Something Red (6 page)

“She’s half the devils from the Gadarene swine in her,” the young soldier said to them as they came up. “I canna get in there for my soul’s salvation and a sackful of silver groats.” Twice he lifted the rondel dirk at his side a quarter-way from its wooden sheath, then slammed it back, not heeding what he did, seething in his frustration. “Jesus and Mary strike her dead!” Hob looked about to see if any of the monks were within earshot; he knew what Father Athelstan would have thought of this profane young man. The three were alone in this straw-strewn corridor built out from the monastery wall.

“Is she yours, sir?” asked Hob.

“No, lad, God be praised, no,” said the other. “I’m a man likes to stay on his feet. We’re bringing these horses from Bolton, up north, to the Sieur de Blanchefontaine. We’re from the castle. You must have heard of Blanchefontaine.”

“No, sir,” said Hob. “But,” he added, seeing the beginning of a frown, “we’re from afar.” A hoof thudded into the stall boards, and Hob and the young soldier jumped, but Jack just shambled over to the stall, limping as if his ankle hurt, and reached in. He caught the mare behind her jaw and stood there quietly with his hand in place while the mare looked at him, white all around the rim of her eye. After a moment her ears went up and her expression relaxed. She took a pace forward. Jack grabbed her ear with his other hand and bunched it up and released it, then stroked her neck. She began nickering and nuzzling against Jack a little; soon she settled into a deep quiet while he stroked her.

After a minute or two he looked back at the young man-at-arms.
“Oogh ai irrow,” he gargled. The soldier gaped at him. “You try it now,” said Hob. The young man stepped forward gingerly. The mare eyed him placidly. Jack motioned for him to enter the stall and use the brush. The soldier was not a timid man, and he stepped into the stall and began to brush down the mare. “My thanks, friend,” he said.

Hob lounged against the stall and watched Jack pet the mare. The long corridor, sweet with hay and sharp with urine, echoed with the occasional lowing of oxen, the neighing of horses, the
slap, slap
of sandals as monks strode down the line of stalls, the hollow thump of a wooden bucket being set down. A few chickens were pecking hopefully amid the loose straw in an empty stall nearby, moving in random intersecting arcs, looking for spilled grain or for insects that had survived the winter indoors. Through doors farther down the corridor, open to the bailey, came the sound of chanting, drifting down faintly from some window set in the monastery’s side.

Hob and the soldier, that same Roger who had sat beside him in the refectory, talked while Roger groomed the mare, Hob explaining how Molly’s troupe entertained with singing, music, and story; how Herself was a skillful healer; how she could brew up the potent
uisce beatha,
the lifewater, from instruments stored in her wagons. All the while Jack stroked and patted the mare, who was by every indication now blissfully content.

“We wait here for three more of our comrades. They’re to come with a string of horses from up near Holme Cultram,” said Roger. “We will not remove till then. Do you persuade your mistress to wait for us, a few days, a sennight, a fortnight at most, and you can travel under our protection. You might winter at the castle. Sir Jehan is keen for any entertainment, and old Thierry, he’s our smith and armorer, he’s troubled fucking cruel with his joints. I’ll swear and avow my lord could use a groom like your father, too.”

“My father’s dead,” said Hob.

“Ah.”

“This is Jack,” Hob added, as if that explained everything. “But I’ll ask Herself if we can wait for you. Though I don’t think Jack would want to be a groom for Sir Jehan.” He looked at Jack, who opened his mouth as though laughing, although what came out sounded more like a rhythmic wheeze.

The older sergeant came up the line of stall doors and looked in at Roger. “Doing a bit better with that she-snake, I see,” he said.

“God’s wounds, she nearly ate my fucking fingers before, the brute, the whore! But Master Jack here has a calming way about him,” said Roger. He introduced the sergeant as Ranulf. Jack nodded amiably; he did as much as possible with gesture and expression, to avoid the pain of speech.

“And what’s
your
name, my lad?” asked Ranulf.

“Robert, sir. Called Hob, sir.”

“They’re going on tomorrow. They’re musicians and healers and such; I told them they should come with us to play before Sir Jehan. They’d find a welcome at the castle.” Roger was eager to acquire some new musicians for the hall: the winter nights hung heavy on a young soldier’s hands.

