Kingmaker: Winter Pilgrims

by Toby Clements

  The giant starts towards him.

  ‘Stop!’ It is the Prior, his arms raised, his voice high with emotion. ‘Stop in the name of God! Stop in the name of all that is sacred!’

  Without breaking stride the giant chops him in the face with the back of his hand. The Prior collapses and the giant kicks his body aside like a child’s plaything and advances on Thomas.

  Thomas stands a moment before finally doing as the Dean instructed. He tucks the beads away and turns and runs for the cloister roof, hauling himself scrabbling up across the slates.

  ‘Kill him!’ he hears Riven scream, and he feels the giant’s fingers on his cassock. He kicks out and pulls free. The giant tries again but misses and Thomas scrambles away, up over the roof of the refectory with a clatter of his clogs, the tiles warm beneath his palms, and then down heavily in the yard. He staggers to his feet.

  Through the door behind him he can hear the crash of someone running through the frater house. He unbars the beggars’ gate and hurries through. The rain has softened the ground, and the millwheel is turning again. Smoke rises from blackened circles where Riven’s men lit cooking fires the night before, but they’ve moved on and now the furlong is deserted save for two of the lay brethren, shovelling something down by the river’s bank by the ford.

  Thomas stops. Where to? He cannot think. He turns and the giant is in the yard, ducking through the gateway after him, moving fast on his bare feet, that great axe still in his hand. Thomas catches a glimpse of someone moving down by the river, near the mill, where the ferryman’s lighter lies still upturned on the bank. He cuts that way.

  ‘Help!’ he shouts. ‘Help me! Jesus!’

  Whomsoever he’d seen there is gone now or maybe had always been a flit of his imagination. He grabs the lighter. It is a rough-built, flat-bottomed thing, turned over, and heavier than he’d thought. He bends and tries to right it, but isn’t strong enough. He looks for the ferryman’s boat pole: if he cannot use it to lever the boat over, then at least he can use it as a weapon.

  The giant comes on.

  The pole is nowhere to be found.

  There is nothing for it.

  He turns and faces the giant.

  ‘Why?’ he shouts. ‘Why me?’

  The question seems to hold no meaning for the giant. His face betrays the same emotion a man might feel milking a cow or washing a bowl. He holds the axe at his side as if he has no need for it now. He towers over Thomas. Thomas throws a punch. The giant catches it, his hand hard as a plank. He twists Thomas’s fist over and forces him to his knees.

  ‘Why?’ Thomas cries again. ‘What did I do to you?’

  The giant says nothing, but puts aside the axe and seizes Thomas’s shoulder. He lifts him as if he were a doll of plaited corn. Thomas kicks him between the legs. There is no reaction. It is as if he does not feel pain. The giant grabs his throat and Thomas can feel each fingertip. The giant forces him backwards on to the upturned boat. Thomas struggles and kicks but it is no use. The hand tightens. He feels the giant stroke his cheek, and he sees there is an almost tender look in the giant’s eyes, but then Thomas sees the ball of his filthy thumb coming down on his right eyeball.

  He screams.

  4

  WHEN THE BELL rings the alarm, the Prioress ushers the sisters into the chapel and locks the iron-bound door behind them. The candles have already been lit for Mass and the flames shiver as the women kneel in uncertain silence and pray.

  Katherine watches Alice in alarm. Her earlier resolve has leached away, along with all colour in her face, and she rocks on her knees, weeping incoherent prayers while her fingers punish her rosary beads. When at last the sedate tolling of the bell signals the end of the crisis, the sisters rise as one and clutch each other’s hands. They are forbidden to speak in the church, lest they interfere with the prayers of the canons beyond the wall that bisects the nave, but gestures are enough. Alice puts her thin arms around Katherine and crushes her with a hug.

  At length they return to their places and kneel again and silently give thanks to God for delivering them from they know not what. Katherine gives Him thanks not only for the delivery from the horsemen, but – perhaps more heartfelt now that the former danger is passed – that the canon has not been seen in the cloister.

  She cannot imagine what her punishment might have been had he been seen, for since the day she had joined the Priory, all those years ago, the Prioress had forever been inflicting ever crueller punishments. Katherine had still been warm with the memories of her mother’s love when she had come, or so she now imagined, and the sudden change in her life had seemed almost unendurably hard, but as the years passed, she’d come to see that the cloistered life needn’t be so harsh, only that the Prioress went out of her way to make it so.

  In the early years she had spent weeks at a stretch alone in her cell subsisting only on rye bread and lentils. If she were lucky: salted fish. She passed the hours on her knees, praying for she knew not what, to a God of whom she was unsure, but as her life progressed from one hardship to another, each visited upon her for something she did not understand or did not do, she began to wonder if God was the merciful deity that the priests espoused. She began to wonder whether He was not an absent God, or perhaps a powerless one, for she could not believe he was a vengeful one, who wished her to suffer this way.

  When she spoke of her thoughts to one of the other sisters, a girl to whom she believed herself close, the Prioress heard within the hour and that evening the whole community was called to witness Sister Joan holding her down while the Prioress thrashed her with a scourge, grunting at each stroke. The sin of Pride was deadly, the Prioress had gasped, and it needed eradicating. This was the first of many beatings Katherine received over the years and now, more than a decade later, the skin on her back and legs is capped by a hardened matt of needle-fine scars.

  Only later was she entrusted with the daily task of taking out the Prioress’s nightly soil and her pisspot, but when Katherine had complained of it, had suggested the lay sisters should deal with it as they did the rest of the nuns’ excrement, she was beaten, and made to carry the bucket away while the blood dried against her cassock.

  Now she leans forward to gain a view down the line of the sisters to where the Prioress kneels in profile, her heavy hands resting on the prie-dieu in an effigy of piety. She is not a pleasure to look upon, with a big jaw and heavy brows that glower even in prayer. She is immensely strong though, with a man’s shoulders, and when inflamed it is possible to see the blood of her Viking forefathers running through her veins.

  Katherine watches as she rises now, her prayers at an end, and with a chopping gesture she instructs the sisters to rise too, to fall into their customary lines. After a pause she leads them across the nave to where Sister Joan stands at the north door. Katherine and Alice fall in beside one another and walk with downcast eyes, but as they pass Sister Joan, the older nun leans forward and pinches Katherine’s elbow to make her look up.

  Joan’s eyes are like slits, and her tiny, pointed teeth are bared in a grin. She is laughing at something and pointing at Katherine. Katherine feels cold wash over her.

  Of course the canon has been seen.

  Almost blind with despair, Katherine follows the sisters through the cloister to the chapter house. Stark within, the room is dominated by a dais on which the Prioress sits like a queen, her head bowed in prayer. The stone floor is spread with rushes that sigh underfoot as they enter and take their places on the low bench and still without speaking each sister raises her hood to cover her face in prayer. When the Prioress has finished her own prayers she would ordinarily read to them from the Martyrology, but today she reads from the Rule of St Augustine, chapter four.

  ‘The fourth chapter of the Rule’, she announces, ‘deals with safeguarding chastity.’

  Katherine feels something twist inside.

  ‘What should you do,’ the Prioress asks, ‘if you notice within your sister a wantonness of th
e eye? Would you admonish her so that the fault does not multiply, but stands corrected? Or would you treat it as an infirmarian might treat a wound?’

  The Prioress looks around as if for an answer. There is none. She closes the book and steps away from the lectern.

  ‘Let me tell you this remarkable thing,’ she says, ‘for it is an example that might inspire you. During the time of Bishop Henry there was a convent of virgins at Watton in the province of York, to the north of here, and they took in an oblate, a girl of five. She passed her girlhood happily enough, in prayer and silent contemplation, but as she grew older, she began to show signs of girlish abandon.’

  The Prioress pauses to let her words sink in.

  Katherine’s eye is drawn to the tight-shut door.

  ‘Now one day,’ the Prioress carries on, ‘when some lay brothers were brought into the cloister to carry out some works, the eye of this girl fell upon one of their number, a handsome boy in the full bloom of youth.’

