In a Dark Wood Read online

  “You spent the night in the forest?”

  “Yes! And he laughed constantly. Forever laughing, as if the entire episode, every passing wet minute of it, were a joke, a sport, an amusement for himself and his tattered fellows.”

  “How many dead?” asked Geoffrey grimly.

  “What?”

  “How many of your party are—”

  “No one. None of us is hurt. It’s the fact of it. The fact, Geoffrey. The mockery of it. He held, and I am a Christian, a mock court, a mock feast table, a mock fire, as if flame could share in a prank, snapping and sparking like laughter, at me, Geoffrey! At the king, Geoffrey, and at you! I’m afraid, Geoffrey, and forgive me. Forgive me, I beg, but I fear that you have more than met your match.”

  “I have a plan, Baldwin.”

  Baldwin stared into his wine cup as if it contained human brains. “We don’t need plans, Geoffrey, although I know they are your great strength. By Jesus’ face, we need results.”

  “You talk as if a man of action were required. One of those sword wielders from Byzantium. And then you change your tune and describe an outlaw only a subtle man can catch. I am your subtle man.”

  Baldwin sighed. “Pray God you’re right.”

  Geoffrey beckoned. Henry clumped across the floor and stood, still red-cheeked.

  “Declare the following regarding this man,” said Geoffrey. “He is now legally, and not simply in effect, an outlaw. Any man who finds him can kill him with impunity. The law offers him nothing, not mercy, not recognition of name or status, nor does it see him as a child under the roof of the king’s power. It is as if he were not born.”

  Henry bowed. It was no easy thing, condemning a man. Henry marched into the darkness that surrounded them, a man carrying out a death warrant.

  Geoffrey sat heavily. The command had taken the last fire out of him. “Don’t worry for even a moment, Baldwin. I will net this man, and every man with him, because to catch one fly is nothing. I will catch them all. With a trick. What is a net but a thing which seems not to be there, by being mostly space? I will seem powerless. I will seem to be asleep, unconcerned. Like a spider, I will feel everything. I will hide just out of sight, an eye filled with poison. Because I know games. I know the game between men and women, between torturer and prisoner, and between hunter and quarry. Tell the king that his spider is awake and waiting.”

  15

  Hugh wished Henry a good morning.

  Henry nodded, too preoccupied to speak. Sometimes Hugh envied Henry. Henry tried hard, took a hitch at his sword belt before he spoke, but Hugh had the feeling that Henry was not quite equal to the challenges God set before him. Nevertheless, Henry was entrusted with the forest work, leading spearmen on horseback.

  Hugh had put any scandal regarding the sheriff, and any disappointment he might have felt towards the sheriff, out of his mind. He hurried to bring the sheriff a knife for his goose quill and shifted the leaden lion’s head paperweight so it pressed the vellum at the right-hand corner where it curled.

  Hugh was gratified at the smile Geoffrey gave him. He could not help noticing that when the sheriff spoke to Henry, a frown line appeared between the sheriff’s eyebrows.

  It was necessary to sign a written edict declaring Robin Hood an outlaw; his spoken declaration to Henry had been impressive but not entirely lawful. The condition of outlawry had in years past stripped a man of all protection of the law. It had been a form of banishment, and such a man’s life had been virtually forfeit. The law was changing, much the way an oak changes its outline over decades, casting a greater shadow, more impressive, more protective. Now a pronouncement of outlawry meant that the man should be apprehended and brought to trial. Naturally, if he were killed in the process, no great harm would have been done.

  The goose quill plunged into the pot of black. Geoffrey wrote his name, the jagged letters staggering across the bottom of the parchment, the quill squeaking, the ink floating in the final y, almost spilling over the confines of the letter, but settling at last.

  “Government is composed of documents,” said Geoffrey. “They are the skeleton of law.”

  Henry grunted agreement, but what did Henry know? He dreamed of the future when his own name was scrawled at the bottom of such sheets of vellum, in those years after Geoffrey had doddered into retirement and Henry had learned to write.

