Molly had bade them wait till later in the year before they wed, citing signs observed in the curl of a raven’s feather, the drift of clouds; and the clarity with which Molly read portent was not to be doubted.
Just before they came away, Hob and Nemain had snatched a moment for themselves, in a little-used upper corridor of Blanchefontaine, in a deeply recessed window seat, and there embraced and fondled each other, and murmured things, so close that the words were felt as well as heard, warm breath on the ear. When with others, the two lovers were almost secretive concerning their affection, but they fell into each other’s arms whenever a private refuge offered itself. Now with the memory of Nemain’s kisses on his lips and the beauty of the woodlands all about, Hob strode along, as near to perfect contentment as was possible on so doubtful a quest.
He felt on the verge of song. In sheer exuberance, he turned half about, walking sideways for a few steps, the better to admire the new wheels on the wagons. Sir Jehan had insisted on having his wainwright fit Molly’s caravan with lightweight spoked wheels, instead of the solid disks she had previously used. Molly insisted, however, on scuffing and distressing the wood, for appearances’ sake, so to obviate unwanted curiosity, and to appear poor and unworthy of theft by bandits or suspicion by Sir Tarquin. But the new wheels turned more easily, rode over roots handily, and generally eased the work of both beast and driver.
The two knights ahead were deep in some discussion, swaying easily in the saddles. A tiny roe deer flashed across the trail ahead of them, obviously startled, and one of the knights’ horses, trained to battle, snapped at it like a wolf, just missing it. After a bit of dancing about, the two horses settled down, and their progress resumed.
At length they came to a fork: a massive oak stood in the center of the way, dividing the road. The sinister branch continued the north—south trail they followed; the dexter branch was the charcoal-burners’ road, running to the northeast, that would take them down through the forest, down the eastern slopes of the Pennines, and set them on their way to the sea.
The wagons rumbled to a halt, and Molly set the brake. This was where they had agreed to part. The knights backed their horses to the side of the trail. Sir Balthasar turned his horse, the tall heavy-boned animal coming around smooth and silent as a cat, docile as an old dog. Hob knew that in a battle this horse would strike forward with its war shoes, horseshoes with projecting spikes, and bite at the faces of opposing foot soldiers.
“I am uneasy, madam,” said Sir Balthasar, “that you travel toward this evil, and ourselves staying behind.”
“There’s safety in ourselves being seen as harmless, poor travelers that we are,” said Molly. And then, with a laugh, “And when was it that poor musicians were traveling with an escort, and that escort led by the dread Sir Balthasar of Blanchefontaine himself?”
The grim knight’s mouth twitched up at the corners, and he made the grudging muffled sound that served him for a laugh. He turned his horse again, and rode up beside Hob. From the pouch fixed to the saddle he drew out a dagger in a scabbard. To Hob he said only, “Remember your lessons,” and leaned down, handing the dagger to the lad. Then he backed to the side of the road again.
Hob began to stammer thanks, but the knight waved him to silence, and pointed down the trail. Behind Hob, Molly said, “Well, put it on, then, a rún, you’ll be wanting it where you can get at it.”
He quickly slipped off his belt, slid the scabbard onto it so that it rested on his right hip, and did up the buckle again. Then, bowing to Sir Balthasar as he had been taught to do at the castle, he caught up Milo’s lead rope again and set off, grinning mightily, down the charcoal-burners’ road.
After a short while, when they had left the knights behind, and were moving along a straight stretch of the path, he drew the knife from its scabbard to admire it. It was the same type as the wooden daggers that Sir Balthasar used when teaching him the art of combat with knives. Like Sir Balthasar’s own dagger, it was heavy and functional, one of the newer double-edged daggers, with a heavy point for punching through mail, a leather-wrapped wooden hilt, and an unornamented iron ball for a pommel. He slid the gleaming blade back into its scabbard, made sure it was settled securely, and strode on, pleasantly aware of the weapon’s weight at his hip.
