Robin: Lady of Legend (The Classic Adventures of the Girl Who Became Robin Hood) (15 page)

Robin’s gaze sharpened on the tailor. How much did he know, or guess?

“The Sheriff has proposed an archery contest,” he went on, “to try and attract men who might be willing to take up his warrant. The prize for the winner is said to be an arrow of solid gold.”

“A tempting reward,” she allowed noncommittally.

“Yes, indeed. These outlaws are reputed to have fine aim, and their leader the finest of all. If ye ask me, I think the Sheriff intends to attract more than bounty hunters—I think he intends to attract the bounty itself.”

“Surely no outlaw would be foolish enough to walk into such an obvious snare,” Robin remarked.

The tailor had yet to take his eyes from her face, shadowed as it was within the depths of her hood. “Indeed, we must hope not.”

She gave the man a small bow of farewell, acknowledging his warning. Clearly, he had guessed who she was and just as clearly, he had no intention of turning her in. It was good to be acquainted with such a man.

“Good day, Master Tailor,” she said, hoisting the sack over her shoulder and heading out the door.

His reply was almost inaudible as he closed the shop behind her, “Good day . . . Master Archer.”

* * * * *

Her men exchanged exasperated glances across the fire. They had been trying for the last quarter of an hour to dissuade Robin from attending the Sheriff’s tourney—without success.

“Robin, ’tis a trap! Eadom—you know Eadom, the innkeeper at the Blue Boar Inn—he told me that some soldiers were in there drinking the other day, and they as good as said so. You will be putting your own head in the noose if you go into Nottingham for this contest.”

“
Tsk
,
tsk
, Lot, will you quaff away all your money?” Robin demanded with mock ferocity, attempting to change the subject. “We will not lend you more just so you can go and drink it all away.”

“Robin, this is serious,” David insisted, refusing to let her divert their concern. “I was there, too, and I heard the same. Do you value your neck so little that you would risk it for pride? Have you thought about what will happen to us if you get caught?”

Robin made a face, instinctively balking at his suggestion that it was pride that goaded her actions.
Well, perhaps it is a little
, she admitted to herself.
But it is more than that. It is about standing up to the Sheriff. He needs to know that he cannot rule me or intimidate me. Flouting him to his face will merely be an added bonus.

“I am certain that you would all survive without me,” she assured her friends, holding up a hand to stave off their protests, “but as it is, I have no intention of being captured.
When
I go to Nottingham, I promise that none shall know me for Robin Hood. Will that satisfy you?”

David scowled. “Do we have a choice?” His voice bespoke resignation.

She gave a merry laugh. “None at all.”

CHAPTER 10

THE GOLDEN ARROW

THE LANCET GATEWAY through the wall around Nottingham Town was crammed with people, all trying to shove their way into the burg. Their discordant voices hurt Robin’s ears and the crush of their bodies made it difficult to move. What little space she had instantly disappeared as a horse and litter wedged their way into the passage, forcing those on foot to squeeze together against the tunnel walls to keep from getting trampled.

As soon as the nobles’ conveyance had passed, the peasants expanded into the gateway once more, carrying Robin along with them. A wave of sound slammed into her as they spilled into the town, making the tunnel rumpus seem like a soothing whisper by comparison.

“Pasties! Get yer hot pasties!”

“Sweetmeats! Barley sugar! Quarter farthing a strip!”

Robin staggered as an overeager vendor bumped into her. Rather than apologizing, he shoved a pasty in front of her face, hollering the price.

Desperately muffling her ears with her hands, Robin stumbled away from the man and towards the leftmost edge of the horde, opposite the current of the crowd. After living in the quiet greenwood for nearly a year, the frenzied commotion and the clamor of peddlers were almost too much for her to endure.

“Certain you will not change your mind, Robin?” David cried, battling his way toward his comrade, his voice barely audible above the din.

She shook her head, but the motion was lost amidst the jostling of the throng; at last, the two friends broke free and stood together in a fallow field, panting hard.

