In a Dark Wood

by Michael Cadnum

  “He has much to learn—”

  “Be careful that he does not become swallowed by his office and turn into another colorless grown man, like your clerk. Like myself, if I may say so.”

  Or, thought Geoffrey, like me.

  31

  That evening a messenger arrived from the forest. The man was black with mud. A splotch of it shined above his eyebrows like a dark eye looking out of his head, contradicting everything he said.

  Henry was driving the men hard. They slept as little as possible, cursing the night for being so long. And they had good news: they had found a recent camp. So recent a deer hung just gutted, and the ashes still glowed. They had blundered on it by accident and had plainly surprised the outlaws. “They were only minutes ahead of us,” said the messenger with a grin.

  Geoffrey ordered the best meats for the messenger and praised Henry. But why was this news painful? For a reason he could not guess, Geoffrey did not like the idea of Robin being surprised.

  “This was deep in the forest?” Geoffrey asked at last.

  “Very,” answered the messenger, chewing. “Halfway to Barnsdale, it seems.”

  So Robin was not lingering near Nottingham. Geoffrey repeated his praise of Henry, but when he stood at the top of the East Tower and looked across the city to the darkness, he was not glad. There was something wrong.

  As he stood there, smelling cooking fires and the dirty water of the moat, he looked up at the starry sky, and a meteor curled across the sky, slowly, like an eyelash burning. Geoffrey looked down, then leaned heavily against the battlement.

  Many years ago a peasant woman had stabbed her husband through the lung with a kitchen knife. The man, through the power of the saints, had run into the road accusing his wife, before he collapsed and died, screaming bloody gouts. The woman had been condemned to the gibbet. But the previous sheriff, a corpulent man who had no pity for any living thing, had suffered a mercy cramp and decreed that she could live, provided that she would be walled up in a tiny house near the graveyard for the rest of her days.

  Such a building was mortared, and the woman was led to it accompanied by priests, and the place was consecrated. She was shut up in it, and the only opening was a small slit, three fingers wide, for light, air, and the food of awed villagers. She did nothing but pray, constantly. Her crime was virtually forgotten. The sheriff was long since dead of a tangled gut, and the priests had faded into age and fallen. The holy woman survived, praying, and, when asked, offering a prophesy.

  Geoffrey did not like to think about her. It was terrible to be locked into a standing grave—worse than locked; a gang of men with sledgehammers would have to free her, and they might well crush her in the process. It was better to think of her as dead, as a spirit trapped on earth, like a moth in a cupped hand. Besides, only very common people sought her help, and while there was no shame in doing so, it was nothing to be proud of, either.

  But Geoffrey had seen a meteor, and a meteor meant only one thing: death. It was the surest omen.

  It was cold by the cemetery, and the stars were too bright, as if eager to overhear. A wind started and stopped, and Geoffrey’s breath joined the breath of Hugh in a sloppy wreath round them both.

  The black slit in the stone wall was directly ahead of them. Such a small building, scarcely bigger than a privy. Geoffrey did not want to look at it. “She’s probably asleep,” said Geoffrey, tucking his gloved hands under his arms for warmth.

  “She never sleeps,” whispered Hugh.

  “How do you know?”

  “We talk about her all the time, everyone I know.”

  Geoffrey nodded.

  There was a cesspit pungency in the air as the slit exhaled. Geoffrey crept close to the slit and put his hand on the moss-hairy wall. “Stand away, so you can warn me if anyone is coming,” said Geoffrey, who actually did not want to be overheard.

  Geoffrey was alone then, leaning against the wall, a wedge of waxy cheese in his gloved hand. Wind took in a long breath and held it. It was colder, and the stars were clear and hard, ice on black water.

  A common person, used to imploring, would know how to begin. Geoffrey had no idea. The smell of the cheese mingled with the stink of human dirt, but Geoffrey was familiar with unpleasant smells.

  A saint you simply prayed to. With this holy woman there was a potential for give and take, and the thought disturbed Geoffrey so much he wanted to leave at once. It had been a reckless thing to come here.

