Something Red

by Douglas Nicholas

  Sir Jehan staggered back against a jamb of the fireplace. Slowly his legs gave way, and he slid to the floor. He was a seasoned knight, and his good hand was wrapping a leather thong about his right wrist to stanch the flow of blood from his ruined hand even while his face was slack with horror. Grievous wounds he had seen and even endured before, but none had been inflicted by a kind of demon in the flesh, and here in his own castle at that.

  Molly began to curse in Irish. Then: “Now must we be hunting her through these long halls, and it’s far better it would be for us to surprise her than for she to surprise us.”

  Molly turned and went back out into the corridor. The horrid sounds of the Fox’s slaughter were dimming. She looked up and down the corridor a moment. She said something low and rapid to Nemain in Irish; her granddaughter ran back toward the solar, partway down the hall.

  She turned to Jack. “It’s better we’ll fare on the morrow, do we have a shield against the Church over our heads, and Sir Jehan is the man to provide it.” Jack just nodded slightly. An austere expression had settled over his features.

  Nemain came running back with a large leather pouch slung over her shoulder, and Molly stepped through heavy hangings into the spiral stairwell that led to the hall below.

  MOLLY KNELT BESIDE Sir Jehan where he lay propped against the wall with a bundled cloak behind his neck. He had bitten into his lower lip to keep from crying out. Nemain stood by them, delving into her leather pouch, handing linen bandage or jar of unguent to her grandmother as required. Molly deftly spread salves, wound white linen strips, administered sips from a small earthenware bottle to Sir Jehan, and all the while murmured urgently to the lord of Blanchefontaine. Sir Jehan endured all with the stoicism of the professional warrior, but on his features was a look of horror that would not fade.

  Molly wiped blood and the remnants of her potion from the knight’s mouth with a cloth, and then fashioned a sling around his neck to steady the mangled hand, still speaking softly and swiftly, bent almost to his ear. Sir Jehan’s face had a sheen, the mist of agony, and sweat beaded on his forehead. Yet he attended to Molly’s words, and gradually some hope came to mingle with the horror in his expression. He contemplated what was left of his sword hand, and listened; at one point he cast a startled glance at Jack. At last he tore his gaze away from the ruin of his hand and peered up into Molly’s face. His expression changed: a growing tinge of awe, even a little fear.

  His free hand clenched and twisted the fabric of his own surcoat as Molly worked on him. Yet when he spoke his voice was strong and clear, and although Hob had not been able to make out Molly’s tense mutter, the knight’s reply was plain.

  “Do you but deliver us, madam,” he said, “and you will find me a firm fr—” Here he gasped; his habitual restless movements had caused pain to shoot through his hand. “—firm friend, for as long as I draw—as long as God grants me breath.”

  Molly sat back and surveyed her handiwork. Then she put her hand lightly on the bandage covering Sir Jehan’s dreadful wound, closed her eyes, and muttered, “Alt fri alt ocus féith fri féith.” Joint to joint and sinew to sinew. Then she stood up.

  There was a rattling and clanking from the other end of the hall as Sir Balthasar strode in with a small cloud of men-at-arms at his back. The castellan had donned a mail hauberk, steel gauntlets, and vambraces, but no helm. His size, his grim visage framed in the chain-mail coif, his powerful stride, made him seem the very figure of some ancient war god. But Hob had seen the Fox, and no longer had faith in the prowess of men, even men like the fearsome castellan.

  Sir Balthasar knelt swiftly beside the Sieur de Blanchefontaine. The links of his mail rustled as he went to one knee and gingerly examined the bandaged hand, where only the tips of the thumb and two remaining fingers protruded.

  Whether from pain or relief from pain, or perhaps from some ingredient in Molly’s potion, the focus of Sir Jehan’s eyes began to wander, and he spoke in a thick, dreamy voice:

  “Balthasar, my lion, my lion! You cannot prevail against it.” The sweat poured down his cheeks. “Not even you—not even you! It is terrible past all belief!”