“You shouldn’t be on the road alone, not with what I’m hearing this day past,” said Ranulf. He hitched up his belt with a creaking of leather from his gambeson: he had a bit of a belly, and the belt, on which his dirk and purse were slung, had ridden under it. “Wait a sennight, you can ride with us.”

“What I told them, wait for us.” Roger’s voice sounded somewhat breathless. Greatly emboldened by the mare’s pacific state, he was bent over, picking up each hoof and holding it across his thighs, examining it for loose nails in the shoe, cracks in the hoof, pebbles. He was working on the last hoof when the mare swung her head around and looked at him, snorting. He put the hoof down at once and moved alertly to the
side, ready to jump the stall door. Jack pulled the mare’s head back to the front, and after a moment Roger picked up the hoof again, cursing softly.

“It’s Mistress Molly who’ll have to decide,” said Hob. “But I’ll tell her what you—”

“Do you know the fork in the forest road below Dickon’s Ford, lad?” Ranulf had the habit of sergeants everywhere: he spoke and you listened, unless you outranked him.

Hob, who had traveled with Molly only for the span of a year and a half or so, looked uncertainly at Jack. Jack nodded.

“Yes, sir.”

“The left or eastern road will take you to the castle. Mark you, it’ll look like it’s dwindling out a mile or so after the fork, deep in the forest, but never you mind, it’ll recover, and it’ll take you straight to Sir Jehan’s gates. He’s a stern and hard-handed man to his enemies, but open of palm to such as are skilled, like your mistress, and your father here.”

“This is Jack,” said Hob patiently.

“Your father, Jack, then,” said the sergeant, and turned back to Roger. The two soldiers began arguing over the best way to teach the mare to behave like a proper steed for a Christian. Ranulf was insisting that Roger had drawn her as his mount and that he should be the one to ride her every day till they reached home. He didn’t want to have to explain to the Sieur de Blanchefontaine’s grim mareschal why they were bringing in a half-wild horse. Roger, on the other hand, wanted to lead her and ride one of the extra horses to come, and let one of the grooms at the castle teach her how to say her prayers like a little nun. Jack as usual contented himself with the occasional grunt or gesture.

Hob left the men there and made his way to the great wagon through the snow of the bailey. He put a foot in the rope loop and stepped up to the wagon’s lip and pulled open the door. He entered the barrel-shaped cabin. He shut the door against the chill air and immediately
opened two of the shutters a bit for light. He was aware that, with her three beasts and wagons, the musical instruments, the herbs, the portable still, Molly was a wealthy woman, but her wealth did not extend to Hob’s wasting a candle in daytime.

He moved about the wagon for a while, tightening straps or cords holding blankets and chests in place, restowing Jack’s tent-peg hammer. The even more formidable war hammer was in its brackets on the wall. Jack had bartered a fine dagger and two gold double-leopard florins for it during one of his earlier campaigns, dickering with a Switzer mercenary from a nearby camp. It was two and a half feet in length, with a ponderous head that had two faces: a flat hammer on the one side, a steel beak like a crow’s on the other. A terrible weapon for crushing or piercing, and in Jack Brown’s big hand it flicked up like a hollow reed stalk, and when he brought it down it fell like a boulder.

This wagon, the largest of the three, was where Molly slept, as did Nemain, except when Molly summoned Jack to her bed. On those nights Nemain slept in the smallest wagon, drawn by the ass, whom Nemain had named
Mavourneen.
The mare drew the middle-sized wagon where Jack and Hob slept most nights and, though well enough liked, had inspired no name, and was just “the mare.”

He unwrapped the sheepskins about the musical instruments: the symphonia, on which Molly had made him a passable performer; the Irish harps that Molly and Nemain played; the goatskin drum that Jack had taken to so eagerly, again under Molly’s tutelage. He inspected each for crack or chip or other damage. Finding nothing amiss, he carefully wrapped the sheepskins again about the flat circular drum with its bone tapper-stick, and about the harps. The symphonia he kept out awhile.

He sat upon the bench that ran along half the left side of the caravan and placed the symphonia on his lap. He tuned the three sets of double strings, and rubbed resin on the wooden wheel. His hands were stiff from the cold and he rubbed them briskly together till they warmed
somewhat with the friction. He fingered the keys and turned the crank; the resined wheel scraped along the gut strings, making a doleful, resonant moan, the paired lead strings soaring above the two sets of drones. He retuned twice as the strings stretched. He practiced runs of notes for a time, and then “The False Knight Upon the Road,” but he faltered after a few bars: a sinister meeting upon the road ran too near the fears that had come to lie across his soul.

