NOTTINGHAM CASTLE
“ONCE UPON A TIME,” ARTHUR explained, having traded the entirety of this story for the pleasure of Zinn’s silence for its duration, “there was a young man named Arthur.”
She instantly broke their deal. “That’s your name.”
“I know that’s my name. This story’s about me.”
“Then why are you pretending it’s about someone else named Arthur?”
“I’m not. Shut the fuck up and listen.”
This was one of their days with nothing to do, in the cramped little cupboard of Zinn’s hovel off Plumptre Street, when she was recovering from the beating she’d taken at the whorehouse. Arthur’s generosity with his own history was aided by a pilfered bottle of Portuguese red.
“Arthur made the same mistake that many young men make of labeling himself in terms of things he did not have. He did not have much food, so he was ‘hungry’—and stole what he could from the people that raised him. Those people never complained, because they did not notice. He did not have any money, so he was ‘poor’—and stole horseshoes from the stables to sell. Those horses never complained, because they were horses, and horses only complain about politics. He also did not have any God, so he was ‘lonely’—and gave hell to those who did. God also never complained, because he was quite busy with being imaginary bullshit.
“Arthur survived like this for quite a while, an orphan boy raised by an entire community of neglect. He had no mothers to praise him but a hundred fathers to discipline him, and that would be a sad story if it weren’t so fucking commonplace and boring. No, young Arthur was just like a hundred other hungry, poor, lonely people, excepting he had the decency to be named Arthur which, objectively, is the best name ever. The only thing special about Arthur was that he didn’t die young, which made him exactly the same as everyone else alive, and only slightly more special than the dead.”
HOT WHITE PAIN LASHED across his forehead and red filled his vision as Arthur went into rage. He sprang up out of Brick’s grapple and smashed his skull into the man’s jaw, he grabbed his wrist and twisted, wrenching the bastard’s arm until the blade was aimed at himself, its tip was already bloodied from Arthur’s brow. The brick tried to resist with both hands, but gave up to claw at Arthur’s face.
Arthur didn’t notice.
He put all his weight into a sudden push that jabbed the knife away from himself and into his would-be murderer’s neck, just once, just barely. He went for a second stab, but Brick released his grip of the knife and barreled backward to probe his wound, which spurted hot blood out as they both tumbled to the ground again.
The knife landed between them, but closer to Arthur, and he didn’t wait. He snatched it up and closed distance in one bound, falling down onto the man, slamming it into his brick chest thrice more, down to the hilt each time, only then pausing to wipe the blood from his own eyes and wince at the agony lancing across his brow. He had to wipe his eyes a second time, then again, but he couldn’t tell if his hands were too bloody to help or if he was bleeding faster than he could wipe. By the time he leaned his head back into the sky, he was staring right into pug-ugly Neck Fat, who was screaming something—but the sound was from another world, underwater away. Arthur wondered if the man knew how stupid he sounded.
Arthur tried to stand but he fell backward. He raised his knife but it was gone, the pug ugly stood on top of him, his boot on Arthur’s throat. Arthur made noises that should’ve been words while Neck Fat reached down to carve out his face.
Arthur’s mouth filled with vomit.
“Having little to tie him to one place, Arthur the young man grew into finding jobs that kept him wandering from town to town. He’d deliver foodstuffs and make trades between Redford and Sheffield, Leeds and Doncaster, always taking what he wanted from his cargo and finding every manner of unsavory diversion along the way. We shouldn’t say he was happy doing this, because that was yet another thing he didn’t have. Happiness.”
“He didn’t have a penis?”
“Shut up. He wasn’t happy, but neither was he miserable—and up until this point he had definitely had a lot of miserable. So comparably, it was better. But the thing, the important thing of it all, is that Arthur kept on labeling himself by the things he didn’t have. More specifically, the things he knew of that he didn’t have. If only he’d known that he should’ve been labeling himself by the things he didn’t know he didn’t have, he wouldn’t’ve had such a miserable time being miserable all the time. Do you follow?”
Zinn shook her head no. “That makes no fucking sense.”
