When Christ and His Saints Slept

by Sharon Kay Penman

  He was not sure at first what he’d heard, and he tilted his head, listening intently. It came again and this time he had no doubts—it was a scream. Turning his stallion about, he followed the sound into a copse of trees off to the side of the road.

  He came out onto a frozen meadow, where a hunt was on. The quarry, though, was not deer or rabbit. Two men were trying to run down a young girl. There was a second child, too, but the men had no interest in him, and when he slipped on the ice and fell, they veered around him, continuing their pursuit of the girl. She’d been attempting to reach the woods, but the snow was hampering her flight, and they were gaining on her with every stride. When she risked a glance over her shoulder, she dodged suddenly, making a desperate detour out onto the ice of a small pond. The men halted at the edge, cursing, for the ice would never support their weight; as light as the girl was, the surface was creaking ominously under her feet. The men swore again, for by the time they circled the pond, she would have gotten into the woods, where it would not be so easy to find her.

  At first glimpse, one of the men bore a superficial resemblance to Gilbert, for he was a redhead, too, and tall enough to look down upon most men. His partner in crime was lean and spare and dark, lacking either the redhead’s brawn or his conspicuous coloring. But he was the dominant of the two. As the redhead continued to stand at the pond’s edge, thwarted and fuming, he swung back toward the boy.

  The child was just getting to his feet. Pouncing upon him before he could scramble out of reach, the man stopped his struggles with a blow across the face and then crooked his arm around the boy’s throat, shouting, “You’d best come back, girl, or I’ll snap the whelp’s neck in two, by God, I will!”

  The girl looked back and froze on the ice, steps away from safety. The boy squirmed, bit the hand clamped over his mouth, and cried, “Run, Jennet!” He paid a price in pain for that, kicked futilely as he was snatched off his feet, and then gagged as the pressure on his windpipe increased. The girl’s face was contorted in horror; she seemed unable to move, and the man grinned, sensing victory.

  “If you care about the cub,” he warned, “you get over here now!” Jerking his head toward his partner, he said, “Go around the pond so you can head her off if she runs for the woods.”

  The redhead was accustomed to taking orders and was starting to obey when he caught movement from the corner of his eye. He turned and his jaw dropped open. He wasted several precious seconds, staring, eyes wide and mouth ajar, as Ranulf’s stallion raced toward them, before blurting out, “Holy Jesus! Ned, behind you!”

  The man called Ned was of a different mettle than the befuddled redhead. The shock of seeing an armed knight bearing down upon him must have been considerable. But his reaction was instantaneous. Without hesitation, he threw the child into the path of the oncoming stallion.

  Ranulf yanked on the reins and the palfrey swerved, with not a foot to spare. But the horse’s sudden plunge carried it onto a glaze of iced-over snow. It skidded, started to slide sideways, and went down.

  Ranulf flung himself from the saddle, and was fortunate enough to land in a snowdrift. For a heart-stopping moment, he could not see where his sword had fallen, then spotted it ensnared in a hawthorn hedge. The prickly spines inflicted deep scratches upon his wrist and hand as he snatched it out, but that was the least of his problems, for the men were almost upon him.

  He was surprised at their boldness, for he’d had a few encounters with brigands of their ilk, and they invariably backed off from any confrontation with a knight, preferring easier prey. They may have been enraged over the loss of the girl, for both children had seized their chance to flee. Or they may have been hungry enough for Ranulf’s horse and trappings to forget caution. Whatever their motivation, they were closing in fast, and he got a second, nasty surprise, for they were better-armed than he’d expected. The big redhead had a rough-hewn wooden club studded with nails, and Ned had a sword, an unusual weapon for one of these outcast, masterless men.

  It was a basic tenet of faith with men of Ranulf’s class that a knight, trained in the ways of war since boyhood, could easily vanquish lesser foes, as much a belief in the superiority of blood and breeding as in the benefits of battle lore and killing competence. Ranulf had accepted this comforting conviction, too, but no one seemed to have told his assailants that they were inferior adversaries.

  The thrust he aimed at Ned should have been lethal. It never connected, though, for Ned parried the blow with startling skill; whatever he was now, he’d once been a soldier, for no man handled a sword like that by chance. Moreover, they understood the concept of teamwork, and only Ranulf’s quick reflexes saved him when they bore in again. Fending off Ned, he whirled just as the redhead swung his club. Unlike them, he had the protection of chain mail, but had that blow landed, it would have broken bones. Instead, he was the one to draw blood. Not a mortal wound, but the redhead yelped and sprang backward so hastily that he nearly fell. Ranulf could not take advantage of it, though, for the other man was circling, ready to strike.

  They’d taken his measure, too, were more wary now. The redhead, in particular, seemed leery of getting within range of Ranulf’s blade. They backed off a bit, talking strategy, not realizing that Ranulf understood them, for unlike many of Norman-French descent, he spoke English—not well, but enough to get by. While they were planning their next move, he retreated slowly toward the closest tree. He was ready for them when they attacked again, and they were forced to pull back, cursing and bleeding. But he was bleeding, too, and his fall had done more damage than he’d first thought, for his knee was stiffening up, slowing him down. Panting, his sword poised for their next assault, he realized that he was in the fight of his life and the odds were not in his favor.

  The children were nowhere to be seen, probably long gone—if they were wise. His horse was not in view, either, and the distant road was still deserted—not that any passersby were likely to have intervened. But he saw then that there was one about to join the fray, for Loth had backtracked to find him, and was coming now at a run, a dark streak against the snow, silent and swift, hackles up, as fearful and blessed a sight as ever filled Ranulf’s eyes.

  The dog made no sound, but alerted by instinct, perhaps, the redhead started to turn just as Loth launched his attack. The man yelled, but had no time to react, for the dyrehund was already upon him. As the animal leapt at him, he recoiled, slipped on the ice, and went over backward. His next scream was one of pain, for Loth had clamped his powerful jaws upon the redhead’s thigh, shaking the man’s body to and fro as if he were prey, as Ranulf had seen him attack deer.

  When the redhead shrieked, Ned whirled in his direction. It was a natural reaction, but one that doomed him, for in the brief moment that he was distracted by the dog, Ranulf lunged, burying his blade in the other man’s back. Ned’s knees buckled. Ranulf’s second thrust all but decapitated him, and blood spurted out like a crimson fountain, splattering Ranulf with gore.

  Swinging his sword up, Ranulf turned then to aid Loth, but the dog had no need of assistance. The redhead’s screams were mingling now with the dyrehund’s fierce, guttural growling. He’d dropped his club when he’d fallen, and had tried then to kick the dog away. Loth released his hold upon the man’s mangled thigh and, seizing an ankle, began a promising effort to cripple his quarry. Unable to break free of those ravening jaws and razor teeth, the man was writhing in pain as he desperately tried to reach his club, which lay tantalizingly close, but just beyond his groping fingers.

  Ranulf kicked the club into the bushes, then reached down and dragged Loth off. It took the man a moment to realize he was no longer under attack, and he continued to claw the snow for his club, kicking feebly at a dog who was no longer there. Ranulf was having trouble restraining Loth; even when he pulled the dyrehund up onto his hind legs, the dog did not desist his struggles, choking and snarling as he fought to get back to his kill. The redhead had now scrabbled to his hands and knees, his breath comin
g in wheezing, gasping sobs. Somehow he lurched to his feet, screaming anew as pain jolted through his crushed ankle. Hobbling, stumbling, weaving like a drunkard, he fled in terror, leaving a blotched and bloody trail across the snow. He’d not get far; Ranulf had seen the terrible gaping wound, the shredded flesh of the man’s thigh.

  Reaction now set in and Ranulf started to shake. Still clutching Loth’s collar, he sank to his knees. Blood was everywhere, splashed across the front of his hauberk, caking his boots. The churned-up snow was bright red, and Loth’s silver muzzle seemed to have been dipped in scarlet; so had his chest. The dyrehund was trembling, too; he whimpered and nuzzled Ranulf, smearing blood across Ranulf’s cheek and into his beard. Ranulf pulled the dog closer, wrapped his arms around Loth’s heaving sides, and held tight.

  When Loth growled, Ranulf raised his head, automatically reaching again for his sword hilt. The boy was standing ten feet away, poised to take flight. Ranulf guessed he was about nine or so, but small for his age, reed-thin and meagre. He seemed all eyes; they dominated the pinched little face, a striking shade of blue-green, glassy with shock. He looked at the body, swallowed, and asked, “Is he dead?”

