5

“I wouldn’t carry such a load for you, Simon,” said the young woman as she hurried up the road.

“Not for Simon,” said Plegmund, “but maybe for some other lucky man under Heaven.”

“Oswulf said you stopped by,” said Gilda, “but would not linger to talk with me.”

“What else did he tell you?” asked Simon.

“My brother was in a strange temper.” She took Simon by the hand and led him to the tall hedge beside the road.

“Meet me tonight, Gilda,” said Simon, “under the big chestnut.”

“Tonight?” asked Gilda coyly. “This very night I believe our cat is due—she’ll have six kittens or I’m a mule.”

“Please,” said Simon.

“Whatever is wrong with Oswulf, after all?” she asked, as Simon continued to hold on to both of her hands. “He says he’ll never bear the sight of you again, but he will say nothing of why.”

Oswulf was given to quickly changing moods, and often made sweeping statements he would later forget. For his part, Simon did not want to put the day’s events into words at all. He found the effort painful as he said, with as much elegant simplicity as he could muster, “The royal marshal has acted, with fatal results.”

“Roland Montfort?”

Simon nodded.

“What has he done?”

“Roland has killed Edric.”

Gilda released his hands.

“Stuck him through with a javelin throw,” added Simon, hating the words as he spoke them. You see, he chided himself, how much better it is to keep quiet?

“Edric,” she said at last, “was going to bring me a woodcock.”

“No other man but Roland,” said Simon in a tone of matter-of-fact despair, “could have killed anyone at such a distance.”

She weighed the implication of this statement.

“You were there, were you, Simon?”

Simon’s shame was personal, in that he had not fought for Edric’s life, and made worse by the implication that as a half-Norman scion he might approve of such butchery. Simon was fully aware that he and Gilda were speaking in English, the language of hill and river, but not the language of government.

Simon kept his answer short. “I was.”

She made no farewell, no promise to see him that night. She was there one moment, and gone the next.

Her sudden absence struck Simon as further proof that the day was being warped out of true by some errant star or planet.

“I’ve penned my goats and placed a double watch all night, both of my sons,” said Plegmund. The robust peasant had the merciful sense to speak softly, of a gently distracting subject.

“Goats?” Simon asked, only half aware what was being discussed.

“I’ve penned them up.” Goats were thought to spoil a woodland—deer did not like to browse where goats had been grazing. “Grestain, the marshal’s sergeant, said he’d kill every last kid,” added Plegmund, “if I didn’t look to them.”

Plegmund said this not in a tone of complaint, but as a workingman talking about a force of nature, relentless and age-old. There was, however, a weary, cordial challenge to his remark. Simon was reminded how potentially violent the royal spearmen were, and how powerless a half-bred Norman lord would ever prove to be.

“How is Caesar?” asked Simon.

“Oh, old Caesar’s been eating nettles, my lord,” said Plegmund with a laugh, “and kills everything he pisses on.”

Caesar was the prolific and fierce billy of Plegmund’s herd, gray and powerful, although blind in one eye from chasing a well-armed Norman squire several summers ago.

“We could use an English king like that,” said Certig.

It was one of those blunt remarks Certig came out with sometimes—all the more since his injury. And it could be considered treason, punishable by death.

As though to underscore the danger of such talk, a knot of horsemen appeared, four of them, cantering easily up the road, Grestain the marshal’s sergeant foremost, clad in the blue-and-gold livery of the royal court.

“Hurry,” urged Simon, “get this cart up and over the hump.”

It was the way of the marshal’s men to try to join in with such tasks, helping to push carts or rescue cats, so that the local people might feel more friendly and inadvertently blurt a word of disrespect against the king. Such armed men had been known to help themselves to local produce, and even someone of Simon’s good name would be hard-pressed to quell a band of greedy guardsmen.

They were too late. Grestain called out a greeting, and common good manners required an exchange of pleasantries.

“You have overloaded your cart,” added the marshal’s man, speaking heavily accented English. The oxen turned their yoked heads toward the snorts and sneezes of the horses. One of the bovine behemoths shook his head, whether in dull fellowship or because a fly teased his eyes, it was hard to tell. The yoke shifted back and forth, and the cart creaked.

“Oh, yes, indeed I have, my lord sergeant,” agreed Plegmund.

“I might almost wonder, my lord,” said Grestain, turning his attention to Simon, “if your folk are shipping weapons under their oats.” The sergeant had a broad, weathered face, and a solid-looking body, like a man who had been put together by a saddle maker, and constructed to last a long time.

Simon knew all the marshal’s men by sight and reputation. For years they had ruined stiles, defiled wells, and set animals alight in the name of amusement. Repairing the damage they had caused over the seasons was a chief burden on the manor’s earnings.

“Ha-ha,” exclaimed Plegmund, his forced laughter sounding nothing like the real thing.

Simon said evenly, “My people are loyal subjects, Sergeant.”

His tone was deliberately and coolly dismissive, and Grestain was quick to say, “Of course, my lord.”

Grestain was a sandy-haired man, with sun-browned features and yellow eyes. Simon knew him to be Roland’s aide, a West Country man trying to rise in a world of knights who preferred dull imported wine to the local cider.

“I herded oxen,” the sergeant said, “when I was a boy. I have never been happier.”

“The ox,” said Simon, judiciously, “is an agreeable beast.”

When a lawman spoke, he was collecting information. Even the lord of a manor had to speak with care. Oxen certainly seemed like a safe subject, in Simon’s view, and subject to no controversy, but Plegmund’s nearside ox was a brute of spirit, and had once swung its massive head at a traveling flute player.

Grestain and two of the sergeant’s men dismounted and heaved their weight against the cart, and together with the others they powered the load over what had to be a very large slumbering giant. This, too, was typical of the king’s men, thought Simon. An imperious bunch, they often wanted simply to be liked.

Only afterward—with farewells given and taken, and best wishes for a pleasant afternoon—did Plegmund confide to Simon in a whisper, “I have an ax under my load, if they’d searched.”

“One ax is not a rebellion, Plegmund,” said Simon with a smile. He was glad Grestain and his gang had ridden off, and he was eager to be home.

“And I have that sword I bought from the Bremen town squire,” added Plegmund. “And that spear I found out by the old wellhead and mended myself last winter. And one or two other blades I keep by me, you might say, against danger.”

“Danger, dear Plegmund,” said Simon uneasily, “is exactly what you will discover.”

“But I hear of trouble everywhere,” said Plegmund. “Coming trouble, my lord, and all of us unready.”