Amity's Vow
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The way to the chapel was strewn with rubble and bloody 
corpses. As Amity trod along the stone floor she was 
conscious that the soles of her bare feet were squelching on 
the stone floor. She shivered as she reasoned that the 
stickiness that adhered itself to her feet was the blood that 
had flowed from the slaughtered victims of the Duke of 
Warwick's revenge. However, she was less concerned than 
she might otherwise have been for the cleanness of her 
feet. After all her naked body was already a mess of dirt, 
scratches and bruises. A little more made no difference at 
all.

But before she bathed her body in a stream or even in the 
castle's filthy moat, in which faeces floated amongst the 
corpses of the brave defenders of the Baron of Flint's 
demesne, she had more pressing duty to attend. And that 
was to give her praise to the Lord God for sparing her from 
the gruesome slaughter that had delivered every man, 
woman and child within the castle walls to a premature 
encounter with their maker. She hoped only that their souls 
would be spared the pains of eternal damnation she was 
certain their murderers must surely endure when their time 
should come. 

Amity was shocked to see that his cloth had not spared the 
priest who served in the chapel any more than it did his 
congregation. Amongst the piled bodies, slumped over the 
pews and under the shelter of the holy relics that had failed 
on this occasion to save believers from the knights and 
mercenary warriors of a vengeful Duke, there, on the very 
spot where the faithful celebrated the blessed Eucharist, 
was the body of the priest, his body slumped over the now 
drying blood he had shed in defence of the holy sacrament.

It was at the feet of the carved image of the Saviour, raised 
high on the cross commemorating the moment of his great 
sacrifice, that Amity bent down, her naked body normally 
so incongruous in such a holy place, and made her 
obeisance. As the Lord Jesus Christ had saved the world 
from its sins, so too had He seen fit to spare her from the 
fate of her fellows. And in gratitude of that, Amity's first 
priority was to pray to the Lord to express her gratitude for 
His infinite mercy and also to request that this mercy 
should extend to the souls of the freshly massacred, whose 
corpses filled every room and open space within the castle 
walls; and no doubt throughout the estate of the now 
deceased Baron of Flint whose foolishness had brought 
such disaster upon his servants and family.

She confirmed the vow she had earlier made as she prayed 
to the Lord her Saviour. As she knew of no sacrifice 
appropriate for a young woman of no worldly wealth, she 
vowed instead to eschew forever any possessions of any 
kind for the rest of her natural life. This was a vow not 
only to accept no reward for her labours beyond that 
necessary to stay alive but to own not even clothes to 
shroud her naked flesh. A vow she intended to keep forever 
and one which would remind not just her, but anyone who 
saw her, of the extent of her gratitude to her saviour.

In truth, clothing was something she rarely wore anyway. 
The recently decapitated Baron, like his father, treated his 
serving wenches as nothing better than whores. They were 
his mere playthings from whom he demanded sexual 
favours whenever he wished and paid no regard at all to 
their own desires. Only the barest rags were ever allowed 
to cover the wenches in his service and he took pleasure in 
their humiliation. 

The Baron was one who believed that just as he owned 
every ox, sheep or swine in his estates, so too did he own 
the villeins and serfs who tended them. Not for him was 
there any intention to reciprocate the fealty extended to 
him. He never promised nor provided any protection or 
consideration. The English peasantry in his service were 
his to dispose as he felt fit and the young Baron followed 
his father's example in his dereliction of any duty towards 
those living within his estate. 

In any case, he was unable to provide the protection the 
serfs most desired. The greatest source of their misery and 
the cause of their most bitter complaints had always been 
the depredations of the Baron himself.

Although he professed to the Christian faith, he frequently 
damned even the Lord Jesus Christ and treated the 
ministers of the chapel as servants whose prime purpose 
was to avail him absolution from the many sins he 
committed. And should a priest show any reluctance to do 
so, or ever display the temerity to question the Baron's 
wisdom, he would be treated with as little respect as that 
shown by the Duke of Warwick's knights to the now 
deceased Father Jacques de Calais whose bloody body 
draped the steps to the nave.

