by Robert Adams
As the grand duke, Don Esteban de Alcaboria, meticulously inspected his personal guards, at the same time rapping out a stream of orders to three clerks concerning matters military, matters nautical, and matters domestic (that is, just what he wished served at the great feast for the newly arrived Papal allies), the town that rose up the terraces below the palace was aboil with its own preparations for the coming custom.
Innkeepers rolled out barrels and pipes of wines of varying qualities, slaughtered beasts and fowl, and heated up ovens for the baking of breadstuffs. Whores donned their finest and most revealing garments, and some of them even washed before dousing themselves with strong scents. As ordered by the agents of their grand duke, all households hung out brightly colored cloths from upper windows and balconies, while musicians and dancers gathered in the squares to await the official commencement of this unexpected fiesta.
In the basin, all of the ships were aswarm with life as flags and ensigns and banners and buntings of every description and a veritable rainbow of color were run up halyards and draped here and there, guns were polished, loaded with powder and waddings, run out ready for salutes of honor.
The faithful retainer, Fernando, pulled deferentially at his lord's sleeve. "Your grace, the galloper has not yet returned from the castillo and I feel . . . I fear that something is amiss with Don Pedro . . . ?"
The grand duke shrugged impatiently, foot already in stirrup, groom waiting to give him a leg up into the gilded saddle of his prancing, showy golden-chestnut barb. "Fernando, you maunder like some old crone! You know that the castillo garrison is understrength; no doubt Don Pedro kept the galloper to fill out a gun crew. Or the man might have stopped at any of a score of places for any of a hundred reasons. Get you gone about your duties. If you have none, I'll give you some, and that right speedily!"
But immediately the grand duke and his party had departed the palace environs, the still-worried Fernando dispatched a second, completely unauthorized galloper—this one a grizzled veteran—with orders to cautiously spy out the place at close range before making to enter it.
Down on Calle Embarcadero, Don Esteban drew up his guards and gentlemen in ranks and waited patiently, trying to ignore heat and sweat and insects while the four huge, elegant, high-masted galleons slowly maneuvered themselves about the cramped harbor in search of anchorages that suited their masters. At some length, they arranged themselves in an extended crescent, with one four-masted galleon standing out from the old wharf section and one out from the careening yard and dry dock, the bow of each of these pointing roughly toward the harbor exit. The two three-masters lay off the long section of new wharves.
"Hummph!" remarked one of the grand duke's gentlemen, Don Jose de Zuera. "If I didn't know better, I'd say that those ships were all afire, your grace. Look at all the smoke! We couldn't see it when they sailed in, of course—the wind would've dispersed it—but with them anchoring, it's there for any to see. What does your grace suppose it portends?"
"Incense, most likely," opined Don Esteban languidly. "They are no doubt saying a mass to celebrate the safe conclusion of the voyage from Italy."
"But aboard all four ships at the once, your grace?" probed Don Jose. "It seems not a little odd, to me."
"As you live longer around clerics, Don Jose," the grand duke stated, "you will find them to be a queer, singular breed given to habits and ways most odd to secular gentlemen."
"Strange that they've not loosed off a single gun in salute as yet, your grace." This statement came from another of the gentlemen, Don Nasir de Guadix. "They should have been firing from the moment they entered the channel, one would think."
"It is as I but just told Don Jose," said the grand duke. "The clerical mind is right often difficult of the understanding of the laity, even of noble-born laity. Look you, though, Don Nasir, they are making ready to salute; see, the gunports are all being opened and the guns run out."
"I hope they loose all at once," said Don Nasir. "What a fine, brave show that would be, eh, your grace?"
A thought then struck Don Esteban, and he beckoned to a young knight, saying, "Don Sergio, my compliments to Don Pedro at the castillo, please. Tell him that I feel it is long past time for him to fire salutes in the honor of our visitors."
