The Wise Woman (60 page)

“Yes, Mistress Alys,” said the younger, standing to speak to her and pulling off his cap.

Alys nodded. The thunder rolled dully as if it had sped away to rage around the other tower, the prison tower.

“The storm has gone,” the lad said. “What a clap that was just now!”

“It’s not gone yet,” Alys said. She turned from the room and went up the next flight of stairs, clinging to the stones at the side of the stairs as if her knees were weak.

She had been right about the storm. As she raised her hand to the latch of the old lord’s door a knife of white light sliced through the arrow-slit to Alys’s feet and then a great angry roar of thunder shook the stone tower. Alys, flinching back, almost fell into the room.

Hugo, his father, and David were seated at the fireside.

“What a storm!” the old lord said. “Are you wet, Alys? Are you cold?”

“No, no,” she said. She heard that her voice was too sharp, too alarmed. She took a breath and steadied herself. “I had to run across the courtyard but we were home before the rain started,” she said.

Hugo looked up at her. “You should change from your wet clothes,” he said. “My father and I are busy with messages from the king’s council.”

“I won’t disturb you then,” Alys said. “I shall be ready to come and clerk for you, if you wish, my lord.”

Lord Hugh nodded.

“I just thought I should tell you,” Alys said. “The new wise woman at Morach’s cottage on Bowes Moor. She is very strange. I met her in the woods when I was fetching the elm bark. She talked very wild. She frightened me.”

Hugo looked up. “Did she do you harm?” he asked.

Alys shook her head. “No, but I would not have her near me when I am at my time,” she said. “I had sent her some goods and thought she might be of service to me. But she talked so wild and looked so strange. I don’t like her. I don’t like her being in Morach’s cottage.”

The old lord was watching Alys curiously. “Not like you to be fearful, Alys,” he said. “Is it your condition?”

Alys shrugged. “It must be,” she said. “But the woman mistook me for someone else. She called me Ann and conjured me to go and live with her. She ordered me to go to the cottage and she said I would be in danger if I did not join her. She made me fearful.”

“Was she hexing you?” the old lord asked.

“No,” Alys said firmly. “Nothing like that. I suppose it was nothing more than my foolish fancy. I do not swear against her, I make no accusation. But I cannot like her living here so close to us. Nor living there—where I like to collect my plants. And it was old Morach’s cottage and now it is mine. I don’t want her living in my cottage.”

“Move her on?” the old lord said, cocking an eyebrow at Hugo.

Hugo laughed shortly. “We’ll dump her over the border into Westmorland,” he said. “They have enough mad old women there for her to merge into the crowd.”

Alys put her hand on her belly. “I would not do her harm,” she said. “I would not cause her to be hurt. I want you to move her gently, Hugo. I am only nervous because of my time and I do not want ill-wishing around me.”

“Oh aye,” Hugo said. “I’ll send a half-dozen men out tomorrow. They can put her on a horse and send her over the border. You’ll not see her again. She’ll not trouble you.”

“Tell them not to hurt her,” Alys said. “I feel it would be bad luck for me if they hurt her.”

Hugo nodded. “I’ll tell them to be gentle with her. Don’t fret, Alys.”

She nodded. “I’ll leave you to your business then, my lords.” There was another flash of lightning as she put her hand on the door, and a deep rumble of thunder overhead.

“This storm will do your work for you and blow the old hag across the border,” Lord Hugh said.

“Going the wrong way,” Hugo said briefly. “It’d blow her to Yorkshire and I’d wish that on no one.”

The old lord chuckled and Alys closed the door behind her softly.

The storm did not cease circling the castle all night. Alys went down to supper with her way lit by flashes which made the candles into sticks of black with flames of shadows. Catherine stayed upstairs, whimpering with fear at the storm and cringing when the thunder rolled. Her window was barred tight shut, with the hangings drawn, but still the quicksilver brightness of the lightning drew a rapid silver line around the curtains for one sharp second before the thunder crushed the world into blackness.

Alys’s color was high, she sparkled as if she had been brushed with lightning herself. She was wearing a bright yellow gown and her hair combed loose over her shoulders. She laughed and leaned toward the old lord, smiled across him to Hugo, nodded at the soldiers at their table at the back of the hall who gave her a ragged cheer. She drank deep of the dark red wine the old lord urged on her. She ate well.

