by Mike Ashley
Lady Clara dropped what she was about and jumped up and toward him, and extended both hands to him. Still regarding her gravely, he received her hands in his own, then blinked and started slightly and looked down curiously at the little hands in his big ones, at the right and at the left, then turned the right palm-upward and fairly stared at it, then the left and stared at it.
“Blisters!” he exclaimed.
“We have been making arrows, Mary and I,” she answered, gently and shyly. “And splicing old bows. And twisting and waxing bowstrings.”
He looked her in the eyes, then stooped over her hands again and touched his lips lightly to each of the blistered palms in turn, muttered “Gramercy, my dear!” and straightened and backed out by the way he had come in.
Clara returned to her work, but fumblingly. She blinked to clear her vision, and tears sparkled on her cheeks.
Mary eyed her thoughtfully.
“A grand old man,” said Mary. “Well, a grand old knight-at-arms, however – and as good a poet as any in Wales, even. But as simple and innocent as a baby, or poor Sir Gayling even, for all his questing and gallivanting; and I’d liefer have him for a battling champion, in the ding-dong of rescue and defence, than for a husband or father.”
“Is that so?” cried Clara. “I don’t believe it! We don’t know anything of him as a father, but we can see that he is a good grandfather to poor Lorn; and I have my own opinion as to what your answer would be if he asked you to marry him.”
“Fiddlesticks, my dear! And if you contemplate becoming the Queen of Har yourself – and a crook of your finger is all that’s needed – I advise you to be quick about it.”
Clara stared at her ex-governess and asked tremulously: “Why do you say that – and look so strange?”
“Because you have no time to lose; and if I look strange, who wouldn’t after glimpsing a dead man in a living man’s eyes?”
“What d’ye mean by that? Speak out, or I’ll shake you!”
“Calm yourself, child. I mean what I say. I saw him dead – that poor old King – just as surely as I foresaw your own grandmother dead while she was still walking and laughing, and just as surely as my grandsire True Thomas foresaw and foretold the death of King David at his marriage feast and was whipped for the telling. It is when you see two pairs of eyes glimmering in the eyeholes of the one head – and one pair of those eyes are cold and blind.”
Lady Clara cried out, “To the devil with your soothsaying!” and clapped her hands to her face; and her tears burned and stung the abraded palms. Mary sighed, brushed a furtive hand over her own still face and took up her work again.
* * *
At noon, Lady Clara told the major-domo to send Joseph to her. That important person received the command in silence, and with a weary shake of the head. He was thinking of the easy and peaceful years before poor dear Sir Gayling’s mad expedition into Wales. Those had been the times. There had been no big Welsh damosel then to drive honest men around every day with besoms and mops, in pursuit of honest dirt and dust and cobwebs; and no giddy young dame to demand gleaming crystal and shining plate, and tarts and jellies and custards for every meal till the cooks and scullions were fit to tear out their beards. And now it was worse. Now it was the very devil. Sweeping and scrubbing, and polishing and burnishing and cooking, had been hard enough on the poor fellows, but ferreting out ancient war-gear and repairing it, grinding edges onto rusty swords and axes, splicing old bows and whittling new bows and arrows, and being driven and drilled by Tomkyn the ex-bowyer, was harder.
“The whole world be turned upside-down,” grumbled the major-domo; and instead of going on the lady’s errand, he went in search of some hole or corner in which he might evade Tomkyns’ officious attentions for a little while. Imagine a major-domo hiding from a cook! Such a thing could never have been in the days of Sir Gayling. And so, quite naturally, the dwarf failed to answer his mistress’ summons; but Squire Gervis presented himself some three hours later, and quite of his own volition. He was dusty, but in high spirits. When he took Dame Clara’s proffered hand, he turned it over tenderly, gazed at it adoringly and said that he had heard about it from the King.
“How fares the dear King?” she asked softly.
“That old wonder-boy is as lively as a grig,” he replied enthusiastically. “And as merry too. And even Sir Lorn is companionable. That’s the way it always is with those two. The prospect of a fight, and never mind the odds against them, acts like mothers’ milk – if you’ll forgive the expression – on those mad questers.”
