You've Got Another Thing Coming

“I’ve got you now!” the velvety, deep voice chuckled evilly. “There will be no escape!”

“No, no!” I begged, defiantly holding on to my last hope: grovelling. “Please! Show some mercy!”

The black robe billowed dramatically as the man opposite me raised his hand to deliver the final blow. The scythe next to him glistened threateningly in the setting sun as his well-built hands moved like a dart across the chequered board, cutting through the air and knocked my rook over.

“NO!” I wailed, grabbing at a flowing piece of fabric and tugging it desperately. “Please, it will be the end of me; don’t say the words!”

Cherokee, who stood a few feet away, was talking animatedly with a peasant and his wife. He glanced at us, rolled his eyes and called over:
“Hey, stop that! It’s only a damn game, you know.”

The peasant, however, took a more keen interest. “What was it you said they were doing, again?” he asked the tall fairy, glancing curiously at me and my dreadful opponent. “They said they were supposed to play a game, but I fear I don’t recognize it.”

“I almost feel a bit sorry,” my opponent grinned, and didn’t look so at all. “Check mate, Callie Johnson. Check mate.”

As he put down his own piece I felt myself deflate and fall into a heap by the board. My conqueror grabbed the scythe by his side and hauled himself to his feet. Liam then pushed the hood of the robe back and scampered over to the little group on the road.
“Here you go,” he smiled and handed over the scythe to the peasant’s crumpled wife. “Thanks for the loan; you were right, it {i]was good luck!”

The old woman accepted his agricultural equipment with a big smile. “Too bad young miss over there didn’t listen,” she said, nodding at my groaning heap. “But she seemed so sure of herself, I wasn’t inclined to insist.”

“She has a big ego,” conceded Cherokee.

“And, by the way, she’s a Mrs,” added Liam, eyes a-twinkle.

“Really?” the peasant butted in, his wrinkled face breaking into an even bigger smile. “She’s a pretty one, and those hips are bound to carry forth a nice amount of toddlers! Who’s the lucky man?”

Cherokee raised his hand solemnly, and Liam pointed one finger in his direction. “He is,” he gossiped. “They got married only yesterday over in Münz, at the inn.”

The bald peasant beamed, but found a catch: “But the priest in Münz died three months ago. Who wed them?”

“I did,” said Liam, and you could’ve polished the sun on his bright smile. “Ah, such a beautiful reception it was, too. The groom in black, the bride in white and both were fiercely glaring at the bouquet of lilacs!”

I grinned mirthlessly in my heap on the ground when I heard them talk. Yes, Cherokee had got almost everything he wanted to have in his wedding, but I had stood my ground about the red roses. Instead I’d picked my own flowers, and since a large lilac had been growing outside the main doors it had been an easy choice. They had quite an overwhelming scent, though…

It hadn’t been a too dreadful wedding, nonetheless, I commended. Darn right beautiful at some parts, like having our wedding vows read out loud to us by Liam, who had minimized our communications almost to none.
It had been fine.
At least, up to the point where tradition demanded the groom to kiss his bride.

I’d been fretting about that all day, and even though Cherokee looked calm and collected, I myself was as rigid as a board when his lips gently touched mine and welded our futures together in holy words and actions.

Afterwards there had been some cake, a cup of coffee and a dance, and then we had all gone to bed. A lot of married people have separate bedrooms, Cherokee and I had reasoned. For one, think about all the spouses who snore – they often sleep in separate rooms from their beloved one. So we felt no shame about returning to our own rooms and sleeping the very sound sleep of newlyweds all by our very own selves.

The morning after we had packed our things, checked out and set off down the road to the Queen’s castle. Now that we had MacGuffin and oursleves within grasp of reality, there was no time to waste.
However, since men are prone to do this sort of thing every now and then, we got lost and ended up on a highway, where we soon found a peasant kind enough to point out to us the general direction of the royal family’s abode.

When the wind had begun to howl, Liam had donned a large cloak – or a robe, if you will, tugged a small chequered board from somewhere and kindly suggested that he and I played a game of chess.

And, as you all might now by now, I’d lost.

I pulled myself out of my wallowing misery and pained ego, and stood up.
“Let us just get going, shall we not?” I suggested as graciously as I could manage, silently cursing the comment about my hips.
They were wide. Yes, thank you. No need to comment.

Liam and Cherokee thanked the peasant, who was only happy to be at service, and we set off along the darkening road towards the castle grounds.

