SHORT FIC - There, But for You, Go I - COMPLETED
Title: There, But for You, Go I
Author: Nettlestone Nell
Word Count: around 9000
Rating: G
Characters/Pairings: Allan, DJaq, Robin, Much, Marian, Little John, Will, Robin/Marian, Will/DJaq, outlaws, OC "Johannah"
Spoilers/Warnings: Occurs between 2x12 and 2x13.
Summary: Something of the gang's (in particular Allan's) adventures between Robin's 2x12 "I'm coming, my love," and 2x13's disembarking at the coastline near Acre. Set in Portsmouth. Not a true prequel to Allan-A-Dale Eats A Peach, but harmonizes well with it nonetheless.
Disclaimer: No one can truly own the legend of Robin Hood, but BBC/Tiger Aspect seem to hold rights to this particular iteration.
Category: Drama/Friendship; Epic Short Fic (over 5K words)
There, But for You, Go I
or
Allan-A-Dale Hears a Who
The wharves of Portsmouth bustled. They stank, equal parts of fish and filth, they swelled with peasants, ruffians and scalawags. They teemed with men of high birth and below low, women of no morals, and of considerably less. Rife with pickpockets, stevedores, short-grift thieves. England's last stop for soldiers and coin bound for the Holy Land. Riddled with respectable merchants, and outlaws.
Today, any census would have curiously shown a marked increase in the population of the latter.
Just as any census four days prior would have shown a marked increase in appointed officials (shire sheriffs, to be exact), henchmen, and, unusually, ladies of noble birth.
At eight, little Johannah was not much one for census-taking, nor, as she had never been to school, numbers, but even in her from-birth blindness, the singing beggar girl, a fixture at the docks, had noticed the peculiar trend of companies neither merchant nor military in nature seeking passage on ships to the Holy Land.
Certainly, mid-October heralded not the best season to be out on the water, and persistent news of the wars told anyone with scruples 'twas not the time for planning one's holy pilgrimage to Jerusalem.
As ever, to buy her bread, Johannah sang, one hand held out to receive alms of any kind. She was not like the other children, able to scatter among the crates and dunnage, slip hands into pockets or pouches, small fingers nimbly claiming coin or token without the owners' knowledge. Nor was she able to chase and worry a mark to distraction as did those children traveling in packs until the mark produced coin or tidbit to satisfy and scatter the overwhelming urchin horde.
Hers was but to sing, standing near the gangplanks, songs of good English things, English beauties, the English countryside, England's noble peoples; to evoke pleasure in those arriving, and stoke sadness (and pity) among those here departing England's shores.
It was a good living.
But the past four days had seen her add a new air to her songlist. Some of the dockworkers had not taken too kindly to how often she chose to reprise it. More than one had roughly told her so, a few even trying to get her to surrender her patch. It was rare that the people of the wharf (roughhewn though they might be) were unkind to her, but still, she had made a promise, accepted payment, and she made an effort to keep her word.
The outlaw Allan-A-Dale and the Saracen ex-slave DJaq had paired off (as had the others) to search for the Sheriff and Gisborne (and, naturally, Marian-though it had been hours since any of their company had said her name).
Allan could easily tell by the cast of DJaq's eyes that she would far rather have been tasked to search with Will-for whatever reason Allan did not know, other than that none of the other lads had seemed even willing to so much as tolerate the idea of being paired with him for the task. The Man Who Betrayed Robin Hood, after all, the Reason They Were Here, that Things Had Come to This.
More than once he had caught Robin himself looking at him with murder in his eye on the hell-bent journey down the Portsmouth road from Sherwood.
There had been no stopping, and very little sleeping, and all breath needed for their flight after the Sheriff. (The Sheriff already with a considerable lead.) There had been no true time for confessions or explanations, and certainly none for properly begging forgiveness of his fellows.
He was like a man half-shriven, possibly to be allowed entrance into heaven (the safe society of his former forest brethren), but for now condemned (if not to torment) to Limbo (wait, was it Purgatory?), wishing, hoping-dare he say it-praying for someone to light a candle for him, to beg the priest to fully catalog his sins so that the proper expiation might begin. Setting him one step further away from the Hell he had been simmering in (the fires getting hotter every day).
But he knew, as long as Marian was the Sheriff's prisoner (please, God, for his sake if not for hers, nothing worse), no one existed in the world that cared for him enough to illumine such a taper.
DJaq looked to Allan, trusting in his height (she could hardly see over the at-times tight crowds filling the wharves) and his super-trained observer's eyes to find what they were here to locate: the Sheriff, and through him, Marian.
Her own mind was a mess of both clarity and chaos. So much happening, so much in the last few days falling into place. She loved Will. She had told him (and the others) as much. Allah had been kind and he had returned her feelings. The gang was going to die at the hands of the Sheriff's mercenaries, and she would never see them again, eternally parted, her Paradise something less than perfect. Her Paradise without Will. Without Robin or John, or Much. Or...Allan.
Yet she was with him now, the thief and prodigal unexpectedly returned to the fold. She stood at his familiar shoulder, saw his jaw from that very particular angle below that only she could...saw the two small scars on the underside of his chin (not quite to his windpipe)-from a fence gone wrong. 'Before I had got my sea legs in the business-like, you know,' he had told her in a rare moment of truth, referencing his thief's past.
He had never mentioned this incident to any of the others, all too tall, too distant to notice such a thing.
And if they could not find Marian still here, still on English soil, rescue and return her to Nottingham? Robin had not said as much, but the others seemed to already know it in their eyes: even with Marian safely free from the Sheriff, someone would have to go and try to beat the Sheriff and his plot to kill Malik-Ric. And so, into this already confusing, heady cauldron was thrown the possibility of a return to her homeland. And with it, the question of what to do should they survive both the trip and the foiling of the Sheriff's newest regicidal plot. Would she stay and bid the gang goodbye? All the gang?
Her mind swam with possibilities. With suddenly life-altering decisions on the near horizon sprouting so close to just days ago when she had not expected her life to see much beyond the sun rising over the horizon.
Allan had gauged that the Sheriff had a goodly lead over them. He had absconded from their traveling party to return to Nettlestone, a hard all-night ride. But, he had pointed out that the Sheriff and his company traveled by coach, and that once to Portsmouth they would have to engage a vessel and see it outfitted for the trip. So, certainly, he had assured the lads, they yet had time on their side to rescue Marian before the Sheriff sailed. A chance to find and free her in England, rather than an arduous race over water, and the Palestine desert to come.
"Oi!"
She heard Allan protest, extricating a faceless pickpocket's wandering hand from near his money pouch, his own fingers twisting the theft-bent ones backward, like a man levering open a determined dog's jaws from off its prey.
"Oi! Oiii!" he shouted a second time, with far more irritation in his tone as he similarly plucked the hands of three others off her coin purse, their stealthy touches she had not even felt, much less seen their greedy fingers among the jostling press of people.
"Thanks," she said, meaning it. She was not used to moving about in this sort of an environment, too long reconciled to life in the forest, or the small villages of Nottinghamshire peasants. Her time spent in Nottingham Town, of course, had generally been in disguise, her more likely the prospective thief than the mark. And pickpocketry had never proven her strong suit, though Allan had tried his best to teach her. 'Fingers not long enough,' he had told her, not meaning his professional's assessment to sound negative. 'Height's good, though,' he had counseled. Makes gettin' away in a crowd easier. Missed that since I left off bein' a kid.'
"Give over," he demanded from her now, his eyes on her purse.
She looked at him with a wary eye that said 'what?' better than any spoken word could.
"I shall keep it for you. 'Twill be easier than swatting these insistent 'flies' away from both of us all day."
The notion was sound enough. She considered for a moment. More than did the others, she believed in Allan. Which was not to say that she felt 100% sure of him just yet, but certainly, where her money was concerned, she knew he could have had it off her in a twinkling had he taken a shine to doing so. And so she freely surrendered the coin purse with a burgeoning confidence in the man with whom she once had shared some things far more valuable. And had for awhile contemplated the possibility of sharing others.
"Perhaps," she suggested, untying the leather thong that attached her purse to her waist, "we ought give out to some of these in need, as we see them in our search. We are still Robin Hood, after all."
"Wot's that?" Allan asked over his shoulder as he broke a path through the crowd for them both with only the force of his shoulders. "'We'? Robin gone all kingly on you lot in my absence?"
"No," she replied, taken aback by Allan's assumption, not sure how to explain the gang's recently established motto to this only-just-returned outsider, and finding it hard to keep her low-pitched voice from being carried off in the surrounding din. "Not like that. Though...some things have changed."
Robin and Marian, she thought, engaged. Will and her...declared. The Sherwood band had helped a Templar find and redeem himself, rescued a Queen, sent word to Malik-Ric by the Sultan's best pigeon, stood beside a Crusader knight dying in battle far from the Holy Land's killing fields.
How would those instances have played out had pre-spying-for-Gisborne Allan-A-Dale been among them? Would the hard moments have been quite so hard? The worrisome logistics quite so convoluted? The sad events as gloomy?
Or would the good moments have been slightly dimmed? The times they successfully 'liberated' coaches in Sherwood laden with gold and booty--would those satisfying days have proven clouded by the sound of him grouching that he never personally saw any of the take?
Would Much have been happier to have Allan around to devil him by his side (on his side), or had he, perhaps, been happier in some way to gloat over the then distant man set up in the Sheriff's castle that he had always been most vocally suspicious and most disapproving of?
"No need to spread tuppence among this lot, DJaq," Allan assured her.
When she did not reply to his dismissal of the poverty she saw stretching out, seeming to peek from every crack and crevice, all around her, he stopped his forward motion, turned back toward her and placed a hand over his heart. ('His approximation of a heart', she knew Much would say. 'Blackguard', she knew John would declare, like a sound made when spitting.)
"No funny business, here," he vowed, his hand still in place. "But this lot can pick coin off trees." Quickly his hand shot out to point out to her three separate thieves among the crowd lifting purses and pocketing rings, to the rightful owners' complete oblivion.
"Already," he told her, "they had you and yours 'til I sent them packing. You just see how many of the lads rally back with us this afternoon wot still have two coins to rub together--or even empty pouch left in their possession." His mouth pulled into a near-smile at the notion. "The true poor of Portsmouth, summat tells me, ain't these blokes and kiddies skimming off the harbour's bounty."
