Rhiannon

by Vicki Grove

  He nodded, then thought again and shrugged. “Retreat was encouraged at Glastonbury when a brother was troubled in mind. But here? I really don’t know. I’ve told Brother Silas that when I’m missed he’s to tell the prior I’m on retreat, and if our prior likes it not and calls me to account, Silas is to say he knows not my location.”

  Thaddeus looked down and solemnly brushed sand from the bundle he held. “Not a lie, as I don’t know myself where I’m going, Rhia. But I don’t think anyone here will miss me much. I’ve become a thorn in the vicar’s side with my questions about Jim. It’s obvious he finds me annoying, though I doubt he considers me a real threat, young as I am. My brother monks will surely welcome a break from me as well. The vicar’s annoyance with me has begun to stir the waters, as he is ofttimes testy with all.”

  He then knelt, put the woolen pack upon the ground, and concentrated on carefully unrolling it as he spoke in a voice that was much changed, quieter and hoarse. “It’s been six years since my father gave me as oblate, and now I’m seventeen. I love God, and the good abbot at Glastonbury was in all things His servant. I saw in him that a brother might attain great wisdom and peace of heart through serving others in Christ’s name, but is that in me to do? On retreat, I must decide whether to take my final vows.”

  Rhia’s throat ached, so much did Thaddeus’s dilemma suddenly remind her of her own. Mam, too, was a great servant of God, but Rhia often doubted her own ability to be such a selfless healer as Mam. To tell it true, Rhia oft doubted her own willingness to stay forever upon the bluff doing such hard work, that was the thing.

  “I hope you fare well with this, Thaddeus,” she forced out. “And if the favor you seek is that I tell no one of seeing you, rest assured my lips are sealed.” She then made the rash decision to quickly spill her real thoughts, though he might think her a meddlesome scold. “But Mam and the rest of us upon the bluff will miss you sorely! We call you true friend, and would have cherished your considered advice and ready help right now. With the lepers, that is. And, of course, with Jim.”

  The young monk blew out a long, relieved breath, then looked up at her and smiled.

  “Your words have made my request much easier, Rhiannon, as I wondered if you and your family would grant me use of one of the hospice cottages for my retreat from the brotherhood? I’d pay my way with chores, and as well, I’d ask leave to paint inside the little church. It’s some dark the way it is, and paintings of Our Lord’s life here on earth would be fitting treatment for those walls. I would pray as I worked, for my work is my truest form of prayer.”

  He’d reached the final fold in the cloth and displayed for her his well-loved paints and brushes. “As you see, I’m set to go with you right now, if you give me leave.”

  She crouched beside him to reach and touch the bristles of a brush, then lifted two or three of the small pots of paints. Her quiet gestures might have seemed to the young monk like sincere appreciation of the tools of his work.

  But in truth she noticed not what she was doing, whether it was brushes she was touching or the quills of a living porcupine. For to touch those brushes and paintpots was the only ready way she had of grounding herself, elsewise she feared she might spin right up into the air, buoyed by the pure joy she felt upon hearing Thaddeus’s plans.

  “You’d be most welcome among us, Thaddeus,” she finally found breath to say.

  “Brother Thaddeus. That’s indeed what I will call you now.” She smiled over her shoulder at him, then turned round treacherously so she walked backward as they climbed single file up the trail. “You’re to be my brother upon the bluff, and a welcome son for Mam. So brother, Thaddeus. How’s that?”

  He smiled back, then reached forward to yank one of the many small braids Rhia’d made in her hair that morn. “How’s that for a brotherly action, sister Rhia? Now, as elder brother, I’d order you to turn back around and face forward e’er you step wrong!”

  “Aye, aye, wise brother!” She turned, giggling and obedient, but muttering, “Daisy as small tag-along sister and now you as bossy brother. My dream family, for sure. A small pest and a lordly tyrant!”

  Suddenly, a black shadow soared ’twixt the bluff and the sun, racing across the moss and stone so that Rhia stopped all her teases and shivered with real foreboding.

  “Creeee—-awwwk. Cra—-ra—-ra—-awwkk!”

  “Oh, Gramp!” Rhia let her breath out in a giddy, relieved laugh, feeling her knees atremble. “Good winged sire, the sight of you is most welcome, but I need no more jolts today, if it please!”

