Lady of Sherwood

by Jennifer Roberson

  Marian held out her hands. They shook as if she were palsied. She still felt ill. She swallowed once, then again, and felt the lump go down. She clenched her hands into her apron, ignoring the pain in her left.

  In arrears, the sheriff said. Lands forfeit, the sheriff said.

  Whore, Gisbourne called her.

  Every mark, every silver penny, had gone to ransom the others.

  She had paid the taxes. She had counted them herself. Locksley was Robin’s to tend: she tended Ravenskeep. She had paid the taxes.

  But the sheriff was the sheriff. It was his duty to collect taxes from the shire each session, from every manor, estate, village, and hamlet, to do the accounting, to write amounts and names on the rolls, to sort through the receipts, to enforce the laws of the land with regard to payment and forfeiture.

  Forfeiture.

  Anger, she knew, was better than terror, or she would be utterly helpless.

  “Hal,” she said quietly, “saddle me a horse.”

  “Lady?”

  The trembling began to diminish. She focused only on the task. “I am going to Nottingham. I am going to the sheriff. The sheriff and I have something to discuss.”

  Not long after dawn, Adam Bell and his men awoke to discover their prisoner missing. Robin, crouched low in foliage, did not move except to tense for movement. There was shouting, swearing, accusations made, then Adam snapped at them all that they were wasting time; he could not have gotten far; he was a stranger in their forest and knew nothing of its secrets; and they had best catch him soon or lose the sweetest ransom they might ever hope for, unless they, like German Henry, captured themselves a king.

  Robin purposely had decided against trying for the horse. While a mount would have carried him to safety more quickly, finding the horse in the dark would have resulted in too much noise. Trying to find him now would give away his presence instantly. Better to depend on his feet, slower but far more quiet, than risk discovery in the name of speed. And, for all he knew, the horse had been taken elsewhere by one of Adam’s men.

  He watched as each outlaw, cursing, gathered up weapons. Cloudisley, Clym of the Clough, and Wat One-Hand went, respectively, north, south, and east. It was sheer bad luck that Adam Bell, former yeoman and the one Robin least wanted to face because of his skill with a longbow, came west, directly toward his hiding place.

  Inwardly he cursed and slipped the knife back into his boot. Adam Bell was on him, though he did not yet know Robin was there. Before he could discover it for himself, Robin thrust himself up from the ground and surged at the outlaw.

  He caught Bell around the hips and threw him down flat on his back. Robin scrambled upright, sat on the outlaw’s belly, saw the shock in the light-brown eyes, and smashed his right fist into the stubbled jaw. Then he was on his feet. Quickly he set one boot against the longbow’s belly, grasped one end, and pulled upright against his bootsole with all his might. A sliced string would render the bow temporarily unusable, but Bell likely had another string; better he concentrate on disabling the bow instead.

  When it cracked like a broken leg, Robin dropped the broken half and ran. Behind him, Adam Bell, dazed but conscious, shouted hoarsely for aid.

  Limbs snatched at Robin, snagged his clothing; vines snared his ankles, dropped him more than once. He scrambled up, spitting out leaves and soil, and ran again, leaping downed trees, beating back branches, pelting his way through hip-high fern, bushes, and other foliage. Behind him he heard more shouts. He heard the thrum of a loosed arrow, the tattered hiss of torn leaves giving way; felt the kiss of its passing as it thudded into a tree beside him. Robin dodged aside, dove through fern, scrambled up again, ran again. An arrow loosed from an English longbow could punch through mail. At this short distance it would likely be driven clear through his body. The only way of defeating one was to avoid it. An archer needed a clear line of sight to take proper aim, and he refused to give any of them that.

  He ran, ducking and dodging, swinging around saplings, rolling and bouncing up if he fell, always moving, always cutting an unpredictable course through the trees. He was absently aware of hair being snagged and yanked out of his scalp; of broken boughs stabbing into his legs; of leaves and limbs slapping at his face, against upraised forearms; of the burning in his chest. But he ran.

