By These Ten Bones

by Clare B. Dunkle

  The young man was pale and sweaty, buried under blankets, and his black hair was sticking to his temples. He caught a glimpse of her and quickly looked away. Then he turned and stared.

  “Madeleine!” he gasped.

  “It’s Maddie,” she reminded him. The old hen with the bent comb was roosting on his blankets. She cackled loudly in protest when Maddie shooed her off.

  “Madeleine, what are you doing here?” he demanded in a whisper.

  “I live here,” she told him. “That was my ma you wouldn’t talk to this morning. Why won’t you talk to her? You talk to me.”

  The wood-carver glanced around the empty room, his eyes dull and tired. His face was leaner than before, and there were big black rings under his eyes. He looked like he was suffering, decided Maddie, probably because he was. He glanced back at her and made an effort to move his head closer to her.

  “What did I do?” he asked in a low voice. She looked puzzled. “To get here,” he explained urgently. “What did I do? You’ll have to tell me because I can’t remember.”

  “You saved my life,” said Maddie, and she smiled at him. Perhaps she was no beauty, but her straight hair had russet highlights, and her brown eyes were soft and pretty. The young man gazed at her, and the suffering look on his face eased. But just for a short space of time. Then it was back.

  “From what?” he muttered. When she gave him a blank look, he gritted his teeth. “Saved you from what?” he insisted doggedly.

  Maddie told him about her narrow escape from the Water Horse and his leaving the castle to save her. Then she described the various searches they had organized and the town defenses against the beast. During the whole spirited rendition, the wood-carver stared up at the sooty, cobweb-hung ceiling, his face wearing no expression whatsoever.

  “So it came here,” he murmured. “Straight to your house. You were the first person it wanted to kill.”

  Maddie watched him in silence for a minute, so full of questions that she didn’t know where to start. “Who are your people?” she wanted to know. But he didn’t answer her.

  “Is Carver what your own people call you?” she persisted. “Why do you travel with a foreigner? Why doesn’t he know your name?” The young man closed his eyes, and she wasn’t sure he was listening anymore. “Carver’s what we’ll call you if you can’t tell us something better. But don’t you want us to call you by your name?”

  “No,” he whispered. “I don’t have a name anymore.” And he pretended to sleep until she gave up asking questions and walked away.

  That night, Maddie dreamed that the young wood-carver was walking through her town. His face was very white, but the shadow at his feet was sooty black, as black as a hole in the ground. He stopped, but the shadow didn’t want to stand still with him. It flickered like a dark flame, as if it longed to tear itself free, and all the green grass that fell under it turned dry and brittle. She stepped closer, leaning down to look at it, and the black form on the ground gave a long, shuddering hiss.

  Maddie woke and sat up in the darkness with the hiss still in her ears, remembering the enemy standing at her door. But this time it wasn’t a hiss she heard. The sick wood-carver was talking in his sleep. She dozed off again, listening to the soft whispers repeating over and over, like a song without a tune.

  5

  The next morning, as Maddie hunted for eggs, she heard a gruff voice hailing her. The Traveler was limping along by Angus. “Hey!” he called. “How’s the lad?” Maddie reluctantly came over.

  “Carver’s getting better,” she reported coldly. “The fever is gone, but he’s too weak to be up yet. He was badly wounded.”

  The old man gave a noncommittal grunt. “Wounded how?” he asked. “The farmhands was talking nonsense over some big bogey from the loch.”

  “It was an animal with claws. It slashed him across the chest, so—and so—and so, like that,” she explained, mimicking the long strokes over her own front.

  Ned chuckled. “Yeah, like that,” he agreed with a grin. Maddie frowned. “The lad talking yet?” he continued, and that put her in mind of all those beatings he must have given out. She glared wholeheartedly at him. The blackguard had no feelings at all.

  “You told me yourself that he never speaks,” she snapped.