She accepted his assessment of this place, and they proceeded back through the crowd as before. Near several lowered gangplanks they stopped, Allan trying to strategize who might be best to speak with; Robin and Much having sought out the Harbour Master and Import Taxation Officer, Little John and Will seeking the most influential figure in the Portsmouth underworld to ask similar questions of departing sheriffs and kidnapped maidens.
DJaq was not sure if she heard the voice first or saw the beggar girl from whom it came. It was a pleasant voice, as English voices went, and it more than satisfied the requirements of what the English took as good singing. The small girl was just concluding a song about meadows and milkmaids, and tall grasses best used by country lovers, when, without hardly a pause she began her next tune.
"Allan!" DJaq shouted up to him from where he had ascended the steep incline of a gangplank in hopes to better orient himself to the lay of the land. "Allan!" Across the distance she saw his light eyes they flicked down to see her, found herself thinking of how the sun on sand would flare into them far-worse (sprouting headaches, blurred vision) than into her own deeply brown ones. Thinking of how unsuited (or at least how unprepared) half the gang were for the lands of her people.
Allan squinted down at her, not really ready yet to be bothered, but he had never known DJaq to cry wolf, and so he returned with some haste to her side.
"Wotcher got?" he asked, surprised when she merely gestured to a blind beggar child singing for coin nearby where the multiple gangplanks met with the dock. Certainly, the child was pretty enough under the usual grime that such urchins necessarily wore. Her infirmity did not seem to have been the result of injury, or if it were, no disfiguring signs of the trauma remained. Her hair was Saxon blonde, and poker-straight, the thinness of her frame accenting her delicate features. Sweet enough, but hardly interesting enough to call him down from his plum vantage point to inspect. If DJaq wanted to toss her a coin of charity, it surely could have waited until he'd seen what he needed from his upper perch.
"Listen," DJaq urged him. "Listen to what she is singing. It is that song...the one where you asked me to help you rhyme something with 'bosom-fair'."
He chose to take issue with her claim. "Not tryin' to be funny, but...I came up with that one all on me own, there, DJaq."
"Lis-ten, you wooly-headed Englishman! What are the chances a song you wrote in Sherwood Forest, meant for a Tuxfarne barmaid has made it all the way down the countryside onto the lips of a Portsmouth beggar child?"
He listened. It was his song, the tune, at least, and a great many of the words. Had he been a more virtuous chap he might've felt a bit of guilt for hearing them come, as it were, out of the mouths of babes.
His words, but the name all wrong. He had crafted the song for Meggie (Old Henry's Bones, but he barely recalled her name, now.). This girl was instead singing (he craned his ear to be sure he was catching it right) 'Allan, Fair Allan'.
Remarkable, indeed. He did not wish to speculate on how she might (or might not) have re-worked the 'bosom-fair' passage.
"We must speak with her," DJaq insisted, with conviction and mounting optimism. "Surely it is a sign--a code--a message."
"Wot? You don't think it cannot just be that my talents have been discovered and appreciated here in the South?"
"What?" she asked, acidly. "By re-casting yourself in the part of the object of desire in a shoddily dashed off tavern ballad? Its crafting fueled largely by stolen October Ale?"
He interjected, "And Meggie's considerable...generosity."
DJaq's eyebrows made her point for her. "No."
"Alright, alriiight!" he gave in, motioning with his hands to show her he was going. "We will speak with the child. Perhaps she might actually benefit from some of the Sherwood charity you are so determined to distribute."
"Certainly," DJaq agreed, "for who here would be rewarding her for singing such rubbish?"
At her continued belittling of his 'talent', he shot her a petulant expression. Followed shortly by a submerged grin. It had been an uncommon good batch of ale that day.
There were few (if any) who would have said the Widowed Cob was a genteel sort of an alehouse and inn, and those few were certainly not among the rogues' gallery of Portsmouth that chose to regularly sip, sup, and sleep there.
Added to the roll this day? Nottinghamshire outlaws, four in number, awaiting one of their fellows traveling with a sixth, their recently forsworn enemy. This wretched locale to be their rally point.
"Well," said Much, eyeing a generous helping of sand and grit a-swim in the last swallow remaining in his cup, "we may at least be reasonably sure to avoid the Sheriff by having situated our company here."
"Was it actually ale, do you suppose?" Little John asked the others rhetorically, "or merely mud-stained water?"
"It has given me twice the thirst we had coming in, if only in hopes to wash it from my mouth," Will Scarlet protested.
"You have gone soft, lads!" Robin chided them. "Soft on clear-as-crystal water from the Idle, the Trent, where they begin as Sherwood springs, untouched except by God. You, Much," he challenged his closest fellow, "have drunk more than any one man's fair share of Palestine sand in your day, and often, as I well know, with thankful heart."
"Yes, Master, but it..." Much took in his surroundings with a wary eye, "seemed cleaner, somehow. And the water it swam in, well, I needn't say it, but--more rare than Burgundy wine to a beggarman."
"So," Will noted, "as our searches have all but dead-ended us back here, it seems we may each have cause to sample such delicacy not too far hence," unable to deny to himself some growing level of fascination with the possibility of journeying to DJaq's homeland, despite the disastrous reason behind their prospective voyage.
"I'd rather eat Sherwood dirt the rest of my days, its stones my bread, than cross oceans to pick fights with the Sheriff," declared John, his voice rumbling, impassioned. It seemed for a moment as if he might pound his tankard on the bar in front of him to further emphasize his point.
Robin's head came up at this baldly stated conviction, his eyes searching John's for the full truth of it. Robin's showed a woundedness about the corners that he might have so mis-judged John's commitment to their present course.
"But," John continued, holding Robin's pleading, half hurt gaze, "for Marian...the woman you love, the Nightwatchman, friend to the gang, to the poor..." he paused, to give those words greater meaning, "and for King Richard, I will do this."
At this pronouncement of his intent to support his fellows (and, in particular, Robin), Much slapped his hand companionably onto John's shoulder, quickly retracting it at the solid, almost boulder-like resistance of John's bulk with which he met upon impact. Shortly, he shook out his hand as though it had been cramped, in an effort to return feeling to it.
"Then we are agreed?" Robin's eyes flicked from man to man, examining them for further doubts as to the inevitable turn their trip had taken, "if they cannot be found here, we are, to a man, bound for," he nearly balked at saying it, "for the war court of Richard."
"For Marian," John asserted.
As usual, Much begged to differ, "but it is Richard whose life is held cheaply by the Sheriff. King Richard whom he means to have killed. Not Marian." Quickly he back-tracked, "though, of course, Marian must be found, and rescued. Of course."
Interestingly, Robin did not reply to the argument his own declaration of Richard as their immediate objective had begun.
"She is with Gisborne we believe, yes?" asked Will, as always attempting to be rational.
"Yes," Much speedily agreed.
"He is meant to love her--some version of her, anyway," Will made his case. "He will not let the Sheriff harm her."
At this Robin turned to him. "And so we are to pin our hopes for Marian's safety upon the villain Gisborne?" he asked, as though he did wish an answer, seeming to now argue with his own decision that the King's welfare was paramount, and needs must be seen to first. "That he will not let the Sheriff harm her, as he is alleged to love her? That she will come to no harm by his own hand?"
John interjected, turning the discussion's course slightly to the left, his tone equally as acidic as Robin's when Hood spoke Gisborne's name, "As we now in this alehouse pin our hopes--at your insistence--for her safety upon the last man to report in? The scoundrel A-Dale?"
"Why did you not order one of us to partner him?" Will asked, his tone more reasonable than the others' had momentarily become.
"Why throw DJaq to the wolf?" Much also questioned.
"Would you have gone with him?" Robin asked Much, receiving only a scowl in reply. "And you, Will, would you?"
"If you had ordered it," Will replied with a reflective sincerity.
Robin looked for a moment into the tankard he held, still full, knowing its contents could not slake his thirst, this thirst that seemed to have queerishly settled somewhere in his arms, his eyes, reminding him of a hunger for what was missing there; the sight of Marian, the embrace of Marian--the proximity of Marian. "DJaq has ever had an understanding of Allan. Of parts of Allan that none of us yet have managed to decode, much less demystify."
"You know," Much began, recalling an afternoon in Sherwood when DJaq had been captive in Nottingham Castle. "There was that time...I thought perhaps..." At a forbidding look from Will he fell silent.
"I have complete faith that DJaq can handle Allan," Robin announced, "but more than that, I have complete faith that should he choose to cross us again, DJaq will see into him, and perceive his treachery long before we might."
"Perhaps," Little John continued to cling to his gloom-and-doom belief where Allan was concerned, troubled that the duo had not yet arrived back at the rally point, "she already has."
Will stepped away from the bar. "Shall I go and search them out?"
Much and Little John waited attentively on Robin's answer. Would their leader agree to distrust the man who had only so recently regained it?
Robin handed his untouched tankard over to Little John. "No, Will." He shook his head. "There is time yet before our agreed-upon rendezvous. Let us not let sour grapes interfere with our hopes for what he and DJaq may well have discovered (what we four failed in finding out): the Sheriff, his hiding place, his plans, and--above all--Marian, safe and well and yet on English shores, knowing we will come to fetch her home."
Johannah sensed, even among the thronging crowd, that two individuals were approaching her. Perhaps it was the measured weight of their particular footfalls as they hit the wooden wharf upon which she stood. Perhaps it was the way the warmth of the sun refracted off their faces as they reset their path to encounter her.
"Hullo, my little one," Allan-A-Dale greeted her, going down onto one knee to bring himself closer to her height. "Wot's that you're singing, there? Summat Daddy brought home with him from the pub?"
"Daddy disappeared two years gone, never been seen since," she told him.
Allan shot a calming look to temper DJaq's tenderhearted reaction. One that was clearly meant to recall to her mind that such hardluck stories (true or otherwise) were the very bread and butter of any such child beggar, and could not be trusted.
"Sorry to hear that, Love," he told the girl, his tone soft, but not overly-sympathetic. "I got a nice shiny coin, here to give you, if you'll tell me how you came by that song," he coaxed. He produced the coin, though she could not see it to appreciate, with all the panache of a performing street mage, reached to wrap her fingers about it, knowing that in her business the weight and imprint of the coin she would know, that it would hold meaning for her, proof that he was not bluffing.
Her tiny fingers, their nail tips worn smooth from her constant use of them, probed the golden coin he held between his two fingers, then momentarily settled, resting on the inside of his bared wrist, connecting them in an oddly intimate gesture.
She leaned into him, and spoke quietly to the air just to the side of his face, "Do you travel with a Turk?"
Allan's eyes snapped open wide at the unexpected question, but his voice revealed none of his surprise. "Matter of fact, I do. I do, indeed."
"My name is Johannah," the little girl declared to the space beyond Allan's shoulder, introducing herself. "May I see you?"
It was clear she meant to be addressing DJaq, who needed no prodding from Allan to step forward and encounter the girl. "Hello," she said. "And why are you expecting me?"
Johannah extended her right hand (her left still resting on Allan's wrist) in an upward fashion, and DJaq assumed the girl wished to touch her face. But when Johannah's hand came into contact with DJaq's chin, the child moved her fingers lower, to the well of DJaq's throat, where she felt the lacing, there, and following it caught the tag Will had made to designate DJaq as one of Robin's gang. At this, Johannah brought her other hand to the task, and using both, seemed to be able to divine the scorched shape of the elliptical bow and arrow.
Allan and DJaq watched on, Allan easily as entranced by another person having such tactile skill, as was DJaq by the suspense of what this all surely meant.
Satisfied with the marking she had discovered on the tag, Johannah's hands shot back to Allan's wrist, unmoved from where she had last met with it. She ignored the coin, using his arms as a path up to his chin, beyond his scruff of beard, over his face and straight for the bridge and bulb of his nose.
Had DJaq not been holding her breath in anticipation of the child again speaking, she would have laughed.
"What is it, Little One?" Allan prompted the girl, his eyes crossed as though having sighted a fly on the tip of his nose. He moved his hand to gently bring hers back down.
"You are Allan, Allan-A-Dale," she said, her smile charming, but unable to light up her vacant eyes. "I have been waiting for you."
Marian knew she had not been left alone for long. Knew that if not for the unfamiliarity of the locale (the impossibility of her knowing anyone in it) it was unlikely she would have been allowed out of the direct sight of the Sheriff and Guy.
As with many parts of their plan, they had not told her where they were going, nor when they might return. She had been left in the carriage, set alongside the docks, chained by both wrists to a bulky new ring the Sheriff had ordered a blacksmith in a village along the Portsmouth road to forge and install the day after they awoke and Allan had been found missing.
The driver, her only supervision, had driven most of the night, and from the echo of his snores she could tell he was serving himself more at the moment by sneaking a rest, than serving his Sheriff in the minding of her.
The skin on her wrists was dangerously close to splitting from the amount of tugging she had been practicing upon her shackles, even through what had once been long sleeves. Unless she could be certain the chains would give, it was useless to injure herself in a way that would surely not see clean, proper tending, and would more likely sour and turn on her.
So she chose to try, with her feet, to unlatch the re-enforced carriage's door. It had not been easy, but she had managed to unbolt it and kick it to where it would stay somewhat open, but no large amount, only enough that she might feel something of the breeze.
As her eyes scoured the carriage interior for the thousandth time for possible un-seen means of escape, her ears began to hear, quite nearby, the sounds of a child singing...about England's green meadows, and sky and flowers, pretty girls come to town on market day.
"Hello!" she called from her seat inside. "Hello! I will pay well for a song! More generously for two!" she cried, in hopes of enticing the singer closer.
"Milady," a small child's face, a tow-headed boy, appeared, half-obscured by the door's meager cracked opening. "What likes thee? Johannah will sing."
"Bring her to me, Boy," Marian used her best voice of noble entitlement to command. "I shall have her stand within the carriage that I may better hear her."
"Aye, Lady," he scattered to do her bidding.
Moments later he returned, another small child, a girl of no more than eight on his arm, her blindness apparent. Her clothes were more tattered than any Marian had seen still being worn in the shire. To make up for their rips and worn-through holes, she had on several equally ragged layers. But her posture was straight and, possibly, even proud. Whatever life she lived, it had not yet worn her down. The boy whispered to tell her of the steps she needed to mount to get into the carriage. "Remember to bob yer curtsy to the lady," he murmured to her in lieu of a farewell.
"Are you good at remembering things, Johannah?" Marian asked her, pleased she did not have to hide her shackles for fear they might frighten the child. "Like the words to your songs? Come closer, and I shall show you a game I know." She found she was able to extend her own hand to catch one of the girl's, beginning their necessarily brief acquaintance by tracing and re-tracing the familiar brand from the wooden lintel of Locksley's greatroom fireplace into the child's open palm. Its cherished shape and unending circle giving Marian the unexpected focus and comfort that clutching Rosary beads might for some.
"DJaq," Allan instructed, handing another coin to his mate, "get us bread. Cider if they have it," he inclined his head to the child, "wine if they have not. We shall be here, waiting."
DJaq did not like the idea of walking away when things had just gotten most-interesting, but she saw the necessity in his request, and hurried along to buy the modest provisions with all haste.
"Have you brought your other men?" Johannah asked, herself as curious to have her questions answered as he was to have her ask them.
"My men?" Allan balked.
"Well, the Turk has lived, yes?"
"Lived?" he asked, his mind finally catching her train of thought. "Oh, right. The mercenaries in Nettlestone. Yes. The Turk, that is, DJaq lives. All live. We got clean away."
"I was not sure but that only you would come."
"Only me?"
"Aye. To rescue the lady."
"And why would you think that? Me come, alone, to Portsmouth?" He had, after all, never been one to chase after trouble. Rather, one to run in the calculated opposite direction of it.
"She gave me this, she did. The lady." Johannah reached her hand in among her ragged layers and produced a patch of lace that would have been spotless and fresh, had her own dirty hands not so recently had the use of it. Still, its provenance was unmistakable.
"That is Nottingham lace," DJaq announced from over Allan's shoulder, having returned with the foodstuffs.
Allan spun his head about so that they might share a significant look.
"Where is Marian?" he asked Johannah, no longer bothering, even, to verify that Marian was the lady in question.
"Now sing it back to me, quickly," Marian had told the child. "Allan, fair Allan..."
Johannah did as she was told, fumbling over very few of the short song's rather bawdy lines.
Again, Marian cast about the carriage for something she might leave with the child, a payment, but also a marker, something to prove that it was she who had been here, not possibly another. Something recognizable, connected to her. Something Gisborne and the Sheriff would not notice was missing.
She had no money, no rings or jewelry that had not already been stripped from her to join the coffers of the Black Knights' treasure.
If only she had a shire flower, or paper and ink to craft a note-Robin's ring, as had worked so well in the past. She had to close her eyes at that thought, lest she be distracted from the matter at hand. Robin, his loss, to be buried away to mourn another time. Not this time.
She reached her hands (impossible to raise only one) to the side of her neck and the neckline of her gown, where the lace had begun to pull off, causing her skin to itch. She gave a few scratches, tried to get the gown's embellishment to lay flat and trouble her no further, when she had an idea, and instead of settling it, reached to tear it free, those painstaking stitches that had secured it to the fabric easily broken in the brief act of violence and bid for its mistress' freedom.
"Take this," she told the child. "Show it to vouch for my story. You may keep it, Johannah. It will fetch a pretty penny should you choose to sell it. It is the finest Nottingham lace, made of the rarest Oriental thread. From a skein that was a gift from Queen Eleanor, upon the birth of my mother's first child."
"Do you not want it, my lady?" Johannah's face was troubled.
"It will do me little good, I fear, where I am bound." Out of habit, Marian smiled, as though to brighten the grim prospect of her immediate future for the child. "I will leave it with you, here, that you may find better use for it."
"I do not know," the child confessed to Allan.
"But how can you not know?" DJaq's question rang out, bordering on panic. "You have spoken with Marian? You have encountered her here, on the docks?"
"Easy, there," Allan counseled DJaq, worried she might spook the child. He tried a different tack. "What can you tell us, Little One? 'Bout the fine lady wot gave you that lace piece? Were there men with her?"
"She was left alone, in her carriage, here on the wharf. She did not know where she was being taken, or when." She smiled, "but she knew you would come."
He ignored her smile, and the odd belief she had in him, Allan-A-Dale, as valiant rescuer of Lady Marian.
"And that is all?" DJaq struggled to come to terms with disappointed hopes. "There is no code, no message to tell us how to find her, in all this? Among...all this?" DJaq's mind spun at the seeming impossibility of the task she had believed so close to being accomplished.
"She is no longer here, Lady Turk," Johannah added.
"And how would you know that, my girl?"
She spoke of the wharf gossip that never escaped her sharp ears. "The men with her had contracted ahead for a vessel to be readied with Bendick the slaver. They were only here but scant hours before it sailed for the Holy Land."
Allan closed his eyes at the ill news, as though letting it wash over him, a chilly baptism of truth. Marian, gone, taken beyond their reach. He fought against the urge to re-envision her there in the stable, the last time he had seen her, both of them agreed that he was unable to spare time to secure the key, to devote to picking one of the Sheriff's best locks. Surely they had been agreed, he second-guessed himself. Surely. The Sheriff and Gisborne off to effect the killing of the king. Too late, too late he had stood against it. Without Richard, outlawed forever. Without Marian, disfellowshipped forever. And, his mind recalled to him, rightly so.
"Hours? They have sailed?" DJaq asked hollowly for clarification. "On a slaver?" It was all she could do to choke out the abhorrent word.
Allan simply stood, and reached for the child's hand. "Best come with us for now, Johannah, 'got some lads you ought to meet."
"I do NOT understand," Much fussed and fumed, more than one hardened customer of the Widowed Cob casting a wary eye at his high-strung antics. "Lady Marian is not engaged to Allan, she is not in love with Allan. Why should we for one moment believe she has left a message with this child for Allan? When by the girl's own admission she does not even know the name Robin, or Hood?"
"'Could be one of the Sheriff's tricks," John agreed, also slow to believe the child's veracity. "Might be he and Gisborne are lying in wait for us to make sail from here, in hopes of us falling for this tale-that they are already on the water."
"No, Much," Will addressed the first complaint among the mounting number of them, his eye to Robin at the bar, where their leader stood silent, his head inclined toward studying the worn and rubbed wood in front of him, the outrage, disharmony and scent of possible betrayal swirling all about him among his fellows.
