by Ron Miller
“Good morning, stranger,” said the innkeeper, “you certainly look a little worse for the wear.”
“I’d look a lot worse if I’d remained where I was,” the soldier replied, and went on to provide a hair-raisingly accurate description of the disastrous rout of the Greek army. “I’ve never been so frightened in my life,” he continued, “and I’m no coward. Been in more battles than I can remember and never turned my back on the enemy yet. But by God it was as though an avenging archangel had dropped into our midst! He was a monster, red as the devil himself; went through our ranks like a scythe through a field of wheat. We might as well’ve been wielding pieces of wet string for all the good our weapons did. The thing was indomitable, invulnerable!” He finished a tankard and reached for another with a shaking hand.
“I’ll never forget that armor! It’ll haunt my dreams forever! I can still see it before my eyes: that blood-red shield with the white unicorn. Christ in heaven!”
The soldier leaped from his bench, knocking over the table and spilling precious beer in every direction. His eyes bulged like hard-boiled eggs, he quivered like a plucked mandolin string while his right arm was stretched out as rigidly as a bar of iron. At the end of his arm was a white-knuckled fist and from the fist protruded a dagger-like finger and the finger pointed at the shield that lay propped in the corner by the stairs.
“What in the world’s the matter with you?” asked the innkeeper, frightened and angry at having allowed a madman into his place of business.
“That shield! That shield! He’s here!”
“Who’s here?”
The soldier suddenly turned and grasped the innkeeper by his collar, lifting him from the floor.
“He’s here, you fool! The demon knight I was just telling you about! He’s here, isn’t he?”
“Well, there was a man who came in just before you. He’s upstairs, asleep.”
“Asleep?”
“Asleep. Now that you mention it, he was covered with blood, from head to foot. I didn’t want to embarrass him by mentioning it. Should I go get him?”
“Good God, no! Don’t do anything! If you value your head, don’t move from this spot, don’t utter a sound ‘til I come back! Do you understand?”
“Perfectly.”
“Who’s in charge here? Who runs this village?”
“I suppose you mean Lord Ungiardo?”
“Whoever. Where is he? Where can I find him?”
“In the castle at the top of the road, I imagine, this time of night.”
“He’s loyal to Constantine?”
“Of course. He raised a sizable army for the emperor—to say nothing of our taxes.”
“Excellent. I’ll be back soon. If that man isn’t here when I return, you’ll not regret it for long.”
The soldier, rushing up the steep road, had little difficulty obtaining an audience with Lord Ungiardo, who had already had news of the disaster at the confluence of the Sava and the Ister. Two or three dozen other soldiers—separated from Leon’s main force—had already found refuge at his castle. Ungiardo was amazed and delighted to learn that the knight responsible for the catastrophe was at that very moment unconscious at an inn in his own village. If he could take him prisoner, he realized, he would have grasped Fortune by the short hairs. By expending neither labor nor bloodshed, he could yoke the Bulgurs by the taking of this one man. The astonishing thing was that this villain had come to him of his own accord and had obligingly placed his head in a noose.
Accordingly, Ungiardo gathered together as many of the refugees as he could, along with his own personal guard—not for a moment did he discount the stories of the demon knight’s prowess and was determined to take no chances—and despatched them to the inn where, with any luck, their quarry still slept.
Rashid knew nothing until he found himself dragged naked and kicking into the dusty yard, where he was bound in ropes and chains beyond even his power of breaking. As soon as he learned that his treachery was successful, Ungiardo emerged from his castle to inspect his prize. Even trussed like a mummy, Rashid was such a frightening object that the lord of the village refused to approach closer than a dozen paces. He’d never seen anything quite like this before—he was certain that should even a single thread in a single strand in a single rope break, the prisoner would explode like a barrel of Greek fire. Ungiardo was more than a little cowed by what he had done. He immediately turned and ordered men to ride to Constantine, to tell him without delay what the village of Novigrad now possessed. Turning back to the writhing, cursing giant, Ungiardo wiped his brow with a delicate handkerchief. The sooner he was rid of his prisoner the sooner he would receive his reward and the sooner he could breath easier—or perhaps even keep breathing at all, for that matter.
