by Purple Hazel
“Where hath she been at night?” I heard one of my fellow handmaids asking. She was speaking with a group of girls, huddled in a corner of the laboratory one day. “She disappears in the evening—no doubt to the barracks. I’d wager she hath a lover or two there…perhaps more.”
“Aye, no doubt of that,” replied another. “She comes and goes as she pleaseth. Whence required in the princess’s chambers, she remains. When not, she scurries away without a word to say to us. Rather suspicious behavior methinks.”
“And what of her meddling in Morgana’s potions?” said yet another in a raised whisper. “We all remember what happened the one time, when she dabbled in things she should not have trifled with. Could she be a witch now? It would not surprise me. Her mind doth seem preoccupied with other things as of late.” When they sensed my presence, they hushed themselves like frightened children. It became almost too much to bear, seeing how they, too, must have turned on me.
Again, Morgana’s practices with magic and wizardry had already made people wary of her; and since no one truly knew where Merlin’s secret lair was located within Castle Camelot, this made the well in the courtyard seem like a likely place for me to be communicating with the underworld.
“If she be a conjurer, perhaps she doth draw them from the depths,” people said. “Such might explain her visits to the well during the night.” There was no way to turn the tide of accusations and speculation about me.
“She is said to have expelled the foulness of her own womb…onto the ground beneath her,” they claimed. “Washed herself of the demon’s residue from between her legs as I passed by the next morning,” said another who claimed to be an eye witness.
Who would come to my aid? Who would attest to my innocence? Isolated and rejected, in my sorrow I could think of no one who might speak up for me. I could see no alternative but to pray for deliverance.
To be fair, part of this was due to the castle’s awful yet not-so-guarded secret below ground. The castle, as I said, had been constructed on a hilltop, and underneath the mountain it sat upon there was a system of caverns that included the castle dungeon. A man—more like a creature it was believed—lived down there, and he was in charge of interrogating and torturing prisoners to extract confessions. He was known as “Vile,” and the peasants were literally terrified of him. In fact most everyone was, not just peasants. He was said to be “capable of removing a man’s soul.”
You see, when King Arthur married Gwynevere years before, they lived in a large wooden castle that had a keep and palisade around it. A village sprung up around this keep and grew around its inner wall. Then there was constructed a second large palisade around this village which was protected by a moat. The wall was gradually improved from a palisade into strong wooden beams and posts anchored to the ground with battlements for the defenders. But a wooden castle is still quite easy to set afire, and a stone castle would mean better security for the royal family from which to rule the kingdom. That’s why they built Camelot.
Back then however, when they lived in the wooden castle, there was still the matter of public order and law enforcement. Common criminals captured and sentenced to be executed could be hung in iron gibbets or cages and left to rot. But prisoners accused of treason—or heresy—had to be interrogated or made to confess their treachery. Those duties fell to the dungeon master “Vile” who lived within the nearby mountain. Merlin’s secret lair was also said to be inside those hellish caverns.
King Arthur would send traitors there to be forced to confess or reveal fellow conspirators. The mountain and its mysterious occupant therefore gained quite the reputation, and I’d always heard the mere mention of being sent there would terrify doomed prisoners into admitting to almost anything. But the mountain was appealing in other ways as well. The wooden castle they occupied originally was fed by a stream that came out of that very same mountain. Subsequently, this became a perfect place to build a formidable fortress, right over the caverns where the nefarious creature lived and plied his evil deeds below ground.
The location of Camelot was due to Merlin’s legendary wisdom. To survive a siege, he said, the castle needed to have its own private water source. This mountain had an underground aquifer, and due to this fresh water spring, the mountain formed a perfect natural defensive position on which to construct a castle.
The cavern had already served the king as the location for his dungeon for several years by the time I came to live in the newly built castle Camelot. But once the castle was built over it and prisoners sent to the dungeon, their screams were said to be heard from underground, and the peasants of the nearby town began to believe that the demonic souls of tormented victims still lurked beneath the earth, controlled as unholy minions of the horrible creature who existed within its depths. I have to say I never personally heard such tortured cries, but apparently that’s what people believed; and somehow those superstitious townspeople put it together that I must have been conjuring demonic souls from the bowels of this cavern. Worse, I was bringing the evil into Castle Camelot!
“God protect us! She’s releasing the demons from the darkness, she is,” a blacksmith would say.
“She hast releas’d them. They will possess our souls and haunt our dreams,” a merchant’s wife would comment at the local market in town.
With things like that being said about me, I didn’t stand a chance. Absurd? Oh, yes, it certainly was. But I guess such stories were simply more interesting than the boring old rumors of Morgana being a conspirator and perhaps a necromancer. People had tired of theorizing that Morgana had plotted to overthrow Arthur by hiring mercenaries from across the sea. Time had passed since those fearful days. They needed a fresh rumor to entertain and titillate themselves. That’s basically how I became their next scoundrel to vilify.
“Morgana hast taught her the ways of making potions, and with that knowledge she hast cured the guard of his injury,” they said.
“She hast been seen consorting with the guards too!” said others.
Sure enough word got around about that as well. Therefore, what if I had been infiltrating their ranks with my seductive charms? That’s what really made the story more tantalizing than speculating about the frosty and prickly Morgana all winter. But I’d brought this on myself. I had not been careful, I know. I’d been careless; and it was coming back to haunt me after servants had seen me bathing between my legs at the well that spring when the weather was starting to turn warmer.
Worst of all, when those silly but dangerous rumors reached the ear of King Arthur, scandal rocked the kingdom. Morgana could no longer defend me—and she was not to be put on trial either since as the king’s half-sister she could never be prosecuted for heresy. Therefore she had to abandon me to my own fate. The guards didn’t lift a finger to help me; and when I was finally arrested, it was two of my good friends from the barracks who came and got me from my room. By then, I was expecting to be arrested almost any day. It all came crashing down on top of me within a month.
The Captain of the Guard shunned me, for fear of being connected to the scandal. To be sure, I wasn’t surprised at this—narcissistic fiend that he was, that Gilbert. He was not a nobleman of course, not above being persecuted for heresy, but it was far easier for the other servants to believe he’d been an unwitting participant in my alleged scheme of bewitching the guards with my womanly wiles.
Therefore it became me alone who had to take the fall. Confession to the charges of heresy meant beheading—or even worse being burned at the stake! I knew that, and it horrified me. The implications sunk in even more deeply when I learned I was to be secured in the town pillory like a common criminal. The very thought of it made my skin crawl.
I was taken to the village square—dragged there by two young men who’d once been my dearest friends. This was located in the town outside the inner bailey of the castle, surrounded by village workshops, the inn, the brewery, and the leather tannery which used to make me sick whenever they brought in a
n old cow to skin. There I was locked in a wooden apparatus that I had to poke my head and hands through while standing and bending at the waist. A crowd quickly gathered to watch.
Guards flanked me on both sides for my protection while bitter villagers and castle servants started hurling rotten vegetables at my face! Oh, how I cried and pleaded my innocence.
“I am not a witch, good people! Prithee believe me! I’m just a po’r handmaiden of Camelot!” I screamed pitifully and repeatedly…until I was hoarse.
Children threw pebbles at my buttocks as well, and the guards took quite a while to notice this going on before finally putting a stop to it. It went on and on throughout the day and well into the evening until everyone had gotten the opportunity to voice their discontent with me. This was their chance to express their ire toward Morgana, too, whom they couldn’t touch. Yet I was her servant, you see, so they could at least get to me, which they well-intended to do that day! Made for good sport, I’m sure.
I pleaded with the two guards to make them stop. I tried admonishing them for not helping me. It did no good. I tried swearing to them that I was most definitely innocent.
“My friends, please! Please! Thou know’st me. Thou know’st I’m not a temptress, not a conjurer, not a necromancer. Nothing of the kind, I swear. Tell them boys, please! Make them listen!”
Nothing worked. They only stood by and glared at members of the crowd who once in a while ambled up too closely to the pillory and snarled at them to stand back or they’d face the business end of a spear.
Most good villagers took pity on me after a while, when they figured this public humiliation had gone far enough. By then I was a sobbing, filthy, blubbering mess, covered in rotten food and rubbish, with it literally hanging off me and dangling from my face which I couldn’t touch nor wipe off. I stood bent over like that for hours, fearing the night, weeping pathetically, and dreading what might happen to me in the darkness if those guards left me to endure the more debased intentions of the many ne’er do wells of the town.
And yet, sure enough, as evening fell, my two protectors left me quite alone there and went back to the barracks to get dinner! I begged and pleaded with them in a hoarse whisper, “Please boys! Have mercy! I’ll be helpless!!!”
They said two more would be sent in relief, so not to worry. Then they chuckled and scurried off, slapping me on the buttocks as they turned to leave. But after about an hour, when still no guards had returned to keep order, a shrill of terror struck through me like a lightning bolt when I realized I was going to have to survive the night alone.
This was what I’d feared, and no matter what I might have attempted to defend myself, both my hands and my head were locked in place. From the chest down I was completely vulnerable except for my legs. I knew it would do me no good struggling—not for long anyway. I imagined them coming for me in the night, those lecherous men of the village, especially the wine steward, who had been so vocal earlier exhorting the villagers into pelting me with rubbish. I pictured him and his cohorts tying my feet together and lifting my dress up to expose my bare bottom.
I’d kick them as hard as I possibly could, if I could reach them. I’d fight like hell! But resistance would be futile, and I realized that. I’d be helpless if they came for me in the darkness. The horror of that twisted nightmare ran through my mind repeatedly throughout the night, and no matter how I tried to get some rest, I couldn’t avoid startling awake time and again to check if I heard footsteps behind me.
Yes, I fully expected to be brutalized by some crazed pervert; or perhaps an entire gang of lusting, drunken men. He or they could have mounted me from behind, driving into me repeatedly, one after another, and there’d be nothing I could have done about it. Just let them have at me.
