LITMIR.BIZ

       TWO

      By the following afternoon, with less than an hour remaining between him and the test he must undergo, Hugh de Payens was beginning to doubt that he knew anything at all, more than half convinced that he must be suffering some kind of dementia, since his mind seemed to him to be no longer the one he had grown up with. Faced with what seemed like an interminable wait before he was hauled in to face his inquisitors, he had attempted to distract himself by reviewing the answers to the questions he would be asked, but to his horror he was unable to recall a single word of what he had fought so hard, and for so long, to learn. Not only was he unable to remember any of the responses, he was unable even to recall the basic catechism of questions that his father and grandfather had been hurling at him for months. Frustrated and suddenly close to panic, he imagined he could feel his entire skull, immense and empty, vaulted and grotesquely domed between his ears, too large and hollow, like an empty, echoing cavern. He wanted to weep, and a small voice inside him was telling him insistently to run away, but he did neither. He simply sat where he was, staring straight ahead and trying to empty his mind of everything that occupied it, as he waited to be summoned to the Gathering.

      He became aware that he was no longer alone and raised his eyes to see Payn Montdidier, one of his closest friends and a cousin on his mother’s side, smiling down at him, his amber eyes gentle and filled with humor. “Ready?” he asked, and Hugh stood up, blinking in mild disbelief.

      “Crusty! I didn’t expect to see you here! You can have no idea how glad it makes me, my friend—a familiar face. I have been dying here, by inches, of anticipation, mixed with terror.”

      Montdidier laughed. “I’ve come to know that mixture well since yesterday, so perhaps we may help each other.”

      Hugh frowned. “I don’t follow. What d’you mean, since yesterday?”

      “Anticipation and terror. It hit me for the first time yesterday, when I saw your sister’s new friend. Who is she?”

      Hugh’s eyes went wide with surprise. “You mean Margaret? Louise’s friend from England?”

      “From England?”

      “Aye, the tall, dark-haired girl.”

      “Wearing a bright yellow gown?”

      “She was wearing yellow when I saw her yesterday, with her father and Louise. Is that the lady you mean?” He saw Montdidier’s wide-eyed nod, and grinned. “She’s the Lady Margaret St. Clair, daughter of my godfather, Sir Stephen. What nonsense are you spouting about anticipation and terror?”

      Montdidier’s face had fallen at the mention of St. Clair’s name, and now he shook his head. “Anticipation of meeting her, and terror that she might ignore me … And if she’s the daughter of Sir William St. Clair, she will ignore me, most undoubtedly.”

      For the first time in days, Hugh had completely forgotten about the ordeal that lay ahead of him, captivated by the look on his friend’s face and the emotions that were there to be read by anyone who cared to look. He was about to laugh, then realized that his friend might take his wonderment as ridicule and be hurt. “Crusty, are you smitten? And after seeing the lady only once? I have known Margaret for years. She is no beauty, but—”

      “She has beauty enow for me, Hugh. Those eyebrows, that forehead, and that long neck. I have to meet her.”

      Now Hugh laughed aloud. “Well, that’s easily arranged. You shall meet her tomorrow, and I will not permit her to ignore you … not that she would be tempted for a moment to do such a thing. And I won’t even tell Louise that you asked me to present you to her.” Then his face grew somber again. “But in the meantime, there’s tonight. Will I live through that?”

      Montdidier grinned his old grin again. “By God, if my meeting Lady Margaret St. Clair depends upon that, then I’ll fight to the death for you myself. But we are expected, and I have kept you standing here talking into tardiness. Shall we go?”

      Hugh nodded, swallowed hard, and followed his friend. Payn Montdidier was known as Crusty to all his friends for two very fine reasons: Crusty was a word applied to bread, and the local word for bread, pai-yin, sounded very much like Payn, which, in its turn, was almost exactly similar in sound to Hugh’s last name, de Payens. That similarity of sound had often led to much confusion before some wag started calling the young man Crusty several years earlier. The name had been amusing, and had stuck, and the confusion had been annulled.

      The public functions at the Gathering were always held in the flagstone-floored hall directly beneath the main reception floor, at the foot of the castle’s great spiral staircase, and as Crusty led him into the assembly, Hugh was surprised to see the size of the crowd. There must have been two hundred men in the vast room, perhaps more, not counting the army of servants and scullions who were moving around everywhere, and none of them paid the newcomers the slightest attention as Hugh followed Payn the length of the hall, to a table set for twelve that had been laid lengthwise in front of and abutting the very center of the head table. The table was already filled, but for a pair of vacant, high-backed chairs that sat empty, and as he approached, Hugh paid close attention to who would be sitting with them. There were two St. Clair brothers among them, Robert and Vincent, and that made him feel better immediately, although he could not have explained why. Robert, the elder of the two, was twenty-three, five full years older than Hugh, and yet he was his favorite among all the St. Clair brothers, the senior of four sons, the youngest of whom, Stephen, was fifteen, the same age as Hugh’s sister, Louise. Vincent, sitting beside his elder brother and directly across from Hugh, was two years junior to Robert, and the remaining brother, William, named after the late king of England, was barely seventeen, still too young to attend the Gathering.

      Hugh had been wondering for some time now whether Robert St. Clair might be one of the brotherhood, and as Sir Stephen’s firstborn son, it had seemed likely to Hugh, in his ignorance, that he would be, but Robert’s own father had said the night before that being firstborn did not entail membership in the fraternity, and so now Hugh bit his tongue, stifling his curiosity. Another of Hugh’s friends was at the table, a nineteen-year-old cousin of some description. Hugh had never been able to come to an understanding of the varying degrees of kinship and consanguinity among the Friendly Families, as their clans were known, but Godfrey St. Omer and Hugh had been born less than a year apart and had been bosom companions since early childhood, when Hugh, incapable of pronouncing Godfrey’s name, had called him Goff and the name had stuck. Now they did not even need to speak. Godfrey, lounging in his chair and listening to something his nearest neighbor was saying, merely smiled at Hugh’s approach and closed one eye lazily in a long, welcoming wink.

      The dinner passed quickly, and Hugh remembered little of it, even though it was the first Gathering dinner in which he had ever participated and, in its own way, the most important assembly he had ever attended. He met and spoke with all the other people at his table, most of whom were familiar to him by sight, and all of whose names he knew, although there were four of them, visitors from other regions, whom he had never actually seen before.

      The meal seemed to end before it had time to get started, and as soon as the tables were cleared off, the entertainment began, with musicians, bards, jugglers, mummers, and dancers assembled from the great duchies of Anjou, Aquitaine, and Burgundy, and even a family of tumblers from the court of the King of France. The entertainers, however, were present only to provide an amusing and diverting background to the other activities that were

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