Modern Classics of Fantasy, page 34
But Stephen said: “You know, John, you’re not so skinny now. You’ve started to fill out. The bones are there. The strength too, as you just proved. All you need is a little more meat. You’ll be a man before you know it.”
“Next year?” asked John, though such a prospect seemed as far from his grasp as a fiery-plummaged phoenix. “You were a man at thirteen.”
“Eleven. But I’m different. I’m a villein. We grow fast. With you, I’d say two or possibly three more years. Then we can wench together for sure.”
“Who would want me when she could have you?”
Stephen led him to the bank of the stream. “Look,” he said, and pointed to their reflections in a space of clear water between the pepperworts: the bright and the dark, side by side; the two faces of the moon. “I have muscles, yes. But you have brains. They show in your face.”
“I don’t like my face. I won’t even look in those glass mirrors they bring back from the Holy Land. I always look startled.”
“Not as much as you did. Why, just since we left the castle, I’ve seen a change. Yesterday, when you faced down the Knight Templar, I was ready to wet my breechclout! But you never batted an eye. And you looked so wise. One day you’ll have my muscles, but you can bet a brace of pheasants I’ll never have your brains. Come on now, let’s give Ruth a chance.”
At Stephen’s insistence—and he had to insist vigorously—they bundled their tunics and wore only their breechclouts, the shapeless strips of cloth which every man, whether priest, baron, or peasant, twisted around his loins. Now they would look like field hands stripped for a hot day’s work, and John’s fine tunic would not arouse suspicion or tempt thieves.
“But my shoulders,” John began, “they’re so white.”
“They’ll brown in the sun on the way to London,” he said, and then: “Ruth, you can take your swim!”
He had to repeat her name before she answered in a thin, distant voice: “Yes, Stephen?”
“You can swim now. You’ll have the stream to yourself.” To John he smiled, “She took you seriously about not peeping. But you know, John, we didn’t promise.”
“You’d spy on an angel?”
Stephen slapped his back. “Now who’s calling her an angel. No, I wouldn’t spy. I’d just think about it. I’ve always wondered if angels are built like girls. Let’s do a bit of exploring while she bathes. I could eat another breakfast after that swim. But we mustn’t stray too far from the stream.”
Beyond a coppice of young beeches, Stephen discovered a cluster of slender stalks with fragrant, wispy leaves. “Fennels. Good for the fever you catch in London. We might pick a few, roots and all.”
But John, thinking of Mandrakes, had no use for roots and followed his nose to a bed of mint. “This is what your mother used to sweeten her gowns, isn’t it?”
“Yes, and it’s also good to eat.” They knelt in the moist soil to pluck and chew the leaves, whose sweetly burning juices left them hoarse and breathless, as if they had gulped a heady muscatel.
But where was the stream, the road, the oak in which they had slept?
“The trees all look the same,” said Stephen, “but there, that old beech. Haven’t we seen it before? And there, the torn ground—”
They had wandered, it seemed, to the place of the Mandrake hunt. The hole remained in the earth, disturbingly human-shaped, with branching clefts from which the limbs had been wrenched by the hapless dog.
“Let’s get away from here,” said John, as nausea slapped him like the foul air of a garderobe.
“Wait,” said Stephen. “There’s a second hole. It’s— it’s where we buried the dog. God’s bowels!” It was his crudest oath. “The dirty Infidels have dug him up and—”
Around the hole they saw a Utter of bones … skull … femur … pelvis … stripped of their meat and scattered carelessly through the grass.
“Stephen,” said John, seizing his friend’s hand. “I know how you feel. It was cruel of them to eat the dog. But we’ve got to get away from here. They’ll take us for the hunter!”
Something had waited for them.
At first it looked like a tree. No, a corpse exhumed from a grave with roots entwining its limbs. It wheezed; lurched; moved, swaying, toward them. It was bleached to the color of a beechnut trunk—at least, those parts of the skin (or was it bark?) which showed through the greenish forest of hair (or rootlets?). Red eyes burned in black hollows (tiny fire-dragons peering from caves, thought John). The mouth seemed a single hairlip until it split into a grin which revealed triangular teeth like those of a shark: to crush, tear, shred.
“Run!” screamed John, tugging at his friend, but proud Stephen had chosen to fight.
“Dog-eater!” He charged the Mandrake and used his head for a ram.
The creature buckled like a rotten door but flung out its limbs and enveloped Stephen into its fall; fallen, it seemed a vegetable octopus, lashing tiny tentacles around its prey.
Unlike Stephen, John grew cold with anger instead of hot; blue instead of flushed; as if he had plunged in a river through broken ice. First he was stunned. Then the frost-caves of his brain functioned with crystalline clarity. He knew that he was young and relatively weak; against that bark-tough skin, his naked fists would beat in vain. A blind, weaponless charge would not avail his friend. He fell to his knees and mole-like clawed the ground. Pebbles. Pine cones. Beechnuts. Pretty, petty, useless. Then, a stone, large and jagged. With raw, bleeding hands, he wrestled the earth for his desperately needed weapon and, without regaining his feet, lunged at the fallen Mandrake. The fibrous skull cracked and splintered sickeningly beneath the stone and spewed him with resin and green vegetable matter like a cabbage crushed by a millstone.