David had accompanied Robin into Nottingham, in spite of her protests, as had Shane, Glenneth, and several of the others. It was their risk to bear, they had argued, and worth the danger to see their leader trounce the Sheriff at his own game; but Robin knew their real motive was to be on hand in case something went wrong. Their concern gratified her, but she still would have preferred they had stayed behind.

At least they had agreed to don disguises. David, for instance, was wearing a farmer’s knee-length tunic. Right now it was crooked from his battle with the crowd, and the skirt had gotten spattered with mud; still, the dishevelment only added to his country peasant look.

Robin craned her neck to see if she could spy any of her other friends—a challenge since none of them were wearing their usual Lincoln Green. At last, she caught sight of Will Stutley animatedly flirting with a flower girl. The poor lass seemed torn between succumbing to his relentless attention and ignoring him completely.

“That boy would try to woo the Queen Mother herself,” Robin laughed, her tone not altogether approving.

“Wooing the Queen Mother would still be safer than shooting before the Sheriff,” David insisted.

Robin let out an exasperated sigh. “David, you are my friend and I know you are just worried, but enough already! My decision is made, and you can either support me in it or not, but stop trying to change my mind!”

“I have always supported you Robin,” David said softly. “You know that.”

Robin felt her ire subside. “I do,” she admitted. “And I am grateful for your concern . . . truly I am. But honestly, David, do you really expect the Sheriff to recognize me in this?” She held up her arms in an orator’s gesture and spun in place.

Instead of her suit of Lincoln Green, Robin was wearing her suit of brilliant red. Over her head was a scarlet hood, and one ragged patch covered her left eye. Only the nondescript quiver on her back, the small sack at her hip, and the longbow in her hand were familiar accouterments.

David gave a rueful laugh. “
I
barely recognize you in that getup. Perhaps this ploy of yours will succeed after all.”

Robin smirked. “I intend it to.”

In order to reach the tournament, however, she would have to navigate the tumultuous crowd once again; the very thought made her head reel. To buy herself some time, she surveyed her surroundings.

She was standing in a field to the left of the town gate—the first in a long series of pastures and houses. Beyond the houses were strips of tilled dirt, speckled with budding crops. The road through the gate traveled straight for a hundred paces before broadening into the town square. Atop a small rise in its center stood a gallows tree, surrounded almost indecently by the stalls and shops of the market. Somewhere in the distance a church bell tolled, and more fields could be seen lining the eastern border of the town. The archery range was to the right of the gate, but it was the tall sandstone ridge just beyond it that caught Robin’s eye. Upon this steep precipice perched Nottingham Castle—the formidable home of Sheriff Darniel.

“Nasty thing,” David said, following her gaze. “People say it is impregnable—the cliffs guard it on three sides, and the fourth wall has only one gate. Well, secure it may be, but I find it horribly bleak—I am almost sorry for the Sheriff, cooped up inside there of nights. I am glad
I
do not have to live there.”

As am I
, Robin thought. There was no comparing a castle’s stone walls and cruel ceilings with the bright and sprightly boughs of an unfettered Sherwood. To think that she had almost been mistress of Darniel’s dreadful fortress made her shudder.

“Come on,” she said, hoping David had not noticed her reaction. “We have a tournament to win.”

* * * * *

The archery range was a long, rectangular field covered with fine fescue grass. Whitewash had been painted on the ground to mark where the archers would shoot from, and six targets were arrayed a hundred paces beyond this line. Each target had been dyed into three sections—a white outer ring, a black inner ring, and a white core—with each section being half the width of its predecessor. At the very center of each target was a small black dot.

To the right of the range, near the town wall, the lords and their ladies took their seats upon wooden risers. Colorful banners streamed from the guardrails, and off-white kerchiefs fluttered in the air as women waved gaily at the arriving competitors. There were no seats to the left of the range, only thin rails to keep the peasants and lower-class tradesmen from spilling onto the field. A wooden dais with a purple canopy stood on the far end of the field; this was where the Sheriff and his party would eventually sit. For now, it was empty.

