Great Maria (v5) Read online

  “Please, will you take some men and go with the cook to the mill?”

  He nodded, and she crossed the ward to the New Tower again like a rabbit back to its burrow. Inside the dark stairwell, she leaned against the wall and watched the knights, the redheaded boy in their midst. They all tramped away, down into the stable, and she bounded up the stairs, buoyant.

  ***

  Elena’s grave was in the burying ground just outside the castle wall. Maria let herself through the little door in the gate and walked around the foot of the wall, careful of the thorny shrubs sprouting in the sunlight. The ground pitched off steep as a waterfall, buried in pine. Far down there, the serpentine strips of the fields spread across the valley floor, slashed by the brown streak of the river. She went on around the foot of the wall, in and out of the shadows.

  She said prayers for Elena and her mother, buried higher on the hill, and sat down in the sun with the castle wall at her back. The graveyard was thickly planted in herbs; certain things grew most potent there. Down in the valley, a boy rode a limping workhorse into the river to soak its legs. She wrapped her arms around her knees. Here nearly every day she and Elena had told each other stories of kings and wizards, enchanted weapons and horses and treasure, maidens despoiled and magic castles lost and won. Elena had despoiled the maidens. Maria had preferred the weapons and horses.

  Abruptly she looked up above her. The redheaded boy was leaning against the top of the wall. Their eyes met. All over her body, her skin grew prickly and alive. He did not look away. After a moment she tore her gaze from his and pointed it elsewhere.

  She could sit there no longer, not with him above her, and she raced along the foot of the wall toward the gate. He had looked at her so long and with no reason to be doing it; she remembered his stare and held her breath. She dashed into the ward and ran across to the New Tower.

  Just as she reached it, he reached it, jerking open the door for her. Now they were so close she could see his clear blue eyes. She went through the doorway, into the cool dark of the foot of the stair. He slid past her through the door and went up the stairs toward the hall. In passing, his arm brushed over her breast. She raced up the staircase two flights to her room.

  That night, she could hardly sleep, and in the morning she lay late in bed, daydreaming. The other women clucked over her and tried to get her up but she ignored them. She could think of nothing but Roger.

  When her father had the New Tower built, years before, he had ordered that a passage be made in the wall around the hall, on either side of the hearth, so that he could spy on his men. This passage opened under the stair. Now that Robert was aging he seldom went in there. Maria had found its entrance; now, loving the redheaded boy, she hid in the wall passage and listened for his voice among the arguments and stories and lies of the men.

  During the days, whenever she saw him, he caught her eye in a searching look. They said nothing to one another. Maria could not imagine speaking to him—everything she felt for him would come out, and what if he refused her?

  Adela and Flora, the women who helped her work, twitted her constantly and tried to convince her she was sick. At last, to quiet them, she made them swear an oath to keep the secret and told them about Roger. Flora agreed with her that Roger was wonderful but Adela only laughed, and later Maria heard them giggling in a corner and was embarrassed.

  One morning in the early summer half the knights rode off on a raid. Old Robert stayed home, to help a mastiff bitch whelp her first litter, and when the puppies were dry and nursing, he went to the hall and sat down in front of the fire. Maria brought him a cup of wine. The hall was stifling hot, even with the fire banked. Maria and the other women hurried around the room, throwing all the knights’ bits of gear out into the ward and spreading clean rushes on the floor.

  “It’s so hot,” she said to her father. She came up beside him and put her hand on his shoulder. “How can you bear it? Come outside.”

  Old Robert grunted and heaved his bulk up straighter in his chair. In the bristled laps and folds of his face his eyes were bright as a young man’s. He looked her over, set his cup down, and thumped his knee.

  “Here, puss. Sit down.”

  Maria sat down on his knee. He muttered in his throat. “You are heavier than you were.” He sighed and shook his head, fingering his chin, and looked her over once again.

  “Now, see here,” he said. “Adela tells me you are mooning over that calf Roger d’Alene.”

