The Dragons of Archenfield (Domesday Series Book 3)

by Edward Marston

  “I may say the same to you.”

  Golde smiled quietly. “I am happy where I am.”

  There was a long pause. Ralph stood close in the half-dark and inhaled her fragrance. Its sweetness enchanted him. Golde had removed her wimple and brushed out her hair. He could see the outline of her tresses as they rested on her shoulders.

  “I wish that we met in happier circumstances,” he said.

  “We have met, my lord. That is pleasure enough.”

  “But I am vexed by the loss of a companion, you by the death of a close friend.”

  “A shared anxiety gives us a bond,” she said, “though I must correct one thought. Warnod was no close friend of mine. He was my sister's choice. I weep as much for her as for him. Aelgar has lost everything.”

  “Except you.”

  “Except me, my lord.”

  “You must love her deeply to go to so much trouble.”

  “I promised her to find out the truth,” said Golde. “It is the only way to put her mind at rest.”

  “The truth might destroy her peace entirely.”

  “No, my lord. Aelgar has many frailties, but she also has an inner strength. Uncertainty is what will gnaw into her soul. She must know. Who killed her man? And why? However ugly the facts, she is ready to confront them.”

  “And you, Golde?”

  “Me?”

  “Can you stare the hideous facts in the face?”

  She nodded. “It would not be the first time, my lord.”

  A wolf howled in the distance, but neither of them even heard it now. They were too locked into each other to listen to anything more than the words that were spoken between them. Ralph felt strangely coy. He wanted to reach out to take her in his arms, but he was almost tentative.

  “Why did you never marry again?” he asked.

  “Because that is no route to happiness for me.”

  “When did your husband die?”

  “Three years ago, my lord.”

  “You have never looked at another man since?”

  “I have looked at several and found them wanting.”

  “Did they not measure up to your husband?” he asked. “Is that why you have remained a widow? Because you are still mourning the one man who made you content?”

  “No,” she said, softly. “There was no contentment in my marriage. I was a faithful wife, but I could never love my husband. Companionship was the most that I could hope.”

  “Not love him? Why, then, did you marry him?”

  “Of necessity.”

  “You were forced into this match?”

  “It was arranged for me. I protested in vain.”

  “Could your father be so unkind?” said Ralph, earnestly. “Did he have no concern for his daughter's feelings? What made him wed you to a man whom you wished to put aside?”

  “You, my lord. You and others like you.”

  He understood. Golde's father was one more victim of the Norman occupation, a proud Saxon thegn whose wealth and position had been reduced to insignificance. Where he might have offered the hand of his elder daughter to the son of another noble house, he was instead compelled to marry her off to a brewer from Hereford. Golde was accustomed to a life of recurring loss. She was resilient enough to survive, but it had given her a slightly cynical edge.

  “Thus it stands with me, my lord,” she said with a resigned shrug. “I knew misery with my husband. I sometimes wonder if it is even possible to be happy in marriage.”

  “It is,” said Ralph. “I have known that joy.”

  “Then I envy you.”

  “Perhaps I should envy you, Golde.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you were able to put your marriage behind you and start afresh. Your life is better without your husband.” He turned away with a sigh. “Without my dear wife, mine is far worse. I still grieve over the loss of that brief joy.”

  Ralph was astonished. He never talked about his wife to his friends, let alone to strangers. When he was standing alone in the moonlight with a beautiful woman, his marriage was the last thing he wanted to think about. Yet his words had come out so naturally. He felt no embarrassment. Golde had confided in him and produced an answering confession.

  She touched his shoulder with the tip of her fingers. Ralph took her hand and kissed it tenderly. When he tried to enfold her in his arms, however, she held him off.

  “This is not the time, my lord.”

  “I want you,” he whispered.

  “There are too many other things in the way.”

  “That is the only reason?”

  “It is reason enough.”

  “Then you are not offended?”

  Golde moved in close to brush her lips against his.

  “No, my lord,” she said. “I am delighted.”

  Pain and exhaustion finally overcame him. Gervase Bret fell asleep with his back up against the wall and his legs in the straw. Slumber was no escape from tribulation. His dream tormented him afresh. He was riding across Richard Orbec's land once more when rough hands fell upon him and he was bound securely. Instead of being tied to a horse, however, he was strapped to the back of a huge red dragon, which galloped along the Welsh border, breathing fire and defiance in equal measure. Gervase was helpless. The creature's spikes dug into his body. Its scales rubbed his skin raw. Its long tail curled up to thresh his back unmercifully until it ran with a waterfall of blood.

  The dragon seemed to get bigger, the ropes tighter, and the pain more excruciating. Gervase had never known such agony. His grotesque mount was racing faster than ever. It suddenly stopped beside a river and rippled its whole body. Gervase was thrown high into the air before sailing down towards an outcrop of rock. He yelled in terror.

  The cry and the bump brought him awake. The fiery dragon was no more than a gentle old man, plucking at the strings of his harp. The blood down his back had been the trickling moisture that ran down the wall. Thrown from the scales of a giant beast, he had simply fallen sideways and hit the ground in the dungeon.

  Gervase collected himself and sat up again.