Will continued, "She thinks Robin dead, the rest of us done for. She has no family. Sir Edward is dead. Who else might she expect or depend upon to come for her?"
"But the child knew to ask for DJaq," John dissented.
DJaq broke in, "she has said she was told to ask, but to expect Allan would be alone."
"Then why ask for you at all?" Robin himself queried, quietly, his voice not argumentative, but natural in its pitch.
"It was reasonable to think one of us might have gotten away," Will asserted, throwing a smile to DJaq.
"But DJaq?" Much asked, too lost in his fitting to perceive the rudeness with which he expressed himself. "Come on. Of all of us, DJaq gets away? We're dead, laid out on Ellingham's pyre, or our lifeless bodies dragged behind their horses back to Nottingham, or beheaded onto pikes, whatever-and yet DJaq is free, sky-larking in Sherwood? Rallying Allan to throw out all thought to his own safety and go after Marian? Does she even know how to get to Portsmouth?" With that last jibe, Much seemed to recover his senses. "Sorry," he threw to a wide-eyed DJaq, the beginnings of remorse for his unfair assessment of her beginning to dawn on his features.
"And how was the child found?" Robin asked again for clarification.
"She were singing me song, about Tuxfarne Meggie," Allan offered, truly wishing he were not feeling so compelled to speak up.
DJaq took over, knowing it was probably better the less Allan had to speak in this moment. "The words were altered so that it called for Allan, rather than the tavern maid."
Even amidst the heat of this debate, out of the corner of her eye she saw Will stifle a snigger at her polite use of the word 'maid' to refer to the girl in question. Had she been standing near him she would have sent her elbow into his gut. As it were, she let a glare suffice, and found that much like her, he also could not quite swallow down or fully submerge the persistent euphoria (despite all the darkness that circled about them) with which that long night spent believing they would perish with the dawn had left them.
"How can you trust anything he says, DJaq?" John asked, his attitude fully bitter. "Certainly, he plucked us out from Ellingham's mercenaries, but passing us news of Marian as captured saw us leaving the shire without so much as checking to see if she were not tucked up in her bed in the castle."
"For all we know," Much jumped with gusto on John's bandwagon, "the Sheriff and Gisborne are here only to see to finishing us once and for all-or forcing us to sail to the ends of the earth as a way of ridding themselves of Robin Hood--of us--forever, if not for a generous long while."
"I had not thought of that," Will confessed. "A double-bluff? Could it be true, then, that they might even be using Allan as their tool? His return to us genuine, only, his information faulty?" Here his concern began to show. "Anything could be happening in Nottingham in our absence."
Much, Little John and Will exchanged uneasy looks.
Without thought, at this most-recent slam against not only the genuineness of his earlier repentance, but also his skill at information-gathering, Allan weighed in, his eyes sliding across the dissenting trio, trying to will Robin's to look up so that he might see into them to take their measure. "You've all become rather more chummy than I recall. Is DJaq the only one allowed any longer to have and speak her own mind?"
"You have not been with us, Traitor," Much called out, in the absence of Robin's speaking-up, feeling like he had to defend the gang in its leader's silence. "You do not know what we have been through, what we have seen. In what ways we have...evolved as a gang." His words were near-hysterical in their delivery, but also smacking with challenge. Several in the pub, thinking a coming-to-blows was imminent, looked up from their own drinks and games of chance.
"Yeah, well," Allan slipped into old habits where Much was concerned. "If I had-a been there, I woulda voted against a surprise party in Nettlestone Barn. And if I were overruled I would have at least had the good sense to vet the chap roasting the pig, yeah?" He and Much were nearly nose-to-nose, the blind beggar child all that came between them at present.
"Peace!" Robin ordered, his hands gripping the cusp of the bar as he clenched it to lever himself into a full standing position. "Let us consider for a moment what we know to be true. The Sheriff has taken as big of a risk in leaving Nottingham as have we. He would not do so simply to lure us far afield, when his mercenaries had us like fish in a barrel. He would not risk so greatly unless he felt assured of a generous return. Killing the King would yield such a return. Therefore, I take his and Gisborne's actions as related by Allan to be true."
DJaq reached a hand to Allan's shoulder, to remind him that not everyone present was hostile toward him. At her touch, and remembrance of Johannah at his side, he eased back from his confrontation of Much.
Johannah took out the piece of lace, holding it up where the gang could mostly see it in the afternoon's dim tavern light.
At the sight of it, Much, John and Will froze.
Robin looked as though he might tear it from her hands. He shook his head, addressing the little girl. "You see, small Johannah of Portsmouth," he gave her his hand to hold. "The Sheriff would not be clever enough to leave word only for Allan. It would be Robin of Locksley he would have you singing about, and asking for. The man that would marry the great lady you met. The man whose heart she calls her own." His voice took on a grim cast, "a heart she now bears away with her, according to your word, to Palestine, at the mercy of a treasonous, unprincipled troll and his ogre of a lieutenant bent on the unthinkable: depriving a king of his God-given right to rule, by ending his life."
"And so you believe him?" Much interrupted, sputtering. "You believe Allan?"
"She thinks me dead, Much," Robin replied.
"Well, but, she has done so before-many times-believed you dead, and yet you always came for her. Always!"
"Very well, then," Robin agreed, though not echoing Much's deep conviction. "Then let us take Marian's message and marker," he indicated the girl and the lace, "to hold two meanings. The first, that she is alive, and at present being carried far from England against her will, despite her best efforts at escape. The second," here he paused, his eyes resting, finally, on Allan's, whom they had not met up with since first the black sheep had arrived at the tavern. "...the second, that she trusts that, were we dead, passed out of this life, that Allan would come, alone, if necessary, to fetch her. That she trusts in him to do so, at great personal risk, that even alone Marian believes that he would seek passage to follow her." Robin paused in speaking, but did not avert his gaze, it growing more significant as each moment passed. "I do not know everything that came to pass during your time at the castle," said Robin to his former gang member. "But I do know that you never betrayed her. And I know that more than once she has asked me to seek to forgive, and mend the situation between us. I will not second-guess her faith in you now." He barely stopped for breath. "Much," he beckoned to his mate, "we visit Jakob the moneylender. He will advance us the fares, and find us the soonest upcoming passage before day's end."
Robin and Much were gone, without another rumble or stammer out of Much. John and Will set about securing lodging for the coming evening.
DJaq looked at Allan. The others might not see it (certainly none of them were paying attention to him at the moment), but in the apples of his cheeks, just below the wells of his eyes, she saw a tension there, a strain in those usually smooth, so often jolly, muscles.
"Grace and mercy," she said.
"Wot's that?" he asked, "why you swearin'?"
"Grace," she told him, "receiving things one does not deserve. Like Robin's trust. Mercy. Not receiving things one does deserve. Like Robin's censure." She paused a bit, deciding to re-state it more simply, "like what Much would like to see you get."
He did not reply. She did not expect him to. With the child they made their way back to her patch on the wharf. Once arrived there they stopped as Johannah took up her usual post.
"Here," said DJaq, her hand extending him a tag-Allan looked more closely at it-his tag.
"How's this?" he asked, taken completely by surprise.
DJaq's eyes looked up into his. "I went back for it."
"How d'ye mean?"
"Robin, he had...thrown it into the underbrush."
"Oh," Allan said.
"Take it," she encouraged him. "It is yours. It has always been yours."
"Naw," he said, a slight inflection of his tone showing for but a moment that her rescuing of it touched him, "don't think the others would take too well to that, just yet. Got a better idea."
He reached for the broken thong, oddly wary of touching the actual tag, as though it might hold for him a disturbing sense memory of the last time it lay against his skin at The Trip, and bent toward Johannah, knotting the severed cord together again about the child's small neck. "You have it," he told her. "Keep it for me."
"Until you return?" Johannah asked. "I will wait. Everyday I will be here, waiting for you, expecting you. And her," she said, meaning Marian.
"Tell you what," Allan smiled at her, "D'ye know Portchester Castle yonder?" His own eyes cast toward the spit of land on the Northern side of the harbour. "The Norman church, there?"
She nodded. Two of her brothers regularly trolled for coin nearby its steps.
"Wot say you, one day, when you have a chance," he took out two gold coins, pressing them into her palm, "you go in, perhaps, light a candle? Say a prayer? For Robin Hood's men?"
"For Robin Hood's men," she willingly promised him, adding, as she let her hand rest again for a moment on his bared wrist. "For Allan-A-Dale."
He rose quickly at her calling out of him in particular, attempting to avoid eye contact with DJaq, whose curiosity in his potential reaction was obvious even from the set of her foot against the boards of the dock.
DJaq turned to follow his back as he walked away, craning her neck slightly to call over his shoulder, "it will be a great long time, Allan, before we are returned, you know. It is a trip of...considerable distance."
"Ah," he scoffed at her inference. He did not turn back to answer her, so that she could not see the brief shadow still upon his face from the child's words. "Might as well visit her a church every now and again, mightn't she? What's a blind beggar child got to do, after all, with her time?"
"What, indeed," agreed DJaq, smiling, her tone warm with knowing, with understanding, and far from gloating.
They spoke little after, all her breath necessary to keep up with him and not lose him and the reassuring shade of his tall back in the scurry and kerfuffle that was Portsmouth.
...The End...
A/N: Hopefully, the song the title is taken from works in two ways: Without Allan (after all, she has been told, and perhaps come to believe, that Robin is dead), Marian 'goes' to the far distant unknown. And without Marian's faith in him as Robin interprets it, Allan 'goes', far from the fellowship and trust of his mates-that which means most to him in all the world.
"This is hard to say, but as I wandered through the lea,
I felt for just a fleeting moment that
I suddenly was free of being lonely.
Then I closed my eyes and saw the very reason why.
I saw a man with his head bowed low
His heart had no place to go
I looked and I thought to myself with a sigh:
There, but for you, go I
I saw a man walking by the sea
Alone with the tide was he
I looked and I thought as I watched him go by
There, but for you, go I
Lonely [people] all around me, trying not to cry
'Till the day you found me, there among them was I
[line omitted]
I thought as I thanked all the stars in the sky
There, but for you, go I." - Lerner & Lowe's Brigadoon
Just found myself still thinking about Allan and that peach, I guess, and what came before.
