The Scribe(87)
The guard looked greedily at the cake. Then he snatched it from her and bit into it eagerly. He kept munching as if the young woman was transparent, and when he had finished, he ordered her to leave. Theresa was infuriated.
“Go away or you’ll get the end of my stick,” the guard snapped.
Theresa understood that he would never let her in. She decided to wait in the area until someone came to relieve him, but while she walked she remembered the little window that Alcuin had opened on their last visit. If no one was on guard, perhaps she could enter through it.
She circled the slaughterhouse looking for the window. At the rear, a dozen tiny buildings were packed together as if they had been smashed together. They were the old huts that once belonged to the butchers, but most of them now were occupied by carpentry, cooperage, and cart-repair workshops. She went into a half-collapsed building that looked like it might lead into the slaughterhouse. Upon entering, she was greeted by a one-eyed man wearing a leather apron, who turned out to be the owner of the smithy. Theresa asked him to sharpen her scramasax and feigned an interest in the objects lying about in the inner courtyard. She asked for permission to take a look and went deeper into the smithy with her eyes fixed on the timber walls covered in mallets, wedges, hammers, and cold chisels hanging from hooks like sausages. There was a smell of hot metal, which she welcomed given the cold. To one side, a great door connected the storeroom to an enclosure, which Theresa assumed belonged to the slaughterhouse. Suddenly she felt an arm on her shoulder.
“What is it?” she asked, surprised by the blacksmith.
“That there?” he said looking at the enclosure. “The pen where they kept the animals before they cut their throats,” he said with a laugh. “Here, your scramasax.”
He did not charge her for sharpening the blade, but told her to bring money the next time. When Theresa exited the smithy, she jumped with joy. She had found the window into the slaughterhouse, and best of all she could see that it was still open. Now she just had to find a way to distract the blacksmith.
She was about to bite into her last piece of oat cake when a young lad with an old man’s face planted himself directly in front of her. Aside from his bangs, the youngster was all skin and bones.
“Do you want a piece?” she offered, a plan formulating in her mind.
Luckily the boy was both hungry and gullible. He eagerly took the cake and said he was delighted to come to the rescue of a great lady traveling in disguise. He ran into the smithy, reappearing with the one-eyed blacksmith, and together they headed for the place where Theresa had said her carriage and footmen had come to a halt. When they had left, Theresa dashed into the courtyard, but as she arrived at the window she froze, second-guessing whether it was a good idea to enter the slaughterhouse. She wasn’t sure she was doing the right thing. The Swine might be unchained and decide to attack her, and it was even possible that the monk was wrong about his innocence and he really was a murderer. Yet, something inside her drove her to continue. She wanted to be useful, to find out who was behind it all. She looked back, fearing that the blacksmith might return at any moment.
Scanning her surroundings, her eyes fell on the tools hanging from the wall. She noticed a heavy hammer, which she ruled out taking after realizing she could not even unhook it, so she appropriated a light poker, which she tied to her belt. Then she stacked several planks of wood under the window and climbed to the top so she could just reach the window ledge.
At that moment she heard someone returning, so she lifted herself up, making the pile of timber under her feet collapse. She clambered up the wall, managed to pull the rest of her body through the window, and then plunged into the terrifying darkness of the slaughterhouse.
When she stood, she felt a pain in her bones as if she had slept on a bed of stone all night. She must have hurt her left elbow, for she could hardly move it. At that moment she heard someone handling the window she had just come through. When she looked up, she saw the blacksmith’s face appear, so she quickly curled up in the darkest corner and waited for fear he might see her. The man looked inside but couldn’t see anything in the pitch black. Raising his eyebrow, he suddenly left. Theresa supposed the one-eyed smith was returning to his workshop, but some banging told her he intended to seal the window. When the hammer blows stopped, there was a gloomy silence broken only by the thumping of her heart. She had never been anywhere so dark and imagined this was what it was like to be blind. Then she mentally kicked herself, thinking that not even the most brainless buffoon would have committed such a stupid act. She was alone, in the dark. Locked in a building with a half-wit who might be a murderer. How could she have been so foolish? She didn’t even have any tinder or a steel to light a torch.
She crouched there in silence, listening to her own heavy breathing that sounded labored, like an old woman with a scraping wheeze. She soon realized the blacksmith was long gone. She stood, sliding her hands along the wall in an attempt to feel something that would help orient herself. Again, she felt the greasiness of the walls and she suddenly retched. After several attempts she located the window, nailed shut with some boards.
She was a prisoner: trapped.
Gripping the poker, she brandished it in front of her as she walked on blindly, waving the implement in the air while the other arm felt for the shackles and chains that covered the walls of the corridor. As she advanced she was gradually able to make out the end of the corridor. First she saw just a shadow, then a squat figure in the half-light, huddled into a ball—and finally she could tell it was him. In the scant light filtering through the roof, The Swine lay curled up on the ground, hugging his deformed legs as if he were a great fetus.