Lionhearts

by Nathan Makaryk

  * * *

  POTTER SPEARED HIS LANCE through the open rungs of the siege ladder and urged his horse away, just as de Grendon had ordered. The strain twisted the ladder until its tip slipped off the battlement walls above, and it skidded down the face of the wall, crashing into the next ladder in its path. Potter screamed something victorious and raised his fist in the air. His riding skills had never been great, and he’d never so much as touched a lance before, but this Common Guardsman was the goddamned savior of Nottingham. He reared his horse to return to the gates, but the French lines—who had recoiled from them barely a minute ago—was all too close now. Potter dropped the lance and reached for his sword, but his horse bucked, and Potter could not keep himself asaddle as he slid sickeningly off, his horse falling on top of him.

  * * *

  JOHN LITTLE SHUT THE door behind him, ignoring Marion’s pleas. He could guard this door for her better on the outside than the inside. The mob escaping the castle was coming their way, but they appeared to be looking more for escape than quarrel. John Little could see to it that nobody chose this building as their hideaway. Not with Marion inside. She was too important now.

  At first he held his staff out, warning those that came too close.

  Then he pushed into them.

  When the first man made an obvious choice to engage, John struck his quarterstaff out for the man’s chest. Wheeled it around, caught the man’s wild swing of a sword. Another was behind him.

  He screamed, for everyone they’d lost so far, and John Little didn’t mind so much if he’d be next on that list, if his place there kept Marion off it. He was too old for this. Maybe it was better this way. He swung again, cracked a man’s jaw, waited for the next, they swarmed toward him.

  * * *

  SIMON DE SENLIS SPURRED his horse around. The gates were closing again, having belched out the castle’s defenders, and let none in. He kicked his heels in, and called to his bearers. They could reposition closer, around the curve of the gatehouse’s tower. In case it opened again.

  * * *

  GILBERT MADE IT BACK TO the Trip to Jerusalem, and reached his hand out to the Zinn girl, didn’t he? The friar watched as she took it, incredulous, and Gilbert led her away. There’s nothing we can do now, he told her, but see to our own.

  * * *

  WILL STUTELY SMASHED THE moment there was a head to strike. Someone was breaking the door down with an axe, screaming hell at him. He didn’t wait to find out who it was. The broken table leg cracked when it found skull, and Stutely swung again. Blood splattered his face, matted the wild red mane of the intruder. The man stuttered and fell, but Stutely swung again, three times even after the body had hit the floor, until he heard the skull crack open, and then three times more.

  He stared at the open door.

  Out there, everyone was dying. Because of what he’d done.

  He’d never meant for that. He was just trying to do what he thought was right.

  He closed the door. He wanted to lock himself in again.

  A shattered hole in the door, rimmed in blood, let in the sounds of Nottingham.

  Everyone—everyone—out there, wanted him dead.

  Stutely grabbed his beard, curled into a ball, and wept.

  * * *

  FOR NOTHING, FOR FOLLOWING his orders, for standing in the wrong place, a kind man lost his life—and with it, his chance to ever teach his son the things he had learned, about anger and how it was a poison.

  * * *

  FOR NOTHING, FOR SOME other man’s ambition, some forgettable man, a mother’s son was sliced open. Her tortured years of raising him alone, of the things she’d sacrificed for herself, her years of poverty that he would not starve, her nightly tears at her own inadequacy, wasted in a dash of crimson in the battlefield.

  * * *

  FOR NOTHING, FOR GLORY, whatever the hell that was, a friend and a lover—who was never quite good enough at either—tumbled from his horse and out of himself. What good had it been, wondering at the stars, practicing his disciplines, debating the philosophies of the ancient Greeks, and studying the economics of spice routes? All he had been, all he had wanted to be, was nothing to the steel blade that pierced him above the sternum.

  * * *

  FOR NOTHING, FOR A piece of earth a few feet farther than another, a hundred thousand wishes wisped away.

