He was inwardly relieved. Her questions had left him feeling mauled, and her white face and horrified eyes lacerated him every time he saw them. Staying with her sister would give her opportunity to calm down and come to terms with what he was. He readily gave her permission, and sent her off with a train of servants and the excuse of needing to learn housekeeping. As soon as she was gone, he set off alone for the forest. In the shadows of Broceliande, past and future could become remote, and this present torment would fade into the scents on the wind.
VII
The ducal court left Rennes in the early part of July and rode south to Nantes. The move took several days, but as soon as everyone was installed in Nantes castle, the court resumed its continual chattering in three tongues as though it had never been interrupted.
Nantes was a bigger city than Rennes, a port where ships came down the Loire from Tours and Orléans, and up the Loire from all the harbors of the world. The castle, however, was smaller than that in Rennes, built for Hoel when he was merely Count of Nantes. The ducal court filled it to overflowing. The knights of the household spent much of their time in the town, or practicing their weapons on the field to the north of the castle.
“There’s a letter for you,” one of the pages told Alain de Fougères when he came in from such weapons’ practice at noon one day about the middle of September. “A man brought it this morning. I put it there, on the table.”
“A man?” asked Alain, picking up the letter from the table in the Great Hall and looking at it with apprehension. It was a single piece of folded vellum and the seal was blank. He wondered if it concerned some debt he’d forgotten. Letters were not common things, even for a knight like himself who could read a little. “What sort of man?”
“A farmer from somewhere. Iffendic, I think. He said,” and the page grinned, “a lady gave it to him for you.”
Alain suddenly remembered that Eline’s sister had married the brother of the lord of Iffendic. He almost tore the letter open on the spot — then decided to take it somewhere more private. He had been recalled to the court when it first moved to Nantes, but he was still under something of a cloud. Alain’s position as knight in the duke’s household was supposed to demonstrate Lord Juhel’s loyalty to his feudal overlord. Alain’s dereliction of duty had reflected badly on his father, and Alain still winced at the memory of some of the things Lord Juhel had said. It would never do to be discovered with a letter from Eline.
In the castle garden a few minutes later he broke open the seal and unfolded the paper. Inside it was a single lock of white-blond hair, tied with a strand of forget-me-not blue silk, and on the parchment, in a round, clerical hand, the words, “St. Maugan’s Chapel. Iffendic. Three days before the Feast of Saint Michael. Nones.”
He picked up the lock of hair with hands that shook: it seemed to shine like water. He remembered Eline in her bedroom at Comper with her hair loose over her shoulders. He had known, he told himself joyfully, that she would send for him one day. Tiarnán must have gone off hunting once too often, and she’d realized that she’d really loved Alain himself all along. She needed to send a message, but she couldn’t write and didn’t dare send a messenger, so she’d used some pretext to get a clerk to write out a time and place, and for signature and seal enclosed her hair, knowing that her lover would understand. He touched the hair to his lips. Three days before the Feast of Saint Michael — the twenty-sixth of September. That gave him a week.
He told the court that he wanted to go to St. Malo to see about a ship that was said to have arrived there with some hawks from Norway. The duke and most of the others accepted this without comment: one knight’s absence from the crowded court meant more space for everyone else. Tiher, though, became suspicious when Alain declined his offer to come along.
“You’re not going to Talensac?” he asked while Alain was packing.
“No,” Alain replied coolly.
“Good,” said Tiher, still suspicious. “Because, cousin, Tiarnán could kill three of you before breakfast, and I think that if he found you visiting his wife, he would. It was plain to see at the wedding that he’s besotted with her.”
“I am not going to Talensac,” said Alain. He picked up the gold crucifix he wore on a chain around his neck and held it up in his fist. “I swear to it on this.” He dropped the crucifix and crossed himself piously.
Tiher raised his eyebrows. “Oh. Good. Well, if you see a bargain in hawks, get me one. No gyrfalcons, though; too costly.”
