Something Red (26 page)

Sir Jehan had two fine sets of chessmen, one from the south of Italy, very skillfully carved in elephant ivory, the queens reclining on thrones with three cushions, arched backs, decorated armrests. The other set was French, of deer bone, lacking the skill of the Italian carving but still elaborate. Wooden pieces, much more crude, filled the three or four positions where the originals had broken.

Lots were drawn, and Molly was matched first against Sir Walter, who said little as was his wont; he contemplated the board with his elbow propped on the table and a large hand covering his mouth, as she steadily destroyed his forces.

In the other group’s first match, Dame Aline, faced with Sir Estienne, prevailed despite several mistakes midgame; there was some whispered jesting about an excess of Continental chivalry on the French knight’s part. Dame Florymonde defeated her handily, and persisted as champion through several rounds, till Sir Tancred overcame her.

Hob had a good view of the games’ progress, although he understood little of how it was played. He was kept busy refilling Molly’s winecup; Molly as always drank deeply, although there was little apparent effect on her, except perhaps heightened color and a readiness to laughter. One of the giant Irish hounds had come and put its heavy head on her thigh, rolling its eyes upward and sideways to watch her face. She sat and played chess with one hand, while the other toyed with the monster’s ears.

Eventually Molly was left with Sir Balthasar as the last opponent on her side; the other team had come down to Sir Jehan and Sir Alain, the brother of Tancred. Molly sat back and took a pastry from an attendant page, and Sir Balthasar set down his wine and came over to the hearthside chess tables.

Dame Aline leaned toward Molly and said, with mock seriousness, “Madam, ’ware that he does not bang upon the table when losing, and so upset the pieces, and so escape the battle.”

Hob looked quickly at the dread castellan and saw to his astonishment a meek, almost abashed, grin on the dark hard features, and a rolling of his eyes toward the ceiling. “Aline . . . ” he began, and then just shook his head.

Sir Balthasar took his place opposite Molly and picked up the die to roll for first move; the chair creaked beneath his bulk.

“The bane of all chairs,” said Dame Aline, with a merry laugh. Sir Balthasar gave her a look of mock ferocity.

“Perhaps a new charge on his shield: a broken chair,
sable,
on a field of
or,
” said Lady Isabeau, sober-faced, with not a quirk of the lips to indicate a jest. Dame Aline began to giggle. A moment later Lady Isabeau added, “Le Chevalier de les Chaises.”

But this was too much for Dame Aline, who looked from her husband to Lady Isabeau’s expressionless face and back again, and exploded with helpless laughter.

Determinedly Sir Balthasar rolled, producing a five; Molly threw a three. At this time the combatant with the first move chose the color of his pieces: the castellan chose white, and Molly reached for those stained a deep dark brown.

There was a moment or two when there was just the clack of the deer-bone pieces being set in place on the board. Then: “If he is hard on chairs, what must he be upon a mattress?” said Lady Isabeau in a musing tone, with the same sober innocent pondering expression.

This set Dame Aline off again, and finally she managed to gasp, “I have a great deal of sisterly feeling for yon chair,” before becoming utterly overcome with merriment.

At this point even staid elderly Dame Florymonde pressed her
napkin to her lips; her face grew red and her eyes began to tear, while little snorts and gasps of laughter escaped from behind the cloth.

Sir Balthasar looked to Sir Jehan with a helpless expression. The Sieur de Blanchefontaine said, “Nay, brother, I flee this field of battle; I confess myself a caitiff knight; you must fight yourself free of these ferocious women.”

Hob found it difficult to reconcile the ease and good humor of the two women around the two knights, who at other times conveyed such an impression of menace. Sir Balthasar seemed wrought of stone and iron, Sir Jehan of wind-whipped fire. Yet if these men were so evil, would their wives be so calm and gay?

Sir Balthasar opened a blunt and brutal attack; to Hob, who was unfamiliar with the rules, it seemed that a tide of white players poured down the center of the board during the first double handful of moves; then, a short while later, a sort of hunter’s net of somber pieces snapped shut on the mareschal’s assault, and he was rapidly reduced to staring at the board in dismay.

“She has caught you, husband!” cried Dame Aline, with disloyal glee. Sir Balthasar rose, shaking his head ruefully, and drank wine, first lifting his goblet to Molly in acknowledgment.

