Jack wandered about, gathering up what arrows he could find, pulling them free from trees and corpses alike; they were not to be squandered, for there was no telling when there would be time and material to make more. He tied them into a bundle and put them in the middle wagon; when next they camped he would sharpen the points, repair or replace the damaged fletches—the feathers that guided the missile’s flight—and redistribute the arrows to the women’s quivers.
Jack and Hob checked the animals and the wagons for damage, but the attack had been too brief, the bandits too few, and no real harm had been done.
Hob went over to the man he had stabbed first, who had run on a few paces, and collapsed. He was not a small man, but in his dying he had curled up as a child curls up to sleep, and so he looked dangerous and vulnerable, both at once. Nemain came over and Hob said to her, “I killed this one. I wonder if he has a wife, or children, and they waiting for him to return.” Hob had been in mortal struggles before, but this was the first man he had actually killed himself.
Nemain said, exasperated, “Must you always be thinking three times about everything? He’s after trying to kill us, and he failed, and there’s an end to it.” She stooped and quickly went through his pouch, finding nothing of value or interest; examined the poorly made knife he carried, and tossed it away into the bushes; and stood up again. She set off briskly toward her wagon, slowed, then wheeled on one foot and ran back to Hob. She hugged him fiercely, kissed him on the lips, heedless of whether Jack or Molly watched, and said, “I’m just— I know ’tis that you’re a good man, ’tis why you’re thinking the while about everything, about what you’re doing, and . . .” She paused, getting a bit tangled, and said, “And ’tis not that I’d have you different. ’Tis not.” Then she kissed him again and spun around and marched back to her wagon.
Hob stood there, feeling, as so often happened in dealing with his mercurial betrothed, somewhat disoriented. Then, with a last look at the body, he went and took up Milo’s rope, and awaited the command to move.
Molly gave one more look around, grimacing a little as she surveyed the corpses. She signed to Jack and Nemain to mount their wagons, made a hand-dusting gesture, and swung up onto the big wagon’s seat. She leaned out to look back along the line.
“Away on!” she cried.
CHAPTER 6
EVENTUALLY THE TREES BEGAN to thin, and they received glimpses, here and there, of the green folds of the fells, marching away to the east like waves of the sea. The trail wound among these, and always descending, descending. A rock outcropping seemed to be squarely in the center of the way, but as they approached, a dip in the land was revealed, where the trail dropped twoscore feet on a sharp grade and then ran around the outcrop.
Once around the rock they came upon a little cold-water burn, chattering down over stones and pebbles, and the trail swung in beside it. The slope steepened again, and for a time there was much play with the brakes, and Hob had to haul back on the rope to slow Milo down.
At last they came around the end of a ridge thick with bell heather and matgrass. The down-trending road now leveled out, debouching into what the Scots called a cleugh, one of those narrow, protected upland valleys that invite the traveler to camp for the night. The burn they had been following in its descent here ran straight, clucking and gurgling between green braes. Fescue grass covered the slopes; rushes bordered the little brook. Molly had them pull the wagons around in a rough semicircle, with the open end facing the creek. The animals were picketed on moderately long ropes and left to graze, the ox Milo plainly eager for the new spring grass.
Nemain went and brushed Mavourneen; the little ass was her special pet, and now she examined her ears, removing a burr, and stroking her nose, and speaking a great deal of low-voiced nonsense to her, soothing and affectionate speech without much meaning.
Jack was inspecting the mare’s hooves. Molly had taught Nemain to ride on the mare, using only a bridle and a saddle blanket, and recently Nemain had decided that the mare had been nameless long enough, and was to be Tapaidh henceforth, signifying in Irish fast, speedy, although it was unlikely Tapaidh would win any races.
There were enough stunted, wind-warped trees—two were dead—here and there in the little coomb to provide them with a good-sized fire. Jack laid a nest of small twigs for tinder, and atop that small branches, and atop them larger pieces of wood. Nemain brought him a box of very fine dried grasses, and a flint and steel. Jack struck the flint against the steel, and tiny sparks of burning steel flew into the dried grasses, which caught immediately, lighting the twigs.
