Something Red (27 page)

Gales of laughter echoed from the plastered walls of the solar. Jack turned from his task, shaking his head and smiling in sympathy, but he had seen nothing and was unsure what the jest might be.

From the inner room came Molly’s voice: “It’s pleased I am to have such a pair of merry jesters with me, but we’ll need the harps away, and yourselves out of yon finery, and some of us are old and stiff, and we perishing with weariness, and must have ourselves some rest.” She sounded, as always, anything but old and tired. Still, it was a long time before the two young people could settle to their tasks: just as quiet seemed to be taking hold, a snort or gasp would set off another round of giggles, poorly smothered.

Eventually, everyone was abed; the snow hissed its lullaby, and they settled down to sleep.

*   *   *

H
OB DREAMED OF
N
EMAIN
.

On this night, at peace and fairly safe once more, his prayers said, drifting toward sleep, Jack Brown’s snoring bulk between his cot and the door to the corridor, he lay thinking of Margery. He found that he could not quite remember the exact configuration of her face; he could not quite remember how she dressed. He could recall only a general impression, sparked by details of her person: her brown curls, her dark eyes with their heavy lids, the flare of her hip. He tried to see her exactly at the moment that she had paused at his table, or fastened up the sling for the rescued baby, but he could not.

Hob felt a sense of panic that Margery was dying to him a second time. It brought him up partway to a sitting position. After a bit he sank down again. He lay there, disconsolate, watching the faint glow of the fire’s embers play across the plastered walls. He closed his eyes, and thought of the inn as it had been, and their short time there. Soon thought grew tangled, and memories of the inn and memories of the priest house came to him in odd combinations, although beneath everything was a sorrow, deep and unchanging, like the drone strings of the symphonia that sang beneath the melody. Then he drifted into dream, and the dream was not of Margery, but of Nemain.

Afterward he could remember little of the dream: he recalled that he was aware of her presence but could not see her clearly. There was only a blurred sense of white and red, and a challenging green gaze, and smooth wet skin beneath his fingertips, and—an echo of the journey through the storm—the warm scent of her unwashed body. There came a burst of pleasure so intense that it jolted him awake, and he lay there dazed and disoriented in the darkness, while a series of diminishing pangs, ineffably sweet, rippled through his flesh.

As he came more fully awake, he became aware that his thighs
were soaked: a thick clinging wetness that seemed everywhere. He had been told to expect it, and he knew enough to know what had happened, and that his boyhood was over, and his manhood begun.

He sat up again, and threw off the blanket. He managed to pull on his new shoes and a long overshirt, and, half-asleep, picked his way around Jack’s cot, drew the door bolt and the latch, and let himself out into the corridor. In the garderobe, he contrived to dry himself off with handfuls of straw. When he relieved himself he was surprised at the near-painful delight, as urine burned its way along still-sensitive channels.

He went back out into the corridor. A rushlight flickered in a bracket on the wall, the only movement. A quick rinse of his hands at the water basin that Hubert had shown him, the water painfully cold, and then he made his way blearily back down the passage to the solar.

A shutter rattled with the wind at the end of the corridor. As he drew near the solar door, he could hear quiet voices. Sir Balthasar, who as castellan was responsible for the castle’s safety, would not station anyone on the walls in such ferocious weather, but the guardrooms in the towers had a night watch, and the corridors had wakeful guards who walked about in irregular patterns. Two of them were just around the turn of the corridor; Hob could clearly see their shadows thrown on the wall. The conversation, half-heard, seemed to involve the exploits of one of the two guards, a maid named Marie or Cherie, the maid’s father and his disapproval, a little-used storeroom where lovers might meet. Hob slipped back into the solar and closed the door as silently as possible. He shot the bolt and climbed back beneath the covers.

As he stretched out beneath the woolen blankets, a faint shiver of pleasure ran between his legs, another ghost of the paroxysm just past; but soon thereafter he felt dark eddies of sleep come washing toward him. Before he succumbed, he had time to think—not in so many words, but vaguely, incoherently—that he had now joined the guard outside
with his low-voiced boasts, and Roger with the woman Lucinda so impatient for his return, and mighty Jack himself, who strode forward so eagerly when Molly summoned him to her wagon: joined them in some longed-for guild fellowship—“You men,” he could hear Molly saying to him last summer in the clearing, when he had, for all that, still been a boy. “You men.”

CHAPTER 16

H
OB REMEMBERED LITTLE OF
the third day and evening that they spent at the castle. He and Jack went with Hubert to hear Mass in the little chapel within the keep. They stood with members of the castle household in the back of the unheated chamber; to the front Hob could just see Sir Walter and Sir Archibald. Father Baudoin said the Mass, and though he was still dour of expression and his shoulders were stiff with tension, his voice sang out the Latin phrases in a clear and even melodious tenor.

The day and evening passed much as had the preceding two days: games with Hubert in the afternoon, riddles and feasting and games in the evening among the adults. It was the feast, and the salt-cod dish that he tasted for the first time, and the corridor in the nighttime, that he recalled in later years.

The folk at the high table were growing comfortable
with one another on this third night, and there was laughter and some singing; there was a contest in which a few lines of poetry were recited by one guest, and the next guest had to add a line, and so forth; and amusing anecdotes were told by the better-traveled among the company, notably Sir Estienne, who had fought in Spain, and had been to Rome as well, and had seen the Holy Father.

The dishes followed one after the other, the wine flowed easily, and the pages’ bench enjoyed an abundance of cast-off food.

Hubert had collected some spilled salt and put it aside on a trencher; the lads experimented with a pinch in this dish and a pinch in that, whether it was needed or not. In addition, there was a nearly untouched dish of salt-cod mortrews: the fish pounded, mixed with stock and eggs and crumbled bread, and the resulting dumpling poached. Hob ate his share with gusto. The older page, Giles, had brought in some snow to mix with the younger pages’ wine, and Hob found the wine cooled with snowmelt just the thing to quench his salt-driven thirst.

This evening passed easily, and even Lady Svajone seemed in better spirits, while the elderly Sir Archibald, having drunk rather more than usual, displayed a hitherto unexpected talent for bawdy riddles, till Dame Florymonde insisted that he stop, although she had laughed as heartily as any at the table. The company retired in a good mood, and Hob, trudging up the turret stair behind Molly and Nemain, found himself quite ready for bed.

He awoke from a troubled sleep. Had there been a rapping at the door, or a voice calling, or was that in a dream? He lay and listened to Jack’s snoring. The wind for once had abated; the shutters were motionless. He was still half in the grip of a dream, and the chamber was dark, the fire sunk to barely glowing ash.

He became aware of an uncommon thirst: the wine and the salted dishes at Sir Jehan’s table. Salt! Hob had rarely had such free access to it in his short life. He rose and gained the door without incident, but
found himself oddly reluctant to draw the bolt. Still, he was parched. He slid the bolt back quietly and stepped out into the corridor. Tonight he could hear no sentries, near or far. He went down to the fountain and drank thirstily from his cupped palm for what seemed a long time.

He turned to go back, and hesitated. The corridor stretched away, silent, flickering in the light of two torches set some distance from one another; shadows pooled in the corners and at the entrance to the turret stairwells. The silence began to seem malevolent, and the corridor looked like a trap. He forced himself to take a step, and another, till he gained the door to the solar. He made himself look up and down the passage. What was wrong? Something was not as it should be: the very air seemed thick and tasteless; the light from the torches had unpleasant orange undertones; the flickering shadows almost made shapes against the walls.

He ducked inside and shot the bolt home. He crawled into his cot. He lay there, surprised and dismayed at the strange atmosphere that ruled this night, and he thought that he would sleep no more before morning. But he was thirteen, and healthy, and in what seemed only a moment or two it was morning, and Jack bustling about, and gray daylight leaking under the bottom of the shutters.

CHAPTER 17

T
HE NEXT DAY HOB HAD AL
most forgotten the odd quality of the night before. He and Hubert and Giles heard Mass, Father Baudoin’s tenor echoing from the stone flags of the chapel floor. Later they threw a wooden ball back and forth in an unfrequented corridor on the third level of the keep. After last night’s relative calm, the storm had worsened again, and Hob could hear the wind howling around the corners of the great stone building, the snap of ropes worked loose from the pulleys used to haul freight to the upper levels of the keep.