“Mad?” she whispered; and Damosel Mary looked up from her work with glue and feathers on a clothyard shaft and said, in the voice of a governess: “It’s a very wise man, or a fool, who dares cry ‘Mad!’ at his fellows.”
Unabashed, Gervis replied with unabated good humor:
“A fool, then! And in my folly I repeat that our noble friends are mad. Who but a madman would spend a hundred years and more – some say two hundred – in pursuit of the very thing from which he turns and flees whenever he catches up with it?”
“What thing is that?” murmured Clara.
“He calls it beauty,” he laughed.
“Nay, he calls it the soul of beauty,” she murmured.
He shrugged a shoulder delicately and winked politely.
“And what have you to say of Sir Lorn’s madness?” she asked gently.
“I’ll say that is different,” he answered, with a touch of gravity. “Who wouldn’t be mad, after a year in Færyland with the Maid of Tintagel, or Helen of Troy, or maybe it was Queen Mab herself? But he is mad, our poor Lorn; and it’s struck deep, else he would forget her now, whoever she was.”
He gazed adoringly into her eyes, and she smiled back very kindly, and a little sadly and with just a flicker of pity.
“It is sometimes difficult to distinguish madness from foolishness,” said Damosel Mary.
He turned to her and shook a playful finger, then turned back to Clara.
“I’ll tear myself away now, back to my duty, before one of those mad questers appears and drags me away ingloriously by the scruff of the neck – for my folly.”
And he was gone as lightly as he had come.
The Invading Horde
Dame Clara told the dwarf Joseph to take post on the tower and keep watch on the edges of the forest from dawn till dark: but he excused himself on the plea that he could not be spared from his duties as galloping aide-de-camp to King Torrice. This was on the night of the second day after the King’s and and Gervis’ visits. For two days and a night now the lady had been neglected by her champions, save for the verbal message from Torrice, by Joseph, to the effect that she had nothing graver to worry about now than the blisters on her pretty hands, and that he would compose another song to her as soon as the dastard Drecker reappeared and was finally disposed of.
“He sounds very sure,” she said to the messenger.
“And with reason,” he replied condescendingly. “We are ready and waiting for Master Drecker and his riff-raff. Every stratagem of defence and attack is planned; and we have made more than a score of men-at-arms, all horsed and harnessed and armed, out of your clodhoppers of yesterday.”
So Joseph escaped back to his active military duties; and at the first pale gleam of the next dawn, Lady Clara herself took post on the watch-tower, leaving the command and business of the household archery to Damosel Mary and the bowyer Tomkyn.
She peered down at a shadowy world, but not a sleeping one. A few dark figures moved to and fro about the inner court, and more in the outer court, and yet more in the paddocks beyond and about the edges of the home orchard; and her heart swelled wth gentle pride and sweet gratitude and perhaps with even tenderer emotions at the thought that she was the inspiration and first cause of this vigilance and devotion. She wept a little in happy sadness, but soon dried her eyes on the silken lining of one of the hanging sleeves of her green gown. As the clear light increased, rising and floodin
g, she saw more and more, and farther and farther. Thin feathers of smoke uncurled above the leafy roof of the orchard, the busy human figures increased in number and formless bulks and darkness took shape. Now she saw the abatis of new-felled forest trees which enforced and topped the old wall of tumbled field-stones around the home farm, and four massy clumps of leafy timber far out toward the four nearest screens of the surrounding forest, and each at a point where nothing taller than hay had grown previously.
