Joris of the Rock [The Neustrian Cycle, Book II] (Forgotten Fantasy Library)

by Leslie Barringer

  CHAPTER VI. SAINT-ELOY-OVER-HARDONEK

  "Bring me the cedarwood box with the gold beaters' skin," said Brother Leo, shutting his tired eyes and leaning back in the stone seat, that was cushioned because he was old and racked with rheumatism.

  Juhel leaped to obey, for brother Leo let him watch the painting and gilding of the great capital V that had been three months in the doing; also Juhel had learned to puddle the colours in their little dishes, and to change the water pots and cleanse the dainty brushes. For the sake of the beautiful work he endured the fusty smell of Brother Leo and his furs; and presently white head and black were bent again above the vellum.

  There, in the whirls of crimson and green, Michal sneered from her window at capering David, whose harp was now to be embellished; Juhel felt strange squirms of satisfaction in throat and body as magic grew beneath the aged blue-veined hands, that only ceased from trembling when thus employed. But to-day, indeed, they began to tremble even now, so that Brother Leo had perforce to lay down his little knife; and tears furrowed his withered cheeks, because he did not want to die before his lovely V was perfected. Then Juhel's heart turned over in him for pity and for anger against he knew not what, and he leaned against the mouldy furs and ventured a choked whisper.

  "Brother, let me try – I will not spoil it."

  The old monk blinked with quick hostility; but the brown chubby face, the big dark eyes and quivering childish mouth, gave him to smile as he shook his bowed head.

  "No boy," he murmured gently. "You are how old?– eleven, too young yet awhile. But Sain Eloy heard your offer, and the ungracious answer in my soul. Vana gloria indeed; I am chidden by my own handiwork. See, I will draw you a little shrine of the good saint, and you shall colour it as you please. It shall be your offering on Holy Innocents' Day.

  Juhel understood only the second half of that speech, but his face glowed at the promise; the low humming of autumn sea wind, the twilit sheer of Saint Eloy's towers, the pallid sheen of the moon in the eastern sky beyond them – these joined to stamp the moment in his memory, filling him with the peace of ancient buildings founded and shaped in love.

  Half an hour later he echoed Brother Leo's sigh at the iron boom of the compline bell, that summoned the monk to holly office and drove the boy to supper and bed. Juhel scuttled away down the west walk of the splendid cloister, paused at the lavatory entry to glance at his hands, decided that this evening they would pass Brother Adrian's scrutiny by the refectory door – and jumped at the eldritch whoop of Folquin de Forne by the long stone trough within.

  "Juhel! Hi, Juhel!" called tow-haired fair-skinned Folquin, bounding out upon the smaller boy. "Have you heard? The sub-priors come home again. Hamo is killed, and five of the men, and the great banner and all the money and horses were stolen. They were set upon in the forest by Joris of the Rock!"

  At Folquin's first word Juhel had become a different creature. Rapture, and even candour, vanished from his face; the cherub became an elf, and his questioning voice harboured derision.

  "Who is Joris of the Rock?" he demanded, as the pair of them made for the refectory; for he liked to ruin the enthusiastic declamations of Folquin; and Folquin snorted, his eagerness stemmed by scorn.

  "Joris of the Rock? Why, a great murdering forest thief who eats two Juhels for supper every night – did you know that?"

  "Do I ever know anything until you have told me it?" asked Juhel, demurely ogling his companion beneath bent brows.

  "You are a fool," said Folquin angrily, and flung away from him.

  Juhel grinned and followed, knowing that he would hear the news at table; for the only silent meals were dinner and collation, which the boys took with their elders. Had he treated Folquin this a month ago, Juhel would have been well thumped; that sideways ogle had constantly provoked the older boy, and many a rapid flight had Juhel taken, only to writhe and squeal at last in his captor's merciless grasp. But somehow beautiful Folquin discovered that half his victim's anguish was enjoyment; abruptly the torturings ceased, and for a time each boy was ashamed to notice the other. Now they were on speaking terms, but Folquin did not know that Juhel loved him, and Juhel clung to his method of irritation lest Folquin find out and grow shy once more.

