by Grace Ingram
‘With regret, yes.’
'Guard your tongue! Beside your face, what proof can you show?’
‘Four-and-twenty years ago,’ Guy Armourer said harshly, ’a merchant was riding from Gloucester to Bristol with his daughter and four serving-men, when you and a dozen men-at arms attacked them. You butchered the men and ravished the daughter. Before you rode away with all their goods you told her your name and tossed her this.’ He shrugged off the slackened grasp on his arms, and from under his tunic drew a silver disc suspended from a thong. ‘Maybe you’ve forgotten, among so many murders and rapes. Let it remind you!’ It streaked in a glittering arc to Lord Reynald’s hand, that lifted automatically to catch it.
He tilted it to the light, a coin about twice the diameter of a silver penny, its centre pierced and surrounded by scrawled yet decorative symbols. ‘It’s Saracen. I won it at dice the night before from a returned Crusader.’
‘Warby luck, you called it.’
‘Warby luck indeed!’ His face lighted with triumph. ‘So I begot me a son!’ He tossed the coin carelessly, appraising the young man, and then anger flared. ‘I told the wench if she whelped to bring me the brat when it was weaned!’
‘Nothing would have brought her to do so.’
‘By the Horns, the bitch withheld my own son from me?’
‘In law,’ Guy Armourer responded without heat, ‘a bastard is his mother’s.’ Only the faintest tremor in his deep voice betrayed his own anger; a bastard received harsh training in self-control.
‘Law ? You’re mine! And your name—Guy—how dared she not give you a true Warby name?’
‘Why should she?’
‘I’ve a mind to ride to Bristol and seek her out! My son my own son denied me by a—’
‘By his mother.’
Lord Reynald laughed harshly. ‘And how did she breed up her bastard? Whoredom?’
‘She married an honest man.’
‘Honest, to cheat me of my son?’ He checked himself, realizing that his words did nothing to commend him to that son. ‘You are mine!’
‘If that induces you to forgo your entertainment,’ Guy said, glancing distastefully at the brazier, ‘bid your routiers restore my property and I’ll be on my way.’
Lord Reynald snapped to his feet, almost oversetting the girl. ‘What’s this? Go? You’re my son—yourself you declared it!’
‘To purchase my life. You can be nothing to me, my lord, nor I to you.’
Lord Reynald advanced impetuously to the dais’s edge. ‘You’re mine! I’ll not let you go! ’
‘Will you chain me to your wall?’
He reached to clutch the young man’s shoulders. Guy jerked back in revulsion. ‘But I’m your father! You cannot leave me!’
‘You raped my mother and murdered her father.*
‘I was nineteen, and drunk. You’ll not hold a boy’s error against me forever?’
‘You’ve progressed since that beginning,’ Guy answered, glancing at the brazier.
‘Take those things away! It’s a father’s right and duty to provide for his son. I’ll acknowledge you formally—grant you lands and power—wed you to an heiress—knight you—’ He broke off with a sudden crow of hard laughter. ‘Ah, that touches you! Knighthood—that’s what you aspire to?’
Guy drew a long breath. ‘Yes.’
‘Yours, yours, if that’s your price! And all the rest too, if you stay by me!’
Guy’s eyebrows twitched together. Mention of price had a flavour of bribery to it. Hands gripped his arms, seizing and demanding. He looked up into the handsome face that had nothing in it of kindness nor love. ‘I must consider.’
‘What is there to consider? You are mine!’
‘What’s one forgotten bastard out of the crop you’ve doubtless sired?’
The horrid hush stilling the hall informed him that he had spoken shockingly amiss. Fury flared in Lord Reynald’s face, and his hands closed to print bruises. The pretty girl on the cushion snickered all too audibly, and as he looked at her she eyed him with bright malice and hugged her knees.
‘No other!’ Lord Reynald said thickly. ‘You’re mine!’
Guy stood pondering a long moment, his face showing none of the emotions churning behind it. Then he shrugged free.
‘I'll complete my errand,’ he stated, adding, to forestall objection, ‘That’s a matter of honour. And then I must return to Bristol— ’
‘If you’re not here within seven days I’ll ride myself to Bristol, and slay those who withheld my son from me and every living thing in their household!’
