“My dear, we didn’t mean to discuss this with you tonight,” said the duchess. “No one is going to push you to make decisions in a state of shock.”
“But it does change things, doesn’t it?” she insisted. “The manor is now legally in the wardship of its overlord. As heiress, I need to do homage to him to obtain it. Only it’s not clear who he is.”
Havoise sighed, but Hoel squared his shoulders combatively. “I am the rightful overlord,” he said firmly. “Marie, my girl, the decision as to the fate of Chalandrey isn’t yours to make. I have documents to prove my title to any impartial court. They ought to carry even the partial court I have to take them to.”
Marie stared stupidly, unable to understand him. What did courts have to do with it?
“We won’t discuss this tonight!” said Havoise forcefully. “Marie, drink up your wine and go to bed.”
“No! What do you mean, talking about a court?” Marie demanded, looking from duke to duchess and back again. “I thought you were relying on me to give you Chalandrey. I thought …”
“My dear,” said the duchess, “I saw some time ago that you were not going to marry any of our men, not even poor Tiher, and I told Hoel so. Tiarnán might have changed her mind, I said, but he’s married — and then, of course, he was gone. As for the other household knights, poor fellows, they had more chance of capturing Mont St. Michel, that impregnable fortress, than of shifting your resolution. They’re giving up. The heart went out of them when Tiher pulled out. They keep on for the game’s sake, but no one really expects you to give in now. No, Hoel and I haven’t expected anything from you for some time. What we plan to do instead is to take the case to court.”
“What court could try a dispute between Brittany and Normandy?” asked Marie incredulously.
“There is such a person as the king of France,” said Hoel. “I grant you, he’s a fat old man who doesn’t count for much, and he’s mortally afraid of Robert of Normandy — but he is legally Robert’s overlord as well as my own, and entitled to judge between us. And Robert, in case you hadn’t noticed, is in the Holy Land, and I’m not. I have a good chance of winning. So you see, my girl, you don’t need to fret over who’s entitled to your homage, or break your heart with divided loyalties. You’re not judge of the matter.”
She gave him a stunned stare, then went bright red. So all her resolve, and all her determination and honor, had become irrelevant, and Chalandrey’s fate was something to be decided drily at a law court in faraway Paris?
“Hoel, that’s enough!” said the duchess. “How can you stand there lecturing her like that when she’s just had the news of her father’s death? Marie, come to bed.” Havoise caught Marie’s arm and helped her to her feet.
“I’m sorry,” said Hoel, taking her other arm. “But you did ask.”
They did not need her as a captive, they expected nothing from her — and yet, still, they were kind. Where her own father had given her only emptiness, these two gave her love. Marie began to cry again. “If it were really decided in court that you had legal title to Chalandrey,” she blurted brokenly, “nobody would be happier about it than me.”
Havoise kissed her on the cheek. “My dear,” she advised, “don’t say anything now that you might regret later. Rest first, my dear; rest.”
When Marie had been escorted off to her bed, and the duke and duchess had gone to theirs, the wolf lay awake in his corner, struggling with words. They had used a name that had belonged to him, Marie and the duke and duchess. He recognized that name when he heard it now, despite its distortions: Judicaël had used it to him. He had been watching the scene, trying to understand why the woman was so distressed, and then he had heard his name. Now he lay still, laboriously trying to concentrate his sunken powers of reason and piece together what they had said. The badly fitted muzzle hurt his ears, and the human scents all around him kept his instincts tense with fear, while the shame of being chained up and voiceless in the house of a man who had once treated him with honor was a pain that would not let him sleep. He might as well exhaust himself trying to understand what was happening around him: it would at least distract him from the rest. He thought about it, wordlessly for the most part, shifting clumsy blocks of concepts about like an amputee maneuvering a tool awkwardly with his stump.
There was bad news for Marie in the letter: yes, he had that.
Marie had expected something else bad to happen, and Hoel had said something that surprised her. He turned it back and forth, dredging for words to fit it. Court. That was it. Marie was to leave court, stay with the court, what?