  Sir Balthasar stood. “I cannot do nothing,” he said. He looked around at the wreckage and the dogs’ corpses, at dead Sir Archibald lying almost at his feet. “I will perish or no; all is in God’s hands.”

  “Nay,” said Molly; she faced the castellan. “I have need of you elsewhere.” Although she was a tall woman, Sir Balthasar was big among men, and taller than she. Yet her gaze was so intense, the prominent blue eyes so imperious, her carriage so erect, that he seemed somewhat diminished before her.

  “It’s yourself we must rely upon to bring all to safety,” she said. “Gather everyone that may be found, and bring them here, and barricade yourself within. Arrest any of those outlanders you come upon; but in no wise attempt to engage with that fiend. If it comes, retreat; flee if you must. I will destroy it! But you must do all else.”

  Sir Balthasar’s face darkened even more than its usual ruddy hue; he drew breath to protest; he looked into Molly’s face. What he saw there Hob could not tell, but the castellan’s own expression altered. After a moment: “My lady,” he said, and bowed.

  Molly looked from Sir Jehan to Sir Balthasar and said, “I will save all in this castle who yet live, but afterward you must be my safety against that priest, and his superiors, and their wrath. Swear to me your protection.”

  At once Sir Jehan croaked through gritted teeth, “You have my protection,” and when Sir Balthasar hesitated a moment, he made as if to sit up, and said, this time in the clear ringing voice of the Sieur de Blanchefontaine, “Swear to her safety.”

  Over the mareschal’s hauberk was his belt, a badge of his knighthood, and now he gripped this near the golden buckle and nodded. “By Sieur Jesus, by my belt and spurs, myself between you and all priests.”

  He bowed to Molly and Sir Jehan, then he turned and detailed a squad to barricade the hall, another to search the south side of the castle to bring folk down to the hall, or to arrest the Lietuvan grooms, while he himself would lead the party searching the northern staircases. He warned his men to retreat at first sign of the Fox. At his barked dismissal, the squads set off at a half-trot in different directions.

  After a very short while, folk began to trickle slowly into the hall, sent there by Sir Balthasar’s soldiers. Lady Isabeau arrived with a flock of her attendant ladies and flew to her husband’s side. She knelt beside him, cradling his shoulders, her tears falling on his face.

  Jack was beginning to move restlessly, rolling his shoulders to and fro. Molly glanced at him, gathered up her flock silently, gave over the care of Sir Jehan to his wife, and strode toward the turret stair. She looked back at Jack and the two youngsters. “Away on!”

  CHAPTER 20

  MOLLY LED THEM WITH WHAT might be called cautious haste, looking narrowly into each shadowed corner, searching solar and storeroom. They had chosen a stairway on the south side of the castle and, having tested each door on the first level up from the hall and found nothing but a frightened servant girl, they went up. As they ascended, they began to hear the clash of arms, the harsh voices of men in conflict. They pushed through the heavy draperies at the next level, and came upon Sir Balthasar’s first squad. The men-at-arms had found their Lietuvan almost immediately, and he had turned at bay.

  There was an oriel here in the curtain wall, an outward swelling that enabled a lateral view, with arrow slits on three sides so that archers stationed within could defend the wall. Several men could stand side to side in the little circular room thus created. In the entrance to this room stood Azuolas, sword in hand. He was in a strong position, and he was a formidable swordsman. One of the castle guards was down—Hob could not tell if he was dead—and three were badly wounded, a few feet down the corridor. Trails of red showed that they had been dragged back from the oriel doorway by their comrades. A half-dozen others stood back, panting. Azuolas could not escape
, but no one wished to come within his reach.

  A clatter in the stairwell, and here came Sir Balthasar, the second squad at his back. To his plate gauntlets, the knight had added a small hand targe, strapped to the back of his left wrist. His sword was still in its sheath. He strode down the corridor, matter-of-fact as a man hurrying to supper, but his face was purple with anger. In the whites of his eyes were broken veins. Without slowing or breaking stride he drew his heavy dagger with his right hand as he came and flipped it in midair, catching it so that the point was up, the massive iron pommel at the bottom of his fist.

