The Wicked

by Douglas Nicholas

  He drained the goblet. Sir Jehan reached over with his good hand and poured him another cup. Sir Odinell’s face had begun to redden, and he stared at nothing; he did not seem to notice that his cup had been refilled, but drank again, mechanically, from the new-poured wine, hardly looking at it. He is seeing something else, thought Hob, that is too terrible to ignore.

  “Then one day I saw them in the market square; they rode with three other knights from Sir Tarquin’s household. Their features had altered so much that, were it not for the devices upon the shields slung at their saddlebows, I would not have known them. Yet when I looked I could see them, or some trace of what they had been. How were they different? I feel that, that it was, it was . . . Nay, I cannot say. I remember they were so different, yet I cannot say. . . .”

  He crossed himself twice, three times. His brow was moist; his breathing had begun to labor.

  “Nay, give over, ’tis enough,” said Molly kindly.

  “Nay, ’tis not enough,” said Sir Odinell. “Cattle disappear now and then, ’tis nought to speak of—I can defend against raiders. They drive off some cattle, and I mount with a few of my knights; we follow the tracks. . . . Sometimes we catch them and kill them, and recover the cattle. Other times they escape into Scotland. That is familiar work. But now . . . cattle began to disappear, and then they washed up on the beach, wizened, stringy, as though they were cattle made of dried beef. Some of it might have been from the seawater, but not all, not all.

  “Peasants began to vanish. They went out to the fields, or to the pastures to watch their sheep, and a day or so later, their widows were in my hall pleading for help. We rode out, we scoured the manor from demesne lands to forest lands. We rode along the shore.

  “Then they began to reappear, every one of them dead, and like the cattle their bodies were dried, shriveled—young men looked like old men, old men looked like those long dead. The folk are in a panic. The bodies were found behind a tree, in the midst of a field, washed up, like the cattle, on the strand. Never a sign of the murderers—more than one, because the peasants were vanishing at whiles in small groups. We suspected the new folk in their seaside towers, because they had come, and the evil had begun. But none had seen them at it, or indeed anyone at it. No one saw, save . . .”

  He grew silent. Hob became aware again of the fire’s crackle, and that he had been breathing shallowly, and that his left leg was asleep. He moved a little, and took a deep breath, but surreptitiously, so not to break Sir Odinell’s concentration. But the knight said nothing, till Molly, almost murmuring, urged, “No one save . . .”

  Sir Odinell looked from Molly to Sir Jehan to Sir Balthasar, and back. He seemed hardly aware of Jack and the younger people. Hob could see him gather himself, and could see how difficult he found it.

  “There is a lad belonging to one of my people, a bit of a mooncalf. He has been a lackwit since his childhood, so. . . . He says he saw Sir Tarquin’s wife, Lady Rohese, come from the woodland, it being dusk and he tending the miller’s two draft horses that turn the millstones. She frightened him so—I am not sure how, but he spoke of her face, her walk—that he ran between the horses, where they were tied, and cowered there, and she made to come at him, but could not, and she circled the horses, around and about, but could not come in at him, he knows not why. The horses were agitated, but she did not seem afraid of them, only that she could not come at him. After a while—a very long while, he says—she went away and he crept out from between the horses and ran all the way to his home. His mother brought him to me the next day. I cannot say I believe him, he is such a knotpoll. Yet I cannot say I disbelieve him. Nay, I know not what I believe.”

  Molly and Nemain looked at each other. “The miller’s horses are shod?” Molly asked Sir Odinell. He nodded. “And they shod with iron shoes, and not wooden?”

  “Aye,” he said. “The mill prospers, and they are shod with iron, and walk in a circle all the day on a stone path, and the shoes keep them from becoming halt.”

  “It may be ’tis the iron that holds her off, and that in horseshoes, and they on living horses at that, which may give them more power.”

