The Serpent's Tale

by Ariana Franklin

  Rising to her feet, Adelia said, “If you smell her scent again on anybody else, will you tell me?”

  Bertha nodded. Her eyes were fixed on the cross at Adelia’s throat, as if, ignorant of its meaning, it still spoke to her of hope.

  And what hope has she, poor thing?

  Sighing, Adelia unfastened the chain from her neck and slid it with its cross into Bertha’s dirty little hand, closing her fingers over it. “Keep this until I can buy you one of your own,” she said.

  It cost her to do it, not because of the cross’s symbolism—Adelia had been exposed to too many religions to put all her faith in a single one—but because it had been given to her by Margaret, her old nurse, a true Christian, who had died on the journey to England.

  But I have known love. I have my child, an occupation, friends.

  Bertha, who had none of these things, clasped the cross and, bleating with pleasure, dived back into the straw with it.

  As they walked back through the night, Jacques said, “Do you believe that little piggy can sniff out your truffle for you, mistress?”

  “It’s a long shot,” Adelia admitted, “but Bertha’s nose is probably the best detector we have. If she should smell the old woman’s scent again, it will be on someone who buys foreign soap and can tell us who their supplier is, who, in turn, could provide us with a list of customers.”

  “Clever.” The messenger’s voice was admiring.

  After a while, he said, “Do you think the queen was involved?”

  “Somebody wants us to think so.”

  FIVE

  O n the rise above a gentle valley, a dog and four riders from Godstow reined in and considered the building and appurtenances crowning the opposite hill.

  After some silence, Adelia said, unwisely, “How on earth do tradesmen penetrate it?”

  “Gift of flowers and a nice smile used to do it in my day,” the bishop said.

  She heard a snort from the two men on either side of her.

  “I mean the labyrinth,” she said.

  Rowley winked. “So do I.”

  More snorts.

  Oh, dear, sexual innuendo. Not that she could blame them. From here, the view of Wormhold Tower and what surrounded it looked, well, rude. A very high, thin tower capped by a close-fitting cupola—it even had a tiny walkway around its tip to accentuate the penile resemblance—rose from the ring of a labyrinth that men apparently saw as female pubic hair. It presented an outline that might have been scrawled on the top of its hill by a naughty, adolescent giant. A graffito against the skyline.

  The bishop had led them here at a canter, afraid the weather might stop them, but now that the tower was in sight, anxiety had left him relieved and, obviously, with time to enjoy ribaldry.

  Actually, it had been an easy journey northward, using the river towpath that ran from Godstow to within a half-mile of the tower. So easy, in fact, that Adelia had been invigorated by it and lost her own fear that the weather would hamper her return to her child.

  Such bargemen as they’d encountered had warned them that more snow was on the way, but there was no sign of it. It was a cloudless day, and although the sun hadn’t melted the previous night’s fall, it had been impossible not to rejoice in a countryside like white washing spread out to dry against a laundered blue sky.

  Farther south, on the river they’d just left, Mansur, the bishop’s two men-at-arms, and a couple of Godstow’s men were bringing up a barge on which to take the body of Rosamund back to the convent—once Bishop Rowley had retrieved it.

  First, though, the labyrinth that surrounded the dead woman’s stronghold had to be got through—a prospect that was stimulating the old Adam in Adelia’s companions.

  “I told you,” Rowley said, addressing Adelia but winking at Walt. “Didn’t I say it was the biggest chastity belt in Christendom?”

  He was trying to provoke her. Ignore it. “I hadn’t thought it would be quite so large,” she said, and then sighed at herself. Another double entendre to make the men snigger.

  Well, she hadn’t. The labyrinth at Saint Giorgio’s in Salerno was considered by the town to be a wonder, supposed to represent in length and complexity the soul’s journey through life. But this thing opposite her now was a colossus. It encircled the tower, forming a ring so thick that it took up a wide section of this side of the hill and disappeared behind it. Its outer wall was nine or ten feet high, while, at this distance, its interior seemed to be filled entirely by white wool.

  The prioress of Godstow had warned her about it before she set out. “Blackthorn,” Sister Havis had told her with disgust. “Can you credit it? Walls of granite with blackthorn planted against them.”

