The Iron Tempest

by Ron Miller

  The dark, looming walls were hung with vast tapestries that, unsurprisingly, considering the obsessively monothematic decorating scheme of the palace, illustrated amorous adventures with disturbing candor, inventiveness and an almost clinical realism. Bothered by an elusive, disturbing half-memory, Bradamant hoped that by extinguishing all but the lone candle by the bed she could relegate those erotogenic images to the shadows. That single light also shrank the intimidatingly cavernous room to a sphere of warm yellow light as intimate and encompassing as the yolk of an egg.

  For the first time in days, she began to remove her armor. She let the scaled brunia fall to the floor with a sonorous clank, removed her boots, unwrapped her leggings and pulled the odious woolen tunic over her head and tossed it aside. The dank air of the chamber felt pleasant on her bare skin.

  She caught something moving in the darkness, out of the corner of one eye, and she gave a frisk of surprise, instinctively if ineffectively—perhaps only symbolically—covering herself with one hand as she simultaneously groped for her sword. She sighed with mixed relief and embarrassment when she realized that she had only glimpsed her own reflection in a tall, previously unnoticed pier glass. Why was she so nervous? What had she to fear in this place? She had every reason to believe that it was uninhabited except for Melissa, herself and, if one chose to count him, Merlin. And after what she had just been told, what conceivable reason would they have for harming her?

  Bradamant turned to look again at her reflection. In all her life she had never had more than two or three opportunities to see herself naked and she had successfully avoided most of them. This was not as difficult a task as it might at first seem. For one thing, she never undressed other than to sleep or to bathe, and the latter no more often than the average person of her day and age. And then looking glasses were exceedingly rare and prohibitively expensive luxuries in her word. Her family was well-to-do, but the only large mirrors in her father’s castle had been made of polished bronze. She herself had never owned a mirror and the only ones her mother had possessed had been small glasses meant to be held in the hand, their tarnished and uneven surfaces throwing back a disinterested approximation that she could not wholly associate with herself—as though she were looking at an ill-painted portrait of a vaguely familiar stranger. After a period of curious experimentation, she ignored them. She had no interest whatsoever in what her own face looked like; besides, she did not like the increasingly annoying sense of dissatisfaction she felt about her appearance, an annoyance that smacked of vanity.

  The mirror she’d discovered was larger than anything she’d ever imagined; it was fully as tall as she was. Made of an almost supernaturally perfect glass, as flat and smooth as the surface of a pond, its reverse side was coated with the purest silver.

  In the gloomridden room, surrounded and imbedded in the dark, the pale figure standing before her might have been that vaguely familiar stranger from her mother’s mirrors, grown older and taller. The deeply suntanned face merged into the shadows, as though it were hidden behind a dark mask, leaving the long pale body curiously detached and impersonal. Bradamant dropped her shift and felt it collapse around her feet with a soft rustle, a whispered murmur of approval.

  She could not associate the stranger in the darkness with herself. She felt as though she were a spirit, invisible to the faceless woman, a disembodied viewpoint, a phantom voyeur. It was the anonymous figure in the mirror who was the creature of reality while she was the fiction. She appraised with dispassionate approval the long, hydrodynamic body, as supple as the thread of smoke from an extinguished candle or a stream of oil or honey pouring over the lip of a pitcher; the even longer legs; the small lunar breasts; the stomach like a sun-warmed flagstone. The ivory skin had a bloom, like a peach or plum or a pane of glass in a greenhouse, fogged by the slow, hot breath of the sultry plants within. She watched with cold objectivity as the woman’s hands with the slender fingers glided over the ivory surfaces, like the hands of a blind potter assessing the moist, earthy heat exuding from a vase fresh from the kiln. They eclipsed the twin moons of the breasts, which glowed between the parted fingers like coals through a grate. They glided like the shadows of gulls over the smooth, hard beach of the stomach. The transition from curve to curve was as elusive as the heavy undulations of a tropic sea. The hands were companies of ferrets—ten slender, voracious, serpentine hunters, so frightened perhaps, or so hungry, or so curious, that they slipped sinuously and silently into the shadowed, welcoming thicket, into the clefts and burrows of subterranean moss gardens. They were like eels dreaming in their lightless, submarine lairs. Like dark moray eels guarding their sluggish, perfumed fountains; sounding that immeasurable pelagic zone like the great whales, like plummeting dolphins, the secretive kraken. Like the contemplative oyster folded around its pearl of great price—a pearl like a coy, pink nymph curled on its sea-washed rock. Like the nymph in the protective gleaming arms of the somnolent octopus, the octopus silent, pensive, idle, restless, slow—

