Shadow of the Wolf

by Tim Hall

  They clambered on in silence. After a while, Robin said: “Whatever the scroll says, it isn’t important. Whatever happened, it was a long time ago. You can’t fight the past, Marian, no one can. That’s the most important thing I learned from Sir Bors: There are battles that can’t be won.”

  Marian was striding away and Robin wasn’t even sure she was listening. But then she stopped and turned and she was shouting.

  “What have they done to you? The past isn’t gone. You can’t just give it up. It’s a part of you. This nightmare will follow us forever, no matter where we go, unless we fight and fight until it’s destroyed.”

  Robin hung his head. “I shouldn’t have come back.”

  “Then why did you? I’d be better off alone. I’ve been uncovering the truth, and making plans, and now I’m ready and I can see what needs to be done and I thought you’d be ready too, when the time came. You used to fight harder than anyone—it didn’t matter what or who stood in your way—I saw you stand up to Bawg and Narris and his whole gang, and you weren’t even afraid of the Castellan. But then Sir Bors gave you a blunt sword and let you pretend to make war and he kept you hidden behind his walls, and now you want to carry on hiding—hiding even from the truth because if you hear the truth you’ll have to do something about it and you can’t because it wasn’t some accident or hand of fate that did this to us, it was the Sheriff and the Sheriff is strong and frightening and you’re weak and scared just like your father!”

  All this was becoming too much for Robin. Two days ago he had left a place he felt safe and respected, abandoned people he had come to think of as brothers. Today he had killed a man. And now he had come deep into the place he feared most in the world.

  All of it for Marian. All for her sake.

  And still he didn’t know why those soldiers were chasing her or why Sir Bors had taken her prisoner or where she had been these past years, but rather than telling him any of this she was just shouting at him and saying things he didn’t want to hear about his family. And so when she turned and stomped away Robin felt his anger surge and he found himself running to catch her and physically seizing her by the shoulder and spinning her around.

  “Marian, listen to me! Just stand there and don’t say a word and for once just listen. I need—”

  That was as far as he got because she glared, then gritted her teeth, then launched herself at him, throwing her arms around his neck, pulling his face toward hers, pushing her lips to his, kissing him, and gripping him harder and kissing him over and over. The sweet heat of her breath, the darting softness of her tongue.

  She stopped, breathless, and lowered her head. She stayed there, pressed against him. She whispered something, but the words were muffled against his chest, and the blood was thundering in his ears, so he didn’t hear what she said.

  She stepped away. Her eyes turned to meet his. Her tongue appeared and moved along her lower lip. She continued through the forest. She had become small in the distance by the time Robin followed.

  He caught up and they walked side by side, their eyes fixed on the ground. Every sound loud in the silence between them. The snapping of a twig. Robin’s feet sucking in the wet earth. The clattering wings of a wood pigeon. They walked and they walked, Robin ordering his thoughts, trying to recall all the questions that had been burning through him only moments before, but now, in spite of everything, able to think of nothing except the taste of Marian on his lips.

  He became acutely aware of her smell, the sound of her breath, her every movement—lifting a hand to push a strand of hair behind her ear. He watched her from the corner of his eye, and after a while he saw she was smiling. They clambered on and the smile widened.

  “Robin, the look on your face, when I came out of that lake! I wish you could have seen it, your mouth flopped open like a fish! I’ve only seen one other person look so shocked ever—Bawg, when you shot an arrow at her, remember?”

  Robin smiled. “I did not shoot at her, I was aiming for the drinking bladder. If I had wanted to hit Bawg, I couldn’t have missed.”

  “She got fatter by the year, didn’t she? By now I wonder how big she is.”

  They fell quiet and walked on, watching their feet. Long moments passed before Marian said: “Isn’t it strange how things turn out so differently from how you imagine. You can picture a moment over and over in your head—exactly where and when and how it will happen. And then the moment comes, out of the blue, and nothing you dreamed was anywhere close to the truth.”

