“I believe that the king has brought in this sorcerer, and he is in turn bringing in his devils, or devil-men, or whatever they may be, from the Moorish lands, in small groups. He is assembling them in the West, at Chester. But why? King John is locked in struggle with these ribelli, these rebel northern barons—among whom, dear lady, let me be so presumptuous as to remind you, are your friends Sir Jehan and Sir Odinell, and”—here he glanced down at a parchment held flat to the table by two iron disks imprinted with the seal of Durham Priory—“the so-frightening Sir Balthasar. Against whom do you think the king will use his monsters, eh? So it is for your friends that you act as well.”
“One thing there is that’s fretting me,” said Molly. “I am to understand, from Sir Odinell and others, that the pope’s after lifting the ban on the king, and hasn’t he transferred it to those who rise against the king—my friends, as you say, and you have the right of that—and Innocent is now steadying John Lackland on his throne. And here you’re acting against John, and saying that you’re acting for Innocent.”
Da Panzano sighed. “King John has very shrewdly put His Holiness in an extremely awkward position. The king has done penance, sent tribute, and made himself a vassal of Rome. The pope cannot leave a vassal unsupported—he would lose all authority throughout Europe. So in the open air he supports John Lackland. In the shadows he sends me to England, and with me Sinibaldo. And we will work against the king, and through us you will also.”
• • •
THE LEGATE SAW THEM to the door. Sinibaldo glided ahead, opened the door, looked left and right, and stood a long moment, blocking the doorway, a man letting the view, and any anomaly, soak into his senses. Hob thought him somewhat overcautious, since the garth outside, planted to herbs and drowsy with bees, was clear to the encircling wall; then again, Monsignor da Panzano, despite all his enemies, was in demonstrable good health. Sinibaldo stepped outside and put his back to the priory wall, and the others filed out. The monsignor spoke from the doorway: “As we seek to send spies into the West, King John may have his eyes here in the North. Be guarded in everything you do.”
“We will that,” said Molly.
“Go with God,” said da Panzano, and retreated into the priory. Sinibaldo stepped back into the doorway, nodded gravely to them, and closed the door. A moment later bolts clacked into place.
CHAPTER 5
FOR A MAN SENDING US into the West and King John’s stronghold, sure he’s that careful of his own hide,” said Nemain bitterly. Her eyes were bright with anger and two red spots burned on her cheeks. Nemain had a volatile temperament at the best of times, and she was still incensed over da Panzano’s speech about Molly and her family earning forgiveness.
“It’s unwilling I am to speak my mind here,” said Molly, “not knowing what can be heard. I’m not trusting even those bees. We’ll speak at home.”
Home was the three wagons in which Molly’s troupe traveled.
The path they followed through the garth came to the priory’s encircling wall; here iron gates were set in a graceful but strong stone archway. A heavy middle-aged monk served as porter. When Molly’s group came up to the gate, he bowed, drew a key from the bunch that swung at his waist, and addressed himself to the lock.
Hob looked around. Nearby, two strongly made young monks leaned on hoes, idling for the moment amid the banks and rows of herbs. They did not seem eager to garden, and the Benedictines were not known for sloth. Hob suspected that their presence, and the priory gate locked at midday, were more of da Panzano’s meticulous precautions against his enemies.
At last the lock’s inwards gave a dull clunk, and the ponderous iron gate groaned open. Brother Porter murmured a blessing, which Hob echoed. Jack touched his forehead; the women nodded politely.
They went up the road along the priory wall, passed through the north gate into the square, and now they could see down the wooded slope to the river Wear. It was a day to make one feel that death and the fear of death could not exist amid all this sunlight. Hob tilted his face up a bit as they walked to feel the sun, and took Nemain’s hand. He felt content for a moment; then they stepped into the shadow of old maple trees. The sudden chill, the abrupt dimming of the light, recalled da Panzano’s parting words: “Be guarded in everything you do.”
Perhaps Molly and Nemain felt the same, for they turned, almost as one, and peered into the wooded ravine; down there the river snaked in an oxbow turn around the tip of the peninsula of high ground on which the cathedral and castle stood; and Nemain glanced behind her.
