by Jill Barnett
He cut her gown from neck to waist and stared at her body, unable to look too long upon the wound because of its depth. When he pressed on the soft flesh beneath her collarbone, he could feel the tip of the arrow just beneath her fine blue-veined skin.
He had removed arrows before. From men, not women.
And not his woman. There were two ways to extract an arrow. One was to pull the shaft back out the way it had entered. But if the point was spiked with small prongs, it could rip the flesh away from the bone and make the victim bleed to death.
He used the second method and cut a cross in the front of her shoulder with a dagger. She moaned and twisted, and he had to hold her down. Fresh red blood the color of scarlet poppies poured out from the wound.
He watched her for signs of consciousness. There were none. Thankfully. As swiftly as he could, he used some narrow tongs to pull the arrow shaft through, pinning her with his other arm.
She tried to buck him off her and moaned even more pitifully. He had to take deep breaths of air that were hard to catch and hold. She cried quietly.
“I would take your pain from you if I only could,” he whispered. After a moment that seemed like an eternity, she quieted.
He looked at the arrow in his hand. The shaft was spiked.
But now fresh new blood swelled swiftly from the wound. He dropped a cloth into a beechwood bowl filled with warm water and vinegared wine. Then he dabbed at and firmly pressed the cloth against her shoulder.
It had to hurt. Still she did nothing but give a small wisp of a moan that sounded as if she were farther and farther away.
No matter what he did, the wound would not stop bleeding. His anger, his frustration, was so strong at that moment he wanted to hit something.
All but a few of the Welshmen who had done this to her had already paid harshly for their sin. In his mind’s eye he saw her running, saw them chasing her, and all over again he swelled with that rage.
He felt her look on him before he looked down and saw it. She was awake and stared up at him like a cipher, those bright eyes of hers empty and lifeless. She looked as though she were little more than human air.
Her eyes drifted closed, as if keeping them open were too much for her, but she placed her hand on his where it rested on his thigh.
He stared down at her hand while his thumb stroked one of her fingers. There was dried blood all over her arm, wrists, and hands from holding her wound while she was running.
He took the wet cloth and washed her as gently as he could. When he was done, he wrung out the cloth; the water in the bowl turned a deeper color, like the red-brown dirt of Cyprus, where they had buried too many men. He had seen so much blood in his lifetime that he had thought he was immune to the sight of it.
Apparently not.
Seeing her small hand covered with blood sickened him. Not since his first bloody battle had he felt the bile rise to his throat as it did now. He had forgotten he could feel this.
Still the wound bled on and on, and he knew he must do something drastic, before the wound could become putrid or before she slowly bled to death. He knew what to do, but it did not make the thought easier; it made it more difficult.
Don’t think. Don’t think. So you don’t have to feel.
He stared at the rough oaken table near the bed. His dagger with the handle in the shape of a cross lay next to a squat tallow candle with a bright flickering flame.
Slowly he picked up the dagger and lifted its blade to the fire, watching almost sightlessly as the metal got hotter and hotter. The wound still bled, and to him, it looked as if her life were draining away in a bright red stream.
He took a deep breath and started to move the dagger toward her shoulder. But his hand froze. He could not do this. He could not. He waited, prayed, closed his eyes. He put the blade to the flame again, waiting longer while the dagger blade turned hotter and hotter.
He took another long and deep breath, then swiftly pressed the knife to her shoulder.
Her eyes shot open and she screamed long and loud.
It sounded as if it went on forever. Then she fainted.
He sat there staring down at her, her scream still ringing through his mind, in his head, his ears. In his heart. He dropped the knife as if he had touched the hot blade; it clattered onto the stone floor. He took deep breaths, but it did not help.
He slipped to his knees on the floor as the anguish swelled inside of him. He gave a muffled, aching moan that sounded as if it came from someone else, some wild animal or wounded beast; then he buried his head in his arms and cried.
Chapter 18
Clio slept restlessly, feeling as if she were in between two worlds: The real world, which seemed like a dream because it was nothing but a nightmare of pain. And her dream world, a place where it was safe and sweet and real, where it was night and the stars shone above her in numbers too many for one person to count.
Some of those stars were far away, as if they were closer to heaven. But others, just a few, were so near, she thought she could reach out and touch them with her fingertips.
She had never seen stars like these, some shooting west and others shooting east, while a streaky cloud of them just stayed in the same spot and twinkled like the bright sapphires in Queen Eleanor’s crown.
In this odd dream, she was standing on the edge of a giant crevasse; it was so deep she could not see the bottom--just a huge black abyss that was frighteningly empty.
On the other side of that deep ravine stood Merrick, astride his huge warhorse, which was stamping and snorting and looking like it wanted to jump. Behind him, lined up like men armed and ready for battle, were row after row of standards with distinctive waving banners—sable a cross argent a lion rampant gules—black field, white cross, and rearing red lions.
Suddenly the lions became real, alive. They jumped down from the pennants into live packs that prowled in circles on the ground, then leapt across the wide crevasse as if they had wings.
