Something Red (2 page)

Hob was later unsure of their passage through the forest valley.
Blur,
was what he thought,
Blur, cold, afraid, near to pissed my braies,
in after days, when he tried to remember. There was a sense of pressure on them all the time, like mice at the foot of the owl’s tree, as they hurried along the road that sank to the ford, then through the shallow ice-rimmed stream, Hob splashing shin-deep in the bitter current but too frightened to curse, and up the farther slope.

After what seemed a very long time the road gained the low swells of the foothills, and here came one of the few moments Hob could recall clearly afterward. A spur of black basalt ran down to the road and forced
it to curve around the base. The rock loomed beside the track, twice as high as the wagons. As the ox came up to the bend, Hob hauled back on the lead rope. The corner he must turn seemed to radiate a silent malevolence.

Molly set the brake, reached back into the wagon, and produced a sturdy hazel staff. She climbed swiftly down. She strode forward past the shivering ox, and Hob took a pace back, expecting to be chastised; but she passed him by and strode up to the very lip of the shadow cast by the outcrop, and now here came Jack Brown, the long hammer used on tent pegs in his knotty fist. He had seized in haste what was nearest the wagon door. The lump of iron at the tip of the three-foot shaft was half the size of Hob’s head, and Jack’s forearm was bunched with the effort. With his ungainly rolling walk, his back broad as a hall door, he seemed a kind of troll himself, but Hob was glad to see him between the wagons and that sinister rock.

Molly’s palm showed pale in the gloom: she had flung her arm out sideways to halt Jack’s approach. She stood as though breathing in the forest mist, her heavy body up on tiptoe, the hazel staff thrust in the ground before her. All at once she rocked back on her heels and shouldered the staff. She motioned Jack forward.

The dark man shambled forward past the rock, making Hob think
bear
for some reason. Molly called Jack
artan
sometimes; Nemain had told Hob it meant “little bear” in the tongue she and her grandmother spoke to each other. The hammer looked hungry or thirsty, weaving from side to side like a snake over a dish of milk. Just past the bend, just within sight, Jack stopped still.

Hob felt the hair on his neck prickling. He held to the bridle rope and stood in the middle of the road, waiting for his life to show him the shape it would take.

But Jack darted forward with the hammer, and came back raising on its tip only a bloody rag, coarse gray cloth torn away at one edge,
clotted and caked a reddish black in the center and stained in streaks to the edges. He brought it back to Molly and they stood in the road and considered it like two farmers consulting over a stricken sheep. Molly put a finger to the clabbered mess, raised it to her tongue with a curious delicacy for such an act. Hob turned away and rubbed behind the ox’s ear, a favorite spot with the beast.

F
ATHER
A
THELSTAN
had grown old; Father Athelstan could no longer keep a young orphan at the priest house. When Molly’s caravan had come through a year and a half ago, the bent and shuffling priest had seen a chance to clear himself of his last obligation to the world. From Maeve, come traveling out of Ireland across the Irish Sea, Maeve whom everyone but Jack called Molly, from her he had felt, as the young and the old and the unclever often did, the blunt tide of animal goodness that moved along her bones. The wagons left a few days later with Hob looking back past the high wheels at the tiny chapel, the miserable rutted mud street that ran past the handful of cottages, until that day the whole of Hob’s known universe.

Hob, who remembered no parents, who was too old to be mothered and too young for a lover, considered Molly with a confused awe that veered between love and fear. When he fell ill she wrapped him in skins and brought him heated mare’s milk and herbs. When, as on this evening, she grew fey and terrible, he could not bring himself to look on her. He stroked the curve of the ox’s coarse-haired neck and thought hard of warm stalls, clean straw, stout monastery walls, safety.

T
HE TWO CAME BACK
, Molly plainly upset. With Jack it was hard to tell. Hob’s eyes slid to them, then away. He determinedly observed the
ox’s wide neck; he kept his mind still and muttered
Ave
s. Behind him passed snow-crunching footsteps, Molly’s bell-deep tones, Jack’s harsh gargle. On the road to Jerusalem, far away in the Holy Land, Jack Brown had taken a terrible wound in the throat and another to his ankle: a confused oval of smooth silver scar at the side of his neck as big as a big man’s palm, a ruined voice, a limp, were all the relics he brought back from that hot and haunted country.

