The Serpent's Tale

  Adelia worked it out. “He was quick off the mark to know the boy was missing, then. Talbot of Kidlington—it must be him in the icehouse—was only killed the night before.”

  “Is that a clue?” The gleam in Gyltha’s eye was predatory.

  “I don’t know. Probably not. Oh, dear God, what now?”

  The church bell across the way had begun to toll, shivering the ewer in its bowl, sending vibrations through the bed. Allie’s mouth opened to yell, and Adelia scrambled to get to her and cover her ears. “What is it? What is it?” This was no call to worship.

  Gyltha had her ear to the shutters, trying to listen to shouts in the alley below. “Everybody to the church.”

  “Is it fire?”

  “Dunno. Summoning bell, more like.” Gyltha ran to the line of pegs where their cloaks hung. Adelia began wrapping Allie in her furs.

  Outside, groups of people hurried from both ends of the alley and joined the congestion in the noisy church porch, where those pausing to let others go in chattered in alarm, asking one another questions and receiving no answers. They took noise in with them ... and quieted.

  Though it was crowded, the church was silent and mostly dark, all light concentrated on the chancel, where men sat in the choir stalls, men, some of them in mail. The bishop’s throne had been placed in front of the altar for Queen Eleanor to sit in; she wore her crown, but the enormous chair dwarfed her.

  Beside her stood a knight, helmeted, his cloak flung back to show the scarlet-and-black blazon of a wolf ’s head on the chest of his tabard. A gauntleted hand rested on his sword’s hilt. He was so still he might have been a painted sculpture, but his was the figure that drew the eye.

  The trickle of sound that came in with newcomers dried up. Godstow’s entire population was here now, all those who could walk, at least. Adelia, fearing that the child in her arms might be crushed, looked round for space and was helped up onto a tomb by people already standing on it. Gyltha and Ward joined her.

  The bell stopped tolling; it had been mere background to what was developing and only became noticeable now by its cessation.

  The knight nodded, and a liveried man behind the choir stalls turned and opened the vestry door, which was the entrance used by the religious.

  Mother Edyve came in, leaning on her cane, followed by the nuns of Godstow. She paused as she reached the chancel and regarded the men who occupied the places reserved for her and the sisters. The Abbot of Eynsham sat there, so did Schwyz, Montignard, others. None of them moved.

  There was a hiss of appalled breath from the congregation, but Mother Edyve merely cocked her head and limped past them, a finger raised to beckon at her flock as she went down the steps to stand with the congregation.

  Adelia peered round the nave, looking for Mansur. She couldn’t see him; instead, she found herself looking at mailed men with drawn swords standing at intervals along the walls, as if the ancient stones had sprung rivets of steel and iron.

  Warders.

  She turned back. The knight in the chancel had begun speaking.

  “You all know me. I am the Lord of Wolvercote, and from this moment I claim this precinct of Godstow in the name of our Lord Savior and my gracious liege lady, Queen Eleanor of England, to be held against the queen’s enemies until such time as her cause prevails throughout this land.”

  It was a surprisingly high, weak voice from such a tall man, but in that silence it didn’t need strength.

  There was a murmur of disbelief. Behind Adelia, somebody said, “What do he mean?”

  Somebody else muttered, “Gor bugger, is he tellin’ us we’re at war?”

  There was a shout from the nave: “What enemies is that, then? We ain’t got no enemies, we’m all snowed up.” It sounded to Adelia like the voice of the miller who had questioned Bishop Rowley. There was a general, nervous snigger.

  Immediately, two of the men-at-arms against the southern wall barged forward, hitting people aside with the flat of their swords until they reached the interrupter. Seizing his arms, they pulled him through the crowd to the main doors.

  It was the miller. Adelia got a glimpse of a round face, its mouth open in shock. The men dragging him wore the wolf ’s head blazon. A boy ran after them. “Pa. Leave my pa alone.” She couldn’t see what happened after that, but the doors slammed shut and silence descended again.

  “There will be no disobedience,” said the high voice. “This abbey is now under military rule, and you people are subject to martial law. A curfew will be imposed ...”

