by Jude Chapman
“After besting you on the bedding field, you fear I will best you on the battlefield.”
Held at lance length, Drake searched for an opening, his mouth and eyes in constant use. “I fear your mother bedded a donkey and her spawn came out the wrong end of a mule. What say you?—half-ass, complete ass, or the mule itself, equus riding equus, the smarter equus with hoofs carrying the dumber equus with boots? Surely you can find better sport than an innocent lass.”
The black lance repeatedly jolted the red-and-gold shield. “Not so innocent, Drake. Just ask every man jack. Better yet, ask your doting king about the pleasures his brother takes in highborn maidens the likes of Geneviève de Berneval.”
The lady’s name, tossed around as sport, belonged to the maiden Drake aspired to take as his wife one day very soon. She had sent him off at the start of the festivities and would have been watching now had the two knights stayed within the vicinity of the viewing stands, from whence she had cheered him on, her daisy yellow hair easy to spot and her beauty surpassing all the other fair maidens.
He answered Maynard’s insult with a sharp thrust of his sword. The jolt to Maynard’s breastplate caused the destrier to whinny, throw up his head, and step into a wide, counterbalancing circle. When beast and rider came back around, Drake made ready with another blow and delivered it with such unbridled ferocity that Maynard of Clarendon toppled from his saddle, landing with a thunderous thump and a louder, “Oomph!”
“Ah, landed on your arse … or should I say ass.” Drake dismounted and kicked away the knight’s dislodged lance.
Fumbling for the hilt of his sword, Clarendon scrambled to his feet.
“You owe the lady an apology,” Drake said, “and by God, she shall get one!” Two quick slices of Drake’s sword and Maynard lost his. A hook of Drake’s foot and Maynard fell onto his rump. A prick of white knight’s blade at the base of black knight’s throat, and Maynard broke out in sweat. Drake threw off his helm and slung back his coif. He intended to make Clarendon sweat a bit longer, too make his bowels run loose with fear, and to put the fear of God and of Drake fitzAlan into him.
The roar of hoofs approaching distracted him from his appointed task. Since his hearing counted only one horse, he took his time identifying the rider and appreciated instead the dread showing on the black knight’s face.
Drake misjudged the charger’s speed and turned too late. The horse arrived at full gallop. The rider’s boot hooked him under the jaw at the same driving gait, flinging him back in a clatter of armor and knocking him quite senseless.
Chapter 2
THIS MUST BE HELL, DRAKE decided, which meant he must be dead.
The evidence was convincing. The heat. The blood-red backwash. The smell of spilt blood. And the detached mind screaming into a black void. If this were Hell, it negated everything he had chosen not to believe. God existed. Perhaps even the Devil.
In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti. Amen. The words came to him unbidden, but it was too late. There was no turning back now. No amending a life spent as an unrepentant heathen. He had chosen, and his unbelief had brought him to this, his final reward, his ultimate destination, escape a hopeless wish.
Pater noster, qui es in coelis. Too late, even, for prayer but hopefully not too late for contrition. Confiteor Deo omnipotenti, mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa ….
Miraculously the invocations were taking effect. Instead of plunging farther into a bottomless pit, he was rising up out of the dark. The reprieve from Hell’s depths, though, did not deliver the promised succor. Had he been at death’s door, he would have opened his eyes on a circle of loved ones. Had it been a bad dream, he would have left the nightmare behind. Had he been brainsick, he would have awoken irrational or raving. As it was, he vividly remembered the staggering blow that attacked him from out of nowhere but hadn’t the remotest idea of where he was or what he had been doing beforehand.
On a whirlwind of prickly sensation, he came screaming out of the dark abyss, fighting all the way and landing with a violent crash. His head pounded. The underside of his jaw throbbed. Swallowing burned his throat. Shaking himself into awareness spun the gorse and tree trunks into a sickening vortex. He clamped his eyes shut, listened to his rasping breaths, felt the sun burn hot on his neck, heard flies buzzing round his ears, and picked out a chiffchaff call out its name.
Time. Time to open his eyes. Time to heed the call.
