Women in the Wall Read Online Free Page B

of a green-tunnelled track, would swear the beast shares his eagerness for its death. When he has it cornered, its antlers, if it is a stag, enmeshed perhaps in a branch, it is with a hard, unwavering exuberance that he plunges his weapon in its flesh.
    With the same authority he plunges in and out of Radegunda’s memory. Even here, she cannot control him. The innocence in the midst of his foulness—the scope of his crimes is biblical—makes him hard to reject, impossible to quite condemn. He slithers from definition, radiant in retrospect like some dampish satyr gambolling in the light. She tries to skimp and dim his image, but the merest touch of Clotair is like ginger in a stew. Its pungency swamps the rest.
    Radegunda has galloped after her lord at the hunt and sat with him at table. Now she lies beside him on the feather mattress of their gold-balustered bed. He is kneeling up, his thighs bandy in their triumphant arch, his arms under her belly as he pulls her, backside foremost, towards him so that her buttocks rear into the space between his thighs. She can feel his hairy parts delicately brushing her skin as Clotair plays with her body. He plays gently, frolicsomely, nuzzling and teasing as a soft-mouthed hound will play with a frail young puppy. His touch is light. His fingers ripple along her spine with the movement of lake-waves on a beach. Face in the linen sheet, she imagines her own long white vulnerable back and wonders does it remind him of the back of the deer he killed at the hunt. She clenches her teeth and forbids her flesh to respond to his. She grinds her face into a goose-down pillow, bites her hand until she can taste blood and prays to the Christian God to deliver her from pleasure. Clotair rams his member into the recesses of her body and she screams. “Oh God!” she screams, “No,” she screams, “No, God, No!”
    Clotair is laughing.
    “ I am your god,” he whispers. “You were on your knees praying to me !You couldn’t help it, Radegunda! You are as proud as the boar in the forest but you can’t resist me any better than it can! I can feel your pleasure,” he says with lordly confidence. “I feel it as surely as my own.”
    “I do my conjugal duty.”
    “No, my pet, you do much more! Much, much more!” He caresses her and she lies rigid in the dark, hating her own response to his caress.
    Hating it still in memory, she is glad to remember what happened next.
    When he was asleep, she sat up very, very quietly, edged to the side of the bed and was stealing out of the room when he called:
    “Radegunda!”
    “My lord?”
    “What is it? Where are you going?”
    “I have to go outside a moment.”
    “Even the saints piss!” He laughed. “Even my nun-like wife! Ha!”
    A moment later he was snoring.
    The man lying across their door was asleep. Radegunda stepped over him and walked downstairs and out through the hall where more men and serving-girls were lying about, many of them in each other’s arms. She opened the outer door and the black wind struck her body like the blow of a club. She stepped outside, pulling the door behind her with difficulty. She removed her heavy fur coat under which she wore nothing. Then she rolled naked in the snow, moving quickly lest the skin freeze to the hard, frozen ground underneath and be torn from her body. When she could stand it no longer, she put on her fur coat and crept back into the palace and through the hall. She was stiff with pain and her body was shaking violently. She did not return to where Clotair was sleeping but let herself into a small room containing a wooden kneeler and a chest. Opening the chest, she took out a folded garment, shook it out and, again removing her fur cloak, put it on. It was made of haircloth. She knelt on the kneeler.
    But she was not alone for long. Her prayer was interrupted by a knock and a whisper from beyond the door.
    “Radegunda, it’s Chlodecharius.”
    “Come in.”
    A young man wearing woollen