“Stephen!” he cried, but the answer hissed above him, shrill with loathing:
“Human!”
Multitudinous fingers caught and bound him with coils of wild grapevine and dragged him, together with Stephen, over the bruising earth.
The Mandrake warrens were not so much habitations as lightless catacombs for avoiding men and animals. No one knew if the creatures had built them or found, enlarged, and connected natural caves and covered the floors with straw. John was painfully conscious as his thin body, little protected by the shreds of his breechclout, lurched and scraped down a tortuous passage like the throat of a dragon. His captors, he guessed, could see in the dark, but only the scraping of Stephen’s body told him that he had not been separated from his friend.
“Mother of God,” he breathed, “let him stay unconscious!”
For a long time he had to judge their passage from room to room by the sudden absence of straw which marked a doorway. Finally, a dim, capricious light announced their approach to a fire; a council chamber perhaps; the end of the brutal journey.
The room of the fire was a round, spacious chamber where Mandrake females were silently engaged in piling chunks of peat on a bed of coals. Neither roots nor branches were used as fuel, John saw, since that which began as a root did not use wood for any purpose. Wryly he wondered how the Mandrakes would feel if they knew that the fuel they burned had once been vegetation.
Their captors dumped them as men might deposit logs beside a hearth, and joined the women in feeding the fire. John was tightly trussed, his feet crossed, his hands behind his back, but he rolled his body to lie on his side and look at Stephen’s face. His friend’s cheeks were scratched; his forehead was blue with a large bruise; and the daffodils of his hair were wilted with blood and cobwebs.
“Stephen, Stephen, what have they done to you?” he whispered, biting his lip to stifle the threat of tears. His hero, fallen, moved him to tenderness transcending worship. For once he had to be strong for Stephen. He had to think of escape.
He examined the room. There were neither beds nor pallets. Apparently the Mandrakes slept in the smaller rooms and used their council chamber as a baron used his hall. It was here that they met to talk and feast. The earthen walls were blackened from many fires. Bones littered the straw, together with teeth, fur, and hair; inedible items. The stench of the refuse was overpowering and, coupled with that of excrement and urine, almost turned John’s stomach. He fought nausea by wondering how his fastidious Abbot would have faced the situation: identified himself, no doubt, with Hercules in the Aegean stables or Christ amid the corruptions of the Temple.
Then, across the room, he saw the crucifix. Yes, it was unmistakable, a huge stone cross. Latin, with arms of unequal length, and set in an alcove shaped like an apse. Turtle-backed stones served as seats. Between the seats the ground had been packed and brushed by the knees of suppliants. The place was clearly a chapel, and John remembered the tale—a myth, he had always supposed— that after the Christians had come to England with Augustine, a priest had visited the Mandrakes in their warrens. Once they had eaten him, they had reconsidered his words and adopted Christianity.
“Bantling-killer!”
A Mandrake slouched above him, exuding a smell of tarns stagnant with scum. His voice was gutteral and at first unintelligible. Bantling-killer. Of course. Baby-killer. The creature was speaking an early form of English. He went on to curse all athelings in their byr-nies—knights in their mail—and to wish that the whale-road would swallow that last of them as they sailed to their wars in ring-prowed ships of wood. Then, having blasted John’s people, he became specific and accused John and Stephen of having killed the bantling with their dog. His bantling, he growled, grown from his own seed. Though the Mandrakes copulated like men and animals, John gathered that their females gave birth to objects resembling acorns which they planted in the ground and nurtured into roots. If allowed by hunters to reach maturity, the roots burst from the ground like a turtle out of an egg, and their mothers bundled them into the warrens to join the tribe—hence, the word “bantling” from “ban-tie” or “bundle.”
“No,” John shook his head. “No. We did not kill your baby. Your bantling. It was hunters who killed him!”
The creature grinned. A grin, it seemed, was a Mandrake’s one expression; anger or pleasure provoked the same bared teeth. Otherwise, he looked as vacant as a cabbage.
“Hunters,” he said. “You.”
The crowded room had grown as hot as the kitchen before a feast in a castle, but the figures tending the fire, hunched as if with the weight of dirt, toil, and time, seemed impervious to the heat. They had obviously built the fire to cook their dinner, and now they began to sharpen stakes on weathered stones. Even the stakes were tin instead of wood.
The whir of the flames must have alerted the young Mandrakes in the adjacent chambers. They trooped into the room and gathered, gesticulating, around the two captives. They had not yet lapsed into the tired shuffle of their elders; they looked both energetic and intelligent. Life in the forest, it seemed, slowly stultified quick minds and supple bodies. It was not surprising that the weary elders, however they hated men, should try to pass their daughters into the villages.
The girls John saw, except for one, appeared to be adolescents, but hair had already forested their arms and thickened their lips. The one exception, a child of perhaps four, twinkled a wistful prettiness through her grime. Her eyes had not yet reddened and sunken into their sockets; her mouth was the color of wild raspberries. She could still have passed.
