spreading silence of the grazing land around them.

  “I myself know who stabbed Sir Gilbert with a pretty knife,” said the deputy. “I saw who did it with these very eyes in my head.”

  John could not keep the eager curiosity from his voice. “Every outlaw in the woods knows you’re a worthy opponent.” The truth regarding the murder, John knew, could place Margaret beyond all harm.