Who was the knight honoured with such a monument? That was a question Armand had often wondered. There was no inscription upon the column to give the statue a name, only a stylised sword carved into the face of the pillar itself. Sometimes Armand wondered if the statue represented anyone at all, perhaps being nothing more than an abstract creation of the sculptor.
Somehow, Armand could not shake the conviction that the statue had a living source. Gazing up at the bronze figure on his stocky warhorse, Armand could almost see the knight leaping forwards into battle, bringing righteous death to the enemies of Bretonnia. Some fanciful creation of a sculptor couldn’t have such a semblance of life about it. There had been a man, once, who had fought in all those battles, making war against the despotic Sultan Jaffar and the armies of Araby. He had continued to serve King Louis the Righteous when he returned from the crusades, riding with the king’s armies against the monstrous Red Duke. The last battle inscribed upon the shield made it clear that Ceren Field had been the knight’s last battle. Whoever he had been, he had not survived the destruction of the vampire.
Armand felt the old childish curiosity upon him again. He rose from his seat and walked to the column, pressing his hands against the cold marble. He smiled and shook his head as he started to lean forwards. When he had been a child, he had sometimes been convinced he could hear sounds when he pressed his ear to the column. Sometimes he had whispered questions to the statue, pressing his ear against the stone, hoping to hear an answer.
The sound of an armoured boot clicking against one of the gravestones made Armand spin away from the column. The bloody feud against the d’Elbiqs fresh in his thoughts, Armand’s hand instinctively closed about the hilt of his sword. Having left his retainers behind at Count Ergon’s castle, he appreciated how tempting a target he would make for any killers Earl Gaubert had dispatched.
A single knight stood among the graves, a knight in black armour and grey surcoat. He carried no shield, though a massive iron club was tethered to his belt. The visor on the knight’s great helm was lowered, hiding his features. Indeed, the only identifying feature on the knight was the black raven embroidered upon his surcoat. There was an aura of brooding power that exuded from the black knight as he slowly approached Armand. It was a strange sort of sensation, at once comforting and sinister. Armand kept a ready hand upon his sword.
“Forgive the intrusion,” the black knight’s deep voice rumbled. He gestured with an armoured hand at the plain below. “I was praying before the crypt of Duke Galand when I thought I saw someone moving among the graves on the hill. I was fearful some grave robber or ghoul was disturbing the dead. I do not take such things lightly.”
“You need not have feared, sir knight,” Armand replied, suspicion yet in his voice. “I came here only to enjoy the solitude of this place. I meant no disrespect to the dead.”
The black knight bowed his head in apology. “I meant no offence, Sir Armand du Maisne. Once I saw who was among the graves, I realized my mistake.”
Armand took a step back, his eyes glancing at his surroundings, wary of enemies who might have remained hidden while the black knight held his attention. “You know who I am?” Armand challenged the stranger.
“Indeed, and you know me, though it has been many years since you last set eyes upon me. I am Sir Maraulf.”
“Sir Maraulf?” Armand nodded as he dredged his memory for the name. Recollection was slow in coming, but he did finally remember a marquis of that name. His fief had been devastated by a plague long ago, when Armand was still in swaddling. The plague had killed the marquis’ entire household. The marquis himself had been one of the few to survive. In the aftermath of the tragedy, he had set aside his title and his lands to take up the grail quest. Armand had not heard that Sir Maraulf had returned to Aquitaine.
“It is a long time since you were in these lands,” Armand observed.
“Not so long as you might believe,” Maraulf said. “I have made my abode in the village of Mercal these past ten winters.”
Again, Armand nodded. He had heard there was a strange hermit knight dwelling with the peasants and tending the grail chapel of Mercal. He feared the impertinence of his next question, but no knight of Bretonnia could restrain his curiosity when meeting a man who had taken up the search for the grail. “Your quest, it was successful, Sir Maraulf? You have seen the grail?”
