Something Red (18 page)

“Naetheless, Mistress, tha’d best not tarry.”

“Naetheless, friend Hodard, I will not be tarrying.”

She embraced him warmly; then she turned and clambered swiftly up to the seat. Hob thought that the long lean face was somewhat reddened, but it may have been an effect of the same biting wind that toyed with Hodard’s half-cape.

Molly nodded to Hob and he turned and led Milo around in a semicircle till the ox was once again pointed toward the road that led toward Bywood Old End, and to the juncture with the track that led down to Dickon’s Ford on the Dawlish.

CHAPTER 11

B
ACK AGAIN TO THE TURNING
before Bywood Old End, back past the peasants’ furrows, through the forest to Dickon’s Ford, a dash across. Once again they did not stop to build a fire as they had the first time they crossed, but turned into the southward path and hurried on into the forest.

When they came to the place where they had been ambushed, they found stiffened bodies by the road. The bandits had not even stayed to claim their dead, and the birds, mostly crows, were already busy at them, a grim sight. Hob’s heart had felt hollow in his chest since the inn, and neither the slain men nor the fear of attack could lower his spirits any further. Still, he was resilient as only someone of thirteen summers is resilient, and he had known Margery but a few days, and he did not want to walk into a sleet of arrows in another ambush. He dropped back to walk beside Molly.

“Will they come at us again, Mistress?”

She waved him on briskly. “There’s nothing here now, and no mistake. They dare not linger, even to bury their dead, for fear the reeve’s men will come along and take them. Away on.”

He moved ahead of Milo once more—the ox had begun to turn its head, wondering why Hob was behind it—and quickly led the way past the rigid corpses, with their rustling, croaking, shifting blanket of attendant birds.

Soon they were past the signs of the battle—the trampled bushes, the bodies, the splash of blood here and there on a tree trunk, patches of flattened and crimsoned snow. The track they were on grew broader and a bit more comfortable to travel: the forest stepped back a few paces from the roadside, and the roots of the ancient trees no longer crept onto the snow-packed road, and the wheels need not bump over them, or snag upon them.

The wagons were actually moving into a broad wooded valley, and though their sight was hindered by the thick wooden palisades about them, the surrounding crags of the mountains were farther away. The little troupe traveled quickly down this valley, and met with no hindrance.

Soon the mountain walls began to converge again, and the road rose slowly toward a notch in the hills: Odo’s Pass, sometimes called the Fellsgate. Once past this notch the road wound down toward the high fells eastward, and eventually toward the coast towns. There was a very slight grade, and some slipping of the wheels, and some strewing of ash by Hob, but generally the faring here was not onerous, and soon they dipped into a hollow and then began to rise again toward the brink of the pass.

As he topped the rim of the hollow and once again had a clear view of the road ahead, Hob slowed his pace, and slowed it more, at the sight of the pass; his lips parted; finally he came to a dead halt, and behind him the rumble of wheels ran down into silence, and brakes were set all along the tiny caravan.

*   *   *

A
PORTION OF THE MOUNTAINSIDE
had given way, and huge blocks and slabs of stone, looking as if they had been hurled by giants, had carried down with them earth and snow and whole trees. Odo’s Pass was completely blocked, and there was no way ahead.

Jack and Nemain tied off their animals and came forward. Everyone looked at the tremendous mass of material blocking the notch; there was an air of general bemusement. No one moved or spoke for a moment.

Then Molly released the brake. “Turn the wagon, Hob
a rún,
” she said. “It’s back to the ford, and onto the eastern road. There’s nothing for us here, and the day darkening as we sit.” Jack and Nemain returned to their wagons, and Hob tore his gaze from the destruction before him.

They had had eyes only for the rock slide, perhaps a quarter of a mile ahead: the tangle of boulder and pine trunk and tumbled-down earth. But as Hob turned, heaving at the lead rope to get Milo to swing around and go back, his eye struck some way into the gloom beneath the trees.
“Uh!”
he said, the sound jolted out of him by surprise. He pointed to a spot about ten paces into the forest. This was well clear of the rock slide, and the ground here was unscarred by any upheaval.

