Robin had no memory later of taking to his heels. He ran, his traitorous bow still clenched in one hand, till he could run no more; and then he walked till he caught his breath, and ran on. Once or twice he fell. He did not know where he went or where he was going; as he lay on the ground the second time, the wind knocked out of him, the ragged ends of the broken arrow in his belt digging into his flesh, his foot aching from the root that had tripped him, he thought, I will run till it kills me, for I have killed a man, and my death is demanded by the king’s law. And he got up, limping a little, and ran on. He ran till he was blind with running, till he thought he had lived his entire life running, one foot pounding down in front of the other endlessly, till his bones were on fire with it, and every time either foot struck the ground his whole body cried out against the jolt. He set his teeth and ran on.
But his body betrayed him at the last, and the next time he fell he could not get up but lay, face down, in the leaf-mould, stirring only faintly, like a baby first learning to crawl. And then even that movement ceased, and he turned his cheek to the earth and gave up; and after a little while an uneasy sleep took him. He drifted in and out of sleep, vaguely conscious that the sound of water was very near and that he was more and more thirsty; and he noticed also that the light was growing dim, and at first he thought that in truth he had run himself blind. But he realised that it was only twilight, as happens every evening, whatever the events of the day past have been. And he sighed, and turned his other cheek to the earth, and shut his eyes.
But then he came wide awake, more alert than he had been since Tom Moody first stepped up beside him that day and seized his arm. For he heard, faintly, careful footsteps coming through the trees—coming toward the place where he lay. He rolled over—and his cold exhausted muscles groaned with the effort, and he gasped, and moved more slowly. With numb swollen fingers he snatched up his bow, and scuttled, stumbling, to stoop painfully behind the boulder to his one side. Behind him, now, as he waited to see what was before him, was the stream; and the sound of the water made his mouth suddenly ache, and he turned away from what he expected was his last doom to scoop up the cold water in the hand that did not hold the bow.
The taste of it on his tongue shocked him to full consciousness, and he realised what his actions meant: that he wanted to live. Even with Tom Moody’s blood on his head, and the king’s men looking for him as a murderer—he wanted to keep his life.
He was too tired to run any more; either luck was with him and the footsteps would go away, or he would try to give himself up with dignity. He had several good arrows left; but even if he had the strength to draw his bow—and he was not at all sure he did—he would not seek to take any more life. Even his own.
The mercurial luck that had played with him all this day seemed to turn its face from him now, for the footsteps came ever closer. It sounded like two people—only two; and he thought wistfully of his several good arrows, but he did not move to ready one. The footsteps were approaching with rather too much haste at the expense of care; while they belonged obviously to woodsmen and not common soldiers, he could follow their progress without difficulty. And they seemed to be coming directly and deliberately toward his place of concealment.
He closed his eyes briefly, for his head swam with weariness and an urgent will to live; and when he opened them he thought he dreamed, for he did not see two grim king’s foresters reaching out to drag him to gaol and the hangman’s noose, but—Much and Marian, their faces pale and taut with worry.
He stood up, not knowing what he could say, and staggered around one end of his boulder. His head felt light, and Marian’s face was surrounded by tiny bright twinkling stars. She ran forward, heedlessly dropping her bow on the ground, and threw her arms around him, pressing her cheek to his; her hair tickled his nose. Much, with a sigh, laid his bow carefully against the boulder that had hidden Robin. Another squirrel chattered somewhere close by, and the stream made small glooping noises as it ran, as fish broke the surface to swallow water bugs and bits of leaves.
Marian said, “I was so afraid we wouldn’t find you—that you’d go straight away, take ship for the Holy Land—be sold as a slave to the Saracens—that we’d—that I’d never see you again.”
Much said, “We heard they had some trouble planned for you today—but we only heard this morning. ’Twas a friend of my father’s told him. If there had been time we would have tried to stop you coming; but it was too late.”
Marian, unmoving, said to Robin’s shoulder, “I was worried today, at the fair, long before there was any reason to worry—before you were even late.”
“And then you were late,” said Much.
“And then you were later, and then we started looking,” Marian said, and turned her face at last; there were tear marks on it, and Robin felt a pricking behind his own eyes, that Marian should cry over him. “This place was my best hope—and my last—that you might think to come here and look for us.”
Robin looked around, puzzled, and then recognised what he had not thought to look for. This was the little river where Much’s father’s mill. lay, below them where they now stood by over a mile. But here, with its splendid boulders for playing King of the Mountain, and a pool just upstream for pirates and leaf-sailing races, was where Much and Marian and he had spent happy hours as young children. He murmured, half to himself, “I’ve been running—as I thought, away, or somewhere—all day. Since morning. And this is where I end: barely a league from—from where …”
Marian stepped back, but only to put her hands on Robin’s shoulders, as if she feared that if she did not hold on to him he might still go to the Saracens. “Robin—has it been so bad, since your father died?”
Robin almost smiled. “Not so bad as right at present.”
But Marian would not be distracted. “Why did you never tell us? I—I thought you grieved for your father, and did not wish to press you as you seemed not to want to speak. But—someone could have done something—my father—or you need not have been a forester.”
Robin shook his head. “Your father—or anyone else—could have done nothing, had I been willing to ask. Hush,” he said, as Marian opened her mouth. “It doesn’t matter. Forestry, and the making of arrows, is all I know; and you know what Will Fletcher in Nottingham is like—he would have stood no competition, and I could bear him less as a master even than the Chief Forester.”
“It is not Will who would have brooked no rivals,” said Much, “but the sheriff, who might have found you a little less willing to pay his tax.”
Robin shrugged. “It matters not. What is done is—done.” And then the sight of Tom Moody clutching at the feathered shaft rising from his red-stained tunic was before him, and the shrug turned to a shudder and he closed his eyes.
Marian’s hands shifted and tightened on his shoulders, and she said softly, “What happened, then? We know you met with trouble, dark trouble, but we do not know its name.”
Robin looked at her in surprise. “You don’t know? You—” But he could not get the words out.
Much said, “My father’s friend thought they might accuse you of killing the king’s deer; someone was bragging that he had stolen one of the arrows you’ve made from Sir Richard’s son, who was too drunk to notice.”
Marian whispered, “That’s a hanging offense—if they could do it.”
“They could do it,” Much said briefly, and a little silence fell.
Robin could hear his friends trying not to make the silence too hectic with expectation. He shook himself free of Marian’s hands and took two steps back, carefully not looking at his friends’ faces. “I—I killed Tom Moody. I killed him.” Then he turned and knelt stiffly by the stream, and bent over for another drink; not because he was thirsty, but because it gave him something to do. He had said aloud the awful thing that he had done, and the saying, in some way, made it irrevocable, as it had as yet not been. Or, no, he thought, dipping his hand into the freezing water again. It is not that I have doubted the thing I did; it is that I have acknowledged the burden of it now, by telling my friends of it.
Marian sat down beside him, heavily, as if the spring had gone out of her muscles; as if she, too, had run for hours. Much said, over their heads, “How did it happen?”
Robin told them, haltingly, but he told them, and he tried to tell everything, leaving nothing out but that this was only the latest, last, and worst of his trials under the Chief Forester who had hated his father. Last. His heart even tried to lift a little at that thought: whatever came next, he would never have to take orders from the Chief Forester again. “It is, at best, a very stupid thing I did.”
“It is stupid only because you lived and he did not,” Marian burst out. “He meant to kill you—he would have killed you if you had not stumbled.”
Robin rubbed the back of his neck thoughtfully. The arrow-crease burned with the salt of his sweat. Marian began plucking up the small weeds and grasses that grew on the bank of the stream, and casting them angrily into the water.