The black knight touched his hand to his chest, his steel fingers brushing the embroidered raven. “I found what the gods deemed me worthy to find,” he answered. “What of you, Sir Armand? What is it that you seek here among the dead?” He nodded his head, indicating the marble monument. “I was watching you for some time. It seemed to me you would have made obeisance to that shrine. Why?”
Armand suddenly felt very ashamed at the childish compulsion that had come upon him, doubly embarrassed by the importance Sir Maraulf placed upon such a whimsical impulse. “It was nothing,” he assured Maraulf. “Only a foolishness from my childhood. I was going to ask the spirit of the knight a question. When I was a child, I would press my ear to the stone and sometimes, I imagined, I could hear a ghost whispering to me.”
Sir Maraulf’s attitude became stern. “One should be wary of asking things of the dead and even more cautious of such answers as they might give. Do you know whose monument that is? It honours a noble knight of Aquitaine who fought alongside King Louis the Righteous in the crusades. When he returned to Aquitaine, many great deeds were attached to his name and he had earned the title ‘El Syf’, which in the tongue of the Arabyans means ‘the Sword’.”
“He sounds like a formidable warrior,” Armand commented. “If his ghost could speak to me, then it would surely tell me what I wished to know.”
“And what was that?” Maraulf asked, a note of demand in his tone.
Armand’s pride bristled at the interrogatory tone with which Maraulf addressed him. At the same time, he felt an unaccountable eagerness to unburden himself to a listener who was made of flesh and bone rather than marble and bronze.
“Three days ago, I killed a man,” Armand said. His face became pale and he shook his head violently. “No,” he hissed. “I give myself too much credit. I killed a boy, a fresh-faced youth still earning his spurs. Oh, it was a fair fight and I offered the boy every quarter possible. But in the end, my sword was sheathed in his flesh and he was as dead just the same.
“I had no good reason to kill that boy,” Armand told Maraulf. “Only the excuses of family honour and family pride. That is a feeble reason to kill a knight so far beneath my own station. Another martyr to a feud so old none really remembers how it started. I have killed and killed again in the name of ancestors who are nothing to me but glowering faces in old portraits and names on plaques.”
Armand turned and stared up at the bronze statue. “I spoke to my father about my feelings, my desire to see an end to the feud. Count Ergon is a proud man, and in him the hate has taken root too deeply to listen to reason. He could not sympathize with my guilt, trying to console me by saying the boy had been only a d’Elbiq. When I would not be comforted by the reasoning of hate, my father berated me as a coward, a traitor to the family name. His curses drove me from the chateau, drove me to the only place I have ever known where the burden of feud did not rest upon my heart.”
Slowly, Maraulf advanced to Armand, placing his gauntlet upon the younger knight’s shoulder. “What was it you thought to ask your ghost?”
“I would have asked him how to make the faces of the men I have killed fade from my dreams,” Armand said. “I would have asked how to make the guilt and shame I feel go away. It is one thing to slay a foe who is your equal in a fairly fought contest, but how can any man of conscience live knowing he has done little more than murder upon a boy who didn’t have a chance?”
“El Syf was a renowned swordsman in his day,” Maraulf said, lifting his helm to join Armand in staring up at the statue. “No blade in all Bretonnia could match his. He made it a practice
that any man of any station, noble or peasant, might cross swords with him at any hour. If they could but scratch him, a purse of gold would belong to the challenger. Many came to test El Syf, but when he departed Aquitaine to make war against Araby, the purse of gold still sat unclaimed in his castle.” The black knight crossed his hands, making the fingers resemble the wings of a bird. It was a custom Armand had seen peasants perform when consigning their dead to the grim god Morr.
“I think I know what El Syf would say,” Maraulf told Armand as he turned away from the monument. “He would say ‘kill without regret and ask no quarter from your foe’. For it is by such words he lived… and died.”
“If I could do the same…”
“Regret and guilt serve to remind a man that he is a man,” Maraulf cautioned. “Without these to bring pain to his memories, a man becomes a monster.” The black knight began to make his way back among the graves. “If you ever feel the need to ask a question of El Syf again, perhaps you should ask him which side he died fighting for at Ceren Field.”
