The Outlaws of Sherwood Page 6

  He didn’t go very far. There was a man—a very large dark-bearded man—standing in the middle of the narrow way, leaning on a long blackthorn staff. Robin, suddenly aware of the unmoving shadow that stood in his way, paused and looked up, thinking: how stupid can a man with a price on his head be? I never noticed the fellow; and he is a bit large for overlooking.

  “I’m a stranger here, to be sure,” said the shadow, “but it seems to me that you show scant courtesy; for I was already a quarter way across this slender bridge when you jumped on the far side and strode toward me.”

  Robin didn’t like the man’s tone, and he was a shaggy and draggled-looking figure besides; arrogance did not sit well on him, or so he told himself, to drown out the lecture his better judgement wished to give him on caution. What if the man had been a forester? The man was not a forester, that’s all; and Robin now wanted to get past him and forget the whole incident as quickly as he might. He looked up into the man’s eyes—and quite a way he had to look up to do it—and his voice was not friendly as he said, “Very well, I was in a hurry and was not paying attention, and I did not see you. As you apparently stopped to watch me, for you are still only a quarter of the way over and I am more than half, I suggest that you go back and let me by, and then you may cross at whatever leisurely pace seems best to you. You may even sit be-straddle and dangle a hook for fish if you will, so long as you have an eye out for other travellers who may, like me, wish to proceed at a normal pace.”

  “No,” said the stranger. “I like not your plan, and I seem to have forgot my fishbait. You shall give way before me and prove that the folk here are not the knaves they seem to be.”

  Robin’s nerves were still jumping from the quick, awful wash of fear when he had first seen the stranger and had not known if he faced a doom brought on by his own carelessness; and his temper, never slow to follow up an opportunity, would not now allow him go the long way back to the far shore and let this unpleasant giant past. “I shall not. I say that the folk of your county must have thrown you out for your manners, and you come here to plague us.”

  Something flared in the man’s eyes at these words, and he uttered a sharp bark of laughter that had no humour in it. He said, “Then I shall have to make my own way—as I have often done in this life.” And, as if he thought of using it to clear his present path, he took a fresh grip on his staff.

  “A brute and a bully you are,” said Robin angrily, his temper gone for good, and, instinctively, one hand strayed toward the quiver on his back.

  “And a coward I call you,” said the stranger, his brow lowering in a terrible frown; “for you would shoot me with your arrows when I have naught but a staff to defend myself with.”

  Robin’s common sense tried to make him say something conciliatory; what came out was a snarl: “A coward I will not be called!”—and he ran freely back to the far side of the stream, but with his hands shaking with rage. He cut himself a sturdy oak staff that might hold against seasoned blackthorn, and trimmed it, taking a few deep breaths to steady himself. The stranger had not moved from his place a quarter way across the log bridge.

  Robin left his bow and arrows hung on a tree limb, and went to meet his challenger. He was, or had been, good with a staff, for he was quick and light on his feet, and vagrant breezes had less effect on staves than on arrows. But he had not practised with a staff in many long months, and his footwork would avail him little whilst he stood on the narrow curved back of a log bridge; and he knew besides that he would be no match in physical strength to the giant before him.

  But he stepped up on the log nonetheless, and held his staff warily, and advanced against his enemy; and his enemy straightened up and moved forward to meet him.

  Robin feinted and, as the stranger lowered his staff to parry, raised his own in a lightning stroke to smash the stranger across the brow; only the quickest shift on the stranger’s part saved him from a blow that would certainly have landed him in the stream. “You strike well,” he said, surprised; and, surprising Robin, his voice sounded almost pleasant. He began an attack of his own, but deft and wise though he was, Robin parried ably, and threw the blows back upon him.

  They stood so for many long hard minutes, neither moving but for the rare half-stagger as his opponent drove past his guard and rapped him with his staff; for they were better matched than they appeared. Robin was the smaller by a good deal, and, as he soon knew, the less practised, but he was strong and wiry—and stubborn; and he had the knack of the thing besides. The stranger was just the littlest bit slow, and never quite managed to deliver a blow that had his full strength behind it.