“It’s getting dim,” commented Liam and peered cautiously into the sunset. Clouds hovered overhead and turned the spectacular sky into a Van Gogh-ish painting.

“It’s getting cold, too,” whined I as a breeze swept through our little get-together, creating a wonderful cabaret of people rubbing their arms and hopping from foot to foot. Soon enough, the night bore down on us like a ton of heavy, masonry utensils and the chill waltzed along just to be able to say it had been there.

“Let’s get to the trees,” suggested Liam, referring to the rows and rows of forest-like vegetation surrounding our path. “It won’t be as windy, and we can build ourselves some kind of shelter.”

“Ooh, look at little mister Boy Scout,” snapped Cherokee in his usual, charming demeanour. “Since when did you ever build a shelter?”

Liam gave him a faltering look. “I’ve never built one,” he confessed. “But it can’t be too bloody difficult, can it?”

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“This is too bloody difficult,” wailed Liam and hurled a stick to the ground. The night was settling in nicely, like a slightly-gross party guest that refuses to leave even though every one else has gone home.

One person who wasn’t settling in nicely, however, was Liam. He’d been trying to build a shelter out of fallen-down, wood-like material and after one-and-a-half hours of intensive swearing he’d ended up with two sticks fastened in the ground and one lying unsteadily across them.

Cherokee and I sat on the trunk of a collapsed tree. After several unsuccessful attempts from Liam’s part at building a fire, Cherokee had pushed him aside and produced a roaring fire after just a couple of minutes. Now he and I were staring intently into it, as watching Liam curse had grown tiresome after the first thirty minutes. We had brewed some tea in a kettle that had been stowed away somewhere within Liam’s fantastic attempt at packing, and were now drinking it contently while sharing a loaf of bread.

I felt my eyelids grow heavy, and before I knew it I had fallen asleep leaning on Cherokee’s surprisingly comfortable shoulder for support.

And thus, the night grew colder...

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A noise curiously similar to a herd of banshees with severe tonsillitis disturbed my peaceful slumber.
The display that greeted my glorious awakening accurately confirmed the origin of my suspicions; as anything that caught my eye’s attention were huge shadows with enormous appendages. Only when I closed my eyes, re-opened them, re-closed them, prayed to God and opened them again, did I notice that the shadows were nothing more than enormously hairy, enormously grubby, enormously smelly and plain enormous monsters with a variety of very large weaponry.

“Up ye go, ye lazy scallywags!” roared one of the towering figures and waved a bit with his weapon of choice for emphasis. Another figure agilely kicked down what little had been standing of Liam’s humble shelter and hooted enthusiastically. Yet another figure groped around in the general area where the fire had been settling, and with a ‘swoosh!’ that made me jump the figure had flames licking the sky hungrily.

Its barbaric light filled the scene and blinded me momentarily, as well as anyone else who had been stupid enough to look at the explosion of fire. Blinking repeatedly, my eyes once again settled on the spectacle happening in our small camp.
It took me about a second to take in the eight large, hairy, scary monsters with deep holes for eyes, mouth the size of Venus and artillery that would have made Alexander the Great blush.

My lungs expanded voluntarily as my throat cleared itself in preparation of the blood-curdling scream that was building up underneath the panic.

Just as my lips opened to let it loose a large hand clasped itself over my mouth and dragged my head backwards. A fierce voice hissed in my ear:
“Shut up, shut up, shut up!”

I blinked. The un-romanticism of it all caught me off guard and knocked me into a side-track, as not to worry my poor little head of all the dreadful creatures just a few feet away. I lifted the hand gingerly off of my mouth.
“You’re supposed to say ‘be quiet or I’ll slit your throat’”, I corrected, trying to glare viciously through the back of my skull.

The voice sighed. “Fine,” it conceded. ”Shut the hell up or I’ll kill you. There, are you happy?”

I sniffed. “Not all that I hoped for, but I suppose it will have to do for now.”

“Wonderful,” growled the voice. ”Now, could you please be so kind as to be quiet and follow me, madam?”

Cherokee didn’t wait for a reply but grabbed my arm and gently dragged me towards him and away from the camp. He managed to get me upright and stumble a few steps in the opposite direction before he whispered in my ear again, his words hushed and hurried:
“Keep going straight ahead and don’t look back! I’ll catch up with you as soon as I can.”

I was just about to protest violently against him going to meet his maker in the costume of eight very unattractive monsters when I caught his gaze. It left me momentarily stunned and too wound up to complain.

