‘It is not your concern. There are places.’
Fitzempress turned to the lord of Llanthony. ‘There’s nothing I can do, John. I daren’t cross the Church again. And anyway, this manuscript tries to alter the cosmos; we can’t have that.’
‘No.’
‘Just take a detachment to keep order. They needn’t do the dirty work.’
‘Yes.’
‘I can’t do anything about it, John. Male or female, God’s not with me any more. Becket saw to that.’
In the to-ing and fro-ing outside the doors, where more monks were waiting to join the hunt, John managed to grab hold of the girl’s arm. ‘I’ll delay them. Go and warn her.’
The only other person who saw her slip away was Brother Madoc. He clung onto John, crying. ‘I didn’t know,’ he was saying, ‘I didn’t know.’
‘Didn’t know what, you bastard?’ John shook him off and called out the guard.
* * *
The first thing Finn did was thank God that Dai-Raymond happened to be over at the mill. Then she told Elfwida to lock herself inside the tower, and ran to find Gorm. The pigeon loft was empty and she wasted vital minutes calling for him through the inn and outside until she discovered him sitting beatifically on the nobles’ privy. ‘A fine time to get caught with your trousers down,’ she told him, and helped him pull them up. As she hustled him towards the Stein she said, ‘Remember, you work at the mill. You’ve never worked anywhere else.’ She couldn’t bear it if anything happened to him because of her.
She watched his bandy legs stump over the bridge to where, in the far distance, a black mass was concentrating and moving towards her.
‘Food,’ she said and pelted along the quay and into the inn. With the sun coming in through the open shutters in long beams it looked as it had looked on countless mornings waiting for trade, shadowed, clean and expectant. In the process of going through the nobles’ door to the kitchen and out through the commoners’ she acquired a loaf of bread and some cheese. A new shadow was in the entrance. A monk had run ahead of the others to gain the glory of her capture. He bowed back and fore in an effort to catch his breath as he came at her so that it seemed she was being advanced on by a huge, hopping crow. She felt terror, but she had been activated at long last. She dropped the bread and cheese, went to meet him and gave him Scathagh’s Ploy Number One. The old skill was still there even if the strength wasn’t. The monk dropped, gargling. She picked up the food and yelled to the Elf to open the tower door. Then they were both inside and getting the bar into its slots with shaking hands.
‘There, there.’ She held the sobbing Elf close. ‘There, there.’
‘I didn’t mean to, Finn.’
‘Of course, you didn’t.’ She crooned baby talk to the girl as she led her to the basin and washed the blood off her top lip. ‘But how did you get the manuscript? It was under my pillow this morning when you left.’
‘Still is. That was my copy.’ Elfwida collapsed on her again. ‘I copied it every night when you were asleep. Sort of, to give me power over you. I betrayed you. Oh God, what have I done?’
‘There, there, my treasure. Nothing.’ The fault was hers; she’d never loved the girl enough. Well, she loved her now. Ferociously. She’d never been allowed to show her love to Slaney, but Elfwida was her daughter now. ‘Stay there.’ She scrambled up the steps to the top room and grabbed her manuscript and a satchel. ‘Can you find Lough Mask?’ she called as she came down again.
Elfwida wiped her eyes. ‘Should do. You’ve talked about the place enough, you and the others.’
Why didn’t I take her there? raged Finn at herself. Why didn’t I pay her more attention? The sin is in overlooking people. She stuffed manuscript, bread, cheese and a couple of pinginns – all the money she had – into it.
‘But I’m not leaving you,’ said the Elf.
‘You bloody are. Look at me.’ She put her hands round the girl’s face. ‘Am I or am I not a happy woman at this moment?’
Elfwida stared at her. ‘Yes. Yes, Finn, you are.’
‘Very, very happy.’ She jerked her head at the door. ‘They’ve made me happy, bless them. They’re scared. They’ve read the manuscript and they’re scared out of their wits. They know mine’s the truth. They know they can’t own God for themselves. If they’d torn up the manuscript with a light laugh, it’d be different, but that’s not a light laugh out there.’
It was more like the sounds the pack had made over the body of Pinginn. The door was shaking as they hit it.
‘You take the Word of Woman, Elf, and add your word and then other women can add theirs and one day there’ll be another voice in the world. Can you do it?’
