Brother Cadfael 19: The Holy Thief

not in the cause of the empress and her son."
    "In the cause of sanity," said the earl flatly, and studied Hugh with alert and critical interest, and smiled. "You have felt it, too. This has become a war which cannot be won or lost. Victory and defeat have become alike impossible. Unfortunately it may take several years yet before most men begin to understand. We who are trying to ride two horses know it already."
    "If there is no winning and no losing," said Hugh, "there has to be another way. No land can continue for ever in a chaotic stalemate between two exhausted forces, without governance, while two groups of bewildered old men squat on their meagre gains and stare helplessly at each other, unable to lift a hand for the coup de grace."
    Robert Bossu contemplated that summing up and his own fine finger-ends with a considering gravity, and then looked up sharply, his eyes, which had sparks of burning purple in their blackness, meeting Hugh's unmoving stare with appreciative attention. "I like your diagnosis. It has gone on too long, and it will go on some years yet, make no mistake. But there is no ending that way, except by the death of all the old men, and not from wounds, from stagnation and old age and disgust. I would rather not wait to make one of them."
    "Nor I!" said Hugh heartily. "And therefore," he asked, with an eyebrow cocked expectantly to meet the bright imperial stare, "what does a sane man do while he's enduring such waiting as he can endure?"
    "Tills his own ground, shepherds his own flock, mends his own fences, and sharpens his own sword," said Robert Bossu.
    "Collects his own revenues?" suggested Hugh. "And pays his own dues?"
    "Both. To the last penny. And keeps, Hugh... keeps his own counsel. Even while terms like traitor and turncoat are being bandied about like arrows finding random marks. You will know better. I loved Stephen. I still do. But I do not love this ruinous nothing he and his cousin have made between them."
    The afternoon was drawing on towards the first hint of dusk. Soon it would be time for the Vesper bell. Hugh drained his cup and set it down on the board. "Well, I had better be about shepherding my own flock, if I can count the abbot's two prisoners as any charge of mine. This is still a murder we have on our hands. And you, my lord? I take it you will be away now to your own country? These are no times to turn one's back for longer than a few days."
    "I'm laoth to go without knowing the ending," the earl admitted, warming into slightly self-deprecating laughter. "I know murder is no jest, but these two prisoners of yours... Can you believe either of them capable of killing? Oh, I know there's no reading in the face what the mind can conceive, you handle them as you best can. As for me, yes, in a day or so I must make ready and take my leave. I am glad," he said, rising as Hugh rose, "that I have got to know you. Oh, and I have made other gains, for R� and his servants will be coming with me. There's room in my household for so good a poet and maker of songs. My luck, that I happened on him before he made off to the north, to Chester. His luck, too, for he'd have wasted his eloquence there. Ranulf has things on his mind graver than music, even if he has a note of music in him, which I doubt."
    Hugh took his leave, and was not pressed to remain, though the earl came a few formal steps towards the hall door with him. He had said what no doubt he was choosing to say to all such men holding authority, however limited, once he had measured them and liked and respected what he found. He had seed to sow, and was selecting the ground where it might root and flourish. When Hugh had reached the top of the steps the voice behind him said with mild but impressive emphasis: "Hugh! Bear it in mind!"
    Hugh and Cadfael came together from Tutilo's cell, and refuged in the herb-garden in the twilight after Vespers, to consider what little they had got from him; and it was little enough, but sturdily consistent with what he had affirmed from the beginning. The boy was puffy-eyed and drunken with sleep, and if he felt any great anxiety about his fate he was too dulled still to be capable of appreciating the many pitfalls that lay in wait for him every way. Not a word of Daalny; for her he was fiercely on guard. He sat on his narrow pallet languidly composed, close to resignation, answered questions without any suspect pauses, and listened with dropped jaw and startled eyes when Cadfael