They landed on the other side, near Clio, and the moment they touched the ground, their paws changed into bare human feet.
They roared continuously, then all turned toward her.
She saw the intent to destroy in their eyes, and she ran.
Their roars became human shouts. Kill her! Get her! Stop her!
She stole a quick look over her shoulder and saw the pack of red lions had changed into Welsh outlaws with longbows and leather jacks and looks more frightening than those of animal predators.
Er cof am Gwent! came their Welsh cries.
They shot bloodred arrows at her as she tried to escape. She dodged them and ran on. When the arrows hit the nearby trees, they stuck, then melted in bloodstains as if the trees were wounded and bleeding.
In the distance she could hear Merrick’s voice. Far, far away, calling her name, again and again, but neither of them could cross the deep ravine. The further along its edge she ran, the more the wide black canyon between them seemed to widen.
Until finally, when her feet and her wind were giving out, the dark crevasse turned into a giant black hole that reared upward like an enormous black dragon and swallowed her.
Clio awoke with a shivering start.
Her eyes shot open and she stared at the rough-timbered ceiling of her bedchamber, blinking. She tried to sit up, propping up on her elbows as she did every morn, but pain shot through her right shoulder and back, then ran like fire down her side.
She moaned so deeply it sounded like a growl in the back of her throat, and fell back against the lumpy bed. A few moments later she opened her eyes again. Her vision was blurred with tears from the sharp pain.
Her eyes cleared as the pain in her shoulder changed to throbs, which soon dwindled to something tolerable, a deep ache that spilled and burned across the chest. She hurt, and she closed her eyes and felt her tears spill.
A cold breeze swept over her face, which was hot from nightmares and tears. The air ruffled the small damp hairs near her temples and che
eks.
She turned her chin slightly so she could look toward the loop where the shutters had been left open. It was night outside, sometime between Matins and Lauds. She could see the dark sky. No sign of twilight. No sign of dawn. Just night, deep and dark and almost as black as the chasm of her dream.
Beside the bed was a brazier. Nearby sat a small table with three wobbly legs. Atop it was a wooden basin strewn with cloths and some salve in the kind of hand-thrown pot that Old Gladdys made for her love potions.
Clio shifted closer to the opposite edge of the bed so she could feel the hot air drift up. She relaxed a bit more, then scanned the dark chamber.
A candle flickered golden light in the corner nearest the door, where Merrick was sprawled in a chair. His long legs stuck out in front of him and his elbows hung over the chair arms, while his head cocked over to one side.
He was sleeping, his hands folded at rest atop the thick silken fabric of a richly embroidered blue robe he wore.
Part of her was disappointed.
She liked the loincloth.
She could take in her fill of him, watch him without the tension of him looking into her eyes. There were times when his looks made her feel as if her eyes were windows, clear and open for him to see what she was really thinking.
A frightening thought.
A woman’s mind was the only place she had that was truly all hers. There she could dream her dreams and make her plans. Make the outside world go away. There she could be the one who ruled. She controlled her thoughts and dreams, and there was no man inside for her to answer to, no man to tell her what she could or could not do.
She lay there and watched him sleep. Thinking, wondering, her fantastical dream still fresh in her mind.
There were some—Old Gladdys for one—who said dreams were signs, inklings of what was happening in your life. Clues to the future, or doors that opened to the past.
They claimed that only in sleep could you look at things from a different perspective, in a fantasy that takes all your human fears and doubts away and leaves nothing but the purity of the issue.
’Twas true, she supposed, that she and Merrick were like two people standing on a giant ravine. They were on opposite sides of life with nothing to bind them together except the very impasse that kept them apart.
She wondered if all men and women were so different from each other. Did war truly teach men to look at the world only in terms of defense and protection? Or were men and women different from the moment they were conceived? Did they naturally approach life from opposite directions?
The answers must be somewhere, in heaven or in God’s hands. Perhaps there was a golden chest, a coffer with a bright silver lock, kept high up in the heavens that held all the answers to love and life and why God chose to make a woman so different from a man.
She gave a short, all-encompassing sigh, knowing these were questions for which she might never find the answers.
Her gaze drifted back outside, where the moon had slipped down the sky and shone through the loop, casting Merrick in its white light.
Moonlight turned his black hair silver, and she could see, even from the bed, how long and dark his eyelashes were when his eyes were closed. She was surprised she hadn’t noticed before.
Probably because he was usually glowering at her. You can’t give a good glower with your eyes closed.
In sleep, his features were not so taut and stern. He looked younger and she found herself wondering what his childhood had been like.
When she looked at him sleeping, she could imagine he was once a small boy, an image that was almost impossible when he was awake. It wasn’t that sleep made him look weak. His jaw was still strong and as angled as the stone curtain walls, yet the tension was gone from him, as if he had been sucked dry as the castle well.
Black stubble covered his chin like powdered smudges from walnut shells; it spread up his jawline in a dark shadow and came up to daggerlike points near where his cheekbones were close to his ears.
