The Outlaws of Sherwood (44 page)

“And have I choice, or reward?”

“I begin to think clemency more dangerous than I realised, for you will snap so at the bait I but half-heartedly set out. Perhaps outlaws cannot be broken to service any more than a rogue horse to saddle.” He watched Robin's face, and smiled. “I do not frighten you.”

To Marian he said: “This is your choice, my lady, and almost, if I were not your king, I would beg your pardon for it.” His eyes swung between her and Robin, whose hand lay on her shoulder; the Lionheart's eyes went between them almost irresolutely, if the Lionheart could be irresolute. “My lady, you may stay here, in England, and risk few swords but those of men's tongues, and be a powerful figure in your own land, a king's sheriff, with lackeys to do your bidding. Or …” Robin's fingers tightened, and Marian's hand reached up to press down over his. “Or you may risk as your lover risks; you may come to the southlands too, and bear the heat and the stench and the many kinds of death the war and the Saracens bring us—and risk another sword in your side, which you likely would not survive the second time. I have experience of near-mortal wounds, lady. You may lose your country—and I my new sheriff, which does not please me—and perhaps your life; or you may lose your lover. How will you choose?”

“You already know how I will choose,” said Marian faintly, “for we outlaws have proved, as you say, instructive. I will go where Robin goes, as you will let me.”

“And will Robin let you?” said the Lionheart, as if the question interested him.

Robin said slowly, “If this is my choice, then my choice is that I will no longer try to say her nay. It has taken me almost losing her to make me understand that I cannot. I hope not to lose her; I may at least not lose her to my own stubbornness.”

“Prettily said,” said the Lionheart. “I am almost moved to forgive you the loss of my new sheriff. And if the two of you together survive the king's stubbornness—unlike my advisors, I believe the Holy Land can be won—you will see he is not ungenerous.

“Sir Richard.”

Sir Richard looked up from his post by the door; he had still the slightly bewildered bearing of a servant who awaits a delayed summons. “I do not take you to my war; you earned your peace here now at my father's back, years ago; and you have already learnt my choice between the sheriff of Nottingham and the outlaws of Sherwood, and so I will force from you no price upon that score. I would keep you here besides, to be a strong friend to my new sheriff.

“I give the rest of you news that your host heard only a few hours ago; that I would leave to him in other circumstances, but now cannot. I brought him news that his son was killed under the walls of Palestine shortly before I was released from prison in Germany. It was a good death; a soldier's death.”

Sir Richard said nothing; among the outlaws there was the tiniest stir of air, a suppressed sigh, and the thought of all who had known him was the same: A good death to end a bad life.

“This means that Sir Richard's lands are without an heir; and I as king may award them as I see fit. I believe I will choose to declare Robin Hood as heir. I might wait—under other circumstances—to announce such a future to a soldier who might otherwise feel the need to fight the harder to gain the king's notice; but I think in this case I shall rely on this outlaw's honour to stand beside me even with such a prize already in his eye.

“The heir of a lord like Sir Richard might consider himself a suitor for the hand of the lady Marian. I believe there should be time to celebrate such a marriage before we set sail; as I have said, there will be some delay while we gather our new forces, and the money to furnish them for war.” He looked again at Robin and Marian, with that same glint of interest in his eye. “May I think that, with kingly insight, I have satisfied both your desires for reward?”

Robin said dryly, “Majesty, you may.”

Marian said, “But why?” All eyes turned to her; she stared at the king. “Why? Why do you do this? We are only twelve; and we are not—not an important twelve, in the legions of your subjects. None of us are proven soldiers—or anything else—except our thirteenth, who at least knows how to nurse the soldiers who fall. We are not anything. Anything a king with a war to win should find so—interesting.”

“Why,” said the Lionheart softly. “Why. Have I not mentioned the king's whim?

“I have been hearing tales of this fellow Robin Hood since before I set foot in England again; someone on the ship crossing the Channel had a story about him. There are many urgent matters that greet a king long absent upon his return to home and court—and duty. Most of them are not interesting. The tales of Robin Hood were very interesting. I am, I admit, a little disappointed that he does not wear seven-league boots and knock down walls by the sound of his voice—that latter talent would be very useful in Palestine—but I will, as kings and other mortals must, deal with what I can get. And any lone man who can, with little more than stubbornness and a few ragged friends, set so much of my aristocracy in a rage, is a man I wish to put to
my
purposes.

“Does this satisfy you as to my reasons? If it does not—I plan to keep all of you close to me. You seem to stick together, like stew in the bottom of a pot. You will have or, I am sure, make opportunity to ask me again. I do not wish to waste Robin Hood's obstinacy, you see. There are those who will feel that keeping such a notorious group together at my back is unwise of me—but I have won things in my life that I treasure ere now by unwisdom.

“And now we shall drink together one toast,” said the Lionheart. “To Sir Richard, and to his heir, and to his heir's bride; and to the new soldiers—and scribes, and vegetable-choppers—of the king.”

