by Lara Blunte
However, it was a face to the left which captured Tameas' attention, a face in the throes of complete agony.
Poor Sir Harry, Tameas thought. There, in front of him, was the woman he adored, finally revealed in all her glory to a city full of strangers, walking towards the man who would be her husband, who would enjoy all that was denied to him, all the loveliness he could now see and more loveliness that would never be for his eyes.
Harry, at that moment, couldn't hide his misery, and couldn't tear his eyes away from Isobel, who had almost reached his pew. As Isobel went by him, Harry’s hand reached out and caught a tendril of her golden hair for a moment, as if he knew that this was all he would ever have of her and that he therefore must have it. As if, Tameas thought as he watched, he would sit forever remembering how those locks had felt for a second between his fingers,.
Tameas could appreciate how ravishing Isobel was, as she reached him. As a man he could see it; but, as a man, he couldn't help mourning the fact that she would be wasted on him, and that whatever good things he had, if he had any, would be wasted on her. He couldn't help mourning the fact that a few steps away there was a man who would have made the beautiful girl happy and would have been made happy by her and that, instead, three people were about to be made eternally miserable.
The prince took Isobel's hand and they turned towards the archbishop. Both of them knelt, and the long ceremony that would unite them forever began.
THE NIGHT AHEAD
It was done.
It was done, and could never be undone.
Isobel sat at the banquet in the castle, feeling as naked and exposed as she had felt during the ceremony. She was only human, and had also felt triumph at the open mouths and bulging eyes of the people in the cathedral, including her husband-to-be. She had felt triumph because the people there had thought that they, in Stonemount, had nothing of any value, and they did.
They had their courage, their heart, their strength, none of which meant anything to these southerners. And they had the beauty of their women.
Yet when Isobel had seen Harry, the misery in his eyes had reminded her of her own misery. It had pierced her heart like an arrow tipped with poison to think, as she walked towards Tameas, that she was leaving her true love behind with every step, that he should have been the only man to ever see her as she was, and that it would have made her happy to be only for his eyes.
Instead now here she sat, on a raised dais for everyone to stare at like a bear at a market.
A lot of men were gaping as if they had lost their renowned southern civility. Women kept looking at her, then looking away, then back at her, scanning her face as though looking for faults, whispering.
Isobel knew that she was beautiful, but that fact had never concerned her much. She also knew that beauty faded; it lasted only a breath a half. What did it matter to her that people would sing about her, that her looks might, in legend, live for a long time?
She was concerned with happiness in life, with loving a man and being loved, with having children and seeing them grow healthy and strong, with caring for her father, her brothers and her people. She didn't prize anything that seemed important to the Lathians.
There were already minstrels plucking at the lute and singing impromptu songs inspired by her beauty. In this court they would never know how she felt, or what she thought, or what she could do. They would never care for anything but her golden hair.
Tameas, in fact, was the only person who didn't seem overly impressed. He had stared as other people had, but then she had seen his eyes looking at everyone else, gauging their reaction and understanding how they felt. He was always observing people. She had seen his eyes dwell on Harry, and had seen something that might have looked like compassion in them.
Harry needed no man's compassion, she thought, setting her chin. She ought to cut all her hair off with a knife, and give it to him in front of everyone, telling him that it had only given her happiness because she had thought it would be for him.
That would certainly inspire a song!
She tapped her fingers on the table impatiently, already tired of the poems about her. She felt like turning the table on top of the silly minstrels. Tameas was drinking again, and her heart started to beat like a drum as she thought about the night ahead. What would it be like? Would he kiss her, as Harry had? She would turn her face away, and not allow it!
Dorthe had awkwardly tried to explain what would happen, and had ended up talking about horses. Isobel knew what animals did, she had seen it often enough: but would it be like that, a grim mounting, the prince's weight on her for a moment, and she in pain?
If there had to be pain, she would bear it, she thought. It could not be unbearable, if so many ladies went through it! Yet Dorthe had said, as well, that men wanted to mount every night, sometimes more than once a night.
"How can women bear it?" she had asked.
"Some women like it," Dorthe had replied.
"Did you like it?"
Dorthe had chuckled. "Oh, my poor husband... He used to fumble so much, and was so quick. But there are men who know better, and make women happy. The prince, it is said, does know his way around a bed..."
Isobel didn't want to think of the prince with her in bed, and thought she should drink a little as well, but just then the dancing seemed about to begin.
Tameas stretched his hand to her and she took his. He led her to the stone floor, where other couples already waited. They stood, her hand in his, in front of the others and began moving with the music.
She had Agnetta to thank for knowing the steps and movements, though she supposed she lacked flair, as she didn't know the song. But when she looked up, the girl was smiling at her, as if telling her that she was doing very well and not disgracing herself in the least. Whenever she came face to face with Tameas, and joined her palms to his in the dance, there was a frown marring her. She could see his eyes become more and more detached, until the irony was back in them.
After two dances he led her back to the dais, and she ventured a glance towards Harry's table; he was staring down, as if he refused to watch any longer.
The king stood up to make a speech, in which he wished them many healthy children. The whole room began to jest about what was supposed to take place in the wedding chamber: it seemed the custom here to get more and more bawdy, in a way that, to the northerners, would seem offensive. Yet Isobel saw that her father, also flushed with wine, was laughing and wishing them babies.
And then one of the pestilential minstrels, attired in black and yellow like a bee, stepped forward and began to sing, looking at Isobel,
Did ever lady so fair
Grace the hand of a prince?
Has ever such golden hair
Caused other ladies to wince?
What can we offer instead?
A lord who can show
A maiden the flow
Of love ─ on chair, floor or bed.
The room exploded in loud laughter and applause. Isobel tried not to flush, and saw that her father was also laughing, that all was permitted now that she was married to the prince, now that she would one day be the queen.
Harry's chair, however, was empty. He had probably decided to leave before he stuck a knife in the breast of the minstrel ─ or in the heart of the man she had married, the man who once again was stretching his hand to her, the man to whose bed she now must go.
THE WEDDING BED
Custom once more dictated that Isobel should be borne away by a bevy of laughing girls, who took her to the bridal chamber to help her undress, put on her nightgown, and look her most alluring.
Tameas was carried on the shoulders of loud young men who shouted admonitions for him to thrust, push and conquer, and made many puns with swords, daggers, other pointy objects and sheaths.
They gave him more wine, as it was always the thing to do among men, and Tameas toasted his own imminent performance with them, laughed, cried "Oooh!" and "Aaah!" when they did
, and clapped.
He had just a moment alone with Don, before he entered the chamber.
"By God, you're not going to your death!" Don said, seeing through Tameas' pretense, which was exaggerated enough to qualify as a mockery of the proceedings. "All men in the kingdom envy you tonight!"
"Do they? They envy deflowering a girl who feels contempt and disgust? I think the kingdom will find they have a very strange prince, then."
Don shrugged, "These things have a way of arranging themselves in time, you know..."
"I think, in fact, they very often never do," Tameas said. "I cannot cease caring for Alyon by decree, and in spite of whatever Latin I just spouted in church I feel as though I am expected to be unfaithful to her with a girl I don't know, and don't much like."
Nevertheless, he clapped his friend on the shoulder and walked on towards the door of the room, while behind him the men shouted and sang bawdy songs.
All you maidens soft and fair
You'll know what a man can do
He'll plough your ground
And pluck a sound
A groaning will do too!
Tameas opened the door to the chamber and there was a flurry of ladies giggling, moving around the bed, then running towards him, their eyes flying up coyly to his face. The door was closed behind them as they left.
Isobel sat in bed in her white nightgown, softly illuminated by the candles all around her. The girls had strewn white roses on the bed and the floor, and he looked down as he moved forward, watching his boots crush the petals.
His wife was beautiful, her breasts rising and falling under the sheer nightgown. Yes, any man would be happy to leap into bed and ravish her, and perhaps convince her one day that making love was not such an unpleasant thing.
Any man but him.
Tameas stopped at the foot of the bed on the right side, which had been reserved for him, and put his forearm on the carved wooden poster.
"How do you, lady?" he asked quietly.
"I am well," Isobel said.
She hid her apprehension, but he could see it. She was waiting to be sacrificed, horrified by what was about to happen and yet prepared to put up with it valiantly for the sake of nation building.
She sat weeping inside for Harry, for her wasted youth, her broken heart, and he was supposed to climb on her, take his pleasure and start making the children that were needed for the succession.
They all forgot, sometimes, how difficult it was to make him do what he didn't want to do. He could be a princely mule.
"Will you come to bed, my lord?" she finally asked in a hard voice, unable to withstand the suspense any longer. She wanted it to be over quickly.
"I find that in spite of it having been a long day, or days, I am not yet tired," Tameas replied.
Isobel looked confused. "But...we are not meant to share a bed to rest!"
"I know, Isobel." He saw her flinch. So he might ravish her, he thought, but not use her name. "I know what we are meant to do. But we are not going to do it, not tonight."
"My lord?" she sounded almost angry already. By God, she was quick tempered. And unimaginative. Was it all going to be about duty, for the rest of their lives, always this grim marching on, doing what must be done? She would march alone, then.
"You have said you are not tired! Do I displease you? What is the matter?" she asked, her voice more demanding at every question.
Tameas was now smiling down at her, the pity he had felt for her innocence quickly dissipating. He was no more patient than she was, he just knew how to deflect his temper and display it as something else, something that always managed to infuriate the other person, leaving the advantage to him.
It was going to be too easy with her.
"Well," Tameas said. "I don't know how much you understand about what is meant to happen, but while you can just lie there, I must...rise to the occasion."
Isobel thought of the horses and flushed. Did men look like that under their breeches, and were they just as big, and if so, where would it all go?
"And what is required for that to happen? Must I do something?"
Leaning his back against the poster, Tameas crossed his arms and pretended to be musing on her question. "Not necessarily..."
"Then what is the matter?" she asked, pronouncing the words slowly, with ill concealed contempt.
Her eyes fell to the crotch of his breeches and up again, and he looked down himself. "It's just not happening," he said feigning helplessness. "You know, it is the way, sometimes."
"I have heard, that when men drink too much..."
"Oh, I have trained for that ─it is hardly ever my problem."
"Are you...are you incapable of..."
"Not incapable, no."
"Then what is the matter?" she asked again with a frown, her tone gaining volume.
"The matter is that I want to be in that bed as little as you do," he said, his voice like velvet. "That I, as you, have agreed to a marriage to keep the peace and make our fathers happy, but I have no intention of doing any more than that." He looked down at his crotch again. "Not an inch more, apparently."
She was staring at him with eyes like Medusa’s and he almost expected her glorious hair to become a nest of hissing yellow snakes. "This marriage, like any marriage, must produce offspring, or else it will all have been in vain!" she berated him.
"But Lady Isobel, or rather, Your Highness, a bed is no place for cutting objects such as your eyes. Methinks, in fact, that coward as I am, I shall sleep in that chair there by the goodly fire."
He started to move with lazy elegance towards the chair as she sprang up and knelt on the bed. Now he could see her lovely body outlined by the candles behind her, and there was hardly a man in Christendom and beyond who wouldn't have found the inches necessary for an enthusiastic performance. She was all the more tantalizing because she had no knowledge that she was so exposed, or that her round breasts were moving as she scowled at him.
"How dare you offend me like this?"
Tameas made a helpless gesture. "Men are unpredictable creatures, madam. We might, in church, have a sudden urge, and then, in the bedroom, with a lovely princess...nothing!"
"If you sit on that chair, by heaven you shall never touch me after!" she threatened.
But Tameas was already sitting, putting his feet up on a large stool. "I never shall," he told her. "Unless you ask me."
He could feel the heat of her fury behind him, and hoped she would not brain him with the warming pan. He was fairly confident that she would never ask anything of him.
LONG LIVE THE KING
There was hardly time for the courtiers to smile knowingly at the newly married couple, for their families to predict the happy date of the birth of a baby, or for anyone to give them advice about the rest of their lives; there was no time for Isobel to learn to dissemble her displeasure, or for Tameas to torment her with his courtesy; there was no time for Agnetta and Donnet on one side and Dorthe on the other to find out how the marriage was truly faring after the wedding night.
There was no time for almost anything, for two days after the wedding King Tibold took violently ill.
It happened during a private meeting with his son. First, they had received the lords who, arriving from different corners of the kingdom to see Tameas married, took advantage of the occasion to sue the king for more things, or complain about each other, or warn of skirmishes in the east between the frontiersmen and the barbarians who were trying to cross the sea in their long boats now that the seas were warm.
Tibold had dealt with them all, taken notice of the threats to the kingdom and issued orders that they should be looked into, and that reinforcements should be sent.
Then he had said to Tameas when they were alone, "Someone like Lord DeGray, asking for more advantages and a higher title while remaining a lazy, greedy landlord to his tenants needs to be watched. He has had no road built in his lands to connect them to the ones I am paying for, or to the ones his neigh
bors made ─ and so he makes it difficult for his people to get around, and they feel no prosperity."
Tibold had sat down with a grimace and continued, "He expects to keep them loyal because he is a man of war, and consorts with his knights and allows them much license, but this is a thread he has pulled so tight that eventually it will break." He wagged his finger. "But mind him, because he is still a threat. He is unused to peace, jealous of its advantages but incapable of procuring them through hard labor and brains."
Tameas listened, while Tibold combed his beard with his fingers and added, "Think also that barbarian lords like Etheld and Ulrich have a hankering for our riches..."
The king had stopped speaking then, and grabbed his arm. Tameas had not liked his unhealthy gray pallor the day before, but Tibold had insisted on regaining the time spent on festivities through even harder work.
Now his face was like wax, and he let out a cry, which meant that the sudden pain he felt was great; but when Tameas rushed to his side, the king half rose in his chair, pushing him aside.
"No," he said, "it's nothing! It’s not anything serious..."
"Father, take my arm," Tameas begged.
"No!" Tibold cried, and stood up on his own.
When he straightened his back, however, the pain was too great to bear and he bent again to his left side, his arm now stiff but useless. He took two steps, as if running away from something, or perhaps trying to get to his chamber to hide from his son.
He could go no farther. He fell sideways like a heavy tree and the crown, which he had forgotten to remove, rolled away from his head as his cheek hit the stone floor.
Tameas knelt by his side and saw that his father could not even speak, but that his eyes bulged, and the veins on his neck seemed to be choking him.
"Get his physician, hurry!" the prince shouted at the pages who ran forward.
It was not long before he castle knew that the king was in bed, and that his heart was failing. His three physicians asked everyone to leave the chamber while they tended to him, and Queen Elinor sat in her room, having asked not to be disturbed. Tameas stayed with Agnetta, who wept with her face against his doublet as he held her.