  Maria went hot as if she stood before an open oven. She would never talk to Adela again. Her father took her right hand and opened her fingers out of their fist.

  “Maria,” he said. “I think you should be married.” He kissed her fingers.

  “Married,” she said, amazed, and leaped up. “Papa. To Roger? I can marry Roger?” She threw her arms around him.

  The old man patted her back. “That isn’t what I have in mind.”

  She stood up, cooling. “What?”

  Her father smiled at her. “Not Roger.” He pulled on his chin. “His brother—Richard, the middle brother.”

  “Richard!” Maria cried. That was the gray-eyed knight. “No. I want Roger. I’ll go to a convent first.”

  “Now, Maria. Come here and listen to your old father.”

  “You want me to marry him? Why do you want me to marry him?”

  “Come here.” He beckoned to her. A deerhound lying under the window came over to him, and he slapped it away. “Maria. Do as I say.”

  She went reluctantly over to pull up a stool beside his chair and sit down. Robert took her by the hand.

  “I have no son. All I have is you, puss. Therefore you have to marry and make me a few grandsons.”

  He went on a little about how in his old age a man’s heart yearned for grandchildren to continue his line. Maria stopped heeding his rambling voice. She had never before thought of having children; she herself had been so recently a child.

  “You aren’t listening to me,” her father said patiently.

  “I’m sorry. What did you say?”

  “I want you to marry Richard. He’s older than Roger, he can take care of you. Roger’s not much more than your age, he’s just tilting with Richard over you.”

  “I’ll wait for Roger.” Her father made things more complex than necessary.

  In the seams of her father’s face the sweat lay glistening like jewels. Beneath his heavy eyebrows his small pale eyes were unblinking. At last he patted her hand.

  “Listen to me. Richard is ambitious. I have to give him something to keep him satisfied a while. Trust me. I’ll watch over you.”

  She sat with her hands clasped in her lap, staring at him, affronted. “Papa, don’t you love me anymore?”

  “Of course I love you. Of course I love you.” He took her hands again. “Puss, don’t ever think I don’t love you.” He sighed. Still holding both her hands in his right hand, he wiped the sweat from his face on his other sleeve. He looked her in the eyes. “Very well. Maybe he can convince you. Will you talk to him—when he comes back? Tomorrow.”

  “I won’t marry him.”

  “Talk to him.”

  “All right.” She would talk to Roger as well.

  “Good girl.” The deerhound still stood beside her father, who cupped its lean head in the palm of his hand. He nodded at her. “You’ll come around to it, you’ll see, one way or another.”

  He bent over the dog, talking to it. Maria went out of the hall to the stairway. She felt dizzy, as if she had drunk too much of something strong. If it was not her true love, at least someone wanted to marry her. Going downstairs, she broke into a run from sheer good feeling.

  ***

  Maria went into the end of the hall, where her father usually sat, and stood looking at the hanging on the wall. Her mother had made it. Once she had thought it beautiful but now since she herself had learned to weave she marked the twisted weft and the loose stitches. She turned away from the hanging, putting her back
to the wall.

  The gray-eyed knight was coming in the door. He shut it and put the bolt across it, which startled her, and walked slowly across the room toward her. He was stocky and broad-shouldered, his legs heavy-boned, but he was not tall: when he came up to her she had to lift her head only a little to meet his eyes.

  “Your father says you won’t marry me.”

  “I love another.” She disliked having him stand so close to her. She backed away from him.

  “Roger,” he said. His eyes were the color of ice. He pulled a stool over next to her father’s chair. “Sit down. No, girl. In the chair.” With his hand on her arm he steered her from the stool to the chair.

  Maria wrenched her arm out of his grasp. “You are a sorry lover.”

  “I know.” He started to sit on the stool at her feet, but instead he propped his foot on it. “Roger’s better at that than I. He dandles all the local maids.”

  Maria blinked at him. This new reflection of Roger unsettled her, but she could think of only one thing at a time. She said, “I will always love your brother.”

  “No. He just wants to play with you—I want to marry you.”

