Throne of Darkness: A Novel

by Douglas Nicholas

  “But what do they here?” asked Father Eustace. “Have they broken out of Hell?”

  “ ’Tis that I know, but may not say,” said Molly. “To tell you would be to entangle you in matters dangerous to you and your flock, and ’twould not help against this evil atall. Be content; be wary for a fortnight; be discreet. Reassure your villagers, but vaguely. Caution everyone not to speak of this with strangers.”

  There was a diffident knock upon the priest-house door. Father Eustace went to answer it, and they could just hear Dickon’s voice murmuring outside: the words “Our Hob,” and the word “feast.”

  CHAPTER 26

  FATHER ATHELSTAN CALLED OUT to his young assistant, “Tell Dickon we’ll be there in a moment, and tell him tomorrow there’ll be twice as much hoeing for him to do!” But this last was said with a chuckle.

  He turned to Hob. “I cannot think how you are to go about destroying these things, that so completely overwhelm belted knights. If I need be so discreet as not to mention our assault by these hell-dogs to any outsider, should I then be bold enough to inquire about your methods? Advise me, Hob, now that you are a grown man, and a husband, and a knight-to-be at that.”

  Hob thought a moment. “Perhaps it would be better were you not to ask, Father.”

  “Then will I not,” said the priest. “Let us see what mischief Dickon has stirred up.” He struggled to his feet, and Father Eustace handed him his staff, a length of wood elaborately carved by James Carpenter, with vines and leaves climbing up the barrel. Father Athelstan had told his parishioners the story of the martyred St. Edmund, the patron saint of England, and how the Vikings of the Great Heathen Army had tossed the saint’s head into a forest, and how searchers for it had found it, undecayed, held between the paws of a wolf who called, “Here! Here!” The cunning James had terminated the staff with a knob in the form of this wolf, with the head of the saint peering out from between its paws.

  Armed with this staff, the old priest was more agile, and led them to the door, Sweetlove trailing at Jack’s heels, and out into the square, where tables had been set along one side. On the tables stood the contributions of the entire village: large tureens, steaming gently, some filled with a slurry of turnip, garlic, and pork sausage, others with hard-boiled eggs, and still others with a porray—leeks and ham seethed in milk; loaves of dark bread; and from the various alewives, seven barrels of ale from as many households.

  To one side of the square was a bonfire that had been constructed but not lit—it was late afternoon, and the day pleasant. At sundown it would be lit for light and warmth, for here in this little valley, surrounded by wooded hills, the air tended to be cooler than the season would indicate.

  The priests, the visitors, and then the villagers took their places to either side of the line of trestle tables; the benches filled rapidly, and the boys and girls of the village served rounds of bread to be used as plates, and ladled portions from the tureens onto these trenchers, all under the direction of Gammer Agnes, the village’s senior woman, white-haired, bent, and keen-eyed as a peregrine falcon. As with Father Athelstan, to Hob she did not appear in the least different. She circled the table with the aid of a cane, also whittled by the carpenter, and came up to Hob, who kissed her hand and introduced her to Nemain, which prompted the old woman to treat his wife to a flood of reminiscences about Hob-the-boy. Of course Hob-the-husband could foresee a lifetime of teasing from the mischievous Nemain based on his boyhood trespasses.

  “But sit, sit! Your wife is hungry and you stand here prattling,” Gammer Agnes said to Hob, who had hardly said a word. “Geoffrey! There are empty trenchers down there—are you dreaming, child?”

  Hob sat midbench with Nemain on his right, and a boy whom he did not know ladled a heaping portion of turnip and garlic and pork sausage onto his trencher, while a girl—could that be Osanna, Richard’s baby sister?—filled the carved-wood mug at his elbow with barley beer.

  Jack regularly plucked pieces of pork sausage and other delicacies from his trencher and held them down below his knee, whereupon Sweetlove would emerge from under the bench and delicately pluck them from his fingers. At some point three of the village dogs, rambling around the table soliciting alms, discovered her and objected to her presence, barking at her and snarling.

