Something Red (14 page)

Off a little way into the woods to the east, a movement caught his eye: two tiny roe deer in their winter coats of pale gray-brown. The pair had been foraging along the forest floor, picking through the sparse winter fare. Now they looked back at him as though fearless, or else fear-dazed. An instant later they turned and fled, barking their alarm. For a moment he could see their rumps flashing white here and there through the brush; then they were deep in the forest, hidden by the intervening trees.

A
FTER A BIT
the road widened and the trees fell back, giving way to a border of brush along the roadside. A few paces later they came to a clearing, an irregular oval from which three paths led generally southward. Molly had instructed Aylwin to take the leftmost path, which ran southeast down to Dickon’s Ford; the last pilgrims to turn onto this path were just leaving the clearing as Hob came into it. The right-hand path led southwest, terminating at one of the little deep-woods villages; the middle path also went to Dickon’s Ford, but by a somewhat more toilsome route.

Hob led the way into the leftmost path and the forest closed in again. The cold was piercing, but the boy’s spirits remained high, and he strode along briskly, although with a wary eye on the treacherous
surface of the road, a mixture of frozen dirt, frozen snow, and gray ice, rutted and trampled by previous passersby. His breath was smoking in the crystal air. His free hand in its wool glove held his hood close about his face. The moisture from his breath began to soak into the glove, and soon the world smelled like wet wool, and he was forced to switch hands.

The pilgrims could be heard ahead, but they remained out of sight. Hob looped the lead rope around his elbow and banged his gloved hands together to knock off the ice crystals forming from his breath. A little hedge betty or dunnock, pecking about the ground for stray seeds now that the summer’s insects were nowhere to be found, darted up to a low-drooping branch, startled by the dull report of Hob’s clap. It gave a series of staccato peeps, an alarm. After a moment it calmed to the point where it could venture its usual sweet warble, although Hob fancied he could still hear a note of reproach.

The road bent sharply around an upjut of rock; here the left side of the road rose somewhat while the right sank, and from behind Hob came a
screek
as the wagon slid sideways a bit on the icy surface. But the path’s ruts, made when the dirt was wet in the autumn rains and now frozen into permanence, prevented any skid from progressing too far. In a moment the irregular bangs and thuds of the wheels grinding over the ice ridges resumed, but the squealing stopped. One of Hob’s tasks in the morning was to work lard into the axles of all the wagons. The axles might protest a bit when first they set off, but soon the heat of friction softened the lard and worked it in, and for the most part Molly’s wagons ran smoothly.

Hob settled into a kind of half-awake march, whereby he ignored his discomfort, and watched the walls of forest slowly move past. For a while he observed his surroundings—red squirrels chasing one another down and around the trunk of a pine; the little dragbelly tracks
or half-collapsed tunnels left by voles in the snow; the flutter of two tree sparrows about a recessed pocket in the stone, halfway up a crumbling outcrop of rock. Soon, though, he slid gently into dreamy reveries, in one way or another revolving around Margery.

The road began to rise gently, and the wagon wheels slipped and caught, slipped and caught, on an unusually smooth length of purchaseless ice. “Hob, a bit of ash,” said Molly, and he shook himself loose from the memory of Margery’s mouth on his, a change of attention that jarred like cold water on the skin. He dropped back to lift the tight-woven bag of cold fireplace ashes from its peg on the side of the wagon. He moved up forward again and began to strew ashes here and there on the ice, providing a bit of grit for the wheels to bite.

A flock of chaffinches sported in the skeletal winter branches of the roadside bushes, chasing one another, their white wing bars flashing as they dove in and out of the labyrinth of twigs, a great deal of loud descending song, and often the cry:
spink! spink!
A handful of sparrows were in amid the flock, and a lone brambling with its white rump. Hob threw another handful of ashes and the birds exploded upward from the bushes to the lower branches of the trees; as the wagons moved past, they began to drift back down, the bolder first, then the more timid. By the time Jack passed them they were as raucous as before.

The air had become calm again, although very cold. Hob heard the wind beginning to murmur in the treetops, and reached a hand to pull his hood tighter about him, but after a moment realized that the trees were motionless above him, and that the murmur was unvarying. The southeast-trending path now curved to the left, running due east for a short stretch, which ended where the pilgrims awaited them, clustered by the bank of the Dawlish, whose mumble Hob had mistaken for the wind.