  Adelia struggled with disbelief. The most shocking thing about what was happening was its stupidity. Wolvercote was alienating the very people he needed as friends while the snow lasted. Needlessly. As the miller said, there was no enemy. The last she’d heard, the nearest military force was at nearby Oxford—and that was Wolvercote’s own.

  Oh, God, a stupid man—the most dangerous animal of them all.

  In the choir stalls, Montignard was smiling at the queen. Most of the others were watching the crowd in the nave, but the Abbot of Eynsham was examining his fingernails while the scowl on Schwyz’s face was that of a man forced to watch a monkey wearing his clothes.

  He wouldn’t have done this, Adelia thought. He’s a professional. I wouldn’t have done it, and I don’t know anything about warfare.

  “... the holy women will keep to their cloister, rationing will be introduced while the snow lasts, and one meal a day shall be eaten communally—gentles in the refectory, villeins in the barn. Apart from church services, there shall be no other gatherings. Any group of more than five people is forbidden.”

  “That’s done for his bloody meals, then,” Gyltha breathed.

  Adelia grinned. Here was stupidity in extremis; the kitchen staff alone numbered twenty; if they couldn’t congregate, there would be no cooking.

  Whatever that man is up to, she thought, this is not the way to do it.

  Then she thought, But he doesn’t know any other. This is a man for whom frightened people are obedient people.

  And we are frightened. She could feel it, collective memory like a chill lancing through body heat in the church. An old helplessness. The Horsemen were with them, introduced into their peace by a stupid, stupid swine.

  For what?

  Adelia looked to where Schwyz and Abbot Eynsham sat, radiating discomposure. If this is the queen’s war, they are all on the same side. Is Wolvercote establishing himself over his allies before he can be challenged? Grabbing authority now? Not the Abbot of Eynsham, not Schwyz, nor any other to win the glory, if glory was to be won. Wolvercote had arrived to find the queen of England at hand and must establish himself as her savior before anyone else could. If she succeeded under his generalship, Wolvercote might even be the true regent of England.

  I’m watching a man throw dice.

  He’d come to the end of his orders. He was turning, kneeling to Eleanor, his sword proffered, hilt first, for her to touch. “Always your servant, lady. To you and God in majesty, I swear my fealty.”

  And Eleanor was touching the hilt. Standing up. Skirting him to get to the chancel steps. Raising her small fist. Looking beautiful.

  “I, Eleanor, Queen of England, Duchess of Aquitaine, do swear that you are my people and that I shall love and serve you as I love and serve my gracious Lord, Jesus Christ.”

  If she expected applause, she didn’t get any. But she smiled; she was sure of her charm. “My good and faithful vassal, Lord Wolvercote, is a man of war, yet he is also a man of love, as shall be witnessed by his marriage to one of your own within a day or two, a celebration to which everyone here shall be invited.”

  That didn’t get any applause, either, but from somewhere deep within the congregation, somebody farted. Loudly.

  The men-at-arms turned their heads this way and that, looking for the culprit, but, though a shiver swept through the crowd, every face remained stolid.

  How I love the English, Adelia thought.

  The Abbot o
f Eynsham was on his feet, retrieving the situation by administering a blessing. At the “go in peace,” the doors opened and they were allowed to file out between a phalanx of armed men who directed them to go home without talking.

  Back in their room, Gyltha tore off her cloak. “Are they all gone daft, or is it me?”

  “They have.” She put Allie onto the bed; the child had been bored by the proceedings and had fallen asleep.

  “What’s to be gained by it?”

  “Infighting,” Adelia said. “He’s making sure he’s queen’s champion before she can get another. Did you see Schwyz’s face? Oh, poor Emma.”

  “‘Queen’s champion’?” scoffed Gyltha. “If Godstow wasn’t for Henry Plantagenet before, it bloody is now—that’s what the queen’s champion’s gone and done.”

  There was a knock on the door.

  It was the mercenary, Cross, truculent as ever.

  He addressed Gyltha but pointed his chin at Adelia. “She’s got to come along of me.”

