by JR Tomlin
Last night he'd ended up on his knees and had limped on his bad leg all the way to bed. He had hardly slept. He'd awakened covered with sweat from dreams of his father's men crying for vengeance and Brian's eyes burning out of a black pit, until after hours of restless tossing, he'd given up even the attempt, dressed and gone to the top of the east tower. Wrapped in his cloak, he sat leaning back against a stone merlon.
Around him, white moonlight drowned the castle and he tasted the quick night air, cold and sweet. He thought perhaps he dozed but when dawn extinguished the pale wafer of the moon, he was awake, wrestling with how to provide his men with armor and weapons.
Below in the bailey, Waltir shouted at the men to form into lines even as they finished breaking their fast on bannocks and ale. Soon, as he leaned against the wall to watch, the lines stretched across the yard, each with man with a twelve-foot pole in hand. Waltir showed them how to hold the mock pikes upright with both hands and gave the command to move forward. A dozen of the staves tipped backwards. The butt of one tripped the man ahead. That one stumbled, his pole scything out of control. It knocked another so hard he bent double, cursing.
Waltir shouted to stop and got them in order again. "You've got to hold them firmly. Keep in lines, there or you'll trip each other. If they had blades, you'd be dead."
The staves dipped and wavered like branches in a windstorm as Waltir led the unit to the far side of the yard. By the time he called a halt, the men were sweating. They cursed until Waltir shouted them down.
"Quiet! You're here to listen to me." He waited, scowling. "Now, you have got to learn how to shift those things about. Together, or you'll all regret it. So just holding them upright, we'll practice turning in place." He called for a right turn. Three men let their staves lag behind the turn, and the tips bumped neighboring staves sending one of the men onto his arse in the tangle.
"No!" Walter shouted. "Hold them straight up. Try it again."
After a dizzying few minutes of turning left, right, and about, the unit could turn in place without clouting each other over the head. Waltir wiped his face and glanced at Andrew. He tried to hide his grin.
"Next step we work on carrying them on your shoulder," Waltir said. "Carrying them upright for miles of march would have you tired as whipped dogs."
Waltir took one of the poles and showed how to plant the butt and put it over his shoulder, bracing it with both hands. "That's the position you want. Now watch." He strode forward, the pole steady on his shoulder, not waving or dipping with his stride. "If you don't learn to work together when you turn..." The pole whistled in the air as he spun on a heel. "...with a real pike, you'll take your neighbor's head off."
Andrew straightened, nodded to Waltir and then strode across the yard and into the keep. The tables were shoved against the walls while Caitrina stood, frowning, watching a servant sweeping the rushes on the floor into pile. Another gathered them to carry away. Beyond her shoulder lurked the dark passage. She looked down at the floor, but smiled from under her eyelashes.
He paused mid-stride, trying to remember pretty words that once had come easily. Then she raised her eyes and gave him an even look, not as if she was flirting at all. "Sir Andrew. My mother found a good supply of fresh rushes. These stink horribly." Her eyelids pleasantly crinkled when she smiled. "That will soon be better."
He found himself returning her smile. She was easy to smile at. "A household of knights and soldiers. I fear if you and your mother weren't here we'd be no better."
"Oh, it's my mother you must thank. I'd rather be gathering winkles again." A blush rose up her face under her fair skin until her cheeks were red. "Oh, that's awful. I didn't mean..."
In a muddle of tenderness born of pity and a gentler desire to protect her from his pity, he reached for her hand. "What's awful? Don't be foolish." He ran his thumb over her palm and wondered at the roughness. What had the child had to do to keep her family alive? Holy Mary, she might enjoy a walk by the sea but no one gathered winkles except for food.
"You're being very sweet to me," she said. In spite of her blush, her lips twitched a little in a smile. "You looked right through me before."
"Before? Ah." He must have seen her when they had stopped for her father's levy. "I was a bit full of myself and more than a bit of a fool. I still thought that war had something to do with glory."
