The Story of Silence

by Alex Myers

  Why had he run away? Was he running towards his desire? Away from his father? Could he possibly be following a road that would lead to knighthood? He tried to keep such worries from his mind; being a minstrel wasn’t bad at all.

  But it wasn’t being a knight.

  You can’t be a knight.

  He chided himself thusly every day. A silent chant to himself: You can’t be a knight, you can’t be a knight. He wasn’t strong enough, said a little voice (which sounded like Wendell’s). He wasn’t really a boy, said another voice (oddly like Earl Cador’s). But he was strong enough to kill two men and hadn’t he been living as a boy for all these years, with none the wiser? Couldn’t he …

  It didn’t help that every morning when he went to draw water, as he waited his turn to crank the handle on the well, he looked right down upon one of La Marche’s many training grounds. A rank of pells and a rank of boys battering them. How many years had his inner chant been, I will be a knight? Even now, his hands itched to grip a hilt, to feel the weight of a waster – what had once been a burden now would be a comfort. Even more, he longed for the purity of the strikes and parries. Here was something noble, something true …

  Being a minstrel was worthy. It was peace. At times, when he sang well and the song ended and there was a brief moment of quiet, or when his voice melded with the harp, the two curling together perfectly, he felt happy, as if something inside him answered something outside him. But those times seemed few.

  They had not been at La Marche more than a month when Silence stood once more at the winch to the well, bucket in hand, gazing at the practice yards. They were empty, for he had woken early and, apart from a few servants in the kitchens and the guardsmen on the walls, he was the only one about. He couldn’t resist, so he dashed down the hill, bucket swinging in his hand, and reached the deserted practice yard.

  He was in luck. Just as he arrived, he saw the weapons’ master – La Marche’s equivalent of Master Waldron – yawn and lurch out of the storeroom, headed in the direction of the jakes. Silence waited, and poked his head into the darkened room. No one else around. He set his bucket on the ground and hefted a practice baton. He’d rather grab a waster and batter at the pell, but knew that would be too loud. So he fitted a shield on one arm and took the heavy baton in the other and went through his forms in the yard, keeping one ear and half of one eye cocked to anyone’s approach. It felt good to go through these movements.

  Silence spun about when he heard footsteps behind him. ‘Not bad.’ A squire stood, swinging Silence’s bucket in one hand. He wore a red and blue tabard over a tan shirt and dark brown leggings. His hair hung, a bit ragged, over his ears; his curls were dark black as soot, as were his heavy eyebrows. ‘Not bad for a kitchen boy,’ he said. His face might have been pleasant, handsome even, had it not been for the sneer that twisted his lips. Though he appeared amused, no lightness reached his blue eyes, which stared flatly at Silence.

  Silence squared his shoulders. ‘I’m not a kitchen boy,’ he said. ‘I’m apprenticed to be a minstrel.’

  The boy shrugged. He looked to be about Silence’s age, though it was hard to tell; he had a faint shadow above his lip, but not many other whiskers. ‘You aren’t a squire. So what do you think you’re doing?’

  ‘Practising.’

  ‘You don’t belong here,’ the boy said. He swung the bucket, releasing it and letting it fly across the practice yard to land with a crash. ‘Get back to your chores.’

  ‘Perhaps I do belong. You said I wasn’t bad.’ Silence kept his voice even.

  ‘Not bad for a pot boy. But not any good either.’ The boy crossed his arms over his chest.

  Sir Waldron had taught that level heads fight better than hot ones, but Silence couldn’t keep himself from replying, ‘Shall we put that to the test?’ He stepped close to the squire; he overtopped him by at least a head, though the other boy was heftier, thicker in the chest and shoulders.

  ‘I was hoping you’d say that,’ the squire replied, and Silence heard a note he recognized in the other boy’s voice – a desire to prove himself.

  It took them short minutes to don padded jackets, gloves, helms, and shields. They raised their batons in salute, facing each other, and began. Silence tried a low feint, got the other boy to retreat, and jabbed quickly. The boy caught the stab with his shield, but not squarely, and Silence pressed this advantage, working to get inside the guard, finally landing a strong blow to the boy’s ribs. ‘Point,’ he called loudly, not certain what the sparring customs were here. The other boy grunted. Silence’s heart raced, pounding away in his chest like a cantering horse. A feeling filled him, like when he sang well, a feeling of fullness, of completeness, but this was even better. For the energy didn’t just rise out of him in song, but flowed through his every joint, his every sinew.