  “I am sorry if I startled you, Omri.”

  “Nothing can do that.”

  “How long was I asleep?”

  “Long enough.”

  “Is it night or day?”

  “Still night,” said the Welshman. “Day will poke a finger of light in at you if you stay where you are now.”

  “There is a window?”

  “High in the wall behind me. When they put me in here, I felt my way around every inch of the cell. If you have no eyes, you learn to see with your fingers.” He put the harp aside and groped for something in the straw. “We are not alone down here, Gervase. We share this mean lodging with a tenant of much longer standing.”

  “A tenant?”

  “Here he is.”

  Omri pulled the skull from the straw and offered it to Gervase. The latter shrank back for a second then mastered his fear. He took the skull and brushed the tufts of straw away from it. A beetle crawled out of one of its eye sockets.

  “Who do you suppose he was?”

  “Yet another nameless prisoner of fate,” said Omri.

  “Where is the rest of him?”

  “In the far corner. I covered his bones with straw.”

  “Poor man!”

  “He has not been very talkative,” said Omri with a wry smile. “That is the trouble with the dead. They do not speak Welsh.”

  “He was thrown in here and left to rot!” said Gervase with sudden alarm. “The same ordeal may await us.”

  “I think not, my friend.”

  “They'll let us starve to death in this hole.”

  “We will live. That much is very clear.”

  “Why?” “Because our enemies do not need to kill us slowly when they could have done it much more swiftly on the road.” He gave a chuckle. “Besides, they have fed me twice since I have been in here. Bread, water, and the remains of a chicken. This form of sta
rvation is a tasty way to die.”

  Gervase was reassured. As he shook the last vestiges of sleep from his eyes, his mind cleared. His captors had gone to great trouble to bring him across the border into Gwent. Had Richard Orbec feared that Gervase might see too much on his clandestine visit to the disputed land? Or had someone else decided that the best way to halt the work of the commissioners was to remove one of them from the scene? Monmouth Castle was a Norman citadel on Welsh territory. Had it been taken? Was the red dragon on the rampage again?

  Omri the Blind might hold some of the answers.

  “Only two of you survived,” he said. “Two from ten.”

  “That is so.”

  “Then where is your companion?”

  “I do not know, Gervase.”

  “Locked in another dungeon?”

  Omri measured his reply. “My companion is … somewhere in the castle. But not in such a miserable condition as us.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “Instinct, my friend.”

  “Why were you two spared?”

  “We are not soldiers. We were unarmed.”

  “All the easier to cut you down where you stood.

  ” “They preferred to keep us alive, Gervase.”

  “For what purpose?”

  “This is one,” said Omri, taking up the harp again to conjure some music from its strings. “There are no bards in England but they are revered in Wales.”

  “Throwing you in here is an act of reverence?”

  “I still breathe, I still eat, I still sing.”

  “And your companion?”

  Omri sighed. “I am more concerned about him than about myself. Though I have sung at the courts of the great and the good, I have slept in barns and fields along the way. This dungeon stinks no worse than a stable. I can put up with it. My companion is less robust.”

  “Young and vulnerable, then?”

  “Do not bother about him, Gervase,” advised the old man. “Think only of yourself. Our case is different. We were brought here for one purpose, you for another.”

  “You were ambushed in Wales and brought here,” said Gervase, puzzled. “Why to Monmouth? We have heard no rumours of insurrection. Can the castle be in Welsh hands?”

  Omri the Blind went off into a fit of laughter.

  “Alas, no!” he said. “If it were, I would not be down here with you. I would be up there in the hall, celebrating the occasion with a song of victory. Monmouth, I fear, is still a Norman castle.”

  “Then why do they hold me here?” said Gervase with a burst of indignation. “Do they know who I am? What I am?”

  “Only too well, I suspect.”

  Gervase became restless. Rising to his feet, he picked his way around the little rectangle of stone and accumulated filth. When his foot met the pile of bones, he laid the skull gently beside them. Omri's reconnaissance had been thorough. The window was high in one wall, set in a deep recess and slashed by thick bars. Standing on tiptoe, he could just touch the iron with his fingers. A welcome gust of air filtered in. Thin shafts of light would follow in time.

  “That is not the way, Gervase,” murmured Omri.

  “What?”

  “You will never escape through that window.”

  “How else?”

  “Through the door.”

  “We could never budge it.”

  “They can,” said the old man. “With a key. It depends on how eager you are to get free of this foul.”

  “I would do anything, Omri.”

  “Even take a man's life?”

  Gervase hesitated. “Only if my own were in danger.”

  “Practice with your weapon.”

  “They took away my sword and dagger.”

  “A piece of rope can be as deadly a weapon as either,” said Omri. “And they left you with two lengths of it.”

  Gervase stirred with excitement. There was hope.

  Goronwy waited until first light before he ordered a more detailed search. He and his men had camped beside the clump of trees near Raglan. Dawn found them spread across a mile or more as they looked for more bodies. None were found. Goronwy gathered his soldiers in the shade of the trees and assigned new duties.

