Something Red (29 page)

Hob felt that perhaps this was an evil dream, and he asleep. The castle’s defenses—the murderesses, the spiked pit, the high thick walls—all had proved useless to protect them against an enemy who entered in disguise. The castle had welcomed in this demon, cloaked in the form of a frail old woman. In an instant the walls, the gates, the watchtowers, had changed from stronghold to prison.

He looked about him. Outside, the wind howled through the buttresses; and the snow, the snow that kept them captive here more efficiently than locks, the snow that rode on the wind, rattled and pattered against the breathing shutters.

“Oh, Mistress!” Hob cried; he found that he was panting, as though he had been running up a hill. “Then we are, we are trapped in this castle! With, with that
thing
!”

Molly’s head came up.

“Nay,” she said. “It is trapped in this castle with me.”

M
OLLY SAT FOR A LONG TIME
, regarding the blank stone of the wall across the room as though it were the tapestry Hob had scrutinized, as though the future were woven there.

Finally she turned to Nemain. “I’m after saying that I asked Mother Babd for safety, and it’s you that thought me praying for revenge. Say to me: is it safety we have found?”

“Nay,
seanmháthair.
”

“Then revenge it must be, and it’s revenge I’ll be having, for Osbert that was a friend to me, and for all those he sheltered under his broad roof; and he not able to save himself, nor protect his own from this demon woman. These Beasts . . . iron will not bite them, not deeply. Flesh must contend with flesh, bone with bone. You have seen Jack with his hammer,” Molly said, still in a soft musing voice, as much to herself as to Hob and Nemain. “Jack will be
my
hammer. I have spoken to Jack and he agrees: I will send him against that thing, Beast to Beast, and Jack will be the hammer in my hand.”

Finally she stood up and walked from the room. Hob had a glimpse of Jack sitting in the outer room, and then Molly closed the door, the hunt tapestry settling back into place. Hob looked at Nemain in astonishment.

“She will let Jack be a Beast again, and put him at the Fox, as hounds are put at a boar,” said the girl.

Hob was struggling: the world tilted beneath his feet; all the air seemed to have departed the room. “Jack will be a Beast?” he said. And after a moment: “Again, you said, again?”

Nemain took his hand. “Hob,
a chuisle—
”

“Again, you said!”

“—when Jack was bitten, away there in the deserts—”

“She said he, he had fevers, that was—fevers, she said.”

“More than fevers, more than fevers. Some short while after he’s recovering from his wounds, the curse being passed to him, it’s working
in his blood, and he shifting into a Beast. Sure ’twas rare enough at first, but then more and more, and the while he’s being a Beast, he, he . . . And then to awake, as it were, the next day, and him finding that in the night he, that he . . . Any road, he began his wanderings. And hearing of Herself and her skills, he sought her out at Ely Fair, on the Feast of St. Audrey, and Herself penned up the Beast within him, and he returned to the Jack that you know.”

“What manner of Beast is this, for Jesus’s sweet sake?”

“No one knows, not even Herself. It is like a man, but very big, very strong, and misshapen, and hairy like a beast . . . we call it the Beast, for want of knowing what it is, and it being a kind of beast. There were many such in the old days, but they were bears, or wolves. . . . This is some Southron Beast, that they must have in Outremer, or thereabouts. . . . ”

A short while later the door opened, and Molly and Jack came back in. They had plainly been outside to the wagons, for a sparse layer of snow still melted on their shoulders; a hint of the cold still clung to their garments. Jack was carrying a small locked chest. Nemain went and shot the bolt to the outer door, and everyone gathered in the inner room.

Against one wall stood a narrow table with a ewer of water. Nemain swept the ewer from the table and put it over in a corner out of the way. Jack set the small chest down with a thump on this table, and Molly immediately produced a key to unlock the lid. There was a sense of controlled haste to their actions that was apparent even to Hob, still somewhat bewildered at this strange turn his life had taken.

