Jennifer Roberson - [Robin Hood 01] (27 page)

The grim mouth tightened faintly. “Why are you hiding from Normans?”

Much said nothing. He waited for the blow.

“Do you live here in Sherwood Forest?”

Still Much held his silence. He noticed the pinkish scar winding its way along the man’s jawline, like a serpent bound for his mouth to steal the breath from his lungs.

“I’m looking for someone,” the stranger-who-wasn’t-a-stranger said. “The same two people the Normans seek. A man, and a woman. She was wearing a crimson mantle, though any man with a bit of sense would have stripped it from her by now.” The grip loosened slightly as Much did not answer. “The woman is in some difficulty. I want to find her so I can take her back to Nottingham.”

Startled, Much lowered his shoulder and stared at the man. Then, as abruptly, he realized what he’d done. Only a blind man would miss his reaction.

The man wasn’t blind. After a moment’s hesitation, he knelt down on one knee. “My name is Robin. I mean you no harm. I know you’ve seen her, or you know her. Which is it?”

Much held his tongue.

“She deserves better,” Robin told him quietly. “She was taken against her will.”

Much breathed through his mouth, determinedly saying nothing.

Eventually Robin released him, rising. “All right. Go on. Tend your own business.” He turned, heading down the track in the same direction as the Normans. The threat was abruptly banished.

He went, taking the light with him, and Much watched him. He thought about Marian. He thought about the giant. He thought about the madman, and the Normans who wanted to find them; Normans who would cut off his hand, given the chance again. For trying to steal the sheriffs purse.

He stared hard at the back of the man, who walked steadily down the track, not even looking back. The shadows now had deepened. In brown, he was hard to see.

Robin,
Much said inside. And then, “Marian,” loud enough to be heard.

Robin turned. His expression was obscured by distance, but the tone of his voice was distinct. “Yes. Marian.”

He wasn’t Norman, the man who called himself Robin. He disliked Normans, as had been proved by his behavior on the road when accosted by the sheriffs men. He wanted to find Marian, to rescue her from the madman, and the giant of Hathersage.

Much gestured him to come near. Robin answered it, pausing in poised silence. Much pointed. “There.”

“Why now?” Robin asked. “Why not before?”

Much lowered his gaze. Then he reached out with nimble fingers and touched the belt from which the man’s purse had depended.

“Ah,” Robin said, on a note of discovery and comprehension.

“Marian,” Much said.

Robin smiled faintly. “Show me the way.”

Marian felt sick to her stomach. Her position athwart the giant’s shoulder pressed her belly against her backbone, and the continued jouncing as he strode through the forest, beating vines and creepers aside, merely added to her discomfort. Her blood had all rushed to her head, putting pressure on eyes and ears. And with no hands free to balance herself, she was absolutely helpless.

If I were sick upon his boots, he might put me down.
But she didn’t feel like seeing if it worked.

The giant thrashed his way through one more veil of vines and halted. “Here,” he said harshly. “I’ve brought the girl. But you’d best not harm her. I’ll break you in two, if you try.”

Marian could see little but the giant’s back. Even when she craned her head around, the effort added nothing to her vision but her own braid and the forest.

Then the giant clasped her roughly and hoisted her down, swinging her to her feet and turning her deftly so that she stood with her back to his chest. One huge hand imprisoned her shoulder.

It was the murderer, Will Scarlet. He wasn’t dead at all, not even injured. He stood just before her, staring mutely out of near-black, lifeless eyes, with a jaw hard as stone and an alertness in his posture that put her in mind of an animal just before it bolts.

A
knife was in his hand. Her own knife, Marian saw. And one of his arms was bloody.
He means to kill me.
She thought instantly of flight, but felt the giant’s hand close more firmly yet. She could not help the throttled moan of protest cut off by the gag.

“You’ll not harm her,” the giant declared.

Marian heard the challenge implicit in his tone. For all his roughness, he
had
treated her kindly enough; she saw now the threat came not so much from the giant as from the man who faced her, in decaying shoes and shabby clothing, with blood upon one arm.

Scarlet moved away from the stump, stopped rigidly, and pointed. “Put her there. I’ll not touch her.”

The giant took her to the stump, urging her to sit as she moved stiffly, awkwardly, uncertain of their intent. She sat, wincing inwardly as the wooden “teeth” of the shattered trunk pierced shift and kirtle, biting into flesh. She shifted slightly, not letting the pain show on her face. She’d give nothing to them save whatever calmness she could summon.

Scarlet, still staring, nodded. The fixity of his gaze unnerved her. Marian looked away briefly; like a submissive dog, she wouldn’t challenge him. But it made her angry not to. When he moved, she found she could not keep from looking at him, to see what he might do.

What he did do was approach. She smelled him: extremity, ordure, the dungeon. He showed her the knife. “This was yours.” Marian did not so much as nod. “Yours,” he repeated.

“Here, now,” the giant said uneasily. “I’ll not have you tormenting her.”

