Hobby (2 page)

It was when he stepped through two massive upright pillars, grooved by human hand and pitted by wind and storms, that he smelled something that was neither meadow, nor lake, nor the musty, stale scent of the ruins.

It was smoke.

HE KNEW THAT SMELL. NOT THE ODOR OF A
house burning down, still so fresh and bitter to him. It was the smell of a cookfire, with meat on a spit.

This time, though, caution claimed him. He crept to the side of the garden wall and, using it to shield his back, inched up a set of stone steps that were still preserved and whole.

At the top the stairs broke off awkwardly, but the boy could look down over the entire ruins. He saw the cookfire. It was in one of a series of outlying half-roofed houses beyond the main walls. A man dressed all in black was poking at the fire with a stick. He reminded the boy of the priest in his dream.

The boy almost called out then, but there was something about the man's shoulders he did not care for, a tense roundness, like a hawk right before it mantled, throwing one wing out, then another, to protect its food. Those shoulders belonged to a greedy, angry man, the boy thought. He needed to find people, but—even more—he needed to be careful.

Taking his bearings, the boy ran back down the stairs, turned in through a massive archway, and threaded his way as quietly as possible through the remains of the halls, now only broken masonry and vines.

When he found the cookfire, more by smell than by the mapping in his head, creeping up to peer through the doorway, the man was gone. A rabbit roasting on a spit was not quite done.

He heard a low growl behind him and slowly turned.

In the ruined hallway, glaring at him, was a massive dark dog, its teeth bared.

The boy backed up a step, toward the spit, and moving very slowly, took the boots from around his neck. They were the closest thing to a weapon he had. He was about to fling them at the dog when a whistle shrilled through the air and the dog's ears raised.

"Hold, Ranger!" came a coarse, raw-edged voice from beyond the doorway, and the dog's legs tensed, though it did not otherwise move.

The man stepped into view with hair the grey of old bowstring and a sparse, tired mustache. One eye was half shuttered by scarring. He wiped his nose with his black sleeve but never took his eye off the boy. "Watch!" he commanded the dog.

"Sir..." the boy began, knowing full well the man was no kind of gentry by his voice and clothes. Still, he did not want to provoke the man; he had no idea how dangerous the man was. "Sir, help me. I have been burned out of my house. My family died in the fire. And I am..."

"I think you are a thief, boy. Those boots you hold are much too big for you. That horse and cow too rich for such as you. I think you should be taken to the local sheriff and..."

"I think you are, yourself, a thief and shall not take me there," the boy answered hotly.

The man laughed briefly and horribly, then took two large steps forward so that the boy could smell his terrible breath. He grabbed the boy's shoulder. "Thief I may sometimes be," he said, his raw voice still full of the laugh, "but I will not be called so by a mere boy." In one swift move, he ripped the boots from the boy's hands and threw him down, kicking him in the side almost as an afterthought. It was not hard enough to break any bones, only hard enough to show who was master.

"Ranger," the man said, "keep!"

The dog stood over the boy, growling in a quiet monotone.

"Ranger will not hurt you, boy," the man said with a chuckle. "Lest, of course, you move." He bent over and tore the leather pocket from the boy's side. Opening it, he found only the charred bell, greasy from chicken, and threw it on the ground in disgust.

The boy bit his lip to keep from crying out; the loss of the little hawk's bell hurt more than the kick had.

Sitting down at the fire, the man took off his own boots, which were scarcely more than two pieces of leather tied onto the foot. Slipping on Master Robin's boots, he sighed. "Just my size," he said, and laughed again. "Or close enough that makes no difference. One's not a man without proper boots, don't you think?" He stretched his long legs closer to the fire and sniffed the air appreciatively. "Rabbit's about done, boy. If you lie quiet, I might just give you a piece."

"I want none of you," the boy said. "Or your rabbit." His bravado was encouraged by the fact that his own belly was full enough with chicken. But when he spoke, the dog growled again and moved, if possible, even closer to him, its breath as bad as its master's.

