The Serpent's Tale (14 page)

At last a tall shape loomed out of the shadow ahead, leading a horse and coming toward her. It yelled, “What are you standing there for, woman? Get back. We should have taken the last turning.”

Again, it was her fault. Again, the mare wouldn’t move until the bishop took its bridle and pushed.

So that he shouldn’t be embarrassed in front of the other two men, Adelia lowered her voice. “Rowley, this isn’t a labyrinth.”

He didn’t lower his. “No, it isn’t. We’re in the entrails of Grendel’s bloody mother, that’s what, goddamn her.”

It came to her.
Beowulf.
That was the name. Beowulf, Ulf’s favorite among all legendary Saxon warriors, killer of the Wyrm, slayer of the half-human monster Grendel and of Grendel’s awful avenging mother.

“Waste bitch, boundary walker,”
Ulf had said of Grendel’s mother, meaning she prowled the edge between earth and hell in woman’s shape.

Adelia began to get cross. Why was it women who were to blame for everything—
everything
, from the Fall of Man to these blasted hedges?

“We are not in a labyrinth, my lord,” she said clearly.

“Where are we, then?”

“It’s a maze.”

“Same difference.” Puffing at the horse: “Get
back
, you great cow.”

“No, it isn’t. A labyrinth has only one path and you merely have to follow it. It’s a symbol of life or, rather, of life and death. Labyrinths twist and turn, but they have a beginning and an end, through darkness into light.”

Softening, and hoping that he would, too, she added, “Like Ariadne’s. Rather beautiful, really.”

“I don’t want mythology, mistress, beautiful or not, I want to get to that sodding tower. What’s a maze when it’s at home?”

“It’s a trick. A trick to confuse. To
amaze.
”

“And I suppose Mistress Clever-boots knows how to get us out?”

“I do, actually.” God’s rib, he was sneering at her,
sneering.
She’d a mind to stay where she was and let him sweat.

“Then in the name of Christ,
do
it.”

“Stop bellowing at me,” she yelled at him. “You’re bellowing.”

She saw his teeth grit in the pretense of a placatory smile; he always had good teeth. Still did. Between them, he said, “The Bishop of Saint Albans presents his compliments to Mistress Adelia and please to escort him out of this hag’s hole, for the love of God. How will you do it?”

“My business.” Be damned if she’d tell him. Women were defenseless enough without revealing their secrets. “I’ll have to take the lead.”

They were forced to back the horses to one of the junctions where there was just enough room to turn each animal round without damage, though not enough to allow one to pass another, so Adelia ended up leading Walt’s mount, Walt leading the messenger’s behind her, Jacques behind him with hers, Rowley bringing up the rear with his own.

The maneuver was achieved with resentment. Even Jacques, her ally, said, “How are
you
going to get us out, then, mistress?”

“I just can.” She paused. “Though it may take some time.”

She stumped along in front, holding Walt’s mount’s reins in her right hand. In the other was her riding crop, which she trailed with apparent casualness so that it brushed against the hedge on her left.

As she went, she chuntered to herself.
Lord, how disregarded I am in this damned country. How disregarded all women are.

She was back to the reasoning that had made her refuse to marry Rowley. At the time, he’d been expecting the king to offer him a barony, not a bishopric, thus allowing him a wife. Mad for him though she was, acceptance would have meant slipping her wrists into metaphorical golden fetters and watching him lock them on. As his wife, she could never have been herself, a
medica
of Salerno.

Adelia possessed none of the requisite feminine arts: She couldn’t dance well, didn’t play the lute, had never touched an embroidery frame—her sewing restricted to cobbling back together those cadavers she had dissected. In Salerno, she had been allowed to pursue skills that suited her, but in England there had been no room for them; the Church condemned any woman who did not toe its line—for her own safety, she had been forced to practice as a doctor in secret, letting a man take the credit.

As Baron Rowley’s wife she would have been feted, complimented, bowed to, just as long as she denied her true being. And how long could she have done that?
I am who I am.

Ironically, the lower down the social scale women were, the greater freedom they had; the wives of laborers and craftsmen could work alongside their men—even, sometimes, when they were widowed, take over their husband’s trade. Until she’d become Adelia’s friend and Allie’s nurse, Gyltha had conducted a thriving business in eels and had called no man her master.

Adelia trudged on.
Hag’s hole. Grendel’s mother’s entrails.
Why was this dreadful place feminine to the men lost in it? Because it was tunneled? Womb-like?
Is this woman’s magic? The great womb?

Is that why the Church hates me, hates all women? Because we are the source of all true power? Of life?

She supposed that by leading them out of it, she was only confirming that a woman knew its secrets and they did not.

Great God,
she thought,
it isn’t a question of hatred. It’s fear. They are frightened of us.

And Adelia laughed quietly, sending a suggestion of sound reverberating backward along the tunnel, as if a small pebble was skipping on water, making each man start when it passed him.

“What in hell was that?”

Walt called back stolidly, “Reckon someone’s laughing at us, master.”

“Dear God.”

Still grinning, Adelia glanced over her shoulder to find Walt looking at her. His gaze was amused, friendlier than it had been. It was directed at her riding crop, still dragging along the left-hand hedge. He winked.

He knows,
she thought. She winked back.

Heartened by this new ally, she nevertheless quickened her pace because, when she’d turned, she’d had to squint to make out Walt’s expression. His face was indistinct, as if seen through haze.

They were losing the light.

Surely it was still only afternoon outside, but the low winter sun was leaving this side of the labyrinth, whichever side it was, in shadow. She didn’t want to imagine what it would be like in blackness.

