By the time I registered that I was not only not dead, but— a far worse affair— completely alive, the young man had returned his attention to me. “You’re not a murderer,” he declared. “You’re a suicide. Suicide is a sin and by St. John, I will not assist you in it.”
I gawked. “I just tried to kill your master!” I protested. “Look, you stupid ass, I’ll do it again!” I scrambled to my feet, light-headed, fighting back the urge to scream and laugh hysterically at once, and unsteadily I raised the spike. This time I wouldn’t hesitate, I’d show the whoreson I meant business. He’d have no choice but to cut me down.
But everything seemed to slow. He grabbed me again, both of those meaty mitts reaching for my right hand, and again he heaved me down effortlessly. By the time I hit the floor of the tent, he held my spike. He tossed it away out of my reach. “You pulled back,” he announced. “We both saw it. You made sure not to hurt his lordship the marquis. You are goading me to kill you and I won’t do it. Nor will anybody else.”
He called out, “Richard,” and a sweet-faced boy with a colorless wisp of facial down trotted into the tent. The knight gave him an order and Richard moved toward me, matter-of-factly began to tie my hands in front of me.
“What are you doing?” I shouted, horrified.
“You are now my captive,” the knight informed me— as if I should consider myself lucky. “No more of this nonsense.” Inexplicably, although I no longer liked him, he still seemed to have a warm, earnest glow to him, as if this were his normal state.
“I’m a criminal,” I protested. “Execute me, idiot, do the world a favor.”
He grimaced disapprovingly and shook his head. And then, as if he were my loving older brother trying to teach me a lesson, he said, “From what I’ve seen, you are a sinner, not a criminal, and the burden of a sinner is to repent.”
This could not really be happening. “You want me to repent?” I repeated weakly.
He nodded. The elegant marquis, watching us, looked almost amused now. “You will repent the impulse toward self-murder,” announced the knight. “And whatever blackness is in your soul that drove you to such despair in the first place, you must also repent of that.”
“And then you’ll execute me?” I insisted, desperate.
The marquis laughed. The knight did not. The knight seemed to have nothing resembling a sense of humor at all. He was, it now seemed obvious, German.
Ordinarily I would not have sat there passively, letting some boy-child tie me in knots insufficient to keep a tree from running off. But I’d just tossed myself into the arms of Death…and Death had tossed me back. I was in a state of shock. So when the boy pulled me to standing, I stood. Then, almost as an afterthought, I struggled against his grip. Only because I dimly remembered that I probably should.
“Bind his wrists, but don’t hurt his hands,” the knight said to the boy. “Look at those hands. I think he’s a musician.”
I stopped struggling, startled. I followed the boy out of the tent, blinking stupidly in the brilliant haze of the Venetian afternoon.
About the Author
Award-winning screenwriter NICOLE GALLAND is working on her fourth novel, set in Leominster, England. An itinerant gypsy for much of her adult life, she has recently married, and rumor has it she will even settle down soon.
www.nicolegalland.com
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PRAISE FOR
Nicole Galland and Revenge of the Rose
“A clever novel of courtly love…entertains with a flourish.”
— Publishers Weekly
“Galland has an exceptional gift for characters and relationships.”
— Neal Stephenson, author of The Baroque Cycle
“A tasty fictional stew, mixing elements of twelfth-century culture together skillfully to produce a veritable reading feast…. The combination of vicious politics, mysterious doings, betrayals, and double-dealing, added to a leisurely but engaging plot, will keep those pages turning.”
— Booklist
PRAISE FOR
The Fool’s Tale
“A wallop of a first novel— entertaining and engaging.”
— San Francisco Chronicle
“An ambitious and eminently theatrical story of power, passion, and illicit love…. Galland keeps the reader guessing about the outcome until the very last page.”
— Contra Costa Times
“Set in an age when marriage was strategy, love was temptation, and treachery was a tool of survival, Nicole Galland’s The Fool’s Tale creates a vivid twelfth-century world and three unforgettable characters whose lives entwine with war and politics and climax in an ending as haunting as it is powerful.”
— William Dietrich, author of Hadrian’s Wall
“The characters and descriptions in Galland’s world certainly are worth stopping by to meet as the story gallops through a time of treachery, rife with infighting among the four kingdoms of Wales and border clashes with the English barons…. As we share life from the perspective of each of the three main characters, understanding takes its turn amid powerful emotional tides, awash in realities of today.”
— Albany Times Union
ALSO BY NICOLE GALLAND
THE FOOL’S TALE
Credits
Map by Steve Lewis, the famous fourth-grade teacher emeritus
Cover design by Robin Bilardello
Cover photograph by Mary Javorek
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
REVENGE OF THE ROSE. Copyright © 2007 by Nicole Galland. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Adobe Acrobat eBook Reader July 2007 ISBN 978-0-06-149161-0
Palm Reader July 2007 ISBN 978-0-06-149165-8
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Table of Contents
Cover
Credits
Map
Prologue
BOOK ONE
1: Idyll
2: Eclogue
3: Epistle
4: Exemplum
5: Occasional Poem
6: Bildungsroman
7: Fabliau
8: Panegyric
9: Paralipsis
BOOK TWO
10: Romance
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11: Rhetoric
12: Travesty
13: Débat
14: Complaint
15: Saga
16: Imbroglio
17: Reiselied
18: Palinode
19: Irony
20: Madrigal
Author's Three Apologies for Purists
For the historical purist
For the geographical purist
For the linguistic purist
Acknowledgments
Meet Nicole Galland
A Conversation with Nicole Galland
What first inspired you to write this book?
What is the poem about?
And what about it made you want to turn it into a novel?
That's all very interesting but a little academic, don't you think? Anything...
Can you say a little more about the class-biased propaganda? There's a lot of...
Your chapter titles are all literary references; did you learn anything...
You've got to be kidding.
But what about all the romances and fairy-tales featuring girls and young...
How did you balance the need for historical authenticity with the desire to...
What changed the most as you transformed the story into a novel?
What do you mean by sexuality in general?
What do you think changed least about the story in its new incarnation?
Your novel has a pretty modern voice. What's the point of setting it in the...
So you don't think Jean Renart is turning over in his grave?
An Excerpt from Crossed
About the Author
PRAISE
ALSO BY NICOLE GALLAND
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
Revenge of the Rose Page 44
