Will, lad,” I tell him. “Will en’t sorry for nothing.”
Brother Odo is my scribe, decent enough for a Norman in his simpering, damp-handed way. He does not wish me harm. I think he does not even know why he has been sent down here amongst the gallows birds to listen to the ramblings of a dangerous scofflaw like myself.
Why should he?
Abbot Hugo is behind this wheeze to scribble down all my doings. To what purpose? Plain as daylight in Dunholme, he means to scry out a way to catch King Raven. Hugo imagines languishing in the shadow of the noose for a spell will sober me enough to grow a tongue of truth in my head and sing like a bird for freedom.
So, I sing and sing, if only to keep Jack o’Ladder at arm’s length a little longer. Our larcenous abbot will learn summat to his profit, as may be, but more to his regret. He’ll learn much of that mysterious phantom of the greenwood, to be sure. But for all his listening he’ll hear naught from me to catch so much as a mayfly. He’ll not get the bolt he desires to bring King Raven down.
“So, now,” I say, “pick up your pen, Brother Odo. We’ll begin again. What was the last you remember?”
Odo scans his chicken tracks a moment, scratches his shaved pate and says, “When Thane Aelred’s lands were confiscated for his part in the Uprising, I was thrown onto my own resources . . .”
Odo speaks his English with the strange flat tongue of the Frank outlanders. That he speaks English at all is a wonder, I suppose, and the reason why Hugo chose him. Poor Odo is a pudgy pudding of a man, young enough, and earnest in faith and practice, but pale and only too ready to retire, claiming cramp or cold or fatigue. He is always fatigued, and for no good reason it seems to me. He makes as if chasing a leaking nib across fresh-scraped vellum is as mighty a labour as toting the carcass of a fat hind through the greenwood on your back with the sheriff ’s men on your tail.
All saints bear witness! If pushing a pen across parchment taxes a man as much as Odo claims, we should honour as heroes all who ply the quill, amen.
I am of the opinion that unless he grows a backbone, and right soon, Brother Odo will be nothing more in this life than another weak-eyed scribbler squinting down his long French nose at the undiluted drivel his hand has perpetrated. By Blessed Cuthbert’s thumb, I swear I would rather end my days in Baron de Braose’s pit than face eternity with a blot like that on my soul.
Perhaps, in God’s dark plan, friend Will is here to instruct this indolent youth in a better lesson, thinks I. Well, we will do what can be done to save him.
When Thane Aelred’s lands were confiscated for his part in the Uprising, I was thrown onto my own resources, and like to have died they were that thin.”
This I tell him, repeating the words to buy a little time while I cast my net into streams gone by to catch another gleaming memory for our proud abbot’s feast. May he choke on the bones! With this blessing between my teeth, I rumble on . . .
CHAPTER 2
Thane Aelred was as fair-minded as the Tyne is wide, and solid as the three-hundred-year-old oak that grew beside his barn. A bull-necked man with the shaggy brown mane of a lion and a roar to match as may be, but he treated his people right and well. Never one to come all high and mighty with his minions, he was always ready enough to put hand to plough or scythe. Bless the man, he never shirked the shearing or slaughtering, and all the grunt and sweat that work requires. For though we have lived a thousand years and more since Our Sweet Jesus came and went, it is a sad, sad truth that sheep will still not shear themselves, nor hogs make hams.
There’s the pity. Toss a coin and decide which of the two is the filthier chore.
Under Aelred, God rest him, there was always a jar or three to ease our aching bones when the day’s work was done. All of us tenants and vassals who owed him service—a day or two here, a week there—were treated like blood kin whenever we set foot on