My Lady of the Bog (27 page)

I shook my head. I didn’t know anymore who or what to believe.

King Edward II had wavy hair, a straw-coloured beard and watery eyes. His appearance was proud, I would have said, save for several defects in his toilet: a boil on his throat besmeared with a poultice, a small tear widening in his hosiery
. He was seated with “
his Sami
,” Sikandar writes, apparently referring to a male lover.

Mayura was presented as the “Queen of Hind” and Sikandar as “Shah of
Outremer
.
¹
” When questioned how they had reached his realm, they told him of their tribulations: of the loss of their kingdoms; of their exile, sea voyage, and sojourn in Alexandria; of the Venetians who had intended to sell them as slaves, etc.
And though neither of us spake the Anglish tongue, the English King did not either, and we conversed instead—myself in French and the Queen in Portuguese, rendered by a Spaniard.

Then the Queen withdrew an emerald of a lustrous water, sized like a pigeon’s egg, and placed it in his royal palm.
D
ā
n
ā
.

The King nearly toppled off his chair, for he’d thought us “penniless,” as his people call it. Happily accepting the gem, he returned our largesse by gifting us with a nearby manor, along with the income from its two hundred serfs. He further declared us Defenders of the Realm, so that by nightfall of our third day in Anglia, we were landlords and Anglish gentry, snugly ensconced in an old Roman villa.

But though Sikandar and the Queen had reached safe haven, Sikandar’s reaction come morning was of dismay.
The villa, which had seemed so snug the night before, was all but falling down. The village so generously granted us was little more than several dozen thatched mud and wattle huts along a rutted track, inhabited by folk who looked on us with stark suspicion on rude, starved, frostpinched faces
.

For an unhealthy lot, our villeins were, suffering from all manner of woes: frenzies and fluxes, cardiacles, toothaches, cramps and rheumes, radegoundes and running scabies, boils and coughs and burning agues, griping in the guts and glands, the liver, lights and far reaches of the intestynes! And since their medicines were few and far beneath our own, my Lady brought about many wondrous healings through the application of herbs and tinctures.

For her pains, she was accused of indulging the folk. The gentry have a saying, “Bless a villein and he will smite you. Smite a villein
²
and he will bless you.” And her conspicuous kindnesses were looked upon ill. My Lady’s reply was royal if undiplomatic: “They are
my
villeins whom I’ll bless and smite as
I
do please.”

In short, she ruled the manor like a mother and a queen. If a villein’s child or calf were ill, she had prepared for it a special broth. Our third month there, she had two villeins hanged for killing a traveller, ending talk of her indulgent ways. On Thursdays, she worshipped the sheep, pigs, cows and horses with chanted prayers, waved lights and garlands in a way never seen before. And once a month she gave milksweets to the children. She was at once kind and demanding, hard to fool, generous, and fair. And she was young, imperious and beautiful, and wore robes that shone like the morning star. Was it any wonder then that our villeins loved her?

Our first year was bittersweet. On the one hand, we mourned our former lives and kingdoms, and the Queen often wept for her parted son, quizzing every traveller from the east for news of him, but there was none. Then again, we were so preoccupied with the demands of the manor—vegetable, animal, human, divine—so beguiled by the beauty of the passing seasons, so paralyzed by the winter cold, so entranced by the round of holy days and the stream of supplicants and distinguished guests who came to see her, for her name and fame spread far and wide, that our stolen kingdoms, bit by bit, receded from our minds. For we had found another kingdom which, while considerably smaller, colder and poorer, was just as earnest, real and true.

It was Bloodmonth—the season we sacrificed livestock—when the estranged English Queen landed in Ipswich at the head of a foreign army. At the news, King Edward and his minion fled to Wales, where at Christmastide, they were apprehended; his favourite killed barbarically, they say; and the King imprisoned and deposed.

For us it was an anxious turn. I counselled the Queen we quit this isle as the tides of power were swiftly shifting.

But my Lady would not hear of it, asking me what would become of our villeins.

“Our villeins are not my main concern.
Inishallah
, they’ll endure—as villeins ever do, somehow, despite kings and wars, plagues and taxes. My concern is for my Lady.”

But still she would not agree, claiming our position was not what I feared—and perhaps it wasn’t. Until we unearthed the Saxon treasure.

A villein named Cedric uncovered it while ploughing the spring wheat: a magnificent hoard of gold and silver vessels, coins, plate, ewers and idols, in pieces numbering over a thousand! Though found on property deeded us by the former King, an odd and maddening Anglish law declared that any treasure buried with the intent to recover must go into the coffers of the Crown. The purpose of this strange decree was to frustrate those who would hide their wealth—only to “discover” it after the taxman goeth.

In order to decide its rightful owner, the crowner convened a “jury” of our peers who, upon its inspection, declared the trove a “heathen offring to Goddess Erth” containing many “horrid idoles bearing the masques of asirt’d feends”; in brief, a pagan sacrifice made with no intention of reclaiming and thus reverting to its finder, Cedric who, in turn, was owned by us.

This legal judgment was at once contested, for the Crown had no desire to forfeit so great a sum. The crowner was sacked and a new one appointed, even as a rumour spread through the shire that my Lady had manifest the treasure through a magikal pact with the Lady Diana, one of their most evil fiends. To complicate matters, the Bishop of Exeter claimed the treasure for his see—an assertion without one scintilla of merit. Nonetheless, he sued us for it.
Radix malorum est cupiditas
.
³

1.
Outremer:
literally,
overseas
; a name for the Middle East

2.
Translator’s Note: A villein was a person of a lower caste attached to a villa. However, due to the contempt in which their masters held them, the word has come to mean today any evil being, its former connection to “villa” lost.

