The Serpent's Tale

Adelia possessed none of the requisite feminine arts: She couldn’t dance well, didn’t play the lute, had never touched an embroidery frame—her sewing restricted to cobbling back together those cadavers she had dissected. In Salerno, she had been allowed to pursue skills that suited her, but in England there had been no room for them; the Church condemned any woman who did not toe its line—for her own safety, she had been forced to practice as a doctor in secret, letting a man take the credit.

  As Baron Rowley’s wife she would have been feted, complimented, bowed to, just as long as she denied her true being. And how long could she have done that? I am who I am.

  Ironically, the lower down the social scale women were, the greater freedom they had; the wives of laborers and craftsmen could work alongside their men—even, sometimes, when they were widowed, take over their husband’s trade. Until she’d become Adelia’s friend and Allie’s nurse, Gyltha had conducted a thriving business in eels and had called no man her master.

  Adelia trudged on. Hag’s hole. Grendel’s mother’s entrails. Why was this dreadful place feminine to the men lost in it? Because it was tunneled? Womblike? Is this woman’s magic? The great womb?

  Is that why the Church hates me, hates all women? Because we are the source of all true power? Of life?

  She supposed that by leading them out of it, she was only confirming that a woman knew its secrets and they did not.

  Great God, she thought, it isn’t a question of hatred. It’s fear. They are frightened of us.

  And Adelia laughed quietly, sending a suggestion of sound reverberating backward along the tunnel, as if a small pebble was skipping on water, making each man start when it passed him.

  “What in hell was that?”

  Walt called back stolidly, “Reckon someone’s laughing at us, master.”

  “Dear God.”

  Still grinning, Adelia glanced over her shoulder to find Walt looking at her. His gaze was amused, friendlier than it had been. It was directed at her riding crop, still dragging along the left-hand hedge. He winked.

  He knows, she thought. She winked back.

  Heartened by this new ally, she nevertheless quickened her pace because, when she’d turned, she’d had to squint to make out Walt’s expression. His face was indistinct, as if seen through haze.

  They were losing the light.

  Surely it was still only afternoon outside, but the low winter sun was leaving this side of the labyrinth, whichever side it was, in shadow. She didn’t want to imagine what it would be like in blackness.

  It was frightful enough anyway. Following the left-hand hedge wherever it went took them into blind alleys time and again so that they became weary with the travail of reversing increasingly restless horses. Each time, she could hear Rowley stamping. “Does the woman know what in hell she’s doing?”

  She began to doubt it herself. There was one tormenting question: Are the hedges continuous? If there was a gap, if one part of this maze was separated from the rest, then they could wander until it suffocated them.

  As the tunnels darkened, the shadows conglomerated into a disembodied face ahead of her, malignant, grinning, mouthing impossible things.

  You won’t get out. I’ve closed the clefts. You are sewn in. You won’t see your baby again.

  The thought made her hands sweat so that the riding crop slipped out of her grasp and, in clutching for it, she bumped into the hedge and set off a small avalanche of frozen snow onto her head and face.

  It refreshed her common sense. Stop it, there’s no such thing as magic. She shut her eyes to the gargoyle and her ears to Rowley’s curses—the nudge had set off a shower all along the line—and pressed on.

  Walt said, as if passing the time of day, bless him, “’Tis marvelous to me how they do keep this thorn in trim. Two cuts a year, I reckon. Needs a powerful number of men to do that, mistress. Takes a king to pay them sort of wages.”

  She supposed it was marvelous in its way, and he was right, the maze would require a small army to look after it. “Not only cut it but sweep it,” she said. For there were no clippings on the paths. “I wouldn’t want my dog to get a thorn in his paw.”

  Walt considered the animal pattering along behind Adelia, with which he had now been confined at close quarters for some time. “Special breed, is he? Never come across his like afore.” Nor, his sniff said, would he rush to do so again.

  She shrugged. “I’ve got used to it. They’re bred for the stink. Prior Geoffrey of Cambridge gave me this one’s predecessor when I came to England so that I could be traced if I got lost. And then gave me another when the first one ... died.”