  That night, besides rye bread and "souse" or onion pottage, there was a treat of raisins, given by the prior because the good sub-prior's life was spared to them; and the buzzing voices of thirty boys discussed the robbery and killing and the exploits of Brother Matthias and his iron-shod staff.

  "It is a shame he might not bear a sword," cried Folquin.

  "He would have slain Joris with a sword. What is a staff against a sword? They are cowards, the servants who ran away. I hope my lord Prior has them flogged. If they had all stood together they might have beaten the robbers off."

  "Folquin should have been there," said Juhel indistinctly, his mouth being full of bread. "With a sword," he added more clearly, addressing the tall pewter salt cellar. "what are twenty great robbers to Folquin and a sword?"

  "Bang his head afterward, Folquin," said somebody else.

  Folquin's angry blue eyes gave Juhel a pleasant thrill.

  "Bah!" exclaimed Folquin. "He would have run roaring down the road."

  Juhel nodded cheerfully, and a moment later thrust an uncomfortable remark into a lull of talk.

  "If we have raisins because the sub-prior was saved," he observed, "we should have no bread because Hamo and the rest were killed."

  "Juhel, you are a fool!" exploded Folquin again.

  Juhel said nothing more, but that night he prayed to the Sieur Jesus and to the Blessed Virgin not only for the souls of the dead servants, and for Brother Matthias who was so brave, but also for the men who ran away from Joris, because they now must feel so sorry and ashamed. Then he prayed as usual that Jesus and Mary would help Brother Leo's V; but again as usual he said nothing to the Sieur God, for of Him Juhel was mortally afraid. And as for the Holy Ghost, It seemed to the small boy not a shining Dove, but a tall hooded Terror without a face.

  * * * *

  Either horn of the cliff that protected the harbour of Hardonek was crowned with a great monastery – Saint Eloy on the east, Saint Remigius on the west. Behind them the gray stone wharves and houses fringed the southern arc of the little bay; between them, and hundreds of feet below, rode in and out the bright brown sails of fishing vessels, or wider canvas of a cog or galley laden with wine or wood or onions or quarried stone. Juhel could never remember a time when the chimes of Saint Eloy had not been echoed or forestalled, faintly or sharply as the wind decreed, by the chimes of Saint Remigius across the deep green water; and only on the days of All Souls and of Holy Innocents was he purposely reminded of the dark times before his coming to the coast.

  Vaguely he thought of the Sieur de Ath and of the Lady Aveline as his father and mother; some time, he knew, he would meet them, with Leu, his half-brother, and the cousin called Tiphaine. That would be in the dreadful hour of which he sang in the Mass for the Dead:

  "Tuba mirum spargens sonum,

  Per sepulcra regiounum

  Coget omnes ante thronum."

  But he was baffled when he tried to think what he should say to them. Only the Virgin Mary let herself be loved without question; in Juhel a customary reserve was sometimes shattered by artless greed for affection – a greed which generally shamed him before its force was spent. Thus, when once he contrived to hold a fistful of Brother Odo's robe through some five minutes of a grammar lesson, he was not surprised when Brother Odo cuffed him soundly and deliberately. Juhel wept as in duty bound, yet something in him triumphed over Brother Odo's contempt, for the young monk's gentle face had lit before it hardened, and Juhel knew that he was nearly hugged instead of clouted. Then there was Folquin, the lad of spirit, the born leader and tormentor, whose armour Juhel had somehow breached; but the rest of his schoolfellows held little interest for his questing and secretive mind.

  And from those of his own size Huhe
l brooked no violence; he often cried as he fought, and always gave rather more than he got, so that he was generally left to his own devices. Rough comradeship he really did not understand; he was seldom truly happy save with a monk or two in cloister, library, or garden. Reading he liked, and feeding the goldfish in the fountain pool if the herbarium, and above all, singing in the choir; the last was an accomplishment which saved him many sullen hours at games for which he had no wit or aptitude. Nevertheless he swam well, climbed rocks skilfully, and shot a goodly arrow; for in none of those arts had he to work with others or others to depend on him.

  Until he was over twelve this was the daily plan of Juhel's cloistered life.

