In a Dark Wood (8 page)

“He's a worthy man!” shouted Hugh, but the innkeeper dragged Hugh up the street, into the dark barely tinged with candlelight.

“Best run home before you lose each and every tooth in your head, Hugh.”

Hugh swayed, breathing hard.

A gutter ran down the middle of the street, and Hugh followed it. He did not follow it long, until he began to weep. When he was done weeping, he found his way back to the castle gates.

“What misfortune is this, Hugh?” asked the guard.

“I stumbled,” said Hugh.

“A bad fall,” said the guard, not unkindly. The news would be everywhere by morning, and Hugh felt shrunken as well as filthy.

“It was a fight,” said Hugh.

“No doubt the other man looks the same.”

“It was Thurstin.”

“And you can still walk! Come along, Hugh. That's quite enough adventure for one night.”

Hugh tried to sneak through the servants' dining hall, but Bess sat gossiping with the cook. “Look who fell into the privy,” she said.

Hugh washed himself in cold water in his bedchamber, a small room next to the sheriff's. When he was clean, there was no sign of a fight, except for the bruises that had already blossomed on his ribs and a gouge inside his lower lip. He looked, in his speckled hand mirror, thin and shaken, with the eyes of a stranger.

He felt empty. Bitterness and anger had both left him. He was exhausted, but he found himself staring at his own bunched fist.

13

Nottingham smiled. “You may, of course, talk to the thief, sire, but whatever can such people say? They are little more than animals, as you know.”

“Very little more,” agreed Geoffrey.

“You have some act of persuasion in mind perhaps?”

“Yes, I do.”

“I knew you would change your mind.”

It was always night within these walls. A taper illuminated an oak table and the lean face of the executioner as he smiled, looking into Geoffrey's eyes as into the eyes of a man he knew very well and liked. Geoffrey smiled back in return, sharing a chuckle. Yes, he had changed his mind. He wanted the treasure.

“I will show you the way myself.”

“Don't trouble yourself. One of your men can lead the way.”

“I insist. I have a special interest in this prisoner.”

They cast misshapen shadows in the torchlight of the corridors. Iron bars threw thick, trembling shadows into a chamber filled with gray straw. There was a smell of urine and sweat.

“I want to talk with him alone,” said Geoffrey.

“Stir yourself,” said Nottingham. A hand crept into the torchlight. An eye gleamed. “I can make him talk,” said Nottingham. “I can make him do anything, but you must give me time. You can't interrupt a procedure and expect—”

Geoffrey gripped his arm. “Leave us.”

“I fear you will simply waste your precious time, my lord.”

“Please.”

Nottingham bowed. “As you wish.” He stared through the bars. “I skinned a man like him once. The thin ones are better than the fat. The fat ones ooze. We don't flay often anymore, do we?”

“No need to.”

“I'm glad. Such a messy procedure. But effective. A man will say anything when he has no skin.”

Nottingham's steps whispered down the corridor, and Geoffrey knelt, his face against a cold iron bar. “I passed a gibbet today,” he said. “It is on a mound of earth, and the view from the top of it must be impressive. It is the very gibbet we will use tomorrow.”

Straw rustled. A figure crept into the torchlight but did not meet the sheriff's eye. “Why do you tell me this?” Hoarse and weary. “How can I look forward to my death with anything but hope?”

A pretty speech from a thief. “I have an offer for you.”

The prisoner did not speak.

“An offer of mercy.”

“Why should you show mercy to me?”

“Here is my offer. If you disclose the location of the treasure, I will set aside the sentence of death and order that your hand be cut off instead. In that way you can keep your life, and I can have the money.”

“I would rather die.”

“You value your fingers so much?”

“I don't trust you.”

Bold talk. Geoffrey stood. “You have as much as admitted now that you have a treasure, hidden somewhere. This interests me. I care nothing for you. Nothing at all. You are like a dog on a leash to me, even less.”

The man shrank into a heap of dark cloth and said nothing. The pain in his feet was so great he could think only of relief, and hanging meant he would have no more pain. Geoffrey understood this and also understood that the loss of a hand was even more agony. You could not negotiate with someone who wanted to die.

