Modern Classics of Fantasy, page 32
The angel between them, they climbed the stairs to the sun and, skirting old Edward, who was still busily scything in the Common Meadow, came at last to the kennels. It was mid-day. The Baron and his knights had remained in the castle since the hunt. His villeins, trudging out of the fields, had gathered in the shade of the watermill to enjoy their gruel and bread. Had anyone noticed the quick, furtive passage of the would-be Crusaders, he would have thought them engaged in childish sports, or supposed that Stephen had found a young wench to share with his master’s son and probably muttered, “It’s high time.”
While Stephen’s greyhounds lapped at their heels, they climbed to his loft above the kennels to get his few belongings: two clover-green tunics with hoods for wintry days; wooden clogs and a pair of blue stockings which reached to the calf of the leg; a leather pouch bulging with wheaten bread and rounds of cheese; a flask of beer; and a knotted shepherd’s crook.
“For wolves,” said Stephen, pointing to the crook. “I’ve used it often.”
“And Mandrakes,” asked John wickedly, hoping to frighten the angel.
“But we have no change of clothes for a girl,” said Stephen.
“Never mind,” she smiled, guzzling Stephen’s beer and munching his bread till she threatened to exhaust the supply before they began their journey. “When my robe grows soiled, I shall wash it in a stream and,” she added archly, “the two of you may see if I am truly an angel.”
The remark struck John as unangelic if not indelicate. As if they would spy on her while she bathed!
But Stephen reassured her. “We never doubted you were. And now—” A catch entered his voice. Quickly he turned his head and seemed to be setting the loft in order.
“We must leave him alone with his hounds,” whispered John to the angel, leading her down the ladder.
A silent Stephen rejoined them in the Heath. His tunic was damp from friendly tongues and his face was wet, but whether from tongues or tears, it was hard to say.
“You don’t suppose,” he said, “we could take one or two of them with us? The little greyhound without any tail?”
“No,” said John. “My father will stomp and shout when he finds us gone, but then he’ll shrug: ‘Worthless boys, both of them, and no loss to the castle.’ But steal one of his hounds, and he’ll have his knights on our trail.”
“But our angel has no name,” cried Stephen suddenly and angrily, as if to say: “As long as she’s come to take me from my hounds, she might at least have brought a name.”
“I had a name, I’m sure. It seems to have slipped my mind. What would you like to call me?”
“Why not Ruth?” said Stephen. “She was always going on journeys in the Bible, leading cousins and such, wasn’t she?”
“A mother-in-law,” corrected John, who felt that, what with a Crusade ahead of them, Stephen should know the Scriptures.
“Leading and being led,” observed the angel, whose memory, it seemed, had begun to return. “By two strapping husbands. Though,” she hurried to explain, “not at the same time. Yes, I think you should call me Ruth.”
She is much too young for Ruth, thought John, who guessed her to be about fifteen (though of course as an angel she might be fifteen thousand). The same age as Stephen, whose thoughts were attuned to angelic visions but whose bodily urges were not in the least celestial. Unlike a Knight Templar, he had made no vow of chastity. The situation was not propitious for a crusade in the name of God.
But once they had entered the Weald, the largest forest in southern England, he thought of Mandrakes and griffins instead of Ruth. It was true that the Stane, an old Roman highway, crossed the Weald to join London and Chichester—they would meet it within the hour— but even the Stane was not immune to the forest.
At Ruth’s suggestion, they carefully skirted the grounds of a neighboring castle, the Boar’s Lair.
“Someone might recognize John,” she said. “Send word to his father.”
“Yes,” John agreed, staring at the Norman tower, one of the black wooden keeps built by William the Conqueror to enforce his conquest. “My father and Philip the Boar were once friends. Philip used to dine with us on Michaelmas and other feast days, and I played the kettledrums for him. Since then, he and my father have fallen out about their boundaries. They both claim a certain grove of beechnut trees—pannage for their swine. Philip wouldn’t be hospitable, I’m sure.”
Deviously, circuitously, by way of a placid stream and an old water wheel whose power no longer turned millstones and ground wheat into flour, they reached the Roman Stane. Once a proud thoroughfare for unconquerable legions, it had since resounded to Saxon, Viking, and Norman, who had used it for commerce and war but, unlike the conscientious Romans, never repaired the ravages of wheels and weather. Now, it had shrunk in places to the width of a peasant’s cart, but the smooth Roman blocks, set in concrete, still provided a path for riders and walkers and great ladies in litters between two horses.
“I feel like the Stane,” sighed Ruth, “much-trodden and a trifle weedy.” She had torn the edge of her robe on prickly sedges and muddied the white linen. She had lost the circlet which haloed her head, and her silken tresses, gold as the throats of convolvulus flowers, had spilled like their trailing leafage over her shoulders. As for John, he was hot, breathless, and moist with sweat, and wishing that like a serf he dared to remove his long-sleeved tunic and revel in his breechclout.
“Stephen,” Ruth sighed, “now that we’ve found the road, can’t we rest a little?” Her speech, though still melodious, had relaxed into easy, informal English.