  What is this stranger to me? Bradamant wondered. Whose is that beautiful, passionate body that has never possessed a heart to ache? What is she to me that my mouth should be like wool or that my tongue should cleave so to my palate? What is she to me that I feel a fist clenching in my groin? Why do my calves tighten and my fingers dig into moist palms and my back arch like the ecstatic cat’s? Who is she to me that my own body should coil and uncoil in rhythmic sympathy, like a courting seahorse? Or that it should vibrate like the rocks beneath a cataract? Why do my eyes fail to see, or stinging tears well up from them? Why do I taste blood on my lips? What is this galvanic current that runs through me, as though I’ve been threaded onto a white-hot wire? Why do my ears ring and buzz and whisper as they listen to the cry of my flesh as it becomes proud, as it passes beyond this world where some immense desire that my intellect cannot understand mixes with the desire for another body’s warmth and softness?

  Lost, compassless, storm-ravaged, guided by the guttering pole star of a lonely candle, she drifted into the oceanic bed like a ship abandoned to the hurricane, sinking into its vast billows, relinquished to the welcoming arms of Neptune and the weightless, lightless, dreamless oblivion of the vasty abyss.

  * * * * *

  Bradamant and her guide eventually emerged into a woody ravine, passing through a vine-masked cleft in the rock. When she turned to look, she could find no sign of an opening.

  All that day the women climbed through a wild landscape, rugged and broken, crossing hills and streams without stopping for rest. The conversation, such as it was, was for the most part one-sided, consisting of Melissa’s detailed lectures on the techniques that Bradamant would need to release the imprisoned hero. Bradamant had a thousand questions for the sorceress, but Melissa would not allow herself to be distracted. None of the questions, however, were about the strange dreams of the previous night, of which Bradamant had no memory.

  “It wouldn’t matter if you were Athena or Pentesilea or Dido,” Melissa said, “or had all the armies of Karl the Great behind you, you still would have no hope of besting Atalante, the magician who has kidnapped Rashid—to say nothing of a great many others. Not only is his steel castle impregnable, not only does he possess his flying horse, but he also has a shield that shines with a brilliance that stuns—whoever gazes on it, however briefly, falls to the ground as though dead.”

  “So I heard. I could shut my eyes or blindfold myself,” suggested Bradamant.

  “Really? And how could you tell where Atalante was? How could you tell whether or not he was about to lop off your head? How could you parry his strokes or strike him? No. I’ll show you something that’ll get around Atalante and his magic.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “Agramant, the king of the Saracens, has given a ring to one of his barons, a horrible brute named Brunello. This ring was a prize brought from heathen India and has the property, among others no less remarkable, of rendering its wearer immune to any magic or
spells.”

  “Sounds useful.”

  “It is.”

  “So I only need to get this ring from Brunello, wherever he is?”

  “Yes; he’s at an inn not very far from here.”

  “No problem, then.”

  “We’ll see about that. Brunello, you must know, is a most unchivalrous knight. He’s as expert in cunning, thievery and duplicity as Atalante is in sorcery. He is, like you, on a mission to retrieve Rashid from captivity and return him to Agramant and, typically, his methods are guile and treachery against which, all too often, honesty and openness are helpless. As you surely know, Agramant loves Rashid above all his other paladins and would do anything to get him back safely. Unlike you, Brunello has the advantage of the magic ring. With it, he will succeed. Without it, you will fail.”

