WYRM I.II

                                                        Chapter II: Favorites

Here is a mallard: twenty hands at the hipbone, thirty feet in length from its horny beak to the tip of its long, stiff tail. Massive haunches and long, muscled forelimbs, first three fingers fused into a sort of hoof, the thumb of which is a four-inch spike as sharp as a whetted piton. The saddle sits a little forward of the shifting hips, discouraging the beast from lurching up onto its hinders, as even the best-trained of them will sometimes do, and the bridle — naturally much longer than those used for the domestic horse in antiquity and on the continent — is thick leather around a core of hempen rope, stiff enough to prevent dragging or entanglement. At full tilt a trained war mallard may run faster than the swiftest man, and a lancer on his back strikes with three tons of flesh and muscle driving him.

The earl’s clubfooted stablemaster Gaston Meeks had shown Will sketches of a wyrm-back charge drawn some hundred years ago by a heathen Turk at what he wrote of as the Battle of Al-Uqab. Knights Templar and the Order of Cordoba astride their mallards breaking the ranks of the Moor. Their horses panicked, Gaston had told him, pointing out the strange hooved beasts rearing among the soldiers locked in combat. They threw their riders, ran wild, trampled their own men. Out of all the nations of the Earth, God gave the hammer of the wyrm to England, into the hands of Athelstan the Pious. Never forget that, William.

Looking at the aftermath of the skirmish south of Newgate, William wondered how anyone could ever forget such a thing. Flies, crows, and butcher’s boys swarmed over the carcasses of mallards and men alike, as well as the spine-backed armadon the Welsh had brought with them as a line-breaker. Sir Ralph’s patrol had caught them unawares and broken them with a single charge. Will had never seen anything like it. The earth shaking. Plate and ringmail clattering. The splintering shock of lances snapping as the charge hit home, men dashed against the mallards’ massive keelbones and crushed under their horny feet. Swords unsheathed to cleave helmets and stick in bone. The worst sound came when the mallards turned their thumbs on one another, the horrid squelching as they stabbed at throats and cheeks and haunches. Sir Ralph’s mount, Lady, had been hacked at all along her hindquarters by a maddened foe-beast, though she bore it without complaint as Will brushed her down and flushed her wounds with boiled wine. Great seeping puncture holes and jagged scratches two fingers across.

“That’s a girl,” Will murmured, rubbing her muzzle as the company barber, a fat, white-whiskered Teuton sir Ralph had met while on campaign on the continent, began to stitch her up with a long whalebone needle and a length of gut. Flies buzzed around the gashes. Lady let out a low, mournful grunt. She liked for sir Ralph to be close when she was under the needle or suffering from colic, but his blood was up and he had taken one of the prisoners — Will felt a pang of acrid jealousy — behind one of their patrol’s tents to shame him, the men laughing at the tears on the Welsh boy’s pale face.

The blushing bride!

Don’t worry sweetheart: we’ll be here for you once that dirty brute has had his way!
Waleran, the barber, knotted his last stitch and then bent and bit through it. “She is done,” he said, straightening up and wiping his big, soft hands on the front of his tunic. “What else I should do?”

“That’s fine,” said Will. “Go and see to the wounded.”

At the roadside some of the castle’s men at arms were forcing prisoners to their knees as sir Ralph’s secretary Edwin scratched the names of the captives in charcoal on a sheet of vellum. This one to ransom, this one to trade, these to be bound to such and such a tract of land under the supervision of a sheriff. A few Dick Preston simply killed from behind with the point of his warhammer, driving it down through first one skull and then another with a dull, hollow thunk of metal breaking bone. One man had a kind of fit after Dick pulled the spike out of his head, thrashing and kicking in the mud. The other simply fell flat on his face and did not move. The other squires were setting up camp chairs not far from the kneelers, long-haired and sallow men in mismatched bits of mail and boiled leather. Some of them looked as though they hadn’t eaten in a week.

“Glendower’s n-n-nephews,” bluff sir Edmund Greene stuttered as he strode out from behind the nearest tent and sank into his seat, his bodyservant and his squire descending on him swiftly to begin the long, laborious process of removing his mail, quilting, and leathers. “Leget and C-c-cadugan, or s-some such b-b-barbarous n-nonsense. Lord Owain will b-be wroth.”

“It will not matter one whit,” said tall, gaunt Dick Preston, as he joined the circle, tossing his hammer to his squire, Robert Mortimer, and pushing back his coif to wipe his bloodstained face with a soiled kerchief. “The King will not make peace with Glendower, except by the sword. How many chances has he had before him and refused?”

“This is n-n-not the t-time,” said sir Edmund. “Still your t-t-t-t-t—” He pounded his thigh with a mailed fist, face reddening, until with a choked gasp his throat unsealed itself. “TONGUE, d-damn it. Damn you. Shit. Tom would not like this t-t-talk, not about his m-m-majesty.”

