Outlaw, page 4
part #1 of Robyn Hood Series
“You can’t possibly think of walking all that way alone, what if you are robbed, or gored to death, and what about outlaws and poachers?” The words came back to her, but even as Robyn tried to dismiss the memory of Marian’s complaints, she started to wonder if perhaps if she should have listened. She knew of merchants and farmers being robbed on these roads. Heledd, from the kitchens, had been going on and on about wild men in the woods who’d murder everyone in their sleep. She’d dismissed it as no more than gossip and nonsense but now that she was on her own in the dark, she wondered how true the tales had been.
Robyn had only ever been on the road to Nottingham by horse or carriage and, as the minutes seeped into hours and the sun began to lighten the sky and wake the birds for their morning song, she began to fully appreciate just how many miles the long road to Nottingham actually was.
She cursed herself for not bringing her horse. But then would she have been able to ready the saddle and tack in the dark? Would she have been able to open the gate and make her escape? She made herself giggle at the thought of trying to coax Jasper through the tiny postern door and then laughed out loud at the image of herself riding a horse that would have been small enough to fit through.
A branch snapped behind her.
Arrow ready, she spun around, her heart pounding louder than a church bell.
A stag, magnificent and stately, stood before her, unwavering.
In another life, she would have shot. Struck the creature where it stood and been delighted at her kill. But here, alone in the forest at dawn and without the pressure of the King’s chase and a dozen other nobles on her back, she lowered her bow and allowed herself a moment to enjoy the creature’s presence.
It seemed as if he understood. He stared at her, imperious and dignified, and she couldn’t prevent herself nodding in deference as if to a King.
Then he was gone. Stalking off into the wood as silently as he had approached and Robyn smiled, watching him depart before she turned back to the road.
But there was something else.
At first, she thought it another stag, distorted in the low light.
But it was not.
Rearing up as if on its two back legs, the creature was taller than a man, a thick hide of fur draped over its hulking frame and two great antlers stood proud atop its featureless head. It moved unlike any beast she had seen, its body seeming to teeter like a man burdened with an awkward weight.
Fear clutched at her stomach and the blood drained from her limbs as she shook, slowly raising her bow. Her eyes fixed on the unholy beast, Robyn stepped backwards, her trembling hands and unable to nock her arrow. Stumbling over a root, Robyn hit the ground with a thud that seemed to shock the life back into her. She struggled to her knees as the creature emerged from the shadows to loom above her, swaying in the morning mist, and she choked on a scream as the piercing eyes of a wodwos, a wild green man of legend, stared down at her.
His face, barely visible under the brim of a fur hood, was covered in a mess of thick, bristling hair, his eyes black, his skin thick and tanned like hide, his body covered in the skins of a dozen creatures and perched on top, like the apparition of the Devil himself, were the horns of a long-dead beast.
Robyn felt the cold dread of fear shoot through her body from her toes to her closed-up throat.
No longer in possession of her senses, she scrambled to her feet and, without a backward glance, took off at a run.
Chapter Six
Nottingham Fayre
Robyn had made good time and the sun hadn’t yet reached its height when she first saw the white walls of Nottingham Castle sitting atop yonder hill like a crown.
The sight cheered her and, despite her aching feet, she hurried her step as she walked the final mile up the King’s road. On either side of her, fields of soft, delicate purple flowers filled the air with the gentle scent of heather and the sound of the occasional bleating sheep munching happily amongst the vegetation. As she reached the crest of the road she saw the whole town spread out in the valley below. Carts and people were making their way to the gates from every direction and she could just about hear the distant sound of lutes and players and smell the faintest aroma of hot meat pies as her stomach reminded her how long it had been since her last meal.
But her thoughts were interrupted by a sudden wail.
“’Tis him!” The voice was hollowed out, pained, with the deep stain of grief upon it that bit at Robyn’s stomach. She turned to see two women, one younger than her and the other much older, running towards the gallows. A cross-beam bearing the latest lawbreakers acted as a warning to all those who passed along the road to Nottingham.
“No, Ma,” the younger woman was saying, “Ye mustn’t pull him down, we must leave ’im. ’Tis the law.”
But the mother was tearing towards a lone figure strung from the beam. “My boy! My boy!”
The daughter caught hold of her and tried to pull her back as she fought. “Nay, Ma! Come away!”
As the mother collapsed into the daughter’s arms sobbing, the pair turned and walked back towards the town. Robyn felt compelled to step forward, to say something and somehow offer comfort to the pair, but there was nothing she could think of that might be of help.
In morbid curiosity, she glanced up to the swinging body and froze.
It was him.
The poacher she had met just a few days before. The young lad, in the same rags, and barefoot. She heard his voice begging her to say nothing and realised that someone else had not been so kind. Her stomach twisted and it was all she could do to tear her eyes away and stagger back to the road.
There was nothing she could have done. She knew that. He broke the law and paid a swift price... but she hesitated. Should she have made him take the boar carcass? By abandoning it where it had fallen had she forced him to seek another kill? Was it her fault that he had then fallen into the hands of a less forgiving lord? Was it her silly teasing of Marian, and the arrow she had loosened into the forest, that had caused the boy to panic?
She shook the thought from her head. It was not her fault. She had let him go free.
Yet the guilt was hard to chase away, and she was deep in thought, as she walked the last stretch of road behind the two women mourning their kin.
The town of Nottingham was nestled on a natural rise in the land, and the whitewashed town walls were striking against the greens and purples of the surrounding fields and pasture. As Robyn drew closer to the small northern Cow Gate she lost the two women amongst the growing crowd and her mind was soon occupied by the sights of the busy town on Fayre Day.
The gates were flung wide open and all manner of street performers and sellers of wares were plying their trades. Blankets and rugs were piled high with merchandise; one with leather sandals, another had great wheels of cheese and a woman was happily talking to her customers and allowing them to taste morsels of her wares; there was a scribe with reams of parchment and ink inscribing letters for a penny a sheet; another had a cart of wooden cages each with a bird inside, and as Robyn drew closer she lingered a moment to listen to the soft cooing of the wood pigeons.
Robyn had rarely had the chance to wander as she pleased amongst the sellers of Nottingham Fayres and she had to remind herself that there was a tournament to get to. With great reluctance, she hurried past more vendors, a gaggle of hooded lepers seeking charity, and a man with one leg and a sad-looking dog by his side. As she made her way to the two-storey gatehouse, a sharpened halberd came down in her path.
Startled, Robyn glanced across to the guard who wielded it. Did he recognise her? Did he know she was a lone woman dressed in men’s clothing? Did he somehow guess at her plan to enter the tournament in disguise?
But he merely nodded her towards a smartly dressed clerk already arguing with a group of villeins and cottars over the small matter of a penny admission to the town.
“Ain’t no penny for St Matthew’s Fayre.” A particularly abrupt woman, with long, dark hair and two babes by her side, was arguing.
“Then thou ought to return on St Matthew’s Day. But today ’tis a penny entry or no entry.”
The two were raising their voices and others were beginning to join in. Robyn thought it best to hand over her penny quickly and dash through the gates. Two more guards came charging through the gateway and she turned back to see them breaking up a growing fight; she hesitated before hurrying away from trouble.
The streets of Nottingham were thick with people. Brightly coloured flags were strung up this way and that, hanging over the lanes, and colourful banners were hung from the buildings. The shops and craftsmen had spilled out onto the streets and the sellers called out to passers-by, showing off their reams of brightly coloured woollen cloth in reds, greens, yellows, and blues, and their gold and silver brooches and neck chains. Nobles, merchants, Freemen, young and old, wandered along pausing here and there to examine the wares, while dogs and livestock bayed and barked, minstrels played, women chattered, and children laughed.
At the far end of the lane, high on a raised platform in the market square, Robyn could see six or seven men in bright red costumes and hats performing for the crowd. She darted and dived through the throng of customers towards the stage where she found a good spot to watch the performers juggle and tumble to the sound of a merry band of musicians below.
The smell of pies and melting cheese pulled her away and Robyn searched for its source. A loud, cheery woman was doing a roaring trade at her stall stacked high with pies, and a cauldron of stew bubbled away over a hearth.
“Three farthin’, halfpenny, three farthin’, that’s a penny,” the woman called out the prices, pointing out her wares and exchanging money so quickly that Robyn had little hope of following. As she was pushed and jostled, Robyn reached out and grabbed a decent-sized pie with little clue as to its contents. “Three farthin’,” the woman called and Robyn fumbled for the coins.
She pulled away from the stall and jostled back through the crowd to the centre of the market square. Robyn had forgotten to bring a spoon but it gave her little worry. She pulled down her scarf then tore off the hard top crust and used it to scoop out the still-warm contents of carrot, parsnip, turnip, and the occasional gobbet of mutton drenched in gravy.
She grinned to herself as she wiped gravy from her chin with her sleeve. If her mother had witnessed her consuming her lunch like a starving hound she was certain that Constance would have fainted at the shock of it.
Robyn wished she’d left home even earlier; she could have taken her time and stayed to watch the tumbling acrobatics of the performers and washed down her lunch with a mug of ale, but as she heard the bells of St. Mary’s signal the half-hour, she knew it was time to make her way up to the castle.
She hurried down Moot Hall Gate, usually a quiet lane but now barely recognisable with vendors calling out to her. She was offered a bottle of dark brown liquid that would keep leprosy at bay by a thin, well-groomed man in well-tailored blue robes. There was a series of potters, their wares piled high on their rugs and they sat amongst them offering fine wine jugs and cooking pots.
Her eye was caught by the stall of a bow maker. Hazel, ash, elm and highly decorated yew bows hung from a cross-beam, and various arrowheads were laid out on a trestle table: bodkins, barbed, wide, and narrow heads all finely crafted with sharpened tips. But it was the leather bracers that caught her eye. Arm guards decorated with brightly coloured boars and stag heads in bright inks and threads. She was jostled as she looked and reached out for a particularly fine bracer in a soft green with a white hart inlaid upon it.
“Just three shillin’s,” the vendor, a broad-shouldered man with thinning hair, smiled readily, and she was tempted. But she only had a few farthings left and the single silver coin to enter the tournament.
