Read A Tapestry of Dreams Online
Authors: Roberta Gellis
Tags: #Fiction, #Historical, #Romance, #General
A Tapestry of Dreams
Copyright © 2011, 1985 by Roberta Gellis
Cover and internal design © 2011 by Sourcebooks, Inc.
Cover design by Sourcebooks
Cover illustration by Franco Accornero
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The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.
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Originally published in 1985 by The Berkley Publishing Group, New York
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Gellis, Roberta.
A tapestry of dreams / by Roberta Gellis.
p. cm.
1. Nobility—England—Fiction. 2. Knights and knighthood—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3557.E42T37 2011
813'.54—dc22
2010043656
There had always been an iron hand on the hill called Iron Fist. A strong man could see immediately that the hill was a most desirable place for defense, a rocky outthrust around which the river had worn a deep valley. Where the river crossed the foot of the promontory, there was a shallower area that could be forded; however, it was a deep and dangerous ford. Erosion had carved gullies into the harder stone of the hill so that the protruding mass showed four huge bulges and, lower on the hill, a smaller fifth, which ran crosswise. The river ate away at the base, over the aeons wearing even the hard stone into a shallow curve under the crosswise bulge. From across the river, when the light glanced along the hill just right, a huge fist of stone appeared to threaten any who approached.
It was an ideal place to make a stand to protect the cultivated fields in the river valley below and behind the promontory. It was easy to club one’s enemies as they climbed or push them off with sharpened sticks. Even the primitive tribe that settled there found signs that a still earlier people had defended the great fist. But they did not hold it long.
Another group with a far more ferocious leader took the place. The assault cost half his fighting men, even against the poor defense the less aggressive leader contrived, but it did not matter, for he closed his iron hand over the defeated and enslaved them, eventually melding them into his own tribe to bolster their numbers.
When the Romans who built Hadrian’s Wall found the place, it was clear that it had been used as a fort for a long time. The native slave who acted as translator told the centurion the name of the site, translating the Pictish words into
Pugnus Ferreus,
Iron Fist. It was stone, of course, but iron was the wonder metal that could defeat bronze and black magic, too.
The Roman wall itself could not cross old Iron Fist, for the slopes were too steep and the valley surrounding the promontory was too low; the wall was built on a ridge some half mile to the north. However, Iron Fist was an obvious site for one of the great forts that would house supplies and serve as a base for the soldiers who manned the mile castles. One spring already welled sluggishly from a fault in the rock. The Romans, being fine engineers, widened that fault so that fresh, sweet water flowed freely; probes found others.
Some of the rock that made up Hadrian’s Wall, eighteen feet high and eight feet wide when completed, was hewn cleverly from the slopes of old Iron Fist, hewn so that the promontory became even more isolated and only a tortuous, curving road approached the summit. There was no need for the construction of so elaborate a defense. The Pictish tribes were more a nuisance than a threat, but the centurion was an engineer at heart, and in this isolated post he needed amusement.
A lesser wall, not so much for defense as to mark out the limits of a settlement, was built from the great wall to the foot of the hill where it met the river. But Romans built walls to last; even the lesser wall was built of stone, as were certain storehouses and, of course, a prison. There were plenty of slaves, and the soldiers were often idle; why not keep them busy? The centurion’s name was Artorius—but by the sweating soldiers and exhausted slaves he was most often called Iron Hand,
Manus Ferrea.
The Romans were recalled to defend their native land and abandoned the wall and the
castellum,
but Iron Fist remained a prize to the fiercest, so that the men who held it were called, by custom, Iron Hand.
For those who raided from the sea, the river was a tempting road. A few centuries after the Romans abandoned Iron Fist, the first boats ventured so far upriver, scraped their keels on the ford, and stopped. They raided the rich river valley that time. Their second foray, some years later, was not a success. Fire rained down from old Iron Fist. The ships burned; the warriors died. A few who escaped told the tale, which lost nothing in the telling as time passed, and it came in the end to the ears of a needy younger son. He was clever and strong and hard, but he had brothers of equal merit; his father had no land for him.
So the language in which the name Iron Fist was spoken changed again. The local people learned the words if not the grammar and called the place Jernaeve. Before the Normans came, they had made the conqueror’s language their own—but the original place name stuck. And the hard-eyed mercenary who was given Jernaeve by William the Bastard had an odd romantic streak. He liked “Jernaeve” better than “Poing de Fer.” Moreover, because he had no name himself—other than Oliver le Bâtard (like his lord)—and because he did not wish to give that suspicious master any uneasy thoughts by taking the name Main de Fer, which went with the castle, so to speak—he used the ungrammatical inversion himself and became Fermain: Iron Hand.
