#medievalry

[hollers-and-holmes]

Here is Part 2!

Part one is over here.

Tarcil

Tomorrow in the triumph of the hunt they would feast, but tonight there were orders of venery to be made in the kennels and stables beneath Glorfindel's watchful eye. The King joined the Master to ascend to the house and to mulled wine and fireside seats and unhurried conversation, picked up no doubt to the beat where they had left off a year before.

But down below was the muster, and in the midst of it, a boy.

"Stay here," said Ronyondur with curtness, steering Tarcil to stand near a great oaken grainbin set into the wall, "and make no nuisance of yourself." Together with Tiuco he went out through the far door to feed and bed the hounds.

For a few minutes Tarcil did his best to blend in with the stable wall, picturing a brown moth with bepatterned wings so unmoving against the wood it disappears. Feeling conspicuous still, as an Imladhrim soldier passed and nodded to him, he pressed into the nook between the wall and the grainbox and slid down to sit crosslegged on the floor.

Elves. Ever busy, ever laughing. The Lord Glorfindel among them like a… like a lantern, the boy supposed. Lighting up the corner of your eye even when you were not looking right at him. He did not shout but still you never did not hear him as he gave his assembling instructions to the throng. He would lead the hunt tomorrow, great-grandfather had said.

The boy's first hunt, or at least his first at hound. Rabbits and gamehens upon the Pelennor counted but a little, though still those little victories had gladdened his heart. They would have broken his mother's; she was a gentle soul and would eat no meat, for the thought of harvesting it sickened her.

Even had it not, she was riddled with fear for him. She had borne his father a firstborn, this he knew, and somehow that elder son had died a half-score years before he had come along, though none would tell Tarcil the story. He learned quickly not to ask, for the wound it opened in her spirit again.

She had not wished for him to come. Not on this strange year when the King would allow no party with him. But his great-grandfather had insisted, and to Tarcil's surprise his father had deigned to please the old man instead of his wife.

It had been a good three weeks.

But now great-grandfather was gone with the Master and Ronyondur had left him here among these fair and unfamiliar faces and he felt he should be helping, but for Ronyondur's command to make no nuisance of himself. There were no other boys here that he had seen; he did not know what might be expected of him and could not tell by watching.

He was not as unobtrusive as he thought, for the next passer-by did not pass by, but sank down beside him upon the floor and offered in one lean Elven hand a tiny tart, adorned o'er the top with a minuscule, sugared snowflake.

Tarcil glanced up. For a breath he did not know his new companion, but then recognition swept him. Though gone were the fine-wrought coronet and gleaming, sunlicked mail and silver-broidered livery. Dark hair now braided back instead of fiercely loosed about his face. Linen shirt of holly-red and leather gambeson and tall boots well-worn in the creases.

"Better take it, and make it disappear," said this person, jiggling the tart. "It was not honestly come by."

Tarcil took it, and disappear it did, as he had not been able to. It tasted of honey and blackberries and summer sunlight, if one could taste such a thing. He used his fingertip to dab a dust of crumbs up from his breechleg, while the knight beside him produced a scroll of leather and rolled it out upon the floor. Inside were files and whetstones and a sharpening dowel arrayed in their line. The boy saw then his companion had brought with him a spear, laid now in its great length along the floorboards, its head a lovely thing, silver-etched and broad in the leaf. The pole was lashed in twain at the waist by a cross-haft as long as the boy's arm. His companion hefted the thing by the neck and swung it out into the aisle so it would lay the other way to sharpen. Glorfindel passing by had to skip over the swinging haft or be struck across the shins.

"Ware," he growled, and gave the seated knight a prod in the haunch with the toe of his boot.

The Master's son, unfazed, flicked up a final tart. The Lord Glorfindel whipped it from the air and devoured it in one bite and continued on his errand.

The spear lay now across Tarcil's lap as well, and his hand of its own accord curled around the haft. Upon closer inspection the wood was graven as well, portrayals of venery in miniature, hawks and hounds and horses at the chase, and all among them, boars. Boars, bristle-backed and bellowing, pawing at the snow, backed into the hollows, gouging at the alaunts, tusked and pin-eyed and mighty in the girth. Boars so lifelike he half-expected them to shake their heads at his approaching fingertip. Boars in illustration as tall at the shoulder as a man.

"Are they that large, truly?" the boy asked in a quiet voice, not looking up.

But the answer was slow in coming, and at last he glanced to find grey eyes slanted to him. They were very bright and very keen. They seemed to weigh him for a moment.

At last the rejoining query came, "If they are, what would you do?"

Tarcil pondered, but not for long. "I hope I would do my duty," he answered, and rubbed his knuckle against the groove of a carven holly leaf.

The Master's son accepted this with a single nod and began to whet the spearhead, first moistening the stone with a quick licked thumb. Tarcil had seen Ronyondur spit straight upon his, but he could not envision this warrior resorting to such a thing.

"Have you…" Tarcil began, but faded off. He was not to make a nuisance of himself, after all.

"Never one so great as this," came the answer nonetheless, a finger reaching over to tap a carven pig as it speared up a wailing, writhing hound on its great tusks. "My first little more than a shoat, a scorestone dressed. And still…" the Elven knight leaned in a little closer. "…I had to go and be ill in the bushes, after, I was so full in the belly with nerves."

The boy gaped at this admission.

The whetting began again. "Your grandfather would remember."

He remembered most things.

They did not speak for a while, as the edges of the spearhead grew white and keen. Tarcil fitted his hand around the juncture of the crosshaft , like a spar athwart a mast. "I have not seen a spear like this," he admitted. "What is the crosspiece for?"

"To halt the charge," came the mild answer. "But one must still stand fast." His companion raised the spearhead to the light to peer at, and then pushed it backwards by the throat until the blade lay heavy upon Tarcil's knee. "Test the edge, and tell me: will it serve?"

He did, with a scrape of his thumb across, not along like a baby to slice himself. One of the first things a boy learned, how to gauge a blade-edge. Even done correctly, the thing nicked up a flap of thumbprint.

"It will serve," said Tarcil.

"Good. With luck we will make use of it, tomorrow."

Several years ago I wrote a midwintery/Christmas gift story for my dear Hollers, and posted it over on ff.net, may it rest in peace. Because it’s looking like I’m going to get approximately zilchteen Christmas gift fics written this year, I’m gonna throw that thing up here for festivity’s/posterity’s sake as I repost it to the Archive. It’s about boar hunting, because Sword in the Stone is my favorite book, doncha know. When it’s not Peace Like a River.