Straw Into Gold (7 page)

"What luck?" Innes called.

"A near miss. I'll try another." And I did, and though I got it out of the cart, the turnip landed far off the mark.

Again and again I threw the turnips, Innes reaching about and then handing them to me one by one. And again and again they missed wildly as the arrows came thwacking in. Finally, half desperate, I threw as the cart leapt over a ridge in the road, and the turnip rolled and tumbled in the air until it met the tender tip of the front horse's snout. The effect was astonishing, and as I ducked an arrow that streamed in ferociously just above my shoulder, the horse jolted backward, reared up, and dropped its rider.

"Innes, the first one! The first one is down with one of your wicked turnips. Innes!"

But he did not answer. When I looked about, he was lying in the cart, his face as white as a cloud, his shoulder bright red with the blood spurting from an arrow shaft.

I turned back to the horses. I weighed a turnip, then threw it with all the hatred that had ever been behind the heft of any weapon. It smashed against the second horse's eye and turned him sideways, so the horse behind rushed into him with flailing hooves. Even the wild riding of the cart did not drown out their screaming.

Or mine.

"Tousle!" The nurse was calling, her voice desperate. "Tousle, you need to come forward."

"Innes has an arrow in him, just above the shoulder."

"Come forward now," she called.

The nurse never turned away from the racing horses. Their breaths came in great snorts, and the white sweat that coated their bodies spattered back to us in gobs. "They're all done in with this. Listen to me." A ridge in the road lifted her nearly off the seat, and one of the horses stumbled. "Listen to me. Find the queen at Saint Eynsham Abbey and ask her the riddle. She'll know the answer, if anyone is to know it."

"You've got to stop for Innes," I called back.

"There's no help for him if we stop now," she screamed back at me."Go back. Draw the arrow out, quick and sharp, and then press his hand to it."

"The three horses are down."

"By Saint Brendan, it's not the horsemen we're to worry about. Now, you've got to pull the arrow out. And straight, with no twist at all to it, and no up and down."

"But I never—"

"Do it now. And by Saint Margaret, pull it straight."

I went back to Innes and looked at the blood and sweat on his chest.

"You're to pull it out," he said.

"I am."

"Then do it," he said.

I nodded. I grabbed the arrow with both hands.

"Do it!" Innes cried, and I jerked it out from him, and jerked out a cry from his throat as well, and a fountain of blood from the wound. Quickly I held his hand to the spurting, then tore off a long strip of the burlap and wrapped it around him, all the time blood running down. So much blood running down. Innes's skin was the yellow-white of old clouds.

"Is it done?" called the nurse, looking back."Then settle him onto the cot, with his shoulders high. No, higher."

Innes groaned with my fussing and with the charging of the cart across ruts that seemed as large as ditches. I changed the burlap strips again and again, but the red stains sprouted across them like impossible blossoms, and I pressed my hands against them to hold the life inside.

"Is he still bleeding, then?" cried the nurse.

"Still bleeding."

"And if you hold your hands against the bandage?"

"It still bleeds through."

With a rough pull the nurse hauled back on the reins, hefting the horses back into a trot, then a snorting walk, their heads whisking about to toss the lather from their mouths. "Take the reins," she called to me.

"I've never driven a cart before."

"Neither of the horses will know that. Keep them to a walk. If they want to take their head, pull them like so. Just so." She handed the reins to me and went back to Innes. "And as Saint Leoba says, 'Let the eyes of the unjust be blind.'"

After the rush and speed of the wagon, the gait now seemed horribly slow, and I kept turning my head to see if pursuit had caught us. The nurse bent hugely over Innes, crushing so many green herbs into his wound that the scent of damp moss filled the air. She sang her low lullaby as she worked, and it seemed to me—though this must have been impossible—that she was suddenly happy. Her face had taken on a kind of straight and efficient smile, her lips opening at the words of the song, then closing as the song descended to a hum. Her rubbing hand moved in time to its rhythms.