‘If you do the least hurt to my mother and her husband I 'll disown you forever,’ Guy promised without heat.
Chapter 2
On Thorgastone Waste the bracken fronds were browning, and the scrubby thickets were jewelled with berries. A kestrel hovered above a space of tussocky grass and suddenly stooped. Not far away a hart bellowed challenge, startling Guy so that he jerked on the reins and his mount tossed his head and snorted. He leaned to pat his neck in reassurance. The hawk, with an indignant shriek, lifted from the grass and flapped away, a fieldmouse dangling from its talons. He watched it go, a smile momentarily banishing the trouble from his face. Then, as the bird disappeared, worry knotted his brows again.
As far back as he could remember knighthood had been a crazy dream, stirring the warrior blood in his body; for as many years his monster-father had shadowed his life with shame and bitterness. If the price of knighthood were subjection to Lord Reynald’s rule in that fear-ridden hold, it would be dearly bought but within his grasp at last. Misgivings remained, but he smothered them. ‘And what future have I as my father’s bastard if I refuse?’ he asked aloud, and had nothing but the backward twitch of his horse’s ears for answer.
There was no track, no more than the vaguest hint of a path that threaded between thickets, rocks and bracken patches. He mounted the ridge, letting his tired horses pick the way at their own pace. Yet, though Warby and Trevaine had no commerce with each other, even his townsman’s eyes could discern that other horses had trodden this way. Rain had blurred the prints, but only hooves shod with iron could have so scarred the turf. Scattered droppings, weathered and crumbled, added proof. He rode warily, his eyes searching the rough waste, and drew rein on a small rise as an odd structure loomed out of the thickets on his left.
A giant child had built a table of stone slabs, two set on edge and a third balanced atop. Beyond it a score or so more slabs had been erected in a circle. Guy regarded it in puzzlement, and then started his horse forward. A few yards further, and the hoofprints angled towards the stones. Curiosity turned him aside also, and he followed the tracks. A tangle of brambles barred his way, and his horse shied and whinnied as a trailer clawed at his legs. Undeterred, he moved along the barrier seeking an opening. His mount snorted and laid his ears back, and he had to touch spurs to his ribs to urge him on. Crooked blackthorns hung with scarlet-fruited briars, bryony and the delicate whorls of old-man’s-beard rose out of the brambles, hiding all but the tops of the stones, and he had to follow half-way round the circle before he came to an opening.
His horse snorted and jibbed, ears flattened and eyes showing white-rimmed. ‘Come up, Dusty! ’ Guy admonished him, and used the spurs more sharply. The brute reared up with a sudden squeal, almost unseating him. He backed, snorted and tossed his head, fighting the bit, dug in his hooves and refused to budge. He was sweating and trembling with terror. Guy tried to soothe him, frowning in perplexity. This was a gelding of mature years, no skittish colt, and he had never behaved so before. The stolid packhorse had also caught the infection and was kicking and sidling. In mercy Guy retreated a few yards and tethered them to the stoutest branches he could find. Then he returned.
A few steps inside the gap he halted. Two arms of brambles had been drawn across it waist-high and tied together with a scrap of black cloth. Knotted into the cloth were a few draggled black feathers and a small thin bone. He frowned
at it, half-guessing at a warning, but curiosity and stubbornness moved him to duck under the barrier and walk into the circle.
Here was a thirty-yard space of grass, level and trim as though it had been scythed. The stones towered above his head, weather-worn and lichened. One or two leaned like lurching topers, but most stood erect, deep-sunk in the ground, and he wondered at the labour that had set them in their places. They were old, ages old; older than the legends of the English who had come over the sea when Rome fell, older than Rome, older than the Lord Christ and His sojourn on this earth. Awe’s finger touched him. This was a place of worship. Men had set up these stones as a temple to forgotten gods, and bowed down in ignorance and fear.