I imagined them sneaking up from behind, manipulating my torso and breasts, fingering between my legs, perhaps even spanking me, before spreading me apart and thrusting into me. I remembered the climax of my dream and the ogres surrounding me in that dank cave, drooling and snarling with delight at the helpless prize being offered to them. Those degenerates would have a drunken party together perhaps, using my body over and over again until they’d amused themselves fully. I’d be ravaged endlessly—in every orifice - my breasts pinched hard, my bottom slapped until it was bright red.
They’d sodomize me from both ends at the same time too! I just knew they would. There’d be nothing I could do about it. If one of them shoved his penis into my mouth I’d have no choice but to yield my throat to him. My hands were tightly secured in the stocks. And once one of them tried it like that, they’d all take turns servicing their stiff members in that way, erupting down my throat or saving their issue for my ample behind. I’d have no hope of respite until they’d all expended themselves on me or in me, as many times as they wished.
However as night fell I was to be spared such degradation. No one dared approach me in the town center for fear of being connected to me as a suspected heretic. I never considered this as a possibility though, and instead spent a very restless night in the dark with my hands numb from the cold and my nose constantly itching. Amazingly enough, after several hours I began to realize they weren’t coming for me, thank God. Sensing I would have no nocturnal assailants after all, I caught little snatches of sleep and tried not to think about my trial the next day, especially what horrors might still befall me come the dawn.
Next day, I was retrieved from the pillory by two different guards and brought back to the Great Hall for trial. I was too exhausted to admonish them for leaving me there alone all night and facing unspeakable depravity in the dark. Instead I practically collapsed on the ground from the fatigue in my shoulders and back from being bent over for so long. I looked horrible and smelled even worse from all the refuse and filth thrown at me the day before. Looking back I suppose that’s also what saved me from being ravaged in the night! I was covered in refuse and smelled like a garbage heap.
And I remember begging them pathetically to let me wash myself, so that I wouldn’t offend His Majesty with my odor. Believe it or not, and despite all I’d been through already, that was my only request! Agreeing, they stopped at the well out front of the barracks and let me wash my face and hair. But after a few moments, they gruffly ordered me to go with them into the castle. It was incredible how smug and arrogant they acted toward me. These had been my best friends, my own big brothers essentially, for the past six months. Now they didn’t want to know me. I’d have to get used to things like that, or so it would seem.
Chapter 2
Tried for Witchcraft
No one would dare step forward to help me at first. If it had been crazy paranoia and bizarre rumor spread by naïve peasants, about conjuring demons from below the earth, then Arthur could have easily dismissed it. But I had been seen expelling something gooey and dark from between my legs, and that seemed to be an attempt to abort a pregnancy. Such a thing would have been sacrilege! Worse, the rumors grabbed the attention of the local bishop, and soon it became a political problem for the King.
Heresy you see, or even the mere mention of it, meant a very special examination, and a heresy trial was more a matter of detection rather than the hearing of testimony from eye witnesses. There wasn’t much in the way of presentation of evidence by the prosecution or cross-examination of witnesses at all really. The church had its own “process” for detecting and identifying witches and convicting alleged practitioners of ancient pagan rites. Thus, for the defendant, especially when female, her fate was essentially sealed.
A hearing had been called in Arthur’s court, and the charges had been leveled against me before I even arrived. When brought before the court, the setting was a long table in the Great Hall with King Arthur, his trusted advisors, and some rather ghoulish-looking men in tattered black robes whom I’d never seen.
Roped and bound at the wrists, I was led in by the guards holding me up by my arms. My hair was now wet and stringy, hanging down over my face, plus my clothes were s
treaked and stained with the rubbish hurled from villagers the day before. King Arthur remained silent, showing little emotion. It was clearly no longer his jurisdiction at that point. He didn’t even speak initially. The bishop did all the talking. First, His Eminence read from a dusty leather-bound book; detailing the church’s justifications for the proceedings to follow. All eyes were upon me as he addressed the court.
“Desiring with most heart-felt anxiety,” he began in a low, ominous voice, “that the Catholic faith should increase and flourish everywhere…and that all heretical depravity should be driven from the frontiers of the faithful…we proclaim and restate those particular means and methods whereby our pious desire may obtain its wished effect, since when all errors are uprooted by our diligent avocation, our holy faith will be strongly impressed upon the hearts of the faithful.”
His distaste was obvious. He sneered as he spoke, and I started trembling with icy fear—especially when he began referring to me specifically.
“It has lately come to our ears,” continued the elder bishop, raising his voice, “that the defendant, unmindful of her own salvation and straying from the Catholic faith, hath abandoned herself to devils, and by her incantations, spells, conjurations, and other accursed charms and crafts, enormities and horrid offenses, hath slain infants yet inside their mother’s womb!”
This elicited murmuring responses from Arthur and his advisors as the bishop’s voice echoed in the hall. Meanwhile Merlin, who was also in attendance, remained silent throughout.
“She hath furthermore afflicted and tormented men and women with terrible and piteous pains and sore diseases, both internal and external. She hath hinder’d men from performing the sexual act and women from conceiving, whence husbands cannot know their wives nor wives receive their husbands.”