Authors: Gael Baudino
The words were a slap. Natil bent her head, pressed her fists to her temples. Her answer was truthful, but truth was perhaps the only particle of elvenhood she had left. “I cannot.”
Omelda—dogged, deliberate, purposeful—dragged herself to her feet and went down to the river to bathe.
***
Manarel held the title of steward, but he was not precisely a steward. By training and disposition, he was a forester and a soldier, a quaintly honest man who had taken employment where he could find it. Jacob Aldernacht found him useful. At times like this he found him indispensable.
From Ypris, roads—wide and narrow, frequented and abandoned—led off toward many cities and towns and villages: Natil and Omelda could have gone in almost any direction. But Manarel knew what the passage of feet did to roads and fields, and perhaps he had also that most and invaluable and extremely subtle sense of the world that, had it been dignified with terms like
prescience
or
clairvoyance
, would have landed him in the prisons of the Inquisition; and therefore, after he had studied the roads and the weather, and after he had looked over the pasturelands and ditches that surrounded Ypris, he pointed south. “That direction, Mister Jacob.”
And Jacob, still raging still finding in the truant harper an object upon which to vent his loss and his frustration, nodded. “Let's go, then,” he said, his voice sounding old and raspy even to his own ears. “Let's find her.”
Manarel looked uncomfortable. “What about the other, master?”
“The other?”
“Omelda. The serving girl.”
“Oh . . . her . . .” Jacob shrugged. “She's not important. We'll bring her back. Whatever.”
Manarel looked even more uncomfortable, and after he had swung up on his horse at the head of the troop of Aldernacht soldiers, he examined the horizon with his brown eyes, and bit at his lip in the manner of a man awakening to discover an adder on his chest. “Master . . . could I please say something—”
“Shut up,” said Jacob. “Find her.”
Manarel was respectful, and he knew who paid his wages. “Yes, master.”
But as they rode, the day warming and the June sun beating down on metal hoods and felt hats alike, Jacob caught himself frowning. Despite his anger, despite years of unleashing whatever emotion happened to possess him—joy or sorrow, irritation or benevolence—on whoever happened to be about him, he found that a sense of injustice had wormed its way into his heart.
Natil's work? Maybe. Regardless, he was uneasy about his words to his steward.
He cleared his throat. “Manarel.”
“Master?”
“What . . . what were you going to say?”
It was as near a thing to an apology as had ever come from the lips of Jacob Aldernacht, and the steward stared for a moment before he replied. “I was . . . going to remind my master . . . that Natil is a very brave woman. She even tried to gain Harold's release from the Inquisition.”
She had indeed. At, Jacob recalled, great risk to herself. And now he could not but recall also the esteem in which he had once held her. A brave woman. And a thoughtful one. And an honest one. If she had left his service—without warning, without permission—she doubtless had possessed a good reason.
But his loss and disillusionment still gnawed at him, and his voice was sharp. “Is that all?”
Manarel hesitated. Then: “Yes, master.”
Jacob fixed him with a look. “That's a lie, Manarel.”
Manarel kept his eyes on the road. “Yes, master. It is.”
Jacob chewed on his steward's words for some time, and was about to ask the obvious question when Manarel suddenly froze, reined in, and held up his hand to signal a stop. His face was set, his eyes narrow. Jacob knew his man well enough not to question the peremptory manner in which Manarel had halted the column.
“What?” the old man whispered.
“Something . . . something happened here,” said Manarel, his deep voice rumbling softly. He pointed to a stain on the dirt that Jacob had not noticed. “That's blood.”
“Natil's?” Jacob found that his voice was expectant, tense. Fear or gratification? He could not tell.
Manarel dismounted, examined the stain, raked his fingers through a pile of horse droppings that lay nearby. Jacob recalled with a strange sense of unease that Natil and Omelda had been traveling on foot.
“It couldn't be Natil,” said the steward. “The signs aren't fresh enough. And look, over here: there are prints of boots. Men's boots. And nothing of the soft shoes that the harper wears.”
“Well then . . .” But Jacob's voice trailed off, fading into an indistinct sense of worry. Men's boots. And blood.
