Dark Maiden (27 page)

“That was nothing like.”

“If you want real, Yolande, remember you have cast out demons and the restless dead, an incubus and Julian the cursed. Why should a lapsed cleric and his creature be such a threat?”

“I froze. What if I freeze again?”

“Then it will not matter, because you are not alone. We are married,
cariad
, and you are with child. We are our own trinity. What have Peter and Jehan but lies?”

He could see her testing the notion and beginning to like it. Giving her time to consider and using talk as a salve, he changed the subject.

“Did I see a yellow fog about Peter?” he asked, aware this strange question was normal for Yolande, part of her other world. To speak of normal things, even strange normal things, was good.

“I guessed that you might spot the sulfur.” Yolande rested her chin on her upraised knee. “It came when they were together, Peter and Jehan. Did you see that?”

“Yes, and that is why you never saw it earlier, when that pretty pair were apart. Jehan went to the fair for something. We would do well to discover what.”

Yolande cocked her head, listening. “Why are they not chasing after me?”

“Or hunting me down as a violent thief? Maybe Peter has set them questing after something else, your dragon perhaps. And that was a good story,
inspired.”

She beamed at him, warmth seeping into her, and he breathed more easily, deciding to inject his talk with a little more pepper.

“We are still free, Yolande. Dwell on that. Free and at large. Thank God Almighty that Peter or Jehan could not duck us in their pond. I have some reeds in my tunic we could breathe through, but we would have never gotten away, or only by drowning.”

Yolande crossed herself and said in a low voice, “They might have put you to an ordeal by fire instead.”

She worries over me still.
He knew she did but each time it touched him, especially lately with her anxiety over her pregnancy.

“And that would be a danger how, Yolande? Have you forgotten my tunic full of healing herbs?” He patted his torso. “I picked them to be on the winning side, so to speak, in case Peter accused me. One tip I learned from my unlamented time in the monastery was the healing power of marshmallow. I witnessed a trial there, an ordeal by fire, and after it, the monks used marshmallow as a salve when they bound up the palms of the fellow undergoing the trial, a man they believed to be innocent.”

Geraint met Yolande’s shocked expression stare for stare and grinned. “Of course, were Peter to bind my wound after such an ordeal he would try to put burrs or poison on the burns instead, to stop the healing entire. What is it?”

She shot to her feet and dragged him to his. “The labyrinth—they are going to the labyrinth. That is why they have not troubled to hunt us.” She patted herself down, checking her amulets, crosses and other sacred relics. “They leave me no time to prepare but ’tis often the way of it. Please, Christ and the Virgin have mercy on me. Let me be ready.”

Cursing, Geraint caught her bow before she grabbed it. He made her look at him. “What?” he asked again. His queenly Bathsheba was back with a vengeance and he was floundering.

“They will argue that the burning tree is a sign and tell the others it is time. Time for the end of the world, Geraint. Time for Masada.” She scooped her bow from his strong grip, dragged her quiver over her shoulder. “Where? The labyrinth—where?”

“You do not go alone,” he warned.

Her delicate brows drew together as she frowned. “I never thought I would. I assumed—”

“Hush.” He stopped her lips on her apology. “We are one in this, Yolande, and we shall fight as one.”

“Pray God it does not come to fighting. Not human fighting. I want Joan and Theo and you and the baby safe.”

He was too anxious to jest at her mention of their child. Stifling a rare panic, he crossed himself, said a swift prayer to the Marys and ran forward, leading the way to the labyrinth.

A scent of crushed violets hung in the air as she fell into a run behind him.

She smelled the labyrinth before she saw it, a taint of blood, sulfur and sex. She closed her mind to the presence inside the maze, guessing this was what Geraint had sensed too when he first came to the labyrinth.

You did not tell me of it after because you doubt your spiritual gifts, but you were right, husband, you were right. There is great evil here.

She refused to acknowledge it and focused on the human devilry. Amongst the sickly oaks, Peter sat cross-legged beneath the solitary walnut tree, trim as a demon in his long green robe. A track of sulfur, glowing like a yellow snail’s trail against the sparse grass and spindly oaks, showed where he had been before settling under the walnut.

Fingering a gold cup, Peter watched his circling flock as it wound widdershins about the rim of the labyrinth, the women making one circle, the men another. No yellow fog hung about them but a streamer of sulfur drifted to where Jehan knelt behind the walnut tree, stirring liquid in a boiling pot over a tiny fire. A cracked pot, she noted, testing her bow and notching an arrow.

“For the sake of the children and mothers and the good folk here,” she whispered in Latin, praying her hope down the taut bowstring, clammy fear swirling inside her from her tingling scalp to her numb toes.

Joan, pretty and dark, walked with one hand on Sorrel’s shoulder and the other resting on the shoulder of another woman in a grim parody of a carol dance. Theodore, his hair shining in the sunlight like a silver birch, clutched the tunics of two circling men. She thought of Theo and Joan as she aimed at the distant target, allowed her shoulders and arms work out angles and heights by instinct, kissed the arrow and let it fly.

“Go,” whispered Geraint beside her ear.

The pot exploded, disappearing into a thousand fragments. As Jehan sprawled sideways out of range of the sizzling fire, he was spitting, spitting desperately.

“No deadly drink from that broken pot or gold cup for you, eh, Jehan?” said Geraint.

Yolande strode into the sunlight and shot her next arrow into the heart of the labyrinth. She heard it land, felt the demon hidden beneath it shudder as the dart—blessed by the mystic Katherine and dipped, as the entire quiver full had been, in the holy water of Father Eudo’s church—pinned the creature firmly to God’s earth.

