Yonder Comes a Courteous Knight - Lupus Est Fabula
iii. Lupus Est Fabula
(set directly after “Tattoo? What Tattoo?”)
A/N: Robin Hood by the BBC seems utterly obsessed with tattoos, despite (or perhaps because of) the fact they weren't really the thing in England, 1192. After finding out that the PacMan blob on Guy's arm was actually supposed to be a wolf, I really began to wonder how and why he got it. I was convinced it must have been acquried in the Holy Land. And because my brain would not let me do things without at least a grain of historical truth, I wrote this, desperately attempting to merge the historical timeline with the one presented in the TV show. Fat chance. I decided to challenge myself and try to write it from his point of view . . .
If a wolf sees a man before the man sees the wolf, the man will lose his voice.
The last king of the people of this place, Harold Godwinson of Wessex, was brought down by a sword. When his body was laid out, they say, he was stripped of all raiment and had to be identified by his tattoos. Herod of Antioch, too, they say was amazed to hear that the ancient Britons were tattooed with the figures of animals. These are markings when the wearer of the image calls the spirit of the image to act. These are the ancient stories. But the Romans, too, marked criminals and slaves.
I reached the Outremer in autumn. The voyage was made with haste, with stealth; there was no leisurely departure from London and overland through Genoa and Sicily and through Cyprus-it was as direct a route to Tyre as could be taken by boat, and then to somewhere in the desert between Acre and Jaffa, where Richard and his men were advancing and constantly being beaten back by the specter of Saladin.
In this, Robin of Locksley was right. I was not a crusader, peregrinatio, I took no vows for armed pilgrimage and expected no reward of indulgences upon my return. He was a fool to bring back a Saracen bow-in the Holy Land, the crossbow outranged the Turk bow time and time again. But perhaps all that time in Palestine has made this man think like a Turk-they could not withstand heavy cavalry charges and manuevered, . Guerrilla warfare. Cowardice. Exactly what outlaws do. Just as the so-called army of Jerusalem-they were as full of vice as any breed of men. In Acre there was jealousy, bickering, penury, and starvation. What man would choose to be there? And yet precious King Richard, Coeur de Lion, would rather have that land of desert and fleas than his own kingdom. His own country.
Arriving safely in the harbour of Tyre with a few trusted men, there was little time to acclimatize to the fabulous silhouette of the ancient city. The mission had to be carried out with speed; the Sheriff, for all his roundabout sarcasm, made this quite clear. Inescapably clear. And for my part, I was eager to finish the job as quickly as possible. The other men might be seduced by the wealth and finery, even the women-godless harlots-that the land might supply. We stayed at an inn, far away from the crusaders’ camps but still in the Christian quarter of the city. Late into the night I sat, attempting to melt off the ungodly heat with wine. The task-to find a guide to take us to Richard’s camp-was proving more trying than I had expected.
In the inn, I met an old crusader. He told me a tale of how he had first reached the Holy Land in the army of Frederick Barbarossa more than a year before. His name was Otto. “Guy of Gisborne,” he said-for he spoke Latin, French, German, and Arabic-“you come with a mind for business. My lord was the Duke of Swabia and his father before him was Barbarossa, Holy Roman Emperor. We should be enemies.”
He must have been old enough when he set out on his crusade. Now he was grey, bearing evidence of many battles and many wounds. His clothing was a curious mixture of the rough leather jerkin he must have worn under his mail into dozens of skirmishes, but his tanned skull was hidden by a drapery of bright cloth, such as a Saracen would wear.
“Normally, any man not an Englishman would be my enemy. But we are bound together by a holy war, are we not?”
He gave a grim smile that altogether reminded me of my own. “I was once. But you are not here as a crusader, else you would be wearing a Templar shield.” I stayed silent at this, for though I liked the man, he was still a German and I was not certain I could trust him. He fingered the broadsword at his belt as I kept mine within close reach.