  A creek . . . he splashed through, attempting to stay atop rocks but not succeeding: his boots now were wet. Damp hosen clung clammily to his legs. Slick mud on the other side slowed him briefly, but he leaped free, struck dry soil and grass again, and went on.

  He crossed a deer track and took it briefly, using its beaten ground to gain him footing and time, but he did not stay on it. A track offered no protection; better he stick to shielding foliage.

  A second arrow rattled through nearby branches. He threw himself aside, rolled through fern, came up, barely dodged a thornbush, swung under a low limb, heard an echoing shout of frustration from lengthening distance. He dove through foliage, fetched up painfully against a lightning-shattered trunk, and lay there, winded, for some time, breathing. Listening. Around him nothing moved. All was still except for the heaving of his lungs.

  There were no more shouts, no cursing, no humming of arrows loosed from too close, no rattle through the trees. Only silence.

  And then a bird began to sing from a branch over his head, answered by another a few trees away, and he knew he was safe.

  Robin sat up slowly, wincing against small wounds now making themselves felt. The knife in his boot had shifted; he pulled it out, resettled it in the other boot; grimaced displeasure in the feel and weight of cold, soggy leather.

  Now he had time to sweat. He wiped it from his face with a sleeve, then stood up. Sherwood enclosed him. No man but one who knew the forest intimately would find him, so long as he was very still, or very careful.

  Robin nodded, catching his breath, then set out again at a far more decorous pace than his former headlong flight. He blessed the Godsent sense of direction that never failed him—he was “lost” as a child only when he wished to be—and headed toward the Nottingham road. He needed badly to get to Locksley, and stood a better and faster chance if he sought transport on the road.

  Even if he were forced to steal another horse.

  Early in the morning, not long after dawn, the sheriff was awakened by a servant pounding on his door. DeLacey, struggling up from under linen and confusing dreams, was less than pleased. He called out crossly for the servant to go away, until the servant explained that his soldiers had caught one of the outlaws.

  Whereupon deLacey shot out of bed, snatched up a robe, thrust arms into sleeves, and tore open the door. “You’re certain?”

  The servant bobbed his head. “Aye, my lord. The soldiers brought him into the hall. He’s below.”

  Below. By God, they had caught one of them! DeLacey spent a moment hunting up house boots, ran a hand through his hair, then took himself out of his chamber and strode rapidly down to the hall, anticipating all manner of punishment, where he was greeted by the grimy, gasping, blood-smeared face of Much, the miller’s son, gripped firmly between two soldiers.

  DeLacey stopped short. “The others?”

  “No, my lord,” one of the soldiers said.

  He bit his tongue on a sharp retort. “This is the only one you caught?”

  “Yes, my lord.”

  He glared at Much, then shifted attention back to the soldiers, who were clearly tired and as clearly wary of his mood. They had spent more than a day searching for five men and had only caught a boy. “Where are the others?”

  “In Sherwood, my lord.”

  Sherwood. Damn Sherwood, who swallowed men whole and almost never gave them up. Anticipation turned to ash in his mouth. He had hoped for Will Scarlet, who had murdered Prince—now King—John’s men, and whose escape had embarrassed the sheriff deeply; or for the minstrel, whom he had decided to have castrated while his daughter watched. But the miller’s half-wit son was the least of them, and not
worth waking up for

  “Throw him in the dungeon,” he ordered, gesturing dismissal, and took himself back to bed.

  Twenty

  Robin slipped down through the trees, jumped a ditch by the side of the road, stopped long enough to get his bearings—Nottingham yet lay ahead, and beyond that Huntington Castle—and set out at a good pace for Locksley Village, which lay beyond Huntington at the edge of the forest. He did not walk long; ahead he saw a cart full of cut and bundled wood hitched to a slow-ambling mule, praised Allah before he remembered it was permitted again to thank God in perfectly common English, and broke into a jog.

  The woodcutter, persistently hailed, looked over his shoulder, considered, and obligingly pulled up his mule. Robin arrived, markedly less winded than he had been on his race through the forest, and requested a ride. A cart was not so fast as a horse, but was swifter and decidedly more comfortable than feet which were rapidly blistering inside still-wet boots.

