SHORT FIC - AD 1191: Crusaders' Memories - Pre-series
Title: AD 1191: Crusaders' Memories
Author: Nettlestone Nell
Word Count: 2701
Rating: PG-13
Characters/Pairings: Much, Robin, King Richard, OFC Salima, OC Sir Stephen DeMoure
Spoilers/Warnings: Pre-series. Possible spoiler for the existence of Robin's wound as seen in 1x04.
Summary: Pre-series, set during Robin's time on Crusade. Much struggles to find proper medical care for his beloved master. The hard choices one can wrestle with in life if "everything...is a choice".
*Part of a longer work, "Death Would Be Simpler to Deal With", written as Neftzer at fanfiction.net
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; Short Fic
Community: Treat Much Right
Crusaders' Memories
Five years in. The dead of night.
Much rushes into the tent of Sir Stephen DeMoure without giving the accepted, 'halloo the tent' greeting. His torch, and the erratic way he is brandishing it, threatens to set the entirety of his surroundings ablaze. His eyes are not even open when he shouts the greeting that has been pounding in his head since it was given him by the King.
"You must come at once, by order of the King," he shouted, wheezily, as he had run the entire distance. Only then did he open his eyes, as if ending a prayer. His eyes were larger, though, the pupils dilated in fright much more so than any heavenly petitioner's might be usually found to be.
It was his eyes that showed him what the shaky light of his torch could: DeMoure unable to even rouse himself, the smell and stain of wine on his tunic. Though it was well into the nightwatches, the knight had not bothered to undress to sleep, looking as though he had collapsed directly onto his cot, spilled goblet beside him.
Much's quick assessment of his surroundings, his mind racing like wildfire, found him the woman he sought quickly enough. 'Go to DeMoure's tent,' the King had instructed, his own reaction to Much's nervous fright quite sanguine. 'You will find a nurse there that will help. I will come to you in the morning.' Much did not question the King's not coming himself. It was not the bailiwick of a sovereign to attend on the ailing. After a day like the bloody one that had just passed, Richard had much to accomplish before dawn, and more injured men on his hands than a whole night's worth of personal visitation could see to.
"The King," Much stressed again, his voice still loud and uneven with shaking. "You must come."
He had not seen, due to the shadows she occupied, that with his initial entrance the woman had begun swiftly and deliberately preparing to follow him, gathering up what tools and necessities she might need.
When she did step into the light, his addled mind noted two things about her immediately. One, she was almost unworldly in her beauty, and two, her demeanor was incongruously imperious for a woman who also wore what was clearly the purpling mark of DeMoure fist's on her elegant cheekbone.
"Your friend," she asked as she followed him capably across the dunes to Robin's tent. (You would never know she had just been startled awake.) "He was injured today on the field? He was not brought to the surgeon's tent."
"No, he is my master," Much corrected what he saw as the more egregious of her assumptions first. "His injury has been with him for...many months. Almost a year. But it was healed." In the (to him) eerie desert night, his next question seemed a logical one. "Do you suppose he's been bewitched?" He brought the torch around as he turned his upper body to look at her in the light.
She had to bob and weave out of the way to avoid being set aflame.
Much did not notice. "Do you know anything of dark magicks? Anything that we might do? A potion we could make?" He was desperately, frantically serious.
She was not given to casual smiling, but she repressed one at his remark. "Let us first see of him what there is to see before we..."
"We are arrived!" Much proclaimed, cutting off her attempt at a kind reply to his wild theory.
She bent down to enter the tent flap and found things with this man, Much's lord, as she had expected: his once-healed wound had festered, and he was soon to be in the grip of rot and delirium far beyond what he experienced now. Already his gums bled. She instructed Much on what to do, and attempted to help this Sir Robin as best she could, finding it a task, also, to calm down his man, this nearly-hysterical servant, grieving his (not yet) fallen master.
Before she returned to DeMoure's tent, Much asked her name.
"Salima," she had answered, and he had found it strange that it came with no other qualifier. It was like his own, "Much," no 'of' or 'from', or last name of a family, just 'Much'. Yet for all that the bruise was now well-set into her face, she did not appear to be DeMoure's servant. In fact, in the time they worked here together Much had nearly forgotten to notice the mark of violence on her.
