Something Red (12 page)

His free hand darted toward the neckline of her smock, but by accident or design she moved slightly just at that moment, and this brought his curled hand down on the patch of bare skin by her neck. Beneath his fingers was the thin girl’s sharp collarbone, and his fingertips rested in the hollow beside her throat, the flesh hot and smooth and wet with the sweat of her exertions.

Suddenly his revenge lost its appeal. He stood there an instant without moving. A stray beam of sun found its way through the forest roof; it lay across her features and her eyes glittered, green as the leaves above. Even at this time he had begun to overtop her, and now she looked up a little at him, with a most extraordinary expression on her face: mischief and mockery and a kind of burning intentness, a question. Hob could not tell what was happening between them.

The long moment passed. Then she snatched the fish and in two bounds was out of sight, running lithely through the bushes back to the camp. He did not run after her; he walked slowly back. He was acutely aware of his fingers: they felt as though they had been in very hot water, or very cold water.

When he got back to the clearing she was squatting by the fire, already beginning to grill two fish on long twigs. She grinned at him. He sat down and watched her for a moment, then began to clean the rest of the catch.

When he’d given her the last of the cleaned fish to grill, he picked up a small wooden water bucket and went down a sloping path beside the clearing. Here tree roots and the earth between them served as a crude staircase down to one of the brooks. At this point the brook widened into a rock-bottomed pool, shaded by copious fern; on the opposite bank wild roses spilled down toward the water’s edge. Where the brook ran onward from the pool it tripped over rocks on its way to the lake, and the sound filled the cool dim space with a cheerful burble. Hob sank the bucket beneath the surface and hauled it up splashing and dripping. With an effort he made his way back to the clearing, pulling himself up by branches with his left hand, some of the water in the swaying bucket escaping over the rim, to wet his leg from knee to ankle.

They ate grilled fish from twigs and drank clear brook water from wooden cups. When they had done, he fumbled at the drawstring of his pouch. “I forgot,” he said. “I found these for you.”

Nemain gathered all sorts of small objects, as did Molly; certain stones, feathers, bone: they disappeared within Molly’s wagon and sometimes Hob saw them again, woven into clothing or part of an amulet or charm that one or the other of them crafted. Hob had a feeling that old Father Athelstan would not approve; certainly they were never in the form of a cross, nor did the women ever take them to a priest for blessing. But he had come to know the sort of thing that would interest them.

Now he held them out on his hand, seven small stones from the bed of the brook he followed to the lake where he fished, blue-gray disks smoothed by the action of the stream. Wavering lines of smoky yellow circled the center of each stone. Nemain put out her hand and he poured them into her palm. She examined them minutely, holding them up to catch the sun’s last rays, tracing the yellow pattern with a fingertip.

“Hob
a rún,
it’s a rare eye you have,” she said. She was clearly
delighted, and he found himself to be absurdly proud, just because he had picked up a few brook-bed stones. Still, he was aware of a lingering sense of awkwardness. The moment against the tree lay between them: that hot wet skin, that green glance.

She said nothing more for a while, turning the stones this way and that as dusk fell and the firelight grew stronger. Then she looked up suddenly. “You’re after giving me a present, and I’ll be giving you one as well,” she said. She drew the small cloth bag from her pouch and passed it across to him.

“What is this?”

“It’s to put beneath your pillow. Smell it.”

Hob put the packet to his nose. A fragrance, a complicated pleasant mixture of flowers and greenery with a strong tone of pungent yarrow, came to him. Nemain watched him slantwise.

“Put it by your head, and you’ll sleep the sweeter.”

He looked at it, puzzled, and then thanked her and put it in his pouch. After a while, when it looked as though the adults would not be rising at all that evening, they banked the fire and retired to their respective wagons.

Hob took off his clothes and spread blankets on the chest that served as his bed. He put the packet by his head and put his head on a rolled shirt. The perfume from the packet came to him, a pleasant soothing scent.

Across the clearing Molly cried out once, twice.

H
OB AWOKE ALONE
in the middle-sized wagon, with an unsettled, incomplete feeling: a dream ruptured midway, a significant revelation interrupted. He rolled over on his back and looked out the wagon window. The wooden shutter was latched back against the wagon side and the leather shade was rolled high and tied in place, despite the unseasonably
cool night. He craned his neck, trying to see the stars, but the overarching branches in full leaf hid much of the sky. Fresh air played over his face, and the scent of yarrow came and went in the interior of the wagon. The lost dream nagged at him, a task left undone.