  Killed and mutilated when she’d tracked down the murderer of Cambridge children to a lair a thousand times more awful than this one. But the scent he’d left to be followed had saved her then, and both the prior and Rowley had ever since insisted that she be accompanied by just such another.

  She and Walt continued to chat, their voices absorbing into the network of shrubbery enfolding them. Walt had stopped despising her; it appeared that he was on good terms with women. He had daughters, he told her, and a capable wife who managed their smallholding for him while he was away. “The which I be away a lot, now Bishop Rowley’s come. Chose me out of all the cathedral grooms to travel with un, so he did.”

  “A good choice, too,” Adelia told him, and meant it now.

  “Reckon ’twas. Others ain’t so partial to his lordship. Don’t like as he’s friend to King Henry, them being for poor Saint Thomas as was massacry-ed at Canterbury.”

  “I see,” she said. She’d known it. Rowley, having been appointed by the king against their wishes, was facing hostility from the officers and servants of his own diocese.

  Whether the blame heaped on Henry Plantagenet for the murder of Thomas à Becket on the steps of his own cathedral was justified, she had never been sure, even though, in his temper, the king had called for it while in another country. Had Henry, as he’d screamed for the archbishop’s death, been aware that some of his knights, with their own reasons for wanting Becket dead, would gallop off to see it done?

  Perhaps. Perhaps not.

  But if it hadn’t been for King Henry’s intervention, the followers of Saint Thomas would have condemned her to the whipping post—and nearly had.

  She was on Henry’s side. The martyred archbishop had seen no difference between the entities of Church and of God. Both were infallible. The laws of both must be obeyed without question and without alteration as they always had been. Henry, for all his faults the more human man, had wanted changes that would benefit not the Church but his people. Becket had obstructed him at every turn, and was still obstructing him from the grave.

  “Me and Oswald and Master Paton and young Jacques, we was all new to our jobs, see,” Walt was saying. “We didn’t have no grumble with Bishop Rowley, not like the old guard, as was cross with him for being a king’s man. Master Paton and Jacques, they joined selfsame day as he was installed.”

  So with the great divide between king and martyr running through the diocese of Saint Albans, its new bishop had chosen servants as fresh to their roles as he was to his.

  Good for you, Rowley. Judging by Walt and Jacques, you’ve done well.

  The messenger, however, was proving less imperturbable than the groom. “Should we shout for help, my lord?” Adelia heard him ask Rowley.

  For once, his bishop was gentle with him. “Not long now, my son. We’re nearly out.”

  He couldn’t know it, but, in fact, they were. Adelia had just seen proof that they were, though she was afraid the bishop would receive little satisfaction from it.

  Walt grunted. He’d seen what she’d seen—ahead in the tunnel was a pile of rounded balls of manure.

  “That un dropped that as we was coming in,” Walt said quietly, nodding toward the horse Adelia was leading; it had been his own, the last in line when they entered the maze. The four of them would soon be out—but exactly where they had started.


  “It was always an even chance.” Adelia sighed. “Bugger.”

  The two men behind hadn’t heard the exchange, nor, by the time the hooves of the front two horses had flattened them in passing, did just another lot of equine droppings have any significance for them.

  Another bend in the tunnel. Light. An opening.

  Dreading the outburst that must follow, Adelia and her horse stepped through the cleft leading out of the Wyrm’s maze to be met by clean, scentless cold air and a setting sun illuminating the view of a great bell hanging from a trapezoid set in a hill they had descended more than two hours before.

  One by one, the others emerged. There was silence.

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Adelia shouted into it. She faced Rowley. “Don’t you see, if a maze is continuous, if there aren’t any breaks, and if all the hedges are connected to each other and you follow one of them and stick rigidly to it wherever it goes, you’ll traverse it eventually, you must, it’s inevitable, only ...” Her voice diminished into a misery. “I chose the left-hand hedge. It was the wrong one.”

