“Well, we ought to be,” I said. I smelt evil. “But we’ve found the place. Now we can take our time.”
“No we can’t,” said Walter. “There might only be minutes before they kill Gerald. They might be torturing him. We can’t risk going slow. Let’s get it over with.” He was so sensible and brave and determined. He had my arm, tugging me up.
I knew the boys dreamed of chivalry. Knights rescued maidens and children from magical dungeons. They challenged sorcerers to tilt at the lists, and claimed victory in God’s name. We had told these tales around the evening fires, giggling and nudging, innuendo too, but shining with purity and personal crusade. So many stories over the years, so that magic seemed almost ordinary. Believable at least. Then I stopped thinking about the stories because it had been Richard most of all who loved the tales of romance and tournament. He had always wanted to rescue Tilda from some threatening danger. He had not been able to rescue himself. He had been just a little boy and someone had cut his head from his neck.
My shoes slipped on the dew damp slope. I sneered at myself for having tried to keep them safe through the forest when the pretty red leather had worn away already, leaving long holes beside my instep. The bows were gone, the buckles were loose and the flaps hung open. I looked down at my feet as if they represented my own ruin. But they kept my feet steady and for a few bright moments the slope seemed to carry us forward. Then the air thickened and we slowed. Something intangible began to block us. Invisible hands pushed us away.
Each step down that hill carried the weight of resistance. I became as weak as breath against stone. Plodding, gasping, forcing my shoulders against the unseen barrier, I kept on going. Walter was just in front, nearly doubled over with the effort. Osbert was solid beside me, hair in his eyes as usual, pink in the face and puffed cheeks, all obstinate courage and determined persistence.
I tried to gulp the breath back into my lungs, muttering, “If they don’t want us to go any further, why did they lead us here, every step of the way?” Then quite suddenly within the invisible prohibition, I saw his eyes, black focus, intent upon me, no heavy lids but wide, bright and utterly furious. “Go back,” Vespasian ordered into my mind. “Come no closer. Return the way you have come.” Then the vision was gone, dissipating into mist.
The boys took my pause as their excuse and they stopped beside me. “It’s going to rain,” panted Osbert.
“No,” said Walter. “That black cloud is only over the castle.”
Across the sweet azure of the summer sky a globulous density shaped one fat dirty cloud, concentrating into a violent threat of storm but leaving all the heavens around us in their untouched sunlight. Then directly between us and the castle, light shut down. A grey depression quickly filled the space, the clouds bled and shadow shapes swirled into the cracks. The castle was folded into a tidal fog. As it faded and lost coherence, a hundred turrets loomed up into the surrealist of fantastic space, toppled, and flew into shredded billows. Spits of lightening sprang from the wavering walls. We stood and watched the castle disappear and become a hurricane. As time had deserted us, I do not know how long it took but I saw things that raged like dragons across my terrified consciousness, huge shapes and colours and mountains of grotesque luminescence.
I was only aware that I had fallen when I felt myself slipping downwards. I was on my back on the hillside, alone and staring up into the deformation around me. I was sliding fast. The slopes of gravel crushed against my back as I gained speed. Walter and Osbert were no longer with me and I screamed.
I was flying. Then I was back in two worlds, standing on the hills beyond Molly’s cottage, all wet in their sheep droppings and chilly cloud. I could see my own village down below; perhaps even my own little roof with its silly rusted weather vane and the chimneys in a row. Then through the mist the magic castle’s highest tower rose like a black finger pointing from one world into the other. At once I was back in Tilda’s time and thunder roared and exploded around me. Tilda knew, where Molly did not, that lightning and thunder always marked the entrance into the Underworld and she knew that the slope streaming faster and faster beneath her was the road to Hell.
I twisted around, reaching out for something to slow the descent. I was flung face downwards and continued to slide. My hands were ripped and filled with stone. I felt my flesh tear in shreds and instinctively moved my face to the side.
Tilda shut her eyes as I did, but I felt them fill with blood as she hurtled into a tunnel of ice. I opened my eyes when I hit the bottom. It made no difference for I could still see nothing at all.
