The Wicked

by Douglas Nicholas

  Thibault drew their attention to the number of footprints near the longboat—prints of bare feet, the mark of sailors. The sand here yesterday had been damp with the surge of water pushed ashore by the storm wind, but the next high tide had not come so far up the beach. In this way the footprints had not been erased by the subsequent high tide. There was a confused jumble of prints around the boat, and then the tracks set off to the south.

  “To the south is Sir Tarquin’s stronghold?” asked Molly.

  “Aye; there is little else for a league,” said Sir Odinell. “But this is my land, this bay. Let us follow these prints and see where they sought refuge.”

  “Nay,” said Molly, “it’s only alerting him to what we’re knowing. If they’re walking south, where else would they be heading? They were in good health when they were walking here, and then they’re turning up as we’re after seeing them this morning. ’Twas not the sea that did this to them. Let us return to the castle, and let me view this Sir Tarquin, and learn what I may learn.”

  Sir Odinell turned his horse’s head, and the mount walked around in a circle till they were facing north again. He looked out to the bar, where pieces of the ship were coming loose at irregular intervals.

  “William!” he cried.

  A young man rode up to him. “My lord?”

  “Ride with all haste to Chantemerle; find Daniel Clerk; have him tell off a work party, with three wains, and send them here—this is my salvage, and I am losing it by the moment. They can use this longboat. Thibault will await them on the road, and guide them to the wreck. Come, madam, we will have a feast, and you will see this strange knight for yourself, and then you will give us your rede.”

  CHAPTER 14

  THE HALL WAS BRIGHT WITH torches, loud with the hubbub of the evening meal, the castle’s folk filling the lower tables. And at the high table, Sir Odinell and his wife, Lady Maysaunt, sat with some ten or eleven household knights and, in many cases, their wives as well. Some of the younger knights were bachelors, but most were married, and men and women alternated in the seating. Molly’s people had eaten a bit earlier, that they might be ready to play. They were seated at their own small table again, opposite little Mistress Eloise’s table.

  Sir Odinell had presented Eloise with the two Irish wolfhound pups that Sir Jehan had given him, and she had promptly named them Erec and Enide, after her favorite romance, one that she never lost a chance to hear recited. The demoiselle was entranced with her two puppies, and was always with one or the other, chattering to her charge, instructing it in serious tones, and leading it about by a thin silver chain; one end was fastened to the dog’s collar and the other terminated in a leather strip, which the girl wound about her delicate fist. Today it was Erec who was her escort, Erec and a large woman named Brangwayn, a nurse or handmaid of some sort.

  Now Eloise came in and sat with Brangwayn at her side table, snubbing Erec’s chain about one of the heavy table legs. A serving-woman brought her a small silver goblet, and another woman set before the little maid a tureen of herbed goose in a sauce of pear and grapes and garlic. Immediately she plucked forth a morsel of goose and held it beneath the table, where Erec made it vanish.

  The main table awaited Sir Tarquin. Molly and her little troupe played a succession of quiet tunes; the knights and ladies drank wine and sampled small pastries; the time drew on. At last the Sieur de Duncarlin and his wife, Lady Rohese, were announced, as were five of his household knights. Sir Odinell started a bit to hear Sir Gilles announced, one of the knights who had left his service for that of Sir Tarquin, but he said nothing.

  The music ceased for a moment, and Hob sat, symphonia on his lap, head turned, afire with curiosity. Down the central aisle came Sir Tarquin, and by his side, holding her right hand supported on his left hand’s upturned palm, Lady Rohese. Hob saw a tall, broad-shouldered man, stern-featured, with a certain pallid smoothness to his skin. Against this complexion his burning black eyes stood out. They were set somewhat close together, but not so much that it was unpleasant; his hair was a sleek dark pelt worn in the Norman style.

  Sir Tarquin strode up the aisle, exuding a certain—not joie de vivre, perhaps, but—power, vigor, a gliding athletic gait. This last reminded Hob of . . . what was it? Yes, yes, he had it: when a small boy, he had once seen, in Father Athelstan’s tiny larder, a snake, perhaps hunting mice, sliding in slow curves among the jars and sacks, silent, muscular, smooth as oil. Plainly Sir Tarquin walked, though he made less sound than might be expected, yet there was something of that serpent’s glide about his movements.

