“Aye,” she said. “If he’s killing a mighty warrior, it’s that strength he’ll be garnering to himself, and himself the more terrible because of it. Let us trap him, and drain him, and destroy him.”
Sir Odinell sat silent till he was certain she was done speaking, then asked, “You can do that, madam? And yourself unharmed?”
“She can do that,” growled Sir Balthasar from down the table. “Aye, and all else that is needful.”
Sir Odinell said simply, “But how will you do that?”
“We’ll be doing it, nor are you needing to know how,” said Molly. “It’s not a thing I could be telling you in a way you could understand, and any road, such knowledge is forbidden you.”
She looked at the window through which the raven had gone.
“ ’Tis more than Sir Tarquin’s doings that I’ve had from my little messenger tonight: ’tis guidance as well on what will be, and though it’s by the one strand of spider silk that our safety is hanging this night, yet I’m of the belief that we will prevail.”
TWO DAYS LATER the raven returned. Again it was late in the afternoon, and the castle just sitting down to the tables. The raven came in at a window at the lower end of the hall, and flew the length of the room, occasioning an upwelling of comment and conversation. It sought out Molly at the high table, landing before her amid the trenchers and the goblets, and dropped a gray stone in front of her. She nodded, and the bird took to the air, circled the dais, and flew back down the hall and out into the light of the setting sun.
Molly looked around at the assembled knights and their ladies. “Eat now, and then arm yourselves,” she said. “ ’Tis this very night.”
CHAPTER 25
HOB STOOD JUST WITHIN THE shadow of the trees, stroking his horse’s nose, looking out and down a bit at the grassy slope to the coast road, a ribbon of bare earth winding along the shore. Beyond the road was the scalloped coast of Northumbria: to left and right the sea pushed into semicircular bays, while ahead was the stony headland that divided them. Beyond the rock-studded sands of the bay shores, the German Sea shone like steel; the full moon, new-risen, spilled a path of light along the wave tops.
Around him in the gloom were the half-seen bodies of Sir Odinell’s force, dismounted now, everyone holding his horse’s head, prepared to put a quick hand to the animal’s nostrils and a soothing murmur in its ear, if necessary. The inevitable small sounds of such a force came softly to Hob’s ear: the shift of large bodies; the muffled thump of a hoof as a horse moved in place; a faint jingle from tack and from weaponry; the rustle of chain mail and the squeak of leather; a rattle as a horse made water against the carpet of dead leaves beneath the trees. He was also aware of a strong odor of horse, spiced with the oil-and-tallow treatment used on saddles and boots, as well as the green scent of the forest. Over everything lay the salt breath of the sea.
Molly was near, with Nemain and Jack and Sir Balthasar. Sir Odinell, Sir Jehan and the knights of Chantemerle and Blanchefontaine, armed cap-à-pie with mail hauberks and coifs, armored gloves, greaves, and helms, were stationed to the north; to the south was grouped a levy of men-at-arms from both castles, in boiled-leather gambesons, some with pikes, some with shields and swords. The placement of foot soldiers and knights was based on information about Sir Tarquin’s order of march, reported to Molly by her avian spies, and on her plan of attack, thrashed out with the three senior knights.
Sir Balthasar had provided Hob with a falchion, a sword that was not only short, which made it easier for Hob to wield, but also had a heavy drop point, the thick-backed blade functioning almost as an ax and compensating somewhat for the disparity between the lad’s strength and that of a grown man. Jack of course had his crow-beaked war hammer with him, and both wore leather gambesons. It had been decided that neither would carry shields, because they would have to race after Molly and Nemain, and speed was vital in the initial part of the attack.
The soldier to Hob’s right discovered a lacing that had come loose on his boot, and he moved away a little, so to avoid being stepped on by his mount, and bent to tie it up. The men-at-arms fought on foot, and the horses were used only to bring them to the battlefield, and in fact were now picketed to stakes in the ground. These rounceys were not trained as were the destriers, the warhorses, and this soldier’s horse immediately, perversely, began to whicker, hoping perhaps to start a conversation with the horses to right and left.
