Winter Siege

by Ariana Franklin

  As Gwil lifted Penda into his arms she whimpered and half opened her eyes and he felt the warmth of her blood oozing in sticky rivulets over his hands.

  ‘I’m sorry, Pen, I’m so sorry,’ he murmured as her head flopped on to his shoulder and her eyes fluttered closed; the only sign that she was still alive was the shallow rise and fall of her chest against his. ‘Stay with me, Pen, stay with me,’ he pleaded. ‘Don’t go dying on me now. Not now.’

  He dared not look at her, but stared fixedly instead beyond her, through the window, as though the injured girl in his arms was merely sleeping.

  As a professional soldier he had seen arrows pulled from bodies many times before with varying degrees of success. His only comfort now, the fact he would cling to desperately, was that she had not been hit by a crossbow bolt, which would have driven deeper and would almost certainly have been fatal.

  Milburga and Father Nimbus heard him muttering under his breath and assumed he was praying; in actual fact he was berating God.

  ‘Ain’t she suffered enough, Lord? How much more You going to heap on her? How much more, eh?’

  But God was in a contrary mood. Did I loose that arrow, Gwil? Did I rape her? That was man’s work, surely. So, my answer to you is itself a question: How much more will you heap on yourselves?

  In other circumstances he might have wept but desperation dried his tears; besides, Penda needed all his strength undiluted by any self-pity.

  Maud returned from the kitchen breathless, having run there and back, and handed Milburga the supplies she had asked for.

  ‘We need to strip ’im, get ’im clean afore I do anything,’ Milburga said and before Gwil had time to consider the impli cations of removing Penda’s clothes they had lifted her out of his arms, stripped off her hauberk and peeled back the blood-soaked chemise and bandages which bound her breasts.

  ‘God and all His saints!’ Maud said, stumbling backwards as Penda’s body was revealed.

  ‘Well, bugger me!’ Milburga put her hand to her mouth.

  ‘Oh my goodness!’ said Father Nimbus. ‘That poor child!’

  Then three pairs of eyes swivelled on Gwil.

  ‘So she’s a girl!’ he spat defiantly. ‘Still dying, ain’t she? In God’s name, help her!’

  Milburga was the first to pull herself together and, with a shake of her head, began to tend the semi-naked body now lying face down on the bed. ‘This might hurt a bit, my lovely,’ she said tenderly. ‘But, forgive me, I got to do it.’

  Penda lost consciousness completely at the first pressure from Milburga’s hand; and appeared to feel nothing as the arrow gnawed its way through flesh and sinew, scraping bone and piercing muscle, until, finally, its bloody head emerged through the skin just above her right breast.

  When it was done Milburga cleaned the wound with a cloth soaked in wine and dressed it with yarrow leaves and comfrey while Father Nimbus poured some more wine on to a clean cloth and pressed it to Penda’s lips. All the time Gwil stroked her hair and cheek softly, willing her to survive.

  He wanted to stay with her, as if by sheer proximity to him she might absorb his strength, but Milburga had other ideas.

  ‘You get on now, Sir Gwilherm,’ she said. ‘You got other responsibilities now. This here’s women’s work.’

  She was right and he knew it. He rose reluctantly, took one last look at the insentient patient and left the room.

  When he had gone, Milburga, Maud and Father Nimbus stood around the bed staring in amazement at the creature lying on it. Now that the arrow had been removed they had time to consider the implications of what they had just witnessed.

  ‘So he’s a girl.’ Father Nimbus shook his head. ‘Who would have thought it?’

  ‘Might make no difference what it is,’ said Milburga, ‘if it don’t live. A corpse is a corpse.’ She looked at Maud, who was still white with shock. ‘You’m quiet, my lady! Cat got your tongue?’

  Maud was, indeed, dumbfounded and wrestling with her conscience for an appropriate reaction. The confusion of it all was making her head ache.

