Something Red

by Douglas Nicholas

  Molly was already there, seated near the front of the hall by the stand where Brother Lector would read from the lives of the saints at the monks’ evening meal. She had donned a plain white woolen cotehardie and had pushed the snug sleeves up her arms a little way to keep them free of her food. She ate with her customary enthusiasm, her forearms square on the table, her cheeks full and the strong muscles bunching at the side of her jaw as she chewed briskly. Jack Brown sat beside her. The kirtle he wore over his shirt, the hose that cased his legs, were of dark red-brown wool; with his wide-backed body slouched before the table, he seemed an autumnal figure, rooted in the earth. But when Nemain stepped over the bench to claim a place beside her grandmother the bull-shouldered man made room for her readily enough. Hob took his seat on the other side of Jack.

  Jack Brown looked at Hob for a moment, a piercing regard followed by an unnervingly rapid loss of interest. It was a way Jack had; it was like an inspection by a dog who, having identified another member of the pack, finds no further reason for concern or interest.

  Down the table were four men, stonemasons as Molly reported later, also on their way to Durham. There they would take service with the bishop as cathedral caretakers; the great cathedral erected in the new style by the Prince Bishops of Durham, with its ribbed vaulting and its flying buttresses up in the high shadows, was a post of honor for these craftsmen.

  The one with snub nose and pouched weary eyes ate with concentration, but the other three were murmuring together and pointing here and there with professional interest to the groining of the refectory ceiling, for the hollowed-out halls of the monastery were also famed for their workmanship. The stone dust engrained in the masons’ knuckles gave their muscular hands a gray and corpse-like appearance; the edges of their left hands bore scars from slipping on chisels slick with sweat.

  A monk placed a leather bumper at Hob’s elbow. Jack reached a thick arm to the center of the table; from a clay jar of honey beer he poured out a draft for Hob. Hob took a sip and felt the bite of the sweet-sharp drink against his tongue, with a faint aftertaste, a tang of tar from the pitch-jacked leather. A warmth spread through his empty stomach.

  To his right sat three men-at-arms clad in travel-worn boiled-horsehide gambesons, eating with hefty disk-guard dirks and their fingers, chewing impassively, muttering among themselves, a low comfortable profane grumble. Their hair was cut in the bowl-shaped Norman fashion. One was an older man with the pewter badges of a sergeant; the other two were young men, large-framed, features marked with past batterings.

  “And where in Jesus’s own sweet name would I be if I’d landed on those rocks? I hate ’em all, and she’s the worst, the bitch, the sneak.”

  “Roger’s no luck with horses or women.”

  “Shut up, Olivier.”

  “That hammerhead lassie’s fooled you three times now.” Hob glanced sideways. The rasping voice belonged to the sergeant. “Next time, do you knee her in the belly before you pull the cinch, make her dump her breath, pull it tight. Elsewise she’ll have you in the muck of the road ten paces from the gate.”

  “Next time, do you ask for her hand in marriage before you tickle her belly.”

  “Shut up, Olivier. God take them all. I hate ’em. I had one step on my foot and half my toes were black for a fortnight. God rot them all. I’d rather march, if it weren’t so fucking cold.”

  “Roger, Roger. The lassie’s yours, you must settle her down. Just pull it tight next time. Knee her first, then pull.”

  Hob drew his knife and cut a slice of the rich dense bread from a loaf before him, and dipped it into the steaming heap of turnips and leeks on the trencher between his place and Jack’s. Eddies of smoke from the fire trench made him cough a little. Beside him loomed Jack Brown’s bulk, to anyone else a sinister figure. Eighteen months’ familiarity, Molly’s blessing, and the accepting nature of childhood: all had transformed Jack into an emblem of security rather than threat to Hob. As his stomach filled, as the hazed warmth settled about him, Hob grew sleepy and placid. He sagged against Jack’s broad right arm. The dark man turned him an enigmatic glance, but made no move to dislodge him.

  There followed a period of disjointed thought and dream. Suddenly Hob realized two things simultaneously: he had been at least partly asleep, and a late party was seating itself across the scrubbed board.

