Winter Siege (6 page)

Actually, this time she’d hit the outer rim of the target, but he was as sparing in praise as he was in condemnation.

She shot him a glance as if to ask what she’d done wrong; he was beginning to be able to read her now, to understand her even.

‘Didn’t follow through,’ he told her. She stamped her foot but more in frustration with herself than anything else.

Bugger. Didn’t make sense to stay aiming after the arrow’d left the bow. But if he said it mattered, then it mattered; when he shot, he hit exact centre every time and she would become as good as him if it killed her.

‘Mind out the way, then,’ she said and reached for another arrow.

‘No you don’t. That’s enough for today.’ He reached out to stay her arm but she flinched from him. She would never allow him to touch her; not that he wanted to. Not like that anyway. He was tempted to slap her sometimes for her rudeness; but never would. He had never been one for disciplining children; his wife had complained often enough how he was too soft on young Emouale …

He shook his head against the memory, lowered his arm and stood in front of her.

‘Enough,’ he said patiently. ‘Got to remember that the back is the archer’s friend, got to treat it kindly. Now get inside and see to that stew.’

She hissed at him and he saw her mouth tense as the familiar guarded look clouded her expression once more. Practising archery was almost the only time when she could forget whatever it was she’d forgotten; when the waves she could hear roaring beyond the sea wall in her mind quietened a little, and she wasn’t swept away in the whirling, filthy, inexplicable terror that filled her dreams. With a bow in her hand she could summon up a hatred and a concentration equalling the deluge that’d otherwise overwhelm her. When she shot, she was no longer powerless.

Didn’t mind not knowing who she was; didn’t want to. Sufficient to have been delivered a month ago into a ruined church by that old midwife, Gwil, archer and arbalist.

All she knew for certain was that she was both very young and very old; that she was a girl and yet not female; that she was called Penda because that was the name by which Gwil addressed her but that she once answered to another name which was even now being tossed to and fro like flotsam somewhere on the ocean beyond her mental sea wall – beyond her grasp, beyond his.

‘I’m going to have to call you something,’ he’d announced one day. ‘Can’t go around being nameless all your life.’ And then he’d closed his eyes as if lost in thought and when he opened them again he was smiling broadly: ‘Penda,’ he said. ‘That’s what I’ll call you. Pagan warlord Penda was, descended from Woden, or so they say. I think it suits you.’ She’d smiled, although she hadn’t had the slightest idea what he was talking about. On reflection, however, she thought it suited her too. And that’s all she knew, except that she must shoot and shoot, so the point of her arrow could one day thwack into the centre of a human target and inflict a wound on it like the one in the gaping tunnel between her legs.

There was just one last thing she knew too: that she could trust old Gwil not to come too close. Like he was standing off now, arm outstretched to take the bow.

She passed it over to him and went into the church to stir the stew, pausing in its arched doorway to peer forward and then behind in case … in case of what? Something terrible.

No, nobody there. She went inside and felt the uneven walls slip around her like protective clothing. He’d made a safe, warm home of it, old Gwil. Patched the roof, made stools out of its spars, grubbed in the detritus of the cottages and found a pail, scorched but serviceable enough for cooking and washing in, used old bits of iron from the same source to hang on hidden string between the trees so they’d clang an alarm which would give them both time to disappear through a tunnel he’d scratched out under the back wall.

And he’d made her a cloak out of the hide of a young deer he’d shot when it came blundering through the trees. Bit smelly, but kept out the cold. When she was good enough, he was going to teach her to hunt.

Goose tonight. When Gwil’d said it was time she did some wildfowling she’d spat at him. That awful sea was out there beyond the trees; she weren’t going to risk it sweeping her off. ‘Bloody won’t. I’m a-staying here.’ Here, where he’d made her safe.

‘Stay on your own, then,’ he’d said.

Hadn’t been so bad, really; something near familiar and reassuring about it. Cold, though, bor. The air that Gwil had expected to warm up by now was icier than ever once they left the shelter of the trees.

