by Sarah Bower
“Where are your disciples now, Sebastian?” He spits out the name with all the sarcasm he can muster. But Sebastian seems oblivious to it, clawing frantically at Odo’s hands, his ragged nails tearing at the sinews between his thumbs and first fingers. They struggle silently, Odo’s eyes locked to Sebastian’s as he presses inwards, the pulses in his thumbs beating, he believes, exactly in time with that in Sebastian’s throat. Suddenly he no longer fears those eyes, those enamelled irises you can’t see into, but hates them, the power of his hatred flowing into his hands as he squeezes Sebastian’s neck.
From somewhere, Sebastian finds a surge of strength. Grasping Odo’s wrists, he manages to drag the stranglehold from his throat and, coughing and gasping for air, rolls over and pinions Odo beneath him, his knee pushed into Odo’s chest, his foul breath and the stench from his wounds like the stink of hell in Odo’s nostrils.
“While the Devil strangles, he is killed, Norman,” he pants.
For a moment, Odo thinks, oh, let him, what does it matter? Then, with a fierce uprush of joy and rage, he remembers his daughter; no girl so fine, made of such love, is going to live with the shame of a father killed in a brawl with a common hedge preacher. Twisting under Sebastian’s weight, which is less than the man’s big frame leads him to expect, he manages to throw him off and lunges across the forest floor after his knife, Sebastian at first clinging to his ankle then letting him go with a sharp cry as Odo’s spur cuts into his palm.
“While he wins, he loses, Saxon.”
Sebastian jumps to his feet, followed by Odo, gripping the recovered knife. Sebastian attempts to run, but encumbered by his cloak and at the limits of his endurance, he cannot outpace Odo, who catches hold of his plait and yanks his head back until he hears the cracking of vertebrae and a hoarse bark of pain from the preacher. They are some way out of the clearing, in a dense copse of beech where the low winter sun does not penetrate. Odo shivers, the sweat cooling under his arms and between his shoulder blades. Sebastian slumps to the ground, whether through exhaustion or because his neck is broken, Odo cannot tell. He continues to hold up the Saxon’s head by his plait, coarse as hemp, as a hangman’s rope.
But it’s over; the fight has gone out of his enemy. He yanks Sebastian round to face him, bracing himself for those lizard eyes, but sees only their whites, lumpy, a dingy yellow in the pond-light of the copse. His hatred fills him the way a drowning man fills with water, precise, steady, and cold. He loathes everything about the man from his dramatic looks to his blasphemy, his mad eyes to his improvident prick. Sebastian’s eyes roll back into place, the irises slipping out from under the lids like plates of verdigrised bronze.
“I can’t feel my legs,” the man whines.
“Then you won’t feel what I’m going to do to you next, Tom. A pity.” Odo’s words fall into the immense stillness of the forest with no more significance than the squeaking of a shrew or the unheard creak of a pine cone opening to release its seeds. For a second he imagines comprehension in Tom’s eyes, even remorse, but it is only his imagination, his priest’s liking for stories with morals. The man’s soul is as rotten as his arrow wounds.
“If you kill me, it will be a kindness,” Tom pleads.
Good. “Oh, I’m not going to kill you, Tom. We don’t have a death penalty in England anymore, you know. Besides, I want to give you a taste of what I am condemned to, thanks to you and your inability to resist poking any cunt you can get your hands on, even your own sister. No, there is a punishment on the statute for men like you, but it isn’t death.” He lets go of Tom’s plait and he falls back heavily against the forest floor. Unwinding the strapping from one of his gaiters, he rolls Tom over onto his side, his knee in the small of the Saxon’s back. Tom groans. “You should have killed me, you know,” Odo continues in a light, conversational tone as he binds Tom’s wrists with the leather thong, “when you had the chance. For a minute there, I wouldn’t have resisted, but now…well, things change. Fortune’s wheel turns.”
“What are you going to do to me?”
“Cut your tongue out if you don’t stop that whining.” He lets Tom roll onto his back again and lifts his tunic to expose his genitals. Tom whimpers and starts to shake his head. “That’s right, preacher. The Book of Deuteronomy. He that is wounded in the stones, or hath his privy member cut off, shall not enter into the congregation of the Lord.”
