Ranulf kicked the club into the bushes, then reached down and dragged Loth off. It took the man a moment to realize he was no longer under attack, and he continued to claw the snow for his club, kicking feebly at a dog who was no longer there. Ranulf was having trouble restraining Loth; even when he pulled the dyrehund up onto his hind legs, the dog did not desist his struggles, choking and snarling as he fought to get back to his kill. The redhead had now scrabbled to his hands and knees, his breath coming in wheezing, gasping sobs. Somehow he lurched to his feet, screaming anew as pain jolted through his crushed ankle. Hobbling, stumbling, weaving like a drunkard, he fled in terror, leaving a blotched and bloody trail across the snow. He’d not get far; Ranulf had seen the terrible gaping wound, the shredded flesh of the man’s thigh.
Reaction now set in and Ranulf started to shake. Still clutching Loth’s collar, he sank to his knees. Blood was everywhere, splashed across the front of his hauberk, caking his boots. The churned-up snow was bright red, and Loth’s silver muzzle seemed to have been dipped in scarlet; so had his chest. The dyrehund was trembling, too; he whimpered and nuzzled Ranulf, smearing blood across Ranulf’s cheek and into his beard. Ranulf pulled the dog closer, wrapped his arms around Loth’s heaving sides, and held tight.
When Loth growled, Ranulf raised his head, automatically reaching again for his sword hilt. The boy was standing ten feet away, poised to take flight. Ranulf guessed he was about nine or so, but small for his age, reed-thin and meagre. He seemed all eyes; they dominated the pinched little face, a striking shade of blue-green, glassy with shock. He looked at the body, swallowed, and asked, “Is he dead?”
“Yes.”
“And the other…the one the dog bit?”
“Most likely he’ll bleed to death,” Ranulf said honestly.
The boy was quiet for a moment, staring at Loth. “Good,” he said, and then recoiled when Ranulf seemed about to rise. He did not go far, though, backing off a few more prudent feet. “Are you bad hurt?”
“No, not bad,” Ranuld said and waited, feeling as if he were trying to tame some wild, woodland creature, ready to bolt at any moment.
“Why?” the child asked suddenly. “Why did you help us?”
Ranulf considered several different answers, and then twitched a shoulder in a half-shrug. “I had nothing better to do.”
The boy’s eyes widened even further. But he seemed to take reassurance from the joke, for he slowly edged closer. “I am Simon,” he said solemnly, and after Ranulf introduced himself and Loth with equal gravity, Simon held out a small fist for the dyrehund to sniff. In view of what the child had watched the dog do, Ranulf thought that was a commendable act of courage. Simon peered intently into Ranulf’s face, then glanced back at Loth. “We know where your horse is,” he said unexpectedly. “It ran into the woods and its reins snagged on a bush. My sister found it.”
Ranulf wondered why they hadn’t tried to catch the stallion for themselves, and then realized that to these children, a horse would be as exotic an animal as an elephant. He still did not know why they were out here alone, but did not doubt that he was looking at the sort of poverty he’d rarely encountered; Simon’s clothes were so ragged they showed glimpses of skin and his worn leather shoes were held together with cord. Getting stiffly to his feet, Ranulf said, “Can you take me to the horse?”
The child nodded, but hesitated. No longer meeting Ranulf’s gaze, he asked, “Do you have any food?” Adding quickly, “Not for me, for Jennet.”
“Yes, I do,” Ranulf said, as matter-of-factly as he could manage, and with the child hovering just out of reach, he limped across the meadow toward the woods. Even if he’d had a shovel, the ground was too hard to dig a grave, so he left the body of the outlaw where it had fallen. Simon seemed to share his view that the man did not deserve a Christian burial, for the boy did not glance back, either.
Simon’s sister looked so like him that they might have been twins if not for the age difference; she had the same vivid blue-green eyes, the same light hair of an indeterminate shade that was either a pale ash-brown or a dirt-darkened blonde, and like him, she bore the signs of malnourishment. Ranulf imagined she was about thirteen, yet she was smaller than his nephew Henry, so frail and wan that he ached for her. More than the boy, she comprehended the full horror of what they’d been spared, and he was impressed by the bravery she’d shown in staying to watch the outcome of the battle.
