I smiled at him, hearing the awkwardness. ‘And?’
‘I also … dream foolishness.’
‘It’s possible to dream we are quite different from what we are,’ I told him to make it easier. ‘I myself have dreamed I am a leopard and also a man.’
He coughed, looked sidelong at me because he never liked it when I read his mind. ‘Well, then, I dream that I am the Queen, fighting the Spaniard also and that … well, I am happy.’
And so the decision was made. I need not have gone with them on their voyage, and I need not have done what I did that night. The strangeness of Becket’s cloud-coloured eyes was some of it, the way he looked at me when we practised, as if one minute he could see my breasts and another minute all he could see was the darkness of my skin. And the Queen Moon was there as well, of course, as she always is, although I could not see her or hear her and thought she had left me.
I laid my hand full on his, drank aqua vitae, left my hand there. The hairy ghosts are always cocooned by cloth, as I have said, and so they are sensitive to touch. With my other hand, I unbuttoned the top of my doublet and untied the strings of my shirt with its falling-band. They rarely see women’s breasts, save at the stews where the whores sit about with their breasts perched high on the top of their stays, and so he was not used to seeing any breasts pressing against a shirt as mine were.
‘Merula…’ he said hoarsely, ‘don’t do that.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because … I … because…’
‘Do you think I am a virgin?’ I asked him, having found out the word I needed.
‘Married?’
I felt my lip curling in a smile at him. ‘My husband is dead. If I were only another woman, you would already have tried to kiss me.’
He stopped in what he was going to say, stared, blinked, stared again and his skin started to ruddy and darken, as theirs do when they are thinking what they believe to be evil thoughts.
‘Do you think I would be offended by your kiss?’ I asked. ‘Or would you perhaps be offended by my kiss?’
He swallowed. ‘I haven’t thought of you as…’ He stopped himself, knowing that I most certainly would be offended if he told he thought of me as a man, even though I knew perfectly well that he did. ‘And you are black and it’s strange…’
‘Is it too strange for you?’ I asked, not surprised, for it had taken me a long time to see past his paleness.
He looked down again, then moved, sat next to me on the bench, not opposite. There was hardly room for us both, for as I have said, he is broad and I am neither small nor slender.
‘There’s strangeness, sure,’ he said, running his fingers along my hand to my wrist, and then up to the side of my mouth and down the cord of my neck. ‘You are very strange, Merula.’
The word ‘but’ hung like a bird from the perch of my name and I laughed and tipped my head so his eyes could follow his fingers down into the darkness where my breasts lay. I let him kiss me first, beautiful though his bulk felt against me, I held back until he had put his lips to mine, so he would know he had seduced me and not the other way about. And he had, of course. To be manless is possible, but never pleasant, after all. And to be womanless except for those you can buy, no man likes it either.
He took my hand, went to the innkeeper, spoke quickly, and then caught the key that was thrown to him and so we went up the creaking stairs to a room overwhelmed with a broken-backed bed and a sagging mattress and curtains in tatters all about and a bowl in the corner. It stank of the fish-swimming of other two-backed beasts, but I didn’t care. Becket locked the door behind us, then stood facing me, took my hands and swung them out and kissed my lips properly, so I could taste him and the booze he drank and he could taste me and the booze I drank. Then I unbuttoned the rest of my doublet and opened my shirt so he could taste my breasts as well.
‘Do you know, I have no idea how to undress you,’ he said laughing and muffled, as his hands fought the ties of my canions.
I bent my lips to his ear. ‘You work at your clothes and I’ll work at mine.’
‘You see how wrong you are to wear hose? If you wore skirts, this would be simple,’ he grumbled and turned away while I did the same. Well, we left our shirts, for the pleasure of lifting them off each other and there we were at last, himself in shades of pink and white and quite remarkably hairy and myself … I have said that I am beautiful and so he said as well, enjoying my pointed breasts and flat flanks and belly with his hands, burying his face between my breasts and mounting and riding me while I lay back and went happily to the place where pleasure sings.
