The Wise Woman Read online

  'They are here!' she yelled. 'My sisters are taking us to play with the storm! Can you feel them, Hugo?'

  The wind had torn Hugo's blanket from his shoulders and whipped it away like a ribbon. The rain lashed his stocky white body. He flung his head back and laughed as the wind tore against him and the rain poured down on his nakedness.

  Alys pressed against him, squeezed his thigh between her legs as they stood, drenched in the storm. The lightning dazzled them for a moment and then plunged them into blackness.

  'Feel my sisters,' Alys said urgently. 'We are riding in the storm with them. See how the winds pull and throw us around. We are out in the storm, tossed by the air, bruised by the lightning. The storm is our lover. Be the storm, Hugo! Be at one with the storm and take us all.'

  The earthroot was twisting and turning Hugo's brain. His body was icy from the rainwater and burning from his own heat and the earthroot fever. He savagely snatched up Alys and pressed her against the turret wall and forced himself into her. Alys, her body crushed against the stone wall, her shoulders and head above the parapet in the full force of the storm, laughed aloud.

  'You are the storm, Hugo, you are the storm!' she cried. 'Love me into madness. I have thrown away everything for you. Everything is lost for you!'

  Hugo buried himself into her, withdrew, thrust forward again. At every move Alys was pushed nearer and nearer the edge of the turret wall where it dropped down from full height to waist height. Below them the river was in a spate of deep dark water and wind-lashed foam. Alys saw the movement into fatal danger and laughed again. Deep inside her, desire and madness were building together. She clenched her legs around Hugo's waist and leaned back on the wall. Hugo, blind to everything but his fantasy of witches and storms and magical lust, forced himself into her again and again.

  One final movement flung Alys from the support of the turret wall out into nothing, over the precipice. Hugo held her hips, her legs were around his waist, but her body was half falling from the top of the tower. And then Alys, mad for satisfaction and mad for release from her fear and her guilt, let go of Hugo's shoulders and stretched her arms out, over her head, reaching out into the abyss. The lightning flashed, lighting Alys' insane, laughing face and Hugo's tranced grimace of pleasure as Alys flung herself, head first into nothingness, with only her legs still gripping Hugo. She screamed at her pleasure and the sound was torn away from her mouth by the wind. She opened her eyes and looked downwards. She was dangling from the top of the tower, below her was a maelstrom of boiling winds, seething rain and the tumbling torrent of the river over boulders. Alys stretched her arms out into nothingness and laughed aloud, longing for the final terror of the tumbling fall and then blackness.

  Then her belly clenched with lust and she groaned, instinctively she tightened her legs around his back, forcing him closer and closer, deeper and deeper inside her, wringing every second of pleasure from him. Hugo, not knowing what he did, caring neither for her safety nor her danger but only his own pleasure, snatched her back from the precipice and bore down on her on the stone flags of the turret roof. The rain poured down on the two glistening bodies as they rolled together, knotted with lust. Then the thunder rolled again and Hugo groaned, and fell away from her.

  Alys lay, mouth open, drinking in the rain. Her hair was a puddled wet mass behind her neck, Hugo a spent weight on her body. She pushed him away and sat up slowly. Her head was swimming with the wine from supper and with the powerful drugs of lust and terror. She pushed herself to her feet and hobbled over to the edge of the tower. She was sober now, as a drunkard who suddenly sees the danger he was in will turn sober and cold in a second. She held on to one of the turrets and peered down the dizzying drop. She could not see the foot of the tower, it was too dark and too high. But she could hear the rush of the river water as it broke its back on the rocks. When the lightning cracked the sky again Alys could see the rocks far, far below her, where they formed a cliff of breakneck height down to the raging vortex of the river bed. Alys stepped back from the edge of the tower and pulled her cape around her. She shuddered.

  'That was too close,' she said. 'Too close. Too near to the edge. Too close.' She shook her head like someone coming out of a deep trance. 'The blank rune, the blank rune,' she whispered. 'Oh God! The blank rune. Odin.'

  For a moment she stared down and then she looked out towards the moor. The storm was raging out eastwards; when the lightning struck she could see the rain like a wall of water spreading over the moor up towards the high fells. The river would be filling fast, Morach in her cave would be drowned all over again. The river might spill out in the darkness, flood over its banks and hungrily eat the little hovel and the old arthritic woman, sweep them away before the soldiers came. 'Sleep well,' Alys said ironically to the darkness.

  'Both my mothers. Sleep well. May the thunderstorm take both of you, may the rain wash you both out of my life, may the winds blow you far away from me.' She laughed in a high cracked voice at her own black humour and then turned slowly back to Hugo.

  He was lying where she had left him, his skin cold and wet. Alys wrapped her cape tightly around her and lifted up the trapdoor in the flagstones. In the pigeon coops under the little rickety roof half a dozen tiny red eyes watched her anxiously, the birds stirring fretfully as she passed. Alys stepped down the narrow stone stairs and dropped the trapdoor back into place. She went past Hugo's room and past the old lord's chamber. Halfway down the stairs to the guardroom she met one of the soldiers.

  'Fetch a comrade and go and get Lord Hugo,' she said briskly. 'He is drunk and would go out on the roof to see the storm. See that his servants warm him and dry him and put him to bed. He is dead drunk and cannot walk.'

  The soldier grinned. 'Yes, Lady Alys,' he said. He ran down to the guardroom ahead of her and Alys heard the quick ripple of male laughter. She walked down the stairs, through the guardroom, where the soldiers stood back to let her pass, sneaking a look at her bare white feet, and across to the stairs up to the ladies' gallery.

  Mary was waiting by Alys' bed when she came into the room. Without comment she took the soaking cape from her and wrapped Alys in a warm sheet. Alys, too tired and dazed to be bothered with her nightshift and nightcap, slipped between her sheets wrapped and warm like a swaddled baby.

  'Goodnight, your ladyship,' Mary said carefully, and blew out the candle.

  That night Alys had a dream. It came from the thunderstorm and the pouring rain outside the castle. It came from the boiling flood of the river around the rocks of the castle's foundation. It came from the blank rune. It came from Morach – dark and deep and hidden in her drowned cave. It came from Hildebrande – praying in the darkness with the tears pouring down her old face for the lamb which had lost its way, for the daughter who had turned traitor.

  Alys dreamed she was on the road to Castleton from Morach's cottage. She dreamed she was riding her mare. It was a fine day, sunny and bright and the mare was stepping smartly along the white road. Alys dreamed she saw the bluish leaves of wild sage in the bank at the side of the road and pulled up the mare to pick the fresh florets.

  The mare stopped, Alys slipped from the saddle and bent down over the plant. Then she recoiled. The bank was alive with worms. It was seething with white maggots, tiny and thin, writing together in a huge mass of corruption. As she fell back against the horse's shoulder she saw that the bank on the other side of the road was filled with worms as well. She was trapped between two feasts of writhing, silent maggots.

  Alys went to leap up on the horse but, in the way of dreams, there was no saddle and no stirrup. She could not get up. She fumbled at the horse's back, then she went around to the other side, hoping there might be a saddle on the other side. There was nothing, and she could feel the banks coming closer. The whole monstrous hedgerow of maggots, crawling over every flower, thick in every hole, was coming closer, closer.

  Alys screamed as loud as she could and her scream tore through the fabric of the dream, r