Needle in the Blood (73 page)

Boar perhaps; he noticed scrapes on their way here, shallow nests of earth surrounded by broken branches and uprooted brambles. Or an inquisitive buck. Clamping one hand over the dog’s muzzle to silence her, he creeps toward the open door, knife poised, keeping out of the wedge of sunlight that ripples over the uneven floor. Footsteps, men’s footsteps. Unmistakable, a cautious crunching of small twigs and acorn cups, then a pause, as Juno stops barking and the stranger is obviously wondering what has silenced her. William’s men already? Or Lanfranc’s? Or perhaps just one of his verderers doing his rounds. Odo wishes the steps would start up again, then he would know how many of them are out there. No horses anyway, other than his own, still tethered at the back of the building. He waits, holding his breath, feeling his body’s tension, muscles knotted between his shoulder blades and in the backs of his calves, the quivering, velvety muzzle of the dog under one hand, the smooth grip of the knife perfectly worn to the contours of the other.

Finally the stranger starts to move again, obviously satisfied the barking dog was somewhere else in the forest, the proximity of its voice a trick of the crowding trees. Tree sprites are known to gather sounds and toss them from one to another like children playing with a ball. Odo detects only one set of footsteps and relaxes a little. Not soldiers, then, for they would not come singly. Just one of the woodsmen, or a poacher who is going to get a very nasty surprise when he comes face to face with his landlord. Odo steps out from behind the door, his dog at his heels.

“Norman.”

“Good God in heaven. You.”

The cloak of white lambskins has lost the strange, inner luminosity he remembers but instead seems grubby, dirt patched, the hem stuck with twigs and dead leaves. The Saxon has a gaunt, neglected air, more common vagabond than resurrected martyr. Only his eyes, dense as moss in the oblique forest light, still have the power to make Odo’s soul shudder in his skin. He adjusts his grip on his knife. Surely this meeting was meant; just as his love affair with Gytha was preordained, so is this encounter with its nemesis. It is so perfectly opportune his heart lifts to think of it, shaking off the mire of grief and loneliness which had threatened to engulf it. This is a sign from God, the ram caught in the thicket, the burning bush.

Odo is quick for a big man; his agility always catches his enemies unawares because his body speaks to them of immovable solidity, of the need to besiege rather than attack first. Before Sebastian can make any move to defend himself, Odo runs at him, hooking one heel around the back of his ankle and shouldering him in the chest to knock him off balance. He intends his spur to slice through Sebastian’s Achilles’ tendon, ensuring he won’t get up again, but instead it becomes entangled in his cloak, pulling Odo down on top of him. The two men crash to the ground with a crunch of bone and the whump of air forced out of Sebastian’s lungs. Odo’s knife flies out of his hand and skitters along the ground out of his reach. His sword, he realises, furious with himself, is still lying on the table in the lodge.

And what if Sebastian’s followers are near at hand? Though his instincts tell him the man is alone; he lacks the confident bearing of a well- supported leader, and the forest remains locked in its particular brand of rustling, sighing, chirruping silence. As likely as not his men dispersed Sebastian’s flock so effectively when they found Margaret they took fright and never reassembled. That is the way of these marginal groups, without the proper social structures to hold them together.

Before his opponent has a chance to catch his breath, Odo clamps his hands around his neck and presses hard on his windpipe with his thumbs.

“Where are your disciples now, Sebastian?” He spits out the name with all the sarcasm he can muster. But Sebastian seems oblivious to it, clawing frantically at Odo’s hands, his ragged nails tearing at the sinews between his thumbs and first fingers. They struggle silently, Odo’s eyes locked to Sebastian’s as he presses inwards, the pulses in his thumbs beating, he believes, exactly in time with that in Sebastian’s throat. Suddenly he no longer fears those eyes, those enamelled irises you can’t see into, but hates them, the power of his hatred flowing into his hands as he squeezes Sebastian’s neck.

From somewhere, Sebastian finds a surge of strength. Grasping Odo’s wrists, he manages to drag the stranglehold from his throat and, coughing and gasping for air, rolls over and pinions Odo beneath him, his knee pushed into Odo’s chest, his foul breath and the stench from his wounds like the stink of hell in Odo’s nostrils.

“While the Devil strangles, he is killed, Norman,” he pants.

