Something Red (3 page)

Molly was speaking earnestly. Brother Wulfstan looked appalled. Presently they returned to the road. Brother Wulfstan signaled to the trio by the great stones, and each swung up his staff to his shoulder with a smooth practiced motion. They trotted forth from the gateway, spreading to this side and that to encircle the tiny caravan, sheepdogs taking station around a flock.

Molly clambered up to her seat and kicked loose the brake. Brother Wulfstan loped up to the head of the caravan; as he passed Hob, he gave him an encouraging double slap on the shoulder blades, as though to say, Let’s go, let’s go. It was like being struck lightly with a blackthorn root. Hob surged forward, dragging the lead rope. In a moment he had passed between the tall sentinel stones, and they were away on the climbing approach to the monastery.

He looked around as he stumbled upward: the harsh vigilant shapes at avant-garde, flank, and rearguard, Jack Brown’s shambling strength, Molly turning her keen watchful face to either side of the trail, abruptly relieved him of a burden or constriction. His thin chest expanded, he drew a deep sweet breath, and his steps pattered almost blithely on the frost-hardened soil of the upward way.

From this point on, the road was flanked by a parapet of fitted stones, waist-high, on the downslope side. After a short time walking uphill, Hob’s legs beginning to ache again, the caravan was passed by a squad of monks jogging down to the gate, the men leaning back against the decline. Hob realized that they must have these small groups going back and forth constantly, to monitor the roads between, and to relieve those who had left the portals at either end to escort parties of travelers.

At their left hand the flank of the mountain climbed sheer to Heaven. Presently the wall of rock receded somewhat from the trail, and soon afterward, they came to a cleft in the stone. The road ran on past this point, but a spur curved into the notch, and it was here that Brother Wulfstan turned in. They had come to sanctuary, near the end of the day, in the Monastery of St. Germaine de la Roche.

CHAPTER 2

W
HAT HE FIRST NOTICED: THE
dying off of the caustic wind. Recessed into the mountain, the cleft they had entered provided a natural shelter for the monastery. The mountain’s own meat rose to either hand, while ahead, across the gap, St. Germaine had had only to put a stout wall with a double-leaved iron-studded doorway. When they reached the silent unmoving panels of wood, Hob realized that they were observed from a dozen or so slits, in the wooden doors, in the stone wall.

A sudden rattle made him whirl. Behind the little caravan, across the gap that looked out upon the gulf between Monastery Mount and its nearest neighbor, now moved a light portcullis, drawn from a niche cut in one side of the rock. The monks of St. Germaine were not easily taken at a disadvantage.

The travelers were now isolated between the
outer portcullis and the wall of the monastery proper. A postern opened in the main doors and a short but very burly monk stepped forth, in his hand a stubby truncheon of solid iron. In the opening behind him Hob caught dull glints of metal.

The monks’ vows forbade them “to shed blood by the sword”; this they interpreted as a ban on the use of edged weapons. In consequence, avoiding conflict with the letter of their vows if not the spirit, they had become expert in the use of all manner of staff, mace, and bludgeon.

The stumpy monk faced Brother Wulfstan and held his free left hand before the expanse of his chest; the fingers writhed in a curious manner. Hob, standing by the patient steaming bulk of the ox, wondered at this mute ceremony. But Brother Wulfstan matter-of-factly held his own hand up and made twisting shapes in the freezing air. At once Brother Porter, for it was he, turned and stepped back through the postern and slammed it to. A moment later Hob heard the groaning of bolts, and the two leaves of the great solid gate swung back. Monks boiled out, darting past the wagons to face the portcullis in a roughly dressed line formation.

Brother Wulfstan walked forward, waving Hob to follow him. Hob obeyed, tugging on the bridle rope. There was a moment when he might have been anchored to the earth with a millstone, then the ox came to an understanding of what was required, and began to move. When the last wagon was through the double gates, the line of monks fell back through the opening, the doors were heaved closed, the iron bolts were slid into their brackets. Only then did the monks at the capstan that controlled the outer portcullis throw themselves at the capstan bars, their bodies bowed and their sandals scrabbling on the flinty ground, till the openwork gate had been retracted into the slot that St. Germaine’s first monks had carved in the living stone.