As she was leaving, his curiosity got the best of him. "How is it that you are Saracen and you are here, with us? With the King?"
Her back seemed to tense and straighten at his question. "I may ask," her tone was not quite arch (she had never gotten used to being thought of as only either Saracen or English--both distinctions to her distasteful)," how is it that you are English and you are yet here," her eyes took in the desert sand of this Palestinian landscape, "--with your King?"
Much's mouth fell open at her challenge, and he returned to Robin within the tent as she departed, and spent the next hours as he tended his master muttering a series of glib replies and witty rejoinders to a woman who was no longer there to be impressed by them.
A day later. DeMoure's tent. Night.
"Sultana."
She awoke to Richard's face, illumined by the lantern he held. Held in his own hand, no retainers or guard present with him as he stood here within Sir Stephen DeMoure's tent.
He had come for her himself.
The clothing he wore was simple, comfortable, quite the change from the soldier's gear he wore in the day. The crown was absent from his head, and only his several rings, their stones like fire even in the night's muted moonlight, were there to remind of his kingship.
DeMoure grunted from his cot.
Not impressed, Richard straightened and applied his boot to the underside of the hammocked fabric, and in one motion dumped Sir Stephen unceremoniously to the ground, and onto his knees. The position he should have assumed immediately upon discerning the King's entrance.
"Bring you things," Richard told her, disinterested in Sir Stephen now that he was appropriate in his physical, if not mental, obeisance. "All your things, Salima. You will not return to this tent until I have no more immediate need of you."
With speed and efficiency, not unlike the previous night, she made ready, finishing long before he could have any complaint of her.
"The need," he shared as he took her hand in an oddly Courtly gesture, helping her through the tent flap and out into the starry night, "is quite immediate, I confess."
"As you wish, my lord," she assured him, not referencing any shock she might feel at being rousted from sleep by the King himself, and not a squire, servant or page. And at the King arriving entirely unaccompanied.
He spoke to her casually, as was his way with her, her own temperament (given to silences rather than chatter) had always allowed him a space for unrehearsed, unjudged self-expression that he enjoyed, though often forgot about when not in her presence.
"He is gravely ill, Sultana," he confided in her, though she had known the condition of this Sir Robin well enough from her visit the other night. "You must understand; I," he used the informal, singular pronoun, "cannot lose Robin. We should have come ourselves," he returned to the royal 'we', "the other night and seen to him. If only we had not dismissed Much's terror as only a hazard of his dramatic ways. But we have only just seen him, seen Robin, tonight. We--I have not the knowledge of healing that you do, of course, but I have seen many a man die, many a man waste away with rot. I am no stranger to such sights. But our best Robin is absent from his head, and has spent the days calling for his father--dead the last few years." In his obvious distress, he vacillated between the formal and informal in his speech. He continued, "his eyes look to me, to Much, and know us not. His wound is opened such that I may almost put my hand into it."
They were arrived at the tent.
"I shall attend with you," Richard said, startling her as she entered. The King, the Lionheart did not attend on sickbeds.
The servant Much's eyes were wilder than they had been the last time she saw him, and his lord, Sir Robin was, as Richard had accurately reported, much worse. Not only did he not know himself or any other, he had refused food and drink for the past day, in his delusions believing it poisoned.
"You will bring me water," she told the servant Much. "Fresh water you will boil and let cool."
Turning to the King, she added, "We must find any fruit, Majesty, fresh is preferable, but dried will do."
"It shall be found and brought, of course," Richard answered, attempting to balance his bulk on a far too small camp chair, "But what good may that do if he will neither eat nor drink?"
"You and I together, my lord," she promised, "and he shall drink."
Salima knew their supply lines were currently compromised, knew that fresh fruits of any kind were often rare in camp (French and English knights often distrustful of the exotic shapes and flavors such foods wore), but she had hoped that the King might be able to gather enough to do some good.
But it appeared the situation was more grave than even she knew. Dried figs and three citrus fruits were all that could be discovered on short notice, even on the King's directive. The figs were not of immediate use to her, but the citrus she squeezed into the now tepid water brought by Much.
Sir Robin's eyes had opened in the time before Much had returned with the water, and she believed he could see what was now going on around him, even if he were not lucid enough to understand it.
