The Burning Time (29 page)

“Why, then?” demanded Helena, “Why did ye not abandon our children? Or leave ’em in some home, with payment for their keep? Why, unless ye felt obliged to us somehow? Unless we were people ye cared about, people ye—”

“You made me give you my word.”

“People break their word all the time.”

“Not a Kyteler. I was bound.”

“So ye kept faith with our babes only because ye gave the word of a noblewoman?” Helena narrowed her eyes and peered at Alyce. “I dinna believe it,” she announced. Then she shook
her head sadly. “But I dinna know about such a dark place as you tell about, m’Lady. I dinna know what to say, or how to help ye.”

“There is no help for me, Helena,” Alyce said. “Nor might I recognize it if it appeared.” She smiled, that caustic smile again. “But my state is not important. I told you because you asked, and because you have earned the right to an honest answer. My troubles should not even be mentioned, given the—torment you all …”

In the long pause that followed, Alyce realized she was wrestling with the one question she most needed to ask but could not frame. She could manage it only as statement, as presumed fact. She began to speak rapidly.

“Is—Petronilla de Meath is safe, of course. They would not harm her. I mean, not since she returned to the Church, repentant. You did not mention her fate—and I can understand that, in the circumstances, given what happened to the rest of you. But still, I should like to know—”

Alyce stopped as she watched Helena’s expression change from confusion to dread.

“I dinna mention her because I thought you knew.”

“What. Why would you think—? What would I know?
What
?”

“I thought the night she left you, she told you what she planned to do. I thought you had tried to stop her but failed. I thought she …”

Alyce Kyteler’s hands found each other and formed a knot in her lap.

“She did tell me. She told me she was horribly afraid. And I thought, well, she is usually afraid, and now we are all afraid with reason, so I … we quarreled. I was patronizing and cross. I struck her … but then we made our peace. Or so I thought. She took the first watch. Then, while I was asleep, she vanished. She left me a letter. She wrote that she yearned to return to the Church. Yet she also asked me to raise Sara—and in The Old Ways. I was stunned, hurt, distraught. I was desperate to go after her. But how could I leave the babes alone? And in a tempest?

“Then I discovered that Petronilla had taken one of our horses, and that she had even stol—
taken
—other things with her, things I have never understood. Why should she steal from me? I would have given her whatever she asked for. She was like a daughter to me.… But it was not merely the horse or the objects she took. You remember the legend that one must sleep warily on Samhain Eve for fear one’s spirit may be stolen? T’was like that. Her leaving and taking what she … something broke inside me. I was sleeping, and when I woke, my essence—what made me
me
—was gone.

“I have never told Sara the whole story, of course. She knows only that her mother longed to return to the Church—yet wanted a different way for her daughter, whom she loved above all else. I have been unable to answer her questions—
other than telling her that adults can become set in our ways yet still may wish different choices for our children. Which is what Petronilla wrote to me, after all, even if it did not make much sense. That is what she
did
, too. Did she not? Helena?
Helena. Did she not
?”

Helena stared into the middle distance, possessed by a knowledge too painful to be uttered. Yet she knew it must speak through her.

“Not far down the road from the forest where ye and the children were sleeping, the Bishop’s men-at-arms were closing in. Ye all would have been captured within an hour. Petronilla de Meath intercepted them. She claimed to be Alyce Kyteler. She was wearing the cloak and the silver Moon Helmet of a Wiccan High Priestess, so they believed her. Triumphant, expecting a fat reward, they sent a runner ahead to Kilkenny, saying they were bringing her back as their prisoner. I heard tell the Bishop went to the sacristy to prepare a mass of thanksgiving. Then, when he saw who it was they had captured, he fell into a fury. He dispatched more troops after ye. By then it was too late. Your boat had sailed.

“Never have I seen such rage as his. Rage he spent on Petronilla de Meath. Interrogation, trial, sentence—his vengeance took less than three days. Yet those three days were endless. She begged him not to torture her. She said she be greatly fearing pain and willing to confess to whatever he
wished. So he had her confess. Holy Erin, what he had her confess to! Sorcery. Murdering infants. Making pacts with Satan. Consorting with a horned incubus, concocting potions from the brains of unbaptized infants—everything his sick madness could imagine. She confessed and confessed. Then he demanded she name her brothers and sisters in Satan. She knew from his ravings that ye had escaped his clutches. So she named Dame Alyce Kyteler. She confessed she be acting as go-between, arranging trysts for ye with the Devil. She be naming ye the most skilled sorceress in the world, swearing Lady Alyce had done whatever the Bishop told her to say ye had done. Then he be wanting
more
names. But she be naming no one
except
you. T’is why I be alive at all. Else, those of us sentenced to prison would have been burned.

