After what seemed a great while weariness set in, for dancer and musician alike. The children had been sent to bed long before, and now the charcoal-burners drifted off, singly or in couples, to the cabins, and finally Molly quaffed off one last cup and led the troupe to the wagons. Molly and Nemain climbed into the large wagon to sleep, as was their custom except when Molly had summoned Jack to her bed. On those nights Nemain had the smallest wagon to herself.
Jack and Hob had beds in the midsized wagon, but tonight, although their reception had been hospitality itself, Jack was professional soldier enough to want some kind of watch set, and he undertook to sleep atop the wagon, on blankets spread there, on this April night that was warmer than usual. The wagon roof, though shaped like a half barrel, had a wide flat strip down the center that could be walked upon, and here would be Jack’s bed. He retrieved his war hammer from the main wagon, two and a half feet of ponderous destruction: the steel head a hammer for crushing on one side, and a beak very like a crow’s, for piercing, on the other. Blankets over his shoulder, he climbed the rope ladder one-handed, arranged his rough bed to his satisfaction, and lay down facing the camp, placing the hammer with a faint clink on the roof beside him. He settled himself, resting his right hand on the weapon’s handle.
Hob was the last abed. He opened the shutter in the side of the wagon, and looked out on the clearing. The fire had sunk to ember, against which two or three of the burners, in silhouette, moved quietly about their final errands. He lay down and, after the long day and the beer, slid smoothly and happily down some sort of slope, at the bottom of which was sleep.
He woke once in the night, and listened to the sounds of the night forest—the kew-wick of a brown owl, and, very faintly, a hedgehog’s snuffling; the occasional whicker of a cuddy at its tether in the meadow; nothing else. This began to rouse him—was something wrong? Then he realized that he missed Jack Brown’s heroic snores, which sounded like a bear, nearby and very angry. But he knew Jack was a little wary tonight, and Jack, veteran of many campaigns, could when necessary keep himself to a light doze, and then he made little or no sound. Hob thought vaguely of stepping out of the wagon and checking to see that all was well with Jack and that the silence had no sinister explanation. Then he thought that he might wait a moment or two before getting up, and then he opened his eyes and found that it was morning.
CHAPTER 5
IN THE MORNING, MOLLY EXAMINED the sufferers who had come to her the day before, changing bandages where it was required, giving elixirs and powders to alleviate pain or clean a wound, with instructions for the days ahead. Afterward the troupe sat to breakfast, and there Simon tried to persuade Molly to stay awhile at the camp. This was such a common occurrence with Molly that she had become adept at extricating the troupe without giving offense to their hosts. Everyone hated to see her leave, with her medicines, her music, her wisdom, and that dim but bone-deep feeling of calm and safety that surrounded her, that sense that she, or her man Jack acting at her direction, or both, would keep from harm anyone who was near her.
Perhaps as a means of keeping them in camp longer, Simon offered to show them how they worked wood into charcoal, and Molly, insatiably curious about the workings of the wide world, could not resist. Opposite the entrance to the camp was a broad road that led deeper into the forest. Simon escorted Molly and her troupe, surrounded by a small group of the charcoal-burners, into this road, which proved to be a short alley between the camp and the clearing where burning was done. In a large circular space cleared by the axes of the burners, three mounds stood, and a fourth in the process of construction.
Hob and Nemain trailed along behind Molly, Jack, and Simon. After a bit Hob became aware that a lad, about his own age or a bit younger, was walking along beside them. The three young people came up to stand beside Simon, who was explaining to Molly the way they made the charcoal.
“Here ye see t’ clamp as is bein’ made, Mistress,” he said, indicating a mound of precisely stacked wood. “Theer’s a clear space i’ t’ center, that’s where we set un alight.” And indeed the lengths of wood all butted up to a hollow central shaft, into which a torch could be dropped to ignite the clamp.
