Throne of Darkness: A Novel

by Douglas Nicholas

  Right behind him was Hob, and here tricks he had learned from Sir Balthasar and others he had learned from Molly or Jack were combined in rapid succession, so that even though he was faced with a tall mercenary and he armed with a broadsword, in short order Hob feinted, broke the bandit’s shin with the heavy lead-loaded head, and, as the bandit dropped, struck the broadsword from his hand, and with a backhand blow broke his elbow as he fell past him.

  Jack was battering his third man to death while Hob faced the last routier. A short wiry man with a horribly scarred face—one eye was missing—and grimy hands, he gambled everything on one thrust of his long knife, leaping forward with his right arm out before him, so that his whole body became a sort of spear, with the knife as the spearhead. Hob twisted violently to his left, bringing his club, held with a hand at each end, down at a slant on the knifeman’s wrist, forcing the knife to one side. The mercenary, his strike thwarted, now was impelled by his momentum to stagger past Hob, who switched smoothly to a one-handed grip and swung with all his might, the club’s murderous head banging into the back of the man’s neck, a place so vulnerable that a strong blow meant death. And so it proved now: One-Eye fell and did not move again.

  Jack came striding back from the herb garden. The man whose elbow and shin Hob had broken was thrashing about gracelessly on the ground, uttering wordless cries of woe. Jack, that unsentimental soldier, killed him with one blow of the war hammer as he passed, hardly slowing.

  Molly was calling orders as she climbed down from the roof. Jack went to the small wagon and came out with a compact chest with powders, ointments, bandage. He carried that into the yard and put it down by the two women, who were pulling their clothes into some semblance of order. Then Hob and Jack went into the house, went room to room to make sure no attacker lurked therein, and discovered the husband of the house, lying in a small pool of blood from his battered head, but still alive.

  They took stock. The mercenaries were all dead, and the elderly man was dead. The husband might live. The women were sitting together in the ruins of their herb garden, holding each other and sobbing. Molly and Nemain went into the house and cleaned and dressed the man’s head—he had been clubbed several times—and the two men lifted him onto a bed. Nemain found two coarse but clean blankets, and covered him; as Molly said, “ ’Tis peril for a wounded man to have a chill come into his bones.”

  Then they went out into the sunlight and sat with the women and discovered that they had not been greatly hurt, but only terribly frightened. Now they looked round and saw the graybeard, presumably the grandfather, dead by the doorstep, and set up a wail, and the younger woman began crying, “Hugh! Where is Hugh?” She became more and more upset, and her cries grew louder; and now from the goat pen nearby, a boy of perhaps ten crept out and ran to her arms, and then there was renewed weeping, some of it from joy and relief, some from sorrow.

  Molly and Nemain prepared calming drinks for the women; Jack and Hob carried the dead grandfather into a back room and laid him out on a pallet there. They sent the boy on a run to the nearest neighbor’s cottage, to bring help, and when the neighbors had come, two men with axes and three women, one very old, Molly advised them to send for the shire reeve’s men.

  And when the neighbor women had clustered about the victims, petting them and wrapping them in shawls and generally making soothing sounds and murmured exclamations of pity, and the axmen had taken up station in the yard, looking angry and determined, and spitting on the mercenaries’ corpses and cursing King John and all Frenchmen and especially the routiers, Molly had the troupe resume their journey, pulling away quietly, with a simple wave to the axmen in the yard. For, as she said later, “If we’re to avoid being taken by King John’s men, ’twill not do to be found in the midst of a battlefield, and everyone speaking of us.”

  • • •

  THEY HAD GONE a fair distance before Molly signaled that they were to camp for the night. They pulled off the road into a field bordered with a line of apple trees; a little stream provided water, and there was grass for the animals.

  They sat around a small fire and ate a simple meal of bread and hard cheese and brookwater, and reflected on the day’s events. At some point they were mulling over Hob’s near brush with death, and how Milo had saved him, and Hob said, “I think he must have been startled by yon routier swinging up his ax, and swung his head to avoid it, the horn by chance striking the man’s chest.”

