The Princess and the Hood: Reflections of the Wine Bottle

In the Dungeon

"You have nerves like Spanish steel, risking your neck for simple prayers. But YOU..." He struck me across the face. "...Longstride, are nothing without your precious arrows. Nothing without your bow to fight long range like a coward. You're just a deserter who failed his king and, in doing so, disgraces the church!"

"NO!" My voice echoed through the empty dungeon. As if I were still back there being restrained, I continued, "YOU were the coward! Killing surrendered prisoners? That's not war! Not when they aren't fighting back! It's butchery! And you abandoned your codes too many times!" But Gisbourne wasn't there to hear me.

Me. Robin "of the Hood" Longstride, cast into a pit, reduced to nothing but hands and feet that I couldn't use for anything. I couldn't climb out of here. I didn't have any weapons, tools that I had grown up relying on to stay alive. If I had to use my sword or staff, that meant my enemy was close enough to kill me. Without my bow or woodland-patterned cloak, I couldn't avoid the melee...

"No." I said to myself. "Don't let him break you. Come on, calm down." I steadied my breathing, searching for the better memories. What could I...? Oh, all those times on the practice fields where father would instruct Will and I on using the bow...

'Coward's weapon!' said Guy's voice in my head. Plus there were the times I was hit in the backside with my father's sturdy bow for breaking an arrow during practice. Oh, wait! Sparring together with the sword and the buckler was always great, especially being taught by Tuck. Most devout man I ever met... but without either of those weapons I was powerless at close range. Only if I had the other yeomen in my tent backing me up...

'You need to go into a fight with three other men behind you?'

What about when father took me to the Highland Games years ago and I met that nice girl (plus the king and queen)? What was her name again? Merry?

'That's rich, you get yourself caught in a storm and need a little Scottish girl to save you!'

"SHUT IT!" I yelled, my throat drying.

How long was I in this wretched cave for? Hours? Days? I couldn't tell. Time stood still. It was the loudest silence I'd heard in my life, no other voices to be heard except the ones in my head. They wouldn't let me sleep.

'You think you're some champion of the people? Only if you actually do something right. Otherwise you're just a boy! You think you're the first person to stand up to the tax laws here? Or the hundredth? How many of them have died for their defiance?! Some of them for helping you?'

Suddenly I could see the young dark-haired woman with a rope around her neck, a trapdoor opening under her feet. "NO! Marian!" Hot tears streamed down my face as I saw my fiancée swing, gasping for air until she went limp.

Scattered all around me were bones and tattered clothing; prisoners who had been thrown down here for their so-called crime of trying to feed themselves. Where was the justice? Did it even exist anymore? I had to get out of this place, to do something!

'Do what exactly? Topple the king just by stealing a few coins?'

"GO AWAY!" I cried, kicking at the skeletons scattered at my feet. Suddenly I realised there were no skeletons after all, as my foot flew through the air and the momentum made me fall on my tailbone. "OH!" I groaned. "Please, Lord, let this be over."

I prayed for minutes that stretched into hours. At least they felt like hours. The darkness never changed, nor did anything move unless I kicked or shoved a pebble around. The slightest noise became a roar in the silence, where the smallest squeak of a mouse in the tunnels above would startle me.

'Please, let this be over.' I thought, my body half numb and tingling terribly. 'Either make me faint from thirst or let me die. I don't care which. Just let this nightmare end!'

As I continued to pray I kept my eyes shut, trying to throw aside the dank cave and trade it for a good memory. 'Come on, Rob, think.'

Back in the desert, Tuck, as one of the Templar Knights, was the one to deliver a good sermon to us. Maybe not all of us, but those who had the time and interest to actually listen to him. My "small band of misfits" and I were a few of those active listeners. He told us once about how he'd hear a lot of young men grumbling about their lives, that they felt they needed a bow or a sword to improve their lot in life. But he said no to that, loud and clear. Tuck insisted that the mind and heart were a man's greatest weapons. "Whether you're a farmer, a knight, or even a lowly outlaw," the man said.

At the time none of us ever dreamed we'd end up becoming outlaws ourselves, but sitting in that bottle-shaped cave I realised he wasn't embellishing anything. Heeding his words I knew I couldn't let myself go mad down here, however easy it was to give up. I couldn't just wait around for the day I lost enough weight to lose my life. I had to hold on, however long this ordeal lasted. Even if my heart and mind didn't seem very useful while trapped down here, I had to at least hold onto them. They were literally all I had left.

According to Tuck, weapons like the bow and the sword were just tools, to say the least. If you became too reliant on them, he told us, they would become crutches. I just never realised how dependent on them I had become until I suddenly felt naked in this inescapable cave.

I whispered something else Tuck said during his sermon. "It's in the hearts and minds of the victors that all wars are won."

There was another thing I'd heard often for motivation, something my father Thomas Longstride would make sure my stepbrother Will and I remembered. I didn't dare say it out loud these days, for it pained me since they were both killed by Saracens.

"Rise and rise again, until lambs become lions..."