by A. M. Linden
Chapter 19
Saying Farewell
After being dismissed by the abbess, Aleswina set out for Anna’s cottage, paying no attention to the gatekeeper’s startled look when she pushed the side door open and headed off along the main road that ran through the village. She hardly noticed the curious stares she got from villagers who stopped picking up after the guards’ futile Druid hunt to watch her rush by. When she reached the side path that led to Anna’s front door, she practically ran the rest of the way there.
The front door opened into the main room of Anna’s cottage. After stepping from the midday sunlight into the darkened room, Aleswina had to stop and wait for things to take their usual shape. Only they didn’t. The hearth that was always burning with warm, cheerful embers was cold and dead. The shelves that Annwr kept filled with orderly stacks of bowls and dishes were bare. There was only one table and one chair, and they were both lopsided, held upright with mismatched legs.
Anna wasn’t there. But she wouldn’t be inside—not on a bright, sunny day like this. She’d be outside in the garden, planting and weeding, with Solomon and the other geese following after her, snatching at the worms and bugs she dug up . . . or maybe Betrys was in labor, and Anna was helping her have her baby piglets.
Aleswina crossed the room and rushed into the garden.
Anna was there, pouring a bucket of water over a newly planted patch of meadowsweet at the edge of the fence. The rest of the garden lay in ruins. Sodden bits of gray feathers were scattered everywhere and a hint of sickish sweet stench—a scent Aleswina now knew to be the smell of clotted blood—lingered in the air.
“Anna, where are . . .” Aleswina paused mid-sentence, looking for the geese, especially for Solomon, who’d been her special favorite ever since Annwr had let her hold his hatching egg in her hands, and she’d watched as his little yellow beak pushed through a crack in the shell, his damp, fuzzy head popped up, his bright eyes blinking as he gazed into her face.
“They’re dead. The guards killed them—Solomon, Betrys, all of them. They took what they wanted for their supper. I’ve buried what was left.” Anna was looking at Aleswina as if she was having trouble recognizing her. “What are you doing here? The guards are still—”
“The guards are gone back to Gothroc. The abbess said I could come to tell you . . . to tell you . . .”
Everything Aleswina meant to tell Annwr tangled up into a lump in her throat. Choking on it, she somehow mixed the soldiers’ crimes with the wrong she had done keeping Anna away from her own little girl (compounded by the unconfessed sin of thinking about poisoning Caelym), so that when she managed to speak again, it was to repent and plead for forgiveness, falling to her knees under the crushing weight of all the wrongs done by Saxons against Britons and by Christians against Druids.
It wasn’t that Annwr didn’t recognize who Aleswina was so much as that she was confused about what she was—the sweet, loving child that she had raised as her own for the past fifteen years or the spawn of Llwddawanden’s worst enemy. And as for repentance and forgiveness, those were Christian notions, and Annwr only had to look around her to see how much good Christianity did for her.
Out of habit more than anything else, Annwr sat down next to Aleswina and put her arms around her. Then Aleswina started to cry, and Annwr rocked her until the sobs settled into whimpers that turned into snuffling, wet sighs.
By the time Aleswina had finished wiping her eyes and blowing her nose on Annwr’s apron, the gap between them had closed, and they were talking as freely as ever. Annwr explained her plan for Caelym to travel disguised as a monk, and Aleswina told Annwr about how the abbess thought Saint Edeth had talked to her, and they both laughed until their sides ached. Together, they agreed that Aleswina would bring Caelym back to the cottage that night, and that Annwr would have everything packed and ready to go.
Aleswina was adamant in telling Anna that she was to take with her all of the coins and jewels they had brought in secret from the palace and kept hidden in the cottage loft. Annwr had refused at first, but for once Aleswina was the more stubborn and unyielding, and both of them could see that Annwr would need these funds more than Aleswina would. Having worked out their plans, they had sat with their arms around each other for as long as they dared before Aleswina got up, whispered that she’d be back after the late-night prayers, and left, fighting against a new round of tears.
Chapter 20
Idwolda
“As our Lord chose to die on the cross out of his love for us, so each of us who make our holy vows to Him choose to live loving only him, leaving behind all lesser loves and desires.”
Hildegarth had spent nearly an hour working and reworking that sentence until she felt satisfied that it smoothed the transition from Saint Luke’s account of the dying Christ’s last words to her announcement: “It is with heartfelt joy that I tell you that Sister Aleswina will be pledging herself to Him in body and spirit on Sunday.”
Managing to escape from her well-wishers with the excuse that she had to finish her day’s planting or lose a week’s harvest, Aleswina made her way to the garden, where she set her tray of starts close enough to Caelym’s bush to talk as she worked. Keeping her head down, she told him what Anna and she had decided—that she would go with him to Anna’s cottage after the late-night prayers, and also about the plan for him to travel disguised as a monk.
Caelym had woken from his nap refreshed and ready to leave. He wanted to go as soon as it was dark, and he wanted to go alone, but when he said so, Aleswina’s tears dripped onto the freshly turned earth and, reluctantly, he agreed to wait for her. It was generous of him in view of the pressing need he had to be on his way, but instead of thanking him she just went on working with her back to the bushes.
He endured her silence for a while, then wondered aloud whether there was anything “a person should know about being a monk?”
Aleswina answered without looking up, “Anna says you’ll have to keep quiet and let her do the talking because you don’t know any Christian prayers.”
“Dominus regit me; et nihil mihi deerit—”
At the first words of the twenty-third psalm, Aleswina dropped her trowel and turned around, her mouth open in surprise.
“. . . in loco pascuae ibi me conlocavit. Super aquam refectionis educavit me, animam meam convertit. Deduxit me super semitam iustitiae propter nomen suum . . .” Caelym went on chanting, his legs crossed in front of him, his hands, palm-side up, resting on his knees, his back straight and his eyes half closed, coming to a resonating conclusion on the last syllables, “in perpetuum.” Opening his eyes to see Aleswina gaping at him in what he assumed to be reproof, he said, stiffly, that he had only heard her say the incantation twice and had been, as she might recall, quite ill at the time. “So now if you will tell me how I have been in error, I will correct my mistakes and will speak these words as they should be spoken.”
“But you made no mistakes! You said the whole psalm exactly as it should be said! It took me weeks and weeks to learn it!” The awe and admiration in Aleswina’s voice were unmistakable.
His confidence restored, Caelym acknowledged her tribute. “Well, of course, I am both a bard and a healer, trained since youngest boyhood in careful memorization and in the precise recitation of poems, sagas, and spells.” Returning to the issue at hand, he continued, “So now you will teach me what else I must know to be a monk, and I will prove myself as good as or better than a real one, betraying neither myself nor Annwr—no matter what she may have said to the contrary!”
Caught between Anna’s warning and Caelym’s command, Aleswina started to stammer that she’d never met a monk when the garden gate slammed open and Caelym drew back into the depths of the bushes. From the noise of the footsteps rushing towards her, Aleswina guessed—to her dismay—that the intruder was Sister Idwolda.
Idwolda, the newest of the abbey’s novices, was known for three things: her humble peasant background, her sunny good nature, an
d her clumsiness. It had been a challenge from the first for Hildegarth to know where to safely assign her—sent to wash dishes, the pottery bowls would break almost before she touched them; sweeping the floors, her broom handle would knock icons from their niches and saints’ pictures off the walls; and it was taken as fact that she had only to walk past the door of the scriptorium for ink pots to tip over and spill on just-finished parchments. Mostly now, she worked in the laundry on the assumption that even she couldn’t do too much damage there.
It was an open secret that Idwolda had been admitted to the convent just as her mother was about to sell yet another one of her numerous children to help feed the rest—and that it was Aleswina who’d supplied her dowry and pleaded with the abbess to take her in.
Overwhelmingly grateful for finding herself in the safety and the comparative luxury of the convent, Idwolda wanted more than anything to be Aleswina’s friend. She always managed to sit next to Aleswina in the chapel, at the dining table, and in the common room, where, under the guise of talking about how better to serve God, she’d whisper gossip about the other nuns and novices or tell rambling stories of her life before coming to the convent, happily unaware that Aleswina had only rescued her because Anna asked her to and had never guessed that she would take it so personally.
Now Idwolda, rosy-cheeked and beaming, wisps of nut-brown hair curling out from under her wimple, came crashing around the end of the hawberry hedge. Skidding to a stop in the middle of the row that Aleswina had just finished planting, she began, “The abbess sent me to—”
Seeing Aleswina staring downwards, Idwolda looked down too, and, seeing the bent and battered seedlings crushed beneath her feet, she launched into a flood of apologies and promises to repair the damage, squashing another half-row and knocking over the water bucket as she reached for the nearest hoe.
“No, please don’t! It’s all right! I . . . I . . . need you to . . .” Desperate to save the rest of her plants, Aleswina said the first thing that came into her mind: “I need you to tell me about monks.”
“Why?”
“Because . . .” Aleswina’s newfound ability to make things up at the spur of the moment come to her rescue once again. “Because now that I am going to take my final vows, I want to learn all about our brothers in Christ and what they do to serve the Lord! And you, dear Sister Idwolda, you know so much about life outside our walls, you must tell me what monks do.”
Eager to be helpful, Idwolda launched into a vivid depiction of monks—how some were good folk, not with the grandness of priests, but kind and caring, while others were no better than beggars and layabouts in brown cloaks.
Spending most of her time under Saint Edeth’s rule of silence left Idwolda, a naturally talkative girl, with a build-up of words wanting to be said. Now, given the chance to break out, they got away from her, following one tangent after another, until, entirely lost and without any idea of how to find her way back to the original question, she ended up telling Aleswina not only about monks in general but about the particular monk (one of the kind and caring ones) who had stayed with her family to give comfort to her mother in those sad weeks after her father’s death, and finishing with the somewhat out-of-context remark that her dear little brother, Codric, who’d come ten months after her mother was widowed, was thought by some to favor that very monk.
In a more just life, Idwolda would have been an actress on a larger stage. Still, the private performance she gave, playing the varied parts of her dying father, her grieving mother, and the solicitous monk—even emulating Brother Egred’s deep bass voice singing a ballad about the Christ-child working miracles from His mother’s womb—did not go unappreciated by the small but highly select audience watching it from his hiding place in the bushes. It ended abruptly, however, when she suddenly remembered what she’d been sent by the abbess to tell Aleswina.
“You need to go to the sewing room right away! They’re waiting to get started on your getting-married-to-Jesus habit!”
With that, she picked up her skirts and dashed out of the garden, leaving the last stand of bean shoots crushed in her wake.
The massacre of her baby plants, so soon after seeing the devastation at Annwr’s cottage, was almost more than Aleswina could bear. She got up and left through the gate Idwolda had left swinging open behind her, too downhearted to put her trowels away or remind Caelym to wait until she came to get him after the late-night prayers.
Chapter 21
Olfrick
The silence that met Aleswina when she entered the sewing chamber bristled with impatience and irritation. Sister Eardartha pointed to a footstool with one hand, holding a threaded needle in the other, while Sisters Redella and Ralfwolda looked at her sternly, their scissors snipping at the air.
As they circled around her and draped sheets of white linen over her shoulders, snatches of whispered conversations she’d overheard on the way to the noon prayer came back to her.
“. . . gone on missions for the abbess . . .”
“. . . Sister Durthena and Sister Fridwulfa to Lindisfarne and Sister Oslynne to find Father Wulfric . . .”
“Alone?”
“By herself!”
“The roads are dangerous even if the sorcerer is gone . . .”
“. . . all sorts of men are on the roads . . .”
“No Christian man would harm a nun . . .”
“. . . and besides she’s got a letter of safe passage from the abbess . . .”
“. . . and a fast horse!”
There was no way for Aleswina to sneak a horse out of the convent’s stable, but she could and would bring one of her habits when she went to see Anna off that night—and, in a sudden surge of resolve, she made up her mind to get a letter of safe passage from the abbess as well.
Ignoring the trio of exasperated gasps, she hopped down from the box and wriggled out of the swaths of linen. Making hurried gestures for “breviary” and “need to get,” Aleswina ran out of the sewing room and down the hall to the abbess’s chambers.
There was no answer to her knock.
She gathered her courage, pressed the latch, and inched the door open, calling softly, “Mother Abbess?” again with no answer. Peeking through the crack, she saw a thick leather-bound bible lying open on her desk. The abbess never went to chapel without her bible.
Afraid that there might not be another chance to make her request, she slipped through the door and through the curtained entrance of the antechamber where she’d waited for her first audience with the abbess seven years earlier.
Minutes passed.
Aleswina waited, determined to have the coveted parchment to take with her when she slipped out to see Anna off that night.
The bells for the sunset service rang.
She stayed where she was.
More minutes passed.
Then, finally, there was a shuffle of movement in the hall, the latch clicked, and the door scraped open. Aleswina was about to step out when she heard a loud and demanding male voice.
“The king wants her, and he wants her now!”
Aleswina peeked through a gap in the curtains. It was Olfrick, the captain of the king’s guard. He’d gotten older and fatter in the seven years since she’d last seen him, but it was him.
When they were leaving the palace to come to the convent, he’d come up behind Anna, knocked her out of his way, and called her a name so vile that Anna had refused to tell her what it meant.
Aleswina had never forgotten Olfrick’s nasty, sneering face, and she hated him now every bit as much as she had then—only now he’d get his punishment! People did not demand things from the abbess in that (or in any) tone of voice and the abbess looked very, very angry. In a minute she would send Olfrick—awful, ugly Olfrick—to the worst penance ever, and Aleswina wanted to see that happen!
The abbess lowered her eyebrows, fixed Olfrick in her piercing stare, and spoke in the freezing voice that sent chills into a person’s very bones. “Sister Aleswina is
a betrothed bride of Christ! She will be taking her final vows—”
Olfrick obviously didn’t realize the danger he was in, because he interrupted, “Not anymore! Now she’s the betrothed bride of King Gilberth, and it’s him she’ll be marrying—so hand her over!”
The abbess drew a deep breath, and in a very low, slow voice said, “I will”—Unconsciously, Aleswina smiled a grim smile and nodded her head, confident that the abbess was going to give Olfrick one last warning before she called on Jesus to smite him into a pile of smoldering ashes—“have Princess Aleswina summoned after the evening prayers have been said, at which time I will tell her about this joyful news. In the meanwhile, you and the rest of your men may find your lodging in the village and return for her in the morning.”
Aleswina’s heart stopped beating. Then it started up again, pounding so loud that she thought they would hear it and find her there behind the curtain. And maybe they would have if Olfrick hadn’t bellowed at the abbess, “The king said to bring her back now, not tomorrow!”
Aleswina held her breath.
The abbess spoke as calmly as if he’d asked for alms. “The bells for the evening prayers have rung. When the service is over, I will bring her to you.”
“My men—”
“Your men may wait in the dining hall.”
“My men will stand guard!”
“As you wish, but outside our gates. You will not disturb our sanctuary further.” The abbess pointed to the door, and Olfrick turned and stalked out. The door slammed behind him.
The abbess went to her desk, picked up her bible, and clasped it to her chest—but instead of leaving for chapel, she crossed the room to stand just inside her private shrine, her back to the larger room, as still as if she’d been turned to stone.