Something Red

by Douglas Nicholas

  “See there; there she is again!” Giles had paused, panting, and tipped his head toward the wall. Hob and the pages Bernard and Drogo all turned, looked upward.

  Along the top of this internal boundary wall ran a walkway. On this a woman stood watching them. The sun was behind her; all he could see was the graceful outline of bosom and hip as the wind blew her garments and unbound hair streaming out to one side. The sun was so bright behind her, it made her a woman cut from darkness.

  As soon as she saw them looking up at her, she turned, albeit without haste, and moved off toward the keep. As she turned away, the sunlight caught her face and lit her wind-tossed locks to red flame.

  It was Nemain.

  SIR BALTHASAR SUMMONED Hob one day from his practice with the squires and pages of the castle. Hob came away, wondering if he was in some kind of trouble. The knight led him by circuitous ways to a small cloister, another of the secret spaces in Blanchefontaine.

  Sir Balthasar turned and faced Hob, and handed him a wooden dagger. The knight stepped back a pace, his arms at his sides, and said, “Come kill me.”

  “Sir?”

  Hob stood still a moment, uncertain, and then, realizing what was required of him, sprang at the knight, swinging the dagger in a rapid arc toward Sir Balthasar’s abdomen.

  Sir Balthasar made play with his open hands and a nimble foot, and Hob found himself on his back in the soil of the little yard, the dagger a yard away and his wrist aching.

  The knight looked at him without anger, but without sympathy either. He picked up the dagger, hauled Hob to his feet, and slapped the dagger-hilt back into the lad’s palm.

  “Again, but move slowly, and watch what I do.”

  This time the castellan showed him how his wrist had been seized and his dagger hand forced open and his ankle kicked from under him. “You will need to put on some meat before this will be of use to you, but you should learn what to do now, even before you have the strength to do it.”

  He handed Hob the wooden dagger for the third time.

  “Again.”

  Hob came in again, but with his free hand held above his dagger hand, guarding it. Sir Balthasar did a quick shuffle, and Hob still landed in the dirt, but the knight contemplated him for a long moment, plainly surprised at Hob’s improvisation. Then he set Hob on his feet, and gave him back the dagger.

  “Again.”

  AT FIRST THE BUDS on the trees, seen from the wall-walks of Blanchefontaine, seemed like a green spray on the ocean of black and gray and brown twigs that stretched away from the castle walls. Hob and Giles and Hubert, up on the wall, flew kites in the early spring breezes. As the leaves broadened, the verdant mass grew dense; the ground could no longer be seen for the sea of forest that stretched away from the castle to north and south and to the west, till it broke upon the flanks of hills blue in the distance. To the east the land fell away to the Derwent far below, but there, too, spring surged to life.

  Molly began to speak of taking the road again.

  * * *

  SIR JEHAN was of one highborn family and his wife of another, and their influence reached down to London. He was able to explain the loss of so many knights at his castle with artful tales of more than one battle with Gold-Beard’s bandits, and an encounter with a rogue bear, and for the French chevalier, a horse that tripped and bore Sir Estienne with it over one of the precipitous drops in that steep hill country. Stern warnings from Sir Balthasar, as well as loyalty to Molly among the castle’s common folk, who realized what they had escaped, kept the tale from spreading among the country folk, except in the form of occluded fireside tales. In time, as the years rolled over the Pennines, all that was left was one of those skipping rhymes that older children teach to younger ones, generation unto generation, a few incomprehensible verses, each of which ended:

  Blanchefontaine,

  Fox’s bane

  CHAPTER 26

  GLUE SHADOW DRENCHED THE bailey. The sun had breached the horizon a little while ago, but it had yet to clear the eastern wall. The green-scented early summer air was still cool in the dim dawn. The bustle of preparation about Molly’s wagons, the murmurs of the crowd gathered to bid farewell to their saviors, the ching of the knights’ spurs and the creaking of saddle leather as the escort mounted up, echoed from the curtain walls. Behind it all was a faint splashing: in the center of the bailey gleamed the imported marble of the eponymous white fountain. The snow that had covered it had thawed; the ice that had blocked it had melted. The spring that fed it was once more free to spout in four streams into the air, collect in a shallow pool, and run off in a stone channel past the stables, widening briefly into watering troughs before exiting through a grille under the east wall, to fall in a spray toward the Derwent.

