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The boy huffs, annoyed. He yanks his hand out of his father’s larger one and kicks a pebble across the cobblestones.
“I’m bored.”
The father chuckles and ruffles the boy’s hair. “Patience, habibi. We’re on a quest. These things take time.”
Time, the boy thinks. It took six hours to fly from Jordan to London, two hours on a train from London to Nottingham, another hour on the road from there. All that time, just to wander around an old church yard?
“Why are we here anyway?”
“Ah.” The father stops, looks down at his son, indulgent. “It’s a tradition, see. My father brought me here when I was your age, and his father brought him, and his father’s father, and so on.”
His curiosity piqued, the boy prods the father for more. “Is that the quest? Are we looking for treasure?” He scuffs the ground with his feet, eyes wide. “Is it buried under here? In the church.”
The father laughs, the sound reverberating across the old stones of the churchyard. “Not that kind of treasure. We’re here to find our legacy.”
He notes his son’s confusion and grabs his hand. “Come with me, I think I know where it is.”
They find it under the arching boughs of an old yew, a short pillar of moss-covered stones, unremarkable, maybe even forgotten. The boy frowns. “Is this it?” He scratches his head and squints up at his father. “What is it?”
“It’s a memorial. Like a marker. To honor a man who lived a very long time ago.”
The boy nods. This feels solemn, so he keeps his voice down, even though they are all alone in the church yard. “What was his name?”
“Will Scarlett.”
The boy repeats the name a few times, letting the foreign sound--Scarlett, Scarlett--roll around his mouth. “Was he important? Like a king?”
The father leans over and whispers. “No, even better. He’s our ancestor!”
The boy’s eyes widen in shock. “But…how? We’re not even from here.”
The father smiles, his lesson in legacy just beginning. “There’s a story. Would you like to hear it? It might take a while.”
“I have time!”
Time, the father thinks. It took years of war to force a young Saracen woman to journey to England, and even more years of privation for a poor Englishman to follow her to the Holy Land, and then more than 900 years of birth and love and injustice and death and birth again to bring it all back together, the true legacy of a band of never-quite-forgotten outlaws.