Trouble in the Forest Book One: A Cold Summer Night Read online

  “Ah,” said deSteny. He motioned to the Red Friar. “Do something, will you?”

  “I will put Holy Water on the mat,” he said, though there was little conviction in his voice that suggested he thought this would accomplish anything.

  “Good.” DeSteny continued along to the next mat—it, too, was empty.

  “The mother, the old woman,” said Chilton, his hands shaking visibly on the reins.

  “And this one?” asked deSteny, finding the third roll untenanted. “Who was put here?”

  “His woman. The oldest child is next, and then the younger two.” Fear had taken a strong grip on the warden and he squirmed in the saddle, communicating his unrest to the mule he rode.

  “Empty. Not even bones. They are gone,” said deSteny when he reached the next roll. “What were the rats feeding on, if these are empty?” He found the answer in the last two mats. The younger children lay there, the voracity of the rats and the first signs of decay already changing them into alien creatures. “Friar, tend to them.”

  The Red Friar complied with alacrity, hurrying to anoint them and pray for their souls. When he was done, he got to his feet. “They’ll have to be buried in water, I fear, in order to ensure protection for them, and us.”

  “I suppose you’re right,” said deSteny, who had been thinking the same thing. “We will have to carry them to a faster, deeper river.”

  The men-at-arms were not pleased to hear this. “We can bury them here, facing down, with hawthorn in their graves,” one of them said.

  “It might not be enough,” said deSteny, with unhappy memories mastering his careful thoughts.

  “What about their heads?” asked the Red Friar reluctantly. “We should cut them off, and then they will be still in their graves.”

  DeSteny sighed heavily. “Yes. We could do that.”

  “Then we ought to,” said Wroughton. “The horses will not tolerate carrying rotten bodies.”

  The Red Friar crossed himself. “I will use the sword, if you like.” He had a firm jaw that just now was clamped to granite determination.

  “I would not want to do it,” said deSteny. “But if it must be done, then—”

  “It is necessary,” said Wroughton, his voice rising. “With the father and mothers gone, and the oldest child. And no sign of them. They cannot be left this way.” He looked around as if he expected the early afternoon shadows to stretch out and surround them.

  There was a silence between them all, as massive as the walls of Windsor.

  Then the Red Friar bent down and rolled the first of the bodies out onto the ground. He held out his hand to deSteny. “Your sword.”

  Slowly deSteny pulled it from the sheath over his shoulder, and handed it to the Red Friar. “Go ahead,” he told the monk, and turned away so he would not have to watch the children being decapitated. He heard the whistle of the sword and the solid thunk as it severed flesh and bone.

  “This one can be buried now, face down,” said the Red Friar, addressing deSteny. “I’ve done all that I can.”

  “You heard him. Make two graves,” said deSteny. He knew his men thought him faint-hearted for not watching the friar cut the head off the child, but he had seen—and done—more than his share of that in the Holy Land. He watched as Chilton handed a shovel hanging on the side of the wall to Wroughton, indicating the area where the graves were to be dug.

  “This isn’t my work,” Wroughton protested, not wanting to be stuck with the menial task of digging.

  “I’ll do it,” said deSteny, glad to be doing something. He held out his hand for the shovel and set to work, his chain-mail weighing on him as he labored. By the time he had made a grave big enough and deep enough for the first child, the Red Friar had the second ready, and was reciting prayers over the bodies.

  “Put them both in the same hole,” Wroughton recommended, squinting up at the sky. “Otherwise we’ll be in the forest come sunset.”

  This timely warning alerted deSteny as nothing else could. He held out his hand to Chilton, to be helped out of the grave, then gave a long, steady look at the Red Friar. “What do you advise, Brother?”

  “I think it would be best to be away from here. The men are right. If we linger here we face the chance of being caught in the forest when the sun goes down.” The Red Friar crossed himself and looked at his pyx. “I could anoint all of you for the journey. That might give us a little security.”

