So it proved now. Three bandits came at him, backing him against the side of the wagon, ranging themselves in a rough semicircle. Jack launched himself at the one to his right, the shield on his left arm giving some protection against the two banditti on his left. He ran at the outlaw, who bore a short heavy falchion and a targe much like Jack’s own, but without a spike. Jack came up to him and swung the hammer high. The bandit kept his eye on the hammerhead; he set his feet and shifted his targe to take the expected blow.
Jack stopped short, still holding the hammer aloft, and kicked savagely at the inside of the wolf’s-head’s knee. The bandit went down like a poleaxed steer, bellowing in pain from the torn joint, dropping his short curved sword and letting his shield sag. Now the hammer fell, and the bandit was defenseless before it, and was battered flat, and lay lifeless upon the ground.
In the instant after his hammer-blow landed, Jack sprang backward; he came to rest facing the remaining pair, his targe before his face. One of the men had a woodsman’s ax and from somewhere had procured a stolen shield, not the old-fashioned, body-sheltering, long teardrop shield, but the newer kite-shaped half-shield. He had scraped the paint from it, no doubt to conceal whose device had originally been on it, and it was down to the bare wood and the steel rim. The other had fastened a dagger to a two-foot length of ashwood, to make a crude kind of part-sword, and had a square shield of wicker, roughly constructed.
They were gathering themselves for a rush when Jack stepped in quickly, swinging the blunt end of the hammer down on the upraised kite shield. The shield held well enough, but the tremendous blow, delivered with all the power of Jack Brown’s body, damaged the bandit’s arm: it drooped, leaving his head and neck exposed. Jack leaped rightward, batting away the second man’s dagger-sword with his targe, and swung the hammer again at the wolf’s-head with the ax, but from the side. The crow-beak skimmed over the top of the drooping shield and caught the bandit in the temple, and he was dead before he dropped.
The last bandit backed against the little wagon with a thud, and Mavourneen looked around to see what had shaken the draw shafts. Jack closed in. The outlaw had passed that invisible interior boundary where all hope of prevailing has fled, and the combatant can see only the pain that advances upon him from his future. He pressed back against the little wagon, his wicker shield up under his chin, covering his throat; he was making little grunting thrusts with the awkward makeshift sword. His lips pulled back suddenly in an awful unwitting grin, a doglike baring of teeth against his oncoming doom.
Jack danced a little to set his feet properly, advancing with his targe held toward his quarry, then whirled the hammer in a roundabout swing that dipped at the last moment; the blunt head smashed into the bandit’s ankles and swept his feet from under him. The outlaw screeched something Hob could not make out, his voice high and strangled with his fear, and as he lay on his back threw first the wicker shield and then the dagger-sword at his implacable foe. Jack Brown banged them away with the targe, one after the other, but the bandit had by then rolled under the wagon to the opposite side and scrambled on hands and knees for the cover of the trees, happy to escape.
JACK RANGED UP AND DOWN beside the wagons, methodically killing or crippling one outlaw and then another, and then seeking a third, till Hob thought of Father Athelstan’s favorite quote from St. Peter, how Satan went about as a raging lion, seeking whom he might devour. The next instant he was ashamed for the comparison, and the instant after that, as a last cluster of arrows rattled against the wagon’s side, the roof, and the shield he held, he was too busy for thought at all.
BUT THAT WAS THE END of the attack; the arrows rapidly dwindled to nothing, there was no bandit to be seen, and the pilgrims had reached the safety of the wagons at last, clustering about Milo, who looked about at them curiously.
“Mistress Molly!” Aylwin called up in a voice taut as a strung bow, “Jesus’s sake, sithee tae puir Sawal; och, I prithee hasten!”