Afterwards we lay cupped together in the hollow of the broken-backed bed, which had lost a couple more straps thanks to us, and while he dozed I sat up and looked to see what had been hidden all this time by his clothes. I have no desire for boys who are unmarked by the world, but it made my heart lurch to see just how much the world had marked him. Scars on hairy ghosts are rather ugly and pink when new, and silvery white like a slug’s trail when old. His back was a snail’s carnival of stripes and there were healed cuts on his shoulders, his leg, a raised place on his ribcage where he had been hit by something hard and broken a rib or two. Quite apart from the scar bracelets he wore on each wrist.
His eyes fluttered open again and he shook his head at me, rolled on his back, reached out to bring my face closer and stopped when he saw my left arm.
‘Good God, what’s that?’ He was staring at the world-snake coiling up my arm, which was made when my woman’s cave first gave blood, to show that I knew how to bear pain. It is made by cutting the skin and putting clean stones in the cuts to raise up welts and it hurts a great deal. Some die of it because the scars do not heal and become full of flies and sickness and heat: we say the world-snake has eaten them early. Becket reached out to touch it gently.
‘It is my own world-snake who laid the egg that the world hatched out of and sits in the tree of knowledge as the Queen Moon to teach us all she knows.’
‘Oh.’ He frowned. ‘To us, a snake is evil.’
‘Perhaps your northern snakes are evil, but our snakes are very wise. All my people carry her on their arms, the women on the left arm to make it strong to carry babies and the men on the right arm to make it strong to fight our enemies.’
His fingers followed the spiral to where the head is on the shoulder. ‘It looks like a carving.’
‘It was carved.’ With emphasis, I looked over his naked pink hairy chest and his belly and passed my hand down to his lower nest of hair. ‘Look, you have a snake too.’
He laughed and lo, his snake rose up to tell me how happy it was. Well, I was happy to see it too, and had a warm cave ready for it to explore.
We had to roll off the bed before the last few straps broke, which made me laugh, and when we had both got our breath back, he told me he had never had a woman ride him like that before. I asked him what kind of fools hairy ghost women are, not to know how to be a frog for the pleasure of their man. He said for a woman to ride a man was sinful and I laughed again.
The gods of the hairy ghosts are quite extraordinary, for not only do they tell their people whom they may mate with and when, which is normal for gods who are busybodies that way, they tell them in what way they may mate and what positions. Which is surely none of any god’s business, but Becket was worried his angry storm-god would be offended.
So I told him some of the god-stories of my people, where the feathered serpent tricks the hippopotamus and the Lady Moon’s egg-laying at the beginning of the world and he told me their own god-tale of a garden where a god made people and told them not to eat fruit from a certain tree and a serpent came and told the woman to eat and she did and gave it to her man and so they were driven from the garden and had to work and suffer.
It was a very strange tale indeed, especially as the hairy ghosts say that it shows women are weak and foolish because it was a woman who ate the fruit first. I say, she was clearly the first upside-down pe
rson, to see through the god’s tricks and listen to the wise serpent, so that she could capture the knowledge of good and evil for herself. I say, she was brave and bold to risk it. And kindly too, since she shared with her ignorant and ungrateful man. But Becket told me to hush since I did not know what I said and was in any case speaking blasphemy.
The hairy ghost gods are very easily offended – touchy, oversensitive and short-tempered. No doubt it is from never being visited in the dreamtime.
We lay down to sleep together, skin to skin, most delightful especially for me as I had been sleeping wrapped in shirts next to Rebecca, whose snores were high-pitched, and I much preferred the salty bulk of David Becket.
And so it came about that I went dream-riding with him …
* * *
He was riding his horse half-asleep and the horse itself near ready to drop for weariness. He had had no sleep for three days, except the occasional doze for ten minutes while they waited for the stragglers to catch up, and nothing to eat for a day. They were heading up the Oxford Road and near enough to Oxford to see the hills around it, the fields empty though still unburned. Behind them, perhaps a day or two behind, perhaps less, came the Spanish army, Parma’s finest tercios, driving north-west up the road to catch and destroy them.
