Merlin's Booke (5 page)

He climbed off the bed and walked over to the food cautiously, checking first that neither the Robin-man nor Mag or Nell were around. But he was alone in the closed-in room.

Bending down, he breathed in the smell of the warm loaf.
Bread.
He spoke it. “Bread.” He had loved it once, he remembered. Covered with something. A golden slab sat next to the loaf, and it had little smell but the color was as bright as a spring bird's feather.
Butter,
that was it. “Butter.” He said it aloud and loved the sound of it. “But-ter.” He put his face close to the butter and stuck out his tongue, licking across the surface. Then he took the bread and tore off a piece and dragged it across the butter leaving a strange, deep gouge in the yellow slab. As he stuffed the piece in his mouth, he spoke aloud, “Bread and butter.” The words were mangled in his full mouth, but he understood them with such a sharp insight that he was forced to shout them. The words along with the pieces of bread spat from his mouth. He laughed and scrambled to pick up the pieces and pushed them back in again.

Then he sat down, cross-legged by the tray, and tore off more hunks of bread, smearing it with so much butter that soon his hands and elbows and even his stomach bore testimony to his greed. At last he finished the bread and butter and licked the last crumbs from the tray and the floor around it.

There was a cup of hot water the color of leaf-mold on the tray as well, and he slurped it up, surprised that it, too, was warm. And sweet. He knew then that it was not water at all, but he could not recall its name.

“Names,” he whispered to himself, and named again all the things that had been given back to him, starting with the bread: “bread, butter, horse, dog, hens, jerkin, coat.” Then he added but not out loud,
Master Robin, Mag, and Nell.
He patted his greasy stomach and grunted happily. He could not remember ever being this warm and this full. Not ever.

He looked around the room slowly. There were two windows and the light shining through them reminded him of the light through the heavy interlacing of the trees in his forest. It fell to the floor in strange dusty patterns. Crawling over to the light, he tried to catch the motes in his hand, but each time he snatched at the dusty light, they disappeared and when he opened his hand, it was empty.

Standing, he looked at the window and the fields and forest beyond. Then he thrust his head forward and was painfully surprised by the glass. “Hard air,” he said at first before his mind recalled the word to him:
window.
He had a sudden illumination, a dreamlike memory that assembled like colored glass shards in a pattern that formed bit by bit. Sometimes, he remembered and smiled at it, sometimes windows had many little pieces that made pictures. Of animals and people and grass and trees.

He tried to push open the glass, but he could not move it, so he left that window and tried the other. He went back and forth between them, pushing and leaving little marks on the glass. Angry then, he went to the door and shoved his shoulder against it. It would not open and he could not lift the latch.

So then he knew he was a prisoner in the room. The fields he could see through the glass and the tall familiar trees beyond were lost to him. He put his head back and howled. The long rise and fall of sound comforted him.

Then he went back to the bed and lay down beside it, pulling the covers onto the floor and making a nest of them. He slept.

When he woke again the room was darker and the light through the windows not so pure but shaded. There was a new loaf and a bowl of milk by the door. He stood and walked warily over to it. Then in a sudden fit of anger, he kicked the bowl over and screamed.

A few hours later, when the door remained shut against him and he had urinated all around the bed, hunger led him back to the loaf. He ate it savagely and sniffed around the place where the milk had spilled on the floor, but it had all soaked in.

Bored and angry, he paced back and forth between the window and the door, then he began to trot, and finally run around the room until he was out of breath. Standing in the middle of the room, he threw back his head to howl once again, but this time his howl died away in a series of short gasps and moans. He curled into the covers and wept, something he had not done in almost a year.

When the sounds of his weeping had stopped and he drifted into sleep the door into the room opened slowly. Master Robin entered and exchanged the empty bowl and tray for another, one with a bit of meat stew and milky porridge. Then he picked the boy up carefully and settled him into the bed. He stroked the boy's matted hair, brushing it from the wide forehead.

“There, there, my boy,” he murmured in that soothing low voice. “First we'll tame you, then we'll name you. And then you'll claim your own.”

The voice, the words, the warmth entered into the boy's dreams and, dreaming, he smiled and wiped his finger along his cheek. Then the finger found its way into his mouth.

The next dawn was the repeat of the first, and the next and the next. By the fifth day the room smelled and the floors bore the reminders of his filthy woods habits. But this time when the boy woke, Master Robin was there next to him, lying close and stroking his head.

“Come my boy, let me help you now, let me show you now.”

The boy lowered his gaze, unable to quite meet the man's eyes, his skin quivering under the soft touch, the soft words.

The man rose from the bed and went over to the door where the tray full of food sat. This food was still warm and the smell seemed to overpower the musky, closed-in odor of the room.