"Highness," she asked Richard, who, after returning with what fruits he could commandeer had taken a seat anxiously at the head of the cot, "you must hold him at the shoulders after we sit him up."
Richard lifted Sir Robin's lank-with-illness upper body like that of a child, bracing the man's back against his side, so that he was leaning against the solid, doughty strength of his King.
She did not ask anything of Much, who held the waiting cup. She herself moved to straddle the cot, trapping Sir Robin's legs and lower body with hers.
Beyond her line of sight, she could not see Much's incredulous reaction at her disrespectful and coarse treatment of his master.
Her movement roused Sir Robin, and his ire. His eyes snapped into sharp focus on her. "You will get off of me," he demanded, venom in his tone.
She put her hand out to take the cup from Much, the servant's eyes big as dinner plates. Sir Robin's eyes followed her gesture, and for a moment (the first in three days), he recognized his faithful attendant.
"Much," he shouted, "my sword, we must defend ourselves!"
Much looked to the King (whom Robin could not see was the man holding him). Richard's face was stern as he steeled himself against a madman's desperation.
Much made no move to help Robin.
"Witch!" Sir Robin spat at Salima (she had often been called far, far worse, and over far more provocation) as she wedged the heavy oak tankard between his jaws and forced the drink into him, one hand massaging his throat until he had to swallow. Sure to wait for him to take it all down, she did not immediately remove the tankard from where it pried his teeth apart.
"Don't let them do this to me, Much! Much!" He screamed like a man scalded. "By her scorpion eyes, she will kill us all!" He wailed and shouted in a way he surely would never have done had he had his wits about him.
When the moment had passed and Sir Robin had quieted, passing again into the fullness of oblivion, the King spoke to her alone.
"You will stay here, nursing only him. Do not return to the surgeon's tent without our leave, and do not return to Sir Stephen. You sleep here, you eat here. Much will do for you as you need." In a moment his voice changed as he switched away from giving commands. "I cannot lose him, Sultana. Robin is like no one else to us. It is a great responsibility we give you, putting his welfare into your hands."
"And God's," she reminded him, not wishing to bear the brunt solely on her own Kismet-bound shoulders should things turn out differently than the King desired. That is the trouble with the English, she thought (though she would never have criticized Richard aloud), always thinking they can change what is to be.
And so Salima moves in with Much and Robin, but it is not many days before she knows that what Robin needs he cannot receive at this desert camp. The festering of his wound is too far gone, and the needed supplies are not arriving.
She does not see that Much greatly resents her presence, a daily reminder that he alone is not enough for the nursing of his master. Additionally he resents the King's directive that he must serve Salima, this woman that does not, in his opinion, know her right place (though he is rather uncertain of what that place might actually be).
The final straw in their non-existent relationship comes when she tells Richard, without conferring with Much, that Sir Robin must be sent home if he is to live.
The lack of a compassionate note (to Much's ear) when Salima speaks of Robin, and the callousness and disrespectfulness of her treatment of him (which Much fails to see as necessary in order to save Robin's life) further alienate him from her.
If only he could have known how hard it had been for her to send Robin of Locksley away, how she dreaded to bring the need of it up to the King.
After all, she had tried to convince herself, the King had decreed her removal from the abusive Sir Stephen DeMoure's tent (and life) for the length of Sir Robin's treatment and convalescence. Every day she kept the English knight in the Holy Land (even if it meant his eventual death) was a day she remained free.
And though he could not tell it, she liked Much. She found his light chatter a nice change, and could not have been more impressed with his treatment of his master, the gentle and tender things he did for him above and beyond his subscribed duty.
But was it right to broker her own respite from mistreatment on the life of this man? To gamble so? She knew well that sending Sir Robin to England might prove the death of him. It was a harsh and long trip (so she was told). He might not survive. But she always came back to the fact that she was certain he would not survive here.
She did not know what Fate held for him, and she found herself quite confused over the choosing of what to do with him. She had been allowed choices in so little of her own life, when confronted with the choice of how to best protect his, and how she (might) best protect her own, she found that she could not settle on which benefit to privilege.
In the end she chose the unknown for him: the voyage home. And for herself: the known, the already endured, the Fate she believed spun for herself long before her birth.