It went against the grain to be running away, but he knew he had to do it. He had held Parma for ten days, used all the labrynthine complexity of London to stop him, given the Queen precious time to ride for the second city of her Kingdom, given the barges and boats full of supplies time to go up the Thames, bought some time for Lord Hunsdon to raise troops in the Border country. He had lost most of his men and London was a smoking wreck behind him, but he had stolen the one thing Parma had very little of – time.
And now that Parma had broken out to the Edgeware Road, he was riding like hell for Oxford with what remained to him, a couple of hundred horse and a number of the remnants of the London trained bands running grim-faced at their stirrups. Most of them were ahead of him on the road of course, with scouts out ahead of that. He was with the Rearguard arquebusiers, to form an ambush if Parma should manage to come to contact with them.
His head was spinning with his hunger for sleep as dusk came down. There was some blockage – oh yes, one of the last two wagons with guns and weapons and a couple of barrels of powder, it had naturally broken an axle within a few miles of their goal. The men who had been with it were feverishly trying to unload it.
‘Leave it,’ he ordered, ‘Prime the barrel and leave the fastest rider to blow it up when Parma comes.’
They were young, hollow-eyed and weary, and very frightened. They looked at each other, not knowing how to choose which one to risk almost certain death.
‘Draw straws for it, gentlemen,’ said Becket quietly as he and his four outriders went past.
Something was happening ahead, some stir among the exhausted men plodding along the rutted muddy road, a sound of hoofbeats, easily distinguishable from their own horses because they were bright, firm, not stumbling.
For one second, Becket’s empty belly griped as he wondered if Parma could possibly have stolen a march on him … No. It was impossible. Unless he had fitted wings to his horses.
And here they came, the Queen’s General-in-Chief of England, newly-made the Earl of Sherborne, Walter Ralegh himself riding towards him with his breastplate bright and shiny under his double chain of esses and his buff-coat clean and a woman’s glove pinned to his shoulder as if he were a knight at a tourney.
Too tired to think what else to do, Becket simply turned his horse to meet Ralegh’s, wishing with all his heart he could have had a rest and changed his clothes and washed before meeting the Queen’s Favourite. Ralegh would no doubt look down his long courtier’s nose at Becket’s face still blackened with the smuts of London’s smoke and a throbbing slash on his cheek from a few frantic moments when it had seemed as if Parma’s men had caught him after all.
Ralegh was mounted on a magnificent chestnut animal … That was another thing they had him to thank for, the few days they had needed to move the Queen’s entire stables north and west. The horse stopped and Ralegh waited for his own outriders to catch up.
Ralegh knew he was being watched, you could see it in the tilt of his head. Becket waited dully for arrogance and then …
Ralegh swept his hat off and bowed in the saddle to him. Becket found his mouth was opening, shut it, clutched at his helmet to take it off, then gave up and simply bowed back. What?
‘Captain Becket,’ said Ralegh clearly and loudly, ‘Her Majesty the Queen bids me tell you that she is most mightily delighted with your valour and wisdom in that you have held back Parma for twice as long as she ever could have hoped and so given her time to reach and fortify Oxford. To which end, Captain, she has given me at my own request, her gracious permission that I may dub you knight, here and now as we stand in the field.’
Becket sat blinking while his soggy brains caught up with the honour. Around him his men muttered and a scattered clapping began, then a few cheers and then more. Young John Donne was at his elbow, grinning and delighted.
‘Now, my lord?’ Becket asked, a little bewildered.
‘Now sir, if it pleases you,’ said Ralegh, quite gently. He dismounted, gave his horse’s reins to one of his riders, then came striding over and held Becket’s stirrup for him.
Becket slid from his horse, not quite able to feel his feet and wondering if he would be able to stand up at all. Luckily, instinct and a skilled shove from Ralegh’s shoulder kept him upright. It was true what they said, Ralegh was unreasonably tall. Becket was not at all accustomed to looking up at anyone.
