Erasmus Hobart and the Golden Arrow

There was a chorus of ‘sneak’ from the back of the queue. Erasmus took a discreet look and noted Barnstaple and his usual bunch of cronies. He felt sorry for Harrison: he admired the child’s sense of duty and fair play, but sometimes he felt it would be better if the boy just kept his mouth shut. He looked down at his feet and found a small packet of sandwiches, so tightly wrapped in cling-film you felt that Harrison’s mother was trying to suffocate the contents and make sure they were dead. He motioned to the boy at the front of the queue, who obediently bent down, picked up the package and passed it to the master.

Erasmus looked sternly at Barnstaple. ‘Why did you throw this?’ he asked.

Barnstaple maintained a sullen silence.

‘We’ll stand here until someone tells me,’ Erasmus informed them, ‘and you know what that means, don’t you?’

Some of the smaller boys nodded. Erasmus’ system of punishment basically involved adding up the minutes for which his lesson was disrupted and claiming the time back in a detention. It wasn’t an entirely fair system, since the whole class were punished for the fault of a handful of troublemakers but, as Erasmus himself pointed out, his detentions weren’t about punishing people, but about making sure they came out of school with the right amount of education. British education might be going to the dogs, but there was no way this teacher was going to turn his school into just another kennel.

Barnstaple, knowing Erasmus wouldn’t back down and unwilling to undergo an entire hour’s detention, held up a small wooden device.

‘I was testing this,’ he admitted.

‘Bring it here,’ Erasmus demanded. Barnstaple made his way to the front, the line of boys leaning against the wall to let him pass, whilst simultaneously staring curiously at the contraption. Erasmus took the device from the boy and examined it closely.

‘It’s a catapult,’ Barnstaple explained.

‘I can see that,’ Erasmus told him. ‘More accurately, of course, you should call it a trebuchet. Now what are you doing throwing people’s sandwiches with a piece of siege artillery?’

‘I thought they might want to use it in the play.’

‘I see. This would be the famous production of Robin Hood, would it?’

Barnstaple nodded.

‘And where in the legends does it say that the outlaws fired sandwiches from trebuchets, hmm?’

Barnstaple shrugged. ‘They had them back then,’ he managed.

‘Trebuchets, yes,’ Erasmus agreed. ‘However, I believe they were somewhat short of sandwiches and, even if they weren’t, I doubt it would ever have occurred to them to use them as ammunition.’

‘The French used to throw animals over castle walls,’ someone contributed. ‘Perhaps the English just used to throw their lunch.’

Erasmus looked up, trying to find the source of the comment, one eyebrow raised quizzically. He identified the source of the comment as Atkinson and looked at him levelly. ‘Do you understand why the French threw cows over castle walls?’ he asked.

‘Because they had BSE?’ Atkinson suggested.

‘In the thirteenth century,’ Barnstaple sneered.

Erasmus looked at Barnstaple sternly and the boy fell silent. ‘Believe it or not, Atkinson,’ Erasmus continued, looking back towards the boy, ‘you’re actually thinking in the right area. It was common in siege warfare to hurl diseased animals into besieged castles – the idea was that the disease would spread amongst the inhabitants and lead to an early surrender. However, I fail to see what relevance this has to Robin Hood.’ He looked down at Barnstaple once more.

‘I was just getting into it,’ said Barnstaple. ‘You know, history and all that.’

Erasmus pushed back the classroom door and ushered the pupils to their seats. He handed Harrison his sandwiches as he passed. Once the last few pupils had filtered past, he closed the door and made his way to his desk.

‘Taking an interest in history is very commendable,’ he told the class as they stood quietly behind their desks, ‘but plays about Robin Hood actually say very little about the history of this country. In fact, there are significant elements of the plays which flatly contradict history as we know it.’

He motioned for the class to sit and, as they complied, he surveyed them: there did seem to be a spark of genuine interest, even if it had initially revolved around a practical interest in siege weaponry.

He waited for the noises of scraping chairs and low murmuring to subside, then addressed the class. ‘Can anyone give me an example of a historically dubious aspect of the Robin Hood legend?’ he asked.

Harrison raised his hand, eager to be the first to answer. Erasmus decided not to choose the boy: he’d already embarrassed Barnstaple once this morning and it wouldn’t do to let him draw too much attention to himself – not with double physics after lunch, anyway.

‘Heathfield,’ he called out, noticing the child was holding his left arm up and supporting it with his right as if it were becoming burdensome.

‘Marian, sir,’ Heathfield said.

‘What about Marian?’

‘My dad says she didn’t exist, sir.’

‘Does he now? And what makes him say that?’

‘He says that women knew their place in the Middle Ages, sir, and that they didn’t go out partying with their friends to all hours of the night.’

Erasmus tried hard not to smile: Heathfield Senior’s remarks often said more about the insecurities of twenty-first century man than they did about the position of twelfth- or thirteenth-century woman. He noticed Harrison had put his sandwiches on the edge of the desk – should he tell the boy to put them away? He didn’t understand why Harrison had to wave his sandwiches around like that anyway – did he think they’d run away if he left them in his bag?

‘I was told the French made her up,’ Atkinson contributed. ‘She wasn’t in the early legends and the French added her in.’

‘Why would the French do that?’ Barnstaple challenged.

‘Hufter,’ Atkinson sneered. ‘We were all French back then anyway – that’s just like saying we made it up.’

‘If we were French, why were they called Normans, then?’

‘Everyone was called Norman, that’s why they invented surnames – ’cos it got too confusing.’

Erasmus banged on the desk with his board rubber. ‘Can we have a little order?’ he asked. The room fell silent, except for a few murmurings from Barnstaple, still seething at being insulted.

‘Now,’ Erasmus continued. ‘The example I had in mind is the return of King Richard – that’s been a part of the legend for as long as we can trace it back. Historically, it seems extremely unlikely. Richard spent most of his time out of the country and there’s plenty of evidence he didn’t care about the place in the slightest. Even if we allow for the possibility that Robin could have met the King during the siege of Nottingham Castle, it seems unlikely that standing up for the rights of English peasants would have pleased Richard. Marian is an interesting one, though. It’s widely held she was, as Atkinson pointed out, added by French-inspired romantics at roughly the same time that Guinevere was added to the legend of King Arthur, but a new school of thought has it that Marian was part of the original legends and was removed by chroniclers of the day, possibly because they shared the opinions of Heathfield’s father.’

There were a few chuckles around the room and Heathfield’s face flushed red.

‘Please, sir,’ Harrison held his arm so high Erasmus wondered at how he didn’t dislocate it.

‘Yes, Harrison,’ Erasmus prompted, expecting one of Harrison’s regular requests for the lavatory.

‘Did Robin Hood really exist?’ Harrison asked.

Erasmus sat down on the edge of his desk. ‘That’s difficult to say,’ he admitted. ‘It’s usually true that legends have at least some historical basis, but it’s very hard to tell how much of the legend is attributable to a real person.’

‘Can’t you just look up his birth certificate?’

Erasmus smiled. ‘They hadn’t started keeping them back then,’ he said. ‘But there are Robin Hoods in the records.’ He noted Harrison’s sudden look of enthusiasm. ‘They’re all years later,’ he said.

‘What about going back to the earliest version of the legend?’ Atkinson asked.

Erasmus shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘The trouble with legends like Robin Hood is that they usually begin as an oral tradition. The first written stories of Robin appear at least a hundred years after the time of King John and it’s possible these left out elements, like Marian, which were added by later writers who knew some of the oral traditions. It’s also possible the original writers added some of the political material of their own time to the message.

‘Robin, we are told, robbed from the rich to give to the poor, but this was supposed to happen at a time when we’re told money wasn’t in wide circulation. Peasants were living off the land and they paid for the rights to that land by working the lands of their masters. Their masters mostly earned their keep by means of military service.’

‘So where did all the robbing come from?’ asked Atkinson.

‘Possibly from when the stories were written down. By then, the feudal system had been devastated by the Black Death, labourers were being paid to farm, and King Edward the Third was expecting to live just us as well in a country where thirty per cent of the population had died in a few short years.

