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

particularly take his fancy (although he should be saving it for next quarter day); and
enough to buy the hot fried bread there would be at the goodwives’ booths for
Marian and Much as well as for himself. He wondered for a moment, as he settled
his bow and quiver over his shoulders, if perhaps he should throw the coin he would
need to enter the fair’s archery contest to that hypothetical juggler, and leave his
arrows at home. He hesitated, looking at the tree his last arrow had missed.
He did not hate the fact that he was a second-rate archer; and Much and Marian
knew him and were his friends. But there would be friends of the Chief Forester
shooting too, and nothing would please them more than to taunt him when he stood
up—and to take the story home of how young Robin had missed the mark with his
very first arrow. Robin had learnt that it did no good to answer the taunting, and so
he could hold his tongue; but he had yet to learn to ignore it, and as the
anger—compounded of his helplessness and inability simply not to listen—beat
inside him, it would throw his shooting out. The Chief Forester himself might be
there to laugh his great, rolling, harsh laugh, though usually at such events he
disappeared into the tent set out for the refreshment of the sheriff and his men, and
was little seen.
Robin knew that any story of his own indifferent marksmanship would lose
nothing in the telling. Bill Sharp would be telling it far and wide at least by the next
day—and Robin thought it likely that he would have gone whining to the Chief
Forester to be given permission to go to the fair after all, despite Nobble’s decision,
and would therefore be able to see for himself. There were those who said that Bill
Sharp’s real father was the Chief Forester, and not the farmer who had bred him
up—and sent him off to be an apprentice forester at the earliest possible
opportunity. Robin could readily believe it; it seemed to him that Bill was the Chief
Forester all over again in small, for Bill was a skinny, weedy boy, and the Chief
Forester was fat from many years of living off other people’s labour, and eating at
the sheriff’s table. Robin particularly did not want to miss his first mark, with Bill
Sharp watching.
But Much and Marian would be bringing their bows and would think it odd if he
did not, for they were all to enter the contest. Privately Robin felt that Marian had a
good chance of winning; she was one of those who always allowed for the breeze
that would kick up from nowhere after the arrow had left the string. They might not
like it when she proved to be a girl, but no one would notice in the crowd when the
three of them signed up together, for she would be wearing boy’s clothes, with her
hair up under a hat; and after she won, Robin didn’t think they’d deny her the prize.
If he didn’t enter, Marian and Much might decide they wouldn’t either—he could
hear Marian saying, “Oh, Robin, don’t be tiresome. It doesn’t matter. What is the
prize— a lamb? I don’t particularly want a lamb. Do you? I only came so we could
spend the day together.”
Robin had not told her or Much what his life had been like since his father died;
and this was only too easy a decision to keep, as he had so little time to meet with
them. They knew that his father had been a forester, and a man much admired and
respected by the folk who lived roundabout. Too much respected, in the eyes of the
sheriff, for there were those who felt that Robert Longbow should have had the
Chief Forester’s post; but he had been a quiet man who never took advantage of his
popularity against the sheriff. And so the sheriff and his choice of Chief Forester had
let him alone—in case his popularity might prove inconvenient if anything untoward
happened to him. It had been their great good luck that he had died so suddenly of
the winter catarrh; but he had driven himself very hard since his wife died, and was