XLIX

 

 

GISBURNE KNEW TOO late that he was riding into trouble. The stag had crashed to the ground just fifty yards ahead, almost as if hurled from the greenwood. It had been running full tilt, Gisburne realised, and felled whilst doing so. A stunning shot – or a lucky one.

Moments later, a small man in a dirty brown hood had leapt out after it. Gisburne had not paused, not hesitated in his progress. In truth, he had little interest in the man or his business. He would ride on his way and leave him to it. Where Gisburne was riding to, he did not know. He hardly cared. The past few days – days that had robbed him of the last few things of any value – had left him exhausted, his heart empty. Even Marian, who had seemed so warm during these difficult weeks – enough to inflict upon him the curse of hope – had finally said adieu with disheartening ease. Now there was only this old horse left. His father’s horse. Painful as it was, after so long in the saddle, riding was a comfort. The only comfort. He would, therefore, keep riding until something else presented itself.

As he neared, he saw the man had a drawn knife, but no bow. At that, he felt his neck prickle, and his throat tighten. When the man then turned and gestured in triumph towards the forest, Gisburne knew for certain that he was not alone.

They were around him in seconds – crashing out of the wood, bursting from the leaves and branches like beetles from a rotting log, a dozen rough-looking men. The horse shied and stumbled on the rooty path, almost throwing Gisburne headlong. He overbalanced, gripped the reins and slithered off the saddle in an awkward dismount. When he turned, arrows and blades were pointed at him. He had seen them poaching – in some quarters, a capital crime. They would not let him live.

Gisburne turned about, calculating his chances, when a familiar voice turned his every muscle to stone.

“Well, well, old man – I see you escaped the Devil’s horns after all!”

And there he stood, like some kind of vision – inextinguishable, imperturbable, impossible.

Locksley.

“Good to see you. You look like shit.” And with that he planted his fists on his hips and threw his head back in a great, raucous laugh.

After Hattin, Gisburne had given Locksley no thought. The man, and his crime, had ridden into oblivion. He existed afterwards not even as a memory, but as a remnant of a bad dream that had no bearing on waking life, and which could now be allowed to simply melt away. His intrusion back into this world – into this place – shook Gisburne to the core. And yet, now he looked upon him, he had the uncanny feeling that he should have expected it. That it was somehow inevitable. But of course... Locksley could not be expected simply to die. Not after that. Gisburne did not believe in fate – in lives being somehow arranged by the cosmos. And yet, as he looked upon this man – who, like him, had done the impossible, and walked out of the Hell of Hattin – he felt the earth beneath his feet, the air in his lungs, the sky above his head, vibrate with a weird expectancy. A strange feeling of the two of them being connected forever by that shared, impossible moment.

Good to see you. That was what he said. He did not mean it, not as others meant it. Yet it was as hard to resist as always. Gisburne clenched his teeth, exhumed a memory from some dark oubliette in his brain. An image of a lamplit chamber; of billowing curtains. And blood.

“What do you think of my little band of thieves?” Locksley grinned, as if it were all a grand children’s game. But he had not ordered them to stand down, and showed no signs of doing so.

“So is this what you do now?” he said, surprised by the bitterness in his own voice. “Poach deer and rob poor wretches who have lost everything?”

A flicker of something akin to confusion – or perhaps it was petulance – flashed across Locksley’s features.

“Oh no,” he replied with a shrug. “We rob the rich, too.” There was a ripple of laughter from the men.

Gisburne felt an urge to warn them, but did not know how. What could one say about a man who did not exist? He recalled an occasion, just before Thessalonika, when he had asked Locksley about the village whose name he carried. In truth, he had been feeling homesick, and yearned for an excuse to talk of his own home. Locksley was dismissive, moving the conversation rapidly on. At the time, Gisburne had thought it typical of Locksley’s impatience and lack of sentimentality – his total, sometimes baffling absence of interest in things past – and that he had dismissed it because he wished to stay focused on the coming conflict. Now, looking back, Gisburne sensed something more evasive in the response. The uncovering – almost – of a lie. What did he really know of him, after all? There was not a single thing upon which he could rely – no glimpse in any of their conversations, he now realised, of family, of childhood, of anything. As if he had stepped out of a void.

Gisburne looked down at the deer. The arrow that had pierced its left eye bore a familiar green fletching. He poked it with his foot. “Only you would aim for an eye when the body presents a target as big as a barrel.”

Locksley grinned. “There must be challenges in life.” Then, suddenly, he turned.

Gisburne, too, felt the rumble beneath his feet. Horses approaching at the gallop. The men began to back away into the trees. Locksley looked back at Gisburne and narrowed his eyes as if weighing up his options. Gisburne felt they looked at him now as they never had before – that he had revealed something of himself, and in doing so had stepped outside of Locksley’s circle, and into a far more dangerous realm. He was uncertain whether the approaching horsemen meant his salvation, or were hastening his death.

“Time we went,” said Locksley with a jaunty smile. Then, pulling a knife, he stepped up to Gisburne’s horse and slashed the blade across the back of its hind leg.

There was a horrifying screech as it collapsed and thrashed on the ground, blood coursing from the wound.

“No!”

“Sorry, old man...” Locksley shrugged, and became one with the greenwood.