Modern Classics of Fantasy, page 33
“Hunters have found a Mandrake!” cried Stephen, sitting up in the nest. “It’s a moonless night, and it must be just after twelve. That’s when they hunt, you know. They blow on a horn to muffle the shriek. Let’s see what they’ve caught.”
But John was not eager to leave the tree. “If they’ve killed a Mandrake, they won’t want to share it. Besides, they might be brigands.”
Ruth had also been roused by the shriek. “John is right,” she said. “You shouldn’t want to see such a horrible sight. A baby torn from the earth!”
“I’ll stay and keep Ruth company,” said John, but Stephen hauled him out of the nest and sent him slipping and scraping down the trunk.
“But we can’t leave Ruth alone!” he groaned, picking himself up from a bed of acorns.
“Angels don’t need protection. Hurry now, or we’ll miss the hunters.”
They found the Mandrake hunters across the road and deep among the trees, a pair of rough woodsmen, father and son to judge from their height, build, and flaxen hair, though the elder was as bent and brown as a much-used sickle, and his son wore a patch over one of his eyes. The woodsmen were contemplating a dead Mandrake the size and shape of a new-born baby, except for the dirt-trailing tendrils, the outsized genitals, and the greenish tangle of hair which had grown above ground with purple, bell-shaped flowers. The pathetic body twitched like a hatcheted chicken. Dead at its side and bound to it by a rope lay a dog with bloody ears.
Though the night was moonless and the great stars, Arcturus and Sirius, were veiled by the mist of the forest, one of the hunters carried a lantern, and John saw the Mandrake, the dog, the blood in an eerie, flickering light which made him remember Lucifer’s fall to Hell and wonder if he and Stephen had fallen after him.
One of the woodsmen saw them. “Might have gotten yourselves killed, both of you,” he scolded, digging beeswax out of his ears with his little finger. “Laid out like that old hound with busted eardrums.” He removed a long-bladed knife from his tunic and under his father’s direction—”no, no, clean and quick … cut it, don’t bruise it”—sliced the Mandrake into little rootlike portions, resinous rather than bloody, which he wrapped in strips of muslin and placed carefully in a sharkskin pouch.
“One less of the devils,” muttered the father, unbending himself to a rake instead of a sickle. “Another week and it’d have climbed right out of the ground. Joined its folk in the warrens.”
“A Richard’s ransom in aphroaphrodisiacs!” stuttered the son, completing the word with a flourish of triumph. The market for Mandrake roots was lucrative and inexhaustible: aging barons deserted by sexual powers; lovers whose love was unrequited. From Biblical times, the times of Jacob and Leah, the root had been recognized as the one infallible aphrodisiac. Yes, a Richard’s ransom was hardly an overstatement. A man would pay gold and silver, land and livestock, to win his love or resurrect his lust.
When the woodsmen had finished their grisly disection, the son smiled at the boys and offered them a fragment the size of a small pea. “You fellows put this in a girl’s gruel, and she’ll climb all over you.”
“He doesn’t need it,” said John, intercepting the gift. “Girls climb over him as it is. Like ants on a crock of sugar!”
“But you need it, eh?” laughed the son, winking his single eye at John. One-eyed serfs were common in France and England, and most of them had lost their eyes to angry masters and not in fights. Perhaps the young woodsman had not been prompt to deliver firewood for the hearth in a great hall. “Now you’ll be the crock. But where’s the sugar?”
“He’ll have it,” said Stephen, noticing John’s embarrassment. “Sugar enough for a nest! Give him a year or two. He’s only twelve.” Then he pointed to the carcass of the dog. “Did you have to use a greyhound? Couldn’t you have done it yourselves? After all, you had the wax in your ears.”
“Everyone knows a dog gives a sharper jerk. Gets the whole Mandrake at once. Lake pulling a tooth, root and all. Besides, he was an old dog. Not many more years in his bones. We can buy a whole kennel with what we make from the root.”
When the men had departed, talking volubly about the sale of their treasure at the next fair, and how they would spend their money in secret and keep their lord from his customary third, the boys buried the dog.
“I wish they had put beeswax in his ears too,” said Stephen bitterly. “And see where they whipped him to make him jump!”
“Beeswax doesn’t help a dog,” said John. “At least I read that in a bestiary. His ears are so keen that the shriek penetrates the wax and kills him anyway.”
“It’s no wonder the Mandrakes eat us. The way we drag their babies from the ground and cut them up! If it weren’t for my parents, I could pity the poor little brutes. Now, a lot of dirty old men will strut like coxcombs and chase after kitchen wenches.”
“I suppose,” said John, who had furtively buried the fragment of Mandrake with the dog, “the question is, who started eating whom first.” Then he clutched Stephen’s hand and said: “I think I’m going to be sick.”
“No, you’re not,” said Stephen, steadying John with his arm, “We’re going back to the tree and get some sleep.”
But Stephen was trembling too; John could feel the tremors in his arm. He’s sad for the dog, he thought. I won’t be sick. It would only make him sadder.
Ruth was waiting for them with a look which they could not read in the misted light of the stars.
