by Joan Aiken
Now he would have to wait till the next full moon.
At last Friday came. It was the end of term. All the rest of the boarders had gone off early, in a ferment of excitement, with large trunks stuffed full of their possessions and the things they had made in handwork. By lunchtime Cosmo had the Remove form room to himself, since Eunice had her lecture in the morning as usual and could not pick him up earlier than on any other Friday. He did not mind. It felt peaceful in there, leaning on the sill, looking out into the Woodstock Road, watching the excited bustle of taxis arriving, listening to the slamming of car doors and shouted goodbyes. There was even a kind of security in knowing that they would all be coming back again next term. It was not like his goodbye to Con.
Somebody came into the room and he turned to see who it was.
‘Oh, hullo,’ said Meredith. ‘Not gone yet?’
‘My cousin can’t get here till this afternoon. How about you?’
‘Oh –’ she bit her lip. ‘I’m going to stay with my aunt. F– my father thinks I’d better not be at home, as he goes to his office all day, and I’d be alone.’
‘You mean you’ve got to stay with your aunt all the holidays? Do you like her house?’
‘No. I hate it. It’s in Northampton – a horrible town. I shan’t have anything to do. There’s nothing in the house – no books, nothing. Just for the last week of the holidays Father’s going to take some leave, so I can go home. Only one week in my own home.’
She seemed dazed by ill-fortune.
‘That’s an awful shame,’ Cosmo said. He added impulsively, ‘Shall I write to you?’
She gave him a doubtful look. ‘Well … all right. Thanks. And I’ll write back – though heaven knows what there’ll be to write about in Northampton.’ Then she went on, nervously, but gathering courage, ‘I’m sorry I was foul to you about – about your mother. Old Gab told me that she’d died. I’m sorry I didn’t believe you.’
Cosmo was tempted to say, ‘We still don’t know if she died or not.’ But he kept silent. After a while he said, ‘That’s all right. I hope it isn’t too bad at your aunt’s. Listen, I can hear Mrs Robinson calling you.’
‘So she is. My hateful aunt must have arrived. Goodbye, Cosmo. See you in May.’
‘See you in May.’
He heard her running down the stairs.
6. Sim
Nearly two weeks away from the place had made Cosmo almost begin to doubt the existence of the mill house; he could hardly believe in his own luck at being back. Everything was just the same: the sigh of the weir, old Lob stalking stately to meet him, his spiral of pitons glinting round the grey trunk of the walnut tree, Mr Marvell’s ducks chuntering happily where the brook joined the river, and the sound of Blossom’s whinny, up above the shoulder of woodland.
Everything was the same, but spring had advanced a notch or two: there were more leaves on the trees, the mud by the brook’s edge was beginning to dry into flakes, some grape hyacinths were spots of blue in Eunice’s flowerbed, and a pair of swallows were shooting in and out of the cart shed like rockets without the noise.
‘It’s the best place in the world,’ he said to Mrs Tydings.
‘It is that. How your father had the heart to go so far and stay so long, at the bottom back-end of the earth, I’ll never know.’
‘He was trying to get away. But it didn’t do any good.’
‘Made it worse. If it’s laid on you, you ain’t going to get away, not if you go and sit on the South Pole. You might as well make up your mind to that. Two things I can’t abide, one’s running away, the other’s turning your back on a thing and letting on as it ain’t so, when it’s staring you in the face. Well, you run along out, my lamb –’ they were washing the breakfast dishes – ‘and don’t plague Miss Eunice, for she’s all wound up in her book.’
‘Of course I shan’t!’
He ran out, steering a wide course round the end of the house where Eunice had her study. She really was wound up in her book, for she was correcting galley proofs like long thick extra-wide sheets of loo paper, getting into a fearful tangle as she added more and more ink balloons full of mathematical formulae so that the proofs began to look like a mixture of a wormcast and an Ogham inscription. Eunice had told Cosmo about Ogham: it seemed a very useful and beautifully simple writing system, twenty different combinations of straight lines meeting each other; what a pity it was no longer used.
