Henry dropped his outstretched arm, and Cecily turned away and seized her ends of the poles; she was at Marian’s feet, that Marian’s head might ride the higher. They lifted Marian smoothly; she was surprised again at her friend’s light weight, though she knew the weight would become that of millstones and mountains before the night was out. She tried to fix it in her memory that she had initially thought Marian no great burden, so she might think of it later.
Henry said, “And will you not tell me even at parting—are you Little John?”
Little John said quietly, “Yes, I am he.”
“And”—more wistfully—“is that Robin Hood?”
Cecily was staring at Marian’s face, remembering how pretty she had always thought her, how gay and strong she had always been; she had been equal to anything the boys might do, equal as if she gave it no thought; she did what she chose. While Cecily, a few years younger, stumbled in her wake and loved and envied her. The matted hair curled around her forehead now, the smears of mud and blood on her face made’ her nearly unrecognisable; and never before had her cheeks been hollow. “The shooting you saw today was Robin Hood’s shooting,” said Little John, in a tone suggesting that Henry was foolish to ask.
Henry understood what he was supposed to understand, and he looked a little embarrassed, but he said, “We are not entirely unknown in this area. If you ask the tavern-keeper at the inn on the road to Smithdale he will get word to Henry who leads a troop of travelling players. We usually winter with Sir Michael, at Highwall.” Henry almost smiled. “And we could still use a strong man. But remember that there is always a place with us for someone who needs it.”
Little John nodded. “We will remember; and I shall tell Robin, and he will be grateful, as we are grateful to you now. Forgive us for leaving you with so little courtesy.”
Henry shrugged, and the last anger smoothed out of his face. “Of course. Go with our good wishes.”
But Little John was only half-listening to Henry. Cecily heard it too, a far-off confused sound which might have been horses galloping. Without another word Little John turned so that he led them, the litter between and Cecily behind, and they plunged into the trees.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Marian moaned and stirred. Cecily tried to make her bent elbows take as much of the jolting as she could, but it was not easy. They trotted on for some time, Little John apparently smelling his way, for it was soon too dark to see clearly; but he rarely stumbled or swerved. Cecily panted in his wake, expecting at any moment to have to beg humiliatingly for a pause to breathe; and her feet went on picking themselves up just high enough to avoid being tangled by roots and rocks. But perhaps he knew her limits—or his own; for she never came quite to that point, and they walked and trotted and walked again into the dark hours.
They stopped once, to drink at a stream. Little John said briefly, “Stonebrook; we’re above the Small Falls here,” and Cecily suddenly understood where they were, and that they were quartering their way through a small corner of Sherwood—and with some chance of coming to Friar Tuck before they fell down with exhaustion.
When they went on it was at a gentler pace, but they still covered much ground. Cecily’s shoulders ached and her finger joints were on fire, and she had blisters starting. They stopped a second time and Cecily offered Little John half her bread, but he shook his head. “I’ve eaten mine.”
It was full night now, and as Cecily slumped against a tree and ate her bread in ragged mouthfuls Little John paced carefully around them, peering at the sky where the trees would let him. “Do you know where we are?” Cecily asked, and realised she was too tired to care overmuch what he replied. She still could not chew, and had to hold the hard bread in her mouth till it began to disintegrate on its own.
There was a glint of teeth in the shifting starlight. “I hope so. I dare not wait till dawn, for Marian’s sake if not ours. If the breeze has veered much, I could be leading us past Friar Tuck. I would be happier if the moon would rise, but wishing will not hurry her. And here I should be finding one of our marked trees, and I am not.”
Cecily, on the ground, had a slightly different angle of sight, and her eyes had grown accustomed to the shadows of the trees. “Yes, you are,” she said dreamily. “There. Perhaps the last storm displaced it.”
Little John followed her pointing finger, and there indeed was the little device of braided twigs that the outlaws sometimes used to mark a path. It had broken off and fallen from its high place into a bush, and there lay almost hidden but for the rustle of evening wind across the shadows.
