Novels 03 The Wise Woman Read online

  He thrust Alys toward the soldier and he grabbed her and marched her up the flight of stone steps to the arched doorway. The door, as thick as a tree trunk, stood open. Inside, a torch flickered, staining the wall behind it with a stripe of black soot. The castle breathed coldness, sweated damp. Alys drew her shawl over her rough-cropped head with a shudder. It was colder even than Morach’s drafty cottage. Here the castle walls held the wind out, but no sun ever shone. Alys crossed herself beneath her shawl. She had a premonition that she was walking toward mortal danger. The dark corridor before her—lit at the corners with smoking torches—was like her worst nightmares of the nunnery: a smell of smoke, a crackle of flames, a long, long corridor with no way out.

  “Come,” the man said grimly and took Alys’s arm in a hard grip. She trailed behind him, up a staircase which circled round and around inside the body of the tower, until he said, “Here now,” and knocked, three short knocks and two long, on a massive wooden door. It swung open. Alys blinked. It was bright inside. Half a dozen men were lounging on benches at a long table, the remains of their supper spread before them, two big hunting dogs growling over bones in the corner. Alys could tell at a glance that they were gentlemen. The capes thrown over the chairs were fine wool, lined with silk. They were dressed for leisure in fine colored hose and puffed breeches tied with ribbons at the knee. Their long doublets were slashed to show the bright silken linings. They all wore little velvet caps decorated with feathers or jewels. The air was hot with rancid smoke and the smell of sweat.

  “A wench!” said one. “That’s kindly of you!”

  Alys shrank back behind the soldier who still held her. He shook his head. “Nay,” he said. “It’s the wise woman from Bowes, come to see my lord. Is he well?”

  A young man at the far end of the room beckoned them through. “No better,” he said in an undertone. “He wants to see her at once.”

  He pulled back a tapestry on the wall behind him and swung open a narrow arched door. The soldier released Alys and thrust her bundle into her hands. She hesitated.

  “Go on,” the young man said.

  She paused again. The soldier behind her put his hand in the small of her back and pushed her forward. Alys, caught off balance, stumbled into the room and past the watching men. Before her, through the door, was a flight of shallow stone steps lit by a single guttering torch. There was a small wooden door at the head of the flight of stairs. As she climbed up, it slowly opened.

  The room was dark, lit only by firelight and one pale wax candle standing on a chest. Dark tapestries hung on every one of the curving walls of the tower room. Before the fire was one heavy carved wooden chair and a footstool beside it. Under the glazed window which overlooked the castle courtyard there was a small round table. In the corner were two wooden chests for clothes and a cupboard with a jug of wine and a glass, fine glass, Alys noted, alert even in her fear. Furthest from the door was a small high bed draped with richly embroidered hangings.

  At the head of the bed stood a tiny man, no taller than a child. His dark eyes were on Alys, and his hand repeatedly smoothed the pillow.

  On the pillow was a lean face engraved by sickness and suffering, the skin as yellow as birch leaves in autumn. But the eyes, when the heavy lids flew open and stared at Alys, were as bright and black as an old peregrine falcon’s.

  “You the wise woman?” he asked.

  “I have a very little skill,” Alys said. “And very little learning. You should send for someone learned, an apothecary or even a barber. You should have a physician.”

  “They would cup me till I died,” the sick man said slowly. “They have cupped me till I am near dead already. Before I threw them out they said they could do no more. They left me for dead, girl! But I won’t die. I can’t die yet. My plans are not yet done. You can save me, can’t you?”

  “I’ll try,” Alys said, pressing her lips on a denial. She turned to the fireplace and laid down Morach’s shawl. By the light of the fire she untied the knot and spread out the cloth and arranged the things. The little man came over and squatted down beside her. His head came no higher than her shoulder.

  “Do you use the black arts, mistress?” he asked in a soft undertone.

  “No!” Alys said instantly. “I have a very little skill with herbs—just what my mistress has taught me. You should have sent for her.”

  The dwarf shook his head. “In all Bowes they speak of the new young wise woman who came from nowhere and lives with the old widow Morach by the river. He’ll have no truck with the black arts,” he said, nodding to the still figure in the bed.

  Alys nodded. She straightened the black-bound prayer-book, put the herbs and the pestle and mortar to her right.

  “What’s that?” the dwarf said, pointing to the stone and ribbon.

  “It’s a crystal,” Alys said.

  At once the little man crossed himself and bit the tip of his thumb. “To see into the future?” he demanded. “That’s black arts!”

  “No,” Alys said. “To find the source of the illness. Like dowsing for water. Divining for water is not black arts, any child can do it.”

  “Aye.” The man nodded, conceding the point. “Aye, that’s true.”

  “Have done chattering!” came the sudden command from the bed. “Come and cure me, wise woman.”

  Alys got to her feet, holding the frayed ribbon of the crystal between her finger and thumb so that it hung down like a pendulum. As she moved, the shawl covering her head slid back. The dwarf exclaimed at the stubble of her regrowing hair.

  “What have you done to your head?” he demanded. Then his face grew suddenly sly. “Was it shaved, my pretty wench? Are you a runaway nun, fled from a fat abbey where the old women grow rich and talk treason?”

  “No,” Alys said quickly. From the courtyard below the window a cock crowed briefly into the darkness and then settled to sleep again. “I was sick with a fever in Penrith and they shaved my head,” she said. “I am not a nun, I don’t know what you mean about treason. I am just a simple girl.”

  The dwarf nodded with a disbelieving smile, then he skipped to his place at the head of the bed and stroked the pillow again.

  Alys drew closer. “In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti,” she muttered under her breath. The stone on the ribbon swung of its own accord in a lazy clockwise arc. “This is God’s work,” Alys said. The stone swung a little wider, a little faster. Alys breathed a little easier. She had never used a pendulum at the abbey, the nuns frowned on it as a supernatural force. The stone was Morach’s. By blessing it Alys hoped to stay inside the misty border which separated God’s work from that of the devil. But with the old lord glaring at her, and the dwarf’s slight malicious smile, she felt in equal danger of burning for heresy as being taken as a witch and strangled.

  She put her hand, which shook only slightly, on the old lord’s forehead.

  “His sickness is here,” she said, as she had seen Morach do.

  The dwarf hissed as the crystal broke its pattern of circular swing and moved instead back and forth.

  “What does it mean?” he asked.

  “The sickness is not in his head,” she replied softly.

  “I didn’t see your fingers move the crystal?”

  “Have done with your chatter,” the old lord flared at the dwarf. “Let the wench do her work.”

  Alys drew back the rich rugs covering the old man. She saw at once how his skin shivered at the touch of the air, yet the room was warm. Tentatively she put the back of her hand against his withered cheek. He was burning up.

  She moved her hand cautiously to rest on his flat belly. She whispered: “His sickness is here,” and at once she felt a change in the movement of the stone. It circled strongly, round and round, and Alys nodded at the lord with renewed confidence.

  “You have taken a fever in your belly,” she said. “Have you eaten or fasted?”

  “Eaten,” the old man said. “They force food on me and then the