“What is it, culver? Is there danger?” Hob asked his wife.
“Nay, it’s . . . it’s a feeling that . . .” Nemain began.
“A feeling of being watched, and aren’t the two of us sensing it at the same time, but now ’tis gone, for me at any road,” said Molly.
“For me as well,” said Nemain.
The party walked on, but warily. They crossed the Elvet Bridge with its gates and towers, and the two chapels on the bridge, one at either end, and so down into Elvet Borough. Down by the riverbank the path wound through deep shade: the canopies of riparian trees, the shadow of the high prow of the peninsula itself, cast the way into dappled gloom, but through the tree trunks the sun sparkled where it struck the surface of the Wear. Hob looked back across the river. He could see the grand rose window set in the eastern face of Durham Cathedral, the pride of the Prince Bishops, just rising above the trees of the plateau.
They went on, through winding streets, to Godric’s Inn, where Molly had arranged for them to stay, with the wagons that they slept in kept in a yard behind the inn, the beasts stalled in the inn’s stables, and a place for the troupe to play music each night for pay and for board. Molly negotiated this arrangement whenever possible; it allowed her to keep her people safe and fed during these troubled days, when England seemed to be slipping toward chaos.
They paused before the inn. Molly put a hand on Jack’s shoulder. “ ’Tis women’s business that Nemain and I will be about. Do you two lads go in and have a draft or two, and then come on to the wagons, and we will discuss this pope’s man and his demands.”
Hob knew there were aspects of Molly and Nemain’s religion, the worship of the Old Gods of Erin, that they preferred to keep private, for the sake of the men’s consciences—although Jack was not one to trouble over such things, Hob was more introspective, and inclined to chew over moral conflicts. There were, as well, some aspects of the women’s worship that were forbidden to men, and that Hob and Jack’s presence would cause to fail.
The women entered the alley that ran down between the inn and its neighbor building, eventually debouching into the innyard with its surrounding wall and wide gate for supply wains to enter. There Molly’s three wagons, with wheels chocked, stood along one wall; against the opposite wall were the stables.
Jack and Hob watched them till they turned the corner at the far end of the narrow alleyway, and then entered the inn. Within was the sweet smell of countless spills and spots of beer, and of honey beer, and of wine and cider. With this was mixed woodsmoke; a rich and savory scent of garlic and pork and onions and apples from the stewpot swinging over the cookfire; and a faint earthen smell from the packed-dirt floor.
Windows glazed with oiled parchment admitted a yellowed old-ivory light; an oil lamp, hung on a chain fixed to a ceiling beam, cast a somewhat brighter circle of illumination on the planks, laid across three wine-butts, that functioned as a serving counter. The innkeeper’s daughter, seeing the two men approach, immediately poured two carved-wood mugs of gruit ale: Molly’s troupe had been playing in Godric’s Inn for nigh on a month, and Jack had developed a taste for the strong heather-flavored brew. The increase in custom from folk who came to hear them play, and the fact that Molly’s people slept in their own wagons and so did not take up space in Godric’s sleeping rooms, made the innkeeper happy to provide free food and drink to the company.
They took their beer to a side table and sa
t on the bench against the wall. The neck wound that Jack had sustained in the Holy Land—it showed as an oval patch of silver scar tissue, but the underlying damage was greater than it appeared—made it preferable for him to remain silent, and Hob, after long acquaintance, was able to enjoy sitting quietly next to his formidable friend, who was like an uncle to him.
They sat and watched the life of the common room unfolding before them. A few of the Durham folk came and went, many of them workers in the mills driven by the tireless waterwheels that rolled their upstream sides down into the river Wear and heaved their downstream sides dripping into the sunlight. The grain millers wore smocks dusty with wheat flour; other men had clothes smudged with fuller’s earth: these worked in the fulling mills, where the waterwheels drove great wooden hammers that pounded wool till it was clean and thick. Some drained their mugs quickly, settled their score, and left; others sat with friends and drank and talked and drank again, the conversation usually becoming more and more animated as the drinking went on.