Chapter Seventeen
With my eyes shut I could see, but with them open, I could not. My clothes were tattered remnants of dirty blood stained lilac. I could feel blood striping me like lashes from a whip. I guessed I must be in the castle, and I knew I was in a dungeon. Tilda had little concept of what a dungeon meant but she felt the damp cold stone and knew she was closed off from the warm air of the world above. It was underground, where dark things crawl. The Underworld.
I lay curled, spinning between conscious awareness and the deception of sleep. Then gradually I solidified into myself and was able to struggle up without nausea. It was indeed a dungeon, and utterly inescapable. I stumbled the limits of its confines and quickly found the only door. I could trace it with my fingertips, high and heavy with huge hinges and no handle at all. It was impossible to open and made no echo when I rammed my fists against it. So I sat on the ground in one corner and tried very hard to think. My fall down the hillside had left me scraped and bleeding. The jagged gravel must have cut me down and across, but I suffered from more than scratches, however many, however deep. The black dread I felt was not rational but the creeping hopeless inertia was. Trying to think was like stumbling through fog. Vespasian had commanded me away. Yet he, or something else, had willed me on. Finally, the impulse was so strong, I had been slammed by storm and dragged into imprisonment. It made no sense. I clung momentarily to consciousness but then let it go. I am not sure if I fainted, or if I slept.
When I woke I stared into dazzling scarlet flame. I thought I was indeed in hell. Then I saw Vespasian. He had his back to me and was bending over the fire where a pot swung on its chains. I heard bubbling water and smelled wild mint. I was in altogether a different place. I struggled to sit.
“Stay still,” ordered Vespasian, though he did not turn around or even look at me
I lay as ordered, staring at the tall back of him. The fire threw wild crimson shadow wings against the high curved stone above us. It was a small room but it was not the same room as my dungeon. Three arrow slits, just narrow openings, gazed out at a sky glistening with stars and the night’s deep sea blue. I lay on a wooden slatted bed and a narrow feather mattress with no coverlets. In spite of the narrow openings, it was quite warm and the fire kept out the draughts from the stars. I felt the sizzle and hiss, and the stone walls and arched ceiling shone in the firelight. Then all I saw was Vespasian’s face as he leaned over me.
The ebb and tide of the huge firelight etched beneath his cheekbones and against the squared sweep of his jaw. His eyes glittered as fiery as the flames they reflected. He had cut his hair shorter but it still swept across the high forehead, as black as the shadows. He was angry. For a moment he just gazed down at me. He said nothing, and I did not dare speak. Then he put both his hands on the collar of my blaud and the stola beneath it, and ripped downwards. The already frayed materials opened at once to just above my hips. I felt the sudden scorch of air across my body. Vespasian was still looking at me. Then he reached behind him, took a cloth from the hot water and began to wash my breasts.
The sleeves of my clothes still clung to my shoulders, but otherwise I was quite naked to below my waist and lost in blushes, shame and surprise. The water was scalding. Gradually, even though it relaxed me, the pain became more intense. Vespasian said, “No doubt this troubles you. But there is no one else to do it and you have been badly injured.”
/> His voice was, as always, so soft that I heard him almost as a vibration and the sound merged into the crackle of the fire and the busy water.
“It’s too hot,” I whispered.
“It is not,” he said without expression. “You must suffer it. I have no mandragora to smother the hurt and though I believe there are opiates somewhere here, I will not give them to you. Nor do I have albumen or wine to cleanse and disinfect. I have only water and so it must be as hot as you can bear.”
I closed my eyes and felt the humanity of his hands against my skin. I knew I was shaking.
“Be still,” he said.
“I can’t,” I muttered.
“I’m not interested in your embarrassment,” he said. “You must be still, or the cloth will open the cuts even further.”
“I was gentler,” I mumbled, trying to strengthen my voice, “when I treated your wound.”
