Hawksmaid (14 page)

T
HE ABBESS DRAGGED
M
ARIAN
to a window. Marian's eyes closed at the sudden glint of the rising sun as it reflected off a silver cross borne by a priest on the road below. Behind the priest was a small procession winding up the road to the abbey.

“You see!” rasped the abbess, pointing to a pathetic creature at the end of the procession, “There she is. Face eaten away, one foot half gone.”

Head bowed, her frail body supported by a crutch, the leper moved slowly. Strapped to her back were two wood planks and a bag of nails for the coffin she would
be required to build soon after she entered the abbey hospital. Apparently she didn't have the strength to carry any more than this, for the rest of the planks were carried by men in the procession.

“And now to the chantry!” announced the abbess almost gaily.

In the chantry, no one stood close to the creature. A black cloth had been draped over two trestles in front of the altar where the leper knelt to hear Mass and make her last confession. The arrangement of the cloth and the trestles looked precisely like a funeral bier upon which a coffin would be set.

The priest was an elderly man, whose voice was weak and barely audible as he chanted, “Libera me, Domine.” It was a chant for the dead, for a departed soul, and yet the woman lived.

The service was not long. When it concluded, the leper limped to the door of the church from which she would be led to the hospital. Before she left the church, the priest at the door signaled her to stop. Marian felt herself break into a cold sweat when she saw the priest stoop, reach into a bucket and pour some earth over the woman's remaining whole foot, as one would pour dirt onto a coffin in an open grave. Muttering in Latin,
the priest then spoke his final words to the leper:
“Tu eres morte ad vivendi pero vivendi ad Domine
. Thou art dead to the living but alive again for God.” He tied a black ribbon on to the leper's crutch.

The abbess leaned close to Marian and whispered, “The ribbon is the gravestone. We don't waste time or money with real stones. But it does have a little prayer stitched on it. The nuns do the needlework.” She smiled grimly, then continued to speak. “We have been most successful in routing out lepers. I shall be blessed for this, you know.” She paused. Her hand gripped hard on Marian's arm. “And so shall you.”

“Me?”

“Yes, you. We need someone to tend them. They are getting so ill, this batch, that they cannot do their fair share of praying—praying for the souls of those like me who provide them this beneficence.”

 

As Marian entered the hospital room, she felt that the priest might as well have sprinkled earth on her own feet. It was as if she were stepping into a coffin—a coffin of the living And this was where she was supposed to stay. The most horribly deformed bodies lay in heaps before her, puddles of disintegrating flesh and bones.
Their voices muttered oaths and prayers. Their breath whistled through the craggy remnants of their faces. Marian scanned the room for the leper who had just arrived. Then in the shadows she saw the crutch with the black ribbon on the floor and near it a pile of rags. The rags seemed to have no form. If there had been a body, it must have simply dissolved. Had the poor creature died and been spirited away to heaven?

But then from the pile a voice scratched the air, so dim it sounded no louder than the tiny claws of mice on stone. But something drew Marian to that heap.

Despite the filth, the tattered shreds of skin, the rankness of the odor that rose like a putrid mist as Marian drew nearer, she also felt a pureness of spirit. A stream of light and blessedness flowed from the moldering heap of flesh. This time she did not make the mistake she had years before on that moonlit night on the road to the greenwood. Marian knelt and bowed her head. “Milady Helena, how might I serve you?”

“Good child, I am so happy to see you.” The leper sighed deeply. “If only Robin Hood knew where you are.”

“Robin Hood! You know Robin Hood?” Marian was dumbfounded.

“Oh, my dear, of course I do. Old friends, really. He tried to help me just like his mum. You know his mother, Nelly Woodfynn, always helped me when she could. When I first met you on that road, I was on my way to Nelly's. But then Barnsdale became too dangerous for lepers and I found my way elsewhere. 'Twas only perhaps a fortnight ago that I met Robin again. He knew me from my coming to his mum's, and he did help me so much. Found me a refuge, brought me food, warm clothes. But he was not the same boy I remembered—carefree and always merry. Indeed none of his Merry Men seemed happy but worn down with grief. And I found out it was all for you, my dear, the one sometimes called the Nut Brown Girl. He loves you, you know, but he fears you are dead. And here you are—alive but tending the living dead!” Helena paused and sighed softly. “And now he will think I am dead, too, when he comes back to look for me. Or he'll think that the abbess has found me as she has the others.” Helena gestured toward the people around her, sleeping on piles of rags in the shadowy corners of the hospital.

