XIII. On Watch
His torch held high and spitting in the light rainfall, Thomas stared at the rings of the target cinched against a wall of roped-together straw before him, and for a minute or two he was a boy again, apprenticed to Alpin Waldroup, firing his first arrows in the direction of a lumpy, makeshift target. He had missed far more often than he’d planted an arrow anywhere near the thing. Waldroup warned him that he would spend his first weeks chasing down errant shots and increasingly frustrated by his inability to hit what was right in front of him. It proved to be an all-too-accurate prediction. If he hadn’t been apprenticed (both as a stonemason and as an archer), he surely would have given up.
Now here he was, about to enter a contest using someone else’s bow, when he had hardly fired an arrow in years.
He turned and counted off the steps across the hay-strewn square to the shooter’s line: by his reckoning, one hundred fifty feet. From here the light of the torch barely suggested the location of the targets, two of them side by side. A significant though not impossible distance, he supposed.
He set down his torch, held his bow out, and drew the bowstring. It felt . . . unnatural. He’d have liked to sink a dozen arrows in the rings right then, but knew better than to damage the targets the night before the event. Besides, his were hunting arrows. Tomorrow, target arrows would be provided to the shooters, everyone’s the same. Even now up under the castle the Norman sheriff had possession of them.
He plucked the cord a second time, sensing the stretch in his back and shoulder, his elbow sliding back. Then he relaxed, flexed the bow, putting one foot inside near the tip, and unlooped the bowstring. With a quick swoop he reclaimed the torch. It hissed like an angry cat. He stared down the line at the targets again.
Barring his earliest training with Alpin, had he ever taken aim at anything the way a target shooter would—calm, standing still, taking all the time he needed to prepare, aim, concentrate? Other than those first days with his mentor, he couldn’t recall arrows loosed except in the heat of some sort of battle, on the run. Even against that Yvag fiend, Ađalbrandr, at close quarters in Forbes’s mill, there was no time to think, merely to act. Yet, tomorrow he must do exactly that—stand still and shoot—and with a bow he’d never yet used, however well-crafted it might be. Suddenly, entering the contest seemed like a very foolish idea. He and Little John should have been running for their lives right now instead.
He crossed the square and went through one of the openings in the dividing wall to join Little John at the ducking pond. The armature for punishment had been rolled aside and the narrow arch of a bridge had been assembled across the pond. The contest of quarterstaves would be decided on that bridge, and John, his own torch held high, was testing it.
Thomas watched as he performed something like a dance upon the bridge, forward and back, a turn to one side and then the other. He stumbled but caught himself as the rain spattered down, misshaping his flame-lit reflection in the cold pond below.
“Better you than me up there,” Thomas told him. “I’ve already been half drowned this week, and I suspect by a man you could best one-handed.” He wondered if Sir Richard had found his men and if they would be participating in tomorrow’s contests. Those purses would surely tempt almost anyone, even the most desperate of outlaws.
“This Benedict,” called John, “what’s ’e like?”
“Like a bear you wouldn’t want to bait. He was sitting when I saw him, though, so I can’t tell you much more.”
Little John came clomping down off the bridge. “’Tis a tight walk, and for any sidestepping not much room. More like you’d plunge straight off than find balance long enough ta strike. Pond’s so small, you’re more like to land in muck than water.” For all the complaint in his description, he seemed pleased. “How’d you make out with target range?”
He shook his head. “I worry that I can’t even remember how to find the distance.”
Coming over, John clapped him on the shoulder. “You’ll find it,” he said. “Let’s our watch finish, London road to Lenton Priory, agree that all’s abed and then retire ourselves. I’ll show you one’a the privy ways down to the Leen there.” He turned and started walking.
“I thought you didn’t know your way around Nottingham.”
“Nah, I never said that—just that I’ve not entered any contest hereabout. On account of both sheriffs would be cock-a-hoop to clap me in irons first thing and hang me on the morrow. But I been here plenty enough times with Robbie when he visited his brother. I stay in Sneinton—no one there watching for me. Plenty of places to be invisible in hermitage. I’ll show you.”
They wandered along Chandler’s Lane, passing the gaol where they had stowed their belongings, working their way to High Pavement and St. Mary’s Church, at which point Thomas’s torch guttered and went out.
Little John made the sign of the cross. “Ghosts in the graveyard, don’t like the light, do they?” he said.
Thomas asked only, “Can we find our way with a single torch?”
“We can find it with no torches at all.” He set his own torch down against a tombstone. Moonlight glowed across the layer of clouds. “Better we come with none anyway. Some’a the old fellers don’t like unannounced visitors. Might run us through. We’ll collect it later. What say you to that?”
“I say you’re mad, but I’m at your mercy here.” He placed his extinguished torch beside it. “Lead the way.”
They walked on out of the town and up to the edge of another large escarpment with some small scraggly trees growing out near the edge of it. “Hermitage,” said Little John. Thomas was squinting, but surefooted John led them down a narrow flight of steps cut in the sandstone. Turning at the bottom, he found himself facing still more caves, some of them halfway up the rock face he’d just descended. How the devil were those reached? They were smaller than most of the others he’d seen, but then a hermit didn’t need much space. The small River Leen was at his back, as was the London road and, farther along it, the large bridge over the Trent.
“All right, John,” he said. “Now I see how you’ve avoided the sheriffs. But how do you propose to enter the contest tomorrow if they’re going to arrest you in the first place?”
Little John glanced back, giving him a pitying look. “First, I won’t be found wearing these wet togs come the contest. We got enough coin left for a nice loose linen shirt, right? And, second, it won’t be mine whose name be called. It’ll be—”
“Reynold Greenleaf, yes.”
“That’s yer man.” And he broke into a broad grin. “Come on, then, it’s a long walk ta that priory. It’s way t’other side of castle.”
They strolled along the spit of land between scarps and slopes on their right and the River Leen on their left, and up across the London road.
Thomas had just reached the road when something came screaming out of the night sky for him. He hadn’t heard such a horrible screech for a long, long time, and he responded to it on instinct. He snatched the quarterstaff out of Little John’s grip and swung it hard and fast. With a wet crack, it connected with something, and a creature the size of a bat smacked into the road and skidded.
Flapping, it started to rise again. Thomas hammered it with the staff until the tip was dripping with dark, gelatinous fluid.
“Ne’er in my life heard a bat shriek like that,” said John. He crouched and gingerly lifted the remains of the goggle-eyed creature by its wing. Its body was dripping, washing away in the rain, revealing a core that flexed and came apart and dissolved. “I seen these in the wood, I think, with yer queen. What are these hobs?” He glanced up at Thomas, who was wondering if by some means the hideous little thing had recognized him.
“A sign,” he said sourly. He glanced up the hill toward the town. “The ones that killed Robbie have arrived.”