By now she could see to the forest walls all around, beyond the farthest meadows and cornlands and deserted steadings. The forest edges to the westward, struck full by the level rays, showed leafy boughs and brown boles like a picture on tapestry, but to the eastward they were still gloomed with their own shadows . . . It was from the shadows that the first running figure appeared. It was of a tall man in leather, with a strung bow in his left hand. He checked for a backward look, then ran again. A horn brayed in the shadows and was answered from the right, and then from the left, as if by echoes. A second man in leather appeared, and three more a moment later, all running like partridges from the shadow of a stooping hawk. A leather cap lifted and fell to earth, leaving the shaggy hair of that runner streaming in the wind of his flight. The watcher on the tower could make nothing of that: but after another had stumbled and run on with bowed head and hunched shoulders and in zig-zagging jumps, and yet another had fallen flat and then crawled like a snake, she made out little glints and gleams in the sunshine, and knew them for flying arrows.
Again a horn brayed, but louder and nearer this time. Now a horseman appeared as if from nowhere, galloping toward the screen of shadow from which the men in leather were fleeing, gesticulating and screaming. Four of the runners turned and set arrows to their bowstrings and shot, hard and fast, into the green gloom.
The rider drove through them, wheeled, dismounted and laid hold on the crawler with both hands. The wounded man rose to his knees, to his feet, and sagged across the horse. It was a small horse, but hardy; and so the rescue was made, with the pony running like a dog, the wounded forester draped across like a half-filled sack and the rescuer running beside and holding him in place. He was a small rescuer. Boys of nine years have been taller.
“Joseph!” cried the lady on the tower. “’Tis none other, by my halidom! Run, Joseph, run!”
All the visible actors in that flurry of action disappeared among the hedges and walls, and under the thatched roofs, of a steading. Now, for a long minute, nothing moved in Lady Clara’s wide field of vision – though she looked in every direction – save a few feathers of smoke and wings of birds and ever-trembling leaves of tall poplars. No more arrows leaped from shadow to shine. Nothing moved on the ground. The horns were silent now, but cocks crowed in the home orchard. She gazed abroad and down in growing and fearful wonder, peering for some sign of awareness of danger, listening for a sudden commotion and shouting of armed men; but the great house below her, and the bright landscape all about her, were as still and quiet as if they lay under a spell. Was some wicked magic at work here, to her undoing? What of her champions?
But no, she had already seen little Joseph and five scouts in action; and she refused to believe that any spell save death itself could withhold the hands of that old King and the squires from her defence. Of Lorn she was not so sure. Even though she had made him tremble with a touch of her hand on his sword-belt, she did not blink the fact of his old bewitchment and sojourn in Færyland. What were her frail enchantments, though exercised with all her heart, against those of ageless sorcery? For that dear knight – for succor from those dear hands – she could but hope and pray.
Now the lightening rim of gloom from which the five vanished foresters had emerged stirred again, and the base of that green obscurity was alive suddenly with a score of men in leather and wool, with strung bows in their hands. They did not dash forward, but extended to right and left and advanced cautiously, setting arrows to strings. As many more invaders now emerged and formed a second line. A few of these were bowmen too, but most of them carried boar-spears, short axes or halberds. Close behind these came a fellow with a burning torch and two with a black kettle slung from a pole between them. The torch smoked blackly and flamed palely in the sunshine, and a thin haze of heat quivered above the kettle.
“The rogues! They mean to set us afire!” cried Clara.
Again she looked all around, and again in vain for any sign of a defender. The skirmishers continued to advance, and with more assurance. A big knight in full armor, on a black horse to match, came into view in rear of the two-score skirmishers, riding at a foot-pace. He signaled with a hand – its mail flashed in the sunlight – and shouted a command, whereupon the fellows in front drew together on the run and headed straight for the steading into which Joseph and the five foresters had disappeared. The knight followed them, but neither fast nor far, and soon drew rein and sat with uneasy shiftings and turnings, as if he too (like the watcher on the tower) was puzzled by the stillness. The two-score raiders halted and sent a flight of arrows into the farmstead, and then a second flight, and three fire-arrows flaming like comets: but no shaft came from hedge or wall in retaliation. They loosed a dozen fire-arrows, one of which struck a thatched roof, stuck there and blossomed like a great poppy. And still the spell was unbroken.
