Red Adam's Lady

by Grace Ingram

  “It’s the Scots, my lady. Hasten!”

  “All’s readied,” Emma said composedly, setting an arm about her mistress; from her free hand swung a neat bundle. “Come, m’ lady.”

  She held back as he took her arm. “My little dogs—”

  “Let them run with us!”

  “Their legs are too short, dear boy—”

  “You can’t carry more than the pups, Lady Cecily. They must run.” His patience was breaking; he exchanged sharp glances with Emma, who urged her after the throng surging through the gates. She stumbled forward, tears streaking among her wrinkles, the dogs yelping with excitement and scurrying under folk’s feet with undisciplined enthusiasm.

  They emerged into a disorder in which the dogs’ contribution was scarcely noticeable. Men and boys were driving bellowing cattle towards the woods; bristling swine, breaking from their herders, charged squealing in all directions; dogs and children skirmished everywhere; poultry flapped and squawked underfoot; and women with babies and bundles were already starting down the track out of the hamlet. Yet it was a purposeful confusion, and its calm center was the peasant Adam had warned two days ago, who stood at the head of the street ordering all. The Abbess, clasping a silver reliquary to her breast, gathered her robed company outside the gate. One of the servants was leading out her elderly white palfrey, another hauled a donkey that dug in obstinate hooves and brayed.

  “Everyone down to the ford!” Adam shouted. “Chivingham’s the only chance!”

  The porter boosted two novices on to the palfrey’s broad back, and handed up a child to sit on its neck.

  “Reverend Mother—” one began in protest.

  “You are my charge,” she answered inflexibly, and signed to the man, who seized the bridle and led the placid beast off. “Come, my daughters!” And they followed two by two as quietly as ever they walked in procession into the choir. Avice broke from the servants as they followed, and ran to claw at Julitta’s skirts.

  “Save me, m’ lady! Take me up wi’ you!” M’ lady, m’ lady, don’t leave me to t’ Scots!”

  “You’ve legs, use them!” snapped Julitta, thrusting her off. Avice ran at the Galloway pony and tried to scramble on to the sheepskin, mismanaged her skirts, and fell to her knees and stared about her. The donkey-leader was loading his beast with children; she started for it, but the cook seized her by the hair and dragged her away shrieking. Two more ponies, piled with young girls and children, trotted away down the track.

  Someone raised a yell and pointed. A tiny dark notch in the skyline high to the north moved over it, followed by another and two more.

  “They’re coming!”

  “Let the cattle go! Leave everything!” Adam yelled, caught Julitta and tossed her unceremoniously on to the Galloway’s back.

  “Shall we fire t’ village, m’ lord!” asked the peasant leader. “Sooner’n leave t’ Scots to sack it!”

  For a heartbeat’s space he considered it, measuring the distance to the moor’s ridge; then he shook his head. “They’ll take time to plunder, and we’ll need it.” He raised his voice to a carrying call as men and boys came loping back. “Bows and spears, and all out!” He swung up and kicked his pony into a run after the irregular procession hastening down the track, halted to hoist a pregnant woman up before him, and with a squalling baby under his left arm headed the exodus. Julitta took up another great-bellied woman and followed close.

  The river was swollen after rainy weeks, and sight of the disused ford, when they reached it through a gap in the wooded ridge, struck dismay into Julitta. The roughly-paved approach was broken away, and the further bank undermined and fallen. The turbid water hid the bottom, but she did not doubt its condition matched the rest, after a generation’s neglect. Adam halted on the brink to appraise it, and then urged the Galloway in. A palfrey of breeding would have balked; the stocky brute never hesitated. The woman squealed and wound her arms round Adam’s neck as the water splashed, and a wench in the troop behind shouted a jest that drew shrieks of slightly hysterical laughter.

  Adam, laughing with them, picked his way cautiously over the ford, his sagacious beast testing every foothold. The water reached the pony’s breast, and he leaned into the current’s force to keep his footing, but his legs held firm. At the further bank Adam set down the woman and passed the screaming baby to her; then he splashed back to the deepest water and held his horse there.

  “Julitta, carry your wench over and then take station beyond me.”

