The Serpent’s Tale

hear Rowley stamping. “Does the woman know what in hell she’s doing?”

She began to doubt it herself. There was one tormenting question: Are the hedges continuous? If there was a gap, if one part of this maze was separated from the rest, then they could wander until it suffocated them.

As the tunnels darkened, the shadows conglomerated into a disembodied face ahead of her, malignant, grinning, mouthing impossible things. You won’t get out. I’ve closed the clefts. You are sewn in.

You won’t see your baby again.

The thought made her hands sweat so that the riding crop slipped out of her grasp and, in clutching for it, she bumped into the hedge and set off a small avalanche of frozen snow onto her head and face.

It refreshed her common sense. Stop it, there’s no such thing as magic. She shut her eyes to the gargoyle and her ears to Rowley’s curses-the nudge had set off a shower all along the line-and pressed on.

Walt said, as if passing the time of day, bless him, “’Tis marvelous to me how they do keep this thorn in trim. Two cuts a year, I reckon. Needs a powerful number of men to do that, mistress. Takes a king to pay them sort of wages.”

She supposed it was marvelous in its way, and he was right, the maze would require a small army to look after it. “Not only cut it but sweep it,” she said. For there were no clippings on the paths. “I wouldn’t want my dog to get a thorn in his paw.”

Walt considered the animal pattering along behind Adelia, with which he had now been confined at close quarters for some time. “Special breed, is he? Never come across his like afore.” Nor, his sniff said, would he rush to do so again.

She shrugged. “I’ve got used to it. They’re bred for the stink. Prior Geoffrey of Cambridge gave me this one’s predecessor when I came to England so that I could be traced if I got lost. And then gave me another when the first one…died.”

Killed and mutilated when she’d tracked down the murderer of Cambridge children to a lair a thousand times more awful than this one. But the scent he’d left to be followed had saved her then, and both the prior and Rowley had ever since insisted that she be accompanied by just such another.

She and Walt continued to chat, their voices absorbing into the network of shrubbery enfolding them. Walt had stopped despising her; it appeared that he was on good terms with women. He had daughters, he told her, and a capable wife who managed their smallholding for him while he was away. “The which I be away a lot, now Bishop Rowley’s come. Chose me out of all the cathedral grooms to travel with un, so he did.”

“A good choice, too,” Adelia told him, and meant it now.

“Reckon ’twas. Others ain’t so partial to his lordship. Don’t like as he’s friend to King Henry, them being for poor Saint Thomas as was massacry-ed at Canterbury.”

“I see,” she said. She’d known it. Rowley, having been appointed by the king against their wishes, was facing hostility from the officers and servants of his own diocese.

Whether the blame heaped on Henry Plantagenet for the murder of Thomas a Becket on the steps of his own cathedral was justified, she had never been sure, even though, in his temper, the king had called for it while in another country. Had Henry, as he’d screamed for the archbishop’s death, been aware that some of his knights, with their own reasons for wanting Becket dead, would gallop off to see it done?

Perhaps. Perhaps not.

But if it hadn’t been for King Henry’s intervention, the followers of Saint Thomas would have condemned her to the whipping post-and nearly had.

She was on Henry’s side. The martyred archbishop had seen no difference between the entities of Church and of God. Both were infallible. The laws of both must be obeyed without question and without alteration as they always had been. Henry, for all his faults the more human man, had wanted changes that would benefit not the Church but his people. Becket had obstructed him at every turn, and was still obstructing him from the grave.

“Me and Oswald and Master Paton and young Jacques, we was all new to our jobs, see,” Walt was saying. “We didn’t have no grumble with Bishop Rowley, not like the old guard, as was cross with him for being a king’s man. Master Paton and Jacques, they joined selfsame day as he was installed.”

So with the great divide between king and martyr running through the diocese of Saint Albans, its new bishop had chosen servants as fresh to their roles as he was to his.

Good for you, Rowley. Judging by Walt and Jacques, you’ve done well.

The messenger, however, was proving less imperturbable than the groom. “Should we shout for help, my lord?” Adelia heard him ask Rowley.

For once, his bishop was gentle with him. “Not long now, my son. We’re nearly out.”

He couldn’t know it, but, in fact, they were. Adelia had just seen proof that they were, though she was afraid the bishop would receive little satisfaction from it.

Walt grunted. He’d seen what she’d seen-ahead in the tunnel was a pile of rounded balls of manure.

“That un dropped that as we was coming in,” Walt said quietly, nodding toward the horse Adelia was leading; it had been his own, the last in line when they entered the maze. The four of them would soon be out-but exactly where they had started.

“It was always an even chance.” Adelia sighed. “Bugger.”

The two men behind hadn’t heard the exchange, nor, by the time the hooves of the front two horses had flattened them in passing, did just another lot of equine droppings have any significance for them.

Another bend in the tunnel. Light. An opening.

Dreading the outburst that must follow, Adelia and her horse stepped through the cleft leading out of the Wyrm’s maze to be met by clean, scentless cold air and a setting sun illuminating the view of a great bell hanging from a trapezoid set in a hill they had descended more than two hours before.

One by one, the others emerged. There was silence.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Adelia shouted into it. She faced Rowley. “Don’t you see, if a maze is continuous, if there aren’t any breaks, and if all the hedges are connected to each other and you follow one of them and stick rigidly to it wherever it goes, you’ll traverse it eventually, you must, it’s inevitable, only…” Her voice diminished into a misery. “I chose the left-hand hedge. It was the wrong one.”

More silence. In the dying light, crows flapped joyously over the elm tops, their calls mocking the earthbound idiots below.

“Forgive me,” the Bishop of Saint Albans said politely. “Do I understand that if we’d followed the right-hand hedge, we could have eventually reached the destination we wanted in the first bloody place?”

“Yes.”

“The right-hand hedge?” the bishop persisted.

“Well…obviously, to go back it would be on the left-hand again… Are you taking us back in?”

“Yes,” the bishop said.

Lord, Lord, he’s taking us back in. We’ll be here all night. I wonder if Allie’s all right.

They rang the great bell again, in case the figure they’d seen on the tower’s walkway had relented, but, by the time they’d watered the horses at the trough, it was obvious that he or she had not.

Nobody spoke as loins were girded and a lantern lit. It was going to be very dark in there.

Rowley swept his cap off his head and knelt. “Be with us, Lord, for the sake of Thy dear Son.”

Thus, the four reentered the maze. Knowing that it had an end made their minds easier, though the cost of constantly twisting and turning and backing out of the blind alleys was higher now that they were tiring.

“How’d you learn of mazes, mistress?” Walt wanted to know.

“My foster father. He’s traveled extensively in the East, where he saw some, though not as big.”

“Proper old Wyrm, this, i’n it? Reckon there’s a way through as we’m not seeing.”

Adelia agreed with him. To be girded to this extent from the outside world would be an intolerable inconvenience; there had to be a straighter route. She suspected that some of the blind ends that appeared to be stone and hedge walls were not lined by masonry at all; they were gates with blackthorn trained over them that could open and shut on a direct path.