Wyrm I.IV

                                             Tansy, Ginger, Pennyroyal

“It’s the feast of St. John week after next,” said Lizzie. “Come to town with me. My mother lays a good table. My cousins will be there, and a poet called Winslow my uncle favors.”

“Sir Ralph will need me for the tourney,”

She made a face. She was picking her nails with the edge of her knife. “He has not joined the lists. No one of note will ride.”

“He said he might,” Will hedged, not looking up from the saddle he was waxing. An entire afternoon together with Lizzie would most likely end with him gagged, shackled, and chained to a post in her mother’s root cellar. He wished she would leave him alone, but his indifference and evasion only seemed to spur her to new heights of infuriated determination. When they’d been young she’d tried to kiss him once, then broke a clay pot on his back after he flinched away from her. He wasn’t scared of her, exactly, not now that he was taller and stronger, but he didn’t like the way she looked at him. That gaunt, hungry fixation with which so many of the pennons regarded one another.

“Afraid to take my arm?” A taunting edge, cruel and needling. “Or perhaps you’ll be busy wearing her ladyship’s clothes again. Lame Llewyn told me—”

“What do you want from me?” he snapped, throwing down his hunk of beeswax. He met her eyes, which were huge and furious and also sad somehow. “Take Llewyn to your feast. I’m certain he could tell you more such stories, if you can hear him over the sound of your uncle fucking your pig mother.”

She ran past him and out of the stables, pushing Harry aside on her way to the barn doors. A few mallards raised their heads to watch her go, pond weed and clover hanging from their beaks. Will felt a surge of unreasoning shame and fury at knowing Harry had seen him lose his temper. He knelt, groping for the beeswax in the dirt and straw, and brushed it clean before returning to work. His hand ached from gripping the lump. His wrist burned from working it into the leather. It hadn’t been the lady’s dress, but the gown of one of her women. Fine wool as soft as eiderdown, the dagged sleeves hanging past his waist. Still, how had Llewyn known?

Fool, sir Ralph had chided gently as he pressed Will back against the smithy’s wall. You’ve soiled it. Ash, there. Muck from the yard… A forefinger hooked open Will’s mouth. Cum between your pretty thighs. Has someone been at your virtue, sweetling?

“You’ve done it now,” Harry chuckled, wheeling the big oak dung cart to one of the empty stalls. “She’ll be after you with a vengeance.” A pair of bright-eyed pullets darted past him as he unlatched the gate and hauled it open. They liked to pick through mallard shit in search of undigested nuts and insects, and to stalk the flies that buzzed in seething carpets of black over the refuse. Dirty creatures.

“You want to be flogged?” Will snapped back, though he regretted it at once. He sighed, passing a hand over his sweaty face. “I’m sorry. You see what she drives me to?”

It was an old standby of sir Ralph’s, a half-jest he trotted out when his dour French wife Agnes was in one of her moods and required instruction. He would sit on the steps of their quarters pouring boiled wine over his bruised and bloodied knuckles and he would shake his head ruefully at any passers-by and with a crooked, rueful smile he’d say, You see what she drives me to? Sometimes it slithered in among Will’s thoughts without apparent prompt, scaled coils tightening around whatever he was trying to do until all he could think of was the sound of a fist thudding against meat and those words, and sir Ralph’s smile, which made him hot as melted butter.

Henry unshipped his spade from his handcart, frowning. “I had thought to ask you into town to see the devils at the baiting, but perhaps the joys of squiring overshadow such base things.” He plunged the shovel’s head into a mound of dung. “Your temper is as sour as Lizzie’s, Will. Wed and your children would eat each other in the womb.”

“Shut up, Henry,” Will sighed, sinking back onto his seat and hefting Lady’s saddle over his knees. “Oh, forgive me. She tries my patience. I am not myself.”

“You have not been yourself since summer,” Henry said, shoveling muck into his handcart. The sweet smell of grassy dung grew stronger. “Does the yard still give you trouble?”

Will flushed. Everyone in the castle knew he was a poor study when it came to sword and lance, slower and clumsier than the other squires, unable to keep his head once steel was drawn. Even when he’d ridden against the Welsh with sir Ralph the older man had ordered him to guard the standard. A little boy’s mock duty. Protect your mother while I’m away. Pater familias.