The evening of the fourth day before the Feast of Saint Michael found Alain at the inn in Montfort, a place of unpleasant association that he tried now to banish with hope. The following morning he washed and shaved and dressed with great care in a slashed riding tunic, red velvet with the new wide sleeves, and a pair of striped hose. This time he had left his armor at Nantes. He hadn’t needed it for his invented hawk-buying expedition, and it would never do to lose it again. He strapped his sword to his side, mounted his bay charger, and rode off with a dry mouth and wet palms.
It was about eight miles from Montfort to the chapel of St. Maugan, the other side of Iffendic. He hadn’t been sure where the chapel was, and had to ask for it, but he still arrived closer to noon than the midafternoon office of Nones, almost three hours early. The chapel was in fact the parish church of a small hamlet, and when he arrived he found the yard in front of it full of peasant women fetching water from the well and gossiping. After a few embarrassed minutes waiting under their curious stares, he remounted his horse and rode back toward Iffendic. She was sure to come along the road; he’d find somewhere private to meet her.
About half an hour before St. Maugan’s bell in the distance rang for Nones, she came. She was alone, riding a plump white pony, her head bent as though in grief. Alain, waiting in an apple orchard just off the road, found his heart pounding so hard that he couldn’t speak, and almost let her ride by. But she lifted her head just as she was level with him, looking toward the church tower ahead, and at the sight of her pale face he found his tongue again and shouted, “Eline!”
Eline had intended to talk to him reasonably, to explain that her husband had tricked her into the marriage by his silence over a terrible secret, to say that she considered the vows she had made in ignorance to be invalid. But when she heard Alain shout her name, the speech went out of her head. Safe at Iffendic, away from her husband’s disturbing presence, any remaining ambivalence in her feelings toward him had been swept away. She had slept with a beast, and she felt unutterably defiled. When she saw Alain standing under the apple trees, shaven and elegant, keen with hope and human, she turned her pony, galloped toward him, and jumped off the horse’s back straight into his arms. After a moment’s stunned disbelief, his arms folded around her, and he kissed her passionately. His touch seemed to sweep away the clinging filth of the wolf’s fur, and she leaned against him sobbing with relief. She had been afraid that he would not come, and that she would be trapped in the nightmare forever.
“My darling!” said Alain, kissing her tears. “Whatever has happened? — Here, we mustn’t be seen; let’s go under the trees.”
Under the trees there were shadows and long grass; the apple branches, recently stripped of their ripe fruit but patched gold with autumn, cut off the light. She stumbled over the windfalls underfoot, and from everywhere came the smell of rotting apples, the buzz of drunken wasps. They stopped in a clear space well away from the road and faced each other. Alain’s hair was gold as the apple leaves, and his wide eyes were full of astonishment and concern. She put her arms about his neck and kissed him frantically. Golden strength, sweet safety! “You came,” was all she could say. “Oh, thank God!”
“Of course I came! I would come to the end of the earth for you. What in the world has happened?”
She remembered how she had pushed him out the window the last time they met, and began to cry. She gabbled incoherent apologies, punctuated by kisses; then, terrified at what she was doing, flung herself o
ut of his arms again and hugged her trembling hands against her throat. “Oh, Alain! I’m so sorry!” she gasped. “I can’t say … Swear to me that you’ll help me, that you won’t betray me!”
He took the crucifix from around his neck and unfolded her cramped, terrified hands to set it between them. Then he knelt in the long grass under the trees and placed his hands between her own. It was the act of homage, the gesture a knight would make to his feudal overlord. “I swear by this cross, and by your white hands,” he promised solemnly, “that I will shed the last drop of my blood sooner than betray you, Eline. I am your liege man forever.”
“Oh, my love!” gasped Eline, dropping to her knees to face him. Her face was burning with shame: such generosity, after such treatment as she had given him! “I don’t deserve it of you!” she cried impulsively. “You can call me not liege lady, but mistress. Everything you want of me is yours.”
Still scarcely daring to believe it, he put his arms around her and kissed her again. She responded to him not with the sweet yielding warmth he’d sometimes daydreamed of but with desperation. Anger began to stir even in the rapture. What had Tiarnán done to her?
