I do not like troubadours. They simper disgustingly, though no one forces them. They flatter everyone till it makes me sick, thinking how shameless I must have looked flattering those knights for my grandmother. I had to do it. They have a choice. I do not like these men. Small wonder they do not like me.
So why should they sing of my little triumph: how Isabeau of the Isle of Sorcery, granddaughter of the mighty enchantress Ettarre, first ventured into the wide world and proved—well—I’m not sure what I proved. You can judge for yourself.
~o0o~
“That canting fool of a troubadour!” I whispered in Ursula’s ear when I could pry her away from the harper. “Why do you trust him?”
We were spending a rainy night at an inn. On fair nights we slept rough, and I bit my lip to keep from complaining of rocks or cowpats, because Ursula didn’t complain of them, and I knew I must be strong like Ursula if I wanted to live as freely as she did. When it rained, she looked for lodgings; still, she counted her pennies carefully each rainy night, and I feared it would not be long before I’d be as familiar with beds of mud as I was with beds of rocks. At least out on the commons, it didn’t rain minstrels.
“Who says I trust him?” Ursula said languidly. She raked her fingers through her tangled sand-blonde hair, fluffing it up where her helmet had flattened it. The troubadour caught her misty-eyed glance and winked. Disgusting.
I cocked my head at the troubadour. “I know that look well enough. He has dishonorable designs on you.”
She shrugged. “If he tries anything dishonorable, I can whomp him with the flat of my sword. And if he tries it on you, you can turn him to stone.”
I bit my nail. “I don’t really know if I can.”
“Of course you can,” Ursula said. “You made statues of twenty knights.”
“That was on the Isle of Sorcery,” I reminded her, “in the Garden of Delights. It was a place of power, and it was my home. Now, everything is different. I don’t know where I can draw power now that I’ve left all that behind.”
“Oh.” Ursula looked crestfallen. “I’d thought—well—what a team we’d make: me with my sword and you with your wand, like Arthur and Merlin in the troubadours’ tales. When I was searching for the Garden of Delights, I earned my bread guarding travelers from highwaymen. I thought, now there were two of us, we—well, never mind.”
“You thought I’d be some use,” I blurted out more sourly than I intended. “Not an overdressed piece of baggage on the back of your saddle.”
“Don’t put words in my mouth,” Ursula protested, but didn’t supply any words to replace my harsh ones. The troubadour began to sing again, and all good sense drained from her face like water from a sieve. Slack-jawed and besotted as the men I’d enchanted, she listened to the smooth tenor voice crooning some foolishness about a virtuous low-born maiden who captures the heart of a handsome prince. “Something will turn up,” Ursula said dreamily. “Maybe a handsome prince will fall in love with you and make you his queen.”
I swallowed a wave of nausea, remembering the poisoned kisses I’d given to princes and knights to bind them to Lady Ettarre’s will. “I don’t want a prince,” I muttered. But what did I want? If I wasn’t the Damsel in the Garden, who was I?
The troubadour finished his noise and slithered over to Ursula’s side. “Did my music give you pleasure, Maiden of the Gleaming Sword?”
“Beautiful,” Ursula breathed, lost in wonder.
For myself, I marveled at the mysterious power of the harper’s stupidity, which not only rendered him foolish but spread foolishness even to an otherwise intelligent girl.
“This old prentice-work is hardly worth your praise, fair maid, compared to the rare and rapturous odes I shall compose now I have you to inspire me.”
“I—? Oh! I would be honored.”
“Say not so, my beauty: it is you who confers honor upon me. I think I have divined why seeing you in the guise of a warrior inflames my ardor. Like all art, it is a lie that tells the truth. Is not love a battlefield where a man needs all his courage?”
“You have a pretty way with words, Florian,” Ursula said, “yet this once, I cannot see the sense in your comparison. I admit I have no experience of love, and little more of battle, but I should be very sorry to find love anything like the battlefields I have known. Take the battle I fought around Lammas-tide with Long Luc the Highwayman, who held a girl in the saddle before him as a shield so I could scarcely strike him for fear of killing her. If she had not been desperate enough to throw herself off the horse, I’m not sure what I would have done. As it was, I didn’t have the luxury of offering Luc mercy, for fear he would kill her the moment I looked away. I had to hack him down as hard as I could while he was distracted by her fall. It was ugly: he bled like a punctured wineskin, bubbled gore at the mouth, and cursed until breath failed him. I’d hate to think love anything like that.”
