by Peter Telep
“The knight who chooses you as his squire has his own style of battle. He prefers certain weapons at certain times, and he wishes to be handed these arms in a particular manner that he alone is comfortable with. Speed, quick thinking, and sense of touch are most important.”
The delivery of arms didn’t seem much different than the delivery of saddles or the delivery of dinner plates; one need only know where the package was going and how to present it. Christopher’s confidence jumped up another notch. It was a good chance to show the rest of the squires what he was made of. If he did well, every boy that followed would be measured against his performance. He had to set the standard.
“I will call for a weapon and Christopher will retrieve it for me. I will stand twenty yards away and he will hand the weapon to me in the manner in which I instruct him. Glaive! The shortest one!”
The burst from Sloan’s mouth caught Christopher by surprise-but only for a millisecond. He darted for the rack and scanned the weapons, found the shortest glaive, grabbed it, turned around, and sprinted toward Sloan. The battle lord had taken his described position. Christopher handed him the weapon point up, and Sloan motioned with his index finger that he wanted the point down. Christopher spun the spear around and presented it to his instructor.
Sloan repeated the process with Christopher, who fetched some fifteen different weapons. The other squires scratched themselves or folded their arms or shifted their weight back and forth, watching with vapid eyes as the tedious and what seemed to be ultimately unchallenging process continued. When Christopher was done, his breath ragged and his face ruddy and damp, Sloan moved in front of all the squires to deliver his next dialogue. Christopher remained where he was, in front of the rack.
“The delivery of weapons must become second nature, and that only develops over time. But we have to speed up the process.” Sloan stepped back over to Christopher and reached down into a small leather pouch belted at his side. In the battle lord’s hand appeared a long, woolen rag.
“Tum around,” Sloan ordered Christopher.
Christopher saw the world go to darkness as Sloan tied the blindfold tightly behind his head. Hoots and guffaws from the squires commenced.
Sure, retrieving the weapons seemed beyond sim ple. But now it was a different game.
“Problems invariably arise on the battlefield. Smoke, nightfall, the chaos of an ambush. You must be able to find and deliver the weapons to your master without your eyes. It seems impossible-but it’s not.”
Christopher concentrated on the last vision of the rack he had seen. He tried to pinpoint the location of each and every weapon he had returned there, but some of them were fuzzy, obscured by nerves, pres sure, laughs from the squires, sweat, and his stagger ing heart.
“The long-handled mace!”
Christopher moved forward in the direction he felt was the rack. Raucous laughter erupted from his peers. He was in a realm of pain and darkness, searching blindly for his future, and was spat and chuckled at all the way. For a moment he thought of giving up, but he set his jaw and turned his body in another direction. After half a dozen steps he stum bled into a rack. He felt the weapons: spathas. Wrong rack. But he knew where the other rack was. He drifted sideways and came upon his destination. His hands fumbled over hilts and tips and spikes and long tongues of leather. More sickening laughter. He felt a mace, ran his fingers over the weapon; satisfied it was the long-handled one, he clutched it, pivoted around, and stepped gingerly back toward Sloan.
“Here, squire! Bring me my mace!”
Christopher followed the voice and drew nearer to Sloan. He slid his hand up on the weapon so that his fingers were just below the balled end of the club. He held the handle out for the knight to take. The weapon slipped from his fingers into Sloan’s. Then light stabbed his pupils. The blindfold had been yanked off. Christopher rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands and blinked back the sudden day.
“A bit slow, but for a first time, respectable. We’ll work on it, Christopher. Return to your place in line.”
Christopher balled his fists in pride as he rejoined the other trainees.
While the next boy ran through the weapons rou tine, Christopher observed that none of the trainees in line were laughing. Each watched the next victim intently, seeing themselves in that boy and wondering how they would do blindfolded.
