In a Dark Wood (19 page)

“A pleasure to see you, my lord,” said Nottingham.

“It's always a pleasure to see you,” said Geoffrey. “I was simply telling my Fool how little we love silence.”

It was uncanny the way Nottingham and the Fool resembled each other. The same small bones, the same lean faces, and yet the Fool looked infinitely more graceful. Nottingham bent sideways when he spoke, as if trying to see round Geoffrey, round everything. “Silence is a secret's castle,” said Nottingham.

“Amazingly well put, good Nottingham. Tell us the ways to make a man talk.”

Nottingham eyed the Fool briefly, then looked back with a thin smile. He made his eyes open wide for a moment before he spoke, telling the sheriff that he understood. “If a man wants to keep silent and remembers who he is each moment, it can be difficult to make him talk. Oh, he will bawl and bleat. But the only way to make him speak is to make him leave himself behind, like an empty sack. When he has been stripped of himself, then he will talk.”

“When he is naked of any disguise.”

“Then he talks.” Nottingham's eyes were quick, burnished by the sights they had seen.

Geoffrey turned and spoke as if to the tapestry of the falling warrior, the wounded figure composed entirely of silk and wool. “Tell us some of the ways you allow people to forget who they are.”

“Many ways, as you know well.” Nottingham glanced at the Fool, assessing the Fool's silence, estimating the time it would take to melt it away. “I need not mention the rack, and the tong, the fire iron, and my most recent discovery, the lapping goat. These are really for people who merely hesitate before speaking, not for people who have determined that they will not speak.”

Nottingham waited for encouragement, but Geoffrey did nothing more than touch the tapestry with a forefinger. The tapestry was so thick he could not feel the wall behind it. The multicolored cloth was like the hide of an animal with muscles of granite.

“For those determined silences, we favor slow burning or slow cutting.”

The “we” made Geoffrey clasp both hands together. “And?”

“They both involve time. The slow burning is like death burning, but the fire is built a good distance from the criminal. The flesh ripens, blisters, and begins to char. The man talks. Slow cutting is a method I do not favor. The time involved, and the number of men. You have no idea how annoying it can be. And the mess—needless to say, it is not my favorite form of speech loosing. A rope is stretched across the chamber and made as taut as any straight line you could draw. I take two stout men—two stout and very patient men—and we slide the criminal back and forth across the rope, back and forth across the room, until the man is cut in two.” Nottingham made his hands part, like two wings. “Although generally he speaks long before he is actually in two halves. Such men forget who they are. They seem to be giving birth to something. They can never believe that such a thing is going to happen to them.” Nottingham's voice became almost thoughtful. “And it doesn't, in a way. By the time they talk, they have become little more than a bloody tangle.”

The Fool remained on the floor, looking away from both men.

“No one,” Nottingham continued, “has ever been cut in two in that manner, at least in my experience. It simply advances to a point where it doesn't matter, like a hot knife into ice.”

“Do you,” said Geoffrey in a low, hoarse voice, “sometimes wish you were someone else?”

Nottingham straightened. “I have been trained from boyhood not to indulge in wishful thinking.”

“Thank you, Nottingham, for joining us.”

He flinched. He had expected, no doubt, a long visit, even some wine, and then perhaps an opportunity to demonstrate his powers. “It is,” said Nottingham, “an indescribable pleasure.” His phrase made something tighten in Geoffrey, and he did not move as Nottingham made an ugly bow and faded towards the door. The man did not leave at once, his lean face looking back, expecting, it seemed, a summons to return and to describe yet another example of his skill, the skill he had learned from his father, as a tanner learns to cure hides, and a cobbler how to craft them into boots.

The man was gone, leaving a strange scent in the air. Geoffrey could not place it as he strode to the door to shut it securely, because Nottingham had left it just open, deliberately. The door shut as gently as a book, and Geoffrey recognized the smell: it was goat.

Geoffrey raised his fists before him in a helpless gesture, but the Fool was not looking. He crouched on the floor, his eyes downcast, still holding the head on a stick like an infant.

“I have to have things done—no, allow me to speak the truth plainly. I have to do things that are hateful to me. It is like a vow. Like a vow of silence. If the law will not go into a man, I force it. Sometimes the law is not language and money. Sometimes it is a team of horses that pulls a man into the air like a spider, until he rips apart.”

