The Devil’s Diadem by Sara Douglass

I turned my head slightly to look around the clearing.

Scores of knights and soldiers, all mailled, helmeted and weaponed, had either killed or driven away the Teulu.

There were silver-backed wolves sniffing about the dead bodies.

This company — knights, soldiers, horses, wolves, Edmond — could not possibly have charged en masse into this clearing along a track on which horses could barely manage a stumble in a single line.

This was impossible. It was a dream. I was already dead.

Another vicious band of searing heat encircled my belly, radiating into my back and hips, and I cried out.

‘Maeb!’ Edmond’s mailled hand gripped my shoulder.

‘Maeb, for sweet Jesu’s sakes, is it your time?’

I managed a nod, then cried out once more, clutching at Edmond’s hand. He muttered a curse, then tried to rise.

I gripped his hand with both mine, my despair and fright giving me abnormal strength, and would not allow him to stand.

‘Jesu, Maeb,’ Edmond muttered, then managed to turn enough to shout to one of the knights.

‘Odo! The women! Bring the damned women!’

Oh, he had brought women with him, too. This dream thought of everything.

I screwed my eyes shut with the next contraction and wished desperately for a tight, closeted warm chamber with a thick bed smothered in coverlets. Surely this dream Edmond could provide that as well?

There was a scurrying of feet and then I heard Isouda, Ella and Gytha crying at my side: ‘My lady! My lady! My lady!’

They would be dead also, and thus sharing my dream.

‘I will leave you with your —’ Edmond began, and I gripped his hand even harder, the links of his maille gauntlet pressing deep into the flesh of my fingers.

‘Don’t leave me,’ I said.

‘Don’t go … don’t go.’ I thought that if I let his hand go everything about me would vanish and I would be cast adrift in the blackness of death with this terrible, terrible pain.

‘My lord,’ said Isouda, ‘where is she wounded? This blood … there is so much of it …’

I could hear the horror in her voice.

‘It is not her blood,’ said Edmond, nodding to the dreadful corpse to one side, ‘but Madog’s.’

Now I gave a loud cry as the pain got immeasurably worse. I felt an unbearable urge to push, and knew the baby was only moments away.

‘We need clean cloth,’ said Gytha, who had very suddenly become quite voluble. ‘Water, if you can manage it. A clean knife. Blankets. But we must have clean cloth.’

Edmond just stared at her.

‘Arrange it!’ snapped Gytha and, amid all my pain, dislocation, and disbelief that any of this was actually happening, I thought that a woman who could command a king in this manner was a woman worth keeping by my side.

Edmond once again turned his head and bellowed for the hapless Odo.

I don’t know from where, but Odo did manage to find clean cloths, a single blanket and a clean knife. There was no water save for what some of the knights carried in their drinking skins, but Gytha and the other two women coped with what they had.

I gripped tight onto Edmond’s hand and, with the king by my side, the corpse of a Welsh prince by my shoulder, and half of the royal court’s knights standing about, gave birth to a son in that blood-soaked clearing.

When Isouda lifted him, wrapped in a woollen cloth, and laid him in my arms, I marvelled that both he and I had survived these past few days.

‘My lord king,’ I said to Edmond, who, now that his hand was free, had stripped off his gauntlets and was rubbing his hand which was red with welts from my terrible grip.

‘My lord king, how is it that you are here? And my women … I thought you dead and yet here you be, too.’

Edmond glanced at my women, who left it to him to answer.

‘If truth be told, Maeb,’ Edmond said, ‘I think none of us here truly know. I think it is a tale that will be told about fires for many years to come. And we will tell it to you, but not here, not now.’

Edmond had his men construct a litter for me and the baby, as well as one for Henry’s body, and we slowly made our way back through the mountains. The wolves had long gone and I thought I must have imagined them. The company who had ridden with Edmond into that clearing where Madog had been about to kill me numbered among them many nobles that I knew from court, and who had travelled with Edmond on his funeral procession from Elesberie to Hereford. Robert de Lacy, Lord of Bouland and Alianor’s husband, was here, as was Gilbert de Clare, Earl of Pembroke. Saint-Valery had come, too, and fought with the best of them.

They took turns riding by my litter, exchanging conversation, telling me how Adelaide’s funeral went, and, in Saint-Valery’s case, reciting great lengths of poetry, all of which was meant to entertain me and keep my mind from the uncomfortable jolting of the litter. They did not press me for details of what had happened to me, or to Prince Henry, and did not mind if, as often happened, I slipped into sleep.

I wanted to sleep.

Eventually, we came on the clearing where Gilbert had been tied to the stake.

The stake was still there, and the ground about soaked with blood, but his body was gone.

I thought the bears must have dragged it away to eat.

Edmond asked who had been tied here, and I told him.

‘Ghent? Are you sure?’ he said.

Was I sure? ‘It was Ghent!’ I said, a trifle tersely.

‘Who else?’

Edmond exchanged a look with de Lacy and Pembroke, riding close by, then just nodded to me. He sent soldiers to scour the nearby forests for any evidence of Ghent’s body, but they found nothing, and in time we moved on.

It took a day to reach the area where Madog had abandoned the carts. We stopped here for a night’s rest, Isouda, Ella and Gytha collecting what could be salvaged of our clothing and belongings. I was overjoyed to see the carts, thinking that, if nothing else, I could at least travel more comfortably with my new son from now on.

My women bedded me and the baby in the cart in which I had travelled earlier, and I luxuriated in the cushions and coverlets. Here, also, we had access to a good stream, and Isouda and Gytha heated water and washed me completely, even my hair, removing from me the sweat of fear, Madog’s blood, and that of the birthing.

Our company did not have much food with them, but from what little we did have (mostly taken from the Teulu’s supplies), Edmond made sure that I had a good meal.

As I was settling down after the meal, Isouda, who was making sure the baby and I were comfortable, looked up and suddenly grinned.

‘My lady, look what my lord king has found!’

I raised myself on an elbow and looked over the side of the cart.

Edmond was walking over to us, leading Dulcette.

I couldn’t believe it. The last I had seen of her she had been tied to one of the carts as Ghent led our company toward Bergeveny. Then we had been attacked, and I was bound and blindfolded into the cart under thick covers.

Dulcette must have travelled all this way with us and then wandered off when the Teulu abandoned the carts. I was astounded. Dulcette was a costly horse, and that no one, not even the Teulu, had made off with her was astonishing.

‘One of the soldiers found her wandering nearby,’ Edmond said.

‘He brought her in, and I remembered you riding her from the day of the hunt in the forest beyond the Tower.’

I burst into tears. Of all the things that had happened in the past day or so, the relief of seeing Dulcette safe was one of the most memorable.

Edmond tied her once more to the cart, then signalled Isouda to leave us. Once she had gone, Edmond climbed into the cart and sat by me.

‘How is the child?’ he said, making an effort to be interested.

‘He is well,’ I said, folding the cloth back from the boy’s face so Edmond could see.

‘And you?’

‘And I, too. I am tired and sore and bruised, and I have lost a tooth from being struck in the jaw, but from all of these I should recover. My lord, please tell me, how did you and this company come to find me? And my women? I do not understand.’

Edmond breathed in deeply, looked for a moment at the campsite, and then began to speak. What he said I later had confirmed from my women, as many others among the company.