Virgin in the Ice bc-6

by Ellis Peters

  Yves had no longer any idea of where they were, though he knew that long ago they had left the road. He thought they had crossed a bridge, and that could not have been anything but the River Corve. Somewhere on that upland slope, then. A poor chance of finding a cottage here, even if the snow gave over and let them see their way.

  But it seemed that Brother Elyas knew his way, or was guided to the place where he could not choose but go, for some awful, penitential purpose of which only he knew. A thicket of thorny bushes, heaped with snow, snatched at their garments, sheltering a shallow hollow in the slope. Yves stumbled against a hard, dark surface, and grazed his knuckles on rough wood. A low but sturdy hut, built to give shelter to shepherds in the lambing, and store fodder and litter. The door was held by a heavy bar, but Brother Elyas drew it clear and thrust the door open. They burst through into blessed darkness, Elyas stooping his head low beneath the lintel. The door, clapped to against the wind, fitted snugly, and suddenly they were in blindness, stillness and comparative silence. After the blizzard without, this was almost warmth, and the smell of old but dry hay, stirred by their feet, promised bed and blankets together. Yves shook off snow, and his heart lifted hopefully. Here Brother Elyas might survive the night. And before dawn, before he awakes, thought the boy, I can slip out and bar the door on him, while I go to find someone to help me, or carry a message for me. I’ve held on to him thus far, I won’t lose him now.

  Brother Elyas had moved away from him. He heard the rusting whisper of the hay as a man’s weight was flung down into it. The howl of the wind outside ebbed into a desolate moaning. Yves crept forward with hand extended, and touched a stooped shoulder, caked with snow. The pilgrim had reached his strange shrine, and was on his knees. Yves shook the snow from the folds of the black habit, and felt Elyas shuddering beneath his hand, as though he contained by force what should have been deep and bitter sobbing. Now that they were in utter darkness the thread that bound them seemed to have drawn them closer together. The kneeling man was whispering almost soundlessly, and though all words were lost, the desperation of their import was plain.

  Yves felt his way into the pile of hay beside him, and with an arm about the tense shoulders tried to draw Elyas down to lie at rest, but for a long while the pressure was resisted. At last the lean body softened and sank forward with a muted, wordless groan, whether in consent to the boy’s urging or in the collapse of exhaustion there was no telling. He lay stretched on his face, his forehead on his arms, and Yves raked up the hay on either side to fold him in with at least a measure of warmth, and lay down beside him.

  After a while he knew by the long, deep breathing that Elyas slept.

  Yves lay holding him, pressed close to his side, determined not to sleep. He was cold and weary, and in great need of thought, but his mind was numbed and unwilling. He did not want to remember the words Brother Elyas had spoken, much less try to make out their meaning, for whatever it might be, it was terrible. All he could do now for this broken man, for whom he felt so obstinate and strange an affection, having taken the responsibility for him, was to make certain that he could not escape again to wander and be lost, and to go out and seek help for him in the morning. To which end he must stay awake.

  For all that, he may have been very close to dozing when he was startled into wakefulness again by a voice beside him, not whispering now, only muffled by the cradling arms.

  “Sister … my sister … Forgive me my weakness, my mortal sin—I, who have been your death!” And after a long pause he said: “Hunydd—she was like you, even so warm and confiding in my arms … After six months starving, suddenly such hunger—I could not bear the burning, body and soul!”

  Yves lay still, clasping him, unable to move, unable to stop listening.

  “No, do not forgive! How dare I ask? Let the earth close on me and put me out of mind … Craven, inconstant—unworthy.”

  A longer silence yet. Brother Elyas was still asleep, and out of his sleep he gave voice to his torments, uncovered now, mercilessly remembered. He slept and writhed. Never before had Yves felt himself enlarged to contain either such horror, or such fierce and protective pity.

  “She clung to me … she had no fear at all, being with me! Merciful God, I am a man, full of blood, with a man’s body, a man’s desires!” cried Brother Elyas in a muted howl of pain. “And she is dead, who trusted in me …”

  Chapter Eight

  Brother Cadfael came back from Compline to see Elyas settled for the night, and brought a young brother with him to relieve Yves of his watch. They found the door standing open, the bed wildly disturbed, and the room empty.