Initially, she had welcomed the opportunity to serve as a 
wench for the elder Baron of Flint. Like many in the 
manor, she naively believed that the violence and petty 
slights visited on her by the Baron's knights was not 
representative of their liege. Her new servitude was also 
rescue from the abuse she suffered from her natural father 
who treated his daughter and wife with as little kindness as 
did his Norman overlords. She had long lost her virginity 
to her father's perverse passion from which her mother was 
unable to protect her daughter any more than she was able 
to protect herself from a man who believed only too well 
that she was there solely to honour and obey. 

But, as Amity discovered, all that had happened was that 
she had exchanged one misery for another, with the 
additional burden of having to learn, with no formal 
tuition, the French language that was all the Baron's court 
spoke or understood.

 The old Baron was portly and balding. And, as Amity's 
facility in French improved, she learnt not only the words 
necessary for her to serve her duties as a wench but also 
those words for profanity and obscenity freely mouthed in 
the company of the Baron's equally foul-mouthed knights 
and directed with no restraint at the wenches who served 
him. And these profanities were just the accompaniment to 
the indignities and humiliations met upon Amity and the 
other women who served his table. She soon learnt that 
unless a fellow baron or a member of the royal family 
should visit the Baron's castle, she would be denied the 
modesty she yearned for, and that the abuse she had known 
all her life before was to be exceeded by the horrors that 
were limited by only the Baron's imagination.

After her first day in his service, shivering under the rag 
which served as her only clothes and also her bed linen, her 
tears and shame could not be consoled even by the tender 
caresses of her companions who were now much more 
inured to the Baron's despicable lust. She soon learnt that 
the only solace available to her were her hours of sleep or 
those waking hours in the company of her equally 
unfortunate fellows in the execution of their many and 
arduous menial duties. She wondered how anyone could be 
so cruel and heartless as the Baron and his knights. 

She rejoiced on the occasion of the old Baron's death in a 
hunting accident witnessed only by his eldest son, the new 
Baron. Perhaps the young lad, barely needing to shave and 
so inept on the saddle, would treat his servants and villeins 
with more respect. 

Her hopes were dashed when the young Baron continued in 
the tradition of his father, made worse by the fact that he 
was more virile and so able to pursue his rapacious assaults 
with more energy and persistence. Only the proscriptions 
ordained by the church prevented her from taking her own 
life to bring her misery to its end.

She became a frequent visitor to the chapel, avoiding those 
times when the Baron or his knights made attendance, rare 
though these were, and prayed to the Lord for deliverance. 
She found comfort in the images of the Holy Mother Mary 
and of the blessed saints whose images filled the chapel as 
they did every church in Christendom. And most of all she 
took comfort and strength from the example of Jesus 
Christ, who like her, had suffered so much and had yet, 
through his suffering, brought the blessing of the Holy 
Spirit to the world.

"Fucking Warwick!" exclaimed the young Baron not many 
months after assuming the mantle left by his father. "The 
cunt slighted me. He even accused me of being the cause 
of my father's death."

"He was a close friend of your father, my liege," remarked 
Sir Guillaume, one of the older knights who had lost an ear 
and a hand in the Crusades. "It is natural he should be 
aggrieved."

"Are you suggesting that it was I, you fuckface whoreson, 
who was in some way responsible for my father's death?"

"Not at all, my liege! But many have wondered how it is 
his own arrow should bring him so low."

"Don't you fucking accuse me, you cockless ass. My 
father's arrow was deflected by a tree between him and the 
boar we hunted. Were it not for my urgent ministrations his 
death would have been sooner. Was it not I who raised the 
alarm?"

"I make no accusations, my liege, but words have been said 
in the Royal Court?"

The young Baron eyed his knight with a true glint of 
menace that clouded his misleadingly innocent face. "It is 
not right for the Duke of Warwick to slur my character. 
Not only I, but others in the Royal Court, heard him 
slander my good name and should the opportunity arise I 
shall take my blade and force it deep inside the same 
orifice of his as I shall soon be embedded within of the 
cuckold's daughter, Amity, here."

