Jennifer Roberson - [Robin Hood 02] (3 page)

The Lionheart, dying?

No. Other men died. Weaker men died.

To most of the men in his service, Richard Coeur de Lion was legend, not man. And legends did not die.

“You will stay the night, of course,” she said to Mercardier; best to depart at first light, rather than sleeping on wet ground. “I will see to the arrangements.”

“We go tonight.” The peremptory tone halted her. “We go now.”

She felt stiff and cold, and powerless. “Is there so little time as that?”

“Madame,” Mercardier said curtly, “even now he may be dead.”

Legends did not die. But men did.

And kings.

Marian found Robin upstairs in the bedroom they shared. She had half expected to discover him packing feverishly, a duty she planned to lift from him; and clearly he had begun, for one of the big chests was open and clothing spilled forth. But he was no longer digging through folded shertes, tunics, and hosen to select what he thought best to take. Instead, he stood very still near the foot of the bed, mimicking the wood of its testers.

She stopped, noting the brittle tautness of his posture, and waited.

When he saw her at last, when he could form the syllables of words and make sense out of incoherency, he said what she had at first believed: “He cannot die.”

She waited.

“Not
Lionheart,”
he added, as if she might not know to whom he referred. As if, by hearing the infamous sobriquet, Death might yet be startled away and the warrior-king defended.

She did not say what was obvious: that the king would not have sent for him in such a way otherwise; that Mercardier would not have come himself in such haste and hostility. She said nothing at all, simply waited. There were times a man needed to understand a thing for himself before he permitted a woman entry into his grief. And this was indeed grief, plainly visible in the carnage of his face as he slowly admitted the truth.

“One moment,” he said dazedly. “One moment, and all is changed.” He looked at her. This time he saw her. “One moment the world is as it is. The next, it is something entirely different. Something it has never been before.”

Marian nodded mutely as tears welled into her eyes.

“And
we
are made different,” he said bleakly. “On the instant. What we know, what we were, is banished by that instant, razed like a castle under siege, until nothing recognizable is left. The world is unmade.”

His world had been made and unmade and made again many times, in war, in captivity, in its repercussions. But this was somehow different. She saw it in his face, in his eyes, in the sluggish quality of his voice, as if he were drugged out of pain but remained aware of it nonetheless, waiting for it to seize him once again.

“One moment,” he said, “Richard is alive, and the world is whole, and full. The next . . .” He shook his head. Pale hair stirred against his shoulders. “The next I am summoned to France to see what is left of the man, if he be living yet. So I may witness the world turn itself inside out.”

Marian drew a breath. “He wants you to leave at once. Tonight.”

Robin nodded. “Mercardier is not a man to waste time.”

“Nor should it be wasted,” she said, “when a king is dying.”

He shut his eyes and flinched. Visibly.

Marian did not know the king. She had met him, once, five years before, when he had come home briefly following his ransoming. When he had looked upon the woman who had won the heart of the man King Richard knew as soldier and confidant, who had gotten drunk with Coeur de Lion; the man who had sung with Coeur de Lion, who had killed with Coeur de Lion in the land of the Infidel, in the name of God. She did not know the king, but she did know the man who had done all those things
with
the king, and she was fully cognizant of the pain such bald honesty caused.

To lance the wound, she said, “I have ordered Sim to saddle your horse.”

“A single moment,” he said, “and nothing is the same.”

Marian bent and retrieved a sherte from the floor. “I will do this,” she told him. “Go and eat what you can before that soldier sees to it you never eat again.”

“Mercardier.” His voice was less drugged, more distinct. As was the dryness of irony. “Not a duty he would cherish, this. Fetching me?” His mouth twitched briefly, then stilled. “But he would see to it where another man might speak of failure, not wanting to set eyes on my face again.”

Marian gathered up other clothing, began to place it on the bed so she might select what was needed. “What is he to the king?”

“Captain of his mercenaries, bought men from Aquitaine. But more. They are brothers in many ways, Richard and his captain. More so than ever Geoffrey was, and certainly than John. They are very like in their taste for battle, in the ordering of war.”

“And he hates you,” Marian said. “Why?”

He was silent a long moment. “Because one day, at Richard’s insistence, I wrestled the king. And defeated him. Mercardier has never forgiven me.”

She knew better. “There is more than that.”

Robin sighed deeply. “Of course. There is always more.” He moved at last, to stop her from sorting his clothing. To touch her hand, to grip it, to pull her close. To set a stiff face into her hair as he embraced her. “One moment,” he said, “and the world is forever changed. But there is one constancy in my life that I will never allow to change. You.”

Marian, offering assuagement in the warmth of her body, the tightness of her arms wrapped around his neck, thought of how she had been certain, upon Mercardier’s arrival, that she had lost yet another she loved. And how in that moment the world had turned itself inside out.

But in this moment, as they clung to one another, the world did not move at all. Time was theirs to rule.

Too briefly,
Marian reflected. But better one moment than none.

 

William deLacey, Lord High Sheriff of Nottingham, had sentenced himself this day to his own dungeon. But he was in no danger of being executed or of remaining imprisoned; he inhabited the dungeon cell because it contained money.

The chests of coin were of varying sizes, wood bound by brass, and locked. The sheriff had seen to it that only two men had keys: himself, and his seneschal, Sir Guy of Gisbourne. Who had, five years before, become more than merely steward of Nottingham Castle, but also the sheriff’s son-in-law, by marrying Eleanor, the last and least of deLacey’s daughters.

Just this moment the sheriff was unconcerned with the chests, stacked into uneven columns against damp stone walls, and equally unconcerned with Gisbourne and Eleanor. His attention was wholly commanded by a large cloth he had unrolled from its oiled casing and spread upon the one piece of furniture in the cell: a crude oak table. The cloth itself was unprepossessing, neither of lustrous silk or fine-woven linen, but it represented everything of his shire that was vital to the realm, so that England, embodied by her sovereign, might thrive.

The cloth was Nottinghamshire’s Exchequer, divided like a chessboard into painted squares. Parchment writs served as vouchers for expenses, and wooden tally pieces were placed into an area called the
receipt,
representative of tax payments made to the sheriff. Twice a year it was his responsibility to make an accurate accounting of his shire, and to carry that accounting—and all collected monies—to the Royal Exchequer via Lincoln to London. A preliminary session took place after Easter each year, and it was this session which concerned the sheriff now.

At Michaelmas, in late September, he would be required to
square up
his account, to give a final summary of the expenses and profits of Nottinghamshire by indicating various squares on the Exchequer and explaining what had been done about money—coin spent, and coin collected—in the king’s name. It was an exhaustive process, as every sheriff in England was required to attend the sessions. From this final accounting at Michaelmas the king himself was paid, campaigns were funded, the administration of all of England was underwritten, including the payment of sheriffs. Accounts were required to be accurate and absolute; and it was known by all the sheriffs that writs of expenditures, in the days of Holy Crusade, far too frequently outnumbered tally pieces. William deLacey, who would rather hang criminals than account for the king’s coin, detested Easter and Michaelmas.

He heard the key scrape in the lock. Gisbourne. And so it was; and so Gisbourne let himself into the dungeon and imprisoned them both. For now the wealth of Nottinghamshire—pardon, the
king’s
wealth—was safe.

DeLacey grunted and stepped away from the table. Gisbourne, a short, compact, dark man, bent and placed a stack of wooden tallies into the
receipt.

“And?” deLacey asked ominously.

Grimly, Gisbourne took a packet of parchment from his purse. He untied it and began parceling out the writs into various squares representing cities, towns, villages, manors. No one in England was spared a share of taxes. But neither was England spared expenses.

“And?” deLacey repeated.

“There are more tallies to come,” Gisbourne said. “I have men out now going from village to village to collect the taxes as yet unpaid, but it will take time.”

“I do not have a surfeit of time,” the sheriff reminded. “Tell the men to be ruthless. I must have a full accounting before the preliminary session.”

Gisbourne’s mouth barely moved. “Yes, my lord.”

“See to it.”

“Yes, my lord.”

The sheriff glared at the writs strewn across the Exchequer. “It would be much simpler if everyone simply paid the tax collectors on time. Then it would spare me the need to send soldiers to the villages, and spare the peasants the attentions of those soldiers.”

“So it would, my lord.”

Attention recaptured by the colorless tone, deLacey studied his steward. Gisbourne was being more down-mouthed than usual. “Is this something I should concern myself with?”

Dark eyes flickered. “No, my lord.”

“Eleanor, is it?”

Gisbourne was startled that his business was so obvious, but hid it instantly. “The child is ill, my lord.”

“Which one?”

“The girl.”

Gisbourne’s daughter. Or the girl
presumed
to be Gisbourne’s daughter; the sheriff was well aware Eleanor was more than indiscriminate when it came to her pleasures. Rumor had it Gisbourne had sired neither the girl nor boy, though Gisbourne himself claimed them.

“Will she live?”

“The chirurgeon believes so, my lord.”

“Well, then. Tend my business, Gisbourne, and the chirurgeon will tend his.”

“Yes, my lord.”

William deLacey let himself out of the cell, resolving to visit the mews. He had acquired a young hawk from the Earl of Huntington, and wished to see how its training progressed.

Mercardier gave Marian and Robin little enough time to exchange farewells. The mercenary, already mounted, waited at the opened gate. He said nothing, but the intensity of his stare and the grimness of his mouth made it plain further delay would not be tolerated. As Robin led his horse toward the gate, Marian walked with him.

Conscious of the king’s man, they exchanged a chaste kiss, though Robin’s hand lingered a moment in her hair; and then he was mounting, gathering rein as he swung a leg across the saddle. She had packed him clothing, adding to it a wrapped parcel of cheese and bread; Robin had strapped on dagger and sword. There was nothing left to be done save leave.

“I will be home as soon as may be,” Robin told her, gripping her hand a moment, and then he rode out.

She watched them go: one large, mail-clad mercenary atop a huge bay horse, a younger, slighter knight in simple leather and wool, mounted on a gray. The latter wore no mail, but was no less competent, she knew—or less dangerous—than the mercenary captain he rode with. Robert of Locksley had been soldier, Crusader, and king’s man also, in the days before the Turks had captured him on the same field where her father died. Before he had come home to England much older in spirit than when he left, if only two years greater in age.

Sim closed and latched the gate. The sound of hooves against courtyard cobbles altered into silence beyond the gate, where stone became dirt track. She would not see or hear him again until he returned.

Until a king was dead.

Marian turned abruptly and strode across the bailey to the hall. Inside there was warmth, food, companionship. Even music; Alan was playing his lute. The melody was simple, his tenor voice pure in accompaniment. She paid little enough attention to the lyrics. Instead, she took her seat at the head of the table, intending to eat and drink—but discovered a sudden inability to move.

The table was no longer empty. Men gathered at it now, the men she had expected to gather at it two hours before, when she had supervised the placing of platters and tankards, the treasured bowl of salt. All men save one, who now rode to France.

It was Will Scarlet who poured a pewter goblet of ale and thumped it down upon the table next to her hand. “Drink,” he said. “ ‘Twill put color back in your face.”

She had not known she lacked it.

“Eat.” That was Little John, shoving a platter of pork in her direction. The pile was already denuded, ravaged by male appetites. “ ‘Tisn’t a war, is it? He won’t die.”

Marian looked at them all. At Scarlet, scowling in perplexion; he did not understand her mood. At Little John, with a bush of red beard concealing half his face, but not the blue eyes that were, she saw, plainly worried. For her. At Much, working on a bulging mouthful of cheese—he would never learn proper manners—and at Tuck, whose plate was full of food yet untouched. Alan she gave the merest glance; his head was bent over his lute as he fingered the strings.