  Molly was embraced by Lady Isabeau and Dame Aline, kissed on both cheeks. Jack and Nemain were already on their wagon seats; Hob stood at Milo’s head, holding his lead rope. The ox had grown stout in the last few months, and seemed by no means eager to take the road: it kept tossing its head, trying to reclaim the lead rope from Hob, and looking back sadly at the stables, with their excellent mangers.

  A last word with Sir Balthasar, who bent to kiss Molly’s hand, and with Sir Jehan, who kissed her on both cheeks, and then Molly swung up to her seat on the second wagon. Jack was in the lead this day, and now he gathered up the mare’s reins and clicked his tongue to start her moving.

  The sun touched the crenellated rim of the east wall, streaming through the crenels, blocked by the merlons: for a long moment golden rays shot above their heads to throw the silhouette of the ramparts against the western wall, playing on the gatehouse towers.

  The advance guard clopped into the gatehouse tunnel, along with Jack’s wagon. The inner doors were closed; the outer doors were opened. The first contingent clattered out of the castle, thundered across the bridge, and pulled up some way up the road, to wait for the next batch to pass through the gatehouse. When all were across the moat, the caravan re-formed in the road, and began to move off through the forest that surrounded Blanchefontaine.

  They swung along, through oakwood rich in wood sorrel and wood anemone; this gave way to ash forest with its ground cover of bluebells, and primrose whose leaves Molly used in some of her wound-healing salves, and wild garlic. Red squirrels scampered through the branches; the air was alive with birdsong, blackbirds and mistle thrush predominating; and over all was the scent of fresh breezes, green life, sun-warmed earth: forest delights after so many days cooped up indoors.

  After a while Jack leaped down from the wagon seat and stretched; he threw the reins over the mare’s head and walked ahead, using the reins as a lead. As Hob trudged forward, he kept his eyes on Jack, walking in front. For a time Jack walked along with his gaze on the ground in front of his feet, but after a while his pace picked up; he looked about; he breathed deep of the clear air. He straightened, and despite the slight limp left him from his crushed ankle on that day, so long ago, when his Fate came bounding out at him from a seething cloud of sand, he began to fall into a marching rhythm, and now for just a moment Hob could see him as a younger man, as the soldier he had been, trudging stolidly down the long and dusty road to Jerusalem.

  At a pass where the road began its descent to the eastern coast and the roads to Durham and York, the escort halted, the knights backing their mounts to the side of the road and saluting as Molly and her troupe passed them. Hob looked back a few times, and the knights remained motionless, till they had dwindled to specks, a courtesy: watching over them as long as possible.

  ALL THE REST OF THAT DAY they wound down out of the hills at the familiar plodding pace, dropping down toward the moorlands, the wind from the fells rising to meet them. Jack was up on the wagon seat again, he and Molly and Nemain working the brakes, and Hob trying to keep Milo from wandering onto the downslopes at the side of the path. Blocks of worn diabase formed giant steps down which cold gray streams poured, foaming into white at each successive level. Cool mist
hung over the downrushing water, and drifted over them whenever the wind shifted their way, wetting Hob’s garments, forming a sheen on Milo’s hide.

  Molly had elected to keep her original configuration of animals, rather than accept the offers of horses and gold and an escort and such that Sir Jehan had wanted to press on them. She had seen some signs—in the flight of crows, in the movement of dark rain-heavy clouds—that she had interpreted as guidance from her patron Babd, telling her that she must remain as inconspicuous as possible for a bit longer. Nemain teased her about this, pointing out that Molly was noticed wherever she went, but Molly was adamant.

  “And at any road, we’ll be back in Blanchefontaine this fall, when the weather begins to turn, for Sir Jehan must have care just as Jack must have care, lest he find himself howling at the moon, and changing to a Fox, and what then? Mayhap being burnt alive by the Church.”

  “Does he know his peril, Mistress?” Hob asked.

