Lionhearts

by Nathan Makaryk

  They were joined quickly by the two Delaney brothers, then Friar Tuck—eyes wide like a cat on ice. John Little had volunteered to come but their guide, Sarra, insisted he would never fit through the tunnels, and Tuck was the only one left who had ever known Gilbert. He kept his hood over his bald head, and he breathed short, shallow breaths, as if every hustle from hedgerow to hedgerow was the most daring act of his life. At their rear was Lord Robert, loping meaningfully through the barren fields, deep plow lines making obstacles of every step. Again he wore his half cape slung over one shoulder and carried a thin rapier rather than a proper sword, but somehow his intentions now seemed razor sharp rather than frivolous. His comfort actually took a bit of the edge off this wretched endeavor. Just before he reached the wall, he whipped out his blade and stabbed the air, letting loose a soft huff.

  “Just in case,” he said, throwing her a wink.

  “That’s enough of that.” Lord Beneger made little attempt to lower his voice. “This is serious work.”

  “I know,” Robert answered, reaching for something stashed in his belt. “That’s why I brought my serious hat.” The pointed thing went on, giving the silhouette of his head a single, fierce horn, aimed forward.

  Nick Delaney snorted. “I hope this goes differently than Grafham.”

  “Of course it will,” Robert replied. “For one, Simon de Senlis is that way,” he pointed back to the army, then swiveled toward the city, “while we’re going that way. So there’s no way it can end the same way, is there?”

  “Let’s just hurry,” Tuck said, his voice weak. “Sarra, please lead on.”

  The girl just stared at them, and for good reason. She was frightened out of her soul—she wanted desperately to be done with this task so she could return to her son. But she said nothing, simply dared a glance over the wall, then scurried sideways.

  They followed her, staying low, keeping to the shadows if there were any available. They took every advantage of the low, god-angry clouds that wandered by and obscured the moonlight. There should have been watchmen here and there in the fields, keeping an eye out for raiders or wild dogs, but the farmlands were deserted. Now and then Arable saw abandoned tools, and she could only imagine their owner dropping them and fleeing at the sight of the encroaching army.

  Horns sounded off to the north, repeated back to them after echoing against the city walls to the south. Lord Robert had requested as much, that the army make a ridiculous amount of noise this night. Not just to keep the city awake and alarmed, but as a distraction. To Arable, it felt like slipping around the outside of a great manor while a gala was being held within. She was almost embarrassed that she held a few of those memories at heart, that there was a time when her life had stakes smaller than the world.

  Her belly lurched, and she had to slow. Her hands went to her side, as if she could calm her daughter inside—who was clearly no fan of her decision to run.

  She had to pee, and hoped she would not get killed for something as stupid as that. She’d relieved herself before they’d left, but things like that apparently didn’t matter at all to a pregnant body. She moved anyway, catching up, knowing that soiling herself would matter very little if she ended up dead.

  Eventually they came to a cluster of trees that offered them privacy, and in the daylight it would have thrown its shade over a low stone well. Sarra scampered forward and touched the well’s lip with her full palm, then turned back expectantly.

  “This is it?” Lord Beneger asked, crouching to look down into its depths. The hole was hardly wide enough for a single person, if that was indeed where they were headed. Sarra had been right that John Little could not have gone any farther than this.

  Her voice was a whisper. “There’s a large crack just a bit down. It was hard to squeeze through, because of the angle, but it will open up after a dozen feet or so. Then it’s a single long tunnel, most of the ways at least. I’ve shown you this far, I won’t be much help beyond that.”

  “You’ve done more than enough.” Robert reached out to her, but Sarra flinched away from his touch. She left without another word, fleeing back the way they came. She did not even bother to glance back at them.

  “Poor soul,” Robert said.

  “She’s probably thinking the same of us.” Arable wished she were going that same direction.

  “There will be more of her, if we fail at this,” Beneger warned. “Wars only make three things—widows, orphans, and money.”

  “Money?” asked Tuck.

