She could not weep. She was lost in a pit of grief, but she had no tears. It was strange to be so unfeeling, so numb. Working the gag from her mouth, she struggled to sit up.
“Soldier?” she called. “Soldier? Is anyone there?”
There was a long pause, then the curtains twitched apart. She saw a mailed figure stooping down, and the honest face of a young captain came into view.
“Where are you taking me, soldier?”
With a shaft of pain, she saw he could not meet her eye. Doubtless all the men around him felt the same.
“To the leper house, lady,” he mumbled with an aching heart. Gods above, when he’d signed on as a guard at Castle Dore, he never reckoned on anything like this. How would he tell his wife that they’d taken the Queen to a leper house today? He’d never be able to speak of it for the rest of his life.
“And where is that?” the low voice persisted.
“Outside the town,” he replied. “Lepers are forbidden to live with other folk, so they’ve got a place of their own in the forest.”
Where they mean to lock me up with the man who came to collect me and take me away?
“Very well,” she said. In truth, why should she care?
The path wound onward through the dripping trees. At length she felt the horses slowing to a halt. As they set her litter to the earth and pushed back the drapes, she saw the leper she had met in the prison dismounting from his mule. Two of the men-at-arms pulled her from her couch and untied her bonds, then fell back in alarm as the leper approached. He swung himself forward on his crutch, smelling of rotting flesh and pus and blood, and waving a bandaged arm at the hovel ahead.
“Your new home, lady,” he leered.
Ahead of her a long, low building crouched in a clearing, surrounded by a circle of ancient pines. Though they called it a house, it was no more than a rough shelter of wattle and daub, with two dark windows staring at her like blind eyes. But there was no mistaking the huddle of crutches and sticks round the door.
Around her the men-at-arms were muttering and shuffling their feet, eyeing the building with fear, impatient to get away. The young captain came toward her, white-faced.
“In you go, lady,” he said.
She stood for a moment quite numb, unable to move. The nearest of the guards drew back, leveling their weapons as if to thrust her forward at the end of their pikes.
The leper laughed. “Just see us inside, lads, and leave her to me. I guarantee she’ll be safe once I get her through the door. That’s what I promised the King.”
He nudged Isolde’s back, and she forced herself not to flinch. Whoever he is, he has his dignity. Whatever he was, he was better than he is now.
The smell came to meet them as they neared the door, the same blend of sickness, pus, and blood that the leper himself gave off. Behind it rose a low jumble of moans and cries, a wailful chorus of misery and pain. We’ve plenty of singers, the leper had said to Mark, and she’ll make a fine addition to our choir. Her stomach clenched to feel the force of his words.
The rickety door swung inward at his touch. Inside, she saw a wide hall lit only by the logs of a central fire. The leaping flames cast a flickering, bloodred light on a host of wild faces leering at her like demons of the night. As her eyes adjusted to the gloom, she saw a hundred and more sad outcasts, most of them pitifully deformed. Some had dreadfully swollen trunk-like arms and legs, others had no extremities at all.
Alas, poor souls.
And this is what it means to be a leper, thrown on the dung heap of the world, no more than human refuse to be swept away?
She gazed round in despair. Some huddled against the wall, moaning softly or talking to themselves. Others hunched round the fire in the center of the room, sharing a moment of wild gaiety around the flames. But most of them lay sprawled on rough piles of stinking rags, lying together in a hopeless, tangled heap, arms, legs, and stinking bodies intertwined. As the muffled figures lay mumbling and railing and crying out in their sleep, she could not tell if they were men or women, rich or poor, old or young. Even nature’s dearest gift, the sense of self, had been lost to these desperate souls.
And they were not all adults, fully grown. Among the ravaged faces and wasted limbs, some of them would still be children in the world outside. And Goddess, Mother! Was that a woman with a baby at her breast? They lay on a floor of packed earth, without flagstones, rugs, or bracken between them and the worms. Well, I shall be down there soon, Isolde thought without a shred of self-pity, bowing before the others’ pain. Lay me in that world beneath this world and I’ll be with Tristan.
