The Outlaws of Sherwood

by Robin McKinley

  “He was good sport,” said Little John. “Watching Cecil’s face as he gagged him was best of all. I had forgotten what it is like to have just knocked one’s first Norman off his horse.”

  “Do you know I have still not met your young protégé?” said Will. “My curiosity grows sharp. Is it not strange that I have never seen him?”

  Robin shrugged. “There are too many people in this camp,” he said.

  “There speaks the man who worries about keeping us all fed,” said Little John.

  “Especially you,” said Much.

  “You eat more than I do to keep that mouth of yours going,” said Little John. “Cecil ducked meeting Marian too. Robin and I thought he knew her in his old life. Maybe he knew you too, Will.”

  Will frowned. “So? We are all outlaws together now. Why should we not meet?”

  “You shall,” said Robin. “Have patience with the boy.”

  “You only want someone to talk linen shirts and lace to since Alan and Marjorie are too high-minded to look back on what they lost,” said Much. “I don’t blame Cecil for avoiding you.”

  Robin sent everyone else into hiding before those who were to go to the meeting at Sir Richard’s Mapperley set out. “There is nothing to tell me that we’ve been found or that we’ll be successfully followed, but we are about to twist the sheriff’s tail for him very hard, and he will try his best to turn and bite us for it. The energy of sheer rage can do remarkable things sometimes.” And who should know better than I? he thought.

  Everyone carried a longbow, and most carried a staff besides. The bow Will carried could put an arrow through an oak door, did he draw it strongly, as could Little John’s, though the latter preferred to rely on his staff. “I am glad I am not a sheriff’s man today,” said Robin, looking them all over before they set out. Most of their tunics were patched; many had sewn leather pads over their shoulders where their quivers chafed, and there were dark shiny strips down their dark-green breasts where the straps hung. Their leggings were ragged and not all their boots had begun life paired; but their faces were eager and their eyes bright.

  The last of the Greentree folk shouldered their small personal bundles and bulkier bits of common camp gear and disappeared into the trees. “What an unholy racket,” said Robin, wincing.

  “Harald knows better how to make boots than to walk in them,” said Little John.

  “Now that is Matilda,” said Will, listening; “she has just been slapped in the face by a branch and she wants to chop the tree down.”

  It was a beautiful day; the birds sang behind the leaves, the bits of sky visible overhead were blue, and the little breeze was kindly. Robin and Little John carried the two heavy purses that were to buy Sir Richard’s freedom; Robin felt that the Norman gold was balefully dragging at his belt and trying to bruise his hip with every step. It doesn’t like being put to a good use, he thought, and smiled; and saw, out of the corner of his eye, Little John shifting the purse at his belt to hang more comfortably.

  They came to the edge of Sherwood when the sun was high. They stood in the last row of trees, blinking out at the bright meadow that lay nearest them, below the farms around Sir Richard’s moated strong-hold. Robin looked around at his folk and said cheerfully, “Remember that we are an army of the faithful, come to rout the heathen enemy, and step out boldly.” He was the first into the sunlight, Little John close at his side; the others shook their fears from them, and followed, trying not to huddle. Their lives had become too much like the king’s deer they hunted, and sunlight and empty spaces were strange to them.

  “The sun never shines like this on the Nottingham market,” murmured Rafe with half a laugh to Simon, who, looking around wide-eyed himself, wryly agreed. Simon wished he were a fox himself, thought longingly of the cool familiar reaches of Sherwood, and sighed.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Marian sat bent over her embroidery, that she need meet no one’s eyes; and she kept her fingers moving, that no one watching her might guess she was troubled by anything but following the pattern of her stitchery. Her fingers knew as much as they needed to about pushing a needle through the heavy stuff that would hang on a wall some day; they did not need any further guidance from her brain. Tidily they followed as her eyes directed them; around the curve of the red deer’s flank.

