Tristan and Isolde - 03 - The Lady of the Sea

by Rosalind Miles

  The old chamberlain smoothed down his rusty silk gown and began to warble tunelessly at the door. “The King . . . Prepare for the King—”

  “Enough, enough, hold your peace.”

  Striding through the door was a portly man of middle height with a lined face and an irritable air. His clothes were costly but worn, and the rich red velvet straining across his gut clearly dated from earlier days. But a gold coronet gleamed upon his head, and the gold badge of kingship adorned his neck. This was the man they sought.

  “Sirs—”

  The newcomer came toward them, his hand outstretched, issuing all the courtly greetings of a king. But his hard, greedy eyes and pinched, suspicious mouth undermined the welcome of his words. Here was a man who gave nothing himself but was hungry for whatever he could get. Arraganzo’s heart surged. Perfect. He would be ideal for God’s darker purpose today.

  “Greetings to Your Majesty,” the Legate began smoothly, while Dominian and Simeon bowed deeply at his side. “And good wishes to you from your Heavenly Father above.”

  “What?” Startled, the King raised his eyes to the sky.

  “You are called, sire, to do God’s immortal work,” Arraganzo pressed on in lofty tones. “Father Dominian tells me that you are blessed with many daughters to your name.”

  “Too many,” the King snapped. “Far too many mouths to feed and dowries to find. Well, I can’t do it, and that’s that. I’ll just have to put them into nunneries, every one.” He glared at Arraganzo and thrust out his chin. “Is that God’s purpose, sir? What’s the point of it all?”

  “Who can say? But God may have another aim for your fair girls,” the Legate returned. He drew a breath. “Hear me, sire. Your overlord, King Mark, will shortly decide to put his wife away.”

  The King’s small eyes widened. “He’s going to divorce Queen Isolde?”

  “The pagan Queen, yes,” Arraganzo confirmed. “And then—”

  “He’ll want another wife.” A gleam of calculation brightened the King’s eye. He smiled. “A good Christian virgin, perhaps?”

  “What else?” said Arraganzo in his silkiest tones.

  “One such as your virtuous Theodora,” Dominian put in.

  “Yes, well . . .”

  The King paused. Was “virtuous” the word for his eldest daughter’s sullen, indefatigable will, her violent temper, and the greed that was already making her fat? Sly, too, he mused bitterly, doubtless already sneaking around outside and listening at the door to see what all this was about. God knows why she’s so full of faults, fleeted through his brain, I’ve beaten her enough. Still, at least she’s a virgin, I’ve made sure of that. And she knows her catechism. That’s all they’ll require.

  “Theodora, yes,” he said, summoning a smile. He hesitated as an almost inconceivable future took shape in his brain. That fat trollop of his, the King’s wife? Could it be?

  Yes!

  He drove his fists into his palm and his mean eyes flared. “I’ll bring her to court. I’ll take all eight of them. If the King doesn’t like Theodora, he can take his pick. I’ll get them all new gowns—though God in Heaven, that’ll cost—”

  “One moment, sire,” Dominian interrupted with a glance at Arraganzo. They had prepared for this.

  Without hesitation, the Legate took up the tale. “At the moment, the King’s forthcoming divorce is not widely known. If you bring your fair brood to court, all the other Kings will guess your intentions, and they’ll do the same. Then the lovely Theodora will find other girls in her path. We need to move forward with great care if your daughter is to succeed in God’s work.”

  “His Excellency, the Cardinal Legate and I are on our way to court,” said Dominian. “Would you allow us to take her there?”

  Arraganzo waved a lordly hand. “What could be more natural than that two men of God should introduce a distressed young Princess to King Mark’s paternal care.”

  The King stared. “Distressed?”

  Arraganzo nodded gravely. “We need a good reason to take Theodora into our care. Now, if the King her father is dying . . .”

  “Dying, am I?” said the King doubtfully, stroking his well-fleshed cheeks.

  “Wasting away,” said the Legate firmly. “In pain and torment of soul.”

  “Unable to provide for this hapless female sprig of the family tree,” added Dominian.