  “Yes.”

  “And the other…the one the dog bit?”

  “Most likely he’ll bleed to death,” Ranulf said honestly.

  The boy was quiet for a moment, staring at Loth. “Good,” he said, and then recoiled when Ranulf seemed about to rise. He did not go far, though, backing off a few more prudent feet. “Are you bad hurt?”

  “No, not bad,” Ranuld said and waited, feeling as if he were trying to tame some wild, woodland creature, ready to bolt at any moment.

  “Why?” the child asked suddenly. “Why did you help us?”

  Ranulf considered several different answers, and then twitched a shoulder in a half-shrug. “I had nothing better to do.”

  The boy’s eyes widened even further. But he seemed to take reassurance from the joke, for he slowly edged closer. “I am Simon,” he said solemnly, and after Ranulf introduced himself and Loth with equal gravity, Simon held out a small fist for the dyrehund to sniff. In view of what the child had watched the dog do, Ranulf thought that was a commendable act of courage. Simon peered intently into Ranulf’s face, then glanced back at Loth. “We know where your horse is,” he said unexpectedly. “It ran into the woods and its reins snagged on a bush. My sister found it.”

  Ranulf wondered why they hadn’t tried to catch the stallion for themselves, and then realized that to these children, a horse would be as exotic an animal as an elephant. He still did not know why they were out here alone, but did not doubt that he was looking at the sort of poverty he’d rarely encountered; Simon’s clothes were so ragged they showed glimpses of skin and his worn leather shoes were held together with cord. Getting stiffly to his feet, Ranulf said, “Can you take me to the horse?”

  The child nodded, but hesitated. No longer meeting Ranulf’s gaze, he asked, “Do you have any food?” Adding quickly, “Not for me, for Jennet.”

  “Yes, I do,” Ranulf said, as matter-of-factly as he could manage, and with the child hovering just out of reach, he limped across the meadow toward the woods. Even if he’d had a shovel, the ground was too hard to dig a grave, so he left the body of the outlaw where it had fallen. Simon seemed to share his view that the man did not deserve a Christian burial, for the boy did not glance back, either.

  Simon’s sister looked so like him that they might have been twins if not for the age difference; she had the same vivid blue-green eyes, the same light hair of an indeterminate shade that was either a pale ash-brown or a dirt-darkened blonde, and like him, she bore the signs of malnourishment. Ranulf imagined she was about thirteen, yet she was smaller than his nephew Henry, so frail and wan that he ached for her. More than the boy, she comprehended the full horror of what they’d been spared, and he was impressed by the bravery she’d shown in staying to watch the outcome of the battle.

  He had bread and cheese in his saddlebag, and they fell upon it ravenously, with a hunger he’d never known. He waited until they’d devoured every crumb before asking what they were doing by themselves on the Newark-Grantham Road, and got an answer that dismayed him. They were on their way, Simon confided, to their uncle Jonas in Cantebrigge.

  “God Almighty, you cannot be serious! Not only is Cantebrigge at least eighty miles from here, but it is less than twenty miles from Ramsey Abbey, which has been seized by rebels. You cannot go to Cantebrigge!”

  Anxiety had given his voice an angry edge, and the children reacted with immediate fear, backing away. “We are going to Cantebrigge,” Jennet cried, “we must! And we will, we will go!”

  Ranulf hastily changed his tack. “I did not mean to shout,” he said soothingly, while rapidly reviewing his options. There was another ten miles or more to Grantham; Newark was less than five. “Speaking for myself, I’ve never felt so battered or bone-weary. Luckily, I know an inn in Newark where we can get a decent meal and mayhap even a bone for Loth.”

  They conferred together, speaking too swiftly for him to catch their words; his grasp of English did not allow for nuances or even slurred speech. When they turned back, Simon came forward until he was close enough to be grabbed; it was, Ranulf recognized, a declaration of trust. “We’ve nothing better to do,” he said, with what was almost a smile.

  RANULF had already attracted attention at the inn the preceding night: a lone knight and a dog the likes of which none had seen before. When he and the wolf-dog returned, drenched in gore and with two beggar children in tow, he created a sensation. But their curiosity was to remain unsatisfied, for he offered no explanations and all that blood somehow discouraged prying.

