The Illuminator (29 page)

In more thoughtful times (for when he was not dreaming wild and wondrous deeds from this other life, he had time for thinking), he spared a care, a bit of human understanding, for the monster. Had not the fickle hand of Wyrd given Grendel a craving for human flesh? Was the monster not, then, blameless? Did fate not make monsters of them all? Monsters did not make themselves. And then there was the mother, fierce in her vengeance, fierce in her love. He envied Grendel such a mother.

“Devil's spawn,” some called Half-Tom, and “begotten of a goblin.” His soul had been abraded by such words until it was a polished brilliant, hard and gleaming. If God, never the devil—he knew this with certitude because the holy woman had assured him that the devil could not create—if God had left him unfinished, there had to be a reason.

“God hath made all that is made; and God loveth
all
that He hath made,” the anchoress had said. She had been so reassuring, so motherly in her affection, in her surety, that he'd come to believe it too.

He grabbed his trident-shaped eel spear and headed down to where the Yare spilled its shallow waters into an oxbow lake. With one thrust of a muscular forearm, he pinned a great pike through its gill to the shallow bottom, then heaved it, tail flailing and splashing, into a willow kiddle. A fine fish for his friend. A fine gift for the holy woman.

At the end of market day, after his second pint of third ale—he was not so rich as to afford first pouring—and after his visit to Julian of Norwich, Half-Tom didn't head west into fen country and home, but north toward Aylsham. He had a message for the illuminator,
his
Hrothgar. This time, he would not give his message to a servant. He'd promised the holy woman that he would place the pages, carried inside his tunic, in the illuminator's hands only.

It was out of his way, a longer journey than from the market home— twelve miles to Aylsham and then two more to Blackingham Manor, all in the opposite direction, and the light was fading. But it was the least he could do. He owed a great debt to the illuminator.

And Mother Julian had been kind to him, too. She understood his needs in the way of no other. She knew about his aching loneliness. What was more, she celebrated his smallness. The first time he went to see her, he'd poured
out his bitterness against a God who'd made him half a man in a world that demanded giants. She'd looked at him with compassion in her eyes—so unaccustomed was he to it that he didn't recognize it at first. She'd plucked a hazelnut from a bowl sitting on the window ledge between them.

She leaned forward, held it up before his eyes. “See this, Tom?”—for she seldom called him by the slur that was his name, given him by the monks who found him at their door. “It is a hazelnut. Our Lord showed me a little thing, no bigger than this, which seemed to lie in the palm of my hand; and it was as round as any ball. I looked upon it with the eye of my understanding, and thought, ‘What is this?' ”

Here, she opened his callused palm and pressed the hazelnut into it, then continued. “Understanding came to me thus, ‘It is all that is made.' A thing so small. All creation. A world no bigger than a hazelnut. Safe in Christ's keeping hand. I wondered how long it could last. It seemed as though it might suddenly fade away to nothing; it was so small. And I was answered in my understanding; ‘It lasts, and ever shall last; for God loveth it. And even so hath everything being—by the love of God.'”

That had been three years ago, and the hazelnut Half-Tom carried in a fox-skin pouch strung around his neck was as firm and hard and round as when she'd first pressed it into his palm. Miracle enough for him. Let the rich abbots cradle their bones of saints in gem-encrusted reliquaries of hammered gold. This was the only holy relic he needed.

The sun set clear, but cold, as he trudged north, the road almost cleared of pilgrims now. Most had found their journey's end in Norwich, and those few who had not, had sought shelter and would resume their pilgrimages on the morrow. It took a brave heart, or a fool, to be on the road after dark when the brigands and outlaws came out to claim their rights with daggers and garrotes. It was with considerable relief that he saw the last rays of the dying sun glinting off the redbrick face of Blackingham.

He eyed the huddle of outbuildings with a thought to shelter. His nose wrinkled as he passed the tan yard, where the fresh pelts of slain livestock cooked in vats of urine. After he'd delivered his package, he would bed down near the smithy, where the heat from the forge would linger into the cold night. From Aylsham on, the air had been heavy and pungent with smoke from the crofters and yeomen smoking their winter meats, the closer to Blackingham, the stronger the smell. Best to enter through the kitchen. As a
messenger for a guest of the house, the cook would be bound to give him victuals. There would be an abundance of meat from the winter kills, maybe he could score a rich mutton stew or a pork pie.

As he approached the kitchen yard, last light picked out a dead tree, its gnarly oak fingers and twisted hollow trunk silhouetted against an indigo sky. A good bee tree, he thought with a sigh, but the honey would have been robbed in late September. There might be mead in the Blackingham kitchen. Sweet-spiced and heady, fermented from the honeycomb wash. Mead and a meat pie.

He patted the packet inside his jerkin and made resolutely for the kitchen door. But he was stopped dead in his tracks. A whisper from the region of the tree. Tuneless, and yet musical. Humming of the bees, perhaps, about to swarm. In November? He approached the tree to investigate. On the hill the heavy twilight softened to light-streaked lavender and the wind had died to that absolute stillness that sometimes comes when the day fades. He seemed to be alone beneath the tree; no other person—at least that he could see. Yet the formless tune grew stronger, more melodious. Angel song. Music such as only the Lord would hear in Paradise. The voice of the Holy Mother? A quaking terror began in his toes and swelled to his head, making it bob foolishly like a jester's mannequin. He moved closer to the tree, drawn forward by the floating music that beckoned, undulating and soft, like a woman's body, that forbidden fruit he'd never tasted except in his dreams (for it was only the overripe or the rotten that would be accessible to the likes of him— and he would have none of them).