  Deliberately Geoffrey dipped the fingernail-pale quill deeper into black. He tapped the quill against the inkpot, and a single drop of black extended itself and fell. He wrote, after his name, “Scyrreve of Notyngham,” and blew on the words as they dimmed from brilliant newness to dull permanence.

  As always when he had either read or written, Geoffrey felt that something had been accomplished. Events were messy. Deer slipped, struggled, and were torn to sloppy bits by hounds. Words and numbers lasted, iron hooks of reality a man could cling to and be certain. Seasons changed, summer calcifying into winter, but the prayers learned in childhood followed the soul, like stitches in a hem.

  Baldwin and his men left at dawn, the sky rust brown where the sun bled through the clouds. Geoffrey stood on the walls and watched the king’s men ride through the streets, chasing a single gray cat until it darted behind a drain barrel. He waited until he could see the horsemen in the distance, a smudge of men and horses on the High Way.

  In the other direction was the event he had deliberately avoided. A figure hung from the gibbet, and a small group of men returned to the city, beyond the peaked roofs and chimney smoke. Already a black bird fell across the sky like a single hard coal and circled the stout beams of wood.

  “So,” said Geoffrey, “whatever he buried will remain in the earth.”

  Hugh fastened Geoffrey’s cape against a gust of wind.

  “By law I have to ride out to the gibbet. To make sure that the right body hangs there. I can’t say it is one of my favorite duties. You come, too. I know you’ve seen men hanged before. But you don’t know what it is to have done it yourself. Oh, Nottingham did the deed. But he was my agent, a pair of hands I ordered forth to do what my station would not allow me to commit myself. I killed him.” Geoffrey smiled a thin smile. “I had no choice. My mercy struck the man as cruel.”

  Hugh made the expression of one who understood every word.

  It began to rain as they rode through the streets. The same cat lunged and paused, then hid again as they began to gallop. Rain kissed Geoffrey’s eyes, and he hunched down into the horse’s mane.

  A lifetime among horses, the smell of them, straw and hay, and the pepper of manure on cold mornings, as if the wind itself were fertile. The creak of leather, the jangle of the bridles, decorated with fringe and buttons, brass polished until it gleamed and fired the sun back into the sky in dozens of fragments. And war-horses, with armor covering their nostrils and high-fronted saddles so a man could lean forwards to the kill without pitching off the horse, the pommel a bulwark against gut wounds. Geoffrey had trained until almost any horse knew immediately what he wanted, even the most muscular battle-stallion.

  The horse he rode now was a gray war-horse, without armor. A simple red rope was the bridle, and a plain brass bit matched the brass stirrup. The rain made patches of the horse’s hair stand up, like grass a dog has been playing in, and when the horse tossed its mane, water flew into the air. They rode the long way round, to delay their arrival at the gibbet.

  The mill wheel turned with a ground-shivering rumble as the stones inside the mill itself turned. The miller squinted up at them as they passed, acknowledging unthinkingly the natural superiority of a mounted man compared with a man on foot. The miller had wide black nostrils and was powdered with white. Rain streaked the flour as he waved to the sheriff, a wave that was necessary; a man had to be respectful to the king’s law. Still, within the confines of manners and common sense, it was possible to show some disdain for order. The miller, like so many millers, wanted more than God had allotted him.

  Geoffrey made a point of stopping.
“Good day to you, miller.”

  “Good enough, for wet,” said the miller, showing three brown teeth. A bagpipe lay in a heap on the floor behind him, and a stave leaned against the wall. Those music-making bladders were popular among unpleasant people. “My son is very pleased with you, I must report.”

  “I am honored,” said Geoffrey.

  “He’s entering the tournament.”

  “Tournament?”

  “The archery.” Not “The archery, sire,” an obnoxious lack of manners that was, of course, deliberate.

  “I look forward to seeing his shooting.”

  “He’ll split the prick five times out of six and none better.”

  “That’s very impressive.”

  “They hanged a thief today,” said the miller.

  Geoffrey allowed himself a smile. “I know that,” he said.

  “But it won’t do any good. Men who steal know they take their lives in their hands. They decide to be dead men and feed their families.”

