THE EARL (A HAMMER FOR PRINCES) (14 page)

“If we cut it down, we might bring a curse on us,” Roger said.

Fulk smiled, his eyes on the stump. “I don’t think so. Someone must have stayed here, some wayfarer, and had nothing else to do.” He looked around for signs of a dead fire, or even other marks on the trees. There were none. “Let’s go back. I’m cold.”

“What should we do about it?”

“Nothing.”

“You don’t think the villagers made it—the people whose houses we shall sleep in?”

“God’s bones. That was made within the last few months, the village has been deserted for years.”

Roger walked silent beside him a few strides. Night birds sang before them and behind them. They could hear the sounds of the camp, and through the fringe of trees the campfires shone like blossoms. Roger said, “It’s a god of some kind. I’m sure of it.”

“Maybe.”

They were afraid of it because they did not know what it was. They knew what it was, a face made of a dead tree and stones. He smelled the perfume of flowers, the scent of the open meadow, the strawberries, the tethered horses. It was lighter here. Who would have made it? Looking back, he saw the darkness spangled with lightning bugs and crossed himself.

In front of their hut, Morgan was kneeling on the ground, laying out the fire. Fulk sat down with his back against the wall. All across the camp, in the darkness, men walked back and forth, stood and talked, or cooked their dinners, wearing paths through the weeds around the tumbled, roofless huts. After the clearing in the forest, it was warm and friendly and familiar.

“Here,” Roger said, stepping over a row of buckets to Morgan’s side. “Is that how you make a fire? You should know better,” He pushed Morgan aside and patiently began to teach him what Morgan had known for years. Fulk saw the look on Morgan’s face and laughed.

When he had been a squire everybody had told him what to do. He remembered endless sessions with old and tedious men, who explained some point or other of warfare while the squires dozed and nodded and asked questions to prove how clever they were and threw stones at each other—he remembered being made to groom one horse three times in an afternoon, although each time there seemed no hair out of place. But he remembered that now with pleasure. It was strange. He knew he had hated it, all of it, from the day he entered old King Henry’s service as a page until the day when at last he knelt before the king and was knighted.

“Morgan?”

His hands behind his back, Morgan was watching Roger with the fire; his head rose. “My lord?”

“Do you hate being a squire?”

Roger looked up, startled, and Morgan giggled. “My lord,” he said mildly, and smiled. His eyes returned to the fire bed.

“God of angels,” Roger said. “Who would not hate it?”

Fulk laughed. “Yet it’s pleasant to remember it. Isn’t it?”

“Oh, parts.” Roger washed his hands in a bucket. “Pranks and things. And working with the horses. Learning how to fight.”

“And being half-starved and beaten.”

“Oh, that happens to everyone.”

Squires got less food than anyone else. The older boys always stole the younger ones’ rations. Fulk remembered standing for hours in the hall, waiting to serve the king and his household and the court at dinner, the smell of the food in his nose and his stomach clamped to his spine with hunger. He had always fought the older boys when they came to take his meat, until, exasperated, they held him down and beat him into one large bruise. When he was older he’d stolen from every boy weaker than he was.

“A good beating teaches a boy to accept pain,” Roger said. “Here, you. Get the spits.” He pushed Morgan, who raced off toward the wagons.

Fulk had always run to look busy when someone older was watching him. When nobody was around he’d done nothing. He pulled at the grass that grew between the stones of the ruined hut wall. “I am aging. I remember all that with such longing—”

Roger stretched out on the ground beside him. His long body almost spanned the hut. “It was easier than now.”

“Oh, probably. But then we had nothing to say about what happened to us.”

“I didn’t care.’ Roger yawned; his long arms strained up into the air. “And of course in those days one always knew who was bad and who was good.”

“The tedium of middle age. Separating trivial good from trivial bad.”

Roger laughed sleepily.

As a page, he had burned with anger to hear anything spoken against King Henry. He had swelled like a toad with pride if the king glanced his way. He remembered the king now as a giant—he knew that was not so, that he remembered it so because he had been so small himself.

Past days always seem more glorious than the present. All his childhood, he had hung on stories of the Great King, William, thunderous, gigantic, and part of his love of King Henry was that he was the Great King’s son.

He had taken for granted that it would go on forever, that he would be a little boy forever, carrying dishes and candles and messages through the castles and hunting lodges of the king.

“Did you ever hear stories of King William, when you were little? The Great King, not Rufus.”

Roger opened one eye. “Who did not? Sometimes I wished. . .”

“What?”

Roger braced himself up on one elbow. “It’s mad, I should not say it. I used to pray that I might be magically put back into that
England
. You know. They all spoke of it so well, the elders.”

Morgan was stabbing pieces of rabbit onto the spits. Fulk got up and went behind the hut to make water. He imagined he could feel the idol in the forest, watching him. What mood is this, what fey, silly mood . . . Talking of squires and dead kings.

Rannulf’s sons, he thought, my grandsons will not listen to stories of this reign and long to be here. Suddenly everything he did seemed small and useless to him. He did up his breeches and went back into the hut.

Through the door of the hut the sky was white with stars. Fulk lifted his head. The fire had died to ash; Roger and Morgan lay wrapped like sausages in their cloaks beside him. He had no idea how long he had slept. Somewhere, horses were moving. He had heard the drum of their hoofs through the ground, it had wakened him, and he stood up, his heart hammering. A shout rang out, and hoofs beat hard on the ground.

In the huts, in the spaces between the huts, men twitched and stuck their heads out of their blankets. Fulk fought with his tangled sling, cursing, and kicked at Morgan. “Get up! Get me my horse.” He tore off the sling and threw it away. A voice rose, questioning.

“Roger.”

Waking up, the men around him lifted their heads, crawled out of their blankets, and stared toward the far end of the camp. Groups of them gathered in between the huts. Morgan squirted out of his wrappings and sprinted off. Most of the camp still slept. Fulk’s ears strained; what he had heard could have been the wind, and he went outside the hut and knelt and put his ear to the ground.

Far off, dim, hoofs sounded on the earth. He rose and saw Roger coming toward him.

“Follow me. Where’s—good.” Morgan had brought his horse at a trot through the camp, bridled but saddleless. The tall bay shook its head and snorted and looked down toward the meadow, and its ears pricked, interested.

“What is it?” a man near him cried.

Fulk scrambled up onto the wide, comfortable back of the horse and gathered his reins. “Keep them in camp,” he said to Roger. “Don’t let them chase anybody.” He tightened his legs around the horse’s barrel, and it burst into a short, strided lope, its head high.

The hoarse blast of a horn blared, and all across the camp men cried out and leaped up. Fulk’s horse bolted forward. Fulk reined it down a little, and the horse neighed; he felt its ribs expand, between his knees.

Only half of his men were awake, The camp was a jumble of men struggling up and calling out in sleepy voices, full of running shadows. Fulk strained to see what was happening in the meadow. Horses—he saw horses running free down there, and among them men on smaller horses. They were herding the loose stock up toward the trees. Fulk tightened his legs around the bay’s barrel.

He heard de Brise shouting orders in a clear voice—”Leave your clothes, get horses—follow your lord, there.” Old soldier. The men stealing their horses worked quickly to collect the horses and herd them into the trees. A knight stood in Fulk’s way; someone beside him heard Fulk coming and yanked him aside.

The moonlight turned the meadow grass silver. The horse thieves saw Fulk coming and hesitated; their heads turned, one by one, like deer, and they called to one another. I have no sword, Fulk thought. He pinned his broken arm to his chest.

From his left, another horse charged down toward the thieves—Thierry, screaming like a madman, with his young knights streaming after him. Fulk kicked his horse. The thieves whirled their mounts to flee.

Thierry with his sword raised swept down on them, and they scattered before him. For a moment, alone in their midst, Thierry like a giant lashed out on all sides and cut men down like sapling trees. They did not stay to fight him, all who could fled into the trees, and Thierry with his young knights galloped whooping after them. Fulk loped his horse around behind the loose stock in the meadow and drove them back toward the camp.

Roger cantered into the meadow and helped him herd the horses together, and half a dozen other men rushed around to catch them and lead them away. One or two of the horses tried to escape, lunging and bucking in a circle of men on foot with arms widespread. Fulk drew rein and watched a stocky chestnut stallion feint and bound neatly through a gap in the line of men surrounding him. The men swore and ran wearily after the horse, which snorted, jogged a few steps, stopped to snatch a mouthful of grass, and galloped easily out of reach.

“Who were they?” Roger said. “Did you see any of them?”

Fulk shook his head. “I don’t think they were knights. Their horses were too small.”

The chestnut stallion let a man come within arm’s length of him and bolted away, head and tail high.

“Was anybody killed?”

“All the men at that fire, there. They were knifed in their sleep.” Roger pointed to the fire bed nearest the meadow, between the place where the horses had been tethered and the first of the ruined huts.

Fulk let out his breath with a hiss. “How did they get so close? Who were the sentries there?”

“I don’t know. I told Simon d’Ivry to post men all through those trees.”

The chestnut was de Brise’s warhorse. De Brise and fifteen other men made a circle around him and closed in, and the horse waited, tensed to leap, its eyes shining. Fulk made his muscles relax.

“He’s off with Thierry, I suppose. Come along.”

They rode to the edge of the meadow, and at a short lope rode all the way around that end of the meadow, along the fence of the trees. There was no one there, dead or alive—no sentries, nothing but the smell of wild strawberries. Fulk began to quake with anger and went back to the camp at a slow walk, trying to calm himself.

“Maybe they killed the sentries, too,” Roger said.

“If so, they took them back to be buried. There are no bodies.”

Roger said nothing. A cheer rose from the camp, and Fulk turned to watch Thierry ride back, his young men parading behind him, while the men in the camp rushed down through the huts to meet them and cheered and cheered and cheered.

Fulk said, “Go tell them I would talk with them, Roger.”

The big knight cantered off toward Thierry, who was trotting up to the edge of the camp. Fulk thought of Thierry’s charge into the thieves—that was why the men cheered him. He made himself sit quietly on his horse until Thierry, with Simon among the young men around him, rode up and stopped in front of him.

“Well, nephew,” Thierry said.

“Not so well.” Fulk moved up beside him, his eyes on Simon. “You were responsible for putting sentries at this end of the camp, were you not?”

Simon’s lower jaw sagged. He stared at Fulk a moment, glanced over at Thierry, and suddenly shook his head. “No. No. It was not I.”

Fulk slapped him as hard as he could across the mouth. Simon reeled back into his saddle. The boys around him pulled their horses away from him and Fulk.

“When Sir Roger gives you an order it comes from me,” Fulk said. He pressed his horse closer to Simon’s and leaned forward, his face a hand’s breath from the young knight’s. “You never fail to do what you are told to do. Four men are dead because of you.”

“It was not I,” Simon mumbled. “I swear on God’s holy—”

“You lie,” Fulk said. He pulled his horse around and rode off, past Thierry, who called to him to wait, and up to Roger.

“I won’t insult you by asking if you are sure,” Fulk said, and Roger glanced at Thierry and Simon and nodded.

“My lord,” Simon called, in a pinched voice. “My lord, you have struck me before my friends, and I demand—”

Fulk said to Roger, “Remind him that I could as easily have commanded his death, and if he continues to deny it I will.”

“Nephew,” Thierry said, “are you angry because he disobeyed you, or because he is my comrade?”