After a while Hob got up and got them a large fired-clay pitcher of ale, poured for Jack and himself, and resumed his seat. He sat drinking quietly for a bit, and then he began to think about Jack, and the secrets the ex-soldier carried within him, and how frightened the patrons of Godric’s Inn would be did they know that such as Jack sat watching them.
At heart Jack Brown was a deeply decent man, by chance drifting into the profession of man-at-arms, which inevitably involved periods of controlled savagery. He had been capable of utter ruthlessness in the midst of battle, but once let the lords conclude a truce among themselves, and he would be the first to sit down in a tavern with his former foes. He had the mercenary’s dispassionate violence, and bore no grudges, and generally was cheerful all the long day.
He also had curséd luck: on crusade in the Holy Land, he had been mangled by a turnskin, a shapeshifter, in the hot heart of a sandstorm, and had been rendered unclean thereby. He had begun to change on occasion: to become a monstrous Beast like the one that had so nearly slain him amid the roaring brown clouds of sand, leaving him with difficulty speaking and a lifelong limp. It was like a man, but huge, with long arms and thick bowed legs, a black pelt that on the back was tinged with silver at the tips of the hair.
When he was in this form, Jack was driven to kill and eat of human flesh, to his horror when he awoke in some field or barn, naked and soaked in gore. He was heartsick at what he half remembered having done, and he feared being burned at the stake by the Church should he be found out, and he feared he was beginning to change more often, and he feared that one day he would not change back. He had heard tales of a woman who excelled as a healer; desperate, he had sought her out at the annual fair at Ely.
He had gone right up to Molly and stood before her, hollow-eyed, grim-faced, and found himself unable to speak of what oppressed him—partly because of his ruined throat, destroyed by the bite of the giant shapeshifter, which made communication difficult, but also from shame and from the strange nature of his affliction, so difficult to explain.
She saw a powerfully built man, perhaps eight years her junior, in some form of inner torment. For his part, he saw a handsome woman, heavy but shapely, with eyes that were a startling lakewater blue. Her bearing was as one who expects to be obeyed, but her expression was kindness itself. Even then, eleven or twelve years ago, when she was in her midforties, she had a long thick mane of gray-and-silver hair.
She put a hand to the scar on his neck, a gesture one might use to a restive horse, but also an intimate one; she stood with eyes unfocused, as though listening to something. Her touch was warm, and from it a peace seemed to spread through his body. He closed his eyes and stood there, swaying a little.
After a moment she took his hand, as though he were a child, and led him around behind the booths, to a large travelling wagon, and brought him within, and sat him on a large chest.
When Molly told Hob the tale—one night when the uisce beatha was flowing freely—she said, “ ’Twas my stoutest chest, and I hearing it creak and groan, the poor thing, as though it suffered. And he not a fat man atall, atall. ’Twas then that I’m thinking he must have bones like a bear, and muscle withal, and I’m swearing in my heart that I’ll see him made whole, for he’s to be my consort. This in less time than a sparrow can blink twice.”
Hob on this night was already a married man, albeit a new one, and yet a bit uneasy at his changed relationship with Molly, no longer a child with his adopted grandmother, but almost an equal, if anyone could properly be said to be Molly’s equal. He was fascinated, though, and eased his awkwardness by taking another sip of the fiery liquid.
She looked off into the intermediate distance as people do when they observe their own past. She drank, and said, “I’m never taking to a man so quickly—and I’ve opened my thighs to whosoever I wanted—him so large and dangerous and yet lost: for wasn’t he standing at the lip of his own grave, and the edge of the soil crumbling under his feet? But I’m after bringing him back, I’m pulling him back, I’m working like a devil at a forge for a sennight to pull him back. I dosed him till he near died of it, and made bargains with the Horned Man, the Lord of the Beasts, and crafted amulets for him to wear, and potions to drink.”
She pulled her gaze from the past and looked at Hob. “I would have helped him any road, Hob, ye ken, for ’twas only the right thing to do, but added to all those potions and amulets is the force of the Artist’s will that puts power into those potions and amulets and draws the attention of the Old Gods, and here was my desire for him adding a great strength to that will.”