Much said, “My father came out of the mill and called me just before I was to set off; there had been several folk there who had just left. He said, ‘You are meeting your friend young Robin at the fair today, are you not?’ and I said I was. ‘Tell him then to have a care; for I have heard that the friends of the Chief Forester have a mind to remove him from their master’s sight, and beyond any man’s care.’”
“I wonder he did not kill you outright, at the very beginning,” Marian said, tearing a particularly long weed into bits before she flung it into the water.
Another faint smile crossed Robin’s face. “That would not have been nearly so enjoyable,” he said. Marian’s fingers paused. “What should we do now?” Robin gingerly stretched one arm and then the other; they felt like blocks of wood, and creaked like badly hinged blocks of wood, although wood, presumably, did not ache like this. He thought that perhaps he felt as he would if Tom had held to the original plan of merely beating him—but from Much’s words, that had never been the plan. He wondered if there was some comfort in this, but he was too tired to consider it. “We should not do anything; though I am very glad to have seen you one last time. I would not have dared to come looking for you. You should go home, and forget you ever saw me this day, and—”
“And you will go sell yourself to the Saracens,” Marian put in. “Well, you won’t. We came to help you, and help you we will.”
“And you can’t stop us,” said Much, with almost a grin. “It is hard for you, Robin, but you know, this could almost be a good thing in the long run—”
“A good thing?” exploded Robin. “A man is dead, and—”
“And his death is going to give the Norman dogs an excuse they’ll love, to bite down on us Saxons; yes, I know. But there’s another side of it. Everyone hereabouts knows who your father was. It would be an easy thing to put it about that the trouble you’re in comes of being your father’s son; that the lying Normans can’t bear an honest Saxon around them long—and it’s the truth, too. So, if word goes round that Robin, son of Robert Longbow, is—is living free—well, I think a few hardy like-minded folk might wish to join him. The Nottingham woods are huge; quite a few of us could lose ourselves in them beyond ken of any sheriff’s or king’s men forever. I think a few hardy like-minded folk might be pleased.”
“Pleased? Pleased to do what?” Robin said, throwing a few weeds of his own into the brook, despite the ominous creaking through his back and shoulders. “Pleased to skulk around in the shadows, pleased never to have a roof or a home, or anything over their heads but a price to see them dragged before the sheriff? This kind of talk was amusing when we were children and didn’t know any better, Much. You always told the best stories—I envied you the way you told them, the way you believed them. But that’s long ago—more than just years. It’s nonsense. You must know it’s nonsense.”
“It’s not nonsense,” Much said patiently. “You’ve been too preoccupied with staying out of the Chief Forester’s way for too long to listen to us. Henry had stopped caring about anything but quarrelling with his sons by the end; Richard stayed in England barely long enough to be crowned, and then it was off to the Holy Land—”
“Henry gave us the law,” argued Robin, “and Richard is an honest man.”
“Richard is an honest man in Palestine,” said Much, “and what we have is a Regent who is not. Do you suppose one of Henry’s handsome travelling justices is going to listen to a lot of ragtag Saxons against the word of a Norman sheriff who is a personal friend of the Regent? Think, Robin. You could be our rallying point.”
Robin shook his head. “It sounds fine,” he said. “I’m sure you are often in demand as a fireside speaker. But it won’t work.”
“And if we are going to put it to the test,” Much continued without heeding, “this is the season. It’s spring; we have summer and autumn ahead, when staying alive will be easy, and we have time to make mistakes before winter begins, and we’ll have to be serious.”
