Something Red (36 page)

Jack began to twitch and mutter in his sleep, as one does who has an evil dream. Molly lowered her voice.

“It may be that he can hear us, in some wise.” She put a hand on Jack’s brow,
tsk
ed, dipped a cloth in the cold water of the pitcher. She wrung it out onto the rushes at her feet, then draped it over Jack’s brow.

“It is not a thing to do lightly,” she said in a murmur. “I hated to ask it of him, but I saw no other road to safety. Or to revenge. He agreed. Part of them always longs for it, surely, and I did not want to offer it to him, and blow on the embers once more. But he knew as well that he must change back again, and at once, and again go through the pain of purging the fever from him, and part of him did not want to live through that again. But he agreed, he agreed because I asked it of him, brave lad, and I love him for it.”

She poked at the fire until it revived somewhat, and then sat looking into the flames, distant, abstracted. Hob thought it unmannerly to intrude upon her reflections. He began to gaze into the fire instead; in any event, he did not lack for things to contemplate.

CHAPTER 25

H
OB ENTERED THE CASTLE IN
snow and left in sunlight; entered the castle a boy and left nearly a man. The months they spent there, as Molly coaxed Jack and Sir Jehan back to health, saw Hob shoot up, tall and awkward, with outsize hands and feet. His voice broke and wavered, and finally sank to a bass, interspersed with the occasional embarrassing squeak. But that was much later, toward the summer. It was in the spring that he grew up.

A
S SOON AS
J
ACK
was able to leave his sickbed, he expressed a desire to stand without help. He tottered about the room, collapsed back into the bed. The next day he walked about for a while, and then sat for the rest of the afternoon, and was asleep by dusk. The day
thereafter he walked the corridors, and the next day went down and out into the bailey.

A cool spring rain clattered down on the slate tiles of the stable roofs. Jack stood just outside the keep, and looked about at the wide world, and breathed deeply, as if the homely smells of the bailey’s damp earth, horse dung, woodsmoke, were nourishment itself, and the rattle and gurgle of rain, the ringing of iron hammers on steel from old Thierry’s forge, were the music of Molly’s harp. Then he turned and made his way upstairs and slept through the night.

Jack had always had a formidable constitution, and Hob suspected that some residue of the Beast in Jack’s blood lent him a measure of further vitality. He remembered Molly saying, “. . . and they live long, long.” Within a sennight Jack Brown was helping old Thierry in his smithy, which was also the castle’s armory. At first Jack performed light chores for Thierry, pausing frequently to rest. Another fortnight brought Jack to full participation at the forge, and Thierry was pleased at the help.

Even when not hammering at the anvil, or thrusting bars of iron into the forge, Jack would spend hours picking up and moving lumps and bars of raw iron, or handfuls of horseshoes, from place to place at the forge. Hob thought it strange and purposeless; Thierry, whose joints now barely troubled him at all, thanks to Molly, looked on with an uncomprehending but benign gaze.

One day when rain roared on the smithy roof, Jack brought Hob into the forge with him, the chill spring air from the open doorway thwarted by the heat from the forge, the dark smithy glowing with firelight, sparks showering from the prentices’ hammers as they struck down upon the anvil, the glowing fragments bouncing on the floor and winking out in the shadowy corners.

Without explanation, Jack handed Hob a short bar of iron. The weight sank immediately toward the ground, but Hob gripped it the tighter and managed not to drop it.

Jack gestured for Hob to give it back. The lad did so, wondering. Then Jack gave it to him again, and Hob recognized it for a sort of game, although to what purpose he could not see. This went on for a while, then Jack picked up a sledge and turned again to the forge.

The next day Hob’s arms were sore, and he applied to Molly for some salve, “For Jack kept handing me these bars of iron, and then taking them back, I know not why, and now I ache from wrist to backbone.”

“It’s a way Jack has: it’s getting his strength back he is, and giving you your own as well. Jack was by way of being a master of strength, even before”—she lowered her voice abruptly—“he met that Beast”—and in more normal tones—“and it’s a mort of power that you can gain from him.”