“The elm bark settled your belly then,” the old lord said approvingly. “The baby will do well with you, Alys. No jades’ tricks of miscarriages, eh?”

Alys gleamed at him. Outside the lightning smashed the darkness and the thunder roared in reply. A woman down in the body of the hall screamed.

“No, my lord,” she said brightly. “Not if my skill can prevent it. You will have a fine babe on your knee when the spring comes in.”

Hugo nodded. “I’ll drink a toast to that,” he said.

There was a sharp flash of lightning and a loud clap of thunder. One of the serving-wenches screamed in fear and dropped a tray of meat, and the dogs, who had been cowering beneath the trestle-tables, dashed out into the hall, snatched up the bones, and cowered back into their shelters again.

Alys laughed gaily.

“This rain will beat down the wheat,” Hugo said gloomily. “We may lose some unless it blows over swiftly and the wheat can recover and stand tall again.”

The old lord nodded. “Summer storms never last long,” he said encouragingly. “This one will blow out overnight and in the morn you’ll see a bright yellow sun to dry out the wheatfields.”

“We must go out when they cut the wheat,” Alys said. “And celebrate harvest home.”

A page stepped up to the dais to speak to the old lord. He leaned back in his chair to give an order. Hugo spoke across him to Alys.

“Perhaps you had better stay home,” he said. “You were not pleasantly greeted last time you went out to the fields.”

The lightning flashed like a sword into the hall. Alys met Hugo’s narrowed judging gaze with a brilliant smile which did not waver even when the roll of thunder drowned out his words.

“I care for nothing!” she said, her voice very low. “Not with the storm raging all around us! Come to my room tonight, Hugo, come to my room and I shall take you for a ride in the storm which you will never forget. My sisters go out to play on nights like this and I would be with them. You have forgotten my power, Hugo, but when I stretch my hand out there is nothing which can stop me. I do not fear these village people with their patches of land and their pig in the sty and their hive of bees. I do not fear anything they say nor anything they can do. I fear nothing, Hugo. Come to my room tonight and see how it is to play with a thunderstorm.”

Hugo lost his hard, critical look and was breathing swiftly. “Alys,” he said longingly.

“After supper,” Alys commanded. She turned her head from him. David was at her side and the server of meat bent his knee and proffered the silver plate.

“Give me plenty,” Alys cried over the rumble of the storm. “I am hungry. I shall eat all I need. Give me plenty!”

Supper was concluded swiftly, the noise of the storm made talk impossible, and even the least superstitious were edgy and fearful. For a little while the thunder slackened as it rolled off up the valley. But at the head of the valley by the great waterfall it turned and came raging down the river’s course again, gathering speed and blowing the waters of the river out of course, flooding over their banks. The women did not choose to sit in the gallery where the windows rattled with the wind and the fire spat and hissed with falling rain. They went early to their beds, Ruth sleeping on a truckle bed in Catherine’s room, holding her hand against her night-terrors. Alys laughed openly at the thought of it, flung open her door to Hugo, and then barred it behind them.

He had caught her mood, his eyes were shining. He waited for her to command him.

“Drink,” Alys said, handing him the wine with a small pinch of earthroot. She drained her own glass. “And strip, Hugo, my sisters will only take you skyclad.”

Hugo dragged his clothes off slowly, the earthroot spreading through his body, making his limbs heavy and uncontrolled. Alys could see his dark eyes go blacker yet as the pupils dilated with the drug.

“Alys, my witch,” he slurred.

“Lie on the bed,” she said in a whisper. “They are coming, my sisters. They will come at the next roll of thunder. Listen for them, Hugo! When the lightning splits the sky they will tumble down from the clouds, screaming and laughing, their hair streaming behind them. They are coming now! Now! Now!”

Alys stood naked before the arrow-slit window, her arms outstretched. “I can see them,” she said. “Across the brightness of the sky they’re coming, Hugo! Here, my sisters! Here I am! Take me out in the storm to play with you.”

The wind gusted through the arrow-slit. Alys, burning up with guilt, with desire, with feverish excitement, laughed madly as the rain lashed her body. “Oh, that is good!” she said. The cold, hard rain stung her nipples, in a thousand prickling blows. “Oh, so good!” she said.

She turned to Hugo, driving herself beyond caution. “Let’s go outside,” she said recklessly. “To the top of the round tower.”

