Lionhearts

by Nathan Makaryk

  Sarra steadied herself on a post, frantic for any sign of her son. The boy in the mud invaded her thoughts again, freezing her with the same empty sense of indecision. But the crowd calmed as winners claimed their prizes, and Sarra pushed the image of a trampled Hugh to the back of her mind. He knows to come back.

  “Don’t worry, there’s more for all of you,” Robin called out, quieting the room. “But I have to ask for a little help first. Do you suppose you can help me out?”

  “Aye, we can!” came the reply. Expectant faces and open palms waited upon Robin’s every movement.

  “Those of you who received a coin, could you come forward, please? Let them through, make way now!”

  He gestured them closer, and a few lucky bodies held their coins up proudly and formed a row before him. Five in total, though Sarra only recognized one—a curly-headed friend of Rog’s by the name of Dane, a dockworker who’d shown them rare kindness.

  Robin smiled at the winners. “My friends, I am happy to help you. After all, who else out there is going to help you out?”

  “No one!” Dane answered, instantly earning Robin’s attention.

  “No one!” Robin snapped his fingers. “Why not the King, why doesn’t he help?”

  “He’s in Austria!” came one answer.

  “He’s in prison!” came another. Both were true. Somewhere on the other side of the world, King Richard the Lionheart had been captured. But those still at home were the ones suffering for it.

  “Why not the Sheriff, then?” Robin continued. “Why doesn’t he help?”

  “He’s too busy taking our money!” was a gruff answer, followed by laughter.

  “You have the right of it, friend.” Robin smiled. “One quarter of everything, to pay for Richard’s ransom! You have to be careful these days. I have two hands and two feet, and the Sheriff’s like to take one as my payment!” The grumble that followed had only an empty mirth. The collections for the king’s ransom was no mere tax. For many, surrendering a quarter of all their worth was the brutal snap of a branch long bent to its breaking point.

  “Well I wish I could give these coins to you and ask for nothing in return,” Robin continued, “but even Robin Hood needs help sometimes. You understand that, don’t you?”

  “Whatever you need,” Dane answered for them. “Just name it.”

  “It’s very simple, it’s nothing really.” Robin paused. “I need that coin back.”

  Dane chuckled, as did the crowd, but Robin held his hand out as the laughter faded into embarrassment.

  “This coin?” Dane asked cautiously. “The ones you just gave us?”

  “The very one.”

  His next laugh was smaller, dumber. “Is this a trick?”

  “A trick, no. Call it a curiosity!” Robin clicked his tongue. “Right now that shilling is yours, and you may do with it anything you like.”

  “It’s a crown, sir.”

  “A crown?” Robin’s eyes widened in disbelief. “My, but I’m more generous than I thought! But it’s yours, I won’t take it from you. You’ve had it all of a minute but I’m sure you’ve already thought well on how you’ll spend it, no? What will you do with it?”

  Dane looked to the other four coin-bearers, but the question was clearly for him alone. When he spoke, there was doubt in his voice. “Food. Boots, maybe.”

  “Boots, maybe, that’s good. That’s good,” Robin looked down, kicking his own dark leather boots against the chest. “Would you like my boots?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Don’t call me sir, I’m not a knight.”

  “No, sir. Er, no … m’lord.”

  “Even worse.”

  “Sorry … sorry.”

  “Hm.”

  Sarra wished very much that Hugh would find his way back to her.

  Robin leveled his eyes on Dane, who buried his attention into the ground. “Food, you say? Nottingham has a Common Hall, does it not? Why aren’t you there?”

  Someone in the crowd answered angrily, “You have to be on the lists!”

  “And they won’t put certain types of people on those lists, will they?” Robin prompted them. “Deserters, gang members,… tax evaders, yes?”

  An unsettling murmur rumbled in assent, while a few other titles were called out—other types of people who could be refused the charity of the Common Hall. Sarra hated that she flinched when the word whore was shouted.

  “And with this damned ransom, everyone’s a tax evader, aren’t we?” Robin Hood smiled. “A crown’s a fine amount, I’ll bet you could pay your way onto that list for a crown. Is that what you meant when you said you’d spend it on food?”

