Death and the Lady

by Tarr, Judith

  I dipped the porridge back into the pot. I wiped the children’s faces and Francha’s hands. I did what needed doing. And all the while my anger grew.

  oOo

  The rain had gone away with the night. The last of the clouds blew away eastward, and the sun came up, warming the wet earth, raising pillars and curtains of mist. The threshers would be at it soon, as should I.

  But I stood in my kitchen garden and looked over the hedge, and saw the wall of grey and green that was the Wood. One of the cats wound about my ankles.

  I gathered her up. She purred. “I know where the lady went,” I said. “She went west. She said she would. God protect her; nothing else will, where she was going.”

  The cat’s purring stopped. She raked my hand with her claws and struggled free; hissed at me; and darted away around the midden.

  I sucked my smarting hand. Celine ran out of the house, shrilling in the tone I was doing my best to slap out of her: “Francha’s crying again, mama! Francha won’t stop crying!”

  What I was thinking of was quite mad. I should go inside, of course I should, and do what I could to comfort Francha, and gather the children together, and go to the threshing.

  I knelt in the dirt between the poles of beans, and took Celine by the shoulders. She stopped her shrieking to stare at me. “Are you a big girl?” I asked her.

  She drew herself up. “I’m grown up,” she said. “You know that, mama.”

  “Can you look after Francha, then? And Perrin? And take them both to Mère Adele?”

  She frowned. “Won’t you come, too?”

  Too clever by half, was my Celine. “I have to do something else,” I said. “Can you do it, Celine? And tell Mère Adele that I’ll be back as soon as I can?”

  Celine thought about it. I held my breath. Finally she nodded. “I’ll take Perrin and Francha to Mère Adele. And tell her you’ll come back. Then can I go play with Jeannot?”

  “No,” I said. Then: “Yes. Play with Jeannot. Stay with him till I come back. Can you do that?”

  She looked at me in perfect disgust. “Of course I can do that. I’m grown up.”

  I bit my lips to keep from laughing. I kissed her once on each cheek for each of the others, and once on the forehead for herself. “Go on,” I said. “Be quick.”

  She went. I stood up. In a little while I heard them go, Perrin declaring loudly that he was going to eat honeycakes with Mère Adele. I went into the kitchen and filled a napkin with bread and cheese and apples, and put the knife in, too, wrapped close in the cloth, and tied it all in my kerchief.

  Mamère Mondine was asleep. She would be well enough till evening. If I was out longer, then Mère Adele would know to send someone. I kissed her and laid my cheek for a moment against her dry old one. She sighed but did not wake. I drew myself up and went back through the kitchen garden.

  oOo

  Our house is one of the last in the village. The garden wall is part of Messire Arnaud’s palisade, though we train beans up over it, and I have a grapevine that almost prospers. Claudel had cut a door in it, which could have got us in trouble if Messire Arnaud had lived to find out about it; but milord was dead and his heirs far away, and our little postern was hidden well in vines within and brambles without.

  I escaped with a scratch or six, but with most of my dignity intact. It was the last of the wine in me, I was sure, and anger for Francha’s sake, and maybe a little honest worry, too. Lys had been a guest in my house. If any harm came to her, the guilt would fall on me.

  And I had not gone outside the palisade, except to the fields, since Claudel went away. I wanted the sun on my face, no children tugging at my skirts, the memory of death far away. I was afraid of what I went to, of course I was; the Wood was a horror from my earliest memory. But it was hard to be properly terrified, walking the path under the first outriders of the trees, where the sun slanted down in long sheets, and the wind murmured in the leaves, and the birds sang sweet and unafraid.

  The path was thick with mould under my feet. The air was scented with green things, richer from the rain, with the deep earthy promise of mushrooms. I found a whole small field of them, and gathered as many as my apron would carry, but moving quickly through them and not lingering after.

  By then Sency was well behind me and the trees were closing in. The path wound through them, neither broader nor narrower than before.

