Servant of Birds Read online

  Servant of Birds

  A. A. Attanasio

  Servant of Birds

  published by

  Ignite your imagination!

  second edition copyright © 2014 by A. A. Attanasio

  ISBN: 9781310238338

  http://aaattanasio.com/

  Originally published as Kingdom of the Grail by HarperCollins 1992

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

  CALL NUMBER: PS3551.T74K56

  Cover art:

  Yannick Pugibet Ramiro

  [email protected]

  Love is an inborn suffering.

  — Le Chapelin’s The Book of True Love

  (A.D. 1190)

  Contents

  Servant of Birds

  Garden of Wilderness

  Tree of Wounds

  Shadow of the Sun

  Bread of Hawks

  Earl Bernard Valaise & Ailenor Michau

  |

  Ailena Valaise

  m.

  Gilbert Lanfranc

  /

  Clare Guy

  m.

  Gerald Chalandon

  ___________________|_________________

  | | |

  Hellene Leora Thomas

  m. m.

  William Morcar Harold Almquist

  _______|______ ______|___________________

  / | | | | |

  Thierry Hugues Joyce Gilberta Blythe Effie

  & Madelon

  Servant of Birds

  The Grail is the chalice from which Jesus drank at the Last Supper.

  A child screams and screams. Among the reeds, a crone jerks upright from where she is bent over, her heart suddenly big in the small cage of her chest. Dusk has drawn the curtains of the marsh, and the old woman's round eyes stare hard but see no child in the cane brakes or in the long grass, only mist creeping among slender trees. Her heart grows bigger, expecting a ghost.

  The child's shrill pain comes again. The crone's gaze follows it to the top of the bog bank, where a ringed moon peers among sheaves gathered at the roadside. Slowly, she makes out the dark shape of a rabbit caught in a snare of osier twine. One of the men lurches black against the twilight and stoops to retrieve his catch.

  The old woman's swollen heart shrivels to a sigh. She shakes her gray head and stretches a kink from her back, her legs rooted in marsh mud. Beyond the sheaves of June's hay crop, destined as fodder for the seigneur's stables, the hills gleam scarlet in the last light of the longest day. Bonfires must be blazing at the castle for the midsummer's dance, she thinks, even though the big celebration is yet two days away. The feast of the nativity of John the Baptist will want an abundance of frogs' legs and snails for the castle revelers. But before bending back to her harvest, she glimpses a distant movement.

  Shadows flicker along the high road of the gleaming hills. "Who would be riding the steep trails so late?" she wonders aloud. "And galloping so fast, as if Satan himself troubles their heels. They must know these wends well enough to hurry so recklessly in the falling light."

  The bent shadow of another peasant beside the crone grunts, does not stir to look up. "Guy's siege," the shadow mumbles, lifting a fat frog out of the black water and dropping it deftly into a lidded basket. "Somethings amiss or aright. We'll hear of it on the morrow."

  -/

  After securing her basket of frogs from an alder branch where the dogs and pigs could not reach it, and having laid a nettle crown atop it so no cats could bat it loose, the crone pauses outside her hovel to watch the summer stars kindling above the black hills. The village, which lies east beyond a stand of alder and ancient elms, has already sounded the loud horn for cover fires.

  Into wads of spongy watercress, she ties with bine the snails to be delivered to the castle the next morning and drops them into the basket with the frogs. This night she will sleep only after having laid the bundle against the door, to keep the nightmare from passing under its lintel. Spirits will not abide waterplants, she knows. This is a particular caution she must take on full moon nights, though every night is dangerous: Burrowed as it is out of a dungheap, her hovel attracts the most evil of wraiths.

  Deep in the night, a throb of thunder startles the crone awake. Sitting up on her straw pallet, she sees her door thrown open and moonlight standing on her threshold. With one hand she grabs the crucifix hooked to the wall and with the other the cudgel in the straw at her side.

  A ponderous shadow rises to fill the portal. The villagers have come to take her life then; it has not been enough to mire her in this dungheap these past ten years. They have come finally to slit her throat as well. The old woman raises the cudgel high. "Come at me, rogue, and I'll open your skull to the moonlight!"