Another drink; another pause; another sigh; and then:
“And the great Queen Maeve, for whom I’m named, swore she would have only a man equal to her as a consort—as she was a warrior, he must be a warrior; as she was a woman of wealth and power, so he must be a man of wealth and power. ’Tis not that he’s a match for me in wealth, but he’s fierce in war, and has power in the strength of his body, and underneath that, the power of the Beast.”
It was the power of that Beast that Molly had unleashed on Fox Night, saving Sir Jehan and all his folk from a terrible foe, and that caused Sir Jehan to send them to his friend Sir Odinell when that good knight found himself in perilous circumstances; Molly’s destruction of Sir Odinell’s horrid and unnatural neighbors had in turn aroused Monsignor da Panzano’s interest, and now that agent of the great pope Innocent III wished to enlist them in yet another eerie struggle. Hob sat and wondered at the strange turns his life had taken from the day Molly, perceiving something about him, had taken him into her wagons as an apprentice.
His parents had been lying dead in the middle of a forest road, and a boy of three or four—Hob—sitting dazed and weeping beside them. The carters who found them had buried the couple, and brought the child away with them; passing through the little village of St. Edmund, they had left the boy with the village priest, who had a reputation as a kindly man.
When he was eleven, Molly had taken him from the quiet of old Father Athelstan’s priest house to a life in which one startling event led to another like rooms opening into other rooms in a castle. And in each room was a reward, and in each room was a monster.
• • •
HOB REALIZED that he was sinking into a mood of introspection that was at least partly the work of the gruit ale, and he pushed his newly refilled mug—how many had he had?—over to Jack, and stood up.
“I’m off to the wagons, Jack,” he said, and clapped the older man on the shoulder. Jack nodded, swept a thick finger in a circle indicating his mug, Hob’s mug, and the near-empty jug, and then pointed to himself, meaning that he would finish them and then follow.
Hob stretched, and then walked down the room. He opened the side door of the tavern, stepped out into the squalid alleyway, and threw himself violently to the right.
CHAPTER 6
HOB STARED AT HIS UNEXPECTED ally. Sinibaldo came toward him, coiling the silken cord with wh
ich he had broken necks, stepping sure-footed over the tangle of bodies, the sprawl of limbs. The Italian drew from within his coat a square of parchment folded flat, and a leather pouch the size of Jack’s fist; he looked back and forth between Hob and Jack, settled on Hob, and handed him the parchment and pouch, saying only, “For your mistress.” The pouch was surprisingly heavy. Hob noticed that the bodyguard kept a pace or two away from Jack, and seemed to be wary of him, though hardly timid.
Hob loosened the leather drawstrings of the pouch; within was the glint of silver. He placed the parchment into the pouch and pulled the thongs tight again.
Sinibaldo swept his hand in a half circle, indicating the fallen. “I am being sent to give your mistress this message, and a little coin for your journey; I come to the inn, and from across the way I see these teppistas, these men of violence, of the gutters and alleys. They are waiting to murder or to rob—I am not care, but I am knowing that they do the work, the service, for Bennett in Souterpeth—you know this street? Is where live the, the, the makers of shoes. Bennett is the eyes, the ears, of the king, this King John, in Durham. Is supposed to be segreto, but Monsignore da Panzano is knowing ever’t’ing. So I watch, because you are here at this inn, and here also are Bennett’s dogs, and I say to myself, what will ’appen?”
The bodyguard’s accent was thicker and harsher than his master’s, although he seemed fluent enough in English. Where da Panzano’s speech was musical, though, Sinibaldo’s was grating; it accorded with his habitual stern expression, his abrupt demeanor.
The roughneck who had been pounded unconscious by Jack now moaned and began to roll feebly from side to side. Sinibaldo squatted beside him and swept a hard palm across the man’s face; the slap sounded like a branch breaking. The bravo’s eyes flew open; he gazed in terror at the Italian’s somber countenance.
Sinibaldo turned his back to them, so that Hob could see his former attacker’s upturned face, but not what Sinibaldo was doing with his hands. Sinibaldo murmured a question, but the man only shook his head. The Italian reached out; the man’s eyes widened and he gave forth a shriek.
Throne of Darkness: A Novel Page 3