Elfwida nodded and kissed her. ‘Right.’
‘Good. Get down to the boat and get ready. The tricky bit will be the north shore if you make it. Run like you’ve never run before, Elf. God bless you, I love you so much. Start rowing like hell when you hear me do this.’
At the other side of the door the black mass stopped for a moment at the dreadful sound which did not release them to attack again until it had throbbed away to nothing.
* * *
John and his men drove such monks as had run ahead out of the inn and back over the bridge to the Dublin side of the Stein, chucking a few into the water for good measure. It wasn’t until he’d got them under control that he had time to look back – and saw the inn on fire. ‘Suffer not a witch to live,’ one of the monks was howling, ‘Burn her.’ They all took up the chant. ‘Burn her. Burn her.’ A stone cracked into the mouth of one of them with a force that broke his teeth. She was up on the roof and they could see her waving her sling at them.
‘Water chain,’ said John. But it wasn’t any good; the inn’s timbers and thatch were blackening already in flames that were almost invisible in the sun. There was the deep, satisfied roar of fire going up.
He ran to the far end of the quay so that the tower roof was in his view and saw her sling another stone, then throw a spear. Either the air between them was moving in the heated air from the inn or she was dancing. She let out the ululating yell he’d heard on a winter’s night a long time ago, piercing the monks’ chants with that most unnatural of songs, the vocal triumph of a woman.
But these weren’t poor, simple wolves. He glanced at their upturned faces, primroses following the sun. These had God and Fitzempress’ army on their side.
God was where the poor were, she’d written, suffering with them, crucified again: He was Mary watching the crucifixion. Bloody rubbish she talked. God wanted him to be Governor of Ireland. Then why the hell was every beautiful thing he’d ever known inextricably entangled with that stupid bitch up there? Why was he free to stand here remembering it, when he could be dead from starvation in Strongbow’s prison? The stupid, loving bitch.
The monks were running towards the end of the Stein. He followed them on the inn side of the river so that he could see what they saw – a boat with a girl rowing it gliding out from behind the promontory, heading for the opposite bank of the Liffey. So that’s what she was doing. Letting this one get away. It occurred to him that he hadn’t asked the girl in Fitzempress’ hall what her name was. She wasn’t going to make it; there were some cockle-gatherers’ curraghs beached on the silt. Some of the monks threw themselves at one of them, dragging it towards the water. A nice shot put a spear splintering through its side and immediately they ran for another and begin dragging that. She must be running out of spears.
He saw the monk Madoc, away from the rest, on his knees, praying. Behind him the front of the inn collapsed in on itself. One of the guards on the quay had a bow and quiver. He grabbed them off the man. God forgives everything except lack of love, she’d written. He hoped she was right. She’d better be right.
The staircase to the tower door had gone, and so had the tower door which was a hole with a flicker of flames round it. In the old days he’d have leaped that high, but now he had to burn his hands on a charred beam which was still strong enou
gh to take his weight and clamber up it. Bloody rheumatics. You’d have thought God, male or female, would have made an exception in his case.
The staircase in the tower was beginning to burn, but he made it up to the roof just in time. There she was, and she was dancing, blast her. Shouting, throwing, having a high old time. ‘This is bloody ridiculous,’ he shouted at her over the roar.
She looked round and saw him. ‘I can manage, Pilgrim,’ she said, as if he’d offered to help with the shopping. ‘Go down.’ She had an arrow sticking out of her upper arm – his men had begun to shoot back at her because she was shooting at them as well as the monks. You couldn’t blame them, a madwoman like this one. She wouldn’t feel any pain yet. But soon.
He jumped away as the steps crackled and collapsed and a fireball shot out of the stairwell. He went to her side at the parapet and began shooting down at the crowd by the boats. ‘What I came to ask,’ he shouted, ‘is that girl Slaney?’
‘What?’
‘My daughter. I don’t want to think I’ve come up here for nothing. Is that Slaney?’
She looked towards the river and then turned to smile at him. ‘She’s our daughter.’
‘That’s all right then.’ Come to think of it, the girl had fair hair; she’d taken after him. She was getting near the north bank. He wished he’d known her; he’d have liked a daughter. ‘I suppose she’s heading for Lough Mask?’
‘Will she make it?’