  “And Rashid’s gratitude would go to this Brunello and not to me.”

  “You grasp the problem perfectly. In addition, Rashid would be lost forever to Karl and without him on the Christian side, the emperor will have no hope of defeating the Moors.”

  “So all I need do is relieve Brunello of the ring.”

  “Exactly. When we come to the sea where I must leave you, you’ll continue to follow the shoreline for three days. On that day you’ll reach the inn at which your quarry is stopping.”

  “How’ll I recognize him?”

  “All too easily. He’s a dreadful-looking man of medium build, pot-bellied, with black, greasy, curly hair, dark skin, very pockmarked, a shaggy beard and shaggier eyebrows. His nose is as flat as a mushroom and his eyes are shifty and protrude like a pekinese’s.”

  “A what?”

  “Pardon? Oh. It’s a peculiar dog favored in Cathay. It has popeyes like a frog and a face like a squashed tomato. A dreadful-looking creature.

  “Brunello,” the sorceress continued, “will be disguised as a messenger. All you need do is turn the conversation onto the subject of magical spells. Let him know that you want to confront the sorcerer, but don’t let on that you know anything about the ring. He’s a braggart and self-styled lady’s man, so he’ll offer to show you the way to the steel castle—in his gentle company, of course. Accept his offer and the moment you see the castle, kill him. Let neither pity nor gratitude make you hesitate. You must do as I tell you, without fail. Don’t do or say anything that might give you away. If you do, he’ll either hide the ring or, worse, make use of its second remarkable power.”

  “Which is?”

  “He’ll put it in his mouth and instantly become invisible.”

  “Just one more question, my lady.”

  “What is that?”

  “I understand why Agramant wishes to have Rashid back and, well, I think I understand why I want him,” (“I wonder,” murmured Melissa) “but what is Atalante’s interest in him? What does he gain by this kidnapping?”

  “Ah. That, I am afraid, is one of the things that I cannot explain to you.”

  This answer did not satisfy Bradamant at all, who, for all of her appreciation for and attraction to the sorceress, was becoming increasingly annoyed with her lack of forthrightness. The explicit secrecy and the implicit condescension did little to bolster the sense of trust that Bradamant wanted to feel but whose pride and caution kept in reserve.

  The two women soon came to where the Garonne enters the sea near Bordeaux. Bradamant had been certain that she’d be able to persuade the sorceress to continue on with her, or that Melissa would not be as adamant as she had sounded about her decision to part company so soon. But all of her entreaties, all of her arguments and all of her tears failed to keep the sorceress from saying goodbye. Seeing that there was no other way to see the knight on her way, Melissa had simply disappeared.

  Bradamant, sadly alone, plodded along the shoreline, determined to be tireless in her quest to rescue the man whom she was destined to love.

  A steep and difficult path that wandered up through the tortuous seaside cliffs eventually straightened and entered a pleasant country of vineyards and olive groves. She had lunch with a party of farmworkers who gladly shared their bread, cheese, sausage and wine in exchange for a few stories. She was glad for the food; she had inexplicably not been hungry during all the long march with Melissa, but now she was ravenous. (She wondered somewhat about this. Had time failed to pass while she was in the palace? Had Melissa’s magic kept her from needing to eat? Was it part of Merlin’s hospitality, or his parsimony? In any event, she thought it a little mean that the accumulated hunger was now allowed to catch up with her.)

  She found—as she so often did—that a woman bearing arms and armor was a great novelty and the farmers’ honest curiosity was unbounded—even more so when they discovered who she was. Bradamant told them something of her brothers and of the great feats that had gained them membership in Charlemagne’s Twelve Peers. Replying to questions she had heard a hundred times before, she told them how it could hardly have been helped, all things considered, that the lone sister should have been raised in the arts of war. But to the simple question of what she was doing in this particular place, so far from either the emperor or his enemies, she had no ready answer. She blushed with shame at this innocent reminder that she was selfishly shirking her rightful duty and self-consciously hoped that if the serfs noticed her red face, they would attribute the coloring to the sun.