Molly undid the fastenings at her cuffs and rolled her sleeves back to the elbows up over her strong smooth forearms, and Nemain did as well, exposing delicate wrists and forearms notably slim and pale. Molly’s hands moved with eye-baffling swiftness among the various vessels and jars, mostly pottery but some, including a fair-sized two-handled flagon, of silver. She had a small cask of the
uisce beatha
;
from this she poured a measure into the silver flagon and a modest amount into a little silver cup, which she drank off immediately, sighing heavily afterward. Nemain already had busied herself with mortar and pestle, mixing and grinding herbs and peppercorns and other substances Hob could not so easily identify. As soon as she had finished milling each ingredient, she would pour the resultant powder into a small dish, wipe the mortar out with a clean cloth, and begin again. Her grandmother chose from among these saucers of powder, here pinching a small amount into the flagon, and there emptying the entire dish into it.

Hob could just hear Molly singing at her work. A moment later he realized that she was not singing, she was chanting in a low voice into the mouth of the pot. She poured in another measure of the fiery drink, sang something more—a little louder, loud enough for Hob to realize that it was in Irish. Molly spat three times into the flagon; her ring-pommel dagger appeared in her hand, and she cut her left thumb, deeply enough to start a little stream of her blood, which she held over the mouth of the vessel. A last dash of the
uisce beatha,
a last muttered phrase, and she clapped the lid on the flagon.

Molly wiped the blood from her thumb with a cloth, holding it there a moment to stanch the flow. Then she poured herself a second drink from the cask, and drank it off without ceremony. She poured a half measure of the
uisce beatha
into the little silver cup, looked around vaguely, and got the ewer of water from the corner. She mixed this into the cup, and offered it to Nemain, who drank it gravely, her eyes big above the rim of the cup. When Nemain had finished, coughing only a little, Molly poured and mixed again, and handed the cup to Hob.

Molly had given it to Hob before, usually when he had been ill; but that was rarely. He knew enough not to gulp it. As he drank, he remembered it, that complex taste: something that was wet, yet burned like fire; something that was not sweet, but that left an impression of sweetness.
When he had finished he was aware of a welcome warmth in his stomach, a growing ease in his limbs.

Molly rinsed the cup, added two fingersful of a mottled powder, and poured a small amount from the silver flagon into it. She stirred the mixture and handed it to Jack, who drank it all without stopping. He coughed a little, and drew the back of his hand across his mouth. Molly took back the cup and rinsed it again.

She turned and contemplated Hob. After a moment she said, partly to herself, “Nay, I cannot leave you here: I have some need of you, and any road, you will not be safer anywhere in this castle tonight than you will between me and Jack.”

Molly patted Nemain on the shoulder and pointed to the trunk. Then she turned to Hob.

“Hob,
a chuisle,
you must carry this flagon. You must have it ready when I ask you for it, nor must you spill from it at all.”

Meanwhile Jack had thrown off his clothes; for a moment he stood naked in the center of the room, a man so powerfully built that he seemed shorter than he was. Nemain was digging in the trunk; soon she produced a cloak of coarse russet and threw it to Jack. He caught it and tossed it around his shoulders; somberly he began to tie the strings that fastened it at the neck. Molly started to store vessels away in the chest.

There was a hideous cry from somewhere in the castle, and then the sound of many voices shouting, crashes, shrieks, the deep-throated baying of Sir Jehan’s giant Irish hounds.

Molly looked up from her work. “She’s just after beginning, and ourselves not a moment too soon,” she said. She looked around her, at Jack in his cloak, Hob with the flagon, Nemain throwing another cloak about her own thin shoulders; she looked around her as one looks who is leaving on a journey, making sure that nothing has been left behind.

Then she took the veil from her head and unpinned her hair; it tumbled down her back in a silver flood. Nemain did the same, shaking
her head a little to free her red mane; ripples ran down its length, glinting in the firelight.

Molly turned and strode through the two rooms, pulled the bolt on the outer door, and led them out into the corridor, where already the uproar seemed to have doubled: a bestial snarling, mingled with the shouts of men to their comrades, and the dreadful outcries of the dying.

CHAPTER 19

B
UT THE CORRIDOR ITSELF WAS
empty. From above came calls of alarm, queries and responses, as the castle’s folk tried to determine what disaster was afoot. Now there was the braying of an alarm-horn from below, which ceased with a sudden whine, as though the hornblower had been struck down; and then the clatter of men’s feet upon the stairways. A moment’s pause, and Molly led them swiftly to the hanging that veiled the entrance to the musicians’ gallery. Without hesitation she swept it aside and stepped into the gallery, the others crowding in after her.

