Needle in the Blood

by Sarah Bower

Tomorrow,” says the messenger, on one knee before the great chair beside the hearth where King Harold used to sit, his voice a little unsteady. The word ripples around the hall. Heads bend toward one another, a swing of plaits, a brush of sleeves, as the women murmur together, round eyed with fear and fascination. Tomorrow. Tomorrow. Tomorrow. They hand the word along, one to the next, like a hot coal. Trudy lets out a little shriek and collapses onto the bench alongside the oak table running down the center of the hall. One of the others pours wine for her from a chased silver jug, but she dashes the cup aside with the back of her hand.

  “I’m not drinking that,” she says. “It’s French.”

  “French, my dear, not Norman.” It is the first rational remark Lady Edith has made in two weeks. “Drink up,” she continues, her words sounding hollow from the depths of the king’s chair, falling into the tense hush that has descended on the hall like pebbles into water, “and bring a cup for this man here. He looks in need of it. Where is Gytha?”

  “Here, madam.” Gytha steps from behind her mistress’s chair, set apart from the Saxon women by her small bones and raven’s wing hair, though they all turn expectantly toward her like flowers to the sun. It’s a miracle, thinks Gytha, smiling at Lady Edith. It must be. A sign. They will stop the Bastard here, in Winchester, the seat of the old kings.

  The messenger rises and bows, then drifts toward the table where Trudy holds out a cup of wine with her usual dimpling and eyelash batting. Edith Swan Neck leans forward in her lord’s chair and grasps Gytha’s hands in her own, the skin still with a rusty tinge, black crescents of blood congealed beneath the nails.

  “You must go to the gate for me,” she says, then, addressing herself to the messenger, adds, “Where will the duke enter?”

  “By the West Gate, I believe, madam.”

  Edith nods. “Yes, that is the way from Hastings. We came that way ourselves when…after…” Her high, pale brow knits in a bewildered frown. Taking her hands from Gytha’s, she holds them up in front of her face and examines them, twisting them slowly palm to back, as though the end of her sentence might be written there.

  There is the end of everything, thinks Gytha, stabbed by despair as Lady Edith’s face seems to close up again, the spark of reason extinguished as she contemplates her beloved lord’s blood still staining her hands. There are no able-bodied men left in the city, and what could a mob of women, children, old men, and cripples hope to achieve against William of Normandy’s army? She has seen what it is capable of, on the ridge between Caldbec Hill and Telham Hill, which the Bastard’s men now call Senlac, the Lake of Blood. In that at least, Gytha agrees with them. You could not imagine such butchery if you had not seen it, and as there are no words adequate to describe the smell, or the slip and squelch of their feet among blood and offal, or the clamminess of dead flesh on a damp autumn evening as they turned over corpses in an attempt to identify the king and his brothers, she and Lady Edith are bound by a conspiracy of silence.

  “Send someone else, madam,” she pleads. “You need me to take care of you.” No one who was not there can possibly understand Lady Edith’s retreat into madness, her absolute refusal to wash Harold’s blood from her hands or change the gown whose hem is stiff with gore. It is all she has left, not even a grave to put flowers on, thanks to William Bastard.

  Edith shakes her head. “You must bear witness, Gytha; you must see it through. You will not be afraid?”

  “No, madam.” Not of the Normans marching into Winchester, only of being separated from her mistress. And yet, she asks herself, what is there to fear? Everyone she has ever loved has been wrenched from her, and somehow, she has survived. Perhaps that is what she should fear. Survival.

  “Bring the children to me,” commands Edith suddenly. The women exchange doubtful glances, then look to Gytha, all at once, synchronised like mummers in a play.

  “The children are in Ireland, madam. Don’t you remember? King Harold sent them there, before he left for Yorkshire, to King Diarmait.”

  “Ah yes, yes, of course.” It is plain she remembers nothing, perhaps not even her children’s faces. She says these things from time to time, dredging up phrases from happier days without any sense of their meaning.