The sun, now, was really hot, and, though he did miss Con to a surprising degree – Con had been wonderful for doing things with, much better than Mark – Cosmo was so full of plans that he hardly knew where to start. The boats – the foals – he still hadn’t explored the mill building; then there was his camp on the island where already new nettles were sprouting and he must fetch a sickle from the toolshed and cut them down – there was a lot to do.
Mr Marvell could be heard clanking buckets in the barnyard, so Cosmo went to help him first. The pigs were coming next week, so the most urgent job was to get the pigsty wall built. Mr Marvell had condemned the old pigsties as too small and insanitary; he was knocking the four of them into one.
‘The sow’s due to farrow three weeks after she gets here, so this’ll do while the piglets are small,’ he explained, bashing away with a sledgehammer. ‘Then I plan to let them run in the orchard so as to clear the ground, because that’s full of nettle and dock. Pigs are good for clearing so long as you don’t let ’em stay too long. Then the ground gets pigsick.’
Rebuilding the sty took most of the next five days, on and off, and as an exchange, Mr Marvell gave Cosmo help and advice with the boats. One of them, an old skiff, was not in too bad shape; a morning’s work with sealing compound and a couple of new pieces of planking made it reasonably watertight.
‘Now you give her a day to dry off and a day soaking in the water to take up,’ said Mr Marvell. ‘And then she’ll float like a nutshell. But keep away from the weir.’
The other boat, a punt, was in a much worse state of repair; they left it out, turned bottom side up, to dry out completely before trying to estimate how much would need to be done to it.
Boats and water were something that had been missing from the life in Australia – except for those visits to the coast – and now Cosmo felt he could not have enough of them. He could never cross the footbridge without stopping in the middle to watch the waterweeds waving their long filaments, the fish slipping past, and the diagonal patterns made by the current, while time flowed by, whole quarter-hours together, as fast as the water, and more silently. (But Eunice said that time did not move – or at least, not in the way people imagined. Physics had showed that different things went at different speeds, or could even move in reverse directions. It was all rather hard to grasp.)
On the third morning after the boat-repair job, when Cosmo ran to see if the skiff, left moored under the footbridge, had taken much water during the night, he was indignant to see a boy lying in the boat, reading.
‘This is private land, you know – didn’t you see the notices?’ Cosmo said, rather sharply – his voice was sharper because, for a moment, he had hoped that the boy was Con, but of course he wasn’t.
With considerable reluctance, the boy shut his book and slipped it into a pouch that dangled from his belt. He looked up at Cosmo, frowning short-sightedly. He had a rough, uncared-for appearance – greyish skin, fuzzy, no-coloured hair, bony hands, a few spots – no one would ever pick him out of a crowd for his promising looks; if he were in a basket with a lot of mugs, they would be marked ‘seconds’. His teeth were discoloured from neglect – like Bun’s, Cosmo thought – and his voice when he spoke, was a croak, as if he had not used it for some time.
‘I ask your pardon. I hoped that you would come this way. That was why I waited here. I thought no harm. If I have offended – forgive me.’
His voice was quite different from what Cosmo had expected; rough, with some kind of country accent, but very polite – rather humble, in fact.
‘Waiting for me? I’m sorry – I didn’t –’ Now Cosmo felt embarrassed, felt that he had been rude. But the boy was such a poor dismal-looking sort of erk, with his big hands and feet, his shabby, nondescript clothes, and his doubtful, propitiating look – like Bun again – Cosmo couldn’t help wishing that he would go away. He looked dull – that was the trouble. ‘Did Mr Marvell tell you to come?’ Cosmo asked, thinking ungratefully, I’m lonely, but not for this kind of company. I’d far sooner be on my own!
‘They said I could learn from you. So I have come to ask you to teach me. They said you would know me. I am Sim,’ the boy said as though that explained everything. ‘I have brought my things,’ he added hopefully, pointing to a pile on the riverbank which Cosmo had taken for some old bits of rusty iron thrown out by Mr Marvell. But, looking closer, he saw there was a kind of tunic, and leggings, of chain mail; a dented helmet shaped like Mrs Tydings’s jam cauldron, also rusty; and some terrible-looking contraptions that might be spurs.