I saw the flicker of a smile but he was concentrating on what he was doing and did not look at my face. I realised he was still furious. “If you think your amateur stitching was gentle, then you are mistaken.” His voice remained soft and even, still without emotion, and he continued to bathe me. Then as he worked I realised how gentle his touch was after all. He was intensely careful, the brush of his fingertips gossamer soft, and though the skin of his hands was hard and calloused, he was attentive so that both his hands and the steady handling of the wet cloth were more soothing than brusque. Across my breasts, I felt the brief tingle as his palms crossed my nipples, then easing down over my ribs and belly. Yet his face remained hard and he did not disguise his fury. “I told you not to come,” he said, words disappearing again into the whispered haze. “I warned you. Repeatedly I warned you. You have made every detail and every challenge a great deal more difficult. You should not have come.”
I still did not understand how his warnings had come into my mind. No man could purposefully enter another’s dreams. So I lay half naked with his hands across my body and the warmth of his fingers on my skin. “I had to,” I whispered. “They killed Richard and brought back his poor body. Did you know?”
He looked up momentarily and caught my gaze. “I knew,” he said.
“And they took Gerald. Did you know about that too?”
He nodded. “Of course. That is why I’m here. Gerald is downstairs. He is with his grandmother.”
My mouth must have hung open as I gasped. “Gerald hasn’t got a grandmother,” I said stupidly.
“Indeed?” Vespasian threw the blood stained cloth back into the pot and glared down at me. “Gerald has both a grandmother and a step-grandfather.” He rinsed and squeezed out the cloth and continued to wash me, easing back the edges of the torn camise from the places where it had stuck with gravel and mud and blood. “And he has a step-father,” he said.
“He can’t have,” I said, trying to hang onto cohesion. “Who is he?”
“Me,” said Vespasian.
My thoughts were interrupted by the sudden wind whining through the arrow slits. The fire shivered, shrank to its coals, and burst anew. I closed my eyes and mumbled, “Yes, I think I knew.”
“You know nothing,” said Vespasian, “except how to be a damned nuisance. I might have expected the boys to act the chivalrous knight and come meddling and bounding into my business. But not you, when I had warned you so many times. You are, without doubt, both the least useful and the most dangerous to have come. By what arrogance did you think you could help me?”
My eyes were full of tears. The pain was enough to make me cry, but that wasn’t the reason. “Please stop being angry,” I whispered. “Walter and Osbert did come with me, but I don’t know what happened to them. We didn’t know where you were. We came to help Gerald. We were all together on the hill and then the storm came and I fell and found myself alone. Then somehow I was here.”
Vespasian looked up at me sharply. “It was not a storm,” he said. “You know it was not. We will not yet discuss what it was but you have a very good idea. It took only you, and the boys are safe outside. They do not and will not understand, which is better. Now, it is time to be quiet and let me work.” He was silent for some time, his hands busy and efficient on my body, the steaming water removing the blood and torn flesh. He washed me from my neck, firm across my breasts and down my ribs to the flat plain of my belly. Then he began using the points of small scissors, picking out the shrapnel and tiny stones from the wounds where the fall, or something else more malicious, had imbedded them. It was extremely painful and I clenched my teeth.
The cuts across my breasts were the most painful where the rocks had ripped deep into the flesh. Now, opening each injury to remove the splinters and then to carefully close the wounds again, so once again his fingers were against my nipples. I felt them tighten. Vespasian’s face softened momentarily into slight amusement. For once he misread me. “I repeat, embarrassment is pointless,” he said. “You need hardly be concerned that I find you attractive like this. You are covered in blood and your flesh is striped like a piglet. I do not happen to find blood-letting or the results of torture appealing.”
