by Dave Duncan
“Is Colbert the one they call Goliath?” Stephen said, and his air of authority instantly quelled everyone else.
“No, sir, that’s Squire Delaney. But after Colbert called it quits, sir, this lunatic did go for Delaney. Lordamercy, sir, nobody takes him on! Delaney knocked him down six or seven times and, when he wouldn’t stay down, got mad and began to kick him. The rest of us decided we’d better stop it.”
“This’s the boy who trashed Sir Kendryck?” Stephen asked, and everyone agreed. “Was he enchanted this time?” he asked me.
“No, sir. But he is obsessed with a need to get back into knights’ training. I don’t know why he ever left it.”
“Maybe he damaged too many others?” suggested the larger squire, and quailed under the look he got from Stephen. His companion grinned, though, and I was hard put not to.
“How are his victims?” I asked, wondering how I was going to complete my task without my cantor. I had known that my own agenda at Barton included finding a noble sponsor for my future education. I hadn’t seen that William might have secret plans of his own along the same lines.
“They’ll live, Adept. Delaney will, anyway.” The squires obviously found the situation funny. “Nobody cares much about Colbert.”
“Then, if you will be so kind, carry this wretch to the infirmary so I can treat him, and inform the other two that I will do the same for them.” I looked ruefully at Stephen. “I will need someone else to help me with the incantation, sir.”
“No . . . won’t! Yo’ won’t!” William struggled painfully to sit up. “Whach you need? I’m yo’ helper.” He had lost two teeth and no doubt several more were loose.
“He needs someone with some brains!” Stephen snapped. “When you’ve patched him up, Adept, come to the hall and eat. I’ll tell Elmer to help you, and he can find you there. Now I must go.” And go he did, banging the door.
William struggled to his feet. He swayed a few times as the rest of us watched in fascination, but he did not fall. He blinked at the table. “Whach you nee’done, master?”
“What I don’t need is blood all over the books. So we start at the infirmary with lots of bandages.”
“Ri’. . . .” Step by unsteady step, William headed for the door.
The squires exchanged admiring glances.
“See he arrives safely, please,” I said. “I have to collect a few things here, and I’ll join you there.”
I began the treatment by chanting a healing in the hope of saving his loose teeth; it also stopped most of the bleeding. The sun having set, I had to work by the dim light of a single lantern. The two bearers had gone, and neither Colbert nor Delaney had come by for treatment. Healer and patient were alone.
“Why?” I asked as I bandaged William’s battered ribs. The damage was mostly on his right side, suggesting that either his shield-work had been better than his fencing, or Goliath had done his kicking there. “I can tell by these muscles of yours that you’ve had years of training with sword and longbow. You write a flawless hand and your Latin is far better than most run-of-the-mill priests’, yet you try to keep anyone from finding out. Now you’re a trainee sage and hating every minute of it. Tell me why.”
“Min’ you’ own business.” William was sitting on a stool, half naked. He was clearly in pain, but to clench his fists or bite his lip would just make things worse. Sweat trickled down his face, but so far he hadn’t uttered a single groan.
“But you owe it to me. I found an incantation that should bring the killer right to my doorstep, and I needed your help with it. You have let me down badly.”
“I should ram that staff of yours down your throat for that, you prattling, gutless, Saxon cripple.”
“It’s true.”
“Doesn’t matter. I probably will, yet.”
“Your promises don’t seem to mean much.”
“Just wait and see. The Legier motto is I do my best.”
“But you didn’t! You failed.”
For a moment it seemed that even this argument would be refused. Then William said, “Suppose so. All right, story now, payment later. My father’s a knight, two of my three brothers are knights. I was the baby, but at fourteen I could take the next two without working up a sweat and at fifteen even Arnolph, the eldest. At sixteen I was a squire and my horse fell. Was out cold for three days.”
There but for the grace of God went Durwin of Pipewell.
“After that, I . . . After that, every time I went to get on a horse I . . . I peed in my britches. I couldn’t help it! They all laughed at me, of course.”
Of course.
“My father said if I couldn’t be One Who Fights I would have to be either One Who Prays or . . . or worse.”
Worse was One Who Labors, a peasant, the third estate.
“So you chose the monastery?”
William nodded. “I gave my oath I would stick it for a year.”
“And there you did do your best? You slaved at Latin and writing and the rest. You learned all that in one year? And?”
“And I prayed up a shit storm. But then he wouldn’t let me leave. I showed him I could mount again, even gallop or jump hedges, but he said the family would be better off with me as a bishop or an abbot than another fighter.”
The brothers would have found that even funnier, as it meant one son less to divide up the old man’s leavings when he took his place in the heavenly choir.
“So then you made yourself so intolerable that the monastery had to throw you out?”
“Wasn’t hard.”
“I suppose not.” Easier than Helmdon, no doubt. “I think I know the rest. You saw the man who was with me in the sanctum.”
“Not seeing very well,” William admitted, peering around with eyes puffed down to slits.
“He was Sir Stephen de Mandeville, the count’s son and one of the king’s gentlemen attendants. He was furious at what you had done, but he was impressed.”
“He was?” William brightened.