A great bulk loomed up between Hob and the glimmer of the sea, and he heard Sir Balthasar’s grinding bass, addressing the unfortunate man-at-arms: “Quiet that fucking horse, or I’ll stuff its mouth with your tarse.” There was a muffled apology; the soldier turned to his horse, stroked a hand over the velvet nose, and spoke very quietly in the restlessly flicking ear; and the grim mareschal went back to watching the coast road.
For a time nothing happened. Hob would not dare to move about, but he leaned over, the better to see the road to the south, whence Sir Tarquin must come. A few feet beyond, his view was blocked by a low branch, black on one side, moon-silver on the other. On the branch was an indistinct mound, perhaps a cubit high. A moment later the top of the mound swiveled, and two enormous eyes glinted in the moonlight. One of Molly’s owls sat there, and farther along the branch were shapes that might be others. He and the owl regarded each other for a moment, and then the head turned smoothly back to the road.
More waiting. Hob began to think that some mistake had been made, although Molly rarely made mistakes. Yet the road was so empty, and the sound of the waves so bleak and lonely, that it seemed that nothing would ever happen on this desolate stretch of coast. Even as Hob thought this, there was a furtive movement in the shadows beside the road. He watched the spot where he had seen it, and there was nothing there but darkness, and then there was movement again, and into a small patch of moonlight between areas of leaf-shadow stepped a rat, and it raised its snout, facing toward the hidden war party, and its eyes had a blue sheen to them.
Hob controlled himself with an effort, and made no sound of surprise. He took a stealthy step forward and put one finger to Nemain’s shoulder. She turned and looked at him, and he pointed. The rat was still there, nose quivering, eyes searching the shadows where the knights waited. Nemain nodded, and gave a low whistle.
The lump of darkness that was the owl launched itself into a long, shallow, soundless dive; the wings flew out in a three-foot spread to brake at the last instant; there was a moment’s savagery, a muffled shriek, and the owl beat its way back to the limb, where it began to tear at its victim. Several more times owls drifted like dreams across the shafts of moonlight, stalled gracefully here and there above the ground, and bit and clawed Sir Tarquin’s spies to death. The rats had been sent to scout ahead, to warn of just such an ambush; now none would return to report to the witch-lord.
Again there was a period when there was just the empty ribbon of road, the ceaseless swash of the waves. Then Hob saw the heads of the owls perched nearby swivel as one, looking to the south. The acute, the very acute, hearing of the brown owls had discerned the first warning of the approaching column.
CHAPTER 26
WHEN MOLLY HAD, WITH THE help of the lords of Chantemerle and Blanchefontaine, finished disposing the troops in under the eaves of the forest, she had taken the silver box from her saddlebag, and from it the ball of green ribbon. She and Nemain had gone a little past one side of the crowd of horses and men, and faced each other. The two women wore simple gowns of white linen, tight-sleeved, and pulled up through their belts and bloused over somewhat, in order to allow their lower legs to move freely in the coming battle. Molly had handed one end of the ribbon to Nemain, who stood in place; then she had walked backward, always facing Nemain, unreeling the ribbon as she went, muttering prayers in Irish, till she had gone a little past the other end of the battle line. She had paused a moment, then she and her granddaughter had simultaneously faced the sea, backed to the nearest low branch on either side, and knotted
the ribbon to the trees. The women were thus behind a barrier of green ribbon, and the war party with them.
“ ’Tis like a wall, and we behind it, so that, mage though he be, he will not be perceiving us through the spells I’m after placing on that ribbon, nor will he be able to come at us till we are ready, and I cut the barrier.” So she had told Hob, though to the knights and their men she said nothing of the sort, but only to stay behind the ribbon till she cut it.
NOW MOLLY HAD SEEN the movement of the owls’ heads, turning so easily on their flexible necks, and drew from within her cloak a small pair of silver scissors. She watched the road where it curved out of sight. The sea grumbled; the moon burned along the ridges of the waves. Around the bend came a double column of Sir Tarquin’s bewitched knights. From this distance they seemed almost normal, but after a moment it became apparent that they did not speak to one another; they did not look to left or right; they stared ahead and moved only in counterpoint with the horses’ movements.
There were perhaps a score of them, and one more in the lead, a big man, a very big man, nearly seven feet tall, with a hand-and-a-half claymore, an outsize Scottish sword, strapped to his back. Behind came two white horses, and they drew a carriage like a little room, with a door and two windows in the side that could be seen. Two lanterns—boxes of thin-scraped horn with candles inside—were set at the forward corners of the vehicle; a burly man drove the team, clad in a mail hauberk and coif, but no helmet, a mace in a slot by his side. Curtains of some sort were drawn across the coach windows, so that the interior was hidden.
It seemed to Hob that the carriage, inoffensive enough in appearance, yet radiated menace, and afterward he could never say whether this was so in truth or because he knew that therein must be Sir Tarquin. Behind marched, in poor order, the roughs and ragtag mercenaries that the mage had accumulated as men-at-arms, men who would not flinch at the evil they served, or that they were asked to do.
The eldritch knights passed the midpoint of the ambush; then came the carriage. When the first of the crowd of mercenaries had passed the spot where Molly stood, she snipped the ribbon in half with the scissors, and as the two halves fell to the ground, the men-at-arms surged forward, some with pikes leveled and some with drawn swords, running as silently as possible, as Molly had instructed them. In this way they covered much of the distance before the soldiers below were aware of them.
Sir Tarquin, however, was sensitive to them as soon as the ribbon was broken: the curtain on one window was whipped back, and the mage’s face glimmered indistinctly in the shadowy interior. A word to the driver halted the carriage. A moment later he had flung open the door, and down he stepped to the ground, a tall saturnine man, wearing no armor but swathed in a billowing red cloak, the color just apparent in the glow from the near-side horn lantern. He peered up toward the forest. Hob felt, as he had on the night of the water-mirror, that Sir Tarquin looked right at him and at him only, although he knew this could not be true.
The men-at-arms of Chantemerle and Blanchefontaine had reached the bottom of the slope and jumped without pause onto the causeway, crashing into the disorganized mob of ruffians that followed the carriage, producing an instant uproar compounded of men yelling, the clang of swords, the thuds of pikes as they were driven into leather or quilt gambesons. Many of Sir Tarquin’s soldiers were driven right off the road by the initial impact of the downrushing pikes, the victims tumbling down the farther slope toward the beach, rolling over and over to a halt in the dunes, tangled in the marram grass with gaping wounds in their bellies, thrashing feebly, no more to rise.
As soon as the men-at-arms had begun their charge on foot, Sir Odinell, in nominal charge of the force of knights that included Sir Jehan and Sir Balthasar, signaled for the mailed riders to spread out; at once they began to advance at a fast walk, the knights instinctively slotting themselves in beside one another, forming a battle line. The dew had beaded up on the oiled rings of their chain mail, and when they emerged into the moonlight the dewdrops clothed them in gems, a line of jeweled knights.
Molly and Nemain snatched up their golden hook—headed weapons and trotted after them, effectively concealed by the line of knights and their huge destriers. Behind the two women came Hob, running lightly with drawn falchion, and Jack, making all speed with a furiously determined limp, his terrible war hammer in his big right hand.
Down below, Sir Tarquin’s knights, at the first sound of the clash behind them, had wheeled their mounts and raced back along the road, splitting to either side of the coach and sweeping into the melee at the rear. The struggling men-at-arms from the two castles were now at a disadvantage, caught between the hammer of the eerie knights’ charge and the anvil of the remaining mercenaries.