  “Bless me if you ain’t keeping secrets for him already! Do Ned a favor,” he proposed, fishing out a grimy coin. “Run and bring a mouthful of that water of life. Ah, come on,” he coaxed as she looked disgusted. “The boy would want you to. Fetch old Ned a bit to live on while I’m dragged around.”

  Maddie marched over to Little Ian’s house and found his wife at home. “Here,” she said shortly, holding out the penny, “the old felon in chains wants a drop.”

  The woman was just stirring the morning porridge. She took the penny. “If Black Ewan keeps him through the harvest like he plans,” she remarked, “this may be the first year that we pay our rent in coins.”

  Carver slept most of the next several days, the fever, wounds, and blood loss having left him in a state of apathetic weakness. He rarely spoke, and his hands shook so much that he could hardly feed himself.

  “Madeleine,” he called one morning as she walked by. “Where are my carving tools?”

  “Goodness,” answered Maddie, “I don’t know. I suppose they’re wherever you left them.”

  “In the castle,” he whispered, stirring restlessly under the blankets. “That was days ago. They might be stolen.”

  “No one steals around here,” said Maddie with a smile. “Everyone would know about it.” But the young man still looked worried.

  “Could you bring them to me?” he asked. “They’re on a shelf in the back corner, rolled up in a leather holder. I hate not having them. I need them. I need to carve.”

  “I’ll fetch them,” promised the girl, “but you can’t carve yet. Look at you! You can barely hold a spoon.”

  The young man’s eyes were beseeching. “But I do carve when I’m like this,” he whispered earnestly. “I have to, it’s the only thing I like to do.”

  Maddie took a long look at that suffering face and felt profoundly sad. “I’ll go get your knives,” she said, “and I’ll ask my ma. Maybe she’ll let you carve.”

  Fair Sarah was shocked at the idea. “He still needs rest,” she told her daughter. “He doesn’t need to worry about working yet.”

  “I don’t think he’s worried about working,” mused Maddie. “I think he’s worried about resting.”

  Maddie’s mother soon found this out for herself. That evening she shook wood shavings out of her silent patient’s blankets and looked around the bare room in astonishment. One knob on the back of the wooden settle had blossomed into a pale, many-petaled rose.

  The family ate their meals sitting on low stools by the hearth, and before too many days, Carver was well enough to join them. Wrapped in his blanket, eyes on his bowl, he listened to the banter that went on around him. He still wouldn’t speak to anyone but Maddie, his voice low and cautious, so Maddie began to speak for him, as if he were a very small child.

  “Carver wants more porridge,” she would announce when his bowl was empty.

  “Of course he can have it,” her mother would reply, and the young man would hold out his bowl for another spoonful.

  One day, Maddie hit upon the ingenious device of lying about his wishes. “Carver hates this soup,” she declared matter-of-factly. “He won’t eat it.”

  “That’s—that’s not true,” stammered the wood-carver, caught off-guard. “I think—I think it’s very good.” He shot Maddie a reproachful glance, and she gave him a triumphant grin.

  Maddie’s mother spent as much time as she could spare tending to her patient, and she spent more time than that worrying about him. Concerned over his obsessive carving, she asked Maddie to borrow Lady Mary’s beautiful playing cards. Maddie spent a few minutes teaching the invalid how to play and left him busy with the cards as she went about her duties. But when she r
eturned, she found he had abandoned the game. He was back at his carving.

  “What happened?” she demanded. “Did you forget how it went?”

  “No,” muttered the young man without looking up. “The cards don’t like me.”

  “They don’t like you?” exclaimed Maddie, laughing. “Are you upset that you lost?”

  Carver was nettled. “It’s not that I lost. I’ll show you,” he said, setting aside his tools and looking around to make sure no one else was there. He shuffled the deck as well as he could and laid out the first four cards.

  They were the King and Knave of Swords, followed by the King and Knave of Clubs. Maddie stared at the armed figures in surprise.

  “See how angry they are,” said the wood-carver in a low voice. “They’d come at me if they could. Don’t ask me to play that game anymore. The cards know things.”

  But if the mysterious young man didn’t like card games, he soon developed an interest in chess. Father Mac and the weaver often had a game after sundown, bending over Father Mac’s chessboard in the flickering light of a rush lamp. As long as he was bedridden, Carver pretended to sleep through the visits. He told Maddie that he didn’t trust priests.

  “There weren’t any priests in my town,” he said, “and my mother said that was a good thing. She came from fisher folk, and they know priests are dangerous. They hex the nets and cause storms at sea. She said a man who took a priest in his boat would surely die because the sea gods would drown him.”

  Maddie chuckled. “I never heard anything so silly. Priests aren’t dangerous.”

  “Anyway, we didn’t need them,” insisted Carver. “If we needed something, my mother would pray and kill a chicken and watch the birds that came to eat its insides. Then she knew what was going to happen.”

  “That sounds like nonsense, too,” commented the girl. “Father Mac says no one knows the future. You can trust a priest like him. He’s the servant of God, the One True God, and there aren’t any other gods.”

  The young man looked unconvinced. “Maybe not on land,” he muttered.

  The first time Father Mac came over after Carver was well enough to be up, the invalid was plainly uncomfortable about it. He sat hunched on a stool, fidgeting with his hands. An uneasy silence settled over the room.

  “Son, I was hoping you’d help me,” remarked Father Mac. “I’ve cut a new staff, and it’s not to my liking. You see, when I put my hand here, this knot catches my palm.”

  The task soothed the young man’s nerves like magic. He sat beside the two men, smoothing and shaping the wood, and Father Mac did him the kindness of ignoring him completely. Maddie glanced up from her spinning after a few minutes to find him cutting a decorative band of diamonds into the staff.

  As the game went on, Carver began to pay less attention to his project and more attention to the chessboard. He picked up a captured pawn and turned it thoughtfully in his fingers, evaluating the clumsy woodwork. Quietly and calmly, Father Mac began to explain the game as they played. By the end, the young man was interested enough to ask questions.

  “James, I’d better go,” announced the priest, reaching for his staff. The wood-carver gave a guilty start.

  “I’m sorry,” he muttered, handing it over. “I didn’t finish it.”

  “Ah, well,” said Father Mac with a smile, “there’s always tomorrow night.”

  Every house had to be supplied with its fuel to feed the hearth fires during the long months of winter. The small bricks of dark brown peat, cut out of the bogs in early summer, were dry and ready to be brought home. Maddie and Bess worked long days lugging the peats to the houses and building them up into round stacks. Well enough to walk now, Carver began to help them.

  The two girls made their way home with heavy baskets slung across their backs, leaning forward against the pull of the headbands that helped them manage the baskets’ weight. They talked and laughed, spinning thread as they walked along, and the silent young man followed them with a half-loaded basket of his own, listening to their songs and carefree chatter. He almost looked like one of them now in the new shirt Fair Sarah had made him and one of her long sheepskin blankets wrapped around his shoulders and waist. He persisted in wearing his woolen breeches, though, and Bess thought that was funny. All the other men she knew went about with their legs bare below their knee-length shirts. Although he wore a much longer shirt, even Father Mac didn’t wear breeches.

  In the evenings, the young man sat by the weaver’s fire mending harvest tools. He had set aside Lady Mary’s box without finishing it, and that woman was not happy with him.

  “I already paid him half the price for the work,” she complained to Maddie one morning, looking out a narrow window at the gray day outside. She rarely left her dusty room. Maddie didn’t know how she could stand it.

  “But it’s harvesttime,” pointed out the girl, tidying stacks of books. “And the tools break so often. Carver says in the south they make them out of iron.”

  “I’m the one who paid,” snapped the old woman. “It’s little enough I have now.”

  Maddie looked at the elegant furniture in the corner of that great, gloomy hall and felt in her heart that Lady Mary was right. Once, the new lord’s wife had visited her every few months, bringing presents and sweetmeats. Later, she had sent her servants to the old woman with those comforts that the rich needed to have: new embroidery canvas and thread, furs and muffs, and pieces of lovely cloth.

