V. Iachan’s Departure
Well past the meal, and everyone had turned in. The boys slept together, and it wasn’t uncommon for various of them to get up in the night for a piss, movement that barely caused Thomas to stir if he heard it at all. That was true for all of them in their exhaustion.
If it hadn’t been for Shug, no one would have noticed the absence before morning. But Shug wasn’t given to assessing a situation before voicing his thoughts, and, returning from pissing, he asked himself aloud, “Where’s Iachan?” as he noticed the empty mat.
The whole hut stirred. Lachie said, “Leave off, Shug,” rolled over, and went back to sleep. Kerr looked up, saw the empty mat, and replied, “Gone for a piss, same’s you,” and lay back down. Kerr said nothing as both of them had covered his opinion.
Thomas nearly did the same, but sitting down beside him, Shug added softly, “Well, ’e were gone when I went out and ain’t at the piss hole neither.” Then he lay down and promptly farted.
Two minutes later, Thomas was still awake and Iachan hadn’t returned. He leaned up on his elbows to stare at the unoccupied mat. There was nowhere to go, and why would Iachan wander off anyway?
He got up and padded out of the hut. If anyone heard, they thought he was also going for a piss after being awakened by Shug. Outside, he put on his shoes. He hesitated to wake Alpin, fully expecting Iachan to reappear momentarily. Still, where would he be? Wandering around the abbey in the dark? Too dangerous, and there were plenty of stones to perch on out here if he needed a think, but nobody was sitting there. Not even Clacher munching on some tansy to cure his gout.
He knew that what he was thinking was a ridiculous leap and that by the time he got back everybody might be looking for him, too. But he argued that if he went to the ruins, at least he would confirm that events there weren’t the reason for Iachan’s absence.
Thomas carefully picked his way past the huts and stones and piles of rubble to the downriver path, then increased his pace until he was quick-marching through the deep darkness. The path had its treacherous tree roots and stones, and he was careful of each.
Even before he’d come in sight of the ruin itself, he became aware of how the distant trees seemed to be lit and shifting back and forth in a flickering green glow. Cautiously, he left the purlieu of the trees and sneaked into the plot of grave markers. On the far side of them, dark figures moved before a spitting, flaming ring. He counted four people standing close together: a bearded man, a woman wearing a wimple and glittering headband, a taller man, and one who was squat by comparison with the others. They faced the ring, backs to him. He scrabbled on hands and knees to get closer.
Out of the hole in the air, two imperious black knights rode. It might have been that they were riding black chargers but they seemed to him immense in their slick, reflective armor. He remembered the two who’d accompanied the beautiful queen. These could be the very same two. Then one of the people said a name, “Ađalbrandr,” and he knew they were those knights.
The quartet parted to let the knights pass, and for a moment Thomas glimpsed another, smaller figure, shed of its clothes, in their midst. He gaped, his mouth went dry, and he nearly stood up and shouted. But he’d done that before and was no more prepared for it now than he had been then.
The riders turned their chargers about to flank the naked victim, and the three of them crossed back through the ring. Once inside it, they turned again to face the four people on this side, and Thomas saw Iachan’s slack-jawed face clearly for a moment. Then the bearded man stepped forward and, extending his arm to the green fire, sealed up the circle. The last bit of flame vanished. Iachan and the knights were gone.
The people muttered in conversation, walked closer to the ruin, where he realized now they had horses waiting. The men assisted the woman onto her palfrey, then mounted their own.
He lay flat as they departed, only the woman riding past him. The others went off in different directions.
When they were gone, he crept to where the ring had been, the exact place where Onchu had been taken. Now he knew for certain—knew and was unable to do anything. His hands curled into fists. He couldn’t do this, couldn’t stand helplessly by and just watch again.
Thomas ran to the Abbey of St. Mary, to his hut, but didn’t sleep the rest of the night. In the morning, when it was clear to everyone that Iachan had vanished, Clacher shrugged it off, insisting that the boy had just run back to Selkirk. He’d employed any number of apprentices who found the work too difficult and ran away.
Waldroup seemed to sense that something more had happened, but it wasn’t until they were off away from the others at the quarry that Thomas told him everything he’d witnessed. At the end of the day, Waldroup accompanied him to the old abbey ruins, where footprints and strange animal tracks not belonging to horses confirmed the story. Past where the ring had been, the prints all ceased.