Whatever Tiarnán had done, it had left no mark on her body. When she had undressed and stood naked in the shadows under the trees she was whiter and softer and more lovely than any dream he’d had of her. She blushed to take her shift off, and he thought it looked like the dawn flooding the white winter sky — but to touch her was the very heart of spring. He had never conceived of such ecstasy, such an intense, overmastering bliss; at the fulfillment of it they both wept.
When it was over, they lay together on the heap of their discarded clothes, and she rested her head on his chest and whispered, “Oh, my darling!” He stroked her tangled hair, and knew that he had all he desired of the world. It only remained to keep it.
“Now,” he said determinedly, “tell me what has happened.”
Eline told her story in a stumbling rush: Tiarnán’s hunting expeditions without the dog; the ignorance of the servants about the nature of them; her own desperate questions; Tiarnán’s final reluctant reply. Alain listened in increasing amazement and, against his will, disbelief. When Eline finished, his first question was “Are you sure he wasn’t making … well, some kind of cruel joke? To punish you, perhaps, for fretting over his absences?”
“A joke?” repeated Eline. “No, it’s true. I know it is.” She remembered again Tiarnán’s eyes in the moonlight, and shuddered. Suddenly she was afraid to be there, lying with her lover under the trees. She had betrayed Tiarnán now, and perhaps he could find out. Even the leaves might whisper to him what she had done. She sat up and looked about for her shift.
“Yes, but …” Alain began — and trailed off helplessly. He had been at the duke’s court for over a year and had often shared a table with Tiarnán. He’d slept near him in the duke’s Great Hall, used the same latrine, practiced weapons on the same tilting field. He’d never liked the other man, but a werewolf? It didn’t seem possible.
Eline was on her feet, hurriedly doing up the laces on her shift; she didn’t notice Alain’s expression of doubt. “He told me … everything,” she whispered, and glanced around again uneasily at the shadows. “He told me where he goes when he … he changes. Most often he goes to St. Mailon’s chapel in the woods, and he leaves his clothes under a hollow stone. He told me that he has to go back to them and get — something — he leaves with them, before he can become a man again.”
She remembered that admission, and Tiarnán’s voice as he made it, low and perplexed, his troubled eyes watching her. “But what is this thing you leave?” she’d asked, and he had replied impatiently, “I don’t know! I only feel it. It must be the part of my soul that makes me human.” She had taken that answer fastidiously between the tips of her mind’s fingers, dropped it into her heap of details, and gone on asking — how did he leave it? was it visible? how could he separate out a part of his soul? — until Tiarnán had shaken his head in angry confusion and left the room. It was only after that, turning it over again, that she had realized it was the way to be free. Her first thought had been to use the information herself — but that was impossible. It was difficult for a young noblewoman to get away from the house unattended — even to get out from Iffendic manor house to the neighboring hamlet of St. Maugan had required complicated planning — and to travel on the road through the forest to St. Mailon’s was dangerous and would never be allowed. Besides, she was afraid. The longer she was way from her husband, the greater and more frightful was the shadow he cast over her. So she had turned to Alain, the only man who might, she thought, be willing to take the risk for her. “Listen to me,” she said to him now, urgently. “If someone went to St. Mailon’s and waited until he’d become a wolf, and then stole the clothes and the thing he leaves with them — then he couldn’t come back. He’d be trapped in his beastliness. And I’d never have to endure him again.”
“Yes, but …” Alain repeated — and again trailed off helplessly. Eline had not claimed that she’d actually seen any of this: it was no more than something Tiarnán had told her. It couldn’t be anything but a cruel joke.
Eline stared at him, her eyes growing enormous. He was hesitating; he was afraid. Or perhaps, now that she’d given him what he wanted, he didn’t love her anymore. Perhaps he now despised her as a whore. “Aren’t you going to help me?” she cried in anguish.
Alain jumped to his feet, naked as he was, and pulled her close against him. “Yes, yes!” he protested. “Of course. But …”
But there were no “but”s. There were only her lips, and the feeling of her body against his. He forgot what he’d meant to say. What did it matter if she was wrong? She wasn’t asking him to fight Tiarnán, but only to check out some nonsense about a hollow stone at a chapel. “What do you want me to do?” he asked her.