It was not soon enough to suit Lord Ungiardo when he finally received news from the emperor—in fact, several days had passed during which were an equal number of sleepless nights, racked with nightmares of the giant tearing apart his castle stone by stone until he reached its soft, vital center.
The news came from Balcik, where Constantine had established his new headquarters, and constituted orders to have the prisoner transported there at once.
Rashid, bruised and battered from days of being beaten by cowardly soldiers who took advantage of his impotence to belabor him with sticks, pikes and cudgels (no one dared get near enough to use fists or feet), starved and thirsty, now found himself being loaded onto a wagon like a poleaxed ox. He then had to endure the day’s journey to Balcik. No one had done him even the rudimentary kindness of cushioning the bed of the wagon with straw and he bounced and thudded against the splintery wood like a sack of meal.
It was long past nightfall when Rashid finally felt the wagon rattling over cobblestones; there were one or two sharp turns then the wonderful relief of smooth flags. Only a brief respite, however, for as soon as the wagon came to a halt, his captors dragged him out by his ankles and he fell painfully to the hard stone pavement. When he twisted his head to see where he was, the glare of a lantern dazzled his eyes.
“Ah!” sighed a deep voice from somewhere behind the light. “The Bulgars are surely defeated! Are you certain this is the man?”
“Yes, your majesty.”
Oho! thought Rashid, this must be Constantine himself!
“Then I am truly swimming in a sea of milk!” continued the deep-voiced man. “I’m as certain of victory now as a man whose enemy’s just had his arms cut off. I must let Prince Leon know about this immediately. I’ve said nothing to him before now; I wished to make certain it was the right man. You’ve done well.”
“Thank you, your majesty.”
“When you return to Novigrad, tell your master that he shall have nothing to regret about my gratitude.”
“Yes, your majesty.”
“Now, you men, get this creature into the dungeons and make certain he’s securely chained. And give him something to eat and drink. I don’t want to make the prince a present of a dead man.”
Two or three days passed—Rashid had no way to tell, since his cell was windowless—before he saw anyone other than his jailer, who brought him food and water twice a day.
He was surprised to hear the bolts and chains at his door rattling—only a few hours had passed since he had been fed. The heavy oak door swung open and a tall, black figure ducked through the low opening. Rashid squinted against the glare from the lantern it held; he could not raise his hands high enough to shield his eyes.
The figure silently regarded the chained man for several minutes, until Rashid wondered if this scrutiny was some new, subtle torture he had to undergo.
“Well, well,” the figure finally said, “so this is the archangel that frightened my brother so badly and did such terrible, terrible things to his poor army.”
Allah preserve me! thought Rashid, forgetting himself, it’s a woman! He was suddenly and incongruously aware of his nudity and the foulness of his condition and was swept with embarrassment.
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“Ah, look!” the woman said—to no one in particular since she was alone in the cell with him. Her voice was husky and sibilant and heavy with menace. “Look! He’s blushing!”
She stepped closer and now Rashid could now see her. A tall, thin woman dressed in entirely in black. Her face was cadaverously boney, with hollow cheeks and burning eyes. The eyes looked mad and for the first time within memory Rashid felt frightened. He could deal with any physical threat but there was no defense against madness.
“Do you know who I am?” she asked, her long, narrow head metronoming from side to side like a cobra’s. “Do you know my name?”
“No.”
“It’s Theodora. Does that mean anything to you?”
“Should it?”
“Constantine is my brother.”
“I wish I could say he was lucky man.”
“You’ll not make me angry, if that’s your intent, my friend. But I’m more than Constantine’s sister. I’m the mother of Androfilo.”
“Oh.”
“I see that means something to you, does it?”
“Yes.”
