The Outlaws of Sherwood (10 page)

“Like I'll get used to your abominable longbow, I suppose,” said Much; but he took his sentry duty obediently up a tree.

Will also had an idea for a simple rope-trap for an unwary sheriff's man, to guard some way that outlaws could not have two eyes on, and Much looked at him admiringly: “What a poacher you would have made. I must have you look at our rabbit snares.”

“Let you stay with snaring rabbits,” said Robin. “A man-trap may cause more trouble than it's worth; if we fail to catch one of our own—or some innocent—then we will merely cause undue interest in the trap's whereabouts. Even to foresters' minds will occur the slow thought that a trap is a signal that something important may be close at hand, and worth looking for.”

CHAPTER SIX

Will became almost an ordinary member of the band as his aristocrat's hands grew callused and his carefully trimmed hair grew shaggy. He no longer tied it back with a red ribbon, but with a leather thong; and he laid aside his lace-edged shirt for the rough cloth shirts the rest of Robin's folk wore. Neither he nor Little John would ever be lost in a crowd, for they stood head and shoulders above most men; but there continued to be just the faintest air about Will, however dark and worn his clothing.

“Vanity,” said Marian with a chuckle. “He used to tell us that clothes are a serious business,” she said privately to Robin. “The rest of us would be climbing trees and so on, and he always took his tunic and shirt off first—later, of course, he did it to impress us girls with his chest muscles, which are impressive, you know. But if you want to know the real, awful truth about Will, he used to wash his own shirts because the laundresses never got them white enough to suit him. He said that laundresses didn't care about clothes; they were just paid for a job.”

Her smile faded. “I've found out little enough about what goes forward at Norwell, though. There's some mystery there, and I haven't been able to ferret it out; and I must be careful about asking too many questions.” She frowned, and Robin saw the cloud in her face that gathered there whenever she thought of her own father's household.

But then as the pale spring greens darkened into summer, till even the shadows of Sherwood were as green as leaves, Robin Hood's aristocratic outlaw fell into a desolate mood. Robin's first thought was that Will was reverting to type after all; despite Marian's faith in him, he had begun to miss his soft bed and a plenty—and variety—of food on his table, as well as the table itself and a hall to put it in. Robin was cross for permitting himself to expect otherwise; and crosser still for feeling so disappointed. He put off speaking to Will for a day, a sennight, wondering if he should offer to let him go and get it over with, or whether he should force Will to come to him.

But it was nothing to do with Greentree that had changed Will's mood.

Marian had discovered that Will's sister had not married her Norman betrothed after all; on her wedding day her maids found her door locked from the inside, and she refused to open it. She had been stormed at and threatened—through the door—but there was no graceful way to come at her, as her room was at the top of a bay, and her windows overlooked the old trench from the manor house's days as a fortress.

“And, in the last bitter end of things,” said Marian, “she cannot be forced by physical means to say vows she will not say. She'd only moved to this new chamber the beginning of this year, and Will has realised that she must have planned rebellion from the first. I don't know what all he's thinking, but I can guess that he has thought of it that she did not come to him for help.… She said at the time to the family that she wanted to be a little apart from the household she was soon to leave, to consider her new life before she entered it. She put this over with a great show of maidenly modesty,” Marian said, with a grin of appreciation, despite the precariousness of her friend's situation. “Her father bought it, and he's an old so-and-so, but he was stupid with delight at catching a Norman. And Will, who should have had better sense, only saw this as the proof that Sess's spirit had been broken by the prospect of marrying one of the enemy.” She paused. “I thought it was a little strange at the time myself, but I don't see Sess as often as I was used, in our early tree-climbing days—she's several years younger than Will and me—because her father has kept her mewed up increasingly as she was increasingly inclined to kick against his rule. It was at least possible that he had broken her at last. I thought he must have done, when I heard of the Norman suitor. Sess always had a great deal of character, but quite the wrong kind.”

“And Will feels now he's failed her by running out,” said Robin. “Maybe he wants to run back.”

“I permit that remark only because you are responsible for all your people,” she replied. “Will would never break a promise; nor would he want to break his promise to you. You have no complaints of him besides a little current sullenness, do you? He's a member of your band till you throw him out, and the more fool you if you want to.”

Robin sighed. “On the contrary, I want to be convinced that I don't have to. I don't in the least want to lose him, and have been putting off trying to find out what his doleful looks are about, for fear of what I would hear. But what comes now to the sister?”

Marian frowned. “I don't know, but I will try to find out, for Sess's sake as well as Will's—and the curiosity of a certain outlaw leader. Now that the story has got out a bit, I can ask leading questions; better yet, I can set Beatrix to asking them. Her long nose has been twitching with eagerness since Hawise came back with the first bit of the tale some days ago. It is the favourite topic as we sort colours for our latest epic tapes-try.

“Sess must have the loyalty of one of her maids, to bring her food and water, but they'll find out who it is, and then I feel almost as sorry for the girl as I do for Sess. This can't last long, one way or another. I suppose Sess is hoping the embarrassment she's causing her Norman's dignity will bring him to break off the engagement by the time they dig her out of her earth; but I have not heard that he has done so thus far.” She chewed her lower lip. “What I have heard of Sir Aubrey is not comforting. She is lucky—if you want to call it luck—that it was marriage he offered her.” She stopped abruptly, and when she spoke again her voice was light and careless. “Her betrothed is a lout, her father is a boor; and now her brother is trailing around looking like a thunder-storm about to burst. Men are not sensible creatures.”

“Thank you,” said Robin.

“But I would be looking like a thunderstorm myself if it were my sister,” she said, “so I except poor Will after all.”

“What about me?” said Robin. “Am I to be excepted from the ban?”

She looked at him, smiling, but the smile changed in some way he could not follow, and he both badly wanted to know what she was thinking and badly wanted not to know. “I except you only so long as you do not try to make it impossible for me to go on visiting you here,” she said.

“Your ban is ill-defined, then,” said Robin, “for you would now tell me to let my heart have all its own way over my good sense—what there is of it.”

“Is that what it is that I want?” said Marian. “Then, yes, I would.”

There was another ill bit of news that spring. Edward returned from a visit to Nottingham town one day while everyone was still sneezing and the high road was no road at all but a badly rutted mud slide, and said that there were queries out about a man wanted by the sheriff; and that the description was of a very large man with dark hair and beard, who might be known as John Little. The queries were rather urgent; more urgent than the disappearance of a failed farmer late last autumn would warrant.

“I cracked the skull of one of the soldiers who came to put me in debtors' gaol,” said Little John quietly. “Perhaps the man died.”

His guess proved true, and then Little John also fell into a bleak mood. Robin sent him off on a new errand every time he returned to Greentree, that he might have little time to brood. There was never time for idleness, but even so, Little John recognised what Robin was doing very soon, which Robin privately thought was a good sign. When Little John said rebelliously, “I am no babe, that needs to be nursed, as you would nurse me through the blame and responsibility of my own deeds,” Robin smiled.

“I would trust no babe to bring me news of the Chief Forester; a babe would get lost in the forest, or mistake the Chief Forester for a fat, stupid old man.”

“I can promise not to lose myself in Sherwood; but for the other, it may be a hard task.”

“I have great faith in you,” said Robin.

The Chief Forester and the sheriff of Nottingham had shaken themselves out of their winter sleep and begun to readdress the tiresome question of the new band of outlaws infesting Sherwood. This band had, unfortunately, survived the winter; the weather had taken care of certain similar questions in years past. But the Chief Forester was, from the outlaws' point of view, the lesser evil, for the king's foresters were largely taken up with their legitimate business. It was the sheriff of Nottingham who had more leisure, money, and a wider scope to expend on whim and personal vengeance. This had initially been to their advantage, for while the sheriff could be relied on to bestir himself against any probable threat to his own comfort, and local outlaws of all styles and political persuasions must be numbered on such a list, Robin Hood's company had not, at first, directly troubled him. (Indeed, he had grown a little tired of the Chief Forester's fixation on the subject. The Chief Forester, thought the sheriff, suffered a slight excess of self-importance.)

