Gisburne nodded slowly.
“There is another thing. One of the brothers of that Abbey – a monk named Took – recently spoke out in support of Hood.”
“A monk?”
“Took has radical notions about property – of the kind that monks tend to entertain from time to time.”
“But... supporting a thief?” That seemed beyond the pale, no matter how radical he was.
“He believes that Hood provides hope in a time of need, robbing from the rich to provide for the poor.”
Gisburne gave a dismissive, humourless laugh. “Hood cares nothing for the poor!”
“I told you – it’s not the truth or otherwise of the story that matters. Word of him spreads. It has its own life. He is becoming a legend. You know that it is already becoming common practice to call any outlaw a ‘Robin Hood’? Now, that is real power, when one becomes enshrined in language.”
“Just words,” said Gisburne dismissively. “A stolen name and a stolen reputation.”
“Words have the means to imprison a man,” said John. “Even a king.”
Quite suddenly, he turned his back on Gisburne.
“But... I have a dilemma. I admit I’ve been avoiding the matter, but recent events have brought it to a head. Clearly, if you continue doing... what you do... you are unlikely to remain a secret for very long. That is a problem.”
“To put it bluntly, it is no longer fitting for me to have a landless knight in my service. There is only one solution that I can see...” Gisburne had been half expecting it. His failure in the closing moments of his quest had made it seem inevitable. John’s reassurances had eased his mind, but he saw now that it was a momentary respite, to soften the blow. He watched in numb silence as John went to a small wooden chest, and removed something from inside. A final gift, he supposed. A parting gesture. Then once again, he would be a knight without allegiance. Without purpose. He did not blame John. The prince had treated him fairly in all things. Instead, he cursed his ill luck. It had dogged him his whole life, since the fall from grace of Gilbert de Gaillon. He thought he had found a master who was de Gaillon’s equal. He knew now that this would never be achieved.
“It’s not much,” said John. “Less than you deserve.” Gisburne was barely even aware of holding his hand out to take whatever trinket John was offering. There was simply the cold weight of metal on his upturned palm, and then his fingers closing about it – a half familiar shape. He frowned and held it up before him. It was a large, iron key.
“It’s no castle, I’m afraid,” John continued, his voice carrying a note of genuine apology. “But I must tread carefully, even now. Especially now.”
He turned and let his eyes roam across the chessboard. “The time will come for us to reveal our strategy,” he said. “But it is not yet. Richard has his white knight in Hood – the supposed saviour of the realm, about whom people publicly fawn. But you are this realm’s true protector. My black knight.” He picked up a piece from the board and turned it in his fingers. “It will be a hard road. The outside world will know nothing of what you do. You will receive little reward, and no adulation. You will be misunderstood, resented. Even hated. What is best for this realm is not what is best for the barons. They will misrepresent and distort you as they do me. I cannot promise that your story will be that of a hero; perhaps one day, but not yet. The truth doesn’t always come out. But that is why we fight. And you will be their champion. A knight of shadows.”
He turned to face Gisburne once more, his eyes gleaming with a strange intensity.
“Do you accept this?”
Gisburne gripped the key in his fist. “I do,” he said.
John breathed out, as though in relief. “I know this has been difficult for you. Being a thief. Being...” – he hesitated – “being like Hood. But it is different. We are fighting a war – fighting for a cause. What you do for me is different, just as killing in a war, for a just cause, is different from murder.”
Gisburne thought of Hood the thief. Hood the murderer. Yes, it was different. He would make sure it was.
John turned away, then, to the frost-crazed glass of the window, and gazed at the frozen world beyond.
“I do believe it is finally beginning to thaw,” he said distantly.
Gisburne breathed deeply, his body filling with renewed vigour – a hardened determination. This would be his mission. He felt muscles and sinews tighten, the spirit burn with a fierce heat, the will become tempered like steel.
And there was something else – a softer emotion. One he had not known for years. An almost overwhelming, child-like joy.
For the moment his eyes had settled upon the key, he had known exactly what it was.