“I have just spent the morning with my brother, begging him to give you to me. I showed him that it was not just my son you murdered, but his nephew. I reminded him of how much he loved that boy, and how he appreciated all the good deeds Androfilo had done him. I told him it can’t be anything other than an act of God that snatched you from your cowardly flight and brought you here to fall into my net. ‘Constantine,’ I said, ‘may it please you to make my torment less bitter by making his greater.’
“My son will not have to remain much longer on the shores of the Styx, waiting for his death to be avenged.”
“What are you going to do with me?”
“I don’t know. I admit that my first thought was to have you publicly drawn and quartered, or perhaps broken on the wheel. But I realize now how slight, how trivial these penalties would have been. I needed to devise something unheard-of, something—massive.”
“Please, take your time. Think it through.”
“Have no fear—unlike you, I have all the time in the world.”
She left him thinking how little he liked those last words and how much he feared that they were true.
Nothing much happened for several days, other than that he was moved to an even worse cell, little more than a dank corner in the foundation of the castle’s tower. A constant drool of mucus-like liquid flowed down one wall, exiting through a channel it had cut in the muddy floor. There was no light whatsoever, only the flickering glow of the jailer’s candle and that but once a day. Theodora had ordered that the prisoner be fed only a single meal, a piece of bread spongy with mold. Even at that, more than once he was left unfed for two or three days. He was given nothing to drink and was reduced to licking the fetid moisture that sweated from the perpetually damp stone walls.
His keeper was a twisted little dwarf with walleyes and a club foot. When the creature wasn’t starving his prisoner he made Rashid pay for his moldy bread by providing him with entertainment, which simply took the form of prodding the chained man with a sharp stick while laughing like a loon. Rashid wanted more than anything else to be able to get even a single hand on the creature, who he would then pop like a tick.
How long he was imprisoned, Rashid had no idea. He was fed too irregularly to use the intervals to measure the passage of time. For all he could tell it might have been months or it may have been only a week. Between the torture of his meals he would fall into a kind of reverie in which the phosphorescent image of Bradamant would shimmer before his eyes like a will-o’-the-wisp. Her scent replaced the noisome stink, her voice the perpetual plink-plink of the of the dripping walls. Her figure floated before him, innocent of her armor, long and pale as a tallow candle, her breasts like two glistening teardrops of molten wax, like matched pearls, her legs as sinuously elongated as twin streams of milk, as though her body were a river of milk parted by the rust-colored island that lay midcourse. Within that autumn-colored thicket was a grotto, a cache, a beehive dewed with sweet, fragrant honey, the secret jewels of the pomegranate. Rashid, my love! he thought he heard her say. He raised his gaze to her face, as bright as the moon, that seemed to sear his eyes like a white-hot sword, to eyes as black and sharp as iron spear points, to that magnificent nose, assertive as the ram on a trireme, to lips . . .
There was the clank and rattle of locks and bars and Rashid wasn’t certain for a moment if they were part of the vision, though why the sound of iron bolts should be associated with Bradamant was beyond him. There was a sudden glare of light, harder and more dazzling than the lambent phosphorescence of his lover. He blinked and squinted and a sense of horror overcame him as he saw Bradamant’s face dissolve, melting like wax, shifting and reshaping itself into the countenance of Prince Leon Augustus. What terrible, unthinkable omen was this? Rashid moaned in dispair and agony.
“Everything’s all right, my friend,” the transformed face said, and it was not Bradamant’s voice. “Here, you, unlock those shackles—get those chains off! Hurry!”
Rashid felt hands working at the iron cuffs that bound his wrists, waist and ankles. The skin beneath had been worn almost to the bone and the agony was almost beyond bearing as his flesh was torn away with the iron.
“Is he free?” asked the same voice as before. “Get him to his feet. We must hurry!”
Rough hands lifted him to his feet and pain of limbs straightening that had been unmovingly bent for weeks caused him to cry out. At the urging of the mysterious voice, Rashid was half-carried stumbling from the cell and into the torch-lit corridor beyond. He passed a hand before his eyes and shook his head. “Leon!” he whispered.
