“Plant me here. Did I say where?”
“‘Where the coppice ends’? I think that came first. Was where we were when you fell. It coincides with the edge of the oxgangs I was about offering you.”
He squeezed his eyes shut. “You said that was good land, yes?”
“’Tis. High enough the river won’t flood it, and good soil.”
“We needn’t look farther, then. I promise when next we go I won’t inconvenience you like this again.” At least, he hoped not. It had been many months since the last fit. He’d dared to think he might be quit of them, but as every time he’d thought that before, he was wrong. This one had put him out for hours. Maybe it was the exhaustion or the fall, or both. Or could it have been the ördstone itself riddling through him? Plant me here.
He sat up.
Janet Cardden put a hand on his shoulder. “You shouldn’t leave,” she said. Her gray-green eyes were hard, insistent. “It’s night now. We can’t be sure you’re well enough.” She faced her father. “He must stay the night, visit his parcel on the morrow.”
“I am well enough, thank you,” he protested.
She bit back a reply, meeting his gaze. Her expression softened. “Then do it for your horses. They’re exhausted. I doubt any of you has slept for many days if not weeks.”
“My daughter knows horses, Master Lynn.”
“Horses as well as soldiers. How does one so far removed from war know so much of its practitioners?”
She rose up as if his words stung her. “I’m acquainted with all sorts of animals,” she said, drew her shawl around herself, and walked away.
He took care getting to his feet, but stood without dizziness. Nevertheless, she ignored him as she left. “I have said something regrettable, I think.”
Cardden grimaced, slowly shook his head. “Naught you could have knowledge of. There was a local Roxburgh lad my Janet gave her heart to. Like you he went to war, but was ne’er heard of again.”
Thomas leaned back. “Infantry?”
“Very likely.”
“I saw those faces every day near and far, as many dead as living. I am sorry for him she lost.” Then, “I must be a terrible reminder.”
Cardden patted Thomas’s shoulder. He said, “Come and have some food. Sleep by the fire on the pallet here tonight, we’ll set out again in the morning to mark out your plot.”
They ate, wood bowls of hot, mashed root vegetables along with a few hunks of warm bread. They spoke of livestock and planting—of when to plant oats and barley, which led Cardden to mention the miller of Oakmill, Forbes, who milled all his grains and would, of course, do the same for Thomas, and who, by the way, was courting Janet—or would be anyway once she stopped grieving for her lost soldier.
Janet herself did not reappear.
XII. Waldroup’s Madness
A smith in nearby Roxburgh would build Thomas his plow, and told him to return for it in three weeks. He wandered through the town awhile, getting accustomed to the shops and goods there. There could be no returning to Ercildoun next time he needed something; Roxburgh was larger, busier, and far safer.
During those three weeks, he acquired two oxen from Cardden, which he drove onto his grassy shieling above the stretch of land they would shortly be plowing. The hut there wasn’t much, but he collected bundles of heather and repaired the thatch topping to make it at least habitable and mostly waterproof. Later, down beside his oxgangs of land, he would build a cruck house of stone, but for now as he tended the oxen and grazed his horses, this sufficed. It was a better enclosure than had protected him on many a night the past five years.
His neighbors were a family named Lusk. They had three children and all lived in what could only be described as a hovel, a wretched thing of posted frame, with stone, clay, and here and there wattle filling the spaces between the posts; roof thatch that looked to have been piled together by someone unacquainted with the notion of how a wall could support . . . well, anything. To Thomas, one side in particular looked as if it might cave in with the next good wind and crush half the family.
He still had all his chisels, braces, and mallets. He and Waldroup had bolstered their income working as masons whenever there was no army to join. Fortunately, new fortresses and abbeys and churches were being built all across France, in Belgio and Paesi Bassi, and as far south as Italia, so he’d had ample opportunity to improve his masonry skills, working beside his friend. Waldroup was right—stonework was significantly easier and safer than the practice of war. And even if he and Waldroup could not speak the language, they understood the methodology of cutting and setting stone, and working treadmills and lewises, and once that was communicated they became immediately indispensable. He also beheld and undertook ways of constructing a wall that had not yet traveled this far north, apparently.
Thus, when he described how he might improve his neighbors’ house while awaiting the building of his plow, and offered his services, husbandman Lusk did not refuse, and even gave him his twin ginger-haired boys, Kester and Filib, as assistants—no doubt seeing it as an opportunity for the boys to learn a trade.
First they cut down trees nearer the river and shoved new posts in to bear the weight of the roof while sections of the wall were dismantled and completely rebuilt. Thomas’s plumb line seemed like something magical to Lusk, very like witchcraft, although Thomas convinced him it was natural magic and thus acceptable; the boys grasped the idea immediately without needing convincing, too young perhaps to have absorbed their father’s superstitions. Many of the stones Lusk had used in piling together his wall were unworkable. Quite a few had simply been turned up in plowing, and were piled on without regard to whether they were the right shape for the space. More of these lay randomly along the sides of the fields. Thomas scrounged many useful stones there, and for the rest, he and the boys carried them up out of the river.
Fashioning a wall out of irregular stones was more like working a puzzle than the building of an abbey or church with its uniformly rectangular blocks. But Waldroup and the southern masons had taught him well, and he shaped the stones one by one, filled the spaces precisely, and shortly had a sturdy vertical wall between the beams that would keep the wind from whistling through and not fall over for anything short of a siege engine. By way of payment the family fed him most evenings before he climbed back up to the shieling, where he did nothing so much as simply collapse. Stonework was exhausting. It made his muscles and the skin of his hands hard, but it was a hardness he relished: Repairing Lusk’s house felt like accomplishment.
Lusk must have said something to Cardden, as the tenant-in-chief turned up one morning, Janet accompanying him, to watch Thomas work. As Cardden looked over the mason’s tools laid out, Janet told him in confidence, “We didn’t entirely countenance your claim to have worked on St. Mary’s. I see we were wrong to disbelieve you.”
“Why would I have lied?”
She gave a little smile. “Many do lie about so many things in wanting to impress their betters.”
“Well, my thanks, then, for the warning. When I meet my betters, I shall take care that I tell my story true.”
For a long moment they stared each other down. Her gaze seemed as if it was trying to see him fully, to peer into the depths of him. Then finally she laughed, wheeled her horse about, and rode away. Her father remained, full of questions about the shaping of the stones, all of which he answered, for the benefit of the Lusk boys as well as his landlord, before returning to work.
To the remaining sides of the house, Thomas added small buttressing in two places. Lusk’s home was now far less likely to kill its inhabitants while they slept, even in the winds of a storm. He left it to them to rethatch the roof.
And all the while, as he plowed and planned for his own house, he made regular nocturnal forays to the ruins of Old Melrose.
In the shieling hut he’d thatched, Thomas left a small fire burning in the center space, then set off on foot to the west, coming down from the heights beyond Lusk’s property where he would not be seen. Farther on, he skirted the tiny village of St. Boisil, crossing the heights and then keeping to the river bank, which brought him in sight of the ruins and not too far from the corpse road bridge over the Tweed that he and Waldroup had taken once upon a time. The ruins lay abandoned, empty, the collapsed section if anything larger.
“This is a fool’s errand, you know, little brother,” Waldroup’s voice whispered in his head. “Neither of us has the slightest notion how regularly they seek out a teind, much less if it’s always from here.”
Thomas glanced to where he imagined the shade of his friend walked beside him. “But sooner or later, they will. They have to.”
And Waldroup replied in singsong:
