The Inquisitor's Tale: Chapters 6–10

“The Christians speak of fiends in these forests. A race of men, older even than we, who steal infants and raise them as slaves, and leave their own wretched offspring in the infant’s place. It could be a peasant’s tale, but one never knows these days…”

"But that's not a miracle!" I say. "Smart, yes. Empathic, absolutely. But the other children performed miracles. At least, so you all claim."

Jacob had learned all the plants at a very young age. He seemed to have an affinity for plants.

They think he’s a brigand because they think he’s wearing a mask.

“Go pick up the wheel and put it on the axle. And don't go rushing down this road. It’s too rutted and rocky to hurry down with a laden cart.’’

The men clutch the sweaty handles of their weapons and watch William warily.

So the boy—Jacob—creeps around back, where he finds the pig’s trough. In the trough, among the slop and the stale beer, there’s an old carrot and a withered apple.

“Kill the thief,” Georges says.
Nobody contradicts him.

He dusts off his habit and groggily makes his way to the door of the stable.

He dusts off his habit and groggily makes his way to the door of the stable.

He catches a fleeting glimpse of something—something enormous and dark—flying across the yard of the inn.

She blinks, and suddenly the bald knight is sprawling through the dust.

“She is holy,” Jeanne said, and the sharpness of her voice cut through William’s teasing like a scythe through summer hay.

At dawn, a frog began croaking belligerently from the streambed.

William had rolled onto his stomach and stretched out his arm so it hung limply over Gwenforte’s white flank.

She approached the cacophonous sleeper, now on his side.

More in self-defense than out of any decision to wake up, William pulled himself to his feet—like a tree falling in reverse—and stretched his long arms over his head. Jacob and Jeanne marveled at him, unfurled to his full length.

“Well, my good Christian,” Jacob replied, eliciting a smirk from Jeanne, “it was because of a fire.”

Jeanne’s rustic peasant accent suited tale-telling well.

“So we’re all going to Saint-Denis?” Jacob said.
“We’re all going to Saint-Denis,” Jeanne conceded.

Their accents were unique. Jacob’s was inflected with the rhythms of the Hebrew Bible and the beit midrash where the men of his village studied and argued.

William, on the other hand, spoke the high French of the monastery, which was infused with Latin.

He was about to snap at her—when he saw where she was pointing. He followed the line of her finger, past the mottled, mossy tree trunks.

The innkeeper's jowly face is turning as red as the boy's hair.

And then, beside her, I see the biggest bloke I ever saw. And browner than a serf in summer, I swear it.

But the market—that’s an intoxicating place, isn’t it?

You got every maker and craftsman from every little town nearby, settin’ out their blankets, settin’ out their wares.

Jacob is struggling to keep up, trying to duck and weave past all the peasants and peddlers in the road.

I sawed him mash some crockery to shards.

Jeanne is swimming, or trying to swim. But she don’t know how. Who does? Mostly she’s just flailing and shouting.

I had a friend hang at the gallows once. Weren’t pretty, I can tell you that.

Anyway, I say I’ll sing for my supper. The weasel don’t want to hear it, but the other knights do. So I sing a bawdy song. One of the good ones, where all the bad words rhyme.

Jacob—real carefully this time, and his voice all raspy now—says, “I do believe in God.”

Marmeluc’s face is lit from below by the smoldering campfire.

When the cart was abreast of us, we leapt out and cried, ‘Jowls to the ground!’ like real French brigands.

The next morning, everyone’s a bit groggy, a bit surly, as men’ll be of a morning.

The innkeeper pushes himself to his feet. "Yeah, that's about as far as my hospitality extends, Renard. Everybody check your purses. Renard, you want to stay, you can sleep in the stables."

He peers down from tiny round eyes over a long equine nose.

His cheeks are so hollowed and pitted, he looks like he subsists entirely on turnips.

I've traveled from the Hebrides, down the coast of England, across the Channel, to the Low Countries, and then followed a peripatetic path to this very place.