Shields of Pride

Chapter 19

‘Christ’s nails,’ Ironheart wheezed before his voice was robbed from him by the innocuous-looking clear liquid in his cup. ‘What is this stuff ?’

‘Don’t tell me you’ve never sampled usquebaugh before!’ scoffed Conan, sloshing a liberal amount into his own drinking horn and passing the flask to Joscelin. It was part of the meager spoils bludgeoned from a party of Galwegians earlier in the day as the Scots retreated over the Tees, pursued by de Luci’s hastily mustered army.

Ironheart rubbed his throat. ‘God, it’s barbaric!’

Conan laughed. ‘Give it time, my lord. Their usquebaugh’s like their women - rough at first, but soon your blood’s so hot that you don’t notice.’

‘That depends where you keep your brains.’

‘Same place as yours.’ Conan straddled a camp stool. ‘I saw you eyeing up that laundry wench when we were setting up camp.’

Ironheart made a disparaging sound and took another tentative sip of the fiery pale-yellow brew. This time his throat did not burn quite so much. A warm glow was spreading from his stomach into his veins, comforting him against the evening chill. Autumn came earlier in the north. Up here on the Scots border, the leaves and bracken were already burnished gold. He stared into the heart of the fire until the heat made him blink and acknowledged that he was becoming too old to go on campaign. His body ached with the effort of keeping pace with younger men and his mood was tetchy. Knowing his limitations did not make accepting them any easier. Perhaps he ought to spread the laundry wench on his cloak and comfort himself with her softness, except that he had an aversion to the women of the camp, an aversion rooted in deep fear. He raised his cup to his lips, took a full swallow this time and told Joscelin to pass the flask.

His son darted a look at Conan but handed it over without comment.

‘What’s wrong, don’t you believe I can handle my drink?’ Ironheart snapped. ‘Good God, the night you were whelped, Conan’ll tell you I drank him under the trestle and walked away damned near sober.’

‘Usquebaugh is not wine, sir. You’d not be able to stand up if you drank that flask to the dregs.’

Ironheart was tempted to prove the opposite but resisted. Joscelin had spoken with the conviction of experience. ‘Where did you learn that, as if I didn’t know?’ He scowled at Conan.

Joscelin’s eyelids tensed. ‘In a disease-ridden camp on the road to Falaise,’ he said. ‘It bought me oblivion for a time.’ Rising to his feet, he left the fire and went to check their horses. Ironheart watched him pause at a captured Galloway pony tethered beside the packhorses and destriers. It was a young but sweet-natured mare with a fox-chestnut hide and silver mane and tail. Ironheart knew that Joscelin intended her as a mount for Robert de Montsorrel, knew everything and more than he wanted to know about the woman and child because Joscelin talked of little else - a besotted fool. The usquebaugh burned in Ironheart’s stomach like a hot stone - or perhaps it was bitter envy mixed with the corrosive lees of memory.

Sparks hoisted their way into the darkness on ropes of smoke. A soldier softly played the mournful tune of ‘Bird on a Briar’ on his bone flute. Conan took out his needle and thread and began mending a tear in his hose. Nearby, two soldiers played dice, gambling for quarter pennies. Joscelin returned to the fire, threw on a couple more branches, and sat down.

William drank, then raised one wavering forefinger at his son. ‘It was on a night like this that I met your mother. Has Conan ever told you the tale?’

‘You’re drunk,’ Conan said with a perturbed look in his eyes. ‘Whatever you say now, you’ll regret it in the morning.’

Ironheart answered the question himself. ‘No, he hasn’t.’ His lip curled. ‘But I wouldn’t expect him to boast his part abroad.’

‘So help me God, William, I’ve made my peace with you and her. I’ll not have you drag it out of the tomb again because you cannot hold your drink!’ Conan said sharply.

Ironheart hunched his shoulders and, ignoring Conan, faced Joscelin. ‘I was sitting at a fire like this one, drinking some poison from Normandy that dared to call itself wine and eating bread with weevils in it, when a young Breton mercenary approached me and begged for employment. Begged,’ he emphasized with a fierce look across the flames.

