Brother Cadfael 06: A Virgin In The Ice

with you, Brother Cadfael." He tasted the name delicately if inaccurately, finding it strange on his tongue. He laughed, very softly, surrendering his hand to be led half-blind wherever his guide wished. Thus hand in hand they went out by the cloister, and threaded the maze to the infirmary door.
    In the inner room Brother Elyas lay monumentally asleep, long, splendid and calm, stretched on his back, with lean hands easy on his breast, and face serene and handsome. A tomb-figure carved to flatter and ennoble the dead man beneath, but this man lived and breathed evenly, and the large, rounded lids over his sleeping eyes were placid as a child's. Brother Elyas gathered within him the grace that healed body and mind, and made no overweening claim on a guilt beyond his due.
    No need to agonize any more over Brother Elyas. Cadfael closed the door on him, and sat down in the dim anteroom with his guest. They had, perhaps, as much as two hours before midnight and Matins.
    The small room, bare and stony and lit by only one candle, had a secret intimacy about it at this late hour. They were quiet together, the young man and the elder, eyeing each other with open and amiable curiosity. Long silences did not disturb them, and when they spoke their voices were low, reflective and at peace. They might have known each other life long. Life long? The one of them could surely be no more than five or six and twenty, and a stranger from a strange land.
    "You may have a hazardous journey yet," said Cadfael. "In your shoes I would leave the highways after Leominster, and avoid Hereford." He grew enthusiastic, and went into some detail about the route to be preferred, even drawing a plan of the ways as he remembered them, with a charcoal stick on the stones of the floor. The boy leaned and peered, all willing attention, and looked up into Cadfael's face at close quarters with a mettlesome lift of the head and a swift, brilliant smile. Everything about him was stirring and strange, and yet from time to time Cadfael caught his breath as at a fleeting glimpse of something familiar, but so long past that the illusion was gone before he could grasp it, and search back in his memory for the place and the time where it belonged.
    "All this you are doing in pure goodwill," said Olivier, his smile at once challenging and amused, "and you know nothing of me! How can you be sure I am fit to be trusted with this errand, and take no advantage for my lord and my empress?"
    "Ah, but I do know something of you, more than you may think. I know that you are called Olivier de Bretagne, and that you came with Laurence d'Angers from Tripoli. I know that you have been in his service six years, and are his most trusted squire. I know that you were born in Syria, of a Syrian mother and a Frankish knight, and that you made your way to Jerusalem to join your father's people and your father's faith." And I know more, he thought, recalling the girl's rapt face and devout voice as she praised her paladin. I know that Ermina Hugonin, who is well worth winning, has set her heart on you, and will not easily give up, and by that amber stare of yours, and the blood mounting to your brow, I know that you have set your heart on her, and that you will not undervalue your own worth by comparison with her, or let any other make it a barrier between you, no matter in what obscure way you came into this world. Between the two of you, it would be a bold uncle who would stand in your way.
    "She does indeed trust you!" said Olivier, intent and solemn.
    "So she may, and so may you. You are here on an honourable quest, and have done well in it. I am for you, and for them, sister and brother both. I have seen their mettle and yours."
    "But for all that," owned Olivier, relaxing into a rueful smile, "she has somewhat deceived you and herself. For her every Frankish soldier of the Crusade could be nothing less than a noble knight. And the most of them were none, but runaway younger sons, romantic boys from the byre and the field, rogues one leap ahead of the officers for theft or highway robbery or breaking open some church almsbox. No worse than most other men, but no better. Not even every lord with a horse and a lance was another Godfrey of Bouillon or Guimar de Massard. And my father was no knight, but a simple man-at-arms of Robert of Normandy's forces. And my mother was a poor widow who had a booth in the market of Antioch. And I am their bastard, got between faiths between