The Wicked

by Douglas Nicholas

  Molly and Nemain began to sing. They sang the same melody, but one voice higher than the other. Hob had heard them sing like the angel choirs of great God, but this song, though beautiful in its Irish speech, had a dark strand in the long rise and fall of its melody, that—though Hob could not understand the tongue—somehow made him think only one word: Death.

  As they sang, a crow rose from the trees, flew over them, circled out over the strand, and came forward again, alighting on the carriage roof. Now Sir Tarquin seemed to notice for the first time the mass of black in the trees, and rolled his eyes this way and that, and put his hands to the shafts of the lances again, which served him no better than before, for he snatched them away at once, wincing and shaking his hands. The odor coming from him was now almost unbearable: the odor of carrion.

  Two crows and a raven alighted in the grass near Hob. There was a roar behind him; he whirled, to see the whole flock taking to the air. The sound was deafening. The crow on the coach snapped open its glossy wings; two beats and it was on Sir Tarquin’s shoulder. It leaned toward him, head bent sideways, and like a lover bestowing a kiss, bit a piece from the mage’s cheek. Sir Tarquin gave a hiss; his eyes bulged; he glared at the crow and swung his clawed hand at it, but the bird almost casually sprang into the air and away. Molly and Nemain released the locks of their hooking lances and stepped back three, four paces, grounding the butts in the grass.

  Sir Tarquin put one hand to his throat, stretched out a clawed hand and drew breath, ready to hurl destruction upon the two women, but just then the raven from the grass took wing and landed on Sir Tarquin’s other shoulder. It darted at his face, and he was forced to turn from the women and swat at the black beak, so close to his eye. The raven flinched away; the mage’s clawlike fingernails caught only air; and a moment later the vast cloud dropped with a thunder of midnight wings onto the evil magician, a black avalanche, the birds piling in an ever-increasing heap of darkness, fighting for a place at the feast, coming and going, alighting with empty beak wide and sharp and hungry and taking off again, each with a tiny particle. The heap of black feathers seethed like a cauldron of ink brought to the boil.

  And each bird did its work in utter, unnatural silence; there was neither call nor cry, only the storm of flapping, the clicking, shuffling, rustling blanket of birds over whatever was left of the magus. All the men on the hillside were also silent, their eyes wide and their lips moving in prayer; signs of the cross were made over and over, and many kissed cruciform dagger-hilts, caught in this unholy nightmare: afraid of bodily death, afraid of spiritual pollution.

  One by one, the birds took their mite of flesh, and fought clear of the pile and lifted away into the sky. Slowly the huge struggling heap diminished, and diminished, and after what seemed a year of hideous activity, the last dozen of the feathered attendants of the dead sprang up, flicked broad black wings open, and beat up and away into the morning air.

  There was a tattered red cloak, and some gray cloth, on the grass beside the road—the remains of the wizard’s clothing. A few fragments of darkened ivory, no bigger than a thumbnail, stood out here and there amid the folds of gray and scarlet. At some point in the relentless destruction wrought by the birds, there was not enough left of Sir Tarquin’s flesh to house his unnaturally sustained life. Upon the release of the rest of his body from the binding grip of his will, the long-thwarted forces of Time had rushed in and overwhelmed the structure of his bones; they had crumbled, and the birds had made off with all but these few small shards.

  The carriage stood, its drawshafts vacant, and creaked a little as it flexed in the wind from the German Sea. The mage’s book lay in the scorched grass, but its uncanny flames were quenched with his death. There was nothing else. The breeze lifted a corner of the red rag, just an inch or so, and let it fall, and lifted it again, and let it fall. There was no other movement, and but for the scraps of red cloth and of gray cloth, a few tiny chips of discolored bone, and the dead book, the ground before the mage’s coach was utterly empty.