  “You fucking, you fucking outlander swine! You’d break hospitality? You’d break our hospitality?” He was cursing, steadily but low; his voice was like stones being rolled over by a heavy wagon. “You’ll never die by steel, you pigshit knave: I’ll hang you this night! Hang you by your own guts—by Our Lady!—hang you from the fucking rafters!”

  Sir Balthasar was approaching the embattled Lietuvan at a fast walk. Azuolas could not understand what was said, but the castellan’s intent could be heard in the tone of his voice; could be read in his face and the slant of his great body. Azuolas, unimpressed, impassive, watched the knight’s approach. He reset his feet, made ready for the onslaught.

  As the castellan strode up, Azuolas made a swift clever pass at him. Sir Balthasar stopped it on his little targe, and with a quick rolling motion of his wrist clamped the sword-blade with his armored left hand. Azuolas immediately sought to withdraw it, but Sir Balthasar held it fast. The blade screeched against the plates covering his palm and thumb, but only a few inches were drawn back before the knight’s fierce grip stopped it, and by then Sir Balthasar was through the opening and closing with the Lietuvan, pushing the shorter man back.

  Sir Balthasar’s right hand swept up with the dagger and smashed the pommel down on Azuolas’s forehead. The Lietuvan fell down, dazed and bloody, and the knight wrenched the sword from his grasp.

  “Jesus and Mary!” The castellan angrily threw the sword a little way down the corridor. “Take him down to the hall; hang him with those fucking grooms.”

  Men crowded in and seized the esquire by the arms, and dragged him away, his feet trailing the floor.

  THE FOX HAD GONE UPWARD. Beyond that they could tell nothing, for it moved quickly, and the castle, though only a modest stronghold, was yet a large building, added to over the decades, with many passageways and half-hidden stairways, and rooms opening onto smaller rooms, and these opening onto still-smaller rooms. Molly and Nemain tracked the monster by sound, and by some sense that Hob could only guess at: the two women paused every so often and turned about, listening and looking, and consulted in murmurs, while Hob held the heavy flagon, fearing to set it down even for a moment, lest it be needed suddenly. During these halts Jack looked about him, his face drawn and his manner distant, and Hob avoided his eyes, because Jack seemed so very different from the old, the genial Jack Brown.

  Confused sounds came to them, always in another part of the great structure: muffled shouts and screams, snarling, the clang of weapons. Then there would be silence for a brief time, and then a shriek, abruptly cut short. Sometimes these sounds came from ahead, sometimes behind; to one hand or another; always above them. Molly proceeded at a steady pace: she had announced before they began that she did not want the Fox to discover them first and ambush them before she might unleash Jack, and so they must not let haste make them careless.

  Molly led the way, followed by Jack and Nemain. Hob she assigned to watch behind them, and he looked frequently over his shoulder; occasionally he turned about, walking backward for a pace or two, as he had in the courtyard of Osbert’s Inn, after his glimpse of the mastiff’s fangs through the moonlit grille. The memory flickered before him for a moment. Were he able to laugh in this terrible present, he thought, he would laugh at his past self: he had felt himself to be in danger then, but he had not even tasted danger that night. This slow patrol through the deserted castle corridors—this was peril. This was immersion in nightmare. He shifted the flagon into the crook of his left arm and held it there a moment, awkwardly, while he crossed himself, then hurried a few steps to catch up with Jack and Nemain.

  Jack moved down the corridors with a light and powerful tread, his limp much reduced. He began, every eight or nine paces, to shake his head, a short sharp rapid movement, as a dog shakes its head to shed water, or a man to clear his vision. Finally he reached up beneath his cloak and pulled the leather-bag amulet out, and began to draw it up over his head. Nemain turned quickly and put her hand over his: delicate-boned, narrow, pale, it barely covered half of Jack’s scarred and heavy-knuckled fist, now closed upon the amulet. Yet he released the bag and let it fall back against his chest. Nemain took his hand in hers, as though he were the child and she the adult, and so they proceeded, side by side, down the passage: one more strange sight on this strangest of nights.

  After a while of this tense promenade, another memory came to Hob: Molly saying, “You men.” And then the thought: This will be revenge for Margery. And between the one and the other, he straightened up, and he was almost unafraid.

  There came a burst of high-pitched screaming, echoing down one of the spiral stairwells. Molly went quickly to the archway that led to the steps. She peered upward a moment, then muttered, “She is at her mischief, and ’tis somewhere up these stairs.” And turning to the others: “Away on!”

  At the top of the winding turret stair there was a heavy hanging, there to foil the drafts from the upper passageway, which was a sort of unheated gallery, with narrow unglazed arrow-slit windows, open to the air. Molly swept this curtain aside and led them through the doorless archway; they found themselves at one end of the gallery corridor that ran along the south side of the keep on this high level.

  Here there was a torch on either side of the stone arch; the four stood in a pool of wavering yellow light. If there had been torches lit anywhere down the length of the gallery, they had gone out; certainly now there was only a near-black tunnel, pierced by narrow shafts of bright moonshine from the open window slits. The window slits were cut in a cross shape, both for piety and to allow an archer to traverse his shots, and the bars of moonlight fell against the inner wall in crosses of pearly light, receding and diminishing down the gallery.

  But the corridor’s other end, away at the southeast corner of the castle keep, was also illuminated: there another pair of torches showed them the body of a woman, supine, her arms flung wide and her clothes bloodied, and by her another body, a child—no, it was also a woman, but small. Above them crouched the Fox, its muzzle dripping dark gore.

  CHAPTER 21

  THE SHOCK OF IT FROZE MOLly’s party in place for a moment, and in that moment the Fox became aware of them, and with a rippling movement surged up and past the bodies, ears and eyes straining toward them, all eager attention. The cold airs and breezes that played along the gallery brought their scent to the Fox, and it halted suddenly, ears up straight and slightly forward, one graceful black foreleg bent up in midstep. Its nose lifted slightly, and it sampled the air. It cocked its head to one side. Plainly there was something about Molly, or her people, that troubled it.

  Then its lips writhed back from long ranks of white, white teeth. The Fox was like a fox in form: deadly but elegantly, almost delicately, deadly. Yet it was so huge that it struck Hob, through his rekindled fear, that this must be what a vole might feel when facing a real fox. It was looking from one to another of them, and Hob could feel its amber eyes fix on him a moment, and a wave of sick terror began in his belly and washed up through his chest; yet he stood his ground beside Molly and kept the flagon steady and level. “You men,” she had said; he held to that.

  In the next instant Nemain twitched the cloak from Jack’s body, and Molly deftly snatched the cord with the leather bag from Jack’s neck. Molly and Nemain now cried out in unison: a long rhythmic phrase in Irish, the two voices in high-and-low harmony, piercing, urgent.

 
; Jack started at the sound; he sprang forward a yard, as though a whip had been laid across his shoulders, and stopped. Then he began to walk down the corridor toward the Fox. In the torchlight Hob could see the muscles rippling in Jack’s broad and naked back; yet before the five hundred pounds of the Fox, he no longer seemed large and powerful. In a moment the darkness swallowed him; two heartbeats later he reemerged, gleaming palely as he passed through a shaft of moonlight. Still the Fox made no move toward them, and Jack sank into the next band of shadow.

  He passed through the next strip of moonlight. Hob thought that perhaps Jack was not so small in comparison to the Fox as first he had feared; certainly Jack was broad enough of shoulder. The silent man passed into shadow again; and now the Fox put down its paw and took one pace forward, and a low snarl came to Hob’s ears, rasping, vicious: Hob felt an involuntary shiver that centered itself between his shoulder blades. He realized that he was baring his own teeth, in some faint echo of the Fox’s dagger-mouthed threat.

  Jack reappeared, and Hob was alarmed to see that Jack was having some difficulty in walking: certainly he was shuffling more, and he seemed bent forward, but his figure had not diminished with distance, and indeed seemed if anything broader than usual.