The wagons were halted, with their brakes on, in the village square, and Molly and Nemain and Jack were down from the wagon seats, and stretching a little, just standing there with Hob amid the gathering villagers. Hob was kept busy introducing the village folk to his new family. Folk initially in awe of Molly’s unmistakably queenly appearance were soon thawed by her sweet smile and her pleasant manner; Nemain drew admiring glances from the young men and somewhat less enthusiastic ones from the young women; and everyone was a little afraid of Jack, even with Sweetlove under his arm.
One side of the village square was given over to the church, and next to it, set back from the road a little, was the priest house. The door opened and out came a young priest, supporting Father Athelstan with a hand beneath his left elbow and another about his shoulders. Hob stared. Here was the man who had been as a father to him. Hob had, as children do, thought Father Athelstan to be very old, when he was merely old; now that the priest was somewhat older, somewhat frailer, he did not seem so very different to Hob.
“God save all here!” he cried as he approached the wagons with small stiff steps, the young priest matching his gait.
He came up to Hob and Hob by sheer instinct put his arms around him; the priest patted his back and pulled away to look at him.
“But look what a tall man you have become, my dear child!” He turned to Molly and took both her hands in his. “It is as you said, dear lady; he has flourished in your care. Many a night I have asked Our Lady to take special care of him, and I cannot help but think you have acted in her place.”
Molly smiled at him. “ ’Tis the truth: he’s after growing into a fine young man, and married to my granddaughter no less, and it’s promised by more than one great knight of the North Country that they will see him knighted.”
The old priest regarded Hob again. “I had hoped for a quieter path for him, perhaps a scholar, in the bosom of Holy Mother Church.” He turned and put his hand on the young priest’s shoulder. “This is Father Eustace, whom the bishop has sent to help me, and he is like my own right hand; I could not care even for this little flock without him. He is also a keen scholar, and I hope one day to see him advance in the Church.”
“God and Mary with you,” the young priest said quietly, looking around at the newcomers.
Father Eustace had a pleasant, open Saxon face, thick-fingered hands, and the general appearance of a farm laborer; Hob thought he did not look much like a scholar, but then again Father Athelstan would often counsel against giving too much importance to appearance instead of virtue.
Here was kindly old Father Athelstan, with a mild-faced assistant, his “right hand” whom he hoped to sponsor in the Church; what a contrast, thought Hob, with the urbane and sinister da Panzano, and his even more sinister assistant Sinibaldo, to whom he also referred as his “right hand.”
“But come in, and refresh yourselves,” said Father Athelstan, turning toward the priest house and tottering a bit, as one whose balance is unsteady; Father Eustace put an arm about his shoulders for a moment, till the old man was secure, and then they made their slow way back to the priest house. Molly went after them, leaving the disposition of the wagons to the other three.
Dickon showed them where they could pull the wagons to the other side of the little square, which bordered on the commons; Milo, Mavourneen, and Tapaigh were turned out to graze on tethers in the field, and the wagons were chocked and their doors secured against mischievous children.
Dickon leaned close to Hob, punched him lightly on the arm, and said low, “ ’Twill be a grand excuse for a feast; there’ll be no more hoeing today, God be praised; and we’ve had two prosperous years, so there’s bounty for the table.”
“But you spoke of trouble?” said Hob.
Dickon’s face darkened; he looked away, toward the hills that rose beyond the bell tower of little stone St. Edmund.
“I’m thinking that Father Athelstan will tell you of it; ’tis not my place to be discussing such matters, but your mistress—oh, Father told us much about her, after she took you away—will want to be told, and yourself—nearly a knight, our Hob!”
Hob gave him a little shove, as if to say, You make too much of it, but his friend’s open admiration touched him, and for an instant he considered how it would have been to stay here among these friends, and live quietly without striving against monsters, and rise in the Church, or perhaps marry Beatrix, whom he had thought quite pretty till he saw Margery atte Well, his first brief love, and, of course, Nemain herself.