  His hands rose between them, palms up, begging her. She said, “Why?”

  “Because…” His hands fell. “You wouldn’t follow it.”

  “I will.”

  He straightened. She wondered how old he was—not so much older than Roger, after all: in the way he moved there was something of a boy’s awkwardness. He sat down on the stool in front of her.

  “Your father is a robber, he’ll never be anything else. Roger just wants to be the King of the Robbers. But there’s something else to be done here. This castle’s at the throat of the whole region. The Saracens in the mountains have had no leader since Tib al-Malik was murdered. The King doesn’t interfere here, the Duke of Santerois hasn’t come south of the Roman Road in eight years. Someone is going to make himself great here, why should it not be me?”

  His voice was quick and vehement. She took her eyes from his face. What he had said caught her imagination.

  “Shall I court you?” Richard said. “What does Roger do, besides smile and be pretty?”

  She lifted her head. “I’ll marry you.”

  She saw that surprised him. She could not keep from smiling. She put her hand out to him. He took it; his fingers were rough with callus.

  “Maybe I am a sorry lover,” he said, “but I’ll be a good husband, I swear it.” He kissed her hand. She wondered if she ought to kiss him; she had never kissed a man other than her father. But the knight only got up and went out of the hall.

  She turned to the window overlooking the ward. A dozen knights were gathered around the door. Among them, almost under her window, was Roger’s red head. Richard walked out of the tower. The knights swarmed around him, their voices excited. He nodded, and they let out a yell. Below her Roger lifted his head. He met her eyes a moment and went to join the crowd around his brother.

  Two

  At first, Maria’s father took charge of everything and wanted the wedding on Assumption Day, but on the night before that, a caravan came down the road from the Saracen port of Mana’a, and Richard and Roger went off to attack it. They came back with three important prisoners. Arranging the ransoms kept the men’s attention almost until the equinox. After that, it rained awhile, until Maria almost gave up thinking about the whole subject of marriage.

  On the first sunny day, they all rode down to the village church, the serfs ran in from the fields, and Father Simon married them. The inside of the church was painted with round faces and sheep and the same hills she saw from her window. She stood trembling before the priest, her shoulders and breast drenched from the dew on the blue and white flowers the women had given her. She knew she could escape from this, if only she took heart. The gray-eyed knight appeared beside her. His hand was cold and clammy as a stone. Father Simon spoke of obedience and chastity and kindness.

  She and Richard knelt and received Communion. The wafer clung to the roof of her mouth. She worked frantically with her tongue to pry it loose and then could hardly swallow it. The knight put a gold ring on her finger. He missed the first try, and she raised her eyes and saw him worried and uncertain. Her heart lightened. It would not be so bad after all. She put her hand on his arm and they left the church.

  In the yard, the peasants threw flowers at them and shouted wicked jokes. Richard’s older brother William led up a white mare, the saddle covered with rich red cloth, and Richard lifted Maria up onto its back. Their eyes met. The intensity of his look struck her like a blow. She gathered her reins. Her heart beat like a fist. It would not be so bad after all.

  Newly rich from the ransoms, her father had hung the walls of the ward with Saracen cloth, blood red, silver, and white, and covered the banquet tables with roast meat, heaps of bread and cake, and fruit puddings and blancmange and wine. Maria, Richard, and Robert sat at a table hung with cloth of silver, and the knights and serfs mingled in the ward around them.

  Laughing, Adela rushed up and threw a wreath of flowers around Maria’s neck and kissed her. One by one, the knights were standing up before Richard and her father and offering to drink with them. Maria, who hated being drunk, mixed water with her wine, but the men and most of the women soon began drinking the wine whole.

  Roger came before Richard and saluted him with his cup. His long red hair was bright in the sunlight, and he stood straight and slim as a birch tree. Richard by comparison was plain. He was watching her suspiciously. She realized she had been staring at Roger. The gray-eyed knight leaned toward her.

  “Let’s go.”

  Maria started. “Now? But it’s—” She turned toward her father. He was drinking by turn with three of his knights. “Still daylight,” she said; it was not yet noon. Her father threw his cup down with a clang and swung his head toward her.

  “Are you still here?” He prodded her in the ribs with his forefinger. “Richard, don’t you want my daughter?” He laughed and belched in a windy gust.

  Maria got to her feet. The yell from the people around her boomed in the eaves of the towers. Adela and Flora rushed in around her and hurried her off. Half a dozen of the village women joined them. Halfway up the stairs, they began unlacing her bodice, and in her room they yanked off her clothes as if they were skinning her. Adela brushed out Maria’s hair.

  “Oh, what a beautiful bride you were! If only your mother could have seen you. I cried like a child.”

  They slid her nightgown on over her head. Washed and dried in magic herbs, the linen smelled like sweet grass. Adela’s fat sister Alys brought her a cup of some potion that tasted like egg. While Maria drank it the women crowded around her, tying the ribbons at her wrists and throat. They lifted her up and carried her across the room to her bed. Alys said charms over her and touched her reverently on the bad places with a bit of wood. The bed was strewn with flowers. Maria lay on a mass of crushed blossoms.

  The door banged open and the men flooded into the room, towing Richard along half-naked in their midst. A chair crashed over. The women screeched. They shooed out the men before them in a torrent down the stairs. The door slammed shut, and the shrilling voices and laughter dimmed. Maria sat up.

  Richard came up beside the bed. His chest looked bigger without a shirt over it. Between the nipples grew a mat of brown hair, darker than the hair on his head. She wondered if the hair on Roger’s chest were red. Her mouth was dry as a wad of fleece. He put on his nightshirt and sat down on the bed to take off his shoes. Turning modestly away from her, he stripped off his breeches and hose.

  “Let me sleep on that side of the bed. I don’t want to be against the wall.”

  Maria slid over into the middle of the bed. In the new nightshirt covered with Adela’s embroidery, he turned toward her, and there was a wild knocking on the door.

  “Maria,” her father shouted, his voice muffled by the oak door. “A toast. One more toast to my children.” He laughed, drunk.<
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  “Tomorrow,” Richard called. “Later.”

  The door started to open. Richard said something under his breath; he crossed the room in three strides and slammed the door shut. Maria chewed her thumbnail, willing her father to go away.

  “This is my room now,” Richard shouted. “Stay out of here, it’s mine.” He bolted the door and came back toward her.

  “Maria,” her father shouted. “Come open this door!”

  Richard climbed into the bed, kicking away the sheet and the blanket. Maria reached out her arms to him. He lay down on her, his breath in her face, his body warm under her hands. They struggled together in an awkward embrace, their nightclothes bunched in their way. He kissed her. Her father’s shouts still sounded in her ears. She spread her legs apart. Richard pierced her body. She smothered down a cry, not of pain so much as surprise. He slid himself hard in and out of her. She wrapped her arms tight around his neck. In her ear his wild breathing whined, and suddenly he was soaked with sweat. After a moment he rolled off onto his back beside her.

  Maria pushed herself up on her elbows. Her father had gone. Her mouth and her groin hurt. Richard sat up, throwing pieces of stem and flower petals out of the bed.

  “Lift that pillow for me.”

  She turned the pillow behind him up to cushion his back.

  “Did it hurt? What did it feel like?”

  Maria busied herself with the flowers. She mumbled something. He drew his fingers through her hair.

  “I’ve never seen your hair loose before.”

  “My mother’s touched the floor when she let it down.”

  He took her hair in both hands. There was a knock on the door. “Maria?” Adela called.

  “Go let her in.”

  She climbed across him out of the bed and opened the door. Round with fat, Adela waddled in, carrying a dish of meat in one hand and a cup of wine in the other.

  “I thought you’d be hungry.” She kissed Maria on the cheek and left.

  Maria put the dish on the chest beside the bed. Richard took the cup. She scrambled around him into the middle of the bed. Her nightgown was bloody. He drank the wine; his eyes probed at her.