“Impressed by your courage, not your brains. He has influence. He could probably override your duty to obey your father, and he might be able to sponsor me to study at Helmdon without being a servitor. So let’s both do our best, Squire Legier. Agreed?”
William did not return my smile. “Always.”
I brought the lantern close to inspect my handiwork. “I think that’s as much as I can do tonight. Anything I missed?”
“My crotch. Goliath wears very heavy boots.”
That problem took two more incantations all to itself. I could not imagine how he had managed to walk at all.
“Now,” I said, when I had done what I could. “I have to go to the hall. For some reason there’s a party on. I will give you a sleeping potion and then—”
“No you won’t.”
“It will deaden the pain.”
“Satan take the pain! I have work to do and the pain will keep me awake. Help me on with that shirt.”
As a man sows, so shall he reap.
William insisted he was not hungry, which likely meant that he did not want to show his sausage-meat face in the hall. I took him back to the sanctum and showed him the text that needed to be transcribed when he had finished the sandstone work. The kid could barely see and had trouble holding the stone, but he set to at once as if nothing had happened.
I paused at the door as I was leaving. “William?”
“Ironfoot?”
So I wasn’t “master” anymore. “I just wanted to say that you’re the toughest man I ever met. You may be crazy, but by God, you’re a warrior!”
“Sod off,” he said. “I don’t need your approval.”
Even before I reached the keep, I could tell that official mourning had been suspended. All the shutters on the great hall’s windows stood wide, letting out light, music, and a roar of conversation. A party to honor Sir Stephen’s visit, perhaps? It couldn’t be the king, because the guards on the door had obviously been drinking. Seeing me, they cried out
fake warnings about Merlin arriving.
At the top of the stairs, the noise was louder than anything I had ever heard except thunder. Off to my left a group of men were playing trumpets, fiddles, and recorders, accompanied by women jangling bells and tambourines, plus Sir Scur in his rabbit mask playing bagpipes. In the center of the hall, very cramped, a circle of younger folk were dancing, their hands joined in a great circle.
To my left was a group of knights, Sir Kendryck and his cronies, all of them flushed, leaning on one another, and doing more than their share of noise-making.
“He’s here!” Kendryck bellowed. “Look out, everybody, the dragon’s keeper has arrived. How is the little shit?”
“Hard at work,” I shouted back. “No partying for him.”
“Tyrant! We’re going to match him up with a bear.”
“Won’t be fair on the bear,” Sir Lucien contributed, “unless we chain his ankle, not its.” That was greeted as the joke of the century.
Peering over heads to locate the cause of this celebration, I found it on the dais. The de Mandeville family was there: Stephen and Matilda, with their parents and the usual attendants, Father Randolf, Lady Aveline, Sir Hugh, and Sir Bertrand. But the count and countess were not occupying the chairs of honor. There sat their daughter and a well-worn, weather-beaten man whose graying beard failed to hide the sunken cheeks of someone who has lost most of his teeth. He was undoubtedly old enough to be her father, probably even her grandfather, yet such matches were not uncommon. Everyone was smiling and laughing, dressed in their best. If any of them was faking, it was being done well.
I staggered as a massive arm landed across my shoulders to support a portion—about two hundred pounds—of Sir Kendryck.
“Baron Weldon!” a blast of wine fumes proclaimed in my ear. “King’s new chief forester! Huge promotion. Needs new wife to take to court. Very fast betrothal and even faster wedding!”
Fast or not, no doubt this had been in the wind and explained the urgent need for an abortion. Or had I solved that problem by insisting that the blushing bride was not as far along as she had feared? A really fast wedding might come soon enough to legitimize her little mishap in the eyes of the world.
“She seems happy enough.”
“Going to court!” Kendryck roared confidentially. “Even if the old prune can’t give her much of what a woman needs, there’ll be lots of pretty lads there who can.”
Norman lads, not Saxon, if her attitude toward me was normal. “Good for her. Where’s the food?”
“Over there.” Kendryck reeled more or less upright. “Cummon, I’ll harbinger you.” He stormed into the human forest, ruthlessly plowing a furrow for me that I could never have created alone.
The food was being laid out on tables and snatched away by hungry diners just as fast. No one was sitting down. I rinsed my hands in the bowl provided and set to work with the rest, although making no effort to keep up with Kendryck.
“Adept, sir?” The speaker was the clerk, Elmer—lank, pallid, tonsured, and worried. “Sir Stephen said that you might have need of my services tonight.”
I nodded while hastily swallowing a mouthful of bream. “I did think that, but Squire William is the most stubborn man the good Lord ever invented, and insists that he can do what I need.”
Elmer’s eyes opened wide. “But the story is . . . I mean the squires were laughing that he won’t see straight for a month.”
“He never admits to human frailty. If I do need you later, where could I find you?”
Elmer went into a long and complicated travelogue, describing how to find his cottage, “. . . near the farrier’s, not the blacksmith’s forge near the gate, but the one near the stablemen’s barracks.”
“I know the barracks. Start me from there.”
The second directions were easier. “But please knock softly, Adept, so you don’t wake the babies.”