“Yes, yes, it’s me. Do you think you can walk?”
“What are you going to do to me?”
“Do to you? Nothing. I’m trying to keep things from being done to you.”
“I don’t understand.” He looked around the open space that surrounded him. There was a crumpled, oozing heap he recognized as his sadistic guard. He felt disappointed as he had been looking forward to breaking the dwarf’s neck himself.
“You don’t have to,” the prince replied. “Not yet, anyway. Everything’ll be explained to you soon enough. Right now, we must hurry. Murder’s been done, and worse. I’m risking exile at best.”
“But why?”
“I told you: later.”
Rashid and his rescuers, who moved quickly in spite of their burden—either through skill and strength or inspired by the same terror that seemed to grip the young prince—hurried along a sloping tunnel that finally emerged in the open night air. A few yards away a covered cart waited, into which Rashid was quickly bundled. The moment he was hidden the cart began to rumble off along the cobblestone street. Rashid, his wits slowly returning, wondered if this were nothing more than an elaborately cruel hoax, a subtle torture invented by the furiously mad Theodora. Though still weak, he felt his strength returning—inspired perhaps by the proximity of one of his mortal enemies—and even a weakened Rashid should be more than a match for the few men he had seen so far.
After only a few minutes, the cart halted and he once again heard Leon’s voice: “Hurry! Come on out of there! In this door! Quickly!”
Rashid got a brief glimpse of a moonlit alley, flanked by high, stone walls and a dark doorway a few feet from where he stood. With an effort, he quelled the impulse to break Leon’s neck then and there. Perhaps he was being led to either Theodora—whom he would take no less pleasure in demolishing—or perhaps even the emperor himself. In either case, it would be worth waiting to see what would transpire. He seemed safe enough for the present—if his enemies wished him dead, he’d have been so by now. There was some other plot afoot that had obviously not yet been played out.
A long flight of narrow stairs led to a broad landing or mezzanine, at one end of which was a tall, ornate door. Leon fumbled with a heavy key and swung it open as Rashid was pushed stumbling t
hrough the opening.
He found himself in a broad, dark room, illuminated only by the dim moonlight that drifted through the numerous windows. It was elegantly furnished and decorated. Tapestries hung from three of the high walls and ornately carved furniture was scattered over the carpet-strewn floor.
“Where am I?” he asked.
“My apartments,” replied Leon, locking the door behind them.
“Why?”
“In a moment,” the prince replied, opening the doors of a huge armoire. “Here,” he said, handing Rashid a silk robe, “put this on. Sit down, please. Make yourself comfortable. Food and drink is on the way. Forgive me for not having any light, though, it might not be safe.”
“What in the world do you think you’re doing?”
“You understand that I’m Constantine’s son, Leon?”
“Of course.”
“He hates you for what you did to his army, the one you slaughtered and routed at Belgrade.”
“I would imagine.”
“If he knew I’ve rescued you, he’d banish me. I’d incur his eternal hatred.”
“I don’t know yet that I’ve been rescued. I do believe you’re Prince Leon. For that reason alone, why should I trust you?”
Rashid was astonished and embarrassed to see the prince throw himself to his knees. The prince took his hands into his own as he looked up into Rashid’s face. The knight was even more astonished to see that tears were pouring down Leon’s face.
“Sir Knight,” Leon said passionately, “your valor inseparably binds me to you in willing servitude, valor that seems to me unique, even superhuman. It demands that your well-being is more important to my happiness than my own. For the sake of your safety I don’t care what happens to me. I put your friendship—if you’ll have me for your friend—ahead of my father’s love, ahead of my family’s, ahead of my people’s.”
“Is this true?”
“I swear it in the name of Jesus Christ, my lord and savior.”
Rashid did not quite know what to say. His greatest enemy had just saved his life; he was overwhelmed. He lifted the prince to his feet and embraced him.