  “If we are hunted by what I fear most,” said deSteny, “we should avail ourselves of everything that might guard us from harm, even if it means using methods the Church would not endorse.” He glanced down at the two children’s bodies. “Tend to them.”

  The Red Friar got on his knees and set the two pathetic corpses in the grave side by side, turned so that they lay prone and not supine, their heads set under their feet, also facing down. After sprinkling Holy Water on the wretched bodies, he made the sign of the cross over them and rose to let deSteny cover them with earth.

  “What do you think? Are they at rest?” deSteny asked the Red Friar as he hurried to complete his work.

  “They are, if God is good,” said the Trinitarian, with emphasis on “they.” He indicated the mats. “But regarding the rest of the family, I do not think so, not after—” He gave deSteny his sword again, the blade wiped clean.

  “Nor I,” agreed deSteny as he slipped the weapon across his shoulder and into the scabbard. “It troubles me.” He resumed his work with the shovel.

  The Red Friar crossed himself. “Any sensible man would be troubled, given what has happened.”

  “Truly,” said deSteny, and shaded his eyes to look at the angle of the sun. “We will leave not a moment too soon.” He shoveled the last of the earth on top of the children. “I have heard nothing of missing travelers, not recently.”

  “Nor have I. But if they are missing, it may be that there has been none to look for them, and anyone who has searched—”

  “Might suffer the same fate as the ones searched for; yes, he might,” deSteny finished for the Red Friar.

  “Lamentably,” said the Red Friar.

  DeSteny put the shovel back on the wall. “We can leave now.”

  “Not quite yet,” said the Red Friar, opening the pyx again and taking the time to mark the cross with the Host on the foreheads of each of the company. That done, he nodded to deSteny and scrambled onto his mule.

  Last of all, deSteny mounted his sorrel mare. “For Nottingham,” he said, and set off along the worn track.

  How deSteny returned to Nottingham

  BY THE TIME the Sheriffs party reached the main road, Sherwood was darkening, the long shadows making the undergrowth denser than it was, and turning the canopy of beech and oak to a cloaking mass more menacing than storm clouds. With the fading of the day came a wind, blowing as if to extinguish the last of the light; it was cold and cutting, touching the men to the marrow, leaving them worn out with shivering. The undergrowth rustled and the branches flailed. In addition, the men were growing increasingly uneasy, and their mounts shared their distress, shying at noises and balking at shadows more often than they usually did. A fox darting in a thicket or the whistle of a falcon overhead made horses and riders start in alarm, and the mules became more fractious.

  “I don’t like this,” muttered Wroughton as he watched a badger scurry out of their way. “It’s too late. We should have left Chefford sooner. It will be dusk by the time we are out of the forest.”

  “Possibly,” said deSteny. “But we must keep on, or we will have to camp for the night.” His sorrel mare was restive, and he did his best to calm her. It would not do to have her bolt here in the forest.

  “How far is it to Nottingham?” asked the Red Friar from his place at the rear. “We can’t have missed the turning, can we?”

  “No more than a league or so,” said Chilton in the
lead, his words sounding harsh. “We will be at the edge of the trees shortly.”

  “And not a moment too soon. Look at the sky,” said Wroughton with feeling, nodding once toward the fading sunset streamers in the clouds over the trees. He crossed himself and pressed his legs into his horse’s sides. The horse walked faster.

  The other men-at-arms were doing the same thing, urging their horses to pick up speed to hasten their departure from the encroaching darkness. DeSteny lifted his hand to try to hold them back, for he feared that once their flight began, they would not be easily stopped, and would end in a rout. His efforts were useless, for his mare had caught the apprehension of the others around her and was anxious to get out of the trees as the most skittish of the men. When deSteny tried to hold her in, she began to sweat and tremble, pulling on the rein and tossing her head.

  At the rear of the group the Red Friar’s mule adamantly refused to walk any faster no matter what the monk did to urge him on. Gradually the distance between the men-at-arms and the Trinitarian increased so he was a length, then two, then five behind the rest. When a bend in the road was reached, the party from Nottingham vanished altogether, and it seemed to the Red Friar that the only sound in all of Sherwood Forest was the determined plod of his mule’s hooves.