Molly was down from roof to wagon seat, and thence to the ground, in a moment. She hurried to the knot of men and women surrounding the supine form of Sawal, the pilgrim who had been knifed. The front of his clothing was soaked in red, and he had a little pink froth at the side of his mouth. She moved his garments aside, and spoke in rapid lilting Irish to Nemain, who darted into and out of the little wagon, returning with three of Molly’s sealed jars in her arms and some clean linen thrown over her shoulder. Molly set to work: she stanched the bleeding with some of the cloth, smeared salves from two of the jars on the deep wounds Sawal had taken midbody, bound his torso round with the rest of the cloth, and held the third jar to the wounded man’s lips. Sawal drank, then lay back, looking up aimlessly into the upper branches of the trees with frightened eyes. In a very short time his eyelids fluttered, then dropped, and he slept.
Molly directed his removal to the main wagon, where she secured him in her own bed, then left two women to watch him while she summoned Aylwin outside.
Hob had trailed along behind Molly since she had dismounted from the wagon, so to be ready should she need him. Now he heard her say to Aylwin, “We will not come to shelter before tomorrow, we going forward. But late though we were in taking the road yesterday, yet we reached the ford. Today is young. If we hasten back, it’s at the inn we’ll be before evening comes on, and Sawal may lie this night in a comfortable bed.”
“How lang mun he lie at inn, Mistress?” asked Aylwin.
She spoke low. “Friend Aylwin, be said by me: you must not be in hope of him. His bread is baked. I will ease his pain, but he will die at the inn.”
CHAPTER 9
HOB SET A RAPID PACE ON THE way back. They splashed across the ford and retraced their steps on the track they had taken before—they built no fire, but pressed on with feet aching from the cold water. Now they were heading northwest through the woodland, back toward the inn.
Despite the shock of the attack and Sawal’s sad fate, Hob felt the exhilaration of survival: sweet to be alive and young amid so much death. They were also on the path to the wondrous Margery. Hob was happy with Molly’s praise of him to Jack and Nemain, calling him “quick and bold” in his attack on Gold-Beard, and he had hope that she might repeat it where Margery might hear.
Abruptly Hob slowed. Ahead of him was an unusual sight: a badger abroad in the daytime, and in the coldest part of the year, when they slept a good part of the time in their snug setts. It scrambled from the brush at his left and crossed the road with its deliberate, rolling gait. It disappeared behind some brush for a moment but then Hob caught sight of it once more, crossing an open patch of snow, heading determinedly into the woods to his right.
He increased his pace, pulling at the rope a bit to encourage Milo to greater efforts. They had been walking for less time than it took to draw a hundred breaths when a flock of starlings burst from the trees, again on his left hand. They swarmed into an oak on the other side of the road, for a moment clothing it in false leaves, jostling for position on the branches and emitting a storm of clicks and whistles, and then took off again, soaring over the trees, heading east.
Hob moved steadily along; but he looked after the starlings for a while. Then he scanned the forest on his left hand, but little could be seen beneath the ancient trees.
The wind picked up a bit, and for a space Hob trudged along with his eyes on the trail just ahead and his hood held closed by his free hand. After a little time he looked up, and was surprised to see how closely the dark woods crowded the trail to east and to west. To his left, deep in tree-shadow, he caught a glimpse of movement—pale bulks sliding between black-barked trees.
A moment later they came into sight, perhaps twenty of them: a small herd of the wild white cattle of the North Country. These fierce giants could neither be herded nor tamed, only hunted. They wandered vast tracts of woodland in search of winter food, far up into Scotland, and never sought shelter from the most inclement weather, except perhaps to stand on the lee side of a wood in t
he worst of a storm.
A great shape trod boldly out into the path and turned to face them: the king bull, the only bull to mate with the cows, who held its position by force of body and ferocity of temperament. Hob found himself perhaps twenty paces from the long square-jawed face, the heavy dewlaps of the monarch. Its horns, thick and powerful, swept outward at a sharp angle and then curved in again. Each tip was poignant as an awl: Hob could think of nothing but what bitter wounds the hooking of those horn-ends would make, should the bull choose to attack. The boy stopped short; behind him he could hear the crunch of Molly setting the brake.
“Hob,” came Molly’s voice from behind him, “do you but stand easy a moment; there’s no harm in him for you.”
