[Dark Ages] The Wife of Bath's Tale

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((I enjoy writing Dark Ages fic, and so asked people for any suggestions, based on the Canterbury Tales. First up, someone has asked for the Wife of Bath!))

It was in Acre that I first met her, laughing joking, commanding all in the room with a stern look and a quick tongue if she felt like it. Her name was Alyson, or some such: far too bawdy for a noble, and while at first I questioned her basic decorum, within minutes I felt swept up in her tales. She was a formidable woman, already going “saggy in the wrong parts” as she declared one night, quaffing wine from a goblet as a pet monkey danced for her amusement. I cannot recall which country she came from (in Outremer you can quickly forget such distinctions unless you concentrate), but she spoke free and loose, tales growing more bawdy and hilarious as the oil burned.

She’d had four husbands, as far as I could tell, and was toying with marrying up the first knight she could skittle down in Acre, as far as I could tell. She constantly condemned her own figure, but flashed such descriptions of her “Turk’s head, waiting for a good Christian lance”, that she obviously had a natural confidence. The first marriage had been bad, some kind of pox accounting for him, and she had thrown herself into the arms of a second shortly before he was caught up in one of Frederick’s wars with the Papacy, leaving her wealthy enough. Husband three had died, she alluded, during some misadventure involving a pigeon, leaving husband four to take her to the Holy Land. Where he was now, she didn’t say, though perhaps he abandoned her.

The strangest tale she weaved that night came when some Teutonic fool asked her what women really wanted: money he offered, or flattery? The answer was neither, she said, scolding him roundly. She spoke of a knight, forced to marry some low-born who commanded powerful magics. She could not change being low-born, she said, but could change his time with her. Would he rather she be beautiful but unfaithful, or hideous yet true only to him? The knight – and this is where, at the time, I did not believe the tale – let her choose, at which point she revealed that was all she wanted, and at once became both beautiful, loving and faithful.

I admit, that woman was hard to forget, but it was her tale that stuck with me the stronger. And recently, I’ve been thinking about it as I walk the battlements in the middle watch. Since the embrace, I have come to understand much more of the world. I am not sure when it happened, but, at some point in my world of eternal night, I have come to understand why the knight would let her choose.

And once I understood that, I knew how much of a fool I have been. For now I am a creature of darkness, and my chance at love – as my Lord Edward and Lady Alienor have – has gone.