Sir Odinell gave the word to charge, and the knights began to canter, then to gallop, toward the rear of the coach. As the left wing of the knights’ line swung toward the battle behind the carriage, Sir Tarquin stood revealed. His right hand was upraised toward Sir Odinell’s riders, his left held a book. Was the book on fire? It seemed to be on fire—Hob could not decide: Hob ran, and kept fast hold on his sword hilt, and that was enough to take all his concentration. He was pounding, breathless, down the slope after Molly, and keeping his eye on the magus, the women, and the diminishing distance between them; everything depended on Molly and Nemain reaching Sir Tarquin before he became fully aware of them. To some extent all the rest of tonight’s bloodshed was a battle of pawns; it was the women and the Sieur de Duncarlin who would decide the game.
Sir Tarquin made a sharp pushing motion at the air with the flat of his palm and voiced a piercing cry that seemed as if it would reach the clouds, so loud it was, and there were words in it, but not in any language Hob had ever heard, and a knight and his horse, caught in midstride, were dashed to the ground. They were knocked flat on their sides with a crash that overrode all the din of the fighting, so that Hob faltered as he ran and risked a glance to his right, to see what had transpired. Man and mount were dead, and Hob thought to see wisps of smoke curling up from under the knight’s mail hauberk and the horse’s saddle blanket.
Molly and Nemain were running full out at the mage, their shortened white gowns fluttering, their naked feet flashing as they sped down the grassy slope, their long unbound hair streaming behind them like two great banners, gray and red. The golden crescents at the ends of their spear shafts were flickering with glints of moonlight, and stretching, stretching out before them, seeking the wizard’s throat. So intent was he on the forces from the two castles, and perhaps a little blinded by Molly’s vision-tangling spells, that he became aware of the women just too late.
They closed the last few feet at a dead run and sprang at him like two wolves attacking a stag. The crescents, one on each side, circled his neck and locked with a surprisingly musical clang, and the impact knocked the book from his hand—Hob now saw that it was indeed emitting little licks of flame, though it was not itself consumed by them, and it lay smoldering there in the grass, scorching the green blades.
Sir Tarquin drew breath but then plainly could not speak—a hissing groan, very faint, came from his mouth, and the close-fitting blades had already seared a shallow necklace of burnt flesh where they touched him. Hob had seen Molly silence another wizard with a binding spell, and had time in the whirl of action for the fleeting thought that she had impressed something of the kind into the golden metal.
Sir Tarquin seized a shaft in each hand and made as if to wrench them from the women’s grasp, but as quickly let go with an expression of agony, and another hiss of pain, as his palms contacted the strips of metal that ran the length of the staff. There followed a period in which he tried various stratagems to free himself, including some time spent staring first at Molly, then Nemain, with an expression of intense concentration. Hob himself, normally insensitive to these things that Nemain and Molly felt so keenly, now felt some sort of pressure—clearly the mage was silently commanding them to release him.
The burly driver, who at first had run back to help in the battle behind the carriage, now realized that his master was in peril, and returned, lumbering up, in his hand the brutal mace, a short club ending in a lump of iron with six flanges sharpened to a knife edge. Jack Brown limped swiftly toward him, placing himself athwart the driver’s path. Sir Tarquin’s servant aimed a tremendous overhand blow at Jack’s head, but the dark man threw up the war hammer: the heads collided with a piercing clank, and the driver danced backward, cursing, transferring his weapon to his left hand that he might shake his stinging right hand.
Jack’s body might have been made from the gray-stone bones of the earth, and he showed no such distress. He shuffled forward, and as the driver managed to resume his grip on the mace, Jack swung his hammer over and down, the hammer side of the head smashing the flanged mace to the ground, the war hammer continuing back and up and over again, Jack deftly swiveling the head so the crow-beak side was leading, falling like a summer-night shooting star, punching a hole in the chain-mail links of the driver’s coif, and thence through the roof of his skull.
Now the space around the struggling trio of Sir Tarquin and the two women was, at least for the moment, clear. Hob took up a position facing generally southward, turning his head constantly to keep everything in view. Jack put his foot on the driver’s chest and wrenched the war hammer free. He raised it up again and plunged it into the grassy soil to remove what clung to it, then took up station facing north, his back to Hob. In this way they kept a circular field in view, ensuring that the women would be free to concentrate their efforts on the witch-lord.
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