Neither man moved for a while. Geoffrey usually loved his chamber and did his best thinking there. Now the room was too small, and too cold, as a damp wind breathed into the room from the floor, from every uncovered chink.

“I want you to know this about me. I have a weakness: I am not cruel. I think that I wanted you to be afraid. Threatened. Thinking that I could have your flesh broiled until I found out everything about you.”

The Fool cast a vague shadow about himself, a smudge of Fool shape round him on the stone. The little Fool cast an even smaller shadow, but strangely distinct. The toy was more real than the man.

“I am sorry, Fool. I could never do these things to you.”

The Fool stood, and this time his face was not a caricature. It mocked nothing. But the eyes were bright, as if Nottingham's spirit had entered the Fool as he sat there on the floor. Except that the eyes were not the eyes of Nottingham. Alert, but unguarded. With a spasm Geoffrey realized that the Fool was hiding nothing. Still, Geoffrey could not read the Fool's face. Had he been afraid?

The Fool's homunculus hung straight down, a hammer at rest. The look in the Fool's eyes became clear to Geoffrey. The sheriff glanced away.

It was the look of compassion.

“You aren't like us,” said Geoffrey. “You have already escaped and left yourself naked.” He put his hand on the Fool's shoulder, but heavily, so that the Fool would see that Geoffrey was not merely gentle. “Be assured, Fool, that I will do you no harm. And be welcome to your silence. Leave now, before I begin to hate you again.”

The Fool balanced the head stick on his forehead and spread his arms. The toy head smiled at Geoffrey.

“Very good.” He sighed, feeling ridiculous, as if he had to console the wooden head as well as the human one.

33

Ralf, the chief huntsman, checked the knot on a rabbit snare. The rabbit inside the net kicked and flattened its ears. “Easy now,” said the huntsman, “easy, at your rest.”

The white rabbit was still at the sound of the huntsman's voice. The man could calm as easily as he killed. The burly huntsman was beyond both cruelty and passion, just as a dog is beyond such feeling and will kill or save with the same eagerness. “The rabbits are ready, my lord. My best beaters are ready. And it's a beautiful day for a rabbit hunt, if I may say so.”

This was a long speech from Ralf, who usually kept to short sentences and, when he was hunting, shouts like “There now!” and “Hoy!”

A dove pecked seed scattered on the stones of the courtyard. The laundry wench shielded her eyes to see Geoffrey on his horse, and Geoffrey looked away, quickly.

Lady Eleanor joined them, at last. Geoffrey had promised her that they could go rabbit hunting but did not look forward to it. It was only fair that if she could not go falconing, she could go hunting in some other way. But Hugh was sick with an ague he must have breathed in on the cemetery air two nights before. The doctor had given him a tincture of vervain, but the youth was not well enough to ride.

“You look well this morning, Lady Eleanor,” said Geoffrey.

Still no word from Henry. And now, with Hugh taken ill, the sheriff felt himself surrounded by cares. Perhaps the meteor had foretold the loss of Hugh! But the surgeon had been reassuring, promising that the fever would pass in such a vigorous youth. Geoffrey wished he could believe it. Sometimes the sheriff woke at night and heard the laugh of Robin Hood.

Some of the netlike snares held other creatures, animals as lithe as the rabbits were soft, arm's-length beasts with short forelegs no longer than fingers. These shapes whipped and surged in their nets, and bright teeth sparkled in the sunlight. They had been still until now, asleep, surrendering to the boredom of courtyards and horses.

But now they saw the fields, and smelled the rabbits, and they would not be stilled by the huntsman's low voice. The brown, snaking shapes assumed the forms of all the letters of evil magic as they struggled in the hands of the huntsman's beaters. The huntsman looked to Geoffrey, and Geoffrey nodded to his wife, indicating that her pleasure was to be served.

“Yes!” said Lady Eleanor. “Let the rabbits go!”

Rabbits were everywhere, kicking across the grass. Each rabbit stopped, dazed, for a moment, by freedom. The beaters took their places at the edge of the field and drove an errant rabbit back. The rabbits stood upright, working their noses, and then wandered, feeding.

