Dark Maiden

by Lindsay Townsend

  Yolande expected to be blindfolded so the way to the eventual settlement remained secret. Instead Theodore led them on a winding, switchback course that soon had her completely lost.

  If these are not followers of the forest hermit then I have lost us a day, but I sense they are. So why do I like them?

  Even Geraint was not immune. She could tell from the way he sucked in his cheeks whenever Walter said something particularly fulsome about the commander, checking himself so as not to spoil the former squire’s hero worship. Later he helped the woman Joan and offered to assist Theodore across a swift-flowing stream, kindnesses again he need not have done.

  Yolande prayed and took heed and discovered no spiritual taint in these people, no possession. Up an alder-covered hillside they climbed, down an oak-filled slope and still nothing, only the soft crackling of her boots on the leaf litter and Joan’s giggle as Geraint juggled pinecones.

  But why are there no birds or animals in this evening full of stars? Why no hunting wolves?

  “The commander ordered the wolves to leave this part of the forest,” Theodore said gruffly when she ventured a remark on the silence. “We are not troubled by unruly beasts.”

  “Would I could say the same,” mumbled Geraint in Welsh, causing Yolande to stifle a bout of laughter.

  “We are in oak wood now,” she countered, an idle remark to the others, she hoped, but a message to her husband.

  “I see them, cariad.”

  She had drawn in a mouthful of soft night air to ask after Theodore’s favorite prayers, always a revealing exercise, when Walter clutched at his throat and gasped.

  “Did you swallow something, an insect?” Yolande asked, steadying the young man as he tottered, his freckled face growing paler. She gripped him around his middle, looking for a tree stump or fallen log where they might rest. “I have some ale in our pack you can sip.”

  “He needs the commander.” Theodore put two tiny fingers into his mouth and whistled.

  The others milled about, quite undisturbed. Walter was panting, great wheezing breaths.

  “Let’s get him lying down.” As he spoke, Geraint wrapped his arms around the taller Walter and eased him to the ground.

  “On his side,” Yolande said quickly, sending up prayers for the former squire. No longer milk pale, he was as red as fire and battling for breath.

  Come out of him, she exhorted in Latin, running her thumb over Walter’s stiffened back. There was no trace of a demon. “Steam! We need a fire and water to get moisture into him.”

  She brought out her flints and scraped a heap of pinecones and birch twigs into a pile, longing to call for Theodore and the rest to help. Geraint was talking to Walter, crooning to him, but the others were no more use than boulders.

  “He needs to breathe,” said a new man, deep as a noonday bell. “Stand back.”

  To her intense alarm, Yolande found her feet obeying. Geraint remained planted where he was. Always bucks authority. Strangely that made her feel better. In control again, she paused, watching the stranger.

  A man standing in shadows, neither tall nor broad, with no furious dead riding him. His still, green eyes were a shock, speaking of welcome and healing without words.

  She looked down. Walter had turned over and was gulping great masses of air.

  “You will be healed, Walter, as before.” The stranger had not moved a mouse-length closer but Walter sighed as if his speech were balm. “Rise, Walter, with God in you.”

  Yolande touched one of her amulets in grateful thanks as Walter rolled to his feet. His breath came and went as sweet and steady by now as the fresh night air.

  “And for my next trick,” Geraint grumbled in Welsh, stomping to his feet with considerably less grace.

  “For some an eagle will always be a crow,” the stranger said in Welsh.

  “That is not so welcoming,” Yolande said clearly in English, “but we are glad to find you, Master Herm—”

  She stopped, fighting not to preen at the glance of loving pride Geraint sent her, and interrupted by the stranger’s first words.

  “Well met, Yolande, well met, Geraint.” He stepped from the tree shadows and bowed. “I am the indeed the one you seek, at times called commander, at times hermit, at times mystic but always Peter, Peter of the high forest and the New Jerusalem.”

  Slim, beardless, bare headed, clean limbed and with a similar blank, ageless face as Katherine the female mystic, Peter approached. He made no sound over the forest pinecones and oak twigs and his long green robe and cloak swirled as he moved. The rest of his companions held back as if he put an invisible wall between himself and them.

