WYRM I.I

PART I: NORFOLK

The wolf, escorted by his milk-drawn dam,

Unknown to mercy, tears the guiltless lamb;

The towering eagle, darting from above,

Unfeeling rends the inoffensive dove;

The lamb and dove on living nature feed,

Crop the young herb, or crush the embryon seed.

Nor spares the loud owl in her dusky flight,

Smit with sweet notes, the minstrel of the night;

Nor spares, enamour'd of his radiant form,

The hungry nightingale the glowing worm;

Who with bright lamp alarms the midnight hour,

Climbs the green stem, and slays the sleeping flower.

The Temple of Nature

-Erasmus Darwin

                                            Chapter I: Boys and Girls

                                       Framlingham Castle, East Anglia

                                                 Spring of 1387

They spooked easy, the tricornes. Move too quickly past one and its piggy little eyes would narrow right before it put a three-foot horn through your belly and heaved you up over its back like a miller tossing a sack of grain. William would not miss them. His twelfth year had been spent shoveling their pungent dung and rubbing down their flanks, every Tuesday risking life and limb to wax their horns and clean blood and shit from their huge bony crests, broad and tall as soldiers’ shields, while they drank watered wine from their troughs to keep them docile. A boy named Hugh had died doing that not four months past. One moment he’d been running a cloth along one of Clara’s brow horns, the next he was tangled in the paddock fence upside-down and with his guts all oozing out of his slit stomach and over his chest and face. No, William would not miss them.

He stood outside their paddock now, watching their huge armored heads dip to their troughs, their parrot beaks part to lap water in which pollen and dead insects floated. No more filing down their horny nails or smearing unguent on their irritated hides where their tack had rubbed them raw. No more scraping their dried shit from the soles of his boots. From now on he was sir Ralph Lackland’s squire, his only duty the care and upkeep of his master’s arms and steeds. Sir Ralph owned three mounts of the best Liverpool stock, a pair of oxblood mallards with banded black and white tails and six-inch spikes for thumbs and a swift, playful ostrida with plumage all royal blue and emerald green which he rode only for hunting. William had taken him out for his exercise the morning past and never in his life had he felt anything so free and wild as the long-necked reptile’s speed on the old Roman road. Even when Cardinal Percy, that was the ostrida, had bucked and spat and run off-trail, William had only laughed. I’ll never have to shovel dung again.

He’d boasted as much to the other stable boys, Ed and Harry and Lame Llewyn, the Welsh bastard with the clubfoot, and they had teased and flattered and looked at him with loathing and with envy and with adoration, and none of them had dared to do so much as touch him. They could call him bum boy all they liked; they knew he’d climbed higher than any of them ever would, and they feared him for it. It felt good.

“Hullo, Bill,” said Harry, breaking William’s trance. The fat, tow-headed boy had wheeled a handcart heaped with millet up to the fence and now crouched down to heave it over into the waiting trough. Already the tricornes were raising their heads from their drink, snorting and blowing. “Give us a hand?”

“You’ve two of your own,” said William, stepping back from the fence. He felt angry, though he didn’t quite understand why. He thought of the games he’d played with Harry and the others. Chivy and Put-and-Take and Three in the Bride’s Bed. Hands in breeches and kisses sticky with honey pilfered  from old Maggie’s bees. His cheeks burned and he turned away to hide the flush. “Do it yourself.”

He set out across the courtyard before Harry could say something back. The other boys were jealous. Weak. They knew he was a man grown now, or nearly, and they resented him for it as they’d always resented him for his looks, for his fair skin and delicate features and his long golden hair which sir Ralph liked him to wear loose. They’d called him maiden fair and Isabella and sometimes he’d danced with the girls on May Day in a stolen dress and no one had known, or if they had they hadn’t said so. His mother when she lived had been in service in the duke’s kitchens and she’d called him her angel, mon ange, in her husky voice that had dried up and blown away on the Mortality’s black wind four summers past. His father had been someone, surely.

Past the fullery where Maggie and Old Jane were stomping laundry in piss-water while some brats played at quoits nearby and then the stables, Davey the Harelip leading one of the duke’s mallards through the open doors into the outbuilding’s dung-smelling gloom as the beast lowed and tossed her head. Sparrows, tits, and pigeons flew from his path as he crossed the East courtyard under the rookery’s shadow. In the tower the swordbills and bloody vicars were crying for their supper, high and plaintive squawks that carried for miles while their hairy snaggletooth cousins, little butcher’s boys no larger than a man’s fist, drank and bathed in the public fountain, beating their leathery wings and inspecting one another for ticks and biting fleas. They shat elsewhere and so the maids and footmen drawing up for baths never bothered to shoo them off.