“Ours is an unpleasant job, sire,” said Nottingham, as if he had heard every word. “So much depends on us.”

Geoffrey did not like agreeing with this soft-voiced man, but it was true. “Proceed with the hanging. There is no choice.”

“It is best to show no mercy.”

“I have always thought so.”

And yet, he thought, crossing the courtyard, stepping round a spill of fresh manure, he had not always thought so. He had commanded that men be tortured; he had even seen a traitorous tax collector, a man who had conspired to embezzle, lose his eyes, a proceeding that made Geoffrey thankful that such traitors were so rare. He had never questioned the justice of such punishments. But something about them made him feel frail and less sure of himself. No doubt this was yet another secret weakness, another flaw he had to hide.

Someone turned to avoid his eyes and ducked behind the chapel. The falconer. Proof again that the falconer and Eleanor were lovers. As soon as he began to feel the ache less, something refreshed the pain. A goose was driven, honking and peering one way and then another, towards the kitchen. The whippet ran to his hand and tasted his fingers. The Fool balanced a kitchen knife, point down, on his nose, to the evident pleasure of the cooks.

Sir Roger had said, Make him talk.

He would make the Fool talk. He would make him explain everything. But this afternoon he wanted to sit with pages of vellum, and check sums, and perhaps hear a report on sheep or the disease that made the barley grow in patches like mange.

Hugh unbuckled Geoffrey's sword belt. All of this experience, this closeness to a man like Geoffrey, was a priceless education. Hugh knew it and no doubt believed that God had picked him out for this special honor. Geoffrey hated to chide Hugh, but it was his responsibility. “Sometimes, Hugh, you let an expression of pride show on your face.” Hugh's face was swollen, his eyes downcast.

What showed in Hugh's manner today was not pride, after all. I am a mortal man, Hugh, Geoffrey nearly said aloud. A mortal, sinful man.

Why, Geoffrey demanded of himself, did I take Hugh with me yesterday? Why did I allow the young man to guess at my own wayward nature? Don't think ill of me, Hugh, Geoffrey wanted to say. “Are you feeling well, Hugh?”

“Quite well, my lord.”

“You're sure?”

If there was going to be a period of shame between them, of averted gazes, it would announce itself now. Hugh met his eyes and said, “Just a little weary this morning, my lord.” Geoffrey considered this: Hugh was showing a grown man's care with words.

Geoffrey consoled himself with work.

This was his place. Sitting in a corner of the great hall, wedge of cheese in his hand, listening to a report on the pavage for the city streets, a tax collected to allow the public way to be cobbled. The clerk spoke in numbers, numbers that described the income of the city and its power. Geoffrey listened, feeling that even as they spoke, cobblestones in distant riverbeds began to glow, began to work fitfully to one side or another. Just as the hairs on the head are numbered.

14

It was raining out. The dim pricks of light from three windows glistened on the black paving stones. Everywhere else was black, inside-of-skull black, the black of the deepest point of a scabbard.

His wife crooked a finger, and he entered her bedchamber. She wore a sleeping cap of light gray, a sash across her forehead and a flower at the side, a bright pink too unsubtle to be one of nature's. She ruffled the fur of a dog.

“I've been waiting for you to say something,” she said.

“About what?”

“No doubt they will discuss me with the king. Oh, Geoffrey is doing well, Your Highness, but his wife is a tiresome hag who burdens him with a tedious Fool only she thinks is funny, and he can't stand to sit at the table with her.”

“Nobody else thinks he's funny?”

“The problem, my dear Geoffrey, is you. You think your own thoughts, have your own opinions, your own worries, and you don't care whether someone right beside you is flayed alive with shame.”

Geoffrey began to compose a speech. An apology, blended with a warning that he had many responsibilities.

“You may go,” she said.

What could he say? He left her and wandered the corridor aimlessly. He could strangle the dog. He could strangle her. Both pointless activities, which would probably give him very little pleasure.

A familiar figure stood, one arm against a wall, staring down into the black courtyard. Perhaps to be a Fool was to be cursed. Perhaps it was to accept a form of self-denial—to parody the essentially matter-of-fact, to mimic the tedious. But if he destroyed the Fool, he would hurt his wife in a way she would never expect.

