Wyrm X

                                                                Cleopatra

Kate lay staring at the ceiling from her bed, chewing on a stray lock of her hair. It was a filthy habit, one her mother had tried to break her of for years, but there was a comfort in it, a sense of small, deniable destruction. Her childhood tutor, an aged Greek with a long gray beard and a name she had forgotten, had once shown her an illumination of a serpent devouring its own tail, swallowing and being swallowed. “That’s eternity,” he’d said one day when she’d asked him about heaven, stabbing a gnarled finger at the page. “Concern yourself with life.”

It had been a long night, her ladyship tossing and turning in a cold sweat, crying out for lord Thomas, and for Henry, their firstborn, who had died in his cradle no more than a month from the womb. The other girls were down in the kitchens now, filching hot rolls from (you’re a good girl, Katie) Mary Cutter’s scullions. Kate felt as though just the sight of food might make her vomit. She hadn’t eaten since the afternoon before. She wondered where that skinny pennon was, the one who’d seen her on the curtain wall that night, looking out into the blowing dark.

In the adjoining room, something shattered with a musical crash. “Oh!” cried Lady Elizabeth.

Kate rose from her bed and went to the door. She leaned her head against the cool oak for a moment, breathing deeply, and then pushed it open and stepped through. At once she put her slippered foot squarely on a shard of pottery and cut her heel wide open. She cried out, hopping clumsily away from the starburst of broken clayware where one of her ladyship’s urns had fallen from its little table. The dried flowers within lay strewn among the pieces. Kate sagged against the wall, lifting her foot awkwardly until she could take it in her hand and twist it to examine the wound. That was when she heard the sound, a hollow sort of clucking, and looked across the room at her ladyship’s great bed with its curtains thrown wide and morning sun streaming over the bedclothes and the raptor perched atop the shape beneath them.

It was the duke’s one-armed hen, Cleopatra. There was blood on her feathers and for a moment Kate thought that she’d been hurt, perhaps gashed or bitten by another raptor. Then she saw the finger protruding from the wyrm’s jaws. Slender. Delicate. The hen tossed her head back and swallowed it, gulping convulsively. She let out a trilling shriek as Kate began to back away. The raptor hopped down from the bed, furs slithering after her, and Kate saw what was left of the lady Elizabeth, and the blood soaking the feather mattress. Her ladyship’s Isabella, snout dark with gore, came slinking slow and silent from beneath the bed, bits of soft tissue hanging from her jaws.

“Oh,” the raptor chirped, its voice a perfect twin to the dead woman’s. “Oh, oh!”

“Help,” Kate whimpered. She felt numbly along the stones of the wall, searching for the door, not daring to take her eyes from the raptors she’d kissed and brushed and thrown scraps from the table so many times. “Ann. Joan. M-m-mother.”

Cleopatra parted her jaws and emitted a baby’s thin, mewling cry. Isabella echoed it. The sound of running footsteps. With a crash, Ann de Crecy burst through the far door, blood on the sleeves of her dress and spattered like freckles across her face. “Kate!” she screamed. “It’s all—”

Cleopatra struck her talons-first and bore her down back through the doorway. Out of sight, Ann’s skull struck the floor with a hollow thunk. She kicked one of her slippers free in her convulsions, her bare foot leaping like a landed fish as blood splashed the doorway and the tops of her pale toes. Kate fled, barely feeling the shard of fired clay forced deeper into her right foot with every step. Isabella screamed somewhere behind her as she tore through the room — Ann’s bed, empty, rumpled, kissing games among the furs —, snatching the poker from its stand beside the dark, dead fireplace on pure instinct and pelting out onto the landing, down the stairs, slipping now on slicks of her own blood. The click-click-click of Isabella’s dewclaws on the stones drew her attention back along the flight. The raptor skidded to a halt at the head of the stair. She gathered herself. She leapt, and all at once, as clear as sunlight through cut glass, Kate remembered a morning, years ago, when she’d watched from her window as her father drilled her brothers in the practice yard. “Swing to kill,” he’d bellowed at John, all of six and struggling to lift the wooden sword. “Swing to kill every time, for by God, you can bet the other man will.”

