“Why, to their wives, of course!” she retorted indignantly. “What else keeps us warm at night? What gives us the children we so dearly desire?” She set a work-roughened hand on the sleeping infant. Drying blood stained her coarse fingernails. “Take what else you will from me, my lord, but not that which is most important to me!”
At this, the soldiers all began to laugh uproariously and even John guffawed. “I can’t defend myself against such an argument,” he cried. “Very well, then. You may have your husband back unharmed. But tell me, woman, I must have some means to discipline those who take up arms against me. If your husband fights me again, what may I remove?”
The young woman hesitated only a moment. “He has feet, hands, a nose, eyes. Take what you will of the things that belong to him, but I pray you, leave to me that which is mine.”
This speech sent the soldiers into another great round of laughter. Theophanu, too, smiled slightly as the woman’s husband was unchained from the rest of the wretches fated to go under the knife. “I hope her husband is worthy of such a clever wife,” she said as woman, man, and baby were escorted away.
But Rosvita bent lower, to speak more softly. “I am thinking,” she said slowly, “that if one woman can come out of the city, then another can get in.”
* * *
“I am against it,” said Brother Fortunatus. “What if you are caught?”
“I am a cleric,” insisted Rosvita. “Lord John is unlikely to harm me. It he takes me prisoner, I will appeal to the skopos in Darre.”
“Then let me go with you.”
Rosvita indicated the pallet on which poor young Constantine lay moaning, clutching his belly. He had foolishly drunk from standing water and now had a flux. “You must safeguard the books, Brother,” she said to Fortunatus, “and care for young Constantine. Even if he were well, he’s still too young and inexperienced, and I couldn’t trust him to watch over things as you can.”
The arduous trip over the mountains had stripped Fortunatus of both bulk and humor. He frowned now. “Sister Amabilia could have talked you out of this.”
“Nay, Brother. She would have insisted on coming with me.”
That forced a laugh from him, but their leave-taking was somber.
The sun had not yet risen; mist muted the edges of camp and made the tents into hulking beasts hidden by cloud. From among her women Theophanu had chosen Leoba, who was tall, strong, and a trifle reckless, to accompany Rosvita. Too many sent together would attract notice; one deacon alone might attract mischief. With her face and figure concealed in a cleric’s robe and hood, Leoba waited for her at the edge of camp together with the two guards who would escort them through the lines. The dawn mist robed them in secrecy as they passed through undergrowth, crossed a narrow stream, and then left the guards behind at the farthest sentry post on the lip of the flat plain. The hill on which the gates and towers of Vennaci stood shone in mist and the first glimmer of the sun. They walked across empty fields to one of the old paths on which laborers had once made their way back to the safety of the city walls at night.
The trail lay dusty and level as they walked along, following the path of an irrigation ditch half overgrown with weeds. Everywhere she saw the legacy of conflict: ripe barley unharvested, fallow fields that should have been sown with winter wheat instead grown waist-high with weeds, a distant herd of cattle trampling through a stand of oats. Adelheid’s people could not come out; Ironhead either had sufficient supplies, or he chose to leave the fields to rot as a message to the people trapped within the walls.
The young noblewoman said nothing as they walked, kept her hood down over her face to disguise her Wendish features. The loose robe disguised her body but could not hide her height. Even here, alone, she kept silence: practiced it, Rosvita supposed, for the time when Rosvita’s skill at dissembling would see them through the lines or find them exposed and taken prisoner.
John Ironhead might be merciful and take a ransom for them, or he might be stubborn. Rosvita knew better than to dwell on such thoughts. Yet she was glad enough of Leoba’s silence and the careful way she concealed herself from view. As they walked, Rosvita rehearsed her speech, trying quietly on her tongue the slurs and lisps with which these northern Aostans disfigured the clean sounds of Dariyan.
Ironhead’s main encampment lay to the west. Here along the northern wall where only a postern gate opened along the river, his guards had set up watch posts. They had been here long enough that some had built shacks, and there was a brisk business with prostitutes who now left those same shacks in twos and threes to slip back into town, hands clutched over coins or gripping scarves wrapped around bread and cheese. A few vendors had come from town, too, cloaked by night, and now here at dawn they packed up their wares, gorgeous silks, linens, silver spoons, such luxuries that, in the face of dwindling food supplies, might not seem so important when children cried with hunger.
“Here, Sisters! Where have you come from?” The guard who stopped them had greasy hair, and a thread of meat had caught in his yellowed teeth.
“Which kind of sisters?” cried another guard, snorting with laughter as he grabbed roughly at their hoods. He yanked back Rosvita’s hood and they all exclaimed over her northern paleness; then, with a stick, he prodded back the hood that concealed Leoba.
Rosvita’s heart curdled with fear. It was not Leoba at all. Yet surely she should have known what would happen when the princess acquiesced so graciously as Rosvita insisted that it would be too dangerous for Theophanu herself to attempt to slip through the lines. If Ironhead’s men caught them, he would have a noble prisoner to ransom and a sharp blade to hold over her father’s head. Obviously her words had fallen on deaf ears. Theophanu neither flinched nor showed any expression as the guards poked at her with their sticks. Clearly they had not been in Ironhead’s camp yesterday: they did not recognize her.
The thought hit her at random, like the voice of the Enemy whispering of betrayal: no person seeing Sanglant for the first time could mistake him for anything but a king’s son. But without her retinue, it was impossible to know how exalted Theophanu’s status was.
“Mayhap we should turn these over to Lord John,” said the greasy guard.
“We are good deacons of the church, as you can see,” said Rosvita coldly, slurring and lisping her words as much as she could manage. The anger she did not need to feign, and if she spilled it out on them, then perhaps she would manage not to betray her anger at her lady for putting herself in such jeopardy. “We have come all this long walk from the archbiscop’s palace at Raveni because we heard that many women have fallen into disrepute due to this siege, which disturbs God’s peace. We mean to lead them back onto the path of righteousness.”
“Is there much bread on the path of righteousness?” demanded the greasy guard, and this jest earned him a round of laughter from his companions.
“There is no bread sweeter than God’s forgiveness,” retorted Rosvita sternly. “Will you pray with us, Brothers?”
Bu they didn’t want to pray; they were satiated, and bored, and saw no threat in two deacons crazy enough to want to enter a besieged city. But they were alert enough to argue.
“We’ve orders not to let anyone go in. You’ll bring them news.”
“Oh, hell, Aldericus, the whores take news in every day. You can’t tell me that you don’t squeal out bits of gossip before, during, and after. Half those whores are spies for the queen.”
“Lady’s tits, for all we know, one of them whores is the queen! That’s a hot line of women, they say, going back to old Queen Cleitia when she ruled Darre. They say she took no less than six husbands and made every new presbyter prove himself to her on her couch and the ones she liked best were forced to satisfy her again and again and again until she tired of them or a handsome new face come along. It’s no wonder she warred with the skopos, who in those days was of a similar mind. That’s all women think about!”