Winter Siege (12 page)

‘And your jumping!’ The words came out in a great rush now and she was blushing. ‘How come you can jump like that?’

Pan spread his hands. ‘It’s what we do.’

They were strolling acrobats, collectively the Sons and Daughter of the Great Chan, whoever
he
was. Their clothing declared that they were performers, the colours of their cloaks and caps – all of them feathered – outdid Penda’s so that compared with them she was a dowdy peahen among three peacocks. In fact, they were Saxons who’d all been born into London’s rat holes with the enterprise to clamber out.

‘It was the docks,’ Pan said. ‘All the world comes in on ships to the London docks, and as a lad I saw this sailor doing handstands, don’t know where he came from, somewhere to the east I reckon, but he taught me a few flips and I taught Wan and we went on from there.’

The two men were sharp-faced, thin-bodied and alike as peas in a pod although, in fact, they were cousins. Waterlily was a waif they’d found dancing on the streets for money; they’d trained her and added her to their act to give it feminine interest …

‘And bugger me,’ said Wan, ‘she’s turned out limberer than what we are.’

Her long wavy red hair reminded Gwil of Penda’s before she cut it; indeed, from a distance, they looked remarkably alike, which, he supposed, was one of the things that first endeared Waterlily to him. A childhood in London’s hovels had given her a resilience that was admirable; from the way she chattered she might never have been held at knife-point only an hour or so previously, ignoring the fact that her hands still had a tendency to shake, clattering the many bangles on her wrists.

As the sound of female voices chanting the Nunc Dimittis for Compline came through the barn’s slats, she demanded quiet so that she could listen. Her eyes filled with sentimental tears. ‘I’d like to’ve been a nun. Must be lovely, all that peace.’

‘Got to be a virgin for that,’ Wan told her.

Amiably, she threw a piece of cheese at him – obviously it was a regular exchange.

The three travelled from castle to castle where they were in demand for feast days by lords laying on entertainments for their guests.

‘You’d think, way things are, they’d be too busy fighting,’ Pan said, ‘but the rich always got time and gold to celebrate a knighting or a wedding or some bloody thing.’

‘Done us a good turn, the war has,’ Waterlily chipped in. ‘Ain’t so many farcers around no more. Plenty of mummers, but when did you last see a proper fire-eater? All run off to somewhere safe, and them as stays is mostly bloody amateurs. We’re popular, we are.’

Pan nodded. ‘One chamberlain tells another. Word of mouth. Can’t do better’n that.’

‘But we got to keep off the roads come evening, Pan,’ Wan warned. ‘I’ve told you before, it’s getting too bloody dangerous.’

‘Or’ – Pan glanced slyly at their rescuers – ‘we ought to team up with a couple as could protect us.’

‘That’s right, that’s right.’ Waterlily clapped her hands in delight. ‘You two come along of us and give exhibitions.’

Penda was triumphant. ‘See, Gwil. Twice in a week we been told that. It’s a sure sign.’

The striped balls streamed back into the jugglers’ hands like red and yellow iron filings to magnets, their owners bowed to the applause, there was a roll on the tabors …

The chamberlain of Hertford Castle took the stage. ‘And now, my lords, ladies, messieurs, mesdames, may I present for your amazement that world-renowned marksman with the bow, Master Vaclav of Bohemia, and his talented young assistant, Master Penda, lured at great expense from the court of King Vlatislav the Second.’

Penda had asked, ‘Where’s Bohemia? And who’s King Vlatislav?’

‘Don’t ask me,’ Wan said. ‘Pan come up with them names.’

You had to have an exotic title in this trade. Norman lords, who’d happily hack off the limbs of other races on crusade, liked their entertainers to be foreign. Magicians were invariably Abdul or Mustafa from the Orient, acrobats hired from Far Cathay, dancers from Persia; yet the oaths exchanged as they all struggled into their costumes in the allotted and overcrowded changing rooms rarely came from further afield than Yorkshire or Calais.

