Chapter 8

Clouds slipped past above in silent shrouds. The sun hid his face from the world; Tom wished that he could do the same. He tugged the lead, coaxing the donkey onward past the killing place. The wind played chilly tricks with the corpses of the men strewn about him in the courtyard, rustling their clothes and making it look as though some of them were only just stirring from their slumbers in the grass.

Tanchus leaned against the gatehouse wall, trimming his fingernails with a wicked-looking knife. “Now, you tell me, Hamon. Why didn’t you just kill this here boy last night?”

“You can go on and kill him right now, if you like.” The crossbowman busied himself with inspecting the action of his weapon, cocking it back and firing it without a bolt. “When you’re done, toss him on the cart with the rest of the corpses, and then take ’em all down for burying, and when you’re done with that, go clean out the dung chutes, since that was what the boy was going to do next.”

“Oho! I see now.” Tanchus stepped forward to poke Tom in the belly. “So, how’s it feel to be a slave? Eh? How’s it feel?”

Tom knew better than to answer. He twitched the lead and walked on beneath the raised inner gates of the castle, leading the struggling, straining donkey and the cart loaded down to bent axles with the piled dead.

The clops of the donkey’s hooves hollowed out into echoed taps on the cobblestones that paved the tunnel. Tom found that there was no need to ask the men to raise the outer gate, for it cranked up as he crossed through the tunnel, with grunts and jerks and shouts from above of “Heave, boys, heave!” Another cart trundled in off the drawbridge, smaller and in even worse repair than the one he drove. A troop of four peasant women pulled it by hand, their heads low, their forms huddled, flanked by a pair of Rutters bearing swords and wearing thoroughly ugly smiles.

The heavy, recessed door drew back in the side of the tunnel. “About time, you hags!” Aldred Shakesby stuck out his head. The scar on his face twisted one side of his mouth into a smile that the other side did not match. “What took you so long? Did you have to grow that barley from the seed?” His laughter made his speaking voice sound almost musical by comparison.

One of the women stepped out before the others, heavy of hip and clothed in a housedress dyed a rusty-red. “Where are our men? Where are our husbands, our brothers and sons?”

“Shut your noise.” Aldred wore a jack of heavy leather, studded with iron knobs set two fingers apart. He turned to call down the tunnel. “Tanchus Vidler, Hamon Ruddy, get over here! Search ’em for weapons, then lead ’em in.”

“Now then, my lovelies, now then!” Tanchus rubbed his hands as he approached the women. “Arms out, let’s make sure this ain’t no trick!” He took to his task of patting them up and down with great relish.

Tom stopped his cart on finding that one of the corpses had slid partway off the back and lay dangling with his arm dragging on the ground. He laid the man out straight again, sickness churning at his stomach, then took a deep breath and led the donkey onward.

Aldred leaned in to sniff at the contents of the villagers’ cart. “Now, that’s the stuff! There ain’t two handfuls of decent food in this whole castle. You there, what’s your name?”

“Rahilda Redfield.”

“Redfield, right—wasn’t your husband beadle of the harvest this year? How much barley have you got in stock down in the village?”

“Why don’t you come down to the village and count it yourself?” The big young woman restored a sack of barley that had fallen from the cart, placing it amongst baskets of parsnips, field beans and sourcress. Spatters of blood dribbled off the back of the cart from the severed throat of a slaughtered pig.

Tom nudged the donkey forward, drawing up before the brigands and the village women, and, finding no space to pass by, stopped in front of them with his head hung low. The women turned to look at him; the shriek that came next doubled and redoubled in the confines of the tunnel. One of the women, her hair half gone to gray, shoved her way past the brigands and threw herself down beside Tom’s cart.

“Ell. Elmer! My sweet boy.” The old woman trembled. She caressed the broken head of one of the corpses. “He was my son, my son, my only son.”

Tom stared down at the cobblestones. He wanted more than anything in the world to kneel with the woman and speak some word of comfort in her ear, but he knew that he could not, that he had no friend amongst anyone there. No one in the castle there cared a thing for him—the women because they thought he was one of the brigands, and the brigands because they knew that he was not.

“Mum.” A bony young woman put her arms around the old one, using the embrace to drag her up again. “I know it’s hard, I know it is, but we’ve got living folk to look after. That’s for us to do. Come now, Mum, come now, come away.”

The old woman leapt up, then leapt to the attack. “Murderers!” She sprang at the brigands, trying to wriggle out of her daughter’s grip. “Monsters! Murderers! What have you done?”

“You stay your hand, Diota Byley.” Rahilda stepped forth to block her way. “We’re in deep enough trouble as it is, so don’t dig us in any deeper. Brithwen, you hold your mother back, now.”

“Mum!” The thin young woman grabbed her mother by the back of the dress. “Hold, Mum, please!”

Diota Byley wrenched and wrestled, but could do no more than swing a fist an arm’s length away from Aldred’s amused face. “Murderers!” She collapsed on the flagstones of the tunnel.

Tom kept his face turned away, hoping to escape both the wrath of the women and the notice of the brigands. In amongst the loud and angry echoes, a voice whispered in his ear. “How? How can you do such things? You’re just a boy.”

Tom glanced aside. The youngest of the village women stood at his shoulder—in truth but a girl on the edge of womanhood, with free-flowing auburn hair and a heart-shaped face anyone would call pretty, even through the redness and the tears.

“I’m not one of them.” Tom dropped his voice as low as it would go, hoping that his words would be lost in the tumult. “My name is Tom. I’m from Elverain. I came here with John Marshal.”

The girl’s thin brows went up. “John Marshal? You mean Lord Tristan’s old friend? Is he here?”

Tom had no chance to answer. Rahilda knocked him out of the way, then fell to searching through the bodies on the cart. She rounded back on the brigands. “Where is my Donston? Where is my husband? Where is he?”

“If he ain’t on that cart, and he ain’t lying dead in the courtyard, then let’s just say our employer’s found a use for him.” Aldred scratched his nose. “Aye, best leave off thinking of him altogether.”

“Some of you might find yourselves new men for marrying, and sooner than you’d think!” Tanchus seemed to find himself the height of wit. He scratched his chin, sizing up the women before him. “Let’s see, let’s see, who’ll I choose? Hmm, you there, with the curls. How old are you?”

The auburn-haired girl went white and tried to hide behind Tom’s cart.

“You keep away from my sister!” Rahilda seemed to forget her talk of caution. She sprang up and charged, and might have made it all the way to Tanchus had the crossbowman not been ready.

Hamon Ruddy pointed his loaded crossbow at Rahilda’s chest. “Just you stop right there, if you don’t want this boy to cart you down to the graveyard with the menfolk.”

The women let their anger give way to despair. Diota Byley sat on the cobbles, weeping with such force that it sounded as though she would choke, while Rahilda collapsed against the tunnel wall, striking at it in hopeless fury.

“Come now, all the talking’s done. I’m not going to stand here listening to your wailing.” Aldred Shakesby made a show of turning away. “Get to the kitchen, and get our dinner started.”

“But here, give us that first.” Between them, Tanchus and Hamon got the ale barrel out of the cart. They staggered off together, crab-walking the barrel through the tunnel.

Aldred flicked a hand. “Kitchen’s along the far side, behind the hall at the back.” He opened the side door up to the gatehouse. “Get in there and get to work. And you there—boy! You think those bodies are just going to get up and walk to their graves all by themselves? Get on with you, or I’ll have you hanging from the walls by your innards. Move!”

Tom led the donkey onward, clopping over the drawbridge and out onto the castle green. The sun threw off its cloak of cloud and shot its fire off the mountains that ringed the vale around him. Streams traced down through stands of spruce and fir, touching and flowing one into the next until they gave rise to the river that rushed through the meadows behind the castle, filling all the valley with a whispered lullaby. Had the circumstances of the day been any different, the beauty of the place would have made him stare about in happy awe.

“Jumble!” Tom whistled on the castle green, and then again once in the encircling trees. “Jumble, it’s me. You can come out now. Come back. It’s me.”

No answer came. Birch and alder leaned this way and that down the course of Tom’s travel, on a road that nearly bogged out time and again around the skirt of the castle hill. Fields spread out into the forests surrounding, inroads of axe and plow into a carpet of elm, ash and oak gone bare for the winter soon to come. Women and children stared at him from field and garden, but none of them approached.

The road rose out of crackgrass and bog, up by turns through meadows and then copses of trees standing naked in the chill. Huts ringed the bulging end of the road, their gardens seeming to edge right up to the banks of the river. The graveyard stood on high ground, in sight of water but not so close as to risk a flood. The shallow pit opened up by the brigands was not nearly wide enough.

Tom let the donkey off the harness to graze. He took up a shovel abandoned near the pit and got to work. Every now and again, someone from the village crept from the trees to watch him, but when he turned their way, they always slipped back out of view.

“Jumble!” Tom tried whistling again, in between digs of his shovel into the earth. “Jumble, it’s me! Come on, boy, come on out.”

The whistle came back down alone from the mountains. The donkey shot a look at him, chewing on a mouthful of long grass, then snuffled farther on toward the trees.

Tom took a long look at the faces of the dead as one by one he laid them out in the grave. He found Tibalt Hackwood’s hat lying in the gory bottom of the cart and replaced it on his head before he arranged him next to his uncle Osbert. He made sure that all the men lay on their backs, faced up in a row toward the boundless sky.

A question came to him then. He would not have been able to say from where, if anyone had been there to ask.

“I will.” He spoke his answer to the dead, down on one knee with the butt of his shovel to the earth. “I swear to you all that I will.” He stood and started throwing in the dirt over the row of blank and staring faces.

It felt as though the chilly wind blew against the sun, slowing its progress through the sky and drawing out the pain of the day. Tom’s arms ached to numbness from hauling the bodies of the village men up onto the cart, most of whom weighed more than he did. It took three trips up and back from the castle to bring them all down to their common grave. By the time he had laid out the last of the dead, he could hardly see where he swung his shovel in the falling dark.

“The dung chutes are over there, boy!” Tanchus leaned forth to shout as Tom passed by the entrance of the great hall. Bawdy songs and torchlight filtered through a crack in the door behind him. “Hop to it!”

Tom turned in the direction of his next task, but before he had gotten far, he stopped before something he had not noticed the night before, the one thing in the courtyard that looked like it was well made. A statue stood moonlit on a cleared spot of ground, fashioned in the likeness of a stallion rearing up on its hind hooves, the most handsome and noble horse Tom had ever seen, carved from the stone of the mountains with skill, long patience and love. The great forehooves were raised to give a thunderous blow, the shapely head thrown back in proud fury. Letters ringed the pedestal on which the statue stood. Tom bent to look at them, wishing—and not for the first time in his life—that he could read.

“It says ‘Juniper.’”

Tom turned to find Rahilda standing behind him, a sack of barley balanced on her shoulders.

“It used to be one of those standing stones you see about, but Lord Tristan had it carved to look like his old horse,” said Rahilda. “Just like Tristan to spend a fortune on that, and make a mess of the work on his walls.”

Tom touched the cold stone flanks. “It’s beautiful.”

“My sister tells me you’re not with that bunch.” Rahilda nodded up at the brigands on the walls around them. “But if you’re not, why didn’t you run when you had the chance?”

Tom stood up. “I could ask you the same thing.”

Rahilda shrugged. “There are folk here—children, elders—who could never get away. I won’t leave them.”

Tom let that be his answer, too.

Rahilda started walking. “My sister says you know John Marshal.” She glanced over her shoulder, seeming to expect Tom to follow.

Tom caught up with her in two long strides. “I grew up on the farm next to his. He’s the closest thing to a father I ever had.”

“Where is he now?”

Tom held out his hands and let them drop. “Gone.”

Lord Tristan’s great hall stood more than twice as high as a house, its sharp slate roof coming to a peak within a few feet of the battlements. Windows ran its length, cut back into the timber, all of them shuttered. The kitchen stood at its north end, in shadow from roof and wall.

Rahilda went inside, then emerged a moment later with a bowl of porridge, barley and field beans all in a glop. “Here. Take this down to Lord Tristan. They’re holding him in a cell beneath the watchtower.”

Tom took it and turned to go. He looked back. “Is there anything you want me to tell him?”

Rahilda thought it over, then sighed. “Tell him he should have kept a better lookout on the world.”

Tom hurried off across the courtyard, one hand over the bowl to preserve its warmth. He mounted the steps to the thick wooden door of the tower, found it barred, and so banged on it.

A slot drew back in the door, and a pair of eyes glinted. The door opened, and a man with big arms and a bigger belly leaned out. He was dressed in a shirt of chain armor that clanked against the keys at his belt. “That slop had better not be for me. I saw them carting that pig in here, and I want some fresh pork.”

Tom ducked his head, almost bowing to the man. “This is for the prisoner.”

The jailer picked up a lantern from the room’s lone table and held it out. He jutted his double chin at the stairs. “He’s down there.”

Tom took the lantern and descended. The lancet top of the arched stone staircase brushed through his hair, even though he crouched as he walked. He felt out each of the dank stone steps before he committed his weight. He dared to hope, just a little. He had not sat listening to the tales of Tristan all his life as had Edmund and Katherine, but he still knew that he was approaching the presence of the greatest hero the world had ever known.

“Who is there?” A voice called from beyond the last stair, past the iron bars of a cell and out of the darkness beyond.

Tom reached the door of the cell at the bottom of the stairs. “I’ve brought you some food, my lord.” He held up the lantern to see within—the cell was rather large, a room of the same size and shape as the guardroom above it. A pair of raised stone slabs stood in the center, each of them large enough that someone could lie down on it. Funny paintings ran the circuit of the walls, surrounded by the sort of squiggly symbols Edmund liked to read. Piled sacks littered the floor, beside a fold of carpet on an old table and a chair painted red and blue with two broken legs.

“My thanks to you, then.” Someone stood up in the shadows, a man taller than Tom and twice as wide at the shoulders. “I do not recognize your voice.”

Tom darted a wary look up the stairs, then dropped to a whisper. “My name is Tom. I am not with the brigands. I came here from Moorvale, with John, the Marshal of Elverain.”

“John has come? He is here?” The man felt for the pillar and stepped closer, coming into the light of the lantern.

Tom let out a gasp, and almost dropped the stew. Hope guttered and died within him.

The man was old. Lines cut deep into the skin of his face, and though his shoulders were indeed grand, they were also stooped. His hair gleamed white, save for two dark streaks in his beard, one on each side of his mouth. Tom took all of this in afterward, for it was the man’s eyes that transfixed him in shock and understanding. They were set and shaped in ideal proportion, spaced exactly wide enough and perfectly even, but a thick, milky film covered the whole of their surface.

The prisoner raised a hand while seeming to gaze into the empty space above Tom’s shoulder. “I am Tristan.”