The Outlaws of Sherwood
TO MERRILEE,
WHO SAVED IT;
AND TO R.W.,
WHO SAVED ME
CHAPTER ONE
A small vagrant breeze came from nowhere and barely flicked the feather tips as the arrow sped on its way. It shivered in its flight, and fell, a little off course—just enough that the arrow missed the slender tree it was aimed at, and struck tiredly and low into the bole of another tree, twenty paces beyond the mark.
Robin sighed and dropped his bow. There were some people, he thought, who not only could shoot accurately—if the breeze hadn’t disturbed it, that last arrow would have flown true—but seemed to know when and where to expect small vagrant breezes, and to allow for them. He was not a bad archer, but his father had been a splendid one, and he was his father’s only child.
His father had taught him to shoot; he had also taught him to make and fletch his own arrows. Robin stopped to pull the treacherous arrow out of the ash it had chosen to fly at, and ran his fingers gently over the shaft. It was undamaged, he was relieved to see; he had a living to earn, and little time to spend making his own arrows. Mostly he sold the ones he found time to make; he had some slight local fame as a fletcher. He would rather have had any local fame, however slight, as an archer. But the money was useful; as one of the youngest sub-apprentice foresters in the King’s Forest of Nottingham, he barely earned coin enough to feed himself—in fact he didn’t earn even that, and he was struggling as well to keep title to his father’s small holding. Every quarter saw him in rising panic as the time for the rents grew near.
Fortunately for his peace of mind, Robin was usually too busy, and too short on sleep and food, to have time and energy for thinking. And he was young and strong and still hopeful; this Chief Forester, who sent him on all the most disagreeable tasks, was old, and might be expected to die or at least to retire some day soon. With some luck the new Chief Forester, although inevitably another sheriff’s man, might not hate young Robin for the sake of his mother, who had had the excellent sense to marry another man.
Today Robin had the great fortune to be free to go to the Nottingham Fair, and perhaps his holiday meant his luck was looking up at last. It was old Nobble, who had worked with his father as a friend, who had had the duty to decide which of the younger men might have the day to go to the fair. He had had the wisdom not to choose Robin first, for Bill Sharp, who was the Chief Forester’s spy among the young men, was watching eagerly; but Robin knew as soon as Nobble’s eye fell on him that he was to be permitted to go. He had to stop the smile that wanted to spread across his face from appearing till his name was called—a cautious third. Bill Sharp’s name was not called at all, and that made Robin’s happiness even greater.
Robin was to meet Marian and Much at the fair, and they would see the sights together: the jugglers and the players, the wrestlers and the knife-throwers. There would be no knights’ contests. The best knights did not care to display themselves at so mercantile an event as the Nottingham Fair, much to the sheriff’s chagrin, for the sheriff was vain of his town and his place in it. But his love of gold invariably won over even his love of pomp and ceremony; and while the sheriff said aloud that he was not willing to lay on a tourney that the best would not attend—for petty, illogical reasons that Nottingham need not concern itself with—the truth of it was that he was not willing to lay on a tourney that would end up costing him a great deal of money. He did consider, twice a year, as fair time approached, the noble—possibly even royal—favour he might curry by a fine tournament. But—as he told himself—royal favour was a notoriously chancy (and expensive) thing and at best a long-term one; and the sheriff of Nottingham had a short-term mind.
But the three friends did not care for such things, although Marian often heard gossip about them, and had many times made Much and Robin laugh till their sides hurt with her deadly imitations of the sheriff and his society. Once Robin said to her, “But your stories are second-and third-hand. How do you know?”
“I don’t,” said Marian cheerfully. “But I’m a good guesser—and a good actor, am I not?”
Robin said teasingly, “I will tell you what you already know only if you promise that you will not run off with a band of wandering players.”
“I will not have to,” replied Marian, “so long as evading my father’s questions when I wish to spend a day with you continues to exercise my talents so usefully. Come; Much will think we have fallen in a hole,” and she ran off ahead of him before he could speak again.
There had been little enough time for the three of them to be together in the last months; but the fair was going to make up for all that. They would look in the stalls and admire the trinkets for sale, the bright cloth, the raw wool and flax, the charms and toys, the spices and wines; and everything would please them.
Robin had contrived to finish off another couple dozen arrows since Nobble had called out his name a fortnight ago, working late into the evenings at great expense of sleep and strength—and of eyesight, crouched over one flickering candle till his head ached so badly that he saw twenty fingers and forty arrows. But he knew he would be able to sell them to Sir Richard of the Lea, his best customer—and the kindest, though Robin tried not to think about that too much in the fear that he might realise he should not accept the kindness. Sir Richard was unusual in that he permitted himself, a knight, to be interested in this commoner’s sport. He had first bought arrows from Robin’s father, and had not only organised his own levies to practise with their bows, but he even learnt to shoot himself, and had caused something of a ripple in local aristocratic society by claiming that he quite enjoyed it. But, he said, it was only sense to wish to send archers to the Lionheart in Palestine since the news of the Saracens’ at-the-gallop harassment of properly armed knights had come home to England.
It was a great pity, as everyone said, that such a good man (and forward-looking, said those who approved of his archery; if misguided, said those who did not) should have such a worthless son. There was a good deal of local consternation, among both the high and low, at the prospect of the son’s eventual inheritance of the father’s estates. The sanguine held that, barring an unlucky pox or dropsy, the son would kill himself at one of his headlong games before such a fate came to be. And there was no point in speculating—which everyone then immediately did—whom the king might in such a case assign the estates to.
Robin himself was keeping an eye out for the son as he walked toward Mapperley Castle; he bore a small but slow to fade scar on the back of his neck where young Richard had laid his hunting-whip when Robin had not gotten out of what Richard perceived as his way quickly enough to suit. The son might have had more trouble if his father were less loved; as it was, yeoman farmers got both their flocks and their daughters under cover when young Richard was heard of, and elegant dinner parties in several counties were enlivened by tales of his exploits.
Sir Richard, who had not ordered any new arrows, still let his man show Robin at once into the room where he sat. He said, with the smallest trace of amusement in his gentle voice, “Have you an especial need for ready money, perhaps? Have you permission to go to the fair?”
Robin acknowledged, somewhat guiltily, that this was true. But Sir Richard willingly examined the arrows, as carefully as if he had long awaited them. “You have more than earned your fee with these,” he said. “They are very fine.” A blessing on that wandering goose, Robin thought, whose feathers he had ransacked before returning it, only a little the worse for wear, to its coop. Sir Richard stood up from behind his great desk and fumbled for his purse; and he pressed coins into Robin’s hand and curled the young man’s fingers around them as he turned him toward the door to the long hall that led down stairs and at last to the kitchens.
The smell of cooking made Robin’s head swim. He knew he was accepting charity, but he was also relentlessly hungry and almost never ate meat; and Sir Richard had enough money to support not only his lands but his wastrel son. The odd extra meal for a craftsman worth his salt (Robin told himself) was no ignominy, on either side. It was not until his mouth was already full of beef and gravy and bread that he thought to look at the coins Sir Richard had given him; and found that he had been paid half again his usual price.
So Robin had enough money in his pouch to throw to a juggler who might particularly take his fancy (although he should be saving it for next quarter day); and enough to buy the hot fried bread there would be at the goodwives’ booths for Marian and Much as well as for himself. He wondered for a moment, as he settled his bow and quiver over his shoulders, if perhaps he should throw the coin he would need to enter the fair’s archery contest to that hypothetical juggler, and leave his arrows at home. He hesitated, looking at the tree his last arrow had missed.
He did not hate the fact that he was a second-rate archer; and Much and Marian knew him and were his friends. But there would be friends of the Chief Forester shooting too, and nothing would please them more than to taunt him when he stood up—and to take the story home of how young Robin had missed the mark with his very first arrow. Robin had learnt that it did no good to answer the taunting, and so he could hold his tongue; but he had yet to learn to ignore it, and as the anger—compounded of his helplessness and inability simply not to listen—beat inside him, it would throw his shooting out. The Chief Forester himself might be there to laugh his great, rolling, harsh laugh, though usually at such events he disappeared into the tent set out for the refreshment of the sheriff and his men, and was little seen.
Robin knew that any story of his own indifferent marksmanship would lose nothing in the telling. Bill Sharp would be telling it far and wide at least by the next day—and Robin thought it likely that he would have gone whining to the Chief Forester to be given permission to go to the fair after all, despite Nobble’s decision, and would therefore be able to see for himself. There were those who said that Bill Sharp’s real father was the Chief Forester, and not the farmer who had bred him up—and sent him off to be an apprentice forester at the earliest possible opportunity. Robin could readily believe it; it seemed to him that Bill was the Chief Forester all over again in small, for Bill was a skinny, weedy boy, and the Chief Forester was fat from many years of living off other people’s labour, and eating at the sheriff’s table. Robin particularly did not want to miss his first mark, with Bill Sharp watching.
But Much and Marian would be bringing their bows and would think it odd if he did not, for they were all to enter the contest. Privately Robin felt that Marian had a good chance of winning; she was one of those who always allowed for the breeze that would kick up from nowhere after the arrow had left the string. They might not like it when she proved to be a girl, but no one would notice in the crowd when the three of them signed up together, for she would be wearing boy’s clothes, with her hair up under a hat; and after she won, Robin didn’t think they’d deny her the prize. If he didn’t enter, Marian and Much might decide they wouldn’t either—he could hear Marian saying, “Oh, Robin, don’t be tiresome. It doesn’t matter. What is the prize—a lamb? I don’t particularly want a lamb. Do you? I only came so we could spend the day together.”
