Servant of Birds

by A. A. Attanasio

  The mention of a sword makes Erec stare about reflexively at the lush undergrowth, looking for others among the golden sun-shafts of the alder copse. But they are alone, wading through purple loosestrife and luxuriant tangled locks of willowherb and com-frey. "She must have learned cruelty well from Gilbert and Roger for her son to hate her so and put her out in her old age."

  "Bah!" Dwn's disgust startles a willow-wren from the dark selvedge of the creek, and it blurs past and disappears twittering in the radiant canopy. "Ailena was gruff but never cruel. Her son hates her because he thinks she killed his father. But Gilbert killed himself with his drinking. He was always besotted. Made him churlish. He beat Ailena without remorse, even when she was with child. She lost all her babies to his blows before they were born— all but the two, Guy and his sister Clare—one to torment each of the parents. Clare hated her father for beating Ailena, but the young Guy loved the brute and played with him constantly. Gilbert had the boy on horseback when he was three, hawking by four. They were a famous pair in the castle and countryside, riding everywhere together. Guy was six when his Da was thrown from his horse, right in the main courtyard, while shouting with his wife. Guy forever believed Ailena spooked the horse on purpose and killed Gilbert."

  They pause under a silver birch beside a weir in the creek that has lifted the flow of the stream to shining shoulders of green water. "Were you there?"

  "Yes. I saw it all. It was one of their typical rows. He was drunk and shouting about her favorite game, the court of love she held in the palais with her daughter Clare and the maids. Ailena stamped her foot with frustration. The horse reared, and Gilbert, in a drunken daze, flew off, smote his head on the pavement right in front of Guy, and never rose again."

  Erec nods, finally grasping die black reasoning of Guy's murderous soul. "And from then Ailena ruled without a master—but with a viper for a son?"

  "Thirty years she kept that viper in her nest without it biting her," Dwn says, and leads the way through a natural orchard of wild cherry, crabapple, and sloe. There was ample time then for the troubadours, mimes, prestidigitators, and the courts of love. Plenty of time to indulge all her whims, for she never blundered into marriage again."

  "Courts of love?"

  Dwn places a hand over her mouth and cackles. "An impish game Ailena learned in the Pengord. The women reign over the court of love and make rules for the men. And the women's rules can be quite exacting."

  Erec has long felt a secret fascination with Norman women, whom he has seen only from a distance. With their long hair and slender throats, those haughty, tall creatures are very different from the sturdy, shorn women of the hills. He wants to enquire further about them, to learn their passions and weaknesses from this maid who served them. But through the sun's rays slanting among the trees, the thatched roofs of the village come into view, and Erec silences himself, bows his head under the burden of his hides, and becomes a simple tanner from the hills.

  -/

  Looming majestically above the morning mists, the Castle Lan-franc rises from the river Llan. The swift and deep stream plunging out of the hills bounds the fortress on three sides, like a noose. For Erec, who has seen the bewildering jumble of turrets, walls, bartizans, and battlements from afar, the massive brown castle had always seemed a toy. Now, at the toll bridge—where he is close enough to gaze upon the stark masonry patched with moss and ivy and thick tufts of weed—the vast bulwarks rear up sheer as cliffs, defiant and formidable. High above all the palisades, garrets, and towers soars the donjon, the great central tower, upon which summit baron Guy Lanfranc's black and green banner idly trails. A glimpse of the Lanfranc Griffin—the eagle-headed lion with its talons splayed to strike—drops Erec's gaze back to earth.

  The tollkeeper nods sleepily at Dwn. He is older than even she is and remembers when she lived in the castle, remembers when she would come thundering across the bridge on her red palfrey beside the baroness and her black charger. He glances only briefly at her sturdy companion hunched under his roll of hides, and no explanation is needed. The other villeins, herding their geese to the feast of the nativity of St. John the Baptist and hauling their sheaves of spring hay for the seigneur's stables, are too busy and tired to enquire after another lout come down from the hills to sell his skins.

