Bond of Blood

by Roberta Gellis

  In one of the towers of the keep, the area had been cleared of war gear and made fit for habitation. There were no true windows here, only arrow slits to let in light, and the circular room was dim, but the rushes underfoot were clean and intermingled with herbs so that the room was freshly scented. A fire burned brightly on the hearth, illuminating the grotesque carvings in the dark wood of a low-backed chair set before it. Into this chair Leah pressed her betrothed, and he sank into the cushioned seat with a sense of relief, which was sharply broken when the girl released his hand and moved away.

  "Stay, my lord, I must go to my mother and—"

  With one bound he was upon her, grasping her forearm in his right hand. "Do you go to your mother? Will you ask her to plead for your freedom? Do not be foolish. Crippled or whole, man or demon—oh, yes, I know what they say of me—I am a great matrimonial prize. Your lands march with mine. It is in every way suitable."

  Shocked by his attack, Leah instinctively tried to pull away, and Cain tightened his grip until she went down on her knees. "No, no. Oh, my lord, please. I am in every way willing. Indeed, indeed, I was only going to ask my mother for herbs for your bath. Have mercy," she cried, her tears spilling over, "do not hurt me so."

  "Oh, God." Radnor released her arm as if it had burnt him. "I am sorry. I did not realize I was hurting you." He walked away to the fire while Leah knelt beside the chair, rubbing her arm and trying not to sob. Cain muttered something under his breath and then, more clearly, "If you wish to be free, tell me, and I—I will contrive so that you will bear no blame. I have used you shamefully, poor child."

  "I swear I am content. I pray you to say nothing to my father. He will kill me. Dear lord, what have I done? What have I said? Do not be angry." He walked back towards her and she cringed. "I will go nowhere. Do not beat me, my lord."

  "Beat you? For what? For my own shame and bad temper?" Cain touched the bright hair gently. "You will not think it after this, but I wish to use you kindly. I do not desire that you should fear me out of reason." He closed his eyes and laughed harshly. "I have begun well, have I not? Bruising your arm and frightening you out of your wits." Bending, he lifted her to her feet. "You must not let me frighten you, Leah. Your fear makes me cruel." The remark was ridiculous and Cain laughed. "There, I know you are young—I have led too hard a life—but I will try to remember. Are you truly content? Can you forget that I have been harsh to you?"

  With a surge of thankfulness that the storm seemed to be over so quickly and with so little damage done, Leah summoned up a smile, tremblingly. "Oh yes, I am content, and you are not cruel. My father often uses me much more hardly and never has said he was sorry for it."

  "Does he treat you ill?"

  "No indeed," Leah said, afraid that Lord Radnor would think she had the temerity to criticize her father, "but I am very foolish and do many things amiss. It would be wrong in him to overlook my errors, for how should I ever learn if he did?"

  She looked up at Lord Radnor to see the effect of this statement and noticed that he looked ravaged. This too was a revelation to Leah, for Pembroke always seemed to be refreshed by raging. All men were like that, Leah had assumed, having no other but her father for comparison, yet here was Lord Radnor, exhausted and ashamed. Leah could recognize the emotions because, sorely tried, she too could blaze into a rage. Her reaction, however, paralleled Lord Radnor's, and shame and fatigue followed temper.

  Although Leah's reading of her betrothed's emotion was correct, the reasons she assigned for it were wrong. It was not Radnor's burst of temper that exhausted him but his struggle with his private fear that he was something unclean. The fear went so deep and the struggle was waged so constantly that Cain suspected every emotion he felt and often considered the natural cruelty that exists in every human being as a sure sign of his damnation.

  "I pray you, sit down again."

  Leah pressed Cain gently towards the chair. Insensibly he was soothed and obeyed the urging, turning his face to look at the fire, and Leah, taking advantage of his apparent inattentiveness, rearranged the cushions on the chair more comfortably. Since this service caused no adverse reaction, Radnor continuing to stare at the flames and rub one hand with the other, Leah knelt and fumbled at his sword belt.

  She was pleased by the richness of the gold wire filigree snakes and birds that were riveted to the soft, strong leather. Her father was a veritable miser and locked away all the pretty things in strongboxes. Lord Radnor leaned back and sighed as the buckle gave and Leah lifted the weight of sword and belt from his hips. She folded the surcoat back away from his hauberk, and slipped the worn, rust-stained velvet over his shoulders.

  It was a source of great wonder to Leah that he would wear so rare and precious a fabric for such a purpose; velvet was still imported into England in very limited quantities and brought fantastic prices. But it was not her place to ask questions. He leaned forward to permit her to remove the surcoat completely and docilely raised first his hips and then his arms so that she could pull the mail shirt off over his head. The weight of the mail made her gasp with effort. Technically a squire should do the heavy disarming, but neither Lord Radnor nor his father had a squire.

  In spite of their prowess as warriors and their great position, not too many men wished to trust their sons to Gaunt's training. He had peculiar ideas about serfs and had infected his son with them. Beside that, they frequented the court only when summoned; they were not in favor with Stephen. Although the king listened with respect to anything they had to say, he knew they were rebels at heart and had supported Robert of Gloucester in the late civil wars to the limit of their ability without actually fighting for him. Those barons whose political opinions concurred with Gaunt's had other reasons for withholding their sons. For one thing Gaunt never offered a place to a young nobleman, preferring to fill his ranks with well paid mercenaries; for another, a boy entrusted to them could not come by the training in arts such as conversation, dressing, carving and so on, which were considered necessary for a noble.

  The woolen tunic and linen shirt beneath the mail were stained with rust and blood, and Leah shook her head over the marks. "My lord." She touched Cain's arm and he started and looked at her with blank eyes. "You must have a fresh shirt, and a robe, and—"

  "Yes, well?"

  "Have I your leave to fetch these things?"

  "Yes, certainly."

  "But my mother has the keys to the storeroom. I must go to her to get the keys. You bade me—"

  "Do not be so silly. Could you think I meant you to avoid your mother forever?"

  "It is not my business to think what you mean," Leah answered simply, "only to obey you."

  "Yes, very proper, but you must have a little sense too. If you do not leave the room and it should happen that no one came in, we might starve to death finally, and I should never get the bath I am very desirous of having."

  It took a moment or two for the puzzled girl to realize that he was laughing at her, so grave was his expression, but she did understand finally and smiled. "You are teasing me," she said.

  Her betrothed started to answer, but shivered suddenly, hunching his massive shoulders, for the room was dank and chill in spite of the fire. Leah ran at once for a woolen bed covering from a chest near the wall and draped it over his back. As she knelt before him to fold it around his body, she stroked his passive hand, hard as steel and scarred across the knuckles. She was remembering how kindly he had answered her questions and how tired he looked.

  Lord Radnor held his breath, hardly daring to move his eyes to look at her. She reminded him just then of nothing so much as the wild birds that perched near him as he lay in the woods of his home and, as he had held his breath then not to alarm them, so he held it now for this shy bird.

  How long they would have remained thus lulled by the hiss of the flames and their own quiescence was doubtful, but the idyll was broken when a log snapped in the fire, causing Leah to jump out of the way of the sparks. Lord Radnor
did not move; his hand, like a lure to a bird, lay quiet on his knee and the quiet was indeed a lure to Leah. Daring greatly because he had been kind, because her comfort and possibly her life depended upon her pleasing him, Leah dropped a kiss on that quiet, scarred hand and ran lightly away on her errands.

  Chapter 2

  Leah ran hastily down the dark turret stairs. At the foot she met a maidservant whom she ordered to bring a bath to the east tower room and to ask her mother for the keys of the storeroom. "I will be here on the battlements," she said breathlessly. "Give me your cloak."

  Away from Lord Radnor's presence, her excitement threatened again to overwhelm her and she felt that she had to breathe. She needed, too, peace to consider her fate, and the noisy, bustling hall where she might come upon her father or mother and be told to do something was not the place for thinking. Actually she knew more about her future husband than her mother suspected.

  As closely as she was watched, because highborn girls were guarded well to ensure their marriage value and Pembroke's household was rough and ill-regulated outside of the women's quarters, she listened often to the maidservants' talk. Many of these girls had lovers among the men-at-arms, for Pembroke laughed at such matters and in the face of his indulgence Edwina's prohibitions had little force. They told tales of the warriors who held back the Welsh, who fought in civil war, and who were embroiled in the current upheavals. The Earl of Gaunt and his son were high on the list of heroes.

  Tales of their prowess were many and varied and, even the simple Leah suspected, sometimes exaggerated, but one thing was sure. Father and son were a strange pair and were held together by a strange and reputedly unholy bond. The father was well known to hate the son who obeyed him much as a dancing bear obeys his keeper; sometimes docile, sometimes snarling on the border of rebellion, Lord Radnor, like a bear, was always dangerous. Still, Gaunt was said to repose absolute confidence in his son and sent him alone to the councils of state, and the confidence, so stated rumour, had never been misplaced.

  Some said too that Lord Radnor—reported invincible in war—was not Gaunt's son but the child of the devil whom Gaunt had received because he could father no heir. Certainly twenty years of marriage to a second wife had produced no other child. Leah shuddered briefly because she knew that such things were possible. He said he was crippled, but was he? Or was the foot he limped on the horn hoof that marked Satan in his human form? Leah pulled the borrowed cloak closer about her, chilled by fear more than by the April wind.

  It was useless to dwell upon such fears. This man, whatever he was, would be her husband. Her father had so commanded, and so it must be. Only what would she do if … Whatever else was uncertain, there could be no doubt that Lord Radnor was a great knight, and that she would be a great lady, the equal of any in the land save the queen alone. He would not have wanted to marry her if he planned to do her harm. If she were very obedient, Leah thought, she might be able to please him. With her father obedience did not always serve, but Lord Radnor was much younger than her father. Perhaps he would be kind to her—he had said he wished to use her kindly—or at least not unkind. If that were true, how proud she would be in the ranks of ladies with such a lord.

  After Leah had left, Lord Radnor drew a shaken breath and swallowed hard several times. "Madness," he said to the fire. "It comes from reading those accursed romantic tales."

  Then the sound of his own voice embarrassed him, and he scowled at the blameless flames. For twelve years Lord Radnor had spent few days without a sword in his hand and few nights in a safe bed. He had fought up and down the borders of his father's huge holdings keeping out robber barons and forcing the Welsh, who always desired to throw off the yoke of the Norman conquerors, to continue to serve them and pay taxes. Before that time, however, he had been taught by the priests his father supported, for Gaunt had not only peculiar ideas about serfs but equally peculiar ones about the value of education. The earl felt that if a man could read and write he could never be at the mercy of the clerical scribes; if he could speak and understand all the languages used by the people around him, including Welsh and Latin, he could understand things it might be dangerous to miss and would never need a translator.

  In the mass of tutors needed for such an education, one man, Father Thomas, had recognized the qualities of the irritable, high-strung lad who was such a good student and such a difficult pupil. Father Thomas was not, perhaps, a very good priest, but he was a perceptive, gentle man. For a little while he had tried to foster the streak of gentleness he recognized in Cain with talk of the love of God and the beauty of faith. To this there had been no response; the fear that he was born damned as well as crippled was already too strongly implanted in the child.

  When Father Thomas understood that fear, he promptly abandoned all attempts to save his pupil's soul and saved his reason instead. He had introduced Lord Radnor to the Latin classics available, particularly Virgil's Aeneid, and to the "romance." In these popular tales, knights lived by their honor; they were gentle to all women and loved only one throughout life; they fought for the oppressed and for the right without thought of self. Lord Radnor knew this was not life as it was, but it was a dream to cling to and an escape for his tormented mind. Through all the years of war and brutality and blood and death, he had clung to his dream, yearning for something beyond sordid reality and for a proof, in his endeavor to imitate the heroes of those tales, that he was a good man.

  The Earl of Gaunt, a hard and brutal person, but shrewd and long-sighted beyond most men of his times, had added reality, all unwitting, to his son's dream. He had seen that serfs who had sufficient to eat and who were not totally prostrated with fear of their masters somehow produced better crops. Still harder work and better results could be obtained, Gaunt found, by allowing these virtual slaves to keep a slightly larger proportion of the crop than strictly belonged to them when the yield was particularly good.

  Confidence that they would be protected from the wars that ravaged and ruined the crops they labored so hard to produce and from rapacious minor barons also improved the willingness of the serf to labor for his master. All these things, then, the earl had provided, and the fact that he had become richer and richer and that his lands lay quiet when others endured rebellion proved the maxim that he had drilled into his son—that the way to a fat land was through fat serfs. Fat serfs came through peace that permitted them to till the soil. Lord Radnor's duty, then, was to keep the peace for his serfs by making war on those who threatened them, and the righteousness of the accomplishment of that duty, the protection of the weak, lent a glow of reality to his dream.

  Not that Lord Radnor hated war. His nature was dual; it contained much cruelty as well as softer dreams. He loved his own prowess with sword and lance and his power on his own land and in the councils of the nobles of the realm. It was only that under that satisfaction was a desire for—for what? Cain had not formulated his thoughts, although he was a man given to introspection, and he was not sure what it was he lacked. He did know that the romances of Chretien and Beroul satisfied and stimulated that longing.

  If life could be like that! He stirred in his chair and passed his hand across his face feeling the puckered skin of his scars. He fed his desire with reading and reading, buying and borrowing manuscripts wherever he could lay hands upon them, and the more he read the hungrier he was. For the courtesy, he had brutality; for the shining armor, he had rusty mail, hacked to pieces and mended to be hacked to pieces again; for the lovely ladies, he hardly saw a woman except the ragged, dirty women of the fields and the sluts of the court.

  Lord Radnor rubbed his forehead impatiently. Love, he shied away from the word, but that was the be-all and end-all of the romances. All the battles, all the trials and tribulations of the shining heroes were motivated by the love of fair ladies. He grunted and turned more towards the fire as the maidservants brought in the bath and the leathers of hot water. Clumsy lumps with thick red hands. He stirred again, restlessly, and made
an indistinct sound of discomfort as his shirt tore loose the scab of a half-healed cut on his shoulder.

  The girl—Leah, that was her name—her hands were smooth and thin and white. Love! Suddenly he had a clear picture of himself; his torn face, his skin nearly black and leather-textured with exposure. Orientated by his reading about blond and handsome heroes, Radnor did not understand the male attractiveness of his dark, harsh-featured face with its redeeming softness of beautiful eyes and sensitive mouth. He could only think of the horror at the end of his left leg with which he had been born instead of a foot. He did not see the grace of movement in spite of the limp or the appeal in the promised virility of his great body. All he knew was that he was no golden-haired, perfect knight of the romances, and no woman had ever loved him.

  There were women, of course, the women of the fields that he used like an animal in rut, and the women of the court where he attended Stephen every so often. Some of these had offered love, and, years earlier, filled with the tales he had read, he had disregarded the fact that they were betraying husbands to "love" him. Was not Tristan's love illicit but true and faithful? Lancelot's? But he had learned that, outside of the leather-bound parchments of the romances, a woman who betrays her husband betrays her lover too—or charges a high price for her favors.

  Lord Radnor's mouth grew bitter with memory. The women who had betrayed him and laughed, who had sold him their bodies to steal secrets or gain political ends, had scarred his emotions badly. He had accepted the bond of matrimony as necessary to the continuation of his line, but he had accepted it reluctantly. What was more, he had objected particularly to marrying Pembroke's daughter because Pembroke hated and feared the Gaunts. His father, however, had been adamant, insisting that the dower lands Pembroke offered were not only great but particularly well placed with respect to Radnor's own property and that a blood bond between Gaunt and Pembroke was the best assurance possible of peace among the Norman barons of Wales. Finally Radnor had accepted marriage even with Pembroke's daughter, driven by the fierce desire to have a son to succeed him.