Almost in the circle’s centre another huge slab lay flat in the grass, and near it a broad patch had been burned black. He crossed to it, and looked down on a litter of charcoal, half-burned fragments and grey ash beaten into the earth by rain. A great fire it had been, enough to roast a side of beef or signal alarm across a county, but why any should light it in this wild secret place was beyond his guessing. A smaller fire had burned on the flat stone, and there leaped unbidden into his mind the story of Abraham, who would have sacrificed his son as a burnt offering had not God’s angel stayed his hand. There were burned bones among the charred sticks, and he shuddered and crossed himself. Then he almost laughed aloud, stooped, and picked up a fragment from a fowl’s wing still holding a few scorched and shrivelled feathers.
He cast it from him in sudden loathing and rubbed his grimed fingers in the grass. A burned wing made no culinary sense; one plucked a fowl clean before the cooking. A sacrifice, the thought persisted, burned on this altar-stone as offerings had been burned to some unappeasable god in the ages before Christ was born; a denial of Christian faith. He crossed himself and whispered an Ave Maria. Sweat chilled on his skin. Evil was strong in this place, and all at once he was urgent to get out of it.
Dusty whinnied. The horses, brutes not beglamoured by reason, had sensed this evil before him. Guy plunged across the smooth grass. He missed the way out, and made two false casts before he found the right pair of uprights and the gap in the thicket. He found himself scuttling, his heart thumping as though he had been running as irrational fear mounted in him. He scrambled under the barrier, and swore under his breath as his hair snagged. The gelding whickered as he strode towards the horses, and the pack-animal tugged at his tether. He reached for the bridle and then checked, all his pulses jolting in alarm as a large body moved behind the blackthorns. A girl on a bay mare emerged.
Surprise had him gaping for a moment, and then relief set him grinning far too appreciatively. ‘God save you, fair mistress!’ he greeted her, without thinking, in English.
‘’Save you,’ she acknowledged curtly in the same tongue, and looked him over without favour. ‘Who are you, and what are you doing here?’ She moved into the open, a tall lass in a dark-green riding-dress. With her horse-furniture and fine palfrey it proclaimed her of knightly breeding, but not so certainly as her peremptory manner. It did not commend her to Guy. His smile vanished.
‘My name is Guy Armourer. I went up yonder from curiosity.’ He jerked his head at the looming stones.
‘What’s your business in these parts?’
‘It does not concern chance-met strangers.’
Her head lifted, her brows twitched together in affront, as though no man had ever so rebuffed her; certainly some knight’s daughter. ‘You’re insolent!’
A man thrust from the bushes after her, middle-aged and scrawny, unmistakeably an escorting groom. ‘Shall I mend the oaf’s manners, Lady Helvie?’ he demanded, lifting his riding-whip.
Her glance measured Guy’s imposing inches, and her mouth twitched a little as she shook her head. ‘You’re over-matched. Let be.’
The groom thrust belligerently between Guy and his mistress, but an imperative gesture brought his whip-hand down and sent him to heel. Guy gathered the reins, set his foot in the stirrup and swung astride. It offended his pride that she should look down on him.
‘You’re a Warby man!’ she challenged. ‘None else would venture within that unholy place.’
‘You are here yourself.’
‘We heard your horses—’
‘Is not curiosity common to us both?’
She scowled at him. He regarded her with acute dislike, and she flushed, jerked on the reins to whirl her mare about and was gone. The groom loosed an oath at Guy and pounded behind. Branches crashed, the drumming of hooves diminished, and Guy shrugged. He pulled on the leadrope, clicked his tongue to the packhorse, and followed more soberly.
He wondered rancorously who permitted the arrogant wench to roam loose about the waste accosting travellers, instead of keeping her fittingly to stitchery or spinning. The groom had called her Lady Helvie, and her ways proclaimed her of noble blood, yet she had conversed in English, showing greater mastery of that tongue than most gentlefolk achieved. Also she was at least sixteen, maybe seventeen; by that age she should have been three years wedded and tending a household, with a brat in the cradle and another in her belly.
Guy passed close by the stone table, and gazed up at the vast slab balanced across the other two, higher than his head as he sat his saddle. He marvelled afresh, wondering how ever men could have hoisted that enormous weight and set it in place, and what ages had passed since their strength and ingenuity dwindled to dry bones. Then he pushed his horse harder. Speculation was one thing, but an errand to complete was another, and a sensible man timed his arrival at a castle for the dinner-hour.