  What Adelia was looking at was stone and hedge, twisting and turning in frozen undulation.

  Not a belt, Adelia thought. A snake. A huge, constricting serpent.

  Walt said, “Reckon as that’s a bugger for its hedgers,” nearly causing Rowley to fall off his horse. Jacques was smiling broadly, happy at seeing his bishop unbend.

  Sister Havis had said what Adelia could expect. The original labyrinth, she’d said, had been built round his keep by a mad Saxon necromancer and enlarged by his equally mad dispossessor, a Norman, one of the Conqueror’s knights, in order to stop his enemies from getting in and his women from getting out.

  The Norman’s descendants had been dispossessed in their turn by Henry Plantagenet, who’d found it a convenient place in which to install his mistress, abutting, as it did, the forest of Woodstock, where he kept a hunting lodge.

  “Architectural vulgarity,” Sister Havis had called it, angrily. “An object of male lewdness. Local people are in awe of it, even while they jeer at it. Poor Lady Rosamund. I fear the king found it amusing to put her there.”

  “He would.” Adelia knew Henry Plantagenet’s sense of humor.

  And Rowley’s.

  “Of course I can penetrate it,” the bishop was saying now, in answer to a question from Jacques. “I’ve done it. A wiggle to the right, another to the left, and everybody’s happy.”

  Listening to the laughter, Adelia began to be sorry for Rosamund. Had the woman minded living in a place that invited, almost demanded, salacious comment from every man who saw it?

  Poor lady. Even dead, she was being shown little respect.

  With snow resting on the walls and branches of the surrounding labyrinth, the tower looked to be rising from a mass of white fuzz. Adelia was irresistibly reminded of a patient, an elderly male whom her foster father was attending and on whose body he was instructing Adelia how to repair a hernia in the groin. Suddenly, much to his abashed surprise, the patient had sustained an erection.

  That’s what’s scrawled against the sky, she thought, an old man’s last gasp.

  She turned on Rowley. “How. Do. We. Get. In,” she said, clearly, “and try to remember there’s a dead woman in there.”

  He jerked a thumb. “We ring the bell.”

  Transfixed by the tower, she hadn’t noticed it, though it stood only a few yards away on the hillside, next to a horse trough.

  Like everything else belonging to Wormhold, it was extraordinary, an eight-foot-high wooden trapezoid set into the ground, from which hung a bell as massive as any in a cathedral’s chimes.

  “Go on, Jacques,” the bishop said. “Ding-dong.”

  The messenger dismounted, walked up to the bell, and swung the rope hanging from its clapper.

  Adelia clung to her mare as it skittered, and Walt snatched the reins of Jacques’s to prevent it from bolting. Birds erupted from the trees, a rookery fell to circling and cawing as the bell’s great baritone tolled across the valley. Even Ward, most unresponsive of mongrels, looked up and gave a bark.

  The reverberations hung in the air and then settled into a silence.

  Rowley swore. “Again,” he said. “Where’s Dakers? Is she deaf?”

  “Must be,” Jacques said. “That would waken the dead.” He realized what he’d said. “Beg pardon,
my lord.”

  For a second time the great bell tolled, seeming to shake the earth. Again, nothing happened.

  “Thought I saw someone,” Walt said, squinting against the sun.

  So did Adelia—a black smudge on the tower’s walkway. But it had disappeared now.

  “She’d answer to a bishop, should’ve worn my episcopal robes,” Rowley said. He was in hunting clothes. “Well, there’s nothing for it. We can find our own way through—I remember it perfectly.”

  He set his horse down the hill to the valley, cloak flying. Less precipitately, the others followed.

  The entrance in the labyrinth’s wall when they reached it sent the men off again. Instead of an arch, two stone ellipses met at top and bottom, forming a ten-foot cleft resembling the female vulva, the inference being emphasized by the stonecarved surround in the shape of snakes coiling into various fruits and out again.

  It was difficult to get the horses to enter, though the cleft was big enough; they had to be blindfolded to step through, showing, in Adelia’s opinion, more decency than the remarks made by the men tugging at their reins.