  “Aye, he is well aware of this—and that being one other reason for him to be our staunch ally, and like to be a great help when we return to Erin. And you, young man,” she said to Hob, “he has said he will make a rider of you, and help you win belt and spurs: for Sir Balthasar’s after telling him he sees something in you that he sees in few others, and that a fine knight in the Norman style might be made of yourself. And if so, so much the better for yourself, and for ourselves and our hope to return to Erin.”

  For now Hob was content with the sun on his face and the road before him, and the wheels rumbling along, bearing the little troupe into an uncertain but promising future.

  MOLLY CHOSE A SPOT on the slope of a hill crowned with a copse of trees; a common sight in Britain, where wooded hills served as sacred groves for sacrifices, before the coming of Christ. They pitched camp just below the trees. Jack busied himself clearing a place for a campfire, and gathering wood for it.

  A stream ran down out of the grove to the meadow below. Where it passed the camp, though, it was choked with rushes and soggy leaves from last fall. There was no way to bring the wagons into the wood. Molly sent Hob with a bucket to follow the stream up the hill, into the trees, to obtain cleaner water from the source.

  Somewhat to his surprise, Nemain trailed after him. Up and up they made their way, in the dim aisles between the trees, through fern and violet, following the lively gurgle of the brook as it rushed downhill past them. A last push through vines and wood anemone and herb Paris, and they came upon a little clearing where the space between trees was somewhat greater.

  There a spring welled up into a natural rock basin of no great size. The water in the basin was clear as air, and Hob could see the several sources of the spring as disturbances in the water, bubbling up through the smooth gray stones on the bottom. The irregular bowl was constantly spilling from the lower, downhill side of its lip, silver sheets splashing out and away down the hillside in the stream they had followed here. It was as beautiful in its rough way as the formal white-marble fountain of which Sir Jehan was so proud.

  Nemain knelt beside the spring and drank from her cupped palm. Hob watched her, the curve of her back as she bent over the water, and it came to him that she had gained some weight during the spring, and her face was a little fuller; it was softer and prettier than it had been; and her skin had long since cleared. There was a curving width to the once-narrow hips, no longer much like a boy’s, and a slight but distinct swell to her bosom.

  Nemain stood and retreated a pace or two, wiping her lips on her sleeve. She leaned back against a tree, and the dappled light fell across her. This time Hob was not behindhand: he set the bucket down with a muffled bump, took two strides toward her, and put a hand on the curve of her hip. She looked up at him, that look he had seen before, enigmatic, challenging. Green eyes, green eyes! He raised his hands and placed them gently to either side of her face, as someone had taught him once, so long ago, and kissed her full on the mouth.

  She threw her arms about his neck, and kissed him back with an ardor that surprised him. “Hob,” she said, and gripped his shoulders. She hesitated a moment, distracted by the new musculature beneath her hands.

  “Hob—Robert, Herself was in the right,” she said. “She’s just after seeing you in the priest house, and she tells me, ‘That’s your man-to-be,’ and you a wee boy, so that I laughed.”

  “Herself said—” Hob began, dazed, happy.

  “But after a time I was no longer laughing, and I knew it also, that you should be my man, and I not needing yarrow under my pillow come Midsummer Eve, that I might have a dream of my future consort.”

  She kissed him again, with a kind of ferocity, and the mention of yarrow that had put him in mind of last summer’s camp slipped away, his arms full of her warm body and her face so close to his, so that what he remembered was not the yarrow but the glade where he drew water for that other camp, and how her green gaze reminded him of that deep fern-shaded pool, and how her hair was like the tumble of wild roses down the water’s bank in that glade, and how her face was the white of lilies.

  “Nemain,” he said simply, and then found that he could say no more; then he thought that there was no more that he need say.

  “And next year,” she said, “it’s you and I, Robert, will be clasping hands over a stream, and swearing to one another, and then you will be my consort for aye.” And after the next kiss she slipped from his arms, and said, “Are you ever going to fill us that bucket?”

  She walked away laughing, with some of the mockery that he knew so well from Nemain the little girl, but she turned and looked at him over her shoulder, and it was not a little girl’s look; and she was no longer the scrambling child he remembered: she moved as a lynx moves, with a dangerous grace.