  There might, of course, have been explanations less dire than the obvious one, but Cadfael made straight for the outer door again at a purposeful run, and looked for the signs he had not looked for when entering. The court had been crisscrossed with new tracks at the end of Compline, and even these the continuing snow was rapidly obliterating, but there were still traces of someone who had set a straight course for the gatehouse. Mere dimples in the whiteness, but discernible. And the boy gone, too! What could have erupted there in the sickroom to spur Elyas into such unreasonable and perilous action, after his long apathy and submission? Certainly if he had taken it into his disordered head to do something drastic a half-grown lad would not have been able to stop him, and more than likely pride would not let Yves abandon a creature for whom he had assumed, however briefly, the responsibility. He was getting to know Yves fairly well by now.

  “You run to the guest-hall,” he ordered the young brother briskly, “tell Hugh Beringar what’s amiss, and make sure they are not within there. I’ll go to Prior Leonard, and we’ll have the whole household searched.”

  Leonard took the news with concern and distress, and had every brother scouring the enclave at once, even to the grange court and the barns. Hugh Beringar came forth booted and cloaked, in resigned expectation of the worst, and was short with any who got in his way. With both the secular and the cloistral law directing, the search did not take long, and was fruitless.

  “My fault entire,” Cadfael owned bitterly. “I entrusted the poor wretch to a boy hardly less wretched. I should have had more sense. Though how or why this can have arisen between them is more than I can see. But I should not have taken the least risk with either of them. And now my foolishness has lost them both, the most forlorn pair this house held, who should have been guarded at every step.”

  Hugh was already busy disposing the men he had here at hand. “One to Ludlow, as far as the gate, where either they’ll have passed, or you may have them kept safely if they arrive hereafter. And you go with him, but to the castle, have out ten men, and bring them down to the gate, where I’ll come. Wake up Dinan, too, let him sweat, the boy’s son to a man he must have known, and nephew to one he may well want to have dealings with soon. I won’t risk men by sending them out in this beyond a mile or so, or in less than pairs, but our pair can’t have got far.” He turned on Cadfael just as vehemently, and clouted him hard between the shoulders. “And you, my heart, stop talking such arrogant foolery! The man seemed quiet and biddable, and the boy needed using, and could be trusted to the hilt, as you very well know. If they’ve miscarried, it’s none of your blame. Don’t arrogate to yourself God’s own role of apportioning blame and praise, even when the blame lands on your own shoulders. That’s a kind of arrogance, too. Now come on, and we’ll see if we can’t bring home the two of them out of this cold purgatory. But I tell you what I shall be telling my fellows at Ludlow—move out no more than an hour from home, keep touch, and turn back on the hour, as near as you can judge. I’m not losing more men into the snow this night. At dawn, if we’ve caught nothing before, we’ll take up the search in earnest.”

  With those orders they went forth into the blizzard, hunting in pairs, and obscurely comforted, in Cadfael’s case at least, by the reflection that it was a pair they were hunting. One man alone can give up and subside into the cold and die, far more easily t
han two together, who will both brace and provoke each other, wrangle and support, give each other warmth and challenge each other’s endurance. In extremes, not to be alone is the greatest aid to survival.

  He had taken Hugh’s impatient reproof to heart, too, and it gave him reassurance no less. It was all too easy to turn honest anxiety over someone loved into an exaltation of a man’s own part and duty as protector, a manner of usurpation of the station of God. To accuse oneself of falling short of infallibility is to arrogate to oneself the godhead thus implied. Well, thought Cadfael, willing to learn, a shade specious, perhaps, but I may need that very argument myself some day. Bear it in mind!

  Blundering blindly ahead with a burly young novice beside him, northwards across the Corve, Cadfael groped through a chill white mist, and knew that they were all wasting their time. They might probe the drifts as they would, but the weather had the laugh of them, covering everything in the same blank pall.