Marian's head was swirling. Robin knew Helena. Helena knew about Marian. Not only that, Helena
knew that Robin loved her. “If only…if only he knew that I am alive…well…here with you.”

Marian vowed that if Robin and his mother, Nelly, had taken care of Helena, so would she. She refused to be afraid of the disease.

 

In the days that came, she washed the woman, fed her, and helped the others. Fear, Marian decided, was a worse sickness than leprosy.

But what obsessed her day and night was how she might get a message to Robin, to let him know that she was alive and where she was. She hated to think that he imagined her dead. More than the leprosy, Marian feared that Robin thought she was dead and had stopped looking for her.

 

One morning Marian had been shaking the lice out of the bedclothes when she heard Helena stir behind her.

“What a lovely merlin that is outside on the branch.” Helena's face—really no more than a noseless skull within a black hood—had turned toward one of the narrow slit windows in the thick stone walls.

“Merlin!” Marian ran to the window. Looking out into the abbey's orchard, in the middle of the blizzard
of white apple blossoms she spotted her. “Marigold!
Tshaw pschaw chu churrrru tschaw
.” The words spilled from Marian's mouth in a torrent and tears streamed down her face. Marigold flew to the window and lit on her mistress's fist. With her small tongue she began to lick the salty tears from Marian's cheeks. Marigold was here and Marian knew she could survive anything now. She might be among the living dead, but within herself she felt new life.

 

The next day Marigold came with Ulysses and Lyra. Soon after the kestrel Morgana appeared. “My little hawk mistress!” Marian whispered with delight as she realized that Marigold had led them here. It gave Marian great ease to know the hawks had been able to get out and fend for themselves and Meg and Hodge while she had been imprisoned.

Marian went to Helena. “Helena, my birds have come here—here to seek me out. They look well, and that they have come here for me…. It seems like some sort of a miracle.”

“Now you must be careful that the abbess does not lay a trap for your birds,” Helena replied in her thin voice. “For the miracle is that they have found you, and
not only that but that the little merlin told the other hawks and—” Helena paused. Speaking required a great effort, but her next words were important and she wanted them to be clear. Swallowing hard, she continued, “If she told the others, she could tell Robin Hood.”

Marian's eyes widened. Of course this was exactly what she had wanted—for Robin to know she was alive.

“So now you must send a message to Robin Hood. The little merlin, the one you call Marigold, can carry it.”

“But I have no pen and ink. How can I write anything?”

“I do not think that words are needed. And I think that Robin is watching the hawks and following their flight. He needs only a sign, a sign that you are alive.” She stopped to get her breath. “Send him a lock of your hair. Take the small blade we use for cutting what little food they give us and clip a lock from your hair. A bird flying with such a thing will not be noticed. It will look like stuff for a nest.”

Of course, she didn't need to write anything. Marigold knew where the blasted oak was in Sherwood.
This was not like trying to explain the trees in which the rubies were hidden. She began immediately to whisper to the merlin.
“Meelpa, pischwatch.
Robin
gimmlich bruscha
.” While she was speaking to Marigold, explaining what the bird was to do, she sawed away with the knife on her still rather short hair.

 

That evening Robin sat with his men in the hollow of the blasted oak. At first it had seemed as if Marian had simply vanished. Then, through their network of spies, they heard she had been captured. “It's just so—so odd that we have not a clue where she's been taken,” Robin said, shaking his head sadly. “Does she still live? That is the worst. We know not if she is alive or dead.”

“She lives. I am sure of that,” Friar Tuck said. “But where? And what are they doing to her?”

Robin buried his face in his hands. They had set out to rescue a king with rubies and a sapphire, and now something far more precious to him than any jewels or any king had vanished. The men looked at one another as they saw their leader, weary with worry, shake his head and wipe tears from his eyes.

A grim silence settled upon them. In the space of that silence a merlin swooped through the leafy branches
of the oak and into the vast hollow to alight on Robin's shoulder.

He looked up in shock.

“Why, it's Marigold,” Little John said.

“So it is!” Scarlet rose and looked in awe at the bird.