  I began to wonder if I should have gone to fetch the Allards’ dog. I had company, it was true: the striped cat had followed me. She was more comfort than I might have expected.

  The two of us went on. The scent of mushrooms was all around me like a charm to keep the devils out.

  I laughed at that. The sound fell soft amid the trees. Beeches turning gold with autumn. Oaks going bronze. Ash with its feathery leaves, thorn huddling in thickets. The birds were singing still, but the quiet was vast beneath.

  The cat walked ahead of me now, tail up and elegantly curved. One would think that she had come this way before.

  I had, longer ago than I liked to think. I had walked as I walked now, but without the warding of mushrooms, crossing myself, it seemed, at every turn of the path. I had taken that last, suddenly steep slope, and rounded the thicket—hedge, it might have been—of thorn, and come to the sunlit space. It had dazzled me then as it dazzled me now, so much light after the green gloom. I blinked to clear my eyes.

  The chapel was as it had been when last I came to it. The two walls that stood; the one that was half fallen. The remnant of a porch, the arch of a gate, with the carving on it still, much blurred with age and weather. The upper arm of the cross had broken. The Lady who sat beneath it had lost her upraised hand, but the Child slept as ever in her lap, and her smile, even so worn, was sweet.

  I crossed myself in front of her. No devils flapped shrieking through the broken roof. Nothing moved at all, except the cat, which picked its way delicately across the porch and vanished into the chapel.

  My hands were cold. I shifted my grip on my bundle. I was hungry, suddenly, which made me want to laugh, or maybe to cry. My stomach lived in a time of its own; neither fear nor anger mattered in the least to it.

  I would feed it soon enough. I gathered my courage and stepped under the arch, ducking my head though it was more than high enough: this was a holy place, though not, maybe, to the God I knew.

  The pavement had been handsome once. It was dull and broken now. The altar was fallen. The font was whole, but blurred as was the carving on the gate. A spring bubbled into it and bubbled out again through channels in the wall. It was itself an odd thing, the stump of a great tree—oak, the stories said—lined with lead long stripped of its gilding, and carved with crosses. Here the roof was almost intact, giving shelter from the rain; or the ancient wood would long ago have crumbled into dust.

  She was kneeling on the edge of the font, her dark head bent over it, her white hands clenched on its rim. I could not see the water. I did not want to see it. I could hear her, but she spoke no language I knew. Her tone was troubling enough: pure throttled desperation, pleading so strong that I lurched forward, hand outstretched.

  I stopped myself before I could touch her. If she was scrying her lover, then she was calling him up from the dead.

  I shuddered. I made no sound, but she started and wheeled. Her face was white as death. Her eyes—

  She lidded them. Her body eased by degrees. She did not seem surprised or angered, or anything but tired. “Jeannette,” she said.

  “You left,” I said. “Francha cried all night.”

  Her face tightened. “I had to go.”

  “Here?”

  She looked about. She might have laughed, maybe, if she had had the strength. “It was to be here first,” she said. “Now it seems that it will be here last and always. And never.”

  I looked at her.

  She shook her head. “You don’t understand. How can you?”

  “I can try,” I said. “I’m no lady, I grant you that, but I�
��ve wits enough for a peasant’s brat.”

  “Of course you have.” She seemed surprised. As if I had been doing the doubting, and not she. “Very well. I’ll tell you. He won’t let me back.”

  “He?”

  “He,” said Lys, pointing at the font. There was nothing in it but water. No face. No image of a lover that would be. “My lord of the Wood. The cold king.”

  I shivered. “We don’t name him here.”

  “Wise,” said Lys.

  “He won’t let you pass?” I asked. “Then go around. Go south, as Mère Adele told you. It’s a long way, but it’s safe, and it takes you west eventually.”

  “I don’t want to go around,” said Lys. “I want to go in.”

  “You’re mad,” I said.