She had no idea that in choosing so she had made herself an undeserving enemy of the two Englishmen.
Author: Nettlestone Nell
Word Count: 2701
Rating: PG-13
Characters/Pairings: Much, Robin, King Richard, OFC Salima, OC Sir Stephen DeMoure
Spoilers/Warnings: Pre-series. Possible spoiler for the existence of Robin's wound as seen in 1x04.
Summary: Pre-series, set during Robin's time on Crusade. Much struggles to find proper medical care for his beloved master. The hard choices one can wrestle with in life if "everything...is a choice".
*Part of a longer work, "Death Would Be Simpler to Deal With", written as Neftzer at fanfiction.net
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; Short Fic
Community: Treat Much Right
Crusaders' Memories
Five years in. The dead of night.
Much rushes into the tent of Sir Stephen DeMoure without giving the accepted, 'halloo the tent' greeting. His torch, and the erratic way he is brandishing it, threatens to set the entirety of his surroundings ablaze. His eyes are not even open when he shouts the greeting that has been pounding in his head since it was given him by the King.
"You must come at once, by order of the King," he shouted, wheezily, as he had run the entire distance. Only then did he open his eyes, as if ending a prayer. His eyes were larger, though, the pupils dilated in fright much more so than any heavenly petitioner's might be usually found to be.
It was his eyes that showed him what the shaky light of his torch could: DeMoure unable to even rouse himself, the smell and stain of wine on his tunic. Though it was well into the nightwatches, the knight had not bothered to undress to sleep, looking as though he had collapsed directly onto his cot, spilled goblet beside him.
Much's quick assessment of his surroundings, his mind racing like wildfire, found him the woman he sought quickly enough. 'Go to DeMoure's tent,' the King had instructed, his own reaction to Much's nervous fright quite sanguine. 'You will find a nurse there that will help. I will come to you in the morning.' Much did not question the King's not coming himself. It was not the bailiwick of a sovereign to attend on the ailing. After a day like the bloody one that had just passed, Richard had much to accomplish before dawn, and more injured men on his hands than a whole night's worth of personal visitation could see to.
"The King," Much stressed again, his voice still loud and uneven with shaking. "You must come."
He had not seen, due to the shadows she occupied, that with his initial entrance the woman had begun swiftly and deliberately preparing to follow him, gathering up what tools and necessities she might need.
When she did step into the light, his addled mind noted two things about her immediately. One, she was almost unworldly in her beauty, and two, her demeanor was incongruously imperious for a woman who also wore what was clearly the purpling mark of DeMoure fist's on her elegant cheekbone.
"Your friend," she asked as she followed him capably across the dunes to Robin's tent. (You would never know she had just been startled awake.) "He was injured today on the field? He was not brought to the surgeon's tent."
"No, he is my master," Much corrected what he saw as the more egregious of her assumptions first. "His injury has been with him for...many months. Almost a year. But it was healed." In the (to him) eerie desert night, his next question seemed a logical one. "Do you suppose he's been bewitched?" He brought the torch around as he turned his upper body to look at her in the light.
She had to bob and weave out of the way to avoid being set aflame.
Much did not notice. "Do you know anything of dark magicks? Anything that we might do? A potion we could make?" He was desperately, frantically serious.
She was not given to casual smiling, but she repressed one at his remark. "Let us first see of him what there is to see before we..."
"We are arrived!" Much proclaimed, cutting off her attempt at a kind reply to his wild theory.
She bent down to enter the tent flap and found things with this man, Much's lord, as she had expected: his once-healed wound had festered, and he was soon to be in the grip of rot and delirium far beyond what he experienced now. Already his gums bled. She instructed Much on what to do, and attempted to help this Sir Robin as best she could, finding it a task, also, to calm down his man, this nearly-hysterical servant, grieving his (not yet) fallen master.
Before she returned to DeMoure's tent, Much asked her name.
"Salima," she had answered, and he had found it strange that it came with no other qualifier. It was like his own, "Much," no 'of' or 'from', or last name of a family, just 'Much'. Yet for all that the bruise was now well-set into her face, she did not appear to be DeMoure's servant. In fact, in the time they worked here together Much had nearly forgotten to notice the mark of violence on her.
As she was leaving, his curiosity got the best of him. "How is it that you are Saracen and you are here, with us? With the King?"
