The Outlaws of Sherwood (28 page)

Little John stood up; now he did let his eyes rest briefly on Cecily's anxious, upturned face; but his expression was unreadable. It wasn't just the beard, she thought, and sprang up. He picked up a bundle and set off in the direction that would bring them at last to Nottingham. She hurried to walk beside him, where he could not help but notice her, and he said no word suggesting that she remain behind; he said no word of any kind. She had soon to drop back for the sake of making her way neatly through the tree limbs and vine leaves that clutched at them. Perhaps it was her own oppression of spirits, for he was often silent. But his silence on this day weighed on her heart.

In walking they were a good match, for her legs were long, and she'd always taken strides as long and quick as she could as a kind of protest against being compelled to wear skirts. Walking with her brother had been good practice, for he was nearly as tall as Little John. What Little John had had to teach her was to walk quietly. She was not a bad pupil—in this or in anything else he had chosen to teach her—but her mind tended to wander from the immediate repetitive question of where to put each foot, while Little John, it seemed to her, never stepped absent-mindedly on a twig. Perhaps his feet had their own eyes. She'd complained once to him—weeks ago—that he must be made of air, not flesh, for no one so large could walk so quietly. That had been before he had begun to teach her how to throw an opponent bigger than herself with her hands instead of her staff, and before she'd found out how heavy he could be when the lesson was going against her.

“Flesh enough,” he'd said at the time, “flesh and blood and bone. Or did you think that was Much last night whose blanket you were stealing? I learnt to walk quietly because I needed to learn so badly. Have you not noticed how noisy squirrels are, and how quiet the deer?”

“I am not a squirrel,” she'd said, a trifle sulkily.

“No,” he agreed. “You cannot leap half so far.”

But Little John's bare chin was sunk upon his breast this morning, and she could think of nothing to say; the best she could do was to walk as silently as she was able, to remember past lessons as perfectly as she could, as an indication that … her thoughts stopped here. It was hard not to keep glancing at his face when the undergrowth permitted; when his profile appeared over his shoulder as he held a whippy branch back for her to grab. His beard was the sort that grew up within a couple of fingers' breadth of his eyes, and it was nearly black, darker even than his dark hair. Now she had discovered that he had cheekbones and a chin; and there were long deep lines on either side of his mouth.

Humphrey almost challenged them when it took him a moment to recognise the tall smooth-faced man walking beside Cecil. “Wrestling, eh?” he said, looking at Little John's shoulders. “Nay, I'd not willingly stand up against you. Drink some ale for me, though, will you? I don't miss much, living in trees; but I miss the good ale.”

They had come most of their way to Nottingham without a word between them. Little John paused, and caught one of Cecily's sidelong looks. He put a hand to his face. “I feel a draught,” he said ruefully. He let the bundle down off his back. “Time for the rest of our disguise, I think.” He knelt, which then put him well below Cecily's eye level as she stood beside him, to untie the bundle; hesitated; and looked up at her. “You haven't said how I look.”

She was silent a moment, looking down, and he began to smile, as if involuntarily. The lines around his mouth looked suddenly merry, and his smile was nothing like what it had been behind the beard. “That bad, eh?” he said.

She shook her head; the throb like a cut finger had been hurting all morning, but it was nothing she wished to tell him about. “I don't know. Different.”

He stayed as he was a moment longer, head thrown back, eyes holding hers. There was a little gap in the trees where he had chosen to stop, and the early sun was on his face. “You have no call to complain about my appearing suddenly different.”

She smiled a little. “No. I didn't say anything about that.” He sank back on his heels, and began to pull at the knots of his bundle. “Was it so awful—what you ran from?”

