WYRM I.III (Patreon)

                                    Chapter III: The Sorrowful Moor

When Stephen was young, the crew of the trading ship Hellfire delighted in introducing him as My Lord of Nubia, Stephen the Moor. They made for him a little officer’s uniform and bade him sit on the forecastle deck with arms crossed and an expression of great sternness whenever merchants came aboard to barter or to inspect wares. He had presided over dealings with Frenchmen and Spaniards, Portugueses and Laplanders, Teutons and even real Moors, who had their own language and dressed in queer coats and gowns of chainmail and wore their perfumed hair and beards long, dark, and luxuriant. Sometimes these last had laughed to see him, though once an older man with kindly eyes had glanced at him with an expression of such tragic sorrow that sometimes Stephen, a man grown, still saw it in his dreams or thought of it involuntarily when confronted with sadness.

He thought of it as he looked down at the pox-scarred brigand kneeling in the dust before him, tear-streaked face upturned and on the verge of twisting into rage. He thought of it as he brought his sword up, elbow cocked, and as he swung it and hacked neatly through the man’s neck even as those chapped and bloody lips began to form a curse. Blood misted the ferns and fallen leaves. The head rolled from the forest path and lodged itself in the crotch of an oak tree’s exposed roots where it lay staring at him in mute horror. Blood drooled from the corner of its slack, pink mouth.

“Do not dwell on him,” said sir Godfrey of Acre, appearing at Stephen’s left hand. The Hospitaller was cleaning his bloody sword with a soiled cloth. His tabard was spotted red and brown and there was a long, shallow scratch from his receding russet hairline to just above his right eye, cutting his bushy brow in two. “He is Christ’s to judge. Our own day will come soon enough.”

“Not too soon, let us hope,” said Stephen, forcing a quick smile. The forest all around them was full of the sounds of men being sent to their maker as the knights and men at arms of sir Roger Mortimer’s raiding party put paid to the last of Tall John Duncan’s bandits. By silent consent they set off for where sir Roger’s staff had pitched his camp. “Though it is kind of our savior to relieve his majesty’s courts of the burden of trial and sentencing.”

“You cheer me, my blaspheming friend,” sir Godfrey said, clapping Stephen on the back and favoring him with a smile. “Perhaps you will cheer Christ as well when your turn comes to stand before him.”

“Aye. It must be gloomy work, weighing sins.”

A detail of men-at-arms was hanging Tall John Duncan and near a dozen of his men at the edge of sir Roger’s camp. The bandit chief, sat slumped on the back of a pack ostri, was half-dead already, his skull swollen where a mace must have stove it in, his unfocused right eye blinking sluggishly — his left had swelled shut, the skin over it tight and shiny — as flies crawled over his long, slack face. It was hard to tell how tall he was now. A bearded man-at-arms hoisted himself up behind Tall John to loop a noose around the fiery-haired bandit’s neck, then swung off of the ostri’s back as she shifted and stamped her clawed foot, raking the dead leaves and soft earth of the forest floor. A slap to the lead hen’s haunch and they were off, Tall John and his band of brigands left thrashing in midair as rope cut hard into soft throats. “Oh that’s a lovely sound,” said the bearded man, folding his arms and leaning back against an oak’s thick trunk. The branches above thrummed with tension. Air caught in throttled windpipes gurgled faintly. Sir Godfrey made the sign of the cross and muttered a prayer beneath his breath.

…gratia plena, dominus tecum…

It made Stephen think of father Alfonse’s big, strong hands at work in the soil of the priory garden. Cordoba. The convert, the Spaniards had called him, though he’d been raised in a monastery. Skin nearly as dark as Stephen’s. Long, wiry beard and balding head. I have come not to bring peace, but a sword. Hot peppers growing on frames of wicker. He would be close on fifty now. More likely dead and buried in that same rich soil.

A good life. A good family. Do not cry, my son.

