Ironfoot

by Dave Duncan

  “Forget it,” I whispered to my accomplice as we moved in back of the guests. “We’ll just have to sing a blessing.”

  “I don’t know any flaming blessings,” William said through clenched teeth, “and I’d sooner burn in Hell than bless either of those two.”

  He did have a point. Much as his son detested him, Baron Weldon was just a crabby, dictatorial old man to me, but how could I possibly call on the spirits to bless a woman as defiled and wicked as Matilda, Dowager Baroness Kilpeck? And what blessing? My mind was a blank page. I could remember nothing except the words of command. They raced around inside my head like brain mice: Fac sicut dico! Fac sicut dico! Fac sicut . . .

  William and I hid behind the protective stockade of Hugh and Stephen. Troubadour Arth had given up his efforts to brighten the gloom-ridden feast with music. The chatter was dying down as people realized that something was about to happen. Bertrand glanced around, stepped up on the dais to join the rest of us, and signaled to the two heralds. The trumpets began to blare.

  Everyone was facing the platform.

  The fanfare ended, the door opened. Baron Weldon and Dowager Baroness Kilpeck emerged arm-in-arm and the congregation raised a cheer. The happy couple bowed to the count and countess, who returned the courtesy. Then they turned to acknowledge the commoner group that included us, hiding behind the two knights.

  William rammed an elbow into my ribs so hard that I gasped. But my gasp came out carrying the fatal words: Fac sicut dico! I am sure I did not intend to say them, but say them I did.

  Nothing happened. William looked down at his hands and then at me, dismay on his face. I shrugged and frantically tried to think of some blessing I could sing when given the signal. My brain was frozen.

  A great wind sprang up from nowhere and whirled though the hall. Half the lights went out, and the rest dimmed. The temperature dropped to the depths of winter. The celebrants broke out in screams and howls of alarm—and I realized with horror that I had forgotten Sage Guy’s warning. By speaking the words of the trigger, I had invoked Oculus deceptus, and thus performed magic during the forbidden hours of darkness.

  chapter 38

  the winds of Hell centered on Baron Weldon and his betrothed. They staggered, his cloak almost dragging him off his feet, Matilda clutching at her hood with one hand and her ballooning skirts with the other. Archibald’s wraith appeared in front of her, leering at the audience. Then it spun around to point an accusing finger at Matilda.

  “Murderess!” it shrilled in its London accent. “Repent, murderess! Repent, fornicator! Repent that incestuous bastard you carry in your womb, for it shall be accursed until the day it dies. Repent the poison your woman poured for me, for you have doomed her to eternal hellfire with yourself. Repent your debauchery with that priest who falsely confessed to your crimes and gave you false absolution for them. Repent your sins in my bed, with me and—”

  “Dimitto!” I yelled, and the vision vanished. The wind stopped, the candle flames steadied, pushing back the darkness.

  Matilda screamed. That is a gross understatement. I had never heard a human throat make such a noise, nor dreamed that any woman could. She would have drowned out the trumpets, had they tried to compete with her. Hysteria, as the learned Galen taught us, is a disease of the womb, and no man could have shrieked so. There were words in there, just barely discernable: Repent, was certainly one, and Penance another. She had been raped. It had been self-defense. Forgiveness of sins. . . . She slumped to the floor in a faint. I thought I was about to do the same.

  Our ploy had worked far more than I had intended. Oculos deceptus might not be true black magic, but it was close enough. I was extremely lucky not to have been blighted by it myself.

  Count and countess dragged their daughter to her feet. She started screaming again. The countess swung a vicious slap at her. The impact seemed as loud as a crack of lightning and Matilda’s clamor stopped instantly. Utter silence. Her mother dragged her away into the parlor. But then the whole congregation erupted, as if it had just realized that it had not been dreaming. The party was over. Terrified people began heading for the stairs.

  The count went after his wife and daughter. After a moment’s hesitation, Baron Weldon followed them, and we heard voices raised inside before he slammed the door. I saw, with relief, that the audience had been thinned out by the distance it had to cover to reach the various stairways and the need to discuss what they had seen, so it was leaving in a reasonably orderly fashion, not piling up. There might be some bruising and sprains, but no mass trampling.

  I was grabbed and slammed back against the wall. Pinned there by a hand at my throat, I stared into the murderous fury of Sir Hugh Fiennes.

  “You did that, you damned-to-Hell devil-worshiping necromancer!”

  Beside him, white as a snowbank and teeth bared in a killer snarl, stood Sir Stephen de Mandeville. I had a vision of the pair of them tearing me apart between them, fighting for the privilege of killing me.

