Needle in the Blood (3 page)

“Oh, don’t sound so shocked. That dress is beginning to stink.”

“You won’t lay a hand on her. You thought I’d left already, didn’t you? You thought I’d be gone for good. Well, Trudy, I’ll tell you something. If you try to do anything against my lady’s wishes, I shall know about it. And if they kill me, I shall haunt you till your teeth turn black and your hair falls out.” She fingers her dark plait. “You know I’m a witch, don’t you? You know I mean what I say?”

“All I know is you’re as mad as she is.” Trudy’s response is tart, but there is an uncertain note in her voice that reassures Gytha her threat has struck home.

To be certain, though, before she leaves the house she wakes the slave, Skuli. Hunchback he may be, but he is strong and fiercely loyal to Lady Edith, who stopped his mother drowning him as a baby.

“Stick to her as if you were in the same skin, Skuli,” she orders him. “Whatever happens.”

***

Rape. That’s what they all believe, the sullen crowd gathered before Winchester’s West Gate, in the square where the tax men usually collect the duty on beasts brought into the city for market. It’s clear from their faces, fear mixed with impotence and embarrassment, and the round eyed children, clinging to their mothers’ skirts, who don’t understand but just want to look at the soldiers. But Gytha, from her vantage point on the gate tower roof, sees something much worse.

Did Lady Edith already know what the Queen Dowager intended, how easily she would give away Winchester, her home, seat of government of both her husband, Edward of blessed memory, and her brother, Harold? That she would turn out to be a greater whore by far than her brother’s concubine?

Up here, Gytha is almost on a level with the queen where she stands on the walkway above the great gates, suspended between past and future, gazing down imperiously at the Bastard’s upturned face and upturned lance, her choice made. She looks every inch the queen, richly dressed, not a hair out of place beneath her jewelled coronet and sheer linen veil, though no one attends her but a couple of pages and a single lady-in-waiting, no one who might detract from the drama of this moment, this solitary moment in which she holds the keys of England in her perfectly white hand, the iron ring which binds them poised over the point of William Bastard’s lance.

Behind her, the crowd in the square shifts and mumbles, malevolent, fearful, bored, and uncomfortable in the drizzle that clings to their clothes and hair. Before her the Bastard’s army, drawn up in motionless ranks, their faces lost beneath the helmets they wear with nose pieces angled down almost over their mouths. To Gytha they look like an army of skulls, more dead in their rigid immobility, their leather and mail blackened by the rain, than any blood bright Saxon corpse she saw that day on the field at Senlac. Three of which were the bodies of Queen Edith’s brothers, Gyrth, Leofwine, and Harold the King. As she leans out over the parapet and drops the great iron ring of keys over the point of the Bastard’s lance she looks as though she has forgotten that.

Couching his lance, the Bastard lets the keys slide to the ground, where they are retrieved and handed to him by a footsoldier stationed there for the purpose. Then, at a signal from one of their officers, the Normans commence a rhythmic beating of weapons on shields, accompanied by chanting in French. The massive thud of iron on leather shivers the air like the heartbeat of an angry god. It shudders through Gytha’s bones, making her wrap her arms around herself as though to hold her frame together.
Dex aie
, the Normans chant,
Dex aie, Dex aie, Dex aie
. From inside the walls a single voice is raised in defiance.

“God help you go fuck yourselves!” shouts a man who understands their language. A fair few do. The Confessor himself had Norman blood in him after all, and the Channel, though treacherous, is not wide. Now, though, is not the time to advertise one’s Norman connections, and while the crowd obviously applaud the speaker’s sentiments, Gytha sees several doubtful looks cast in his direction. She wonders if the Bastard understands English. Not that he will have heard that single, reckless yell above the din of his triumphant army. So many of them. He must have emptied every house and hovel in Normandy of its able-bodied men to pack his ships and swarm across England like a plague of black ants.

She longs to run back to Lady Edith’s house, to the comfort of its familiar rooms whose fine hangings will keep out the Normans as they keep out draughts. Even now Lady Edith’s power seems unassailable; seated in the king’s great chair before the hearthstone, still wearing the gown she wore as she knelt in the mud and gore on Senlac Ridge, she is all England’s defiance concentrated in one frail form.

