The Outlaws of Sherwood (40 page)

“I like it,” said Will. “But it won't last.”

“I do not understand why we have been left untroubled this long,” said Robin. “It is not to the sheriff's credit that he has even pretended to believe it.”

Again Will broke the silence: “We should perhaps shift this gloomy meeting to Marian's chamber. She might have some better chance of convincing our blockhead leader of the wisdom of keeping his head from the block.”

Robin said dourly, “I fear that the most Marian has learnt this sennight is that the name of Robin Hood has nothing but fear and pain attached to it.”

“She has not,” said a new voice. Little John turned around as Cecily emerged into the sunlight.

Robin smiled for the first time.

“I dare you to repeat those words to her,” said Cecily.

“I dare not,” said Robin. “She might grow warm, and her fever is not long gone.”

“Look,” Will said quietly. There was that in his voice that made them all turn quickly around.

A little train of riders was cantering out of the forest on the road to Sir Richard's castle.

“Shall we go down and see what may be happening?” said Much after a few minutes, while everyone's eyes burned with the strain of trying to identify the riders. There was always the possibility that they had nothing to do with Nottingham or the sheriff, though no one believed this. From such a distance the riders were still mere spots, bouncing to the horses' rhythm; but there was a purposefulness about the horses' gait, and the party clung too close together to be friends coming for an idle visit.

Robin shook his head. “Not just yet. Or at least I do not wish to: I would rather see what I am looking for first. The gate has been closed this long; we need not fear surprise.”

So they all stood and stared. Slowly they became aware of heightened activity below them, and voices shouting. But Sir Richard's voice was quite calm when he joined them on the wall walk. “You are observing our approaching guests?”

“Did you know they were so close?” said Robin.

Sir Richard shook his head. “I have been hearing since the afternoon we waited for the litter and the horses to carry you here that the sheriff of Nottingham was hiding behind the next tree, and I fear I had become somewhat jaded. Certainly I heard the message that he was setting out for Mapperley this morning, but I credited this report as I credited it yesterday and the day before. I have wondered daily—hourly—why it is that no one from the sheriff has come to inquire why our gate is closed.… I will, however, remember to give Philip a nice young colt for his efforts—and an apology. I fear I was not polite to him this dawn.”

It was hard for Cecily to remember that less than a fortnight ago she was serving guard duty as a young outlaw named Cecil. She could remember quite clearly, as she braced against the trunk at her back and sighted an arrow along a forester's cap, and held her breath as she waited for him to pass under her without looking up, that she had thought then it was hard to remember her previous life as a person named Cecily in long skirts. It was probably the constant ache in her shoulder that made her philosophical, and the loss of sleep it compelled, as she could do nothing but be philosophical—or join Marian for some one-armed pillow-hurling—till it healed. But she wondered if whoever it was that she was would stay herself long enough for her to get accustomed again to living in her skin? When she lived in her father's house she had wanted nothing more than to shed that skin permanently; she'd come even to hate it when it became something to be sold to a cold-faced Norman lord. She looked away from the riders and down at her hands, opened the fist of her good hand and stared at the callused palm.

“Why do they never look up?” she had whispered, in her last life, as Cecil, to her teacher, Little John, after the seventh or twentieth king's forester had crept by beneath them, looking searchingly into every bush and shadow.

Little John shrugged. “It is enough for us that they do not.”

“For so long as they go on not doing it,” said Cecily, peering the way the man had gone. “Surely even foresters must learn eventually that Robin Hood's outlaws like climbing trees?”

Little John said dryly, “The trouble they do not see may not see them. The chances of being gored by a boar one has not seen are still a good bit higher than the chances of being shot by a Robin Hood one has not seen. I have not a high respect for the men we watch for, but I believe they know that to live and let live works better on outlaws than on wild pigs.”

“So long as you are not a Norman with a fat purse,” said Cecily. “Just so,” said Little John.

The riders grew steadily closer to Mapperley's walls. The sheriff was learning to look up at last.