Epilogue
Village of Gisburne – 13 January, 1192
GUY OF GISBURNE rode along the winding, high banked lane, lost in thought, his head pounding from the night before.
For a long time he had been riding with little thought for his surroundings. He was weary – exhausted by the demands of his quest, worn down by the weeks of travel, dispirited by its conclusion. De Gaillon was right; you felt more tired after a defeat. He kept telling himself that it had not been a defeat – that it had achieved exactly what was needed. And perhaps it would even help bring Hood to justice. That was something for which he heartily wished. But he knew the resources of that man – resources drawn from a seemingly inexhaustible well – and doubted that his end would come so easily. And there were other things, too. Things left unfinished.
There was Tancred. For the sake of all that was good, all that was reasonable, he wished the world cleansed of him. Whether that had indeed been achieved, he had not heard one way or the other.
There was also Mélisande de Champagne. Of her, he had thought a great deal. He told himself she was a mere fact of his mission, a temporary alliance – another piece on the chessboard which could now be disregarded. But he was not yet skilled enough in the art to make himself believe that lie.
Then there was Galfrid. His heart shrank at the thought. That was his defeat, his loss. The rest was simply incidental damage – the scarring of battle. But that... He knew what Gilbert would have said: that in order to win, one had to be prepared to lose something. But that did not make it feel any better.
He sighed heavily and looked around him, seeking solace in the quiet of the land. For a long time he had been travelling through the sparse, rolling landscape typical of these parts, dotted with gnarled trees and outcrops of mossy, grey rock. The road itself followed the high ground. To his left, for much of the way, the valley had fallen away in a gentle slope down to a tumbling, icy river, swollen now by the thaw. Its roar had been his constant companion for the greater part of that afternoon. Across the bleakly beautiful panorama a network of dry stone walls spread like grey-green veins, and here and there a lonely cottage leaned into the wind. The snows of recent weeks had here quite gone, and the brisk breeze had whipped the bare ground dry. The sun came and went with alarming rapidity – solid clouds hurtling across the cold blue sky, their pattern of huge shadows sliding across the open fields and moors, plunging them into cold, grey darkness before bursting back into light moments later.
Over the last league, the landscape had begun to soften, becoming flatter, more sheltered by trees, the stone walls replaced by thick hedges. He half recognised these roads now, as one does in a dream – at once familiar and unfamiliar, muddled by memory. It had been a long time since he had travelled this way. Years. He had been a different man then. The last time he had expected to do so, just over a year ago, he had got only as far as the priory at Lundwood. There, the monks were caring for his dying father, cruelly cast off his land by Richard’s edict. There, too, had been Marian.
He shook his thumping head to rid himself of that thought, then winced at the way his tender brain seemed to bounce in his skull.
The blame for the state of his head lay squarely at Llewellyn’s door.
At their reunion in Notting
ham Castle the week before, Llewellyn had greeted him heartily. True to his word, and without prompting, he drew out the promised bottle of potent, ecclesiastical brew – but not before he had plied him with just about every other kind of drink, some from lands Gisburne had not even heard of, and at least one that Llewellyn had described as “an experiment”.
As was evident from their surroundings that night, Llewellyn liked experiments. Gisburne gazed around the workshop in the bowels of the castle – a larger and far richer version of his temporary accommodation at the Tower. It was a cluttered treasury of outlandish devices both real and imagined, some complete, many only half realised, others no more than pinned sketches on scraps of material or parchment. Often there was a strange beauty in their intricate design, in the iron, wood, bronze and ivory of their construction. Some featured stout springs or heavy tubes cast in metal, evidently intended to launch lethal projectiles. Others had structures as fine as fishbones – one, stretched with some gossamer-thin, near-transparent material and shaped like a bird. The purpose of many of these things was lost on Gisburne – and, perhaps, on anyone but Llewellyn himself.
The current experiment, in particular, seemed to have taken the esteemed enginer into the realms of the bizarre. In the centre of the pockmarked square table was a wooden stand, and upon the wooden stand something that loosely resembled a human arm, fashioned from dozens of shaped plates of metal, all hinged, overlapping and interlocking in a manner that brought to mind the body of a wasp. It was as if the limb had lately been wrenched from such a creature – but grown of iron and steel, and of outlandish size.
