Sir Balthasar took his place opposite Molly and picked up the die to roll for first move; the chair creaked beneath his bulk.
“The bane of all chairs,” said Dame Aline, with a merry laugh. Sir Balthasar gave her a look of mock ferocity.
“Perhaps a new charge on his shield: a broken chair, sable, on a field of or,” said Lady Isabeau, sober-faced, with not a quirk of the lips to indicate a jest. Dame Aline began to giggle. A moment later Lady Isabeau added, “Le Chevalier de les Chaises.”
But this was too much for Dame Aline, who looked from her husband to Lady Isabeau’s expressionless face and back again, and exploded with helpless laughter.
Determinedly Sir Balthasar rolled, producing a five; Molly threw a three. At this time the combatant with the first move chose the color of his pieces: the castellan chose white, and Molly reached for those stained a deep dark brown.
There was a moment or two when there was just the clack of the deer-bone pieces being set in place on the board. Then: “If he is hard on chairs, what must he be upon a mattress?” said Lady Isabeau in a musing tone, with the same sober innocent pondering expression.
This set Dame Aline off again, and finally she managed to gasp, “I have a great deal of sisterly feeling for yon chair,” before becoming utterly overcome with merriment.
At this point even staid elderly Dame Florymonde pressed her napkin to her lips; her face grew red and her eyes began to tear, while little snorts and gasps of laughter escaped from behind the cloth.
Sir Balthasar looked to Sir Jehan with a helpless expression. The Sieur de Blanchefontaine said, “Nay, brother, I flee this field of battle; I confess myself a caitiff knight; you must fight yourself free of these ferocious women.”
Hob found it difficult to reconcile the ease and good humor of the two women around the two knights, who at other times conveyed such an impression of menace. Sir Balthasar seemed wrought of stone and iron, Sir Jehan of wind-whipped fire. Yet if these men were so evil, would their wives be so calm and gay?
Sir Balthasar opened a blunt and brutal attack; to Hob, who was unfamiliar with the rules, it seemed that a tide of white players poured down the center of the board during the first double handful of moves; then, a short while later, a sort of hunter’s net of somber pieces snapped shut on the mareschal’s assault, and he was rapidly reduced to staring at the board in dismay.
“She has caught you, husband!” cried Dame Aline, with disloyal glee. Sir Balthasar rose, shaking his head ruefully, and drank wine, first lifting his goblet to Molly in acknowledgment.
There was a brief respite for pastries and spiced wine, the scent of cinnamon tickling Hob’s nose; an elaborate jest was told by young Sir Tancred, involving two maids and a blacksmith, enjoyed by all except Father Baudoin; and at last the final conflict was to begin, between Molly and the victor of the other group, Sir Jehan himself.
Sir Jehan took his place more warily than had Sir Balthasar, his gaze rapidly flicking back and forth from the board to Molly’s face. They threw, and this time Molly had the better of the toss.
She had first move and her choice of colors; once again she took the darker pieces. She opened with two subtle probes, and Sir Jehan countered as delicately. Moves began to come less and less often; the game became increasingly complex. The slow entanglement of the pieces, the near stasis, and his own ignorance of the game began to tax Hob’s attention, and his eye wandered about the room.
A wordless growl from Sir Jehan brought his eyes back to the board. Molly had taken one of Sir Jehan’s castles. Sir Jehan moved his hand to the board, moved it back, then darted forth and slid his bishop three squares—at this time the bishop’s limit—along a path of diamonds. Immediately Molly captured a knight. Sir Jehan became very still, but his thumb turned the rings on his fingers, a mindless habit. Soon Molly took two more pieces, and Sir Jehan’s game collapsed. The Sieur de Blanchefontaine looked at Molly and then at the board, as if in disbelief, but only for a scant few moments, hardly noticeable. He then drew a deep breath and congratulated Molly courteously, and rose somewhat stiffly from his seat. He reseated himself at the main table and drank slowly, lost in thought.
Molly was acknowledged winner of the tourney. The knights seemed surprised, but Hob was not. He had come to the conclusion that Molly could do almost anything. The chevalier Estienne composed a few verses in Norman French in honor of Molly’s accomplishment, which Hubert, that critic and veteran of many castle dinners, adjudged barely adequate, detailing his complaints to Hob in a whisper.