“I thought it would go easier for me, once I had squired a while.” His face burned. “I have no gift for it.”

They worked a while in silence, as they had before Will was made squire. Henry shoveled dung into his barrow. Will worked beeswax into Lady’s saddle. He thought of sir Ralph ripping his sword from its sheath and spurring Lady in among the rebels, thrusting and slashing to either side. “There might be real fighting soon,” he said, the words spilling out of him in a sudden rush. “It’s all anyone talks about. The king’s favorites, how he beggars the realm on gifts for them, how the lord privy seal and the lord chancellor cannot find coin to pay the levies fighting Glendower’s rebels in Wales. The barons are withholding taxes.”

Will thought of Dick Preston’s squire, Christopher Tewskbury, who had been feathered with arrows and trampled under the boots of fighting men. He thought how strange it was that a king taking a liking to one of his knights could cost ten thousand men their lives, that if His Grace smiled at the wrong man, three hundred miles away a squire would take an arrow through his cheek so that blood and teeth spilled out over the trampled grass. He stared at Henry, embarrassed and a little angry at having made himself sound such a coward.

“The world needs poets as well as knights,” Henry said magnanimously. He paused, leaning on his shovel. His brow furrowed in thought. “Though for what I have no notion. Come on and let’s go into town.

“A little bloodsport will do you good.”

It was a short walk to Butcher’s Green where the baiting pit was dug, but with the crush of travelers and the market day crowds it took Will and Henry nearly half an hour to reach the rammed log outer wall and join the seething crowd packed tight around the cylindrical hole, sixty strides across near as deep. The bull, a rust-colored Yorkshire Devil with massive horns and a neck as thick around as one of Lady’s haunches, was already chained to his post and circling, slaver dripping from his deep, muscular jaw.

“A penny on the blood bay!” Henry shouted at a passing bookie, pressing a coin into the man’s hand. Charcoal scratched on parchment and the man went on. Will felt as though he might suffocate, the crowd was pressed so close. The rooftops of Framlingham Town seemed a hundred miles away over their heads and the fug of pipe smoke swirling in the air. Butchers’ boys and shavepates roosted on the post of the gallows and the eaves of the nearest inns and common houses, sunning their wings and croaking in their harsh, fluting voices.

The raptors came out not long after, slat doors set flush with the walls of the pit yanked up by rope. A blur of plumage. Trilling cries. They fanned out as they closed on the big bull. It turned to face them and let out a deep warning rumble Will could feel in his balls, the thick chain secured to the cuff on its left ankle slithering over the dirt as it took a half-step back. The crowd was alive, laying last-minute bets and buying swallows of warm beer from the brewer’s boy with his tin cup on a string, stamping their feet and shouting, baying for blood.

The pack’s lead hen feinted left, darted right, the devil’s massive clawed foot coming down where she’d been only a breath before, and sprang onto the beast’s back. She was perhaps a tenth part his size. Less, more than likely, but Will saw at once that she knew how to goad him. Her dewclaws flashed as she raked his throat, holding onto his spine for dear life with her jaws. The devil caught one of her cocks, not quite so quick, on the tip of his  horn and flung the beast across the pit with a jerk of his massive head, bellowing in agony and rage. The raptor struck the wooden wall and fell and did not rise. Blood in the dirt.

The others worried at the devil’s shins and slashed with their hooked claws at his exposed stomach. A pair of hens went at his long, stiff tail, leaping and beating their feathered arms as they kicked out at him. Blood ran in rivers over his wrinkled, leathery skin. He roared, swinging his head from side to side. The pack swarmed over him. His stubby forearms clawed at the air as he lurched toward the pit’s rough-hewn wall of planks, trying to dislodge his shrieking, clawing passengers. A little cream and brown hen lost her footing on his neck and he caught her in midair, the crunch of her bones audible even over the crowd’s roaring as his jaws snapped shut like a furrier’s trap.

