Squire's Honor

by Peter Telep

  But Doyle caught something in the way the man stressed certain words. It hit him. He turned to Montague, and, with a grimace forming, reported, “He’s a Saxon.”

  Montague shrugged off the fact as completely unim­portant. “Show him our money. He’ll understand that.” He looked to the master. “Money. Deniers, yes?”

  “Denier, yes,” the master answered in broken Celt, “one denier,” he pointed to the opposite shoreline some thousand yards away, “to go across.” He thrust his palm toward Doyle.

  Doyle looked back to Montague. The brigand nodded and gestured with a hand to pay the man. With a trace of reluctance, Doyle turned back, then untied the leather change purse strapped to his waist. He fished out a denier and handed the coin to the master. The Saxon licked one side of it, rolled the taste around in his mouth, then smiled, his teeth remarkably white.

  “Our money’s good,” Montague said behind him, then guided his horse onto the quay. “Let’s not waste any more time.”

  As the master helped both of them transfer their rounseys across a short, weather-beaten gangplank and onto the splintered and slightly warped rectangular deck of the flatboat, Doyle puzzled over the master’s testing of the coin. Could he really tell a slug from a denier by its taste?

  If the master was indeed a skilled money taster, he was an even better flatboat skipper. He deftly guided the craft with his long stick in the strong current and brought them downstream toward a quay on the oppo­site shore. During the ride, Doyle chewed heartily on some smoked whiting from his pack. The fish was a little tough, but any food was good now. He washed the whit­ ing down with some cider, while Montague tore greedily into his riding bag. The fat man stuffed everything he could into the beard-framed abyss that was his mouth.

  They reached the quay, and, with speed born of expe­rience, the master tied the flatboat to two of the pier’s thick wooden piles. He dropped the gangplank into place, then, with uncalled for courtesy, proceeded to help them guide their nervous rounseys over the board.

  Once on solid ground, Doyle and Montague mounted their horses. The master waved and uttered something, a good-bye perhaps, then turned back to his ropes and prepared to shove off.

  Shading the rising sun from his eyes, Montague said, “Now, that wasn’t so bad, eh laddie”?

  Doyle shook his head, no. It was, in fact, the first time he had ever used a toll cross, though he had cer­tainly heard about them.

  “Aye, but I am,” Montague continued with a slight chuckle, “a little disappointed in you.”

  Doyle delayed his reply as he reined his horse toward the Quantocks and started toward the rolling hills. Montague came up on his side. Without looking at the man, he asked, “What are you talking about”?

  “You just did business with a Saxon.”

  Doyle looked down at his three-fingered hand. Damn! He’d forgotten what he’d told Montague about wanting no part in dealings with Saxons. Yet trade with the master seemed so natural, and he doubted he and Montague would have been able to swim across the Parret in that current, or, had they bound the flatboat master and stolen his vessel, they probably would not have been able to pilot it to the opposite shore. They would have been swept downriver and leagues out of their way. They needed that Saxon and he needed their patronage. He appeared the average merchant. Did he have a family somewhere? How different was he? Was he one of the butchers Doyle had faced on the Quantocks or that particular devil who had robbed him of his fingers? No. He was just a man. Just a man trying to get by. Just a man like Doyle. This was not a startling revelation, for he and Christopher had talked politics occasionally, and Christopher had always argued that one day Saxons and Celts would coexist peacefully, that Saxons weren’t any different than Celts. Both peoples harbored the ugly talent for war; both possessed the wisdom to put an end to the bloodshed.

  It was ignorant and unfair to blame the entire Saxon people for what had happened to him. They were all vic­tims, in one form or another, of the war. He hated the Saxons because they had taken Weylin away from him. But they hadn’t stopped there. They had maimed him, had stripped him of who he had been, a fine archer.

  But who’s really to blame?

  He had thrown himself to the Saxons because he had wanted to die; he had wanted to end the guilt over killing Leslie and Innis. But instead they had disfigured him, had kept him alive, and now the torture continued, torture brought on … by himself.