Still I managed: “But…”

“Go!” he pressed and pushed me forward. I watched his retreating back as he made his way back to the camp, heard a blood-curdling scream of terror and realised it had been coming from me. Instantly, I fell silent and became slightly embarrassed at my own sudden dispay of emotions.

A little while after this, survival instincts knocked aside my common sense for once and ushered my legs into a rapt sprint. They carried me a long way – my word, yes – until I was stopped three metres later by a crossbow to the forehead.

“My, my, my…” said a pleasant tenor voice and chuckled in the way you laugh at a really, really bad joke. “What ever do we have here?”

I felt my knees begin to weaken dangerously and I felt lightheaded. The man pressed the point of the crossbow to my skin until it pricked, allowing one oozing little drop of blood to escape. Cross-eyed, I tried to follow its trail as it trickled its way down my face. Nausea overcame me. I had no issue with other people’s blood – it was seeing my own that usually caused me problems.

“Oh, no…” mumbled I as cold sweat slimed its way up my spine.

“Oh, yes,” purred the voice. It belonged to a man in his mid-thirties, not too bad looking but a little ruffled up and unkempt. He wore a leather vest over a large tunic, with a mighty-looking sword attached to his side by an impressive belt with a buckle as large as my fist. His leather boots came all the way up to his knees where the bootlegs had been folded down.
He didn’t wear trousers, though. The initial thought made me want to laugh out loud, but the man was aiming a crossbow at my hindbrain without bothering about the brain lingering in between.
The man was wearing green tights. And he had a green hat with a large feather in it.

I managed to shudder defiantly and he chuckled again.
“Pray, tell me,” said I, trying to sound sophisticated in case Death was listening close by and I wanted to make a good first impression, “are you by any chance a member of a travelling theatre group, and right now dressed up solely because you were practising your monologue as Hamlet, Prince of Denmark?”

The man’s chuckle evaporated. “No,” he growled, looking as puzzled as a man who does not like being puzzled and would rather turn another person into a puzzle than ever admitting he was, indeed, puzzled.

I sighed. A “damn,” was added as well as I stared myself silly at the crossbow. “Then you must be the dashing Robin Hood, who cunningly steals from the rich and gallantly gives to the poor.”

An owl howled in the distance.

Now the man looked like a mouse which had just ravished, killed and disembowelled a tiger.
“Aye,” he said. “If you by poor mean me and my little band of devout followers, then yes, I am that Robin Hood.”

I swallowed. “Oh, how wonderful…”

“Now,” he added in the tones of someone who knows they’re in control but might consider being a bit thoughtful to the underdog. “I want you to tell me, exactly, who you are and what you are doing in my forest.”

“We were camping?” answered I, exceedingly suspicious of this new tone of voice.

“Who are ‘we’?” The next question was fired rapidly.

“Me, a guy and another guy.”

“Who are those other guys?”

“My…” I hesitated, “husband and our mutual friend.”

“You’re married?” He looked surprised.

“You’re gay?”

“What?”

“I mean, you happy?” I batted my eyelashes innocently. Hood’s crossbow had been lowered as he shot off his uncivilized interrogation.

“What kind of a question is that?” asked Hood, thrown off his track. “Anyway, it’s none of your business!”

I huffed. “Well, you’re asking me all these weird questions, so why can’t I ask you some?”

“Because I’m holding a crossbow to your forehead,” he huffed and raised his lethal-looking weapon.

“Oh,” I said. “Good point.”

“Why, thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

There was a little pause where we steered our minds back to the bottom line.

“So, I’m just going to put my hands up like a good little girl?” I asked and raised said limbs tentatively.

Hood nodded. “Yes, that does sound like a good idea.”

“Capital!” replied I and stretched my arms as far above my head as they would possibly go.

Hood waved his little crossbow and smiled like the Cheshire cat. “Also, I would like you to walk this way-“

“And talk this way?” I filled in, adding a little song-and-dance number to the routine.

Hood grimaced. “That will not be necessary. Please shut up.”

Silence ensued as Hood ushered me at crossbow-point in front of him. In a matter of seconds we were back at the scene of destruction, which was previously known under its stage name ‘our camp’.

It looked like a war zone.
The main fire had been trampled out, but small fires had erupted all over the place as to create a sort of line-dance of flames. Arrows, spears and broken bows littered the place almost in the same way the bodies next to them did, and red seemed to be the colour of the season as far as this lot was concerned. The clang of metal sounded through the place and through the smoke that lined the battle came a pair of warriors, swords a-glaze with fire and blood. They fought like Vikings, meaning they fought like people high on speckled mushrooms with no sense of reality or even balance.
It was like watching two drunks squabble.

