“You remember me, my lord, Matilda of Risle?”
“The moss lady.” He looked exactly the same except that he was drier and had bound Saxon trousers showing beneath his habit. “It worked, you know. Wonderful on putrid wounds. We’re having great success in the hospital.”
Chattering happily he followed her like Theseus led by Ariadne through the maze of skaters to the island on which her household was camped. She settled him on a rug with a leather cup of Berte’s hot, spiced wine in his hands.
“My lord, do you happen to know a Roman called Vegetius or something? I should like my son to learn of him.”
The abbot looked at her as if snakes had sprouted out of her head. “War,” he said; in fact he almost shouted. “It turns up wherever you look. Their filthy war and their sieges and their blood. I’ll have nothing to do with it.” Wine tipped out of his cup and down his habit. He calmed himself down.
“I’m sorry. It’s just that I’m sick of anything to do with war. They’re trying to drag in the Church, my abbey, ordinary people, making them choose one side or another, when they’re both the same.” He smiled at Berte as she refilled his cup. “Yes, we have a copy of Vegetius in the library, but it is a manual for war, you know. Wouldn’t it be nicer if your son learned the preservation of life, Galen perhaps?”
“There’s a lot of war about,” said Matilda. “He’s going to be a knight, not a physician.”
The abbot sighed. “Well, it’s all learning… if you want to come over and copy it out, I’ll arrange it. I’m afraid the librarian wouldn’t let it beyond the walls.”
She was charmed. She couldn’t read or write; she knew of no woman who could. “I’ll send my chaplain tomorrow, if I may.”
Skating over the ice towards them came a monk and behind him limped a beggar who had neither skates nor boots. They approached Matilda’s island. The monk bowed to Abbot Walter, although to judge by his finer habit and the jewelled cross round his neck one might have mistaken him for the superior. Matilda, whose categorisations of class were unerring, recognised a commoner promoted above his station. The abbot introduced him with some pride, however: “This is my prior, Brother Daniel.” She remembered the complaints of Father Alors and her fellow-landowners in the Fens. This was the obstructionist. She didn’t like him.
“Forgive me, my lord.” Brother Daniel was plump and moist and obsequious. “We have been doling out food and ale to the poor as you commanded” – he pointed to some braziers and a stall surrounded by a crowd a hundred yards away – “and this man complains of his foot. I thought perhaps…”
“Of course.” The abbot drew the beggar up the rise and set him on Matilda’s rug with an automatic: “Do you mind?” Matilda did mind; the man was filthy and covered in sores, doubtless self-induced; since he was one of the poor who would eventually inherit the Kingdom of Heaven she saw no reason why he should in the meantime pollute her rugs. However, in such exalted company she could hardly say so. “Please go ahead.”
It was the abbot who unwrapped the rags from the foot. Matilda noticed that Brother Daniel didn’t touch the beggar himself. He was looking at the abbot and she, looking at him, was shocked by the blankness of his face which had only a minute ago glistened with smiles and perspiration. It registered nothing. Some shutter had come down to hide something else. She thought: “I wouldn’t turn my back on that little man.”
A smell of dirt and corruption came from the beggar’s foot, though the man himself was enthusiastic with drink. “You cure it, lord. Go ahead and cure it. I’m happy.” He was prepared for one touch of the abbot’s finger to drive out his foot’s ailment. So was Matilda.
Three of his revealed toes were split and dark. “Snow got in it,” explained the pauper cheerily, “but don’t you worry about that, lord, it don’t hurt now. You go ahead and cure.”
The abbot turned to Brother Daniel. “Get him drunk.”
“He’s drunk already.”
“Get him drunker. It’s frostbite.” As Brother Daniel gestured to the monks in the distance, Abbot Walter turned to the beggar. “We’ve got to cut these toes off, my son. You shall come to my infirmary and we’ll do it right away.”
“Don’t you bother, lord.” The beggar was edging off the rug. “They don’t hurt now. Don’t you worry.”