  Their breath came in great gasps, and a red haze was in their eyes. Sweat ran down Robin’s face and sides, and his ribs burned from the stranger’s bludgeoning. And this for who gets to cross first, he thought in disgust, for his bruises were cooling his temper. Perhaps it was that ill-timed thought, or the sweat running into his eyes, that put him out, for of a sudden a blow he did not see knocked his staff aside and caught him fairly between the last rib and the hip, and swept him into the stream.

  “Ugh,” grunted Robin, floundering to the surface, and spitting water. The stream was cold, and his body seemed to contract inside its skin with the shock of it after the heat of the contest; his bones ached with the chill. He stood up awkwardly; the strength of the current pulled him off balance, and his backbone felt as if it had been split in half by the stranger’s final blow. He glared up at the man still standing on the bridge. The stranger was looking down at him with a curious expression on his face. “Well, you have won,” Robin said ungraciously. “I would count it a favour if the victor would now proceed on his way and leave me in solitude.”

  “You fought well,” said the stranger, as if he would make peace.

  Easy for him to say, thought Robin, who only grunted again in reply, and pushed his dripping hair away from his face; it clung to his neck like weeds. The cold made his teeth chatter, and he could feel the blood blackening the skin at all the places the stranger’s staff had struck him, as if the water were a charm to bring up bruises. He found himself ungenerously hoping that a few of his own blows were making the stranger’s sides throb as well. He set out for the nearer shore—and to his annoyance found the stranger came to meet him, and held out a huge hand to pull Robin through the mud and water-weeds of the slower-moving water near the bank.

  “My thanks, sirrah,” Robin said grimly. “Why do you not go? I have acknowledged that you have won the right to cross the bridge first; or you have acknowledged it for me by removing me from your path. Yet you are still on the side of the stream where you began.”

  “And you, on the contrary, are where you wished to be,” said the stranger with something like humour.

  Robin had taken off his boots and was peeling out of his tunic, and he looked at the stranger with dislike, but something in the man’s face brought a weak flicker of humour to his own. Now that the stranger was not standing like a small mountain in the middle of the bridge, nor scowling like a medium-sized thunderstorm, Robin found himself thinking that he looked like someone whose company Robin might have enjoyed in other circumstances.

  “Just where I wanted to be indeed,” said Robin, and began discouragedly to wring out his tunic.

  “I will offer you an apology, if I may,” the stranger said after a moment. “My temper is not so good as it might be, and I—well, it is of no matter.”

  “My temper is nothing to boast of either,” said Robin ruefully, now squeezing the water from his shirt, and shivering in the light breeze. “Perhaps times are hard with you; and such weighs on a man’s mind.”

  The stranger went suddenly still, and Robin looked over at him—at first curiously, and then with some alarm. What if this man had been sent by the sheriff after all—? Robin’s hands paused, and for a moment the only sounds were the voice of the water and the rustling of leaves, and, audible perhaps only to himself, the sodden slow drip of water striking the moss around h
is feet.

  “Times, in truth, are hard,” said the stranger slowly, “and I have come a long way in a short time, and am not—at ease in the new country where I find myself.”

  Not a spy, thought Robin; or I doubt the sheriff could hire any spy so good at his craft as to put on such a look of weariness. He squeezed again, and a heavy splatter of water sank into the wet moss. Although the sheriff is holding little back of late.

  “May I set you on your way, then, if you are unfamiliar here?” he said aloud, trying to sound disinterestedly courteous. He picked up one soggy boot and looked at it with gloom.

  The stranger heaved a great sigh, and spoke as if he made a hard decision. “I seek the man they call Robin Hood.”

  Robin dropped his boot, more in surprise than apprehension. “What for?” he said aloud.

