Читать книгу Between the Monk and the Dragon - Jerry Camery-Hoggatt - Страница 8

I

Fletcher dug the wolf pup out of the burrow, withdrew his hunting knife from its sheath, and then paused, aware of the pup’s tiny head and its soft fur against the rough calluses of his palms and fingers. He thought for a moment of his own child, equally as helpless, but his own child had taken his wife from him, and this pup had done nothing except to be born. He braced himself to do what his sense of duty told him had to be done, then took the pup’s head firmly in one hand and slit its throat in a single firm stroke.

It was something he had done many times with larger animals, but this was somehow different. The knife entered the throat too easily. Fletcher felt something horrifying within himself, felt the gorge rise within his throat, had all he could do to keep his stomach down. A wave of anger surged over him. He dropped the knife, and grasping the pup’s head in his right hand and the body in his left, he wrenched its neck like a chicken. There was blood on his tunic, blood on his hands. Fletcher counted six or seven droplets of blood in the air, and beyond them a spattering of others too tiny to add to the count. A strange silence fell over the glen like snow falling on the marshes. He saw his own hands, covered now with blood, he saw the carcass of the mother wolf tied to the rump of his saddle, he saw the arrow, his arrow, that had killed her, he saw Alysse, her hair shimmering in the morning breeze, her smile an eternal beacon that called to him from somewhere deep in his dreams or maybe from the other side, he saw her dressed as the Virgin Mary, with lighted candles flickering at her feet, he saw her giving birth and then dying, her last breath the sigh of life fading from her body, he saw the girl an infant covered in mucus mixed with the blood of the wolf pup, he saw the girl older, maybe ten, poring over a book by the light of a candle in a corner of the hut, he saw the candles of the church where Alysse’s body lay waiting a funeral and a simple Christian burial within the monastery walls.

❧

Just the day prior, Fletcher had tracked the pup’s mother deep into the king’s forest, where he had caught sight of it silhouetted against the grey English sky, sniffing the wind as though it somehow sensed that there was danger nearby. It was odd for a wolf to do that. Usually wolves kept a low profile, preferring to blend into the grasses and heather of the forest. Fletcher had stopped his horse and dismounted a hundred paces off, down-wind.

It was unusual that there should be a hunter in an English forest on the day before the Feast of the Annunciation in this year of the Lord 1253, and it was unusual that in this forest the hunter should be a commoner, but John the Fletcher had been sent on precisely this errand by the sheriff of Warwickshire, within whose jurisdiction the forest lay. The wolf had been wreaking havoc on farms in nearly a ten mile radius. There was concern for the farm fowl but even greater concern for the smaller children, and the farmers had appealed to the sheriff and then beyond the sheriff, but it was only after Prior Robert, titular head of the Monastery of St Cuthbert and St Chad, had added the voice of Christendom to the voices of reason and pleading that the sheriff had obtained rights of warren to engage in the hunt. His reluctance had been understandable—the shire bordered royal lands, the forest in which the wolf had found refuge was the king’s own demesne, and it was forbidden to hunt there except at the king’s pleasure. The sheriff had been granted the warren only on the condition that he send his own sergeant, and that any other found hunting there should be brought bound to the stockade and made an example.

“And keep an eye out for hunters in the forest, John,” the sheriff had grunted, reinforcing this secondary responsibility. “Somebody’s poaching the king’s game. The forester says there’s a hunter’s bivouac in that mound near the north fork of the river.”

Fletcher had acknowledged this instruction with a grunt of his own. Poaching in the king’s demesne was serious business. A nobleman or knight caught hunting without permission might be released with a heavy fine or the loss of his title or liberty, but a peasant or villein—who had neither gold nor freedom to lose—might rightly and justly expect punishment by maiming, the lopping of a hand or the blinding of an eye.

The wolf had raised its head for a better sense of the breeze, but in doing so had exposed its position.

Without taking his eye off his quarry, Fletcher withdrew his bow and an arrow from the quiver he wore diagonally across his back. Had it not been for an intervening stone outcropping the wolf would have been easily within range, and as he seated the arrow in its place Fletcher thought that even a clumsy archer might bring down such a target. He steadied his left foot against a fallen log, but with his eye on the wolf he failed to note that the underside of the log was rotted out. When the log collapsed beneath his weight, the wolf caught the sound and was gone. It was gone, but not before Fletcher discharged his weapon. The arrow caught the wolf in the flank. Fletcher heard a yelp of pain, and then scrambling in the brush.

When he reached the brow of the hill, all he could find was a thin trail of blood and the oddly mixed and dragging paw prints made by three good legs and the one crippled by the arrow.

He went back for the horse, but did not mount. Instead he walked the horse along the ridge, picking up the trail where he had left off, then following the prints and blood down into the glen until the trail disappeared completely in the swift water near the north fork of the river. The wolf was wounded, but how badly he could not tell, and it had enough of its wits about it that it managed to lose both the hunter and the horse by taking to water.

Fletcher worked both sides of the river for a mile or more in either direction, looking for the wolf’s prints in the mud of the riverbank and then just beyond the heavy boulders that lined the water’s edge. The fork in the river only complicated things because it added two additional banks where the wolf might have left the water, and the spring snow melt had swollen the river and increased the chances that the animal had drowned and been carried down one of the two rivers. Fletcher moved methodically down one bank, then up another, and only when the light began to fade did he decide to withdraw. He would return in the morning with one of the sheriff’s hounds that might pick up the trail by scent.

The return to the village was slowed by only one distraction. Just off the path Fletcher spotted a hunter’s bivouac. As instructed, he stopped to investigate, though he did not spend more than a moment; he paused only long enough to note its location and check briefly inside. It was low-slung, hunkered down into a little mound of earth like an animal’s lair, large enough for two or three good sized men to spread out protected from the weather, with its back directed toward the road and its opening masked by a stand of tall trees.

What he did not see was that high in one of the trees there was a small wooden perch, placed there as a lookout for game or authorities by the hunter who had built this secret shelter within the king’s demesne.

What he did see chilled him to the bone. Within the bivouac, on a short peg driven into the wall, there was a girl’s coat, no doubt left there because the spring day had turned warm. This bit of evidence he read as easily as a monk reads Latin. The coat belonged to his sixteen-year-old-daughter, Elspeth.

❧

Elspeth swung down from the crab-apple tree and gathered up a half-dozen small apples she had picked and dropped into the grass. Then she sat on a rock beside the river that ran through middle of the forest. She drew her head back and tried to roll the apples one at a time down the bridge of her nose. The trick, she thought, is to hold perfectly still. Easier said than done, though, but worth the effort—why, she did not know. As she finished with each apple she threw the core hard across the river, trying to reach the other side.

This did not last long. There was a moan or a yelp coming from the underbrush on the other side, beneath the low canopy of branches. Something was hurt. She touched the hunting knife at her waist, then moved down the river to a little bridge of rocks, then threaded her way carefully across to the other side.

It was a wolf, badly hurt with the broken shaft of an arrow in its flank. It did not take a hunter like her father to know that the wolf was dying.

Elspeth wondered what any person of compassion should do in such a case. There was little danger of being bitten; the wolf was too far-gone for that. It was obviously in great agony. She sat on the edge of the river and chewed a long blade of grass and thought, but her thoughts were troubled by the agonizing whimpers from the animal on the bank. “Poor thing,” she said. Then she rose and withdrew her knife from its sheath.

“There,” she said. “Not long now. Hold on.” She wiped her forehead with her sleeve, held her breath, and then with a single hard stroke she had the throat cut, and the beautiful animal closed its eyes and was gone.

A breeze came up and ruffled its fur, and Elspeth drew her hand back quickly. Only moments before, the animal had been warm, quivering, probably as much in agony as in fear, if it felt fear. It had throbbed with a beating heart. She had killed chickens, and had even helped her father slaughter a hog once, but never before had she killed anything so wild or so beautiful. The animal was magnificent. She turned to go, but something caught her eye. A row of heavy teats on the animal’s underbelly told her there were pups somewhere. The teats were full and round, and obviously in need of suckling. She whistled then, and muttered, “You’re a mama.”

She climbed a boulder that lay hard on that side of the river, taking care to keep her profile low in case the hunter might still be near. Deepening shadows covered her movements, but they imposed an urgency of their own.

She started up the bank of the river, stooping low as she walked, looking out for the animal’s tracks but moving quickly because of the encroaching darkness.

“What kind of man shoots an animal and then leaves it to die like that?” she said to herself, spitting disgustedly into the dirt because she already knew the answer. From the markings on the shaft of the arrow she knew what kind of man had done this. The hunter had been her father.

It was not difficult to find the lair. Elspeth tracked back along the river until she found where the wolf had entered the water, then along the trail of prints and blood to the place on the bluff where the wolf had taken the arrow. Somewhere along the way she found part of the shaft wedged in among some branches where apparently the wolf had rubbed its shank until the arrow had broken off. She continued this line of movement, reasoning that a wounded female would lead its attacker away from its pups. She found the lair just a little way from the bluff, nestled in beneath the ruins of an old Roman wall.

She crouched, not wanting to attract the attention of the wolf’s mate. The lair was concealed behind some low-lying branches of an elderberry, barely a stone’s throw away, and she moved in cautiously. There was only a single pup, barely visible in the darkening light. The pup was the size of a small cat, and when she drew it out it was unable to open its eyes.

“There,” Elspeth said softly. “You’ve got no mother.” She stroked the pup’s fur cautiously, keeping her hand well back of its head in case it might lunge and bite her. “Don’t worry, baby, I won’t abandon you, not when you’ve got no mother.” She knew enough about the forest to know that without a mother the pup would starve, but she also knew enough about the village to know that it had no future there either. There were dangers either way, and not just for the wolf. From the dogs in the village. From her father. From Sheriff Ranulf, who would want to know what she was doing with a wolf pup—if she were caught. Of these, she feared her father the most. There was no telling what he would do if he discovered she had been in the king’s forest.

“You’re hungry,” she said, though she did not really know that. Perhaps the pup had stirred this first inkling of maternal instinct in her. “I’ll feed you,” she added, then said reassuringly, “gruel—goat’s milk and boiled oats. Bet you never had goat’s milk and boiled outs.”

The journey back to the village went quickly enough. On the way she stopped at the bivouac for her coat. She wrapped the pup in the coat as long as she was on the road that led into the town of Warwick, but at a certain place the road forked off to a footpath to Wharram, the village where she lived with her father. In Wharram she held the coat before her like a sack of potatoes. Surprisingly the pup remained still, so no other of the villagers suspected anything that might run afoul of the law or normal custom.

At the hut she tried to feed the pup gruel, but when she met with little success she wrapped it in a cloak and placed it in a box beneath the lean-to that had been built on the back wall nearest the fenced enclosure where she and her father maintained their meager collection of livestock. She placed a rough plank over the top of the box to serve as a lid, fed the other animals, then went inside to fix supper.

❧

John the Fletcher was a large man, angular and strong, barrel-chested, with arms as long and as thick as an ox-yoke. He had a hawk-like face, with sharp features—a hooked nose that had been broken in a fight, and a strong chin with a heavy black beard. He had his Welsh mother’s unruly black hair and thick eyebrows. None of this you noticed when you saw him. It was as though these traits, each of which might have been prominent in another man, God had added in as an afterthought, something that would have dawned on you after he had left: “Oh, yes. He was like that, too.” What you noticed were his eyes. Fletcher’s eyes were black, sharp, piercing. They were deep set like onyx into that rugged Welsh face. They were as bright as they were dark, and they stood in such striking contrast to his other features that they held you captive for a moment. They seemed to miss nothing. He could spot an egret or a crane a mile off. The villagers sometimes said that he had eagle eyes, a reputation he had nurtured. The sheriff had been impressed enough to call upon his uncanny ability to spot even the slightest movement on the horizon.

Fletcher had been sent to the shire by his parents when he was quite young, and he had brought nothing with him when he’d come. No tools, no skills, fewer words. An apprenticeship to a bookbinder had ended in disaster—he was no good with books—but he could work miracles with a bow and arrow, like what he remembered of his father before he had been sent away. Fletching arrows and archery were in his blood and fingers. For a time, his grandfather had been the Welsh king’s personal archer and a skilled huntsman before he lost three of the fingers on his left hand when the cranking mechanism of his cross-bow had broken during a border skirmish with a band of marauding Danes.

He believed it was his mother who had arranged the apprenticeship with the bookbinder, though he did not know how she had accomplished this. She was unlettered, and the English village of Wharram near Warwick was a good distance from the Welsh border. He could not name the village where he had been born, and had only the dimmest memories of his parents. The bookbinder had done the finish work for the scriptorium of the Monastery of St Cuthbert and St Chad. It was a slow, demanding craft and John’s thick fingers had found no friend among the quires and glue and thread that marked the bookbinder’s trade. To make matters worse, he saw no use for books, and had stoutly refused to learn to read. Books were nothing more than dead markings on a page that confused a man’s spirit and made him discontent with the lot to which he had been assigned by Almighty God.

When the weather was fine he had played truant, which had displeased his master and brought beatings down upon him. When he had grown large enough to strike back he had been ejected from the bookbindery in disgust. Well and good. He hated the man. Instead, he returned to fletching arrows and archery the way his father had taught him in his early youth, before he had come to the shire.

It was from his father and grandfather that John the Fletcher had inherited his skill with the bow, not to mention his eagle eyes. Like them, he was master of both longbow and crossbow, this latter weapon introduced from Italy—lately made wicked by the addition of a steel bow, which added power and range, and by steel bolts with chiseled points for maximum penetration. Unlike its cousin the longbow, the crossbow could be carried loaded, it could be drawn and aimed with the archer lying prone, and it delivered its bolt silently, all of which made it an ideal weapon for hunters and assassins. A skilled marksman with a good eye and a steady hand could place a bolt through solid armor at three hundred and fifty paces. But the crossbow was slow. It had to be cranked back, rather than drawn back, and when speed was necessary an archer always preferred a longbow. British archers were unmatched in the whole of Europe; any one of them could fill the air with a steady river of arrows, the second arrow following so closely on the first that it was aimed and in the air before the former had struck its target. It was among such men that John the Fletcher was considered a master bowman. Once, with a longbow he had brought down a wild boar that had charged his party at full run twenty paces to his left.

So skilled was John Fletcher with either weapon that he had eventually been promoted to the rank of sergeant in the service of Ranulf, Sheriff of Warwickshire, perhaps the highest rank afforded a man who could not read. He had been an energetic man, had worked hard, had had hopes of living as well as any man born to a peasant’s modest station. That was before Alysse died in childbirth, leaving him with a broken heart and a pitiful, squalling baby girl whom he had kept alive with rough lullabies and a thin gruel of goat’s milk and boiled oats. (Thank God for the women of Wharram—especially Sarabeth—who had watched the baby when he had had to work.) After Alysse’s death he made no further attempt at progress, but simply accepted his station as the will of God.

Alysse had been dark and spirited and comely, the love of his life and now the angelic figure who haunted his dreams both waking and sleeping. Her high cheekbones and broad forehead had framed eyes that could have lighted the way home for mariners lost in the great sea.

Fletcher tried to think of the child as Alysse’s gift to him, someone for whom she had given her very life, but when he was tired or discouraged his perspective shifted and he saw the child as an intruder, a thief, who had taken its mother’s life in the very act of being born. Its first lusty squall had drowned out its mother’s dying sigh, so that when Sister Bertrice the midwife turned from the child to its mother she discovered that Alysse had quietly slipped away, like a messenger who leaves a package on the doorstep and moves along to another errand in a different place. To John it seemed as if the child had stolen its mother’s breath from her.

Sister Bertrice had handed him the squalling baby while it was still covered in its mother’s blood and what John thought was mucus from the birth canal. There was an urgency to her movements that made him panic. Why had she done this? The blood on his hands shocked and horrified him.

The panic was over in a moment. When Sister turned back, the look in her eye and the change in her manner told him that Alysse was gone.

His life itself was gone.

“I’m sorry,” Sister had said then. “God took her. I did all I could. It seems you can’t have both, John, but she got you a fine, strong child.”

“Boy,” he had said, not really asking. He had not looked, had been afraid to look, and had been distracted by the urgency of Sister’s movements.

“A girl,” Sister said. She cleaned her hands on a towel. “I’m sorry, John.”

Fletcher stood there numbly. Why would God take Alysse, and not me instead? Or the baby? What am I going to do with a baby? I don’t need a baby. Especially not a girl. Not without Alysse. Why take Alysse, and not the baby instead? With Alysse alive they could have tried again for another child, at another time.

Sister took the child gently, washed it and wrapped it in the blanket Alysse had folded and left ready on a chair near the bed. “Now take the child outside. Send for Sarabeth; she’ll know what to do. I got work to do here.” There was a pause in her talk as she handed the baby to Fletcher. “Hold its head like this,” she said.

John had tried to hold the baby’s tiny head, but it was awkward. The baby’s muscles did not work, and it was so small it seemed to get lost in his large hands, and then he was aware that it looked so fragile and its skin was wrinkled but so soft there against the rough calluses of his palms and fingers that he thought for a moment that it had none of him in it and all of Alysse, and he was overcome by the helplessness of it and he had felt helpless to care for it too and he wanted it gone. But then again, as fragile as it was, it had been strong enough to steal its mother’s breath from her. It had taken her life and his too. He held his breath for a moment, thinking of Alysse’s breath, now forever drowned out by the breathing of the baby. He felt the gorge rise in his throat. It would be so easy to drop the child. Or wrench its neck. Who would know? He could call it an accident.

As deep as it was, this reaction was also fleeting, a momentary pause in the normalcy, and it raised an equally fleeting revulsion within him. How could he have thought such? But the death of Alysse had not been normal; nothing would ever be normal. Not now. How was he to raise a child without Alysse?

“. . . Father Athanasius.” Sister was saying something.

“What? What was that you were saying?”

“I said to have one of the children bring Athanasius.” As she said this she bent over Alysse’s body and quietly closed the eyelids. She crossed the girl’s hands above her heart.

“Yes. Father Athanasius . . .” Fletcher said, and left the midwife to the sorry holy work of cleaning up after the birth and the death, preparing Alysse’s body to be moved to the monastery church to await the funeral mass and after that the spring thaw when the ground would open up to receive all that remained of his dreams and hopes and happiness.

Thus had begun a long nightmare of grief. Was this what the priest had called The Dark Night of the Soul, this asking questions for which there are no answers, this waiting to forget but never forgetting, this wound that would never heal, just as Alysse herself would never return to him no matter how—or how long—he waited; this loving the child because it was Alysse’s dying gift to him yet hating it too because of the terrible price it had exacted by its birth?

Already by nature a private man, Fletcher withdrew more deeply into himself, closing off the wound from light and air and healing. Is it right even to want to be healed from such a wound? The loss had changed him, and that had been the infant’s doing too. To be healed of such a wound was to release his wife to the past, and he could not bring himself to do that. Worse, it was to forgive God, and he did not want to do that either. But then, who was he to think such thoughts? The wound did not fester, did not torment him, did not leave him crippled or ashamed, not like that bookbinder had left him ashamed, but it did not heal, either. It was a sweet dark place within him, a cave for the soul, a kind of hermitage where he could escape alone into the quiet comfort of his grief.

Even now, sixteen years later, Fletcher still slept on his own side of the canopy bed he had made as a marriage gift for Alysse, the bed in which she had come to him as a bride and then had left him as a mother—victim of her own infant. He still woke up at night listening for her gentle breathing or the soft crackling of the straw in the ticking as she shifted her body in her sleep. What he had instead was the girl, sleeping in her own bed, filling the air with the ebbing breath of early womanhood.

Sometimes the girl awakened him with night terrors. Once when she was maybe six she had cried out, “Mama!” in her sleep. That was an odd thing. How could the girl miss a mother she had never known? Elspeth had never smelled her mother’s hair, or tasted her sweet kisses, or dreamed with her of growing old together. For that matter the girl had never known her father the way he was before he had been forever changed by her mother’s death. How could she understand what she had taken from him? The cry had left Fletcher hollow inside, aware more than ever that what he had to give was not what the girl had needed.

So now, sixteen years after Alysse had been taken from him, when the girl was nearly a woman and was apprenticed to that bookbinder’s son and his seamstress wife, still she filled a void inside him. How old would Alysse be now? He had kept track—count nineteen years from the age of the child. The girl, three; Alysse, twenty-two. The girl, seven, Alysse, twenty-six. When the girl turned sixteen, Fletcher thought of Alysse: thirty-five. What would Alysse have been like at thirty-five? Would her body have rounded and softened with age as had the bodies of the other wives in the village, many of them her childhood playmates, whose children played with her daughter? Would her eyes have crow’s feet, as theirs had crow’s feet? Would her voice have deepened in tone? What of her laugh? The dying of her laughter had taken the summer breeze from his heart. As a child the girl had laughed like her mother and had never been able to understand why such laughter should move her father to tears.

Sometimes when he thought the girl was not looking, Fletcher found himself gazing at her. She had Alysse’s same dark Welsh hair, worn long and braided down her back like her mother, but at night cascading loose in a way that framed her mother’s dark eyes; she had her mother’s tight build, with wiry arms and the long, slender fingers that had so easily mastered the seamstress’ craft. In her apprenticeship she was learning two trades—with equal facility she was learning to stitch dresses for ladies or quires for books, however the need arose. Alcera, the seamstress who was teaching her to sew, had also taught her to read—Alysse had been able to read, and had dreamed as much for her child and how could he deny his dead wife her single strongest wish? But that had been a disaster because it had quickly filled the girl with ideas about moving beyond her station, ideas that Fletcher knew were stupid and dangerous, especially for a woman born and raised a peasant.

He had tried to do right by Alysse, and hoped that he had raised a daughter Alysse would have been proud to own. Recently he had managed to arrange a marriage for the girl with a good Welsh boy named Meurig something from Aberystwyth, a tradesman with a good skill, the son of a silversmith, but Elspeth had said something about his having no more authority over her than what she might give him of her own free will, and that she counted the betrothal a mistake. Fletcher blamed the books for that. Such things make a woman proud and give her ideas about being better than her man, and more than once he had threatened the seamstress with physical harm if she did not desist.

Alcera had proven difficult on this question of teaching the girl to read, insisting that she had every right to train the girl’s skills as she pleased, and that she, Alcera, had given Alysse her solemn promise while the baby was still in the womb. An obstinate woman, Alcera, and no model for his daughter to copy, but in the end it had been Fletcher himself who had finally relented out of respect for the wishes of his wife, and the semblance of friendship with Alcera’s husband Levente. He and Levente had grown up in the same household, if not as brothers or even as friends, at least as two boys who had both been shaped by the same man—Levente’s father had been Fletcher’s master, and a hard taskmaster to them both.

But there had been compensations, too. Levente and Alcera also allowed the girl to return home each night to the hut in Wharram since there was no grown woman in the house to tend to the needs of her father. Fletcher believed that this apparently generous arrangement on Levente’s part benefited the giver more than the recipient because it allowed him the benefit of the girl’s service without the expense and trouble of maintaining her board.

Fletcher paused long enough at the gatehouse to file a verbal report that he had spotted the wolf in the forest, but had lost the trail in the thinning light. He arranged for a hound and its handler to be ready at first light, then headed to the hut that he shared with his daughter in the village of Wharram, nestled in a hamlet a mile beyond the foregate.

It was quite dark by this time, and he made his way home by the light of a torch he had taken from the sheriff’s storehouse of weapons and equipment. In his left hand he carried a loaded crossbow. He threaded his way among the rows of half-timbered houses owned by the merchants, out along the lane past the cottages, and then the huts that ringed the outskirts of the town.

Just before he turned down the path to Wharram, he stopped for a flagon of ale at a dimly lighted storefront at the edge of the town. It could hardly be called a tavern, more a small thatched hut where one could buy ale. A crudely lettered sign above the door gave name, though neither Fletcher nor any of the other patrons could have read the words: The Pint and Ploughman. The windows were shuttered to ward off the evening chill. A bit of light came from several candles set out in a row along the center of an ancient wooden table, and there was a small fire in a fireplace set well back beyond an interior wall. The proprietor’s name was Willem—an old friend.

Most of Willem’s regular patrons had snuffed their torches and left them outside the door. Fletcher added his to the others and stepped inside for a drink. He had known most of these men since childhood; they were lifetime neighbors and frequent comrades in arms. Willem’s sister Sarabeth the serving woman had tended to his child when she was born, and sometimes when she was sick with fever. She brought his ale before he asked, and he tossed the proper coins across the table without a word. The ale was thick and bitter, but it eased the pain he felt as he thought of Alysse, and it always stiffened his resolve to do right by her daughter despite what she had done to her mother. Ale—a good thing given to men, a gift of God and the barley fields. Calmed his nerves to do right by the girl.

But she has a stubborn streak in her, thought Fletcher, and the streak was made worse since Alcera had taught her to read. The girl went into the king’s forest, she talked back to him, she came and went as she pleased, she refused to do her duty with that Welsh boy Meurig, with whom he had made what any sane person would agree was a good match. She walked about the village like she was somebody, better than their neighbors, better than him. Once she had even looked Sheriff Ranulf in the eye and told him to take his hand off her arm. It was an arrogance unbecoming a girl of her station, and it left Fletcher speechless and ashamed in the presence of his friends.

“Another flagon, Sarabeth,” he said as he placed a stack of coins on the table.

Fletcher tossed it back in a single swallow, rose, lit his torch at Willem’s fire, retrieved the crossbow, and made his way down the path that led to the village where he and his daughter shared a hut and a lean-to shed, but little else beyond the common bond they both had with Alysse.

The hut was a typical peasant’s affair—a single room under a thatched roof, built on a slightly excavated pit about four feet in depth. No castle, but good enough for a working man and a girl. It got them through the cold Warwickshire winters. There was a small lean-to attached at the side, and then behind that an enclosed pen for what few animals they possessed. A chicken coop and a privy marked the far corners of the property. Like many of the huts in the village, this one had a grape arbor on the south side; he had planted it there to provide a gentle shade of the mixed and brilliant layers of green that cut the summer sun.

Everything seemed to be in order. Tools and farm implements were stacked against one wall. A bag of un-ground wheat rested against another. Candles were already lit. The girl had made a small fire against the evening chill. On the wall near the door was a series of small pegs, on one of which hung the girl’s coat, retrieved from the bivouac, just where it had hung that morning.

Fletcher said nothing as he sat down to the supper of grouse and some gruel the girl had prepared. Finally, his belly full of food and ale, and his limbs tired and aching from the hunt, he readied himself for bed.

Elspeth sat at a rough bench he had made for her mother, brushing her long hair with her mother’s combs. Lately, she had taken to wearing her mother’s dresses, too, and tonight she wore her mother’s nightclothes. He had saved these in a trunk beneath the bed because parting with Alysse’s clothing was more than he could bear, but the girl had found them and had asked permission, but even so when she wore them he found it disturbing. Who did she think she was?

But he said nothing about that. He was no good with words, and there was little place in his house for talk. Women talked. Men said what needed to be said with their tools and weapons. Hunters bided their time and waited. Farmers plowed and planted, and then bided their time and waited. It was the women who filled the air with talk. But there were serious matters to discuss and so at last he broke the silence: “The sheriff says there’s a poacher in the king’s forest. Told me to keep a lookout.” His voice was gruff, and still laced with traces of the Wales he had left behind when he was a boy. He unbuttoned the top button of his shirt and pulled it off over his head, replacing it with a woolen nightshirt.

Elspeth set down the brush and turned to him. “You were in the forest today?” she asked, but she turned her eyes aside and Fletcher thought she probably knew the answer already. She stood and came to him, placing her hand on his shoulder.

“There was a poacher in there. Maybe more.”

“Any idea who that might be?” said the girl, quietly evading the potential accusation. She picked up the brush again, ran it casually through her hair.

“Certain of one of them.” He looked at her hard. “The sheriff catches a commoner in the king’s forest, and he’s got to make an example of him. Won’t have a choice.”

“What kind of example?”

“An eye or a hand is hard to replace.”

“So you think there may be more than one?”

“At least one.” He looked at her coat hanging on its peg.

“What kind of fool poaches the king’s game?”

“I’m going to try to warn him off first. He’s got too much to lose; a warning’ll give him time to reform before it’s too late.”

“And if he doesn’t?”

“Then I’ll do my duty.” Fletcher felt his forehead cloud over, and the look he gave was intended to send a shudder down the girl’s back. If his eyes had been crossbows, they would have dropped her in her tracks. He jutted out his chin and nearly growled out his final remark: “Remember, girl. You don’t want to challenge me, understand? You’ll learn the hard way, you will.”

Elspeth stepped back and curtsied to her father. “It doesn’t do to threaten me, sir,” she said, smiling. She ran the brush through her loose hair again and smiled at him, her teeth an even white row of gems, like the string of pearls the sheriff’s wife sometimes wore. “My father works for the sheriff, sir.”

“Not for long if you’re caught in the king’s forest.”

She bent down and kissed him on the forehead. “If I hear about anybody poaching in the forest, I’ll bring you word. I promise.”

I promise, she says! I’ll bring you word, she says. Answers like that infuriated Fletcher because they were so patently dishonest. “And keep clear of the forest yourself,” he had said to her to reinforce the warning. “Understand me?” Even as he said it, he thought the girl was developing the same hard, distant look he had seen in her mother, but he did not ask what was troubling her. Was it dissatisfaction? Was it fear? Let her be afraid, he thought, if fear keeps her out of the forest. But he knew it wasn’t fear he had seen. That was what he thought about as he pounded his straw pillow into a tight ball, pulled the rough cover up around his chin and snuffed the candle. There was something brewing in the girl, something unrelated to the bivouac and the girl’s presence in the forest that day, something perhaps only Alysse could have understood.

Ah! Alysse. The very thought of her name flooded his mind, drowning out his worries about the girl. As Fletcher drifted off to sleep he thought only of Alysse.

❧

There was a presence in the hut, but Elspeth could not quite make out what it was. The air had grown stale and heavy, and dim with sleep her memory was more of an obstacle than a help as she tried to locate the presence and figure out what it was. She smelled something hard. Tar maybe. But it was somehow exhaled, the breathing discernable as a faint rhythm in the air. The feeling of alarm grew within her until she slowly began to feel trapped, enclosed, smothered. After a time she realized that her heart was beating hard and erratic, then almost wildly. Whatever it was, it breathed, and she had taken in the smell of it in her sleep, had taken part of it into herself, and for a moment she thought she would be sick. She swallowed hard against that. She felt flushed and sweaty in her bedclothes.

Then there was a movement in the corner of her eye—a subtle, undulating movement in the thin sliver of moonlight that leaked in through a crack in the window. What was that? A tail? Did she see a tail? Or the outline of a tail? It was too large for a lizard. It slipped silently out of sight around the corner of her father’s canopy bed. There was an animal in the hut, and she knew instinctively that it was dangerous. She pulled the covers closer around her, and groped in the dark for a knife or something she might use as a club, but there was nothing at hand. She squinted into the dark corners of the hut to see if she could gain some sort of clue about what it was.

It had been the hard smell of tar that had awakened her; she now knew it for certain. What was it? How did it get in? Where was her father?

What she said next she said very quietly. “Father.” That was all, just the one word. Father.

He emerged from behind the canopy.

She said—again, very quietly—“There’s something in the hut.” If she closed her eyes she could see it again. She described it to her father—the smell of tar, the shimmering, the tail slipping around behind the bed. “It’s some kind of animal. It’s got a lizard’s tail, I think. No, it’s too big for that. Too big to be a lizard. I think it’s in the corner. On the other side of your bed.”

Her father stood up in the dark, moved quietly to the doorway to retrieve his crossbow. He could not load it there in the dark and instead hefted it above his head like a club. Then he moved to the bed, calmly pulling it around to expose the space between the bed and the wall.

Nothing.

The space was empty.

He opened the door to gather a little more moonlight, and then used his flint kit to light a small lamp. When he left the door open, she thought perhaps it was because a trapped animal is more dangerous than a free one. She thought about the pup in the box outside.

“Nothing, Els. There’s nothing there.” He held the lamp low and looked under the bed, waving his arm in the small space to show her there was nothing there. “Look for yourself. Nothing. No lizard, no creature. You’ve had a bad dream.”

A small breeze came in through the open door, chilling the sweat against her skin. “It was here. I know it was here. Right there, behind your bed.” She went, knelt, looked hard beneath the bed. Nothing. She took the lamp and made a careful inspection of the hut. Nothing. Beneath the two beds. Behind the table. Nothing.

“Go back to sleep, Els,” her father insisted. “There’s nothing here. You’re safe. You’ve just had a bad dream. Go back to sleep.”

It was a long time before she drifted back to sleep, and even wide awake she relived the dream. It had all seemed so very real, so vivid, as though she could reach out even then and touch the creature, but it was gone as quickly as it had come. She sat on her bed with her back to the wall and stared out the open window at the corner tower of the town, and wall of the monastery and the convent, all of it outlined against the sky by the glow of the moon. Even the fresh breeze that came in through the window could not clear from her memory the smell of tar that seemed to linger in the air like a stain.

❧

When Fletcher woke, his tongue tasted sour and dry and he thought for a moment that he had been chewing on lemon rind. His head throbbed in a kind of incessant marching beat. His woolen nightshirt clung to his body from the night sweats, and the sticky throbbing heat nagged at him, forcing its way past that fragile barrier between things remembered and things dreamt.

He had told the girl she had had a bad dream, something about a creature in the hut, but there was more to it than that. He should have known this moment would come. He had sensed something was disturbing in the girl. There was that defiance, that flash in the eye, that granite set of the girl’s jaw.

Fletcher knew more than he had told the girl. That was no dream. What she had described was a dragon. It might still be there; dragons could almost disappear at will. The defiance in the girl had drawn a dragon into the hut.

He wasn’t sure he wanted it gone. Not yet. He wanted to see it for himself first.

But the light had grown strong, and Fletcher forced himself to clear his head to get up. The wolf was waiting in the forest. He dressed and headed for the stockade, taking with him a hunk of the long-bread the girl had set out for his breakfast.

No sooner had Fletcher gone than Elspeth was on her feet. She dressed quickly, her fingers trembling in the morning cool. Before the sun was fully up she had quietly gathered the wolf pup from its box in the shed and returned it to the forest.

❧

At the foregate, the stable boy had already saddled his horse. Fletcher slipped the crossbow and a quarrel of bolts into one of the saddlebags, and in the other he put provisions for himself and Aelric, the handler for the dog. As he mounted, he took up a longbow in one hand and a quiver of arrows for his back.

Aelric rode a second horse. There would be time for walking when the hound had picked up the wolf’s scent.

“So John, what’s our quarry today? Two legs or four?”

“I put an arrow in a wolf last night near the north fork of the river.”

Aelric laughed, an insidious little laugh that made John want to spit. “The great John Fletcher didn’t take him out with his first shot?”

“Shut up, Aelric,” Fletcher said without looking at the man. He finished tying off his saddlebag, then mounted. “I put too much weight on a rotted log. The log broke just as I released the bowstring. I lost his trail when he took to the water. He can’t have gotten far. We’ll start where he went in. The hound can pick up his scent there.”

They rode in silence until they were beyond the foregate. Fletcher thought about the girl. He knew all too well what kind of creature the girl had seen. Fletcher himself had been burned by such a creature when he was a boy. The bookbinder had kept a small dragon the way some people keep snakes as pets because they are fascinated by the beauty of their scales or the sinuous way they moved.

The bookbinder’s dragon had held a similar fascination for Fletcher. Dragons are intelligent creatures; part of their nature is their ability to mimic other natural phenomena—a rock formation, a stand of trees, another animal. It was a state the bookbinder had called the “mime.” Or they shift colors to match their surroundings the way a chameleon changes colors, only dragons do so exquisitely, and by holding themselves stock still they can perfectly disappear. As he rode beside Aelric, Fletcher was fully aware that this outcropping of rock or that stand of short trees might well be a dragon, or even a roil of dragons, in a state of mime. When it was still a kit the bookbinder’s dragon had been known to mime cats and then dogs, and once when it was larger it mimed a small shed, so that few if any of the villagers had even known that it was there. In fact, few of the villagers had ever seen a dragon—more correctly, few were aware of having seen a dragon—and fewer still were courageous enough to believe they existed. To see one, you have to be looking for it, and you have to be willing to face the reality that something beautiful can also be terrible. People seldom look for creatures they’re afraid to believe exist.

But there was evidence of dragons even so—the mime had its limits. No living thing stays stock-still forever, and sooner or later even dragons have to breathe. When dragons flew overhead on a starry night their shapes could sometimes be discerned as a darkening of the stars, but it was a darkening that said dragon only to those who looked very intently and patiently. What’s more, a dragon’s mime might trick the eyes, but not the nose or the ears. They give off a distinctive odor—hard like tar. They leave footprints. And then there is the bellowing, but even that was a kind of camouflage. The bellowing of dragons is often taken for thunder.

Sometimes when the wind shifted Fletcher smelled the hard, acrid smell of tar and knew that somewhere nearby there was a dragon, no-doubt standing stock still but tracking their movements with its eyes. In the old days while he had still been indentured to the bookbinder, Fletcher had known of a small roil of dragons that nested in a cave near the village, but he had said nothing to the authorities because the creatures held a peculiar fascination for him. Something terrible can also be beautiful.

The bookbinder’s dragon had grown larger as Fletcher and Levente had grown larger, all of them kept in the same house, all kept against their wills by a demanding and angry taskmaster.

“Know anything about dragons, Aelric?” asked Fletcher, breaking the silence only when they were well away from the town.

Aelric laughed again, that same high-pitched nervous way John found annoying and revealing at the same time. “Dragons, John?” he said. His eyes shifted quickly from side to side and his body dropped a little closer to the saddle and the protecting bulk of the horse. “There ain’t no dragons. Not now, if there ever was any.” He glanced behind himself and then stared at the dog, which had frozen in position, pointing at a small outcropping of rock that loomed from a bluff that had appeared on the left, casting a long morning shadow onto the trail ahead of them. “Back,” he said to the dog. The animal let out a low rumble, then returned to its place on the trail. The hair remained raised on its back.

“Don’t believe in them then?” said Fletcher. Aelric had stopped to let his horse piss, and Fletcher had to twist around in the saddle to be heard.

“Never seen one, that’s all,” said Aelric, catching up. “Got no time for some creature I never seen. Don’t want to see one, not in my lifetime.”

They rode more deeply into the shadow of the bluff. Aelric looked back in the direction of the outcropping, but with the change of perspective it had disappeared from view.

“Maybe you’re not looking in the right places,” said Fletcher.

“No such thing as a right place. Why would I look for a dragon? They’re dangerous.” Then, as an afterthought, he added, “I’m not saying I believe in them though.”

“Dangerous, but oh so beautiful,” said Fletcher. The bookbinder’s dragon had been a marvel. “Dragons are weird beautiful, like something you’d see in a dream. Nothing else like them. Nowhere.”

“Beautiful and dangerous then, but neither if they’re made up out of some storyteller’s head.” Fletcher noticed that Aelric drew his mount a little closer to his own, and kept darting his eyes across the countryside.

Fletcher thought about the time he had been burned. He might have been ten. Maybe eleven. At the time, the dragon was the size of a small cat, but it was more lizard-like, with layers of fine scales that reminded him of the trout he sometimes caught in the river. The scales were iridescent silver, and so fine he imagined the animal’s hide might feel smooth to the touch. It could have been a lizard, except for the talons and the wings—and the fact that it could disappear. The wings were disproportionately large, so that they almost looked comical. They were locked into the pronounced and protruding bones of its shoulder blades. The bookbinder kept the dragon in a cage, but when he let it out for exercise, it had to struggle to maintain its balance against the weight and distended length of the wings. Its belly was low to the ground, so that as it made its way across the floor of the bindery, it swayed from side to side, and sometimes even fell over, and as a young boy Fletcher had felt a kind of sympathy for it, and after a while even something like affection.

When he brought it morsels of bread from his dinner-plate, the dragon had made a cooing, clucking sound like a hen might make, or it would purr like a cat, the rumble coming up from deep within its belly.

But once, as he fed it, the dragon had responded to his outstretched hand with a blast from its nostril-flame, which was how Fletcher discovered that an animal can be both dangerous and beautiful at the same time, that something beautiful isn’t automatically safe or good. When he had reported this event to the bookbinder, the man had blamed him rather than the animal. “That can happen,” he had said. “Watch yourself around my dragon.”

“I got burned by a dragon once. When I was a boy,” said Fletcher simply.

Aelric turned in his saddle and looked at him, hard, then snorted: “You seen dragons, have you!” As he said this he rested his hand on the butt of the crossbow he had brought in his saddlebag. The trail led closer to the bluff.

“They’ve got this weird way of disappearing,” Fletcher insisted. “Like lizards and horny-toads. And snakes. A snake holds perfectly still against a flat rock, it disappears. Dragons do that, too.”

Just then a flock of grouse shot up from the brush beside the path in front of them. They had held so still and the coloring of their feathers had blended so perfectly with the bushes that the hunting party might have passed them by completely if the hound had not caught their scent and run out to rout them from their nest. Fletcher said nothing. What more needed to be said?

Levente, who was older, had challenged the bookbinder about the danger. “It burned John,” he said. “It could burn one of the farm animals, or even a child. What if it burned somebody else, maybe worse than it burned John?”

The man had been unmoved. “A dragon’s no more to blame for that than a wolf is to blame for eating sheep. It’s their nature.”

“We don’t keep wolves as pets,” Levente said. “And we don’t let wolves run freely through the countryside, eating people’s farm animals. We hunt them down and kill them.”

“That we do,” the bookbinder had said to him, “but if we kill them all, the farms get overrun with rodents. Even wolves have their place in God’s creation. But I haven’t let my dragon run free now, have I?”

“But somebody could get hurt,” Levente protested, but Fletcher knew the protestations would have no effect on his father.

“Would you give up the fire crackling in your hearth on a cold winter’s night just because somewhere, sometime, somebody else’s fire got out of hand and burned his house down?”

“But a person takes precautions.”

“Right,” said the bookbinder. He shook a sharp-pointed awl at Fletcher. “My point exactly. Mind yourself around my dragon.”

That he had done. Once, the dragon had broken its holding chain and escaped, only to be recaptured and returned by the bookbinder. Fletcher had felt sympathy for the animal then, and brought it food. It was too large to be confined in such a place as the bookbindery. It was a living thing, a marvel, as near to perfect as any creature Fletcher had ever seen, before or after, but terrifying and mysterious nonetheless. By then he had realized that he was held captive in the same way as the dragon—the bookbinder was a hard man—and he wanted freedom for himself and the dragon both. In an odd way, he identified with it.

Fletcher and Aelric rode in silence after that. Fletcher was not afraid of dragons, not for himself, but he did worry about the girl.

With the hound it took no time at all to locate the carcass of the wolf. It had made its way farther downriver than he had expected, had proven extraordinarily strong. It was a large animal, and would have been beautiful were it not that its pelt was matted with blood and mud and dirt. Perhaps the arrow had opened an artery. Fletcher raised the carcass slowly and turned it over to inspect the damage the arrow had made in the pelt. The shaft of the arrow was broken, but he would recover the tip later when he skinned it. The pelt would go to the sheriff. He would give the rest of the carcass to Aelric for the hound.

“John, look here,” said Aelric. He pointed to the wolf’s throat, which had been cleanly sliced through with a knife. “I thought you said you put an arrow in it.”

Fletcher indicated the broken shaft in the animal’s shank. “Somebody else did that.”

“A poacher in the king’s forest!” Aelric gave a low whistle.

“A poacher would’ve taken the carcass,” said Fletcher flatly. He ran his hand along the animal’s back, stiff now in death.

“Why cut its throat but leave the pelt behind?”

“He didn’t come to take the wolf, only to kill it. Probably a farmer who’d lost too many chickens.” But maybe Elspeth had done this, which was more disturbing.

“Why not skin it anyway?” asked Aelric. “It’s a pretty thing.” He glanced at the hound, then ran his fingers through the wolf’s thick fur.

“And be caught in the act or later with the evidence in his hands?” Fletcher said. “Maybe he heard someone coming.” He let out a low whistle. “Look here at its belly. This wolf had pups.” As he talked he cleaned off the carcass as best he could and slung it up on the horse behind the saddle. With a rope he tied it to a pair of iron rings that hung behind the saddlebags.

“Home now?” asked Aelric.

“Not yet. While we got the hound we’ve got to find the lair and kill the pups. And a mother wolf means a father wolf. Let’s hope we find him, or else we’ll be hunting again tomorrow.”

They found the wolf’s lair on the edge of a small glen, near the ruins of a Roman wall, not far from the rise where she had taken the arrow. When the wolf had led him down river she had taken them away from her lair, a mother’s instinctive movement even in dying to protect her young. It was a beautiful and sacrificial thing, something he admired in the animal even as he realized that its blood was on his own hands. He caught an image of a squalling, bloody baby Alysse had left him.

Footprints leading up to the lair told him someone had been here, too. The opening had been widened by a solid, stomping kick. Had Elspeth done that? She did not seem heavy enough, but then again, she was a tough girl who often did things that surprised him.

Within the lair, deep back, he found a single pup. What that meant was hard to tell. Had there been other pups? Had Elspeth taken them? Why? What had she done with them? And why leave this one? Perhaps she had decided to scatter the litter, hoping to give them a better chance of survival, and had simply missed this one. Either way, without a mother it was likely to starve. That was the way of the forest. Some creatures live, some die.

Despite himself Fletcher rankled at that. A pup without a mother was evidence enough that there was something wrong with the world. Should he leave this tiny creature at the mercy of the elements? It would soon enough be a meal for some forest creature, and if not that, then it would starve. And if it survived somehow, he and Aelric would be back hunting it as a mature animal, only later in the year, maybe in winter when the natural game in the forest would grow scarce and like its mother it would make its way out of the forest to fill its belly with chickens and farm animals.

He withdrew his hunting knife from its sheath, and then paused for a moment, aware of the pup’s tiny head and its soft fur against the rough calluses of his palms and fingers, and in his mind’s eye he pictured Elspeth as a baby, equally as helpless, but Elspeth had taken Alysse from him, and this pup had done nothing except to be born. Elspeth had grown defiant, and he could lose his job if the forester caught her in the forest. She was risking everything—she was nothing but trouble, right from the start—she had taken Alysse from him—he could wring the girl’s neck. He braced himself to do what his sense of duty told him had to be done, and then took the pup’s head firmly in one hand, and prepared to slit its throat in a single firm stroke.

What happened next you have already heard. The knife went in too easily, and Fletcher was overcome by a mass of crowding images of tragedy. His arrow that had killed the pup’s mother. Images of Alysse in childbirth, the infant, the girl, the Blessed Virgin, Alysse calling out to him from the other side, her body in its coffin awaiting burial.

From somewhere far off Aelric was saying something. “John, are you alright?” Aelric was shouting now. “Fletcher!”

When he came to his senses he was holding the pup in his hands, alive—tiny, helpless, but alive. The knife was lying in the dirt near the mouth of the lair.