  Gramp came in for a landing upon a slender willow tree that grew from a small fissure in the steep trail, bending it nigh to the ground with his cumbrous weight. He made a right silly sight, bobbing on his tiny branch just feet from the two of them.

  But woe to anyone who took as fool that large and crusty bird upon his tiny, bouncing perch. For Gramp had not flown clear to meet them for no small reason. Indeed, he was now staring hard into the woods and had begun a throaty growl with his neck feathers spiked and his eye feathers gathered to a menacing squint.

  Rhia reluctantly followed his gaze, then yanked on Thaddeus’s sleeve and pointed.

  There, deep inside the twisted vines and dense shadows of the forest, stood the riderless horse she’d seen first on Ona’s funeral morn! It looked straight at them with large wet eyes that seemed so filled with loneliness and yearning that Rhiannon’s breath caught in her throat.

  “What would the beast have us know?” Thaddeus whispered, as though he’d read her thoughts. “Is it a mount from Lord Claredemont’s stables, gone missing?”

  “It must be,” she breathed, “as no one else upon the manor rides. The vicar’s acolytes use donkeys sometimes, but never would mount a horse.”

  Gramp, reassured now the other two had seen the threat, hunched down into his neck feathers and surveyed the horse with cooler eyes, giving up his growl.

  “We’ll tell Almund Clap about this lost steed as soon as we may,” Rhia decided. “He’ll take it back to where it belongs. Though it’s strange it hasn’t returned on its own, or been searched for and found by the lord’s groomsmen.”

  Thaddeus nodded agreement. And still they stood quietly watching for a while, as it was impossible to pull one’s gaze away from the beast’s great, beseeching eyes.

  It was the horse that finally broke the spell. He shook his head, sending his long mane spinning, then cantered away through the thick trees.

  By then the trail had grown treacherous with twilight. They hastened their step, and Rhia felt a niggling dread, as the sun had most certainly gone to the nether side of the steeple tower ages ago. Mam would be fit to be tied.

  Chapter 17

  In fact, the sun had clean finished his nightly sink into the choppy waters of the bay when they reached the top of the trail. The sky was swirled with vivid hues of orange and woad. A hush hung over the woods as all creatures made tracks for home, and the rough see-saw of the crickets and peepers and other night chirpers was just starting up.

  “I hope I’ll be welcomed.” Thaddeus sounded worried. “I lack true invitation—from your mother, I mean. I’d not be a burden to her, nor to your grandmother, either.”

  At that, Rhia laughed. “Thaddeus, you’ll be the great and good surprise that makes Mam forget to chide me for this close-cut return.” Too close, really, and she added, some nervously, “I would say it’s almost still twilight, wouldn’t you?”

  “Well,” he said, giving a shrug. Rhia decided to take that as a yes.

  The settlement now loomed in the clearing just ahead. Something seemed odd, though. The door to their cottage was closed, unusual on a warm spring night, and the window remained uncandled, though light from the firepit danced upon the walls.

  That firelight was not cut by the usual shadows of people moving inside the house, though. Where was everyone? She cast her eyes over the other cots.

  Sal’s window was candlelit, but no candle burned in the wi
ndow of the French pirate. The door of his cot, which Rhia had most times pushed hard upon and with reluctance, now hung wide open, thudding back against the wattle in the rising wind!

  “Hark,” Thaddeus whispered. “Someone weeps at Sally’s place.”

  Rhia nodded. “It must be Sal herself,” she whispered back. “It’s not Mam nor Granna, nor could such a low voice be Daisy. Whatever’s wrong has surely brought the others to her side, though. I’ve never heard Sally cry before. She’s too damaged to know how much she’s lost, so never goes to whining nor wailing about it.”

  A sudden and quite terrifying sound then issued from the open door of the pirate’s dark cottage, a cry much resembling the muffled shriek of a forest creature beside itself with the pain of a greater creature’s toothed attack.

  Rhia’s hands went to her mouth but she was too frozen of brain to speak or act.

  “Whoever is in that cottage needs immediate help!” Thaddeus asserted, heading toward the open door from which issued the pitiful keening.

