Beggar’s Flip
Benny Lawrence
© 2019 Benny Lawrence
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from the publisher.
978-1-949290-29-5 paperback
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This is for all of you who asked for it.
You have only yourselves to blame.
PROLOGUE
THE SIXTH TIME that the Lady Melitta sent me down the stairs, I realized what should have been obvious to begin with: It was going to be a real bitch of a day.
It had begun the night before, as most bad days do. One of my many daily tasks as Melitta’s handmaid was to bring my lady her supper tray, and I’d dropped it, sending all its contents crashing down onto the carpet. Wine. Gravy. Custard. A particularly greasy duck. It wasn’t exactly an accident and Melitta knew it, but she didn’t get as angry as I’d expected. I think she was distracted by something more pressing. Maybe she had crabs, or a raging infection. I can only hope.
She thrashed me, of course, but it was a routine kind of thrashing. Her heart wasn’t really in it. I’d become a bit of a connoisseur of thrashings, in the years I had spent as Melitta’s servant, and this one didn’t come close to ranking in the top twenty on the all-time scale. And yet, for some reason, I lost my head in the middle of it, and I bit her hand.
Why? Damned if I know why. I was sixteen years old then, and my moods went up and down like a bucket in a well. I was unpredictable even to myself.
It was, I say in all modesty, a hell of a bite. I got my teeth into the fleshy part of the palm, below the little finger, and clamped down until my teeth nearly met. If I’d had a few more seconds, then I probably could have taken a whole chunk off. But Melitta—I’ll say this much for her—Melitta knew how to stay calm under pressure. Instead of squawking and flailing uselessly, she snatched up a stick of firewood and smashed blows against the side of my head until I had to let go.
And after that, things got unpleasant.
It went on so long, and I made so many noises, that we woke up my father on the floor below. My father, Lord Iason, always was a light sleeper—I think it was because of his lifelong terror of assassins—but my howls that night could have woken a corpse.
Once awake, my father trailed up the stairs, peeked through the door, and cleared his throat uncomfortably. Which may not sound like much, but it was rare for him to go so far. Though it might have been coincidence, Melitta dropped her stick of firewood, and then me, a few seconds later. She paced back and forth across the room—quick, impatient, furious steps—then threw herself into her chair. Her fingernails drummed on the arm.
She wasn’t supposed to do anything that would put my life at risk. My father needed me too badly, for a reason that was never ever mentioned or discussed. But Melitta probably spent half her time daydreaming about some kind of fatal accident.
When she finally spoke, it was a hiss, like seething water. “Get out of my sight.”
I checked the floor, to be sure that I wasn’t leaving any teeth on it, and then scrabbled backwards out of the door. My father had ghosted away by that point. He always tried to avoid getting involved. Such a shy, sensitive man.
I collapsed onto my straw mat outside Melitta’s door and wrapped my blanket around me. We were a month into winter, and there was a white tracery of frost over the flagstones.
Just as I was beginning my post-thrashing ritual (catch breath, rub bruises, curse a lot), Melitta’s door crashed open. She stormed out in her robe, a violet whirlwind. In one swift, vicious motion, she snatched my blanket away from me, and then stormed back into her room. The door smashed shut again.
For some time, I didn’t do anything—didn’t curl up or hug my knees to keep myself warm. I just stared at the opposite wall and hated her, hated her, hated her. Nothing else in the universe seemed more vivid or more real.
It was my breath that eventually caught my attention, the way it misted out in front of me. That’s when I realized that I was shivering hard, my muscles jerking in something close to convulsions. It was bitter, bitter cold. My feet were bare, and already they looked bloodless and chalky blue.
How the hell, I wondered dully, was I supposed to sleep?
That was a stupid question, because of course I wasn’t supposed to sleep. I was supposed to pass a miserable night out on the bare landing and transform by morning into a quivering little rabbit who wouldn’t even dare to raise her eyes from the floor in my lady’s presence.
Unlikely. But it’s hard to predict your own breaking point, it really is. You can hold out through a lengthy beating, and then dissolve in snivelling tears when your shirt gets torn.
A thought popped into my head, and I almost laughed. Right that moment, right that second, my half-sister Ariadne would be getting ready for bed, a couple of turns down the spiral stairway from where I was sitting. Servants would have put warming pans between her sheets and aired out her pillows. Fluffed her coverlets, which were filled—I shit you not—with swan feathers.
Our evenings couldn’t be more different. But then, she was Melitta’s daughter. My mother, now dead, had been a servant who wasn’t fast or lucky enough to stay out of my father’s way. Apparently that was important, for some reason that I’d never really understood.
