Needle in the Blood Read Online Free PDF

breath sharply. She thinks he must be in great pain from his injuries.
    “I was on a stool, then I leaned to get my drink from the floor beside me and overbalanced.”
    “But what are you doing here all alone?” she asks indignantly. “How did you get up here in the first place?”
    He gives a dismissive shrug. “My brother is a guard. He lets me live here. My wife went back to her father when I…well, I’m no use to a woman like this, am I? So here I am. My brother went off early to watch the Normans arrive.”
    “Then he’ll have seen more than he bargained for. One of their horses kicked a child and killed it, and now the crowd has turned ugly, and I’m afraid there will be a great deal of blood spilled.”
    “I wondered what was going on. There seemed to be a lot more noise than I would have thought, seeing how the queen told us all to receive them in peace. I sometimes wonder if it was worth fighting them at all. Perhaps we should just have stood aside and let William Bastard in. After all, what difference does it make to people like us who’s king?”
    “We must fight. King Harold has sons living; we must fight for them if nothing else. We cannot simply sit by while they trample our children to death and steal from us and…”
    “All right.” He raises his one hand in a gesture of surrender. Gytha feels herself blushing. Her tongue was always her curse, Adam said so, and her mother before him, worrying that a girl such as her, with only a modest dowry and such quick wits, would never get a husband. Well, she got Adam, and tried to be a good wife and keep her wits to herself, and was left with Adam’s debts for her pains.
    “I’m sorry. I saw it, you see, that great horse about twice the size of any I’ve ever seen. The child’s head couldn’t have been much bigger than its shoe. And the man riding it never even drew rein.” Why the lie? Why conceal the identity of the rider? She has a sense that, in some curious way, the story is her own, not to be shared, that it has for her a special power and meaning, that the name of Odo of Bayeux is a spell too potent to be uttered aloud. Nonsense. The accident was witnessed by hundreds of people. What makes it so special to her? She is tired, overwrought; she must return to Lady Edith. But what will she tell her? “Come now, let me lift you. They’ll be sending their own men up here soon. You must try to find your brother.”
    “I have a crutch somewhere. It slid out of reach when I fell. If you find that and wedge it under the stump of my arm, I can manage.”
    “How will you get down from the wall?” she asks, casting about for the crutch, which she finds lying only a few feet away.
    “There’s a ladder close by. I can hop down it. You’d be amazed what I can do.”
    Gytha smiles at him. “I’m sure I would.”
    She helps the man to stand, then props the cross piece of his crutch as gently as she can in his armpit. Though he winces, he makes no protest and sets out briskly enough, ducking under the lintel, covering the ground surprisingly quickly, his stump swinging like a bell clapper between his crutch and his good leg. She follows him out onto the parapet. The smell of smoke reaches her along with shouts and cries, the nervous whinnying of horses and a ragged whistling of arrows, the smoke striking a hot, acrid note beneath the pervasive odour of wet wood and the stale beer-breath of the stranger as he turns to her.
    “They set fires to contain riots,” he explains, sniffing the air. “I’ve seen it. Rings of fire around the crowd, as if it’s a scorpion and will sting itself to death.”
    “And I suppose they take great care with firebreaks, so they are not deprived of the spectacle of the scorpion’s suicide,” says Gytha bitterly. “It seems our new king is surprisingly persnickety about killing. Oh my God.” She stops, instinctively grasping the stranger’s good arm. Heavy footsteps clatter toward them, running, spurs jangling,