Robin had not told her or Much what his life had been like since his father died; and this was only too easy a decision to keep, as he had so little time to meet with them. They knew that his father had been a forester, and a man much admired and respected by the folk who lived roundabout. Too much respected, in the eyes of the sheriff, for there were those who felt that Robert Longbow should have had the Chief Forester’s post; but he had been a quiet man who never took advantage of his popularity against the sheriff. And so the sheriff and his choice of Chief Forester had let him alone—in case his popularity might prove inconvenient if anything untoward happened to him. It had been their great good luck that he had died so suddenly of the winter catarrh; but he had driven himself very hard since his wife died, and was not so strong as he had been. No one thought anything of Robert Longbow’s death but sorrow to see a good man gone; and Robin had known better than to mention the unnecessary call that came one stormy midnight after his father was already sickening. When Robert came back late the next morning, he was wet through, and he took to his bed, and did not leave it again alive.
His friends knew that the Chief Forester was hardly Robin’s favourite person, but they knew little more than that. Let them think the unpleasantness was minor, left over from the old romantic story of how his father and the Chief Forester had courted the same woman, and his father had won her, despite the Chief Forester’s better standing—and private income. He’d bring his bow to the fair, and enter the archery contest, and try not to miss at least his first shot. Even if Bill Sharp was not there, he was always at his worst with a lot of people watching him. But he really wanted to see Marian win.
He resettled his bow on his shoulder and gave another shake to his quiver, that it would hang straight, and not tease the back of his neck; he spent far too much of his daily life walking to be comfortable with an arrow-sack looped around his belt and banging against one leg in the common manner. That done, he set off solemnly through the trees—trying to feel that his decision was not only final but a good one, and that he was pleased with it besides. It was a long way to the town of Nottingham; it was probably foolish of him to have taken the time for target practice, particularly when practice wasn’t going to tell him anything he didn’t already know. He tried to whistle, but gave it up as a bad job.
He knew no other life than forestry, and if he left Nottingham he would have no choice but to give up his father’s holding. His father’s pride in England had extended to include his pride in tenant ownership of a cottage and small bit of land—land for a garden, and the cottage large enough to have separate rooms for eating and sleeping. There was even a separate coop for his wife’s chickens, built against one outside wall of the cottage, where the birds were not only out from underfoot in the house, with their dirt and their feathers, but safe from foxes and other marauders as well. It was not only Robin’s mother’s family who was conscious that she’d married beneath her.
There was another reason Robin would not leave Nottingham, nor voluntarily give up his loosening hold on his father’s land: Marian. And he could not help it that he often recalled that his gentry-bred mother had chosen to marry a mere forester with no prospects. But while the present Chief Forester remained, there was no chance of marriage for Robin, neither to a member of the gentry nor to the humblest village girl, who would never contemplate sleeping apart from her chickens were she so fortunate as to own any.
Robin knew the Nottingham woods hereabouts so well he did not need to think about where he was going, and his feet carried him responsibly forward while his mind was elsewhere. But he was not in the mood for any meeting with his fellows, and he was snapped out of his reverie by the sound of voices: one of them Tom Moody’s, the Chief Forester’s great friend and crony, and another Bill Sharp’s.
Robin stopped, but it was too late, for they had seen him. There were half a dozen of them together, and they sat and watched him so expectantly that he wondered if they had been waiting for him, and what they intended to do.
Bill stood up to his full if insignificant height, and leaned casually against a tree by the narrow, tree-crowded path. Robin, if he continued, would have to pass so near him their sleeves might brush; and there was no graceful nor inconspicuous way to leave the path altogether. The others sat where they were; Tom had a very large grin on his face. There was what appeared to be the remains of a meal spread out around them; one or two were still chewing, and Robin could smell the sharp tang of the ale in the small open cask that lounged on the greensward among them.
“A very good day to you, Master Robin,” said Bill, his arms folded across his negligible chest, the sole of one foot cocked nonchalantly against his tree. “I’m afraid I can’t suggest that you join our feed—I fear there is little left but crumbs.”
Tom stood up, and Robin recalled that Tom was the only forester his father, who could see goodness in almost anybody, had called bad. Tom was still grinning; there were small strings of meat caught between his teeth. He shot the king’s deer for his own belly whenever he chose, and the Chief Forester looked the other way—so long as he got a haunch of it. “Perhaps young Robin would like the crumbs—he’s a little too thin, don’t you think, lads?” He reached out as Robin stood hesitating a few paces from where Bill leaned against his tree, and seized his arm.
Robin could not stop the spasm of disgust that crossed his face as the man’s fingers touched him, and he jerked himself free with an unnecessary violence—a violence that he knew at once had cost him any chance he might have had in escaping this meeting without some kind of skirmish.
Tom laughed, for he knew it too, and it was what he wanted; and he was pleased that his prey had proved so easy to bait. He pawed at Robin again, circling the young man’s upper arm with his thick fingers. “Too thin, eh, lads? Too thin to do a man’s work as a forester?”
Robin flushed but stood stiffly and said nothing, hoping against his better judgement that Tom might yet let him pass.
