Something Red (24 page)

Hob saw a tensely muscular man, broad-shouldered but lean-waisted, with an impression of enormous energy pent tightly within. A triangular face sloped from wide cheekbones to a chin like a boat’s keel; the deep-set eyes
were blue, or perhaps gray—something light, at any rate. Red hair, more orange than Nemain’s fiery scarlet, grew in a peak a quarter of the way down his broad forehead. The effect, with his taut and toothy grin, was that of a distinctly lupine ferocity, overlaid with a perhaps insincere good humor.

Molly was introduced to him as “Queen Maeve from Ireland.” He made no comment but bowed deeply, in such a way that it stopped just shy of mockery. He welcomed her under his roof; he exchanged pleasantries with Lady Svajone; he greeted his knights and dames Aline and Florymonde.

His speech came in short bursts of eloquence; his eyes, restless, sought the corners of the room, the guards, the firelight, the dogs. Hob, with part of his attention on the table in case he should be needed, nevertheless had time to puzzle over the lord’s strange effect on him. Under the Sieur de Blanchefontaine’s elaborate courtesy seemed to lie some kind of restless humor: fevered merriment, an unhealthy excitement.

Hob had a sense of great wariness. He did not like the way Sir Jehan smiled and smiled, while his eyes glittered in a way that suggested cruelty. Sir Jehan had spoken nothing that lacked kindness—and yet, and yet: the boy thought to himself that being near the knight made him feel as though he were in the narrow monastery stall with Roger’s powerful, eye-rolling mare; as if Sir Jehan might at any moment, at a signal heard only by himself, take a turn toward menace.

“I pray you excuse me,” Sir Jehan said with a bow to the assembled company at the high table, “while I . . . repair my appearance. I have been scouring—” He peered down the hall at the screened entrance through which he had entered. Hob followed his gaze, but could not see what had captured Sir Jehan’s interest. “Scouring these snow-drowned forests—” He swung about, and caught sight of Hob. He looked startled and angry to see a strange face among the pages, an expression that lasted for half
a heartbeat, and then smiling, smiling again. “Scouring these forests for my meat; the results are as you see.”

Hob felt the skin at the back of his neck prickle as it strove to erect the hairs there. The boy, with his excellent recall of things once heard, now could hear Molly, rising from Gold-Beard’s corpse and asking if the Terror ranged the woods everywhere, saying “and it scouring the woodland for meat the while.”

And then Sir Jehan was gone, striding through the archway beneath the musicians’ gallery. The dogs who had come in with him were clustered about the fireplace, where two grooms with pewter basins were washing the blood from their fur. Even sitting on its haunches, the dog nearest Hob was up past the groom’s waist. A third groom appeared with several cloths; the dogs were toweled dry. They bore the treatment docilely enough, although there were a few muttered protests, rumbles in the deep chests that could be heard even amid the noise of the hall.

T
HERE WAS A PAUSE
in the serving; the company rested, and sipped at wine. Hob took this opportunity to lean back on the bench, his shoulders propped against the wall, and gaze about him. Never had he seen such activity, amid so much light, after sundown, not even at Osbert’s Inn.

The stone of the walls was covered with white plaster, as was the custom, and that was covered to a great extent by hangings depicting battle or the hunt, or allegories of love. Above the great hearth near the dais, of necessity bare of cloth covering, the occasional backdraft of smoke had over the months coated the plaster above the fireplace with varying amounts of carbon soot, as though veils of black and of dark and light gray hung from the ceiling. When Hubert saw him looking up to where they reached the ceiling, he told Hob that when the warm weather
returned, Lady Isabeau would decree a whitewash, and the shutters would be thrown open to dry the glistening walls.

Haunches of the three deer and two huge boar that Sir Jehan had brought down were cooked in this hearth and carved at a sideboard; the smaller fireplace down at the western end of the hall was used primarily for heat. More elaborate dishes were still being borne in from the kitchen—actually an outbuilding connected at this level by a short stone corridor from the hall—by a stream of servants: men, young maids, middle-aged women, most in the livery of Blanchefontaine, some in aprons or voluminous overfrocks. They entered the hall laden with food and drink, and returned to the kitchen with empty platters and flagons. They reminded Hob of columns of ants he watched in his boyhood summers.