  The King gave a cynical laugh. “Well, that’s true at least.” He rolled his eyes unhappily around, refusing to think about his crumbling crenellations and decaying walls. Bad enough to have to share his bedchamber with mice and rats. But if Theodora got her hands on the King . . .

  He looked longingly at Arraganzo’s gold pomander, his costly gown of velvet silk, and the massive cross of rubies around his neck. “D’you have any idea what everything costs these days? Why, the horses alone eat me out of house and home. And that eldest of mine can eat like a hog when I let her, that’s why she’s getting so fat—”

  Arraganzo brushed his complaint aside. “So then, you throw her on the King’s mercy and make ready to die.”

  A real alarm awoke in the King’s ferret eyes. “But I don’t, do I?”

  “There may be a miraculous recovery,” said the Legate with superb disdain. “If the girl gets King Mark to the altar and his ring on her hand.”

  The King hesitated. “I don’t know . . .”

  “Come, sire,” said Arraganzo with a trace of contempt, “you know she’ll be safe with us.”

  The King surveyed the Cardinal and the priest and returned the contempt with interest. “Oh, I’ve no doubt of that.”

  “Let us see her, then,” said Arraganzo briskly. If the rustlings and whispers he had caught were anything to go by, the young woman and her sisters were not far away.

  “One moment, then,” said the King, who then withdrew. Soon afterward he was back, escorting one, three, five, how many girls?

  The Cardinal turned a laugh into a cough. Dear God, what a brood the King had been blessed with! But there was no mistaking the eldest, sailing forward like a swan at the head of the skein, her sisters trailing forlornly in her wake.

  “Here they are,” mumbled the King. “Theodora, Divinia, Petrina, Calvaria, Laboria . . .”

  “Sirs . . .”

  Theodora was already curtsying under Arraganzo’s nose, deliberately targeting the most important man in the group, the Legate noted with satisfaction as he surveyed her up and down. Ambitious, was she? That promised well. He did not like her smell, the strange warm, bready odor of all women that rose from her ample flesh, so alien to those who lived their lives among men, but he had to admit this creature was no more disgusting than the rest. Not tall, but with a bosom that would get her noticed anywhere, a plump neck and shoulders, and voluptuous hips shaped for an amorous hand. And she must be ready for a change. The faded silk she wore, long outgrown and too tight across her breasts, would make any young woman crave a new gown. As she looked around, her eye was already inquiring, anything here for me?

  Good, very good! And just as Dominian had said. As she curtsied before him and knelt to kiss his ring, Arraganzo saw with unbridled delight that she gave him the eye. Himself, Dom Luis Carlos Felipe Arraganzo da Sevilla y Cadiz y Pinca y Salamanca, Cardinal Legate of the Pope and a prince of the Church! If this raw, sensual abandon did not wake King Mark’s dormant desire, nothing would. “Bless you, my daughter,” he murmured with deep sincerity.

  Still, the wise man always made doubly sure. Arraganzo turned to survey the other daughters, who were straggling behind. The next in line was a pale, slender thing with a long white neck, folded hands, and downcast eyes. With no breasts or hips to speak of, she would appeal to any man whose secret, deep-buried longings ran to boys. And there were others, too, languishing in the rear. Divinia and Petrina, for instance; now what about them . . . ?

  “Greetings, Father.”

  Theodora had moved on to Dominian with another low curtsy and a slow, languorous smile. Dropping his
gaze, anxious to avoid her eye, the priest was horrified to find himself staring at her breasts. Now God forgive me! Shame knocked like vomit at the back of his throat. Is this truly Your work, dear Lord? Did You die for this?

  But already he could feel his protest being swept away, his fears blown into infinity by a superior force. The Cardinal Legate was already at the door, with Theodora and another of the girls at his side.

  “Come, Father,” Arraganzo called in the voice of Rome. Raising a silent prayer, Dominian had no choice but to obey.

  chapter 18

  Nothing had changed in the Castle of Unnowne. The aged Seneschal greeted him as before, the same ancient retainers guarded the upstairs door, and the lady herself still languished in her bath with her white-clad attendants and the doctor at her side. She reared up eagerly as Tristan strode in, a look of keen anticipation on her face. The smell of the sickroom came to meet him again with its tender, healing scents of lavender and vervain. But now he noticed what he had not caught before, an indefinable hint of evil in the air.

  “So, sir,” the lady crowed in triumph, “you have killed my enemy?”

  “Your enemy?” Tristan returned angrily. “You lied to me, lady. The knight you accused of wronging you is mad.”

  Her eyes grew round with hate. “He is not mad! Wicked men have the art of other-seeming—he deceives everyone.”

  Vividly, Tristan saw again the anguished eyes of the stranger knight searching his face like a wounded animal, the unkempt beard and dreadful matted hair. “Lady, I saw him with my own eyes,” he returned. “He’s out of his mind, and you made him so.”

  She gasped with rage. “I did not! And if I did, he deserved it.”

  Now it was Tristan’s turn to catch his breath. “No man deserves that!”

  “He treated me cruelly,” she shrilled. “He took advantage of my bed—”

  “You took him to your bed,” Tristan cut her off. “Then you made up the story that he had done you wrong. In reality, you did a terrible thing to him. You poisoned him, lady, and robbed him of his wits.”

  A look of childish cunning crept over her face. “Now why would I do that?”

  “Because you could not forgive him for rejecting your love.”

  Her head went back in a howl of pain. “Why should I forgive him?”

  Without warning, she skipped from the bath as naked as a needle and ran toward him, as shameless as a child. Her long hair fell around her like a cloak, gleaming in the pearly light of the darkened room. Her skin, too, glowed with the same luster, wholesome and golden white. Tristan looked away, but not before he had seen that the whole of her body had no sign of disease.

  “Lady, lady—” The women attendants swooped down and surrounded the dripping figure, solicitously enveloping her thin, childish body in soft wraps.

  The doctor came forward, anxiously shaking his head. Tristan turned on him as the attendants led the lady away. “What is this? There’s nothing wrong with your lady that I can see.”

  “Alas, sir, there is.” Tears stood in the doctor’s eyes. “Our lady is ill indeed, but in her mind. She was never strong, even as a child. She suffered terribly when she lost her mother, and when her father lay dying too her wits began to turn.”

  “But you called it a skin complaint?”

  “In truth, she does suffer eruptions when her body rebels. Then she scratches her arms and picks away at her flesh if we cannot get her into the bath to calm her down and turn her mind to better things.”

  So that was the cause of the outbreak he’d seen on her arms . . . Tristan stared in distress. “How did this malady first show itself?”

  “She stopped answering to her name and refused to accept that she came from here.”

  “From this castle, you mean? The place where she was born?”

  “I do not come from here!” the lady cried out from the shelter of her attendants’ arms, in a high, broken chime. Her shadowed, tragic eyes and sudden, odd, quicksilver smile confirmed all the doctor said.

  “I was born in a silver palace with gateways of gold,” she trilled on with the same strange, flashing smile. “And pillars of crystal holding up every floor. Three trees grew under my window that sang to me every day, whether birds roosted in their branches or not. There was an orchard whose fruit never failed, and a well of love from which maidens could drink their fill.”

  Alas, poor lady . . . Tristan bowed his head in grief.

  “And the King my father loved me beyond compare. He found me in his garden, asleep in the heart of a rose. I was no bigger than his little finger, but he took me to his heart. The Fair Ones had left me there, so he reared me in a nutshell and brought me up as his own.”

  “And you remember that he called you after your mother, my lady,” said the doctor, trying intently to engage her eye. “He named you—”

  “I have no name,” she interrupted, darting her eyes around like a captured fawn. “That’s why I’m the Lady ‘Unknown.’ ”

  Tristan brought his hand to his head and closed his eyes. Unnowne. Unknown. Of course.

  “And all this?” Tristan muttered, gesturing round the sickroom with its ointments and potions and lotions everywhere. “If they’re not needed, why are they here?”

  The doctor gave a smile shot through with pain. “Alas, they’re all we have. We don’t know how to minister to a mind that’s so sick. When she scratches her arms, she often infects the skin. So we soothe her body to keep her distress at bay. The cooling waters of the bath and these lotions bring down the heat of the madness that grips her every day.”

  “Every day? Gods above, what a cruel affliction.” Tristan shook his head. No wonder the lady had had no pity for the wandering knight.

  “Every day,” the doctor repeated, “she suffers some delusion or distorted thought.”

  “There was no lover, then?” Tristan said heavily. “No trusted knight, faithful and true to her?”

  “Oh, there was.” The doctor covered his eyes to hide his tears. “He waited years to marry her, he loved her so. But he went away in the end, because she could not recover her mind. He had to accept that she would always be mad.”

  Tristan felt grief enveloping him like a cloud. He struggled to throw it off.

  “Mad, perhaps,” he said forcefully, “but the rest of you here don’t have that excuse.”

  The doctor looked alarmed. “What do you mean?”

  “Why did you let her poison the stranger knight? She has made him as mad as she is and now he suffers horribly, too. Is that right?”

  The doctor held out his hands helplessly. “Oh sir, we had no idea what she planned to do.”

  “But you still supported her afterward. You backed up her story and sent me out into the forest to fight an innocent man.”

  “When you came, the Seneschal and I wanted to tell you what we knew. But our lady’s father had made us swear an oath that we’d be loyal to his daughter all our lives.” He shook his head. “We never dreamed that our trust would be tried like this.”

  Pain upon pain . . . Reading the troubled face, Tristan saw layer upon layer of deep and careworn love.

  “Sir, you have borne too much, you and your fellows here,” he said sorrowfully. “When I leave, I’ll make sure Queen Isolde knows of your plight. She’ll send you some good young knights and ladies, too, to keep your mistress company and help her to better ways. You may never cure the wounds that beset her mind. But they can help you to bear the burden and cheer her life with music and dancing and other courtly delights.”

  The doctor’s eyes were pools of wonder and hope. “Can you do that, sir?”

  Tristan took the doctor’s hand in both of his. “You have my word.”

  “Then may all your Gods give you a safe journey when you leave.”

  Tristan bowed. “That must be now, good sir. I fear I shall already suffer for this delay.”

  His meager preparations to depart were soon complete and all the castle turned out to see him on his way.
The end of the long summer day was in sight, and the sunlight was fading into silver-rose, violet, and gray. The scent of the woodland rose from the mossy ground, and he drank in the wonder of life, ever springing anew.

  Yet he could be lying dead now at the hands of the stranger knight. The angry brothers Balin and Balan could have killed him, too.

  Tristan laughed in disdain. Killed me? I would have beaten them.

  Ah, Tristan, came a somber voice from within, all men go down to darkness in the end. Who would have known if you had died in the wood? Who would have mourned your passing? When you die, what will you leave behind?

  Leavebehindleavebehind, whispered the weeping willow on the bank. Tristan felt an unfamiliar agony in his soul. Who would care if he lived or died?

  The greenway was opening on the high road ahead. All around him the forest bloomed in its midsummer height, lavish clusters of key-shaped seedpods crowding the sycamores as the busy oak, beech, and yew competed to unfurl their banners of green.

  And he was riding back to Castle Dore? Back to King Mark?

  Fool! Fool! Triple times fool!

  He laughed in pain. A man could die in a wood—even one of King Arthur’s Round Table knights, as the poor deluded stranger took himself to be—and no one would know. Was his own life, the life he so stoutly defended with his sword, no more than that, as fragile as a blade of grass?

  Tristan’s mind roamed on. All men, weak or strong, even knights errant like the brothers Balin and Balan, were blind to the danger that lurked in every blade. Not even King Arthur could escape such a fate. His heart grieved for all the misguided battles in which men fought each other to the death, not knowing what they did.

  “Goddess, Mother!” he cried to the uncaring trees, “the love of one good woman is worth a hundred jousts.”

  A strange sensation seized Tristan, like a dull ache. In all his years of traveling the tournaments, men lived, men died, as the Great Ones decreed. They came out of the dark into the light, like a sparrow fluttering into the mead hall at night, and flew out into the dark again when their time was done. So it was for every man, and so it would be for Tristan himself. But what then?