After a bit he realized he was staring at the keys but seeing the forest path. He wrung his hands, forcing the tension from his fingers; he drew in a sharp breath. He began again, essaying “Lady Isabel and the Elf Knight,” singing along a little as Molly had taught him, and the sound of the grimly triumphant old ballad drifted out the window:
If seven king’s-daughters here ye hae slain,
the melody rising, falling, its sinuous curves echoing faintly from the monastery walls, filling the darkening bailey.

He thought of leaving this refuge for the ice-clad road, the drifting snow, the unknown thing that ranged the woods. He sang the old song of evil overthrown, and his fingers danced over the keys, though his hands were cold, and his heart was chilled.

If seven king’s-daughters here ye hae slain,

Lye ye here, a husband to them a’.

CHAPTER 4

T
HE NEXT DAY, A REQUIEM
Mass for Brother Athanasius was said, and then he was interred in the brotherhood’s crypt. During Mass Hob stood again in the back of the chapel. Afterward the covered litter was borne from the chapel, the monks pacing behind, save for one who went before the bearers with an iron truncheon in each hand. He struck these together with a ringing clank, keeping a grave slow time, one stroke for each step. Hob followed them out, to stand watching them cross the frozen ground toward a small archway in the farther reaches of the bailey. All who were about other business paused to cross themselves and stand in prayer a moment. The archway, so Molly had told them, led to the crypt itself, far down a side tunnel, in a shadowy silent chamber hollowed from the mountain, where past members rested in niches in the rough-hewn gray rock. Here the
still, cool air never grew warm, never grew cold, and the monks’ footfalls were muted by rock dust from long-dead predecessors’ picks. In accordance with the brotherhood’s rules, no one save the officiating priest and the brothers themselves had been allowed to attend that interment.

Out in the cold, in the sun-bright bailey, all was commotion and hurry, the jingle of harness and clatter of hooves. Molly’s troupe was preparing to resume their journey, and the party of pilgrims had elected to accompany them, for a little way at least. The pilgrims now stood waiting in a cluster near the open smithy door to take advantage of the heat from the forge. Their staves were leaned against the smithy wall. They drew woolen and sheepskin cloaks closer, they clapped mittened hands together. Their scrips were slung around their shoulders, and each of these satchels was bulging with fare from the monastery kitchens. The monks never asked for recompense for board or lodging, but any pilgrim of substance left a donation behind, and the largely self-sufficient monastery had never lacked.

There were a score or so of the peregrines, come from Carlisle, most of them burghers, guild-brothers in the tanners’ guild. Their leader, Aylwin, a thickset man in middle age with a slab-cheeked cheery face, had come with his brother and one of his sons, and their three wives. A fairly prosperous free farmer from just outside Carlisle had also joined their party.

Now the wagons were ready to roll, and each pilgrim took staff in hand and trudged forward through the opened inner gate. Molly’s troupe began in their usual order: Molly in the ox wagon with Hob at the ox’s bridle to help guide the great beast, then Nemain, then Jack with the mare bringing up the rear. Molly brought the ox through the capacious doors to the outer ward. Hob had to keep hauling on the cheek strap of Milo’s bridle, the ox repeatedly turning its head in wistful attempts to begin a turn back to the stable.

Molly halted the ox just short of the portcullis, and the pilgrims
came crowding up to either side. The double escort of eight monks took their stations around the company.

Hob heard the gates close behind them, and a moment later the
clack, clack
of the pawls: just ahead, the portcullis slid sideways into the rock. Soon there was before him only the open cleft in the rock, the road that ran past the monastery, and the sheer drop beyond into the gorge. There was a moment’s reluctance to step through those gates into the endless unprotected world, and then Molly clucked to the ox, and Hob grabbed the bridle rope and urged Milo forward.

They turned left, and immediately the road began to climb, winding up the side of Monastery Mount. The advance party of monks walked easily up the incline, springing on sturdy legs over rock and rut. They had brought tight-woven linen bags filled with ash from the fire trenches, and now with a motion as though sowing seed scattered ash and bits of burnt wood in handfuls on the trail ahead of the oncoming party, to assist foot and hoof and wheel in the struggle to secure purchase on the frozen ground.