…sancta Maria, mater dei…

Urine streaming down limp legs and the ropes creaking, creaking as the bodies swung. Tall John Duncan still jerking there. Stains on the fronts of hose and rotten breeches. Smell of shit. Undignified, dying that way. It made Stephen think of the sorrowful Moor. I would like to die alone, he thought. Like an old hound that crawls into a burrow when he knows his time is coming. I would like to be alone when I see Christ.

In the chaos of the still-unfolding camp they found sir Roger and his squire and companions removing the barding and armor from the old knight’s harvestman, Eustache, who sat crouched like a twelve-foot broody hen, licking blood from his scimitar claws as they undid his complex network of thick leather girths and buckles. Flies and biting midges swarmed around and in his thick pelt of speckled feathers. Swags of loosed chainmail hanging from his coif gave his long, narrow skull a comical look as he straightened his serpentine neck, like an affronted matron in a pantomime. He uttered an indignant squawk.

Sir Roger turned to meet them, wiping Eustache’s pungent oils on the front of his tabard. He was a tall man, and strongly built, just past twenty and still beautiful as his mother had been with her sharp cheekbones and close-cropped auburn hair, matted from his coif, and wide, mischievous mouth. If his cousin the king were to die, it would be Roger who would sit the throne. “Stephen, my friend,” he said, breaking into a broad grin that showed his pair of iron teeth. “And you, half-a-priest. God love the pair of you. This rabble have neither coin nor forage in their camp. They were fed, equipped, and watered somewhere near. A day’s ride, perhaps two. Take twenty men and go and find which petty inbred shit held their leash, will you?”

“God willing,” said sir Godfrey.

Stephen thought of the Moor and his sad, dark eyes, and of the deck of a ship pitching beneath his small feet. “God willing,” he said, and returned the other knight’s smile.

                                                             ****

Chauntecleer plunged through the clouds and into London’s vast, enveloping stench, which Lizzie could smell even through her mask. It made her eyes water, that bouquet of shit, decay, stale smoke, and sex. It made her burn between the legs where the kite’s powerful dorsal muscles thrummed against her thighs with the force of their dive. Below, the muddy ribbon of the Thames sparkled in the dim midmorning light. Through the scudding fug of chimney smoke she could make out the sprawl of Westminster and the belltowers of Holy Trinity and St. Thomas of Acre, the high walls and spires of the Tower on its lonely island. Flocks of gulls and bloody vicars floated on the thermals rising off the water, screeching as Chauntecleer flew past them and extended his vast wings to slow his plummet. Lizzie struggled to keep her head up against the sudden pull, and then Chauntecleer banked to the left and she caught sight of the Ark.

It had run ashore five hundred years ago in the reign of King Athelstan and there, beached at the mouth of the Thames and half-buried in silt, it remained, its hull of overlapping iron petals rusting in the salty air. The first wyrms had come from its belly, disgorged by strange machines long since decayed into uselessness, and the last of the Old Blood as well. Lizzie had seen the tapestries in the earl’s solar; the pale, towering strangers kneeling with eggs in their cupped palms before bearded Athelstan and his fierce warriors.

An fane ouhr isle dyd synk ain depff

From drown’d hall ouhr Olde Bloode crept

Attaine an Arkc, wyrm coiledde tight

Sette stiffe thee sayles towahrd blackeffest Night

The Tutelage had lasted for a hundred years, the Elders passing on their knowledge of the wyrms and their husbandry, establishing the great breeding lines and the stud books. They had taken English wives and sired English heirs and faded slowly out of history, the only vestige of their presence the occasional gaunt giant one might see in the London streets or at Richard’s court in Westminster. They made Lizzie uncomfortable; the hugeness of them, and their sad, pale eyes, like the eyes of ghosts.

There were other pennons in the air over the sprawling city, some climbing, others circling along Chauntecleer’s same heading toward the muddy, torn-up tracts of the landing fields at Whitehall. They were low enough now that Lizzie could hear bells tolling the hour and see the parts of the city left dead and empty by the Mortality, wounds of sagging rooftops and deserted alleyways. It had taken one in five in the big cities, she’d heard her uncle say. She had suffered it herself, gripped with madness and fever on a filthy pallet in one of the pest tents outside Framlingham, and still bore the pockmarks on her back, belly, and neck where the plague tokens had burst. She thought that Will had come to see her, damn him, but perhaps that had only been her fever toying with her heart.