Unfortunately, the Baron was true to his word and Amity 
soon lay beside her sated master, shivering from the chill 
of the banqueting hall and her own shame, while the Baron 
resumed his drunken revelries with his other knights who 
had similarly taken advantage of the many pretty young 
women who served his table, slaved in the kitchen and 
throughout cared for their many needs beyond those of 
their carnal desire.

It was not many days after this that Sir Guillaume fell low 
in a sword-fight, to be discovered by three other knights 
who wept while wiping clean their blades of the blood that 
they claimed belonged to the assailants, whose bodies, 
unlike that of Sir Guillaume were never to be found.

And from that day hence no suggestion was made by the 
late Sir Guillaume's fellow knights of the rumour rife 
within the Baron's manor that it was the young Baron 
Reynard who had been responsible for his father's untimely 
demise.

 This was not, alas, the last time the Baron referred to the 
slights he had endured from the Duke of Warwick. Not 
many days after Sir Guillaume had been laid to rest, 
amongst great weeping in the chapel, Amity heard the 
Baron once again curse the name of the Duke. She lay 
beneath the snoring body of Sir Henri, his penis still 
between her legs and her arse still sore from the Baron's 
simultaneous violation.

"The whoreson declared that in battle against the 
treacherous Comte de Boulogne, he would not choose to 
serve beside me. He said that he could no more trust me 
than should my father when hunting. Is there no limit to the 
hogfucker's impertinence? Am I not, as much as he, a 
servant to the King?"

The other barons expressed horror at the Duke's most 
recent example of discourtesy, vying with each other to 
recount the vile unholy deeds he had committed and the 
extent to which his arse deserved to be abused. 

"There is a village but one day's ride hither that should feel 
the wrath of your steel," remarked Sir Simon. "They 
deserve as surely as their master to feel the vengeance of a 
baron dishonoured."

The Baron of Flint laughed. "Every wench will know a 
knight's cock in their arse and their babes in arms the 
lethalness of his steel."

The evening was enlivened from thence by speculations of 
the Baron's righteous rage, whose concomitant sexual 
excitement was similarly stimulated to the further shame 
and distress of the abused serving wenches. This was a 
night whose bruises pained Amity and her fellows for 
many days after, while, receiving no sympathy and no 
respite, they continued to serve their masters in their 
menial and amorous chores.

"I pissed on as many whores as I had piss in my bladder!" 
boasted the Baron after he and his knights had enacted 
their revenge, fired up with mead, hemp and wine. 

"And I their pathetic children!" boasted Sir Henri, whose 
lascivious hands groped the naked flesh of poor Edwina, 
who had just this day began her service in the Baron's 
kitchen and had suffered the most from the knight's 
predations.

"Not one villein or serf alive! And every ox, ass and swine 
removed to our kitchen!" echoed Sir Yves with a cruel 
laugh. "The Duke of Warwick now knows that the Baron 
of Flint is not a man to cross."

However, there was no immediate reprisal and the Baron 
was frustrated by the lack of concern the Duke showed to 
those in his estate, although a formal complaint was made 
to the King to compensate the Duke for his loss. 

As the days and weeks passed by, Amity heard more 
accounts of the atrocities the Baron chose to inflict on the 
peasants labouring on the Duke of Warwick's fields, whilst 
suffering, as did the other wenches, the drunken self-
congratulation of the knights of Flint.

The Baron's frustration at the Duke's stoical inaction 
mounted at the same pace as his boldness in the extent of 
his murderous incursions into the shires and boroughs who 
owed allegiance to the Duke. Amity shivered, despite the 
extent of her own misery, at the accounts of the knights' 
depredations. No woman or child, let alone man or 
livestock, was spared the sword or carnal lust of the 
knights and their armed servants. Each horror was recalled 
in detail of women raped, children abused and men 
disfigured before, without exception, all but the valuable 
beasts of the estate were slaughtered or put to the flame. 

Like the other wenches, accustomed now to a court that 
treated them with no respect, but at least spared their lives 
and refrained from mutilating their young bodies with the 
swords and knives never far from their person, Amity was 
frightened that an excess of mead or ale might be enough 
for the court to extend their perversions beyond that which 
they normally felt free to express on the Duke's servants.

