on the raised stone dais that dominated one end of the vaulted hall.
It was an eerie feeling to be seated at a long trestle table, its surface covered with a prim white cloth and laid with fine silver and pewter, and to overlook a hall whose walls were scorched and blackened by fire, bristling with the nests of enterprising colonies of swallows. Mouldy rushes and decomposed leaves littered the floor, rustling and even moving now and then with small living things. Horses nickered and scuffed heavily against one another in a crude pen constructed at the far end of the hall. Their smells of offal, sweat, and leather mingled unpleasantly with musk and decay, which in turn was flavoured pungently with the oily black smoke that rose from the pine-pitch torches burning in iron cressets set into the stone walls.
Two longer tables had been erected at either end of the dais to form an open-ended square, while the fourth side was taken up by a firepit filled with glowing red coals. Squirrels, hares, capons, and other small game were turned on spits by men who defied the heat and flames to snatch at pieces of the sizzling meat and crackling skin. Larger shanks of venison, mutton, and boar were overseen by two bustling women— the only two in the camp so far as Servanne could discern— who turned their spits and basted their meats with large copper ladlefuls of seasoned oil. Another fire, pitched over an iron grating, kept cauldrons of water boiling, steaming the air, and smaller pots of stews and sauces burping sluggishly at the end of long iron hooks suspended from crossbars.
Even to the casual observer, it would be obvious that these were not men accustomed to hardship. The life Servanne had envisioned for outlaws who spent their days poaching and their nights avoiding capture was definitely not one of fine linen, rich food, and flagons encrusted with gold and silver. Moreover, common foresters would hardly move about the countryside with a large stabling of horses, and most especially not the heavy-shanked, muscular animals that Servanne saw being fed and well tended in the pens. They were no ordinary plow-horses, nor were they nags stolen from merchants who used them to draw carts or carry packs. Sir Hubert had kept a fine stable of warhorses—huge beasts trained to respond to a knight’s commands, to kill if provoked, to bear the burden of full armour and heavy weapons.
At least half of the two dozen animals penned under the charred and rotted archways of the pilgrims’ hall could have rivaled the best Sir Hubert had kept in his stables. And one of them, a huge black destrier with a silver mane and tail whose slightest grunt or annoyed sidestep sent the rest flinching nervously out of range, would have compared favorably to the white rampagers bred for King Richard’s use.
Who were these men if they were not common thieves and outlaws?
Her curiosity roused, Servanne took a new interest in examining the faces around her. To her immediate right was the Black Wolf—an enigma from start to finish, and far too complicated for a cursory perusal. To her left, the mercurial sprite, Sparrow, equally baffling. Sandwiched between the half-man, half-child and the stoically formidable presence of Biddy, was the one they called Friar. He had shed his monk’s robes and was dressed more comfortably in lincoln green leggings and linsey-woolsey tunic. As serene and smooth as his countenance might be, there was narry a hint of softness in the breadth of his shoulders or the solid muscle in his arms and legs.
Gil Golden sat on the Wolf’s right-hand side, which gave Servanne a clear view of the terrible, ravaging scar that distorted the left side of his face. He too could not boast of an inch of excess flesh, but his was a wiry trimness not thinned by starvation or deprivation. To his right sat a pair of scoundrels so identical in features, clothing, and gestures, Servanne had initially blamed a weakened constitution for causing her to see double. Twins were a rarity in England. The fact that these two—nicknamed Mutter and Stutter by their comrades—should have survived to adulthood with no twisted limbs, missing teeth, or pockmarks to distinguish them apart, was truly a wonder. They lifted their eating knives in unison, chewed in unison, and, after the third goblet of strong ale, turned red as raw meat and belched in unison.