  “I hadn’t thought about it.”

  “I’m aware of that.” Robin suddenly raced through his words with precision. “So think about it now. You have a choice! You can give that coin to Nottingham, and to the Sheriff, and pay your way and feed yourself and be considered a lawful man. Or you can give it to me, as I ask for it, and show that you can be as generous as I am. If you are my friend, as you claim to be, why would you refuse to do for me that which I gladly did for you?”

  Dane opened his mouth to answer, but Robin silenced him with one finger.

  “But if you do give it back to me, know that you’re choosing my side. Know that you would be considered an outlaw, as I am. An enemy of Nottingham. I will not take the coin from you, friend, it is yours. I simply want to know what you’ll do with it, when I ask for it back.”

  Robin’s hand extended again, just as before, and the room was ever silent. Even the steady patter of rain outside had somehow faded beyond Sarra’s ability to hear it.

  Dane resolved himself, the muscles at his jawline flexed. “I don’t think I will, no.”

  “You don’t think you will, what?”

  “I don’t think I’ll give it back to you.”

  Robin Hood smiled. “And why not?”

  “Because when you gave it to me, it was a gift.” Dane swallowed, trying his best to look tall and proud. “I didn’t ask for it. It was your choice to give it. But if you ask it of me, that’s different. You always say that nobody should be able to take anything from us.”

  “Is that what I always say?”

  Dane pursed his lips.

  The greyhound man’s fist smashed bloody across Dane’s face and brought him to the floor.

  Sarra lost her footing, her heart pounded furiously, and she gasped for air as the crowd reeled in horror. They had all gone blurry—no, there were tears in her eyes—and she blinked them away. Looking twice, she realized the attacker had not used his fist. He was holding a short bludgeon. He flipped the tiny club about in his hand as he heaved Dane back to his knees and pried the gold crown from his fingers.

  “Who else received a coin?” Robin barked out, and the other four cowered. “I ask for it back. Do you give it to me?”

  In unison they dropped and held out their hands, desperate to be rid of their incriminating prize. The man with the bludgeon gently reclaimed the crowns from two more coin-bearers, then turned with horrifying speed to crash his weapon onto the tops of both their skulls. Sarra screamed, but threw her hand over her mouth to keep from drawing any undue attention her way.

  Hugh. She searched desperately for him, but couldn’t avoid watching what was next.

  One man and one woman remained, quivering, on their knees. The others cradled their heads, rolling in pain.

  “I ask for that coin,” Robin’s ferocity was naked now, “will you give it to me?”

  “I don’t … I don’t know,” the next man whimpered. He pounded the coin onto the ground and turned to scramble away, but the greyhound man bounded over him and twirled the bludgeon by a short rope at its handle, slinging it upward into the man’s chin. His teeth cracked loud enough to silence the room. Robin seemed startled by something, then wiped the fine spray of blood from his face.

  There was still no sign of Hugh.

  “I ask for that coin,” Robin growled at his
final victim, a thin woman with ratted black hair. “Will you give it to me?” By now, the friar had brandished a thick knife that kept anyone in the crowd from pretending to be a hero.

  The woman stayed at her knees but straightened upright and bore herself into Robin’s eyes. “Don’t pretend to give me a choice!” she bellowed back at him, her volume masking her fear. “You’ll hit me either way. You’ll hit me if I give it to you. You’ll hit me if I don’t. You’ll hit me if I do nothing. So hit me. Because you’re going to. You’re going to hit me because you’re a bully.” She clenched her neck. “You’re going to hit me because you’re a coward.”

  “No.” Robin held his hand up, staying the greyhound. He crouched down on the balls of his feet to bring his face next to hers. “You’ve got it all wrong, love. You did have a choice. But you already made it.”

  He stood.

  “I’m going to hit you because you took my money in the first place.”

  The bludgeon came up but Sarra closed her eyes before it fell, the sound was enough. The crowd panicked at long last—they’d been frozen in disbelief but now fell prey to hysteria. A few fled into the rain, but the rest were halted by Robin’s voice.