William the Bastard, hard and clever, ruled, then died in his bed. His son, William Rufus, harder but not nearly as clever, was shot by an arrow while out hunting after only a few years as king. William’s youngest son, Henry, followed. As clever as his father, Henry, too, died in bed—but he had no living sons, for his heir had drowned in a crossing of the narrow sea.
Before he died, Henry forced his reluctant barons to swear they would make his only surviving child, his daughter Matilda, queen. But death loosened Henry’s powerful grip on the barons, and some repudiated the oath forced on them and invited Henry’s nephew, Stephen of Blois, to take the throne.
Thus, the seeds of civil and foreign war were sown, for in England there were barons who decided to stand by their oaths to Matilda, and in Scotland to the north King David felt he must support his niece. The whole land seethed with rumor and counterrumor, and atop old Iron Fist, a new Oliver Fermain prepared to defend Jernaeve, knowing King David would not dare leave so strong a keep, astride a main road between his realm and England, in the hands of one who would not swear fealty to him and might oppose his purpose.
A horse floundered through the treacherous ford, almost toppling its wavering rider. The man, numb with cold and exhaustion, clung desperately, casting only a single glance at the threatening fist of rock that towered over him, the tips of its great knuckles just gilded with the rising sun. Although he could see the walls that projected above the stone knuckles like awkward, ugly rings, he knew the angle would prevent him from seeing the men who walked guard duty on those walls.
The horse slipped and slithered among the ice and rocks of the bank and at last heaved itself onto solid ground. As the horse came around the curve made by the largest knuckle, the man raised his head at last. The narrow riverbank was clean and empty. No blood stained the rocks; no corpses fouled the river.
The rider was too tired to smile, but his breath seemed to come more easily after he had seen with his own eyes that what the men on the north wall said was true, that indeed he was not too late with his warning, and he spurred his tired horse so that it quickened its plodding walk to a heavy trot. The touch of the spur was a mark only of the man’s eagerness, not of the distance still to go. Only a few of the horse’s lengthened strides brought them to the point where the stone of the cliff met the stone of a Roman-built wall, mended and reinforced over the centuries. The river turned with the curve of the hill, too, so that the bank on which the narrow road ran was no more than fifty feet wide for a quarter mile or so. But he did not have to go so far. The gate he sought was close by.
Already the rider could hear the challenge of the guards. He gathered his strength and bellowed, “It is Bruno, Berta’s son.”
What his name meant to anyone now, after so many years of absence, he did not know, but one man alone was no threat to Jernaeve keep, and some of the men-at-arms might remember him. In any case, the gate was open when he reached it, and he went through without further challenge, turned sharply left to pass through the narrow space between the wall and the side of the hill on which Jernaeve—old Iron Fist—perched.
The passage, a hundred feet or more long, widened suddenly, stretching out into a series of fields some half-mile square that sloped gently upward to the north until they met the great Roman wall. It was a fertile piece of land. The close furrows of the winter planting could be seen under the mantling of snow, but Bruno did not ride the path toward the cottages that backed against the Roman wall and housed the demesne serfs.
He kept his horse on the frozen mud of the snowy track that turned to the right, past the wooden buildings that served both as living quarters for the men who guarded the lower walls and as guest quarters for visitors’ men-at-arms. Those buildings lay in the shadow of Jernaeve’s cliff, where fire and missiles could be rained down on them—in case a guest developed ambitions of permanent residence. Almost halfway around the base of the hill, the track Bruno followed met the road that wound left and right in sweeping curves to climb up Iron Fist, each curve exposed to the narrower one that hung above it.
At the end of the last curve, the road made a short, sharp turn, nearly a right angle, and went under a portcullis between two towers, called east and west. The wall that stretched beyond the towers, enclosing nearly the whole of the flattened top of the hill, was far more massive than the one below, a wall built of ancient stones culled from the Roman ruins and newly set by skilled Norman masons. The portcullis was lifted, permitting entry to the dark passage through the wall, fifteen feet thick at that point, with another portcullis at the far end. There were slits in the roof of that passage, Bruno knew, slits for shooting arrows and for pouring boiling oil, but he did not raise his head to look.