“. . . oh there’s craft in it, it’s as bad as I’ve seen, I want us on as quick as quick.” Hob heard Molly’s footsteps returning swiftly. He looked up. She stood over him with a curious strained expression. “
Stór mo chroí,
you must lead on as fast as you may, and mind the road ahead. I’ll watch the forest, nor must you trouble yourself about it.” He nodded stiffly, and she turned away quick and crisp and hurried back to her seat, waving to Nemain to mount the second wagon.

She had spoken to him with an elaborate gentleness and kindness, as one spoke to a spooked horse. It was this that frightened him more than anything so far.

He caught the ox’s bridle rope; as soon as Molly was settled he pulled. Insignificant as Hob’s strength was, the giant stepped forward, obedient but with an unconvincingly furtive air, as it skirted the rock and followed Hob down the track. It had a kind of trust of Hob, after a year and a half in which he had mostly been the one to feed and groom it, and it followed him as one might follow a parent, a sight at once comical and piteous.

They hurried on, slipping on the iron-hard ruts and steel-colored patches of ice, the wagons swaying dangerously; in their tearing eyes the chill nasty wind, in their ears the creak and groan of flexing wood, the thud and clop of hooves on the hard ground, the harsh whistle of breath in the bitter air.

Now, adding to their troubles, the road began to rise steeply. The
beasts began to labor, the brakes were set and released constantly, and the muscles of Hob’s calves and those along the front of his thighs began to burn and grow numb.

A pressure came to Hob. It rested behind his right shoulder blade. He could feel a hard cruel eye fixed on his thin boy’s body, clear as clear, crisp as the clamping grip the shire-reeve used on poachers, just above the elbow: that old painful grip, all lawmen know it, they probably used it on Jesus at Gethsemane. A gaze like a bailiff’s grasp had hold of Hob’s innards.
Nor must you trouble yourself about it.
He looked fiercely at the wretched path ahead; he took another step, the tension on the bridle rope increasing and easing as the ox fell behind, caught up.

In forcing himself on, Hob felt the lock on his soul ease a bit, but his thoughts were all awhirl, too scattered even for a coherent
Ave.
He could manage but a mumbled
Holy Mary, Mother of God,
in time with his steps. Soon the difficulty of the grade and the lull of the chant snared him enough to let him forget the amber eye behind him. How did he know it was amber? His flesh knew it.

Up and up the road wound: oak and yew gave way to fir and claw-needled pine; long ribs of frost-broken stone stood forth here and there; the grade steepened. The land dropped away on the west. They were climbing the western flank of Monastery Mount, that the peasants still called Thonarberg, and the road was narrowing and hugging the rocky slope.

He walked bent forward against the grade. He walked this way for a long time, his right arm stretched out behind him, pulling on the lead rope. Suddenly he woke to his surroundings, as though he had been pacing in his sleep.

Ahead the road passed between two high outcrops of rock. On the east a spur of naked granite, veined with frost, ran to within a yard of the road. On Hob’s right hand, where the slope plunged down into the rift between Monastery Mount and the broken crags and frozen rivers of
Old Catherine to the southwest and the Little Sisters to the northwest, now mostly behind them, a spine of rock climbed out of the gulf and bent toward the road. In the portal framed by these two bourne stones stood a small knot of hooded men.

There were three—no, four—and Hob had a moment when he felt bathed in ice water, before he recognized the rough gray mantles, the closed sandals stuffed with dried mountain grasses, that marked St. Germaine’s Companions, the brothers of the Monastery of St. Germaine de la Roche, with their iron-shod staves, their reddened faces, their bodies hardened from plain fare and the highland winters. Their arms were scarred, their knuckles swollen, badges of their service to their oath: to maintain the safety of the road, from the crude gate the caravan now approached to the Thonarberg Bite, a point just over the crest of the pass that ran, threading through the mountains, along the western shoulder of Monastery Mount.

G
ERMAINE DE LA
R
OCHE
, a gentle soul, born into wealth, in love with God and His works, had it in his mind to build a refuge high in the mountain passes, to gather some like-minded companions, away from distraction, where he could glorify God by prayer, by meditation, and by studying the precarious but tenacious existence of flower and moss in the desolate uplands. It took six years and a substantial part of his family’s wealth to fashion a strong-walled compound off the Thonarberg Pass road, to establish a Rule and obtain the bishop’s approval, and to gather his first set of comrades.