  “Quiet!” he shouted. “We are not done here! Nobody leaves.”

  Eventually the entire room buckled down, curling into balls, to be as small and unnoticeable as possible.

  Sarra slipped down from her post and hid as well, then burst with relief when Hugh splashed out of the crowd and flung himself around her. His face was white, and she engulfed him in her arms that he might see nothing more. She closed her eyes as the tears ran hot down her cheeks and into her son’s hair. But she could not close her ears.

  “These five of you took coin from me, and have been punished.” A moment or two of silence, save for the moans of those five. “But I threw six coins.”

  The room shifted, Sarra peeked out. Robin picked his way with care through the huddled bodies, a wolf stalking in the bushes. The greyhound signaled—just a nod of his head, really—but it led Robin Hood to stop directly in front of Sarra’s husband.

  “Show me your hands.”

  “I didn’t get one, none.”

  Robin turned back for confirmation. “He does,” the greyhound stated. “I watched him pick it up.”

  Back to Rog, Robin’s face was all smiles. “Are you calling my friend a liar? We know you have it.”

  Sarra didn’t have enough hands to stop Hugh from watching and also to muffle the whine that rose in her throat.

  Rog kept his face stubbornly down, away, his fists behind his back, his mouth tight. He didn’t respond when Robin Hood repeated the demand. Nor when the friar grabbed his shoulders and wrestled him to the ground. Rog simply stayed where he landed, unmoving, as if he could ignore himself out of the room.

  “It’ll be better here, you’ll see.”

  You’ll see.

  The friar handed his knife to the greyhound, then revealed an iron hatchet from beneath his cloak.

  “I’m not going to pry your fingers open like a child,” Robin said. “You either give me the coin, or we’ll take a king’s ransom from you. One in four. You hear me, friend? We’ll take your hand.”

  Rog made noises, they weren’t quite words.

  “Try that again, friend. Use a language this time.”

  “I-don’t-have-anything.”

  “It’s either in your fucking hand or you gave it to someone else, and I don’t think it’s the latter. Open your fist, then.”

  “I don’t … I didn’t…”

  “God’s cock, man. Give me the coin.”

  Someone braver than Sarra shouted, “He doesn’t have it!”

  Robin looked sideways at the greyhound a third time, who nodded again. Small, but with an absolute and grim certainty. Sarra wasn’t the only one who knew Rog was lying.

  Robin hesitated, but his voice was strong. “Alright, Tuck. Do it.”

  White funneled in from all sides as Sarra’s vision closed tight on her husband. She felt somehow twenty feet tall, her hands impossibly large and numb, her stomach churned as her balance span, but somehow she kept watching, noiselessly, breathlessly, as they held Rog’s arm across the wooden chest, a strap of leather went around his wrist, the greyhound pulled it tight and stepped on it, Rog’s mouth was open, in pain, maybe, but his hand still a fist, and the friar knelt on him, one knee on his chest, and nobody helped and nobody helped andnobodyhelped and the hatchet split flesh and bone but it didn’t cut the hand off, no, it was left dangling by a strip of slick bloody meat and the friar nearly toppled as Rog screamed, the greyhound went down and kicked Rog in the ribs, they fought and kicked him again until his arm was braced back across the chest a second time and the hatchet chopped down once more, just missing the wrist as he squirmed, gouging deep in his forearm, a well of dark red pouring out, it wasn’t until the third try that the hand came off and Sarra stared at her husband’s blood, it was so much blood, and nobody helped and he didn’t even have a coin and it was so very much blood and Hugh was choking.

  Her son was gagging at her breast, struggling to be free, she’d been holding him too tight. She let him loose but held onto his cheeks—always too hard and never hard enough—preventing him from seeing his father’s mutilated arm. Hugh coughed a mouthful of spit into his hands and gasped for air, then buried himself into her chest again.

  Friar Tuck was hammering an iron spike through the palm of Rog’s severed hand, nailing it high on the back wall of the Pity Stables.