But Manarel was looking elsewhere, examining other prints, other traces and scrapes, following the trail. There was more blood—old blood—and then a little farther on, in the ditch at the side of the road, half covered with reeds and weeds, he found something else. He found the body of a man.
Josef's body.
Jacob, who had stayed at the steward's side, turned away, the world blurring to his eyes. His men, their mail and weapons, their horses . . . all turned into soft, indistinct smears.
“His sword is still sheathed,” Manarel said softly.
“Of course,” Jacob murmured distantly. “He didn't know how to use it.”
“His purse is gone. So are his rings. He died of a cut to the throat.”
Jacob did not look. “Yes . . . yes . . . he would have tried to talk his way out of it.” Tears were moistening his dry, withered face. “He didn't last a season, did he? He didn't even last until the next town, did he?”
He heard Manarel straighten. “I'm deeply sorry, master. Mister Josef was a good man.”
Jacob shook his head. “He was a nitwit. Just a nitwit. We'll carve it on . . .” His voice, gasping, broke into many pieces, but he continued. “. . . on his tomb. Josef Aldernacht. Would-be scholar. Inferior musician. Wretched poet. Family nitwit.”
His words faded into the warm air. Silence. A snort from one of his horses. He sensed that Manarel was waiting for orders.
“Have . . . have two of the men take his body back to the house,” said Jacob. “have them tell Francis to bury him with all the customary flummery. Pauper's graves aren't for nitwits.” He sniffed, smeared his tears with his sleeve, felt Manarel's stare. “They're not for nitwits. They're for idiots. And fools.”
“As . . . as you wish, master.”
Caving in. That was it. Everything inside of his was caving in. A crumbling, a shuddering, and then release . . . and descent. “Go on,” he said. “Take care of it. And then we'll go on. We'll find Natil . . . wherever she is.”
But his voice sounded faint, distant, as though he were not at all sure of what he would do with Natil when he actually found her.
***
Marjorie's body, in accordance with Jacob's orders, was sewed up in a canvas sack and tossed into the earth as though it were the corpse of a particularly troublesome dog. There were few mourners. Francis and Claire were present in all their funereal finery, making a very genuine show of their very genuine grief at such a very genuine loss. One or two servants appeared out of curiosity, the rest were there to attend Francis and Claire. Only Eudes demonstrated real tears: wardrobes could obviously become rather attached to the bitch of the kennel.
Edvard and Norman were not at the grave. Edvard and Norman did not appear to be anywhere. On the surface, this was nothing unusual: the young men often raided the chest in Gold Hall for a sack or two of florins and then went off to Hypprux or to Maris to squander the money. As often as not, they did so without notice.
This time, though, Francis sensed that there was something wrong. He was not a particularly imaginative man, but he had come to sense an oppression about the Aldernacht house that persisted despite his attempts to deny it, that made the absence of Edvard and Norman hint at dark possibilities, frightening consequences. The summer was well along, and the rooms were, as usual, hot, sometimes stifling; but certain parts of the house had acquired an abominable sense of closeness, as though walls were reaching to walls and ceilings to floors, as though rooms had shrunk to airless cubicles and corridors to the narrowest of shafts. He found himself staying away as much as possible, and when he actually had to go inside, he eschewed certain rooms, certain halls, avoided completely the maze of hidden passages that wound through the house.
No, he spent his days in Gold Hall, fuming silently as Eudes and Charles readied and dispatched the hated shipment of wool cooperative gold, or in the gardens, looking with dull incomprehension at the fruit trees, or watching the industrious ants, whose winding trails—more numerous this year than he had ever seen before—snaked down the paths and even seemed to converge on the house. He examined the flights of robins and wrens, and noted with mild disbelief that a number of crows had apparently taken up residence in an unused room of the mansion, or had found some particularly plentiful store of summer insects within its walls.
There was another one, even now; his black head poking out of a crevice, a long strip of red meat dangling from his ebony beak. A shrug, a flutter, and he was gone, but another was taking his place, plunging in where his brother had gone out.
And then the servants began complaining about an odor that was hanging about the west wing. It had started, they said, as a subtle presentiment, and had, in only a few days, become a stench. It was giving them headaches, making them gag, but no one had been able to determine its source.