  Two well-favored men, blank-faced, their blond hair confined by jeweled nets, their trim and muscular forms clad in a livery of gold and green and white, were settling a small, aged woman into her seat, just across the board from Molly. The woman had the slow, careful movements of the very frail. She sat down sideways and one of her esquires lifted her feet over the bench and in under the table; Hob had a glimpse of silken escaffignons, Heaven blue, on tiny feet, peeping from beneath her robe.

  Hob had never seen such a handsomely attired person, and he sat up, yawning despite his kindled interest. He saw a delicate face, a long nose, and large light eyes, gray as the winter sea and slightly tilted, set amid a web of wrinkles; a lock of straight snowy hair escaped from beneath her wimple. Over a cotehardie of white linen she wore a quilted over-robe of green silk. About the cuffs, golden thread was worked into a repeating pattern of a great tree in which two birds perched, with sun and moon and stars above its canopy. Despite the robe she seemed cold, holding it tight at her neck and giving a little shiver from time to time.

  The two esquires now took seats to the right of the old woman. To her left was a man in late middle years, with a beard of gray brindle, black brows, eyes the blue of May skies, kindly and humorous: he radiated benevolence. His crimson robe, its blue hood thrown back, suggested a doctor of medicine; certainly he was some kind of scholar. He noticed Hob straightening up and yawning, and he smiled gently at the boy. Hob had an immediate and unusual sense of his friendship and warmth, and further, a feeling that he knew that Hob had been asleep, and that further still, it was a secret between the two of them, and Hob grinned at him, hardly knowing why he did so.

  Hob became aware that Molly, with her easy good humor, had introduced herself to the party and had managed to engage the scholar in conversation. “. . . Lady Svajone,” he was saying. “We will . . . we will to going . . . we will to go our way homeward, to far Lietuva, across the . . . the seawater, far past Normandy, far past the Burgundians and the Rhinelanders.” His speech was rapid, but oddly accented.

  Lady Svajone leaned forward, her luminous eyes fixed on Molly. “Our home is being . . . many away. Is being much away. You also, you also from many away, from not, from not here?” Her voice was whispery but sweet, like a little girl with a sore throat.

  Molly smiled at her and spoke slowly and simply. “My home is in Erin, what these folk call Ireland, across the inner sea,” she said. Her strong accent became if anything more vivid, just from the mention of home.

  “I am Doctor Vytautas,” the scholar said. “We have find a . . . refuge? a refuge here for a while. Is been much of the not pleasant, the not peace, in our home countries.” He took a sip of the honey beer. He smoothed his damp mustaches with a forefinger, a fussy gesture. “I am been secretary and physician to the family”—he indicated Lady Svajone with a kind of seated half-bow—“is now a score and a half of years. Much of the family holding is been . . . is losted, but now hope is coming that . . . well. We will return, now that the circumstances have, have more of the . . . of the favor.”

  “I wish you joy of it,” said Molly. “Be said by me, exile has a bitter taste, and it’s not from well-side gossip that I’m speaking at all.”

  One of the fair men leaned over and cut off a tiny bit of fresh bread for the old woman, placing it on her trencher of stale bread, beside her untouched portion of turnip stew. She put it in her mouth and ate it slowly. She said something in their language to Vytautas, a querulous note in the sweet faint voice. He stroked her hand, small and bony, the knuckles prominent and the skin near-translucent, spotted with age. He murmured in her ear. He looked up an
d said, “Gintaras . . . ” He motioned to the young man, who cut another dainty piece. She toyed with the morsel and began a long mumbled complaint to Gintaras, who bent his head to hear.

  Molly drained her jack of honey beer and reached for the jug. Her face had a flushed glow; she was beginning to sweat from the beer and the food and the fire. She leaned toward Vytautas. “Is it a poor appetite she has?” she asked in a low voice. “I have a remedy for a sickly nature.”

  He said, “Brother Abbot has speak of your . . . knowing? knowledge, your knowledge of the herbs. I have my own remedies, but my . . . stuffs, my materials are . . . thin? deplete? I would being grateful for some things of the summer woods, of the woods of this summer that has passed. Although . . . ” He glanced sideways at his charge, then back at Molly, managing to convey, with the faintest of shrugs, the slightest lift of the eyebrows, how little he dared hope that anything might be of help.

