Something Red

by Douglas Nicholas

  “I am a hedge queen now, truly!” she said. “Many’s the hedge I’ve slept beside here in England, and my rule extends to three wagons only. My lands are forfeit”—here her eyes darkened and the deep sweet purr of her voice roughened to an unpleasant snarl—“and my kin scattered, or worse. And it is true, I was not a grand queen like your English queens, but I was a queen in my own right as they are not, and a battle queen, and a chief to my clan. Someday I may return to Erin, and there gather up what kin may yet live, and find those who have shattered our clan”—she paused as if striving for discretion, but only an instant, for she was exhausted from the struggle against the storm, and she had drunk her share of Sir Jehan’s wine, and her cheeks were beginning to flush—“and shed blood. Be said by me, I will shed some blood.”

  At this, Sir Jehan cocked his head to one side and looked at her past his shoulder, as though he struggled to bring her into clearer focus. “I heard—away there in Ireland—I heard stories—fireside stories, mind you, fireside stories—of battle queens in ancient days; even women who taught war wisdom, and weaponcraft—even the skills of the body, leaping over shields and the like—taught them to warriors,” he said, dropping down into his seat again. He dipped a bread sop absently into a dish of frumenty, then put it down untasted on his trencher; he lifted his goblet of wine; he set it down again. “Trapping an enemy between crossed spear points . . . ”

  A page served him from a bowl: cabbage with gobbets of marrow. Sir Jehan looked at the trencher of cabbage; he reached for the salt cellar; he moved it a hand’s breadth to one side on the table. A moment later he moved it back. It was as though life’s candle burned so hot in him that he could not bear to be still for long, lest he be scorched. Abruptly he turned back to Molly. “But surely that was long ago—if ever, if ever—and I cannot see you, dear madam, wielding a weapon.” His smile flicked on again, and this time it stayed, and he sat grinning like one of his hounds, but with little humor in his eyes.

  “Oh, there are a few women yet in Erin who have mastered weaponcraft,” said Molly comfortably, settling back in her chair and sighing, all curves and heavy limbs. “And myself among them.”

  Hob was thinking of Molly atop the wagon, and what Sir Jehan would have said had he seen her, her skirt rucked up above her milky muscular calves, sending her black-fletched arrows humming into the woods; and yet, he thought as he looked at her, at ease and heavily elegant, it was hard to see it in her now.

  And because he was looking at her, as was Sir Jehan, he was just able to catch the flurry of movement: Molly’s hand blurred toward her waist and the ring-pommel dagger there and whipped the slim knife from its sheath, and in the same motion flung it down the room, as a gardener carelessly flicks a pebble away from the plot he is weeding, seemingly without looking, a spinning metallic flicker that flew along the hall and ended with a whup! dead in the pith of the pine target, a third of its blade buried.

  There was a sort of iron chord as every knight and most of the soldiers on guard duty tensed, with thumping of heels against the floor, or grasping of hilts, causing a rattle of scabbards; here and there was the whispery rasp-and-chime of long steel sliding out. Sir Jehan and Sir Balthasar were half up from their seats, hands on their own daggers. Yet Molly sat so relaxed and with so pleasant an expression, her empty hand still outstretched toward the target, that there was nowhere for their alarm and anger to go, and Sir Jehan sank back with a muttered curse and a dismissive wave at the guards. Sir Balthasar sat down more slowly, his face dark with suffused blood, and he did not take his eyes from Molly after that. She put her hand down and placidly picked at a stray thread on her gown.

  The target was fifteen yards away, and at an angle, and yet the dagger was strongly fixed in the soft center of the pinewood disk, although perforce at a slant.

  Sir Jehan had kept his broad smile, although his eyes no longer had any least bit of humor in them, and this, with his wide forehead and triangular face tapering to so sharp and prominent a chin, gave his countenance a singularly wolfish cast; he scanned Molly’s features hungrily, as though prepared to spring upon her, and to tear her thoughts from her.

  She gazed back at him blandly. He sat back a bit, and cleaned food from his dinner knife by wiping it on one of the pieces of stale bread provided for that purpose. He stuck it deftly into the salt, withdrew it with a small amount of salt on the flat of the blade, and sprinkled it over his cabbage. His movements were ostentatiously sedate, and Hob saw that his hand was quite steady.

  “A pretty thing to put in someone’s eye, madam,” said Sir Jehan in a frosty tone; he tipped his goblet to Molly. Dame Aline put a small hand almost to her eye before she stopped herself and turned the gesture into a smoothing of her wimple.

  Lady Svajone regarded Molly with evident admiration, her large gray eyes fixed on Molly’s hand, the slight tremor of her own hands stilled, her mouth in a little smile. Vytautas made a gracious gesture of mimed applause and bowed his head to Molly; the two Lietuvan esquires regarded her with a cool professional appraisal, as did the knights seated about the table.

  After that, Molly was treated with respect, although Sir Jehan could bring himself to address her only as “Lady Maeve,” and Molly gave no least sign of offense at it because, as she remarked to Jack and Hob later, “I am a queen now only of three wagons and the roads they wend upon, and in any case there is little I may do about it this night. If I can read the fall of crow feather aright, the winds will change direction, somewhere in the sennight to come.” The others of his household followed Sir Jehan in this matter of address, but otherwise showed her every courtesy. There was a certain awe and fascination following her dagger cast, and those who were in the hall at the moment told those who were not; the distance of the throw tended to increase by a yard or so with each retelling.

  THE REST OF THE MEAL proceeded without incident. At intervals Hob served a fresh course, or offered a fresh ewer of water and towel between courses. But the long day and the long evening were wearing down even Molly’s endurance, Nemain was pale and silent, and Hob was near exhaustion. Down at Jack’s table, Olivier and Goscelin and three or four others had already left for their sleeping quarters; Ranulf was drinking quietly, his eyes a bit glassy; and even as Hob looked, Roger put his head down on the table and began to snore softly, just audible to the pages’ bench. Jack himself, with his iron stomach, seemed unaffected, but even he was blinking a great deal, and gazing about him somewhat dreamily.

  At last, to Hob’s relief, Sir Jehan and his wife rose to take their leave; all stood, and then reseated themselves, but the meal was effectively over, and soon Hob, with Jack close behind, found himself happily stumbling upstairs toward his rest; ahead he could hear Molly and Nemain speaking in Irish, their voices echoing back down the turret stairwell.

  Once inside the solar they had been assigned, the door bolted, Molly got them settled for bed. A pair of serving-maids tapped at the door, sent by Lady Isabeau, but Molly sent them away, preferring privacy to service: she did not want such witness to the casual chatter between queens and serving-men, for so she had represented Jack and Hob.

  Soon the women had retired to the inner room, candles were snuffed, and Hob and Jack climbed into their cots. Jack spent perhaps five minutes, propped on one elbow, gazing into the dying fire, then abruptly lay down; a couple of deep breaths and he was asleep.

  Hob, exhausted but excited as well, his mind racing with new sights and sounds, lay watching the faint firelight play on the ceiling. He turned on his side, then rolled back.

  Jack was already snoring. Hob looked around, at the stout oak door to the solar, the walls finished with plaster, the little fireplace with its embers glowing softly. Behind the plaster of the outer wall was the stone of the keep. A shuttered window in this wall, deeply recessed, gave out on the bailey. The window, set with thin plates of horn, opened inward. Outside the horn window, the wooden leaves of the shutter were heaving with the wind against the latch, a muffled thudding.
Hob went to the window and put a knee on the deep sill—the wall was three feet thick at this point—and swung the horn window toward him. He climbed up fully into the window recess, leaned out to the shutter latch, and slipped the wooden tongue, holding the shutter open just a bit that he might look out, as he had at the monastery.

  But here he was much higher up from the ground. Through the whirl of snow and cloud the waxing moon, a day or two from the full, toiled to illumine the scene: the dark edge of a buttress that sprang out from the wall to Hob’s left was rimmed with silver. He could see that the storm was unabated, the snow piling and piling in drifts on roof and parapet. Far below in the bailey, torches shone in niches beside the doors of the stable and other outbuildings. Even in the niches the wind had them fluttering frantically, like so many golden flags.

  Hob closed and latched the wooden panels, shut the horn window, climbed down from the sill. He crept into his cot, drawing the bedclothes up over ear and chin. He thought of the storm, the walls, the gates guarded by armed men, even the stout door to the solar, and he thought happily: What could harm us here? What could reach us here?

  CHAPTER 15

  MORNING AT THE CASTLE. THE winds had died down toward daybreak, but soon began rebuilding in strength. The dim daylight, the constant voice of the storm, and the sheer fatigue of the last few days, left everyone in a not unpleasant lethargic state. Molly’s party slept late, weary to the bone from the struggle against the previous day’s storm, and no one troubled them except only the little page Hubert. He appeared with the compliments of Lady Isabeau and with several serving-men bearing trays with a breakfast of smoked herring, cheese, toast soaked in wine, so that they need not leave the solar even to eat.

  Molly had them set up a table in the outer room, and for most of that day they ate, made adjustments and repairs to clothing, and napped. Jack was sent out to the wagons for the harps in their leather casings, and returned dripping melting snow from his struggle across the bailey. Fragrant oils were brought forth, and the instruments cleaned, and then Molly and Nemain fell to tuning and practicing, for as Molly said, “It’s a good refuge that this castle will be to us. If we’re ever to make our way to Erin in time to come, and do there what we must, this so-arrogant lord may prove us a fine patron and a protector; and be said by me, we will have need of both.” She tested a silver string with her fingernail. “He’s after seeing that I have claws, but now, now he must see us fit to grace his table, for hasn’t he stopped just this side of calling me an impostor? It’s like a skittish new pup he is, and new to the lead, and what’s more soothing than a well-played cláirseach?”

  Hob she dismissed for the afternoon, that he might see some of the castle, with Hubert to guide him, from the dim storerooms on the first level, fragrant with the mingled scents of dried apples and garlic and smoked meats and salted cod, to the dovecotes clinging to the highest level of the keep, overlooking the bailey. Hubert showed him how there was access to the doves from within the keep, and the separate structure that housed the carrier pigeons. They climbed to the rooms, just beneath the roof, where the gutters channeled rainwater into great cisterns: here rainwater was pooled with water hoisted up from the well, and from these cisterns water was sent down through the castle’s lead pipes.

  Passage from level to level was by winding stone stairs set in turrets embedded in the walls of the keep; the wedge-shaped treads, narrow in the center and wide at the walls, gave Hob trouble till he mastered the trick of them. Many of the things that might interest boys—the forge, the stables, the armory—were outbuildings, down in the bailey, backed up against the curtain walls. The storm was deemed too dangerous for anyone but those who had necessary duties to fulfill to venture outside. There was a real danger that the young and the weak might lose their way in the great yard, blinded by the snowstorm, freezing to death behind a wall of wind-driven white, a few yards from shelter.

  But Hubert threw open the shutters in a first-floor passageway. “There’s the bailey,” he said, as Hob strained to see through the shifting white veils, “and yon outbuilding is the smithy, and next it is the armory, and—”

  Here he broke off to scowl at three children, two boys and a girl, all under six years of age, who had burst around a corner, chasing one another and screaming with laughter. They slowed to an abashed walk when they saw the august Hubert, himself all of eleven years or so, and vanished down a stairway.

  Hob and Hubert turned back to the window. Between gusts of snow white as a bride’s wimple, the boys could glimpse guide ropes strung from door to door, crisscrossing the bailey, with shielded torches planted in the snow beside each rope line, making lines of fire from outbuilding to keep, and from outbuilding to outbuilding. Very few men ventured to cross the bailey—and they were all men, for it was hard physical work to struggle through the drifts, and easy to become lost if one’s hand slipped from the rope during a white blast from the storm.

  It brought home to Hob, leaning there on the windowsill, how difficult it would be to leave the castle till the storm had abated.