  Beneger shrugged. “For the right side, at least.”

  “We can’t risk a light until we’re down there.” Peetey was squinting into the well’s mouth. “But I can’t see anything. Which one of us is feeling the most nimble?”

  At this Lord Beneger laughed, and cast a smug smile upon Robert.

  “Alright,” Robert submitted. “Someone hold my hat.”

  The going was slow, made even harder by the dark night, but Robert was able to suspend himself within the shaft of the well by sticking his feet out in opposite directions. They’d brought a good length of rope that Peetey anchored with his body, wrapped around Robert’s waist in case he slipped. Eventually, after a good deal of pivoting and cursing, he claimed to find the crack Sarra had mentioned. A flurry of noise later, he found a way to slide himself into its shelf.

  “It’s small,” he said, his voice muffled. “There are … boards here? Planks. I need the light.”

  After a brief discussion they decided to risk it, hoping the light would be contained in the little cubby he’d found and not spill out to be seen like a beacon by the city watchmen. Nick lowered down one of their two iron lanterns, small things with walls of horn, and a single hinged door. The flint and candle were inside, and a small pouch of kindling, but what followed was a fairly laughable amount of time in which Robert tried, again and again, to get the flame to hold.

  “We’ll have a good view of the war, at least,” Nick joked.

  “We could just wait until a flaming arrow comes our way,” Peetey followed, “and use that instead.”

  Eventually Robert found success and laughed at his failures, and the features of the well become immediately evident. It was not so far down to the water, and the south side indeed had a broken gullet where the stone had crumbled and exposed the bare earth behind it. In that crack was an open scar, curved diagonally, which seemed just wide enough for a human body to lean in—though uncomfortably at that.

  “Not much of a tunnel.” Tuck grimaced.

  “So now maybe we can stop laughing at my fire-starting skills then,” Robert answered. From his uncomfortable position, Arable was amazed he could do anything at all that required his hands. He pivoted the lantern to the other side of his body with some difficulty. “Looks like it’s more of the same for a bit, then opens up. And I was right, there are some loose planks here…” again he twisted the shaft of light into the well’s abyss, “… there. That’s how they’ve been getting out.”

  Across from his opening was a slight ledge where the stones were uneven, marked by obvious scrapes across its lip. Repositioning himself, Robert manhandled the planks at his feet to reach across the gap and rest on that thin outcropping. They only barely held onto the stones by a fingerswidth or so, desperate to slip off and dunk a person into the well water below. Nick gave the first test by lowering himself as far as he possibly could before letting himself drop onto the planks, which bent but mercifully held his weight. Robert shimmied down the crack, and Nick followed, and one by one they crawled into the earth.

  This is a nightmare, Arable told herself, letting her feet dangle over the edge. She didn’t have the strength to suspend herself like the Delaneys did. This was no place for a woman in her condition. She eased her weight farther over the stone lip, her toes reaching out, desperate to find the wood before she was in free fall. But then she slid with a start and did not even have time to yelp. Her stomach lurched for a single hellish moment, but her feet touched the planks and N
ick Delaney’s arm was around her waist, and she’d never been more thankful.

  “Are you alright?” he asked, with genuine concern.

  “Oh, no,” she answered, grabbing his arms with both hands. “That won’t be an option for quite a while.”

  The crack’s slant played with her senses. Losing all concept of balance, she had to slide on her back and shuffle her feet as if she were on the heavily banked edge of a cliff, excepting another cliff had already smashed into hers and was inches away. The sounds of her own breath and her heart were suddenly extremely close, and she tried not to think about the uncountable amount of earth lying above her, waiting to crush her like a pea. Nick kept his palm open for hers whenever he could, but soon he had to focus on himself instead.

  Arable had been in storage caves and cellars before, but never anything like this. She felt like an insect navigating a tiny crevice between stones, and the air around her was suffocating. Her knees wobbled, but she forced herself forward.