She swung the poker with all her might. Its hooked prong punched deep through Isabella’s skull and the momentum of her swing carried the raptor on to crash into the wall. The wyrm’s death throes tore the length of iron from Kate’s hands. She took a half-step backward and slid roughly down three steps, banging her heel and elbow and bruising her tailbone with enough force to knock the air out of her lungs as she came to rest just above the bottom landing. She stared out the open tower door into the courtyard, unable to catch her wind.

Before her was a vision of Hell. There was Hugh the armorer dragging himself across the paving stones inch by torturous inch as raptors shredded his back with claws and teeth, flaying him alive as quickly as a woman might hull peas. Two of them were fighting over one of his eyes while by the wreckage of the fullery one of lord Thomas’s big boar raptors had the corpse of a girl no older than six in its jaws and was shaking her like a pullet with a rat, spraying her blood over the ground and the wall of the stables. More were swarming over the huge carcass of the old kite, Icarus, which the castle guards had done a poor job burning in the yard a fortnight past, chasing rats and squabbling over what looked like the arm, head, and right breast of a washerwoman Kate knew by sight but not by name. Not far from the door Nurse lay curled in a pool of her own blood, pullets and butcher’s boys tearing at her exposed skin, winkling her eyes out of their sockets like snail meat.

“Kate,” whispered a frightened voice. “Help me, Kate.”

Kate turned. Joan Howard sat slumped in the little alcove by the door. She’d missed her in the shadows. Joan’s golden hair was loose. Her arms were folded tight around herself, the heavy sleeves of her gown nearly but not quite obscuring that its hem was soaked in blood. She seemed to look through Kate, her big blue eyes wide and fixed and staring.

“They came out of the kennels, Kate,” said Joan. Kate bent to pull the other woman to her feet, but when she took Joan’s hand she saw between her parted sleeves that her gown and stomach were laid open and her guts were coiled in her lap like fat, contented serpents. Joan let out a faint and weary sigh, her chin sagging to her chest. “I’m so afraid, Kate.”

Kate backed away. She felt she might go mad. A shriek from the direction of lady Elizabeth’s rooms drew her attention back to the head of the stair. Cleopatra stared down at her, blood dripping from her gore-soaked plumage. The raptor started down the steps. Kate turned and ran, not giving herself time to think before she sprinted out into the bloody nightmare waiting for her in the courtyard. Raptors looked up from their kills all around her. Their bright eyes were cold and curious. In a flash she saw the broken fence around the tricorne paddock, the ostri flocking frightened through the chaos, the fires spreading from the scullery to the great hall and the keep.

Where did they come from? she thought in wonder as she raced for the steps leading up to Pennon House and the aviary. She felt strangely weightless, each desperate stride imparting speed to the cotton fluff of her body until the ground seemed to blur beneath her feet and the world around her became not Hell or a waking nightmare but just an idle daydream, the kind of fantasy she’d entertained in her girlhood when lessons ran long or friends stung her pride or her mother beat her harder than usual for stealing from the kitchen. An old tricorne cow lumbered across the yard on the far side of the rookery, her back seething with raptors trying to bring her down. Beyond her the castle gates stood open. There were dead men strewn about by the gatehouse. More raptors tearing at their corpses. Lord Thomas had left perhaps thirty in his kennels; the rest must have come from the surrounding forests. Hundreds and hundreds of them, swarming along the ramparts where a few men at arms fought desperately, and fell, and died one by one.

