“Daniel is a very keen fellow, and it is why I sent him to Duncarlin—he has gone before, and hates the errand, for the castle and its inhabitants oppress him, and he feels unclean when he has been there. But he is, as I say, keen, and he did not overlook a glance that ran between Sir Tarquin and Lady Rohese when your troupe was described, and Sir Tarquin then accepted at once. I believe you must be doubly on your guard when he is here, for I fear your desire to be overlooked as beneath his notice may be offset by rumor that has reached his ear.”
Molly looked thoughtful. “Sure and he may have heard some tale of our doings at the inn; indeed, I mistrust that our last encounter might have been with agents”—here she told him of what befell the Scots—“sent to probe what was toward at the inn, and to instill fear in the country folk.”
“He is to come within the sennight,” said Sir Odinell, “and will dine with us, but says he may not stay the night—may not stay long at all, he does not say why—and so will return to Duncarlin. He is no great distance from us, perhaps a dozen miles down the coast, but I think there is some other reason for his departure, for they are very . . . very . . . well, you will see, and tell me your mind on this matter when he has gone.”
With that, he called Daniel in and had him take the party to a solar, a set of three rooms that they might have to themselves. This was unusually good treatment for traveling musicians, even excellent musicians, but Sir Odinell could not bring himself to establish two queens—however reduced their circumstances—in a common sleeping room, and in any event he did not want anything of Molly’s private conversation to be overheard, for fear of gossip, if not spies.
So it was that Hob and Jack had a room to themselves, and Hob had a bed to himself that night, a real bed, and he stretched out in comparative luxury, goose-down pillows with smooth headcloths on them, and warm coverlets, for even in late spring the castle, high on its promontory, was cooled by the sea wind, and April nights could be chill. As he drifted to sleep he became aware of a scratching noise, and a rustling down in the rushes that covered the floorboards. He looked over the edge of the bed, but it was too dark to make anything out, even by the glow of embers in the small fireplace.
He lay back down again, not overly concerned: all castles had mice, and rats, and cats and terriers to hunt them. The scratching came again, and he turned on his side, facing away from the fire. By chance he opened his eyes as he lay there. The glow from the hearth was caught and reflected by something in the far corner, something faint, something blue. Through the low-lidded eye of incipient sleep he watched this tiny point, or points—was there more than one? Were there two? A bit of enamel that had fallen from a piece of jewelry, echoing the firelight? As his body drifted into ease, he almost thought to see the bits of color move, and then vanish, but his eyelids closed, and by the morning, the scent of the sea in his nostrils and Jack bustling about, he had forgotten everything.
CHAPTER 12
THE SHUTTERS IN THE GREAT hall, though fastened, were flexing against their latches, producing a muffled banging that underlay the howl of the wind and the crash of the surf outside. Hob had awakened to a mild breeze outside his window. By the time the troupe had assembled and descended to the hall, a stiff wind blew from the German Sea.
Sir Odinell had established their status as that of visiting troubadours, although Molly composed neither song nor poem. He wished to avoid comment on the fairly good treatment a band of musicians was being granted. Accordingly they were given their own table, just off the north side of the dais, opposite the little table reserved for Sir Odinell’s daughter, Mistress Eloise, a girl of about eleven years, and her nurse.
After a perfunctory breaking of their fast—a cup of ale, toasted bread—Molly and Nemain went off to the solar, citing preparations having to do with their Art that required an absence of males in the immediate vicinity, and leaving Hob and Jack to lounge about the hall.
For the rest of the morning Sir Odinell held halmote court in the hall, adjudicating matters involving the tenants of his manor. Normally such estate business would be done outside—there was an oak under which it was traditional to conduct this business—but the steadily deteriorating weather necessitated that transactions should be conducted inside.