From the ridge Trevaine’s tower beckoned across a couple of miles of valley. The girl and her groom had vanished, and he thought no more of her. He came cautiously down the broken slope that presently flattened into rough pasture, where herdboys watched cattle and sheep. He came upon a track and followed it between stubble-fields where three plough-teams striped the faded gold with brown. He passed through a hamlet where women cooking over outdoor fires looked curiously at him and a smith came to his forge door to watch him pass, and plunged into coloured woods. Another mile, and they opened before him on wider fields, a larger village, and the castle above it on a low rise. And Trevaine was not Warby; a ploughman shouted a greeting, and the urchin leading the ox-team waved to him.
Trevaine was in no way like Warby. Women greeted him from doorways, children and dogs skirmished about his horses, and hens took off in squawking flurries from under their hooves. The cottages were trimmer, fresh with whitewash, the garden-patches prosperous with onions and cabbages, the hives humming content, the very dunghills steaming complacently. Behind a barn door someone was whistling, and a couple of girls gossiping by a well giggled at Guy’s salutation.
Small qualms assailed him when he clattered over a drawbridge and under a portcullis for the second time that day. The gate-guard sergeant was civil; he called up a groom to tend the weary horses, and appointed a trooper to lead him to Lord Henry, ‘Try the hall first, Piers. Drill’s been over this half-hour, and the dinner-horn will be sounding any time. And main glad he’ll be to have his good hauberk mended fit to wear.’
Guy met his bland gaze and smothered a grin as he shouldered the weighty packs. He knew, and the sergeant knew, that the hauberk had not been repaired, but let out to accommodate Lord Henry’s expanded paunch, but neither would say so.
Lord Henry was indeed in the hall, where the servants were laying the tables for dinner. He stood by the edge of the dais, a large tawny man in the early fifties who had given up the struggle against encroaching weight, talking to a tall woman who presented a trim back in dark crimson and a tawny bare head. Guy spared her shape an appreciative glance as he tramped up the hall.
‘Ha, the armourer from Bristol! You’re well come! ’ Lord Henry boomed. His voice was designed by nature for encouraging a hunt or commanding a cavalry charge, disconcerting within doors.
‘God save you, my lord.’ Guy bent his knee to the rushes, shrugged off his burden
at the dais steps, and looked past Lord Henry into the startled hazel eyes of the girl from the waste.
‘God’s Grace!’ she blurted. ‘Here’s the lout himself!’
Lord Henry looked from her to Guy, menace kindling.
‘You’re the fellow who showed my daughter discourtesy?’
Guy looked up into his purpling face. ‘I returned what I was offered, my lord,’ he answered coolly. ‘And the lady did not tell me her name or station.’
‘Offered?’
‘Would you tell your affairs on a chance-met wench’s demand?’
The girl flushed scarlet. Lord Henry spluttered. ‘God’s Throat, you’ve an insolent tongue in your head!’
‘He was in the Devil’s Ring! He’d come from Warby!’ the girl exclaimed.
‘Since the fords lie westward that’s the road a man must take, unless he’d travel five leagues out of his way.’ Guy stooped to swing the packs on to the dais, and his sleeves pulled up his arms.
‘He has come from Warby! Look at his wrists!’ she cried. The welts left by Lucifer’s thongs had scarcely faded. Lord Henry stared, his anger suddenly sharpened by suspicion. ‘If you were taken by Warby, how did you come alive out of it?’
‘Lord Reynald freed me.’
‘He never spares any!’ the girl declared.
Guy shrugged. ‘I’m here.’
‘Why should that devil loose you? For what service?’
‘It was his whim. There was some talk of Warby luck.’ Guy was sticking fast to the truth, if only part of it; a knight did not stoop to lie. The trooper who had escorted him was poised to use his spear at a nod from his lord, and half a dozen servants had moved up behind him. His palms were sweating as he remembered Lord Reynald’s parting words. ‘If he learns you’re a son of mine, he’ll hang you from his gate-tower.’
‘He’s no armourer! He’s a spy, or a witch sent to overlook us! He was in the Devil’s Ring! ’
‘You spoke with me in my stepfather’s forge,’ Guy reminded Lord Henry, his glance dwelling briefly on the belt-line round which his own hands had run the measure.