Hob was saying a rapid
Paternoster
under his breath. He came up to the rail beside Nemain. He peered through the spaces in the wooden screen, and found that the whole of the great hall was visible to him except the portion of wall beneath the gallery. It was a moment before he would agree with himself to accept
that what he saw was real. When he did, he put the flagon straight down and crossed himself, then picked it up again.

At the lower end of the hall, crowding against the entrance from the stairs, seeking to escape down into the snows of the bailey, was a crowd of terrified women, children, and unarmed men. At the hall’s front, about the dais, were a score of men-at-arms, and about the table on the dais lay several dead knights, including the aged Sir Archibald and the French knight Sir Estienne, who now would never see Scotland. By the hearth was a great mound of bloody gray fur: the giant hounds of Ireland, dead in a heap. Half-dressed, with a naked sword in his hand, Sir Jehan stood just inside the archway, staring about him in disbelief.

And by the high table crouched the Fox. As Hob stared in horrified fascination down through the screen, the Fox reared up on its hind legs and took a few paces forward, walking like a human being.

Hob’s breathing became ragged. The Fox was just that, a monstrous fox: five hundredweight or more of tense power, quick as an arrow, straight as a javelin, bright as a new-polished sword-blade, and female as Eve; Hob could see immediately that it was a vixen. Tall and deadly and graceful: the Goddess of Foxes.

Even as he watched, it dropped back to all fours and leaped over the high table as though it were a tussock of grass, landing amid the men-at-arms, who hacked at it with no visible success.

It leaped in great bounds; it turned about, almost in its own tracks; it dashed here, and swerved there, and always killing, killing. Through Hob’s frozen terror a thought came faintly to him: it was gamboling, it was playing at slaughter. It ran past men and with tilted head drew a fang across their middles. Men screamed and cursed; they held their hands over their bellies, that their entrails might not escape through the gaping rents; they lay to right and to left, dead and dying. The men swung mace and sword, hacked, stabbed: their steel would not bite. Their blows went awry. The creature was too fast, too agile, too strong, and its flesh
seemed to resist the metal itself. Every so often a blow would land, and the Fox would recoil, but little damage was done.

The Fox sprang from place to place, blithe as a new lamb, and each leap left a mortally wounded man behind. Now and again it would pause to survey its accomplishments, and then the crimson tongue would loll out over serried white teeth, and Hob felt that it was laughing. The skin on top of the long nose wrinkled up in a snarl, the amber eyes closed partway: a gloating expression, an expression of blood-crazed glee.

Sir Jehan shook himself into action. He vaulted with an athlete’s grace to the tabletop and down again upon the other side, and without pause swung a great blow at the Fox’s neck. But the monster shied away and the blade whistled past. The Fox swirled about Sir Jehan like a red cape twirled by a dancer and appeared at his right hand; the knight, off balance, swung backhand at the Fox and grazed its shoulder. This wound seemed to have no more result than the earlier ones: the Beast staggered but recovered; it did not seem to bleed; in a moment it seemed as though it had not been touched.

Sir Jehan attacked again and again at a furious pace, and the Fox, mischievous as a puppy, avoided each cut or thrust by a hairbreadth, but did not attack the knight. The Sieur de Blanchefontaine had in his hand a heavy Scottish sword with the typical drooping quillons, and between the weight of the weapon and the sheer violence of his assault, as well as the horror of what he faced, he had begun to tire in the space of a dozen breaths. His face was set in a kind of lofty grimace, but his breath came in whistling sobs.

The Fox reared up on its hind legs again; Hob had a sense that it was playing with Sir Jehan, the cruel game that cats play with mice. Hob would remember in later years that lean swift warlord, in desperate struggle, forced backward by the beautiful red flame of the Fox, the Fox that paced forward on its slim black hind paws, weaving like a huge
snake, leering down upon the tall lord, the rustle of fabric, the shuffle and stamp of boots amid the rushes, the silver wheel made in midair by the flickering sword, the white hand and wrist that wielded it, the still whiter ridges of teeth that suddenly bent as a willow bends in a breeze to the river ripples, slow-seeming, lazy almost: but all Sir Jehan’s speed could not match it. There was a champing clack, and elegant jaws neatly took half the knight’s hand; a moment later the scream, the clang of the dropped sword.