  “Going to Nottingham,” the woodcutter said.

  Robin was not. But that was closer to his destination than where he was currently. “I’ll hop off at the turning,” he said.

  The woodcutter shrugged and jerked his head toward the back of the cart; Robin boosted himself onto the back as the mule was told with a slapping of reins and muttered command to move along again.

  After several pokes in the back, he rearranged a portion of the piled wood and sat more comfortably, legs and feet dangling off the back. He considered removing his boots to see if there was remaining water to empty out, but decided against it lest his feet protest having wet leather put back on. Instead, he occupied himself picking tangles and twigs out of his hair as well as tree sap, working thorns free of his clothing, and inspecting several scratches on his forearms he didn’t remember getting.

  Then he heard hoofbeats.

  He looked up sharply. The approaching horse and rider were bound the same way as the cart, likely to Nottingham, and therefore Robin, riding on the back and facing the way they had come, had an unobstructed view of the oncoming rider.

  He thanked God this time in Saxon, Arabic, and French, just to be certain the Deity understood.

  Robin grinned. With tangled hair, torn and stained clothing, mud-and dirt-soiled hosen, he was hardly the picture of an earl’s heir, a knight, or even a minor landowner. No one would think to find him perched upon the back of a woodcutter’s cart, idling his way along the Nottingham road, even a man the sheriff might otherwise have ordered to arrest Robert of Locksley. And perhaps had.

  He waited until the rider and his horse were even with the cart and very close, paying no attention to the lowly peasant woodcutter and his disheveled apprentice, and then Robin stood up in the back of the cart.

  “Gisbourne!” he bellowed into the steward’s right ear.

  Gisbourne started visibly. Before his mount could react, Robin flung himself bodily from cart onto horse, straddled the rump quickly, yanked the knife from his boot, slung one arm around Gisbourne’s chest to grab the reins, then quietly set the blade at the steward’s throat.

  “Gisbourne,” he said, “I need your horse.”

  “I am a knight!” the steward cried, who had not had time to see anything more of his assailant than a leaping body.

  Robin grinned. “So am I.”

  Gisbourne stiffened, then hissed at the touch of the knife. “You? I think not. Knights don’t ride with woodcutters, hold knives at other knights’throats, nor do knights steal other knights’ horses.”

  “They do if they need them more than the other knights do. But you are not truly a knight, Gisbourne, just a man whose family bought him the title and sent him into the world, where he became a lapdog to William deLacey.”

  Gisbourne was outraged. “Who are you?”

  Robin ignored the question, asking one of his own. “Has the sheriff arrested anyone at Locksley Village?”

  “Locksley Village!”

  “Answer me, Gisbourne.”

  “He sent soldiers there.”

  “Did they arrest anyone?”

  “They haven’t come back yet.”

  He relaxed minutely. Perhaps there was still time—But Gisbourne, who felt the lessening of tension, abruptly sank his spurs deep into his mount’s sides.

  The horse, being told to run in the most emphatic of ways, and being told to stop in an equally emphatic way as Robin sharply reined him in, proceeded to do the only thing left for a horse to do.

  He reared.

  Robin, sitting bareback atop a slick and abruptly vertical rump, slid off unceremoniously, dragging Gisbourne with him, and landed flat on his back as the horse swung around in alarm. Gisbourne landed atop him. The horse, no more content to have two bodies sprawled against his front hooves than giving him conflicting orders about going or not going, attempted to leave. Immediately.

  Like all horsemen who preferred to ride than walk, Robin had not released the reins. The horse, employing far greater weight and power than the man at the end of the reins, backed up frenziedly, dragging him in his panic out from under Gisbourne’s body.

  As the horse moved, Robin flipped over, doubled up, and dug in his knees, but was pulled flat again onto his belly with an oof of expelled air, then onto his side as the horse, responding to the weight that still clung to the reins, sashayed abruptly sideways. Fortunately for Robin, he sashayed sideways into the startled woodcutter’s equally startled mule, which responded to the offense by reaching out a gaping mouth to grab a hunk of the horse’s shoulder.