  At one point, and only moments ago it seemed, she had felt gratitude to the peculiar red-headed boy whom she had never liked terribly but who, nevertheless, had risked his life for hers and William’s. Indeed, in that moment on the allure she had acknowledged an enormous debt to him; but now that this same boy had been unmasked as a girl with all the duplicity and unnaturalness such a revelation entailed, she was overcome by feelings of revulsion and anger. And yet, and yet, she was still in his or, damn it, her debt, and still grateful; yet the disorderliness of it all was appalling, especially to one who admired order above all things. What she wanted most was to close the curtains around the bed, hide the pathetic abomination lying on it from view and forget about it. She couldn’t, of course; so instead she turned away and started pacing the room; she had always done her best thinking on the move.

  ‘What do you suppose we do now?’ she said eventually, her feet crunching rhythmically over the rushes.

  ‘Pray that she recovers, of course,’ said Father Nimbus. His conversation with Gwil that night in the chapel, never far from his thoughts, was foremost now. ‘I have a feeling that this child’s physical injuries are perhaps the least of her suffering,’ he added.

  Maud stopped pacing and glared at him. What did he know about her suffering? Did everybody keep secrets from her these days? ‘What on earth do you mean?’ she snapped.

  ‘Judge not, that you be not judged,’ Father Nimbus said vaguely, aware that he had gone too far and was in danger of revealing too much.

  ‘Well said, Girly!’ Milburga nodded approvingly. ‘After all, can’t blame ’er, travelling the length and breadth of the country like her and Gwil did. No female safe? Course she dressed as a boy. Who wouldn’t?’

  They were silent for a while until Milburga added: ‘Besides, boy or girl, she’s a bloody good archer, or so they say, and if that lot out there carry on like this much longer we can’t afford to lose her.’

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  AS THE LIGHT began to fade and the fighting died down, Penda developed a fever. Maud and Milburga attended her unstintingly – bathing her burning limbs with cold, wet cloths, encouraging her to sip water from a horn cup they held to her lips – but she was soon consumed by it.

  In her delirium, she would wake; her unseeing eyes would suddenly open wide as she arched her back and convulsed against the bed. Then she would cower into the pillows; her skinny arms mottled with fever writhing in front of her face as though fending off an invisible assailant.

  As each crisis passed and the fever dipped temporarily Maud and Milburga took it in turns to stroke her brow and speak soothingly to her until the advent of the next one.

  It was gruelling to watch and made even more so by the fact that it was now obvious to both women, from the things she cried out in the grip of it all, that her torment extended, as Father Nimbus had warned, far beyond her physical wounds.

  Watching her suffer so terribly, Maud’s initial feelings of abhorrence for this peculiar changeling began to dissipate, replaced by an overwhelming sense of pity.

  She had known death and seen injury before, plenty of it in fact. During his lifetime, her father had insisted she learn the basics of medicine and the healing properties of herbs, as any chatelaine worth her salt must, but she had never before witnessed the process of dying and realized that her ministrations to Penda, inspired at first by a sense of duty, now sprang from another place entirely.

  ‘Will she live?’ she mouthed anxiously, after one particularly bad episode.

  Milburga shrugged. ‘Don’t know,’ she said. ‘That’s in God’s hands now, that is. We can’t do no more but wait and see.’

  Father Nimbus, who had left them, though reluctantly, to attend the wounded and dying elsewhere – and there were many that day – looked up from his duties every now and again to offer up a prayer especially for the girl. Cousin Lynessa did the same, crippling her a
ged knees on the cold, hard flagstones of the chapel as she prayed for Penda’s soul.

  The patient herself was oblivious to everything, however; some part of her soul had sprouted wings long since and flapped away through the solar window; whether or not it would come back she neither knew nor cared.

  In her delirium she returned to the strange, flat, watery lands she had so often dreamed about but this time found herself in a warm wooden hut, standing on a floor of freshly strewn sweet-smelling herbs and reeds.

  A man stood beside her, a kind one judging by the look of him, and next to him the woman with the long golden hair who had appeared to her in dreams before. A little girl was sitting by the fire chattering away like a jackdaw; and all the time strange but familiar names drifted through her memory like blossom on a breeze. Nyles, Aenfled, Gyltha. Yes! The little girl was Gyltha! She remembered now! Her little sister, Gyltha! And the man, Nyles! And the woman, Aenfled! Her father and mother. This was home.

  No sooner had she recognized it than her wings flapped again, and she was transported to another place.

  Now she was crouching in the marshes, huddled against her mother, little Gyltha whimpering fearfully through the hand her mother held over her mouth.

  She looked up through the latticework of reeds above her head and caught a glimmer of the vast grey sky beyond and the shadows of the marsh harriers flying overhead. She could hear the wind rustling in the reeds, the raucous voices of the birds calling to one another and the slopping of water all around.

  Then, suddenly, she heard horses’ hooves in the distance, harsh male voices, and danger so close she could smell it filtering through the reeds with accents of men and horse sweat and another stench: the very worst one. And the next thing she knew she had broken away from the huddled figures and was running for her life through the marsh, knowing only that she must draw the men as far away from her family as she could. Her legs burned with exhaustion but she willed them to carry her further and further until finally, inevitably, one of the men, the monk, plucked her off the ground by her hair, pulled her on to his horse and carried her away.

  She was soaring above the land now like a seagull on the wing, watching as they sped towards a ruined church: two men, two horses and a red-headed girl, tiny specks on a vast, shimmering landscape.

  She could no longer see the two figures cowering in the ditch from here, but her heart ached for them and hot tears coursed down her cheeks, scorching her flesh and melting her wings until finally she was spinning out of the sky back down to the watery earth.

  They raped her as she lay there, both of them. She remembered it now, but only the monk had beaten her too.

  She had fought back at first, tearing at his face, using her hands like claws against him, but it was futile. Eventually she gave up and lay impassively beneath him as he robbed her of her soul.

  She saw his eyes spark as he smashed his fists into her face and ground himself inside her as though he could split her in half, and when she began to bleed he became frenzied, howling like an animal, thrusting his hands between her legs into the wound he had made, smearing her blood into her hair.

  He had admired her hair, she remembered that too.

  ‘A red-head!’ he had called back to the other man as he snatched her up. ‘Thank God for a red-head!’

  When they had finished with her, she lay as still as a corpse on the cold, damp ground while they prepared to leave.

  ‘She dead?’ she heard one of them ask. Then there was a searing, sickening thud as the monk, or so she presumed, kicked her in the ribs to make sure. When she made no response they mounted their horses and rode away.

  Time passed and when she could move again it was dusk. She felt nothing, remembered nothing and knew nothing except for one damned thing: that she wasn’t going to die out here in this god forsaken marsh.

  She groaned as she dragged herself first to her knees and then, slowly, agonizingly slowly, to her feet and began to stagger towards the church in the distance.

  She would die there, she decided; it was as good a place as any. She clenched her fists against her pain and felt her fingers close around an unfamiliar object in the palm of her hand.

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  THE MORNING BROUGHT two unexpected gifts to Kenniford: the lifting of the siege and Penda’s recovery.

  Having vented his spleen on the castle in the aftermath of the escape, the King’s appetite for another siege in the barren climes of winter, never exactly strong, waned completely. The cost was prohibitive for one thing, the discomfort for another, so, with his unrivalled ability to move an army at great speed around the country, he moved them west in pursuit of the Empress.

  From the battlements in the blue half-light of the morning, the men on watch witnessed the welcome sight of hundreds of human backs and horses’ rumps retreating into the forest and the castle awoke to the cacophony of their celebration.

  ‘Enough to wake the bloody dead,’ Milburga muttered, peering through the solar window to see what was going on.

  In a sense, of course, it was. When she turned back to the room, Penda had opened her eyes.

  Milburga sent for Gwil, who arrived almost immediately, dishevelled and unshaven having not slept all night. As he burst through the door he barely acknowledged the faithful nurse but pushed past her, his eyes searching frantically for the tiny, wraith-like figure in the bed.