He braced an elbow in a lake of blood, eerily iridescent, and gazed forward. The funnel he looked into was an indistinct blur. Shock sharpened his focus.
The black knight lay languidly on his back. His limbs were stretched out in goose-flight formation. His face was bloodless. His unclosed eyes reflected a pure sapphire sky. His sword lay within a lax, upturned hand. And a second sword was thrust into his crotch up to the cross guard.
To the white knight, worse than gazing upon a corpse that had met a gruesome end, worse than being unable to tear his eyes away from the gore, and worse than facing the real possibility he had indeed stepped into Hell, was realizing something inconceivable: he clutched the pommel of the killing sword. Three feet of forged iron embedded to its full length. Three feet of whetted blade that surely must have riven bowels, penetrated ribcage, and pierced heart. Three feet of steely death wrapped tightly inside the curled fingers of his blood-soaked hand.
A dream, a nightmare brought on by concussion, yet too real to be imagined away. He tried to open his fist, to surrender the sword to the black knight, to renounce the deed, but his fingers refused to release their death grip.
Pounding horses advanced from all sides. In a bleak effort to run, to escape, and to vanquish the hideous image with flight, he slipped in the undercurrent of body fluid that was not his own but might as well have been. When one of the riders struck a mace at the base of his skull, he pitched uncontrollably back into the abyss from which he had crawled.
* * *
Drake returned to consciousness choking on dirt and struggling for breath. His arms were cruelly wrenched back, a sturdy rope having been looped around his wrists. The hemp burned his flesh. He couldn’t feel his fingertips.
A torch concealed his captors as dark shadows creeping along a distant stone wall. The chill settling into his bones told him he had been transported to a dungeon, that deep underground level of a castle keep where prisoners were imprisoned under the harshest of conditions … and usually forgotten.
One of his captors tore the garnet ring off his finger.
Drake tried to twist his head around, but a knee bore down on his back, flattening him into the ground. Chin down and the fingers at his back flailing for release, he was powerless. Someone moved around to his blind side and kicked him in the ribs. Even within the protection of his mailed hauberk, Drake suffered the full impact. He grunted and raised knees to chest. Another kick from another boot struck the opposite set of ribs. This time, he didn’t have any breath left with which to grunt.
He fell into a swoon. Possibly only for a moment. Mayhap for eons. When he regained consciousness, he was trussed like a pig, a blindfold encircling his eyes, a rag digging into his mouth, and a second set of rope knotting ankles to wrists.
“What say you? Let’s hang him!” The blood-chilling voice, slurred with drink, belonged to Graham de Lacy, a one-time childhood friend.
“No, no. I think,” began Seward Twyford, his reedy voice unsteady. “I think we ought to ransom him instead. Lord fitzAlan would pay dearly. Anything we ask.”
Rufus fitzHugh had a differing opinion. “I say we do Drake like he did Maynard.”
The kicking resumed. While Drake was knocked from one spot to another, powerless to resist, his tormentors swore and ranted at the fate visited upon their compatriot, the beardless youth who met with an ungodly end. Their outrage was grounded in a gruesome revelation: not only had Maynard of Clarendon been gutted like an animal for the table, his manhood had been cut away. Death was horrible; castration, unforgivable.
Drake
pushed his tongue against the biting gag and spoke, his words garbled yet clear enough to be heard. “Didn’t kill him.”
“The sword was in your hand,” said a man whose voice Drake didn’t recognize.
Drake twisted around and tried to see him through the folds of the dirty rag wrapped around his head, but glimpsed nothing but shadow. The trouncing renewed, fiercer than before. Blood, warm and strangely comforting, ran down his face and into his neck. A wave of nausea took hold. He spilled what was left in his guts and rolled into a ball of agony, moaning and stinking to high heaven.
“The bastard deserves no less for what he did,” Graham said.
The knights argued among themselves. A majority vote of four ruled. A fifth man, his voice unheard but his presence palpable, also grunted approval. His captors had arrived at unanimous consent: to get the blood money first and hang him afterwards.
* * *
Having exhausted themselves, the drunken knights shuffled out to get drunker.