Will tried not to let the nauseous weight in his stomach claw its way into his throat. Blood steamed in the dirt. It was a brisk afternoon, overcast and gray, and the wind brought the scent to coat his mouth. Copper. Rot. A thick, meaty sort of warmth, enfolding and sticky, like the condensation that would gather on your upper lip if you bent to inhale the aroma of a trencher full of good brown gravy.  His gorge rose. He thought of the Welsh, of their armadon’s panicked squeals as sir Ralph and Dick Preston drove their lances home into its flank. He tried to step back from the arena’s edge, but the weight of the crowd held him fast. At his side, Henry beat his fist against the stout wood post and shouted, “Come on, then, you brute! Come on!”

The devil staggered, letting out a kind of mournful basso bleat, and collapsed to the arena floor, the impact of his body against dirt shaking the stands. Groans and cheers from the onlookers. Coin exchanged, and curses. The hen and her surviving packmates disjointed the beast like clockwork, swarming over his throat and haunches, slashing ligaments and opening his windpipe with the precision of master butchers. He blew his last in a bloody snort that stirred the dust before his muzzle, and then his bellows flanks went still. The surviving raptors began to eat, burrowing in at his armpits and groin and behind the armored slats of his ribs, at the belly.

“There’s a Caesar wasted,” Henry groaned. He passed a hand over his broad, sweaty face. “Come on and let’s have some molasses bread before the next bout. The Frenchman on Baker Street makes it best.”

Will followed the other boy gratefully out of the crush, sidling and elbowing his way past drovers, farmhands, tenants, and all the rest of the townsfolk out for a day of bloodshed and merriment. The world seemed to smooth itself out as they slipped away from the crowd and down a narrow side street, passing a big black tomcat with a dead pullet’s throat in his jaws. The cat gave them an evil glare and trotted on his way, and before Will could turn to watch him go a strong arm snaked around his throat from behind and yanked him into a dark alley between a farrier’s and a public house. He clawed at the arm, and at its owner.

“No use,” came Lame LLewyn’s grunt. “Quit it.”

“I’m sorry, Will,” said Henry, rounding the corner. He did sound it, which made Will feel a little less afraid. Ed stood at his back, and Quick Tom, the youngest of the stable hands. “The boys agree: you need reminding of your station.”

The fat boy hit Will in the stomach hard enough that he bent double, spitting bile. Ed and Lame Llewyn wrestled him back upright and the white shock of Henry’s fist caught him above his short ribs. Then again across his cheekbone.

“You think because he hides his sword in your sheath you can treat the rest of us like shit tracked in across the floor?” Henry slapped him, not one boy hitting another but as a man would slap a child. Sharp and hard. Eyes here. Don’t cry, petit putain. “I will be squire to sir John Lancaster next Spring, and Ed may go to sir Richard Howard, second cousin to the king on his mother’s side, and then where will your airs have got you? Are you listening to me, Will?”

“Yes, Henry.”

Another slap. Henry drove a knee into Will’s belly, doubling him over. Llewyn seized a fistful of his hair and jerked him back upright. “You think he’s going to lift a finger against three stablehands?” asked Henry, his voice low and level. Two men passed the mouth of the alley without looking in. One laughed loudly at something the other had said.

“No, Henry.”

“There then,” Henry said, brushing dirt from Will’s tunic. “Let him go, lads. Now we are all friends again, eh?”

Will wiped blood from his mouth. He was a coward at heart. He knew it, and hated himself for it, but a coward needed friends. “If you’ll have me,” he said quietly, pitching his voice the way he did when he wanted sir Ralph’s hands on him. Vulnerable. Delicate. A little frightened. They looked back at him and for the first time he could see that they were frightened, too, that perhaps they really did miss him. “I’ve been a fool.”

Henry clapped him on the back, nearly knocking him to the dirt, and slung an arm around his shoulders. “Shall we have that molasses bread after all?”

“Alright, Henry.”

                                                              *****

Kate waited at the foot of the stair to the lady Elizabeth’s apartments, pretending to study a tapestry depicting the Conqueror’s landing at Pevensey. Knights on mallard-back riding to shore through the surf. The kites of the Norman pennonry in flight, their keel-crested bills lined with needle-like snaggleteeth, their riders all in red to match the bloody color of their wings and throats. How many had died for William’s throne? What had he been like, really, to make men follow him so eagerly to war?