Lower still and now she heard the bellowing of duckies in harness and those being driven to market, not the great crested trumpeters of the north country but the flat-billed Southern breeds with their spotted russet hides and plain tail feathers like a pheasant hen’s. A lower sound, more a thrum in the air than a call, from the long-necked titans yoked to the harbor chains and to the water locks that fronted the great warehouses of the royal shipbuilders. They raised their long, dolorous heads to watch her pass, towers of black-striped flesh and muscle heaved up high above the rooftops, gulls roosting by the hundred on their shit-draped backs, the sea breeze bearing in the rich, grassy smell of their dung.

Thatched roofs and wooden shingle. Dirty faces watching from between the billowing laundry. Water. Tower on their right, ravens screaming, bloody cardinals lifting their scarlet crests and letting out harsh calls of warning. Dead city. Streaks of gray and brown and dirty white. Pack of raptors hunting rats. Over brewers’ and smiths and glassworks and the thousand other little organs of the city’s great and supine corpus until trampled green and brown opened up beneath them and they came in for a landing at Whitehall, Chauntecleer settling into his odd, hopping gallop while on their right another kite beat her vast wings and pranced the last few earthbound steps before the drop, her rider flashing a salute Lizzie returned. Unbuckling. Ladder crew. Dirt under her boots and then a little room in the Pennon house where she skinned her breeches and thought of Will while she touched herself with dirty fingers, her cunt burning hot, the little prick of her bud stiff and raw from her flight.

You bastard, she thought, rubbing herself furiously. You dunghill by-blow.

Afterward she wiped her glistening hand on a rag and splashed tepid water from the basin on her face. She felt slightly crumpled, as though she were a blown-up pig’s bladder slowly leaking air. A knock at the door came not long after, a little ginger girl with a new flyer’s hollow cheeks and sharp, protruding collarbones. “Chancellor’s man is outside for you, miss.”

Lizzie pressed a penny into the girl’s tiny hand and brushed past her into the broad, low-ceilinged hall. Tapestries of kites in flight and at roost — volant and sejant, serf she heard in the Skeleton’s voice — with their riders hung collecting dust. A fat, broad-hipped woman with graying hair led a group of young girls past Lizzie from the yard, their little feet tracking mud over the flags as they gossiped and whispered and dawdled. Lizzie felt a pang of loss in her stomach, a moment’s sentiment for following the Skeleton like a hatchling its mother as she berated them for sneaking food, for ignoring her lessons, for tacking their kites wrong. “Keep up, then!” the fat woman barked, though not without affection, and then they were past.

On the packed earth of the house’s yard a young clark waited, cap in hand, two saddled ostri at his back. “Pennon,” he said, managing to make the word at once respectful and slightly repulsed, as though he was grateful she existed to spare him the odious work of carrying messages but still disgusted to be made to come within a league of her. “His excellency awaits.”

“Then let us not delay,” said Lizzie, grasping for graciousness and landing somewhere rather terser than she’d meant. The clark bore it with good grace, and even suffered her a hand to help her mount. She checked his face with her hip as she swung astride her cream-feathered hen, who cooed and twisted her long, serpentine neck to look back at her with bulbous eyes. She scratched under the hen’s chin, fighting down the urge to grin at the clark’s red-faced discomfort as he swung himself up onto his dark, long-legged gelding.

