Erasmum Hobart

by Erasmum Hobart

  The rider was travelling at a leisurely pace but, even so, Erasmus had very little time to make sure he was only dealing with one man before he grasped his creeper and launched himself from his branch and across the road. Fighting the urge to perform a Tarzan impression as he leapt, he swung his legs forward and braced himself for impact. His boots made solid contact with the body of the rider and threw him from his saddle and into the road, where he landed heavily and lay, groaning, on the floor. Erasmus landed on a branch on the other side of the road then hopped down and made his way over to his victim. The horse had bolted and left the man lying face down in the dirt.

  Erasmus drew the man’s dagger and used it to cut his belt, then took his pouch and checked its contents. There seemed to be three dozen or so coins, all of which were solid gold and, although he wasn’t quite sure what the cost of living was, Erasmus had to assume this was enough wealth to loosen a few tongues at the inn. He was about to stand up and take his leave, when it occurred to him that his victim was lying prone on a darkened stretch of road. If he left him he might be trampled by a horse during the night. Carefully, Erasmus turned the man over and dragged him to the side of the road, laying him under a shady tree. In the half-light, he didn’t pay much attention to the man’s features until a chance ray of moonlight illuminated his pale face.

  ‘Deloial!’ Erasmus hissed.

  At the sound of his name, the man’s eyes snapped open and he looked up into the face of his mortal enemy. ‘You!’ he gasped and made to sit up. Unfortunately, Erasmus hadn’t chosen a very safe place for Deloial to lie and the man’s head connected solidly with a low branch as he tried to rise. Knocked unconscious, he fell on his back – his arm, with the finger still stretched out accusingly, falling limply by his side. Erasmus sighed: he seemed to be fated to make this man’s life a living hell – he just hoped none of his colleagues were descended from the man, otherwise things might get uncomfortable once he got home.

  After checking Deloial’s breathing was regular, Erasmus placed the day’s takings in his pouch and rose to his feet. As an afterthought, he also took the man’s dagger and strapped it into his belt before strolling down the road in the direction of the inn. On reflection, he didn’t feel as guilty about robbing a man like Deloial as he would have felt if he had succeeded with his earlier attempts. Men of the cloth may well have made their wealth by exploiting the oppressed mass of the peasantry, but at least you knew where you stood with them. Deloial was such an unpleasant character that Erasmus wouldn’t have been surprised to find he’d murdered his whole family to make his way in the world. The thought didn’t absolve him of guilt entirely, but it perked him up enough to put some of the spring back into his step. Hopefully, a tankard of ale would return the rest.

  Chapter Twenty

  Public houses are a very English institution. Find an English village, it is said, and you are assured of a church with a warm welcome and a hostelry with an equally warm pint. Why this image is unique to England is unclear, however, since public houses go back to the days when drinking water was tantamount to suicide and, across Europe, the juice of the grape and the grain was universally hailed as the only alternative.

  In England this state of affairs remained until the arrival of first gin and then tea, which transformed the English reputation overnight: changing it from a nation of ale-swilling thugs who charged around continental Europe looking for a fight, to one of elitist tea-drinkers who sailed around the world looking for an empire.

  It’s fair to say that, though such stereotypes may have some basis in fact, England would not have progressed far if it had done so with most of the populace under the influence. If Henry V had slurred his famous ‘band of brothers’ speech then fallen off his horse, Agincourt would have been a very different story. Had his archers all been suffering from double vision, it is likely far fewer French knights would have fallen, although many more would have been counted. It is, therefore, reasonable to assume the stereotype drunkard applies to only a proportion of the populace and, furthermore, that the most likely place to find those stereotypical people is in one of England’s plentiful supply of pubs.

  Despite the onset of night, Erasmus didn’t have any difficulty finding the inn. Even before its lights hove into view round the bend in the road, he could hear nerve-racking sounds of smashing wood, clashing steel and yells of pain, anger and general thuggery. It sounded like a rough night at The Feeding of the Five Thousand.