Her eyelids flinched and his stomach lurched. Her father was one of the one's who had been killed. Someday, it would be nice if he could stop feeling that way--that it was somehow his fault.
"No, when they came it was hard to see glory in it." Her face got even pinker. "But that's over."
To make up for reminding her, he said, "You're a guest not a servant, for Jesu sake. I have to ride to strengthen my leg, but riding alone is no pleasure. I'd enjoy company sometime."
"Oh," she said. All at once, they were smiling. "My mother wouldn't like it, but we don't have to ask her."
"I don't think she would deny me, Caitrina."
One of the servants made a noise in his throat, waiting, Andrew supposed, to ask a question so he let go of her hand. Beyond the dais, he went through the door and took the stairs down into the murk in brisk strides. A torch in an iron sconce cast a flickering light in the passage.
Gil sat at ease on a stool near the door swishing a whetstone along the edge of his sword. The stink of damp and mold slapped Andrew's face as though he were still at Chester Castle. His stomach twisted. "Were they fed?" Andrew asked.
"Aye."
"You're to stay outwith the door when the servant brings it. See that James gets the order." A wry smile twisted Andrew's mouth. "I'll have no escapes." He motioned for Gil to open the door.
A fug of piss and sweat hit him in the face when he stepped into the open doorway. A gag surged in his throat and he swallowed hard. Squinting into the dimly lit room, he surveyed the prisoners. They stood, one by one, slowly to their feet, faces drawn in alarm. They wore their own tunics and trews, now stripped of all armor. Piles of hay were clumped along the walls for bedding. A spear of faint light from the window slit, no more than a foot wide eight feet above the floor, stabbed the floor.
One of the men took a step forward. "How long..."
Andrew stepped back and closed the door. "I'll order blankets for them if we can spare some. Water and soap once a week will keep down the stench." For some reason he didn't want to consider, cold seeped into his bones.
Gil dropped the bar into place. "Aye."
He stroked the hilt of his sword as he strolled back out into the bailey and towards the smithy. Waltir was already promising the men pikes that he did not yet have.
The wide doors of the smithy stood open but as soon as Andrew stepped inside, he was met with waves of heat from the roaring fire in the huge stone forge and the reek of hot metal. Cathal carried a piece of glowing metal to his anvil and his hammer quickly formed it into a long pike point. Water sizzled crazily when he plunged it into his waiting bucket.
"How many pikes do we have the metal for?" Andrew asked.
The man wiped the dripping sweat from his face with his arm. "Should be enough for a hundred, but that'll leave none for anything else. No chance of getting more, I'm thinking."
"Not if the English can help it though my Uncle David may yet bring supplies." He'd have to hope that there were more in the armor stores. A hundred wouldn't even arm the men that he had now much less when he raised more. And he had to raise more. Many more.
Andrew breathed sharply through his nose. "Sweet Jesu." Deadly tired, his mind was sore with it. He leaned a shoulder against the wall of the smithy. As Cathal began pounding on another pike point, Andrew squinted into flames as fiery as a Gray Friar's vision of hell. The friars were wrong. Hell was a cold, dark, hungry place where madness sounded in your skull like a smith's hammer falls. He tore his gaze from the forge to stare unseeing out the doorway. He should tell his uncle. The priests had it wrong.
* * *
Caitrina
pulled the hank of hair hard to tighten her braid.
"Why are you doing that?" Isobail said.
"I'm going riding." The copper-colored braid was as thick as her wrist but not tightly wound enough. It was hard to ride if it came loose and blew in her face. "Sir Andrew said I could ride with him today."
"Without a chaperone?" Isobail pulled the veil from her head and folded it neatly, edges together, frowning. "You know mother won't allow it."
"I'm not going to ask her." Caitrina regarded her sister in disbelief. "You can't think that he means us harm."
Now her eyes burnt with tears, but she wasn't about to be a watering pot like her sister had become. They'd argued all the time before. Caitrina swallowed hard to get rid of the rasp that had closed up her throat. "Why is it so bad if I do something I like?"
Isobail tucked in her lower lip. "And you'll be alone with him."
