Forbidden Forest Read online

  Tom Dee returned with three horses: a bay cob, a gelding with one blind eye, and a dray horse big enough to be a knight’s mount but heavy-hoofed and sullen. The gelding lifted his head and pranced at Red Roger’s touch, and the bay cob settled well enough under the yeoman.

  But John, who had ridden only one horse in his life, and that only after he had drunk a bellyful of strong ale, put his foot into a stirrup and froze. The horse sneezed, the convulsion running through the bulk of the big animal. Realizing that their pursuers could approach at any moment, John swung up into the saddle with a pounding heart.

  Tom Dee laughed. “A man-at-arms holds his elbows so,” he said, demonstrating a poised, steady posture, arms crooked. “And he keeps his feet in his stirrups, except to kick a peasant’s head.”

  The dray swelled and let out a huge sigh. John’s chain mail chimed at each clop of the big horse’s hooves. His feet dangled far below the stirrups, and he feared the mount might give out under his weight. “How much did you pay for this worthy dray?” asked John, not wishing to offend.

  “The horse displeases you?” asked Tom.

  “I pray you have not been cheated,” John replied in the manner of the best merchant foister, a hard bargainer.

  “The price was sweet,” said Tom. “They cost our Lord Roger not a farthing.”

  “Tell me, Tom,” said John, afraid to put the question into words, “what happened to Simon the ferryman?”

  “Your master had few friends,” said Tom Dee.

  “What do you suppose happens when merchants get their hands on a thief?” asked Red Roger. “They cut him to chops, and let him bleed to death without a priest.”

  John clenched his fists, a gesture so sudden his horse gave a kick.

  A sheriff’s man rode up the High Way on a cob horse curried and clipped, a pretty thing. Lord Roger glanced back and made a soft click with his tongue, like a man chiding a dog. Tom Dee gave a tight smile and said, “John, say not a word, and take this goatskin in your hand. Make believe you’ve had more than a swallow of sweet wine.”

  John accepted the skin of wine from Tom’s hand.

  The deputy took in John’s poor knightly disguise with one glance. The lawman’s horse, with its soft mouth and quick hooves, stretched its muzzle toward John’s dray, and the sheriff’s man twitched his reins. Lord Roger swept back his cloak, letting his silver buckles and brilliant red sleeves take the sun.

  This flash of aristocratic manner momentarily silenced the sheriff’s man, and when he questioned them at last, Red Roger was brief in his reply.

  “Yes, we heard of this outlaw youth,” said Red Roger in a nobleman’s drawl. “We tried to find a pitcher of wine worth drinking at Stoneford, and the place was a hive of rumor—no place for a quiet drinker today.”

  The lawman’s eyes were full of questions, but Red Roger gave his horse a pat and explained that the High Way from York was a ragtag mess of robbers and beggars, “no honest man in sight.”

  “My lord,” began the sheriff’s man, staring hard at John. Then the deputy broke into a grin. “I do believe your young sergeant is drunk.”

  “Drunk as a boar, and I’m out of patience,” said Roger. “I’m packing him off to Jerusalem, where the pagans can stew him in oil.”

  It was not true just then, but it became the truth as John mourned his thieving master the ferryman, a man with a warm laugh. John emptied the goatskin, drinking hard.

  The morning became a blur of sunlight and bright puddles as the wine fumes gripped him. He was certain that he fell off the horse sometime in the forenoon, but he had no sure memory of it.

  At some hour during the afternoon John lay flat in an open wagon, the wooden wheels creaking, rimmed with highway mud. The wagon carried the sweet smell of timber, and splinters lay about the wagon bed.

  Red Roger held up John’s head and let him drink from a skin of wine and water. He said, “Rest easy, John.”

  Red Roger looked up sharply and said, “Swing wide of the ruts, will you?”

  The driver’s voice responded, in singsong obedience, “Yes, my lord.”

  “You’ll stay with me, John,” said Red Roger. “I’ll teach you to rob from the very angels.”

  Chapter 5

  No cartwheels turned, no axle rumbled. The world was still.

  John was in a bedchamber. Red Roger held a cup, and John swallowed a thin, sweet liquor. “Pears steeped with Damascus prunes,” he said. “Sound medicine for a confused mind.”

  “Prayers,” John heard himself say. The proper prayers were as necessary as medicine for recovery, he knew. Saint James was the saint to aid the ill, and John remembered praying with Hilda as his father lay gasping in his bed. “Must pray,” said John.

  Or perhaps he thought it so urgently it was like a spoken word. Surely no Christian had ever experienced such a headache.

  John opened his eyes. A wax candle burned, giving brilliant light. The bedchamber had stone walls. John could smell the rain outside as it touched the mortar and rock and pattered on the shuttered window.

  He stood and put a hand out to a woven cloth on the wall to keep from falling. His sword cuts still ached, but with the itchy soreness that promises healing. The bright colors of the dyed wool at his hand depicted a glorious battle, a castle, and a man lifting a trumpet to his lips. Beyond, hills were spiked with armed men. This was, John reckoned, the Battle of Jericho. The walls of the besieged city were about to tumble, and the army of the Lord about to hack its enemy to scallops.

  John was hungry. A young woman garbed in rough-spun beige wool entered the room with the cautionary step of an experienced house servant. She was dimpled and pink-cheeked. “Oh, you’re awake, are you?”

  John admitted that he was awake, and standing.

  “I’ll tell his lordship,” said the serving woman.

  When the door whispered on its hinges again, Red Roger entered the room.

  “I cannot repay you with more than thanks, my lord,” John began. Polite formula, but entirely true.

  “I know you’ll repay me very well, John,” said Lord Roger with a quiet laugh.

  John sat in a large room. His father had done business with respectable pelterers and river merchants, and as a boy John had entered well-timbered houses. But this was in size a grander dwelling than any he had dined in before, and the roast hare and onions was the best dish he had tasted since his father sealed a contract with the archbishop’s armorer.

  Lord Roger did not take a bite of hare, but he joined John in drinking wine, and answered John’s questioning glances with a calm “No one followed us here.”

  John drank as much of the white wine as he could hold. It was served by a manservant with lowered gaze and barely whispered apologies as he removed John’s plate and checked the contents of the pitcher. The serving woman tiptoed in, her eyebrows raised in apology, and lit an oil lamp with a glowing twist of dried rushes.

  There were no other servants, judging from the silence of the rooms in the big house. And aside from the lord there were no other inhabitants, no children or lady of the house. The walls were cloaked with noble hangings, woven illustrations of unicorns and miracles. But there were few furnishings, aside from the table and two benches. The dishes and candle fittings were of finest quality, but one platter was old silver, roughly smithed, and a candleholder on the table was decorated with the faces of angels. Not one piece of silver matched another.

  “Moses is striking water from a rock,” said Lord Roger. John stood, aware now that his gaze had seemed to be on the decorated cloth at one end of the room. “The Children of Israel are parched, in a desert. Do you know the story?”

  “Well enough, my lord.” Once, long ago, Father Chad had given the lesson in simple Latin, and John had followed the meaning.

  Perhaps this answer did not please his lordship, for his eyes were suddenly downcast.

  “But,” said John quickly, “I forget much.”

  “Life under Heaven is a wilderness,” sai
d Red Roger. “We have no true companions, John. You will need new garments. Undyed gray and Lincoln green. Find Tom and take him with you to cut a quarterstaff. And tell him you’ll need a skinner’s knife or short sword—something with a fine edge.”

  John realized that he had not seen his sword on awakening, and put his hand to his hip.

  “A staff and knife, John, are the tools you need,” said Lord Roger. “Your work will be silent. We aren’t men of wild song and the longbow, like those beggarly thieves of Sherwood Forest.”

  “Are there such outlaws?” asked John.

  Red Roger gazed into the fire. “Only,” he said at last, “until men like you and I can run them down.”

  Chapter 6

  Outside the presence of Red Roger, Tom Dee was an even quicker, more agreeable man. He was eager to show John his lordship’s land, the henhouses bare of a single fowl, the pond with only a few ducks, all the way to a peasant’s cottage, its roof bare of thatch, the beams naked.

