The Serpent’s Tale

at the gateway, where Eleanor was getting up on a horse.

Damn, damn it. She must talk to Rowley before they were separated. Whether she could do it unnoticed…and with a failed assassin in tow…yet she dared not let go of Dakers’s hand.

And Dakers was laughing, or, at least, a low cackle was emerging from the hood round her face. “What is it?” Adelia asked, and found that in taking her eyes off Rowley and the others she had lost sight of them. “Oh, be quiet.”

Agonized with indecision, she towed the woman toward the archway that led to the outer bailey and the entrance to the maze. The wind blew the servants’ cloaks open and closed as they milled about so that the golden lion of Aquitaine on their tabards flickered in the light of the torches. Soldiers, tidy in their padded jackets, tried to impose order, snatching unnecessary and weighty items away from clutching arms and restraining their owners from snatching them back. Only Eleanor was calm, controlling her horse with one hand and shielding her eyes with the other in order to watch what was being done, looking for something.

She saw Ward, like a small, black sheep against the snow, and pointed the animal out to Schwyz with a gloved finger as she gave an order. Schwyz looked round and pointed in his turn. “That one, Cross,” he shouted at one of his men. “Bring her. That one with the dog.”

Adelia found herself seized and hoisted onto a mule. She struggled, refusing to let go of Dakers’s hand.

The man called Cross took the line of least resistance; he lifted Dakers as well so that she clung on to Adelia’s back. “And bloody stay there,” he yelled at them. With one hand on the mule’s bridle and his body pinning Adelia’s leg, he took his charges through the archway and into the outer bailey, holding back until the rest of the cavalcade joined them.

Eleanor rode to the front, Eynsham just behind her. The open gates of the maze yawned like a black hole before them.

“Go straight through, Queen of my heart,” the abbot called to her joyfully. “Straight as my old daddy’s plow.”

“Straight?” The queen shouted back.

He spread his arms. “Didn’t you order I to learn the whore’s mysteries? Diddun I do it for ee?”

“There’s a direct way through?” Eleanor was laughing. “Abbot, my abbot. ‘And the crooked shall be made straight…’”

“‘…and the rough places plain,’” he finished for her. “That old Isaiah, he knew a thing or two. I am but his servant, and yours. Go, my queen, and the Lord’s path shall lead you through the whore’s thicket.”

Preceded by some of her men, one holding a lantern, Eleanor entered the maze, still laughing. The cavalcade followed her.

Behind them, Schwyz gave another order and a lit torch arched through the air onto the piled tinder in the guardroom…

The abbot was right; the way through the maze had been made straight. Alleys were direct passageways into the next. Blocking hedges revealed themselves as disguised, now open, doors.

Mystery had gone. The wind took away the maze’s silence; the hedges around them bent and shivered like ordinary storm-tossed avenues. Some insidious essence had been withdrawn; Adelia couldn’t be sorry. What she found extraordinary was that if the strange abbot who declared himself a devotee of the queen could be believed, Rosamund herself had shown him the secret of the way through.

“You know that man?” she asked over her shoulder. Flinching, she felt Dakers’s thin chest heave up and down against her back as the housekeeper began cackling again.

“Ain’t he the clever one.” It wasn’t so much a reply as Dakers’s commentary to herself. “Thinks he’s bested our wyrm, so he do, but that’s still got its fangs.” Perhaps it was part of her madness, Adelia thought, that there was no animosity in her voice toward a man who, self-confessed, had visited Rosamund in her tower in order to betray her to the queen.

They were through the maze within minutes. Swearing horribly at the mule, Cross urged it into a trot so that Adelia and Dakers were cruelly bumped up and down on its saddleless spine as it charged the hill.

The wind strengthened and drove snow before it in sporadic horizontal bursts that shut out the moon before letting it ride the sky again. As they crested the hill it slammed, shrieking, into their faces.

Adelia looked back and saw Rowley, Jacques, and Walt being prodded out of the maze by the spears of the men behind them.

There was a howl of triumph from Dakers; her head was turned to the tower-a black, erect, and unperturbed outline against the moon.

“That’s right, that’s right,” Dakers screamed, “our lord Satan did hear me, my darling. I’ll be back for ee, my dear. Wait for me.”

The tower wasn’t burning. It should have been a furnace by now, but despite broken furniture, oil, a draft, and a torch, the bonfire hadn’t caught. Something, some thing, had put out the fire.

Its door faced the wind, Adelia told herself. The wind carried snow and extinguished the flames.

But what couldn’t be extinguished was the image of Rosamund, diabolically preserved, waiting in that cold upper chamber for her servant to return to her…

It was a sad little flotilla at the river: rowing boats, punts, an old wherry, all found moored along the banks and commandeered by Schwyz’s soldiers. The only vessel of any substance was the barge that Mansur and Oswald and the Godstow men had brought upriver to collect Rosamund’s body. Adelia looked for Mansur and, when she didn’t see him, became frightened that the soldiers had killed him. These were crude men; they reminded her of the followers of Crusade armies passing through Salerno who’d been prepared to slaughter anybody with an appearance different from their own. There was a tall figure standing in the barge’s prow, but the man was cloaked and hooded like everybody else and the snow hindered identification. It could be Mansur, it could be a soldier.

She tried reassuring herself with the fact that Schwyz and his men were mercenaries and more interested in utility than the slaughter of Saracens; they would surely see the need to keep alive every skilled boatman they had to take them to Oxford.

The chaos that had reigned in Wormhold’s bailey was now redoubled as Eleanor’s people fought to accompany their queen on the Godstow barge-the only one with a cabin. If there was someone managing the embarkation, he was overwhelmed.

The mercenary Cross, in charge of Adelia and Dakers, waited too long for orders; by the time he realized there weren’t going to be any, the barge was dangerously overladen with the queen’s servants and baggage. He and the two women were waved away from it.

Cursing, he hauled them both along to the next vessel in line and almost threw them into its stern. Ward made a leap and joined them.

It was a rowing boat. An open rowing boat tied by a hawser onto the stern of the Godstow barge. Adelia shrieked at the soldier, “You can’t put us here. We’ll freeze.” Exposed to the lacerating wind in this thing, they’d be dead long before they reached Oxford, two corpses as rigid as Rosamund’s.

The boat shuddered as three more people were forced into it by another guard, who clambered in after them. A voice deeper than Adelia’s and more used to carrying overrode the wind: “In the name of God, man, do you want to kill us? Get us under cover. Ask the queen, that lady there saved her life.” The Bishop of Saint Albans had joined her, and her protest. Still roped to Jacques and Walt and at a spear’s end, he nevertheless carried authority.

“I’m getting it, aren’t I?” Cross shouted back. “Shut your squalling. Sit there. In front of the women.”

Once everybody was settled to his satisfaction, he produced a large bundle that turned out to be an old sail and called to his companion, addressing him as Giorgio, to help him spread it.

Whatever their manners, he and his companion were efficient. The wind tried to whip the canvas away from them, but Dakers and Adelia were made to sit on one end of it before it was looped back and up, bringing it forward so that it covered them as well as the three prisoners and, finally, the two soldiers themselves, who took their seat in the prow. Their efforts had been self-preservation; they were coming, too. With deliberate significance, Giorgio placed a stabbing sword across his knees.

The sail was dirty and smelly, and rested heavily on the top of everybody’s head, not quite wide enough for its purpose, so that covering themselves fully against the slanting wind on one side left a gap on the other. Ice formed