THE EARL (A HAMMER FOR PRINCES) (7 page)

Whoever had built the ferry had used craft; the rope ran through a block and tackle hitched to the trunk of a tree. While Roger shouted across the river, Fulk investigated the workmanship. There was a similar arrangement on the drawbridge at
Stafford
Castle
. Wulfric often brought river fish to the castle kitchens and he might have gotten the idea there.

A man had come out of the hut across the way and was unmooring the barge, shouting all the while. Roger turned to Fulk. “What is he saying?”

Fulk listened—Wulfric was speaking English. “Something about the horses. We can’t take both across at once. We’ll leave mine here and come back for it, but I’ll go with you. I want to see what his toll is.”

The barge swam empty across the river toward them. In Fulk’s ear the rope groaned and shrilled through the pulleys. Roger stepped down the bank to haul the barge up against it, and Fulk called, “Don’t—leave it out a little, we can take the horse into the water.” The weight of the horse might ground the boat. He led Roger’s horse into the knee deep water. Pebbles crunched under his boots. The horse threw up its head and snorted, rolling its eyes at the barge, but when Roger took its bridle it followed him docilely onto the flat bottom. Fulk pushed the stern away from the bank and threw one leg across the gunwale, and Roger grabbed his arm and pulled him in. The barge wallowed slowly back toward the other side.

Wulfric was hauling with all his strength on the ropes. Fulk sat in the stern, watching him, impressed by the man’s skill. When they were nearly to him, Wulfric looked up; apparently he recognized Fulk, because for a moment he stopped pulling and glanced around wildly. Roger reached up and took hold of the rope over his head and hauled them onto the bank.

“So, Wulfric,” Fulk said. “You’ve become a ferryman in my absence.” He walked carefully up to the bow of the barge and stepped onto dry land.

Wulfric bowed several times, displaying his bad teeth. “The bridge is gone, my lord. I thought it was my Christian duty to help travelers like yourself, my lord.”

“Yes,” Fulk said. “What is your charge for ferrying us across?”

“Nothing, my lord.” Wulfric bowed; his black hair barely concealed a balding spot like a tonsure on the crown of his head.

“Surely you charge other people something?” Fulk glanced back—his horse was still hitched to the tree on the far side. “We have to get my horse across.”

“Sometimes people give me something,” Wulfric said. He went to the ropes, and Roger got back into the barge. “Just as—you know—a token.” Wulfric showed his teeth again in Fulk’s direction. “Just some of their produce, or something like that, but from my lord, I would take nothing.”

“Of course not,” Fulk said, looking around at Wulfric’s hut and the area around it, which had been his garden once and now lay fallow. “Do you still fish?”

“Oh, well,” Wulfric said, hauling ropes. “When I can, of course.”

The barge had reached the far side; Fulk watched Roger coax and whip his horse on board. Wulfric leaned against the tree, an alder whose bark showed deep scars from the ropes. “We hear something of what goes on, south,” Wulfric said. “In the war. The young prince, now, he seems to be doing somewhat better than last time.”

Fulk said, “He’ll be your king someday.”

Wulfric’s eyes widened; Fulk could see him imagining how he would report that to the next travelers. “My lord
Stafford
to me . . .” The barge was in midstream, with Fulk’s horse braced on all four legs, rigid, while Roger tried to soothe it.

Fulk said, “My bailiff was remiss—he never told me about your ferry. I’ll have to ask him about it.”

Wulfric went gray. He paused at the ropes.

“For example,” Fulk said, “what do you give me for your use of my river?”

“Oh, well,” Wulfric said, “you must nderstand, my lord—”

"A tenth seems fair enough, doesn’t it? A tenth for me and a tenth for the Church.”

Wulfric hauled the barge in to the bank and stood, half turned away from Fulk, watching Roger lead off the trembling horse. His knotted, freckled shoulders glistened with sweat. Finally he looked at Fulk. “A tenth, my lord.”

Fulk nodded. Roger stood nearby with both horses, waiting. Fulk reached into his wallet and took out a halfpenny. “For our passage.” He wondered if it was enough and decided Wulfric would never dare charge anyone more than a farthing. “Give my tenth to Gilbert at
Stafford
. Good day.”

