The Seven Streams

by Warwick Deeping

  “The men murmur for the sword,” he said. “I met Malan in the woods to-day, after I had slain this beast with a long flight. They clamour to be led against those who have harried and sacked the Seven Streams.”

  “Let them murmur; I echo them.”

  “Your wounds?”

  “Are tough as leather. Shall we not take the sword?”

  “It is God’s will.”

  “Never had men better cause than we.”

  The Heretic had not been idle while he played the Samaritan to Tristan in the ruin amid the woods. Even as in the wake of a great ship the waters seethe and foam, so the rude peasant folk of the Seven Streams had risen in the track of the Bishop’s host. Burnt hamlets and ruined towers, these were their witnesses, their solemn oracles. They had flocked to Samson, these homeless men whose kinsfolk had fallen to Jocelyn’s swords. Samson had preached to them more fiercely than of old. They were as tinder to a torch, these woodlanders; they were ready to burn for him in the quitting of revenge.

  That evening Tristan and the Heretic watched the sun go down behind the hills, and spoke together of what might chance to them in the unknown. Far to the south towered the great mountains, like sable pyramids fringed with fire. The stream clamoured in the woods beneath, as though it voiced the turbulence of the age. They spoke together, these two men, of Rosamunde, of Joyous Vale, and the Bishop’s war.

  Tristan, lifting his sword, pointed it to a star that shone solitary in the southern sky.

  “Let us remember Ronan’s town,” he said.

  There was a strange smile on Samson’s face as he laid his hand on Tristan’s shoulder.

  “Whatever life may give,” he said, “some joy, much pain, travail, and discontent, I trow there is no better quest in life than such a one as hangs upon your sword.”

  “You speak in riddles,” quoth the younger.

  “This star, what a riddle lives therein.”

  “Your tongue plays with me.”

  “Not so, brother; have I not said enough?”

  The two men looked into each other’s eyes. On Samson’s face there was that goodly light that streams up from a generous heart, brave and bounteous, man’s love for man. In the Heretic there were no ignoble moods, and, like Paul of old, he esteemed himself little.

  “Brother,” he said, “the fight for the truth gives its own guerdon. That you are with us, I know full well; moreover, I mind me that a man’s heart reaches through human love into heaven. A fair face, two trustful eyes, the waving of a woman’s hair. How many a pure spell is wrought with these!”

  Tristan stood leaning on his sword, looking not at Samson, but towards the south.

  “Are you so old?” he asked him suddenly.

  “I—brother?”

  “You followed also through the woods. And had the eyes no spell for you?”

  Samson leant his arm over Tristan’s shoulders, even like an elder brother, who banishes self.

  “For me,” he said, “are no such songs as men make at sunset when the heavens are red.”

  “And Rosamunde?”

  “Can one bound to God, even as I am bound, turn to look on a woman’s face? Nay, Tristan, my brother, the dream is thine, a dream to set thy young blood stirring.”

  Tristan looked long into the Heretic’s eyes.

  “You love her?” he said.

  “I have loved her,” Samson made answer, “even as others have loved her, because one cannot look on her unmoved. It is her privilege to be loved, yet may not my eyes confess the truth. Yours is the hand that must seize the torch, yours the sword that shall cleave the spell.”

  “And you——”

  “I am Christ’s man, brother. What I do, I do with my whole heart.”

  CHAPTER XIV

  Tristan and the Heretic rode south-west towards the sea with their hundred lances aslant under the summer sky. They were as men challenging a kingdom with their swords, and they tossed their shields in the face of fate. The fine audacity of such a venture set the hot blood spinning in their hearts. To raise the banner of liberty aloft against Pomp and Power! To hurl damnation in the mouth of the Church!

  The Papists had left garrisons in many of the strong places of the Seven Streams. The main host had recrossed the river known in those parts as the Lorient, and had camped about Agravale, ducal city of the Southern Marches. They had raided the province of the Seven Streams into a desert, so far that life seemed absent. A great silence had descended over the land. Hamlets were in ashes; towers stood mere blackened shells upon the hills. As to the lords and gentry of the province, they had either fallen or taken like outlaws to the woods. It was such desperate men as these that Samson coveted to swell his company.