But Tom only stretched out his other hand, and pulled one of Robin’s arrows half out of the quiver—by the feathers, Robin knew, and he gritted his teeth, for he could not afford damage to even one of his arrows—and then let it drop again, and Robin heard the protest of the other stiff pinions as the dropped shaft forced its way downward. “And certainly too thin and weak to draw a man’s bow like a man.”
He laughed again, and the hot foul wash of his ale-smelling breath over Robin’s face brought all the young man’s frustrations to a boil. Tom knew as well as he himself did that he could not easily draw his father’s bow, which was a hand’s-length longer and better than a stone heavier to pull than the plainer, lighter bow he carried. He kept his father’s bow in what had been his father’s room, carefully wrapped and stored against damp and rodent teeth; and occasionally he took it out and practised with it, when no one was near. But he could not bear it that this man should gibe at him so, now, and just before anger stopped thought altogether he said to himself: They are here to trap me—well, let them do their worst. And then the anger overcame him, and he snarled at his tormentor: “I can draw a bow as well as you, or any other fat forester who can barely sight down his arrow for fear of stinging his paunch with the released string.”
Now Tom let go of Robin and his own face began to flush up with anger, and Bill dropped his crossed arms and stood warily, and the other four men stopped chewing and got to their feet. What they thought of doing or might have done Robin did not know; but anger still darkened his mind and while it did he felt no fear. “If you choose to doubt me, then I will happily meet you at the Nottingham Fair later today, for I go now to that place that I may see how I fare at the archery contest. And I will say that I will shoot far more handsomely than you, whose greasy hands will let his bow slip, and mayhap his arrow shall pierce the sheriff’s hat where he sits watching the performance, and then you shall win a prize specially for you, and yet like not what you might have chosen.”
The seven men stood for a moment like a tableau in a Christmas pageant; and then Tom said thickly, “We shall not wait for the fair; we shall have our shooting match here. And by my faith, if you do not shoot as you choose to boast you can, be sure that I shall take great pleasure in basting your ribs till your sides are as red as any flayed deer’s.
“Come,” said he, turning on his heel. “What shall we use as mark?” He spoke, not to Robin, but to his friends; yet even they quailed before the fierceness of his gaze. Bill backed cautiously away from him, as if Tom might order him strung up kicking for a more challenging target. “There,” he said, and Robin’s heart sank in him as Tom pointed. “See the gnarled oak tree, two score rods distant, I judge, or thereabouts? And see the crotch halfway up that tree, and the small black burl beneath the crotch? At that we shall aim.” He strode over to where his bow and quiver lay, next to the small open cask on the ground, and he snatched them up, tumbling the quiver through the loop on his belt, his knuckles white where they held the bow.
“As the challenged, I go first,” he said; but Robin was too sick to protest that it was not this test he had offered as challenge; nor, he knew, would a protest have done him any good. At such a range he would be lucky if his arrows did not bounce—if they struck the correct tree at all. The anger that had borne him up drained away as suddenly as it had risen, and he was cold and weary, and knew he had been a fool. He wondered if Tom meant to kill him after. There was no doubt that Tom was the better archer, any more than it was uncommon knowledge that Robin was not the archer his father had been; Bill had made his ears burn often enough on this subject—for all that Bill himself could barely hit the broad side of a barn at six paces. Robin thought sadly that he had not known the old wound could still hurt so sorely.
Robin turned heavy eyes to Tom as the bigger man took his stance and pulled his arrow powerfully back—but he noticed that the man’s hands were not quite steady. With anger? Robin thought. Or with ale? Either way he will take joy in beating me senseless.
“Three arrows each we may try,” Tom said between his teeth, and let go his first shaft. It flew straight, but a little awry, for it buried itself at the left edge of the burl, and not the center. The second struck so near to the first that their feathers vibrated together; and this second one was nearer the burl’s center. But the third, which should have struck nearest of all, went wild, and sank in the trunk a finger’s-breadth from the burl. Tom threw his bow down savagely and turned to Robin. “Let us see you shoot yet half so well,” he said threateningly.
Robin slowly moved forward to take his place, slowly unslung his bow, bent it to slip the string into its notch, and pulled an arrow from his quiver. But his hands were steady as he drew the bowstring back and sighted down the arrow.
His first arrow struck the far right side of the treetrunk, a good hand’s-breadth from the burl. There was a snicker behind him. It might be Bill; he doubted it was Tom. And yet his arrow was, for him and indeed for most archers, good shooting. It was not for his archery that Robin’s father had called Tom Moody bad. He notched and drew his second arrow, and it flew beautifully, to strike at the veriest right-hand edge of the burl; and yet it was nearer the mark than only one of Tom’s, and Robin had already shot two.
He fitted his last arrow to the string, staring at his hands, which went fairly about their familiar work without acknowledging the trouble that they and the rest of Robin were in. The arrow was his best; from the same fine-grained bit of pine he had made a half-dozen arrows Sir Richard had paid handsomely for, so handsomely that Robin had let himself keep the last, the odd seventh, in the wistful hope that so excellent an arrow might have an effect on his marksmanship. When he raised the bow, for a moment his eyes clouded over, and he could not see the tree he was aiming for; and he wondered, as his arrow quivered against the string, if he would ever shoot another after Tom and his lads got through with him.
