Warlord oc-4

by Angus Donald

  I was so surprised by her new demeanour towards me that I was rendered speechless. Which, I believe, was a very fortunate thing. I do not like to think what would have happened if I had defied her. And so I ordered the servants to prepare a piping-hot wooden tub in the wash house, soaped and scrubbed myself thoroughly, dressed in suitable clean clothes, and made an effort to wear the mask of a happy, carefree fellow.

  I should like to tell you that Goody’s irresistible words cleansed my soul of its malaise, and that after that I was a different man: cheerful, sober and filled with purpose. I should dearly like to tell you that. But the world does not turn in that way, at least not for me, and I have vowed to tell the truth on these pages.

  I did make much more of an effort, though, to appear happy and normal; I rose early each day, whether I had slept or not, and I realized that my fondness for wine had passed an acceptable point, and banished the fruit of the vine from our table except at great feasts. But I was not cured; the soul-sickness lingered, filling my bones with lead, my stomach with vinegar and my head with bloody horrors. At the end of each long, dreary day, sober, sad and exhausted, I would retire to my chamber and huddle beneath my blankets, staring at the white plastered wall by the feeble light of a wax-dipped rush, both dreading and yearning for sleep.

  Baldwin and Goody made all the arrangements for the wedding. Easter was late that year and we were to be married the week after it on the last day of April. But two arrivals to the neighbourhood in that crisp spring month blew all our plans apart like cobwebs in a gale.

  In the first week of April, a dusty messenger arrived from Hubert Walter, Archbishop of Canterbury, Papal Legate and the Chief Justiciar of England. Walter was the man who held the country for Richard while the King did battle against Philip’s forces in Normandy. I knew him by sight as a short, wide, muscular bishop, the kind of man who was equally at home slaughtering his foes from the back of a horse or delivering a solemn address in an incense-wreathed cathedral. He had a reputation across Europe as an able administrator, a ruthless ruler and a man utterly loyal to King Richard.

  His messenger was a tired knight I had never met before, and whose name, I am ashamed to say, now escapes me. His message was simple: Richard needed more knights for the war in France, and all those landed men in England who owed him service were being summoned by Hubert Walter to a muster at London in May. The new force was expected in Normandy at the beginning of June. I held three English manors of the King in the West Country, the manors of Burford, Stroud and Edington — I held Westbury, of course, from the Earl of Locksley — and also in theory the manor in France now occupied by the black-headed French knight and his son: I had little choice. Like it or not, I was going back to war.

  The second arrival was even less welcome. On the day the messenger had left, to carry his news to other idle knights scattered about the North, Goody had bid me goodnight at dusk and had left me, with a cup of watered ale beside the banked hall fire, cleaning Fidelity with an old cloth, a smooth stone and a pot of goose fat, and made her way to her own apartments in the southern part of the courtyard. A few moments later, I heard her screams: three long, high shrieks of soul-shrivelling fear.

  I burst out of the hall with my sword in my hand and sprinted towards the two-room guest house that Goody had made her home. The outer door opened at one blow from my boot, and I found myself in a small, dark hall. To my left I could see seams of light coming from the other room, a bedchamber, and in a trice I had smashed that door from its hinges with a brisk shoulder charge. As I stood in the wreckage of the doorway, I saw Goody standing, apparently unharmed, in the centre of the room, clutching a candle to her chest, her underlit face frozen in a rictus of fear. On the far wall, on the white limewash, some shaky hand had written in blood:

  One year, one day after you wed, you pay.

  But that was not the horror of the room. On the bed, propped up on the pillow, wrapped in the swaddling clothes of a new-born child, was a day-old lamb, with a little white baby’s linen cap tied to its head. The animal had been crudely skinned before being dressed in linen bands, and its pink, glistening flesh, pointed jaw, and bulging blue-grey eyeballs gave it the resemblance of a freakishly deformed human infant. Nur, it seemed, was back in our midst, her malice towards us undimmed.

  The room smelled of blood and excrement and burnt hair. There were people crowding into the chamber behind us, peering through the smashed doorway, muttering and crossing themselves, and the light of half a dozen candles made the crude lamb-baby look even more terrible. I strode across to the bed and swept the awful dead thing off the blankets with one sweep of my hand, and then I went and took Goody in my arms, pressing her wet face gently into the crook of my neck and shoulder.