  Eventually it opened, the lantern was on the ground and played havoc with their shadows, and Arable fought to control her body. To her embarrassment she was shaking uncontrollably, and Nick sat her down to massage her shoulders and arms. Behind, Tuck sounded like he was having an even worse time of it than Arable had, but Peetey helped him through his every complaint. Once all six of them were in the little rock chamber, they caught their collective breath.

  “I hope that was the hard part,” Nick tried to laugh.

  “We should move,” Robert said, less joyful than he’d been earlier. “Even if they didn’t see the light, we made a hell of a lot of noise. Swords hitting stone walls like that, that kind of sound travels.”

  “What if I stayed here?” Tuck suggested.

  “Then you’d die here instead of there,” Lord Beneger answered. “And in the dark.”

  That was enough for any of them. They lit the second lantern from the first, and made their way down a wormlike tunnel just barely too small for a person to ever stand upright. Again it was painfully slow going, given that there were only two lanterns for six of them, and the passage was unnavigable enough without the sickening sling of shadows tricking Arable’s feet every second or so. The good news was that her daughter had already started reorganizing every one of Arable’s internal organs, so the extra pain from stooping over was hardly even noticeable compared to the normal pain in her lower back. She tried to focus on her breathing, or her heartbeat, on anything she knew to be constant. Anything to avoid thinking of how much distance they actually had to cover in order to get past the city walls, and how little of it they had likely traveled so far.

  There were forks now and then, which usually dead-ended quickly. They would send a single person down each one with a lantern for half a minute, crawling to check if it seemed viable. Generally, they decided that if a passage got smaller it was the wrong way, and if it got larger it must be the right one. Whether that was a good strategy or not, they couldn’t tell. They traveled for what felt like forever, but was probably close to a full hour, and Arable ached viciously at all the hunching and squatting. There were times when they seemed doomed to wander the tunnels forever, and they began to question if they had somehow turned around and were backtracking on themselves. But eventually there came a larger chamber where they could at last stand up comfortably, stretch their agonizing muscles, and—apparently—get ambushed.

  “Lotta noise yer making,” came a female’s voice. “Don’t move, we’ve got crossbows.”

  Arable froze, certain of very little aside from the fact that she did not want to die down here. The proximity of the lanterns blinded them to anything beyond the ground immediately around them. Aside from the shift in echoes, there was no way of knowing how large this new chamber was, nor where the voice had come from. So the six of them stood motionless in their lone pool of light, a very easy target for whomsoever had been waiting in the dark.

  “Are you with the White Hand?” Robert asked of the stranger, his hands raising gently in submission.

  “Wow, you’re bad at this,” the voice returned with a slight laugh. “You answer the questions, we ask them, or else we shoot you with—”

  “Who else is with you?” Beneger interrupted from the back of the group.

  “I—what did I just say?”

  “Gilbert?” Tuck stepped forward, making sure the light fell on his face. “Gilbert, are you out there?”

  From slightly elsewhere a whistle pierced the room, made ever more hollow by the odd acoustics—such that it was almost impossible to tell where the sound ended and when the echoes had taken over. “Friar Tuck,” came a soft, sonorous voice, unmistakably male but surprisingly delicate. “That is a surprise.”

  “Gilbert.” The friar seemed relieved, though Arable could not say the same. From everything she had heard about the man, no one rested easier in his company. “Lady Marion sent us. She would have come herself, if she could. We know you’ve been smuggling people out of the city, and we need your help smuggling ourselves … in.”

  “What?” came the female’s voice. “Why in God’s crusty taint would anyone want to sneak themselves into Notts right now?”

  “You’d have a point, Zinn,” said Gilbert, “were these people anyone else. But I’ll tell you once and once only—whatever they say, trust it as well as if I said it myself. They’re good people.”

  “Fine.” She seemed to shrug it off. “Don’t matter much to me. By the way, we don’t have no crossbows, we can’t a-fucking-ford that.”