“Ah.” Little John heaved a sigh that told Cecily he was more worried than he was admitting.
They arrived at Friar Tuck’s cottage soon after; there was one long questioning bay from one of the dogs, but they knew most of Robin’s band. Little John and Cecily were old friends, and the dogs came up to thwack their thighs with their great brutal tails. Tuck knew his dogs’ voices and recognised the single query that meant the arrival of a friend, and his door opened before Little John and Cecily had got close enough to knock.
“Why—?” he began, and saw the litter. “Come in,” he said. “I will risk a fire.”
He had one ready laid for such an extremity, and it caught and flared up at once. Cecily shivered; it was her thoughts that made her cold more than the gentle air—or a reasonable fear of the conditions of Tuck’s roof and fire-hole, despite Jocelin’s attentions—but cold she was. Tuck knelt by the litter, which they had laid upon the floor as they could, and hissed between his teeth. “Marian,” he said. “What happened?” He began to raid a small cupboard as Little John told him.
“Guy of Gisbourne,” said Tuck, dismayed; “that is the worst news yet. Folk see things so differently.” He had knelt again, and was delicately cutting at the sash around Marian’s body.
“All who were there today, save us two, I think, believe they saw Robin Hood,” said Little John.
“Ah,” said Friar Tuck. “I believe you, and yet that is not what I meant.”
Cecily was foggily aware that Tuck was saying something important, but she could not make herself understand. “What do you mean?” she said.
“There is water in that tun by the door. Bring me some,” said Tuck; and when she had done so, he said, “Have you asked Robin Hood who he is?”
Cecily said, puzzled, watching Tuck’s deft hands, “No. I would not.”
“Have you asked yourself who he is?”
Cecily said slowly, “He—he is our leader.”
“The leader of a band of outlaws,” said Friar Tuck, “who live leanly in Sherwood. And did you hear the folk today talk of this Robin Hood whom they saw shooting his arrows into the target better than anyone else?”
“They spoke of him—as if he were not human,” Cecily said, thinking of the woman selling trinkets. “She said he was one of the Old Ones, come to save England.”
“Robin Hood would not agree, I think,” said Friar Tuck, laying back the clotted cloth; Marian gasped and murmured, and one of the dogs whined outside the door.
“No,” said Cecily, shocked.
“I would not agree with either Robin or your fairground tale-teller,” said the friar. “And Marian, I guess, agrees with me, or she would not be here.” He added softly, “But, my dear, was it worth your life to make the tale come true?”
“But—” said Cecily, and could think of no words to follow.
Friar Tuck said kindly, but with some humour, “Ask me about the meaning of life, or anything else you choose. Tales are as much the necessary fabric of our lives as our bodies are. There are blankets in that chest; pull them out and lie down beside it; there is just room for you, I think, as you are the smaller. Little John, I will trouble you to help me bring my mattress here by the fire, and then if Cecil will let you have any of the blankets, you can sleep too. There should be space enough where the mattress lay, although I may require you to keep your feet tucked up.”
“They will look here
,” said Little John.
“Not tonight,” said Friar Tuck. “Only an outlaw could find his way to me on a night with no moon. I will not let you move her further tonight anyway; tomorrow we will decide what to do—early tomorrow, I promise you. Perhaps we should all four—and the dogs—go to ground in the little bolt-hole you and Robin arranged for me after the good baron had cause to hate me. Perhaps I will merely send you. I have not decided. Go to sleep.”
Cecily said, struggling to keep her eyelids open a minute longer, “You—say—four—of us. Then Marian will live through this night.”
There was a pause long enough to notice, before Tuck said, “I believe so. In all events, you can do nothing about it; you have done your turn, and it is now mine. Go to sleep. I dislike repeating myself.”
Smells haunted Cecily’s dreams: bright sharp smells of green spring and bitter herbs, and grim smells of blood and death, but nothing woke her for several hours, till her stomach observed that she was now smelling food, and then her eyes came stiffly open.