  Molly asked him a question in what Hob knew to be Latin. Vytautas’s eyes widened with surprise, then crinkled with pleasure, and he relaxed into the comfort of a language in which he was fluent, the universal tongue of scholars. Molly leaned forward, searching his face, following along. In addition to her native Irish, she had a mastery of English, whether the near-German low speech used by the Angle and Saxon peasants or the near-French high speech of the Norman lords. Her Latin, though, was adequate but halting, and she had to concentrate not to be left behind.

  The incomprehensible syllables washed over Hob. He found that when he blinked, his eyes would stay closed till he struggled to open them. The warm weight of food in his stomach, the honey beer, the heat from the fire trench, the hum of talk, left him in a happy trance, and he put his head slowly down on his crossed arms and listened to the sound of the conversation, and paid attention to the curious scenes that formed behind his eyelids, and slept.

  HOB AWOKE A FEW HOURS LATER, on a blanket beneath which was the bunching rustle of straw, by the scent of it mixed with herbs: tansy to keep the vermin away, lavender to sweeten the tansy. The blanket on which he lay and the other with which he was covered were of clean undyed wool. Dimly he remembered stumbling up with Jack Brown to the men’s dorter. Cots, frames of wood with leather straps webbed across and pallets of straw atop the straps, had stretched in a double row away down a long stone-walled room. The rushlight Jack had held had showed windows here and there, cut in the rock and closed with ironbound wooden shutters. Hob had sat on a cot and had let himself fall sideways. Jack Brown had pulled his straw-filled shoes off and lifted his feet into the bed, helped him out of the rest of his garments, and spread the blanket over him, the last thing Hob remembered.

  Now he lay and looked into darkness, hearing, below the snores and grunts of his unseen roommates, a steadily growing discordant rumble outside the shuttered window. He swung his bare feet onto the icy wooden floor, and felt his way to the stone wall, and thence to the wood and iron of the shutter. He fumbled the peg from the loop, letting it hang on its thong. He pushed the big shutter open, to find himself on the second floor of the monastery, looking down at a torchlit scene in the bailey, a scant twelve feet below.

  It had snowed again while he slept, and there was a fresh carpet of white. The torches held by several monks cast a ragged circle of yellow light that sparkled in the drifts. In the center was a rough litter, on which lay a scarlet ruin in tattered robes. It looked like a deer that had been inexpertly butchered. Molly squatted by one side of the litter, her skirts spreading on the snow, while Brother Abbot hovered anxiously beside her. On the other side Father Thomas knelt in the snow, administering the last rites to the broken corpse.

  Fragments of speech drifted up to Hob as he hung on the windowsill, appalled and fascinated.

  “. . . blood be frozen on him, sithee . . . ”

  “. . . found him i’ valley, past t’ ford . . . ”

  “. . . what could, what could do . . . ”

  “. . . traveling alane . . . alane, ye canna . . . ”

  The warrior monks did not easily lose their composure, nor did they now, but even Hob could hear the strong undertone of shock and disbelief in their gruff professional comments.

  “. . . wolves, or . . . a bear come out of winter sleep?”

  “. . . gutted like a . . . ”

  “But it were Brother Athanasius! And he fully armed!”

  “. . . been eaten at, the while he was fresh! Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!”

  “Wolves?”

  “Right hand is gone, sithee, and his eyes—”

  “But it was Brother Athanasius!” Brother Abbot burst out. “Surely not wolves, surely not: Samson and Goliath together could not have stood against him. What could kill Brother Athanasius?”

  Molly looked up from where she squatted, her forearms across her powerful thighs. “It was a piece of this robe that we found, and it lying by the trail.” She bent her gaze again to the horrid thing on the litter. “There’s a black shadowy art that’s in this.” Then, lower, “I can taste it.” Everyone crossed himself at this, and Brother Abbot turned away, his hand over his eyes, but Father Thomas paused in his office to regard Molly thoughtfully.

  Hob became aware of the spill of freezing air coming through the unglazed window. He felt his way back to his cot and returned with a blanket wrapped like a cloak about his shoulders. He noticed now, beyond the clump of murmuring monks, a closed traveling wagon, wide and long; it stood with chocked wheels against a blank stretch of monastery wall, just beside the doorway of the buttery. The wagon was paneled in rich auburn woods, glinting darkly in the torchlight. Ornate shutters, finely carved in a pattern of vines, with what seemed to be faces peering from among the leaves, were closed against the cold, save for one that was latched back, displaying a thin translucent pane of horn—to Hob a shocking extravagance—through which candlelight from within cast a wan glow. Lady Svajone and her close attendant physician had chosen to remain in the luxury of their traveling wagon, warmed by oil lamps and candles and body heat, rather than avail themselves of the monks’ comfortable but austere dormitories.

  There was a door at the back end, as in Molly’s three wagons. The two blond esquires had risen from richly made sleeping furs, wolf and winter rabbit and pine marten by the look of them, laid out by the wagon’s back wheels. They had been sleeping on guard before their mistress’s door, like bandogs. Now they stood there warily eyeing the monks crowding around the litter, listening to the tone of dismay in a language incomprehensible to them. One unobtrusively held a drawn dagger down at his side, and the other stood with left hand on right elbow and right hand resting, as if by chance, on the hilt of his sword.

  The door opened and Doctor Vytautas, swathed in a generous linen night-robe and a sable-lined pelice, came out onto the little back platform. He asked them a question. They shrugged; they pointed; after a moment Vytautas gathered the skirts of his robe in one hand and picked his way down the steps. The clack of his wooden soles on the steps came clearly to Hob; then Vytautas was on the snow, shuffling with short careful steps over to the little torchlit group.

  He worked his way to the center of the monks, and the boy saw him start and cross himself as he came upon the litter and what remained of Brother Athanasius on earth. He knelt and examined the bloody wreckage. The torches fluttered a bit as random gusts came down off the mountainside. Shadows danced over the corpse, giving it at one point a semblance of movement that made Hob draw back involuntarily.

  Vytautas conferred with Molly and Brother Abbot awhile, then hurried back to the wagon, his gait unsteady, his palm against his brow. He clattered up the steps and disappeared within, and now Hob could no longer ignore the pain seeping into his bare feet from the icy floor, the chill air fingering the blanket he wore cloakwise.

  He leaned out and pulled the shutter to, fumbled the latch pin into place, and felt his way along the wall back to his cot. A moment later he was snuggled in, lifting his feet to trap a fold of blanket under them, ducking his face under the cover
to warm himself with his own spent breath, slowly becoming comfortable.

  He was too young and too tired to fret about what he had seen. Around him were the thick stone walls of the monastery, outside were the formidable monks of St. Germaine: he was safe enough at this moment, and warm as well. He slept; but he dreamed, and in his dream was a cruel amber eye.

  CHAPTER 3

  THE NEXT MORNING HOB took the opportunity to hear Mass in the monastery chapel. Brother Athanasius had not yet been laid out and it would be a day before a requiem Mass was said for him, but a grim mood seemed to permeate the roughly dressed walls: the calls and responses were muted, the echoes falling away into shadow and silence. The monks stood somberly on the bare stone floor and Hob lingered near the back of the little chapel.

  Molly never set foot in a church of her own accord, although she would attend if it seemed unwise to refuse. Hob was unsure why this was. Molly would upon occasion say something that would utterly scandalize him, so uninterested did she seem in the question of her soul’s salvation. She had little piety and less to say about it, although she would speak as a good Christian around such as the monks, and let herself be known by the Christian nickname Molly, rather than the pagan Maeve. The monks were glad enough of her healing to ignore their own misgivings about her.

  Molly made no objection to Hob’s hearing Mass when it was at hand, as now, but he never saw her at Christian prayer when the caravan was by itself. Nemain was much the same. The two had their own secrets. Jack Brown, now, would cross himself at roadside shrines, but had a soldier’s rough indifference to church, except on the high feast days.

  After Mass Hob came out into the bailey, glad to see the sun. He went back to the men’s dorter and shook Jack awake, and together they made their way down to the kitchen to beg a little taste of something. They came away with a handful each of salt cod on stale rounds of bread and jacks of barley beer, which they took to the stables. They climbed atop a chest-high partition; this defined a half-room filled with heaped hay across the corridor from the stalled ox. There they sat, eating and drinking in a companionable silence. Hob watched with interest as the monks bustled about, mucking out the stalls and bringing in wooden buckets of icy water for the troughs.