Had he been an enemy, he would have been dead long since—shot as he rode along the bank, or as he strove to burst through the gate or traverse the passage between the wall and the cliff, or as he climbed each curve in the road. There would be many, many dead enemies before any reached the passage between the portcullises and were trapped there. It was a warming and comfortable thought. Tired as he was, Bruno turned to look back over the formidable defenses, which were only the least and outermost. Those of Jernaeve itself, which crowned Iron Fist, were far stronger. They might be strong enough.
Beyond the second portcullis, the bailey opened out into a rough rectangle dominated by the massive keep. The noise, reflected back from the thick stone walls, struck Bruno like a blow. From pens and kennels against the east wall, cattle lowed, sheep and goats bleated, pigs grunted, and dogs barked. Within the yard, men and women moving about at their morning tasks laughed and shouted at each other, and from the area between the men-at-arms’ quarters and the north wall of the chapel came the thud of wooden weapons, an occasional shout of pain or surprise, and the regular clang of hammer on anvil from the small smithy.
Just beyond the east tower against the north side of the wall were the stables, and a groom ran out to take Bruno’s horse. His knees buckled as he dismounted, and the groom dropped the rein to support him, calling out for help. Bruno started to shake his head, and then glanced toward the wooden forebuilding, which sheltered the steep, unrailed stair that led to the entrance of the great hall. He uttered a weary chuckle. It would be just his luck to have escaped so many dangers only to fall off the stair and be killed.
By then he had been recognized, and a lounging man-at-arms ran ahead to tell his master of Bruno’s arrival. Sir Oliver, as dark and strong as the keep he held, was at the door when Bruno had struggled up the stair, and Bruno said, “The Scots are at war. Norham and Alnwick have yielded to King David—and Wark is besieged.”
“Wark,” Sir Oliver repeated, his voice expressionless. “How long since?”
“I meant to sleep there last night, thinking David’s army would keep to the coast, but parts of the village were still burning. I have been all night coming those few leagues, dodging the Scots.”
“Can you remember how far north you saw the last raiding party?” Oliver asked.
“I do not think they
were
raiding parties. They were hunting someone, I could swear. I was driven far to the east, keeping clear of them,” Bruno replied. “The last I saw was a league north or a little more.”
After frowning for a moment longer, Sir Oliver nodded and gestured with his head toward the fire, newly fueled. From the embers of the logs that had burned slowly through the night, new flames leapt along the dry branches, spitting and roaring. Without more words, Sir Oliver went out and down the steps. Bruno knew that he would send more men to protect the great wall to the north, and possibly to warn the serfs to make ready to come up into the castle in case the Scots should succeed in breaching the lower defenses. For the time being, Bruno had no further duties—and he was good for no more anyway.
The groom had melted away from his side when Sir Oliver appeared, and Bruno took a careful step toward the fire, watching where and how he put his foot down. He had been numb with cold from riding through the day and the bitter night, unable to make a fire to warm himself even when he stopped for brief rests, lest the light and smoke draw his enemies. Immersion in the freezing water of the North Tyne when he forded the river had added the final touch; Bruno had no feeling in his legs from knees to toes.
Eventually he reached a bench set to the side and well away from the hearth and let himself down on it. To come too close to the fire for the sake of warming himself quickly would only increase his misery later by inflaming his chilblains. The area was quiet because it was the high end of the hall, the place of the noble family. Bruno was glad of it. He did not wish to be asked for news.
There had been a normal bustle of activity—but at a decent distance—while he had spoken to Sir Oliver; the serfs had known better than to crowd their lord when a messenger came. But he had spoken softly and apparently no one had recognized him—or, if they had, did not know what to do. Now the servants were busily clearing away a few scattered sleeping pallets and snatching at the remnants of the bread, cheese, and ale with which Sir Oliver and those entitled to break their fast with him had started the morning. Bruno just sat, trying to cudgel his tired brain into deciding whether it would be less effort to call one of the servants to help him or to remove his wet shoes himself. Suddenly the activity stilled and a silence fell.
By the time Bruno’s dulled reactions had brought his head up, light footsteps were rustling the rushes in a hurried advance, and a soft voice cried, “Bruno! Brother! Is it you?”
Small, warm hands pulled at his helmet, lifted it off, cupped his face. Pale blue eyes, made deep as bottomless pools by the darker ring around the iris, glinted happily. Rosebud-pink lips parted in laughter, and a flush of happiness colored cheeks translucently fair and framed by long, thick braids of palest gold.
“It
is
you! And you have not changed at all,” she exclaimed joyfully, carefully setting the helmet down and feasting her eyes on her half brother’s crisp black curls and dark eyes. His face was strong and square, with the handsome aquiline nose and the thin, well-shaped lips of the Fermains, the line of the latter somewhat blurred by several days’ growth of black beard stubble.
The silence that had startled Bruno into seeking its cause had ended by the time she spoke, and the warm pleasure in her voice drew a smile, in spite of Bruno’s exhaustion. “And you have not changed either,” he said, “although you should have. Will you never grow up, Demoiselle Audris?”
“Alas,” she said, lowering her eyes for a moment in mock sorrow, “I fear I am as grown as ever I shall be. Have you lost count of time, brother? I have put two and twenty summers behind me. And you are unkind to call me Demoiselle, as if—”
“No, Demoiselle,” he interrupted her gravely. “You are unwise to call me brother. My mother—”
“Oh, Bruno, I do not care a rotten apple about your silly mother. Do you not know that you could shave yourself by looking into Uncle Oliver’s face?” She laughed merrily. “Except, of course, that he is bald and gray.”
“My looks make no difference,” Bruno said severely. “In fact, they are a good reason for you to mind your tongue. I was not speaking only of your inches when I asked if you would never grow up.”
Audris released Bruno’s face and started to seat herself beside him on the bench. In doing so she touched him and became aware of his condition. Her eyes widened, joy being replaced by apprehension. “Oh, heaven! You are cold as ice and soaking wet!”
When an old maidservant had come timidly to her door to tell her that Bruno, Berta’s son, had come home, she had been delighted, thinking that her uncle had changed his mind and invited her bastard half brother back to Jernaeve. Now she realized that some dire emergency must have brought Bruno. She jumped up to call to a manservant, only to see her uncle standing and looking at them with a frown.
Audris met Oliver’s eyes steadily, lifting her chin and straightening her back. “Uncle,” she said, “I see that Bruno has come to us at no small risk bearing heavy tidings.” Her voice, although not raised, could be heard throughout the hall because a new silence had fallen as soon as she faced Sir Oliver.
Oliver nodded and came closer. “Yes,” he said, watching her keenly and somewhat nervously. “The Scots are attacking. Wark is taken.”
Audris stared back, startled by the news at first, but then she shook her head, refusing to be distracted. If the Scots came to attack Jernaeve, they came, but it would not be in the next few hours, and she could see no reason why poor Bruno should sit wet and cold while they waited.
“Even so,” she said, “I cannot see why you could not spare one moment to bid Eadmer to see to Bruno’s needs. Now I will take him to my own chamber—”
“No,” Bruno said.
But the rigidity of Sir Oliver’s lips relaxed just a little, his frown lightened, and he nodded. “Yes, Bruno. Go with her. You will be no good to me until you have rested anyway.”
Bruno might have protested again, but Oliver had already walked away, and it was useless to argue with Audris. Besides, she had slipped away too, beckoning to the nearest menservants and telling them to help Bruno as she ran ahead to her quarters in the south tower. He watched her go, thinking with the old stab of anxiety that her feet barely stirred the rushes as she went, so light and frail she seemed. He remembered his terror when he had first seen her, only a few hours old, at his mother’s breast. He had been sure Audris would die, like the other legitimate children Sir William had sired. Then Sir William would find a hundred excuses to beat him and, even when he could not, would stare at him with burning, angry, hate-filled eyes because of all the young he bred, only the one the castle whore
said
was his survived. But the lady, Audris’s mother, had died instead.
Suddenly Bruno smiled, remembering how his mother had laughed at him when he began to weep because he was afraid and also because so tiny and tender and beautiful a creature as Audris should die.
“She
will not die,” Berta had said, “not this one. Do you not see how hard she sucks, for all she is so small? And it is
my
milk she takes,” she added proudly, lowering her voice so that none but her son could hear, “not that sour whey that leaked from her mother’s tit.”
The men helped Bruno back across the hall and up the narrow stairway to the third floor of the south tower. The door, thick and ironbound—a last, strong defense should enemies fight their way into the great keep—was open. Bruno blinked, for the light was strong compared with the dimness of the hall below. The true windows of the hall opened only inward, on the bailey, where the high walls that surrounded the whole hilltop blocked the sun of early morning and evening. Here the windows opened southeast and southwest over the cliff above the river, and even though they were set deep in the thick wall and closed against the worst of the winter cold by thin-scraped hides, the room was bright. The men paused uncertainly in the doorway, and Bruno noted with dull surprise that they had both turned their heads away from the loom that stood near the hearth.