  They all drew in again resignedly to Bromfield when they judged the time to be spent and the work impossible. The porter had set fresh pine torches in the shelter of the arched gateway to provide a beacon glow homeward, for fear some of the searchers should themselves go astray and be lost, and from time to time he set the bell ringing as an added guide. The hunters came back snow-caked and weary, and empty-handed. Cadfael went to Matins and Lauds before seeking his bed. The order of observances must not be utterly disrupted, even to go out in defense of innocent lives. Nothing could now be done before dawn. Not by men. But God, after all, knew where the lost might be found, and it would do no harm to put in a word in that quarter, and admit the inadequacy of human effort.

  He arose at the bell for Prime, and went down with the rest in the winter darkness to the cold church. The snow had ceased at the first approach of morning, as it had done for several days, and the reflected light from all that depth of whiteness brought a pure and ghostly pallor even before dawn. After the office Cadfael ploughed his way alone down towards the gatehouse. The world around him was a waste of white broken by shadowy dark shapes of walls and buildings, but the porter had kept his torches burning hopefully under the archway, and they shed a full, reddish light over the stonework, and into the outer world beyond. To replenish them he had had to open the wicket in the gate and pass through, and as Cadfael approached he was in the act of re-entering, pausing in shelter to stamp off snow before he came within, and closed the wicket again behind him.

  Thus it happened that he was facing inwards while Cadfael was facing out, and only Cadfael saw what he saw. The wicket was lofty, to admit mounted men, and Brother Porter was short and slight, and stooping to shake his skirts clear. Behind him, and not many paces behind, two faces suddenly glowed out of the dimness into the flickering light of the torches, and shone clear before Cadfael’s eyes. Their suddenness and their beauty took his breath away for a moment, as though a miracle had caused them to appear out of the very air. No heavenly visitors, however, these, but most vividly and vitally of this world.

  The girl’s hood had fallen back on her neck, the red light flowed over a great disordered coil of dark hair, a wide, clear forehead, arched, imperious black browns, large dark eyes too brilliant to be black, by the reflections in them the darkest and reddest of browns. She had, for all her coarse country clothes, a carriage of the head and a lance-like directness of gaze that queens might have copied. The lines that swooped so graciously over her cheekbones and down to full, strongly folded lips and resolute chin made so suave a moulding that Cadfael’s finger-ends, once accomplished in such caresses, stroked down from brow to throat in imagination, and quivered to old memories.

  The other face hung beyond and above her left shoulder almost cheek to brow with her. She was tall, but the man behind her was taller, he was stooped protectively and watchfully to bring his face close to hers. A long, spare, wide-browed face with a fine scimitar of a nose and a supple bow of a mouth, and the dilated, fearless golden eyes of a hawk. His head was bared, and capped closely with blue-black hair, coiling vigorously at his temples and sweeping back thick and lustrous over a lofty skull. Cadfael had visions of that face terminating in a short, pointed beard, and with fine-drawn moustaches over the long, fastidious lips. With just such faces had he seen, in his time, proud, mailed Syrians wheeling their line of charge outside Antioch. This face had the same dark coloring and sculptured shape, like cast bronze, but this face was shaven clean in the Norman fashion, the rich hair cropped, the head framed by rough, dun-colored homespun, a local peasant’s wear.

  Well, they happen, the lightning-strokes of God, the gifted or misfortunates who are born into a world where they nowhere belong, the saints and scholars who come to manhood unrecognized, guarding the swine in the forest pastures among the beechmast, the warrior princes villein-born and youngest in a starving clan, set to scare the crows away from the furrow. Just as hollow slave-rearlings are cradled in the palaces of kings, and come to rule, however ineptly, over men a thousand times their worth.

  But this one would not be lost. It needed only that flashing glimpse of the black-lashed golden eyes to make it certain they would burn their way before him to wherever he set out to go.

  And all in the brief moment while the porter was ridding himself of the snow he had collected on his skirts. For the next moment he had stepped within, and closed the wicket behind him, just in time to cut off, short of the gates, the dual vision of youth that was surely advancing to ask for entry.