Hob breathed a little easier to hear this, but Milo was more of a skeptic. The ox swung its head away from the king bull’s glower and took an interest in the side of the road; stealthily it lowered its head, till its eyes dipped below the level of Hob’s shoulder: now the boy’s slight body occluded the sight of horned death. Milo was of a different tribe than the wild white cattle, and in any case had been robbed of all interest in the struggle to acquire a retinue of cows and hold it against lust-driven challengers, but plainly he wanted no misunderstanding to arise.
The patriarch stood in the road and glared arrogantly at Hob and Milo, while behind it its heavy-bodied brides, as well as the bachelor bulls it had vanquished, surged across the road, from one wing of the forest to another, left to right. When all had crossed it turned and trotted lightly into the forest gloom. The great beast was surprisingly agile, its tremendous musculature carrying it easily over the terrain with a springing step, almost a dancing gait.
Hob could hear that the pilgrims were beginning to catch up with the stopped wagons. Though they were downhearted and mostly silent, Hob could just hear their subdued muttering as they wondered about the reason for the halt, the sound swelling somewhat as more and more of them tramped up behind Jack’s wagon.
When the forest shadow had engulfed the last hint of the herd, Hob let out a sigh and set off once more. He set a quick pace, and for once Milo seemed uninclined to linger or stray. Soon the pilgrim voices trailed off again into silence.
“Hob, cease awhile,” said Molly, after they had gone along for a bit, and simultaneously she set the brake again. Behind her the other two wagons came to a halt. Molly swung down and went back to Nemain. Hob looked around at them, puzzled: he knew they wanted to get the wounded man to Osbert’s Inn as soon as they might. But Nemain set her brake, got down, and tied Mavourneen to the lead wagon. The two women walked to the western edge of the road and peered into the trees, heads cocked. They seemed to be more listening, or tasting the air, than actually looking.
Jack looked on patiently from the seat of the last wagon; the pilgrims began to come up and cluster beside him, asking why they had stopped. Jack spread his broad hands to indicate his ignorance. The mare took a pace to the side and began to paw in a desultory fashion at a small clump of desiccated grass, dead and frozen, poking up through the roadside snow; through the rumble of the pilgrims’ muttering, the rattling of the grasses beneath the mare’s hoof came clearly to Hob through the crisp air.
Finally Molly came forward again, and Nemain untied the little ass and threw the reins up to the seat; she put her hand into a loop and mounted the wagon in one agile bound. Her slim body seemed to Hob to fly from road to wagon, skirts flaring, effortless as a cat springing up to settle on a fireside bench.
“Is there danger, Mistress?” Hob asked, still gazing back along the little procession.
She looked off to the west and sighed. “It’s a strange feeling and no mistake, lad. I sense that there is something, yet I cannot grasp it. You have at whiles looked at the sun, and then away?”
“I— Yes, Mistress.”
“And what did you see when you looked away, and you just after looking at the sun?”
“It was like the sun, Mistress, but dark.”
“And it moving with you, and coming between yourself and the world for a while, and then fading.”
“Yes, Mistress, just so.”
“It’s a feeling like that that I have, and Nemain as well; something is to the west, or something should be to the west, and yet for all we can tell, there is nothing.”
“All the beasts and birds we have seen since we left the ford have been moving from west to east, Mistress, as though they cared not to be in the west.”
She looked at him in surprise. “It’s an eye you have in your head, Hob.” She gazed at him a long moment, then slipped her hand within his hood and patted his cheek. Her palm was warm against his skin, though she went ungloved on this cold day. “An eye you have in your head,” she said again. Then she turned and remounted the wagon seat. “Away on,” she called back along the convoy.
THE TRACK THEY WERE ON ran back through the peasants’ fields—today no one was to be seen—and ended at that road that, to the east, led to Bywood Old End; to the west it went past Osbert’s Inn and back toward Monastery Mount. It was late in the day when they turned leftward onto this road. Hob thought, I am hastening back to her, and despite the grim nature of their errand, an eagerness arose in his heart. He strained to see the inn that was so near, but a small patch of forest was between them and the inn’s clearing, and all he could see was the trees, and above and behind the grove, two or three red kites circling slowly, their cruel hooked beaks just visible at this distance.
