by Ron Miller
From somewhere sounded a trumpeting call to arms, echoed by another and another, until the air shrilled with the sound. Drums and bells and tamborines rattled, rang and trilled. The air vibrated with the tension, like the highly-electrified atmosphere preceeding a powerful storm. Jolted into action like frogs attached to a Voltaic cell, horsemen leaped for their mounts and every unarmed man scrambled for a weapon. In the brief time it took for Rashid to rush from the wall a full-scale melée was in progress—as violent and bloody a conflict as Rashid had ever seen, exacerbated by the fact that it was unplanned and uncontrolled. In the midst of the milling fray, he could see Bradamant, still on Rabican, her sword rising and falling as rhythmically as a flail. The intelligent animal, having no more love for the Moors than any other servant of the Christian emperor, bit furiously at its enemies, neatly lopping off fingers, hands, ears and noses.
Bradamant, for her part, was furious with the frustration and disappointment of having been separated from Marfisa. Her only desire, the focus of all her rancor, had been the death of that hated woman. Tears of anger poured down her face as she made the unfortunate soldiers around her bear the bloody brunt of her wrath. She resembled one of those armed spirits who accompany the archangel Michael and not a few of her enemies indeed thought themselves victims of a supernatural avenger.
Not being able to find her immediate enemy in the crowd, she searched for Rashid and immediately recognized his silver eagle as he emerged from the gate. For the briefest moment she stayed her hand, as blood poured down her blade and drooled from her elbow. She saw nothing else but that tall, powerful figure, the broad, strong shoulders, the deep chest, the leonine hair and beard, the bearing as graceful and restrained as a tiger’s—and then remembered that another woman had been enjoying those manly attributes—and perhaps others. At that last thought her fury broke like a flood bursting a levee. “No!” she screamed, and a poor foot soldier lost his head. “No other woman but me can kiss those lips!” And another head shot into the air like a football. “If you’re not to be mine, neither will you be anyone else’s!” A head split like a melon. “Rather than see you die of passion in another’s arms I’ll see you die in remorse at my hands!” Two more heads went flying. “Then at least we’ll be joined in hell!” Heads leaped around her like popcorn. “You’ve killed me as surely as if you’d plunged a sword into my heart! And a murderer must forfeit his own life—that is the law!” A dozen clutching hands tried to pull her from her saddle and she lopped them off as easily as she’d brush away flies. “But your death won’t have paid for mine! My murder was wrong while your death will be right! I’ll’ve only killed someone who wanted me dead. But you, you, faithless Rashid, you murdered one who loved and worshiped you! How can your one poor death equal the thousand deaths you’ve made me suffer?” With every word another Saracen was mutilated, decapitated or disemboweled to emphasize their meaning.
Her monologue was interrupted when a Moor, further shortening Sir Lambert the Short with a dexterous back stroke, sent the unlucky man’s head spinning full into her face. Stunned, she nearly missed parrying the furious blow that followed. Lunging forward, Bradamant pinned the man to his horse’s crupper like a butterfly to a cork.
Seeing an opening before her, Bradamant jerked her sword free and spurred Rabican. The horse leaped toward Rashid, crushing half a dozen Moorish heads and rib cages in the process as though it were charging through a patch of pumpkins. Rashid saw her and was confused and shocked by her appearance. She looked like a demon, covered with blood from head to foot, her eyes blazing through the gore—as though a blacksmith had dropped two white-hot rivets into a bucket of blood—her lips drawn back from white teeth that gleamed like bare bones amidst the crimson. She was brandishing her sword over her head like the flaming tail of the portentous comet.
“Beware, Rashid!” she screamed. “You’ll not wear my heart as a trophy!”
Rashid, while perhaps naïve, was not stupid. He still did not understand what Bradamant was doing here, or why she was charging toward him like a berserk dervish, but evidently she thought that he had been false with her, though he could not imagine why she would think this. After all, nothing had happened with Angelica.