“Good day,” Wulfric said, woodenly, and poked the halfpenny into a pouch at his belt. “My lord.”

Fulk mounted, and they rode off toward the monastery. After they had gone a little way, threading a path through a stand of alders and willows, Roger said, “God’s blood, the sour look on that one’s face deserves a blow.”

“Maybe.” It was difficult to enforce laws when people had grown used to ignoring them. He went over his talk with Wulfric in his mind, wondering if he’s played a tyrant, and decided he had not. Ahead, the ground rose steeply, covered with tangled berry patches and seeding grass. They rode up the hillside, avoiding the outcroppings of rock. A pheasant boomed up out of the high grass, almost under the hoofs of the horses, and they shied.

“It’s hot,” Roger called. “It’s going to be a hot summer.”

“It’s always a hot summer.”

They rode up onto the crest of the hill and looked down into a pine wood, across a slope littered with boulders and heavy brush.

“That old bee tree has fallen down,” Roger said, pointing. A huge old hollow oak tree that every summer had swarmed with bees and dripped honey lay now in a heap of dust and chunks of rotten wood across the slope, halfway to the edge of the forest. The bees were gone. Fulk nudged his horse down toward it, leaning back in his saddle—on this steep slope the horse hobbled downhill, picking its way.

“Let’s jump it,” Roger called.

Fulk gathered his reins and rapped his heels on the horse’s ribs. His horse burst into a lope, straining at the pull of the steep slope; behind him, Roger let out a yell, and his horse thundered after Fulk’s. Fulk tightened his reins to give the horse something to lean on. The broken trunk of the bee tree rose out of the grass like a wall, and the ground all around it was littered with branches. The horse gathered itself like a bow bending and sailed over the trunk, its neck and head reaching, reaching—Fulk clutched a handful of mane and watched the bee tree flying beneath them. The horse landed and stumbled and flung itself at a full gallop downhill. Roger’s horse pounded after them, a wild drumming of hoofbeats. Fulk shouted. The wood rushed toward them, thick and dark, full of low branches. They swerved into the mouth of a narrow deer trail. Birds screamed and fluttered in the trees overhead. Fulk crouched in his saddle. He had lost a stirrup when the horse stumbled, and he poked his foot around, blindly hunting it—the iron stirrup cracked him on the ankle and he gave up. The ground flattened out and his horse lengthened its stride, pricking up its ears. Glancing back, Fulk saw Roger crashing along after them, ducking branches; his horse’s nostrils were red and wide, pumping.

A windfall appeared in the trail, and Fulk’s horse hurled itself over it almost without checking. Branches scraped Fulk’s back and the pommel of his saddle struck him hard in the stomach. He put his head down—let the horse find its way—and used his hands and legs to steady it and urge it on. The shifting of the horse’s balance delighted him, its quick coordination. A tree whacked his leg.

The horse crashed through a narrow place between two clumps of yew and burst out onto the meadow around the monastery. Behind them, Roger yelled, and the sound of his horse’s hoofs drew nearer. Fulk’s horse flattened its ears to its head and drove on, straining for more speed. Fulk headed it up toward the monastery gate. Roger’s horse was the faster and with each stride crept closer. The monastery gate was gone, leaving only a gap in the rock wall just wide enough for one horse. The lean gray head of Roger’s horse drew even with Fulk’s knee; sweat had stained it dark as armor. Flecked with yellow stonecrop, the monastery wall sailed toward them. Fulk pressed his rein against his horse’s neck, moving it over against Roger’s gray, trying to keep the other horse behind him; the rein shaved the thick lather from the horse’s neck in plumes.

Roger shouted. His horse surged up head to head with Fulk’s, and in two strides, right before the gate, the gray pulled out in front. Fulk sat back to stop his horse. The two plunged headlong through the gate and into the courtyard.

Their hoofs rang on stone. Fulk sawed on his reins. Skidding on the half-buried paving stones, the gray tried to stop and could not and ran into the oak tree beside the door of the chapel, and Roger fell off into the branches. Fulk wrestled his horse to a stop and burst out laughing.

