While Angelus clanged on the cracked church bell, Tarn stood with his head downcast. He was supposed to be praying. In a way he was, the impenetrable rote-learned Latin slipping through his brain like the reiteration of a mantra, but he was also pleasantly occupied in speculating how plump his daughter might become if they could farm all three fields each year without destroying the soil, and at the same time thinking of the pot of fennel-spiced beer that should be waiting in his hut.
As the Angelus ceased to ring, his neighbor’s hail dispelled both dreams.
Irritated, Tarn shouldered his wooden-bladed hoe and trudged along the Wealdway, worn deep by two hundred years of bare peasant feet.
His neighbor, Hud, fell in with him. In the bastard MidlandSussex hybrid that was the Lymeford dialect, Hud said, “Man, that was a long day.”
“All the days are long in the summer.”
“You were dreaming again, man. Saw you.”
Tarn did not reply. He was careful of Hud. Hud was as small and dark as himself, but thin and nervous rather than blocky. Tarn knew he got that from his father Robin, who had got it from his mother Joan -who had got it from some man-at-arms on her wedding night spent in the castle. Hud was always asking, always talking, always seeking new things. But when Tarn, years younger, had dared to try to open his untamable thoughts to him, Hud had run straight to the priest.
“Won’t the players be coming by this time of year, man?” he pestered.
“They might”
“Ah, wouldn’t it be a great thing if they came by tomorrow? And then after Mass they’d make their pitch in The Green, and out would come the King of England and Captain Slasher and the Turkish Champion in their clothes colored like the sunset, and St. George in his silver armor!”
Tarn grunted. “ ‘Tisn’t silver. Couldn’t be. If it was silver the robbers in the Weald would never let them get this far.”
The nervous little man said, “I didn’t mean it was silver. I meant it looked like silver.”
Tarn could feel anger welling up in him, drowning the good aftertaste of his reverie and the foretaste of his fennel beer. He said angrily, You talk like a fool.”
“Like a fool, is it? And who is always dreaming the sun away, man?”
“God’s guts, leave off!” shouted Tarn, and clamped his teeth on Ms words too late. He seldom swore. He could have bitten his tongue out after he uttered the words. Now there would be confession of blasphemy to make, and Father Bloughram, who had been looking lean and starved of late, would demand a penance in grain instead of any beggarly saying of prayers. Hud cowered back, staring. Tarn snarled something at him, he could not himself have said what, and turned off the deep-trodden path into his own hut.
The hut was cramped and murky with wood smoke from its open hearth. There was a smoke hole in the roof that let some of it out. Tarn leaned his hoe against the wattled wall, flopped down onto the bundle of rags in the corner that was the bed for all three of the members of his family and growled at Alys his wife: “Beer.” His mind was full of Hud and anger, but slowly the rage cooled and the good thoughts crept back in: Why not a softer bed, a larger hut? Why not a fire that did not smoke, as his returning grandfather, who wore a scar from the Holy Land to his grave, had told him the Saracens had? And with the thought of a different kind of life came the thought of beer; he could taste the stuff now, sluicing the dust from his throat; the bitterness of the roasted barley; the sweetness of the fennel. “Beer,” he called again, and became aware that his wife had been tiptoeing about the hut.
“Tarn,” she said apprehensively, “Joanie Brewer’s got the flux.”
His brows drew together like thunderclouds. “No beer?” he asked.
“She’s got the flux, and not for all the barley in Oldfield could she brew beer. I tried to borrow from Hud’s wife, and she had only enough for him, she showed me-“
Tarn got up and knocked her spinning into a corner with one backhanded blow. “Was there no beer yesterday?” he shouted. “God forgive you for being the useless slut you are! May the Horned Man and all his brood fly away with a miserable wretch that won’t brew beer for the husband that sweats his guts out from sunup to sunset!”
She got up cringing, and he knocked her into the corner again.
The next moment that was a solid crack across his back, and he crashed to the dirt floor. Another blow took him on the legs as he rolled over, and he looked up and saw the raging face of his daughter Kate and the wooden-bladed hoe upraised in her hands.
She did not strike him a third time, but stood there menacingly. “Will you leave her alone?” she demanded.
“Yes, you devil’s get!” Tarn shouted from the floor, and then, “You’d like me to say no, wouldn’t you? And then you’d beat in the brains of the old fool that gave you a name and a home.”
Weeping, Alys protested, “Don’t say that, husband. She’s your child, I’m a good woman, I have nothing black on my soul.”
Tarn got to his feet and brushed dirt from hs leather breeches and shirt. “We’ll say no more about it,” he said. “But it’s hard when a man can’t have his beer.”
“You wild boar,” said Kate, not lowering the hoe. “If I hadn’t come back from The Mead with the cow, you might have killed her.”
“No, child,” Tarn said uneasily. He knew his temper. “Let’s talk of other things.” Contemptuously she put down the hoe, while Alys got up, sniffling, and began to stir the peaseporridge on the hearth. Suddenly the smoke and heat inside the hut was more than Tarn could bear, and muttering something, he stumbled outside and breathed in the cool air of the night.
It was full dark now and, for a wonder, stars were out. Tarn’s Crusader grandfather had told him of the great bright nights in the mountains beyond Acre, with such stars that a man could spy friend’s face from foe’s at a bowshot. England had nothing like that, but Tarn could make out the Plow, fading toward the sunset, and Cassiopeia pursuing it from the east. His grandfather had tried to teach him the Arabic names for some of the brighter stars, but the man had died when Tarn was ten and the memories were gone. What were those two, now, so bright and so close together? Something about twin peacocks? Twins at least, thought Tarn, staring at Gemini, but a thought of peacocks lingered. He wished he had paid closer attention to the old man, who had been a Saracen’s slave for nine years until a lucky raid had captured his caravan and set him free.
A distant sound of yelping caught his ear. Tarn read the sound easily enough; a vixen and her half-grown young, by the shrillness. The birds came into the plowed fields at night to steal the seed, and the foxes came to catch the birds, and this night they had found something big enough to try to catch them- wolf, perhaps, Tarn thought, though it was not like them to come so near to men’s huts in good weather. There were a plenty of them in Sir Robert’s forest, with fat deer and birds and fish beyond counting in the streams; but it was what a man’s life was worth to take them. He stood there, musing on the curious chance that put venison on Sir Robert’s table and peaseporridge on his, and on the lights in the sky, until he realized Alys had progressed from abject to angry and must by now be eating without him.
After the evening meal Alys scurried over to Hud’s wife with her tale of beastly husbands, and Kate sat on a billet of wood, picking knots out of her hair.