  The innkeeper was as amazed by Ranulf’s request for two rooms as he was by his alarming appearance. A private room was an almost unheard-of luxury, except for the highborn; it was usual for strangers to share not only a chamber but a bed, and it seemed utterly bizarre to him that Ranulf should want to squander a room upon bedraggled urchins who ought to be bedding down out in the stables with the lord’s fine palfrey. He confined himself, though, to a timid protest, which Ranulf ignored, for he thought Jennet would be fearful sharing a room with anyone but her brother, so soon after the thwarted rape.

  As much as he needed a bath, Ranulf knew better than to ask for one, not in a small, shabby inn in the midst of winter. The innkeeper was able to scrounge up some soft soap of mutton fat and wood ash, and he washed himself as best he could with cold water and a burlap towel. When the children crept downstairs to join him in front of the fire, they were still filthy, but so unself-conscious that he realized bathing was for them done only in summer, if at all. They’d shared their lives with him by now, offered up in hesitant bits and pieces as they’d made the slow trek back to Newark, and the more they’d told him, the less he’d wanted to know.

  Simon and Jennet were children of the Fens, having lived all of their brief years in the bleak isolation of the Lincolnshire salt marshes, more cloistered than in any convent. Their mother was long dead and Jennet had insisted so vehemently that their father was a “free man” that Ranulf knew he must have been a runaway villein, a serf bound to the land. Their world had been a wattle-and-daub hut out in the Fens; all they could say was that it had been north of Sleaford. There they’d dwelled, just this side of starvation, their father fishing for eels and sometimes taking water reeds into Sleaford to sell for roof thatching. But he’d not taken them; until Ranulf had shepherded them through Newark’s streets, they’d never seen a town. As far as he could tell, the only people they ever saw were other fishermen and their families, mayhap an occasional peddler—until the day the outlaws came.

  They took turns relating the horrors of that day, with the detached composure of emotional exhaustion. How their father had sensed danger and sent them off into the marsh to hide. How they’d waited out in the wind-ripped bogs for their father to fetch them, huddling together for warmth as gulls shrieked overhead and night
came on. How they’d seen the smoke, and when they dared to venture back, they found their home in flames and their father’s body sprawled by the hen roost. The hens were gone, of course, as was the pig that was their prized possession, and every scrap of food that Jennet had salted away and stored for winter. And whatever the brigands hadn’t carried off had been burned in the fire.

  They did not seem to know how long they’d lingered in the ruins, and Ranulf did not press them; better such memories were mercifully blurred. They’d buried their father and eventually hunger had driven them to undertake this lunatic quest of theirs—to seek out their only kinsman, their father’s younger brother Jonas, plying his trade as a tanner in the distant town of Cantebrigge.

  Stretching his legs toward the fire, Ranulf massaged his aching knee and watched the children as they ate their fill, probably for the first time in their lives. It was a Wednesday fast day, but he’d made a conscious decision to violate the prohibition against eating flesh; he could always do penance once he got back to his own world. Now it seemed more important to feed Simon and Jennet the best meal he could, and the innkeeper had served up heaping portions of salted pork, a thick pottage of peas and beans, and hot, flat cakes of newly baked bread, marked with Christ’s Cross. To Ranulf, it was poor fare, and he ended up sharing most of it with Loth. But Simon and Jennet savored every mouthful, scorning spoons and scooping the food up with their fingers, as if expecting to have their trenchers snatched away at any moment. And Ranulf learned more that night about hunger and need than in all of his twenty-five years.

  What would become of them? How could they hope to reach Cantebrigge? And if by God’s Grace, they somehow did, what if this uncle of theirs was not there? They’d never seen the man, knew only what their father had told them, that soon after Simon’s birth, a peddler had brought them a message from Jonas, saying he’d settled in Cantebrigge.

  That confirmed Ranulf’s suspicions: two brothers fleeing serfdom, one hiding out in the Fens, the other taking the bolder way, for an escaped villein could claim his freedom if he lived in a chartered borough for a year and a day. It was a pitiful family history, an unwanted glimpse into a world almost as alien to Ranulf as Cathay. But like it or not, he was caught up now in this hopeless odyssey of Abel the eelman’s children. In an unusually morose and pessimistic mood, he wondered how many Simons and Jennets would be lost to the furies unleashed by Geoffrey de Mandeville’s rebellion.