D
ICKON’S FORD
was the only convenient crossing of the chilly little Dawlish, which, although more a large stream than a river, ran too deep elsewhere to cross safely.

The stream ran fast and shallow here over a bed of slate. The water sped in silver sheets over the wide plates of gray-blue stone, bunching up into low ripples where it traversed irregularities in the rock. When it ran through the little chutes between the edges of the slabs or dropped a few inches from one level to the next, the water foamed into white, but generally the rock bed lent it a dark, almost black color.

The Dawlish, as folk hereabout called it, was one of many brooks and rivers so named throughout England. Molly said it meant “black stream” in the old British tongue that was cousin to her own. She was drawn to such bright bits of knowledge as a crow is drawn to bright bits of metal or mica, and like a crow she hoarded them up.

Once Hob had remarked to Jack Brown, “At whiles it seems that Herself knows some morsel about everything,” and after a moment Jack had just nodded.

Now most of the pilgrims dashed across on the rocks; the men carrying the few women followed more slowly. The Dawlish here ran only six inches deep; still, shoes and hose were wet to the ankle.

Hob trudged out into the icy water, and found himself checked after a few paces. Milo had stopped at the water’s edge, snorting in alarm; the ox looked at Hob as though the boy had surely made an error. Hob clucked and yanked on the lead rope, and Molly snapped the reins on Milo’s back. The ox began to move onto the slate streambed, managing to convey, by the tossing of its head and something of the set of its shoulders, a palpable sense of grievance. Jack tied the mare off to a tree and helped Nemain across with the little wagon, then crossed back to bring the third wagon over.

By the time they were all up safely on the farther bank, Hob’s feet
had gone quite numb. The day was declining rapidly toward evening, and in any event it was necessary to build a fire to dry off their shoes and warm their feet. Molly consulted with Aylwin and decreed that they should camp for the night by the Dawlish, which would at least provide running water.

They pulled the wagons into a semicircle, the outer curve facing the wind, and Molly sent Hob and Nemain to gather armloads of dry brush, mostly dead gorse and heather. The greater part of the men went foraging for branches, and Jack and Aylwin and another of the bigger pilgrims went deeper into the woods and came back dragging a section of fallen tree, two feet in diameter and the length of a tall man.

Three fires were soon laid. Molly produced flint and steel from the last wagon, and soon little tonguelets of flame were peeping up through the twigs and brush at the bottom of the mounds of interlaced wood. The travelers stood about, huddled and stamping, as the smaller branches caught, then the larger. The wood was not entirely dry, because of all the recent snow, and there was a billowing of smoke. Soon the big log in the center blaze began to ignite, and Hob stretched his hands happily toward the heat.

Here and there a pilgrim would lean on his staff and stand on one foot; the other foot was extended toward the fire. The redolence of steaming wool and leather was now added to the aromatic scent of woodsmoke, the crisp clear air of the woods with its touch of pine, the cold-water breath of the Dawlish.

Some of the provisions packed at Osbert’s Inn were brought forth; a simple meal of dark bread and onions was prepared, washed down with water from the stream. Molly carried a small barrel of grain in the last wagon, and Jack fed the animals from this: an amount insufficient to satisfy, but enough to stave off weakness for a day. Molly arranged her journeys in one- and two-day stages in winter, when there was no forage to be had. In this way she moved from station to station,
friend to friend, patron to patron, for it was impossible to carry enough in the wagons to feed the three beasts.

Once again the women retired to the wagons. Jack set watches about the clearing. Hob, too young for guard duty, joined those men off watch by the fire. The boy lay down as near as he dared to the dancing yellow glare. He left his sheepskin coat on but took off his shoes and rolled himself up in a blanket, and lay staring into the flames. Behind the crackling of the fire was the mumbling Dawlish, and once the hooting of an owl, and soon a chorus of snoring from the men ranged round the fire. Hob slept, half-aware of the changing of the watch, and soon the night passed into morning.

CHAPTER 8

D
AWN REVEALED A HIGH ROOF
of thin pearl-gray cloud, in furrows like the peasants’ fields, moving slowly against the still-black treetops. The fire, now ash and ember, was built up again. Molly provided a cauldron, and the company sat to a breakfast of porridge and water and bits of the hard cheese they had taken from the inn.