He waved his arms in an effort to stop her—he was certain that if he could only speak to her for a moment or two he’d be able to cure whatever delusion was infecting her. Instead of slowing her rush, she sheathed her sword and raised her golden lance. Rashid braced himself and raised his own weapon. As he spurred Frontino, he tried to aim for a spot that would do his lover the least injury, though he could see the point of her own lance unwaveringly aimed directly for his heart.
Bradamant saw that Rashid had deflected his weapon, which ought to have told her something, but her heart had been hardened and she did not allow her lance to vary from its target by as much as an inch. The thundering of Rabican’s great hooves, each as massive as an anvil, synchronized with her pounding heart, a heart that threatened to burst from her chest like a fist through wet paper. At the last second, as Rashid’s anguished face filled her vision like a swelling balloon, when her lance was not two yards from his heart, she swerved its point.
The steel-tipped lances glanced from their targets with showers of sparks and a banshee shriek. Rashid’s burst into splinters with a sound like a thundercrack and both riders were nearly thrown from their saddles by the tremendous impact. Bradamant’s breath was knocked from her and for a brief ecstatic moment she thought that Rashid had killed her. But when she pulled Rabican to a halt and turned to see Rashid still on his horse, her fury and shame again erupted in a blinding agony. Anger that he was still alive, remorse that she had tried to murder him—incompatible emotions indeed—exploded into an unquenchable flame like a pellet of sodium metal dropped into a bowl of cold water. But she could not bring herself to attack him a second time.
She turned away from Rashid as her eyes filled with the flaming red blindness of her rage. With an inarticulate scream she charged into the battle with unprecedented ferocity. It was as though a tiger had suddenly appeared in the midst of a dogfight. Within a quarter of an hour more than three hundred Saracens fell before her golden lance or succumbed to her sword. Heads burst in gay splatters like exploding piñatas, severed limbs flew around her like branches in a storm until at last she found herself all but alone on the reeking battlefield, Rabican buried to his gaskins in mutilated corpses.
Rashid, horrified at this terrible transformation in his lover, circled her warily. “Bradamant!” he cried. “Talk to me! I’ll die if you don’t!”
The bloody maiden did not reply, but instead remained motionless, like a gory war memorial in the midst of the butchery heaped around her in steaming piles.
“What is it you think I’ve done?” he said. “Listen to me, for the love of God!”
Bradamant heard his words and absently wiped thickening blood from her face with her gloved hand. She barely understood the sense of what Rashid was saying, but the sound of his voice seemed to sweep through her, melting her anger like the first warm winds of spring reducing ice and snow to limpid streams and life-teeming ponds. She felt her heart, which during the melée had been as incandescent as molten iron and had since threatened to congeal into a lump of cold metal, soften and begin throbbing like a living thing again. It began to pump more than blood through her veins; she felt compassion flowing like a heady elixir. But she was not yet ready to admit either compassion or clemency.
Digging her spurs into Rabican, she galloped away from Rashid, away from both the Saracen and Christian camps, into the low hills that rose beyond the sea. Behind her she could hear pursuing hoofbeats that she recognized as Frontino’s. Not until she reached a small cypress-lined valley did she rein poor Rabican—who was panting like a bellows and slathered with sweat mixed with blood. Nearby, surrounded by a neat half circle of the tall, dark trees, was a small marble pavilion, a monument of some kind, part of her mind assumed, or perhaps a temple to some pagan deity.
She turned in her saddle and saw that Rashid was still a mile away and behind him rode another, whose blood-red figure she recognized even at that distance as Marfisa, quickly catching up to her knight. In ten minutes her two pursuers arrived almost simultaneously, but where Rashid pulled up a dozen yards from Bradamant, Marfisa did not hesitate. She galloped past Rashid at full speed, lowering her lance.
Bradamant’s heart had lifted at seeing Rashid’s anguished face, but at seeing her sworn enemy charging she felt it shrink and harden once again. She had thought that Rashid had pursued her out of love, but that was evidently a romantic misconception. Why else had he brought this woman, the cause of all her misery, other than to give Marfisa another opportunity to murder her? What else would have inspired the Moorish warrior woman unless it was her love for Rashid?
