Chapter Six: A Chest, A Necklace, A Story
Fog dominated the dawn air, clinging to the tree tops and suffocating the first glimpses of the sun. Some people love these in-between hours, watching the sun edge upwards and hearing the birds sing their first morning songs, but not me. I was too tired to function properly, my body was cold and awake but my mind was fuzzy and warm, still wrapped up in cosy bed sheets.
The six of us were sat around the fire, bleary-eyed and weary, leftover broth heating on the flames for our morning meal. We had wakened early for a full day of hunting, since the boys' fathers would be absent, travelling to Gotha to pay dues to their Lord.
"Not much grub." Craig muttered. Froth boiled over the sides of the pan, splashing onto the fire with an angry hiss. He was always complaining, I noticed.
"We got more bellies to fill these days." Eric said, stretching his arms out and yawning loudly. I thought about apologising to him for the burden of having me around, but decided not to – it clearly wasn't going to help change his mind about me now anyway.
Craig began sloppily ladling the broth out into wooden bowls, each steaming gently in the chilly air. The six of us ate mostly in silence apart from the occasional belch, usually from Eric.
I glanced over at the hills where the lights had been a few nights ago, but I couldn't see anything through the fog. I supposed the Franks must have been awake by now though – any warriors back home would be summoned early in the morning to train in the fields. Just behind this blanket of white there could be an entire army practicing. If I listened carefully I thought I could almost hear the sound of steel clashing against steel, but that seemed unlikely from so far away.
"I guess we should be splitting ourselves into, uh, groups or summat?" Leopold ventured, breaking the comfortable silence.
"Pairs." Eric decided. "You come with me Leo. Rest of yous can sort yourselves." I saw a hint of worry strike Leopold's face, but he quickly smiled and nodded.
"Can I go with you?" I whispered to Stan, and he nodded at me. I actually felt a small rush of excitement at the idea of getting to spend a day just the two of us.
"You two?" Craig asked with a sneer, "which damsel will do the killing?"
"Leave off Craig." Stan replied, his voice seeming surprisingly calm through gritted teeth.
The warmth of the broth helped to liven me up, so I was grateful for it despite its taste and the unpleasant surprises of gristle. Eventually I realised that I was the only one still eating, the others all sitting idly with bowls discarded around them. I had been brought up focusing on etiquette when eating, not speed, so it was pretty common for me to struggle to keep up with their ravenous dismantling of whatever food was put in front of them. Still, I tried to gulp the rest down as quickly as I could – I knew I'd be glad of it later, after a hard day's work.
"Filthy, disgusting, animals." Eric said suddenly.
"What?" I asked in disbelief. Was he about to lecture me about table manners? The thought seemed so absurd I almost wanted to see it happen. I tried to meet his gaze, and it was unmoving. His narrowed eyes were still bloodshot and crusty from sleep.
"You heard me. We shouldn't have let Jews into our midst."
"But…" I began, but I had not the slightest idea of what to say.
"You lie, you cheat, you steal." He emphasised the last word, his eyes gesturing at my bowl, like I had no right to eat with them.
"He has done none of that." Stan interjected.
"Has he not?" Our morning meal seemed to have become a confrontation in just moments, and I couldn't fathom how. "Their little tribe wandered into our home, gold jangling in their pockets, and bribed their way in! The Franks got rid of them for a reason!"
"They are the first Jews ever to come to our village! Pray, explain why you hate them?"
Eric paused at that, and I shot Stan a grateful glance. He smiled ever so slightly back, but looked away as soon as Eric seemed to notice. I wasn't sure why it mattered that Eric saw Stan smile at me like that, but it certainly seemed to. I held my breath waiting to see how Eric would respond, but instead of a sneering remark he just shrugged.
"Have an enjoyable day, you two." He added, smiling in a way that few people are able to, where the slight movement of his lips was not just insincere, but held a threat.
"Let's go." Stan muttered, standing up and retrieving his bow. Their eyes burned into my back as I walked away, and as I left I felt myself once more becoming an outsider in this village, only this time I was dragging Stanley with me.
"Do not fret." He said, seemingly reading the worry on my face. "They'll come round. We don't listen to Eric a whole lot, y'know."
I chuckled. "What's our plan then?"
He shrugged. "I have a surprise for you. First though, we need Abbo." Before I had a chance to ask any questions, he placed two fingers between his lips and gave a piercing, almost painfully loud whistle, followed moments later by the sound of barking coming towards us. A large dog with short brown fur came bounding over, its tongue hanging idly out of its mouth in a dopey grin. It followed Stan as he walked towards the woods, and Stan scratched its neck fondly as they went.
"A surprise?" I shouted, realizing I should probably have been following as well. I jogged to catch up with Stan before he could disappear in the trees.
"Of sorts." Stan replied, waiting for me to catch up, out of breath and panting. Was I that different from Abbo? The thought amused me.
"Okay." I shrugged, giving up any attempt at guesswork. Stan knocked branches with his hands as he walked, seeming to enjoy watching silvery dew drops fall from the leaves.
The sky was smattered with pale red now, like the 'rosy fingered dawn' of Homer's Odyssey, and it was starting to warm up a little. In just a couple of weeks I felt very different from the boy that sat in those Greek lessons, learning about Homer and Plato. Now I was doing something that would have been unthinkable to him, wandering in a forest with a pagan boy, and I felt just as safe as behind my desk back home.
"How do you know where you're going?" I asked, since we weren't following a path of any kind through the dense woodland.
Stan laughed. "If you were back in your village, wouldn't you know your way around?"
"Well, of course, but Dijon isn't a village, it's a city. Buildings all look different, trees don't."
