Outlaw (2 page)

The warning words of the village priest rang loud in Robin’s head. “With a wolf, you walk away slowly, and he’ll leave you alone. With a bear you look him in the eye and stay still. But pray you never ever see an Outlaw. If you do, then run for your life. Outlaws are child-eaters. Outlaws are blood-suckers.” There was nowhere to run to, and no time either. Robin was soon surrounded by half a dozen Outlaws who were plucking at his sleeve and grinning up at him. There was a wildness in their eyes that alarmed him at first, but then he saw that
they were smiling eyes. These were no cut-throats. These were no child-eaters. They were reaching up and touching his hair, his ears. But their touches were gentle, inquisitive. Marion was there beside him. One or two of them were babbling incoherently.

“What are they saying?” Robin asked.

“They’re just happy you’re with us, can’t you tell?”

“Can’t they speak?”

“Course they can, but not like you or me. The sheriff caught them. He had their tongues out – for the sport of it.” Then the hunchback who had first spoken to him was limping towards him.

“I’m Will Scarlett,” he said, holding out his hand. “You’re welcome, Robin. Let’s get you home.”

And so Robin was led away into the forest by his escort of Outlaws. They went at a run, but silently. Not a twig cracked, not a leaf rustled. All around him the forest flitted with darting shadows.
They were coming too, all of them. He looked everywhere for Marion, but could not see her. All day it seemed they travelled on, down deer tracks he never knew, and deeper into the forest than he had ever been in his life. It was evening before they came to a cliff face that rose sheer out of the forest. It didn’t stop them. They plunged suddenly into the darkness of what seemed to be a vast cave. Then they were running along a tunnel towards a pinprick of light the other end, out across a clearing, down a ravine and into thick forest again. When at long last they stopped, they stood still, breathing hard and listening.

Before Robin knew it, clamouring children were running towards him out of the trees. Many of those had Marion’s white hair and pink eyes, and one hobbled along behind the others on a crutch, his leg twisted inwards. There were lepers too, Robin
saw, faces and fingers eaten away by the disease. He shied away, trying to fend them off, and was relieved to see Marion coming towards him. She took his hand and made off with him, shooing the children back.

They ate wild pig that night, all of them sitting in the shadows of a great crackling fire, but Robin had no stomach for it. It was not just that he felt their eyes watching him all the time, though that was part of it.

“You don’t speak and you don’t eat,” said Will Scarlett. “What’s the matter?”

“They’ll hang him, won’t they? My father, they’ll hang him. You were there, weren’t you? You saw it all. She said you did. Why didn’t you help?”

“How?” said Will Scarlett. “With what? Would you have us fight with our bare hands against armed soldiers? You hurled your dagger and you ran. If
you hadn’t then you’d be in Nottingham tonight and tomorrow morning they’d be stretching your neck alongside your father. How would that help? Tell me that. Your father’s a good man, Robin, known everywhere in the forest for his kindness. And he’s a wise man too. He told you to run, didn’t he? He knows what we know, that to survive is everything. We have to survive. Until good King Richard comes back from his crusade and brings us justice, we have to survive.”

“So we wait, do we?” Robin protested. “We just wait until the king decides to come back. Meanwhile Guy of Gisbourne starves my mother to death and the Sheriff of Nottingham hangs my father. You wait if you like. I will not wait.” He hurled his meat into the fire. “I will eat nothing until either my father is safe here in the forest, or I am dead.”