  Does he do that, put a force between them? Puzzled and wary, Yolande watched Peter strolling ever nearer, closer to her and to Geraint, and she wished for daylight to see him clearly.

  “Welcome to you both and to the new life within you, Yolande.”

  She felt Geraint start alongside her, sensed his anxious glance but registered no shock from him, no fluster, pride or panic for himself.

  He knew already. My husband knew. And he did not share with me.

  He had always been glib and easy with excuses but never with Yolande. Her love for him pierced him and his love for her coiled and burned within. He was hollowed out, a shadow of a Geraint but no more than that. What could he say that forgave his betrayal? His lie?

  A lie of omission only, the mystic Katherine would say, a little delay to spare her worry when your wife is already at stretch. When she must drill all her energies to the point of this New Jerusalem and its fleshly mystic, defeat the man before it is too late.

  But then, what if Katherine was wrong? And what did saints and mystics care for the little people, the jugglers and ragtags of the world, who muddled along as best they could to make a life for themselves and their wives? Too late he saw how ruthless Katherine had been, how pure and deadly in her purpose.

  The irony is, if I had told Yolande earlier she would have pointed that out to me at once.

  Shame devoured him so much he could not look at her, could not stand to see the censure in her gaze. And again, it made him realize just how rare she was—an exorcist, but with such heart, such sympathy for others.

  Her heart is a kingdom and I have ravaged it.

  Stumbling over tree roots—he who never tripped unless on purpose—Geraint shuffled with burning ears and an aching heart toward the stand of oaks where Yolande had dreamed the settlement would be. At one point, perhaps as a kindness, Yolande squeezed his fingers. The bow hanging across his shoulders bounced down his spine, reminding him of the happier time when he had massaged her in her cot at the monastery of Saint Michael and the Magdalene.

  Still, he dared not look at her. A fine support he was, when she was about to enter her main trial.

  Yet what if Katherine the mystic is wrong? Walter, Joan, even Theodor seem decent, people who have found their true way.

  Yolande squeezed his hand again. “No children,” she said in her father’s tongue, and aloud in English, she asked, “Are your children all abed or with their grandparents?”

  “Alas, we have no other womenfolk who are pregnant like yourself, and no little ones yet,” said Peter, radiating sorrow and sincerity. Yet who but a bad poet says “alas”?

  “Perhaps your babe is indeed the holy innocent, the sign we have been waiting for,” Peter went on, smooth as his grass-green clothes. They had entered a clearing and the man began to point out the lines of huts and field strips, all blue-black and silver in the warm night air.

  “Where is your church?” Yolande asked. “On our travels, my husband and I always offer thanks for a safe journey completed.”

  Geraint sensed her start afresh as Theodore chuckled, a surprisingly deep laugh. Catching a movement, Geraint noticed Joan shaking her head.

  “This is our church, this clearing, these trees,” Walter explained, clear voiced as a herald and with no trace of his earlier sickness. “And our holy maze—”


  “We should not overwhelm our guests with chatter, Walter.” Peter softly reproved him. “We shall all pray and give thanks.”

  “Amen,” said Yolande.

  They knelt in the clearing and prayed, Peter leading. Geraint saw the doors of the huts crack open and more figures slip out to join them, all kneeling. Amazingly quickly, they all appeared close to rapture. Several from the thatched huts had clearly been asleep and were naked yet they prayed without any modesty, some swaying on their knees.

  Geraint was so distracted and miserable that even these pert breasts and sweet young female faces failed to stir him, although he could understand how the dowdy, brown-robed Katherine might consider this unaffected form of worship a fleshly rapture. Kneeling close to one of the oak trees, Yolande swayed, her hips moving like an eastern dancer’s. Once, she touched the tree, her lips moving with a different prayer to that intoned by Peter.

  If any man looks at her with lust, I’ll rip his balls off and juggle with them.

