ON MOORSTEAD
Louisa Trent
Trent Publishing
www.louisatrent.com
Copyrighted Material
Copyrighted Material
ON MOORSTEAD
Louisa Trent
Copyright © Louisa Trent 2012
Published by Trent Publishing at Smashwords
The reign of Edward the Confessor, the year 1051, England
(Fifteen years before the Norman invasion of William the Conqueror)
ON MOORSTEAD,
’Tis eventide. And deep within a darkling fen of heath and heather, an Anglo-Saxon witch dances by moon-glow,
Whilst a brooding Norman lord watches transfixed.
Around them swirls a smoky scent:
Mossy peat. Magical potions. Medieval passions.
And malicious politics.
Prologue
The hunting party was gaining on Avice.
To the well-trained hounds, she was quarry, differing not at all from the hare or the fox. If the vicious pack caught up to her, the dogs would bring her to ground. Rip her apart, limb-by-limb, too -- should the order for blood-spill be given by the mastiffs’ owner.
Gralam of Normandy.
Begging for charity from the warlord would do her little good. The noble beastmaster who gave chase here today had no understanding of mercy. In his jaundiced opinion, she amounted to sport, a respite from his courtly ennui. And citing her virtue would only earn her his royal ridicule as one and all raped her. Mayhap, the assault would end a few violations short of actually killing her. Then again, most likely not.
Nobles were perverted pigs. Swill-eating swine, the lot of them. Boars rutting in the mud owned more decency than those snout-whiskered brutes.
Avice held a hand to the achy stitch in her side. Why, oh, why had she taken it into her head to go walking alone at cockcrow?
She should have piggin’ known better. Venturing outside her little cottage whilst the new warlord entertained visitors up at his tower fortress amounted to naught short of a fool’s folly. Just as surely as rats nested in thatched roofs, Gralam of Normandy had spied her strolling through the woodlands. Straightaway, he had put aside his quest for red deer in favor of pursuing her rosy tail.
Well, no wide-eyed doe was she. No common trull for the taking. Neither jaw-snapping dogs nor their cruel royal owner would find her easy pickings.
Avice hunched her shoulders and rounded low. She wore a scratchy wool gunna the same hue as dirt. The hunting party would be less apt to see if she remained close to the spongy earth, where carking bindweed had choked out all vegetation save for a few tenacious betony plants. Taking care not to get tripped up in the vines, she jumped a tumbled-down fieldstone wall. The lichen-covered rocks were all that remained of a once prosperous farm, marauding Danes having burnt everything else to the ground long ago.
Tyranny and neglect had almost obliterated the moor folk. One invader after another had plundered the land and enslaved its populace. This current influx of Norman nobles -- all friends of King Edward the Confessor -- was more of the same.
Bugger them all. No man enslaved her.
Sweat beaded her upper lip. Avice swiped it away. Narrowly avoiding an unearthed tree root here, a bent sapling there, she cast her sights to the horizon.
A brook twisted and turned up ahead, its watery depths dividing fallow pasturelands from overgrown woodlands. If she braved the stream’s fierce currents, the lead dog might lose her scent. The noblemen who pursued her would have to scratch their pox-riddled bollocks to alleviate their boredom, then.
For all that the aequinoxium had come and gone a fortnight since, spring had yet to awaken the dormant earth and thaw the ice-jammed waters. No help for it, Avice gritted her teeth and took the plunge.
Ack. The frigid waters chilled even her hot witch’s blood.
Sopping wet to the skin and shivering to the bone -- courting ague for sure -- she emerged on the opposite side.
And the snarling hounds, tracking the acrid smell of her fear, kept coming. The hunting party was too close, much too close for her to shift her shape now.
The moors. She must reach the heaths and heathers. Every rabbit warren, every foxhole, every rotted-out tree stump was familiar to her there. As a child, she had often squirreled herself away in their musty enclosures to daydream. Those hidey-holes promised her sanctuary now.