  Over the bridge, the road passes before the enormous garden to the right, which fades in the dispersing fog to the orchards and the hunting forest. To the left is the parade ground, expansive fields doited with a few cattle sheds and a shanty for the herdsman. The road banks, crosses the exercise grounds, and reaches the barbican, the first outwork of the fortress, a palisade of keenly pointed staves and piles too high to clamber over.

  The porter lias already thrown open the heavy wooden gate of the barbican, and the villeins enter freely. All are familiar faces, and the porter hardly seems to notice them from where he sits on a high stool with his legs propped up on the crossbar of the open gate. With a lazy gesture, he stops Erec. Dwn quickly—too quickly for Erec—steps forward and delivers their agreed-upon story. The porter's rheumy eyes study the Welshman and his hides. They are elk and otter hides, clearly valuable, and the porter admits them.

  Inside the barbican, the road crosses another open field, the lists, where a sergeant and a squire are working with a frisky stallion. To either side of the lists the ground falls away in steep, rock)' slopes down to the broken banks of the Llan. Directly ahead is a moat fronting colossal masonry walls. Several varlets are wading up to their hips in the algal-green water, catching frogs for the cookhouse.

  The drawbridge is down, the iron gate of the portcullis hoisted, and the villeins are piled up against the enormous oaken gates. The gates are strapped with metal and have not been unbarred, but a small door in one of the gates, barely large enough for a horse, admits the townspeople two abreast. Before Dwn and Erec pass through, the crone casts a furtive glance at a keyhole window in the turret beside the portcullis. The chief porter watches from there, and she is hoping that he will take no special notice of her country cousin.

  Dwn's hope shrivels as they cross the threshold into the bailey and a sergeant steps from the turret door and calls them aside. He speaks langue d'oc, and Erec, though he does not understand the words, knows what he is asking. He lowers his bundle in front of him so that, if he must, he can heave it at the stout man and shove his way out through the door to take his chances against the archers overlooking the lists.

  The sergeant, in a chain-mail vest and cowl, is gruff and keeps one hand on the hilt of his sword. He does not like the look of this Welshman, for he is bigger than most, and though he wears rude clothing there is something arrogant about him. He stands too erect, and his stance is broad and slightly askew, like a man trained to fight with a sword.

  "Speak you French?" the sergeant asks in elementary Welsh and slaps Erec's sides, feeling for weapons.

  Erec shakes his head, motions to his hides and points to the hills. The sergeant draws his sword and hacks off the hemp rope around the bundle. The skins flop open. Assured that no weapons are hidden among the hides, the sergeant taps Erecs boots with the flat of the blade, sounding for knives, and runs the sword up the outside and inside of the tanners legs. With curt indifference, the Norman then motions him to pick up his skins and enter.

  -/

  Dwn knows her way through the back wynds of the bailey and is able to show Erec, away from the throngs of villeins and merchants in the courtyard, the thatched-roof stable with its long row of stalls, where more than three dozen horses are champing their morning fodder. Ricks of hay and heaps of muck jam the spaces between the stables and the animal pens, and dogs, pigs, and hens forage freely there.

  Alongside the stables are ramshackle but commodious wooden structures—the barracks for the men-at-arms whom Guy has hired to aid him in his siege of a neighboring barons castle. Erec hurries from there gladly, not wanting to rub shoulders with the very men the Invaders' king has oftentimes used to murder good W
elshmen.

  Dwn leads him past a noisy carpenter shop and the ringing forge of a smithy, where a master armorer is manufacturing crossbow bolts and spearheads. They pass shops of cobblers, chandlers, spinners, tinkers, glaziers, and tailors. From the alleys between the workshops and the long storehouses, they glimpse sheds alive with shrill screams. These are the baron's hawk mews, where the chief falconer is dangling rags of meat.

  Past cows being milked and braying donkeys overladen with roof tiles and firewood, Dwn and Erec shoulder their way among red-capped guildsmen and their bareheaded apprentices. No one else seems aware that the baroness is returning, for all are going about their business as on any other day. A small crowd with sacks-over their shoulders has gathered before a round building with a tall chimney; this is the seigneur's great oven, where all the villagers bring their flour to be baked into bread.

  Dwn stops Erec there so that they can observe the adjacent chapel, an incongruous building of elegant blackstone pinnacles and sculptured saints. Behind it is another moat and a massive wall with towers protecting the inner ward. The drawbridge is down, the portcullis raised, and Erec gazes in open fascination at the vast inner courtyard and the palais, an L-shaped stone building with high-wrought pinnacles, large, pointed windows, and sloping roof of red tiles. Rearing above the palais, at the far extreme of the castle, he sees the great keep, the round citadel that dwarfs all the other towers. At its top is a gibbet for hanging enemies and a flagstaff upon which flies the black Griffin against a green field.

  The gate tower trumpet blares. The people milling at the front of the bailey clear out of the way as squires dash from the barracks and the stables. The gates are heaved open; five bareheaded horsemen in full armor boom over the drawbridge, surge into the bailey, and dismount.

  Erec immediately recognizes the baron, Guy Lanfranc, though he has never seen him from this close distance. Neither tall nor powerfully built, Lanfranc's jowly face—with its single deep crease across his forehead, and dense black eyebrows joined above a pug nose—nevertheless radiates a brute command. His thick jet hair is long and pulled back severely, tied off military-style in a topknot. And his complexion, dark as oiled walnut, gleams with tension as he shouts orders to the squires who remove his armor so he can mount a fresh horse for the ride to the palais.

  Erec also identifies Guy's warmaster and eyes him well as he strides past in his dented and scarred armor on his way to the smithy. Roger Billancourt wears his gray hair cropped close to his square skull, erased at the temples by a lifetime of wearing a helmet. His weatherbeaten face, marred with ancient scars that break his stubbly beard into patches, glowers at all who met his steely gaze.

  Dwn whispers and points with her face to a burly knight at the baron's side, "The one with the Breton mustache is William Morcar."

  Morcar's face is graven, like an outcrop of the castles masonry, with a bushy yellow mustache that droops past the boot-tip of his jaw.

  The old handmaid's stare fixes on an angular knight with the soft face of a clerk. "The tall one with the bald head is Harold Almquist."

  Erec's gaze slips off the rangy Almquist, whose shiny pate gleams with sweat above a cuff of frizzy orange hair. He has not the look of a warrior to the Welshman. But the man behind him does—a long-shouldered archer, his bow slung across his arm. He looks feline, his cheeks beardless and hollow, no eyebrows above his green, wide-apart stare. His hair, cut short at the back of his neck, is so fair it shines white as chalk in the sunlight.

  "That is Denis Hezetre, the baron's childhood friend. He and Guy adventured together in Ireland when they came to manhood and could no longer abide the baroness's rule. He looks far younger than his years and is admired among the ladies, though he lias never taken a wife nor favors any lady."

  "Perhaps he prefers to be mounted."

  "I think not. While in Ireland, Guy saved his life but took a dire wound in the groin and lost his little worm. As Guy deprived himself of woman's love to rescue his friend, so Denis swore then to shun such love himself. He has lived as celibate as a monk since."

  -/

  Erec and Dwn sit on the stone molding of the chapel with the sun in their eyes. This benefits the crone, whose damp bones are warmed and who has earned three silver pennies from the sale of Erec's hides. Once the sun found them so did the guildsmen. Already the bootmaker and the clothier have sent their apprentices to look over the skins, and Erec is pleased to turn over the money they have paid him to the old woman. She sits with her hands open in her lap, her riven face upturned, eyes closed, basking in the hot rays.

  An excited trumpet blast brings Erec to his feet. The trumpeter extends the alarm to a flourish, announcing the approach of a dignitary. Dwn clutches at Erec's arm and pulls herself upright. "It is she! She has come back!"

  The people in the bailey, who clearly are not expecting anyone of stature now that their seigneur is in the castle, stop in the midst of their endeavors and share baffled looks and murmurs. "Guy has kept the secret well," Erec remarks, taking Dwn s hand and leading her toward the front gate.

  "Perhaps he does not know?"

  "He knows. Else why would he have returned from the heat of his siege? The message was borne to him late yesterday on the high road."

  Ah yes, Dwn remembers: the riders galloping on the steep hill trails at nightfall yesterday. "Ailena is wise to have kept her return secret. Treachery is not beneath her son. Yet I cannot reason her return. She will have no strength to match her son's wrath."