  She had never quite decided if she approved of her skill with the needle or not; she knew she enjoyed designing clothing, and sketching tapestry scenes she would later fill in with coloured thread, but the rather idiotic patience it took to do the needle-work itself scared her a bit. Mostly she didn’t think about it; what it had provided her with for many years was time and peace to follow her own thoughts undisturbed; what was frightening was how much time, especially over recent months, she needed for those private thoughts.

  The other women chattered on; but Aethelreda, the only one of them who knew the story behind Marian’s lengthening silences, deflected most of the attention from her cousin.

  Robin and Little John and Will—would Will dare go?—went to Mapperley tomorrow—blithely, Marian thought. Without any fear that Sir Richard’s real danger might be a trap for the man known so far and wide as Robin Hood had come to be; known as the man who daily made a fool of the sheriff of Nottingham for every day the sheriff failed to catch and hang him. The Baron of St Clair was quite specific on this point. Sir Richard was about to lose everything, and the source of this had naught to do with her Robin; but she thought that the noise made about Sir Richard’s imminent downfall was a little too loud, even for a man of Sir Richard’s rank, unless someone wished very badly that the news penetrate far and deep—even into the fastnesses of Sherwood where the sheriff’s men did not go. The. recent over-activity of the foresters was a blind to the purpose.…

  No; she did Robin an injustice; he knew he put himself in danger. But the sheriff was growing shrewd; what direct threats and the dubious strength of his own men could not accomplish, perhaps tangential threats against someone who could not protect himself—and to whom Robin had reason to feel sympathetic—might accomplish instead. Would even the sheriff be quite so vindictive, without such added purpose, against Sir Richard in his troubles? He risked certain ill feeling among Sir Richard’s powerful friends—Sir Richard was known to be on friendly acquaintance with the Lionheart himself—by stripping him. The sheriff was no fool. But his other goal had come to obsess him.

  But what to do? Any mere emissary sent on Sir Richard’s behalf would be suspect; and worse than suspect, once those purses were upended and some of their contents recognised—very likely by one or two of the sheriff’s friends brought for the spectacle, the previous owners of this or that jewel. So vast a sum as Robin had had to put together left the outlaws little leeway to be careful with.

  Beatrix appeared at the door of the chamber. “Marian, Nigel is come. Again,” she added, with the smile Marian had intensely disliked for years. “He and your father”—again the smile—“specially request you join them.”

  Silence fell while Constance and Hawise and Euphemia exchanged glances. Marian composedly began to fold up her work; she had learnt composure since Beatrix came to live under her father’s roof, Beatrix with her sharp eyes and sharper tongue. “Aethelreda, if you will accompany me?”

  “Of course, my lady.” Much of Marian’s composure had come of watching Reda; she had not understood, when she was younger and gayer. Perhaps she should be grateful to Beatrix for forcing the lesson on her before Robin shot Tom Moody, and she found herself with a terrible secret to hide.

  The two of them went down the cold stone stairs and into the great hall, where a fire always burned, the table where her father always sat drawn near. From the far side of the big room the fire was no warmer than the tapestry of a fire might be, and even in high summer the room was cool with a damp, insinuating coolness that was unpleasant: unpleasantly cold right up until the rare moment in August that it became clammily too warm.

  Her father sat in the sa
me chair in the same place summer and winter; she preferred her smaller private rooms unless there was some occasion or company that needed entertaining in a way too grand or too proper than the women’s rooms permitted.

  Her father, she thought, had no cause for dreaming of being lord of a castle—a castle whose real Great Hall could contain their entire house. As he grew older he grew more timid, less able even to give the house servants the orders to lay a table or see to a neglected room—orders that had been his wife’s, that should have been Marian’s, that devolved more often on Aethelreda and Cerdic, their seneschal. But her father did not see to his estate either—such as it was—nor to its books; that, too, came to Marian, and to Reda and Cerdic. The master sat, day after day, by the fire in the hall of his cold stone house, and dreamed.