She sat down beside him; he'd never asked her about her history before. She had, in fact, dreaded that he might, because she had not wanted to do any further lying; the essential lie of her name and her gender was hard enough to bear. She'd thought daily of what would happen when she was finally discovered, for it never occurred to her that she would not be discovered. Even if the laces on her tunic had not chosen to give at the same moment that the thin-worn spot on her shirt had decided to tear, she would not have been able to avoid her brother forever. To make herself sleep at night she had told herself the story of the lady This or That, who'd led her husband's knights into battle while he was away on the Crusades; led them and won, too. She knew several stories like that which had come to her father's castle. They were always her favourites, and she believed them fiercely while her father and her brothers scoffed at them as minstrel's fantasies.

Somehow they rang hollow to her at midnight in Sherwood. She had been grateful and ashamed at once for the natural reticence of the outlaws, their easy willingness to leave someone so visibly troubled by memory kindly alone. She had never understood why they had trusted her when she was so mistrustful herself; how had Robin known that her guilty secret was no threat to them? She had wanted to confess during every sleepless night she had—had occasionally gone so far as to creep out of the cave and look for Robin, who seemed to her never to sleep at all, but to spend the nights investigating the corners of Greentree, or whittling by the fire, or going on long mysterious walks through the trees. But she never had. The thought of Marian always stopped her.

She found herself choosing words carefully, for fear of saying too much, even now. “It seemed so to me. I had enough to eat, and I know that that … makes me different from most of us. But I could not eat it. You had your livelihood taken from you; my life was to be given to someone I hated.”

“It is perhaps another form of starvation,” he said, “although I would have said there was no other form of starvation, those months ago when Robin found me.” He looked at her, and she bit her lip against asking him what he thought of her now. “But then I did not think,” he continued, “till I knew—Marian, that a lady could shoot straight, or not mind the calluses on her fingers—or learn to stand guard duty, and handle a staff.” Cecily thought she perceived a twinkle, but was not sure. “You may be grateful that I had known Marian some time before Cecil appeared, and had known Cecil some time before Cecily—appeared. Else I might have tied her in a sack and left her for the foresters to find.”

Cecily sighed. “Well, you do see why it was Cecil.”

“I see,” said Little John. “I do not exactly pardon you, but I do see.” He had unfolded the bundle, and set various things aside, and now handed her a red tunic. “It was simply my fate to be saddled with you. I have long thought Fate has a tricky sense of humour.”

Cecily remembered, some weeks ago, when the talk at the fireside had come round to the absent Little John and how he had resisted—and never quite given up resisting—the presence of women in the camp. Cecily was in the tree she used on the occasions when Will or Marian was present; she could neither see nor be seen, but she could hear quite clearly. Her blood had run cold at this. “I'm glad I was here before him,” said Marian, “or we might none of us have got through. There's a lot of him to get around.”

“It's a tunic,” said Little John. Cecily found herself holding it out in front of her as if uncertain of its identity. She shook herself, lowered her arms. “Yes.”

“What ill thoughts were you thinking, not of the tunic, then?” said Little John, and she heard herself saying, “Friar Tuck said that you did not care for women because you had had your heart broken.” Her tongue stopped just before she added what Marian had said next: “In his slow, methodical, deep-eyed, immovable way—I think he likes having things to be against. I
pity
the woman who tries to break that heart.”

“I've not had my heart broken,” said Little John, calmly. “I had three silly sisters and, briefly, a silly wife—who left when I first got into trouble. She was relieved to have the excuse, and the demesne court was relieved to grant it her; she had by that time a more suitable husband in her eye. That was several years ago. Now, turn that tunic right-side up, if you have recognised it yet, and put it on. We must look pretty fine to compete with the crowds today. If I've forgotten how to wrestle, then we can be shabby again. There's hose for you too; what you're wearing didn't fit you even before you started tearing them to shreds.” She pulled her tunic off, self-consciously; she'd hastily patched her shirt that morning (too late now) and was wearing a shift beneath it as well. Muffled in pulling the new tunic over her head, she almost didn't hear Little John ask: “What was the man you were to marry like?”

“A toad,” she said violently, re-emerging. “He had no neck, and a dome-shaped head with no hair on it, and very large poppy eyes.… He was even a kind of pale green, I think, though they tell me he is very fierce in battle.”