3.
Radix malorum est cupiditas:
Greed is the root of evil.

Chapter 36

F
or the length of a day, a storm had raged: twelve hours of lashing rains had stripped the trees of their yellow leaves, pasting them on the flagstone walks like bending, melting Dali money—some surreal blend of bill and bullion.

I drove to Stour to forage dinner, examining wheels of three-year-old cheddar and crumbling bricks of Buxton blue, but in the end, I left without buying any. For I’d lost my appetite, and not just for food. There was nothing in this world I wanted—but Vidya Prasad back in my arms.

Returning home, I sat at the window. The rainy twilight was serenely beautiful; the platinum clouds were torn and the moon and stars were sailing through the tears. But, lovely as it was, I couldn’t taste one bite of it; like some thwarted connection, its beauty was refused.

I slammed the table with my fist. Incited by Sikandar, I wanted to hang men, torch fields, loot villages. I wanted to descend on the jail where Vidya was, break her out and take her away. I wanted to see someone punished for Jai’s death and my Lady’s murder, and for all the pain that we’d endured.

And yet even as I railed, I knew the person I was most angry with was me. For I had failed
both
my Ladies. And the most disheartening part was that every day’s failure meant another night that Vidya spent in jail.

Odin enacted my despair. He sat at the window, watching the road as if Vidya might come driving up it. Finally, after hours of patient waiting, he let out a yowl and collapsed in a jumble of bones at my feet, gazing up at me with large, reproachful eyes.

The ivory tower I had built was demolished, and in its stead, stood a pillar of victory, the ivory’s hard, luxurious luster replaced by pitted, sun-bleached bone. Sartre said, famously, “Hell is other people.” But I cry, unequivocally, “Hell is yourself!” I shook my head. I hated my destiny; I even hated the enchanted book, as both seemed bent on rubbing my nose in everything I’d spent my life avoiding. My mistake, I saw, had been letting out my love for Vidya and letting in her love for me. Doing that had compromised my defenses and now the locks of long-sealed doors were being turned by skeleton keys as if some ghostly janitor were bent on taking inventory of everything I’d locked away.

And I thought, then, what being a warrior means: you ride out from your castle, with all its comforts and defenses, to face the pain of feelings you’ve avoided all your life, against which you’d built your goddamn fortress in the first place!

Then it was midnight. Moonlight fell through the diamond panes and where it struck the kitchen tiles were eldritch signs and fatal symbols finger-painted in the dust: spirals, meanders and a
that was at once a raptor’s beak, a vulture’s claw and woman’s vulva. And in the dream (for that’s what it was) I knew they spelled some crucial message, one—
alas!
—I could not decode.

Then the scene outside began to shift, like in those time-lapse films where melting clouds race the sky and rising vines entwine the trees—but here the film was spooling in
reverse
, and I watched in awe as years unpeeled, the stars unwheeled around the Pole, and seasons cycled back upon themselves from green to white to gold to green . . . And when it stopped, the wooden tower stood again atop Bulbarrow:

Item, that she worship the demon Glasya Labolas, a great President, who commeth forth like a Dog and is Captaine of all manslayers;

Item, that she adorth a Hed whom she calls Gunesha, alias, Shax or Scox, a darke and high Marquesse like unto Behemoth, with a hoarse and subtill voice, and by this idolatry maketh riches to flow, jewels appear unbidden, and buried treasure reveal itself;

Item, that she worshipeth cows, snakes, curs and cunning felines, and by this conjunction healeth many, maketh rain to fall and drown the fields and trees to flower out of season in contravention of the will of God . . .

The list went on for several pages . . .

. . .
that for these and other detestable enormities, we pray the chattels, house and lands of the foreign enchantress known as Mayura be seized by the Crown, and that she and her hellish minions be handed over to the Bishop of Exeter for the application of ecclesiastical law
.

This last phrase meant, according to our counsel, a week or so of ravishment and torture followed by death over a slow fire.

“My Lords, I am a lost and wayfaring queen come of late to this fair isle. If I possessed the powers you ascribe to me, I would have willed myself home long ago, accompanied by my Prince, retainers and wealth. The fact I am here, with my life, lands and liberty in jeopardy, accused of being a sorceress and witch, is the most certain proof I have that I am not.”

“You speak well, my Lady.”

“It is the truth.”

“Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ is the Truth.”

“If so, then He dwells in my words.”

There was a murmur from the gallery.

“How came you, my Lady, to these fair shores?”

“By the will of God—in the form of errant winds and shipwreck. Through the Bahr Al-Qulzum
¹
to Alexandria. And beyond the Pillars of Hercules due north. Whereupon, your former Sovereign cast on us a look of mercy and granted us a vill, in the shadow of his royal umbrella.”

Here some confusion ensued, as the “umbrella” was apparently unknown, and with it the concept of taking refuge underneath it.

“It is said that you bewitched the King.”

“As he did us. With his love and kindness.”

Throats were cleared as the former Monarch—once much loathed—was remembered fondly, now that his wife and son had deposed him.

“And did you not, with the use of knots, cause storms and gales to overtake the land?”

For the people were starving. Seven summers of constant rains had rotted even the seed in the field, and were followed by winters so cold and cruel that boats froze fast in Poole Harbour and wolves came down from their wooded barrows. It was only in the last two years that the ruinous floods and rains had abated—though the winters were still a far sight colder than many a villein’s child could bear.

“I am not responsible for your country’s clime. I am no more its cause than you yourself, Sir, are creator of the Great Hindu desert.”