  She hitched her gown to her knees and pushed her pony in. With a snort and a squeal he soused in, and water wrangled icily against her legs. Its force startled her. The girl clung desperately as they fought across, past Adam who leaned to snatch a kiss as their knees touched, delighting the gathering villagers, to the opposite bank, where she set down the girl and returned to hold her pony between his and the verge. Then the porter coaxed down the old palfrey, less reluctant now the example had been set, and the two ponies completed the living chain on the ford’s downstream edge.

  The men had overtaken their women and children. At Adam’s orders they first carried across their bows, holding them high to keep them from the water, and then stood breast and shoulder-deep across the river to pass children over and help the women, weighted by their gowns, to make the crossing. The water thrust and worried; men braced themselves to withstand it, clung to the horses when foothold failed them, staggered and cursed and floundered. No hill farmer ever learned to swim; without the horses at their backs to buttress them they would not have ventured above the knee to save their lives.

  Julitta’s duty was to hold her tired mount steady in the current, to lean and grab when the gulping, sodden man at neck or rump lurched, to encourage frightened, dripping creatures handed along the human chain and give them anchorage. Little children, wailing and struggling, went first, and then the mothers; the older youngsters following. On the far bank they gathered up babies and bundles and dripped away towards Chivingham. Terror of the Scots had overcome fear of the river, and the operation was conducted with surprising speed and order. Only the donkey dug in his hooves on the edge and refused to budge; as soon as his load of children was hoisted off he loosed a shattering bray and trotted back, exasperated laughter behind him.

  Hooves drummed along the Chivingham road and Ivar topped the slope, pulling his Galloway to a sliding halt at the water’s edge. “They’re warned, m’ lord! What aid can I give?”

  “Take my lady’s place in the line. Julitta, cross back to the ridge and watch for the Scots!”

  It was no easy task to extricate herself from the chain and return to the northern bank, and she thanked God for the pony bred to the harshest usage and roughest country. Adam gripped her lightly by the shoulder as she passed him, his glance an accolade that fired her blood. The Abbess, keeping her household of women together, condemned her bare legs with a censorious glare she scarcely noticed; she smiled at the two old women in the midst of panting lapdogs, and mounted to the highest point of the ridge.

  The far skyline was empty now, bare of the scuttling ants that had swarmed over it. She could discern the church tower above the trees, but the village was hidden. Her sweeping survey of the valley found nothing amiss, and at half a league no sound would reach her. Southward she could distinguish the wall and roofs of Chivingham and the straggling line of fugitives hurrying along the track. Below her the crossing continued, regulated by the Abbess and the peasant leader. After the village women and children went the convent servants and boarders, Lady Cecily and Emma cumbered with armfuls of yelping dogs, and then the nuns. Last of all crossed the Abbess, and Julitta grinned to see her soused and gulping, passed from one arm to another while the irreverent water swirled her skirts about her.

  A thread of smoke spiraled up, thickening to a column. She shrieked above the splashing and outcries. “Adam! They’ve fired the village!”

  “Are they in sight?”

  “Not yet!”

  “W
atch until they are!”

  The last man of the chain set the Abbess on the bank. The wretched nuns, whelmed to the toes in sodden woolen, struggled up the slope. The Abbess wrung water from her robes, clasped the reliquary firmly to her breast, and with impregnable dignity followed them. The human chain was breaking apart. The men stumbled to shore, the palfrey and the two ponies with them; Ivar and Adam joined them for a brief conference, and then her husband came carefully across the ford to her.

  His tunic clung like a skin, and his exertions had split one shoulder seam. He shivered as the wind bit, and smiled tight-mouthed at her with that commendation that was more than any other man’s praise. He did not touch her, but stared at the haze of smoke thickening beyond the trees and blurring the far fells, and then at the fugitives straggling away from the ford.

  “When you see them come between the trees yonder, cross over. I’ll keep six archers with me and hold the ford, if they reach it before the nunnery folk are safe in Chivingham.”

  She gazed at him, chilling with a cold that had nothing to do with wet clothing in the wind. “Adam …”

  He looked back at the stumbling figures, the women weighted by drenched gowns, old Cecily lumbering among her little dogs, the indomitable Abbess. His disfigured face hardened. “We need half an hour, but I doubt we’ll be granted it. What else can I do?”

