Standard of Honor

by Jack Whyte

  Joanna, he now realized, had been advancing with an arrow nocked into the bow in her left hand, holding the shaft in place with her index finger, and now, with infinite slowness and patience, she began to raise the bow to the firing position. It seemed to take forever, and the stag stood where he was, looking away from her in three-quarters profile, his nose raised, sniffing at the air for anything resembling danger. André glanced at Sylvester again and noticed that the huntsman was frowning slightly and looking downward, towards Joanna’s feet. He swiveled his own eyes to see what the other man was looking at and realized that Joanna, too, had stopped in mid-step. She had the bow up by now, but she was off balance, her right foot where her left should be, so that she could exert no pull on the bowstring. But even as he realized that she could not make the shot, Joanna achieved what he would have said at that moment was impossible: she straightened smoothly and stepped forward onto her left foot, pushing against the straining bow stave with her straight left arm and pulling the string smoothly back to touch her cheek. The stag flinched and began to leap away from the sound that it had heard, but the arrow was already flying true. It smacked solidly into the beast’s chest behind the point of the shoulder and burst its heart, dropping the creature where it stood. André could not even gather himself to congratulate Joanna on what she had done. He simply stood there, staring at her, open mouthed, and she returned his look with one of her own, raising her eyebrows quizzically as though to say, “There, you see?”

  An hour or so later, he witnessed another demonstration of the same kind of virtuosity, this time from Berengaria, when a large hare broke cover unexpectedly. They had not known it was there, for they had been tracking a boar at the time, but suddenly there was the hare, bounding on its powerful hind legs and leaping nimbly from side to side as it raced for safety across the far side of the clearing they had entered. The Princess had been the first to see it and she spun easily to follow it, bow already fully drawn as she led it and gauged the timing and direction of its leaps, and by the time he had realized what was happening, André had also accepted that she was too late. But she released smoothly and her arrow struck the hare in mid-bound, piercing it cleanly and sending it tumbling half a heartbeat before it would have been safely out of reach among the long grass at the edge of the trees.

  Soon after that, close to noon, Sylvester suggested that they stop to eat. They had lost the boar trail on stony ground and they were glad to stop and eat from the baskets of bread, fruit, and cold meats that the cooks had prepared for them. The sky was still covered by high, dull cloud, and Sylvester asked the women if they wished to hunt on or if they had had enough and were ready to go home. There was no discussion. They would not be leaving here, Joanna said, until they had some good wild pig to take with them. She looked to Berengaria for confirmation, and the Princess nodded in assent, her attention focused on the cold roasted pheasant she was clutching in both hands. André watched and listened to all of this, content to say nothing, and greatly surprised at how much he was enjoying the outing.

  It started to rain as they were preparing to resume the hunt, and at first it was light, a shower that everyone believed would soon pass over, but it did not, and as time went by, the downpour increased so that they were soon seriously inconvenienced. They were deep in the woods, in hilly terrain, and the roar of the downpour on the canopy above their heads was deafening, but the masses of leaves above merely intercepted the rain and deflected it so that instead of falling on the forest floor as normal raindrops, it tended to pool on the broad leaf surfaces and then spill from one leaf to another, gathering momentum and volume until it fell in solid streams, penetrating even the wax-scraped wiry wool of their foul-weather cloaks. André leaned close to Sylvester at one point and shouted into his ear.

  “Were you the one who predicted heavy rain to Richard?”

  The huntsman cupped his hand over his mouth to shout above the noise of the rain. “Aye, but I meant nothing like this. This is worse than I have seen in years. There’s a cavern about half a mile ahead of us, up on top of the scree slope, in the face of a cliff. Found it a few weeks ago, first time I came hunting here. It’s a struggle to get up there, but it’s big and dry inside and we can light a fire, if there are no bears in there.”

  “A fire? Is there wood there?”

  “Probably. Depends on who has been there recently. The locals have been using the place as a shelter for hundreds of years, and most of them stock the place with firewood before they leave. There was a pile there when I found the place.” He shrugged. “Of course, some people will use up every scrap of wood that’s there and won’t replace a stick. Do you want to try it?”

  “Lead on! It’s big enough, think you?”

  “Oh, it’s big, much larger than it looks to be from outside, because the entranceway is really very small, barely three paces across, compared to the space inside, which is about ten times that wide. And it’s deep, too, with high roofs. There are three big connected chambers, one behind the other like beads on a string. Front one’s the biggest, open to the outside. The back one has some light in it during the day—a kind of glow that comes down like a fading sunbeam from somewhere up above—and the middle one’s always dark.”

  André smiled at the huntsman. “Like a fading sunbeam … I like that. Let’s hope there are no bears in there today.”

  They approached the cave mouth with great caution, having picked their way carefully up the treacherous scree slope, and when they were all in readiness, with arrows nocked and ready to draw, Sylvester threw a succession of rocks into the darkened cavern, pausing each time to listen for sounds that would indicate that the cave held tenants. Nothing emerged, and no sound disturbed the silent darkness beyond the cave mouth. Eventually Sylvester himself, carrying a heavy, springwound arbalest primed and ready at the level of his waist, stepped slowly into the entrance and paused there, framed in the opening and lit from behind, inviting any animal inside to charge at him. He remained there for a count of ten, and then he straightened slightly and disappeared into the darkness.

