Lionhearts

by Nathan Makaryk

  When he awoke the next morning, a full team of dray horses was pounding through his skull.

  “I’ve found the postern door,” David whispered, while helping him eat soup like they were a dying elderly couple. Other injured men were on the cots beside them, very likely pretending to be asleep just to spy on their act. “It’s near a cage they call the Rabbit, in the southwest corner. It’s never used, supposedly, and a storage larder was built around it some fifty years ago.”

  Arthur was impressed. “What did you do—kill the castle historian?”

  David stifled a laugh. “You think we’re the only ones who’ve thought about slipping out that way? People talk. The postern door leads to a small path cut into the rock, and a sharp climb down to the river. Apparently, the serving girls use it now and then to slip into town discreetly, to earn some extra penny.”

  “Hm.” Arthur moved his head, testing its limits. The dray horses didn’t like that, and resumed their pounding. “Alright, let’s slip out with the whores. What’s stopping us?”

  “You being dead,” David answered, and the patient next to them stirred slightly. They lowered their voices even further. “And Prince John’s men. There’s eighteen thousand things more important that need to be done in this castle, but somehow there’s always two of the prince’s guard watching that larder.”

  “Only two?” Arthur mulled it over. “We can handle that.”

  “Only if we’re suicidal.”

  They looked at each other for an uncomfortable length of time.

  “Which we’re not,” David said sternly.

  “We surprise them. Same way we—” He went from a whisper to nearly breathless. “Same way we got these gord tabards.”

  David shook his head. It was hard to ignore that his cheeks were more sunken than normal. “Prince’s men aren’t dumb gords, I’ve seen them. They’d take us apart. And their only job is to not get surprised.”

  “Well we can’t hide behind a cowl forever. You want to stay here until we’re caught?”

  “We’ve lucked out, actually. There was a class of new recruits in the castle when this happened. Those recruits all assume we’re with the veteran Guardsmen, and the regular Guardsmen all assume we’re with the recruits.”

  “Yes, we’re so damned lucky,” Arthur hissed, making a note to add this to Friar Tuck’s abominable list of God’s glorious bounty. “So you’re saying we’re trapped with twice the number of people who want to kill us?”

  “Once you’re ready, we’ll give the postern a look.” David dipped a dirty rag in a basin of water, stared at it as if he had no idea why he’d done so, and let it drop back in. “But I’ll give you this. We’re damned lucky we got out of that bailey when we did.”

  * * *

  TWO DAYS AFTER PRINCE John seized Nottingham Castle, Arthur and David volunteered to walk the bulwark, which gave them the best opportunity to study the behavior of the prince’s men around the postern door. The elevated walkway took them all around the perimeter of the middle bailey and up to the towers of the high keep’s walls, then back down again. On the western leg of this walk, they’d tip their chins over the edge—where there was nothing but sheer stone wall, then cliffside—and tried not to imagine the damage such a fall might do to them. On the cityside eastern walk they always grew silent, watching the desperate huddles of spectators still confined in the great lower bailey beneath them. The people had spread out into small groups, at the commands of the gords there who were equally trapped by the curtain walls.

  On each pass, Arthur would pick a cluster and squint, searching for the faces of any other Red Lions who’d been at the tournament. Ricard, or Clorinda. The Dawn Dog’s size should make him easy to spot, but Arthur doubted he’d escaped after being fingered in the riots. The girl he’d saved with the meat skewer, she might still be down there.

  “Are you looking because you’re hoping they’re safe?” David asked. “Or so you could turn them in for a chance to get out of here?”

  Arthur didn’t answer, because he hadn’t much decided.

  “I’m sure they’ve all been caught,” he said instead. “Guards knew who to target during the tourney. The Red Lions were betrayed, but hell if I know who did it.” A nasty little black nugget suddenly popped into his brain. “Though I know one little bitch who always thought her breeks weren’t big enough…”

  David shook his head. “Wasn’t Zinn.”