  “You mean …,” Robin said, “like the way we used to imagine our future? How we said we’d sail the five seas and go to Troy and Carthage.”

  Marian looked at him and grinned. “We would visit the pharaohs,” she said. “And the Crusader Cities.”

  “We’d steal the Crown of Thorns …”

  “Learn the songs of mermaids and ride a unicorn and …”

  “Trade treasure with kings.”

  Robin looked around them at the wildwood, flexing its talons of shadow, and he looked at the dried blood on his tunic and he remembered the Sheriff’s henchmen terrorizing the village. You’re right, he thought. This is not the future we envisaged.

  “Actually …,” Marian said, “I didn’t mean our adventures. I was talking about something else. I meant how I imagined the first time we … I can’t believe I’m telling you this … but for years, even when we were living in the tower, some nights, I’d lie awake and I’d think about … kissing you. Properly. And the way I dreamed it you … What am I thinking? I am not telling you this!”

  They clambered on, a slight smile playing around her lips.

  After a while Robin said: “At the citadel, I used to imagine the day I would see you again. It was going to happen years in the future. I was a knight of the realm by then, and I was returning to England, sailing into port with fifty bannermen and a hold full of gold and …” He trailed off, stared at his feet, kept walking.

  “Tell me!” Marian said, bounding to his side, slipping her arm beneath his. “You can’t be embarrassed in front of me. And we can’t have secrets, we tell each other everything. Come on, continue. I can see you on that ship, standing at the prow, battle-weary but proud! And where was I, what did I look like? Tell me! How did we meet?”

  “You didn’t tell me yours.”

  “We’ll both tell. You first.”

  “It’s your turn.”

  “You owe me! You left me out here all alone, and now you’ve got to make amends—the very least you can do is tell me this daydream of yours.” She pulled him to a halt, reached her hands behind his neck, stood on tiptoes. “Robin Loxley, you are so infuriating, tell me the rest this instant, or I swear I will never let you kiss me again, not so long as we—”

  She looked toward the horizon. Her grip tightened at the back of his neck. He heard it too: faint noises of a struggle, from the east—from just beyond the forest.

  Marian let go of him and stepped away, staring toward the commotion. She hesitated, then moved toward the noise. Robin followed.

  They crept toward the wildwood edge, the sounds of destruction growing louder as they went. They reached the tree line and crouched still and looked out. There was a village, a short distance outside the forest, halfway down a steep slope. Crashing about the village were the Sheriff’s militiamen. Robin counted at least nine, ten of them, the wolf-head emblem livid against their chests. He watched them turning over carts, pulling apart animal shelters. He saw a dog, speared through the belly with a crossbow bolt. Three soldiers armed with ironwood clubs went into one hut. Two of the red-cloaked figures came back out, dragging an unconscious man. From inside the hut came a woman’s screams.

  And then Robin’s eyes were drawn back up the slope. Above the village a solitary figure sat, dressed all in black. He had his head bowed and his face was hidden beneath a hood. He picked at his fingernails with a knife while his stringy black mare bit lazily at the bark of a tree. Marian was looking at this man too. Robin fel
t her freeze and go tense.

  One of the rangers ran up to the hooded figure and was saying something. The man in black sat motionless. The soldier returned to the village. Then the man in black raised his head and turned to look up at the forest. He lowered his hood.

  The right side of the Sheriff’s face was that of a normal, healthy man of middle age. The left side of his face was burned, or melted perhaps, the skin folded down like hot wax, his sandy beard and hairline growing only in glistening clumps. The socket of the left eye hung red and loose. His intact eye was a startling bright blue.

  He looked along the tree line. His gaze reached Robin and stopped.

  Robin could feel it. He was sure the Sheriff was looking directly at him.

  But then he turned away and lowered his head and raised his hood and went back to picking at his nails with the knife.

  Marian let out a long breath.