He murmured a few words under his breath—a prayer, perhaps, or a farewell to Marian; or an apology to his father—and loosed his last arrow.
Another vagrant breeze arose from nowhere, and kissed his arrow in its flight; Robin felt it brush his cheek as well. And the arrow, perhaps, wavered.
And struck true, dead center, in the burl.
A barely audible gasp rose behind him: a hissing of breath through shut teeth. Robin stared at his arrow, its shaft still vibrating, and for a second time his vision briefly clouded. He blinked, and heard footsteps behind him, and stiffened to prevent himself from cringing away from what he felt sure would be a heavy hand on his shoulder, preliminary to the beating he would still receive, from many heavy hands, despite his lucky shooting.
But Tom strode straight by him, toward the tree, and after a moment Robin followed him without looking around.
There was no doubt that Robin’s arrow was beautifully centered, and that neither of Tom’s better shots came near it. Tom growled something, jerked the perfect arrow out of the tree, and trod on it. Robin heard the shaft break, but said nothing, thinking of his ribs, and of the sound of approaching soft footsteps behind him. But Tom still made no move toward him. He pulled his own arrows out of the tree and then stepped aside, glaring; and Robin, in a daze, stepped forward, retrieved his two remaining arrows, and restored them carefully to his quiver. He would check them later. After a moment he also stooped and hastily picked up the splintered halves of the broken arrow; and these he thrust under his belt.
Still no one said anything, and he moved cautiously away, toward the path, toward his day at Nottingham Fair, his day with Marian. He had to turn his back on Tom to do this, and he walked jerkily, as a man passes a growling mastiff which he knows would be happy to tear his arm off if he makes a false move; and he had regained the path and turned down it, carefully not looking back, when there was a strangled shout behind him.
“And do you think then, that you shall go unhindered to Nottingham Fair, and boast to your friends in the dirt that you did best Tom Moody at archery?”
Robin, too conscious of what was happening off to one side, was not conscious enough of what lay under his feet on this rough woods path; and he stumbled, ever so slightly, and his head nodded forward to save his balance. And an arrow whistled past his ear.
It whistled so nearly that it creased the nape of his neck, gently, and the narrow place where it rubbed was red and painful for many days. Fear jumped back into Robin’s throat and stopped his breathing, and his bowels turned to water: He means to kill me, he thought, and he turned like a creature at bay, crouching against the possibility of a further shaft from his enemy, groping over his shoulder for his bow, which he had providentially not unstrung. He notched an arrow and let fly back at the little group around the gnarled oak tree.
He aimed for Tom Moody’s right leg. He had aimed neither well nor carefully, and he took no thought for the consequences, should he succeed at so tricky a shot—or should he fail. But he was nonetheless appalled as he saw the feathered shaft appear as if by magic in Tom’s broad chest, as he heard the man’s hoarse cry of pain and terror. Tom looked down a moment, and clutched at the great spreading red stain around the thing that grew now so abruptly from his breast; and then his knees buckled, and he fell forward on his face and lay still. The snap of the shaft as Tom’s weight crushed it was very loud in the stillness; and then, like a long echo of that sharp, final sound, a squirrel appeared on a branch of the oak tree, and shrilly protested the invasion of his peace.
CHAPTER TWO
Robin had no memory later of taking to his heels. He ran, his traitorous bow still clenched in one hand, till he could run no more; and then he walked till he caught his breath, and ran on. Once or twice he fell. He did not know where he went or where he was going; as he lay on the ground the second time, the wind knocked out of him, the ragged ends of the broken arrow in his belt digging into his flesh, his foot aching from the root that had tripped him, he thought, I will run till it kills me, for I have killed a man, and my death is demanded by the king’s law. And he got up, limping a little, and ran on. He ran till he was blind with running, till he thought he had lived his entire life running, one foot pounding down in front of the other endlessly, till his bones were on fire with it, and every time either foot struck the ground his whole body cried out against the jolt. He set his teeth and ran on.
But his body betrayed him at the last, and the next time he fell he could not get up but lay, face down, in the leaf-mould, stirring only faintly, like a baby first learning to crawl. And then even that movement ceased, and he turned his cheek to the earth and gave up; and after a little while an uneasy sleep took him. He drifted in and out of sleep, vaguely conscious that the sound of water was very near and that he was more and more thirsty; and he noticed also that the light was growing dim, and at first he thought that in truth he had run himself blind. But he realised that it was only twilight, as happens every evening, whatever the events of the day past have been. And he sighed, and turned his other cheek to the earth, and shut his eyes.
But then he came wide awake, more alert than he had been since Tom Moody first stepped up beside him that day and seized his arm. For he heard, faintly, careful footsteps coming through the trees—coming toward the place where he lay. He rolled over—and his cold exhausted muscles groaned with the effort, and he gasped, and moved more slowly. With numb swollen fingers he snatched up his bow, and scuttled, stumbling, to stoop painfully behind the boulder to his one side. Behind him, now, as he waited to see what was before him, was the stream; and the sound of the water made his mouth suddenly ache, and he turned away from what he expected was his last doom to scoop up the cold water in the hand that did not hold the bow.
