The Hostility of Hanno: An Outlaw Chronicles short story by Angus Donald Read Free Book Online Page B

one-room cottage
     like gold and silver threads in a fine castle tapestry. My father was the one who taught me to sing – and it was thanks to
     that skill that I first came to the attention of my master Robin Hood. Six years later, I was his personal
trouvère
– a ‘finder’ or composer of songs – and also his trusted lieutenant. In a way, I owed my extraordinary advancement from dirt-poor
     labourer to lord of war to my father’s love of music.
    He had been a strange man, my father. I had been told that he was the second son of an obscure French knight, the Seigneur
     d’Alle and, as such, he had been destined for the Church. He had duly become a monk, a singer at the great cathedral of Notre-Dame
     in Paris. But somehow he had been disgraced and forced to flee to England. Robin, who had known him then, had told me that
     some valuable objects had gone missing from the cathedral and my father had been accused of their theft – accusations that
     my father had strenuously denied. Nevertheless, he had been cast out of the Church and had had to make a living with his voice.
     As a masterless
trouvère
, he had travelled to England and wandered the country singing for his supper and a place to lay his head at the castles across
     the land, but tidings of his expulsion from Paris ran ahead of him and he could find no secure position; no lord was willing
     to take a thief into his household. Eventually, during his long wanderings he met my mother, Ellen – a lovely woman in her
     youth – and married her and submitted to the dull but stable life of a common man working the land. I remember him cheerfully
     saying to me once, when I was no more than five or six years old: ‘None of us knows what God has in store for him, Alan; we
     may not have fine-milled bread on the board or fur-trimmed silk on our backs, but we can wrap ourselves in love, and we can
     always fill our mouths with song.’
    My family was a contented one, happy even; I might well have inherited the strips of land my father worked and been trudging
     behind a pair of plough oxen on them to this day, had it not been for my father’s untimely death. Before dawn one morning,
     as we slept – my mother, father, myself and my two sisters, all snugged up together on the big straw-stuffed mattress in our
     tiny hovel – half a dozen armed men burst through the door and dragged my father outside. There was no pretence of a trial;
     the sergeant in charge of the squad of men-at-arms merely announced that the Sheriff of Nottinghamshire had declared that
     my father was a thief and an outlaw. Then his men wrestled a rope around my father’s neck and summarily hanged him from the
     nearest oak tree.
    I watched them do it, at the raw age of nine; restrained by a burly man-at-arms and trying not to cry as my father kicked
     and soiled himself and choked out his life before my terrified eyes. Perhaps I am weak, but I’ve never been able to watch
     a hanging since – even when the punishment is well deserved – without a sense of horror.
    That act of unexpected violence destroyed our family. My mother lost the land that my father had ploughed and, to stave off
     destitution, she was forced to gather firewood each day and barter it to her neighbours for food or sell it to any that would
     buy; and few would. Why hand over a precious silver penny for sticks of timber when there was plenty of kindling to be had
     for free in the woodlands not three miles away? We slowly began to starve: my two sisters died of the bloody flux two years
     after my father’s death, a lack of nourishment making them too feeble to fight off the sickness when it struck. Faced with
     a stark choice, I became a thief; cutting the leather straps that secured the purses of rich men to their belts and making
     away with their money into the thick crowds of Nottingham market. I like to think that I was a good at it – I have always
     been lucky, all my long life. But, of course, one cannot