“CHEROKEE!” I screamed as I recognized my tall, infuriated spouse as one of the fighters.

He turned his head at the sound of my voice, and in that exact moment his opponent managed to single-handedly stab Cherokee’s sword in his own thigh. The large, hairy monster of a man – because that was what I was hoping the creature was – howled in pain and fell into a heap on the ground with the sword still in his leg.

“Huh?” said Cherokee, dazed and completely drenched in what I hoped to be other people’s blood. He then looked up and saw me. “Callie, what the bleeding fuck are you doing here?! Why are you holding your hands above your head, and who’s that guy behind you with a crossbow, and why - ?” He stopped there, sensing something was sort of out of line.

“Uhm, Cherokee,” said I. I then thought it best to continue as well. I stuck a thumb over my shoulder “This nice man here is Robin Hood.”

Cherokee’s face contorted and I heard Hood chuckle behind me. He pushed me forward until I was eye-to-pecks with Cherokee, who made a grab for me.

“Ah-ah!” smiled Hood over my head and raised his weapon. “I’ve got the toys here, mate. Don’t touch her. Make a move that I might find offensive, and she’s dead.”

I saw Cherokee’s chest swell with anger, and the back of my brain noticed how nicely his muscles contracted under his shirt. The rest of my brain was worrying itself with the amount of danger the back of my brain was in, seeing as the crossbow hadn’t changed target.

“She’s my wife, you bastard!” growled Cherokee. He stood perfectly still, but I could see his fists clench and his teeth grind.

“Ah, so you are the lucky man!” said Hood jovially. “I found her waltzing along in my forest, so I reckoned I’d take care of her for you.”

“What a lovely thought,” hissed Cherokee, his face looking like a storm-cloud. “But I am here now, so you no longer have to look after her.”

“Yes, I could,” grinned Hood. He then looked behind Cherokee and gasped theatrically. “Oh my, my, my!” he said, his face a mask of sadness. “It seems you’ve frightfully mistreated my welcoming party. Didn’t you like them?”

The evil glint in Hoods eye reflected in Cherokee’s contortion of muscles. The back of my head fully enjoyed the view, but the rest of my head was more aware of the danger involved in standing in front of Cherokee when aggravated.

“They were fine until they tried to cut my head off,” replied Cherokee. “I rather took offence.”

“Dear me,” grinned Hood again. “I’m afraid it is against the law to kill the residents of this forest.”

“The lawless have laws?” Cherokee sounded mirthless. Carelessly, he also added: “And none are dead. At the moment.”

Hood leaned a bit to the right as to get a better look at the scene. “Oh, I don’t know,” he said in a carefree tone of voice. “That man over there seems to be going at any minute, now.”

The man with Cherokee’s sword in his thigh was on the ground with blood practically gushing out of his wound. He was as pale as death, and as quiet, too.

“He’s still got blood in him,” said Cherokee without even turning around.

Again, Hood grinned evilly. “I can wait.”

Cherokee started, and relaxed in unadulterated surprise. “Your own man?”

Hood shrugged indifferently. “He should have known better.”

“You would honestly let your own man die?” Cherokee was stunned. I could tell, because there was no half-witty, sarcastic remark.

I decided to speak up on my… husband’s behalf. “But Cherokee didn’t kill that man. I saw it; he rammed himself right into Cherokee’s sword!”

Hood chuckled and tickled my neck with the point of the crossbow. “Ah, yes. But he’s got his enemy’s sword in his thigh. Who would argue that he did it to himself when it’s much more fun,” here he laughed and waved his free hand in Cherokee’s direction, “to blame him?”

I craned my neck in order to get a good look at my captor. The twinkle in the eye was unmistakable. He was madder than a hatter, and far from as pleasant as the normal version of fairytale hatters.

“I would recommend for you two to follow me to my camp,” he said. “There you shall be given a fair trial and, if things go smoothly, a decent burial as well.”

Cherokee flared up. “You’re not taking her!” he shouted and gestured violently in my general direction. “She has nothing to do with any of this!”

“Au contraire, mate,” grinned Hood, who thought he looked dashing while doing so. “She’s guilty of murder, by association, and also for trespassing.”

“He’s not dead yet!” bellowed Cherokee.

Hood gave him a look that said more than words. Then he added: “It’s not like I really care.”