  Endless whispered words, too soft to hear, as gold hammered air-thin is too pliant for anything but the finest altar. The prayers were urgent, too, like those of a woman who had only minutes to live, not at all like those of someone who had been praying for twenty years.

  “Good woman,” whispered Geoffrey, “I have brought you some food.”

  The quiet prayers grew faster. They were like the shuddering imprecations of someone tortured nearly to death. The presence of such holiness pressed Geoffrey against the wall.

  In an instant the cheese was gone. Vanished, as a spirit would vanish into an opening in the fabric of space. And the prayers stopped. There was silence, black and perfect as a moat at night. Then they began again, even more quiet, and if he had not heard them before, it would have been impossible to hear them now, as soft as green leaves blown across grass.

  “Good woman, I need your help.”

  The unseen lips continued their constant whisper, but the sound grew brighter as the lips approached the dark cut in the stone. She was there, listening as she prayed, on the other side of the stone. Geoffrey shivered. “I need your help,” he repeated.

  Again silence, like a third person between them.

  “I have seen a meteor, and I need to know: am I about to die?”

  A glistening white twig appeared on the stone sill of the slit. Another joined it, and another, fingers in the starlight. “God’s palate,” she whispered, like an unusual curse a knight might make, but so fervent Geoffrey knew it was not a curse. “God’s precious wounds.”

  And the woman wept.

  “Please, good woman,” said Geoffrey. “Please, don’t cry.”

  “God’s precious tongue,” the woman keened, and Geoffrey began to cry, too. He knew why the woman wept, seeing before her like a presence in the room the terrible agony of Christ. Geoffrey pressed himself hard against the wall, so the stones hurt. He wanted to ask her to stop crying, but it was futile, because he knew she had good reason to weep, naming the tender parts of Christ’s body, and weeping at the terrible agony He felt. The two of them were locked in the horror of it.

  And the shame, that mortals were so unworthy. It did not matter to Geoffrey whether he lived or died. His life swam like the sheen on the skin of a bubble.

  Hugh was waiting, just beyond earshot. The two of them hurried away from the churchyard. High on the wall a guard shifted his spear, turned, walking his rounds.

  “God gave me a sign this night,” said the sheriff. “A sign that I am in mortal danger.”

  “Did the anchoress—” Hugh could not bring himself to ask. Geoffrey had never felt so close to Hugh, nor had he ever felt how impossible it was to express his tangle of fear and faith.

  “My lord,” said Hugh, “I will protect your reputation and your life with my own.”

  The intensity of the young man’s speech touched Geoffrey, but it concerned him, too. And somewhere in his mind there was a touch of affectionate amusement as well. What can you do, dear Hugh, he wanted to say, that all my men and all my prayers cannot bring to pass?

  Geoffrey surprised himself by saying, “I know you will.”

  32

  The Fool stood in a shaft of morning light. The alert eyes followed Geoffrey as he paced. In the Fool’s hands was a kind of sceptre, but a very grotesque sceptre. A stick of wood ended in the neck of a head, like a pike into the neck of a criminal. The head resembled the head of the Fool himself, but smaller. The Fool carried a severed Fool’s head—perhaps a charm against beheading,
but in Geoffrey’s eyes a reminder of what he deserved.

  “Because, as I told my wife, I feel that we should have a discussion,” the sheriff continued. “I have asked someone to join us, briefly. I want you to get to know this castle, and my responsibilities, better than perhaps you do now.”

  The calm of morning mass still lingered in the sheriff, but as he paced and talked, he felt the last of it dissipate. The thing in the Fool’s hands turned and was watching.

  “Because a sheriff is not simply another man, to be admired or mocked. A sheriff is in a position to do terrible things.”

  The Fool’s head on a stick had lifted to the level of the Fool’s shoulder. The Fool’s face was a mockery of alertness, and the smaller face was a mockery of that, an exaggeration of an exaggeration. It had wide white eyes and red lips.

