The Wolf Hunt Page 2

  Marie glanced up, and Tiher grinned at her in what was intended to be reassurance. She looked back at her folded hands at once, and he gave a sigh of rueful resignation. He never got anywhere with pretty girls — not with well-born ones, anyway. He was not merely ugly, but landless. Landless knights didn’t marry. How could you have a wife when you had no house for her to live in, and your bed was in your lord’s hall along with a score or two of your comrades in arms? Even Alain — who was, as Marie had guessed, Tiher’s cousin — was unlikely to marry, and he was the second son of a lord and not just an impoverished nephew. Still, Tiher liked women’s company when he could get it.

  “You’ll come to no harm with us, Lady Marie,” he told her. “Duke Hoel will treat you honorably.”

  She did not reply. Tiher sighed again, and they rode on in silence.

  They traveled for nearly four hours that afternoon. The mare Dahut continued to misbehave, balking at streams, lunging at pastures, and occasionally kicking at Tiher’s mount or trying to bite. Tiher cut a switch of willow and thrashed the horse each time she played up, but still found his arms aching from the mare’s jerks at the bridle by the time they reached the abbey of Bonne Fontaine, where they were to stay the night. Marie by that time was pale with weariness, and she slumped painfully in the saddle. Her muscles had forgotten how to ride, and Dahut was not an easy goer. Nonetheless, when the abbot appeared at the gatehouse to greet them, she slid quickly off the horse and threw herself on her knees before him. “Help me, Father!” she cried loudly. “These men are abducting me. My father sent me to the priory of St. Michael, and they’ve stolen me away against my will!”

  The abbot stared at her a moment, more in resignation than surprise. It was not unknown for knights to abduct pretty girls from convents. Then he looked accusingly at Tiher. A younger Tiher had once attended school at that same abbey, and he still thought of the abbot as able to fling God’s thunderbolt at need. “It’s the duke’s orders, Father!” he protested hastily. “The lady is the heiress to Chalandrey, and Duke Hoel wanted her out of Mont St. Michel to keep her safe from the Normans.”

  The abbot’s face cleared. He was a Breton of the March. He loathed the Normans, whose raids had often struck at his abbey’s lands. He remembered nothing particularly reprehensible about Tiher, and he knew Alain de Fougères by sight. Alain’s mother had been a great benefactress of the abbey. He had no doubts about whom to believe.

  “You need have no fear, my daughter,” he soothed. “Duke Hoel will see that you are well treated. And you must know, child, that whatever you’ve been told, Duke Hoel is your true overlord. In swearing fealty to a Norman, your father robbed Brittany of what was rightfully his.”

  Marie bit her tongue. It was clear that appeals would achieve nothing, and to persist in open opposition would only make her captivity harder to escape. She’d been ashamed of her tears and stunned stupidity at Mont St. Michel, but now she silently thanked God that she’d seemed such a fool. If they thought her weak and silly, they wouldn’t expect her to do anything now but weep.

  The abbot escorted them into the abbey guesthouse, where his servants prepared rooms for them: one room for the three knights, and one, next door but decently separate, for Marie. The knights took the precaution of closing the wooden shutter on the single window of Marie’s room and barring it securely on the outside, and they locked the heavy door and kept the key. Marie sat down wearily on the bed and buried her face in her hands. Her limbs were still trembling from the ride, and she was so tired that she feared she would fall asleep where she sat. But she knew she must escape that night. Already they were twenty miles from Mont St. Michel, farther than she had ever gone on foot; after another day of riding the distance might prove too great for her. She didn’t dare try to steal a horse. She had to go that night, or not at all. She must rest a little first, though, and eat to get her strength back. It would be best to leave in the early hours of the morning. She was used to waking before the dawn to say the office of Lauds, and she was confident that the deep-voiced abbey bell would rouse her as easily as the shrill jangler in the priory.

