Dark Maiden (21 page)

He wrapped her in his cloak, pulling her onto his knee. He rocked her, singing a strange, lilting tune, half a lullaby.

“One of my mam’s. I cannot remember it all,” he admitted, divining and answering her question without her asking.

“Why now?” She stopped a final shiver but only just. “I have not talked in my sleep for months.”

“No, far too busy with lustier, pleasant things, wife, but to be serious…“ Geraint held up his arm.

Yolande watched his supple fingers, watched them right down to the tip of her braid, where he planted a blue ribbon. “Serious,” she said, flicking her hair. Part of her was amused and another part absurdly pleased.
Is it a sin of vanity to be so glad?

“You know I like you in ribbons and this is one of the few times I will get my wish.” He gave her their drinking flask, a piece of cheese and bread. “To be truly serious, Yolande, I think it is the coming trial, this hermit of the forest and his New Jerusalem.”

She gobbled a huge bite of bread, silencing the sarcastic reply that of course she understood that. Geraint was a man with a man’s slowness of wit and he was trying his best to comfort and reassure.
And
do you want him smacking your bottom in anger?

Disquieted by this new, queer vulnerability, she felt a faint wave of sickness. As she wondered at it, Geraint said, “You spoke of the end of days again and Richard Rolle and a hermit with a hundred followers.”

She swallowed and found her voice. “Do you still believe the world will go on?”

“I do, lovely. I think almighty God made this earth to last. If he were judging us, he would start with the kings and bishops, lay them low with the pestilence. Yet those wretches keep on breathing.” He winked at her, swooping in and taking a teasing bite from her bread before kissing her neck. “Bread and Yolande, my manna from heaven.”

“Hush, you.” She made the sign of the cross on his forehead, wondering what else she had said in her sleep but too proud to ask.

He rocked her afresh on his lap. “You were most exercised by the hundred followers, how they can remain hidden in this huge woodland, why they want to be hidden.”

“Yes, but Katherine said there were runaway serfs in the settlement. It would be natural for them to be wary.”

Geraint shrugged a wiry shoulder. “Even so,
occult
was the word you used in your sleep. ‘A secret occult labyrinth, a dark Jerusalem’ was what you said.”

His words flung her back into her nightmare and she remembered it fully.

A place of trees, oak trees, not healthy ones but stunted and gnarled, with few leaves. In the midst of the ailing oaks stood a walnut tree.

“Walnut?” Geraint queried as she spoke of the dream. “That must be a rare thing so far north.”

“Rare and sinister,” Yolande agreed. “They meet under the walnut tree beside their labyrinth and promise to do all to join Richard Rolle before the coming end of the world.”

“Who are they?” Geraint’s question was natural but the fire in her belly that she had experienced during her dream returned to her in force. She saw falling fire, perhaps from a dragon, and the labyrinth stretching away, close to the walnut tree.

A tree said to be beloved by the devil himself.

“It goes widdershins,” she whispered, her scalp crawling with dread as she scanned the labyrinth afresh. “Its every turn is to the left and the north, the places of evil.”
So what kind of Jerusalem does it lead to? One for demons? Is this place a dark mirror of the holy city?

“I am as much left-handed as right and do you think me bad?”

She chuckled. “To be sure, husband, would you call yourself good?”

“Not I, and proud of it. But then,” he added with devastating logic, “I am not lurking in a forest pretending to be holy.” He filled her sight, blowing away the webs of her dream. “You will kill any minotaur within any labyrinth, my Bathsheba,” he went on, certain in a way that made it sound as if she carried two sacred bows. “You will defeat them.”

Reminded anew of
them
, Yolande said quickly, “We should speak in my father’s tongue.”

Geraint did not question her instinct. “Good.” He spoke with a dreadful accent and had mastered only a few words of her father’s language.

“They come.” Yolande’s mastery of the tongue was also less than perfect but this way they could speak together. She doubted any other in England or Wales would understand her and suddenly she knew that was important. “They come. Closing. From north. We—we are…” She scowled, frustrated that she could not remember the Ethiope word for “runaways” if indeed she had ever learned it.

He leaned in and kissed her. “Runaway servant,” he said softly in English. “You at least, yes. I am always a juggler. You are from London.” He grasped her elbows, squeezing fiercely. “We are married, mind.”

“I was about to say the same.” Yolande leaned back, trusting Geraint to catch her, and laughed. “Yes, husband, do you
mind
how we fled over London Bridge?” she exclaimed in louder English, establishing her claim to Geraint and his to her.

Bracing herself for a reply from the approaching but unseen strangers, she warned herself to gasp and look surprised. “You shot at that merchant with your bow, husband,” she continued, wondering when these creeping folk would make themselves known.

They spy on us and for what reason? Yet there are no restless, angry dead riding in them, I smell no stink of sulfur, so that is one good thing.

“Mine, eh?” Geraint remarked and she knew her shrewd honeyman would guess that she had given her bow to him to allay suspicion of them as newcomers.

Yolande heard a welcome sound, more welcome to her straining ears than the rasp of a dagger from a sheath or the creak of a bow.
For the moment at least, these wary strangers do not consider us a threat
.

A man cleared his throat.

“Who is there?” called Geraint in English, a perfect study of alarm. He leaped to his feet and lurched forward to screen her with his body.

Oh, so you will act the part of a bad tumbler, my husband? Or are you overanxious to protect me as usual?

A slight figure shuffled into the firelight, pointing at Yolande, and her body tingled in alarm. Next she gasped in real shock as a child’s voice asked, “Are you the devil, dark lady? Are you?”

The speaker was a dwarf, not a child. Yolande gave a low bow and said steadily, “No sir. I swear by God and Great Maria that I am a good wife and a good woman.”