For a moment, Odo thinks,
oh, let him, what does it matter?
Then, with a fierce uprush of joy and rage, he remembers his daughter; no girl so fine, made of such love, is going to live with the shame of a father killed in a brawl with a common hedge preacher. Twisting under Sebastian’s weight, which is less than the man’s big frame leads him to expect, he manages to throw him off and lunges across the forest floor after his knife, Sebastian at first clinging to his ankle then letting him go with a sharp cry as Odo’s spur cuts into his palm.

“While he wins, he loses, Saxon.”

Sebastian jumps to his feet, followed by Odo, gripping the recovered knife. Sebastian attempts to run, but encumbered by his cloak and at the limits of his endurance, he cannot outpace Odo, who catches hold of his plait and yanks his head back until he hears the cracking of vertebrae and a hoarse bark of pain from the preacher. They are some way out of the clearing, in a dense copse of beech where the low winter sun does not penetrate. Odo shivers, the sweat cooling under his arms and between his shoulder blades. Sebastian slumps to the ground, whether through exhaustion or because his neck is broken, Odo cannot tell. He continues to hold up the Saxon’s head by his plait, coarse as hemp, as a hangman’s rope.

But it’s over; the fight has gone out of his enemy. He yanks Sebastian round to face him, bracing himself for those lizard eyes, but sees only their whites, lumpy, a dingy yellow in the pond-light of the copse. His hatred fills him the way a drowning man fills with water, precise, steady, and cold. He loathes everything about the man from his dramatic looks to his blasphemy, his mad eyes to his improvident prick. Sebastian’s eyes roll back into place, the irises slipping out from under the lids like plates of verdigrised bronze.

“I can’t feel my legs,” the man whines.

“Then you won’t feel what I’m going to do to you next, Tom. A pity.” Odo’s words fall into the immense stillness of the forest with no more significance than the squeaking of a shrew or the unheard creak of a pine cone opening to release its seeds. For a second he imagines comprehension in Tom’s eyes, even remorse, but it is only his imagination, his priest’s liking for stories with morals. The man’s soul is as rotten as his arrow wounds.

“If you kill me, it will be a kindness,” Tom pleads.

Good. “Oh, I’m not going to kill you, Tom. We don’t have a death penalty in England anymore, you know. Besides, I want to give you a taste of what I am condemned to, thanks to you and your inability to resist poking any cunt you can get your hands on, even your own sister. No, there is a punishment on the statute for men like you, but it isn’t death.” He lets go of Tom’s plait and he falls back heavily against the forest floor. Unwinding the strapping from one of his gaiters, he rolls Tom over onto his side, his knee in the small of the Saxon’s back. Tom groans. “You should have killed me, you know,” Odo continues in a light, conversational tone as he binds Tom’s wrists with the leather thong, “when you had the chance. For a minute there, I wouldn’t have resisted, but now…well, things change. Fortune’s wheel turns.”

“What are you going to do to me?”

“Cut your tongue out if you don’t stop that whining.” He lets Tom roll onto his back again and lifts his tunic to expose his genitals. Tom whimpers and starts to shake his head. “That’s right, preacher. The Book of Deuteronomy. He that is wounded in the stones, or hath his privy member cut off, shall not enter into the congregation of the Lord.”

“A bastard shall not enter into the congregation of the Lord,” says Tom between gritted teeth, “tell that to your bastard brother, Norman.” While Odo thinks about this, Tom tries to squirm away from him, but with his arms bound behind him and his legs dead he achieves nothing but an ineffectual flapping of his body, like a landed fish.

“Your thegns undid his bastardy, Saxon. They all cheered when he was anointed king. Like a bunch of silly children cheering a conjuring trick. He’s as legitimate as you or I now, and I dare say the Lord likes him better. Now, hold still and it’ll be over quicker.”

Straddling Tom’s chest to hold him down, Odo begins to cut, through the slack, goose-pimpled scrotum with its scattering of coarse, blond hairs. His skin crawls as he takes hold of Tom’s penis, wrinkled and intimately clammy. Feeling sick, he hesitates, the barbarity of what he is doing, and its pointlessness, as clear to him as though he were watching himself from the upper echelons of one of the trees.