  “Then why wasn’t she here? A crowd that size, full of assholes buying little flags, it was a pickpocket’s wet dream.” Arthur didn’t quite believe his own words. He’d finally come around to like the little critter, he just didn’t have any better suspects. “Where was she?”

  “She was with Will,” David answered. “Ricard told me about it, at the tournament. They were supposed to attack that dockmaster we’d been tailing.”

  “Attack him?”

  “I don’t know. Threaten, maybe. Maybe worse. I guess they gave up on trying to get any dirt on him.”

  Arthur ground his jaw. He’d found plenty of dirt on that man—by the name of Saddle Maege—but refused to give it to the Lions. That refusal might have cost the man his damned life.

  Fucking hell.

  There were worse things in the world than guilt, but that didn’t make it taste any better.

  One of those “worse things” reared its head only a bit later that day. On their lap about the bulwark, they passed the curious Lace Jackal—the troll-faced archer who’d bested Red Fox in the last minutes of his life. Arthur and David kept their heads down, thankful for the stolen quilted hoods that obscured their faces. The Lace Jackal spoke with a skinny fop in a clean blue tabard, and Arthur nearly froze when he caught a critical snippet of information.

  They’d captured Will Scarlet.

  That quickened their pace.

  Arthur wanted to tear the castle down with his bare hands. He had only stayed in this cuntslop of a city because Will had convinced them the tournament would change their luck. But with Will captured, and the Red Lions destroyed … there was no damned reason for Arthur to be anywhere near Nottingham.

  Excepting a prince’s orders and a locked gate.

  “What the fack do we do now?” David asked, eyes wide, on the western half of their loop.

  “I don’t know,” he answered, and those words had never been heavier.

  At dinner that evening, they dared to approach a couple of gords who seemed on the more harmless side, to pry from them whatever information they could. Sebastien was a thin, fastidious fellow with a drawn face, and he eventually revealed that Will Scarlet had been arrested the very morning of the tournament. That likely meant he’d been captured while doing that damn dockmaster job with Zinn, and Arthur hated how much he cared to know it. One more thing for him to feel guilty about.

  They spent fifteen minutes nodding at the religious ramblings of a puffy-faced half Spaniard named Matthias before he mentioned that Will Scarlet was being held in the prisons beneath their very feet. Those prisons were now swarming with people arrested from the lower bailey, well past its ability to house them. Some had been turned in by their fellow citizen and labeled a conspirator of Robin Hood, as Arthur had seen during the riots. Others had turned themselves in just to get the fuck out of the bailey.

  Because some people in the bailey—particularly those who weren’t willing or able to protect themselves—were starving.

  The castle’s cooks weren’t prepared to feed such a mass, though they admittedly did what they could. There was food in the guards’ barracks, where Arthur and David kept their hoods over their faces and ate the best meals they’d had since Locksley. But most of the other gords—not all, but most, shockingly—only ate half their meal and carried the rest out to the battlements, where it was lowered in buckets to the hungry mouths below. Both Sebastien and Matthias eventually left to do exactly that.

  David suggested that they ought to do the same, but Arthur wouldn’t have it. They needed their strength, and th
ey’d be gone soon enough. One half-eaten meal wouldn’t help anyone down below. Arthur and David needed to tend to themselves first.

  At night, they watched the prince’s men change shift at the postern. One man of the midnight watch had an angry bladder and took regular breaks, briefly leaving only one watchman on the door.

  But attempting an escape that night would mean leaving Will Scarlet behind. Situated as they were, in disguise at the sole access point to the prisons, they were Will’s only hope.

  Arthur recognized the look in David’s eye, because it was the same as his own. The both of them very much wanted to pretend the Will Scarlet problem was not a problem at all, and make their escape without him.

  But if Arthur had told the Lions what he’d learned about Gerome Artaud as they’d asked—as Scarlet had asked—then Will would never have been on that job. He never would have been arrested.

  So they planned, and they slept.

  * * *

  THREE DAYS AFTER PRINCE John seized Nottingham Castle, the postern door was no longer an option. The prince’s men spent all morning barricading it with timber and clean blocks of sandstone that had been meant for renovating a wooden keep. By the time they were done, no weak bladder would ever give Arthur and David the time they needed to clear the way. It would take hours of labor for the two of them to move the obstacles, and wake half the castle in doing so. Arthur cursed the loss of its possibility with every expletive he knew, and a dozen more he didn’t. The only way of leaving the castle unseen now was over the western battlement. It might be possible with the help of a damned long rope if they could find one, or they could do it with a simple jump and be rid of their hell forever.

  Prince John’s name was no longer spoken aloud in the castle. Instead he was referenced as simply him or by a solemn nod toward the highest keep, where his small figure could often be seen in the window of the top floor, looking down at the chaos he’d created.

  * * *

  FOUR DAYS AFTER PRINCE John seized Nottingham Castle, the grim reality of their new existence was beginning to set in. Not just for the two of them, but everyone. Rumors that the prince was more interested in punishing the city than catching Robin Hoods had spread like a rash. The commonfolk trapped in the lower bailey—who had by now earned the moniker of baileyfolk—began constructing shelters from the collapsed ruins of the spectator scaffolding. There were squarish structures rising in surprisingly organized rows throughout the archery range, and the entrance area where the vendors had sold their wares was dismantled and repurposed into fire pits. A few intrepid men used the available timber to raise an improvised ladder up to the outside curtain wall and attempt an escape, and they might’ve succeeded had they not proven too terrified to jump down the other side.

  After that, the longer bulwark around the lower bailey was kept evenly populated with guards and crossbowmen. Arthur and David were conscripted to walk that duty, which afforded them none of the privacy the middle bailey ramparts had. They grouped with another pair of guards—two of the newest recruits, who were both named Henry. Arthur named them Henry Left and Henry Right, regardless of how they were standing. Mop-headed and fidgety, both of them, the Two Henries looked to Arthur and David for instruction, and now Arthur was training the future of the fucking Nottingham Guard.

  The few staircases that descended from the curtain wall down to the bailey floor were blockaded and tightly guarded, and there was always at least one of the prince’s men within eyesight. On one occasion, Arthur watched a Guardsman named Timon sneakily reach down to hoist a friend from the bailey up over a blockade, only to be descended upon immediately by the prince’s sentinels. Both offenders were marched up to the high keep, and rumors held they both found themselves in the already packed prison tunnels not long after.

  Nobody else tried to help those below slip up the cracks after that.

  So the Guard lined the bulwark in a solemn row, as if they were protecting the castle from an invading horde—excepting the horde was on the inside of their walls. One could walk the full circumference of the lower bailey before ascending back up to the training yards, which made it easy for the bowmen to keep any hostility from brewing amongst the baileyfolk.

  But not all were there for the show of force. Henry Left and Right volunteered to pass messages over the wall from commonfolk gathered on the city side. Citizens would collect near the main entrance and shout messages up to the Guardsmen above, a few words at a time, who would then do their best to relay those words to their target. It sometimes took over an hour before the person could be found to hear his message, since all communication was done by simply yelling from the battlements to the people below. But the Henries claimed it was worth the effort, to help connect husbands to wives, parents to children, reassure them that the other was alive and well.

  Not long after, other guards joined them.

  On the evening of the fourth day, David volunteered for one of these jobs. And Arthur, of course, fucking followed him.

  They passed messages that a father was missed, that his two-year-old son cried for his papa every night.

  They passed messages that a wife had been robbed, and kicked from her own home.

  They passed messages of violence and longing. Out in the city, there were too few Guardsmen to keep peace—they were all following their orders of keeping the roads into the city secure, that no soul could enter or leave.