  Robin, muttering imprecations at the horse, used the distraction to scramble to his feet, whereupon he leaped to grab the bridle and unceremoniously jerked the horse away from the mule.

  Gisbourne was on his knees. Robin, standing at the stirrup of the snorting, rolling-eyed and quivering—but newly submissive—horse, suggested he stay there.

  The steward, getting his first good look at his assailant, stared at him with mouth agape, patently astonished. “Locksley!”

  Robin said lightly, “From one knight to another, I still need your horse.”

  “That’s stealing!” Gisbourne shouted, but by then Robin was in the saddle and departing at a gallop.

  DeLacey waited as soldiers brought the boy up from the pit dug below the floor of the dungeon. It required the unlocking and peeling back of an iron grate from the stone floor, and the lowering of a crude wooden ladder that the prisoner was required to climb in order to get out, thereby putting himself into the waiting arms—or at the waiting end of sword or pike—of the soldiers fetching him out.

  Much was nimble coming up the ladder; he was a cutpurse and quick with hands and feet, so the sheriff knew better than to take no precautions. The boy was grabbed and yanked up at the lip of the hole, shoved unceremoniously against the wall, where his hands were tied behind him. Then he was hauled upright again and positioned before the sheriff, bent elbows clamped in the hard grips of soldiers.

  “Tell me,” deLacey said.

  Much stared at him from beneath lank hair, vacant-eyed.

  The sheriff smiled. “Boy, you may be a half-wit, but the other half undoubtedly understands questions. Tell me where they are.”

  Much made no answer.

  “Where did they go?” deLacey asked.

  This time when Much said nothing, the sheriff brought the back of his gloved hand across the boy’s face. Blood burst from his mouth and spilled down his face to drip onto his tunic. He gasped in shock, eyes shying away as if he were cornered prey; and deLacey, who rather considered himself the predator, repeated his question.

  Bleeding, Much said nothing.

  DeLacey sighed, then struck again. He felt the fragile bones of the nose break. Much stared wild-eyed a moment, and then the pain swamped him. He moaned pitifully, began to cry, and sagged in the soldiers’ grasp.

  “My men took you near Locksley Hall,” deLacey said. “They went into the forest, found you, and took you. The others must have been nearby. I want to know where they
went.”

  Much continued to cry.

  “Boy, I can do more than this. I can break every bone in your body. Is that what you wish?”

  Great gouts of blood painted Much’s face, dripping steadily onto the floor. He was taller now than the sheriff recalled, but quite thin. It would be nothing to shut a wrist into larger hands and snap the bones.

  But he had hoped it would not be required.

  “Where?” he asked again.

  Much, trembling, with tears carving runnels in the blood and grime, said through the blood in his mouth: “Forest.”

  “Where in the forest?”

  “Forest!”

  DeLacey shut gloved fingers upon one of Much’s ears. “Boy,” he said, “I can rip this off your head.”

  “Forest!” Much shouted.

  “Where in the forest?”

  “Don’t know! Don’t know!”

  Which was entirely possible. Questioning of the soldiers who had caught the boy suggested the outlaws had fled all at once and with no apparent direction in mind. If they had believed themselves safe at Locksley Hall, they might not have thought beyond a roof and a meal.

  “Where?” he asked again, pinching the ear more tightly.

  Much sobbed. “Ran,” he said. “Ran.”

  DeLacey opened his mouth to ask another question, but heard footsteps on the stairs. He waited, watching the boy tremble, as the soldier came down.

  “My lord, the Lady Marian FitzWalter is here.”

  DeLacey released Much’s ear and turned sharply. “Marian?”

  “Yes, my lord. She insists on seeing you at once.”

  The sheriff entertained the brief but perversely satisfying image of having her escorted into the dungeon to meet with him, but decided against it. She had been in the dungeon before, had been in the pit before, and likely would not be much intimidated.

  Instead, he glanced at the bleeding boy, then stripped off the one glove. “Put him back,” he said, and as the rope was cut from Much’s wrists and he was shoved unceremoniously toward the ladder, deLacey climbed the stairs. Smiling, he murmured aloud, “I believe Gisbourne delivered my message.”