Red Adam's Lady

by Grace Ingram

  “Oh no, fair lady, leave us our breakfast!” Adam protested, sitting up. A flick of long ears, a double flash of white rump hair, and the deer had vanished. The squirrel dropped its tail and streaked higher, clung to a whipping twig and chittered angrily. Adam laughed, climbed stiffly to his feet and stretched carefully.

  “I can hear you creaking,” Julitta jibed, her eyes pricking with indignant tears as she saw how bruised he was.

  “Like an unoiled hinge,” he agreed. “It’ll work out on the march.”

  She threw off the cloak, conscious of his appreciative eyes on her, and shamelessly glorying in his pleasure; no one had ever before reckoned her beautiful, thin and slight-breasted as she was. He reached his hands to her, and as she came to her feet enfolded her in urgent arms.

  “My flower of joy, my tall white lily,” he murmured into her hair. “This was our marriage night, lovelier than all my dreams, alone in the woods.”

  “And only the gentle beasts to greet us on our morrow.”

  He loosed her. “If it were not urgent to reach York—” he began, and stilled with lifted head. Metal chinked on stone. A horse snorted, and a man’s voice uttered a few words in an unknown tongue.

  Three horsemen thrust from the bushes below; stocky, dark men, mat-headed and bearded, astride stocky horses, wearing loose shirts of dull yellow and checkered cloaks. Their legs were bare, their feet in rawhide brogans; each man carried a spear and had a round shield slung between his shoulders. The foremost yelped gleefully and slid to the ground, flourishing his spear.

  Adam and Julitta leaped as one for their weapons on the rock, and then broke apart. She saw Adam hurl his sword-scabbard into one man’s face and lunge after it, and then she was backing from the leader. His beard split in a brutal grin as he reached for her, shouting in his own language. His filthy garment was one stiff brown splotch from waist to hem; not his own blood, for he moved too easily, running at her with his eyes alight under the black brows. One hand grabbed at her throat, the other for her dagger wrist. He missed as she ducked. Knowing that if she bungled her one blow they would rape her, hack off her breasts and rip up her belly for vengeance, she drove the knife up under his rib cage and felt him die on its point. Rank breath gusted in her face, his contorted in mortal agony, and a gush of blood drenched her as he lurched against her and slid down. She jerked away, gasping.

  One Scot was going down with Adam’s sword in his belly; he wrenched it back as the man jolted to earth and whirled under the last man’s spear. He struck it up over his shoulder and dived in. The Scot let go and grappled, and they rolled clawing into a bramble patch. She dodged round threshing legs, ran in and stabbed as a yellow shirt and bare buttocks heaved uppermost. A screech, a heaving effort, and red head and white body were atop. Adam’s elbow jerked, the Scot squalled and lost his hold, and Adam pulled back to his knees for striking space and rammed in the sword until it rang on rock.

  He thrust erect and swung frantically around. She stumbled into his arms and clung crying and shivering to him. He gripped her so that her ribs creaked, and she pressed to his shuddering body, her face burrowing into his shoulder, so pithless that she could not have stood unaided. He was whispering her name over and over, his cheek against her hair. Then one of the horses snorted, and she forced control on herself, lifted her head from its refuge and gripped her husband’s arms. “Adam, you’re not hurt?”

  “You—he didn’t—”

  “No—no—”

  He held her to his thudding heart. “Julitta—my valiant darling—dear God—” Again he buried his face in her hair, and they clung to each other, shaking with shock and horror.

  He drew away at last, and their flesh parted with sticky reluctance, glued with the blood she had shed. In sick loathing she ran to the stream and down to the pool. She threw herself into it, and knelt scrubbing at her polluted flesh, remembering against her will the feel of her knife sliding into the Scot, the jerk as the life broke out of his body and left him a dead weight. She told herself savagely that he would have done worse by her, that she had but saved herself, but the memory would haunt her long enough.

