WYRM I.V

                                                        The Interview

Lizzie sat perched on her mother’s garden wall, watching the family take their leisure in the yard. Her mother and uncle still sat at table with the remains of their dinner, conversing in low voices, smiling warmly at each other. Do they know the rest of us know they’re lovers? Do they care? She had no memory of her father, Henry Preston, who had died fighting the French when she was very young. She remembered the summer day Dick rode home with his brother’s bones in a cedar chest, though, and the sight of her mother’s tear-streaked face through the branches of the lilac hedge. Her uncle’s bare legs and the strange, swinging worm between them, so different with its purple veins and thatch of coarse red hair from her playmates’ little members. How her mother had sighed with pleasure when Dick wrapped her skirts around his fist and guided himself into her, there in the garden where now Lizzie’s bastard sisters yelled and turned somersaults and chased their long-suffering black tomcat, Lord Peter, pelting him with chestnut husks.

“Will there be war?” her mother asked, speaking softly so that Anne and Margaret wouldn’t overhear. In the shade of the old apple tree by the north wall Dick’s mallard Achilles snorted in his sleep, his huge flanks shivering so that the sparrows perched along his spine shuffled and peeped in indignation.

“It will depend on Bolingbroke,” said Dick. “Without him we haven’t the men. And it won’t be a war, Molly. Not with Thomas leading us. He sits headman of the Court of Chivalry; we’ll ride to London and lay Richard our concerns, but legally. The army is only for…” He twirled his hand, forefinger out, searching for a word. “Emphasis.”

“Terrible thing, her ladyship’s loss,” said Lizzie’s aunt, Maud Colchester, who had come to the garden wall to nurse her youngest while her husband Walter and his big red-faced sons played at rings with the rest of the men and some of the younger women. The servants were lighting candles and lanterns now. In the distance feast-day revelers sang and laughed nearer the center of town. There would be a bonfire in Cotter’s Field after evening mass. “What’s she like, their Elizabeth?”

It’s funny, I only just told Lord Pale she was with child.

“I don’t know her, aunt Maud. I’m just a pennon.”

“They ought to let you girls eat something on St. John’s day.” With deftness born of long practice she scooped a breast from the bodice of her dress and guided the babe’s hungry mouth to its nipple. “You’re only skin and bone.”

Lizzie thought how nice it would be to have someone tuck her in the crook of their arm and fill her with warm milk. She thought of Lady Elizabeth’s plump serving girl. Those round, heavy breasts heaving after her climb up to the parapet. Was she going to jump? “I get enough, ma’am,” she said, smiling. “Your fellow seems to, certainly. He’s a proper little piglet.”

Maud smiled fondly. “He is, isn’t he? Greedy thing.”

Lizzie’s stomach was a knot of hunger by the time the day was over. She’d used all the old pennon tricks — gulping water, sucking on a heel of old black bread — but she felt as though she’d swallowed a starving rat. She snatched a half-drunk cup of wine and a cold roll from the remains of the table’s spread, glancing surreptitiously around the yard to see whether anyone was watching. Her uncle was leading Achilles to the gate, his daughters running after him, demanding loudly that he kiss each of them and then Lord Peter goodnight. Her mother had gone back inside and the others were in conversation by the far wall where a few torches still guttered.

She stuffed half the roll into her mouth, savoring the taste of squash and barley, the softness of the good white bread. If my father had lived I might have bread every day, she thought, watching her uncle swing himself up onto his mallard’s back and heel the beast out into the crowded street of drunken revelers. I might be some landed knight’s fat little wife and nurse his children at my breast. She swigged her wine, sucking it back and forth through her teeth, and ate the rest of her roll hurriedly, licking gravy from her fingers. But I would never fly.

Chauntecleer would want brushing before he bedded down. She turned with reluctant longing from the table and started toward the house. She was halfway to the back door when she saw the ragged shape curled between the West wall and the woodshed. It was Will. There was blood on his clothes and his cheek was bruised, his lip split, his hands scratched. He looked like a rat she’d seen once quivering in the corner of a dead-end alley in town. Pullets must have been at it, or cats. Broken paw. Black eyes glazed with fear. She knelt beside him and laid a hand on his shoulder, though he flinched at her touch. Her breath caught in her throat.

He looks so beautiful like this.

“What happened, Will?”

He looked for a moment as though he wanted to tell her something, as though he would burst into tears and cling to her like a babe to its mother, and she ached between her legs for it. Instead he lunged up and kissed her, smearing blood from a cut over her cheek and jaw. Her breath caught in her throat. She made herself relax, made herself hold back from biting him, from tearing the lips from his beautiful face and swallowing them whole. His blood tasted like salt and copper.

“Who hurt you?” she whispered against his mouth, gripping the back of his neck. Who dared hurt you before I could?

Her other hand found the heat between his legs, the shuddering stiffness pressed against his hose. He said, “Don’t touch me there. Please, don’t.” He led her finger to the tight little hole between his buttocks.

