TWENTY
After months had passed in the physic’s employ with only the sparest contact with anyone besides the old man and Marguerite, the night came for Adair’s first visit to the castle. Not that Adair wanted to go to the stronghold of a Romanian nobleman. He had nothing but hatred for the devils who raided Magyar villages, destroyed their homes, and captured their land. He couldn’t easily dismiss his curiosity, however; Adair had never been in the abode of a rich man, never been inside castle walls. He’d only worked the fields. He figured he would be able to bear it if he pretended the owner of the castle was Magyar, not Romanian. Then he could marvel at the grand rooms and finery all the same.
His job that night was to carry a huge jar of a potion they had worked on the previous evening. As usual, the potion’s purpose was kept secret from him. Adair waited by the door as the physic fussed over his appearance, finally choosing to dress in a fine tunic embroidered with gold threads and studded with colored cabochons, signifying that it was a special occasion. The physic rode his charger and Adair trudged behind, lugging the urn on his back like an old grandmother who could no longer walk upright. The drawbridge over the moat was lowered for them, and they were escorted into the great hall by a squad of the count’s soldiers. Guards lined the walls.
A feast was in progress in the great hall. The physic joined the count at the head table and Adair squatted in the back of the room against the wall, still hugging the jar. He recognized some of the emblems on the shields decorating the walls; they were from the estates where he’d worked. The count’s dialect sounded familiar, but Adair couldn’t understand what they were talking about because the conversation was peppered with Romanian. Even a simple boy like Adair understood what this combination of facts meant: this count was originally a Magyar, but he had allied himself with the Romanian oppressors to save his own skin and preserve his fortune. That had to be why the villagers shunned him: they figured Adair was a Romanian sympathizer as well.
He’d just stumbled on this realization when the old man summoned him over with the urn. Dismissed with a wave of the physic’s hand, Adair went back to his place at the wall. The physic removed the oiled cloth cover so the count could inspect the contents. The nobleman closed his eyes and inhaled deeply, as though the foul- smelling stuff was as sweet as a field of wildflowers. The count’s courtiers laughed with anticipation, as though they knew something exciting was about to happen. Adair was holding his breath at the prospect of learning the purpose of at least one of the physic’s mystical potions, when the old man’s sharp gaze fell on him.
“This is not the place for the boy, I think,” he said, motioning to a guard. “Perhaps you can find something better to occupy his time, teach him a thing or two about soldiering. He may have to help defend this castle one day, or at the very least, save my old and worthless head.” Adair was led away amid mocking laughter from the onlookers, and taken to a courtyard where a handful of guards lazed about. These were not knights or even professional soldiers, just simple guards, though far more experienced with a sword or a spear than Adair. Under the guise of “training,” they took brutal pleasure in abusing Adair for two hours as he tried to defend himself with these unfamiliar weapons. By the time he was allowed back into the great hall, his arms ached from swinging a dull broadsword, the heaviest one the guards could find, and he was nicked and bruised.
The scene in the great hall was not what he’d expected. The count and his vassals seemed to be merely intoxicated, lolling in their seats or fallen to the floor, eyes closed, childish smiles on their faces, ropy muscles gone slack. They paid little notice as the physic made his farewells, leading Adair through the courtyard. In the gray predawn, they picked their way over the drawbridge and through the forest. Adair trudged behind the old man’s horse, and exhausted as he was, was grateful not to be carrying the urn.
The mystery of the physic’s ways slowly began to coalesce in Adair’s mind. On one hand, Adair was grateful for the warm, dry place to sleep and not to be working himself to daily exhaustion and an early grave as a field hand. Unlike his family, he had three meals a day, nearly all he could eat: stew, eggs, the occasional strip of roasted meat. He had sexual companionship, so he would not go insane with unsatisfied desire. On the other hand, Adair could not help but see it as a deal with the devil, even if it had been made against his will: there was a price to pay for a life of relative ease, and he sensed he would be given the bill eventually.
He received the first hint of the payment due one evening, when the physic took Adair and Marguerite to the woods. They walked for a long time, and since they were engaged in nothing more than putting one foot in front of the other, Adair saw the opportunity to ask a few questions of the old man.
“May I ask, master, why it is that you do all your work at night?” he asked, careful to sound as timid and guileless as possible.
At first the old man harrumphed, as though he wouldn’t dignify the question with an answer. But after a few moments-for who doesn’t like to talk about himself, no matter how trivial the questions-he cleared his throat to answer. “It is a habit, I suppose… It is the sort of work best done away from the prying eyes of others.” The physic breathed heavily as they went up a slight incline, and it wasn’t until they reached a level path that he continued. “The fact of the matter is, Adair, that this work is best done at night, for there is a power in the darkness, you know. It is from the darkness that these potions draw their strength.” He said this so matter-of-factly that Adair felt it would only reveal his ignorance to ask the old man to explain, and so he resumed his silence.
Eventually, they came to a place so wild and overgrown that it looked as if it had never been seen by human eyes. Around the roots of the poplars and larches was a proliferation of a strange plant, the broad and fan-shaped leaves standing on willowy stems high above the ground cover, waving to the trio of visitors.
The physic motioned for Marguerite to follow him. He led her to one of the plants, wrapped her hands around it, and then signaled for her to wait. Then he walked away from her, calling Adair to come with him. They walked until the maidservant had almost disappeared in the dimness, her white smock glowing in the moonlight.
“Cover your ears and be sharp about it, or you will be the worse for it,” he instructed Adair. Then he pantomimed for Marguerite to pull, which she did, throwing all her weight into one jerking movement. Despite having his hands clasped tight over his ears, Adair swore he heard a muffled noise erupt from the plant as it was ripped from the ground. Adair looked at the physic and lowered his hands, feeling conspicuous.
Marguerite trotted up like a dog following its master, carrying the plant in her hands. The physic took it from her, brushing away the dirt clinging to the hair roots. “Do you know what this is?” he asked Adair as he inspected the thick, five-pointed knob, bigger than the span of a man’s hand. “This is a mandrake root. See how it’s shaped like a man? Here are the arms, the legs, the head. Did you hear it scream just now, as it was pulled from the ground? The sound will kill any man who hears it.” The physic shook the root at Adair. It did look like a stubby, misshapen man. “This is what you need to do to gather more mandrake root-remember this well when I send you out for more. Some physics use a pure black dog to pull up the root, but the dog will die when he hears the scream, like any man. We don’t have to bother with killing dogs since we have Marguerite, do we?”
Adair didn’t like that the physic had included him in his comment about Marguerite. He wondered, ashamed, if the old man knew about their trysts and condoned Adair’s casual treatment of her. Indeed, the physic might liken it to his own brusque treatment of the housekeeper, using her like an ox to pull a stump from a field, and, though she was deaf and dumb, he clearly had so little regard for human life that it didn’t matter to him if she lived or died by pulling out the root. Of course, it was possible that the mandrake’s shriek wouldn’t really kill her even if she had been able to hear it, and that the old man had only told Adair the story to frighten him. But Adair filed the tidbit of knowledge about the mandrake away in his memory, with the other morsels of wisdom the physic had shared with him, for use another day.
What little enjoyment Adair took from his new life began to fade as he grew increasingly unhappy with his solitary routine. Boredom gave way to curiosity. He made a thorough inspection of the bottles and jars in the physic’s study, then took inventory of the wider room, until he knew every inch of the upper floor of the keep. He had enough common sense not to venture into the cellar.
Without asking the physic’s permission, Adair started taking the horse on afternoon rides into the countryside. He reasoned that it was good for the horse to be exercised between the physic’s infrequent rides. But sometimes, when he’d put many miles between him and the keep, a voice would tempt him to flee, to keep riding and never return. After all, how would that old man find Adair without a horse to carry him? However, Adair also knew that