Will Scarlett reached forward and gripped Robin by the wrist. “Do you think you are the only one to suffer at this butcher’s hands? Look around you, Robin. A motley bunch of misfits, aren’t we? There’s every mutation you could imagine here. There’s me, a hunchback, and there’s half a dozen more the same. There’s white-haired cagots, albinos, call them what you will, like Marion. There’s simple folk who talk to the moon in puddles. There’s lepers, there’s one-legged beggars. Blind, deaf, dumb – we’re all here, all misfits, all Outlaws. And why do you suppose we’re here? Well, I’ll tell you. Until the sheriff came most of us lived in Nottingham as others live. Oh yes, they’d laugh at us, curse us, throw their stones at us, but when you’re like we are, you have to put up with that. Water off a duck’s back. But the new sheriff wanted us out. Human vermin, he called us. The work of the devil. And
there were plenty of greedy priors and grasping abbesses to tell him he was right – if he paid them enough. To all of them, we were rats to be driven out. And he did it all legally too. After all, it’s the sheriff that makes the laws, isn’t it? He’s the king’s man in Nottingham. His word is the king’s word and must be obeyed. First we weren’t allowed to hold property in Nottingham. I was a tailor, and a good one. They closed me down. Then we weren’t allowed to sleep within the city walls. We could work by day, but every night they drove us out of the city and closed the gates. If you were caught inside after nightfall, you had your tongue pulled out. Winter nights were cold in the forest. A few risked it, and hid in Nottingham. They lost their tongues for their pains. But he hadn’t finished with us, oh no. He passed another law: all ‘Outlaws’ – he had a name for us now – were not to be allowed
back in the city at all. So we left family, friends, everything and everyone, and we came here to live in the forest. The monks and priests put it about in the pulpits that we are devil-worshippers, child-eaters, blood-suckers – I see you’ve heard the stories too. So we live here and we survive. We have become creatures of the forest, creatures of the dark. And we wait for the king to come, for the justice we deserve. If we fight them in the open, then they will destroy us. They are too many and too strong. So we rob what we need. The sheriff’s men look for us, but they cannot find us. We have lookouts all over Sherwood. If anyone comes into the forest, we know it. That’s why we were there this morning.” Will Scarlett held up his father’s great bow. “Here, your father dropped this. I found it. It’s yours now, Robin.”

Robin took his father’s bow and held it in both
hands. When he spoke, he spoke so softly through his tears that they had to strain to listen. “I cannot sit here with you, warm by the fire, and think of Father alone and cold in his dungeon. My father cannot wait for the king’s justice.” He lifted his head. “I will not hide away like a rabbit all my life, bolting for my hole at the first sign of the sheriff’s men.” He saw the hurt come into Will Scarlett’s eyes and at once wished he had not spoken to harshly. “I did not mean it like that,” he went on. “You must do what you must do, and I must try to save Father. All I ask is that you lend me a dagger and some arrows, and set me on the road to Nottingham. I will do the rest myself.”

Will Scarlett stood up and took Robin by the shoulders. “Any man would be proud to have a son like you,” he said, and he gave him his dagger. “Here, have this. And you have all the arrows you
could want. Marion will take you to the road. God go with you, Robin.”

Marion led the way up the ravine, across the clearing, through the black of the cave and out into the forest beyond. She was light on her feet and fast, so fast that she was often far in front of him. Robin would have lost sight of her entirely were it not for her white hair moving through the trees ahead, like the moon dancing over water. Robin was beginning to wonder how much further they would have to go when he saw her stop suddenly and crouch down in the undergrowth. He crouched beside her.

“Cross the stream ahead and follow the track,” Marion whispered. “You’ll be in Nottingham by dawn.” Robin made to go, but she held him back. “Whatever happens,” she said, “you will come back to the forest, won’t you?” Robin looked into her
eyes and could scarcely bring himself to look away. He saw the fierce faith in them. She believed in him, believed in him utterly.

“I’ll come back,” he said. “And when I do, I’ll bring Father with me.”

And he left her there without another word and ran off into the night. They were brave words but Robin felt far from brave. The thought of what he now had to do was daunting. He knew Nottingham. He had lived there as a little boy and been there often enough since, driving pigs or sheep to the market with his father. He had often gazed up at the great walls of the castle and seen the barred windows of the dungeons on the far side of the moat, white fingers gripping the bars. He had seen the cages in the marketplace where the prisoners were brought to be mocked and abused all morning long, before they hanged them at noon. The sheriff’s
men would be everywhere, lolling on street corners, roaming the streets in gangs, filling the taverns. There were hundreds of them and they would be armed to the teeth. Even now, as Robin came out of Sherwood into the light of morning and saw the walls of the city rising from the mist in the distance, he had no notion of how he would set about finding his father, still less how he would spirit him away out of Nottingham.