“We have to do something. They’ve taken another. What can I do?” Thomas asked.
“I don’t know,” Waldroup replied with an imposed calm. But from his expression it was clear that these creatures snatching someone from their group with such ease had shaken him badly.
That evening, the two of them sat on cut blocks delivered in the final cartload of the day. The three Selkirk boys sat well off to one side, huddled away from everyone else. Their conversations all day only reiterated that none of them believed Clacher’s claim that Iachan had run off. As Kerr put it, “He’d ne’er go back where his old man’d beat him some more, and he don’t know no place else.” Nods all around.
Thomas hunched over his own bowl of lamb and turnips and bread, limiting the breadth of the world for which he was responsible to this small wooden bowl. Waldroup hadn’t spoken a word since the ruins.
Without looking up, Thomas said, “You were on a battlefield when you saw them, you said,” as though they had been conversing about this just moments before.
Waldroup hardly slowed his eating, as if he hadn’t heard. A moment passed, and he simply replied, “Norman battle,” and went right on eating, only glancing around to make sure no one else was within earshot.
“Which one?”
“Has it a name? I never heard it. I fought with King David against Stephen for possession of Northumbria. We lost, I suppose, though the king got to keep Carlisle and his boy’s got a title still in England. It was over quick and hardly any pay in it. So I went and hired on with Stephen’s mercenaries, following into Wales, where he retreated. Then joined with Waleran de Beaumont on his behalf and sailed off to Normandy. Stephen showed up eventually and brokered a peace, but by then I’d already been brought down.” He pointed with a fistful of bread at the puckered scar over his shoulder. “Broadhead right in the joint, nearly snapped off ’tween the bones. When I was done screaming, I thought I’d lost the arm for sure.” He winced at the recollection of the agony.
“So, there I lay among a lea of dead archers as the sun went down, when three people come into view, walking across the field as if on a casual outing. Must have walked into the aftermath from a nearby town. I could tell from the way they dressed they were people what know a fair amount of comfort in their lives. The way they turned over the bodies like looking for the tastiest one, I thought them witches. Then one of them made some sign in the air, and a circle of green fire split everything wide.” He looked Thomas in the eyes. “Your black knights just rode right out of it like magic. Was two of ’em, maybe e’en the same two.”
“They let you see?”
“I was lying in among the corpses, blood, and dead horses, myself a dead man too pigheaded to die. The witches had caught themselves a livelier boy, a foot soldier who’d been clipped above the ear, hardly more than dazed and confounded, really. They stood him up, swaying, glancing around at the sky like he’d never beheld it before, and then the knights led him to that green blaze. She was waiting there on the other side, everything shimmering red like a waterfall of blood behind her, as if her red hair was grown out and plaited into the whole world there. I could only watch them. But I think they didn’t care whether or not any of us saw. We were just dead men to them. The knights and the lad—well, they stripped him first, same as Iachan and your brother—they all went through, and then one of those three people knelt before the green fire and as he stood up, the fire vanished, until nothing of it remained. It was like he’d poured it down his sleeve.”
“But what’s on the other side?” Thomas asked.
“Now, how would I know that? They didn’t take me. If they had, we wouldn’t be discussing it now.”
“But then it could be heaven? It could be?”
Waldroup knocked his wooden spoon against the bowl. “Those thorny soldiers—you recall them thinking how they should kill you? Sound like the thoughts of angels to you?”
Thomas squirmed. “But now they can come after us here? And you can’t shoot anymore, on account of your shoulder.”
For a moment, Waldroup just stared at his own scar, then he snorted. “Have you not noticed me hauling blocks of stone, boy? My shoulder healed fine. Not perfect but better than it should have. Hurts in winter, sometimes in the rain. It was my luck that day they didn’t search my side of the field instead of the other one. Your brother and Iachan . . . whatever you think—and whatever is on the other side—it’s better they were chosen than you. I don’t have to follow those black knights to know that I don’t want to.” He concentrated on his lamb, finishing it in silence. When he looked up, he found Thomas eyeing him still. “What, is there something else?”
