The Outlaws of Sherwood Page 8

  “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 bit
ten 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.

  And there was now another woman in the camp, a widow named Sibyl, who had lost her farm after she lost her husband, and arrived in Sherwood soon after Will. “I knew it was hopeless alone, but … I did not think, till I heard of Robin Hood, that I had anything left to do but wait to die; it would not take long, and I would be with my husband again.” Her look of grief faded and was replaced by one of faint bewilderment. “I did not at first see that Robin Hood was aught to do with me; but I knew that, were Walter alive, and we lost the farm, he would have come to Sherwood; and so I came.”

  Robin had first thought to send her along to the next place that their spy system heard of that she might fill; but by the time there was such a place, Sibyl was taking her regular turn at standing guard, and had learnt, more easily than most, not to get lost. There was, besides, someone else by then who worse needed that place in the world outside Sherwood. And so she stayed. When another suitable place was heard of, there was again someone else, someone who could not learn not to get lost, and who was oppressed by the heavy encircling green of Sherwood besides; and so Sibyl stayed. By the third time there was no longer any notion of asking her to leave; she did not wish to, and she—and Marian—were among that first half-dozen who could reliably draw a longbow.

  The presence of women as a spur to the men among Robin’s outlaws did not trouble the sheriff; its results did. Bolder now, longbows in hand, they prowled the common ways through Sherwood, woodscrafty enough to remain invisible, pleased with the success of their experiment thus far; pleased still to be alive and untaken. But their relocation activities cost money; and their various saleable skills could earn only so much when the craftsmen in question had often to stop their hands’ work to chop firewood or stand guard. They peered through leaves at the gaudily dressed Normans making their unknowing ways here and there; and they plotted.

  Much returned to camp one day with the news that the canon of Turham was travelling to Nottingham to deliver up the latest taxes due the sheriff. The canon’s rents upon his Saxon farmers were known to be harsh; to this canon the sheriff had often looked, and for each look, it seemed, the rents rose again.

  It was, as Much said, and as even Robin was compelled to acknowledge, ridiculously easy. A dozen outlaws burst from behind the trees and surrounded the canon’s company; the two guards among them were so surprised, they were taken before they had a chance to grab for their weapons. The outlaws relieved the canon’s palfrey of the weight of its saddlebags, and led him and his companions, blindfolded but otherwise unharmed, to a place near the main route to Nottingham. When Rafe slapped the palfrey’s flank to make it trot forward, it kicked him.

  “A steed to suit such a master,” said Much cheerfully, as Rafe sat panting in the leaf-mould, rubbing his thigh and grimacing. The canon’s farmers later discovered mysterious small clinking bundles hung on their cows’ horns or in their mangers, or slid under thresholds, or dropped in cradles. The price of fair rent the outlaws kept, and two or three of the oldest and youngest of them, the ones best able to look innocent or ordinary, were dispatched to various markets to buy what the band most needed.

  “It won’t stay this easy for long,” said Robin.

  “You are the worst killjoy honest rogues have ever been forced to bear,” said Much.

  Jocelin, squinting over needle and thread in the flickering light of the fire, was heard to say something wistful about roofing timbers. Jocelin had been a carpenter.

  “Think again,” said Rafe. “Are you going to peel them up and tuck them under your arm whenever we must go out to play follow-the-leader with a few foresters? Let’s not make it any easier than we have to for them or the sheriff’s men to guess what they’re looking at.”

  “You’ve turned as gloomy as Robin since the canon’s horse kicked you,” said Much; “it must have rattled your heart loose. I’m tired myself of my face hitting my blanket with a splash instead of a thump every night. We’ll have moss growing on us soon.”

  “Nobody is making you sleep under the leaks,” said Rafe, “nor stopping you from plugging ’em. I’ve a bit of canvas you could have, if you asked.”

  “A real roof—” began Much.

  “But if I hear any more about it,” added Rafe, “you will eat that canvas, instead of sleeping under it. We’re becoming very grand for homeless outlaws, aren’t we? Roofs, my faith. Next you’ll be wanting tailors.”

  “Maybe we should stop a thatcher on the road,” said Jocelin.

  The sheriff tried sending a group of hired soldiers led by several of his own men into Sherwood soon after the canon had had his baggage lightened; but Sherwood is a vast forest, and the sheriff’s men were not nearly such good trackers as Will Scarlet. Robin and his folk crept after the noisy group—“Do you suppose the sheriff’s bright mercenaries have never seen a tree before?” whispered Will, as one of them reeled back from a slap in the face dealt by a branch released by the man he had followed too closely. In the course of his reel he cracked himself against another tree and fell to his knees. It was not difficult leading them astray.

  It was not difficult, but they were a long day at it; and there were a few grim looks from those with the most bruises and least sleep when Robin said, “Now we must do it a second time. After the fox has hunted the mother who flutters her broken wing at him and then flies away, he may return to the place he first saw her, and look again.”

  So the next day they did it again. One of the sheriff’s men was caught in a trench Little John had dug—one of his first efforts and not, he protested, one of his better ones—and one soldier was caught by the leg and dangled far above the heads of his fellows by one of Will’s snares. There were several of Robin’s folk at hand when this happened, who turned purple with repressed laughter at his yelling. “He screeched like a babe too hardly woken,” said Much that evening. “If his friends hadn’t been so busy looking for ways to cut him down without breaking his crown when he fell, they might have noticed some leaves trembling without a breeze nearby, where we were biting the bark to stop ourselves laughing aloud.”

  The sheriff’s men found nothing and went home, two with scrapes and sprains, and all with anger and wounded pride. But the sheriff did nothing more for the moment, and when the canon of Turham tried to extract a second rent, there was such an outcry that the sheriff told him to desist. The sheriff again decided—or decided to decide—that Robin’s folk were merely the latest pack of the usual riffraff, perhaps a little cleverer than most, but nothing more. He could lose occasional rents; and it was the risk taken when a civilized Norman tries to administer the barbarous Saxons. The
failure of his first skirmish was disheartening but not serious. He did, however, raise the price on Robin’s head.

  “We do not want the sheriff to come to believe that all mischief in all of Nottinghamshire is of our doing,” Robin said severely to his people, who showed some tendency to be flattered by their new reputation. One or two of the men who had girlfriends in town shifted uncomfortably; they had told their Sues and Nancys nothing—or nothing they remembered; and they guiltily remembered one or two more glasses of ale than were perhaps wise—but they had been glad to listen to the tales the women told, and to bring them back to Sherwood. And it was possible they had retold them with a little too much enthusiasm.

  “In the first place it is not true,” Robin went on; “and in the second we do not need the sheriff declaring a private feud on us. Let us attempt to look like the common sort of outlaw, that the sheriff may be permitted to believe us so.”

  And accordingly the next wealthy travellers waylaid in Sherwood were some London friends of the sheriff’s, nothing to do with local rents and Saxon farmers; and these lords and ladies from the distant city were simply relieved of their jewels and money. When they complained of this outrage to the sheriff, he was so pleased by the ordinariness of the robbery that his reaction was almost perfunctory, and his friends were offended. When they returned to London they took a very long way around to avoid all forests—no mean feat in the heart of England.