Love Beyond Time

by Speer, Flora

  “Clothilde has explained what happened.” Savarec knelt beside his daughter. “Is he still alive?”

  “Yes, he’s breathing, and now and then he moans.” Danise met her father’s level gaze. “He opened his eyes for a moment or two, and he tried to speak, but I could not understand him.”

  “If he wakened, it’s a good sign.” It was the third man who spoke, a golden-haired fellow with a pleasant face. He went to his knees and put out a hand, feeling the unconscious man’s head and apparently coming to the same conclusion as Danise. “He has a lump here, beneath his hair. From the blood on this rock beside him, I’d guess he hit his head on it when he fell.”

  “Danise,” said Savarec, noting his daughter’s questioning look, “this is Count Redmond. I had planned for you to meet him under more agreeable circumstances, but this moment must do.”

  “On the contrary, Savarec,” said Count Redmond, “these are agreeable circumstances, for your daughter has shown herself to be both intelligent and discreet. Another maiden might have run into the camp crying to anyone she met that a strange man had been found in the forest, thus leading everyone gathered at Mayfìeld to imagine we faced a Saxon attack.”

  “This man is no Saxon,” Danise said, certainty in her voice. “I have seen Saxon prisoners and heard them speak. He is unlike any of them. His speech, his clothing, his hair, his clean-shaven face -”

  “As I said, Savarec,” Redmond interrupted, “an intelligent young woman.”

  “Father, he will need good care,” Danise said. “Will you have him taken to your tent? Clothilde and I can nurse him, and if you think it’s necessary, you can easily set a guard there to watch him.”

  “Yes,” said Savarec, “that’s what we’ll do. We’ll keep your cloak over him, Danise, to hide his strange clothing, and if anyone asks who we are carrying on the litter, we can say he’s one of my men-at-arms who met with an accident. That way, we’ll cause no alarm. But I will tell Charles in private what has happened, in case he wants to post more guards around the camp.”

  Guntram unrolled the litter, and he, Savarec, and Redmond lifted the unconscious man onto it. With Savarec and Danise leading the way and Clothilde walking beside the litter, Redmond and Guntram carried it out of the forest and into the Frankish camp. They were not stopped. Savarec was well-known, and his story of an injured man-at-arms was at once accepted.

  Inside Savarec’s tent, a folding camp bed was quickly set up and the stranger laid on it. Danise sent Clothilde for hot water and cloths so they could bathe the man, and while she was gone, Danise began to undress him. She was not so involved with her patient, however, that she did not hear her father and Count Redmond talking just outside the tent.

  “A lovely maiden,” Redmond said. “Your daughter is all you claimed her to be, Savarec.”

  “I knew you would be pleased,” Savarec said.

  “We will talk again soon, my friend.”

  “You understand,” Savarec said, “she must agree.”

  “I would not agree myself if Danise did not,” Count Redmond responded.

  A moment later, Savarec entered his tent and stood behind Danise, watching while she worked.

  “Where is Sister Gertrude?” Savarec asked. “Why is she not with you?”

  “She has gone to the queen,” Danise responded. “Sister Gertrude was of help to Hildegarde during her last pregnancy, while we were in Agen, so Hildegarde asked to see her as soon as we arrived in Duren.”

  “Which is why you took the opportunity to go off by yourself into the forest?” demanded Savarec.

  “I was not alone. Clothilde was with me. I thought it would be peaceful amongst the trees.”

  “Peaceful?” To Danise’s surprise, considering Savarec’s overly protective attitude toward her, her father chuckled. “On occasion I have myself wanted to escape to some peaceful place far from Sister Gertrude’s sharp tongue. But she does mean well, Danise, and she has your welfare always at heart.”

  “I know. It’s why I am so patient with her. Father, look at this. I found it tucked into a pouch inside his tunic. What could it be?” Danise held up a flat, square object contained in a parchment-like cover.

  “I have no idea what it might be. I’ve never seen anything like this before.” Savarec took the floppy disk, looked at it in perplexity, then handed it back. “Keep it with his other belongings until he is well enough to tell us what it is.”