  Adam had joined her. Silently he scoured himself with a handful of sand; in silence he helped her to wring water from her hair and proffered a checkered cloak for her to dry herself. They recovered shirt and smock and returned to their camp. The ponies were browsing unconcernedly among the bushes. “At least they’ve given us horses,” Julitta observed, and scrambled into her clothes.

  Adam went to them. They snorted and sidled at his alien voice and scent, but did not break away, and when she followed he had tethered them securely and was taking a bundle from one of the filthy sheepskins that served as saddles. “Best see what they’ve looted,” he said distastefully, unknotting rawhide thongs. He shook out a mass of gray cloth, a bloody tunic, and forth jumped a bronze-mounted drinking horn, a comb of carved bone, and something small and pale that landed at Julitta’s feet. It was a woman’s finger wearing a gleaming silver ring. She knew it. She had seen it but yesterday evening.

  For a moment she stood frozen, then dropped to her knees, retching emptily. Adam swooped and snatched it up. “Dear God!” he whispered, and his arm came round her.

  “Margaret … Everard’s wife …” she choked, and he stiffened. Then he turned her against his shoulder and stroked her hair until she recovered and pushed back. They looked gravely at each other. He touched her hand.

  “Julitta, it’s at peril of soul we go on.”

  She nodded. A duty was laid on them. “Murdering rebels I’d not care about, but the country folk—”

  “The innocents. Even that termagent—who’s more innocent than an unborn babe?”

  He tore at the ground with his dagger, laid the finger in the tiny grave and covered the disturbed earth with a stone. He crossed himself. She knelt beside him while he spoke a brief prayer, and then ran to the camp for their belongings, averting her eyes from her victim’s hairy nakedness exposed by the yellow shirt. Their refuge’s enchantment was shattered, and she found it strange that nothing had changed in the bracken-heaped shelter where they had loved.

  The ponies were iron-mouthed unmannerly brutes, accustomed to usage a reasonable man would not deal a balky pack mule, but they proved durable. The sheepskins and clumsy wooden stirrups did not provide comfort, but any kind of horseflesh between their knees was good. The spare horse followed without need of leading, and Adam changed from one to the other. As long as they could they kept to the trees’ cover, and when they emerged to climb the ridge Julitta felt a creeping unease between her shoulders. Again and again she turned to look about, but the moors rolled away empty, whale back beyond whale back to the distant blue tops.

  Once they halted to breathe the ponies, and to water them sparingly at a small cascade. Discovering hunger, they forced down stale oatcakes, grim chewing even with butter to grease the way. Julitta noticed that Adam had fastened to his sheepskin one of the checkered cloaks. She had not thought him the man to choose such plunder, then realized it was incontrovertible proof of their story.

  They drew rein on the ridge beyond Digglewick, looked down on the woods’ fleece and over the valley, green under the morning sun. A vagrant wind gusted woodsmoke, harsher and stronger than any household fire, and a more pungent stink also reminiscent of kitchen catastrophe. The underbrush thinned, the woods opened, the fields spread beyond. Both saw the brown huddle in the track, and stopped. Adam slid down.

  Gently he turned over the body, and it came woodenly, all of a piece as it had stiffened, from the blotch in the thirsty dust. Blue flies lifted sullenly and settled back. One of the blackberrying urchins, thought Julitta numbly, maybe seven years old. His left arm was gashed to the bone. He had run in terror until he fell, and bled to death in the track.

  “Dead all night. Earth-cold, and his smock wet with dew,” Adam said hoarsely, and gathered him up. He laid him across his mount’s neck, and struck away carrion flies with a muttered oath.
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  “God have mercy on His innocents,” said Julitta, her throat thick with tears.

  Adam crossed himself, mounted and held the dead child in the crook of one arm. They followed the dark splashes in the track.

  The cottages were gray ash and black charcoal; here and there a fringe of smoldering stakes remained of the palisade, and behind it heaps of ruin glowed dully as the wind worried them. Smoke trailed across the ploughland, and with it the stench of burned flesh. But human figures scrabbled in the wreckage to salvage whatever Scots and fire had left, and men formed a rank across the street as they trotted up it.