Doubts assailed her. What if she stumbled? Fell? What if the peat bogs remained forever beyond her reach? What then, what then? Dear goddess, what then?
No choice then. Save death.
Avice snickered to herself. Not her own death, of course. If there was a mortal choice to be made this new morn, the barons, not she, would bear the brunt of it.
Though -- the high-ranking stink of all those rotting corpses might prove difficult to explain, as well as deadly to others.
Due to the mysterious circumstances surrounding the kill, the Confessor would blame witches. In a quest to root out heretics, the king would send inquisitors from court to their tiny village. Descending on the moors like locusts, these inquisitors would torch every hut in their search for justice, the guiltless inhabitants within incinerated by royal decree.
A shudder shook Avice from head to heel, and back up again. Someday, she might indeed meet her fate on the faggots, but never would she take innocent lives with her. This situation called for a more discreet use of her powers. An alternative she had best come up with right quick.
A single steed approached at a steady cantor. No ordinary moor rouncey was this. The animal closing in on her was a warhorse, a charger trained to do his rider’s bidding unto death.
Her heaving chest fit to burst, her breaths shallow and ragged, Avice whirled about and looked the lone courser directly in the eye.
Discharge your rider, Equus!
At her unspoken command, the dark steed reared and bucked, unseating his equally dark rider…
…just as a hedgehog appeared from out of nowhere and darted across the trail.
Its duty to her done, the spiny creature then scurried away. After proving an excuse for the mishap, Avice released the steed from her mind-connection.
Your task here is finished, Equus. Go, and take my thanks with you.
Empty-saddled, the destrier bolted, presumably galloping for the stables up at the tower-fortress, and Avice gave over her attention to the fallen nobleman.
Gralam of Normandy, himself.
To hide her identity, Avice quick showed him her back.
“The hunting party arrives any moment, and they will expect amusement,” the new overlord of the moors said from behind her. “Strip off. Bare to the skin.”
Like piggin’ hell!
Avice dove for the trees.
A whoosh split the air and came with a dagger attached. The throw’s mighty force slammed her into a gnarled oak, leaving her unscathed, but deftly pinned at the drooping shoulder of her too large gunna. A fur mantle sailed past her nose and dropped at her feet.
Gralam of Normandy rasped, “The coins within the cloak are yours. For the inconvenience.”
Inconvenience! Is that what the new overlord called rape?
Whether freely given or harshly stolen, a forfeited maidenhead left a woman naught with which to barter for marriage. Along with carrying the taint of promiscuity, she also faced the very real possibility of growing a big belly. With no way to feed a hungry babe, save the age-old one, many a good maiden ended up on her back.
And the Norman thought a few miserly coins would compensate for that lifetime of misery?
Avice stared at the rich fox cloak, luxurious fur garb signifying noble wealth and lordly prerogative, and something inside her snapped. Just. Snapped.
On a surge of defiance, she stepped out of her run-down boots. A rip and a pull freed her threadbare wool gunna and thin linen tunica from the pinning knife. Save for the coif covering her hair, she stood naked.
And proud. Eat dung and die, Norman.
The new overlord had other ideas.
“Don the fur and run, wench.”
Gralam of Normandy thought to garb her as a fox for the amusement of his hunting party, did he?
The Norman’s cruelty tasting like a bitter herb in her mouth, she bent over. Mooning the new overlord full on, she reached for the cloak. The coins -- the price of her maidenhead, the payment for her inconvenience -- rattled.
The clinking of precious metal did little to drown out a decidedly male groan.
Not a groan of carnality. A groan of suffering. After dodging many a groping hand and tending more than a few hurting moor folk, she knew the difference between the two.
Bundled up in the mantle, the deep hood disguising her face, Avice turned to consider Gralam of Normandy.
Agony had bleached his swarthy skin and contorted his handsome enough features. The unnatural angle of his left leg told of a broken the bone, the ragged whiteness of which jutted out from the skin. If ever he walked again, his gait would contain a pronounced limp. At best, he would go through the rest of his days pain-wracked and shuffling, a vestige of his former self.