“R-r-r-right as usual,” sir Ralph chuckled, pushing his way through the prisoners and stepping over one of the men Dick Preston had killed. He dropped into his own seat and beckoned back over his shoulder for Will, who quickened his pace. “However Tommy and His Nibs decide to spend them, we’ve bagged two of Glendower’s nephews.” He seized Will’s wrist, looking back at him. “I have a need to put my feet up. What can we do about that?”

Will stepped in front of the knight and sank to his hands and his knees in the trampled dirt, breathing through his mouth to keep from gagging at the scent of blood and shit mixed into the earth’s rich, loamy smell. Dick Preston laughed. Sir Ralph’s spurs pricked the small of Will’s back as the knight settled his feet. Will’s cheeks burned. There was an excitement to it, beneath the humiliation. He had done this before, though never in front of others. He could feel the older squires looking at him. Rob Mortimer, who everyone called Rabbit on account of his prominent buck teeth, and broad, soft-spoken Walter Mannering, sir Edmund’s boy. No doubt they’d been used the same during their breaking in.

“You are a b-b-bastard, Ralph,” snarled sir Edmund. “A h-h-horse apple. PISS. Shit. Fuck. Imp-p-pertinent.”

Dick Preston held a hand up. “As the mummer said to the bishop, I’ve taken both your points.” He paused for Ralph’s snort of laughter. “I spoke out of turn, now let us all be friends again. If you can’t celebrate the sight of a great heap of dead Welshmen with your brothers, what’s left to you?”

“To dead Welshmen,” said sir Ralph, raising his wineskin. His spurs dug deeper into Will, who bit his lip to keep from crying out. Stools, after all, had no voices.

“To d-d-d-d-DEAD, damn it all, fuck — dead W-welshmen.

Preston drank. A little wine ran red down his long, slim throat as his Adam’s apple worked. He wiped his chin with the same bloody kerchief, smiling broadly. “Dead Welshmen.”

                                                              ****

From her place beside lady Elizabeth at the end of the earl’s table, Katherine watched the merriment of the great hall with heartsick envy. It was only three years now since her father, a wool merchant, had been raised to the peerage for financing the king’s Scottish ambitions, and two since her ladyship had called for a new girl and Kate’s ambitious mother had proffered up her darling over others, fairer and better bred, by dual incentive of flattering portraits and an “unrelated” gift of olive oil, sixteen hogs, and a beautiful ostri mare with gray and black plumage and an odalisque’s long, curling eyelashes.  “It’s prettier than Kate,” her father had grunted when he first laid eyes on it.

“He dotes on Pole and de Vere with sickening attentions,” the earl snarled, mouth full of onion and gravy. “Another month and he’ll be vomiting his breakfast into their open mouths like a broody sparrow.”

“de la Pole,” Surrey corrected him, chuckling. “You ought to have heard him chide those foresters, Tom. Nobody screeches like His Ladyship when you rob him of his wood!”

“If only John would hear reason and return,” said Bolingbroke, combing his thick fingers through his forked, wiry beard. He was a big man, square and solid, with a doleful voice. “Three pennons in the last year, and still he stays intent on taking Castile for his bride.”

“Castile!” the earl roared. He knocked his trencher from the table with a sweep of his arm, spraying Bolingbroke with gravy and soaking his own sleeve. At once the hall’s raptors were a knot of tearing, snapping feathers ripping at the bread and meat strewn over the flagstones. A few rolled locked in half-mock combat, strings of dripping pork stretched taut between their jaws. “Is he short of soap? I would have lent him some.”

“Do not fault John,” Surrey interjected crossly as a shaking serving girl replaced the earl’s lost supper. “An English king on Castile’s throne would be a dagger at Charles’ breast. Besides, Pole and de Vere have made the court unsafe for him. For all the Gaunts, in truth.”

The earl flapped his sodden sleeve in frustration until another girl appeared to wring it out. “And he has left them ample room to do so!” he snapped. “You know what the king is like; step from his sight and you are a fart in the wind. If John had stayed we would not find ourselves so poorly led, nor Richard throttled by such base and ugly counsel.”

“Do they not fight like children?” Lady Elizabeth whispered in Katherine’s ear. Her breath smelled of garlic and mint. “I have seen manlier in swaddling cloth.”

Katherine reddened. Her own mother would never have dared to mock her father so lightly, much less where he might overhear. Lady Elizabeth had been good to her, though. Far better than she’d hoped when she set out in tears from her father’s warm, comfortable house in Cumberland. If she was coarse in her manners on occasion, who was Kate to judge? The earl seldom imposed himself on her bed while she was heavy with child — his third was expected soon — and after the first week’s tears and stiffness Kate had started to enjoy her ladyship’s soft, dextrous fingers and to marvel at the soft impacts against her palm when the babe kicked in her womb. There were other girls sometimes and on occasion she would spend a night in their little bedchamber, gossiping with Ann le Crecy and Joan Howard or sometimes playing kissing games and reading frightening stories from Joan’s little red book. Not often, though.

You are her favorite, Kate. There is no question of it. Ann’s hand cupping the spill of her soft belly. She likes her girls well fatted, and you are so round and plump. A little sweet, like the French make. Patisserie.