“Not today.” She shook her head and replaced the bracer.
“I’ll be gone on the morrow,” he warned.
“Perhaps when I win the tournament.” She grinned.
He laughed. “Fair fortune, lad,” he said and waved her off as she zigzagged in and out of the crowd, making her way up towards the castle on the hill.
At the end of the lane was a wide street lined either side with families and young children watching the parade of Green Men and wolves collecting alms for the poor. She paused; the costumes of the Green Men with their long furs and antlers sent a bolt of fear to her stomach as she remembered the creature of the woods she had seen only hours before. She paused a moment, feeling both fearful and foolish; of course, the creature she’d seen had been no wodwos. He had just been a man in costume on his way to the fayre. How could she have been so clod-headed? What child was she that she was scared of merrymaking?
She shook the thought away with a smile of relief and crossed through the parade, handing her last few farthings to a wolfman who must have been sweltering in the August heat in his costume of furs. She barely heard him thank her as she hurried through the parade and towards the castle entrance, nerves simmering in her belly.
Chapter Seven
The Castle Gates
Robyn was relieved to see there was a line leading from the main gate of the outer castle wall, she wasn’t late: they were still allowing contestants to enter. She hurried to join the end and was immediately overwhelmed by the sheer amount of young lads and older men clutching their swords, staves, and hunting bows.
There was a broad-shouldered man up ahead, with thick, tree trunk arms and a four-foot bow. Robyn felt like a child in comparison with her short, little hunting bow and weedy muscles; she would never be able to beat his draw power.
Suddenly she wondered if she had overestimated her skill. Perhaps her father and friends had only allowed her to best them out of chivalry. Nerves twisted in her stomach as she thought of the humiliation of failing in her first fair test. She wondered if she should simply go back to watch the tumblers and pretend she had never dreamed up this wild plan.
But then she thought of returning to her estate empty-handed and seeing her mother fretting and standing by as their home was made forfeit to the Crown. No. She had to stay. She had to at least try.
A richly dressed noble in bright scarlet passed by on horseback, skipping the queue of plainly dressed Freemen and yeomen. Robyn admonished herself for not having dressed in finer clothes and brought a horse; no doubt there would have been no need for her to wait in line if she had. She tapped her foot and peered around the man in front, to the castle gate; it was a long line and slow-moving. If she was too late to enter the tournament then it would all have been for naught anyway.
She tried to think of something else and from her vantage point on the high bridge, she could see out over the valley. Robyn watched the bustle of the wharf far below busy with goods being unloaded in the shadow of Castle Rock. She entertained herself by trying to guess what might be in the caskets: fine mead? Italian oils? French wines?
There was shouting up ahead, and the sound of a scuffle.
Two fierce men, in the red and green of Nottingham, dragged a third between them. They marched past her and along the bridge away from the gates. The man being dragged had a swollen eye but he still struggled valiantly against them.
“The King shall hear of this!” he shouted. He dug his heels into the ground but this did little to halt his oppressors. They dragged the man all the way to the end of the bridge and threw him to the ground where he promptly stood again and continued his admonishments upon their determinedly deaf ears. The parade of wolves and Green Men continued around them.
There was discontented muttering all around. Robyn caught the hushed conversation of two older men with greying beards and stooping shoulders. “Ye can’t blame the man.”
“Aye, but the law is the law: the entry fee stands.”
“’Twas never no fees afore this Sheriff.”
“Aye... but if the Sheriff hath the King’s faith, then he hath mine.”
She watched in fascination as the man continued to berate the unmoving guards until suddenly he pulled a knife. He barely had a chance to wave it in the air before the two guardsmen were upon him, knocking him to the ground.
Robyn stared open-mouthed then glanced back to the other men in the queue, but not one of them paid the fight heed. The man was struck again and again, and even over the sounds of the parade, cheers, drums, fiddles, and flutes his shouts and cries for help could be heard, yet no man was willing to make a move to go to his aid. Why was no one helping him?
He was wilful and disobedient, criminally uncivil to his superiors but this was the roughest turn of justice. Where was the rule of law?
Her feet twitched: she wanted to go to him, but what could she, a young woman, alone and friendless, do to stop them?
Afraid and uncertain, Robyn turned away and, like the others, pretended not to hear his cries.
“YOU.”
Robyn was paying no heed: her mind was still on the man beaten by those rough guardsmen. He had long gone now and all she felt was an awkward mixture of guilt, sorrow, and relief.
“You, the whelp in the ’ood,” the man called irritably.
She snapped her head up as she realised she was being called. A smartly dressed man in a dark green tunic with a black cowl beckoned to her and she nervously stepped, forward hoping he wouldn’t notice she was a maiden.
“Guest or challenger?” His voice was rasping, no doubt tired from a morning spent arguing, and his tongue seemed a little oversized for his mouth, adding to his rough manner.
“Challenger, sire.” She had never realised how light and feminine her own voice sounded; it was high-pitched and reedy. He would notice. Surely he would spot her deceit. She thought of the stable lad, Ned. How did he speak? How did he move?