“Be serious! It is you who are not being serious,” said Robin. “Have you given any practical thought to your shining notions of Saxon revolt against Norman tyranny? It is too late for me, so I do not matter. But do you have any idea what using me as a so-called rallying point would mean for those who rallied? Do you understand how absolute the no going back would be? I can’t believe that you do, or you would not suggest it. What kind of a man do you suppose me to be, that I could permit these ‘hardy like-minded folk’ to come to me, knowing that by so coming they could be hung for my offense if they were caught? Hardiness alone grants you no woodscraft, and woodscraft—do you understand what the isolation of living in Sherwood would mean? It would be a short life, for one thing: we would only be able to kill the king’s deer to feed ourselves for as long as our arrows held out, for we would not be able to buy steel and twine to make more. Even if we knocked a travelling fletcher on the head for his supplies, where could we leave the wood we need for shafts to season, when we had not even a place to sleep dry? We could not build anything, for large as Sherwood is, I can tell you that the foresters might find their way to any part of it by lucky or unlucky chance; it is what we are for. Is what they are for. And they will hear the same rumours that your like-minded folk will, and they will be looking. The occasional rogue in Sherwood is a common thing and no one cares overmuch so long as he kills no one important; but an entire band of them, waving a banner saying ‘Down with the Normans’ virtually in the sheriff’s teeth? Be sensible, man.”
“This is why we need you,” said Much comfortably. “You’re a pessimist and a good planner.”
“I have not begun to plan and be pessimistic,” said Robin angrily. “You are simply not listening; you wish to ignore me—beyond my symbolic status, of course, which you find valuable—because the price on my head, you think, is oppressing my spirits—as it damn well is, I agree, and as it should. Stop telling yourself beautiful stories, Much. How many examples do I have to give you before you will listen? Perhaps after we run out of arrows we can learn—before we starve—to make snares out of gut, to catch our food. Perhaps. But are we to raise our own sheep for wool to make our clothing? Do any of your like-minded folk know how to card and spin? A meadow, deep in the heart of Sherwood, full of sheep that don’t seem to belong to anybody might cause a little curiosity too. And where did the sheep come from? Do we steal lambs from the farmers who are already being taxed past bearing by the sheriff who wants my head? In that case we might as well go on stealing lambs—and calves and chickens—and eat them too. I’m sure snares would be a nuisance. Of course then we wouldn’t make so grand a rallying point for our fellow Saxons. We would look, from the farmers’ perspective, quite a lot like Normans.”
Much and Marian exchanged glances. “We will not be entirely cut off from the outside world,” said Marian carefully.
“You cannot be a part of this madness, Marian,” said Robin sharply; “you always had less patience with Much’s will-o’-the-wisps than I did.”
“Nor am I an overtaxed farmer or an outlaw in hiding?” said Marian. “It is possible that it is exactly that that leaves my head clear now to judge what you cannot judge—”
“Judgement!” said Robin. “Neither of you is judging anything. Neither of you wishes to look past a friend in trouble, and I honour you for it, but there is no future in it—I must make you see that there is no future in it.”
Much said, “You are right that not everyone who believes in us will have both the strength and the desire to live as an outlaw—I do know what you’re trying to say. But we will not be completely isolated. We will be able to get arrowheads and wool and other things through our friends.”
“Bought with leaves and twigs?” inquired Robin.
“Our skills will still be saleable; it is the marketing that must be done by others,” said Much.
“There is, of course, a great deal of call for bagging flour and meal in the king’s forest,” said Robin.
“You can still make arrows,” said Much. “One of my friends, Harald, is a leather-worker, caught in a position something like yours might have been under Will Fletcher. There are other examples. And I—oh, I can experiment with snares. And someone will have to dig privy vaults. You see? I do have some notion of what I’m proposing.
“But I’m not going to argue with you tonight. You’re tired; you couldn’t be anything else. You can sleep in the old barn at the mill tonight, and tomorrow night as well. Just promise us—for this evening—that you won’t try to sacrifice yourself to your stubborn idea of justice to a Norman king. No sacrifices till you’ve had at least one good night’s sleep, and something to eat.”
“And have let you talk at me some more,” said Robin.
“That’s right,” said Much.
There was a long pause. Robin looked at his two friends, seated now on either side of him, and it occurred to him that they were going to take him into custody as inexorably as any king’s foresters might: their faces told him that. “Oh, to the devil with you, and your troop of merry bandits with you,” he said. “I promise.”