"Robin McKinley - The Outlaws of Sherwood" - читать интересную книгу автора (McKinley Robin)

fame as a fletcher. He would rather have had any local fame, however slight, as an
archer. But the money was useful; as one of the youngest sub-apprentice foresters in
the King’s Forest of Nottingham, he barely earned coin enough to feed himself—in
fact he didn’t earn even that, and he was struggling as well to keep title to his father’s
small holding. Every quarter saw him in rising panic as the time for the rents grew
near.
Fortunately for his peace of mind, Robin was usually too busy, and too short on
sleep and food, to have time and energy for thinking. And he was young and strong
and still hopeful; this Chief Forester, who sent him on all the most disagreeable
tasks, was old, and might be expected to die or at least to retire some day soon.
With some luck the new Chief Forester, although inevitably another sheriff’s man,
might not hate young Robin for the sake of his mother, who had had the excellent
sense to marry another man.
Today Robin had the great fortune to be free to go to the Nottingham Fair, and
perhaps his holiday meant his luck was looking up at last. It was old Nobble, who
had worked with his father as a friend, who had had the duty to decide which of the
younger men might have the day to go to the fair. He had had the wisdom not to
choose Robin first, for Bill Sharp, who was the Chief Forester’s spy among the
young men, was watching eagerly; but Robin knew as soon as Nobble’s eye fell on
him that he was to be permitted to go. He had to stop the smile that wanted to
spread across his face from appearing till his name was called— a cautious third. Bill
Sharp’s name was not called at all, and that made Robin’s happiness even greater.
Robin was to meet Marian and Much at the fair, and they would see the sights
together: the jugglers and the players, the wrestlers and the knife-throwers. There
would be no knights’ contests. The best knights did not care to display themselves
at so mercantile an event as the Nottingham Fair, much to the sheriff’s chagrin, for
the sheriff was vain of his town and his place in it. But his love of gold invariably
won over even his love of pomp and ceremony; and while the sheriff said aloud that
he was not willing to lay on a tourney that the best would not attend—for petty,
illogical reasons that Nottingham need not concern itself with—the truth of it was
that he was not willing to lay on a tourney that would end up costing him a great deal
of money. He did consider, twice a year, as fair time approached, the
noble—possibly even royal— favour he might curry by a fine tournament. But—as
he told himself—royal favour was a notoriously chancy (and expensive) thing and at
best a long-term one; and the sheriff of Nottingham had a short-term mind.
But the three friends did not care for such things, although Marian often heard
gossip about them, and had many times made Much and Robin laugh till their sides
hurt with her deadly imitations of the sheriff and his society. Once Robin said to her,
“But your stories are second- and third-hand. How do you know?”
“I don’t,” said Marian cheerfully. “But I’m a good guesser— and a good actor,
am I not?”
Robin said teasingly, “I will tell you what you already know only if you promise
that you will not run off with a band of wandering players.”
“I will not have to,” replied Marian, “so long as evading my father’s questions
when I wish to spend a day with you continues to exercise my talents so usefully.
Come; Much will think we have fallen in a hole,” and she ran off ahead of him before
he could speak again.
There had been little enough time for the three of them to be together in the last
months; but the fair was going to make up for all that. They would look in the stalls
and admire the trinkets for sale, the bright cloth, the raw wool and flax, the charms