Jack rubbed a hand over his face, trying to wake himself up. The luxuriant hair in curls over the tops of his ears and down his neck, the fine pelt that covered his hands and forearms, his bushy eyebrows, all were still of the darkest brown despite his forty-three years, and there was a dusky shadowy tone beneath his pale skin that turned him brown as bread in summer. Folk in the village where he’d been born and raised called him Jack Brown, Jack the Brown, or Brown Jack, to distinguish him from the village’s other two Jacks: his friend Jack White, with his pale blond mop, and an older man, Jack the Fletcher, who made all the arrows for the archers up at the nearby castle.
When they had finished they took the leather mugs back to the kitchen and returned to the stables, Hob to tend to the ox and Jack to the mare and the ass. When Hob heard Molly’s voice in the bailey, he put down the bucket of grain he held and went to see.
Grooms were backing brawny dappled-gray draft horses up to Lady Svajone’s carriage, hitching them up in a manner Hob had not seen before, three horses abreast, with high-arched elmwood collars, carved and gaily painted with flowering vines, rising above their withers in a complex arrangement. The horses’ droppings were steaming in the snow. Molly stood nearby, speaking with the foreign doctor, who seemed as agitated as he had been the night before. Nemain leaned against the wall by the kitchen door, wrapped in a warm cloak, biting delicately at a large chunk of toasted bread, still hot from the ovens. She was absorbed in watching the grooms buckle the horses into the harness.
“Be said by me, it’s safer you’d be entirely did you wait till all parties were ready to take the road,” Molly was saying urgently to Doctor Vytautas.
“Alas, she is insist, she is demand that we make the travel. She fears that she will never have the safe, the safety, till we come down from out these mountains. I am urging her to stay here and rest, but she refuse to make consideration of this. We have the guildsmen, the . . . the men who cut the stone?” Molly nodded. “They are to come with us. And we have Gintaras and Azuolas.” He gestured at the esquires, engaged in readying their horses, a pair of fine matched blacks.
The Lietuvans worked with swift efficiency, deftly spreading saddle pads and heaving up saddles, clucking to soothe the restless mounts, tightening cinches. Their saddle pads were yearling bearskins, an accent of barbaric beauty beneath the ornately worked saddles. They threw tasseled reins back over the horses’ heads and, almost in unison, vaulted lithely into the saddles.
The conversation resumed, but in Latin, Vytautas fluent and confident, Molly hesitant. Hob lost interest; he wandered over to Nemain. She broke off a piece of the bread and gave it to him. “They’re running from it,” she said.
“Did you see that poor monk?” asked Hob.
“I heard somewhat of him,” she said. “Herself is teaching me,” she added obscurely. Hob knew that Molly instructed Nemain in the use of herbs and the cure of animals and people, instruction that Jack and he were not allowed to share. He supposed that Molly had found a lesson in the horrifying assault. The fear and misery of yesterday, held at bay by the new morning, began to seep back into his soul.
One of the grooms was pushing hard at the leftmost horse, one hand against the horse’s breast and the other holding the reins close beneath the bridle. The rows of little bells along the cheekpieces tinkled brightly in the crisp clear air. The horse tossed its head and snorted, breath smoking, and backed awkwardly three or four paces. Another groom began to buckle it into the straps.
Two other wagons, plain and rugged, were already hitched to teams of workaday horses. These were for the handful of Lietuvan grooms and other retainers who traveled with Lady Svajone, evidently a person of some consequence. The masons had hitched an ass loaded with packs of their tools to the second wagon, and climbed up into the wagon bed, heavily robed against the cold.
“The masons are off as well?” said Hob.
“They are indeed.”
“I had not thought they would leave the pilgrims. Herself says both are bound for Durham.”
“I had not thought they would be so hen-hearted,” said Nemain severely.