“A bastard shall not enter into the congregation of the Lord,” says Tom between gritted teeth, “tell that to your bastard brother, Norman.” While Odo thinks about this, Tom tries to squirm away from him, but with his arms bound behind him and his legs dead he achieves nothing but an ineffectual flapping of his body, like a landed fish.
“Your thegns undid his bastardy, Saxon. They all cheered when he was anointed king. Like a bunch of silly children cheering a conjuring trick. He’s as legitimate as you or I now, and I dare say the Lord likes him better. Now, hold still and it’ll be over quicker.”
Straddling Tom’s chest to hold him down, Odo begins to cut, through the slack, goose-pimpled scrotum with its scattering of coarse, blond hairs. His skin crawls as he takes hold of Tom’s penis, wrinkled and intimately clammy. Feeling sick, he hesitates, the barbarity of what he is doing, and its pointlessness, as clear to him as though he were watching himself from the upper echelons of one of the trees.
Then he remembers what Tom has done, how he has cut at the root of Odo’s own masculinity, leaving him powerless to protect his woman and their child, and his mind darkens again, the dark swelling like a plague boil, leaving no room for reason. Adjusting his grip on his knife, his hand slipping a little on a slick of sweat, he makes a final upward cut, severing Tom’s organs from his groin, momentarily rapt by the welling of blood into the shallow reservoir between the Saxon’s lifeless legs. Then, twisting round to face Tom, he holds up the penis, the testicles dangling from it like a couple of pearly, purplish plums.
“The source of life, Saxon,” he gasps between gusts of laughter, afraid he is beginning to rave but helpless to prevent it. Tom seems to have fainted. Clambering off his chest and kneeling beside him, Odo slaps his cheeks hard. Tom’s eyelids flicker. “God is such a fucking joker!” he shouts, angry that such a fine insight should go unappreciated. Blood and urine trickle down Tom’s thighs. Odo cleans his knife on the grass then holds the blade over Tom’s mouth to see if he is still breathing. Just. A thin mist on the blade, a scarcely perceptible rise and fall of his scarred chest. Odo does not think he will last long. His skin already has the waxy bloom of a corpse, his blood dark, his mouth lolling open. Odo feels a mild, sentimental regret at the prospect of his death, which will deprive him of the consolation of company in his enforced chastity.
He forgets to say the comfortable words, which annoys him later when he remembers, because he would have enjoyed the luxury of considering, and then rejecting, the idea. There might be something satisfying, he reflects, in stuffing the man’s mouth with his genitals, making him a mirror image of his foresworn king in death. But what is the point? His followers have clearly deserted him, so there is no one to appreciate the irony but the odd fox or badger. Besides, Tom is beyond feeling the pain of that damned battle and what it did to the men who fought in it; all such a gesture would achieve would be to remind himself of it.
He turns away from Tom and starts back toward the hunting lodge, realising as he walks that he is very hungry, with a good, pure hunger like that of a man who has purged himself through fasting. Whistling up Juno, he takes down a bow from a hook in the lodge wall and goes looking for breakfast. His heart feels oddly light and insubstantial in his chest as he prowls around the forest paths hunting for small game. He even sings and talks nonsense to his dog as he might have done on any day’s hunting in the company of friends and vassals, knowing his mistress was waiting for him at home with a long kiss and a cup of wassail. The forest itself confers a sense of unreality, enmeshing him in its shadows and silences, its sudden, eerie eruptions of birdso
ng and the whispered parliaments of trees. He is nothing in this ancient landscape, steeped in the consolation of indifference, so how much less is his pain?
He shoots a good, fat wood pigeon, and Juno takes a couple of wild rabbits, which makes him think, as he tucks their hind paws into his belt, he must have a word with his warrener about the improvement of the pillow mounds. He finds some late blackberries, sweet with must, and a fairy ring of mushrooms. As he picks them, he thanks the fairies for their bounty, then laughs sheepishly at himself, putting his hand to his throat without thinking, to touch the Tear of the Virgin. Its absence opens a chink in his serenity, and he whips his hand back as though the sensation of his shirt lying flat against his skin has burned him.
“Come on dog,” he says heartily, “breakfast.”