“And no one speaks to my Yolande that way.” It irked Geraint so much to hear his queenly wife being polite to this beardless manikin that his teeth ached. The dwarf might be a leader, might even be the hermit they sought, but he more than others should understand about prejudging
and not do it
.

He felt Yolande’s fingers on his shoulder, a silent plea for him to keep his temper, and to do just that he looked more closely at the dwarf.

Yolande, as calm as a stalking lioness, made their introductions, offered hospitality and asked after the stranger’s name and company. Theodore, an imperial name for a pale figure dressed in monkish brown and with flaxen hair. The little fellow’s hair in particular, shorn close to his tiny skull, gave Geraint pause.

Brutally clipped off and recently too, as if Theodore could not wait to be rid of it. Geraint wondered what Yolande had sensed and longed to ask her but knew that even in Welsh it was unwise.

Schooling himself grimly to patience, he waited.

Theodore had arrived with an escort of five and Yolande hoped her stores would stretch to that number. Four silent, sober men and a neat, black-haired woman who blushed. She gave the woman her cup and flask and left her to share out between the others. She herself deftly divided the bread, making the sign of the cross above it first.

“Pity we are not Jesus, to make this a feast,” remarked Theodore, who had crouched by the fire and was doodling in the ashes with a stick. “Yet it is a miracle we met you tonight.”

“You knew we were coming?” Yolande asked, alarmed.
Great Maria, have they those with foresight among them, or seers who can watch everything through a scrying glass?

Theodore grinned as if enjoying her discomfiture. “I cannot claim that, Mistress Yolande. We merely wander in the woodland in these spring evenings for our refreshment and delight and,” he shrugged his slight shoulders, “you were here, that is all.”

He accepted a piece of bread but refused the ale. In the shake of his head, Yolande caught a vivid glimpse into his past.

A dwarf for a lady, dressed in silks, smothered in ribbons and jewels, pampered like a lapdog, well cared for but not recognized as a man.

Here in these wildwoods he can be himself.

Yolande had been warned by Katherine to expect an evil group and this shook her. She was glad of Geraint’s warmth and silent support as he settled by her, his long legs snug against hers so that she was almost on his lap, sitting by the fire.

“You are from London.” Theodore raised white eyebrows as he chewed, as if surprised her bread was good. “I was born in that city.”

“Yolande and I were married there,” Geraint dropped in. “I am from everywhere.”

“I can see that, master juggler,” replied Theodore. Yolande dug her nails into her husband’s sinewy thigh, praying these two would stop sparking off each other.

In return, her scalp tingled when Geraint gave her plait a tug and leaned close to breathe in her ear, “You want to be my princess again tonight, keep jabbing me.”

“Promises,” she teased him, wishing they were still alone but aware she should focus. “Are you all from London?”

She listened carefully to their answers, aware of Geraint doing the same.

Theodore had run from a lady before she could collar him with a silver collar like her lapdogs, Geraint learned. The woman, Joan, had fled from the strip fields in Oxfordshire when her reeve beat her once too many times. Two others were serfs from monastery lands near Saint Albans, another a former fisherman, sick of the sea.

The last one, Walter, was the most interesting to Geraint. A squire, Walter had disliked fighting and blood but had kept training, bound to his family duty, until the commander spoke within the great hall of his lord.

“Commander?” Yolande picked up on that martial title as he had.

“The name we give our leader as a mark of respect,” explained Theodore, snapping his fingers at Walter. “Go on with your tale, my boy.”

Geraint expected Walter to bridle but instead he hugged his lanky legs with his arms and said in a rush, “It was a revelation. I learned so much. That I did not have to wage war, that fighting was not the only way for the younger son of a knight. That I did not have to mew myself up in a monastery to escape.”

I’m with you on keeping out of the monastery, Walter, but so far I hear nothing astonishing.
Glancing at Yolande, Geraint sensed the same puzzlement from her, a tiny frown appearing on her forehead.

“The commander made all clear,” Walter continued. “We are warriors for God and for those weaker than ourselves.”

“A worthy ambition,” said Yolande. “I would be interested to learn more.” She tossed a melting look at Geraint. “If it please you, husband?”

“I am all attention, madam.”

“Amen,” said Theodore, wiping crumbs off himself and rising to his feet. “Shall we go?”

“Let us dowse the fire first and gather our things,” said Yolande swiftly. “We shall catch up with you, if we may.”

Theodore waved them on. “Go to it.”

“Bossy little brute,” Geraint complained when they were alone again. “But genuine.”

“As you say.” Yolande paused in her packing and tapped her front teeth with a finger, a gesture which reminded Geraint eerily of himself. “Genuine.”

“You like them.”

“You do not?”

“I did not say that.” Geraint stood to pass water on the fire, a habit that scandalized Yolande. “Saves our drinking water.”

“You may get burned one of these days.” She huffed her exasperation, a tall dragon, smooth and silky and—
control yourself, Geraint
.

“So may we both.” Dowsing the last of the flames, Geraint hastily reordered himself, striding to Yolande’s bow before she automatically took it herself. “Any holy man who calls himself commander is strange to me.”

“Hush.” Yolande touched one of the amulets around her neck.

But mark this, she did not contradict you.
Geraint took the bow and removed the pack from his wife’s shoulders. “We shall see,” he said.

Yolande expected to be blindfolded so the way to the eventual settlement remained secret. Instead Theodore led them on a winding, switchback course that soon had her completely lost.

If these are not followers of the forest hermit then I have lost us a day, but I sense they are. So why do I like them?

Even Geraint was not immune. She could tell from the way he sucked in his cheeks whenever Walter said something particularly fulsome about the commander, checking himself so as not to spoil the former squire’s hero worship. Later he helped the woman Joan and offered to assist Theodore across a swift-flowing stream, kindnesses again he need not have done.