  At half-past five in summer and half-past six in winter Brother Adrian marched down the dorter ringing a little hand bell pitched to rouse the woefullest sluggard. Followed a donning of clothes, a wash in the stony trough, a scuffle round the three great towels whose increasing wetness made for early rising; then a sedate procession, two and two into the great dim church for prime and the Mass of the Blessed Virgin, and sometimes Chapter Mass as well. Thereafter the boys broke fast alone with Brother Adrian, for the monks ate nothing before noon.

  When the convent was at chapter the boys played; terce rang them into school in the sheltered north walk of the cloister. On greater feast days the morning's work – or, if holiday were granted, the morning's play – was broken by High Mass; otherwise they sat till after sext, the midday office, and then dined with the monks. While the latter enjoyed their "meridian" or after-dinner nap, Juhel and his companions were turned loose withing bounds for two hours or more on end. At nones their whooping ceased; no sound from the fields might disturb the slow march of their elders from the great dorter. Next, the boys must be washed and sobered for the light meal called collation, and for reading or quiet games in the cloister, or choir practice for the dozen chosen voices, or the steam and repressed din of the weekly bath. At sunset two-and-two again to vespers; then learning of lessons for the morrow, and play when the lessons were thought to be learned; and lastly, at the hour of compline, supper and evening prayer and bed.

  For Juhel bed did not invariably mean sound sleep. Sometimes he woke the half of his roommates with a scream of terror; that was when wild beasts chased him through a dream forest. Sometimes he had a waking nightmare of unutterable loneliness, when the blue-gray window shapes dwindled and grew remote, while he, too, shrank until he felt no bigger than his morning's finger nail; then to cry out seemed entirely useless, for any noise he made must be no louder than the singing of a gnat. But on stormy evenings the gales would get into his blood and excite him, so that he tossed for hours and heard strange voices in the war of wind and sea, and when the outer dark grew full of demons and too menacing to be borne, with what relief would Juhel see dim lights slant through the shutter slats, and hear the friendly organ blast and the brave steady choiring of the monks at nocturnes – the answer of Michael and the heavenly host to all the powers of air and night and evil! Juhel sometimes dropped into exhausted sleep in the ten midnight minutes which elapsed before the burst of matins song; and more than one of the monks sang better and more lustily because he knew that a small boy had listened and found comfort in the sound.

  Nobody blamed Juhel for his nightmares; there were several orphans of the Jacquerie among the other boys, but all had relatives of a sort to visit them and send them clothes and toys and comfits, and none was sole survivor of such a massacre as that in the Tower of Ath. Sulkiness by day was another matter; the solitude which might have cured it formed no part of the boys' conventual life save as punishment. Hence Juhel had his share of bread and water, and an occasional encounter with the birch rod of the lean third-prior. Yet on the whole he fared contentedly as those of happier begetting; and after his seventh year he grew comely and plump and strong.

  Vaguely he knew himself legal ward to the Count of Barberghe, that foxy lord whose greed provoked the outbreak of the Jacquerie; vaguely he thought of the tower and lands which he would one day possess; but the outside world meant little to Juhel, even when it came so close as to rob the good sub-prior and kill the convent servants. True, on the octave of Corpus Christi in that same year Juhel had leaned from a window and watched with staring eyes six galleys of the Easterlings stand in toward the harbour mouth, only to put about and sail off to the westward in search of plunder worse defended; then, indeed, he had added a squeal to the great roar of triumph and derision which went up from the cliff tops, where monks, lay brethren, and men-at-arms waited with slings and bows, with lime and pitch and smoking torches, to defend the harbour entrance. And later in that strange day he, too, had laughed and cheered to hear how at Karmeriet up the coast the Viscount Raoul of Ger had dealt with four more pirate ships and crews. In another twenty-four hours came news of the death of Red Jehan de Campscapel, and the young Viscount Raoul rubbed shoulders in Juhel's mind with Roland and Olivier and Amadis and Arthur; but for the most part the boy preferred to forget that he was Sieur de Ath, and that some day soon he must leave this beloved home to enter the household of the Count of Barberghe, to learn to be page and squire and to earn the spurs of chivalry.

