Post of the Month

~ October 2007 ~

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Tuck had been walking for some time. The rabbit snares had been checked but all had been empty, so he had decided to do a circuit of the area before heading back to camp.

He had taken the path from out under the trees, even though that afforded him some shade in the fierce heat of the day, and had moved onto the track by the river.

Sweat was trickling down his face and his back. He thought back to the days of being sixteen and seventeen, when a hot day had not bothered him in this way. When he had not carried extra weight. He had always been stocky, but his girth had not expanded until his twenties. He wondered why; he had never been lazy, nor eaten more than the other brothers.

On the other side of the river lay a path which connected in time with the road to Lincoln. It ran alongside the river for a while and then turned away into the trees. As he walked, Tuck kept his eye on it, secure in the knowledge all but his head was hidden behind the tall reeds growing on his side of the river.

He saw no soldiers. A millers cart full of sacks creaked slowly along, a couple of itinerant labourers in shabby clothes.

There was a young woman with a child of about two years old walking along the path on the other side of the river. She carried a heavy reed basket full of washed clothing. The toddler was browned by the sun, barefoot, wearing nothing but a rough shirt and trousers rolled up to his knees to reveal skinny brown legs. He ran along the path ahead of his mother, darting this way and that, chasing a butterfly. A bright looking dark haired little boy. He minded Tuck of Timothy; the way he had rolled up his trousers to the knees to wade in the shallows of the stream near Thornton in the summer. Tuck smiled, watching the child run along the path ahead of his mother.

His mind went back to a six year old Timothy walking smartly alongside him along such a path, his guiding stick clicking rhythmically against the stones, sweeping from left to right. Timothy's hand had felt for his and tugged his sleeve to get his attention. _"Is there anything in my way ahead, Tuck? I'm going to run. Tell me when to stop."_

Tuck had goodnaturedly complied, and seen the way ahead for the young boy as he had ran along the path, eventually pulling him up with a shout to stop because the path was strewn with obstacles. The other brothers at Thornton had felt that Timothy should behave with decorum at all times, but Tuck didn't see why the child should not run around like any other child, if he wanted. He had sometimes amusedly - if guiltily - thought to himself that being raised in an abbey was more of a handicap to Timothy than his blindness.

"Simon!" The mother's stern cry jerked Tuck out of his thoughts; startled, he looked back at the scene. The child had gone far too close to the edge of the river bank where it was overhung and therefore dangerous. The mother simply scooped the protesting toddler up and carried him along set on one hip. Then she took the path away from the river through the trees and was lost to view.

Tuck watched them go. Then he shook his head to himself and took the small path away from the riverside. It wound for a way in the direction he needed to go before swinging towards the south, and for that distance he might as well follow it rather than waste energy scrambling through rough forest.

Here, he was under the coolness of the trees again. The forest closed round him once more, made him feel more secure. He walked on along the bracken-lined path, feeling his heart still thud. It had not been the cry that cause his heart to thud, but the name...

_"Simon!"_ Suddenly he was five years old again, in a small wiry body, peeping out from behind the woodpile by the side of his parents cott, seeking refuge from Alice, who had held the neighbouring cott. A tall thin spinster who disliked children, she had always been a fearsome figure in Tuck's childhood - but her one attraction was that she had plenty of hens that laid, and he as a small child had liked to crawl into her henhouse, slide his hand under the soft downy feathers of her sitting hens and take a freshly-laid egg to pierce and eat.

_"Simon of Tuckenby, you've been at my chickens again, and if I catch you-"_ She had waved the broom angrily and he had shrank further behind the woodpile.

When she had gone inside his mother's home. presumably to complain, he had made a run for it, across the village of Tuckenby as fast as his short legs would carry him, across the stream and into the nearby copse. Whereupon he had shinned up a tree and spent several hours in hiding until the light fading and his stomach growling had caused him to return home.

