The Serpent's Tale

by Ariana Franklin

  How far Oxford was she didn’t know, either, but at this rate of progress, Godstow could only be an hour or so away—and there, somehow, she must get ashore.

  With this determined, Adelia felt calmer, a doctor again—and one with an ailing patient on her hands. Part of her extreme irritation had been because she was hungry. It came to her that Dakers was probably even hungrier than she was, faint from it—there’d been no sign of food in the Wormhold kitchen when they’d investigated it.

  Adelia, though she might condemn the thieving mercenaries, hadn’t come empty-handed out of Rosamund’s chamber, either; there’d been food left on the queen’s tray, and hard times had taught her the value of foraging.

  Well, Rosamund wasn’t going to eat it.

  She delved into her pocket and brought out a lumpy napkin, unfolded it, broke off a large piece from the remains of Eleanor’s veal pie, and waved it under Dakers’s nose. The smell of it acted as a restorative; it was snatched from her fingers.

  Making sure the soldiers couldn’t see her—she could barely see them in the darkness under the sail—she leaned forward again and slid the cheese she’d also filched between Jacques and Rowley until she felt the roped hand of one of them investigate it, grasp it, and squeeze her own hand in acknowledgment. There came a pause in the three men’s bailing, during which, she guessed, the cheese was being secretly portioned, causing the soldiers to shout at them again.

  The remains of the veal pie she divided between herself and Ward.

  After that there was little to be done but endure and bail. Every so often, the sail drooped so heavily between them that one of the men had to punch it from underneath in order to rid it of the snow weighting it.

  The level of water slopping below her raised legs refused to go down, however much she threw over the side; each breath she expelled wetted the cloak muffling her mouth, freezing immediately so that her lips became raw. The sailcloth scraped against her head as she bent and came up again. But if she stopped, the cold would congeal the blood in her veins. Keep on bailing, stay alive, live to see Allie again.

  Rowley’s elbow jerked into her knees. She went on bailing, lean, dip, toss, lean, dip, toss; she’d been doing it forever, would continue forever. Rowley had to nudge her again before she realized she could stop. There was no water coming in.

  The wind had lessened. They were in a muffled silence, and light of a sort—was it day?—came through the window of the sail’s gap, beyond which snow was falling so thickly it confused the eye into giving the impression that the boat was progressing through air filled with swansdown.

  The cold also coming in through the gap had numbed her right side and shoulder. She leaned forward and pressed against Rowley’s back to preserve some warmth for the two of them, pulling Dakers with her so that the housekeeper’s body was against Jacques’s.

  Rowley turned his head slightly, and she felt his breath on her forehead. “Well?”

  Adelia shifted higher to peer over his shoulder. Despite the fall in the wind, the swollen river was running faster than ever and putting the rowing boat in danger of crashing into the barge or veering against a bank.

  One of the soldiers—she thought it was Cross, the younger of the two—was fending off, having abandoned the shelter of the sail so that it drooped over his companion, who was hunched over the prow thwart, exhausted or asleep, or both.

  There was no movement, either, from Walt or Jacques. Dakers was still slumped against Jacques’s back.

  Adelia nosed Rowley’s hood away from his ear and put her lips against it: “They’re going to raise Eleanor’s standard at Oxford. They think the Midlands will rise up and join her rebellion.”

  “How many men? At Oxford, how many men?” “A thousand, I think.”

  “Did I see Eynsham back there?”

  “Yes. Who is he?”

  “Bastard. Clever. Got the ear of the Pope. Don’t trust him.”

  “Schwyz?” she asked.

  “Bastard mercenary. First-class soldier.”

  “Somebody called Wolvercote is in charge of the army at Oxford.”

  “A bastard.”

  That disposed of the main players, then. She rested her face against his cheek in momentary contentment.

  “Got your knife?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Cut this bloody rope.” He jiggled his bound hands.

  She took another look at the soldier crouching by the prow; his eyes were closed.

  “Come on.” Rowley’s mouth barely moved. “I’ll be getting off in a minute.” They might have been journeying luxuriously together and he’d remembered a prior destination to hers.

