Winter Siege (31 page)

They were silent for a while until Milburga added: ‘Besides, boy or girl, she’s a bloody good archer, or so they say, and if that lot out there carry on like this much longer we can’t afford to lose her.’

AS THE LIGHT
began to fade and the fighting died down, Penda developed a fever. Maud and Milburga attended her unstintingly – bathing her burning limbs with cold, wet cloths, encouraging her to sip water from a horn cup they held to her lips – but she was soon consumed by it.

In her delirium, she would wake; her unseeing eyes would suddenly open wide as she arched her back and convulsed against the bed. Then she would cower into the pillows; her skinny arms mottled with fever writhing in front of her face as though fending off an invisible assailant.

As each crisis passed and the fever dipped temporarily Maud and Milburga took it in turns to stroke her brow and speak soothingly to her until the advent of the next one.

It was gruelling to watch and made even more so by the fact that it was now obvious to both women, from the things she cried out in the grip of it all, that her torment extended, as Father Nimbus had warned, far beyond her physical wounds.

Watching her suffer so terribly, Maud’s initial feelings of abhorrence for this peculiar changeling began to dissipate, replaced by an overwhelming sense of pity.

She had known death and seen injury before, plenty of it in fact. During his lifetime, her father had insisted she learn the basics of medicine and the healing properties of herbs, as any chatelaine worth her salt must, but she had never before witnessed the process of dying and realized that her ministrations to Penda, inspired at first by a sense of duty, now sprang from another place entirely.

‘Will she live?’ she mouthed anxiously, after one particularly bad episode.

Milburga shrugged. ‘Don’t know,’ she said. ‘That’s in God’s hands now, that is. We can’t do no more but wait and see.’

Father Nimbus, who had left them, though reluctantly, to attend the wounded and dying elsewhere – and there were many that day – looked up from his duties every now and again to offer up a prayer especially for the girl. Cousin Lynessa did the same, crippling her aged knees on the cold, hard flagstones of the chapel as she prayed for Penda’s soul.

The patient herself was oblivious to everything, however; some part of her soul had sprouted wings long since and flapped away through the solar window; whether or not it would come back she neither knew nor cared.

In her delirium she returned to the strange, flat, watery lands she had so often dreamed about but this time found herself in a warm wooden hut, standing on a floor of freshly strewn sweet-smelling herbs and reeds.

A man stood beside her, a kind one judging by the look of him, and next to him the woman with the long golden hair who had appeared to her in dreams before. A little girl was sitting by the fire chattering away like a jackdaw; and all the time strange but familiar names drifted through her memory like blossom on a breeze. Nyles, Aenfled, Gyltha. Yes! The little girl was Gyltha! She remembered now! Her little sister, Gyltha! And the man, Nyles! And the woman, Aenfled! Her father and mother. This was home.

No sooner had she recognized it than her wings flapped again, and she was transported to another place.

Now she was crouching in the marshes, huddled against her mother, little Gyltha whimpering fearfully through the hand her mother held over her mouth.

She looked up through the latticework of reeds above her head and caught a glimmer of the vast grey sky beyond and the shadows of the marsh harriers flying overhead. She could hear the wind rustling in the reeds, the raucous voices of the birds calling to one another and the slopping of water all around.

Then, suddenly, she heard horses’ hooves in the distance, harsh male voices, and danger so close she could smell it filtering through the reeds with accents of men and horse sweat and another stench: the very worst one. And the next thing she knew she had broken away from the huddled figures and was running for her life through the marsh, knowing only that she must draw the men as far away from her family as she could. Her legs burned with exhaustion but she willed them to carry her further and further until finally, inevitably, one of the men, the monk, plucked her off the ground by her hair, pulled her on to his horse and carried her away.

She was soaring above the land now like a seagull on the wing, watching as they sped towards a ruined church: two men, two horses and a red-headed girl, tiny specks on a vast, shimmering landscape.

She could no longer see the two figures cowering in the ditch from here, but her heart ached for them and hot tears coursed down her cheeks, scorching her flesh and melting her wings until finally she was spinning out of the sky back down to the watery earth.

They raped her as she lay there, both of them. She remembered it now, but only the monk had beaten her too.