Arthur continued regardless.
He spat it out, the stinging taste of bile bringing him back to his senses. He would’ve wondered why he was still alive, but the pug-ugly’s face had been made even pug-uglier by the thin metal skewer that pierced it from cheek to cheek, little bits of charred meat still dangling by the handle. Neck Fat’s head twitched, his hands fumbled to make sense of what the girl had done to him, and why he couldn’t open his mouth.
Arthur pushed himself up to his knees despite the heavy drunken weight that swirled through his senses. With his left hand steadying the pug-ugly’s face, his right pulled the skewer back out the way it’d entered, and then up again through his pug-ugly nostrils, and eventually, hopefully, into whatever constituted his pug-ugly brain.
The body slumped backward, as Arthur probed the wound on his own brow again. More blood on his hands, his head was numb, his hands were shaking. The young woman was there, but sideways, or upside down. She clutched her torn clothes across herself, but her modesty was wasted since the world had chosen to go entirely blurry.
“Thank you,” she probably said.
“Did he cut my head off?” Arthur asked back. Something about those words didn’t sound right, or maybe it wasn’t his voice at all. Again he tried to finger his head, certain there was a knife wound all the way across it, his brains seeping out. He surely didn’t have long left.
“Cut your head off, sir?” she asked, leaning in. Her hair was a thousand pinpricks in the wound on his head, but her accent was the stuff of dreams. That girl saved your life, he knew, although he wouldn’t be alive long to enjoy it. “I can’t say to that, but you’ve got a nasty one here, that.”
Arthur winced as she inspected him, testing out his eyebrows, wondering if there were still muscles up there that worked. “Did he cut my head off?” he asked again, since words weren’t really his thing anymore.
“No,” she scoffed. “You got lucky, there. I think his hilt got you more’n the blade. Not too deep.” Her fingers brushed at his forehead, which was fortunately quite numb. “But you’ll be ugly. Best get going. Don’t want to be caught with no corpses right now, that’s ever the truth.”
“Wait,” he said limply, since he was in love with her now, but he’d never really seen her face, and she disappeared and left him to tend to his own injury.
The urge to crumple and sleep was profound, but he remembered his bargain with the world. He’d saved the girl, which meant David had to be safe. He’d find David and they could limp out of here, and Arthur could die in peace outside the castle. Or farther. Not in Nottingham. He’d never wanted to leave the forest, and damned if he was going to fucking die here. If nothing else, he had to survive just long enough to get outside the city and die with some green around him.
There were water troughs not so far away, he remembered, and he knew he had to wash the blood off his head and his hands if he stood any chance of slogging along. When he emerged from the crannyway of the fight, there were still people running and calling out, but they were a thousand miles away. All Arthur wanted was the water.
One trough was overturned but the other was upright—he plunged his hands in first and scrubbed away at the blood, then pushed his entire face into its depths. That was as good as a slap across the cheek, it sprang his nerves to life and he came up sputtering. His head was still abuzz, but he grew the bravery to massage closer and closer to the wound on his head. Eventually his fingertips found soft tissue, but he seemed mostly intact. Most of the pain was above his right eye. He didn’t go any farther, fearful that his fingers would plunge through down to the bone, or worse. He wondered what would happen if he poked his own brain, if he might lose all control of his body and shit his breeches. Even David would laugh at him for that.
He cupped water into his mouth, too, he’d almost forgotten about the vomit. The water was dank and bloody, but better than bile. No wonder she hadn’t fallen in love with me. He’d been covered in blood and bork. She called me ugly.
A hideous crack split the air, followed swiftly by the horrible screams of too many people, and Arthur eased his head around to see it with startling clarity. The easternmost audience stand, where the actors had been hoisting people to safety, was collapsing. There were altogether too many bodies on it, all swarming over each other like a cluster of ants, and the structure beneath them buckled once and twice in a plume of dirt—as if it were some beast that opened its great mouth to eat them all alive. The tinder screamed from the pressure, snapping the rope that reached up above. The body of some poor sod was practically launched from the battlement like from a catapult, flung by the tension in the rope down into the mess of broken wood and bodies below.