Over the next rise and he would see the gibbet by the bridge. Already he could see a few crows perched on a dead branch in a nearby oak tree, waiting. Here was where his father would be brought afterwards, after they had hanged him in the market square. Then, and only then, a terrible thought came into Robin’s mind. Perhaps they had done it already. Usually they would do it at midday when the market square was crowded. They would
haul the prisoner out of the cage and drag him screaming across the square, hang him and leave him there for an hour or two, and then bring him down to the gibbet. But maybe they had done it yesterday. Maybe they had taken him back to Nottingham and hanged him at once. Why else would the crows be there?

“No!” Robin cried aloud. “No!” And he ran down the hill, his legs pounding, head back, tears streaming down his face, praying and praying he was not too late. The mist lay thick along the riverbanks. There was no river to see, no bridge and no gibbet. He could barely see the road in front of him now.

The horse loomed suddenly out of the mist. Robin was going so fast he had no hope of stopping. He careered into the animal at full speed. The horse reared up, throwing his rider out of the saddle. As
the mist lifted, the horse was cropping the grass busily beside the gibbet. Two men lay stretched out and senseless on the road. Robin woke, his head throbbing, and sat up. Above him he saw the gibbet, stark against the morning sky, and below it lay a soldier, still unconscious. He looked to Robin like one of the sheriff’s men.

“Maybe you were heaven sent,” he breathed. “My size too, and a sword and a horse. All I could want.”

He left the soldier trussed up and gagged under the bridge, and emerged dressed in the mail and helmet of a sheriff’s man, a sword at his side, his father’s bow over his shoulder. The horse was eating still and easy enough to catch. The gates of Nottingham were open when Robin got there; and from all around, people came streaming in for the market. Carried along by the crush of cattle and
sheep and pigs and people, Robin rode up the narrow streets and into the market square. As expected, there were sheriff’s men loitering by the castle gates and the market traders were setting out their stalls around the square. The scaffold stood in the centre of it, the hanging rope swinging in the breeze. He had hoped to find his father already in one of the cages – it would have helped – but they were all empty. Robin was sitting on his horse looking into the last of them, when a voice spoke up from behind him. “They tell me there’s only one this morning for the rope. Killed the king’s deer, he did. Not likely to be killing any more, is he? Poor beggar. Still, be a nice day for a hanging. I never miss one, you know. Never.” The man squinted up at Robin, shielding his eyes against the white glare of the sun. Robin left him and rode over the drawbridge into the castle courtyard. He
did not think twice about what he was doing. In fact, he did not think about it at all. He just did it.

The courtyard was full of soldiers, and a smith was shoeing from a smoky shed nearby. Robin tied up his horse and strode into the castle. He tried to look as if he knew where he was, all the time searching for a stairway that might lead him down to the dungeons below. No one challenged him. No one even appeared to notice he was there. He saw two soldiers emerging from a narrow doorway below the main staircase. As he passed them, one of them spoke. “Like Samson. Sheriff’s own words.”

“Sheriff’s idea was it then?”

“I heard it was Guy of Gisbourne,” said the other. “He said that if this fellow was big like Samson, well then, maybe we’d better treat him like Samson. He did it himself by all accounts.” Robin’s heart
chilled. The stone stair spiralled down into the darkness, lit only sparingly by torchlight. He came to a long corridor, two guards at the end of it, sitting at a table playing dice. Robin walked towards them, hand on the hilt of his sword.

“You come for Samson?” said one of the guards. And he didn’t even wait for a reply. He threw him the key.

“In there,” he said, pointing Robin to one of the dungeon doors. “Help yourself. He’ll hang well, that one. Good and heavy.” And they went back to the dice.

Robin unlocked the door and went in. His father sat on the stone floor, his head in his hands. When he looked up, Robin saw there was a bandage around his eyes and a rope around his neck. Robin crouched down beside him and helped him gently to his feet. “It’s me, Father,” he whispered. “It’s
Robin.” His father reached out, felt for Robin’s face and held it tight between his hands.

“They’ve put out my eyes, Robin,” he said. “I’m no use to you any more, no use to anyone. Let me die, Robin. Just leave me and let me die.”