Little John shifted beside her, leaning on the stonework as he eased his leg. She had without meaning to chosen the gap in the wall nearest his to look through. She remembered her words to him outside the earthwork where Marian lay, and wondered that he would still speak to her after she had betrayed herself so; but events had crowded upon them. She had tried to give him as little opportunity as she could, since they came to Mapperley, to snub her. And it was easy enough, for she slept with Marian and he with the other men. She thought longingly of guard duty, which had been boring and cramped often enough at the time. As she watched the approaching riders she could hear Little John's breathing, sense the bulk of him against the stone—she felt she could discern the human shadow that touched her from the cold hard edge of the shadow the stone threw.… What nonsense, she said to herself.

The riders pulled up to a walk to blow their horses.

“That's the sheriff in front, right enough,” said Sir Richard. “He always did ride like a sack of meal; no horse can put up with it for long.”

She could see the wink of pale faces as they looked up to the high walls of the castle, and she wondered if they could see their watchers, unmoving against pale stone. Robin Hood's outlaws had not lived in Sherwood long enough to train their hunters to look up into the trees; and now they never would.

Little John sighed extravagantly: the frustration of a strong man who watches his enemy approaching and can do nothing.

“Do any of you wish to be present for the exchange of verbal pleasantries that is sure to occur when I decline to raise my gate to my impetuous guest?” said Sir Richard. “To—er—allow for a certain hesitation in the walking speed of certain of our number, we might have need to begin our descent soon.”

“That's us,” said Much. “Will and Little John and me, we go first, so you can't get ahead of us.”

There were a great many folk trying to look casual in the general vicinity of the gate when Sir Richard arrived, the other outlaws among them—including Marian, who had got out of her bed to sit in a chair by the window for the first time the day before. She had persuaded a couple of the junior squires to carry her out in a sedan-chair. All the younger squires and page-boys loved her, and loved the story of the Nottingham Fair, which she had refused to tell them, which made them only worship her the more. She looked thinner and frailer than she had ten days before, but there was some colour back in her face, and her chin set with its old familiar arrogance when she caught Robin's eye. “Should you—” he began.

“Don't even bother to say it,” she said.

He looked at her a moment, and then moved near her to take her hand. The junior squires glowered in the background.

The porter had descended from his little chamber, and bowed to Sir Richard. With a straight face he said, “My lord, the sheriff is come to visit his good friend Sir Richard of the Lea, and is saddened by the shut gate, and wishes to inquire of Sir Richard what possible hurt he anticipates from the peaceful land and folk of England that his good friends meet with so chill a reception?” The man paused and added with a grin, “He also wishes to request your porter's head on a silver plate for not opening the gate at once upon his herald's declaration of his visit. This tale of threatening brigands is all very well, but can't I see he's the sheriff?”

Sir Richard strolled in the most leisurely manner toward the gate, perhaps to give everyone an opportunity to find a good view of the subsequent proceedings. Robin, without a word, caught Marian up in his arms and went gently up the narrow stone steps to the second floor of the gate house, where they could watch through the barred windows there; the others followed. Tuck looked anxious, Rafe eager, and Sibyl looked animated for the first time since Eva's death.

They could hear Sir Richard's voice clearly, though it sounded a little hollow; and clearly they could hear the sheriff's reply—or rather, they could hear what he instructed his herald to say. The ditch before the gate was a narrow one; they heard most of what the sheriff bellowed at his herald before the herald opened his mouth, and they could see the expression—and the colour—of the sheriff's face: the former choleric and the latter maroon. He dispensed with his herald's services after the first exchange; he all but danced in his rage at the edge of the ditch.

“Wouldn't it be lovely if he fell in?” said Marian.

“I have heard of your traitorous behaviour!” he howled. “I heard it, but I did not yet believe it—”

“Of course not, his history of kindly and honourable dealings with Sir Richard being borne so strongly in his mind,” said Robin.