The pain was becoming excessive and my head rolled, while dizziness and nausea swelled over me. I wanted to slap him but instead I felt myself falling. This wasn’t like the fall down the hillside where I had been remorselessly dragged and dashed against stone. This time the fall was gentle, like floating. Then suddenly I realised Vespasian’s thumb was pressing against my neck. His eyes locked mine and I disappeared into his frown. His last words thumped in my brain He said I’d been tortured. Not a fall, not an accident after all. It made such absurd sense. But now my temples were simmering, my eyes blind with tumbling lights, and I turned and retched. Vespasian was holding my head, my hair lifted carefully away from my face, his hand cool on my brow and the cloth against my cheeks. I tried to pull away; I knew I would vomit, but he held me tight. I coughed and then heaved. I vomited almost into his hand, but he never budged.
When I could bring back nothing more than acid bile, he leaned me backwards again, calmly washed his hands and the cloth in the pot of simmering water, and began at once to wash my face. His own face was so close to mine now that his breath was in my eyes, warm as the water he cleansed me with. His voice seemed magical, like a chant or a spell. “Sleep,” he ordered, very softly. “Sleep now, little one.”
The warmth and the comfort and the shifting breath swam into my nostrils. I tumbled into the pupils of his endless eyes. He was utterly in command of my mind and I did as he commanded and slept.
It must have been a long time before I woke.
When I did, I was alone. The room was day lit and empty. I lay on the same bed but the fire in its small central hearth was little more than smouldering ashes, lifting a little in the breeze from the windows. But I felt drowsy and warm and I was covered up to my chin with a clean linen sheet. Beneath this, all across my breasts and ribs, down over my belly and hips, stopping just above the hair at my groin, I was neatly and heavily bandaged.
My chemise, ripped down the middle, had been drawn together again, barely covering me, but my bliaud, although still attached to me at the shoulders, was ripped beyond repair. I shut my eyes again and set my knowledge into its new lists, organised between Tilda and myself, sharing the difficulty of comprehension. I wondered if I had been drugged and remembered that Vespasian had mentioned opiates.
But strangely it was not my own condition that now interested me so much as his. I was sure of nothing, but I remembered Vespasian speaking of torture. Then although he was clearly furious, he had nursed me and tended me. I had spewed all over him and he had patiently held me, wiped it up and cleaned me afterwards. He had bandaged me so efficiently and so completely that I was immovably encased. I wondered just how much practise he must have at healing the tortured.
I was not sure if his anger was simply because I had disobeyed his dream warnings. He had told me to go back, but I had come forwards. I had come to help him, and to help Gerald. He had sho
wn me the absurdity of both intentions and he had given me no credit for the attempt. Of course I hadn’t spoken to him about wanting revenge for the dead, or the fact that I felt myself to blame. I blundered between two time frames, and something foul had followed me. I couldn’t tell him about that, but perhaps I was now being punished for it.
Vespasian explained nothing. Now I could not do so either.
It was an hour before I tried my legs and tottered from the bed to the door. It was locked. So, clutching the remnants of my clothes around me, I leaned against the wall and dragged my feet to the first arrow slit. Looking down initially gave me vertigo. My room was a tower amongst the clouds. Beyond the dark spread of the river below, the hill rose up to the first skirts of the forest. There remained no visible marks of my terrible slide. The slope was gentle and the grass was peacefully lush. I could see no jutting rocks, nor anything that might have wounded me so badly. There was no Walter, no Osbert. The sun shone. A rural England smiled back at me, pretending life was normal.
The sun was high when someone brought me food. I recognised her at once. She opened the door with a key that clanged like a smith’s hammers and she puffed in, all out of breath from the stairs to this attic in one of the castle turrets. Uta must have climbed a thousand steps. She told me her name, but I already knew who she was.
“We met once, at the East Cheap,” she said. “I was with my uncle and aunt and my cousin. You tried to steal my cousin’s purse.” I nodded. Her hair was no longer plaited, but hung loose in golden curls. She was prettier than Isabel had ever been. “Of course, we didn’t know who you were then. I’m sorry you have to be here. But I’ve brought you food.” It was far better food and more plentiful than I had been used to. No umble pie, but a pottage of venison and peas with fruit and foreign wine.
“I want to know about Vespasian,” I said.
She stared at me, as if believing me simple or befuddled. “What a ridiculous name. I’ve no idea who you mean.”
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