Perhaps because of the intrusive din of the gale or because of the continued gloom of the hallway, the shutters having been made fast against the wind, the three lads played with less than their usual enthusiasm. The ball flew back and forth along the corridor, Hob and Hubert facing the larger Giles. Finally Hubert missed a
catch, and the ball landed and bounced with several loud clacks down along the corridor.

A woman of about forty years came through a nearby doorway, her arms full of bedding, and scolded them for making so much noise as she passed. The pages led the way down a curving stair to an alcove one level down; Giles produced a die and they played at throwing for straws for a while, but this soon palled. The afternoon passed slowly; an oppression hung over the lads’ spirits, and Hob, who had delighted in Hubert’s company on the previous few days, was relieved when summoned to attend Molly and Nemain.

T
HE MEAL THAT EVENING
went much as others had on the previous evenings, except for an indefinable heaviness to the mood; not quite melancholy, but far from the merry banter of the day before. Dish followed dish, and still conversation languished.

There was a back-billow of smoke from the fire, and at once the hall took on a bluish haze. The fireplace had a flue that ran straight through the keep wall and into two vents, one on each side of a buttress. Servants ran to block the vent on the windward side, leaving the leeward vent open; others opened a shutter on each side of the hall, to clear the air. From the pages’ bench, Hob could see slantwise through the open window. Outside, the snow had ceased for the moment, gaps appeared in the wide wall of clouds, and the moon, now full, had just risen above the rim of the curtain wall.

In a moment the hall had cleared of its smoky haze, and the cold air pouring in had become unpleasant. Lady Svajone had recoiled when the shutters were first opened, and a shudder had run through the slight frame. Doctor Vytautas made a gesture to Gintaras; the tall esquire turned and went into the passageway to the kitchen, returning
at once with a camlet cloak that they had brought down with them from their quarters. Vytautas and Azuolas wrapped it about her, but she still seemed distressed. She put one frail hand on the table edge, and held tight as though to quench the slight shivering that was just apparent, despite the warmth of the camel’s-hair garment.

But now servants hastened to close and fasten the heavy shutters, and within a few breaths the warmth of the fire began to reassert itself. The tiny Lietuvan withdrew her hand from the table and tucked it beneath her cloak. Azuolas tried to interest her in a sugared pastry.

Something had curdled in the atmosphere of the great hall. A further restlessness, a sense of unease, seemed to seep into the air through the walls. The cat, once more in its favored perch in the window recess, began to back up against the shutter, its ears flat and its eyes wide. After a moment even this refuge would not suffice, and it dropped with a small bang onto the table below, leaped to the floor, and scuttled along the wall till it disappeared through an archway near the dais.

The five huge Irish dogs had gathered in a knot near the fireplace, shifting place uneasily from time to time. This caught Sir Jehan’s restless eye, and he watched them for a bit, scowling.

“Gruagh!” called Sir Jehan. This was his favorite, the pack’s leader, the largest of the five—its name signifying “giant” in Irish. It stood slowly and paced toward him, ears and shoulders drooping and tail tucked beneath its hindquarters. A couple of yards from the table it stopped and sat down suddenly.

“Gruagh!” said the knight again. The dog got up; stood irresolutely for a moment, then bolted back to the hearth, where it huddled again with its fellows. “Damn you,” muttered Sir Jehan.

One of the grooms who had bathed the dogs earlier got up from a bench in the lower hall and came up to the giant hound. He put a hand between the braided leather collar and the dog’s powerful neck, and
tugged, urging it toward the high table. The wolfhound dug in its long legs. Its eyes slitted, its ears went back, and it showed the groom its forest of gleaming teeth.

The man stepped back quickly and looked at Sir Jehan. The knight made a wordless noise of disgust, and gestured to the groom to return to his seat.

Hob saw that an uneasy awkward silence had fallen upon the high table. Lady Svajone pushed listlessly at her pastry; Doctor Vytautas sat grim and preoccupied. The others at the table also showed signs of the increasingly strange atmosphere.