by Jack Whyte
I hope that all is well with you in Tir Manha. Uther says the mountains are very lovely there at this time of the year, but I felt, when he said it, that he was merely making conversation, being polite to his elders. Your father agreed with me, too, and we have both formed the distinct impression that our grandson is reluctant to leave us this year.
The explanation for that is easy to provide, and it has little to do with a reluctance to return to Cambria. This year, for the first time, I believe, Uther is loath to leave the girls of Camulod, and one girl in particular. Her name is Jessica, and she has been visiting here with her father, an old friend to Picus, who now lives in Gaul. She is a pretty little thing, sufficiently so to have turned the heads of Uther and Cay both, stirring a form of rivalry between them that is new. I suspect that my dear grandson fears he is leaving the field to his beloved cousin uncontested, and he seems completely unaware that his fears are groundless. Jessica will be returning to her home in Gaul within the week, and I doubt that she will ever return here, since her father is in failing health. Alas, love appears immortal to the young.
I wanted to tell you about that so that you will not be too concerned should you notice any listlessness or unease in your beloved son on his return. He may simply be pining, and if he is, it will pass. He has had no physical knowledge of love yet, to the extent of my knowledge. The child, Jessica, is an innocent, and I know she is at least as well guarded by her parents in such matters as Uther and Cay have been guarded recently by each other in that respect.
Both boys have grown this year, nevertheless, as I said, from infancy to young manhood almost overnight. It is hard to believe that fifteen years have passed since they were newborn babes.
Farewell, my dear Veronica, and I hope we will be able to see each other again soon. Know that you are in our minds and in our prayers every day, and that your father and I are proud of the grandson with whom you have blessed us.
LV
Chapter SEVEN
Mairidh was dreaming of the boy when the horse woke her with its snorting and stamping, and the moment reality began forcing itself upon her, she moaned and fought against it, refusing to open her eyes. The weight and warmth and smell of the man lying against her side, the feel of his heavy arm across her waist, gave her no pleasure, and she refused to open her eyes to look at him, knowing that when she did she would start an entire new day filled with pain and fear and brutality. He was snoring slightly, his face thrust into her armpit, his breath fluttering against her breast, and the rancid stink of his body made her want to vomit. The Pig. The name had sprung into her mind when she first saw him, and she had heard no other name to gainsay it. She had lost count of the number of times he and his companion had taken her the previous day and night, both of them seemingly insatiable. Now the thrust of his morning hardness pressing against her flank warned her that as soon as he awoke he would be back at her again.
Mairidh was no maiden. She had known her share of men— some said far more than her share—and she exulted in her body and the pleasures it gave her. These two, however, had abducted her after killing the boy. They had brutalized her and dragged her off with them, forcing her to run at the back of her own horse while they both rode the poor beast. They had tethered her by a too-short length of rope, so that as she ran she was in constant danger of being kicked by a flying hoof. Time and again she had fallen and been dragged, but even the beatings she endured for slowing them down had become preferable to the agony of stumbling and staggering behind the horse, hands bound in front of her. Eventually she had fallen into a stupor of exhaustion in which her body ran mechanically while her mind lost all awareness of what was happening.
They had killed the boy, and she had made it possible. Her reward—abduction and violation—had been immediate and inevitable. And even though her complicity in the killing had been unwitting, for a time she had felt that there must be some kind of arcane justice in what was happening to her. Such a beautiful boy, and she had lured him to his death.
Eventually, when they had decided they were far enough removed from the scene of the murder, they had made a rough camp and built a tiny fire, tying Mairidh to a nearby tree while the taller one went off to look around and check that they were where they ought to be and that they were in no danger. He had returned quickly, grinning and nodding to his companion that all was as it should be, and then the two of them had finally let down their guard and relaxed. They had relieved themselves, squatting within sight of her, and then they had eaten, giving her nothing. After that, the evening's entertainment had begun.
They had thrown dice to see which one would have her first, and the shorter of the two, the Pig, who lay beside her now on her right side, had won. The other had held her down, kneeling on her arms. She had fought them at first, but they had beaten her bloody, splitting her nose and lips, and eventually she had submitted and lain still, emptying her mind of everything but her husband's compassionate face while they took her, one after the other, time and again, arousing each other by example long after she would have believed they could sustain such lust.
On countless occasions over the past ten years, Mairidh and her husband Balin had discussed the ramifications of what she was now enduring, facing it as a distinct possibility because of the great amount of travelling they did together. The roads were unsafe everywhere in Britain nowadays, the entire countryside swarming with wandering bands of homeless and desperate men and women, and anyone faced with the prospect of travelling any distance from home had to give serious consideration to the possibility of robbery, abduction and violation in the course of their journey. In consequence, few people travelled nowadays in small groups, preferring to wait for company upon the road in order to enjoy the relative safety offered by larger numbers. Women, as always, were especially vulnerable.
