The Outlaws of Sherwood

by Robin McKinley

  “I would also ask,” said Friar Tuck, “since you remind me, that you endeavour not to be followed when you bring me the happy couple.”

  “I would not be here to ask favours of you, Friar Tuck, were we not able to avoid being followed,” said Robin sharply; but the friar merely smiled.

  “You comfort me,” he said.

  “Then we will be on our way,” said Robin, and jumped up, suddenly angry that he had enjoyed the friar’s food, and had lain on the greensward drinking the friar’s cider. He set the near-empty jug down with a thump.

  The friar and the others rose more slowly, though Much’s face was still unfriendly, and Marian looked sardonic. “As you have a long walk—I guess—before you, I will not press you to stay,” said the friar, “though there is little cider left to tempt you besides. But go not away in anger, Robin Hood; I am perhaps more of a coward than your other folk; and if this is true, then you should be glad to elude the crisis that could force me to take permanent refuge with you. And for the rest, if you have no doubts about what you do, then you are less of a man than I think you.”

  “Cleverly phrased,” said Robin.

  The friar looked at him. “Perhaps you should come again, when you are at leisure, and we will discuss it further.”

  “So long as I am not followed.”

  “My visitors, when there are any, are a contradictory assemblage; I draw the line only at a guest leading a bloody-visaged Norman to my very door-step. But yes, I should say you should come to me unpursued by those who seek the price on your head, because I am an old man and lazy as well as a coward, and I will not see the trap till it springs shut around you. And it would curtail our conversation as well.” He paused. “Truce?”

  “Truce,” answered Robin. “It is perhaps chancy for my immortal soul to be in conflict with a churchman.”

  The friar laughed. “It is. Believe it.”

  “We believe it that thus you have lived to such an age and girth,” said Will; and so they parted on good terms. As they passed through the oaken gateway, Robin paused and looked back. The friar was looking after them; one dog had its head raised and was looking too, but the others lay flat and motionless, like mossy brown stones cast surprisingly far from the stream that ran at the foot of the knoll. “I will send you a man named Jocelin,” called Robin. “He was once a carpenter, and he frets, sometimes, at living in trees. He will weep for joy over your cottage.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  Heretofore the Sherwood outlaws’ battles had been small skirmishes, and fought mostly from the rear—and, as Marian had said, with surprisingly little bloodshed. Over the recent weeks they had developed rather a flair for detaining the heavy purses of certain people unwary enough to wander little-guarded near the forest of Sherwood. “Once I thought it was a crime that news travelled so badly through England,” said Much; “now I bless the Norman carelessness that cannot be bothered to warn its own folk. I will grow to love the race after all.”

  But the assault on the Baron St Clair was a different thing. Never before had Robin’s folk gone out seeking trouble on the trouble’s own home ground; nor on such a scale. One of the reasons they had been able thus far to perform their purse-cutting so neatly was that they were careful to take on only the smaller, softer, and more foolish varieties of wealth. Roger of St Clair was none of these reassuring things.

  “The decision’s been made,” said Much.

  “I am well aware of that,” said Robin. He added broodingly: “I could almost wish that Little John’s scouting had been less successful. I still do not understand why a man like St Clair is not hiring a cathedral, and filling it with a hundred guests; it feels almost too good to be true that he prefers to skulk off to a small chapel in our forest, where we can so readily get at him.”

  “You do not know him,” said Little John. “For this suits him exactly, to own the chapel as he owns his estate—as he thinks he is about to own his wife. In a cathedral there might be one or two folk looking at the cathedral instead of at the gripping fist of St Clair.”

  “I believe you,” said Robin; “it merely seems to me odd. But we have too many uses for the money this adventure should bring us to ignore the opportunity.”

  “You mean that the adventure will bring us,” said Will Scarlet.

  “Money!” cried Much. “What about reuniting the young lovers?”

  “Young lovers be hanged—as we hope not to be,” replied Robin. “We shall at least find out if our hiding-places are as good as they must be; a test of fire. After that day’s work there will be Normans after us thick as witch-hunters after a poor old woman with a cast in one eye.”