Then he remembers what Tom has done, how he has cut at the root of Odo’s own masculinity, leaving him powerless to protect his woman and their child, and his mind darkens again, the dark swelling like a plague boil, leaving no room for reason. Adjusting his grip on his knife, his hand slipping a little on a slick of sweat, he makes a final upward cut, severing Tom’s organs from his groin, momentarily rapt by the welling of blood into the shallow reservoir between the Saxon’s lifeless legs. Then, twisting round to face Tom, he holds up the penis, the testicles dangling from it like a couple of pearly, purplish plums.

“The source of life, Saxon,” he gasps between gusts of laughter, afraid he is beginning to rave but helpless to prevent it. Tom seems to have fainted. Clambering off his chest and kneeling beside him, Odo slaps his cheeks hard. Tom’s eyelids flicker. “God is such a fucking joker!” he shouts, angry that such a fine insight should go unappreciated. Blood and urine trickle down Tom’s thighs. Odo cleans his knife on the grass then holds the blade over Tom’s mouth to see if he is still breathing. Just. A thin mist on the blade, a scarcely perceptible rise and fall of his scarred chest. Odo does not think he will last long. His skin already has the waxy bloom of a corpse, his blood dark, his mouth lolling open. Odo feels a mild, sentimental regret at the prospect of his death, which will deprive him of the consolation of company in his enforced chastity.

He forgets to say the comfortable words, which annoys him later when he remembers, because he would have enjoyed the luxury of considering, and then rejecting, the idea. There might be something satisfying, he reflects, in stuffing the man’s mouth with his genitals, making him a mirror image of his foresworn king in death. But what is the point? His followers have clearly deserted him, so there is no one to appreciate the irony but the odd fox or badger. Besides, Tom is beyond feeling the pain of that damned battle and what it did to the men who fought in it; all such a gesture would achieve would be to remind himself of it.

He turns away from Tom and starts back toward the hunting lodge, realising as he walks that he is very hungry, with a good, pure hunger like that of a man who has purged himself through fasting. Whistling up Juno, he takes down a bow from a hook in the lodge wall and goes looking for breakfast. His heart feels oddly light and insubstantial in his chest as he prowls around the forest paths hunting for small game. He even sings and talks nonsense to his dog as he might have done on any day’s hunting in the company of friends and vassals, knowing his mistress was waiting for him at home with a long kiss and a cup of wassail. The forest itself confers a sense of unreality, enmeshing him in its shadows and silences, its sudden, eerie eruptions of birdsong and the whispered parliaments of trees. He is nothing in this ancient landscape, steeped in the consolation of indifference, so how much less is his pain?

He shoots a good, fat wood pigeon, and Juno takes a couple of wild rabbits, which makes him think, as he tucks their hind paws into his belt, he must have a word with his warrener about the improvement of the pillow mounds. He finds some late blackberries, sweet with must, and a fairy ring of mushrooms. As he picks them, he thanks the fairies for their bounty, then laughs sheepishly at himself, putting his hand to his throat without thinking, to touch the Tear of the Virgin. Its absence opens a chink in his serenity, and he whips his hand back as though the sensation of his shirt lying flat against his skin has burned him.

“Come on dog,” he says heartily, “breakfast.”

He gives one of the rabbits to Juno then, waiting for his fire to heat up sufficiently for cooking, then he prepares the rest of the meat. He dips the frayed edges of Gytha’s torn cloak in the blood. He himself is plausibly bruised and bloodied from his encounter with Tom. Spreading the cloak out on the table, he then examines it critically as the room fills with smells of roasting meat, walking around the table, standing back occasionally, with his head on one side, as though he is admiring a tapestry or an illumination in a book.

The food tastes delicious, the meat, the mushrooms fried in the fat from the pigeon, spring water, all have the holy taste of the sacrament on his tongue. He knows there will be pain to come, but for now, with work still to do, in a world rid of Tom, he feels strong and serene. He wonders if this is how expectant mothers feel, if this is what accounts for their tranquillity in the face of all the terrors of childbirth.

Once he has eaten, he kicks earth over his fire, catches his horse and spurs it to a fast gallop, carrying Gytha’s cloak bundled roughly over his pommel. Reaching the castle as dusk is falling, he flings himself out of the saddle and pounds on the gate with both fists as though all the devils in hell are after him. The shocked, fearful features of the guards as they open up to him fill him with satisfaction, though he is careful to keep an anguished expression on his bruised and scratched face and to exaggerate his breathlessness when he speaks, making wild, sweeping gestures with his bloodstained hands.