  Beside him: Lady Rohese, a woman of smoldering beauty, a woman neither young nor much past youth, dark-haired, dark-eyed. Hob had just begun to think how beautiful she was when she looked at Molly’s table, and he thought to see an expression of the sourest evil, covered over with an attempt at neutral cordiality—an effect as of powdered sugar on a dish of spoiled meat. The sight was profoundly disorienting, a sensation of being pulled in two directions at once, and he began to understand Sir Odinell’s odd reaction to her, and to understand as well the knight’s difficulty in expressing it.

  The knights followed, pacing slowly, almost somberly. Hob thought them formidable men at first glance; but then he saw that they moved as men wading through thigh-deep water, slowly, ponderously. Their expressions were inward, as though in deep thought, or in waking dream.

  As Sir Tarquin and his wife mounted the dais, the young dog Erec emerged from beneath the table, his long flexible tongue swiping goose grease from his nose. This would have been a droll sight but for the dog’s aspect: his eyes were fixed upon Sir Tarquin, his lips drew back from what were still mostly puppy teeth, his ears flattened, and a low rumbling groan came from deep in his chest. He stalked stiff-legged to the end of his chain, and followed the Sieur de Duncarlin’s every movement, his stance expressive of the greatest hostility.

  Brangwayn said something to her young charge, and Mistress Eloise pulled Erec to her side, and pushed his hindquarters down till he sat, and offered him a bit of goose, but the dog for once was not interested, and when she held the meat beneath his nose, he averted his muzzle, and looked off to the side, indicating refusal.

  Pages swarmed about the newcomers, seating them in order of precedence, Sir Tarquin at Sir Odinell’s right hand, Lady Rohese at Lady Maysaunt’s left; the pages dispersed the five knights who had come with Sir Tarquin throughout the rest of the company at table. Hob was keenly interested in these men, for he too had recognized Sir Gilles’s name, and knew him for one of the two knights that Sir Odinell had dismissed. And it was immediately apparent that there was something very disconcerting about them. They were grave but vacant; they nodded slowly and responded slowly when spoken to, and while they evidently could speak—Hob could not hear the conversation from where they sat—it was also evident that their seatmates were struggling to make conversation.

  It was not so with Sir Tarquin. His voice was rich and strong, a mellow supple baritone, and it rose above the hum of conversation. Indeed he dominated the table, commenting, discussing—at one point it seemed to Hob that the talk was of wine, at another point it was Chrétien de Troyes, perhaps in regard to Erec and Enide, words coming to Hob’s ears in gusts and then sinking into the general sound, for there were many at the high table and many more in the hall. The Sieur de Duncarlin had a hearty laugh, and essayed some humor of his own, for at two or three points several of Chantemerle’s knights and dames laughed at things he said, but Sir Odinell had throughout the evening a guarded expression, and as time went on it seemed that Sir Tarquin made people more and more uncomfortable.

  While they waited to play, Nemain drew a handkerchief from her sleeve, wiped her brow daintily with it, and then contrived to drop it. Hob bent to retrieve it, one hand on the symphonia to steady it. Nemain bent to take the handkerchief from him, and while they were leaning toward each other, she said, barely moving her lips, “Watch him eat.”

  There was a great dea
l of natural noise—so many people talking, eating, serving, moving about, laughing—yet as low as Nemain had spoken, Lady Rohese suddenly looked over at their table, and Hob felt immediately that Nemain had been heard, although that seemed impossible. After a long moment, the woman looked away, but she had made Hob very uneasy.

  He watched Sir Tarquin closely for a while, flicking glances at Lady Rohese from time to time to make sure she was not observing him. Sir Tarquin was animated, forceful, witty, and talking, talking constantly. But he was not eating very much. It was not that he ate nothing: Hob saw him put food in his mouth, chew, swallow; but there was very little being consumed. He moved his food on his trencher; he cut meat; he signaled that he was through with this or that dish, most often when he was making some emphatic point—a hand outstretched, a finger raised in the air, and the like. The page would come and remove the dish while everyone paid attention to Sir Tarquin’s latest quip or statement.