Author: Nettlestone Nell
Word Count: around 9000
Rating: G
Characters/Pairings: Allan, DJaq, Robin, Much, Marian, Little John, Will, Robin/Marian, Will/DJaq, outlaws, OC "Johannah"
Spoilers/Warnings: Occurs between 2x12 and 2x13.
Summary: Something of the gang's (in particular Allan's) adventures between Robin's 2x12 "I'm coming, my love," and 2x13's disembarking at the coastline near Acre. Set in Portsmouth. Not a true prequel to Allan-A-Dale Eats A Peach, but harmonizes well with it nonetheless.
Disclaimer: No one can truly own the legend of Robin Hood, but BBC/Tiger Aspect seem to hold rights to this particular iteration.
Category: Drama/Friendship; Epic Short Fic (over 5K words)
There, But for You, Go I
or
Allan-A-Dale Hears a Who
The wharves of Portsmouth bustled. They stank, equal parts of fish and filth, they swelled with peasants, ruffians and scalawags. They teemed with men of high birth and below low, women of no morals, and of considerably less. Rife with pickpockets, stevedores, short-grift thieves. England's last stop for soldiers and coin bound for the Holy Land. Riddled with respectable merchants, and outlaws.
Today, any census would have curiously shown a marked increase in the population of the latter.
Just as any census four days prior would have shown a marked increase in appointed officials (shire sheriffs, to be exact), henchmen, and, unusually, ladies of noble birth.
At eight, little Johannah was not much one for census-taking, nor, as she had never been to school, numbers, but even in her from-birth blindness, the singing beggar girl, a fixture at the docks, had noticed the peculiar trend of companies neither merchant nor military in nature seeking passage on ships to the Holy Land.
Certainly, mid-October heralded not the best season to be out on the water, and persistent news of the wars told anyone with scruples 'twas not the time for planning one's holy pilgrimage to Jerusalem.
As ever, to buy her bread, Johannah sang, one hand held out to receive alms of any kind. She was not like the other children, able to scatter among the crates and dunnage, slip hands into pockets or pouches, small fingers nimbly claiming coin or token without the owners' knowledge. Nor was she able to chase and worry a mark to distraction as did those children traveling in packs until the mark produced coin or tidbit to satisfy and scatter the overwhelming urchin horde.
Hers was but to sing, standing near the gangplanks, songs of good English things, English beauties, the English countryside, England's noble peoples; to evoke pleasure in those arriving, and stoke sadness (and pity) among those here departing England's shores.
It was a good living.
But the past four days had seen her add a new air to her songlist. Some of the dockworkers had not taken too kindly to how often she chose to reprise it. More than one had roughly told her so, a few even trying to get her to surrender her patch. It was rare that the people of the wharf (roughhewn though they might be) were unkind to her, but still, she had made a promise, accepted payment, and she made an effort to keep her word.
The outlaw Allan-A-Dale and the Saracen ex-slave DJaq had paired off (as had the others) to search for the Sheriff and Gisborne (and, naturally, Marian-though it had been hours since any of their company had said her name).
Allan could easily tell by the cast of DJaq's eyes that she would far rather have been tasked to search with Will-for whatever reason Allan did not know, other than that none of the other lads had seemed even willing to so much as tolerate the idea of being paired with him for the task. The Man Who Betrayed Robin Hood, after all, the Reason They Were Here, that Things Had Come to This.
More than once he had caught Robin himself looking at him with murder in his eye on the hell-bent journey down the Portsmouth road from Sherwood.
There had been no stopping, and very little sleeping, and all breath needed for their flight after the Sheriff. (The Sheriff already with a considerable lead.) There had been no true time for confessions or explanations, and certainly none for properly begging forgiveness of his fellows.
He was like a man half-shriven, possibly to be allowed entrance into heaven (the safe society of his former forest brethren), but for now condemned (if not to torment) to Limbo (wait, was it Purgatory?), wishing, hoping-dare he say it-praying for someone to light a candle for him, to beg the priest to fully catalog his sins so that the proper expiation might begin. Setting him one step further away from the Hell he had been simmering in (the fires getting hotter every day).
But he knew, as long as Marian was the Sheriff's prisoner (please, God, for his sake if not for hers, nothing worse), no one existed in the world that cared for him enough to illumine such a taper.
DJaq looked to Allan, trusting in his height (she could hardly see over the at-times tight crowds filling the wharves) and his super-trained observer's eyes to find what they were here to locate: the Sheriff, and through him, Marian.
Her own mind was a mess of both clarity and chaos. So much happening, so much in the last few days falling into place. She loved Will. She had told him (and the others) as much. Allah had been kind and he had returned her feelings. The gang was going to die at the hands of the Sheriff's mercenaries, and she would never see them again, eternally parted, her Paradise something less than perfect. Her Paradise without Will. Without Robin or John, or Much. Or...Allan.
Yet she was with him now, the thief and prodigal unexpectedly returned to the fold. She stood at his familiar shoulder, saw his jaw from that very particular angle below that only she could...saw the two small scars on the underside of his chin (not quite to his windpipe)-from a fence gone wrong. 'Before I had got my sea legs in the business-like, you know,' he had told her in a rare moment of truth, referencing his thief's past.
He had never mentioned this incident to any of the others, all too tall, too distant to notice such a thing.
And if they could not find Marian still here, still on English soil, rescue and return her to Nottingham? Robin had not said as much, but the others seemed to already know it in their eyes: even with Marian safely free from the Sheriff, someone would have to go and try to beat the Sheriff and his plot to kill Malik-Ric. And so, into this already confusing, heady cauldron was thrown the possibility of a return to her homeland. And with it, the question of what to do should they survive both the trip and the foiling of the Sheriff's newest regicidal plot. Would she stay and bid the gang goodbye? All the gang?
Her mind swam with possibilities. With suddenly life-altering decisions on the near horizon sprouting so close to just days ago when she had not expected her life to see much beyond the sun rising over the horizon.
Allan had gauged that the Sheriff had a goodly lead over them. He had absconded from their traveling party to return to Nettlestone, a hard all-night ride. But, he had pointed out that the Sheriff and his company traveled by coach, and that once to Portsmouth they would have to engage a vessel and see it outfitted for the trip. So, certainly, he had assured the lads, they yet had time on their side to rescue Marian before the Sheriff sailed. A chance to find and free her in England, rather than an arduous race over water, and the Palestine desert to come.
"Oi!"
She heard Allan protest, extricating a faceless pickpocket's wandering hand from near his money pouch, his own fingers twisting the theft-bent ones backward, like a man levering open a determined dog's jaws from off its prey.
"Oi! Oiii!" he shouted a second time, with far more irritation in his tone as he similarly plucked the hands of three others off her coin purse, their stealthy touches she had not even felt, much less seen their greedy fingers among the jostling press of people.
"Thanks," she said, meaning it. She was not used to moving about in this sort of an environment, too long reconciled to life in the forest, or the small villages of Nottinghamshire peasants. Her time spent in Nottingham Town, of course, had generally been in disguise, her more likely the prospective thief than the mark. And pickpocketry had never proven her strong suit, though Allan had tried his best to teach her. 'Fingers not long enough,' he had told her, not meaning his professional's assessment to sound negative. 'Height's good, though,' he had counseled. Makes gettin' away in a crowd easier. Missed that since I left off bein' a kid.'
"Give over," he demanded from her now, his eyes on her purse.
She looked at him with a wary eye that said 'what?' better than any spoken word could.
"I shall keep it for you. 'Twill be easier than swatting these insistent 'flies' away from both of us all day."
The notion was sound enough. She considered for a moment. More than did the others, she believed in Allan. Which was not to say that she felt 100% sure of him just yet, but certainly, where her money was concerned, she knew he could have had it off her in a twinkling had he taken a shine to doing so. And so she freely surrendered the coin purse with a burgeoning confidence in the man with whom she once had shared some things far more valuable. And had for awhile contemplated the possibility of sharing others.
"Perhaps," she suggested, untying the leather thong that attached her purse to her waist, "we ought give out to some of these in need, as we see them in our search. We are still Robin Hood, after all."
"Wot's that?" Allan asked over his shoulder as he broke a path through the crowd for them both with only the force of his shoulders. "'We'? Robin gone all kingly on you lot in my absence?"
"No," she replied, taken aback by Allan's assumption, not sure how to explain the gang's recently established motto to this only-just-returned outsider, and finding it hard to keep her low-pitched voice from being carried off in the surrounding din. "Not like that. Though...some things have changed."
Robin and Marian, she thought, engaged. Will and her...declared. The Sherwood band had helped a Templar find and redeem himself, rescued a Queen, sent word to Malik-Ric by the Sultan's best pigeon, stood beside a Crusader knight dying in battle far from the Holy Land's killing fields.
How would those instances have played out had pre-spying-for-Gisborne Allan-A-Dale been among them? Would the hard moments have been quite so hard? The worrisome logistics quite so convoluted? The sad events as gloomy?
Or would the good moments have been slightly dimmed? The times they successfully 'liberated' coaches in Sherwood laden with gold and booty--would those satisfying days have proven clouded by the sound of him grouching that he never personally saw any of the take?
Would Much have been happier to have Allan around to devil him by his side (on his side), or had he, perhaps, been happier in some way to gloat over the then distant man set up in the Sheriff's castle that he had always been most vocally suspicious and most disapproving of?
"No need to spread tuppence among this lot, DJaq," Allan assured her.
When she did not reply to his dismissal of the poverty she saw stretching out, seeming to peek from every crack and crevice, all around her, he stopped his forward motion, turned back toward her and placed a hand over his heart. ('His approximation of a heart', she knew Much would say. 'Blackguard', she knew John would declare, like a sound made when spitting.)
"No funny business, here," he vowed, his hand still in place. "But this lot can pick coin off trees." Quickly his hand shot out to point out to her three separate thieves among the crowd lifting purses and pocketing rings, to the rightful owners' complete oblivion.
"Already," he told her, "they had you and yours 'til I sent them packing. You just see how many of the lads rally back with us this afternoon wot still have two coins to rub together--or even empty pouch left in their possession." His mouth pulled into a near-smile at the notion. "The true poor of Portsmouth, summat tells me, ain't these blokes and kiddies skimming off the harbour's bounty."
