by Tasha Bell
©Tasha Bell 2015
No part of this book may be reproduced in any written, electronic, recording, or photocopying without written permission of the publisher or author. The exception would be in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews and pages where permission is specifically granted by the publisher or author.
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*Disclaimer: A version of this book was previously sold under my pseudonym Alice Longstaff as People of the Vale. If you bought that book please send me an email at [email protected] and I will send you a copy of this version free of charge.
People of the Vale
The bedchamber shuddered a battering ram slammed into a wall somewhere far below, the curvy courtesan’s body jiggled and shook, not from the impact of the siege weapon, but from the tongue that worked expertly between her legs.
She had always wanted to be fucked by a king, it would be just her luck for the castle to fall down before he actually put it in her. She pulled the man up by his tousled hair. “Take me, Your Majesty, we haven’t much time.”
The King knelt between her legs, his thick shaft clasped in one gold ringed hand. “We are safe here.” He gestured at the groups of stone trolls who stood impassively around the edges of the chamber, maces gripped in their huge grey hands. He ran the tip of his fat cock up and down her valley, wetting himself in her juices, and plunged into her. The courtesan cried out in shock as in one moment he filled her completely and the door to the royal quarters burst open in a splinter of oak fragments.
Framed in the entrance stood a dark haired young man, his heavily muscled body covered scars, mud and died blood. Double handed over one shoulder he carried a heavy broadsword, he was light on his feet, ready for whatever might come at him.
“Oh, fuck off.” Muttered the Pretender King, Lord of the Dukes of the North, as he rolled from the soft bodied courtesan and reached for his dagger.
Chapter One
Viviana had heard the glad news a week ago, after ten long years of war the Dukes of the North had finally been defeated. A traveller on his way out to the plains had recounted the news in the tavern. He told the excited villagers that King John’s armies had run down the traitors at Castle Ranchester and that in front of a fifty thousand cheering soldiers they had thrown the Pretender King and his stone trolls from the high battlements. The stranger had said that the army was being disbanded and the soldiers demobbed. The men of Amvale would be coming home.
She couldn’t believe it had been ten years since the war had come to the village, ten whole years since the men of the valley were summoned to the square and marched out of their lives. They had not known how to fight, those poor Sons of The Vale, they were ploughmen and millers, gentle country folk, raised to nurture crops not to kill - but they had been ordered away none the less - fodder for King John’s endless fight. Amvale had once been the home of the Dragon Riders, and it was written into the ancient constitutions of the land that they would provide support to the King in times of need by sending him three dragons, or failing that three thousand men.
The last of the Dragons had died out three generations before, and with it the glory of the Vale, now they were nothing but poor farmers, obliged to honour an ancient debt. She shuddered at the thought of what the men would have been through since she last saw them, the miles they would have marched and the death they would have seen.
“Do you think they’ll remember us Alexandra?” Viviana asked, gazing from her window to the other side of Amvale Forest, where a faint cloud of dust was rising, kicked up by the weary feet of the Men of the Vale marching towards their homecoming.
“I don’t know Viv” replied Alexandra. She was normally so cheerful, but Viviana could tell from the tone of her voice that today she was worried. Alexandra continued: “I was only fifteen when they left and you must have been twelve, they have been away so long I’m not sure that I can remember what they look like.” Viviana leaned on the windowsill and tried to judge if the dust cloud had got any closer, it seemed to her that it hardly moved at all. “I’m sure Christian will remember me,” she said, she turned to face the other girl. “And your father and your brother, they won’t have forgotten you”
Alexandra looked sadly at her highborn friend. “We must be prepared,” she said. “After ten years of war this village will not see the same amount of men return as went to fight.”
“I know,” said Viviana with a sigh. “But if something had happened to Christian, or to your father, we’d have felt it, surely somehow we would have known by now”
She looked back to the dust cloud, now almost at the edge of the forest, and pictured her reunion with Christian. He had been her childhood friend. The son of the head gardener at Loxley Hall. They had been inseparable and he had taught Viviana more than any of her fusty tutors with their ancient books ever had. He had snuck her out of the house to hunt for wild honey in the woods, had shown her how to imitate the calls of the birds so that they would come down and take food from her hand. He had shown her the best places to swim in the river Am and how to sneak into the dairy and skim the cream. The best memories of her childhood all seemed to revolve around Christian, and she always felt that a part of her had been taken with him when the men were conscripted.
Her most cherished childhood memory was of the day that he took her climbing up in the mountains. They had sweated and toiled for the best part of the day, along narrow ledges and seemingly impassable outcrops of rock. Many times she had wanted to go home, but Christian had led her onwards he eyes shining, telling her that she had to see what it was he had found. Finally they crossed the lip of a cliff and out onto plateau at the top of the world. They were they were standing in on the lip of a gently sloping depression, like the shallow crater of a volcano, all around them were scattered the ancient bones of cows, horses and people. She had wondered what could have dragged all those animals up there to die, and then all at once realised that she was standing in an ancient abandoned dragons nest. How he had found it she did not know, but it was her he had chosen to share his discovery with, it made her thrill in a way she had never experienced before.