“No,” Scarlet said grimly, then tucked the knife away into the drawstring of his hosen. “You don’t know me at all. No one does, now. What I’ve done is done; what I
will
do is yet to be done. But don’t judge me by what I’ve done. Judge me by what I do.”

Marian’s breath scraped against the wool. She could not discern his intent in such a rambling discourse. He was obscure, unintelligible, and very, very dangerous.

“Here.” The giant again. “What do you want of us?”

Will Scarlet stood before Marian. The clearing was small, hedged by vine- and creeper-choked trees, with fern lacing the ground. “We’re outlaws,” he said. “D’ye know what that is?”

She said nothing, because she couldn’t.

“Outlaws are men who live outside the law,” he continued, “because either they’re men who want to do that, or men who
have
to do that.” He stared at her fixedly, then dropped down to squat before her. “Do you know aught of that? How men are made to live as beasts in the forest, because it’s their only chance of freedom? Beasts, in the forest—but ’tis better than living as beasts under the yoke of the Norman pigs like you!”

Marian shut her eyes, cursing his mistake, until his hand on her chin brought her stiffly to awkward attention, heart banging in her chest.

“Here, now,” the giant growled. “You say you want to trade her to the sheriff for our freedom. If you harm her, he’ll never trade any such thing.”

Scarlet stared only at Marian, dirty fingertips on her chin. “You don’t know me,” he whispered. “You don’t know me at all. I’d never harm a woman.”

Liar,
she longed to say, spitting it into the stubbled face so very near her own.

Scarlet rose, taking his hand from her flesh. He looked now at the giant. “The track to Nottingham lies that way.” He pointed. “They’ll be coming there. You’d best go set a watch, then come back to me when you’ve seen them. We’ll decide what to do then.”

Don’t.
Marian tried to catch the giant’s eyes.
Don’t leave me here with him.

“No,” the giant said.
“You
go and watch.”

Will Scarlet smiled faintly. “Me, they’ll kill on the spot. You, they’ll listen to. You said so yourself.”

Marian stared hard at the giant, trying to make him see that he put her in danger if he left her with Will Scarlet.
Make him see.
But the giant nodded agreement despite her silent pleading.

Scarlet’s voice was steady. “Tell them if they follow, I’ll kill her. Leave them there on the track, then come back to me.”

The giant moved close to the madman. “You’ll not harm her, Will Scarlet.”

For a long moment they faced one another, one huge, red-maned man, and a smaller, darker, more desperate man. Then Scarlet took Marian’s meat-knife from his hosen and gave it to the giant.

It was enough. The man nodded, cast a last glance at her, then strode off through the forest in the direction Scarlet had indicated when pointing out Nottingham’s track.

Will Scarlet stared at her, malignancy in his eyes. “I’m going to tell you what they did. I want you to know. Every part of it. I want you to
know.
”

She stared back, uncomprehending, wary of the tone that promised to tell her something he wanted her to hear; that he
meant
for her to hear, because he knew it was a weapon against which she had no defense. Her plea to God was explicit:
Don’t let this man touch me.

Will Scarlet smiled slowly in a feral anticipation. “Little Norman whore.”

 

Robert of Locksley—Robin—stopped as the boy motioned him to. He waited, watching the dirty, sharp-boned face as he listened intently to the boy’s halting explanation that Marian and the giant were very near. That Much was a simpleton, he knew; it had become very clear shortly after they set off after Marian. The boy said very little, and then only in single-word sentences, or half-framed, inarticulate phrases. He had been poorly treated through much of his childhood, and poorly fed to boot; he was small and slight for his age, hollow of belly and face, with the staring, hopeless eyes of a soul needing care and nourishment in a land that could give him nothing.

This is how poachers are made.
Locksley was aware of a growing dislike for the customs of his country, as well as his countenance of them.
The Normans run roughshod over every Englishman, save those with the coin to buy their courtesy or interest, and then maim and kill the peasants who have no choice but to steal to eat.

In the Holy Land, he had seen the same: the faces of starving Saracens before they were killed by Christians. War did that to people, stripping them of food so that soldiers could be fed, but England,
this
England, was not at war at home. Yet her people, from child to adult, suffered a fate like the enemy Richard fought.

He would stop this. He would.
But Richard was not in England, nor like to be any time soon.

Much waited mutely. Locksley came back to himself, realizing he’d withdrawn so far from the present that the boy now was confused, staring at him in perplexity. Briefly he put a hand on Much’s thin shoulder, then nodded. “Find me what you can find, then come back quickly and tell me. I will have to make a plan.”

The miller’s son nodded and left him, slipping into the deepening shadows as the day slid downward toward dusk.

Locksley watched him go. Then, frowning thoughtfully, he examined the nearest cluster of saplings for one best suited to him. He had only a meat-knife, neither sword nor bow. His best bet then was to make himself a crude weapon from materials at hand. “Quarterstaff,” he murmured. “Length for leverage and distance, to ward off a giant who wrestles, or a man they say is mad.”