  They continued on like this, Silence parrying the squire’s slashes, angling a few off his shield, and scoring a couple more hits. One to the boy’s thigh, one to the boy’s shoulder, another to his ribs. Four solid hits. He could feel himself tiring, but he tried one more low feint. This time the boy was ready, and parried hard. Silence staggered off balance and the boy hit him with his shield, sending Silence sprawling to the ground.

  Silence rolled to his side, scrambling to get his feet beneath him and lift his shield. Though they were lightly armoured and though Silence had tempered his own strikes against his opponent, hitting to bruise but not to break, the boy now raised his baton and struck full force. Silence barely got his shield up, and that at an awful angle, bending his arm back awkwardly. Again, the boy slashed with his baton, and Silence threw himself to the side, saw the boy swing around to try again – he would stove Silence’s helm in with a blow like that. Was he a lunatic? Desperate, Silence didn’t try to regain his feet, but instead scrabbled on the ground and launched himself for his opponent’s ankles, sending him toppling to the ground.

  ‘Hey now,’ came a deep voice from above them. Silence felt a hand at his neck and then suddenly pulling him up by his tunic in a rough, slightly choking motion. ‘What’s this, what’s this …’

  ‘This kitchen boy’s trying to turn a sword fight into a wrestling match,’ the other boy said. ‘Because he can’t win fairly.’

  Silence got to his feet and saw that it was the weapons master who had pulled him up; he recognized him from all the times he had spotted him ordering the pages and squires through their drills. ‘We were having a friendly match, sir,’ Silence replied, ducking his head politely to the man.

  ‘Go back to your pots,’ the other boy sneered. ‘In a real fight I would have killed you a dozen times over.’

  ‘You did knock me down, that is true. But I landed four hits. On a field of battle, those blows would have counted for more.’

  ‘They were little taps,’ the boy laughed. ‘You haven’t any strength.’

  ‘And you haven’t any brains, Alfred,’ the man said. He had a neatly trimmed brown beard and a head as bald as Hob’s. ‘You’re wearing padded jackets, not mail. Your friend here …’

  ‘He’s not my friend, he’s a dirty little …’

  ‘This fellow,’ the weapons master continued, ‘pulled his strikes. As he ought to. You fought without any control. I have often said that is a weakness of yours. You fight to hurt your opponent rather than improve yourself. Is it any wonder that you aren’t advancing? What’s your name, boy?’ the weapons master asked.

  ‘Maurice,’ Silence said.

  ‘Well fought, Maurice. You have a flourish to your strikes, I’d say. Something fancy that doesn’t need to be there. But your steps are quick.’

  Alfred pulled off his helm and shook his dark hair loose. Then he snorted, ‘Quick for a pot boy.’

  The weapons master hooked his thumbs behind his belt. ‘You have more than a little to learn, Alfred. I think it best if I set you with a requirement. This time, every morning, extra practice with Maurice.’

  Alfred groaned, ‘That’s not …’ He met t
he master’s glare for a moment. ‘Yes, sir.’ He turned and stumped into the storeroom.

  Silence gathered the helm and gloves that Alfred had left on the ground and the weapons master clapped him on the shoulder. ‘There now. I was a kitchen boy once.’ Silence didn’t correct him, just scurried to put the gear away. When he emerged from the storeroom, the weapons master handed him the empty bucket. ‘Don’t be late, eh?’

  Giles had no shortage of jeers about Silence’s new training regimen (he had happened to oversee part of the sparring as he was returning to the keep from an early-morning assignation in some tucked-away yard). ‘The first Sir Minstrel, the one-and-only knight and bard combined! He’ll kill you and then sing over your grave.’

  Hob was more dour, but perhaps that was only owing to the fact that they woke him up when they returned: ‘If you break your finger sparring, you shan’t be much good on the lute.’

  ‘I solemnly promise not to let my fingers get broken,’ Silence said.

  ‘And if this training nonsense gets in the way of you learning songs …’ Hob threatened, reaching out a hand so Silence could heave him up from the pallet.