"The bleeding has stopped," she soon called to me softly. "But it would take only a rock against a wheel to start it again. He's got to be still for the wound to close. And this cart is not the place for a body to be still."

"It is also the very thing that the king's soldiers will be looking for."

She nodded slowly."Not far away, on the river side of the road, there is an old mill."

"I passed it just yesterday morning."

"Well," she said, "I have known the miller there and his wife. It would be a place to hide Innes until the wound closes. Or at least for the night."

"I passed the mill yesterday morning just by chance," I said, half in a whisper.

"Nothing is ever quite by chance. Go along now. And keep the gait slow. Mind the black horse most especially."

Nothing is ever quite by chance.

I minded the black horse most especially, but he was too tired from his run to cause mischief. We plodded along slowly, while everything in me wanted to whip the horses to a gallop. Slowly the houses started to spread themselves out, slowly the gardens and fields grew larger, and slowly, slowly the mill finally slouched into view. From this side the mill seemed to lean out over the water, its wheel about to tilt in.

"There," the nurse called. "Stop just there."

"The house is on the far side."

"There are reasons for not telling the miller and his wife that you are here. Now help me. I'll see that the wound is fair and clear and then be off with the cart."

"It would be warmer in the house."

"Warmer than you'd like, if the King's Grip comes."

"No reason for him to stop here, of all places."

"Reason enough. Now," she said, gesturing,"there will be bandages there, and two blankets just there. No, by your other hand. Bring them along. And that pouch of herbs there too. And you might as well bring the rest of the oatmeal, if the crockery is not all smashed." While I gathered everything up, she reached under Innes and tucked him to her, all the while crooning her soft lullaby.

The sunlight glinted off the rimy stones of the mill as we carried Innes across, keeping ourselves out of sight of the house beyond. The wheel creaked slowly about as if it were hardly aware of what it was doing. Water sloshed lazily from its troughs and ran over the icy coating that the winter had built up along its edges. Inside, it was warmer but dark as dark. The mill's innards groaned with the crabbed turning of the wheel outside, almost as if it were groaning with Innes. I waited for my eyes to pick out shapes and found myself rubbing the grain dust away from them. It filled the air so thickly, I wondered for a moment if I could drown in it.

"The stairs are there," the nurse called, and we climbed them to the thrumming of the mill wheel. The floors, the beams that spanned overhead, the very air vibrated with the turning. Up in the loft a slit of a window let in enough light to see sacks of properly stacked meal. I pulled three from the pile and spread them flat, then laid a blanket over them all. The nurse laid Innes down and checked the bandage, fussing at its tightness but glad that no new blood showed.

I huddled back against the roughness of the sacks while she fussed, and the smell of the meal dusted up. I closed my eyes and was at once home again with Da, each of our hands yellow with the meal of the week's baking. The smell of the fire, the lumps of dough rolling themselves out to rise, the taste of the meal in the air—they were all so sharp that I almost reached forward for them.

"I'll be going now and leaving you to Saint Jude of blessed memory," said the nurse. She had to yell against the thrumming.

I knew she would have to go. She would hurry the cart along and drag with it any searching horsemen, like wood chips in a boat's wake. Only this time if the Grip caught her, he would not simply warn her against meddling. I nodded as she pointed to the bandages. "A change at nightfall, and again in the morning. As gentle as ever you can." I nodded again, and she took my face in her huge hands, leaned forward, and pressed her forehead against mine, her nose against mine. Then she reached down and scooped the thick meal dust into her hands. "Let the eyes of the unjust be blind," she said again. She started down the ladder, looked at us once more, and was gone. I was left with the thrumming and with Innes.

I had never been kissed so before. The newness of it and the loss of it were all mixed up together, and I could say nothing in the heat of that mix.

Sitting there, I thought it seemed that this was all one of Da's phantasms. In a moment he would shake his hands and the air would swirl and the misty pictures dissolve. We would pick up our mugs and laugh and stretch our feet out to the fire. But it was no phantasm. The thrumming of the mill wheel and the labor of Innes's breathing were both real.

We slept. Warm and tight against the sacks, we slept.