  Brother Cadfael closed his eyes, opened them hopefully, and closed them again upon dazzled recollection that might almost have been delusion. In the between-light of dawn, in the grip of a hard winter, and complicated by the pleasurable, warming glow of torchlight, what dreams may not come!

  He had taken but three more labored paces through the fall, and the porter had barely reached the door of his lodge, when the bell pealed at the gate.

  The porter turned, startled. He had been preoccupied first with reaching up to the sconces in which his torches were set, and then hurrying back into shelter, and he had seen nothing stirring in the lingering darkness without. Only after his back was turned had the two—if they were real indeed!—stepped within range of the light. He hoisted resigned shoulders, and waded back to open the small grid that would show him who stood without. What he saw astonished him still more, it seemed, but it spurred him into instant action. The great latch lifted, and the lofty wicket swung open.

  And there she stood, tall, meek and still confronting them, in a too-large gown of faded brown homespun, a coarse short cloak and ragged-edged capuchon flung back from her head, the sheaf of dark hair tumbling to her shoulders. The sting of cold air had brought out a rosy flush on her cheekbones, in a skin otherwise creamy-white and smooth as ivory.

  “May I enter and take shelter here a while?” she said in the mildest of voices and humblest of manners, but with that confidence and calm about her that could not be quenched. “Through weather and mishap and the distresses of war I am here alone. I think you have been looking for me. My name is Ermina Hugonin.”

  While the porter was conducting her excitedly into his lodge, and hurrying to inform Prior Leonard and Hugh Beringar of the sudden appearance of the missing lady at their gates, Brother Cadfael lost no time in slipping into the roadway and casting a shrewd eye on the empty countryside in all directions. Empty it was, to all appearance. There were corners, copses, bushes, any of which could quickly conceal the departure of a young and swift-moving man, and either her companion had chosen to vanish among these, or the falcon had indeed taken wing and flown. As for tracks in the snow, a few early-rising good men with sheep to dig out or beasts to feed had already gone to and fro past the gatehouse, and among their traces who was to pick out one man’s foot? She had spoken truth, if a somewhat deceptive truth; she entered here alone. But two had approached the gate, though only one rang to ask admittance.

  Now why should such a man, bringing a lost girl to safety, avoid showing his face within? And why,
pondered Cadfael, should not the one man who was aware of the evasion make it known openly to all? On the other hand until he knew of a good reason one way or the other, why should he? First hear and consider what the lady had to say.

  He went back very thoughtfully to the lodge, where the porter had hurried to prod his fire into life and seat her beside it. She sat self-contained and silent, her wet shoes and skirts beginning to steam gently in the warmth.

  “You are also a brother of this house?” she asked, raising dark eyes to study him.

  “No, I am a monk of Shrewsbury. I came here to tend a brother who has been lying sick here.” He wondered if any word of Brother Elyas’ misfortunes had reached her, but she gave no sign of knowing anything of a wounded monk, and he forbore from mentioning a name. Let her tell her own story once for all, before Hugh and the prior as witnesses, then he might know where he himself stood. “You know how diligently you have been sought since you fled from Worcester? Hugh Beringar, who is deputy sheriff of the shire, is here in Bromfield, partly on that very quest.”

  “I heard it,” she said, “from the forester who has sheltered me. I know from them, too, that my brother has been here, while I have been hunting for him. And only now that I find my way here myself do I learn that he is again lost, and half the night men have been out searching for him. All this countryside knows of it. I fear you have made a poor exchange,” she said with sudden, flashing bitterness, “gaining me and losing Yves. For I am the one who has cost you all so much trouble and time.”

  “Your brother was safe and in excellent health,” said Cadfael firmly, “as late as Compline last night. There is no need to suppose that we shall fail of finding him again, for he cannot have gone far. The sheriff’s men in Ludlow will have had their orders overnight, and be out by now. And so will Hugh Beringar, as soon as he has seen you safe and well, and heard whatever you can tell him.”