Unless she interceded on his behalf.
After administering a sleeping draught of mandrake, poppy and vinegar, she could pull the broken leg straight. Set properly on a stout oak splint, the bone would knit as strong as before. He would walk again, run again, ride again --
Rape again, too.
Nay!
As barking hounds crashed through the trees, she silently moved her lips.
Softhearted witches burnt at the stake, cruel nobles burnt elsewhere, and only a piggin’ idiot would heal someone who would condemn her for her troubles.
After laying a curse on the Norman’s head, Avice took off at a run, leaving the overlord lying there, crumbled and broken on the ground.
Chapter One
After tossing and turning in bed for hours, Gralam gave up on the notion of sleep, threw off his fur pelt covering and stared up at his solar’s vaulted ceiling.
Why would she not leave him alone?
She being the young peasant wench he had rescued from certain rape. Every eve she would invade his bedchamber high within the walls of his tower-fortress and fling a heaping platter of derision in his face. Rather than lavish him with well-deserved accolades for saving her questionable peasant honor, she accused him of something -- he knew not what -- as he hovered on the cusp of sleep. Little wonder he had given up on the pastime.
“Fiendish night terror,” he shouted into the darkness. “Begone!”
But nay, she stayed on, a constant source of irritation. A twelvemonth since a riding accident had claimed the use of his leg, and she bothered him more than his disability.
Christ’s bones. Why did the wench detest him so?
Verily, her belligerence confounded him. How dare she hate him, a powerful overlord of the realm? In comparison to his importance, a lowly serf such as she had no more worth than the muck that coated his boot soles. Why, she should have dropped to her knees and kissed his feet in gratitude for his intervention on her behalf. After all, he had given her his best fur cloak, paid for her inconvenience in coin, told her to flee, and then waylaid his hunting party until she could get away -- all accomplished at great personal cost to himself.
And by that he did not mean his mangled leg.
His House of Wessex guests had not taken kindly to having their rape-sport cut short. That little wench had single-handedly ruined his chances of currying courtly favor, royal influence he needed to save his skin, anti-Norman sentiments being what they were in this damp and dismal country.
Dragging himself from the tangled tick, Gralam took up his second-best cloak and his newly carved walking stick and left his private quarters for the parapet, where he would limp back and forth until dawn. Sometimes, however, exercise lessened his leg cramps and exhaustion would finally claim him. Then, he would fall asleep against the battlements…if fortune smiled favorably upon him.
A long shot. As the puffy baggage beneath his eyes would attest, of late, luck frowned on him more often than grinned.
Whilst shuffling along the parapet’s notched wall, he pondered the identity of his nocturnal accuser.
Maddening how he had caught only a fleeting glimpse of her, and that through a thick fog of discomfort. If they danced nose-to-nose -- something else he could no longer do -- he still would not recognize the little tart.
Unless, perchance, she glared at him. Then, he would recognize her immediately. She had done quite a bit of glaring, as he recalled.
What had he done to warrant her animosity?
Even his political opponents, many and virulent within the Confessor’s court, refrained from exhibiting such unmasked revulsion of his person. The same went for mortally wounded enemies on the battlefield. Warriors everywhere understood the impersonal nature of killing. After all, there but for a mightier sword, the honor of death might just as easily have gone to them. Not even his father showed him such personal contempt, his sire basing his scorn on cold principle, not on any actual heated feeling. Never had Gralam come up against anything as hotly intimate as his nocturnal accuser’s regard.
And that included in bed. Like a bonfire, her wrath singed him to the quick.
Gralam ran a hand wearily over his heavy lids and down his gaunt cheeks. Since the accident, he had become something of a ghoul, hollowed-eyed and sunken-cheeked and always in a foul mood. Nowadays, he rattled chains wherever he went. All because of her. What more could he have done for her? What more had she expected him to do?
“Speak, peasant wench. Speak!” Mayhap the billowing winds would carry his shouted command to wherever his accuser lived.
