XI. Into Nottingham
The Waits ushered Thomas into Nottingham by the Mansfield Road, which led into the market square. Well before they reached it, they passed various sandstone caves carved out of the heights and slopes surrounding the town. Some had wooden façades built onto the fronts but, according to various members of the Waits, these were lately added. The caves were much older. Some reached deep into the stone. Some, they told him, even had stairs extending up or down into the rock—some to well rooms; others, within the promontory on which Nottingham Castle stood, snaked up to the very top.
The castle was impossible to miss. It was more complex than any motte and bailey construction he’d seen before: There were three baileys at various heights, and at least two identifiable keeps as if two ruling families lived side by side there overlooking the River Leen, though both would be occupied by the more powerful and prominent Normans. Beneath the arrangement of walls and keeps, various odd caves pockmarked the escarpment itself. It looked like a giant dovecote. Elias pointed. “Sheriff’s dungeons there, too.”
The look of it reminded Thomas of something Nicnevin had told him once—how she had released a group of humans after showing them the sacrifice well she called Hel, and how “the fools named a goddess after it and insisted various caverns in your world led directly into her.” He marveled that no one thought these caves led to some supernatural realm. Maybe because the people here had carved them all out. Then again, maybe there were some folk who did think it.
“Tell ’im about the wall,” said Benedict.
“Soon enough,” Elias said, which proved to be only a few minutes.
Down the center of the market square ran a stone wall, approximately chest high, and with openings here and there—nine in all, with one long stretch of uninterrupted wall to the northwest.
“This side here is the Saxon borough,” explained Geoffrey, “where you’re welcome on account of you’re Saxon, ain’t yah. The other side of the wall, the Norman French inhabit. Them as is housed near the castle. It’s my opinion they came here under King Henry and stayed. They put on an animal market there with goats and chickens and hogs. We kept the grains, the barley and malt an’ everything else in the market on our side.” He grinned, then added with pride, “So we got the ale.”
“What about that?” Thomas pointed. At the far end of the wall on this side were a pond and a contraption something like a siege engine but with a seat at one end of it, which at the moment was occupied by a sopping wet woman. Two burly men stood at the opposite side of it, having just raised her out of the pond, while a third man stood beside them.
“Oh, ’at’s the ducking pond,” Benedict proudly announced. “And that woman, she’s done summat’s put ’er in that chair. Slew her babbies, killed her husband, or maybe she’s a hedge-born doxy, who knows.”
Osbert leaned closer and whispered, “All that’s sheriff’s business, and the Norman sheriff at that. Best to let it be.”
“I see,” Thomas replied, less than certain.
“If it’s adultery she’s committed, they’ll send her off soon enough after the public humiliation,” said Elias. “Then again, if it’s murder, this is all prolusion to hanging.” He pointed. “The man in the blue tunic there, he’s our sheriff.”
The sheriff had a short black beard not unlike Thomas’s, but his face in profile was thinner, angular, his brows dark. His blue tunic was decorated by a small emblem on the left chest of a rough green cross against a red field. He caught sight of the Waits and waved to them. Elias waved back.
“As I said, the Normans have their own, a taller man, and red-faced like he’s furious all the time,” he explained. “He operates from the castle.”
“Two reeves? That must be confusing.”
“They stay out of each other’s way.”
“Which do you serve?”
“We serve the boroughs, wherever the threat comes from.”
“But—”
Elias scratched at his gray beard. “I know what you’re asking. We’ve never yet had to choose, and please God we never have to.”
Thomas accepted the answer. It was time to leave the Waits and finish his undertaking. “I thank you all for your good company on the road. Now I need to find the tannery.”
“Which one?” asked Warin.
“Ah, Hodde, I think it was.”
“What, like the outlaw?”
“Outlaw?”
“Robert Hodde,” said Elias. “Scourge of Sherwood. Leaves us alone as we’re too many in number to trouble.”
“I . . . don’t believe there’s a relation. He’s a tanner by trade. My, ah, my uncle. I bring news for him.”
“So you’re his nephew, Robyn? Robyn Hodde?”
“Well, we’ve come to spell the last name as Hoode.” He couldn’t very well take it back now. At least varying the name might provide him some distance. With luck no one here would go asking the tanner about his nephew.
