“We should never be in too great a hurry for spiritual nourishment.”
Geoffrey bowed and stepped to the book. An angel knelt before Mary, flourishing a scroll that read, “Ave gratia plena.” The Annunciation. The white dove descended to Mary, and Mary looked up from the Scriptures she was studying. The angel’s wings poised behind him. He was changing human history, but even so, he would stay only a few moments. Both the angel and Mary wore halos, their holiness delivered on golden plates. The halos caught the light and gave it back into the room in the soft, steady gleam of real gold. This one page was more valuable than his father’s entire library.
“Thank you for showing me this,” said Geoffrey. “It makes everything so clear.”
“Is it not one of the most beautiful things you have ever seen?”
“Perhaps the most beautiful.”
“Ah, you flatter me. But we are proud of it.”
“The pigs, Lady Emily.”
She allowed a dimple to appear and vanish in her cheek. Geoffrey was pleased: she was annoyed. “I wanted you to see perfect beauty, before you looked upon beauty savaged.” They followed in her wake. “I don’t know why these beasts behave as they do,” she said.
“This time of year the peasants feed their herds by letting them graze on acorns, and I think they become too happy to be free and eating.”
She turned, wrinkling her nose. She was not surprised that Geoffrey had a sympathy with swine. “Our Lord put a gang of devils into such a herd, and they rushed over a cliff.”
“Alas, Lady Emily, we have no cliffs.” Implying that they did have devils.
“There!” she said, holding forth her arm dramatically, a pageant Pilate calling, “Behold the Man!”
Pig sign was everywhere, even to the squashed black of pig dung. Small white flowers Geoffrey did not recognize, bunches of white, had been torn like a blanket to get at the earth.
“Alyssum,” she said.
“They must have been beautiful.”
“They were.”
“And will be, I hope, once again.”
She showed Geoffrey her profile. “If God wills it.”
The echo of the Crusaders’ cry, “God wills it!,” may have been intended to demonstrate Geoffrey’s own lack of vigor, but instead it made the abbess seem deliberately helpless. “They came through the hedge,” said Geoffrey.
“Just as before.”
“They no doubt left this place and hid in the King’s Forest.”
“That is exactly where they went, although I have no idea where they are now.”
“Of course not. How can a good woman like yourself be expected to note the travels of pigs?”
Outside the abbey walls Geoffrey was content to walk his horse. He felt that he should explain the abbess to Hugh, but could not begin. “A person like the abbess,” Geoffrey said. “A woman like the abbess—” he broke off. Continuing to think of her as a woman was a mistake. “Finds beauty the most important thing in the world. It reminds her, I think, of Heaven.”
“She is very proud,” offered Hugh.
“Yes, although her pride is not such a great disfigurement. Although,” he hastened to add, “still, no doubt, at least a small sin.”
The hills were the color of breath on a silver plate. Fields that had been green only days ago were suddenly acorn brown. A peasant walked away from a pile of branches and gathered another branch, a scribble of black lightning he placed upon the pile. Everything was gathered in. The land was slow, like the steady breath of a sleeper. The road was more prominent now than at any other time of year, the step-impacted earth bright, like a long, straight tear across brown cloth.
In the distance a herd of pigs gathered under a stand of oaks. A peasant lifted a staff and struck a tree, and acorns showered, invisible at this distance. The pigs squirmed together where the nuts fell, and the peasant stopped working and looked across the field to Geoffrey. The man wiped his forehead with his sleeve and continued to work. A dog looked on, grinning as dogs do when they are satisfied, and Geoffrey wondered how many times he had seen such a sight, peasants working without speech in a world of animals, nearly animals themselves.
Geoffrey rode hard, and pigs scattered, grunting. Their bunched tails and flat, mobile snouts seemed suddenly like the perfect disguise for a devil.
The peasant wore a black cap and a pig-colored tunic. A bramble clung to his tattered stockings, a miniature ox-horn. He wished the sheriff good day, and Geoffrey made a show of having to restrain a spirited horse from riding further into the herd. “Pigman,” said Geoffrey.