"Not now, perhaps," the man said. "But anon." He began to eat greedily, smacking his lips as he did so. His manners, the boy thought, would have earned him a great clap on the head from Mag.

The boy lay still, ribs aching, and fell into a kind of reverie. In it he saw the man felled by a thrown stone, crumpling to the ground, where he lay haloed in blood. A dog licked the blood till it was gone, then put its reddened muzzle into the air and howled. But when the boy woke, the man was very much alive and the dog had not moved from its guard position. Then the boy knew that it had just been a dream. His eyes began to tear up and he willed himself not to cry.

THEY STAYED IN THE RUINS FOR THE REST OF
that day and night. Much of the time the boy was bound, loosely when the dog was nearby, tightly when it was gone hunting with the man. No amount of twisting and rubbing the rope against stone seemed to help.

The boy fell to dreaming more and more, and his dreams were of blood and fire, fire and blood. They exhausted him. They confused him. He wondered if they had any meaning beyond disturbing his sleep.

At dawn the man seemed to make up his mind about something. "Not coming then," he mused aloud. "Well, it was worth the try."

"What was?" the boy asked, thinking the man was speaking to him, and receiving a cuff on the ear for asking. It was hard enough to make him fall over, hard enough to set his ear ringing, like the bells of a captive hawk.

The man picked him up, setting him against a fallen pillar. "Now, boy, don't ask me questions. I do not like it. Give me answers. That will sweeten my hand."

The boy nodded, not chancing another blow. "What is your name then, little thief?"

The boy thought for a moment. His name was Merlin, like the hawk in Master Robin's mews. But that was his name with the family. And the family was no more, buried under earth and gone to worms. Names could have power, he knew that instinctively. His own name had given him back his power of speech, had given him a past. And even though this man's power was great, it was a black, evil thing. He would give the man no more power than he already had.

"Hawk," the boy said. "My name is Hawk." It was close enough.

The man laughed. "A lie of course. You hesitated too long for the truth. And who would have named such a small, darkling boy such a strong, powerful name? But no matter. I will call you Hawk. It is conveniently short. And as for me, you can call me ... Fowler ... for I have mastered you as a falconer does a bird."

The boy almost spoke back then, for if he knew anything well from his years with Master Robin it was falconry. This man was no fowler. And he was no master either. But the boy bit his lip and said nothing.

"We are but a day out of Gwethern, a busy little market town, where I will sell your labor to a farmer and collect the wages. And you will not run, little bird, else I will have the sheriff on you. As will the farmer." He smiled. It did not improve his looks. "Do you understand me?"

The boy glared.

Fowler raised his hand for a slap.

"Yes," Hawk said, begrudging the syllable.

"Yes what?"

"Yes ... sir." The second syllable was even more grudging.

"I will unbind you, hawkling," Fowler said. "But my dog will be your leading strings. Mind him, now. He has a foul temper. Fowler and Fouler."

He laughed at his own joke, the sound coming out jerkily.

Hawk did not smile. He stood slowly and held out his hands. Fowler undid the ropes on the boy's wrists.

"Watch!" he said to the dog, and Ranger took up a position at Hawk's heels. He did not leave that place for the rest of the long day.

 

They walked for a while before Fowler mounted Goodie. The big horse trembled under his weight, not because the man was heavy but because he was unfamiliar and kept at her with his rough boot heels.

They made a strange company, but not so unusual for a market town road: a half-grown boy, nervously in front of a menace of a dog; a massive, black-clad man on a plowhorse, leading an old cow by a rope.

No one will wonder about us,
Hawk realized.
No one will question the man's right to sell us all: horse, cow, boy. Even dog.

Just as he came to that awful conclusion, a large tan hare started across the road.

"Ranger, stay!" Fowler called out, though the dog had made no move toward the hare. But Fowler should have paid more mind to the horse. Unused to the road, upset with the man on her back, startled by the hare, the normally placid Goodie suddenly shied. She took one quick step to the left and then rose up onto her back legs.

Fowler was flung off, landing with a horrifying
thud!
His head whacked against a marker stone and, as he lay there, unmoving, blood flowed out of his nose, staining his mustache.

