Novels 03 The Wise Woman Read online

  Morach muttered something under her breath and turned to climb the ladder to her sleeping platform. “Put the water on,” she said. “I’ve some chamomile to mash. I need it to clear my head.”

  Alys bent her head and blew at the fire and set the little pot of water on its three legs in the red embers. When the water started to bubble Alys threw in some chamomile leaves and set it to stand. When Morach came down with her bag of fortune-telling bones, she and Alys shared the one chipped horn cup.

  Morach drank deep, and then shook the bones in their little purse.

  “Choose,” she said, holding out the purse to Alys.

  Alys hesitated.

  “Choose,” Morach said again.

  “Is it witchcraft?” Alys asked. She was not afraid, her blue eyes were fixed challengingly on Morach. “Is it black arts, Morach?”

  Morach shrugged. “Who knows?” she said carelessly. “To one man it’s black arts, to another it’s wise woman’s trade, and to another it’s a foolish old woman muttering madness. It’s often true—that’s all I know.”

  Alys shrugged and at Morach’s impatient gesture took one of the carved flat bones, then another, then a third, from the little pouch.

  Morach stared at her choice. “The Gateway,” she said first. “That’s your choice, that’s where you are now. The three ways that lie before you—the castle life with its joys and dangers and its profits; the nun’s life which you will have to fight like a saint to regain; or here—poverty, dirt, hunger. But…” She laughed softly. “Invisibility. The most important thing for a woman, especially if she is poor, especially if she will grow old one day.”

  Morach studied the second bone with the rune scrawled on it in a rusty brown ink. “Unity,” she said, surprised. “When you make your choice you have the chance for unity—to travel with your heart and mind in the same direction. Set your heart on something and stay true to it. One goal, one thought, one love. Whatever it is you desire: magic, your God, love.”

  Alys’s face was white, her eyes almost black with anger. “I don’t want him,” she said through her teeth. “I don’t want love, I don’t want lust, I don’t want desire, I don’t want him. I want to get back where I belong, to the cloister where my life has order, some peace and some security and wealth. That’s all.”

  Morach laughed. “Not much then,” she said. “Not much for a drab from Bowes Moor, a runaway wench, a runaway nun. Not much to wish for—peace, security, and wealth. Not a great demand!”

  Alys shook her head irritably. “You don’t understand!” she exclaimed. “It is not a great demand. It is my life, it is what I am used to. It is my proper place, my deserts. I need it now. Holiness—and a life where I can be at peace. Holiness and comfort.”

  Morach shook her head, smiling to herself. “It’s a rare combination,” she said softly. “Holiness and comfort. Most holy roads tend to the stony, I thought.”

  Alys shrugged irritably. “How would you know?” she demanded. “What road have you ever followed but your own choice?”

  Morach nodded. “But I follow one road,” she reminded Alys. “And they call me a wise woman rightly. This is what the Unity rune is telling you. Choose one road and follow it with loyalty.”

  Alys nodded. “And the last one?”

  Morach turned it around, looked at both sides, and studied the two blank faces for a moment. “Odin. Death,” she said casually and tossed the three back into the bag.

  “Death!” Alys exclaimed. “For who?”

  “For me,” Morach said evenly. “For the old Lord Hugh, for the young Lord Hugo, for you. Did you think you would live forever?”

  “No…” Alys stumbled. “But…d’you mean soon?”

  “It’s always too soon,” Morach replied with sudden irritation. “You’ll have your few days of passion and your choices to make before you come to it. But it’s always too soon.”

  Alys waited impatiently for more but Morach drank deep of the tea and would not look at her. Alys took the little purse of copper coins from her pocket and laid it in Morach’s lap. Morach knocked it to the floor. “There’s no more,” she said unhelpfully.

  “Then talk to me,” Alys said. For a moment her pale face trembled and she looked like a child again. “Talk to me, Morach. I am like a prisoner in that place. Everyone except the old lord himself is my enemy.”

  Morach nodded her head. “Will you run?” she asked with slight interest. “Run again?”

  “I have the horse now,” Alys said, her voice quickening as the idea came to her. “I have a horse and if I had money…” Morach’s bare dirty foot stepped at once to cover the purse she had knocked to the floor. “There must be an order of nuns where they would take me in,” Alys said. “You must have heard of somewhere, Morach!”

  Morach shook her head. “I have heard of nothing except the visitors and fines and complaints against nunneries and monasteries taken as high as the king,” she said. “Your old abbey is stripped bare—the benches from the church, the slates from the roof, even some of the stones themselves are pulled down, and carted away for walls, or mounting blocks. First by Lord Hugo’s men from the castle and now on his order by the villagers. It’s the same in the north from what I hear, and the south. They’ll have escaped the king’s investigations in Scotland, you could try for it. But you’d be dead before you reached the border.”

  Alys nodded. She held out her hand for the cup and Morach refilled it and handed it to her.

  “The mood of the times is against you,” she said. “People were sick of the wealth of the abbeys, priests, monks, and nuns. They were sick of their greed. They want new landlords, or no landlords at all. You chose the wrong time to become a nun.”

  “I chose the wrong time to be born,” Alys said bitterly. “I am a woman who does not fit well with her time.”

  Morach grinned darkly. “Me too,” she said. “And a whole multitude of others. My fault was that I gained more than I could hold. My sin was winning. So they brought the man’s law and the man’s power against me. The man’s court, the law of men; I have hidden myself in the old power, in the old skills, in woman’s power.”

  She looked at Alys without sympathy. “Your fault is that you would never bide still,” she said. “You could have lived here with me with naught to fear except the witch-taker but you wanted Tom and his farmhouse and his fields. Then when you saw something better you fled for it.

  “They thought Tom would die of grief for you, he begged me to order you home. I laughed in his face. I knew you would never come. You’d seen something better. You wanted it. I knew you’d never come back of your own free will. You’d have stayed forever, wouldn’t you?”

  Alys nodded. “I loved Mother Hildebrande, the abbess,” she said. “I was high in her favor. And she loved me as if I were her daughter. I know she did. She taught me to read and to write, she taught me Latin. She took special pains with me and she had great plans for me. I worked in the still-room with the herbs, and I worked in the infirmary, and I studied in the library. I never had to do any heavy dirty work. I was the favorite of them all, and I washed every day and slept very soft.” She glanced at Morach. “I had it all then,” she said. “The love of my mother, the truest, purest love there is, comfort, and holiness.”

  “You’ll not find that again in England,” Morach said. “Oh, the king cannot live forever, or he may cobble together some deal with the pope. His heirs might restore the church. But English nuns will never have you back.”

  “They might not know I ran…” Alys started.

  Morach shook her head emphatically. “They’ll guess,” she said. “You were the only one to get out of that building alive that night. The rest burned as they slept.”

  Alys closed her eyes for a moment and smelled the smoke and saw the flicker of flames, orange on the white wall of her cell. Again she heard that high single scream as she ducked through the gate and kilted up her habit and ran without care for the others, without a care for the abbess who ha