And then one evening, there was a dread morose silence in 
the court. A messenger from the King had arrived, guarded 
by the Royal privilege whose potency defended him from 
the anger expressed by the Baron who was so near to 
enacting on the trembling servant. 

"The King has declared that he will offer no protection 
should the Duke take what he considers due recompense 
for the wrongs he has suffered!" the Baron exclaimed, not 
for the first time that evening. 

As it was Amity who was at this moment enduring the 
Baron's drunken amorousness in the sullen and cheerless 
atmosphere that had engulfed the court in their post-dinner 
orgy, she particularly trembled as she heard the Baron's 
words. Would he visit on her the blows that poor Matilda 
had suffered when the Baron was similarly angry and it 
was she who was fellating him? Would Amity also earn a 
broken nose and bruises that took more than a week to 
subside?

On this occasion, no! The Baron's despondency left him 
disinclined to do more than drink and moan, showing 
rather more anger towards his knights whom he accused, 
long and vociferously, of showing excessive zeal in their 
ravishments of the Duke's properties, both human and 
animal. 

"I am a man who has been wronged not only by the insults 
of a Duke, but also by the excess of my own court!" the 
Baron swore. "You are all nothing but the open cunts of 
pox-ridden whores!"

And later still in the evening, the serving wenches, Amity 
amongst them, huddled together in unwilling attendance of 
the court's possible lusts, the Baron's anger extended to 
insulting the King, who had unfairly sided with the vicious 
Duke, and, even, (and this shocked Amity to the core) to 
God, the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, who had so 
abandoned the Baron in his hour of need. 

It was these shocking profanities that convinced Amity, 
who soon afterwards retreated to the chapel to beg 
forgiveness for the sins she had committed in the duty of 
the Baron, that her lord and master would be damned in 
this life as he would surely be in the next. As she bent 
down, wearing only the filthy rags that maintained her last 
few shreds of modesty, she begged that the Lord Jesus 
should spare her; although she understood that His justice 
should be extended to those who so impertinently 
desecrated His name.

It was late afternoon not many days later that Amity first 
heard word of the Duke's vengeance of the slights he had 
suffered. 

The Baron's court was sat around the table, venison and 
boar sating their hunger and the bodies of Amity and the 
other wenches their rapacious lust. On the table was the 
hookah pipe and imported opium prepared by his servants 
and costing, so the Baron boasted, more than ten hide of 
oxen. It was then, Amity suffering the slow and inexpert 
thrusts of the narcotised Sir Louis, that the captain of the 
guards entered the chamber and in his halting French 
announced the long-feared arrival of the Duke of 
Warwick's army.

"Shit! Fuck the Lord Christ!" swore the Baron, rudely 
throwing off poor Edwina. Despite the pleas of his knights, 
the Baron had not prepared any additional defence against 
this promised assault. "What terms can we plea?"

"The Duke's messenger says that if you surrender yourself 
at once to his justice, he will spare the court and your 
peasants. But should you show the least reluctance to face 
the punishment he has planned for you, every man, woman 
and child, whatsoever their estate, will fall to his soldiers' 
steel."

"Fuck! No choice at all!" exclaimed the Baron. "His 
gaolers and torturers are infamous throughout the land for 
the sick perversity by which they mete the Duke's so called 
'justice'. We must needs fight to the death."

"Is that wise, my liege?" ventured Sir Jean de Calais, who 
was even more a victim than Sir Louis to the disorientation 
of the opium he had so greedily inhaled. 

"Are you suggesting that your lord to whom you owe fealty 
should bend his knee to the accursed Duke?" snapped the 
Baron, rudely shoving Edwina onto the floor, her master's 
semen trickling from her vagina, and standing breechless 
and shameless in front of his court.

"Not at all, my liege," pleaded the knight.

"In that case, you shall join the captain of the guard and 
fend off the assault. Only in that way, by being amongst the 
first to display your loyalty, shall you be spared from my 
own wrath."

Reluctantly, Sir Jean pulled on his hose, as did the other 
dishevelled knights of the court, and followed the captain 
of the guard through the door of the Baron's banqueting 
hall to what he clearly believed was his ultimate fate. The 
Baron snorted as he pulled his own hose to his waist.