The wagons creaked along, far too slowly for Hob; the pilgrims came trudging in the rear, their chatter silenced. He could hear behind him the tramp of their shoes, the thud of their staves on the hard dirt of the road, but nothing else for a while. Then the cold wind came sighing again through the tops of the trees; a rushing moan masked the sounds of the subdued travelers.
In a very short while they rounded a small curve and came again in sight of the inn. To Hob’s right came in the broad northern way; ahead lay the track back to Monastery Mount; on his left, the clearing and the inn. But something was amiss: the gates were ajar, and in the clearing before the walls was a group of villagers, the men all bearing flails, axes, billhooks, or scythes. The tools of the farm, but also the weapons of the peasantry.
There was a flurry of consultation in the group, and then a villager, not young but not old either, detached himself from the group and came with lagging step to meet Molly’s little convoy. He was well-known to Molly; doubtless this was why he had been delegated to meet her.
He came up to the wagon, a sturdy balding man, an ax trailing unheeded from his right hand.
“God save thee, Mistress Molly.”
“And you also, Luke,” she said warily. “What is amiss?”
“Inn’s been attacked, sithee, Mistress.”
“Att— Speak you, friend Luke: what has happened?”
Luke looked down at the ground. He spoke without raising his head.
“They’m all been killed, Mistress, all on ’em.”
Molly stood up on the seat and peered toward the inn. “All of them . . . All of them? But who . . . ?”
“Wild beasts or summat like: they be all tore up like.”
Hob put his hand out blindly and held to Milo’s harness.
“Was there no one that saw . . . ?”
“Nay, Mistress; some on us as come up this morning found gate open, sithee, and dogs dead. And ’twas only young Eadmund alive, what was t’ groom’s prentice, and he dyin’, and oot of all sense wi’ t’ pain.”
Over on the outer wall of the inn a crow alighted, then another. High above, the remorseless red kites made wide circles in the bright cold air.
“Did he speak at all? Did he say aught of what happened?”
“He were in terrible dolor, Mistress, and part of his face tore at, sithee. He were just chunterin’, verra low. ’Twere hard to hear ’im, an’ harder tae ken what he were on aboot: summat aboot a fox, he talked of nowt else for a time, but then he were just breathin’ heavy and sayin’
nowt, and then breathin’ light wi’ now and then a sigh, and then he died, right afore oor eyes.”
“A fox? And what did he say of a fox, at all?”
“That were t’ only word we could ken, Mistress; the rest was more grietin’ and moanin’, like, an’ once a fearsome scream.”
“And poor Osbert, so strong, and his sons, and his daughters, all gone?”
“Aye, Mistress, an’ a’ Master Osbert’s men as well, an’ a’ t’ guests. Two on ’em—t’ guests, sithee—two on ’em was belted knights, that might ha’ been grandmams for a’ good thae gowden spurs done ’em. And one were armed cappypie, Mistress, wi’ mail and a’, and t’other as had his sword in hand, but t’ hand nigh off above t’ wrist.”
The villager had a soft blurry voice, and he murmured his frightful news to Molly in hushed tones. Hob, holding to a strap against the ox’s warm hide and gazing at the gates to Osbert’s Inn, reflected on how pleasant the man’s voice was, and how the sun sparkled in the snow that covered the inn’s ridgepole. He felt like himself and not like himself. His thoughts seemed unable to settle, like the bright butterflies of last summer on a warm but windy day.
He began to walk toward the gates. He felt that he walked, and that he watched himself walk, all at once. Hob and his watcher came up to the wide-open outer gates, and now the devastation within the dog run came in view. The ten great black bodies lay this way and that. One had its chest torn out, but most had terrible long slashes along their sides and bellies. Something faster and stronger and more agile than they had opened them up, one after the other; and speedily, too, for they had fallen near one another. The whole pack working in concert had been unable to defend itself. Hob-the-watcher thought vaguely of one of God’s swift angels, flashing past a bit above the ground, his arm out to the side and a dagger in his flawless hand. The mastiffs’ entrails had spilled out onto the hard cold ground. Pools of dark ice spread out from the bodies: frozen blood.
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