“Well?” the Bastard had asked, his voice harsh and unexpectedly thin for such a big, barrel-chested man.

“Yes,” she had replied, stretching out her fingers to touch the bloodied torso just below the left nipple, her tone as cool as meltwater, “that is my lord the king. Here, you see, is the strawberry mark over his heart. He used to joke that it was his bull’s-eye. Perhaps your archers need a little more practice, Your Grace.” Forcing the Bastard to look, to take in his army’s handiwork, the head severed, one leg gone below the knee, the genitals hacked away to leave a mushy hollow surrounded by blood soaked hair. Even Countess Gytha, King Harold’s redoubtable mother, nearly vomited, and her lady-in-waiting fainted dead away. Even the men with the Bastard hung their heads and cleared their throats and broke a sweat despite the creeping cold of an October evening.

Gytha herself felt as though her head had floated off her shoulders and her bowels turned to water. It was not so much the mutilation of King Harold as the sheer scale of the destruction, bodies and parts of bodies strewn everywhere, twisted, torn, open-mouthed as though they had been about to speak when they were struck down. A chorus of screams and groans from the wounded, the sad, exultant cawing of the crows circling in the bloodshot eye of the setting sun, awaiting their turn. She knows death—of course she does, who does not—but before this she knew only its quiet face, blue-lipped or sunken-cheeked on a pallet, turned to a wall, its mess hidden beneath the sheets. But this, well, this was so showy.

Lady Edith, however, treated it all with lofty indifference, continuing to gaze at her lover as though he were still as he used to be, laughing and golden with eyes as blue as the sea in summer, leaving the Bastard no choice but to do likewise.

Now the Bastard knocks three times on the gates with the tip of his lance. He has only to walk his horse forward with the lance pressed against them for the gates to swing open on their well-oiled hinges, the crowd inside dividing, stumbling back over their own feet to clear a space in the center of the square. As the queen turns to watch, William of Normandy, distinguishable by the gold coronet encircling his helmet, flanked by two of his senior officers and their standard bearers, rides into the city of Winchester, the great hooves of his war horse dancing nervously over the earth where lie the bones of generations of the kings of Wessex. The horse knows the power of their ghosts even if its rider cannot feel it.

His soldiers have stopped their chanting now, as they form up to follow their lord into the city, and his entrance is greeted by a silence as pervasive as the drizzle blurring the grey November sky, that sings in Gytha’s ears like an echo of the chanting and shield-beating. Waiting until his advance guard are through the gate and deployed in a cordon around the citizens who have turned out to witness his arrival, the Bastard raises his right hand to command their attention. Peering down into the square, Gytha sees the fair, ruddy-faced English behind the cordon like a rich, lively tapestry drained of its vibrancy by a dark frame.

“Unhelm,” says the Bastard to the group of men surrounding him. “Let these people see we are men like them.”

The Bastard’s companions appear to doubt the wisdom of his order. Gytha sees heads turn, toward each other, toward the crowd from which a few ragged jeers escape in response to the Bastard’s words. Only one man follows his lord’s example without a moment’s hesitation, raising his arms to lift the helmet from his head and hand it to his squire, pushing back his mail hood and running a hand over his tonsured crown. His movements are deliberate, exaggerated, like those of a mummer, whose every gesture has some precise and particular meaning. He smiles, turning this way and that so everyone can see his smile, broad, sensual, with his mouth turned down slightly at the corners so he seems to mock himself. Don’t worry, says his smile. All this is only for a moment, for a day. We are players on the stage for an hour or two. The blood is not real; the corpses will get up and walk off between scenes; you will find Death in the ale house later, with a mug and a plate of cheese, his mask hung around his neck like a hood.

People smile back, as though they cannot help themselves. At once the atmosphere becomes more relaxed. The rest of the Bastard’s lieutenants remove their helmets, though none of them has a smile as disarming as that of the bold cleric. Their expressions veer from the supercilious to the faintly embarrassed. Even as the Bastard, who does not even attempt to smile beneath his shock of hair as red as Judas’, addresses the people, their eyes remain drawn to the man with the tonsure and the curls almost as fair as an Englishman’s.

Gytha is not impressed; she has seen that smile before, and like a survivor of the smallpox, she is proof against its charm. At dinner, in Lady Edith’s great hall, softened by wine and candlelight, its warmth flowing into Lady Edith’s eyes as he listened to her craft some witticism. Later, when he cast away his lute saying he was too drunk to play, and played ill enough when sober, and Earl Harold must finish his song without accompaniment. Broadening as Lady Edith retorted that if Earl Harold must finish so bawdy a song, she would withdraw her ladies to her bower, as some were maids and should not be encouraged to set their sights on so merry a widowhood, lest no man would then be brave or foolish enough to marry them.

On the battlefield, as he glanced across to where she stood beneath the dead apple tree with Lady Edith and Countess Gytha, leaning to exchange words with the Bastard, ugly, guttural French words, then bursting into laughter.

The smile of Odo of Bayeux, the Bastard’s brother.

“I wish you to know I come in peace,” says the Bastard in his disappointing voice, his English heavily accented. Bishop Odo nods for emphasis. “This city was the seat of my revered and beloved kinsman, King Edward, may he rest with God.” The Bastard crosses himself. His lieutenants do likewise, though the bishop also contrives to bow his head in an instant of prayer. “Generations of your kings lie buried here, guardians of a fine system of government which I swear now, before you all, as the latest in that line, to uphold and protect, and to build on as God grants me power.” The Bastard exchanges a glance with his brother, almost as though looking to him for approval, then backs his horse up a little, leaving the stage to him.

Bishop Odo uses no fine words, though his English is far more fluent than his brother’s, but confines himself to facts, to the dull, administrative business of an occupation. A curfew will be imposed at dusk, he tells the crowd. No citizens will be allowed beyond the walls for any purpose, though the country people will be allowed in on two days of the week to sell their beasts and produce. A governor will be appointed who will fix prices and tariffs and take responsibility for law and order. He does not expect the people to notice many changes to their everyday lives— some subdued jeering at this, ignored by the bishop—but two important alterations to the laws of the Witan will take effect immediately. All slaves will consider themselves free forthwith and King William has further decreed that, as he respects God as the sole arbiter of life and death, there can no longer be recourse to capital punishment in England.

“We are not ogres,” he concludes after a pause, turning his horse so people on all sides can see his face, candid, sincere, perhaps the merest trace of irony in the white lines scored by sun and laughter at the corners of his eyes, “but we believe a society can only flourish if it has just laws, properly upheld. As the pretender Godwinson was punished for his treason, so will those be punished who transgress the law.”

He looks as though he is about to say more, but at that moment a small child, apparently attracted by the gold and silver discs decorating his horse’s harness, darts out between the soldiers in the cordon and lunges for the largest, brightest roundel at the center of the chest strap. The startled animal rears, and though the bishop quickly regains control of it, trying to force it back on its hind legs before the flailing front hooves can come down on the child, he is hampered by the men behind him. In the crowded square, there is no space into which he can safely manoeuvre the thrashing animal. The little boy, intent on the shiny ornaments, leaping to reach them, stretching out his arms, blinded by their glamour, has no idea of the danger he is in.

A hoof strikes the side of his head. Gytha hears a soft, sickening thud, though she knows it is impossible; the sound of a child’s skull cracking is too small to be heard above the shuffling and murmuring of the crowd. The boy crumples, bare, skinny legs folding like broken sticks beneath his body. For a split second it looks as though the bishop is about to fling himself out of the saddle in person in an attempt to drag the child to safety.

Then, as those close by realise what is happening and surge toward the child, pushing out a bulge in the cordon, the soldiers caught off guard, staggering against the wave of fury and panic behind them, he thinks better of it. Instead, he and the rest of the Bastard’s officers bunch protectively around their lord. Perhaps, if he had dismounted, made some attempt to save the boy, however futile, he might have won them over, shown them he was a man like the rest of them, moved by the instinct to protect a child. If he had put them before the safety of his brother. But it is too late.