  They pushed on warily, avoiding such places as were garrisoned by the Bishop’s men. Samson was as a merchant who possessed one ship; he would not imperil her as yet in troublous waters. Men gathered slowly to him as he made his march, grim, stony-faced men whose silence seemed fiercer than their words. Blood was thicker than dogmas and decretals; they had one common bond, these children of heresy, one common vengeance. They had suffered, all of them, in home and heart. In three days Samson’s company had increased to the number of two hundred spears.

  As for Tristan, he was as a hound in leash; his sword thirsted in its scabbard; he had tasted blood, and was hot for a tussle. His sinews were taut despite the southron’s spear, and his strength seemed greater than of yore, perhaps because his heart bulked bigger. Nightly when they camped in the woods he would wrestle with any man whose ribs could bear his hug. He could take Samson by the hips, burly man that he was, and hold him high above his head. The fellows would gather round and gape at the giant. Tristan began to know his power the more as he found strong men mere pygmies in his grip.

  They held westwards towards the sea, through grassy plains where streams went winding ever through the green, and poplars threw their towering shadows on the sward. Samson had trudged the land through in the days of his preaching. He knew each hamlet, each road, each ford. The Papists had padded through this same region like a pack of wolves, and Tristan and the Heretic found no life therein.

  On the fourth day they came upon the ruins of a small town set upon a hill in a wooded valley. Vultures flapped heavenwards as they rode into the gate; lean, red-eyed curs snarled and slinked about the streets. Tristan smote one brute through with his spear that was feeding in the gutter on the carcass of a child. In the market square the Papists had made such another massacre as they had perpetrated in Ronan’s town. The horrible obscenity of the scene struck Samson’s men dumb as the dead. The townsfolk had been stripped, bound face to face, left slain in many a hideous and ribald pose. The vultures’ beaks had emulated the swords. The stench from the place was as the breath of a charnel house, and Samson and his men turned back with grim faces from the brutal silence of that ghastly town.

  Near one of the gates a wild, tattered figure darted out from a half-wrecked house, stood blinking at them in the sun, a filthy tangle of hair over his dirty face. The creature gestured and gibbered like any ape. He fled away when Samson approached, screaming and whimpering as though possessed with a devil. The man was mad, had lost his reason in the slaughter of children and kinsfolk. Save the dogs and the vultures, he was the one live thing they found in the town.

  When they were beyond the walls and under the clean shadows of the trees, Samson lifted up his hand to the heavens like one who called on God for help.

  “Brother, shall such deeds pass?” he said. “Before God, I trow not. Heaven temper our swords in the day of vengeance.”

  Tristan’s thoughts were beyond the mountains, hovering about a golden head and the ruffian priests who ruled the south. What might her fate be at the hands of the Church? His manhood rose in him like a sea thundering up in the throat of a cavern.

  “Samson,” he said, with iron mouth, “God be thanked for the strength of my body.”

  “Brother, thank God for it,” said the Heretic, grimly en
ough. “Would I had the power of a hundred men. My strength should be a hammer to pulverise these dogs.”

  “Ha, Heaven see to it, when I have Jocelyn by the throat, I will break his back as I would break a distaff.”

  Hard by the sea there was a certain strong place set upon a rock, Tor’s Tower by name. It was a wild pile of masonry clinging to naked stone, wind-beaten and boisterous. The place had fallen by treachery into Papist hands, so Samson gathered from men who joined him on the march. A Papal garrison had been established there, some of the bloodiest ruffians in the south.

  Tor’s Tower stood a mile from a great arm of the sea. Between the rock and the shore were treacherous marshes, while on the landward side wild heathland dipped to a waste of woods. Dull skies hurried over the place; the wind piped keen from over the sea. A narrow causeway led to the tower, winding round the flank of the rock. It was the very aerie Samson coveted till he had hatched a flight of goodly eagles.

  Tristan rode through the woods and reconnoitred the tower, saw that weeks would be needed to starve such a place. Even as he lay hid in the woods, some two-score spears rode home from a foray, passing close by Tristan’s lair. They had wine skins and spoil laid over their shoulders, also two young peasant girls bound back to back, and tied together on a horse. The men’s rough jesting reached Tristan’s ears, he heard their oaths and their unclean talk. His fingers itched for the pommel of his sword; he kept cover, however, and bided his time.