Then the duchess had said the words that had included his name. “Marry”? He had once gone surety for Marie that no one would marry her by force. Ah, that other often-repeated noise had been “Chalandrey.”
The bad news in the letter was that her father was dead: that was why she had wept. And then she’d realized that her father’s manor was now hers, and she had been afraid. Afraid that she’d be forced to marry? Then the puzzle about the court, and then the duchess had reassured Marie that they wouldn’t force her to marry … no, that was not what had been said. The duchess had told Marie that they knew she would not marry. And then his name: Tiarnán. Might have. Changed her … mind.
Why might he have changed her mind? Marry.
It was only after a long weary session wrestling with the whole scene that he began to understand that Marie had been in love with him. He did not wholly believe his own labored interpretation, but even the possibility that he was right sank into him a shaft of bloody anguish. He again remembered her at Nimuë’s Well, pinned naked on the grass by the robbers. She was a lovely woman, and she was brave and loyal. He valued loyalty much more now that he had known betrayal. What was any lovely woman to him now?
Nothing, never, ever again. His body now would respond with a rush of desire to the scent of any bitch in heat, though his human self recoiled from the arousal with disgust. The thought that he might have been loved once by Marie showed him his degradation now more plainly than the muzzle and the chains. He began to whimper quietly in the darkness. He clawed at the humiliating muzzle and twisted it back and forth against the floor. Mirre woke up and licked his ear, and he forced himself to stop. It must be endured.
He remembered Alain looking at him in the boiling shed at Treffendel. Alain, human and elegant as ever, but with the same rank, frightened scent that had clung to the rock at St. Mailon’s. Alain, who knew who he was and had urged Hoel to kill him. He had been able to do nothing, nothing, nothing but endure it as helplessly as he had endured everything else Alain and Eline between them had done to him. He had lost all hope of returning to human form. But perhaps one day, if he endured long enough, he would find it in his power to return to them some of the destruction they had practiced on him. If he were mild and patient, the muzzle would be taken off — and Alain would have to visit court again one day. Judicaël would not approve. But Judicaël had never approved of him killing, and it had never stopped him before. What other reason did he have now to stay alive?
The court stayed at Rennes for Lent. Few people traveled in the penitential season, and the duke received a bare handful of visitors. He couldn’t even go hunting: between the ban on meat and the need to let the deer produce their young in peace, the forest was closed to the hounds. Hoel amused himself with his wolf instead. After a week or so, the muzzle was quietly left aside, and well before Easter, the chain joined it. Even Tiher grudgingly admitted that Isengrim was perfectly well behaved. He never even threatened to bite, didn’t bark, never stole food from the table, and, as Hoel gleefully pointed out to his wife, was house-trained from the first. If the dogs barked at him, his only response was to walk away with an air of such disdain that the duchess laughed at his dignity. Hoel taught him to come, heel, sit, stay, and fetch, all in the same morning. “Marvelously intelligent animal!” he said, rubbing Isengrim’s ears. “But I knew that from hunting you, didn’t I?”
Isengrim
understood him. The number of distorted words which he could recognize increased with each day that passed, and the continual effort of reaching for their drowned counterparts brought the words in his mind up into shallow water, where sometimes he glimpsed their meaning even before he touched them. Sometimes he could even follow a conversation — though always it took an effort of concentration, as though he were trying to understand a foreign language, once familiar but now half-forgotten. Constantly surrounded by human talk, human feelings and desires, the human part of him staggered out of the depths into the air, as though it had reached a beach where it lay gasping, still washed by the sea of animal instincts but no longer perpetually sinking beneath it.
He was content to wait on Hoel. The duke had always been the overlord he wanted, and there was no dishonor in serving him in any shape. The casual childishness of so much that was said to him — Good boy! Here’s a treat for you! — shamed him at first, but moved him less and less as he grew accustomed to it. How else was the duke supposed to speak to an animal? He was very glad to see the muzzle and chain go, and he was careful to do nothing that would bring them back. It was tempting to snap back at a dog that barked at him; tempting to bite one of the pages who occasionally teased him for a dare — but the temptation was one he could resist. And if he stayed near Hoel, the duke protected him.
