The Wanderer and the Way 12
A Trap Opens and Closes
This is Chapter 12 of The Wanderer and the Way. The full book is now available for preorder on Amazon for release on March 10.
Theodemir waited until Agnes had finished singing Prime. In his agitation, he could not compose himself to join his voice to hers, but he waited in the hope that the prayer would fortify her for the news he had to give.
She looked at him as soon as the Amen was sung. “You have news?” she said. His anxiety had penetrated even into her prayer.
“Your husband is dead, Lady,” he said.
“You are certain?” she asked. It was not grief that colored her words but caution.
“My uncle sent him into a trap. He believed your husband had become a danger to him, and so he gave warning of his coming to a Moorish governor and sent him to his death. Since he has not returned, we may now be certain he is dead and his men with him.”
“Your uncle is a cunning man,” she said. She went and sat on a bench that was out of the morning sun and looked up at him with a face that was full of calculation.
“Are you sure this was not said to deceive you?” she asked.
“He is cold when he lies,” he replied. “He was gleeful when he told me this.”
She leaned her back against the wall, closed her eyes, and breathed deeply. He could see that her mind was working, but slowly she began to shiver and then to quake and a great gush of tears came. He sat down beside her and put an arm around her back. She collapsed onto his shoulder, shaking and weeping. It was not in his mind to untangle all the threads of her sorrow or her fear, nor yet of the burden now lifted from her soul and the guilt she must feel for rejoicing in the death of a man, even a man she hated, though a man who loved her.
How to offer comfort for all of this was more than his wit could puzzle out, so he said the thing that was foremost in his mind, “You are free, lady,” he said, “You are free. You are free. You are free.” Yet even as he said it he knew, and knew that she knew, that the act that gave her freedom had also snapped shut the doors of a trap.
“Marry me,” he said. He knew even as he said it that he was rushing her with cruel impatience, but he had spent the night gazing at the rafters, working out in his head every possible means for her to escape, and now he was desperate to show her that escape was indeed possible. Indeed, it was easily within her grasp.
She pushed him away from her. “No, no, no!” she cried.
“Lady, hear me,” he begged. “My uncle has told me what he intends. The other women he means to sell, and their children with them. But you he means to make a concubine, like Fatima or Sakina. This is all because of me. I am supposed to be his heir. But I have thought to become a monk. He is trying to force me to marry so that I must decide for him and not for the Church. If I marry you, he will have his way, and I will be his heir. And I will do it with the gladdest heart. God has told me that you are my vocation. I understand it now. God directs me not to the Church but to you. Marry me.”
“No, no,” she protested, rising and walking away from him.
He rose and took her by the shoulders and turned her to him. “I am not the man you love,” he said. “If I could restore you to him, I would. But this is your escape. I must go as the king commands, but if we are married, my uncle has his wish. I will be a soldier. I will be his heir, and the blood of his line will continue in our children. You would become, in effect, the lady of this villa. As such, you could protect the other women and their children as well. And when I return, if my mission is a success, the king has promised me lands of my own, and we can be quit of my uncle altogether, have lands of our own, and find worthy men for the other women. It mends all. Marry me.”
She wrenched herself out of his grasp and ran away from him, down towards the river. She ran so fast and so straight that he feared that she meant to cast herself into the water and drown. He ran after her and was about to catch her when she collapsed on the bank weeping. He stood over her, not able to comfort her again, for fear he would seem a bully and bring not comfort but more pain. At last she raised her head and looked out across the water.
“No,” she said again. “No. I cannot marry you. It is true I do not love you, but what is that? I did not love Eric. Nor did any of the women in the village love the men they chose on that beach when Eric made them choose. They did not know them at all, except for how they looked. But most of them love their husbands now. Once their children were born, and they held them together, and wondered at them, and looked into each other’s faces, they loved their husbands, and their husbands loved them. And if we married, I am sure it would be the same. When we held our first child and looked at each other as it squalled and cried out for our aid and comfort, I should love you then as you love me now. Except then you would love me properly, not this strange mad love that comes to me unbidden from so many men, but proper love such as any man and any woman may earn by marrying.”
“Then lady, let us marry,” he said.
“No,” she said. “Don’t you see? I cannot marry. It is God’s curse on me for my sin. Any man I make a promise to dies. I made a promise to Drefan of Bamburgh, and that same day I broke it, and he died. And to mend that, I made a promise to Leif, and he died. And then, to save Mother Wynflaed and the other women, I made a promise to Eric. And now he is dead. I made a promise, and I broke it, and now God will never let me make such a promise again. If I married you, you would die.”
He argued gently, and he argued firmly. He argued wildly, and he argued soberly. He argued furiously, and he argued meekly. He argued that he would be glad to die for her sake. It made no difference. On this point she was certain, quite as certain of her curse as he was of his vocation. And in arguing thus, he unwittingly convinced himself that no impediment stood between them but her belief in this curse and that if ever she could be persuaded out of it, she would fall rapturously into his arms and they would marry and live a life full of delights, which only made him argue all the more ardently.
But at last he grew weary of argument, and saw that she was far more weary of it than he, and felt pity for her and sorrow for having badgered her so in her grief, and he said, “Forgive me, lady. I have made my case and I see I do nothing but weary you. So I will say no more on it. But you must come away with me when I go on the king’s business. You cannot remain here in safety.”
“No,” she said again. “I cannot leave them.”
“Leave who?” he asked. In his ardour he had forgotten the other women entirely.
“My sisters,” she said. “They are all here because of me. Eric came to Whitby because of me. And I chose them all to come with us and be wives to his men. They are my responsibility, and I cannot leave them.”
“But there is nothing you can do for them,” he protested. “My uncle will sell them and make you a concubine. That is the promise he has made, and he never speaks idly. There is nothing you can do but come away and save yourself.”
“I have to go and tell them,” she said, suddenly rising to her feet and walking off in the direction of the village.
He hurried after her. She turned and looked at him as if she had not expected him to follow. She stopped and looked at him. “I have to go and tell my sisters that our husbands are all dead,” she said.
“I will go with you,” he said.
“Why?” she asked. “What business is it of yours?”
He had followed because he felt himself to be her natural companion and support in all her woes, and yet he saw that she did not think him so in any part. It was a business between women that she went to do, a business between sisters, and she saw him only as an interloper on their grief.
“He is doing this because of me,” he said.
“No,” she replied. “He set this trap for Eric long before you arrived home. He is doing this because he was growing afraid of Eric. There was only ever one man that Eric would bend the knee to, and that man was Thor, and Thor is dead. Thor is dead, and the fault is mine. Witteric saw that Eric was growing restless, and he got rid of him to save his own skin. None of this is your fault. It is mine. And none of it is your business. It is mine.”
“We could take them with us,” he said desperately.
“A dozen women and as many small children, and half of the women pregnant and near their time? Don’t be absurd.”
“He will make you a concubine. He will use you as he had used Fatima and Sakina.”
“He will never make me into Fatima or Sakina,” she said, “He can beat me, and he can rape me, but I will fight with tooth and nail. I will never submit.”
“He will break you as he has broken them,” he said. “He knows the manner of it. Do not think you will resist in the end.”
“Nothing he can do to me will equal the suffering I have caused,” she said, looking him steadily in the eye, without any sign of the tears or quaking which has so lately afflicted her. “I will not break, because I am broken already. All I can do now is suffer as I deserve.”
“But I can spare you all that,” he pleaded.
She shook her head. “It is not your part to do so,” she said. Then she turned and resumed her path towards the village, leaving him too stunned and broken to follow.
The Wanderer and the Way is now available for preorder on Amazon for release on March 10.
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