  “And who are you? Here, you’re one of them.” Angrily, Gyltha pushed the man out onto the steps. “She ain’t going anywhere with you, you pirate, and you can tell that bloody Wolvercote I told you so.”

  The mercenary staggered under the assault as he held it off. “I ain’t Wolvercote’s, I’m Schwyz’s.” He appealed to Adelia. “Tell her.”

  Gyltha kept pushing. “You’re a bastard Fleming, whoever you be. Get away.”

  “Sister Jennet sent me.” It was another appeal to Adelia; Sister Jennet was Godstow’s infirmarian. “The doctor wants you for summat. Urgent.”

  Gyltha ceased her assault. “What doctor?”

  “The darky. Thought he was a bargee, but turns out he’s a doctor.”

  “A patient,” Adelia said, relieved. Here was something she could deal with. She bent down to kiss Allie and went to get her bag. “Who is it? What’s the trouble?”

  Cross said, “It’s Poyns, ain’t it?” as if she should know. “His arm’s bad.”

  “In what way bad?”

  “Gone sort of green.”

  “Hmmm.” Adelia added her bundle of knives to the bag’s equipment.

  Even as they left, accompanied by Ward, Gyltha was giving the mercenary little shoves. “An’ you bring her back as good as she goes, you scavengin’ bugger, or it’s me you’ll answer to. And what about your bloody curfew?”

  “Ain’t my curfew,” Cross shouted back. “’S Wolvercote’s.”

  It was in operation already. Ward gave a grunt in reply to the bark of a fox somewhere out in the fields, but apart from that, the abbey was quiet. As they skirted the church and turned up by the barn, a sentry stepped out of the doorway of the little round pepper pot of a building that served as the convent’s lockup.

  The flambeau above the doorway shone on his helmet. He had a pike in his hand. “Who goes there?”

  “Infirmary, mate,” Cross told him. “This here’s a nurse. Pal of mine’s poorly.”

  “Give the password.”

  “What bloody password? I’m a queen’s soldier, same as you.”

  “In the name of Lord Wolvercote, give us the password, see, or I’ll run you through.”

  “Listen here, friend ...” Avoiding the pike, Cross shambled up to the sentry, apparently to explain, and hit him on the jaw.

  He was a short man, Cross, but the taller sentry went down as if poleaxed.

  Cross didn’t even look at him. He gestured to Adelia. “Come on, will you?”

  Before obeying, she stooped to make sure the sentry was breathing. He was, and beginning to groan.

  Oh, well, it had been a password of sorts.

  “I’m coming.”

  Sister Jennet was imperiling her immortal soul by bringing in on one of her cases a man she thought to be a heathen doctor. Nor was she doing it any good, either, by acquiescing to the presence of his “assistant,” a woman whose relationship with the bishop had caused speculation among the sisterhood.

  Yet that same bishop during his visit had spoken of the skill and scope of Arab medicine in general and of this practitioner in particular, and if she was religious, Sister Jennet was also a doctor manqué; it was against every instinct of her nature to watch one of her patients die from a condition about which she could do nothing but a Saracen could.

  The tug and counter-tug of the battle within her was apparent in the anger with which she greeted Adelia. “You took your time, mistress. And leave this dog outside. It’s bad enough that I have to countenance mercenaries in the ward.” The infirmaress glared at Cross, who cowered.

  Adelia had seen infirmaries where Ward’s presence would have improved the smell. But not here. She looked around her; the long ward was as clean as any she’d encountered. Fresh straw on its boards, the scent of burning herbs from the braziers, white sheets, every patient’s head cropped close against lice, and the ordered bustle of the attendant nuns suggesting that here was efficient care for the sick.

  She shut Ward outside. “Perhaps you would tell me what I can do.”

  Sister Jennet was taken aback; Adelia’s manner and plainness of dress were unexpected in a bishop’s moll. Somewhat mollified, the infirmaress explained what she required of Dr. Mansur. “... but we are both imprisoned in the damned Tower of Babel.”

  “I see,” Adelia said. “You can’t understand him.” Mansur probably understood quite well but could not move without her.