Not my problem, he cursed to himself.
Maybe saving the girl wasn’t enough. How many fingers had he broken in the last week? How many people had he hurt, that didn’t deserve it? The way David wouldn’t deserve it?
How many did he have to save to get David back?
“So one day, more’n a few years ago, Arthur was in Sheffield inventing clever new ways to be miserable, when someone else went and topped him at it. Arthur’s cart, which was arguably the only thing he really owned, went missing. Not missing in the sense that you can’t remember where you left it, and darn if it wasn’t right next to your boots the whole time missing. No, missing in the sense that some feckless dickshit took it from exactly the place you left it. More of the stolen type of missing.
“So now Arthur, the man who never had anything, somehow had even less. All the money that wasn’t his and the food that wasn’t his and the weapons that weren’t his were now the feckless dickshit’s, which contributed mightily to Arthur’s sense of miserable. He turned every alleyway in Sheffield upside down looking for the feckless dickshit, finding lots and lots of things like failure and fury and fuck all. For one of the first times in his life he truly deeply wished there were a God, specifically so that Arthur could blame Him rather than himself for his own fuckup. He eventually submitted to his poor luck and found his way to a stables in hopes of starting from scratch, or finding work to pay for dinner, but instead he found the aforementioned feckless dickshit.”
“This story’s crap,” Zinn interrupted.
“Shut up, it’s almost over. And you’re supposed to be silent.”
“It was a bad deal. I thought I wanted to know more about you, but I’m finding out that I really don’t care.”
“A deal’s a deal.”
“Fine. But you don’t know how to tell stories. You’re skipping all the action.”
She pouted, but sat back to let it finish.
Not my problem, he repeated, staring at the wreckage.
Even as he started running, against every good decision, to help.
Not my problem!
People were everywhere—scrambling, crawling, climbing, screaming. Every flash of blond hair stole Arthur’s attention, but it was never David. Some people were fleeing, terrified out of their wits. Arthur understood their panic, but still hated their cowardice. Women and children perhaps had cause to run, but there were men stronger and abler than Arthur without even a single knife wound in their heads who were running away.
But there was always that difference between men. Those whose instincts were to hide, and those whose instincts were to rise. Old Walter of Locksley had made that distinction, back at his family’s castle, back before the world had found a way to shit upon itself. When Arthur and David had found themselves at the mercy of his hospitality, and treated like decent folk rather than thieves. Treated as if they were worth more than the worst of their luck. Arthur asked Walter once why he’d put his faith in the two of them, and he’d just laughed. As if the question didn’t even make sense.
When Walter died and Locksley burnt, Arthur understood. Then, as now, some people ran into danger, and others looked out for themselves. There was a stunning similarity to it now, climbing through the rubble to do what he could. He weaved through the masses of the destroyed spectator stands, trying to find where he could do the most good, even though good wasn’t a thing he’d ever much fancied before.
At first it was easy. The people at the edges needed a hand standing up, or a shoulder to lean upon, and Arthur was quick to help. Some he found standing around aghast, unsure how to assist, and Arthur gave them specific tasks. “Take her, walk her away, don’t leave her.” Or, “Talk with that man there, keep him talking, don’t let him fall asleep.”
But deeper in was the thick of the madness, bodies and bodies all writhing on themselves, screams from above and below. At a glance he could see some clearly broken legs, a few people that weren’t moving at all. Others trapped underneath the wreckage. “Stand back!” he shouted the moment he saw the danger—the weight of helpers trying to get to the victims was pushing the splintered timbers down farther into the mess, only serving to crush the people trapped beneath.
They heeded his words, and he organized them to step off the debris and focus their efforts, first on those who could be easily cleared from the wreckage, and then on clearing what they could of the wreckage itself. The victims were hurried off toward the field to lie down, which helped settle some of the confusion and chaos. Arthur climbed down into the hole and found a horrified woman staring back at him, her chest pinned by a heavy support post. Her mouth was open, but it seemed she couldn’t breathe enough to even call for help.