He hadn't escaped unpunished for running amongst Alice's sitting hens causing them to flutter from their nests. His father had thoroughly basted him, and then with sore bottom he had sat on his high-legged stool at the roughly hewn table in their cott and been chastised further as his mother had brought the bread and pottage to table.

_"Fie for shame, your behaviour ill fits you, Simon, as a child destined for the glories of serving the Lord."_

He remembered how he had not understood the word destined and had asked for explanation.

His mother had doled out a small piece of bread to go with his meal and poured him small beer into his wooden beaker. _"When you are eight, you will be set for the Church."_

He had been told that ever since an infant, but at age five, the meaning of what he was being told had suddenly sunk in.

_"Why?"_ Tuck could remember asking, both curious and somewhat afraid.

He remembered the smell of pottage, watching his mother ladle it out into a steaming heap in his wooden bowl_"We promised you in service to the Lord."_

He remembered vaguely a muttered explanation by his mother of fever taking his twin brother and two elder sisters when he had been an infant - he could remember none of his siblings except...except the slightest memory of a girl picking him up and carrying him around and he tangling small fingers in long hair. He presumed it was a memory of one of his sisters. Which of his sisters it had been, he didn't know. His mother had never told him their names. He only knew the name of his twin brother - Thomas. Dead at eighteen months old.

His siblings had all died of fever in the space of a week and he alone had lived - his parents had not known why, but in gratitude they had decided to give him to the Church when he was old enough.

Tuck as a child had never questioned it, but as an adult he had often looked back on the decision his parents had made and questioned it. Why? He had been their only surviving child, their only son - someone who would have looked to them in their own age. Why had they given him away to the Church?

Perhaps he had been their most precious possession to give, Tuck reasoned to himself now. Perhaps his parents had had other children after they had given him to the Church. He supposed it was possible. He had never returned to Tuckenby to find out. He supposed he could have done when he had left the Church after Timothy's disappearance. But that would have felt like failure - returning to the village of his birth and admitting he had left the Church. He had wanted to go where no-one knew him....

On that fateful day, just after he had turned eight years, he had kissed his mother goodbye. She had received his kiss but had not kissed him back, nor hugged him. She had, Tuck remembered now, always been an unemotional woman. _"Be good, Simon."_ That was all she had said.

His father had taken him to the Abbey of St Augustine and left him there. He had never seen either parent again. He could remember their names - his mother had been Mary, his father had been Simon like himself - but he could scarce remember their faces now. He remembered far more clearly Bess, his black and white dog he'd had. Who had come with he and his father on their long, almost silent walk across the chilly October moors to St Augustine's and who had left with his father. He had wanted to keep Bess with him. But he had been sternly told that monks did not have possessions.

He remembered now how Father Michael, the Abbot of St Augustine's, had looked sternly upon him upon receiving him into his presence in the Abbot's quarters._"What is your name?"_

_"Simon of Tuckenby,"_ he had replied in a small voice, overawed by this huge, forbidding building of stone he found himself in. He had never seen the like of it before.

_"No longer of Tuckenby."_ Father Michael's voice had been quiet, but justas stern as his gaze. _"You will be known as Brother Simon now."_

It had never suited. His parents had given him up and he had struggled angrily against the very name they had christened him. He had started to hate it. Finally, when he had moved from St Augustine's to Thornton Abbey at twelve years of age, he had seen his chance and when questioned, had given his name as simply Brother Tuck. Simon of Tuckenby was as good as dead.

The sounds of a horse approaching in the opposite direction along the thin trackway made Tuck jerk out of his thoughts of the past and stop in his tracks. It was not a hurried approach, more of a slow plod, of a creature that perhaps carried more than it should and who was tired.

Tuck listened intently, hand automatically going to the stout sword at his belt, and then he moved noiselessly off the path and into the shrubs and trees at its side. From there, he craned his head to look down the path at who approached.

