Post of the Month

~ January 2010 ~

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Merries ~ Written by Gwyn, Annie, Siiri, Rhys, Esther & Angela. Posted on the HoS Yahoo group February 2008

John left the pebbled shore of the lake and headed into the trees towards the outlaws camp once more.

He had been on watch for the latter half of the short June night, and as the camp had begun to stir, had taken himself off down to the lake to have a scout around, and to fill a bucket with water from the spring that bubbled out from between rocks by the small waterfall. They did not drink the lake water.

He walked on up the slight slope away from the lake shore, the trees closing around him once more. Dawn was on its way. The trees around him were grey in the early light, the sun had not yet risen. But the life of the forest was stirring. John paused and watched a fox. A night hunter, on its way home. Over his head he heard a call and looked up to see a hawk drifting on the wings of the early morning breeze above the tree tops.

Night hunters and day hunters.

_Which am I, night hunter or day hunter?_ John wondered.

_I'll be both til I find who took Robert!_ he vowed solemnly to himself, and then headed on through the trees to the camp.

Sitting on his heels before the feeble camp fire, Will put his head in his hands, suddenly realising how exhausted he was. He had taken the first watch, and after John had taken over, he had hardly slept for the remainder of the night. He had been running on the surge of anger that had fuelled him since Robert had first gone missing; anger at whoever had taken him. Now that energy was draining out, Will felt an overwhelming desire to just lie down and sleep. Sleep and wake up to find it had all been a very bad dream and everything was as it usually was.

Tuck bent over the fire to build it up, and his concerned eyes watched Will's form.

"Don't let Rhiannon see you like that," Tuck warned softly, casting a glance over at the small cave in the rockface, where Rhiannon had disappeared to look through stores.

"I know, I know," Will muttered irritably, and lifted his head from his hands.

Tuck sighed and prodded at the pottage warming over the embers in the dented pot, and exchanged a worried glance with Alan, who stood over the fire, warming his hands.

Moving out from the mouth of the cave, Rhiannon with Ellie on her hip, surveyed across the clearing to the fireside with worried eyes.

She was now beyond verbalising her anxiety for Robert. She had expressed it in so many ways, she could no longer express it. And yet it still remained like a piece of coiled and knotted rope within her.

There was no other woman to talk over her fears with. That was the price paid for being in camp with her husband. When she had been heavily pregnant last winter, she had stayed in Sedgeley with Meg and had had her to talk fears over with. Fears of childbirth and other subjects men just did not understand. Subjects she had to keep to herself.

She now could understand how lonely sometimes Marian must have felt during Loxley's time as Herne's Son, and she felt nothing but sympathy for the woman - God knew how she was faring now at Halstead, having eschewed Herne and therefore all first Loxley and then Robert had stood for, had worked for. Shutting the world out - rejecting even Tuck when he had visited her in concern - meant shutting reality and reality's pain out.

_God forbid that I become like that,_ Rhiannon thought now.

She moved over to the fire, and held out the small hessian sack to Tuck she had taken from the stores. "It's all we have," she said.

Tuck took the sack and inspected the contents; scallions, leeks, a few withered parsnips.

"We need bread if we can get it," Rhiannon said, thinking how strange it was to be talking so calmly about bread when Robert was missing. "From one of the villages, if we visit them." She looked at Tuck. "I presume that's what we do next - ask at the villages around these parts if they saw anything suspicious the morning Robert dsappeared."

John pushed his way from the shielding swathe of bushes and arrived in the clearing. The scene he surveyed seemed ordinary at first, and comforting in its ordinariness. Tuck prodding at the contents of the cookpot, a swirl of steam rising from it along with the smoke of the fire. Early morning sunlight filtering across the grass of the clearing. Will sitting pensive before the fire, Nasir sitting on the log by the fire, Much sitting there too, whittling away at a stick with his knife. Alan standing warming cold hands over the rising heat from the fire. Rhiannon stood there with a restless infant on her hip, giving her a dry crust to chew on.

But Robert was not there and he should be.

John drew in a breath of resolve and walked across the clearing to join the others at the fire.

He accepted without a word the bowl of food Tuck handed him, and with the others, stood there and ate in near silence.

Nasir nodded to John as he joined them. His own bowl of food sat on the ground between his feet. He had barely touched it. The dark smudges beneath his eyes were testament to a night spent in a restless half-sleep, as he berated himself for losing the tracks of the cart that had carried Robert out of Sherwood. Even now he could see the muddied road, churned and rutted by a day’s traffic, stretching out in either direction. _I should have tried harder_ he thought in frustration. _There might have been something, some small clue that I missed. Something to show us the way they travelled_.

There had been a time when he and Sarek had spent many hours out in the desert or the mountains, following all but invisible trails; learning to track man and beast across unyielding terrain. They had been the best of their group, held up by their Da’i as an example to the other Hashashiyyin acolytes. He reached for the spoon in his bowl and stirred at the food half heartedly.

Those days seemed a lifetime ago, but the skills that he had learned then had always served him well in Sherwood.