“We’ve just begun!” he laughed. “London lies days away. We want to be leagues down the road before night.”
“But it’s already mid-afternoon. Why not rest till it gets a little cooler?”
“Very well,” he smiled, reaching out to touch her in good-humored acquiescence. Stephen, who found difficulty with words, spoke with his hands, which were nests to warm a bird, balms to heal a dog, bows to extract the music from swinging a scythe, wielding an ax, gathering branches to build a fire. He could gesture or point or touch with the exquisite eloquence of a man who was deaf, dumb, and blind. When you said good morning to him, he clapped you on the shoulder. When you walked with him, he brushed against you or caught you by the arm. He liked to climb trees for the rough feel of the bark or swim in a winter stream and slap the icy currents until he warmed his body. But he saved his touch for things or the people he loved. Neither ugly things nor unkind people.
“We’ll rest as long as you like,” he said.
Ruth smiled. “I think I should borrow one of your tunics. You see how my robe keeps dragging the ground.”
With a flutter of modesty she withdrew to a clump of bracken and changed to a tunic.
“Watch out for basilisks,” John called after her. “Their bite is fatal, you know.” He muttered under his breath to Stephen: “First she ate your food, and now she wears your clothes.”
“Our food and clothes,” reproved Stephen. “Remember, we’re Crusaders together.”
John was shamed into silence. He had to listen to Ruth as she bent branches, snapped twigs, and rustled cloth, almost as if she wished to advertise the various stages of her change. He thought of the wenches—ten? twenty?— who had disrobed for Stephen. The subject love confused him. The Aristotelian processes of his brain refused to sift, clarify, and evaluate the problem; in fact, they crumpled like windmills caught in a forest fire. He had loved his mother—what was the word?—filially; Stephen he loved fraternally. But as for the other thing, well, he had not been able to reconcile the courtly code as sung by the troubadours—roses and guerdons and troths of deathless fidelity—and the sight of Stephen, surprised last year in his loft with a naked wench and not in the least embarrassed. Stephen had grinned and said: “In a year or so, John, we can wench together!” The girl, snickering and making no effort to hide her nakedness, had seemed to him one of those Biblical harlots who ought to be shorn, or stoned. Who could blame poor Stephen for yielding to such allurements! As for himself, however, he had sworn the chivalric oath to practice poverty, chastity, and obedience to God. He had thought of a monastery but rather than part with Stephen, who was not in the least monastic, he was willing to try a life of action.
“Has a crow got your tongue?” smiled Stephen. “I didn’t mean to scold.” He encircled John’s shoulder with his arm. “You smell like cloves.”
John stiffened, not at the touch but at what appeared to be an insinuation. He had not forgotten his father’s taunt: “Girl!” According to custom, it was girls and women who packed their gowns in clove-scented chests, while the men of a castle hung their robes in the room called the garderobe, another name for the lavatory cut in the wall beside the stairs, with a round shaft dropping to the moat. The stench of the shaft protected the room—and the robes—from moths.
“They belonged to my mother,” he stammered. “The cloves, I mean. I still use her chest.”
“My mother put flowering mint with her clothes,” said Stephen. “AH two gowns! I like the cloves better, though. Maybe the scent will rub off on me. I haven’t bathed for a week.” He gave John’s shoulder a squeeze, and John knew that his manhood had not been belittled. But then, Stephen had never belittled him, had he? Teased him, yes; hurt him in play; once knocked him down for stepping on the tail of a dog; but never made light of his manliness.
“It’s not a dangerous road,” Stephen continued, talkative for once, perhaps because John was silent. “The abbots of Chichester patrol it for brigands. They don’t carry swords, but Gabriel help the thief who falls afoul of their staves!”
“But the forest,” John said. “It’s all around us like a pride of griffins. With green, scaly wings. They look as if they’re going to eat up the road. They’ve already nibbled away the edges, and”—he lowered his voice—”she came out of the forest, didn’t she?”
Stephen laughed. “She came out of the sky, simpleton! Didn’t you hear her say she don’t know nothing about the forest?”
Before John could lecture Stephen on his lapse in grammar, Ruth exploded between them, as green as a down in the tenderness of spring. She blazed in Stephen’s tunic, its hood drawn over her head. She had bound her waist with the gold sash from her robe and, discarding her velvet slippers, donned his wooden clogs, whose very ugliness emphasized the delicacy of her bare feet. She had bundled her linen robe around her slippers and crucifix.
“No one would ever guess that I’m an angel,” she smiled. “Or even a girl.”
“Not an angel,” said Stephen appreciatively. “But a girl, yes. You’d have to roughen your hands and hide your curls to pass for a boy.”
She made a pretence of hiding her hair, but furtively shook additional curls from her hood the moment they resumed their journey, and began to sing a familiar song of the day:
In a valley of this restless mind,
I sought in mountain and in mead . . .