The usual stream of tenants waited at the lower end of the hall, and were conducted to the dais by the sergeant-at-arms. A pig had strayed from the yard of one villein, and destroyed part of the vegetable garden of another; the necessary settlement was established. Another of Sir Odinell’s tenants had, by dint of clearing and planting, turned hitherto unused ground into farmland, and now the rent for the new patch of ground had to be agreed upon. A complaint was brought by a Mark Petty that another tenant of Sir Odinell was persisting in an affair with Mark’s wife. The Sieur de Chantemerle fined the adulterer a small amount, but warned him in the severest tones that the next penalty would not be so light.
Hob found the proceedings of great interest: the workings of manorial life displayed before his eyes. He had seen something similar at Blanchefontaine, but Sir Odinell’s manor was much more extensive, encompassing farm and forest and fishing village, and the problems were accordingly more varied.
Jack had managed, by sign and a painful word or two and Hob’s interpretation, to obtain a flagon of ale, and sat happily drinking—with his size and robust constitution, it had little adverse effect—and watching the parade of witnesses, the arguments and counterarguments, the decisions by Sir Odinell and his advisors.
So the morning slid by, and as the court concluded, the wind outside, consistently loud, began to rise to the occasional shriek. Through this din Hob now heard the golden notes of a trumpet, a series of four notes repeated three times, a signal of some sort. Sir Odinell rose with his senior staff, including Daniel Clerk, and made for an archway. As he passed Hob and Jack he said, “Come, then, my friends, and you’ll see a sight—a ship in this gale. This alarm signifies pirates, for who else comes to landfall here? Yet it may be only a merchantman driven close in by this storm.”
Into a turret stairwell they trooped, Sir Odinell and his staff, followed by Hob and Jack. They went up and up, passing several levels, the stair winding to the right. They emerged on the roof of one of the two most seaward towers, and immediately had to squint against the force of the wind. The gale drove rain almost sideways, a moderate rain interspersed with drenching squalls.
They gathered at the seaward parapet. Far out, a ship was barely discernible through the battering rain and spray. Closer in, its companion, clearly not a pirate ship but a heavy, flat-bottomed cog from one of the German trading cities—Hamburg, perhaps, or even Lübeck. This ship was obviously in trouble, driven by high wind far too close to a lee shore, with many of its sheets loose, writhing like snakes in the gale, and the big square sail beginning to tatter. Tiny figures of sailors, their canvas smocks whipping about their bodies in the terrible winds, could be seen struggling desperately to turn the yard enough to go about on the other tack. They had just cleared the headland on which Chantemerle stood, but the scoop of the bay to the south was far too close for safety, and the next headland loomed before them.
Hob found himself clenching his fists. The ship wallowed, it bucked and plunged, its head came around, and it just scraped past the next outjut of rock, and on south. For a moment it was still in sight, and as Hob watched there was an enormous crack, and the sail split up the middle. A heartbeat or two later, and the ship was obscured by the intervening promontory. Its sister ship, unable to help, could be seen for a while longer, then it too vanished to the south.
Sir Odinell turned away—he had been prepared to issue orders to resist a landing by pirates—and led them below. As they trudged down and around the stairwell, Hob could hear him giving orders for a Mass to be said for the sailors, that they might be safe, or if not, for their souls.
THAT EVENING, Dame Maysaunt presided over dinner. A brisk, cheerful woman younger than her husband, she kept the conversation flowing, was
conversant with doings in London and on the continent, asked riddles, proposed songs in between courses, and generally filled in the gaps in Sir Odinell’s conversation—the latter was inclined to dignified silences, well enough on campaign, but disconcerting at the dinner table.
The troupe played some lively music, though there was no dancing, and Molly, fortified with wine, waited for a relative moment of quiet in the great hall, raised her harp, and executed a breathtakingly complex and rapid piece, the notes falling like a heavy rain, so quickly did her fingers pluck the strings, a waterfall of sparks, a torrent of beauty, echoing through the hall, till even those farthest from the dais were completely silent.
Hob himself had never heard Molly play such a dense and swift piece, and found himself with mouth slightly open at its end. There ensued the usual moment of stunned silence, and then the loud and enthusiastic tributes.