  “I like not your picture of our doughtiness,” said Will. “I can see out both my eyes.”

  “Should we succeed,” said Much, “we’ll have coin enough to bring twice as many as we are through the hardest winter England has ever seen.”

  “Your grasp of the economics of weather is sadly feeble,” said Marian. “If it is that hard a winter, you will spend it in the cellars of Blackhill, and a tight fit it will be.”

  Much grinned at her. “Ah, but the wine we could afford to drink while we waited for spring!”

  There was a faint twang from where Alan had been playing his lute for a group of folk at a little distance. Alan-a-dale was still shy of the court, as he thought of them from his days of playing for lords: Robin and Much and Marian, Little John and Will Scarlet; but neither could he stay away from them far or long as the day he dreaded and prayed for came ever nearer. The result was that the “court” knew his music very well without having quite paid attention to it or having had it performed specially for them. His shyness was not soothed, either, by Robin’s general noise-ban; any occasion when his muse was particularly present, his muse being a creature who loved volume, was sure to result in a curt order from his new leader to be quiet. It was also not lost upon him that Little John was no music-lover and grew frozen-faced in his vicinity.

  But the relationship between Little John and Alan-a-dale was dubious at best. Little John had, finally, after low-spoken protest and some mulishness, agreed to arrange for a message to be delivered to the lady Marjorie.

  “She must know to keep her courage up!” cried Alan, looking like a rabbit shouting at a lion. “You would not be so cruel as to deny her some token!”

  “Wouldn’t I?” said Little John. “I wonder about this fair maid of yours, who has so little courage as to bend to others’ bidding so quickly, even to marrying a man she loathes.”

  “You do not know her!” Alan cried, cheeks crimson with fury. “She is all gentleness, all sweetness, all softness!”

  “I know the type,” murmured Marian, sotto voce, to Will. “She is going to find hauling her own water and mending her own stockings a fate past comprehension. And when her stockings wear out, and she has to wear coarse wool next to her skin, she will have blisters, and then she will weep.”

  “She will have been weeping right along,” said Will, “from her first glimpse of Greentree.”

  “—and she believes her first loyalty is to her father, which is just as it should be, not to—to—me, who only loves her,” finished Alan, and his beautiful voice broke on a sob. Little John, sitting on the lopped-off trunk of an old tree, was still only half a hand’s-width shorter than the standing Alan. He looked up under his dark straight brows at the pale boy trembling in his passion, and said nothing, but the set of his shoulders suggested that he was restraining himself. Alan put a long elegant hand over his face a moment, gave one last shudder, and took his hand down again; his eyes were suspiciously bright. “You will take a token to my lady,” he said fiercely.

  Robin, Marian, Much, and Will watched with great interest as Little John won the struggle with himself not to stand up and loom over Alan, who did not take being loomed over well. He bent down, instead, picked up a branch at his feet the width of an ordinary man’s forearm, perhaps the size of one of his wrists, and broke it in half. He looked musingly at
the ragged edges of the wood rings thus revealed, as if he would tell Alan and his lady’s fortune there. At last he said: “Very well, I will take your token.” He threw half the broken branch into the fire, where it crackled with sap; Alan half-turned and startled away, as if the fire were an enemy approaching him from behind. Little John added: “I will even try to deliver it.”

  Alan whirled back to Little John again, and opened his mouth twice or thrice, but nothing came out. At last he seized his lute round from its strap across his back, and clutched it to his breast as if it were the token he wished given to his lady; or as if it were the lady herself and, having her, he need not bear Little John any longer. His breast heaving and his knuckles white against the frets of his instrument, he stalked off; they could hear him crashing through the undergrowth for several minutes. Robin sighed.

  “He is making no more noise than a wounded boar,” said Marian. “Don’t distress yourself.”

  “I hope he takes care of that lute,” said Will. “It’s a fine one, and ’twould be a waste to use it for kindling.”

  “You push him hard,” said Robin to Little John.

