The wind was blowing a gale and he was freezing cold. With straining hard work he could turn over and curl up a bit in the rustling leaves and sticks and stones and bright spikes of bramble and twigs.
His mouth was shockingly dry. And he was naked. Bare as a peeled twig. That was why he was so cold. The bastards hadn’t even left him a shirt to keep him decent.
Dodd lay still in the little dip full of leaves that his body had apparently crawled into by itself at some time during the night. Something of what had happened was coming back to him. He had been watering Whitesock and the mare at the stream and somebody had managed to creep up behind him and hit him…or more likely, drop on him from a tree. Ay, that was likely since his horses hadn’t noticed anything. Stupid bloody soft Southron horses, no Northern hobby would have let anyone ambush him like that.
He thought he’d done his best, fighting in the fog of being hit on the head to start with, mainly by instinct. The front of his head was sore as well as the back so perhaps he’d managed to headbutt someone. He hoped so.
Lying in the darkness of his sealed eyelids in the little stand of coppiced hazels from the smell, Dodd felt the black ball of rage in him that never really went away. It was in the pit of his stomach, swelling. It worried part of him even though the heat of it was giving him strength.
Somebody-several somebodies-had dared to rob him and beat him like a dog. They had taken everything. Carey’s loaned suit, his boots, his shirt, his sword that he was fond of, his knife that he’d had since he was a boy and lost several times in mad card games or bets on horse races, but always won back, his hat, his nice new horses reived from Heneage himself…Christ, they’d even taken his underbreeks. And they must have spent quite some time kicking him once he was on the ground too, the bastards, though they’d made the mistake of failing to slit his throat while they had the chance and for that they would pay. All of them would pay. Firstly in money and fire, and then in blood as they died screaming and, if he was feeling merciful, he might not wipe out their entire families unto their babes and seventh cousins. Possibly. If they died painfully enough.
Rage was making his breath come short and he still couldn’t get his blood-caked eyes open and find out if he really was blind. Though from the racket the bastard birds were making over his head, he knew it was probably dawn.
Cursing to himself he worked his tongue and snorted to get some spit up, then rubbed and peeled away some of the blood on his eyelashes. His head was full of metal from the blood smell. His whole body hurt, but he didn’t think he’d broken any bones-maybe there was a rib busted from the way it hurt to breathe.
Obscurely he blamed the Deputy Warden. It had to be his fault for bringing him south from Carlisle and into foreign parts where they were barbarians and committed long-winded complicated suicide by beating him up and robbing him. Goddamn the bastards. And the Deputy and…
He actually heard the sticky sound as his eyelids parted and he could see past them into the world.
A lovely golden sunrise was stirring up the birds who were shouting at each other with no need at all, it being September. He hated them.
Slowly and carefully, Dodd sat up in the leaf litter and moss. He scraped his head on one of the hazel branches above and was chittered at by a squirrel with a nut in its mouth. Dodd reached for it to strangle it and stop the noise but it “Kikikikkked” at him and escaped with a flirt of its russet tail.
While he waited trembling for all the various parts of him to stop banging and throbbing, he looked at the twigs above. There were cobnuts aplenty and more had fallen. He picked them out of the moss and broke them with his backteeth, ate a few. As the birds calmed down, he heard the sound of the stream nearby, which stood to reason since he couldn’t have crawled very far.
His other eye wouldn’t open properly because it was swollen. So he squinted his good eye and looked at his hands where the knuckles were raw and a cut in the web of skin between thumb and forefinger of his left hand so he had probably wrestled someone for a sword or dagger.
His knees and elbows were grazed, probably from crawling into the clump he’d been lying in through the damp cold night. Christ, he was cold. He pulled his knees up and wrapped his arms round them and shivered. He hadn’t been this low since…Well, ever. He’d had uglier awakenings but never one more humiliating and lonely. Him! Henry Dodd, Land-Sergeant of Gilsland, husband of Janet, Will the Tod’s red-headed Armstrong firecracker of a daughter, properly stolen from her father’s tower one wild night and her laughing behind him on the galloping horse and her arms tight around his waist and her hands distracting him, ay, that was a warm thing to think of…Of course, lately he had been playing the part of a respectable gentleman in fine wool loaned him by the Courtier, but he was also the rightful winner of the feud between himself and Vice Chamberlain Thomas Heneage which counted for something. Him! Beaten up, stripped and left naked in a ditch to die of cold. They’d got his money too. Forged and true, they’d got the lot.
Jesus God, he was angry. His hands were shaking with it as well as the cold.
And he was affeared as well. What if the bastards came back to finish the job they had so foolishly left undone? What if they were working for Heneage? He didn’t know who they were, mind, but if they came back…
He didn’t know he was showing his teeth in a snarl. He wasnae deid yet and until he was, they were as good as dead themselves. Once he knew who they were.
All he could remember from the fog and rage of the fight was a flash of dirty orange and white. That was all. Not much to go on.
The sun was fully up now and starting to warm him a little but he sat and listened a little longer. Nothing at all except what you’d expect in a hazel wood turning over to autumn. A little rustling sounded like a blackbird; there were other brown birds still arguing in the further branches and from the sharp smell now attacking his slightly cleared nose, he’d used a fox run to get into the bushes.
Grunting with effort and his left hand cupped to keep his bruised tackle from brambles, Dodd eeled and crawled along the small stinking corridor through the dense brush until he shoved out into the morning sunlight by the banks of the stream.
The mud around it was well stirred up. Further away he could hear deer, nearby the animals had fled the man in their midst. Well he wasn’t in a fit state to catch one for breakfast, so they could save their effort.
The brambles that had prickled him were heavy with berries so Dodd ate all he could reach of them and the riper cobnuts. Then he slipped and slid down the bank to the stream snickering at him over the stones of the little ford.
He looked about for tracks and signs very carefully. Yes, as he’d thought, there was a yew tree over the stream with a wide branch that hung over where he’d been watering his horse. Nobody there now, though the bark was scraped. He’d been unforgivably careless. The mud of the bank was rucked up, broken branches all around, a gash in the trunk of a willow tree where the horse had kicked. You could see there had been a fight.
Him against how many? Two? Three? Hard to tell with the way all the signs were over each other. He picked his way about the place on his tiptoes, squinting. There was a drier spot where the nettles were flattened and a few threads of grey wool caught on them. So that was where they must have laid him down while he was unconscious and stripped off his clothes. He could see where the heels of his boots had made dents in the soft mud and been dragged off by the bootprints of the man that did it. There was a scrap of good linen from his shirt there on a bramble.
Another scrap of thread, this time of a faded but once virulent orange. Tawny they called it at Court. So he hadn’t dreamed the orange and white clownlike clothes. Dodd felt the thread with his fingers-it was silky, so he kept it by wrapping it round his little finger like a ring. It might make a fishing line anyway.