At last Hob and Nemain and Jack were free to join Molly in the priest house, while Dickon went off to organize a celebration. They crowded into the little house, Sweetlove at Jack’s heels, and Hob looked around in wonder. All these familiar sights: the small rooms, the simple, even spartan, furniture, the old smoke-darkened crucifix over the fireplace.
He peeked into the little room that had been his bedroom; there was a larger cot there now, for Father Eustace, but the room looked much the same as it had during the years when he had lived there, an orphan dependent on the old priest’s kind heart, and suddenly his eyes grew moist, and he surreptitiously swept a finger along one eye and then the other. Sir Robert the ferocious knight, he thought, mocking himself, and then it did seem humorous, and he felt better. Still, he looked around one last time, and then rejoined the others in the central room.
While Jack and the young couple were tending to the animals, Molly had taken the opportunity for a little privacy to consult with Father Athelstan about his health, and now she sent Nemain out again to fetch various remedies from the little wagon—jars of this and crocks of that—while she dictated proper use to Father Eustace, who wrote everything down in rapid Latin, scratching letters into the soft inner surface of a section of birch bark with an iron stylus. When he was done he rubbed charcoal into the scratches to darken the letters and make them stand out against the pale birch.
Nemain also had brought back a small cask of the uisce beatha, and when Father Athelstan suggested some wine for his guests, Molly countered with an offer of the fiery drink. Father Eustace produced small pewter mugs, and a health was drunk round. Almost at once there was a change among the six people gathered in the tiny room, an increased ease and sense of intimacy. They sat about on Father Athelstan’s few chairs and a garden bench that Father Eustace had brought in, and Sweetlove, having determined that Jack was settled, and that no one was having anything to eat just yet, sat quietly at his feet; grew drowsy; slumped more and more; and finally turned around twice and lay down, placing her chin on Jack’s foot. Soon she began emitting small high snores.
Outside there was some commotion: the sounds of crude tables being set up, and a bonfire being laid, by the men; the bustle of the women bringing out dishes and food and jugs of home-brewed ale.
Within the priest house Molly was giving a highly edited account of the last several years. She did manage to convey the eerie quality of some of the enemies they had faced, and touched upon Nemain’s dispatch of a foreign swordsman and cowing of three drunken men-at-arms; and Hob’s killing of a near-seven-foot knight who wielded a huge hand-and-a-half claymore, and Hob armed only with a dagger; and Jack’s various martial exploits—all without once mentioning the Old Gods of Ireland or that Jack had been a shapeshifter. The two priests hung on her every word: no matter how uncanny her tale, no one would ever think Molly would lie.
“These are troubled times,” said the old priest. “When folk go to market—folk here go to Little Bridekirk, ’tis our market town—we hear murmurs of unrest and rebellion, and skirmishing between the king and the barons, and mercenaries roaming the countryside . . . and worse, worse than mercenaries.”
He sighed, and regarded his cup, and seemed disinclined to continue. A silence grew.
“Dickon spoke of trouble you had had,” said Hob, to encourage the old priest to speak.
Father Athelstan looked up.
“Yes; we have had our experience with what I believ
e are demons loosed upon the countryside.”
“What is it that you are telling us, then?” asked Molly.
The old priest made as if to speak, then paused and took a sip from his mug, and another.
“This is wonderfully good,” he said, examining the amber liquid. “The Psalms tell us that wine cheers the heart of man. . . . Ah, well. We had a boy herding the village’s goats—this is Thurstan John’s-son. Hob may remember John’s marriage to young Adelina; this is their child. Thurstan was up in the hills to the south with the goats, and he saw a bunch of men in hoods and cloaks on the road, and two on horseback, and they scattered things in the path, metal things, for they shone silver, and they went up and down the road strewing them as the farmers strew seed, and soon there were these metal things that covered the road from one side to the other, so that nothing coming around the curve of the path, and especially coming fast, could avoid encountering them.
