“They are Saracens. They know no better.”
Richard looked at her and back to the Saracens. He pulled the case off the arrows on his saddle. Maria whistled to the dogs. Bending her mare around, she started up the snowy hillside. The mare carried her clambering up over the rocks. One of the Saracens gasped. She reined in her mare on the steep slope above the ravine. The bow sang again. When she looked, Richard was walking into the ravine to get his arrows.
He rode up beside her. They walked their horses on along the strange, silent hillside. Brown and dun, the dogs scattered around them through the colorless trees. She glanced at Richard. His eyes were vague, as if he looked inward.
They let their horses pick their way down the slope. Ahead, the beach spread its pale sand at the foot of the gray rolling surf. The wind tasted salt. She nudged her mare forward into the open.
They rode down onto the beach. The sea jumped and tossed off to the gray horizon. He led her through the wind toward a fisherman’s lean-to. They dismounted and brought their horses into the fragile two-sided shelter. The wind battered the thin boards over their heads. The surf boomed on the shore. They pulled off their clothes and coupled in the back of the lean-to, while the horses stamped and snorted and the dogs prowled around them. Wrapped in his heavy fur cloak, they lay still in one another’s arms. The night was coming. They got up and put their clothes on and rode home.
***
In the spring, after the planting, Richard took his men into the mountains, and Maria went back to the Cave of the Virgin, where her roofless chapel stood carpeted in new grass. Eleanor and Robert came with her. Every now and again Richard rode down from the mountains, and she had to go back to her castle to meet him, but he never stayed above a day and a night, and she left for the shrine again as soon as he was gone.
The summer pilgrims swelled the crowd of men and women working on the building. The chapterhouse had sent two brothers to help the English monk serve the shrine, and in a single day, all working together, the monks, the pilgrims, and the serfs threw up a sleeping house in the village, a mile from the cave. There, before Michaelmas, in September, Maria bore a son.
That put her out of humor. She had taken for granted that the baby would be another girl, another Ceci. From Richard in the mountains a messenger came to instruct her to name the baby Stephen. Robert hated him at once.
Brother Nicholas baptized the child. The master mason was carving the mullions in the chapel windows, twisting stone vines and trees around them, and in the branches of the trees putting birds and snakes. After every day of work, the people would come up to admire what he had done. Everybody loved him, in spite of his stench. At the end of his year with them, when he had to go back to his monastery in Agato, many of the people wept.
On the day he was to leave, they gathered on the roadside in front of the chapel, the men in their stained tunics, with their work-hardened hands and faces, and the women in their shawls, and he went from one to the next, blessing them by name and kissing them. Since he was a monk, they could give him no gift. Maria especially felt it sorely. She knelt before him with her two sons and he blessed them.
“Lady,” he said. “Keep faith with God.”
Maria kissed his hand. He took his staff and with his apprentices to windward of him walked away down the road. All the rest of the morning the men worked in a frenzy, but the women lagged and shook their heads and sighed.
At noon, Maria sat down under the trees in the yard of the shrine; opening her dress she gave her breast to the baby. Eleanor was calling to Robert on the stony hillside. Maria sang a ballad the French pilgrim had sung her.
Two horses were dragging a sled loaded with stone up the road. Behind them a few riders came, but she paid them no heed. The workmen were hammering inside the chapel. She fit her song to that.
A horse stopped in front of her. Startled, she looked up. Richard swung down from the saddle. She had not seen him since the midsummer. The sun had faded his hair to a light brown. She scrambled to her feet. The baby, losing the nipple, let out an angry cry.
“You look like a serf.” Richard kissed her. “I’ll take you into the woods, like a serf. Where is Robert?”
Maria shouted to Eleanor to bring him. Richard took the baby and juggled it. Over his mail, he wore a long white tunic, to keep the sun off. Maria put her hand on his back. He kissed her again. His mouth was softer than she remembered. Between them, Stephen cried, and Richard stood away from her.
“Here. Put this where it belongs.” He touched her breast. She cradled the baby in her arms. She leaned against him.
“Show me your God-gift,” Richard said. “Is it done?”
Maria sat down to finish nursing Stephen. “Why are you here? It isn’t winter yet. Have you taken Mana’a already?”
He shook his head. The reins trailing from his hands, he sank down on his heels before her. His horse cropped the grass below the tree. “Why, are you unhappy to see me?”
She leaned forward and kissed him. He had come all the way down from the mountains just for her sake. She felt guilty she had not missed him more.
“Where have you been fighting?”
He gestured offhand. “Up there with the lizards and the rocks and the arrows.”
“Papa,” Robert screamed. He ran up the road toward them. Reaching his father he turned him by the arm away from the baby and Maria. “Papa!” He flung himself into Richard’s arms.
Maria closed her dress. Eleanor, smiling, was walking up the road toward them. Richard wrapped his son up in his arms. “Jesus, you’re big. Here, give me a kiss.” Robert screwed his face up and pursed his lips, and Richard kissed him. The little boy laughed and hugged him.
“Here,” Maria said. She tucked Stephen into his blanket and stood up. Eleanor was standing under the trees watching them, her face wearing her blandest, sweetest smile. Robert preferred her to Maria, and now he was laughing and hanging on Richard. She gave the baby to Eleanor.
“Don’t you want to see the chapel? Eleanor, take the children down to the village.” She got up, shaking the grass seeds from her skirt.
Richard lifted Robert up by the arms and settled him on his shoulder. Crowing, the little boy fastened his hands in his father’s thick hair. Maria started off ahead of them, but Richard got her by the hand and held her beside him. His fingers were ridged with callus from the summer’s fighting. While they walked across the yard to the chapel, she marked that he still stepped short in his right leg. Robert was bouncing up and down on his shoulders. Maria said, “Don’t let him pound you like that.”
“I would liefer pound you.”
Her face grew hot. She squeezed his hand, and he put his arm around her shoulders.
The outside of the chapel was finished, save for the roof and the door. The brick rectangle had three windows on each long side, a wooden porch, and a space for a double door in front. Most of the workmen were inside laying down the planks for the floor. Maria took Richard all the way around the outside, to show him the windows Brother Nicholas had carved. He looked closer at the walls themselves, how the bricks and stone were fit together, and the building laid out and leveled on the hillside.
“Your workmen made all this?”
Maria nodded, proud. They were coming around to the front door again. “The master mason taught them, that monk I told you of—he even showed a boy from the village here how to make the drawings and measurements. Arnalto.”
“Good.” Richard lifted Robert down from his shoulders and set him on the ground. “I am taking all these men up to the mountains to build me a new castle.”
For a moment, she stood still, to collect her jumbled thoughts. Robert ran shouting into the chapel, calling to everyone that his father had come.
Maria said, “When they are finished here.”
“No. It will snow up there soon. If I can’t shelter my men up in the pass, I’ll lose it. You can have the workmen again when I’m done with them.”
Maria walked sev
eral steps away from him, through the dry grass of the hillside. The chapel was nearly finished. She had talked with the monks of consecrating it on Epiphany. It was hers, her God-gift. He had not come to see her; he had just come to steal away her workmen. Richard stood in front of the chapel, one hand braced on the wall, his eyes on her. She knew she could not stop him from taking every workman away.
Before her the steep slope fell off down toward the village. Eleanor was walking along the path, Stephen in her arms. Maria picked up her skirt in her hands. “Wait,” she cried. “Eleanor, wait for me.” She ran down the stony slope, through the thorny wildflowers. Out of breath, her legs stinging with scratches, she stumbled out onto the path a few steps ahead of Eleanor.
“What’s wrong?” Eleanor said. “Oh, Maria, you’ve torn your skirt.”
“I hate him,” Maria said. She looked back at the chapel, but Richard was gone. She sat down on the path to take the thorns from her feet and began to cry.
***
With the summer over, and the tide of pilgrims dammed, the monks’ guesthouse was empty except for Maria, Eleanor, and the two children, whose beds took up one corner of the long room. Maria changed Stephen’s clothes and put him to sleep in his cradle. Eleanor was mending Maria’s torn skirt, the needle whipping back and forth through the heavy blue cloth.
“Have you seen Robert?” Maria asked. She went to the window.
“You must bow to him, Maria,” Eleanor said. “He is your husband.”
“Let him bow to me for once. He’s a dog to use me like this.”
She reached out the window to close the shutters. In the evening a cool wind blew up from the sea, across the harvested fields and the sweep of brown pasture that lay between the village and the hillside where the cave was. She had chosen this bed because of its view of the chapel. She banged the shutters closed.
“This is more important than his work—this is for God.”
“So is the Crusade.” Eleanor shook out the skirt. “It’s too great a tear to mend well, but you can use it for everyday. I don’t understand you, Maria. What will people think? You should love Richard, no matter how he treats you.”
“I hate Richard. You take him, he wouldn’t care, Robert already loves you better than me, and Stephen could learn to. You be their mother, and when you lose them, you can suffer.”
“You are overwrought.” Eleanor sat down beside her and hugged her. “It is this sickly wind of late. They will ring for Vespers soon. Put yourself in a better mood for prayer.”
Maria wiped her eyes. She sat staring at the floor, morose. The bell rang for Vespers, and Eleanor brought her cloak. They went out of the guesthouse toward the monks’ little church, built by pilgrims’ offerings.
In the clear autumn air the tolling of the bell rang like drops of water on a gold dish. From the village, spread along the narrow valley, people came walking up toward the little church. Maria with Stephen in her arms stood in front of the church, waiting for Robert. The last person went by her, and she had not found her son.
The voice of the English monk reached her, chanting the first phrase of the prayer, and the chorus of the villagers took it up. Usually with the workmen from the chapel, the congregation overflowed into the dooryard and stood looking in through the windows, but now the church was half-empty. Maria stood outside, in the deepening blue twilight, waiting for Richard to come. The night-singing birds began to call in the fields around her. From the chapel the voices of the villagers measured out their prayers. Stephen slept against her shoulder, smelling of sour milk.
Through the village came a train of mounted men and men on foot—her workmen, Arnalto leading them, their belongings in bundles on their shoulders. Richard spurred his bay horse over to her and reined in. Robert sat before him on his saddle.
“Come home,” he said. “I will put these people to work and be back for Christmas.”
“No,” she said. She did not look at Robert.
Richard made a sound in his throat. He shifted in his saddle, creaking the leather. He met her eyes.
“I am sorry to do this. I know why you are angry. But it must be done. Can’t you understand me?”
Maria said nothing. Robert was looking down from his perch in front of his father’s saddle. “Stephen is little.”
“Yes,” Richard said. “As little as his mother.” He wheeled his horse and rode away toward his parade of knights and workmen. Maria went up the hill to pray in the deserted chapel.
At moonrise, she came back to go to bed. She dreamed of riding a horse bareback over a wide yellow meadow. Noises broke into the dream. She woke with a start. In the darkness, men were rushing into the guesthouse.
Eleanor shrieked. Maria rolled out of her bed, lunging toward the cradle where her baby lay, and Stephen started his thin-voiced shrilling cry. Someone caught her from behind, his arms wrapped around her pinning down her elbows. She thrashed in his grip, grunted with effort, and kicked back, but her bare feet could not hurt him. Vast and dark, a cloth fell over her head and shoulders.
“Stephen,” she screamed. “Don’t hurt my baby—don’t hurt—”
They were dragging her out of doors, wrapped in a thick cloak. She twisted, struggling to free her arms, to kick, and screamed again. Stephen was crying. Someone would hear, someone would help her. Horizontal, she was borne swiftly along, and the folds of the cloak lay against her mouth and nose. For an instant she could not breathe. She turned her head frantically until she found air. She landed on her side on something hard. An instant later, another body rolled up against hers.
“Eleanor,” Maria called. “Eleanor.”
“Yes—I’m here,” Eleanor wailed. “Don’t fight, don’t give them reason to hurt us.”
Whatever they were lying on began to jounce and squeal along. A wagon. The baby had stopped his wails. Panicking, Maria flung herself from side to side until she lay exhausted and half-smothered against the wagon’s wall. She started to cry.
Eleanor was crying too. Maria ran out of tears and lay still, trying to hear what was going on around them. It must be Theobald, stealing them to use against Richard. But the longer she thought about that, the less likely it seemed. She lifted her head, straining to hear.
She could make out the sounds of the wagon and the team, the two men in the wagon seat, and three other horses. No one thieving her away would send only five men to do it. She lay back, brimming with anger, and squirmed over toward Eleanor.
“Eleanor,” she said softly. “These are Richard’s men.”
Eleanor fell silent in mid-sob. Maria lay still, patiently listening; at last, Eleanor murmured, “Do you really think so?”
“Yes.” Maria strained her arms against the ropes. They had bound the cloak around her above her elbows, like a wrapped cheese. She worked her arms back and forth to slide the blanket up.
Eleanor began to pray in a voice still choked from crying.
Maria rested a little. The edge of the cloth around her was free of the ropes, and a trickle of cold air dribbled in. She took hold of the material in her teeth and tugged it loose.
The ropes fell slack over her elbows. Still half-buried in the heavy cloth, she lay on her side thinking that perhaps she ought to let them take her to Richard, to apologize to him and to accept his apology, before something happened that could not be mended. She yanked her arms free, sat up, flung aside the cloak, and stood in the wagon bed.
They were rolling down the moonlit road, over the bare hills; three knights ranged alongside the wagon. One cried, “Wait!” and jigged his horse toward her. She braced herself to keep her balance when the wagon stopped.
“Don’t touch me,” she cried. She pulled the cloak up over her nightdress and struggled with the unfamiliar shoulder clasp. “If you touch me, my husband will kill you.”
The three knights reined in their horses. Maria scrambled across Eleanor’s prone body to the wagon seat and snatched Stephen from the arms of the man beside the driver.
“
Hold her, damn it,” a knight called, but his voice wavered. The two men in the wagon sat motionless—they were serfs. “Stop her. Grab her, pick her up, are you afraid of her?”
Maria stepped over Eleanor and jumped down from the back of the wagon to the road. A big blond knight wheeled his horse across her path. She did not recognize him. Richard would have chosen men she did not know.
“If you stop me,” she said softly, “I will tell him that you handled me.” Ducking under his horse’s neck, she started down the road, back toward the shrine.
“Maria!” Eleanor screamed.
The knights galloped up around her, hemming her in with their horses. She cradled Stephen tightly in her arms. The moonlight shone on their mail and their shining, sweating faces.
“God’s wounds, are you all afraid of a woman?”
Maria slid between two horses and went on along the road. The ground was rough under her bare feet. The talkative knight swore, and the other knights laughed.
“You go put your hands on Gripe’s wife.”
Eleanor was still calling to her, but she ignored that; it was not Eleanor’s fight. Hoofs clattered behind her and a lone knight rode up around her.
“Now, come along,” he said. He reached for her with both hands.
“If you touch me,” she said, “you’ll have to hurt me. Get out of my way.”
“Now, listen—”
“Get out of my way.”
The knight sat up straight. He reined his horse aside, and she walked off along the road toward the shrine.
Fourteen
In the morning, with the monks, she went around the chapel to see what work they could do alone. The carpenter had hewn and shaped the planks for the rest of the floor, and the pegs were all cut. Brother Anthony had helped the workmen set down that part they had finished. He showed Maria and the other monk how to slide the grooved and tongued boards together and how to bore the holes. Twice they cut the holes through and missed the stud underneath, and when Brother Anthony finally pounded in the first peg, it broke off halfway down and they had to drill it out. At noon they were still working on the first plank.
Great Maria (v5) Page 13