“Wasn’t my agony enough,” she screamed at the knight, “that you have to flaunt this woman? I’ve seen how much you want to drive me away, but now you want to use her as a cowardly weapon against me. All right! I’ll give you want you want by dying—but I’ll see the reason for my death die with me!”
Like a striking cobra, she lunged at Marfisa, catching the other’s shield with such a violent blow that the woman spun completely around in her saddle, flying from her seat like a top. She landed backwards on the grass, her helmet sailing as her head struck the earth.
Bradamant leaped to the ground, throwing her lance aside in favor of her sword. She ran toward the stunned Moor, intent upon severing Marfisa’s head before she had a chance to rise. But Marfisa had bounced to her feet like a rubber doll, as enraged by her second fall as was Bradamant at the sight of her rival. Bradamant could hear Rashid calling both her name and Marfisa’s, but the words were muffled by her anger, which overfilled her like the brimming crater of a volcano. In her bloody delirium she believed that Rashid’s shouts were meant to encourage his new lover.
Marfisa had drawn her yataghan as she had risen and the women, only two paces apart, hacked at one another until Rashid had to shield his eyes from the dazzling scintillation of the flying sparks. The ringing sound of the blows came so quickly that they blended into a single, sonorous clamour. The women pressed toward one another until Bradamant’s vision was filled with the dark, raging face. Bradamant flung her now-useless sword aside and grappled hand-to-hand, tearing at her rival with fingers and teeth, her face streaming blood from a dozen scratches and bites. She felt Rashid’s traitorous hands at her shoulders, trying to restrain her, to pull her away from Marfisa. She felt her dagger slipped from her belt by his hand and her disgust and fury at this additional perfidy—not knowing that he’d similarly disarmed Marfisa—lent her renewed strength and a piston-like jab from her mailed elbow sent the knight rolling.
Rashid did not abandon his efforts to part the women and this time, when he tried to pull Marfisa away, she turned on him, hissing like an ocelot. Blind with frenzy, she twisted from Bradamant’s clinch, picked her weapon from the grass where it had fallen and turned upon Rashid.
“How dare you!” she shrieked. “I’ll send you both to hell!”
Rashid backed away from the enraged woman, relunctant to defend himself, fending off her blows with his shield, until finally, pressed to desperation, he was forced to draw his own weapon.
Bradamant could have been no more delighted at this spectacle than if she had been an ancient Roman watching a gladiatorial contest. No sight could have ravished or delighted her more than this one that confirmed her every suspicion: Rashid and Marfisa were obviously having a lover’s spat. She made no move to save either combatant, but instead picked up her sword and stood aside to watch.
If Rashid defended himself like Mars, Marfisa was a Fury unbound. Bradamant saw that he was restraining himself, for she knew as well as he did the fatal power of the sword Balisard, and that he was striking his opponent with only the flat of that irresistable blade. Seeing him do this only served to convince Bradamant that she was correct in her assumptions about Rashid’s feelings toward the woman. He saw her trying to murder me, she thought. By all rights, if he loves me as much as he once claimed, he wouldn’t hesitate by as much as a heartbeat in putting the harlot to death. But look at that: he’s trying to save her life!
Finally, however, Marfisa’s raging passion proved greater than Rashid’s reticence and she penetrated his guard with a blow that cut through his shield like a knife through paper; the blade smashed through his helmet and would have split his skull had he not deflected the blow with his forearm, which was so numbed by the stroke that his sword dropped from his nerveless hand. He fell, stunned, to one knee.
Marfisa, her mad eyes glittering at the sight of imminent victory, drew back her hand for the final, fatal blow. Rashid, however, grasped the hilt of his fallen sword with his good hand and lunged at the woman like a bull. Whether he was thrown off balance by having to use his left hand or if he were still dizzied by that last titanic impact, he missed her by a scant inch, driving the point of his weapon a full foot into the trunk of a cypress.
With an ululating cry of triumph, Marfisa raised her yataghan over the fallen knight’s head and Bradamant, her heart shattering like cold glass, raised her hands over her head and screamed.
