The Wanderer and the Way 13
The Parting Cup
This is Chapter 13 of The Wanderer and the Way. The full book is now available for preorder on Amazon for release on March 10.
Theodemir tried to reason with Witteric, but his uncle merely watched him with amusement, as he might have watched a rabbit in a snare helplessly straining and kicking against the cord that knotted itself ever tighter around its leg. This was his revenge for Theodemir having found the king’s favor, the very revenge that Alphonso had warned Theodemir about, though it took a more diabolical form than any the king had imagined. The beauty of it was that, as Agnes had understood, it was a piece of cruelty long-planned and subtly executed for entirely other reasons. All that was required to make it into Witteric’s revenge on Theodemir was to rub Theodemir’s nose in it, which he did by dressing Fatima and Sakina in dresses that were the perfect echo of Agnes’s simple linen smock belted with a knotted cord, and cutting their hair short like hers, and making them sing psalms while they fondled him and pressed their bodies against him.
This performance was repeated each evening until Theodemir refused to take his meals in the dining room but went to the kitchens for bread and cheese and small beer, which he carried down to the bank of the river to eat alone. He hoped that Agnes would observe his loneliness and join him for company’s sake or that Elswyth would invite him to join the women and their children for the evening meal in the village. But this did not occur. Of how the women of the village had received the news of their widowhood or what, if anything, they were planning to do to prevent Witteric from placing the yoke of slavery on their necks, he did not learn. He did ask Agnes about it on the day after their first interview, for Agnes continued to come to the villa and keep its gate just as she had done before. But Agnes had rebuffed his inquiry. The strain did show on her face. For all its perfection of form and complexion, he could see the signs of tiredness around her eyes and of strain around her mouth. This did not make her any less perfect in his eyes, but she became perfection in agony, beyond all his power to touch or to redeem. It could never be said that she welcomed his presence or had ever sought him out or longed for his coming, but she had at times tolerated him and even shown him some kindness and interest. All that now ceased. If he attempted to join his voice to hers in prayer, she would stop singing and stand stock still until he went away. If he intruded beneath her willow in the heat of the afternoon, she would go and stand on the flagstones of the courtyard where the full sun beat down on her and echoed heat from the stone walls so that it was painful even to put a hand to the ground, and there she would remain, wilting in the heat, until he quit the willow and left it to her private occupation.
After the third day, he let her be and focused on his preparations for the journey. It truth, there was not a great deal to do, for Alphonso’s scribe had impressed upon him that as ambassador, all his wants on the journey would be provided for by the caravan. He had only to provide his horse, a spare mount, his clothes and footwear, a hat against the sun, and any such companions, to the limit of four, whom he wished to bring with him. In the matter of companions, he found himself defeated. The companions of his youth were scattered, and he had not made the connections with the young noblemen of the district that a man in his position should have made. He was not in any position to recruit any but the rankest flunkies and hangers-on to accompany him on such a long and tiresome journey. And, knowing the form that Witteric’s vengeance was taking, he felt no need of companions willing to watch his flanks or his back, and so he recruited no one at all. Nor did Witteric put any obstacle in the way of his preparations, for he had no intention of interfering with the king’s business. He provided Theodemir with an excellent mare and another as good for a spare and even pressed upon him a fair sum of money, explaining as he did so the many trials of the road and the means by which a man with ready money might avoid them. He had only one aim in this, to force Theodemir to marry Agnes and thus anchor him to the life that Witteric intended for him. It made no difference to his uncle that Theodemir protested that he would gladly do so if the lady would consent. A man, Witteric maintained, could get the business done if he had the will. Getting the business done, against whatever defense the lady might mount, was, indeed, the necessary sign that Theodemir had become the kind of man that Witteric wanted him to be. Agnes was to be tamed and ridden, and it was only a matter of whether Theodemir or Witteric was to be the rider who broke her.
Since Witteric had provided him with all the usual necessities for a long journey, there was only one item of preparation which Theodemir had to complete for himself, and this he was able to arrange after some number of inquiries around the district and a small sum of silver exchanged with a man of particular talents. And so the week quickly passed, and a messenger arrived from the king’s captain, Hathus, that the party would assemble in the church yard of Santa Maria in Iria Flavia at the third hour of the following day. Thus on the day fixed for his departure, Theodemir, dressed for the road, with his main horse saddled and bridled and his spare horse laden with all that he had packed for the journey, stood by the gate as the sun was rising, waiting for Agnes to come from the village to assume her post on the gate.
When she arrived, she looked at him dully, the expectation of suffering written on her face. “Farewell, Lord,” she said. “I pray for the success of your embassy.”
“It is not too late to come with me, lady, and escape all of the suffering that my uncle intends for you.”
“I thank you, lord,” she said, “But my answer must be the same. I cannot leave my sisters. I am bound to them and must suffer with them.”
“Will you kneel with me and say a prayer together?” he asked.
“If you wish, lord,” she said, her voice as dull as it was before.
They knelt together while the sun flushed over the sky and threw out long shadows from every stone and tree and prayed together the prayer of prayers, the Pater Noster. And then, without asking her consent, he sang, “Oh God, come to my assistance. Oh Lord, make haste to help me,” and thus began the office of the dawn. She sang it with him, without protest, and there was in her voice that morning a lilting wistfulness such as he had never heard from any tongue and which almost stripped him of his manhood and his purpose. And yet also, it affirmed his purpose even more. When the office was complete, they rose together, and Theodemir took a wineskin from his saddlebag and indicated two cups that stood on the bench where she often sat in the shade.