“That’s perilously close, don’t you think?” said Elias.
“Me, I don’t know any by name,” said Warin, “but the tanners are all clustered along the marsh. Walk the slope down past castle wall, then ask.”
Benedict laughed at that. “Tha won’t need to ask.” He tapped his nose. “Just follow your nostrils.”
The slope Warin sent Thomas down deposited him below the town and beside the castle rock. Along the escarpment leading to it lay more caves than he’d seen upon the Mansfield Road. The rock face itself curved away around a broad marshy plain that verged the River Leen. That cliff face had been carved into dozens and dozens of openings, a few fronted by wooden façades. Others had stone houses built right up against them, as if the houses had grown out of the scarp. He followed them, initially picking up the smell of roasting barley malt. If the hanging signboards were any indication, most of the grain roasters were placed near alehouses. A great many alehouses. As with the others he’d seen, none of the openings appeared to be natural—all were scraped out of the long, winding sandstone butte. He supposed there might be an entire network of caves within the rock, including the Norman sheriff’s dungeons deep in the castle escarpment above.
He asked one of the brewers where he might find the tannery caves. The man pointed back in the direction he’d come. He turned around. Initially he was accompanied on the path by many, but the numbers dwindled as he passed by the slope he’d come down and walked around the far side of the castle rock, and not long after that his eyes began to water. The air emerging from the openings ahead stung his eyes. Inhaling it made him feel he was scouring out his lungs. The openings that lay ahead stank like caves dug straight into the devil’s realm. It must be an entire row of tanners.
Rather than torture himself further, he braved the nearest opening to ask which was Hodde’s tannery. The woman he asked had a wet linen cloth covering the lower half of her face; above it her eyes were red and irritated, as was the skin of her hands and wrists. But she stepped out and pointed to a specific cave. Naturally, it stood at the far end of tannery row, as he was coming to think of this horrid stretch of caverns.
The outermost chamber of the Hodde tannery was uninhabited. A great leather cloak hung drying against a wall there. The air within was like the condensation from the piss of a hundred goats.
Thomas cupped one hand over his nose and mouth. He wished he had a piece of linen such as the woman had worn.
He entered the interior cave. The floor of it had been carved into a series of recesses—vats of various sizes dug for the processing of skins. A group of figures, most wearing aprons, knelt between the vats, some with large wood rods that they used to stir the contents. At his arrival, they looked up, all as red-eyed as any demons, and at that point he could stand it no more and ducked back out and onto the path outside, where he stood with hands on his thighs while he sucked in the comparatively tolerable air. He wiped at his eyes.
A moment later the aproned man who’d been kneeling over the nearest vat emerged after him. “How might I help thee, stranger?” the man asked. He was inspecting Thomas’s clothes. He reached over and touched the loose sleeve of the green cotehardie with a kind of wary familiarity. Thomas glanced up. There was a certain family resemblance.
Thomas asked, “You’ve a brother who dwells in Sherwood?”
“That I do, aye,” said the man. His slightly defiant tone expressed anticipation of the nature of the news.
“He’s slain, I have to tell you. His last request of me was that I deliver his takings to his family in Nottingham.” He drew the large pouch of coins and jewels from his shoulder bag.
“Outlaw ways finally caught up wi’im. Well, I’ll go ta Lenton Priory, give some’a this coin ta Prior Bluett that they remember his soul.” Hodde took the pouch, nodded at Thomas’s clothes. “An’ you one a his, best take care hereabout. Sheriffs, especially Passelewe . . .” He seemed to debate whether to say more, then instead asked, “How fared Little John?”
He shook his head. “I’ve yet to locate him.”
“Hmm. ’E comes ’ere, look for him in Pilgrim.” At Thomas’s confused expression, he pointed. “Back t’other way, way you come, far side’a malt kilns.”
Thomas thanked him. “Tell me, how do you stand the reek?”
Hodde grinned with brownish teeth. “Don’t notice it hardly anymore. But it keeps rats away. No plague in tanner’s house.”
They parted company. As fast as he could escape the mephitic air, Thomas headed back around the castle promontory.