There was a brief respite for pastries and spiced wine, the scent of cinnamon tickling Hob’s nose; an elaborate jest was told by young Sir Tancred, involving two maids and a blacksmith, enjoyed by all except Father Baudoin; and at last the final conflict was to begin, between Molly and the victor of the other group, Sir Jehan himself.

Sir Jehan took his place more warily than had Sir Balthasar, his gaze rapidly flicking back and forth from the board to Molly’s face. They threw, and this time Molly had the better of the toss.

She had first move and her choice of colors; once again she took the darker pieces. She opened with two subtle probes, and Sir Jehan countered
as delicately. Moves began to come less and less often; the game became increasingly complex. The slow entanglement of the pieces, the near stasis, and his own ignorance of the game began to tax Hob’s attention, and his eye wandered about the room.

A wordless growl from Sir Jehan brought his eyes back to the board. Molly had taken one of Sir Jehan’s castles. Sir Jehan moved his hand to the board, moved it back, then darted forth and slid his bishop three squares—at this time the bishop’s limit—along a path of diamonds. Immediately Molly captured a knight. Sir Jehan became very still, but his thumb turned the rings on his fingers, a mindless habit. Soon Molly took two more pieces, and Sir Jehan’s game collapsed. The Sieur de Blanchefontaine looked at Molly and then at the board, as if in disbelief, but only for a scant few moments, hardly noticeable. He then drew a deep breath and congratulated Molly courteously, and rose somewhat stiffly from his seat. He reseated himself at the main table and drank slowly, lost in thought.

Molly was acknowledged winner of the tourney. The knights seemed surprised, but Hob was not. He had come to the conclusion that Molly could do almost anything. The chevalier Estienne composed a few verses in Norman French in honor of Molly’s accomplishment, which Hubert, that critic and veteran of many castle dinners, adjudged barely adequate, detailing his complaints to Hob in a whisper.

S
O THE AFTERNOON
wore into evening. Members of the company came and went, and gradually began to assemble again for the evening meal. Lady Svajone, absent all day, made her appearance, as always attended by Doctor Vytautas and her two esquires.

They settled her in her usual place, swaddled in a cloak of undyed wool. On the cloak’s bosom was a rayed circle, worked in red and yellow thread, and below it a tree, cunningly rendered in brown and green. A
repeated pattern of sinuous lines at the tree’s base suggested vegetation. Below the tree, echoing the rayed sun above, was the crescent moon, outlined in light and dark blue strands.

On her wrist, all bone and dry loose white skin, was a silver bracelet studded with smaragds, glints of green in the light from fireplace and candle; her hand and arm were so tiny that the bracelet seemed in danger of falling off at any moment. Around her neck, visible whenever the cloak fell open, a string of amber beads glowed against a cotehardie of darkest green.

She seemed somewhat frailer than the day before. She leaned across the table to talk to Molly, who bent to hear; but her voice was so faint that Hob could hear nothing of what was said.

The dinner that night went much as it had the previous night, except that Hob was introduced to the delights of mutton gallimaufry, which had proved uninteresting to the diners at the main table, and which Hubert had managed to secure almost intact for the pages’ bench. The dish, composed of mutton and onions, chopped fine and stewed in verjuice and butter and white ginger, provided such a welter of unfamiliar flavors for Hob that he regretted finishing his share, and fell to licking his fingers.

When most of the table had been cleared except for sweetmeats and pastries, and the serious drinking had begun among the knights, Molly offered to provide some music from her native land, a suggestion that found favor with the company, except perhaps for Father Baudoin, and perhaps the castellan—Sir Balthasar’s scowl was so habitual that it was no longer a reliable indicator of his mood.

Molly signaled to Jack, who left the lower tables and vanished into the turret stairway. A few moments later he returned with the two harps, one under each arm. He set them down some little distance from the fire, and arranged two small benches near one another.

Molly and Nemain took their seats by the harps. Each took up a
cláirseach,
Molly the larger and Nemain one about two-thirds the size of her grandmother’s. The harps were of willow wood, the wood carved with interlaced ribbonwork that terminated in hounds’ heads; the brass pegs were strung with gold and silver wire. There was a bit of final adjustment of the tuning, as some strings had expanded from the warmth of the hearth, and then they were ready.