She turned at the sound of footsteps on the flagstones, her heart thundering in her breast. It was red-faced old Mary Cutter from the kitchens, as she’d known it would be, bustling toward her with a wicker basket laden with cups of small beer and shaved ginger, which Lady Elizabeth drank to settle her stomach in the mornings.

“Kate Spitalfield, you look as though the Devil himself just danced across your grave.” Mary Cutter’s big gray eyebrows drew down in concern. “Are you stricken, girl? I can make a poultice if it’s fever, I remember that much of what grandmam taught me.”

“It’s nothing,” said Kate, forcing her brightest smile. Men often remarked on her dimples. “Just a passing chill, I suppose.” She reached for the basket. “Let me save you a trip up the steps, Mary. I’ve been away too long as it is.”

Because her ladyship is in a delicate condition.

Mary pursed her lips in thought, then pressed the tray into Kate’s hands. “You’re a good girl, Katie. Don’t go spilling it, now,” she chided, and with a vicious pinch to Kate’s cheek she turned and stumped back toward the kitchens.

You’re a good girl, Katie.

The powder dissolved quickly in the cup of watered beer. On her way up Kate touched the paper packet to one of the candles set in a recess along the stair and watched the flame flare yellow, paper blackening and curling like dead skin peeling back from a wound. In a few heartbeats it was gone, just ash drifting in the afternoon heat. She dropped the last flickering end and ground it under the heel of her slipper until it was nothing but a smear on the worn gray stone. Up the steps to where the others were tending to her ladyship in the warm morning light. Anne de Crecy raising her chemise to inhale the scent of the clean cloth while Lady Elizabeth sat slumped half-naked in her chair by the fire, a wet cloth draped over her face. Joan Howard busied herself forcing slippers onto Elizabeth’s dainty feet, which had been swollen since the third month of her pregnancy. Isabella, her ladyship’s banded grey, lay curled in her mistress’s lap, one slitted yellow eye tracking the movements of her ladies in waiting.

“And here’s Kate now,” said Anne with evident relief.

“A drink, Katie.” Lady Elizabeth held out a pale hand without removing her wet cloth. “My head is splitting.”

Kate gave her the cup. Elizabeth’s long fingers curled around the polished wood. She drank, throat working, and then handed it back. “Oh, bless you,” she sighed. She hadn’t slept well, up half the night tossing and turning, rising to piss every half hour. Kate had helped her from the bed a dozen times. “What would I do without you, my sweetling?”

You’re a good girl, Katie.

She was an hour letting them dress her, but by the time they’d laced her kirtle around her girth there was color in her cheeks and she was in good spirits, laughing at Anne’s grotesque impression of the chapel priest, Charles de Brole, who was infamous throughout the castle for his habit of picking his nostrils and eating the findings whenever he thought no one was watching. By noon she was ready to adjourn to the spinning room with the other ladies of her husband’s court and Kate had begun to allow herself to think that perhaps nothing would come of the tea, that perhaps it had only been some backwoods cunning man’s quackery

Lady Elizabeth paused at the top of the stairs, a queer look passing over her face. She laid a hand on the swell of her belly. “Oh, I don’t feel at all well,” she said, clutching at Kate’s arm, and then she crumpled to the floor. Kate dropped to her knees with her as the others screamed and wept and called for help, running about like headless chickens. Things seemed to move very slowly, as though the air had become thick as syrup. The raptor Isabella shrieked from the arm of Elizabeth’s chair, plumage bristling and teeth bared.

“Help me get her to bed,” Kate said grimly, looping her arms under Elizabeth’s. Anne de Crecy took the feet.

The rest was screaming and sweat, blood and piss, and at the end, well after the sun had gone down, a little thing no bigger than a rat that slithered hot and red and motionless out from between the lady’s legs. The midwife wrapped it in a cloth and took it from the room into the night. The other girls huddled close, wiping perspiration from their lady’s burning skin with cool, wet cloths. Nurse held lady Elizabeth’s head in her lap and wept, her toothless mouth trembling as she stroked the noblewoman’s hair with a gnarled, claw-like hand. “Oh, my pet,” the old crone wheezed. “My pet, my pet. It happens to all of us, soon or late.”

“It was a girl,” Elizabeth sobbed, clinging tight to Kate’s hand. “A little girl.”

