III. Waldroup
“Hey, little brother. Hey, wake up now.” Hands shook him gently.
“Onchu,” he muttered, then tried to reach out.
“Is that supposed to be your name or mine?”
He opened his eyes. A bearded face he didn’t know grinned down at him, features fluttering in torchlight. It’s nighttime. With that he realized that what he thought inside he no longer had to say aloud; he could contain thoughts, keep them to himself. He recalled all at once inhumanly long fingers that played across his head, seeming to pierce his skull, the sensation so intense that he wiped a hand across his face to see if there was blood from the sharp nails. None, but his body shivered as if beset by an ague. The stranger looked concerned. It was an expression Thomas had beheld most of his life, mainly in response to something he’d said, but right now it didn’t matter.
He sat up, clutched at his side where it twinged, and stared past the man. Green fire. Gone, everything was gone, everybody. Onchu, too. His eyes welled with tears.
“Boy, what is it?” The man twisted to follow his gaze.
He shook with weeping, tried, then sobbed, and tried again to explain. “Queen of Heaven. She’s took—she’s took Onchu.”
The bearded man’s expression furrowed, which puckered the scars across his cheek and forehead. His gaze shifted to the tilted gravestone beside them, and he grunted with apparent understanding. “That so, little brother? Then I am most sorry for your loss. Which one is his?”
“No,” he answered, wretched and despairing. He rocked back and forth, put his hands on his head. How was he to explain? “She took him,” he said again. In his head he heard the voice of a neighbor, Mrs. Duncanson, speaking of someone’s stillborn baby: “Not lost but gone before, poor dear.”
“Gone,” he managed. “Gone before.” He shook his head. It was impossible to tell it. She had taken Onchu and left him behind, when it should have been him. He tore at his hair, slapped himself, unable to sit still until the man stabbed the torch into the ground, then grabbed his arms and anchored him in place.
“Go ahead and rage, boy. Get it out, but not by harming yourself.”
The strength of those arms kept him in check, kept his hands at his sides while he kicked and twisted and yelled, until finally his fury broke, leaving him empty in his weeping. The man knelt patiently, as if he’d nothing else to do in the world. He wore a light tunic and loose, checked trousers. A satchel lay beside him, made of heavy cloth and patched in a few places. A cord was tied to the points of it, front and back. It must in some manner unfurl. Thomas’s interest in it carried off his misery. The man hesitantly let go of him, and he wiped at his runny nose and wet face.
“Your family live hereabouts?”
Thomas nodded. “I—my . . .” He stopped, unable to locate the knowledge. Where was the name of his family, his town? What was that neighbor’s name that had just been in his head?
The man must have read confusion or terror in his expression. He patted Thomas’s shoulder. “Well, let’s be up, then. This ground’s soggy after the rain.” As he stood, he offered his hand. Thomas took it and the man drew him upright, not letting go until it was clear Thomas could stand unaided. “Odd that you’re not soaked from it. Ya can’t have lain there long.” He lifted the cord of his satchel over his head and onto his left shoulder with the satchel resting on his right hip. “Can you share at least your name, then?”
“Thomas.” He said it without thinking, then skried the name as if it would reveal the thoughts he couldn’t find. When that failed, he walked straight past the man to where the green fire had been.
“And lovely to meet you, Thomas, my own name’s Alpin Waldroup,” the man said as if still conversing with him, adding in a singsong voice, “‘Oh, and that’s grand, sir, thankee for not leaving me on the wet ground to rot.’”
The jibe was lost on him. He muttered, “Onchu?” and waved his hands in the air as he stumbled around in a circle.
Alpin Waldroup shook his head, picked up his torch, and walked over. “Boy,” he said.
Thomas dropped to his knees, pushed his palms across the rough ground. “Where are they? They’re gone, just gone.” Looked up. “Where are they?”
“Thomas, lad.” He reached to squeeze Thomas’s shoulder reassuringly, but the touch jolted him. He lurched to the side, where he sprawled on his back, arms and legs windmilling wildly.