  Some of his schoolfellows were already destined for the cloister; these Juhel rather pitied, since they must more and more be encompassed by iron restriction of monkish life as ordered by the stern prior. Floquin de Forne and a dozen others, besides Juhel himself, were orphan wards or heirs of noblemen; and sometimes they talked among themselves of the wicked peasants whom one day they would rule.

  "They will not rise against me," promised Folquin on one occasion.

  Folquin was perched on the cloister wall, his bright determined face the fairest thing in all that expanse of sky and sward and sunlit carven stone. Juhel looked up from a game of fox-and-geese; the squares were deeply scored in the cloister pavement, and he sat cross-legged on the rushes beside them.

  "What will you do if they try?" asked Hugolin, another of Folquin's admirers.

  "Ride them down as my father did;. No, I shall bid my archers fill them with arrows; it is folly to waste a charger among their scythes. A pack of idle vermin! What are you grinning at, Juhel?"

  "You, wasting your archers' time pulling arrows out of peasants. Why not starve them all dead? Then your archers can scythe the corn, and you can glean behind them."

  "Gomeril!" shouted Folquin. "What would you do then?"

  "Keep them on my side if I could," said Juhel.

  "Ho! Little Jacques-Juhel! A lot you know about your peasant friends! Will you give them comfits and sing to them in the solar? Peasants are made to be kicked, and I shall kick them."

  "You might kick Juhel, too," suggested Hugolin.

  "Him!" snorted Folquin, meeting Juhel's eyes and looking away.

  "You come and kick me, Hugolin," Juhel advised. "Come on, greedy-guts, and see what will happen."

  But Hugolin only scowled, for he knew what would happen.

  * * * *

  Folquin it was in the end who brought to Juhel the news that the Count of Barberghe had come to visit the prior.

  "He wants to see you," said Folquin. "Brother Adrian sent me to say you were to wash and to go at once to the prior's parlour."

  "Oh!" breathed Juhel blankly, staring down from the ledge of a cut haystack into the lifted face of Folquin. Folquin was excited, a little envious that the world clutched Juhel before it clutched himself, and even, perhaps…

  Panic in front of Folquin was unthinkable; Juhel crushed it down in his heart and got soberly to the ground. If this was the last time he would tread his way between the familiar farms buildings, at least he had Folquin beside him. Cattle lowed in the tilted fields, poultry clucked in the shadow of barns, and apple blossom filled the orchard; ahead was the landward slope of the cliff ridge and the bulk of the gray monastery, and east and west were shards of sea – pale-green and jaggedly shaped by the slant and sheer of dark cliff faces, or curved and fringed with surf along sunlit reaches of sand.r />
  "Do you not want to go with the count?" asked Folquin curiously.

  "No," replied Juhel. "He – it is he they call the Fox."

  Folquin nodded, accepting Barberghe's reputation as reason for reluctance.

  "You will do well enough," he remarked; and then: "I wish I was coming too."

  "With me?" breathed incredulous Juhel, glancing at him.

  "With anyone," said Folquin absently. "I am tired of this place, and besides, I am thirteen now."

  Then he saw that Juhel was flushed and somehow hurt, and a queer smile touched his carven lips. When Juhel had parted from him he dived up the stair of the boys' dorter.

  "So you are Juhel de Ath," snapped the sly-featured bulky cound of Barberghe when the boy stood before him.

  "Yes, my lord Count."

  "My lord Prior tells me you have in you the makings of a man. It is time to test you in saddle and hall. Ay, I can see the Ath in you. Be ready after meat – and look me in the face when I address you."

  "Attend me later, Juhel," commanded the prior; and so the boy came at length to receive the gold signet ring which Tiphaine his mother had first hung round his neck twelve years before.

  Juhel looked down at his device, the dagger between stars; and when he knelt to receive the prior's blessing he set the ring on his thumb.

  "This is my very own," he thought. "It is the only thing besides my clothes that I can take away."

  But as the boys flocked out of the refectory Folquin pounced upon Juhel, drawing him deftly aside, and at the same time fumbling mightlily beneath his own tunic, from which he presently drew a flat leather-backed book with a tarnished silver clasp.

  "You – your ballad book–" stammered the younger boy, finding the soft and pleasant-smelling leather in his hand.

  "Keep it," said Folquin hurriedly. "You always liked it better than I did."