He turned to one of the three earthen mounds. “Then ’tis covered wi’ soil, sithee, wi’ some openin’ left at bottom, and set on fire down central hole, and when ’tis well alight, we cover up holes, and leave but a wee opening here and there, and she burns quiet-like one, two, mayhap three days, and then she’s ready, and we cover her up and damp all fire down, and then we may open it. But she mun be watched, for if she breaks oot through t’dirt, she’ll all burn up and turn to ash, or if she smothers, ye’ve got a lot of half-burned wood. So she mun be watched, weary work, and that’s what Edulf, there, is aboot. Be it that he sees flame brast its way oot, he’ll throw more dirt on’t.”
He indicated a young man sitting on a curious stool; a seat with one leg from the center. The young man sat so that the one leg of the stool and his own two legs formed a tripod that kept him balanced.
The young man who had walked in with them now explained to Hob and Nemain, “If Edulf falls asleep, yon stool will pitch him over and he’ll wake soon enough.” The youth was speaking as though from a desire to be helpful, but Hob had realized that he was stealing admiring glances at Nemain, and that he was speaking mostly to her. For some reason that he himself could not fathom, this attention to Nemain pleased and annoyed Hob at the same time. Nemain seemed unaware of the almost furtive way the lad looked at her, looked away, looked at her again.
Then Simon must show them the closely woven sacks that the charcoal was put into, and how they paid in kind to the lord whose woodlands these were—one of the Percys, with strongholds to the north and on the coast—and the uses of charcoal at the forge, and how it burned hotter than wood, until Hob thought they would never get away on the road again. Molly, of course, was interested and alert; she always wanted to add more knowledge to what Hob felt was an already immense store.
At last they returned to the wagons, and then there followed the inevitable greasing of axle shafts, hitching of the draft animals, accepting a “wee bit storkenin’ ”—baskets of food for the trail—from the burner women, extended leave-taking. Then Hob was leading Milo out onto the forest path again, moving northeast along the green corridor, the diminishing chorus of farewells fading into silence behind him.
He soon fell into his easy travel pace, breathing deeply: the haze from the charcoal-burners’ camp was quickly left behind, and the air was much cleaner. The breeze was rich with the scent of spring, and the varied perfumes of flowers mixed with the salty smell of the ox’s great body. Along the edges of the trail, silverweed formed an impromptu border; in under the trees were carpets of bluebells; ramsons with their clouds of delicate white stars put forth the scent of garlic. Where wildfire or storm had felled some of the huge grandfather trees, grasses sprang up, and slim young trees drank the sun and strove upward.
They walked till the sun began to slant past the zenith, when Molly called a halt. A brief pause for the midday meal, and they took to the trail again. For a time they proceeded without incident; then Hob became aware of some noise coming up behind them. He turned and walked backward for a few paces. Coming around the bend after them was a group of about eight—no, more, perhaps ten or twelve—men, roughly dressed, some with sacks such as the charcoal-burners used slung over their shoulders. There was some banter, and from a couple of the men at the back, snatches of song.
They were marching along at a good clip, and soon overtook the wagons. Their little column parted to either side; they wished Jack a good day—Jack, with his ruined voice, just nodding and smiling as he was wont to do—and as they moved past the wagons, touched their foreheads to Nemain up on the seat of the second wagon.
Hob kept turning round to see. Their faces, their hands were black and grimy with charcoal. To Molly, the leader, pulling at a greasy forelock, called out, “God save you, Mistress.” Hob s
aw that the back of his hand was nearly black with charcoal, the little creases at wrist and knuckle showing white against the darkness.
Molly answered, “And yourself as well,” but quietly, without her usual good cheer. The leader nodded to Hob, and gradually the men pulled ahead. Some way on, there was another bend, the road disappearing behind tree trunks, brush, outcroppings of rock. Hob slowed, paid out the lead rope, and walked back toward Molly.
Milo looked around for Hob, his steps slowing, and Hob slapped him lightly on the rump to indicate he was to keep going. The ox made one of his peculiar snorting sighs, which to Hob’s ears always sounded mildly aggrieved, and resumed his pace.
Hob gestured, and Molly bent down to hear. Hob, with a glance at the bend ahead, said urgently, “Mistress, there is something amiss with yon charcoal-burners.”
“It’s a bad feeling they had to them, surely,” said Molly.