It was frightful enough anyway. Following the left-hand hedge wherever it went took them into blind alleys time and again so that they became weary with the travail of reversing increasingly restless horses. Each time, she could hear Rowley stamping. “Does the woman know what in hell she’s doing?”

She began to doubt it herself. There was one tormenting question:
Are the hedges continuous?
If there was a gap, if one part of this maze was separated from the rest, then they could wander until it suffocated them.

As the tunnels darkened, the shadows conglomerated into a disembodied face ahead of her, malignant, grinning, mouthing impossible things.
You won’t get out. I’ve closed the clefts. You are sewn in.

You won’t see your baby again.

The thought made her hands sweat so that the riding crop slipped out of her grasp and, in clutching for it, she bumped into the hedge and set off a small avalanche of frozen snow onto her head and face.

It refreshed her common sense.
Stop it, there’s no such thing as magic.
She shut her eyes to the gargoyle and her ears to Rowley’s curses—the nudge had set off a shower all along the line—and pressed on.

Walt said, as if passing the time of day, bless him, “’Tis marvelous to me how they do keep this thorn in trim. Two cuts a year, I reckon. Needs a powerful number of men to do that, mistress. Takes a king to pay them sort of wages.”

She supposed it
was
marvelous in its way, and he was right, the maze would require a small army to look after it. “Not only cut it but sweep it,” she said. For there were no clippings on the paths. “I wouldn’t want my dog to get a thorn in his paw.”

Walt considered the animal pattering along behind Adelia, with which he had now been confined at close quarters for some time. “Special breed, is he? Never come across his like afore.” Nor, his sniff said, would he rush to do so again.

She shrugged. “I’ve got used to it. They’re bred for the stink. Prior Geoffrey of Cambridge gave me this one’s predecessor when I came to England so that I could be traced if I got lost. And then gave me another when the first one…died.”

Killed and mutilated when she’d tracked down the murderer of Cambridge children to a lair a thousand times more awful than this one. But the scent he’d left to be followed had saved her then, and both the prior and Rowley had ever since insisted that she be accompanied by just such another.

She and Walt continued to chat, their voices absorbing into the network of shrubbery enfolding them. Walt had stopped despising her; it appeared that he was on good terms with women. He had daughters, he told her, and a capable wife who managed their smallholding for him while he was away. “The which I be away a lot, now Bishop Rowley’s come. Chose me out of all the cathedral grooms to travel with un, so he did.”

“A good choice, too,” Adelia told him, and meant it now.

“Reckon ’twas. Others ain’t so partial to his lordship. Don’t like as he’s friend to King Henry, them being for poor Saint Thomas as was massacry-ed at Canterbury.”

“I see,” she said. She’d known it. Rowley, having been appointed by the king against their wishes, was facing hostility from the officers and servants of his own diocese.

Whether the blame heaped on Henry Plantagenet for the murder of Thomas à Becket on the steps of his own cathedral was justified, she had never been sure, even though, in his temper, the king had called for it while in another country. Had Henry, as he’d screamed for the archbishop’s death, been aware that some of his knights, with their own reasons for wanting Becket dead, would gallop off to see it done?

Perhaps. Perhaps not.

But if it hadn’t been for King Henry’s intervention, the followers of Saint Thomas would have condemned her to the whipping post—and nearly had.

She was on Henry’s side. The martyred archbishop had seen no difference between the entities of Church and of God. Both were infallible. The laws of both must be obeyed without question and without alteration as they always had been. Henry, for all his faults the more human man, had wanted changes that would benefit not the Church but his people. Becket had obstructed him at every turn, and was still obstructing him from the grave.

“Me and Oswald and Master Paton and young Jacques, we was all new to our jobs, see,” Walt was saying. “We didn’t have no grumble with Bishop Rowley, not like the old guard, as was cross with him for being a king’s man. Master Paton and Jacques, they joined selfsame day as he was installed.”

So with the great divide between king and martyr running through the diocese of Saint Albans, its new bishop had chosen servants as fresh to their roles as he was to his.

Good for you, Rowley. Judging by Walt and Jacques, you’ve done well.

The messenger, however, was proving less imperturbable than the groom. “Should we shout for help, my lord?” Adelia heard him ask Rowley.

For once, his bishop was gentle with him. “Not long now, my son. We’re nearly out.”

He couldn’t know it, but, in fact, they were. Adelia had just seen proof that they were, though she was afraid the bishop would receive little satisfaction from it.

Walt grunted. He’d seen what she’d seen—ahead in the tunnel was a pile of rounded balls of manure.

“That un dropped that as we was coming in,” Walt said quietly, nodding toward the horse Adelia was leading; it had been his own, the last in line when they entered the maze. The four of them would soon be out—but exactly where they had started.

“It was always an even chance.” Adelia sighed. “Bugger.”

The two men behind hadn’t heard the exchange, nor, by the time the hooves of the front two horses had flattened them in passing, did just another lot of equine droppings have any significance for them.

Another bend in the tunnel. Light. An opening.

Dreading the outburst that must follow, Adelia and her horse stepped through the cleft leading out of the Wyrm’s maze to be met by clean, scentless cold air and a setting sun illuminating the view of a great bell hanging from a trapezoid set in a hill they had descended more than two hours before.

One by one, the others emerged. There was silence.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Adelia shouted into it. She faced Rowley. “Don’t you see, if a maze is continuous, if there aren’t any breaks, and
if
all the hedges are connected to each other and you follow one of them and stick rigidly to it wherever it goes, you’ll traverse it eventually, you
must
, it’s inevitable, only…” Her voice diminished into a misery. “I chose the left-hand hedge. It was the wrong one.”