She accepted his assessment of this place, and they proceeded back through the crowd as before. Near several lowered gangplanks they stopped, Allan trying to strategize who might be best to speak with; Robin and Much having sought out the Harbour Master and Import Taxation Officer, Little John and Will seeking the most influential figure in the Portsmouth underworld to ask similar questions of departing sheriffs and kidnapped maidens.
DJaq was not sure if she heard the voice first or saw the beggar girl from whom it came. It was a pleasant voice, as English voices went, and it more than satisfied the requirements of what the English took as good singing. The small girl was just concluding a song about meadows and milkmaids, and tall grasses best used by country lovers, when, without hardly a pause she began her next tune.
"Allan!" DJaq shouted up to him from where he had ascended the steep incline of a gangplank in hopes to better orient himself to the lay of the land. "Allan!" Across the distance she saw his light eyes they flicked down to see her, found herself thinking of how the sun on sand would flare into them far-worse (sprouting headaches, blurred vision) than into her own deeply brown ones. Thinking of how unsuited (or at least how unprepared) half the gang were for the lands of her people.
Allan squinted down at her, not really ready yet to be bothered, but he had never known DJaq to cry wolf, and so he returned with some haste to her side.
"Wotcher got?" he asked, surprised when she merely gestured to a blind beggar child singing for coin nearby where the multiple gangplanks met with the dock. Certainly, the child was pretty enough under the usual grime that such urchins necessarily wore. Her infirmity did not seem to have been the result of injury, or if it were, no disfiguring signs of the trauma remained. Her hair was Saxon blonde, and poker-straight, the thinness of her frame accenting her delicate features. Sweet enough, but hardly interesting enough to call him down from his plum vantage point to inspect. If DJaq wanted to toss her a coin of charity, it surely could have waited until he'd seen what he needed from his upper perch.
"Listen," DJaq urged him. "Listen to what she is singing. It is that song...the one where you asked me to help you rhyme something with 'bosom-fair'."
He chose to take issue with her claim. "Not tryin' to be funny, but...I came up with that one all on me own, there, DJaq."
"Lis-ten, you wooly-headed Englishman! What are the chances a song you wrote in Sherwood Forest, meant for a Tuxfarne barmaid has made it all the way down the countryside onto the lips of a Portsmouth beggar child?"
He listened. It was his song, the tune, at least, and a great many of the words. Had he been a more virtuous chap he might've felt a bit of guilt for hearing them come, as it were, out of the mouths of babes.
His words, but the name all wrong. He had crafted the song for Meggie (Old Henry's Bones, but he barely recalled her name, now.). This girl was instead singing (he craned his ear to be sure he was catching it right) 'Allan, Fair Allan'.
Remarkable, indeed. He did not wish to speculate on how she might (or might not) have re-worked the 'bosom-fair' passage.
"We must speak with her," DJaq insisted, with conviction and mounting optimism. "Surely it is a sign--a code--a message."
"Wot? You don't think it cannot just be that my talents have been discovered and appreciated here in the South?"
"What?" she asked, acidly. "By re-casting yourself in the part of the object of desire in a shoddily dashed off tavern ballad? Its crafting fueled largely by stolen October Ale?"
He interjected, "And Meggie's considerable...generosity."
DJaq's eyebrows made her point for her. "No."
"Alright, alriiight!" he gave in, motioning with his hands to show her he was going. "We will speak with the child. Perhaps she might actually benefit from some of the Sherwood charity you are so determined to distribute."
"Certainly," DJaq agreed, "for who here would be rewarding her for singing such rubbish?"
At her continued belittling of his 'talent', he shot her a petulant expression. Followed shortly by a submerged grin. It had been an uncommon good batch of ale that day.
There were few (if any) who would have said the Widowed Cob was a genteel sort of an alehouse and inn, and those few were certainly not among the rogues' gallery of Portsmouth that chose to regularly sip, sup, and sleep there.
Added to the roll this day? Nottinghamshire outlaws, four in number, awaiting one of their fellows traveling with a sixth, their recently forsworn enemy. This wretched locale to be their rally point.
"Well," said Much, eyeing a generous helping of sand and grit a-swim in the last swallow remaining in his cup, "we may at least be reasonably sure to avoid the Sheriff by having situated our company here."
"Was it actually ale, do you suppose?" Little John asked the others rhetorically, "or merely mud-stained water?"
"It has given me twice the thirst we had coming in, if only in hopes to wash it from my mouth," Will Scarlet protested.
"You have gone soft, lads!" Robin chided them. "Soft on clear-as-crystal water from the Idle, the Trent, where they begin as Sherwood springs, untouched except by God. You, Much," he challenged his closest fellow, "have drunk more than any one man's fair share of Palestine sand in your day, and often, as I well know, with thankful heart."
"Yes, Master, but it..." Much took in his surroundings with a wary eye, "seemed cleaner, somehow. And the water it swam in, well, I needn't say it, but--more rare than Burgundy wine to a beggarman."
"So," Will noted, "as our searches have all but dead-ended us back here, it seems we may each have cause to sample such delicacy not too far hence," unable to deny to himself some growing level of fascination with the possibility of journeying to DJaq's homeland, despite the disastrous reason behind their prospective voyage.
"I'd rather eat Sherwood dirt the rest of my days, its stones my bread, than cross oceans to pick fights with the Sheriff," declared John, his voice rumbling, impassioned. It seemed for a moment as if he might pound his tankard on the bar in front of him to further emphasize his point.
Robin's head came up at this baldly stated conviction, his eyes searching John's for the full truth of it. Robin's showed a woundedness about the corners that he might have so mis-judged John's commitment to their present course.
"But," John continued, holding Robin's pleading, half hurt gaze, "for Marian...the woman you love, the Nightwatchman, friend to the gang, to the poor..." he paused, to give those words greater meaning, "and for King Richard, I will do this."
At this pronouncement of his intent to support his fellows (and, in particular, Robin), Much slapped his hand companionably onto John's shoulder, quickly retracting it at the solid, almost boulder-like resistance of John's bulk with which he met upon impact. Shortly, he shook out his hand as though it had been cramped, in an effort to return feeling to it.
"Then we are agreed?" Robin's eyes flicked from man to man, examining them for further doubts as to the inevitable turn their trip had taken, "if they cannot be found here, we are, to a man, bound for," he nearly balked at saying it, "for the war court of Richard."
"For Marian," John asserted.
As usual, Much begged to differ, "but it is Richard whose life is held cheaply by the Sheriff. King Richard whom he means to have killed. Not Marian." Quickly he back-tracked, "though, of course, Marian must be found, and rescued. Of course."
Interestingly, Robin did not reply to the argument his own declaration of Richard as their immediate objective had begun.
"She is with Gisborne we believe, yes?" asked Will, as always attempting to be rational.
"Yes," Much speedily agreed.
"He is meant to love her--some version of her, anyway," Will made his case. "He will not let the Sheriff harm her."
At this Robin turned to him. "And so we are to pin our hopes for Marian's safety upon the villain Gisborne?" he asked, as though he did wish an answer, seeming to now argue with his own decision that the King's welfare was paramount, and needs must be seen to first. "That he will not let the Sheriff harm her, as he is alleged to love her? That she will come to no harm by his own hand?"
John interjected, turning the discussion's course slightly to the left, his tone equally as acidic as Robin's when Hood spoke Gisborne's name, "As we now in this alehouse pin our hopes--at your insistence--for her safety upon the last man to report in? The scoundrel A-Dale?"
"Why did you not order one of us to partner him?" Will asked, his tone more reasonable than the others' had momentarily become.
"Why throw DJaq to the wolf?" Much also questioned.
"Would you have gone with him?" Robin asked Much, receiving only a scowl in reply. "And you, Will, would you?"
"If you had ordered it," Will replied with a reflective sincerity.
Robin looked for a moment into the tankard he held, still full, knowing its contents could not slake his thirst, this thirst that seemed to have queerishly settled somewhere in his arms, his eyes, reminding him of a hunger for what was missing there; the sight of Marian, the embrace of Marian--the proximity of Marian. "DJaq has ever had an understanding of Allan. Of parts of Allan that none of us yet have managed to decode, much less demystify."
"You know," Much began, recalling an afternoon in Sherwood when DJaq had been captive in Nottingham Castle. "There was that time...I thought perhaps..." At a forbidding look from Will he fell silent.
"I have complete faith that DJaq can handle Allan," Robin announced, "but more than that, I have complete faith that should he choose to cross us again, DJaq will see into him, and perceive his treachery long before we might."
"Perhaps," Little John continued to cling to his gloom-and-doom belief where Allan was concerned, troubled that the duo had not yet arrived back at the rally point, "she already has."
Will stepped away from the bar. "Shall I go and search them out?"
Much and Little John waited attentively on Robin's answer. Would their leader agree to distrust the man who had only so recently regained it?
Robin handed his untouched tankard over to Little John. "No, Will." He shook his head. "There is time yet before our agreed-upon rendezvous. Let us not let sour grapes interfere with our hopes for what he and DJaq may well have discovered (what we four failed in finding out): the Sheriff, his hiding place, his plans, and--above all--Marian, safe and well and yet on English shores, knowing we will come to fetch her home."
Johannah sensed, even among the thronging crowd, that two individuals were approaching her. Perhaps it was the measured weight of their particular footfalls as they hit the wooden wharf upon which she stood. Perhaps it was the way the warmth of the sun refracted off their faces as they reset their path to encounter her.
"Hullo, my little one," Allan-A-Dale greeted her, going down onto one knee to bring himself closer to her height. "Wot's that you're singing, there? Summat Daddy brought home with him from the pub?"
"Daddy disappeared two years gone, never been seen since," she told him.
Allan shot a calming look to temper DJaq's tenderhearted reaction. One that was clearly meant to recall to her mind that such hardluck stories (true or otherwise) were the very bread and butter of any such child beggar, and could not be trusted.
"Sorry to hear that, Love," he told the girl, his tone soft, but not overly-sympathetic. "I got a nice shiny coin, here to give you, if you'll tell me how you came by that song," he coaxed. He produced the coin, though she could not see it to appreciate, with all the panache of a performing street mage, reached to wrap her fingers about it, knowing that in her business the weight and imprint of the coin she would know, that it would hold meaning for her, proof that he was not bluffing.