He was almost whispering, though the men were plainly out of earshot. “Those we have met, the burners of charcoal, they were careful to wash hands and face when not at toil, though they yet had black lines where the . . . the black, the burnt wood had settled and they could not scrub it out.”
He glanced again over his shoulder, walking backward, one hand to the wagon to steady himself. “But these men—their faces, their hands are as black as though they had just been working, as though to say: Look what a charcoal-burner I am. But, Mistress, the lines in that lead fellow’s wrist and knuckles are white against the black, where they should be ground-in black.”
She looked at him, shaking her head slowly, beginning to smile, and said, “My keen-eyed little hawk!” She pointed to his new dagger. “Loosen that scian,” she said. Then she took the lead rope from him and told him to relieve Nemain on the driver’s seat and to send her forward to consult.
When Nemain came back she told him to do the same for Jack, and then Hob went forward again. Molly handed him back the lead rope, saying only, “Be ready.”
The dagger that Sir Balthasar had given him was in a leather sheath waterproofed with beeswax and wool grease; within this sheath was a birchwood liner. Hob loosened the knife in its scabbard, working it up and down a few times inside the wood till he was sure it would draw quickly. He took a deep breath, aware of a tension in his chest, a tingling in his limbs, not entirely unpleasant.
Now they were nearing the curve in the road. Milo, who was of a contemplative rather than an observant nature, maintained his straight-ahead course, and was heading, perhaps disingenuously, for the grasses at the outer side of the bending track; Hob, accustomed to this, leaned his shoulder against the vast head, and so pushed the ox gently into the turn.
And there was the little party of men, off the trail, apparently at rest. The band lay in positions of ease on either side of the road. One, at the end farthest from the oncoming wagons, lay supine with his forearm over his eyes, while their chief knelt and examined his ankle. A sprain, then, or some other injury, and the group taking advantage of the pause to rest against the grassy slopes through which the road wound.
Now the leader stood up from his injured comrade, and stepped into the road, a hand raised to stop them, an easy smile on his face. From the other side of the road, another stood and stretched, as though preparing to resume his travels. Yet most reclined peacefully, obviously reluctant to rise.
The chief indicated the groaning man. “Mistress, young Thomas here canna gang mair,” he said in a deferential manner, ambling closer to the wagon seat.
“Hob, stop,” said Molly, setting the brake. “Is it that he needs to ride?” she said to the leader, now almost at the wagon seat. On the right side the other man moved closer, as though interested in their conversation.
Molly’s face grew apprehensive, and she seemed to shrink in on herself, and she grasped the hems of her shawl and drew it tightly about her, crossing her arms beneath her breasts as she did so. She looked nervously from one of the approaching men to the other, and her voice came again in such an old woman’s quaver that Hob almost laughed aloud.
“ ’Tis not a great deal of room we have,” she said, and at once the men began to move quickly toward her, and then Hob was certain: Outlaws, wolf’s-heads! They were big men but not fat, and they were swift men, agile men, and in a trice they each had a foot in a rope loop and a hand on the wagon, beginning a rapid climb. Their other hands reached for Molly; the men leaned, they stretched toward her.
At this moment Molly straightened in her seat, the fear running out of her face like water, leaving a lofty abstracted expression. Her hands flew out from her sides, the arc of her unfolding arms spreading the shawl like wings, the dagger thus revealed in each hand burying itself in a brigand’s throat with a muted chunk.
Both bandits now froze, unable to believe this horrid turn their lives had taken. Molly rasped the daggers out again. The outlaws’ lifeblood began to pump from their throats, and they slid away to either side, hands at their necks, desperate to stem the flow, but in vain, in vain.
The whole band now leaped howling to their feet, whipping weapons from beneath their clothes. Most of them rushed toward the wagons. Hob had his new dagger out and pivoted in place, striking backhand and taking one of the men in the side as he ran past; the man stumbled on a few steps and then went down.
Forewarned by Hob and by their own fey ability to sense evil, Molly and Nemain were ready for the furious burst of violence. Nemain was already up on the little wagon, bow in hand; she tossed Molly’s bow and quiver to the roof of the first wagon. A moment later Molly had swarmed up the rope ladder and thrown herself onto the roof, rolling, snatching arrows from the quiver and seizing the bow as she rolled, coming to her feet and nocking an arrow even as she rose from her knees.