  SEVERAL MEN had dragged a log from the forest to the space by the carriage so that Molly and Nemain, weary almost unto death, might sit and direct the movements of the men of Chantemerle and Blanchefontaine: there was still some work that must be done, and only the women knew what it was. They sat side by side, swaying with fatigue, and yet with an air of deep contentment, and Molly gave a string of orders to Sir Odinell and Sir Jehan and Sir Balthasar, and those high men went and had their men carry those orders out. The two packhorses, with saddlebags that Molly had prepared before they left Chantemerle, were brought up and tethered to the log. From one of the packs Molly had them bring a small cask of the uisce beatha, and cups for herself and Nemain, and the two women sat and drank, Molly heartily, Nemain sipping slowly.

  Hob sat next to Nemain and put his arm around her and kissed her with the utmost tenderness, for he did not know whether she was in pain or other distress. She smiled at him, and then looked down and frowned. She put a hand to the slit in his gambeson, and the shirt beneath, and it came away red.

  All at once she was on her feet. “It’s off with that thing, a rún; I’m not to be losing my man before my wedding night.”

  “Nay, it’s you should be sitting down, and resting, after you—”

  But she was tugging at the laces of the gambeson, and so he began to help her, and they got it off. There was a line of red across his chest from one side to the other, and it had stained a broader band below the cut where his shirt had absorbed the bleeding, but it was a superficial wound, and Nemain was relieved. Hob urged her to sit and rest, but even he could see that the uisce beatha, and the consciousness of victory, had gone a fair way to ameliorate her fatigue—and she was young.

  She went to the packhorses and came back with salves and powders and linen strips, and washed the shallow slice in his skin, applied pulverized herbs and a soothing salve, and bound all up in clean linen. She draped his shirt around him, and at last he persuaded her to sit down on the log, and to rest. He put his arm around her again, and so they sat while Molly directed these last stages of the cleansing of Sir Tarquin from the land.

  Sir Odinell had sent riders to Chantemerle for wagons to remove the wounded; the castle was only a few miles up the coast, and now wagons with straw pallets began pulling up, loading wounded men, and heading north again. Gradually none were left but those who had escaped harm.

  Not all the wagons were on errands of mercy: one was a supply wagon prepared the night before under Molly’s supervision, and another was Molly’s large traveling wagon. Sir Balthasar had thoughtfully ordered that two horses be harnessed to her personal wagon instead of Milo, and that it be brought down the coast, for he did not think Molly and Nemain in any condition to ride saddle horses, and he thought it better that they should be able to ride inside, and lie at their ease.

  Now Molly, sipping at a second cup of the uisce beatha and working with a small group of Sir Odinell’s men, had them bring forth from the supply wagon sacks of pig fat and a bottle of poppy oil obtained from Sir Odinell’s kitchen, and toss some of the sacks in through the open door of the coach. A sack was opened and pig fat smeared around the outside of the carriage. Poppy oil was poured through the windows and along the roof.

  A wooden shovel from the same wagon was used to pick up the ragged remnants of Sir Tarquin’s red robe, and the book that now lay so quietly on the ground, and toss them into the carriage, followed by the shovel itself. The door was pushed shut, and four men took hold of the shafts and dragged the wagon down to the strand.

  The tide was almost out. They stopped the wagon on the damp flat sand left by the withdrawing waters, and held torches to the bottom edges of the coach, and thrust torches in through the windows so that the curtains caught, and let the flaming brands drop to the carriage seats within. There was a whoosh as the fat and oil caught, and the whole structure was enveloped in crackling flame.

  By the time the wagon had burned to ashes, the tide
had gone out completely and was now returning, the advance edges of those waves that reached the shore spreading in a foam-white carpet nearer and nearer the smoking remains. At last the leading edge of the German Sea touched the ashes, hissing against those glowing embers still surviving. Thereafter wave upon wave invaded the ashes, soaked them in salt water, lifted them, bore them out and away to the deep.

  SIR ODINELL AND SIR JEHAN stood together, watching the disappearance of every last fleck of ash. With them were a few others: knights, men-at-arms, and Hob as well—he had reluctantly left Nemain’s side at Molly’s bidding, to make sure the carriage was utterly destroyed. Sir Odinell stood holding a bloodstained white cloth to a minor wound on his forehead. He said, speaking to Sir Jehan but watching the waves arriving, the waves departing, “Christ be my salvation, I would not have believed it. You said she would cleanse my land of this filth. I would not have— I did not believe it, not then.”

  Sir Jehan, looking out on the silver immensity, said, “She is the sea, Odinell, the sea.”

  CHAPTER 29

  THE LORDS OF CHANTEMERLE AND Blanchefontaine climbed back up the slope to the road, Hob and the others trailing behind, and thence to where Molly sat with Nemain.

  Hob went immediately over and sat beside Nemain, putting his arm about her. She leaned back against his chest, then sat up abruptly, realizing she was pressing against his wound, but he pulled her back against him, and thereafter they sat quietly.

  Two knights had led up the white carriage horses, and asked if they should be killed and burned, to remove any taint of the evil mage they had served. Molly heaved herself to her feet and went to the horses. Between the intense fatigue of the struggle with Sir Tarquin and the uisce beatha, she was halfway to being drunk. Certainly she was as drunk as Hob had ever seen her, but the result was only an exaggerated caution in her movements.

  She put a hand under one horse’s jaw, looked in its eyes, patted its neck; then she did the same with the other. She stood back, and said, “Nay, there’s no evil to them; it’s only innocent slaves of evil they’ve been, and they not having an easy time of it, and it’s setting them free that’s the path of justice, and they to be slaves no more. Take off these bridles, and let them loose up in those woods we’re after hiding in.” This was done as she directed, and for years afterward it was noticed that white horses would crop up occasionally among feral Galloway ponies.

  She sat down heavily on the log again and reached for the cup. Sir Jehan came over and put his right leg up on the log, and leaned in to speak with Molly, his right elbow resting on his thigh. The iron hand shone dully in the sun, save where the light caught the silver legend.

  “Madam,” he said low, so that only Molly on the one side and Hob and Nemain on the other could hear, “must we burn these knights of Sir Tarquin’s household as well, or can they be given Christian burial?”

  “Himself is no more; sure and his power is destroyed entirely. These knights were after being enslaved by him, and they being victims themselves in that way, no less than his horses. Christian burial—it’s a priest you should be asking that of, but burning—nay, they’re not needing it.”

  “And his castle? Should Odinell have it purified by the Church? Or is it safe as it is?”

  “ ’Tis safe as it is, that castle. I’m just after telling you, his power is no more. As to letting the priests at it, well—” She took another sip, smiling to herself, looking into the cup. “Sure and it can do no harm.”

  SIR ODINELL, SIR JEHAN, AND Sir Balthasar were walking about the scene of conflict. Not far from where Molly sat they came upon the corpse of the giant knight that Hob had slain. In the daylight, stretched full-length on his back, one mailed fist outflung as though reaching for the hand-and-a-half hilt of the claymore, the knight seemed even larger than he had by the glow of the carriage lanterns. He lay there like a toppled statue, as long of body as Walking Rollo—for whom Sir Jehan had named his wolfhound pup—the Orkney jarl, who was too big for a horse to carry.

  “By Saint Cuthbert! The size of this wight!” said Sir Odinell. “I saw you batter him from his horse.” This to Sir Balthasar, who nodded. “How comes he here?”

  Molly said, “That gesadóir’s after summoning him, with the hold he had over him, and the giant coming to aid him, coming on foot from the melee.”

  Sir Odinell paced alongside the body, and stopped. He looked along the corpse to the feet, and back to the head; he noted the congealed lake of blood in the left eye socket. He looked over at Jack, sitting cross-legged in the grass near Molly with his war hammer across his lap, and looked at the crow-beak on the hammerhead. He indicated the fallen giant, and called to Jack, “You slew him?”

  Jack, extending an arm that was the definition of brawn, pointed a thick finger at Hob.

  “You slew this, this—?” Sir Odinell said to Hob, who nodded shyly. The three knights drifted over to the log, where Hob was made to tell his story, which he did as simply as possible.

  At one point Sir Odinell burst out, “With a dagger? You slew him with a dagger?”

  When he had finished, Hob found to his immense irritation that he was blushing, so strongly that he could feel prickles of heat on his cheeks.