  “Nothing else,” she agreed steadfastly. “God hold you in His hand, Adam my dear.”

  “Julitta, remember always, I love you with all my heart.”

  She watched him go, his head flaming against the bright water. On the far bank men gathered about him; a few words, and some trotted after the fugitives, while the rest dispersed to ambush among the rocks and alders at the river’s brink. She fixed her gaze on the gap between the trees where doom would show, and repeated the Ave Maria over and over.

  A hoof clicked against stone behind her, and she whirled, her pulse thumping in her throat. A rider emerged from the trees on the track’s other side, a tall fair man carrying his right arm slung in a white kerchief. For a moment he gaped incredulously across at her, and then spurred his mount down the slope and up, dragging him back on his haunches alongside her. A brace of men-at-arms followed more cautiously.

  “The Scots!” Julitta shouted, as sunlight twinkled distantly on moving metal. She pulled her horse aside, and as Humphrey grabbed at her she screeched, “You fool! The Scots are on us!”

  “You little bitch! Oh, you treacherous little bitch!” he raged, and slapped her furiously across her face.

  She reeled and caught at her pony’s coarse mane to stay astride him, tears of shock and pain blurring her eyes. The Galloway plunged sideways, and recovering, she snatched out her dagger and cried again, “The Scots!”

  A yell answered; Adam was storming across the ford, his sword silver-bright amidst the spray, with Ivar half a length behind him. Humphrey grabbed at Julitta; she slashed his wrist, and an arrow whistled past his face. He ducked and swore, looked back at his enemy, at archers rising from ambush and nocking arrows, and recoiled. “You lying whore!” he choked, wheeled about and dashed down the slope as Adam’s pony heaved up the bank. Without heeding his challenge he turned his horse into the nunnery track and galloped away, his soldiers at his heels.

  She clattered down, her eyes watering and her cheek smarting, into Adam’s urgent arms. “The Scots… he didn’t heed me…

  He loosed her and lifted his head to listen. A glance stayed Ivar’s curses. The hoofbeats diminished to a drumming felt rather than heard, a pulse throbbing in the head. Then, sudden and sharp, came a far-off cry like a bird’s, a clangor and a yelling. Adam caught her bridle.

  “God has heard us,” he said soberly. “I think we have the rest of our half-hour.”

  19

  Chivingham gate jarred shut behind Adam, and as he swung down into a throng of fugitives, the first Scots loped howling up to the ditch. A voice barked command, arbalest strings answered viciously, and a screech lifted beyond the wall. As Julitta slid down into her husband’s arms she saw the rush check, while more and more wild creatures broke from the woods and swarmed across ploughland and waste.

  Adam set her on her feet and turned to Gilbert, sweating and fearful in his father’s absence, clad in hastily-assumed mail. Cattle, sheep and pigs were milling in the bailey’s center and making hideous uproar; women were crying, babies howling, dogs barking. Outside the rough, shoulder-high wall of mortared stone the Scots’ yells skirled as they gathered. A handful of men-at-arms held the gate, and flanking it Baldwin Dogsmeat’s sixteen crossbowmen were ranged along the wall.

  “All men to the walls!” Adam shouted above the tumult. “You’ve all bows and shafts out of store? Hell’s Teeth, get to it—spare strings, bracers and gloves too! Drive those beasts between the barn and stable and pen them with ropes before they run mad! Reverend Mother, Lady Matilda, get the women and children inside the hall. Heat water and prepare bandages; we’ll have wounded to tend. Spearmen, stand by in the midst to deal with any who break over! And hurry, hurry!”

  Hurry they did, spurred by the yells outside. None disputed his bidding; as the highest-ranking lord he automatically assumed command, and Gilbert was plainly thankful to relinquish it into his competent grip. Gautier regarded him with a surly scowl, but no one ever paid the least heed to Gautier’s opinions. Lady Matilda expressed her mind on high-handed insolence that gave her orders in her own hold, but the Abbess impelled her into the hall. Julitta slipped through the throng to acquire archery tackle, and then climbed the outer stair at the hall’s end to the solar doorway. From that vantage point she had in range the northern wall with its gate, most of the western wall and the northeast corner, and she would not impede the men defending them.