The castle got used to the sight of the wolf walking quietly behind its lord, or sitting by his knee at table. When visitors began arriving again for Holy Week, the courtiers pointed the wolf out to them with pride and reassurances. “That’s the duke’s wolf Isengrim,” they said. “A fine beast, isn’t he? You don’t need to be afraid of him: he’s tame, and you can see how he loves his master.”
Apart from his master, the wolf could be seen to love the duchess and Marie. If they came into the room he would go over to greet them, pressing his nose into their hands, and he would follow them about the castle or lie at their feet. To others he was merely polite. Time and a few dropped comments had confirmed Isengrim’s first horrified conjecture that Marie had loved him — or rather, had loved the man he had been once. It made him watch her with a bittersweet regret. He began to be able to pick out her scent quickly from a roomful of others, and increasingly he found himself searching for it. He liked the way her body moved within her gowns, the shape of her above him, the controlled poise with which she held herself. Her voice was never shrill, but always low and pleasant, and she laughed easily, tossing her head back at her suitor’s jokes and replying to them lightly. If he licked her hand, her skin had a sweet taste all its own.
He could not remember clearly what she looked like to human eyes. Her body on the grass at Nimuë’s Well, yes, and the way she had stood afterward, with her rich brown hair in tangles over her shoulders. But he could not remember the color of her eyes. He had never paid attention to her eyes when he was a man, and now there were no colors in the world.
He knew, bitterly, that the reason he had never noticed her was because he had been in love with Eline — sweet, beautiful Eline, who had betrayed him so easily and so entirely. He did not like to remember Eline at all. He did not dream of killing her, as he dreamed of killing Alain: to see her again at all would cause him too much pain. He would be glad if she died, and were buried and placed forever beyond his eyes. It was much better to think about Marie. Those thoughts, too, were full of pain, but at least the pain was sweet. If that scene at Nimuë’s Well had been played out one year earlier, he might have married Marie, and Eline would never have been more to him than the daughter of a neighboring lord. Marie, he was quite certain, would never have wept and badgered him to tell his secret. Even if he had told it, she would not have betrayed him. She might have left him for a convent, but treachery was one thing that would never stain her. If he had married Marie, he would be human still, happy and at peace with his wife in his own manor. Sweet pain to imagine it!
The clerk Kenmarcoc, who’d been given a place in the duke’s chancellery, took a particular interest in Isengrim. He exclaimed when he first saw the wolf, and Isengrim, who was still chained and muzzled at the time, got to his feet eagerly and stood looking at the clerk with his bright feral eyes. It was in the hall after Mass on a Sunday: the duke was conducting business with his officials, and Kenmarcoc was bringing in some accounts. Marie was nearby with the duchess.
Kenmarcoc edged cautiously up to the wolf, then, even more cautiously, held out his hand for the beast to sniff. Isengrim touched it with his muzzle and sat down again, still watching the clerk.
“That’s the wolf I saw my last night in Talensac, when I was in the stocks!” Kenmarcoc exclaimed. “Seems I didn’t need to be so afraid of him.”
“How can you tell?” asked Tiher sceptically. As Master of the Hunt, he was among the officials beside the duke.
“He looks just the same,” said Kenmarcoc. “And I won’t forget in a hurry how I saw him. He walked right toward me: at first I thought he was a stray dog, but when he was only a few yards away, I saw he was a wolf. His eyes were all green in the moonlight. I was pinned in the stocks and couldn’t move, and I thought he’d kill me.”
“What were you doing in the stocks?” demanded Hoel, shocked and curious. A cleric should have been exempt from such punishments.