When I opened my eyes, it was still light, the kind of light that lies low on the land late on a winter afternoon. Innes was still asleep, his breathing less harsh now. Nothing else moved. All was absolutely quiet. But something had wakened me.

Then I knew: It was the quiet that had wakened me. The mill wheel had stopped.

I crawled to the edge of the loft stairs and peered down at the very moment that the miller was thrust into the mill by the King's Grip, the miller's wife following closely behind. With mailed hands the Grip pulled the miller's smock and lifted him up, holding him so close that it seemed as if he were about to bite him. The miller's wife stood still, her hands smothered in her apron, afraid to plead with anything but her eyes.

With a jerk the Grip tossed the miller into a heap, and his wife immediately rushed over and knelt between them. But the Grip ignored them. Instead, he drew his sword and began to poke it into the sacks, one after another, until he walked ankle deep in the meal that poured from them. The miller and his wife stayed on the floor, watching.

I had seen battles in the conjurings that Da had set in the air before us. I had seen the murderous rage in the eyes of the great Achilles as he stalked Hector, then slew him with a sweeping stab. I had never understood the blood lust that reddened his face. I did now.

The Grip sauntered to the staircase and set his foot on the first step. I scuttled back, crossed the floor, leapt over the sacks, and huddled quietly beside Innes. I wished that the thrumming would cover us again.

"Master," I heard the miller call, "no one has been up those stairs these five days and more. You see yourself that the dust lies thick upon them."

I waited, my breath like a millstone in my chest. The first step creaked under the weight of the Grip.

"With a simple push," the Grip said, "I could split this beam and bring this mill to a ruin. Two, maybe three more winters will bring it down for me. How is it, miller, that fortune changes so quickly for some? You, who might have been miller to the king himself, as wealthy and envied as any merchant has ever been."

"On the darkest days," said the miller wearily,"I think it but chance."

"Chance or design, you have lost everything on a boast."

"Not everything," said the miller's wife.

As I listened to their voices coming up through the floorboards, I imagined her taking her husband's hand in her own and fronting this man with the short sword.

A long pause, with some scuttling below. Then the Grip's voice came again. "Chance or design, the end is the same. But here is my design: See to it that you do all as I told you. The reward is large should you be the one to find them. The penalty for hiding them is even larger. And the king is of a mind that no one—not even those closely connected—will be spared his anger. Now bring some bread. And I'll take that bottle, and that. Load them into the saddlebags quickly and hope that I decide not to take anything else. Your ear, or perhaps her nose."

I heard a bustle below, then the grating sounds of the Grip's footsteps, a whistle and the sharp snort of the horse, and, after a moment, a gallop. I sank back against the meal sacks. "What fills a hand fuller than a skein of gold?" I wondered, and held my own hand up to look at it. I could barely make it out in the wasted light. What might fill my hand? I let it drift to my forehead to touch the spot where the nurse had touched me.

The sound of someone slowly ascending the stairs. A pause. I backed against the sacks, making myself as small as ever I could. Then a whisper filtered up through the dust like a distant memory.

"You needn't be afraid now." I peered out from behind the meal at the miller's wife, who stood with open hands looking into the loft. "It's all right. The miller will watch a moment against his return, but he is sure to be off to burn some barn or smash the windows of a manor house or two. That's the way of it with his type."

I stood up, wonderingly."You knew we were here all along?"

"Not until the King's Grip started up the stairs. We saw the meal dust fall through the flooring as you ran across. He saw it too, but he didn't know what it meant; fancy that. There's to be some good in working a mill all your life long." She crossed the loft and stood over us. "You're the boy from yesterday," she said, and I nodded.

When she saw Innes, she looked at him with an almost aching tenderness. She went to the top of the stairs and called the miller, who came with hands roughened by his work to pick up Innes as easily as a sack of flour. He balanced him down the loft stairs and out the mill with his wife mothering behind him.

"You're not to sling him about like your grain," she scolded. "And you'll be watching his head by the doorway. No, his head, you numb miller."