  I made croaking noises; the pressure on my larynx eased a fraction. “She poisoned Archibald! She and Udela.”

  “You are lying! The priest confessed!” Hugh tightened his grip and I couldn’t speak. I thought my last moment had come.

  William was beside me, though. “Father Randolf was lying, Sir Hugh. They were lovers. He was protecting her!”

  Hugh was the count’s foster brother and knew the family relationships. “No! No!” But he did relax his grip enough for me to breathe.

  “She carries his child,” I gasped. “She came to me for an abortion and then changed her mind when—”

  Stephen screamed and swung a fist at me, but Hugh struck the blow away with his spare hand. “Wait! Let’s hear the rest of this filth.”

  “Randolf couldn’t have poisoned Archibald,” I babbled. “He said both men died of the same poison and they didn’t. And he wasn’t here that morning, when the wine was delivered. He’d gone to Northampton.”

  Stephen had been in the sanctum to hear that confession. He spun around and rushed to join whatever was happening in the parlor. The yelling inside seemed even louder, then the door shut it off again.

  Hugh released me reluctantly, still seething. “Get out of here! You have done all the damage you can do. You are no longer wanted, understand?”

  I nodded, swallowing painfully.

  “Has Richard paid you?”

  “Countess said I could take two spell books. There are five of—”

  “Take the whole damnable lot and leave at dawn! We’ll have no more Satan worship at Barton.”

  “Yes, Sir Hugh.”

  He stalked away, leaving me trembling after the narrowest escape of my life so far.

  William gave me a sympathetic look and handed me the dropped staff. “That was close, Brother Durwin. Come and have a drink.”

  He held my arm as I stepped down from the dais, and then led me along the hall to the deserted food table. He filled a horn with beer for me, and I drained it.

  “It went well, though,” he said judiciously, smiling, but not gloating as much as I would have expected. “I think we can say that the wedding is postponed indefinitely.”

  “That would be the logical conclusion,” I agreed. I took more beer. Then a meat sausage . . . a thick slice of cheese. I washed them down with more beer and began to feel better. After a few more minutes at the manger, we gave up and headed for the exit. I think we both knew we had better depart before Sir Hugh or the count discovered us still there.

  We hadn’t gone five paces before we stopped dead. Coming toward us was William Legier senior, Baron Weldon, with tears streaming down his weather-beaten old cheeks into his beard, and I could swear that beard looked grayer than it had fifteen minutes before.

  He stopped. We stopped. For a moment there was silence.

  “William?” he said.

  “Father?”

  “Oh, William!”

  It was a cry for pity, and it was answered. Squire William step
ped forward and embraced him.

  Feeling very guilty and unwanted, I walked around them and went on my way. At the top of the stairs I glanced back. The baron seemed to be weeping on his son’s shoulder and William was still hugging him tight, patting his back as one would comfort a child.

  I began my story by telling you of three miracles. And so it ends with a fourth.

  chapter 39

  i left a candle burning in case my assistant returned in the night, but he didn’t. I was wakened by the sound of the door closing. The candle had burned away, and a gray light showed through the shutter ports. I hoped I was hearing William arriving, not a lynch party of de Mandevilles.

  After a moment William’s head emerged through the trap. He regarded me with eyes like squashed strawberries.

  “If you speak above a whisper, I will feed your guts to the hounds,” he said.

  “I know an incantation for hangovers,” I said softly.

  “Stuff it.” He clambered up and looked around in the dimness. We had not been the tidiest of tenants, he and I. He went for his knapsack and began to collect his discarded clothes.

  “How did it go?” I asked noncommittally. I was assuming that he had joined the hunting pack of squires in their mass booze-up.

  He grunted. “I had no idea the old goat could drink like that.” Then he chuckled softly. “But I won. I put him to bed. God’s mercy, I do need that incantation.”

  I threw off my covers and began to dress. “You are coming back to Helmdon with me?”

  William sighed. “No. Arnolph and the others have all gone. . . . He’s all alone. His new job for the king terrifies him. The old fart needs me.”

  Which is what I’d been dreading to hear, selfishly. “I don’t know how I’m going to manage five horses by myself.” Not to mention my bag of silver and six massive grimoires, together worth a fortune.

  “Oh, I arranged that yesterday,” William said. “Goliath set it up with Alwin to have a troop of squires escort us. It’ll just be you going now, of course. Good outing for them, and even as a king’s man you don’t rank knights.”

  “And Alwin agreed?”

  “Of course he did. Alwin will do anything for Goliath.” I did not ask him to explain that remark.