He had bread and cheese in his saddlebag, and they fell upon it ravenously, with a hunger he’d never known. He waited until they’d devoured every crumb before asking what they were doing by themselves on the Newark-Grantham Road, and got an answer that dismayed him. They were on their way, Simon confided, to their uncle Jonas in Cantebrigge.
“God Almighty, you cannot be serious! Not only is Cantebrigge at least eighty miles from here, but it is less than twenty miles from Ramsey Abbey, which has been seized by rebels. You cannot go to Cantebrigge!”
Anxiety had given his voice an angry edge, and the children reacted with immediate fear, backing away. “We are going to Cantebrigge,” Jennet cried, “we must! And we will, we will go!”
Ranulf hastily changed his tack. “I did not mean to shout,” he said soothingly, while rapidly reviewing his options. There was another ten miles or more to Grantham; Newark was less than five. “Speaking for myself, I’ve never felt so battered or bone-weary. Luckily, I know an inn in Newark where we can get a decent meal and mayhap even a bone for Loth.”
They conferred together, speaking too swiftly for him to catch their words; his grasp of English did not allow for nuances or even slurred speech. When they turned back, Simon came forward until he was close enough to be grabbed; it was, Ranulf recognized, a declaration of trust. “We’ve nothing better to do,” he said, with what was almost a smile.
Ranulf had already attracted attention at the inn the preceding night: a lone knight and a dog the likes of which none had seen before. When he and the wolf-dog returned, drenched in gore and with two beggar children in tow, he created a sensation. But their curiosity was to remain unsatisfied, for he offered no explanations and all that blood somehow discouraged prying.
The innkeeper was as amazed by Ranulf’s request for two rooms as he was by his alarming appearance. A private room was an almost unheard-of luxury, except for the highborn; it was usual for strangers to share not only a chamber but a bed, and it seemed utterly bizarre to him that Ranulf should want to squander a room upon bedraggled urchins who ought to be bedding down out in the stables with the lord’s fine palfrey. He confined himself, though, to a timid protest, which Ranulf ignored, for he thought Jennet would be fearful sharing a room with anyone but her brother, so soon after the thwarted rape.
As much as he needed a bath, Ranulf knew better than to ask for one, not in a small, shabby inn in the midst of winter. The innkeeper was able to scrounge up some soft soap of mutton fat and wood ash, and he washed himself as best he could with cold water and a burlap towel. When the children crept downstairs to join him in front of the fire, they were still filthy, but so unself-conscious that he realized bathing was for them done only in summer, if at all. They’d shared their lives with him by now, offered up in hesitant bits and pieces as they’d made the slow trek back to Newark, and the more they’d told him, the less he’d wanted to know.
Simon and Jennet were children of the Fens, having lived all of their brief years in the bleak isolation of the Lincolnshire salt marshes, more cloistered than in any convent. Their mother was long dead and Jennet had insisted so vehemently that their father was a “free man” that Ranulf knew he must have been a runaway villein, a serf bound to the land. Their world had been a wattle-and-daub hut out in the Fens; all they could say was that it had been north of Sleaford. There they’d dwelled, just this side of starvation, their father fishing for eels and sometimes taking water reeds into Sleaford to sell for roof thatching. But he’d not taken them; until Ranulf had shepherded them through Newark’s streets,
they’d never seen a town. As far as he could tell, the only people they ever saw were other fishermen and their families, mayhap an occasional peddler-until the day the outlaws came.
They took turns relating the horrors of that day, with the detached composure of emotional exhaustion. How their father had sensed danger and sent them off into the marsh to hide. How they’d waited out in the wind-ripped bogs for their father to fetch them, huddling together for warmth as gulls shrieked overhead and night came on. How they’d seen the smoke, and when they dared to venture back, they found their home in flames and their father’s body sprawled by the hen roost. The hens were gone, of course, as was the pig that was their prized possession, and every scrap of food that Jennet had salted away and stored for winter. And whatever the brigands hadn’t carried off had been burned in the fire.
