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The fire collected itself together in one place and Nemione, gathering her yards of silk about her, sat down beside it and held both hands up to the blaze. At that moment also, a short and stalwart figure stepped forward out of the bushes.
‘Bravo, Mistress,’ the dwarf said, applauding her. She smiled a welcome. I realized that her abuse of him was, like her costume, an affectation, and that they were as fond of each other as mistress and servant may be.
The little fellow looked somewhat like an eft or newt in the breeding season, or like a scorpion perhaps, with a sting in his rapier. He wore a breastplate and cuisses of silvery scales, and his skin had a silvery cast too. I remembered what my mother had told me when I was a child at her knee: that a dwarf of the Altaish, though he leave his mountain home for ever, must always retain this ingrained livery, tincture of the metal he had dug and abandoned.
‘This is Erchon,’ said Nemione.
The dwarf bowed low.
‘And you, sir,’ he said, ‘do not need your armour to be recognized as a Brother.’
‘Good day, Master Scantling,’ I returned, and he bowed again, with a flourish, and walked on down the little stony beach and into the river, where he waded thigh-deep.
‘Take care!’ I shouted.
‘Peace, Wolf’s Head,’ said Erchon. ‘The nivashi cannot smell a dwarf.’ From close beneath the riverbank he lifted a fish-trap which he opened and emptied on to the bank. A mass of writhing fish, as scaly and argent as himself, fell out and the dwarf in his turn fell on them, banging their heads against a stone. Soon he had spitted them and was roasting them at the fire.
‘The trouble with this pretence,’ said Nemione, as her dwarf offered her a portion of the fish, ‘is that silks are not practical for the wayfaring life. I had better give up being a lady and turn myself into a gypsy. It will be easier that way.
‘Eat your fish, Erchon, Koschei. Do not look at me.’
The dwarf obediently turned his back on her and began to devour his fish, not bothering to separate them, flesh from bone, but eating them whole, heads, bones, tails: all. I bowed my head and used my knife on my fish, trying hard to concentrate on the food.
Yet I could not help peeping at Nemione. I saw her prepare herself for conjury with a whispered charm. Then she closed her eyes and started to strip off her jewellery. I do not mean that she unclasped and unpinned the many pieces she wore but that she touched each one and, at her touch, it vanished. I had to bite hard on a piece of fish to stop myself exclaiming. She stroked her embattled hair. At once it began to writhe, twisting about her head like a nest of vipers as it freed itself from its confinement and settled about her shoulders like some errant and lusty cloud. I had to bite my hand to stop myself crying out in fear.
Next, she began on her garments.
Perhaps the spell was a primitive one; or, more likely, she did not know enough to transform her dress with one pass. Her garments melted successively from her and left her sitting there in nothing more than a thin, white shift.
I thought, I am a Brother and I should take what is offered me. I moved my hands, putting down the fish.
‘Cheat!’ cried Nemione, opening her eyes. She glared at me.
‘You are very lucky, Brother Koschei, that I did not slay you where you sit!’
Judgement had the upper hand. I was quiet. If she could not make the unclothing spell more elegantly, I reasoned, she was unlikely to have the powers of life and death. After a moment or two had passed, when we were both calm, ‘Forgive me, Mistress Baldwin,’ I said, and bowed my head.
So I did not see what Nemione did to clothe herself again but only that, when I was allowed to look at her, she wore the red and orange garb of a Rom and a burden of brassy necklaces around her neck.
‘No more lady,’ she said.
‘You look as well in this gallimaufry,’ I said.
‘Oh, empty compliment! Now I am a dirty hedge-drab.’
‘You have the same angel’s hair.’
‘I can’t change that,’ she confessed. ‘Help me, Koschei, for old times’ sake; help me to darken my hair.’
By good fortune I had with me a bottle of the dye with which we Green Wolves used to darken our faces on moonlit nights. I took the stuff from my wallet and showed it her.
‘This may help. You must dilute it in water. Then rub it on.’
‘Perhaps if I use my comb – oh, fie! It is gone with the gown.’
It was my turn to laugh; but I only smiled gently.
‘I have a comb.’