The children seemed to have come from the midst of a game. Dice, it appeared, from the small white objects they rattled, a little like the whale-bone cubes which delighted the knights in John’s castle. But the dice of the Mandrake children were not so much cubes as irregular, bony lumps scratched with figures. The Greeks, John recalled from the Abbot’s lectures, had used the knucklebones of sheep and other animals in place of cubes.
But the Mandrake children had found a livelier game. They stripped John and Stephen of their breechclouts and began to prod their flesh with ringers like sharp carrots and taunt them for the inadequacy of human loins. The Mandrake boys, naked like their parents, possessed enormous genitals; hence, the potency of the murdered, fragmented roots as aphrodisiacs. Stephen stirred fitfully but to John’s relief did not awake to find himself the object of ridicule. With excellent reason, he had always taken pride in the badge of his manhood, and to find himself surpassed and taunted by boys of eight and nine would have hurt him more than blows. Only the girl of four, staring reproachfully at her friends, took no part in the game.
A church bell chimed, eerily, impossibly it seemed to John in such a place, and a hush enthralled the room. An aged Mandrake, rather like a tree smothered by moss, hobbled among the silenced children and paused between John and Stephen. Examining. Deliberating. Choosing. He chose Stephen. When he tried to stoop, however, his back creaked like a rusty drawbridge. He will break, thought John. He will never reach the ground. But he reached the ground and gathered Stephen in his mossy arms.
“Bloody Saracen!” shouted John. “Take your hands off my friend!” Stretching prodigiously, he managed to burst the bonds which held his ankles and drive his knee into the Mandrake’s groin. The creature gave such a yelp that red-hot pokers seemed to have gouged John’s ears. He writhed on the ground and raised his hands to shut out the shriek and pain. Shadows cobwebbed his brain. When he struggled back to clarity, Stephen lay in the chapel before the crucifix. Looming above him, the aged Mandrake stood like Abraham above Isaac. The other adults, perhaps twenty of them, sat on the turtle-shaped stones, while the children sat near the fire to watch the proceedings from which their elders had barred them. The impression John caught of their faces—brief, fleeting, hazy with smoke and the dim light of the room— was not one of malice or even curiosity, but respect and fear, and the pretty child had turned her back and buried her face in the arms of an older girl.
The officiating Mandrake intoned what seemed to be a prayer and a dedication. John caught words resembling “Father” and “Son” and realized with horror if not surprise that just as the Christian humans burned a Yule log and decked their castles with hawthorn, holly, and mistletoe in honor of Christ, so the Christian Mandrakes were dedicating Stephen to a different conception of the same Christ. First, the offering, then the feast. The same victim would serve both purposes.
He had already burst the grapevines which held his ankles. In spite of his bound hands, he struggled to his feet and reeled toward the chapel. Once, he had killed a Mandrake with cold implacability. Now he had turned to fire: the Greek fire of the East, hurled at ships and flung from walls; asphalt and crude petroleum, sulphur and lime, leaping and licking to the incandescence of Hell. He felt as if stones and Mandrakes must yield before his advance; as if Mary, the Mother of Christ, must descend from the castles of heaven or climb from the sanctuary of his heart and help him deliver his friend.
But the Mandrakes rose in a solid palisade; and, shrunk to a boy of twelve, he hammered his impotent fists against their wood.
“No,” he sobbed, falling to his knees. “Me. Not Stephen.”
“John.”
His name tolled through the room like the clash of a mace against an iron helmet. “John, he will be all right.” Her flaxen hair, coarsened with dirt and leaves, rioted over her shoulders like tarnished gold coins. She wore her linen robe, but the white cloth had lost its purity to stains and tears. She might have been a fallen angel, and her eyes seemed to smoulder with memories of heaven or visions of Hell.
She had entered the room accompanied, not compelled. She was not their captive. She has gained their favor, he thought, by yielding to their lust. But God will forgive her if she saves my friend, and I, John, will serve her until I die. If she saves my friend—
He saw that she held her crucifix; gripped it as if you would have to sever the hand before you could pry her fingers from its gold arms.
One of her companions called to the priest, who stood impassively between his cross of stone and his congregation, and above Stephen. He neither spoke nor gestured, but disapproval boomed in his silence.
Ruth advanced to the fire and held her crucifix in the glow of the flames, which ignited the golden arms to a sun-washed sea, milkily glinting with pearls like Saracen ships, and the Mandrakes gazed on such a rarity as they had never seen with their poor sunken eyes or fancied in their dim vegetable brains. In some pathetic, childlike way, they must have resembled the men of the First Crusade who took Jerusalem from the Seljuk Turks and gazed, for the time, at the Holy Sepulchre; whatever ignoble motives had led them to Outre-Mer, they were purged for that one transcendent moment of pride and avarice and poised between reverence and exaltation. It was the same with the Mandrakes.
The priest nodded in grudging acquiescence. Ruth approached him through the ranks of the Mandrakes, which parted murmurously like rushes before the advancing slippers of the wind, and placed the crucifix in his hands. His fingers stroked the gold with slow, loving caresses and paused delicately on the little mounds of the pearls. She did not wait to receive his dismissal. Without hesitation and without visible fear, she walked to John and unbound his hands.
