Something Red (20 page)

They were now in a sort of short tunnel within the gatehouse. Behind them were the front doors, already being swung shut by men-at-arms from the porter’s gatehouse guard. The heavy valves swung closed with a ponderous grace; there was a muffled thud as they met. Other men grappled with handles set into the walls. The handles were set into squared-off logs shot back into holes in the side walls; these were now drawn out, gleaming with the animal fat worked into them as a lubricant. The beams were dragged across the width of the entranceway, sliding into brackets on the doors, strengthening the seal.

Ahead of the travelers was the portcullis, a heavy latticework of
oak beams clad in beaten iron. The vertical beams ended at the bottom in sharpened steel points resting on the stone of the gatehouse floor. The portcullis could only be raised with much effort by guards in the chamber above this entryway; chains clanked upward onto a cogged wheel; pawls prevented it from slipping back down. But the lattice could be dropped immediately by one person: a kick to the braking lever released it, and the whole weight thundered down in an instant, and it was a sorry wretch who stood beneath those heavy pointed ends when it fell.

Immediately beyond the portcullis was another pair of solid doors, prohibiting a glimpse into the inner courtyard. Hob became acutely aware that they were in a trap, with Jack left outside. He told himself that they were among friends, that Ranulf and his men were in here with them, but the events of the last few days had tightened his vigilance till it thrummed like a plucked bowstring at any least threat.

To distract himself he looked around: at the doors with their huge bars; at the massive stone walls to either hand, curving inward with the shape of the two gatehouse towers; at the ceiling with its spaced holes; at the floor of fitted stone, littered with wisps of straw and bits of dried horse dung. The horses were fidgeting in the enclosed space and two watered the stones where they stood. The passageway began to smell of horse and, to a lesser extent, of leather, and men’s sweat, and the smoke from Ranulf’s torches with its resinous undertone. The close air, despite the many living bodies and the flaring torches, could not be said to be warm, but it was at least out of the wind and snow.

Hob nudged Nemain, and pointed out the holes in the ceiling; he could hear the sound of several men’s voices up there.

“Those are murderesses,” she said. She was only a year or so older than Hob, but she had traveled with Molly for many years, and knew much that he did not.

“Murderesses?” Hob said, confused: there was no mistaking the deep, harsh male tones above.

“That’s what they call them,
murderesses,
those holes you’re just after pointing at. If there’s someone they don’t like coming in, they trap them in here, and the next moment aren’t they raining arrows or hot oil down through those holes. Murderesses.”

“Oh,” said Hob, looking up again. One was just above their heads.

There were more voices and grunts from above, a clank of iron pawls, and the portcullis began to rise, disappearing inch by inch through a slot in the ceiling stones, up into the guardroom above. Soon they heard it bang home. They waited; still the inner doors remained closed.

The horses danced in place, the clop of horseshoe on stone echoing and reechoing in the vaulted chamber. One horse was much larger than the others: a destrier, trained to a knight’s service, worth many times the value of any of the other mounts. It stood still, tall enough that Hob could see it above the intervening horses, and looked about placidly at its lesser kin; it had the calm of a very large animal that had had fear trained out of it.

Roger’s mare began to bite at the horse next to her, and he bent forward and punched at her neck; her ears went flat, and she curled her head around and snapped at his knee, just out of reach.

The sergeant stood in his stirrups, peering upward through the nearest murderess. He subsided, but a moment later was standing again, trying to see what the porter’s crew was doing in the upper room. “God’s wounds,” bellowed Ranulf, losing patience at last, “are all you fucking lackwits asleep up there?”

A face appeared in one of the roof-holes. “There’s snow what’s drifted up against the inner doors, sarge; Waleran’s away to the back shed for shovels.”

“Bennet! Bennet, you whoreson fuck, we’re perishing of cold down here!” Roger yelled up toward the speaker. He started to stand in his stirrups as Ranulf had done, but the mare moved in an intricate
shuffle under him and he thought better of it and dropped back into the saddle with a thump. “Shake it off, Jesus’s sake, and put it back in your braies!” And then, muttering, “Sweet Mother of God, get us in where it’s warm!” He bunched the reins up in his fists as he tried to check the mare’s antics; she was trying to scrape his leg against the wall.

“And God and Mary with
you
as well, Roger, you prick,” the porter called, laughing. “Say an
Ave
while you’re waiting that you may not burst of choler.” He withdrew from the hole; they heard him say something and there came a gust of laughter from several men in the upper room. But very soon thereafter they heard the scrape of wooden-bladed shovels in the snow outside; there were several clanking thumps as heavy bolts were shot, and then the inner doors swung open.

Hob looked past Molly’s wagon and the mounted men ahead, out over the snowfield that was the bailey, with thick flakes falling straight down onto an expanse of drifts. Here and there the track of someone tramping across the bailey from one building to another could be seen, but mostly it was a field of white. Spitting torches set in recessed sconces showed the entrances to smaller outbuildings that backed up against the curtain walls, and hinted at those high dark curtain walls themselves and at the loom of the great keep.

The horses clattered out into the night; their hooves fell silent as they stepped out into two or more feet of snow, with higher drifts. Ranulf led the way ahead, bearing to the right as he tracked toward the stables. The wagons trundled out, one after the other. Behind him Hob heard a rumble and a bang as the portcullis was dropped, and then the groan of the inner doors being swung shut. He was uneasily aware that Jack was still outside the castle with the remainder of the men-at-arms. In a few moments they had crossed the snowy courtyard, churning the smooth expanse into jumbled drifts, drawing near two connected stone buildings, low but wide—the castle stables, set against the eastern curtain wall at the opposite side of the bailey from the gatehouse.

Broad doors were thrown back, and Ranulf’s men swung down from their saddles and walked their mounts and the new horses into the golden warmth. The near-silent shuffle of hooves through the bailey snowdrifts became a muffled drumming as the horses walked onto the hard-packed earth floor of the stables. Grooms appeared and quickly relieved the men-at-arms of the spare horses. The group began to disperse to left and right down the central corridor of the stables, heading for their individual stalls, passing from Hob’s sight.

Ranulf rattled off orders and stumped back out into the bailey, heading for the keep to make his report. He was pressing with one hand at his lower back, walking stiffly after the long cold hours in the saddle.

He had assigned Goscelin and two other men to Molly’s party. One went up to Milo’s head; Goscelin surrendered his mount to the third man and pulled Mavourneen toward the wall beside the stable. After a bit of maneuvering the two wagons were backed up to the wall, side by side, and Hob and the first man-at-arms began unhitching the ox, while Goscelin helped Nemain get the little donkey out of the traces.

They worked with numb fingers to release the various buckles and ease the slipknots. Soon the clacking of the portcullis gears floated across the bailey to Hob’s ears, as the porter and his crew went about admitting Jack Brown and the others, and then the second part of the group came floundering across the open courtyard. Hob felt better as Jack joined them. The dark man led the mare up and circled her about, then smoothly backed the third wagon against the curtain wall.

Jack had the wagon braked and the mare out of harness so swiftly that he finished a moment or two after everyone else. Molly and Nemain disappeared into the large wagon while Hob and the men walked the animals into the welcoming stable.

Grooms descended on them and led them to various stalls. The stable crew displayed a variety of clothing, but all wore the insignia of
Blanchefontaine Castle: a cloth badge sewn to their outer garments, bearing a stylized white fountain. Four lines representing water leaped from the fountain’s top and curled to right and left, seeking the ground.

Hob tried to get Milo settled and fed, but he was bone-weary, and quite willing to let a pair of grooms push him good-naturedly from the stall. He and Jack joined Goscelin and one of the men-at-arms—the other had vanished somewhere—and went back outside to the big wagon to find Molly.

Molly and Nemain awaited them by the back of the large wagon; the door stood open, and a dim gold glow poured out into the steadily falling snow. Just inside the doorjamb was a stout chest, of cedar banded with iron, that Molly used for the finer elements of her wardrobe. Molly came up to Jack; she put a hand on his arm, and pointed out the chest. He went up and reached in for the rope handle on one end and dragged it screeching out onto the wagon lip. He caught hold of the other handle and slid the chest off the wagon and stepped back with it. Nemain climbed into the wagon and extinguished the candle, then closed the back door. From a thong looped about her narrow waist she took a small disk-handled key and secured the back door latch with its iron barrel lock, another sign of Molly’s wealth.