  Terriers are often unaware that they are small, and Sweetlove was no exception: she stalked forth from the shelter of the bench, stiff-legged, her nose wrinkled up, exposing her formidable teeth, while a hideous grinding snarl came from deep in her chest. The village dogs, startled, retreated three or four paces out of sheer prudence. But they were much larger than she, and there were three of them, and so Jack’s big hand came down and swept Sweetlove from her feet.

  He set her firmly on his lap, stuffed pork sausage into her mouth, effectively distracting her and not incidentally silencing her snarl. Behind him, the trio of dogs, unable to see her, sheltered as she was by Jack’s broad back, lost interest and wandered away.

  So the afternoon wore into evening, with stories and jests and memories traded back and forth. Molly, always eloquent, told stories of their traveling life, tales of inns and castles, as she had at the weir-tender’s cottage, and wide-eyed children—and their parents as well—hung on every word.

  Gradually the tureens emptied, and the fourth butt of ale was finished and the fifth broached. The sun hung low above the forested ridges to the west, and dark-gold shafts of light shot between the trunks of trees, black against the blaze of sun.

  Five men left the square and returned with instruments: a large and a small drum, two wooden whistles, and a wooden flute. A bench was dragged from the tables to the other side of the square, and the five sat to play. The large drum began the simplest of rhythms: boom boom boom, to which the rapidly tapped small drum added complexity. Then the whistles began together, and finally the flute, and the men and women formed circles, the women within, and joined hands, and danced in opposing directions to various lively country airs.

  Hob and Nemain joined them, dancing in different rings, and after a while Molly got up as well, and made her way to the inner ring and took a place there, as lively and graceful as one a third her age.

  The sun sank beneath the backbone of the western ridge, and darkness flooded the square. Here came Dickon with a blazing torch lit at his cottage hearth, and thrust it into the pile of dry logs and branches the men had constructed. It burned there for a moment as if nothing would happen, a glowing yellow-red heart in the darkness of the pile, and then branches caught, and there was a rapid bloom of flame, and suddenly the pile was afire, and the square lit from one side, and the dancers’ shadows thrown against the Saxon stone of the old church’s facade.

  There was a pause for the dancers and musicians to rest, and to drink more ale. Molly had Jack and Hob bring out their instruments, to the villagers’ intense curiosity. They sat on the musicians’ bench; each woman tuned her claírseach, retested, and retuned. Then Hob tuned his symphonia to Nemain’s harp, and Jack tightened the goatskin on his drum’s frame. The troupe struck up a lively country dance, and almost immediately folk quaffed off their mugs and returned to the hard dirt of the open square. By now the ale was having some effect, and the more formal circle dances were dissolving: there began smaller rings of five dancers or so; pairs of sweethearts swinging each other about in a whirl, both hands clasped; and the occasional solitary twirler, exalted by the music and the ale.

  All this while Father Athelstan presided at the end of one table, in a chair brought out from his house. He seemed in the best of humors, and not at all disapproving. Hob wondered what the dry and desperately pious Father Baudoin, chaplain of Sir Jehan’s Castle Blanchefontaine, would have thought of the raucous scene.

  After a while fatigue and ale led most of the dancers to return to the benches, and it was then that Molly gave Jack and Hob the stand-down signal, and after the slightest amount of retuning the two harps to each other, she and Nemain began to play. Hob reached down beside t
he bench and retrieved his own mug of ale, drank deeply, and set it down, prepared to enjoy himself. At one point or another in their performances, the two women played without the men, and it was one of Hob’s greatest delights to hear what beauty his wife and her grandmother could coax from the Irish harps.

  Nor did they disappoint on this evening that was so pleasant: the air delicious with the fragrance of growing things, the pungent aroma of woodsmoke; the sweet scent of spilled ale. The firelight lit the fronts of the tiny cottages and the ancient church, and the sides of Molly’s three wagons across the square. In the open commons beyond, the three draft animals showed as shadowy bulks amid some of the village goats and sheep.

  The harps launched into an Irish air, played in unison, one of those ravishing melodies with unexpected drops at the end of a stanza, so different from the yeoman-like English strains. Then the harps diverged, one providing accompaniment to the other, building to a sublime complexity. The villagers sat in something close to stunned silence; all except Father Athelstan, who left his chair and hobbled down the length of the tables to sit nearer to the music.

