The sword in the stone (18 page)

"Who doth ambition shun

And loves to lie i' the sun,

Seeking the food he eats

And pleased with what he gets,"

Then, both together:

"Come hither, come hither, come hither:

Here shall he see

No enemy

But winter and rough weather."

The song ended in laughter, and Robin, who had been twisting his brown fingers in and out of the silk-fine threads which fell about his face, gave them a shrewd tug and scrambled to his feet.

"Now, John," he said, seeing them at once.

"Now, Measter," said Little John.

"So you've brought the young squires?"

"They brought me," said Little John.

"Welcome whichever way," said Robin. "I never heard ill spoken of Sir Ector, nor reason why his sounders should be pursued. How are you, Kay and Wart, and who set you so luckily into the forest at my glades on this day of all days?"

"Robin," interrupted Maid Marian at this point reproachfully. "You can't mean to take them with you on a venture like this!"

"Why not, my sweet?"

"Well, they are children."

"But that is exactly what we want."

"I think it's inhuman," said Maid Marian, and began to do up her hair.

The chief outlaw evidently thought it would be safer to change the subject for the moment, because he turned to the two boys and asked them a question.

"Can you shoot?" asked Robin.

"Trust me," said the Wart.

"I can try," said Kay, more reserved, as they laughed at the Wart's comical assurance.

"Come, Marian," said Robin, "let them have one of thy bows." Maid Marian handed him a bow and half a dozen arrows twenty-eight inches long.

"Shoot the popinjay," said Robin, handing them to the Wart. Wart now looked and saw a popinjay set up full five-score paces away. He guessed that he had been a fool and said cheerfully, "I'm sorry, Robin Wood, but I'm afraid it is much too far away for me."

"Never mind," said the outlaw. "Have a shot at it anyway. I can tell all I want to know by the way you shoot."

The Wart fitted his arrow as quickly and neatly as he was able, set his feet wide in the same line that he wished his arrow to go, squared his shoulders, drew the bow to his chin, sighted on the mark, raised his point through an angle of about twenty degrees, aimed two yards to the right because he always pulled to the left in his loose, and sped his arrow. It missed, but not so badly.

"Now, Kay," said Robin.

Kay went through the same motions and also made a pretty good shot. Each of them had held the bow the right way up, had quickly found the cock feather and set it outwards, each had taken hold of the string to draw the bow — most boys who have not been taught are inclined to catch hold of the nock of the arrow when they draw, between their finger and thumb, but, of course, a proper archer pulls back the string with his first two or three fingers and lets the arrow follow it — neither of them had allowed the point to fall away towards the left as they drew, nor struck their left forearms with the bow-string, two common faults with people who don't know, and each had loosed evenly without a pluck.

"Good," said Robin. "No lute-players here."

"Ah," said Little John, "it warn't bad for boys, but suppose you show

'em, Measter 'ood."

"Is it a match?" asked Robin, smiling grimly. These two men were the oldest of rivals with the bow in England, and could never forbear to take one another on in competition.

"Go on," said Marian. "You two are like kids."

"Us ha'nt never fled afore a challenge, Measter 'ood," said Little John slowly, his eyes twinkling, "as thee knows to thy cost."

"Get on, man," said Robin. "You know I could beat you with one hand tied behind my back."

Little John deliberately put the toe of his great bow against the inside of his instep, pulled the grip outward with his mighty right fist, and slipped the string into place with his left hand. It was a movement like an absent-minded caress, but probably nobody else except Robin could have strung his bow.

"'Tis for a buffet, Measter?" he inquired, grinning at Robin with sly challenge.

"A buffet," said the captain of the outlaws. "Go on and I'll let you off with a light one."

Little John lumbered himself into position and

remarked

philosophically, "Folk say the last laugh rings merriest." With this, in a limber flash which had nothing to do with his bear-like movements and slow speech, the fugitive who had once been called Naylor had raised, drawn, loosed and lowered his bow, apparently without aiming it, and the arrow was saying Phutt! in the heart of the popinjay, before cleaving straight through it and burying its point in the ground.

"A shaky loose," said Robin, from two yards behind him, and, as Little John turned round to smile at his captain, but before he could turn back again towards the popinjay, the captain's arrow also was cutting through the bird of straw.

Wart noticed that where he and Kay had been compelled to aim their woman's bow twenty degrees above the mark, Robin and Little John were still loosing well below it, although it was a hundred yards away. The boys had been given Maid Marian's bow to shoot with because they could not have drawn any other. Its draw was a horizontal pull of only twenty-five or thirty pounds, while Robin and his lieutenant were opening arcs with a force of anything up to or above a hundred. If you have ever attempted to lift a hundredweight upwards from the ground, with all your stature to help you, you will be able to appreciate the steady force which the two greatest English archers were able to exert, not upwards but horizontally.

"Robin, said Maid Marian sharply, "you are being a baby. You will just go on and on until each of you has had a dozen shots, and then one or the other of you will miss and the conqueror will claim the right to give him a smack. How can you be so childish?"

"I want to beat John here," said Robin Wood, plausibly, "because otherwise he will become insubordinate."

"Insubordinate fiddlesticks. Leave your silly competition and send these boys back to their father."

"That I won't do," said Robin, "unless they wish to go. It is their quarrel as much as it is mine."

"What is the quarrel?" asked Kay.

Robin threw down his bow and sat cross-legged on the ground, drawing Maid Marian to sit beside him. His face had suddenly gone puzzled.

"It is this woman Morgan the Fay," he said. "I hardly know how to explain about her."

"I shouldn't try," said Marian.

Robin now turned on her quite angrily. "Look here, Marian," he said.