A strong golden glow moved and danced on the wagon’s ceiling. He hitched himself up on one elbow to see. The fire had been built up again, and there on the other side of the clearing sat Molly, gazing into the flames, her back against a thick-bodied grandfather of an oak and a fired-clay jug by her side. Her hair was unbound, and fell forward over one shoulder in a rich gray tumble, down past her hip.

Hob took down a long linen shirt from its peg and pulled it over his head. He rolled off the chest and stumbled barefoot to the door. He was still half asleep. He swung down awkwardly from the wagon and made his way over to Molly.

He thought she might shoo him back to bed, but she said nothing. She wiped a film of perspiration from her round sun-reddened face with a wing of her shawl, though a cool night wind was moving through the broad leaves.

He stood next to her and she looked up and wordlessly patted the space beside her, on a cloth spread between the bases of two large roots. He joined her, leaning back, the bark rough against his shoulder blades. Molly put her stout arm around his shoulders and drew him to her side, smoothing the fine black hair back from his forehead.

“Is it that you can’t sleep,
mo chroí
?” she said dreamily.

“I was asleep, and then I was looking out, and . . . ”

Thunderous snores from Jack began to rattle through the clearing.

“Sure and there’s not a creature sleeping within a league of that,” she said. “Well, that’s all that’s left of him this night, that snore.” She laughed a little to herself.

“I was dreaming, and it was, it was . . . I wanted to know what it was.”

She turned a little and looked at him with more interest, although her eyes, blue as summer lake water, were low-lidded and focused on him with some difficulty.

“And what can ye bring to mind of it, at all, Hob?”

“It was . . . I forget.” The fire, the wind, the trees, crowded in on the memory of the dream; it flew apart like the steam from Molly’s kettles. He squinted across the clearing. “It was something that was, that was white, that gleamed, it was a gleam of white, and something else, something red. I wanted to know what, what—it was something important and I wanted to know, but I, I can’t . . . ”

“You men,” said Molly, to Hob’s delight. “You men never remember your dreams.” She took a sip from the jug. “Jack, now, says that there’s never a dream he remembers on waking, it’s like a black sea he jumps into each night. You can learn from dreams: what was, or what’s to come. But what’s forgotten is no help at all.”

Beyond the fire’s yellow circle the moon threw patches of pale light where it made its way through the net of heavy branches. Close by, an owl gave voice to a startling series of barking screeches. The snores paused an instant, then resumed, a snarling undercurrent to the crackling of the fire, the pop of sap in a too-new twig thrown in with last winter’s dead logs. Wisplets of smoke played in amid the flames, as though reluctant to join the main upwelling cloud.

Something about the snoring reminded Hob of Jack’s harsh difficult speech. The encircling arm, the stroking hand, Molly’s warm bulk, relaxed him, and made him bold. “Mistress,” he asked, “what happened to Jack’s neck?”

Now,
he thought,
I’ll be sent off for being the curious mouse at the larder.

But Molly tilted the jug up again. From the side of his eye, Hob watched the thick shapely throat quiver as she swallowed, swallowed again.

“Well, I’ll tell you some of it,
mo chroí.
” Beads of moisture stood out on her forehead. A few damp silver locks had tumbled over her eye, and she pulled them back and tucked them behind her ear.

“Jack Brown was in the Holy Land. He was carrying a pike for Sir Baldwin, he being the castellan of Aiglemont, when that knight went on pilgrimage. Our Jack was one of sixteen in Sir Baldwin’s company, and they traveling along with a whole train of others, pilgrims and men-at-arms on their way down to Jerusalem, and baggage wagons, and the Templars their shepherds on that stretch of road. It was some road of the old Roman folk they were on, dust and dry hills all around, and the heat terrible late in the day as it was, and didn’t the Moors come at them in a rush, one minute nowhere and the next down upon them.”

“The Moors are the Devil’s followers, Mistress?”

“Something like,” she said, and drank again. “Cruel dark men, on horses fast as thaw-water. With curvy swords like sickles, only with the edge outwards, if you see what I mean.”