The abbot pinioned the man’s ankles. “My son, they have an evil humour which, if it isn’t stopped, will spread to your vital organs and you will die.” He put his nose down to the foot and sniffed luxuriously. “See? You can smell the evil. I can’t cut them off myself – I’m not allowed to shed blood – but I’ve trained the smith and I shall stop the bleeding with some wonderful moss…” Two monks came up to support the beggar, who was beginning to sway, and led him off.
Brother Daniel said sorrowfully: “I fear you can’t be in the infirmary tonight, my lord.”
“Why not?”
“If you remember, my lord, the Glanvilles are coming with other of our chief tenants.” Brother Daniel was sweetly urging, as if talking to a child.
The spirit drained away from the abbot’s face: Matilda saw he was older than she had once thought. “Can’t you do it?”
“My lord, they wish to discuss the possibility of mounting a crusade against the Saracens at Lisbon.”
“War again,” shrieked the abbot; “don’t they know we are on the point of great discovery? The schools in Paris, the Arab mathematics, the new medicine at Bologna… we are beginning to learn about this amazing plan God has made for us and all they can think about is killing. I tell you if they leave me alone to think and find out, away from all this bureaucracy and feasting, I could uncover the face of God.”
Only Berte was equal to the embarrassment. She leaned forward and put another cup of wine into the abbot’s hand. “You tell ’em.”
The abbot stared into the cup. “I can’t go on like this, Daniel.” The prior shrugged; obviously the solution, whatever it was, lay in the abbot’s own hands.
When the two monks prepared to take their leave Matilda said: “Do you have to go so soon?” She did not understand Abbot Walter nor half what he said but when she was with him she felt in touch with new horizons; again she was conscious of the similarity between him and the boy Fitzempress. But hopelessly the abbot said he must.
“I must pray and make my confession before I meet these people.”
He had completely won Berte’s maternal heart. “What sins could you possibly have, lad?”
He looked straight at her. “I have this problem with lust.”
The women watched him skate away. “Poor man,” said Matilda, “perhaps we ought to invite him to Dungesey.”
“Definitely,” said Adeliza. “Poor man.”
As they ate their lunch they were a sitting target for Stunta, the clerk. “Request a council, commander. King’s sieging Bedford. Ely’s in revolt. War’s coming closer.”
Matilda knew it and for this day at least had been trying to forget it. She looked at the man with loathing. Percy of Alleyn had used all his influence with her to persuade her to drop, temporarily, her attempts to get the clerk dismissed from his church. “He may not be much on the spiritual side, my lady, but these are military times, and if the parish is levied I’d rather see it led to war by someone like Stunta than, say, Father Alors.”
The thought of Father Alors in battle had amused Matilda and she had given in – for the time being. Now she bit into a duck wing with a savagery which would have disconcerted a lesser man. “Well?”
“Muster the parish levies soon. Fight for the king for forty days. Dungesey unprotected. Women need defence. Teach them to shoot.”
Why did the fool talk as if longer sentences would give away information to the enemy? “Shoot? They shoot already.” More than once she had seen a Fen wife stop what she was doing, grab a bow and send an arrow at a duck or goose flying overhead. Usually they hit it.
“Crossbow. Deterrent. Nobody’d charge a woman with a crossbow. Too chancy. An exper
t in our midst.” Stunta pointed to where a figure was pushing itself along one of the courses bent double, arms behind its back. It was the mercenary from Ghent, holder of the king’s warrant. “Master-arbalist. Shame to waste him.”
Matilda opened her mouth to send the idiot packing and then closed it to suck on the duck wing while she considered. She had every reason for not granting the clerk’s request. She did not like him, she did not like the mercenary and certainly she did not like the crossbow, despicable weapon that it was. Further, no lord liked his peasants armed above the average; it gave them ideas and turned them into better poachers.
But the last few years had loosened the floorboards in Matilda’s mind between what was conventional and suitable for women and what was not. The powerlessness she had experienced, especially during her marriage to Vincent, had deeply affected her. She had been frightened by her helplessness. Kings, men, commanded everything. They gave you a husband and told you he was your lord to be obeyed. He died and they gave you another and he was your lord to be obeyed. They frightened you if you were barren, they frightened you if you were fruitful. She wanted to defy and to spite. She wanted to control something. Waleran of Meulan moved across the shifting floorboards and a wicked Matilda rose up and pointed a crossbow at him; she wasn’t going to use it, but Waleran didn’t know that and was afraid. She took the duck wing out of her mouth. “All right. He can teach me at the same time.”
* * *
The Dungesey men filed down to the Causeway to practise archery with the conventional bows they would use in the army, led by Stunta, and left the butts on Middle Green free for the women. Steward Peter had expected them to dislike their women being trained as home-front arbalists, but they had accepted the idea, though their jokes were unremitting.
“Try and miss the church bell,” Kakkr called out, “that comes in handy.”
“Try and miss the church,” said Wyrm. “Same reason.”
His wife, Milly, pretended fury and pointed her crossbow at him, which sent him off, miming terror. The mercenary strode down the line: “What have I told you?”
She sulked. “Only aim if we wants to kill. Only aimed at his head. Wouldn’t hurt that. Nothing in it.”
Willem waited for the cackling to stop. “You would kill him wherever you hit him. Why?”
“’Cause they die from bleeding and shock.”
Through the frosted morning air came the shouts from Stunta as he threw down the clout on the Causeway and paced out the distance so his archers could get the right trajectory. “Eight score. Loose.” There was the rushing of arrows. Willem wiped the palms of his hands down his jerkin; anybody who’d been in battle sweated at the sound. But those arrows were only effective in the main if they hit exposed skin; they couldn’t pierce mail nor, more often than not, the padded leather hauberk. The weapon he was putting in the hands of these women could pierce anything. He said: “If you, or any of you, do that again, you get out of this troop. Load.”
They were using light bolts which needed a less powerful prod but which, with their superior speed, could penetrate as far. Six tassels vigorously polished six bolt grooves, and the bolts were inserted. “Cock.” At least they’d stopped giggling at that.
Teaching women had brought more problems than he’d expected. Six pairs of feet were inserted in the stirrup – he’d made them with double stirrups so that they could put both feet in and get more leverage. He’d underestimated how strong they were; only Matilda, who’d never done the manual work which gave the others muscle, found it difficult to draw back the hemp string over the catch, but her determination made up for that.
“Aim.” A child who’d been standing on a water-butt to watch gave a wail as it fell off. One of the bows wavered. “You dare,” Willem shouted, “the enemy’s advancing whether that kid cries or not. Don’t think. Breathe. Let half of it out.” Six chests took in the air and half-exhaled it as six bows steadied on the butts sixty paces away. “Loose.”
Chwwt-pt.
Tuna broke away from the line and ran towards her child. On finding it was all right she hit it which made it wail again. At least, thought Willem, she’d taken her bow with her. He’d broken them of putting the thing on the ground. Followed by the rest he walked to the butts.
Only a handful of the island women had been found suitable for training. Some were pregnant, the others were too old or crippled with rheumatism. The Wealas women had flatly refused, saying they had their own way of dealing with male enemies. (“Screw them to death, no doubt,” Fenchel had said.) That left five and Matilda.
The yew trees had been lopped to within an inch of their lives to provide the heartwood for the prods and an elderly ox had sacrificed its existence and heels for the glue and his hide for the belts. The women had helped to make their own bows, all except Matilda who could not imagine a time when she would not have servants to do it for her. Willem had insisted, however, that she make and fletch her own bolts. “No arbalist worth his salt lets anyone else do his fletching.” So with Berte holding a struggling goose Matilda, with distaste, had plucked likely pinions from its wings. “Right and left wings are flighted different. Use feathers from the same wing.”