‘A few minutes here to make you a knight,’ said Ralegh, his Devonshire burr only a breath in Becket’s ear. ‘Then we’ll be up the road in an hour and you in your bed.’
‘But I—’
‘It will please your men, at least. And the Queen will have it.’
John Donne was at his elbow again, whispering something … Oh he was being told to kneel here, away from the deeper mud. What did it matter? His legs were caked already.
Shaking his head like a bear, Becket knelt, fumbled the straps of his morion, took the helmet off at last, shook his curls free and tried to settle his mind. Ralegh was before him, clean buff leather, polished blued steel … Well, he had some mud splashes on his boots too.
There was a hiss and scrape as he drew the long Damascene rapier and Becket felt the flat of it on his shoulder, right, left and right again. There was a rumble of approval and amazingly loud cheering and clapping again.
Ralegh looked around at the men. ‘Rise Sir David Becket, most valiant and glorious knight of the Queen.’
Becket heaved himself up, sincerely terrified he was going to faint, to find Ralegh gripping his hand.
‘Did you know you won me forty pounds, Sir David?’ said Ralegh conversationally.
Becket blinked and then half-grinned. ‘You made a book on how long we’d last?’
‘Of course. None of the others would dare venture past five days, but I struck out for ten. So I am personally indebted to you besides the Queen.’
‘How is she?’
Ralegh shook his head and smiled. ‘Extraordinary. Better than I have seen her in months. And very angry.’
‘Good. You know Parma’s on my tail.’
‘Ah yes.’ Once again Ralegh held Becket’s stirrup and he climbed into the saddle while every muscle in him protested virulently at the outrage. ‘Tell me on the road.’
By the time they came past the huge earthworks still being feverishly dug by shirt-sleeved young students, old men and women, while the children carried baskets of earth up to the tops of the banks, Ralegh had skilfully filleted out the whole tale of Becket’s doings from his exhausted ramblings. And somewhere at the back of his mind, Becket thought he had come on a new thing. He had seen the Prince of Orange many years ago while he was fighting in the Netherlands, and he had served under Sir John Neville,
under many captains in fact. But with Ralegh’s lean face tilted towards him attentively, it suddenly came to him that just as she had found herself the perfect bureaucrat in Cecil, Lord Burghley to be her Lord Treasurer during the peacetime, the perfect spymaster in Walsingham during the strained arm’s-length non-war over the past ten years or so, now the Queen had found herself the perfect warrior to be her General-in-Chief. It was typical of her. For the first time since early spring, most unlikely, most irrationally, his misery and horror began to lift, it began to seem possible that Parma could be fought and destroyed.
* * *
I woke and Becket himself dreamed on, less powerfully, floating women, sea-snakes, coupling with strange creatures.
It had been a dream of prophecy; there was no mistaking the brightness of it, the strength, the sense it made. No wonder he was haunted and weary. Nothing tires the spirit more than prophecy.
A little later, when I had dressed myself again, I woke him and when he had roused himself most unwillingly and drunk ale and dressed, we went primly down the stairs and out into High Holborn and Becket seemed not able to look straight at me any more. I wondered if he was afraid I would want more of him, so I smiled and chinked my purse. He said nothing of his new dream, and nor did I speak of it, not wishing to frighten him.
Rebecca was cold to me. She did not like it that I went and disappeared with her husband’s best friend, nor did she like it that I returned bright-eyed and loose-limbed when I had said I would. I offered her the money for my manumission and she sat and stared for a long while.
‘Whose idea is it?’
‘Becket’s,’ I told her. ‘But it seems that my son is not here in this cold place, so I must go to Portugal again.’
Her lips tightened and she looked in the purse. ‘Keep it,’ she told me and bade me fetch pen and paper, which I did, and she wrote out a manumission that her aunt and Dr Nunez signed. But when I had the paper in my breast, I felt no different.
‘What will you do now?’ she asked.
‘Seek service again,’ I answered, knowing what she was thinking. ‘I might go and stand by the servingman’s pillar in St Paul’s.’
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