  His jealousy crippled him. All around the voices became higher and faster, worshippers waving their arms aloft and calling on Christ, on the Virgin, on Richard Rolle as they launched themselves at God. Yolande’s breathing quickened, coming in spurts as it did when she was close to her yielding crisis, and his member stiffened in response.

  She seeks spiritual ecstasy and I want earthly congress. Truly I am depraved.

  “I see it now!” Peter suddenly shrieked. “Jerusalem the golden, the holy city, floating on star beams to us!”

  “Golden,” chanted the women. The men stretched up their arms to receive this vision.

  “We must make ready,” called Theodore, a tiny, quivering bundle beside Peter, his childlike face enraptured.

  “Yes!” shouted the men. The women crossed themselves over and over, Yolande’s hands moving the fastest of them all.

  “Expel evil!” bawled Peter, and Geraint braced himself.

  Here it comes, the loathing of the Jew, the Welsh, Irish, Scots, black, poor, the different, the stranger, the wise, the witch. Always the same filthy hate.

  “Embrace your neighbor.” A surprising, pleasant instruction and one Geraint acted on at once, enfolding Yolande in his arms. He hugged her fiercely while her fingers rested on his shoulders.

  “Sorry,” he whispered, heart scalded afresh. Did she did not hear him?

  “Root out the evil within your hearts!”

  Geraint wished Peter would be quiet. He wanted to share with Yolande, talk to her about the baby, tell her how they could settle down if she wanted to.

  For she cannot be doing exorcisms with a babe in arms and for a year or two we can make a home within a house. Every day will be an adventure.

  To him, certainly, for he had not lived in a house for years. And I still have my other plan and if Yolande approves that…

  “Geraint, Geraint Welshman, come forth into the circle!”

  The instruction puzzled him for he saw no circle, but Peter had challenged and he never backed down. He gave his glassy-eyed wife a final squeeze and shot off his knees. His joints clicking as they did after a night of tumbling, he sidled into the clearing, glad of the bow. If any of these mystics tried anything, he would be ready.

  So why was the back of his neck crawling?

  Peter the mystic watched the rangy man with the face of Lucifer stroll out from beneath the trees. His woman, the beautiful black, had not moved. This Yolande would be a useful addition. He had smelled lavender, rose and rosemary on her and guessed she was an herbalist from the way she had dealt with the gasping Walter. He had surmised she was fertile too, from the faint deeper shadows beneath her eyes, visible even in this semidarkness. He had a knack for details.

  Her husband was a different matter, a troublemaker, a questioner. So it was fortunate Peter had slipped out of the forest yesterday and visited the fair. He had seen what Geraint Welshman could do.

  And if God inspires me to change a few details, that is only right. His wife deserves a far better end than what he can offer.

  Is Geraint a thief or more?

  Peter considered, prayed to his god and waited. There was, in the end, some more time. He still waited on Jehan from the fair. And what better than his own Judas figure?

  Geraint and his fate will convince any doubters.

  “Look well on this man, my people. Here is one who needs all your prayers and compassion. Welcome him. Grant him your kiss of peace. Welcome!”

  He smirked as the Welshman backed up, circling wildly, while his flock closed in on him, the sheep overwhelming the lone wolf. And as Yolande hurried into the clearing, Peter let her go, knowing time and his god were on his side.

  Finally, he was winning.

  Chapter Sixteen

  It must have been close to midnight before the forest dwellers stopped mauling him. Geraint treated the whole sticky affair as a tightrope walk, aware of the bow on his back rooting him to his exorcist and of Yolande’s brief, warm hug, and waited for the tide to wash over him.

  Finally Peter suggested he sleep in the hut for young men, the bachelors, “For tonight only, you understand, to reflect and to seek God’s guidance and to accept and be worthy of this revelation.”

  Yolande meanwhile had bedded down with Joan and the maidens. Sadly, he had not seen to which hut the chattering women had taken her or he would have gone there.

  We need to talk and I need to apologize.

  He wanted, badly, to make love to her as well but such heaven would have to wait.