  “Terrible things,” said the sheriff. “Please, have some wine.” The Fool declined with a gracious gesture, more courteous than speech, and the head on a stick made a flourish in the air. Geoffrey poured himself some wine, purple splashing into the goblet with a sour sound.

  Geoffrey frowned over the rim of tiny bubbles and drank. The Fool watched, a mask of patience and interest. “I apologize for the way I behaved towards you. It was inexcusable.”

  The Fool made a self-deprecating bow.

  “I was tired, of course, and mad with—well, not mad. Sick in my heart with rage. Rage that I no longer feel. But as master of this household I should never speak to a servant in that manner.”

  The small head watched him.

  Geoffrey consoled himself that he was wise enough to know how to apologize and wise enough to know when to stop. “And now I think the time has come for you to know me better. I don’t say, you notice, for me to know you, because I have never heard your voice.” Geoffrey allowed himself a smile. “You are always silent.”

  The small head was rapt.

  “Silence is a subject I understand better than you think. Silence is everything, speech is nothing, just as the blackness of the sky is profound and rich, poured out like iron over everything. While stars, those tiny specks of light, are almost nothing. When something is almost nothing, it becomes very important.”

  “A world of silence. Forest and brake, field and river. At best, the grunt of a cow, or the murmur of a fly.” He said “fly” directly into the eyes of the small head, and the thing seemed to understand, seemed nearly to smile. Disheartened, Geoffrey plodded on. “So you see how important it is that people talk. Without talk we have only the bare, cold walls. We have only the wind and the sky, and—what is that devilish thing? For the love of Jesus, put it away!”

  The head bobbed and trembled, and the Fool consoled it. He rocked it like an infant, while the sheriff looked on, appalled. He put his hands over his head, to make sure it was where it was meant to be, he supposed; he didn’t know why he was doing anything.

  “Speech,” continued the sheriff, pacing again, “and its counterpart, silence, are of special importance to the sheriff. Because if the sheriff wants to know where something is hidden, and who else helped to hide it, he must crack the nut of silence and extract the morsel, the little truth, that only speech can deliver.”

  The Fool hugged the head across his breast and gazed upwards at Geoffrey from the place where he had fallen to his knees, in an attitude of reverence.

  “And so he learns how to make people talk.” Speaking of himself in the third person was a great comfort. “He does not enjoy this, but he has no choice.”

  Geoffrey gazed into his wine cup and saw a purple, quaking vision of himself.

  “Yes, send him in at once,” said Geoffrey in answer to the announcement of his second visitor, but he continued to gaze into his wine, at the bubbles at the edge of its surface like blue pearls.

  Immediately he knew it had been a mistake. He should have tolerated the Fool, pretended to enjoy the Fool’s company, and gone about his business. But it was too late. The other visitor had arrived.

  “A pleasure to see you, my lord,” said Nottingham.

  “It’s always a pleasure to see you,” said Geoffrey. “I was simply telling my Fool how little we love silence.”

  It was uncanny the way Nottingham and the Fool resembled each other. The same small bones, the same lean faces, and yet the Fool looked infinitely more graceful. Nottingham bent sideways when he spoke, as if trying to see round Geoffrey, round everything. “Silence is a secret’s castle,” said Nottingham.

  “Amazingly well put, good Nottingham. Tell us the ways to make a man talk.”

  Nottingham eyed the Fool briefly, then looked back with a thin smile. He made his eyes open wide for a moment before he spoke, telling the sheriff that he understood. “If a man wants to keep silent and remembers who he is each moment, it can be difficult to make him talk. Oh, he will bawl and bleat. But the only way to make him speak is to make him leave himself behind, like an empty sack. When he has been stripped of himself, then he will talk.”

  “When he is naked of any disguise.”

  “Then he talks.” Nottingham’s eyes were quick, burnished by the sights they had seen.

  Geoffrey turned and spoke as if to the tapestry of the falling warrior, the wounded figure composed entirely of silk and wool. “Tell us some of the ways you allow people to forget who they are.”

