Seeker

They were playing prisoner’s base. It was Maud’s turn to run out from the line of children into the town square with one of the boys chasing her. With a squeal, Maud took off through the mud. Glancing back, she saw her pursuer was the tall boy with the limp, Michael. Michael was still very fast, even with the bad foot. He had invented a kind of swinging run, and because he had long legs, he was keeping up with Maud just fine as she plunged through puddles and across the deep ruts made by carts.

The other children, all fifteen of them, began to spread out through the town square and the alleys leading off it, each chaser trying to touch the one he chased and claim a prisoner for his team.

Maud’s seven-year-old legs were moving as quickly as they could, which was not quick enough through the mud and animal dung on the lower side of the square. The skirt of her dress, which had once been a very light color, was now covered in muck and bits of the leaves that were blowing all over the town on this autumn morning.

Risking a look behind her, she discovered the boy with the limp had stopped. He’d lost a shoe in the mire and was trying to get his foot back inside it without stepping onto the ground. Maud ducked into an alley, ran ten paces, then moved sideways into the tiny passage that led back behind the alehouse. There, she crept along the wall, her back pressed into the stone.

She heard the boy’s footsteps coming down the alley. She tried to keep her eyes closed, thinking that would help her go unnoticed, but she couldn’t resist a peek when his steps got close. Michael ran right past the opening to her tiny passage.

“Maudy, where are you?” she heard him call out from farther along. “You’re out of bounds! The prison yard ends here.”

Maud smiled, moving deeper into the small back alley. It would lead her to another street, and from there she could make it back to her base without being captured—and all while staying in bounds.

“Maudy!” the boy called again. “Be fair!”

His voice was farther away. He had continued up the main alley. He would be too far away to catch her when she came out the other side.

As she edged her way down the dim and muddy corridor, her nose filled with the smell of animals. On her left, the tiny passage let into a stone courtyard at the back of the inn, where several horses were tied up. The place hadn’t been shoveled out in weeks, and the smell was overpowering. Maud snuck past the opening to the enclosure, intending to slip into the darker passage beyond, but something caught her attention.

At the rear of the inn was a room with its wall right up against the back alley. A shutter over a window was partly open, and she could hear voices inside, arguing.

“Do not think you will change the Old’s mind,” one voice said. “There have been Youngs before you, yet I am still here.” Maud was intrigued. The man’s voice sounded cruel, which scared her, but it also sounded foreign, which was interesting. He was speaking her language, but he had a funny way of doing it.

“You cannot stop me from talking to my own master,” another voice said. This one was much younger. “We have both taken the same oath.”

“Oath!” the older man said, almost spitting out the word. “Stretched, I am. Since years too long to count.”

What does he mean by “stretched”? she wondered. Was this man long and thin? Had he been put to the rack? Maud’s curiosity got the better of her. She crept closer. By standing on tiptoe, she could look through the crack between the shutter and the stone wall. It was dark in the room, almost as dark as the tiny alley where she was hidden, yet she could just see the faces of the two men. One older, the other one young—hardly even a man yet. But neither looked like he had been stretched.

“You were with a woman,” the young one said. “I saw you. In the upstairs room.” The younger man also had a funny way of talking. He didn’t have an accent, like a foreigner might, but there was a slowness to his voice, as though he had thought everything out ahead of time, and now the words were falling out of his mouth in a steady way.

“No one cares what you saw,” the older man said.

“We stand apart from humanity, so our heads are clear. It is our oath. The Old will hear of this.” The younger man moved as if to go out into the horse yard, but the older man stepped forward, blocking him. Even though their voices were slow, their movements were so fast, Maud could not figure out how they had gotten across the room so quickly. She had to shift her feet ever so slightly in order to keep the two of them in view. A small knot of wood had been knocked out of the shutter, and by moving to her left, she could see them through its jagged hole.

“The Old will hear nothing,” the older man said, his arm across the door that must lead to the stable yard.

“Let me pass,” said the younger one.

“You pass when I permit.” There was something shiny in the older man’s hand that had not been there a moment before. Maud thought it might be a knife, but how had it gotten into his hand so quickly? She realized the younger man also had a knife in his hand. Like magic, the weapons had appeared.

“What happened to the Young before me?” the younger man asked, his knife held up against the other man’s knife, his eyes searching the older man’s face. “That was your doing.”

“Was it?” the older man asked. “You were not there. The Old was not there. Who can say?”