Clara, up on her tower, was as spellbound as the menaced steading and the fields spreading stilly all around from the silent house under her to the still walls of the forest. She wanted to scream, but her throat refused. It seemed to her that the forest watched and waited expectantly, and that everything within its sinister circuit, seen and unseen, would start and cry out in protest but for the same fatal hand that gripped and silenced herself . . . Once more she tried to scream – and for cause, God wot – but with no more success than before. That same span of leafy gloom stirred to life again and spewed forth running men; but this time it was a multitude. It flooded into the sunshine like a dark tide flecked with glinting spear-points and upflung blades and spotted with garments of tattered finery among the jerkins of drab leather and wool. An awesome sound rose from it like the hum and growl of sea surf. It flooded to and around the mounted knight and bore him with it toward the smoking farmstead into which the vanguard continued to shoot fire. It did not check, but in its weight of hundreds, carried the first two score forward with it against the still hedges and silent walls. And then the spell broke.
A hundred arrows darted from hedges and walls and gables; shouts and the braying of horns shook the smoke and were answered by shouts and horns from the right and the left; and more arrows darted forth and struck and stood quivering. From the ambushes of felled trees on either hand came armored men on large horses, shouting and with leveled spears, breaking from the trot to the gallop – a dozen from the right and a dozen from the left. Lorn led one party, up on the mighty Bahram, and in front of the other charged King Torrice under his plume of black-and-white ostrich feathers. The invading flood recoiled; and its front – what remained alive of it – turned upon the pressure from behind, screaming and striking for a way of escape. Now it was every knave for himself, of those murderous hundreds.
They were spitted like partridges. Lorn was among them. He threw his spear aside and hewed with his sword. They were split like fish. The white stallion tore them with his teeth and crushed them under his terrible hooves. Torrice was among them, not charging now but reining his black horse this way and that and using his great spear as a lesser craftsman might use a light sword, prodding here and there. Though a master of every chivalrous combat-tool, he held that the spear was the knight’s first weapon. Peter and Gervis were among them. Like Lorn, they too had discarded spears for swords for such infighting as this. Goggin and Billikin were among them, plying their long blades like gentlemen born. Twenty armored rustics on plow-horses were among them, hacking with axes and bashing with spiked maces. And even the big knight who had brought them here with promises of easy rich rapine now took part in the slaughtering
of them, cutting them down and riding them down in his frantic efforts to win clear and away. Screaming like trapped beasts, the remnants of the horde broke in every direction – but not all of them to safety, for the dwarf Joseph and the hundred archers from the burning farmstead were on their heels.
The lady on the tower shut her eyes. She cried out, but in the din of triumphant shouts and horns from the house and courts below, her voice was no more than whisper in her own ears. After a little while, she looked again, avoding the motionless shapes on the ground. Footmen still ran in groups and pairs, pursued and pursuing, to the flashes of knives and axes. Some of the horsemen still galloped and struck, but most of them moved more slowly and with an air of aimlessness now.
But King Torrice and all his five men, and Joseph on his running pony, were still in play. And Drecker, clear of the rabble at last, was riding like a madman for the nearest edge of the forest. His spear was gone. His great shield was cast off. He dropped his sword and cast off mace and ax from his saddle-bow. Anything for speed with which to escape a red doom: for that old King and that young knight were after him, converging on him from right and left. But he hadn’t a chance. At the very edge of the forest – But the watcher on the tower had closed her eyes again.
Quest’s End
King Torrice of Har was dead. The exertions of that last mêlée and the final stroke on Drecker’s neck had stilled that long questing forever. He had lived to be carried in by Lorn, and to smile and murmur a few words at the touch of Clara’s tears on his face. Now he lay on a couch of silks and furs in the great hall, in full armor, with tall candles at his head and feet. His hands were crossed on his breast, on the cross of the long sword that lay there unsheathed. His helmet, with its proud plume, was at his left elbow. Clara and Lorn knelt on the right of the couch and the squires on the left. At the head of it, a wandering friar read from a great missal, now muttering and now chanting. All the surrounding gloom was full of kneeling people, and over all rang and sighed and sobbed a dirge from the Damosel Mary’s harp.