  As Erasmus approached the building, he saw the brawling had spilt out on to the road, where two men were lunging at each other drunkenly with longswords. Occasionally, the swords would collide with a resounding clang but, more often than not, the combatants would end up stabbing at the empty air a foot or so to one side of their opposite number.

  Erasmus watched the fighting for a moment then looked nervously back along the road, expecting soldiers to arrive at any moment to resolve the matter. Nobody came, of course: in these turbulent times, unrest at a country tavern was usually left to sort itself out and the best the barman could do was to hide away until the worst was over, hoping that the blood stains would wash out of the walls. Erasmus stepped quietly around the brawling masses to the inn door and peered into the murky depths, looking for any sign it was safe to enter.

  The scene inside the inn left one in mind of the after-effects of an extremely confined tornado. Up-ended tables lay sprawled around the room like so many giant toast racks, and tankards lay in puddles of their former contents, some still spinning with the force of their impact. In the centre of the room, two burly men were restraining a third – whose hand still held a sword, despite his arms being pinned to his sides – and a red-faced, bearded man was waving his own weapon at him accusingly.

  ‘I’m asking you one last time,’ said the bearded man slowly and deliberately, ‘did you spill my pint?’

  The pinioned man seemed to consider this carefully, looking down at his trapped sword arm, around the room at the scene of total carnage their argument had wrought and finally at the blade swinging within inches of his throat.

  ‘How about if I just buy you another?’ he said.

  The bearded man’s face remained fixed for a moment before breaking into a broad smile. His two companions, taking this as a cue, released their captive’s arms and the bearded man patted him on the back as they made their way to the bar.

  ‘It was a good fight, wasn’t it?’ the bearded man was saying. ‘The way you sliced that guy’s arm off was pretty impressive.’

  ‘Yes. I was quite proud of that shot. What about that backhand of yours, though – that was amazing.’

  ‘Yeah. He won’t be arguing with me again.’

  ‘What did he actually say to you?’

  ‘I don’t know. Why, does it matter?’

  ‘No, not really. Now where’s that barman?’

  Not wishing to engage in conversation with men who would kill over spilt ale, Erasmus decided to find a place to sit before getting himself a drink. The corner table had somehow escaped the ravages of the brawl and was, as usual, occupied by the two arring peasants, although the shorter of the two was nursing a bleeding lip.

  ‘Is your friend all right?’ said Erasmus as he joined the men at their table.

  ‘All he said was arr,’ said the taller man, ‘then that bloke smashed him in the face.’

  ‘Perhaps it was the way he said it,’ said Erasmus.

  ‘How many ways can you say arr?’

  ‘A…arr,’ said his companion through the cloth he was holding to his wound.

  ‘Oh, I grant you there’s a number of ways, yes.’

  ‘Arrr.’

  ‘And they’re new to the inn certainly, but that doesn’t excuse…’

  ‘Arr.’

  ‘I know he was already angry, but he didn’t need to…’

  ‘Arrr.’

  ‘Look, why are you sticking up for the man? He did split your lip, after all.’

  ‘Arr.’

  ‘Well
, that’s your prerogative, of course, but I still don’t think…’

  ‘ARR.’

  ‘All right, all right.’

  The tall man turned to Erasmus. ‘He has very strong opinions on these things,’ he said.

  ‘It’s not going to do your agreement with the barman much good, is it?’ said Erasmus.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, I thought he paid you to spot troublemakers.’

  ‘Spotting them’s one thing. We aren’t paid enough to stop them.’

  Erasmus nodded in understanding and the tall man scratched his beard. They were both startled by a loud crash and, looking round, they saw a group of men, each with hastily dressed wounds, turning one of the tables back up the right way.

  ‘They don’t make tables like they used to,’ said the tall man.

  ‘No?’ said Erasmus.

  ‘They’re too light. The old tables used to be solid oak – a man could put his back out trying to turn one of those over. These things are just cheap junk.’

  Erasmus looked back at the table. It looked solid enough to him: the average pub table in his day would have been so much splintered wood after the kind of treatment these had received. These tables had probably been in continuous use for decades, the patterns of scratches in their surfaces were as much a history of their life as tables as the rings in the wood were a history of the trees they had been before.

  ‘What brings you back here, anyway?’ The tall man’s question jerked Erasmus back to the here and now and to the reason he had returned to the inn in the first place.

  ‘I’m after information,’ he said, then winced as another table was turned over with a resounding crash.

  ‘Expensive stuff, information,’ said the tall man.

  ‘Arr,’ his friend concurred.

  ‘I’ve got money,’ said Erasmus, resisting the urge to place the pouch on the table dramatically. Somehow that didn’t seem like a sensible idea.

  ‘Well, you get some ales in and we’ll talk.’

  The bar area was relatively clear: the protagonists of the devastation had retreated to a corner with their drinks and were now laughing and joking like lifelong friends as a number of dead bodies were carried past them and through the side door for disposal.

  ‘Rough night,’ said Erasmus as the barman looked at him with tired eyes.

  ‘Friday,’ said the barman. ‘What can I get you?’

  ‘Three ales, please,’ said Erasmus. He placed a gold piece on the bar.

  The barman’s eyebrows raised at the sight of gold. ‘You’re not from round here, are you?’ he said. He placed three foaming tankards and a handful of silver coins in front of the teacher.

  ‘What makes you say that?’

  ‘Saying please – it’s almost a foreign word in these parts.’

  ‘I was brought up to be polite. Old habits die hard.’

  ‘Don’t try saying please to that lot in the corner. You might find they die a lot less hard than you think.’

  Erasmus returned to the corner table and placed the ales down in front of the men, then sat down once more. The shorter man, whose lip had now stopped bleeding, grabbed at his ale enthusiastically and drank half of it at a single draught, not even bothering to wipe the foam from his lips after he drank.

  ‘It’s good for cuts,’ said the tall man, seeing Erasmus’ puzzled expression. ‘Now what kind of information are you after?’

  ‘I’m trying to find Marian.’

  ‘Marian, eh? Well can’t say as I knows any Marian. Do you know a Marian?’

  This last was directed to the short man. He shook his head. ‘Naa.’

  Erasmus placed a couple of gold pieces on the table and slid them over to the tall man, who picked them up and examined them.

  ‘Mind you,’ he continued, ‘there was a Marian who was part of some outlaw band. I seem to remember some talk of her.’

  ‘Arr.’

  ‘Can’t say I rightly remember much of what they said, though.’

  Another two gold coins slid across the table and a look of recollection drifted across the tall man’s face like a cloud scudding across a windy sky.

  ‘She used to have a camp near here, didn’t she?’

  ‘Arr.’

  ‘She had to move on, though – the Sheriff wasn’t mighty pleased when she took his tax money. He wanted Robin Hood to take that.’

  Erasmus was shocked. ‘You knew about that?!’

  ‘I might have done.’ A non-committal arr from the short man implied he may well have heard something as well.

  ‘I’m not paying you for that,’ said Erasmus. ‘I’ve spoken to the Sheriff about it personally.’

  ‘What did he tell you?’

  ‘I couldn’t really say.’

  A gold coin slid across the table from the tall man to Erasmus. Erasmus took the coin and placed it back in his pouch.

  ‘I know that Robin Hood is working for the Sheriff,’ said Erasmus. ‘I know that two years ago Robin broke out from a trap and managed to threaten the Sheriff’s life and that—’

  The tall man raised a finger to his lips. ‘Not too much,’ he said. ‘You have to make your information worth the money. Tell people too much and they won’t bother paying you next time.’

  Erasmus’ brow furrowed in thought. ‘I don’t remember much after that,’ he said. A gold coin sliding across the table persuaded him to tell them about the Sheriff’s deal with Robin and by the time he’d told them he was actually responsible for the whole mess, the balance stood at one gold coin in the tall man’s favour. Erasmus stopped the tall man from sliding this coin over. There was, he realised, no easy way for him to explain what he had done without going into detail – and that he was unprepared to do.