Lady Elizabeth’s hand on her thigh. “The night before sir Richard and the rest of them rode off to deal with the Welsh raiders,” the lady whispered to her, “Thomas came to me and knelt beside my bed, and he wept like a child and said that he wanted to ride out with the men so that his loves would not die without his arms around them, if misfortune should befall the party. I have never seen him so tender. I confess my thoughts were most unmaidenly, but then I am no maiden.

“When we lay together I gave him what he needed. You recall the little soapstone Madonna gifted to me by the Bishop of Kent? Of course you do. The one with the sapphire eyes.”

Her grip tightened. Kate felt suddenly light-headed. She had drunk too much. Sitting at the earl’s table, even with the women at the end, made her nervous. Lady Elizabeth’s whispering made it worse. Her trencher suddenly repulsed her, the gravy shining with grease, the translucent roast onions tangled like a great mass of flatworms. The friar and priest and the chapel’s acolytes seemed all to stare at her from their table below the dais, just above the salt, and the rookery boys were laughing at something the raptor master Geoffrey de Launcey had said, spit stretching between their teeth, while the earl’s fool John Moon stood up on a long trestle table and lit his farts with a candle flame to wild applause.

That night, long after she had staggered out into the cool gloom of the inner courtyard to vomit by flickering torchlight, after she had swilled water around her sour, stinking mouth and chewed a sprig of mint and put her tongue inside lady Elizabeth, she slipped from the great bed and past the old crone she knew only as Nurse, asleep in a chair by the door, through the maids’ chamber where the mingled scent of cunt and lemons hung in the air and then out into the galleries. The castle was silent, lights burning on the walls, bored guards looking out over the lake and the Roman road. Her thoughts raced. Her slippers made no sound on the courtyard steps or as she crossed the flagstones to the high court stair, lifting her skirts out of the dust.

Out on the plateau the kites were moonbathing, their huge wings spread wide to catch the silver glow. A few turned their great heads to follow Kate’s progress across the rammed and leveled earth, one letting out an inquisitive gobble, but they soon lost interest. She passed the aviary barn and the squat gray bulk of Pennon House. The smoke-blackened husk of its predecessor, which had burned in the time of the earl’s father, stood a little farther up the hill, and the woman she had come to meet was waiting in its ruin. In the entry hall she sat slumped on the sooty steps which had once led to the house’s upper floor, a tall, slender thing with cropped dark hair in fur-trimmed riding leathers like a man’s, her flight mask dangling from around her neck.

“You’re flushed,” said the woman.

“It’s a long walk,” said Kate, embarrassed. She felt painfully aware of the sweat between her thighs, of the fishy smell still lingering on her lips and fingertips. She took the leather scroll case from within her cloak. “Everything is here. I did as you asked. The code, I mean. Memorized it.”

The woman held out a gloved hand. Dust motes danced in the shafts of silver light that fell through the charred beams and hanging stonework. “Bring it.”

Kate licked her lips. She didn’t like the old Pennon House. With every step toward the inky darkness of the stair she felt more acutely conscious of the weight of the stones above her, of the chance — however small — that any mislaid foot or careless cough might bring a black deluge of soot and rock to pulverize her body and entomb it, never to be found. How could the rider look so perfectly at ease here?

A pale giant emerged slowly from the shadowed steps beyond the rider, planting the clawed knuckle of one massive wing beside its mistress as it turned its head sidelong and a mad yellow eye found Kate. Its throat and skull were bald and scabby, freighted with pendulous wattles which hung like a cock’s over the base of its massive bill. Fine white hair covered its body, shifting gently in the night breeze. A kite of some kind, near as large and twice as ugly. Kate fought the urge to turn and run, or scream. Whoever the rider worked for, whatever she wanted, Kate had no illusions she would leave the ruined house alive if she betrayed their presence. She proffered the scroll case, ashamed at how her hand trembled, and at the thin trickle of piss she could feel running down her leg.

“Mordred doesn’t bite,” the rider said, her voice soft. She reached up to scratch the great kite’s throat. “Do you, my brute?” The pale kite made a dry, thin clacking sound deep in his chest, and the rider pursed her lips and kissed at him the way some did  with cats. Psspss. Then, still stroking the kite’s plumage, the rider took a little paper packet from her doublet and tossed it to Kate, who fumbled, nearly dropping it. It weighed nothing at all.

“See your lady love drinks that,” said the rider. Her mount wrapped his other wing around her, half screening her from sight, but her dark eyes glittered over his pale membrane. “It should dissolve in ale or wine easy enough.”

Kate thought of the little kick against her ear. Her heart was a stone in her chest. “How — what will it do to her?”

The rider swung herself up onto the kite’s back with practiced ease.“If you should hesitate,” she said, glancing back over her shoulder as her mount turned to climb the stairs toward the open sky. “I promise the next order will be worse.”

The giant and his rider slipped back into the dark. A few dry scrapes and clatters, then the whump of massive wings flogging the air, and then all was silent once again. Kate looked at the packet in her hand. She was still shaking.

She wanted to vomit again.