Something Red

by Douglas Nicholas

  This evening passed easily, and even Lady Svajone seemed in better spirits, while the elderly Sir Archibald, having drunk rather more than usual, displayed a hitherto unexpected talent for bawdy riddles, till Dame Florymonde insisted that he stop, although she had laughed as heartily as any at the table. The company retired in a good mood, and Hob, trudging up the turret stair behind Molly and Nemain, found himself quite ready for bed.

  He awoke from a troubled sleep. Had there been a rapping at the door, or a voice calling, or was that in a dream? He lay and listened to Jack’s snoring. The wind for once had abated; the shutters were motionless. He was still half in the grip of a dream, and the chamber was dark, the fire sunk to barely glowing ash.

  He became aware of an uncommon thirst: the wine and the salted dishes at Sir Jehan’s table. Salt! Hob had rarely had such free access to it in his short life. He rose and gained the door without incident, but found himself oddly reluctant to draw the bolt. Still, he was parched. He slid the bolt back quietly and stepped out into the corridor. Tonight he could hear no sentries, near or far. He went down to the fountain and drank thirstily from his cupped palm for what seemed a long time.

  He turned to go back, and hesitated. The corridor stretched away, silent, flickering in the light of two torches set some distance from one another; shadows pooled in the corners and at the entrance to the turret stairwells. The silence began to seem malevolent, and the corridor looked like a trap. He forced himself to take a step, and another, till he gained the door to the solar. He made himself look up and down the passage. What was wrong? Something was not as it should be: the very air seemed thick and tasteless; the light from the torches had unpleasant orange undertones; the flickering shadows almost made shapes against the walls.

  He ducked inside and shot the bolt home. He crawled into his cot. He lay there, surprised and dismayed at the strange atmosphere that ruled this night, and he thought that he would sleep no more before morning. But he was thirteen, and healthy, and in what seemed only a moment or two it was morning, and Jack bustling about, and gray daylight leaking under the bottom of the shutters.

  CHAPTER 17

  THE NEXT DAY HOB HAD ALmost forgotten the odd quality of the night before. He and Hubert and Giles heard Mass, Father Baudoin’s tenor echoing from the stone flags of the chapel floor. Later they threw a wooden ball back and forth in an unfrequented corridor on the third level of the keep. After last night’s relative calm, the storm had worsened again, and Hob could hear the wind howling around the corners of the great stone building, the snap of ropes worked loose from the pulleys used to haul freight to the upper levels of the keep.

  Perhaps because of the intrusive din of the gale or because of the continued gloom of the hallway, the shutters having been made fast against the wind, the three lads played with less than their usual enthusiasm. The ball flew back and forth along the corridor, Hob and Hubert facing the larger Giles. Finally Hubert missed a catch, and the ball landed and bounced with several loud clacks down along the corridor.

  A woman of about forty years came through a nearby doorway, her arms full of bedding, and scolded them for making so much noise as she passed. The pages led the way down a curving stair to an alcove one level down; Giles produced a die and they played at throwing for straws for a while, but this soon palled. The afternoon passed slowly; an oppression hung over the lads’ spirits, and Hob, who had delighted in Hubert’s company on the previous few days, was relieved when summoned to attend Molly and Nemain.

  THE MEAL THAT EVENING went much as others had on the previous evenings, except for an indefinable heaviness to the mood; not quite melancholy, but far from the merry banter of the day before. Dish followed dish, and still conversation languished.

  There was a back-billow of smoke from the fire, and at once the hall took on a bluish haze. The fireplace had a flue that ran straight through the keep wall and into two vents, one on each side of a buttress. Servants ran to block the vent on the windward side, leaving the leeward vent open; others opened a shutter on each side of the hall, to clear the air. From the pages’ bench, Hob could see slantwise through the open window. Outside, the snow had ceased for the moment, gaps appeared in the wide wall of clouds, and the moon, now full, had just risen above the rim of the curtain wall.