They were away early, eager to compensate for yesterday’s late start. Two tracks led from the ford on this side: one that went eastward, the one that Ranulf had recommended, and one that plunged south, running along the Dawlish for a while, and then swerved to the southeast, following forested clefts in the mountains, heading generally toward Durham and York. It was this latter track that they were to follow, and Molly cautioned Aylwin not to let his company of pilgrims stretch out ahead of the wagons as they had done yesterday,
for the woods to the south were reported to be infested with the bandits that the king’s regarders had swept from the forest north and west of Osbert’s Inn.

Jack Brown then, with Nemain and Hob as interpreters and a great deal of gesticulation on Jack’s part, attempted to impart a rudimentary plan of defense from attack to the unmilitary Carlisle men: a circular formation, men on the outside, staves at the ready, striking at any who came near, and women grouped within the circle of their men. The whole group was to begin a slow shuffle back to the wagons, where the women were to climb inside, the men to put their backs against the wagon sides. They were told to concentrate on defending themselves from any attack that came nigh them, and to stay where the wagons would protect their backs, and to let Jack do the main work of repelling the bandits. At this last many looked skeptical, yet none was rude enough to contradict.

F
OR A TIME
, as camp was broken, the travelers looked thoughtful, even glum, as they considered Jack’s instruction. Soon, though, the brisk walk in the crisp winter air, the subtle winter sunlight striking down through the naked trees, the chatter of birds seen and unseen in the branches, lifted their hearts. They were in deep forest now. Imperceptibly their pace increased, increased; soon they were strung out through the woods, the earliest of the party out of sight of the wagons whenever the road curved to avoid an ancient tree or rocky outcrop.

They had been traveling only a short while, during which Hob had had to scatter ash only once, when Molly began to grow uneasy. She turned and twisted on the seat, peering in both directions into the forest.

“Hob,” she said at last.

The boy came back to her and reached for the bag of ashes, thinking that she wanted more traction on the hard-packed snow.

“Nay, lad, give me the lead rope, and run forward and tell Master Aylwin to halt. His people to wait in the road, and we coming up to them. Tell him it’s a bad thought I have about this road and no mistake, and it’s safer we’ll be together.”

“Yes, Mistress.” He handed up Milo’s lead rope, and began to trot forward. He just had time to become aware that all the birdsong had stilled, when there was a shout from forward, where Aylwin walked with the lead pilgrims.

At that same moment Hob heard a hiss and thump behind him. He slid to a halt, and turning about saw a speckle-fletched arrow sprouting from the wagon’s forward left wheel, the shaft still blurred and humming with the vibration of its spent force.

Half a heartbeat was lost to frozen surprise, and then Molly kicked the brake shut and tossed the lead rope in Hob’s general direction and stood on the seat to open the forward hatch. She drew forth a bow and quiver, slung them on her shoulder, drew her skirts up a foot or two through her belt to give her legs free play, and seized the rope ladder that hung from roof to seat. She swarmed up the swaying rungs with remarkable alacrity.

The half-barrel–shaped roof of Molly’s big wagon had a two-foot-wide flat strip down the center. There were rope loops fastened to the roof on either side of the walkway strip, and Molly grasped these and hauled herself to the rooftop, grunting a little. She stood up and, balancing on the walkway, began to bend a linen bowstring to her bow: an Irish bow, slightly recurved at the ends, shorter than the Welsh longbow.

The pilgrims were in disarray, but each member of Molly’s troupe knew exactly where to go and what to do in such an attack. Hob’s guidance with the lead rope was a help to the sweet but unintelligent Milo, but the ox would also obey the reins held by Molly, up on the wagon seat. When not in use, the lead rope was trailed back and slipped into a notch on the wagon board; the knot on the rope’s end held it in the
notch. Now, as Molly was gaining the roof, Hob ran back and snatched up the rope, dropped it into the notch on the fly, and continued on to the back of the wagon. Here was Nemain with a similar rope that led from the axle of her little wagon. She dropped it into a notch in the tailboard of the big lead wagon, and Hob closed a wooden clamp on it and jammed a stout oaken pin through a hole in the clamp, locking the rope in. Jack had already fastened the rear wagon to the middle one in similar fashion.