The Paths of the Air

by Alys Clare

  He had not even looked for them at Samhain; Joanna had told him not to bother as they wouldn’t be there. He didn’t know where they had gone. He didn’t know where they were now and he didn’t know when he was going to see them again.

  It made him angry.

  Some time later he resumed his seat by the hearth, a mug of ale in his hand. He had tried to divert himself by going out into the courtyard and checking that Will had dealt with the dead leaves blocking the gulley – of course he had – and by pretending an interest in Will’s woman Ella’s preserve-making.

  The other place he wanted to be was Hawkenlye Abbey.

  But he had been there only a couple of weeks back on the flimsy excuse that perhaps they’d like help in raking up the leaves. They had accepted his offer with gracious kindness and given him a besom and a rake, and for four or five happy days he had worked alongside the lay brothers in cheerful companionship.

  Abbess Helewise must have realized that it was Samhain and that he visited Joanna and Meggie around the time of the festivals. She had been too tactful to mention it.

  He did not want to risk going back to the Abbey so soon. If he kept turning up there like a puppy wanting attention they would see the underlying neediness. He really didn’t want them – oh, all right, he didn’t want her – feeling sorry for him.

  He took a long pull at his ale. I’m no use to anyone, he thought mournfully, I’m idle, I’m miserable, I’m full of self-pity and I’m—

  His ruthless catechism of faults might well have run on for some time, but Will tapped at the door and announced that there was a stranger at the gate and would Sir Josse come out to see if it was all right to let him in?

  It did not take Josse long to leap out of his chair, put his mug discreetly out of sight, brush down his tunic and wipe a hand across his beery lips. He hurried out through the door and down the steps. Beside him Will muttered, ‘There he is, sir. Wasn’t sure I liked the look of him.’

  ‘I see,’ Josse murmured.

  ‘Fellow looks as if he could do with some Christian charity, though,’ Will observed piously. ‘Never seen a man so weary and still on his feet.’

  Josse had to agree. The stranger was tall, wide in the shoulder and ought to have had the confident stance of one well able to take care of himself. Instead he was trembling with exhaustion. He wore a travel-stained brown tunic that reached almost to the ground, held in at the waist with a leather belt. His satchel of soft leather must have cost a pretty penny but was scratched and battered. The skirts of the brown tunic were generous; if the man were carrying a sword, it was concealed and, Josse thought grimly, it would take him a moment or two to extract it.

  Josse had a long knife in a sheath on his belt. He did not expect to use it but it was reassuring to know it was there.

  What could be seen of the stranger’s skin, between the hem of the headdress low over his eyes and the fold that covered his mouth and nose, was a sort of brownish-olive shade. Might he be from Outremer? Former crusaders often returned accompanied by servants they had picked up and it was all too common for these poor souls to be cast off once their masters were safely home. As Josse gave the stranger a tentative smile, the man put his right hand over his heart and bowed. The gesture was so alien, so unlike anything a native Briton would offer, that Josse decided his guess was right.

  ‘I am Josse d’Acquin and you have arrived at my estate of New Winnowlands,’ he announced, speaking loudly and clearly. Keeping his tone friendly, he added, ‘What do you want of me?’

  The man lowered his eyelids and dropped his chin. ‘I seek shelter, master,’ he said huskily.

  ‘I see.’ Josse was playing for time.

  ‘I work,’ the stranger said eagerly, risking a brief bashful upward glance. ‘I chop wood, I sweep floors.’

  He looked as if he could hardly even hold an axe or a broom, never mind wield them. ‘I have all the men and women I need for such tasks,’ Josse said.

  The stranger seemed to sink into himself. ‘Very well, master,’ he muttered. ‘Thank you for your time.’

  He turned to go.

  ‘Wait!’ Josse called. ‘Come back. You may sleep in an outhouse and we will feed you.’ Beside him he sensed Will stiffen. He plunged on regardless. ‘Rest here with us,’ he urged, ‘build up some strength and, when you are restored, go on your way.’