  How charmless men became when they decided to be outspoken. “I had always thought of greed as a sin,” said Geoffrey.

  “And so God will punish in His good time. But what can folk do when God Himself makes hungry children?”

  “If your son shoots as well as his father talks, he will win the mark indeed.”

  “There’s a certain freedom to an outlaw,” said the miller.

  Geoffrey made a dry laugh. “And this from you. No man is less an outlaw than a miller. You drudge, joined to your place by the river, to your millstones, to your space on the earth.”

  The miller made a brown smile.

  “The law is a miller’s friend,” Geoffrey concluded.

  “And the outlaw’s, too. An outlaw knows he may be dead tomorrow, and he can fling himself away with a laugh, because what choice does he have?”

  “Your mother was an argumentative soul, as I recall,” said Geoffrey, smiling.

  The miller’s face tightened.

  “She’d argue with a water trough as soon as pass it,” said Geoffrey merrily.

  The miller twisted his face into a grin. “She had a tongue. And she raised a son with an eye in his head to see what’s taking place round him. The word is, my lord—”

  The sudden courtesy cut Geoffrey, and he tightened his hold on the reins.

  The miller came close and put a floury hand out to Geoffrey’s knee. “The word is, my lord, that while you have spent time with the ladies, forgive me, sire, Robin Hood has been visiting the city streets, under your very nose.”

  “That prankster? I know he has been doing such things, and I realize he finds it humorous,” Geoffrey lied. “And I have been allowing him this freedom, as a man might allow a puppy to get well into mischief before cutting a switch, especially if the man has weighty matters on hand. His time has run out, but I don’t have the desire at this point to beat him yet. You may say I enjoy the company of ladies, or you may say I am closeted with my accounts. At any rate, I am too—”

  “Certain ladies, they say, sire. Certain ladies who, speaking properly, have no business even looking at a man. At even casting an eye in the direction of his finger.” The word finger was enunciated with elaborate care. “A certain particular lady who has no such business, and I beg my lord’s pardon.”

  “I am too busy to bother with the prankster, except to declare him outlaw. I will get to him in my own good time. As for the gossip you have gathered under your nails, I have seen several tongues cut out in my day and have always marveled at the transformation it makes in a man.”

  A slow smile, with three brown teeth, and the miller’s eyes disappeared with merriment. “Well said, sire. These tinkers who wander from place to place have so little better to talk about, you might as well cut off tongue, nose, cock, toes, and leave them but one eye while you’re about it.”

  “Such a dreadful man,” said Hugh when they had left the miller behind them.

  “What? Oh, him. He simply gave me something to think on.”

  The thief’s eyes were half open. Geoffrey saw that much and looked away.

  “I wanted to strike the man down,” said Hugh.

  “The miller? He is a man who is afraid of the law inside himself. And to prove otherwise to himself, he acts as obnoxious as possible in the face of it. Why do we have to worry ourselves over men like him when we have the power to do this to a thief?”

  Hugh had seen many men hanged, and he gazed at the bare feet of the figure on the gibbet. A carrion crow soared over the cross-beam, fluttered, and landed at the rope wound round the span of wood.

  Sheep crowded the hillside, the color of maggots, and the stink of them perfumed the wind. Not one lifted its head. A shepherd leaned on his staff, staring at the backs of the sheep that surrounded him. He wore a cloak that wrapped him and a cap that gave his head the shape of a thumb.

  They rode until they reached the High Way. Baldwin’s men had destroyed the rain-smoothed surface of the mud. Many of the hoofprints were gray with rainwater, but it was not raining now. Faint blue shifted across the sky, and the clouds yellowed where the sun broke overhead.

  The High Way was a simple stretch of mud. The King’s Forest crowded either side, saplings along the edge where the older trees had been cleared. The green-black trees were a physical manifestation of the majesty of the law. Birds fluttered from branch to ground, unaware they were supported by justice just as a man’s hand is stayed or freed by the hand of God. Geoffrey did not know why, but he was at peace. At peace, in the midst of these terrible burdens.

