by Peter Telep
“She just told me she works for Moma. Let me guess, Moma and her trollops do certain favors for the abbot?” “Shush! Lower your voice.” Montague peered around the room as if the abbot’s spies had transformed them selves into flies that had found purchase on the walls. Then he made clear his action. “These walls are thin.”
Doyle’s lip rose in a sour grin. “I cannot wait to meet this abbot,” he said quietly. “He makes deals with the Picts and Saxons—and sleeps with whores.”
Montague winked. “And we should be glad he does. His, shall we say, appetite, will work to our benefit, laddie.”
Montague’s implication reeked of something. “Hold a moment. You’re not thinking of doing what I think you’re doing?”
“I first thought of threatening to expose him as a means for him to hire us,” Montague said, rubbing a sore spot on one of his fingers, a spot that had only recently been covered by a gemstone ring, a spot that probably represented payment to Morna for Jennifer’s services. “But that’s very bad business, you under stand. And would probably land us on a pyre. No, we’re not more powerful than the abbot. Morna and I have come up with another plan that we think is even better.”
“Before you tell me about it,” Doyle said, “what can you tell me about Jennifer”?
“Stay away from that one, laddie,” Montague said, his voice going stern. “She’s trouble. And remember what she is.”
“I didn’t ask for advice; I asked about her.”
Montague snickered. “I guess you’ll learn the hard way, in more ways than one. Find out about her for yourself. But stay away. Now, listen to the plan.”
Before Doyle could argue further, Montague spelled out the details of their meeting on the morrow with the abbot. He knew he should have been listening to Montague, but he couldn’t direct his attention away from the remembrance of Jennifer on top of him and how he’d stroked her heavenly skin.
When he was finished, Montague asked for Doyle’s opinion, to which Doyle replied,“I’m still not sure about it. Can you go over it one more time”?
7
Marigween’s head throbbed. She was dimly aware of her body, of the pressure under her chest. As some saliva reached her tongue, she discovered a sour taste and remembered the ale. She heard the strain and groan of timbers, then felt her weight pitch involuntarily to the left. She tried to open her eyes, then remembered the blindfold. She tried to move her arms, found them still bound together at the wrists behind her back. Fragments of memory collected further. They had brought her here, blindfolded her, and forced the ale down her throat. She realized that while she had slept she had wet her shift.
The cog tipped again, a little more gently this time. She rolled onto her side, coughed, and then, before the nausea caused any real discomfort, she retched, retched again, then it all came up. There was no way of telling where the vomit had gone, onto the bed or over its side. A bed of bile and piss and darkness was her home now.
Her physical discomfort was, however, a paradise compared to the pain of losing little Baines. She coughed up more spew, and one cheek became wet with drool and something else. After the fit she tried to imagine what they had done with her baby. She’d seen him one minute, then the next he had been silent and gone. Was there any chance at all that Baines was still alive? She wanted to cling to that hope, but it might cause her even more pain if she discovered the worst. Yet that was what mothers did; they never lost hope; they never stopped praying; they never stopped loving.
The average mother was, however, not aboard a Saxon cog, bound and throwing up and awaiting the torture of foreigners. It was hard to maintain hope for her child when she had so little for herself. Torture would begin between her legs.
Timbers creaked again, but this time it wasn’t the settling of the cog on the channel. She heard footsteps, loud ones, and they were spaced more apart than an average step, as if someone now descended a ladder.
“Who’s there?” she asked, then wished she hadn’t. They couldn’t understand her anyway, and now they knew she was awake.
She heard someone draw near. Her blindfold was removed, and the skin it had covered seemed to leap from her face. She opened her eyes. The room was gratefully dark, illuminated by what was probably a single candle resting somewhere unseen. It only took a moment for her gaze to adjust.