After that, Sir Odinell considered that the troupe had established themselves as special guests, if of no great social standing, that might be housed and treated with some consideration, even respect, and he demanded no great amount of music from them that night, but let them play when the mood would take them and, in between, encouraged them to partake of the dishes enjoyed at the high table.
Soon enough they were abed again, and Hob, now remembering vaguely the scratching, the faint blue glimmers, of the other night, looked into the shadows for vermin, but there was nothing, and soon he drifted off to sleep.
In the morning the wind had abated, the sun shone in the bluest of skies, clouds like piles of bleached wool drifted lazily along the horizon, and monstrous corpses began to wash up on the sandy shore beside the castle.
CHAPTER 13
THE MORNING HAD HARDLY BEGUN when a page sent by the tower sentries gave Sir Odinell notice that bodies had begun to wash up, in horrid condition, on the strand to the south of the castle. The Sieur de Chantemerle and a council of his senior knights hastily assembled and prepared to investigate. Molly was sent for and soon the four members of the troupe were tramping after Sir Odinell and his advisors.
No need to saddle mounts: the monstrosities were within walking distance. Out the inner gate and across the outer ward, Sir Odinell striding a bit ahead, uttering curses under his breath. The outer gates were being pulled open as he came up and he led the way out and down the long slope to the coast road, then back past the walls and down to the strand.
A knot of men-at-arms awaited them. Three of the corpses had been dragged up above the high-water mark. They were in the same hideous state as the body Molly had half pulled from the rhine. The group stood upwind from the bodies. Molly and her family stood a little away from Sir Odinell and his council, for the knight was making arrangements for disposal of the wretches, but Molly was more interested in how they came to be here.
As they watched, every ten waves or so a dead man, deeply wrinkled, presenting the aspect of a man long deceased, was cast up on the sand, as though in some ghastly parade from the sea. As each came drifting ashore, floating in with the last dying force of a wave and snagging enough on the wet sand to remain on land, Sir Odinell’s soldiers, every line of their bodies expressing not only distaste but fear of the uncanny, dragged them up above the borderline between wet and dry sand.
For a time there was nothing from Sir Odinell and his knights but a kind of stunned contemplation of the frightful scene: bodies could be seen near in to land, farther out, and yet farther out, one following the other, the only sound the rush of the sea wind, the muted crash of the waves, and the abrasive rasp as each corpse was pushed up onto the damp sand.
The bodies showed every evidence of long corruption, and there was a darkening, almost an under-skin browning, as though they had been burnt, or bathed in tanner’s acid.
After a time the dreadful procession slowed, and the bodies came more slowly, and finally the last one, or at least the last that could be discerned, approached closer and closer, and drifted into the shallows, and was nudged up onto the strand by the modest waves.
Molly went closer as she had with the body in the rhine, and called to Sir Odinell. She pointed out to the knight the dead men’s canvas smocks, most split up the back for some reason, their earrings, their pigtails held together with tar.
“It’s the sailors you’re after watching yesterday,” she said, “but it’s a trouble to me to think how come they here, and in this state.”
“I can tell you the way of it, madam,” said Sir Odinell. “We have observed over the years that there is a current, at least in this part of the year’s course, that comes up from down the coast, and eddies in here round yonder rock”—here he pointed to the promontory to the south of Chantemerle that formed the southern bound of this bay or inlet—“and casts up its burden here, on these sands. This comes from Duncarlin, from Sir Tarquin’s stronghold. Let us saddle horses and ride south awhile.”
She put a hand to his arm. “Nay, ’tis a great evil and a powerful sorcery there is to this, and ’tis I must be warning you not to force a contest between yourself and this Sir Tarquin. If ’tis he who is doing this, he’ll be destroying you, and you lacking my help, and perhaps destroying you even with my help. I’m not to be seeing which way this will end, but there’s no settling it at the end of a lance: not at this time, perhaps not ever.”
“You mistake me, madam,” he said. “I had no intention of setting foot outside my own lands. But I want to see if there is any sign of what occurred, without alerting him to my actions.”