  Now, how was she to get out? Marie heaved herself off the bed and carefully examined the room by the light of the single tallow candle the abbot’s servants had left for her. The window shutter was not only firmly barred, but creaked at the merest touch: even if she could force it, it would be bound to make a lot of noise, and that would wake the knights next door. The walls of the room were thick mud and wattle upon a ground course of stone, the roof was tightly bound thatch, and beneath the rushes the floor was hard-packed clay. It might be possible to dig through one or another of them — but it would take hours of effort, and leave her too exhausted to go any distance.

  That left the door. She went to it last. When she held her candle up she could see the bolt, slotted into a hole in the doorpost. Level with it, scraped into the wood of the post, was a small trench that must have been made by someone in the past opening the door with the bolt half in. Marie stared at that light scrape in the wood for a moment, her breath unsteady. She knew when she saw it that it was the way out, but it took a little time for her to understand how. Then, fumbling with excitement, she drew off her white wimple and jammed it in a wad between the bottom of the door and the stone threshhold, next to the hinges, where it would foul the door’s swing invisibly.

  A monastic servant came in a few minutes later, carrying a tray with a dish of pottage and a cup of wine for her supper, together with a ewer of water for washing, a basin, and a clean cloth. All three knights trailed behind him and stood in the doorway looking at her while the servant set his tray on the bed. Tiher was holding a candle, which made their shadows flap blackly about her room.

  “Is there anything you require, Lady Marie?” asked Alain politely.

  “Your absence,” Marie returned coldly.

  Alain looked offended, bowed stiffly, and left. Tiher gave her a froggy grin and followed, and the third knight, Guyomard, pulled the door shut behind the servant. The wadded-up wimple made it stiff, of course, so stiff that for a moment Marie stopped breathing, terrified that he’d look to see what was jamming it. But he didn’t: he dragged it to, and through the thump of booted footsteps retreating, Marie just caught the click of the key turning in the lock. She leapt to her feet and rushed over. The bolt showed blackly in the crack between the door’s edge and the frame, but it was impossible to see if it had stuck in the scraped-out trench or if it had gone securely into its socket. And she did not dare check, not yet. She leaned her head against the doorpost and prayed silently and passionately that the door was not locked. She thought of her father, camped before the walls of unimaginably distant Nicaea, grieving for Robert. I will keep your honor safe, she promised him inwardly. I will never give your lands to your enemies. You will be proud of me, Father. You will be proud of me at last.

  Then she said three Paternosters to calm the thundering of her heart, and turned to wash before her supper.

  When the bell rang for Lauds, Marie was up, three years of convent life taking her fumbling feet into waiting shoes even before she was fully awake. Then she stopped. Even in the complete darkness before cockcrow, the room was unfamiliar. This wasn’t her little cell at St. Michael’s; this was … Remembrance brought a flood of almost unbearable excitement.

  She made herself sit still, listening. The bell stopped; the rustle of feet died away across the court, and the opening phrases of the office, thin and slow with sleep, whispered from the chapel. Marie took a deep breath, rose to her feet, and groped her way through the total blackness to the door. There. Rough frame, smoother planking; latch. She let her hands slip down, over the latch, along the edge, then along the sill. There was her wimple, exactly where she’d left it. Her first eager tug didn’t shift the cloth, and she had to force herself to work it out slowly, patiently shifting it back and forth until, suddenly, it came loose. The door gave a screech as it did and pulled toward her. Marie felt a jolt in her chest as t
hough her heart had tried to descend a step that wasn’t there, and she froze, crouching by the threshold. But still there was no sound but the distant whisper of the monks saying the office. She got to her feet, clutching the wimple in one sweaty hand.

  “Christ and Saint Michael help me!” she whispered. She wrapped the wimple carefully around the door latch, then pulled hard.

  The wimple muffled the noise a little, but still the bolt gave another screech as it dragged along the frame — and then the door was open. Marie rested her palm against the post for a moment, listening, over the thunder of blood in her ears, for some sound of alarm. Again she heard only prayers.

