The Outlaws of Sherwood (11 page)

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.

CHAPTER SEVEN

The little band of outlaws had stabilized by late spring—by the time of the Nottingham Fair, and the end of Robin's first year as a man with a price on his head. The folk that remained at last remained by choice—a combination of theirs and Robin's. And if those that wished to remain (as Robin thought sometimes, particularly late on a sleepless night) too often had more of Much's view of their life and prospects than his, he supposed it couldn't be helped.

Greentree itself was often nearly empty; there were too many watches to be stood now. There were look-outs at several, varying locations on the main roads through or near Sherwood, waiting for well-dressed travellers who peered so nervously into the shadows as to suggest they would be worth stopping; and other green-clad folk lay hidden in (occasionally, when they thought they could get away with it, behind) trees, to see who walked the more private ways that the outlaws walked. There were the two smaller outlying camps to be attended to, Growling Falls and Millward; and there were several tiny go-to-ground havens for the hard-pressed. And, most dangerous and exhausting, there was the running of the system of secret messages and messengers that provided for the folk who did not stay in Sherwood.

As the season progressed, Will's and Little John's moods lightened somewhat; Will no longer sought solitary errands, that his oppression of spirit might not oppress his friends. In this the real difference between the two men was apparent, for Little John had always preferred duties he could perform alone. And while everyone was sympathetic to Will's trouble (even those who thought privately that he was a little odd to be so distracted by the fate of a mere sister), only Robin guessed what the one other member of his band with a price on his head might be thinking. The other outlaws were a little in awe of Little John.

Marian had brought no more word of Sess's fate; but Robin still watched Will with an edge more of anxiety than he did Little John. Robin, in his dislike of philosophy, had a blind spot about some of his volunteers' reasons for volunteering; he knew only that the blind spot existed. Will had given up, or lost, more than anyone else in his company. And since some of Robin's blind spot was a guilty conscience about Marian, and as Marian and Will were friends, the conscience, or at least the uneasiness, tended to bleed over to stain Will too. It was all the worse that Will was a good friend to Robin; like Little John, Will Scarlet was one of the few of Greentree's members he could talk to without feeling as if
CHIEF
was branded on his forehead and his every word must matter.

And Marian gave him something further to worry about. “I fear that Will may take it into his head to attempt his sister's rescue; he has friends among us, you know, and could perhaps do it even if you did not like it,” she said. “There are those who would like the romance of it well.”

Robin had been thinking about the pleasant weight of her head upon his breast, and his arm around her shoulders. They were half-lying between two great roots of an enormous oak tree, and the earth was warm with the approach of summer despite the evening chill in the air. Overhead he could see a few stars through the scalloped leaves. It was not often that they slipped away from the cares of his people to be alone together, and Robin thought that this was just as well, since when he was alone with her his brain seemed to cloud over and … He shook himself gently, and sighed, and sat up, pulling his tunic down where it had rucked up during his quarrel with a few twigs and pebbles digging into his backbone.

Marian sat up as he did, but leaned against him, and turned her face to his, slid her fingers along his jaw, and kissed him. His brain clouded over in a rush, like a thunderhead obscuring the sun. Then he took his arms from around her, where he discovered they had put themselves, apparently of their own volition, and stood up.

There was a little silence, and Robin said, in a voice that did not sound like his own, “I am sorry for Will's trouble, but you are right that I would not like it if we tried to rescue her. I do not like it that any woman should be married against her will, but I think we would overreach and risk what little gain we have made—did we decide to concern ourselves about such as she, who has at least a roof over her head, and food to eat.”

Marian was silent so long that Robin stooped down beside her again. “Mari, I—”

She stopped his mouth with her fingers, as she did so often when the tone of his voice warned her what he would say. “Don't say it. I don't want to hear it again.”

He took her hand in both his, and so they sat for some little time. With his hands locked together he could not give in to the desire to stroke her hair, and her face was turned away from him. “I think I will go … home now,” she said, and her voice was thick with misery.

“Your father—”

“Robin, I am a woman grown. I need not stay with my father forever. And—”

But she said no more, and he dared not prompt her, and the silence stretched out between them till it was as impenetrable as the shadows around them. “I will try to talk sense to Will,” she said at last, with a little of her usual brisk manner. “For you. But if I were Will's sister, I would want to be rescued.” And she was gone into the forest.

A few days after Marian's warning, Robin was sitting on the ground near the camp at Growling Falls, making holes in the dirt with a stick, puzzling out plans for a new hiding-place with Little John. There were still great stretches of Sherwood where there was nowhere for Robin's folk to disappear when danger approached them too nearly. Now that they were putting themselves at greater risk by robbing the high road, such alternatives to disaster were terribly necessary; there had been a near miss for Harald and Gilbert just a week before. Little John had suggested that they begin to go underground. “Is not privy duty enough digging for you?” said Much. “But no, I daresay not, for your grandfather was a badger.”