The exception was the fools. Buffoonery had to be seen to be home-grown; fools kept the plain names of Wilfrid or Godwin or Oswald: Saxons to a man – as if finding comical the antics of a people they’d conquered reassured some hidden Norman unease at having conquered them. They were always the
pièce de résistance
; their drollery, especially their ability to fart tunes, had noble audiences rolling among the rushes. The Sons and Daughter of the Great Chan ran them close in popularity, partly because their agility beggared belief, and watching a skimpily clad Waterlily being twirled like a twig by Pan’s upheld right hand brought roars of appreciation from male watchers, if not their less enthusiastic ladies.

Master Vaclav and his talented young assistant attracted little applause to begin with, and only appeared on the first programme above a sad-looking dancing bear.

‘I told you an’ told you,’ Pan explained wearily afterwards, ‘every bugger in that hall uses a bow out hunting, an’ every bugger in that hall thinks if he only practised a bit more, he could do what you do.’

Penda was indignant. ‘Bloody couldn’t.’

‘Oh, you’re clever, but there’s no sparkle to the act. Got to have sparkle in this game.’

So sparkle, somewhat to Gwil’s disgust, was introduced.

Penda now ran down the length of the great hall – apparently carelessly, but in fact counting her steps to mark out the required distance of a hundred feet – and placed a large square straw target at the far end of the tables.

Another roll on the tabors. (‘Always musicians at the entertainments; you don’t need to bring your own,’ Pan had said. ‘Just give the taborer a halfpenny.’) Penda twirled and bowed again – she was good at sparkling; Gwil, self-conscious, tended to lumber.

She came back to pick up her bow and sent an arrow into the dead centre of the bull. Gwil took her place, and aimed, splitting her arrow open through its fletched end. To show it wasn’t a fluke, they repeated it, each time moving the target a further two yards away.

A candelabrum was set on the top of the target and its branches lit. Gwil and Penda took turns to snuff out the candles.

Oohs and aahs from the watchers began to punctuate the performance.

Now it was the turn of the glove; it had been specially made for Penda with slightly extended fingers; Pan had suggested it, saying it was worth the expense.

Penda took up position at the side of the target, extending her right arm so that her gloved hand lay against the bull.

Again the tabors drummed. One by one Gwil sent an arrow so that it lodged between each finger. (Louder oohs and aahs, though in fact this wasn’t as difficult a trick as putting out a candle flame.)

Now. The finale.

For the first time, Gwil took up the crossbow – until this moment they’d been using vertical bows. While he cocked it the chamberlain, as instructed, took the floor. ‘And now, my lords, ladies, messieurs, mesdames, Master Vaclav will perform a feat so dangerous that he begs your co-operation by not moving or calling out in case he is distracted in his aim. To this end, the doors of the hall will be shut to ensure that there is no draught.’ There was a sharp, collective intake of breath and a long roll on the tabors.

Penda took the close-fitting cowl off her head and replaced it with a conical Phrygian cap, settling it carefully so that its forward peak was three inches directly above her forehead. She bowed again and took up a stance in front of the target.

Gwil hated this bit; it wasn’t that he distrusted his aim; he was shooting as well as ever, though there was bound to come a day … What worried him was that there were times when, for all her gaiety in front of an audience, a look came into Penda’s eyes – she never shut them for this but stared straight into his – that told him she didn’t much mind if the bolt went through her brain.

I don’t care, it said, not if it wipes out the memory I can’t remember.

It shocked him; he’d thought she was doing so well. When he tried to envisage what it was like in the girl’s head – and he thought about it a lot – he saw a horizontal shutter dividing her past from her present, the darkness behind the shutter seeping through it like fog into a room, so that her present, no matter how brightly lit, was always shadowed.

The drumming stopped. There was silence.

The hiss of the bolt going through the air sounded in the ear in the same second that the Phrygian cap lifted from Penda’s neat, boyish red head and hung, quivering, as if from a hook on the target behind it.

In the stamping and roars of applause, Gwil cocked and armed the crossbow again, turned to face the top table, aiming at it for a second, causing a gasp, before raising his sight and sending another shot through a ribbon attached to a beam above the hostess’s head, separating it, so that the bunch of flowers it had been holding fell into her hands.

As they escaped the thunder of the hall, the Sons and Daughter of the Great Chan, dressed to go in for their act, clapped them on the shoulder. ‘That’, said Pan, ‘is what I call
sparkle
.’