And then a rat, scurrying away as Martha shooed and cursed it out of the kitchen, dropped something that, though slimy and partly decayed, was obviously the remains of a human finger.
***
The trail left by Natil and Omelda turned cold quickly, and, at camp that night, Manarel was shaking his head. “They must have left the road, Mister Jacob,” he said. “Somewhere behind us. I can't understand how they could have done it without leaving some trace, but I think that's what happened.”
A few feet away, supper was cooking over an open fire. There was no inn close by, and so even Jacob Aldernacht had to eat stew out of a bowl and sleep under the stars tonight. A soldier's lot. A mercenary's lot. The lot Josef had chosen, the lot that had killed him before he even had a chance to taste it.
Josef had been on Jacob's mind a great deal these last hours, occupying his father far more after his death than he ever had before it. And Jacob was also thinking about Francis and Karl. And Claire. And Edvard and Norman. His family. His nest of vipers. But then there was Natil, and he was no longer sure how he felt about Natil. And no Manarel was telling him that the trail, like everything else in his life, had gone cold, was lost.
“Do you want to backtrack, Manarel?” he said without enthusiasm, without taking his eyes off a fire which persisted in showing him Natil's sweet but serious face, her agile hands, the glint of her harpstrings. “Would that be best?”
Manarel fell silent. Again, Jacob remembered his steward's lie, the lie he had admitted but never corrected. No, Manarel had stopped short of saying everything about Natil and Omelda. Jacob had shushed him, and he had closed his mouth on the subject. Whatever his master wanted. Whatever his master ordered. Yes, Mister Jacob. No, Mister Jacob. As you wish, Mister Jacob.
“I think,” said the steward, “that it would be best to push on.”
Jacob blinked. “Push on? Are you expecting them to come back to the road?”
“Maybe, Mister Jacob. But . . .” The steward obviously felt that he had drawn close to a forbidden subject. “I . . . think we should go on.”
Jacob interlaced his skinny, old-man fingers. The lie. “About the other day, Manarel . . .”
Manarel did not look up. “Yes, Mister Jacob?”
“What were you going to say the other day? When you said you had nothing to add, and I said you were lying.”
Manarel seemed to consider his words as though they were so many bricks. Blunt living, a blunt man. “I think that if we go on, we will find Natil—and maybe Omelda—in Furze.”
Jacob blinked for a second time. “Furze? What the hell are they going to do in Furze?”
Manarel looked cautiously about, but no: the other men were out of earshot. A whisper would not carry to them. “Something happened about two weeks ago. A little longer. It happened on the night you found Madam Marjorie.”
Jacob winced. Would that night had never happened! First the strange little whore in his bed—and though he still had his suspicions, he had yet to find out for certain what she had actually been doing there—and then Marjorie. It had been the beginning of the end of everything.
“Go on,” he said brusquely.
“The house had been roused by . . . well we're still not sure what. Someone was running about and crashing into things. I turned out the guards, and we all went looking. We didn't find anything, and so we settled down to making sure that everyone was safe and accounted for. That was when it . . .”
He fell silent, counting his bricks. After a time: “I knocked on Natil's door, Mister Jacob. She was there, but there were . . . others . . . with her.”
Whores in his bed, Marjorie returning—Jacob was ready to believe anything. “What others?”
“Omelda was there. She didn't seem right at all. Natil was Natil, of course. She's always just Natil. But there was a nun there, too.”
Jacob blinked, wrinkled his nose. “A nun?”
“Well, Mister Jacob, she was dressed like a nun. But I didn't think even at the time that she actually was. She didn't smell right.”
“She didn't what?”
“She wore scent. Perfume. Nuns don't do that. At least not where anyone can notice them. But she was dressed up like a Benedictine. And Natil asked me to help her escape from the house.”
Manarel's voice and manner told Jacob everything. “And you
did
?”
“Yes, Mister Jacob.” Manarel looked as though he fully expected to be struck for his words, but he spoke them nonetheless. A brave man. Jacob liked that, just as –dear God!—he still liked Natil. “Natil is an honest woman. I'll never question that about her. She went to help Harold, and I fully believe that she'd jump into a bonfire to save a friend. She asked me to smuggle the nun out of the house and out of the town. And so I did.”