Stan looked at me quizzically and shrugged, "Trees differ to me." He began, touching the bark of a large oak. "There's hundreds of stories in each knot of wood. Buildings are what we get when we destroy them and build something ourselves, and we can't match the gods."
I felt like pointing out that Dijon had stone churches and high towers, not just huts like here, but I thought better of it. I guess he had a point, after all.
Eventually we reached a small clearing, just a few feet across, sheltered by overhanging branches. The ground was covered with foliage and brambles, and something about it looked a little odd.
I wasn't left wondering for long, because Stan reached down and began to heave on a branch. The very ground began to move, the greenery sliding away to reveal a shallow hole underneath. At first I thought it was some hunting trap, but then I realised it was filled with wooden chests.
"This is our storehouse." Stan said, jumping down the few feet into the pit, followed as ever by Abbo. I hesitated, and he held out his hand, helping me down. "We keep food here, and spare supplies, in case we get attacked and our stores stolen."
"Huh." Out of the corner of my eye I could see Abbo sniffing at one of the chests, probably smelling some cured meat or something inside. "This is…interesting. Thank you."
Stan laughed. "This isn't the surprise, numpet." He walked over to one of the chests, lifting the latch. "Though this place is secret, so don't bleat about it."
I nodded. "C'mere." He said, patting the earth next to him. He seemed excited, and when I sat down next to him he pushed the lid open quickly. "We aren't huntin' today. I found something I wanted to show you."
From inside he pulled out three pale bundles, handing one to me. It was parchment, wrapped tightly with red ribbon. Rolls and rolls, some blank but others written on, though the writing was in faded Latin.
I looked up and Stan was smiling at me, holding the other two bundles in his outstretched arms for me to look at. "This is wonderful." I muttered. "Where did it all come from?"
"I'm not sure. A lot of this was probably taken from the Dacians during the wars, years ago."
I untied the ribbon, resisting the urge to smell the familiar musky scent of the parchment. Most of the rolls looked like dull inventories of some kind, covered with items like 'bags of ginger' and then a number, but we didn't really care about reading them anyway.
We wiled away the morning scribbling on the sheets, Stan copying out words over and over until they were legible. He broke the first quill we used, holding it too tightly between his fingers, but he was remarkably persistent this time, like he really cared about mastering this.
Abbo sniffed about us idly while we worked, and I tried to show I was comfortable with him, petting him cautiously. I wasn't really used to dogs, and I'm sure my unease was obvious to Stan.
"Will they not mind, if we don't catch anything today?" I asked, when Stan appeared to have taken a break from writing. We had already used an entire role of parchment, and in my mind I was trying to work out how many more we would need before Stan was fully able to write.
"Why should we care?" Stan asked. His voice was deadly serious, and for some reason I burst out laughing, falling onto my back. Stan lay down next to me, laughing now as well.
The quiet of the forest surrounded us, that almost-silence, broken only by leaves rustling and the faint calls of birds a long way away. Stan was staring upwards at the canopy, and the endless grey sky that hid above it. I watched him out of the corner of my eye, the way his hands fidgeted, the way his chest rose and fell, gently, constantly, and the way his nose and brow wrinkled ever so slightly as he was lost in thought.
I was worried he would notice me looking and yet I couldn't look away. I was no more able to break my stare than I was able to command the sun to set, and wish it to be night time. It didn't make any sense to me. It was like we were brothers, like I had found someone who understood the nature of myself better than I did, and it was frightening.
"I wanted to, um, ask you something." I began, because speaking settled my nervous soul. "The other day when we were hunting, I saw you playing with some necklace you hide under your shirt. If you don't mind me asking, what is it?"
He paused for a moment, and I worried that I'd offended him, but then he reached up to his neck and lifted the necklace, removing it from its hiding place under his shirt and handing it to me.
It looked like a tooth – but a large, animal one – and it was clumsily broken off, still attached to a fragment of jawbone with a hole bored into it and the string looped through. I pressed my thumb against the point of the canine, feeling it press against my skin but not drawing blood. "Why do you wear this?"
I handed the necklace back to him and he clasped it in his hand tightly, the string hanging loosely over his curled fist.
"It is the canine of a young she-wolf." He said softly. I opened my mouth to tell him to stop, not to tell the story if it would upset him, but no words came out. "This wolf had just had her first cubs, and she was feeling defensive and territorial. My mother was foraging in the woods, when she strayed too near the den. The wolf attacked her."
He paused, uncurling his fingers and letting the tooth sit exposed on the palm of his hand. "I heard her scream, but by the time I got there it was much too late."
Somewhere not too far from us there was a sudden noise, as birds scattered in all directions hurriedly, most likely where some of the others were hunting. "I killed her." Stan muttered. "The mother wolf. I couldn't stop beating her with the hilt of my knife. I must have killed her a hundred times over."
"But – why keep it?" I asked, sitting upright. "Is it to show you avenged you mother?" It seemed morbid to me, grotesque even.
He smiled, a small, sad smile. "You don't understand us yet, do you?" I shrugged, not knowing how to respond. "When will you stop thinking of me as just some angry, senseless creature?"
I wanted to respond but it didn't seem wise. Stan looked away, staring off into the darkness that lurked beneath the branches.
"I remember the feeling exactly. A great emptiness, stronger even than my sorrow." He continued. "And it didn't help. I could have killed that wolf a thousand times over, she could have been brought back to life each day just so I could kill her again, and it still would not have helped."
He lifted the necklace up and placed it over his head, tucking the faded white tooth back out of sight beneath his shirt. "The necklace," he said, "never lets me forget that."