I managed that night by wrapping my straw mat around me like a stiff pancake. It kept some of my body heat in. Even so, there were times when I could feel my heart laboring, thudding with slow, painful jolts, as if my blood had grown too thick to flow through my veins. When that happened, I would get up and race up and down the stairs until my lungs burned.
The problem was that running made me sweat, and sweating made me colder. As night inched towards dawn, I stopped trying to sleep. I walked around and around and around the landing, with my arms inside my tunic, hugged against me, and I could only hope that my footsteps were keeping Melitta awake.
Whether it was that or something else, I don’t think that my lady slept well. When she rang the bell at daybreak to summon me into her room, it had a particularly impatient sound to it: Ting! Ting! Ting!
She was out of bed when I entered the room, sitting stiffly in an armchair by the low-burning fire. I bowed my head and waited.
Melitta inspected me. Not that I was looking at her face—I was studying the toes of her slippers, face downcast—but still, I could tell. I could tell whether Melitta was smiling or frowning from the way the hairs on the back of my neck prickled.
“What are you waiting for?” she snapped, with sudden irritation. “Move.”
MELITTA’S CHAMBER WAS at the top of the tower keep, so waiting on her involved an awful lot of climbing up and down. Melitta first took me as her handmaid when I was eight, and back then, it only took a trip or two up and down the stairs to bring me to the point of collapse. By the time I was sixteen, I was a lot tougher, but the work still took its toll.
As always, the first job of the morning was to carry Melitta’s slop-pail down to the yard and empty it. Then I carried up her breakfast tray. That much I did by sheer reflex. Shuffling along half-asleep, I almost didn’t notice how much I was hurting. Almost.
I was hungry, too, though it hardly seems worthwhile to mention it. I was always hungry back then. The scraping ache in my stomach was like the feel of stone underfoot. Just one of the bastard facts of living.
Melitta watched me narrowly as I put the tray down, but she said nothing—just drew her chair up to the table and waved f
or me to keep going.
Another trip down the tower stairs to fetch firewood, and another for a bucket of water. By then I was really struggling. My legs felt almost liquid, trembling beneath me, and my heart pounded so hard that I saw stars.
It was a vast relief when I reached the top floor. As I filled the washbasin, Melitta stared out of the window. She had already finished her breakfast. My lady was always, always trying to slim down, and so she ate very little in the morning: a hard rusk dipped in wine, and perhaps a few raisins or olives. Stupid, if you asked me. She was always starving by the time supper came, and would gobble something like two roast fowl and a pile of honey cakes, giving herself terrible heartburn. Which made her just a peach to deal with.
Her voice bored into me, all of a sudden. “Did you bring up enough wood?”
“Yes, my lady,” I said, instead of the answer I wanted to give, which was Of course I did, you stupid bitch.
“It doesn’t look like enough.” Idly, she picked up a split chunk of ash wood, as if to inspect it.
“It’ll last until supper. My lady.”
“I don’t think so.”
Melitta was stronger than she looked. She gave a quick flick of the wrist, and the chunk of wood sailed backwards, in a graceful arc, straight out of the tower window.
I must have been a little light-headed by then, because I just stood there stupidly for the few seconds it took for the wood to reach the ground. There was a distant thump when it landed in the courtyard. Melitta didn’t even look to see where it hit.
“No,” she went on, picking up a log in each hand. “I don’t think it’s enough wood at all.” Two more jerks, and those logs went out the window as well. “Not nearly enough.” Two more logs followed. “You’re going to have to learn, Gwyneth, that I won’t tolerate shirking.” Two more. “You’re going to have to learn to work.” Two more. “Without complaint.” Two more. “Without question.”
That emptied the woodbin, and she dusted off her hands. “More wood. Get moving.”
I looked her in the face then. This was absolutely forbidden, but if I hadn’t done it, I think I would have howled or thrown a boot. Melitta’s pupils were black and blown wide, as if she was in the grip of terrible anger or terrible excitement. She expected me to crack—to scream or to fight, to resist somehow—and when that happened, she would resume what she had been doing the night before, exactly where she left off.
She didn’t need to wait for me to crack, could have started the beating whenever she wanted. But she preferred it when I gave her an excuse. It scored her a point in some elaborate game that she played with Iason, on days when he wasn’t ignoring her.
I bowed, too late, and backed out of the door. I wasn’t going to win this, but damned if I was going to let her have any fun.
IT WAS SHEER hatred that got me down the stairs that time and back up with my armload of firewood. I didn’t bother to lower my eyes when I shuffled back into my lady’s room. She glared at me and I glared right back. We were too angry, both of us, to observe any of the niceties—too angry, even, to talk in sentences longer than one word.
“Wood,” I announced unceremoniously and dumped it in the middle of the carpet.
Melitta’s eyes swept down to the logs, the bark dust and mites scattered over her rug, and then back up to me. Her voice rasped as she ordered, “Water.”
