The Once and Future King

Chapter X

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.

‘Can you shoot?’

‘Trust me,’ said the Wart.

‘I can try,’ said Kay, more reserved, as they laughed at the Wart’s assurance.

‘Come, Marian, let them have one of your bows.’

She handed hum a bow and half a dozen arrows twenty-eight inches long.

‘Shoot the popinjay,’ said Robin, giving them to the Wart.

He looked and saw a popinjay five-score paces away. He guessed that he had been a fool and said cheerfully, ‘I am sorry, Robin Wood, but I am afraid it is much too far for me.’

‘Never mind,’ said the outlaw. ‘Have a shot at it. I can tell by the way you shoot.’

The Wart fitted his arrow as quickly and neatly as he was able, set his feet wide in the same line that he wished his arrow to go, squared his shoulders, drew the bow to his chin, sighted on the mark, raised his point through an angle of about twenty degrees, aimed two yards to the right because he always pulled to the left in his loose, and sped his arrow. It missed, but not so badly.

‘Now, Kay,’ said Robin.

Kay went through the same motions and also made a good shot. Each of them had held the bow the right way up, had quickly found the cock feather and set it outward, each had taken hold of the string to draw the bow – most boys who have not been taught are inclined to catch hold of the nock of the arrow when they draw, between their finger and thumb, but a proper archer pulls back the string with his first two or three fingers and lets the arrow follow it – neither of them had allowed the point to fall away to the left as they drew, nor struck their left forearm with the bow-string – two common faults with people who do not know – and each had loosed evenly without a pluck.

‘Good,’ said the outlaw. ‘No lute-players here.’

‘Robin,’ said Marian, sharply, ‘you can’t take children into danger. Send them home to their father.’

‘That I won’t,’ he said, ‘unless they wish to go. It is their quarrel as much as mine.’

‘What is the quarrel?’ asked Kay.

The outlaw threw down his bow and sat cross-legged on the ground, drawing Maid Marian to sit beside him. His face was puzzled.

‘It is Morgan le Fay,’ he said. ‘It is difficult to explain her.’

‘I should not try.’

Robin turned on his mistress angrily. ‘Marian,’ he said. ‘Either we must have their help, or else we have to leave the other three without help. I don’t want to ask the boys to go there, but it is either that or leaving Tuck to her.’

The Wart thought it was time to ask a tactful question, so he made a polite cough and said: ‘Please, who is Morgan the Fay?’

All three answered at once.

‘She’m a bad ’un,’ said Little John.

‘She is a fairy,’ said Robin.

‘No, she is not,’ said Marian. ‘She is an enchantress.’

‘The fact of the matter is,’ said Robin, ‘that nobody knows exactly what she is. In my opinion, she is a fairy.

‘And that opinion,’ he added, staring at his wife, ‘I still hold.’

Kay asked: ‘Do you mean she is one of those people with bluebells for hats, who spend the time sitting on toadstools?’

There was a shout of laughter.

‘Certainly not. There are no such creatures. The Queen is a real one, and one of the worst of them.’

‘If the boys have got to be in it,’ said Marian, ‘you had better explain from the beginning.’

The outlaw took a deep breath, uncrossed his legs, and the puzzled look came back to his face.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘suppose that Morgan is the queen of the fairies, or at any rate has to do with them, and that fairies are not the kind of creatures your nurse has told you about. Some people say that they are the Oldest Ones of All, who lived in England before the Romans came here – before us Saxons, before the Old Ones themselves – and that they have been driven underground. Some say they look like humans, like dwarfs, and others that they look ordinary, and others that they don’t look like anything at all, but put on various shapes as the fancy takes them. Whatever they look like, they have the knowledge of the ancient Gaels. They know things down there in their burrows which the human race has forgotten about, and quite a lot of these things are not good to hear.’

‘Whisper,’ said the golden lady, with a strange look, and the boys noticed that the little circle had drawn closer together.

‘Well now,’ said Robin, lowering his voice, ‘the thing about these creatures that I am speaking of, and if you will excuse me I won’t name them again, is that they have no hearts. It is not so much that they wish to do evil, but that if you were to catch one and cut it open, you would find no heart inside. They are cold-blooded like fishes.’

‘They are everywhere, even while people are talking.’

The boys looked about them.

‘Be quiet,’ Robin said. ‘I need not tell you any more. It is unlucky to talk about them. The point is that I believe this Morgan is the queen of the – well – of the Good Folk, and I know she sometimes lives in a castle to the north of our forest called the Castle Chariot. Marian says that the queen is not a fairy herself, but only a necromancer who is friendly with them. Other people say that she is a daughter of the Earl of Cornwall. Never mind about that. The thing is that this morning, by her enchantments, the Oldest People of All have taken prisoner one of my servants and one of yours.’

‘Not Tuck?’ cried Little John, who knew nothing of recent developments because he had been on sentry duty.

Robin nodded. ‘The news came from the northern trees, before your message arrived about the boys.’

‘Alas, poor Friar!’

‘Tell how it happened,’ said Marian. ‘But perhaps you had better explain about the names.’

‘One of the few things we know,’ said Robin, ‘about the Blessed Ones, is that they go by the names of animals. For instance, they may be called Cow, or Goat, or Pig, and so forth. So, if you happen to be calling one of your own cows, you must always point to it when you call. Otherwise you may summon a fairy – a Little Person I ought to have said – who goes by the same name, and, once you have summoned it, it comes, and it can take you away.’

‘What seems to have happened,’ said Marian, taking up the story, ‘is that your Dog Boy from the castle took his hounds to the edge of the forest when they were going to scombre, and he happened to catch sight of Friar Tuck, who was chatting with an old man called Wat that lives hereabouts –’

‘Excuse us,’ cried the two boys, ‘is that the old man who lived in our village before he lost his wits? He bit off the Dog Boy’s nose, as a matter of fact, and now he lives in the forest, a sort of ogre?’

‘It is the same person,’ replied Robin, ‘but – poor thing – he is not much of an ogre. He lives on grass and roots and acorns, and would not hurt a fly. I am afraid you have got your story muddled.’

‘Fancy Wat living on acorns!’

‘What happened,’ said Marian patiently, ‘was this. The three of them came together to pass the time of day, and one of the hounds (I think it was the one called Cavall) began jumping up at poor Wat, to lick his face. This frightened the old man, and your Dog Boy called out, “Come here, Dog!” to make him stop. He did not point with his finger. You see, he ought to have pointed.’

‘What happened?’

‘Well, my man Scathelocke, or Scarlett, as they call him in the ballads, happened to be woodcutting a little way off, and he says that they vanished, just vanished, including the dog.’

‘My poor Cavall!’

‘So the fairies have got them.’

‘You mean the People of Peace.’

‘I am sorry.

‘But the point is, if Morgan is really the Queen of these creatures, and if we want to get them away before they are enchanted – one of their ancient Queens called Circe used to turn the ones she captured into hogs – we shall have to look for them in her castle.’

‘Then we must go there.’