At first Matilda had been affronted by the mercenary’s attitude, and had told Alleyn: “He must not talk to me like that. He must treat me with respect.” But Percy of Alleyn had said: “He’s a professional, my lady. He’s teaching you as he would teach any man, lord or peasant. It’s the only way he knows. Remember Jacques at Risle?” And into Matilda’s memory had floated the long-quieted voice of the master-at-arms teaching her brothers. “Lunge, my lord, lunge. You’re not a maiden afraid for her bloody honour. Lunge.” She recalled the master-at-arms who had berated Fitzempress. Oh well, if princes could stand it, she could.
“At least he doesn’t handle me,” she thought, “and he’d better not.” The mercenary would put his arms round the other women, moulding them into the right stance, hitting their elbows down, but Matilda he never touched.
He was a mercenary and she despised him, but on the second lesson he had demonstrated how it should be done and casually shot six bolts, each one burying itself uniformly into the gold, and Matilda had seen she was learning from a master.
At the butts each of the six women had lodged a bolt in the target somewhere. They were getting better, though only two of them had the makings of fine archers. One of them was Matilda herself and one was Maggi, Stunta’s woman. At first Matilda had been affronted that she must stand in the same line as the clerk’s trollop, but when she had seen how good Maggi was at archery she had been overcome by the urge to be better.
Maggi, who had hit the outer gold, was a small, thin woman whose fuzzy red hair escaped from her cap to frame a small pointed face and blob of a nose, giving her the appearance of a russet hedgehog. “She’s a natural,” Willem had told Stunta, and the clerk had wept with pride. Matilda was less naturally gifted but she had a ferocity which the best arbalists possessed, launching something of their own will at the target ahead of the bolt. All the others just stood behind their crossbow and shot it.
“This is what you are aiming at.” Willem stabbed his finger into the gold. “This. It’s easy. Stop thinking about your bloody sex lives and shoot. We keep at it till we get it right. Tomorrow we’ll try from the kneeling position. Retrieve.”
As Milly went back to her place she winked at him. “Any position, any time,” she said. Which was the other problem with teaching women.
* * *
Father Alors’ sojourn at Ramsey Abbey while he wrote out the work of Vegetius in his careful script was extended. He found spiritual comfort in the beauty and lack of women of the abbey. He also enjoyed its cellar.
“You could have copied out the Bible in this time,” Matilda told him crossly on his return, but soon she and the rest of her household were absorbed in the amazing tale Father Alors carried.
“Give up the abbacy?” Matilda was incredulous.
“Well may yo
u disbelieve your ears, madam. I could scarcely credit it myself. But that is what Walter wishes to do, it seems.” He drank off a beaker of wine. “Most of his monks say he’s been manoeuvred into it by Brother Daniel and are afraid. They don’t want him to go. But there are those who support Brother Daniel because of his big promises. Hysterical as women the lot of them. Quem Deus vult perdere dementat prius.” Father Alors, who had never approved of the monastic ideal, snorted, “St. Oswald must be groaning in Paradise to see his heir so effeminate.”
“He’s not effeminate,” said Matilda, automatically defending the abbot, though she did not understand him. She couldn’t see why deserting one’s post should be accounted a female quality. She herself would never have abandoned such power.
* * *
King Stephen’s army, which had come to put down Bishop Nigel’s revolt, teetered on the edge of the uplands and looked out through fine spring rain across a puzzle of water and carr, to where the island of Ely lay, and wondered how the hell to get to it.
The local population was unhelpful. So was the terrain; rivers which promised at first to flow in the right direction turned back on themselves and went somewhere else. Two patrols which had been sent to locate the island had not come back.
The king’s chamberlain entered the king’s tent. “I have put the Abbot of Ramsey and his prior in the guest pavilion, my lord.”
“Did you find out what they want?”
“My lord.” The chamberlain tested his words as if he could not believe them. “The abbot wishes to give up his position at Ramsey and will request that you put his prior, Daniel, in his place.”
“Relinquish his abbacy?” It was unheard of.
“That is my understanding. And, my lord, Prior Daniel indicated secretly to me that he wished to see you first and alone.” The chamberlain hesitated. “I think you should see him, my lord.”
The Morning Gift Page 13