Armand’s mind was troubled by Maraulf’s last words. He would have pursued the black knight, to ask him the meaning of that enigmatic advice, but the sound of hooves on the field below arrested his attention. He turned his head to observe Count Ergon and five of his attendants galloping across the field towards the hill. The visor on Count Ergon’s helm was raised and there was such a look of anguished concern written across his features that Armand immediately forgave his father for the harsh words that had driven him from the castle.
Before making his way down the hill to join his father, Armand looked for Sir Maraulf to thank him for his advice and for listening to his troubles. But there was no trace of the black knight, only the wind rustling among the weeds.
* * *
“My lord?”
Earl Gaubert d’Elbiq lifted his head and squinted in the darkness of the high room. Night had fallen and no servants had come to light the torches, obeying the desolate man’s order for solitude. Upon the floor, at the foot of the throne, he could still see the pallid, lifeless features of his son’s face, though it had been a day and better since Sir Girars’ body had been removed to prepare for burial.
“My lord?” the feeble, nasally voice asked again. This time, when the earl peered into the darkness, he could see a crouched figure standing to one side of his seat. Earl Gaubert recognized the broken posture of Vigor, one of his footmen. Vigor had once been the earl’s stable master until a horse had kicked him and broken his back. It was a sense of charity that made the earl keep him on despite the way the crippled peasant depressed his spirits and reminded him of his own infirmity.
“What do you want, slinking about in the dark like a hunchbacked cat?” Earl Gaubert demanded, hurling a goblet of wine at Vigor’s head.
Vigor tried to duck, but his broken body wasn’t equal to such agility. The peasant whined as the goblet smacked against his skull. “I meant no disrespect, my lord,” the cringing man pleaded.
“Then explain yourself and be quick about it,” the nobleman snapped.
Bowing, scraping the floor with his grimy hands, the crooked footman presented himself before the throne. “The servants have been speaking… about what you said to Sir Leuthere.”
“I have forbidden that coward’s name to be spoken within these walls,” Earl Gaubert snarled. “He is afraid of that du Maisne scum that killed my son. I am not. If I was whole, I would take up my own sword against him! I would make Count Ergon mourn for his child as I have mourned for mine!”
A sympathetic smile was on Vigor’s face as he heard his lord’s pained fury. “That is what they said,” he continued, nodding his head eagerly. “They said you wanted Sir Girars’ killer slain and did not care how.”
Earl Gaubert scowled at the peasant. “What are you about?” he asked. “You think that you can kill a knight! Even when you weren’t a crook-back, Sir Armand would have flayed you alive without breaking a sweat.”
Vigor bowed his head still lower, wincing at his master’s scorn. “I did not mean to suggest that I…”
“Then what did you mean to suggest?” Earl Gaubert growled, quickly losing patience with the peasant’s timidity.
“Magic, my lord,” Vigor said, his voice lowered to a whisper. “Use magic to avenge Sir Girars.”
Earl Gaubert shook his head and chuckled. “Magic? Witchcraft? That is your advice?”
“Jacquetta could do it…”
The nobleman snorted derisively. “That witch kill a knight? Her spells are fine for hexing crops and spoiling milk, maybe drying out a field or two! But kill a knight? The hag wouldn’t know how and wouldn’t dare even if she did.”
Vigor nodded his head, but his words were not quite in agreement with those of his lord. “Jacquetta has worked only small magic for you because you only offered her small things,” Vigor said. “If you promised her more, she would be able to make better spells.”
“It is too bad you did not have enough to offer her to fix your back,” Earl Gaubert scoffed, but the mockery rang a bit hollow. There was something to consider in the peasant’s suggestion. Though it offended every knightly virtue he possessed, Earl Gaubert wondered if magic might prevail where cold steel had failed him.
“Go and find the witch,” Earl Gaubert told Vigor. “Tell her I want to meet with her.”
