A nearby brook ran down into a rock-bound pool, where the knight and his guests, armed with six-foot hazel twigs to which were fastened horsehair lines, cast hooks into the chilly water. Flies made of colored silk, of partridge feather, of dove feather, enticed the fish to snap at the hooks, and Sir Odinell discoursed at some length on the subject, until Molly gently steered the conversation back to the coming wedding and the way to the campsite.
Lady Maysaunt had lamented the loss of an opportunity for a wedding at the castle, and had wept a little, and had supplied Molly with a large box filled with gaily colored ribbon, and flowers fashioned of ribbon, and heraldic animals fashioned of ribbon, all that Molly might decorate her wagons in a suitably festive manner. She had also offered to supply a gown, which Molly diplomatically refused; Sir Odinell had volunteered his chaplain’s services to marry the couple, but Molly said smoothly, “There will be someone to officiate.”
Now the wagons rolled southward, rumbling, creaking, with the grinding sea on the left and Sir Odinell’s field land on their right. Here the flax and hemp had been harvested in July, and the fields were fresh-plowed for the planting of turnips by the knight’s tenants, the rich dark furrows drenched with last night’s rain. The sun rose, dripping molten gold into the pewter of the German Sea, and began to work upon the soaked fields.
A mist arose from the deep slits in the earth, as the heat of the sun torched the chill from the wet soil, and pulled water steaming from the ground. A layer of low-lying fog persisted for a time, and then began to burn off. They passed the side road that led to Adelard’s Inn, and plodded on.
After a while the fields ended in a line of forest. A track led off at a slant toward the woods, and Molly directed Hob to turn off onto it. They entered the trees. As Sir Odinell had said, there was room for the wagons to pass, albeit with some bumping over roots and the odd stone half-embedded in the earth.
After not a very great while they entered the campsite, where trees and brush had been cut back, and the sun striking in past the canopy had nourished a carpet of grass. Molly had the main wagon drawn up at the far side of the clearing, close to the slope down to the brook, and the other two wagons placed along the near side, as far as possible from the large wagon, for privacy. The animals were loosely tethered and tended to, and while Hob and Jack gathered firewood and set up camp, Molly and Nemain, delving into the box of ribbons, decorated the main wagon, which was to be the couple’s wedding chamber tomorrow.
A simple meal, with everyone perhaps a little quieter than usual, and then to bed. Hob lay awake a long time in the midsized wagon, the shutters open and the occasional hooting of an owl drifting in on the night breeze. Jack usually slept here as well, but tonight Molly had called him into the big wagon. Sweetlove lay, chin on paws, disconsolate, on Jack’s bed at the other end of the wagon.
Nemain, who usually had a place in the main wagon with her grandmother, slept tonight in the little wagon. Hob thought of her, alone, so near, and a surge of desire made him turn this way and that, seeking comfort.
Tomorrow Molly would marry them according to the old Irish religion. Hob had been told by Father Athelstan that such old beliefs were of Satan, yet Molly was the most deeply good person he had ever known. Jack, that stolid cheerful man, a good if not very observant Christian, loved Molly and did not trouble himself with contradictions. The soldier, a man of action rather than introspection, did not fret about it: why should Hob?
There was no question of not marrying Nemain, but Hob would have liked something to ease his conscience on the question of his bride’s pagan practices. Hob, as Nemain said, had always to “think three times” about what he was doing, and what it meant, and whether it was the right thing to do, either by the light of Father Athelstan’s teaching, or by the light of Molly’s teaching-by-example. Should Hob be guided by Jack’s conduct; should he follow Jack’s lead? In the darkness, broken only by a shaft of moonlight slanting through the leaves into the wagon, Hob clasped his hands and asked to be given a sign.
CHAPTER 31
THE NEXT MORNING THE WOMEN went down the wooded slope to the brook and followed it downstream. There they bathed in the pool formed by a rocky basin, in the dark cold water of the northland. They returned swathed in lengths of the undyed cloth known as blanket, laughing together at some murmured jest, to vanish within the main wagon.
Then it was Jack and Hob who made their way down to the water. The brook plunged over a gray slate ridge and fell in a sheet of silver six feet into the pool. At the other side of the basin, water poured out of the pool and away down the slope, running toward the east and, eventually, the German Sea.
Jack threw off his clothes and leaped in; immediately he began to scoop water over his brawny limbs. Hob stepped down, waded into the waist-high water, gasping at the shock of the chill. He plunged beneath the surface, hearing the rumbles and squeaks of the moving water. When he came up, Jack had retrieved the bar of soap that Molly had given him and was soaping himself. This was not their usual mutton-fat-and-ash soap: for this special occasion, Molly had brought out a bar of olive-oil soap, perfumed with thyme and lavender, brought all the way from Spain and bought at the Ely fair. When Jack was finished, Hob washed himself head to toe, sneezing a little at the unfamiliar perfume.
Back up the dirt path through the trees, cloaked in large squares of cloth, holding their clothes with one hand and drying their hair with the other. Hob had the sense that the day was like one of the dances Molly had taught them to play, beginning slowly but then increasing in tempo. Certainly his pulse was faster, and there was a growing impatience; his movements became quicker, his breath came more rapidly. When they came to the midsized wagon he bounded up the steps, Jack following with a grin.
Jack opened a shutter for light; from one of Molly’s trunks he drew, to Hob’s astonishment, a set of wedding garments for him: a green tunic and hose, green leather shoes, a woven belt dyed green. At the string-and-loop fastening, the belt swelled into a square, on which was embroidered an Irish endless-knot design in silver thread. Hob sat down on the chests, pushed together, that served him as a bed, and began to dress. He could hear the women outside, leaving the large wagon, laughing, talking, their voices fading as they made their way down the wooded slope to the brook again.
Jack, dressed in clean shirt and hose, but with his usual heavy belt, was, oddly enough, barefoot. He had Hob stand up and turned him around, inspecting him. “S’goorh,” he croaked. It’s good. For him this was a long speech, and an indication of his pleasure at the day. Jack picked up his goatskin drum, and they were ready to go.
They left the wagon, Hob in the lead, and he set off down the path to the pool where they had bathed. Perhaps two-thirds of the way down, a path branched off to the right. This led to the brook itself, some way upstream from the little waterfall into the rock basin that formed the pool. Hob became aware that Jack, right behind him, had turned off onto this side path and was gesturing for Hob to follow him. The lad retraced his steps to the fork and set off after Jack, following the soldier’s lead.
A moment later he stopped, frozen. Jack’s hearing was acute. When Hob’s footsteps, padding along the dirt trail, ceased, the dark man paused, looked back, a question beginning to form on his face. Hob broke into a grin: he was following Jack’s lead. Here was his sign! He set off again, a lightness, a happiness, spreading throughout his heart.
JACK AND HOB CAME OUT onto the stream’s bank, where the women waited. Molly stood barefoot in the middle of the little brook, and Nemain on the far bank. Molly held out her left hand, and Hob came to her. She positioned him, facing Nemain, on the near bank.
He gazed with something like wonder on his betrothed. Nemain wore a gown of green silk, a paler green than Hob’s own garments, with an endless-knot border at neck and wrists, worked in silver thread; the gown was cinched with a belt of silver links. Her hair was unbound, and a mild but steady breeze that blew toward the falls fanned it sideways, a red flame flickering
from behind the tree-green gown.
Molly, standing barefoot in the icy stream, with her hair in a thick silver braid down her back, had a silver goblet in her right hand. Now she began a prayer in Irish. Jack left his drum leaning against a tree, and stepped into the brook—Hob now understood why he had not put on shoes—and faced Molly, who handed him the goblet: he was, Molly had explained, the witness. Molly, still chanting, reached out to either side and, taking Nemain’s right hand, placed it in Hob’s. Around Molly’s neck was a green ribbon; like Hob’s belt and Nemain’s gown, it had the endless-knot pattern of Ireland worked in silver. Molly now took this from around her neck, kissed it, and looped it around and around the young couple’s wrists as they stood with hands clasped across the stream.
Molly had explained the ceremony to Hob the day before: the hands were clasped across the stream that the water gods might be witness to the marriage for all the gods, and Jack was the witness for all men and women. Now she half spoke, half sang a long prayer to those gods.
She turned to Nemain, but she had spent some time translating this part of the ceremony from the Irish, so that Hob could understand, and now she spoke in English. “From this day, you are to approach each other with awe and delight, and to lie with none else, and to be a tribe to each other, back to back against the wide world. Swear to this, by the water that runs between you, and by the gods, and they dwelling in that water.”
“I so swear,” said Nemain.
She turned to Hob. “Swear to this.”
“I so swear.”
For a moment there was no sound but the gurgling of the shallow brook as it ran over the smooth stones in its bed, the singing of the water: the voice of the water deities, witnesses for the gods.
She faced Jack. “Give them drink.”
He handed the goblet to Nemain, who drank with her left hand, and reached the cup over to Hob. He took it left-handed and took a deep swallow: it was the uisce beatha, and burned down his throat.
Molly addressed Jack. “Witness, speak. Are they married?”
“Yerrh,” Jack said from his ruined throat. Yes.
And with that, Jack Brown, man-at-arms, sometime Crusader, sometime mercenary, sometime shapeshifter, and the standing witness for all humankind, gave his assent, and so they were married.
CHAPTER 32
MOLLY UNWRAPPED THE RIBBON from their wrists, retied them, Hob’s left hand to Nemain’s right, and holding the other end, stepped from the water, leading the couple—Nemain leaping lightly over the brook to Hob’s side—up the slope, through the trees. Jack came behind, scooping up his drum as he passed it. He took his bone tapper-stick from his pouch and began tapping out a lively marching rhythm with a skip in the middle. So it was that they came to the large wagon.
Molly whipped the ribbon from their wrists and shooed them within. Nemain closed the door behind them, and they heard Jack’s drum grow softer as the older couple withdrew to the smaller wagons and the campfire, leaving them alone at the far side of the glade.
Hob opened the shutters on the side away from the clearing, facing the wooded slope they had just ascended. A faint murmur came to them: the stream’s chatter, drifting up-slope to them through the trees. Sweetlove, over by Molly and Jack’s campfire, was barking at something; she fell silent suddenly, as though she had been hushed by someone. The room grew bright; the sunlight, shimmering gold and green through the clouds of leaves, fell mostly on Molly’s big bed, a real bed with wood frame and leather webbing, goosedown mattress and large pillows, that Jack folded up against the wall in the mornings, and pulled down at night.
In after years, some of what happened was to Hob a blur, and some stood out in his memory, sharp and bright as one of Molly’s arrowheads.
Hob turned back from the window; they contemplated each other. After a moment the corners of Nemain’s mouth quirked up, the beginnings of that smile of pure mischief Hob remembered from her childhood.
“Oh, Hob,” she said simply, meaning nothing and everything at once, and with quick clever movements of those slim fingers, she undid ties and ribbons, and let her gown slide to the floor. The sun struck in through the side window, a shifting dappled glow, filtered through the swaying branches, the wind-tossed masses of leaves, so that light and shadow moved over her body. Where the sun lit her, her pale, pale skin seemed to glow as though illumined from within.
He felt as though he could happily stand for a thousand days, and do nothing but gaze upon her, and lose himself in those large green eyes, but in two steps she came to him, laughing—“I wish you could be seeing yourself, and you looking like a man in his cups”—and began to pull at his laces. He started to help her, moving as one dreaming, and as he stepped from his braies he put a hand on her side, the skin at first cool and then the warmth of her blood rising to meet his burning palm, her side a yielding softness under which were the muscles Molly had trained for war.
He fell upon her then, enveloping her in his arms, bearing her gently down onto Molly’s bed. They slid and rolled, a bit awkwardly, till they were fully on the bed: he did not want to release her, not for a moment.
He ran his hands over her, the gleaming milky skin, the mane of scarlet hair that poured down her back, the little patch of russet fur between her thighs, and the tips of her breasts, where the areolas, raised a bit like the caps of shy forest mushrooms, were tinted the pallid pink of the dog roses that grew throughout the North Country.
He kissed her everywhere, while she in turn, the young queen, explored her new dominion, entranced by the strength in his neck, the width of his shoulders, the depth of his chest.
Soon they fell to kissing and caressing each other, laughing, teasing, and she showed him where to touch her, and how, and all laughter and teasing then ceased, and there was left only deep concentration, and at last she rolled to her back, lifting her hair to one side, graceful as a dancer, and with not a word seized him and guided him into her.
A period of slow movement, stately as the tide, and then she urged him to ride up on her a bit, so to bear upon her most sensitive part; she even introduced him to the idea of moving in slow circles, and it all began to go faster, and again faster, until she stopped him, and bade him lie still, and because he trusted her, trusted her completely—she was Nemain, his childhood friend, his fated wife—he followed her every direction, keen and attentive as any dog of the sheep-herding Scots, and soon she bade him move again, and he did, and stop again, and he did that also.
And at last Nemain had come to her moment, a lynx arrived at the rabbit’s throat. She sank her nails into his back; she bit at his shoulder; she clamped upon him within, as if to milk the seed from him—and this proved to be the signal his loins had waited upon. One after another, inward gates flew open, and a sweet burning ran through him; his mind went silent, and his body grew taut as a drawn longbow. Like the sun above the rain-damp earth, he hung over her, and poured heat into her dark and secret places.
CHAPTER 33
LATE THAT NIGHT, THE TROUPE sat around a waning fire, watching the wood Jack had gathered slowly collapse into pale ash and glowing embers. The celebration had included music from the women’s homeland, songs Hob had never heard before; a great deal of food; a fair amount of strong drink. Two logs were placed at right angles; the younger couple sat on one, and the elder couple on the other, with Sweetlove between them. The terrier was asleep with her chin pillowed on Jack’s thigh, and her feet were fluttering: she was obviously deep in some running dream.
Conversation had ranged over every aspect of the summer’s events, from serious discussion of the assistance the De Umfrevilles might provide Molly against her enemies back in Ireland, to merry reflection on Daniel Clerk’s infatuation with Hawis, and what sort of marriage they might make. Molly—who was rarely wrong in such matters—thought it would be a good one.
Speech had gradually given way to a placid silence. Jack was working at the last bits of meat on a bone. Nemain had shifted herself and turned sideways
so that she could assume what was becoming her favorite position, leaning back against Hob’s chest. With one hand put behind him, he braced himself on the log; with the other, he was idly stroking stray wisps of hair back away from Nemain’s forehead.
Molly was thinking her own thoughts, and now she said, somewhat obscurely, “Sure and that’s done.”
Hob, at ease and utterly content, asked, “Mistress, what will you do next?”
She looked at him, just the least bit unfocused. “Let me see.” Molly picked up her mug of the uisce beatha. She had filled it again, and from this angle it looked to Hob a bit like the water-mirror: he could see the reflection of the moon in it, very small.
Molly began to gaze intently into the cup with its miniature freight of burning water and drowned moon.
Hob sat up straighter, now intrigued, and Nemain sat up as well. “Can you see the future in the cup, Mistress? What you will be doing?” he asked in a quiet voice, not wanting to distract her.
“Aye,” she said, in a low voice.
“And, and what . . . ?”
Molly slowly reached out a hand sideways, a dreamlike movement, the loose sleeve of her gown falling away from her shapely arm, her hand reaching, reaching to the side, slowly, while she gazed with fervid intensity into her cup. Nemain put her hand over her mouth suddenly.
“It’s after saying . . .” Her hand began to move quickly, and it captured Jack’s earlobe without, as far as Hob could see, her looking to see what her hand was doing.
“. . . it’s after saying I am to finish this cup,” she said. Jack was already beginning to laugh, a rusty gargling, to anyone outside the family a horrible sound. She held his earlobe between thumb and forefinger. “And then take this lad into yon wagon, and show him that in this wide world there are roads he has yet to travel.”
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