He gives one of the rabbits to Juno then, waiting for his fire to heat up sufficiently for cooking, then he prepares the rest of the meat. He dips the frayed edges of Gytha’s torn cloak in the blood. He himself is plausibly bruised and bloodied from his encounter with Tom. Spreading the cloak out on the table, he then examines it critically as the room fills with smells of roasting meat, walking around the table, standing back occasionally, with his head on one side, as though he is admiring a tapestry or an illumination in a book.
The food tastes delicious, the meat, the mushrooms fried in the fat from the pigeon, spring water, all have the holy taste of the sacrament on his tongue. He knows there will be pain to come, but for now, with work still to do, in a world rid of Tom, he feels strong and serene. He wonders if this is how expectant mothers feel, if this is what accounts for their tranquillity in the face of all the terrors of childbirth.
Once he has eaten, he kicks earth over his fire, catches his horse and spurs it to a fast gallop, carrying Gytha’s cloak bundled roughly over his pommel. Reaching the castle as dusk is falling, he flings himself out of the saddle and pounds on the gate with both fists as though all the devils in hell are after him. The shocked, fearful features of the guards as they open up to him fill him with satisfaction, though he is careful to keep an anguished expression on his bruised and scratched face and to exaggerate his breathlessness when he speaks, making wild, sweeping gestures with his bloodstained hands.
“Wolves,” he gasps and, “Toussaint,” letting his haunted eyes do the rest. Then, when he can see the men have filled in the gaps for themselves, that before morning it will be all round the castle that the witch’s escape attempt was thwarted by ghosts in wolfskins, and only he managed to escape with his life, he shows them the cloak, torn and bloodstained, which they all recognise as Gytha’s. Humbly, he begs leave to sit awhile in the gatehouse. He will take a cup of ale and try to recover himself, but he bids them summon Osbern, because he does not think he has the strength to take another step unaided.
He realises how thoroughly his playacting has succeeded when he sees Osbern’s face, stricken and drained of colour as a souling mask. Full of solicitude, he cups his hand under Odo’s elbow to help him to his feet.
“Come along, my lord, let’s get you to your bed.”
As soon as they are clear of the guardhouse, in the outer court, deserted at this hour, Osbern sees his master somehow grow in stature, the broken man mend himself. He is afraid, for a moment, that Odo too is a ghost, a further elaboration of whatever hideous spell has been worked by the spirits of the forest in this season of mischief. But when his master speaks, in a voice on the strained side of normal, he is reassured; whatever has happened, it has not involved any congress with the other side.
“Have men arrived from the king, Osbern?”
“Only this evening, sir, around Vespers. Lord Hamo managed to impress upon them that it was too late to go after you tonight.”
“Good. And no nonsense from the Archbishop?”
“Quiet as a mouse, sir. I suppose he will leave it to the king now?”
“And we, I trust, will slip in between the two of them.”
“We, my lord? Do I take it Mistress Gytha got away then?”
They are just outside the hall door. Putting a finger to his lips, Odo nods, then says loudly, as he precedes his servant through the wicket, “Have my bath filled, Osbern.”
While he bathes, he debates sending some men to bury Tom in the morning, but thinks better of it. Let the forest take care of its own, let the earwigs have his brain and the worms his mad eyes, boar take his flesh and wolves his great bones. Odo has had enough of him, and his men have better things to do. He closes his eyes and tries to believe the world is nothing but this cocoon of fragrant steam he is wrapped in, and the delicious tingling of his skin as Osbern scrubs it with a stiff brush until he glows like a bridegroom.
He grants William’s officer a brief audience, clad only in his shirt and dressing gown, during which he listens to nothing the man has to say but manages to persuade him he is almost out of his mind with shock and grief, drawing quite coldly on whatever resource drove him to disfigure Tom as he did. If, he tells himself, he harbours a lunatic inside his skull, then he might as well learn to turn this strange affliction to his advantage. So he speaks in disjointed phrases of wolves and hobgoblins and peering through the fabric of the universe to the other side. He crosses himself frequently, contriving to make his hand shake as he does so, and continually breaks off in the middle of sentences to stare distractedly into the gloom beyond the wavering circle of light shed by his single candle.
Disconcerted by the earl’s ravings, the officer withdraws as soon as he decently can, satisfied the task he was charged with by the king has been done for him by some other agency whose nature he would prefer not to dwell on. Osbern, with a conspiratorial glance over his shoulder as he sees the officer out, mouthing obsequious apologies as he does so, expects to be reassured by a smile or a wink from his master, but instead sees him slumped in his chair staring moodily into the heart of his fire. Though surely the blankness in his eyes is just a trick of the poor light.