  “Wait, wait!” Rhiannon grabbed his sleeve and spoke in a frantic rush. “I wanted to tell you something of this earlier, but hadn’t the chance! Thaddeus, remember when I told you of the Man Who Sleeps, that he was past knowing anything at all? Well, I was mistaken, for he has indeed come awake these past days! The moaning we hear is certainly his, yet things are never as they seem with him. He may be dangerous!”

  “But he needs quick attendance!”

  Thaddeus strained to proceed, but Rhiannon dug in her heels and detained him, grasping his arm with both hands.

  “If there was quick help to give him, do you not think Mam would have given it? The fact that his door is left wide open tells me that Mam has had some encounter with him, mayhaps involving Sally, causing her to weep so pitifully! Some encounter less than gentle, for certain, as he is a great deal addled, also shaded, and unknowable. And . . . he has a dark wish.”

  That did the trick. The young monk was now all ears. “A dark wish?”

  Rhia nodded and released her hold. “He says he would sleep forever. He sees terrible things in his head—hellish visions, nightmare scenes. You may do him harm, or he may harm you, as he may mistake you for some shade come from his dreaming world. He ofttimes calls me a dream name, the name of some phantom sister of his . . . Adela.”

  Thaddeus’s eyes widened with that. “Adela? Like the countess who perished aboard the White Ship, the half-sister of . . .”

  She quickly nodded.

  He paused a moment. “So that’s why you insisted upon knowing for certain if there were survivors of that tragedy.” He took a breath and let it out. “Though, of course, Adela is a common enough name, in the Norman tongue.”

  For an instant their eyes met, and they acknowledged the slenderest possibility of the impossible. Much like the impossibility of dragons held within an artfully decorated chamber, deep within marshy ground. Impossible, but . . . just possible.

  “We must go first to Sal’s,” Rhiannon stated firmly, leading the way.

  All were in the cottage—Granna and Daisy, Mam and poor distressed Sal, who sat upon the pallet with her head upon Mam’s shoulder and her pale face blotched from hard weeping. Daisy sat close on Sally’s other side with Queen Matilda held fast against her chest in mimic of the embrace given Sal by Mam. Granna stood on her two feet near the pallet like a tree grown up through the floor, watching it all and clucking her tongue.

  Sally was the first to spot Rhiannon standing in the doorway. The weeping girl sat up rigid, reaching her arms toward Rhia and trying to say her saying, though she hiccupped through it, which was right pathetic. “Three . . . huck, huck . . . three . . . huck! Huck fish!”

  Rhiannon ran and knelt at Sal’s knees. “Oh, Sal, whatever’s happened to grieve you so?” She took Sally’s hands into her own, searching Sal’s empty eyes. “Oh, Sally, nothing should ever, ever intrude upon your peace again, nor pain you!”

  It was a mark of their worry over Sal that when Thaddeus walked silently over the threshold to stand beside Granna, all merely nodded as though he’d been expected.

  Mam whispered to Rhiannon, “Daughter, I ask your forgiveness. I should have considered that you wouldn’t tell me the sleeper had come awake unless you’d seen it. Had I taken you at your word, Sally might have been spared this ordeal.”

  Rhiannon looked Sally over. There was neither blood nor bruise upon her, not that Rhia could see. The cloth of her nightshift was some ripped at the neckline, though.

  Granna meanwhile leaned to speak from the side of her mouth to Thaddeus. “You are most welcome, young monk,” she told him, gruffly and quietly. “Whatever the reason for the climb up, it was well-timed, as we have ne’er before dealt with such a lunatic. Why, the one next door may be devil possessed, and if so we’ll have certain need of a monkish priest such as yourself!”

  Thaddeus whispered back to her, “Will you walk outside with me, to fill me in?”

  As they exited Sal’s cottage, Granna stepped quite spritely and kept Thaddeus between her and the cot wherein crouched the man she’d decided was most certainly a lunatic. She slowed to a hobble, though, when they were some way past that danger, and she took the young monk’s arm as they neared the hives. There, she sat heavily down upon the work stump and took a big heave of breath, shaking her head. The bees stopped their drone to get a good listen to what she’d say.

