Dark Maiden (8 page)

The last few steps to the Tower door were as steep as a mounting block and as slippery as glass but she placed her feet steadily, feeling Geraint balancing behind her on his strong bare toes. The key slid into the lock as though through water and turned easily—too easily.

She took a deep breath and pushed at the door.

Sulfur, so powerful it made her eyes water and dragged away her breath, assailed her. Yolande stepped across the threshold of the Tower and though she could not yet see the spirits of the restless dead, the force of their rage almost brought her to her knees.

Aware that once she sank she would never rise, she raised her bow high and yelled, “Come out! Challenge me or be forever damned!”

The taut string of her bow hummed and her scalp burned as if scorching claws had raked across it. Crying, “Saint Michael, protect Geraint!” she leaped sideways and fired off an arrow against the north wall of the Tower, the north being the devil’s place. The arrow clattered against the stones and spiraled down to the fetid earth at the Tower’s base.

“What’s that stink?” Geraint roared behind her.

“Evil air,” she coughed. Holding the cross aloft, she cleared her throat, chanted the creed within her mind and called out, “By the power of Saint Michael and Saint Magdalene, I command you to leave this place. Go to your final rest and judgment, trusting in Christ’s compassion. Leave the living in peace.”

Foul replies roosted like crows in her skull, insults against her color and race and sex that shamed her ears and made her stomach boil.

“I thought the abbot had searched this place,” Geraint complained, unaware that his grumble was a distraction inspired by whatever haunted the Tower.

“Things return, things reside, things are summoned,” she answered in a fast chant. She ran into the middle of the Tower and stared at the long grooves of the inscription. “Come out!” she shouted in Latin.

The circular walls around her flickered and a bat flew straight at her face. “Down!” she screamed and tossed herself to the ground. Rolling free and up again, she saw her brave Welsh tumbler sway as the squeaking pipistrelle launched itself for the threshold—exactly against its instinct and nature.

“Julian the accursed, come out!” The Latin sounded false in her ears but she fired a second arrow, deep into the inscription itself.

Sparks punched into the backs of her eyes. Through the sooty blackness she felt Geraint grab her tunic, keeping her firmly in this world.

“Fight me, bastard!” he yelled.

“No!” ordered Yolande, dreading that Geraint would ignore her, lunge in and be lost.

Three balls of light burst from his fingers, hitting the word “gather” in the middle of the inscription and obscuring it.

We shall be denied no longer
, boomed in her mind. Around her, the Tower seemed to shift on its foundation as the restless dead screamed their frustration.

“I can free you,” she called in Latin. “I can help.”

The smell of sulfur increased.

Our rites are not yours.

“I will bury you with honor and salt and with grave goods,” she countered. She did not mention holy water or prayers, which might be too much.

Some need more
, a whisper warned, coiling like a worm in her skull. She clamped down hard on her inward shudder as the alien presence, colder than ice, touched her mind. Trusting in her dream and the saints, she allowed it, breathing slowly like a swimmer before undertaking a deep dive, and let the pictures overwhelm her.

Geraint heard her gasp and stiffen as if absorbing a blow. He stood more closely behind her, his back to her back, and scanned the gathering shadows for any possible threat. She was as cold as a statue and murmuring in Latin, her voice so low and fast he could not understand what she was saying.

Again, her bow sang as she loosed another arrow. She was firing at something he could not see but his skin still crawled with fear. A wave of sickness passed over him then his vision cleared again.

“Yolande?”

“Almost there, almost at the root,” she answered, resuming her chanting, now in another language, neither Latin nor Greek. The tongue of her father and used rarely, for she stumbled on it at times and he could hear the stops and breaks. His pounding heart swelled with pity.

Let me help, let me help, please
, he pleaded with the saints, thinking of the Magdalene especially, who liked tumblers.

And then he saw it, a mound of earth so low as to be almost unnoticeable, piled against the eastern part of the circular tower wall. Easily missed, it looked for all the world like a rough, mossy stone jutting from the tower wall, part of the fabric of the building.

“Should that be there?” He pointed.

She was off, hunting like a keen hound, diving across the earth and bits of ancient paving stone. As he sped toward her, she pounced and shoveled the earth away with her bare hands.

“Abbot Simon has fading eyesight,” she gasped, working away, crossing herself and saying more in that queer tongue of her father’s and then adding phrases in Greek that Geraint knew he should understand but had forgotten. “H-he must have missed this.”

She stopped as a skein of earth tumbled away and the bodies were revealed. Two figures coiled in on themselves and sprawled one over the other as if tipped into this shallow grave. One, by the length of its hair, was surely a woman, although the clothes had rotted away and most of the flesh.

Geraint covered his mouth to stifle his exclamation. Yolande said quietly, “We must lay them properly to rest.”

“These were surely victims of some great illness or evil but who buried them?”

“We may never know,” replied Yolande, “but we should be quick.” She stopped him with her bow. “Do not touch them.”

She stripped off her cloak and ripped it with her dagger then laid one half of the cloak on the bare ground and, with her boot, pushed the first corpse onto the cloth. Next she covered the woman’s body with the other half of the cloak.

Swiftly, she dropped some coins and a comb beside the woman’s head. For the second body she offered an arrow and a dagger. She scraped a mark above their heads then began to cover them with fresh earth.

“Go to your rest,” she said aloud, and in an undertone to Geraint, “I need more earth.”