  Being inside wasn’t nice. The way ahead of them was fairly wide, but blackthorn covered it, shutting out the sun to enfold them in the dim, gray light of a tunnel and the smell of dead leaves.

  The roof was too low to allow them to remount. They would have to walk the horses through.

  “Come on.” Rowley was hurrying, leading his horse at a trot.

  After a few bends, they could no longer hear birdsong. Then the way divided and they were presented with two tunnels, each as wide as the one by which they’d come, one going left, the other right.

  “This way,” said the bishop. “We turn northeast toward the tower. Just keep a sense of direction.” The first doubt entered Adelia’s mind. They shouldn’t have had to choose. “My lord, I’m not sure this is ...”

  But he’d gone ahead.

  Well, he’d been here before. Perhaps he did remember. Adelia followed more slowly, her dog pattering after her, Jacques behind him. She heard Walt bringing up the rear, grumbling. “Wormhold. Good name for this snaky bugger.”

  Wyrmhold. Of course. Wyrm. In marketplaces, the professional storytellers—that the English still called skalds—frightened their audience with tales of the great snake/dragon that squirmed its way through Saxon legends just as the mimicking tunnels coiled through this labyrinth.

  Wistfully, Adelia remembered that Gyltha’s Ulf loved those stories and played at being the Saxon warrior—what was his name?—who’d killed one such monster.

  I miss Ulf. I miss Allie. I don’t want to be in the Wyrm’s lair.

  Ulf had described it to her with relish. “Horrible it was, deep in the earth and stunk with the blood of dead men.”

  Well, they were spared that stench at least. But there was the smell of earth, and a sense of being underground, pressed in with no way out. Which is what the Daedalus who concocted this swine intended, she thought. It explained the blackthorn; without it, they could have climbed a wall, seen where they were heading, and breathed fresh air, but blackthorn had spines that, like the Wyrm, tore flesh to shreds.

  It didn’t frighten her—she knew how to get out—but she noticed that the men with her weren’t laughing now.

  The next bend turned south and opened into three more tunnels. Still unhesitating, Rowley took the alley to the right.

  After the next bend, the way divided again. Adelia heard Rowley swear. She craned her neck to look past his horse for the cause.

  It was a dead end. Rowley had his sword out and was stabbing it into a hedge that blocked the way. The scrape of metal on stone showed that there was a wall behind the foliage. “Goddamn the bastard. We’ll have to back out.” He raised his voice. “Back out, Walt.”

  The tunnel wasn’t wide enough to turn the horses without scratching them on head and hindquarters, not only injuring them but also making them panic.

  Adelia’s mare didn’t want to back out. It didn’t want to go on, either. Sensibly, it wanted to stand still.

  Rowley had to squeeze past his own horse to take hers by the bridle in both hands and push until he persuaded the animal to retreat back to the cul-desac’s entrance, where they could re-form their line.

  “I told you we should keep going northeast,” he said to Adelia, as if she had chosen the route.

  “Where is northeast?”

  But, irritated, he’d set off again, and she had to try and drag her reluctant mare into a trot to keep him in sight.

  Another tunnel. Another. They might have been wrapped in gray wool that was thickening around them. She’d lost all sense of direction now. So, she suspected, had Rowley.

  In the next tunnel, she lost Rowley. She was at a division and couldn’t see which branch he’d taken. She looked back at Jacques. “Where’s he gone?” And, to the dog, “Where is he, Ward? Where’s he gone?”

  The messenger’s face was grayish, and not just from the light straining through the roof; it looked older. “Are we going to get out, mistress?”

  She said soothingly, “Of course we shall.” She knew how he felt. The thorned roof rounded them in captivity. They were moles without the mole’s means of rising to the surface.

  Rowley’s voice came, muffled. “Where in hell are you?” It was impossible to locate him; the tunnels absorbed and diverted sound.

  “Where are you?”

  “In the name of God, stay still, I’m coming back.”