  “Would you risk this adventure—and our lives—on a silly boy’s love-struck whim?” said Little John. “The girl will live with the waiting. If she’s anything like her lover, she dreams of him every night and, dreaming, every night he rescues her. Upon waking she is sure that it is true.”

  “What a lot you know about the dreams of romance,” said Will.

  Little John gave him an inscrutable look and went on: “She does not need the doubtful proof of any token. But I will try, and she will get it if I can make it so. But I cannot say I like it.”

  On the evening air came the muffled whine and ting of long running chords played with ill-suppressed fury.

  “If he were to stay with us, he would have to learn to be pressed hard,” said Robin; “I do not understand why he thinks he would prefer such a life. I hope we may find some more suitable place for the two of them—soon, before, as you say, Marian, his lady wears too many holes in her stockings. I must acknowledge that the boy does his work and does not complain; and I have not spared his musician’s hands.”

  “It has happened that a lady could surprise you,” said Marian to the fire.

  Robin smiled faintly. “Try to deliver the token as you can, my friend, but take no more risk than you wish or deem wise.”

  “That I can promise,” said Little John.

  “And meanwhile, he must stop that appalling noise,” said Robin, and got to his feet.

  For a token, Alan-a-dale produced a bit of ribbon which, he said, the lady had once given him, and it broke his heart to give it up. (“Good,” said Little John. “Let us forget the whole matter.”) The token was handed over to a man, who gave it to a maid, who, heart fluttering in excitement, gave it to the lady; and then the sending was reversed, and a little silk purse was given to the maid to give to the man, who gave it to Little John, who tucked it away with a snort. But when the purse was laid in the surprised hand of Alan-a-dale, a smile so sunny and brilliant broke out on his face that those who had grown used to him in the last ten days looked at him in amazement and did not recognise him.

  So the plan was laid, and the players appointed, each to a part; and Alan grew frantic—and absent-minded—with hope and fear. On the day before Roger of St Clair’s wedding day, Alan contrived to free a rabbit from one of Much’s snares instead of killing it, and the usually good-natured Much lost his temper. Food was always the first thing on all the outlaws’ minds, and an extra rabbit in the stew would have been welcome the night before so hazardous an enterprise. But nothing could discomfit Alan now; he looked hazily at Much, pulled the little silken purse from a pocket (near his heart), kissed it, and walked away smiling.

  “I shall set him digging a privy vault ditch long enough for all of Nottingham town,” said Much. “He can dig till he has no skin left on his hands, and cannot play his wretched lute.”

  “Tie him up and leave him in a cave, more like,” said Will. “A pity it is we need him for the day.”

  “Brides have been married by proxy ere this,” said Much. “And brainless boys too.”

  Robin laughed. “Now that he would not forgive us—and I think I cannot blame him for that. We will carry him tomorrow fettered and gagged, if it seems necessary.”

  “And I shall jerk the rope,” said Much.

  Little John and his companions left before dawn, to lie in wait near the manor house till the bride party would leave; and to those left behind, the air became frangible with tension, and struck at the eyes and in the breast like splinters of glass. There were several hours to wait till it was their turn to make their way to the chapel in the forest. Even the sound of beeswax smoothed on a bowstring was troubling; and when the string slipped away from its handler and snapped against the bow, everyone jumped.

  “This won’t do,” said Robin. “We shall set out at once.”

  “We might go the long way round,” suggested Will, “and wear the fidgets out, as with a fractious horse.”

  Robin shook his head. “We shall have need of all our edge to face down our Normans; for I think St Clair will not yield quietly.”

  “Quietly?” said Will, who had jumped the farthest when the string cracked. “I should hope not.”

  The ones that were to go picked up their bows and staves and knives, and settled their boots and belts and tunics, and then all melted discreetly into the undergrowth. There were very few left behind; most of them were already departed on other errands, watch-standing and message-bearing. Greentree became merely a quiet glen deep in Sherwood, and birds sang undisturbed in the branches at its edge, and the sunlight fell in a small bright patch in its center.