Her tiny fingers, their nail tips worn smooth from her constant use of them, probed the golden coin he held between his two fingers, then momentarily settled, resting on the inside of his bared wrist, connecting them in an oddly intimate gesture.
She leaned into him, and spoke quietly to the air just to the side of his face, "Do you travel with a Turk?"
Allan's eyes snapped open wide at the unexpected question, but his voice revealed none of his surprise. "Matter of fact, I do. I do, indeed."
"My name is Johannah," the little girl declared to the space beyond Allan's shoulder, introducing herself. "May I see you?"
It was clear she meant to be addressing DJaq, who needed no prodding from Allan to step forward and encounter the girl. "Hello," she said. "And why are you expecting me?"
Johannah extended her right hand (her left still resting on Allan's wrist) in an upward fashion, and DJaq assumed the girl wished to touch her face. But when Johannah's hand came into contact with DJaq's chin, the child moved her fingers lower, to the well of DJaq's throat, where she felt the lacing, there, and following it caught the tag Will had made to designate DJaq as one of Robin's gang. At this, Johannah brought her other hand to the task, and using both, seemed to be able to divine the scorched shape of the elliptical bow and arrow.
Allan and DJaq watched on, Allan easily as entranced by another person having such tactile skill, as was DJaq by the suspense of what this all surely meant.
Satisfied with the marking she had discovered on the tag, Johannah's hands shot back to Allan's wrist, unmoved from where she had last met with it. She ignored the coin, using his arms as a path up to his chin, beyond his scruff of beard, over his face and straight for the bridge and bulb of his nose.
Had DJaq not been holding her breath in anticipation of the child again speaking, she would have laughed.
"What is it, Little One?" Allan prompted the girl, his eyes crossed as though having sighted a fly on the tip of his nose. He moved his hand to gently bring hers back down.
"You are Allan, Allan-A-Dale," she said, her smile charming, but unable to light up her vacant eyes. "I have been waiting for you."
Marian knew she had not been left alone for long. Knew that if not for the unfamiliarity of the locale (the impossibility of her knowing anyone in it) it was unlikely she would have been allowed out of the direct sight of the Sheriff and Guy.
As with many parts of their plan, they had not told her where they were going, nor when they might return. She had been left in the carriage, set alongside the docks, chained by both wrists to a bulky new ring the Sheriff had ordered a blacksmith in a village along the Portsmouth road to forge and install the day after they awoke and Allan had been found missing.
The driver, her only supervision, had driven most of the night, and from the echo of his snores she could tell he was serving himself more at the moment by sneaking a rest, than serving his Sheriff in the minding of her.
The skin on her wrists was dangerously close to splitting from the amount of tugging she had been practicing upon her shackles, even through what had once been long sleeves. Unless she could be certain the chains would give, it was useless to injure herself in a way that would surely not see clean, proper tending, and would more likely sour and turn on her.
So she chose to try, with her feet, to unlatch the re-enforced carriage's door. It had not been easy, but she had managed to unbolt it and kick it to where it would stay somewhat open, but no large amount, only enough that she might feel something of the breeze.
As her eyes scoured the carriage interior for the thousandth time for possible un-seen means of escape, her ears began to hear, quite nearby, the sounds of a child singing...about England's green meadows, and sky and flowers, pretty girls come to town on market day.
"Hello!" she called from her seat inside. "Hello! I will pay well for a song! More generously for two!" she cried, in hopes of enticing the singer closer.
"Milady," a small child's face, a tow-headed boy, appeared, half-obscured by the door's meager cracked opening. "What likes thee? Johannah will sing."
"Bring her to me, Boy," Marian used her best voice of noble entitlement to command. "I shall have her stand within the carriage that I may better hear her."
"Aye, Lady," he scattered to do her bidding.
Moments later he returned, another small child, a girl of no more than eight on his arm, her blindness apparent. Her clothes were more tattered than any Marian had seen still being worn in the shire. To make up for their rips and worn-through holes, she had on several equally ragged layers. But her posture was straight and, possibly, even proud. Whatever life she lived, it had not yet worn her down. The boy whispered to tell her of the steps she needed to mount to get into the carriage. "Remember to bob yer curtsy to the lady," he murmured to her in lieu of a farewell.
"Are you good at remembering things, Johannah?" Marian asked her, pleased she did not have to hide her shackles for fear they might frighten the child. "Like the words to your songs? Come closer, and I shall show you a game I know." She found she was able to extend her own hand to catch one of the girl's, beginning their necessarily brief acquaintance by tracing and re-tracing the familiar brand from the wooden lintel of Locksley's greatroom fireplace into the child's open palm. Its cherished shape and unending circle giving Marian the unexpected focus and comfort that clutching Rosary beads might for some.
"DJaq," Allan instructed, handing another coin to his mate, "get us bread. Cider if they have it," he inclined his head to the child, "wine if they have not. We shall be here, waiting."
DJaq did not like the idea of walking away when things had just gotten most-interesting, but she saw the necessity in his request, and hurried along to buy the modest provisions with all haste.
"Have you brought your other men?" Johannah asked, herself as curious to have her questions answered as he was to have her ask them.
"My men?" Allan balked.
"Well, the Turk has lived, yes?"
"Lived?" he asked, his mind finally catching her train of thought. "Oh, right. The mercenaries in Nettlestone. Yes. The Turk, that is, DJaq lives. All live. We got clean away."
"I was not sure but that only you would come."
"Only me?"
"Aye. To rescue the lady."
"And why would you think that? Me come, alone, to Portsmouth?" He had, after all, never been one to chase after trouble. Rather, one to run in the calculated opposite direction of it.
"She gave me this, she did. The lady." Johannah reached her hand in among her ragged layers and produced a patch of lace that would have been spotless and fresh, had her own dirty hands not so recently had the use of it. Still, its provenance was unmistakable.
"That is Nottingham lace," DJaq announced from over Allan's shoulder, having returned with the foodstuffs.
Allan spun his head about so that they might share a significant look.
"Where is Marian?" he asked Johannah, no longer bothering, even, to verify that Marian was the lady in question.
"Now sing it back to me, quickly," Marian had told the child. "Allan, fair Allan..."
Johannah did as she was told, fumbling over very few of the short song's rather bawdy lines.
Again, Marian cast about the carriage for something she might leave with the child, a payment, but also a marker, something to prove that it was she who had been here, not possibly another. Something recognizable, connected to her. Something Gisborne and the Sheriff would not notice was missing.
She had no money, no rings or jewelry that had not already been stripped from her to join the coffers of the Black Knights' treasure.
If only she had a shire flower, or paper and ink to craft a note-Robin's ring, as had worked so well in the past. She had to close her eyes at that thought, lest she be distracted from the matter at hand. Robin, his loss, to be buried away to mourn another time. Not this time.
She reached her hands (impossible to raise only one) to the side of her neck and the neckline of her gown, where the lace had begun to pull off, causing her skin to itch. She gave a few scratches, tried to get the gown's embellishment to lay flat and trouble her no further, when she had an idea, and instead of settling it, reached to tear it free, those painstaking stitches that had secured it to the fabric easily broken in the brief act of violence and bid for its mistress' freedom.
"Take this," she told the child. "Show it to vouch for my story. You may keep it, Johannah. It will fetch a pretty penny should you choose to sell it. It is the finest Nottingham lace, made of the rarest Oriental thread. From a skein that was a gift from Queen Eleanor, upon the birth of my mother's first child."
"Do you not want it, my lady?" Johannah's face was troubled.
"It will do me little good, I fear, where I am bound." Out of habit, Marian smiled, as though to brighten the grim prospect of her immediate future for the child. "I will leave it with you, here, that you may find better use for it."
"I do not know," the child confessed to Allan.
"But how can you not know?" DJaq's question rang out, bordering on panic. "You have spoken with Marian? You have encountered her here, on the docks?"
"Easy, there," Allan counseled DJaq, worried she might spook the child. He tried a different tack. "What can you tell us, Little One? 'Bout the fine lady wot gave you that lace piece? Were there men with her?"
"She was left alone, in her carriage, here on the wharf. She did not know where she was being taken, or when." She smiled, "but she knew you would come."
He ignored her smile, and the odd belief she had in him, Allan-A-Dale, as valiant rescuer of Lady Marian.
"And that is all?" DJaq struggled to come to terms with disappointed hopes. "There is no code, no message to tell us how to find her, in all this? Among...all this?" DJaq's mind spun at the seeming impossibility of the task she had believed so close to being accomplished.
"She is no longer here, Lady Turk," Johannah added.
"And how would you know that, my girl?"
She spoke of the wharf gossip that never escaped her sharp ears. "The men with her had contracted ahead for a vessel to be readied with Bendick the slaver. They were only here but scant hours before it sailed for the Holy Land."
Allan closed his eyes at the ill news, as though letting it wash over him, a chilly baptism of truth. Marian, gone, taken beyond their reach. He fought against the urge to re-envision her there in the stable, the last time he had seen her, both of them agreed that he was unable to spare time to secure the key, to devote to picking one of the Sheriff's best locks. Surely they had been agreed, he second-guessed himself. Surely. The Sheriff and Gisborne off to effect the killing of the king. Too late, too late he had stood against it. Without Richard, outlawed forever. Without Marian, disfellowshipped forever. And, his mind recalled to him, rightly so.
"Hours? They have sailed?" DJaq asked hollowly for clarification. "On a slaver?" It was all she could do to choke out the abhorrent word.
Allan simply stood, and reached for the child's hand. "Best come with us for now, Johannah, 'got some lads you ought to meet."
"I do NOT understand," Much fussed and fumed, more than one hardened customer of the Widowed Cob casting a wary eye at his high-strung antics. "Lady Marian is not engaged to Allan, she is not in love with Allan. Why should we for one moment believe she has left a message with this child for Allan? When by the girl's own admission she does not even know the name Robin, or Hood?"
"'Could be one of the Sheriff's tricks," John agreed, also slow to believe the child's veracity. "Might be he and Gisborne are lying in wait for us to make sail from here, in hopes of us falling for this tale-that they are already on the water."
"No, Much," Will addressed the first complaint among the mounting number of them, his eye to Robin at the bar, where their leader stood silent, his head inclined toward studying the worn and rubbed wood in front of him, the outrage, disharmony and scent of possible betrayal swirling all about him among his fellows.
