"Sire, if it pleases you to take your rest here, this house is yours
"Thank you, old man. Heaven will be grateful for your hospitality toward its humble servant, for I am a Christian knight."
The old man crossed himself at once. In school, Maxence had been taught how to pay his way in the coin of word. The oldest of the children reappeared, ewer in hand.
"My thanks, boy. Tell me, would you know how to look after my steed?"
The boy gazed at his grandfather without answering.
"Of course he does, sire!" said the old man. "Off you go-you know where fodder can be found, and make sure you give the horse a good rubdown!"
The boy walked toward the horse. Maxence told him he could ride it instead of leading it to fodder. The boy smiled at last. Maxence plunged the ewer into the spring's fresh water.
"It's good water, it is, sire," the old man said. "It's kept me in good health for seventy years, it has!"
"Upon my word, seventy years! It must be good indeed-you seem quite sprightly still!"
On hearing these words, the old man couldn't keep from contorting his face in a grin. Maxence saw he would have food and shelter tonight for a trifle.
"My daughter and my son-in-law will soon return from gathering mushrooms," the old man continued. "We've had rain of late, and we'll have wild mushrooms tonight. Water, bread, and a mushroom omelet are all we can offer you, milord."
"I'd gladly make it my daily fare, if it would guarantee I'd stand up just as straight at your age!"
The old man straightened proudly, his face wracked by another smile.
So sore were his loins and limbs from riding that Maxence would have liked to turn in right after supper, but he would have offended his hosts had he begged his leave of them so hurriedly. Thus he spoke graciously of the lands he had seen, his adventures among the Turks, the Germans, and the Calabrese, as well as of a few customs peculiar to these people, and likely to astonish poor folk who'd never been more than a league from their clearing. Then, once the children were in bed and their mother busying herself clearing up, the grandfather removed a flagon of spirits from the dough trough. His son-in-law pointed and said, "If it's the springs of youth you're after, those are the waters that keep him a strapping lad at his age!"
Maxence was drifting off, but the sight of the bottle restored his forces a bit, for he loved to drink, and the omelet they'd shared would have seemed more delicious with a pitcher of wine. The old man filled the goblets and set the flagon down in reach. The liquor was rough but did the job as well as any other. Maxence settled himself against the wall before picking up the trail of his thoughts once more. He was among men now, and knew what his hosts wanted to hear. He answered their desires, telling tales of Moorish serving girls and Italian bordellos, which he readily embellished with far-fetched or flattering episodes. Eyes wide, the forest-dwellers hung on his every word. They pressed on late into the night, he speaking, the others listening, and everyone drinking so much that the old man had long since fallen asleep on his bench when Maxence was at last done with his flowery fables.
"Well, my good men, that's how women are in those lands!"
Across from him, the son-in-law was nodding off, his nose sometimes dipping into his half-empty goblet. "What a life you've had! What women you've seen! We don't have any like that around here… Well, there is one, one beautiful woman in these parts, but she's…"
Maxence, who wanted only to crawl off to sleep, straightened in his drunken stupor and, as best he could, assumed the air of a great lover hearing tell of a legendary lonely lady. The man hesitated, as though fearing he'd said too much. Maxence pressed him. "Come now, a pretty damsel? You must tell me all about her!"
"A… damsel? Oh, I don't know… She is a beautiful woman, but…"
"But?"
"But… how should I put it? We think her a bit of a witch, milord, and she frightens us."
Maxence shrugged. "I've yet to meet a woman who frightens me! Come now, tell me everything! After all, you must, if she's a witch. Do you understand?"
The threat lurking behind his last words overcame the woodsman's scruples.
"Milord, she lives not far from us, on the island in the river. She lives alone. My father-in-law, who has indeed seen seventy winters, claims she's been there all his life. She was already living there, alone on the island, making charcoal, when he was a little bov:'
"What are you saying?"
"The truth, milord, as the old man has spoken it a hundred times."
"Then she must be a hundred if a day!"
"A hundred she may well be, but her hair is dark as the crow's wing, and the snow no whiter than her teeth or skin. Milord, it's girls of sixteen who seem crones beside her! I remember, for I saw her once, up close. My father-in-law had told me so much about her that I wanted to see her for myself, I went to the island. And suddenly there she was, standing before me, stepped out from behind a thicket."
"What did you do?"
"I gazed on her a long time. I was a young man, just married, my wife expecting our first child. And yet I swear to you, at her slightest sign I would've left it all behind, wife and child; never would I have come back across the river. But she remained unmoving, unspeaking, in the middle of the path, and I fled. So far as I know, God never wrought a thing so beautiful-the Evil One must have had a hand in it… Once home, I pulled my wife to me and held her close. Since that day, I have avoided the banks."
The man fell silent. His eyes, which had shone as he spoke, were once more dull with drink. Maxence wanted to pour him another, but he shook his head.
"Thank you, milord. I've had enough. I should not have spoken of such things. They always make me sad."
"Let's go to bed. It was a beautiful tale, my friend. But do you really believe that woman's a hundred? Your father-in-law is old. Sometimes, toward the end of such a long life, everything runs together in one's head. Was it not the mother, or even the grandmother of the girl you met, that he'd known as a child?"
"I don't know, milord. Were she but sixteen summers, she'd still be too beautiful. So much beauty is a terrible thing: a man's soul cannot conceive of it without being troubled forevermore. Please, I beg of you-forget what I've said. No doubt you're right, no doubt she's but sixteen, or twenty, and shines too brightly for we who share these woods… She must be a good Christian… I wish her no harm."
"We'll see."
Looking up, Maxence was surprised to find on the face of host an expression of such fear and remorse that he hadn't the heart to worry him any longer.
"Rest easy. I'm a knight, not a prelate. Let us to bed."
The two men rose clumsily. Maxence lay down beside the fire and rolled himself up in a blanket from the couple's bed while, with an uncertain step, the man joined his sleeping wife.
Heads were heavy the next day at dawn. When it was time to say goodbye, Maxence gave the old man a medal he'd claimed to have brought back from the Holy Land, then took the path toward the river.
In the morning mist, man and mount, both half-asleep, trailed the night's dreams. Maxence liked this torpor, the world's melancholy in the early hours of the day. Among his memories of military life, he loved more than the thrills of victory and pillage the uncertain dawns, the hushed sunups when, first to rise, he'd walked at length among his dozing comrades. It was a good hour for lending a hand, when the sentinels themselves were often nodding off. Yet he had felt invulnerable then. He retreated into those slow minutes as though into the heart of an impregnable citadel. Then a bugle would sound at the other end of camp, the sleepers would stir, and Maxence begin once more to fear death.