The gray horse stood shaking is head and snorting. Roger clawed his way out of the tree, his hair in his eyes, and looked dazedly from side to side. Fulk bent over his saddle pommel and sobbed with laughter.

“I won, at least,” Roger called, and went toward his horse. When Fulk looked up, he was laughing, too. He wiped his eyes on his sleeve and rode over to the well, which still stood in one corner of the courtyard.

“That’s a good horse,” Roger said. “He tried hard enough.”

Fulk slid down from the saddle. “He’s stronger than yours.” The gray was a famous racer; Roger was always winning races at fairs and tournaments with him. Roger hauled up a broken wooden bucket full of water from the well, and the horses thrust their heads forward, snorting.

“No,” Fulk said, elbowing his horse away. “You’re too hot.” He dipped up a palm full of water, drank it, and scooped up more for his horse. The thick pink tongue scrubbed his hand.

“How long have the monks been gone?” Roger said, looking around.

“Some while, obviously.”

The chapel and the two other buildings in the monastery were all falling down. They were made of wood, and holes gaped in their walls. Grass and gray-green weeds sprouted all over the courtyard, splitting the paving stones, and the wall was tumbling slowly to pieces. There was an old fire bed in one corner of the wall, a half-burned log and a heap of charred wood. The road west from
Stafford
ran just below this hill, and wayfarers caught on the road at night probably came up here for shelter. Fulk led his horse slowly around the courtyard to cool it down.

This place made him uneasy, as if someone were watching him. The wind roared through the pine woods all round it, with a distant, constant howl, and the wildflowers in the courtyard stirred, their blossoms swaying from side to side. It was beautiful, but he preferred the squat, homely buildings of
Stafford
, where people lived and worked.

Roger was giving his horse more water. Fulk slid his hand between the bay’s forelegs. Roughened with sweat, the hide there felt dry and cool.. Roger’s horse was probably still overheated. Fulk walked his horse around behind the dormitory, looking in the windows where the shutters had broken. Dry brush had blown up against the building in deep, soft heaps; twigs crackled when he stepped on them. He went back to the well and let his horse drink its fill.

“I’m going inside. Those damned monks, God save us from them. The place is a ruin.”

Roger nodded; he took Fulk’s horse off to tether it. Fulk put his shoulder to the chapel door and forced it halfway open.

The narrow, vaulted room smelled musty and mildewed. Nothing moveable remained in it—either the monks had taken everything with them, or people had stolen it. Even the altar was gone. On the wall over the dais where it had stood, there was a patch of discolored wood in the shape of a cross, where the Crucifix had hung. The air was dusty and hard to breathe. Fulk went to the side door into the dormitory—the silence and emptiness made the back of his neck prickle.

Made of oak and bound in iron, this door stood half open, and he put his hand on it to push it wider. Part of the door around the latch had been recently broken off.  

Someone had forced his way through here. He stepped back, warned, and shifted to one side to see through into the corridor beyond.

In the dim light he could see only a little way past the door, but the thick dust on the floor was covered with footprints.

“Roger.”

He kicked the door open and went through it, drawing his dagger. The corridor stretched away empty into the brown shadows. He thought, There is nothing here, I am acting like a child. He went cautiously down the corridor, glancing into the open doors on either side. These were monks’ cells, so small he could see every corner in a quick glance through the door.

Something whispered in the dust behind him, and he whirled, so that the club smashed down across his raised arm instead of his head. The blow knocked him sprawling down the corridor. He rolled—the wash of pain in his arm froze his breath in his lungs and blinded him, and he flung himself to one side, unable to see what was attacking him.

The club smashed into his side and he cried out. He could hear someone breathing hard. His eyes cleared, and he saw the club descending and tried to pull himself out of the way, and it struck him across the knee. A huge man loomed over him. His right side and his arm hurt so much he was sick; he got his feet up and kicked, slamming his bad side against the floor, but his feet struck the man with the club in the groin and knocked him back across the corridor.