  She was tugging at Robin’s sleeve, then she was up and running through the forest. And Robin was following. The sounds of destruction behind them growing faint. And the pair of them were silent and they were running and running and neither of them looking back.

  “Now you’ve seen him,” Marian whispered. “Now you’ve seen your enemy.”

  They were the first words either of them had spoken for hours. After seeing the Sheriff they had continued north through the wildwood, running when they had the strength, walking when they didn’t. Now it was dusk and they were crouched at the tree line, watching the fields turn purple and then gray. They were listening for sounds of horses in the open or for anyone in the forest behind.

  “That’s the man who did this to us,” Marian whispered. “Now you’ve seen him. Now it can begin.”

  Robin said nothing. He was thinking about the Sheriff. He was thinking about all Marian had said, and about the scraps of sense he had managed to lift from Sir Bors’s scroll, an awful possibility beginning to form in his mind.

  The dusk grew darker, then lightened to silver, starlight frosting the hills. Marian moved out of the forest. Robin followed—a surge of relief, free of the wildwood at last. They walked in silence, across plowed fields, stubbled and sticky underfoot. Scrub, wild and uninviting. They kept off the road, not even using the droving paths, but searching always for the hardest route, to make pursuit more difficult, clambering over collapsed walls and through sharp thickets.

  They hurried on, the North Star showing them the way. All the questions were rising once more in Robin’s mind but for now he remained silent, partly for fear they would argue again. Getting far away from the Sheriff’s men, only that mattered for now. They walked and they walked and they didn’t talk.

  It began drizzling, then raining hard. They sheltered against a hillside, beneath an overhanging rock. They sat a few paces apart, and in the space between them the air felt the way it can before a thunderstorm: tense and taut. Marian pushed her jade amulet to her lips and studied the horizon. She glanced at him, then stared once more into the night.

  “I talked to you,” she said, not meeting his eyes. “Every day we were apart. Does that sound strange? I would ask you sometimes if I was doing the right thing, and if it was something hard I had to do, you would be there, urging me not to give up. And I heard your laugh, other times, and saw the look on your face. In a way you were with me, no matter what. Maybe you think that sounds stupid. Or mad.”

  She took a breath, apparently about to say more. But whatever it was remained unsaid. It rained harder and a sharp wind blew. Robin stood and took off his cloak and draped it around Marian’s shoulders. He went and sat again by himself but then she wriggled closer and threw the cloak around them both and pushed herself against him. When they touched the charged air broke and Robin felt it shiver through his skin—he held her close and it shuddered into his bones. He could still feel her kiss, imprinted on his lips.

  Soon the rain eased and she was getting to her feet and Robin was pulling on his cloak and they were off again, walking and walking through the night. Marian looked back across a land that was bands of purple and gray and black. She pointed.

  “Lanterns,” she said. “He’s on our trail.”

  Robin looked and saw a distant flickering. “Could be a campfire,” he said. “Travelers, stopped for the night.”

  “It’s him. He’s following.”

  “You thought they were tracking us through the forest, but then we saw him and his rangers in that village, so they couldn’t have been.”

  She turned and headed across a fallow field.

  Whenever Robin looked back he thought he could see that spectral orange glow in the distance. And he was beginning to think it could be four distinct spots of light. Surely they were only campfires?

  He hurried after Marian.

  * * *

  The nocturnal world. Eerie quiet punctuated by points of noise. The spectral wail of foxes. The rustle and screech of a pine marten hunting. Something dashing across their path, its eyes flashing.

  Onward, tracing the course of a valley, keeping to the lower marshy parts, rather than the exposed road on the upper slopes. Twisting through a copse of trees, following the narrow trail dug out by sheep. Disturbing a boar and both of them jumping at the snort and the crashing off into the undergrowth. The wind picking up. Sometimes now choosing the paths to make the walking easier. Finding an old Roman road, crumbled and uneven but at least firm underfoot. Robin looking back and again thinking he could see those four orange lights. And thinking this time, yes, they were moving. She’s right. They look like lanterns. They’re drawing closer. Aren’t they?

  Trying not to think about that. Taking his bow from his back and stringing it and concentrating on Marian and on the path ahead.

  * * *

  From a distance the village appeared dark and silent. Perhaps even deserted. As they crept closer they could hear pigs snuffling and people coughing in their half sleep the other side of thin walls. A restless, nervous feel to this place. They crept amid the wattle-and-thatch huts. There was a barn that looked like it might house horses. Robin slid the bolt. It made a grating sound.

  A dog started barking; guard geese jabbered.

  Robin and Marian crept around the barn, hid in the shadow of the building.

  Movement. Whispers. Two people appeared. The blade of a scythe catching the starlight. The men moved slowly around the barn.

  Robin and Marian circled the building in the other direction. They slipped back out of the village, continued along the path they had left.

  * * *

  It was almost dawn by the time they reached the next village.

  “We can’t carry on in the daylight,” Marian whispered. “We’ll have to find somewhere to hide. Tonight we’ll try again to steal horses and continue to the coast.”

  The village was surrounded by a ditch, to keep out wild pigs. They crawled into it, hopped over the wettest part and crept into the village. There were ten or twelve houses, gathered around a common green and a Trystel Tree. There was a garlanded wellhead and a stream whispering beneath a wooden bridge. There was a granary, set high on stilts. Marian climbed the ladder and Robin followed. Several times the ladder creaked and he froze but the village continued sleeping.

  The granary was dry inside and the walls were made of tightly woven willow poles so this was a good place to hide through the daytime. Against the walls were the storage urns for the grain but there was space between them to sleep. They stretched out on the hard floor, an arm’s length apart. Between them Robin felt that thunderhead tension once more. Marian shuffled back and forth, trying to lie comfortably. Finally she twisted around and put her head on his stomach. When she spoke her voice was already becoming drowsy.

  “I didn’t mean what I said—about being better off without you. And it was silly of you to say you shouldn’t have come back. You had no choice, don’t you see? It’s not enough to say we belong together. I am you, just the same as you are me. Our fates are tied, we’ve always known that.”

 
; She shuffled position again, putting one arm across him and laying her head on his chest. It was almost painfully exhilarating where their bodies touched.

  “You don’t mind me using you as a pillow, do you? Not that you’re very comfy—nothing but muscle—like lying on a sack full of rocks. I know I’ve been horrible to you. It’s only because I’ve been scared, and being scared makes me angry. You understand that, I know you do.”

  Her hand found his and she knitted their fingers. Her voice dropped to a thinner whisper.

  “In that forest, all alone, you don’t know what it was like. The noises at night. Singing and footsteps and … other things. The stories we were told about that place. I don’t want to believe them, not anymore. But the things I heard, and thought I saw … Perhaps, sooner or later, all the stories come true. All the monsters made flesh.”

  Robin was feeling delirious through lack of sleep and the exhaustion of running through the night. He knew Marian must be feeling the same. She gripped his hand tighter.

  “My mother used to tell me a story about a nymph called Arethusa. I must have read it to you, do you remember? Arethusa spent her whole life running from a river god—she was running and running but never getting away. One night, terrified and desperate, Arethusa hid in a savage wood. She hid there and a thick mist came and covered her. The river god stalked her—she heard his footsteps—and she broke out in a cold sweat. More and more sweat poured from her skin. The sweat became a spring, then a stream, then a river. A goddess had taken pity on her and was trying to save her—she was transforming her into water. Arethusa flowed away as a river and she thought she was free. But the river god saw her and turned himself into water too and he mixed his current with hers and she was caught. Every time I heard that story it scared me more. Can you think of anything worse? A nightmare you can never escape because it flows into you. It becomes you. Well, I think it’s coming true. I can feel that man in my sweat, on my skin, in my hair … I could run forever and never get away.”