Jennifer Roberson - [Robin Hood 01] (49 page)

“God—” he choked, and snatched at boots and cloak, then unlatched and yanked open the door. The
bean sidhe
followed, hooking nails into his shoulder and tearing the tunic away, the linen sherte beneath, the flesh beneath that. Blood ran from his back. Behind him, FitzWalter howled.

He tugged on boots and fled, sweeping the cloak around his shoulders. Faces swam before him as he made his way through the hall, as he clawed for the latch, as he tugged open the door; and then he was in the storm where the bodies screamed and cavorted, and he knew his only escape lay in leaving Ravenskeep.

He fought the wind across the courtyard, tripping over loose cobbles, and at last found the stable block. It was securely latched, but he undid everything and let the wind throw open the door. Deftly he caught up bridle, pad, saddle; quickly he caught the bay; in taut silence he readied the horse, then swung up into the saddle and rode him out of the stable into the howling wind.

Eyes teared from grit: he was on the road to Arsuf, spitting and swearing and fighting to keep his seat on the horse. Debris rolled by: a tree limb torn off from its trunk like a man’s arm from his shoulder, a shutter from the hall, a mass of russet feathers still attached to a one-legged chicken.

“Robin!” Marian shouted.

The bay danced across the cobbles, shedding sparks from iron-shod hooves.

“Robin—”
she cried.

He glanced back as she ran toward him, buffeted by the wind. He saw the shroud of hair wrapped around her and the pallor of her face: a skull like Hugh FitzWalter’s grinning into the storm. From the blackness of her mouth the
bean sidhe
shrieked his name.

“No—” he mouthed. Then, in desperate fury:
“There is no God but God—”

 

Marian couldn’t see his face, just the pallor of hair and hands. He wore her father’s clothing. The dark cloak snapped in the wind, winding around his body.

Like Hugh’s and Mother’s shroud
—And then the pain was renewed.
Not another death
—

She saw his expression as she reached the horse. He was white-faced, white-lipped, with eyes gone wide and black. If he saw her at all he did not appear to know her, for he reined the horse toward the gate.
“There is no God but God
—” And then something more, more raggedly, in a language she didn’t know.

“Wait!” she said. “Robin—
wait—”
She reached for and caught rein, dragging the horse around. “—not in this storm—”

The main gate’s bar gave way with a muted crack. Wood crashed open. Rusted hinges broke, freeing the gate completely.

The boom of wood striking cobbles frightened the horse into a frenzy. He reared, striking out, as Robin fought to control him. Marian, blinded by her hair, put out a warding hand. She fell back a single step, caught her heel on a cobble, then blurted an outcry as the hoof slashed by her head and snagged a tangle of whipping hair.

It jerked her to the ground. Marian sprawled there, gasping, as the horse reared again. She thrust up a rigid hand. “Robin—
NO
—”

The horse fell out of the sky.

Robin fought the horse as the bay rose up and up beneath him, flailing iron-shod forehooves like a war-trained destrier. He saw Marian fall, saw the white flash of her hand, heard her garbled outcry snatched away by wind.
Acre all over again
—
another woman crushed
—

With effort he battled the horse as it slung its head from side to side, mouth gaping open. He dared not let him down in the same position ... he hauled on rein, digging in with his left heel once, twice, thrice, banging boot into flesh, fighting to move the bay a step, or two, or three ... cursing wind and screech and equine strength. In midair he jerked the horse offstride, abusing the gaping mouth, kicked free of stirrups and jumped, sliding down across saddle and rump as first the cloak snagged, then tore free as he bent over FitzWalter’s daughter.

His hands closed on her slender wrists, clamping flesh to flesh as cloak billowed and black hair whipped, obscuring her face. Robin jerked her from the ground, stood her there, peeled back her hair even as she staggered, stripping hair away from her face, expecting to see blood and a matted, splintered hole like the ones he had seen before, in Acre and here, in his room.

“No—” she said, “I tripped—”

No blood at all, only hair, and a pale face gleaming like a peeled skull, like the faces in the room, grinning with clattering jaws.

He recoiled.
“No—”

“Robin—
Robin
. . .” She clutched at him. “I promise—I tripped over a cobble—”

He clung to her shoulders as black hair was flung at his face to mingle with his own. “No more—” he gasped. “I can’t—”

“Robin—” She shook back hair, but the wind caught it again. He could see nothing of her face but white rents between whipping strands, and the flash of a Celt-blue eye. “Come in out of the storm.”

“I can’t—” he said again, “can’t
stay
here—”

She pulled hair from her mouth. “You won’t get ten paces in the wind ... here, this way—” She slipped from his hands and caught a wrist, tugging adamantly.

