by Sarah Bower
She knelt beside him on the bed and began to undress him. She worked methodically, starting with his shoes, his belt, smiling to herself as she laid his jewel-handled dagger on the nightstand. She made him sit up and raise his arms as she pulled his tunic and shirt over his head, then removed his chausses, working them skillfully over his erection. He reached for her with a groan, but she shook her head and pushed him away, saying nothing, as enigmatic as Emma, the mute.
Then she began to run her hands over his body, lightly at first but gathering force, stroking and squeezing his flesh like a potter moulding clay, making him her own. When she touched his flanks, he doubled up with laughter.
“Ah,” she said triumphantly, “ticklish.”
***
She has set a pattern for their encounters. Every time, this is how they begin. She strips him naked and explores him, telling him the story of his body, which is not the story of the body he knows, consecrated to God and to William. She tells him that the way the hair curls on his chest reminds her of embroidering chain mail, and that one day, she supposes, it will turn as grey. That the skin on the insides of his knees and elbows is so soft, it is almost impossible to believe it belongs to the same body as the callouses on his hands. His navel, she says, is as deep as the first joint on her index finger, and she is unsure whether to trust a man with curly eyelashes. She tastes the iron of swords and the nails on the Cross in his mouth when she kisses him and the sea in his seed. His earlobes feel like velvet, and his penis, when hard, is silky as a mushroom cap. He is unique, and the way she loves him is unique, learned from him and not from other men.
He is relieved she was not here to witness his defeat this afternoon, though he was not thrown and managed to deflect the worst of the blow, turning his horse’s head as his opponent’s lance collided with his shield, the shock fizzing through his arm and shoulder and jaw, exploding behind his left eye. She was away in the castle somewhere with Freya and the dressmaker from Rouen, putting the finishing touches to her gown for this evening’s feast. That is some consolation at least, for two broken lances and his wounded pride. And the other man is what he would term a professional, travelling round Europe from tournament to tournament, making his living by winning prizes. His squire has already been to Odo’s tent to lay claim to horse, shield, and a purse in lieu of the splintered lances. Wincing as Osbern draws his shirt sleeve back over his arm, he wonders what kind of dancing partner he is going to make. Still better than his brother Mortain or his fat nephew Curthose.
“Will the king be there?” she had asked him, thoughtfully testing the length of primrose yellow silk between her fingers.
“William doesn’t particularly enjoy feasting. But he’s sent me a gift, a Life of Saint Odo with three new miracles.” He was glad she was too absorbed in examining the fabric to notice his expression.
As Osbern eases him into the rest of his clothes, he hears raised voices outside the tent. Another man down, he thinks ruefully, though the English are not usually so responsive an audience, more interested in the pie sellers and the acrobats who do balancing tricks on the lists between bouts than the jousting knights themselves. Well, what can you expect of a people who fight on foot with axes like a rabble of serfs and think football is a game for gentlemen? Then suddenly the commotion is closer, the hide hung across the entrance to the tent shivering as a body seems to stagger into it before regaining its balance and moving away.
Drawing his knife from the belt Osbern is about to fasten around his hips, Odo steps forward and pulls back the hide in a single, rapid movement. He comes face to face with a man as tall as himself, whose strange, green eyes, dense and luminous as enamel slipped over silver leaf, are disconcertingly familiar. Though big, the man is gaunt, no match for the two guards standing with long pikes crossed to bar his way. He is a Saxon by his colouring and the style of his sandy moustache, worn long and without a beard.
“Who are you, man? How did you get here?” asks Odo in English.
“God is watching you, Norman.”
“Not through your eyes, I think,” he replies with a confidence he does not feel, appraising the stranger’s long cloak of lambskins so white they seem to glow from within, making the glitter of the standards fluttering around the tournament ground seem tawdry by comparison. “Get rid of him,” he tells his guards, “then report yourselves to your commander for a flogging and have him send me some more competent protection.”
The intruder struggles, his chest pushing against the crossed pikes. He is stronger than he looks. Odo raises his dagger to the man’s throat.
“Don’t think I won’t use it,” he warns, and as the man straightens up and lifts his arms in a gesture of surrender, draws its point, almost in a caress, down over his breastbone, cutting open his threadbare shirt.
He gags, almost drops the knife. The smell is terrible, like rank meat. His dagger has cut, not only the shirt, but a wad of filthy bandages underneath. The man’s chest is densely scarred, whorls and roundels like contours on a map, purple and angry red, some weeping thick yellow pus. The pikemen shy away in disgust as Osbern, casually threatening, tossing his own knife from hand to hand, comes to stand beside his master.
“Do not pity me, Norman,” sneers the intruder. “I am beyond harm. I was dead, but rose again.”
“Dear God in heaven.” Odo crosses himself, with his left hand, his amethyst catching the hard winter sunlight falling through the tentflap.
“You think holiness resides in a stone, priest?”
Arrow wounds, he realises, beginning to understand. He gives the Saxon his best self-deprecating smile. “As the saint says,” he says, switching to Latin, “‘since the world began life has betrayed those who placed their hopes in it.’”
“Then you know me, Norman. Be on your guard, you will see me again.” And before any of them are aware of it he has gone, swallowed up by the crowd which closes around him as though he had never been.
***
“You look very pale,” whispers Agatha as he takes his seat beside her for the rest of the tournament. “Where were you? What took so long? Are you really hurt? You should give this up, you know, a man of your age.”
“Getting my injuries seen to, and no, they’re not serious, and yes, I should give it up. Stop nagging and tell me what I’ve missed. I got waylaid by some hedge preacher pretending he was Saint Sebastian.” His had been the last bout on horseback, and they have moved onto hand-to-hand combat; the English, he notes, glancing across to where Agatha’s women sit like a row of magpies, are taking more notice now.
“Saint Sebastian?” queries Agatha. “How odd. You didn’t miss much. The last pair fought with maces. Dull, all brute force and no skill. Saint Sebastian was probably more entertaining. This is better, though one-sided. You see the one on the right, in the leather and mail, his grip’s all wrong? He’ll tire quickly.”
He laughs, then sucks in his breath sharply as the air jerking through his body jars his shoulder. “You should have been a man, Agatha.”
“Yes.” She continues to stare at the men fighting, but they are just a blur, flashing blades, dust clouds, a few grunts and the remorseless clang of iron on iron as if she were condemned to sit in a smithy all day. How noisy it must be on a battlefield, she thinks, stealing a sidelong glance at Odo. He knows, of course. He has spoken to the priest. There are so many things they cannot speak about, yet he ought to understand.
“I was thinking,” he says, “that I might arrange a marriage for Margaret once the tapestry’s finished.”
“Embroidery,” hisses Agatha. “How many times do I have to tell you?”
The man with the faulty grip stumbles and drops to his knees. A ragged cheer goes up from the crowd. Odo slaps his thigh three or four times in appreciation, then, to the accompaniment of excited oohs and aahs, the man struggles up again and the fight resumes.
“Shall we have a bet on it? I’m not sure I agree with your assessment.”
“Really, Odo, are
you not deep enough in sin by taking part? Must you gamble as well?”
He shrugs. “You know me. Anyway, what do you think? My squire, Guerin. His prospects are good. Some land in the Cotentin, enough to keep the crippled sister as well. And he can’t take his eyes off her.”
He has guessed. Who else could it be? Stuck up Judith? Emma with her twitch? Mad, maimed Alwys? Gytha? This is his way, to trick and tease. She suddenly remembers a time early in their childhood, before William, before Bec or Saint Justina’s, when he crept up behind her and pushed her into the moat at Conteville.
Then, of course, dived in himself to pull her out and talked Maman out of beating her for ruining her clothes.
“Will his family agree? Will hers?”
“Her father is my vassal, and I dare say he’ll be relieved to get rid of a daughter who will be well over twenty and another one who’s good for nothing. As for his, I’ll make sure Margaret brings a good dowry. Good enough to make them think of her as if she were my daughter.”
“Will Guerin wait?”
“He can’t marry before he’s knighted, and that won’t be for a year at least. He hasn’t seen sixteen summers yet.”
At which age, Odo had already been a bishop for three years. Lucky Guerin, not to have his decisions made for him by William of Normandy.
Odo’s gaze is challenging. There is no way out, it tells her. She struggles until her muscles ache to keep the smile on her face. There is a surge in the crowd as the man with the faulty grip brings the flat of his sword down conclusively across the back of his opponent’s neck, sending him sprawling. When he does not move, a couple of his servants run in from among the tents clustered around the ends of the lists to drag him from the field. Each takes hold of an ankle; the man’s head bumps over stones and hummocks of grass. The victor bows to the raised platform where Odo and Agatha are seated with Hamo and his family and Odo’s birthday guests.
“You’ll have to excuse me,” says Agatha, trying to rise, but he stops her, his hand clamped over hers where she has rested it on the bench to push herself up.
“No work today. I forbid it.”
She sighs, and he relaxes his grip and rubs his shoulder.
“Why didn’t you come to me?”
“Because you were in Ely. Or dead, for all I knew. Because…well, what would be the point in confessing to you?”
“I’m a priest.”
“And up to your neck in sin yourself.”
“Aren’t we all?”
“You know what I mean. Tell me, when did you last confess?”
Four men enter the lists, two armed with swords and two with the curious double-headed axes favoured by some of the English.
“This will be bloody,” he says, then suddenly turns to look at her, full on, his eyes wide. “I love her. It’s not a sin.”
“Yet if I love, it is? Even though I have never laid a finger on the girl, never even spoken to her, well, not in language she would understand anyway. Whereas you…”
“You know there’s no comparison. The love of men and women is ordained for procreation.”
“Priests are ordained to love God.”
“She is…my way of loving God.”
“Then perhaps you should consider leaving the Church. If William will let you, of course.”
It is unthinkable. Sent to Lanfranc’s school at Bec when he was eleven, he can scarcely remember a time when his life was not dominated by the canonical hours, fasts, festivals, rules of dress and demeanour, the sacraments. Even in the breach he honours them. Even in his readings of the classical philosophers, he is looking for glimpses of the One True God, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Outside the Church there would be no love.
***
Gytha’s eyes follow the path of candlelight from the mirror, as it breaks and spills over Freya’s glassy hair and is reflected back again. She is not yet ready to look at herself. She holds out one arm in front of her and admires the way the wide yellow sleeve falls back to reveal the close fitting emerald green underdress. She turns her hand in front of her, whitened and softened with baths of milk and scented oils, as though it belongs to someone else, then smoothes it over the gown, where it hugs the rise of her belly like a second skin, the skirt flaring where Freya will fasten the girdle set with citrines and freshwater pearls around her hips. So much silk, so many stones. She looks through the mirror, over the reflection of her shoulder, at the green satin slippers, embroidered with pearls and gold thread, aligned under a chair like miniature soldiers awaiting battle orders. Foot soldiers, she thinks, beginning to giggle.
“Just look at yourself, madam,” says Freya, leaning from behind to pass the girdle around Gytha’s body, “what is there to laugh at?”
Gytha swallows her laughter and lets her eyes move slowly away from the shoes until they meet themselves, silvery, blurred as though by tears, looking out from the polished surface of the mirror. Where am I, she asks herself, where am I? Who is this woman with gold in her hair and the eyes of a mermaid? She looks for herself for a long time, until Freya has buckled the girdle, arranged Gytha’s overskirt so the rich brocading beneath is set off to best advantage, and adjusted her neckline the better to show off her breasts and shoulders.
She looks for herself until Freya is beginning to cast anxious glances toward the adjoining door between this, Odo’s solar, which has been made over, for this evening, into a dressing room for Gytha, and the winter parlour where he will by now be waiting. But there are so many selves. Peeping through the legs of the adults is the little girl growing up on oysters and fish head broths, the silver black estuary and stories of Celtic princes consumed by passions for faeries, dream princesses, virgin-skinned witches with wits honed like shark’s teeth. Here is the bride wreathed with ivy and almond blossom, carried to her bridegroom’s house on the shoulders of tall young men who only yesterday were little boys she used to go digging for sandworms with; and here the young wife, earnest, hard working, awkward, and disappointed in her husband’s arms. The mother she will not look at, nor the ghosts whose tiny hands clutch at her skirts. Here is the lay sister sewing her tears into altar cloths, and here she, not Freya, dresses her lady for love, taking her time, exchanging charged glances in mirrors while my lord waits in the next room. The whore; ironically the only time in all her life that she ever slept alone in her curtained cell. And backwards, and forwards, to the dark woman of Odo’s dream. That is all she is, why her reflection wavers and fades in front of her as though she is watching herself drown. She is Odo’s dream.
She turns away from the mirror, crosses to where her shoes are waiting under the chair, and pushes her silk stockinged feet into them.
“Am I ready?” she asks Freya.
Freya’s gaze is careful and critical. She steps forward and makes a small adjustment to Gytha’s veil, a fine tissue of gold beneath which her hair hangs in a single thick braid, then nods her satisfaction.
“I’ll tell his lordship he can come in, shall I?”
“No, one more minute.” She has noticed, among her day clothes folded over a chair, the flat package tied with red ribbon. “I must hide the camel. Freya, can you take it into the bedroom and…slip it under my pillow?” My pillow? But Freya, taking the package, does not seem to notice.
Gytha shivers. Despite the fire, the extra rugs and thick hangings at the windows, the solar, with its large windows overlooking the Roman walls and the country to the south, is draughty, and she is used to woollen clothes. She knows silk holds warmth, but somehow it does not feel as though it does; this dress feels as though it is still hanging on the dressmaker’s dummy, or as though there is no heat in her body it can absorb. With a dizzying sense of unreality, she sees the door to the winter parlour open and Odo come in, resplendent in yew green velvet embroidered with hunting scenes in gold thread, gems and pearls enough to decorate the effigy of a saint in a cathedral. He takes her hands and holds her at arm’s length, appraising her.
Possessio mea.
“Turn round for me,” he says, letting go one hand and turning her by the other as though they are dancing. “You are absolutely beautiful. Here, I have something for you.” Loosing her other hand, he reaches into the close-fitting sleeve of his tunic where, she now notices, something is hidden, a jumble of hard edges pulling the fabric out of shape. As he pulls, a glittering snake uncoils itself from his sleeve and curls up again in his palm.
“I’ve heard tell of snake charmers,” she says, “mystics who can make snakes docile with music.”
He laughs. “And did Harold Godwinson have one of these wonders as well?”
“Thankfully not. I think I would have been mistrustful of it.”
“Then I shouldn’t regret my gift is not a snake charmer?”
“A gift, my lord? Surely we should be giving you gifts tonight.”
“You do, Gytha, you know it.” He takes a step toward her. “Every day.”
“Please, my lord. You’ll make me blush.”
He has lifted the bright snake to her throat and is reaching his hands around the back of her neck to clasp it.
“Careful of my veil,” she admonishes. “Freya has rearranged it I don’t know how many times.”
“A snake charmer would be more original,” he says, “but then, lovers aren’t very original are they? There seem to be so few ways to express love. So, we say, I love you, and give binding ornaments.” She says nothing as she turns to marvel at the necklace of emeralds and diamonds whose cold fire burns in the silver mirror, because she has no words to describe the sensation of such a jewel next to her skin. Will it corrode in the brine for salting fish, or will its lights be extinguished by mud? Will it throttle her? She puts up her hand to touch it, but her fingers encounter his instead, sliding away from the necklace, along the crest of her shoulder.