Cleopatra was behind her. She caught a glimpse of the one-armed hen from the corner of her eye. Others were taking notice. It was perhaps thirty yards to the steps, but what would happen if she gained them? What would happen if she reached their summit? The doors of Pennon House would not save her. Across the yard, the old cow collapsed onto her side, huge trunklike legs pawing weakly at the ground as she struggled to rise again. A river of blood soaked the earth behind her. There were men fighting in the doorway of the great hall even as its roof caught fire, but it was too far, and there were raptors between it and her, and she would only die there instead of here at the base of the great stair. She spied Llewelyn the lame stableboy hiding in the wreckage of the fullery, his huge eyes pleading with her as they saw one another.

I can’t help you.

A shadow passed over her. She looked up, but there was only the blinding morning sun. Her injured foot twisted beneath her as she missed her step. She fell, cracking her head against the edge of the next stair. The world went white. When her vision returned, bubbling pink and black around the edges, it was to see Cleopatra bearing down on her. The one-armed raptor shrieked. Kate couldn’t breathe. She glimpsed sir Harold Greene atop the north wall with a clutch of men at arms, shields braced and spears darting through the gaps at raptors swarming up the switchback stair and from the guardhouse. A pair of archers loosed again and again into the mass of the pack.

Cleopatra reached the steps. In a single leap she was atop Kate, one dewclaw cutting deep into her breast, the other a dark, scything blur. Kate sagged back against the woodwork and rammed earth. The side of her face felt… loose, somehow. The collar of her dress was wet, and the air was colder than the chill alone could account for. Cleopatra looked down at her quizzically. The raptor chirped, her crest of feathers rising to stand on end as she flared the ruff of tawny quills around her neck, slaver dripping from her jaws to mingle with Kate’s blood.

I’m going to Hell.

Something huge and pale came thundering down the steps. The raptors encroaching on Kate scattered with screams of anger and warning as the kite Mordred caught Cleopatra in his massive bill and lifted her thrashing and shrieking bodily into the air. Blood poured down on Kate, who lay staring up at the kite’s shaggy chest, huge muscles moving like cables beneath plumage and skin, as Mordred’s beak snapped shut and Cleopatra’s lower half fell to the steps beside her, legs still kicking aimlessly. The kite braced himself in a wide stand, callused knuckles thumping stair and hillside, and let out a reverberating hiss, sweeping his head back and forth. Over his shoulder, a familiar face appeared.

“Give me your hand, you little fool,” said Margaret Pole, leaning down from the saddle. Kate thought of the small, curled red thing that had slid out of lady Elizabeth. She rose, shaking, and took Margaret’s hand. Shescrambled up the white kite’s tack. Her head ached. There was a bright, stabbing pain just below her ear, and when she turned she felt loose flesh shifting against her throat. She gripped Pole tight around the waist as Mordred wheeled about and began loping up the steps, leaving the courtyard behind. They plunged at a dead gallop over open ground. The aviary was burning. A dead kite lay smoldering before the flame-wreathed doors. Pennon House stood dark and silent. Mordred rose up on his haunches, vast wings beating, and the grown receded with dizzying speed. The cold wind tore at Kate. Tears streamed over her cheeks.

You’re a good girl, Katie.

She thought of her lady, who had loved her in her own strange way, as one might love a doll, or a favorite dessert. No one deserved to die like that. Alone. She thought of the red thing, and the letters she’d sent South, and of the Skeleton dead in her cage and all the other people who must have died because of what she, Kate Spitalfield, had said. She thought of her father, who had sold her for a minor post at court, and of her mother, who had kissed her hand the night before she left and said, “be safe, my love” and left her to dark dreams.

As they soared over the curtain wall a roar rose up all around them, a grating screech of rage and bloodlust that swept Kate’s thoughts away. She twisted in the saddle and saw on the hilltop a titanic wyrm all white and faded ochre, taller than a house and longer than two tricornes end to end. It stalked on muscled legs to where the dead kite smoked and pinned the carcass beneath one great claw to feed, tearing strips of half-raw meat from the other wyrm’s bones and tossing its head back to gulp them down. She had never seen anything like it, not even when her father took her and her brothers to the baiting pits in Ulfpen to watch a shrike kill French mastiffs by the dozen, seizing each dog in its jaws and shaking until its back broke, then discarding the pissing, whimpering remains in favor of its next victim. Before long it dwindled in the distance, then vanished altogether as they rose above the clouds.