‘Robin Hood was the perfect tale to carry the sentiments of the people of that time, which might explain why King John is given such a poor portrayal. King Richard, by contrast, is portrayed as a great king even though he was hardly ever in the country.’

‘Sir,’ Harrison asked. ‘What’s the feudal system?’

‘I’m glad you asked that,’ Erasmus told him, ‘because that’s what we were supposed to be studying today. Now, if you’ll all turn to page one hundred and thirty in your textbooks, we’ll have a look at what life was like in the Middle Ages.’

There was a general rustling of pages and Erasmus drank deeply from his lukewarm tea. In a way he was grateful for the school play – he’d never have been able to get the pupils interested in the Barons’ Revolt and Magna Carta if they weren’t already thinking about the period. That was the trouble with the curriculum, history was expected to be a dry repetition of facts: there was no real understanding to go with it. If you could put the class into one of those reconstruction villages for a week, like a mediaeval version of Big Brother, now that might help them to understand what it was like.

He opened his own battered copy of the textbook to the relevant page – oh well, time to get on with the lesson. He noticed Barnstaple was leaning over towards Harrison’s desk, his eyes intent on the smaller boy’s sandwiches. Almost unconsciously, the teacher picked up his board rubber and hurled it across the room. The projectile hit the desk within an inch of Barnstaple’s hand and bounced off towards the back of the room; the sound of the impact made both boys jump and Barnstaple, already in an imbalanced position, fell from his chair with a crash. A ripple of laughter spread across the class as Barnstaple picked himself up, his face red with embarrassment and one hand clutching his forehead.

‘Now what’s the matter?’ Erasmus asked.

‘I hit my head,’ Barnstaple replied. Erasmus summoned the boy to his desk and inspected the purple swelling just above his eye. It was nothing serious but, if it meant he could rid the class of a disruptive influence for long enough to get the other boys settled into some work, then it was an opportunity worth taking.

‘Go and see the nurse,’ he instructed the boy, ‘and don’t be too long, you’ll be making the time up tomorrow evening.’

‘Yes, sir,’ said Barnstaple, thoroughly cowed, then made his way out of the classroom door. The other pupils watched him go then looked expectantly at their teacher.

‘Right,’ said Erasmus in a businesslike tone. ‘What we’re going to do today is to read the chapter on Magna Carta and then I want you to write a thousand words on what effect you think the document had on the common man. Heathfield, you can come here and distribute the exercise books.’

The ginger-haired boy made his way unhurriedly to the front of the class and took the pile of books from his teacher. Erasmus watched as each child accepted his book and turned to see what mark they had received for their homework. Atkinson was staring wistfully into the corner of the room and Erasmus followed his gaze, which was trained somewhere just above his confiscated bow.

‘We’ll never know, will we sir?’ Atkinson asked.

‘Know what?’

‘Whether Robin Hood really existed.’

‘Perhaps we will one day,’ said Erasmus and he shot a glance at the equations, just visible at the top of the board. ‘Perhaps we will.’

Chapter Four

The end of the school day came, as it always did, as something of a relief. Despite having a passion for teaching, Erasmus always felt the school day was at least half an hour too long and that the hours of eight-thirty until four o’clock had been arrived at with more consideration to the children’s parents than to the children themselves. He retrieved his board rubber from the back of the room for the third time that day, then sat down at his desk and finished his mug of tea, before rolling the blackboard round to the squiggles that had so confused Clarence the previous night.

Ciphered in the impenetrable scrawl was the key to time, an equation so elegant it was almost a work of art, yet so simple it should scarcely have taxed a remedial student and yet – and yet – it was he, Erasmus Hobart, who had discovered that equation, who had realised it could be applied to create a machine that could travel in what had once been naively cast as the fourth dimension. There, described in a thin layer of chalk dust, was a summation of the quantum nature of time, a description of how all times were superposed in one space and how, far from accepting the universe as observed, a traveller could spin the quantum universe until he had selected the time at which he wished to observe it. The full ramifications of interacting with a different quantum state of the universe weren’t entirely certain, but then nothing was when you were dealing with quantum physics.