  She was no longer screaming, but her whole body was shuddering with the shock of the encounter. I held her tightly. We did not speak. Then I steered her, on unresisting feet, out of the guest house and back into the hall, and from there through into my bedchamber. And, holding her chastely in my arms, we both lay down on the bed and I gently rocked her until, some hours later, she found sleep.

  I could not sleep myself: the words written on the wall in Goody’s chamber marched through my head in a simple, endless drum-beat: One year, one day, after you wed, you pay. One year, one day, after you wed, you pay…

  The next morning, at dawn, I rose, summoned a sleepy-eyed Thomas from his pallet, washed, dressed, armed myself with sword, mace and misericorde, saddled Shaitan, who was badly in need of some exercise, and took the road towards Alfreton. I was determined to speak with Nur and put a stop to this nonsense once and for all. I ordered three green-cloaked men-at-arms to accompany Thomas and myself on that mission, reckoning that five mounted warriors would easily be a match for one mutilated girl and whatever poor bedraggled followers she might have gathered around her in the deep woods. And, to be honest, it felt good, a warm satisfying feeling, to be well-armed and mounted on a mettle-some destrier, and surrounded by my loyal armed men, riding to war in defence of my woman.

  We approached the lair of the witch Nur from the east, coming up the Great North Road from Westbury and turning left on a narrow path towards Alfreton into dense woodland two or three miles from that small settlement. It was an ill place, even on a bright April morning, and the trees, venerable oaks, tall alders and exuberant ash, grew close together, their trunks covered in the snake lines of vines. The trunks seemed almost to be huddled together in fear, or from cold. We were no more than five miles from my lands and yet I felt as if I were entering strange and hostile country. As we plunged into the trees, a raven cawed above our heads and flapped away on black, tattered wings, and from then on the wood seemed softly quiet, almost expectant in its thick silence. The path grew even narrower; thin questing shoots, spreading branches and catching brambles barring our path, and plucking at our horses’ coats and our loose clothing; the ground underfoot was a deep mulch of dead leaves and boggy mud, our mounts’ hoofbeats no more than dull thuds. Even in full daylight, only a little sunshine pierced the high canopy of leaves, and we moved through a green-tinged world, silent and close. Evil seemed to hum in the air with the midges and dragonflies. The men-at-arms pulled their cloaks close around their shoulders, though the day was warm. Even sturdy Thomas wore an uneasy frown on his young face.

  We forged onwards slowly, walking the horses, looking for some sign of Nur and her camp. But we found no trace of her, just a surrounding army of thick grey trunks and shifting walls of green dappled foliage. I knew that this patch of Sherwood Forest, an island of trees surrounded by farmland, was only twenty or thirty acres in size and yet we seemed to have been travelling for an age with no sign of leaving the woodlands — by now we should have ridden clear through these woods and be entering the broad open wheat fields around Alfreton. I began to regret my haste in sallying out after the witch without a guide: if I had paused and found a countryman, a good local man who knew this place like his own hearth, to lead us through this dank woo
d, we would not now be — I had to admit it — lost.

  I looked down at Shaitan’s feet and saw that the path had disappeared completely; we were merely threading our way through uncharted woodland, passing where we might between the trees. I could not see the sun, not even its vague direction; this opaque green world had swallowed it whole. We seemed to be within an enchanted fairy realm, a place of magic and evil. I had a brief moment of panic, a sudden breathlessness, and thumping heart, which I believe I managed to conceal from the men: I knew not where we were, or how we might escape with our lives, indeed with our souls, from that fell place. Eventually, I called a halt.

  ‘I believe we must have scared her away,’ I said, attempting a brisk, confident tone but producing one that came out dull and eerily muffled by the closeness of the trees. ‘We will not see her this morning, I fear. And perhaps we may never see her again. But the day is drawing on, and I should like to eat my dinner back at Westbury. So we will now return the way we came and rejoin the Great North Road without delay. This way, men, and look lively for I am hungry for my own hearth!’