SO THE AFTERNOON wore into evening. Members of the company came and went, and gradually began to assemble again for the evening meal. Lady Svajone, absent all day, made her appearance, as always attended by Doctor Vytautas and her two esquires.
They settled her in her usual place, swaddled in a cloak of undyed wool. On the cloak’s bosom was a rayed circle, worked in red and yellow thread, and below it a tree, cunningly rendered in brown and green. A repeated pattern of sinuous lines at the tree’s base suggested vegetation. Below the tree, echoing the rayed sun above, was the crescent moon, outlined in light and dark blue strands.
On her wrist, all bone and dry loose white skin, was a silver bracelet studded with smaragds, glints of green in the light from fireplace and candle; her hand and arm were so tiny that the bracelet seemed in danger of falling off at any moment. Around her neck, visible whenever the cloak fell open, a string of amber beads glowed against a cotehardie of darkest green.
She seemed somewhat frailer than the day before. She leaned across the table to talk to Molly, who bent to hear; but her voice was so faint that Hob could hear nothing of what was said.
The dinner that night went much as it had the previous night, except that Hob was introduced to the delights of mutton gallimaufry, which had proved uninteresting to the diners at the main table, and which Hubert had managed to secure almost intact for the pages’ bench. The dish, composed of mutton and onions, chopped fine and stewed in verjuice and butter and white ginger, provided such a welter of unfamiliar flavors for Hob that he regretted finishing his share, and fell to licking his fingers.
When most of the table had been cleared except for sweetmeats and pastries, and the serious drinking had begun among the knights, Molly offered to provide some music from her native land, a suggestion that found favor with the company, except perhaps for Father Baudoin, and perhaps the castellan—Sir Balthasar’s scowl was so habitual that it was no longer a reliable indicator of his mood.
Molly signaled to Jack, who left the lower tables and vanished into the turret stairway. A few moments later he returned with the two harps, one under each arm. He set them down some little distance from the fire, and arranged two small benches near one another.
Molly and Nemain took their seats by the harps. Each took up a cláirseach, Molly the larger and Nemain one about two-thirds the size of her grandmother’s. The harps were of willow wood, the wood carved with interlaced ribbonwork that terminated in hounds’ heads; the brass pegs were strung with gold and silver wire. There was a bit of final adjustment of the tuning, as some strings had expanded from the warmth of the hearth, and then they were ready.
Molly settled her harp on her knees, leaned it upon her right shoulder; Nemain took a moment longer to arrange herself, then nodded to her grandmother. Molly led off and Nemain followed. The women had rings on every finger: Molly’s were all of silver, save one that looked to be of iron, on the fourth finger of her right hand. Nemain’s were of gold, and the firelight toyed with them prettily as her fingernails struck the gleaming strings.
The two harps rang through the hall; tinkling ripples from each overlapped in a way Hob could never quite follow. The music of each seemed distinct, yet each agreed with the other in some fashion. After the harps had made play for a while, the women began to sing. It was a song Hob had heard them sing many times, in wayside inns, by woodland campfires, and each time more ensorcelling than the last. Nemain had told him it was a song in pra
ise of the moon.
Now he sat and listened in the suddenly hushed hall. Lady Isabeau leaned forward eagerly. Sir Jehan leaned back and turned his head aside and then watched from the sides of his eyes. Even the mareschal was attentive. The pages held off for a bit. One after another, the wolfhounds sank their heads on their front paws; one sighed ostentatiously; they watched the singers, rolling their eyes toward Sir Jehan now and then to reassure themselves that all was as it should be.
Nemain’s young voice, clear and high, entered a bit after Molly’s, and twined about the elder woman’s deep sweet singing, as vines in leaf climb out along a sturdy branch, winding about, adding a light grace to the dark strong tones that bore the strange main melody. The two voices, now diverging, now chiming together, each by turn drawing ahead of the other or lagging behind, conjured an image in Hob’s mind, startling in its clarity: the wind piping through ancient stones arranged on a bare hilltop; the moon rising over the trees of the surrounding forest; the scent from the slopes of the hill, covered with rippling purple heather, black in the moonlight; the shadows of the stones reaching, reaching, far down the perfumed hillside.
Whether because of the late hour, or the exalting quality of the music, the two women sat cloaked in beauty: Queen Maeve and young Queen Nemain. Nemain in particular drew Hob’s eye: with her face grave in concentration, lit more strongly along one side by the flickering fireplace, she seemed to Hob more as a woman than a child, if only for this moment. Her skin had cleared, and was white as the drifts of snow outside; her hair glowed as ruddy as the cooler embers at the edge of the fire, and when she glanced his way, her eyes caught the fireglow, green as the smaragds in Lady Svajone’s bracelet.
The song ended; the music died away. For a moment all that might be heard was the crackle and spit of the flames playing about the logs in the great fireplace. Everyone had been leaning forward, save Sir Jehan and Father Baudoin. Now there was a general sigh and a shifting of position. Only the priest seemed unaffected, sitting well back in his chair and sipping fretfully at his cup. Either the wine within or what he had heard displeased him, for he sat with lips compressed and eyes slitted.
But Sir Jehan seemed genuinely pleased. “Oh well played, delightful, mesdames, delightful.” And for once he did not have a mocking edge to his voice, for once he smiled with his eyes as well as his mouth.
Hubert nudged Hob, gave a slight upward incline of his chin toward the high table. Sir Tancred, who looked to be about thirty, sat gazing at Molly with an open admiration that bordered on the ardent, despite the difference in their ages. As they watched, he raised his goblet and offered a salute to skill and beauty. The company joined him in the toast; thereafter through the evening he watched Molly in a fashion that was just this side of impudent.
THE FOUR FILED into the solar; Jack bolted the door behind them. Hob and Jack put down the harps beside the door, and Hob began to put them back in their leather covers. Molly disappeared into the inner room, and Jack went to pull out the bedding from a niche in the wall. He began to set up the cots for Hob and himself with a soldier’s practiced movements.
Nemain turned to Hob, who was hunkered down beside the first harp, pulling the drawstrings closed on the cover. He glanced up at her, unaccountably shy: he had never seen her look so poised; he had never seen her dressed so finely; he had never seen this cool, haughty stranger before. He gazed in consternation at the calm blankness of her face for two or three heartbeats, and then, slowly, she pushed her dainty pink tongue out between her lips, and just as slowly crossed her eyes.
Gales of laughter echoed from the plastered walls of the solar. Jack turned from his task, shaking his head and smiling in sympathy, but he had seen nothing and was unsure what the jest might be.
From the inner room came Molly’s voice: “It’s pleased I am to have such a pair of merry jesters with me, but we’ll need the harps away, and yourselves out of yon finery, and some of us are old and stiff, and we perishing with weariness, and must have ourselves some rest.” She sounded, as always, anything but old and tired. Still, it was a long time before the two young people could settle to their tasks: just as quiet seemed to be taking hold, a snort or gasp would set off another round of giggles, poorly smothered.
Eventually, everyone was abed; the snow hissed its lullaby, and they settled down to sleep.
* * *
HOB DREAMED OF NEMAIN.
On this night, at peace and fairly safe once more, his prayers said, drifting toward sleep, Jack Brown’s snoring bulk between his cot and the door to the corridor, he lay thinking of Margery. He found that he could not quite remember the exact configuration of her face; he could not quite remember how she dressed. He could recall only a general impression, sparked by details of her person: her brown curls, her dark eyes with their heavy lids, the flare of her hip. He tried to see her exactly at the moment that she had paused at his table, or fastened up the sling for the rescued baby, but he could not.
Hob felt a sense of panic that Margery was dying to him a second time. It brought him up partway to a sitting position. After a bit he sank down again. He lay there, disconsolate, watching the faint glow of the fire’s embers play across the plastered walls. He closed his eyes, and thought of the inn as it had been, and their short time there. Soon thought grew tangled, and memories of the inn and memories of the priest house came to him in odd combinations, although beneath everything was a sorrow, deep and unchanging, like the drone strings of the symphonia that sang beneath the melody. Then he drifted into dream, and the dream was not of Margery, but of Nemain.