"What difference does it make?"
"You don't know." Isobail's eyes got wet looking. "How can you know? You don't know what it means. You'll just cause more trouble. Why can't you do what you're supposed to?"
"I don't care." Caitrina tied off her braid with a piece of green yarn and stood shaking her head in bafflement. "What good does me to do what I'm supposed to? I'll still end up at the convent the first chance mother gets."
Isobail gave her a look like she was stupid. "You should be glad! I'd go to the convent if they'd let me."
"Well, they won't." She grabbed her cloak. "You'll get married and have your own castle and..."
Isobail shuddered and her skin had a waxy undertone. "You don't know what you're saying."
"Maybe not--but I'm going riding."
"Mother of God, Caitrina, you are such a child," Isobail said. She had that look on her face that meant she was going to tell. "Why can't you grow up? When mother finds out she will tell Sir Andrew you didn't ask. What will he think of you then?"
Caitrina clutched her cloak to her chest. "Telling on me won't keep them from marrying you to someone." She turned to walk off.
Isobail shouted after her, "I'm not going to tell. But she'll find out anyway."
Angry and troubled, Caitrina kept going down the narrow stone stairs and through the bailey towards the stables where Sir Andrew would be waiting. She sucked back the tears that she'd sworn she wouldn't let fall. All she wanted was to have someone care about her the way she was, and not expect her to act like a lady in a ballad. Or turn her into a nun they would never let off her knees, praying. Why couldn't Isobail understand that? It would have been nice having a sister to whom she could talk. The breeze cut with an early autumn chill and Caitrina pulled her cloak around her shoulders as she wondered how two sisters born a year apart could be so different.
As she neared the stables, she pushed away her distress. Sir Andrew stood in the doorway caught in the hazy daylight deep in some private thought. Against his weathered skin, his light hair was almost ash-looking where the sun had bleached it.
First, she was just glad to see him; and then, as she looked again, there was a sharp stirring of some memory. A window in the cathedral of a knight kneeling in a shaft of sunlight and uplifting the hilt of his sword to take a sacred vow, of which her first glimpse of Andrew had reminded her when she saw him those months before. So strong was this sense of familiarity that her anger, caught up in it, faded to a memory. She stopped, watching Andrew in startled awe, moved by a dream of beauty and of loyalty, and suddenly she wanted this moment not to end even as it was ending. Andrew smiled and came towards her from the stable, leading their horses.
"Hallo, the horses are edgy. A ride will do us all some good."
As they rode through the gate, all the faces turned to watch them. In the long line of men at the far end of the yard, she saw Donnchadh turn his head to stare after them. From the guard who lowered the drawbridge, she could feel a wistfulness when he returned Andrew's cheerful greeting.
"We'll take our time," Andrew said, "but dark comes early already."
The sun was high in the hazy autumn sky. Far below at the base of the cliff, gulls mewed and dove into the lapping foam. Andrew headed for the hills up a rocky path ranging northeast along Avoch Bay, not talking much. It was a glorious day. The air was cool but heavy with the scent of peat smoke and autumn leaves.
Beneath a rowan heavy with white blossoms, they ate a pie savory with chicken and rosemary. She licked gravy from her fingers, a little dizzy from wine.
Looking up from refilling her cup, he said, "This is well, is it not?"
"Yes," she said, "Of a certainty, it is." If only dark were not coming so soon. She hated the idea of returning to the castle. Andrew curled easily in the grass, his head near her knees, turned away from the light leaving his eyes in shadow. He had nice hair, fine and light; it had a kind of innocence, curling at the nape of his neck. It would be pleasing to touch.
She said, "Today makes me wish I could play the harp, but my fingers just tangle with the strings. Though I suppose nuns do not play the harp."
Andrew looked up. With his face in shadow, it could only be seen that he smiled. "I can't think of you as a nun."
"Nor can I," she said and heard the sting in her voice. She shook her head. "A daughter is not supposed to go against her parents. I know that. I wouldn't mind marriage. It's not that I've taken the minstrel's ballads to heart."
"My uncle was given to the church. He was the second son. He'll probably be a bishop one day." Even in the shadow, she could see the crease between his straw-colored brows. "But I don't know if he wanted to go."
"I don't know what's wrong with me. Isobail nags me to do as behave as I should, but I can't stand it. Life..." She paused to try to figure out something she had never put into words before, even to herself. "Life is so hard. Children sicken and die. People go hungry. Isobail..." She flapped her hand. Her sister ravished by the Englishman Cressingham was something she preferred not to think on too closely or that somehow her mother blamed her. "Our father killed in this horrible war." She had to work to keep the tears out of her voice. "Why can't we have some joy with all of it? Surely that is not such a bad thing to want."
Andrew gave her a narrow, silent look. "Not a bad thing at all. God knows you deserve some joy after all this. You should have something better than being forced to a life you don't want." He rose smartly to his feet and gave Caitrina his hand, pulling her to her feet. He plucked a white blossom from a low branch of the rowan tree--the last blossoms of the year. She held it as they rode.
After a while, Andrew gave his bay its head; it plunged with reckless abandon, and Andrew laughed as if a boy let loose. She kicked her gelding to a canter and caught up. It was a day for adventures. They explored the caves by the firth and Andrew showed her where he had once tumbled to the beach below and broken an arm.
He gave her a long look before he turned his horse's head further north. At the crown of a hill covered with half-stripped old beeches, he swung from the saddle and helped her down. Already the afternoon shadows were long and gold was creeping into the colors of things. His face and hair were tinted with it, too, and his voice was muted when he said, "I always came here to think." Between the gaps in the smooth trunks of the trees distant things showed like glimpses of another world: black pine forest, a stream coiling like a snake through a glen hazy with heather, hills on the skyline, a toy-like byrne beside a strip of field, and the turquoise of Beauly Firth stretching past the horizon.
Within, the wood had a clearing like a tonsure filled with broken light. The sinking sun struck through the open places and lay in softly shifting flakes upon the ground. The western edge of the hollow was rimmed with shadow and beneath their feet leaves swished and whispered. The air was heavy with the scent of autumn and of secret places.
Andrew stood gazing into the sun-entangled leaves. There was a faint gilded bloom where his tanned face caught the light. His hair, his eyes, his skin seemed to drink in the light; she had a fancy that if she drew him into the shadow he would
continue to glow. He turned and smiled at her with a look of radiant happiness. He took her hand and led her down the slope. Leaves rustled and bristly husks opened spilling out nuts like polished jewels. They sat down under a tree where the leaves filtered the sun. It would have been a sin to break the quiet so she whispered, "It's beautiful. And it must be your place. You would have been here if I'd come here alone."
He laid his head on her knees and she brushed back his hair from his forehead. Her heart seemed lighter than itself and to weave itself a new tapestry in the changing branch patterns against the sky. He began to talk softly, telling the secrets of boyhood when he'd ridden these hills and the dreams that he'd had before the bitterness of the world that he had seen in war and endured in his life had seemed to destroy them. When he fell silent, closing his eyes for a moment, she could see against his eyelids the colors of sunlight and the leaves.
A cool blue shadow had spread until it touched them. The gold on the tree trunks had deepened to copper. He stretched and laughed a little, helping her up. They brushed leaves, fibers and beechnuts from each other's clothes.
They stopped at the gap at the edge of the woods and when he looked back the shadow of a branch fell across his face. His eyes searched the woods for something, she knew not what. She touched his hand. "I wish you could show it to me in the spring."
"There must be a way," Andrew said.
The horizon was darkening to purple beneath a crimson-speckled pile of clouds as they started back. He asked about the food in the castle and listened while she talked about winter plantings in the garden. Soon they were out of the hills and Avoch Castle hulked before them. Twilight was over. It was almost dark. There was a moment of quiet in which the call of a guard and the clank of the portcullis were like different-colored silences.
Andrew said, "There's nothing to worry about, lass. You'll see. I'll think of something."
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE