The Outlaws of Sherwood (37 page)

He ran too, holding the blade a little to one side; and ran almost into Much, who had just felled a mercenary with his staff. “I'm glad to see you,” panted Much, and there was no sarcasm in his voice; but there was no time for conversation, for two more of Guy's men were upon them, and Much took a sword through his thigh. He fell with a gasp, but his dagger was in his hand, and then in the other man's belly, before that other man could make the final stroke. Alan had pulled his stolen sword free just in time to slice into the second man's shoulder. The man dropped his sword and clutched his shoulder, screaming, falling to his knees, and Alan stared, appalled. “
God
,” said Much, hauling himself upright on one leg and against a tree. He snatched the sword out of Alan's nerveless hand and finished the wounded man.

Alan, taking a deep, shuddering breath, turned to Much, who was going white, and started to say, “Your leg—here, we must tie it up for you at once”—when a third mercenary came upon them. He struck first at Alan, who could not reach an arrow in time; Alan ducked and, without thinking, threw up an arm to protect his face—and felt the blade sink into the palm of his hand. Much, faint and wavering on his one good leg, and with no idea what to do with a sword, took a wild swipe at the man, and managed to catch him under the arm, where his chain-shirt did not protect him; and fell down upon his enemy as he drove the point home.

Tuck, holding Simon's staff awkwardly, went on, back toward the chapel, following the sounds of cries and blows. In a little while he heard two muffled cries: one that sounded like victory and one that sounded like loss. He looked around a shoulder of rock and saw one of Guy's men raising his sword for the final stroke as Rafe dropped the two bits of his broken staff. But the man let his delivery linger a little too long, to enjoy his success; and Tuck brought the smooth knob end of Simon's staff down upon the tender place where the neck's tendons cradle the skull; and he saw the bright blood flower around the staff like petals around a stem, in the moment before the man fell. He and Rafe stared at one another a moment, and Rafe croaked, “Thank you.”

“Here—you'll have more use for this,” said Tuck, and thrust the sticky knob at Rafe.

“You're doing all right,” Rafe said, with a bleak smile that reminded Tuck of Simon's, but he took it anyway. He shifted it from hand to hand for a moment for the feel, and said, not looking at Tuck, “Whose was it?”

“Simon's,” said Tuck. Rafe paused a moment longer, and then turned and left Tuck standing.

Tuck averted his eyes from the body of the man he had killed, and reluctantly he followed the way Rafe had gone.

He arrived at the edge of the chapel clearing in time to see the few outlaws that were left on their feet straggling out of the trees to a halt, trying to look as if they had any strength left. Guy and Robin were still fighting, but their steps dragged, and their blows had the stiff, mechanical pace of the practise field. Tuck looked around; four outlaws he saw, but neither Will nor Little John; and he saw none of Guy's men.

And at that moment Robin was a little too clumsy in turning away one of Guy's lagging blows, or perhaps the sword found a weak place at last—the place, perhaps, where it had gouged out a chip earlier—for Robin's staff burst apart with a noise like the end of the world.

Robin made to duck and tumble away, but Guy was too quick for him: victory gave him a last burst of strength, and he seemed to tower over the slight young man he had been hired to kill. The sword drew a line of blood along Robin's jaw till it came neatly to its resting place in the hollow of his throat. Robin straightened up slowly.

“If any one of you takes a step closer,” said Guy clearly, “your master dies instantly.”

Silence fell. The blood drummed in Tuck's ears; but he was sure that no birds sang anywhere in these trees, and he would not have been surprised if he had found that the stream had stopped running. None of Robin's folk breathed.

“Kneel,” said Guy. Robin did not move, and Guy pressed the point of his sword a little harder into Robin's throat. Tuck could see him open his mouth a little to try to get his breath. “
Kneel
,” said Guy, but Robin only rocked back on his heels.

And then, like the bolt of lightning Tuck had not been able to pray for, a dagger came flashing through the leaves—flashing
down
, where Guy could not see it, standing as he stood with his back to one particular tree at the edge of the clearing.