  “Lady Rohese . . .” began Sir Odinell. He stopped. He indicated Sir Jehan, and began again. “We were on several campaigns together. He called me Ironbrow”—here Sir Jehan nodded, with a little smile—“because I was so hardheaded, and the least fanciful of men. Half of his daring schemes I put a halt to, and he said it was because I was too short of sight to see the advantage, and I said it was because I was a sensible man. But now . . . Lady Rohese, as my intent was to say, is a very beautiful woman, and yet somehow repellent. I cannot say how, or why, as I could not say what was different about Sir Hugh and Sir Gilles. Yet, when I see her, I find her beautiful and repellent in equal measure: my eye is drawn back and back to her, you understand, but my loins are cold. It is as though I grope in a mist—nothing seems safe now, nothing seems solid, and my people are frantic.”

  Sir Jehan, unable to sit quietly any longer, arose, paced to the fire, paced back to the table, paced to the fire. The wolfhound pup arose when he did, trotted after him to the fire, trotted back to the table close on the knight’s heels, then followed him back to the fire. Sir Jehan paused, and the dog sat down, looking about him with a smug air: engaged in important business with his tall associate.

  Molly was sitting calmly enough, but her air was preoccupied. Sir Jehan addressed her. “Have you any counsel for my brother knight, madam?”

  “A thought there is to me,” said Molly, then corrected herself: “I have a thought that I have heard some tale concerning a woman like this Lady Rohese.”

  Hob noticed her lapse into Irish phrasing, a sure sign with Molly that, however calm she appeared, she was distracted by some inner turmoil.

  “I’m hearing—a while back, this is, and I a young lass myself—firelight tales of seeming women, killers, blood-drinkers; and they truly less than women, or more than women; and aren’t they luring travelers, and dancing with them, and then rending them to pieces with the great strength that comes on them. And in one of the tales, there was a young man took refuge among the horses, and so he’s keeping himself safe till the dawn came, and the night passing off, and the women departing. But his comrades all were slain. This other matter—the withered corpses—nay, I’m thinking that ’tis a new evil to me, but ’twould be curious if the one was not harnessed to the other.”

  Sir Odinell passed a hand over his brow. “Can you help me, madam?”

  “It’s my thought that I can help, though I’ll be asking you to bind yourself to help me—when I’m to return to Erin, and myself needing help then to regain my place—with knights, or gold, or influence from your people. But why is it that you cannot have this evil knight removed, you working the while through the influence of your kin, the De Umfrevilles, the Nevilles, and the like?”

  “My people are not negligible, as Sir Jehan will tell you, though I am the least of them. But this eldritch knight, it seems, may not be touched: on the one hand, he has letters and commissions from the pope, and on the other the king has granted him this castle that stood forfeit by virtue of its former lord’s misadventures at court. Though the pope and the king be at each other’s throat, he is the darling of both, and the messenger through which they may treat with each other privily, or so I am to hear. The bishop has given me no satisfaction. The parish priests, my own chaplain, all say masses for deliverance, but there is no deliverance. I am told by the magnates of my family that I am on my own in this, for fear of a misstep at court, or of excommunication. Sir Jehan alone has offered me hope, and you, madam, are that hope.”

  Molly looked at him coolly. “If it’s unwilling the great men of your family are to help their own kinsman, why would they be helping me, and myself a stranger, and a widow, and nor am I even a Norman?”

  “They will help you for my sake, and they will help you the more because they could not help me in this matter, where the most high and po
werful men move against them. They are ashamed, and they will work to remove this shame in any other matter. But something about this man and his patrons has them helpless.”

  Molly sighed, and turned a bit in her chair to look into the hearth. There was a moment when no one spoke, and all Hob could hear was the crepitation of the flames biting at the wood. The knights watched her according to their natures: Sir Odinell stolidly; Sir Jehan with a tic twitching one corner of his mouth; Sir Balthasar scowling, his great body leaning forward somewhat as though he were a savage dog restrained by a leash.

  Molly stirred herself. “Bíodh sé amhlaidh,” she murmured; then in English, louder, “So be it. We will help.” She drew a great breath, turned to the table, and began to speak rapidly and clearly.

