The Serpent’s Tale

knights, in order to stop his enemies from getting in and his women from getting out.

The Norman’s descendants had been dispossessed in their turn by Henry Plantagenet, who’d found it a convenient place in which to install his mistress, abutting, as it did, the forest of Woodstock, where he kept a hunting lodge.

“Architectural vulgarity,” Sister Havis had called it, angrily. “An object of male lewdness. Local people are in awe of it, even while they jeer at it. Poor Lady Rosamund. I fear the king found it amusing to put her there.”

“He would.” Adelia knew Henry Plantagenet’s sense of humor.

And Rowley’s.

“Of course I can penetrate it,” the bishop was saying now, in answer to a question from Jacques. “I’ve done it. A wiggle to the right, another to the left, and everybody’s happy.”

Listening to the laughter, Adelia began to be sorry for Rosamund. Had the woman minded living in a place that invited, almost demanded, salacious comment from every man who saw it?

Poor lady. Even dead, she was being shown little respect.

With snow resting on the walls and branches of the surrounding labyrinth, the tower looked to be rising from a mass of white fuzz. Adelia was irresistibly reminded of a patient, an elderly male whom her foster father was attending and on whose body he was instructing Adelia how to repair a hernia in the groin. Suddenly, much to his abashed surprise, the patient had sustained an erection.

That’s what’s scrawled against the sky, she thought, an old man’s last gasp.

She turned on Rowley. “How. Do. We. Get. In,” she said, clearly, “and try to remember there’s a dead woman in there.”

He jerked a thumb. “We ring the bell.”

Transfixed by the tower, she hadn’t noticed it, though it stood only a few yards away on the hillside, next to a horse trough.

Like everything else belonging to Wormhold, it was extraordinary, an eight-foot-high wooden trapezoid set into the ground, from which hung a bell as massive as any in a cathedral’s chimes.

“Go on, Jacques,” the bishop said. “Ding-dong.”

The messenger dismounted, walked up to the bell, and swung the rope hanging from its clapper.

Adelia clung to her mare as it skittered, and Walt snatched the reins of Jacques’s to prevent it from bolting. Birds erupted from the trees, a rookery fell to circling and cawing as the bell’s great baritone tolled across the valley. Even Ward, most unresponsive of mongrels, looked up and gave a bark.

The reverberations hung in the air and then settled into a silence.

Rowley swore. “Again,” he said. “Where’s Dakers? Is she deaf?”

“Must be,” Jacques said. “That would waken the dead.” He realized what he’d said. “Beg pardon, my lord.”

For a second time the great bell tolled, seeming to shake the earth. Again, nothing happened.

“Thought I saw someone,” Walt said, squinting against the sun.

So did Adelia-a black smudge on the tower’s walkway. But it had disappeared now.

“She’d answer to a bishop, should’ve worn my episcopal robes,” Rowley said. He was in hunting clothes. “Well, there’s nothing for it. We can find our own way through-I remember it perfectly.”

He set his horse down the hill to the valley, cloak flying. Less precipitately, the others followed.

The entrance in the labyrinth’s wall when they reached it sent the men off again. Instead of an arch, two stone ellipses met at top and bottom, forming a ten-foot cleft resembling the female vulva, the inference being emphasized by the stone-carved surround in the shape of snakes coiling into various fruits and out again.

It was difficult to get the horses to enter, though the cleft was big enough; they had to be blindfolded to step through, showing, in Adelia’s opinion, more decency than the remarks made by the men tugging at their reins.

Being inside wasn’t nice. The way ahead of them was fairly wide, but blackthorn covered it, shutting out the sun to enfold them in the dim, gray light of a tunnel and the smell of dead leaves.

The roof was too low to allow them to remount. They would have to walk the horses through.

“Come on.” Rowley was hurrying, leading his horse at a trot.

After a few bends, they could no longer hear birdsong. Then the way divided and they were presented with two tunnels, each as wide as the one by which they’d come, one going left, the other right.

“This way,” said the bishop. “We turn northeast toward the tower. Just keep a sense of direction.”

The first doubt entered Adelia’s mind. They shouldn’t have had to choose. “My lord, I’m not sure this is…”

But he’d gone ahead.

Well, he’d been here before. Perhaps he did remember. Adelia followed more slowly, her dog pattering after her, Jacques behind him. She heard Walt bringing up the rear, grumbling. “Wormhold. Good name for this snaky bugger.”

Wyrm hold. Of course. Wyrm. In marketplaces, the professional storytellers-that the English still called skalds-frightened their audience with tales of the great snake/dragon that squirmed its way through Saxon legends just as the mimicking tunnels coiled through this labyrinth.

Wistfully, Adelia remembered that Gyltha’s Ulf loved those stories and played at being the Saxon warrior-what was his name?-who’d killed one such monster.

I miss Ulf. I miss Allie. I don’t want to be in the Wyrm’s lair.

Ulf had described it to her with relish. “Horrible it was, deep in the earth and stunk with the blood of dead men.”

Well, they were spared that stench at least. But there was the smell of earth, and a sense of being underground, pressed in with no way out. Which is what the Daedalus who concocted this swine intended, she thought. It explained the blackthorn; without it, they could have climbed a wall, seen where they were heading, and breathed fresh air, but blackthorn had spines that, like the Wyrm, tore flesh to shreds.

It didn’t frighten her-she knew how to get out-but she noticed that the men with her weren’t laughing now.

The next bend turned south and opened into three more tunnels. Still unhesitating, Rowley took the alley to the right.

After the next bend, the way divided again. Adelia heard Rowley swear. She craned her neck to look past his horse for the cause.

It was a dead end. Rowley had his sword out and was stabbing it into a hedge that blocked the way. The scrape of metal on stone showed that there was a wall behind the foliage. “Goddamn the bastard. We’ll have to back out.” He raised his voice. “Back out, Walt.”

The tunnel wasn’t wide enough to turn the horses without scratching them on head and hindquarters, not only injuring them but also making them panic.

Adelia’s mare didn’t want to back out. It didn’t want to go on, either. Sensibly, it wanted to stand still.

Rowley had to squeeze past his own horse to take hers by the bridle in both hands and push until he persuaded the animal to retreat back to the cul-de-sac’s entrance, where they could reform their line.

“I told you we should keep going northeast,” he said to Adelia, as if she had chosen the route.

“Where is northeast?”

But, irritated, he’d set off again, and she had to try and drag her reluctant mare into a trot to keep him in sight.

Another tunnel. Another. They might have been wrapped in gray wool that was thickening around them. She’d lost all sense of direction now. So, she suspected, had Rowley.

In the next tunnel, she lost Rowley. She was at a division and couldn’t see which branch he’d taken. She looked back at Jacques. “Where’s he gone?” And, to the dog, “Where is he, Ward? Where’s he gone?”

The messenger’s face was grayish, and not just from the light straining through the roof; it looked older. “Are we going to get out, mistress?”

She said soothingly, “Of course we shall.” She knew how he felt. The thorned roof rounded them in captivity. They were moles without the mole’s means of rising to the surface.