It was not a very good throw. Cecily had had a grisly and painful and terrifying time in the last few seconds, trying to get herself into any position that would give her any shot at all; and then her whole body throbbed so miserably that it was hard to put even her good shoulder into the throw. But throw she did.

And it did what it needed to do. The blade struck Guy's upper arm, below the mail, as he stood with that arm stretched out, and his sword-point pressed into Robin's throat. The force of the blow knocked the point aside, gouging Robin's flesh a little, and Guy was more tired than he knew, for he
dropped
his sword, which he should not have done for so little a thing as a minor flesh wound. He looked, amazed, at the dagger, as it fell to his feet, red with his blood—it was the first blood he had shed this day.

He had only a moment for such thoughts, for Robin's hand slapped up his dagger from its sheath; and Guy of Gisbourne fell with Robin's dagger buried in the place Robin had felt Guy's sword. That little wound leaked blood down Robin's chest to mix with the other dirt and cuts, for it was not the first blood he had lost; and he stood a moment, head bowed and legs braced, staring at his fallen enemy; and he realised his hands were trembling.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

It was mostly over for the outlaws then; and Tuck's work began. Simon was dead by the time they found him, as was Eva; as were Jocelin and Harald and Humphrey. Alan, despite his own wound, had managed to staunch Much's; Much would live, but he would never walk straight on both legs again. Alan might have lost a finger; it was too early to say. It had been only a glancing blow, or he might have lost the whole hand; as it was, there were tendons severed. Alan was perfectly quiet as Tuck dressed it, but when the friar stole a look at the boy's face, he was crying, the tears flowing silently down the pale cheeks. Tuck's own face puckered in sympathy, but Alan smiled a very old smile and patted Tuck's nearer hand with his one good one. “If I am to lose the use of a few fingers,” he said in a steady voice, “why, I must teach Marjorie to play my lute.”

The outlaws who were still hale enough were set to tearing cloth to make bandages—no one was willing to use any bits of their fallen enemies' clothing, which put a strain on Tuck's meager resources—and to digging up the friar's cache of food, and throwing anything that could be made more of by adding water into a pot and making soup. Little John, who came back only shortly before Robin decided to send someone to look for the last two unaccounted-for members of the bloody and bedraggled band, appeared carrying an unconscious Will Scarlet over his shoulder. Tuck, holding his breath, felt the lump under Will's ear and decided the skull was not broken. He turned then to the ugly slash above Will's left knee.

Little John paused long enough to tie something around the calf of one leg and one forearm—pushing Tuck's hands aside as he tried to look at the wounds first—and limped out again. Robin, who had been to see Marian, found him searching in the lengthening shadows of late afternoon for arrows. They collected half a dozen still usable ones of their own; they rejected Guy's shorter, clumsy shafts, of which there were a great many more. When they returned to the very rough camp that was spreading out in front of Tuck's cottage, they brought with them two squirrels and two rabbits, and were cheered like heroes.

By then Robin was limping too, and claimed to be surprised when Tuck discovered that one foot had been half cut off. Robin shook his head. “I don't remember it,” he said.

“You'll know as much about it as you'll want to by tomorrow morning,” said Tuck.

Of those who lived, Marian's was still the worst case, and Tuck had cause to be grateful for this gruesome favour. He used up his small store of candles that night, tending to the wounds of the ten outlaws that were left, while the sweat ran down his face and his eyes blurred with exhaustion. He had no sleep that night, but he did not think this was unfair, for he was the only one of them all who had lost no blood during the past day; and by morning all his patients were at least no worse. A few—Marian among them—looked to be healing.

Tuck was nonetheless luckier than many, for no one got much sleep the night after the battle. Cecily could neither lie still nor move; her shoulder pained her incessantly, and the earthwork's small store of whisky and brandy, which most of the outlaws were happy to apply to, did her no service. She had never tasted the contents of the flask her brother had hung round her neck that day; she had told herself that she would in just another moment, when she could not bear it any longer. Then when that moment passed, she said the same to herself again, and so more moments passed; and then she had seen Guy and Robin in the clearing in front of her tree; and then she had made her way down out of that tree, with Rafe's help, and had given her flask to Tuck. She'd finally tried a sip or two—which did burn distractingly and not unpleasantly on the way down—but then it began to make her queasy.