  The man sat down, which made him look, as he drew his knees up to clasp his hands around them, rather like a short thick mountain than a taller thinner one. “I come from the far side of Nottingham,” he said; “but we know your sheriff there, too. My lord needed no help to raise the rents on the yeomen who worked his land; but the sheriff and his taxes gave it him anyway, and generously. They have been this three years at driving me off my farm, and they have done it at last. I could not meet the rents when my lord raised them once more.… I had lately heard of a man named Robin Hood; I little knew whether to think him real or a tale to torment such as I. But I have nothing left to risk, and so I thought to look for him.…” He paused, and swallowed. “Forgive me, but I have had little to eat this past sennight, and our battle, which I brought on myself—I have ever had a hasty temper; my lord would not else have taken notice of me among his other Saxon slaves—seems to have taken my strength.

  “It was seeing you, well-clothed and fed, and hurrying to your business with such firm purpose that you did not see me, that brought a sudden blackness to my mind, and I challenged you.”

  Hurrying to my business with such firm idiocy, thought Robin; I suppose such preoccupation does make me look honest, for only an honest man could afford it. He undid his damp leather wallet from his damp leather belt, and opened it. “It is your own fault that it is wet,” he said to the man on the ground, “but the bread’s made of the miller’s coarsest meal, and should have held up to its soaking pretty well.” He held it out to the stranger, noticing for the first time how hollow the man’s eyes were beneath the weariness, and how his ragged clothing hung over a frame too thin for its great bones.

  The man looked at the wallet and then at Robin, but he made no move to touch the food. “I thank you, but I do not ask for charity,” he said, with a slight return to his old threatening manner. “I would ask, if you will or can give it, a direction to this outlaw, Robin Hood—or perhaps the information that you are a sheriff’s man, and will clap me in irons.”

  Robin grinned. “I would like to see me try it. It’s not charity—may I say that the temper you wanted to apologise for is showing again, even if you have not the strength to back it just now? Take the food, or I’ll stamp it into the mud.” He found himself growing embarrassed. “You see—I am Robin Hood. It’s your first wages, if you like, although we cannot pay wages, and we have yet no spoils to divide, as successful outlaws are expected to do. But if you think I look well-clothed and well-fed, you will be better off with us than without us.”

  But the man only went on staring. Robin took a step closer. “Take it,” he said, “or I’ll drip on you.”

  The man reached up and took the wallet, but then he bowed his head, and still he did not touch the food. “I do most humbly beg your pardon,” he said to the ground.

  Robin, putting on his boots and grimacing at the clammy feel of them, said, “Yes, as well you may, but don’t go on about it, if you please. I think we might as well go back to Greentree, where we—live. I can bring you in and get dry too.”

  The man broke the bread in half, and offered half back to Robin, who, after looking at the set of the stranger’s mouth, accepted it. The man thoughtfully ate his half, looking at the stream. “Would you wish me, for my first command, to fall off the bridge into the water?”

  “It’s an idea,” said Robin. “But while I am considering it, you could tell me your name.”

  The man climbed slowly to his feet again, and Robin wondered how he could not have noticed before how very thin he was, and how worn his clothing. “For the size of our holding, my father was called Little; and so I became John Little after him, or Johnlittle, as it amused those who looked up a certain distance to see my face to call me.” He paused; his beard made it hard to read his expression. “But that was when I had a home and a holding, and friends to call me by name.”

  “We shall baptise you again as you enter your new life,” said Robin, tipping his own head back to look up the certain distance. “I call you Little John, and so you shall be known from this day forward.”

  “So then I shall,” said he, and, ignoring the bridge, waded into the stream, and crossed so to the other side. He was wet to the neck when he came up on the opposite shore.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Robin lost count of how many bowls of stew Little John ate that evening; it might have been six or seven. That was besides the half a pie and the ends of two almost-stale loaves (nothing edible in Greentree lasted long enough to get really stale) he’d eaten when they first arrived.