  And now Nemain, that most hardheaded and sarcastic of their little family, surprised Hob by shaking her head and saying “Nay, nay, ’tis not what I think.” She looked out into the meadow, where Milo grazed at the end of his tether, partially obscured by the gathering darkness, the firelight echoing from his thick blunted horns, his large dark eye now and then flashing as it caught the ruddy beams.

  She looked back at her husband, and said gravely, “I’m thinking that he’s feeling some faint shadow of that passion to protect that you’re seeing in bulls—they ranging round the herd and ready to attack wolves and other bulls and suchlike that threaten the cows—and Milo’s full fond of his Hob.”

  Hob said, laughing, “Our Milo, our timid Milo, a king bull, like the king bulls of the wild white cattle?”

  “I’m not to be changing my word on this, husband,” said Nemain. “ ’Tis the way of it; I’m feeling it in my heart.”

  Hob spread his hands and looked at Molly, an appeal to authority, but Molly just shrugged and sipped at her cup. “When she’s so sure, I’m finding she has the right, almost always. And any road, I’m too tired to think more on’t.”

  But Hob was still chuckling. “Perhaps you think he’s becoming an ox warrior—I could ride him into battle.” At this point Nemain threw a bit of bread at him in mock fury for teasing her, which made Hob laugh harder, and look for a crust to throw back—in some ways they were still the boy and girl who had grown up together—and which provoked him to elaborate on his theme: “Or, or, we could sharpen his horns and use him against those Cousins.”

  “What?”

  Hob, about to pelt Nemain with a pebble’s worth of hard cheese, paused, shocked. Molly had leaped to her feet and was glaring at him.

  “I, I, said that Milo . . .” began Hob, at this point not sure what he had said, the startling having driven it from his mind.

  “He said that we might use Milo against the Cousins,” said Nemain, looking at her grandmother curiously. “But ’twas just in banter. Why should that make you so cross?”

  Molly looked back and forth, her expression still stern but softening. “Cross? Nay, child, I was startled myself. Hob, you have given it to me, you have given it to me.” She pulled Hob to his feet and swept him into a hug; she released him, kissed his cheek, and sat down again. She turned to Nemain.

  “Deaf as a post in fey matters, is he? I’m thinking the Mόrrígan Herself put those words in his mouth.”

  Nemain, still with an oddly cautious expression on her face, said carefully, “You are going to use Milo against the Cousins as though he were a king bull of the wild cattle?”

  Molly waved her hand dismissively. “Nay, child, think, think! I will use the wild white bulls themselves. I will send them, kings and bachelors both, against these vile hyena-men, and they will trample their blood into the earth.”

  • • •

  AND WITH THAT, Molly, much cheered, emptied her mug of water onto the grass, and rose, and began making preparations to retire. Jack pulled down her bed in the wagon and set about spreading blankets. Molly sat on the narrow rear platform of the wagon, her feet dangling, and brushed out the four-foot silver length of her hair.

  The others followed her example. Nemain made up their bed in the midsized wagon while Hob watered the draft animals and banked the fire. Jack whistled for Sweetlove; doors were closed and locked; shutters were opened partially on a chain.

  Weary as they were, sleep came easily, with the fragrance of green growing things drifting in at the wagons’ open windows, and th
e stream laughing quietly to itself at some private jest.

  CHAPTER 20

  UP THE COAST THEY WENT, the north–south road that they traveled veering inland somewhat. Several days’ travel brought them to the river Lune, at this point a narrow lovely fast-running stream, tree-bordered, pouring between rock gates into pools, rushing over big boulders, dark cold water alternating with stretches of white-foaming rapids.

  They crossed on a plank-paved bridge set on stone piers, the planks banging and creaking beneath the wagons, and turned west toward the coast. The next day brought them to the inn.

  The inn was known as Warin’s Inn, or Fulke’s Inn; it had been owned at times by each of these men, and though now the innkeeper was a certain Toly, local custom was stubborn, and insisted on using one or the other name of the two long-dead proprietors.