“A fine day for a ride,” he managed after an agonizing pause. He seemed unable to meet her eye. They crossed Whitehall Fields at a clip, scattering the robins and fiddlebeaks that had come to peck for worms where the kites’ claws had churned the soil. Lizzie watched a kite come in downfield, a big Scots buzzard, bald-headed and white with dangling wattles. Mean beasts, but loyal if broken right. They went up the shallow incline at the field’s edge and over a broad bridge of logs and rammed earth where a pair of nutcrackers — runty tricornes named for their parrot-like beaks — were pulling a sledge laden with tarped-over guano scraped out of the aviary, their driver sitting on the bench ahead of the malodorous load and flicking his long whip at the backs of their beaked heads. A track switched back upon itself after the span and took them up into the city proper, Westminster visible as a hulk in the distance, the clamor of voices and the thunder of feet and claws growing louder, craftsman’s shops and guild halls giving way to narrow alleys between leaning tenements and inns and alehouses. Behind one such a slateback chained to a post gorged himself on sour mash laid out in a trough while an old woman cleaned between his plates with a rough rag.

Lizzie didn’t like the way the city made her feel: hemmed in, lost, and helpless. From above it was an oddity, a patchwork of stone and rotting wood overflowing with mud, garbage, shit, and indigents. At ground level it was the whole world rolled up like a rug and folded on itself. Flies swarmed. Pullets and urchins both streaked underfoot, laughing and cursing and hollering rude rhymes. Once she saw a raptor watching her from its perch atop a pile of scrap wood, eyes bright and inquisitive. She wished she was home cuffing Will and asking him why he never came to see her. She wished she was tying him naked to a tree and beating his stomach with a willow switch.

They came to an intersection, paving stones surfacing from the muck to make a proper road streaked and dotted with wyrm dung, just as a crier on ostri-back raced into view, his royal blue banner trailing the crown and stars Lizzie recognized as those of the king’s favorite.“Make way,” the crier bellowed as a pair of hornists coming up behind him blew a long, high flourish. “Make way for his lordship!”

Men and women scattered from the road to kneel beside it, doffing caps, curtsying, dabbing their sweaty brows in the shadow of a lichyard raised up from the pavers by a good four feet. Grass burst between the bars of its black iron fence. A spotted duckie bellowed irritably as its owner shoved it toward the roadside. There was a growing tramp of footsteps and dust swirled over the stones as heavy wyrm-tread stirred the air.

A tall, broad-shouldered man in black doublet, cape, and hose appeared on mallard-back, flanked by liveried knights on ostri draped in plate and chainmail barding and with footmen, squires, scribes, and pages trailing after. A young cardinal in robes of flowing red, his blond tresses long as a maiden’s, rode beside him. The man in black was handsome, his little beard and mustache well-kempt and his black hair falling over his shoulders in oiled waves. Rings flashed on his fingers, which were thick and muscular — soldier’s hands, her uncle might have said approvingly — and on the scabbard he wore on his hip. He and his entourage threw coins to the crowd, but his dark, hooded eyes never ceased to move with cold and calculating intent over the backs and faces of the kneelers.

“The earl carried his majesty’s last tourney with the queen’s favor on his arm,” the clark intoned under his breath, leaning into the gap between his mount and Lizzie’s. “It’s said he favors both their beds.”

“You gossip like a woman,” Lizzie said.

They made the rest of their journey in silence, arriving just past noon by the tolling of the city’s bells at the high and heavily patrolled outer walls of the Westminster grounds, the barbed bolts of scorpions set atop the spiked ramparts to keep watch on the sky. At the gatehouse she dismounted, a stablehand taking her ostri, which butted her shoulder affectionately in parting. The clark, still scowling, led her through an iron sally port set into the larger gate and into the torchlit dark of the archway beyond, which opened onto lush and shady grounds in the lee of the castle. The sweet, tart smell of rotting apples lingered in the air and wasps and honeybees flew looping through the grass in search of fallen fruit. Shade and sunlight dappled a brickwork path which split and wound among the trees. Banks of flowers overflowed their beds, and more young couples than armed soldiers patrolled along the wall. Here and there the riotous nests of swordbills sprawled among the orchard’s upper branches.

This place is soft.

