The Once and Future King (11 page)

‘Ah, don’t plague me about a little thing like that. You run along now, there’s a good boy, and mind you don’t forget to take Kay with you. Why ever didn’t you mention it before? Don’t forget to follow beyond the strip of barley. Well, well, well! This is the first half—holiday I have had since I started this confounded tutorship. First I think I shall have a little nap before luncheon, and then I think I shall have a little nap before tea. Then I shall have to think of something I can do before dinner. What shall I do before dinner, Archimedes?’

‘Have a little nap, I expect,’ said the owl coldly, turning his back upon his master, because he, as well as the Wart, enjoyed to see life.

Wart knew that if he told the elder boy about his conversation with Merlyn, Kay would refuse to be condescended to, and would not come. So he said nothing. It was strange, but their battle had made them friends again, and each could look the other in the eye, with a kind of confused affection. They went together unanimously though shyly, without explanations, and found themselves standing at the end of Hob’s barley strip after Mass. The Wart had no need to use ingenuity. When they were there it was easy.

‘Come on,’ he said, ‘Merlyn told me to tell you that there was something along here that was specially for you.’

‘What sort of thing?’ asked Kay.

‘An adventure.’

‘How do we get to it?’

‘We ought to follow the line which this strip makes, and I suppose that would take us into the forest. We should have to keep the sun just there on our left, but allow for it moving.’

‘All right,’ said Kay. ‘What is the adventure?’

‘I don’t know.’

They went along the strip, and followed its imaginary line over the park and over the chase, keeping their eyes skinned for some miraculous happening. They wondered whether half a dozen young pheasants they started had anything curious about them and Kay was ready to swear that one of them was white. If it had been white, and if a black eagle had suddenly swooped down upon it from the sky, they would have known quite well that wonders were afoot, and that all they had to do was to follow the pheasant – or the eagle – until they reached the maiden in the enchanted castle. However, the pheasant was not white.

At the edge of the forest Kay said, ‘I suppose we shall have to go into this?’

‘Merlyn said to follow the line.’

‘Well,’ said Kay, ‘I am not afraid. If the adventure was for me, it is bound to be a good one.’

They went in, and were surprised to find that the going was not bad. It was about the same as a big wood might be nowadays, whereas the common forest of those times was like a jungle on the Amazon. There were no pheasant—shooting proprietors then, to see that the undergrowth was thinned, and not one thousandth part of the number of the present—day timber merchants who prune judiciously at the few remaining woods. The most of the Forest Sauvage was almost impenetrable, an enormous barrier of eternal trees, the dead ones fallen against the live and held to them by ivy, the living struggling up in competition with each other toward the sun which gave them life, the floor boggy through lack of drainage, or tindery from old
wood so that you might suddenly tumble through a decayed tree trunk into an ants’ nest, or laced with brambles and bindweed and honeysuckle and convolvulus and teazles and the stuff which country people call sweethearts, until you would be torn to pieces in three yards.

This part was good. Hob’s line pointed down what seemed to be a succession of glades, shady and murmuring places in which the wild thyme was droning with bees. The insect season was past its peak, for it was really the time for wasps and fruit; but there were many fritillaries still, with tortoiseshells and red admirals on the flowering mint. Wart pulled a leaf of this, and munched it like chewing—gum as they walked.

‘It is queer,’ he said, ‘but there have been people here. Look, there is a hoof—mark, and it was shod.’

‘You don’t see much,’ said Kay, ‘for there is a man.’

Sure enough, there was a man at the end of the next glade, sitting with a wood—axe by the side of a tree which he had felled. He was a queer—looking, tiny man, with a hunchback and a face like mahogany, and he was dressed in numerous pieces of old leather which he had secured about his brawny legs and arms with pieces of cord. He was eating a lump of bread and sheep’s—milk cheese with a knife which years of sharpening had worn into a mere streak, leaning his back against one of the highest trees they had ever seen. The white flakes of wood lay all about him. The dressed stump of the felled tree looked very new. His eyes were bright like a fox’s.

‘I expect he will be the adventure,’ whispered Wart.

‘Pooh,’ said Kay, ‘you have knights—in—armour, or dragons, or things like that in an adventure, not dirty old men cutting wood.’

‘Well, I am going to ask him what happens along here, anyway.’

They went up to the small munching woodman, who did not seem to have seen them, and asked him where the glades were leading to. They asked two or three times before they discovered that the poor fellow was either deaf or mad, or both. He neither answered nor moved.