“Outside,” Hugo said thickly.

Alys threw her dark blue cape around her nakedness, and put a blanket around Hugo’s shoulders. He stumbled as she led him across the gallery, down the stairs and across the lobby to the round tower. The old lord was still in the hall, there was no one in the guardroom. Alys and Hugo slipped through, and up the narrow dark stairs, past the old lord’s room, past Hugo’s chamber above it, and up the stairs and out to the top of the tower.

In a sheltered corner the pigeon coops were battened down to keep the messenger pigeons safe. Alys wanted to release them—to fling the precious birds out into the random winds so that they would be tumbled and lost and never find their way home. Apart from the coops, the roof-top was empty, slate-floored and inhospitable, a tower pointing upward into the very vortex of the storm. The air was howling around them, the wind buffeting them so strongly that their words were whipped from their mouths and they were deafened with the hurrying gale. Alys stepped across to the parapet and looked down.

The walls were high and straight as a plumb line. Alys could barely see the foot of the tower where it grew, like some strange crag, from the sheer rock of the cliff above the river. As the lightning flashed, Alys could see the cliffs, shiny and wet in the darkness as they fell away, in a sheer drop down to the riverbed. Each crag was as pointed as a pike, and below them the river crashed and foamed over more sharp rocks, breaking in waves of black water and white spume. Alys let her cape fly out behind her and turned her face up to the drenching rain.

“They are here!” she yelled. “My sisters are taking us to play with the storm! Can you feel them, Hugo?”

The wind had torn Hugo’s blanket from his shoulders and whipped it away like a ribbon. The rain lashed his stocky white body. He flung his head back and laughed as the wind tore against him and the rain poured down on his nakedness.

Alys pressed against him, squeezed his thigh between her legs as they stood, drenched in the storm. The lightning dazzled them for a moment and then plunged them into blackness.

“Feel my sisters,” Alys said urgently. “We are riding in the storm with them. See how the winds pull and throw us around. We are out in the storm, tossed by the air, bruised by the lightning. The storm is our lover. Be the storm, Hugo! Be at one with the storm and take us all.”

The earthroot was twisting and turning Hugo’s brain. His body was icy from the rainwater and burning from his own heat and the earthroot fever. He savagely snatched up Alys and pressed her against the turret wall and forced himself into her. Alys, her body crushed against the stone wall, her shoulders and head above the parapet in the full force of the storm, laughed aloud.

“You are the storm, Hugo, you are the storm!” she cried. “Love me into madness. I have thrown away everything for you. Everything is lost for you!”

Hugo buried himself into her, withdrew, thrust forward again. At every move Alys was pushed nearer and nearer the edge of the turret wall where it dropped down from full height to waist height. Below them the river was in a spate of deep dark water and wind-lashed foam. Alys saw the movement into fatal danger and laughed again. Deep inside her, desire and madness were building together. She clenched her legs around Hugo’s waist and leaned back on the wall. Hugo, blind to everything but his fantasy of witches and storms and magical lust, forced himself into her again and again.

One final movement flung Alys from the support of the turret wall out into nothing, over the precipice. Hugo held her hips, her legs were around his waist, but her body was half falling from the top of the tower. And then Alys, mad for satisfaction and mad for release from her fear and her guilt, let go of Hugo’s shoulders and stretched her arms out, over her head, reaching out into the abyss. The lightning flashed, lighting Alys’s insane, laughing face and Hugo’s tranced grimace of pleasure as Alys flung herself, headfirst, into nothingness, with only her legs still gripping Hugo. She screamed at her pleasure and the sound was torn away from her mouth by the wind. She opened her eyes and looked downward. She was dangling from the top of the tower, below her was a maelstrom of boiling winds, seething rain, and the tumbling torrent of the river over boulders. Alys stretched her arms out into nothingness and laughed aloud, longing for the final terror of the tumbling fall and then blackness.

Then her belly clenched with lust and she groaned, instinctively she tightened her legs around his back, forcing him closer and closer, deeper and deeper inside her, wringing every second of pleasure from him. Hugo, not knowing what he did, caring neither for her safety nor her danger but only his own pleasure, snatched her back from the precipice and bore down on her on the stone flags of the turret roof. The rain poured down on the two glistening bodies as they rolled together, knotted with lust. Then the thunder rolled again and Hugo groaned, and fell away from her.