by Harold Lamb
He laughed, running his fingers through the coils of her hair. "Oh, I can find my way over the water, but you could not without me. Now let us be making a bargain between us. Not for gold or salvation would I take you to the castle-and, faith, I doubt if De Ferrand would hold to his word if I did-but you must bide and talk with me until the first of the sunrise. Will you do that?"
Quickly she looked up at him. "Aye, I will do it. But first, your horsewhere is he?"
Springing to his feet, the crusader whistled, and heard a faint stamp of hoofs under the shadow of the ridge. Putting on his mantle and steel cap, he hastened forward with the girl running at his side, entered the gloom of the ridge, and stepped out upon the highroad. Here Malik stood, docile enough.
Then the breath caught in his throat and he stared, voiceless, at the black line of the ridge above him, where the summits of the trees stood stark against the moon's glow. Above the trees, across the sky, leaped a phantom.
Clear against the silvered clouds Bryn saw the great black horse, and the rider with wings beating behind him, swooping toward him! Bryn flung himself into his saddle, while Malik stamped and reared and a girl's scream pierced the night.
Malik, mad with excitement, danced and reared. Bryn turned him to face the thing that leaped out from under the trees and crashed upon the road. He had no shield, but he leaned forward and struck at the onrushing shape. The steel blade clanged against metal, and as it did so something struck Bryn's head. A roaring filled his ears, and yellow flames sprang before his eyes. He rolled from the saddle and fell. Blood filled his nostrils, and he felt earth under his hands.
Hoofs thudded near him, and Malik's battle scream rang in his ears. His sword was under his knee and he caught it up as his head cleared and he was aware of monstrous shapes rearing over him. His helmet had been knocked off and warm blood trickled down his face.
Something lashed down toward him and he moved aside, springing to his feet and gripping the black form of the rider of the sky about the waist. The rider twisted, lifting his right arm for another blow, when his horse swerved and he came down.
Again Bryn was struck, and again a glancing blow on his shoulder; but the impact of heavy iron sickened him. The panting breath of the other through the slits of his closed helmet beat against his wet face. "If he is a devil," Bryn thought, "he is mortal, and one of us will have his death here."
As they strained on staggering feet, Bryn felt the huge strength of the man in mail. He saw a long arm rise against the sky, holding a weapon that seemed to be a war club or smith's hammer. But swiftly Bryn released his grip-flung up his right hand and caught the handle of the weapon.
Putting forth all the strength of shoulder and arm, Bryn bent back the weapon. With a curse, the man in mail let go his grasp and clutched at something in his belt.
As he did so, Bryn set his feet and swung the massive weapon. It crashed against the steel of the helmet, and the steel crackled and snapped. Again Bryn lashed out, and the face of the helmet shattered as the man reeled back. And Bryn struck a third blow that crunched upon bone and flesh. The dark figure fell prone in the road, stirring a little, and became a still shadow against the white dust.
Then a light flamed before Bryn, a voice cried out: "He is slain!" and Alaine knelt beside him.
"'Tis the devil is dead, not me," muttered Bryn. "For love of God, bring me water."
Catching up his battered helmet from the road, the girl darted away, and Bryn limped over to look at his enemy. The great body in black and bloodstreaked mail lay sprawled on its face. To the broad shoulders a pair of long swan's wings had been attached by straps. Now the wings were crumpled and broken. Bryn turned him over with his foot and bent to look into what had been his face.
Bryn pondered the broken countenance. "'Twas Hugo," he said at last. "Aye, the Genoese captain."
He heard Alaine returning, and he drank deep of the cool water she brought in his helmet.
"That, there, was Hugo," he said, "but what is this?" Upon his light steel cap was the mark of a massive hoof.
"Look at the weapon in your hand, Sir Bryn," she responded.
The head of it flared out, into the shape of an iron hoof, with even the marks of nails upon it. Bryn let it fall beside the body.
"Why did he do this?" Alaine whispered.
Sure, Bryn thought, the Genoese had robbed upon the highroad in the guise of a fiend, and sure he had slain here his own light o' love who had left him for De Ferrand. But what of tonight? Hugo had tricked him at the table into boasting about Malik-had not known that he, Bryn, would be here upon the road this night. Then why had the night rider come?
Suddenly Bryn laughed. Why, Hugo had sought the girl for himself, spying down from that ridge behind the trees. And he had seen her come to the road with another man ...
Bryn picked up his sword from the road and sheathed it. Then he bent down and lifted the girl in his arms. She lay quiet against his shoulder, and a slim arm encircled his neck. He pressed his cheek against the heavy mass of hair, and lifted his head to whistle to Malik.