Little John laughed, and she looked at him reproachfully. “I do not blame you for not wanting to marry a toad,” he said gravely, and pulled his own tunic off. She said, so quietly that he might not have heard her, “And he would not talk to me.” She thought: I don't think he cared if I knew how to talk.

Little John pulled his shirt off after the tunic and then picked up a small pot of something which she now recognised as tallow. “If you would attend to my back, I will deal with the rest of me,” he said. “A wrestler should be a little slippery.”

He offered her the pot, one long bare arm stretched out toward her, the pot cupped in his broad palm; she took it from him daintily, her fingertips not touching his hand; and he turned and sat just before her, his head a little bowed. She noticed that he'd trimmed his hair when he cut off his beard. He was so close to her that she was conscious of the warmth of his skin. Blindly she dipped into the pot with her fingers, slapped some of the soft grease on Little John's back, and began to smooth it out. “Careful,” said Little John. “That's all there is, and there is a lot of me.”

“The dogs will follow you,” she said, her voice a little high.

“So long as none decides to try a taste,” he said. “Use your hands, for pity's sake. My brother used to do this for me, and he would nearly knock me over.”

“You must have been smaller then,” she said. She began to use the palms of her hands, rubbing the long round muscles in a circular motion, using the heels of her hands around the shoulder-blades, running the edge of her palm down the spine. She was not so young that she did not know what was happening to her: why her heart was beating too fast, why her breath came hard; why there was a knot in the pit of her stomach which spread into a terrifying warmth over her lower belly and thighs. She knew, and tried to pretend she was Little John's brother, and failed.

“That should do,” she said, after a few of the simultaneously longest and shortest minutes of her life; and Little John moved away from her, and turned to pick up the grease pot. She absent-mindedly went to rub her sticky hands down the front of her bright new tunic, when there was an exclamation from her companion and her arms were nearly jerked out of their sockets as Little John grabbed her wrists. “Not on the tunic! Have you no sense?” He rubbed each of her hands down each of his forearms, and she closed her eyes briefly and thought about fraternal relationships, and then Little John said: “Here—are you all right? I am sorry, did I hurt you?”

“Not nearly as much as all the bruises from my quarterstaff lessons, my friend; a mere dislocated shoulder or two is but nothing,” she said with a fair imitation of her usual tone.

He dropped her hands. “Fortunately you are a fast healer,” he said. “But you look unwell. Are you afraid of our adventure today? Robin may be right that we are wrong to risk ourselves this way.” He rubbed at one sticky forearm. “I do not know but that I feel uneasy myself.”

She shook her head. “A little. No, not really. Robin is always right about that kind of thing, but I still want to go with you.”

“You need not.”

Her stomach was beginning to feel like a stomach again; the cramp was fading to a queer unfamiliar ache that she did not care for but could live with; and all of her began to feel on more familiar territory. “Stop trying to protect our youngest and weakest member,” she said equably. “You have already invited me, and I wish to go.”

He looked at her a moment longer, but when she lifted her eyes to meet his something happened to his face, and he turned away, and picked up the little pot of tallow again. Cecily pulled on her new hose—which fit her much better than her old ones—and then began to tear bits of leaves into littler bits while she waited for Little John to finish his own preparations; and put her mind to what they might see today in Nottingham.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

They could hear the noise of an unusually large crowd before they reached the main road. They were so accustomed not only to the relative silence of the woods, where loud noises were liable to be wild boars or king's foresters, but to the sense of being outlaws, that it took them a conscious effort of will to step out and join the throng of holiday-makers and people with wares to sell on the way to the Nottingham Fair.

Little John was noticed at once; in a sky-blue cloak he could hardly be missed. Cecily's eyes had bulged when he shook it out, last, from the bundle he had carried from Greentree, and swept it on. He grinned at her expression. “We're supposed to draw attention, remember? And the lad I took this from is on his way to Scotland.” By the time they arrived at the outskirts of the town, where the commons was already thick with little booths and bright-dressed jongleurs and acrobats tumbling between them, Little John had gathered a following.