So while the sheriff had not been idle in pursuit of these outlaws, his harassment was irregular, as if he was not entirely convinced that he needed to care that they existed; or as if he was still hoping, if he tried very hard to forget about them, that his forgetfulness would have the salutary effect of making them forget to believe in themselves, whereupon they would burn away like fog in sunlight, and stop troubling him. “He believes his own lies,” said Much; “chief among them that he is the law, and not merely the bully with the biggest stick, in Nottingham.”

But Robin's folk had grown harder to ignore. They grew less and less inclined to remain quietly in the heart of Sherwood, nursing their subversive notions—and eating the king's deer. They had begun preying upon the high roads. There was even talk of some kind of spy network among them and other subversives in other parts of England, where local malcontents might go and begin new lives, and cheat their rightful Norman overlords of rents and taxes.

By the time of the spring fair in Nottingham there was a lively new topic of gossip among the small farmers and merchants who set up booths. Robin Hood had already become quite a favourite among them; more and more of them had friends or relatives who had been assisted, or thought they had been assisted, by some member of the Sherwood outlaws (Robin would have been astonished at the amount of philanthropy he was responsible for at several retellings' remove.) The conversations went: So, had everyone heard of this Robin Hood and his band of folk in Sherwood Forest? Yes, yes, of course everyone had heard. Well, the latest was that they were not merely offering a helping hand to those cheated by greedy Normans—they were now
robbing
the greedy Normans directly. Pause for appreciative laughter and the rubbing together of hands. Was this not the classic end of thieves? Was this not how the Normans
must
be treated? Did it not seem as if this Robin Hood was—well—some instrument of fate?

The preying upon the high roads had begun as the longbow practice abruptly became rather successful. After lengthy moaning and groaning and the rubbing of pulled muscles, accompanied by lingering reproachful looks at their leader, suddenly there were half a dozen outlaws capable of hitting what they aimed at—capable of knocking a deer down from four hundred yards' distance; capable of putting an arrow through a forester's hat from the same distance (although the fellow who did this was nearly drawn and quartered by Robin, when he heard of it). Then there were eight of them who began to carry longbows; then fourteen.

Robin said nothing to his once-reluctant pupils beyond generous praise, but he knew that what had done the job at last had as much to do with pride as with practice. Little John and, later, Will had joined the longbow sessions after the general tenor of aggrieved complaint was well established. Much was among the loudest, and certainly the most articulate, of the complainers, although Robin had noticed when he had begun to hit more targets than he missed, and that there was a look of sneaking pleasure on his face when he saw how deeply the arrow from the bigger bow had bitten into the target. But it was when Little John had hurled several arrows better than a hand's-breadth into the gnarled, thick-skinned old oaks of Sherwood with no more remark than a look of faint surprise, that Much shut up and concentrated on shooting. Little John did not pick up a bow by choice; his staff was readier to his hand. But when he held a longbow, specially made to fit his long length—“To think I almost cut that one down not a sennight since as impossible,” said Humphrey—the arrows went where he sent them.

Will had been shooting from a conspicuously oversized bow for some years. “Since I found out I could,” he said cheerfully; “I like to show off.” He had brought his own bow with him, and demonstrated his prowess by breaking off the tail-feathers of his first arrow with the point of his second, so close did they strike. “Wasteful,” he said afterward, looking at the damage; “it will have to be retied now.” He looked at Robin. “You are not saying that showing off can be like that.”

“I am not saying it,” agreed Robin.

But there was a second material matter in the acquiring of the outlaws' close attention to mastering the longbow. Marian had taken practice with the rest, when she was present; and could be seen practising on her own when she had been very many days away from camp and had missed her turns; nor did she ever complain, though she sometimes grew a little white around the mouth after she had pulled the string a few times.