The Taming (Peregrine 1)

As they drew closer, she could smell the place. Over their own horses and the unwashed bodies of the Peregrine knights came the stench of the castle.

“My lady,” Joice whispered.

Liana did not look at her maid, but stared ahead. Helen had told her of the filth of the place, but she was not prepared for this.

They came first to the moat. All the latrines of the castle emptied into this protective body of water and it was thick with excrement as well as kitchen slops of rotting animal carcasses. Liana kept her head high and her eyes forward while, around her, her maids coughed and gagged at the smell.

They rode in single file through a long, low tunnel and overhead Liana saw three openings for heavy, spiked iron gates that could be dropped on intruders. At the end of the tunnel was a single courtyard, half the size of her father’s outer bailey, yet there were three times the people here. Her nose already outraged, now it was her ears’ turn. Men hammered hot iron on anvils; dogs barked; carpenters hammered; men yelled at each other above the noise.

Liana could hardly believe the noise and the stench of stables and pigsties, which looked as if they’d not been cleaned in years.

To her right a maid squealed and her horse sidestepped into Liana’s. Liana looked up to see what had frightened the girl. A urinal from the third story opened into the courtyard and now a heavy waterfall of urine was cascading and splashing down the wall into a deep puddle of filth on the ground below.

After the maid’s squeal,

neither Liana nor her maids said another word. They were too horrified to be able to speak.

To Liana’s right were two stone staircases, one leading to the single tower, the other to the lower two-story slate-roofed building. With this small castle there were no inner and outer courtyards, no separation of lord and retainer, but everyone lived together in this small space.

At the head of the stairs Liana saw two women. They searched the crowd of newcomers until they saw Liana, then one of them pointed at her and they both laughed. Liana could see they were maids, but the filth of the place made it obvious they did no work. She’d soon fix them and teach them not to laugh at their betters.

The girls sauntered down the stairs and as they rounded the short stone wall, Liana saw their figures. They were both short, buxom, small-waisted, big-hipped girls with lots of coarse dirty brown hair hanging in long braids down their backs. Their clothes were tight and revealing and they walked with an insolent, exaggerated sway to their hips. They strutted across the courtyard in a slow way that made their big breasts move under their clothes, and most of the men stopped to watch them.

As a knight helped Liana from her horse, she saw the maids ooze their way toward Rogan. He was yelling at some men about the Neville wagons, but Liana saw him glance down at the girls. One of them turned and gave Liana such a look of triumph that Liana’s fingers itched to slap her face.

“Shall we go inside, my lady?” Joice said meekly. “Perhaps inside it’s…” Her voice trailed off.

It was obvious that her husband was not going to show her her new home and by now Liana didn’t expect him to. Assuming that the staircase the insolent maids had used led to the lord of the manor’s quarters, she lifted her skirts and went up them, kicking bones and what looked to be a dead bird out of the way as she ascended.

At the top of the stairs was a large room, the doorway partitioned off by what once must have been a beautiful carved wooden screen, but now axe heads were buried in the wood and nails had been driven into it to hold maces and lances. Through the wide wooden doors of the screen, one of which hung by only one hinge, was a room about forty-five feet long by twenty-five feet wide, with a ceiling as high as the room was wide.

Liana and her maids stepped into this room in silence because no words could express what they saw. Filthy would not describe it. The floor looked as if every bone from every meal that had been eaten in this room for over a hundred years was still on it. Flies swarmed around the maggot-covered bones, and Liana could see things—she refused to consider what things—crawling about under the thick layer of refuse.

Spider webs with fat occupants hung from the ceiling almost to the floor. The double fireplaces at the east end of the hall had three feet of ashes in them. The only furniture in the room were a thick, heavy table made of a slab of blackened oak and eight scarred, broken chairs, all covered with grease from years of meals.

There were several windows in the room, some of them fifteen feet above the floor, but the glass and the shutters were gone, so the smell of the moat, the courtyard, and this room mingled.

When one of the maids behind her swooned and began to faint, Liana wasn’t surprised. “Stand up!” she commanded, “or we’ll have to lay you on the floor.” The girl uprighted herself immediately.

Taking her courage in her hands, as well as her silk skirt, Liana made her way across the room to the stairs in the northwest corner. These too were covered with bones, straw crushed to powder, and what was possibly a dead rat. “Joice, come with me,” she said over her shoulder, “and the rest of you remain here.”

Up eight stairs was a room, opening to the left, and a toilet, to the right. Liana just looked into the room but did not enter it. It contained a small round table, two chairs, and hundreds of weapons of war.

Liana continued up the circular stairs, a timid Joice behind her, until she reached the second floor of the tower. Before her was a short, low round-topped hallway, and a few feet along it was a door leading off to the right. This was a bedchamber with a filthy straw-filled mattress on the floor, the straw so old, it was merely two pieces of coarse wool on the floor. A latrine led off this room.

Joice stepped forward and put her hand down as if to touch the two blankets heaped at the foot of the mattress.

“Lice,” was all Liana said, and moved on down the hallway.

She entered the solar, a large, spacious room filled with light from the many windows. Along the south wall was a wooden staircase that led up to the third floor. A rustle overhead made Liana look up. Along the carved corbels that held the ceiling beams were wooden perches and here sat hawks, all of them hooded and jessed. There were peregrines, kestrels, merlins, goshawks, and sparrow hawks. The walls were coated with bird droppings, which had dripped down to form hard hills on the floor.

Liana lifted her skirt higher and went across the filthy floor to the east side of the room. Here were three arches, the center one creating a little room, one wooden door barely hanging, the other missing. Set in the stone wall was a little piscina, the basin used by the priest for ablutions after mass.

“It is sacrilege,” Joice whispered, for this was a private oratory, a holy place for the saying of mass for the family.

“Ah, but here we have an excellent view of the moat,” Liana said, looking out the window and trying to bring some humor into this hideous place. But Joice did not laugh or smile.

“My lady, what shall we do?”