  When the two of them squelched back to camp, they headed at once for the fire. All the children were lingering significantly in its neighbourhood, where the big pot that was one of the Sherwood band’s dearest possessions sat on its short iron legs and steamed; its aroma said, vegetable soup, heavy on the turnips and too few marrow bones. The old woman who was tending the fire looked at Robin and then at his companion; and her face went abruptly blank, and her cheeks hollow, as if she were sucking in at the corners of her mouth. She turned and busied herself at the woodpile, and threw several good chunks on the fire, that it would blaze up better, to cook the soup faster or to cause wet clothes to steam dry more quickly.

  One of the children went up to Robin and grabbed a corner of his shirt. She squeezed it disbelievingly, and looked up into his face with an expression of deep disapproval. This was a child who had been thrashed by her mother the day before for playing in the pond, and getting her only whole suit of clothes wet.

  “You’ll get no soup,” she said with profound certainty. Someone behind them chuckled, and there was a rustle, and utter silence fell.

  Robin said mildly, “There was a little trouble about a bridge that was too narrow. But all has ended well, and I wish to introduce you to our latest member: I give you John Little, henceforth to be known as Little John.”

  Much appeared from wherever he had been and said, “A little trouble, say you?” He lifted one of the staff-flayed strips of Robin’s tunic. “And with, we understand, a little man.” He gazed up at the newcomer looming over Robin’s shoulder. “Be it so; I would not cross your judgement.” He dropped his eyes to Little John’s staff—Robin had lost his green oak to the stream—and said, “I am sure you will be a very useful man to have around. With your little staff. I welcome you.”

  Little John’s mouth stretched and curled as if he were not accustomed to smiling; and he said, “I shall try to be useful. And your name, my new friend?”

  “Much,” said Much. “Much of Whitestone Mill, as I was; although the person of that name seems to be gaining some notoriety of late, and I believe I shall start leaving him at home in Sherwood.”

  The outlaws were lucky in their first winter. Snow fell rarely, and only a little of it sifted through the many branches and stubborn brown oak leaves of Sherwood to cover the ground. The center of Greentree’s glen gleamed white in the sunlight occasionally; but what snow there was melted quickly. Thanks to Harald, by the time there was ice underfoot everyone had shoes stout enough to walk without fear of frostbite, and a leather tunic to cut the winter wind. As the season stayed mild, the animals the outlaws depended on
for food and clothing were in good condition, and most of them continued to stray through the forest as they did during the rest of the year, and did not take hibernation too seriously.

  The winter chill and the shortness of daylight did, however, cut down on the number of folk who left what homes they had to seek Robin Hood, for which favour Robin felt that a little snow and a permanently cold nose was worth it. Even the sheriff and the king’s foresters seemed willing to live and let live for a time, and take things, even outlaws, a little more leisurely, be grateful for the boon of a gentle winter, and wait for spring.

  By midwinter Robin could hardly remember a time when Little John was not at his elbow, patient and hard-working, ready to carry out orders, and to suggest improvements on those orders before he followed them. As his frame filled out to its proper proportions, he suited his nickname even more illustriously than he had when Robin met him on the log bridge; and yet for all his size he moved quietly through the laboriously preserved tangle around Greentree. He also never got lost.

  And he unexpectedly knew practical things about the design and shoring-up of earthworks. “From farming a landscape that doesn’t want to be farmed,” he said. And from being the largest man in several villages and automatically expected to do more than an equal share of the heavy work. “I learnt to have an eye for hills and ditches in self-defence,” he said.

  “Self-defence,” said Much. “Ah. A man the height of a Midsummer bonfire would find himself preoccupied with self-defence.”

  “Even as horses are plagued by horse-flies,” said Little John. “I learnt wrestling when I was a boy, when I got tired of being knocked down by boys half my size and twice my age.”

  Nonetheless no one was sorry when the little green knots of young leaves began to appear on the tips of twigs, even though the stream at the edge of Greentree’s meadow promptly overflowed and the hut-cave where they mostly slept was flooded, and almost everyone caught cold. No one became dangerously ill, only a trifle snarly.