In eighty-five years, the monastery had never exposed a clear opening between the walls to the outside world; the double-gate system,
thought out by candlelight in the very small still cell that St. Germaine allowed himself, had never failed. Novices chafed at the constant turnout drill when any conveyance must be brought in or out of the compound, but the older hands knew it to be a mighty pillar of their defense.

The wicked are often horridly inventive. Men with knives between their teeth had been known to lash themselves beneath wagons; men with crossbows had been known to secret themselves beneath a bale of hides, a quarrel aimed at Brother Escort’s back: hence the passgate signs, changed constantly and known only to senior monks, that said,
No one now threatens me from hiding.
Only when Brother Porter had given the sign, Brother Wulfstan the countersign, would those ponderous valves open.

Hob now looked about him. He stood in a kind of bailey, with the outer wall spanning the cleft like a stone curtain, the blocks closely fitted, disdaining mortar. The cleft narrowed toward the back, and there, scorning to build in this natural hold, the monks had tunneled back into the naked rock, so that where a donjon might have been expected, there was a doorway and some windows, not overlarge, and then the faceless brow of the mountain.

The bailey itself was surprisingly extensive, for it ran some distance into the flank of the mountain, and its sides had been hollowed further by the industrious brethren. About the perimeter were stout-beamed wooden outbuildings: stables and byres; a smithy and armory; mews from which emanated harsh raucous cries and a faint jingling of bells; the buttery where ale and wine were stored in butts or casks; the laundry whence clouds of white steam from the tubs, dark gray smoke from the fires, issued forth from vents and from the open double doors; the dairy from which a novice now staggered, oppressed by an ashwood yoke across his slight shoulders: swaying awkwardly from the yoke ends were two tubs of yellow-white cheese.

In the center of the bailey was a wide-mouthed stone well, with
an ample roof like the cap on a mushroom, to keep out rain and bird-filth. Hob would later learn that there was another well deep within the keep; there was also a stream that emerged from the side of the mountain, and flowed in a thin flat sheet down the granite to one side of the compound, to cross the road in a channel graven by the monks for the purpose, and slide away down into the coomb. The water arose from the heart of the mountain and had never been known to freeze before it had crossed the road, howsoever bitterly the winter fell on the highlands.

The wagons were directed to a clear space between two stable buildings. Here monks assisted in unharnessing the animals and in directing them to stalls within the outbuildings. Hob, by Molly’s order and by his own inclination, would not leave the ox till it was safely stalled for the night. The last rope was cast off, and he trudged forward hauling on the bridle, the ox with stretched neck following at some delay. The bailey was darkening into a blue-gray haze, and the yellow light from the open double doorway spilled out in a glowing rectangle onto the frozen pebble-shot dirt.

He stepped through the doorway into a paradise of warmth perfumed with hay and urine, where horses and oxen stood drowsing in a row of crude stalls along the back wall, which was the mountain itself. The heat from so many great animal bodies, from the oil lamps hanging from the crossbeams, fell about Hob’s skin like a damp ecstatic blanket. He found that he was smiling foolishly; it was difficult not to.

The young monk who had led them within now indicated a stall. In a trough and two mangers at the back: clean water, hay, oats mixed with barley. Hob led the ox inside, and closed the stall door on its creaking wooden pintles. He looped the leather latch on the peg and leaned his face for a moment against the animal’s huge side, still chilled from the outside air but with the indomitable warmth of breathing blood beginning to warm it from within. He put his palm flat against the hide.
He rested; with empty mind he paid attention to his body as it warmed by stages, happy as a snake on a sunlit stone.

After a time he roused. He spoke softly to the beast, removing its halter, offering it sweet hay; from a peg on the wooden wall he took a rough cloth, dried the creature’s vast back. Molly called the ox
Milo;
Hob himself, when he was off some way alone with it, called it
Lambkin.
Hob had known and held lambs; he was aware of the incongruity of the term. Still, he felt it was an endearment one used to the very young or those beloved and protected; perhaps he had heard someone use it in this fashion. He could not quite remember who had been so called.

The stall door creaked against the latch; the leather stretched and held. The wooden drawlatch lifted, the loop came free, and Nemain slipped in.