Pan was right; in a country falling apart, its barons and knights still managed to observe saints’ days, weddings, celebrations, etc., with music and feasting, despite the growing poverty outside their walls.

It was their masters of ceremonies who were feeling the pinch. Roads were becoming unsafe for those without military escort, and too many itinerant performers had abandoned England to ply their trade in safer lands. Those who remained were sought out by anxious castle officials responsible for finding entertainment that wouldn’t shame their lord in front of his guests. The Sons and Daughter of the Great Chan, along with Master Vaclav of Bohemia and his talented young assistant, had only to turn up at the gates of a castle to be welcomed, their reputation from their visit to the previous one having preceded them.

They were assured of a night’s lodging, sometimes two if the feasting went on long enough, a silver penny in their pockets and all the food they could eat from the nobility’s leavings.

Also, and this was even more valuable, they were kept apprised of the political situation: which area was in turmoil, which castle under attack – the war had become one of sieges – and, therefore, how to avoid them.

For more than a year the five of them, protected by Gwil’s and Penda’s bows, were able to travel the roads in comparative safety from one end of the country to the other. Wherever they went Gwil enquired of the monk but without success. Sometimes he felt he was merely treading water; he just didn’t know what else to do.

He hadn’t told Penda’s history to his companions. It was maintained that they were uncle and nephew. (Neither had claimed the closer relationship of father and son; Gwil because it would somehow be betraying the little boy in a Brittany grave, and Penda because she knew she’d had a real father and, for the same reason, felt discomfort at denying his existence.)

Whether Pan, Wan and Waterlily were aware of Penda’s real sex, Gwil didn’t know. Thrown together as closely as they were, he thought they probably did, but secrets were respected in their profession, and the acrobats paid lip service to the deception.

But although she and Pan and Wan got along well, she was jealous, and showed it, when Waterlily made a fuss of Gwil. ‘You steer clear of that one,’ Penda told him privately, ‘she’s a slut.’

‘You watch your mouth.’ Gwil was cross; he felt protective of the girl. ‘She’s one of us.’

‘She’s one of anybody’s.’

Waterlily’s relationship with Pan and Wan was undeniably anomalous. ‘None of our business,’ Gwil said uncomfortably, adding: ‘What I once heard a Frenchie call a
ménage à trois
. Means the three of ’em don’t mind.’

‘Well, you’re too old for it, so you see it don’t become a
ménage à
four.’

There were even times when Waterlily extended her range and disappeared for the night with one of the better-looking young lords from their audiences. After each such encounter, another bracelet, sometimes of gold, appeared on her wrists. What shocked Gwil on those occasions was not just the young woman’s wantonness, but the fact that both Pan and Wan shrugged it off as ‘Waterlily’s way’. He wondered how the girl avoided pregnancy and had to assume she was conversant with what he’d heard described as ‘Eve’s herbs’.

Originally, he’d hoped Penda would benefit from female companionship and that, as she reached puberty, might gain instruction in the, well,
women’s things
that awaited her, a responsibility which, he feared, might otherwise fall to him.

Not now, though; it was clear that Penda found Waterlily’s exuberant femininity alarming and he was also aware that anything the girl had to teach wasn’t what he wanted Penda to learn.

Still, he was fond of her, and it was an amiable enough caravan – they’d acquired a mule to carry their equipment – that trudged, leaped and shot its way into early December. Faces, events and the names of their hosts tended to blur into one, and so did the halls with their bright wall paintings, the glorious velvets of the clothing, heat from hundreds of blazing candles, the silver on the tables, and the food – such food: heaped dishes with over-elaborate sauces, swan, crane, boar, pheasant, larks’ tongues; all of it overlaid with the smell of men and women who’d overeaten …

Until they arrived back nearly where they’d started – at the castle occupied by the Sheriff of Bedfordshire.

Their last.

On their way in through the gatehouse, they were pressed back against its walls by the egress of a mounted party of secular clerics, very pious, very dignified, in their long, simple white tunics; only the quality of their horses, and the bejewelled brooches in the centre of their thrown-back cloaks, suggested that they were Jesus’s camels trying to get through the eye of a needle.

Gwil’s and Penda’s attention was distracted from them by Waterlily, whose behaviour was never at its best when presented with the sanctimonious.