  I turned Shaitan and urged him in the direction from which we had just come; but something was wrong with my senses, for after only a few moments I found myself facing a wall of dense greenery with no clear passage through it. Oddly, we seemed to be surrounded by the wood, as if the trees themselves had moved in around us, hemming us in. I dismounted and ordered my men to do likewise and, drawing Fidelity, I began to hack at the brambles and fronds, and the low swooping branches that blocked our path forward. It was slow going, and sweaty, aching work, and my sword arm was weakened by many months of inactivity, but we did make some progress. I slashed and swiped at the swaying woodland, moving forward only a yard at a time, the thick sap running down the fuller of my blade like the blood of wounded trees. At last, the boughs began to thin, and when I had hacked through a thick patch of head-high green ferns, I found myself — to my surprise — leading Shaitan into bright sunlight and a clearing no more than thirty paces across. My eyes were dazzled at first after so long in the gloom of the forest, and I found that I was standing at the edge of what could only be described as a small village. I was astounded: all around the edge of the clearing a ring of mean hovels had been constructed. There were huts, even tiny cottages of timber and turf, with trickling smoke coming from holes in the bracken-thatched roofs — and people, scores of people, mature women sitting by their doorways cradling babies, young girls tending pots by a fire-pit in the centre of the space, skinny children in tattered clothes running hither and yon, squealing and laughing, playing catch-me-if-you-can in the warm sunlight.

  I heard my men and their big horses crashing through the greenery behind me, then Thomas was at my shoulder, his own sword drawn, staring agog at the scene before our eyes. These are the outcasts, I thought, these are the runaways, rejects and outlaws of the kind who had once flocked to Robin for protection. And they are all women.

  Apart from their sex, there were other characteristics that united these people: they were all ugly, some spectacularly hideous; deformed, crippled, lacking limbs or digits or ears; leprous, blind or ancient or just drooling mad. Only the babies, wrapped in filthy rags, appeared to be whole. I absorbed all of this in a few heart-beats, and while I was staring in amazement at the hidden village, the women in turn noticed me. A crone at the far side of the clearing, seated by the entrance to a sagging turf hut, gave a gibbering screech, pointed a bony finger at me, and fled into her hovel. The whole village immediately erupted in a chittering, babbling roar, and the placid, happy scene disintegrated into movement. Old women with flapping empty dugs scrambled to scoop up suddenly screaming babies and darted away into the forest; emaciated girls with filth-matted hair wailed and cowered behind the nearest trees. One lumpen woman, broad-shouldered but with an enormous purple goitre swelling from her neck, grasped a thick branch from the wood pile and, growling, took a pace towards us and shook it in our direction in a distinctly threatening manner. Everywhere were women scurrying and rushing; calling out in alarm and anger. The occupants of the sturdier hovels bustled inside and slammed their doors, throwing wooden locking bolts across with a thump.

  But one door opened.

  The door of the largest hut, almost a house in fact, burst open and a figure strode into the centre of the clearing. She threw back her head and howled like a vixen in mortal agony, a long, booming shriek of limitless rage and pain. It was Nur, witch-chieftain of this women’s village, the queen of the damned, in all her ragged majesty.

  Her hair, long since turned ash-grey, had been shorn and spiked with dried mud so that it stood proud of her head and resembled the spines of a hedge-pig; her skeletal body was draped in a filthy, ripped grey chemise that fell only to her thighs and exposed round swollen knee joints above spindly shanks; the nails on the ends of her long, knuckly fingers were overgrown and twisted into yellow curls; she held a tall polished staff in her right hand, its head a knot of roots encasing a rounded piece of granite in which thin seams of sparkling quartz glinted and shone; a necklace of tiny animal skulls bounced on her bony chest — weasel, shrew and mice heads, painted a rusty brown and strangely marked in black and white with chalk and charcoal; around her waist was a belt of half-cured snakeskin supporting a big furry pouch, the papery heads of two serpents, dangling from the knot in the front where it was secured; her mottled yellowing skin, wherever it showed, was crisscrossed with fresh tiny red scratches and older healed and half-healed scars as if she rolled in a bed of thorns each night… But it was her face, her poor mutilated face that drew the eye. When I had first known and loved Nur, she had been a shining beauty to shame the sun and the moon — but my enemies had taken her and had cut that transcendent loveliness from her, slicing off her nose, her lips and her ears. Her once wondrous face now resembled a living skull, the dark-burning eyes the only hint of humanity above the gaping red holes of her nose and the eternally grinning teeth. A smear of charcoal beneath each eye socket and along the cheekbone gave her an unearthly look, while the chalk paste that covered her lower jaw enhanced the skull-like illusion. In truth, she was terrifying to behold, and I heard the men-at-arms behind me curse and gasp, and begin to make the sign of the cross and mumble desperate prayers for their Salvation.