  Within the hour I bade farewell to my assistant. Our enmity had turned to friendship and mutual admiration, and we embraced. I said I fully expected him to become a king’s man too before we met again. He called me Ironfoot, but now he said it with affection, not derision.

  My six-squire escort was very subdued for the first few miles, but a persistent drizzle of rain and a cold wind soon sobered them up and returned them to their usual raucous selves. At Northampton we were advised that the bridge over the Nene was unsafe, so I retraced the route by which I had come, through the king’s forest.

  We reached Helmdon before nightfall, and received a warm welcome. The sages were almost as delighted to hear of William Legier’s departure as they were amazed by the treasure of grimoires I had brought.

  I had not intended to name my new sponsor, but my escorts were all blabbermouths, and the news boosted my status into the skies.

  Younger members of the faculty were more interested in the load of fresh venison we had acquired. Kenric brazenly told them that it was a gift from the king, so we did not need to offer our prepared explanation of how we had stopped for some archery practice on the way and two fat bucks had run right into the arrows.

  Stories have endings, but life goes on. Change came even to Helmdon. I progressed fast in my studies, becoming quite expert in reviving old incantations by picking out the trip wires in them. One by one the sages dropped their prejudices against tampering with the texts.

  I spent much of the first month after my return working on Prince Richard’s horoscope. As I had promised the queen, I drew it up myself, although I consulted a lot with Sage Alain, who kept our astrological records, and also with Guy, who checked my Latin prose for me.

  “This is very convoluted,” he complained more than once.

  I assured him that it was meant to be so. Queen Eleanor’s learning was legendary, so I was confident that she would be able to read it, but it would certainly challenge her son, if he were ever allowed to see it. Years later, when he was king, he was renowned for his fluency in Latin. He once remarked to me, his enchanter general, that my own style had improved a lot, which puzzled the listening courtiers.

  Guy also warned me that I should be more tactful. “This prediction that the subject will be a great warrior? You must temper that!”

  “Mars in Leo? What else can it mean?”

  Guy conceded that point. “And you state categorically that he will be king of England. His older brother, Prince Henry, is heir apparent, so you mustn’t say that.”

  “I don’t say that. The stars do.”

  “Well then, you simply cannot tell a man that his beginnings will be greater than his endings!”

  “I swore I would be strictly honest,” I said. Of course time fulfilled the stars’ prediction there. Richard as a crusader was to see Jerusalem from afar but fail to reach it; on the way home he got himself locked up in a castle on the Danube and had to be ransomed. He failed in a king’s supreme duty to produce a legitimate heir, and died while besieging a minor castle.

  Alas, somehow word leaked out that I had been commissioned by the queen. Soon half the gentry of the county were pestering me to draw up horoscopes.

  A few years later, after I had left the academy to work for the king, I ran into Delaney of Carlton again, by then a belted knight, but still known as Goliath. He told me that the count had died of a broken heart while his castle was coming down; Stephen had inherited the title. Baroness Matilda had taken the veil, but Sir Delaney could not remember in which nunnery. Nobody knew what had happened to Father Randolf, although there were rumors that he had gone on pilgrimage to Jerusalem.

  And Squire William? His eldest brother, Arnolph, died of a crossbow bolt in the throat, and the second of camp fever. The third son was by then an ordained priest, and ineligible to inherit, so when their father died, three years after the events related here, William became the second Baron Weldon. He married a rich heiress and fathered seven sons. I sang at his wedding.

  afterword

  the history is real. King Henry did hold a council in Northampton in October 1164, intended to bully Archbishop Becket into submission. Becket fled the country, but he was martyred six years later by four knights who claimed that they were acting on Henry’s orders, which he denied.

  All the places named still exist, except one. Of course the places themselves have changed very much in eight and a half centuries. Barton (which means “barley farm”) is now called Earls Barton. If you Google it, you will find pictures of the wonderful old Saxon church tower that Durwin admired. The church is Norman, so that may be the one he knew.

  The place that has disappeared is Pipewell, now just the name of some woodland on the outskirts of the city of Kettering. There is an “abbey church” there, but it is Victorian in age, and so much younger.

  about the author

  Dave Duncan is a prolific writer of fantasy and science fiction, best known for his fantasy series, especially The Seventh Sword, A Man of His Word, and The King’s Blades. He is both a founding and an honorary lifetime member of SF Canada, and an inductee of the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame. His books have been translated into fifteen languages.

  Dave and his wife Janet, his in-house editor and partner for fifty-seven years (so far), live in Victoria, British Columbia. They have three children and four grandchildren.

 

 

 
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