Balin had been endlessly, and at times tediously, insistent upon the need for Mairidh to consider, realistically and ahead of the fact, all that might be and could be involved and entailed in such a misadventure. Her life was the first and most obviously endangered thing: she could be killed attempting to defend herself, or she could be killed from sheer brutality or by accident in the commission of a robbery. Whichever way the death occurred, it would end everything. Next came her health: they might break her bones and rupture her internal organs; they might scar her or mutilate her beyond recognition; or, even less pleasant to consider, they might infect her with some dreadful, incurable disease. Once, when she was a mere child, Mairidh had come face to face unexpectedly with a leper whose facial deterioration was far advanced and horrible to see. She had thought the incident forgotten, but for a term of months following Balin's initiation of these discussions, Mairidh had had terrifying dreams about being ravished by a progression of lepers, all of them as disfigured as the poor creature with whom she had come face to face.
She had railed at her husband then for what she saw as his obsession with her eventual defilement, but she knew now why he had been so concerned, and she blessed him for it.
Balin had known one young woman years before he met Mairidh who had been a clean-living and devoutly religious Christian. This young woman had fallen into the hands of brigands and been repeatedly beaten and violated before being abandoned, naked and alone, by the side of a road far from her home. Her dubious good fortune at being left alive by her abductors was set at naught, however, by the fact that the next group of travellers to come her way was a squad of Roman legionaries who had deserted their post and were fleeing into the mountains—this had been in the north country, almost twenty years earlier, during the final days of Rome's occupation of Britain. These ruffians used the woman even more brutally than had her original captors, but they, too, left her alive when they went on their way.
She was eventually found, close to death, by Balin himself, who was passing that way with his usual large armed escort. He took her into his care, directing his people to make camp right away and then see to the young woman's needs and nurse her back
to health. For more than a week—an insignificant amount of time to Balin, who was in no hurry to arrive anywhere by any particular date—they remained in the same spot while the woman recovered her health and faculties, and when she was sufficiently recovered, Balin went to her tent to visit her and asked her to tell him about what had happened to her. She told him all he needed to know, including the details of who she was and where she lived, but he was most concerned by the fact that she seemed to be consumed with guilt, as though all the misfortunes that had happened to her had somehow been her own doing.
Balin tried to comfort her then, to put her mind at ease, for he could see that it was her mind that had been most affected—far more than her body—by what had happened to her. Her body was already beginning to heal, her bruises showing the colours that meant they were fading and improving. Her mind, however, in Balin's judgment, was making no such progress. He talked to her for long hours on each of the three nights she stayed in his camp during her recovery, and on each of those occasions he took the greatest care to stay far removed from her, well beyond the range of any accidental touch, because he had seen the terror that overtook her face whenever he approached her too closely. On each of those three nights, he talked to her quietly, purposely keeping his tone soft and soothing. None of the fault for what had transpired was hers, he told her time and again, but he never began to believe that she paid any heed to his assurances.
On the morning of the fourth day, he awakened to find that she had killed herself during the night, evidently unable to bear the feelings of guilt and uncleanliness that had filled her with despair.
Balin never recovered from the shock of that incident, Mairidh knew. And when he found himself, years later, all unexpectedly blessed with a brilliant and beautiful wife decades younger than himself, he became increasingly concerned about taking steps to ensure that she would never be infected with that kind of crippling, despair- filled guilt, a concern that eventually matured into a mild obsession.
Travel is the function of ambassadors and messengers: they carry tidings over long distances. Balin had to travel, and Mairidh insisted upon going with him. And so Balin had turned his mind towards the instruction of his wife, teaching her to believe that she should feel no guilt if she should ever be forced or violated sexually by anyone.
Her body, Balin had convinced her, was merely the vessel that contained what the Romans called the animus, her soul. As such, her body might be destroyed or mutilated, but her soul, being immortal and immutable, could not be affected by anything earthly. Mairidh now knew, and her mind accepted, that nothing these two men could do to her would change the truth of who she was. They might kill her, and they probably would, but at the moment of her death all power to harm her would be lost to them. Alternatively, they might leave her nurturing a fertile seed. If that were so, she had a score of ways to deal with it, the last of which would be to have the child and pass it on to someone else to rear. They could injure her physically, too, but the pain would heal. What they could not do was hurt her mentally, unless she herself permitted them to do so, and that she never would. The indignity of suffering their animal lusts and brutality was an inconvenience, no more. The filth of their unwashed bodies could be laved away. The marks of their beatings would diminish, and the memory of their foulness would fade.
Her only lasting regret over this incident, she realized, would be for the beautiful boy.
Now Mairidh lay naked on the ground, her arms stretched above her head because they had tied her wrists again and attached the rope to the tree behind her, leaving no slack. It was difficult to breathe lying there, and more difficult still to move at all. The sparse grass on which she lay did nothing to soften the stony ground beneath her, and Mairidh had never known such pain. Her arms were the least troublesome—they soon grew numb, and her awareness of them dwindled to a constant, throbbing ache in her shoulders that flared into white-hot pain only when she attempted to move. The rest of her body was a mass of individual aches and agonies—rope burns on her wrists and a seemingly endless progression of bruises, abrasions and contusions, lumps and welts, and cuts and scratches. There were whole areas where the skin had been torn from knees, ankles, hips, thighs and buttocks when she had fallen and been dragged behind the trotting horse. Her cheeks and brows throbbed dully from the fists that had battered her when she tried to tight them, and her ribs and flanks were sore from the kicks they had used to urge her to her feet whenever she had fallen behind the horse.
For a long time she had thought she might die of cold during the night, but the shorter man had risen to piss and to throw more wood on the fire, and had noticed her lying shivering on the grass. He had stood gaping at her for a while, scratching himself, before dragging his smelly blanket over to where she lay and throwing himself on her again. He had then fallen asleep on top of her, and eventually he slid off to lie huddled against her side, one leg and one arm across her, holding her down. She had not dared to move for fear of wakening him again, and eventually she had slept.
Now she could sleep no more, and the pain in her arms made her want to whimper. Her bladder was full, too, and had been for hours. She knew she could not hold it much longer; the agony was too intense. But if she moved, she would waken the Pig, and then she would have to squat in front of him, naked, and the thrust of his manhood against her hip left her no doubt what that would bring. And that would waken the other one, the big one, who if anything, had been worse than his companion.
The Pig stirred and snuffled, hitching closer, thrusting himself against her and then sliding one heavy leg up along her thigh and onto her belly so that the full weight of it bore down on her swollen bladder. She could no longer fight against the pain or the pressure, and so she gave in and voided where she lay, feeling the scalding heat flooding her thighs, the relief of it almost approaching sexual pleasure. She made no sound, and as the warm reek of her urine rose to her nostrils, it seemed sweeter to her than the goatish stink of her abductor. The heat went quickly from the wetness, however, and she felt it turn icy against her skin. Don't let him feel it! she prayed. Don't let it wake him up!
She knew there were others close by. She had learned that much the previous day, listening to the two of them. They had not talked much, and when they had it was in a dialect she had never heard before, but she had been able to decipher enough to gather that they belonged to a party of twelve who had landed their boat here on the coast and then split up and travelled inland in twos and threes in search of whatever plunder they might find. They were to meet again and disembark for home this morning, and anyone who failed to reach the meeting place by then would be abandoned, presumed dead. These two could have joined their friends the previous night—the short foray made by the tall one on their arrival here had verified that—but they had been unwilling to share her with the others and so had stayed here to keep her for themselves.
Mairidh had no illusions. She knew these two would leave her dead behind them. Her body, she thought. That they could take and destroy, but not her mind, not her spirit—not the animus that was herself.
The man beside her stirred again and grunted, and she froze. For several heartbeats nothing happened, and then she felt his hand move to her hip and push her away, rolling her over onto her side. The hand moved then to her belly, grasping her and pulling her backward, hard, against his loins. But as she tensed against the thrust of him she heard a scuffling noise, and then the sound of a meaty, concussive, crunching blow directly behind her head. The man convulsed, flinging her away from him and filling her ears with a gasping, gurgling, outraged noise that sent her scrabbling, legs scissoring in panic, all thoughts of her philosophy forgotten as she rolled wildly in search of survival, her eyes wide-stretched in terror, her tethered arms preventing her from making any attempt to gather or protect herself.
It was still dark, just before dawn, and she saw the blackness of a hunched figure stooping over the body of the Pig, then straightening, wrenching something free. Wh
atever he was pulling broke away suddenly, with a grating, sucking sound, springing high and stopping at the level of the crouching figure's head. Mairidh recognized it as a small axe and rolled away again, face down this time, waiting for death. But the noises moved away, leaving her, and she rolled back, fighting for leverage to sit up, knowing it to be impossible. She twisted sideways instead, struggling to see, and in the murky half-light she saw one leaping figure with an upraised arm confront another surging up from the ground. The axe swung down, and again she heard an awful bone-splintering impact, altered by distance this time and followed immediately by a scuffle of falling bodies. She felt vomit surge in her throat, and then she remembered what these animals had done the day before, and the nausea was gone. She looked to where the Pig lay, stiff-legged, his head a featureless black mass.
Her rescuer—could he be that?—was back now, looming over her, and she closed her eyes again, afraid to look. She felt his hand touch her right breast, and some part of her mind was acute enough to register the contact immediately as being a touch—an accidental touch, not a caress or a squeeze—and she began to hope. The hand—both hands now—moved swiftly upward, following the line of her stretched arms to the wrists. She heard an intake of breath and then a fumbling, followed by a grunt of effort and the sound of the axehead biting into the tree behind her, twice, and then a third time. The pressure on her arms lessened, and she knew he had chopped through the rope. He was already pulling and tugging at her, forcing her to rise.
Her arms were on fire, as though they had been torn from their sockets, and she floundered uselessly, unable to use them either to push or to support herself. She felt the smoothness of bare skin as both of his arms slipped about her waist, encircling her and attempting to lift her. He hissed in her ear.