  ABOUT MIDAFTERNOON a small page ran up to them and told them that Molly had summoned Hob to attend her in the solar. When he and Hubert arrived, somewhat breathless, at the private rooms, he found Molly, Nemain, and Jack ready to descend to the hall. There was little urgent business for the knights and their ladies during these cold months—no campaigns, no crops, no courts to preside over, only the seasonal holidays, and with a storm like this preventing even hawking and hunting, the castle’s high-table folks usually gathered in the hall to amuse themselves. Dinner ran into supper, and Father Baudoin began to include sermons on gluttony and drunkenness in addition to his favorite topics of sloth and lechery.

  In the hall, small groups clustered here and there on benches, performing such small tasks as could be done quietly indoors. Men worked on harness; women knit or worked with distaff and spindle; the archers were back at their target, throwing their iron arrowlets. The archers were betting on each throw, and small coins changed hands frequently. There was a constant hum of conversation, and with it the clink of tools, occasional laughter, low cries of triumph or dismay from the archers.

  At the high table sat the household knights and the castle’s guests, drinking spiced wine, telling stories, plucking small pastries from trays brought round by servants. Hob took his seat on the pages’ bench and inhaled happily. A rich scent, compounded of wine, spiced meats, and baked bread, mingled, not unpleasantly, with the unguents and perfumes with which highborn women anointed themselves.

  The chevalier Estienne was reciting a long poem in recent circulation, great gouts of which he had committed to memory. Hob found it almost impossible to follow the pure Norman French, his difficulty compounded by the chevalier’s Continental accent. Molly seemed to find it perfectly clear, and laughed delightedly several times at what appeared to be humorous passages. Occasionally there was a verse or two of song, embedded in the poem, which the French knight sang in a pleasant flexible tenor. Nemain sat with an enigmatic expression, but Hob knew her well enough to tell that she was paying no attention.

  Hubert translated bits here and there, in between his duties, enough to let Hob determine that it was a tale of a young Christian noble, a Saracen slave girl, their love, and their difficulties and adventures, some amusing, before her conversion and their marriage, but Hob found that a great deal of the humor eluded him.

  Late in the afternoon Dame Aline proposed a game of chess. Dame Aline, a great enthusiast if an indifferent player, was as pleased to watch others as to play herself; when Lady Isabeau further suggested a tourney, the castellan’s wife immediately sent pages for two boards and two sets of chess pieces, had tables set up by the hearth, and divided those who were interested into two groups. The one who remained undefeated from each group would play the other.

  Sir Jehan had two fine sets of chessmen, one from the south of Italy, very skillfully carved in elephant ivory, the queens reclining on thrones with three c
ushions, arched backs, decorated armrests. The other set was French, of deer bone, lacking the skill of the Italian carving but still elaborate. Wooden pieces, much more crude, filled the three or four positions where the originals had broken.

  Lots were drawn, and Molly was matched first against Sir Walter, who said little as was his wont; he contemplated the board with his elbow propped on the table and a large hand covering his mouth, as she steadily destroyed his forces.

  In the other group’s first match, Dame Aline, faced with Sir Estienne, prevailed despite several mistakes midgame; there was some whispered jesting about an excess of Continental chivalry on the French knight’s part. Dame Florymonde defeated her handily, and persisted as champion through several rounds, till Sir Tancred overcame her.

  Hob had a good view of the games’ progress, although he understood little of how it was played. He was kept busy refilling Molly’s winecup; Molly as always drank deeply, although there was little apparent effect on her, except perhaps heightened color and a readiness to laughter. One of the giant Irish hounds had come and put its heavy head on her thigh, rolling its eyes upward and sideways to watch her face. She sat and played chess with one hand, while the other toyed with the monster’s ears.

  Eventually Molly was left with Sir Balthasar as the last opponent on her side; the other team had come down to Sir Jehan and Sir Alain, the brother of Tancred. Molly sat back and took a pastry from an attendant page, and Sir Balthasar set down his wine and came over to the hearthside chess tables.

  Dame Aline leaned toward Molly and said, with mock seriousness, “Madam, ’ware that he does not bang upon the table when losing, and so upset the pieces, and so escape the battle.”

  Hob looked quickly at the dread castellan and saw to his astonishment a meek, almost abashed, grin on the dark hard features, and a rolling of his eyes toward the ceiling. “Aline . . . ” he began, and then just shook his head.