An oblique person, Molly’s granddaughter, lean and intense and silent. Her silence was that of one who carries gold in a secret purse, hoping not to be noticed. Hob’s silence was that of a shy child, fearful of ridicule. In the last year and a half they had become somewhat comfortable with one another: the familiarity of two chicks beneath Molly’s capacious wing, increasingly tinged with the cat-and-dog tension of sister and brother, for so Molly treated them, though Hob was a prentice and Nemain Molly’s own flesh.

“Where is Herself?” asked Hob.

“She’s away with Brother Wulfstan to pay her courtesy to Brother Abbot,” said Nemain, her manner distracted, her voice low, almost faint. Hob could tell she was troubled. She had come to this country as a child, and her accent was never as strong as Molly’s. When she was frightened, which was seldom enough, it grew more noticeable.

She went to the back of the stall and dipped up a handful of oats with barley for the ox. It lipped daintily at the mixture. The ox obeyed Nemain readily, although warily—she had somewhat of the way with beasts that her grandmother had. Hob had seen Jack Brown stop an
animal by looking it in the eye, and what man or beast had ever resisted Molly’s touch? But it was Hob that Milo, or Lambkin, loved and looked to for protection.

Nemain bent her head to watch the ox eat. “I could feel it,” she said to the ox’s forehead, or perhaps to the oats in her hand. “It watching me the while, and myself feeling it the while.” A lock of her hair, a little greasy, stuck in two lank clumps, slipped forward, a startling red against her brow that was white as bone. Her hand began to shake.

Hob felt a surge of fellowship, or even kinship: he had thought himself alone with his fear. He came up and put an awkward arm about her thin shoulders, delicate bones beneath his hand.

He held her tensed body. For a moment she stood still; then she turned swiftly and buried her face against his breast: there was a muted sob, and then she just rested against the coarse cloth upon his chest. It was perhaps the last time in her life that he heard her crying at all.

Now Hob, who had last autumn completed his thirteenth year, his body still mostly hairless, his limbs thin, his waist slim, had an unexpected kind of awakening, a foreshadowing: what previously he had felt only for Lambkin, he felt for another like himself, with that sweet undercurrent, sensed but unnoticed, that underlies everything between brother and sister, father and daughter, son and mother, like a wide dark river whose path is belowground: nothing of itself can be seen, but the ground above is fertile and moist and ferns and grasses thrive along its course.

He looked down at her narrow skull, her hair a flaming red despite the grime of the long road, the white scalp gleaming here and there. Though she was a bit more than a year older than he, he realized he overtopped her by several inches; he had the entirely novel sense of himself as tall and protective, so that when the young monk opened the stall door Hob did not flinch nor did he spring back from Nemain, as
he might have done but a few moments before. Instead he looked up beneath his brows, above his encircling arms.

The young monk, Brother Aelfwin of stalwart North Country Angle peasant stock, who in obedience to the dead hand of St. Germaine de la Roche had run guard duty alongside wagons carrying whores over the pass and endured the merciless teasing such women employ against handsome young forbidden men, hardly noticed either the embrace or Hob’s defiant glare. Indeed, after four years in the rigorous life of the monastery, he knew a score of ways to dispatch a stripling like Hob, using only what might be found in the stall, or even his empty hand, but his attention this evening was fixed on his own hollow stomach and on dinner, nearly ready. His only concern was to collect the guests.

“Young man, young may,” he said, “ye twa mun come the noo t’hae yer meal; gae ye left across bailey; yon double doors in t’ angle o’ wall. Dinna bide: ye’ve nobbut a moment till a’ the porridge is gane.” This last was said with a wink and a grin, and then he was gone, for he had to alert all the travelers and he himself was hungry with the robust eager happiness of early perfect health.

A
LOW-CEILINGED HALL
, wide but not too long, with thick pillars springing up to shallow groined vaults. Along the length ran trestle tables, a double row, scrubbed with coarse stones each day till they were a dull gold on top. Down the middle of the hall ran a trench in the old style, filled with blazing wood, the smoke drawn out through a slit in the central vault. Disks of the coarse black onion-studded bread, three days old and hard as wood, were set between every two places, and young monks whisked along the tables, scooping steaming ladles of boiled turnip and leek onto the dark rounds. Hot fresh loaves of the same bread were ranged here and there down the long table. Once each
fortnight the monks served meat; once each month they themselves were allowed meat.