  There is a stirring among the sisters, all of whom can imagine such a thing, though few have seen it for themselves. Alice at last seems to have understood what is being said, for she begins moaning and swaying again, as she had in the nave.

  The Prioress continues, her gaze avoiding Katherine: ‘And this youth noticed the girl, too, and so it was that each watered in the other the seeds of desire, and soon their nods turned to gestures and they sought one another out in the secret darkness of night.’

  The sisters gasp.

  ‘Block your ears, oh brides of heaven!’ the Prioress pronounces, enjoying herself, ‘for that night this girl walked out a virgin of Christ and in the next moment she was corrupted in the flesh as she had been in the spirit!’

  ‘Shame,’ a sister mutters. ‘For shame!’

  Others agree. The Prioress lets them calm themselves before she begins again: ‘Soon the evidence of the nun’s wickedness was all too clear,’ she says, ‘and when the truth emerged that the girl was with child, the shocked virgins of the community clapped their hands together and fell on her, ripping the veil from her head. They whipped her without mercy! Some argued she should be tied to a tree and burned over charcoal. Others cried out that she should be skinned alive!’

  Alice clutches her rosary to her mouth, kissing the crucified Christ.

  ‘But mercy prevailed,’ the Prioress soothes, ‘and the sinner was put in a cell, with her hands manacled to the wall, while chains were attached to her ankles and passed through a window to a heavy log of yew, so that all that night she was stretched by its weight.

  ‘The next day the sisters asked the canons to lay hands on the youth who had occasioned these ill deeds. One of the canons – a slight lad with a girlish frame – was dressed in the sister’s veil and sent to sit in the appointed place at the appointed hour for their meeting. Sure enough the corrupt youth approached her and fell on him whom he thought a sister!’

  Again the sisters gasp.

  ‘Burning with lust, he was as a stallion brought to mare! But then those canons present, concealed in the undergrowth, jumped out and administered a bitter antidote to this lust with their staffs, beating him mightily so to extinguish his fever.’

  Alice is delirious now, mumbling an endless prayer, dropping to her knees, righting herself, and all the other sisters are murmuring and chanting.

  Katherine can think of nothing but escape.

  The Prioress holds out a hand to calm them.

  ‘If it had ended there,’ she went on, raising a finger, ‘if it had ended there, then this shining example of zeal in defence of chastity might have been obscured for ever, but the virgins of the community asked the canons to hand the wretch over, as if to glean some information from him, and when they had him in their hands, such was their clamour for virtue’s reward, that they laid the youth out and, summoning their sister from her cell, they placed in her hands a knife taken from the kitchen and they forced her to unman the monster!’

  A sister screams. Alice pitches against Sister Maria, who staggers and cannot hold her. She slips and falls to the ground, her head bouncing hollow on the flagstones. The infirmarian scuttles over and the sisters mill around her fallen form. Katherine steps back, and while the others are clustered around Alice, she turns and rushes for the door, not pausing to glance at the Prioress, who remains standing at the lectern.

  Katherine throws open the heavy chapter house door and hurtles out into the cold white of daylight. From the tail of her eye she sees a blur of dark cloth. She manages two more steps until she feels a barking pain on her shin. She is tripped and goes sprawling in the snow. She tastes blood in her mouth. She looks up to see Sister Joan stepping over her, raising a staff and crashing it down on her, and after that, nothing.

  She wakes on her back in one of the stables. Her feet are tied to an iron hoop set high in one wall, and Sister Joan is looming over her, tying her hands together above her head. When she is happy with the knot, Joan runs the rope from her hands through another hoop set on the wall behind Katherine’s head and she pulls on the rope, stretching Katherine so that she is lifted off the ground. The cords burn her wrists and ankles but she will not cry out. She will not let Sister Joan see her weep.

  Joan ties off the rope and leans over her for a moment.

  ‘We ought to peel your skin,’ she says, ‘like they wanted to do to that nun.’