There, embedded in the side of a snowbank, gray with rock dust, scarred by chisels, lay a hand, spread as in warning:
Go back.
It ended in a torn ragged stump of wrist, as though bitten through by monstrous jaws. The snow below the stump bore a stain like a sash trailing earthward, widening as it fell, fading as it widened, diluted with snow-water, red to pink.

“The masons,” said Hob, in so quiet a voice that one might mistake it for calm.

“Turn about, Hob, and lead on, quick but steady,” said Molly coolly. Once they had the wagons hauled around and facing back, they moved
as quickly as prudence dictated, and as silently as thudding hoof and rumbling axle permitted.

It was as if the act of retracing their steps had released the snow. They had scarce gone ten of Hob’s paces back toward Dickon’s Ford, when movement at the boy’s right hand caught his eye: a snowflake, swooping in irregular arcs, slid down the air. A moment later another followed, then two together; then the air was sprinkled with flakes, dark against the sky, white against the somber mass of trees. This continued for the space of twenty or thirty breaths, while Hob plodded as fast as he might back along the trail, encouraging Milo with clucks and little tugs on the lead rope. The wagons rumbled up the forest road, over root and stone and hard-packed old snow increasingly covered with slick new snow. After a while they bartered silence for speed. Molly called encouragement to the little troupe, and Hob could hear Jack’s sharp whistle, as the dark man sought to spur the mare to greater effort.

Then a squalling wind filled the air with whirling whiteness, and vision was effectively foiled. Hob came to a stop, adjusted his hood, and began to walk again. He walked bent over a little, looking at the ground to his left. He had the lead rope in his right hand and his right arm straight out, so Milo would walk in the center of the track, but he walked on the left margin of the road, so that he could see the boundary between road and the brush-filled verge of the forest.

He trudged along for some little time like this, and then the wind dropped sharply and the snow all but ceased. There was a layer of new snow through which he tramped, but he could see about him once more. They were passing the ambush site again. The bodies now were covered with a light blanket of snow, and the trees about were dark with crows and the occasional raven, all of them fluffed into balls for warmth. They had taken refuge from the snow squall amid the tangle of branches, where at least some of the wind’s force was broken.

The bodies covered in white brought Hob back again to the memory of the courtyard at Osbert’s Inn and the two sisters’ bodies, side by side in their shrouds. Because the walking was difficult and uncomfortable and above all monotonous, he gradually sank again into a dull gray sorrow, in which the constant need for movement was not enough to distract him from his grief.

When the bandit slain had receded out of sight, but well before they had come to the ford again, Molly called out to the boy, breaking him free of his ceaseless gnawing at the past: her voice was welcome to him for that relief.

“Hob, cease a moment.”

She set the brake and dismounted the wagon. She gestured to the others. Jack and Nemain once more fastened their respective beasts to the wagons ahead and came up to the lead wagon. Hob came trailing back, the lead rope slack in his hand.

Molly slumped back against the wagon, leaning against the front wheel. There was a little splintery gouge in the wheel’s wood, right by her elbow, where, after the battle, Jack had dug out the first arrow of the ambush with the point of his knife. Molly looked around the little group. Hob thought she had never seemed so weary.

“A fear there is to me,” she said, beginning to lose her English as she thought hard in Irish, “that it’s being herded we are.” She made a visible effort to grip the foreign idiom once more. “I cannot tell at all. Those masons, surely they are all dead, if the inn is any guide to us; and they being dead, Lady Svajone with whom they traveled is dead, and her doctor is dead, and her esquires, and her grooms and drivers. This thing kills before us and behind us, and we not knowing what happens beyond the next bush. I have a sense of being toyed with.”

She straightened, and looked at Nemain. She spoke formally. “Nemain, are we being herded?”

Nemain considered, and then said slowly and carefully, “Nor can
I tell,
seanmháthair,
but I can tell that there is some misdirection makes it difficult to know.”

Molly said, very low, “Yet the Crow-Mother led me in this direction, from the inn, and I asking Her the road to safety.”

“I was watching you the while,
seanmháthair,
and your face, and by the look of your eyes I did not think it was of safety you spoke. It was revenge entirely that I saw there.”