  “Yes,” she said. “He won’t let me in. I walked, you see. I passed this place. I went where the trees are old, old, and where the sun seldom comes, even at high noon. Little by little they closed in front of me. Then at last I could go no farther. Go back, the trees said to me. Go back and let us be.”

  “You were wise to do it,” I said.

  “Mad,” she said, “and wise.” Her smile was crooked. “Oh, yes. So I came back to this place, which is the gate and the guard. And he spoke to me in the water. Go back, he said, as the trees had. I laughed at him. Had he no better word to offer me? Only this, he said. The way is shut. If you would open it, if you can—then you may. It is not mine to do.”

  I looked at her. She was thinner than ever, the weight of her belly dragging her down. “Why?” I asked. “Why do you want to get in? It’s madness there. Every story says so.”

  “So it is,” Lys said. “That was why I left.”

  There was a silence. It rang.

  “You don’t look like a devil,” I said. “Or a devil’s minion.”

  She laughed. It was a sweet, awful sound. “But, my good woman, I am. I am everything that is black and terrible.”

  “You are about to drop where you stand.” I got my arm around her before she did it, and sat her down on the font’s rim. I could not help a glance at the water. It was still only water.

  “We are going to rest,” I said, “because I need it. And eat, because I’m hungry. Then we’re going back to Sency.”

  “Not I,” said Lys.

  I paid her no mind. I untied my kerchief and spread out what I had, and put in a fistful of mushrooms, too; promising myself that I would stop when I went back, and fill my apron again.

  There was nothing to drink but water, but it would do. Lys would not drink from the font, but from the spring above it. I did as she did, to keep the peace.

  The cat came to share the cheese and a nibble or two of the bread. She turned up her nose at the mushrooms. “All the more for us,” I said to her. She filliped her tail and went in search of better prey.

  We ate without speaking. Lys was hungry: she ate as delicately and fiercely as a cat. A cat was what I thought of when I looked at her, a white she-cat who would not meet my eyes.

  When we were done I gathered the crumbs in my skirt and went out to the porch and scattered them for the birds. I slanted an eye at the sun. A bit past noon. I had thought it would be later.

  Lys came up behind me. Her step was soundless but her shadow fell cool across me, making me shiver.

  “There is another reason,” she said, “why I should stay and you should leave. My lord who is dead: he had a brother. That one lives, and hunts me.”

  I turned to face her.

  “He wants me for what I am,” she said, “and for what he thinks I can give him. For myself, too, maybe. A little. I tricked him in Rouen: cut my hair and put on a nun’s habit and walked out peacefully in the abbess’ train. He will have learned of that long since, and begun his tracking of me.”

  I shrugged. “What’s one man in the whole of Normandy—or one woman, for the matter of that? Chance is he’ll never find you.”

  “He’ll find me,” Lys said with quelling certainty.

  “So let him.” I shook my skirts one last time and stepped down off the porch.

  I was not at all sure that she would follow. But when I came to the trees, she was behind me. “You don’t know who he is. He’ll come armed, Jeannette, and with his men at his back.”

  That gave me pause, but I was not about to let her see that. “We have walls,” I said. “If he comes. Better he find you there than in a broken chapel, beating on a door that stays fast shut.”

  “Walls can break,” said Lys.

  “And doors?”

  She did not answer that. Neither did she leave me.

  After a while she asked it. “Why?”

  “You’re my guest,” I said.

  “Not once I left you.”

  “What does that have to do with it?”

  She started to speak. Stopped. Started again. One word. “Francha.”

  “Francha.” I let some of the anger show. “God knows why, God knows how, but she has decided that she belongs to you. You went off and left her. Her mother is dead, her father died on top of her; we found her so, mute as she is now, and he begun to rot.” I could not see her, to know if she flinched. I hoped that she did. “I took her in. I coaxed her to eat, to face the world, to live. Then you came. She fixed the whole of herself on you. And you left her.”

  “I had no choice.’

  “Of course you did,” I said. “You had to have known that the way was shut. He exiled you, didn’t he? your cold king.”

