Outlaw Guy

Falling Apart

Author's Note: written for the prompt word fair

Falling Apart

It isn’t fair, Guy thinks, as the white-hot pain shooting through his leg sends him crashing back onto the forest floor. My first real act of being an outlaw and I’m cut down before Robin has nocked his first arrow.

Dizzy and nauseous, aware that his roomy outlaw breeches are soaked with more than the blood oozing from his right thigh, Guy painfully turns his head. He can see through the leaves partially obscuring his view that Robin and his gang are winning the fight, despite one of their number, namely him, being out of action.

A handful of the guards escorting the cart carrying the chest of tax monies along the Great North Road are on the ground, either dead – so much for Robin’s don’t kill doctrine – or knocked out, while the other handful are battling it out with the outlaws.

Robin, Guy sees, has discarded his Saracen bow in favour of his scimitar and is presently slashing at a burly, lumbering guard, a grin on his face. After spending the past two weeks living with the outlaw, Guy believes he now knows Robin well enough to say with confidence that Robin is actually enjoying himself despite the seriousness of the occasion. Likewise, Allan seems to be having a ball, dodging and weaving, wielding his two swords as if he were a performer at a circus.

Djaq, that soft-spoken, kind-hearted scrap of a girl, always making weird pastes and assuring Guy that Robin will give him every chance to prove he can become a good man, screams a blood-curdling scream and runs one and then another guard through with hardly a backward glance. It makes Guy realise there is more to her, more to all of the outlaws in fact, than he had first thought.

John thumps a further guard with his staff, whirls round ready to take on another attacker. But there is no one left, as the final two guards, sensing the battle lost, drop their swords. One hurls himself onto a frightened horse’s back while the other leaps into the now empty cart, grabbing the reins of the harnessed horse.

“The sheriff will hear of this,” the guard in the cart shouts, tugging viciously on the reins in an effort to get the spooked horse to move.

“I truly hope so,” Robin says, nudging a sack of stolen coin with his boot and grinning. He lifts a hand and waves as the cart finally lurches forwards and trundles off in the direction of Nottingham, without its precious load.

Danger over, Guy rolls onto his back. He stares at the patches of blue sky between the leaves and branches, fervently hoping the gang don’t forget about him in their euphoria over seizing a large quantity of coin.

~

He wakes to find he is on his bunk, naked apart from the outlaw tag Will made him, a pair of braies – Robin’s judging by their tightness – and a swaddling of bandage around his upper right thigh.  He can hear a tangle of excited shouts and thumps: the gang rejoicing. Mixed in with the whoops and backslapping, he can make out Djaq’s high feminine laughter.

Guy smiles; they didn’t forget him. Indeed, Robin’s hefty shove, spilling Guy into the undergrowth after the guard rammed a sword through his leg, almost certainly saved his life. Now, Guy realises, he owes Robin gratitude not only for letting him join his gang when the outlaw has every reason to run Guy through the first chance he gets, but also for saving his life. Guy finds the thought an unsettling one, but has no more time to dwell on it as Djaq enters the sleeping area and crouches next to his bed.

“Awake at last,” she says, giving him a warm smile. “How do you feel?”

“Like someone who got on the wrong side of the sheriff and ended up in his fucking Festival of Pain; only, this time, his ridiculous contraptions actually worked.”