  “We’ll be taking our usual assortment of wagons, nor will we be dressing so grandly, either”—she gestured toward the gowns she and Nemain wore when guests at the—“castle—“and as handsome an offer of a horse for Hob that it was”—here a nod to both Sir Jehan and his mareschal, Sir Balthasar—“he’ll not be Squire Robert on the road, but Hob the prentice, and we all poor traveling entertainers. We’ll be arriving as if by chance, and lodging at the inn nearby, and entertaining the folk, with music and suchlike, and ourselves listening, and watching, and myself seeking guidance from She who protects me.”

  Sir Odinell looked blank at this, but Sir Balthasar, fiercely loyal to Molly as he was, still was a follower of the Christ, and crossed himself, as he did whenever Molly spoke, however obliquely, of the Old Gods of Erin.

  She looked at Sir Odinell. “You, my lord, will be hearing of us, and inviting us to stop in your stronghold, and we to remain a sennight, and you to hold a feast, and ourselves to entertain, in honor of Sir Tarquin and Lady . . . Roisín?”

  “Rohese,” said Sir Odinell.

  “Rohese, that we may look on them, and all unmarked by them, ourselves being but poor traveling musicians and beneath notice.”

  “But . . . a sennight at the inn, and another at the castle, before you can do aught?”

  “Nay, ’tis not a delay for a reaper to stop and sharpen the scythe,” said Molly. She turned to Sir Jehan. “Would you ever give us writing materials?”

  Sir Jehan said to Hob, “Robert, call in one of the men outside.”

  Hob went to the door and drew the bolt back. He looked out and beckoned to one of the two men-at-arms stationed there. The man came in and looked to Sir Jehan.

  “Berengar, go you to Father Baudoin; give him my compliments, and say he is to give you a small amount of what is needful to write.”

  Berengar bowed and departed.

  Molly turned to Sir Odinell. “My lord, you are to precede us, and that by no fewer than two days; tell us the path to take, and describe what we may see along the road, and I will make a map to follow. ’Twould not do for us to be arriving stirrup to stirrup with you, and Sir Tarquin and his witch wife taking note of it, and he concealing that which he does, or moving against us and we not ready for him.”

  When Berengar returned bearing a small sack with two rolls of parchment, ink, and quills, Molly set to work. She drew stylized mountains, streams, forests; she sketched out a path for them to follow. First north, then northeast, and then a gradual curve toward the east; down along what Sir Odinell said was a charcoal-burners’ path through the forested slopes of the Pennines, into the long descending coombs that led toward the fells, and so finally to the coast, where Sir Odinell’s castle, Chantemerle, stood with its feet in the cold waters of the German Sea.

  Sir Odinell stood over her shoulder and described the landscape and the width of the path, pointing to the growing map with a scarred finger, while Molly, who could read and write where Sir Odinell could barely sign his name, jotted reminders of landmarks and indications of the quality of the road in her imperfect Latin.

  For a time the only sounds in the room were the drone of Sir Odinell’s voice, the scratch of the pen. At last Molly was satisfied, and she sat back and sighed.

  “Do you leave tomorrow, my lord,” she said, “and we two days after that, and ourselves being slower as well, we’ll be coming to the coast some days after you, and none will be marking us together.”

  CHAPTER 3

  HOB WENT OUT INTO THE bailey to watch the Northumbrians’ departure. A gray morning, with some low mist concealing the hard-packed earth of the castle yard. The four knights and six mounted men-at-arms were in the saddle, but not yet formed into a column. They were awaiting hampers of the pork-and-cheese pies called flampoyntes, packed along with fired-clay bottles of bragget; these were even now being put up in the castle’s kitchens.

  A small group of the castle’s people, those with no immediate business, had come out to see them leave, a novelty to spice the daily round of work. Each man-at-arms led a sumpter horse to carry the baggage; one such horse had two large wicker baskets, a basket to each side. In one was the male wolfhound pup, in the other the female, the Adam and Eve of Sir Odinell’s future wolfhound pack.

  Each knight led his huge destrier, roped to his saddle on the right. The Northumbrians’ mounts, rounceys or saddle horses, eager to be moving, shifted position, tossed their heads, made water. The destriers, trained to ignore screaming men and clanging metal, stood like stone horses. Sir Odinell and his men sat quietly, their bodies swaying in the horseman’s effortless compensation for a mount’s fidgets, their faces masks of patient gloom, as they waited to take the trail back to their haunted home.