  She stepped cautiously out into the corridor. Now she could hear something from the room where the three knights were sleeping — but it was only one of them snoring. They, of course, were not in the habit of rising for Lauds, and they’d slept through the bell. Marie tried to stifle the rush of triumph: she still had a long way to go. Closing the door of her room carefully behind her, she hurried along the corridor, pulling the wimple over her head and tucking her hair under it as she went.

  The forecourt of the abbey was deserted. The outer gate was barred and bolted for the night, but only on the inside, to keep out intruders, and the gatekeeper was asleep in his lodge. Marie had no trouble unbolting it and slipping out.

  The moon had set, and everything was dark and strange. The road was visible only as a gray open patch against the shapeless blackness of the land. The silence was so deep that it numbed the ears, and little sounds — the rustle of clothing, the clumping of feet, even the rasp of breath — resounded hollow and vast. The roadside weeds were heavy with dew. Marie stopped after a few steps and stood motionless, hearing again the rush of blood in her ears. For the first time, she felt afraid. She had never before been alone out of doors at night, and in the darkness, beyond the strip of cultivated land beside the road, lay the forest. She had seen it the afternoon before, a shadow on the hills, sometimes coming close to the road, sometimes fading into distance, but never completely out of sight. The forest of Broceliande, the mystery that filled the heart of the duchy of Brittany as deep as the sea. There were wolves there, and other savage animals; there were robbers more savage still — and there were other things more dangerous than either, things that fled with a laugh and a ringing of crystal bells into hollow hills, or smiled up at you from wells when you looked for your own reflection. Things that could steal away your shadow and drive you mad; demon things.

  Marie was a Breton of the March, where one spoke French; the forest belonged to the older Brittany, which spoke a more ancient tongue. But she had heard the stories. The country people left certain trees alone, decked certain springs monthly with flowers, built bonfires annually on particular flattened stones, and left little offerings of bread and milk. The church condemned it all, but the peasants stubbornly persisted, and few village priests had the courage to tell them to stop. Even priests could suffer if “the Good People” were offended. And the heart of the Good People’s land was the forest.

  Marie swallowed, crossed herself, whispered a prayer to Saint Michael. She had escaped: she would not let fear of things unseen keep her a prisoner now. But she started toward Mont St. Michel along the road. The afternoon before she had planned to make her way back through the forest in order to baffle pursuit, but she could no more enter the forest’s shadow in that moonless dark than she could grow wings. The road would be safe until dawn. And in the daylight, she told herself firmly, the forest will seem safer, too.

  As she walked, the land gradually, almost imperceptibly regained its shape. A hill humped itself up, black against the east; a brook followed a dip under a shadow that became willows. Then the silence was broken: a cock crowed from a farmyard as she passed, and her heart skipped a beat with relief. It was well known that all evil things retreated to their dens at cockcrow. Soon a few hesitant birds chirruped uncertainly; others called back. All at once the whole dawn chorus — the thrush and the warbler, the robin and the lark — sang full-throated from every bush and hedge, and the rest of Marie’s dark fears drifted away on their tide of song. The light grew and the fields turned green, dappled with the white and yellow of meadowsweet and buttercups. Rabbits bounded for their burrows as she approached; a vixen ran across her path in a streak of red. Two swans flew low overhead, their wings booming. As the eerie quiet of the night receded, Marie found herself grinning with pure joy and walking with great bounding steps. This was no dream, no fantasy of holiness: this was real. She’d escaped! The knights had thought she was dull, timid, easy to deceive — but they were the ones deceived, and she was on her way home.

  She should get off the road before they came galloping after her. Marie half-ran, half-skipped to where a farm track led off to the left beside a brook. Along a field, over a ditch, through a pasture, and there, closer than she’d expected, was the forest. There was nothing sinister about it now that the sun was up. The trees were covered with the vivid green of May, fuller than early spring’s leaves, brighter than summer’s. The morning sun had brushed their tops with a light as rich and yellow as butter. There were bluebells flowering under the old oaks, and the undergrowth had been coppiced recently, the straight young wood cut to be used and the rest cleared, so that the flowers carpeted a space open and airy as a hall, dappled with sun. The farm track continued on under the trees. The fear she’d felt before now seemed ridiculous: Broceliande was a beautiful place. Happily, she followed the path onward.