So it had been the most horrible of days, that cold November morning when he had been called to the square with all the other menfolk. She could still picture him as he stood in front of the recruiting sergeant, no longer a gardener’s son, but not quite a soldier yet either. The breastplate he was given had been far too big for his narrow boy’s chest and the helmet had pressed his unruly hair into his eyes. At only fifteen he had been the youngest of the men to leave for the wars, but he’d bravely marched off with the others, trying to look like a man though his slight frame and hairless chin were those of a child.
She wondered what Christian would look like now, she was sure he’d be handsome, even at fifteen she had thought him the most beautiful man she had ever seen. And she knew he’d still have the same mischievous laugh and broad ready grin. She looked back to the dust cloud and started to plan all the things they’d do together over the coming weeks as she reintroduced him to the gentle pleasures of life in the vale, she would pack ropes and they would climb once more to the dragon’s nest.
***
Alexandra finished pinning up Viviana’s hair. She too was thinking back to the day the men had left. She had wept from the moment she heard the terrible news, and had
begged her father to flee into the woods with her brother, to hide there until the round-up had finished. But her father would not be moved, he had said that the Men of the Vale always did their duty, that they might not have dragons anymore but they still had their pride, and he strode out into the square with his eldest son, their jaws both clenched tight though their eyes glistened. Alexandra’s last memory of them was seeing them turn back one last time to look at her as they crossed the bridge over the River Am, Kit had stumbled over his large feet and her father had hauled him up by his elbow, that’s how they had walked out of her life – arm in arm – and she desperately hoped it was how they would return.
After the men left the village had grown quiet. Everywhere Alexandra had seen the shadows of those who had gone to fight, in the empty benches they left outside the tavern and in the unharvested corn left to spoil in the fields. In those first few years the women had stuck together to help each other through, unusual bonds had developed, relationships that never would have flourished in times of peace. With her clumsy brother gone to fight, Alexandra’s rooms above the tavern had felt deserted and cold, and she had come to rely more on her friendship with the highborn Viviana.
She remembered how hard Viviana had taken Christian’s departure, it was like a part of her soul had fallen away that day. She desperately hoped that she would see them happily reunited, and she dared not tell Viviana that she knew something terrible had happened to the men of the vale, that she had woken in the night three years ago knowing a tragedy had befallen them. Alexandra had her mother’s blood, and was cursed with the visions that came to all women of their family. Although the she tried to be happy at all times the images of blood that had hit her then still had not left.
She looked over at Viviana’s silhouette framed in the window. When the men had left Viviana was just a girl. A scruffy little thing, thin as a whip with uncontrollable blond hair and a permanently dirty face, no one would have been able to guess then that she was heir to half the Vale. Alexandra smiled to herself remembering her friend as the scrappy little tom-boy she once was. No doubt that she was a woman now. At some point her hips and breasts had filled out and her walk had taken on an unconsciously feminine shimmy, she found it hard to believe that any of the men would recognise the fine lady her friend had grown into.
Judging by the dust cloud’s progress the men would not reach the village for another two or three hours, their tired feet making slow progress after what must have been several months of marching. But Alexandra could not bear to spend the afternoon stuck away inside Loxley Hall, waiting to see if they would have their hearts broken or healed, so clutching her friend’s hand she pulled her out into the corridor, they would go and wait in the square, even if they had to stand there all afternoon.
Chapter two
By six almost the whole village was assembled in the centre of the village, but still the men did not arrive. The still warm autumn sun slanted over the rooftops and hit the wall of the tavern that for generations had been run by Alexandra’s family. Outside Matt Tindall and his three sons sat drinking strong ale with a ragtag gaggle of cronies, they leered and shouted as Viviana and Alexandra past. Viviana seemed not to notice, but Alexandra gave them a seething look of contempt. Matt and his family had been left behind when the other able bodied men were summoned to fight. They claimed that they had been hunting boars high in the Borset Mountains when the call to muster had sounded, and so they had missed their chance to fight for King John. Alexandra did not believe a word they said, two separate villagers swore that they had seen them sneaking towards the woods that grey dawn.
Elsewhere groups of women and the other men who were not taken to the wars - those too young or too old, those who had hidden and those who were crippled - were gathered in small groups talking nervously. All were excited to see their loved ones return, but terrified of receiving confirmation of their worst fears, that the husband or son they had waved off on that cold November morning all those years ago had fallen in some lonely northern field, far from those who loved him. No one had been able to get specific news about their loved ones, but reports filtered down to them from travellers through the village, three thousand killed by stone trolls at Carnock Water, another eight hundred in Blansford Dyke.