Reining about, the knight cantered off in the direction of the castillo, his silk-lined velvet cape floating out behind him.
Major Rupen Ademian, USA, returned to Virginia a few weeks before Christmas 1953. A bit surprised that Marge had not driven to meet him at Broad Street Station, he allowed a smiling redcap to wheel his footlocker and B-bag out to where a long line of taxis awaited, settled back, and gave the driver the address of the apartment to which Marge had moved some months after he had been recalled to active duty and sent to Korea to command a company of infantry in the war that was called a "police action."
The thirty-two-year-old officer now wore ribbons denoting some impressive decorations, far more impressive to the knowing eye than the mere Bronze Star and Purple Heart from World War II. The taxi driver, a WW II vet himself, whistled softly between his teeth, then asked diffidently, "Welcome home, Major. How was it, sir? As bad as the big one?"
Rupen sighed. "Yes, it was bad. There's no such thing as a good war, but this one was especially stupid, pointless. Nothing at all was accomplished to justify the expenditure of lives."
"But we won, didn't we, sir?" stated the driver.
"In a pig's asshole we did!" was Rupen's quick response. "It's not over, man, not by a long shot. Those talks in Panmunjom are just a truce, a temporary cease-fire, not peace, so don't let anybody kid you."
"By the way, driver, don't take the gear out until I say so. My wife's a nurse. She may be on duty at the hospital, and I don't have a key to this new place yet, so unless she is home or I can find another way to get in, I may have to have you drive me out to my sister's place on River Road."
The driver crinkled up his forehead and, as they were just then stopped at a light, turned half around to look Rupen in the eyes. "Major, as one old soldier to another, you won't spend as much to go out on River Road if you switch over to a county cab. I'm on a meter, see, and a run out there would end up as high as ten, fifteen, even twenty dollars."
Wordlessly, Rupen reached into a side pants pocket and drew forth a silver money clip, then riffled through the thick fold of greenbacks. The driver smiled, his eyes lighting up. Nodding, he turned back to his driving.
"You're the boss, Major. You tell me where you wanta go and that's where we'll go, by damn."
Lucky at cards and dice, as ever, Rupen had left a high-stakes poker game at the main O-club at Fort Benning with something over twenty-three thousand dollars; the pudgy-looking bulge around his middle was, in reality, a money belt stuffed with hundred-dollar bills—around eight hundred and eighty dollars per month for a bit over two years of fear and pain and privation. And he still would have felt cheated at double the figure. World War II had been different to his way of thinking; he had gone willingly and had been basically responsible for all that had happened to him. But there was no truly adequate recompense for two years plus of involuntary servitude.
The inequity of it galled him, too. During World War II, damned nearly every swinging cock in the whole country had been in one of the armed services—those not too old, too young, or crippled in some way—and quite a number of women, too; it had been a truly democratic, citizen army. But those doing the bleeding and the dying in that slice of very hell called the Korean Police Action were mostly the unmarried and the unlucky minority, while the majority of American men stayed Stateside—fat and happy and healthy and unbidden, making money hand over fist and precious few of them giving a rat's ass whether Korea was won or lost.
The address was a three-story house of the late-Victorian era on Floyd Avenue not far from the college. In comparison to the similar houses on either side, it looked a little rundown, shabby even, and Rupen wondered why; for what with her income from nursing and
the monthly monies from him and the army, Marge should be able to live quite comfortably, and in any emergency, she knew she could always draw from his accounts or ask Papa for help.
The bell inset in the peeling door had been painted over so many times that it was a sure bet it did not work. Rupen tried the knob, turned it easily, and stepped into the foyer to peer at the names scrawled in dim pencil on the battered metal covers of some half-dozen small mailboxes. There it was, "Ademian 2fl rear."
Major Rupen Ademian, mindful of the taxi waiting outside, started briskly up the shadowy stairs with their covering of cheap, threadbare carpet toward a horror that might have broken a lesser man.