The taste of it on his tongue shocked him to full consciousness, and he realised what his actions meant: that he wanted to live. Even with Tom Moody’s blood on his head, and the king’s men looking for him as a murderer—he wanted to keep his life.
He was too tired to run any more; either luck was with him and the footsteps would go away, or he would try to give himself up with dignity. He had several good arrows left; but even if he had the strength to draw his bow—and he was not at all sure he did—he would not seek to take any more life. Even his own.
The mercurial luck that had played with him all this day seemed to turn its face from him now, for the footsteps came ever closer. It sounded like two people—only two; and he thought wistfully of his several good arrows, but he did not move to ready one. The footsteps were approaching with rather too much haste at the expense of care; while they belonged obviously to woodsmen and not common soldiers, he could follow their progress without difficulty. And they seemed to be coming directly and deliberately toward his place of concealment.
He closed his eyes briefly, for his head swam with weariness and an urgent will to live; and when he opened them he thought he dreamed, for he did not see two grim king’s foresters reaching out to drag him to gaol and the hangman’s noose, but—Much and Marian, their faces pale and taut with worry.
He stood up, not knowing what he could say, and staggered around one end of his boulder. His head felt light, and Marian’s face was surrounded by tiny bright twinkling stars. She ran forward, heedlessly dropping her bow on the ground, and threw her arms around him, pressing her cheek to his; her hair tickled his nose. Much, with a sigh, laid his bow carefully against the boulder that had hidden Robin. Another squirrel chattered somewhere close by, and the stream made small glooping noises as it ran, as fish broke the surface to swallow water bugs and bits of leaves.
Marian said, “I was so afraid we wouldn’t find you—that you’d go straight away, take ship for the Holy Land—be sold as a slave to the Saracens—that we’d—that I’d never see you again.”
Much said, “We heard they had some trouble planned for you today—but we only heard this morning. ’Twas a friend of my father’s told him. If there had been time we would have tried to stop you coming; but it was too late.”
Marian, unmoving, said to Robin’s shoulder, “I was worried today, at the fair, long before there was any reason to worry—before you were even late.”
“And then you were late,” said Much.
“And then you were later, and then we started looking,” Marian said, and turned her face at last; there were tear marks on it, and Robin felt a pricking behind his own eyes, that Marian should cry over him. “This place was my best hope—and my last—that you might think to come here and look for us.”
Robin looked around, puzzled, and then recognised what he had not thought to look for. This was the little river where Much’s father’s mill. lay, below them where they now stood by over a mile. But here, with its splendid boulders for playing King of the Mountain, and a pool just upstream for pirates and leaf-sailing races, was where Much and Marian and he had spent happy hours as young children. He murmured, half to himself, “I’ve been running—as I thought, away, or somewhere—all day. Since morning. And this is where I end: barely a league from—from where …”
Marian stepped back, but only to put her hands on Robin’s shoulders, as if she feared that if she did not hold on to him he might still go to the Saracens. “Robin—has it been so bad, since your father died?”
Robin almost smiled. “Not so bad as right at present.”
But Marian would not be distracted. “Why did you never tell us? I—I thought you grieved for your father, and did not wish to press you as you seemed not to want to speak. But—someone could have done something—my father—or you need not have been a forester.”
Robin shook his head. “Your father—or anyone else—could have done nothing, had I been willing to ask. Hush,” he said, as Marian opened her mouth. “It doesn’t matter. Forestry, and the making of arrows, is all I know; and you know what Will Fletcher in Nottingham is like—he would have stood no competition, and I could bear him less as a master even than the Chief Forester.”
“It is not Will who would have brooked no rivals,” said Much, “but the sheriff, who might have found you a little less willing to pay his tax.”
Robin shrugged. “It matters not. What is done is—done.” And then the sight of Tom Moody clutching at the feathered shaft rising from his red-stained tunic was before him, and the shrug turned to a shudder and he closed his eyes.
Marian’s hands shifted and tightened on his shoulders, and she said softly, “What happened, then? We know you met with trouble, dark trouble, but we do not know its name.”
Robin looked at her in surprise. “You don’t know? You—” But he could not get the words out.
Much said, “My father’s friend thought they might accuse you of killing the king’s deer; someone was bragging that he had stolen one of the arrows you’ve made from Sir Richard’s son, who was too drunk to notice.”
Marian whispered, “That’s a hanging offense—if they could do it.”
“They could do it,” Much said briefly, and a little silence fell.