The knives struck out. From where Maud stood, it looked like a blur of many arms, with flashes of light from the blades winking at her again and again. One knife seemed to disappear into the younger man’s chest.

Then the younger man was falling to the floor. The older man had a hand around the boy’s back, to help him settle to the ground without making a lot of noise.

When the younger man was lying on the floor, he whispered, “I have written it down. All of it.” His voice was so quiet, it took Maud a moment to understand what he said.

The older man shook the boy roughly by his shirt. “What did you write?” he asked.

“Many things about you,” the boy said, even more softly than before. “Others will know what you are …”

The older man shook him harder.

“Where?”

A smile crossed the boy’s lips, but no more words came out. He was staring up at the older man, and somehow Maud understood that the boy was not breathing anymore.

Maud gasped. In her short life, she had seen several dead men. In the winter, beggars would sometimes freeze in the town square or out on the road. But she had never seen a man die before. Realizing immediately that she had made too much noise, Maud slid down the wall as fast as she could, to remove her head from view.

Hardly a moment had passed before the man was there, right above her. He had crossed the room in the blink of an eye, and he was standing against the shutter. She could hear him breathing.

The shutter swung open. Maud closed her eyes, trying to become invisible, pressing her whole body against the wall, as if she could squeeze herself into the stone. There was a wide windowsill beneath the shutter. She could feel it above her head. Was it wide enough to hide her body from the man’s view? She was not sure. She could feel the wet mud on her skirt and on her arms, making her into little more than a dark blur in the dim alleyway. Maybe she would be hard to see.

All at once the man was gone from the window. Maud didn’t wait to find out what he would do next. She scrambled to her feet and pressed on through the tiny alley, so narrow here she was forced to walk sideways. In her haste, she knocked over several buckets by a pig trough behind the butcher’s shop next door, setting off a terrible racket of clanging metal and squealing animals. Maud ran then, terrified the man was after her, the close walls scratching her arms as she went.

At last, she came out onto a wider lane, rather full of people. This street was so muddy, it swallowed her feet to the ankles, but she hardly cared. At the bottom of the lane, she turned and was relieved to find the town square as busy as she had left it. She lost herself among the men and women milling about in front of the butcher’s shop and hauling carts toward market stalls.

As she passed in front of the inn, a hand grabbed her shoulder. She turned, and with a jolt of fear found herself looking up at the man she had seen in the back room. He wore a long cloak over his shoulders now, but his face was the same.

“You,” he said to her.

Maud could not move. She expected a knife to appear suddenly in one of his hands.

“Fetch me water,” the man said. “I will wash.”

The man had taken her for one of the serving girls at the inn. He was not going to stab her. She wrenched her shoulder out of his grasp and ran off through the square.

A moment later, a hand grabbed her again. Making a fist, Maud turned and swung at her attacker. She hit Michael, the limping boy, square in the face. He fell backward, into a deep, muddy puddle.

“I got you fair, Maudy. You’re my prisoner!” he said as he slipped around in the mud and tried to get back to his feet.

“All right,” she agreed, relieved to see her friend. “I’m your prisoner.” She took Michael’s hands and helped him up.

Together they walked toward the top of the square, where most of the children were gathering for another round of prisoner’s base. The limping boy walked her triumphantly back to the others—he had returned with a prisoner and did not much mind that she had struck him in the face.

Weeks later, when she had begun to put the inn and the men with knives from her mind, Maud was marched out of her house to greet an honored visitor. She had been scrubbed quite clean in a tub of warm water that morning, and she was now wearing a fancy and rather uncomfortable dress into which her mother and maid had forced her with great difficulty. Her hair had been braided and tied with ribbons.

Maud’s father was a cousin to their lord, the baron, and her family lived in a large stone house at the top of the hill, overlooking the village. Though Maud often snuck away to play with the villagers’ children, she knew quite well she was not one of them. Maud could read, for instance, something few of the village children were ever likely to do.

It was because of her education, she sensed, that she was now being sent away with this visitor. It was the year of our Lord 1472, and it was quite ordinary, being sent away. Her older brother was gone to the monks right now, receiving his education, and her other brother was a squire to their cousin the baron, who lived in the castle on the hill beyond the wide river, which she could see in the distance.

Girls were often sent to serve great ladies in distant places, but this visitor was obviously not a representative of a great house. He was dressed in a simple robe, like a monk, which was tied at his waist. Over this he wore a long cloak, which seemed to contain a large number of interior pockets, all stuffed with objects whose strange outlines could be glimpsed through the cloth. And he was old. Being seven, Maud did not know how old, and she didn’t trouble herself too much to wonder—it was enough to note that he had long hair streaked with gray, and a beard that reached past his neck.

Maud’s father was affectionate with no one and was feared by all members of the household, herself included. Yet he was treating this old man in the simple robe like visiting royalty. Servants were called to fetch wine and food, a bed was offered, then more wine.

The old man responded to these suggestions politely, yet he waved off everything but a plain meal. All of his attention was fixed on Maud as she was introduced to him. His eyes were the best part about him, she decided immediately. His eyes took her in all at once—they saw not just her clothes and shoes and hair, which were, after all, her mother’s doing, but something more, something inside her. His face was very serious, but those eyes of his were smiling.

At first, Maud refused to go with him and was both shocked and pleased to see deep embarrassment on her father’s face. The old visitor did not argue with her. Instead, unexpectedly, there was a flower in his hand. She had not seen how it came to his hand, but there it was, like magic, and he was presenting it to her.

Maud was unsettled for a moment—but only for a moment. The flower smelled sweet, and the man placed it behind her ear. Before she knew it, she was walking down the road with him, a small pack of her belongings slung over the man’s shoulder. When she looked back, she saw both of her parents at the top of the road, looking after her as she walked away. Her father usually spent a great deal of time being angry about Maud’s behavior, and this was the first time she had observed him being proud of her.

“You will see your mother and father again,” the man told her, catching her looking back. “I promise you that. You will see them many times in the next few years.”

He had a strange way of speaking. His words came out like a chant, or like a poem. And some of his words were funny to her, as though he had learned to say them differently than she had. This had made her uncomfortable at first, but she was already growing used to it.

“When will I next see them?” she asked.

“Soon,” he promised. “And after some time, if life with me does not suit you, you may return to them. So you see, there is nothing to fear.”

“How did you make the flower appear?” she asked him.

“It was only in my pocket.”

“I did not see you take it from your pocket. It was not in your hand, and then it was.”

“Ah. You are good at noticing things. I admire that,” he told her, with a twinkle in his friendly eyes. “I can move quickly if I must.”

“But you did not move at all!”

“I did. Very quickly. And so shall you, when I have trained you.”

Maud smiled when she heard that. She had understood when she met him that he intended to give her an education. She suspected it would be a far more interesting education than the one her parents had been planning, which laid a heavy emphasis on needlework and musical instruments.

They walked a while quietly, with Maud feeling that it was a very pleasant silence.

“I hope life with you does suit me,” she said after some time.

When she met their traveling companion, however, her good feelings ended. She had managed to forget, mostly, about the man in the tavern. Now he was standing right next to her. He was being introduced to her as a companion and teacher. The man’s cruel eyes looked her over. Then he nodded to the older man, but he did not say a word of greeting to Maud.

Maud felt a moment of panic—did he recognize her from the front of the inn, when she’d ignored his order to bring him water? Did he recognize her from the back alley? But no, even if he had seen her then, she’d been dirty, in old clothing, and she didn’t think this man could recognize children individually. One child, to him, was probably very like the next.

“We shall be taking good care of this Young,” the old man said to the other man, in his steady voice.

The other man made only a grunt for response as he lifted a bag over his shoulder, and the three of them continued walking along the road.

Maud’s hand slipped into the old man’s hand, and she was comforted a bit when he squeezed it tightly. There had been three of them before, she understood. The old man, the middle man, and the young man she had seen in the inn. Now they were calling her “the Young.” She was replacing that young man, who in turn had replaced someone else.

As they continued on, she did not dare look at the middle man. If what he’d said in the inn were true, there had been several youngsters like herself, all of whom were now dead. She thought suddenly of running away, back to her home, but that might make the man suspicious and cause him to come after her. And besides, she didn’t want to leave the old man.

Perhaps sensing her change in mood, the old man leaned close to her and began to speak again.

“Now, child, if you are to stay with us, you must know that we stand apart from humanity. Why?” He tapped the side of his head. “So our heads are clear to judge. Tyrants and evildoers beware.”

These were the same words she had heard from the young man in the inn. Maud stole a quick look at the other man, but his face showed no sign of listening to their conversation.

“In the beginning,” the old man said to her, a smile playing across his lips, “there was the hum of the universe …”