Kate clung to Margaret with all her strength and tried to think of nothing at all.

She didn’t remember landing. She didn’t remember getting out of the saddle. It was just after sunset and very cold, and she could hear the ocean. Margaret knelt by a little cookfire a short way off. The pennon was scraping a flint along the edge of her knife, and as Kate watched she coaxed its meager sparks to flame among the dead brown moss and broken twigs she’d piled at the center of her little firepit. The pennon had removed her cap and her dark hair spilled soft over her shoulders. In her boiled flying leathers she looked very much like her brother.

The side of Kate’s head itched and burned terribly. Margaret had ripped the front of her dress and stitched the gash across her right breast up with catgut. Kate remembered fighting tooth and nail to get away from the needle. She remembered Joan Howard’s guts lying heaped in her lap. A little way beyond the faint circle of firelight Mordred was preening himself, clacking his  bill rapidly with a sound like dry, hoarse laughter.

“I’m sorry about your fingers,” said Margaret. Her voice was oddly blurred and indistinct, as though she were speaking underwater. “It had to be done. They’d only have festered, and then you’d have lost the hand as well.”

Kate looked down. Her right was missing its first two fingers. The stumps had been sewn messily shut. She didn’t remember that, either. Her head was ringing. Her fingers itched. Her thoughts were sticky and slow. When she raised her uninjured hand to touch the side of her skull, she found tender bumps of sutured flesh where her ear should have been. I should be surprised, she thought dully. I should be afraid. Why don’t I feel anything? Am I dead? Is this Hell? Am I going to wake up again and again forever, and every time I do there will be less of me?

“Am I dead?” Even her own voice sounded slurred and nasal in her sole remaining ear. The spit-thick mumbling of a simpleton.

“You took a knock to the head,” said Margaret. The fire was catching now, and shadows danced over her heart-shaped face. “A nasty one, but you must have a thick skull. You’ll be yourself in a day or two.”

“Myself,” said Kate. She watched as Margaret rummaged through one of her saddlebags and set a little iron cookpot in the fire to heat. She emptied a skin of brownish liquid into it, steam rising and bringing with it the scent of beef and marrow. The pennon stirred the broth.

“You must have so many questions,” said Margaret.

“I suppose,” said Kate. She couldn’t think of any.

“What happened at Framlingham is happening all over the Isles,” Margaret continued with the giddy enthusiasm of someone delivering long hoped-for news. She tapped the spoon against the cookpot’s rim. “The reign of the Plantagenets and their barons is over. Soon Lancaster will land his armies at Oxford and retake the throne. With the old names and their petty grudges and miserly hoarding swept away, England will flourish again.”

Kate listened to the half-dead pounding of the sea against the rocks. She couldn’t be sure in the gathering dark, but it seemed as though they had made camp on an island. A gentle snow had started to fall by the time she replied.

“Why did you make me poison lady Elizabeth?”

Margaret looked away, pawing through the saddlebags. “Better a little sadness now than to watch the babe torn to pieces in its cradle. We spared most of them, these past few years. A few we missed. Bastards, cripples, other ugly little secrets. They’ll die with their parents. The dragons have the scent of their blood. All the noble blood of England.”

“Dragons.” Kate thought of the beast she’d seen outside the aviary. What Margaret said made no sense to her. It seemed like a child’s story, grisly and random. “Who did that?”

“The Lord Chancellor,” said Margaret, still not looking up from the saddlebags. “Martin Pale.”

Kate began to cry. It sounded terrible and hollow to her, her sobs confined to the dark interior of her skull where they echoed and re-echoed, thick with the snot that leaked out onto her upper lip. She hugged herself, the stumps of her fingers itching and burning as she gripped her arms. Was her family alive? Was the duke, or any of his men or retainers? Lady Elizabeth was in heaven now with the little red thing, and as Margaret put a tin cup of bone broth in her lap Kate had a vision of that clot of dark menstrual decay grown vast and serpentine, lobes of wrinkled flesh fluttering along its length as it coiled tight around its dead, half-eaten mother, the fishlike circle of its toothless mouth rooting blindly for her breast.