The snake creatures with the brilliant teeth were insane, lashing their nets from the inside. Even the horses quickened at the sight of the frenzy and shied, wide-eyed.

“Look how excited they are,” called Eleanor. “Let the rabbits spread out, and let some go into the nettles over there, where they'll be more difficult to catch.”

Geoffrey tugged his gloves on more tightly and chewed his lip. He fiddled with the shortsword he wore and scuffed the ground.

“Now!” cried Lady Eleanor.

Nets were shaken open, and the ferrets were in the field. Rabbits streaked and bounded across the grass, but the ferrets were invisible, dark arrows that seemed to speed nearly underground. A rabbit kicked, its white fur suddenly pink. Another screamed, and the beaters struck the nettles, as everywhere in the field rabbits struggled and went nowhere.

Lady Eleanor clapped her hands. “It's wonderful!” she cried.

“We'll be eating rabbit tonight,” Geoffrey noted dryly. “They certainly make quick work of it.”

A rabbit's scream was so unlike the cry of an animal—an undiluted cry of terror. The beaters worked the nettles with their bush sticks, flat, club-shaped paddles. The men called to each other, pointed, and laughed. The huntsman, who had seen this a thousand times, jumped up and down, pointing and cheering.

Geoffrey smiled wearily at all of it. He loved Eleanor in her pleasure, but he could not share it. “Will you please excuse me from this frolic?” said Geoffrey. “I will walk in the woods for a moment.”

“Of course,” said Lady Eleanor, not bothering to glance at Geoffrey and declining to note the tone of his voice. Geoffrey, like most men of reason, did not enjoy walks in the woods. Only his contempt for such a hunt could drive him away.

Immediately the other world had him again. The shouts of the beaters were silenced, and the laughter of his wife dimmed and went out like a candle consuming the last spoonful of its wax. Sun filtered through the branches, and he was in emerald air, trapped in it and yet wanting it, believing that in this amazing beauty he, too, could be beautiful.

He slipped into the darkness under a tree and held his breath.

He was not alone.

He loosened his shortsword in its scabbard. He had seen a figure, an indistinct presence. He crouched, to make himself smaller and to listen closer to ground level for the crush of pine needles and the snap of twigs.

Another fly moaned through the air, slowly, because it was late in the year for flies. The sound of its passage was lost in the whisper of wind high above. Geoffrey did not move. He should, he reasoned, call out. He was armed, although not heavily. It was probably a forester or even a poacher. A poacher would be terrified of the sheriff, Geoffrey told himself.

He kept his silence.

A step, there, behind the trees directly before him. The dry syllable of weight taken off pine needles, a single, definite sound. Someone was waiting for him.

The day had fallen away, like a cloth stripped from a bed to expose a naked thing. The morning existed only here, his hand on his sword. He had been brought here, by God or by the other unseen powers of the universe, for this meeting. He knew that.

But he did not know what to do. He wanted to speak, but he did not know what to say. And anyone who would hide, cowering behind trees, was not worth addressing.

He drew his sword. The shaft of steel left the scabbard with a sound that itself would be a warning. The sword reflected the forest dimly, a gray, blurred reflection, a tear in reality itself through which he could see another, duller reality. He strode round the stand of pines and cleared his throat to speak.

A shape uncoiled and threw itself high over Geoffrey, towering, and a roar like the crashing of a great tree froze him. A limb fell down upon Geoffrey, crushing every thought.

34

He could still see. He could not move his arms or legs, but he could look upwards with open eyes and fail to comprehend what was happening. A hellish monster rose high over Geoffrey, a shaggy thing, a chunk torn out of midnight. The thing fell down over him. Small eyes, red-black, like silver tarnish. Twin spouts of hot breath, and the sour stink of an old dog, decay and saliva. The huge thing eclipsed the day, and Geoffrey saw only black fur, and the heat of the thing was everywhere.

The thing grunted, and teeth tore the wool of his tunic. The beast chewed wool for a moment, struggling to reach blood, and Geoffrey squeezed the hilt of his sword. The thing shook him, and Geoffrey's legs flailed, his joints creaking. The animal rose high again, towering on its hind legs, and Geoffrey saw what would destroy him.