Passager (3 page)

House.
The word came unbidden into his mind. And with the thought of house came the idea of food. Not berries and mushrooms and nuts and the occasional silver-finned, slippery fish torn open and devoured bones and all, but
food.
He was not sure what that meant anymore, but his mouth remembered, and filled with water at the thought.

So he crept back down the path to the edge of the trees and squatted on his haunches, to stare avidly at the house.

There was a stillness about the house, except for that thread of smoke that seemed to unwind endlessly from the chimney.

At the prompting of his stomach, which ached as if it had suddenly discovered hunger for the first time, the boy left the sanctuary of the forest and ventured into the clearing. But he crept cautiously, like any wild thing.

There was a sudden flurry of sharp, excited duckings. A familiar word burst into his head.
Hens!
He mouthed the word but did not say it aloud.

A high whinnying from one of the two outbuildings answered the hens. “Horse!” This time the boy spoke the word, his own voice reminding himself of the size of the beasts with their soft, broad backs that smelled of home.

He edged closer to the house, sniffing as he went, almost drinking in the odors, his chin raised and quivering.

Then the dogs began to bark and he turned sharply to run.

“Not so fast, youngling,” said the man who loomed, suddenly, by his side and picked him off the ground by the shoulders. The man's voice was soft, not threatening, but the boy kicked and screamed a high, wild sound, and tried to slice at the man's face with his nails.

The man dropped him and grabbed both of the boy's hands with almost one motion, prisoning him as deftly as he had hooded the falcon.

The boy stopped screaming, stopped kicking, but he pulled away from the man, cowering, as if expecting a blow. His face was white, underneath the dirt, but his eyes were so dark as to be almost black, and hard and staring, the green-black of winterberries.

“Now hush ye, son,” the man said in that soft, steady voice. “Hush, weanling, my young one, my wild one. Hush, you damned eelkin. I'll wash your face and hair and see what hides under that mop. Hush, my johnny, my jo.” The soft murmuration continued as he marched the stone-faced boy all the way to the house and kicked open the door.

“MAG, FETCH ME A GREAT TOWEL. NELL, MY GIRL
, put water in the tub. I've caught a wild thing that followed me home through the wood.” The voice never got hard, though it got quite loud. “Quick now, the two of you. You know how it is with the wild ones.”

Two women with kerchiefs binding their hair and long clay-colored gowns seemed to spring into being from the vast fireplace to do the man's bidding.

“Oh, sir,” said the girl as she hauled the kettle full of water, “is it a bogle, all nekkid and brown like that? Is it a wodewose?” Her eyes grew big.

“It is a boy,” said the man. “A sharp-eyed, underfed boy not much older than your own cousin Tom. And as for naked, well, he'd not been able to make clothes for himself after his own wore out, there in the middle of the New Forest, poor frightened thing. There are more than one of them put out in the woods nowadays. The nobles can send their extra sons off to a monastery as a gift of oblation, their hands wrapped in altar cloth and their inheritance clutched therein. But a poor man's son in these harsh times is oft left in the altar of the woods.”

Mag appeared then with the toweling, shaking her head. “He looks not so much frightened, Master Robin, as fierce. Like one of your poor birds.”

“Fierce indeed. And needing taming, I suspect, just like them. But first a bath, I think.” The man smiled as he spoke, ever in that soft voice, while the two serving women clicked and clacked just like hens around the great tub. When at last they had emptied enough water in it and were satisfied with the temperature, Mag nodded and Master Robin dropped the boy in.

The boy had no fear of water, but it was not at all what he had expected. It was hot.
Hot!
River water, whatever the season, was always cold. Even in the lower pools—the ones he had dammed up for fishing—the water below the sun-warmed surface was cold enough to make his ankles ache if he stayed in too long.

He wanted to howl but he would not give his captors the satisfaction. He wanted to leap out of the bath, but the Robin-man's great hand was still on him. He didn't know what to do and indecision, in the end, made up his mind for him, for the fear and the warmth of the water together conspired to paralyze him. And the man kept speaking to him in that soft, steady, cozening voice.

The boy thought about the fawns in the forest, how they could disappear. How
he
had disappeared before when the man had stared at him. He closed his eyes to slits and willed himself to be gone, away from the man and his voice, away from the women and their hot water, away from the house.

But he had not slept well the last night, his dreams had prevented that. He was hungry, he was frightened, and he was—after all—only eight years old.

He closed his eyes and disappeared instead into a new dream.

In the new dream he was warm and safe and his stomach was full. He was cradled and rocked and sung sweet songs to by women in comforting black robes. They sang something he could remember just parts of:

 

Lullay, lullay, thou tiny child,
Be sheltered from the wet and wild...

 

But,
he thought within the dream angrily,
I am wet and I am wild.
He made himself wake up by crossing his fingers, and found himself in a closed-in room.

Alone.

UNTANGLING HIMSELF FROM THE COVERINGS
, the boy crept to the floor and looked around cautiously. The room was low-ceilinged, heavily beamed. A grey stone hearth with a large fireplace was on the north wall. A pair of heavy iron tongs hung from an iron hook by the hearth. The fire that sat comfortably within the hearth had glowing red ember eyes that stared wickedly at him.

Suddenly something leaped from the red coals and landed, smoking, on the stones.

The boy jumped back onto the bed, amongst the tangle of covers, shaking.

The thing on the hearth exploded with a pop that split its smooth skin, like a newborn chick coming out of an egg. A sweet, tantalizing, familiar smell came from the thing. The boy watched as it grew cool, lost its live look. When nothing further happened, and even the red eyes of the fire seemed to sleep, he ran over, plucked up the hazelnut from the stones, and peeled it. His mouth remembered the hot, sweet, mealy taste even before he did.

He ran back to the bed and waited for something more to be flung out to him from the fire. Nothing more came.

But the nut had rekindled his hunger, and with it, his curiosity. He raised his head and sniffed. Besides the smell of roasted nut, beyond the heavy scent of the fire itself, was another, softer smell. The first part of it was like dry grass. He looked over the side of the bed and saw the rushes and verbena on the floor. That and the bed matting of heather supplied the grassy smell. But there was something more.

He scrambled across the wide bed and looked over the side. There, on a wooden tray, was food. Not mushrooms and berries, not nuts and silvery fish. But
food.
He bent over the food, as if guarding it, and looked around, his teeth bared.

He was alone.

He breathed in the smell of the warm loaf.

Bread,
he thought. Then he spoke the name aloud.

“Bread!”

He remembered how he had loved it. Loved it covered with something. A pale slab next to the loaf had little smell.

Butter.
That was it.

“But-ter.” He said it aloud and loved the sound of it. “But-ter.” He put his face close to the butter and stuck out his tongue, licking across the surface of the pale slab. Then he took the bread and ripped off a piece, dragged it across the butter, leaving a strange, deep gouge.

“Bread and but-ter,” he said, and stuffed the whole thing in his mouth. The words were mangled, mashed in his full mouth, but he suddenly understood them with such a sharp insight that he was forced to shout them. The words—along with the pieces of buttered bread—spat from his mouth. He laughed and on his hands and knees picked up the pieces and stuffed them back in his mouth again.

Then he sat down, cross-legged by the tray, and tore off more hunks of bread, smearing each piece with so much butter that soon his hands and elbows and even his bare stomach bore testimony to his greed.

At last he finished the bread and butter and licked the last crumbs from the tray and the floor around it.

There was a bowl of hot water the color of leaf mold on the tray as well. The bread had made him thirsty enough not to mind the color of the water and he bent over and lapped it up. He was surprised by the sweetness of the liquid and then knew—as suddenly as he had known the name of bread and butter—that it was not ordinary water. But he could not recall its name.

“Names,” he whispered to himself, and named again all the things that had been given back to him, starting with the bread: “Bread. Butter. Horse. House. Hens. Jerkin. Coat.” He liked the sound of these things and said the list of them again.

Then he added, but not aloud,
Master Robin, Mag, Nell.

Patting his greasy stomach, he grunted happily. He could not remember being this warm and this full for a long time. Maybe not ever.

Going back to the bed, he lay down on it, but he did not close his eyes. Instead he stared for a moment at the low-beamed ceiling where bunches of dried herbs hung on iron hooks. He had not noticed them before.

What else had he not noticed?

He sat up. There were two windows, and the light shining through them reminded him suddenly of the sun through the interlacing of the trees in the forest. This light fell to the floor in strange, dusty patterns. He crawled off the bed and over to the light, where he tried to catch the motes in his hand. Each time he snatched at the dusty beams, they disappeared, and when he opened his hand again, it was empty.

Standing, he looked out the window at the fields and at the forest beyond. There was a strong wind blowing. The trees were bending toward the east. He thrust his head forward, to smell the wind, and was surprised by the glass.

Hard air,
he thought at first before his mind recalled the word
window.
He tried to push open the glass, but he could not move it, so he left that window and tried the other. He went back and forth between them, leaving little marks on the glass.

Angry then, he went to the wooden door in the wall next to the hearth and shoved his shoulder against it. It would not open.

So then he knew another name.
Cell.
He was in a cell. The fields he could see through the glass and the tall familiar trees beyond were lost to him. He put his head back and howled.

From the other side of the door came a loud, answering howl. One. Then another.

Dogs!

He ran back to the bed and hid under the covers and shivered with fear. There were no trees for him to climb. It was the first time in a long while that he had felt hopeless. That he had felt fear.

Wrapped in the covers, in the warmth, he fell asleep and did not dream.

WHEN HE WOKE AGAIN THE ROOM WAS DARKER
and the light through the windows shaded. There was a new loaf and a bowl of milk by the door.

The boy clutched the covers and listened, but he could hear no sound of dogs beyond the door. So he went over, warily, to the tray of food and cautiously looked at it sideways, through slotted eyes.

In a fit of sudden anger, an anger that smelled a good deal like fear, he kicked the bowl of milk over and screamed.

There was no answering scream beyond the door.

He went back to the bed, curled up in the coverings as if he were in a nest, and willed himself back to sleep.

A few hours later he stood and urinated all around the bed, marking it for his own. Then, hungry, he went back to the door where the loaf waited on the tray. He ate it savagely, stuffing huge hunks into his mouth, and growling with each bite. When he was done, he sniffed around the place where the milk had spilled onto the floor, but it had all soaked in.

Bored and angry, he paced back and forth between the darkened windows and the door, faster and faster, until he broke into a trot. Finally he ran around the room, until he was dizzy and out of breath.

Then, standing in the very center of the room, he threw back his head to howl once again, but this time the howl died away into a series of short gasps and moans. He went back to the bed and curled into the covers and wept, something he had not done in a year.

When the sounds of his weeping had stopped and he drifted into a half sleep, the door into the room opened slowly. Master Robin entered and exchanged the empty tray for another, one with trenchers full of meat stew and milky porridge. Then he went over and stared down at the boy in the bed.

“Who are you, boy?” he whispered. “And how come you to our wood?” Then he knelt down and sat on the bed, stroking the boy's matted hair and brushing it from the wide forehead.

At last he murmured in that soothing, low voice, “It does not matter. First we'll tame you, then we'll name you.” He smiled. “And then you'll claim your own.”

The voice, the words, the warmth entered into the boy's dreams and, dreaming still, he smiled and wiped his finger along his cheek. Then the finger found its way into his mouth and he slept that way until dawn.

 

The next day was a repeat of the first, and the next and the next. There were trays of food, by the bed or by the door. The hearth fire seemed always to be glowing with embers. Occasional hazelnuts popped mysteriously out onto the hearth. Milk and stew appeared as if by magic. But the boy did not see anyone else, though his sharp ears picked up sounds from beyond the door. Mag's voice singing. Or Nell's. And—occasionally—the whine of a dog.