This was not in itself the strangest part of the scene, however. All about it there were drawings of insects and crawling sea beasts, and upon a platter, in various states of preservation or dismantlement, numerous large beetles, hornets and other armoured creatures – some, Gisburne recognised, native to the Holy Land, and perhaps further afield. A dung beetle, locusts, gigantic cockroaches, the likes of which he had never seen before. And spiders – of such size he hoped never to meet in life. Amongst all of them, however, it was the more modestly proportioned scorpions that caused him to shudder.
“Lunch?” said Gisburne, sipping tentatively at Llewellyn’s “experimental” brew, and finding it not only palatable, but surprisingly conventional – something like cider, but, by Gisburne’s reckoning, some hundred times stronger.
Llewellyn cast him a weary, unamused smile, as if it were the hundredth time that day he’d heard the joke – though quite who visited him down here, Gisburne could not imagine.
“The crabs and lobsters, I did eat,” he said. “The Moors partake of locusts, I have heard, but personally I shan’t be turning to them for sustenance. Only for inspiration...”
Gisburne turned his gaze to the hinged shell upon the wooden stand.
“That?”
“That.”
“What is that?”
“It is the future of warfare,” said Llewellyn.
Gisburne stood, studying it more closely. “So, we are to become like crabs and beetles, scuttling across the battlefield?”
“Have you never tried to crush an earwig underfoot, only for it to still be quick and vital after three tries? Have you never eaten lobster, and not had to attack it with all your strength to release it from its shell, though it be a fraction of your size? They are great survivors – armoured by the Almighty since creation. We have much to learn from this wisdom, if we only care to look. Imagine if you could walk right up to your foes, knowing their blades – and even their arrows – could do you no harm.”
“Don’t think I haven’t thought about it,” said Gisburne. He picked up the strange carapace, feeling its weight, testing its complex, interlocking plates and joints, and shook his head slowly. “Little wonder that it’s becoming a rich man’s game.”
“It’s too heavy,” sighed Llewellyn. “And awkward. The articulation needs work. You see, it’s all a question of the right steel – making it strong enough to resist a blade, yet flexible enough to be workable. But if I can make it flex just the right way, and make it lighter...”
“I could test it for you,” offered Gisburne, feeling the extent of its movement.
“You could,” said Llewellyn, standing and taking it from him with a suddenly proprietorial air. “When it’s ready...” He placed it carefully – almost lovingly – upon its base once more. It was, Gisburne thought, like one child relieving another of a cherished toy before it becomes damaged. “Don’t worry,” said Llewellyn, his back to his guest. “I will keep you informed of my progress. God knows you’re going to need all the help you can get to preserve your life in the months to come.”
Gisburne smiled and raised his glass. “To beetles and lobsters, and all their creeping kind.”
Llewellyn raised his own, and they both drank.
By the time they moved on to the monkish brew that evening, Gisburne was already flagging, and they had only managed about a quarter of the bottle before he gave up the ghost. Llewellyn had stoppered up the remainder and presented it to him.
Gisburne had worked his way through most of it on the night before this final day’s travel, as compensation for the dismal lodgings in Bradford. All day, he had been regretting it, nursing a thick head that not even a bitter Yorkshire wind could blow away. The worst hangovers of all were born from drinking alone.
Quite suddenly, Gisburne found himself at a turning so familiar it made him stop. A winding lane struck off to the left by a broken oak tree – a tree he had played in as a child. He geed Nyght on, suddenly impatient for what lay ahead.
And then, as the lane turned, he saw it: a picturesque stone house – modest in size, but well-proportioned, with arched windows and a square tower at its western end. The house in which he had been born. The house in which his mother and sister had died. The house Richard had stolen from his father, and John had now restored. Gisburne was suddenly overwhelmed by a feeling he never thought to have again.
He was home.
He urged his horse into a gallop.