  Perhaps it was time to let go of his hatred, let go of blaming the Saxons. It wasn’t going to be easy, and it wasn’t going to happen overnight. But maybe one day he’d be able to look upon the Saxons without prejudice. Then he might feel better about himself.

  Doyle slid his boots deeper into his stirrups, pulled down the drawstring on his shirt to close the neckline. The wind of his momentum cut across his face, and for a moment he looked at Montague.

  The old robber caught him looking and half shouted, “It’s all right, laddie. The Saxons killed my boys. I don’t feel any better about dealing with them than you do. But we have to live. And she’s changing, this realm. She really is.”

  By late afternoon, Doyle and Montague reached the end of the northwest side of the Quantock hills. Here, the hills became a series of wooded bluffs that overlooked the port of Blytheheart. The two marveled at the harbor as they reached the summit of a considerable wide cliff. A dirt trail snaked away from them to the east and led to the outskirts of the port. Before venturing down, Montague wanted to dismount, rest a spell, and exploit their God’s-eye view by giving Doyle a verbal jaunt of the seaport.

  There were four main cobblestone streets, each run­ning north to a connecting road that paralleled the Bristol channel. There were at least a half dozen side roads that linked the streets, and they, too, were of the most expensive stone.

  To the west, Montague pointed out the stocks and pil­lory of the punishment mound, and farther inland, the elaborate roof of the monastery; the building and adjoin­ ing grounds took up an entire block. Still farther south was a passage Montague called Plower Street, the grain market, and there were a great number of shanties set up there, around which merchants bustled like so many colorless specks.

  At the base of the ramparts in the west was an enormous cathedral, supported by literally fivescore but­ tresses. Stained glass, lancet-shaped windows of intricate design were set into every stone wall. An immense bell tower rose above the great church and now tolled Vespers in unison with the monastery’s bell. The cathedral was encompassed by a curtain wall of indeterminate height from this angle, but Montague said it thwarted thieves, or at least slowed them down a whole lot.

  Farther west, and on the same street as the cathedral, a tiny inn stood in its shadow. Montague reported that the boardinghouse had been relegated to Saxon merchants since there had been a few Celt-Saxon clashes at the Bove Street Inn, which stood on the northeast side of Blytheheart. Bove Street itself, besides being home to the inn, its stables, and, Montague added with a gleam in his eye, its brothel, was also where Blytheheart’s sum­mer fair was in progress. Peddlers’ tents were shoulder to shoulder and created a miniature trading city that was bordered by St. Thomas Lane and the bluffs in the south. But the peddlers’ tents were nothing compared to Merchant Row, one of Blytheheart’s main north-south streets on the east side of the port. This, Montague said, was the home of the real action. It was, Doyle thought, the marketplace of Falls ten times over. There had to be at least one hundred stalls down there, and he could not believe the number of people swarming the street, even more than in the grain market. And strangely, the peo­ple in both markets ignored the Vespers bell.

  Montague must have sensed his question coming, and he informed him with a knowing grin that the people down there in the markets were predominantly Saxons and Picts; they had come from the two merchant cogs docked at Blytheheart. Doyle looked to where Montague suggested, saw the four huge wharves that jutted out into the channel, two empty, two the temporary stop for the cogs. There was a lot o
f activity on the gangplanks of both ships. Barrels and crates came off and went onto the vessels, all under the auspices of a vast number of herring gulls and terns that squawked at sailors as they traced circles overhead.

  On the opposite side of the street that faced the wharves was a string of gable-roofed homes. Doyle guessed that the richest of Blytheheart’s merchants resided there, but he was only half-right. Montague said that the abbot’s chancellor lived in the largest house on the west side, next to the Customs House. The chancel­ lor was responsible for monitoring all financial matters in Blytheheart for the abbot. He had one of the port’s largest private residences, either to discourage him from corruption or as a product of it. It was like offering free food to a scullion; the boy would steal less food from the kitchen that way. Give the man who handles all the money everything and he may not want more. According to Montague, you can never have enough money, and he’d wager a scoreof deniers that the chan­cellor was so deep into the abbot’s till that he would need someone to grab him by the ankles to pull him out. Doyle chuckled over that, then turned his gaze to the center of town.