"Faith, Alaine," he whispered, "ye have had wooers a-many, among lords and devils. But now, girl, ye'll have only one, a poor churl of a soldier without service who'll carry you to his own land."
After that day the tongues of the good people of the island wagged long and loud. For, they said, the captive crusader had vanished like mist from his cell, and the witch girl Alaine was no longer to be seen.
But two tongues said nothing. The seigneur, De Ferrand, brooding in his tower, looked at times down upon the gibbet where hung the long body of Hugo with the hammer-hoof tied to its neck, after a just trial that had proved the corpse guilty of theft and murder and black magic and treason to its merciful and noble liege lord, the Seigneur Renault de Ferrand.
Chapter One
When the small boat grated on the beach, he jumped over. In the wash he felt the sands of Africa under his feet. Forgetting that he should not do so, he ran the boat's bow up three paces to the edge of dry sand. There was almost no tide.
Then, remembering why he had come, he let go the boat and straightened his long body. Curiously he looked at the gray mainland, with its tufted greenery showing over garden walls. A flat country he thought it to be, and dismal enough-this shore of the enemy.
On his thin freckled face he felt the hot shore breeze. He was overlarge for his age-eighteen the first day of that month of March in the year 1805. Silently he took his jacket, book, and moleskin valise, handed out by the boatswain. "Thank you," he said, and handed back a shilling extracted awkwardly from his pocket.
Fingering the shilling, the seaman stared grudgingly at his solitary passenger-at this odd young Yankee, embarked at Syracuse on the Neapolitan packet, and the only one to go ashore at the port of Alexandria in Egypt. At a time, moreover, when the gentry were all for leaving Alexandria, bag and baggage. Not that the slow-spoken Yankee belonged to the proper gentry. "Lad," warned the English seaman, with a vague idea of repaying the shilling with advice, "look well about you for cutpurses; and cutthroats-among the pygan savages here, and pay no girl more'n twenty piastres, which is a shilling more'r less. And by the same-"
"I'll bear it in mind, bo'sun," acknowledged the Yank quickly.
"And by the same token, when and as in trouble, take yourself, young Yankee, to yon brig that flies your colors," added the Englishman, his heavy voice edged with faint contempt.
He pointed out at the black hull of an armed brig anchored in the road among the passing raking sails of feluccas. "Not as A-merican colors be safeguard along the Barbary way, where as I have'eard tell at the port Tripoli an A-merican fraygate was surrendered, full armed and manned-"
"At Tripoli, yes," agreed the young Yankee. He hoped the sailor would still his tongue. Instinctively he held out a hand calloused by the chafing of salt-encrusted rope.
"At Tripoli her captain 'auled down his colors. Captain Bainbridge he was."
The young Yankee folded his ja
cket over his arm, his somber eyes lowered to the prints of his feet in the sand. The contempt in the English seaman's voice was impersonal, stubborn-something that had to be said because it was true. "And not a man wounded among all of them. Nah, not a fight in the lot of them." He spat into the water. "Surrendered with whole skins to the pygan corsairs of Tripoli!"
Gripping his book, the lanky boy answered under his breath: "She grounded on an uncharted reef."
"Ah."
The Yankee lifted his eyes, tense with fear. "They went in and burned her afterward-the Americans did."
He prayed inwardly that the boatswain would cease his loud abuse of the Americans at Tripoli. Already people were glancing their way, and a young woman appeared at his elbow, a silk kerchief gripped over her head, her slippered feet sinking into the sand. She was asking questions in good French and labored English, of which the boatswain seemed to understand little. Eyeing her, the man said: "Nah, then."
"She is asking," said the Yankee, who caught the drift of her French speech, "the price of a passage to Syracuse on your packet vessel."
"Yes," assented the girl, "please. To Syracuse or anywhere."
She held her head turned from the Yankee, who saw the fall of dark hair against a young cheek, and the bright peacocks embroidered on the scarf.
"To Syracuse?" The boatswain pondered, trying to get a sight of the girl's slim breast in the V of the shawl. "Fifty-two sov'reigns, or Venay- tian sequins."
The girl let out her breath in a sigh. Her head turned slowly toward the quay jutting from the beach, where carriages waited among eddies of servants-where wealthy would-be passengers waited for a chance to board one of the few vessels leaving the port of Alexandria. Her dark eyes half closed, her small shoulders lifted defiantly, she began to walk toward the quay.