Robin could hear his friends trying not to make the silence too hectic with expectation. He shook himself free of Marian’s hands and took two steps back, carefully not looking at his friends’ faces. “I—I killed Tom Moody. I killed him.” Then he turned and knelt stiffly by the stream, and bent over for another drink; not because he was thirsty, but because it gave him something to do. He had said aloud the awful thing that he had done, and the saying, in some way, made it irrevocable, as it had as yet not been. Or, no, he thought, dipping his hand into the freezing water again. It is not that I have doubted the thing I did; it is that I have acknowledged the burden of it now, by telling my friends of it.
Marian sat down beside him, heavily, as if the spring had gone out of her muscles; as if she, too, had run for hours. Much said, over their heads, “How did it happen?”
Robin told them, haltingly, but he told them, and he tried to tell everything, leaving nothing out but that this was only the latest, last, and worst of his trials under the Chief Forester who had hated his father. Last. His heart even tried to lift a little at that thought: whatever came next, he would never have to take orders from the Chief Forester again. “It is, at best, a very stupid thing I did.”
“It is stupid only because you lived and he did not,” Marian burst out. “He meant to kill you—he would have killed you if you had not stumbled.”
Robin rubbed the back of his neck thoughtfully. The arrow-crease burned with the salt of his sweat. Marian began plucking up the small weeds and grasses that grew on the bank of the stream, and casting them angrily into the water.
Much said, “My father came out of the mill and called me just before I was to set off; there had been several folk there who had just left. He said, ‘You are meeting your friend young Robin at the fair today, are you not?’ and I said I was. ‘Tell him then to have a care; for I have heard that the friends of the Chief Forester have a mind to remove him from their master’s sight, and beyond any man’s care.’”
“I wonder he did not kill you outright, at the very beginning,” Marian said, tearing a particularly long weed into bits before she flung it into the water.
Another faint smile crossed Robin’s face. “That would not have been nearly so enjoyable,” he said. Marian’s fingers paused. “What should we do now?” Robin gingerly stretched one arm and then the other; they felt like blocks of wood, and creaked like badly hinged blocks of wood, although wood, presumably, did not ache like this. He thought that perhaps he felt as he would if Tom had held to the original plan of merely beating him—but from Much’s words, that had never been the plan. He wondered if there was some comfort in this, but he was too tired to consider it. “We should not do anything; though I am very glad to have seen you one last time. I would not have dared to come looking for you. You should go home, and forget you ever saw me this day, and—”
“And you will go sell yourself to the Saracens,” Marian put in. “Well, you won’t. We came to help you, and help you we will.”
“And you can’t stop us,” said Much, with almost a grin. “It is hard for you, Robin, but you know, this could almost be a good thing in the long run—”
“A good thing?” exploded Robin. “A man is dead, and—”
“And his death is going to give the Norman dogs an excuse they’ll love, to bite down on us Saxons; yes, I know. But there’s another side of it. Everyone hereabouts knows who your father was. It would be an easy thing to put it about that the trouble you’re in comes of being your father’s son; that the lying Normans can’t bear an honest Saxon around them long—and it’s the truth, too. So, if word goes round that Robin, son of Robert Longbow, is—is living free—well, I think a few hardy like-minded folk might wish to join him. The Nottingham woods are huge; quite a few of us could lose ourselves in them beyond ken of any sheriff’s or king’s men forever. I think a few hardy like-minded folk might be pleased.”
“Pleased? Pleased to do what?” Robin said, throwing a few weeds of his own into the brook, despite the ominous creaking through his back and shoulders. “Pleased to skulk around in the shadows, pleased never to have a roof or a home, or anything over their heads but a price to see them dragged before the sheriff? This kind of talk was amusing when we were children and didn’t know any better, Much. You always told the best stories—I envied you the way you told them, the way you believed them. But that’s long ago—more than just years. It’s nonsense. You must know it’s nonsense.”
“It’s not nonsense,” Much said patiently. “You’ve been too preoccupied with staying out of the Chief Forester’s way for too long to listen to us. Henry had stopped caring about anything but quarrelling with his sons by the end; Richard stayed in England barely long enough to be crowned, and then it was off to the Holy Land—”
“Henry gave us the law,” argued Robin, “and Richard is an honest man.”
“Richard is an honest man in Palestine,” said Much, “and what we have is a Regent who is not. Do you suppose one of Henry’s handsome travelling justices is going to listen to a lot of ragtag Saxons against the word of a Norman sheriff who is a personal friend of the Regent? Think, Robin. You could be our rallying point.”
Robin shook his head. “It sounds fine,” he said. “I’m sure you are often in demand as a fireside speaker. But it won’t work.”
“And if we are going to put it to the test,” Much continued without heeding, “this is the season. It’s spring; we have summer and autumn ahead, when staying alive will be easy, and we have time to make mistakes before winter begins, and we’ll have to be serious.”
