Chapter 13
The bells chimed for the next prayer hour, and Brother Leviticus pulled off his dirty gloves, tucked his weeding tools under his arm, and bid Glenna farewell as he bustled towards one of the doors.
Alone, she waited, looking around the garden, past the beds and furrows of cabbages and turnips, beans and leeks, off to the distant orchard where before bells, two oblates atop a slim ladder had been picking peaches while supervised by a tall thin monk.
There was no one left. She stood then, brushed the blades of grass off her clothes.
The grass grew between cracks in the stacked flat stones that formed a garden bench.
Casually she looked around and moved slowly toward the bloodbane, then bent quickly and snatched a few leaves, slipping them into the woolen purse at her belt.
She turned around and almost jumped out of her skin.
A ginger-haired boy stood right there, hardly an arm’s length away, a wide, toothsome grin upon his face. “You are well, my lady.” He sounded pleased, assured in speaking to her, and vaguely familiar, and that intrigued her.
That he wasn’t looking at her hands or purse told her he had not seen what she had done. “Aye,” she said cautiously.
“You do not remember me.” His shoulders fell slightly.
“You took my horse when we arrived. I doused you with rainwater. Forgive me.”
He shook his head.
“She frowned. You will not accept my apology?”
“We have met before,” he said looking disheartened.
Glenna studied him, then something struck. “Ruari?” She paused, then saw plainly the answer to her own question. “Not remember you? Ruari!”
He grinned and she threw her arms around him and pulled him against her, laughing. She stepped back, hands on his shoulders, now broader. “Look at you.”
“I expect looking at me is more easily done when I no longer look like a bruised pig.”
Another image of him flashed through her mind and she felt a pang of pity and a mixture of emotions deep in the pit of her belly, even now, more than three years past. The beating she had witnessed was unforgettably horrible. He had been so young.
With a wan smile, she studied his face and pale skin, bright with a milkmaid’s color on his cheeks, not features that were dark blue with bruises or overly-swollen past recognition.
His nose had healed and without crusted blood, cuts, and swelling, was quite narrow and was larger as he had grown, with a crook like a falcon; it still bore the breaks from the punches and cudgel swings.
Yet the boy’s sweetness had not changed and it was a joy not to see sheer fear in his eyes when he looked at her.
“And you are now wed to a great lord,” he said brightly.
She wanted to groan ‘No!’ but remained silent.
Lying to the boy was cruel, but she could not tell him the truth and put him in the path of trouble.
Lies were always trouble, even if you were fairly skilled at the telling of them.
This boy who stood in front of her had already lived through too much.
She reached out to touch his brow, smiling.
“You have straw in your hair.” She picked it off his tousled hair.
“I tend the stable and animals there,” he said with excited pride, standing straight and taller, no longer cowering in fear and awaiting the next blow. He was a far cry from beaten, half-dead seven year old lad she had happened upon in the woods. “And Pater Bancho teaches me to read.”
“So you are now here.” She remembered his young mother, the pale woman only a few years older than Glenna, thin and sobbing, with deep dark shadows under her eyes and who cried for her child while the sheriff, Munro the Horrible, beat him so cruelly.
Glenna asked quietly, “What happened to your mother?”
“She is dead. Three years now. Her lungs were weak. She did not live long past that summer, though we were safe in the high forest at that time, and she was grateful to you for that. By Michelmas she could not sleep. She coughed all night. Soon, she brought me here. Pater Magoon could not save her.”
“I am sorry, Ruari.”
“She is better where she is now,” he said with far more maturity and acceptance than one would expect from a lad his age. “Horrible Munro would have not stopped until he found us.” He shrugged. “He believes we are dead. I am safe here.”
The abbey bells rang again.
He looked over his shoulder and back at her sheepishly. “I cannot stay. I gave my word to the prior I would not again miss prayer and reflection.”
“Then run along with you, Ruari of Beauly,” Glenna said kindly, waving her hand as he turned and ran from the gardens, zigzagging on the paths and leaping over small bushes and a bed of pease, only to plop into a small puddle of water from the stormy days before.
He disappeared around a corner and left her to believe the boy’s bright spirit and curiosity would make that promise to the prior difficult to keep.
She turned to pick up her comb, when she heard Fergus barking from inside the stables and spun around.
Was Fergus alone in there? “Ruari?” She called out to ask him, but he was gone.
She put her comb in the purse with the precious red-leafed herb, pulled the strings closed and headed for the stable.
“God’s eyes, you worthless hound! Stay in the water!” Lyall leaned over the wooden half-barrel filled with water, penning the dog under him as he swept the bottom of the trough for the ball of soap he’d dropped.
Fergus stuck his wet, sloppy head through Lyall’s arm, looked around curiously, wagged his long tail which sent water flying into Lyall’s eyes, and then started vigorously licking his ear.
“Cease!” He laughed and pulled his head away.
“You surely are good for little, dog. Stop licking my ears.” He grabbed the animal by the wet scruff on his neck and faced him eye to eye, almost nose to nose.
“You remind me of one of the tourney whores.”
“Woof!”
“Aye.” He ruffled the dog’s ears and head.
“That you do, hound. Stop your licking.” Lyall paused, thinking back.
“What was her name? Hold still. Look you. I found the soap. Ah, yes. Deloys. Sweet she was…flamed-haired and freckled all over. She was the widowed sister of a mercenary from Flanders and famed from the Caledonia hills to coasts of Normandy for her long, wet tongue.”
“Woof! Woof!”
“Aye, that she was,” Lyall scrubbed the animal, which squirmed and fought him when he was silent.
The unruly beast stood still if he talked to it.
“So you like the sound of my voice, do you?” He paused.
“Then to make this task simpler, I shall tell all, in great detail, the wondrous tales of my lusty dealings with Deloys of Lille.” And he began talking and scrubbing, pulling off mud clots and soaping the dog’s hide clean, and in time, his talk brought back to mind all the wild, mad, and sordid tales of his tourney youth.
“…Then she got up from her knees, tied the drawstrings on my braies and held out my sword and belt. She said, ‘Be gone with you now Lyall Longsword,” he told the dog, using her name for him with no little pride. “The melee begins soon,’ she said. ‘You need to use your sword to fill your purse rather than fill me and mine.’”
Lyall shook his head slightly. “She was a saucy wench. Robert of Ayr once said Deloys could suck your feet out of your boots.”
There was a sudden creak and a soft thump as the stable door thudded slightly against the wall. He dropped the soap, sat back and looked toward the stable doors.
Glenna was standing there, afternoon sunlight behind her, framing her in a bright glow and casting her face in dark, unreadable shadows.
He felt his neck flush hot. “How long have you been standing there?”
She was silent for a heartbeat or two and then she stepped into the light. “I just arrived. Why?”
He shook his head.
She walked toward them and her dog barked again and looked ready to jump out. “Stay!” she warned and the hound obeyed, its tail switched the air and spat water back and forth.
Lyall soaped him again. “His coat was tangled with mud.”
“Aye,” she said, staring at him oddly. “And now it looks as if you are wearing the mud.”
Lyall looked down and saw he was soaked with stains of brown water.
Flecks of hard mud were all over his undertunic.
The cloth clung to his chest and his thick mat of chest hair showed clearly beneath the thin linen and arrowed down towards the drawstrings on his braies.
He picked at cloth, but it stuck to his skin.
She shoved up the sleeves of her gown and knelt down on the other side of the trough. “Hand me the soap. There is still mud on him here.”
“The soap is in the bottom. I’ll get it.” He reached down but was too late to stop her. Already she had her hands in the water.
“Here it is.” She held up the soap and began to clean the dog, humming as she rubbed the soap over his thick fur. Lyall sat back, resting his arms on his raised knees, which were soaked, too.
She began to sing.
The dog stood perfectly still, and Lyall, too, dared not move, so overwhelmed was he, as if he were caught by the pure, deathly-sweet sound of a siren.
What magic came from her lips was honeyed and high, as fluid as the notes of a flute, mournful as a pipe, and lilting as a lute.
She sang the most hauntingly en passant words:
Bird on a briar, bird, bird on a briar
Kind is come of love, love to crave
Blithful bird, have pity on me,
Or prepare me, beloved, for my grave
I am so blithe, so bright bird on a briar
When I see that beauty in the hall,
She is white of limb, lovely, true
She is fair, the flower of them all.
Might I love her, by her will I will have her
Steadfast of love, lovely and true
Of my sorrow, she may save me
Joy and bliss would be, ever new for me.