The climb up the cliffs of rain-slick, crumbly rock from the shallow beach was costly to Sir Ali and his party of galloglaiches. Sir Sean Jernigan and a sergeant were resting briefly on a narrow ledge a bit over halfway up when that ledge abruptly tore loose from the cliff and plunged them both to their deaths on the rock-studded sand below. Moreover, debris knocked loose no less than three other climbers, and one of these unfortunates chanced to fall directly atop a man standing still on the sand at the base of the cliffs, breaking his neck. All that could be done was to strip the bodies of still-usable weapons, equipment, and supplies and leave their dead where they lay.
Once the survivors were atop the cliffs, they found themselves on a rocky plateau grown with tall, wiry grasses, gorse, and heather, almost flat and featureless as far as any could see through the cold, driving rain.
The sudden demise of Sir Sean left Sir Ali and his two English squires, along with a young Irishman who had been one of the Irish knight's squires, as the only noblemen in the party with but some fourteen vintenary sergeants and three centenary sergeants to assist them in handling almost three hundred men who, though near-matchless fighters in actual breast-to-breast combat, were almost undisciplined, undisciplinable, and savagely insubordinate on occasion, and too many of whom spoke a variety of English that even native-born Northumbrians and Lowlander Scots had difficulty in understanding.
There were, however, a few points in Sir Ali's favor with these rude galloglaiches. One was that they knew him to be not only the man of their chosen chief, his grace of Norfolk, but a close personal friend of that worthy, as well, so they were unlikely to murder the Arabian knight or to see him harmed by enemies. One other favorable factor was that most of the sergeants and quite a few of the other ranks spoke a type of French—an archaic Anglo-Norman-Erse dialect still spoken in certain parts of Ireland and some of the Western Isles of Scotland—much better and more understandably than they did English, and Sir Ali spoke French, too. The third favorable factor was that all of these Royal Tara Gallowglasses had seen Sir Ali ibn Hussein fight, and they respected him, to a man.
Sir Ali also owned a matchless sense of direction, so that by dawn he and the raiders, now all draped over in white surplices adorned with reddish crosses, were almost under the northwest wall of the Castillo de Gijin. Although this pile had been described to him by the Baròn de Sao Gilberto, still the Arabian knight hissed softly through his teeth when he finally saw it close up.
The place was built on, built into, the very stony core of an extrusion of the cliff line. For long previous centuries, it and the fortifications that had preceded it had been the stronghold of those men and families that had held Gijon. In earlier parlance, the site of the present Castillo had been the motte and the older section of the upper town to the southeast of it had been the bailey. Probably, mused Sir Ali, much of the stone for the walls had been quarried on the spot, which fact would account for the broad, deep dry moat that encompassed it on all sides visible from his vantage point. The sides and verges of that moat seemed too regular to be natural.
Before Sts. Rogiero di Pancetta and Bertramo al-Iswid had given Believers the secrets of gunpowder, this castillo would have been impregnable, could only have fallen to treachery from within or lengthy, hideously expensive siege. Even today, in modern times, with siege guns, a determined garrison could hold that castillo almost indefinitely if attacked from this side, the northwest, as the land hereabouts offered little or nothing with which to try to fill that moat and allow attackers to get at any breach their guns might batter through the walls.
The only alternative in this instance was guile, which method Sir Ali had planned to use all along. He would get himself and a few of his steadier men inside, then drop the bridge and open the gate to admit the bulk of his force.
Leaving all but a score of his force concealed in a fold of ground some quarter-mile distant from those ancient walls, Sir Ali proceeded slowly, striving to appear utterly exhausted. He and the rest of the smaller party had deliberately torn some of their clothing and left most of their armor and weapons behind, though their long, full surplices adequately concealed others. A few men had inflicted dagger cuts in their own flesh just deep enough to bring sufficient blood to make their "bandages" look convincing.