Now Cosmo was really taken aback. ‘Teach you?’ he stammered. ‘Wh-what am I supposed to teach you? Geometry – stuff like that?’
‘Nay, no magic. I am a very plain fellow.’ And indeed Sim looked it. ‘Though I am fond of books,’ he admitted. ‘I was sorry when my father took me from the monastery.’
‘What have I got to teach you, then?’
‘Why, to fight. I am going on the crusade, you see. Next month. With my uncle Aveyron, my mother’s brother. We are going to rescue the city of Jerusalem.’ Sim heaved a sigh, as if he did not relish the prospect.
‘Why go,’ Cosmo said, ‘if you don’t want to?’
‘Oh, I must. My father bound me into my uncle’s service. He owed my uncle for a piece of land – so my service is a means of paying that debt. I must learn to manage a boat – for we shall be travelling over the sea – and to fight.’
‘Oh, well, I can teach you to row, anyway. That’s not hard. We may as well start now, if you like. The oars are in the shed – do you want to help me get them down off the beams?’
Poor Sim was as clumsy as he looked, all thumbs – twice he was nearly knocked out by loose planks while they were taking down the oars, and then he slipped and fell into the water – but he took these misfortunes with unruffled good humour, laughing at himself for being such a jackass. It turned out that he could not swim, either, so Cosmo had to teach him the rudiments of that – though the water was icy, much too cold for bathing really, and would be for several weeks yet. Still, you could hardly let the poor wretch go off to the crusades in such a state of ignorance and incompetence.
‘Keep your blades down, Sim! You’ll knock yourself cold if you wave them about in the air like that. Okay; take a rest now – let them trail back along the boat. Why isn’t your father going on the crusade?’
‘Oh, he went once before, when he was younger. When my uncle Robert was killed. That was how my father inherited the Manor – he was the second brother, you see.’
Cosmo did see.
‘And you are your father’s eldest son?’
‘Ay. But he has never loved me,’ Sim said resignedly. ‘He put me into the monastery when I was six. And indeed I would have been glad to stay there. A monkish life would be no hardship to me. Now that my younger brothers are growing, my father will have enough help at the Manor.’
‘Did – has anyone ever told you about a prophecy?’ Cosmo delicately avoided the word curse. But Sim looked wholly blank and bewildered.
‘Father Anselm holds that prophecies are vain and wicked things, coming from the Devil. I know nothing concerning any prophecy.’
‘Oh, well, forget it.’
Now Cosmo felt really angry – he was not quite sure with whom. Fancy sending this poor simpleton off on a crusade, though! He hardly knew enough to come in out of the rain. Certainly didn’t know what was in store for him. Nor, presumably, did the uncle who had taken his service as payment for a debt.
‘What kind of fighting do you have to learn?’
‘Why, with sword and spear – what else?’
No good expecting people to use net and trident in the Holy Land, Cosmo supposed.
‘Well, Mr Marvell lets me ride his young horses – I suppose we could have a try at jousting. We’d better bring your armour along – it’s in a shocking state – you can’t go off to Jerusalem with it all rusty like that! It’ll all have to be scrubbed with a metal brush. But first we’ll soak it in something to get the worst off. Good grief, man, it’s heavy! – and you’re expected to wear that in the desert?’ He imagined trudging through the Australian desert weighed down by all those heavy iron rings. They were flat, about the size of halfpenny pieces, overlapping, sewn to a thick leather jacket, which, in itself, must have weighed five or six pounds.
Cosmo discovered that Sim hardly knew how to ride, even. He explained that there had been little opportunity in the monastery, save when, very occasionally, he had been sent on an errand, riding the choirmaster’s ambling mule. Astride of flighty Juno he fell off more often than he stayed on, so Cosmo transferred him to the more sober and biddable Punch.
‘I wonder what you’ll be riding, out there in the desert?’
‘My uncle plans to take six chargers with him. Some knights wait, until they reach Acre, and there buy Saracen steeds – but they are poor spindly things, my uncle has heard, not fit to carry a man of substance. These are more like his horses,’ and Sim looked respectfully at the massive Blossom, whose enormous hoofs needed shoes the size of barrel-hoops.