CHAPTER III
Baron Gui de Gavaudan paced anxiously along the battlements of Castle Aquin. Sometimes the baron would pause, looking out across the night sky, staring at the stars and the sleeping landscape they shone upon. The green pastures and lush fields of Aquitaine, the finest vineyards in all Bretonnia, these were things worth fighting to protect. Worth killing to keep.
Why wouldn’t the fool just die already? If he recovered, the king would restore the dukedom to the sickly wretch, forsaking the title in favour of the great El Syf!
He should be dead, how the old duke had managed to cling to life these many months was a mystery to Baron de Gavaudan. Any other man with the poison of the Arabyan Deathstalker in his veins would have perished in a few minutes. The Arabyans had practically deified a janissary who had lasted a fortnight after being stung by one of the scorpions. Yet here was the Duke of Aquitaine, El Syf, still refusing to let the poison finish him eight months later!
The baron fingered the pectoral about his neck, the silver talisman that marked him as the king’s steward. De Gavaudan was effectively master of the dukedom while King Louis was away at the royal court in Couronne. It was more power than the baron had ever known, certainly more than he could claim as father-in-law to the king.
But it was not for himself that he had taken such chances, that he had fouled his honour with murder and poison. It was to secure the position of his line, to make certain the position of his descendents. The title of King of Bretonnia would not pass on to the sons of King Louis and Queen Aregund. When King Louis died a new king would be crowned by the Fay Enchantress, chosen from those who had sipped from the grail.
The Dukedom of Aquitaine, however, was another matter. That title would pass to de Gavaudan’s grandchildren, ensuring the power and prestige of his line. His grandson would lord over the most prosperous dukedom in the realm, inherit wealth and power second only to that of the royal throne itself. What greater honour could the baron claim than making such a future possible for his descendents?
There was only one thing standing in his way: the sickly mass of broken humanity that had finally been brought back to Aquitaine from the wastes of Araby. El Syf was already more than half dead when he was brought within the halls of Castle Aquin by his retainers.
Half dead wasn’t quite dead enough to ease the baron’s mind. A man who had survived the poison of the Deathstalker for such a long time might manage a recovery. That was something the baron couldn’t allow to happen.
He didn’t like what circumstances had compelled him to do, but the baron was a practical man. His enemy was in his grasp, lying sick and helpless in one of
the castle’s chambers. He did not think the Lady would lower herself to smiling upon this enterprise, but certainly the gods could not have made a neater gift of El Syf.
No, the baron thought, a cruel smile twisting his face, the old duke will not recover.
The assassin he had sent to visit the sick man would see to that.
What troubled the baron was the time it was taking his killer to do the job. He had ordered all attendants away from the duke’s room, leaving the way open for the assassin. The victim himself was already at death’s door, helpless to defend himself. All his man had to do was place a pillow over the duke’s face, hold it there for a few minutes, and the deed would be done.
Why was it taking the assassin so long to return and report that El Syf was dead?
Baron de Gavaudan stalked along the battlements for another hour, his unease growing with every step. Somehow something had gone wrong. It was a conclusion he didn’t want to make but it was the only reason why the murderer didn’t come back to let him know the task was finished.
Unable to wait any longer, the baron made his way back through one of the castle’s watchtowers, descending into the tapestry-lined gallery that opened upon the guest chamber he had designated as the duke’s sick room. He would see for himself why his assassin had failed to return. Had the fool faltered at the last? Some pang of guilt or conscience kept him from doing his duty? If such were the case, the baron intended to have the knave quartered and his innards fed to the crows!
A single candle burned in the musty room, an icy draught rushing through it from the broken window set high upon its outer wall. A shapeless heap of unused furniture cloaked against the dust and damp huddled against the inner wall. The only other appointment in the room was a large four-poster bed, a thin sheet hanging from the engraved tester suspended above the mattress. The baron could see the figure of his enemy through the almost transparent curtain, a black huddle sprawled across the few blankets de Gavaudan had allowed for the sick man’s comfort.
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