Molly thought for a moment. “You have the right of it. There was a hunger for safety in my thoughts; but in my mouth, in my mouth, there was a bitter thirst for revenge. I know not which it is that Crow Babd has sent us.” She looked away into the west, where a pearl-bright gleam in the roof of cloud showed where the sun had begun to sink toward the tree line, making for Ireland and making for its nest beyond Ireland, down in the Western Ocean. “It is a bitter, bitter thirst, and not my first taste either,” she said, so low that Hob could barely make out her words.

After a moment she brushed her hands together in a dusting-off motion, and said, “Enough. We cannot return to the inn. We can take the eastern path and see what comes of it. Herded or not, it is back toward the ford we must go in any case. Away on.”

As he took his place at Milo’s head, Hob wondered why Molly and her granddaughter had been so careful to deliberate in English, rather than in their native speech. They had done it also outside the walls of Osbert’s Inn, when Molly asked the younger woman whether to go forward or to return. It was as though Molly and Nemain felt that he and Jack ought to be included, perhaps because the course of the future now ran so quickly into shadow and uncertainty. He felt proud for a minute or two, but then, as he turned it this way and that in his mind, pride fell off and apprehension rose to take its place.

T
HE RESPITE FROM THE SNOW
did not last, as all had known it would not. Snowfall began again gently, and again progressed to thick veils of white that fell straight down like river water falling over a cliff; then the wind awoke once more, and the snow came at them, stinging their cheeks, clustering on their eyelashes. With equal suddenness the wind changed, veering across their path, and eyes could again open wider than slits.

The snow’s accumulation was startling in its rapidity. Hob was now trudging through ankle-deep snow and it was increasing with every twenty steps he took. Walking grew difficult, and driving the animals as well. Even Milo began to labor and snort, and the wheels of the wagon sometimes slid rather than rolled.

The wind was piling the snow into drifts when Molly called another halt, had the wagons all roped together, and sent Hob up to take her place while she took the lead rope herself. She tightened her cloak a bit and hoisted her skirt somewhat, tucking it into her belt. She had Hob reach back through the hatch and hand her down a staff. Then she set off once more. Now Hob in the first and Nemain in the second wagon had little to do but be ready with the brakes; Jack was needed back by the mare, who became difficult when she was frightened, as she was now by the increasing storm, and he walked beside her with a rope run back to the brake lever.

They moved off again through the forest, and for a time made better progress, although Milo, obediently following Molly as she led the way into whistling white emptiness, looked around every few minutes to see that Hob was still there; then, reassured, the ox turned back to the path.

Hob was hunkered down in his sheepskin coat on the wagon seat. The reins were held loosely in his gloved hands, more as a precaution against the unexpected than as a guide to the ox; Hob’s foot was braced against the footboard near the brake, ready to stamp it shut. So
they proceeded for a time, moving through a largely featureless world of tumbling snow and the barely glimpsed backdrop of the forest.

Hob became aware that Molly had stopped, and Milo as well. He kicked at the brake to prevent the wagon from running up into the ox’s rump. He shielded his eyes with a glove, peering forward past Milo’s blunted horns. Through the curtains of snow, blowing now nearly sideways, Hob glimpsed a group of riders, sitting motionless, blocking the trail.

There seemed to be perhaps a score of horses, although many behind the front ranks seemed riderless. Four riders in front ranged across the nearly obscured path. He could not make out the faces of the riders, muffled as they were in cloak and cowl against the weather, but the ominous stillness with which they sat exuded menace.

Suddenly the rider on Hob’s right charged off the trail at an angle, the horse floundering through the drifts, in a headlong flight toward a nearby broad-trunked oak. They skidded to a halt just before a disastrous collision, the flung snow from the braking hooves leaping ahead in a little wave.

The mysterious rider sawed at the reins, hauling the horse’s head around and kneeing it back toward the trail. From deep within the shadows of the cowl came a familiar voice: “Jesus wither you like that fucking fig tree in Bethany, you whore, you traitress! You near killed us both, you smoking pile of goat dung, she-devil, she-fiend!”