Molly settled her harp on her knees, leaned it upon her right shoulder; Nemain took a moment longer to arrange herself, then nodded to her grandmother. Molly led off and Nemain followed. The women had rings on every finger: Molly’s were all of silver, save one that looked to be of iron, on the fourth finger of her right hand. Nemain’s were of gold, and the firelight toyed with them prettily as her fingernails struck the gleaming strings.

The two harps rang through the hall; tinkling ripples from each overlapped in a way Hob could never quite follow. The music of each seemed distinct, yet each agreed with the other in some fashion. After the harps had made play for a while, the women began to sing. It was a song Hob had heard them sing many times, in wayside inns, by woodland campfires, and each time more ensorcelling than the last. Nemain had told him it was a song in praise of the moon.

Now he sat and listened in the suddenly hushed hall. Lady Isabeau leaned forward eagerly. Sir Jehan leaned back and turned his head aside and then watched from the sides of his eyes. Even the mareschal was attentive. The pages held off for a bit. One after another, the wolfhounds sank their heads on their front paws; one sighed ostentatiously; they watched the singers, rolling their eyes toward Sir Jehan now and then to reassure themselves that all was as it should be.

Nemain’s young voice, clear and high, entered a bit after Molly’s, and twined about the elder woman’s deep sweet singing, as vines in leaf climb out along a sturdy branch, winding about, adding a light grace to the dark strong tones that bore the strange main melody. The two
voices, now diverging, now chiming together, each by turn drawing ahead of the other or lagging behind, conjured an image in Hob’s mind, startling in its clarity: the wind piping through ancient stones arranged on a bare hilltop; the moon rising over the trees of the surrounding forest; the scent from the slopes of the hill, covered with rippling purple heather, black in the moonlight; the shadows of the stones reaching, reaching, far down the perfumed hillside.

Whether because of the late hour, or the exalting quality of the music, the two women sat cloaked in beauty: Queen Maeve and young Queen Nemain. Nemain in particular drew Hob’s eye: with her face grave in concentration, lit more strongly along one side by the flickering fireplace, she seemed to Hob more as a woman than a child, if only for this moment. Her skin had cleared, and was white as the drifts of snow outside; her hair glowed as ruddy as the cooler embers at the edge of the fire, and when she glanced his way, her eyes caught the fireglow, green as the smaragds in Lady Svajone’s bracelet.

The song ended; the music died away. For a moment all that might be heard was the crackle and spit of the flames playing about the logs in the great fireplace. Everyone had been leaning forward, save Sir Jehan and Father Baudoin. Now there was a general sigh and a shifting of position. Only the priest seemed unaffected, sitting well back in his chair and sipping fretfully at his cup. Either the wine within or what he had heard displeased him, for he sat with lips compressed and eyes slitted.

But Sir Jehan seemed genuinely pleased. “Oh well played, delightful, mesdames, delightful.” And for once he did not have a mocking edge to his voice, for once he smiled with his eyes as well as his mouth.

Hubert nudged Hob, gave a slight upward incline of his chin toward the high table. Sir Tancred, who looked to be about thirty, sat gazing at Molly with an open admiration that bordered on the ardent, despite the difference in their ages. As they watched, he raised his goblet
and offered a salute to skill and beauty. The company joined him in the toast; thereafter through the evening he watched Molly in a fashion that was just this side of impudent.

T
HE FOUR FILED
into the solar; Jack bolted the door behind them. Hob and Jack put down the harps beside the door, and Hob began to put them back in their leather covers. Molly disappeared into the inner room, and Jack went to pull out the bedding from a niche in the wall. He began to set up the cots for Hob and himself with a soldier’s practiced movements.

Nemain turned to Hob, who was hunkered down beside the first harp, pulling the drawstrings closed on the cover. He glanced up at her, unaccountably shy: he had never seen her look so poised; he had never seen her dressed so finely; he had never seen this cool, haughty stranger before. He gazed in consternation at the calm blankness of her face for two or three heartbeats, and then, slowly, she pushed her dainty pink tongue out between her lips, and just as slowly crossed her eyes.