“But when she would not name any others, de Ledrede had her publicly flogged in the marketplace. The whole county be summoned and forced to watch, including us prisoners. We be brought from jail in irons. That body of hers, so frail.… But ach, her spirit! I dinna believe this was the child-woman I had known. After the flogging, when offered forgiveness and the sacraments of the Church if she would name others, she
laughed
. In the Bishop’s face. In the marketplace. With the crowds watching. ‘
Fie
,’ she sings out,
‘Fie, fie, fie, amen!’
T’was so cold the vapor from her breath was like smoke, I remember. As if she be breathing fire.

“Next morning he had her flogged again. Five times that day. Every two hours. They be having to work in shifts so the torturers could rest, for even the men doing the flogging be too tired to continue. In between, they left her raw body bound to the whipping post, exposed to the freezing rain. There were rumblings of outrage in the crowd but no one moved for fear of the men-at-arms. We prisoners were kept standing in our chains. The Bishop, he sat to one side, wrapped in his furs, fingering the rubies in that big gold cross of his. He kept drinking heated wine and calling for more flagons. Every minute he watched us, as if feeding his empty eyes with the sight of us. He spoke to the crowd only once—a strange speech, like he was pleading with us. He said we be having to understand he was a good man, he was only doing his duty, he was saddened but forced by righteousness to carry out divine punishment, he was forced to be an instrument of God’s wrath. He said God be no base merchant haggling for souls that were his by right. He said heavenly light needed human darkness so as to show itself clear, so what ill he be forced to do, it be for her salvation and ours. Then he pulled his cowl down, so his eyes be hidden.

“Five floggings. All day long. After the third lashing she dinna scream anymore. After the fourth, the man plying the whip flung it down in disgust and walked off. But the Bishop ordered a yeoman to pick it up and go on.… Then, when it
was finished, de Ledrede pronounced sentence: Petronilla de Meath would be burned alive at the stake in the marketplace on the following day.

“We be dragged back to prison. I knew they put her in a cell near mine, so I kept calling to her softly. No answer. Then I hear a key turn in the lock of my cell grate, and who should walk in but Father Brendan Canice. Do ye remember who he—? Aye? Well, he told me the moment he had heard what was happening, he had ridden hard from Kells at Ceanannus Mór to Dublin, where he got himself an audience with the Archbishop, then had ridden on without stopping all the way to Kilkenny. The Archbishop had granted Father Brendan special permission to visit Petronilla and to offer her repentance, the sacraments of the Church, and delivery from the stake if she recanted her defiance—even
without
naming any others. From her cell, he had heard me calling to her. Always a fair man, he was. He bribed a guard to let me join him in Petronilla’s cell.”

Helena paused, passing a hand over her forehead and eyes as if to wipe out a sight sealed there past any forgetting.

“I canna describe what she—how she—I tried to talk to her. Then I tried to chant at her, teach her some of the meditations on pain. Such a young Seeker, a Neophyte. She never had time to learn more than the basic rituals … I canna be sure she even heard me. But I lay down next to her in the filthy
straw. I cradled her head in my arms. Her hair looked almost as red as yours once did; t’was matted with blood, stiff with it. I dinna know what to do, so I said the spells to her over and over, trying to squeeze years of Craft study into hours, trying to fill her brain with the disciplines that would lift her outside her body. I dinna believe they would work. They dinna always work; they dinna work for me in childbirth, remember? Aye. But I dinna know what else to do.

“Brendan kept talking to her, too. Pleading with her to recant, saying her death was a waste, a selfish waste, since now t’would change nothing, save no one. He beseeched her to let him make the pact with the Bishop for her life—prison instead of the fire. He begged her to choose to live, for his sake, for the sake of true Christianity, for the sake of humanity. I remember him telling her that grace belongs to all humanity—not just each of us, not just her, not just one miserable sinner. T’was odd. Through that whole night she opened her eyes and spoke only three times. The first was after he said that. She tried to—stutter through those cracked lips. We leaned in closer. T’was like straining to hear someone underwater, drowning. ‘One miserable sinner,’ she gasped,
‘is
all humanity.’