Her back seemed to tense and straighten at his question. "I may ask," her tone was not quite arch (she had never gotten used to being thought of as only either Saracen or English--both distinctions to her distasteful)," how is it that you are English and you are yet here," her eyes took in the desert sand of this Palestinian landscape, "--with your King?"
Much's mouth fell open at her challenge, and he returned to Robin within the tent as she departed, and spent the next hours as he tended his master muttering a series of glib replies and witty rejoinders to a woman who was no longer there to be impressed by them.
A day later. DeMoure's tent. Night.
"Sultana."
She awoke to Richard's face, illumined by the lantern he held. Held in his own hand, no retainers or guard present with him as he stood here within Sir Stephen DeMoure's tent.
He had come for her himself.
The clothing he wore was simple, comfortable, quite the change from the soldier's gear he wore in the day. The crown was absent from his head, and only his several rings, their stones like fire even in the night's muted moonlight, were there to remind of his kingship.
DeMoure grunted from his cot.
Not impressed, Richard straightened and applied his boot to the underside of the hammocked fabric, and in one motion dumped Sir Stephen unceremoniously to the ground, and onto his knees. The position he should have assumed immediately upon discerning the King's entrance.
"Bring you things," Richard told her, disinterested in Sir Stephen now that he was appropriate in his physical, if not mental, obeisance. "All your things, Salima. You will not return to this tent until I have no more immediate need of you."
With speed and efficiency, not unlike the previous night, she made ready, finishing long before he could have any complaint of her.
"The need," he shared as he took her hand in an oddly Courtly gesture, helping her through the tent flap and out into the starry night, "is quite immediate, I confess."
"As you wish, my lord," she assured him, not referencing any shock she might feel at being rousted from sleep by the King himself, and not a squire, servant or page. And at the King arriving entirely unaccompanied.
He spoke to her casually, as was his way with her, her own temperament (given to silences rather than chatter) had always allowed him a space for unrehearsed, unjudged self-expression that he enjoyed, though often forgot about when not in her presence.
"He is gravely ill, Sultana," he confided in her, though she had known the condition of this Sir Robin well enough from her visit the other night. "You must understand; I," he used the informal, singular pronoun, "cannot lose Robin. We should have come ourselves," he returned to the royal 'we', "the other night and seen to him. If only we had not dismissed Much's terror as only a hazard of his dramatic ways. But we have only just seen him, seen Robin, tonight. We--I have not the knowledge of healing that you do, of course, but I have seen many a man die, many a man waste away with rot. I am no stranger to such sights. But our best Robin is absent from his head, and has spent the days calling for his father--dead the last few years." In his obvious distress, he vacillated between the formal and informal in his speech. He continued, "his eyes look to me, to Much, and know us not. His wound is opened such that I may almost put my hand into it."
They were arrived at the tent.
"I shall attend with you," Richard said, startling her as she entered. The King, the Lionheart did not attend on sickbeds.
The servant Much's eyes were wilder than they had been the last time she saw him, and his lord, Sir Robin was, as Richard had accurately reported, much worse. Not only did he not know himself or any other, he had refused food and drink for the past day, in his delusions believing it poisoned.
"You will bring me water," she told the servant Much. "Fresh water you will boil and let cool."
Turning to the King, she added, "We must find any fruit, Majesty, fresh is preferable, but dried will do."
"It shall be found and brought, of course," Richard answered, attempting to balance his bulk on a far too small camp chair, "But what good may that do if he will neither eat nor drink?"
"You and I together, my lord," she promised, "and he shall drink."
Salima knew their supply lines were currently compromised, knew that fresh fruits of any kind were often rare in camp (French and English knights often distrustful of the exotic shapes and flavors such foods wore), but she had hoped that the King might be able to gather enough to do some good.
But it appeared the situation was more grave than even she knew. Dried figs and three citrus fruits were all that could be discovered on short notice, even on the King's directive. The figs were not of immediate use to her, but the citrus she squeezed into the now tepid water brought by Much.
Sir Robin's eyes had opened in the time before Much had returned with the water, and she believed he could see what was now going on around him, even if he were not lucid enough to understand it.