  "Unless, old mother, she's come back to face him with the most immutable strength of all."

  Dwn stops, her face contracting as the sudden and harsh truth of these words blows coldly through her. "Surely, you have guessed right, Bold Erec. Ailena has returned as a corpse."

  -/

  Guy Lanfranc charges out of the gate of the inner ward astride a brown destrier, his face locked in a grim scowl. He does not believe that Mother would dare return even as a corpse. He suspects this is one of his enemies' deceptions, and he will have none of it. The flag signal he had his men send from atop the donjon commanded the bailey porter to drop the outer portcullis. He will not be fooled by a Trojan horse.

  At the front gate, Guy's knights catch up with him. Roger Bil-lancourt, his gray head covered with a chain-mail cowl, dismounts and receives the gatekeeper's report. "The party is small," he repeats for the others. "Three sumpter mules and an oxcart that flies the Swan."

  "What trickery is this?" Guy mutters.

  Roger advances to the gate and peers through a looking-hole. "They have two strange beasts with them. And two mounted knights. But the oxcart is too small for more than a half dozen men."

  "Lift the portcullis," Guy calls impatiently. "Swing wide the gate. I'll quail no more before my mother's ghost. Let's be done with this. Our siege waits on us."

  As soon as the gate opens, Guy lurches ahead and bends forward so as not to strike his head on the rising portcullis. Across the drawbridge, he [Mills up short, his upper body surging back and forth with the impatient movements of his horse as he tries to comprehend the spectacle approaching him.

  There, on the road before him, waits a hide-covered carriage drawn by two oxen, its banner emblazoned with a Swan, black-masked head serenely bowed. At the reins sits a dwarf in motley garb, and on his hunched shoulder squats a black monkey dressed as a squire. Beside the dwarf, a Jew in a burgundy tunic mumbles prayers, his bushy beard and long gray temple locks bobbing as he sways back and forth.

  To one side of the carriage, two Bactrian camels richly caparisoned, with scarlet reins and silver tassels, regard the startled crowd at the gate with nonchalant hauteur. Atop one perches a tall blond-bearded knight in a turban and billowy robes. Across his lap, a crooked saber lies, hilt and baldric inlaid with gold. A Mamluk dagger glints at his hip, and from the saddle bow dangles a quiver of four-foot-long javelins. Around his neck, a thick golden band catches sunlight.

  On the other side of the oxcart, a sleek, wispy-legge
d white stallion carries a bareheaded knight garbed entirely in black but for a scarlet formde cross over his heart. Behind him three heavily-laden mules nibble the grass at the roadside.

  "Ho! Castle Valaise!" the dwarf calls out in langue d'oc thickly accented with Italian inflections. "Your mistress is returned!"

  "Fie!" Guy shouts back. "This is Castle Lanfranc. No mistress rules here."

  The knights cross the drawbridge and assemble beside Guy, gawking and murmuring among themselves before this strange menagerie. From behind them, the villeins filling the gateway buzz with excitement at the sight of the baroness's banner and the strange creatures. And across the river, the villagers have gathered to gape.

  "I am Guy Lanfranc, earl of Epynt, baron of this castle. State your business."

  The dwarf stands up, the monkey clambering atop his head, and gestures to the banner of the Swan. "This is our business. Do you not recognize the ensign of this domains right ruler? Make way for the baroness Ailena Valaise!" The dwarf snaps the reins, and the oxen plod forward.

  "Halt!" Guy bellows. "Stand fast and be recognized!"

  The oxcart whines to a stop.

  At the gateway, sergeants gruffly shove aside villeins to make way for an ample dame in a fur-edged pelisson of the finest Flanders cloth, escorted by a long-skulled man with sallow skin and foppish bearing: Gerald Chalandon and his wife Clare advance hurriedly through the crowd.

  "Mercle!" Guy growls under his breath when he sees his sister and her husband. "Keep them back, Harold. This smells foul."

  Gangly, bald-pated Harold Almquist dismounts and runs to stop the anxious couple. Clare is already calling, "Mother? Mother—show yourself."