A short man stood before her. His face was clean shaven and very plain. There was nothing about it that she would remember. So, too, was his hair, not long, not short, just there, perhaps a bit gray. Admittedly, it was hard to see him while lying on her side, hard to note the rest of the shadowy room, which she decided was a small cabin interposed by the structural beams of the ship. In fact, her half-inverted view made her want to vomit again; she heaved, but there was no liquid reply.
“Easy there. I’m here to help—if you’ll be nice about it,” he suggested quietly.
She shivered. “I’m so ill. And I’m wet.” He rolled her down onto her chest.
“What are you doing?” She shivered again, this time from the raw thought that he might hurt her.
Then she realized he was untying the bindings on her wrist. “I’m going to clean you up,” he said. “The hatch is locked from the outside—so forget about running.”
Marigween had been so preoccupied by her grotesque condition that she only now noticed that the short man spoke her tongue.
“Are you a Celt?” she asked, feeling her hands come apart, the skin of her wrists bounding in freedom.
He moved to her legs. She’d barely felt the bindings that coiled over her boots. He made a noise that might have been a chuckle, but there was a trail of something else behind it, maybe sarcasm. “No, I’m no Celt,” he answered as he struggled with a knot.
“But you know the language.”
“I’ve been out of practice,” the sailor confessed.
“It doesn’t sound like it. Do you know what happened to my child?”
“No.” His tone was flat; she couldn’t tell if he’d lied or not.
As her legs came free, she fervently prayed their conversation had caused the man to lower his guard. Marigween pulled one knee toward her chest as she rolled onto her back. She thrust the leg forward and drove her foot into the short man’s abdomen.
He flew backward to the opposite wall of the cabin, shrank toward the deck, then hit it with a low thud.
She sat up and looked for the leather cord that had bound her. She found it on the soaked blanket, snatched it, then hopped from the bed. She fell to her knees before the disoriented sailor, threw the cord over his head and wrapped it once, twice, around his neck; but, before she could pull it taut and squeeze him into hell, he slipped his fingers under the choker. He ripped the cord from his neck and out of her grip.
Marigween didn’t see his hand coming from the right, only the shadow of it on the wall behind him, an image that reached her too late. His palm struck her cheek with a force that toppled her. She groaned as her face kissed the moist, splintery deck of the cabin, and she thought the fire in her skin might touch off a blaze in the small room.
He slammed her onto her back, sat upon her chest, and pinned her hands behind her head.
With her breath ragged and the taste of blood in her mouth, she stared at his gloomy face. His eyes were so narrow with anger that she could barely see them. A bead of sweat slid down his heavily pored nose, formed a drop which hung on the tip of his nose, then dropped to her neck. She thought he smelled terrible, then dis covered that the odor came from herself.
“You don’t have to hurt me.” “Maybe I do,” he said.
At that moment, Marigween realized the mistake she’d made. She should have gone for the hatch and to hell with him. But he’d said the hatch was locked from the outside. Then again, he could have been lying. She stopped punishing herself; it didn’t matter now—not much of anything did. He was going to hurt her. No amount of pleading would change that. She’d tried, failed, and would now pay.
&nb
sp; He looked at her and tried to catch his breath. He squeezed her wrists tighter and tighter, but then, with out warning, he released his grip and climbed quickly off of her. She sat up and looked at him as he moved a step back. His expression loosened from rage to some thing on the order of frustration. He rubbed the spot on his chest where she’d booted him.
She sprang up. Indeed, there was a short ladder of six rungs that led up to a hatch. She reached the ladder and, taking every other rung, climbed to the hatch. She slid the latch back and pushed up with a balled fist. The hatch would not give. She heard a voice from the other side of the wood, and then her captor shouted an unfamiliar reply from below.
Marigween went slack, and her will fled. She wanted to drop off the ladder, hit her head on the floor, and end the madness. She closed her eyes, let herself go, felt the hot, sticky air of the cabin rush up and lift her hair from her shoulders and neck.
But she felt the sailor there in an attempt to catch her, and the two of them crashed onto the deck. With her eyes still closed, and new sensations of pain birthing, Marigween curled herself into a ball and cried.