  Minutes later, having made sure that no animals were lurking in the farthest recesses of the three linked caverns that stretched backward for at least sixty paces into the cliff, the two men stood together again, this time looking out into the driving rain. Behind them in the first cave, they could hear one of the other hunters chopping dry wood into kindling, while another of their number worked patiently with flint, steel, and finely chopped and shredded bark and grass to start a fire. The two women had gone into the farthest of the caves, the dimly lit one, and there Sylvester had shown them a cleft in the floor over an underground stream that offered a natural and pleasant latrine. He had then left them together to do whatever they needed to do.

  “How far are we from the wagons, do you know?” André asked him.

  Sylvester pointed off to their right, down the scree slope. “Half a mile, if you go that way, straight through the brush and across a steep gully with a stream at the bottom, but it will be heavy going in this rain.” He flicked his hand towards the left, the way they had come. “If you go back that way, on the other hand, there’s an easy path—we crossed it at one point, you may recall—that swings back around to where they’ll be now. A mile and a half, perhaps two.”

  “An easy path? Easy enough for the wagons to follow if we sent for them to come here?”

  “Aye, to the bottom of the slope, at least, but if you wanted anything after that, you’d have to hump it up the slope on your back.”

  “That’s what men-at-arms are for, when they’re not fighting. I think we should send for them.”

  Sylvester turned slowly and looked at him. “Now why would you want to do that?”

  André met his look squarely. “Because this rain shows no sign of slackening and we have two ladies with us. They may not look like ladies, dressed as they are, and they have not been behaving like ladies through all this, because neither one of them has made a single complaint, but
sooner rather than later the discomfort of this weather is going to penetrate their calm, which has been admirable until now. The rain may ease soon—it certainly ought to, because it can’t continue this way forever—but in the event that it does not, then we ought to be prepared for whatever eventuality might arise. And one of those eventualities, I believe, is that the lady Joanna might not change her mind about remaining here until she kills a pig. If that happens, then we might end up spending the night here.”

  “The King would not be happy with that,” Sylvester growled, but André shook his head.

  “I don’t know, my friend. I think you might be wrong there. You yourself put the notion into Richard’s head yesterday when you told him it might rain heavily today, and that is why we brought a wagon filled with tents and blankets. It was the King’s idea that we might be stranded by the weather, and he bade me be certain that I brought the necessities to keep the ladies dry, warm, and comfortable. He trusts us both implicitly in this. We have sufficient men to guard them, and we brought the cook along to feed everyone. So oblige me by sending your best man to find the wagons and their escort and to bring them here as soon as may be. I will inform the Queens of what is happening.” He hesitated. “By the way, the third cave, at the back, with the latrine. Is there an updraft in there? Could you keep a fire burning in there without choking to death?”

  Sylvester shrugged. “I don’t know. I’ve never thought about that. I always use the fire pit in the front cave.”

  “Hmm. Well, we’ll soon find out. There must be a chimney of some kind in the roof there. If light can get in, then air must be able to get out by the same route.”

  THE DOWNPOUR HAD NOT ABATED by the middle of the afternoon, but the temperature had plummeted so deeply that it felt more like a winter’s day in England than anything one might ever expect to encounter in Cyprus. And then the wind came up, gradually at first, then strengthening to a gale and later still to a howling, lethal fury the like of which none of them had ever seen. In the forest below their cliff face, whole trees were uprooted and sent flying while others, older and more established, were shattered and sundered by the power of the winds, weak forks ripped apart and great limbs and branches torn away and transformed into flying weapons. Awe-stricken, but too wet and tired and miserable to really care about the reasons underlying the phenomenon, no one could explain it and no one tried. When they grew bored with watching the catastrophe, they concentrated all their energies upon drying themselves and their clothing, and staying warm.

  The wagons had arrived and been unloaded long before the wind arose, every able-bodied man in the party turning to the task of carrying cargo up the treacherous slope of shifting shale and rocks beneath the cliff face and stowing it in the front cave, where a veritable bonfire now roared. When everything was safely moved, André sent them all out again, this time to find a sheltered spot in which to conceal the wagons and horses, and then to gather firewood to stave off the rapidly increasing cold. He had gone with them, as had Sylvester, leaving behind only a single elderly man from the cook’s crew to tend to the ladies, should they require anything. That, too, had been before the storm winds really asserted themselves, and they had still been gathering piles of wood when one savage, icy gust of swirling wind plucked one of their number up bodily and threw him down the rocky slope to land unconscious, one arm broken and his head bleeding against a stone. That caused them to cut short their fuel gathering and settle for transporting what they had gathered up into the safety of the caverns as quickly as they could move.

  There had been no question of continuing the hunt in such weather, or even of making the journey homeward to Limassol, for they had all seen with their own eyes the power of that wind. Instead, St. Clair had set all hands to preparing for a night in the cave. The twelve men-at-arms had been put to work at once, building an angled wall of stones and rubble across the narrow entrance to the cavern in order to deflect the force of the gusts that howled through the opening. The top of it was still half the height of a man short of the entrance’s highest point, but it was high enough and strong enough to reduce the howling force of the wind to tolerable levels. Behind the wall, in a wide ring around the central fire pit—the floor of the main cavern was easily thirty paces long and almost the same in width—they had set up four leather tents as sleeping quarters, where they would be out of the wind gusts that still spilled into the cave from time to time. They could not drive pegs into the stone floor, but they were able to raise the tents solidly nonetheless by securing the guy ropes to heavy stones, and while all of that was happening, the cook and his crew were roasting a haunch of venison on a spit that they had placed over a second fire.

  Sylvester had also ordered small fires lit in the central and rear caves, and the one in the rear chamber burned clean and well, as he had thought it would, whereas the one in the central chamber had to be extinguished immediately, before its smoke drove them all out into the storm. Having proved that the rear chamber could be kept warm and ventilated, he offered the two Queens the option of sleeping in the main cave with the rest of the party, in one of the four tents, or of sleeping by themselves in the rear chamber. He was unsurprised when they opted for the latter, for Ianni the steward had already been hard at work fashioning beds and seats by the fire from piles of tents and blankets, and generally converting the space for the women’s use, even to the extent of lighting fat candles in standing sconces against the walls and having portable tripods set up as washstands, with ewers of heated water for their ablutions.

  André bowed to the Queens and told them that he would have some hot food sent in to them when it was ready, but as he turned to leave, Berengaria called him back and thanked him, although for what, he could not have said. Her courtesy surprised him, for they had barely exchanged ten words all day, but he bowed slightly in acknowledgment and thanked her in return, and then was truly surprised when Joanna asked him to be seated for a moment, since she had several things to say to him and to ask about.

  Someone had moved four knee-high boulders close to the fire that Sylvester had built close by the back wall of the chamber, where the smoke rose swiftly and cleanly upward, disappearing into the heights without causing any discomfort, and two of them had been converted to seats by the simple addition of a wad of padding to each. André thought the padding might be folded leather tents, but even as he looked at them, one of Ianni’s men came by with a third pile of cushioning and set it atop another boulder, pressing it into shape. André nodded his thanks to the man and crossed to it, looking inquiringly at Queen Joanna, who stared back at him openly, then sat down across from him, crossing her booted, leather-clad legs and gripping her knee between interlaced fingers.

  The effect of that simple movement hit André squarely beneath the rib cage, taking his breath away. He had been looking at both women all day and had, he thought, grown inured to the fact that they were women dressed as men, but they had been wearing heavy woolen cloaks all day, too, and all of them, himself included, had been concentrating on other things, and that had greatly dissipated the impact of their appearance. Now, however, they had laid aside their cloaks and the leather cuirasses they had worn for hunting, and both had found time to brush their hair, but they had not yet had any opportunity to change their clothing completely and they were now wearing only light, knee-length tunics, much like surcoats, over leather breeches that revealed, shockingly, the shapes of their legs and hips, so that by raising her armored knee and grasping it the way she had, Joanna Plantagenet had filled his mind and vision, instantly, with the awareness of her body. In looking away so quickly, he had undone himself further, because Queen Berengaria, similarly clad—although the word that came to him instantly was unclad—had been moving towards him, bending slightly forward so that the shape and fullness of her breasts were emphasized.

  He closed his eyes instinctively, feeling the warm flush of redness creeping over his face, but when he opened them again, neither of the women appeared to have
noticed anything amiss.

  “I have been most impressed with you today, Master St. Clair,” Joanna said clearly. “The task you were given is an imposition that could easily have been placed upon someone else. I know that, because I am the one who asked that you be given it, for my own selfish reasons. But you have discharged it admirably, with great patience and without a single frown or complaint, albeit it has turned out to be a far more hazardous and lengthy task than any of us could have guessed at. You have performed your duty and fulfilled your obligations wondrously, and my brother shall hear of it directly. My sister here thinks the same and will add her voice to mine. And for all you have done for us today, we now thank you.”

  “It was my duty, my lady, as you say, but it was also pleasurable. May I—may I ask why you asked for me?”

  Joanna flicked a glance at Berengaria, then looked back at St. Clair, her head tipped slightly to one side and a tiny frown of annoyance, or it might have been perplexity, creasing the skin between her brows. “Because I thought you have a mind, sir, and might be capable of conversing sensibly, so why would you jeopardize that opinion by asking such a foolish question now?” When she saw the uncomprehending look that drew from him, her frown deepened. “I think—” She sat up straighter. “It cannot have escaped your attention, surely, Sir André, that the majority of your fellow knights can barely speak at all, once the topics of exercising, training, killing, and warfare have been exhausted. My brother tells me you can read and write with fluency. Is that correct?”