  The story she told the peasants was simple enough to satisfy their curiosity and need for an exciting tale, but if it was simple it was because her listeners took her story at face value—it would never occur to them to cross-examine her about the most obvious deletions, contradictions or unlikelihoods.

  That Bradamant had been the only girl-child among half a dozen aggresively martial males surely was not enough to account for her prediliction for what were usually considered manly arts; it was a prediliction she had ardently pursued since she had been old enough to walk. That she had been worshipped to the dangerous limits of idolatry by her older brothers had certainly been an incentive, and her reciprocal worship undoubtedly influenced her to emulate them, though surely she must have been born with some innate talent—it is obvious to anyone that belligerancy and martialism ran strong in Clairmont blood. Of course, it did no harm that Montauban had been as much—indeed much more—a military training camp as it had been a home. During the family’s war with the emperor, it had been forced to flee its ancestral home in its native Ardennes when a traitor delivered it into the enemy’s hands. After discovering and hanging the spy, the Clairmonts narrowly made their escape. Finding no refuge anywhere within the realm of Charlemagne, they finally took service with the King of Gascony and there built Montauban, the “Hill of the Foreigner”.

  If Bradamant’s combative personality was inherent, then there surely must have been a powerfully dominant gene in the Clairmont line, for Bradamant proved to be no less physically capable than her siblings; her desire to echo their achievements needed be no unfulfilled fantasy. She grew from an awkward and gangly child into a tall, long-armed, long-legged youth; it was a peculiar and incongruous sight to see her handling a five-foot sword as easily as a conductor brandishing his baton. Or at least it seemed incongruous until the watcher noticed the grim intensity of the lean, tight face. The duke once remarked that his daughter must be constructed entirely of willow wands, wire and Damascus steel since there seemed to be no alternate explanation for such prodigious strength in such a lanky body. She was built, as one of the old instructors—retired knights all—said with considerable admiration and not a little envy, much more like a snake than a badger. Her strength was like that of a spring or bowstring, instead of that of the solid block or cudgel. Neither brothers nor cousins, except morally and physically impregnable Roland (whom she had, in any case, always thought of as obnoxiously self-righteous—an ill-expressed opinion that accounted for the perceptible coolness between them) were ever able to consistently best her at any game or with any weapon. And she was virtually indomitable with the lance, her weapon of choice. Nor could a
ny, except Roland of course, match her in piety. But then, piety and martial training do go very much hand in hand, since both depend a great deal upon an unquestioning acceptance of authority.

  Bradamant did not at all like the daily grind of her scholarly training—the lessons to be conned, the enforced scrutiny of endless Latin texts—and she hated being cooped up while all the outside world impatiently awaited her to combat its sins. Her happiness, however, counted for nought: for seven years the training of her mind and body was unremitting. More than once she complained bitterly and just as often the priest who was her instructor would remind her that “You will have your own way to make in the world, my lady.” She knew the truth that lay behind those words, however much she resented hearing it: that she needed not only a quick hand and tough body but a feeling heart and thinking brain to survive the brutally hard world that lurked like a starving wolf outside the walls of Montauban. Therefore, every morning, winter or summer, rain or shine, she tramped the five long miles to the priory school, and then back again that afternoon.

  After school, her physical training took up the remainder of the day. It was then that Baldrick, the ancient knight who acted as Montauban’s armorer, took her as firmly in his sinewy hand as if she had been the grip of a broadsword. Though now half-blind, there were none who surpassed his knowledge of war-making and its tools. He instructed the avid girl in the proper use of the broadsword, short sword, quarterstaff and cudgel, alavica and bec-de-faucon, luchet and falk, longbow and crossbow, the dagger and the lance—with which latter Bradamant excelled above all others. Her brothers and cousins gladly took on the task of teaching her hand-to-hand fighting and wrestling.