  So they passed messages that the gangs were taking over, rising up in the absence of the Red Lions. That they were selfish and violent.

  Messages that a sister had gone missing.

  That a mother had caught sick and had no one to care for her.

  That a grandfather had tried to leave the city and been clubbed over the head, that he might not wake up.

  Some of the messages were never heard, they were meant for someone who’d been taken to the prisons. Sometimes they weren’t messages, but questions.

  Is my brother in there?

  Is my daughter alive?

  When will my baby see her mother?

  Some of those, they couldn’t answer.

  That night—late, late, that night—Arthur went to the postern door. It wasn’t guarded anymore, because it was too impossible to use. He went alone, without David. He didn’t go there to escape, he simply needed a location he knew would be deserted. He went there that he could have a moment’s peace, that nobody would see him when he lowered himself carefully down into a ball and cried for the first time in more years than he could remember.

  * * *

  FIVE DAYS AFTER PRINCE John seized Nottingham Castle, there was an eruption of violence within the Nottingham Guard.

  The castle’s armsmaster was a great Scotsman called The Simons, who happened to be Caitlin FitzSimon’s father. He’d withdrawn to his quarters in the barracks the very first day and never reemerged, which was the source of great concern. The question of Caitlin’s loyalty and execution incited a brace of rumors, shattering the Guard into factions. Some believed the armsmaster was complicit in his daughter’s crimes and had betrayed them all, while others believed she’d been innocent, murdered without cause. But everyone worried there were traitors within their ranks—spies from the gangs, or even a “Robin Hood” amongst them. And the prince’s promise turned that fear into a spark, because everyone knew that the price of ignoring the slightest suspicion was the same punishment as being guilty. And that price was to earn a lionheart—eight arrows to the chest.

  Arthur’s guess that a Red Lion had defected was confirmed when the traitor was marched through the bailey into the captain’s offices. Arthur and David arrived too late to see the man’s face, but they got caught in the wake. A fight broke out when a small group of Guardsmen took it upon themselves to raid the captain’s offices to execute the informant in the name of The Simons. That attempt ended with minimal violence, but it led to a heated debate about what should be done with the would-be executioners. Which led to a riot far more troublesome than the orig
inal scuffle.

  Which led to the first death.

  That same day, the first of the baileyfolk died of starvation.

  Messages, that a grandmother was ill.

  That someone trapped in the bailey had a new child, that it was healthy.

  Arthur couldn’t find the father to hear that message.

  Six days after Prince John seized Nottingham Castle, people traveled through the gates of the castle for the first time since the archery tournament. This was not, however, an improvement. It was a group of thirty armed men bearing shields with red-and-white stripes, ringed in red-and-white circles, and matching livery. They were loyal to the Baron of Hornby, a man named Roger de Montbegon, who was in turn loyal to Prince John.

  With their admission, the prince’s forces in the castle tripled.

  That afternoon they doubled again with a host from Worcester, led by two horse-faced brothers named Philip and Ralph. A smaller but fiercer—and holier—complement accompanied the Bishop of Coventry, an elephant man named Hugh de Nonant. Arthur didn’t want to know these people’s names, he didn’t want to live a life where they mattered. But the politics and rumors were all that kept the castle alive, and it was becoming increasingly obvious that the men of the Nottingham Guard were exactly as valuable to the Prince of the High Keep as the baileyfolk below.

  On the seventh day, violence engulfed the lower bailey. The baileyfolk had organized into two different camps—half that wanted to help the Guard and end their captivity peacefully, and half that wanted the predictably opposite. The fighting there went uninterrupted, as there were few in the Nottingham Guard who were willing to risk themselves to intervene. Not with mutiny in their own ranks. Not with the prince’s growing army ready to cast them over the walls as well. Which meant the more violent of the two groups won, which was generally a bad sign.

  Arthur and David kept passing messages back over the walls, that a little girl could no longer find her mother.