  "Be still, woman," a man's voice gruffs. "I am Erec Rhiwlas, chieftain Howel's son. I've not come to harm you."

  Lowering her club, the crone peers at the silhouette in the doorway, at the bristly outline of a beard and the bulky hide of a mantle. It is not the custom of the Invaders to wear beards, nor would any but the most noble have a mantle of fur. "Howel's Erec?" she whispers skeptically. "Erec the Bold, who raided Guy's cattle from their sheds all this past winter?"

  "The same," the heavy voice answers, "though a mite taller now, with this new bump atop my head. You've a treacherous mat at your threshold."

  "My snails," the old woman grunts, catching her breath. Working for the Invaders might well be a crime to a chieftain's son. Though surely he already knows she works for them. Why else would she be living in the village dungheap?

  "Snails are they? They slid underfoot like eels. Show some Welsh charity, old mother, and invite the son of Howel into your dung pile."

  With the help of her cudgel, die crone pulls herself up from her pallet. The crude crucifix made from two sticks tied together with hemp trembles in her hand, and she lays it down with the cudgel on a rickety bench. She straightens the rumples from her rag shift, then picks up the watercress wad, feels the hardshelled snails intact within, and beckons the large man to enter. "Come in then. I will start a fire and prepare you some acorn flummery."

  Erec bends to enter the tiny hovel, and the fecal stink of the enclosure hurts his sinuses. By the moonlight gushing through the open door, he makes out the sad shapes of the tottery bench, a hobbled stool, the straw pallet, and a squat fireplace, really just three stones leaning together before a hole in the dung wall for a flue. "Come, old mother. I think it best we talk outside, under the stars."

  -/

  "So you are Dwn of Margam." Erec studies the crone, and her round, black eyes blink. He knows she cannot believe that he is before her—a chieftain's son venturing so close to an Invader's keep with no other men. But he is not alone. A clansman stands guard out of sight among the black trees. There is grave danger for a fighting man on such a cloudless, moony night in the enemy's croft, yet he is patient and does not cower. This woman of the fields has never seen the fierce likes of a Welsh warrior before, and he lets her examine him closely in the brash moonlight.

  Indeed, he has the undeniable marks of nobility about him— the full brindled beard, battle-bent nose, regal brow, and deep-set eyes of a Cambrian Warrior—not the refined bearing or imperious features of the clean-shaven Norman gentry, yet nonetheless the agile poise of a chief, rough-hewn yet proud. Slick beaverskin covers his broad shoulders; red leather, maroon in the silver light, straps his waist and lower legs, and a short sword hangs at his hip, its hilt of buck's horn polished dark with grasping.

  "Dwn of Margam—" She speaks softly. "I am she, though I've not seen Margam since I was a child."

  "Why did you leave?"

  She blinks again, wondering why a chieftain's son would care. The wicker coop nearby quivers w
ith hens troubled by these voices in the night. Farther off, among the trees, the warrior's pearl-gray horse shimmers like a patch of fog. Its glorious presence alone is enough to convince her of Erec s identity.

  "My father was a taeog, a bondsman, and I was the youngest of his many children. He sold me when I was seven to an earl. Bernard Valaise." Dwn regards him anxiously and adds with what fierce conviction she can muster: "If you've come to take my life for aiding the Invaders, I'll not resist you. I am too old. Death would be a gift."

  "I'm not here for vengeance," Erec says softly. "Your father sold you to the Invaders. That was punishment enough."

  "Then forgive me for asking—why are you here? Why bother an old woman who lives in a dungheap?"

  "Once you lived in the castle. What did you do there?"

  "I was a maid," she answers, aware to mute the pride in her voice. "For many years, I was the handmaid to the earl's daughter."

  "And what became of that earl's daughter?"

  "That is a long and wearisome story," the crone protests.

  "Then shorten it and tell it sprightly, and afterward I'll tell you my business."