  Tristan and Samson were soon agreed in the matter. When dark had fallen, they marched over the moor, left twenty men to guard the causeway, climbed up with the rough ladders they had hewn in the woods. The sky was of ebony, sealed up against the stars. Half the Papists were drunk in the place when Samson’s men planted their ladders against the wall. Tristan was the first to leap down into the court. He slew two guards who kept the gate, hurled down the bar, shot back the bolts. Samson’s men came in like a mill-race, and there was bloody work in court and hall. When they had made an end of the vermin, they cast their bodies down the cliff, remembering Joyous Vale and the town in the valley.

  Tristan and Samson watched the dawn streak the eastern sky with gold above the woods. They were masters of Tor’s Tower and the wild wastes that glimmered towards the sea, while fifty dead men were wallowing in the marshes at the foot of the rock. The tower was well victualled, could be held for months by loyal and wary men. Samson was for making it a rocky refuge to the scattered companies of the Seven Streams.

  “Give me but one sure pinnacle,” he said, striking the battlements with the scabbard of his sword, “one high place where we may rear up our flag, and the sheep will take courage, gather, turn to a pack of wolves. Tor’s Tower shall be our beacon height. Give me till the spring, and the southrons shall find no feeble rabble for their swords.”

  Tristan had a more passionate quest within his heart, and his thoughts, like swift swallows, pinioned south. He had sworn solemnly to his own honour that he would follow Rosamunde and set her free.

  “Brother,” he said, “hold Tor’s Tower till I come again; send out your riders through the countryside. Men will gather when a flag’s unfurled.”

  “Go where you will,” said Samson, grasping his shoulder; “the star leads towards the south. Ha, good rogue, have I not hit you fair? God keep you on such an errand.”

  “I ride south,” said Tristan, with a smile.

  “Take ten men with you. I can spare no more.”

  “Brother,” said Tristan, “I am content with my own carcass.”

  “What devil’s scheme has caught your heart?”

  Tristan laughed, spread his great chest.

  “Samson,” he said, “believe me no traitor when I go to take service in the Bishop’s guard. I shall prove a good smiter, doubt it not. Master Jocelyn shall not complain of my sword.”

  CHAPTER XV

  The ducal city of Agravale queened it in the south amid the gloom of her ilex woods and the perfumes of her pines. The city stood on the verge of a great precipice that plunged to the sweeping waters of the river Gloire. Southwards from this line of precipices, crowned in the centre by the towers of Agravale, stretched a broad valley spreading many leagues to the great mountains that closed the Marches from the nether south. The plain was a vine-clad Arcady, rich in olives, painted thick with flowers. Purple and green and gold, it swept to the sombre bosoms of the mountains, whose snowy peaks smote like moonlight through the clouds.

  On the north a wilderness of woods covered the plateau that ended in the great precipice above the river. Black was the tincture of this wild, a gloomy green like the sullen depths of some unsailed sea. Here the ilex made midnight in the valleys, and the stone pine lifted its beseeching palms towards the sky. Holly and cedar, cypress, oak, and yew, a torrential wilderness of trees choked up the valleys and concealed the hills. Here the wolf hunted and the wild boar rooted in the glades. Only the wind made music, while the shadows danced and quivered on the grass.

  Agravale, proud city of the south, lay pale and luxurious under the southern sky. Its white walls stretched like marble veins into the sombre green-stone of the woods. It was an opulent city, sleek, sinful, and magnificent. Colour enriched its many gardens, where vines clustered and roses revelled. The pomegranate thrust up its ruddy blooms, and glowed with the gilded roundness of its fruit. The orange burdened its green canopies with gold. The arbutus bled; the oleander blushed against the blue. Like wine poured from heaven were the sunsets upon the white pinnacles of the mountains. Northwards flowed the woods, beating with leafy billows on the walls.

  Agravale, rich city, possessed a duke in those times, Raymond the Simple, a puppet prince whose instincts were monastic, save in his obedience to his wife. The Duchess Lilias kept her husband like a half-tamed ape, mewed up in the palace with baubles to trick his temper. He was as weak of wit as he was feeble of limb, while Lilias, proud Semiramis that she was, queened it through all the Southern Marches. She was a greedy dame, loose of mouth and loose of life. Bishop Jocelyn was her confessor and her confidant. The pair pandered to the passionate temper of the city of Agravale, and were very obedient to their Father the Pope.

  The Bishop and his companies had marched back from the Seven Streams with much plunder and honour, and the holy praise of Mother Church. They had martyred and massacred, laid waste the province, dangled their dogmas on the points of their lances. There had been much rejoicing at Agravale, much opening of wine casks. Triumphant Masses had been sung in the great cathedral of St. Pelinore. A tourney had been held without the walls, for there was good cause for pride and pleasure in Agravale. The children of the south had upheld the Roman Faith; their swords had shone in the cause of truth.

  The great inspiration of the city was a certain passionate rivalry that existed between Bishop Jocelyn and Lilias the Duchess. The pair diced with gold, gambled with extravagance, for the edification of the saints and the good people of Agravale. When Dame Lilias laid out new gardens with marble fountains and towers therein, the Bishop out-gardened her by the magnificence of three acres. When Jocelyn feasted all the beggars of the city, the Duchess out-charitied him with much silver and good cloth taken from her coffers and her presses. The pair kept Agravale a-bubble with their vanities. The Bishop would have hired the angels out of heaven to out-dance the wantons who tripped at the bidding of Lilias the Duchess.

  The rivalry between the pair had been exaggerated the more by the swaggering quarrels of their knights and mercenaries. Like hired gladiators, they were ever ready to rend each other’s throats in the cause of chivalry. It had so happened that the Bishop’s champions had been worsted by Lilias’s men in a late passage of arms without the walls. Percival, captain of the ducal guards, had unhorsed some dozen of the Bishop’s paladins with his single spear. There had been great wrath thereat in the episcopal palace.

  One August morning, a bronzed, iron-faced man entered the forecourt of the Bishop’s palace, threaded his way through the loungers by the stair leading t
o the inner gate. A guard met him with crossed pike on the top step, bearing the episcopal badge on the breast of his tunic, a golden key in a mailed hand. Tristan, turning a deaf ear to sundry witty gentlemen who were sitting on the benches in the sun, told the guard his business.

  “Friend, I would see your captain of the horse. Tell him a stranger has tramped leagues to serve under him. Tristan le Sauvage is my name.”

  The guard grounded his pike and stared Tristan over.

  “Sir Ogier is at dinner,” quoth he.

  “He can listen the better, being so wholesomely occupied. Come, friend, lead on.”

  The man took Tristan to a small room that was joined to the guards’ hall by a winding stair. At a table, with a page boy at his elbow, sat a giant with a great hairy jowl, gigantic hands, and a heavy paunch. He was gnawing a mutton bone like a huge ogre, and had a tankard of ale at his right hand. He stared Tristan over with his small, close-set eyes, showed his teeth when he heard his business. Ogier had been born a butcher’s son in the distant north, and had carved out his fortune by the sheer weight of his arm.

  “So, lad,” he said, smacking his lips and tossing the bare bone upon the table, “you would serve the Bishop and drink his beer? Good, very good. Can you pay for your stomach?”

  Tristan showed the girth of his arm, the knotted muscles swelling under the sleeve. Ogier rose up, towering like a poplar over Tristan’s head; his belt would have girded two common men’s loins.

  “My child,” he said, setting a hairy hand on Tristan’s shoulder, and leaning his great weight thereon, “stand fast now; let me feel my prop.”

  Tristan never budged; he was like a stone buttress against the flank of a tower, yet he rocked a little as the giant bore on him. Ogier grinned, puffed out his lips.

  “Short men stand stiff,” he said. “Come, my troll, we will try you further.”

  “What you will,” was Tristan’s retort.

  Ogier thudded down by the winding stair, his broad body shutting out the light. There was a tilting yard joining the Bishop’s stables, and in the yard stood a horse-block of solid stone.