  But he did not, thought his daughter bitterly, dream any longer of being lord of a castle, but, instead, of his daughter’s being the lady of one, and of a greater fire in a greater hall that he would sit beside in his declining years, with no burden upon him even to pretend to see to anything. His son-in-law would take care of business, and his daughter would at last become the daughter she should be—bustling and house-bound, and probably fat, Marian thought, with children clinging to her skirts.

  She looked at him now, and, hearing their footsteps, he looked up and their eyes briefly met; he did not often meet her eyes. The hope in his was as clear as that in a hound’s who sees his master belting on his hunting gear.

  Would it have been so bad to be plump and to have children and to gossip about small things while she counted linens? It was too late now; it was too late since her mother had married her father, over twenty years ago, her mother who was the closest friend of the young woman who chose to be cast off by her family rather than give up the man she loved, a young forester named Robert. Marian’s mother had been her only loyal friend over the first hard years, and had brought her baby daughter to play with her friend’s baby son. Because of his mother, the son had learnt to read, where the father could barely sign his name; because of her mother’s friendship with the wife of a forester, Marian had begged and whined for a bow when Robin had been given his first bow. Robin had been very quick at his letters, quicker than Marian; but Marian had been quicker with her bow.

  It was unfair to blame Nigel on her father. If it had not been Nigel, it would have been someone else, and it could have been someone worse. Except that someone worse would have been easier to turn away again, and again, as she turned Nigel away. He rose to greet her now with a cautious smile on his face; she thought his knees stayed slightly bent so that he could drop back in his chair at once and arrange his face as if he had not noticed her arrival, in case she proved to be in one of her “moods.” A worse man would have let himself be turned away; a worse man or a better.

  She was never sure if this bit of defensive behaviour on his part made her want to laugh, or run him through with the sheep-spit hanging from its hook by the fireplace. She paused a moment, halfway across the room, and surveyed him. Encouraged by this, his knees straightened the rest of the way, and his smile settled in upon his mouth. “Good morrow, sir,” she said.

  “Good morrow, my lady; Aethelreda.” He was tall when he unbent to his full length; taller than Robin, if not so tall as Will or Little John. It was a joke, a bad joke, to think of any of the folk of Sherwood when she looked at Nigel; he was short-sighted from peering long hours at his accounts, and he went everywhere in a litter or carriage. He did not care for walking or for riding horseback; either was likely to stain his clothing with sweat, and he was fastidious about such things. His hands were flabby, though there was a callus on the second finger of his right hand, from the pressure of a pen.

  Aethelreda murmured something polite, and turned to move a chair closer to the fire as Rawl, the master’s elderly body servant, brought one for Marian. Marian quelled a shiver; it was colder here than in the heaviest downpour in Sherwood; some internal voice told her that this had something to do with the company. When her father’s hall was full of people on the feast days it was warm enough—then the air turned steamy, and caught at her throat, and the hall seemed too small, and again she wished for Sherwood, and the dappled roof of leaves that never weighed upon her. She pulled her scarf closer around her and thought, I would rather live in a hut in the woods; a hut like the one of my first memories, with a clean-swept dirt floor, and a brown-eyed boy watching me from behind his mother’s skirts as I watched him from behind mine. Overlapping that thought was another one: And how many times a day do I tell myself so?

  I wonder if Robin would simply send me away—as he has sent other awkward or unsuitable folk away—if I declared that I was staying? I wonder if he would like me to try?

  And then, very quietly, the thought that stopped her from trying: I wonder if he loves me as I love him?

  She found herself staring at Nigel, whose smile was beginning to falter. She sat down. “Fetch wine,” said her father, and Rawl hobbled quickly off. He took his duties as first squire very seriously; he didn’t let it bother him that there was no second squire, or that he had been first squire to a man who never left his fireside for thirty years and more. Marian tightened her composure with her scarf and said, smiling, to Nigel: “Forgive me my absent-mindedness, sir. I am preoccupied with the troubles of a friend.”

  Nigel’s face smoothed out. Now he was preparing to be sympathetic. Marian kept her smile in place by force of will. “A friend?” he said. “Do you know Sir Richard of the Lea?”