  Katherine feels the older nun’s rough palm sweeping over her leg, from ankle to thigh, pushing away the skirts of her cassock so that they hang bunched around her waist. Katherine can hear her breathing thicken. After a moment Joan turns and leaves, locking the door behind her. Katherine lets out a sob and her tears run to meet the fine strands of hair at her temples. There is no air or light in the stable and she is unable to hear the ringing of the bell that has until that morning ordered her life, so she cannot say how long she is there. It feels like a lifetime and Katherine has soiled herself twice before the door is opened and the light from a pair of rush candles spills in. Two sisters – one of them Joan – step aside to admit the Prioress.

  She sniffs in disgust.

  ‘Sister Katherine,’ she begins, ‘the sisterhood is roused and wonders what to do with you for the shame you have brought on our community.’

  Katherine tries to speak but her throat is constricted.

  ‘I have asked them to let you leave the priory,’ the Prioress continues, ‘to go your own way in the world, but they respond that you will only broadcast our failure abroad and bring yet more shame on us.’

  A silence lasts. The Prioress looks Katherine over, exasperated.

  ‘The nun of Watton cried out, child,’ she says. ‘She cried out to be beaten. She cried out that she deserved to be punished! Yet you lie in silence, as if your sin is worthy of neither comment nor shame.’

  ‘Holy Mother,’ Katherine whispers, finding her voice, ‘I spoke but three words to the canon. He came to my rescue as I was being pursued by men on horses beyond the walls. Had he not done so I would now be dead.’

  ‘Ha! Even now the devil disports in your mouth, child! For you make no mention of our Sister Alice.’

  Katherine cannot stop herself gasping. She did not want Alice mentioned, to be blamed, to be involved at all.

  ‘Sister Alice said nothing to the canon. Not one word! She did not even look at him!’

  ‘But the canon looked at her! She will be reciting one thousand Credos in the chapel all night tonight and in the morning she will be taking up your penitential task of carrying the bucket from my cell to the dung heap—’

  ‘No!’

  Katherine writhes but the Prioress launches forward so that her broad face fills her vision. Her breath is septic.

  ‘No?’ she asks. ‘No? You dare command me?’

  ‘Holy Mother, you cannot send Sister Alice out to the river tomorrow. Those men will be there. I know it! They will be waiting for her. For all that is holy, I beg of you!’

  Her voice rises in a scream as the door is slammed.r />
  The long night passes. Katherine wakes three or four times – never conscious for more than a few instants – and each time she hopes she is waking from a nightmare. Sometime towards the morning she is roused with a bucket of water sluiced over her body by a figure in the doorway. Her body arches, pulling on the muscles that have cramped in the night, grinding the ropes deep into the wounds in her wrists and ankles. Sister Joan is there with a knife and she slashes through the cords that bind Katherine’s hands to the wall. Katherine crashes to the ground. She does not scream. She has nothing left to give. She lies there as the Prioress comes in and looks her over again.

  ‘Is she alive?’ she asks.

  Joan nudges her body with a clog.

  ‘She is.’

  ‘Get her on her feet and have her carry two buckets of water to the infirmary. She has a job to do.’

  The Prioress leaves and Joan picks Katherine up by her armpits.

  ‘Walk,’ she says.

  She takes her hands away. Katherine collapses. Joan tries again. Katherine collapses again. Joan hauls her to her useless feet and drags her from the room. As the blood begins to circulate Katherine cries out and throws herself down with pain. Sister Joan half pushes, half drags her outside into the yard.

  It is dawn, and rain is falling. The snow has turned to slush.

  The bell above is ringing a slow clap, like a knell, and she pulls on the well rope so slowly Sister Joan loses patience and helps with the bucket, pouring the water out into two small ones and even helping her to her feet. But then she walks behind her, cursing her, calling her a devil, a whore and worse.

  The stone steps are the worst. The pain makes her dizzy. At the top Joan opens the door of the infirmary and pushes her staggering across the rushes. She has never been permitted to visit the whitewashed room above the calefactory. It is long and low, lined with two rows of six straw mattresses on each side and at the far end of the aisle, like an altar in a nave, a broad table dominated by the infirmarian’s bottles of tinctures and bags of herbs and her pestle and mortar.