  Lady Rohese said almost nothing, but she observed everyone in turn, almost to the point of rudeness; she ate more than her husband, but not a great deal more; and whenever he reached one of his crescendos, that was when she would signal for a dish to be taken away.

  As Sir Tarquin spoke, and gestured, and continued with a kind of sham dining, Hob noticed that there was a sinuous ease to the knight’s movements that at first seemed graceful, but soon became disquieting, in ways that would be hard to articulate, but that he felt deep in his flesh. The knight’s arm, when he reached for the goblet of wine that he touched to his lips—but did he swallow?—had an anguine curve that for a moment did not seem to match the underlying structures of human bone.

  Sir Odinell also reached for his wine cup, and often, and there was no doubt that he swallowed, his throat working strongly: he seemed very ill at ease, and at last he remembered Molly, and asked that they play for the company. As they had at the inn, they struck up a pair of lively dance tunes, and then Hob and Jack stilled the symphonia and the drum, and the two women addressed their harps. Hob placed the symphonia gently on the rushes beside him, and when he straightened he found Lady Rohese’s eyes, magnificent and horrid, fixed upon him. He felt the flesh of his face go stiff and cold; the look in those eyes was so hostile that it was like being bathed in venom. What did she know about them, or was this just the face she presented to all the world? He could not think where to look, but at that moment the women began to play, and he fixed his eyes on Nemain’s fingers.

  As was so often the case, when the harps began to play, the hall grew more quiet, and when the women began to sing, the hall became silent. Hob let the song, with its complex two-harp underpinnings and the Irish knotwork of Molly’s alto, Nemain’s soprano, speak to him of the beauty that is in the world, the good that runs like a half-hidden seam of gold through the ore of existence. He took a deep breath.

  Then he dared a glance at the high table. He did not notice whether Lady Rohese was staring or not, because he encountered the gaze of Sir Tarquin, which rendered the hostility of his wife’s glare almost bland by comparison. He kept his face neutral, but his black eyes held an ophidian glitter, and they were fixed on Molly with a bitter malevolent rapacity. Hob glanced at Molly to see what Sir Tarquin saw. Just then Molly raised her head; she turned her large and comely eyes, blue as the sky echoed in lakewater, to the Sieur de Duncarlin’s face and looked at him with the utmost calm, still singing, as though she were gazing at a quiet garden on a summer afternoon: an astonishing display of self-control in the face of thrice-distilled malice.

  Then she bent again, unhurriedly, to her harp, and she and Nemain finished the song, the harps ending on a minor chord, the notes lingering for an instant, returned to the ear by the plaster walls. There was a moment while everyone sat quietly, attention turned inward. Then there was acclamation, from high table and low. Even Sir Tarquin feigned enthusiasm. Only Lady Rohese and the five spectral knights of Duncarlin sat silent, she gnawing very slightly at her lower lip, and they gazing distractedly out over the lower hall.

  Sir Odinell made a signal to Molly, and she led the group in quiet unobtrusive music thereafter. They had been shown to Sir Tarquin and, more important, had seen the Sieur de Duncarlin and his wife, and so the troupe’s pretext for being there had been established, and the less attention paid to them from now on, the better.

  And indeed it was not long before Sir Tarquin, with suave politeness and self-deprecating humor, indicated that they would have to return to his stronghold. After the necessary pro forma protests from Sir Odinell—they had not yet come to the sweets, and the bakers had prepared swans and ships of hardened sugar, and so forth—there was acceptance, with apparent reluctance, from the Sieur de Chantemerle, and Sir Tarquin said his farewells in his musical baritone, and Lady Rohese nodded a curt, indeed barely civil, agreement.

  Sir Tarquin stood, giving his hand to his wife; she took it and got up, and his knights rose in a cloud about them. Sir Tarquin now made his way slowly along the long table, so to round the end. As he went he had a word or a jest for each knight or dame that he passed; as he walked he took his riding gauntlets from his belt, and drew them on.

  The knights drifted after Lady Rohese. Not a word had Sir Gilles said to Sir Odinell or any of his former comrades. Five strongly made men, moving with sureness and purpose, and yet they made Hob think of a mist, a fog—something vague-bordered and insubstantial. He wondered at it: they seemed solid enough, but their expressions, their gestures, were such that it seemed they were in a dream, and he peering in at them from outside that dream.

