“Maybe as a bairn. Not in my employ.” He pointed the plant at Thomas. “You ever work stone, Fingal?”
Thomas shook his head.
“Well, there’s a ringing endorsement.”
“He’s an apprentice, Lachlan. None of these Selkirk boys knew anything at the start. I’ll teach him.”
Clacher thought, shifted his gaze from Waldroup back to Thomas. “Sure, we’re short a few, and with Lenox dead under that putlog scaffold . . .” He grimaced. “I’ll try him. But you’re responsible for him, Alpin.”
“Oh, agreed.”
Clacher tapped the tansy stem a bit, then chuckled. “Maybe you can get him running one of the treadwheel cranes before winter.”
“You don’t even have me working one of them.”
“And why would I? You’re too good at the quarrying.” He then retreated into his hut.
Waldroup gently turned Thomas around. He said, “Come, get some broth now. You have to be hungry.” They walked back to the fire. From one of the lean-to structures, Waldroup grabbed wooden bowls and spoons, handed one of each to Thomas.
Staring at them in his hands, he said, “I don’t understand.”
“It’s simple, really. The master mason has just approved you to work the quarry with me. I thought he might. King David wants this abbey completed in a decade. We currently don’t have enough men and lost a good one a week ago to an accident.” He ladled some broth into Thomas’s bowl. “Quarry work is hard; the other boys’ll tell you that. You get good enough at cutting, you’ll move up the ranks and maybe work here, shaping the stone. Put your mark upon this abbey.” He ladled broth into his own bowl. “More to the point for you, maybe, each day you work the quarry gives you an excuse to look in upon the ruins where your Onchu was took. Mind you, don’t you say anything about that to the others. Right?”
He glanced over his bowl at the four pairs of eyes that watched him approach.
The broth wasn’t terribly good, but Thomas found that he was ravenous, as if he’d been starved for a week. They joined the loose circle of men and boys. The men sat on broken chunks of stone, the boys on the damp ground. While Thomas slurped at the broth in his bowl, Waldroup introduced the other boys as “Iachan, Kerr, Lachie, and Shug.” All of them hailed from Selkirk and seemed to know one another. He felt he ought to know where Selkirk was but only nodded, saying nothing rather than display his ignorance. Lachie inquired where he was from, and Waldroup answered for him. “Oh, Fingal? He’s a runaway from Otterburn.”
“Yer father beat ya?” sandy-haired Iachan asked. “Mine did. Nuffin I did were right.”
“Well, you’re not beaten here,” Waldroup promised.
Thomas noticed he was looking at the other men as he said this. Most of them nodded. Two wouldn’t meet his gaze. His rescuer seemed to wield a certain amount of authority.
“Lachie here works the treadwheel. He’s been with us longer. Started at the quarry same as you will tomorrow.” He grinned at some thought. “You’d better have another bowl of broth, little brother. By tomorrow’s end you’re gonnae be too sore to eat.” He clapped him on the back and nudged him toward the ceramic pot.
After he’d finished his second serving, Waldroup took his bowl and spoon, pulled him to his feet, and led him to another of the huts. “That mat there belonged to Lenox. You take it. Everybody understands. The other boys have theirs, anyway. You drag it into that hut. You’ll be sleepin’ with the Selkirks.”
He picked up the straw matting Waldroup had pointed out and hauled it into the other hut where four mats were already laid out. He placed his at one end of the hut and sat down on it. The mat didn’t seem terribly comfortable but it was dry. The other boys came in together.
The one called Lachie said, “I was you, I’d move to the other end. That’s Shug next’a you an’ he farts in his sleep.”
The boys laughed, including Shug. “An’ when he’s awake,” added Kerr, the tallest, muscular one. Shug punched him in the shoulder, then laughed again.
They all sat down on their respective mats. Thomas lay on his back. He didn’t know who he was but his name now was Fingal, and in the morning he was going to go off and cut stone. The shifting new reality left him dizzy.
Onchu was gone. The Queen took all, knights but not men. He clung to the words of his riddle as if he had the slightest idea what they meant.
IV. Cleaving Stone
Waldroup supplied him with tools and an off-the-shoulder bag to contain them. Like the mat he’d slept on, the tools had belonged to Lenox, the man who’d died and who, as it turned out, was the first marked grave in the new cemetery north of the abbey.
Thomas proved to be a fast learner. By the second day, he had absorbed the idea of there being cleavage and bedding planes, and was able to identify stress points in a slab of limestone and drive his copper wedges along a line with the precision to split it into blocks. Waldroup remarked, “Anyone would think you’d done this before.” Iachan and Shug were impressed, too.
He hadn’t, of course, but something about the work was akin to counting things—patterns opened to him in a kind geometry. Striations in the stone revealed themselves as lines and angles, almost as if drawn upon the slabs. Focusing on the work kept his thoughts from straying to Onchu and how he should have been taken instead. He was the damaged one. Nobody would have missed him, would they? Even if he ever remembered more people, they would all say that Onchu had mattered, had been of worth.
The one aspect of quarrying he had trouble with was carrying cut blocks to the oxen-drawn carts to be hauled to the abbey site. The other boys were stronger, and even they grunted and groaned at the sledges they used to pull the rough stones onto the carts.
The first day proved Waldroup true: He ached nearly to where he didn’t want to eat, just to crawl off and sleep. But Waldroup wouldn’t allow it and made him eat the mutton and bread and mashed-up turnips.
He was going to sit alongside the other boys, who seemed just as exhausted, but Waldroup led him off a ways.
It turned out he was ravenous—too hungry to care where he sat.
Waldroup asked, “Anything new come to you, today, Fingal? Remember more?”
It took him a moment to remember that he was Fingal. He shook his head.
“Well, let’s give you a few days, hmm? Can’t elude you forever.” He chewed on a chunk of bread awhile. “You always suffer from those fits?”
“Yes.” He bowed his head as if to ward off a blow.
“Anything you ever gabbled out before make any sense?”
Waldroup seemed to be teasing him. He glared through his brows. “Sometimes. Maybe. My sister thinks it’s prophecy.”
“A sister, then, you have a sister. See? You did remember something new.”