  The abbot of Blytheheart, the port’s most powerful man, lived in the most complex and elaborate abbey Doyle had ever seen. Queen’s Camel Abbey was a peas­ ant’s toft compared to it.

  Montague noted with a touch of irony that it was Lord Street that divided Blytheheart neatly in half and led to its center, where stood the abbey’s seven-foot­ high circular curtain wall. There were perhaps two full acres of land within the circle, and on that land stood a barn, stable, two wells, at least three separate gardens, and the rectangular abbey house itself, rivaling the cathedral in its ornate design. A cloister court broke the center of the abbey, and Doyle saw several persons walking across its many-fountained landscape.

  On the other side of the abbey’s curtain wall were cultivated parcels, and on them, loosely grouped clusters of timber-framed peasant houses, their roofs thatched with wheat straw. Two mills stood out among the structures, their patched-hemp sails turned steadily by the sea breeze. Grain sacks were being carried away from one of the mills by a line of workers, one tiny bit of activity among a sea of movement.

  Doyle took one final sweeping gaze of the port. He took a deep breath, awed.

  Montague rested a hand on his shoulder, squeezed him twice. “Welcome home, laddie.”

  2

  It’s only a dream.

  The wolf pack tightened its circle around Marigween and Baines. A frigid wind lashed over mother and child, and rustled the fur of the growling animals.

  One leapt in the air.

  Marigween’s rounsey bucked as she pointed the dead knight’s javelin in the direction of the beast and closed her eyes.

  She heard the wolf bark and wince, and felt the beast’s weight on the end of the javelin, a force that threatened to pry the weapon from her grip.

  She opened her eyes—

  As another wolf took to the air. There wasn’t time to yank the javelin from the breast of the first wolf. She released the weapon as the carnivore crashed down on top of her; its yellow-eyed gaze bore into her own.

  She fell from her horse. Baines let out a cry. The wolf’s hot breath reeked and his gummy spittle leaked onto her cheek as they plunged toward the ground. Her rounsey made a human-sounding cry as the other wolves attacked it.

  She hit the earth and was thrown onto her side. The wolf fell away, rolled over, and righted itself.

  She sat up, her back ablaze with pure, raw pain. She thrust her legs forward and dug her heels into the grass in a gasping effort to retreat. She wrapped a protective arm around her child. She tried to use the other hand to boost herself up to stand.

  But he came. He lowered his gray-black head and his jaw fell open. The beast’s black lips curled back. Ivory-white canine teeth that would tear her flesh into small, digestible chunks were slick with drool.

  She was game. She knew that. The wolf could not know the sadness of what it was about to do.

  “Stay away!”

  He leapt and landed, and his heavy, long-nailed paws knocked her onto her back. She lifted her head and looked to her chest.

  The wolf wrapped its jaws around Baines’s head. He growled as he bit down, then tore the baby from the bag and off her chest. The animal shook its head violently with the baby in its mouth, as if it enjoyed the way the child writhed and instinctively lifted its arms and clenched its hands at the fiery pain in its head. Marigween wailed and felt the wolf’s needling teeth as if they were in her own head.

  After another round of prancing with the baby, the wolf dropped the child to the ground.

  Slick with gore, Baines did not cry. He did not move. “No. NO. NO!”

  Another wolf trotted onto the scene and began a barking, scratching fight with the wolf who’d killed Baines, a fight obviously over the child’s sweet flesh.

  Still another wolf wandered into Marigween’s line of sight. This one stayed out of the fight and turned on her.

  The wolf pried its way past her flailing hands and sank its teeth into her neck.

  And now her neck should feel warm from her blood, but it was cold. Her ears should detect the snorting of the wolf, but they only registered her own labored breath.

  Her nose should crinkle under the musty, sweaty scent of the wolf’s coat, but it remained smooth with no odor to tighten it.

  Her mouth should be sandy and dry with perhaps a bit of salty-sweet blood seeping into it, but it hung limp and numb.

  Marigween could remember the details of the dream with excruciating ease—two nights spent dying in the dream and two mornings waking up soaked had been ample reinforcement. Strangely, Baines had not cried out for his nightly feeding. Had he, too, been dreaming?

