Needle in the Blood

by Sarah Bower

  While Fulk lets the horses drink from the brook, and Freya, saying it looks like rain, rummages among the mules’ packs for something to wrap Thecla in, Gytha goes inside the building. The longer arm of the L is a bare room, its earthen floor spattered with desiccated bird droppings and its corners thick with spider webs. The shells of last year’s swallows’ nests cling to the broken rafters. A high, thin wind carries the ghosts of their songs, lifting the loose thatch and whipping up eddies of dust. Poking at one of the old nests with a stick she finds lying on the floor, Gytha wonders when this building was last used by men.

  She walks through a low arch with the remains of a curtain pole fastened above it into the smaller room beyond. Once again, its only ornaments are webs and dust and empty nests, but in the middle of the floor is a standing stone, intricately carved. In the pearly light filtering through the holes in the roof, the stone glitters slightly as she stoops to examine the decorations. It is covered on all sides except the top, which is smooth and greasy with old tallow, with dense geometric patternings of circles and crosses giving way on one side to an image, framed by trails of stone ivy, of a haloed saint striking with a lance at the breast of a winged serpent.

  “A saint slaying a dragon,” she mutters to herself with a rueful smile. And are there not dragons to be found in Wales? he had asked as they stood before his tomb at Saint Vigor. What had she answered? Something about dragons more easily tamed by kisses than armies? “Well, Odo, it seems I have found my tomb. It may not be the one you intended, but at least it has a saint and a dragon.” Straightening up, pushing her fists into the small of her back, which is beginning to feel the strain of carrying her growing infant up and down so many steep hills, she notices for the first time an arched doorway in the wall opposite the stone’s saint and dragon face. The hinges screech as she pushes open the door, which sags, gouging a fan of earth out of the floor, then promptly falls down with a loud thud which startles the horses and makes Thecla cry. Stepping over it into the grassy court formed by the two arms of the L, Gytha announces, “This is it. I shall live here.”

  Fulk and Freya exchange eloquent looks.

  “You know what I said to you in Y Gelli, Freya.”

  “Yes, madam.”

  “I meant it.”

  “Thank you, madam.”

  “Roof’ll need completely replacing,” comments Fulk, reaching up and snapping off the end of a rafter where it overhangs the door. “Rotten. But you could do all right. Couldn’t grow much at the back, too much shade. But there’s room for a pig there.” His face brightens. He scuffs up the soil with the toe of his boot. “Beans, peas, grow anywhere they will. Don’t know what we’ll do for bread though. Need something to trade. Honey maybe. We could keep a couple of hives. Plenty of clover in the valleys. Fish. Water parsnip I shouldn’t wonder…”

  “Oh, Fulk, do shut up.” Freya glares at him, colder than the brook rushing past his feet.

  “I am confident I can find a way to live,” says Gytha, “but first I suppose we should find out if it belongs to anyone. I think the smaller room may be a chapel of some kind.” By silent consensus they all look down at the settlement below them. “I shall change. Freya, help me.”

  It is late morning by the time they ride up to its gates, the sun almost at its zenith, an indistinct glow of pale pewter behind a veil of cloud. Though nothing is visible behind the double palisade of sharpened poles, it is obvious this is not a village but the stronghold of some local chieftain. One gate opens a chink as they approach and a small man with inquisitive eyes and delicate hands appears in it, flanked by two others, not much taller, but considerably broader than himself, both armed with bows charged. Gytha urges her horse forward, Fulk a few paces behind, his hand on the hilt of his sword.

  “My name is Aelfgytha,” she says to the small man, speaking slowly to be sure she is understood. “My mother was Aranrhod and she came from these parts. My father was an Englishman. I wish to speak with the master of this house.”

  The small man takes in Gytha’s gown of yew green Flemish wool beneath the sable cloak, the jewels in her ears and on her fingers, the quality of her horse. “The master of this house is Owein ap Llwyr,” he replies, in a voice unexpectedly resonant for so dainty a frame, “but he is away now at his daughter’s wedding. I am Gereint, his steward. How may I be of service?” His English, mercifully, is fluent, though richly accented.

  “Firstly by offering us kinder hospitality than a chink in the gate and drawn bowstrings. We have been on the road a long time.”

  “Forgive me.” Satisfying himself that they are no more than one man, a couple of women and a child, Gereint signals his men to lower their weapons and shouts an order in his own language which elicits much creaking of ropes and a widening of the opening in the gate. “We are obliged to be cautious since the Normans settled themselves in Y Gelli.”

  Trusting that Fulk’s Norman origin will be sufficiently concealed by the length of his hair and the beard he has grown since they left Canterbury, Gytha gives Gereint a conspiratorial smile and says, “We understand completely, believe me.”

  They ride into a spacious, well-kept courtyard bordered on one side by a long, low hall with an undercroft and on the rest by the usual collection of kitchens, bakehouse, dairy, forge, armoury, women’s houses, stables, and mews. It is much as you would expect of any lord’s establishment, except that the buildings are not in muted hues of wood and stone but are a conflagration of colour, every inch of plank or plaster covered with designs like those Gytha saw on the stone altar in a blazing discord of madder and ochre, weld and woad and a vibrant purple she thinks probably comes from the ground shells of certain kinds of shrimps. The people she sees going about their business in the courtyard are dressed, men and women alike, in tunics embroidered with similarly vivid swirls and crosses, the higher among them, such as Gereint, also wearing gold and silver jewellery of intricate workmanship. Even in the watery light of the pewter sun, her eyes are dazzled. She begins to wonder if this is the root of her embroiderer’s skill, which was always more than simply having small hands well-suited to close work, if it came from her mother and the bright visions of her people among their black rocks and seaweed grass.

  Fulk helps her down from the saddle and Gereint leads her into Owein ap Llwyr’s hall, which seems sparsely furnished to eyes used to Odo’s magpie excesses, though the walls are hung with many bright tapestries and paintings on hides, and the roof beams elaborately carved with mythic beasts and goblin heads with their tongues sticking out and heads wreathed in ivy, some gilded, some painted in the same colours as the outside walls. She becomes anxious when she sees Fulk and Freya taken off to some other part of the compound, but she will not show it for fear of insulting Gereint by mistrusting his hospitality. Seating herself on the stool he offers, she casts her eyes down and folds her hands over her belly.

  “Your husband,” says Gereint, standing before her with his back to the fire. “Where is he?”

  “Dead, sir.”

  “I am sorry. Have you no family you could go to?”

  “None, sir, but my two servants and their daughter. But I have not come to you for charity. I do not lack substance. Rather, I desire to fulfil a promise made to my husband on his deathbed, to ease his passage to heaven by dedicating my life to God.”

  “A worthy notion, though I fail to see how Owein ap Llwyr can be of service to you.”

  “There is a chapel, in the hills about a mile from here, fallen into neglect. Is it in Lord Owein’s gift?”

  “Saint George’s, you mean. It is, but as you say, in a parlous state. There was a hermit there, but he was killed in Fitzosbern’s raids three summers back. There has been no one there since. Surely you would be best pursuing your goal in a convent. If you are set on this part of the world, I’m sure my lord could recommend you to a place.”

  “I am a naturally solitary person, sir. My own resources are sufficient to me.”

  “But the child?”


  “I believe I know enough to raise and educate her.”

  “Her?”

  Gytha gives a self-deprecatory smile. “Just a fancy I have.”

  “I understand,” says Gereint warmly, “my wife is just the same. We have five sons and she was convinced every one of them would be a girl. Preparing me for the worst, I suppose. Well, I cannot think Lord Owein would make any objection.”

  “I have means. I will make Lord Owein a gift in exchange for the chapel and the hermit’s house.” Opening the purse hanging from her girdle, she takes out an uncut sapphire the size of a robin’s egg and holds it on the flat of her hand while Gereint inspects it with something close to wonder in his shrewd, black eyes.

  “That is very…impressive,” he says.

  “I have more.”

  “Two such and it’s yours.”

  That is robbery, she thinks, but then again, is any price too high to pay for perfection? And was there ever a steward who did not like to line his own pocket as well as his master’s?

  “Done.” She draws a second stone from the purse, a ruby this time, and slightly larger. Gereint sweeps them from her palm as though they might be withdrawn, or even disappear in a puff of coloured smoke, if he fails to act quickly.

  “For that you may have roofing materials and whatever else you need to make the place sound.”

  “I thank you. I will send my man to discuss our requirements with you, once we have assessed everything. And now, if you will forgive me, I should like to make a start.”

  “Will you not at least break bread with us and set out after the day meal?”

  Thinking of Fulk and Freya, she demurs, but sits through the meal in an agony of impatience. All the time she endures Gereint’s wife’s counsels on childbirth, a vision shimmers in her mind of her new home and how it will be when the roof is sound and the beans planted, the hearth swept and a couple of these prettily carved stools before it, when there are stout hides at the windows and bees in the hives and a silver cross upon the altar to draw out the glitter in the granite dragon’s eyes.

  ***

  They work unceasingly throughout the spring, Fulk and a couple of men from Owein ap Llwyr’s household. Though Freya is clearly minded to take up Gytha’s offer of freedom, Fulk will not hear of it until the hermitage is restored and a decent sow chosen. He is Lord Odo’s man before he is Freya’s, he tells her, with the uncomfortable suspicion that it is more complicated than that, though he could not say how.

  By the time Owein ap Llwyr returns from his daughter’s wedding in Ireland, the hermit’s room is weatherproof and they are working on the roof of the chapel. Having chided his steward severely for letting the lady live up there in such conditions, and heard Gereint’s reply that she had refused all offers of hospitality, accepting only the services of the two workmen, a plain cross of silver forged by the smith, and the carpenter’s offer to make her an oak table, a set of stools, and a crib, Lord Owein mounts his pony and goes up to Saint George’s to see the mad Englishwoman for himself. Suspecting she may be genuinely holy, for how else to account for her behaviour, he takes with him a mule laden with two sacks of flour, a barrel of wine, some Welsh onion sets, and a bag of bean seed.

  Her new landlord puts Gytha in mind of nothing so much as a goat. Though tall for a Welshman, he is a head shorter than Fulk, with a black beard which curls to a point like a goat’s and yellow goat eyes. His legs are bowed, but he is nimble, and so quick Gytha, now well into her sixth month, can scarcely keep pace as he tests the soundness of a rafter with the point of his knife, or praises the stonework around the hearth, or wonders that she can be content with so plain a cross, or frets about the safety of her child. His speech bubbles like the brook over stones, and occasionally falls into reflective pools, at the bottom of which Gytha suspects a cool, analytical intelligence lurks like an ancient and wily pike.

  Once he has satisfied himself that the work is progressing to an acceptable standard, he asks Gytha to accompany him to a rock ledge overhanging the brook a few paces down the track from the hermitage’s eyrie.

  “Permit me,” he says, taking her arm with a smile of stained goat teeth glimpsed through the glossy curls of his moustache, “the path is very rough.”

  “And I am very ungainly,” she replies gallantly.

  “I used to come here, you know, when I was a boy. Old Dafydd would hide me from my father when I’d displeased him, which was often. I would fish from this ledge and listen to Dafydd’s wisdom while we cooked the trout. He was my Merlin, you might say, though I am no Arthur, for if I were, Dafydd would still be here and Neufmarche back in Rouen.”

  “Perhaps Dafydd’s time had come, my lord. The longer I live the more I see the futility of questioning God’s will or the way He goes about achieving it.”

  “Then you are a wise woman and a worthy successor.” He pauses. “I also have a son who fishes up here. It might be well if you would make yourself known to him.”

  “And do you suppose your father had this sort of conversation with Dafydd? Do you not think it wiser to let your son come to me of his own accord if he is minded to unburden himself? No doubt he has confidants more likely than me.”

  “But not ones to whom I may speak candidly.”

  “Which you believe you have a right to do to me because you have let me have your hermitage. I must take on the hermit’s duties as well as his house. Even though I paid, more than fairly, I thought, for so small a plot.”

  “Gereint has shown me the stones. What’s more, there are people in some of the villages between here and Y Gelli who have become suddenly and inexplicably wealthy. I will not ask how you came by your jewels, or your swollen belly…as long as you will do me this occasional favour. The boy is pleasant enough. You should not find it too onerous.”

  She looks into Owein’s crafty goat eyes, trying to read there if he is a man who will keep his word. She thinks he must, if it is a matter of his own son, but she wishes Odo were there. Odo has an instinct for these kinds of situations. Then thoughts of Odo lead her to see in her mind’s eye the image of the saint and the dragon on the chapel altar stone, and she knows she has no choice but to trust Owein, because this is the place where her child must be born.

  “I’m sure I shall not.”

  “Good, then we understand one another. I think we shall be fast neighbours, Aradrhon’s daughter.”

  ***

  Though the weather in the hills is always changeable, it proves to be a kind spring, with few long periods when work on the hermitage is impossible. Under the inquisitive eyes of lambs and the occasional, lofty gaze of eagles, Fulk and his men complete the building and haul up the furniture from Owein ap Llwyr’s carpenter’s workshop. Helped by Thecla, the women plant out a vegetable garden, until Gytha can no longer bend to the work and occupies her time sewing baby clothes, hemming blankets for her bed and curtains for the crib, and embroidering a cloth for Saint George’s altar.

  She waits out her goose month almost in a trance, in which nothing seems real but her daughter, turning somersaults in her belly, clearly visible now beneath the taut stretched fabric of the gown she has made out of two of her old ones. Even the work going on around her seems to be happening behind a veil, immediate yet distant, all to her direction and yet somehow not her responsibility. Sometimes, especially when the baby moves, she thinks of Odo, but not as often as she had expected to, and not with the pain for which she braces herself. She feels guilty about this. Sometimes she talks to her daughter about it, as though the baby is a wiser soul than she is.

  You know I still love him, don’t you? she says, her voice soundless, merely a vibration of the cord that binds her to her daughter. It’s just that I have to think of you now. He would understand, wouldn’t he? After all, you’re part of him too. She tries to conjure up his face, but though she can list each feature, from the lazy cat curve of the smile that says, I want you, to his short nose and curling eyelashes, she cannot seem to put them together. He is
a picture in her memory, without the spark of animation. She knows she should regret this, but does not, and that compounds her guilt until she begins her monologue of self-justification all over again.

  Her guilt becomes focused on Fulk, making her resentful of his obstinate loyalty to Odo, so that, in the end, she and Freya are working together to convince him he has done all he can for her. The day he puts the last straw in place on the ridge of the chapel roof, flailing at the swallows, newly arrived from their winter quarters and expecting to find their nests where they left them at the end of last summer, the three of them drink a toast to the future as the sun narrows to a bright diadem on the brow of the hill behind the hermitage. Then Gytha puts down her cup and goes into the chapel, where what remains of Odo’s jewels, except the pearls, are concealed in a recess behind the altar which was once, she presumes, intended to house the Host. Grabbing a handful at random, she goes back outside.

  “Hold out your hands,” she says to Fulk, then pours the jewels into his cupped palms. “There. For you and your family. Go, lose yourselves, be happy. Keep the finest pigs in Christendom and give Thecla a tribe of brothers and sisters.”

  “But what about the baby, madam?” This time, perversely, it is Freya who appears reluctant. “It can’t be long now.”

  “Freya, this will be my fifth child.”

  “Fifth? But I thought…”

  “I have let you think a lot of things about me that were wrong. Forgive me. You believed I disliked children. I never disliked them, I was simply afraid. All my other four died, and it hurt me more than seemed reasonable or bearable.”