"Fetch me my armour!" he commanded Edwina. "And you 
other sires, prepare yourself to defend me, if needs be to 
the death!"

The knights were visibly reluctant to move, but the Baron 
stood up and placed his hand on the hilt of his sword. They 
then stood up and shuffled off to their chambers to clothe 
themselves in oxhide, metal and steel.

Amity and the other wenches remained in the banqueting 
hall. Where better to be as the Duke's knights besieged the 
castle walls than in this, the most heavily defended 
sanctum of the entire castle? Naked and shivering from 
fear more than from the cold, the wenches huddled 
together against the walls, hoping that their presence in a 
hall otherwise denied them except in the service of their 
lords should pass unnoticed in the few hours left to them.

Not all knights returned to the banqueting hall, arraigned in 
their armour. Amity wondered, as did the Baron more 
vocally, whether those absent knights were proving their 
mettle in the defence of their master or whether they were 
cowering in their chambers, hoping to escape the Duke's 
retribution. However, the extent of the Baron's trust of 
those knights who had returned was most visibly displayed 
by his reluctance to let even one of them leave his sight 
and join the many serfs and guards, where surely their 
services were most required, to defend the castle walls with 
bow and arrow, cauldrons of boiling tar, and sacks of loose 
stone. Instead the Baron partook of yet more opium and 
mead, and preoccupied himself more in the invention of 
profane and obscene oaths than in devising a stratagem for 
the defence of the men, women and children whose lives 
depended on his wisdom and vigilance.

Every few minutes, another guard entered the chamber, 
sometimes bloodied by the rocks and stones launched over 
the castle walls, and in one case, limping from the wound 
of an arrow that had ascended the castle walls. And with 
each report, the news was worse and the Baron's advice to 
his men more hysterical and progressively less practical. 

At last, the outer walls were breached and the news was of 
true savagery. Babies had been snatched from their 
pleading mother's arms and impaled by sword and pike. 
Women were raped by one or more assailants, irrespective 
of either their youth or their maturity, before they too were 
killed in ways that sometimes matched the perversity of 
their blood-soaked lust. No man was spared, but was 
treated more summarily and often with unnecessary 
cruelty. Only livestock was reprieved the slaughter met 
upon Christian folk, perhaps only to later provide benison 
for the Duke's table. 

Throughout the siege, the Baron's banqueting hall was also 
besieged, not by the Duke's warriors but by an increasingly 
desperate mass of peasantry clamouring to share the 
protection of those knights still defending their mostly 
incoherent and now totally drunk Baron. He had by his side 
his wife, poor Alinor, who was treated with almost as little 
respect as his wenches, her bosom exposed from beneath 
her ripped gown and serving as a suckling toy for the 
hysterical Baron.

Never before had Amity felt pity for the Baron's wife who 
was normally spared the indignities reserved for his 
wenches and for whom conjugal duties were provided 
rarely and in privacy.

The anxious peasants were denied the sanctuary of the 
knights' protection, which was at the moment most 
dedicated to denying them this privilege, while Amity held 
tight to Edwina's naked body, relishing again the flesh that 
had been her closest companion on those many nights 
where Amity experienced the only love she had ever 
known. A love far more passionate and true than Amity 
had ever known from the brutish Norman knights who held 
all Saxon wenches in the lowest contempt. They were 
accustomed to being treated lower than the horses, hounds 
and falcons to which the knights expressed greater 
affection than those they fucked each and almost every 
night.

At first the only report of the approach of the Duke's 
soldiers was that provided by the messengers, but soon 
these were supplemented by the resounding thumps against 
the walls of the inner keep as unknown but undeniably 
large objects thudded on its frame. A chunk of wall burst 
open, letting in more light than normally penetrated the 
arrow slit holes that lined the walls and normally provided 
the only evidence of daylight that Amity had known since 
her first day of servitude to the Baron. Crumbling masonry 
and stone fell onto the Baron's table, scattering the wooden 
platters and toppling a flagon of mead onto the floor where 
it shattered into shards.