  Arable gasped when she saw him—mostly because he’d made no noise in traveling closer, but also because he chose to reach out with his single gloved hand first. Other than that, Gilbert’s face was utterly normal, if a bit on the long and gaunt side. He exchanged a short shake with Tuck, which seemed a strangely friendly gesture compared to every rumor Arable had heard of the ghost man. He picked up the lantern and stepped back, aiming the light upon them. “I don’t know your friends.”

  “I know. A lot has happened since you left,” Tuck answered. “Hopefully there will be time enough for that later.”

  “Whacha mean to do in the city?” the girl named Zinn asked. She approached but stayed shy of the light, making it difficult for Arable to make out much more than her small frame. Just a thin little girl in tattered clothes, messing with the flop of her hair. Twelve, she guessed, both by her face and her attitude.

  “Nothing,” Robert answered. “But we need to pass through the city to get to the castle.”

  “Ooooh,” Zinn shifted her weight side to side, “that’s different. That’s no small favor.”

  “I know the way into the castle,” Arable explained. “But we don’t know these caves. All we need is safe passage, and if you can help us get to the path to the postern gate without being seen, that would be helpful.”

  “No it wouldn’t,” Zinn returned with a satisfied smile, “because the postern’s locked from the inside. There’s only one way into the castle and we—fucking hell!” The girl suddenly spasmed and shoved Arable to the side, though she was not the target of the girl’s anger. Tuck was elbowed aside just as carelessly, until Zinn stood nose to chest in front of Lord Beneger. A bright snap of the lantern reflected the blade she pulled from her belt—her right hand aimed it squarely at Beneger’s breast, her other controlled a long coil of rope tied to the knife’s handle.

  “Steady now,” was all Beneger said, backing into the curved cave wall.

  “What’s wrong?” Gilbert asked.

  “I know this particular fuckface,” Zinn snarled. “He works with FitzOdo. He’s the one that nabbed Scarlet.”

  “Will Scarlet?” Arable gasped. “You know him? The same Will Scarlet?”

  “I hope there aren’t two of him,” Zinn replied, but all her focus was on Beneger, who seemed rightfully wary of the knife at his heart. “I was just starting to like him when this royal dick fucker trapped us, nearly got me killed. He threated to let his men gang-rape me if Scarlet didn�
�t turn himself over. But he did. Will Scarlet traded his life for mine.”

  Arable stared at Lord Beneger’s sallow face. She had not previously thought it possible to hate the man any more.

  “For what it’s worth,” Beneger said, carefully, “I did not personally make that threat. I was held at knifepoint—as I am now—and one of my men … well, a woman, actually, made that threat.”

  Arable didn’t care. “She’s a child.”

  “No I’m not!” Zinn snapped. “But if I was, I’d be the child that’s gonna fucking gut you.”

  Robert and the Delaney brothers both tensed, as if sensing the need to step in and stop her. Arable’s instincts were more in line to help her push the blade in.

  “Is Will Scarlet still alive?” Arable asked. “What about Arthur, and David?”

  “I don’t know,” Zinn answered. “Haven’t seen any of them since that day.”

  “Nor I. But you made the right choice to walk out of that room.” Beneger paced his words slowly, his eyes locked on Zinn. “I don’t know those other two, but Will Scarlet is as bad as they come. He’s responsible for beating and butchering poorfolk across the city—oh, and killing noblemen in the woods. I saw what was left of Lord Brayden’s wife with my own eyes. He’s a monster. You dare throw the word rape at me, when you work with him?”

  This was deeply troubling news, to say the least. Obviously Will was capable of rash acts, but Arable had a hard time believing the rest of it.

  Zinn, apparently, was of similar mind. “He’s not like that. The noblefolk in the woods were his, yes,” Zinn said. “Though he said he just killed ’em. Didn’t say anything else.”

  “Are you so sure that you know him? And what of Gilbert here, is he a blushing innocent as well?” Beneger addressed the White Hand directly. “Care to explain why you’re away from your post, Guardsman?”