“Be serious! It is you who are not being serious,” said Robin. “Have you given any practical thought to your shining notions of Saxon revolt against Norman tyranny? It is too late for me, so I do not matter. But do you have any idea what using me as a so-called rallying point would mean for those who rallied? Do you understand how absolute the no going back would be? I can’t believe that you do, or you would not suggest it. What kind of a man do you suppose me to be, that I could permit these ‘hardy like-minded folk’ to come to me, knowing that by so coming they could be hung for my offense if they were caught? Hardiness alone grants you no woodscraft, and woodscraft—do you understand what the isolation of living in Sherwood would mean? It would be a short life, for one thing: we would only be able to kill the king’s deer to feed ourselves for as long as our arrows held out, for we would not be able to buy steel and twine to make more. Even if we knocked a travelling fletcher on the head for his supplies, where could we leave the wood we need for shafts to season, when we had not even a place to sleep dry? We could not build anything, for large as Sherwood is, I can tell you that the foresters might find their way to any part of it by lucky or unlucky chance; it is what we are for. Is what they are for. And they will hear the same rumours that your like-minded folk will, and they will be looking. The occasional rogue in Sherwood is a common thing and no one cares overmuch so long as he kills no one important; but an entire band of them, waving a banner saying ‘Down with the Normans’ virtually in the sheriff’s teeth? Be sensible, man.”
“This is why we need you,” said Much comfortably. “You’re a pessimist and a good planner.”
“I have not begun to plan and be pessimistic,” said Robin angrily. “You are simply not listening; you wish to ignore me—beyond my symbolic status, of course, which you find valuable—because the price on my head, you think, is oppressing my spirits—as it damn well is, I agree, and as it should. Stop telling yourself beautiful stories, Much. How many examples do I have to give you before you will listen? Perhaps after we run out of arrows we can learn—before we starve—to make snares out of gut, to catch our food. Perhaps. But are we to raise our own sheep for wool to make our clothing? Do any of your like-minded folk know how to card and spin? A meadow, deep in the heart of Sherwood, full of sheep that don’t seem to belong to anybody might cause a little curiosity too. And where did the sheep come from? Do we steal lambs from the farmers who are already being taxed past bearing by the sheriff who wants my head? In that case we might as well go on stealing lambs—and calves and chickens—and eat them too. I’m sure snares would be a nuisance. Of course then we wouldn’t make so grand a rallying point for our fellow Saxons. We would look, from the farmers’ perspective, quite a lot like Normans.”
Much and Marian exchanged glances. “We will not be entirely cut off from the outside world,” said Marian carefully.
“You cannot be a part of this madness, Marian,” said Robin sharply; “you always had less patience with Much’s will-o’-the-wisps than I did.”
“Nor am I an overtaxed farmer or an outlaw in hiding?” said Marian. “It is possible that it is exactly that that leaves my head clear now to judge what you cannot judge—”
“Judgement!” said Robin. “Neither of you is judging anything. Neither of you wishes to look past a friend in trouble, and I honour you for it, but there is no future in it—I must make you see that there is no future in it.”
Much said, “You are right that not everyone who believes in us will have both the strength and the desire to live as an outlaw—I do know what you’re trying to say. But we will not be completely isolated. We will be able to get arrowheads and wool and other things through our friends.”
“Bought with leaves and twigs?” inquired Robin.
“Our skills will still be saleable; it is the marketing that must be done by others,” said Much.
“There is, of course, a great deal of call for bagging flour and meal in the king’s forest,” said Robin.
“You can still make arrows,” said Much. “One of my friends, Harald, is a leather-worker, caught in a position something like yours might have been under Will Fletcher. There are other examples. And I—oh, I can experiment with snares. And someone will have to dig privy vaults. You see? I do have some notion of what I’m proposing.
“But I’m not going to argue with you tonight. You’re tired; you couldn’t be anything else. You can sleep in the old barn at the mill tonight, and tomorrow night as well. Just promise us—for this evening—that you won’t try to sacrifice yourself to your stubborn idea of justice to a Norman king. No sacrifices till you’ve had at least one good night’s sleep, and something to eat.”
“And have let you talk at me some more,” said Robin.
“That’s right,” said Much.
There was a long pause. Robin looked at his two friends, seated now on either side of him, and it occurred to him that they were going to take him into custody as inexorably as any king’s foresters might: their faces told him that. “Oh, to the devil with you, and your troop of merry bandits with you,” he said. “I promise.”
CHAPTER THREE
Robin woke up with an intolerable headache and a sense of impending doom that it took him a few moments to define. When he had remembered the events of the day before, fear tried to shoot him bolt upright—and his abused body, which had turned to stone overnight, jerked an inch or two in its bed of straw and refused to move further. The jerk, however, woke up a great many more, not only physical, protests, that cast the headache into comparative shadow. Robin lay still, staring at the roof, and his thoughts were bleak.
He rolled over—cautiously—at last, and found lying beside him not only a loaf of bread and a bottle of water, but his father’s bow, still in the wrappings he was used to keep it in.
He ate the bread, drank the water, and contemplated the bow. He was still too tired to think sensibly—he felt as if the night before had been more a period of unconsciousness than of sleep—and his bruised emotions could not decide if they were chiefly of gratitude for the mysterious rescue of the one possession that meant more to him than any other, or fear of finding out how, exactly, it had been restored to him.