THE ROAD PROCEEDED DOWNWARD, albeit at a gentle angle. Shafts of sunlight pierced through the ranks of tree trunks, the canopy of new leaves, to lie in broad bars of yellow warmth against the dark earth of the trail. The air was moist here under the green roof, and the fragrance of growing things was a constant pleasure. Hob began to enjoy the beauty all around him, the rhythm of the march, even the soothing presence of the ox, companionably pacing behind him: the coarse rope in Hob’s hand tensing and releasing as he and Milo fell out of and back into step; the ox’s homely familiar snorting and snuffling; the muted impact of the great hooves on the dirt.
Sir Odinell had assured them that the path would be wide enough for the wagons, and so it proved. The charcoal-burners were men for whom felling trees was nothing; they were born to it, and they kept the road wide for their own purposes: for ease of dragging tree trunks to the fires, or to allow their wains to trundle down to the lowlands, filled with the product of their labors. Here and there the road narrowed a bit, or the wagon wheels would bang and bump over big roots not completely covered by the soil, but generally they made good progress.
The troupe had traveled much of the day without pause, always descending, for Molly had hoped to come into open land as soon as possible; in the forest lay too many dangers. But now, as the day waned, they became aware that the amber late-afternoon light striking down into the occasional clearing was filtered through a blue-gray haze, and the harsh perfume of woodsmoke bit at their nostrils. In some places the smoke grew so thick that the sunlight separated into shafts, dark gold against gray. A distant murmur, that Hob realized he had been hearing for a while, began to resolve into the various sounds of human activity: male voices, female voices; the hum of conversation and the odd shout; the thump of a mallet, the crunch of an ax into bark.
The smoke thickened until there was a distinct curtain of haze visible as Hob peered down the trail ahead, a channel that ran between walls of trees. As he looked, two men stepped into the way; lean men, but sinewy. They stood some little distance ahead and watched the troupe approach. They bore long-handled axes, but placed them head-down in the dirt, their hands folded on the handle ends. The noise had quieted considerably; a child’s voice was raised somewhere, then hushed abruptly.
Molly bade Hob stop a few paces shy of the men, who seemed wary, but not hostile. Their eyes flicked from Hob to the ox to the wagon, quickly settling on Molly. Hob glanced back at her. She wore that expression of authority and benevolence that made everyone trust her.
“God save all here,” she said, as though she were the devoutest Christian.
“Amen,” said the charcoal-burners together. They stepped around the ox and came up to the wagon seat. “Where be ye bound, Mistress?” said one.
“We’re away to the coast,” said Molly. “We’re musicians, and we’re just after playing at Castle Blanchefontaine. There were some knights there, up from the coast, Sir Odinell and others—do you know him? He with three blackbirds on his shield?—and they telling us of your good road through the forest here.”
The axmen looked at one another and nodded. Sir Odinell had passed them and spoken to them on his way to and from Blanchefontaine. This reassured the burners, for though Molly and Hob seemed inoffensive enough, and the more formidable Jack was not easily visible back there in the last wagon, the wagons might be full of hidden thieves.
One of the burners was a bit older, streaks of gray beginning to show in his hair, an air of command, a decisive manner. “Do ye stop the night wi’ us, Mistress,” he said. “Thae woodlands are nowt to gang through i’ t’ darkness.”
Molly beamed at him. “It’s delighted we’d be to take some rest and no mistake, and what’s b
etter than a night among friends?”
The axmen turned and walked ahead. Milo had begun to investigate some grasses beside the trail, and Hob had to pull for several moments before the great head came around. The ox gave the obligatory snort of protest at being so put upon, and began to place one ponderous foot in front of the other. The little train of wagons went only a little way before Hob began to see children flitting in and out of the underbrush ahead of them, and then the charcoal-burners turned in at a break in the trackside trees. Hob followed them in, pulling Milo into the turn, and a cleared space opened up before his eyes.
One side of the clearing was given over to heavy wains, used to haul logs into the camp for burning. Beyond was another of the natural meadows: lightning and fire had downed several great trees some time ago, and grasses were abundant here. Here were tethered the black or brown fell ponies used to pull the burners’ wains, strong sure-footed animals, with long drifting manes, some plaited; their sturdy legs bore long fine hair that formed a kind of veil about their hooves.
