by Dan Davis
“Yet you make some good suggestions. You have a natural capacity for cunning and no doubt have a long future ahead of you as an outlaw. Let us push on. In order to do what must be done, we need to be at Mansfield before it is light. And dawn approaches.”
***
I crept through the shadows between houses just as a rosy dawn grew in the east. I would have been quieter without my armour and I would have seen and heard better without my helm but I simply could not bring myself to go without either.
The village of Mansfield was quiet. Like Blidworth and Linby, the folk were clearly dead, enslaved, or terrified into silence and abject misery. The houses were quiet. The few fires, from the faint smell of the dry smoke, were burning low. There were no animals in the pens by the houses. There were few crops growing in the gardens. The middens still stank, of shit and rot, corpses and old blood.
Jocelyn and Swein had both argued that it should be them sneaking in alone. Or that I should take archers with me, at least one or two, who could watch my back while I stole back the women.
Once, months before, Jocelyn had accused me of being so arrogant that it bordered on madness. Confidence turns to arrogance when your view of yourself becomes warped beyond truth. It becomes madness when your view of the world itself is warped and that night, my madness had reached a new height. I told my men that I alone was strong enough to fight my way out if anything went wrong. I believed that no man, not even William’s men, could stand against me. Had I not proved myself better than them at every turn? What a ludicrous notion.
My anger and my fear played their part in robbing me of my reason. My anger at William and his men for taking Eva and Marian paled in comparison to the anger I felt at myself for putting them at risk. My fear that they would be hurt was almost overwhelming. That fear was greater than I was willing to admit even to myself.
Secretly, I was also hoping that I could find and rescue both women by myself. It would be a way of redeeming myself to both of the women and to myself but I did not admit such vanity to my men, of course. So I browbeat their objections down and, like a mad fool, went into the village alone.
The top of the church caught the first dim light of the morning, the sandstone glowing softly as if catching the light from the air. The door was half bashed in, hanging awkwardly, like a broken tooth.
If Much had been telling the truth, that was where they were.
I picked my way carefully, slowly. Breathing lightly, still I could hear my own breath hot in my ears. Every step I took further into the centre of the place, the more I doubted that Marian and Eva could truly be held inside.
What did William want from me? What was I walking into? I realised that, whether riding into the village at daylight or sneaking through in the dark, I had been drawn into William’s web once again. But how could I do anything different? What move could I make that would confound him?
But why did I even need to? I had been caught up in the schemes of Swein. That lad admired and aspired to cleverness. To stratagems and gambits.
I did not. I wanted the women back. William — or his man John — had them.
All I need do was kill any man who stood in my way.
I kicked down the wattle fence before me and strode into the village.
The black rectangle of the church door beckoned. I jogged up the steps and yanked open the broken door, which gave with a shriek of wood on wood, loud and jagged enough to wake the dead.
Inside was dark. It reeked of death. Of rotting flesh and blood that was fresh.
Muffled movement at the far end.
Ambushers or prisoners, either way, the makers of the noise had to be approached. I stepped forward and there came a cry, a stifled cry from that end.
The blackness at my feet was complete. My helm restricted my sight even further. I held my shield up and strode forward, sword point before me.
A woman’s voice, her throat tight with terror, cried out.
“Help!”
She was at the far end of the church and I ran forward toward it.
And I tripped.
Like a blundering fool, like a child in a game, I tripped over a rope set for the purpose. It caught on my ankle and my momentum carried me forward and down.
I fell hard on my shield.
Then they were on me.
William’s men sprung from the darkness on either side, with a weighted net and ropes at the ready. They struck blows on my back and my head with sticks and bludgeons and staves, over and over.
My sword was not in my hand when I swung it, so instead I swung my fists. I struck out with my feet, my elbows. But they were so many and I was struck about the head so often that their blows knocked me senseless.
I fought, of course. Though I was blinded and knew not which way was up, I wrestled and thrashed and heaved and struck down one after the other.
But the men set upon me were freshly fed with the living blood of the villagers. I was dragged out into the street.
A knife found its way to my throat. The cold iron nicked my skin, drawing blood and searched around under my jaw.
I was utterly certain my throat was to be cut. My final thoughts were wondering what my final thoughts were going to be, and thinking about how paltry those thoughts were. I wondered if I should instead think of my wife or her children, Jocelyn and Emma but I thought of how I had failed them all and failed the two women I had set out to rescue and I hoped that Swein, Anselm, and the men would get away.
But the knife instead sawed away at my chinstrap and my helm was twisted from my head. I blinked in the slight glare of the predawn sky.
There was a great giant of a man there before me. A head taller and twice as wide as I.
“He said you was a great knight,” the huge man said. “He said you was to be feared. Never to be fought, not even a score of the sons of Adam could face you. But I know knights. You all want to save a lady from a dragon, don’t you? Well, I’m the dragon. And you ain’t saving no one, my lord.”
With his giant’s strength, made unnaturally strong by William’s gift, he brought a cudgel down onto the back of my head.
***
When I awoke, I was on my back, on the cold ground.
My head was throbbing with every breath. It felt as though my skull was caved in at the back. A tender mass of broken bone shards and swollen skin.
There were men around me, voices, the stench of blood and death.
It was dark, still. But the sky above was pink with the morning and quickly turning to blue.
I was in chains.
They clanked as I raised my hands to feel my head only to find my hands bound to my body. My legs were likewise wrapped.
My mouth was stoppered with a rag tied tight.
“He lives,” a man’s voice said.
“Thank the Creator for that,” another man said and I was kicked in the side of the head.
The pain shot through me. I ached all over and wondered if my arms and legs were broken. My sight was impaired in some way as the figures around me were blurred and smeared. I realised I had blood in my eyes but I could not move my hands up to wipe my face.
Still, I saw the big man move into view above me. He faced away from me, down the street and bellowed.
“You men out there. As I’m sure you can see, I have your master Richard of Ashbury in chains. Attack me or any of my men and I will slit his throat. I see a single arrow. I hear the twang of a single bow. I slit his throat. I see one of you following us, I slit his throat.”
The big man, Little John the Bailiff, turned and mumbled to one of the other figures.
I guessed there were at least a dozen men around me and a few moved off toward the church.
Jocelyn would not give up on me, I thought, he would not back down. Neither would Anselm. They would keep their distance.
Swein and his archers, I did not know what they would do. Swein wanted revenge for the hurts he had suffered at the hands of the men about me, or their friends. Wheth
er he would seek to avenge me when it was a lost cause, I could not guess.
But Jocelyn, surely, would attempt to save Marian and Eva, no matter if I were dead or alive.
Two women were dragged from the church. I could not see properly but both had heavy hoods tied down over their faces. They had been dressed in filthy old robes. The women whimpered under their hoods as they were brought to Little John.
I writhed and tried to sit up but the men guarding me struck me and a filthy old man sat upon my chest, a rusty dagger held to my throat.
“You want these women?” the giant shouted out. He glanced at me and grinned through his thick, black beard. “You want both these women, do you not?” He laughed. “You follow me and both of them will get this.”
John grabbed the woman nearest to him and wrapped one mighty arm about her from behind. With his other hand, he stabbed a knife up into her throat and sawed back and forth.
Rolling over, I threw off the old man on my chest, his dagger slicing deep into my cheek, all the way through until it clashed against my teeth. But the other men pinned me down, held me on the ground and allowed me to watch the murder.
Blood gushed from beneath her hood. It poured out, soaking John’s arm and the woman’s robe. Her body sagged against him and he held her to him.
A great cry of anguish sounded from outside the village.
Jocelyn or Swein watching from afar, afraid that it was Marian rather than Eva. We always fear the worst, when those we love are concerned.
Little John shoved the body of the woman into the hands of his men, who gathered about her with two buckets. They between them held her upright, pulling her hooded head back so that the blood spurted into the buckets. When the pulse faltered, they picked her up and held her body so that the feet were higher than the head, draining as much as they could.
“Can we string her up, John?” one of the men said.
“No,” John said, his voice like the falling of a tombstone. “We ride for Eden. Bring the body.”
I was picked up by rough hands and heaved onto the back of a horse, face down and I was tied onto the beast.
The woman who yet lived was wrestled onto a waiting horse and slapped around until she ceased struggling and complied.
The body of the woman was tied onto another horse near me. As they tossed her on, the horse shied away and the body slipped. They grabbed it and shoved it back on top with a stream of curses. The hood fell away for a moment.
As the men and horses filed out of the village of Mansfield, with me along with them, I knew I had failed. The feeling was worse than any wound I had suffered.
But in any case, the woman who had been stabbed was not Eva.
And it was not Marian, either.
Little John had murdered some other woman, for my watching men’s benefit. What it meant, I knew not. Perhaps Eva and Marian both lived. Or perhaps they were already dead.
It seemed I was being taken to William and to the place they called Eden.
***
I had imagined myself storming William’s lair. In my fantasies, I had been sometimes alone, sometimes charging at the head of a mounted band or with archers’ arrows flying past me to bury themselves into William’s monsters.
Never had I expected to be dragged there in chains.
My wounds were bad. My skull pounded with every step of the horse.
To distract myself, I attempted to count Little John’s men by the sounds of their voices and the smell of them. Not all of them spoke and they all stank of blood, so it was difficult but there was a score, at least. The horse I was tied to was a swaybacked old mare with mud splattered all over her coat and shit all around her hindquarters.
The sun rose to its midday peak above the green leaves overhead. My view was of the track beneath the horse, her mud-caked hooves and a short way in front or behind at the men who had captured me. All flowed past me in a flickering of dappled sunlight. A jay’s blue wings flashed as it swooped through the dappled splashes of sunlight.
Soon, the woodland gave way to open fields and then a hard-packed track surface. I must have dozed for a while and was woken by the horse’s hooves clattering on flat cobblestones. I peered about me, wincing from the wounds, remembering my failure.