  Bows and spears menaced them until someone called Adam’s name, and the men broke to meet them and surround the horses, their faces sullen with shock and grief. One cried out and thrust forward, reaching for the child. Adam dismounted and relinquished his burden into his arms, trying to speak his sympathy. The peasant hugged the stiff corpse to his breast, tears streaking channels down his smoke-grimed cheeks into his beard. The rest closed round him, and then drew him away to a trampled garden where two women and three children lay in a row. Julitta turned her eyes from butchered flesh and the two burned things scarcely identifiable as human. She reached blindly for Adam’s hand, and it gripped fiercely.

  “Lord Adam!” A man sat propped against an apple tree heavy with ripening fruit, his thigh swathed with bloody clouts; a burly fellow, hair and beard gray-streaked, with a kind of natural authority in his voice and eyes. “We owe it to you,” he said in stiff French, “that we are not all dead. Our thanks for the warning.”

  Adam moved to him, and seeing his weakness went down on one knee at his side. “What happened? When…?”

  “Just past sundown. We had driven our beasts into the woods and were all about, not caught within doors or abed.”

  “How many?”

  “Threescore at least.”

  “Sir Everard and his lady?”

  “Dead and gutted and hewed apart,” the peasant said brutally, “and the unborn babe spitted on a spear.”

  “Dear God!” Adam whispered. “I warned him—over and over—”

  “If he heeded you, maybe our dead would be alive now,” the man declared harshly. He nodded to the row of bodies, his face twisting. “My mother… too old to run …”

  “God rest her,” Adam said, and crossed himself.

  Behind him there was a scuffle as someone shoved through the crowd. As Adam turned his head, a knife gleamed under his nose. Ivar grinned wolfishly.

  “Our reckoning, my lord!”

  “Hell’s Teeth, is this a time for paltry revenges?”

  “Ivar, no!” Julitta cried, checking with poised dagger and pounding heart. Though she avenged him as his blood spurted, she could not prevent Adam’s murder.

  “My lady, I’ll free you o’ this ravisher!” Visibly he stiffened his resolution, and a red trickle started down Adam’s throat. The crowd groaned, and the wounded peasant made a futile grab at his legs.

  “Let it wait until we’ve done with the Scots, you zany!” Adam exclaimed, his eyes steady on Ivar’s. The point jabbed deeper, and for the space of a dozen heartbeats none dared stir. Then Adam put up his hand and pushed the blade aside, took it from a slackened grip and stood up. Ivar stared at him, his chest heaving as though he had run a mile, and the peasants began to growl and edge forward. Adam proffered the knife’s haft to its owner. “Cry truce and get astride that ugly dun!” he ordered and turned his back to address the wounded peasant. “We must warn the nunnery and Chivingham. If I live I’ll send you help.” Ivar was still staring bemused, and he thrust him towards the horses. “Move, man! You’re riding with us.”

  A woman cried, “God reward you for your mercy to my fool brother!”

  “Most likely I’ll get him killed by the Scots,” Adam replied. “God be with you, good folk!”

  No one spoke until they were easing their mounts up the incline to the ridge. Then Adam dropped back to ride alongside Ivar.

  “In drunken folly I did you wrong,” he said steadily. “I acknowledge my fault and am sorry for it.”

  Ivar roused from bewildered apathy. “I’d forgive that. It’s what you done to my lass I’d cut your throat for.”

  “I’ve not touched her. I’m married.”

  “What’s that to do wi’ it? So was old Maurice married.”

  “You fool, could any man wedded to my lady ever look elsewhere, least of all at your Avice, that wet fish?”

  “You murdered t’other ravening hound over her!”

  “Defending her. She’s virgin still for all I know, and lodged safely in the nunnery.”

  He caught his breath. “That’s truth?”

  “My word on it.”

  Ivar nodded sullenly, and they rode on a little way in silence. Then he said abruptly, “I meant to slit your windpipe—but—a man isn’t a sheep. What now?”

  “If we both survive, you’re head groom of Brentborough. I need one.”