  The inn was set on a side road, not far from the coast. The building nestled amid the deep shade of giant oaks, as though it wished to avoid notice. It was not overlarge, nor did it seem prosperous, but it was a place where people who wished to be overlooked might go for a while. Behind the building a slope led down through wooded land to the shoreline of a large bay, and above the wind in the leaves could be heard the swash of the Irish Sea.

  In short order Molly had cornered Toly, halt in his left leg and dour in demeanor, and made her usual arrangements: meals at the inn, the beasts to the stables, but the troupe to sleep in the wagons. Again, in the interests of anonymity she paid in silver rather than barter for their services as musicians.

  Jack and Nemain and Hob tended to their respective beasts, Hob taking a little extra time with Milo, so that first his wife and then Jack left the stable before him. There were two rows of open stalls—there was no door at the inner end of each stall. In the stall corresponding to Milo’s, across the stable’s central aisle, was tethered a handsome rouncey with a small well-shaped head and large eyes. One reason that Hob was slow in settling Milo in his stall, feeding and watering him, and brushing his coat, was that he would stop every now and then to admire the horse. Its coat, in the dull light of two candle lanterns, gave off a rich and subtle chestnut gleam.

  And now, at the far end of the stable aisle, a man entered, swathed in a traveler’s cloak, his face half-concealed by the tilt of a broad-brimmed hat. He came up to the horse’s stall, and Hob, brush in hand, nodded politely. The man, about to enter the stall, turned and faced Hob. His eyes, cast in shadow by the hat brim, by some trick of the farther lantern glittered darkly; he stared into Hob’s face. Then he turned, without a word or gesture of greeting, took a saddle blanket from the stall partition, and swung it over the horse’s back. The blanket had some sort of complex design—Hob could not quite make it out—and from its edges dangled tassels, each one fashioned of several strips of leather.

  The traveler threw a high-pommeled, high-cantled saddle over the saddle blanket, the leather heavily worked with vinelike designs. The horseman settled the saddle, tightened straps, and stopped. He stood a moment with one hand to the pommel, tugged his hat a little lower on his forehead, then turned very deliberately and again looked into Hob’s face. Once more little could be seen of his face, but his eyes stared with such intensity they seemed to burn.

  Hob, brushing more and more slowly as his fascination with the stranger grew, ceased entirely. He began to become angry: it seemed intentionally rude. The horse already had its bridle on; it was tethered by the reins. The man turned back, untied the reins, and began to back the horse into the aisle. As the horse came out, turning to face the doors away at the end of the aisle, the horseman paused and again glowered at Hob.

  But this was too much. Hob was no child, to let this discourtesy pass. His expression grew stony, his hand flew to his dagger-hilt, and he prepared to challenge the lout. Immediately the man’s demeanor changed, a smile spread across his face, and he backed away. “Excuse me, young master,” he said in the most pleasant tones, tinted with an indefinable accent. He put a hand to his heart and bowed, and walked toward the front of the stables, leading the horse, who followed him at the end of the reins with outstretched neck. Hob, left confused and uncertain after this bewildering shift of attitude, contented himself with a curt nod.

  Hob looked after the stranger, troubled; the man left the stable in a swirl of brown cloak, and Hob could hear but not see him mount, and the horse clatter out of the yard. He did not know what it was that had happened, nor what it meant, but there was a sudden weight on his heart, and he hurried through the rest of his chores, crossed the innyard, now sunk in dusk, and entered the common room with its yellow light, its promise of fellowship.

  “And here’s my hero knight-to-be,” said Nemain, with just a hint of mockery. “We were after thinking you’d spend the night in the straw.”

  Hob was about to tell her of what had happened, but a strange reluctance gripped him. It was almost as though there was a chain on his tongue. He smiled and nodded and sat to his meat, but there seemed to be a shadow between him and his family, and he was moody and silent the rest of the evening.

  CHAPTER 21

  HOB AWOKE BESIDE NEMAIN IN the midsized wagon. The partially open shutter by the bedside admitted a shaft of light from the rising moon, enough to show the fall of her hair that hid her face, the gleam of her shoulder peeping from the coverlet, even a hint of the faint freckles that adorned that shoulder. He absently stroked her hair, which elicited the kind of muffled, enigmatic sound that results when sleepers imagine that they speak.

