The Outlaws of Sherwood (41 page)

Besides, thought Cecily, the sheriff standing on a box would barely come up to the Lionheart's collarbone. It's hard to look too grand when you're led by someone who looks like a pudding with legs.

Robin was thinking dazedly, What comes to us now? Will the king listen to both sides of our story? He meets kindly with Sir Richard—surely that is a good sign for us. Yet does our host not blanch as he sees the king cross his threshold? The sheriff has many friends, if only because he is the sheriff. If it is not accident—it cannot be accident?—then it is the sheriff's message that has brought the king, and not Sir Richard's; there cannot have been time for Sir Richard's … and so he flinches.

A little wryly the thought continued: I was wrong when I said that I should leave here and let my friends stay in comparative safety in my absence; it is they who should have left and I stayed.… Well. Come what may. We make our stand here, whatever stand we can, where we are found.

The bustle and clatter of the two great parties passed from the outer bailey to the inner; most of Sir Richard's people followed, some to work and some to gape. The outlaws trailed slowly after, half-fascinated and half-longing for the old simple days of sleeping uncomfortably in trees and fearing discovery. The king and the sheriff and all the grander members of the three households disappeared behind doors soon enough; and the other folk began reluctantly to take themselves off to their proper occupations.

The outlaws were left, feeling rather forlorn, standing in a corner of the inner bailey. Their Sherwood instincts meant they clung automatically to available corners. Marian's sedan-chair was trailing them at a prudent distance; Marian herself was riding on the crossed forearms of Rafe and Robin. She slid down to stand, weakly, and put her arm around Robin's waist. The sedan-chair crept a little closer. The bearers were as in awe of Marian's tongue as they were of anything to do with Robin Hood; and while they felt that Marian could do no wrong, sometimes the right that she did to them hurt.

She looked around at her companions, and an ironic smile appeared on her face. “A sorry lot of gawps we look, to be sure,” she said.

Robin closed his still-hanging jaw with a snap, and straightened his back. “We'd best make ourselves tidy,” he said; “we'll be called up to account for ourselves some time—dear Fate,” he said with some violence. “I only hope it is tonight; I cannot bear the waiting.”

Marian said thoughtfully, looking after the vanished company, “I would guess it will be. The Lionheart is not known to be a patient man himself.”

“It would be excellent tonic for our self-importance if it should happen that we have nothing to do with his visit,” said Will.

Robin grinned. “I should be very glad—but I doubt we could have such luck. Our luck was spent in Sherwood, some days past.”

“Nor, I suspect, will we have the luck to find any water-bearers not totally occupied with the king's party,” said Much wistfully. “I've grown quite attached to hot water to wash in.”

“I'm hungry,” said Cecily.

“So am I,” said Marian, sounding surprised. “How if I do my failing-invalid performance and have food sent up to my chamber for all of us? There should be some quite good crumbs that fall from the platters tonight, if I can find someone to brave the tumult that must be bursting out in the kitchens just now.” She smiled at her chair-bearers, who smiled adoringly back.

“I think you may discover willing sacrifices,” said Robin; “and I'll see what I can find out about hot water.”

“I do love to be waited on hand and foot,” said Much. “This business of being a cripple has its advantages, Marian; you should learn to appreciate them more.”

“And then I'll drown you in it,” said Robin.

It was not a merry meal, though Marian was right about the crumbs, and Robin about the staunchness of her chair-bearers. Everyone started whenever there was a noise outside the big outer chamber of the women's apartment, where they had gathered; and there were a good many such noises, mostly scampering, often accompanied by anguished whispers. “I'm expecting someone to reclaim about half the amazing number of feather mattresses they gave us when we arrived,” said Marian; but no one did.

Occasionally the din from the dining hall rose to a level they could hear, if dimly, from halfway round the other side of the keep. But mainly the disturbances were from the constant to-ings and fro-ings of the extra squires and body-servants either attached to the guests, or hastily assigned to them. The anguish level was audibly higher in the latter.

Cecily found she was not so hungry as she thought; or that her stomach had shrunk in the meanwhile from increasing dread. She—like Robin, though she did not know it—did not believe the king would be sympathetic to her and her friends. She knew Much's still uncrippled idealism—and her brother's; and she knew that Robin hoped, at least aloud, that the king might listen to the truth, instead of to the sheriff. She did not know what Marian thought; Marian could use her lady's training in ways that Cecily had never been able to learn, and one of her more significant skills was of turning any conversation away from a subject she did not wish to discuss. Cecily wondered what Little John thought.

Perhaps it was because she had known too many lords that Cecily could not believe in a king; it was not as though he were Saxon himself, blond hair or no. She'd heard—from the baron who was to have been her husband—that he barely spoke English; French was his native language and the language of his court. She heard the baron's own hissing accents as she remembered. He had met the king and eaten at his table (so he said). How could she have any confidence in such a king?

She got up abruptly. A dinner in consequence of a king's visit would go on for hours, however unprepared poor Sir Richard was to entertain such a guest. The Lionheart would have brought enough of his own minstrels and his own sweetmeats to turn any meal into a feast; so much generosity—to a nobleman—might be expected of him. She did not think the outlaws would hear their fate till tomorrow at earliest; she also knew how feasts could go on for days, particularly when there were politics being passed with the plates. She wondered how Sir Richard had dealt with the problem of seating the sheriff of Nottingham and his party; and for all her own troubled future, she did not envy the master of Mapperley.

She went to the door that led into the hall. Darkness had fallen, but torches had not yet been lit here, with all the attention centered upon the king. The first royal page-boy who stubbed a toe would set up a howl that would get them lit, but she was not a royal page-boy and had to grope her way—rubbing along the corridor with her right side, in fear of bumping her left—to the stairs that led to the battlements Robin had been pacing a few hours earlier.

She was staring so fiercely at nothing that she did not hear him coming up behind her till he spoke; and with the drag of his wounded leg he was not so quiet as he used to be.

“I hope you see no one else coming to join the party.”

For a moment she thought the voice was only in her own head, the product of the concentration of her thoughts; then she turned and saw Little John's outline against the evening sky. He limped forward and leaned on the wall with a sigh. “A glorious company we shall look,” he said, “shambling on half-healed legs, or cradling some other wound. How is your shoulder?”

Cecily tipped her head in a half-shake, which was what she had developed over the last week to take the place of a shrug. “It is, as you say, half-healed, which is an improvement.” One keeps searching for ease, she did not say, and not finding it, till the memories of no-pain seem only like daydreams. “Think you then that the king will call for us?”

“I do not think of it one way or another. Robin and Marian—and Much and Tuck and your brother—think so.”

“Then you do not think so.”

“You are too sharp for me.”

She could not see his face. “It comes of having sat at my father's table too long and listened and not been allowed to speak,” she said.

“Whereupon you learnt to guess what was not said by the shadow it cast,” Little John said softly. “You are right. But Much and Will talk enough for several men, and I have been most often allowed silence when I wished it.”

Cecily said, remembering, “I knew that Will was thinking of going away when he stopped protesting. My father thought that he had given up, and was pleased. He is a stupid man.”

Little John said, “You do not think Robin is a stupid man.”

She almost laughed. “No. He may be the most terrifying person I have met—because you believe what he tells you even when you know better. And yet I think he would quench that fire in him if he could—perhaps because it throws such dark shadows around the things he does not say. Much isn't stupid either—or even my brother. But I think they are a little—flame-blinded. And I think the Lionheart will not care for a fire that does not burn to the king's laws.”

“Aye,” said Little John.

There was a silence, till Cecily said curiously: “Why do you follow him? Robin, I mean. I …” She stopped.

“You,” said Little John. “Why do you follow?”