Ursula, God love her, told this bloody tale as matter-of-factly as if she were saying we’d had a rainy August, while the troubadour’s face took on the most peculiar expression, as if he’d raised a dipper of water to his lips and found himself drinking down a live eel.
“You’re not joking, are you?” Florian managed to say after several ineffectual attempts at speech.
“Not in the least,” said Ursula.
“This—this armor isn’t a disguise? You really are a knight-errant?”
“Well, I can’t say I’ve been knighted...” Ursula hedged.
“She’s a knight,” I cut in.
Florian turned to me. “She’s the warrior who cut Long Luc down to size?”
“I didn’t witness that particular battle,” I admitted, “but I personally watched her cut eleven heads off a dragon, easy as saying paternoster.” There, I thought, let him meditate on that before he lays a finger on her.
“Really?”
“I wouldn’t say it was easy,” Ursula said. “The trick was noticing which heads breathed fire and either cutting those off first, or positioning myself so they couldn’t reach me without scorching the dragon itself. It was no walk in the garden, I assure you....”
“Nonetheless, she won her way, where most of the properly dubbed knights fled with burned backsides,” I said. “She rescued me, and twenty knights besides.”
“Really?”
Ursula blushed to the roots of her hair. “I suppose so.”
Florian’s idiot gape widened into an avid smile. “Maid Ursula, if this is true, you could win a great purse of money at Lord Bertram of Ouesterre’s St. Gall’s Day Tournament.”
“Do you really think so?” Ursula was all bashful eagerness. “You may laugh, but I’ve never even seen a tournament.”
“If you really brought down Long Luc, you should take the tournament by storm,” the troubadour said. “After such a battle, a joust will be child’s play. Just remember to capture, not kill. There’s no profit in killing.”
“I should hope not,” Ursula said. “That would make me an assassin. But how do you profit in a tournament?”
“You capture knights to win ransoms, or horses to keep. Some landless knights make their living doing nothing but tourney.”
“We could use another horse,” Ursula said to me, “even if I won nothing more.”
I scowled at Florian. “Don’t speak of winnings without the price. One man’s winnings come from another’s losses. What will this adventure cost Ursula?”
“Nothing, nothing! Lord Bertram displays his wealth by offering the whole tournament out of his own treasury—purses of gold awarded each day of the tournament, and three days of feasting for all guests and travelers. I can guide you there and see Maid Ursula entered in the lists.”
The harper wore that shrewd look I’d often seen in my cousin Charles’s eye when he was trying to manipulate things to his advantage. I fixed my eye on him, trying to imitate Grandmother’s most intimidating stare. “Why are you so eager? What do you stand to gain by it?”
“Why
shouldn’t I delight in the rise of so rare a heroine?”
I glared in silence.
“If she does triumph, I want to be the first to rhyme the story of the maiden warrior,” he said.
“And—?”
“Well, a man’s got to live on something,” he said. “You could profit by it too, if you’re discreet—and I know a wise maiden like you, my lady Isabeau, must understand discretion.”
“Stop flattering and say something honest.”
“Your forthrightness disarms all lies, Lady Isabeau,” he said. “Surely you can discern that none of the crowd at the tournament—those uninitiated in the lore of Ursula’s prowess—would expect a blushing maiden to overpower strong men, proven warriors as big as Long Luc. The odds against her will be massive. Think how much we could win betting on her.”
It sounded fishy to me. “Didn’t the Church ban tournaments?”
“We’re not headed for Rome, Lady. The Bishop of Ouesterre is Lord Bertram’s little brother. He’s not going to preach down his brother’s favorite sport.”
“We have to live on something, Isabeau,” Ursula said.
“I know,” I said irritably, but in truth I needed her reminder. Lady Ettarre might have regarded me more as a valuable horse or prize brachet than a grandchild, but still, I’d been as used to regular meals as her palfrey was to a full manger.