She bit his neck. He gasped. Crickets sang in the lowering dark. He’s mine. He’s finally mine.

“You’re hurting me.”

She snarled and he quieted, letting her push into him, sliding first one knuckle and then the next past the quivering ring. He was so soft inside, like silk. Like aspic. I wish I had a cock, so that I could fuck you with it. I wish I was your father.

“Tell me.”

                                                              *****

They approached the holdfast and its town along the old Roman road that ran beside the baron’s fields. Men and women labored at the hip-high wheat beneath the punishing sun, scythes swinging back and forth in a lazy rhythm. More followed close behind to gather and tie the sheaves, which in turn were stored in the capacious saddlebags of a pair of duckies ambling after the working lines, dripping fronds of watercress hanging from their bills as they chewed their cud. It made Stephen think of father Alfonse in his garden, spacing the seeds for the summer’s crop of vetches. A finger-length between each bean. Thumbprints in the soil. That might have been me at work in the field, he thought idly, reaching back to wipe the sweat from his neck above his padded gorget. If I had listened just a little better.

“Kite rampant quartered with three stars and a ram,” said sir Godfrey, who rode at Stephen’s side on a swaybacked gray ostri hen, his hand raised to shade his squinting eyes. “I don’t know the standard. Do you?”

“One upjumped landlord’s by-blow or another,” Stephen answered. “What’s the difference?”

A few of the men chuckled. They rode on past wooden runs where the hog-sized hornless tricornes called nutcrackers rooted in the churned-up mud with their horny beaks, sharp and curved like the bills of the parrots Stephen had seen sailors keep as pets or hunt off the Nubian coast. Several of the creatures looked up at them with beady eyes nestled deep in folds of wrinkled skin. Others scratched themselves against the fence posts or drank noisily from a carved trough. The odor of their dung, pungent and faintly sweet, was heavy in the air even as Stephen hailed at the gate and waited as the men at arms within pushed the heavy oaken doors apart.

A slight man of perhaps five and forty in a long black tunic and cap waited to greet them in the courtyard, hands already clasped in apologetic supplication. “Sir Stephen the Moor of Hampshire, on behalf of sir Roger Mortimer and his excellency bishop William of Wyekham,” sir Godfrey bellowed in his best battlefield voice, deep and sonorous and carrying. Chickens fled their ostri as they flooded in. The men began to dismount, calling for stable hands and pages and curriers. The people working in the yard, bent at the well and throwing feed for the chickens, paused to watch. Swordbills clacked and cackled from the eaves above, shifting their talons on the slate. “To see whoever is master here.”

“The baron is hawking, sirs,” the black-clad steward said. His eyes lingered on the bloodstains crusted on their garb.

“Oh, it’s just as well.” Stephen slipped from his saddle and handed a young stable boy his reins and a penny for good measure. “We’ll wait in his rooms. Have some wine sent up, and something to eat.”

He parted from his ostri, Socrates, with a fond scratch of the beast’s long, feathered neck, and followed the befuddled steward across the packed earth yard to a squat, unfinished keep, its crown still jagged, awaiting stones that seemed in no hurry to come. The baron’s solar was surprisingly spacious and well-lit, clean rushes on the floor and sunlight streaming through the wavered glass. The people bustling in the courtyard below looked as though they had plunged underwater, their silhouettes distorted. The steward made his excuses and in short order a frightened-looking page brought cold chicken, barley bread, and a ewer of wine. Stephen poured himself a cup.

“When were you knighted, Stephen?” said sir Godfrey, angling his scabbard as he sank down on one of the room’s spindly chairs and stretched out his long legs. “I don’t believe I’ve ever heard.”

“By Lancaster, for bringing Bishop le Despenser to heel after the disaster in Ghent.”

“The Fighting Bishop? I knew him at Rouen. How did you manage that?”

“I and a few others held a pier against five thousand Flemish peasants who’d been following us since Ypres,” Stephen said. He took a swallow of wine. It was good, sweet and dry. He could still smell them. The sour reek of their unwashed skin and desperate sweat. He could see the whites of their bulging eyes. Cudgels and hoes hemming him in on all sides as Samuel Peale swung his big hand-and-a-halfer and Fuscone the artillerer setting a taper to the string of his pole gun, eyebrows burnt, scarred hands at work with black powder and a twist of paper. The ships taking on supplies, but slowly, so slowly. He turned the bishop’s ring on his right pointer. “What of yourself, my friend?”

“It is of little account,” said sir Godfrey.

Stephen thought of the sorrowful Moor. In the courtyard outside another party had ridden in, falcons on their wrists and braces of pheasants tied to their ostris’ saddles. One rider had a tusked, splay-legged hedge lizard slung over his mount’s back, blood dripping from its whiskered muzzle. The steward reemerged and met a tall, big-bellied man who Stephen took to be their host. Their exchange seemed rapidly to turn unpleasant, the big man gesturing and shouting

“Interesting,” said sir Godfrey, leaning forward in his seat to peer around Stephen.