His nose was long and straight and noble, like the beak of one of the king’s hawks. His hands were tanned, and black hair swirled thickly from his forearms to his wrists and peppered lightly over those strong hands with clean and clipped nails.
She remembered his hands from the clearing, gauntleted, covered with blood. In her mind’s eye she saw the whole scene again. The violence, the dispassion. Her fear.
Until she had seen him fight with that sword, she could not imagine what his life had been like. She remembered secretly wishing she could be a knight and travel off to strange lands and have the freedom to do as she wished.
What a youthful desire, the kind where you see the world from dreamy eyes instead of seeing how it truly exists. The kind that makes you feel foolish in retrospect.
She stared at her aching shoulder, now empty of its arrow. A cloth was tied about it, and she was glad. Part of her did not want to see it because she might have to relive what had happened to her.
Instead, she stared at the thick woolen cover on the bed, plucking at some threads. As if her eyes had minds of their own, her gaze rose to look at him.
Today, for the briefest of moments, she’d tasted a small bit of his harsh life. It had changed her. So it must have changed him over the years, again and again, each incident pounding away at him the way a battering ram slams against a gate until it splinters.
The violence he’d witnessed and lived through, the way life could become death in a mere instant, the apathy to both, must have influenced the way he was. His view of the world.
She was surprised how much a moment could alter a lifetime. It was like aging a few years in one single day. Things seemed clearer to her, because she had a small taste of how war and a knight’s duty in life could taint a man.
And she could begin to understand Merrick now, to see why he thought of everything in terms of war and defense, why he felt the need for protection.
Because after all those years of war, Merrick knew nothing else.
Clio had been cooped up in her chamber so long she wanted to jump out the window and try to fly.
Instead she demanded a bath.
You would have thought, from the looks on the servants’ faces, that she had asked for the English throne. After more clucking than could be heard from the chickens in the stable yard, they decided they must “check with the earl for permission for her to bathe.”
The Earl of Orders had barred everyone but one maid from her chamber. After the first two days she had begun to feel like a prisoner. By the end of the week she had decided he was the meanest of men to keep her shut up like some outlaw.
Her shoulder felt perfectly fine. Well, except for when she fainted because she tried to go down the stairs too soon. And those two puny times her wound had reopened and the bleeding had started again.
Just because she had been shot with a little arrow did not mean she could not supervise some ale making. The servants had tattled on her and she never had the chance. With some ingenuity, however, she had managed to oversee the digging of an herb garden by sitting in the arched window in her chamber and hollering down to Thud and Thwack.
At least until Merrick saw her. And therein lay her problem. Merrick. Other than to come in, yell at her, or threaten to tie her to the bed, she had not seen much of him since that night she awoke.
The very next morning the chair he had slept in so quietly stood empty. For some reason she cared not to ponder, she felt a strange stab of loneliness.
But now it was midmorning, just past Terce, and Dulcie stood behind a squat wooden bathtub with a splintered rim and rusted joints. Clio sat inside, her knees pressed against her breasts and warm water up to her armpits. There was golden sunshine outside and she could hear the song of a meadowlark somewhere above her.
“Turn yer head, my lady.” Dulcie was busy scrubbing Clio’s long hair with a soft pungent soap made from lentils and mint. The scent was almost as soothing as the feel of soapy fingers scrubbing her hea
d. It felt so good after days of sleeping and forced bed rest.
“So what is my lord up to this day?” Clio asked casually, imagining him pacing her room in a loincloth, with his mouth gagged.
“He is meeting with the master mason.”
“Ah, yes. No doubt he has been busy adding more murder holes.”
“Aye, my lady. That or looking for his horse.”
Clio winced slightly. She felt some guilt over the horse. That fine animal had disappeared along with the Welshmen who got away. Had she not taken it, well …
But Merrick had said nothing about it. Nary a word, which ate at her conscience a bit. Deep inside, she wished he had ranted and raved because then she would not feel so guilty.
She paused, a sudden thought hitting her for the first time. She glanced at the perch near her bed. ’Twas empty. Cyclops was asleep in the corner, but Pitt was no where.
“Where is Pitt, Dulcie? I haven’t seen him. He was with me when I left.”
“No one has seen the bird.”
She sat there for a long time.
“Perhaps he finally figured out how to fly,” Dulcie suggested.
“Aye,” she murmured. “Perhaps.” Her bird was gone, like Merrick’s prized horse. She supposed there was some justice in that. There had to be some kind of recompense for her rash actions. She just hoped that both of the animals were well.
Dulcie rinsed her hair. “I think my lord is busy because he spent so much time in here with you those first days.”
“I know,” Clio said blithely. “I awoke and saw him that one night.”
“Oh, not one night, my lady. He would not let anyone inside until he was certain you would be well. He even took the arrow out himself. The earl nursed you himself.”
That gave her pause, and shut her up.
She stood, her thoughts pensive, while Dulcie toweled her off, then she stepped from the tub.
Somewhere in her fog of memory she remembered him talking to her, softly, gently, those strong arms that held her in her shadowed dreams. Lips on her brow and a strong warm feeling when she was shivering.