“So be it, then,” said Molly.
“Let us mount, and ride south along the beach, and see what may be discovered. Do you ride?” he asked.
“I do, as do my people here.”
Molly and Nemain were from Ireland, and had learned to ride as children; Hob had been taught by Sir Balthasar; Jack could ride if need be, but had always been a foot soldier, and would never be happy on horseback.
A SHORT WHILE LATER the Sieur de Chantemerle, his inner circle of senior knights, Molly’s troupe, and a half-dozen mounted men-at-arms were clattering over the stones of the outer gatehouse, down the ramplike approach to Chantemerle and south on the coast road. Sir Odinell hastened past the crescent of sand beside Chantemerle—nothing of the ship had drifted in with the sailors, which was odd in itself. When he had passed the rocky headland to the south of the castle, he set a slower pace, scanning the shoreline for planks, rope, cloth, cargo—any evidence of what had happened to the ship. But there was nothing here either.
“If they went down with the ship, madam,” he said to Molly, who rode knee to knee with him, “then some small part of the ship, if not more, should have drifted in with them, borne by the same currents. And they have not drowned as one might expect, but have died as others here have died.”
“ ’Tis not the sea they’re dying from, you have the right of that,” Molly said. “ ’Tis some form of sorcery, and haven’t I seen it before, and that in your own lands, and we on our way to Adelard’s Inn.”
“You have seen it yourself?” the knight asked.
“ ’Twas in a rhine, and the poor thing wizened and decayed, and it appearing just as you described to us, back at Blanchefontaine.”
They had reached the point at which the coast road wandered inland behind a screen of rock, on its way to meeting the road that led west past Adelard’s Inn. Sir Odinell turned his horse toward the shore. The riders plunged down the short slope to the beach, their horses’ front legs rigid as they braced themselves against the grade, kicking up sprays of sand and torn-loose clumps of marram grass. They trotted over to the hard-packed surface of wet sand, and turned south again.
Sir Odinell turned in his saddle. “Thibault!”
One of the knight’s men spurred up to the head of the column.
“My lord?” he said.
“Scout for us,” said Sir Odinell, gesturing ahead. “We seek anything to do with those sailors.”
Thibault, a younger man, of some repute for his tracking skills an
d excellent sight, took station a little way ahead of the group, and rode leaning over, watching the ground for tracks, or for wreckage, however slight.
The rhythm of the coastline here was rocky headland, followed by scooped-in sandy bay, followed by another headland. Another such promontory loomed ahead, and Thibault, coming to the rocky wall that was the root of the headland, turned his horse inland and urged it upward. The horse scrambled up the bank and Thibault turned it south again.
Sir Odinell drew rein and the scouting party bunched up around him. They stood there for some moments, waiting for Thibault’s report. The horses snorted and shifted about on the wet sand; the waves crashed in, hissed over the sand, pulled back again. The damp breeze from the sea imparted a sheen to the leather of the saddles and the reins grew slick with moisture.
Then there was a hail from above. “My lord! The ship’s all agley out on the bar!” Thibault was pointing south to the next bay.
Sir Odinell leaned forward in his saddle and set his mount at the slope; the horse made a swift, half-jumping ascent, and everyone followed. When they had reached the upper bank, Thibault led them south to the next bay, and here was an extraordinary sight.
The cog had been pushed by the gale toward the land, and had run aground on a sandbar, perhaps two hundred yards from shore. It lay on its side, rigging trailing in the water like seaweed, the split sail and the mast overboard, the yardarm dug into the sandy bottom and serving as a sort of anchor. The sea was pounding the ship’s hindquarters, and the vessel was slowly breaking to bits. The forecastle, a crenellated wooden tower, was intact, but the aft castle was half-destroyed by the battering of the waves.
Already the shore was littered with wreckage: pieces of strake; the odd length of rope; barrels intact and barrels staved in, littering the sand with honey, with flax, with resin from the Baltic; bolts of fine cloth, sodden and twisted. Amid all this a large longboat was drawn neatly up on the sand.
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