“I grew up sparring with my brothers,” Ursula told Florian. “I can fight without killing. Teach me the rules of the tournament as we travel. I’ll see what I can win there.”
And so we were stuck with that ninny as our companion all the way to Ouesterre. As we trudged beside Ursula’s horse—for Cloudmane could scarcely be expected to carry three—Florian and Ursula talked incessantly about jousts and melees and lists and the peculiar set of superstitions and habits that passed for honor among tourneyers. When they tired of those subjects, Florian sang his love-lyrics, some of them obviously reworked to force the name “Ursula” in where a two-syllable name belonged. I wondered what girl he had serenaded before with those tunes: Marie? Jeannette? But Ursula drank them all up as if she’d never in her life heard of insincerity.
In the mornings before we took to the road, Ursula would run through her exercises, bending and stretching her lithe frame, swashing her sword arm in all directions, lunging at an imaginary opponent.
Sometimes when she was busy stretching and lunging, I would retreat into the roadside brush to try one of the small spells I’d done effortlessly in the Garden of Delights, like calling a bee. I’d kept bees for my grandmother, Lady Ettarre. I used to call them to alight upon the orange trees she loved, with their sweet flowers and their sharp, acidic fruit. But outside the Isle of Sorcery, I saw no orange trees. All the flowers and herbs that had lent me strength in the Garden of Delights were far away. In the scrubby woodland and grassy meadow of our journey, there were herbs aplenty, but they were strange to me; I scarcely knew their common names, much less their lore. Ursula laughed when I asked her to name them. “Those? Nettles; watch how you handle them! That ugly leaf? Ugh, burdocks. Haven’t you ever seen crabgrass before? But of course, you grew up in such a well-kept garden, you never saw common weeds.”
Her words struck a chord in me: I had grown up in that garden like the herbs till she plucked me out of it. What if I never put down roots again? Everything I had known as common was rare and strange here. I had a whole world to learn, leaf by leaf and stone by stone. The very grass was coarser, and the dirt that clung to its roots smelled different.
Hiding behind a hedge, I stroked a tufty yellow weed-blossom, then rested my fingertips on the succulent stem beneath it, trying to feel the flow of nectar inside it and cast that sense out into the air for the bees to find. I called the bee with words and with melody and with my heart, but I had so little confidence that the weed between my fingers was fit for bees that I was unsurprised when nothing answered my summons. Then I heard Ursula call, “Isabeau, where’ve you gone? Time to move along.” I dropped the weed-blossom to follow her. A bee landed on it, whether my call had anything to do with it or not.
~o0o~
The day of the tournament found Ursula resplendent and ready. She’d spent most of her dwindling money supplementing the odd hand-me-downs of armor she’d gotten from her brothers with second-hand greaves and a gaudy shield painted with her own new cognizance: a rampant unicorn on a field of green.
Separated from Ursula for the first time since I left Grandmother’s lands, I sat stiffly among the spectators, playing the fine lady. For once, the richly embroidered gown I’d worn to entrap knights was useful in my new life. We’d had to brush the mud off it with Cloudmane’s currycomb. To my mortification, Florian had proved most deft at this operation, gently coaxing soil to depart without harming my painstakingly embroidered sprays of poppies, jasmine, amaranth, and damask roses. I glowered as he praised my beauty and the gown’s splendor, predicting great conquests. But I admit he was right. In my finery, I could be introduced as Lady Isabeau of the Isle, and no one would challenge my right to a seat among the noble. Florian stood by my shoulder as if he were my attendant.
Everyone was packed closely in the stands: ladies, minstrels, servants, noblemen, lapdogs (with four legs or two), and the occasional child. I was not used to being surrounded with people like a cow in a herd, feeling their breath on my skin, catching a faint whiff of sweat even from well-scrubbed ladies, overhearing murmured conversations that had nothing to do with anyone I knew. It was worse than one of those feast-days when Grandmother would decide that all of us—her children and grandchildren, legitimate and illegitimate, plus a scattering of in-laws, great-grandchildren, and servants—must flock together to Mass and a meal in some uneasy counterfeit of cordiality. Except that those were people I knew too well to trust, and these tournament-goers were people I knew too little to trust. I felt sure every one of the people around me must know me for a fraud.
I was just trying to think of a pretext to retreat from the crowd when Ursula rode into the lists as if borne up on the music of the heralds’ trumpets. The helm she’d polished for hours last night shone like silver, and she held herself as proudly as the unicorn painted on her shield. A man somewhere behind me chattered to his neighbor, “Good seat on a horse, that new fellow with the unicorn. Who is he?”
Florian took that as his cue. “Not he. She, my good friends, is the Maiden of Révie. Listen!” With that he began his song: “From Révie comes a maiden as strong as she is pure,/And where she sets her target, her victory is sure...” There was more in that vein, but I won’t repeat it all lest it turn your stomach. Bets were placed; Florian’s money was already wagered, as was the small stake I’d acquired by selling a pearl button from my gown.
From the opposite corner appeared Sir Thibault of Grismont, bearing a shield on which a golden bull of exactingly detailed masculinity charged across a crimson field. Thibault himself was like a bull, big and broad; his horse was proportionately heavier than Ursula’s. I reminded myself that the dragon, too, had been bigger than Ursula. At least Sir Thibault had no extra heads.
The champions saluted Lord Bertram—a man of some thirty years, milk-faced, thin, and weedy-looking, with a remarkably childish face. Then an even thinner and weedier man in a bishop’s miter presented the Holy Scripture (closed, I noted) and bade the two contestants swear upon it that they would fight fairly with the strength of their limbs, employing neither poison nor sorcery against their opponent.
I had to restrain myself from snorting audibly. As if I, or any self-respecting sorcerer, would sully the High Art of Solomon to cheat in some barbaric sport! At least when I enchanted knights for my grandmother, I’d believed I was serving justice, upholding a rightful ruler against usurpers. Still, I kept my mouth shut. Why defend the honor of sorcerers, when I wasn’t sure I’d ever be a sorcerer again?
Ursula and her bull-like opponent swore on the Bible, then rode to their own ends of the field to await the herald’s signal. Somewhere below
, a bard was mooing out idiotic verses about Sir Thibault’s mighty prowess and courtly manners.
Ursula sat her horse steadily, motionless, yet I could glimpse the motion waiting to happen in her tense shoulders, in her mount’s stance, as I would in a drawn bow. The herald’s flag descended, and she and her steed sprang straight toward the opponent like a loosed arrow. She planted her lance squarely in the middle of the rampant bull and careened forward, sweeping the thick-set knight out of the saddle. Thibault the Mighty hit the ground in a mighty cloud of dust, spewing language that would not enhance his reputation for courtliness.
Florian leapt to his feet, crowing like a cockerel:
“The Maiden’s maiden tournament reveals her unmatched power.
Though never has she jousted until this, her dawning hour,
As champion over crude mankind, armed in innocence
She wields the lance of purity, and virtue her defence.”
I ground my teeth. Did he notice—or care—what expectations he was raising? If the crowd believed Ursula won through moral purity, what harm would it do her reputation if she met a stronger foe? Or was this crowd so accustomed to lies that they never thought of believing a word?
Whether believed or not, the bards of the first two champions gave way to others praising the next pair, Guilbert de Montrod and Orme of Orcanay, in terms indistinguishable from those used on Sir Thibault. No wonder Florian had leapt at the chance to sing the praises of a female knight; at least it gave him something different to say.
Most of the spectators seemed to doze during the bards’ songs, but a few tapped their feet in rhythm. One lady in a high-peaked headdress, a stylish hennin, fixed her eyes on the champions, her whole body tense with anticipation. A strange sense of familiarity teased my mind. She reminded me of Grandmother somehow, though not in any obvious way. Grandmother’s dark hair was streaked with white, her age-spotted hands knobby at the joints and large for her slight frame; her thin lips, even when silent, were a study in sarcasm. The spectator in the hennin was tall and fair, past the first bloom of youth, perhaps, but by no means old. Her lips were like delicate rose-petals, her hands like lilies; the lock of hair that drooped artfully from her headdress was as blonde as butter. Nonetheless, there was something alike about them: perhaps the elegance of her close-laced gown or the imperturbable confidence in her gaze. I almost felt I could smell the orange blossoms that always scented Grandmother’s clothes.
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