  But no one had been to see Lady Mary in almost a year. She sat day after day in her dark castle room with nothing new to think of. She couldn’t just come down to the houses now and sit with the other old crones to spin thread. She had lived like a stranger among them for fifteen years, and it was too late to do anything about it.

  Maddie walked back from the castle, thinking sad thoughts. She spied the wood-carver sitting on his favorite boulder, his head bent over a small figure that he was shaping with a knife. Maddie walked up quietly, remembering the day a few weeks ago when he had sat on that same rock and she had pointed out the hills to him. Then he hadn’t spoken a word to her. Now he spoke to her all the time, although he rarely spoke to the others.

  She stopped, as she had before, to watch him turn the carving. He was so clever, so much more interesting than everyone else. His shadow stretched out before him, long and faint. She remembered her dream about the shadow that hissed, and smiled to herself.

  But his shadow was darker, surely, than her own shadow beside it. Maddie blinked and looked again. Darker still, changing color by the minute, like night falling over the world. It lay on the ground, dense and black, wavering and feeling about. Then, like a man crawling on his elbows, it began to move toward her.

  “Hey!” cried Maddie. Caught unaware, the carver jumped, and knife and wood went flying. He spun, leaping from the rock like a man facing attack. Then he saw who was there, and his hostile expression eased.

  “What happened?” he demanded.

  “Your shadow!” she stammered, pointing to the ground behind him. “It moved! Moved by itself. I saw it.”

  He turned to look, and she looked, too. His shadow was exactly like hers, long and thin and gray in the overcast evening. Maddie blushed hotly, waiting for him to laugh at her.

  But the young man didn’t laugh. He just watched his shadow for a minute. When he straightened up and faced her again, his green eyes were wary.

  “Are you going to tell the others?” he wanted to know.

  Maddie’s blush deepened. “They’d think I was daft.”

  She watched him turn away and hunt for his knife and block of wood. “I had a dream about it,” she explained. “Your shadow, I mean. It was black, and it hissed at me, and it killed all the grass it touched.”

  Carver found his knife and stowed it back in the leather holder. “That’s silly, Madeleine,” he said. “A shadow can’t kill things. It needs flesh and bones for that.”

  “Oh,” said the girl, feeling shaky and thoroughly foolish.<
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  “It can’t hurt you,” he went on seriously. “It just wants to, that’s all. But I won’t let it. You know that, don’t you? You know I wouldn’t let anything happen to you.”

  Maddie stopped feeling foolish. She felt her skin crawl. She stared at the long, harmless shadow on the grass and the strange young man who cast it.

  “Don’t tell the others,” repeated the carver. Maddie managed a smile. He was so handsome and clever, and he cared for her. He wanted her to be safe and well.

  “I won’t,” she promised. “They’d laugh at me.” But she knew in her heart that they wouldn’t.

  6

  By day, Ned puffed along behind Mad Angus, herding the cattle, and he was locked up with the giant in his stall at night. The old Traveler was the only one who minded. Maddie was delighted with the arrangement. She spent her free time with the mysterious wood-carver, and she grew fonder and fonder of him, in part because he was so obviously attached to her. She was still the only person to whom he spoke freely, the only one in whom he confided his troubles. He was almost well now, and her neighbors respected the quick work he made of their broken tools. Maddie put the hissing shadow from her mind. She began to daydream of a future in which the good-looking carver boy stayed by her hearth.

  Then tragedy jarred the town. Bess’s mother went into labor, and when the child was born, the women scattered, wailing. The baby had the face of an animal, they said. It had the mouth of a beast.

  The townspeople gathered outside the smith’s house, whispering together. Maddie stood with them, her arm around Bess, and her frightened cousins gathered near her. Their father was away from home, doing work for the new lord. The smith often traveled from town to town.