“How much drink does your father keep in his stores?” the big knight bellowed.
“More than enough to wash away the blood,” Seward answered, his voice disappearing down the passageway.
Another wave of sickness overcame Drake. Heaving, he managed to shift into a kneeling position and vomit the remaining bile. When it was over, he slumped against a nearby wall for support, arms bent to the cords.
Drake sensed he wasn’t alone.
He gazed up and sniffed out a faceless adversary staring down at him. Through the blindfold, his eyes failed to glimpse the remotest shadow, yet the two knights met over a dark divide. Drake wasn’t sure if the other man was emanating hatred or pity, but it felt more like pity. Eventually, the silent knight followed his fellows, leaving Drake confined behind a barred wooden door, to suffer alone and bleed in the dark. At least now, though, he knew where he had been brought. Twyford Castle. Soon his father would come looking for him. Drake prayed, though he never prayed, that it wouldn’t be too late.
Either no time or an eternity had elapsed. Sleep, or more likely sporadic unconsciousness, came easily to Drake and without memory. When the door finally cranked open, he roused, incapacitated, disoriented, and hurting beyond misery.
“Good news,” Rufus said. “His eminent lordship the senior fitzAlan has delivered your ransom posthaste.”
A second man cut the cord binding his ankles. The two hefted Drake up by the armpits. His cramped legs didn’t work very well. His head was the size of melon and his thinking hazy. He moaned words that were incomprehensible even to him.
“Aren’t you the lucky one,” Rufus said cheerfully to Drake. “We won’t have to hang you.”
His breath stinking of aqua vitae, Seward belied his partner’s gay declaration with a voice filled with dread. “You know why we have to do this, Drake. If … if we let you go … you’d geld us … like you did Maynard.”
Drake shook his head in protest, but he wasn’t about to convince either man, drunk as louts, of his honorable intentions, much less persuade either what a bad idea it was to hang him. A very bad idea indeed.
“Not to mention he murdered him,” Rufus said to Seward. “Or did you forget so soon?”
Rufus fitzHugh and Seward Twyford transported their bloody burden up a wheel staircase, through the kitchen, down a winding passage, and past a creaking postern gate. For the distance, they blathered on how they planned to celebrate when the deed was done. Two lasses, five flagons, three days, two nights, and a cozy fire, a formula so contrived as to forget they snuffed out the life of a friend.
Drake sniffed the air, night air, fresh and sweet, and heavy with the scent of sage. Crickets hummed. Horses nickered nearby. Together they hiked up a steep incline, Rufus walking on the right, his grip on Drake’s elbow overconfident and slack, and Seward taking up his left, the same side as the castle’s barbican.
“Got any piss left, Drake?” Seward asked, crowing like a loon, his voice reverberating against the castle wall.
They were convinced Drake hadn’t enough spit left to put up the least of a fight, and even if he did, they didn’t give a damn since they were soused past caring.
Seward was unprepared when Drake slammed him against the wall. When his skull collided with limestone, the young knight grunted and slumped onto the pathway with a dull thud. Seward Twyford was clearly past being soused out of his mind.
Drake pointed his face in Rufus’s direction. Though cruel and crazy, Rufus was a coward at heart. He backed away, uttering, “No, Drake, no.” He lost his footing on the gravelly path. Drake lowered his head and drove the top of his skull straight into his gut. Both men went down with a violent lurch. Quick as the wind, Drake spun on his shoulders and locked his legs around Rufus’s throat. The besotted lad flailed his hands against the chokehold to no avail. His offering to the gods, bent on reversing fortune, stepped up the pressure until Rufus went slack. Drake kicked the senseless carcass away.
The quiet was total except for strained breathing coming from three men who had seen death and escaped at the last possible moment.