  How dark it had become! Vast shadows loomed around him, devouring the last of the daylight. The Red Friar clutched the pyx more tightly, trying to take confidence from the presence of the sacred article. He muttered part of a Psalm but stopped when he heard the tremor in his voice. Then he tried to make his mule walk faster and attempted to shout to the Sheriff and his men, only to discover his throat was too dry and too tight to do more than croak. In growing terror he began to recite his prayers: “Salva me, Domine, de morte et daemonae. Libera me de ira . . . iram? Sequestra me de . . .” He could not keep the Latin phrases in his mind, though he tried over and over, unable to recall the rest of the petition no matter how he tried. “Salva me de morte in aeternam . . . aeternam.”

  The mule continued to pick his way along the track in stolid rhythm, untroubled that the rest so far out-distanced them. Then he stopped, his long ears turning, his head coming up, nostrils flaring as his back went rigid. His neck craned out, tense, and sweat darkened his flanks. He gave a sudden, terrified bray, bucked and reared to rid himself of the weight of the Red Friar, then bolted at a jarring, uneven canter, leaving the Trinitarian lying on the ground, stunned, the pyx fallen from his grip.

  Dazed as he was, the Red Friar realized the forest was alive—alive and malign. He tried to summon his strength to rise, to find the pyx, to pray, for from the deep, dusk-green shadows there emerged the figures of men, half a dozen of them, as if their bodies were being born directly from the trees. Each man was holding weapons, each baring fangs more ghastly than their longbows, cross-bows, knives, and swords.

  Two of them approached the Red Friar, taking care to avoid the pyx where it lay on the ground, its silver top open and the last of its precious contents degraded and scattered, useless to anyone.

  “Too bad,” said the nearest of the figures, with a lupine grin.

  The Red Friar could not summon up the fortitude to cross himself, and his soul filled with anguish.

  “Never tasted a monk’s blood before,” his tormentor went on. “Do you think I’ll like it? Or will it be too holy for the likes of me?” he asked the Red Friar with counterfeit sweetness as he knelt down.

  A sharp command interrupted him. “Not yet, Will. He’s mine by right.” One of the shadow-men stepped forward, a tall, arresting figure with a mane of white hair and eyes that shone like a wild animal’s, flashing red instead of gold. His lips curled back in a ferocious smile. “Welcome to Sherwood, Trinitarian,” he said in bad Norman French. “Good of you to join us. And you will join us.”

  The rest of the band chuckled at this, though to the Red Friar, it sounded more like a growl than a chuckle.

  “Libera me de morte, Domine. Salva me!” the monk cried aloud, suddenly finding his voice at last.

  “Don’t bother God with that. Let us answer your prayers. We’ll save you from eternal death. Won’t we?” And with that he reached down and seized the front of the Red Friar’s habit, plucking him to his feet as easily as if he were lifting a lamb, and not a sturdy, grown man. “You will be one of us now, in our damnable life everlasting. Rise from the dead to live among us.” There was no mercy in this creature, only cruelty and encompassing pride. He was amusing himself with his prey.

  The Red Friar struggled futilely, battling the cold dread rising within him as much as he feared the shadow-clad, white-haired demon who glared balefully at him. He tried to call on God, but the words failed him, and his soul ached. His captor apparently sensed the Red Friar’s emotions, for he winked before bending his head to sink his teeth deep into the monk’s neck, attaching himself there so that none of the monk’s blood would be wasted. The Trinitarian gave a single, despairing howl as he felt the fangs pierce his flesh, then went slack in the monster’s arms, all resistance gone.

  Around them, the grinning men watched in envious, respectful silence as their leader made his kill.

  * * *

  Far ahead on the trail, deSteny turned in the saddle at the appalling cry that came eerily through the trees, as if journeying ahead of the wind. His mare tugged against his hands and whickered her distress. The others were momentarily transfixed by the hideous wail, and looked to deSteny for reassurance.

  Then the monk’s mule, lathered and panicked, hurtled past them and set all the rest of the party careering out of the woods in horrified disorder, the Trinitarian’s mule still well in the lead. They rushed past the cluster of wood-cutters’ huts at the edge of the trees, struggling to pull in their mounts by the time they reached the gates of Nottingham. One of the men managed to catch the Red Friar’s mule and hold its reins. Exhausted now, the mule did not protest.

  “Where’s the monk?” asked Chilton, averting his eyes from the panting, riderless mule.

  “Back there,” said Wroughton, cocking his head in the direction of the forest. “He dropped behind a while ago.”

  Hamlin crossed himself. “In the forest? Still?”

  Chilton went white about the mouth. “But—”

  “He has the pyx,” said one of the men-at-arms. “It will protect him.”

  The rest made reassuring, guilty mutters, except for deSteny, who had turned his sorrel mare back in the direction of Sherwood, and was now listening intently.

  “What is it?” asked Chilton, who had also noticed something odd about the place. “Do you see—?”

  “I don’t know,” deSteny admitted as he fought the urge to go back into the forest in what he already knew would be a foolish and futile effort to save the Trinitarian. Reluctantly, he turned away from the trees and started toward the town.

  The gatekeeper appeared at the portcullis to identify them and let them into Nottingham. He looked at deSteny and the men with him and bit back the complaints he had been about to heap on them. He noticed that the monk who had gone with them had not returned, an ill omen most certainly. Whatever they had encountered in Sherwood Forest had left them profoundly shaken, and they would not welcome his animadversions at this time, as appropriate as they might be, and richly deserved as well. So he stood aside and let them go by him, then tugged the gates closed and set the massive bolt back in place with unaccustomed alacrity, his spryness coming from a sharp prickle of horror that raised the hair on his arms and the back of his neck. Something was out there that must, at any cost, be kept out. He had the conviction that he had to be quick getting the gate shut, or place all of Nottingham in grave danger, and as much as he wanted to take pride in what he did, all he experienced was bone-melting relief.

  As they clattered up the high street, the men-at-arms began to look askance at what they had done, and the things they had seen that day. Inside the walls of the town, i
t was hard to believe that so much evil could lurk nearby.

  “Do you think we have to confess this?” asked Wroughton as they reached Nottingham Castle.

  DeSteny did not realize at first that Wroughton was talking to him, so lost was he in his own ruminations. He shook himself and said, “Confess? To fearing the Devil and his servants? What is the sin in that?” As he spoke, he could not rid himself of the chagrin he now felt at his lack of courage.

  “But the Red Friar is still—” Chilton began, striking to the heart of deSteny’s self-recriminations.

  “He knew what the risks were, and he undertook to face them, according to his vows,” said deSteny more loudly than was necessarily. He looked toward the moat of the castle and the watch-post where the Marshal and his Guards kept their posts. He signaled to Sir Humphrey to lower the draw-bridge for them, and waited for the first clank of the chain. Suddenly he wanted very much to be back in his own quarters, with the consolation of his seventeen books to take away the humiliating sense of defeat that clung to him like an odor. His head ached and his muscles felt knotted. His appetite had deserted him. He did not want to think of food, not after this day.

  “Do you think the Red Friar will be all right? The outlaws won’t want to harm him, will they? Not a man in Orders? It’s not as if he would do them harm, is it?” asked Wroughton nervously as the draw-bridge began its ponderous descent. “I mean, being a Brother, and all, he’ll know what to do, won’t he? To protect himself from . . . them. He is a monk. He’ll be safe—won’t he?”

  DeSteny could only look at him.

  Wroughton turned away from deSteny’s gaze, mumbling, “No, I suppose not.” He fell silent as the draw-bridge completed its descent and they prepared to enter the castle. “What are you going to tell Sir Humphrey?”

  “That we investigated the murder of a family of crofters,” said deSteny brusquely, reminding himself that it was true. “We did our best to see the bodies received proper burial.”