Needle in the Blood (4 page)

A woman breaks from the crowd, screaming, wailing like a wood sprite fleeing the tree fellers. The soldiers push her back. She stumbles, but collects herself and tries again.

“My baby!” she cries, “my baby!” over and over again. The words slice through Gytha, colder than the rain; tears stand scalding in her eyes. My babies, cries her heart in unison, my babies. She slumps against the parapet, gouging her nails into the lip of the wall until the remembered pain in her womb is driven out by the rough stone grazing her hands. The mother hurls herself again and again at the cordon, arms raised, fists clenched, her mouth gaping open, reckless in her grief and desperation. Her child lies quietly, on his side, his knees drawn up to his chest as if he is asleep.

Bishop Odo, breaking from the group of men surrounding the Bastard, begins to shout orders above the rising din, the crowd roaring and boiling behind the cordon. More men run into position to reinforce it, but it is clear they cannot hold the mob back for long. Their anger swells and binds them, transforming them into a single, raging force against which the bishop’s smooth words will break as easily as the child’s skull. For a brief, exhilarating moment Gytha thinks,
They’ll do it, we’ll do it, we’ll throw them out.

Then suddenly, a Norman pikeman loses his nerve and runs his weapon through the woman, who clutches at her belly before doubling over, casting one last look of reproachful astonishment at the bishop before she falls. The crowd stills, the roar dies away as hundreds of lungs swell with sucked-in breaths, hundreds of hearts miss their beats with shock, hundreds of eyes, round and brimming with disbelief, turn to their neighbours and then to the bishop, grim and white faced as the marble faces of long dead Romans still sometimes turned up from the soil during ploughing. The child, they understand, was an accident, but this is murder.

Gytha, still gripping the parapet, its stones digging into her palms, mortar crumbling under her fingernails, looks to Queen Edith. Surely she must do something, say something, remonstrate with the red haired savage on his black horse, impassively watching his brother lose control. But she does not move, it is as though she is tied to the spot by invisible bonds, silent as if the Bastard had personally strapped a scold’s bridle to her head. Her expression, moulded by years of training and rigid restraint, gives nothing away, yet, as Gytha watches, she stoops slightly to wipe the tears from the cheeks of one of her pages with her immaculate sleeve. It is all that is left to her as the history her surrender has set in train starts to unwind in the square below.

Norman soldiers are now pouring through the gate, but far from intimidating the citizens, their arrival seems to reignite the flame of rebellion temporarily doused by the cold horror of the grieving mother’s murder. Gytha’s human tapestry begins to unravel as the crowd finally bursts through the Norman cordon and turns on the soldiers, pitting fists and walking sticks, stones and dinner knives against the Bastard’s army, love and rage against implacable efficiency. Women gather up their children and flee back down the main thoroughfare, to seek sanctuary in the priory whose precinct faces the square at the opposite end of the street. The old and infirm, and the early wounded trailing a slime of blood, struggle away down the many narrow alleys and passageways winding between the jumble of buildings bordering the square. The Bastard’s men will not pursue them among their own shadows and secret shortcuts.

Bishop Odo, still conspicuous by the fatal flamboyance of his horse’s harness, still bareheaded, though his brother and the rest of his officers have by now retrieved their helmets from their squires, glances up at Queen Edith, exchanges brief words with the Bastard, then spurs his horse into the affray, shouting more orders to the soldiers, kicking away his assailants with his spurred boots, fending off the more determined with a hefty, nail studded club as well as a sword. His saddle, marvels Gytha ruefully, must be some kind of portable armoury, his harness a chain of pennies for dead men’s eyes. Does he, she wonders, bother to carry the Sacrament with him also, or is he not that kind of bishop?

The Bastard dismounts, and to her horror, Gytha sees him disappear into the gate tower directly below her, accompanied by several of his men. Stupidly, she had believed herself safe up here, high above the square and concealed behind the parapet of the wall. But if he intends to come up here looking for the queen, she cannot help but be discovered. She could go to the queen, to whatever protection her status and her two pages can offer, but there is little love lost between her and Lady Edith, whose three sons by King Harold she has always seen as an impediment to the ambition of the Godwins for legitimate kingship. She would as lief hand Gytha over to the Normans as protect her against them. Her only other alternative is to make her way around the walls in the opposite direction in the hope of finding her way down by some ladder or stairway not yet occupied by William Bastard’s troops.