Along with the constant thump of projectiles came also the 
echo of the agonised screams of the women pressed against 
the doors of the banqueting hall, no longer opened even to 
the pleads of messengers or guards, as the Duke's soldiers 
one by one reduced their cries to whimpers and finally 
silence.

The banqueting hall's doors were finally breached despite 
the best efforts of the Baron's knights holding them close 
with the weight of the banqueting hall's oaken tables. The 
knights were thrown asunder just as much as the makeshift 
defences they had erected. The head of a wooden battering 
ram emerged, having pushed the knights onto the floor, 
nursing their bruises, while Amity could glimpse at last the 
enemy that had distantly caused her so much fear. 

There was no more shit left in her to add to the pile at her 
bare feet, nor urine to splatter on her already foul-smelling 
thighs. From her other cowering companions, ignored for 
so long, there came a wailing of cries of mercy as some at 
least relieved themselves of what little their fright had not 
already loosened onto themselves and the stone floor.

Little time was wasted in dispatching the Baron whose 
head rolled onto the floor and whose body slashed to 
pieces by the invading warriors' swords. No mercy was 
shown either to the knights whose defence of their liege 
was soon forgotten in the much more urgent task of 
defending themselves. Dead bodies were scattered around 
the floor, blood seeping onto the stone floor and trickling 
past Amity's shivering feet. And the authors of this 
onslaught stood in the room, proud and victorious after 
their bloody assault wondering what little was left on 
which to sate their bloodlust.

And so soon after the door was breached, Amity, no more 
than her fellows, nor Edwina who had mercifully fainted 
from despair and dread, barely comprehended the extent of 
the horrors meted on the Baron's wenches when they too 
became the object of the knights' attention. 

To Amity, these knights were no better than those who had 
raped her so many times before and with so little mercy 
while in the service of the now deceased Baron. They were 
nothing more than further manifestations of the 
overbearing invader of her native land who for more than a 
century treated the natives of Albion with less respect than 
the fields they tilled or the oxen that pulled their till. And 
her sympathy for poor Alinor, the first woman to be raped, 
was lessened dramatically by her fears that she would not 
long survive after one of these knights should choose to 
thrust between her oft parted thighs.

The rape she suffered was even more violent than that 
she'd become accustomed to, as, one by one and severally, 
the Duke's knights fucked both her and her fellows. Her 
groin felt like it was bleeding as surely her body would 
soon from the thrusts not of blades but of engorged 
penises, seemingly not lessened at all by affects of the 
mead and wine the knights treated themselves from the 
Baron's table.

And then, a miracle occurred. 

Surely, the very miracle for which Amity had prayed at the 
feet of Lord Jesus Christ when she had last begged for 
mercy in the chapel.

The beams which supported the ceiling to the banqueting 
hall had been weakened by the onslaught of the siege 
engines and gave way, bringing with them, not only timber 
but the weight of the masonry they supported. And in that 
collapse, which she was only later to evaluate, it brought 
low all the knights who attacked her. And also all her 
companions.

And so it did too the knight who was at that moment 
engaged in violating her much-despoiled vagina, killed 
almost instantly by a rock that smashed open his skull but 
left his erect penis inside her. The first Amity was aware of 
was the blood that splattered her face and then the 
collapsed body of the now dead knight who had shown her 
such little respect.

It was only many hours later, too frightened and too abused 
to stir, that Amity at last pulled herself free from the 
knight's corpse. Her body shivered uncontrollably. All 
around her was the stench of death, shit and urine. Blood 
covered her entire body and she was not at first sure how 
much was hers and how much was of the dead knight or of 
the other corpses around her. But God's mercy was great. 
The only blood she had shed was that inside her vagina and 
arse from the assault she had suffered, and this was not the 
first time she had experienced the bloodletting of too eager 
fucking, so she was soon able to differentiate it from any 
more lethal wounds.

And when she emerged, she knew that of higher priority 
than tending for her wounds or concern for others who like 
her might have been spared by God's mercy the fate of 
most of the Baron's subjects, was the duty to give thanks to 
the Lord that she had escaped death.

He had bestowed upon her a miracle. He had intervened to 
save her life and Amity had a vow which she had made and 
one which she now had the duty to observe.