Great Maria by Cecelia Holland Page B

immobilized him, but great with child she was slower than the other people, and once he managed to hit her. In front of everybody else she screamed at him, and he shouted back, calling her filthy names until she ran upstairs and buried herself in bed and sobbed with rage. All night long, lying beside him in the dark, she plotted to kill him. Just before dawn, Ceci woke, and she got up to quiet her. When she went back to bed, she began to cry. At once he touched her face. She turned and went clumsily into his arms, and they kissed.
    Still Roger did not come back. Everybody went around the castle in terror of Richard. The moon had come into its full face, when Adela liked to find dyestuffs, and Maria leaped at the chance to leave the castle. With Ceci, she went down the road, Adela beside her, toward the village. In the fields on either side, the serfs harvested their wheat and barley. Their high-sided carts leaned in the ditch beside the road. Maria hitched Ceci up on her hip.
    “Not in the next new moon, but the one after,” Adela said, and laid her hand on Maria’s bulging body. “It will be cool then. Not like the last time.”
    Maria snorted at her. She was in good spirits at getting away from Richard. “It wasn’t so bad, the last time.” They walked through the thorn hedge.
    The village was a circle of two-room huts, with the church the biggest building. Alys had planted herbs in the garden beside her house, in the shade of an oak tree. There the village women often sat spinning and weaving and gossiping. They were all cousins of Adela and her sister Alys. Cooing, they clustered around Maria and Ceci.
    “Ah, Maria,” Alys said. “She blooms when she carries her babies, doesn’t she?”
    “I sprout too,” Maria said. She gave each of the women a kiss, and they all made the Cross over her. They were great-breasted women, brown from their lives in the sun, wearing clothes of the same cut, the same cloth, as if they were one woman seen in half a dozen looking glasses. They rubbed their faces together with Adela’s and sat down.
    “And Master Richard?” Alys said. “Is he mending?”
    Maria shot a warning look at Adela. “He is very well, God be good.”
    “God be good.” Everybody crossed herself.
    “But no word yet from Master Roger?”
    Maria shook her head. “Nothing.”
    “Master Richard is none too glad of young Roger, I’ll tell you that,” Adela said. “He’s been cursing him since the day the red knave left.”
    “Adela,” Maria said.
    Alys gripped her knee. “We had it they were fighting. They are bad spawn, those two, mark.” She squeezed hard. “You have your burden there, young woman. The Saracens are right, he is a dragon.”
    Maria braced her hands on her back. The women were passing Ceci from lap to lap and feeding her honey cakes. Adela and Alys carried on a long esoteric conversation about the virtues of two different dyestuffs. When they had agreed, Maria said, “What about a dragon?”
    “The Saracens call Master Richard that, says the miller.”
    Maria made a face. “There is truth in it,” she said.
    The women tittered. Alys picked up her wool cards and began to comb a mat of fleece. Her right elbow pumped vigorously. “He is a good lord, he does not rob us, and now he is building ovens for us. We are pleased enough with him, although God have mercy on us poor Christians there’s little we could do if we were not.” She and the other village women crossed themselves. She rolled the wool from the left-hand card and folded it carefully. “He is not a dragon to us.”
    The villagers had no dyewoods to spare. Maria and Adela went off to the wood. The village dogs leaped and barked around them until they were halfway across the common to the river. Adela led the way, cutting across a fallow strip of ground and down into a meadow waist-high in uncut hay. They waded the river where it ran shallowest, and walked down the waste between two stands of wheat.
    Maria shifted