  * * *

  FOR NOTHING, FOR DIRT, for one man to say that he claimed it, a grieving father was finally gone himself, would never wake to the memory of the empty impression in the bassinette again, but as he fell he knew he would miss it more than anything else.

  * * *

  FOR NOTHING, FOR NOTHING, for nothing, a hundred sons became a hundred griefs, and a hundred more, and their memories, stacked up upon each other, hundreds of lifetimes of love and needs, amounted to little more than a film of dirt that, too, blew away, for nothing.

  SIXTY-TWO

  ARABLE DE BUREL

  THE TRIP TO JERUSALEM

  IF THE FIRST TUNNEL under the walls of the city was terrifying, this then was some arcane hell. This wasn’t a tunnel. This wasn’t a passage. Perhaps a hare might think it useful, but to a human it was madness. They had to crawl, but crawl was not even fit to describe this—as one could crawl on one’s hands and knees, which would have been a luxury here. It would be more accurate to say that Arable was slithering, with her elbows trapped by her navel and her fists punching herself in the chin with every few inches she was able to nudge forward.

  Perhaps on a flat surface, or through grass, this might have been slightly less torturous. But the rough stones scraped her arms, and her sleeves were doing little to protect her. And it was anything but straight or smooth, its incline was often grueling and even the slightest of advancement came only at laborious cost. The only advantage of the tiny confines was that she did not fear sliding backward onto Nick Delaney, because she could simply inhale a full breath and her lungs would expand and wedge her safely in place. Such was how tight it was.

  Oh, and pitch black.

  “You, then, share the same lunacy as the Red Lions,” the innkeeper of the Trip to Jerusalem had answered, an aging man knighted Sir Richard-at-the-Lee. Zinn referred to him as the greenbeard, and he seemed more than willing to honor his part of whatever bargain he’d made with the Red Lions. “But I’ll tell you the same thing I told them, that you can pay me all the honey in England and there’s still nothing I can do about the size of the hole.” He had led them to the second story of his inn, into a secluded dining space that was all cave, and drew back a tapestry to reveal a honeycomb pocket. “Not sure why I even bother hiding the thing, since no fool would ever think to climb themselves in there.”

  Except the Red Lions. They’d been using Zinn and other children to climb in with spades and scrape away at its sides in the hopes of one day making it a possible secret entrance to the castle. Whether it even connected all the way in, the greenbeard didn’t know. That thought was more horrifying than anything else—the idea that she’d eventually come to a dead end, and they’d have to crawl out again backward.

  Zinn was the smallest of them, but she stayed behind—her chopped ear would get her killed if she made it into the castle. So Arable led, the Delaneys next, and Bolt struggling behind them.

  There was no movement in the air. She was sweating through her every article of clothing. The air was the same temperature as her breath, and disturbingly stale. Any moment she truly thought upon how absolutely trapped she was—unable to move her arms, or to twist, or to breathe freely, or ever to be out of this hell if she wanted to—she felt panic claw out her heart and she started to sob. Not a cry of sadness or loss, but a wail, a horror that knew no bounds, her teeth would chatter, and she had to prop her feet up to keep herself from sliding. She wanted to flail her arms berserk, and she could already feel the deep bruises caused by her fitful spasms.

  Nick’s voice floated up toward her in the utter inky black. “Breathe, Arable, breathe.
You’re strong, you’re stronger than this. Don’t think about it. Imagine the rocks are gone. There’s sky above you, and we’re just playing a game. Breathe.”

  The only thing that telling her to breathe would do was make it more likely she would punch his face the moment they were clear of this. She knew he meant well, but now was not the time to coddle her.

  “If I can do it, you can do it,” came Bolt’s voice from farther back, and that—surprisingly—helped. Not because it made her believe in herself, but because she knew that the faster she went, the harder it would be for his lame leg to keep up. If “Charley Dancer” got lost in this tomb beneath the castle, then one good thing had happened this day. And it must have been harder on the Delaneys, too, being wider than her, but they refused to show their misery.