  Those that followed Robin stepped, as always, on rock and moss and leaves, that would not take a footprint, and avoided soft low ground. Robin automatically looked for water to cross; his folk’s boots were stiff with wax and grease as a result of this habit of their leader, and there was little grumbling, if one or two sighs, as they waded upstream through one of the many rivulets that wandered all ways through Sherwood, as proof of insufficiently treated toes or ankles became apparent.

  They had a longish wait when they arrived at the chapel, but it was easier, lying on cool earth or outstretched on huge branches behind screens of oak leaves, and watching for what they knew would come, than waiting purposelessly in camp had been. No one fell asleep and only a few noses itched. Robin observed at his leisure that the baron’s chapel was smaller than Friar Tuck’s, but in better repair; there was not merely glass, but coloured glass with leading in all its windows, and the stone walls were shiny with fresh scrubbing.

  There was a brief distraction in the form of Friar Tuck’s arrival; it had been decided that the quicker the rearranged bridals took place, the better. “Not that I have any great doubt that if St Clair wishes to find out who performed the service he will be able to, whether or not he sees me. But I like the thought of doing it with dispatch, however disrespectful this may seem,” was Tuck’s reaction to the proposal.

  “But can the fat friar walk so far?” said Will.

  “Hmph,” said Tuck. “Just tell me when it is—I already know where—and attend to your own part of the business.”

  Alan-a-dale was put in the charge of Much, with a severe warning to behave himself. Fortunately he seemed tractable enough now that the day was finally here; his face was pale and he looked everywhere around him very anxiously, his eyes opened so wide that the rest of his features seemed pinched. “I hope she will have the strength,” he murmured at intervals, whether or not there was anyone to hear—or to pay heed. Robin’s and Will’s eyes met sardonically once after this comment, each wondering if some of the young lover’s apprehension might be for himself.

  Will heard the approach first, but as he turned his head to attract Robin’s attention, Robin’s own head turned and his eye brightened: there was the faint but unmistakable sound of a party
of horsemen who did not care for the noise they made, or to what distance it might be audible. Thus it was still some little time before any of Robin’s party could see anything. Soon it was apparent that the approaching parade was a celebratory one; someone was singing a merry song, and the horses’ harness jingled with the sort of trappings left off more sober processions.

  Even to eyes peering through leaves the bride was readily detectable among the other riders. She sat upon a white horse with flowers in its mane and tail, and she wore a long bright gown suitable for a noblewoman on her wedding day. She did not truly ride, for her horse was led, its bridle in the hand of a man in the dark plain garb of St Clair’s men at arms. But she did not have the demeanor of a prisoner so much as of one so frail as to need protection from most of life, even the direction of one’s own horse. (Robin thought of Marian, and wondered where she was. Curled up in a window embrasure somewhere in Black-hill, perhaps, staring out over Sherwood, and thinking of the adventure she was not a part of. There had never been any question of her accompanying them—to Robin’s profound relief. She knew as well as anyone that she could not risk the ill chance of St Clair’s recognising her. But, perversely, Robin missed her presence at his side; he would have liked to hear her breathe through her nose when the bride came into sight.) The bride’s hands were delicately crossed before her on the pommel, and she swayed lightly, like a flower, to the horse’s slow pace. Her head was a little tipped down, and her shoulders a little bowed: not as one in fear or sorrow, but as one content to wait on events.

  They rode to the door of the chapel, and the priest was helped down from his pony and went bustling into the small building, with two clerkly figures carrying bundles hurrying after him. There was a general hubbub of dismounting, and then the guardsmen sorted themselves out into a double row, as if their only purpose were to honour their master’s wealth and pride by their numbers; and they stood on either side of the chapel door as the lady’s horse was led up. There was a pause; it seemed to be expected that the baron would wish himself to help his bride dismount; that on his arm only she should depend this day. But a little gesture of his gloved and ringed hand changed this; and two guardsmen sprang forward, one to hold the lady’s stirrup, and the other to offer her his hand.