“The hooded men then pushed into the deep bushes to one side of the road. And soon thereafter a party of knights and men-at-arms came along the road from the other direction, all mounted and riding fast around the bend, and the horses stepping on the things in the road, and screaming and falling, so that all was terrible confusion.
“And now from the bushes come these terrible animals, like none that the boy has seen before. There begins this horrid slaughter, the strange beasts irresistible, killing knights, soldiers, and their horses. Thurstan quickly turned the flock and went down the back slope as fast as he could, ran to me, and blurted out his story.
“Now this killing—one could not call it a battle—was out of sight, over the hills, but the road the knights were on, if you keep on it, is this very street outside the door. The nearest castle is two hours’ ride from here; the shire reeve is also far; and after Thurstan had seen what he had seen, what use would either be? Old Wybert had just died, and between Wybert and myself we had guided the village, and so now ’twas up to me alone. Should I ring the bell, and summon our people to safety, or would that bring the devils down upon us?
“At last I decided to bring all the people in; I had Sexton ring the bell, and we brought in all the folk and even the goats and sheep, all that we could, into the church, and James Carpenter came with a great leather bag of nails and his hammer and also his little hammer and his old hammer—the head was sturdy but the handle broken in half, but one could use the head by itself. . . .
“Where was I? Ah, James gave out nails and sawn boards and short lengths of logs split in half, and all the young men under his direction nailed up every door and window. We lit candles and I said Mass right there, and shrove everyone at once, and gave Communion. And then the laughter began.”
Father Athelstan paused to rub his eyes with a blue-veined hand. Hob thought it was a beautiful hand, in its way, despite the irregular spots and discolorations of age: so gaunt that the tendons stood out like a net along the back, and the knuckles, slightly swollen, were as clearly articulated as a hawk’s claw. Father Athelstan drank again: Molly’s uisce beatha always lifted up the heart.
“Outside it was night, and that night, children, was filled with demons. We saw none—only Thurstan saw them, those strange animals, from a distance, but who else could it be? A storm of laughter, but the laughter of souls in torment, and at the doors, buttressed as they were with James Carpenter’s planks and half-logs and the iron nails that Isaac Smith makes for him—you remember Isaac Smith, Hob: his daughter, Big Rachel Smith, would watch you while I was saying Mass, or hearing confessions, or—God bless me, where was I?”
He was very old, thought Hob, and a bit forgetful, and talkative, but he seemed still the alert and intelligent man who had been chaplain in two Norman castles when younger, and who had taught Hob all his lessons.
“At the doors, I was saying, even through all the wood of the doors and the further wood that had been nailed on, we could hear the whuff of creatures sniffing at the joins, and horrendous scratching at the planks, like the dogs of Hell, and laughing and tittering, very high, and growling, very low. I cannot think what they must look like, but the sound was the sound of Satan and his vassals.
“The women were crying, which set the bairns crying, and all the men talking in loud voices. I said to them—I was rather stern, I am afraid—‘Be still! The Lord God will not desert you in your hour of need: you know this, so be comforted, and pray rather than making this unseemly noise in church,’ and we prayed together, and after a while the men and women were calmer, and so also became the babes. And so we passed the night.
“But there were screams from outside: they killed all the horses and oxen, for we could not bring them into so tiny a church, and then, and then, they . . . left.”
“Left?” asked Hob.
“We heard these terrible noises; they seemed to go on forever, and then they ceased. The next morning James and two of his apprentices climbed into the bell tower and removed the boards from one of the arches; the village was empty outside. Folk worked to open the doors, and found not only had every horse and cow been killed, but they had been eaten down to the hooves and bones, and these were cracked and splintered as though by giant wolves, or giant bears—or by Satan’s dogs.
“We lived in terror for many days; horses and cows were lent to us, for the plowing and for milk and cheese, by the bishop and by the castle, and we were just able to have enough. The bishop thought it might be demons, but sent as punishment for the village’s sins—my little Saint Edmund’s!—and he dispatched Father Ronald, known for his piety, to cleanse the community. Father Ronald said Mass, and prayed all around the outskirts of the village, and blessed everyone, and left.