The last boy to run through the routine was Doyle, the trainee next to Christopher who had shot him that ugly look. Doyle appeared to be the oldest of the crew, perhaps even sixteen, and slightly taller than the rest of the trainees. Christopher noticed that Doyle was faster than anyone he had seen thus far, and feared Doyle was swifter than himself.
When the time came for Doyle to run a weapon blindfolded, Sloan chose the middle-sized javelin, perhaps the hardest weapon to identify, considering there were three other javelins that were almost identical, varying in length by mere inches.
But Doyle proved his competence and ran the javelin back to Sloan with the precision of a sighted man. Christopher could not help but be envious. The other squires openly expressed their admiration by nudging Doyle with their fists as he found his place back in the formation.
“You run very well,” Christopher said.
Doyle did not reply to the compliment, but remained cold and stoic next to Christopher. It was odd standing next to someone who really wasn’t there, and as Sloan spoke more about what would follow in the days ahead, Christopher began to think of Doyle as an obstacle: there, something that must be stepped around, and something you do not talk to. Perhaps Doyle fe1t the same about him.
When the session was over, Christopher watched as Doyle marched back toward the castle alone. Christopher was accosted by the other boys and answered their questions about the burning of Shores, the story that had been passed around the castle about his slaying a Saxon, and the death of Baines. He answered these questions with an absence caused by the mysterious and abrupt boy named Doyle. Why was he so reserved?
After Christopher finished conversing with his new friends, he climbed on Cara’s waiting back and let Orvin lead the mule back toward the castle. The mule’s steps were measured and smooth, and it was good to take the weight off his throbbing and limp legs.
“The pressure was on you, being first,’’ Orvin said. “I thought about that for a moment. But then I just Acted.”
“As you should have. Do not be surprised if more rigors are placed in your arms than in any other’s. It is by Hasdale’s request.”
“Then it was no accident that I was picked first.” “You held your pennon as high as any other.” “But not as high as one.”
Orvin did not address Christopher’s reference, but Christopher knew the old man understood. Doyle’s flag had flown the highest.
The breeze was balmy, and the sun burned off the morning haze and opened up the clouds. The path took them through the thin, verdant stand of trees that broke into the base of the hill supporting the castle. As they started up the rise, Christopher’s curios ity leaked to his lips: “Who is Doyle?”
The sonata of meadow pipits flitting from branch to branch and the thumping of Cara’s hooves on the dirt filled Christopher’s ears. He waited for an answer to join those sounds, but none came.
“Who is Doyle?” he repeated.
Orvin made a noise with his mouth that could have been the phrase, “I don’t know,” but Christopher was unsure. What he was sure of was that Orvin hid something. The lie was easy to read.
“You know everyone, Orvin. Tell me.” “He is Baines’s brother.”
Christopher was at once shocked-and then in total disbelief. “No he isn’t. Baines had no brother.”
“Doyle was taken by Weylin, a traveling jewelry merchant, when he was very young, and only returned to the castle when the merchant was killed while stop ping briefly-but at the wrong time-at Shores.”
“He was kidnapped and forced to serve the mer chant?”
“At first, ye
s. But I believe he grew to love the man.” “So he’s a lot like me,” Christopher said. “Without parents.”
“Oh, he has parents. But they do not know their son.” “Does he know I was Baines’s friend?”
“He knows Baines was killed with you.”
“I don’t think he likes me,” Christopher said, his voice full of resignation. “He probably blames me for his brother’s death.”
“His feelings cannot be that strong,” Orvin answered. “Baines was a brother that Doyle barely knew.”
“I hope you’re right.”
Orvin’s reasoning carried truth, but the sneer on Doyle’s face was a picture hanging firmly on a wall of Christopher’s mind. He decided he would not cower in the presence of Doyle, despite the boy’s aggressiveness. In fact, he would try to befriend Doyle. There was so much he could tell Doyle about Baines. Christopher and Baines had been like brothers for a brief time, and to rekindle that kind of friendship with Doyle might ignite a part of Christopher that had fallen into mid night, a part that Baines had lit so brilliantly.