  The Scots veered away towards the village, and on the wall a man loosed a cackle of relieved laughter and flung up his spear. “They’ve gone! They’ll not face us!”

  “Hold fast!” Adam shouted. “They’ll be back!”

  “How d’you know their minds?” Gautier demanded sourly.

  “Not their minds, their bellies. They are hungry.”

  “Hungry?”

  “Moorland won’t support an army. These are foragers. They’ll not turn from plunder while there’s life in them.”

  He climbed the stair beside Julitta, and Gilbert and Gautier crowded after him. They watched the horde ransack cottages and barns, bearing out whatever poor possessions the peasants had had to abandon, pitching sheaves of unthreshed corn into the street, hauling out sacks of grain. More and more loped up from the ford, on foot and astride their rough ponies, yellow shirts and checkered cloaks outlandish in the familiar fields. The later comers grabbed and quarreled with bitter greed; fights swirled and knotted the scurrying throngs. Then, inevitably, thatch flared with a gush of flame scarcely visible in the sunlight, firebrands hurtled, and smoke drifted downwind over the manor, stinging eyes to tears and throats to coughing.

  Over the ridge from the ford, at a dead run, came a rider of the knightly sort in helm and hauberk. He burst into the mob barking commands, his lancehead flashing as he brandished it, and by twos and threes and dozens they left their looting and squabbling to gather round him. A prickle of fear ran down Julitta’s spine; a low wall, sixteen arbalesters and their peasants who had never seen warfare seemed a pitiful defence against that muster of savages. The knight was marshaling them into some sort of order, and now they broke back to the flaming village in purposeful groups.

  “Baldwin!” Adam shouted. “Mark that knight!”

  “He’s marked,” Baldwin answered placidly.

  “They’ll rush the wall! Wait until they’re in point-blank range and don’t waste a shaft!” he called to his untried peasants, and then turned on Gilbert and Gautier. “Range your men along the walls—you take the west and you the east—and don’t let them break!”

  “And you?” Gautier sneered.

  “They’ll try to burst the gate; that’s my post!” He pushe
d the surly lad half-way down the stair in one jolt. The courtyard’s chaos had now been resolved into some semblance of order; peasants and servants were scrambling to the walls with bows and spears, axes, pitchforks and scythe-blades tied to poles. Scots were running from the burning village carrying hurdles and doors for siege-shields; a dozen trotted with a heavy beam between them, emerging from the blaze and smother like fiends from Hell’s Mouth. Julitta strung her bow.

  “You’ll flank them from here as they ram the gate,” Adam said in her ear. “Try dropping shots.”

  She swung round and gripped his arms, gazing into his steady hazel eyes, his grim face that softened as he smiled at her. So she would remember him for all her life, whether that were fifty years or half an hour. “Adam—”

  “Dear heart, I must go. If—if the worst befall—”

  She nodded as he faltered. “I’ll join you cleanly, beloved.”

  He kissed her on the lips and took the steps in three leaps. She followed his bare head across the enclosure to the gate, a void where her entrails should have been.

  The Scottish knight had dismounted to marshal his tangle of saffron shirts; the checkered cloaks had mostly been cast aside. Some swung the heavy pole between them, and he was arranging those bearing improvised siege-shields on either side to cover them from the defenders’ arrows. His horde scurried about him, screeching and capering, pressing forward, and all at once broke from his hands singly, in clumps and then swarms, storming headlong for the wall. A few ineffective shafts streaked at them.

  “Hold it!” Adam yelled. “Wait to nail his eyeball!”

  Baldwin’s ribald voice suggested an alternative target, and won a crack of raucous laughter from his troop, waiting as coolly as for target practice, while the Scots, yellow shirts fluttering and naked legs bounding, raced for the ditch. Julitta nocked and drew, chose her man out of the foremost, and placed her first shaft deliberately just under his bristling beard. He leaped high and went down full-length under pounding feet, and she shot coldly and carefully to make every arrow count, closing her mind against their humanity. Scots were not men, but ravening wolves on two legs.