Will continued, "She thinks Robin dead, the rest of us done for. She has no family. Sir Edward is dead. Who else might she expect or depend upon to come for her?"
"But the child knew to ask for DJaq," John dissented.
DJaq broke in, "she has said she was told to ask, but to expect Allan would be alone."
"Then why ask for you at all?" Robin himself queried, quietly, his voice not argumentative, but natural in its pitch.
"It was reasonable to think one of us might have gotten away," Will asserted, throwing a smile to DJaq.
"But DJaq?" Much asked, too lost in his fitting to perceive the rudeness with which he expressed himself. "Come on. Of all of us, DJaq gets away? We're dead, laid out on Ellingham's pyre, or our lifeless bodies dragged behind their horses back to Nottingham, or beheaded onto pikes, whatever-and yet DJaq is free, sky-larking in Sherwood? Rallying Allan to throw out all thought to his own safety and go after Marian? Does she even know how to get to Portsmouth?" With that last jibe, Much seemed to recover his senses. "Sorry," he threw to a wide-eyed DJaq, the beginnings of remorse for his unfair assessment of her beginning to dawn on his features.
"And how was the child found?" Robin asked again for clarification.
"She were singing me song, about Tuxfarne Meggie," Allan offered, truly wishing he were not feeling so compelled to speak up.
DJaq took over, knowing it was probably better the less Allan had to speak in this moment. "The words were altered so that it called for Allan, rather than the tavern maid."
Even amidst the heat of this debate, out of the corner of her eye she saw Will stifle a snigger at her polite use of the word 'maid' to refer to the girl in question. Had she been standing near him she would have sent her elbow into his gut. As it were, she let a glare suffice, and found that much like her, he also could not quite swallow down or fully submerge the persistent euphoria (despite all the darkness that circled about them) with which that long night spent believing they would perish with the dawn had left them.
"How can you trust anything he says, DJaq?" John asked, his attitude fully bitter. "Certainly, he plucked us out from Ellingham's mercenaries, but passing us news of Marian as captured saw us leaving the shire without so much as checking to see if she were not tucked up in her bed in the castle."
"For all we know," Much jumped with gusto on John's bandwagon, "the Sheriff and Gisborne are here only to see to finishing us once and for all-or forcing us to sail to the ends of the earth as a way of ridding themselves of Robin Hood--of us--forever, if not for a generous long while."
"I had not thought of that," Will confessed. "A double-bluff? Could it be true, then, that they might even be using Allan as their tool? His return to us genuine, only, his information faulty?" Here his concern began to show. "Anything could be happening in Nottingham in our absence."
Much, Little John and Will exchanged uneasy looks.
Without thought, at this most-recent slam against not only the genuineness of his earlier repentance, but also his skill at information-gathering, Allan weighed in, his eyes sliding across the dissenting trio, trying to will Robin's to look up so that he might see into them to take their measure. "You've all become rather more chummy than I recall. Is DJaq the only one allowed any longer to have and speak her own mind?"
"You have not been with us, Traitor," Much called out, in the absence of Robin's speaking-up, feeling like he had to defend the gang in its leader's silence. "You do not know what we have been through, what we have seen. In what ways we have...evolved as a gang." His words were near-hysterical in their delivery, but also smacking with challenge. Several in the pub, thinking a coming-to-blows was imminent, looked up from their own drinks and games of chance.
"Yeah, well," Allan slipped into old habits where Much was concerned. "If I had-a been there, I woulda voted against a surprise party in Nettlestone Barn. And if I were overruled I would have at least had the good sense to vet the chap roasting the pig, yeah?" He and Much were nearly nose-to-nose, the blind beggar child all that came between them at present.
"Peace!" Robin ordered, his hands gripping the cusp of the bar as he clenched it to lever himself into a full standing position. "Let us consider for a moment what we know to be true. The Sheriff has taken as big of a risk in leaving Nottingham as have we. He would not do so simply to lure us far afield, when his mercenaries had us like fish in a barrel. He would not risk so greatly unless he felt assured of a generous return. Killing the King would yield such a return. Therefore, I take his and Gisborne's actions as related by Allan to be true."
DJaq reached a hand to Allan's shoulder, to remind him that not everyone present was hostile toward him. At her touch, and remembrance of Johannah at his side, he eased back from his confrontation of Much.
Johannah took out the piece of lace, holding it up where the gang could mostly see it in the afternoon's dim tavern light.
At the sight of it, Much, John and Will froze.
Robin looked as though he might tear it from her hands. He shook his head, addressing the little girl. "You see, small Johannah of Portsmouth," he gave her his hand to hold. "The Sheriff would not be clever enough to leave word only for Allan. It would be Robin of Locksley he would have you singing about, and asking for. The man that would marry the great lady you met. The man whose heart she calls her own." His voice took on a grim cast, "a heart she now bears away with her, according to your word, to Palestine, at the mercy of a treasonous, unprincipled troll and his ogre of a lieutenant bent on the unthinkable: depriving a king of his God-given right to rule, by ending his life."
"And so you believe him?" Much interrupted, sputtering. "You believe Allan?"
"She thinks me dead, Much," Robin replied.
"Well, but, she has done so before-many times-believed you dead, and yet you always came for her. Always!"
"Very well, then," Robin agreed, though not echoing Much's deep conviction. "Then let us take Marian's message and marker," he indicated the girl and the lace, "to hold two meanings. The first, that she is alive, and at present being carried far from England against her will, despite her best efforts at escape. The second," here he paused, his eyes resting, finally, on Allan's, whom they had not met up with since first the black sheep had arrived at the tavern. "...the second, that she trusts that, were we dead, passed out of this life, that Allan would come, alone, if necessary, to fetch her. That she trusts in him to do so, at great personal risk, that even alone Marian believes that he would seek passage to follow her." Robin paused in speaking, but did not avert his gaze, it growing more significant as each moment passed. "I do not know everything that came to pass during your time at the castle," said Robin to his former gang member. "But I do know that you never betrayed her. And I know that more than once she has asked me to seek to forgive, and mend the situation between us. I will not second-guess her faith in you now." He barely stopped for breath. "Much," he beckoned to his mate, "we visit Jakob the moneylender. He will advance us the fares, and find us the soonest upcoming passage before day's end."
Robin and Much were gone, without another rumble or stammer out of Much. John and Will set about securing lodging for the coming evening.
DJaq looked at Allan. The others might not see it (certainly none of them were paying attention to him at the moment), but in the apples of his cheeks, just below the wells of his eyes, she saw a tension there, a strain in those usually smooth, so often jolly, muscles.
"Grace and mercy," she said.
"Wot's that?" he asked, "why you swearin'?"
"Grace," she told him, "receiving things one does not deserve. Like Robin's trust. Mercy. Not receiving things one does deserve. Like Robin's censure." She paused a bit, deciding to re-state it more simply, "like what Much would like to see you get."
He did not reply. She did not expect him to. With the child they made their way back to her patch on the wharf. Once arrived there they stopped as Johannah took up her usual post.
"Here," said DJaq, her hand extending him a tag-Allan looked more closely at it-his tag.
"How's this?" he asked, taken completely by surprise.
DJaq's eyes looked up into his. "I went back for it."
"How d'ye mean?"
"Robin, he had...thrown it into the underbrush."
"Oh," Allan said.
"Take it," she encouraged him. "It is yours. It has always been yours."
"Naw," he said, a slight inflection of his tone showing for but a moment that her rescuing of it touched him, "don't think the others would take too well to that, just yet. Got a better idea."
He reached for the broken thong, oddly wary of touching the actual tag, as though it might hold for him a disturbing sense memory of the last time it lay against his skin at The Trip, and bent toward Johannah, knotting the severed cord together again about the child's small neck. "You have it," he told her. "Keep it for me."
"Until you return?" Johannah asked. "I will wait. Everyday I will be here, waiting for you, expecting you. And her," she said, meaning Marian.
"Tell you what," Allan smiled at her, "D'ye know Portchester Castle yonder?" His own eyes cast toward the spit of land on the Northern side of the harbour. "The Norman church, there?"
She nodded. Two of her brothers regularly trolled for coin nearby its steps.
"Wot say you, one day, when you have a chance," he took out two gold coins, pressing them into her palm, "you go in, perhaps, light a candle? Say a prayer? For Robin Hood's men?"
"For Robin Hood's men," she willingly promised him, adding, as she let her hand rest again for a moment on his bared wrist. "For Allan-A-Dale."
He rose quickly at her calling out of him in particular, attempting to avoid eye contact with DJaq, whose curiosity in his potential reaction was obvious even from the set of her foot against the boards of the dock.
DJaq turned to follow his back as he walked away, craning her neck slightly to call over his shoulder, "it will be a great long time, Allan, before we are returned, you know. It is a trip of...considerable distance."
"Ah," he scoffed at her inference. He did not turn back to answer her, so that she could not see the brief shadow still upon his face from the child's words. "Might as well visit her a church every now and again, mightn't she? What's a blind beggar child got to do, after all, with her time?"
"What, indeed," agreed DJaq, smiling, her tone warm with knowing, with understanding, and far from gloating.
They spoke little after, all her breath necessary to keep up with him and not lose him and the reassuring shade of his tall back in the scurry and kerfuffle that was Portsmouth.
...The End...
A/N: Hopefully, the song the title is taken from works in two ways: Without Allan (after all, she has been told, and perhaps come to believe, that Robin is dead), Marian 'goes' to the far distant unknown. And without Marian's faith in him as Robin interprets it, Allan 'goes', far from the fellowship and trust of his mates-that which means most to him in all the world.
"This is hard to say, but as I wandered through the lea,
I felt for just a fleeting moment that
I suddenly was free of being lonely.
Then I closed my eyes and saw the very reason why.
I saw a man with his head bowed low
His heart had no place to go
I looked and I thought to myself with a sigh:
There, but for you, go I
I saw a man walking by the sea
Alone with the tide was he
I looked and I thought as I watched him go by
There, but for you, go I
Lonely [people] all around me, trying not to cry
'Till the day you found me, there among them was I
[line omitted]
I thought as I thanked all the stars in the sky
There, but for you, go I." - Lerner & Lowe's Brigadoon
Just found myself still thinking about Allan and that peach, I guess, and what came before.