"So," John said finally, resting his hands on his staff as he stood at the fireside and looked round at them, "where do we search this day."

"Done the streams hereabouts an' nuthin'," Will said.

"So we look elsewhere," Rhiannon said with more calmness than she felt.

"We search further." Will slid his sharpened dagger back into its scabbard at his belt as he rose from the fire. "I'm goin' over Darkmere way today - follow the Lincoln Road there for a bit. If Gisbourne took him in a cart bound for Nottingham - maybe someone saw something."

"Time for us to start asking questions, maybe," put in Alan. "At the villages. Rhiannon's right."

"Naz has been to Benfield...." John began.

"Sedgeley?" suggested Much. "That's one of the nearest villages. We could ask there."

"So who's goin' to Sedgeley today?" Will asked. "It's just going to take one of us to go there."

John kept quiet, his head bowed, and stared hard down into the flames of the cookfire.

Alan sensed the cause of John's quietness only too well. "I'll go to Sedgeley this day," Alan volunteered.

Will merely nodded, but flung John's bowed head a searching, meaningful look; John kept his head bowed and did not meet Scarlet's eye.

Much attempted to be optimistic. "We've helped Sedgeley a lot in the past, we have. Got them through the winter with that grain. If they know Robert is missing, they'll be concerned and want to help. They'll keep an eye out."

Tuck nodded thoughtfully to himself. "See if the villagers can give you some bread, Alan, whilst you're there. A few wortes for the pot maybe or some barley; we're in need of something to eke out the meat we get."

It seemed wrong to be discussing food in the same breath as discussing Robert's disappearance, but they needed to eat.

"Meg's toft is going to ruin for want of attention," John said at last. "She's no interest in it at the moment and the food that's growing there is wastening. Some's probably died due to lack of watering. Maybe she could spare us some food that otherwise is going to be wasted."

Will scowled into the fire. "She ain't been herself since Adam died."

"When I was there last," John said, "she didn't know how she was going to pay the Heriot for Adam. A whole pig....that would have seen her through some of the winter once slaughtered and its meat salted."

"Then she'll need coin to buy a new pig," said Alan.

"She'll not take it," Tuck said. "She's proud, is Meg."

John scratched his head. "Maybe she'll take it in return for some food out of her toft."

"Ask her, Alan," suggested Rhiannon.

Will drew from the purse at his belt a small cloth drawstring bag, tipped its contents out into one work-roughened hand and counted the several silver pennies laying in his palm, glinting in the sunlight that slanted down through the tree canopy. He tipped the few pennies back into the small bag and threw the bag across the fire to Alan, who caught it. "Here," said Will. "Give this to Meg in exchange for some food from her toft. We need food, she needs coin to buy grain an' a new pig. An' tell her to take it. Tell her she'll do herself an' us no favours by bein' stubborn or proud."

Alan nodded.

Nasir drew himself from thought as the others fell silent, his mind still on Will’s words that it was time to search further.

"I will head west," he said slowly, picturing the route through the forest in his mind. "There are several smaller villages lying that way and that will lead me onto Thetford."

From Thetford, he could circle the edges of the forest south, towards Rufford. Bigger places; more people. Market towns, where the forest folk and the farmers met to gossip and do business and where he could mingle unnoticed. The storm had marked the night that Robert had disappeared. Folk would still be talking of it, and of the work they had faced the next day in repairing the damage it had wrought. Not so hard, Nasir thought, to steer casual conversation to anything unusual seen that same morning as villagers had travelled about their business.

He glanced up and caught John’s gaze. "I’ll be away overnight," he said, knowing John would understand his reasoning. The outlaws had fewer dealings with these villagers. Not like at Sedgeley or Maybury; no men to trust like Thomas of Benfield. There would be less chance of a friendly reception the closer he travelled to the western edges of the forest and he would need to travel with extra care. He lapsed into sober silence at the thought that the search for Robert could take him away from the familiar protection offered by Sherwood.

John but nodded in answer. He didn't question the Saracen. Nasir was a law unto himself, and if he felt he needed to be away overnight in order to conduct a more thorough search, then John trusted him. He thought that perhaps Nasir was their best hope at tracking where Robert had gone - or been taken.

"Someone needs to stay at camp in case Robert returns," said Much, desperately trying to remain optimistic. "If he comes back here and finds the camp empty....he'll wonder where we are, what's happened."

"Rhiannon...." Tuck began, looking across at her.

She almost immediately shook her head. "No. I want to search."

Tuck looked at the flushed-cheeked Ellie in her arms and sighed to himself. The child was teething and fractious, probably had a temperature, and would have benefited from a day's rest spent under the cool shade of the trees that overhung the camp.

Will looked at Tuck. "You stay here, Tuck," Will said. "You ain't going to get her to change her mind. Bleedin' stubborn woman."

Rhiannon managed a slight smile, stroking Ellie's wispy head.

Tuck bent to lift the cookpot off the fire. Someone needed to stay at camp, he reasoned, and it was true he was neither as young or as fleet as the others - but at a time like this, he felt inadequate.