Hob looked about. Across the clearing, through the fine blue-gray haze from the burning that was more perceptible here in this open space, the other side of the camp backed up against a wall of trees. Here were pitched tents and lean-tos containing stacked wood, tools, bins to keep food from forest animals. There was a row of small cabins constructed of interwoven logs chinked with mud. In front of them, a group of women and near-naked children regarded Molly’s troupe with shy wonder.
The men were more forward, gathering about, calling greetings, and minutely examining every aspect of the wagons’ exteriors. Some, obviously come from the burn, had smoke-blackened faces and hands, and everyone’s clothes were sooty and generally bore the odor of a cold fireplace, but those not on duty had conscientiously washed hands, faces, necks. What could not be cleaned, however, was the residue of charcoal that had, over the years, in some cases over the decades, worked its way into the tiny crevices and wrinkles about the knuckles and elbows, even of the children. Older men and women bore these marks wherever the skin had wrinkles.
“Bring yon o’er be t’ cuddies,” said the younger axman, nodding at the ox and walking away. Hob followed him and guided Milo over to the meadow side where the ponies, called cuddies in these mountains, were tethered. The wagons were pulled up in a line and chocked; Milo and the little ass Mavourneen and the mare were turned out into the grass, and the company went to sit about the communal cookfire. Their hosts brought up benches to sit on, and fetched bitter ale in wooden cups, carved in idle hours by those charcoal-burners who were skilled in this way.
In short order Molly, in many ways the mother of all the world, had acquired three children, two leaning at either side and a very small one on her lap. But she pointed to a fourth, in among the women, and beckoned.
The child came forward, part interested, part wary, cradling her left arm in her right hand. Molly had seen the burn from yards away, and now she took the girl’s arm gently in her hand, and tsked over the red weeping flesh, and gave an upward nod to Nemain, who got briskly to her feet and trotted over to the small wagon. The child was clearly in some pain, and made halfhearted attempts to retrieve her arm; the men standing about the newcomers grew silent, and the girl’s mother came right up to Molly, a tense watchfulness in every line of her stance.
Nemain returned with three jars and some strips of clean linen, and Molly, clucking and smiling at the child, and speaking soothing nonsense in that wonderful deep voice, honey with a faint rasp to it, contrived to clean and salve the wound and wrap it in linen. All at once the child broke into a great smile, a smile like a shaft of sunlight slanting through forest gloom, and reached back to tug urgently at her mother’s skirt.
“What, hinny, what?” The woman bent down and the child said something very low in her mother’s ear. Her mother slowly relaxed, straightened. She did not smile, but her expression softened; she looked around and said to the company, “T’ wean’s nae mair dole tae her arm!”
This prompted a general warming in the burners’ attitude, hitherto somewhat shy, and a young man came forward, and it soon became apparent that burns and splinters formed a part of life in a charcoal camp. Molly turned her sleeves up, exposing her strong shapely forearms. Then she sighed, stood, and went around to the back step of the little wagon. Nemain went up the steps and began to pass down pots of this and jars of that, and more bandages, and large and small needles for splinters. Hob was pressed into service to hold various implements, and Molly spent some time tending to ailments—most of them small, but a few rather more serious.
All the while she drank the burners’ beer, and even this carried an undertaste of smoke. Hob had his own wooden cup, which their hosts kept filled, and though he sipped where Molly drank heartily, he began to feel a bit dizzy: an empty stomach, a day’s long march, were not the best preparations for all this generosity. Molly, of course, with her formidable constitution, seemed almost unaffected as she tended one person after another.
Finally, as Hob was watching her deftly tear off thinner strips from the linen she was using for bandages, creating ties to finish the dressing on a wrapped shin, he became aware of a crackling, spitting sound above the general murmur of conversation and comment, and a delightful aroma began to compete with the general smokiness. He looked over to the cookfire. Two men were turning a pig on a large spit there, and cauldrons suspended from tripods steamed and bubbled.
