Waldroup scowled at McCrae, then faced Clacher. “Lachlan,” he said, “I wasn’t even—”
Clacher only repeated, “Day’s end!”
Waldroup finally bowed his head in capitulation and shook it slowly. “Fine,” he told Thomas. “Day’s end. I guess if you’re training with me, at least you won’t be off by yourself somewhere they can snatch you, too.”
VI. Learning the Bow
True to his word, end of the day every day unless the rain was so torrential as to be blinding, Waldroup trained “Fingal” in the art of the bow, using broken scaffolding planks for targets. They practiced in the quarry, which, because of its closed shape, kept misaimed arrows from disappearing into the landscape. And despite Clacher’s threat, they usually had an audience of three Selkirk boys, who were occasionally allowed to draw a bow themselves. Iachan had never returned and that trio now never went anywhere except together.
By fall’s approach, “Fingal” had learned to hit the plank with nearly every shot. He proved to have a gift with the bow: He saw the shape of every arrow’s flight before he let go, and it wasn’t long before his hypothetical arc and the true one aligned almost every time. More than that, it seemed that, once shown something, Thomas couldn’t forget it. Waldroup proclaimed him an excellent target archer. “Now you have the distance, we’ll see how you handle firing on the run. Master that, and you’ll truly be formidable.”
His extraordinary memory also assisted in studying McCrae and the other craftsmen as they wielded mauls and chisels and scrapers to shape the mullions and intricate trefoil designs at the top of the openings, and to smooth the curves defining the arches until they almost mimicked folds of drapery. While the masons mixed mortar, passed hods up to the scaffolds, worked the treadwheels and lewises, Thomas practiced detailing in imitation of their work, using cracked or split pieces that lay scattered about, duplicating delicate tracery in cast-off chunks of stone. Amazed, Clacher proclaimed, “If t’was carpentry, I’d name ya Joseph.” It was as if he’d been shaping stone since he was five. Thomas told an increasingly dumbfounded Waldroup that he thought his empty mind was just hungry to be filled up with everything.
Transforming as both bowman and mason, he was changing in other ways as well.
His fifteenth summer had seen a growth spurt. He stood now a full head taller than the spring day when Waldroup had found him—shorter than the unnocked bow, but nearly equal with Waldroup. They were close enough now in height and color that they might have been mistaken for a father and his sinewy, shaggy-haired son. The boy Waldroup had found among the graves had transformed.
In those five months, the new abbey had transformed, too. Its entire ambit was framed now, the south aisle built higher than the running mold around it, and higher than the lancet arches of the first four of its windows. When it was done, it would have eight of them.
The south transept extended higher than the door, and the east entrance had risen nearly to the height of its rose window. Clacher predicted that, with a few more men, they might finish the abbey in less than the ten years King David had required. He hoped to hire six more over the winter. But work would go slower next spring as they came to rely completely upon scaffolding, treadwheels, and lewises to place every stone.
It was on one cold autumnal day that a party of five influential men and women arrived at the abbey to behold its progress. Thomas, working with a brace and shell bits to grind small pock marks in the stones for the pincers of a lewis to grasp, glanced up and saw them on horseback. He was wearing a heavy shoulder cape with the hood up against the cold, and so half of his face remained concealed. It covered his look of shock.
“The helpers of the elven,” Waldroup had called them, and here they were—the very ones who had taken Iachan. Had they been hunting for him?
The lead man wore a dark beard. Close up, Thomas saw that it was gashed on one side by a florid scar. One of the women was she who’d ridden past him as he crouched in the dark. She wore a wimple and the same headband, glinting with precious gems. She sat loftily, and held her fur-lined cloak tightly around her as she looked them all over. Thomas quickly bowed his head and pretended to concentrate all the more upon his work with the brace.
Clacher had left whatever he was doing, and walked past Thomas to intercept them. “Good sirs!” he called. “Alderman Stroud!”
The name was like a slap. It rang in his ears. Memories that had eluded him for all these months broke open. He heard his father call out the same way: Alderman Stroud! Welcoming the man to their home . . . He could see home now, its stone walls, tapestries, the overhead beams. His mother, and Innes, his sister. He remembered them, knew them, knew his family’s name. Rimor de Ercildoun. And this man, with the scar through his beard, had been a friend of his father’s, or had pretended to be, in order to select Onchu for the elves.
Where was Waldroup? At the quarry probably or somewhere in-between with the cart and the oxen. The enemy had arrived, and he was nowhere about. Thomas looked for a direction to escape. If only he had his own bow. . . .
The alderman was telling Clacher, “We were passing on our journey and wanted to see how the abbey is progressing.”
He sighed. So they weren’t here for him at all. Thomas lay down the shell bits. He sat still and listened.
Clacher had launched into a windy declaration of the magnificent design of the new abbey, praising the skills of his group of workers—how he had personally selected each of them, and how they hoped to complete the work in less time than even the king anticipated. He groused that he could certainly do with more workers, but, as they all knew, skilled masons were scarce.
The alderman replied, “You’ll see some soon enough, I wager, now that the Battle of the Standard’s resolved. Archbishop Thurstan raised an army, if it’s all to be believed, and despite a determined campaign, the king lost against Stephen. Everybody’s being sent home, save for Earl Cospatric. He’s dead.” He tittered as if at some private joke. “This winter will see any number of men returning, and none singing a paean to 1138, the year when King David was repelled.”
Thomas’s eyes went wide. He’d not thought to ask what year it was and nobody had said. But how could this be? It was 1135. The Year of Our Lord was one of the few things that stuck in his head back before the Queen had touched him. He knew the year with absolute certainty.
“Now, please, lead the way. We want to see how the transept is coming,” Alderman Stroud said as he dismounted.
Clacher escorted the quintet past where Thomas sat upon the block of stone. From beneath his hood, he watched the alderman, followed by the woman and the one who had to be the taller man from the ruins, and another woman unfamiliar to him, her dress as green as summer. Then a third man walked up from behind him, and Thomas couldn’t help glancing around. A heavy figure wearing a gray tunic under a heavy red cloak with gold-trimmed shoulder cape. His belly half obscured his belt. He slowed as he neared. Stopped.
The oddness of it made Thomas look up.
The reddish beard was thick. In the wind, where everyone’s cheeks were pink and chafed, his remained so colorless it seemed no blood reached the skin. His expression remained almost vacant, as though the muscles of his face connected to nothing any longer—almost as empty as the last time Thomas had seen him, floating away in the river.
Baldie stood there, eyes as shiny and soulless as buttons, staring down at him, seemingly perplexed. More jowl and fat than at the river, but unmistakably Baldie.
Within the beard his mouth worked, as if uncertain of what he wanted to say. His voice grated like an old hinge. “Know you, do I?”
Thomas lowered his head and shook it vehemently. He kept his hands gripping the block of stone so as not to tremble.
In the distance, Alderman Stroud called, “Balthair, come along!”
Thomas stared down at Baldie’s brown leggings and muddy shoes. If they stepped toward him, he would flee, but finally, and unsteadily as a drunk’s, the legs walked off toward the abbey, followed by the horse.
Thomas lifted his head only enough to watch Baldie’s red-draped back as he joined the alderman and the others. The five followed Clacher inside the abbey walls.
Setting down the brace, Thomas slid off the stone.
This surely couldn’t be. Baldie was dead. How had they resurrected him? What had they turned him into?
That this Baldie nearly recognized him terrified Thomas. He wanted to find Waldroup’s bow, string it, and kill them right now. But how would he ever explain to Clacher and the others what he’d done? Those five might conspire with the elven but they would die like anybody else, and he would be hanged for it. Who would listen to his claim that one of them was already dead, drowned? Even Alpin couldn’t save him from being hauled before a reeve. In any case, Waldroup had taken the bow with him that morning. He wouldn’t be using that.
Thomas paced around the stone. His head threatened to crackle with lightning, and he knew what that meant: a fit was coming. It had been so long, he’d thought himself free of them. But a fit here, now, and all of Stroud’s party would realize who he was. He didn’t dare remain.
He struck out, walking swiftly, not daring to run, around the eastern end of the abbey, away (he hoped) from where Clacher would regale the visitors with stories of the abbey’s construction—off in the general direction of the quarry. He was just going off to help Waldroup. Was Baldie paying him any mind? He had to hope not.
He grit his teeth, balled his fists, fighting back the imminent seizure, muttering, “Not yet, not yet, not yet” in rhythm with his quick walk as he climbed the heights beyond, until he was halfway down the other side of the hill and out of sight. Then he gave in, let the lightning and the roaring fill his head. He dropped onto hands and knees and drowned in the blanketing wave of it. He thought he heard himself shout, bark, no idea what words if any poured forth.
When he came to his senses again, it seemed nothing had changed. Minutes not hours had passed. The light was the same or near as. He wiped at the foaming spittle at his lips, then unsteadily he got up. No one was watching. No one had heard him. All right, then.