She heard him rise and say, “Were you not the captain’s, I would’ve—” he broke off.
Marigween’s imagination finished his sentence. She continued to cry as hard as anyone could. She tightened the fist that was her body, then ordered her heart to stop beating.
8
The insipid druid had been right. Orvin wouldn’t kill himself over the fact that they had reached Blytheheart by sundown and had proven Merlin’s calculations correct. He would, however, die if he didn’t get something else to eat besides his words. Repentance Row was barely visible through the fog, nor was there enough moon or torchlight to fully uncloak the cultivated fields of the tofts to their right. Even the lights from Saints Michael and George Cathedral on their left offered only a small token of illumination.
Merlin had been silent since descending the bluffs. That worried Orvin; when the druid kept to himself it meant he was thinking. And when Merlin thought too much, all of Britain was in jeopardy.
Perhaps Orvin had exaggerated just a little bit. But the druid had influence over Arthur, and that influence was not good. The king had to learn how to rule by him self. The way Orvin had trained the young saint to act independently, so should it be with Merlin and Arthur. He’d offered that advice to Merlin; the druid acknowledged the merit of the argument, then ignored it, sup plying Orvin with another reason to detest the man.
“Do not fret, Sir Orvin,” Merlin said as he shuffled over the cobblestoned street with effort, “there are no plans for the realm in my silence. Only plans of where I shall rest my head on this foggy eve.”
Orvin stopped. He was hit by a jolt, a mental pillar from above that drove through his head and buried itself in his stomach. The pillar marked this spot, this moment, as some bizarre milestone in his relationship with the self-proclaimed wizard. “Get out of my mind,” he ordered the druid.
Merlin’s smile was a dull yellow thing in desperate need of polishing. “We’ve made progress, you and I,” he said. “The longer we travel together, the closer our thoughts become. So it always is on a long journey.”
A merchant’s cart that was jam-packed with sacks of grain lumbered up the road toward them. Orvin held in his reply as they moved closer to the edge of the street. The two men driving the cart tipped their heads in a greeting as they passed. Once the cart was swallowed by the fog behind them, and the racket it made was nearly gone, Orvin resumed the conversation. “Our journey has been too long, and now you’re amusing yourself by guess ing at my thoughts—something which annoys me to the core! We’ve made no progress at all.”
Merlin shook his head in disagreement. “I did not guess at your thoughts, Orvin. I’ve come to understand you, and your fear of me. And I see I’ve touched on a nerve.”
Orvin turned away from the older one and resumed his trek down the row. He did not care if the druid fol lowed, but knew he would. “The only thing I am afraid of is what you’re doing to Pendragon’s son,” he called back.
The druid arrived at his side. He was out of breath and fought to keep up. “Won’t your sky tell you what I’m going to do?”
Orvin stiffened his jaw and increased his pace, knowing it would cause the other pain. It had been too many days since he’d stared at the blue arch and drawn from it the feelings, the images, the sensations of what would be. Premonitions born in the clouds came and went; some he paid attention to and some he did not. But never, never had he been able to sense anything about the druid. It was as if Merlin had some power to block from the world feelings and imagery that concerned himself. Merlin was, after all, the man who had taught him the art; the druid probably knew many ways to hide himself from it.
“Trick cups and shells, disappearing cards, weighted dice, those are your games and the way you play them,” Orvin said. His feet were just beyond excruciatingly tired, his back a notch beyond that. He almost felt like giving up the argument, but if his greatest pleasure—food—still eluded him, he would continue to indulge in his second-greatest pleasure as a means to forget about the misery.
Gazing ahead, Merlin replied, “One can only hold up a shield for so long before it is pounded into uselessness.”
“Correct, druid. So why do you not admit you’ve been wrong? Leave Pendragon’s son alone. He’s capable.”