  “And this? What could this be?” Danise held up a leather object. Again, Savarec took it to examine.

  “It appears to be a folding purse of some kind. These green and white parchments have lettering and numbers on them. Perhaps this man is carrying a message. Now, that is a very strange way to fasten breeches.”

  Savarec bent to help Danise, who was struggling with the unfamiliar fastenings, and soon their patient lay naked. At once Savarec pulled a quilt over the man’s exposed torso and then together they examined his arms, legs, ribs, skull, cheekbones and jaw, noting the many bruises and scrapes he had sustained.

  “He appears to have no broken bones and no serious injuries other than the blow to his head,” Savarec said. “His body beneath the clothing is surprisingly clean, which suggests you were right to assume he is a nobleman. Here is Clothilde with the water. Bathe his injuries and cover him quickly so he doesn’t catch a chill. I am going now to report to Charles what has happened.” Savarec paused at the tent flap. “I have posted Guntram just outside. Call him if our guest gives you any trouble. If he wakens, have Guntram send someone to me at once.”

  The two women worked quickly as Savarec had bidden them, but not so quickly that Danise did not have time to note how well made the stranger was. He was not as heavily muscled as most Frankish warriors, but there could be no discounting the potential strength in his long legs, or in his shoulders and arms. His hands were long, with tapered fingers, and his nails were well shaped, though several had been broken as a result of his fall from the tree.

  Clothilde, after an exclamation of annoyance that a young man should be lying almost naked to her mistress’s view, made a point of covering his manly parts with a cloth, but not before Danise had rested fascinated eyes on him. She had lived a protected life since her mother’s death a few years ago, but her earliest youth had been spent in a freer way, so the sight of unclothed male babies or little boys had been common. She had also, on several occasions, helped wounded men. This unknown man’s body should have been no different from any other. But it was. Danise glanced at the cloth over his groin and blushed.

  “Be particularly careful when you wash his face,” Clothilde advised. “Those scratches must be painful. I wonder if his nose is broken?”

  “My father thinks not, but we won’t know for certain until the swelling subsides.” Gently Danise wiped dirt and pieces of leaves off the man’s hair, taking special care around the lump on the left side of his head. Then, after rinsing the cloth first in warm water, she began to work on his face. He muttered a string of unintelligible words and groaned, but did not rouse from his stupor. When he lay clean and well-covered, Danise turned to Clothilde.

  “You will have to ask Guntram to find clothes for him,” she said. “He cannot go about in his own clothing. He will attract too much unwanted attention.”

  “I will see what I can do,” Clothilde replied, “but from the look of him, don’t expect him to waken soon, if ever. I think Savarec ought to have the physicians look at him, and then the priest.”

  “We will leave those decisions to my father.”

  Danise pulled up a stool and sat down beside the bed. She smoothed back the man’s damp hair, sighing at the condition of his face, which was turning blue and purple where the bruises were darkening. He was not a pleasant sight, yet in his very strangeness, in his battered form and his helplessness lay a peculiar attraction, while the mystery of his presence alone and unattended in the forest intrigued her.

  “You cannot be a Frank,” she murmured. “You are from a land far
away. When you can speak again, will you tell me about your home?”

  “He may never speak again,” Clothilde warned. “I’ll get rid of this dirty water and wash out the cloths we used on him.”

  The tent flap had barely closed on Clothilde when the man opened his eyes. Twin pools of brilliant blue regarded Danise with an intensity strong enough to make her hold her breath. He did not speak. When she could bear the silent scrutiny no longer, Danise asked, “Can you tell me your name?”

  Still that intent stare, clouded now by a growing anxiety. He moistened his dry lips.

  “Je ne sais pas,” he whispered.

  It took her a moment or two to understand what he was trying to say. The language he used was not Frankish, though it was somewhat similar.

  “You don’t know your own name?” Thinking she might have misunderstood him, she touched her bosom. “Danise. I am Danise. And you?” She laid her hand on his chest.

  “No!” He nearly knocked her over when he tried to get out of bed. “No!”

  “Guntram!” Danise did not need to call him; Guntram was with her before the word was out of her mouth. He forced the stranger back onto the bed and kept him there. The stranger put both hands up to his head, holding it tight and groaning.

  “He’s in pain,” Guntram said. “It’s the head wound. Stay there!” he shouted at the man on the bed and shook his finger for emphasis. The man stared back at him, then nodded to show he understood. Guntram released his hold on the man and stood watching him, ready to prevent any threat against Danise.

  “He can’t remember his name,” Danise explained. “My asking upset him.”

  “His confusion will end when the swelling is gone,” Guntram replied. “Don’t give him anything to eat or drink until tomorrow. If you do feed him, he may vomit and choke to death.”

  At that moment Savarec returned with a black-robed physician and the physician’s assistant, who carried a basket filled with supplies.

  “Charles has sent us the royal physician,” Savarec explained. “He said his physician may as well practice on this man, since he is never sick enough to give the doctors employment.” Guntram and Savarec exchanged manly grins at this statement, acknowledging Charles’s famous good health and vitality.

  “You must leave,” the physician announced, waving them toward the tent opening. His assistant took a pottery jar out of the basket.

  “What are you going to do?” asked Danise, unwilling to turn her patient over to anyone else, even the king’s own physician.

  “Why, I’ll put leeches around his head wound to reduce the swelling,” the physician replied. “It’s the best treatment. He will awaken sooner with my help.”

  “When he did wake for a moment or two, he seemed to have no memory,” Guntram said.

  “Then he is in dire need of my treatment, and the sooner, the better.” The physician waved again. “Go, please, all of you.”

  “You may need someone to hold him down,” Guntram said.

  “My assistant is stronger than he looks.” The physician turned his back on them and lifted the lid off the jar of leeches that the assistant held out to him.

  “He’s quite right,” Savarec said. “Physician, I’ll leave my man Guntram outside the tent in case you need him. Danise, come with me. It’s time I spoke with you about my reason for ordering you to join me here at Duren.”

  Danise knew well that particular note in her father’s voice. She made no objection. After a backward glance toward the bed and the physician bending over it, she followed Savarec out of his tent.

  “Here is Sister Gertrude, come from the queen,” said Savarec, pausing to let a tall, thin nun join them. “How does Hildegarde? Better today, I hope.”

  “She is as well as any woman can be who is forced to bear child after child with only a few months of rest between each pregnancy,” Sister Gertrude told him tartly.

  “Hildegarde is not forced.” Savarec’s method of dealing with Sister Gertrude was always to speak mildly and calmly in response to her verbal provocations, and he did so now. “Hildegarde loves Charles deeply and truly, as he loves her. Their affection for each other is beautiful to see.”

  “The problem of loving between men and women,” said Sister Gertrude with no diminution of sharpness, “is that for the men it is all loving and pleasure, while for the women there is the burden of childbearing and the ills that go with it. Not to mention the trials of motherhood for a woman whose husband is away fighting for half the year, leaving her to attend to his lands as well as his children.”

  “Sister Gertrude,” Savarec warned, “you will turn Danise away from a woman’s natural desire to be a wife and mother.”

  “So I hope to do, and thus prolong her life and her happiness,” responded the nun, meeting Savarec’s glance with glittering eyes.

  “Both of you, please come into your tent,” Savarec bid them. “I will not discuss my daughter’s future here in public.”

  “There is precious little privacy in a tent,” Sister Gertrude told him. “All the way here from seeing Hildegarde I could not avoid noticing what people were saying and doing in their tents. It is disgraceful the activities supposedly decent folk will resort to in the middle of the day.” But she did follow Savarec into the undyed woolen tent she shared with Danise and Clothilde.

  Savarec pulled the entrance flaps closed, then turned to face the two women. The tent was small, with barely space enough for three narrow folding cots and a couple of clothes chests. There was no other furniture.

  “Sit down, Father.” Danise motioned him to one of the beds, then sat facing him, with Sister Gertrude beside her. “I am curious, since you have been content to let me stay at Chelles undisturbed since last autumn. Why did you want to see me now?”

  “The time has come,” Savarec informed her, “for us to discuss your marriage.”

  “Marriage?” Danise repeated, looking distressed. “This is what I feared. Father, you promised me you would not force me. You gave me your word.”

  “And I will not break it. I was too happy with your mother ever to insist that our daughter should wed a man she does not like. But, Danise, if you are to marry at all, it must be soon, before you are too old. Over the past winter I received several offers for your hand. I thought it would be a good idea for you to meet the men who are interested in you, so you will be better able to decide if any of them pleases you.”

  “What will you do if none of them pleases her?” Sister Gertrude asked. “If Danise decides she wants to return to Chelles to live, rather than marry, what will your response to her be, Savarec?”

  “Danise, I will never force you into a decision that will make you unhappy. Because you are so dear to me, I will allow you to decide for yourself whether to marry or to devote yourself to the religious life.”

  “You know what I will advise,” Sister Gertrude said to Danise. “Spend your life safe and comfortable at Chelles, and thus avoid all the problems and heartbreak of marriage to a Frankish warrior. You have heard the story of my youth, Danise, of how I was betrothed to a man who, against all my pleas, left me to go to war, and how he died in battle. He claimed to love me, but he left me. The same fate, the same bitter grief, could easily befall you if you marry.”

  “No man worthy of the name of warrior would heed a woman’s tears and entreaties to stay at home when his honor and loyalty to his king required him to go to war,” Savarec said sternly.

  “Father.” Danise looked at her parent with troubled eyes. “There is something you do not know, which I now must tell you. Last year, when the queen requested my presence at court and you sent me to Agen with Sister Gertrude here, under the protection of Count Theuderic and his men – during our long journey across Francia I became fond of one of those men.” She stopped, trying to think how to explain to her father what it had been like during those enchanted spring weeks of riding through the countryside with a man she had loved from their very first meeting.

  “Hugo was good and ki
nd and a most honorable man,” Danise went on. “When we reached Agen, he told Charles boldly that he wanted to marry me and begged Charles’s permission to ask my hand of you. Charles promised he might, when the Spanish campaign was completed, after Hugo had earned rewards to make him wealthy. Charles all but promised him a great estate and a title.” Again Danise stopped, this time choked by tears.

  “He knows, child.” Sister Gertrude’s hand touched Danise’s with surprising gentleness. “I wrote to Savarec soon after Charles and his army returned to Agen from Spain. Charles sent my letter along with his own message to Savarec. Your father knows your affection for Hugo was both true and innocent. He knows you did not lie with Hugo. At least my watchfulness was able to save you from that much grief after Hugo’s death at Roncevaux. Your body remains untouched, and I believe your heart will heal in time, for you are still young, and there was nothing formal between you, no betrothal vows.”

  “You knew, all these months, and you never mentioned it in any of your letters to me?” Danise looked at her father. “Is that why you let me stay at Chelles so long?”

  “Sister Gertrude thought it would be best for you, and I agreed,” Savarec said. “But you cannot dwell forever in the past. Eventually, as I had to do after your sweet mother died, you must make your peace with what has happened and go on with the remainder of your life. I will leave the choice of wedlock or the religious life to you as I have promised, Danise, but I would not have you remain at Chelles solely because you are afraid to face the world again after Hugo’s death. You have had more than nine months in which to mourn him. For the weeks of this Mayfield at Duren and the coming summer at Deutz with me, I ask you to consider what good you may do in the world if you marry and have children and make some noble Frank happy – for any man married to you must be a happy man.”

  “I need not repeat my opinion on this proposal,” Sister Gertrude said.

  “Indeed not,” said Savarec with unusual asperity. “We know your thoughts on marriage all too well.”

  “You will give me until the end of summer to decide?” Danise asked.