The Once and Future King. T. H. White

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