  The melancholy lines that appeared on Nigel’s face at Sir Richard’s name looked honest enough. “Indeed yes. A good and worthy man. It is a thousand sorrows that he should have been cursed with such a son.” Marian felt Aethelreda’s quietness freeze into stone at her elbow, and she put a hand on her friend’s arm, but casually, that the men might not think anything of the gesture. “A thousand thousand yet, when you think of one fewer noble holding falling from the good hands of the Saxons and into the clutching ones of the Normans.”

  “Now, Marian,” said her father nervously; but the half-Norman Nigel only smiled again. Marian knew this time she definitely wanted to run him through with the sheep-spit. “It is my earnest belief,” he said sonorously, “that Saxons and Normans will learn to live together in peace in this beautiful land. Perhaps even within our lifetime we shall see it.” He looked at her through his eyelashes.

  That, thought Marian, is what Reda calls his covetous look, and she’s right. Her own eyes wandered to the fireplace, and Reda perhaps felt the hand on her arm close before Marian drew it away, for she turned to her lady and under pretext of arranging her scarf for her—which Marian kept fidgeting with—caught her eye and smiled her slow smile. The halo of her flaxen hair blocked the sheep-spit from Marian’s gaze as she bent toward her. Marian sighed; Reda knew her very well.

  “There are better-looking, better-dowered girls within a day’s ride,” Marian had said once, furiously, to Reda—Marian did not waste her composure when they were alone. “Why me?”

  “Maybe he likes a challenge,” Reda replied. “You and your father’s estates.”

  Marian snorted with laughter—a muffled snort, that Beatrix might not hear from the next room and come to inquire the cause; Beatrix felt that laughter was most often the expression of some vice that needed to be put down or tied up or locked away. Reda rarely laughed; that time too she had only smiled her slow smile.

  It was hard to tell about Reda sometimes; her composure went to the bone. She rarely spoke—and only to Marian—of her own youth, when she had watched her father die of a wasting disease in a year and a half, and her mother die of grief in six months; and a wastrel younger brother go through the family estate at such a pace as to have come to the end just as he fell off his horse and broke his neck. Reda had bought her composure dear; and she was less than three years older than Marian. She was pretty and, as Marian had cause to know, both practical and kind—and able to keep her peace. She might have married
, had any man had the sense to see past her dowerlessness. None had, and Marian had convinced her father to send for her; she was but a second cousin once removed after all, and had no nearer family left her.

  Rawl returned with wine and cups and then retired only far enough to hover at her father’s elbow, almost quivering with eagerness to be sent on another errand. They were lucky to have Rawl and Cerdic and Aethelreda; very lucky.

  “Rawl,” she said, and his spaniel’s eyes shifted at once to her face. She was not the master, but she would do; any errand was better than none. “Would you ask Cerdic to join us here?”

  “I asked,” she said, when Rawl had disappeared, “for any news of Sir Richard; Cerdic has cousins there.”

  Nigel’s face had rearranged itself once again into its melancholy lines, but this insistence upon the topic of another man’s ills (another unmarried man, Marian thought suddenly, with amusement; Sir Richard was a widower of long standing) obviously did not suit him. Perhaps any tale of a landed man’s loss of land was upsetting to a land-proud account-clutching man like Nigel. She had a pang as she thought this, for would she not be devastated if her father lost his lands—and he could be foolish enough to do so without Cerdic’s sharp-eyed loyalty—this home that she had grown up in, however much she had grown to dislike it of late? And, she thought, something that cuts even closer to the heart: would I like it if all Robin’s conversation with me began tending to the sad plight of a good-looking widow.…

  “If there were only something his friends and well-wishers could do,” said Nigel.

  “As you mention it,” Marian said quickly, relieved that he should have fallen so neatly where she wished him to fall, and fearful that he might back out again if she let him go on talking, “I had thought of riding there tomorrow to offer him what comfort a friend might”—Nigel’s eyes flickered—“and to tell him that if he is in need of bed and board for the immediate future we would be honoured to be of use to him.”