Then Brendan wept, and he be saying curses on the Bishop and be begging her to let him tell de Ledrede she had recanted, even if she dinna mean it. ‘Let me lie,’ he pleaded, ‘let me bear the sin instead of you.
Pretend
to go through with it, what does it
matter
, t’is only
words
. In Christ’s name, I beg you, let me
carry the lie, let me save you!’ She looked up at him—a look so mellow with tenderness! But when she tried to smile, blood bubbles be frothing from her mouth. Then she spoke the second time. ‘I own my courage now,’ she chided him mildly, ‘Why would you be taking it from me?’ After that, he ceased his pleading. Poor man, he be sobbing, muttering things like ‘Not my church, not my Christ, not this, oh Jesus not this.’

“So then I told him what to do. ‘Sean Fergus,’ says I, ‘If you truly want to help her, here is what you must be doing.’ I told him to hurry out to the Kyteler estate, to Sysok’s and my cottage, to my pantry. I told him what to be looking for and where to find it and how to mix it. But he stared at me in such horror before he wheeled and rushed out, t’was clear he would never be able do it. I knew he would not be coming back. A consecrated Christian priest, after all.…

“But I dinna have time to be angry. I went back to trying to concentrate her, trying to teach her how to block the pain. Through the night, as the hours passed, I be saying over and over how she be not really there, not in prison; how the cell be not real; how she be lying in a green apple orchard in full Mayday bloom, just before the Beltane Sabbat. I told her how the blossoms be trembling on the warm spring wind, the air heady with the wine-scent of fruit to come and abuzz with the sleepy drone of nectar-drunk bees, how the creamy petals be tumbling like snowflakes down to the soft emerald grass where she lay, under a bowl of sky so clear and blue it arched
on forever.… That was the third time she opened her eyes. ‘Apples,’ she says, ‘I like apples.’ Like a child. Or a madwoman. But she be speaking so calmly I felt mayhap I reached her after all.

“Then, like a sign from Brigid the Healer, there was the turnkey again. And in walks Sean Fergus. The man looked blasted. He had brought what I asked for, though, mixed as an ointment. Properly mixed, too—all the correct proportions. He puts it in my hands. Then he crosses himself.”

Rapt, Alyce leaned forward.

“Aconite,” she whispered.

“Aye. And cinquefoil. And foxglove. In beeswax and almond oil. Though fairly little of it. Still, Biddy Róisín would have been proud of her boy. I told him that, I said it. Poor Sean Fergus. He be like a man sleepwalking, a wraith. ‘What do I do now?’ he mumbles. I could give him no answer. ‘I know not what to
do
,’ he kept saying. ‘My Church is killing Christ again,’ he says, ‘What can I study now that I bear this knowledge’—but flat like, not like a question anymore—‘How do I live the rest of my life.’ I dinna know how to answer him. When I began to rub the ointment on her I be looking up at him—that he should step out, for her modesty’s sake. Then he be backing away out of the cell, crying all soft, still asking those questions that not be questions, still staring at us … I dinna know what became of him. I never saw him again.

“Then I sat with her, holding her, waiting for her to die. T’was not enough ointment he brought to pass her over, but sure I knew she would not last the night anyway, and at least it eased the pain. A long night, that.

“Then t’was morning. We all were dragged in chains to watch the execution. The Bishop be in his big chair, in his furs, with his cowl covering his eyes again. I think he be sweating, because the lower part of his face be wet. He be so drunk they had to help him into his seat. They carried her out, too, but when they bound her to the stake, she be so limp they had to lash her tight with ropes, to hold her upright. I thought—I hoped—mayhap she be already dead. She seemed not conscious, and I be thankful for that.

“But then, as the smoke swirled closer to her body and the rags of her skirt caught fire, she opened her eyes again. She looked straight in front of her. I canna ever forget it. That small face … it be hugely swollen now, a purple, scarred, bloated pulp between those blood-caked braids once the colour of the snow-heavy sky. I could smell her flesh beginning to sear. I tried to not breathe her, not to
breathe
her
in
. I tried to look away. But the guards wrenched my face back again and with their filthy fingers forced my eyes open and held my eyelids up. Snowflakes were starting to swirl. Her feet were blistering, charring black in front of me. I started to vomit.