  “He has only the two servants,” said Tom, “Albert and Freda, Albert’s daughter. A rare cutpurse was Albert, in all the big towns. The sheriff of Doncaster’s men beat him and left him in a ditch for dead.”

  “It is kind of Red Roger,” said John, “to shelter a fugitive.”

  Tom gave a short laugh. “As for Freda, she can make a noise like a woodcock, exactly.”

  “Why are there no other servants?” asked John.

  “A bright pearl like Freda,” said Tom, with a smile, “who can make a noise like a wild pigeon, is worth three giant men like you. Red Roger finds the men he needs, and no more.”

  Tom led the way back to his own cottage, a white-walled, low building with a smoke vent in the roof. It was dark inside, and John could barely make out Tom as he searched among what sounded like tools of iron and wood. Hand pikes, halberds, and several glaives—soldiers’ spears. “This quarterstaff I took from a yeoman from the west, a man not quite as tall as you but wide. See how it fits your grip.”

  John stepped into the sunlight with the staff. Whoever had once owned it, he had not used it much—the wood was smooth, both ends unworn. John swung it at an imaginary foe. A staff like this could dent a crusader’s helmet.

  “And this knife will suit you,” said Tom. It was a horn-handled blade, whetted keen, and big enough to skin a fallow deer.

  Now Tom’s voice grew quiet, confiding. “We must be careful. The law cannot hurt a man like his lordship,” he said. “He can act the nobleman, bored and above lifting a purse. But it can lay its hands on me, and on you. I saw a man gutted with a pickax in Derby for using it to dig under a baron’s wall.”

  Executioners often used a felon’s tools against him during punishment, and John had seen equally dramatic examples in York, in the fields outside Micklegate Bar.

  “When we go out,” Tom continued, “stay right with me, step by step. Keep to the shadows. If ever you hear me call out for you to flee, then flee hard, John, and never once look back.” Fli herd, John.

  “Surely his lordship’s enemies are mine,” said John. He said this with enthusiasm—loyalty was considered a great virtue. “But I will not take a man’s life,” he added.

  “Red Roger is a proud man, and unforgiving,” said Tom. “He’ll never forget a slight, as long as he breathes. I warn you: never insult or hurt him. He lives for the pleasure of punishing his enemies.”

  “Then I hope I am always his friend,” said John with an uneasy chuckle.

  “You are a dog to Red Roger,” said Tom, “and so am I—strong and loyal. His lordship has no friends.”

  “The abbot of Saint Phocas is ill famed,” said Tom Dee, “with a woman he keeps in his parish house. And he has a whore here in Barnsdale, an innkeeper’s dimpled daughter. He rides to see her each Monday—he’s a steady sinner.”

  They sat in Tom’s cottage, John’s eyes growing accustomed to the dark interior and the eye-smarting wood smoke. They ate oatcakes and mare’s-milk cheese.

  “The priest is sunk deep in harlotry,” Tom continued, not unhappily. “And he cheats at dice. Raffle and three-dice, any game, and cards too. Our abbot would play toss-coin at the gates of Heaven. He is a smarter gambler than Red Roger, and the lordship hates him.”

  “He carries coin at his belt,” said John, understanding what he was being told.

  “But the abbot rides a-whoring with an armed guard,” said Tom. “Red Roger has been hoping for a strong-armed robber like you.”

  Freda stood in the courtyard, head to one side, and when a woodcock began its song, she echoed it, note for note. You’ll weep, lady, no more—this was what some people heard in the bird’s soft tune.

  She knocked a turnip on its head, three times for each meager pink-and-ivory root, the only vegetable in this early spring.

  John could close his eyes and see the gardens of his boyhood. Leeks and just-cropped colewort, parsley and a row of garlic. Hilda gathering tansy to use against fleas, the flowers dried and tied in a cloth sack.