  More silence. In the dying light, crows flapped joyously over the elm tops, their calls mocking the earthbound idiots below.

  “Forgive me,” the Bishop of Saint Albans said politely. “Do I understand that if we’d followed the right-hand hedge, we could have eventually reached the destination we wanted in the first bloody place?”

  “Yes.”

  “The right-hand hedge?” the bishop persisted.

  “Well ... obviously, to go back it would be on the left-hand again ... Are you taking us back in?”

  “Yes,” the bishop said.

  Lord, Lord, he’s taking us back in. We’ll be here all night. I wonder if Allie’s all right.

  They rang the great bell again, in case the figure they’d seen on the tower’s walkway had relented, but, by the time they’d watered the horses at the trough, it was obvious that he or she had not.

  Nobody spoke as loins were girded and a lantern lit. It was going to be very dark in there.

  Rowley swept his cap off his head and knelt. “Be with us, Lord, for the sake of Thy dear Son.” Thus, the four reentered the maze. Knowing that it had an end made their minds easier, though the cost of constantly twisting and turning and backing out of the blind alleys was higher now that they were tiring.

  “How’d you learn of mazes, mistress?” Walt wanted to know.

  “My foster father. He’s traveled extensively in the East, where he saw some, though not as big.”

  “Proper old Wyrm, this, i’n it? Reckon there’s a way through as we’m not seeing.”

  Adelia agreed with him. To be girded to this extent from the outside world would be an intolerable inconvenience; there had to be a straighter route. She suspected that some of the blind ends that appeared to be stone and hedge walls were not lined by masonry at all; they were gates with blackthorn trained over them that could open and shut on a direct path.

  No good to her and the others, though. Investigating each one to see if it were movable would take too long and would result only in having to make further choices of tunnels that ended in fixtures.

  They were condemned to the long way through.

  They made it in silence. Even Walt stopped talking.

  Nighttime brought the maze to life. The longdead trickster who had designed it still tried to frighten them, but they knew him now. Nevertheless, the place had its own means of instilling dread; lantern light lit a thick tube of laced branches as if the men and the woman in it were struggling through an interminable gray stocking infested by creatures that, unseen, rustled out their dry existence in its web.

  By the time they emerged, it was too dark to see whether the cleft they stepped through was ornamented like the entrance. They’d lost interest, anyway; amusement had left them.

  The tunnels had to some extent protected them from the bitter air that assailed them now. Apart from an owl that, disturbed by their coming, took off from a wall with a slow clap of wings, there was no sound from the tower that faced them across the bailey. It was more massive than it had appeared from a distance, rising sheer and high toward a sky where stars twinkled icily down on it like scattered diamonds.

  Jacques produced another lantern and fresh candles from his saddlebag and led them toward a blacker shape in the shadows at the tower’s base that indicated the steps to a door.

  Nobody had crossed the bailey since the snow fell; nothing human, anyway—there were animal and bird prints aplenty. But the place was an obstacle course. Snowy bumps proved to be abandoned goods: a broken chair, pieces of cloth, a barrel with its staves crushed on one side, battered pans, a ladle. The snow covered a scene of chaos.

  Walt, stumbling, revealed a bucket with a dead hen inside. The corpse of a dog, frozen in the act of snarling, lay at the end of its chain.

  Rowley gave the bucket a kick that dislodged the hen’s carcass. “The disloyal, thieving bastards.” Was that what this was?

  It had been said that when William the Norman died, his servants immediately stripped their king’s body and ran off with such of his possessions as they could carry, leaving his knights to find the great and terrible Conqueror’s corpse naked on the floor of an empty palace room.

  Had Rosamund’s servants done the same the moment their mistress was dead? Rowley called it disloyalty, but Adelia remembered what she’d thought of Rosamund’s neglect of Bertha; loyalty could come only of exchange and mutual regard.

  The door to the tower, when the four reached it, was of thick, black oak at the top of a flight of wickedly glistening steps. There was no knocker. They hammered on it but neither dead nor living answered them. The sound echoed as if into an empty cave.