“You helped make this possible, Kate,” said Margaret. “You helped set the world free.”

Kate vomited into her soup.

It was three days before Kate’s head cleared. By that time they were within hours of Oxford, flying by day and in short hops from islet to islet so as not to overtire Mordred, who struggled with their combined weight. It passed the time to watch him wade in the surf, patient as a heron and just as quick. With his lethal bill he skewered fish and tossed them flashing up into the air, gamboling through the gentle waves and uttering hoarse, croaking laughter. He was oddly graceful on land, his gait swift and fluid, his tread nearly silent.

Just now he was dozing as a light snow fell on the forested island they’d landed on that afternoon. He slept standing on all fours, eyes closed, breathing slow and deep like a little bellows. The sound made Kate think of Hugh the armorer, who had always greeted her by name and once had given her a little iron clover, which she’d lost. She’d seen him once with the Darcy boy, who Joan Howard had told her in a delighted, disgusted whisper was the brute Ralph Lackland’s bastard, and even then the big smith had been so tender. She had thought of the sight of them for weeks afterward, not in her own heat but out of a kind of maternal fondness for that waif of a child. She wondered where he was now. Dead, most like, on some lonely battlefield.

The crunch of pine needles underfoot announced Margaret a few moments before she stepped back into the little clearing. The pennon dumped an armload of broken branches to the ground beside the last night’s smoking firepit. “You’ve let it go out,” she said.

Kate said nothing. She felt nothing at the irritation in the other woman’s eyes, or at the cold settling into her bones as she sat beside the smoldering pit Margaret had dug in the hard, frozen ground. She looked back at the ashes. Beside her, Margaret knelt and began breaking branches. Mordred stirred in his sleep with a low, rhythmic clicking sound. Kate scratched the stub of knobby flesh where her ear had been.

The fire caught, dry wood popping in the circle of stones, and Margaret rose, brushing dirt from her knees. She looked at Kate. “I’m filthy,” she said. “Help me get these bloody leathers off so I can piss.”

Kate tried to enjoy it, undoing all those little clasps and laces. Hadn’t she once thought how beautiful Margaret was, with her lustrous hair and catlike, smirking mouth? Hadn’t the sight of her, smug spymaster with Kate in the palm of one long-fingered hand, once stirred her to slick, velvety wetness between her plump thighs? Or had it only frightened her? She remembered the smell of her own piss running down her leg in the burned-out ruin of the old Pennon House. She remembered the first time lady Elizabeth had pushed her down onto the furs of her great bed, kneading the flesh of her stomach, reaching between her thighs. Maybe those things were the same.

Still, she was surprised when Margaret turned and kissed her. The other woman tasted of elderberries and smoke and sweat. Beneath her leathers she wore only a thin woolen tunic and damp, wrinkled hose, and Kate could see her little breasts through the tunic’s sagging neck. Margaret straddled her thigh. She pushed Kate down onto the thin bedroll she’d laid out on the frozen ground, rubbing herself against her, reaching down to touch herself. Kate could feel her heat. Her wetness soaking through her hose. “Pretty thing,” she groaned. Her fingers fumbled at the torn neck of Kate’s dress. She scooped a heavy breast out of the garment, holding its nipple between thumb and forefinger. Kate let herself squirm beneath the other woman’s touch, back arching, blood flooding her cheeks.

It could feel good.

She realized, as Margaret humped her like a boar mounting a sow, that the Poles and their master must have secured her father’s position at court. That was why he’d paid so dearly to place her at lady Elizabeth’s side. He probably hadn’t even known why. Hadn’t wanted to know. She thought of the beautiful ostri her father had set with her to Framlingham, which lady Elizabeth had named Helen and had ridden a few times through the forest trails before the wyrm sickened in the cold, damp climate and died in the night in its stall.