  “Many ways, as you know well.” Nottingham glanced at the Fool, assessing the Fool’s silence, estimating the time it would take to melt it away. “I need not mention the rack, and the tong, the fire iron, and my most recent discovery, the lapping goat. These are really for people who merely hesitate before speaking, not for people who have determined that they will not speak.”

  Nottingham waited for encouragement, but Geoffrey did nothing more than touch the tapestry with a forefinger. The tapestry was so thick he could not feel the wall behind it. The multicolored cloth was like the hide of an animal with muscles of granite.

  “For those determined silences, we favor slow burning or slow cutting.”

  The “we” made Geoffrey clasp both hands together. “And?”

  “They both involve time. The slow burning is like death burning, but the fire is built a good distance from the criminal. The flesh ripens, blisters, and begins to char. The man talks. Slow cutting is a method I do not favor. The time involved, and the number of men. You have no idea how annoying it can be. And the mess—needless to say, it is not my favorite form of speech loosing. A rope is stretched across the chamber and made as taut as any straight line you could draw. I take two stout men—two stout and very patient men—and we slide the criminal back and forth across the rope, back and forth across the room, until the man is cut in two.” Nottingham made his hands part, like two wings. “Although generally he speaks long before he is actually in two halves. Such men forget who they are. They seem to be giving birth to something. They can never believe that such a thing is going to happen to them.” Nottingham’s voice became almost thoughtful. “And it doesn’t, in a way. By the time they talk, they have become little more than a bloody tangle.”

  The Fool remained on the floor, looking away from both men.

  “No one,” Nottingham continued, “has ever been cut in two in that manner, at least in my experience. It simply advances to a point where it doesn’t matter, like a hot knife into ice.”

  “Do you,” said Geoffrey in a low, hoarse voice, “sometimes wish you were someone else?”

  Nottingham straightened. “I have been trained from boyhood not to indulge in wishful thinking.”

  “Thank you, Nottingham, for joining us.”

  He flinched. He had expected, no doubt, a long visit, even some wine, and then perhaps an opportunity to demonstrate his powers. “It is,” said Nottingham, “an indescribable pleasure.” His phrase made something tighten in Geoffrey, and he did not move as Nottingham made an ugly bow and faded towards the door. The man did not leave at once, his lean face looking back, expecting, it seemed, a summons to return and to describe yet another e
xample of his skill, the skill he had learned from his father, as a tanner learns to cure hides, and a cobbler how to craft them into boots.

  The man was gone, leaving a strange scent in the air. Geoffrey could not place it as he strode to the door to shut it securely, because Nottingham had left it just open, deliberately. The door shut as gently as a book, and Geoffrey recognized the smell: it was goat.

  Geoffrey raised his fists before him in a helpless gesture, but the Fool was not looking. He crouched on the floor, his eyes downcast, still holding the head on a stick like an infant.

  “I have to have things done—no, allow me to speak the truth plainly. I have to do things that are hateful to me. It is like a vow. Like a vow of silence. If the law will not go into a man, I force it. Sometimes the law is not language and money. Sometimes it is a team of horses that pulls a man into the air like a spider, until he rips apart.”

  Neither man moved for a while. Geoffrey usually loved his chamber and did his best thinking there. Now the room was too small, and too cold, as a damp wind breathed into the room from the floor, from every uncovered chink.

  “I want you to know this about me. I have a weakness: I am not cruel. I think that I wanted you to be afraid. Threatened. Thinking that I could have your flesh broiled until I found out everything about you.”

  The Fool cast a vague shadow about himself, a smudge of Fool shape round him on the stone. The little Fool cast an even smaller shadow, but strangely distinct. The toy was more real than the man.

  “I am sorry, Fool. I could never do these things to you.”

  The Fool stood, and this time his face was not a caricature. It mocked nothing. But the eyes were bright, as if Nottingham’s spirit had entered the Fool as he sat there on the floor. Except that the eyes were not the eyes of Nottingham. Alert, but unguarded. With a spasm Geoffrey realized that the Fool was hiding nothing. Still, Geoffrey could not read the Fool’s face. Had he been afraid?