At one point a young, dark-haired serving-woman wound her way among the tables, and Hob’s thoughts returned with a jolt to Margery. The rapid changes in his circumstances in so short a time, brought home so poignantly, made him feel confused, sorrowful—he hardly knew what. A moment later Hubert’s elbow dug into his ribs, and the page’s hissed warning returned him to himself, and the necessity of plying basin and towel at the change of courses again. He plunged back into his tasks with a sense of relief.

Dish followed dish: soups, pies, roast meat, boiled meat, fritters; sauces flavored with wine, cloves, cinnamon, onions, ginger, pepper, saffron; smoked herring, salt cod, and loaf upon loaf of white bread and dark. There was less variety if no less quantity at the lower table, but still Hob was amazed at how well the castle ate. Molly had the wealth to feed them well, but she tended toward the simple but hearty, a choice all but dictated by their life on the road.

Every so often Hob would dart up to the table to attend Molly and Nemain, cutting meat, offering ewer and basin in between courses, and holding a towel for them to wipe their hands. Then back to the bench,
where crumbs, bones, and mostly empty dishes had begun to accumulate, and where one of the wolfhounds had become an attentive spectator.

M
OST OF THE PEOPLE
in the lower reaches of the hall were those who lived and worked in the castle, and a few stranded travelers, like Molly and Lady Svajone, but of lesser status. There were two villages not far away, according to Hubert, but they were huddled under the drifts of snow, and no one had come from them to the castle, whether to work or to trade, since the storm began.

Food was piled on the trestle tables, simpler fare than was eaten on the dais, but plentiful. The hum of conversation, the rattle of knives and bowls and wooden mugs, swelled into a muted rumble. Children chased one another under their parents’ feet or crawled in the rushes. One or two babies were crying, and two women sat together at a side wall, nursing. Sir Jehan’s huge dogs wandered about, foraging for scraps. Above even the wolfhounds’ reach, in a deep-set window recess, a white-pawed tabby ignored the turmoil; it dozed with forearms flat and straight before it, one paw turned inward, the picture of peace. The shutters over the window heaved and banged in some sudden gust of wind, and the cat opened its eyes. After a moment they slowly shut again.

As the meal wore on, the din from the lower hall grew less: slowly at first, then more and more, people finished their meals, and withdrew, women with children leaving first, then other castle folk. Tables and benches were knocked down and stacked against the walls as they cleared. A few were left not far from the dais, where some of the newly returned men-at-arms lingered over their ale. Hob could see Jack quietly drinking among Ranulf’s squadmates, while Ranulf’s little son, fast asleep, dribbled on his father’s shoulder, until his mother came to whisk him off to bed.

Below their feet, on the windowless first level, were the storehouses,
but above them, two levels up, there was a dorter, subdivided into sleeping alcoves, so that people need not convert the hall to sleeping quarters. Only at the far end of the long room, where the entry guards kept watch by the screen, were cots set up, and curtains hung across recesses, so that the watch off duty might sleep, ready at hand if needed.

A group of the castle’s archers had begun one of their games, games that tested the virtue of hand and eye. Halfway down the hall and against the south-side wall, perhaps fifteen or sixteen yards distant from the high table, was a disk of wood, hung from a beam, flat against the plaster of the wall. The disk was a narrow section of trunk hewn from a mountain pine, perhaps two feet in diameter. The archers threw small iron arrows at it by hand; they soaked the target in water every day to soften the wood enough to let the arrowlets stick in it. The outer rings counted for less than the inner, and the pith at dead center counted most of all. Bets were taken and there was a deal of dispute, but all good-natured: no archer would dare an open quarrel in the hall, for fear of arousing the wrath of the sergeants, or worse, of the castellan Sir Balthasar.

S
IR JEHAN RETURNED
, fresh and clean, in a surcoat of his own murrey, with gold and white embroidery at neck and cuff, blue tunic, white hose; the whole offset by fingers heavy with rings and a pendant of his own fountain symbol wrought in silver. He took his seat beside Lady Isabeau. Food and drink appeared before him, and he beamed at everyone before falling to with a gusto that approached savagery.

When he had somewhat sated himself, though, he began to pick at Molly.

“And this is the charming Demoiselle Nemain, I am to understand?”

“This is the young Queen Nemain,” said Molly quietly.

“Ah, yes,” said Sir Jehan; and then, with not quite a sneer, not quite a discourtesy: “Queen Nemain.”