Crouching with their backs to the great expanse of reeds that troubled her, they’d waited for dawn and the honking, whistling, fluting air-borne invasion that came in with it out of the North Sea, displacing the air with a hundred thousand beating wings. Arrows speeding up from her bow hadn’t been loosed in hatred this time, more with wonder at the magic of flight and the need to bring some of it down to the cumbersome, featherless humans below.

Dead bodies had plopped about them, one with an arrow of hers in it. ‘Mine,’ she’d swanked as they picked them up, although she’d been bound to hit something, the sky being so thick with birds. ‘We’ll have this un for supper.’

‘Long as you pluck it,’ Gwil had said.

Which she had, unsurprised by the ease with which she did it, and the instinctive knowledge that, when she’d set it to simmer, a leaf or two of sage and a couple of wild garlic bulbs ought to go in with it. She could remember enough.

‘Could do with some bread,’ she grumbled as she poured it out on the wooden platters he’d made.

‘Come spring,’ he said, ‘when we go to Cambridge.’

She began whimpering. ‘Don’t want to go to Cambridge, Gwil. I want to stay here.’

He knew she was terrified of going outside this deserted village; she’d only come wildfowling – they’d needed something other than squirrels to eat – because she was equally frightened of being by herself.

But they couldn’t stay here; when the weather improved the village’s former residents might come to rebuild or carry off the church’s stone. It was lucky this long-drawn-out winter still hampered people’s movements and had given her the solitude in which to recover – as much as she could recover.

It was strange, Gwil thought; she knew which call came from which bird and could tell one herb from another, but she didn’t know her own name. She had no memory of what was personal to her, yet with common tasks, like cooking, like laundering, she retained the lessons somebody had taught her.

She was sitting on the other side of the fire – she always kept it between them – gracelessly stuffing food into her mouth as if it was a chore, her small freckled face displaying no pleasure in what was a good stew.

She doesn’t show pleasure in anything, Gwil thought, except …

He waited until she’d licked the platter, then he said: ‘We’ll get me another crossbow in Cambridge,’ and watched her come alive, as she always did when the subject was shooting.

From the moment she’d seen him practising with the ordinary bow he’d made for himself, she’d nagged and nagged until he carved and strung one for her.

The way she’d handled it told him she came from a wildfowling family, though few wildfowlers possessed the potential she did; oh, he’d spotted that sure enough, the fury that launched itself with the arrow as if from the same bowstring had shocked him, at first making him wonder whether, in that strange little head of hers, she remembered more of her ordeal than she realized. She stood differently, too, with a bow in her hand: confident, more upright and, from the very first time she held one, he had seen that she had the makings of an exceptional archer.

Not that he told her so; when she was shooting her fear gave way to an arrogance that could lead to self-satisfaction – the ruin of many an archer who had stopped practising because of it.

‘And me,’ she said now, ‘I want a crossbow.’

‘No.’

‘Why?’

‘Can’t afford two.’

He began telling her how much expense and preparation went into the making of a first-class crossbow; how the best prods (the bow itself) were laminated, and how the glue for that came from the shredded tendons of an ox’s heel soaked for days to soften it. He explained how its heavier draw weight necessitated using a leather stirrup to pull back the string (usually hemp); how its arrows (bolts or quarrels) had tips (bodkins or broadheads) that could go through any thickness of armour.

‘And it’s slow. A good archer can loose off five times quicker than an arbalist.’

‘Why did you use one then?’

‘Longer range,’ he said shortly, which was true, but the real reason was that it was the surer killer – near always fatal, whatever part of the body it hit. The strongest close-linked mail couldn’t withstand a crossbow bolt, however much backing it had.

‘How’d you lose yours?’ She doted on the tales he recounted about mercenary life, the armies he’d served with, the battles, the crusade he’d gone on as a young man. What he hadn’t told her, and, out of shame, never would, was that he’d lost his crossbow through being in the company of the men who’d raped her.

‘In the flight from Lincoln,’ he said, which, once more, was true – in its way.

‘Make me one. I want one.’

‘Maybe. When you’re skilled with the short bow. Being an arbalist’s easy; anybody can use a crossbow.’

I’d have talked like this with my son, he thought. Then he thought: No, Emouale was loveable and he was damn sure she wasn’t.

Again he was tormented by his last sight of a little boy waving goodbye from the doorway at Vannes.

She’s not a substitute, Gwil
, the Lord put in.
She’s a penance for your sins. I never said salvation would be easy.

She’d tired herself with too much archery practice, and, unusually, slept late the next morning, so he took the opportunity to go back to the spot where Ramon and the others had assaulted her. The little quill case she’d had clutched in her hand when he found her intrigued him; he’d studied the document it held time and again, hoping the writing on it would turn itself into words he could understand, but its curious letters obdurately remained letters.

Nevertheless, he thought, let’s see if the monk and the others left anything else that’ll help track the bastards down.

The moment he stepped out of the trees, the vast, fenland sky came at him with its endless underlay of reeds, a landscape in which nothing moved.

He had no trouble finding the site again. Ice had frozen it exactly as it had been a month ago; the crushed reeds still retained traces of her blood on them, as if the Lord had halted Time itself in order that the evidence of what had happened here should be preserved for all to see. And weep.

Wait, though, somebody other than himself had been here since. And that somebody had brought along a broom of birch twigs, for here it was, discarded, where it hadn’t been when Gwil had first investigated.

And that somebody had used the broom to sweep the area beyond the site, for here were reeds lying down in neat tracks where they’d been brushed flat. As if somebody had been searching for a lost object among the roots.

‘He was nearby,’ Gwil yelled at his Lord. ‘He was nearby and alone, the bastard, and You didn’t tell me.’

No hunter, though, was he?

He supposed he had to thank God for that at least, because if the monk had possessed the craft of tracking, he would have noticed the trail the girl had left as she’d dragged herself towards the trees.

He could’ve brought others, Gwil. Come down on you and her like wolves on a lambing pen.

True, very true.

Are we sure it was the monk?

Gwil strode over to the birch besom and picked it up. Strips of black wool tied its twigs together. He ripped one off, sniffed, but could smell only the cold that stiffened it. Then, as his mittened hands warmed the material, there arose from it the faintest but unmistakable whiff of asafoetida.

‘It was him, Lord. And he wants that quill case real bad.’

It was time to start tracking the bastard down.

LAST NIGHT, IN
the scriptorium of Perton Abbey, when he had copied the scratches from his wax tablet on to parchment in the cursive script of which he is justly proud, the scribe had been overcome with indecision.

Had the abbot gone mad? Should he tell somebody? What he was copying was not decent, an affront to God Himself. History could not be written from the point of view of a mercenary, a debased girl and … the scribe shudders … a woman, however rich, who had flouted Heaven’s law with an unnatural act against the rights of a husband.

He felt he was being dragged into a conspiracy imperilling his soul; indeed, at the description of the wedding night at Kenniford Castle, with the husband ascending the stairs to the woman’s chamber, he’d had to creep away from his desk to the lavatorium in order to plunge his heated head and
…
well, other parts into the cold water of its trough that his body might not commit a shameful act of its own accord.

And yet, and yet, with it all, he is fascinated, like a bird fluttering to its doom towards the antics of a gyrating stoat.

Perhaps, when the tale was finished, he could dare to go over the abbot’s head and take the manuscript to his bishop. When it was finished …

In the meantime he has to know: ‘My lord, what is the document in the quill case? And does the mercenary succeed in finding the villains?’

‘When the thaw came with the spring, Gwilherm de Vannes began tracking them, like a hound with its nose to the spoor of a wolf. He did not tell the girl he’d named Penda what he was about; he feared what it would do to her to come face to face with her abusers. Nevertheless, track them he did, and the pursuit led them both west and, at first, was easy, for the mercenary devil Ramon left a path of destruction behind him. But as we shall find, that particular trail went cold …’

‘Does Gwilherm pick it up again?’

‘We shall see, we shall see.’ The abbot was discovering, somewhat to his surprise, that he was a born storyteller. ‘But for a moment, let us return to the political situation. Now where were we?’