“We’re sorry we left you so long,” said Stephen, “but the hunters had just killed a Mandrake, and …”
“I don’t want to hear about it.”
“Mandrakes can’t climb trees, can they?” asked John. “The parents might be about, you know.”
“Of course they can climb trees,” said Stephen, who was very knowledgeable about the woods and improvised what he did not know. “They are trees, in a way. Roots at least.”
“Do you think they suspect we’re up here? They can’t see us, but can they sniff us out?”
“I wish you two would stop talking about Mandrakes,” snapped Ruth. “You would think they surrounded us, when everyone knows the poor creatures are almost extinct.”
“Stephen’s parents were killed by Mandrakes,” said John sharply. He would have liked to slap the girl. She had a genius for interruptions or improprieties. It was proper and generous for Stephen to express compassion for a Mandrake baby, but unforgivable for this ignorant girl to sympathize with the whole murderous race. Her ethereal origins now seemed about as likely to him as an angel dancing on the head of a pin, a possibility which, to John’s secret amusement, his Abbot had often debated with utmost seriousness.
Ruth gave a cry. “I didn’t know.”
“How could you?” said Stephen. “At least the ones who killed my parents fought like men. They didn’t sneak up in the dark. They stormed out of the forest before dusk, waving their filthy arms and swinging clubs. We had a chance against them—except my mother, who was bringing us beer in the fields. We were haying at the time and we had our scythes for weapons. They only got one of us besides my parents, and we got four of them. It’s the females who’re really dangerous—the young ones who pass for human and come to live in the towns. The males can’t do it; they’re much too hairy right from the start, and—well, you know. Too well endowed. But the little girls look human, at least on the outside. Inside, it’s a different matter—resin instead of blood; brown skeletons which’re—what would you call them, John?”
“Fibrous.”
Ruth listened in silence and shrank herself into a little ball. Like a diadem spider, thought John, with brilliant gold patterns. Drawing in her legs and looking half her size.
“Tell her about them, John,” said Stephen, who was getting breathless from such a long speech. “You know the whole story.” And then to Ruth: “He knows everything. French, English, Latin. All our kings and queens from Arthur down to bad old King John. Even those naughty pagan goddesses who went about naked and married their brothers.”
John was delighted to continue the history. He liked to deliver lectures, but nobody except Stephen ever listened to him.
“In the old days, before the Crusades,” said John, who warmed to his tale like a traveling story teller, “in the old days the Mandrakes lived in the forest, and they were so dirty and hairy that you could never mistake them for human. They weren’t particular about their diet. They liked any meat—animal or human—and they trapped hunters in nets and roasted them over hot coals and then strewed their bones on the ground as we do with drumsticks at Michaelmas.” Here, like a skilled jongleur, he paused and looked at Ruth to gauge the effect of his tale. The sight of her reassured him. If she pressed any harder against the edge of the nest, she would roll from the tree. “But one day a little Mandrake girl wandered out of the forest, and a simple blacksmith took her for a lost human child, naked and dirty from the woods, and took her into his family. The child grew plump and beautiful, the man and his wife grew peaked, and everyone said how generous it was for a poor blacksmith to give his choicest food—and there wasn’t much food that winter for anyone—to a foundling. But in the summer the girl was run down and killed by a wagon loaded with hay. The townspeople were all ready to garrot the driver—until they noticed that the girl’s blood was a mixture of normal red fluid and thick, viscous resin.”
“What does ‘viscous’ mean?” interrupted Stephen.
“Gluey. Like that stuff that comes out of a spider when she’s spinning her web. Thus, it was learned that Mandrakes are vampires as well as cannibals, and that the more they feed on humans, the less resinous their blood becomes, until the resin is almost replaced, though their bones never do turn white. But they have to keep on feeding or else their blood will revert.
“Well, the Mandrakes heard about the girl—from a runaway thief, no doubt, before they ate him—and how she had ‘passed’ until the accident. They decided to send some more of their girls into the villages, where life was easier than in the forest. Some of the Mandrakes slipped into houses at night and left their babies, well-scrubbed of course, in exchange for humans, which they carried off into the woods for you can imagine what foul purposes. The next morning the family would think that the fairies had brought them a changeling, and everyone knows that if you disown a fairy’s child, you’ll have bad luck for the rest of your life. It was a long time before the plan of the Mandrakes became generally known around the forest. Now, whenever a mother finds a strange baby in her crib, or a new child wanders into town, it’s usually stuck with a knife. If resin flows out, the child is suffocated and burned. Still, an occasional Mandrake does manage to pass.
“You see, they aren’t at all like the Crusaders in the last century who became vampires when they marched through Hungary—the Hungarian campfollowers, remember, gave them the sickness, and then the Crusaders brought it back to England. They had to break the skin to get at your blood, and they had a cadaverous look about them before they fed, and then they grew pink and bloated. It was no problem to recognize and burn them. But the Mandrake girls, by pressing their lips against your skin, can draw blood right through the pores, and the horrible thing is that they don’t look like vampires and sometimes they don’t even know what they are or how they were born from a seed in the ground. They feed in a kind of dream and forget everything the next morning.”