  “No.” She put her arms round him.

  “Don’t,” he said. “I’ve got to find Henry. Warn him.”

  “No.” In this blizzard, nobody would find anybody. He’d die. The fen people told tales about this sort of snowstorm, of unwary cottagers, having ventured out in it to lock up their poultry or bring in the cow, unable to find their way back through a freezing, whirling thickness that took away sight and sense of direction so that they ended up stiff and dead only yards from their own front doors. “No,” she said again.

  “Cut this bloody rope.”

  The soldier in the prow stirred and muttered, “What you doing?”

  They waited until he settled again.

  “Do you want me to go with my hands tied?”

  Rowley breathed.

  Christ God, how she loathed him. And loathed Henry Plantagenet. The king, always the king if it costs my life, yours, our child’s, all happiness.

  She delved into her pocket, gripped the knife, and seriously considered sticking it into his leg. He couldn’t then go wandering about in a circle and end up as a mound of ice in some field.

  “I hate you,” she told him. Tears were freezing on her eyelashes.

  “I know. Cut the bloody rope.”

  Holding the knife, she slid her right arm farther around him, all the time watching the man in the prow, wondering why she didn’t alert him so that Rowley would be restrained ...

  She couldn’t. She didn’t know what fate Eleanor intended for her prisoner or, even if it was a benign one, what Eynsham or Schwyz might do.

  Her fingers found his hands and walked their way to the rope round his wrists. She began cutting, carefully—the knife was so sharp that a wrong move could open one of his veins.

  One strand severed, another. As she worked, she hissed bile. “Your leman, am I? No use to you, am I? I hope you freeze in hell—and Henry with you.”

  The last strand went, and she felt him flex his hands to get their circulation back.

  He turned his head so that he could kiss her. His chin scraped her cheek.

  “No use at all,” he said, “except to make the sun come up.”

  And he was gone.

  Jacques took charge. Adelia heard him put a sob into his voice, telling the furious Cross that the collision with the bank had caused the bishop to fall overboard.

  She heard the mercenary’s reply: “He’s dead meat, then.”

  Jacques burst into a loud wail but smoothly took Ward off Adelia’s lap, shifted her so that she sat between him and Walt with the sleeping Dakers resting on her back, and returned the dog to its place under her cloak.

  She was barely aware of the change. Except to make the sun come up.

  I’ll make the sun come up if I see him again. I’ll kill him. Dear Lord, keep him safe.

  The snow stopped, and the heavy clouds that carried it rolled away westward. The sun came out and Cross rolled back the sail, thinking there was warmth to be had.

  Adelia took no notice of that, either, until Walt nudged her. “What’s up with he, mistress?”

  She raised her head. The two mercenaries were sitting on the prow thwart opposite. The one called Cross was trying to rouse his companion. “Come on, Giorgio, upsy-daisy. Weren’t your fault we lost the bloody bishop. Come on, now.”

  “He’s dead,” Ade
lia told him. The man’s boots were fixed in the solidified bilge water. Just another frozen corpse to add to the night’s list.

  “Can’t be. Can’t be. I kept him in the warm, well, warm as I could.” Cross’s bad-tempered face was agonized.

  Lord, this death is important to this man. It should be important to me.

  For the look of the thing, Adelia stretched so that her hand rested against the dead man’s neck where a pulse should be. He was rigid. She shook her head. He’d been considerably older than his friend.

  Jacques and Walt genuflected. She took the living soldier’s hand in one of hers. “I’m sorry, Master Cross.” She spoke the end words: “May God have mercy on his soul.”

  “He was bloody sitting here, keeping warm, I thought.”

  “I know. You did your best for him.”

  “Why ain’t you lot dead, then?” Anger was returning. “You was sitting same as him.”

  Useless to say that they had been bailing and therefore moving, just as Cross himself, who, even though exposed to the wind, had been active in preventing collision. And poor Giorgio had been alone, with no human warmth next to him.

  “I’m sorry,” she said again. “He was old, the cold was too much for him.”