  The instrumental piece drew to a close, and without stopping, Molly and Nemain swept into a song in Irish, Molly’s dark contralto and Nemain’s bright soprano weaving against each other, their separate but complementary notes now crossing, now drawing apart. Hob sat sideways on the bench, the better to watch Nemain’s fingers flying along the strings; Jack, his bodhran beside him on the bench, had taken Sweetlove up onto his lap, and was listening to the music, head bent and eyes closed, while his hard brutal hand stroked along the little dog’s back with the most tender of touches. At last the voices swelled to a crest and then plunged to end on a thrilling prolonged low note, Nemain’s bright descant holding true, while below it Molly sustained a tone deep and fateful as the drone on Scottish war pipes.

  Hob looked over. Everyone was silent, all eyes on Molly and Nemain; a descent of angels could not have produced a greater effect. Father Athelstan was sitting at the end of the outside bench at the nearest table. The aged priest was bent forward, hand on chin, elbow on knee, staring intently at the harps, a look of joy on his face, his eyes bright and alert despite the amount of ale and, before that, of uisce beatha, that he had drunk. Once again Hob was aware of how little he had understood of this man when he had been a child in his care: how much more formidable he was than suspected.

  The storm of applause finally broke, and the villagers abandoned their seats to cluster around the musicians’ bench, to tell Molly and Nemain, shyly, how wondrous was this night to them. Many of them had never heard anything like this, even on holy days in St. Bridget’s church, with its large choir, over in Little Bridekirk. After that the two drummers clustered about Jack, examining his bodhran, and asking questions. He was unable to tell them much, of course, although Nemain translated some of his curt answers, but he was willing to demonstrate, with gestures, and short runs on the drum, some of the skills he had learned to employ, and after a while the small-drum player got his instrument, and attempted to copy some of Jack’s effects, even though the drums were constructed differently.

  At one point Hob, who had drunk quite a bit of beer and was seeing this village sprung from his childhood through a pleasant haze, found himself sitting on a bench next to Beatrix. She was now a pretty young woman, with a billow of thick black hair, Saxon blue eyes, a scattering of freckles.

  On her other side sat the rangy towheaded Eadward, with whom Hob had had a long-standing but friendly rivalry: the two fleetest boys in the village. Sometimes Hob won, sometimes Eadward: footrace after footrace failed to establish who had the primacy. Now Beatrix’s right hand, Eadward’s left, were on the table, fingers interlaced.

  They were engaged. “Father’s read the banns twice now,” she said in a happy voice, while Eadward grinned at him from her other side. For a moment it felt to Hob as it had when they all sat together down by the little stream in the heat of the summer, cooling bare feet in the current and teasing one another.

  “God and Mary with you both! I wish you joy of your marriage,” said Hob, filled with a strange emotion, perhaps born of the firelight, the half-lit buildings and wagons, the music; perhaps born of the realization that, choosing a path in this life, one must abandon another: a three-strand emotion, that mixed contentment with his own lot and happiness for his old friends, while below these feelings ran a note of sadness, deep and strong as Molly’s voice.

  • • •

  HOB AWOKE BESIDE NEMAIN. The ale was still singing in his blood, and he felt pleasantly heavy and sleepy. Nemain lay flat on her stomach with her face crushed into her pillow, the head-cloth disarranged, her breathing deep and regular. He propped himself up on one elbow and reached across her back to push the shutter partway open. The moon was up, but far from full; the bonfire had been banked to embers, with stones placed around it; the square lay ghostly in moonlight, in starlight.

  Directly across was the little church, built in Saxon times and still sturdy after several hundred years. Hob remembered how, when he was a child, the one little window in his room afforded a view of the side of that church, toward the rear, and the fields behind them, running away to the dark mass of wooded ridges beyond, everything faint and silent under the moon; on nights when he was wakeful, he would kneel at that window, and spin dim dreams of future glory.

  Beside him Nemain’s hand fluttered. She turned half on her side, opened her eyes a slit, closed them again, and batted at him blindly, feebly. She mumbled something—low, distracted, thick-tongued—that might have been: “Lie down, sweeting; lie down.”

  Hob pulled the shutter closed and lay down again. He ran a hand gently across her back—silk was never so smooth—and she gave the slightest gurgle of pleasure, and then began to snore lightly.

  He closed his eyes. He had just time enough to consider by how much the vivid joys of adulthood exceeded the muted yearnings of childhood before he sank beneath onrushing waves of sleep.

  CHAPTER 27

  THE NEXT MORNING FATHER ATHELSTAN was up soon after dawn, and shortly the bell rang in the little church tower. Hob and Jack went to hear Mass; Father Athelstan officiated and Father Eustace attended him. The old priest, with the remarkable vitality that some elders display, did not seem much the worse for his robust drinking the night before. When Father Athelstan had dismissed the congregation and the villagers had filed out to begin their daily tasks, he came up to Jack and Hob and said, “Come see this.”

  He led the way to the church doors, folded back into the narthex, and pointed at the door on the right. Hob bent to see better, squinting in the dim light within the church.

  “Wait,” said Father Athelstan. He swung the door closed, so that one-half of the entrance was shut. Now, with the sunlight falling full on it, Hob could see the deep parallel grooves scored by the hyenas’ blunt claws.

  “Christ protect us!” said Hob, exaggerating his surprise a little—he had already seen the hyenas, loping toward him over moonlit sands—but only a little. It was shocking, to see what these things could do with their claws, and to know that their jaws were worse.

  “You know, my son, most of the churches built before the Normans came to us were of wood, and many of those old Anglian and Saxon churches no longer stand. We are fortunate to have this church, built in stone, as a refuge: we cannot be burnt out, and even Satan’s hounds could not claw their way in. Ah, here is Father Eustace.”

  The young priest had finished setting the altar to rights, and putting away their vestments in the tiny sacristy. Now he took station beside Father Athelstan, ready to support him should he need it.

  “Come, Father,” said the old priest, “let us show our guests the print. This way, Hob, Jack.”

  The two priests set off around the church. Halfway down the right side Father Athelstan pointed to the ground. There was an impression the size of a big man’s palm, with four thick toe-prints tipped with the holes made by their claws, and a squat palm-print
behind them.

  Father Athelstan said, looking down, “I have never seen anything that looks like this; it is like a dog’s print, but thicker, broader—and a bear would have more toes.”

  Here was another side to the old man. One expected Father Athelstan to know his Gospels, his Latin, his Norman high speech, but not a tracker’s knowledge. Hob could not remember the old priest entering the surrounding woodland, or even leaving the village.

  But Hob had no intention of introducing the concept of a hyena, much less a bouda: a small village is no place for secrets, and one slip by a villager at market in Little Bridekirk could bring John’s agents down upon the little place, thirsting for answers, ready to torture for answers, about Molly’s troupe and where they had gone. And of course no one would be able to provide that knowledge: their only hope would be that death would end their torment. Suddenly the morning seemed chill, despite the sunlight.

  “It’s good that you have a stout stone church to retreat to, Father,” said Hob. “And you should maintain a watch for a fortnight at least, as we have said. Perhaps it would be wise to keep James Carpenter’s lumber in a corner of the church, and the nails, and perhaps one hammer, in the event that they come at you suddenly?”

  Father Athelstan considered. “Yes, we have been watching the roads from the hilltops, but you are right: we might not have so much warning the next time—pray God there is no next time!—and it would be well to have the lumber ready, and perhaps a butt or two of fresh water in the church. Father Eustace, see if you can draw up a list of needful things, and send for James, and Isaac.”

  A small boy came running up to them.

  “Yes, Thomas?” said Father Athelstan, putting a hand to the boy’s head.

  The child hesitated; he frowned in concentration, seeking to deliver his message correctly. Then: “Beg your pardon, Father, but, um, Mistress Molly asks that you excuse men—um, excuse the two men with you, for that she needs them. And Mistress, Mistress—um, the other one, Father—says her husband is just trying to get out of doing work.”