Читать книгу Between the Monk and the Dragon - Jerry Camery-Hoggatt - Страница 9

II

Fletcher set the pup down, then went to the edge of the glen and emptied the contents of his stomach. He rinsed his mouth from the water bag on his saddle, spitting over and over again, trying to wash the terrible taste of tar from his tongue. “I can’t kill it, Aelric,” he said, coming back. “It’s got no mother and it’ll probably starve to death, or even end up supper to some larger animal, but I can’t kill it.” He waited for his breathing to slow and his heart to stop its wild terrified beating. What was that? Why would a pup affect him like that? He’d killed a hundred wolves, for Christ’s sake. Including pups—when he’d had to. What was this about?

“You’re in charge John,” said Aelric, shaking his head. “What’s next?”

Fletcher rinsed his hands with water from the water bag, and splashed water up on his face. Then he mounted his horse and led off in the direction of Warwick

“Not a word, Aelric,” he said.

“You’re in charge,” Aelric said again.

❧

Returning from the forest, Elspeth came upon three of the village boys, the one in the middle a strapping youth named Jason, who snatched her up by the waist and held her aloft for a moment.

“Put me down, Jason, you ruffian,” said Elspeth, laughing. She pounded his chest.

“Sit with me in church, Els,” Jason pleaded. He continued to hold her aloft, and she realized he must be incredibly strong. “I’ll put you down if you’ll promise to sit with me in church.”

“It would be improper. I’m betrothed, remember, and my father would not allow it.”

“You let me deal with your father, Elspeth.” He set her down on the road, and he and the other boys stepped into pace beside her.

“Nobody deals with her father,” one of the other boys said. He held his arms up in a mock stance of a man aiming a crossbow. Then he pulled the imaginary trigger.

Jason jumped him over the top and knuckled him under the ribs. “He shoots me dead, I’ll come back and drive him mad by knuckling him in his dreams.”

“Alin’s right,” said the other boy soberly. “He’s already a madman.”

“He’s not,” insisted Elspeth. “He’s a man of his word. And a gentleman.”

“A gentleman who’ll break every bone in Jason’s body if he sits beside you in church,” Alin said. He picked up a pebble and threw it hard into the brush, startling a small grouse out of hiding.

“He’s made commitments,” said Elspeth. “He’s a man of his word. And he’s given me over to a Welshman, and would not think kindly of a village whelp who would try to intervene.” Even as she said this, she knew that the marriage would not take place. It was an imposition, something she would prevent, but Jason did not know that, and she sometimes used the betrothal to her own advantage in conversations like this one.

“I’m seventeen,” said Jason defensively. “I’ve got my own flock already. I’m full-grown by any standard.”

Elspeth was unimpressed by this claim. “Are you man enough to deal with Meurig ap Gwynedd?” she asked.

“Bring him on,” Jason replied, but just then they came in sight of Elspeth’s hut, and he stopped before he could be seen by her father. Just before he left, he reached out and grabbed Elspeth by her braided hair, forcing a kiss. “You’re mine,” he said. Then he turned with the other boys and ran for the village.

Elspeth aimed an imaginary crossbow of her own and pulled an imaginary trigger. “So much for manhood,” she muttered as she continued along the path.

❧

As he thought about it, Fletcher realized he didn’t have it in him to confront the girl about the pups. At least not directly. He had had his say last night at supper. Today he was too tired from the hunt to bring it up again. It was none of her affair. A man’s work, that’s all. He skinned the wolf, gave the meat to Aelric for the dog, set the pelt aside for the sheriff, and made his way back up the path to Willem’s pub for ale. One flagon. Two. Maybe more. He couldn’t remember and he didn’t care. He hardly saw the flagons, said hardly a word to Sarabeth, but he was in a bad way as he stumbled back to his hut in the dark.

Elspeth had a small fire going, and a stew. “I was worried about you,” she said.

He pulled out a chair and dropped heavily into the seat, spreading his legs to steady himself.

“Eat some stew,” she said. “You’ll feel better.”

Fletcher said nothing. Who was she to tell him what to do, or how to feel better? “Don’t want stew,” he said heavily. He was having trouble forming up the words. “Bring some of that beer. We’ve got beer, don’t we?” His speech was slow and slurred like the mud in the river after a storm.

“You’ve had enough,” she said quietly.

“Who are you to tell me anything?” he demanded. “What do you know? About life? About anything? You think you’re so smart. What? Because of that bookbinder and his wife? You’re a girl, not even a woman. You’re like your mother.”

“Father, don’t . . .” she said.

“I thought you wanted to know about your mother.”

“I thought you loved her.”

“She was too good for us little people. Sat around reading while the other women worked. Puts ideas into her head. She starts imagining things, having dreams, thinks they’re real, that’s what she does.”

This tirade lasted until the light in the hut had faded so badly he had to grope to find his bed, stumbling in fully dressed.

Elspeth removed her father’s shoes and set them by the door, then went to her own bed. Before he had finished, her father said something that troubled her even more deeply than his drinking or his going on and on about her mother: The creature in the dream had been a dragon. And then her father had added angrily that she could not—must not—tell anybody about the dragon in the dream. The sheriff would catch wind of it and think she had gone mad. “Not a word,” he had said. “Not to Alcera, not to Levente, not to anybody.” She would be taken away from her father. Does having dreams about a dragon make one crazy? Had she gone mad? Would they take her away?

She sat up in bed and leaned her back against the bedstead of her small cot, arms wrapped around her knees, trying to tease out memories of what had happened in the dream about the dragon, but the dream was too far gone and she could not recall the details. Even so, thinking about it she had trouble going to sleep. What if the dream returned? She threw back the covers to cool her sweating ankles. She rose and went to the window to open the shutters and draw some air into the room. It wasn’t far—three or four steps—though it seemed to take forever. She felt as though she was walking in slow motion, the way a jester might walk in one of the festivals at the castle. It was a struggle to get to the window.

Even so, she was careful not to wake her father. She remembered pausing to catch her breath, then opening the shutters slowly, stopping just short of the spot where she knew they would creak.