"Highness," she asked Richard, who, after returning with what fruits he could commandeer had taken a seat anxiously at the head of the cot, "you must hold him at the shoulders after we sit him up."
Richard lifted Sir Robin's lank-with-illness upper body like that of a child, bracing the man's back against his side, so that he was leaning against the solid, doughty strength of his King.
She did not ask anything of Much, who held the waiting cup. She herself moved to straddle the cot, trapping Sir Robin's legs and lower body with hers.
Beyond her line of sight, she could not see Much's incredulous reaction at her disrespectful and coarse treatment of his master.
Her movement roused Sir Robin, and his ire. His eyes snapped into sharp focus on her. "You will get off of me," he demanded, venom in his tone.
She put her hand out to take the cup from Much, the servant's eyes big as dinner plates. Sir Robin's eyes followed her gesture, and for a moment (the first in three days), he recognized his faithful attendant.
"Much," he shouted, "my sword, we must defend ourselves!"
Much looked to the King (whom Robin could not see was the man holding him). Richard's face was stern as he steeled himself against a madman's desperation.
Much made no move to help Robin.
"Witch!" Sir Robin spat at Salima (she had often been called far, far worse, and over far more provocation) as she wedged the heavy oak tankard between his jaws and forced the drink into him, one hand massaging his throat until he had to swallow. Sure to wait for him to take it all down, she did not immediately remove the tankard from where it pried his teeth apart.
"Don't let them do this to me, Much! Much!" He screamed like a man scalded. "By her scorpion eyes, she will kill us all!" He wailed and shouted in a way he surely would never have done had he had his wits about him.
When the moment had passed and Sir Robin had quieted, passing again into the fullness of oblivion, the King spoke to her alone.
"You will stay here, nursing only him. Do not return to the surgeon's tent without our leave, and do not return to Sir Stephen. You sleep here, you eat here. Much will do for you as you need." In a moment his voice changed as he switched away from giving commands. "I cannot lose him, Sultana. Robin is like no one else to us. It is a great responsibility we give you, putting his welfare into your hands."
"And God's," she reminded him, not wishing to bear the brunt solely on her own Kismet-bound shoulders should things turn out differently than the King desired. That is the trouble with the English, she thought (though she would never have criticized Richard aloud), always thinking they can change what is to be.
And so Salima moves in with Much and Robin, but it is not many days before she knows that what Robin needs he cannot receive at this desert camp. The festering of his wound is too far gone, and the needed supplies are not arriving.
She does not see that Much greatly resents her presence, a daily reminder that he alone is not enough for the nursing of his master. Additionally he resents the King's directive that he must serve Salima, this woman that does not, in his opinion, know her right place (though he is rather uncertain of what that place might actually be).
The final straw in their non-existent relationship comes when she tells Richard, without conferring with Much, that Sir Robin must be sent home if he is to live.
The lack of a compassionate note (to Much's ear) when Salima speaks of Robin, and the callousness and disrespectfulness of her treatment of him (which Much fails to see as necessary in order to save Robin's life) further alienate him from her.
If only he could have known how hard it had been for her to send Robin of Locksley away, how she dreaded to bring the need of it up to the King.
After all, she had tried to convince herself, the King had decreed her removal from the abusive Sir Stephen DeMoure's tent (and life) for the length of Sir Robin's treatment and convalescence. Every day she kept the English knight in the Holy Land (even if it meant his eventual death) was a day she remained free.
And though he could not tell it, she liked Much. She found his light chatter a nice change, and could not have been more impressed with his treatment of his master, the gentle and tender things he did for him above and beyond his subscribed duty.
But was it right to broker her own respite from mistreatment on the life of this man? To gamble so? She knew well that sending Sir Robin to England might prove the death of him. It was a harsh and long trip (so she was told). He might not survive. But she always came back to the fact that she was certain he would not survive here.
She did not know what Fate held for him, and she found herself quite confused over the choosing of what to do with him. She had been allowed choices in so little of her own life, when confronted with the choice of how to best protect his, and how she (might) best protect her own, she found that she could not settle on which benefit to privilege.
In the end she chose the unknown for him: the voyage home. And for herself: the known, the already endured, the Fate she believed spun for herself long before her birth.
She had no idea that in choosing so she had made herself an undeserving enemy of the two Englishmen.