Two men had veered toward Hob, and now he flipped the dagger to a forward grip and backed away in the knife-fighter’s crouch that Sir Balthasar had drilled into him, until he came up against Milo’s shoulder. The bandits had knives, one of them very long, and they were grown men, and, tall and rangy a lad as Hob was, they had the reach that he did not, and the weight.
“If you cannot fight the man, fight some part of him,” Sir Balthasar had said at one of Hob’s private lessons in murder, held in an unused corner of Blanchefontaine’s cloistered herb garden—grim afternoons amid the droning of bees and the drowsy scent of thyme. “Most men seek to deal a mortal blow, but you are young, and have not your full strength. Yet, being young, you are quick: dance away, run backward if you must, but keep from their reach, and the while you must make them bleed in those parts they are not protecting: the off hand, the shin, the forearm, whatever they neglect. The wounds will be of small account, but the pain and the blood will sow doubt in their hearts, and lessen their valor, and if you can keep alive the while, ten or fifteen small wounds will drain a man to weakness. Then you may come round behind him as he staggers, and hack head from body.”
Now Hob watched the bandits’ hands, and as they separated, intending to come at him from each side, he leaped at the one with the shorter knife, sliced at the back of his empty left hand, and leaped away, putting distance between himself and the other soldier, Master Longknife, as well.
Shortknife was no soldier: he immediately wasted time looking at his left hand, where two fingers had stopped working. Hob was aware that he himself had stayed too long in one spot: here loomed the other bandit with his cubit-long knife, poised for the downstroke. At that moment a hiss, a meaty thump, and Hob was looking at one of Molly’s arrow-heads, protruding three fingers’ width from Longknife’s neck: the shot had gone through from back to front, and he toppled forward, dead or dying.
Hob leaped at Master Shortknife again, cut his left shoulder, and danced away. The man shook himself awake and charged Hob, who jumped aside and cut him again, high on his left arm. None of these wounds was serious, but the man’s arm was sheathed in blood, two fingers would not obey him, and his comrade was dead. A moment later, the panic of the untrained took him, and he ran
off into the trackside brush, disappearing among the trees.
Hob whirled and looked back along the little caravan. Jack had come up at a fast limp with his crow-beaked war hammer in his right hand and a spiked targe on his left forearm, and he was battering at two opponents, as matter-of-fact as a carpenter nailing a piece of wood. Two others lay dead at the dark man’s feet, heads—for none wore helmets—misshapen from the terrible blows Jack had given them. Here and there were bandit bodies, sprouting the long arrows, fletched with crow-feather, that Molly and Nemain used.
Even as he watched, Jack broke one man’s arm with the hammer, sidestepped smartly, and blocked a knife thrust from the other bandit with the targe. Jack, off-balance from avoiding the blade, batted the second man in the side with the hammer, a weak and ineffectual blow that nonetheless served to make the bandit stagger a pace or two away—all the opportunity that Jack needed. The war hammer came up, crow-beak pointing forward, and fell like a tree. The arm the bandit flung up to stop it was battered aside and the beak, deflected from its capital target, plunged into the man’s chest. He fell flat upon his back and lay there, wheezing pink foam. In very short order he became still. Jack looked around. The man with the broken arm had surrendered the field, disappearing into the trees.
Jack and Hob stood still a moment, breathing heavily, and looked about them. Up on the wagon roofs the women, with arrows nocked and bows half-drawn, turned in slow circles, searching for any threat, but all was quiet. Nine bodies lay scattered about; two more blood trails led into the forest, one so heavy that Hob doubted the bandit who had made it would survive.
Molly and Nemain slung their bows, still strung, to their shoulders, and climbed down the rope ladders to the wagon seats, and thence to the ground. The women were unscathed. Hob had a couple of bruises—he had no idea how he had acquired them—and Jack had two small cuts, both on the same shoulder. Nemain fetched some of Molly’s remedies from the little wagon, and the women applied salves and linen bandages.
The Wicked Page 5
