I wanted to tell you about that so that you will not be too concerned should you notice any listlessness or unease in your beloved son on his return. He may simply be pining, and if he is, it will pass. He has had no physical knowledge of love yet, to the extent of my knowledge. The child, Jessica, is an innocent, and I know she is at least as well guarded by her parents in such matters as Uther and Cay have been guarded recently by each other in that respect.
Both boys have grown this year, nevertheless, as I said, from infancy to young manhood almost overnight. It is hard to believe that fifteen years have passed since they were newborn babes.
Farewell, my dear Veronica, and I hope we will be able to see each other again soon. Know that you are in our minds and in our prayers every day, and that your father and I are proud of the grandson with whom you have blessed us.
LV
Chapter SEVEN
Mairidh was dreaming of the boy when the horse woke her with its snorting and stamping, and the moment reality began forcing itself upon her, she moaned and fought against it, refusing to open her eyes. The weight and warmth and smell of the man lying against her side, the feel of his heavy arm across her waist, gave her no pleasure, and she refused to open her eyes to look at him, knowing that when she did she would start an entire new day filled with pain and fear and brutality. He was snoring slightly, his face thrust into her armpit, his breath fluttering against her breast, and the rancid stink of his body made her want to vomit. The Pig. The name had sprung into her mind when she first saw him, and she had heard no other name to gainsay it. She had lost count of the number of times he and his companion had taken her the previous day and night, both of them seemingly insatiable. Now the thrust of his morning hardness pressing against her flank warned her that as soon as he awoke he would be back at her again.
Mairidh was no maiden. She had known her share of men— some said far more than her share—and she exulted in her body and the pleasures it gave her. These two, however, had abducted her after killing the boy. They had brutalized her and dragged her off with them, forcing her to run at the back of her own horse while they both rode the poor beast. They had tethered her by a too-short length of rope, so that as she ran she was in constant danger of being kicked by a flying hoof. Time and again she had fallen and been dragged, but even the beatings she endured for slowing them down had become preferable to the agony of stumbling and staggering behind the horse, hands bound in front of her. Eventually she had fallen into a stupor of exhaustion in which her body ran mechanically while her mind lost all awareness of what was happening.
They had killed the boy, and she had made it possible. Her reward—abduction and violation—had been immediate and inevitable. And even though her complicity in the killing had been unwitting, for a time she had felt that there must be some kind of arcane justice in what was happening to her. Such a beautiful boy, and she had lured him to his death.
Eventually, when they had decided they were far enough removed from the scene of the murder, they had made a rough camp and built a tiny fire, tying Mairidh to a nearby tree while the taller one went off to look around and check that they were where they ought to be and that they were in no danger. He had returned quickly, grinning and nodding to his companion that all was as it should be, and then the two of them had finally let down their guard and relaxed. They had relieved themselves, squatting within sight of her, and then they had eaten, giving her nothing. After that, the evening's entertainment had begun.
They had thrown dice to see which one would have her first, and the shorter of the two, the Pig, who lay beside her now on her right side, had won. The other had held her down, kneeling on her arms. She had fought them at first, but they had beaten her bloody, splitting her nose and lips, and eventually she had submitted and lain still, emptying her mind of everything but her husband's compassionate face while they took her, one after the other, time and again, arousing each other by example long after she would have believed they could sustain such lust.
On countless occasions over the past ten years, Mairidh and her husband Balin had discussed the ramifications of what she was now enduring, facing it as a distinct possibility because of the great amount of travelling they did together. The roads were unsafe everywhere in Britain nowadays, the entire countryside swarming with wandering bands of homeless and desperate men and women, and anyone faced with the prospect of travelling any distance from home had to give serious consideration to the possibility of robbery, abduction and violation in the course of their journey. In consequence, few people travelled nowadays in small groups, preferring to wait for company upon the road in order to enjoy the relative safety offered by larger numbers. Women, as always, were especially vulnerable.
Balin had been endlessly, and at times tediously, insistent upon the need for Mairidh to consider, realistically and ahead of the fact, all that might be and could be involved and entailed in such a misadventure. Her life was the first and most obviously endangered thing: she could be killed attempting to defend herself, or she could be killed from sheer brutality or by accident in the commission of a robbery. Whichever way the death occurred, it would end everything. Next came her health: they might break her bones and rupture her internal organs; they might scar her or mutilate her beyond recognition; or, even less pleasant to consider, they might infect her with some dreadful, incurable disease. Once, when she was a mere child, Mairidh had come face to face unexpectedly with a leper whose facial deterioration was far advanced and horrible to see. She had thought the incident forgotten, but for a term of months following Balin's initiation of these discussions, Mairidh had had terrifying dreams about being ravished by a progression of lepers, all of them as disfigured as the poor creature with whom she had come face to face.
She had railed at her husband then for what she saw as his obsession with her eventual defilement, but she knew now why he had been so concerned, and she blessed him for it.
Balin had known one young woman years before he met Mairidh who had been a clean-living and devoutly religious Christian. This young woman had fallen into the hands of brigands and been repeatedly beaten and violated before being abandoned, naked and alone, by the side of a road far from her home. Her dubious good fortune at being left alive by her abductors was set at naught, however, by the fact that the next group of travellers to come her way was a squad of Roman legionaries who had deserted their post and were fleeing into the mountains—this had been in the north country, almost twenty years earlier, during the final days of Rome's occupation of Britain. These ruffians used the woman even more brutally than had her original captors, but they, too, left her alive when they went on their way.
She was eventually found, close to death, by Balin himself, who was passing that way with his usual large armed escort. He took her into his care, directing his people to make camp right away and then see to the young woman's needs and nurse her back to health. For more than a week—an insignificant amount of time to Balin, who was in no hurry to arrive anywhere by any particular date—they remained in the same spot while the woman recovered her health and faculties, and when she was sufficiently recovered, Balin went to her tent to visit her and asked her to tell him about what had happened to her. She told him all he needed to know, including the details of who she was and where she lived, but he was most concerned by the fact that she seemed to be consumed with guilt, as though all the misfortunes that had happened to her had somehow been her own doing.