  ‘I solemnly promise to learn all the songs you require of me,’ Silence said.

  ‘What a meek boy, for such a fierce fighter,’ Giles teased. ‘Our Maurice is simply split down the middle. Half timid, half brave. Half tall young man, half high-pitched girl.’ These last words he spoke in a quivering falsetto.

  Silence felt heat rise up his neck. ‘I do not sound like that,’ he protested.

  ‘Careful, or you’ll make Sir Minstrel angry, Giles,’ Hob muttered. ‘Maurice, go and tune the lute and run through “Chanson de Roland” five times.’

  Each morning, he would make his way to the practice yard, even as the weather grew colder, and feathers of ice formed on puddles. Early morning, the yard was often vacant, though he never knew who he would chance upon: sometimes Hob, curled up around an empty wineskin (that meant a delay in his training as he and Alfred would carry the befuddled harpist to his pallet: it wouldn’t do to leave his master to get frostbitten). Sometimes Giles, straw in his hair, whistling lustily on his way back to their chamber. And sometimes women, wrapped in cloaks. Servants, mostly, but now and then the cut of the cloth indicated a more noble sort. Silence would bob his head and hurry past, trying not to look. He knew that minstrels were supposed to, as song and story had it, be in the thick of courtly intrigue and love. But he had no interest – he didn’t need a lesson from Griselle to explain that part to him. And he believed that Giles’s involvement in love intrigues was more than sufficient for the three of them.

  He and Alfred often sparred from first light until Prime, barely exchanging a word between them. Some mornings, by unspoken agreement, they put off sparring and instead worked at the pell. Silence watched Alfred closely, looked for the darkness of his eyes, the clouds that gathered there in the blue. Looked for how his heavy brows would pull close, wrinkling his forehead. These were signs to work the pell, signs that some anger was brewing that needed to be vented. And Silence preferred it not to be vented on his bones.

  On a morning when snow had powdered the ground, he and Alfred came to the yard and found Hob snoring in the storeroom, asleep under a pile of padded jackets. The room smelled of vinegar, leather, sweat. Silence looked down at the minstrel. His face was pale as the snow, relaxed in sleep so that his features seemed almost melted. Awake, sober, alert, this man could play the harp so beautifully; he could tell the story of Arthur pulling the sword from the stone and you could feel the wind blow through Arthur’s hair and then caress your own face, so real did he make it seem. But this …

  ‘What do you think he’s dreaming of?’ Alfred said.

  Silence nearly jumped, so startled was he by Alfred’s question. ‘More wine?’

  Alfred laughed.

  ‘Or perhaps he dreams of less. Sometimes, in dreams, we see ourselves as better than we are.’

  ‘Sometimes worse.’ Alfred stooped down and took one of Hob’s arms, draping it over his shoulder. Silence took the other.

  ‘I like the dreams the best that take me somewhere else. That are apart from real life. Ready? Heave!’

  They stood up, Hob between them, his toes dragging on the ground. He gave a moan and his head rolled around on his neck, to loll on his chest. They started walking towards the keep. ‘What do you dream of then?’

  Silence cast a quick look at Alfred, to see if he was about to be teased or preyed upon. But the boy’s face was open, eager, his eyes shining. ‘I dream sometimes … well, they start near where I grew up. In the forest, and I’ll be walking through the trees and come to a spring. And I’ll kneel over the spring and be able to go inside it.’

  ‘And?’ Alfred prompted.

  ‘And anything. Sometimes it’s piskies who attack me and try to steal my clothes.’ He coloured a bit at sharing that – those dreams could be oddly terrifying. ‘And sometimes it’ll be a nymph, wanting to talk.’

  ‘A nymph!’ Alfred exclaimed. ‘I’d like to dream of a nymph.’

  ‘They aren’t what you imagine them to be, I fear.’

  ‘Pffft. How would you know? These are just dreams.’

  Silence shrugged. ‘And what do you dream?’

  They had reached the room Silence shared with the minstrels and Alfred shouldered the door open. Giles’s pallet was empty and they carefully set Hob down, pulled a blanket over him.

  ‘I dream of falling,’ Alfred said. ‘Always, again and again. I dream of falling and I wake just before I land.’

  ‘Your heart beating as if you’d been in a race?’

