The gray knight squinted. “A battle. Where?”
“Mama,” Robert said, before she had to answer. “Is Papa well?”
“Yes,” she said. “Papa is safe.”
Robert leaned on her knees. “Is Uncle Roger safe?”
“Yes,” Maria said. Jean was watching her steadily. She sent Eleanor away with a word. She held her voice even. “Jean, will you talk to the messenger tomorrow, before he goes back? Ponce Rachet should know we caught that thief.” They had run down a robber on the road to the East Tower.
“And Uncle William,” Robert asked. “Is he well?”
“Yes.”
“Good. I like Uncle William but I like Uncle Roger best.”
Jean fingered his stubbled chin. “Robo,” he said. “Go bring me something wet. And your lady mother too.”
Robert ran off down the room. Jean dropped his voice. “What is this about a battle? What is wrong?”
Maria stood up. “The Saracens have taken Richard prisoner.”
Jean’s face seemed to close up. At the other end of the room, Robert lifted the ewer, intent on what he was doing. The old knight took hold of Maria’s hand.
“I’m sorry. Have they asked any ransom?”
Maria shook her head. Robert brought a cup carefully across the room to Jean. He had filled it overfull; the wine trembled on the brim. Jean backed away from it, letting go of Maria’s hand. “No. Serve your lady mother first, who loved you first.”
Maria took the cup. She had to force herself to drink the swallow of wine. Robert went back for the other cup.
“If Theobald attacks us,” Jean said, “we cannot fight him. If he strikes we must retreat, he would take Birnia at once.”
The wine was whole. She drank another long taste of it. “I will not lose Birnia.”
Jean’s pale eyes were steady. “It’s all to no use anyway if he’s dead.”
Maria lifted the cup and sipped the strong red wine.
***
Jean took all the knights to the border, to watch for Theobald. Maria put her pages out to stand guard on the walls. They had less work to do, anyway, since the knights were gone. Robert made them all into an army and tirelessly ordered them around. Maria could not sleep. She took to drinking down a full cup of wine before she went to bed. When Eleanor saw it she gave her a look acid with disapproval.
“I need something,” Maria said sharply. “If I must go to bed alone.”
“You have ever been so temperate.” Eleanor bent over the looking glass, plucking the stray dark hair on her upper lip. “Yet you are so shrewish now, I cannot help but be disappointed in you.”
“God’s blood.”
“You ought not to take oaths before children.”
Maria prayed for Richard. She had heard all her life what Saracens did to their prisoners. Thinking about him made her want to cry. For some diversion, she went down into the town. Before she had seen Iste, she had not understood towns, but now she made use of the market place and the craftsmen’s shops. The people there knew her, pointing her out as if she were a talking dog. She was gay as a new bride, until Eleanor rushed up to her, her face glowing from the sprint down the street, and said, “The priest just told me that talk has it Richard is dead.”
Maria’s stomach shrank to a knot. “Where? Who told you that?”
“The priest, I said. Father Gibertetto. He says everyone is talking about it, all over town.”
“Ah.” Maria hitched up her basket on her arm and called to Stephen, who was watching the drunken men stagger out of the wineshop. “Let’s go find out what they actually know.”
The old priest begged her forgiveness. “I never meant you to hear it,” he said, with an evil look at Eleanor. “I would speak nothing to your hurt, my dear lady.” His watering eyes probed at her. “We shall say Masses for his soul.”
“Don’t,” Maria said, “he is not dead yet.” She went out onto the porch of the church, where she had left Stephen. Taking him up in her arms, she went across the market place and down the street toward the inn, where she had left her horse. Eleanor walked beside her.
“Maria—”
“Don’t talk.”
They went into the innyard. When he saw them, the ostler climbed down off the fence and went to get their horses. His widowed daughter came out the door of the inn.
“Good morning,” she said. “Come inside and have a mug of cider.”
Maria shook her head. “I will, the next time I am here.”
Large and soft-fleshed as a sweet cake, the ostler’s daughter crossed the yard to her side. “Oh,” she said, “they are talking it all over town, I suppose, about Dragon dying. Come inside, it’s cool out here.”
“Don’t go in there,” Eleanor whispered. “She is the worst gossip in the town.”
Maria stepped away from her, rubbed by her tone of voice. “Go back, if you will—take Stephen, see that he takes a nap.” She walked across the yard toward the inn.
The ostler’s daughter caught up with her at the door. She said, “This girl was not with you, when you were in Birnia the other time.”
“She is my husband’s cousin.”
They crossed the inn’s plank-walled common room and went down into the kitchen. It was above ground, with windows, so that the sunlight poured in and turned the steams and smoke in the air yellow as butter. A knave was kneading bread dough at the table. The room smelled of yeast. The ostler’s daughter took Maria into the corner near the ovens and brought her a cup of warm cider and a dish of clotted cream.
“If you tell me it is not true,” the ostler’s daughter said, “I will believe you. These people put me by, they love rumor.”
Maria ate a spoonful of the cream. The fat woman picked up a basket from the floor and took out a great piece of needlework.
“I won’t lie to you,” Maria said. “It may be true, but I am—I—we have heard nothing for certain either way. It is just a rumor to me, too.”
The ostler’s daughter crossed herself. “God have mercy on you. I went for three days not knowing if my husband was dead or alive.” Her fingers stitched the long green stem of a flower. “But if you know so little, how have these tongues come to busy themselves with it? Have you thought of that?”
Maria frowned at her. “What do you mean?”
“I heard this tale of Dragon dying from Ramkin, the charcoal burner. How would Ramkin know such a thing—a man who lives all but two days of the month in the forest? Fen people keep secrets. He heard it here, in Birnia town, from someone who wishes you ill.”
Maria put down the empty bowl, her eyes intent on the woman’s face. “Who?”
The woman smiled placidly down at her needlework. “Fulbert, the butcher. He sells hides to the tanneries in Occel, he is in Theobald’s pay.”
Maria said nothing, amazed. The ostler’s daughter stitched the outline of a leaping lion.
“I know every secret in Birnia.” Her voice was sweet with pride.
“Even mine,” Maria said. “What are you making?”
“A vestment for old Gibertetto.” She held it up. Among flowers and leafy stalks, the signs of the Evangelists stood at the four tips of a cross. “The secret I do not know is who told Fulbert, when there has been no one into Birnia from the south in more than a month.”
She took the work in hand again and stitched yellow curls for the lion’s mane. Maria folded her own hands in her lap, trying to find sense in it: the charcoal burner, the butcher, the tanneries at Occel, and the rumor that linked them all. She said, “Someone in my castle is betraying me.”
The needle tacked down one end of a curl. “Perhaps.”
“You would not have told me this,” Maria said, “if you did not intend to help me.”
The ostler’s daughter lifted her round face. “I will do what I can.”
***
Theobald marched an army up to the border near the Rood Oak, but Ponce Rachet sent eighteen knights from the East Tower, and one night with their
help Jean set fire to the meadows where Theobald was camped and, in the panic and excitement, ran off most of the Count’s horses and killed several of his men. Theobald retreated. Jean and his old knights fell back to the King’s Road. When Theobald pursued, they wheeled around behind him and shadowed him down the fen, picking off his sentries and scouts. But then Ponce Rachet’s men had to go back to the East Tower, to meet some emergency there.
Maria heard all this from three of the old knights, who staggered back to the castle suffering a variety of ailments. She and Eleanor bandaged their wounds and dosed them for their arthritis and their bad backs. Outside on the wall, Robert marched the boys around, waving the wooden sword Jean had made for him, while Stephen hurried along behind. Maria watched them from the third-story window. The three knights were asleep in the bed behind her. Eleanor came up beside her.
“Maria,” she said. “You heard them. You must send the children away.”
“I heard. Jean’s crafty, he is beating Theobald.”
“You are mad, Maria—Theobald will shrug him off like a fly, these three cannot fight anymore, two are dead—they say Ponce Rachet’s men are gone. There are only fifteen men left. Theobald has scores of men, he can get more when they die. He—”
“Stop, Eleanor.”
Eleanor turned to look out the window. The boys’ voices piped in the ward below. Robert’s shout overrode them all.
“Is Richard dead?” Eleanor asked.
Maria put her hand on the warm stone of the window sill.
“Don’t you think I would know if my husband were dead?” She turned into the room. “Mind these men. I am going to the town again.”
She took Robert with her to the inn, left him to play in the common room, and joined the ostler’s daughter in the kitchen, where the widow was sewing the horns on Saint Luke’s ox. The two women greeted each other like old friends. The ostler’s daughter made a place for Maria on her bench. Maria smoothed her skirts over her knees.
“Let me see. You are nearly done, you work hard—what is this stitch here?”
The other woman wove her needle through the loops of thread, gathering them into a tight round blossom against the linen. Maria could not follow it. The ostler’s daughter said, “I have shown half the women in Birnia my stitches, and they try and try but turn out ugly scraggly work, and in the end come to me to make them their pretties.”
Maria set her teeth together, determined to learn it. She watched how the other woman stretched the linen in her fingers while she sewed, to keep it straight.
“Who has visited the butcher?”
The needle flashed through the cloth. “Several people. Two men from Occel came here, but they stayed with us and seemed to be no more than merchants. There was a small man, with a limp, who spent most of the day with Fulbert yesterday.”
Maria shook her head. “I know no small man with a limp.”
“Also, there were two men, father and son, very like—the older much the taller? No. And a needle-nosed young man, on foot, but wearing a short coat, like a knight. He came yesterday. Fulbert—”
“Yes,” Maria said. She nodded once. “Haimo. He is one of my hostages from Iste.” She had wondered when she marked him leaving: such a one would have no innocent business outside the castle.
The two women smiled at each other. Turning back to her work, the ostler’s daughter took stitches along the ox’s horn. Maria sat still. The warmth and light of the kitchen soothed her.
“And Fulbert has been sending our smith—Galga is his name—sending Galga off into the countryside, now and then. I think he may be taking messages to Count Theobald, up on the fen.”
Maria grunted. “I will deal with Haimo.” She got to her feet; now that she had an enemy within reach, she felt charged with strength.
“Have you heard any new word of your husband?” the ostler’s daughter said.
“No. Nothing.”
The woman looked quickly away from her. Maria pulled her cloak up over her shoulders. “Thank you. I will remember what you have done for me.”
“Such things as I do. Bring me some needlework when you come again, and I will show you that stitch.”
Maria went out to the common room. Half a dozen men sat around a table below the window, wine flagons scattered around them. They turned owlishly toward her. Robert raced to her side.
“Mama, come meet my new friends. I told them all about you.”
Maria took his hand. The men at the table were making her uncomfortable with their stares. “No—we must go home.” She led him to the door and out the wide plank steps into the yard.
A wagon blocked the gate. Two oxen stood steaming in their traces before it, their split feet half-buried in the mud. Maria held Robert back on the steps.
“Robert,” she said. “You must help me. I need a knight’s help.”
The boy spun toward her. “Tell me. Oh, Mama, oh, I swear I’ll do good.”
She laughed. She crossed the yard toward her horse, walking carefully to keep from muddying her shoes. Robert leaped around her.
“Mama! Tell me—”
“Ssssh. It is a secret matter.”
He pressed his lips together. Maria gave him a strong hug and kissed his forehead. The ostler led up her mare by the bridle. She climbed up into her saddle, smoothing her skirts under her.
“Here you go, little prince,” the ostler said. He boosted Robert up behind the mare’s saddle, and Maria rode around the wagon toward the gate. The drover got back into his seat, shook out his whip, and shouted. The oxen shouldered into the harness. The ostler cried out, dismayed, and with a crunch the wagon smashed into the steps of the inn. Maria rode out to the street.
“Mama, now can you tell me?”
“When we are home again.” Of the three knights in the Tower, only one could walk. She wished the bald cook from her home castle were here: him she could have relied on. Birnia’s cook, the only sound man in the castle save Haimo himself, wheezed when he walked and spoke endlessly of spiritual matters.
They rode out the gate of the town. Maria nudged the mare into a long canter. She thought of waiting until Jean or Ralf returned, but Haimo might do other mischief, or he could escape. She could not endure it if he escaped.
Robert held onto her waist, and she urged the mare into a full gallop up the hill. The wind streamed in her face. They raced up the hard, rutted road, past the dead fields and the oak trees finally turning red. While they climbed, the air cooled to a wintry chill. Before them on the knob of the hill the Tower stood up dark gray against the sky. The gate was open. She jogged the mare through it and dismounted.
There was no one in the ward. Robert leaped down from the horse and went to take the reins. Maria said, “The secret is that Haimo is a traitor, and we must take him prisoner.”
“A traitor!”
“Go up to the knights’ room,” Maria said, “and wait for me.” She struck him lightly on the shoulder to hurry him off. Haimo was coming out of the stable to get her horse. While he walked he pulled on his short coat. Her heart knocked on her ribs. Robert disappeared into the Tower. The young man came up and took Maria’s reins.
“Good afternoon, Haimo.” She looked him in the face.
“My lady.”
He led the mare off toward the stable. She locked her fisted hands together and hurried over to the Tower steps.
The knights’ room stank of liniment and myrrh. Half the castle’s dogs lay in the rushes on the floor in front of the hearth. Two of the sick knights snored in chorus. The other stood at the foot of the bed, stiffly trying to get his crippled arm into his shirt. Robert was helping him. The old knight pushed his head through the neck of the shirt and tugged it down with his left hand. He had been a huge man once. Now his muscles hung wasting from his rack of bones.
“My lady,” he said, “what is this my knave here tells me?”
Maria went up to him. “Haimo—a hostage, he is the groom—he has been spying on us for Theobald’s sak
e. Can you help us? There’s nobody else.”
The old knight grunted. “Get me my sword,” he said to Robert. His right arm dangled from his sprained shoulder. “I’ll never get this into mail. Where is Haimo now?”
“In the stable.”
Robert brought the sword in its scabbard. The old knight took it by the hilt in his left hand. He threw off the scabbard in a coiling stroke of his good shoulder. “Let’s go.” He strode off toward the door.
They went down the stairs single file, Robert just ahead of Maria, and the old knight leading them. Maria said, “Robert, you must go to the stable and ask Haimo to come into the ward. Be careful. Don’t warn him that we are waiting for him.”
The knight opened the door out onto the stairs. The sunlight poured in past him. “Robo, look the bastard in the eye and say, My mother wants her mare again. No more. Go on.”
Robert dashed past him and down the outside stair to the ward. The old knight let Maria out before him. They followed the boy toward the stable door, walking in the rut the hoofs of horses had worn into the path. Just before they reached the stable door, it burst open, and Haimo came flying out.
He skidded to a stop and flung himself straight at Maria. The old knight bawled, “Run, you dog!” Maria raised her arms between them to shield herself, and the young man seized her by the wrists.
“I’ve got her, I’ll kill her, if you—don’t—I’ve—”
Maria kicked him, struggling against his grip. She rushed toward him and bowled him over. They fell together into the dirt of the ward. Haimo whined, his breath hot in her face. He struck her nose hard with his fist. An instant later he was torn away from her. She sat up, dazed.
“Mama,” Robert screamed. He dropped his bloody dagger and flung his arms around her. “Mama, are you hurt?”
“No.” She patted his back. Her eyes were watering. Her nose hurt with a pulsing sharp pain. Haimo lay in the rut before the door, his mouth open. The old knight planted one foot on his chest and drew the sword out of the young man’s body.
“You damned dog,” the old man murmured. He came toward them. His face was green with pain and he held his bad shoulder stiffly hunched against his neck. His fingers were slimed with Haimo’s blood. He daubed Robert’s cheeks and forehead with it.
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