“Good morning,” said Friar Tuck as she sat up. “It is a fine morning, and the dogs are disturbed by no far-off rumble of armed men coming this way. There is bread and cheese and ale on the table and stew on the fire.”
“How is Marian?” said Cecily; her voice sounded as rusty as a neglected byrnie.
Tuck shook his head, but his face was not gloomy. “I do not know yet. I may know today; perhaps not till tomorrow. I believe she will live if she can, and that is a great thing.”
Cecily looked at Marian’s sleeping face, and thought that some of the lines that had been there yesterday were there no longer, and she felt a little hopeful. This left her some freedom to think of other things—like the fact that her clothes chafed her as if she had been wearing them a year. “I would wash,” she said gruffly; Friar Tuck looked mildly surprised. “You may borrow a change of clothes from me if you do not mind the skirts.”
Cecily ducked out of the hut with a roll of Friar Tuck’s spare gown under her arm. The dogs were inclined to wish to help her at her bath in the little pool beyond the chapel; and then she had some trouble deciding how to tie (or not tie) the billows of Friar Tuck’s robe so that her gender would not inadvertently reveal itself, telling herself first that it didn’t matter anyway and then that it did, and then again that it didn’t. Little John knew already and Friar Tuck wouldn’t care. Probably. He was too busy with Marian anyway. She decided that she couldn’t decide and that not deciding was best expressed by not tying. Whereupon she wadded up some of the billows in one hand so they would not catch between her legs and trip her that way (the hem ended well above her ankles) and her wet, reasonably clean, or at least less dirty, clothes in the other, and went back to the hut for breakfast. She found she still hated the feeling of skirts flapping around her, and wondered why Tuck bothered wearing them. It was not as though he did not possess several other individualistic approaches to being a priest and friar.
Little John and Tuck were in the middle of an argument; the friar was shaking his head. “I do not know if that is wise,” he said. Little John protested at once: “Would you have him not told?”
Friar Tuck stood looking down at Marian, who was lying very still. “I might,” Tuck said at last, “for he can do no good by knowing; you could wait a day, in the hope that I might have good tidings to allay a terrible tale.”
“And what if someone hears a tale of Robin Hood shooting at the fair and being wounded by Guy of Gisbourne and rescued by a tall man and a boy? And brings the tale to Sherwood? Cecil and I should be bringing our own tale by this morning. We are the only folk from Greentree who were in Nottingham yesterday, but there are those who love Robin well enough to venture into Sherwood for his sake, or the sake of news of him after what they know they saw.”
Friar Tuck took a long minute to answer. “I did not expect to be able to stop you; bad news travels fast, but not so quickly that, were it my choice, I would not risk the delay of one day. I would ask you to bear her to our hiding-place, however, ere you leave; for I do not like the risk of any man coming to inquire of me today about any belly wounds I may have seen recently.”
Cecily surprised herself by saying, “Only one of us needs to take news to Robin; and Friar Tuck should be seen about his chapel in the ordinary way. Marian should not be left alone—at very least that she might not wake in the dark and have no one to tell her where she is. I will stay if there is no reason against it.”
Little John’s smile was so slight and so wry that had he still been wearing a beard she would not have seen it. “It is a good plan and a good thought, but I would rather face twenty foresters than wait in the dark for something that may not come.”
Cecily said sadly, through a mouthful of cheese (which required no chewing), “So would I. Ten foresters anyway. But you are the better tracker and the faster, and it is only sensible you should be the one to go.”
Robin had not liked the idea of Little John and Cecil—Cecily—going into the sheriff’s baited trap; but it was true that since Sir Richard regained his land the air the outlaws breathed seemed thick with the sheriff’s hatred, and the leaves seemed to have eyes in them, that had been their friends before.
The loss of Rafe’s source of news when Lucy married and moved a town away was a severe one, and came at a particularly bad time from the outlaws’ point of view; as if fate had arranged it, the pieces fit so neatly. And Rafe himself, one of the sunnier-tempered members of Greentree, had been trailing around like a lost fawn since Lucy had told him.