  “I exiled myself.”

  Her voice was stiff with pride. I snorted at it. “I believe you, you know. That you’re one of Them. No one but a soulless thing would do what you did to Francha.”

  “Would a soulless thing go back? Would it admit that it had erred?”

  “Have you done either?”

  She seized my sleeve and spun me about. She was strong; her fingers were cruel, digging into my arm. She glared into my face.

  I glared back. I was not afraid, not at all. Even when I saw her true. Cat, had I thought, back in the chapel? Cat, yes, and cat-eyed, and nothing human in her at all.

  Except the voice, raw and roughened with anger. “Now you see. Now you know.”

  I crossed myself, to be safe. She did not go up in a cloud of smoke. I had not honestly expected her to. That was a cross she wore at her throat, glimmering under the robe.

  “So they’re true,” I said. “The stories.”

  “Some of them.” She let me go. “He wants that, my lord Giscard. He wants the child I carry, that he thinks will be the making of his house.”

  “Then maybe you should face him,” I said, “and call the lightnings down on him.”

  She looked as shocked as if I had done as much myself. “That is the Sin! How can you speak so lightly of it?”

  “Sin?” I asked. “Among the soulless ones of the Wood?”

  “We are as Christian as you,” she said.

  That was so improbable that it could only be true. I turned my back on her—not without a pricking in my nape—and went on down the path. In a little while she followed me.

  II.

  When the threshing was done and the granaries full, the apples in and the windfalls pressed for cider, my lone proud grapevine harvested and its fruit dried in the sun, and all of Sency made fast against a winter that had not yet come, a company of men rode up to our gate.

  We had been expecting them, Lys and I and Mère Adele, since the leaves began to fall. We kept a boy by the gate, most days, and shut and barred it at night. Weapons we had none of, except our scythes and our pruning hooks, and an ancient, rusted sword that the smith’s widow had unearthed from the forge.

  Pierre Allard was at the gate the day milord Giscard came, and Celine tagging after him as she too often did. It was she who came running to find me.

  I was nearly there already. All that day Lys had been as twitchy as a cat. Suddenly in the middle of mending Francha’s shirt, she sprang up and bolted.

  I nearly ran her down just pas
t the well, where she stood rigid and staring, the needle still in one hand, and the shirt dangling from the other. I shook her hard.

  She came to herself, a little. “If he sees me,” she said, “if he knows I’m here . . .”

  “So,” I said. “You’re a coward, then.”

  “No!” She glared at me, all Lys again, and touchy-proud as ever she could be. “I’m a coward for your sake. He’ll burn the village about your ears, for harboring me.”

  “Not,” I said, “if we have anything to say about it.”

  I tucked up my skirt and climbed the gate. Pierre was up there, and Mère Adele come from who knew where; it was a good long run from the priory, and she was barely breathing hard. She had her best wimple on, I noticed, and her jeweled cross. The sun struck dazzles on the stones, white and red and one as green as new grass. She greeted me with a grunt and Lys with a nod, but kept her eyes on the men below.

  They were a pretty company. Much like the one that had taken Claudel away: men in grey mail with bright surcoats, and one with a banner—red, this, like blood, with something gold on it.

  “Lion rampant,” said Lys. She was still on the stair below the parapet. She could hardly have seen the banner. But she would know what it was. “Arms of Montsalvat.”

  The lord was in mail like his men. There was a mule behind him, with what I supposed was his armor on it. He rode a tall red horse, and he was tall himself, as far as I could tell. I was not so much above him, standing on the gate.

  He turned his face up to me. It was a surprising face, after all that I had heard. Younger, much, than I had expected, and shaven clean. Not that he would have much beard, I thought. His hair was barley-fair.

  He smiled at me. His teeth were white and almost even. His eyes were pure guileless blue. “Now here’s a handsome guardsman!” he said laughing, sweeping a bow in his high saddle. “Fair lady, will you have mercy on poor travelers, and let us into your bower?”