I had apologized to Roger for my rudeness to him that day in Wakefield Inn, and he had been most charming about the whole affair. In fact, I was beginning to like him, and I was glad that he’d been invited by Goody to the betrothal feast.
Beginning not long after noon, the feast was a long, slow business, with much talking and joking between the many courses. Bernard de Sezanne entertained us by performing his latest music and then amused many of the guests by playing parodies of songs that I had written but with new, salacious words that mocked my love life, and mine and Goody’s future together — in the bedchamber and out of it. I had to put up with this sort of ribaldry, despite my new rank as a knight, and while it was not very clever, the guests seemed to find it far more amusing than it truly was.
By the time Bernard had finished mocking me and making the most of his applause, it had grown dark. I rose to my feet, a silver wine cup in my hand: ‘My lords, ladies and gentlemen,’ I began, ‘I beg that you will all now join me in drinking a toast to my beautiful betrothed. A woman whose supreme loveliness shines…’
The door of the great hall flew open with a loud crash, and a dark figure — a woman clutching a huge round pot — strode into the hall. The figure let out a piercing shriek, a high, eerie howl of rage and fear and madness that stopped every heart in the hall for an instant. I sat down in surprise, as if my legs had been cut from beneath me. Everybody turned to the doorway to look and the Norman healer Elise, who was seated at one of the lower tables in the hall, screamed: ‘It is the Hag, the Hag of Hallamshire! God save us all!’ Then she clapped both hands over her mouth as if to stop any more sound emerging.
The black-clad woman held the pot high, and I saw that it was painted white and decorated with stars and crescent moons and strange deformed animals and weird symbols in green and black. She screamed: ‘A betrothal gift!’ The pot, held up in the flickering torchlight, was then dashed to the ground with another shriek of unbearable, unearthly pain. It exploded on the rush-strewn packed-earth floor, and out of the wrecked shards, dozens of small black-winged creatures shot into the air, squeaking bundles of black fur and leathery skin that flapped past our heads, causing many folk to visibly pale and duck before them. And the bats were not the only living things to crawl from the smashed shards: half a dozen poisonous adders slithered out, making for the darkness at the edges of the hall; beetles, lizards and two rats were also liberated by the crashing pot, and these beasts scurried under the tables.
The woman — I could clearly see now that it was Nur — was emitting rhythmical eerie shrieks, like some hellish music that sent shivers running down all our spines. Every eye in the hall was on her, and this night she looked truly terrifying. Her face had been whitened with some kind of paste, but black circles had been painted under her eyes to give her even more of a skull-like look. Her mutilated, glistening nose had been reddened, and her cropped ears and grinning lipless mouth all added to the vision of horror.
Then she began to dance; capering and still screaming from time to time, gibbering and prancing madly in the shards of the broken pot, her rat-tail hair bobbing and swaying about her ruined face. We were all frozen to our benches, not a man could move. I could not drag my eyes away from the awful spectacle; it was as if I was deep in some devilish enchantment, and I was not alone. No one spoke a word, no one moved a muscle while Nur danced her mad dance and sang her awful music in the centre of Kirkton’s newly built hall.
We were spellbound.
Finally she let out one final eerie screech, and came to a halt in front of the high table where I was sitting with Goody at my side, with Robin and Marie-Anne and Little John and Tuck. Nur thrust out her hand at me and I saw with a shudder that it held a human thighbone: ‘I curse you, Alan Dale,’ said Nur, in a low voice bubbling with hatred. ‘I curse you and your milky whore!’ And she pointed the bone at Goody. I was frozen with shock and terror at this unholy visitation; I could not move my arms or my legs, I could only stare in horrified fascination at Nur’s snarling, ravaged white-daubed face, and listen to her hate-filled voice, and the poison that spewed from her lipless mouth: ‘Your sour-cream bride will die a year and a day after you take her to your marriage bed — and her first-born child shall die, too, in screaming agony. But your days, my love, my lover’ — Nur slurred these words in a hideously lascivious manner — ‘your days will be many, your life long, yet filled with humiliation and ultimately despair. You will lose your mind before you lose your life — that is my curse. For you promised yourself to me, and…’
‘No!’ A girl’s voice, low but vibrant with passion and loud enough to reach the edges of the hall. I turned my head, the muscles seeming to creak with the strain, and saw that it was Goody speaking. ‘No,’ she said again, more loudly this time. ‘You will not come into this hall, on the day of my betrothal, with your tricks and your jealousy and your malice. No!’
Goody stood. She was staring directly at Nur, her blue eyes crackling with anger. ‘Get you gone from here!’ said my lovely girl. And Nur seemed to be as surprised as the rest of us at Goody’s fiery courage. The woman in black lifted her thighbone, pointed it at Goody and began to speak. But my beautiful betrothed was faster than the witch. She grabbed Little John’s staff that was leaning beside her against the table, and smashed the thighbone from Nur’s hands. Then she launched herself over the table, seeming to almost fly through the air — directly at the woman in black.
Goody’s first blow with the blackthorn caught Nur around the side of the head, jolting it to one side with a splash of red droplets. ‘You fucking bitch!’ said Goody, her voice beginning to rise. ‘He belongs to me.’ Her second blow smashed into Nur’s mouth, splintering teeth and dropping the appalled creature to the floor. ‘Listen carefully to this, bitch. He’s my man.’ The staff slammed down on to her shoulder. ‘And if you ever come near us again, bitch…’ Goody dealt Nur a double-handed lateral blow across the spine that landed with a sickening thump. ‘If you come near us once more, bitch, I will make you really suffer.’ A smash across the back of the neck sprawled Nur among the rushes.
The blood-streaked witch began to scramble towards the doorway, crawling awkwardly with one hand held protectively above her head.
Goody’s staff whistled down again, connecting with her forearm, and I heard the crack of bone. Still nobody else in the hall moved a muscle. Nobody else could move. We just goggled at the spectacle of a slight girl of no more than sixteen summers taking on the forces of the Devil single-handed and armed only with a stick.
‘And you, you bitch…’ Smash! ‘killed…’ Smash! ‘my…’ Smash! ‘ kitten!’ Goody screamed the last word at the top of her lungs, and the heavy staff crashed down once more on Nur’s back. Goody saved her breath then, to concentrate on giving her enemy a beating she would not forget. The blows rained down with the rhythm of the threshing-room floor, thudding into her enemy’s skinny frame; and I could see that Nur’s ravaged face was by now mashed, torn and bloody, and one arm seemed to be broken. Finally the battered black-clad woman reached the door; scrabbling on hands and knees in front of the opening, and Goody screamed: ‘Get out, bitch!’ The staff pounded down once more on the crawling witch’s skinny rump. ‘And don’t come back!’ Again a massive blow to the buttocks. And Nur shot out of the hall and into the darkness — and was gone.