  It was impossible to know how long they burrowed. Arable had to stop often, the strain on her body was too much. She worried desperately about what damage she was doing to herself, to her daughter. And there was obviously no chance for the others to squeeze past her and forage forward, so they were all stuck at her piteous pace. The first few times she stopped to rest they encouraged her to keep going, but after a while she simply said, “We’re stopping,” and they did not argue. She would lie there, bury her head into her forearms with her eyes closed, and try desperately to control her breathing, to slow her heart, to ignore her circumstances. To think on better times, until she could muster up the motivation to move rather than to die.

  She tried to picture her daughter in her womb, similarly confined, unable to move, in darkness. It wasn’t the same thing, not by a long shot, but it helped to put herself in the mind of her baby. She felt a connection that reminded her why she needed her heart to keep pumping, her lungs to keep breathing. And eventually, eventually, she would slide one elbow up a few more inches and pull her body forward, returning to the endless, unbearable, claustrophobic shuffle through crumbled stone and rubble.

  There was a point, surely hours and hours in, when the noises became slightly different and Arable tilted her head carefully up and did not hit it on rock for the one-thousandth time. She pushed against the ground and found the roof of the tunnel here was slightly higher, and she released another cry as she rolled over and finally stretched her arms out. The pain was nearly crippling, but it felt wondrous to unbend them again. Her muscles trembled uncontrollably, and she lay on her back, and her lungs heaved for great desperate gobs of air.

  “It opens a bit,” she gasped, hearing Nick crawl in behind her, also exploding in huffs of relief and agony. But he kept moving, shuffling around her, she could hear his hands patting out the circumference of the little cavern.

  “Don’t try standing,” he said, “but we can all sit here, at least. Let’s catch our breath.”

  Arable cried again this time, and fingers fumbled against her leg to find her hand, which she held tightly. She had no doubt it was Nick, and she thought back to the idea not so long ago that the man had developed feelings for her. And here she was, trapped in a coffin with him and Bolt as well, who a year ago had almost certainly harbored an infatuation of his own, and perhaps still did. The world had a cruel way of putting people together.

  “I’m pregnant,” she blurted out in desperation, having absolutely no filter on her thoughts.

  “And you just found out?” Peetey answered. It wasn’t really that funny, but Arable was a raw nerve and she bellowed in laughter, as did the others. They were so desolate, their emotions so extreme, that any shift could send all four of them careening from one mania to another with little effort.

  They waited and took turns stretching, untying their boots and emptying out the loose rocks, and trying in vain to find any words to describe their terrible plight. “I would trade anything to be in the other group,” Nick mumbled.

  That had been a contentious debate. Men like Lord Beneger and Quill had knowledge that would have been useful once inside the castle, but they were also the most capable of managing the threat of Sir Robert FitzOdo. Essentially, Arable and her four companions were the least useful at both tasks, which is why it fell on their unqualified shoulders to handle the little thing of ending the war. They had thought this would be an actual tunnel, that they could jaunt up in a few minutes and pop magically into the castle. The other group even thought they might catch up if they could deal with FitzOdo quickly.

  There was no quickly in here. The others were hours behind, if they were still alive at all.

  And the war—the war they thought they could put a swift end to—had been waging for all that time. While they rested, here in the black belly of the rock, more and more died.

  “I assume I’m not the only one,” Arable fought to regain her voice, “who’s thought about how this cuts our options in half?”

  There was a bit of silence. It was Bolt who eventually asked, “How do you mean?”

  “Our job is to find Prince John, and convince him that it truly is King Richard out there,” she answered. “And, if that fails, to extract him. Which is obviously where you two come in, I don’t think I would be of any use there. Hopefully you have an idea on how to do that?”

  “I didn’t want to think about it much, either,” Nick answered, squeezing her hand. “But I imagine it meant smashing something heavy over the prince’s head and dragging him around a bit.”