Erasmus adjusted a couple of figures based on the voyage of the night before, then tossed the board rubber in his hand as he basked in the glory of his achievement.

Where should he go tonight? Should he try to solve some great mystery, like what exactly happened on the Marie Celeste, or try to meet one of history’s great statesmen for an interview? Perhaps, he considered, he could try to find the truth of the Robin Hood legend. It was certainly an interesting proposition.

He pocketed the board rubber and picked up his mediaeval costume, which he had washed at home the previous night. Then, mindful of Clarence’s intrusion after his previous outing, he locked the door to the corridor before unlocking the storeroom. Inside the small room, the privy stood, silent and expectant. Erasmus ignored it for the moment and turned his attention to the wardrobes, opening the door to the first and revealing a rack of clothing, with plastic hangings dividing it into sections. Each section was labelled with a range of dates for the era to which the clothes belonged, with sections like the 1500s, where fashion had changed on an almost weekly basis, being contrasted with those of earlier centuries, where advances in clothing had been seen as secondary to the continual struggle to survive.

Erasmus hung his clean clothing in the 1000s section, then rifled through the other clothes in the same era, looking for something more likely to blend in with forest surroundings. He finally settled on a brown tunic with matching cloak and trousers, which he complemented with a leather belt, a pouch and a pair of calfskin thigh boots.

He dressed hurriedly, then checked his appearance in the mirror on the inside of the wardrobe door. Perfect – except for one detail. He rummaged in a drawer at the bottom of the wardrobe and pulled out a small, cloth bag, inside which were a pair of contact lenses. He disliked wearing lenses, but his glasses were a product of a later era. Although he had no way of knowing how much impact introducing advanced technology into the ancient world would have, he didn’t want to be the man who went down in history for ruining it.

Having assured the authenticity of his costume, Erasmus examined himself in the mirror once more. He was probably a little clean for a mediaeval peasant, but that should go unnoticed for long enough for him to attract a little dirt. He practised a few mediaeval expressions, greeting himself as if he had just unaccountably run into his exact doppelganger in a village street. Then, satisfied he would pass muster, he picked up his modern clothes from where they lay on the floor and hung them up in the second wardrobe.

As he turned his jacket up the right way, the board rubber fell from its pocket and, distractedly, Erasmus attempted to put the implement back. It wasn’t so easy to insert the rubber into the pocket of a jacket he wasn’t wearing, however, and after failing on his first attempt, he popped it into the pouch he wore on his belt. He closed the wardrobe doors, then a thought occurred to him and he returned to the classroom.

Standing in the corner of the room was the bow he had confiscated from Atkinson. Erasmus picked it up and tested the string once more. He’d never fired a bow before, but it was unlikely anyone else would guess that, so carrying one would probably be a sensible measure to discourage anyone from attacking him. Finally, satisfied that he was ready to depart, Erasmus re-entered the storeroom, locking the door behind him, then turned his attention to the privy.

The interior of the privy was not what one might have expected from such a primitive device. Although the essential seat was present and correct, it was covered with a padded leather cushion, firmly fastened into place with brass studs. The walls, far from being bare wood, were covered with a mass of wires and small, blinking lights and a periscope hung from the centre of the ceiling, its brass glinting in the light from the outside world.

Erasmus sat down on the cushion, adjusted his posture to make himself comfortable, then pulled at a wooden panel that was almost flush with the wall on his right. The panel swung on smoothly oiled joints until it hung over Erasmus’ lap like one of the old-fashioned school desks in which chair and writing surface were one combined piece of furniture. The surface of this desk, however, contained something more than an inkwell, with a series of lights and liquid crystal displays, all connected to each other with lengths of rainbow-striped ribbon cable. In the centre of the panel was a series of buttons, a small keyboard, a joystick with a big red button on top and a throttle, all cobbled together from bits of old computer equipment, and these were labelled, using the black and white embossed stickers from a label maker Erasmus had confiscated from a troublesome first former. The joystick was labelled ‘where’ and the throttle was labelled ‘when’.