“I can’t blame her,” he said miserably; “I couldn’t marry her, now could I? Or I could, I suppose, but what man who loved a woman would ask her to live as we do?”
Robin had overheard this much of a conversation between Rafe and Simon and Jocelin; they had fallen silent when they recognised Robin’s step. It might merely have been the end of the conversation anyway, but Robin thought not. What man would ask a woman he loved to live as they did? It was a thought he was only too familiar with.
The other rumour he had heard of late, one he could not decide whether to hope for or not, was that the Lionheart was coming home to England. Richard was a Norman and spoke English like a Frenchman, but he was king. Would he uphold the laws of England or would he be careless of the rights of the English so long as his fellow Normans were happy? Whom would he believe, the sheriff of Nottingham or Robin Hood? Was it, Robin thought dismally, a question worth asking?
It was not just that he was the king. Everyone loved Richard Lion-heart, even outlaws hiding in the king’s forests. He was tall and blond and heroic, and he had been fighting for the Holy Land, a cause that the Saxons—except perhaps when there was a sheriff leaning on them too heavily—could love too. Almost everyone seemed to forget his Norman blood when they spoke of him. Maybe Robin had once felt that way too, long ago, when he was still a king’s forester himself. But he did not forget it now, just as he feared that if the king did decide to hear the sheriff’s complaint of them as true and serious, his outlaws would give up in despair that the Lionheart had turned against them, before any one of them was taken.
Robin had an uneasy day while Little John and Cecily were at the fair; he half-imagined he could hear the crowd from the heart of Sherwood. He listened to his imagination and it sounded like an angry crowd, shouting of cruelty and disaster … and then he cursed himself for a fool and was more uneasy than ever. It was not surprising that Little John and Cecily did not return that night; the fair would go on till evening, and if Little John was keeping in his role as a wrestler, he would have proven a popular contestant.
But as the next morning drew on toward noon, Robin gave up all pretence of not being anxious.
It was past noon when there was the cry from the nearest guard that someone bearing news approached. Robin’s heart tried to rise and sink simultaneously when he saw Little John come toward him, obviously hale and—when he got a little closer Robin saw some of the bruises, and that the shirt he wo
re was not his own; it looked like it might fit Friar Tuck. The cut on his cheek did not look like the kind of thing a wrestler should have received. “Where is Cecily?”
“With Marian.”
“With Marian?”
Little John hesitated, and Robin took him by the arms and shook him. “Speak, man! What has Marian to do with the news from Nottingham?”
Little John sounded as if he were reciting a speech he had memorized; maybe he was. “At the shooting contest at the fair, one archer stood out among them all as the best. As the final arrow struck the target, a man leaped from the sheriff’s tent and challenged the winner, naming Robin Hood. As the crowd had done among themselves already.”
“And?” said Robin violently, as Little John paused; but he knew already the end of the story.
Little John’s voice was flat. “This man called himself Guy of Gisbourne, and he drew a sword on the archer, who had no sword, and the crowd pressed around the two of them in anger, for they had liked it that Robin Hood should win the sheriff’s contest, and did not like Guy. But Guy … wounded the archer with the point of his sword.”
“Marian,” said Robin. “She lives?”
“She lives,” said Little John. “She is with Friar Tuck, who would have had me stay the news for a day; he hopes that Marian may rally and we be sure of her by tomorrow. Cecily is with them.”
“Is Cecily hurt?” Robin asked; but his lips moved stiffly over the name. Marian was lying wounded by the closing of the sheriff’s trap.…
“No,” said Little John, and touched his purple cheek. “Not to signify. Bruises. There’s less of her to resist when a nailed boot steps on her. There was quite a mix-up at the end, when we were getting Marian away.” Little John paused.
Robin looked at him, his eyes dark with visions of the day before; of the day to come; of the woman who lay under Friar Tuck’s roof.
“Will’s little sister saved my life,” Little John added as if inconsequentially.