8
Green mold covered the walls of the long, nar row hall that led to the prison cells. There was a particular scent to it, not the characteristic fetor that wafted from the pond outside the leatherdressers’ hut, more a musty, tight stench that sneaked up on the nostrils. A leaky well created much of the dampness in this stone tomb, one that was never fixed, and perhaps just as well. Prisons were supposed to be cold, dark, damp, and this one would live up to every criminal’s expectations right down to the mystic spiderwebs tracking its ceilings and the dark, cracked comers where wall met floor, the gatehouses of rat holes.
The door to the cellblock was open via a new leather sheath covering the snoring jailer’s spatha on the far end of the hall. Bribery was a new talent of Christopher’s, one he felt at once comfortable and at once nervous about. A double cross made him nervous, but old Regan had taken the new sheath in his paws, and his three chins pushed out as he leaned down and inspected the work. His beefy face reflected a smile back to Christopher, and the deal was sealed. The open door was Regan’s end of the bargain. No double cross. Relief.
Christopher pulled the iron-barred door slowly toward him. There was no creaking noise that, from the looks of the rusted hinges, should have come. Regan must have oiled them. The jailer did not want his slumber disturbed. Good.
He passed into the cellblock, shifting his head from side to side, scanning the miserable interiors of cell after cell. Shackles hung from the walls, the floors, and the ceilings, all manners of binding a man evi dent in each of the quarters. A prisoner could hang from the ceiling and the wall, the wall and the floor, the floor and the ceiling. Christopher felt empathic pain flicker across his ankles and wrists as he imag-ined what serving time here would be like. Unshackle me, damn you! I’m innocent! IN NOCENT! Groans of pain and the howling of the mad were sounds that seemed to echo still off the stone around him.
Christopher arrived at a cell near the end of the block, pushed in its iron door-which this time protested loudly-then stopped. He edged the barrier a few more inches so that his body could pass through. He heard Regan shift his position in the high backed chair, then continue his snoring, mumbling something about youth and the lieutenant and “no,don’t tickle me like that.”
Inside the cell, Christopher set down the woolen blanket and the two pillows he carried. He unfolded the blanket across the floor. Bound within the gar ment was a richly enameled drinking horn and a thin clay jug of ale plugged with a cork. He had sneaked the horn out of Orvin’s chamber and figured on hav ing it back before his master rose in the morning. He knew how important the horn was to Orvin; it was only to be used on the most special occasions: a victory celebration, a marriage, a birth, a death.
And, of course, a midnight rendezvous with a beautiful girl in a dungeon.
Christopher placed the ale and the horn to the side of the blanket, then positioned the pillows on the wool, leaned back, and tried out the makeshift bed. The stone floor was extremely hard, but he shrugged it off. It wasn’t exactly a poster bed in the solar, but it was theirs. And it was private.
The sound of tentative footsteps rose above Regan’s snoring. Christopher bolted up from the blanket and slid out into the hall. He turned his head to see Brenna walk toward him, her face betraying her trepidation, clearly born from the location of their meeting place.
She voiced her misgivings. “Are you sure this will be all right?”
Christopher nodded, put his index finger to his lips, then gestured with his thumb to Regan behind him. Regan breathed like an armorer’s bellows, a great bag of wind inhaling and exhaling and capable of keeping even the most stubborn of fires hot.
Christopher led Brenna back to their cell, where they both settled on the blanket. Brenna would not lean back on the pillow, but sat upright, her eyes still taking in the eerie decor of the prison.
The cork came easily from the jug, and Christopher filled the drinking horn with ale. He proffered the horn to Brenna, who took the ale and sipped on it twice before returning it to Christopher.
Christopher downed a huge gulp of the fresh brew, then smacked his lips, refilled the horn, then downed another swig.
“What do we do now?” Brenna asked.