“My lord?”
“Do not trespass on the abbey grounds or I will slaughter your swine.” He spoke slowly, clearly. The peasant bowed, and Geoffrey was nearly certain this was not the right herd. How difficult it was to be right about anything.
Hugh galloped from the edge of the forest wild-eyed. His horse was dark with sweat, and Hugh wept where a branch had lashed him. “My lord!” he managed.
“What’s wrong? What is it?”
“I have found something amazing!”
“What is it?”
“Something the pigs dug up!”
“What?”
“Come see—I can’t tell you.”
“I will go nowhere unless you tell me what it is.”
“It is—a treasure!”
38
They stood in the forest, the smell of tree decay all round them. The mulch had been torn by pigs rooting for acorns, and the roots of the oak were exposed here and there, wooden worms tangled and snapped. Two leather skulls gathered to a topknot fastened with blackened cord. One of the cords had been loosened.
“Look!” breathed Hugh.
Geoffrey was afraid to touch it for a moment. He took the heavy sack with trembling fingers. He peered into the wet leather and saw only darkness. He stepped into a puddle of light, and a crowd of small suns smiled up at him. The slick leather slipped from his fingers, and they both gasped.
But it did not spill. A single yellow moon slid across a root and floated there on the surface of the black earth. Hugh picked it up and held it between his fingers.
“Is it,” Hugh asked hoarsely, “real?”
“Is it real!” But doubt is easily shared, and Geoffrey took the yellow disc into his own fingers. He opened his hand. The coin slipped into the very center of his palm, the midpoint, instantly warm with his touch.
He closed his hand round it. “It’s real,” he said. “You have found the thief’s treasure. Our poor thief! Still rotting on the gibbet.”
“The pigs found it,” Hugh said. “I simply stumbled over it.”
“What do you think we mean by ‘finding’ something? We stumble on nearly everything that happens to us—and we have to know a treasure when we fall on it. You have a good eye, Hugh. A good, alert eye, like a merlin.”
Their horses were blotchy with sweat by the time they returned to the castle. Geoffrey knew that some of the thief’s victims would come forward to claim their due. But he also knew that the king’s purse would be fatter in a day or two, and he planned the report he would write. He would, of course, ignore the swine. But he would praise Hugh, in a way that reflected Geoffrey’s shrewd ability to appoint helpers.
“Sir Roger!” cried Geoffrey. “You are looking well!”
The old man sat in the sunlight of the courtyard, a sword across his knee and a staff in his hand. His white hair lifted in a gust of wind. “Well enough to soak up sun,” said Sir Roger.
Geoffrey told him about the trove Hugh had discovered, and the old Crusader smiled. “A good eye and perhaps the help of Heaven,” he said. “You are fortunate in each other.”
Lady Eleanor took the dog off her lap. “Shouldn’t you lie down?”
It was evening, and Geoffrey felt empty of color, like the hills around the city, and the fields beside the roads. At last he uncorked the poppy wine and sipped.
Lady Eleanor made pleasant conversation for a while, the sort of t
alk that softened a room, like a tapestry, and then she stopped herself and put a finger on Geoffrey’s lips, even though he had been saying nothing.
Geoffrey realized that he had been beguiled into her chamber. Not tricked so much as led like a horse. It was darker out than he had realized, and there was the honey scent of beeswax from the candles round them. “I’m worried about you,” she was saying.
“No, you aren’t.”
“No, I’m not. You can take care of yourself. But what I mean to say is—I want you to lie with me. And yet I feel that you are too injured.”
Geoffrey sipped the wine. A taste like resin, but darker, numbed his tongue. “Too damaged for love?”
He had forgotten how well he knew his wife’s body and what pleasure it could give. So pale, in the light of one candle, and then, no candles at all, darkness—and her body with its own light, a messenger not from Heaven but from the world of the daughters of men. She was as warm as just-quickened wax, and she spoke his name in his ear like a secret, a magic name only the two of them knew.
He woke much later, suddenly, like a small door springing open. She was beside him in the bed, and the canopy had been pulled round them. There was only silence and the sound of her breathing. He was like a field after rain, changed entirely, if only because it lay under a clean sky.
39
The Fool was standing on his head, pointing his feet towards the ceiling and wiggling them. Hugh trailed behind the sheriff, and for a moment Geoffrey could read his squire’s thoughts. “Go ahead, try it,” said the sheriff. “Add to your many talents.”
Hugh laughed and followed Geoffrey into the room.
“I’m sorry I’m late, good surgeon. A lad stole a flitch of bacon from the market, and I had the good luck to be in the market at the time. Or bad luck, actually, since I am not overfond of dragging peasant boys into the prison.”
“You look very fit, my lord, for a man just mauled by a bear.”
“It hurts very badly, good surgeon. No, don’t touch it. Please. Well, if you must.”
“No swelling.” The surgeon lifted the dressing suspiciously. “No poisons.” He frowned, thoughtful and, it seemed, nearly disappointed. “You say you stuffed the wounds with mallow?”
“That’s right.”
“Dried mallow.”
“Exactly.”
“I’ve never heard of such a cure.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t say it was a cure. Just a sop for the blood until the real cure takes place. Under good hands like yours.”
“It seems to have worked. I would rather have you eat a theriac prepared with the blood of bear, but without another bear at hand …”
“They are scarce.”
“Yes,” sniffed the surgeon.
“You seem unhappy, my friend.”
They were both surprised at this. The surgeon was, as Geoffrey knew, friend to very few. The surgeon looked away, patting himself with both hands. “I am so forgetful these days.”
“So many things concern you.”
“Yes. The brain is like a treasure chest: when it is full, something must be removed in order to add something.”
“It’s not so bad to be forgetful. You may forget unpleasant things.”
“My apprentice has run away.”
Geoffrey paused in adjusting his tunic. “Run away?”
The surgeon put a hand to his cap, and then walked to the window, shaking. “I’m sorry, good sheriff. It was last night. It happens. An apprentice can’t manage his duties. He suffers a change of heart. Oh, it’s difficult, the work we have to do. But I saw a great future in him.”
“I’m sorry.”
“A great future.” The surgeon turned. His eyes were red, and he gathered his basket with hands that fumbled, spilling a leather sack of herbs. “Oh, my myrtle. It darkens the hair, as you know. Used with crocus, of course. I told you this.”
“Did you? I can’t remember.”
“Neither can I. We have a great deal on our minds, you and I.”
“Yes. And if you will forgive my saying so, we are both condemned to fail much of the time.”
The surgeon looked down at his basket, tucking in the last of his myrtle. “I don’t know, my lord …”
“People die. Outlaws escape.”
“And apprentices run away. His knowledge will make him wealthy. He can claim to know how to cure the wens, the sprains, the falling sickness, all of it. He can claim stolen knowledge, and people will gather round him, because he will be cheaper than a surgeon.”
“I will tell everyone that your dressings drew the poison from my wounds.”
“Do you know that in the Holy Land there is a snake that spits poison? You pass it, and it fires venom through the air. Now, how is an apprentice going to cure people in a world so foul, so fallen that the creature damned by God Himself spits fatal darts?”
“He will find it very difficult.”
“He will find it impossible. In summer the very air is a pestilence. The gases above a marsh can raise a pustule with just a twitch of the wind. How can an apprentice cure in a world so treacherous? He will find it totally impossible. He has the Latin of a traveling player, the French of a tavern slut, and the manners of—why, the dogs at your table, my lord, the graceful whippets, are better-mannered than that once-mewed finch. I was a great fool to suffer his impatience, for even a moment. When he didn’t accept his duty of reading to Sir Roger with good cheer, I should have beaten him to a paste, and that’s God’s truth.”
“Good surgeon, there will be other apprentices—”
“Damn that ungrateful badger pig. Smug and proud, thinking himself the perfect little surgeon. Forgive me, my lord, but I feel the spleen running through the vents of my body like spring rain. Oh, how strong it makes me feel to have this fury—this fury of the justly enraged—in my blood. Therefore—” The surgeon paused at the door, like a man at the edge of a cliff over which he was about to fly. “Therefore, I leave you now to rearrange my plans and find a new apprentice, one who knows his duty like a dog.”
There was a clatter of horses, a great choir of snorting and clopping, and cries of “Here!” and “Ho!”
“It sounds,” said Geoffrey, “as though an army has ridden into the courtyard.”
A figure stumbled into the chamber. It was glistening with sweat, and forest mud starred its leather breastplate. “My lord!” it gasped.
“Henry?”
“I bring you a prize.”
“What sort of prize, good Henry?”
“A prize stolen from Robin Hood!”
Geoffrey went cold and felt for a bedpost, simply to have something solid in his grasp. When he could speak, he said, “What have you stolen?”
“One of his men!”
Geoffrey felt a small wave of relief but stiffened at once. “How did you manage—”
“Days and nights, my lord, we hounded them. Still-warm ashes, and game hanging from trees, and the stink of them. The smell of that band forever shut off from human comfort.”
Geoffrey splashed wine into a goblet. “Here, Henry, please. It will steady you.”
Henry slurped. “Thank you, my lord. It tastes better than anything in the world after nothing but moss water.”
Geoffrey made a gesture of welcome and of impatience.
“Camp after camp we followed them, always minutes behind. They must have been terrified of us, so deep in the forest, the sheriff’s men, the dogs of the king, breathing hot on their napes!”
“I have no doubt. Please, continue.”
Henry wiped his lips with his fist. “Finally I sent the forester ahead and kept the rest of the men back, cutting wood and sneezing, making all the noise a band of hearty men could make. And this good man saw a figure, sprinting like a deer through the trees, and followed him on a parallel path through the forest. Robin Hood has his sly ways, but we have ours. Our good forester crept like a weasel and watched while this outlaw lay down under a tree; the forester stepped forth as easy as
a man stepping up to table, I have no doubt, and pressed his good steel against the criminal’s throat!”
“Who is it, then?”
“And then he dragged the wretch back to the rest of us, and we had by that time crept forwards ourselves, sly as stoats, if you’d only seen us! And when that felon looked upon the good men who had him, he fell to his knees for his soul.”
“Who is it?”
“I’ll bring him in to you now, my lord, and you can see him for yourself. A miserable beast he is, I must say, befouled and besmeared, and a shameful thing to drag into your good presence.”
Success had made Henry eloquent. Geoffrey watched out the window, but he could see only a mill of sweaty horses and dismounted men, talking quietly in the usual after-hunt manner.
The door burst wide, and a heap of green rags was thrown to the stone floor.
40
“There he is, Lord Sheriff!” said Henry. “One of those filthy whelps who kept you prisoner!”
The heap stirred, and a head lifted and looked at Geoffrey. The man made a small smile of recognition, even of friendship. And of regret. Regret that his life was now forfeit, that a slow death at the hands of an expert was all the future he had.
Geoffrey walked to the trembling figure and knelt. He looked hard into the face of Will Scathlock. Will looked down and sighed. This was the end of his life. Like most men, he understood that he could not escape forever, but he had hoped to die much later, and in some pleasant place far from his enemies. His posture, even the wet prints his hands left on the stones, spoke of fear and also of acceptance.
Geoffrey stood and walked to the window. He controlled almost nothing in his life. His life controlled him. He was a spider fastened to his web. He had no more freedom than a peg driven into the leg of a chair. He was locked deep, and mallet-flattened, and all he could do was breathe and love or hate his life.
The horses were fewer, and the courtyard reflected sunlight. The blacksmith had begun to work again, and the clank of his hammer touched Geoffrey, a bell, miscast and unmusical, ringing across a far greater space than a courtyard.
In a Dark Wood Page 17