The monks had launched one of the curraghs, but the girl had landed on the other side and was already running between the tree stumps towards the forest in the distance. He aimed an arrow at the monks’ boat but they were getting beyond range and he missed. ‘She might.’ If she could run fast, if they didn’t send cavalry after her, or dogs, if she avoided the countless dangers on her way.
The Loon shouted, ‘Isn’t it a lovely day, Pilgrim?’ and coughed as the shaft of a longbow took her in her left side.
He’d no arrows left. Down there one of the best Welsh marksmen in Fitzempress’ army was fitting another shaft into his bow. John picked his woman up and swung her round so that he could kiss her and receive the arrow into his own back.
* * *
What disturbed the archdeacons of Dublin and Llandaff, as they searched through what was left of the tower the next morning, was to discover among the wreckage not one, but two, contorted pieces of lead which had been streaked with black. From their knowlege of monastery fires, they identified them as melted inkwells and were forced to draw the conclusion that there had been not one, but two, writers at the Swan Inn. Had the place been a factory of women scribes? A satanic spring of female heresy welling up from hell? Was there a copy of the dreadful manuscript?
They gave orders that the two skeletons they also found in the wreckage be hacked apart; they had been welded together when the lead of the tower roof had turned into molten liquid. The male skeleton was put into a coffin and shipped back to England for burial in the state accorded Norman barons, however mad. They discussed for some time what should be done with the female skeleton. As a heretic she deserved to go into unconsecrated ground, but since she had also once been an Abbess of Kildare they decided in their charity to adjudge her mad as well, and put her wrapped in sackcloth in an unmarked grave in the lepers’ churchyard on Lazy Hill.
* * *
In the room overlooking the plain of Cashel, the archbishop pondered the information he had received, and stood up to find that it was evening and that his bones had gone stiff from sitting in one position for so long.
‘The girl’s heading for Lough Mask then,’ he said. ‘I’ll send riders to the Archbiship of Tuam to intercept her. If she once gets among those islands we’ll have trouble finding her. They’re a funny people, the Partraige. I don’t trust them. In fact I don’t trust Connaught at all – no idea of reform. It may be well that the Normans conquer Connaught as well.’
He glanced sharply at the monk: ‘You’ve been doing research on the dead woman.’
‘Yes, my lord.’
‘Not from sympathy, I hope?’
‘No, my lord,’ said Madoc.
But the archbishop didn’t trust him; the dead woman’s life had impinged too much on the monk’s, or his had impinged too much on hers. He might be penitent now, in fact he looked as if he were suffering, but his part in all this had not been creditable. He would have to be incarcerated somewhere far away to reflect on his sins and to keep his mouth shut. Now that he knew it all, the archbishop was more frightened than ever that the story would get out. And the evil manuscript was here with him, in this room. They’d call it the Cashel heresy. He would show it to Laurence O’Toole and then have it burned. Heaven forfend that the escaping girl should have a copy. God as a woman, indeed. The obscenity of the idea panicked him again, and he lumbered across the room to the door to order the pursuit into Connaught.
As he opened it, he heard the loud cadences of Gerald of Wales’ voice greeting a newcomer, and the gentle Irish voice of Laurence O’Toole making a reply. Thank God, he was back.
‘I should think it shame, my lord archbishop,’ Gerald of Wales was saying, ‘that in a country like this, which professes itself Christian, there have been no holy Christian martyrs.’
The Archbishop of Cashel tutted with irritation. ‘I expect there’ll be plenty now the Normans have arrived,’ he muttered, and went down the stairs.
Brother Madoc remained looking out at the darkening plain of Cashel, his mind’s eye seeing a tower on fire. ‘There has been one,’ he said to the empty room, ‘only it was for a different Christianity. And it was a woman.’
Did she have a copy of the manuscript, that girl who was out there somewhere, struggling westward through the darkness? They’d catch her for sure; the odds against her were too great.
Suddenly he leaned out of the window.
‘Run,’ he called into the night, ‘Run.’
First published in the United Kingdom in 1989 by Headline
This edition published in the United Kingdom in 2019 by
Canelo Digital Publishing Limited
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Beaconsfield, Bucks HP9 2DU
United Kingdom
Copyright © Diana Norman, 1989
The moral right of Diana Norman to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 9781788635097
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
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