  ***

  Gytha sleeps fitfully and wakes before dawn, though she can tell morning is close by the rustle of the doves and chickens roosting in the eaves of the hall. She sits up, rubbing the backs of her calves to drive out the hard cold of the earth floor. Since their return from Senlac, and Lady Edith’s refusal to leave the king’s chair, they have given up retiring to her bower, where they had mattresses of wool and straw to sleep on, and have made do with the hall. As her eyes adjust to the thinning darkness, she becomes aware of shapes moving toward the king’s chair, where Lady Edith dozes, slumped against one of its carved arms. She jumps to her feet to intercept them, her heart lurching into her throat as though it has been thrown free of her chest wall by the force of her movement.

  “Who’s there?” she demands in an urgent whisper. Have they come already, the Bastard sending some men stealthily ahead of his main force to take Edith and find out from her where Harold’s sons are hidden?

  “Just me,” replies Trudy.

  Gytha sighs with relief. “God, you gave me a shock. I thought you were a Norman.”

  “We thought we’d try and get her changed while she’s still half asleep,” says another voice. Malfrid. Always easily led.

  “What?”

  “Oh, don’t sound so shocked. That dress is beginning to stink.”

  “You won’t lay a hand on her. You thought I’d left already, didn’t you? You thought I’d be gone for good. Well, Trudy, I’ll tell you something. If you try to do anything against my lady’s wishes, I shall know about it. And if they kill me, I shall haunt you till your teeth turn black and your hair falls out.” She fingers her dark plait. “You know I’m a witch, don’t you? You know I mean what I say?”

  “All I know is you’re as mad as she is.” Trudy’s response is tart, but there is an uncertain note in her voice that reassures Gytha her threat has struck home.

  To be certain, though, before she leaves the house she wakes the slave, Skuli. Hunchback he may be, but he is strong and fiercely loyal to Lady Edith, who stopped his mother drowning him as a baby.

  “Stick to her as if you were in the same skin, Skuli,” she orders him. “Whatever happens.”

  ***

  Rape. That’s what they all believe, the sullen crowd gathered before Winchester’s West Gate, in the square where the tax men usually collect the duty on beasts brought into the city for market. It’s clear from their faces, fear mixed with impotence and embarrassment, and the round eyed children, clinging to their mothers’ skirts, who don’t understand but just want to look at the soldiers. But Gytha, from her vantage point on the gate tower roof, sees something much worse.

  Did Lady Edith already know what the Queen Dowager intended, how easily she would give away Winchester, her home, seat of government of both her husband, Edward of blessed memory, and her brother, Harold? That she would turn out to be a greater whore by far than her brother’s concubine?

  Up here, Gytha is almost on a level with the queen where she stands on the walkway above the great gates, suspended between past and future, gazing down imperiously at the Bastard’s upturned face and upturned lance, her choice made. She looks every inch the queen, richly dressed, not a hair out of place beneath her jewelled coronet and sheer linen veil, though no one attends her but a couple of pages and a single lady-in-waiting, no one who might detract from the drama of this moment, this solitary moment in which she holds the keys of England in her perfectly white hand, the iron ring which binds them poised over the point of William Bastard’s lance.

  Behind her, the crowd in the square shifts and mumbles, malevolent, fearful, bored, and uncomfortable in the drizzle that clings to their clothes and hair. Before her the Bastard’s army, drawn up in motionless ranks, their faces lost benea
th the helmets they wear with nose pieces angled down almost over their mouths. To Gytha they look like an army of skulls, more dead in their rigid immobility, their leather and mail blackened by the rain, than any blood bright Saxon corpse she saw that day on the field at Senlac. Three of which were the bodies of Queen Edith’s brothers, Gyrth, Leofwine, and Harold the King. As she leans out over the parapet and drops the great iron ring of keys over the point of the Bastard’s lance she looks as though she has forgotten that.

  Couching his lance, the Bastard lets the keys slide to the ground, where they are retrieved and handed to him by a footsoldier stationed there for the purpose. Then, at a signal from one of their officers, the Normans commence a rhythmic beating of weapons on shields, accompanied by chanting in French. The massive thud of iron on leather shivers the air like the heartbeat of an angry god. It shudders through Gytha’s bones, making her wrap her arms around herself as though to hold her frame together. Dex aie, the Normans chant, Dex aie, Dex aie, Dex aie. From inside the walls a single voice is raised in defiance.