  She was away and down the hill before he could rouse himself to dip the bucket into the rock basin. He set off down the hill, the weight of the water unnoticed, because of either his new strength or the exalted singing of his blood. He came out from the shelter of the trees in time to see her climb into the small wagon, and he stopped.

  He stood there for a long time. He could just barely make her out through the open window as she moved about within, busy, perhaps, preparing one of Molly’s mysterious remedies. He took a fine deep breath. He had the sense that the ground had shifted underneath his feet, and that he saw his life from a new vantage point: it was like looking down on the hawks by Monastery Mount, instead of up at them.

  Later, when he was a man of property and power in Ireland, and a queen’s consort as well, Hob could still recall unaltered this moment, this fragment of life in which his time-to-come stood forth and revealed itself to him.

  The world seemed to widen, rippling outward from where he stood, and the air to take on a luster, so that the sunlight playing in among the clouds of leaves bore a brilliant clarity he had never before encountered. The wind twirled the leaves on their stems; the alternating surfaces, green above and silver beneath, twinkled before him. Within all this woodland glory was set the wagon like a jewel box, and within the wagon Nemain, that jewel, moved back and forth across the window. And this was all his.

  He thought that he almost remembered this scene, and all this beauty, from another time, or from another campsite, or from a dream: her bare forearm as she reached for the wagon’s high shelves, that quick gleam of white skin; and her hair swinging forward to hide her features as she bent to her work, that flicker of something red.

  GLOSSARY OF IRISH TERMS

  a chuisle

  pulse, heartbeat

  (“O pulse”)

  a rún

  love, dear

  (“secret treasure”)

  Mavourneen

  my sweetheart

  (mo mhuirnín)

  mo chroí

  my heart

  mo mhíle stór

  my thousand treasures

  seanmháthair

  grandmother

  (literally: “old mother”)

  stór mo chroí

 
; treasure of my heart

  uisce beatha

  whiskey

  (“water of life”)

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I would like to thank my editor, Emily Bestler, for her enthusiasm for this book, and for her intelligence and good cheer. I am grateful to my agent, the excellent George Hiltzik, a man who gets things done. My gratitude also to dear friends Patricia and Michael Sovern for their support of this project, and, always, the pleasure of their company. My thanks to Susan Holt, for her unfailing advocacy and encouragement; to Polly Pen, Susan Blommaert, and Craig Every for their kind and helpful comments; to Juosef Natangas Tysliava for help with the pronunciation of Lithuanian names; and, for her sharp eye and shrewd advice and heartening words, to the First Reader and Fairy Bride, Theresa Adinolfi Nicholas.

  DOUGLAS NICHOLAS is an award-winning poet whose work has appeared in numerous publications, among them Atlanta Review, Southern Poetry Review, Sonora Review, Circumference, A Different Drummer, and Cumberland Review, as well as South Coast Poetry Journal, where he won a prize in that publication’s Fifth Annual Poetry Contest. Other awards include Honorable Mention in the Robinson Jeffers Tor House Foundation 2003 Prize for Poetry Awards, second place in the 2002 Allen Ginsberg Poetry Awards from PCCC, International Merit Award in Atlanta Review’s Poetry 2002 competition, finalist in the 1996 Emily Dickinson Award in Poetry competition, honorable mention in the 1992 Scottish International Open Poetry Competition, first prize in the journal Lake Effect’s Sixth Annual Poetry Contest, first prize in poetry in the 1990 Roberts Writing Awards, and finalist in the Roberts short fiction division. He was also recipient of an award in the 1990 International Poetry Contest sponsored by the Arvon Foundation in Lancashire, England, and a Cecil B. Hackney Literary Award for poetry from Birmingham-Southern College. He is the author of Iron Rose, a collection of poems inspired by and set in New York City; The Old Language, reflections on the company of animals; The Rescue Artist, poems about his wife and their long marriage; and In the Long-Cold Forges of the Earth, a wide-ranging collection of poems. He lives in the Hudson Valley with his wife, Theresa, and their Yorkshire terrier, Tristan.