‘About bloody time,’ muttered Bernard. And he dropped his branch and collapsed in a heap in the wolf-churned frozen mush.
Chapter Ten
I fell to my knees in the snow, dropping the club and finally allowing my bone-weary arms to dangle from the shoulders. Robin was here. I didn’t know why and how he had appeared in the nick of time to save us from certain death, and in my soaring relief, I didn’t care.
Tuck came over and lifted me to my feet. He enfolded me in his brawny arms and I felt his great warmth and strength flow into me. He tended to my arm, cleaning it quickly and wrapping it in a fresh bandage. Robin greeted me, stared into my face with his great silver eyes, and congratulated me on my survival. He looked pleased to see me and I felt the familiar glow of affection for him. Then he thanked me for rescuing Godifa. ‘It was she who saved me,’ I said, my voice unsteady with relief. And I told all of them how she had slain Ralph, the wildman, and helped to fight off the wolves with my poniard. Goody just stood there with her head hanging, looking more guilty than heroic, but the men all made a great fuss of her, telling her that she was her father’s daughter, and that he would have been proud of her, which made her choke back a sob.
Best of all, Robin’s men had brought food. John spread thick woollen blankets on the snow, and we fell on the cold meat, cheese and bread that they provided from their saddlebags. Bernard discovered a skin of wine and appeared to be trying to drink it all in one huge draught. Tuck had looked at the bump on his head and allowed that he probably wouldn’t die immediately. In fact, the wine and food revived Bernard sufficiently that, sitting on a crumb-strewn blanket in that snowy clearing, he even began to compose what would later be known as ‘The Death Song of the Sherwood Werewolf’, an eldritch melody mimicking the howls of wild wolves, that tells of the beast that lurks in the hearts of all men. I could hear him humming under his breath between gulps of wine. He performed it some weeks later, in a cosy fire-lit cave when I was surrounded by dozens of Robin’s warriors, and even in that stout company, it chilled my soul.
There was one incident that struck me as a little strange, though. Robin had brought a prisoner with him, a common soldier of middle age or even slightly older, with a hangdog, frightened expression on his saggy face, and a painful-looking wound in his shoulder from an arrow that prevented him from lifting his right arm to defend himself. Robin told me that he had encountered a small group of Murdac’s men while he was searching for survivors of the massacre at Thangbrand’s. They had quickly destroyed this handful of enemy soldiers but, unusually, instead of dispatching all the surviving warriors cleanly and quickly, Robin had insisted on keeping this man alive. Looking at him, and remembering Sir John Peveril, I suppressed a shudder. Seated on a horse, with his legs bound underneath the animal’s belly and his good hand tied to the pommel, he was a forlorn figure. I went over to speak to him, but Robin stopped me with a hand on my shoulder. ‘Don’t talk to him, Alan; in fact, don’t even look at him,’ he said. ‘Just make believe he doesn’t exist, that he’s a ghost.’
I stared at him. Was he contemplating another ghastly mutilation? But I dared not disobey, so I avoided the poor man. May God have mercy on my soul.
My recollection of the rescue fades at this point. Perhaps it was the shock of the past few days that robbed me of my memories, perhaps the wolf bite or my total exhaustion. Perhaps it is just the price of living such a long time: I am old now, by any standard. And the details of some parts of my life have become blurred and some moments disappear from the mind altogether. But some memories are clear as a crystal mountain stream, and one of those was my first council of war with Robin’s men at the Caves.
We must have packed up our belongings in the clearing, though I don’t remember it, and mounted the horses. And Tuck must have called his great wolfhounds to heeclass="underline" they were Gog and Magog, he told me later, and he insisted that they were still puppies. A friend had given them to him and he was training them for war, he said. But puppies or not, I never found myself entirely comfortable in their presence, knowing that these huge canines could rip one of my arms off with no more effort than it would take me to pull a drumstick off a capon.
Doubtless we rode away through the forest for many hours, though I can recall not one thing of the journey. And, presumably, when we reached Robin’s secret base, half a dozen great caves deep in Sherwood, my wounded arm was attended to and I was allocated a place to sleep. I must also have spent some days recovering from my recent ordeal but this too has slipped my memory: my recollections revive at a long table loaded with food and drink, three or four days after the fight with the wolf pack. Robin was seated at the head, flanked by Hugh and Little John. The benches down the sides of the table were filled with outlaw soldiers eating a midday meal of roast venison off solid gold plates that bounced the light from outside the cave on to the low ceiling. I had never seen such splendour before and I was shocked by the casual way that the men banged these precious plates about and scraped them with their knives. Right at the bottom of the table, Will Scarlet and I sat sharing a boiled capon with onion sauce. Tuck was absent; he almost never joined in the councils of Robin, saying, only half in jest, that it offended his Christian soul to hear the wicked plots of evil men.
Bernard took no part in our deliberations either; he and Goody were in a separate cave where they were polishing ‘The Death Song of the Sherwood Werewolf’, Goody providing a spine-chilling howl-like accompaniment. She had made an astounding recovery since her adventure and seemed to be her bright and cheerful self once again, although she liked to keep either Bernard or myself close by her at all times and I did hear her sobbing quietly beneath the covers once or twice, when the pain in my bitten arm prevented sleep.
Hugh and Will Scarlet, I discovered, had survived the massacre at Thangbrand’s by pure chance. Early on the morning of the attack by Murdac’s men, Will had been squatting at the long trench, partially covered with wooden boards, which served us as a latrine. He had seen the first mounted troops pour through the gates at dawn and, without even tying up his hose, he had sprinted straight into the forest and had hidden in a tree for a day and a night. Robin’s men, riding south to join Thangbrand for the end of the Yuletide celebrations, had come across Will in the charred ruins of the old Saxon’s hall, crouched on the ground, knees hugged to his chest, rocking back and forward and weeping uncontrollably. To me, now, he seemed a changed boy: friendly, seeking my favour. The days of our mutual animosity, it seemed, were long gone. However, every time he smiled at me, and I saw the gap in his front teeth that I had put there with my sly iron nail, I did wonder if he had truly forgiven me, or whether, one day, when I was least expecting it, he might seek vengeance.