They did not seem to know how long they’d lingered in the ruins, and Ranulf did not press them; better such memories were mercifully blurred. They’d buried their father and eventually hunger had driven them to undertake this lunatic quest of theirs-to seek out their only kinsman, their father’s younger brother Jonas, plying his trade as a tanner in the distant town of Cantebrigge.
Stretching his legs toward the fire, Ranulf massaged his aching knee and watched the children as they ate their fill, probably for the first time in their lives. It was a Wednesday fast day, but he’d made a conscious decision to violate the prohibition against eating flesh; he could always do penance once he got back to his own world. Now it seemed more important to feed Simon and Jennet the best meal he could, and the innkeeper had served up heaping portions of salted pork, a thick pottage of peas and beans, and hot, flat cakes of newly baked bread, marked with Christ’s Cross. To Ranulf, it was poor fare, and he ended up sharing most of it with Loth. But Simon and Jennet savored every mouthful, scorning spoons and scooping the food up with their fingers, as if expecting to have their trenchers snatched away at any moment. And Ranulf learned more that night about hunger and need than in all of his twenty-five years.
What would become of them? How could they hope to reach Cantebrigge? And if by God’s Grace, they somehow did, what if this uncle of theirs was not there? They’d never seen the man, knew only what their father had told them, that soon after Simon’s birth, a peddler had brought them a message from Jonas, saying he’d settled in Cantebrigge.
That confirmed Ranulf’s suspicions: two brothers fleeing serfdom, one hiding out in the Fens, the other taking the bolder way, for an escaped villein could claim his freedom if he lived in a chartered borough for a year and a day. It was a pitiful family history, an unwanted glimpse into a world almost as alien to Ranulf as Cathay. But like it or not, he was caught up now in this hopeless odyssey of Abel the eelman’s children. In an unusually morose and pessimistic mood, he wondered how many Simons and Jennets would be lost to the furies unleashed by Geoffrey de Mandeville’s rebellion.
That was mere speculation, though. These ragged, half-starved orphans were all too real, flesh-and-blood burdens, weighing ever more heavily upon his peace of mind. All through supper, he’d been silently debating his conscience, seeking to convince himself that he’d done what he could, that he was not responsible for them. But when the meal was done, he heard himself saying reluctantly, “If you are truly set upon going to Cantebrigge, I’ll take you.”
Ranulf had been surprised and vexed that the children had not shown more enthusiasm for his offer. It was no small sacrifice he was making, after all, for he had more to fear than Mandeville’s brigands; Cantebrigge was the king’s borough, and so were most of the towns they’d be passing through on their way south. But the children’s acceptance had been subdued, even wary, and he’d gone off to bed in a thoroughly bad humor. In the morning, though, he’d awakened to find Simon and Jennet asleep on the floor by his bed.
This journey was likely to be as expensive as it was dangerous; it was already draining his purse. He might have to stop at Wallingford on his way west and borrow money from Brien, for he’d had to buy a mule for the children, and mantles, too, for their cloaks might better serve as kitchen rags. He’d already decided that if-God Willing-he ever got home again, this Cantebrigge detour was a secret he’d share only with Loth, for he well knew that his misguided chivalry would make him a laughingstock. Who would ever understand why he’d gone to so much trouble for the children of a runaway serf?
Their pilgrimage was an excruciatingly slow one. The children were fearful at first of riding the mule, and even though they were traveling along the Great North Road, it was rough going, pitted and rutted by the winter weather. Moreover, daylight hours were dwindling away, dusk infiltrating now by late afternoon, and in every town or village, they ran into rumors of Mandeville’s depredations. Raiding throughout Cambridgeshire, up into Lincolnshire, he was spreading terror and laying waste to shires already suffering from famine. He’d gathered together a motley army: his own vassals and tenants, unemployed men-at-arms, bandits lured to his banner by his promises of money and livestock and women, all for the taking. Ranulf heard stories of pilgrims ambushed, merchants robbed, villages plundered and burned. How much of it was true and how much was hearsay, he had no way of knowing.