  The hut was fetid, oppressive, windowless. Rats rustled in one corner and Walter curled on a rough pallet beside him, twitching in a dream. Geraint grinned. If the former squire was posted there to keep watch on him, he was not doing so good a job. There was a bulky youngster sleeping across the door but he knew how to counter that.

  He shouldered Yolande’s bow, scrambled stealthily off the pallet and climbed into the roof. With crook beams and struts to brace the walls, it had plenty of hand and toeholds. The spring night made the light inside murky but he could see well enough to climb.

  Up in the rafters, he crawled rapidly over the main portion of the hut using a crossbeam, listening always to the sleepers snoring below. He spotted a slight gap in the roof where a winter gale had shifted the thatch and worked his way around to it.

  So tempting it was, as he caught his breath, to punch through, breathe the clean night air. His shoulder muscles aching, complaining, he forced himself to listen again then prodded out through the gap with the bow.

  Before he could react, the bow continued gliding, free and easy, and with a faint hiss, it disappeared.

  No! Geraint bellowed in his mind, flapping wildly after it.

  An elegant fist wielding a knife hacked at the thatch, vanished then reappeared, beckoning.

  He pushed through the gap. Yolande kissed him lightly.

  “We are in much danger,” she whispered, crouching on the roof with him. “We must talk.”

  She vaulted down into the darkness and he followed her.

  They fell onto packed earth, a jolting landing, but this bare ground would show no tracks and he guessed Yolande had chosen it for that reason. Her bow over her shoulder, she led them into the forest, straight to a holly then under its low branches and into the heart of the tree.

  She motioned for him to settle in the dry “nest” the spreading branches gave them and he leaned back on his elbows, the better to look at her.

  A queen tonight, for sure you are, Yolande, and I your most loyal follower.

  “I love you,” he croaked, the words flooding out in a race of Welsh and English. “I love you and am sorry, cariad, so sorry.”

  Silent, dangerous, she came at him. Dropping her bow, kicking aside his pack, she straddled him, tearing at his tunic.

  So much for talk. And is she trying to beat me or make love?

  Her mouth kissed his and he knew—hot, sweet love.

  “Love me,” Yolande said in her father’s tongue. “Love me an
d need me.”

  Need reared in her again, harsh as fire and ice together so that her loins burned. Her lips were so parched they cracked and her breasts and legs were cold. Geraint begged forgiveness, offering his love, trying to explain, and she cradled his unhappy mouth with another kiss.

  We both need comfort here and I am the one to give it.

  She ran her fingers through his chest hair. In this late spring, he was tanned to the shade of old oak wood. Abruptly, as if he could sit quivering under her sweeping caress no longer, he brought his arms up her spine and tongued her ear.

  Heat scorched her, a lightning strike from her nipples to her groin. Still he tongued and nibbled, praising her breasts, their slight increase and softness.

  How is it he has noticed and I have not?

  What did that matter anyway? She wrestled with his braies, won the match and dragged them down, exulting in his rampant desire for her. She boosted herself up and plunged down hard onto him, sheathing him.

  Geraint’s expression was almost comical as it finally dawned on him that she was wearing a dress. She might have laughed had she not been so filled yet so wanting. Rocking, trying to peel off her gown so he could touch her naked, she rode him.

  “My turn,” he said in Welsh. He hooked her over and lay on top of her, then eased his manhood inside her and slid in and out so slowly, so deeply, that she mewled with mingled pleasure and frustration.

  “Bathsheba mine.” He sucked her breasts as he joined with her, going slow where she had intended to be fast. Ruthless in his lovemaking, he snared her, every full, gentle movement and thorough grinding of his hips a rippling joy.

  Somewhere in this tapestry of limbs and kisses, of his “I love you” and her gasped response, the night gave way to blistering light and she screamed her release.

  Lolling on her side as Geraint nuzzled her neck, she was only half wearing her dress, just the sleeves and shoulders. The rest had rolled up under her armpits and should have been mighty uncomfortable, but not when Geraint was knuckling her spine.

  Ah, a juggler’s hands, both equally deft, equally firm. How delicious.