He didn’t stop to consider what he would do if he faced
both
men. If it came, it came; by then, he hoped, Marian would be free, thanks to Much’s intervention.

 

Shadows lengthened. The sun edged down the sky to dip below the canopied screen of overlapping treetops, filtered now through boughs and branches in a counterpoint of dark and light, a leafy chiaroscuro. Shadows lay long on the ground, reaching out importunately to touch the crumpled hem of the woman’s soiled kirtle.

Scarlet stood before her, staring at the intercourse of shadow and woolen fabric. He saw the tips of bare toes whisked away beneath the kirtle. The stitches had all come loose; the hem was ragged and torn.

It shocked him. He stared more fixedly yet, seeing things he had not seen, blinded to the world save for what he needed from it. Now he looked at the ruined kirtle and ragged shift, still damp and weighted by mud; the tattered remnants of a braid, ratted and snagged and tangled; the defilement of her face, bruised and scratched and dirtied—and bloodied on her chin where he had dared to touch her.

It shook him. He felt it all over again, the pain, the fear, the futility, and the wild, killing, helpless rage that prior to that day had never touched his soul. Since then, it had lived there. Since then, it had shaped him.

Will Scarlet knelt down. He crept forward mutely. He hunched at the despoiled skirts, reaching out to touch the fabric, to put the tips of his trembling fingers against the ruined wool.

“No,” he breathed. She stiffened. But when she made to retreat, he caught a great handful of still-soaked kirtle. “No,” he told her hoarsely, and then looked up very slowly to find her staring at him white-faced out of blue eyes dilated black, with smudges beneath lower lashes and a welt at the corner of one, where the dusky birth of a bruise stained a flawless cheekbone dark.

The gag had cut her mouth.

“Don’t you see?” he cried. “There was nothing left to do!”

But she was gagged, and mute. He saw the faintest of twitches in her face, in her lashes, as she recoiled from his outcry. Her body was perfectly stiff, but she did not move again.

Scarlet knotted gouts of wool in both hands, kneeling before the woman like a supplicant before a priest. “She was young,” he whispered. “She was beautiful. Any man would want her, even a highborn man. But it was Will Scathlocke she wanted—it was
Will Scathlocke
she took. Though others wanted her—men better than him . . . it was Will Scathlocke she married. Because—she loved him, she said ... because she
loved
him. Because—she loved ...
him.”

The woman’s face was bloodless.

His own contorted. “I am not—a man women love. I expected nothing of it. She could have had any man in the village, any lord in the castle—she was that beautiful. Like you ... like—you ...” He gazed up at her, seeing beyond the dirt and bruises to the bones and flesh beneath. “Pretty Meggie Scathlocke.”

She didn’t so much as blink.

“She carried my child in her body before the winter was out.”

She swallowed heavily, trying to breathe through the gag.

His pallor matched her own, beneath the stubble and filth. “And then—the Normans came. Six of them, d’ye see? Prince John’s men, aglitter with Norman mail, awash in bright silk surcoats bearing Norman arms ...” Dark eyes searched her own avidly. “D’ye see how it was? Can you
know
how it was? Pretty Meggie Scathlocke—alone in the hovel we had made into a home.”

Her chest lifted raggedly as she drew in an uneven breath through the weave of the wool.

He tugged at her skirts, crumpling the stained fabric in his rigid, trembling hands. “My Meggie, all alone—and six Norman soldiers—”

Will Scarlet broke off, choking on his words. Abruptly he unclamped his hands, dropped the crumpled wool, lurched to his feet and three steps away, where he stopped, and stared, white-faced, with near-black eyes aglitter with something akin to madness.

“Pretty Maggie Scathlocke, made to serve the Normans.
Saxon
Meggie Scathlocke, made again and again to whore for the Normans, until she could do naught for any of them, because they were all used up, and so they turned to things no decent man would think of, to continue their sport, their use of the Saxon whore.” His entire body trembled. “Do you know what a sword hilt can do to a woman’s body?”

She twitched a single time. He saw the tears in her eyes spill over onto her lashes, then trickle down her face, making runnels in the grime.

“Aye,” he hissed, “put yourself in her place. Be pretty Meggie Scathlocke with a baby in her womb, made to do such things for six Norman beasts.” He balled up his fists before her, banging his own chest. “Put yourself in
my
place, coming home to find her so, all sprawled out across the dooryard of the hovel that was our home, bleeding from what they’d done
—dying
from what they’d done, those foul godless animals who serve the devil himself, and him in a royal mask.”

Her tears dampened the gag.

Three strides and he was to her, reaching down to catch her arms. He dragged her to her feet, his face but inches from hers. Spittle struck her cheek. “Put yourself in my place, little Norman whore, and ask yourself why I murdered four of your own kind. Put yourself in my place, little Norman whore—and ask yourself why I shouldn’t do to you what they did to her!”