Robin Hood (20 page)

“Aye, we'll meet again, Robert Loxley,” he said, nodding decisively. “Be sure of it.”

N
ight fell over Peper Harrow, and after an ample but simple meal like the one they had enjoyed the night before, Sir Walter retired, claiming to be unusually weary. Robin sat before the hearth again, enjoying the warmth of another blaze. He hadn't been sitting long, however, when one of the servants appeared saying that Sir Walter had sent her. Marion was on her feet immediately, but the girl explained, somewhat sheepishly, that the old man had asked not for her, but for Sir Robert. Robin thought that Marion regarded him with a touch of resentment as he stood, puzzled himself, and followed the girl up the stairs to Walter's bedchambers.

The room was dark when Robin entered. He could barely make out the old man's bed, which appeared plain and ancient. Moonlight filtering in through the window alighted gently on the blankets and pillows so that he could see the old man was lying on his
back, as still as death. He couldn't see if Walter's eyes were open or closed, and after waiting for some time for the man to speak, he began to wonder if perhaps in the few minutes it had taken the servant to fetch him, the old knight had fallen asleep. He was just about to turn and quietly let himself out of the chamber, when Walter stirred.

“Longstride,” he said. As always he turned his head directly toward Robin. Not for the first time, Robin wondered if the man was only feigning his blindness, or if his hearing had grown so acute that he no longer needed his eyes to know what everyone around him was doing.

“You need to know what I know,” the old man went on. “Your father was a stonemason.” Robin saw him smile in the darkness. “Is that pleasing to you?”

Robin took a breath and nodded. Then, realizing the man could not see his gesture, he said, “Yes, it is. A mason …”

He trailed off, silenced by the onset of a memory …

H
E IS IN
Barnsdale, his childhood home. In the village center. The cross of the Celts stands in the middle of the square, gleaming in the sun beneath a sky of purest blue. He feels himself rising and falling. He is being thrown. Exhilarated, scared, laughing. He soars up toward the blue, falls back. And is caught in strong arms, only to be thrown again. Rising, falling, laughing until he can't catch his breath.

Finally, those powerful arms catch him one last time and set him on his feet. Robin looks up into the clear blue eyes of his father. He knows those eyes. He has seen them reflected in a looking glass, and in the gleaming armor of the knights who sometimes come
to his town. They are his eyes, too. Clear and blue and honest.

His father kneels down before him and grips his arm gently. “Always keep this day in your memory, and in your heart.”

The cross behind his father has a small gap, a single spot where one last stone has yet to be set. His father leads Robin to the base of the cross and trowels cement into the gap where this last stone will be placed. He takes hold of Robin's hand and presses it into the wet cement, making an imprint. He smiles at Robin, who smiles back. Then the stonemason presses his own hand into the cement beside Robin's imprint.

Two other men, standing with a cluster of soldiers, separate themselves from the group and join Robin and his father next to the cross. They press their hands into the cement, too.

The older Robin, the man in a darkened bedchamber in Peper Harrow, who is watching his childhood self and wondering at this long-forgotten image from his boyhood, knows these men. He can almost name them, but that knowledge flutters just beyond his reach, like a butterfly on a summer day, and then it is gone.

Robin's father now walks to where the last stone rests, a chisel nearby. Robin follows, and so sees the words carved into the stone on one side. Words that Robin has committed to memory with his father's help.

“Rise and rise again, until lambs become lions.”

His father hefts the stone, carries it to the cross, and sets it in the gap, the inscription facing in, so that only those who have come to witness the completion of the cross will know that it is there. The words, resting forever beside the handprints.

The stonemason turns to his son and smiles, and Robin grins back at him, thinking what a wonder it is to have a father who could have fashioned such a great cross.

R
OBIN STOOD IN
the darkness of Sir Walter's room.
My father was a stonemason.
These words echoed in his mind, like rolling thunder on a summer evening. Such a small thing, and yet he knew so little of his family, of his past, that it seemed huge, like a man's sword in the hands of a child.

“But he was more than that,” Sir Walter said from his bed. “He was a visionary.”

“What did he see?” Robin asked in a hushed voice.

“That kings have need of their subjects no less than their subjects have need of kings. A dangerous idea! Politics!”

Robin had said much the same thing to Marion earlier this day, and hadn't known at the time what to make of his own words. Had those been his father's words, sent to him across time and over miles and through the boundary between life and death, between thought and memory? Or did such sentiments simply run in his blood? Was he finally learning what it meant to be a Longstride? Strange that the lesson should only be brought home now, when he had taken on another man's name.

Robin looked at the old man, eager now to know the rest of the stonemason's tale. “What happened to him?”

“Put out your hand.”