Lord chancellor Martin Pale sat alone on a long stone bench, his white cloak spread over the brickwork parquet on the edge of a reflecting pool where ducks drifted over water smooth and clear as glass, fussing with their plumage and occasionally diving with little glunk sounds as the water closed over their tail feathers. He was feeding them, tossing oats into the pool and watching them peck and shake their heads to sluice the water from their bills. Even seated he was taller than Lizzie. He must be seven feet and more, she thought. Maybe eight. Christ’s wounds.

Lank white hair hung to his shoulders, framing a long, cadaverous face with a massive beak of a nose, sunken chin, tiny black eyes like the mouths of anthills, and a thin, lipless gash of a mouth. He looked as though someone had sculpted him out of clay without particular skill or thought. His voice, when he spoke,  was pitch and gravel boiling in a barrel.

“Leave us, Thomas.”

The clark bowed and departed. Pale fixed Lizzie with his squinty gaze. He held out his hand to her, his long, spidery fingers beckoning. She drew her scroll case from within her leathers and set it in that dead white hand, hardly daring to breathe. He took it. His thumb, twice the length of her palm, brushed her hand. She was surprised by his warmth. His skin fairly burned to the touch. He opened the case and cracked the earl’s wax seal. “Why don’t you tell me the gossip from Framlingham,” he rumbled, setting a small pair of lenses on the bridge of his great nose and unfurling the scroll. “It has been a season and more since the earl graced us with his presence at court.”

He turned the vellum sheet, produced a reed pen from his sleeve, wet its tip on his small tongue, and began to write. From the undergrowth beside the path slunk a long, cream-colored raptor with a dead rat in her jaws. She eyed Lizzie as she stalked to Pale’s side and jumped up onto the bench. He stroked her absently while he wrote. She shook out her silky plumage and gulped down her rat, head thrown back and neck curved up. “Come now,” Pale chided, not looking up.

“Her ladyship is with child,” Lizzie stammered, casting about for something that might interest one of the king’s ministers. She felt as though she’d missed a step coming down the stairway, all the swagger and easy confidence of the landing field knocked out of her by one quick blow. “Her sisters made a gift to her of the knucklebones and hair of saint Maura of Troyes. Golden hair, in two hanks tied with silk ribbon. They were set in an alcove in the chapel.”

The lord chancellor’s pen scratched. He paused, turning the sheet over and taking a second roll of vellum from within his jerkin. He unrolled it and compared the two, smoothed the second onto the bench at his side. “Lovely,” he rumbled, and he shot her a sidelong look which clearly conveyed that she should continue.

“Why do you…” She swallowed, quailing under his pinhole stare but unwilling to give in. Something about him made her angry. His strange, chalky white skin, maybe, or his empty gaze, or just the fact that he frightened her. “All due respect, m’lord, why do you want to hear gossip?”

“Because the kingdom hangs by a thread,” he said, dashing off a few more lines of cramped, illegible script and raising the sheet to his lips to blow on the drying ink. He took a handful of sand from a little bowl at his sand and sprinkled it over the sheet, then rolled it tight and snapped his fingers for a herald Lizzie hadn’t seen, who came running with a tiny handheld crucible in which rich crimson wax ran liquid. The herald poured it. The chancellor waited a moment, then thrust his signet into it to leave the deep impression of a crowned shrike rampant. “And because I envy you, pennon. To fly above the clouds, to see the world as it truly is, without all the clamor and scrabbling of its little tyrannies, its petty vendettas…” He sighed, slipping the rolled parchment back into Lizzie’s scroll case. He placed it in her hand. “To see us as God does is no mean thing. Do not squander it.”

The herald had more scrolls tucked under his left arm, and with a decorous clearing of his throat he set them beside the chancellor while keeping a wary eye on the sleek, watchful raptor. Silence followed as Lord Pale looked over whatever it was with which the lord chancellor concerned himself, and Lizzie realized she’d been dismissed and made her exit with a stiff and hasty bow, flushing in embarrassment. As she made for the gatehouse through the shade of the gardens, she wondered what had been so important as to occasion a flight to London for a single sheet of paper, and why the lord chancellor hadn’t been in his offices to receive it.