When ready, he and his score or so came up out of the declivity and slowly straggled on across the rough, brushy ground toward the castillo, taking pains to stay in plain view of sentries and to make noise. They apparently succeeded well in being noticed, for by the time they came to the verge of the moat opposite the raised bridge, a corporal's guard were gathered on section of wall above the entryway, covering the strangers with arquebuses and cocked crossbows. "Alto!" rang the shout, "Quien es?"
Having fought both with and against knights from most portions of the Iberian Peninsula over the years, Sir Ali was become apt at aping not only their speech but their air of superiority, their overweening arrogance, and their utter contempt for any of non-noble birth.
In the Castilian dialect, he shouted a snarled "What the hell can I do save halt, you ill-begotten rogue of a ninny? Men walk upon clear air only in fairy stories. Inform your commander that Don Ali ibn Hussain de Al-Munecar y de Castro de Castilla and what is left of his retainers and crew have arrived at his gate, having survived shipwreck in that Satan-sent tempest last night, and drop the bridge, you peasant pigs, or it will go hard for you all. Hear me and heed my words, you nameless spawn of syphilitic goats!"
The gentleman had clearly identified himself, and his manner and speech left no doubt as to what he was, so the most of the guards set themselves to lowering the bridge that spanned the moat and raising the portcullis, while one of their number ran to Don Pedro's quarters to breathlessly gasp out the news to the old borracho. They all knew that it was invariably a most unhealthy practice to anger Castilian knights and noblemen, whose hot tempers and matchless cruelty were become a byword. God and all the saints be praised that Don Pedro was not a Spaniard of any description, but a Leonese Basque like most of the rest of them.
Don Pedro had slowly come back to consciousness out of a drunken stupor in the midst of a great stench to discover to his chagrin that once again he had fouled his breeches and his bed. He had but just laved off his legs and lower body from a pail of tepid water, donned clean smallclothes and breeches, and was breaking his fast with brandy and barley bread when his long-suffering squire knocked and entered, trailed by one of the men of the castillo garrison, this latter sweating, panting, and wide-eyed.
Breathing as shallowly as possible in the reek of the small, close, windowless room, Escudero Juan Gallinanes said, "Don Pedro, Alberto here has just come from the north gate. A party of about twenty Crusaders led on foot by a knight are just on the other side of the moat and are demanding entry and aid. The knight says that their ship went down in the storm of last night, which most likely accounts for a few screams that the winds brought down to us from the north while you were . . . ahhh, sleeping."
"They are mostly wearing Crusader surplices, Alberto says. All are torn, battered, and dusty, and some have bloody bandages, as well. Everything about them would seem consistent with the knight's tale of shipwreck. Now true, Don Pedro, the storm was not all that severe, but then we know not in just what condition was the ship, either."
Gallina
nes knew that this last would bring a smile to the face of his knight, even in his hungover condition, for Don Pedro's opinions concerning the numerous maritime disasters that the grand duke had had towed into Gijon-port over the last year or so were well known about the castillo.
"Alberto says that even as he left, the corporal and the rest were making to lower the bridge lest they further anger the knight, who seems to be either of Granada or Castilla . . . and you know how badly those types terrify humbler folk, even when they happen to be in a good mood. So the knight will no doubt present himself to you in all his superciliousness and in no long time, Don Pedro."
Losing his brief smile, the Basque knight nodded and arose, then swayed for a moment, supporting himself against the table edge, while muttering curses damning all Spanish knights to the deepest, foulest pits of perdition. "All right, Juan, hold the bastard off as long as you can. I must change clothes. Have you seen my sword lately?"
Even as the squire and knight spoke, however, the corporal and his gate guard all lay dead in their blood and the column of Sir Ali's main body of galloglaiches were trotting across the lowered drawbridge and streaming under the menacing points of the raised portcullis and through the angled tunnel beyond it to emerge within the castillo and fan out in small units seeking out the rest of the resident garrison.