Ignoring every pain, Arthur straddled the beam, reaching his arms down and around it, but he simply wasn’t strong enough to lift it. “Help!” he called, but everyone around was consumed with their own emergencies.
Arthur repositioned his feet and gripped it again. He didn’t need to pick it up, he simply needed to relieve a little of the tension on her, that she might breathe, that she might wiggle out on her own. He bent low with his knees and then pulled, every muscle in his body screamed at the effort, and surely the beam eased up by a few fingerwidths, just barely. He couldn’t spare the energy to look down, but he heard her gasp for air. She had only to slide out of the way now, before he lost his grip. His fingertips went raw and pain lanced down both his arms. There was no way to hoist the beam any higher, but he could hold onto it for just a little bit longer.
Just a little bit longer.
A pain seized in his chest, but he fought it, he dared a glance downward to see if she was clear yet.
She hadn’t moved.
She still lay there gasping, eyes unfocused, unaware that she could squeeze out now, or unable. Arthur tried to yell at her, but his neck was clenched too tight, the sound only came out as a sputter. His knees started to wobble, he knew he couldn’t keep this up for much longer. If he dropped it now, she’d be dead. Even if he tried to ease it back down to recuperate and find help … that wasn’t an option. His legs were failing, there were only seconds before it fell.
His heart lurched as he felt it slip from his fingers.
“Arthur chased the feckless dickshit all through the town. In and out of every building. Up the stairs and down the stairs. Through the fields and through the church. Around a tree and around a bush—how’s that for action? Is this a better fucking story now? No. In the end he grabbed the feckless dickshit and threw him to the ground and meant to beat whatever feck he might still have in him. But he didn’t. Because as he’d given chase, he realized that the feckless dickshit was actually very much like himself. They were about the same age, the same build, they were very equally matched when it came to chasing, and the dickshit had only stolen what he could to survive. So even as Arthur pinned the dickshit’s arms to the ground with his legs and raised his fist in the air to turn his face into pulp, he knew he wasn’t gonna do it. Because he finally realized the one thing he didn’t have, that he didn’t know he didn’t have.
“Someone like himself. Someone to be miserable with.
“The moment I met David, that all changed. I’ve been very happy being miserable ever since.”
“Because you two are fucking?” Zinn asked.
“No, you cunt.”
“So what’s the point of this story, I’m supposed to always remember that my enemies might be just like me?”
“Fuck, no, enemies are the worst, you should always kill them. The point is that you can’t go it alone. You need someone like you. And I think that’s us. I think you’re a lot like us.”
“I’m not like you.” Zinn curled her defiance into her lip. “You’re old and ugly.”
“Goddamn,” Arthur smiled with pride, “you’re one feckless dickshit.”
Arthur’s eyes shot open as the weight of the beam went up, not down. Just in front of him was another man, his arms as thick as the wooden beam itself. Head to toe his dark skin was covered in hair and sweat and the goddamned blue quilted doublet of the Nottingham Guard. But he hoisted the beam up another few fingers and nodded to Arthur importantly.
The fact that he still had strength to move at all was a shock, but Arthur clambered down to the ground and slid his arm around the woman’s waist. Don’t drop it on me, he thought, but pulled her out from under the beam and to the safety of a few feet away. The wood made a sickening smash into the earth when the Guardsman let it drop, leaving nothing to the imagination as to what it would have done to a human.
“She alive?” the beastman asked, kneeling to investigate. Arthur tried not to look him in the face. If he were recognized now, he wouldn’t stand a chance.
“I think so,” Arthur grumbled. “Thank you.”
“You know her?”
Arthur just shook his head sideways. Go away.
“Here,” the guard said, and Arthur looked up to see him pull the blue cowl off his shoulder and over his head, and into Arthur’s hands. “Cover her up.”
Arthur’s face must have shown his confusion, because the guard elaborated by way of brushing the woman’s hair away on the right side of her face, exposing the scarred nub of her ear. “Don’t let anyone see that. Dangerous thing to have right now, right?”