Hoisting her skirts, she begins to run, stumbling over the rubble strewn surface of the parapet, dodging around the ramshackle shelters that have made their appearance over the years, temporary homes to the watchmen with their makeshift hearths, pots, and tripods, and the telltale scatterings of straw which can be hastily kicked into a bedding mound once the officer of the watch’s back is turned. Though her feet are bruised through her fine calfskin shoes, she is scarcely even out of breath before a voice hails her from within one of these rough huts.

“Help! Help me.” An English voice. She ducks without hesitation under the lopsided lintel. As her eyes become accustomed to the gloom inside, she can make out a face, a glimmer of pale skin in the feeble light from the doorway, a glint of an eye, a dark scribble of beard. But something is wrong; the features seem to stand in the right alignment to one another, yet the face itself is not where she would have expected a face, but resting on the floor, one cheek pressed into curious undulations by its lumpy surface.

“I fell, you see,” says the man. Gytha begins to see. The stranger is lying on his side, stranded on account of the fact that the half of his body in contact with the floor has only bandaged stumps of arm and leg, no leverage to get him back upright, too painful no doubt for him to roll himself over. Though she feels sympathy for him, she cannot help laughing, and her laughter is like the mob in the square, because once it has escaped she cannot stop it up again. It spills from her like ale from a leaking spigot, washing away the sight of the little boy falling under the bishop’s horse, the awful, helpless anguish of his mother, the white-lipped fury of the bishop hacking and clubbing his way through the mob in the square as though the disaster were somehow their fault.

“I lost my limbs at Hastings,” says the man indignantly, but there is laughter in his voice also, as well as pain, and she can feel the twinkling of his eyes through the dusty dark.

“These Normans have brought us all very low, sir,” she responds, wiping tears from her eyes, kneeling at his head and pushing him into a sitting position. “How did this happen?” He sucks in his breath sharply. She thinks he must be in great pain from his injuries.

“I was on a stool, then I leaned to get my drink from the floor beside me and overbalanced.”

“But what are you doing here all alone?” she asks indignantly. “How did you get up here in the first place?”

He gives a dismissive shrug. “My brother is a guard. He lets me live here. My wife went back to her father when I…well, I’m no use to a woman like this, am I? So here I am. My brother went off early to watch the Normans arrive.”

“Then he’ll have seen more than he bargained for. One of their horses kicked a child and killed it, and now the crowd has turned ugly, and I’m afraid there will be a great deal of blood spilled.”

“I wondered what was going on. There seemed to be a lot more noise than I would have thought, seeing how the queen told us all to receive them in peace. I sometimes wonder if it was worth fighting them at all. Perhaps we should just have stood aside and let William Bastard in. After all, what difference does it make to people like us who’s king?”

“We must fight. King Harold has sons living; we must fight for them if nothing else. We cannot simply sit by while they trample our children to death and steal from us and…”

“All right.” He raises his one hand in a gesture of surrender. Gytha feels herself blushing. Her tongue was always her curse, Adam said so, and her mother before him, worrying that a girl such as her, with only a modest dowry and such quick wits, would never get a husband. Well, she got Adam, and tried to be a good wife and keep her wits to herself, and was left with Adam’s debts for her pains.

“I’m sorry. I saw it, you see, that great horse about twice the size of any I’ve ever seen. The child’s head couldn’t have been much bigger than its shoe. And the man riding it never even drew rein.” Why the lie? Why conceal the identity of the rider? She has a sense that, in some curious way, the story is her own, not to be shared, that it has for her a special power and meaning, that the name of Odo of Bayeux is a spell too potent to be uttered aloud. Nonsense. The accident was witnessed by hundreds of people. What makes it so special to her? She is tired, overwrought; she must return to Lady Edith. But what will she tell her? “Come now, let me lift you. They’ll be sending their own men up here soon. You must try to find your brother.”