A shout went up from the crowd and there came sound of marching feet on the old boards of the Bridge. Moments later the man of Amvale walked back into the square. Cries of excitement mingled with exclamations of horror from the waiting villagers. Of the hundred and fifty men who had marched over that bridge and out of Amvale ten years earlier barely forty limped back in, and those not the big-chested, ruddy-faced country men who had left, singing harvest songs and promising to be back in time to sow the spring crops, these men were a different breed. Most were ragged and hollow checked, they looked more like a colony of lepers than a column of soldiers. Some were obviously wounded, missing limbs or eyes. One small group seemed to have been blinded, they walked roped together following the sound of a bell. Alexandra spotted her brother Kit and ran to him.
“Kit” She shouted, throwing her arms around his neck, “oh Kit, you’re back! Thank the lord!” She paused looking at her brother, he was still tall and lanky and still seemed to have a faint twinkle in his eye though his lips were already quivering, it seemed that some men were incapable of having their spirit broken. “And father?” Alexandra asked, already knowing the answer.
Kit looked down at his little sister. The girl he’d left behind had grown, filled out, become an attractive women. Her large eyes began to fill with tears as he stood silently still, shaking his head sadly. Eventually he managed to speak.
“Three years ago” he said, “At Neighton Bridge. I tried Alexandra. I tried all I could but…” he began to sob. Alexandra had always known her brother as a happy-go-lucky joker, but as he stood in the familiar square, the place where he had spent his carefree childhood, she saw all the emotion and pain of ten years of horror flowing out of him, his shoulders seemed to crumple and he fell forwards to embrace her.
As Kit sobbed disconsolately on her shoulder a man stepped forward to talk to Alexandra. She did not recognise him, he hadn’t been one of the men who had left the village. He was hugely broad and powerfully built, so much so that he had almost looked squat standing next to Kit, though he could only have been a few inches shorter than her brother. He was older than the other men, his close-shorn hair flecked with grey.
“Your father was a hero Alexandra,” he said in a deep voice. “I was with him when he fell.” His broad sun browned face furrowed with emotion as he talked.
“I’d been separated from my regiment when they ambushed us on the bridge. I’d taken a crossbow bolt to my calf, I couldn’t walk. Your father didn’t know who I was, we’d never seen each other before, but he ran to me and held off the Pretender King’s troops as I tried to crawl back to our lines. He fought them off long enough for our reinforcements to arrive, but he was cut so badly.” The stranger stopped speaking and ran his hand over his cropped scalp. Alexandra could not bear to hear what he was saying, but she found she could not stop him either.
“I held him in my arms all that night,” he said. “All he wanted was to talk about was you and your mother, about this village and his tavern, and I promised him that no matter what happened to Kit I’d come back here and look after you.”
Alexandra looked at the muscular stranger, this man who’d brought her the most devastating news of her life and who was now saying he wanted to help her, she felt herself flush with emotions, joy at her reunion with Kit, grief at the loss of her father. Maybe if he hadn’t rushed back to look after this outsider he would have come home to her.
“I don’t need any looking after” she said.
***
Viviana scanned the returning men for Christian. She was certain that she would spot his broad grin or hear his infectious laugh as he ran towards, but there was no sign of him among the home comers. One-by-one the men hurried to embrace thei
r families in the square. All around her Viviana could hear their sobs as they recounted the fates of those who had not come back. Eventually there was only one man left alone in the square. He stood at least a head taller than the others and his dark hair fell to his broad shoulders. While the other home-comers had searched the crowd for familiar faces he stared ahead with his jaw clenched and his eyes narrowed. Around his narrow waist he wore a thick leather belt from which hung a long sword. He carried a large, green leather sack under one arm. The other villages kept away from him, intimidated by this dark unmoving presence in their midst. Eventually Viviana approached him.
“Christian?” she said.
The man looked down on her, she could feel his gaze travelling over her body, starting with her hair, so artfully pinned by Alexandra that morning, but now falling loose, and moving over her face along the curve of her neck to her breasts, before sliding down to her hips. Viviana was used to the stares and winks of Matt Tindall and his friends, but this look felt different, it felt hungry, as if this man could have ripped her clothes from her right there in the square, in front of the whole village. Eventually he raised his eyes to hers and she shivered, they were Christian’s eyes, but older, so much older, as if he’d been away 1000 years not the ten she had experienced waiting for him.
“Viviana?” he said at last.
“Oh Christian!” She threw herself into his arms, he was so much bigger than the boy she remembered. Back then he had been a lanky bean-pole, but now she could feel the layers of muscle beneath his tunic, she was acutely aware of how small and soft her body was next to his. How if he wanted to he could have picked her up and crushed her in his arms. There was a power in him that had never been there when they had lain next to each other as children, staring up at pictures in the clouds, something had changed.