The nightmare would not diminish. “Richard—” he said. Then, in anguish,
“La ilaha
—
la ilaha il’ Mohammed
—”

She pulled him to a walled garden, through its gate, then into a tiny chamber full of lamplight and pallid stone, a milky luminescence in the darkness of the storm. “Here,” she said breathlessly, and yanked shut the flimsy door that rattled in its place as the wind clutched at it again.

He breathed noisily.
“Bean sidhe,”
he murmured.

Marian smiled. “That’s what
I
thought, too—” But then she lost her smile. “Robin—?”

One step and he caught her, clasping her arms, hanging on to his only salvation: the price of his survival on the bloodied plains of Arsuf, because he knew he had to tell her; he had been
charged
to tell her. But it wasn’t enough, not now; there was too much in his soul. It swelled like a putrid canker, then burst through inflamed flesh to release the pressure at last.

“Why can’t he understand? Why can’t he let it be? I told you what he wanted—I carried the message to you ...” His face was stark, sharp bone beneath taut flesh. His mouth felt rigid and warped. “I did what he asked me to—I did what
Richard
asked me to, save the one thing ... I couldn‘t—I
couldn’t ...
and all those people dead—all those people butchered ... Saracen women and children, the girls raped to death, the mothers spitted on swords—breasts hacked off ... stripped naked to die in the streets ...” He shuddered from head to toe. “Acre was
heinous
—it wasn’t a victory, it was a massacre—a disgrace ... he ordered all of them killed, all of them beheaded—more than twenty-six hundred Turks ... because Saladin broke his word—” He gritted his teeth. “An excuse, nothing more—he’d have done it anyway ... he could be hard and cruel and brutal, dangerous to anger—” He had to make her see, and he was doing it all wrong; Richard wasn’t a monster, he was a
man.
“And yet he was never cruel to me ... even when I said no, that I couldn’t—that I was not a man for that—not for bedding men, nor kings, nor even
Richard
—” He bared his teeth. “I failed my liege in that—all I could do for him was butcher Saracen souls, not ease the needs of his body—” He broke it off then, gazing blindly into her face. “The needs of his
body—Ya Allah!—
the needs of my
own—”
Breath hissed through his teeth. “And I can’t—I
can’t
...” He laughed, then chopped it off. “What would Richard say? What would a woman say?” Fingers found her hair, threaded their way through, touched the curve of her cheek. “What would
Helen
say, to a Paris who cannot love her?”

Tears stood in her eyes, bright in candlelight, then one broke over a bottom lid and spilled down a bruised cheek to dampen his fingertip.

“Marian—” he rasped. “Oh God—
Marian
—”

“I am not—” She swallowed heavily. “I am not who I need to be, for you ... I am not what
you
need—”

It hurt his throat. “No one is. No one can be ... not even—Richard—” Robin shut his eyes.

“I would—like to be—” she said jerkily. “But—I don’t know how.”

One of the candles died, its wick spent at last. His soul felt as barren, as wasted. He was ashamed of what he had done, of what he had said, because no one not a soldier could begin to understand, and even then he might ridicule him for thinking so much about it, for permitting it to rule him; for allowing dreams to shape his life when there was duty to do it for him.
Just as my father said before he ordered me beaten.

Robin gazed down into Marian’s face, recalling where he was; better yet, where he
wasn’t:
not in Acre, Arsuf, or Jaffa, nor in Huntington Hall. With effort, he took his hands from her. “You’d better go.”

“Robin—”

He moved aside because he had to. He turned his back on her. “This is a chapel?—no.” He answered his own question as he glanced around. “An oratory ... good. I am in need of prayer ... and more than that, I think ...” He turned to her after all, risking it, risking himself, watching the play of light on her pale bruised flesh. Desperation engulfed him. “Marian—
go.”

Her chin rose. “Will you? Run away again?”

It hurt more deeply than anticipated. He shook his head. “No.”

“Then—I leave you to God.” She turned away and unlatched the door. He saw the shine of tears in her eyes, but she was gone before he could speak.

 

Tuck knelt before the altar in Nottingham Castle’s tiny chapel. He was filled with an awful certainty that whatever he did now—confession, penance, prayer—would never be enough.

He sweated in the alcove, clenching trembling hands. He had not been able to eat and his belly protested noisily, but his spirit was hungry for something much more substantial than food. He required understanding. He needed sincere compassion. He desired a measure of acknowledgment from the God who ruled his life.

“In nomine Patris, et Fili, et Spiritus Sancti,”
he murmured. “In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit—”

But he could not. He was wracked with doubt and guilt. He was not worthy even of prayer, to pay his addresses to God, who knew very well what he’d done.