He tore at the carcass of a roasted pigeon. Before him was a salt cellar. It was silver, and in the shape of a boat with six oars and a sweep rudder, and cunningly made. Sir Jehan reached out and touched it; withdrew his hand; reached out again and moved the cellar along the table a small way, like a child playing at sailing the boat. He fidgeted in his seat; he tapped his fingers against his goblet; he drank.

“Nemain: was that not the name of a terrible goddess?” he asked. “And it means—‘frenzy,’ is it, in your speech? Surely a large fierce name for such a slender maid?” He nodded toward Nemain; it was not quite a patronizing nod, and his tone was not quite mocking; but near, very near.

“It is one of the three names of the
Mórrígan,
the Great Queen, the Queen of Phantoms,” said Molly, now Queen Maeve. Till now Hob had heard only Jack call her “Maeve.” She seemed unabashed, as comfortable as if she were relating a tale to Hob by a campfire in the forest clearing. “It is Her guise as the confounder of armies, who causes armed comrades to turn on one another in their terror—”

Here Hob noticed Father Baudoin: he looked at Molly with eyes widened, then narrowed; he leaned back in his chair; surreptitiously he crossed himself.

Molly’s voice, ever courteous, began to harden, a faint rasp creeping in, “—and when Nemain has come to be a full woman and has come into her power, we will return to Erin, to the place of our kin, and to those who slew our kin, and then it will be seen if her name lies loose or snug upon her.”

Sir Jehan had finished his meat and much of his drink, and he could sit no more. He rose in a swift supple manner, and stood behind his own chair. He ran his hand over the chair back, and then began to pace. He paused by the fire and looked at Molly.

“And you were—a queen, then? Away there in Ireland.” Sir Jehan peered intently into the fire for a moment; seemed to lose interest; bent and looked more closely at the smoke curling upward. He straightened and paced away a short distance, then turned and looked suspiciously at the hearth. Hob wondered again at his uneasy movements. “I have been to—to the Irish wars,” said Sir Jehan. He gestured toward the giant brindle-furred dogs, now stretched out before the fire. “I had three—three things—of Ireland: wealth, advancement. These dogs.”

He moved about again, restless as a stag in autumn. “In Ireland also I have met—hedge kings, sheep-meadow queens. The Irish—each chieftain styles himself a king. . . . Is it thus with you, madam?”

If Molly was offended she gave no sign. She sat at ease as though she were in Osbert’s common room, and she laughed so heartily that even Sir Jehan, prowling about tensely, his legs springy and his step soft, his thumb hooked in his belt by his dagger, his eyes darting keenly here and there, must smile in resonance; but it was a smile that came and went, came and went.

“I am a hedge queen now, truly!” she said. “Many’s the hedge I’ve slept beside here in England, and my rule extends to three wagons only. My lands are forfeit”—here her eyes darkened and the deep sweet purr of her voice roughened to an unpleasant snarl—“and my kin scattered, or worse. And it is true, I was not a grand queen like your English queens, but I was a queen in my own right as they are not, and a battle queen, and a chief to my clan. Someday I may return to Erin, and there gather up what kin may yet live, and find those who have shattered our clan”—she paused as if striving for discretion, but only an instant, for she was exhausted from the struggle against the storm, and she had drunk her share of Sir Jehan’s wine, and her cheeks were beginning to flush—“and shed blood. Be said by me, I will shed some blood.”

At this, Sir Jehan cocked his head to one side and looked at her past his shoulder, as though he struggled to bring her into clearer focus.
“I heard—away there in Ireland—I heard stories—fireside stories, mind you, fireside stories—of battle queens in ancient days; even women who taught war wisdom, and weaponcraft—even the skills of the body, leaping over shields and the like—taught them to warriors,” he said, dropping down into his seat again. He dipped a bread sop absently into a dish of frumenty, then put it down untasted on his trencher; he lifted his goblet of wine; he set it down again. “Trapping an enemy between crossed spear points . . . ”

A page served him from a bowl: cabbage with gobbets of marrow. Sir Jehan looked at the trencher of cabbage; he reached for the salt cellar; he moved it a hand’s breadth to one side on the table. A moment later he moved it back. It was as though life’s candle burned so hot in him that he could not bear to be still for long, lest he be scorched. Abruptly he turned back to Molly. “But surely that was long ago—if ever, if ever—and I cannot see you, dear madam, wielding a weapon.” His smile flicked on again, and this time it stayed, and he sat grinning like one of his hounds, but with little humor in his eyes.