The horse was a sturdy grey, and possessed a bridle with scarlet and silver trappings. In the saddle sat a greying-haired man in his fifties, clad in sober but finely woven clothes of cloth. Tuck immediately marked him down for a merchant, coming from Nottingham. Behind him in the saddle and clasping onto him as the slow plodding horse rhythmically swayed along the track, sat a woman, her green gown of shot silk clinging to her thin and gaunt frame, a wimple framing her angular face. The fillet that secured the wimple around her head was jewelled, and her long fingers were fretted with rings. She was of an age with the man. His wife, or his mistress.

Tuck's eyes lingered over the merchant's apparel and most of all the money purse which hung from his finely tooled leather belt. He hesitated, then as the horse plodded ever-nearer to his hiding-place, he casually stepped out from it and stood in the middle of the track. Patiently, he waited for them to draw up to him.

The man reined back the horse and halted on the track before Tuck. He was thin, with a narrow face, close-set eyes. He regarded Tuck suspiciously. "What do you want, good friar?"

Tuck moved round to the side, drew his sword and prodded the tip of it lightly against the full money pouch that hung from the man's belt. "That," Tuck said simply, and looked up at the rider with a smile.

The man stared at Tuck as if he couldn't believe him, then realisation flooded over his face at realising who Tuck was connected with; his hand went immediately to the ornate dagger at his belt.

"I wouldn't if I were you," said Tuck, "Robin i the Hood and the rest of my colleagues are over there," and he jerked his head towards the screen of trees at the top of the bank. It was true enough - the camp was in that direction, even if it was miles away.

"It's all the money I have!" the man protested.

"All the money you have on you," Tuck corrected. "Your horse is well-fed and has goodly trappings, your clothes are not threadbare, your shoes are new, and your good lady wears rings set with turkey-stones. I'd say you have plenty of money at home and what you carry is just a fraction. You may have even sent your servant on a detour around Sherwood with the larger sum of money you carry whilst you decided to take a short-cut through the forest itself to reach your home. Tis often done nowadays for the merchants that pass this way have grown wise." He nodded at the money purse hanging from the merchants belt. "But I'll take that as your fare through Sherwood and it will suffice."

"Sweet Jesus in heaven, protect us from this fiend - Nicholas, do as he says and give him the money!" cried the woman, making to pull the rings from her fingers to throw at Tuck's feet.

"Friend," said Tuck, darting a concerned look at the genuinely scared face of the woman whilst he addressed the merchant, "I am not out to murder you. I do not want your horse, and your good lady can keep her jewellery. I just want that," and he nodded again at the money pouch.

The merchant scowled, untied the money purse and tossed it at Tuck.

Tuck neatly caught it, one-handed. "Bless you, my child."

The merchant scowled afresh at him. "And what use will money do you in the forest, monk? You cannot eat silver pennies."

"Maybe not, but it can be turned into grain for others. Or settle a debt upon which lives are balanced." Tuck stepped back from the path, and lowered his sword.

"God go with you," he said in parting.

The merchant took up the reins and hastily clicked his tongue to the horse and it stumbled forwards at a faster pace; where she sat behind her husband still clinging to him; the woman turned an ugly face to Tuck as they passed him by and she spat at him. "Call yourself a man of God!" she said in derision.

Tuck said nothing, merely watched them go until the horse disappeared through the green haze of the summer trees. When he eventually turned away from the track and made his way north-east through the trees, his face was sober.

_Call yourself a man of God._

There had been a time when it had not been so.

Memories came back to him of the clamour and stench of London; the mudflats of that tidal river and the boats strewn there; a forest of masts. The heaving throng of people milling around the cobbled streets, the dark interior of an apothecary's, a pair of smiling eyes in the fields outside the city, a coarse skirt trailing through long dewy grass - and a man who had taken the name of Simon again.

Tuck hastily shut the memories away before the memory of the sound of her screaming invaded them. Because it always did.

He shook off the past and moved onwards through the forest, back towards camp.