With Molly’s lilt in his ears and the shifting firelight in his eyes, Hob seemed to see the clouds of dust, the column of wayfarers, the sun’s beams stuttering along the polished lance heads. Pictures came to him as though he were watching, from a mountain ledge, the dwellers in a valley far below: clearly seen but very small, and not quite real.

T
HE FIRST ATTACK
swept along the column like a Syrian sparrow hawk stooping at a snake. White cloaks billowed out behind the lean dark horsemen; the burning desert sun flashed and sparkled on the storm of scimitars; the riders in their quilted tunics were shouting what Jack had come to learn was “God! God is great!” in their rapid rattling speech. An uproar began at the rear by the baggage wagons, swelling toward Jack’s position in the center of the march,
in which was mixed the wails of pilgrims and the clank of colliding metal and the skeeking of wooden whistles as the sergeants tried to rally a defense.

Jack and his comrades had a scant moment to snatch at swords and war hammers, and to swing their short kite-shields around from behind their backs. All was confusion on the instant, the pikes out of reach in one of the wagons, no time for forming up. Jack got his sword out and swung his shield up just in time to parry a whistling slash at his head, stabbed ineffectually at the horse, then braced for the next rider, who passed him by but cut Leofric next to him crosswise, left shoulder to right waist, smooth as silk, and then was gone.

Another blur of striped tunic and white turban, a glimpse of narrowed black eyes, a prominent nose, and Jack hacked at the rider’s thigh and felt the bite of the sword blade into meat, but the horse carried the brown man on away and then the greater part of the fighting was on up the line.

Jack looked around. Leofric was plainly beyond all help; Jack turned away and set himself, braced for the next assault.

Three more times the Saracens circled and raced up the column on their swift beautiful horses, the delicate hooves kicking up clouds of dust. The wind was picking up, too, and raising more dust and loose sand from the dry burnt land. The riders came a fourth time, out of the wind, and Jack had to squint against the grit that stung his eyes and half blinded him.

The day steadily darkened and the wind began to sing. The moving air ripped the top layer from the land and threw it against the stalled caravan and still the bronze men came, wave upon wave. Jack’s throat was so dry that it burned. He set his back against an open-top wagon and hunched behind his shield, lunging whenever a rider loomed up out of the murk. He could not see a yard to either side, and the cries of his
comrades came dimly above the blare of the gale. He was alone in a tan blankness.

The sand flung by the storm against his unprotected face and hands was beginning to wear away bits of skin, and his hands were oozing blood from dozens of tiny cuts. There was shouting toward the distant front of the procession, and the hissing ring of steel upon steel, the thud of mace upon flesh, a horse screaming, but nearby was only the moan and shriek of the wind, the gritty patter of sand upon his boiled-leather gambeson. He peered through the dun haze. There was nothing.

There was nothing, and then there was the Beast. It came bounding out of the brown clouds on all fours, and Jack’s stomach turned to ice as he saw the big dark broad-backed shape hurtling toward him: massive black-furred limbs, a naked leathery breast, hands folded into fists the size of Jack’s head, the knuckles pounding along the ground, a bestial mask of anger, fangs like a demon, and yet it was like a man and yet, yet, it was
not
a man.

The next instant it had slammed him against the wagon, his left arm pinned beneath the great body pressing against the shield, his sword somewhere in the dirt. From the shadow beneath a heavy shelf of bone, little red eyes bored horribly into his; black lips drew back from yellow canines, two inches long. A scorching breath was on his face, a salty animal reek in his nostrils. Giant hands gripped his arms and shook him like an infant; his chin rattled against his collarbone and he felt himself sinking into a dazed lassitude. His head lolled back and he felt the rim of the wagon’s side at the back of his neck and he looked up into the roil of brown cloud in a stupor, a vast weight on his chest crushing the air from his body.

A searing pain at the side of his throat broke the dreamy paralysis of his limbs. He tried to scream but had no breath. He managed to draw up his right leg, and his right hand scrabbled at his calf, groping for the
dagger strapped there. He drew the foot-long blade, struck blindly at the demon’s side. It was like striking a young oak, but the thing sprang back. Jack fell groaning to the ground and scrambled beneath the wagon, chest heaving and throat a bloody mess.