  The wolves had not appeared on the Mendips. But those sounds had broken mental locks and had loosed some of her carefully hidden fears. Her apprehension lived freely in the dream.

  But it’s only a dream.

  Reality was around her, safe, comfortable reality, a reality that held the promise of reaching Blytheheart before sundown. Already she could smell the brine in the air. Twice she breathed it in, breathed in the promise.

  It hadn’t been that hard to reach the Quantocks, she reflected. Things had gone fairly smoothly. She had noted something that could have happened, though.

  When she had arrived in the river valley, she had observed that some massive group of people, an army perhaps, had recently been there. The earth had been tom up and the remains of cookfires had been scattered all along the shoreline.

  The Lord had indeed been watching over her; He had moved a possible threat out of her path.

  She had crossed the Parret River by way of a silent flatboat master who; when he had been asked, would tell her nothing about the group that had been in the valley. He had only smiled and said it would be one denier to go across. His Celtic was broken and strangely accented.

  Now as she guided her rounsey in a steady, gracious trot, she tried to remember what Uncle Robert looked like. It had been so long. She knew he still wore the tra­ditional shaved-center pate of a monk; his hair would not have changed. He might have gained weight. She remembered him as being very big, but to a little girl all adults are big. The one thing that had stood out about uncle was his laugh, his hee, hee, hee, hee, hee. Always five hees, as if he’d practiced it.

  She remembered when he had held her in his arms. He had laughed his laugh and she had touched his lips, curious about how he produced that strange, silly noise. She longed to hear it now. His letters received by carrier pigeon during the weeks she had been in Merlin’s cave had only mimicked the cadences of his voice, but they had reminded Marigween of his warm sense of humor, and had clearly conveyed his excitement over her com­ ing to Blytheheart. He had already arranged quarters for her just outside the monastery, on a farmer friend’s toft, and she’d be allowed to stay as long as she liked.

  The memory of that ancient man and his ancient cave she had lived in seemed ju
st as ancient in her mind. Marigween’s future lay just beyond the Quantock hills.

  She could see the tiny lights of the monastery on the west side of Blytheheart, but there was only one trail down into the port, and it led off to the east. The sun had set, and Vespers services were probably over for at least an hour already. The air was thin and near-wintry here in the bluffs. The wind swept over the channel and arrived with a temper. She’d thought her nights on the Mendips had been cold; they were balmy compared to the cliffs. She made sure Baines was bundled as tightly as he could be, and, ignoring a chill that probed her shoulders and chest, she descended the dirt trail toward Blytheheart.

  The wind did not feel as strong by the time she reached the point where the dirt stopped and a long, cobblestoned lane began. Buildings on either side of the lane thankfully dispersed the brunt of the seabom breeze. As her rounsey stepped onto the stone, Marigween realized he had thrown a shoe, the suspect hoof click-clocking differently from the others. At least she was here and could easily get him reshod. Marigween pulled her cloak tighter to fully conceal her sleeping child, then heeled her slowing mount.

  To her right she could see at least twoscore tents, but there were probably even more obscured from her view. No doubt, Blytheheart’s summer fair was in progress. Nearly every tent was illuminated from within. The flickering light of torches and candles threw shadows upon the canvases. She could hear chatter, faint wisps of music, and smell what had to be cauldrons that surely contained steamed meat and vegetables. A pang hit her stomach. It had been nearly a week since she’d had a warm meal. That would be the first thing she would request of her uncle. The second would be an equally warm bath.

  Marigween reached an intersection, but continued straight along her northern course. She knew this road would take her to Pier Street and that road would lead her across Blytheheart in an east-west path toward the monastery. Now she neared a rather large inn with dozens of merchant carts lined up in its front yard. There was a stable and hostler’s permanent lodge behind the inn, and another, long, rectangular, three—story building off to inn’s right. The place’s front door swung repeatedly open as traders came and went. She heard two of them chuckle from the stoop, then saw one, a young clean-shaven lad, look her way. She averted her gaze. He called out to her. She heeled her rounsey and the horse complied with speed, but his bare hoof now gave him more trouble.