One

LEOBA knew she did wrong but at the same time she did not know. It was exactly as Lord Uric had said. In some cruel way the King owed her a life. It was impossible for her to think of her new lover as anything but a ‘lord’. She could as easily call him ‘Uric’ as take to the skies with the meadowlark. Such familiarity might imply a feeling of warmth between them and she was aware that this was not the case. He was a wolfish man, this Kentish ambassador, and was she, a cattlemaid of the royal holdings, any less of a hunter.

Milking cows was something she did carelessly but expertly. After all she had been doing it for an age of summers. When the other maids spoke to her she barely answered. Her head rested against the strong flank of the cow and she felt its comfort against her cheek. The tallows on several upturned pails dotted about the shed flickered with a smoky light and provided scarcely enough for the milkmaids to see what they were doing. A child of less than seven winters with lively inquisitive eyes kneeled next to her in the dirty straw. Where the child had come from Leoba had no idea. She knew only that she had been sent as a chattel to learn the milking. In twenty or thirty winters, if she survived everything the elves or evil might throw at her, she would still be here in exactly the same place. Unless she found a suitable man to marry her. She was a pretty child with cornflower eyes and nut brown hair and so it was not hopeless. Leoba motioned for the child to grasp the udder, which she did with uncertain twig-like fingers. The cow, which Leoba had chosen for its especially good and friendly nature, fidgeted a little as it sensed the inexperience of the child. But soon with Leoba’s guidance the milk bounded under the small new hand into the wooden bucket.

‘What is your name?’

‘Leofrida,’ the child answered. ‘I keep missing the bucket.’

‘Do not worry,’ Leoba said gently, ‘you have the idea. Strong but soft. Strong but soft. Like this.’ She took over the milking and the cow turned its broad accepting head around to momentarily regard them both.

‘Why do they chew and chew like that?’ the child asked. ‘They never finish breakfast.’

‘Ha!’ Leoba said. ‘Are you hungry?’

The child nodded.

‘Well when the cart takes the milk up to the kitchens we shall go with it.’

The child unexpectedly flung her arms around Leoba almost unsettling her on the stool.

‘Do not waste your love on me,’ Leoba said. ‘I am not worth it.’

The child withdrew, seeming not to understand, and unhappily looked at her hands. Leoba knew what the child was feeling but for some reason she chose not to comfort her.

‘Queen Ealhhild is an early riser and she likes her morning milk,’ Leoba told the child.

‘I can go with you?’ Leofrida said hopefully.

‘Not this morning. Perhaps next.’

‘I want to see the Queen.’

Leoba raised her hand and the child, as if familiar with the signal, retreated into the corner. She watched as the child crawled through the straw and over to where another cattlemaid was milking. This other maid told Leoba there had been no need to frighten the child. ‘She has done no wrong,’ she chided.

‘You look after her then.’

There were a few streaks of blood in the glow toward the sea like mottling in the yolk of an egg. Already the dew was leaving in wisps from the long summer grass. The day would be hot again. Leoba lugged the wooden milking pail toward the Queen’s chamber. It was quite a step from the byres to the royal halls. This was one of her chores, as a familiar and trusted cattlemaid, to bring the Queen’s morning milk. Of course it was not a chore it was an honour. Or at least Leoba had to pretend that it was so. She stopped to retie her hair for too many strands had come loose from the tail. She was a large-boned woman but not particularly tall. Her face, with its broken slope of a nose and mild grey eyes starred about with lines, had obviously seen much of life. It was like a cloth that has been used countless times to polish a table but it was not without a certain worn charm. She wiped her hands on her dress and took a handful of milk from the pail. It was neither warm nor cold. Exactly as the Queen liked it. There was an iron brooch which held her dress at the shoulder and in its circle was the likeness of an owl. It was Leoba’s protective spirit and the brooch had been a gift from her mother. She felt for it in a reassuring way and, thinking of her mother now, she was determined to complete what she had arranged.

She left the wooden bucket and came away from the path, picking up her dress over a knot of bramble, and in the twilight under the trees, unstrung the leather purse that hung from her belt. Inside the purse was a small glass vial which even in itself seemed to her exotic. The glass of it was sea green under a liverish sky. It had a ground glass stopper. She shook it and watched the tiny beads of powder, which looked greyish and unpleasant, dance around the inside. She felt a strong desire to put some on her tongue. There was more than enough to fell an ox. Or so Lord Uric had said. She did not understand why he wished to be rid of the Queen but accepted that the world of intrigue in which he moved was a world as far above her as the morning star which shone weakly overhead. Her heart felt like a horse that was galloping away. There was something else in the purse. A large garnet with a subtle rosy water that seemed almost fragrant in its beauty. The kin called these stones ‘blood berries’ and the irony was not lost on the woman who held it in her clammy palm that this really was a bloodstone. Her mouth was as dry as the ashes in a burial urn.