She drifted in and out of consciousness; her dreams were as dreadful as wakefulness, for she dreamed that someone was pulling her head back to cut her throat, only the pain of it somehow always concentrated in her shoulder. Or she dreamed that her staff was broken and a man with a sword was about to—she awoke with a gasp and a jerk, and the jerk set fire to her shoulder all over again. As the night wore on, she grew more and more tired.… She wondered how Marian bore it so patiently.

“Her time will come later,” said a familiar voice; “it is not so bad for her now because she is too ill to notice so much.”

Cecily's eyes came open. Little John was sitting beside her, one of his knees drawn up and one arm around it; his other leg looked as long as a young tree, and there was a rusty-brown bandage, rough as bark, tied below the knee. She tried to sit up, and he slid his unbandaged arm under her with a dexterity that suggested he had dealt with other people's injuries before: “Aye,” he said, “you do not suppose we outlaws win all our victories easily, do you?”

She smiled a little, and he picked up a cup that had stood hidden beside him. “I did not want to waken you if there was no need,” he said. “But this may help your sleep a little, if only a little, and it will ease the heat of the wound.” She drank obediently, though it had a bitter taste. “What is it?”

Little John made the low rumble that passed for his chuckle. “An old farmwife's remedy. My father used it on sore oxen.… Our village thought him a great man for the remedy, for we had no oxen to spare.”

Cecily said, looking down into the cup, “It smells like what Tuck has been giving Marian.”

“It is,” said Little John. “It is also good for sore oxen. Tuck says he learnt it from a brother of his order who had learnt it from an alchemist in Constantinople, and I say that the alchemist's mother was from Nottinghamshire.”

This did not roil in her stomach as the whisky did, and while it was not exactly true that the pain in her shoulder lessened, it was true that the pain around it lessened, and she could feel the tips of her fingers again, and most of that side of her body felt less hot. “Is your leg very bad?” she said drowsily.

“No,” said Little John. “But Tuck seems to think it won't stop bleeding unless I sit down for a while, so I'm sitting down. I'm not wholly sorry for the excuse; I was forgetting the way of sitting down, these last days. Is the draught helping?”

“Yes.” She sagged a little more against him, almost contented to have her shoulder hurt, if he would stay by her. The pain still got in the way enough that it was hard to think about anything, but there was a comfort in the sound of his breathing as the throbbing in her ears began to ebb.…

She fell asleep, leaning on his chest, and he edged her a little off a particularly painful bruise, leaned his head back against the tree he had propped them up against, and closed his own eyes.

Rafe and Sibyl were the nearest to unhurt of any of the outlaws, and Tuck could not afford to let them rest, although he was pretty sure each of them fell asleep standing up as soon as either stopped moving. Robin and Little John helped as they could, hauling water, chopping wood, even changing poultices; but Little John was limping too hard to disguise and Tuck told him to get off his leg and, preferably, to get some sleep. And shortly after that Tuck put his hand by accident on a bloody axe-handle and snatched at Robin, who had turned indifferently away, pulling back his sleeve and exposing a long slash on his upper arm.

“I don't remember this earlier,” said Tuck.

“No?” said Robin in a neutral voice, and Tuck was too busy to pursue it, but merely bound it up and told him it was time for him, too, to try to sleep. Robin never had to tell anyone of his meeting, weaponless and with an armful of dead branches to break up for firewood, with one of Guy's men. The next day, when the burying began, no one questioned the body of another mercenary.

Robin went often to watch for a minute or two by Marian's pallet. There were several folk in the little half-cavern now, but every time he appeared in the doorway her pale face turned toward him. Sometimes he went in to her; sometimes he did not.

“I plan to go on living a while yet,” she whispered once. “You might as well attend to other matters.”

Dawn came. Tuck and Rafe and Sibyl and Robin fell down where they were and slept.

It was not surprising that they heard nothing.