A KNIGHT’S TALE

Julie looked at the blonde woman who was obviously with the imposing man she'd been talking to. Her own head was whirling. She hadn't had time to process Robert's last name nor what had just happened in the cubicle and now she'd been recognized. She sighed. Did that really matter right now? Did anything matter but what was going on with Robert?

"Yes," she nodded distractedly, too worried about Robert to avoid a certain rudeness, "but that's neither here nor there." She looked back at Maximus, opening her mouth to ask him who he was, why Robert would have taken him for....

"General Meridius!"

Maximus turned, frowning at a reporter from a Coffs newspaper. "Not now, please. I have a friend here in grave danger. Please, not now." The way he said it was not a request and the expression in his eyes made the man back off across the room.

"General Meridius?" Julie repeated. "Are you a...?"

"He is," Joimus smiled, "but that, too, is neither here nor there at the moment. I'm sorry I...."

"Her husband," Maximus spoke up, his eyes going again to the curtains, "I believe he was the man who pulled Alistair from the mill."

"Is...is this mill near the Glen?" Julie asked, never having seen it.

"Not far at all," Joimus supplied.

"Then, yes, it is most likely Robert. He, I, um...we...live near there, too."

"You do?" Joimus was surprised. "I thought I knew every...."

"Oh, um, we've not been there long." She looked back at Maximus. "I was just coming out the door a while ago when he collapsed in the front yard. Said he'd pulled a man from a fire. He's...he's not doing all that well, I'm afraid. Do you know anything about what happened?"

"Only that a man went into the mill and carried Reverend Harris out. The medics were giving him oxygen but he disappeared while they were getting Alistair into the ambulance."

"Reverend Harris?"

"Yes, he is the Glen's pastor and lives with his new wife in the mill."

Julie was on information overload. "Why," Maximus continued, "would he leave like he did when he still needed medical attention?"

She herself was not sure of that. She hadn't even known Robert's last name until a moment ago. Oh, God...Loxley. How in heaven's name could his last name be Loxley?  "He...he's a very...private...man," she offered lamely.

A nurse came up to Julie. "You can go be with your husband now," she said. "He's asleep, but you can sit with him if you like. They'll be taking him for tests shortly."

"Tests?"

"Chest x-ray, that sort of thing."

As she approached the curtain, another nurse was just leaving, several vials of blood in her hands. "You can go on in. I've finished."

The head of the gurney had been elevated to help with his breathing and Robert lay there quietly, his eyes closed, breathing oxygen. Several monitors beeped, rather irritating her jangled nerves, and she stood by the railing on his right side a while, looking down at
him. They'd gotten him in one of those horrid hospital gowns. She always hated those things, but on him, it was just terribly...wrong. A thin white blanket was pulled halfway up his chest, his arms lying at his sides, an IV hooked up to his left arm. "Oh...Robert," she sighed, brushing a lock of hair off his face.

Pulling her hand back, she let it rest high on his bare right arm, her attention then attracted by the feel of the scar that crossed it diagonally. She ran her fingertip down its length, a good nine inches or so. How could he have gotten such a thing? And what had been going through his mind when he'd tried to fight off the three men earlier?

What no one knew was that during the battle for Jaffa, Robert had been surrounded by Saracens. Richard himself had been caught in the sudden onslaught, had been unseated from Fauvel and was struggling to gain his footing just to Robert's right. A Saracen archer, finding position on a broken wall, let fly his arrow at the king. Robert, struggling with a knife-wielding Saracen, had seen the archer release his arrow, had thrown himself in front of Richard, taking the shaft in his right side. Mounted Templars had ridden up just as Robert collapsed into Richard's arms. The Saracens left alive fled back into the hills, and Richard, still kneeling, supported the form of the man who'd just saved his life.

It was that moment that had changed everything for Robert. Richard himself had carried him to his own tent, sending for his own surgeon. Robert remembered no more than the carrying, the arrival in the tent, for the surgeon's pulling out of the barbed arrowhead had
sent him spiraling down into darkness. When he came back to himself, it was night and for a long moment he lay there, his side still screaming in pain, trying to remember where he was and why. Turning his head on the small cot where he lay, he looked across the
interior space of the large tent, his eyes coming to rest on a man seated at a small table, studying what appeared to be maps, his head backlit by a torch. Who...? But there could only be one man with such a burnished glory of red-gold hair.

He tried to raise himself on one elbow to see better, but the beginning of the effort sent hot pain searing through his side and he lay back with a low moan. Richard heard and got up, walking to stand near the cot. "I am here," the king said, "because of what you did today. I shall not forget it."

And he didn't. During their time of rebuilding the wall, which Richard himself participated in with his own hands, carrying heavy stones, the king would come back to his tent, hot and tired, and when he was clean would sit and talk with Robert. A close friendship developed between the two men, and in Robert, Richard found a man with whom he could share his inmost thoughts. It was, thus, that Robert had eventually come to know what that moment on the hill as Richard had seen Jerusalem meant to the king.

As their friendship grew and the battles with the Saracen continued, Richard discovered Robert knew how to fight with a sword as well as his longbow. Eventually Richard had knighted Robert somewhere halfway between Jerusalem and Jaffa.

"Time to take him to x-ray," a male technician said, pulling open the curtain.

Julie wandered back out to the main waiting area. Ah, the couple from the Glen were still there. "How is the reverend?" Julie asked.

Maximus looked up at her, his jaw grimly set. "Not well. Not well at all," he sighed. "They fear he may not last the night."