  Arable grimaced at the thought. “I was picturing something more like a gag and tying his hands together, but the point is the same. Can you imagine trying to drag an unconscious body, or a person who doesn’t want to go, back down this tunnel?”

  Another silence clearly meant no.

  “So if Prince John doesn’t believe us, well then I don’t know what we do.” She laughed at this, because she had nothing else to feel. “Aside from die. I suppose we just sit and wait to die.”

  “Frankly, that sounds better than ever coming back this way,” Nick said, and gave her knee a gentle squeeze.

  The idea that the Nottingham gangs had arranged to use this crawlspace was laughable. That this was some sort of “ingenious plan” for ferreting people in and out of the castle was ludicrous. But at the same time, it was a mortifying comment on how difficult it would be to get into the castle otherwise. She thought back on her winter’s escape from the castle through the postern door with Will Scarlet and Elena, and how insanely easy that was in comparison. But without that path, this wormhole proved that Castle Rock truly was as impenetrable as its reputation claimed.

  Unless one had a king’s army. Perhaps the siege was already over. Eventually they might poke their heads out of the ground to discover that it had all ended hours ago.

  They slogged on.

  Nick offered to go first this time, even to come back and report what he’d found, but nobody wanted to be left alone in the absolute dark. And Arable was the smallest of them, and it made little sense to put their largest person first in case they bottlenecked in a hole through which he could not fit. So Arable led again, and she cried again, and she wished that literally every single thing in her entire life had gone slightly differently if it meant things would not have led her to this inhuman misery.

  After another hour, or longer, she felt certain that all their hopes were dashed. The tunnel had ended, as it had always seemed like to do, and her breathing became erratic and she knew she was about to dive off the edge of sanity. She kicked her legs in fury and realized there was a pocket of air above her a few feet back, and returning to it she was able—with great effort—to squeeze upward into a vertical shaft, and her fingers probed higher. The rush of blood was invigorating, to stand up again, and her fingertips found a few smoother lines in the rock. “This is mason work,” she whispered with excitement. “We’re getting close.”

  That rush gave her the energy she needed for the last—and most brutal—climb, ascending a chimneylike flue between the quarried stone and the unforgiving cave wall. They took this section one at a time, for if her legs gave out and she fell, they would all break their bones upo
n each other, and Arable was categorically uninterested in finding out which one of them would turn to cannibalism first. In the end she guessed it was thirty or forty feet up, but by far the most exhausting thing she’d ever done, always barely keeping her body suspended in the air by applying pressure to both sides of the ragged flue.

  At the ledge it turned to a horizontal crawl again, and her muscles found relief. Another mole tunnel, yes, but at the end was the faintest of light—a tiny speck of soft amber.

  There was room at last to shuffle, too, and wide enough that two might uncomfortably do so side by side. She stayed to give a hand to Nick behind her, and then moved down toward the light. Bolt needed the most help in the ascent, his leg being more hindrance than ever, and he needed a few minutes to recover as his chest seized and his muscles cramped. At long last Arable drew him with her down the tunnel, that they might recognize where the light was coming from.

  The tunnel chomped down one last time into the tightest crawlspace yet, but this was just a single rock to squeeze beneath and then a drop down. On the opposite side was a full tunnel, a real and honest man-made passage, and they were emerging into it by dropping in from its ceiling. A lantern flickered from a dozen paces away, and Arable looked around for an easy method of slipping down from their stony lip.

  “Shit,” Bolt whispered beside her.

  “What?”

  “This is the gaols.”

  She looked again, and he was right. She had thought perhaps it was part of the wine cellars, but she recognized now the iron bars glinting a lantern’s edge to the right. “Shit.”

  “What’s wrong?” Nick whispered from behind.

  “This is a dead end after all,” Bolt said back to them. “We’re in the prisons. There’s no way out from here, not without the keys.”