  They kept shouting in order to guide him. He shouted in his turn, mostly oaths. He was swearing in the Arabic he’d learned on crusade—his choice language when he cursed. Sometimes his voice was so near it made them jump; then it would fade and become hollow, raving against labyrinths in general and this one in particular. Against Dame Dakers and her bloody serpent. Against Eve with her bloody serpent. Even, appallingly, after blackthorn tore his cloak, against Rosamund and her bloody mushrooms.

  Ward cocked his ears this way and that, as if enjoying the tirade, which, his mistress thought, he probably was, being another male.

  It’s women to be blamed, always women. He wouldn’t curse the man who built this horror, or the king who imprisoned Rosamund in the middle of it.

  Then she thought, They’re frightened. Well, Walt may not be, but Rowley is. And Jacques definitely is.

  At last a tall shape loomed out of the shadow ahead, leading a horse and coming toward her. It yelled, “What are you standing there for, woman? Get back. We should have taken the last turning.”

  Again, it was her fault. Again, the mare wouldn’t move until the bishop took its bridle and pushed.

  So that he shouldn’t be embarrassed in front of the other two men, Adelia lowered her voice. “Rowley, this isn’t a labyrinth.”

  He didn’t lower his. “No, it isn’t. We’re in the entrails of Grendel’s bloody mother, that’s what, goddamn her.”

  It came to her. Beowulf. That was the name. Beowulf, Ulf’s favorite among all legendary Saxon warriors, killer of the Wyrm, slayer of the halfhuman monster Grendel and of Grendel’s awful avenging mother.

  “Waste bitch, boundary walker,” Ulf had said of Grendel’s mother, meaning she prowled the edge between earth and hell in woman’s shape.

  Adelia began to get cross. Why was it women who were to blame for everything—everything, from the Fall of Man to these blasted hedges?

  “We are not in a labyrinth, my lord,” she said clearly.

  “Where are we, then?”

  “It’s a maze.”

  “Same difference.” Puffing at the horse: “Get back, you great cow.”

  “No, it isn’t. A labyrinth has only one path and you merely have to follow it. It’s a symbol of life or, rather, of life and death. Labyrinths twist and turn, but they have a beginning and an end, through darkness into light.”

  Softening, and hoping that he would, too, she added, “Like Ariadne’s. Rather beautiful, really.”

  “I don’t want mythology,
mistress, beautiful or not, I want to get to that sodding tower. What’s a maze when it’s at home?”

  “It’s a trick. A trick to confuse. To amaze.”

  “And I suppose Mistress Clever-boots knows how to get us out?”

  “I do, actually.” God’s rib, he was sneering at her, sneering. She’d a mind to stay where she was and let him sweat.

  “Then in the name of Christ, do it.”

  “Stop bellowing at me,” she yelled at him. “You’re bellowing.”

  She saw his teeth grit in the pretense of a placatory smile; he always had good teeth. Still did. Between them, he said, “The Bishop of Saint Albans presents his compliments to Mistress Adelia and please to escort him out of this hag’s hole, for the love of God. How will you do it?”

  “My business.” Be damned if she’d tell him.

  Women were defenseless enough without revealing their secrets. “I’ll have to take the lead.”

  They were forced to back the horses to one of the junctions where there was just enough room to turn each animal round without damage, though not enough to allow one to pass another, so Adelia ended up leading Walt’s mount, Walt leading the messenger’s behind her, Jacques behind him with hers, Rowley bringing up the rear with his own.

  The maneuver was achieved with resentment. Even Jacques, her ally, said, “How are you going to get us out, then, mistress?”

  “I just can.” She paused. “Though it may take some time.”

  She stumped along in front, holding Walt’s mount’s reins in her right hand. In the other was her riding crop, which she trailed with apparent casualness so that it brushed against the hedge on her left.

  As she went, she chuntered to herself. Lord, how disregarded I am in this damned country. How disregarded all women are.

  She was back to the reasoning that had made her refuse to marry Rowley. At the time, he’d been expecting the king to offer him a barony, not a bishopric, thus allowing him a wife. Mad for him though she was, acceptance would have meant slipping her wrists into metaphorical golden fetters and watching him lock them on. As his wife, she could never have been herself, a medica of Salerno.