She seemed to have recovered from her own fears, even to have forgotten them. Hob found her bewildering these days; found her not quite the little girl he had played with last summer. In the last few months it had seemed to him that she was at times more easily troubled than he. She was more wary and alert. But then he would sense by her silences, her flushed keen glances, that something within her spirit was growing, bright as the ice rivers that ran down Old Catherine’s gray sides. Sometimes he worried that it might also become as hard, or as cold. Hob, with his scanty experience, found her difficult to judge, as he found everyone difficult to judge. He had been the lost child, the boy in the priest house, playing with the village children yet not himself a child of the village, and then this: away on the endless road, with formidable Molly and her silent man and her fey grandchild.
There was a bustle. The two esquires trotted their mounts up and took station ahead of the gray team. Brother Abbot came forward to take his leave. Doctor Vytautas pressed a small leather bag into Brother’s hand, enfolding it in both of his. Whistles sounded, a driver climbed to the seat of Lady Svajone’s wagon, and Doctor Vytautas scurried to the rear of the wagon and skipped lightly up to the door. In a moment he had vanished within, and Brother Abbot gave sign to Brother Porter to open the great gates.
The procedure of the day before was reversed, the doors swinging open to reveal that the portcullis had already been drawn across the exterior gap. The monks of the day watch and the monks of Lady Svajone’s escort over the crest of the Thonarberg—doubled since last night’s discovery—trotted out together, to fill the exterior forecourt.
Hob and Nemain drew back a bit, for the grays were eager to go and dancing a bit in the traces. The driver braced a leather sole against the brake until the doors were open wide. Then he kicked it loose. The two esquires were already through the gate. Lady Svajone’s wagon began to move slowly after them, toward the still-closed portcullis. The wagon’s rowan-wood wheels had iron rims with little blunt spikes worked into the iron, so that they bit into snow and ice and mud. The gates swung closed behind the third wagon, the capstan monks gave a collective grunt as they strained against the bars, and a moment later Hob heard the squeal of the portcullis being retracted.
On the other side of the wall the drivers could be heard clicking their tongues and whistling to their animals; calls of farewell rang out crisply in the frosty air from the little train and from the monks who remained behind; the rumble of the wheels echoed from the mountainside. After a moment the portcullis squealed again. The postern opened and the monks of the day watch filed back in.
Molly came to Hob. “We’ll be away ourselves on the morrow or surely the day next. See that you’ve stowed— Look at this face.” She took him under the chin and began wiping his cheek with a fold of her skirt. “Must you be putting your whole face into the porridge? And what’s this smutch up here?”
Hob screwed up his eyes as she scrubbed vigorously at his forehead, clucking and muttering. Finally she released him, with a little pat of approval.
“See that you’ve stowed and tied fast everything that’s loose. There’ll be a mort of haste upon us from the moment we’re out the gate till we come off the mountain, and there’ll be no stopping on the road to shift what’s come undone. We’ll not be playing for the good brothers, so you can leave the instruments in their wrappings. Then you’re to help Jack look over the harness and the wheels and the like.”
“Yes, Mistress.”
“There’s my lad.”
In the event, they stayed two full days after that. Molly was kept busy tending to the monks and dispensing salves and ointments, and the others were glad of the rest. It was while Hob and Jack Brown were in the stables again, with Jack showing him how to mend a frayed leather trace, that they heard a string of Saxon oaths delivered with a strong Norman accent, a little way down the row
of stalls. Jack and Hob wandered down to find one of the men-at-arms from the refectory, brush in hand, standing outside a stall and wishing hellfire upon the horse within. This was a tall mare with a large and ugly head, her ears laid flat and her lips drawn apart. As Hob came up, she darted at the soldier, lunging forward to the limit of her tether, her big yellow teeth snapping shut on the air with a loud click.
“She’s half the devils from the Gadarene swine in her,” the young soldier said to them as they came up. “I canna get in there for my soul’s salvation and a sackful of silver groats.” Twice he lifted the rondel dirk at his side a quarter-way from its wooden sheath, then slammed it back, not heeding what he did, seething in his frustration. “Jesus and Mary strike her dead!” Hob looked about to see if any of the monks were within earshot; he knew what Father Athelstan would have thought of this profane young man. The three were alone in this straw-strewn corridor built out from the monastery wall.
“Is she yours, sir?” asked Hob.