I asked first, she thought, and sighed, and shifted her shoulder. “I follow because I had so few choices. I thought of them all while I was locked up in my room, before I ran away. I should have been thrown out of a convent, if I didn't go over the wall first; I was too wild—wild with the life I'd led, or not led. I don't sing or anything, and I'm not pretty, or—or tractable. And … after I'd followed Will …

“But I don't think I ever believed this life would last. I was hoping to wear myself out somehow, to resign myself finally to the convent—to have something to tell over to myself during long hours on my knees. My father would pay, even now, I think, what would be necessary for some sisterhood to take such a fallen creature as I am—hoping that singing Lauds in the middle of every night would keep me docile enough during the days not to get into any more trouble that would embarrass the family.” She paused. “And I've woken up every morning since I ran away hoping that I might have one more day of it—even these last days. I think I shall not go to bed tonight at all.”

She stopped, dismayed that she had let herself go on in such a way. While she was trying to compose an apology that would sound unpremeditated, Little John said, “You forget that I am the only other member of our band who has a price on his head. I killed one of the men who came to turn me off my land because I could not pay the Norman tax that was killing me.” A little breeze moved down the wall walk, whispering of ghosts and old promises. “I will not say that I did not know my own strength, for I knew it very well; it is the one thing I have always known. You cannot be as large as I am without knowing that everyone else is smaller. I could have hit him less hard, and I did not, and he died. So I, too, had a secret; one known in Sherwood, but one that I could have carried outside perhaps even less well than Cecil might have carried his.”

He moved his leg again as Cecily rearranged her elbow. “I too have awakened every morning praying that this life might go on a little longer. I believe in Robin, but I do not believe in what he believes in. I do not believe in the justice of kings. He does not truly believe in it either; but it is a shield against what you called a fire. And he does believe in justice.”

“Do you know him so well?” said Cecily.

“I was one of the first,” said Little John. “As there are but twelve of us at the end. I remember how he did not believe that what we were doing would last one more day. I would not want to be believed in the way the folk who came to him believed in him. Perhaps that is why I do not. Perhaps that is why he believes in justice.”

There was silence again; twilight was passing, and night crept close around them; and Cecily found herself thinking that perhaps—perhaps it would never be dawn again. She said, almost idly, “Why did you follow me up here?”

Little John said nothing for so long that she thought she had not asked the question aloud. But at last he said: “I would like to say that I decided when I saw you leave that I, too, wanted to breathe free air. Perhaps it is that I have never lived within the shadow of such walls before, but I find the weight of them almost stops my breath, and I long for the sound of trees, or at least the touch of wind on my face. I could say that, for it is true.” He stopped, musingly. She looked at him sidelong; despite the darkness, she could still see the line of his profile, and she already knew his face by heart, though till less than a fortnight before she had known him only bearded.

“It seems to me that one of two things may happen by the king's coming,” he said. “One of them is that I shall be hung by the neck till dead. I do not think the king will find that he needs to see us to pass that judgement.”

Cecily shut her thoughts off ferociously.

“If I am lucky I will be sent off to the Holy Land to kill Saracens till they kill me; which will not be long, for I am not much of a fighter. I am only large.” He paused again. “As it seems, then, that my future is like to be short, perhaps some things do not matter as they might, like the fact that you are daughter to a lord. I followed you up here tonight to tell you that I love you, for I would not be shamed by the courage of your words to me as you left Marian's bedside a few days ago at Tuck's chapel.”

Cecily, who had often felt that her love was rather a devilish thing, looking to unseat or upset her, burst out: “My courage! Dear God, you cannot love me if you say so! It is courage that keeps me silent, that I would not be a burden to you! Is it not pity you feel?”

“Never pity,” said Little John with such simplicity that she could not help but believe him. “But allow me some little time to understand why my best student drew me so; I have never been a boy-lover. I was not the one of us wearing a mask.”