A
FORTNIGHT OR SO LATER
, Hob’s muscles began to grow, and while he was becoming gangly with increased height, his limbs began, though slowly, to thicken. A few more weeks, and he began to help hammer at the forge, and he discovered calluses on his palms from handling tools and iron and steel. He ate well each night, for Sir Jehan stinted them nothing, and Hob and Nemain were honored and even pampered by all the castle’s folk.

One night, Molly called Hob over, looked at his wrists and ankles, turned his hands over to inspect his palms. “Coming into your growth, you are: ’tis time you knew weapons. I’ve asked Sir Balthasar to set you at learning Norman swordcraft, he being the grandest killer of the North Country, or so I am to hear.”

The fire was burning merrily now, and the firelight shone in Molly’s silver hair, making ruddy highlights reminiscent of Nemain’s. She had a ceramic crock of the
uisce beatha
by her side, and her eyes had a glassy sheen.

“He will show you those arts that he knows, and afterward, when
we have left this castle, I will show you those arts that he does not know. One day you will be even more dangerous than Sir Balthasar.”

A twig popped in the fireplace and drew her gaze to the flames. She suddenly sat very still, looking into the blaze as though there were something there, far down in the fire.

She turned back to him, and looked at him with the same glistening, empty eyes. She was drunk, or she was fey; perhaps both.

“Be said by me, one day kerns will call you Robert the Englishman, and you dwelling in Erin the while, and an adopted man of the O’Cearbhalls, and a high man at that, and you will walk the fields of battle all unscathed. Foemen will step away to the right hand and the left, fearing to engage you, the dread champion in Erin. I tell you that men will be boasting, not that they prevailed against you, but only that they had a passage at arms with English Robert, and lived to walk the earth afterward.”

She came to herself a little, and used her shawl to dab at her brow and upper lip, and drank again; and that was all he heard from her that night.

H
OB PRACTICED WITH THE SQUIRES
in an exercise yard formed from a part of the bailey and defined by an internal wall, only two stories high, that ran from the keep to one of the northern watchtowers. They grunted and strove with wooden weapons, wrestled and ran, covered in sweat and dust.

Whether it was Molly’s healing power, or his own resilience, when Hob now looked back on Fox Night, it was to draw from the memory strength rather than weakness: what mortal foeman would he ever face that would be as terrible? He threw himself into learning combat with such zeal that often Ranulf or whoever else was instructor that day would have to pull him back, like an overeager hound. Hob felt in some obscure way that he must prepare himself, to make himself worthy to
be in Molly’s troupe, and worthy, as well, to be Nemain’s companion. He remembered that slim pale hand and its dagger and the thrust that had saved his life, and his ferocity at practice soon caught him up to the older youths, and indeed dismayed them somewhat; indeed they began to fear him a little.

“See there; there she is again!” Giles had paused, panting, and tipped his head toward the wall. Hob and the pages Bernard and Drogo all turned, looked upward.

Along the top of this internal boundary wall ran a walkway. On this a woman stood watching them. The sun was behind her; all he could see was the graceful outline of bosom and hip as the wind blew her garments and unbound hair streaming out to one side. The sun was so bright behind her, it made her a woman cut from darkness.

As soon as she saw them looking up at her, she turned, albeit without haste, and moved off toward the keep. As she turned away, the sunlight caught her face and lit her wind-tossed locks to red flame.

It was Nemain.

S
IR BALTHASAR SUMMONED
Hob one day from his practice with the squires and pages of the castle. Hob came away, wondering if he was in some kind of trouble. The knight led him by circuitous ways to a small cloister, another of the secret spaces in Blanchefontaine.

Sir Balthasar turned and faced Hob, and handed him a wooden dagger. The knight stepped back a pace, his arms at his sides, and said, “Come kill me.”

“Sir?”

Hob stood still a moment, uncertain, and then, realizing what was required of him, sprang at the knight, swinging the dagger in a rapid arc toward Sir Balthasar’s abdomen.

Sir Balthasar made play with his open hands and a nimble foot,
and Hob found himself on his back in the soil of the little yard, the dagger a yard away and his wrist aching.