‘Oh, come on,’ said Kay. ‘He is probably loopy like Wat, and does not know what he is at. Let’s go on and leave the old fool.’

They went on for nearly a mile, and still the going was good. There were no paths exactly, and the glades were not continuous. Anybody who came there by chance would have thought that there was just the one glade which he was in, a couple of hundred yards long, unless he went to the end of it and discovered another one, screened by a few trees. Now and then they found a stump with the marks of an axe on it, but mostly these had been carefully covered with brambles or altogether grubbed up. The Wart considered that the glades must have been made.

Kay caught the Wart by the arm, at the edge of a clearing, and pointed silently toward its further end. There was a grassy bank there, swelling gently to a gigantic sycamore, upward of ninety feet high, which stood upon its top. On the bank there was an equally gigantic man lying at his ease, with a dog beside him. This man was as notable as the sycamore, for he stood or lay seven feet without his shoes, and he was dressed in nothing but a kind of kilt made of Lincoln green worsted. He had a leather bracer on his left forearm. His enormous brown chest supported the dog’s head – it had pricked its ears and was watching the boys, but had made no other movement – which the muscles gently lifted as they rose and fell. The man appeared to be asleep. There was a seven—foot bow beside him, with some arrows more than a cloth—yard long. He, like the woodman, was the colour of mahogany, and the curled hairs on his chest made a golden haze where the sun caught them.

‘He is it,’ whispered Kay excitedly.

They went to the man cautiously, for fear of the dog. But the dog only followed them with its eyes, keeping its chin pressed firmly to the chest of its beloved master, and giving them the least suspicion of a wag from its tail. It moved its tail without lifting it, two inches sideways in the grass. The man opened his eyes – obviously he had not been asleep at all – smiled at the boys, and jerked his thumb in a direction which
pointed further up the glade. Then he stopped smiling and shut his eyes.

‘Excuse me,’ said Kay, ‘what happens up there?’

The man made no answer and kept his eyes closed, but he lifted his hand again and pointed onward with his thumb.

‘He means us to go on,’ said Kay.

‘It certainly is an adventure,’ said the Wart. ‘I wonder if that dumb woodman could have climbed up the big tree he was leaning against and sent a message to this tree that we were coming? He certainly seems to have been expecting us.’

At this the naked giant opened one eye and looked at Wart in some surprise. Then he opened both eyes, laughed all over his big twinkling face, sat up, patted the dog, picked up his bow, and rose to his feet.

‘Very well, then, young measters,’ he said, still laughing, ‘Us will come along of ‘ee arter all. Young heads still meake the sharpest, they do say.’

Kay looked at him in blank surprise. ‘Who are you?’ he asked.

‘Naylor,’ said the giant, ‘John Naylor in the wide world it were, till us come to be a man of the ‘ood. Then ‘twere John Little for some time, in the ‘ood like, but mostly folk does put it back’ard now, and calls us Little John.’

‘Oh!’ cried the Wart in delight. ‘I have heard of you, often, when they tell Saxon stories in the evening, of you and Robin Hood.’

‘Not Hood,’ said Little John reprovingly. ‘That bain’t the way to name ‘un, measter, not in the ‘ood.’

‘But it is Robin Hood in the stories,’ said Kay.

‘Ah, them book—learning chaps. They don’t know all. How’m ever, ‘tis time us do be stepping along.’

They fell in on either side of the enormous man, and had to run one step in three to keep up with him; for, although he talked very slowly, he walked on his bare feet very fast. The dog trotted at heel.

‘Please,’ asked the Wart, ‘where are you taking us?’

‘Why, to Robin ‘ood, seemingly. Ain’t you sharp enough to guess that also, Measter Art?’

The giant gave him a sly peep out of the corner of his eye at this, for he knew that he had set the boys two problems at once – first, what was Robin’s real name, and second, how did Little John come to know the Wart’s?

The Wart fixed on the second question first.

‘How did you know my name?’

‘Ah,’ said Little John. ‘Us knowed.’

‘Does Robin ‘ood know we are coming?’

‘Nay, my duck, a young scholard like thee should speak his name scholarly.’

‘Well, what is his name?’ cried the boy, between exasperation and being out of breath from running to keep up. ‘You said ‘ood.’

‘So it is ‘ood, my duck. Robin ‘ood, like the ‘oods you’m running through. And a grand fine name it is.’