At midnight, once the sobbing was over and her mistress had fallen into a troubled, sweat-soaked sleep in Nurse’s arms, Kate slipped from her bed and past the pallet where Anne and Joan lay whispering to one another. She padded out onto the landing. A few low-burning candles lit the steps down to the yard. There was a chill in the air, early for September, and she shivered in her gown and felted slippers as she crossed the flagstones past the roosting chickens and the rookery at the center of its constellation of fresh droppings. She climbed the steps to the south wall, the one overlooking the mirror lake and the distant hills. The warm wind hit her when she reached the battlements. It blew her hair about her face and brought the smell of oats and rain and wyrm dung with it.

Low-burning torches lit the parapet at intervals, but there were no men nearby. With the Welsh bottled up by Hotspur and his raiders there was little reason to keep watch, though perhaps that would change soon. Everyone was whispering of war. Kate closed her eyes, just for a moment, and the sight of the slick, bloody thing flashed before her. She dug her nails into her palms until the image receded into the dull, pulsing pain.

The wind caught  at her nightgown as she hoisted herself up between two merlons. The ground below seemed to pitch before her, yawning black and green and purple, colors of bruise and rot. Will my body look like that, once it’s in the ground? She thought of the thing again, red and still on the soiled cloth.

“Are you daft?”

Kate looked up, clutching suddenly at the merlon on her left. The ground seemed very far away, her footing tenuous, the wind a hand guiding her gently toward the edge. It was one of the pennons, a hunched and bony young woman of perhaps sixteen with her blond braid pinned high on her head and a sour expression on her narrow, weasely face. She sat perched on a merlon a few yards along the wall, her back to the night and the moonlit surface of the lake, her slippers dangling above the parapet. She looked like she’d been crying for some time.

Kate stared, unable to think of anything to say.

“You won’t die,” the pennon continued in the slow, patient voice of someone explaining an abstract concept to a dull child. “At best you’ll break your legs, or an arm. If you want to do it right, use the rookery, or the old tower at the end of the West wall. Rose Cooper jumped from there a few summers ago. You could hardly recognize her. Do you remember that?”

“I…” Kate stammered, at a loss. “I h-hadn’t yet come to serve her ladyship.” She felt as though the chain that had dragged her out of bed and up onto the wall had suddenly gone slack, leaving her directionless and limp. It was so far to the beaten, grassy earth below. “I’m Kate.”

“I know who you are,” sniffed the pennon, wiping her nose on her sleeve with the unthinking efficiency of a much younger girl. “You’re her ladyship’s favorite. La patisserie.”

Kate’s cheeks burned. She hadn’t known her embarrassing pet name had traveled beyond the walls of Elizabeth’s rooms. Her head swam as the dark beyond the wall dragged her attention inexorably back to its enfolding softness. Slowly, clinging to her merlon, she scrambled back down to the parapet and took a long, shuddering breath. The pennon watched her, expressionless.

“Are you going to jump, then?”

“What?”

“From the tower.”

Kate looked away. Maybe Christ had sent this skinny imp to torture her. She deserved it. She deserved far worse. You were thinking of father and mother, she told herself as she dug her nails into her palms. You were thinking of Joan and the twins, and what would happen to them. She looked out between the merlons at the mirror of the lake where duckies waded in the moonlight, dipping their crested heads to sift for pond weed. One of them reared up on its haunches and trumpeted, a sound so lonely that Kate felt her heart must break. It sounded like the cry of the last living thing in all creation.

You were thinking of yourself.

“It’s true, what the squires and his lordship’s knights say,” said the pennon. She hopped down lightly from her perch and took off her cap, freeing an unkempt thatch of dirty blond hair. She lifted her chin. She was shorter than Kate, but she walked with a man’s swagger. It made her seem tall. “You’re a pretty thing.”

She sauntered past and took the steps down to the courtyard, fading slowly into the dark outside the torchlight’s flickering circle. Kate watched her go. There was a leaden weight in the pit of her stomach, as though she’d swallowed a stone, and the wind picked up and recommenced to tugging at her gown. A single step. A few wild, tumbling seconds to the ground.

It was a girl.  A little girl.