A lock of curly hair dropped into Robin's lap. “It's Marian's,” Robin said in awe. “She sent it. This is a sign. She lives!” His eyes widened in thought. “But where? How?” He turned to Marigold. The merlin cocked her head and peered with great curiosity into Robin's eyes.

Robin felt something stir inside him. It seemed peculiar and yet there was a feeling of something slightly familiar. Perhaps it was just a glimmer of the communication with birds that Marian had known all these years, but he felt that this bird might become his ally. Had not Marian often told him that for a true falconer a well-taught bird was never a captive but a partner?

Suddenly Robin knew what he should do. In his shirt, he had some hedgehog bristles and a tuft of robin's feather that he always used for fletching his arrows. There was no way that Marian would fail
to recognize them as his. He quickly tied the bristles and tuft into a small bundle and placed it on his fist in the time-honored tradition.

Marigold approached the offering with all the dignity and nobility of her ancestry. She snagged the bundle in her beak, then settled on his fist. Robin walked out of the hollow with his arm extended. As he had seen Marian do countless times, he thrust his arm into the air. Marigold spread her wings; roused them once, twice; and then lifted off in flight.

Slowly she rose and circled frequently so that Robin might follow her path in the darkening day. He got onto his horse and followed her, his heart bursting with gratitude, as Marigold led them steadily toward Nottingham.

“So she is there,” he said to himself as Marigold circled the abbey on the knoll three times.
And now to rescue her,
he thought.
But how?
The chief strategist of the band was a prisoner. It was up to him now.

“
Y
OUR DINNER, MILADY!”

Marian looked up, confused, from the corner where she sat with Helena. The abbess never entered the hospital, let alone bearing a plate of food for her. Food was always shoved into the outer chamber by a young scullery maid. But there was the abbess, holding a plate with something red and steaming on it.

“What?” Marian asked.

“‘What,' you say? You don't recognize it? I certainly thought you would, my little hawk mistress! 'Tis the brain of a freshly slaughtered rabbit. I understand they are a favorite of predatory birds from hawks to eagles. I am told that such birds crush the rabbits' skulls with their talons, that indeed their talons are much stronger than their beaks. Here, my dear, have a crop full!” She laughed and set the plate on the floor. “Oh, and when you tire of rabbit brains perhaps your own brain will commence to work and remember the whereabouts of the rubies.”

Marian pressed her hand to her rib cage where she kept the small precious bundle of feather and hedgehog bristle under her bodice. Marigold had dropped the bundle through the window that morning. Helena had been right—all that was needed was a sign. With the lock of hair and the bundle of fletching both she and Robin knew the other to be alive. She did not attempt to eat the raw bloody mess. No self-respecting raptor—be she hawk, falcon, or eagle—would ever take food from a tyrant. Refusal was her last weapon against her captor. “Robin will be here soon,” she kept telling herself. “Soon.” The bundle of feathers was
nourishment enough. But he did not come, not that day nor the next nor the next. And still more days passed and yet there was no sign of him. Only the abbess came—sometimes with a mound of raw rabbits' brains, other times with the still-quivering heart of a guinea fowl—all the delicacies that Marian had at one time or another served her own birds. Marian refused to eat. Nor would she eat the food of the lepers despite their begging her to do so. The abbess became wary: if the girl died they would never find the rubies.

Marian was growing thinner and weaker with each day, but her gaze became haughtier, nearly murderous with contempt.

The lepers moved beyond their own despair as they saw the person who had treated them so kindly wasting away before them. One morning Marian collapsed not far from Helena's pallet. They could do nothing to make her comfortable. Helena had been begging her to eat the raw, bloody organs offered by the abbess, but Marian would only say, “He will come. Fear not.”

 

Marian's breath grew raspy. Her eyelids barely flickered, and soon she did not respond at all. To the lepers who lived constantly within the shadows of death, who
knew intimately the signs of finality, and who had witnessed so often the passing of the spirit from the body, it appeared that she was dying.

At the window Marigold perched transfixed, watching, but strangely calm. Indeed, the little merlin was experiencing a sensation that she had never known in her life. It was not hunger, nor was it the peculiar quickening she felt as she swooped to kill prey. It was a sensation close to that early exhilaration she had known on her first free flight. Something was stealing over the bird that seemed familiar but at the same time very strange. It was the spirit of her mistress.