The knight looked at him without anger, but without sympathy either. He picked up the dagger, hauled Hob to his feet, and slapped the dagger-hilt back into the lad’s palm.

“Again, but move slowly, and watch what I do.”

This time the castellan showed him how his wrist had been seized and his dagger hand forced open and his ankle kicked from under him. “You will need to put on some meat before this will be of use to you, but you should learn what to do now, even before you have the strength to do it.”

He handed Hob the wooden dagger for the third time.

“Again.”

Hob came in again, but with his free hand held above his dagger hand, guarding it. Sir Balthasar did a quick shuffle, and Hob still landed in the dirt, but the knight contemplated him for a long moment, plainly surprised at Hob’s improvisation. Then he set Hob on his feet, and gave him back the dagger.

“Again.”

A
T FIRST THE BUDS
on the trees, seen from the wall-walks of Blanchefontaine, seemed like a green spray on the ocean of black and gray and brown twigs that stretched away from the castle walls. Hob and Giles and Hubert, up on the wall, flew kites in the early spring breezes. As the leaves broadened, the verdant mass grew dense; the ground could no longer be seen for the sea of forest that stretched away from the castle to north and south and to the west, till it broke upon the flanks of hills blue in the distance. To the east the land fell away to the Derwent far below, but there, too, spring surged to life.

Molly began to speak of taking the road again.

*   *   *

S
IR JEHAN
was of one highborn family and his wife of another, and their influence reached down to London. He was able to explain the loss of so many knights at his castle with artful tales of more than one battle with Gold-Beard’s bandits, and an encounter with a rogue bear, and for the French chevalier, a horse that tripped and bore Sir Estienne with it over one of the precipitous drops in that steep hill country. Stern warnings from Sir Balthasar, as well as loyalty to Molly among the castle’s common folk, who realized what they had escaped, kept the tale from spreading among the country folk, except in the form of occluded fireside tales. In time, as the years rolled over the Pennines, all that was left was one of those skipping rhymes that older children teach to younger ones, generation unto generation, a few incomprehensible verses, each of which ended:

Blanchefontaine,

Fox’s bane

CHAPTER 26

G
LUE SHADOW DRENCHED THE
bailey. The sun had breached the horizon a little while ago, but it had yet to clear the eastern wall. The green-scented early summer air was still cool in the dim dawn. The bustle of preparation about Molly’s wagons, the murmurs of the crowd gathered to bid farewell to their saviors, the
ching
of the knights’ spurs and the creaking of saddle leather as the escort mounted up, echoed from the curtain walls. Behind it all was a faint splashing: in the center of the bailey gleamed the imported marble of the eponymous white fountain. The snow that had covered it had thawed; the ice that had blocked it had melted. The spring that fed it was once more free to spout in four streams into the air, collect in a shallow pool, and run off in a stone channel past the stables, widening briefly into watering
troughs before exiting through a grille under the east wall, to fall in a spray toward the Derwent.

Molly was embraced by Lady Isabeau and Dame Aline, kissed on both cheeks. Jack and Nemain were already on their wagon seats; Hob stood at Milo’s head, holding his lead rope. The ox had grown stout in the last few months, and seemed by no means eager to take the road: it kept tossing its head, trying to reclaim the lead rope from Hob, and looking back sadly at the stables, with their excellent mangers.

A last word with Sir Balthasar, who bent to kiss Molly’s hand, and with Sir Jehan, who kissed her on both cheeks, and then Molly swung up to her seat on the second wagon. Jack was in the lead this day, and now he gathered up the mare’s reins and clicked his tongue to start her moving.

The sun touched the crenellated rim of the east wall, streaming through the crenels, blocked by the merlons: for a long moment golden rays shot above their heads to throw the silhouette of the ramparts against the western wall, playing on the gatehouse towers.

The advance guard clopped into the gatehouse tunnel, along with Jack’s wagon. The inner doors were closed; the outer doors were opened. The first contingent clattered out of the castle, thundered across the bridge, and pulled up some way up the road, to wait for the next batch to pass through the gatehouse. When all were across the moat, the caravan re-formed in the road, and began to move off through the forest that surrounded Blanchefontaine.