“Right,” Arthur said, stunned. But he obeyed, and pulled the cowl over the woman’s head, leaving its hood up to cover her incriminatingly clipped ear.
The beastman’s face was heavy and certain, his eyes pinned Arthur to the spot.
“More important things than that, right now. Right?”
“Right,” Arthur agreed again, swallowed.
“And we’re all on the same side right now.” Sweat dripped down his nose. “Right?”
Arthur. “Right.”
Whoever this Guardsman was, he surely knew what Arthur was. “Good,” he huffed. “Help me move her to the field, then let’s get back at it. More to do.”
Thankfully, it was only another ten minutes before it was over. Arthur bandied with a few other groups of men and moved about some of the remaining wood debris looking for more survivors, but most were already free of the rubble. Five deaths in all, dozens wounded, but the harrowing frenzy had dissipated into one of mutual aid. There was still an obvious commotion coming from the market stalls to the south and beyond—where no doubt the crowd was still trying to mob their way out of the castle gate—but here in the archery field, the chaos from earlier had thankfully found pause.
A man, kneeling next to an older woman, injured, whispered prayers. “Thank you, Lord, for sparing her.”
Arthur shook his head in spite but walked away. Your Lord didn’t spare her. It was people like me or that Guardsman that saved her life. Where was your God when the structure collapsed?
What sort of god would’ve let any of this happen at all?
This insanity had brought out both the best and worst in people, and all of it was born from within themselves, not from up above. It’d been a while now since Arthur had talked with Friar Tuck, but his empty words of advice came to mind now. Tuck had told Arthur to consider every good thing in the world when comparing to the bad, and was certain that his god would come out the stronger.
Not this day.
But still, Arthur had a curious compulsion to say Thank God when David of Doncaster milled through the field on his own.
They embraced instantly, but both recognized there was little time for emotion. The entire field had become a makeshift hospital now, and they found a patch on the ground to themselves where they could tend to their wounds and speak quietly. David tore off part of his tunic to make a wrap that went around Arthur’s forehead, to keep his wound from collecting any more dirt. “How the fack did you do that to yourself?”
“I did it for love,” he groaned, only mostly joking. He recounted aloud his fight behind the vendor stall, and of the young woman he’d rescued. “Didn’t recognize her, though, and I haven’t seen her again yet.”
“You’re picking an odd time to start courting.”
Arthur flicked his friend’s hand away. “She could be an ally, and that’s something we need if we mean to get out of here. They said they saw her stealing, and that’s our kind of folk. But she wasn’t with the Lions.” With the amount of time they’d spent with Nottingham’s largest street gang of late, it was easy to forget that there were still smaller gangs that managed to survive as well. “The Red Lions have been betrayed. The guards knew exactly who to target in that contest.”
“I noticed that, too,” David mumbled. “Actually, Cait noticed it.”
“Hm.” Arthur felt a twinge of pity. “For all the good it did her. All her bluster about being a lion … which earned her eight arrows, right in the heart. We’d best be careful, or we might still get lionhearts ourselves.”
David blinked a few times absently, then focused again. “With Fawkes and Caitlin gone, I don’t even want to know what happens with the Lions now. It’ll be anarchy. We’ve got to find Will and get out of Nottingham.”
“And Zinn,” Arthur added, somewhat surprised in himself.
David clicked his tongue. “And Zinn. They were on some errand together this morning for the Lions, so they’re probably still together. But first, we have to get out. Castle gates are locked, and we have to assume any guard that gets a good look at us will recognize us. They mean to interrogate every man, woman, and child in this bailey until they’re confident everyone with any affiliation to Red Fox or Robin Hood has been caught. We can’t stay here.”
Arthur looked south, to the vendor stalls. Beyond that, the gates, the crowd, the interrogations, the paranoia. “I imagine that’ll get worse once they find those bodies I left behind the stands.”
David didn’t respond, his eyes were red and watery and somewhere else. A quick glance told Arthur all he needed—David was staring at the crimson splotch on the hay target that still stood at the center of the archery range. Caitlin and Alfred’s bodies were no longer there, but their blood still soaked the ground.