“No, lad, God be praised, no,” said the other. “I’m a man likes to stay on his feet. We’re bringing these horses from Bolton, up north, to the Sieur de Blanchefontaine. We’re from the castle. You must have heard of Blanchefontaine.”
“No, sir,” said Hob. “But,” he added, seeing the beginning of a frown, “we’re from afar.” A hoof thudded into the stall boards, and Hob and the young soldier jumped, but Jack just shambled over to the stall, limping as if his ankle hurt, and reached in. He caught the mare behind her jaw and stood there quietly with his hand in place while the mare looked at him, white all around the rim of her eye. After a moment her ears went up and her expression relaxed. She took a pace forward. Jack grabbed her ear with his other hand and bunched it up and released it, then stroked her neck. She began nickering and nuzzling against Jack a little; soon she settled into a deep quiet while he stroked her.
After a minute or two he looked back at the young man-at-arms. “Oogh ai irrow,” he gargled. The soldier gaped at him. “You try it now,” said Hob. The young man stepped forward gingerly. The mare eyed him placidly. Jack motioned for him to enter the stall and use the brush. The soldier was not a timid man, and he stepped into the stall and began to brush down the mare. “My thanks, friend,” he said.
Hob lounged against the stall and watched Jack pet the mare. The long corridor, sweet with hay and sharp with urine, echoed with the occasional lowing of oxen, the neighing of horses, the slap, slap of sandals as monks strode down the line of stalls, the hollow thump of a wooden bucket being set down. A few chickens were pecking hopefully amid the loose straw in an empty stall nearby, moving in random intersecting arcs, looking for spilled grain or for insects that had survived the winter indoors. Through doors farther down the corridor, open to the bailey, came the sound of chanting, drifting down faintly from some window set in the monastery’s side.
Hob and the soldier, that same Roger who had sat beside him in the refectory, talked while Roger groomed the mare, Hob explaining how Molly’s troupe entertained with singing, music, and story; how Herself was a skillful healer; how she could brew up the potent uisce beatha, the lifewater, from instruments stored in her wagons. All the while Jack stroked and patted the mare, who was by every indication now blissfully content.
“We wait here for three more of our comrades. They’re to come with a string of horses from up near Holme Cultram,” said Roger. “We will not remove till then. Do you persuade your mistress to wait for us, a few days, a sennight, a fortnight at most, and you can travel under our protection. You might winter at the castle. Sir Jehan is keen for any entertainment, and old Thierry, he’s our smith and armorer, he’s troubled fucking cruel with his joints. I’ll swear and avow my lord could use a groom like your father, too.”
“My father’s dead,” said Hob.
“Ah.”
“This is Jack,” Hob added, as if that explained everything. “But I’ll ask Herself if we can wait for you. Though I don’t think Jack would want to be a groom for Sir Jehan.” He looked at Jack, who opened his mouth as though laughing, although what came out sounded more like a rhythmic wheeze.
The older sergeant came up the line of stall doors and looked in at Roger. “Doing a bit better with that she-snake, I see,” he said.
“God’s wounds, she nearly ate my fucking fingers before, the brute, the whore! But Master Jack here has a calming way about him,” said Roger. He introduced the sergeant as Ranulf. Jack nodded amiably; he did as much as possible with gesture and expression, to avoid the pain of speech.
“And what’s your name, my lad?” asked Ranulf.
“Robert, sir. Called Hob, sir.”
“They’re going on tomorrow. They’re musicians and healers and such; I told them they should come with us to play before Sir Jehan. They’d find a welcome at the castle.” Roger was eager to acquire some new musicians for the hall: the winter nights hung heavy on a young soldier’s hands.
“You shouldn’t be on the road alone, not with what I’m hearing this day past,” said Ranulf. He hitched up his belt with a creaking of leather from his gambeson: he had a bit of a belly, and the belt, on which his dirk and purse were slung, had ridden under it. “Wait a sennight, you can ride with us.”