The lepers round the fire raised their heads to look at the new arrival as she came in. The light from the flames and the smoke inside the room lent a dreadful air of the underworld to their hooded faces, overbright eyes, and roughly bandaged forms.
“Welcome to the house of the outlaws!” cried her escort with a flourish that chilled her blood.
One of the men round the fire turned around in anger to answer the leper’s hoarse cry. “Outlaws we are,” he cried back. “But not of our own free will. We broke no law. We never chose to murder, rape, or steal.”
“Yet we linger here, souls that the world hates and shuns,” another sorrowful voice seconded. “Our punishment is worse than that of those condemned to suffer by law for what they have done. They know that sooner or later their agonies must end. But innocent as we are, we must suffer till death.”
Alas, poor souls, maimed and sick by nature and then punished for it so harshly, too . . .
Isolde stepped forward, her heart in her mouth. “Oh, sirs—”
But the leper leader was before her, bearing down on the speaker with an unmistakable threat.
“Shut your mouth, will you?” he said menacingly. “No more of that.” He gestured toward Isolde with a terrible leer. “We have a new inmate, my friends, and she’s gently born. So let’s have no more complaints. Madam here expects the very best. Which is why I’m taking her to lie with me.”
He pushed Isolde onward down the room. At the end of the communal chamber, a wicker partition fenced off a private space, and a crude length of sacking served it for a door. The leper hooked it aside with the remains of his arm and drove her through. The light of the fire hardly penetrated the space within. All she could see was a huddle of bed rags on the floor, with the same sickly sweet smell of disease that the leper himself gave off.
Her sinister guardian threw back his hood, and she saw that he had no hair. No eyebrows or eyelashes, and not a hair on his head. Great suppurating sores covered his scalp and marched on down his neck, and she flinched to see the raw red craters oozing with yellow pus. He read her shocked face and laughed.
“Oh, it takes all your hair, this disease. Good thing I’m such a beauty without it, eh, my love?”
He came lurching toward her. Her legs, her body, her heart turned to stone. Close up, he smelled even worse.
So, Isolde, is this your punishment?
Tell me then, Great Mother, what was my sin?
“Well, Lazaran?”
A woman was standing in the corner of the room. Dusk as it was, she glimmered in the shadows with her own light. Her long black hair was shot through with gray, and her shapely face had a luminous sense of wisdom, peace, and calm. Tall and unmoving, she had the air of a queen of the forest, a mother deer of many summers who has seen many great stags come and go.
“Well, Lazaran?” the mellow voice resumed.
The leper twitched away from Isolde as if he had been stung. “Madrona!” he cried in a fury. “What are you doing here?”
“I have come to greet our newcomer.”
Who was this woman? Isolde fastened hungry eyes on her. She had been a fine lady once, that was plain, and a grave beauty hung about her still. Her manner and bearing had a unmistakable nobility, and she carried herself with an undefeated pride. Isolde caught sight of a thick girdle of amber beneath her cloak, and at her waist she wore a bronze workbox
on a handsome chain, containing all the implements of the lady of the house. Isolde looked at her in pity and wonder. Living here, the woman must know that she would never use her scissors, pins, needle, or comb again. Yet there was still the remains of a tattered dignity in her air.
The woman searched Isolde’s face, then surveyed her hands. “You are not a leper.”
“No.”
“Do you have reason to think you have caught the disease?”
“None.”
“Have you been confined here by family or friends, who fear you may have been in contact with leprosy and may pass it on to them?”
“Not at all.”
She fixed Isolde with a gaze as still as water in a woodland pool. “Then why are you here?”
“On the orders of the King.”
The woman nodded as understanding dawned. “You are the Queen.”
“Of course she’s the Queen,” hissed the leper. “But keep it to yourself. I don’t want all these reprobates knowing who she is.”
Isolde felt her cracked lips smiling with bitter irony. “I was the Queen. But I have fallen foul of the King. All this has been contrived by my husband, Mark.”
The woman did not look surprised. “You defied him. That was something he could not forgive. So he chose the leper house as his revenge.”
Isolde gave a cracked laugh. “Can you believe it?”
The woman gravely inclined her head. “It’s a punishment that jealous husbands like to inflict. And if you catch the infection here, that will suit the King, too. If you die in the wood, forgotten and unseen, no one can accuse him of your death.”
Isolde nodded grimly. “And you? What brought you here?”
The proud head went back. “I came here to be with my son.”
Isolde’s eyes widened. “By choice?”
“It would be any mother’s choice. I was a widow with an only son. We were well-to-do, we had our own estate. But my son traveled overseas and came back with the disease. I wanted to be with him and nurse him till he died. At least I could do that.”
The woman glimmered at her with a grief too deep for tears.
Isolde dared not speak. After a while, the level tones resumed. “And afterward, I had nowhere else to go. My son is buried here, and I wanted to stay. The Gods had decreed that I would not catch the disease, so I go on taking care of those who have.” A tender smile appeared on her careworn face. “They are my family now. And when I die, they will bury me with love. Not everyone can say that.”
“Madrona? Madrona?”
A childish voice broke in on their debate. The rough sacking parted, and a slight, clumsy form came shouldering through. In a dream of misery, Isolde saw a young boy of eight or ten swing himself into the room on a rough forked crutch and reach out to Madrona with a hopeful smile.
Madrona’s face lit up. “Come here, my prince!” She swept him into her arms.
Isolde felt her tears rising for the first time. “What a dreadful affliction this is.”
Madrona paused. “There is not much pain. Lepers soon lose all feeling in their limbs. The worst is the numbness and slow loss of strength. In time, the disease burns itself out, and some suffer little at all.”
“Is that enough, madam? Or will you talk all night?”
Isolde turned. The leper was looking at her with a savage, brooding desire, as if he was already fingering her flesh.
“Come, lady.” He bared his teeth and reached out a bandaged hand.
Isolde took a breath and readied herself to fight. But Goddess, Mother . . . to think of inflicting pain on a creature in pain . . .
Madrona stepped forward, the child in her arms. “Think again, Lazaran,” she said.
He turned on her heavily. “Think what?”
“Do not do this. Be wise and leave her alone.”
“And if I don’t?” he jeered.
Madrona turned away, as if bored. “Do what you like, the woman’s nothing to me. I’m taking this child to bed, so I’ll leave you alone. But if she’s the Queen as you say, you’d better take care. The King’s thrown her to you in a fit of rage. What if he changes his mind?”
“He wouldn’t do that,” Lazaran growled, his eyes darting to and fro. “He said I could do what I liked.”
“And you believed him?”
“He’s the King!” the leper blustered. “He gave me his word.”
“Just as he gave his word to this very Queen,” Madrona returned, “when he stood beside her in church and promised to care for her all her life. And look at her now. If he’ll destroy the ruling Queen, my friend, what will he do to you?”
“Why should he do anything to me?” But the swollen face was dark with suspicion now.
“He could change his mind tomorrow and want her back. And in the meantime, you’ll have raped her and beaten her, too, because you’ll have to do that to force her to submit. If you’ve despoiled his darling, he’ll flay you alive, no matter what he says.”
The leper’s tongue flickered out round his lipless mouth, and he seemed to shrink inside his rags before their eyes.
“Curse you, you’re right,” he snuffled with a savage oath. “Kings, like the Gods, love to play with us. He probably wanted to torment me with her. Or else he wants her here in torment, waiting for the blow to fall.”
Madrona nodded gravely. “That’s very likely.”
Lazaran’s bloodshot eyes flared. “Well, he won’t make a fool out of me. I can bide my time. He’s given orders that she’s to be kept short of food, so the sickness will seize her all the quicker as she grows weak. When it does, he won’t want her anymore. Then she’ll be mine, and I can do what I want.”
He turned on Isolde with the swiftness of a snake. “And it won’t be long, my darling. Give us a kiss till then?”
chapter 44
The big knight rode out of the forest in the hour before dawn, when the last of the night stars still trembled in the sky. As he crested the hill and began the long, slow descent to Castle Dore, some of the townsfolk saw his great frame, dark in the mist against the rising sun, and were stung into a moment of wild hope.
“It’s Sir Tristan!” shouted one of the watchers at the ford, leaping and splashing about in the shallows for glee. But he was a poor natural, simple since the day he was born, and in times gone by he had seen Queen Guenevere attended by a fairy host, a watery giant who lived under the ford, and the massed armies of Uther Pendragon at their last stand. So no one was inclined to believe what the shouting lad said. And the wiser sort knew the leap that Tristan had made. No man on earth could have survived that fall.
“It’s not Sir Tristan, no,” one of the women said gruffly. “He’s gone from us now, my lad. He’ll come no more.”
The staring boy cocked his head to one side and grinned. “Who is it, then?”
This was the question in all the townspeople’s minds as the stranger rode down the valley and up through the town. Men noted his fine weapons and splendid armor and put him down as a prince from Outre Mer. Women saw his worn face and haggard air and knew that even if he had come from that unknown kingdom beyond the sea, he had suffered cruelly, and very likely for love.
Who was he? followed him like a whisper wherever he went. And the same question was put again by the chamberlain when the stranger rode up to the great gate of Castle Dore and asked for King Mark.
“Who are you, sir? And what is your business here?”
The stranger shook his head. “My name is nothing, and my business will be brief. But tell your King that he may admit me without disgrace. I am a knight of the Round Table, and King Arthur is my lord.”
“A knight of King Arthur, eh?” Mark demanded when the word was brought. “Gods above, fool, show him in at once! You can’t keep a man like that dancing attendance in the gatehouse without food or drink.”
Which is exactly what the King would have done in another mood, the chamberlain reflected rancorously as he bowed himself out. But between Mark’s royal rages a
nd his frightening black sulks, there was no serving him at all these days. Still, the stranger must be treated with chivalry.
“This way, sir,” he offered politely, leading the newcomer up through the courtyards and cloisters to the King’s privy chamber. He knocked and threw open the door.
“Sire, the stranger knight is here to pay his respects.”
“Come in, come in,” Mark cried.
At his invitation, a lofty, broad-shouldered figure moved into the room, carrying his helmet in the crook of his arm. The newcomer was clean-shaven and well-groomed, with long fair hair neatly trimmed and curled; but his broad face was never meant to be so thin, and his features bore signs of sickness and suffering. His large frame, too, was painfully lean for his height, and he walked like a man far older than his years.
Mark leaned forward on his throne, a sharp impulse of alarm springing inside his skull. Who was the gaunt stranger, and what did he want? Forcing a smile, he waved a welcoming hand.
“Greetings to you, sir,” he caroled cheerfully. “What brings you to our court?”
The stranger bowed. “I am seeking Sir Tristan.”
Mark tensed imperceptibly. “Are you, now? Why so?”
“I’ve come to thank him for his goodness to me.” The knight laid his great hand on his sword. “I want to pledge him my oath of undying brotherhood.”
“Gods above, man,” Mark cried in a nasty tone, “what did he do?”
The knight looked away with an awkward shrug.
“I can hardly answer that,” he said uncomfortably, “except to my shame. But I am more than the battered knight errant you see now. I was once a man of honor, a knight of King Arthur and one of his Fellowship.”
“A knight of the Round Table?” Mark’s eyes narrowed. “Who are you, then?”
“They call me Gawain. I was Arthur’s first companion, and I’ve sworn to be his last.”
Mark’s ungainly body twitched with shock. Was this worn, haunted creature the great hero Gawain, famous alike for his roistering ways with women and his tireless strength? The eldest of the four great brothers from the Orkney Isles? In truth, Gawain was King Arthur’s cousin and closest kin, and they shared the same fair coloring and outstanding build. But just look at him now, Mark snarled inwardly. Darkness and devils, was everything these days turning out for the worse?
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