Our procession had reached a stone pathway, the surface was large, irregular pebbles with flat tops embedded into a hard surface. What we called a pitched path. It was quite common in castle courtyards or the homes of the wealthy but was completely strange in the middle of the wild greenwood.
Looking ahead, I was shocked. The trees all around me had thinned and ahead was a high timber wall across the path with an open gateway in the centre. It was a hunting lodge. One of the few I knew were deep in Sherwood that the king could use as a place to stay while he hunted deer and boar.
The lodge was a rambling stone and timber complex that seemed to grow from the wild profusion of vines and scrambling plants climbing over the walls. The woodland around it had been cut back, coppiced and cleared of brushwood but still the trees were huge, gnarled and ancient.
The men around me were strangely silent, the only sounds were of hooves and leather shoes upon the stone pathway that took us through the gate and into the huge courtyard of the lodge.
Pillars of limestone, carved at the top and bottom supported a gateway in a thick timber wall that stood at least ten feet high. The outer face of the wall was plastered and painted with leaf patterns though it was crumbling everywhere. The wall seemed to extend a long way in both directions before turning to make an enormous square enclosure. The weathered limestone columns had turned green and were pitted from the climbing vines around them.
“You are honoured, little man. As you pass through these gates, you are leaving England. And you are entering Eden,” Little John said from beside the old horse. I knew he was talking to me. “You will obey the law of this land or else I will have to punish you. I trust that you will behave yourself? Good, good.”
Beyond the gateway, there was a massive open space, all of it paved with the solid pitched surface of flat cobbles. But filled with a great mass of living green plants. Servants tended to them. The cobbled surface had been pried up all over the place to reveal the soil beneath.
Ahead was the main hall, a long, low single storey building of stone on the bottom half and timber on the top.
Many of the other buildings were constructed similarly. To the right of the hall was a big storehouse or barn, roughly built but sturdy. Between the hall and the barn was a thick hedge of raspberry bushes, tangled and overgrown. Beyond the barn, I could just see the corner of what was clearly a huge stable.
The other side was obscured by the horse but I caught a glimpse of workshops. The walls of all the buildings were covered with vines and climbing plants.
It was tough to see far because everywhere was overflowing with plants, crops, bushes and trees.
John clapped me on the back with his meaty palm, hard enough to knock the wind from me and make my head swim.
Little John leaned down to speak into my ear, his hot breathing reeking of death. “We have a special place reserved just for you. Cost us a fair old bit of trouble, getting hold of all that iron. But then what my Green Lord wants, my Green Lord gets, right? Anyway, hope you like it, Sir Richard, as it’s the last place you’re ever going to live in. If you can call it living.”
He laughed. A big, belly-shaking, rumbling laugh that scared birds from the trees above. His men laughed with him, the silent spell broken.
I was struck upon the back by clubs, wrestled from the horse, dumped onto the ground and struck again. Powerful hands dragged me to my feet. Blades were held to my throat and the men pushed me forward through the courtyard of the lodge complex.
I got a better look at the main building as they dragged me toward it. It was a squat hall built from the local sandstone with a timber and tile roof on top. Other buildings around the courtyard were a mix of timber and others stone.
The truly
astonishing, peculiar thing was that beside and between all the structures was an abundance of green leaves. Overgrown hedges and sprawling young trees grew against every building. There were apple trees and wild raspberry bushes. Clumps of cereal crops were planted around lines of grape vines.
Before the front wall of the main hall was a wild garden of herbaceous plants and weeds. I recognised henbane, hemlock, monks’ wood, foxglove, datura, and hellebore.
I could see little order to anything and the growth seemed overgrown and almost wild.
Throughout the enclosure, amongst the crops and herbs, were William’s servants. Men, women, young and old. They were slumped like slaves, their faces pale and their eyes dark. They clutched hoes, rakes, and scythes to their chests, glancing up at us from under their eyebrows.
“Walk,” William’s men said and shoved me on through toward the hall. Little John strode before me, sending the slaves scurrying in panic.
They dragged me into the building, yanking open the door. Instead of a grand open space, it was a long corridor down the centre with doors along each side and a single door at the far end.
“Guess what we got in here, then?” Little John shouted. He stomped past the first pair of doors then banged on the ones after, hard enough to rattle the beams locking them shut. “These are the cattle pens. Our cattle are the folk of Sherwood, the outlaws, the villagers. You hear me in there? They serve us or they feed us. Don’t you?”
I prayed that Marian or Eva would be there but saw neither. Surely, if they lived, William would have a special place for them.
Although, I recalled how William had rounded up the locals in Palestine and penned them in a single large room underground. A young Jocelyn and Emma had been flung in with the Saracens and forgotten about. They were the children of a Frankish noblewoman and yet for William they had no more value than any of the other Saracens that he and his men used for harvesting blood.
Palestine was a land of war, a land of Saracen heathens who the Pope had declared enemies of God and Christ, so in a way, William’s scouring of that land made a perverse kind of sense, to himself at least.