  “Nor he me. It is why I sent for you. You speak his tongue, I understand.” She paused. “Is he as skilled as Bishop Rowley declared him to be?” At the mention of the name, her eyes flickered to Adelia’s face and away.

  “You will not be disappointed,” Adelia promised her.

  “Well, anything is better than the village barber. Don’t stand there. Come along.” She glared again at the mercenary. “You, too, I suppose.”

  The patient was at the far end of the ward. They’d put woven screens of withies round the bed, but the smell coming from beyond confirmed the reason for Sister Jennet’s need of unChristian help.

  He was a young man, his terror at his surroundings enhanced by the tall, white-robed, dark-faced figure looming over him. “It don’t hurt,” he kept saying. “It don’t hurt.”

  Mansur spoke in Arabic. “Where have you been?”

  Adelia replied in the same tongue. “Summoned to church. We’re under military rule.”

  “Who are we fighting?”

  “God knows. Snowmen. What have we got here?”

  Mansur leaned forward and gently lifted a covering of lint from the boy’s left arm.

  “No time to waste, I think.”

  There wasn’t. The mangled lower arm was black and discharging stinking, yellow pus.

  “How did it happen?” Adelia demanded in English—and added, as she so often had to, “The doctor wants to know.” Cross spoke up. “Caught it under a cartwheel on the march to the tower, clumsy young bugger. Put some ointment on it, can’t you?”

  “Can you leave him his elbow?” Mansur asked.

  “No.” The telltale signs of necrosis were already racing upward beyond the joint.

  “We’ll be lucky if we can save his life.”

  “Why did the little woman not do it herself earlier?”

  “She can’t. She’s not allowed to shed blood.” The Church’s proscription against surgery was absolute. Sister Jennet could not disobey it.

  Mansur’s hawklike nose wrinkled. “They would leave him to die?”

  “They were going to send for the Wolvercote barber.” The horror of it overcame her. “A barber, dear God.”

  “A barber who sheds blood? He need not shave me, Imshallah.”

  Even had he been called in, the barber would have had to do his work in the kitchen to avoid offending God’s nose with bloodshed in the area of the sacred cloister. Now, so would Adelia. This added tussle of medicine versus her religion caused such turbulence in Sister Jennet that she made arrangements for the operation in a rap of furious order
s, and watched Mansur carry her patient out of the ward as if she hated them both. “And you,” she shouted at the despised Cross, “you crawl back to your kennel. They don’t want you.”

  “We do,” Adelia told her. “He ... er, he knows the password.”

  However, the procession of doctor, patient, doctor’s assistant, her dog, mercenary, and two nuns bearing clean linen and palliasse went unchallenged as it emerged via the door from the infirmary chapel and turned left toward the kitchen.

  Adelia let the others go in first and caught Cross by the front of his jerkin before he could enter. She was going to need him; the patient would be less frightened if Cross, his friend, were present. She didn’t like Cross much—well, he didn’t like her—but she thought she could trust him to keep silent. “Listen to me, that boy’s arm has to come off, and I ...”

  “What you mean ‘come off’?”

  She kept it simple. “There’s poison spreading up your friend’s arm. If it gets to his heart, he will die.”

  “Ain’t the darky going to say magic words over it or summat?”

  “No, he’s going to amputate, cut it off. Or rather, I am going to do it for him but ...”

  “Can’t. You’re a woman.”

  Adelia shook him; there wasn’t time for this.

  “Have you seen the state of the doctor’s hands? They’re in bandages. You will hear him talk and see me work but ...”

  “He’s going to tell you what to do, is that it?” Cross was slightly reassured. “Here, though, what’s my lad going to do without his bloody arm?”

  “What’s he going to do without his bloody life?” Adelia shook the man again. “The point is ... you must swear never to tell anybody, anybody, what you see tonight. Do you understand?” Cross’s unlovely, troubled face cleared. “Is magic, ain’t it? The darky’s going to do sorcery, that’s why the nuns ain’t allowed to see.”

  “Who’s your patron saint?”

  “Saint Acacias, a’course. He always done well by me.”

  “Swear on him that you will not tell.”