Perhaps it was as well that Mr Marvell was away today, buying seed at some superior agricultural supply store in Reading. Cosmo was not certain if he would have approved of the exercise Punch and Juno were receiving – though they seemed to enjoy it thoroughly.
‘Keep your legs as straight as you can, Sim,’ Cosmo panted – remembering the knights in the Bayeux tapestry with their feet almost touching the ground. ‘And sit back – not so far forward. Keep your centre of gravity in your seat, man!’
‘I cry your pardon? I know not this centre of gravity.’
They were tilting at each other with long ash poles which were not really heavy enough, the points tended to fly up in the air. Cosmo presently had the notion of wiring old pound and two-pound weights, from a rusty set of scales that he had found in the old dairy, on to the ends. Then the points kept down satisfactorily but were rather damaging if, as occasionally happened, they connected with the target. After a while Cosmo had another good idea – he rigged up a punchbag made from a big plastic agricultural sack stuffed with insulating wool and suspended from a bough of the great oak in the middle of the pasture.
‘Pretend that it’s a Saracen – no, go on, you’ve got to, Sim!’ he shouted. ‘If you don’t spike him, he’s going to spike you.’
‘I was not made for warfare,’ poor Sim gasped, as Punch cantered to a ponderous halt.
‘What are you good at?’
‘Why, nothing,’ Sim said humbly. ‘But Brother Lawrence said I have good perseverance.’ He pronounced it per-severance.
Cosmo had to admit this was true. Sim was prepared to go on trying as long as he was asked to; but presently, for the sake of the horses, they had to stop, and walk Punch and Juno till they stopped sweating and were ready to be rubbed down. Then the chain mail – which Cosmo had left soaking in a bath of Clearust – had to be scrubbed and sanded. Mrs Tydings’s wire stove-brush was some help there; so were wire pot scourers. A good deal of skin came off their fingers too.
‘What we really need,’ said Cosmo, ‘I’m sure they must have them in factories, is some kind of big tumbling-machine that would roll the stuff round in emery or against bristles until it’s all scoured.’
Failing this, they had to do it all by hand.
Here, however, Cosmo had to admit, Sim showed his merit as a companion. He might not be able to do anything else well, but he could sing in a clear tuneful voice, and knew all kinds of songs, from monastic chants and hymns to
funny little jingles, some of which, he admitted with a blush, he had made up himself.
‘My beautiful sister Alice
Deserves to live in a palace
Her hair is bright as the golden fleece
And the troubadours call her Belle Alys.’
‘The words are pretty silly, Sim,’ said Cosmo kindly, rubbing away at a legging. ‘But the tune is first-rate.’
‘I can play on a lute a little, too,’ Sim offered. ‘The choirmaster had one. But of course,’ he added sadly, ‘you can’t take a lute on a crusade.’
Cleaning the armour proved a four-day job. The Clearust, as Cosmo had predicted, only took off the worst; after that it was a case of steady rubbing, with a bit of sword practice in the afternoons. At the end of each day, Sim was so exhausted that he seemed to go out like a candle flame. Cosmo was pretty tired too but he supposed he must have more stamina – poor Sim looked as if he had never eaten a full meal in his life.
Just the same, Cousin Eunice, emerging from her proofs, said, ‘Are you all right, Cosmo? We hardly seem to see you.’
‘Oh, yes, I’m fine,’ he said. ‘It’s just – there’s a job I’ve got to do.’
‘Well, don’t overdo it.’
By Friday the armour was reasonably bright. They had given up over the spurs – wicked, spiked things, with enough rust on them to give any horse gangrene. ‘I’d leave them behind, honestly, Sim,’ Cosmo said. ‘You’re not the world’s best rider – one jab with those and your horse’ll have you into the Dead Sea.’
Then they did some bow-and-arrow practice. Cosmo suspected that this might be more useful than all that spear stuff – he had heard that the Saracen attack was a kind of guerrilla warfare, darting over the sand dunes, sending off a flight of arrows, and galloping away into the distance again.
Unfortunately Sim was a hopeless shot. He could not seem to hit anything that was smaller than a door, or farther than three feet away.