Involuntarily, the boy licked his upper lip, then as if ashamed, wiped the back of his hand across his mouth. When Master Robin sat down on the bed with the tray, the boy reached over to grab the loaf. The man slapped his hand.

The sting did not hurt as much as the surprise. And then the memory of that other slap, when he was holding a joint of meat, jolted through him. “Forgive …” he said in a whisper, as if trying out a new tongue.

The man hugged him suddenly, fiercely. “There is nothing to forgive, young one. Just slow down. The bread will not run away. It is manners of the house and not the woods I am about to teach you.”

The words meant less than the hug, of course. The boy sat back and waited.

Master Robin broke the bread into two sections. Then he picked up a silver stick with a rounded end and stuck it in the bowl of porridge. “Spoon,” he said.

The boy whispered back, “Spoon.” He put out his hand and his fingers closed around the handle of the spoon with a memory of their own. He ate the porridge greedily but with a measure of care as well, frequently stopping to check out Master Robin's reaction through the corners of his eyes.

“Good boy. Good. So you are no stranger to a spoon. How long were you in that woods, I wonder? Long enough, though. Long enough to go wild. Ah well, we'll tame you. I'm not a falconer for nought. I have a long patience with wild things. Eat then. Eat and rest. This afternoon, after we dress you, I'll take you out to the mews to see the hawks.”

When the man left with the tray, the boy sat on the bed and watched. He made no attempt to follow out the door. There had been a promise. That much he had understood. A promise of a trip outside. It was enough.

However, he was too excited to nap again and he wandered around the room, not restlessly or angrily this time, but to catalog the room's contents. It was
his
room now. He had made it his, first by marking it and then by feeling safe in it. There was the bed and its rumpled covers, the rush-strewn floor, and a large closed wooden wardrobe he could not open. To one side of the bed was a small table that occasionally held a candle. He remembered its light when once he had awakened in the night. There was no candle there now. Instead a large bowl and jug stood there. He peered into both. They were empty.

He went to the window and looked out. A cow grazed on the open meadow, fastened by a chain to its spot. Near it two large brown dogs ran back and forth in some kind of frantic game for which only they seemed to understand the rules. The boy put his hand to the window and drew a line down the middle several inches long.
He looked at it and then, ever so carefully, drew a line across the middle.
After a moment of thought he drew a round thing on top.
Then he stopped and shook his head. The figure was incomplete. It needed something. He stood back from the window trying to puzzle it out, but the lines blurred together, then faded.

When he turned around, Master Robin was standing in the room and beside him were the two women.

“Hallo,” said the man. “We've brought you some clothes.”

The older woman wrinkled her nose as she looked around the room. The younger one gave a tentative smile. Then all three moved toward the boy who waited stone still.

It took them quite a while to dress him, for he had forgotten what to do and was uncomfortable with so many hands on him. And once he snarled and the women drew back. But Master Robin persevered and, at last, the boy had on short trews, a shirt, and a vest, which were the names Mag gave the clothes. And he wore as well a peculiar harness of plaited rope that went around each shoulder and across his chest and back, with a lead that Master Robin kept tight in his hand. It reminded the boy of the chain that held the cow but he did not try to pull it away. It made him feel part of the man, and he liked that now.

Then Master Robin sent the two women from the room, and they scuttled like badgers running back to the sett. The boy laughed as they closed the door behind them, and that made Master Robin laugh, too.

“So, you can laugh and you can cry and you can speak some, too. You are no idiot, for all that Mag would have you so,” said the soft voice. “Would you like to see the birds?”

His answer was to stand.

“Well. And well.” Master Robin stood slowly and patted him, almost carelessly, on the head. “Tomorrow we will do somewhat with that hair.”

He knocked on the door and there was a series of small sounds as the door was unlocked from the outside. Then they went from the safety of the room, the rope loose between them.

The birds were housed in a long low building, with horn in the small windows.

“The mews,” Master Robin said as they entered. And he gave names to many things as they walked through the long room. “Door, perch, bird, lamp, rafters.” And mimicking his tone, the boy repeated each with a kind of greed. In fact, his face looked as it had when he had smelled the first loaf of bread, his eyes squinting, chin up, a kind of feral anticipation.

They walked slowly through the sawdust on the floor, and the boy took it all as if it were both his very first and also his hundredth time in such a place.

At last they were before a trio of hooded birds on individual stands where the heavy sacking screens hanging from the perches moved slowly in the bit of wind like castle banners. Master Robin stood for a moment, nodding his head at the birds, hands behind his back. The boy echoed his stance.

Then, as if he could contain his excitement no longer, the boy turned to the man and whispered, “Bird. Hawk. Yours?” His voice was husky, deeper than most boys' his age.