She took up the pail again and strode forward with a determined twist to her lip. She had the ability to become as unfeeling as a piece of flint, an ability she had discovered in the grasp of many a selfish man, and it was this useful ability that she engaged now as the track led her through a copse of trees and into the open and rising ground of the noble halls. Her heart, which still thundered away, she was unable to control, but her mind was set and free for the moment, of conscience. The Queen was heavily pregnant but Leoba did not examine this extra consequence to her act. She had asked the thane why she should not kill the King himself but Uric had persuaded her that he hardly wanted the King dead and that if she should succeed in killing him how then should King Radwald feel the pain that she herself had felt? She would be relying on his ghost to feel it. A most tentative proposition.

In the porch of the Queen’s sumptuous hall she exchanged pleasant words with the ancient woman who attended mostly closely to the Lady Ealhhild. This woman, known simply as ‘Nurse’ to most of the population of Rendlesham, appeared older than the hall, which itself had been standing longer than living memory. Her bones, worn of all suppleness, seemed to grind rather than roll together and she used a crutch of ash to aid her slow and painful locomotion. This particular morning Leoba had the milk ready in the wooden beaker that she used as a scoop and the nurse did not inquire why this was so as she watched Leoba tip it into the glass that she had brought from the Queen’s personal collection. Nurse Gudrun was a reader of the weather and Leoba asked her what the yellow bruising she observed in the sky to the east might mean.

‘The sky is like the punched face of a woman, Leoba. Is it not?’

Leoba shrugged. ‘Not really.’

The nurse looked at her as if a little irritated that her assessment of what the sky was like should be disputed.

‘It is the Lady of the Dawn is it not and does not her face look battered?’

‘I suppose,’ Leoba said, hesitantly. ‘If you say so.’

‘I do say so,’ the nurse insisted. ‘I do say so.’

‘Well I must leave you,’ Leoba said. ‘Please wish the Lady Ealhhild well for me.’

She began to descend the steps of the porch with her pail of milk.

‘There is a new god and the Lady says that he is a woman hater.’

‘What new god?’ Leoba enquired, turning for a moment to face the old crone.

‘The god of these Kentish men.’

‘Do not worry,’ Leoba told her. ‘Lord Ing fears no other god and the Goddess hardly needs protecting.’

‘Why then is the Lady fretting?’

‘She is close to her time,’ Leoba said, smiling. ‘It is natural that she should fret.’

The nurse shook her head and then something unforeseen occurred that threatened what Leoba had accomplished. The old woman stumbled and the glass of milk she held tipped and slopped at least half its contents to the floor.

‘You clumsy old fool!’ Leoba cried, for she could not help herself, and flew up the steps to take the glass from the old woman’s hand.

‘What is happening?’ an imperious voice demanded from within the chamber.

‘It is no matter my Lady,’ Nurse Gudrun called. ‘I have spilt the milk that is all.’

‘Well fill the glass again,’ the voice advised. ‘Am I to die of thirst?’

‘What are you doing?’ Leoba almost screamed, because the nurse seemed about to tip the rest of the glass away. ‘Half of it is good, Nurse. The portion that remains is good why throw it?’

The nurse allowed Leoba to add more milk to the glass from her pail.

As she left for the kitchen halls Leoba did not feel like eating breakfast but she must take the rest of the milk as she did every day and she would force herself to eat something. She felt as if she had swallowed a giant stone. She could feel it sitting in her stomach. Away from the incident she wondered if she should not have let Nurse Gudrun pour away the rest of the glass. That man was a demon and he was in her bed. He had possessed her and it was he who had done it. This, at least for the moment, was how she thought of it and it was a means of putting one step in front of the other. And it was not that she wished to return to make certain, it was that she now found herself wishing that the Queen might survive. Yet only a short time before she had been set on the feudal justice of her death.

The kitchen halls, of which there were two of impressive size, were busy feeding the working men and women of the estates, all of whom had been up at first light, attending to the first of an endless series of daily chores, as Leoba and her fellow maids of the oxen had risen to do the milking. The soldiery, billeted in the various warrior halls which were established only a field away, would throng to the kitchens a little later, and the thanes and lords collected about the King himself in the splendid gabled hall would rise still later with the expectation that breakfast would be already set before them. The Queen usually took her first meal with only Nurse Gudrun for company. She rarely appeared unless suitably attired and most of the morning she gave over to her religious preoccupations. A cloaked shadow might be seen moving between the trees behind the Queen’s hall and people knew that there was a sacred grove of the Goddess not far from there. This area of the woodland was out of bounds and it did not require a soldier to guard it. Fear of offending the Goddess or the Lady Ealhhild, and most ordinary folk found it difficult to distinguish the two, was more than sufficient to keep the ground holy.

The strip of gammon that Leoba forced down with a beaker of milk seemed to want to strangle her from the inside. She made forced conversation with her fellow chattels. It was late summer and the talk was greatly of the harvest. A young servant girl of the King’s hall was being teased about her, as yet unrequited, obsession with a handsome blade of the Rendlesham fyrd. Leoba, as an experienced woman of thirty winters, wanted to warn her that all men were trouble but she knew herself to be the worst follower of her own advice and so she kept silent. Lord Uric’s voice was in her head. He told her that the Queen was as fatted as any sacrifice and that a bitter cattlemaid had dealt her more than enough death to bring her down.