She sighed deeply and tilted her head back to gaze into his eyes. Alain, Alain, she thought, why didn’t I marry you? “Tiarnán told me that he always wants to go into the forest when the moon is full,” she whispered. “He always leaves the house at cockcrow, so he must reach St. Mailon’s an hour or so after dawn. If you go to St. Mailon’s the night before the moon is full, in the morning you could go up the bell tower and watch until Tiarnán comes.”
“What if he doesn’t come?”
“Then you try again at the next full moon. But I think he’ll go. He said he usually goes there.”
Alain was quiet a minute, considering. He still felt very doubtful about Eline’s story. On the other hand, there was no great danger in spending the night at St. Mailon’s. Even if Tiarnán showed up to consult his hermit, he could be pacified with some excuse. “Oh yes, I was on my way back from St. Malo and I remembered I once vowed to observe a vigil for the saint, and I missed my chance of doing it there, so I turned aside and came here. After all, it’s the Breton name of the same saint, isn’t it? No, I swear I haven’t been to Talensac. It’s your manor; you’d know if I had. Eline’s at Iffendic? Well, I haven’t stopped there, either.” Yes, Tiarnán would have to accept that. And if Tiarnán didn’t show up, Eline might be willing to admit that her husband, cold, dark devil that he was, had played an unpleasant joke on her, perhaps for no other purpose than to distress her and make her cry. And for that, Alain thought with satisfaction, Tiarnán had already been repaid, with cuckoldry. “Very well,” he told Eline, kissing her hand. “I’ll do exactly as you say, and go to St. Mailon’s the night before the next full moon. I swear it to you now.”
She threw her arms around him again. “Oh, thank you, Alain! Please, please, be careful!”
He felt as though his heart had burst into flower, like a tree. “We must arrange somewhere to meet afterward,” he said, “whether Tiarnán comes or not.” Then he smiled and added, “By then we’ll need somewhere warmer than this.”
He was delighted with the way she blushed.
It was not difficult to find an excuse to go to St. Mailon’s chapel the
night before the full moon. When he returned from his “trip to St. Malo,” Alain told the court that the ship he’d heard of hadn’t arrived. It seemed natural, then, when he said he’d heard it had docked and that he meant to try again. Tiher was again suspicious, but, again, was easily put off with a misleading oath.
Finding the chapel itself was more difficult. It lay off the road from Iffendic to Comper, two full days’ ride from Nantes. The road was a narrow country lane, and for most of its length it ran through thick forest. He missed the turning at first, and rode all the way to the edge of the cultivated lands near Comper before realizing his mistake, and had to turn and ride back. It was dusk when he finally found the place. Only the tip of the bell tower showed above the trees, black and dangerously sharp against the evening sky. He turned his horse into the narrow path that led toward it, but had to dismount and lead the animal. The branches of the young oaks hung low over the path and made riding impossible. He had put his armor on this time, just in case he met Tiarnán and the other wasn’t pacified with explanations. The hauberk weighed on his shoulders, and his sword, hung to be comfortable when riding, kept tangling in his legs as he twisted under the trees on foot. He was irritable and out of breath when at last he led the horse into the clearing in front of the church.
St. Mailon’s was small, scarcely bigger than a peasant’s hut, a squat gray building that lacked even glass for its windows and made do with wickerwork screens, like a house. Crane flies swooped up and down in the fading light of the clearing, but the night was already deepening under the branches of the surrounding trees. The moon was hidden behind the forest. A bat fluttered past like a falling leaf, but nothing larger stirred. Alain had a sensation that he was being watched, and looked about with his hand on the hilt of his sword, but no one was there; there wasn’t even a rustle in the undergrowth. Everything was still. Not peaceful, though. It was as though the whole forest were coming awake and was aware of him, staring at him with hatred. The story he’d disbelieved in the apple orchard didn’t seem quite so impossible now, and he swallowed and crossed himself. He reminded himself that he stood on holy ground, and that, anyway, all he had to do was stay hidden in the church and watch. And if the story was true, then Eline was married to a monster, and it was his duty to rescue her. To rescue her from a werewolf! That was a deed for a hero.
The Wolf Hunt Page 17