“Will you take a cup with me, lady, to mark our parting?”
She avoided his eye but said, “If it will please you, lord. If it will ease your mind, I will.”
He went ahead of her and filled up the two cups, taking one for himself and indicating that she should take the other.
“I salute your courage, lady,” he said, “which is far greater than mine. I salute your loyalty and your honor, which alike is far greater than mine, and I pray that the Holy Ghost will be with you in all your trials and will never let your despair of the love of God.” Then, with tears in his eyes, he drained his cup.
“You reckon your own merits too meanly, sir,” she said, and drained her cup in turn.
“I hope you will keep firm in that opinion, lady,” he said.
“Oh, I cannot get used to this Spanish wine,” she said. “It is strange on my tongue and querulous in my belly.”
“There is a great cure for tribulations in this vintage,” he said gently.
She looked at him quizzically. She opened her mouth, but though her lips moved, she made no words. She began to slump sideways, but he put out an arm to prevent her from falling. And then she slowly tilted forward until she was slumped over his shoulder. He lifted her gently, delighting in the lightness of her. He laid her across the pack on the second horse’s back and secured her there with a rope, then covered her with a blanket. He unhooked the gate and led both horses through, then clambered up over the gate to secure it from the inside before clambering over it again, mounting his horse, and leading the second horse, with Agnes, concealed and insensible, tied across its back.
Hathus was a man of middle height and middle years, stocky but not fat, greying at the temples, with a flat, weathered face, scarred above the brow. His face was one that did not easily show emotion, but which at rest had a somewhat grim and resolute aspect, as if soldiering was so engrained in him that he wore the face of battle even when at rest.
“I am glad to see that my ambassador is at least prompt and can find the place agreed upon,” he said when Theodemir rode into the churchyard. Twenty soldiers and their horses were assembled there, along with a string of spare horses and ten wagons, each heavy laden and equipped with a mule and a driver. “I hope that your companions will show the same discipline,” the captain continued. It was clear from his tone that he thought that the men he was to convey to Aachen were likely to give him more trouble than all the perils of the road combined.
“No one else is coming,” Theodemir replied. “I have every faith in the king’s captain and the men he commands. I need no other comrades.”
“And what about the girl,” Hathus asked.
“A girl?” Theodemir asked, astonished at the question.
“The king said that he thought there was likely to be a girl. He said that if there was, I was to tell you from him that you are a fool. But he also told me that I was not to interfere with any corporal works of mercy.”
Theodemir got down from his horse and went to the captain. “In truth,” he said, “I am just the fool that the king thinks I am.”
“Are we to wait for this girl, then?” Hathus asked.
“She is on my second horse, asleep,” Theodemir said. “I want to put her in a wagon until she wakes, but not in the town where she may be seen.”
“You are a damn fool,” Hathus said gruffly. “I say it for myself as well as for the king.” He walked over to Theodemir’s second horse and looked under the blanket. “You gave her a surgeon’s draught?” he asked.
Theodemir nodded, looking around to make sure they were not observed. He was not sure whether or how far Witteric would pursue the caravan when he found Agnes missing, but he hoped at least to leave some doubt in Witteric’s mind as to whether Agnes might have fled on her own, knowing what treatment awaited her once Theodemir was gone.
Hathus licked the back of his hand to wet it and held it to Agnes’s mouth and nose. “She is breathing, at least,” he said. “But I hope you have reckoned your dose correctly. Surgeons kill as many with their potions as they do with their knives.”
“The man who prepared it was most specific,” Theodemir said, but he was trembling a little, for when he had lifted Agnes, she had seemed lighter to him than he had expected, and he wondered if he had given the man who prepared the draught a proper estimate of his patient’s weight.
“Well, she will be as comfortable there as anywhere until she wakes,” Hathus said. “If she wakes,” he added darkly. “But good God, man, is this what the king meant by a corporal work of mercy? I’ll have no truck with woman thieving or murder, nor yet with concubinage. I’ve daughters, and I’ll not aid any man to treat any woman as I would not have my daughters treated.”
“I am saving a woman of noble blood from being reduced to concubinage,” Theodemir said.
“Then why did you need to drug her,” the captain asked.
“There are others I cannot save,” Theodemir said. “She would not leave them. But she is my vocation. I will save her before all other causes, and even against her own will. If your daughter were determined to allow herself to be beaten and raped rather than abandon her friends, what would you do?”
“I’d put her on a horse, and her friends be damned if I had not the means to save them,” Hathus said.
“Then we are of one mind,” Theodemir said.
Hathus sighed deeply. “Easy to say such a thing,” he said. “But false men say fine and wise things sometimes, when they mean to deceive.”
“This woman is my vocation,” Theodemir said. “If the king’s caravan will not take us and guard us, I will take her alone. I would not fail the king, but I put her safety and her virtue above my duty to the king. Call me false for it, if you like. But if you think me false, go back to the king and tell him that his embassy to the court of King Charles failed before it left the churchyard.”
“Oh, God save me from men who will put a woman before their king,” Hathus exclaimed.
“Why does any man follow a king if not for the safety of his womenfolk?” Theodemir replied.
Hathus considered this. “That may be,” he said after a moment’s thought. “But a wise man will not say such a thing in the presence of his king, nor yet of his ministers, nor of anyone who does not wish him well.”
“Are you one who does not wish me well?” Theodemir asked.
Hathus let the blanket fall back over the still form of Agnes. “Mount, you damn fool,” he said. “Let’s not waste any more of the cool of the morning.”
The Wanderer and the Way is now available for preorder on Amazon for release on March 10.
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