  Keeping together—nobody suggested separating—they filed around the tower’s base, through arched entrances to courtyards, to where another door proved as immovable as the first. It was, at least, on ground level.

  “We’ll ram the swine.”

  First, though, the horses had to be cared for. A path led to a deserted stable yard containing a well that responded with the sound of a splash when Walt dropped a stone down it, allaying his fear that its depths would prove frozen. The stalls had straw in them, if somewhat dirty, and their mangers had been replenished with oats not long before their former occupants had been stolen.

  “Reckon as it’ll do for now,” Walt said grudgingly. The others left him chipping ice from the well’s windlass.

  The pillagers had been arbitrary and hurried. An otherwise deserted byre held a cow that had resisted theft by being in the act of delivering its calf. Both were dead, the calf still in its birth sac.

  Dodging under a washing line on which hung sheets as stiff as metal, they explored the kitchen buildings. The scullery had been stripped of its sink, the kitchen of everything except a massive table too heavy to lift.

  Trying the barn, they found indentations in its earth floor to show where a plow and harrow had once stood. And ...

  “What’s this, my lord?”

  Jacques was holding up his lantern to a large contraption in a corner by a woodpile.

  It was metal. A flanged footplate formed the base of two upright struts attached to it by heavy springs. Both sets of struts ended in a row of triangular iron teeth, shaped to fit into the corresponding row of the other’s.

  The men paused.

  Walt rejoined them, to stare. “Seen ’em as’ll take your leg,” he said slowly. “Never like this un, though.”

  “Neither have I,” Rowley told him. “God be merciful, somebody’s actually oiled it.”

  “What is it?” Adelia asked.

  Without answering, Rowley went up to the contraption and grasped one set of its teeth. Walt took the other and, between them, they pulled the two sets of struts’ rows apart until each lay flat on the ground opposite the other, teeth gaping upward. “All right, Walt. Careful now.” Rowley bent and, keeping his body well away, extended an arm to fumble underneath the mechanism. “Work
s by a trigger,” he said. Walt nodded.

  “What is it?” Adelia asked again.

  Rowley stood and picked up a log from the woodpile. He gestured for Adelia to keep her dog away. “Imagine it lying in long grass. Or under snow.”

  Almost flat, as the thing was now, it would be undetectable.

  It’s a mantrap. Oh, God help us.

  She bent and grasped Ward’s collar.

  Rowley chucked the log onto the contraption’s metal plate.

  The thing leaped upward like a snapping shark. The teeth met. The clang seemed to come later.

  After a moment, Walt said, “Get you round the whatsis, that would, begging your pardon, mistress. No point in gettin’ you out, either.”

  “The lady didn’t care for poachers, it seems,” the bishop said. “Damned if I go wandering her woods.” He dusted his hands. “Come on, now. This won’t beat the Bulgars, as my old granddad used to say. We need a ram.”

  Adelia stayed where she was, staring at the mantrap. At two and a half feet high, the teeth would engage around the average man’s groin, spiking him through. As Walt had said, releasing the victim would make no difference to an agonizing and prolonged death.

  The thing was still vibrating, as if it were licking its chops.

  The bishop had to come back for her.

  “Somebody made it,” she said. “Somebody oiled it. For use.”

  “I know. Come along, now.”

  “This is an awful place, Rowley.”

  “I know.”

  Jacques found a sawing horse in one of the outhouses. Holding it sideways by its legs and running with it, he and Walt managed to break down the tower’s back door at the third attempt.

  It was nearly as cold inside as out. And more silent.

  They were in a round hall that, because of the tower’s greater base, was larger than any room they were likely to find upstairs. Not a place for valued visitors to wait; it was more a guardroom. A couple of beautiful watchman’s chairs, too heavy to be looted, were its saving grace. For the rest, hard benches and empty weapon racks made up the furniture. Cressets had been torn from the walls, a chandelier from its chain.