We worked together, Erchon and I, he fetching water from the river in the brass cup, which fortunately had been left on the bank and so had not packed itself away in whatever ethereal trunk or closet the fine clothes were laid; I mixing a proportion of the dye into each cupful and combing it into Nemione’s hair with my soldier’s comb of steel. It was hard to do – not the dyeing, which worked admirably – but the combing of her gossamer hair. Never before had I stood so close to her. The only women I had touched were rough camp followers and country girls who, knowing their business with men, were greedy and sharp-tongued. Nor did their skins smell sweet as a damask rose and feel like one petal of that rose, fallen in the dewy morn.
‘Spare me,’ I whispered in her ear, so that the dwarf would not hear. ‘I am a man.’
‘Pretend we are sister and brother,’ she said. ‘As once we were, in the Cloister.’
So I finished the task. Nemione, looking into the dye-bottle exclaimed,
‘It is all gone!’
‘I shall easily get more,’ I lied. I knew that the penalty for losing any part of my kit was three month’s duty without leave and possibly a flogging at the end of a rope.
The stuff was drying in her hair, turning it as black as a night-crow’s wing. She looked as bewitching as the Queen of Spades.
‘You will soon get a gypsy lover, Mistress,’ said Erchon the dwarf.
‘Look in the river,’ I said. ‘You will see yourself how much you look the part.’
She stood there a long time, on the river’s edge, gazing at the rippling simulacrum of herself.
‘I shall journey safer when I have found a band of Rom,’ she said. She turned and looked at me.
‘What can I give you Koschei, for your patience and your dye?’
‘A little piece of yourself – to meditate on and to love.’
‘I will give you some strands of this counterfeit hair. But that is not enough. I have a long and perilous journey ahead – but I do not need Erchon any more. What gypsy lass has her own dwarf? I will lend him to you and, when I send, you must discharge him from your service.’
‘Very well.’
She pulled some long hairs from her head and gave them to me; I coiled them up and put them, wrapped in my neckcloth, in my wallet. Then she gave me Erchon, telling him to march smartly to my side and there remain, until she called.
‘Goodbye,’ she said, and turned and walked away along the track, her brave gypsy clothing bright in the shadows of the overhanging trees. She did not look back but Erchon and I watched until we could see her no more. Then, facing each other, we exchanged smart salutes before we shook hands.
‘Will she soon find company?’ I asked the dwarf. ‘Do gypsies travel in this locality?’
‘Yes, Master – and many of them at this time of the year. There is a horse fair in Vonta, fine trotters, proud pacers, sumpter horses, palfreys, vanners, destriers, barbs – what you will. And the mountain men bring their cast-off slaves to sell.’
‘Yet there is danger for Nemione.’
‘She will survive it, more than half nivasha as she is,’ the dwarf said.
‘She is the daughter of the reeve at Espmoss.’
‘But who was his mother? And who is her mother?’
‘Why does she journey?’
‘Ours not to ask, Master; nor to reason why.’ As he talked, Erchon busied himself in tidying our temporary caravanserai, and trod upon the ashes of the fire. He heard the rumble before I did, and the jingle of harness.
‘Hark!’
‘Into the trees!’
‘Too late, Brother Wolf. There is the caravan-master and he has seen us. Smile as they pass and pray they will soon overtake my lady.’
We stood aside to watch the procession of gypsies pass.
‘Look, gypsies!’ Alice exclaimed.
‘I can’t. Tell me.’
‘You can see the ripe corn. They are camped on the edge of the field. The chrome on their vans glitters in the sunlight and they have a lorry – two – and a car; there’s some washing on a line – gone now. Out of sight. What a pity gypsies gave up horses and painted vans.’
‘I knew one who lived in a vardo black as coal, and every line and carved curlicue upon it was picked out in gold and red – and a great hairy-heeled mare pulled it.’
‘Dominic’s mother?’
She must have guessed it.
‘How do you know?’
‘I read your letter when you went for a pee.’
It was the sort of thing Helen herself would have done; that this Alice had pried in his guilt did not make him angry, but irrationally fearful. She was cheeky and unpredictable, that was all, he reasoned, the child of a broken home; and he had left the letter and the postcard on the dashboard.
‘Why did Dominic send you the picture of a horse?’ Alice continued.