Prettier than Kate, her father had grunted when he saw it.

Margaret pushed two fingers past Kate’s lips. Dirty fingertips slid over teeth and gums. “I’ll make a place for you,” Margaret whispered in her ear. “Tomorrow we’ll be with our new king, riding for London. You could be a duchess. A marquess. Would you like that, Kate? I know how hard it must have been. Even knowing now how crucial your work was, how much suffering you prevented, I know it must weigh on you.” She bit Kate’s earlobe, her breathing heavy. “You can be a part of the rebuilding.  Part of the new England.”

Kate thought of Hugh crawling disemboweled across the courtyard, eyes vacant, raptors on his back slashing and biting at his shoulders, his neck, his arms. The new England. She started to laugh. Margaret kept kissing her, kept pushing her fingers deeper into her mouth, but Kate couldn’t stop laughing. It felt, if not good, then at least like some kind of release, some acknowledgement that her beauty was dead, that her second poor excuse for a home was gone, that everyone she’d known there had been eaten alive, and it was all her fault.

You’re a good girl, Katie.

What else was there to do but laugh?

The next morning Kate woke feeling refreshed in spite of the bitter cold. She let herself curl tight against Margaret in their shared bedroll, savoring the sleeping pennon’s warmth, her unwashed smell, the lean muscles of the arm on which Kate’s head rested. The last stars were fading, eaten up by the pale dawn. For a few precious minutes she held back her memories of Framlingham. She felt almost alive.

It was an hour’s flight to Oxford. Mordred climbed steadily, his vast wings flogging the air until they soared above low-hanging clouds, spires of ephemeral white and gray rising all around them, gulls and lesser wyrms occasionally glimpsed through scudding banks. Kate rested her head against Margaret’s back, letting her eyes drift closed. She hated flying. She hated the way the wind clawed at her like it wanted to snatch her off of the kite’s saddle and hurl her screaming into empty air. She hated the surging power of Mordred’s muscles beneath her, and the bite of the saddle’s straps, made for skinny pennon legs, cutting into her thighs and calves.

Undo them, then, whispered a little voice in the back of her mind, the voice of Joan Howard crouched in the shadows behind the huge oaken door, her guts spilling out around her bloody feet, her mouth fixed in a rictus grin. Come back to us, Katie. Our little pastry. Come let us hold you. Bite you. Kiss you. Her ladyship is cold, Katie. She’s so cold, and she misses you.

Nothing in the world is easier than falling.

They came out of the clouds. Margaret’s whole body went rigid. Kate opened her eyes. Below, Oxford lay in ruins. Smoke rose in swaying towers from burned-out buildings. Huge wyrms like the one that had appeared on the hilltop at Framlingham stalked the streets, chasing people rendered small as ants by distance. Mordred groaned, beating his wings to rise again, but Margaret kept him level. They banked out over the waterfront.

The piers were smashed to splinters, pilings knocked askew and broken, and the masts of English ships rose crooked and bedraggled from the bay, where bodies floated singly on the tide and further out in rafts of dead and bloating flesh. Gulls and butcher’s boys and seahawks rode these makeshift islands, feasting on eyes and tongues and other soft meat easily stripped from the bone. Even in the seaward wind two hundred feet above the sea, Kate could smell the rot.

A huge sloping back breached the water below, smooth hide the color of dried blood, and beneath a flash of pale underbelly as it turned, oarlike fins slapping the surface. A blast of air and vapor spouted from the nostrils set high up on its long, toothy skull and birds fled the bodies nearest to it, screaming in indignation. Its jaws parted, seawater streaming between teeth like daggers, and snapped shut on one of the drifting corpses. The creature rolled and bore its prize under the water with a titanic sloshing sound as its bulk displaced brine. Within moments there were only ripples left to mark its passage.

Over the howling wind, Kate could hear Joan Howard laughing.