I promised not to waken the babies and of course had to inquire and so learn that there were three of them, the oldest not yet four. Waken a brood like that and you would rouse the whole castle.
“It’s not likely I’ll need you, though,” I said, realizing that I was learning to expect miracles from Squire William Legier.
Once I had eaten, I had no more reason to remain there, so I piled a platter with the softest foods I could see and conscripted John the page to carry that and a flagon of wine back to the sanctum. William, with his contempt for pain, was still hard at work. I insisted that he take a break and some refreshment, while I took over the copying.
Mouth full of food and loose teeth, William uttered a long mumble that was probably, “So what’s the party for?”
“Baroness Matilda has found herself another baron, Baron Weldon. High in the king’s favor, it seems.”
“Grew up near Weldon—never heard of any baron.”
“Then you’d better run and warn the count that he’s marrying his daughter to a fraud.” End of discussion.
Next we had to proofread the copies and correct the mistakes, of which there were remarkably few, considering how poor the light was. Even then I wasn’t satisfied.
“Verse eleven doesn’t make sense,” I said. “Ineptio? Why a verb? Why would a criminal play the fool? I think it should be inepte—badly.”
My squire’s attempt at a smirk twisted into a grimace of pain. “I’ve heard,” he mumbled, “old Guy ripping you to shreds for wanting to change even one letter in a script.”
“But I’ve known where a change made an incantation work, when it wouldn’t before. Let’s see . . .” I needed time to find the three-voice version of Malefice venite in Guy’s grimoire, but when I did, I could confirm that it included that same versicle. My hunch had been right, the word should be inepte. In this case I suspected that the corruption had been a genuine scrivener’s error, not a deliberate trip wire. Even so, over the centuries such tiny copyists’ errors could mount up and any one of them might render an incantation useless.
In the next hour we corrected three more such mistakes by comparison with the other version, and one that I had to make on my own authority, because the versicle and response in question were not present in Guy’s copy. I struck them out.
William howled at seeing his work defaced. “How can you do that?”
“Because,” I said, “it’s unicorn fewmets! It’s another deliberate trap to keep the uninitiated from dabbling in matters beyond their ken. Why would this versicle appeal to a Germanic pagan god in the middle of a Latin prayer? Just so the spell won’t work if it falls into the wrong hands, that’s why. The original sage who transcribed it put that in to deceive the ignorant. He knew it was there and could ignore it.”
I was suspicious of another couple of wordings, but did not dare tamper any further with the text. By the time we had read the whole incantation through twice, from back to front, William was spitting blood from his loose teeth and I could barely keep my eyes open. Midnight was long gone.
“Bedtime!” I said. “We both need sleep. We’ll summon the killer in the morning. You’re out on your feet.”
In fact William was seated, but even he didn’t argue that time.
chapter 30
by dawn, a few hours later, we were dressed and ready, if not well rested. I wanted to go and fetch Sir Stephen, but William insisted that this was his duty, and limped off to fulfill it. Unhappy at the prospect of trying an unfamiliar incantation before a witness, I read through it a few more times, becoming more and more certain of discrepancies in at least two places.
William returned. “Says he’ll be here in a moment.” He sat down at the table—gingerly.
“Why did you pick a fight with Goliath? He’s the giant, the biggest of the squires, yes?”
“’Cos I knew I could beat the small ones.”
“He slaughtered you.”
He showed bloody teeth in a grin. “No shame in losing to him, and I got in a few good ones before he got me on the ground and started the execution.”
/> Then I understood. “So no one else is going to challenge you after that, and some knight may want to enlist you?”
William managed something close to a smile. “Oh, you do understand? I was starting to wonder.”
Soon afterward, he opened the door for Stephen, bright-eyed, resplendent in an embroidered robe of purple linen, and apparently freshly shaven. He was wearing a sword, which was a troubling sign of the faith he put in my ability to summon the killer.
His smile at William seemed genuine enough, free of mockery. “How are you this morning, Squire?”
“I have felt livelier, Sir Stephen.”
“I heard other accounts of the fights. They suggest you should be in need of a month’s bed rest.”
“They stopped short of driving a stake through my heart, sir.”
Stephen laughed and turned to me. “Where do you want me, and which murder will you start with?”
“I do not need to name names, only the crime committed, sir. If there is more than one murderer within range, they should both respond. I shall be happiest if just one person arrives and confesses to all three crimes.”
Stephen nodded grimly. “Three people making separate confessions would be the ruin of our house.”
Enchanter and cantor sat at the table, but I put Stephen on a stool at the other end of the room, on the pretext that he would be hidden by the door when anyone entered. My real reason was that I found the prospect of a witness unnerving and wanted him as far away as possible, as if that made any difference.
After that, there was nothing to do but begin.
“Set the pitch,” I told William, who was having trouble speaking, let alone singing.
William chanted a few words; I nodded. “Fine! Here we go.”
First versicle; first response. Second versicle . . .
And finally . . . nothing.
“Didn’t work!” I said.
“You can tell?” Stephen asked, surprised.
“Yes, sir. Let’s try it again, Squire.”
Again nothing happened.
“Then I’m going to try a couple of—I hope—corrections.”