As the hooves pounded the road, memory tugged at him, and he did not resist. For a moment, he was a child again. The small boy being chased by the wife of Godwine the farmer, for robbing apples from their orchard. Slightly older, and stealing his little sister’s cake, and blaming it on the dog – then, later that week, almost breaking his arm as he’d tried to ride off with a visiting knight’s colossal destrier. Not long before he was due to leave for Normandy, pushing yeoman Robert’s boy in the mud and relieving him of the silver penny his uncle had given to him for his name day.
Then there was the time with Gilbert de Gaillon. The time when everything changed.
HE WAS THIRTEEN. One year into his apprenticeship with Gilbert, and already grown in confidence. Life with Gilbert was good – his master was firm, but fair, and the training, hard as it was, easily within his capabilities. Many knights treated their squires like common slaves who simply had to put up with whatever was thrust upon them, no matter how mean or cruel. Some seemed to consider that good sport. De Gaillon, however, took his responsibilities as a mentor seriously. He was not only the boy’s master, nor simply a trainer in the arts of combat. He was also a teacher, preparing his young charge for life. And when he spoke to Gisburne, he did so as he would anyone else, making no allowance for status. This was almost unique among the knights Gisburne had encountered. At first, he valued it highly. Then, he began to take it for granted. Soon, he was becoming cocky.
It came to a head one night in the summer. It had been a good day – one of those in which everything, even the weather, seemed to work in one’s favour, and at the end of which one’s muscles had the satisfying ache of hard work well done. He had served de Gaillon his meal and was finally eating his own, seated by the camp fire along with several of the other squires. Nicolas, an older squire who Gisburne greatly admired, was talking loudly to his fellows. Nicolas was tall, broad shouldered, with hair as black as pitch – a son of a we
althy family. His uncle was a Count, and had sent him the gift of a new knife as a reward for his good conduct in a recent tournament. He wielded it like a sword in the flickering light of the fire, and joked about how he could eat two meals at once now he had two eating knives. It was a beautiful piece of work – its handle carved in bone, with all manner of inlays and glittering ornaments. All marvelled at it.
But it was not this that occupied young Gisburne’s mind. It was Nicolas’s old knife, sticking upright out of a slab of bread.
It was an object Gisburne had long coveted. The handle was of black wood; two elegantly shaped parts, held in place either side of the tang with flat rivets. The blade – about a palm’s length – was simple, but satisfyingly shaped and proportioned. Sharpened on one edge, flat on the other, and thick at the base, giving it good strength and weight, the whole gently tapering to a fine point. There was nothing in the way of decoration upon it. It was not ostentatious – probably not very valuable. But in Gisburne’s mind, it had a simplicity that he had seen in no other – and every part of him wanted it for his own. Now that Nicolas had his fancy new knife, he could see no earthly reason why that should not be so.
That night, he crept into the tent where Nicolas lay sleeping. It was a mad undertaking. Nicolas was five years older than he, and twice his size – if he caught him in the act, he would skin him alive. But his lust for the prize drew him on. He had expected the theft itself to be a challenge; in the event, both knives were left lying in plain sight by their owner’s snoring head. As he plucked up the blade, he saw that Nicolas was dribbling in his sleep like a baby. He left the tent chuckling to himself in a delirium of triumph.
Then the whole world collapsed around him.
In the dying light of the fire, watching him, half-dressed as if just risen from his bed, was Gilbert de Gaillon. Gisburne’s limbs froze, his face suddenly burning hot. His mind spun, seeking excuses. Explanations. But there were none. He was utterly exposed. De Gaillon’s eyes, glinting in the firelight, dropped to the knife in the boy’s hand, then came back up to his face, the unrelenting gaze boring into him as he stood, mute and useless. Gisburne expected some dreadful retribution – a beating, a barrage of unbearable admonishments, total humiliation before all his peers, perhaps even to be sent packing back home, a miserable failure. An exposed thief. But none of these things happened. What did happen was worse than all of them. De Gaillon narrowed his eyes for a moment, then, without a word, turned and walked away.
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