His eyes scanned the purple twilight, searching the knoll and the tree. The sound seemed to come from the interior of the great oak trunk. He circled, like a deer approaching the verge of the forest. He touched the rough bark of the tree. Song, undoubtedly a woman's voice, but younger, a girl's perhaps, rose from the bowels of the tree. Not the Holy Virgin. Her voice would come from loftier heights, surely. A witch, then? Some evil spirit, possessing the tree? Half-Tom was not easily frightened. He'd seen predator and prey, witnessed the treacheries of field and fen and violent weather, encountered what he thought might have been the occasional fairy, or was it a dragonfly—who could ever say for sure? But even in the marvels that the dwarf encountered in his childlike acceptance of his natural world, trees did not sing. And this one was undoubtedly singing. In a woman's voice, that in itself a cause for anxiety.
He jerked back his hand, faster than from a hot griddle. Then he turned and fled toward the kitchen, as though the devil nipped at his tired heels.

Magda sat, cross-legged, inside the great hollow oak, humming softly to herself. This was a sound that pleased the bees. She didn't know how she knew this, she just knew it. The bees were her friends. The tree was a favorite retreat. She liked its quiet. She liked its small secret room, hidden from the world. She'd entered through a hole at the base, squeezing herself to half-crawl, half-slide between the gnarly roots. Carrying her offering with her, she'd twisted her body into a seated position. This is the way a baby feels inside its mother, she thought. No wonder they all came crying into the world.

Magda liked most small things, small spaces, small creatures. She missed the two little ones that she'd watched at home. On cold nights such as this, she'd hugged her little sisters under her arms in the hayloft where they slept, like a chicken sheltering its chicks beneath its wings. She wondered who warmed them now. And who cared for the ferret for whom she'd filched morsels from her father's table.

It wasn't that she was unhappy at Blackingham. The work was hard, but no more than she could do. And Cook was good to her, even let her sleep with her in her bed on cold nights. She'd plenty to eat and a warm shirt of wool that smelled of herbs. Her old ragged one had smelled like a privy. And wicked bugs lived in it, devil bugs that tormented her. She was glad when Cook had burned it. Now, her skin was pink, and her hair smelled nice, like lavender. And all her scabs were healed. (She couldn't remember when she hadn't had scabs to pick.) Still, sometimes the bigness of the place—so many people, so much emptiness, so many colors—confused her. And sometimes, in lonely moments that sneaked up on her, she ached for the little ones. She had nobody to take care of.

In the shadowy interior she could scarcely see the bees clinging to the wall of the tree-room, a seething mass, a living tapestry, the wings of the outside bees stirring, making body heat, to keep the others warm. She knew that when the outside bees grew cold, they would swap. Such a perfect unity, working together to ensure the survival of all during the winter. Why couldn't people work like that? Probably some reason that she was too dull to understand. She was, after all, a simpleton. Her father had said so.

From the bowl on the ground in front of her, she took two sticks, soaked in honey water, and inserted them gently into the living mass so that the bees could feed. The interior of the mass was as warm as the bed-brick Cook placed in their bed on cold nights. The smell of the pulsing bee tapestry mingled with the earth and wood. But there was no hint of rotten sweetness inside the tree. The worker bees had swept it clean.

The hive was growing. Soon, the tree would be too crowded. Next year, they would drive out the old queen and another hive would be born. She remembered the feel of the bees, gathering on her arms and shoulders like soft wool, when she'd taken the honey last September. That was when the blacksmith had come to kill the bees to rob them of their treasure, but she'd convinced him, with a violent shaking of her head and Cook's help, to let her gather the honey. And save the bees.

“Let 'er have a try,” Cook said. “That 'un's got a surprise or two up her sleeve.”

The blacksmith had backed away, a gentle giant, smiling and nodding. She knew him well. All the children knew him. He suffered them to hang around his forge, watching his pounding hammer flashing sparks against the anvil. If one of them got a sty around the eyes, he would say, “Come 'ere. Hold this iron rod while I hammer t'other end. When I've finished here, I'll fix yer peeper.”

The heat from the forge would force the pus and then the smithy would make a great fuss of wiping it away with some magic incantation.

“She has the gift of charming, all right,” the smithy had said, when she gentled the bees and produced the dripping comb from the interior of the tree.

Magda hadn't known it was a special gift, but she'd always known how to take the honey without killing the hive. The bees, like all God's creatures, owed tribute, and they paid theirs in sweet gold. Now, she brought the sleeping workers her tribute in return: a bowl of sticks soaked in water, honey, and rosemary so they could feed during the winter.

She sat with the bees while the evening gathered, thinking about how fortunate she was to have found this hermitage. The thickening gloom reminded her it was time to return to the kitchen to help Cook. It was Magda who carried the meals to the illuminator and his daughter. Lately, the last week especially, they no longer came to the solar to eat with Lady Kathryn. The illuminator seemed cross, out of sorts, and the girl was sick a lot, green
and retching. Not really sick. Her father should not worry so. Magda knew why Rose could not keep her victuals down. And she'd figured out why the illuminator's daughter was surrounded by two colors, the pink with an inner rim of light and that light growing brighter, more distinct, as Rose grew sicker. The sickness would be over soon. It never lasted long.