He sat beside me. I grudgingly offered him a cup, and he poured himself an overflowing cup of wine. “There was another man named Guy here. Perhaps you have heard of him.”
I gritted my teeth. This was a stain upon my honor, for Guy de Lusignan had lost Acre four years before to the Turk, because of quarrelling for the crown of Jerusalem.
Otto of Swabia was not offended, or at least he buried his affront in wine. In the heat I had no stomach for it. “The Saracens say that Barbarossa’s death was the will of God.”
“Heathen superstition!”
He held up his sword hand, gnarled and missing a finger. “I was there. Do you know Anatolia-but you have not been there? We were crossing the Saleph River. It is hip-deep at its highest point. Hip-deep. The current is not strong. Barbarossa was old. I think it was his heart failed him.”
“And he drowned?”
“Weighed down by his armor, Sir Guy. Pray you never meet such a fate.”
“My armor is not that heavy, Otto of Swabia.” I nodded to the light mail I wore, not mentioning that I was aching to abandon it for a few moments’ freedom-a bath, perhaps.
He gazed into his cup as if he would divine the future. “Most of the army fled. Or committed suicide.”
“Is that the usual extent of German courage?” His eyes changed. I watched him flexing the crooked remains of his hand. He was not a fool-and yet . . . “But you stayed. Why?”
The crusader shrugged. “There were five thousand of us left. Five thousand to make it alive to Acre.” He drained his cup of wine. “We were meant to take Barbarossa’s body to burial in Jerusalem.”
I repressed a laugh spiked with scorn. “But you never reached it.”
“No. You will find his bones in the cathedral there. Thousands of miles from home.”
He stood up and gazed east, or what he supposed was east in the darkness, lit only by a few Moorish lamps and the stars through the open-air windows. “You will find Tyre full of fountains and Roman ruins. Alexander once set foot here, and Nebuchadnezzar conquered it, too, they say. Walk down those narrow streets, and you will meet all that the empire has to offer. The Bedouin, the Syrian, the Turk, Sudanese and Circassian and Byzantine . . . All to be had for a price, my friend. The bazaars are beautiful and dazzling. It is nothing to Saracen eyes, the wealth of the East, but to Christians of Germany and England . . .”
It was true. I had never believed the tales of the opulence, even with the spices, carpets, and fine things that sometimes made their way even to Nottingham from the Holy Land. Men are given to exaggeration. But if Tyre was representative of the East, its wealth had not been exaggerated. Perhaps that was why men like Otto the Swabian had stayed.
“But beware. A man grows languid in this climate, Gisborne. Here the serfs have freedom far beyond what we know in our own lands.”
I frowned. “How can that be?”
“There are so few knights left,” continued my informant. “And most of these people are natives. Turcopoles, some of them, but others Jews and . . . it’s the way things work here. You’ll soon grow used to it.”
I got up from my seat. “I am not staying long.”
“That’s right, you have a mission,” he mocked. “But few men to carry it out with you.”
“I brought only men I could trust.”
“You will need a guide to get you to the Coeur de Lion’s camp.”
I reacted too soon, I should have hid my true purpose from him. “How do you know it is Richard I seek?”
He again looked down to his wine cup. He stared at the flagon, now empty, and then to me. I reached into my purse and flung out a piece of silver. One of the inn’s boys emerged from the shadows to replace the empty flagon and was gone again as quickly and stealthily. “The men who arrive now know nothing of the winter of 1190. We crusaders starved, for all our ideas of glory. I shall not starve again.”
I nodded, but repeated my question, bringing with it the blade of my knife to his throat. “How did you know I seek Richard?”
He smiled a little drunkenly at the knife and patted it away with his wrecked hand. His French was becoming thicker now, and since he had no English, he switched to Latin. “That winter, Gisborne-you learn to know the look of someone hungry for something. Those who always desire blood.”