Erasmus flicked a switch on the side of the board and the privy hummed into life, with lights streaming along translucent wires, LEDs flicking on and off in what appeared to be random sequences and the displays on the control panel blinking a couple of times before settling down. A series of numbers appeared, the co-ordinates of Erasmus’ previous jaunt, with a prompt for a label displayed in flashing capitals beneath. The schoolteacher entered in a date and location – his research had placed Lady Godiva’s ride in Coventry somewhere between 1038 and 1051 – then pressed the button to store the information. It wasn’t, he had to admit, a very precise fix, but it was a start. He’d be able to improve on that when he’d made a few more trips.

Erasmus surveyed the control panel before him and breathed deeply. Last night had been an experiment – he had had no real destination in mind – now he was going to put his machine to the purpose he had always intended – the pursuit of historical truth. It was true he would never be able to tell anyone what he discovered – he was less than willing that his machine should fall into the hands of the authorities – but he could finally find the answers to all those questions that had nagged him throughout his life: he could finally know what really happened. He placed his hands on the joystick and the throttle, moved them carefully until he was satisfied with the contents of the display, then closed his eyes and pressed the red button.

Chapter Five

The Middle Ages was once said to be a time when England was covered in an impenetrable forest, when a squirrel could cross from one end of the country to the other without once setting foot on the ground. This is now known to be untrue, though it may have been possible for squirrels that had mastered the art of hitchhiking or stowing away on carts.

For a squirrel to cross a shorter distance, say from one part of Sherwood Forest to another, was much simpler and would have been particularly easy deep in the heart of the forest where the upper branches of the trees grew so close as to blanket out the sun. Here all was suffused in a strange green light, filtering through the leaves to the ground below and this, so the peasants held, was where the spirits were said to walk and where the night came faster and deeper than in any other part of England. Here the common man feared to tread.

Guy of Gisburne was not a common man. He didn’t believe in phantoms and fairies and knew the only thing that went bump in the night was the door of the privy when the plague was in town. For him, Sherwood Forest held no ghostly fears – the only threats were outlaws. You had more chance of an arrow in your back than of having your soul stolen by whatever demons lurked in the ancient wood.

He rode quietly through the heart of the forest, or at least as close to it as he could get whilst wearing scale-mail armour and mounted on a horse. Despite his lack of supernaturally induced fear, his eyes betrayed a certain nervous tension and his feelings were somehow transmitted to his horse, which was behaving a little skittishly. A resounding clang on his helmet made him look up – above him in the trees he saw the small form of a creature scurrying away through the branches. Bloody squirrels. He hadn’t come into the woods to hunt squirrels, he’d come to hunt outlaws. Outlaws who were stealing the King’s deer and waylaying merchants whose taxes would fund his wars in the Holy Land.

The root of the problem was that Prince John was an unreasonable man: to him, being robbed didn’t constitute a tax deductible expense. Because it was much harder to extract money from a merchant when they’d already lost it, he had decided on a policy of punishing those who were insufficiently careful with their or rather, as the Prince saw it, his money. Such merchants were, in future, to be regarded as de facto thieves.

Unfortunately, this didn’t have the desired effect. Convictions for theft increased vastly, but most of the convicted were those who had been robbed. Since this provided little money for King Richard’s war chest, John was forced to think again.

His next brainwave was vastly more effective. Instead of blaming the victims of crime, he decided, instead, to blame those officials whose lands were havens for cutthroats and whose thoroughfares were most often used to waylay wealthy travellers.

Hunting outlaws was proving to be an infuriating pastime: even with the Sheriff, Gisburne himself and ten men-at-arms combing the forest, the demands of Prince John on behalf of his brother were proving intractable. The outlaws knew the forest well – too well – and seemed to be able to melt away into the trees at will. Gisburne was all for letting them stay in their damned forest, but he knew that, though his and the Sheriff’s heads would be of as little use to Richard as the merchant’s hands, that wouldn’t stop John from appropriating them if they were less than totally successful.