  Two of them rode back towards Powys to take news of the ambush to Cadwgan ap Bleddyn. Two more carried the same message along the road towards Caerleon. A burial detachment was formed and the eight soldiers from the escort were laid in shallow graves to protect their bodies from scavengers. The stench of death was already beginning to spread.

  Sleep had not dulled Goronwy's rage. When he and his men rode up to Raglan itself, the young man's temples were still pulsing madly. He had found the reason for the delay and buried the victims of the attack. Rescue and retribution were now his twin aims. Raglan itself was a tiny hamlet made up of mean cottages. A mangy goat was tethered outside one dwelling. Chickens squawked outside another. Sheep ranged the hills all around.

  The meagre population was dragged from its hovels to face Goronwy's stern interrogation. They were simple souls. Their testimony was honest. They had seen the soldiers come down the road from Monmouth and they had heard the sounds of the attack. Beyond that, they had little to add. Violence had locked them indoors. They had been too frightened to venture out to see the results of the ambush.

  Their description of the soldiers matched that of the shepherd boy who had been questioned in the night. Goronwy at least knew one vital fact. Welsh soldiers had been killed by Norman attackers. The armed escort from Caerleon had been ambushed by men from across the border.

  Brandishing his sword, Goronwy rode up and down.

  “Is there anything else you can tell us?”

  “No, my lord,” said the one of the peasants.

  “Did you not hear anything as they went past?”

  “Nothing.”

  “No word? No command? No name?”

  Another man edged forward. “I heard a name, my lord.”

  “What was it?”

  “The soldiers rode past my door as I was putting the harness on my donkey. A name was spoken and they laughed.”

  “What name?”

  “Cruel laughter, my lord. It made my blood run cold.”

  Goronwy knocked him over with the flat of his sword.

  “The name, you idiot!” he snarled. “What was the name?”

  “Richard Orbec.”

  Richard Orbec led the retreat at full gallop, taking his men in a wide loop before powering down the hill towards the house. Forty knights were sweating in their armour in the morning sun. Some carried spears, but most had swords in their hands. Their horses sent up a flurry of earth and grass as they descended the hill in an ordered retreat.

  Orbec himself was first across the drawbridge and first to dismount inside the palisade. His men poured in through the gates and tugged their animals to a halt before jumping from the saddle. The drawbridge was hauled up and the gates were shut. On their lord's command, the knights ran to defend various points on the ramparts against an invisible enemy.

  It was an impressive performance, but it did not entirely satisfy Orbec. He pulled off his helm and beckoned his captain across.

  “We are still too slow,” he said, sharply.

  “We can ride no faster, my lord.”

  “The men can be deployed more effectively once they are inside the defences. The weak point is at the rear of the house.”

  “Yes, my lord.”

  “Station four more archers there.”

  “I will.”

  “We'll have fresh timber cut to strengthen the palisade.”

  The captain nodded. “Is that all for today, my lord?”

  “We will practice one more time.”

  “We are as ready now as we will ever be.”

  “That is what I once thought,” said Orbec, crisply. “In Normandy. You can never prepare enough for any eventuality. Trouble may strike when we least expect it. The speed of our response must be decisive.”

>   “Yes, my lord.”

  “Mount up again! We'll ride in from the east this time.”

  Canon Hubert and Brother Simon were conscientious members of the commission. The Domesday returns for Herefordshire had thrown up a number of irregularities and it was their task to look into them. One of their number had unaccountably disappeared and a second had gone in search of him. Hubert and Simon felt it their duty to press on with the allotted task on their own. The village of Llanwarne could not provide them with a shire hall, but they could still examine a witness, if only in an informal manner.

  Ilbert the Sheriff was very restive under questioning.

  “I am not involved in this enquiry in any way!”

  “We believe that you are, my lord sheriff,” said Hubert.

  “The dispute is between Maurice Damville and Richard Orbec.”

  “It also concerns Warnod.”

  “His last remains are six feet below the earth.”

  “A legacy yet survives.”

  “Legacy?”

  “Yes,” said Hubert. “Far be it from me to prefer the claim of a Saxon thegn over that of two Norman lords, but justice must be served here. This great survey of ours is not simply an inventory of the nation's wealth. It brings to light theft, fraud, forgery, wrongful annexation, and all the other appalling abuses that have taken place in the shires.”

  “You talked of a legacy.”

  “Warnod had a legitimate claim to the land that is part of Richard Orbec's holdings. If that claim is upheld—and it lies within our power to make that judgment—then the property passes to Warnod's heir.”

  “He has no heir.”

  “How do you know?”

  “He lived alone. Without kith or kin.”

  “That is so,” conceded Hubert, “but property may be willed to close friends just as easily as to family.”

  “And it may be willed to the Church,” noted Simon.

  Ilbert Malvoisin bided his time before he spoke. He had underestimated the two men. They were shrewd and persistent. Canon Hubert was the chief inquisitor, but Brother Simon would throw in a remark from time to time to show that he had missed nothing. The sheriff looked around for a way to disentangle himself from the dialogue.

  They had strolled to the edge of the village. The sad vestiges of Warnod's habitation could be seen in the distance. They could even pick out the mound of loose earth that had been shovelled over the red dragon.