  She squints at him shrewdly in the moonlight, wondering what he really wants, then brushes straw from the kirtle she has thrown over her rag shift. "Very well then. Ailena was her name. She lived her first nine years across the Channel, in the Perigord, where her mother held large estates in common with her brothers. It was when Ailena's mother died that Bernard Valaise, titled but landless, brought his daughter here to make his fortune."

  "By claiming Welsh land," Erec interrupts bitterly. "To the Invaders, we are barbarians and our land wilderness only too happy to be tamed by their grain." He stares hard at the breeze harping among the branches. "Well, go on. Bernard claimed our land, built his castle, and bought you to be his daughter's handmaid. Why? Why a Welsh girl?"

  "Bernard wanted these hills to be their home," Dwn replies. "He insisted his daughter speak the language of the people she ruled."

  "And you taught her our tongue and our ways."

  Dwn nods meekly, her small dark eyes clouding with the memory of it. "Yes. We were companions from childhood. I ... served her forty-nine years." She straightens her back.

  "Then Archbishop Baldwin came here preaching the Crusade, and your mistress set out for die Holy Land to win peace for her soul in the afterlife. Is that not right?"

  "Ten years ago that was. But she did not set out. She was put out. By her son, Guy Lanfranc."

  "Exiled by her own son?" Eree snorts in contemptuous amazement at the callousness of the Normans.

  Dwn cocks her head. "But tell me, why should Erec the Bold suddenly care to know this tired story?"

  "Ah, old mother, for truth's sake my father Howel would know; he has sent me to you to learn all I can of Ailena Valaise."

  "Christ bless us, why? Ailena was old when she left, her bones bent and barbed. Surely she has found her way to her soul's eternal repose by now."

  "It would appear not, Dwn of Margam." A smile opens the warrior's full beard. "My fathers scouts have just brought word from Brecon. The baroness has returned from the Holy Land. Only yesterday, she crossed the Usk at Trefarg, and she camps this night on its northern bank. Our scouts believe she will arrive at her castle by midday."

  Pale in the moonlight, the old woman's face drains of all expression. For several minutes, she stares at Erec with her dark, round eyes, suspecting cruelty, looking for contempt in the broad, whiskered face. He is laughing at me—and then he will kill me, for I have betrayed my own people. I have served the Invaders my whole life, and now I must pay with my life.

  But the Welshman stares back with benevolent intensity, almost with amusement at her shock. When he speaks again, his voice has a soothing cadence: "Old woman, do not think we intend harm. The baroness, when she ruled this domain, was generous to our people. It was she gave free passage to the tribes when we moved our herds through these river meadows. She traded her castle's crafts for our cattle. She even sent gifts each year to the chieftains. But her son—" Erec's expression hardens, his eyes narrow to slits of disdain. "In hor absence, Guy Lanfranc has not only denied us passage, he has built a fortalice near the river to extend his domain, and from there he has attacked our camps. Whole settlements have been burned, the people scattered into the forests to live like animals. And many who did not flee fast enough were killed, cut down by sword and arrow. Families who would not leave their cattle have been slaughtered—women and children." His face contorts with poisonous hatred, and he must draw a deep breath before he can speak calmly again. "Howel seeks to know if the return of the baroness will temper her wicked son. I am come to find out."

  -/

  Dwn lies on her straw pallet too excited to sleep. Her eyes flex in the darkness, seeing back through time to the bone-warped old woman who had been carried howling from her castle ten years ago. "Do not weep for me, Dwn," Ailena had said the last time they spoke, even as Guy's knights strapped her into the litter that would carry her from the castle. "I am already on my way back."

  Tears spurted hotter in Dwn's eyes to see that ruined face promising to return. The handmaid had been certain that within the year her mistress's skull would be a beetles palace.

  Her rage has kept her alive, Dwn is sure, staring into the darkness and seeing the baroness's face, wrinkled, pale as a wedge of fungus on the arthritic tree of her body. Her rage is carrying her home to die.