Sir Richard moved away from the wall he leaned on, and threw open the doors of a cabinet near at hand; within were a large carafe of wine and some goblets. “The wine is not worthy of a great occasion,” said Sir Richard; “but it is the best I can offer you.”

“Then it will do,” said the king. Sir Richard himself poured and served: the king first and then, with a faint smile, Robin and Marian; and then the king's men, who, upon outlaws, even pardoned ones, being served before them, had once again failed to look bland and attentive; and then the others. They were one goblet short, and Cecily handed hers back to Sir Richard, and curled her fingers around the base of Little John's cup.

“Health and victory,” said the Lionheart; and they all drank.

“And to the king's mercy,” said Robin.

“And to comrades,” said Cecily.

AFTERWORD

I grew up with Howard Pyle's
Robin Hood
(and with Alfred Noyes'
A Song of Sherwood
). But I was slow to recognise the significance of
authors
, and that therefore Pyle's was a particular version of the tale rather than the tale itself in some absolute sense. Later I read other Robin Hoods; in the last several years, as I worked on mine, I have read over two dozen.

From my first paragraph I have found myself falling into the gaping crevasses in my knowledge of English history. Growing up with Pyle there were several things that simply were the
truth
about Robin Hood. One of them was that he shot a longbow. Another was that he lived in the time of Richard Lionheart. A third was that the sheriff of Nottingham was his chief enemy. Imagine my horror when I discovered that the sheriff of Nottingham did not administer Sherwood Forest; that the English did not commonly use the longbow till about 150 years
after
Richard Lionheart.

I am no historian, and never flattered myself that I would write a story that was historically accurate. I did, however, wish to write something that was, let us say, historically unembarrassing. A cousin of mine, who is an historian, told me that our sense of history in the 20th century is not what it was 700 years ago; we have what we call
the media
now, with the result that history tends to be even-handed and instantaneous. This was some comfort; for example, the English were quietly using the longbow as a hunting weapon long before Edward III faced the French at Crécy, which is when the English longbow enters 20th-century textbooks.

I've read bits of my Robin Hood aloud several times in the last few years; invariably there were questions, not necessarily about the historical veracity of what I was doing, but about why I had chosen this version of the tale over that version—or where this or that portion of the tale had come from. Many people have strong ideas about who Robin was and what he was like; and a lot of our ideas are as incompatible with each other as they are with history. There is a variant in which Robin is a disinherited earl, for example. My Robin has always been a yeoman (yeoman, by the way, is a term that was not generally used till well after the Lionheart's day—because the position that would come to be known as yeoman was not yet widespread). There are even tales of a Robin Hood who did not live in Sherwood Forest.

When I could, I have tried to be historically unembarrassing. When I couldn't.… The book that rescued me from the slough of despond is called, simply,
Robin Hood
, written by James C. Holt, a professor of Medieval History at the University of Cambridge. It is a lively and fascinating book, and one of Holt's theses is that the tales of Robin Hood have always reflected what the teller and the audience needed him to be
at the time of the telling
.

Scholars disagree about when the stories were first told; the earliest hints of an historical Robin Hood date around 1260. The first literary reference to him is from
Piers Ploughman
in 1377. But the retellings through the centuries have echoed concurrent preoccupations—not those of a possible historical precedent that existed, and may or may not have been a person named Robin Hood. And the slow accretion of the details that most of us would consider inseparable from any man called Robin Hood is sometimes surprising. Maid Marian did not appear till 1500; nor till about the same time was Robin presented as an honourable outlaw who stole from the rich to give to the poor. And it was not until Sir Walter Scott's
Ivanhoe
in 1819 that Robin was inaugurated as the Saxon champion against the Norman conquerers.

The Outlaws of Sherwood
is not the last Robin Hood story any more than it is the first story about an outlaw band living in Sherwood Forest a long time ago. I needed my Robin to carry a longbow—even during the time of Richard Lionheart. I needed him to be a particular kind of hero with a particular set of preoccupations, surrounded by a company of people with preoccupations of their own. My Robin Hood is meant to be neither absolute nor definitive—nor historically satisfying. But I hope my readers may find him and his company persuasive and congenial.

About the Author

Robin McKinley has won various awards and citations for her writing, including the Newbery Medal for
The Hero and the Crown
, a Newbery Honor for
The Blue Sword
, and the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Adult Literature for
Sunshine
. Her other books include the
New York Times
bestseller
Spindle's End
; two novel-length retellings of the fairy tale
Beauty and the Beast, Beauty
and
Rose Daughter
;
Deerskin
, another novel-length fairy-tale retelling, of Charles Perrault's
Donkeyskin
; and a retelling of the Robin Hood legend,
The Outlaws of Sherwood
. She lives with her husband, the English writer Peter Dickinson; three dogs (two hellhounds and one hellterror); an 1897 Steinway upright; and far too many rosebushes.

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1988 by Robin McKinley

Cover design by Angela Goddard

ISBN: 978-1-4976-7366-3

This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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C
KINLEY

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