Chapter 4
OUR POWERLESSNESS WAS SO OBVIOUS it was shameful to me. Norcross’s sword jangled as he made his way to the frightened miller. “On my word, miller.” Norcross smiled. “Only last week did you not have two sons?”
“My son Matt has gone to Vaucluse,” Georges said, and looked toward me. “To study the metal trade.”
“The metal trade …” Norcross nodded, bunching his lips. He smiled as if to say, I know that is a pile of shit. Georges was my friend. My heart went out to him. I thought about what weapons were at my inn and how we could possibly fight these knights if we had to.
“And with your stronger son gone,” Norcross pressed on, “how will you continue to pay your tax to the duke, your labor now depleted by a third?”
Georges’s eyes darted about. “It will be made easily, my lord. I will work that much harder.”
“That is good.” Norcross nodded, stepping over to the boy. “In that case, you won’t be missing this one too much, will you?” In a flash, he hoisted the nine-year-old lad up like a sack of hay.
He carried Alo, kicking and screaming, toward the mill.
As Norcross passed the miller’s cowering daughter, he winked at his men. “Feel free to help yourselves to some of the [18] miller’s lovely grain.” They grinned and dragged poor Aimée, screaming wildly, inside the mill.
Disaster loomed in front of my eyes. Norcross took a hemp rope and, with the help of a cohort, lashed Alo to the staves of the mill’s large wheel, which dipped deep beneath the surface of the river.
Georges threw himself at the chatelain’s feet. “Haven’t I always been true to our lord, Baldwin? Haven’t I done what was expected?”
“Feel free to take your appeal to His Holiness.” Norcross laughed, lashing the boy’s wrists and ankles tightly to the water wheel.
“Father, father …” the terrified Alo cried.
Norcross began to turn the wheel. To Georges and Marie’s frantic shrieks, Alo went under. Norcross held it for a moment, then slowly raised the wheel. The child appeared, wildly gasping for air.
The despicable knight laughed at our priest. “What do you say, Father? Is this what you expect from the Pope’s protection?” He lowered the wheel again and the small boy disappeared. Our entire town gasped in horror.
I counted to thirty. “Please,” Marie begged on her knees. “He’s just a boy.”
Norcross finally began to raise the wheel. Alo was gagging and coughing water out of his lungs. From behind the mill’s door came the sickening cries of Aimée. I could scarcely breathe myself. I had to do something-even if it sealed my own fate.
“Sir.” I stepped forward, toward Norcross. “I will help the miller increase his tax by a third.”
“And who are you, carrot-top?” The glowering knight turned, fixed on my shock of bright red hair.
“Carrots too, if my lord wants.” I took another step. I was prepared to say anything, whatever gibberish might divert him. “We’ll throw in two bushels of carrots!”
I was about to go on-a joke, nonsense, anything that came [19] into my head-when one of the henchmen rushed up to me. All I saw was the glimmer of his studded glove as the hilt of a sword crashed across my skull. In the next breath I was on the ground.
“Hugh, Hugh,” I heard Sophie scream.
“Carrot-top here must be keen on the miller,” Norcross jeered. “Or the miller’s wife. By a third more, you say. Well, in my lord’s name, I accept your offer. Consider your tax raised.”
At the same time, he lowered the wheel again. I heard a struggling, choking Alo go under one more time.
Norcross shouted, “If it’s a fight you want, then fight for the glory of your liege when called upon. If it’s riches, then attend harder to your work. But the laws of custom are the laws. You all understand the laws, do you not?”
Norcross leaned against the wheel for the longest time. An anguished plea rose from the crowd, “Please … let the boy up. Let him up.” I clenched my fist, counting the beats that Alo remained under. Twenty … thirty … forty.
Then Norcross’s face split into an amused smile. “Goodness… do I forget the time?”
He slowly raised the wheel. When Alo broke the surface, the boy’s face was bloated and wide-eyed. His small jaw hung open, lifeless.
Marie screamed and Georges began to sob.
“What a shame.” Norcross sighed, leaving the wheel aloft and Alo’s lifeless body suspended high. “It seems he wasn’t cut out for the miller’s life after all.”
A silence ensued, a terrible moment that was empty and gnawing. It was broken only by Aimée’s whimpers as she emerged weak-kneed from the mill.
“Let us go.” Norcross gathered his knights. “I think the duke’s point is adequately driven home.”
As he made his way back across the square, he stopped over me where I still lay and hovered. Then he pressed his heavy boot into my neck. “Do not forget your pledge, carrot-top. I will be looking especially for your tax payment.”
Chapter 5
THAT TERRIBLE AFTERNOON changed my life. That night, as Sophie and I lay in bed, I couldn’t hold back the truth from her. She and I had always shared everything, good and bad. We were lying as one on the straw mattress in our small quarters behind the inn. I gently stroked her long blond hair, which fell all the way down her back. Every time she moved, every twitch of her nose, reminded me how much I loved her, how I had since the first time I had set eyes on her.
It was love at first sight for us. At ten!
I had spent my youth traveling with a band of itinerant goliards, given to them at a young age when my mother died, the mistress of a cleric who could no longer hide my presence. They raised me as one of their own, taught me Latin, grammar, logic, how to read and write. But most of all, they taught me how to perform. We traveled the large cathedral towns, Nîmes, Cluny Le Puy reciting our irreverent songs, tumbling, and juggling for the crowds. Each summer, we passed through Veille du Père. I saw Sophie there at her father’s inn, her shy blue eyes unable to hide from mine. And later, I noticed her peeking at a rehearsal. I was sure, at me … I swiped a sunflower and went up to her. “What goes in all stiff and stout, but when it comes out it’s flopping about?”
[21] She widened her eyes and blushed. “How could anyone but a devil have such bright red hair?” she said. Then she ran away.
A cabbage, I was about to say.
Each year when we returned, I came bearing a sunflower, until Sophie had grown from a gangly girl into the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. She had a song for me, a teasing rhyme:
A maiden met a wandering man
In the light of the moon’s pure cheer,
And though they fell in love at that first sight,
It was a love that was born for tears.
I called her my princess, and she said that I probably had one in every town. But in truth, I did not. Each year I promised I would come back, and I always did. One year, I stayed.
The three years we’d been married had been the happiest I had known. I felt connected for the first time in my life. And deeply in love.
But as I held Sophie that night, something told me I could no longer live like this. The rage that burned in my heart from the day’s horror was killing me. There would always be another Norcross, another tax levied upon us. Or another Alo… One day, the boy strung up on that wheel could be our own.