‘Robin Wood!’

‘Aye, Robin ‘ood. What else should un be, seeing as he rules ‘em. They’m free pleaces, the ‘oods, and fine pleaces. Let thee sleep in ‘em, come summer, come winter, and hunt in ‘em for thy commons lest thee starve; and smell to ‘em as they brings forward their comely bright leaves, according to order, or loses of ‘em by the same order back’ard: let thee stand in ‘em that thou be’st not seen, and move in ‘em that thou be’st not heard, and warm thee with ‘em as thou fall’st on sleep – ah, they’m proper fine pleaces, the ‘oods, for a free man of hands and heart.’

Kay said, ‘But I thought all Robin Wood’s men wore hose and jerkins of Lincoln green?’

‘That us do in the winter like, when us needs ‘em, or with leather leggins at ‘ood ‘ork: but here by summer ‘tis more seasonable thus for the pickets, who have nought to do save watch.’

‘Were you a sentry then?’

‘Aye, and so were wold Much, as you spoke to by the felled tree.’

‘And I think,’ exclaimed Kay triumphantly, ‘that this next big tree which we are coming to will be the stronghold of Robin Wood!’

They were coming to the monarch of the forest.

It was a lime tree as great as that which used to grow at Moor Park in Hertfordshire, no less than one hundred feet in height and seventeen feet in girth, a yard above the ground. Its beech—like trunk was embellished with a beard of twigs at the bottom, and where each of the great branches had sprung from the trunk the bark had split and was now discoloured with rain water or sap. The bees zoomed among its bright and sticky leaves, higher and higher toward heaven, and a rope ladder disappeared among the foliage. Nobody could have climbed it without a ladder, even with irons.

‘You think well, Measter Kay,’ said Little John. ‘And there be Measter Robin, atween her roots.’

The boys, who had been more interested in the look—out man perched in a crow’s nest at the top of that swaying and whispering pride of the earth, lowered their eyes at once and clapped them on the great outlaw.

He was not, as they had expected, a romantic man – or not at first – although he was nearly as tall as Little John. These two, of course, were the only people in the world who have ever shot an arrow the distance of a mile, with the English long—bow. He was a sinewy fellow whose body did not carry fat. He was not half—naked, like John, but dressed discreetly in faded green with a silvery bugle at his side. He was clean—shaven, sunburned, nervous, gnarled like the roots of the trees; but gnarled and mature with weather and poetry rather than with age, for he was scarcely thirty years old. (Eventually he lived to be eighty—seven, and attributed his long life to smelling the turpentine in the pines.) At the moment he was lying on his back and looked upward, but not into the sky.

Robin Wood lay happily with his head in Marian’s lap. She sat between the roots of the lime tree, clad in a one—piece smock of green girded with a quiver of arrows, and her feet and arms were bare. She had let down the brown shining waterfalls of her hair, which was usually kept braided in pigtails for convenience in hunting and cookery, and with the falling waves of this she framed his head. She was singing a duet with him softly, and tickling the end of his nose with the fine hairs.

Under the greenwood tree,
sang Maid Marian,

Who loves to lie with me,

And tune his merry note

Unto the sweet bird’s throat.

‘Come hither, come hither, come hither,’ mumbled Robin.

Here shall he see

No enemy

But winter and rough weather.

They laughed happily and began again, singing lines alternately:

Who doth ambition shun

And loves to lie in the sun,

Seeking the food he eats

And pleased with what he gets,

then, both together:

Come hither, come hither, come hither:

Here shall he see

No enemy

But winter and rough weather.

The song ended in laughter. Robin, who had been twisting his brown fingers in the silk—fine threads which fell about his face, gave them a shrewd tug and scrambled to his feet.

‘Now, John,’ he said, seeing them at once.

‘Now, Measter,’ said Little John.

‘So you have brought the young squires?’

‘They brought me.’

‘Welcome either way,’ said Robin. ‘I never heard ill spoken of Sir Ector, nor reason why his sounders should be pursued. How are you, Kay and Wart, and who put you into the forest at my glades, on this of all days?’

‘Robin,’ interrupted the lady, ‘you can’t take them!’

‘Why not, sweet heart?’

‘They are children.’

‘Exactly what we want.’

‘It is inhuman,’ she said in a vexed way, and began to do her hair.

The outlaw evidently thought it would be safer not to argue. He turned to the boys and asked them a question instead.