  An unchurched household, Lord Roger’s house observed neither meatless days nor Sunday worship, and this sabbath morning John worked beside Freda, clearing the garden of weeds. A worm spilled out of a clod, onto a stepping stone, and Freda rescued the squirming blind creature from the sun, where it would surely parch and die. She flung it onto the moist, dark garden clods, and then bent to her work again.

  When John spied a crack in the garden wall, he remembered what Hilda had called such fissures. “Look, an elf gate,” he said lightly.

  Freda straightened and looked him straight in the face.

  “They come in from the hill,” she said at last. “At night.”

  John felt a prickle, and a chill.

  “To watch us?” he asked at last.

  Freda smiled. She laughed and bent back to her work.

  John was sure she had forgotten, but much later, as they raked the pulled weeds into a mound, she said, “There’s not a thing we do that the elves would want to look at. But even so—they know everything.”

  Was it a trick of his mind, or was she telling him something more?

  Sang the woodcock, You’re in danger, John, yes you are.

  Chapter 7

  “Like children, but not.” That was how Hilda had described elves she had seen as a little girl, in the field near the hamlet of Bodeton Percy.

  Hilda had caught a fever after sitting in the pillory outside Bootham Bar in York, and she died shriven and forgiven by the priest for her trade in hanged men’s knuckles. But the treatment of an elf frecht—an elf friend—was hard in most cities, and John had been happy to take to the road after Hilda’s death. John, too, would have faced punishment someday. Only hunger had forced him to leap onto a passing cheese man’s cart one warm noon, carve a slice from a great golden wheel, and run off into the hedges. That was his first, negligible act of thievery. And it was far from his last.

  Day by day John had found that the drunken chamberlain and the road-weary traveling clerk did not notice the slits in their purses until long afterward, much less remember the tall youth jostling them in the market.

  John rarely let himself imagine finding a red-cheeked wife, bedding down with her on long wintry nights, and living cozily in a cottage. But John suffocated every such hope in his breast. He knew that a criminal’s life ended with a trudge up a ladder, a bowed head, and a hangman’s yellow-rope noose.

  The following afternoon, after an early supper of pottage and brown bread, and a pitcher of thick brown ale, John followed Tom into the shadows. He felt a tug at his sleeve, and turned to see Freda.

  She waited until Tom was well out of earshot. Then she pressed an amulet into John’s hand.

  The amulet was a heavy base metal crudely smithed in the shape of a cross. John shook it and something sealed inside its hollow core made a rattling whisper.

  “The finger of a man who killed his master,” she said. “Hanged and quartered, all without a murmur.” A good death was much admired, and the relics of a peni
tent criminal were considered powerful magic.

  “Good Freda, I doubt that I need such great protection.”

  Smelling of yeast and sweat, she put her lips to his ear, and kissed it, just as Hilda used to.

  “What did our sweet Freda give you?” asked Tom Dee.

  John showed him the amulet, then returned it to safekeeping around his neck.

  “Do you admire our lord and master?” asked Tom.

  “He must be cunning,” said John, after giving the question some thought.

  A stone wall ran across the hill, and a flock of sheep, each beast with its head to the turf, grazed in the distant mist. Some stewards had burned out villages for the grazing land, and John could see the dark stumps of cottage walls. Wool was a more profitable crop than barley or peas, and only a few shepherds were required to work a flock.

  “He unsnared me from a mantrap a year ago last Candlemas,” said Tom Dee. “I tried to live by poaching venison, and now I serve him as he desires.”

  “You must feel grateful to him,” said John.

  Tom did not respond for a while, the two men approaching a disused wellhead, the watering place timbered over, a flat, grassless place in the field.

  At last he said, “Our Lord Roger has no warmth like other men.”

  “But he is kind to you,” said John, feeling embarrassed as he spoke for his own lack of worldliness.

  “And he beds Freda,” said Tom, “but this is not the same as love.”

  “Whose land is this?” asked John, eyeing a cottage space reduced to char and ash. He was troubled by this insight into the passions of Lord Roger, and for the moment he did not want to hear any more.

  “Our own Lord Red Roger’s,” said Tom. “He drove his peasants off the land, and does well at sheep breeding. But he plays at dice.”