David’s face was afire with blame.
“Hey.” Arthur put his hand on his friend’s knee, but no response. “You did what you had to.”
He tightened his lips and swallowed, but it was not an agreement.
“If you had refused, they would’ve killed you next. That’s what happened to Caitlin. That’s on them, you hear me?” He gave him a slight shake. “That’s on them.”
“I could’ve missed just a little. A foot to the side.”
He was probably right. Caitlin’s disobedience had been an arrow that blindly sailed wide of the target, an obvious refusal. David had the skills to put an arrow just shy of the target’s chest instead. Nobody would have blamed him for being a bit wobbly under the circumstances.
But that wouldn’t help him now. “They still would have died.”
“But it wouldn’t have been me.” David’s voice was small, as if it were hiding behind him. “It wouldn’t have been my arrow.”
“Hey.” Arthur squeezed harder now, enough pressure to force David to look at him. “It may have come from your bow, but that wasn’t your arrow none neither. The Sheriff of Nottingham sent that arrow. Prince John sent that arrow. Not you. They used you, like a tool, you’re no more at fault than the bow itself. You can be mad as fucking sin that they used you like that, and you should be. But that’s it. You didn’t kill Alfred, you didn’t kill Caitlin. They did. Take this … whatever it is you’re feeling right now … whatever fucking pity or blame you have for yourself, and you aim it at something useful. Yeah?”
Arthur punched him in the chest for good measure, hoping it would make up for the right words that he clearly didn’t have.
David nodded slowly. “I don’t think I’ve ever killed anyone before.”
“Fuck,” Arthur said, because it was all there was to say. “You serious?”
“I think so. We’ve been in plenty of fights and close calls, and I’ve certainly meant to kill before, but I think today was my first.”
Arthur grimaced. He had killed two, maybe three people within the last hour and hadn’t even thought about it. Why don’t you feel bad about that? Friar Tuck would probably ask, smiling with his crooked teeth and lopsided eyes. You keep insisting that you don’t need my Lord to have morality, but you don’t flinch at taking life. Why is that?
Because life isn’t precious, he wanted to tell Tuck, and David, and the world. Any fool can get born, and any fool can get dead. It takes a special fool to stay somewhere in between. But David was softer than Arthur was, always had been, and it wouldn’t do to poke that particular wound.
“That doesn’t count as your first,” he insisted, quite matter-of-factly. “Let’s make your real first a good one, in helping to make this right. The Sheriff and the prince, yes? The Sheriff and the prince.”
David finally came back down from the moment and gave Arthur the queerest look. “You’re not … you’re not saying we go kill the Sheriff and the prince, are you?”
Arthur laughed. “God, no! That’d be insane!”
“Because that would be insane.”
“Yes. No, not right now!” He hadn’t meant that at all, he’d only been trying to redirect his friend’s anger. But the thought sent his mind tumbling into dangerous places. “Actually, wait. That might be brilliant.”
David twitched, as if to get away. “You can’t be serious.”
“No, not about killing the Sheriff, no. But what about going in, into the middle bailey of the castle? Everyone’s trying to get out right now, so the Nottingham Guard is watching the main gate very intently. How close you think they’re watching the gate that goes up into the castle proper?”
“I don’t know, and we’re not going to find out,” David said carefully, “because we’re not insane.”
“Just think it through.” Arthur’s thoughts raced. “Will’s told us a dozen times about how they escaped from the prisons. That was in the next bailey up, not down here. He said that Arable led them to a storage larder where there was a postern door. No chance that’ll be guarded right now, not while the gords are tearing themselves to pieces. We just have to find that gate.”
“We don’t just have to find it,” David insisted, “because we’re not insane enough to try that. You don’t think they’re going to notice two very insane people looking like us wandering up to the bailey gate? With everyone trying to escape, you think they’ll let us walk in?”
“Not looking like us.” Arthur smiled. “But if we take out two guards down here, and get their tabards and cowls…”
“Fack!” David kicked out. “Fack fack fack fuck fuck fuck that might work.”