Conan sat very still. A groove of muscle tightened in the hollow of his cheek.

‘Sir, if you want to speak about this, do it tomorrow when you’re sober,’ Joscelin said.

Ironheart looked down at the restraining hand Joscelin had laid on his sleeve. ‘I won’t want to talk when I’m sober. No, you sit here and listen; it’s time that you knew.’ He shook Joscelin off and raised his cup in toast to Conan. ‘As it happened, I needed men and decided that if he was useful with a sword, I would hire him. In the meantime, soft fool that I was in those days, I let him sit at my fire and share my supper. Imagine that. I might as well have invited a wolf to dinner!’

‘You were as glad of my company as I was of the warmth,’ Conan said with quiet anger. ‘And when I asked if you had employment for my sister, too, you immediately jumped to the conclusion that she was a whore.’

‘It was the way you said it and the way she came to the fire with neither wimple nor veil to cover her hair.’

‘She was a virgin; she didn’t have to wear a head covering to be respectable.’

Ironheart’s laugh was caustic. ‘God’s toes, I’m not stupid. No man in his right mind would allow his sister to walk around an army camp with her hair uncovered, especially if she was a virgin. It would be an incitement to rape if ever there was one. You knew what you were about, Conan. You thought you’d use Morwenna to make sure of your position in my retinue. A clean untouched lass would be certain to appeal to a man who was finicky about using the camp sluts and had been a long time from home. It’s the truth, isn’t it?’

Conan chewed the inside of his mouth. ‘She was a virgin,’ he said thickly. ‘And it was her own idea to remove her veil, not mine. We had argued about it earlier. She said that she was sick of traipsing the mercenary route never knowing where the next meal was coming from and that she intended finding herself a provider. I came to you genuinely seeking employment, hoping we could settle somewhere for a while and that she could work as a seamstress or lady’s attendant, but Morwenna saw you and wanted more.’

Ironheart gulped the last mouthful of usquebaugh. ‘You didn’t stop her when she loosened her braids and you didn’t refuse the silver I paid you for her maidenhead. ’

‘No,’ Conan bit out. ‘You’re right. I was enough of a whore myself to sell her to you. Would to God that I’d kept away from your banner that night.’

‘Amen to that!’ Ironheart snarled and looked at the son he had begotten on that long-ago campaign. Morwenna’s clear, beautiful eyes watched him across the firelight. He remembered her laughter, her willfulness and her impudence that sat so at odds with his ideal of women. He remembered her hair in his hands, dark and heavy and cool, the predatory demands of her body that took his own by surprise, although she had indeed been a virgin. And suddenly all the usquebaugh in the world would not have been enough to grant him oblivion. His eyes burned and filled with moisture and his chest and throat tightened. ‘I need a piss,’ he said and, lurching to his feet, staggered off in the direction of the latrine pit.

Conan put his face in his hands for a moment, then lifted his head and looked at Joscelin. ‘I should never have taken the usquebaugh from that Galwegian,’ he said bleakly.

‘Was that what really happened between him and my mother? I have never heard him speak of it before.’

‘More or less. I knew she was determined to make his bed her haven. She told me that she would give her maidenhead while she had a choice. You know how hard it is on the women of the camp; their men are killed in battle and they become the spoils and chattels of the survivors. Morwenna saw her freedom in your father.’ Conan rubbed his scar. ‘I don’t suppose it was a strange choice back then. He was a handsome man in his younger days and he had presence and a way of smiling that turned women to water. I could see she was set on him. The silver was incidental. I did not mean what I said about being whore enough to take it from him. As far as I was concerned, it was a bride price.’

Joscelin’s mind filled with a faint but evocative recollection of his mother’s thick dark hair and her hand touching his head. A glint of laughter. The memories must be painfully intense to the grown man who had possessed so much more and lost everything. ‘Perhaps it was too high for him to pay,’ he said softly, his eyes upon the tall shadow beyond the firelight.