“I have a crutch somewhere. It slid out of reach when I fell. If you find that and wedge it under the stump of my arm, I can manage.”

“How will you get down from the wall?” she asks, casting about for the crutch, which she finds lying only a few feet away.

“There’s a ladder close by. I can hop down it. You’d be amazed what I can do.”

Gytha smiles at him. “I’m sure I would.”

She helps the man to stand, then props the cross piece of his crutch as gently as she can in his armpit. Though he winces, he makes no protest and sets out briskly enough, ducking under the lintel, covering the ground surprisingly quickly, his stump swinging like a bell clapper between his crutch and his good leg. She follows him out onto the parapet. The smell of smoke reaches her along with shouts and cries, the nervous whinnying of horses and a ragged whistling of arrows, the smoke striking a hot, acrid note beneath the pervasive odour of wet wood and the stale beer-breath of the stranger as he turns to her.

“They set fires to contain riots,” he explains, sniffing the air. “I’ve seen it. Rings of fire around the crowd, as if it’s a scorpion and will sting itself to death.”

“And I suppose they take great care with firebreaks, so they are not deprived of the spectacle of the scorpion’s suicide,” says Gytha bitterly. “It seems our new king is surprisingly persnickety about killing. Oh my God.” She stops, instinctively grasping the stranger’s good arm. Heavy footsteps clatter toward them, running, spurs jangling, breathless, shouted exchanges in French. “They’re here.”

The two Normans look as surprised to see Gytha and the maimed man as she is horrified to come face to face with them. Rounding a bend in the wall, they skid to an uncertain halt, exchange doubtful looks and begin muttering to one another in their barbarous language. Though Gytha cannot understand their words, she can tell from their gestures they are debating something to do with her companion. Whether to kill him most likely. One of the soldiers slides his hand toward the dagger in his belt.

“No!
Non
!” she yells, thrusting herself protectively in front of the invalid. “Can’t you see he’s a cripple?”

The soldiers shrug, look blank.

“
Blesse
,
blesse
,” pleads the man, gesturing at his stumps with his one good hand, but the Normans look unimpressed. Now both have their daggers drawn and are advancing on the crippled Saxon, yet he has done them no harm, lying helpless in his eyrie on top of the wall. And he clearly cannot defend himself against them. She could not forgive herself for standing by and letting them kill him, yet she has no weapon, and she is a small woman, no match for two well-fed Normans. A woman. Of course she has a weapon, the most powerful of all.

“Go, quick as you can,” she whispers to the man as she lets go his arm and steps forward, hips swaying, pushing back her cloak with one hand to reveal the line of her breasts beneath her gown. Though loose, the wool is very fine and falls close to the curves of her body. Swallowing her fear, licking her dry lips, she lets a smile spread slow as a summer sunset across her mouth.

***

By the time she arrives back at Lady Edith’s house the city is quiet again, its rabble of low buildings squatting sullenly beneath a false twilight. There is no wind to disperse the smoke from the fires set by the Normans around the square, and it hangs, settling over roofs beneath the weight of the rain, loitering in back streets and the narrow alley by which Gytha makes her way, squeezed between the city wall and the back courts of the merchants’ houses lining the main street.

It was not so bad, she reflects as she wades through the smog, coughing, scarcely able to see more than a step in front of her. No worse, really, than lying in the marriage bed with Adam, stiff backed, eyes squeezed shut as he toiled above her, his cock rasping in her dry fanny, his sweat soaking the front of her night gown. At least the soldiers were quick and she didn’t have to sleep beside them afterwards or wake to their sour morning lusts. At least by these acts she has saved a life, rather than creating a new death, another baby too weak to survive. At least, if a child were to result from what she has done, she might strangle or drown it without demur; her body already knows well enough what it is to be tricked out of a baby to suckle. She touches the bronze and enamel locket she wears, a gift from Lady Edith last Christmas, and thinks of the four twists of dark, downy hair she keeps inside it. How it can be that God should have so punished her for submitting to her duty as a wife, yet inflict no sense of guilt upon her for what she has just done?