  Sir Balthasar had initiated Hob’s training as a knight: the lad had begun riding lessons last autumn, and he was keenly interested in the great destriers, one of which would, God willing, be his someday. He had tended some of them in the Blanchefontaine stables, big and powerful things in outsize stalls. He had practiced leading one while riding an ordinary rouncey, always keeping it on the right or dexter side, a standard practice that led to the term destrier. At these times it had cost Hob an effort not to keep looking back at the huge head, the shovel teeth, looming over his right shoulder.

  Now he made his way around the packhorses to obtain a closer view of Sir Odinell’s warhorse. The horse was an unusual gray, and the mist had settled along its flanks, giving its brawny haunches the sheen of steel. It was saddled, on the chance that Sir Odinell, making his way through bandit-sheltering forests, might have need of it in haste. Hob was admiring the ornate saddle cloth, with its scalloped edges, its elaborate embroidery, the colors standing out strongly against the gray hide, when he became aware of Sir Jehan’s voice close by.

  He looked up, past the horse’s tall shoulders, to see Sir Odinell leaning away from him to speak with Sir Jehan on the other side. The reins of Sir Odinell’s rouncey were in his left hand, and his right fist was on his hip; he bent from the waist to hear Jehan; the whole suggested an attitude at once tense, even uneasy, yet managing to convey the arrogance of the Norman.

  “I feel that, dark as it may seem to you now, Christ and His saints will not abide this evil longer. If you need swords, send for us; Balthasar and I and half my knights are yours—but this business does not seem like sword-work. I do not know if we will even clear sword from scabbard before ’tis over,” said Sir Jehan.

  Hob moved a little, casually, to hear better above the whining of the puppies, who did not care for their new circumstances. From this angle, he could just see Sir Jehan reach up and rest his bronze hand on the saddle’s high wooden cantle. “When you said you had someone who could aid me,” said Sir Odinell, “I thought—well, I did not know what to think, but you are sending me one man-at-arms—a sturdy enough wight by the look of him, but not young—as well as a young squire, a damsel, and a grandmother. Should I be calm?”

  Sir Jehan rapped lightly on the wooden face of the shield hung from Sir Odinell’s saddle.

  “A strong shield, Odinell. Could you make a seawall of such shields that would hold back the tide, were you to bury them side by side in the sands of the shore, away there by your castle beside the
German Sea?”

  “Could I make— Nay, brother, you have seen the sea and its movements: you know that nothing stands against the incoming tide. What is it that you tell me?”

  Sir Jehan rapped again on the shield, but on the iron rim, and harder, the bronze clanking against the metal, the rouncey shying a little under Odinell.

  “This grandmother is the sea, brother Odinell, the sea: she will go where she will, and nothing will stand against her, and she will wash your land clean of this filth.”

  CHAPTER 4

  THE WAGONS TRUNDLED ACROSS the dry moat, the planks of the rolling drawbridge thundering beneath the hooves of the draft animals and the knights’ horses. The little column swung to the right, heading north through the forested slopes of the Pennines. A pair of knights rode their horses at a walk a little way ahead. Hob followed with the lead rope to Milo the ox, who pulled the big wagon. Sir Balthasar kept to a slow pace beside the wagon’s seat, where he could converse in low tones with Molly. The little wagon, driven by Nemain, and the midsized wagon, with Jack at the reins, followed, with four more knights bringing up the rear.

  The road wound north through the forest. The pass they sought, to descend from the Pennine heights, was to the northeast of Blanchefontaine. This was the way Sir Odinell had come, a way Molly’s troupe had never taken. Usually they would descend from the highlands by passes to the southeast, making for Durham or York.

  Hob was sharply aware of the varied scents that came to him down the forest aisles: the green world was awakening, and he felt himself to be part of this surging life. He was aware of the feel of his new body, his new strength, and he was these days always conscious of Nemain: where she was, what she was doing, how near or far from himself.