  It was easy going for a while, and she was free to imagine what she’d do when she got back to St. Michael’s. She’d go straight to Lady Constance. “Lady Mother,” she’d say, “those knights who came to fetch me — they weren’t from Duke Robert at all.” And Constance, pale with shock at Marie’s reappearance, would whisper faintly, “No?” “No,” Marie would say. “They were from a duke, certainly, but not Robert of Normandy. Hoel of Brittany had sent them to abduct me. He meant to marry me off to one of his own men and steal my father’s lands. But I managed to escape. I thank God and Saint Michael, who saved me from having to turn traitor to my sworn overlord. I hate treachery above all things,” she would say pointedly. “I’m astonished, Lady Mother, that you didn’t realize who that Alain de Fougères was and who he served — you, who know the pedigree of every knightly family on the Breton March.”

  Some of Marie’s happiness vanished. Constance had certainly known. What would she do when the novice she’d betrayed turned up again on her doorstep?

  Marie bit her lip and told herself that Constance wouldn’t be able to do anything. She wouldn’t dare admit that she’d connived at the abduction of a young noblewoman entrusted to her care; she’d have to pretend that she, too, had been deceived. The priory was safe, she told herself. It had to be. There was no other refuge within reach. She pressed on.

  The path grew narrower, and soon she left the area of coppiced woodland behind. The forest floor became a mixture of brambles and saplings where there was a gap in the canopy above, and bracken shoots and bluebells where there wasn’t. Eventually Marie noticed another track which left her path to the right. It was rough and half-choked with brambles, but it led north, the direction she wanted. She kilted up her skirts out of the way of the trailing brambles, and turned right.

  The going became much harder. Last year’s leaves covered the ground, hiding the fallen branches, the stones, the dips in the path, so that she stumbled often; in the sunnier patches there were nettles and thorns. The effort made her painfully aware that she’d already walked a long way on an empty stomach. Her muscles were still stiff and sore from the previous day’s riding, and she longed to lie down and rest. She reminded herself of how proud her father would be when he learned of her daring escape, straightened her shoulders, and continued on. She walked more slowly, though, and watched for some sign of a farm or cottage where she could buy food. The night before she had filled her purse with all the money that had been packed into her luggage: it should be more t
han enough to see her home.

  Two hours later, she’d come upon no sign of human settlement. Since she left the road she’d seen nothing but the trees, with the light slipping through them in bewildering patterns; heard nothing but the cries of the birds, and the scolding of an occasional squirrel. Her path had long since vanished into the undergrowth, and she’d struggled on along a series of deer tracks which ran a little ways into the forest, then disappeared without warning. As the sun climbed higher the day became hot, and midges and mosquitoes rose whining from black muddy patches on the forest floor. She found herself thinking longingly of water — but she’d passed no water since the brook where she left the road. Her legs were scratched by brambles and stung by nettles, and her face and hands had been bitten by mosquitoes. She wondered if the knights would already have passed her along the road. If they had, it would be safe to return there. She didn’t think she could endure much more of the forest.

  She sat down beside the trunk of a fallen tree, to rest and to check her direction by the sun. For a few minutes, though, she was too exhausted even to move, and she simply sat, leaning her cheek against the tree’s green bark. At last she crossed herself and said a prayer, then looked up at the sun, which scattered light unevenly through the shifting leaves above her. It was noon, and the shadows were short. She looked down at the shadow of the tree beside her — and realized that the angle of the shadow was wrong. She’d been walking west, not north. West, into the heart of the forest. Worse, she could not remember when she’d last checked her direction, and couldn’t say how deep into Broceliande she had come.