  But just as an outlaw was freed by being condemned, so a man of law was freed by having so much responsibility he had no freedom at all. He need not decide what to do next. He had no choice but to do exactly what was required of him.

  16

  The market was rich with food, some still struggling. Chickens in wooden cages fluttered and stared. A feather floated like a star in the air. A goose, tied by a rope to a pole, had collapsed. It lunged feebly at a laughing boy and was too tired to do more than hiss. Pickerel and carp glittered in baskets, and there were bunches of watercress. A pile of cabbages hulked beside wheels of white cheeses. A basket shivered, and a bird worked its head through the lid and beheld the market with a copper-bright eye. A broad hand shoved the bird back where it belonged, and a voice called, “Pee-jons!”

  Bunches of parsnips gleamed under the mud that smeared them. Great domes of black bread glistened in the sun. Turnips with purple markings like bruises tumbled onto a blanket. Everywhere the air was noisy with haggling, and laughter, and gossip. Respectful heads bowed as Geoffrey passed, and he declined offers of an apple, a wedge of bread, and a slab of cheese mottled and gleaming like a cornerstone.

  But summer was over. The last of the fat harvest was in, and already the carrots were huge bulbs, distended with too much growth, like goiters, or thin and overlong, tapering to long white hairs. Barley had been transformed to barrels of ale, and the lambs that bleated and tugged against ropes were already too leggy to fetch the highest price. Even the cabbage was tinged with brown, the slowest-selling or slowest-growing heads already turning their outer leaves into skulls within which the brains were shrinking.

  “What did you do with this sword, sire?” asked Ivo. “What caused it to be like this, if I may ask?”

  “I attacked a plant. I believe it was a holly bush.”

  Ivo squinted along the blade, letting his eye slowly open when it met Geoffrey’s gaze. “A holly bush?”

  “I was very angry.”

  “But you don’t want to do that sort of thing, now do you, my lord?”

  “Not as a rule.”

  “Ever,” Ivo snapped. “Forgive me, I value steel above everything. My father was a furbisher, as was my grandfather, and we all loved steel more than meat, more than women, nearly.”

  “I understand,” said Geoffrey.

  Ivo laid the sword gently on a bench that was hacked and scarred. He ran a finger along the flat of another
blade. “To see a blemish in a perfect thing pains me. A blemish implies fragility, as in a man it implies sin.”

  “Naturally.”

  “Sin in a sword snaps it. Now, you can fight with a snapped sword. Sir Roger gutted a Saracen with a sword like a shard of glass. I was there—surrounded by Damascus steel, our English blade irons dragging our arms weak. Sir Roger’s blade rang sour, like a piss-pot struck with a spoon, and the thing shattered. Upright, like a finger of glass, and the infidel, with his victory in his teeth, before he could grin, was fed his own bowels. Quick Sir Roger! Such a sight! He took that broken steel as you’d take a finger into butter and slipped it from cock to breast before you’d blink.”

  Ivo patted the sword and found a purple-stained rag. “Not, however, the best way to slit a man, Christian or not. So, and forgive me, when you bring me a weapon of fine steel, smooth as cream, not even the tiniest of flaws, all gory with tree sap, I am”—Ivo cranked his vise, a noise like a bird’s chirp—“I am angry.” He made the word long: “ang-gry.”

  He rubbed the blade with a tincture that smelled like vinegar. “Although, forgive me. No doubt the holly bush offended the king’s man in some manner not understood by a lowly furbisher.”

  Geoffrey’s fondness for Ivo was insufficient antidote for his irritation. “I have many worries, Ivo. Sometimes I can’t control my anger.”

  “It’s balance you need, not control, and forgive my brazen mouth. Too much spleen, and you need soak it up! Spleen-stone! Ask the surgeon—he has cured my foul humors many times with a little rock, a little greenish serpentine, my lord.”

  The furbisher squinted along the blade, then sat and pedaled his wheel. The whetstone sang, and the sword spit sparks. “The finest edge can be made crooked by hacking the most common wood. Just the way the smartest man can be made a little stupid by the commonest wine.”