She had fought back at first, tearing at his face, using her hands like claws against him, but it was futile. Eventually she gave up and lay impassively beneath him as he robbed her of her soul.

She saw his eyes spark as he smashed his fists into her face and ground himself inside her as though he could split her in half, and when she began to bleed he became frenzied, howling like an animal, thrusting his hands between her legs into the wound he had made, smearing her blood into her hair.

He had admired her hair, she remembered that too.

‘A red-head!’ he had called back to the other man as he snatched her up. ‘Thank God for a red-head!’

When they had finished with her, she lay as still as a corpse on the cold, damp ground while they prepared to leave.

‘She dead?’ she heard one of them ask. Then there was a searing, sickening thud as the monk, or so she presumed, kicked her in the ribs to make sure. When she made no response they mounted their horses and rode away.

Time passed and when she could move again it was dusk. She felt nothing, remembered nothing and knew nothing except for one damned thing: that she wasn’t going to die out here in this god forsaken marsh.

She groaned as she dragged herself first to her knees and then, slowly, agonizingly slowly, to her feet and began to stagger towards the church in the distance.

She would die there, she decided; it was as good a place as any. She clenched her fists against her pain and felt her fingers close around an unfamiliar object in the palm of her hand.

THE MORNING BROUGHT
two unexpected gifts to Kenniford: the lifting of the siege and Penda’s recovery.

Having vented his spleen on the castle in the aftermath of the escape, the King’s appetite for another siege in the barren climes of winter, never exactly strong, waned completely. The cost was prohibitive for one thing, the discomfort for another, so, with his unrivalled ability to move an army at great speed around the country, he moved them west in pursuit of the Empress.

From the battlements in the blue half-light of the morning, the men on watch witnessed the welcome sight of hundreds of human backs and horses’ rumps retreating into the forest and the castle awoke to the cacophony of their celebration.

‘Enough to wake the bloody dead,’ Milburga muttered, peering through the solar window to see what was going on.

In a sense, of course, it was. When she turned back to the room, Penda had opened her eyes.

Milburga sent for Gwil, who arrived almost immediately, dishevelled and unshaven having not slept all night. As he burst through the door he barely acknowledged the faithful nurse but pushed past her, his eyes searching frantically for the tiny, wraith-like figure in the bed.

‘Thought you’d gone and died on me,’ he said, as he removed his coif and dropped to his knees beside her. ‘You’ll be all right now, won’t you, Pen?’

To his horror, she shook her head.

He reached out to touch her forehead. ‘Fever back, is it?’ he asked, turning anxiously to Milburga, who shrugged. Penda shook her head again, but smiled this time.

‘Not
Pen
, is all,’ she said, her voice barely a whisper. ‘I’m
Em
. My name, Gwil, it’s
Emma
.’

Milburga saw the look of alarm on the mercenary’s face, suddenly as pale as the girl’s.

‘Don’t take no notice. Been saying strange things all night,’ she said, tapping the side of her head to imply that the fever had affected Penda’s brain. ‘Made no sense most of it. Fever talk, ’at’s all. It’ll pass.’

But Gwil knew exactly what it meant. ‘You’ve remembered then,’ he said quietly.

Penda nodded and stretched out her hand to him. ‘But also how you saved me,’ she said.

And to Milburga’s further surprise, the newly appointed commander-in-chief of Kenniford Castle buried his face in the palm of the girl’s upturned hand and wept.

‘And him tough as old boots, I thought,’ she told Maud and Father Nimbus after Mass. ‘Crying like a baby!’ But Father Nimbus was unsurprised and merely nodded.

‘As I suspected,’ he said. ‘That child’s suffering extends far beyond our understanding and Sir Gwilherm knows it.’

‘Well, that’s as may be,’ said Maud brusquely, ‘but it’s all a bit much, if you ask me. And what in heaven’s name are we to make of it? Is she Penda? Emma? Boy or girl? It’s as if we’ve had some sort of changeling thrust into our midst.’

Now that it looked as though Penda would recover, Maud felt it reasonable to vent her irritation with her.

‘And another thing,’ she added. ‘What’s to be done with her? She can’t sleep in the guardroom now, surely?’

They all agreed that she certainly could not and there was much scratching of heads until Milburga suggested putting her on a pallet next to Tola in the corridor.

‘I can keep an eye on her that way,’ she said.

As the days and weeks of peacetime passed the number of people in the castle grew fewer. Most of the ‘useless mouths’ Sir Bernard and Sir Rollo had complained about returned to salvage what was left of their village. Many of the mercenaries left too, of course, to where they could get better pay – their talents being in demand by warring barons – taking their women with them. Some of Maud’s men sent their wives and children into service with the nuns at the convent of Godstow upriver, accompanied by Cousin Lynessa.

Maud wondered aloud one day whether or not Penda could be dispatched too but Father Nimbus raised a reproving eyebrow.

‘Kindness at all times, my lady,’ he admonished gently.

She was standing at the solar window one bright morning delighting in the fact that it was hers again, looking out on to the castle to assess those who remained like pieces on a chessboard.

In the topsy-turveying caused by the siege, the complexity of feudal status in the castle – of villeinage, serfdom, free men, of who owed what to Maud, their overlord, and what service they must perform – had all been overthrown.

For instance, in the old days the laundress Godwifa, down there in the drying court hanging out clothes with her big red-chapped hands, had been paid a penny a day, a pair of shoes at Easter and a cottage near the keep as long as her husband ploughed Maud’s north field when it was time. But her husband had been killed in the war and, with three children to bring up, Godwifa was asking to be allowed to stay in her cottage anyway.

‘I suppose I still have to pay her,’ Maud had said to Sir Bernard bitterly one morning during their discussion of manorial business. ‘What about my ploughing?’

‘She’s a good laundress, my lady.’

‘She can’t plough.’

‘She can launder.’

So Godwifa stayed in her cottage as, secretly, Maud had intended she should all along, but it entailed harness-maker and -mender Merrygo ploughing for her instead, so he complained he didn’t have enough time to do his proper job, let alone his own ploughing.

‘It’s against custom,’ Merrygo grumbled. Custom was the law at Kenniford; its people lived by it, their memories of what they owed to its lord and what they were due in return going back for generations.

‘It may have escaped your notice that we’re at war, and that we’ve just been besieged!’ Matilda snapped at him. ‘Just work harder.’

Pampi the gooseherd had also complained at extra duty because his geese were let out at night to patrol the walls and give a cackle of alarm if they heard an enemy approach. (Father Nimbus said it was how Rome had been saved from the Gauls.) She’d allowed him an extra penny for that – she couldn’t afford more and felt she’d been generous enough.

It was a fine March day she looked out on, almost as warm as late spring. Daffodils were nestling in the fields’ balks and rooks were building nests in the elms on the Crowmarsh bank.

Around the castle itself there were few birds, apart from some sparrows vying with the hens for insects in the moss between the cobblestones. The stone dovecote by the pond with its beautiful louvred turret of a roof was empty. After the bad and hungry winter, not one of its birds had remained uneaten. Gorbag had even cast a rapacious eye towards the mews, but Maud had told him that if any of her hawks were touched he would go into the cooking pot with them. Hadn’t her peregrine brought down a heron only that morning as a contribution to the communal stew?

She grieved for the cherry trees, but the apple orchard behind the church still stood and some early bees were emerging from the skeps in the outer bailey to buzz around the small plumes of blossom emerging on its twigs.

Despite lack of fodder for the castle’s stock during the winter, they’d been able to save a few animals from the annual slaughter – the rest were now in pieces, packed in barrels of salt – and a decent-sized herd was now grazing on the pasture down by the river bend under the eye of Wal, the cowherd, who was equipped with a hand-bell to be rung at the first sign of enemy horsemen, the threat from which was still present. In the sties, piglets were suckling from a fat, indolent sow.

Bart the dairyman (sixpence a week and a seat at the hall table at Michaelmas) had set his daughter to turning the churn handle while he practised his archery in the outer bailey, and the
clunk-clunk
of forming butter inside it made a bass counterpoint to the
tang-tang
coming from the smithy where Jack the armourer (eighteen pence a week and four ells of cloth at Christmas) was mending hauberks. And here, with long strings of trout over their shoulders, came Tove and his son fresh from the river.