As the twigs ignited the smaller branches, Jack set up a tripod and hung therefrom a cauldron. Hob drew water from the burn, secretly pleased with himself that he could now, half the way to his fifteenth birthday, carry two heavy buckets without staggering.
Molly and Nemain brought forth the salt cod, oats, and dried apples they had carried away with them from Blanchefontaine, and the loaves of heavy bread from the castle’s ovens. The two women made play with spices and pans, and soon produced a tasty loblolly, served on rounds of the dark onion-studded rye.
When they had eaten, they rested comfortably about the fire. Jack had dragged a couple of logs up to serve as seats for himself and the women, and now he worked quietly at mending a frayed strap for Tapaidh’s harness. Hob had spread a blanket upon the ground, and he lay propped on one elbow, blinking into the fire, hearing behind him the ceaseless conversation of the brook.
After a while Molly roused herself, and had Hob get up, get out the symphonia, and sit to tune it. She began to teach Nemain the harmony she wanted sung to a new ballad she had learned at Blanchefontaine. They worked it out as was their custom: Molly would sing a verse, Hob playing along, mostly the drone strings at first till he caught the melody. Then Molly would repeat the verse, and this time Nemain would sing with her, chiming with some notes and harmonizing with others.
“So much I think upon thee that I grow all pale,” sang Molly, and then sang it again, with Nemain’s light high voice interlacing with her own deep alto, a plait of sound. “Between Lincoln and Lindsey, Northampton and London—softer, Hob, softer,” Molly singing and listening to the other two at the same time, gesturing to show them what she wanted, whether strong or delicate, tapping her foot for the rhythm. “I know no maiden so fair, as the one to whom I’m bounden. Nay, child, up upon ‘whom,’ up upon ‘whom.’ ”
This last was to Nemain, and Hob, his fingers now clever enough upon the symphonia’s keys to allow his mind to roam a bit, reflected that anyone else who addressed Nemain, that youngest of women, as child, other than her grandmother—whom Nemain loved with a wolf-fierce devotion—would be in some peril.
They began the song again, and though things seemed to be going well, Molly broke off, sat a moment, and then said, “Leave off, leave off, my heart is not in it.”
She gazed into the flames awhile, then stood and paced off along the brookside, into the shadows just beyond the firelight. Soon, though, she came back and sat on the log again. She looked around at the other three, a look of such intensity that Jack immediately put down his mending, and Hob ceased his practicing and laid his open palm upon the symphonia’s strings to hush them. Nemain sat down next to Hob.
“I’m after taking a step on the wrong road,” she said. “ ’Tis one thing to be fending off the evil that springs at you, another thing entirely to run toward it. This scourge that Sir Odinell’s telling us of, ’tis no light matter, and you two”—here she nodded toward Hob and Nemain—“with your lives long in front of you, and espoused to each other at that. Nay, I’m needing Sir Odinell’s support, that I might restore our clan, but—should this business go agley, and what business may not?—I’m thinking ’twere better that you two were safe in Blanchefontaine; so Nemain should be left to head the clan.” She did not mention Jack. Jack would follow her into Hell any day without stopping to put his boots on, and all of them knew it.
Nemain slapped
her hands down upon her thighs. “And I to head a clan, after hiding like a milkmaid behind a Norman’s walls? I am a queen as you are a queen, seanmháthair, and not a little help to you either, and strong as you are, you will be the stronger for me at your right hand, nor do I see myself scuttling back to Blanchefontaine, and any road I’ll not do it.”
And before he knew what he was to say, Hob heard himself saying in his new man’s voice, which for once, praise God, did not have one boyish note in it, “And Nemain and I are promised, and I will not leave her side, not for any reason.”
Molly looked from one rebellious young face to the other, and burst out laughing. “It’s a pair of badgers I’ve with me and no mistake.” She grew grave again. “Still—”
Nemain, seeing the wind change back against her, said hastily, “Cast a feather, then, and see what the Great Queen sends you.”
Molly contemplated her granddaughter for a few moments, then: “You may have the right of it. Let us see what She sends me.”
Without further ceremony she got up and went to the large wagon, reappearing a moment later with a shallow wide-lipped black-iron basin, a leather bag, and a raven’s wing-feather. Nemain took the basin from her and went to the burn to fill it. Hob watched as Molly began to take handfuls of flat round stones from the bag, some gray, some white, with rough pictures scored in them, the grooves blackened with ink or painted red to make them stand out: a lamb, a fire, a sheaf of wheat, a butchered sheep—these were for the four great quarter-days of the year; three raven’s heads, for the Mórrígan, Molly’s patron, a triple goddess; the cauldron and club of the Dagda; and so forth.
Hob had seen the stones before, but rarely used; in any event their use was not explained to him, was indeed forbidden to him, a matter between grandmother and granddaughter, priestesses and adepts both.
Nemain set the basin, with a gallon or more of pure water in it, down with a thump on the far side of the big wagon, so that the basin was sheltered from the golden firelight; in this way it was lit only by the cool half-light of the moon. Molly beckoned to Hob.
“Hob, a chuisle, stand over there, and say nothing nor move at all till I’m giving you leave.” Hob was utterly mystified. Jack, who had seen this before, crossed thick arms and leaned back against the chocked wagon, the wood creaking under his bulk.
Molly arranged the stones, perhaps thirty in all, around the wide rim. She drew a slightly curved, beeswax-coated piece of bark from the leather bag, and placed the raven’s feather upon it. Nemain fetched a small cask of the uisce beatha, the strong Irish drink Molly distilled herself, and two silver cups, very old and battered, featureless. Nemain poured a half cup into each.
The two women sat on opposite logs; they began a ceremonial chant, wavering harmonies in a minor key, that ended abruptly. Without a word they each drained a cup, setting it down with a thump upon the log they sat on.
Hob watched all this with some misgiving: he had been taught that such practice was of Satan, and he felt sure that old Father Athelstan, who had raised him, an orphan, in the priest house, and who was as a father to him, would not approve. Yet he held Molly in higher esteem than anyone he had ever met, even Father Athelstan, and he knew her to be good to the bone, and Nemain herself was his bride-to-be, and— It was too much to think upon, and he settled for crossing himself quietly.
Jack Brown, placid Jack, less imaginative, more stoic, grinned at Hob’s uneasiness; the grin faded after a bit, however, as he thought more on it, and he crossed himself as well, the experienced soldier taking his precautions against danger from whatever direction.
Molly put the leaf in the center of the water; each woman took an end, and they spun it sunwise. The quill upon the leaf revolved; the point indicated first this stone and then that; finally it came to rest pointing at nothing, at a blank spot. The women contemplated this, and a discussion broke out in Irish.
Nemain had been in England for a third of her short life, and was apt to switch between Irish and English more easily, less consciously, than Molly. Now she spoke in English to Molly: “Blood?”
Molly thought. “Blood,” she said, and straightway both women drew knives, pricked thumbs, and let a few drops fall into the basin. A small breeze wandered into the campsite at that moment, and troubled the water, and the point of the raven’s quill swung to point at a gray-brown stone, and there it stayed.
“Och!” said Molly, and snatched up the stone. She looked pensive, and began to gather up the other stones. She noticed Hob looking intently at her, a question in his eyes. “That’s done, then. You may speak, lad; what is it?”
“Does it say we may go on with you, Mistress?” asked Hob.
“ ’Tis more than ‘may’ that it says,” Molly said. “ ’Tis a command that you should do so. As though Herself had some hand in this—we thinking that ’tis Sir Odinell we’re helping, and now . . . it may be ’tis Her bidding that sent us here all along.”
MOLLY WAS THOUGHTFUL AND QUIET for a while. Then she took a deep breath. “Well, ’twill be what it will. It’s ready we must be, and our skills at their keenest. A few rounds of the knife game, and then it’s to bed.”
For the time Hob had traveled with them—now almost three years—Molly had taken Nemain off into the woods, away from Jack and Hob, and there taught her the physical skills that went with a battle queen’s warcraft, much of which was secret. To some degree this was to avoid confusing Hob, at first just an orphan boy traveling with them. Jack of course was privy to Molly’s real nature, but there was very little that could trouble the phlegmatic soldier.
As they became more close-knit a family, they began to practice more in front of Hob, and indeed Molly was beginning, as she had promised him, to show him tricks and sleights of the body, to make him more formidable in battle, as Sir Balthasar was training him in the Norman martial skills.
One exercise that Nemain was set to master, that Molly did not trust Hob with, was the knife game. One hand spread on a log, the other with a knife darted between each of the fingers, slowly at first, then faster and faster. After a while they would play with each other, the two women’s left hands flat to the wood, their right hands with daggers, each stabbing between the other’s fingers, singing a chant in Irish that went faster and faster, the blades flashing, the points going thock and thock and thock, till grandmother and granddaughter were both breathless and, at a signal Hob could not perceive, stopped abruptly. No one was ever hurt, but Hob’s blood would turn cold as highland brookwater when he watched the blurred gleaming steel frolic about his betrothed’s delicate fingers, and he disliked it intensely.
Hob wandered away from the camp now, so to avoid the sight of Nemain’s fingers in this quick-stepping peril. He strolled over to the water’s edge. Here the little burn, its rumpled-silk surface studded with stones of modest size, ran level for a space, mumbling and chuckling between the green banks. The ripples in the water caught the firelight, so that shifting veins of gold were at play in the dark stream. Just beyond the campsite, the burn resumed its downward journey, tripping over a low ledge of half-submerged whinstone and angling downslope, running to the east, the lowlands, the coast to which they were bound, away by the wide cold waters that the English called the German Sea and the Hollanders called the North Sea.
Hob walked to the beginning of the slope, and he followed the burn’s course downstream with his eye as it ran ahead of them toward the future. Within a short distance, though, the brook was lost to sight, wandering away into the gloom.
Part II
THE BURNING DOLL
CHAPTER 7
A ROAD THAT AT TIMES seemed little more than a sheep trail wound down into the folds and creases of the Northumbrian fell country. It wandered beside the little burn, now growing larger with each mile, as tributaries converged and swelled its waters. Heather, not yet in bloom, and bilberry shrubs covered the rolling hillsides, rising to either hand; mosses covered the wetter ground, and as they dropped lower and lower toward the
coast, the scattered gold of lesser celandine brightened the walk.
The ridgelines were haunted by the feral North-umbrian goats, appearing, disappearing; sometimes they seemed to be keeping pace with the little troupe. Hob would see their high back-curving horns, their flowing black and white locks, the almost acrobatic agility of their progress as they skeltered from level to level; then they would be gone, only to return a little while later.
The stream became more and more swollen, and a rumble began to assert itself. A little farther and the rumble became a bellow, as the little river ran out over a threshold of rock into thin air, to plunge threescore feet into a deep chilly pool. The road had to veer away from the water and return again in a switchback to accomplish the loss of height that the water did in moments, falling sheer through the empty air.
After that the land rapidly began to level out, and eventually the crude track over the fells broadened, and the roadbed turned to plain dirt, with nothing growing in it, but with some ruts from wagon wheels. Dense dog-rose hedges, a month or two from flowering, sprang up on either side, then gave way to wood-pole fencing; beyond were quilt-like fields cultivated in square parcels known as furlongs or the long narrow rectangles called selions, each one worked by a different villager. This ensured that no one would have only poor land: each had a share of the good fields; each had a share of stony or less fertile soil. The strips had little borders of uncultivated land, again increasing the resemblance to a quilt.
By imperceptible degrees the road descended; the land flattened; they moved through level fields. Here and there were rhines, the drainage ditches that kept the land dry enough for tilling, and avoided floods.
The road ran in beside a field newly planted to flax, and alongside the field was a rhine. Slowly Milo plodded along beside the ditch, which was perhaps six feet below the grade of the road. Hob walked in a rhythm that matched Milo’s pace. In his ears was the dull thud of Milo’s hooves on the dirt path, the creaking of the wagons; the effect was hypnotic, and he was in a vague daydream wherein he had a steel-colored destrier like Sir Odinell’s, when two partridges, made uneasy by the travelers, exploded from the field and raced away north. This drew his eye to the birds, to the field itself, and, idly, down to the rhine. In the rhine was a shallow band of moving water, and in the water was—
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