“Be bound until I say,” she ordered in Latin and swung her notched bow at Peter. “Poison, commander?” Speaking in English, she was shifting too, every stride bringing her nearer. “Did they force the children to drink poison at Masada?”

At once, as she hoped, the mothers in the circle gripped their youngsters more tightly.

Within the circle of men, Theodore lowered his arms. “What do you mean?” he asked. “Commander, you told us Masada was a place of angels.”

“If dead men, women and children are angels then yes,” said Yolande. “But Peter did not tell you that, did he? He did not say the folk there killed themselves. A mortal sin for some, murder for others.”

Theodore crossed himself and several women gathered their children into their arms.

“There is still a little left in the broken pot,” Yolande went on, not caring if the pot or its contents were there or not. She wanted the others to witness Peter’s reluctance, to understand how they had almost been duped, hoodwinked into murder. “Drink, Peter. Become an angel first.”

Sulfur streaking his face in yellow tears, Peter lowered his head as if in prayer but she was not convinced, not for all the saints in heaven. The man had not yielded yet.

A slight movement off to his side distracted her but only for an instant. Stalking alongside her, matching her step for step, Geraint had the left side covered.

“Running away already, Jehan?” he shouted. “Should you not be plunging into the river to prove your innocence?” He whipped back his arm, throwing fast and hard.

Off beneath the shadow of the walnut tree, Jehan stumbled, dropping the pack he had gathered to himself and was trying to creep away with. Shrieking, he gripped his bleeding elbow, staring at the cut Geraint’s stone had made as if his injured arm no longer belonged to him.

“Not going to plan, is it, you bastards?” Geraint yelled in Welsh.

“This is our final test!” cried Sorrel suddenly from within the circle of women. “The false prophets, the black with her unholy spawn. Believe Peter and be ready for heaven!”

“Be not afraid,” Peter called out. An echo of his words ran ’round the two circles but Theodore still looked uncertain.

Fighting down the urge to gag as the murky stink of evil filled her, Yolande took a step closer and aimed the bow squarely at Peter’s groin.

“Drink,” she said again. “Show us all the way to heaven.”

Peter wet his lips, rising as she walked closer to him, and wiped a sulfur tear away. “I cannot. You have destroyed it, you and your unholy spawn. Fight me and your child will die.”

His threat was more devastating than his commonplace repeat of Sorrel’s words. An answering ripple in her womb forced Yolande to lower her bow but she would not give up. For the sake of Geraint and her baby, for Theodore and Joan, for Walter and the children and a hundred nameless others, she dared not.

Liar.

Determined to dismiss Peter’s malice, she closed herself against him, shutting his reaching evil out from her soul.

She was near to a suffocating panic still. Geraint laid his arm across her body, shielding her and her baby. The odor of rottenness retreated a little as she sensed the demon at the center of the labyrinth beginning to stir again.

I will kill the fruit of your womb
, it said inside her mind.
I know your name, Yolande. Your carnal unions make you mine.

“We are married, united in the eyes of God,” Yolande whispered.

And the caresses you enjoyed before you were married? How are those different from what has been done here?

Guilt threatened but she refused to be pulled down by it. “Such things were a joy for us alone, intimacy we could share as we moved toward our wedding,” she replied in Latin, hastily crossing herself. “What has been done here is an ignoring of women and their pleasure and a denial of closeness for them and their men. True partnerships are discouraged in this place.” Indeed, were any of the men and women here married? She did not think so.

There is no marriage in heaven
, hissed the demon in her mind.

“We are not in heaven. On earth, marriage is a sacrament, blessed by God for the comfort and companionship of men and women and the rearing of children.”

But not your child, Yolande. It is already dead.

She had anticipated this brutal attack but hearing the soft, cold words inside her she could not stop her reaction. With sickening dread she imagined the words, the evil wish, reaching down to her belly, strangling the spark of life there. Her challenge to Peter, the Latin she had ready for him, dissolved into an oily bitterness that tied her tongue. She trembled and again her husband moved, pitting his human sinews against a pride older than man, against a creature that hated human life.

You cannot shield me from this, beloved.

As if he had heard her thought, Geraint twisted ’round and kissed her ear. “We do well,
cariad
, warrior mine. They have not lynched us yet. We three are safe.”

Geraint is right to call you a human trinity, my daughter.
The voice, warm and loving, was Katherine’s.
Take a comfort from him.

I do.
Yolande was surprised to find only a moment had passed. The circles of men and women remained, clustered ’round the labyrinth. Jehan still moaned behind the walnut tree. Theodore looked worried while Joan watched him. And Peter—
I am Legion
, Peter’s voice mocked her.
You shall not stop my sacrifice.

“Why the drink, Peter?” She kicked the trailing yellow sulfur tendrils away from her feet and legs. “Did you decide poison was surer than having the men here kill the women? That was the plan, was it not? The men as angels would slay the women before killing each other. But then you realized some men were still thinking, still uncertain, and so you chose a simpler method, but why? And why should murder bring anyone to heaven?”

“You understand nothing,” said Peter but this time there was no echo from the others.

Yolande spoke again. “Why a labyrinth that goes to the sinister side? Why is there no marriage or birth or death here? Why no church?”

“We have no need for such indulgences,” broke in Walter, gasping a little. “Have we?”

“Your question answers you, Walter,” Geraint said quietly. A new rustle of voices rose around them as the young squire stuttered in his breathing, at one point clawing at his throat to expel the evil there.

And is it a surprise he cannot fill his lungs in this mawkish yellow fog? But I can do something and I will.

“Your man needs healing.” Trusting him, Yolande passed her bow to Geraint and approached the squire. “Peter, your man needs help.”

Indifferent, looking almost sulky, Peter glanced at the younger man. “His faith will save him, unless he is unworthy.”