What Christopher wanted to do, and what she would let him do, were two different things. What they both wanted to do was a third. He had started with a kiss on her hand, and graduated to a kiss on her cheek one evening as he said good-bye to her just outside the garderobe of the great hall. But now the stone walls and iron bars boxing them in had ironi cally opened up a world of private possibilities to him. No one would ever know or see what happened here except them. He had fantasized about her on more than one occasion. He saw them alone, in each other’s arms, their bodies pressed tightly together as he buried his face in her neck.
“I don’t know,” Christopher said. “What do you want to do?”
Brenna shrugged. She twirled an idle finger through her ebony hair. Christopher had seen her do this before, and he took it as a sign of her boredom. He had to extract himself from her twirling.
He grabbed her hand and turned it over, palm up. “Did you know that I’m a chiromancer?”
Brenna smiled, shook her head, no. Keeping com-pany with Orvin paid off in situations like this. Christopher had become an amateur storyteller with a keen sense for whimsical tales that always involved himself.
“Oh, yes,” he continued, “I studied with two of the finest when they passed through Shores. I can tell you things you never knew about yourself, and things that will happen to you.”
Christopher passed his finger slowly across Brenna’s palm, pretending to see things in the skin that made his jaw drop and his vocal cords rustle with “ohs” and “ahs.”
“What is it?” Brenna asked.
Christopher widened his eyes, then raised his eye brows several times as Orvin was fond of doing. A sly smile nicked the comers of his mouth. “You really need to know this, but you have to unlock the mes sages within me first.”
“How do I do that?”
By the way she asked, Christopher knew she was on to him. “With a kiss.”
Christopher’s desire was no visible surprise to her. She slid herself across the blanket, leaned forward, and closed her eyes.
The moment was here, and Christopher felt a sud den surge of panic quake within him. All the anticipation and expectation of kissing her fully and squarely was now at the forefront. And with the perfect moment upon him, the fear of success, of obtainment, wrestled with the desire to lick his lips and kiss her.
“You filthy swine! Get in there!”
Christopher turned his head so quickly that he felt a muscle lurch in his neck. Brenna shot to her feet. Christopher stood and peered slightly beyond the iron door.
Two armored sentries hauled in a drunken, bare foot young herald whose tom stockings and tunic, blackened left eye, and bleeding knuc
kles advertised either a brawl he had beeri in or the fist-happy work of the sentries. Probably both.·
One of the sentries strong-armed the herald into a cell three doors down from theirs, then slammed the iron door after the man. “You’ll not see the light of day this week,” the sentry promised in a baritone voice that bounced off the walls.
Christopher turned back to Brenna, knowing his face did not reassure her. In fact, it terrified her. She was about to say something, but caught herself with a hand over her mouth. The sentries started down the hall toward Regan. They would have to pass their cell.
Christopher yanked up the blanket and pillows, threw them against the side wall closest to the approaching sentries. He pushed himself against that wall and stood with Brenna, gripped her hand tightly, and wished he could disappear into the cracks in the stone behind him. Their bodies stiffened as the sen tries passed by on their left. A pair of long shadows glided across the floor of the cell.
As the sentries tried to wake Regan, Christopher and Brenna hustled up the blanket, ale, and horn, then moved to the opposite wall of the cell, pressing everything as tightly as they could against it.
Regan told Christopher that they hadn’t had a pris oner in the dungeon in over two moons. It was Christopher’s luck that business had suddenly improved in the cellblock.
But it was also Christopher’s luck that the guards, having notified Regan of the recent inmate’s arrival and location, slipped by them without incident. They let out their breaths.
Christopher looked to Brenna. She was striking in the dim light, parts of her face illuminated then cast in shadow, the total image of her face held back, teas ing him with its completeness.
Both of them still fought for breath as Christopher moved quickly toward her and let his lips find hers. It was wet and soft and nice. Their kiss.