The Fool wore a peasant cap, pulled over his head, so that his head resembled a gourd. His tunic was pied, red and black, and his stockings were black and white, a motley that was almost elegant. He had dark eyebrows and bright eyes and seemed to have applied some art to his lips. They were as red as slapped flesh.

“My father loved to laugh,” Geoffrey was surprised to hear himself say. “It's strange. In every way I have surpassed my father's accomplishments, and yet he surpasses me in the pleasure he drew from life.” The Fool's eyes looked into his own, dark and gleaming, like stones of great price. Geoffrey did not even know if the Fool spoke English or if the Fool was utterly deaf. “You see a lot, but I wonder how much you understand.”

The Fool collapsed to the floor, and his feet projected into the air where his head had been, the stout shoes of a huntsman, until Geoffrey examined them closely, which he took the leisure to do, since he had paid for them. Not quite as stout as a huntsman's shoe, thinner-soled, more built for leaping. Green leather, forest green, but unstained. The Fool rarely went beyond the courtyard.

“The world is so much surface. So much exterior,” said Geoffrey to the Fool's shoes. “We can never be completely certain what is going on in someone else's mind.” For some reason the Fool made him feel like talking, but this was understandable. Some men could open their hearts to a dog.

“I have been encouraged to make you talk. But I detest the idea.” Nothing demoralizes like a promise of mercy.

Geoffrey waited the amount of time he would have spent listening to the Fool if the Fool were talking. And in an odd way he
was
talking. By standing on his head in a very relaxed way, the Fool intended to communicate something. Geoffrey tried to guess what. A kind of cheerful insult, of course, but perhaps something else.

“Because we are flesh, cruelty can force us to do anything,” said Geoffrey. “When the king wants me to apprehend someone, he simply orders me to bring his body into the keep. His body. Alive, almost always, because justice cannot be visited upon a corpse. What it can be visited upon is the man's soul, but to catch that, you must bring its cage. The body is everything.”

The Fool sprang to his feet in a graceful bound that made Geoffrey step back, startled. The Fool seemed to say that yes, the body was everything and that this was a good thing. See, the body is beautiful. The Fool tumbled across the floor and sprang from hands to feet to hands on down the corridor, a way, Geoffrey supposed, of bidding good evening.

When the tumbling figure had vanished down the corridor, Geoffrey continued to stare after it. The Fool was a mystery, like the mummified serpent with two heads Geoffrey had seen as a boy and actually touched. Tough as spliced cable, with four withered eyeholes and twin rows of fine teeth, barely teeth at all, armor in the mouth. A creature God had thrown down to the earth like Aaron's staff, to say: see, I am God. Heaven and earth pass before me, and I can make anything I desire beneath the firmament.

God, however, had not made the Fool, and Geoffrey did not know exactly what forces had. Something French, he imagined, which was to say something incomprehensible. Something men decided to make of themselves. Was there, he wondered, a guild of Fools? Did God measure such behavior a kind of penance? Of course not, thought Geoffrey, trailing one hand along the cold stone of the corridor. And if the Fool took pleasure in such behavior, wasn't it a bit like sinfulness? The wrinkled priest who had instructed Geoffrey as a boy had been gentle but sure-handed. “But Christ's mercy, and Mary and John, these are the ground of all my bliss,” the priest had said, smiling in a tired way, as if such bliss wore out the very soul it claimed. Plainly any bliss not grounded in Christ was grounded in something potentially wicked.

He slipped into the East Tower and froze at the sight of a candle, a stab of light in the blackness. He put a hand on a manuscript and whispered, “Good evening,” a neutral greeting he would use with anyone, because he had expected darkness.

A shadow spilled across a wall. An arm, cast in gold in the light of the candle, and the curve of a woman's hip beneath gray cloth. “My lord?”

Someday, thought Geoffrey, I will change my life. Someday—when I am a stronger, better man.

“My lord,” she repeated, knowing in every gesture, the shaking down of her dark hair, the hook of her thumb into a fold of his tunic, that he had admired more than her voice. She drew him into the candlelight. The candle was a stub, smoking, the scent of servants' wax.