“Horses but not horses, knights but not men!” he cried out. “The Queen took all through fire green! Say their name!”
Waldroup had drawn back from the flailing limbs. “What fire you talkin’ about?” he asked, but Thomas’s eyes were rolled up in his head, his back arched. He clawed at the dirt. Then, as quickly as it began, the fit ended, and Thomas sighed shakily, blinking and confused. Spit and foam trickled from the corner of his mouth. Waldroup repeated his question.
“Green fire,” he answered. “A ring of it right here.” He pointed to the empty night.
For the first time, Waldroup looked worried as he cast about them. The heap that was the abandoned abbey seemed to move and shift at the edge of the torchlight. The eye sockets of the skulls carved on the stones seemed to look their way. He hauled Thomas upright again. “We’d do well to quit this place, I think.”
“But, Onchu—”
“Onchu’s not coming back, lad.”
Thomas looked to where the fire had been. “It should have been me, not him.”
“Be glad it wasn’t. Come now, come on.” He lifted the torch and strode forward. Not wanting to be left behind in the dark, Thomas hurried after.
They walked through the black night, the torch throwing just enough light to reveal a few yards of the path they trod.
“Listen, then,” said Waldroup. “I think we should give you another name for now. Maybe no one will come looking for you, but it’s best if we don’t assume anything. So, what would you like to be called?”
“Don’t know.” He had only just become Thomas.
“Let’s call you Fingal, then, since you’re a stranger even to yourself.”
“Fingal,” he repeated, trying it on.
“Now, we’re heading for the Abbey of St. Mary that King David’s having built. You know of it, yes?”
Thomas turned the words over, finally shook his head in defeat. “I don’t remember anything but me and Onchu and Baldie.”
“Baldie, eh? Well, your memory’s improved by one. You didn’t remember him the last time.”
“He drowned. In the river.”
“Hey-o. Well, he won’t be looking for you, anyway.”
They walked on. It was a two-mile trek on the path. Waldroup said nothing more and Thomas strained to remember more, but the memories he sought remained just out of reach. Moments did rise up before him—the reeds and catkins, a silhouette against the sun, lifeless Baldie floating away.
Eventually a light flickered in the distance. At first he took it to be a reflection of the torch, but it grew ever larger until it became a campfire surrounded by various lean-tos and half a dozen small huts. The wet night was warm but men and boys sat near the fire, where a set of three upright poles supported two bowed crosspieces from which hung a large ceramic pot.
One of the men, holding a wooden bowl, watched them approach. “Thought maybe you’d fallen in the quarry, Waldroup. What you got there? Another apprentice?” He pointed his large wooden spoon at Thomas.
“Runaway, name of Fingal. Needs work.”
“You try to pass him off as a carver, I’m leaving.”
“You’d do best to pack now, then, Seumas McCrae.”
“You’re having me on.”
“I am, and you’re doing all the work.” The men around McCrae laughed.
Waldroup wove a path through them to the largest hut. A man with stringy gray-and-black hair leaned in the doorway, watching their approach. He wore only a linen tunic, apparently ready to sleep, but was chewing idly on a yellow-flowered stem of tansy. Behind his hut, a pale wall full of arched windows and chimneylike buttresses stood out against the black night. To the right stood an odd, immense framework with a treadwheel in the center of it.
Impossible how much had been built. Why, surely not a month earlier, only the cloister and nearby priory had been finished. The monks had new dwellings but little else stood here. How did he know this? Onchu had led him past here repeatedly to fish in the . . . the Tweed. That was the river. They’d seen these men and the structures at a distance. No more than a week earlier, there was hardly anything erected here. How had this happened? Waldroup put a hand on Thomas’s back, shoved him forward, which brought him back to the moment with this man eating the raw flower. “Lachlan Clacher,” Waldroup said, “this is Fingal.”
Clacher took the stem out of his mouth, then spat. “You digging up boys at the quarry now, Alpin?”
“One more for the quarry. And we could still use a few.” He gestured at the four boys seated by the fire.
“He’s all sinew,” Clacher complained.
“So was I once.”
