“I will,” said Cadfael, after a brief pause to get the drift of that, for it made sense more ways than one. And he went at once to proffer the request. Hugh was already preparing to mount and ride back to the town, and Sister Magdalen was in the yard to see him go. No doubt she had been deploying for him, in her own way, all the arguments for mercy which Cadfael had already used, and perhaps others of which he had not thought. Doubtful if there would be any harvest even from her well-planted seed, but if you never sow you will certainly never reap.
“Let them be together by all means,” said Hugh, shrugging morosely, “if it can give them any comfort. As soon as the other one is fit to be moved I’ll take him off your hands, but until then let him rest. Who knows, that Welsh arrow may yet do the solving for us, if God’s kind to him.” Sister Magdalen stood looking after him until the last of the escort had vanished up the forested ride.
“At least,” she said then, “it gives him no pleasure. A pity to proceed where nobody’s the gainer and every man suffers.”
“A great pity! He said himself,” reported Cadfael, equally thoughtfully, “he wished to God it could be taken out of his hands.” And he looked along his shoulder at Sister Magdalen, and found her looking just as guilelessly at him. He suffered a small, astonished illusion that they were even beginning to resemble each other, and to exchange glances in silence as eloquently as did Elis and Melicent.
“Did he so?” said Sister Magdalen in innocent sympathy. “That might be worth praying for. I’ll have a word said in chapel at every office tomorrow. If you ask for nothing, you deserve nothing.” They went in together, and so strong was this sense of an agreed understanding between them, though one that had better not be acknowledged in words, that he went so far as to ask her advice on a point which was troubling him. In the turmoil of the fighting and the stress of tending the wounded he had had no chance to deliver the message with which Cristina had entrusted him, and after Eliud’s confession he was divided in mind as to whether it would be a kindness to do so now, or the most cruel blow he could strike.
“This girl of his in Tregeiriog—the one for whom he was driving himself mad—she charged me with a message to him and I promised her he should be told. But now, with this hanging over him… Is it well to give him everything to live for, when there may be no life for him? Should we make the world, if he’s to leave it, a thousand times more desirable? What sort of kindness would that be?” He told her, word for word, what the message was. She pondered, but not long.
“Small choice if you promised the girl. And truth should never be feared as harm. But besides, from all I see, he is willing himself to die, though his body is determined on life, and without every spur he may win the fight over his body, turn his face to the wall, and slip away. As well, perhaps, if the only other way is the gallows. But if—I say if!—the times relent and let him live, then pity not to give him every armour and every weapon to survive to hear the good news.” She turned her head and looked at him again with the deep, calculating glance he had observed before, and then she smiled. “It is worth a wager,” she said.
“I begin to think so, too,” said Cadfael and went in to see the wager laid.
They had not yet moved Elis and his cot into the neighbouring cell; Eliud still lay alone. Sometimes, marking the path the arrow had taken clean through his right shoulder, but a little low, Cadfael doubted if he would ever draw bow again, even if at some future time he could handle a sword. That was the least of his threatened harms now. Let him be offered as counter, balance the greatest promised good.
Cadfael sat down beside the bed, and told how Elis had asked leave to join him and been granted what he asked. That brought a strange, forlorn brightness to Eliud’s thin, vulnerable face. Cadfael refrained from saying a word about Elis’s imminent departure, however, and wondered briefly why he kept silent on that matter, only to realise hurriedly that it was better not even to wonder, much less question. Innocence is an infinitely fragile thing and thought can sometimes injure, even destroy it.
“And there is also a word I promised to bring you and have had no quiet occasion until now. From Cristina when I left Tregeiriog.” Her name caused all the lines of Eliud’s face to contract into a tight, wary pallor, and his eyes to dilate in sudden bright green like stormy sunlight through June leaves. “Cristina sends to tell you, by me, that she has spoken with her father and with yours and soon, by consent, she will be her own woman to give herself where she will. And she will give herself to none but you.” An abrupt and blinding flood drowned the green and sent the sunlight sparkling in sudden fountains, and Eliud’s good left hand groped lamely after anything human he might hold by for comfort, closed hungrily on the hand Cadfael offered, and drew it down against his quivering face, and lower into the bed, against his frantically beating heart. Cadfael let him alone thus for some moments, until the storm passed. When the boy was still again, he withdrew his hand gently.
“But she does not know,” whispered Eliud wretchedly, “what I am… what I have done…”
“What she knows of you is all she needs to know, that she loves you as you love her, and there is not nor ever could be any other. I do not believe that guilt or innocence, good or evil can change Cristina towards you. Child, by the common expectation of man you have some thirty years at least of your life to live, which is room for marriage, children, fame, atonement, sainthood. What is done matters, but what is yet to do matters far more. Cristina has that truth in her. When she does know all, she will be grieved, but she will not be changed.”
“My expectation,” said Eliud faintly through the covers that hid his ravaged face, “is in weeks, months at most, not thirty years.”
“It is God fixes the term,” said Cadfael, “not men, not kings, not judges. A man must be prepared to face life, as well as death, there’s no escape from either. Who knows the length of the penance, or the magnitude of the reparation, that may be required of you?” He rose from his place then, because John Miller and a couple of other neighbours, nursing the small scars of the late battle, carried in Elis, cot and all, from the next cell and set him down beside Eliud’s couch. It was a good time to break off, the boy had the spark of the future already alive in him, however strongly resignation prompted him to quench it, and now this reunion with the other half of his being came very aptly. Cadfael stood by to see them settled and watch John Miller strip down the covers from Eliud and lift and replace him bodily, as lightly as an infant and as deftly as if handled by a mother. John had been closeted with Elis and Melicent, and was grown fond of Elis as of a bold and promising small boy from among his kin. A useful man, with his huge and balanced strength, able to pick up a sick man from his sleep—provided he cared enough for the man!—and carry him hence without disturbing his rest. And devoted to Sister Magdalen, whose writ ran here firm as any king’s.
Yes, a useful ally.
Well…
The next day passed in a kind of deliberate hush, as if every man and every woman walked delicately, with bated breath, and kept the ritual of the house with particular awe and reverence, warding off all mischance. Never had the horarium of the order been more scrupulously observed at Godric’s Ford. Mother Mariana, small, wizened and old, presided over a sisterhood of such model devotion as to disarm fate. And her enforced guests in their twin cots in one cell were quiet and private together, and even Melicent, now a lay guest of the house and no postulant, went about the business of the day with a pure, still face, and left the two young men to their own measures.