  The tall man seemed unperturbed by Erasmus’ refusal; in fact, he clearly saw it as part of the game. ‘All information has its price,’ he said. He took another gold coin from inside the folds of his cloak and placed it with Erasmus’ original coin.

  ‘Not this information,’ said Erasmus. ‘If I tell you this, I might have to make sure the conversation never took place.’

  ‘You can trust me to be discreet,’ said the tall man, adding another gold coin to the pile. Erasmus doubted that – it was totally incompatible with there being an exchange rate between gold and words.

  ‘You don’t understand,’ said Erasmus. ‘It’s not that I won’t tell you. I can’t tell you.’

  ‘Matters of state,’ the tall man said with interest. He added a number of coins to take the pile up to ten gold coins then slid it towards Erasmus.

  Erasmus put his hand on the pile of coins and pushed them back towards the man. He shook his head adamantly. ‘I can’t tell you this. It’s not a matter of state, it’s a matter of the continued existence of life in the way you understand it.’

  A complex pattern of emotions played out on the tall man’s face, shifting between confusion, intense curiosity and, finally in response to Erasmus’ fixed stare, resignation. He withdrew the pile of coins to the inner recesses of his cloak and looked at Erasmus critically.

  ‘You know what you did wrong there, don’t you?’

  Erasmus shrugged.

  ‘You told me there was information to have. Basic rules of information – if you have something to sell, let the buyer know it’s there, but don’t show him what it is. If you have something you don’t want to sell, don’t wave it around.’

  Erasmus nodded.

  ‘Now that’s advice,’ said the tall man, ‘so I’m giving that for free. I’d be grateful if you take that into account in any future dealings. Now, going on from how the Sheriff got into this, what’s he up to now?’

  ‘Not much,’ said Erasmus.

  ‘Don’t undersell it.’

  ‘Well, he might have something in mind,’ said Erasmus, ‘but I couldn’t really say what it was.’

  ‘Much better.’ A gold coin slid across the table.

  ‘The Sheriff isn’t happy with Marian’s ac
tivities. He sees them as drawing attention to his shire and running the risk of Prince John’s unwanted attentions.’

  ‘And what does he plan to do about it?’ Another gold coin wended its way Erasmus-ward.

  ‘He plans to lay a trap of some kind and deal with her once and for all, but I don’t know the details.’ Erasmus said this last forcefully, pushing back the tall man’s third coin.

  The man looked at him with interest. ‘You could have made something up,’ he said.

  ‘If people give out lies instead of information that would devalue information as a commodity.’

  ‘Good. Very good,’ said the tall man.

  ‘Arr,’ the small man agreed.

  ‘Where I come from we have a thing called education,’ said Erasmus. ‘We give information out freely to anyone that asks.’

  ‘And where do you come from?’

  ‘I can’t tell you.’

  A small pile of gold was ventured and, with a shake of Erasmus’ head, declined. The curiosity in the tall man’s eyes was intense, but Erasmus was resolute. He decided to steer the conversation back to the information he needed.

  ‘You haven’t told me about Marian,’ he said, sliding a coin across the table.

  ‘They had to leave their camp,’ said the tall man. ‘The Sheriff was too close to finding it – apparently he has a man on the inside.’

  ‘I know,’ said Erasmus. The coin was propelled back towards him.

  ‘Deloial,’ said Erasmus, replying to the implied question. ‘Do you know where Marian can be found?’ he added, sliding the coin over once more.

  ‘I saw her here recently, but she wouldn’t tell me where her camp was.’

  ‘I thought you said all information could be traded.’

  ‘Not when you’ve only got a limited supply of gold and she’s got this year’s tax.’

  ‘But do you know how I can find her?’

  ‘I know where she’ll be tomorrow.’

  Erasmus slid a coin over and, in return, the tall man slipped him a piece of parchment. Erasmus unrolled the parchment and read it to himself.

  SO YOU THINK YOU’VE GOT A SHOT?