“What I told them, wait for us.” Roger’s voice sounded somewhat breathless. Greatly emboldened by the mare’s pacific state, he was bent over, picking up each hoof and holding it across his thighs, examining it for loose nails in the shoe, cracks in the hoof, pebbles. He was working on the last hoof when the mare swung her head around and looked at him, snorting. He put the hoof down at once and moved alertly to the side, ready to jump the stall door. Jack pulled the mare’s head back to the front, and after a moment Roger picked up the hoof again, cursing softly.
“It’s Mistress Molly who’ll have to decide,” said Hob. “But I’ll tell her what you—”
“Do you know the fork in the forest road below Dickon’s Ford, lad?” Ranulf had the habit of sergeants everywhere: he spoke and you listened, unless you outranked him.
Hob, who had traveled with Molly only for the span of a year and a half or so, looked uncertainly at Jack. Jack nodded.
“Yes, sir.”
“The left or eastern road will take you to the castle. Mark you, it’ll look like it’s dwindling out a mile or so after the fork, deep in the forest, but never you mind, it’ll recover, and it’ll take you straight to Sir Jehan’s gates. He’s a stern and hard-handed man to his enemies, but open of palm to such as are skilled, like your mistress, and your father here.”
“This is Jack,” said Hob patiently.
“Your father, Jack, then,” said the sergeant, and turned back to Roger. The two soldiers began arguing over the best way to teach the mare to behave like a proper steed for a Christian. Ranulf was insisting that Roger had drawn her as his mount and that he should be the one to ride her every day till they reached home. He didn’t want to have to explain to the Sieur de Blanchefontaine’s grim mareschal why they were bringing in a half-wild horse. Roger, on the other hand, wanted to lead her and ride one of the extra horses to come, and let one of the grooms at the castle teach her how to say her prayers like a little nun. Jack as usual contented himself with the occasional grunt or gesture.
Hob left the men there and made his way to the great wagon through the snow of the bailey. He put a foot in the rope loop and stepped up to the wagon’s lip and pulled open the door. He entered the barrel-shaped cabin. He shut the door against the chill air and immediately opened two of the shutters a bit for light. He was aware that, with her three beasts and wagons, the musical instruments, the herbs, the portable still, Molly was a wealthy woman, but her wealth did not extend to Hob’s wasting a candle in daytime.
He moved about the wagon for a while, tightening straps or cords holding blankets and chests in place, restowing Jack’s tent-peg hammer. The even more formidable war hammer was in its brackets on the wall. Jack had bartered a fine dagger and two gold double-leopard florins for it dur
ing one of his earlier campaigns, dickering with a Switzer mercenary from a nearby camp. It was two and a half feet in length, with a ponderous head that had two faces: a flat hammer on the one side, a steel beak like a crow’s on the other. A terrible weapon for crushing or piercing, and in Jack Brown’s big hand it flicked up like a hollow reed stalk, and when he brought it down it fell like a boulder.
This wagon, the largest of the three, was where Molly slept, as did Nemain, except when Molly summoned Jack to her bed. On those nights Nemain slept in the smallest wagon, drawn by the ass, whom Nemain had named Mavourneen. The mare drew the middle-sized wagon where Jack and Hob slept most nights and, though well enough liked, had inspired no name, and was just “the mare.”
He unwrapped the sheepskins about the musical instruments: the symphonia, on which Molly had made him a passable performer; the Irish harps that Molly and Nemain played; the goatskin drum that Jack had taken to so eagerly, again under Molly’s tutelage. He inspected each for crack or chip or other damage. Finding nothing amiss, he carefully wrapped the sheepskins again about the flat circular drum with its bone tapper-stick, and about the harps. The symphonia he kept out awhile.
He sat upon the bench that ran along half the left side of the caravan and placed the symphonia on his lap. He tuned the three sets of double strings, and rubbed resin on the wooden wheel. His hands were stiff from the cold and he rubbed them briskly together till they warmed somewhat with the friction. He fingered the keys and turned the crank; the resined wheel scraped along the gut strings, making a doleful, resonant moan, the paired lead strings soaring above the two sets of drones. He retuned twice as the strings stretched. He practiced runs of notes for a time, and then “The False Knight Upon the Road,” but he faltered after a few bars: a sinister meeting upon the road ran too near the fears that had come to lie across his soul.
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