  In a moment the hall had cleared of its smoky haze, and the cold air pouring in had become unpleasant. Lady Svajone had recoiled when the shutters were first opened, and a shudder had run through the slight frame. Doctor Vytautas made a gesture to Gintaras; the tall esquire turned and went into the passageway to the kitchen, returning at once with a camlet cloak that they had brought down with them from their quarters. Vytautas and Azuolas wrapped it about her, but she still seemed distressed. She put one frail hand on the table edge, and held tight as though to quench the slight shivering that was just apparent, despite the warmth of the camel’s-hair garment.

  But now servants hastened to close and fasten the heavy shutters, and within a few breaths the warmth of the fire began to reassert itself. The tiny Lietuvan withdrew her hand from the table and tucked it beneath her cloak. Azuolas tried to interest her in a sugared pastry.

  Something had curdled in the atmosphere of the great hall. A further restlessness, a sense of unease, seemed to seep into the air through the walls. The cat, once more in its favored perch in the window recess, began to back up against the shutter, its ears flat and its eyes wide. After a moment even this refuge would not suffice, and it dropped with a small bang onto the table below, leaped to the floor, and scuttled along the wall till it disappeared through an archway near the dais.

  The five huge Irish dogs had gathered in a knot near the fireplace, shifting place uneasily from time to time. This caught Sir Jehan’s restless eye, and he watched them for a bit, scowling.

  “Gruagh!” called Sir Jehan. This was his favorite, the pack’s leader, the largest of the five—its name signifying “giant” in Irish. It stood slowly and paced toward him, ears and shoulders drooping and tail tucked beneath its hindquarters. A couple of yards from the table it stopped and sat down suddenly.

  “Gruagh!” said the knight again. The dog got up; stood irresolutely for a moment, then bolted back to the hearth, where it huddled again with its fellows. “Damn you,” muttered Sir Jehan.

  One of the grooms who had bathed the dogs earlier got up from a bench in the lower hall and came up to the giant hound. He put a hand between the braided leather collar and the dog’s powerful neck, and tugged, urging it toward the high table. The wolfhound dug in its long legs. Its eyes slitted, its ears went back, and it showed the groom its forest of gleaming teeth.

  The man stepped back quickly and looked at Sir Jehan. The knight made a wordless noise of disgust, and gestured to the groom to return to his seat.

  Hob saw that an uneasy awkward silence had fallen upon the high table. Lady Svajone pushed listlessly at her pastry; Doctor Vytautas sat grim and preoccupied. The others at the table also showed signs of the increasingly strange atmosphere.

  Outside, the wind returned with force, and somewhere in the recesses of the keep a loose shutter was swinging open and closed, each swing producing a muffled boom at irregular intervals: a noise not loud, but one that gnawed at the nerves.

  Lady Isabeau’s still beauty now looked less like an ivory figurine, and more like an image on a tomb. Only little Dame Aline made attempts at jest for a time, but gradually even her high spirits succumbed to the general air of dull anxiety, and eventually she gave up her attempts at conversation, and sank into a kind of appalled silence.

  Sir Jehan’s fidgets increased; he made as though to eat more, but hesitated; at last, as though out of patience with something, he threw down his napkin upon the table, took his wife’s hand, and made to rise. The other men stood politely and bowed. Sir Jehan and Lady Isabeau said their good-nights and retired through the archway that led past the kitchen.

  The meal resumed, but conversation was scant. Soon Lady Svajone’s face began to
take on a sheen of perspiration, and she moved restlessly. Whether from the woodsmoke or the icy drafts from the window, she was evidently in some discomfort. Vytautas turned to her and took her wrist; the two esquires tensed. A look of deep concern ran among the three men, and they began making preparations to retire. The doctor murmured apologies to the company on the dais. The esquires helped her up, and half-supported her as she tottered from the hall.

  Hob just caught the glance that leaped between Nemain and her grandmother: a stony blank stare, whose very lack of expression, between those two who so often smiled on one another, marked it for Hob as some form of warning. A moment later Molly arose, and Nemain after her, close as a shadow. Sweeping her gaze over Jack and Hob, so that those two felt compelled to rise as well, Molly made her excuses to the company and left the hall.

  THE MOMENT THEY HAD ENTERED the outer of the two rooms set aside for their use, Molly turned to Nemain.

  “It is here, is it not?” she asked her granddaughter.

  “It is here,” said Nemain.

  Molly turned away at once and stamped into the inner room, Nemain and Jack and Hob trailing slowly behind her, as the ocean trails up the strand, following the moon.

  Once within the inner room, Molly stood a moment in immobile thought. Then she bade Nemain and Hob to remain, and taking Jack by the arm, drew him back out to the entrance room, and closed the door behind them.

  Hob turned in puzzlement to Nemain. “What is here?”

  Nemain said, “The bane of Osbert’s Inn.” Then she added, unhelpfully, “We’re just after feeling it, in the hall.”

  “In the hall? You felt that they were here? The ones who, who killed Marg— The folk at the inn?”

  “Aye,” she said, but distractedly: she was looking at the door to the outer room, where Molly’s and Jack’s voices could be heard, but indistinctly.

  Hob was stunned. It was as though the castle had been turned inside out. The stout walls that rose about them, the locks, the armed men, changed from haven to snare, and the more tightly sealed the fortress was, the tighter they were caught.

  The door opened, and the two adults entered. Molly looked grim, and Jack subdued. Jack closed the door firmly behind them. The clack as the latch engaged sounded like a poacher’s bent-branch snare snapping tight.

  CHAPTER 18

  MOLLY WAS PACING THE FLOOR before the fire. Nemain sat on a stool beside the fire, watching her grandmother. They were comparing their thoughts and perceptions, picking at the mystery, but again it was all in English.

  Jack Brown and Hob were seated on a bench against the wall. Ever since Molly had spoken to the dark man, something was different about him. Hob tried to watch him without being seen to be watching. What was it? The normally stoic Jack now presented a serious, even a worried, countenance. This was not surprising, given their extraordinary circumstances, but beneath the concern was a furtive air foreign to Jack, openhanded Jack, kindhearted placid Jack. It was almost an air of guilt; and here and there beneath that, far down, glints of a hard glee.

  Jack turned sideways and stretched his length on the bench, and put a brawny arm across his eyes, as though settling for sleep. It was hard to tell if he was beginning to doze, or yet listening to the discussion. Hob looked away. His eyes roamed idly around the room, but he followed the women’s debate keenly.

  Jack Brown had bolted the outer door to the rooms before coming into the inner room, and closed the inner door as well, another barrier against eavesdroppers. Jack had also reached up and twitched the door cloth across on its rod, so that the door was covered. The door cloth, a tapestry depicting a hunting scene, was there to forestall drafts, but had the additional virtue of muffling what was said within. Now Hob found himself seated opposite the door, contemplating the weaver’s art.

  In the tapestry a stylized array of knights and foresters rode in a wood, carrying boar-spears: hunting spears with a crossbar that prevented an impaled boar, mad with rage, from forcing its way along the shaft to kill its tormentor. To one side a boar was depicted backed against a tree, encircled by alaunts, the powerful dogs used to hunt boar and bear. At its feet a dog lay dead.

  “It may be the moon that is calling to it, and the moon waxing these past nights,” said Molly, “or it may be that someone has entered the castle and we not knowing of it. I felt it, I felt it! There in the hall, this night, this hour! As I have not felt it these nights past. Yet I cannot tell where it is; no more can I tell who it might be.” She came to the door; she flicked irritably at the edge of the tapestry, then turned and stalked slowly back past the fire. “But be said by me, we should not trust this wolfish lord.”

  Nemain watched her closely.

  “Oh aye, ’twas there tonight,” the girl said slowly. “I felt it there, seanmháthair, and yet I cannot think it is Sir Jehan.”

  Molly halted and looked down at her. “That foxy jackeen! ‘I have been to the Irish wars.’ And him looking at us from the sides of his eyes the while.” And after a moment: “ ‘A hedge queen,’ Himself says! This back-of-the-beyond Norman lordling!” Hob realized that she was far more angry at Sir Jehan’s gibes than she had appeared the other night. “These Normans! These new men, with their new-wrought titles!”

  She resumed her pacing, walking up and down the small room, her arms hugging herself beneath her heavy breasts, her lips pursed, frowning at the floor as though she might find the answer in the random designs the strewn rushes made there. Her passage raised a piquant scent: to the fragrance of the rushes themselves, bruised beneath her feet, was added that of the dried fennel, red mint, cowslips, that were sprinkled in amid the long rustling stems. Hob found it enjoyable even at this tense moment, one of the pleasures of castle life that had not been found in Father Athelstan’s austere household.

  It was doubtful that Molly noticed the spiced air: she was deep in her own thoughts. “His own dogs would not come nigh him!” she said viciously. And then, almost muttering: “It must be Himself, it must be.”

  “Never, never. I cannot feel it in him. ’Twas the high table that the dogs would not come nigh.”

  “Yet ’tis here, you yourself have said it! And why else should not the dogs come nigh the high table?”

  “Others sat or served at the high table as well as Himself, seanmháthair, and one of them may be . . . I feel it to be here as well . . . ” said Nemain, and stopped. And a moment later: “But ’tis not male.”

  “Not male!”

  “I am not to be moved from that belief,” said Nemain.

  A draft from some chink or crevice set the tapestry rippling. That, and the firelight’s flicker over the hanging, drew Hob’s eyes again. The figures seemed to move against the forest background. Hob came to his feet, his eyes fixed on the boar at bay, the dogs living and dead.

  “Mistress!”

  “Hob, what is—”

  “Mistress, did Lady Svajone not pass by the inn without stopping?”

  Molly and Nemain were staring at him as he stood: his stance was rigid, his voice strained, his mouth drawn down.

  “And did she not tell us . . . that, that they parted from the masons at the ford; they came here. They came straightway here. She told us this.”

  “Yes, child, but—”

  “Yet she knew!”

  That he would interrupt Molly not once but twice was a mark of his distraction. He gazed fixedly at the tapestry, where the shivering fabric made knight and forester, horse and dog, seem to move. The merest mocking semblance of life.

  “You told her that the dogs were slain, but naught of the manner of their slaying. Yet she knew! If even those terrible dogs could be slain, she said, their bellies slashed open like fishes. As though she’d seen! But Mistress, she said she was past the inn and away and gone long before. And all who were within the inn are dead. Who is it would know how the dogs were killed?”

  For a moment they both just looked at him, a blue gaze, a green gaze, and then Molly put a hand over her eyes. After a mom
ent she drew it down her face, with a motion as of one who, stepping indoors from a rainstorm, wipes the blinding water from her eyes.

  She turned to Nemain. “Have I not chosen well?”

  Nemain said gravely, “You have chosen well, seanmháthair, and I am pleased with your choice.”

  Molly turned back. “Blind! Hob, a rún, you have seen it, and all our art blind as a mole. Cobwebs, cobwebs! Yet the instant you’re after saying it . . . ” She tilted her head and spat onto the hearth, a curiously ritualistic action. “The thinnest twig may serve to break a cobweb.” She turned and looked away to the corner of the room, her head raised as though to see someone on the level above. “I feel her now, I feel her now! Nemain, it is she, is it not?”

  “I believe it’s truth he’s spoken, seanmháthair. It seems so, so . . . Well, now I can see it, I can feel her, now that Hob—and I said ’twas not male! But how did we come to be so blind?” said Nemain.

  “She’s after hiding from us, and someone else, someone with a mort of power, spreading the cloak under which she’s lying concealed. Spinning the cobweb. Someone I did not suspect at all, and who else might that be? Not those two golden guard dogs of hers! I wonder what other accomplishments our outlander doctor may boast. Can he cast such a glamour over that thing, that we could not perceive her, nor perceive the glamour itself?”

  Hob had gone back to the tapestry, and to his thoughts, hunting along his own trail; now he spoke up. “If Lady Svajone was there, Mistress, and her wagon is now out in the courtyard, then, then—”