Drake struggled to his knees and thence to his feet. Letting his sense of smell take over, he followed the sage and raced into the night. The terrain was uneven and rocky. Tripping over a knoll, Drake somersaulted down the rolling decline. He found himself lying on his back and panting through blood-packed nostrils. The gag bit into his mouth, making it hard to breathe. His hands, prisoners inside unyielding ropes, had lost all sensation. His eyes, trapped in darkness, yearned for sight. He was exhausted beyond fatigue and possibly beyond death. Easy enough to lie there until his hangmen revived and came to reclaim him. Easy to let the lull of the night take him into its gentle embrace. Easy to admit defeat and go to his Maker. He slipped into unconsciousness and stayed there for he knew not how long.
A second wind stirred him back to awareness. It might have been the foulness of the breeze. Or the mournful call of a distant owl. Or the icy-fingered chill of the dark. Or his own soul awakening him back to life.
He refused to surrender into that good night. Maybe another night, he thought, when he was an old man, and dawn seemed too far away to even be imagined.
He used the hard ground to scrape the blindfold from around his eyes, but the cloth was secured in such a manner that his best efforts proved useless. He attempted to work the gag free in the same way, but it dug into the corners of his mouth and refused to budge. One of those knights knew how to tie a good knot, blast the man, and one day he’d get his recompense in kind.
He clambered onto unsteady legs and ran like the devil. Having lost all sense of direction, he might have been heading straight back to the castle, but he let momentum and the winds carry him forward. Let fate be his master, either to free him or damn him to perdition.
Limping along, he faltered more times than not, taking one step forward for two steps backward, constantly fearful that his captors would catch up and take him to the hanging tree branded with his name. He collided with more than one shrub, slammed into tree after tree, and collided with a boulder that left behind a sickly ripping sound followed by fiery pain that traveled the length of his shin. Each time, he managed to rise, gather his bearings, and head into the unknown, letting his hearing guide him into the balmy, bug-infested darkness.
He was wholly familiar with the terrain surrounding Twyford Castle: its footpaths, wagon roads, hazards, and hiding places. To the west flowed the Itchen, less than a quarter-mile distant and a viable escape route if he didn’t drown in the tumid waters. North led to Winchester, three short miles to safety, but a far distance for a beaten, blind, and bound man on foot. The surest path lay south toward Itchendel, two miles distant but a road that would assuredly be watched once Seward and Rufus roused from their joint stupors and alerted Graham and the others. East led into sparse meadows, pastureland, fields, and chalky downs, the route least likely to be trailed since it would be an exhausting trek and the hardest to track.
Having regained his be
arings and applying his senses to ferret out wind, odors, and sounds, he left the river behind and fled eastward, shaping in his mind a map that would circle back and come up on Itchendel from the south. It would be a long march, some six or seven miles of uneven terrain, but a way home if he didn’t fall into a senseless stupor; if exhaustion didn’t give out quicker than night; if the elements didn’t overtake him; if five would-be hangmen didn’t catch up with him; and if maggots didn’t feast on his carcass before dawn.
His breath came in great rasping huffs. The ground rose treacherously upward. His feet twisted on plowed furrows, ragged tree roots, unseen brush, jagged rocks, and unexpected hollows. He lost his balance and toppled more than once. Each time, it became more difficult to get up. He thought he heard footsteps tracking him until they blended in with the trill of a nightjar. The rhythm of a horse’s hoofs was soon drowned out by the flowing gurgle of the Itchen.
He bumped into something solid. A tree. No, a man, the same height as himself.
He grunted, butted with his elbow, and swung to the left. The man’s right arm trapped him. He swung to the right. But the man’s left arm shot out. The night stalker finally spoke. “Drake.”
Recognizing the voice, he said the other man’s name. Though it came out as two muffled snorts from behind the gag, the utterance was entirely coherent inside his head.
Stephen.
Chapter 3
AN ANGEL ENCASED IN SHIMMERING bronze hovered above him, a smile on her pretty lips.
“Kiss me,” Drake said.
Her lips came within a hair’s breadth of his. Then her mother shouted, “Enyd! Go down to cook and have her dish up some clear broth.”
The promised kiss did not materialize since Enyd—only fourteen but already a beauty—was also fleet of foot and obedient. As the girl scampered below stairs, Nelda Goldsmith wiped hands upon her apron, threw Drake a baleful look of warning, and briskly backed out of the chamber.