He was glad to break away from the pitiful remains and dig, praying there were no others in this place. He dug with his knife, crumbling the hard-packed soil and pushing it toward Yolande. She placed it, handful after handful, over the sad pair, shaping the earth over each while singing softly—a lullaby. Geraint suppressed a second shudder.

It was a slow and painful labor but at last it was done. Yolande raised herself from her crouch and sprinkled salt on the fresh graves. She gave a stiff bow and backed up several paces.

Is it over?
He longed to ask but a rancid taste in his mouth warned him that it was not.

Yolande said a final prayer for the dead. It was one of her father’s prayers, so old that all souls and gods would respect it. Her knees cracked as she straightened but the swirl of sulfur in the air was fading. She blinked and the faint yellow haze vanished.

Geraint squeezed her shoulder. “What now?”

Kiss her.
The idea made sense. He gathered her nimbly into his arms and leaned toward her.

Their lips met, hers as soft as flower petals, his as warm as the sun. Arousal stroked through him in a thrusting animal need. She was so hard and soft together, her skin so smooth and flawless…

“Not here.” She was trying feebly to thrust aside his exploring fingers but still arched her back so he could cup her breast more fully. “Please, God, this is not us, not fully us, not here!”

Her plea undid him. His grip relaxed and she hurled herself carelessly away from him, falling and landing badly on the hard-packed earth. As he moved to help her to her feet, she said, “No, can you not see? This is not us!”

He spat on his fingers, intending to show her very much that this was them, yes indeed, and then the cool voice of the Magdalene came to him like an unwelcome confessor.

Should you desire this much, Geraint? Are you a man or a Priapus?

He did not understand what a Priapus was but he recognized the question. When Yolande gained her feet and said quietly, “This is me, alone,” he understood and pressed her fingers. Her hand was cool again, delicately strong.

“A demon is here,” she said quietly. “It tries to use our desires against us. It has lost those two poor souls.”

“Were they sacrifices?”

“I do not know and it does not matter now, not in the greater scheme of things.” She spoke quickly as though girding herself for the next fight. “I am glad there was no vampire.”

“Vampire?”

She sighed. “I would have needed to bury them with a boulder jammed between their jaws, to pin them to the earth.” Quickly, apparently ashamed of her admission, she turned to the inscription again. “What were those spheres you threw?”

“Three apples from the orchard.”

“Ha! I suppose they were blessed, being abbey apples.” As she searched for something in her tunic, she motioned for him to keep chattering.

“And thrown by a juggler, do not forget,” he quipped. He did not want to cut a caper inside the Tower so he added in Welsh, “Peace and blessings to all those who are within this place.” Just as he might when entering a house.

Forget your blessings
, rasped a new thought.
We spit on your blessings, you disgusting little Briton.

“I know you now,” Yolande called in Latin. She had heard the challenge too and sensed the presence of the approaching demons, more ominous than a building thunderstorm. “Proud as the Romans of old and as cruel. You should go back whence you came, Julian the accursed and others of your kind. Your sacrifice has failed.”

The pressure in her brain was such she felt as if her eyes stood out on stalks, but she drove her order home. “I have buried those two, woman and man, and they are beyond your vile touch. Get back to hell!”

We are not yours to command. None of yours, darkie, woman-whore—

The voices cut off with a shriek as she pinned the cross and a packet of her most sacred and magical herbs into the very middle of the inscription, driving it home and fixing it fast with an arrow point.

“Begone!” she screamed in Latin and felt the whole tower shift in response to her command as the strength of Saint Michael and the Magdalene flowed through her.

The world around her went white and then all was silence.

* * * * *

Sometime later, she blinked.

“Back with me,
cariad
? That is good.” Geraint lay sprawled beside her on the Tower hillside. He ran a flower of grass down her cheek, tickling her. “I thought it better for you to stir out here with the skylarks than in there.”

“Larks? There are no birds above the Tower.”

“There are now,” he replied simply. He waved the key in front of her. “Shall I keep this to give to the abbot? It is locked again so you need not fret.”

Yolande sat up, grateful her vision did not spin. “Have you anything to drink?”

“A girl after my own. Here we go.” He gave her a flask.

“What next?” she wondered, not realizing she had spoken aloud until he answered.

“Next we stroll back to the abbey, you refresh yourself in the guesthouse for a day or so and then we move on.”

Yolande hid her expression behind the flask. She liked the “we” but wanted to be clear about it.

“I go where I am called,” she said, pulling distractedly at a clump of speedwell. “Somehow those who need me find me, but it is a wandering life.”

“Excellent.” His teeth gleamed against his tan. “That suits me.”

“I must remain as I am.”

He rolled onto his stomach. “For now, certainly, but not forever. For this time of seven. Did you know Jacob labored for seven years for his wife?”

She laughed, amused at one idea. “You intend to work?”

“Not me. Not honest, sweating toil. But waiting I can do very well.”

He would wait for me for seven years.
The thought was beguiling and terrifying in equal measures.

“I think you should ask this mentor of yours who laid this on you. Did he mean seven years or seven months? Was it Abbot Simon?”

“No, another.”

“When you next meet him, ask.”

“I will.” In her mind, her words were already a vow.

“What kind of man is he? No, let that keep.” Geraint wrapped a chain of speedwells around her wrist. “I love being with you, Yolande. I love you, my dark maid.”

“I love you.”
I love you, honeyman
, she corrected silently, but she knew Geraint understood. Truly, it was enough for both of them for now.

“Should we go tell Abbot Simon his tower is clean?” he asked sometime later.

“He will know already.”