  He could delay no longer: he was summoned elsewhere, for he must . . . he must . . . no matter, it was a summons of some urgency, and right now his task was to get under way. He dressed quietly, and slipped out the door, closing it slowly lest the hinges squeak. A foot to the rope loop, and so to the ground, the steadily rising moon providing enough light to avoid a misstep, and off into the woods.

  It was darker here under the trees, but Hob knew he had to follow the downhill slope, so that he could . . . he could . . . no matter, he would know what to do when the time came. From behind him came the sound of a dog barking, faint and growing fainter; he paid it no mind.

  He lifted his feet carefully to avoid tripping on exposed roots and the tangle of undergrowth. The slope steepened, so that he braced himself by putting a hand to tree trunks, alternating between right and left. At last there was a push through a tangle of bracken, and he felt a breeze with the bracing scent of salt water against his face. Before him opened a huge empty bay, the tide full out, with the waterline perhaps seven miles distant, the damp sands glistening in the moonlight.

  The bay was carved into sections by sandbars—some with the flat rock deposits called skears—and by deep gullies that the powerful tides had scoured out.

  Hob began to hurry along the shoreline, his legs swishing through the coarse salt-loving grasses. He feared being late for . . . for . . . his appointment, his meeting. He was unsure about it, but just now he needed to concentrate on making all speed.

  There was a dark circular mass on the slope down to the beginning of the damp and level sands, and as he tried to make out what it was, his ankle struck against something in the grass, and he tumbled to earth.

  “Hob! Hob, where are you?” It was Nemain’s voice, right beside him.

  “I’m here,” he answered, scrambling to his feet. He felt an odd annoyance. Where else would he be?

  “What do you see?” Her voice was so close that he turned in a circle, but he was alone on the foreshore, the trees of the forest a good five yards away. Yet she sounded as if she stood next to him.

  “I cannot see you,” he said. “I’m by the bay. Where are you?”

  “Hob!” she cried, but now her voice came from farther away, back the way he had come, and he looked up the beach, and saw her burst from the trees and come toward him at a run. Behind her, a moment later, Molly and Jack crashed through the fringe of brush at the tree line and ran after Nemain.

  She pounded to a halt in front of him, and peered in
to his face. “Hob, what were you—” She put a hand to either side of his head and pulled him down to her, looking deep into his eyes.

  “Ochone! Hob, you’ve been—” She kissed him openmouthed, then stepped back and slapped him hard across the face. Slight as she was, she had trained with weapons under Molly, and a slap from her was no token gesture. His face burned and, shocked, he felt the ground moving under him. A feeling of wakefulness rushed in upon him, a change of perspective so intense that he staggered in place, but at that moment Molly and Jack reached him, and Jack gripped his arm till he steadied.

  “What am I—why am I here?” he asked, though he had still a fading sense of an urgent appointment.

  “It’s for no good purpose,” said Molly. She put a hand to his brow. “You’re all right now, but there’s some evil has called you out here.”

  From within the forest, directly behind them, came a bubbling falsetto cry, rising to a pitch of hysteria, then falling, then silent once more. A moment later there came a series of yelps, still within the trees, but away to the north; this was echoed by five or six separate voices, yipping in chorus to the south. Finally, from the central voice rose a mad swell of laughter, the mirth of a crazed goblin.

  “And there’s the ones who’ve lured you here, and moving toward us, to sweep us up like fish in this fisherman’s net,” said Molly, and she gestured to the dark circular mass, which Hob, peering in the moonlight, now saw was a round skin boat, over whose tether, hidden in the grass, he had tripped.

  Molly was turning in place, looking for a refuge, but they were trapped: the goblin-haunted forest behind them, and before them, the wide sweep of empty sand and then the sea. She was cursing in Irish under her breath as she turned. To run up or down the beach was useless: the line of hunters was too widespread, the gibbering and howling now up and down the curve of bay-bordering forest. There must be a good two dozen of them—hard-to-kill werebeasts, and Molly and Nemain without spell or potion prepared, and even the mighty Jack overmatched.