  Sir Balthasar pointed silently to the dagger he had given Hob, back in its sheath at Hob’s side, and Hob just nodded. Sir Balthasar’s habitual expression was so savage that one would have to know him to realize he was gazing approvingly at the lad, but Hob could tell. The knight said nothing. He went around behind the log and off up the hill to get the men ready to move, but as he passed Hob he clapped him on the shoulder. Hob thought to himself it was not unlike being struck with a mace, but nonetheless an unfamiliar emotion rose in him, which in a moment he recognized as pride.

  Sir Odinell went to look again at the body, glancing back at Hob a few times. Sir Jehan set off up the hill in Sir Balthasar’s wake, but before he went he said to Hob in a quiet voice, “Sir Balthasar has an apt pupil, it seems: not yet fifteen, and fighting that outlander swordsman on Fox Night, and now you’ve come to be this giant’s bane.”

  Molly started, as though at a barely heard signal; she turned blue eyes on Hob, unfocused with fatigue and strong drink, but also with a fey look that she sometimes had, when she felt that the future declared itself to her, and she said to Hob, “It’s that name that men will be calling you, and they sitting around a fire, remembering this night we’re just after passing through, and you a great man by then.”

  She looked away, toward the giant’s corpse, although she appeared to be seeing something far distant. “Robert the Englishman, they’ll be saying in Erin,” she murmured. “Giant’s Bane.”

  Sir Odinell wandered back from the giant’s corpse and, inspecting Hob, said, still a bit bemused, “With a dagger.”

  Nemain, reclining at ease on Hob’s breast, idly picking apart a tangle at the end of her scarlet hair, looked up at Sir Odinell—in her reckoning, in Molly’s reckoning, he was her social inferior, she a queen and he but a Norman lord—looked up at him with leaf-green eyes, and smiled, a smile that suggested a cream-fed cat on a cushion, and patted Hob’s thigh in a proprietary manner, and said only, “My man-to-be.”

  CHAPTER 30

  MOLLY’S LITTLE CARAVAN LEFT Chantemerle quietly one morning at the beginning of August. The night before, it had rained heavily, the downpour roaring against the shutters, the wind from the German Sea hurling the drops against the castle wall. Hob lay snug in a seaward tower of the keep, and listened to the shout of the storm. The soothing contrast between the violence outside and the silence of the room, broken only by occasional crackling from the banked fire, urged him toward sleep, but it was warring with the excitement that roiled his heart—the day after tomorrow was his wedding day.

  Eventually, though, sleep stole over him, and then it was early morning, the rain had stopped, and Jack was opening the shutters. Outside the sky was still dark.

  Molly wanted them to be on their way, and farewells ha
d been said the night before. Some bread and cheese and a draft of ale, and the company was ready to take the road. In the stables, Nemain went about unlocking the wagons and restowing the locks, while Hob and Jack and Sweetlove waited at the foot of the long ramp. Grooms brought Milo and Mavourneen and Tapaidh down, the ramp boards booming under their mismatched hooves. Soon the animals were in their traces, Hob had Milo’s lead rope in hand, and Nemain and Jack were up on their respective wagons, Jack with Sweetlove curled on the seat beside him. Molly called out, “Away on!” The wagons, in their usual order, trundled out of the stables and across the outer ward.

  There was a bit of delay at the barbican—a delay almost inevitable, what with the usual opening of the heavy inner doors, the raising of the portcullis, the opening of the outer doors, the lowering of the drawbridge. This last would be done but once in the day, unless some threat emerged.

  Hob led Milo through the gatehouse—into the dark echoing passage, where the clop of hooves was greatly magnified, and out again into the gray light of false dawn. They stumped down the slope, Molly leaning a little on the brake, to level ground; and Hob led Milo in a shallow curve to the left, heading south along the coast road.

  Arrangements had been made the night before: Molly had explained to Sir Odinell that they wanted to find some private woodland glade where her granddaughter and Hob—Squire Robert once again, when within Norman walls—might be married. The Sieur de Chantemerle, hearing Molly’s requirements, had suggested a small clearing in the manor’s woodlands, where Sir Odinell set up a camp at certain times of the year.