  Cross said, “Taught me soldiering, he did. We been through three campaigns together. Sicilian, he was.”

  “So am I.”

  “Oh.”

  “Don’t move him,” she said sharply.

  Cross was trying to gather the body up so as to lay it along the thwart. Like Rosamund’s, its rigor would persist until it encountered heat—there was none in this sun—and the sight of it on its back with knees and hands curved like a dog’s was not one its friend would want to see.

  Walt said, “By Gor, ain’t that Godstow by there?”

  Allie.

  She realized that she was surrounded by a glittering, diamond-hard landscape that she had to shade her eyes to look at. Trees had been upended, their roots like ghastly, desperate, twiggy fingers frozen in the act of appeal. For the rest, the countryside appeared flattened by the monstrous weight of snow fallen on it so that what had been dips in the ground were merely smooth shallows among the rises they interspersed. Straight threads of smoke rising against a cornflower-blue sky showed that the lumps scattered on the rise above the bank were half-buried houses.

  There was a small, humped bridge in the distance, white as marble; she and Rowley had stood on it one night in another century. Beyond that—she had to squeeze her eyes nearly shut to see—many threads of smoke and, where the bridge ended, a wood and the suggestion of gates.

  She was opposite the village of Wolvercote. Over there, though she couldn’t see it, stood the nunnery of Godstow. Where Allie was.

  Adelia stood, slipped, and rocked the boat in her scramble to get up again. “Put us ashore,” she told Cross, but he didn’t seem to hear her. Walt and Jacques pulled her down.

  The galloper said, “No good, mistress, even supposing ...”

  “Look at the bank, mistress,” Walt told her.

  She looked at it—a small cliff where flat pasture should have been. Farther in, what appeared to be enormous frozen bushes were, in fact, the spread branches of mature oak trees standing in drifts that must be—Adelia estimated—fifteen feet or more deep.

  “We’d never get through,” Jacques was saying.

  She pleaded, begged, while knowing it was true; perhaps when the inhabitants disinterred themselves, they would dig tunnels through the snow to reach the river, but until then, or until it thawed, she was separated from the convent as if by a mountain barrier. She would have to sit in this boat and be swept away past Allie, only God knowing how or when, or if, she could get back to her.

  They’d passed the village now. They were nearly at the bridge that crossed the tributary serving the mill. The Thames was widening into the great sweep that would take it around the convent’s meadows.

  And something was happening to it ...

  The barge had slowed. Its sides were too high to see what was occurring on its deck, but there was activity and a lot of swearing.

  “What’s the matter?”

  Walt picked up one of the bailers, dipped it over the side, brought it back, and stirred his finger in it. “Look at this.”

  They looked. The cupped water was gray and granulated, as if somebody had poured salt into it. “What is it?”

  “It’s ice,” Walt said softly. “It’s bloody ice.” He looked around. “Must be shallower here. It’s ice, that’s what it is. The river’s freezing up.”

  Adelia stared at it, then up at Walt, then back to the river. She sat down suddenly and gave thanks for a miracle as wonderful as any in the Bible; liquid was turning solid, one element changing into another. They would have to stop. They could walk ashore and, many as they were, they could dig their way through to the convent.

  She looked back to count the boats behind them. There were no boats. As far as the eye could see, the river was empty, graying along this stretch but gaining a blueness as it twisted away into a dazzling, silent distance.

  Blinking, she searched for a sight of the contingent that should have been accompanying them along the towpath.

  But there was no towpath—of course there wasn’t. Instead, where it had been, was a wavy, continuous bank of frozen snow, taller than two men in some places, with its side edge formed by wind and water as neatly as if some titanic pastry cook with a knife had sheared off the ragged bits of icing round the top of a cake.

  For a second, because her mind was directed only at reaching her daughter, Adelia thought, It doesn’t matter, there are enough of us to dig a path ...

  And then, “Dear Lord, where are they?” she said. “All those people?”