Through the open window, moon-beams had cast a soft glow around the hut. She paused a moment to breathe in the air and let her heart stop pounding. In the distance, outlined against the sky above her she could see the towers of the Monastery of St Cuthbert and St Chad, the high belfry a finger pointing toward the heavens, and beside the monastery the lower walls of the Convent of St Elizabeth, then the town, and nearer, to the left, the foregate where the sheriff’s armory was kept. Beyond the wall of the convent, the river made a ribbon in the moonlight, a silvery snake that bellied up to the bluff on one side, then stretched lazily across a woven tapestry of fields and farm houses, curled down beside another sleepy village, dropped rapidly into a steep ravine and finally in the far distance laid the tip of its tail in a lake that glistened silver in the bright moonlight.

Elspeth turned to go back to bed. The hut was still lighted by the dying embers of the fire in the fireplace where she had cooked the evening meal for herself and her father. On the table was the long-bread she had set out for their breakfast. She could hear her father’s breathing behind the curtain of the canopy bed, heavier than usual, but regular and deep. Elspeth had always taken comfort in her father’s night breathing. Its regularity had the effect of a clock—like the tower clock at the church. Her father’s night breathing measured off the night almost without variation. Everything was as it should be. She thought about the creature, the dragon. Would it come back?

A breeze came in through the window, ruffling her hair, then her bedclothes, then the curtain on her father’s canopy bed. Within the bed behind the canopy there was a soft glow, like the embers of the dying fire in the fireplace, but it ebbed and flowed in a rhythmic pattern, regular and deep like her father’s breathing. The only thing like it she had ever seen was the pile of coals in the forge at the blacksmith shop, flowing and ebbing with the movement of the bellows. She held her breath and slipped quietly in for a closer look. With one hand she steadied herself against the bedpost, and with the other she drew back the canopy—ever so gently—to see what made the glow in her father’s bed.

What she had seen was not her father at all, but a large animal, sleeping. She had watched in silence as the animal rolled over. It looked like a huge lizard, but larger than any lizard she had ever seen. Its upper back was covered with scales, like a trout maybe, which gave way to plates beneath on the creature’s underbelly. Its back was dark green, with an iridescent shimmer of yellow, but beneath, in the underbelly, the green lightened until it was almost white. The creature had four legs, the hind legs large and strong, the forelegs very small, with claws instead of feet. Each of the claws had three large talons, each talon the size of a man’s finger.

On its back were disproportionately large wings, too large for the body. From the size of the wings, Elspeth guessed that the dragon was still young, a pup or a kit, she did not know what to call it. A creature with wings of that size would need to be much larger in the body or the wings would be unworkable. Even so, the dragon was not small. She had the impression that if it were stretched out to its full length it might be larger than she was. On its head were two pointed, scaly ears, and large bulges where its eyes protruded slightly. The eyes were glazed over now in sleep, but were still fully visible behind thick, clear membranes. There was something familiar about the eyes, and Elspeth later remembered thinking that it might be the way they reminded her of a lizard she had once brought home from Alcera’s garden.

The glow came from the dragon’s nostrils. It was very calm, very steady, flaring and ebbing rhythmically as the creature slept. In some ways the consistency of it was even reassuring, like her father’s night breathing, but had that hard smell about it, like tar. Elspeth backed up slowly, not taking her eyes off the sleeping creature. “Father,” she said once again, calling out quietly as she had done before.

Fletcher lay in his bed and tried to picture Alysse in his mind’s eye, but all he saw was what he could remember of the girl she had been when she died—forever nineteen years old, forever gone. He fingered his bedclothes, imagining they were the cloth of her skirt. He searched his memory for the smell of her hair and the look of joy he had seen in her eyes on their wedding day. He laid his head back on the hard pillow, imagining so vividly Alysse’s lap. He listened for her breathing and the soft rustling movement of the straw in the ticking of the mattress.

Such imaginings were more difficult now. So many years had passed, and with each year it became harder and harder to remember. He had heard that there were artists who could draw or paint an image of a person that preserved the memory perfectly, but he had never seen such an image. Such extravagances were only for the royals and the landed gentry, or those among the merchants who had money and had traveled outside the shire, but they were not for poor men like archers.

The only things even remotely like such images he had ever seen were the stained windows and paintings and statues of the Blessed Virgin in the monastery church where the villagers gathered for mass, and he sometimes stood transfixed before the statue of the Virgin, imposing what details he could remember of Alysse’s face and shape upon the holy artifact until the mother of God and the mother of his child would blend together into a single image in his mind. He sensed that somehow this was a sacrilege, but both women were holy to him and he had continued the practice nonetheless, telling no one. Sometimes he wondered how the one woman could have given birth to so blessed a child while the other had birthed only this agony of a daughter for whom he could find no place in his broken heart.

When he could bring himself to pray he asked that the Virgin would carry word of his grief to his wife, but those were rare times. He seldom found the words for prayer.

In recent years there had been another source of agony. As the girl grew she had taken on her mother’s features—the line of her jaw when seen from behind, the way she held her head as she looked at the sunset, the sound of the mother’s laughter a distant echo in the laughter of her child. At night it was the same. Sometimes Fletcher gazed at the girl’s form, sleeping in the other bed, but he saw the form of Alysse there, too, and he wished she were sleeping beside him in his own bed, so that each night before he fell asleep he had to force himself to remember that it was only Elspeth’s face he saw, this imperfect imprint of her mother, this face of the girl who had forever taken his Alysse from him. She owed him something for that.

❧

The following day, returning home from his rounds, Fletcher entered the town through the north gate, dismounted, then led his horse past the town-side gate of the monastery and the south transept of St Cuthbert’s Church. If he were not distracted by his concern for Elspeth, he might have entered for a moment’s reflection and prayer, or at least to pause before the church, if only to draw comfort or guidance from the nobility of its architecture and the sacred art with which it was adorned. He wondered how many of the villagers had noticed that he often paused to mutter prayers before the statue of the Blessed Virgin. Tonight he passed in silence.

St Cuthbert’s Church was the jewel of the monastery grounds, a soaring structure of solid granite, with a wonderful red and white rose window overlooking the high altar in the chancel, scenes from the lives of Jesus and the Holy Apostle Paul displayed in six pairs of stained glass windows with pointed arches running down the ambulatories on either side of the nave, and a fine set of Old Testament scenes set into the north clerestory windows high above, so that even in the dimmed and slanting evening sun the stone walls often seemed pierced with colored light. Outside on the spires were finely carved grotesques and gargoyles, intended, the priest said, to ward off demons and dragons should they appear.

If the church was the jewel of the monastery, the altar was the jewel of the church. It was high, gleaming, its paneled triptych gilt in gold. Set into the panels were shallow carvings of biblical scenes, the crowns sometimes set with jewels. The altar was the pride of both the monastery and the congregation of townspeople and villagers. Whether it was due to the general superstition of the peasants, or the fact that Warwick was far enough from the beaten path that the bolder sort of bandits picked more accessible targets, or were simply afraid of getting caught, it had been a wonder to him and a tribute to Sheriff Ranulf that the sanctuary was unlocked day and night, quite open and unguarded, and yet the jewels of the high altar of St Cuthbert’s Church remained untouched. Perhaps they were protected by the unseen hand of God.

Through an open doorway in the transept Fletcher caught a fleeting glimpse of an old monk, silently lighting candles in preparation for Vespers, and then, deeper within the chancel, the niche that held the statue of the Blessed Virgin. In the moment it took to take in this scene his mind flashed back with its usual dogged persistence to the single most momentous occasion of his religious experience—the funeral of his beloved Alysse. The flickering candles brought it all back. The coffin, the funeral march, the monks in the choir, Father Athanasius’ funeral homily preached all in Latin but translated for him by one of the brothers, the deep and unsatisfying sense of hollowness within him when it was over.

All of this transpired in only that moment it took to walk past the open doorway of the church. He continued through the foregate, released the horse to one of the sheriff’s grooms, and headed home. The path took him past The Pint and Ploughman, where he stopped for a drink to clear his head.

“Ale.” That was all he said to Sarabeth. She brought a flagon in silence. He failed to notice the way she fussed with a stray lock of her hair in the thin light of the doorway, or the bustling physicality of her body as she reached across his right shoulder to set the flagon before him on the table. There were so many troubles that required his attention, not least among them the emerging difficulty with his daughter, who was approaching womanhood with a petulance unbecoming a peasant girl in the year of the Lord 1253.

If nothing else, the goings on in the king’s forest told him the girl was hiding something from him. He could abide a strong-willed child, but not a liar. Then there was her obstinate refusal even to talk about the marriage he had arranged for her with that boy in Aberystwyth. There was the dragon the had appeared in the hut. Beneath it all, tugging strongly at the corners of his mind, was that troubling business with the wolf pup, with its flickering rapid-fire images revealing a deeply disturbing connection with Alysse, just as everything he did or said was connected in one way or another with Alysse.

When he looked up finally from the flagon of ale, Sarabeth was seated opposite him at the table, watching him intently. She was a large, rawboned woman whose ruddy complexion and long braid of thick red-gold hair reflected her Scottish ancestry. For all the energy she usually exuded, Sarabeth was also capable of that deep inner quiet of a woman accustomed to waiting. The world had not rewarded her wait, so that even though she was now past her prime, Sarabeth had known neither the pleasures of marriage nor the joys of motherhood. What maternal instincts she possessed she lavished on the patrons who frequented her brother Willem’s pub for ale, man and woman alike, but among these she paid special attention to those who were without the care of a wife at home, such as John the Fletcher who in his loneliness had occasionally sought out her help or advice about what to do with his daughter, Elspeth.

“So, John,” she said, eyeing him with more than her usual circumspection. “What’s troubling you tonight? You’ve got that look on your face again.”

He did not move, but simply looked at her. She always made such a fuss when he was there.

“Don’t you know I worry about you so?” Sarabeth was saying. Her voice rippled from her, deep throated and smooth like aged brandy, set off against the hubbub and clatter of the pub by the rolling lilt of her native Scotland.

“I was thinking about a funeral mass a lot of years ago,” he said.

“Alysse,” she clucked. “You’ll not move along from that now will you?”

He sat silent as she talked.

“Aye,” she said. “I remember it well enough myself. Quite vividly as it happens. You alone on the mourners’ bench. Willem and I sat in the transept. I held the baby, remember? I remember pulling my blanket up around her against the winter chill. Sister Bertrice sat there beside us, remember?”

Fletcher drained the flagon. Sarabeth was back in a moment with a pitcher.

“Could I tell you something, Sarabeth, just between the two of us?” he said. “I remember watching you there. I even thought at the time that except for your face, it could have been Alysse sitting there, holding the child before its baptism.” For a moment the scene flashed across Fletcher’s troubled imagination. The baby dressed in a white baptismal robe. The candles gone, the church festooned with banners. The chant, while serious, would have been full of hope.

Somebody at the back of the pub called for Sarabeth’s attention. When she returned, she sat down beside him. “The funeral. What time did it begin?”

“I remember the bells tolling Sext.” Sarabeth’s question thrust him headlong and heart-long back into the nightmare. In his mind’s eye he saw a faceless acolyte whose solemn ministrations with the incense brazier had filled the air with the thick sweet smell of a church in mourning. Then came the coffin, a simple lead-lined wooden box that had been made by one of the monks in the monastery woodshop. He remembered wanting to crawl inside it, to join Alysse in the sweet oblivion of the box, but could not because he had to care for her baby. Behind the pallbearers filed the monks of the Monastery of St Cuthbert and St Chad. Then the other acolytes, the sacred scriptures, and last of all Father Athanasius. Athanasius carried an incense brazier on a silver chain, singing the words of the liturgy in high-pitched Latin, swinging the brazier systematically in the direction of the various sectors and rows of the worshippers, blessing them with the heavy smells and sounds of the Christian burial rite.

“Father Athanasius officiated, remember?” he went on.

“Who can forget Athanasius, God rest him?” said Sarabeth. Athanasius had been the priest at St Cuthbert’s for as long as anyone could remember, since the turn of the century even, until the inevitable infirmities of old age had forced him from his pulpit. Fletcher looked around the hut at Willem’s patrons. There was hardly a man or woman there whom Athanasius had not baptized. He had buried most of their parents, and some of their husbands and wives, and sadly one or two of their children. It had been Athanasius who had officiated at his marriage to Alysse, and Athanasius who had baptized their child.

But on the day of Alysse’s funeral, Fletcher thought, it had also been Athanasius, acting the role of pallbearer to his hopes and dreams, who had announced Alysse’s death and in this sacrament prepared her soul for paradise, even as later on in the spring it had been Athanasius who had consigned her body to the earth.

“Yes,” said Fletcher. “Who can forget Athanasius?”

“Don’t remember his sermon, though” said Sarabeth. “That much was forgettable.” She laughed a little, awkwardly.

“They were all forgettable,” John replied. “He preached in Latin. Remember?”

“Aye. Not like Father Thomas.” The new priest occasionally lapsed into English.

“Want to know what he said?” asked Fletcher, suddenly needing not to be alone.

“Don’t tell me your talents extend to Latin, now.”

“I’ll tell you if you’ll fetch another phitcher of ale.” He was unaware that he had slurred the word “pitcher,” but was alert to the blurring of the images in his mind’s eye. The flames of Willem’s candles, only moments before bright and crackling in the evening light, were now softening into an unreliable glow. In Fletcher’s mind’s eye, Willem’s candles illuminated the movements of the monks in the church, and in their unsteady flickering light the shapes of their habits blended into huge ghostly shadows cast up against the walls of the chancel.

Sarabeth poured another drink. “Now,” she said. “Tell me how you know Latin.”

“Never said I knew Ladin,” said Fletcher. “Said I knew what Fatherr said in his sermon.”

“Alright, then, John,” said Sarabeth. “Tell me that, then. But first tell me how you know.”

He drank from the flagon, setting it down hard on the table. “One the monks transslted, doan remember which one.”

“Brother Constantine?” she said. “He sat next to you.”

“Righ, Constantine. It was Constantine translated Athnasius’ serm’n for me. When th’ other monks filed into the chancel, Constantine slipped in beside me on my pew. Whispeered everything right in my ear.”

Fletcher was recalling the way the funeral entourage had processed down the north ambulatory, behind the final pew, and then up the center aisle. The pallbearers had set the coffin on a bier that had been placed at the point where the transept intercepted the nave. They then continued on to seats in the chancel, each one in turn bowing to the crucifix that hung above the high altar. As they mounted the short stairs to the chancel, unexpectedly Brother Constantine had broken ranks and had taken a place beside Fletcher on the mourner’s bench. He was a small man, and his movements within the church had hardly been noticed by the other mourners.

All of this recollection Fletcher had kept in a tight bundle inside him, as if by clinging to the details he could keep them from fading in his mind. But tonight, what time and an aging memory could not accomplish was quietly being turned into a finished work by the powerful numbing effect of the ale.

“Probly this monk—Constantine—had hell to pay in Shapter.”

“Now that you say it I remember the prior’s frown!” said Sarabeth. Prior Robert had more than frowned; he had indicated his displeasure with a heroic scowl. He had been a much younger man then, and freshly installed in his office had been distracted from his duty to offer pastoral care by an unusually large preoccupation with his new authority.

“He give a look that wuld’v had the devil doing penance,” Fletcher said, “but Constantine only smiled and nodded and settled in quiet.”

“Tell me about the sermon,” said Sarabeth. She poured him out another flagon of ale.

He concentrated hard on what she had said. “Lemme think a minit,” he said. He reviewed the entire stock of his memories, running through them the way he might inventory a shelf of crossbows, but raggedly because of the ale. He remembered being thankful for the presence of another warm body beside his own. On every prior occasion he cared to remember, the space beside him at mass had been filled by Alysse herself, now reduced to a body in a coffin not more than a foot or so before him. He remembered almost reaching out to touch it, but shrinking back when Constantine whispered something in his ear too quietly to make out.

Then he started to cry, unashamedly because this was Sarabeth who would not think ill of him no matter what he did, and because the opinions of the other patrons did not matter to him.

Athanasius’ funeral sermon had been reduced to a short homily, no doubt because Alysse, while well known and loved in the village and town, had not been a woman of consequence. A short homily was adequate for the wife of a peasant; the husband would not understand the Latin in any case. Athanasius had not reckoned on Constantine translating, but that little mattered.

“Athanasius said that we ought not to grief as those who got no hope.” The tears were coming freely now. Fletcher did not care that Willem and the other patrons were watching him, maybe listening to what he said. “He said that Chrishians who die baptized and shriv’n are raised incorrubtible in the fin’l resurrecshun.” Fletcher thought about Alysse’s body, encased in its lead-lined coffin, already in that process of decay that is the end of all living things. Surely the hope of a bodily resurrection in paradise did much to allay the grief of those who are left behind. Even as his memory grew fluid and imprecise, still he was clear enough to know that Father Athanasius’ words had been intended to ease the old priest’s own doubting heart, his boney fingers raised in oratory, his own thick cough reminding the parishioners that the decay of the grave sometimes swallows us even while we live.

Then Sarabeth was saying something to him, but he couldn’t make out what it was. He tried to stop the flow of images and confusions and tears to concentrate on what she was saying, but he couldn’t do that now either. Sarabeth had slipped around on his side of the table and was cradling his head against her shoulder. “It was wrong, Sarabeth,” he said. “Shoulda been me, died.”

“But God has his reasons, John,” said Sarabeth, stroking his black hair with her hand. He thought that was what she said. Maybe something else. “Shhh, now, God has his reasons.”

It wasn’t God’s faull, he thought. It was the faull that girl, that child. The girl did this to Alysse. “Lea me ‘lone for a few minutes, will you Sar’beth? I wanna thing thiss through.”

Sarabeth disentangled herself from him and gently laid his head down across the table, and there, with the softly swirling sounds and bittersweet smells of The Pint and Ploughman, John the Fletcher dreamed the never-ending dream of Alysse.

He dreamed of the old priest stepping down from the high pulpit. He dreamed of Brother Constantine whispering that he would remember John and the baby in his prayers at Vespers, and then of Sarabeth bringing him the child. He dreamed of Alysse’s coffin being taken to a crypt in the apse to await interment after the spring thaw. He dreamed of the other deaths that winter, other bodies consigned to temporary crypts in the apse, and of their burial in the sacred monastery grounds after a special funerary mass when the thaw made it possible to open up the ground.

Then he woke up, startled, clear only that he was in little condition to move. Willem and Sarabeth were locking up. He stood and warily made his way across the floor toward the door of Willem’s pub.

“Better let us come along,” said Willem. “We’ll get you home, and in bed too.”

Willem slipped Fletcher’s right arm over his shoulder and Sarabeth came along the other side. With his free hand, Willem picked up a torch to light the path. It was dark already, and would be darker still when they made the return trip back to their hut.

As they made their way along the path, Fletcher tried to engage them in conversation.

“Iss a sinn?” he asked.

“Is what a sin?” asked Willem.

“What idiot priest said,” said Fletcher, taking some clarity from the cool breeze that ruffled his hair and kicked up the branches of the trees. “Iss a sinn to grief?” What Fletcher did not bury, could not bury, was his sense of confusion and loss over this woman whose life had made his own complete. The priest’s words, intended in their own way to comfort and encourage, had left him confused about the very grief they were designed to allay. And so he wondered if it was sinful that he still grieved. If it was, then it was a sin of which he would not repent; he had no choice but to live with this guilt.

“If not a sin, then a shame,” said Sarabeth, as she shifted her weight to get a better grip. She slipped her arm closer around his waist.

Willem was more philosophical. “If you want an answer to a question like that, you should ask the idiot priest.”

But Fletcher knew there were many questions he would not ask the idiot priest. Where was Alysse now? Did she miss their baby? Did she miss him? Where is the justice of a God who would take a mother and leave the child? What was the sense of that?

❧

When Elspeth got home, the hut was empty and in disarray, as though her father had left in a hurry. The gate was unlatched, and the goose was in the lean-to tearing open one of the sacks of grain that had been stored there for grinding into flour. Inside the hut there was a half-eaten loaf of bread on the table, and her father’s bed had been slept in but not made. At an earlier time in her life she would have found this worrisome, but lately, as the sheriff had come to rely more heavily on her father’s skills as a watcher and hunter, he had been called to service on increasingly short notice, and had had to stay sometimes late into the night. He left word when he could, but that was the exception rather than the rule. He could leave no note because he could neither read nor write.

What Elspeth did at such moments varied with her mood and her level of hunger and whatever she read in the subtle clues her father might have left behind. Usually she simply waited until her father got home to prepare their supper. Sometimes she nibbled on whatever fruits or vegetables were at hand to curb her appetite, but sometimes, when the appetite began to gnaw with a sixteen-year-old’s peculiar voraciousness, she simply went ahead and cooked, keeping her father’s portion hot on the fire until whatever hour he got home. It was an imperfect system, but in the absence of written communication it kept them both fed.

Elspeth corralled the chickens and then scattered pieces of the bread near the chicken coop. She caught the goose and returned it to its pen. Inside, she made her father’s bed, swept the floor, and then started a small fire to warm the hut while she waited for her father. The sun set. The evening breezes turned chilly.

She started supper, chopping the ingredients for a thick gruel and setting them on the pot to boil. Still she waited. Still no sign. From time to time she returned to the pot to stir the gruel so it wouldn’t burn on the bottom. She was stirring the pot when she heard the sound of voices on the cart path outside. Willem. Sarabeth. Her father. Willem’s voice and Sarabeth’s were clear and distinct—she would have recognized them anywhere—but the voice of her father was muted and slurred and it took a moment for her to realize who it was. She thought at first that her father must be sick, and she had the door open before they arrived, and had pulled a chair back from the table and thrown back the covers of the canopy bed in case they needed that instead.

Her father was muttering something about “idiot priest” and “phurgatory” and “‘Lysse,” all of which told Elspeth nothing at all except that the man was not sick, but drunk. Very drunk.

“I have him now,” she said to Sarabeth and Willem. “I’ll see his bar bill is paid in the morning.”

The three of them moved Fletcher to the bed and Elspeth pulled off his shoes and lifted his legs up onto the bed. Fletcher was sweating heavily now, and Elspeth was aware that he might be sick. She turned to look for a bowl. When she turned back, Willem and Sarabeth were closing the door behind them. She heard something that sounded reassuring—not to worry about the bill, all would be well—but was called back to the bed by the sound of her father retching into the bowl.

Then she heard sputtering at the fire. She turned back quickly to see that the gruel had boiled over and was spilling out in sporadic bursts and pops, threatening to douse the flame. Elspeth grabbed at the pot handle to stop the spilling and more importantly to salvage what she could of the gruel. It was a quick unplanned urgent gesture, and in her hurry she neglected to pad her hand against the heat. The searing pain of the burn was instantaneous; she later discovered that it had left a long red welt across three of her fingers and a part of her palm. She jerked back, upsetting the tripod that held the pot over the fire, falling backward against a chair. The gruel spilled out onto the floor, making a large steaming mass across both the floor and her dress, giving her another shot of pain, this one less intense but distributed over a wide area on her left leg. Worse, she twisted the leg as she fell.

Her father was upon her then, lunging at her, stepping into the steaming gruel, his fists flailing. Elspeth tried to get to her feet, but the twisted leg did not support her weight. Her father brought a chair down hard across her back. The chair splintered into six or seven large pieces, all of them sent flying or sliding across the floor. He slipped and came down hard on his right knee in the steaming mass.

Then it was over. The gruel, thinning as it spread, had cooled very quickly into a terrible but harmless mess. Her father, sick from the pain and the alcohol managed only to raise himself enough to fall backward onto the bed. Elspeth stumbled outside, and for a while sat spread-eagled by the door catching her breath and trying to think through what she should do next. Then, when the searing pain again demanded her attention, she struggled up and stumbled to the well, where with her unburned left hand she drew up a bucket of cool, clear, healing water.

She went and sat down in the lean-to, pulled wheat sacks around herself for warmth, and waited for either sleep or morning, whichever might come first, to provide relief from her confusion and fear.

It was in one of those fitful, intermittent periods of sleep that she found herself disturbed by the excited cackling of the hens, themselves disturbed by something on the roof. She was sure she was dreaming, but even in her sleep when she held her breath and listened carefully she caught the barely audible sound of a presence, and then a heavy movement above that started on the roof and ended near the chicken coop. She thought at first that a sudden gust of wind might have rustled the leaves in the trees beyond the fence, but the trees closer to the house were absolutely still, and she could see by the light of the half-moon that the movement in the yard was different than wind—closer to the ground, steadier, more substantial. A low growl anchored her attention around the side corner of the house.

In her dream she pulled in her arms and legs, frantically scrambling to hide herself behind the wheat sacks, and then when she had her head covered too she watched out of the triangular opening of the lean-to.

The creature was in the barnyard this time, moving across the tight space where the pathway came close to the corner of the hut. Its tail was stretched out and its spines raised, the way a porcupine might raise its quills when it felt threatened. It had grown. The wings were a better fit to its body now, and she had the impression that it could probably fly. Its eyes flashed, and another low rumble welled up within its throat. The rumble was short and raspy, the sort of sound that would have developed into a roar had the creature been larger and more mature. To Elspeth the rumble was enough. The fear was the same, and it was there from the moment that the dream began. This time the curiosity was gone, and the fear presented itself as her only emotion, intensified and made concrete by the throbbing welt on her hand and the scalded skin on her leg. The creature was something from a nightmare, and the fear gripped the girl instantly.

She rubbed the ache in her back where the chair had hit. Almost reflexively she reached for a metal rod that was leaning against the corner of the hut, not really knowing if such a weapon would be of any use against a creature like this one, but realizing also that doing something was better than simply waiting for the animal to attack. As she did so, a blast of flame shot from the creature’s nostrils. She threw the rod. She had not been burned, but was now terrified. She turned suddenly, and scrambled for the space behind the stacks of supplies that were stored in the lean-to.

She cried out for her father like before, but this time she was aware that her father, drunk and sick in the hut, would not come to her aid. The cry, oddly, seemed to be enough for the moment. The creature retreated. There was a long silence, punctuated in the distance by the barking of a dog.

When she woke up she tried to recall the dream. It had all seemed so real, as real and vivid as the throbbing pain in her hand and leg. If her father had not told her that the creature was the stuff of dreaming, she would have staked her life on the fact that it was real. Whatever she might have thought about the reality of the dragon, she knew that the fear at least was real. She prayed for this nightmare to pass, and then, slowly, in what seemed like an answer to her prayer, she felt her spirit calm and her heart slow. Her mind moved to other things. She thought vaguely of the saying she had once heard at church—weeping endures for the night, but joy comes in the morning.

But the danger had passed and there was nothing more to be done. She nestled down deeper into the grain sacks and went back to sleep.

Fletcher’s head felt like it had been filled with cotton soaked in creosote, and then split open with an axe. He tried to spit, but his mouth was dry, and nothing came except for the flat acrid taste of tar. His knee throbbed, and below the knee there were scalded places where the skin had been burned. None of this made any sense to him, and he sat for a long time trying to clear his head.

He tried to reconstruct what had happened during the night. The hut was a shambles. One of the chairs was broken. The fire pit and the tripod had been overturned, and ashes were scattered across the floor. Mixed in with the ashes a mess of cold gruel had spread out on the floor in the shape of Warwickshire. The girl was gone.

Then slowly the story came back to him in broken, fragmented images, shattered images like a stained window he once saw in Warwick that had cracked and then shattered under the strain of a small earthquake. He had come home drunk. Must have stopped at The Pint and Ploughman, but there was no memory of coming home. The girl had spilled the gruel, and may have burned her hand. It was impossible to tell what had happened first. He seemed to recall saying something harsh to the girl, something about Alysse.

After that, the memory mired in a fog as thick as the spilled gruel.

When Elspeth woke again she was huddled into the farthest, deepest corner of the lean-to. She ached from the cold and the cramped position in which she had fallen asleep. She reached back and forced her hand against the small of her back, pushing hard to try and warm the muscles. A spasm ran through her right leg. Through the opening she could hear the chickens, and see the sun, and smell the dew that was heavy on the grass. She pulled herself up and out, working her way over the pile of wheat sacks and supplies.

The leg was a problem, and she found a stick to use as a makeshift crutch. In the middle of the yard she found the metal bar she had thrown at the creature the night before. It was fully fifteen feet from the opening of the lean-to. I must have thrown it hard, she thought. She was thankful that she had not hit one of the animals.

She did not go back into the house because she had no idea what she would find there. Her father had been drinking, and there had been an accident with the fire. Clots of gruel had spattered up onto her dress, and there was a mess of it dried on her leg. Her hand was now throbbing with the burn from the handle of the pot. A thick angry red line ran diagonally across three of her fingers and the palm, where the welt was already beginning to blister.

She went to the well and tried to turn the handle with her left hand, hoping to draw some fresh water for the welt, but also to delay going into the hut. She could not go to Levente’s shop with the spattered gruel on her clothing. Besides, the welt would make it hard to do her work, and it would raise questions she would not want to answer. This dilemma, while painful, suddenly made one thing very plain: She was in danger, and it had something to do with her father, and with her unbidden dreams of dragons.

She considered her options. If it came to it, she could hide in the bivouac in the king’s forest, but that would only serve in an emergency. A better plan would be to stock it as a way-station, a place to launch a run for Coventry, or maybe Wales. If she ran, would she take the horrors of the dreams with her?

“What happened to you?” It was Alcera’s voice and it was coming from behind her. Elspeth jumped, startled and for some reason embarrassed, as though she had been caught doing something shameful. She turned to see the master seamstress walking along the path. The older woman turned into the yard, closing the distance between them quickly. “You look like you’ve been in a fight, Els. What happened?”

“I . . .” Elspeth started, but was interrupted. She was aware of deep blushing, ashamed again. The feeling of having been caught at wrongdoing filled her head. She couldn’t think clearly.

“She spilled some gruel last night by accident, Alcera.” Her father was speaking from the doorway, answering Alcera’s question before she could. “When she went to stand up after supper she tripped and fell. Spilled gruel all over herself. It’s not serious,” he said. “Isn’t that right, girl?” he said, looking for confirmation.

“I’ll be alright,” Elspeth said. “I slipped and fell. I caught my hand on the tripod and spilled everything. You should see the welts on my fingers.” She held out her hand for Alcera to see. “I was just coming out to the well for some more cold water.”

“Those welts look angry, Els,” said Alcera. She turned the hand over, opening the fingers gently for a better look. “You take the rest of the day to see to them. Be especially careful with the blisters because if they break, the sickness will get worse. We’ll look for you tomorrow.”

“Thank you, Alcera,” said Elspeth. “I’ll do that and see you tomorrow.”

“And keep off that leg,” said Alcera, as she continued her journey.

Elspeth limped inside and helped her father clean up the mess from the night before.

❧

After the death of Father Athanasius, the Church of St Cuthbert had a new priest whose preaching had caught the attention of both civic and diocesan officials because of its emphasis on the importance of duty, always a safe topic now that Thomas Aquinas was baptizing Aristotle’s Great Chain of Being and making it the basis for a just and ordered society. Human over animal. Husbands over wives. Parents over children. Civic authorities over private citizens. Church over state. Thus Aquinas asserted a fresh claim for the final authority of Holy Mother Church over all things.

Following the Eucharist, Father Thomas replaced the elements, and turned quietly and mounted the high pulpit to deliver his sermon, the movement of his robes causing a faint crackle as he climbed the steps. He was a tall, thin man with angular features and a nose that might have been broken in a fight. What always struck Constantine was Thomas’ fingers—they stuck out of his hands like sticks, with large knots where the joints would have been.

Thomas was both a priest and a brother of the monastery itself, where he had lived in cloistered seclusion since the day he had taken vows fourteen years past. He therefore answered to two ecclesiastical authorities—Prior Robert, who managed the affairs of the Monastery of St Cuthbert and St Chad, and Bishop Stefan, whose See at Coventry oversaw the whole of Warwickshire. While Prior Robert rightly supervised the business of the monastery and acted on its behalf in affairs of the world, there were rumors that Thomas chafed at the limits this imposed upon him, and had even chided Robert in private over any steps he might have taken that Thomas thought unwise or theologically lax. Robert, the rumors said, endured Thomas’ remonstrations with patience and good humor, and some of the monks thought privately that by doing so he better prepared his soul for heaven.

A simple man himself, Father Thomas was thoroughly imbued with the spirit of the Church, and Christendom was for him the encompassing principle upon which the whole of life turned, ecclesial and secular and familial, so that the very concept of authority outside the life of faith was quite impossible for him to conceive.

Whatever his theological reasoning, and however troublesome for his fellow monks, Thomas assumed full autonomy within the monastery church, and therefore also over the spiritual life of its congregation. He wore his ecclesiastical authority like an oversized habit—he smothered himself in it. It was his brother monks who chaffed beneath it like a hair-shirt.

It was the final Sunday of June, and within the congregation—hosted by the monastery—there was a contingent of military men lately returned from the Holy Land. Father Thomas had chosen for his text St Paul’s wonderful admonition to the Romans to obey the civic authorities, thinking that in this one text he could elaborate a whole complex of ideas showing that obedience to authority was God’s right and only way.

As always, Father read out the text of scripture in Latin, Jerome’s Vulgate having served the needs of the devout for nearly a thousand years. Most of his sermon was in Latin, too, which left it unintelligible to the villagers and townspeople, but the old priest’s Latin was not fluent and in his great fervor for the gospel he occasionally lapsed into English. Thus the villagers heard the Word of God. The prayers, the hymnody, and the scriptures, all were sung or spoken in Latin, but then entangled within them were threads of exposition in English. Invariably these moments of enlightenment came when Father was in high fervor, so that they tended to be shouted rather than spoken, driven forward and made compelling, not by any inherent logic, but merely by ferocity and passion. As confused as this style of preaching could be, when the villagers listened intently they could sometimes make out the lines of the old priest’s thinking. Between these moments, when the priest returned to his Latin drone, they had ample time to ponder the ways of God and man. For those among them who were unlettered this was the closest they might come to hearing the very Word of God.

“‘Omnis anima potestatebus sublimioribus subdita sit non est enim botestas nisi a deo. . . Let every person be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except from God,’” Father said abruptly, “so it says in our text. But why is this so?” He raised a crooked stick finger and directed it out generally at the entire assemblage of villagers and townspeople and monks who sat before him. “It is because the heart of man is desperately wicked, an unreliable guide in matters spiritual and temporal. It is this wickedness, this terrible fallenness, that tears apart all that is sacred and holy. Because of this wickedness, God has ordained authorities among men—to control the appetites and discipline the passions . . . .” Then he lapsed again into Latin.

As Thomas droned on, Fletcher’s thoughts drifted to the sheriff and the order of the shire, and the battle with the Danes that had cost his father his fingers and thus also his trade as a huntsman. Surely his father had not paid this price in vain, but had paid it in the name of order. If the order of society was God’s great plan for Christendom, obedience was good and right, but not only, as the priest had said, because it controlled the human appetites, but more importantly because God was a God of order and because God had made society itself, with its inherent structure of king and nobleman, villein and servant and slave, each in his place.

Fletcher quietly patted Elspeth’s shoulder, indicating in that non-verbal language fathers share with daughters that the priest had made a good and important point. He whispered the name, “Meurig ap Gwynedd,” but Elspeth shrank back slightly, allowing his hand to slip unheeded to her back.

To Fletcher this line of reasoning made sense, not because as a father he wished to be obeyed, but because as a sergeant in the service of the sheriff he had seen first hand the misery caused by masterless men who did not wish to be accountable for their actions. It was not a matter of who was right, but of who held the properly constituted authority—parents over children, baron over villein, king over baron, and Holy Mother Church over all.

“. . . Holy Mother Church over all,” Father continued, not knowing that his language had been anticipated by this quiet man in the back of his congregation. “It was disobedience that had caused the fall of Adam, and even now brings wars and famines, pestilence and plague, all visible signs of the evil and fallen state of man! Disobedience was the original and primal sin, the very thing for which God drove Adam from the garden!” By this time the priest was red-faced, nearly shouting out his sermon. What was the word he had heard? Diatribe. That was it. Diatribe.

Fletcher listened and thought about Elspeth and grew as red-faced as the priest, shamefully aware that he was the father of a disobedient daughter. Surely God would punish them both, the girl for her open rebellion against the law of God, and the father for his failure to teach his daughter this primary lesson of the Christian faith!

“Even this is indicated in the natural order, in the relation between animals and men,” the priest continued. “For the higher animals are those that can be trained in the service of king and country, while those animals that cannot take training are the very ones that prey upon man, that destroy our crops and eat our farm fowl.”

Fletcher thought about the wolves he had hunted and the damage they had done to the villagers’ livestock. He thought about the moles and rabbits and rodents that burrowed their ways into the villagers’ vegetable patches. He thought about the dragon. Surely the priest was right!

Elspeth usually listened to Thomas only sporadically, if at all. Thomas was a man of God, but he was hard to hear, just as the scriptures were hard to understand, and she wanted and believed she deserved clearer evidence from the maker of heaven and earth. A bird outside flew against the rose window with a nearly silent thud, and clouds now cast varied patterns of light and dark against the clerestory windows above her. The rivering light through the stained glass brought the biblical images to life; they captured her imagination and carried her away to the Holy Land. A willing conscript, she was. Perhaps she might even take the Cross and join the crusades if she could convince her father to teach her the skill of archery. She could dress as a boy! Maybe some nobleman on crusade would be willing to take along a high spirited lad with skill in archery and the ability to read.

“And so also,” the priest continued, “when the Holy Apostle Paul instructs wives to obey their husbands, and children to obey their parents, and slaves their masters, he bases that admonition on the primary structure of the created order itself. For to rebel against parents or masters is to sin not only against God, but also against nature. In the same way, he means for those same husbands and parents and masters to train up their wives and children and servants to the holy estate of obedience, and in doing so to raise them from the lower form to the higher, and thus to save their souls!”

Elspeth gazed at the ceiling, hoping for a breath of air, but the church was fully enclosed so that not even the movement of the ushers along the ambulatories provided relief. The women fanned themselves. A not-so-subtle change of pitch in Father’s voice caught her attention, and she suddenly sat up and tried to focus.

“‘Filii oboedite parentiyus vestrin in domino . . . Children obey your parents,’” Father said, “for in obeying your parents you learn the important lessons about obeying the civil authorities whom God has placed over you.” Then came more Latin.

Like a ship dragging anchor, this final crescendo of the sermon caught her attention and held fast. So far as she was concerned, it might as well have been the whole of the sermon, and despite her growing sense of independence she found herself filled with consternation and shame because she knew, as her father knew, that she had within her an unrepentant heart and an unbroken spirit. For days now she had thought about running, about leaving him alone in the world, and then she had thought about killing him. It was a tearing of whole cloth, to think like that. He had been sent away from his home as a boy; he had been bereft of his wife as a man. Could she be the one who took his final human contact from him?

But in the last months, since she had stolen the wolf pup, he had grown angrier, more preoccupied, and more unpredictable. Something within him had soured like milk, and she could hardly avoid thinking that in some way it was her fault.

“He who spares the rod . . . . Chastise and discipline the soul . . . . Thus he draws us to Himself . . . .” The words echoed in Fletcher’s head as the mass concluded. Such words were all the more painful because he had tried to train Elspeth into a life of obedience, but the girl had been headstrong, like a wild animal, following her baser nature. Now he had that idiot Levente and his wife to reinforce every bad trait in the girl. The harder he tried, the worse she got. Fletcher knew that despite his most serious efforts he had failed miserably in this foremost of a parent’s duties—failed the girl, failed God, failed Alysse.

The mass ended. He rose and brushed past the girl in a hurry to get out of the church. Elspeth, limping, had to struggle to keep up. She caught up with him outside in the narthex. They walked home slowly then, impeded by her limp.

Fletcher did not say anything to the girl, and instead tried to piece together the key points of Father Thomas’ rambling sermon. From this sermon, or more precisely, from what he understood of it, John Fletcher had in his own way resolved to do better by his daughter. He who spares the rod . . . . Chastise and discipline the soul… Thus he draws us to Himself . . . . Chastise and discipline the soul . . . . Thus he draws us to Himself . . . . He who spares the rod . . . .

❧

Several weeks passed. There were fewer problems with wolves in the shire and the talk in the village turned to other things. Fletcher found himself reluctantly thinking about the wolf pup, but not understanding what had happened, or why it had happened, and that had led to a period of deep brooding. The episode with the wolf pup had unnerved him. He had seen something within himself he did not know was there, as real as if he had lived through a waking nightmare. In his darkest moments it all came back. The images, the blood, the wrenching of the pup’s neck. All of this had happened only in his mind, but still it horrified him. In reliving the nightmare, he saw himself, too, clearly for once—angry and enraged and as wild as this animal he had almost killed with his bare hands. He did not like it that he had had to beat the girl, but he did not know what else to do to curb her rebellious, headstrong spirit. His treatment of his daughter—but how else could he treat her?—spoke to that same something within him he had not known was there, and he felt dirty and disgusted with himself, like the floor of the sheriff’s stable.

These things he kept within his heart, torn apart as it was. One entire afternoon he spent walking alone along the back roads and forest paths of the shire. As he walked he pondered who he could share this struggle with. The priest? He had committed no sin. Elspeth? It would not do to let her see him question himself. The sheriff? It would not do to let such a man think less of him. Aelric was excluded, too, because he did not trust the man’s discretion. He thought about the disturbances in his daughter’s spirit, which also seemed to be growing, and these disquieted him even more.

When the sheriff’s man Caedmon asked him to account for his time, he said merely that he had been keeping an eye on the king’s forest.

At first he could not say whether he was troubled more deeply by the images that surrounded the incident with the pup or the appearance of the dragon, or by the growing disturbances in the girl herself, but in time this difficulty resolved itself as concern for his daughter. The girl was the one who had drawn the dragon into the shire. More than anything else this is what filled his thoughts as he trudged home to Wharram late that afternoon.