“Maybe as a bairn. Not in my employ.” He pointed the plant at Thomas. “You ever work stone, Fingal?”
Thomas shook his head.
“Well, there’s a ringing endorsement.”
“He’s an apprentice, Lachlan. None of these Selkirk boys knew anything at the start. I’ll teach him.”
Clacher thought, shifted his gaze from Waldroup back to Thomas. “Sure, we’re short a few, and with Lenox dead under that putlog scaffold . . .” He grimaced. “I’ll try him. But you’re responsible for him, Alpin.”
“Oh, agreed.”
Clacher tapped the tansy stem a bit, then chuckled. “Maybe you can get him running one of the treadwheel cranes before winter.”
“You don’t even have me working one of them.”
“And why would I? You’re too good at the quarrying.” He then retreated into his hut.
Waldroup gently turned Thomas around. He said, “Come, get some broth now. You have to be hungry.” They walked back to the fire. From one of the lean-to structures, Waldroup grabbed wooden bowls and spoons, handed one of each to Thomas.
Staring at them in his hands, he said, “I don’t understand.”
“It’s simple, really. The master mason has just approved you to work the quarry with me. I thought he might. King David wants this abbey completed in a decade. We currently don’t have enough men and lost a good one a week ago to an accident.” He ladled some broth into Thomas’s bowl. “Quarry work is hard; the other boys’ll tell you that. You get good enough at cutting, you’ll move up the ranks and maybe work here, shaping the stone. Put your mark upon this abbey.” He ladled broth into his own bowl. “More to the point for you, maybe, each day you work the quarry gives you an excuse to look in upon the ruins where your Onchu was took. Mind you, don’t you say anything about that to the others. Right?”
He glanced over his bowl at the four pairs of eyes that watched him approach.
The broth wasn’t terribly good, but Thomas found that he was ravenous, as if he’d been starved for a week. They joined the loose circle of men and boys. The men sat on broken chunks of stone, the boys on the damp ground. While Thomas slurped at the broth in his bowl, Waldroup introduced the other boys as “Iachan, Kerr, Lachie, and Shug.” All of them hailed from Selkirk and seemed to know one another. He felt he ought to know where Selkirk was but only nodded, saying nothing rather than display his ignorance. Lachie inquired where he was from, and Waldroup answered for him. “Oh, Fingal? He’s a runaway from Otterburn.”
“Yer father beat ya?” sandy-haired Iachan asked. “Mine did. Nuffin I did were right.”
“Well, you’re not beaten here,” Waldroup promised.
Thomas noticed he was looking at the other men as he said this. Most of them nodded. Two wouldn’t meet his gaze. His rescuer seemed to wield a certain amount of authority.
“Lachie here works the treadwheel. He’s been with us longer. Started at the quarry same as you will tomorrow.” He grinned at some thought. “You’d better have another bowl of broth, little brother. By tomorrow’s end you’re gonnae be too sore to eat.” He clapped him on the back and nudged him toward the ceramic pot.
After he’d finished his second serving, Waldroup took his bowl and spoon, pulled him to his feet, and led him to another of the huts. “That mat there belonged to Lenox. You take it. Everybody understands. The other boys have theirs, anyway. You drag it into that hut. You’ll be sleepin’ with the Selkirks.”
He picked up the straw matting Waldroup had pointed out and hauled it into the other hut where four mats were already laid out. He placed his at one end of the hut and sat down on it. The mat didn’t seem terribly comfortable but it was dry. The other boys came in together.
The one called Lachie said, “I was you, I’d move to the other end. That’s Shug next’a you an’ he farts in his sleep.”
The boys laughed, including Shug. “An’ when he’s awake,” added Kerr, the tallest, muscular one. Shug punched him in the shoulder, then laughed again.
They all sat down on their respective mats. Thomas lay on his back. He didn’t know who he was but his name now was Fingal, and in the morning he was going to go off and cut stone. The shifting new reality left him dizzy.
Onchu was gone. The Queen took all, knights but not men. He clung to the words of his riddle as if he had the slightest idea what they meant.