  “God help you go fuck yourselves!” shouts a man who understands their language. A fair few do. The Confessor himself had Norman blood in him after all, and the Channel, though treacherous, is not wide. Now, though, is not the time to advertise one’s Norman connections, and while the crowd obviously applaud the speaker’s sentiments, Gytha sees several doubtful looks cast in his direction. She wonders if the Bastard understands English. Not that he will have heard that single, reckless yell above the din of his triumphant army. So many of them. He must have emptied every house and hovel in Normandy of its able-bodied men to pack his ships and swarm across England like a plague of black ants.

  She longs to run back to Lady Edith’s house, to the comfort of its familiar rooms whose fine hangings will keep out the Normans as they keep out draughts. Even now Lady Edith’s power seems unassailable; seated in the king’s great chair before the hearthstone, still wearing the gown she wore as she knelt in the mud and gore on Senlac Ridge, she is all England’s defiance concentrated in one frail form.

  “Well?” the Bastard had asked, his voice harsh and unexpectedly thin for such a big, barrel-chested man.

  “Yes,” she had replied, stretching out her fingers to touch the bloodied torso just below the left nipple, her tone as cool as meltwater, “that is my lord the king. Here, you see, is the strawberry mark over his heart. He used to joke that it was his bull’s-eye. Perhaps your archers need a little more practice, Your Grace.” Forcing the Bastard to look, to take in his army’s handiwork, the head severed, one leg gone below the knee, the genitals hacked away to leave a mushy hollow surrounded by blood soaked hair. Even Countess Gytha, King Harold’s redoubtable mother, nearly vomited, and her lady-in-waiting fainted dead away. Even the men with the Bastard hung their heads and cleared their throats and broke a sweat despite the creeping cold of an October evening.

  Gytha herself felt as though her head had floated off her shoulders and her bowels turned to water. It was not so much the mutilation of King Harold as the sheer scale of the destruction, bodies and parts of bodies strewn everywhere, twisted, torn, open-mouthed as though they had been about to speak when they were struck down. A chorus of screams and groans from the wounded, the sad, exultant cawing of the crows circling in the bloodshot eye of the setting sun, awaiting their turn. She knows death—of course she does, who does not—but before this she knew only its quiet face, blue-lipped or sunken-cheeked on a pallet, turned to a wall, its mess hidden beneath the sheets. But this, well, this was so showy.

  Lady Edith, however, treated it all with lofty indifference, continuing to gaze at her lover as though he were still as he used to be, laughing and golden with eyes as blue as the sea in summer, leaving the Bastard no choice but to do likewise.

  Now the Bastard knocks three times on the gates with the tip of his lance. He has only to walk his horse forward with the lance pressed against them for the gates to swing open on their well-oiled hinges, the crowd inside dividing, stumbling back over their own feet to clear a space in the center of the square. As the queen turns to watch, William of Normandy, distinguishable by the gold coronet encircling his helmet, flanked by two of his senior officers and their standard bearers, rides into the city of Winchester, the great hooves of his war horse dancing nervously over the earth where lie the bones of generations of the kings of Wessex. The horse knows the power of their ghosts even if its rider cannot feel it.

  His soldiers have stopped their chanting now, as they form up to follow their lord into the city, and his entrance is greeted by a silence as pervasive as the drizzle blurring the grey November sky, that sings in Gytha’s ears like an echo of the chanting and shield-beating. Waiting until his advance guard are through the gate and deployed in a cordon around the citizens who have turned out to witness his arrival, the Bastard raises his right hand to command their attention. Peering down into the square, Gytha sees the fair, ruddy-faced English behind the cordon like a rich, lively tapestry drained of its vibrancy by a dark frame.

  “Unhelm,” says the Bastard to the group of men surrounding him. “Let these people see we are men like them.”

  The Bastard’s companions appear to doubt the wisdom of his order. Gytha sees heads turn, toward each other, toward the crowd from which a few ragged jeers escape in response to the Bastard’s words. Only one man follows his lord’s example without a moment’s hesitation, raising his arms to lift the helmet from his head and hand it to his squire, pushing back his mail hood and running a hand over his tonsured crown. His movements are deliberate, exaggerated, like those of a mummer, whose every gesture has some precise and particular meaning. He smiles, turning this way and that so everyone can see his smile, broad, sensual, with his mouth turned down slightly at the corners so he seems to mock himself. Don’t worry, says his smile. All this is only for a moment, for a day. We are players on the stage for an hour or two. The blood is not real; the corpses will get up and walk off between scenes; you will find Death in the ale house later, with a mug and a plate of cheese, his mask hung around his neck like a hood.

  People smile back, as though they cannot help themselves. At once the atmosphere becomes more relaxed. The rest of the Bastard’s lieutenants remove their helmets, though none of them has a smile as disarming as that of the bold cleric. Their expressions veer from the supercilious to the faintly embarrassed. Even as the Bastard, who does not even attempt to smile beneath his shock of hair as red as Judas’, addresses the people, their eyes remain drawn to the man with the tonsure and the curls almost as fair as an Englishman’s.

  Gytha is not impressed; she has seen that smile before, and like a survivor of the smallpox, she is proof against its charm. At dinner, in Lady Edith’s great hall, softened by wine and candlelight, its warmth flowing into Lady Edith’s eyes as he listened to her craft some witticism. Later, when he cast away his lute saying he was too drunk to play, and played ill enough when sober, and Earl Harold must finish his song without accompaniment. Broadening as Lady Edith retorted that if Earl Harold must finish so bawdy a song, she would withdraw her ladies to her bower, as some were maids and should not be encouraged to set their sights on so merry a widowhood, lest no man would then be brave or foolish enough to marry them.

  On the battlefield, as he glanced across to where she stood beneath the dead apple tree with Lady Edith and Countess Gytha, leaning to exchange words with the Bastard, ugly, guttural French words, then bursting into laughter.

  The smile of Odo of Bayeux, the Bastard’s brother.

  “I wish you to know I come in peace,” says the Bastard in his disappointing voice, his English heavily accented. Bishop Odo nods for emphasis. “This city was the seat of my revered and beloved kinsman, King Edward, may he rest with God.” The Bastard crosses himself. His lieutenants do likewise, though the bishop also contrives to bow his head in an instant of prayer. “Generations of your kings lie buried here, guardians of a fine system of government which I swear now, before you
all, as the latest in that line, to uphold and protect, and to build on as God grants me power.” The Bastard exchanges a glance with his brother, almost as though looking to him for approval, then backs his horse up a little, leaving the stage to him.

  Bishop Odo uses no fine words, though his English is far more fluent than his brother’s, but confines himself to facts, to the dull, administrative business of an occupation. A curfew will be imposed at dusk, he tells the crowd. No citizens will be allowed beyond the walls for any purpose, though the country people will be allowed in on two days of the week to sell their beasts and produce. A governor will be appointed who will fix prices and tariffs and take responsibility for law and order. He does not expect the people to notice many changes to their everyday lives— some subdued jeering at this, ignored by the bishop—but two important alterations to the laws of the Witan will take effect immediately. All slaves will consider themselves free forthwith and King William has further decreed that, as he respects God as the sole arbiter of life and death, there can no longer be recourse to capital punishment in England.

  “We are not ogres,” he concludes after a pause, turning his horse so people on all sides can see his face, candid, sincere, perhaps the merest trace of irony in the white lines scored by sun and laughter at the corners of his eyes, “but we believe a society can only flourish if it has just laws, properly upheld. As the pretender Godwinson was punished for his treason, so will those be punished who transgress the law.”

  He looks as though he is about to say more, but at that moment a small child, apparently attracted by the gold and silver discs decorating his horse’s harness, darts out between the soldiers in the cordon and lunges for the largest, brightest roundel at the center of the chest strap. The startled animal rears, and though the bishop quickly regains control of it, trying to force it back on its hind legs before the flailing front hooves can come down on the child, he is hampered by the men behind him. In the crowded square, there is no space into which he can safely manoeuvre the thrashing animal. The little boy, intent on the shiny ornaments, leaping to reach them, stretching out his arms, blinded by their glamour, has no idea of the danger he is in.