  The sun went on shining beautifully, unfairly, pitilessly, on an empty river where, perhaps, in its upper reaches men and women sat in their boats as unmoving as Giorgio sat in this one, where, perhaps, corpses rolled in sparkling water.

  And what of the riders? Where were they, God help them? Where was Rowley?

  The answering silence was terrible because it was the only answer. It trapped the oaths and grunts of effort from the barge as if in a bell jar, so that they echoed back in an otherwise soundless air.

  The men on board it labored on, plunging poles through the shallow, thickening water until they found purchase on the river bottom and could push the barge another yard, another ...

  After a while, the bell jar filled with sounds like the cracks of whips—they were encountering surface sheet ice and having to break through it.

  They inched past the point of the river where it divided and a stream turned off toward the mill and the bridge. There was no noise from the millrace, where a fall of water hung in shining stillness.

  And, oh, God Almighty save our souls, in all this wonder, somebody had used the bridge as a gibbet; two glistening, distorted figures hung from it by the neck—Adelia, looking up, glimpsed two dead faces looking quizzically sideways and down at her, saw two pairs of pointing feet, as if their owners had been frozen in a neat little dancing jump.

  Nobody else seemed to notice, or care. Walt and Jacques were using the oars to pole the rowing boat along so that it didn’t drag on the barge. Dakers sat next to her now, her hood over her face; somebody had placed the sail around the two of them to keep them warm.

  They inched past the bridge and into an even wider bend where the Thames ran along a Godstow meadow—which, astonishingly, still was a meadow. Some freak of the wind had scoured it of snow so that a great expanse of frosted grass and earth provided the only color in a white world.

  And here the barge stopped because the ice had become too thick to proceed farther. It didn’t matter, it didn’t matter—there was a scar leading down the rise from the convent to the shore and, at the bottom of it, convent men with shovels were shouting and waving, and everybody in the two boats was shouting and waving back as if it were they who were marooned and had glimpsed a rescuing
sail coming toward them ...

  Only then did Adelia realize that she had been sustained through the night on borrowed energy and it was now being debited out of her body so quickly that she was close to the languor that comes with death. It had been a very near thing.

  They had to disembark onto ice and cross it to reach land. Ward’s paws slipped and he went down, sliding, until he could scrabble resentfully up again. An arm went round Adelia’s waist to help her along and she looked up into the face of Mansur. “Allah is merciful,” he said.

  “Somebody is,” she said. “I was so frightened for you. Mansur, we’ve lost Rowley.”

  Half-carried, she stumbled across the ice beside him and then across the flattened grass of the meadow.

  Among the small crowd ahead, she glimpsed Eleanor’s upright figure before it disappeared into the tunnel that led up to the convent gates, a steep, thin pathway with walls twice head height on either side. It had been dug to take Rosamund’s coffin; instead, it received a litter made out of oars and wrapped around with sailcloth, under which rested the contorted body of a mercenary soldier.

  A beautiful tunnel, though. At its top stood an elderly woman, her studied impassivity displaying her relief. “You took your time.”

  As Adelia fell, babbling, into her arms, Gyltha said, “A’course she’s well. Fat and fit as a flea. Think as I can’t look after her? Gor dang, girl, you only left her yesterday.”

  EIGHT

  If her heart sank at the prospect of feeding and housing the forty or so exhausted, bedraggled, frostbitten men, women, and dogs shambling through her gates, Mother Edyve gave no sign of it, though it must have sunk further when she saw that they included the Queen of England and the Abbot of Eynsham, neither of them friends to Godstow, to say nothing of a troop of mercenary soldiers.

  It didn’t occur to her that she was welcoming a force of occupation.

  She ordered hot possets for her guests. She surrendered her house to Queen Eleanor and her maids, lodged the abbot and Montignard in the men’s guesthouse with their and the queen’s male servants, and quartered Schwyz on the gatekeeper. She put the queen’s dogs and hawks in her own kennels and mews, distributing the other mercenaries as widely as she could, billeting one on the smith, another in the bakery, and the rest among individual—and aged— retainers and pensioners in the houses that formed a small village within the convent walls.