At the head of the range rose the archers’ tent—a huge, enclosed structure where the participants could rest between bouts. Brilliant-hued ribbons and heraldic pennons fluttered from its roof, a few detaching beneath the talons and beaks of curious birds. In front of the tent stood a small trestle table, and a squat man in purple livery sat behind it, listing the competitors on a piece of parchment.

“Names?” he intoned as Robin and David approached, his gaze already discounting the rough-clad peasant and the one-eyed lad in red.

“Jack. From Tamworth Town,” Robin invented. “My companion is not competing.”

“Then he is not allowed in the tent,” the scribe told them rudely. “He can watch the tourney from behind the rail with the other rustics.”

His brusque tone made Robin bristle, and she opened her mouth to protest his impudence, but David cut her off.

“It is all right, R–er–Jack. Find me when you are done.” He cast an appraising look at the crowd and added, “If you can.”

Robin watched her friend disappear into the throng. Then with an aquiline glare at the scribe, she pushed aside the thick canvas of the tent and stepped inside.

It was like walking into a warren. Over two hundred archers had come to answer the Sheriff’s call, drawn by the generous gold prize and the lure of recognition and employment for those who shot well.

Most of the competitors were examining their equipment for any defects they might have overlooked; their greetings to each other were genteel, but terse—there would be time for talk later. The majority of the chatter came from a score of young men whose evident reason for entering the tourney was merely to impress a lady-friend.

Behind Robin, the tent flap opened again and a herald stepped inside. In a voice trained to resonate over all other noise, he called out the heats for the first round. Each heat had ten men, assigned in the order of their arrival. Since Robin had been the last to arrive, she was in the last heat.

At first, she waited calmly, listening with interest to the sporadic roar of the crowd and trying to guess by their cheers or jeers how well someone had shot. After each heat, the archers would return to the tent—those who had performed poorly to collect their things and leave, the rest to settle down and await the next round. Of those who had remained, some glowed with pride, while others bore supercilious smiles. Robin knew it was the ones who showed no emotion at all that were the greatest threat: content to let their skill do their boasting, they were the ones who had skill to boast of.

As her turn drew near, Robin felt her calm self-assurance slipping away and her heart begin to hammer. She tried to relax, whispering to herself that she had nothing to fear, that she would certainly pass such an early round . . . but in spite of her best efforts, her nerves were stretched taut by the time her heat was called.

Swallowing hard, Robin took her place on the whitewashed line and strung her bow. The crowd, seeing her, began to jeer. Might as well be lame in the hand, they called, than to try and shoot at a target with only one eye—let alone the right eye at that! Was this archer so foolish as to think he could still judge distance accurately? What a jest his effort would be!

So concerned were they with Robin’s eye-patch that they spared not a glance for her mouth—if they had, they would have been startled by the small grin of confidence growing there. They had no idea that their taunts, instead of distressing the scarlet archer, were soothing away her tension instead.

It was true that for most bowmen, being blind in one eye would have been a grave handicap. The left eye especially was needed to sight the target, and without it, determining distance would be nearly impossible. But as a child, the vision in Robin’s right eye had been blurry. Young though she had been, she had logicked that if practicing archery could strengthen her body, then practicing vision should strengthen her eye, and had taken to wearing a linen rag over her left eye whenever she had trained with her bow, forcing herself to use only her right. Though her cousin had teased her and called her the “one-eyed oddity,” Robin had persisted, and within a year her blurring had disappeared, and she had gained the ability to sight a target as confidently with one eye as with two, much to Will’s chagrin.

This crowd is in for a surprise
, she thought.

With renewed assurance, Robin nocked an arrow and raised her bow, drawing back the shaft so that the fletching touched the corner of her upturned mouth. The crowd’s jeers turned to startled cheers as her arrow whizzed through the air to lodge neatly in the white core, automatically advancing Robin to the next round.

With each round she advanced, the targets moved back another fifty paces and the number of contenders dwindled. At last, there remained only thirty archers, out of the original two hundred. Of those thirty, only ten would progress to the penultimate round, and of those ten, three to the finals. Robin intended to be one of those three.