Death and the Lady

Death and the Lady

A Story from the World of The Hound and the Falcon

Judith Tarr

www.bookviewcafe.com

Book View Café Edition
July 30, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-61138-285-3
Copyright © 1992 Judith Tarr

A story of love and loss and the price of immortality,
written in honor of J.R.R. Tolkien’s 100
^th
birthday.
This is a
sequel to
The Hound and the Falcon.

The year after the Great Death, the harvest was the best
that anyone could remember. The best, and the worst, because there were so few
of us to get it in; and the men who had lived through the plague all gone, even
to the fledgling boys, in the high ones’ endless wars. The few that were left
were the old and the lame and the witless, and the women. We made a joke of it
that year, how the Angel of Death took his share of our men, and Sire and Comte
the rest.

We did what we could, we in Sency-la-Forêt. I had lost a
baby that summer, and almost myself, and I was weak a little still; even so I
would have been reaping barley with my sisters, if Mère Adele had not caught me
coming out with the scythe in my hand. She had a tongue on her, did Mère Adele,
and Saint Benedict’s black habit did nothing to curb it. She took the scythe and
kilted up her habit and went to work down the long rows, and I went where she
told me, to mind the children.

There were more maybe than some had, if travelers’ tales
told the truth. Every house had lost its share to the black sickness, and in
the manor by the little river the dark angel had taken everyone but the few who
had the wits to run. So we were a lordless demesne as well as a manless one, a
city of women, one of the nuns from the priory called us; she read books, and
not all of them were scripture.

If I looked from where I sat under the May tree, I could see
her in the field, binding sheaves where the reapers passed. There were children
with her; my own Celine, just big enough to work, had her own sheaf to gather
and bind. I had the littlest ones, the babies in their pen like odd sheep, and
the weanlings for the moment in my lap and in a circle round me, while I told
them a story. It was a very old story; I hardly needed to pay attention to it,
but let my tongue run on and watched the reapers, and decided that I was going
to claim my scythe back. Let Mère Adele look after the babies. I was bigger
than she, and stronger, too.

I was growing quite angry inside myself, while I smiled at
the children and made them laugh. Even Francha, who never made a sound, nor had
since her family died around her, had a glint of laughter in her eye, though
she looked down quickly. I reached to draw her into my lap. She was stiff, all
bones and tremblings like a wild thing, but she did not run away as she would
have once. After a while she laid her head on my breast.

That quieted my temper. I finished the story I was telling.
As I opened my mouth to begin another, Francha went rigid in my arms. I tried
to soothe her with hands and voice. She clawed her way about, not to escape,
but to see what came behind me.

Sency is Sency-la-Forêt not for that it was woodland once,
though that is true enough; nor for that wood surrounds it, closing in on the
road to Sency-les-Champs and away beyond it into Normandy; but because of the
trees that are its westward wall. People pass through Sency from north to south
and back again. Sometimes, from north or south, they go eastward into Maine or
Anjou. West they never go. East and south and north is wood, in part the Sire
de Sency’s if the Death had left any to claim that title, in part common ground
for hunting and woodcutting and pig-grazing.

West is Wood. Cursed, the priest said before he took fright
at the Death and fled to Avranches. Bewitched, said the old women by the fire
in the evenings. Enchanted, the young men used to say before they went away.
Sometimes a young man would swear that he would go hunting in the Wood, or a
young woman would say that she meant to scry out a lover in the well by the
broken chapel. If any of them ever did it, he never talked of it, nor she; nor
did people ask. The Wood was best not spoken of.

I sat with Francha stiff as a stick in my arms, and stared
where she was staring, into the green gloom that was the Wood. There was
someone on the edge of it. It could almost have been a traveler from south or
east, worked round westward by a turning of the road or by the lure of the trees.
We were a formidable enough town by then, with the palisade that Messire Arnaud
had built before he died, and no gate open but on the northward side.

Francha broke out of my arms. My Perrin, always the first to
leap on anything that was new, bolted gleefully in Francha’s wake. Half a
breath more and they were all gone, the babies in their pen beginning to howl,
and the reapers nearest pausing, some straightening to stare.

If I thought anything, I thought it later. That the Death
was not so long gone. That the roads were full of wolves, two-legged nearly all
of them, and deadly dangerous. That the Wood held things more deadly than any wolf,
if even a tithe of the tales were true.

As I ran I thought of Perrin, and of Francha. I could have
caught them easily, a season ago. Now the stitch caught me before I had run a
furlong, doubled me up and made me curse. I ran in spite of it, but hobbling.

I could see well enough. There was only one figure on the
Wood’s edge, standing very still before the onslaught of children.

It was a woman. I did not know how I knew that. It was all
in shapeless brown, hooded and faceless. It did not frighten our young at all.
They had seen the Death. This was but a curiosity, a traveler on the road that
no one traveled, a new thing to run after and shrill at and squabble over.

As the children parted like a flock of sheep and streamed
around it, the figure bent. It straightened with one of the children in its
arms. Francha, white and silent Francha who never spoke, who fled even from
those she knew, clinging to this stranger as if she would never let go.

The reapers were leaving their reaping. Some moved slowly,
weary or wary. Others came as fast as they were able. We trusted nothing in
these days, but Sency had been quiet since the spring, when the Comte’s man
came to take our men away. Our woods protected us, and our prayers, too.

Still I was the first but for the children to come to the
stranger. Her hood was deep but the light was on her. I saw a pale face, and
big eyes in it, staring at me.

I said the first thing that came into my head. “Greetings to
you, stranger, and God’s blessing on you.”

She made a sound that might have been laughter or a sob. But
she said clearly enough, “Greetings and blessing, in God’s name.” She had a
lady’s voice, and a lady’s accent, too, with a lilt in it that made me think of
birds.

“Where are you from? Do you carry the sickness?”

The lady did not move at all. I was the one who started and
spun about.

Mère Adele was noble born herself, though she never made
much of it; she was as outspoken to the lord bishop as she was to any of us.
She stood behind me now, hands on her ample hips, and fixed the stranger with a
hard eye. “Well? Are you dumb, then?”

“Not mute,” the lady said in her soft voice, “nor enemy
either. I have no sickness in me.”

“And how may we be sure of that?”

I sucked in a breath.

The lady spoke before I could, as sweetly as ever, and
patient, with Francha’s head buried in the hollow of her shoulder. I had been
thinking that she might be a nun fled from her convent. If she was, I thought I
knew why. No bride of the lord Christ would carry a man’s child in her belly,
swelling it under the coarse brown robe.

“You can never be certain,” she said to Mère Adele, “not of
a stranger; not in these times. I will take no more from you than a loaf, of
your charity, and your blessing if you will give it.”

“The loaf you may have,” said Mere Adele. “The blessing I’ll
have to think on. If you fancy a bed for the night, there’s straw in plenty to
make one, and a reaper’s dinner if you see fit to earn it.”

“Even,” the lady asked, “unblessed?”

Mere Adele was enjoying herself: I could see the glint in
her eye. “Earn your dinner,” she said, “and you’ll get your blessing with it.”

The lady bent her head, as gracious as a queen in a story.
She murmured in Francha’s ear. Francha’s grip loosened on her neck. She set the
child down in front of me—Francha all eyes and wordless reluctance—and followed
Mère Adele through the field. None of the children went after her, even Perrin.
They were meeker than I had ever seen them, and quieter; though they came to
themselves soon enough, once I had them back under the May tree.

oOo

Her name, she said, was Lys. She offered no more than
that, that night, sitting by the fire in the mown field, eating bread and
cheese and drinking the ale that was all we had. In the day’s heat she had
taken off her hood and her outer robe and worked as the rest did, in a shift of
fine linen that was almost new. She was bearing for a fact, two seasons gone, I
judged, and looking the bigger for that she was so thin. She had bones like a
bird’s, and skin so white one could see the tracks of veins beneath, and hair
as black as her skin was white, hacked off as short as a nun’s.

She was not that, she said. Swore to it and signed herself,
lowering the lids over the great grey eyes. Have I said that she was beautiful?
Oh, she was, like a white lily, with her sweet low voice and her long fair
hands. Francha held her lap against all comers, but Perrin was bewitched, and
Celine, and the rest of the children whose mothers had not herded them home.

“No nun,” she said, “and a great sinner, who does penance
for her sins in this long wandering.”

We nodded round the fire. Pilgrimages we understood; and
pilgrims, even noble ones, alone and afoot and tonsured, treading out the
leagues of their salvation. Guillemette, who was pretty and very silly, sighed
and clasped her hands to her breast. “How sad,” she said, “and how brave, to
leave your lord and your castle—for castle you had, surely; you are much too
beautiful to be a plain man’s wife—and go out on the long road.”

“My lord is dead,” the lady said.

Guillemette blinked. Her eyes were full of easy tears. “Oh,
how terrible! Was it the war?”

“It was the plague,” said Lys. “And that was six months ago
now, by his daughter in my belly, and you may weep as you choose, but I have no
tears left.”

She sounded it: dry and quiet. No anger in her, but no
softness either. In the silence she stood up. “If there is a bed for me, I will
take it. In the morning I will go.”

“Where?” That was Mère Adele, abrupt as always, and cutting
to the heart of things.

Lys stood still. She was tall; taller in the firelight. “My
vow takes me west,” she said.

“But there is nothing in the west,” said Mère Adele.

“But,” said Lys, “there is a whole kingdom, leagues of it,
from these marches to the sea.”

“Ah,” said Mère Adele, sharp and short. “That’s not west,
that’s Armorica. West is nothing that a human creature should meddle with. If
it’s Armorica that you’re aiming for, you’d best go south first, and then west,
on the king’s road.”

“We have another name for that kingdom,” said Lys, “where I
was born.” She shook herself; she sighed. “In the morning I will go.”

oOo

She slept in the house I had come to when I married
Claudel, in my bed next to me with the children in a warm nest, Celine and
Perrin and Francha, and the cats wherever they found room. That was Francha’s
doing, holding to her like grim death when she would have made her bed in the
nuns’ barn, until my tongue spoke for me and offered her what I had.

I did not sleep overmuch. Nor, I thought, did she. She was
still all the night long, coiled on her side with Francha in the hollow of her.
The children made their night-noises, the cats purred, Mamère Mondine snored in
her bed by the fire. I listened to them, and to the lady’s silence.