“Lizzie’s after you!” shouted Arnault the cooper, who was pissing against the forge’s wall with his breeches down around his ankles and his skinny buttocks bare to the wind. “Best get thee a good sharp knife, my Nancy.”

“I don’t need to carve a girl to gentle her,” Will hollered back. “We don’t all have your way with cunt, old man.”

He rounded the corner to the sound of Arnault’s high, hoarse cackle and waved to Hugh the armorer, who was beating out the red-hot links of an iron chain on his anvil while his sons, hands and faces blacked with soot, worked the bellows. Hugh nodded back. Sometimes he gave a florin, after, and always a kind word. Out through the postern and across the shadow of the prison tower where the old earl had hung highwaymen and poachers out for all to see until the butcher’s boys stripped them to bone and sinew. Now there were women plucking geese for supper and stuffing the small feathers into burlap sacks and trading gossip with one of lady Elizabeth’s maids, a plump young thing named Katherine all the castle’s boys were forever plying with sweets and poetry.

From the top of the cut stone steps leading down to the low court in the lee of the curtain wall Will could see clear across the looking-glass surface of the mere where a herd of duckies dipped their crested heads to drink and to sieve pond weed from the muddy banks to the hills beyond. The Scots and their French masters had come within a day’s march of those same rises only a summer earlier, after the king’s expedition failed and the earl had ridden home in a towering fury. Hotspur and his riders came to Framlingham to reprovision and remount after routing the invaders a week later. Will still dreamed sometimes of Henry Percy, that strong jaw with its well-kempt beard, that cropped hair the color of ripe wheat, but dark with sweat as he wrestled off his helm and tossed it to his squire. The devil’s own broad, shining grin in spite of his three broken teeth. A Frenchman’s mace had done it, he said cheerfully as he swung himself down from the back of his shrike. The beast was blown, foam dripping through its steel and leather muzzle, but it nuzzled its master when he set a hand against its thick, muscular neck. Just a trifle. That smile. A few teeth.

God loves us all, every wretch in Creation, Will had heard the earl groused later as his valets dressed him for the evening meal, but none so much as He loves Harry Percy.

In the low court Dick Preston and sir Edmund Green were drilling the new levies for the coming raiding season. Port and brace, advance, fall back. Kill. Die. Get out of the bloody way before the heavy lancers trample you to paste. A few of the other squires and knights’ favorites were hanging about on the edges of the beaten marshaling ground. “Shields, shields, shields!” Dick bellowed, beating his own with the flat of his training sword as though to remind his charges what the object in question looked like. His face was the deep red of fresh blood. “You want holes poked in your tits? Want to try breathing through your neck?”

In among the campaign tents, broadcloth flapping in the light spring breeze, the smell of cooking meat and sweat and shit. Pullets underfoot, bright-eyed little things eating lice from their bedrolls and stealing ends of bread. Will knelt to let one eat the rind of the little round of cheese he’d had for breakfast from his palm. “Puss puss,” he cooed, scratching its feathered skull as it nosed curiously at his hand. “That’s a girl. Good girl.”

Sir Ralph was waiting for him in the warm gloom of his tent. The knight lay half covered in furs, his quilted arming jacket unlaced to show his scars, his broad chest rising and falling slowly as with half-lidded eyes he watched Will duck under the flap. “Come here, boy,” he husked, his voice rough with sleep. “My damned leg is cramped again, and Preston says we’re soon to ride against the raiders. Make yourself useful.”

Will went to the pallet and knelt, pulling back the furs to reveal sir Ralph’s muscular calf, puckered by a long-ago French arrow. He straddled the leg carefully and pushed his thumbs into the knotted muscle. He began to work at it, soft at first, then harder, kneading and pressing. The knight stretched out, gritting his teeth. Puss puss, thought Will. Good girl.

                                                               ****

Lizzie had not meant to fall in love with daft, pretty Will Darcy. It embarrassed her that she’d done so anyway. Angered her, sometimes. The other pennons — a few of whom could read about as well as she — had found a poem she’d written once about his hair and years later hollering out bathe’d in/thy honey’d locks/my heart does burst/whene’er he talks remained a popular jape among the older girls, who preferred one another’s mouths, fingers, and secreted candlesticks to fumblings with boys. Among the earl’s levies one need only mention the pennons to see all manner of vulgar mime, flat palms rubbed against tucked cocks, fingers thrust together crotch to crotch. Sooner find a maid in a brothel than a willing lay among the pennon girls.

Even strapped to her kite Chauntecleer’s back, the whole of the countryside laid out below her in grids marked by the rivers and the stone walls of shepherds and the straight dun ribbons of the old Roman roads, she could think of nothing but Will. Beautiful Will. How she longed to piss in his mouth, to trap that pretty face between her thighs and make him drink her bitter urine. She let out a snarl of frustration into the wind and pressed her masked face to the hump of soft, velvety skin at the base of Chauntecleer’s long neck. The thunder of the kite’s great heart drummed soft and swift there.