  ‘Thought you’d gone and died on me,’ he said, as he removed his coif and dropped to his knees beside her. ‘You’ll be all right now, won’t you, Pen?’

  To his horror, she shook her head.

  He reached out to touch her forehead. ‘Fever back, is it?’ he asked, turning anxiously to Milburga, who shrugged. Penda shook her head again, but smiled this time.

  ‘Not Pen, is all,’ she said, her voice barely a whisper. ‘I’m Em. My name, Gwil, it’s Emma.’

  Milburga saw the look of alarm on the mercenary’s face, suddenly as pale as the girl’s.

  ‘Don’t take no notice. Been saying strange things all night,’ she said, tapping the side of her head to imply that the fever had affected Penda’s brain. ‘Made no sense most of it. Fever talk, ’at’s all. It’ll pass.’

  But Gwil knew exactly what it meant. ‘You’ve remembered then,’ he said quietly.

  Penda nodded and stretched out her hand to him. ‘But also how you saved me,’ she said.

  And to Milburga’s further surprise, the newly appointed commander-in-chief of Kenniford Castle buried his face in the palm of the girl’s upturned hand and wept.

  ‘And him tough as old boots, I thought,’ she told Maud and Father Nimbus after Mass. ‘Crying like a baby!’ But Father Nimbus was unsurprised and merely nodded.

  ‘As I suspected,’ he said. ‘That child’s suffering extends far beyond our understanding and Sir Gwilherm knows it.’

  ‘Well, that’s as may be,’ said Maud brusquely, ‘but it’s all a bit much, if you ask me. And what in heaven’s name are we to make of it? Is she Penda? Emma? Boy or girl? It’s as if we’ve had some sort of changeling thrust into our midst.’

  Now that it looked as though Penda would recover, Maud felt it reasonable to vent her irritation with her.

  ‘And another thing,’ she added. ‘What’s to be done with her? She can’t sleep in the guardroom now, surely?’

  They all agreed that she certainly could not and there was much scratching of heads until Milburga suggested putting her on a pallet next to Tola in the corridor.

  ‘I can keep an eye on her that way,’ she said.

  As the days and weeks of peacetime passed the number of people in the castle grew fewer. Most of the ‘useless mouths’ Sir Bernard and Sir Rollo had complained about returned to salvage what was left of their village. Many of the mercenaries left too, of course, to where they could get better pay – their talents being in demand by warring barons – taking their women with them. Some of Maud’s men sent their wives and children into service with the nuns at the con
vent of Godstow upriver, accompanied by Cousin Lynessa.

  Maud wondered aloud one day whether or not Penda could be dispatched too but Father Nimbus raised a reproving eyebrow.

  ‘Kindness at all times, my lady,’ he admonished gently.

  She was standing at the solar window one bright morning delighting in the fact that it was hers again, looking out on to the castle to assess those who remained like pieces on a chessboard.

  In the topsy-turveying caused by the siege, the complexity of feudal status in the castle – of villeinage, serfdom, free men, of who owed what to Maud, their overlord, and what service they must perform – had all been overthrown.

  For instance, in the old days the laundress Godwifa, down there in the drying court hanging out clothes with her big red-chapped hands, had been paid a penny a day, a pair of shoes at Easter and a cottage near the keep as long as her husband ploughed Maud’s north field when it was time. But her husband had been killed in the war and, with three children to bring up, Godwifa was asking to be allowed to stay in her cottage anyway.

  ‘I suppose I still have to pay her,’ Maud had said to Sir Bernard bitterly one morning during their discussion of manorial business. ‘What about my ploughing?’

  ‘She’s a good laundress, my lady.’

  ‘She can’t plough.’

  ‘She can launder.’

  So Godwifa stayed in her cottage as, secretly, Maud had intended she should all along, but it entailed harness-maker and -mender Merrygo ploughing for her instead, so he complained he didn’t have enough time to do his proper job, let alone his own ploughing.