Slowly, Robin reached toward the bed. Walter groped for his hand for a moment before finding it.
He gripped tightly; there was strength still in those old fingers. Robin stood just by the bed now. Looking down into Walter's rheumy eyes, he saw that they looked almost white in the moonlight.

“A blind man can see things in the dark,” the old knight said. “Do you understand me?”

He swallowed. “Yes.”

“Close your eyes,” Walter told him. “Leave the remembering to me.”

Robin did as the old man said, waiting for whatever Walter had in store for him. Suddenly he felt the old man's body convulse, as if Walter had been struck by lightning. The old knight's grip tightened painfully on Robin's hand, until Robin felt that his bones were being ground to dust. At the same time, Robin doubled over, as if he, too, had been struck. He wanted to cry out, to ask what was happening. But in that instant, he saw.

T
HEY ARE BACK
in Barnsdale. Robin, his father, other men. Soldiers. So many soldiers. The cross looms above them. Dull now, almost gray, beneath a brooding sky. The soldiers hold his father, pinning his arms. Robin is yelling for them to let his father go. Tears stream down his face and he struggles to break free of the hands that hold him back. He wants to go to his father, to help him get away from the soldiers. But he's held fast and so can only watch.

A soldier steps to where his father is held, a sword in hand. And with a single powerful stroke, he cleaves the mason's body. Blood blossoms from the wound. His father's legs buckle beneath him, his head lolls; only the grasp of the other soldiers keeps him from collapsing to the ground. A scream is ripped from
Robin's throat. Then the world begins to spin. The blood, the soldiers, the cross. And all is black.

R
OBIN OPENED HIS
eyes in the darkness, his hand still in Walter's crushing grip. He remembered it all. The memories coursed through him, as though a dam had cracked and given way. Walter dropped his hand, and Robin staggered briefly before regaining his balance. His chest ached with the memory of that sword stroke. His head spun, as it had when he was boy. When he had witnessed the murder of his father.

“Who?” he asked, breathing hard.

“Think!” Walter told him, his voice harsh in the still, dark room. “King Henry's soldiers! You were there. You saw it. Do you remember what happened after that?”

Robin closed his eyes again, reaching back for that memory as well. But though he scoured his mind for any hint as to what followed the horrors he had just seen, nothing came. At last he opened his eyes again and shook his head.

“Almost nothing before I was young in Normandy, brought up among farming folk.”

“You were taken there by two men,” Walter told him. “Noblemen. Sympathizers. They took you out of danger, and hid you with a family in France.”

“You!” Robin said, comprehension crashing over him like a wave. And with that understanding came a vague memory of two men standing with Robin and his father by the cross in Barnsdale.

“Yes,” the old man said. “The other was a nobleman, my best friend since my youth.”

Robin shook his head slowly, trying to keep up
with all that the knight had told him. “I don't understand. Noblemen, led by a stonemason joined in … in what?”

“An appeal to justice,” Walter said, his voice growing stronger, his eyes open wide in the darkness and shining with moonlight. “And one without bloodshed. He was a philosopher, and he had a way of speaking that took you by the ears.” He paused, as if savoring the memory. “Finally, hundreds listened, who took up his call for the rights of all ranks, from baron to serf, and many a nobleman saw the right of it.”

A visionary, Walter had called his father. And yet what was left of the stonemason's dream? The hidden memories of a little boy, and the dreams of an old knight.

“His call died with him,” Robin said softly.

But Walter grabbed for his hand again and gripped it hard. “Not dead!” the man said. “Not now!”

Robin considered this, staring at their hands in the ghostly light. “You and I and others, Sir Walter.”

The old knight nodded, staring at Robin intently through sightless eyes. Robin stared out the window toward the fields and the shadowed wood beyond. The notion that had come into his head earlier in the day returned now. Not exactly his father's way, perhaps, but certainly his own.

W
ILLIAM
M
ARSHAL
SAT
at the writing table in his chamber, gazing out an open window at the rooftops of London. The sun was just up in the east, and the waters of the Thames glittered with its light, as if diamonds had been strewn across its surface. He smiled bitterly at the thought. Strange that such rank
waters should look so lovely at a distance. He shifted his gaze toward the White Tower, which gleamed in the morning sun. Something dark and rank festered within its walls as well.

It had only been a matter of days since John had banished him from the throne room and the halls of power, but already William felt like a stranger in the city. He had served kings most of his life. To have that taken from him by the likes of Godfrey and Richard's wastrel of a brother …

A knock at his door roused him from his dark thoughts. A servant entered, carrying a small rolled piece of parchment, sealed with wax. A message from his man in the north.

Marshal broke the seal and unrolled the parchment.

The message scrawled in that familiar hand was chillingly brief. “200 French arrive at night at Hampton Bays.”

Marshal took a long breath and gazed once more toward the White Tower.