At Grantham, they were forced to stay over an extra day, waiting out a freezing rainstorm. When they finally reached Stanford, they were delayed again, this time to find a barber for Simon. The boy’s jaw had begun to swell, for he had a rotted tooth which should have been pulled months ago. He bore the pain in good spirits, though, and carefully tucked away his yanked tooth as a keepsake. In truth, both children were starting to enjoy their first foray into the world beyond the Fens. They did not realize their danger, so utterly had they come to trust in Ranulf’s protection, and they were fascinated by the castle at Stanford, the timbered town houses of two stories, their first market. Every day brought new and strange sights, and each night an inn awaited them, where there’d be a warm fire and all the food they could eat and then a safe night’s sleep on pallets in Ranulf’s chamber. Ranulf marveled at first that it took so little to content them, until he realized that those who’d had nothing expected nothing, and he began to worry that he was unwittingly teaching them an unfair lesson-to hunger for more than they could ever hope to get.
By their second week on the road, they were in Cambridgeshire, and much too close to Ramsey’s captured abbey for Ranulf’s comfort. But at Huntingdon, they had a stroke of luck, for they were able to join a caravan of merchants bound for London to sell their wares, men who’d banded together for protection against Mandeville’s cutthroats and their own fears. They were more than happy to have Ranulf ride with them; the sword at his hip guaranteed his welcome.
They parted company at Caxton, the merchants continuing south, Ranulf and the children turning off onto the Cantebrigge Road. There were fewer than ten miles to go now, and his relief was considerable, for he’d heard a very disturbing tale from some of the London-bound merchants-that Mandeville had raided the town of St Ives. Ranulf found that hard to believe, for St Ives was a prosperous borough, site of a famed fair. Surely Mandeville did not have enough men or enough nerve to attack a town? Rumor or not, though, it was unsettling, and he was grateful that he’d soon be able to turn his young charges over to their proper guardian. What he would do if the uncle could not be found, he did not know, for that was a dilemma he’d resolutely refused to address, preferring to fall back upon his innate optimism.
But as those last few miles began to ebb away, so did Ranulf’s confidence, and he found himself struggling with a sudden sense of foreboding, wondering what they would find in Cantebrigge. Yet he never expected what awaited them around a bend in the road: a sky full of smoke.
Ordering the children to hide themselves until he returned, he began a cautious investigation. It was almost dusk, but to the east, the sky glowed, and within a mile, he knew why-the city of Cantebrigge was afire. The first structure to come into sight were the stone walls of the castle, and then the rippling grey surfac
e of the River Granta. The town lay just beyond, wreathed in smoke. Ranulf had been in Cantebrigge before, during his father’s reign, and as he looked now upon the charred and blackened shell off to his right, he knew it had once been a church, even remembered the name: All Saints by the Castle. Reining in his stallion, he stared at the ruins in shocked silence. All Saints was well away from the town; flames could not have spread that far. To have burned, the church must have been deliberately torched.
He was close enough now to see people wandering about, and it was like being back in the smoldering streets of Winchester, watching as dazed survivors stumbled about aimlessly in the wreckage of their lives. Loth growled softly, looking up at Ranulf with anxious eyes, for the scent of death was in the air. But it was then that Ranulf noticed the castle portcullis was up and the gates ajar. So it was over. The dying was done; the grieving only just begun.
Ranulf did not want to go any farther, to see any more. There would be bodies in the rubble of those smoking houses and looted shops. There would be bloodstains in the streets, but no screaming or wailing, not yet. When grief came so suddenly, the bereft were silent, too stunned for tears. He’d been at Lincoln, at Winchester, at Oxford. He knew what he’d find.
A slight, stooped figure was trudging up the street toward the castle, his priest’s cassock befouled with blood. He seemed unaware of his surroundings, but as he passed Ranulf, his step slowed and his aged eyes focused upon the younger man’s face. Recognition was mutual, and as dangerous as it might be, Ranulf did not deny it. Instead, he swung from the saddle to stand in the street beside the old man, chaplain for more years than he could remember at his father’s royal castle of Cantebrigge. “Father Osmond,” he said, “are you injured?”
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