  The man spun round to face Josse once more, already sunk low in a bow. ‘May God bless you,’ he said in a hoarse whisper. God, Josse noted, not Allah; perhaps the man had adopted the faith of the master who had brought him so far from his homeland? ‘May he rain down gifts on you, on your sons and on the sons of your sons,’ the stranger was adding, ‘even until the tenth generation.’

  ‘Aye, well, I don’t know about all that,’ Josse said, embarrassed. ‘Come in, and Will here shall see about feeding you.’ Will sucked air through his teeth, a sound so eloquent of disapproval that Josse sighed in exasperation. ‘Won’t you, Will?’ he added pointedly.

  ‘Aye, sir.’ Will looked the stranger up and down. ‘You’d better follow me,’ he said grudgingly.

  Josse watched the two of them walk away. Will was heading for one of the outbuildings that were used to store surplus produce in the late summer. It was now empty and it smelt pleasantly of apples. It had a rudimentary hearth so the stranger would be able to have a small fire. He could—

  Something occurred to Josse; something he should have thought of earlier. Running to catch up with Will and the stranger, he called out, ‘You’d better tell me your name.’

  The man stopped, turned and, looking Josse coolly in the eye, said, ‘I am John Damianos.’

  The presence of a strange foreigner sleeping in his outbuilding disturbed Josse far more than he had anticipated. As much as he had thought about it – which was not very much at all – he would have said that he’d probably have forgotten all about the man after a couple of days, leaving Will and Ella to see to the stranger’s well-being.

  But it did not happen like that at all.

  Will and Ella certainly looked after him well enough. Despite his initial misgivings, Will seemed to want the foreigner to regain his health and strength as quickly as possible. This might have been with the aim of seeing the back of the fellow but Josse thought not. He concluded that Will was concerned with the reputation of New Winnowlands and, indeed, of Josse himself. It was as if it was up to Josse’s household to respond to the man’s faith in them and do their utmost to provide that which he had humbly come seeking.

  Ella, who normally did no more than silently obey whatever orders were issued to her, also seemed affected by this generosity of spirit. Josse noticed the sudden variety in the dishes that were brought to his table; they all seemed to have the most delicious and mouth-watering smells. Josse checked with Will, who confirmed that the same dishes were being sent to the outbuilding. ‘Hope it’s all right with you, sir, only you did say as to feed him up.’

  ‘Aye, Will, of course it’s all right,’ Josse assured him. ‘I had—’ I had never imagined Ella to be such an imaginative cook, was what he nearly said. But since it was hardly kind or flattering to the mild and chronically unselfconfident Ella, he held back.

  But Will seemed to understand. ‘Makes a change from pie, sir,’ he observed in an undertone.

  ‘Nothing wrong with Ella’s pies,’ Josse said stoutly. Then, grinning, ‘But aye, it does.’

  Will’s contribution to the stranger’s comfort was to furnish the outbuilding. He had knocked together a crude bed frame from old hurdles and stout pieces of wood and stuffed some sacks with straw for a mattress. He – or perhaps Ella – had provided woollen blankets. To help keep the night chill at bay, he had repaired the hearth, adding more stones to its circle, and he kept the stranger well supplied with firewood.

  With regular and nourishing meals and a warm place in which to sleep, the stranger ought to have recovered some strength. Which made it all the more peculiar that instead of rising in the morning w
ith the rest of the household and offering to help with the chores – even a relatively weak convalescent could have done something – John Damianos continued to sleep through the short November days as if all the food and rest had no effect at all.

  Far from being able to ignore the presence of a stranger in their midst, then, Josse – and, he was quite sure, Ella and Will and everyone else at New Winnowlands – found that John Damianos was perpetually on his mind.

  It was odd.

  Days passed. Soon the stranger had been at New Winnowlands for a week, then ten days. Ella continued to provide him with large amounts of food and drink. Will had approached Josse bashfully one morning and asked if it would be all right to broach the new barrel of small beer, only the previous one had gone down so fast, what with one thing and another. Josse had noticed that the amount he had to fork out for flour had gone up considerably; Ella seemed to be constantly baking . . .

  It was time to go and see for himself.

  Early the next morning he went to the outbuilding. He tapped on the door – it was closed and latched – but there was no answer from within. Josse was about to tiptoe away but then a flash of anger got the better of him. Rapping smartly on the wooden door panel, he said loudly, ‘Are you awake in there?’

  There was a snort, as if someone were being roused from deep sleep, then sounds of rustling straw. ‘A moment,’ said a sleep-dazed voice.

  After quite a long time the door opened and John Damianos stood in the doorway. He was fully dressed in his tunic and the concealing headdress. Behind him, the straw mattress had been shaken up and the blankets neatly folded on top of it.

  The stranger made his hand-to-heart bow, bending low so that Josse could not look into his face. ‘Master,’ he murmured. ‘You wish to speak?’

  ‘Er – aye, I do,’ Josse replied. ‘I wanted to ask you – to see if you—’ His momentary anger had vanished and now, put in the position of a host who had revealed all too clearly that he wished his visitor to depart, he felt nothing but embarrassment. ‘How is your health?’ he rapped out, his tone made brusque by his unease. ‘Are you feeling stronger?’

  The man bowed again, but not before Josse had glimpsed the brief, sudden smile that creased up his eyes. ‘Master, I offer honour and respect to your esteemed household, for I, a stranger, have been treated like a prince.’

  Josse waited, not speaking, and the man straightened up and for an instant met his eyes.

  John Damianos looked exhausted.

  Fear slid down Josse’s back. Dear God, the man’s sick of some dread disease, he thought wildly, and I’ve let him into my household so that I and all my people are endangered! But then common sense returned: sick men did not eat like healthy horses.

  Dumbly he stared into the stranger’s eyes. His puzzlement must have been easy to read; after a moment, John Damianos said, ‘I am stronger than before, master, but still I need to rest. If I may beg your indulgence a little longer . . .’ He left the sentence unfinished.

  Josse waved a hand. ‘Of course!’ he heard himself saying. ‘Stay as long as you like! I am sorry to have disturbed you.’

  Then, cross with himself for his cowardice and for lacking the good sense to have seized the chance to ask a few questions – as well he might have done, given all that he and his people were doing for the stranger – he backed away, turned round and hurried back to the house.

  Josse was not to know but others burned with curiosity about the foreigner in their midst even more than he did. Ella in particular, cooking for him, spent rather more time than was good for her in dreaming about him. She did not tell Will, but in the privacy of her own thoughts she made up a long, romantic and highly unlikely story. Fed by the tales and legends told to her when she was a child, her account of how the stranger had ended up begging at the gates of New Winnowlands involved frost giants, flying horses and a bridge the colours of the rainbow. Her fascination had an edge of fear for, as Will had remarked, it ‘ain’t natural for a flesh-and-blood man to eat like what he does and sleep both the night and the day away like a new-born babe’.

  Ella thought that John Damianos might be under an enchantment. According to Will, the foreigner kept the door fast shut and it could not be opened from the outside. It surely followed – or at least it did according to Ella’s fairly limited powers of logic – that the stranger locked himself inside the outbuilding because he had something terrible to hide.

  What could it be?

  Ella took to pondering this fascinating question as she peeled vegetables and drew the guts out of chickens. Was the stranger really a man or was he an animal spirit who took on a different form in the night hours and went out hunting as an owl, or a wolf? Was this why he had to sleep through the day, out of sheer exhaustion? Was he cursed because he had done something very, very wrong, something that had aroused the fury of some dark spirit of the deep forest? Was he under a spell that meant he ate and ate and still did not grow strong?

  Shivering with delicious fear, Ella let her mind run free.

  And presently just thinking was not enough.

  She waited for a clear sky and a generous moon. She lay beside Will until he was asleep, then she got out of bed, wrapped her cloak around her, picked up her wooden shoes and silently let herself out of the warm little room off the kitchen where she and Will slept.

  She crept across the stone floor, lit only by the remnants of the fire in the hearth, and opened the door. Putting on her shoes, she scurried across the courtyard towards the outbuildings, her heart beating fast. She was amazed at her own courage. What was she doing out there, all by herself in the still, cold night? For a moment fear gripped her and stopped her in her tracks. She ought to go straight back to her cosy bed and forget all about this mission . . .

  Slowly she walked on.

  As she approached the outbuilding, it seemed that the door was not as tightly fastened as usual. Was there a tiny gap between door and lintel? Or was it just her imagination?

  She had to look; she had to.

  She crept nearer.

  The door was closed but it was not fastened from the inside. Instead, a loop of twine held it shut. She untied the twine and opened the door.

  The fire had been banked down but it gave enough light for her to see by. The straw mattress was puffed up and the blankets lay draped across the foot of the bed.

  Of John Damianos there was no sign.

  Fear raced through Ella like fire through a bunch of dry kindling. The atavistic, unspoken, unacknowledged terror of the weird and the unknown that lay deep in her countrywoman’s soul took her over completely and her simple mind translated an empty bed into a savage and bloody tale of shape-shifting werewolves, malevolent spirits, cruel creatures of the night that soared up into the black starry sky to descend on their helpless prey to tear out their throats and suck their blood.

  He’s not here, she kept thinking, over and over again. He’s not here.

  Hand to her mouth to suppress her scream of horror, Ella backed out of the outbuilding. Terror made her clumsy; she tripped and fell. As she hastened to stand up again, a sob broke out of her. Then, with a wail, she flew back across the yard and in through the kitchen door, recovering sufficient presence of mind to stop her noise as she entered the house and to make sure she closed and fastened the door without a sound. Then, trembling violently and longing only for the blessed safety of her bed and Will’s snoring presence beside her, she took off her shoes and her cloak and crept into the little room off the kitchen.

  She would have tried to bar the door, only Will would have noticed in the morning and been suspicious.

  She scolded herself. She had been unbelievably foolish and look where it had got her. Why, the foreigner was as much of a mystery as ever!

  But at least – and in the silent darkness it seemed quite a lot – at least nobody knew what she had done.

  Ella was wrong. Someone did know, for he had both heard and seen her.

  He had been setting off on
his regular night-time mission, carrying the usual burden. Ella had guessed more accurately than she knew, for the reason that he slept the day away was indeed because he was out all night.

  Tonight he had done as he always did and waited until well after the household had gone to sleep. That time always seemed to him unbearably long but he knew this was an illusion, brought about by his desperate need to be on his way. To ease the agony of having to wait, he would sit quite still on his straw mattress and make body and mind relax until he could walk in the quiet inner pathways in the way they had taught him in that mysterious land so far away. Sometimes it worked; sometimes it did not.

  Finally he got to his feet, shouldered his satchel and the pack and let himself out, fastening the door so that it would look closed to a casual glance. He crossed the courtyard to the place in the wall where it was possible to climb over and was actually sitting astride, about to drop down onto the frosty grass on the other side, when he spotted her.

  The only reason he saw her was because of a slight change in the light. Perhaps she had cast a momentary moon shadow; perhaps he had caught a fleeting movement out of the corner of his eye. Up on the wall he froze.

  She had not seen him; she was intent on the outbuilding. He watched as she unfastened the twine, eased the door open and looked inside. He heard her suppressed sob and for a moment he felt her terror, as if the emotion was so powerful that it blasted out of her and assaulted everything and everyone around. He was sorry for her then; sorry for her suffering and her extreme fear.

  She stumbled off, back the way she had come. He sat quite still on the wall, and when he was satisfied that she had really gone inside, slipped down on the far side and hurried away, breaking into an easy, loping run that covered the ground with surprising speed.

  When he was some distance away he stopped and turned around, looking back the way he had come. He sent a silent thank you to the generous, unquestioning souls who lived in that place where he had been taken in.