chapter SEVEN
The wind blew cold, white clouds casting shadows over wood and field. Cows turned their backsides to it. The breeze brought tears to my eyes.
The ride back was not long enough—I wished I could forestall my return for many hours. As I rode behind Hubert I could feel the tense strength of his small frame. The horse tossed and pranced, turning his head to gaze at the two of us, showing the white of his eye.
Hubert struggled, scolding the mount in a quiet voice, and this caused the animal to kick his hind hooves so that I had to hang on to Hubert to keep from tumbling into the road. “Three days I’ve been riding Winter Star,” said Hubert. “Look how he tries to turn his head around and bite me!”
It was true that Winter Star was trying to snake his muzzle around, baring his strong yellow teeth. What I feared more than the warhorse was the glance of the knight who rode with us, the bearded fighting man with the scarred mouth.
“Who is he?” I asked, softly, directly into Hubert’s ear.
“He is Rannulf,” said Hubert.
I knew the name.
When we reached the courtyard of the hall, Wenstan watched while Hubert tended Winter Star. Rannulf remained on horseback and watched for a while, and then when I glanced back he had vanished.
With Rannulf’s disappearance, Wenstan whistled a minstrel tune under his breath, a pretty tale, the story of a man who felt love for a woman he could never see, who lived behind a wall. “The white thread and the red thread,” sang Wenstan. He did not stutter when he sang.
Winter Star grew calm under the stroke of Hubert’s comb. I tried to make my question sound casual. “I thought Christians were forbidden to speak to a man like Rannulf.”
Hubert jumped back as the horse swung its head around to eye the two of us. The air rang with the sound of chain mail under the fettler’s hammer, blacksmith’s smoke drifting over the courtyard. “No one talks to him. And Wenstan says we should not speak of him,” said Hubert.
“He killed five men in the famous tourney of Josselin, didn’t he?” I persisted. Tournaments had been condemned by the church. Father Joseph, who preferred homilies on Mary feeling the Babe leap within her womb, had said that such mock battles were an offense to Heaven.
“Wenstan says six knights were killed that day,” said Hubert. “A game-fight that became a battle. Rannulf has been ordered on Crusade by the priests, but he has not yet decided to go. Wenstan says he cares nothing for his soul.”
To have no regard for one’s soul was like caring nothing for one’s mother—it was impossible to imagine a man so callous or wicked. But some knights had a reputation for beating women senseless, stabbing drunks, running down eyeless beggars, all to expend their idle energy. My master Otto had said this was why the Crusade was required, not merely to free Jerusalem from the Saladin’s armies, but to send fighting men far from the marketplace.
“Sir Nigel lets him share the roof with us—” Hubert fell silent as Wenstan approached, singing softly about the red lily and the white.
Wenstan wrapped my foot in yellow linen, cross-binding it so I could stand and stride with ease, but all the while I wanted to ask about this knight who defied the power of the Church. The sword Wenstan brought out from the dark interior of a side room was long and tarnished, with a grip of cured cowhide. He extended the pommel in my direction, and I hesitated.
Wenstan nodded impatiently.
Still, my hand held back.
“If you look like a squire,” said Wenstan, with difficulty, “if you look fighting-able, you may win our lord Nigel’s heart.”
I had never held a sword, and I was surprised at how well it fit my hand. And yet, when I gave a cut at the empty air, I felt the strangeness of the weight, my body out of balance. Wenstan gave me a smile and shook his head.
Someday, I swore to myself, I’d use a sword to whisk an Infidel’s blade from his fist, chop off the hand, the arm, and the head. With Nigel, Rannulf, all of them, looking on amazed.
Winter Star grew stoical at my touch, as I dabbed tree tar onto a cut on her knee, caused, Hubert said, by the horse running through the woods. “The horse was hoping I’d be brained by a branch. Which I was, nearly.” He had me feel a bruise like a dove’s egg at the crown of his skull.
I sat at a stone wheel, working the pedal myself, grinding sparks from my age-gray sword. The housemen accepted my presence among them, as I took my time, happy to have my hands at work. I mended a girth-strap, to sling under a horse’s belly, as I understood it, and hold the saddle where it belonged. I reworked a new buckle for a hasp for one of the pleasure-women’s ivory lockets.
The household brought me metal work, ivory crosses dangling by a frail link, tinker’s pots cracked after only the second boiling. All the servants save Wenstan were to travel to other masters once Sir Nigel left on Crusade. Only a few would remain to husband the place in its emptiness and keep beggars and outlaws from taking roost.
It was understood by all that to leave for Crusade was to travel to one’s death—few Crusaders expected to return. There was sadness as well as eagerness to make things right in the air all afternoon, into the evening. The word was about that a moneyer’s apprentice and a hammerman was available, no work too fine. I blushed to mend the love lockets of the brazen ladies, keeping my hands alive so my thoughts could sleep. The cook’s carving knife needed a new rivet, a medallion of Our Lady needed a hook-and-hook, an easy way to attach a necklace, and strong, if the work is well wrought.
Late in the day, when it was almost too dark to mend the bucket handle in my hands, Hubert leaned into the smith’s shop and said, “Sir Nigel sends for you.”