Now was the time to say what he’d lain awake thinking this morning, what had been working at him all day. “I thought . . . I thought you’d maybe be willing to teach me what you know. You know, soldiering.”
“Soldiering. Oh, you think soldiering’ll help?” Waldroup set down his bowl. “So, here’s what you need to know about soldiering: It’s all a great mess every time, two sides fighting for some sort of supremacy, and you’re to contribute your skill—and your life, if needs must. At the end of the day, whatever castle you’ve stormed or village you’ve sacked and burned, it’s all for them, the people of comfort and power. And the next day, if you live, you’re expected to do it over again. There’s pay in it most of the time if you can keep your gorge down. Almost everyone does at first, and some for a long time, but they get to like it, can’t do nothin’ else. Plenty don’t make it past the first skirmish, the first minute. And some kings lose their nerve and sell you out, giving back all that you’ve taken for them in order to make a truce or bargain to capture whatever prize they really sought, which you weren’t privy to because nobody tells common soldiers anything. Here’s the rules of soldiering for a mercenary: embrace the fight, fight to win, and ignore everything else. Just know that when a king wins, most of the time it means you’re unemployed again.”
“But that’s what you did.”
“That’s what I did, yes. With a warbow. More chance of survival as a bowman. Aren’t charging at crazy men in a mess of blood, shit, carved-out livers, and muck, not as likely to get trampled. But an arrow can still find you, same as yours finds them. And those Ailfion knights . . . we don’t even know what it takes to bring them down.” He tapped the wooden spoon against his scarred shoulder. “Stick to the stonework, and don’t be wandering off by yourself again. Then you can live a full forty years like other men.”
“Iachan didn’t wander off. They took him from right here,” he said. “What if one of these men helped them? What if Clacher did it?”
“What? Clacher’s not helping elves.” But he glanced at Clacher as if to make certain, then got to his feet. He started to walk away with his bowl. Thomas got up and stalked him like a shadow. Abruptly, Waldroup turned about and dragged him away from the cooking fire. Everybody was watching and everybody would have been able to hear.
Finally, Waldroup let go of him and said, “Listen to me, son. What I told you the first night is the truth. Your brother’s not any place you can pursue him, not any place you want to pursue him. The best soldier in the world can’t bring him or Iachan back from Ailfion.”
“I will.”
Waldroup hissed through his teeth. “Nobody goes into the world of the dead and comes back. And that’s what Ailfion is for our like. Nobody knows what’s on the other side of that ring. I didn’t understand what I’d seen on the battlefield, and I asked and I asked, told my story to whoever would listen, until somebody warned me I should shut my mouth if I didn’t want the elves coming for me, too. Because they have done for others, and you never know when one of them’s listening—that was my warning. Don’t know who they are, the helpers of the elven. Look like anybody, smiling and friendly, so you won’t realize who you’ve told until you wake up in your bed and they’re already around you, dragging you off, never to be heard from again. I paid heed. I shut up. And I’m still here. If there is one among us, and you poke at this, you’re poking a stick into a hornet’s nest that you can’t even see, what can open up beside you and drag you right in.” He shook his head and walked back toward the thick of the huts.
Thomas ran after him. “Alpin! Teach me things! Fighting things!” he yelled.
Waldroup came about. “Lad, you do not know what you’re saying.”
Miserably, he replied, “That describes my whole life.”
Seumas McCrae, sitting nearest, turned at this and goaded Waldroup: “Ah, go on, then, Alpin. Teach the boy the bow at least. You made us listen to your jabber long enough about how grand you are with it in your hand. Prove it.”
From the doorway of his own hut, Clacher yelled, “You do it at day’s end if you do it at all! I won’t be losing quarry time over this, especially as we’re down another pair of hands. And by that I mean you drag any more of them boys other than him into this at all and I’ll send you packing, Alpin Waldroup.”
Waldroup scowled at McCrae, then faced Clacher. “Lachlan,” he said, “I wasn’t even—”
Clacher only repeated, “Day’s end!”
Waldroup finally bowed his head in capitulation and shook it slowly. “Fine,” he told Thomas. “Day’s end. I guess if you’re training with me, at least you won’t be off by yourself somewhere they can snatch you, too.”