Great Maria (14 page)

Fifteen

Not in the next spring, but the spring after, Richard went from Maria’s castle to the hill town of Iste. To prove that the roads were safe now for travelers he brought Maria, her sons, and Eleanor after him in wagons, guarded only by the drovers and two knights.

Maria rode her mare. She would not sit in the wagon. The road wound through the rolling hilly countryside. The lower valleys were already planted in the spring crop. Sighting them, the serfs ran out of their fields to greet them. Maria could hardly understand their patois. For the first time, she heard Richard called Dragon.

On the fourth day they climbed into the steeper hills. The forest closed in around the road. Maria jogged her mare along beside the lead wagon, until Stephen began to shriek and she had to go back to the next to last wagon and pull Robert off him.

“Thief,” Robert shouted. He wiggled out of her arms. “Eleanor, make him give it back.”

Eleanor ran up the road from the last wagon, where she had been sewing with another woman. Maria held Robert away from Stephen by the back of his shirt. He turned and struck at her with his fists.

“Eleanor!”

“I’m sorry, Maria,” Eleanor said. She climbed up the moving cartwheel into the wagon. “Robert, what a bad boy. What have you done?”

Maria picked up Stephen, who pushed his face against her shoulder and sobbed. His face and hands were covered with crumbs. He smelled of fruit pudding. Maria quieted him with a kiss and set him down.

“Now, Robert,” she said. “He is only a baby. You can’t hit him.” She picked up a bit of greasy linen from the deck of the wagon. “Did he eat your pudding?”

Robert gulped at her. He glared at Stephen. “I was saving it. Papa says—I was saving it, I didn’t even have any.”

Eleanor soothed him, whispering in his ears. Maria nudged her aside. She picked up Robert’s hands. “There is more pudding in the front wagon. You must not hit your brother.”

Robert yanked his hands free. “Papa says I should guard what’s mine. I didn’t even have any!”

His blue eyes blazed at her from his grimy brown face. She shook her head at him. “You have to guard your brother too. Don’t you want to be a good knight? Like Papa? A good knight never strikes someone who can’t fight back.”

“Mama.” He chewed the inside of his cheek. “Why does being good have to be hard?”

Maria laughed. “If it were easy, it would be worthless.” Eleanor had run up to the front wagon to fetch him some pudding. Maria stroked his black hair away from his forehead.

“Come ride with me. You can hold the reins.”

He jumped up, his eyes snapping. An instant later he stiffened. “Knights don’t ride palfreys.”

Maria snorted. “Then stay here and ride the wagon.” She pulled her mare by the reins up to the wheel and stepped awkwardly across the gap into the saddle. Eleanor was coming back to them, a chunk of fruit pudding in her hand.

“Mama,” Robert called. He stretched his arms toward her. “Mama, I didn’t mean it—let me ride—I’ll hold the reins—”

Maria rode back to him and lifted him up before her. “Eleanor, watch Stephen.” Giving the reins to Robert she took hold of the saddle pommel with both hands and let him steer the mare in and out of the trees alongside the road.

***

Iste stood at the head of a mountain valley. From the window of the tower where she stayed, Maria could look out over half the green country she had passed in coming here. The sharp dialect the people spoke, heavy with Saracen words, confused her as much as the rapid tempo of their lives and the close quarters they lived in. Richard had given the little city and its valley to Roger. In his hall, musicians played for every meal, and the tumblers and dancers performed half the night. People from all over the area came to dine and be entertained. He even kept a lion in a pit in the courtyard and threw raw meat to it every evening. Maria quickly had the smith build an iron grille to keep the lion in and Robert out.

They went to Mass in Iste’s old cathedral. The priest told stories from the Book of Judges, finding in each detail some ingenious likeness to Richard’s war against the Saracens. Maria admired the cathedral’s painted dome and the tall statues of the saints and prophets, crusted with silverwork and enamels. The sermon dragged on. Her eyes went elsewhere. Two of the men in the row of people across the aisle from her wore coats of the same dark green. Their fat wives were watching her keenly. She straightened her gaze away from them, back toward the pulpit. The priest was still talking. She thought of the green coats: symbols of some secret bond, some conspiracy. She entertained herself a while devising an elaborate plot from which she could save Richard. He stood beside her, his eyes fixed on a point beyond the altar, his hands rammed down under his belt. He was thinking. He was always thinking. She went back to her green-coat conspiracy.

When the Mass ended, they went out onto the open porch. Roger came after them. “What did you think of my priest?” he said.

“Well,” Maria said, “his sermon was very long.”

Roger gave her a quizzical look. Richard laughed. “She didn’t listen to three words of it in a row. I could have told you that.” He stopped in the sun at the foot of the steps. Above him, halfway up the porch, Maria put her crucifix away in her sleeve.

“What did he say?” She looked from Richard to Roger. “Was it a good sermon?”

“You should have listened,” Roger said. Richard went on laughing.

“I heard him. Nothing sings like a greased wheel. Except a well-paid priest.”

“I don’t have to pay him. He knows where the good works come from. Maybe you should offer him something.” Smiling, he nudged his brother with his elbow. “I’d rather be a second Samson than some desiccated judge in a gold cloak.”

“It must have been an interesting sermon,” Maria said. “I’m sorry I missed it.”

“So is Roger,” Richard said. He knocked his brother’s arm.

Roger stood beside him on the step. He was taller than Richard, and he went down another stride to make them the same height. “Come hunting with us. Since you came to Iste I have not talked with you above half an hour at a stretch.”

Richard shook his head. “I don’t have a horse fit to hunt on. You’ve missed the best of it, anyway—it’s nearly noon.”

“You’d better find something fit to fight on. That bay won’t take you another season.” He struck Richard in the chest and went out across the broad paved square before them. A groom came up to meet him, leading his horse.

Richard watched him go. Maria stood on the step above him. She knew she should not grudge Richard his brother’s love. The rest of the congregation was wandering down along the porch, standing in little groups to talk, and waiting for their horses and litters. Many of them were watching her. A servant led up her mare and Richard’s big gray horse. Roger rode off with a group of other men, local people, still in their Sabbath clothes: not Normans. She started to get on her mare, but Richard stopped her.

“Damn you, can’t you wait? Sometimes I think I married a boy in skirts.”

He lifted her up into her saddle. While she gathered her reins, she watched Roger and his friends meet other men and ride out the gate.

“The first time I ever noticed you,” she said to Richard, “was once when you kept me from getting off my own horse by myself.”

Richard mounted his gray stallion. “It would be different if you looked decent doing it.”

She brewed a nasty answer; he turned the back of his head to her. “I’m not going to fight with you.”

Side by side, they rode across the wide, crowded square. Most of the townspeople were going home on foot. The older people all wore sober clothes, but their children were dressed in brilliant colors, their shoes trimmed with gilt. Richard leaned forward, his eyes directed down over his horse’s shoulder.

“There he goes with that damned lumpy chicken leg of his.” He dismounted. Maria slid down from her saddle.

“I told you not to take this horse.”

On foot, he led the horse by the bridle up the street. She walked beside him. Richard glanced fretfully down at the horse’s bad leg. “I’ve personally soaked that leg for three days.”

They went up the street. Iste was plastered across the side of the mountain, decks of white stone houses rising from the foot of its vast valley, and most of the streets climbed hills. Their horses’ heads bobbed between them, the gray stallion’s long, veined head dipping with each stride. The street narrowed, the walls on either side rising high over their heads. Richard walked ahead of her into a narrow archway. A man on horseback was trying to come through from the other direction, but the way was too narrow.

“Hey, you there, move aside,” the stranger called. “Let us pass here.”

Richard said, “Get the hell out of my way.” Maria followed him into the black resounding arch. Beyond, in the widened street, a man in a feathered hat stood to one side, his face splashed over with a nasty smile.

“My lord, I did not see it was you.”

Richard snarled something at him. He led his horse past the other man. Behind the feathered hat, two litters waited, carrying women in wonderful dresses, their faces tinted rosy as a sunburst. Lounging in their cushions, these women eyed Maria with amusement. She walked up the steep street after Richard.

“A typical drab little Norman,” one woman said.

Richard stopped to look at his horse’s foreleg again. Its knee was puffed up soft as a rising loaf. Maria caught up with him. Here on the edge of the street the slope pitched away sheer to the roofs below. She could see over the whole lower town and out across the green valley, checked in vineyards and pasture. She glanced toward the archway. The elegant man and his women were gone. Drab. She touched her cheeks.

“More of Roger’s people,” she said.

“Yes.”

She smoothed her fingers over her cheekbones. “I could paint my face up like that.”

“I’d wash it off with lye soap.” He picked up the horse’s hoof and flexed its leg; the horse snorted in pain. “Jesus God, it’s sore all the way up to his shoulder.”

“Why do you suffer these people?” She sat down in the street, looking across the valley into the blue distance. “Do they honor you? Do they help you? All I ever see them doing is feeding themselves in our hall and ordering our servants around.”

“Roger is a good lure. You’ll see what I mean. Speaking of food, when are you going to find us a cook?”

He started on again up the street. She followed, one arm across her white mare’s withers. Roger’s present cook even burned the bread. Yet Roger’s present friends kept on coming to supper and staying to watch the tumblers and the wrestlers and the men who sang and spoke poems.

“You should go among these people more,” Richard said. “Talk to them. You might make friends of the women.”

“Pah.”

Throughout the spring, while Roger hunted and hawked and lay with the wives of his friends, and Richard went off talking to the town elders, Maria put Roger’s citadel in order. She found carpenters to make furniture for him, she brought in several women to keep the place up, and she got another cook. The hot, dry air of the hill town was invigorating. Roger’s servants came to her with their disputes over duties and their charges of theft and backbiting and laziness. It amused her to judge them, and she and Eleanor laughed over some of the cases, when they sat in her room at night sewing.

On a market day, with Stephen and Robert, she went to the square to buy cloth. Most of the vendors brought their trade first to the citadel, and until now she had been too busy to go at her leisure. The market place stood before the town’s main gate, in the cathedral square. The merchants had set up their stalls beneath the city wall. A crowd of buyers flooded past their striped and painted awnings. Maria and Eleanor walked along in their midst, staring at the Saracen women in their heavy black veils and the Jewish men whose ringlets hung down over their ears. Maria carried Stephen on her hip. Robert ran on before them and pointed everything out as if he ruled it all.

Maria stopped before a stall that displayed woolen cloth. She stroked her hand over the nearest bolt, admiring the smooth feel of the stuff, as fine as any she had ever woven herself, and the excellent red color. It was hard to make good red dye. The vendor hustled over behind his counter.

“Lady, you give me such honor I cannot think how to repay you, save to sell you some of this splendid cloth, fit for such a fine lady.” Bending below the level of the counter, he lifted up three bolts of deep blue and purple wool.

“Oh,” Maria said softly. She slid her hand under a fold of the blue cloth. “Eleanor, feel this.”

Eleanor fingered the cloth. “I’ve seen better.”

“What a surcoat this would make—see how smoothly it drapes.”

“My sweet ladies,” the vendor said, “this stuff will make you rivals of those few angels you do not already surpass.”

Maria laughed. On her hip, Stephen was reaching down for the cloth. The vendor asked his price. Maria haggled with him a few moments—she had never bought cloth before, either she had woven it herself or the men had stolen it. She had no idea of its worth in money. At last she had him accepting half of what he had originally demanded.

“Eleanor,” she said. “Is that a good price?”