He rocked there on fleshy knees: a child in need of comfort. A son in need of his Father.

“Forgive me,” he murmured wretchedly. Tuck squeezed his eyes shut. “Make me strong,” he whispered. “Father—make me
strong.”

In the bailey outside the keep the wolf-wind howled an answer.

Much hunched in the dark. He was shielded from the worst of the wind by burrowing into a hollow dug by an animal between the exposed roots of a giant oak not far from Ravenskeep’s gate.

He had left the other outlaws because he tasted storm. It filled his head with ringing and a vague stuffiness, setting his ears to aching. He knew what it promised, but he saw no sense in telling the others; they were men, all of them, considerably older than he. Surely they knew by the taste and the smell and the sound that the storm would be worse than most.

His world was threatened, and the woman he called his princess.

Much rubbed at his nose. Pressure was in his head, nagging mercilessly; the storm would grow worse before it blew itself out. He recalled it had happened before when he was just a boy: a fierce, angry windstorm had driven ships out of the North Sea into the Wash at Kings Lynn, where later they had sunk. It ravaged villages, blowing down daub-and-wattle; it shattered his father’s millwheel; it flattened the stable at Ravenskeep—driving out all the horses—and tore down every shutter. People had died in the storm, crushed by falling trees, or flattened beneath collapsed dwellings.

Much didn’t want Ravenskeep to blow down. It was the princess’s castle.

He hunkered closer to ground, squinting against flying debris. He would stay the night if he had to, to make sure the princess was safe.

 

Marian went out into the storm and latched the oratory door behind her with hands that shook very badly. She stared at them fixedly, then shut them into fists and pressed them against her breasts. She was hot and cold at once, all bound up in emotions so raw she ached with it. There was grief and anguish and pain, that Robin could be so tortured; shock and denial and sickness, that war could be so brutal; lastly, an understanding, a harrowing comprehension of what had been done to him, or what he had done to himself, or what Richard had
caused
to be done by the insanity of—desire.

He had said: “—
not ease the needs of his body
—
”

Nor even of his own.

Marian shut her eyes. She knew now what it was, the vague disquieting tension; the unacknowledged hunger; the appetite for his touch. She was as much a victim as the king, or Eleanor deLacey, who had told her what it was and that a woman could need it also, promising pleasure of it.

She had lied to him:
“I am not what you need,”
she had said, meaning not good enough, too innocent, not able to ease his needs. But she was wrong. She
was
what he needed; a woman to ease his pain, ease his needs, give him back what he had lost. She knew it instinctively.

A wave of panic swamped her.
I can’t
—Will Scarlet’s face hung before her, its near-black eyes staring into her own; his mouth telling her ugly truths of what the Normans had done to his wife, and his desire to do it to her.

But it was
Robin
inside. Not Will Scarlet.

Panic surged again.
I can’t
—But she was no more immune to the needs of a body than
he
was, or the king.

 

Wind twisted the tree limb and bent it nearly in two, scouring Little John’s face with damp leaves and prickly twigs. He swore, bent almost double to avoid branches clambering for flesh and clothing. The others fared better because they were not so tall; his face burned with welts and scratches.

Just ahead, Will Scarlet’s hunched form was a blob against the greenish darkness. His question was shouted to reach above the wind. “Where?” Scarlet shouted. “Where are we going?”

Little John swore again.
I should be home with my sheep.
But that life seemed banished, now. The sheriff wanted him. He had been seen in the company of outlaws who had killed Norman soldiers.

“Where?” Scarlet shouted again, pitching his voice to carry to the men ahead of him.

One of them swung back. Little John saw Cloudisley’s pretty face twisted against the storm. His dark hair ran wet with rain, tangling at his mouth. “A cave!” Cloudisley shouted; Little John mostly read his lips. “Not far—it will provide some cover!”

“Sheep,” Little John muttered, “and good fleece for warmth—”

But that was in his past. His present was his future.

 

Marian swung around and snatched open the oratory door, blowing in on a gust of wind. The other candle blew out. Only the lamp was left, casting eerie illumination into the hardness of Robin’s face. He sat there rigidly in the rope-bound, ancient throne: Arthur before his knights as they accused the queen of adultery, all bleak and wasted and angry, afraid to hear the truth because it destroyed the childhood dream.

“Lies,” she said roughly, “all the dreams are lies. We
make
whatever we are ... the magic isn’t in dreams, but in what we take for ourselves.”

He was used up, bruised and battered. He said only, “Let it be.”

“No.” Marian closed the door, shutting out wolves and
bean sidhe.