There was a blast of sound as though the earth itself had heard Bradamant’s wail and every hidden cavern, canyon, gorge and hollow had become a mouth that echoed her. The force of that geological lament was like a physical blow—Bradamant and Marfisa both staggered and dropped their weapons, stunned, their skulls ringing with mournful echoes.
A rosy light streamed from the marble pavilion and Bradamant turned toward the glare, whose rays seemed to caress her, carrying away her anger like the cool, clean water washes away the dross in a miner’s pan, leaving behind only the glittering traces of gold.
It’s wrong for a sister to slay her brother, thundered a voice, like an articulate earthquake. Under its impact, Bradamant felt her brain reverberate like the clapper of a bell. Or for a brother, the voice continued, to slay his sister. You, Rashid, and you, Marfisa, sprang from one womb and one seed. Your father was that Rashid who was murdered by his wife’s brothers, who then, not knowing that their sister was with child, set her adrift in the sea. Galaciella’s boat was not lost however, but cast ashore on a desert coast near Tripoli. There she gave birth to her twins and died. Fortunately, I happened to’ve been nearby. I gave your mother as decent a burial as I could and took her newborn babes with me to my hiding place in the mountains of Carena. There I enchanted a lioness who gently suckled the infants for a year and eight months.
“I have no recollection of this,” said Rashid, who had come to Bradamant’s side. She dared a quick, sidelong glance at him but otherwise refused to acknowledge his presence.
“Nor I,” said Marfisa.
Nor should you, agreed the voice. One day when I was away a band of Arabs stole you from me, Marfisa, but Rashid ran into the rocks and hid. Having lost one of you, my desire to protect the other became a compulsion to which I devoted the remainder of my life. This compulsion was increased tenfold because my studies of the stars had told me that Rashid was fated to perish, betrayed, in the midst of the Christian empire. I did everything in my power to protect him, to shield him from this fatal destiny.
“Atalante!” cried Bradamant.
Yes, it is I. We’ve met before, my brave, stubborn maiden. All my magic was powerless against your determination. After my last effort to save Rashid was defeated, I saw, finally, that I’d been foolish to try to circumvent what the stars had foreordained. Without the hope of preserving Rashid’s life to sustain me, I wasted away. There was no longer any purpose to my life if I couldn’t save his. Before I died, I had this monument erected, knowing that the three of you were to meet here one day in combat.
I’ve waited in this pleasant glade for a long time so that you, Bradamant, who adore Rashid so truly and faithfully, could finally purge yourself of that hateful jealousy that was surely destroying you and your love
.
The voice fell silent and the light faded. Birds and squirrels that had been knocked senseless from the trees picked themselves up and shakily returned to their branches. Bradamant, Rashid and Marfisa looked at one another in confusion and embarassment. Bradamant was now able to watch with equanimity as the other two embraced one another. Her heart swelled with new-found generosity and compassion.
Rashid turned to her and held his arms wide. Bradamant rushed into them like a needle to a lodestone.
CHAPTER TEN
In which three Brave Knights punish an Evil King
The sky was purpling with twilight before Bradamant realized that she and her two companion knights had passed an entire afternoon with their glad reminiscences. Rather than return to Arles, Rashid suggested they spend the night at a deserted farmhouse he knew was not far off. This was far more appealing to Bradamant than a night in the city and Marfisa agreed with her—neither woman relished the idea of having to deal with the considerable fuss they knew would greet them when they returned, from both the Christian and Saracen camps. They looked forward to furthering their relative intimacies, though of course now with entirely different motives.
The farmhouse lay not more than a mile beyond the temple of the now thoroughly late Atalante, but, as Fate perversely ordains such things, they were not destined to reach it. Indeed, they had not gone half the distance when Bradamant asked, “What’s that sound?”
“I don’t hear anything,” replied Rashid.
“I do,” added Marfisa. “It sounds like someone crying.”
“I still don’t hear anything.”
“Over there,” said Bradamant. “In that spinney. It’s getting louder as we approach.”