Kenmarcoc snorted. “Said something to the lady of the manor which I shouldn’t have, my lord. I won’t repeat it. I was upset over leaving Talensac, and I’d had a few drinks to comfort myself. Well, I went too far: I can admit that now. But I was upset. She’d quarreled with the machtiern — Lord Tiarnán, that was — and I still think she was to blame. He was so grieved over the quarrel that when he went into the forest for the last time I don’t think he really wanted to come back. And even when she’d come home and said she meant to make the quarrel up, when we were still expecting him back, she still wouldn’t admit she was to blame. Father Judicaël came from St. Mailon’s to reconcile her to her husband, but she quarreled with him, too. And Father Judicaël, you must know, my lord, is a man of such holiness that the people of the region thank God for giving us one of his saints. Tiarnán — well, I was his man. I was angry for him, particularly when his lady was in such a hurry to marry that de Fougères fellow.”
“My cousin, you mean,” said Tiher dryly.
“Forgive me, my lord,” said Kenmarcoc. “I talk too much.”
Marie could not say why she felt unsettled by what the clerk had said. She went over it several times in her mind afterward, always with the feeling that she wasn’t remembering it right, that something more must have been said, or she wouldn’t have this sense of disquiet when she thought of it. But the missing element remained obstinately missing, and at last she put the problem from her mind and concentrated instead on the disciplines of Lent.
On the evening of Palm Sunday the castle was full. From every corner of Brittany, Hoel’s vassals came to pay their respects to their liege lord and to join in the celebrations at Rennes cathedral. Marie was surprised when the duchess took time from her busy schedule to summon her to her chamber. When she went there, she was even more surprised to find Havoise in consultation with Sybille and with her dressmaker, Emma.
“So here you are, my dear,” said Havoise, breaking off her discussion. “I want you to try this gown on.” She picked it up, a beautiful sweep of dark green. Marie looked at it in bewilderment. It had been embroidered in gold across the bodice and along the long sleeves from elbow to midhand, and was held together at the sides with gold buckles.
“This is far too grand for me,” she said. “And I’m in mourning.” She was, in fact, back in the old black gown which she’d worn from St. Michael’s. Even the duchess couldn’t ban it when it was worn in mourning for her father.
“Marie,” said the duchess sternly, “you are not going to Paris in that horrible old black thing. I forbid it. You are the heiress to an estate about which Hoel and I are making a great deal of trouble, and you are going to look worth every bit of it, or you are not coming at all.”<
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“Coming to Paris?” asked Marie in amazement.
“Coming to Paris to see the king,” agreed the duchess. “King Philippe has agreed to hear the case. We’ll meet in Paris at the Feast of Pentecost. But you will not come in that old black gown. You can wear this at court, and for the journey I’ve ordered some other clothes for you. Emma here can make any adjustments that are needed.”
Sybille giggled. “Look at her trying to say no,” she said.
“Yes,” said Marie, blushing and laughing. Her heart fluttered helplessly with excitement. To go to Paris, to see the king of France! She’d never left Brittany and the March in her life, and the King in Paris seemed like something from a fairy tale. “Oh my lady, thank you !”
“Just like a normal girl sometimes, isn’t she?” said Sybille.
“Just occasionally,” agreed the duchess.
XIII
Judicaël was praying in St. Mailon’s chapel on the evening of Easter Sunday when the bell tinkled sweetly.
He had had a difficult Lent. Officials had come from the bishop of Rennes to talk to him, and they had questioned him at length about his conduct over bonfires and other manifestations of demon worship. It was true that he’d never viewed these with the same dismay as the ecclesiastical authorities, regarding them rather as courtesies paid to the land’s original inhabitants than as works of the devil. He was able to swear that he had never blessed a bonfire in honor of any fairy being, but he doubted that was enough to satisfy the bishop. Since Tiarnán had been lost he’d had no confidence in his own opinions about anything. He found the dry, impatient questions of the bishop’s men almost impossible to answer. It might well be, he thought, that this Easter at St. Mailon’s would be his last; that he would be forced from the chapel and given some minor place in a monastery or at the ecclesiastical court, or even stripped of his priesthood. And perhaps that was indeed what he deserved.
The Wolf Hunt Page 29