  ‘Yes. Dizzy. Out of breath. Sweaty.’

  ‘What else do you dream?’

  ‘That’s it. I’m always falling.’

  Back at the storeroom they drew on padded jackets, tightened their shields to their arms, and fought, the normal quiet settling over them.

  That winter, Silence learned the whole of ‘Roland’s Song’ and amused Alfred by reciting it aloud as they went through sword forms. They’d do forms in the near-dark of morning, working until their breath hung in thick clouds before them, and only then don the padded gear and spar against each other. Sometimes the weapons master came down and watched them, muffled in a thick, fur-lined cloak and what looked like a dead fox for a hat (the better to cover his bald pate). He corrected their forms, urging Silence to a longer stance, urging Alfred to keep his weight in the front of his feet. And sometimes other squires would happen along as they went about their morning chores, and would stop and yell from the side of the yard. ‘Can’t you beat that singer boy?’

  ‘Who’ll be a knight first, the servant or the squire?’

  Alfred never replied, but Silence noticed that his strikes were more wild and harder when they landed. ‘Ignore them,’ the weapons master would say. ‘It’s good training. Your foes are unlikely to smother you with praise.’ And occasionally he would offer, ‘You are improving. Slowly.’

  ‘Why do they tease you?’ Silence finally worked up the courage to ask. He and Alfred had come back to the room he shared with Hob and Giles; it wasn’t much, the three of them piled on straw pallets, adjoining the cow barn. But it had a brazier, and Silence had sung a song for the cook and earned them some cakes, and the room was a private place where they could eat.

  Alfred held his hands – chapped red and white with the cold – to the brazier. Hob and Giles had gone that morning to sing for the count and his wife, and set Silence to practise a set of dance melodies on the lute. He gulped his cake down and tuned the strings.

  ‘Why does anyone tease anyone else? It’s the way of things.’ Alfred flexed his fingers and Silence heard his knuckles crackle.

  Silence almost said that he’d been teased because he was the earl’s son, but knew he couldn’t share that. Who he had been … that had to disappear. So instead, he strummed the lute and said, ‘Usually there’s some reason. And you’re not weak, or cowardly. Nor do you put on airs, a
s some with rank do.’

  ‘I have no rank,’ Alfred said. ‘My mother was a noblewoman, who conceived me out of marriage. No one will tell me who she is; she’s long since banished to a convent. The count took custody of me. He might have made me a kitchen boy or a groom, or apprenticed me to a smith. But he let me train as a page and then raised me to squire.’

  ‘And your father?’

  Alfred crammed the cake in his mouth, chewed, swallowed, and shrugged. ‘Could be anyone.’

  ‘You could be the king’s own son!’ Silence said. ‘Or the count’s!’

  ‘Don’t let him hear you say that.’

  ‘But it could be a wonderful story …’

  ‘Stories are wonderful because they aren’t real,’ Alfred retorted. He pulled out his wool cap and snugged it over his ears. ‘Life is nothing like a story. Stories leave all the hard parts out.’ And he pushed through the door and back into the blustery weather, leaving Silence to practise the dance tunes alone.

  When Hob and Giles returned, he played everything through for them.

  ‘A little listless,’ Giles said. ‘You want it to be livelier. It’s a dance! Think of the ladies and make them lift their heels. Make them lift their skirts!’

  ‘Your rhythm is terrible,’ Hob said, hunched over the brazier. ‘More practice. I told Lady Isabel you’d play for her girls.’

  So Silence bundled the lute and himself beneath a thick wool cloak and crossed the cold yard to the keep. The great hall hung heavy with smoke, enough to make Silence cough. Two hearths blazed merrily and the squires sat at tables with shirts of mail before them. The keep’s armourer was instructing them in how to mend rents. Silence hurried by, glancing at Alfred, who met his eyes briefly before turning away.

  Across the hall and into a side chamber. Wood panels lined three of the walls, painted with forest scenes: a dog bringing down a stag, birds perched in a tree. The paints were glossy and caught the firelight so that the room glistened. Silence bowed to Lady Isabel, a tall and stately woman with an unfortunately crooked nose that wandered off to the left. Half a dozen young women twittered and chatted before the hearth. Silence took a seat on a stool, tuned once more, and began to play.