  “What!”

  “Don’t I owe it to you to make amends?”

  Julitta glanced aside at her husband in a kind of sorrowful surprise. This Adam was half a stranger to her. Ivar was staring as though he found him beyond credit; dumbly he shook his head. Then they reached the wide skyline, drew rein to breathe the horses, and looked about. Ivar uttered a strangled yelp and gestured northward.

  The farthest whale back was an anthill swarming with tiny dark figures creeping down into the hollow. Julitta, screwing up her eyes against the glare, could just distinguish the larger insects that were horsemen from those on foot, and make a rough estimate of their numbers. Threescore, maybe four, but more and more were crawling over the crest.

  “It’s the whole Scots host,” Ivar croaked.

  “Not quite. Foragers in force,” Adam answered, peering under his hand. Again he rammed his heels into his horse’s barrel. “Chivingham—that could be held. Not the nunnery. How to get the nuns to safety—”

  “There’s the old ford,” Julitta gasped, clinging to the sheepskin with all the strength of her thighs as the pony pounded down the slope. “If we win time—”

  “We must,” Adam said curtly.

  The Galloway ponies had been hard-used already, but they had strength and valor yet. Adam and Julitta, the heaviest and lightest riders, changed mounts every two or three miles. They chose their grades judiciously, eased the ponies up the long slopes and urged them down, and came at last to the valley’s head above the nunnery. A threefold gasp of thankfulness greeted the sight of thatch on roofs and peasants at work. The Galloway brutes were lathered and weary, but they had a gallop left in them.

  “The ford’s beyond the trees—maybe a mile,” Julitta pointed. “And Chivingham over the hill.”

  “Ivar, bear warning to Chivingham the Scots will be at their gates in two hours or less. We’ll bring down the nuns and their folk.”

  Ivar bore away for the trees. Adam and Julitta pelted down the slope, yelling and waving to the herdboys on the waste and the ploughmen in the stubble, and clattered up the street. At the smithy door he leaped down, snatched the hammer from the smith’s hand and beat out a violent alarm on the anvil.

  “The Scots! The Scots are on you! Get to Chivingham for your lives!” And as men and women came running and shouting from cottages, barns and threshing floors he threw down the hammer, thrust through the gathering throng repeating his warning, and ran to the nunnery gate. The old porter was already dragging it open, bleating questions; Adam pushed past without checking and ran for the Abbess’ lodging.

  She was on her feet as they burst into her parlor, icy in dignity. “Lord Adam, if this unseemly intrusion means you seek sanctuary, you cannot find it here. I do not deny it you, but your enemies have searched here twice, not scrupling to invade the church itself—”

  “You’ll have the Scots invading it before noon,” Adam interrupted harshly. “Rouse up your household!”

  She glanced once into his eyes, then caught up her handbell. Its
imperative tinkle brought her servitor nun in anxious haste. “Sister Scholastica, bid Roger and Anlaf ring the alarm. Assemble everyone in the church—”

  “When have Scots respected sanctuary? Chivingham’s your only chance. Get all your folk out. Bring no more than you can carry—hide your holy relics and treasure—but down to the old ford with all speed.”

  The daughter and sister of warriors nodded coolly. “See to my people, Lord Adam. I will take order for all here.”

  She swept her robes from the parlor. The two small bells that decorously clanged for the services now clashed alarm through the valley as the porter and a scared lad hauled on the ropes. Women were hurrying from all sides, servants from the kitchens, veiled sisters, a handful of novices, the boarders and their waiting-women, calling, questioning, clucking alarm. Someone began to wail, and Julitta with familiar exasperation recognized Avice, but before the contagion could spread hysteria through the company a woman in a greasy apron clouted her into sniveling quiet.

  Adam drove through all to where his old kinswoman stood beyond the turmoil, ankle-deep in yapping dogs and clasping the two puppies to her breast. She looked anxiously up at him as he reached her side, the dogs leaping round his brogans.

  “Oh, but they misused you grievously, dear boy! And you’re not safe here, they have searched—”