Though she sang about a man searching for Christ, the words rippled from her tongue as merrily as if she were singing a carol. John wished for his kettledrums and Stephen began to whistle. Thus, they forgot the desolation of the road, largely untraveled at such an hour and looking as if the griffin-scaly forest would soon complete its meal.
Then, swinging around a bend and almost trampling them, cantered a knight with a red cross painted on his shield—a Knight Templar, it seemed—and after him, on a large piebald palfrey, a lady riding pillion behind a servant who never raised his eyes from the road. The knight frowned at them; in spite of the vows demanded of his order, he looked more dedicated to war than to God. But the lady smiled and asked their destination.
“I live in a castle up the road,” said John quickly in Norman French. Unlike his friends, he was dressed in the mode of a young gentleman, with a tunic of plum-colored linen instead of cheap muslin, and a samite belt brocaded with silver threads. Thus, he must be their spokesman. “I have come with my friends to search for chestnuts in the woods, and now we are going home.”
The knight darkened his frown to a baleful glare and reined his steed, as if he suspected John of stealing a fine tunic to masquerade as the son of a gentleman. Boys of noble birth, even of twelve, did not as a rule go nutting with villeins whom they called their friends, and not at such an hour.
“We have passed no castle for many miles,” he growled, laying a thick-veined hand on the hilt of his sword.
“My father’s is well off the road, and the keep is low,” answered John without hesitation. “In fact, it is called the Tortoise, and it is very hard to break, like a tortoise shell. Many a baron has tried!”
“Mind you get back to the Tortoise before dark,” the lady admonished. “You haven’t a shell yourself, and the Stane is dangerous after nightfall. My protector and I are bound for the castle of our friend, Philip the Boar. Is it far, do you know?”
“About two leagues,” said John, and he gave her explicit directions in French so assured and polished that no one, not even the glowering knight, could doubt his Norman blood and his noble birth. It was always true of him that he was only frightened in anticipation. Now, with a wave and a courtly bow, he bade them God-speed to the castle of the Boar, received a smile from the lady, and led his friends toward the mythical Tortoise.
“Such a handsome lad,” he heard the lady exclaim, “and manly as well.”
“If I hadn’t been so scared,” said Stephen, once a comfortable distance separated them from the knight, his lady, and the unresponsive servant, “I’d have split my tunic when you said your castle was named the Tortoise. There isn’t a castle for the next ten miles! It’s the first fib I ever heard you tell.”
“You were scared too?” asked John, surprised at such an admission.
“You can bet your belt I was! They were lovers, you know. Bound for a tryst at the castle of the Boar. He winks at such things, I hear. Runs a regular brothel for the gentry, including himself. That lady has a husband somewhere, and the Knight Templar might just have run us through to keep us from carrying tales.”
With the fall of darkness, they selected a broad and voluminous oak tree, rather like a thicket set on the mast of a ship, and between them the boys helped Ruth to climb the trunk. With nimble hands, she prepared a nest of leaves and moss in the crook of the tree and, having removed her clogs and hidden them, along with her crucifix, settled herself with the comfort of perfect familiarity. She seemed to have a talent for nests, above or below the ground.
After she had eaten some bread and cheese and drunk beer, she returned to the ground, stubbornly refusing assistance from either boy, and showed herself a more than adept climber.
“Is she angry with us?” asked John.
“She drank all that beer,” explained Stephen, “and while she’s gone—”
They scrambled to the edge of the nest and, bracing themselves against a limb, aimed at the next oak. Gleefully, John pretended that Ruth was crouching under the branches.
He was sorry to see her emerge from an elm instead of the inundated oak and rejoin them in the nest.
“I was looking for rushes to keep us warm,” she said. “But I didn’t find a single one. We’ll have to lie close together.” She chose the middle of the nest, anticipating, no doubt, a boy to warm her on either side, and Stephen obligingly stretched on her left.
With the speed and deftness of Lucifer disguised as a serpent, John wriggled between them, forcing Ruth to the far side of the nest. Much to his disappointment, she accepted the arrangement without protest and leaned against him with a fragrance of galangal, the aromatic plant imported from Outre-Mer and used as a base for perfume by the ladies of England.
“The stars are bright tonight,” she said. “See, John, there’s Arcturus peeping through the leaves, and there’s Sinus, the North Star. The Vikings called it the Lamp of the Wanderer.”
Stephen nudged him as if to say: “You see! Only an angel knows such things.”
“Stephen,” he whispered.
“Yes?”
“I’m not afraid anymore. Of leaving the castle. Not even of the forest!”
“Aren’t you, John?”
“Because I’m not alone.” I told you we were safe with our angel.”
“I don’t mean the angel.” He made a pillow of Stephen’s shoulder, and the scent of dogs and haylofts, effaced Ruth’s galangal.
“Go to sleep, little brother. Dream about London— and the Holy Land.”
But fear returned to John before he could dream. At an hour with the feel of midnight, chill and misty and hushed of owls, he was roused by the blast of a horn and a simultaneous shriek like that of a hundred otters caught in a millwheel. The sounds seemed to come from a distance and yet were harsh enough to make him throw up his hands to his ears.