Goscelin turned and led the way toward the keep. As they trudged toward the dark indistinct loom of the castle’s main building, a thinning of the downpouring snow allowed Hob to see, a few yards away from Molly’s caravan, two wagons backed against the curtain wall. Each had a layer of snow several feet thick on its roof. One wagon was a workaday transport, but the other was of fine dark wood, with shutters adorned with graven vines, leaves, faces: Lady Svajone’s two wagons. The caking of snow on the upper surfaces of the carving brought the vine-and-leaf pattern into bright relief against the dark wood.

“Mistress! Look!”

Molly turned to follow Hob’s pointing finger, and her handsome
face broke into a grin. She stood beaming, her strong legs planted in a drift, snowflakes beginning to catch on her shawl.

“Well, and there’s one thing that’s come right. They must surely have parted from those poor masons, and denied that thing another feast,” she said with pleasure.

“Unless,” said Nemain darkly, shivering, lost inside her grandmother’s cloak, “some of the men from the castle have found but the wagons, and all dead within, as at the inn.”

“Nay,” said Molly confidently, “I do not feel it so. We will meet them within.”

Roger came up to them from the stables, tramping his way through the snow. “Come, Mistress,” he said to Molly. “There’s warmth and every good thing within; surely you have had enough of snow this day?”

“I have that,” said Molly, and the party moved on toward the keep’s looming darkness.

The keep had no entrance at ground level. Instead, an enclosed stairway ran up the south side. Entry was into a fortified forebuilding: a sort of miniature of the castle entrance, a cottage-sized stone building with a stout oak door in its eastern face, farthest from the gatehouse. The door was hinged with iron straps and pierced at eye level by an iron grille. Roger stepped up to it and knocked backhand; the iron lozenges sewn into the leather of his glove clanked against the grille. The inner grille covering shot aside, a guard examined Roger briefly, and withdrew; an instant later Hob heard the snick of drawn bolts, and the door swung open.

Roger and Goscelin and the third man-at-arms entered to a volley of greetings and the insults with which men express pleasure at the sight of friends. Molly’s party crowded in behind. The room was warmed only by body heat and rushlight, but it was out of the snow and the wind, and just being within a real room after the snowstorm was a delight to Hob.

He looked around. The guardroom was bare except for a bench and table, a weapons chest, cloaks hung on pegs, a water bucket, and two hard-eyed guards: one quite large, one small and wiry. Hob, trying to return their gaze, at first thought the mismatch somewhat comical. Almost at once he changed his mind, deciding that he understood the reason some sergeant had paired them: one would be very strong, and the other very quick.

An arch at the back of the guardroom led to one side of a small unlit vestibule divided into two halves. The wall that divided the vestibule ran only partway to the back. It was necessary to walk to the rear of the vestibule, turn rightward around the end of the divider, and double back again to gain the bottom of the stairs. In this way no light from the guardroom reached the bottom half of the stairs; it was lit entirely from the torches in brackets along the upper part of the stairwell.

The party bunched up for a moment in the dim-lit second part of the vestibule. The entrance to the enclosed stairway was faced with ashlar, and peeking from behind the lintel stone were the iron teeth of another portcullis. Unlike the great portcullis that closed the keep, this smaller gate was kept raised, unless there was an attack under way. Now, drawn up as it was so that its iron fangs lined the top of the opening, the portcullis gave the stairway entrance the suggestion of a mouth, yawning wide to devour all who would enter.

But Goscelin and his comrade trudged prosaically through the arch and led the climb up the stairway: broad stone treads and modest risers in a rectangular corridor also lined with ashlar. Molly and Nemain followed next, the girl trailing her hand along the smooth stone. The stairs were completely enclosed, with neither window nor arrow slit. Roger held back and offered to help Jack with the chest. Jack just shook his head; he carried the chest easily. He managed to convey his thanks with a smile, a dip of the head. They went up together, the young man-at-arms pointing out this and that aspect of the castle’s defenses to
Jack, the older veteran, who listened and nodded but did not speak. Hob tailed along behind.