I put away the knife, but cautioned him to lower his voice if we were to come to a mutual understanding. “What do you mean? Why would you help me? Were you still a knight of the Swabian army I might understand-”
“Lukos, lupus,” he muttered. “Their eyes shine in the dark like lamps!” At this point I feared I was entertaining the whim of a madman, a lost crusader with too much of the desert sand in his eyes. But his look grew lucid. “When you have done what you came here to do, take me back to England. Give me land and title. These things can be done.”
“I do not know-”
“The risk is great, so the prize must be great. There is no other way to get into the desert. You would trust the people of Tyre, of Acre? Your king’s spies must be everywhere. Robin of Locksley, I have heard he is in your king’s personal guard-”
“Locksley?” I repeated, unable to curb my enthusiasm. Otto nodded, looking again at his sword hand. “With King John on the throne,” I said softly, “my lord the Sheriff of Nottingham will be well-placed.”
“Then you could grant me title?”
“Yes.”
In the dim light, Otto of Swabia pulled back the sleeve from his raggedy garment to reveal the inside of his right wrist. Tattooed there was a bird. “A raven,” he said. “When the ravens stop flying around Kyffhauser Mountain, Barbarossa will return.” He said it with a smile so that I could not tell whether he was speaking in irony or not. “If we are to trust one another, you must be marked, too.”
I pulled back in instant revulsion. “Normans do not wear tattoos,” I said.
“Cowards like Turks, then,” he muttered over his shoulder, turning disdainfully away. “Pah!” And he spat on the ground.
“Wait.” I placed one hand on his shoulder, the other on the hilt of my sword in its scabbard. “If you can find me more men-we must be dressed as Saracens or the plan will never succeed.”
Otto stroked the remnants of his beard, white, grey, and faded gold. “A wolf for you, Guy of Gisborne.”
“A wolf? Why?”
“Ferocity, courage . . . it’s the sign of young warriors.”
I forced my face into a smile. “I am not young.”
“You’re young enough, my friend.”
While the attack on Richard Coeur de Lion was a disaster, thanks to that fool Robin of Locksley, I could not remove the tattoo from my arm any more than I could forego my promise to Otto of Swabia. Though I knew exactly what the Sheriff would say if we both made the passage to England and then to Nottingham: he would want the German dead, no matter what services he had rendered, no matter what part he had played in the assassination attempt, that it was no fault of his that it had not succeeded.
The skin had still been inflamed from the needles and ink when Locksley slashed it, and it was slow to heal. The voyage back could not be delayed as any setback was a moment closer to the King’s guards discovering the real perpetrators. It almost made me laugh to think myself ill with fever on the ship home when I was supposed to be in bed in Locksley Manor, rendered sluggish by a contagion. For this reason the trip was interminable, and my awareness of Otto’s movements grew more and more hazy. In my distraction I began to wonder if I’d dreamed the German up, but the still-festering wound on my wrist made that impossible.
When I recovered, when we reached England, despite the mission’s failure I felt pleasure. Few things gave me that sensation of pleasure unadulterated by bitterness or cynicism. With Otto of Swabia as an ally, we could plot again. We could get rid of Richard by some other means. I would persuade the Sheriff to see the old crusader’s usefulness. That is when I discovered that he was already dead.
The body had been in the hold, for how long I could not tell. He’d been stabbed. Later, when my own men admitted to having taken his life, they could not deny he’d put up a considerable fight. His body gave witness to the ferocity of his spirit. I took pleasure, then, in slitting their throats, for daring to defy my orders. I came back from the Holy Land, then, utterly alone.
Otto had said nothing in the brief weeks I had known him about a woman. But in his purse, I found a miniature mosaic of exquisite workmanship-from Constantinople, no doubt-of a woman. Was she German? Was she Greek? Saracen? Jew? Wife or lover? Dead or alive? There was no clue, no name. Vous et nul autre was the only inscription. He had kept her close, like his loyalty to Barbarossa, which he had even tattooed into his flesh. What did my marking attest? The wolf that led the lambs astray? The wolf that stole a man’s voice? Wolves sometimes seem solitary creatures, but they have packs, they have mates.
Wolves mate for life.