  Dwn's heart beats against her ribs to think of the fury that has sustained the baroness all these years. Ailena Valaise had not always been a twisted old harridan, Dwn recalls, but she had been full of rage from the first. Even as a young girl, when Dwn, who had learned langue d'oc on the Norman estate where her father served, first met Ailena, the dark-haired, dimple-chinned girl was surly. Ailena had resented leaving the sunny, cultivated dales of the P6rigord for the mountainous wilderness of Wales. The only joy she expressed in those first years of her long unhappiness was the laughter that jangled from her whenever she released the small birds the earl trapped for his falcons. They were red-legged crows peculiar to Wales, and watching them spurt from their opened cages, Ailena's delight made her beautiful. "Welsh crows should not be pressed to feed Norman hawks," she said once, and the Welsh workers that the earl kept on his estate repeated it often enough to earn the dour Norman girl the Welsh nickname Servant of Birds.

  Dwn closes her eyes. These memories—keen as incisions— score her heart, and she soothes herself by thinking, Whoever is coming back, whatever angry hag will appear tomorrow, she will not he the Servant of Birds.

  That old friend died piece by piece years before her vicious son threw her out. The damp seeped into her bones and swelled her joints, the cold hardened her marrow, and the black wind that shivers the stars snuffed the last warmth from her heart long ago. Whoever is coming hack will not he she, Dwn admits, and curls around the darkness that is left to her.

  -/

  Waking slowly, Dwn sees first light slanting through the laths that shutter her round windows. Is it a dream? she asks and sits up so that the threads of gray light touch her haggard face and ignite the amber of her eyes. The laths across the round windholes in the thick wall of dung keep the cats out at night. Each morning, when she opens the shutters, a cat or two comes in to eat the small mice and voles that have crept under the door during the night. But this morning, she shoos the eager cat away, more eager herself to stick her grizzled head out the small hole and look for the gray horse.

  She blinks stupidly. The horse is gone, but there is a man squatting by the creek, drinking water from his hand, a large, ruddy man with a brown beard streaked orange above his lips and from the corners of his mouth. His hair is bowl-cut in the country style, but he wears no beaverskin mantle, nor the red leather leggings, and certainly no sword. Instead, he is dressed in a coarse blouse of dirt-colored cloth with a hemp belt. His trousers, too, are of cheap cloth, baggy and tucked loosely into crude and heavy leathern boots. Ha
d the moonlight addled her last night and made this common villein appear as a warrior-prince?

  "Where is your fine horse?" Dwn calls out from the windhole.

  Erec presses a finger to his lips and gestures toward the alders. There, budging through the morning mist, are the scrawny village pigs, six evil-eyed swine rooting along the creek bed for grubs. "The swineherd will not be far afield." Erec crosses the creek in one stride, scattering the wild cats from their coverts in the mint grass. Up close in the light, his countenance is harsher, more bellicose, the pale track of a lethal scar glinting across the bridge of his bent nose. Greenish-hazel eyes lock steadily onto the old woman's and hold her fast. "Think me no longer Howel's son. For now I am simply Erec, some distant cousin of yours from the hills, a tanner come to trade his hides."

  Over his shoulder, on the grassy tuft beside the hennery where they had sat last night, Dwn sees a bundle of animal skins. "Where is your fine steed? And your sword and mantle?"

  "They've strolled back into the hills with my guard." Erec winks cunningly. "Gather your frogs and your snails, old mother. We've no time to squander if we wish to see for ourselves the return of your baroness."

  -/

  Among the billowy drapery of ivy-hung alder and elm, on the way to the village, Erec says, "Tell me about Ailena Valaise. I was but a lad when she left for the Holy Land. All the grief in my life began then, for that was when Guy Lanfranc began his murderous raids, when his warmaster Roger Billancourt began killing our cattle rather than driving them to the castle. He could slaughter more than he could drive, and that was as good as killing the people, for it starved us."

  "Roger Billancourt—" Dwn makes a vile face. "He is a godless, evil man. He was wannaster to Guy's father, too. It was his idea to take our castle by cunning when Ailena was a girl in mourning—fifteen she was when the earl Bernard died of quinsy—fifteen when Gilbert Lanfranc married her by the sword—"