Wells were dug; a flock of mountain goats furnished milk, meat, cheese, and clothing; forays into the lower forests provided fuel and wood for carpentry. Four months of peace followed.

The monks’ tranquillity was shattered in the dead heart of the night by a handful of pilgrims, bleeding and hysterical, battering at the
gates. Close on their heels: banditti from the lower ravines, swinging their weighty saxes, knives that were as long as a tall man’s arm from elbow to fingertip. The monks snatched whatever was to hand, and in the melee that followed, six of the wolf’s-heads were stretched out lifeless in the freezing mud at the gate.

Next morning the pilgrims left generous offerings beneath the icon of St. Luke the Physician, Germaine’s patron, and Germaine gathered his monks. His thin face, beneath the disordered wreath of brown hair tinged with gray, was suffused with a kind of rueful joy. “Comrades, God has held up a mirror to my vanities: He has shown me that in seeking retreat from this sorry world, I have been blind; I have scanted my calling. The apostle John said, ‘Who says he loves unseen God, but who loves not his neighbor standing plain before him, is a liar.’ Brethren, I have been indulgent with myself: love of God is not exercised without travail and danger.” Some of the faces turned toward him were swathed in linen bandages. He beamed at them. “We will forgo our books; we will keep safe the pass.”

T
HAT WAS
eighty-five years ago, and the Monastery of St. Luke was now renamed the Monastery of St. Germaine de la Roche, long gone to his rest. Now as then the travelers were met at the double outcrop by a knot of vigorous monks, armed with their iron-tipped staves, many of them retired soldiers. They were, these days, largely illiterate, but skilled men of their hands, said to have developed a high degree of artistry in the use of their simple weapons.

Hob halted about a foot before the portal. The monk in charge came forward, an older man, perhaps forty-five. Below his robe were the knotty calves and thick ankles of a mountaineer who never takes a level step in a day, and clenched on his staff the knobby knuckles of one who has pounded sheaves of reeds to toughen his fists. Beneath the whitening
brows, surprisingly mild brown eyes regarded Hob kindly; on the monk’s left cheek was a complicated pattern of scar tissue.

“God save all here,” said the monk.

“Amen,” said Hob.

Molly had dismounted; now she came trudging up, the voluminous shawl cast about her shoulders, hooding the heap of silver hair, rendering her modest as a nun.

“Jesus and Mary with you, Wulfstan,” she said cordially enough, although she wore a dire look.

An expression of genuine pleasure replaced the professional courteous suspicion of the warrior monk. “Mistress Molly,” he said.

Whenever she stayed at the hostel the monks maintained, the first few days were employed in easing a host of small and great miseries with her herbs, her salves, the cunning grip of her big pale hands. Brother Wulfstan himself remembered lying on his pallet, a pain like Brother Cook’s cleaver through his left eye, sick shivers, the rushlight in his cell assuming such haloes as the angels are said to wear.

Brother Abbot and the ancient Father Thomas, chaplain to the Order, had come in, and remained to guard against impropriety. To Brother Wulfstan they seemed, through his pain, ghosts or shadows. Next he remembered the wooden cup with a broth tasting like charcoal and thyme, with a vile bitter undertinge. Back, back a long way to the husk-filled burlap pillow; a hand, rough-skinned but not hard in the way that Brother Wulfstan’s own hand was hard, was placed firmly on his forehead, preventing, it seemed, his head from bursting.

In ten or fifteen breaths he had sat up again, the tears of respite in his eyes, as the pain ran out from his body like whey through a sieve. He had peered into the lake-blue wide-set eyes, the round ruddy comely face, the queenly mane of steel hair peeping from beneath the shawl, and begun an earnest
Ave.
After some time old Father Thomas had managed, not without a certain mounting irritation, to convince Brother
Wulfstan that the Queen of Heaven had not left her Son’s side merely to heal his dolors.

“A word with you, little brother,” Molly now said; she herself was perhaps seven or eight years older than Wulfstan.

They paced off the road a bit, leaving Hob facing the little group of monks, their staves grounded in the ice-slick soil, their eyes flat as they studied him. Impossible to stare back at them: for something to do, Hob glanced behind. Jack stood at the side of the road, patient as one of the draft animals. Nemain looked past him at the gate, thin-limbed, her skin blotchy as her blood ignited with her new estate as a woman, her eyes green as spring grass; from beneath her shawl escaped a lock of hair red as apples. His only family, now, in all God’s wide cold world.