‘Thought you’d read my books.’
‘Not all. I suppose there is a horse like that in one of them.’
‘Right! The Ima, who live in the Plains of Malthassa, herd horses – we were talking about them earlier, when we passed the sign that said “J-J Rousseau”. The best ones belong to the Imandi, their leader, and the best one of all is the Red Horse.’
‘What colour was Helen’s horse? I can’t remember.’
Again he was disturbed. He was sure he had not revealed Helen’s name; and Dominic had not written it down. He had not told her what colour the horse was either: he was certain of that.
‘I didn’t tell you,’ he said. ‘She was brown and white – skewbald, or “coloured” in gypsy parlance. They prize pied animals highly.’
‘Half and half, like good and evil; neither one thing or another, like me,’ Alice said and then, before he could respond to this new slant upon her puzzling character, reached forward and reinforced his unsettled mood with a fresh CD.
‘You don’t have to do that each time,’ he said. ‘Put in a stack.’
‘I want this one.’
Clapton again; and the album was called Backtrackin’ – what he was at, to drive half way down France on this fool’s errand; doubly a fool for picking up this precocious waif? Well, it wasn’t so far to Auxerre, where he would drop her. She would easily find another lift there, or a room if she intended to stay overnight. He listened to the music and felt the morass of nostalgia stir and individual memories rise up like wraiths.
They had reached Burgundy and were passing a sign to Sens. The landscape was rich and rolling: you could see how lords and princes had prospered here, he thought, and built their chateaux forts and later on, when there was a kind of peace, their tree-embowered, swan-encircled chateaux set like still islands in a motionless sea, so formal were the pleasure gardens. As if to echo these thoughts, a brown road sign with a formalized chateau, turreted and neat, came into view and, beyond it, the edge of the forest which covered the hills on either side of the road. Other signs warned of deer, though a high deer fence marched with the margins of the wood.
‘They used to hunt all the time here,’ he said. ‘In the Middle Ages. In fact, Saint Thibaud loved the hunt so much that in his church, ahead of us in Joigny, he is shown on horseback, off to the chase with his dog. And Archbishop Sanglier was of course known only as “The Boar”. I wonder, was he a thickset, muscular man, a grasping priest who loved the riches which gave him the freedom to hunt? – the riches of Mother Church. There is a famous Treasury in the abbey at Sens.’
‘Wasn’t it in Sens,’ the girl said, ‘that Abélard was condemned?’
How could she know that – a history lesson at school?
‘Not for loving Héloise,’ he said, ‘but for an intellectual sin: for refusing to set limits to the activity of human reason.’
‘Reason? Peter Abélard?’
‘He was a great churchman as well as a lover. A formidable intellect! Though, it is remarkable that he did not lose his reason after he was set upon.’
‘Thinking was all he had left,’ she said. ‘Thinking of Héloise and praying.’
‘Excuse me – but you’ve studied the period in class?’
‘Oh, no. They don’t tell us young wenches about castration. ‘Taint a fit subject for a liddle gal.’
Phoebe spoke like this sometimes, putting on the accents of a yokel.
‘Oh, ah,’ he replied in kind, looked full at her and caught her watching him. He knew then he had won that joust – this time she had not fooled him into a delusion – and continued casually,
‘Burgundy is famous for happier things as well.’
‘I bet you wouldn’t say that if you lived in the Middle Ages!’
‘I don’t suppose I would. But look, here’s another reminder of hunting: a service station called L’Aire de la Biche – the Hind’s Place. Would you like a coffee?’
‘Please!’
They sat opposite each other at the table. She drank her black coffee and eagerly devoured a large slice of gâteau. This is the first time she has eaten today, he thought and asked her ‘Would you like a proper meal?’
‘Later?’ she said, the question mark riding high in her voice.
A woman was watching them with unconcealed curiosity; he had seen several men glance and he leaned back and looked at the girl as if to confirm that he saw what the others saw. She had the kind of beauty many men divorced good wives to gain, that unknown and conjectured many who would envy him, escorting her – if that was the correct term for his role in this surreal interlude.
‘Later?’ she had said. Although an interval of time had passed, he decided to reply.
‘OK. Later on.’
