In the Court of the Yellow King Read Free Page B

distraught. After a time, he’d begun to regain both his senses and spirits... then went missing and was found in the orchard, a length of rope ’round his neck.
    As she and Gamyl shared this conversation, Gehilde remained attentive to the quiet and orderly bustle of Marymeade’s morning routine. Now it was disrupted in a flurry of commotion. Voices rose in anxious queries. Footsteps slapped quick in the halls. Robes swished and rustled.
    “Sister Gehilde!” That was Magrin, not a nun but a short and stocky widow who served as a kind of gruff but well-meaning mother-bear nursemaid to them all.
    Gehilde hastened from the room, Gamyl close behind her. In the abbey’s main chamber, which they used as their common space for dining and sitting, the tables had not yet been set for the fast-breaking. Nuns and lay-sisters crowded in, wide-eyed, looking alarmed and frightened.
    And with good reason.
    Vikings.
    Vikings, pagan sea-raiders, attacking the village below.
    Through the fog and rain, they could see nothing of it. But they heard the shouts and screams, and the brief clash of battle.
    Aeldwyn, the fisherman’s daughter, had brought the grim news when she fled her family’s house down by the shore.
    “Mother told me to run, to take Wigla and the baby and get far away,” the girl said, gasping for breath. “She went to look for Father and the boys.”
    The baby, red with indignation, fussed and squalled in a bundle slung across Aeldwyn’s back. Little Wigla, a pretty child with long curls and freckles, began to sob.
    Everyone looked then to Gehilde, their abbess. Weary though she was, she cast it aside at once. She barked swift instructions to Sister Udela, bidding her fetch the treasures of their humble church – a silver crucifix, an ivory cup set with garnets that had been a gift from Alfred of Wessex, the bronze-inlaid reliquary containing a clump of straw from the manger in which Christ had slept, and their holy books – and for the others to gather only their most prized possessions.
    “Meet by the well-stone,” she told them. “There is a tunnel there, through the old Roman bath. It leads to the hut in the orchard. Magrin, you know the way.”
    The stout widow nodded.
    “Go, then, and hurry! Aeldwyn, you and the children go with them.”
    “Our mother—”
    “Would want you to be safe. Go with Magrin.”
    The rest scurried to obey. Their lives of humble piety and simplicity here meant that they had little in the way of belongings. It would not take them long.
    “What about you?” Gamyl asked.
    Gehilde shook her head. “Marymeade is in my charge. The monks are in my care, and they are in no fit state to be moved. I will plead for them.”
    “The Vikings will surely kill them where they lay!” Gamyl protested.
    Remembering Brother Rubert, who had damned himself by taking his own life, Gehilde softly said, “If that is God’s will, then so be it and let it be a mercy.”
    Gamyl raised her chin in a manner Gehilde knew all too well from their girlhood. “I am staying with you,” she declared.
    There would be no arguing. Gehilde smiled and squeezed her hand.
    Soon, the others had gone. The abbey was empty but for the four of them: the two ailing monks and the two sisters.
    No more sounds of violence reached their ears from the direction of the village. They could make out a dull glow that might have been the smoldering fires of thatch-roofed houses, but nothing else.
    Out of the grey fog and rain, the Vikings appeared. They came in a line, round shields held before them as if they expected to be met by armed men.
    A wretched, despairing moan slid from Gamyl’s lips. She covered her mouth, then murmured through her fingers. “Gehilde... their shields... do you see?...”
    “I see,” said Gehilde, touching the rosewood cross she wore on a cord around her neck and sending a silent prayer to the blessed Virgin.
    “They are the same that Brother Oston would—” Gamyl could not go on.
    Brother