  Sir Tarquin stepped from the dais and began to walk down the aisle. Erec, who had been lying flat but tense, his hindquarters bunched beneath him on the floor, his eyes and ears fixed on Sir Tarquin, suddenly exploded into motion with a roar, teeth flashing, lunging to the limit of his chain, which was snubbed about the heavy table leg. Mistress Eloise cried out to him in a shocked voice.

  Sir Tarquin, agile and sinuous as a serpent, swerved just out of the young dog’s reach, the sudden movement toward Hob’s side of the room necessitating a supple sidestep against a tall-backed bench that stood nearby, a gauntleted hand thrown out to preserve his balance. There was a small silver disk on the gauntlet’s cuff, there to fasten a wrist thong against the winter winds; Hob just caught the flicker of the button, scraped off against the bench-back’s edge, as it tumbled winking down among the rushes on the floor.

  Hob had had a moment when the sudden eruption of sound disoriented him; he had caught a whiff of vile corruption, and now he looked to the floor—had the dog scrabbled up a dead mouse from the rushes as he launched himself at the Sieur de Duncarlin? But there was nothing—where the rushes had been disturbed by the dog’s claws, the floor seemed clean and dry—and now Mistress Eloise was reeling the dog back by his chain.

  Sir Tarquin recovered his balance smoothly and stood, nodded to Sir Odinell and Lady Maysaunt again, and stalked out. Erec never took his eyes from Sir Tarquin’s back, while Mistress Eloise, her arms about the dog’s neck, spoke in his ear: soothing, meaningless phrases.

  Lady Rohese followed her husband, smiled at Mistress Eloise, and, without pausing, stooped as she passed Erec, spat in the dog’s face, and continued down the hall, trailed by the five odd knights. The young dog sneezed.

  Sir Odinell looked at Molly with an expression that said plainly: You see how strange they are. Molly said nothing; her manner was thoughtful. She kept watch on the departing group as they made their way toward the archway that led out to the stairwell. Mistress Eloise had quieted the dog, except for an occasional sneeze. When the party had left the hall, and they could hear them on the stair, Molly turned back to the knight.

  “Be said by me,” she began, and then there was a racking, rasping cough, and a loud wheezing breath: Erec was standing square on his feet, looking at nothing, his eyes wide and his breathing choking off to silence as they watched. The dog took a step and collapsed onto his side, his legs twitching.

  “Father!” cr
ied Mistress Eloise in a horrified urgent voice, and Sir Odinell rose, uncertain.

  “Nay,” said Molly, “I’m not having it! I’m not having it!” and she sprang from her chair and knelt by Erec’s side. Nemain came around the table in a flash, rooting frantically in a pair of pouches at her side. Molly picked up the wolfish head and, closing the mouth, blew strongly into the dog’s nostrils. Nemain gave her a little vial, and Molly pulled the stopper with her teeth, put a thumb to the dog’s lip and pulled it away, and poured a small line of golden-brown powder in the lip’s inner crease, then closed the animal’s mouth. She spat out the stopper and Nemain deftly snatched it from the air. Molly handed the vial to Nemain, and began to blow into the dog’s nostrils again. In between she muttered a rhythmic phrase in Irish, to which Nemain gave a repeated antiphon; all the while Molly massaged Erec’s lower jaw while keeping his mouth closed.

  The women’s call-and-response murmurs were barely audible to Hob where he, with others, bent over the small group on the floor. The dog gave a great snort and shuddered; in a moment he began to breathe on his own, with a deal of difficulty at first, but with increasing ease. His tongue explored his mouth, and he smacked his lips, and gulped, again and again: gradually he swallowed all Molly’s powder.

  Mistress Eloise, crying quietly but furiously, stroked Erec’s side, and after a fair amount of time, Erec’s tail began to thump sideways upon the rushes. Folk stood up, exhaled, stretched. Molly sat back on her haunches.

  “That vile cailleach,” she said in a low voice.

  Hob, watching with the others, was standing just behind Sir Odinell and Lady Maysaunt. She was gripping his arm with both hands, still caught up in the shock of the event. Sir Odinell bent his head toward his wife and said, just loud enough for Hob to hear, “I see . . . I begin to see it, now; Jehan has not failed me. Strange fevers require strange physic.”