"You may as well face it. Either we must have a boy to help us, or else we have got to leave those three to their fate. I don't want to ask the boys to go in there, but it's either that or leaving poor old Tuck to be turned into a pig or something."

"He's just like a pig, anyway," said Marian.

"Bah!" exclaimed Robin.

The Wart thought it was time to ask a tactful question, so he made a polite cough and said: "Please, who is Morgan the Fay?" Robin, Maid Marian and Little John all answered at once.

"She'm a bad 'un," said Little John.

"She's a fairy," said Robin.

"No, she isn't," said Marian. "She's an enchantress."

"The fact of the matter is," said Robin, "that nobody knows exactly what she is. It's only my personal opinion she's a fairy."

"And to that opinion," added the chief of the outlaws, staring at his wife, "I adhere."

Kay asked: "Do you mean she's one of those people with bluebells for hats, who spend most of the time sitting on toadstools?"

"Certainly not. There aren't any such creatures. Queen Morgan is a real fairy, and one of the worst of them at that."

"If the boys have got to be in it," said Marian, "you had better explain the affair from the beginning."

Robin Wood took a deep breath, uncrossed his legs, and the puzzled look came back into his face.

"Well then, Kay and Wart," he said, "suppose that Morgan the Fay is queen of the fairies, and that fairies are not the kind of creatures which your old nurse has told you about. Some people say that they are the old folk who lived in England before the Romans came here, and that they have been driven underground. Some say that they look like small humans, dwarfs, you know, and others that they look quite ordinary, and others still that they don't look like anything at all, but put on various shapes as the fancy takes them. Whatever they look like, they have the old knowledge. They know things down there in their burrows which the human race has forgotten, and quite a lot of these things are not good for us to know."

"Don't talk so loudly," said Marian, with a strange look, and the boys noticed that their little circle had drawn close together.

"Well now," said Robin, lowering his voice, "the queer thing about these creatures that I am speaking of, and if you'll excuse me I won't name them by name any more, is that they are without hearts. It is not so much that they wantonly wish to do evil, like that Madame Mim of yours, that all the forest was talking about, but that if you were to catch one and cut it open, you would not find a heart inside. They are cold-blooded, you know, like fish."

"They are everywhere, even while you are talking," said Marian. The boys looked about them, feeling queer.

"Be quiet," Robin said. "But I need not tell you about them now. It is unlucky to talk about them at all, and I don't know much more to tell. The point is that I believe Morgan is the queen of the — well — of the Good Folk, and I know she lives in a castle to the north of the forest called the Siege of Air and Darkness. And this very morning, by means of enchantments, the Old People have taken prisoner one of my best servants and one of yours."

"Not Tuck, Measter?" cried Little John, who, of course, knew nothing of recent developments because he had been out on sentry duty. Robin nodded solemnly. "Friar Tuck," he said. "The news came from our northern tree-tops just before your message arrived about the boys."

"Alas, poor Tuck!"

"It happened like this," said Marian. "But perhaps you had better explain first about the names."

"One of the few things we know," explained Robin, "about the — the Blessed Ones, is that they go by the names of common animals. For instance, one of them may be called Cow, one Goat, one Pig, and so forth. So,if you happen to be calling one of your own cows, you must always point to it when you call. Otherwise you may summon a fairy — a Little Person — who goes by the same name, and, once you have summoned it, it can take you away."

"What seems to have happened this morning, continued Marian, taking up the story, "is that your Dog Boy from the castle took the hounds right up to the verge of the forest when they were going to scombre, and he happened to catch sight of Friar Tuck, who was chatting with an old wild man called Wat that lives hereabouts — "

"Excuse us," cried both the boys together, "is that the old man who lived in our village before he lost his wits? He bit off the Dog Boy's nose, as a matter of fact, and now he lives terribly in the forest, a sort of ogre."

"It is the same man," replied Robin, "but, poor thing, he's not much of an ogre. He just lives on grass and roots and acorns, and wouldn't hurt a fly. I'm afraid you have got your story muddled up."

"Fancy old Wat living on acorns!"

"What happened," went on Marian patiently, "was this. The three of them came together to exchange the time of day, and one of the hounds (I think it was the one called Cavall) began jumping up at poor old Wat, to lick his face. This frightened the old man, and your Dog Boy called out,

'Come here, Dog!' to make him stop. He did not point with his finger, and that is all there is to tell. You see, he ought to have pointed."

"What happened?"

"Well, my man Scathelocke happened to be woodcutting a little way off, and he says that they all three vanished, just vanished, including the dog."

"Oh, poor Cavall!"

"So the fairies have got the Dog Boy, Wat and Friar Tuck!"

"You mean the People of Peace."

"I'm sorry. I wasn't thinking."

But the point is that, if Queen Morgan is really the Queen of these creatures, and if we want to rescue them before they are enchanted, we shall have to look for them in her castle."

It seemed obvious.

"Then we must go there," said Kay.

ROBIN WOOD smiled at Kay and patted him on the back, while the Wart thought despairingly about his poor dog. Then the outlaw cleared his throat and began to speak again, this time in a serious voice.

"You are quite right about going there," he said, "but I must tell you the unpleasant part. Nobody can get into the Siege of Air and Darkness except a boy."

"Do you mean we can't get it?"

"You could get in," said Robin.

"I suppose," explained the Wart, when he had thought this over, "it is like the thing about unicorns."

"You are right. A unicorn is a magic animal, and only a maiden can catch that; fairies are magic too, and only a boy can enter their enchanted towers. That's why they always take changelings out of cradles." Kay and Wart sat in silence for a moment. Then Kay said: "Well, I'm game. It is my adventure after all."