  Nur advanced across the clearing towards me, leaning on her staff, one clawed hand held up in front of her, a hailing gesture, or a benediction, or a curse. I could hear that she was muttering words under her breath in a chanting rhythm, in a language that I recognized as Arabic; but my slight knowledge of that tongue had faded with time. I knew, though, that it was not a blessing. She stopped less than two paces from me, and said, in English: ‘Alan, my love, the light of my life, my darling man; welcome to Al Mara Madina. You have come at last to fulfil your promise, that can be the only reason for this intrusion.’

  I stared at her, speechless with mingled apprehension and disgust; her lipless mouth opened and I realized that she was trying to smile coquettishly at me. I finally managed to stammer: ‘Wh-what promise?’ But I knew how she would reply.

  ‘You have doubtless abandoned your milky whore and come to me to beg my forgiveness — and to make good your promise to love me for ever and never leave me. The spirits of the wildwood have at last granted my request.’

  The poor, deformed, broken women of the camp were creeping out of their hovels by now, curiosity overcoming their fear, and groups of them were hovering, half-visible, at the tree line, reassured by Nur’s calm conversation with me and my men. I was unmanned by the mutilated witch’s words, and for a brief moment I remembered the beauty she had once been and the passion of our lovemaking, the wonder and the joy that we had made between ourselves; I had indeed promised many things in the first flush of young love that Mediterranean summer, foolish things, the poured-out promises of a pleasure-drunk boy, and I had indeed broken my word. Looking at her now, I understood the pity that Goody said she felt for her; this monstrous creature before me, daubed with c
halk and coal-black, gathering her half-baked, childish pretence of magic around her like an invisible cloak: substanceless and pathetic, with only the power to cause a little nervousness in the feeble-minded; this was a poor woman made miserable by a cruel fate and unlucky circumstances, she was no enchantress, she was no true witch. She had no power beyond that of any ordinary human soul to hurt with words or deeds.

  Staring at her in bright daylight, examining her tawdry rags and emaciated, crudely painted face, I found my courage returning like a river in spate, a rushing of hot blood through my arms and legs.

  ‘Come now, Nur,’ I said briskly, ‘you know very well that I have not come here for that. Let us put aside these foolish games. I came here because you have trespassed into my home and hearth, and have frightened the good woman that I love with your silly tricks and ugly threats. And I tell you now that you must stop this attempt at intimidation. I will not allow you to continue to harass my wife-to-be. Do you understand? This foolishness must stop. Now. Else I shall be very angry.’

  For a moment Nur looked at me in stony silence. Then she said quietly: ‘You have become cruel, Alan. You were never like that before. A demon is gnawing on your soul. I can see it. Your heart is now a shard of ice. And you are forsworn; a liar like all your sex; a wretched, lying, worthless man.’ And she turned her back on me and walked to the centre of the clearing, by the pit-fire. She turned again to face me, thrust a hand into the hairy pouch at her waist, and pulled out a handful of dried herbs. Sprinkling them on the fire with her left hand, and holding up the staff in her right, she said: ‘One year, one day, after you wed, you pay.’ The herbs had caught fire and a thick, pungent, blue-greenish smoke was rising from the pit and enveloping her frail, raggedy body. The smoke seemed to cling to her skeletal frame as she repeated: ‘One year, one day, after you wed, you pay.’ But this time I could hear the murmurs of the other women repeating the refrain. It began low, but with each repetition the chant became louder. ‘One year, one day, after you wed, you pay.’ The women were swaying slightly with the rhythm of the chant, and I noticed that they seemed to be, almost imperceptibly, coming closer to the centre of the clearing, moving towards me and my men with shuffling steps, quiet but purposeful.