  Robin Hood, his face white, thrust a finger at it. “That’s mine now! And it stays there. I’m starting a collection. If anyone tries to take it down…” He may have picked anyone at random to focus on, but it was Sarra’s eyes he found. “Well, you’ve seen how I deal with people who take what’s mine.”

  She could only barely feel its tiny uneven ridge through the shawl at her neck, slimy but firmly held in her son’s little hands, but Sarra knew well enough that Hugh had coughed out a gold crown.

  PART I

  BLACK SNOW

  ONE

  ARABLE DE BUREL

  THE SHERWOOD ROAD

  SUNDAY, 12TH DAY OF JANUARY

  ARABLE WAS STARING AT nothing.

  “I see nothing.”

  “Good,” Arthur whispered, next to her. “Let me know if that changes.”

  Crouching in earth still stained from the black snow, the three of them squinted uselessly into the distance. Despite Arthur’s warnings that there was something-they-had-to-see ahead, the Sherwood Forest looked the same in every direction—an endless expanse of barren spires, its once lush canopy shorn both by winter and by flame. If Arable was expected to see anything other than desolation, she doubted she’d find it.

  Arthur a Bland, too, bore the signs of their winter’s famine. His frame was somewhat leaner, his red mane and beard somewhat mangier. Where he once looked like the type of thug who might beat you to death for frivolous joy, he now looked like the type to stab you to death for the coins in your pocket. Perhaps that is not so large a distinction, after all, Arable thought. She was still comparably new to trusting men such as he.

  As Arthur eased to his feet and crept forward, David followed. They were two sides of the same coin. Where Arthur was gruff, David was supernaturally kind—so much so that Arable often wondered if she’d become an object of flirtation for him. A smile always lingered within the long features of David’s face, and he kept his thin horse-mane hair tied back into a long blond tail. One would never fear being beaten or stabbed to death by him … but simply because David of Doncaster preferred the longbow over the knife.

  These were Arable’s friends now, and the worst part was that she sort of liked it.

  “It’s up a bit more.” Arthur lowered his voice even further. “Best we stay silent until we’re on it, just in case.”

  “Yes, but what is it?” she asked.

  “Wha’d I just say now?” he replied in shock, his frozen grimace signaling the
very serious start of their silence. Arable threw her hands up in frustration, causing David to smile, but not speak.

  The boys moved with caution, searching for silent spots with each footfall, pausing behind whichever tree trunks seemed thick enough to hide their bodies. David held his spindly fingers aloft—the middle two encased in his lambskin archer’s glove—to signal Arable for a safe moment to follow. She couldn’t decide if they were being exceptionally diligent, or honestly afraid that every tree concealed an enemy.

  It didn’t matter. They were hiding from nothing.

  Arable de Burel had been many things in her life. A handmaiden, a servant, a thief. A lady, a fugitive, a traitor. She’d been both a lover and a mourner—recently, and to the same person. She’d been as close to the top of society as she was now to its bottom, and she’d been to both extremes more than once. She’d lost her family, she’d fled more homes than she could count, and was intimately familiar with the terror of each day’s hopes extending no further than the morrow.

  But she had never, not even once, been afraid of trees.

  “There’s nothing there!” she proclaimed, and both Arthur and David dove for cover.

  Ignoring their attempts to quiet her, she trudged forward with no care at all toward the noise she made. A plume of soot billowed in her wake, weeks of ash stirred into eddies as she kicked through the forest’s debris. The deep smell of smoke permeated everything, and most of the Sherwood’s naked trunks bore weeping black lines where they’d been discolored by rainfall. But up ahead was the only meaningful marker in the Sherwood—an area where first the trunks were scorched black, then into cracked and broken shards, and then finally to ruin.

  They were at the edge of the Sherwood Road, and Arable’s breath halted in her chest. She suddenly regretted her flippancy—if she’d known they were coming here, or anywhere she might be seen, then she might not have joined them. She’d been so thankful for Arthur’s invitation, and a slight adventure in the forest had sounded like a perfect distraction. But seeing it now, and the wide road that might bring any traveler upon them, was too harsh a reminder of why they were hiding in the forest in the first place.