“I could not believe that a lord of this land—”

“Even a Saxon,” said Much.

“—would give succour to a band of common rabble—”

“Definitely Saxon,” said Much.

“—indeed, I wonder that I do not find you with your throat cut by this rabble, and all your goods stolen—”

“As we have often stolen yours,” Will said cheerfully.

“I cannot understand how you would come to so low a choice as this, to turn your back on the law of this good land, the king's law, to give comfort to the king's enemies—”

There had been some confusion in the bailey yard, but few paid attention, most eyes being riveted upon the spectacle the sheriff of Nottingham made, shaking his plump fists at a cool and unreachable Sir Richard. But Sir Richard paused in the middle of explaining his attitude toward rabble and the king's law, and toward a sheriff who would hire a notorious ruffian like Guy of Gisbourne for any purpose whatsoever and then speak to another man of his decision to harbour cutthroats. “He is not mincing words, our lord, is he?” murmured Will. But there was a certain electricity apparent in the pause, and people began to look behind them. The few watchers left on the south wall were obviously looking intently at something, and there were cries and pointing fingers.

Those in the gate house could not guess what was going forward; they could not see to the south. But now some of the men with the sheriff were looking south; and the news, whatever it was, went quickly from mouth to mouth. The sheriff's fists dropped, and he, too, looked south, facing away from those in the gate house, so they could not see if he watched in hope or in fear.

It seemed a long time but it was not when a gaily caparisoned rider cantered up to Sir Richard's gate. The sheriff's men parted before him like cheese from a knife. Two men rode with him; one carried a banner, the second, some kind of long horn. The second raised his instrument to his lips and blew a brief, merry
ta-ta-ta;
and at that moment the wind caught the banner and snapped it out flat, that its device might clearly be seen by all.

And the herald shouted: “King Richard the Lionheart is come to visit his liege lord Sir Richard of the Lea.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

The outlaws stumbled down the steps to the gate, to stand near as the portcullis was raised and the drawbridge lowered. The hearts of Robin's folk beat quickly, but the hearts of Sir Richard's folk did too; there were many flushed faces and half-eager, half-fearful looks. No one thought of running away or of hiding; this was the
king
. That was enough, for good or ill.

The king was both very grand and not grand at all. He was tall; perhaps as tall as Will or not quite so tall as Little John. He rode a tall horse with a girth great enough to fill his long legs; and mounted he looked like a giant. But he rode as a man rides when he sits in the saddle every day; and if there was no visible effort on his part to look commanding it was because he did not need to make the effort. Every easy turn of his golden-haired head was regal; the set of his foot in the shining silver stirrup was regal. Even someone who did not know to look for a tall blond man would have picked this man as the leader.

The Lionheart's eyes raked the folk around the gate. His face was long and stern; stern even when he smiled. Cecily, feeling her heart still beating too quickly, could not decide if his smile made her glad or terrified. It was not, she thought, a facile or a comforting smile. Her father had been to Henry's court; Will had once been to the Regent's. “And a colourful and wicked place it was, too,” was Will's comment. “I don't know which the more, but I was grateful to be the humblest liege and not expected to linger.” But no one she could call friend and ask questions of had been presented to the Lionheart; he was always away from court, before and after he became king, fighting some battle in which he might distinguish himself further as deserving his nickname. She found she half-expected him to have yellow eyes with thin vertical pupils, like a cat's. It was with almost a shock that she noticed, looking at his smile, that his eyes were blue.

The sheriff and his party crept in after the king's men had all passed beneath the gate; but they were a subdued group, and Sir Richard's people barely noticed them. There were not many more of the king's party than of the sheriff's, nor were they conspicuously better attired. The sheriff was known for his material generosity with his favourites, and the Lionheart, for all his love of colour, always looked a little too soldierly for perfect glamour. But the difference in bearing between the two groups was unmistakable; so unmistakable that no one within Sir Richard's protection bothered to put into words the thought that while the king was present they had nothing to fear from the sheriff of Nottingham.