He walked on, clumsy and slow, in the direction of the quarry.
The year was 1138. Waldroup confirmed what the alderman had said. Three whole years had somehow spun by without him. He was fifteen, but he ought to have been eighteen. The green fire had swallowed him and spat him back out in a different time.
“Lucky for you it did,” Waldroup told him. “It’s probably the reason you’re still alive. If that very alderman and your drowned friend bestride the land now, you can be sure they’d have done for you if they’d caught you on the day.”
Was his soul imperiled? Shouldn’t he make some sort of confession to one of the monks who dwelled in the priory? Maybe get some blessing to repel them?
Waldroup advised against sharing the story with anyone. “Any one of those monks could be like your Alderman Stroud. If you’ve something to say, take your troubles up with God directly, as He won’t share it with anyone. See it this way: Right now no one’s looking for you. Or me, while we’re about it. And I’d prefer they didn’t have cause to. Now, come on, help us get that slab into the cart and then we’ll head back to the abbey and have a look at them. I’ve never yet beheld a dead man who talks and rides.”
But by the time they returned to the abbey with their quarried stone, the five visitors had gone. Clacher had abandoned his fawning attitude. In his opinion, they had come here just to pass some idle time, and hadn’t really cared about how the work was going at all. “Very odd people,” he said. “All they wanted to see was the north transept, what’s hardly built and failed to impress. Didn’t care about our work otherwise, and nary one smile between ’em, like strangers who had arrived together by accident.”
When the first snow came, the workmen changed tactics. Instead of cutting and placing more stones, they piled a layer of straw and thatch on top of the highest row they had finished to protect it from moisture, and then lay one more row of stones on top of the thatch. Once that had been accomplished, there was no more quarrying to be done, no more work.
The abbey was going into hibernation for the winter.
VII. Ercildoun
The high street was a swill of snow and mud and rotting foodstuffs as the two men trudged into Ercildoun from the south.
Nothing much had changed in Thomas’s three-year absence. Wood houses and buildings were laid out on both sides of the high street, one and two stories, in some places so tightly packed as to form a rampart of house ends with shared walls or, at most, small lanes between, leading to the narrow backland strips called rigs that extended out behind each house. Some rigs contained separate sties and stalls where byres weren’t built onto the back end of the houses; on other plots it was kilns and ovens—fire sources and cooking hearths separated from main houses and shops to protect the entire town from accidental conflagration. On this cold day their smoke combined to haze the air blue. The street smelled of wood, bread, hops, manure, pottery, and hot iron. The mingle of smells shifted as they walked toward the bowyer’s shop near the top of the hill. Nobody paid them much mind. They were dressed like any other men in their caps, heavy cloaks, and loose trousers.
Thomas counted windows, doors, footprints in the slush and people about. He watched for any of his own family, but saw no one he recognized, neither parents nor sister. Only four of the seventeen people looked at all familiar. He suspected he’d met them somewhere, sometime, but in his fuddled former life identities hardly ever stuck and everyone seemed strange. Those who glanced his way didn’t give him a second look. They don’t recognize me at all. It was both thrilling and disheartening, and he felt like a ghost wandering up the street. His own family, when they did see him, would they know him? Would they believe him when he explained who he was? They had lost their sons already, three years gone.
Three years gone.
His brain seized upon the phrase, and a flash of lightning ripped through his head, a vision of Onchu riding behind the Queen, but he managed to wrestle this fit down, throwing himself against Waldroup, who held him upright. Through clenched teeth, he muttered the riddle so that only Waldroup heard: “Three are dead, but only one gone, and two still striding in Ercildoun.”
Bracing him until he could stand, Waldroup eyed him askance. It was his first encounter with a fit since that night he’d found Thomas. “Is this going to happen a lot here?” he asked.
Thomas squeezed his eyes shut and concentrated on driving the lightning out of his brain. It shrank, dwindled as if rushing away. “I don’t know,” was all he could reply. “I thought the fits had left me until Baldie reappeared. Least, I—I didn’t shout it. That’s a first time, I think. And I pushed it away. Didn’t used to know how to do that.” After a moment he gently shook off the support.
“Still, your Baldie’s from here, isn’t he? Could be the place, the memory of it, sets you off. We’d best do our business, take a room, and lie low this night,” Waldroup said. “Now, where’s the bowyer’s?”
Thomas pointed to the building beside the ironmonger’s, noticing for the first time a wooden sign hung over the door—the carved image of an upright bow and vertical arrow side by side. That was new. There had been no such signage three years past. Glancing about, he saw another over the brewster’s door, a wooden slab on which were carved what looked like a sprig of yellow gorse beside a rabbit. He couldn’t figure how that represented anything at all.
“Let’s see if your man at least has staves. You can pick one out and retrieve your bow come the thaw.” Thomas followed him to the door, but Waldroup turned and put a hand on his chest. “What’s your name then, stranger?”
“Fingal—” He paused and thought. “Fingal Coutts.”
“Good.” Waldroup opened the door. “After you, Squire Coutts.”
“Squire?”
“Would you rather be my page?”
Inside, the building was divided into a small workshop in the front, with the residence beyond a tapestry at the back. A bench occupied the center of the workshop, positioned to sit in the light from the window had the shutters been open. Along it were scrapers, a two-handled draw knife, assorted feathers, and arrows—some without fletching, some without tips. Wood shavings covered the floor like flakes of snow. It all smelled of freshly cut wood and oils.
One of the posts supporting the right-hand wall had two large pegs driven into it near the top. A bow lay across the pegs and would have formed a cross were it not for the cord strung from tip to tip and the large stone hanging from a hook at the cord’s center, the weight of which pulled the bow down. In the low light it made the wall seem to be frowning at them. The bow was polished, and crisscrossed with sinew on either side of its the center.
The bowyer emerged from behind the tapestry. Warm air from the back arrived with him. He was thin, and all of his hair grew around the sides of his head. Thomas had seen him before, but it was clear he did not recognize Thomas.
“How may I assist you gentlemen?”
Waldroup explained, “My young squire here needs to acquire a bow.”
“Ah, apprenticing in the art of warfare?”
“Cutting stone mostly, but, yes, a bit of that, too.”
“Oh, you are from the abbey?” the bowyer guessed.
“We are, but winter’s set on displacing us and it’s time to hone other skills.”
The bowyer looked Thomas up and down. “You’re tall, young man,” he said as if Thomas did not recognize that about himself. He walked to the bow that was being tugged upon by the stone weight. “This one might suit you well. I’ve been tillering it awhile now, driven out the flat places, the bit of warp. It’s good yew.”
“It isn’t made for someone else?” Waldroup asked.
With closed eyes, the bowyer raised his brows. “It was, in fact, commissioned. But he has quite forgotten about it.” He lifted the weight off the string and set it on the floor, then lifted the bow from the post and turned it upright.
“Who forgets ordering a bow like this?”
Now the bowyer stared straight at them, relishing the opportunity to gossip. “It is for a local man who came into wealth when his father and brothers died. He hardly remembers from week to week what he wants.”
To Thomas it sounded almost as if the bowyer was describing him; but that couldn’t be, as he had no other brother but Onchu. His sister, yes, but . . .
The bowyer continued, “He might recollect it by the time summer comes ’round again, so there’s plenty of time to tiller him another, assuming you’re a customer who pays.” He compared the height of the straight bow to Thomas. “Yes, this will be a good fit for you, young man.” He held it out.