“The castle thought it was wolves, and sent a hunting party to sweep the valley: three knights and a group of men-at-arms and a huntmaster, as well as beaters and dog handlers. They found nothing, although we showed the hounds the prints, to give them the scent. Giant doglike prints, but not dogs, unless they were the Evil One’s dogs. Yet the knights were scornful, I could tell, though they hid it beneath their courtesy. Still, as I have said, both church and castle saw fit to lend us the horses and cows we needed to live. Certes, this is excellent liquor, my dear lady.”
This last was said after another sip. Father Athelstan was calm, even telling this tale of horror, and Hob could very easily envision him, by example and chastisement, quieting a churchful of terrified villagers. Now, looking at the old priest with adult eyes, Hob could see him, not as the mild and boring teacher of Norman English and Church lore, but as a remarkable man of force and intellect invisible to a child, a man capable of leading others during a crisis, a man who did not lose his nerve, even surrounded by devils. And, thought Hob, he lived simply, but he was a man who seemed to take a keen enjoyment in life.
Sweetlove chose this moment to waken, and to sit up, yawning, jaws wide and pink tongue curling at the tip. Father Athelstan put a hand to Father Eustace’s shoulder, and heaved himself up; he shuffled across to Sweetlove, and bent to pet her.
“Father,” began Hob, intending to warn the old priest that Sweetlove did not care for attention from anyone but Jack, but Father Athelstan put out a bony hand and placed a palm alongside Sweetlove’s face, his thumb caressing her ear. She tilted her neck and leaned into his hand, and he remained bent over, and petting her, for some little while, and she gave every sign of pleasure.
It might be from sleepiness that she’s so docile, thought Hob, but I believe that there are some people that one senses one can trust, like Father Athelstan, or like Molly, for that matter, and she just trusts him. She’ll let Molly pet her, and sometimes Nemain, and once in a fortnight she’ll let me pet her, but no one else but Jack, till now.
“A lovely little dog,” said the priest. He straightened with a groan, and resumed his seat.
“Thank you, daughter,” he said to Nemain, who had refilled his cup. “But I fear to think of you all, our Hob and his new family, traveling the while these monsters stalk the king’s roads.”
Hob looked at Molly: he desperately wanted to reassure the old priest, but he would not dare to say a thing lest it put the others in danger or, worse, cause their quest to fail.
But, as she so often had, Molly surprised him.
“These demons that you heard . . .” she began, and paused.
“Yes, my lady?” said Father Athelstan.
“This is not to leave this room,” said Molly. “I would have you swear not to speak of it.”
Puzzled, Father Athelstan nodded. “I swear by my hope of salvation.” This was as serious an oath as he could have uttered.
“And young Father Eustace as well,” said Molly.
“I swear by the Cross,” said Father Eustace.
“It’s hunting them that we are, and soon we’ll be destroying them, and ourselves having destroyed more than a score of them so far. I tell you this that you do not live in fear. Be cautious for a fortnight or two, and then you may live as before.”
The priests sat in astonishment for a bit. Father Athelstan looked from Molly to Hob.
“Our Hob? You are hunting demons? God bless my soul! I . . . I cannot picture it. But you tell me this young woman has killed a swordsman? And our Hob has killed a giant knight? You are as creatures of legend, sprung from the shadows!” He beamed at them.
And yet, thought Hob, the old priest, strong of mind, clear of thought, secure in his faith, received tidings of the strange doings of Molly and her troupe with far less difficulty than the worldly da Panzano, or the martial Sir Odinell. He saw Molly for her essential goodness and honesty: he did not doubt her tale, nor did he doubt that she was out to do good and not to do ill.
“We came upon the place of that battle,” said Molly. “There was not much left for burying, and all the bones, no matter how big, broken; this sits well with what we know of these creatures.”
Throne of Darkness: A Novel Page 14
