I told him he was more likely to meet them in Heaven. But he didn’t want to hear that. So he set off for Saint-Denis, where Yehuda lives.
There is a space, as we wait to see if the story will continue. But the silence is filled only with the clink of mugs at distant tables.
At last, Marie says, “Yarrow is a powerful healer.”
I laugh. “Not that powerful.” And then I ask Aron, “This was his miracle, then?”
“What else could it have been?” He pushes his black hair back to show us the scar. “How old does that scar look?”
“Years old,” says Jerome.
“Days. It’s days. I swear it on my life.”
I’m studying Aron, considering.
Old Jerome, in turn, is studying me. “What are you here for?” he says suddenly.
I say, “What is everyone here for? I want to see the king and his troops. And, if I’m lucky, the three children and their—”
“No,” Jerome interrupts me. “There’s something else. You have a motive.”
He holds me in his gaze. He has very red lips under his white beard.
At last, I shrug. “I collect stories,” I say. “This seems a promising one.”
The little nun at the end of the table is smiling at me in a most unsettling way.
“So,” I say, because she is making me uncomfortable and because I want to hear more of the story, “as far as I can tell, these children have nothing in common, don’t know each other, and have no reason ever to meet. But they do meet, don’t they? How? That’s what I want to know.”
The innkeeper grins. “Well, isn’t that lucky? I can tell you that—because it happened right here.”
HAPTER 7
The Innkeeper’s Tale
The first to arrive is William.
He’s come out the other side of Malesherbes not much worse for wear—sure, under his robes he’s spattered with blood, and I imagine he’s a bit worn-out. But the day’s fine and he’s survived the forest. More than survived, really. His stride is long, and the breeze is cool and fresh and invigorating.
“How do you know all this?” I interrupt. I want to know if I’m sitting at a table filled with wizards and mind readers.
“Most of it I heard from those who was there,” the innkeeper replies. “And some of it I take a guess at. I know what kind of day it was, I know how long his legs are, is it really so far a stretch to say his stride was long?”
I suppose it isn’t.
“Besides, sometimes elaborating a little bit helps keep the ale flowing on a slow night.”
• • •
William’s been walking some time when, out ahead of him, he sees a group of pilgrims. They look wealthy—their cart is painted, they’re dressed in brightly dyed tunics and gowns. They’re a family of wealthy merchants, heading for the cathedral at Saint-Denis. This I know, because they came here later.
Two men and one woman are walking alongside the cart, and an old lady and a really old lady are riding inside it. William raises a big hand and waves at them. He’s been walking alone for a while, and it would be nice to have someone to talk to. Yes, there are women there. But they’re not peasants and, besides, they’re old.
One of the old women sees him wave and says something to the men walking alongside the cart. The men turn, look back at William, and then peel off and stand in the middle of the road. The walking woman smacks the behind of the horse and hurries the cart ahead.
“Hail, friends!” William calls. The men are waiting for him. Silently. As William gets closer, he can see them better. The older one has a thick red beard. The younger has curly red hair. A father and his son. They look nervous. And William can’t see their hands under their brightly colored cloaks.
“Hail,” William says again. With less confidence this time.
“Halt,” says the father. “Unmask yourself.”
William comes to a stop about thirty paces away from them. “What?”
The bearded man looked nervously at his son, and then back to William. “Take off your mask, if you mean no harm.”
William blinks at him. “What mask?”
The young man is biting his lip and staring. Suddenly, he pulls a short sword from beneath his cloak. “In the name of Christ, be away!”
William has no idea what is going on.
The older man draws a hatchet. “Be you brigand or be you devil, begone!”
William continues blinking at them. “I’m not a brigand or a devil. I’m a Benedictine brother. A monk.”
The ruddy father and son are brandishing their weapons in an attempt to be menacing. They do not look menacing. They look afraid.
“I am a monk,” William says again. “Devoted to God. Can we walk together on the road? I’m . . . kind of lonely.”
The son’s eyes are wild. “Begone!” He swings his sword at the air. William stumbles backward. He trips over his own sandal and lands—smack—on the road. “Begone!” the younger man shouts again.
“Fine,” William says. “You’re crazy—but fine.”
The men start to back away, leaving William sitting on his derriere in the middle of the road.
And then he figures it out. He starts laughing.
If the men were scared before, now they’re terrified. They turn and shout, “Spur the horse, Mathilde! Fly! Fly!” Mathilde smacks the horse, and the cart goes rumbling down the road, with the men running after it.
William’s figured it out. They think he’s a brigand because they think he’s wearing a mask. They think he’s wearing a mask because they’ve never seen someone with his color skin before. Hard to believe, I know. But what other explanation is there? William sighs, stands up, and brushes the mud from his enormous behind.
William starts out slowly now, so as not to overtake the pilgrims, but soon the cool air and swooping larks whip his mood into a fine, happy froth, and he completely forgets. It’s not much later, then, that he comes across the paranoid pilgrims.
They are stopped in the middle of the road, and their cart is cocked half on its side. One of the cart’s wheels is lying on the grassy edge of the road a few feet away. The small group is standing around the cart, staring at it like it’s some strange fish, washed ashore. The women have their hands on their hips. The two men have their weapons drawn and are looking all around them like something’s going to jump out of the woods and grab them.
And then that something comes walking down the road. When they see William they start shouting: “Away, brigand! Away!” The women stare, clutching each other for protection.
William sighs. He shakes his head. He keeps walking.
“Back!” the son cries. “Avaunt!”
William walks straight for him.
The young man swings his sword at the air. But William strides right at him, and the young man steps back. And back again. “Avaunt . . . ,” the young man mutters.
William walks past him. The travelers fall back. All except the oldest woman. She’s wearing black wool, and her pale blue eyes fix William with the most evil stare he’s ever seen. He tries to ignore her.
William walks up to the cart, puts his large hands on the axle where the wheel was attached, and lifts the cart up.
The pilgrims gape.
“Well?” William says. “Do you want to put the wheel back on or not?”
None of them move.
“I’m not a brigand. I’m a monk from the Abbey Saint- Martin. My mother was a Saracen”—he uses the word so they’ll understand what he means—“that’s why I have brown skin. But I’m a monk. A monk.”
Still, they do not budge. Their mouths hang open stupidly.
“One last chance,” William says. “Go pick up the wheel and put it on the axle. And don’t go rushing down this road. It’s too rutted and rocky to hurry down with a laden cart.” He
waits. “I’m going to drop it if you don’t go get that wheel soon.”
Not a person moves.
So William drops the cart. When it lands, there’s a crack of wet wood. “I offered,” William says, shrugging.
The old woman with the pale eyes mutters something about the anti-Christ. The men clutch the sweaty handles of their weapons and watch William warily. So the big oblate walks away. The cart lies in the middle of the road, broken and useless.
• • •
He gets here just before sunset. The yard out front is empty, except for my stable boy, Jacques. Jacques is sitting on a stump, whittling. William stands in front of him and says, “Excuse me.” Jacques looks up, screams, and falls backward off the stump.
William instantly drops to one knee and says, “I am a brother of the Monastery Saint-Martin. I want only a place to sleep and some food, please.”
Jacques stammers, backs away from him slowly, and then turns and runs inside to get me. Tells me there’s a giant wearing a mask out in the yard, asking for a place to sleep. I come outside. I’ve seen Africans before. You see all sorts when you run an inn. But I’ve got to admit I’ve never seen anyone as big as William. Well, once. The Red Monk, Michelangelo di Bologna.
Anyway, I can’t let William come inside.
“And why not?” Jerome exclaims, his face flushing burgundy behind his beard.
Look, Brother, he seems like a nice kid. I liked him. But he looks like something out of the Book of Revelation. I mean, he has a nice face if you actually look at it, but most people don’t really look. They just glance, get up, and leave. And I got an inn to run here.
So I offer to let him sleep in the stables. Free of charge. That’s as fair as I can make it.
Then he asks for food. I ask for money. He doesn’t have any, but he says he’ll work for it. So I have him sweep up the stable. Good worker, that kid. When he’s done, I bring him a big portion of the pigeon stew. He must have been famished, because he cleans out the whole bowl in about three bites.
Then I leave him in the stable, and pretty soon, he’s snoring so loud I can hear him in the inn.
So William’s here.
• • •
Not too long after, my door swings open, and a troop of filthy knights comes in. Petty knights. No horses. No lord either, except whoever’s paying them that day. Just wandering around the countryside, pushing people around. I gotta tell you, the best thing about the Crusades is that morons like that have somewhere else to go to cause trouble.
Riffraff like them don’t usually pay, so I’m on my guard already. I try to tell them to wipe their feet. They don’t care. They’re filing in—one, two, three, four, five of them. I end up learning their names as they sit there, drinking. There’s Baldwin, who’s short and bald—so that’s easy to remember. There’s Georges and Robert. I can’t tell which is which, because they’re the muscle. Each big as hills, and neither as smart as one. Then there are two brothers, with curly golden hair. One is tall and skinny, with a big Adam’s apple and a lazy eye. Haye, his name is. And his brother is chubbier and called Marmeluc, which is a ridiculous name if you ask me.
Finally their leader walks in. Small and wiry, with long, ratty yellow hair and a face like a weasel. Sir Fabian, they call him. Fabian is holding a rope that trails behind him and out the door.
I’m just trying to figure out what the rope is for when the door opens one last time.
There is a girl at the end of the rope.
A peasant girl. The rope is tied around her neck. It’s left a red ring on her skin. The girl looks dusty and bruised and exhausted.
But there’s something about her. Something . . . I don’t know. If I were those knights, I wouldn’t want to keep her tied up. There’s something about her that looks like it can’t be caged or bound—at least not for long.
Well, Sir Fabian the Weasel makes her sit on the floor, and he ties the rope around his ankle. “In case I get too drunk to look after you,” he says. And then he and the rest of them start drinking.
So Jeanne’s here, too.
• • •
Twilight’s settling over the forest. A boy creeps up to the inn. He’s afraid. He’s not sure he’s welcome here. After what’s happened to his village, I don’t blame him. He sees Jacques, peeling carrots in the yard. He stares for a moment and decides that Jacques looks jumpy.
So the boy—Jacob—creeps around back, where he finds the pig’s trough. In the trough, among the slop and the stale beer, there’s an old carrot and a withered apple. They don’t look very good, but the boy hasn’t eaten, and hasn’t slept, in more than a day. He takes them.
“Hey!” says a voice. Jacob drops the food.
The bald knight stands up out of the bushes. He was relieving himself. “Are you stealing?” says the knight. “Are you a thief?”
Jacob hesitates for a moment and then decides his best bet is to try to simply walk away. He does it real calm, real slow. But Baldwin hikes up his pants and hurries to catch up with him. He grabs Jacob, hard, by the arm. “Hey!” he shouts to nobody. “I caught a thief! I caught a thief!” His fingers dig like screws into Jacob’s arm. The little boy winces and tries to regain his footing as he’s dragged around the corner of the inn, into the yard. I don’t know if any of you ever got dragged around by a bully when you were kids. I did. There ain’t nothing scarier. They got total power over you. You can’t run, fighting back won’t do any good at all, and pleading makes them laugh. Just remembering it makes me feel sick and scared all over again.
Well, I figure that’s just about how Jacob was feeling. And after his long and terrible day, if I were him, I would have been about ready to cry.
In front of the inn, a couple of knights are out enjoying the fresh air and the sunset—Haye, Georges, and Robert.
“Look!” Baldwin says. “I caught a thief! Stealing from the pig’s trough!”
“I’m not a thief!” Jacob exclaims.
“Thieves are bad,” says Georges. Because he’s really smart.
Baldwin says, “What should we do with him?”
Jacob’s heart is pounding as he looks between the cruel men with their lazy sneers.
Haye smiles. “I want to play ball.”
“Good.” Baldwin grins. “Let’s play.”
Now all three children are here. Jeanne, William, and Jacob.
• • •
Baldwin pushes the kid. Hard. Jacob’s neck snaps backward, and he goes careening into the chest of one of the big knights.
Robert stares down from under the black brow that stretches over both of his eyes. Then he pushes, and Jacob’s feet go out from under him and he hits the ground. The wind is knocked out of him. Jacob writhes in the dirt, trying to get some air into his lungs, squirming like a fish in a boat.
Just as Jacob gets his breath back, Haye grabs his shirt and yanks him up. The little boy stares into the knight’s wide blue eyes. Only one looks back at him.
He shoves Jacob to the anvil-faced knight, Georges. Georges grabs Jacob around the neck. “Kill the thief,” Georges says.
Nobody contradicts him.
• • •
Jeanne, meanwhile, is sitting on the floor next to Fabian’s feet—under that table over there.
She stares up at Fabian as he sucks on a chicken bone. Beside him, Sir Marmeluc takes deep drafts of ale.
Jeanne watches them, disgusted.
Then Baldwin pokes his head in the front door. “Fabian!” he says. “We caught a thief!”
Fabian continues to suck on the chicken bone. Slowly, he puts it down. A line of saliva trails from his lower lip to the bone. “So?” he says.
“I think Georges is gonna kill it. Wanna watch?”
Well, I start shouting. I don’t know who this thief is or who he’s supposed to have stolen from, but no one is going
to kill anyone on my property. Terrible for business.
But Fabian doesn’t give a pig’s nose about my business or what I’m saying. He gets up, knocks his stool over, and goes to the door. The rope around Jeanne’s neck gets tight. He kicks his foot out, jerking her head forward. She crawls to her feet and, because she has no choice, she follows Fabian outside. So do I.
In the yard in the falling dusk we see a boy with curly brown hair. Georges is choking him. His face is red and turning blue, and his little legs are kicking the air.
And then a voice cuts through the yard, bright and commanding and clear. Like a war trumpet or something.
“Stop it! Leave him alone!”
We all turn and look. The knights, too.
It’s Jeanne. A little peasant girl, with a rope around her neck. Telling a bunch of knights what to do.
Georges is confused enough to drop Jacob—just bam. Drops him. Jacob bounces. Then he lies still in the dust.
The knights look at Jeanne. Then they look at Fabian.
Fabian shrugs. “Get it over with already.”
Baldwin draws his sword. He advances on Jacob.
“Hey!” I shout. “Don’t!”
“We can take him to the woods to kill him if you want,” says Sir Haye, shrugging.
“Don’t kill him at all!” I cry.
And Jeanne is shrieking, “Stop! STOP!”
• • •
Inside the stable, William opens his eyes and pushes straw from his face.
People are screaming in the yard.
Why are people screaming in the yard?
He sits up—and finds his face very close to his donkey’s rear end. He plants a big hand on the donkey and pushes it away.
More screaming. William pulls himself to his feet. He’s covered in hay. He dusts off his habit and groggily makes his way to the door of the stable. When he gets there, he can’t figure out how to open it. He pushes it to the left, but it won’t budge. He pushes harder. It still won’t open. More screaming outside. William wonders, Did they lock me in? He leans all his very considerable weight against the door. Nothing.