Afterward he could remember little of the dream: he recalled that he was aware of her presence but could not see her clearly. There was only a blurred sense of white and red, and a challenging green gaze, and smooth wet skin beneath his fingertips, and—an echo of the journey through the storm—the warm scent of her unwashed body. There came a burst of pleasure so intense that it jolted him awake, and he lay there dazed and disoriented in the darkness, while a series of diminishing pangs, ineffably sweet, rippled through his flesh.
As he came more fully awake, he became aware that his thighs were soaked: a thick clinging wetness that seemed everywhere. He had been told to expect it, and he knew enough to know what had happened, and that his boyhood was over, and his manhood begun.
He sat up again, and threw off the blanket. He managed to pull on his new shoes and a long overshirt, and, half-asleep, picked his way around Jack’s cot, drew the door bolt and the latch, and let himself out into the corridor. In the garderobe, he contrived to dry himself off with handfuls of straw. When he relieved himself he was surprised at the near-painful delight, as urine burned its way along still-sensitive channels.
He went back out into the corridor. A rushlight flickered in a bracket on the wall, the only movement. A quick rinse of his hands at the water basin that Hubert had shown him, the water painfully cold, and then he made his way blearily back down the passage to the solar.
A shutter rattled with the wind at the end of the corridor. As he drew near the solar door, he could hear quiet voices. Sir Balthasar, who as castellan was responsible for the castle’s safety, would not station anyone on the walls in such ferocious weather, but the guardrooms in the towers had a night watch, and the corridors had wakeful guards who walked about in irregular patterns. Two of them were just around the turn of the corridor; Hob could clearly see their shadows thrown on the wall. The conversation, half-heard, seemed to involve the exploits of one of the two guards, a maid named Marie or Cherie, the maid’s father and his disapproval, a little-used storeroom where lovers might meet. Hob slipped back into the solar and closed the door as silently as possible. He shot the bolt and climbed back beneath the covers.
As he stretched out beneath the woolen blankets, a faint shiver of pleasure ran between his legs, another ghost of the paroxysm just past; but soon thereafter he felt dark eddies of sleep come washing toward him. Before he succumbed, he had time to think—not in so many words
, but vaguely, incoherently—that he had now joined the guard outside with his low-voiced boasts, and Roger with the woman Lucinda so impatient for his return, and mighty Jack himself, who strode forward so eagerly when Molly summoned him to her wagon: joined them in some longed-for guild fellowship—“You men,” he could hear Molly saying to him last summer in the clearing, when he had, for all that, still been a boy. “You men.”
CHAPTER 16
HOB REMEMBERED LITTLE OF the third day and evening that they spent at the castle. He and Jack went with Hubert to hear Mass in the little chapel within the keep. They stood with members of the castle household in the back of the unheated chamber; to the front Hob could just see Sir Walter and Sir Archibald. Father Baudoin said the Mass, and though he was still dour of expression and his shoulders were stiff with tension, his voice sang out the Latin phrases in a clear and even melodious tenor.
The day and evening passed much as had the preceding two days: games with Hubert in the afternoon, riddles and feasting and games in the evening among the adults. It was the feast, and the salt-cod dish that he tasted for the first time, and the corridor in the nighttime, that he recalled in later years.
The folk at the high table were growing comfortable with one another on this third night, and there was laughter and some singing; there was a contest in which a few lines of poetry were recited by one guest, and the next guest had to add a line, and so forth; and amusing anecdotes were told by the better-traveled among the company, notably Sir Estienne, who had fought in Spain, and had been to Rome as well, and had seen the Holy Father.
The dishes followed one after the other, the wine flowed easily, and the pages’ bench enjoyed an abundance of cast-off food.
Hubert had collected some spilled salt and put it aside on a trencher; the lads experimented with a pinch in this dish and a pinch in that, whether it was needed or not. In addition, there was a nearly untouched dish of salt-cod mortrews: the fish pounded, mixed with stock and eggs and crumbled bread, and the resulting dumpling poached. Hob ate his share with gusto. The older page, Giles, had brought in some snow to mix with the younger pages’ wine, and Hob found the wine cooled with snowmelt just the thing to quench his salt-driven thirst.
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