“I was referring to the shield you are hiding behind, Orvin. You spent more time with me in your youth than you did with your father.”
“That was not his fault. He was busy building a castle.
If it weren’t for him—”
“So I tried to teach you what he could not,” Merlin said, cutting him off and keeping the conversation where he wanted it to go.
“And you failed, druid! You failed! You failed with me the same way you will fail with Arthur.”
Merlin had not touched on a nerve; he’d touched on all of them. There were many reasons Orvin had for hat ing the druid, all of them seeming perfectly logical, all of them reasons any outsider would understand. But Orvin knew that his chief reason for loathing the wizard mixed reason and emotion, and that blend would not hold up to careful scrutiny. Yes, Orvin knew that, knew his reason was irrational, but he didn’t care. It was Merlin’s fault.
“I did not fail with you,” Merlin said. “You believe you failed with your own son. And blame that failure on me. You think I could have made you a better father, a father who would’ve been able to talk Hasdale out of a vengeful quest. You believe if I had done the proper job, your son would be alive today.”
Orvin thrust his foot out in front of Merlin. The druid tripped and fell forward onto the stone. It was a small miracle that the old man was able to break his fall—though only slightly—with the palms of his hands. Orvin walked past the man, not bothering to look back and see if the other was hurt. “A pox be on you for talk ing too much.”
Orvin shuddered. His fragile ego had snapped like an overwindlassed bowstring. Tripping the druid was childish and improper to say the least, despicable to say the most.
“I loved you like a son, Orvin,” Merlin said, his voice cracking as he tried to project it.
He did not want to admit it, but there was a smidgen of guilt over hurting the old man; now Merlin’s words ladled out a bellyful. Orvin stopped and turned around.
Merlin winced as he brushed dust from his hands and the knees of his robe. He set off toward Orvin with a noticeable limp, adding, “I loved Uther Pendragon no less, and Arthur, his son, with as much passion. I’ve never known three men such as you.” He came within arm’s length of Orvin and stopped. “I did everything I could for you, Orvin. Taught you all that I know. I could not convince you to leave the knighthood, and so I accepted that—just as you should accept that your father did everything he could for you, and you did everything you could for your son. But no man is more powerful than fate. I have tampered with it and have discovered there is no control
ling it. It goes where it wants—even with a druid’s intervention. Your father’s fate, your fate, your son’s fate, Arthur’s fate, and even Britain’s fate … none of them have ever been fully in my hands.”
Orvin had, for many moons, rested on the comfort able pillow of blaming Merlin for everything. It was hard to pull that pillow away, to rest his head on the cold, hard rock of reason. Could it be that Merlin had admitted something was more powerful than himself? In all the years he’d known the druid, never once had he heard the man open up as much as he had on this eve. Was there an ulterior motive under his modest confession?
“Why are you telling me this?” Orvin asked, his gaze probing the other’s.
“Because I believe that peace is not far from this realm, and not far from our hearts. You were a good father and good husband, Orvin. Much better than Uther. There was a time when I truly thought you had obtained that balance between mind and heart. And it was you I told the young Arthur to look to for an example. You were the embodiment back then. And in many ways, you still are. You took a saddlemaker’s son and turned him into an excellent squire. Of course your young patron saint has made many errors, but he’s done many great things, as you have. Now, if you’ll permit me to walk with you, we should make haste for the monastery.”
Merlin had offered a lot to ponder. Orvin had always assumed that the druid harbored a resentment toward him for not becoming a soothsayer. The druid had once said that he’d learned to tolerate Orvin. Had he now learned to love him again? So he said. Merlin was not wont to lie, but still, there was a nagging sensation that he wanted to make a reconciliation for some other reason than the fact that he felt Britain would be at peace and so should they. That analogy held no water. The druid could feel guilty, or was it something else?
Orvin thought of apologizing, but felt too awkward to do so. He simply turned from the druid as an indication that he agreed with the man: yes, they should be going. They had a duty and were wasting time.