He waited. When no return answer was forthcoming, Gralam bunched his black cloak around his shoulders and, leaning heavily on his walking stick, left the tower.
The stone walls were closing in on him. Trapping him. Suffocating him. To breathe freely, he must escape the palisades.
Without any further awareness, he found himself outside the gates, across the drawbridge, and en route to the moorlands, a fey region of secret pagans, supposed fairies, and not to forget -- although he would dearly like to -- the subjects he ruled.
His populace. Aloof peasants of small stature, crafty ideas and odd customs. As an outsider, he walked -- rather, limped -- warily there.
Peat squished under his boots, the scent of fetid decay withering his nostrils, altogether gagging him. Ashes looped high above his head, the smoky ring leading him further into the bogs he so detested.
Before he saw her, he heard her, chanting some unintelligible verse that assuredly had no basis in Church dogma. And what did he do? Run -- er-- shuffle away? Hide? Make the Sign of the Cross, as any rational and cautious God-fearing Norman overlord would do?
Alas, nay. He did none of those things. He merely stood there, irrationally under the stars, incautiously out in the open, his sleep-deprived eyes widened.
On her, an otherworldly reed of a female.
Her unbound hair competed with the night in hue. The looseness signified her looseness. Its abbreviated length reflected her waywardness. Or, at the very least, her distinct lack of Christian piety. Decent women did not wear their hair cropped like a hedgerow. Long hair was a good woman’s crowning glory.
Ergo, she was not a good woman.
Her jaggedly cut tresses captivated him, nevertheless.
Squinting in pain from his long journey, Gralam tried to make sense of it all. Lack of sleep could play tricks on the mind. Had he perchance conjured her up?
Too late, he realized, ’twas the other way round.
“You are cunning folk,” he said, his tentative explanation giving them both an easy way out. “You deal in herbs, not spell casting.”
She shook her head. “Nay. I use aromatic plants to practice the Dark Arts. Sorcery.”
Despite his father’s often repeated pronouncement to the contrary, he was no coward. Yet, at her blatant confession of witchcraft, he fell back a pace or two. “Good Lord! What magic do you perform?”
“Now, let me see.” Tip-tap. She drummed her pointed chin with two fingers. “I employ a fetch, talk to the dead, and change my shape at whim. A white gyrfalcon is my favorite disguise.”
“Why not a black cat?” he asked facetiously.
She wrinkled her nose. “Lacking in imagination. But any animal will do me in a pinch, even uninspired ones.” The saucy puss grinned, tilted her lovely jaw to entice.
Having none of that, he asked with a sneer, “Are you a seer?”
“Nay. More is the pity. Alas, the goddess deprived me of that handy skill. I grope about in the dark, the same as everyone else, when it comes to prophesy and foretelling.”
“Can you read minds?”
“Again -- nay.”
“Just as well,” he muttered under his breath.
“But I do have my strengths. Without resorting to boasting, suffice it to say, with the assistance of spirits, I hold supernatural power over others. What you heard, what you followed, what brought you here to me tonight, was my rune to you. As explanations go, this one is a broad sweep of the broomstick to be sure. I do, however, believe my answer covers the extent of my abilities. Any further questions?”
Aye. Why was the Cyclops in his braies suddenly ramming against the linen for release?
He could hardly ask her that question, though, and her inability to read his mind relieved his.
After the accident, he had lost his potency. And limp as grass, he had remained to this day. To have his virility return, and so auspiciously, caused his suspicions to rise.
Along with his cock.
Not that he was lamenting this change. Far from it. ‘Twas only that -- of a temperate habit, he had never before experienced such a powerful carnal urgency. His rearing manhood left him more than a little confused. Delighted, naturally, but still somewhat taken aback.
Christ’s boner -- er -- bones. Did the one-eyed monster levitate as a by-blow of this female’s natural charm? Or, had another sort of charm, sinister in origin, resulted in the return of his lost vigor?
Gralam sniffed the air.