The dog left the boy's heels and went over to its master. It sniffed the man's head uncertainly, then sat down, threw back its head, and howled.

For a moment Hawk did not know what to do. He was stunned by the scene, which was—and was not—the very dream he had had: stone, blood, howl. He remembered, bleakly, the other dreams he had had that had come true. The dream of the flame-breasted bird. The dream of the whistling black-coated man. And now, most horribly specific, this.

He did not know if his dreams were wishes so powerful they came true, though he had certainly never wanted the fire that had destroyed his life. He did not know if he had the ability to see slantwise into the future. Either—or both. He did not know and was afraid to know.

The dog kept on howling, an eerie sound, awful and final.

And tears, unwanted, uncalled-for, fell from Hawk's eyes. He could not seem to stop crying.

"
WHY?" HAWK ASKED ALOUD. BY THAT HE MEANT
: Why was he crying at the death of the awful Fowler, a man who had beaten him and tied him up and would have sold him? Why was he crying now when he had not cried—not really—at the death of those he loved? Master Robin, Mag, Nell, the dogs, the hawks. "Why?"

Still crying, he got up onto Goodie's back, for she was once again the stolid plowhorse, and they started down the road, with Chum right after.

Hawk wiped his nose on the back of his sleeve, thinking that he had not been able to touch the man nor bring himself to bury him. He only wanted to be gone away, from the man, the stone, the blood, the howls. He was almost a mile along before he could no longer hear the dog.

Without wanting to, Hawk fell into a reverie on Goodie's back and began to daydream. It was a very odd dream this time—of a wizard and a green castle. There was a bird in the dream as well, eating an apple, then spitting out a green worm. When the worm touched the ground, it grew to dragon size, then took to the air, its great wings whipping up a wind. Hawk woke sweating, though the day was cool. Was it another dream of the future? And what future, he wondered, could include all those things?

As suddenly as the dream ended, so did the path. It opened instead onto a real road that was rutted with use. For the first time there were other travelers: farmers with carts piled high with vegetables—carrots and neeps and green onions. Whole families in wagons, the children packed in with the caged fowl. Here and there single riders trotted on fine horses, not plowmares like Goodie. Hawk felt entirely awkward and dirty, ragged and alone. But at least he saw nothing like a wizard, a castle, an apple, or a worm.

He was hungry, but there was little he could do about it until they came upon a town. Besides, hunger was not new to him. Before he had found his family, he lived alone in the woods for a year, foraging for berries and nuts. He had not starved. One or two days without a proper meal would not kill him. Fire killed. Men killed. His own belly would not do him in.

He guessed he should have turned out Fowler's pockets. A dead man spends no coins. But that would have made him a thief indeed, and despite what Fowler had called him, he was none of that.

The road quite suddenly widened and ahead was the town. He recognized its gate. It seemed even grander than he remembered, made grander perhaps by his hunger and his fears. He let Goodie go her own pace, following after the wagons and carts, in through the stone gate marked with the town's seal. Gwethern.

Clearly it was a market day. Stalls lined the high street. There was more food—and more people—than Hawk had seen in a year. His stomach proclaimed his hunger loudly. But it proclaimed something else as well, a kind of ache that food would not take away. To buy food, he had to sell either Churn or Goodie, and they were his last ties to the farm. He got off the horse's back and led both horse and cow carefully through the crowded street.

Noise surrounded him: sellers calling out their wares, children whining for a sweet, women arguing over the price of a bit of cloth, a tinker bargaining with a man for a wild-eyed mare, a troubadour tuning his lute, two farmers arguing over stall space, and a general low hubbub.

For a boy used to living on a small quiet farm near a wood, it was suddenly too much, and Hawk backed up as if to escape it all, bumping into a barrow full of yellow apples.

"You! Boy!" came a shout from behind the barrow.

Hawk turned. There was a man with a face as yellow and sunken as any old apple; veins large as worm runnels crossed his nose.

Startled, Hawk stepped back against Goodie's shoulder and the man slammed a stick down across the barrow. If it had landed on Hawk, it would have been a sharp and painful blow.