“Mm,” Stephen agreed. He set his cup down on the table as the big man and his steward vanished into the shadow of the keep. It was a short while before he heard heavy footfalls on the steps outside the solar. The big man from the courtyard stroad into the room, a heavy falconer’s glove on his left arm and a pair of brindled raptors at his heels. He wore a leather doublet with scrollwork in cannetille about the skirt and collar and a pair of hose left dusty and spotted with leaves and pine needles from a hard day’s riding.  The steward in black came scurrying after him. “Sir Geoffrey Hoare, the third Baron Walsingham,” the steward gasped as Stephen maneuvered to greet them, sir Godfrey rising from his chair and offering a deep and courtly bow. “Your lordship, sir Stephen the Moor, emissary of the king’s cousin sir Roger Mortimer, and of  his excellency the bishop of Wyckham.”

“You make an odd assembly,” the baron boomed with forced good cheer, his long russet mustaches quivering as he spoke. “Had I known of your coming I would have greeted you more suitably. I must needs beg your pardon, sirs.”

“You shall have it, then,” said Stephen warmly, clasping the baron’s proffered hand, though the taller man’s tone had been closer to rebuke than plea. “No need for begging. Let us be friends, my lord, for our business is the kingdom’s and no loyal subject need concern himself.”

The baron’s raptors chittered to each other, one leaping up onto the back of a chair to scrutinize Stephen more closely. The baron sat and gestured that they do the same. He stripped off his glove and flung it at his steward. “Leave us,” he snapped. The slender man near stumbled over his own feet in fleeing from the solar. The baron’s other raptor settled at his side, eyes slitted and nostrils flared. He stroked its long, narrow skull with one thick finger. “You are too gracious, sir. How can I aid my noble lord of March?”

“Sir Roger has sworn to rid these woods of banditry by Christmas,” Stephen said. “He is a young man, and keen to prove himself to his royal cousin and the court. We have ridden after Tall John Duncan and his brigands this past week, but they have not yet come to bay. Sir Roger sent us to ask the region’s gentry whether they have found themselves more plagued by theft and raiding than was usual, to help us track their movements.”

The baron’s expression softened somewhat. Perhaps he thought us tax collectors, Stephen mused, noting the rings on the other man’s fingers and the golden chain about his thick neck.

“We had some trouble a week past. Brigands robbed the local monks of relics, wool, that sort of thing. Poachers taking deer. We caught one at it, strung him up, and heard no more of it.”

They passed an hour in conversation before making their excuses and departing. Stephen could not shake the sorrowful Moor from his thoughts, but with an effort of will he spoke past those weary eyes, that lined and kindly face, as they came down the steps of the baron’s keep. “He was combative.”

“I saw his smallfolk fletching arrows by the gross as we rode up,” sir Godfrey answered, nodding.

“No doubt the king seeks to ward himself against those loyal lords discomfited by his gross favoritism and profligate spending. A sorry state.”

“And if the noble baron and sir Roger should go hunting and compare their two accounts?”

“Let’s give the chancellor his war,” said Stephen, snapping his fingers for the stable boy as they stepped out into the yard. “Then we’ll worry about that.”

                                                                  *****

A few days after she found Will in  her mother’s garden, Lizzie waited at the west corner of the mallard stables where they bordered on the tricorne paddock, watching the huge beasts lock horns and push each other back and forth through the churned mud of the yard, grunting and heaving like smiths’ bellows to decide who would have first pick of the morning’s acorns and slop. She liked to watch them tussle, watch them sink into their wallows and emerge armored in clinging muck. They had a strange grace to them, for all their vicious temperament and monstrous bulk. Better still was when the tricorniers and their big boar-raptors split the herd and shunted their mounts into the field for outfitting and maneuvers. She liked the way their charges made the ground reverberate beneath her feet. The crash and clank of armor jangling.

Near noon she heard the creak of a barrow drawing near and left off watching the wyrms squabble, straightening up. Henry came around the corner just a moment later, pushing a load of dung. “Lizzie,” he said, sounding surprised. “What are you do—”

She caught him full in the face with the stick of firewood. There was a nasty crunch of breaking cartilage. He fell screaming to his knees and in one stride she was with him and bent to grab hold of his nose. She twisted it. Blood leaked out between her fingers. His scream ended in a strangled, nasal squeak. His eyes went huge. “You want to teach him a lesson again,” she said sweetly, “you ask me first. Yes?”

He looked briefly uncomprehending, then tried to nod, which brought tears to his eyes. “Nyeth,” he choked out at last.

She released his nose with a final cruel twist and wiped her bloody hand on the back of his tunic as he doubled over on hands and knees, sobbing silently.

“Good.”