“I think it’s monstrous,” said Ruth.
“They are, aren’t they?” agreed John happily, satisfied that his story had been a success.
“Not them. I mean sticking babies with knives.”
“But how else can you tell them from roots? It’s because a few people are sentimental like you that Mandrakes still manage to pass.”
“Frankly,” said Ruth, “I don’t think Mandrakes pass at all. I think they keep to themselves in the forest and eat venison and berries and not hunters. Now go to sleep. From what you’ve told me, it’s a long way to London. We all need some rest.”
“Good night,” said Stephen.
“Sweet dreams,” said Ruth.
The next morning, the sun was a Saracen shield in the sky—Saladin’s Shield, a Crusader would have said—and the forest twinkled with paths of sunlight and small white birds which spun in the air or perched on limbs and constantly flickered their tails. Ruth and Stephen stood in the crook of the tree and smiled down at John as he opened his eyes.
“We decided to let you sleep,” said Stephen. “You grunted like a boar when I first shook you. So we followed a wagtail to find some breakfast.”
“And found you some wild strawberries,” said Ruth, her lips becomingly red from the fruit. She gave him a deep, brimming bowl. “I wove it from sedges.” For one who professed an ignorance of the forest, she possessed some remarkable skills.
Once on the ground, they finished their breakfast with three-cornered, burry beechnuts, which required some skillful pounding and deft fingers to extract the kernels; and Ruth, appropriating Stephen’s beer, took such a generous swallow that she drained the flask.
“To wash down the beechnuts,” she explained.
“I don’t know why the pigs like them so much,” said Stephen. “They’re not worth the trouble of shelling.”
“The pigs don’t shell them,” reminded the practical John.
“Anyway,” continued Stephen, “we hadn’t much choice in this part of the forest. We found a stream though.” Hoisting the pouch which held their remnants of food and their few extra garments, he said: “Ruth, get your bundle and let’s take a swim.”
“I hid it,” she reminded him, almost snappishly. “There may be thieves about. I’ll get it after we swim.”
All that mystery about a crucifix, thought John. As if she suspected Stephen and me of being brigands. And after she drank our beer!
The stream idled instead of gushed, and pepperwort, shaped like four-leafed clovers, grew in the quiet waters along the banks. Stephen, who took a monthly bath in a tub with the stable hands while the daughters of villeins doused him with water, hurried to pull his tunic over his head. He was justly proud of his body and had once remarked to John, “The less I wear, the better I look. In a gentleman’s clothes like yours, I’d still be a yokel. But naked—! Even gentlewomen seem to stare.”
But John was quick to restore the proprieties. In the presence of Ruth, he had no intention of showing his thin, white body, or allowing Stephen to show his radiant nakedness.
“You can swim first,” he said to her. “Stephen and I will wait in the woods.”
“No,” she laughed. “You go first. Stephen is already down to his breechclout, and that is about to fall. But I won’t be far away.”
“You won’t peep, will you?” John called after her, but Ruth, striding into the forest as if she had a destination, did not answer him.
The stream was chilly in spite of the Saracen sun. John huddled among the pepperwort, the water as high as his knees, till Stephen drenched him with a monumental splash, and then they frolicked among the plants and into the current and scraped each other’s backs with sand scooped from the bottom and, as far as John was concerned, Ruth and the road to London could wait till the Second Coming!
When they climbed at last on the bank, they rolled in the grass to dry their bodies. Stephen, an expert wrestler, surprised John with what he called his amphisbaena grip; his arms snaked around John’s body like the ends of the two-headed serpent and flattened him on the ground.
“I’m holding you for ransom,” he cried, perched on John’s chest like the seasprite Dylan astride a dolphin. “Six flagons of beer with roasted malt!”
“I promise—” John began, and freed himself with such a burst of strength that Stephen sprawled in the grass beneath the lesser but hardly less insistent weight of John. “I promise you sixteen ticks with an abbot’s rod!”
Stephen was not disgruntled. “By Robin’s bow,” he cried, “you’ve learned all my tricks!”
“I guess we had better dress,” said John, releasing his friend to avoid another reversal. “Ruth will want to swim too. I hope she didn’t peep,” he added, looking askance at some furiously agitated ferns beyond the grassy bank. To his great relief, they disgorged a white wagtail and not a girl. Still, something had frightened the bird.
“What do you think she would see?” laughed Stephen.
“You,” said John, eyeing his friend with an admiration which was more wistful than envious. Stephen was a boy with a man’s body, “roseate-brown from toe to crown,” to quote a popular song, and comely enough to tempt an angel. When he shook his wet hair, a great armful of daffodils seemed to bestrew his head. A marriage of beauty and strength, thought John. For the hundredth time he marveled that such a boy could have chosen him for a brother; actually chosen, when they had no bond of blood, nor even of race. He peered down at himself and wished for his clothes. At the castle he never bathed in the tub with his father’s friends: only with Stephen, sometimes, in the stream of the old millwheel, or alone in the heath from his own little bucket (even in the castle, he had no private room, but slept with the rancid sons of his father’s knights).