I want to beat you, Will. She had looked for him on her land leave the day before and found no trace. The other squires had smirked at her when she went asking after him. I want to hurt you til you love me.

The kite trilled deep in his chest, banking left, and Lizzie raised her head. The wind beat at the roughened bronze and cunning little glass eyepieces of her flight mask. There, in the cleft between a low berm and the rocky Southern slope of the hills, she caught the flash of sunlight glinting off of polished metal. Armed men on the move. Outriders on ostri-back moving ahead of a larger column, Welshmen and their wyrms, five or six hundred strong. Three days from Framlingham. Perhaps four. An hour’s ride to Newgate, twice that to Faircastle or Ulfpen. She gave a gentle tug on Chauntecleer’s reins, guiding him back Westward. Even a small party of raiders would have swordbills with them, and once airborne the smaller flyers would take Chauntecleer apart like rotten broadcloth. At full pelt, though, they would never match his speed.

The kite beat his massive wings, planes of hairy reddish skin bellying and flattening to Lizzie’s either side as the serpentine cables of his dorsal muscles flexed beneath her saddle. Looking back she could see the swordbills taking flight, circling higher and higher, but they were already falling away. Hungry shadows fading back into the failing light.

They landed hours later in the high field where the earl’s grandfather had leveled the hilltop, Chauntecleer coming to ground at an awkward, lumbering run on his hind legs before folding his vast wings and dropping to all fours along the final stretch of beaten earth. He shook himself and squawked, arcing his long neck around to peer at her as she began to unbuckle her legs from his saddle. “My baby,” she said, reaching up to scratch his throat as he tipped his long bill up and warbled with contentment. “My good boy.”

The ladder girls got her unstrapped and one helped her down while the other set to work on Chauntecleer’s tack. The kite gorged himself on fruit and scraps from the butcher brought up on a waxed canvas by another pair of girls while they worked. Lizzie pulled off her mask and worked the stiffness from her legs, using her arms to bend first one calf and then the other up against the hard muscle of her backside. She was just starting to sweat when a murmur ran through the ground crew.

“Pucker up,” one of the ladder girls muttered to Lizzie out the side of her mouth. “Skeleton's here.”

Lizzie lowered  her leg and turned to face Margaret Greene, the earl’s flight captain, advancing toward her from the direction of Pennon House. Though her flying days were long over, Greene dressed like all pennons in hose and breeches under a quilted doublet. She walked with a limp, leaning heavily on an ashwood cane, and she was so thin that when she sucked in her lips you could see the teeth pressing against the backs of them.

“Back early, Preston,” she rasped.

“Welsh raiders on the road to Newgate, ma’am.”

“Finally run out of sheep to fuck, have they?”

“Must have, ma’am.”

“Good girl.” Greene rapped one of the ladder girls on the shoulder with her stick. “Welsh on the road to Newgate. Tell Sam Mercer and the Bull. Now, damn you.”

The girl sped off. Lizzie could still remember the sting of that cane on her back from her own years running ladders and tending to the kites in their great aviary. I should learn their names, she thought, watching the little waif sprint across the field toward Pennon House and the steps down to the hall and towers. All these new children springing up like fungus.

“Chasing the Darcy boy again, I hear tell,” the Skeleton growled, signaling with a jerk of her head that Lizzie was to follow her. They set off in the runner’s wake. “Get his baby in your belly and I’ll flush the damned thing myself. I will not lose a flier, not in raiding season. Don’t give me this headache, you wretched slut. I will not stand for it. I’ll have your uncle chain you to your bloody bed before I see you waste yourself on some fool invert.”

“He’s not an invert.”

He is.

“Hush. Fool girl. You’ll have my post someday, if you keep your head. If not, you’ll be a nothing. Another fat sow, piglets sucking at your dugs, your man out rutting as he likes, your uncle grousing over your dowry until they put him in his grave. You think Dick Preston generous? Who chose the Pennons for you?” Slap of the stick across Lizzie’s shins, though the older woman stumbled with the effort of it. “Pay attention. Put that stripling from your mind. Tomorrow you dispatch to London with a message for his excellency the Lord Chancellor. Can you pull your melon from your cunt long enough to wait for his reply, ears open, thinking of the kingdom’s delicate position?”

She thought of Will on his back in the cellar with one of the other stable boys, years ago, and of the pearly gleam of their excitement spilled across flushed skin. She felt small. Breathless. Bathed in dust and grime among the chinks of light that fell through the wooden joists of the new scullery.

“I can, ma’am.”

“Prove it.”