Daughters of Babylon

DAUGHTERS
of
BABYLON

Elaine Stirling

Copyright © 2014 by Elaine Stirling

Cover design © 2014 Karri Klawiter

also available in paperback (ISBN: 978-1-909636-08-8)

Published by Greyhart Press

All Rights Reserved

www.greyhartpress.com

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is either coincidental or used with permission.

The author and publisher wish to thank our beta reader team for
Daughters of Babylon

Sarah Briggs

Kellie Fry

Misha Herwin

Jan Vincenc

For Abby, Nora, and Sam

If I could have a thousand years—just one little thousand years—more of life, I might, in that time, draw near enough to true Romance to touch the hem of her robe.

—O. Henry, “He Also Serves”

None of it is true. There are no people about whom you have been warned, and if there were, they would not be the Cairds. They have all died off and anyway they never existed. It is nothing but stories and stories are lies, as are songs and poems and promises of truth.

—Anne Cameron, Tales of the Cairds

We were always going to. We never did.

—Blythe Pendaris, annual address to TPA shareholders

The Queen of Heaven

The cook and I did meet ’neath the oleander tree

Till the cuckoo stole his eggs away to Galilee

Will the bread inside this oven ever rise?

—a Cossante, traditional fertility chant

A baronial manor house
near the Welsh Border
HOLY WEEK, A.D. 1189

For as long as Eleanor could call up images of
Reine du Ciel
, she believed she could outrun despair. The priory at the far southern reaches of Aquitaine meant nothing to her husband and jailer, Henry, king of England, beyond the usual grain, gold, and
garçons de guerre
, of which her duchy had probably been stripped bare by now. The memory of Queen of Heaven had become her freedom on the head of a pin. Every day for fifteen years and eight months, Eleanor, in her mind, danced the farandole at harvest with the ruddy-cheeked and joyful. Every day, she recalled the names and faces of her court at Poitiers, her beloved court, and set to paper the quips and sweet flirtations in the tongues she’d heard them spoken, explaining to her sometimes nervous guards, “These are my Greek and Latin drills. Look.” She would spread her arms. “No messenger birds, no agents lurking in the beeches to spirit my scribbles away.” But Good Fridays were always difficult, and on this, the 52nd anniversary of her father’s death, the scent of apricots in blossom eluded her. Imagination offered no mountains swept in mauve, no sheep or misty vineyards, only four people trudging.

She sat at her desk in the turret and closed her eyes.

They looked like pilgrims on an empty stretch of yellow road with low hills like flattened tin scrap to their left; the setting sun, a topaz nestled between slopes. If the sky were a woman’s face, Venus would be a single hovering teardrop. There was a small, rhythmic clicking sound, connected somehow to the group of travelers, though she couldn’t quite figure how. A cricket in the ditch along the roadside? Buttons or augury bones jangling in a pocket? No, the sound did not come from the unfolding tableau but from here in the turret.

Eleanor dropped the quill she’d been twiddling with and glanced beneath her writing desk. Nothing. She pressed the heels of her palms to its scarred oaken surface, rose and leaned forward to inspect the mortar that was chewed to lattice by worms and Heaven knows what manner of Mercian plaster louse.
Clickety-click-click
. No sign of crickets.

She glanced toward Leland, chief guard, who dozed at the top of the staircase in the center of the landing. His head had dropped forward, chin to collarbone, so that only his shoulders and bobbled knit hat were visible, and these rose and fell in consonance with his snoring, which was not in synchrony with…
clickety-clickety-CLICKCLICKCLICK
—

“
Maudit parbleu!
”

The elusive noise was coming now from deep inside her left ear. She shook her head and tipped it to one side and then the other, but as she strained and hopped about, the tintinnabulation swelled in volume and intensity, setting off reverberatory twitches in her right eye and at both corners of her mouth. The villagers of Cerabornes outside of
Reine du Ciel
used to dance and bang tin pots to ward off demons. Had some imp from Aquitaine smuggled its way in a sack of dried apricots?

I must tell Haldis, she thought, to cut back on the nutmeg.

Eleanor stepped away from the desk and pressed fingers to her cheeks. Her lips were twittering, pulling upward at the corners at a rate of seven, eight, nine involuntary grins per second. The ferocious winking of her eye called up the memory of a food taster from Limousin—Tibitard was his name, poor fellow. Over the years, he’d ingested so many toxins intended for his lordships that he became a jittering bundle of saliva-hurling palsies. He spent his final years suspended from a scaffold in a rye field to scare away the starlings.

She took small cautious steps around the landing with Leland’s capped head like a mushroom at the center and considered the possibility of poison. Anything was possible, although she’d received no missives to suggest that her continued existence was irritating Henry more than usual. If anything, her staying alive served as a political pin cushion, a repository for barbs not currently required by an English king who preferred to live in Normandy. If he or their warring sons had outraged yet another vassal by pillaging crops and castle, the murder of his estranged queen, about whom Henry was known to proclaim, apparently without irony, “She is everything to me,” would snap tripwires from Hadrian’s Wall to the Holy Land.

Eleanor came around again to the desk where her twitching gaze fell to the parchment, weighted by an ink pot and box of quills. The sheet had sat wordless for so long it had begun to curl in at the edges, as if reverting to the shape of the doe whose graceful curvatures it had once warmed. Only moments ago, before the twitches began, she’d written what she could remember of a
rubielo
: