By Possession (8 page)

Her spirits renewed immediately and all thoughts of cowering at Darwendon disappeared. She smiled inwardly, and glanced at the man who claimed to be her lord. She would let Addis de Valence escort her to London, but once they got there she would not serve him.

“Aye, we go to London,” he said. “But first we go to Barrowburgh.”

CHAPTER 4

P
EACE. THAT WAS WHAT
he felt in her presence. He could not account for it. She did not have to speak, she did not even have to know he was there for the comfort to flow like warm water. He had experienced a peculiar strangeness since returning, as if he walked foreign ground during a distant time. Only when she was near did he feel properly centered inside his own body and existing in the world in the normal way.

He had almost turned back to Darwendon because of her. He had stopped where the road from Salisbury met this one and debated it. The peace waiting in one direction held much more appeal than the conflict promised in the other. She would not welcome his return or his demands for her presence, but the peace would still be his while she moved through the manor and sat aside at the table. He doubted that he could flatter or bribe her into more than that. She resented his claims, and the deformed Addis de Valence would hardly succeed where the handsome Raymond Orrick had failed.

He drove the cart until twilight began falling even though his hip pained him and Moira grew weary and uncomfortable. She was not an inconvenience, but the cart and donkey were. It would take much longer to make this journey now. But he also pushed on because he wanted them both exhausted before he made camp for the night. She would sleep then despite what had happened this day, and he would sleep too, despite the temptation of ultimate peace lying a few paces away.

It did not work that way. Sleep did not come quickly at all. He lay by the fire listening to her soft breaths carried to him on the night from the place he had made for her in the cart. He imagined that breath in his ear and on his body and felt himself sinking into her softness and warmth. He rose and walked into the trees, away from her, and forced himself to reconsider the decisions he had taken regarding Simon.

The man would not move against him publicly. He would not risk the king's disfavor by committing an open murder that might inflame the opposing barons. If the quiet opportunity came his way, that was different, but in that perhaps nothing had changed. The truth regarding that suspicion should be clear soon enough, but barring such a chance Simon would bide his time.

So the immediate future depended upon the king and the law and the customs of the realm. If those failed him then the choice would be faced squarely, but he suspected it would be a bigger choice than Raymond or Moira saw. At least he would face it in London, where he might better learn the odds and risks. He would face it while Moira's peace would help him to think more clearly. And Simon's quiet opportunity would be harder to find or arrange in London.

Contemplation of what awaited unsettled him, and he paced back to the fire. He paused at the cart and looked in.

She rested on her side, one hand in a loose fist by her face as a child might sleep, her dark hair making a nest for her head.

He had planned to make this a fast journey, but that would not be necessary now. He could stay in London for as long as it took, because the reason beckoning him back to Darwendon would be with him.

He should let her go when they arrived in the city, release her to the life she claimed as her right, but he could not. If she found her stonemason he should allow her to wed, but he would not. A man who had been enslaved should be sympathetic to her quest, and he was, even though her status was not that of a slave and he knew the difference all too well. For one thing, if she were a slave she would have been in his bed from that first night, and he would not be peering over a cart wall at her, battling his desire.

He might be sympathetic, but that weighed little against that desire, or the peace, or the inexplicable possessiveness that had made him kill three men for trying to defile her.

He roused her at dawn and got them back on the road in quick order. Moira found some dried grasses among the trees with which to make a cushion on which to sit. She looked like some harvest goddess perched on a bed of hay beside him, reminding him of ceremonies that he had seen in the Baltic lands. It was at planting and harvest that the oldest rituals were performed by Eufemia's people, rites that alluded to an ancient time when their supreme deity had been a woman and not a man, when the physical vitality of the earth had possessed more importance than the vast abstractness of the sky.

They rode past more woods, and he thought about those years among the Baltic people. The experiences seemed more familiar to him now than the memories of his own family and land. They believed that every shrub
and plant, every stream and pool, even every rock, was a home to a spirit. After a few years he had come to understand. After he had lain with Eufemia he could sometimes sense the spirits quivering in the growth around him, speaking a primitive language to his soul.

The trees now flanking the road contained none of that. If there had ever been spirits in the land of England, they had long ago left or been silenced. Here the rocks were for moving or chiseling, the streams for washing and drinking, the trees for cutting and burning. Eufemia's people performed their ceremonies in the open air, surrounded by the spirits. The Christian God was worshiped in buildings constructed by clever, intelligent masons who deformed the stones with tools and logic.

He glanced at the woman who had concluded she should marry such a man. Her head was bent and she sniffed herself, making a little grimace. Long fingers plucked at the cloth over her breast, pumping it slightly to let air flow. He had driven the cart off the road at sundown yesterday, not worrying whether there was water nearby, but he knew it was not the day's sweat that she smelled so distastefully.

She noticed him looking at the swells appearing and disappearing beneath the puffing cloth and straightened in her ladylike way.

“Were you imprisoned all those years?” she asked to divert his attention.

“Nay.” She had been the first person to ask outright. Not even Raymond had sought the details. Everyone assumed he had endured horrible, heathen tortures that were unfit for discussion.

“Then why didn't you come home or send word? Everyone thought you were dead and look at the problems it created. God's crusade or not, you had duties and obligations here.”

“For a woman determined to escape her duties and obligations to me, you are sharp-tongued enough in reminding me of mine to everyone else.”

“Do not be ridiculous. You were born to your responsibilities.”

“As you were born to yours. Tell me, how was it learned that I was dead?”

“When the others returned to Barrowburgh. The knights who had joined you. They came back with the tale that you had fallen during one of the campaigns, during one of the r … r …”

Lost in that swamp, the French fool leading them having no idea where to go
. “During a
reise
. It is a German word. The Teutonic Knights who led the Baltic crusade are mostly German.”

“They said that you had been cut down. One saw you fall.”

Horses pouring at them from every direction. The enemy whom they had been running down for days suddenly materializing en masse, swords and spears ready, possessing a determination the haphazard collection of crusaders could never match.

“But they could not be sure I was dead.”
Which one had seen him fall? Who had been with him that day?

“Only a few escaped that attack. They said that even if you had only been wounded the pagans would kill you as they always did the fallen crusaders.”

“It is the Teutonic Knights who kill all the defeated. Women and children too. Not the pagans.”
Not one of our spears, Eufemia had said. The wound is the wrong shape.

“If they would just convert, this would end,” Moira said, articulating the logic of all of Christendom.

“If they convert, they do not lose only their gods. That crusade is not just about Christianity, but about land. The Teutonic Knights have a kingdom stretching for hundreds
of miles out from their city of Marienburg, all of it taken when they defeated tribe after tribe, and they seek more. They give the land to crusaders who fight for them. They even gave me some, to compensate me for my ordeal. But now they have met a people who will not be easily conquered, and a king as shrewd as any Teutonic Knight or Roman pope.”

It just poured out, unexpected, thoughts never before articulated since, freed by Eufemia, he had suddenly seen that crusade in a different way. In Eufemia's way. Back with the Knights, no longer needing the illusions that had sustained him for six years, the scales had fallen from his eyes during his final
reise
into the Wildnis. It had been a campaign of personal revenge when he embarked, but riding his horse through the carnage of bodies in that first defenseless village, he had known that he could never do it again.

He expected Moira to look more shocked. They were pagans, and one did not defend them. Instead curiosity lit her eyes. “What ordeal? They gave you land, you said, to compensate you for your ordeal. If you were not imprisoned, not captured …”

“They are a slaveholding people. They trade in them, sending most of them east into Rus'ia or south as far as the Saracens. They make slave raids into neighboring lands. I was captured, but not imprisoned the way you think. For six years, I was a slave. I was not traded, but kept by one of their priests.” He had sworn to tell no one in England about that degradation. Perhaps this peace had its dangerous side.

Her blue eyes sparked. “You lived as a slave, you know what it means, and the first thing that you do upon returning is force me back into bondage!”

“It is not the same thing. I was not born to it, and you
are not a slave. A slave does not ride in the cart, but pulls it. A slave does not own property, but is property. A slave does not speak to her master as you do to me without being punished.”

He had not meant it as a threat but she retreated as if he had, as well she might. A serf did not speak to her lord the way he allowed her to address him either.

“Still, one would think …”

“One would think that upon his release a man once enslaved would want to free the world? It does not work that way. A man brought low wants to raise himself up, and make clear the distinction between the past and the present.”

“So you use me to remind yourself that you are no longer as I am. I enhance your self-worth, much as Darwendon does. I trust that when you get Barrowburgh back and are drowning in status and property and serfs that you will no longer need me to feed your pride and remind you of who you were born to be!”

He doubted that it would turn out that way because he did not keep her for those reasons. Her explanation made much more sense than his, however, so he did not correct her.

She turned her body away and did not speak for hours. Her annoyance could not affect the peace, and he was not much given to talk anyway. Angled this way he could look at her without her seeing it, so he did not disturb whatever thoughts occupied her. On occasion he saw her repeat that private sniffing.

He should have thought about that yesterday. Almost all those slave women reacted the same way about that part of it. After being used they would want to wash. He kept a lookout for a stream or pond.

“Did you have a family there? Is it permitted with their
slaves?” she asked suddenly, as if hours had not interrupted their conversation.

“It is permitted, but not freely chosen, and of course there is no Christian marriage. Another way in which slaves are different than villeins.”

“As you said at the hallmote, only because the Church has interfered.”

The sun had peaked and begun to fall when he left the woods behind and scanned the countryside. He spotted the glitter of water not far ahead and drove the cart toward it, angling off the road and down a low hill toward the small lake.

Moira climbed off the cart, stretching and sighing with exaggeration to let him know that he had waited too long to stop.

“The lake looks shallow. Go and wash if you want. I will stay here with your cart,” he said.

She looked at him with surprise and then suspicion. He stretched himself out on the hill behind the cart where he could observe the road. She must have realized that he could not watch her from that position, because she rummaged in a basket, then walked down to the lake.

He stripped off his buckskin tunic. The thin leather was cooler than wool but still too warm for the summer sun. Lying back in the grasses, he closed his eyes and tried not to imagine the lush body being uncovered thirty paces away.

That proved impossible, since all morning a part of his mind had been divining the various parts until it had constructed a fairly complete image. Full breasts, high and firm, enough to fill his hands, probably with velvety brown tips. The rest creamy in color, like the round buttocks he had seen, much lighter than the tan of her face. Elegant curving lines where torso tapered to waist and then flared
to those womanly hips. Long legs, with thighs … Having her in London was going to be very uncomfortable if the condition of his body right now was any indication. Her presence might bring peace to his soul, but the price would be torture of a different sort.