“Water,” I repeated and snatched up the bucket next to the door. “Water,” I muttered, and headed down the stairs again.
The anger was good; it pumped adrenaline through me, and that kept me going for a while. I clattered down six flights of steps at top speed, the empty bucket banging against my knees. All too soon, though, the last of my energy went out of me in one great whoosh. My aching legs buckled, and I sat down on the steps.
I went through my mental checklist: exhausted? Yes. In pain? Yes. Hungry? Hell yes.
In short, a real bitch of a day. Such days are common, when you work for a real bitch of a queen. But you never really get used to them. I never did, anyway.
It wasn’t safe to sit still for too long. I got up and headed down the stairs again, more slowly, while I weighed my options. There were only two. I could slip away and look for a place to hide and rest. If I was very lucky, I could scrounge something to eat and maybe even take a nap. But sooner or later, someone would find me and turn me back over to Melitta and then . . . well. I flexed my shoulders and felt the pain roll through me, like one of the great foam-capped waves I’d seen in the distance through Melitta’s window. I couldn’t handle another thrashing so soon.
Maybe that left me with only one option: to do what I was told, for as long as my limbs kept obeying me. Simple—but not easy. Melitta could keep me going up and down the stairs all day, if the fancy took her. She wouldn’t even have to speak. She would only have to raise and lower one finger, over and over and over.
I filled my bucket at the courtyard well and lugged it back to the base of the tower. If I had gone straight up, without hesitating or thinking about it, maybe I could have made it, but I didn’t go straight up. I looked far above me, to the cornice that crowned the top tower window, and all of my muscles screeched in unison: Not a chance.
I stood there for quite some time.
And then I heard it: a gleeful, high-pitched titter.
It seemed vastly unfair that somebody—anybody—was in the mood to laugh when I was so miserable. Still, it was a distraction, and that was something.
The sound was coming from the stables, to my right. I abandoned the bucket of water by the stairs and slipped through the half-door into the steamy, straw-and-dung-smelling warmth of the stalls.
I didn’t understand right away what I was seeing. All I could make out at first was some vast mound of frills, quivering away in an empty stall. Best I can describe, it looked like a vast levitating plate of dessert. As my eyes adjusted to the gloom, I realized it was a woman, leaning back against the wall, with her wide skirts flipped up over her head.
There was only one person in the castle who wore that kind of ridiculous frilly gown. It was my half-sister, the Lady Ariadne, heir to the house of Bain, ruler-to-be of the island of Bero.
There was no need for Ariadne to wear all those piles of lace. She had, after all, just turned seventeen—the celebrations went on for days and even I was given a cup of wine. She was old enough to order her own clothing, and all the seamstresses in the palace jumped four feet in the air when she walked by. Yet she refused to trade her frilly frocks for something that made her look her age.
I asked her once why the hell she didn’t dress like a grown-up. She said, “Because I like to know something other people don’t.”
“What’s that? How to shimmy around a ballroom wearing ten petticoats?”
“I know that I have a brain, and nobody else does, except for you. People look at me, see mounds of pink fabric, and think, ‘Aha! Girl! Must be stupid.’ It’s like camouflage.”
Maybe it was like camouflage, but not when she was backed up against a stable wall, tittering, with her skirts flung over her shoulder.
Then I saw what was making my sister squeal. There was a woman there with her, a lean brown woman, whipcord thin. She was one of the servants in the castle bakery—I’d seen her in the kitchen when fetching Melitta’s meals. She was about the same age as Ariadne and I, and she didn’t say much but she had an interesting kind of face.
Now she had my sister backed up against the stable wall. She was moving rhythmically, in time to Ariadne’s squeals, her hand buried somewhere I didn’t want to see.
If it had been any noblewoman other than Ariadne standing there with her skirts over her head, I might have been worried about the kitchen girl. But I trusted Ariadne not to force this on someone who didn’t want it. And besides, there was all the giggling. However things had gotten to this point, they were both of them having a very good time.
Well. Good for them, I guessed. But it wasn’t going to happen for me, and now I’d wasted
three precious minutes that weren’t mine to waste. My lady Melitta was up in the tower counting the seconds until I returned with her damn washwater, and she’d make me pay for every last one. I started backing towards the door, keeping as quiet as I could.
Two steps away from the open air, my foot slipped and I went flying. The floor rushed up to meet me and I crashed heavily on my side.
For just an instant, I was too stunned and hurt to move. Then I was hit by a wave of total, all-consuming fury. Did the entire universe hate me today? Couldn’t I ever catch a break? I clawed my way to my feet and stalked out to the yard in a red-hot haze.
“Wait,” called a voice from behind me. “Wait!”
I nearly howled in frustration, but instead I stopped and turned around.
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