Once Odo is alone, and Osbern in his usual position, rolled in his blanket across the threshold to his lord’s bedchamber, he kneels at his prie dieu and hopes for prayer to enter him, if not to drive out his tormentor, at least to silence it for the night. He recites the Nunc Dimittis but the words cannot exclude him from the life of the castle around him, the tramp of the guards’ feet on the wall, his household packed into the hall and the great chamber above this room, many, no doubt, too nervous to sleep, staring up into the dusty dark between the roof beams or into the glimmering eyes of lovers. He thinks of the baker and his boy, and baby Leofwine, curled up beside the ovens which never go cold, of the smith whose night breath blows ash across the embers in his forge, of the fletcher, the armourer, the grooms and pigmen and cattleherds, the dairy women and the laundresses with their forearms like prize fighters, of Master Pietro stroking his great belly as if it were his mistress, and Turold, probably stroking the mute, Emma, while he turns over new jests in his hard mind, of Hamo pretending to sleep while the countess berates him for some imagined slight or other.
Of his great hanging, packed away in boxes, all its figures, the soldiers and lovers, kings and shipwrights, the horses and dogs and wolves and falcons, his brothers, himself, holding their breath, waiting to dance, to ride down an enemy, to pursue a destiny. You must finish it, she had said, look at the price some of us have paid.
Not some of us, all of us, he answers her now, from the dark heart of his castle whose walls bristle with the armed men he has interposed between himself and William. Nothing, he thinks as he climbs shivering into bed and flexes his toes against the hot stone wrapped in flannel Osbern has placed at the bottom of it, which is as cold as a cold love. And tries to hate William for forcing him to replace the warmth of his love’s embrace with hot stones. But cannot.
Because there is a new bond between them now, the bond of solitude.
Pearl
The Feast of Saint Odo 1072 to the Solemnity of Peter and Paul 1073
But where are we going?” Freya a
sks this several times a day, as though it is the refrain to the long song of their exile.
“I shall know when we get there,” Gytha replies, an inadequate response, plunging Freya back into a hostile silence, but it is the best she can do. Fulk, riding beside Gytha, with Freya and Thecla a little way behind on the overloaded mule, says nothing. He is torn between his sympathy for his woman and her longing for a destination, a place where she can establish a household and bring up their child, and his solemn promise to Odo to watch over Gytha as if she were his own flesh and blood. In such circumstances, where women are concerned, he thinks it wisest to keep silent.
Gytha is uncertain how long they have been travelling, though she knows there have been two Sabbaths, when the roads were quiet, the fields deserted, the doors of houses more firmly closed. Despite their good horses, stout shoes, and warm clothes, the conditions of their journey have been wretched due to the need for discretion. They are out of Kent now, in the honour of William de Warenne, Gytha thinks, or possibly Fitzosbern. Every other Norman seems to be called William. Whichever lord it is, like Odo, he keeps the main roads in good order, potholes filled, verges cut back, troops of liveried soldiers barracked at regular intervals, inns and way stations where the price of bread and ale is strictly controlled. These are the routes leading from London to the south coast, the king’s communications links with Normandy, and his buttress against invasion from France or Anjou, and for this reason Gytha keeps away from them.
She insists on taking by-roads and sheltering at night in remote granges or byres, even caves, sometimes, in preference to risking identification in a manor hall or abbey pilgrim house. They are permanently soaked to the skin and plastered in mud, it seems, from the rain driven through their clothes by the bitter November winds or from fording streams that have burst their banks. They have to make frequent stops for Fulk to gouge packed, sodden earth from the horses’ hooves before their feet rot or bruise. Thecla whines incessantly, exhausted by nights without fires when it is too cold to sleep and, sometimes, a shortage of food if Gytha thinks it unsafe to exchange any of Odo’s jewels for supplies. His generosity has been too ostentatious; she must find somewhere, far enough away for no one to ask questions, or at least, not pertinent ones, where she can change showers of diamonds, uncut emeralds and rubies, veined lumps of turquoise and smoky quartz the colour of his eyes in a summer dusk, into small coins to buy bread or herrings or bacon. She will not sell the pearls, though; she will keep them for her daughter.