The Scottish Prisoner

The shock of it waned quickly, though, and soon enough the icy ball in his wame began to thaw under the gentle flame of the whiskey. There were immediate things to be dealt with; grief must be put away.

Abbot Michael was talking of neutral things: the weather (unusually good and a blessing for the lambs), the state of the chapel roof (holes so big it looked as though a pig had walked across the roof, and a full-grown pig, too), the day (so fortunate that it was Thursday and not Friday, as there would be meat for di

The abbot saw the moment when Jamie felt once more in command of himself and sat back a little, inviting him by posture more than words to state his business.

“If I might ask a moment of your time, Father …” He drew the folded sheet of paper out of his bosom and handed it across. “I know ye’ve a reputation for learning and history, and I ken my uncle said ye’ve a rare collection of tales of the Auld Ones. I should value your opinion of this bit of verse.”

Abbot Michael’s brows were thick and white, with long hairs curling wildly in the ma

Jamie’s own eyes had been traveling round the room as Abbot Michael talked. It was an interesting place—any place where work was done interested him—and he stood up with a murmured excuse and went to the bookshelves, leaving the abbot to his close inspection of the poem.

The room was as big as the Duke of Pardloe’s library and had at least as many books, and yet the feeling of it was more akin to the small cluttered hole in which Pardloe clearly did his thinking.

You could tell from the books whether a library was meant for show or not. Books that were used had an open, interested feel to them, even if closed and neatly lined up on a shelf in strict order with their fellows. You felt as though the book took as much interest in you as you did in it and was willing to help when you reached for it.

The abbot’s books were even more overt. A dozen volumes—at least—lay open on the big table by the window, half of them lying on top of one another, all open, and leaves of scribbled notes sticking out of the pile, wavering—beckoning—in the draft from the window.

Jamie felt a strong desire to go across and see what the open books were, to go to the shelves and run his knuckles gently over the leather and wood and buckram of the bindings until a book should speak to him and come willingly into his hand.

It had been a long time since he’d owned a book.

The abbot had read through the sheet several times, with interest, then frowning in concentration, soft lips moving silently over the words. Now he sat back with a small, explosive ‘hmmph!’ and looked over it at Jamie.

“Well, now, there’s a piece of work,” he said. “Would you know who wrote it?”

“I would not, Father. It was given into my hand by an Englishman, but it wasn’t him who wrote it. He’d been sent it and wanted me to translate it for him. Which I did but poorly, I’m afraid, me not having the Irish close to my tongue.”

“Mmm-hmm, mmm-hmm.” The abbot’s childlike fingers tapped gently on the page, as though he might feel out the truth of the words.

“I’ve never seen a thing like it,” he said at last, sitting back in his little chair. “There are a deal of stories about the Wild Hunt—you’ll know that, maybe?”

“I ken ‘Tam Lin,’ though it’s nay a Highland tale. A man from the Lowlands told it, when we were in prison together.”

“Aye,” the abbot said thoughtfully. “Aye, that’s right; it’s from the Borders. And this wee sheet doesn’t mention anything from Tam Lin’s tale—save maybe for this reference to the teind. Ye’ll know that word, will you?”

Jamie hadn’t much noticed the word when doing his own translation, but at the speaking of it felt a prickling of the hairs across his shoulders, like a dog putting up its hackles at a scent.

“A tithe?” he said.

The abbot nodded, tapping his fingers now against his chin as he thought.

“A tithe to hell. Some versions of the tale have it, and some don’t. But the notion is that the faeries owe a tithe to hell, for their long lives—and that tithe is one of their number, given over once every seven years.”

His lips pursed, pink and clean in the neat frame of his beard.

“But I’ll swear this isn’t truly old, as you might think. I couldn’t be saying, now, without a good bit more thought, what it is exactly about this”—he rubbed his fingers softly over the lines—“that makes me think it was a man of this century who wrote it, but I do think that.”

Father Michael rose abruptly from his desk. “D’you find that you think better on your feet? I do, and a wearisome thing it is in the chapter meetings, the brothers going on at length and me wanting to leap from my seat and dance a jig in the middle of the room to clear my mind but pi

He gestured toward a glass case on one of the shelves, in which a gigantic beetle with a huge horny protuberance on its head was pi

“A grand specimen, Father,” he said, eyeing it warily.

“Do you like it? ’Twas sent me by a friend from Westphalia, a Jew. A most philosophical sort of Jew,” he assured Jamie, “a man of rare parts named Stern. Look, he sent me this, as well.”

He plucked a discolored chunk of what looked like ivory out of the clutter on the shelf and put it into Jamie’s hand. It proved to be an enormous tooth, long and curving to a blunt point.

“Recognize that, do you?”

“It’s the tooth of something verra large that eats flesh, Father,” Jamie said, smiling slightly. “But I couldna tell ye is it a lion or a bear, having not had the advantage of bein’ bitten by either one. Yet,” he added, with a discreet sign against evil. “But as I havena heard that there are lions in Germany …”

The abbot laughed.

“Most observant, mo mhic, a bear is just what it is. A cave bear. You’ll have heard of them?”

“I have not,” Jamie said obligingly, recognizing that this apparently idle chat was in fact the abbot’s means of walking up and down while turning over the question of the poem in his head. Besides, he was in no hurry to return to his companions. With luck, one of them would have killed the other before he came back, thus simplifying his life. At the moment, he didn’t much mind which one survived.

“These would be the massive things, sure. Stern gave me the measurements he’d taken of the thing’s skull, and I tell you, man, ’twould be as long as the distance from your elbow to the tip of your longest finger—and I do mean yours, and not mine,” he added, twinkling and flexing his wee arm in demonstration.

“All gone now, though, alas,” he said, and shook his head regretfully. “There are bears still in the German forests, the creatures, but nothing on the lines of the fellow that bore that tooth. Stern thinks it’s some thousands of years old.”