  “Well then, young monk, here’s what happened,” she set in. “Rhiannon had told us the sleeper was awake sometimes, but we discounted that as none of us had seen him so much as move a muscle. Until this afternoon, that is, when, as Aigy noted, we found the hard way that we ne’er should have doubted our Rhia. Aigneis was taking Sally for a short walk in the nice weather, and she thought to stop and check the sleeper whilst she was about it. She had Sally by the hand when she came up to the pallet where he lay. We now believe he’s watched with slitted eye our comings and goings for some time, as when he glimpsed poor Sal he sat smack up and reached to put rough hands upon her afore Aigy could think what was happening!”

  The bees got even quieter, as though they’d been shocked and now held their breaths.

  Thaddeus quietly asked, “Rough hands?”

  Granna pushed out her bottom lip and nodded. “She’d a little charm upon her bodice, see? Rhia’d given it to her this morning, and Sally seemed to think it quite the thing, kept touching it and looking down at it. It was silver and shaped like a clammy shell. Well, he wanted that charm, was it. He reached and tore it right off Sally’s shift as rough as you please, and that put Sally to screaming fierce. Those screams is what brought me to the scene of the crime. By then the lunatic had pilfered that charm and was hunkered down upon his haunches in the corner of his cot with it. Aigneis had hustled Sally back to her own cot by then, and Daisy’d joined them. I and those two has been there since, comforting Sal as best we could while the other one hunkered and howled next door.”

  Granna sighed and took her pipe from its pouch. “Sally is not hurt, that’s a blessing. She’s mostly afeared because the loony what took her charm put her in mind of her bad brother what cracked her noggin, that’s my take on it. Poor helpless little thing.”

  Thaddeus had stood silent through this account. Now he asked, “Did the sleeper who’s now woken say anything at all when he acted so rudely? Drop some word that might tell us why he became so agitated about that charm?”

  The moon was now high in the sky, and the courtyard lustrous, though the door of the man they talked of yawned open and black as the mouth of a cavern.

  Granna hard-eyed Thaddeus. “Interesting you ask it that way, monk,” she muttered. “He did drop a single word. Aigy says that he pronounced that one word right clear when he lunged at Sal, and he says it o’er and o’er even now. Can you not hear it woven within his moans? Aleron, that’s the word, if word it be.”

  Though they were at some distance, the man’s pitiful keening still reached their ears. And within that formless sound
there floated those three syllables—: A—le—ron. He moaned them as a child may moan its mother’s name, enclosed in blubbers and boohoos.

  “Ayyyy . . . ahhhyyy . . . ahyyeeeeleron!” the wretched man wailed.

  “Yes, I do hear! Aleron is a Norman name, mistress. A name given males.”

  “Norman, you say?” Granna spat upon the ground. “I mighta thunk they’d be the root of such trouble.”

  “And here’s something else,” the young monk continued excitedly. “The silver shell? I believe it’s a pilgrimage token. In fact, I think it’s a badge from the church where the bones of Saint James are said to lie, in far Espania. Do you know where Rhia got it?”

  Granna slapped her knees. “Well, not in Espania, monk! Unless she grew back the birdy wings of her great-granddames and flew there unbeknownst to us one fine night! You’ll have to ask her yerself where it came from.”

  Granna pulled upon Thaddeus’s arm and rose.

  “I’ll go on home to see what the fire may have to say of all this,” she stated. “Take me there, please, then hasten back to be with the others, if you will.”

  When Thaddeus had seen her safely situated beside her fire, he hurried back to Sal’s, resisting the strong temptation to enter the cot of the mysterious man instead.

  They sat much as before, with Rhia now finger-combing Sally’s hair and with Daisy upon Aigy’s lap, her eyes nearly closed and her thumb in her mouth. “I’m hungry,” she mentioned, yawning large. “Did we ever eat?”

  “We did not, and we should,” Mam answered gently, putting Daisy to her feet then standing herself. She turned to Thaddeus. “I’ll be glad of your escort, sir, as we take Sally home with us. It’s been a hard afternoon and all, I think, are nigh exhausted.”

  As they shared bread and soup that night, they spoke of light things, talk suitable for Sally and young Daisy, leaving matters of more import to be discussed later. Thaddeus timidly asked if he might stay with them a few days and was given wholehearted welcome by all. Rhia told the news of market, and of the rough riders through it, making the story seem a bit funny, honking geese, that sort of thing. She passed along to Granna the spidery bunion cure given her by Hilda Mopp, then she turned to Daisy. “Everyone at the ale booth asked about you. They were overjoyed that you’ve healed so well.”