In a short while the company was summoned to dinner. The woodsmen had contrived a novel solution to the lack of a table: stumps of wood, most about a cubit across, served as small tables lined up in front of benches set next to the cookfire. Hob and Nemain sat near a young man named Henry, who seemed to have been delegated to serve them. He kept their trenchers heaped with pork, and portions of pigeon stew flavored with alleluia, the leaves imparting a tart undertone, the stew ladled direct from the cauldrons, and he saw to it that all had hunches of dark bread studded with garlic, and that their wooden cups were filled with beer. He urged them to have some scranshums, as he termed the crunchy pork skin bits served as a delicacy.
Molly was deep in conversation with Simon, the senior axman who had greeted them; he seemed to be a kind of patriarch of the group, and indeed many of them resembled him. Hob could just hear snatches of their conversation. She was questioning him closely about the road ahead—its safety, whether there were bandits or other dangers. In particular she was concerned about any sharp drops from one level to the next, where the wagons’ brakes might not hold. He was reassuring about the physical qualities of the trail, but had heard rumor of outlaws in the forest to the east, and had doubled the size of his work parties, and always left sufficient men in the camp to defend it.
The troupe’s arrival had occasioned a bigger meal, and a more communal meal, than was usual, and there came a period when everyone, except those on duty at the burn site some distance away, just sat and contemplated the meaning of contentment. Then Molly roused herself and sent Hob and Nemain for the instruments. There was a fair amount of room between the cookfire and the meadow where the dim shapes of the draft animals drowsed at the end of their tethers. This was augmented by moving all the benches and log-end tables to the other side of the fire, creating a passable dance floor.
Jack took the goatskin bodhran that Molly had taught him to play, a flat drum that he propped on his left leg; in his right hand he had a bone drumstick, with a knob at each end, that he could twirl, striking with each end to produce a rapid skipping beat. Molly and Nemain each took up a cláirseach, an Irish harp, and began the arduous task of tuning—they had not played for at least a week and the dampness, the changes in altitude, had affected the instruments, even in their leather cases. Hob himself struggled to get his symphonia ready: it had three pairs of strings, two of which were drones and one that played the melody. He tuned to cues from Nemain’s harp. Then there was the wooden wheel which moved upon the strings, producing the sound—this wheel must be resined befor
e he could play.
At last they were ready, and, following Molly’s lead, they struck up a simple dance tune. Hob cranked the wheel with one hand and fingered the keys with the other, listening to the rapid tap-and-boom of Jack’s drum on one side and the two harps, Nemain providing a harmony for Molly’s main melody. The music filled the small camp, and one or two of the animals moved restlessly.
At first everyone was too entranced, too eager to drink in this sound, to get up and dance—when did they ever hear much music, away here in the depths of the forest, let alone music of such quality? After the troupe had played two or three tunes, though, people began to go out on the flat dirt clearing and form circles, the women inside, moving widdershins, the men outside, moving deasil, and the children generally underfoot.
They played for much of the evening, till the fires burned low. Men left and relieved those on duty at the working part of the camp, and others came in, ate, and joined the dancing. Those resting from dancing began to drink deeply, parched from the effort and the smoke haze that overhung everything.
Hob began to feel that a sort of enchantment was descending over the camp. Nemain had put down her harp, and had gone to sit by Jack, the better to do the intricate counterclapping at which she excelled. The music echoed from the forest around, and the firelight cast a golden flickering glow partway up the surrounding trees; above that the trunks vanished into the darkness. The very smokiness of the air diffused the light. The thud of the dancers’ feet augmented the beat of Jack’s drum and the rippling claps that Nemain produced, almost too fast to follow; arpeggios from Molly’s cláirseach fell like jeweled rain around the somber moan of the symphonia. A breeze brought them the scent of the high-slope forest, and over everything the tang of burning, sometimes harsh, sometimes surprisingly fragrant.
The Wicked Page 4