The Yankee's gaze followed the bright blue of the peacock scarf, and it seemed to him strange that this young woman should be alone and afoot on the beach. The thought only touched his mind, while he repeated silently the words he should not have spoken: They went in and burned her afterward ... He remembered how the fire had sprung from the sacks piled against the polished oak of the wardroom, crackling and burning amethyst color from the tar and charcoal in the sacks-whirling up the masts and the tarred shrouds in a hot dry night wind, mirrored in the still water, until the heat began to explode the charges in the shotted guns, and they fired their requiem for the doomed frigate, the Philadelphia ...
Clamping shut his lips, he walked away from the landing boat, not toward the crowd on the quay but toward the nearest alley of the town.
He walked, the boatswain noticed, planting his feet wide like a man who had been long at sea. Not like a proper gentleman! Such a traveling gentleman, in the boatswain's opinion, would have fondled the neck of the trim wench who had come by to catch his eye. Aye, a proper gentleman would have hallo'ed for a chaise to convey him into town, instead of trudging off carrying his own bag.
"Nah," said the seaman, pocketing his shilling. He was certain only that this young Yankee was like others of his kind, a man with an eye for trade who would pay down good money to escape a fight.
The Yankee walked hastily into the shade of the first alley and looked around him there, hoping that he was not followed from the beach. Beside him veiled women dozed in the shadow of a half-ruined kiosk. Bells jangled past him as dusty donkeys trotted by, their loads bumping against him. The dust hung in the air, and the stench of the ground choked him.
Against the wall a long human body smelled sickly sweet. Peering down at it, the Yankee made out a ragged dolman over shoulders where the flies had not clustered. The unburied body, then, must have been a French soldier, a relic of the French army of occupation, abandoned in Egypt like the charred skeletons of Napoleon's fleet off one of the mouths of the Nile ...
Wings flapped over his head. A tawny-white buzzard came to rest on the clay wall above the body.
The Yankee thought it a pity that no one troubled to give the body, even though it was a foreigner's, a grave. Frowning, he reminded himself of his two mistakes at the beach. First, he had lent a hand in beaching the boat; second, he had shown temper at the taunt of the English seaman, who was probably no more than a deserter, keeping his hide whole and his purse full under the Neapolitan flag.
Carefully the youth repeated the identification he had made up for himself: "My name is Paul Davies. I am a graduate of the King's College in the city of New York, now seeking lucrative employment as teacher of the French language-or ciphering-in some Christian family. My purpose in venturing to Egypt is to improve my mind by sight of the temples and pyramids of the ancient world."
The only book he had was the one he carried so ostentatiously, being The Pilgrim's Progress by a certain John Bunyan-an account of a journey which Paul had found only mildly interesting.
And his education, he knew, hardly qualified him to teach anyone, because it was that of a midshipman, recently promoted to lieutenant in the United States Navy.
Down the center of the alley limped a tall man leaning on a long staff, crying out "Ya hu-ya hak!" His shaggy head bent back, he would have blundered into Paul, if the Yankee had not stepped aside quickly. The crier, a blind beggar, was followed by two armed men, who stopped Paul, asking questions he could not understand.
By their tufted red skullcaps, he knew they were police.
"Giauringlisi!" exclaimed one impatiently, and jerked open Paul's valise, pulling out the few linen shirts and the pair of slippers it held. An English foreigner, they thought him to be.
He had no weapon. He could not resist. The one thing he should not do under any circumstances was to start a fight. So he smiled helplessly while the police ransacked his small bag, finding little.
Then they looked attentively at his narrow civilian trousers and white shirt, and the bigger of the two thrust his hand against the bulge in the shirt over the belt, where Paul's wallet lay.
Before they could extract the wallet, they heard the heavy tread of feet approaching, swiftly in quickstep. Around the corner behind them swung a platoon of stocky figures clad in uniforms green with age. The figures carried muskets brightly polished, and their sun-darkened heads turned quickly and silently toward the pair of police. At once the police stepped back to the wall, gripping their long staves warily, leaving the narrow street clear for the marchers.
Greeks, thought Paul, noticing their baggy pantaloons cut off above the knees. Barely he had time to scoop his belonging back into his valise and step aside. The Greeks swung by like a pack of mastiffs passing stray wolves. The Turkish police hugged their wall. And the Yankee seized this chance to stride off into the dust after the marching detachment.
He kept close to it, observing how the throngs in the alley scattered at the sight of their muskets.
In this spring of 1805 the flotsam and jetsam of the wars jammed the port of Alexandria. After the remnant of Menou's French army had surrendered, the redcoats had come and gone in their quest after Napoleon. On the heels of the departing English the letting of blood went on with bands of the Egyptian Mamelukes raiding the garrisons of the Turkish sultan-nominal ruler of the land-while deserters herded together to pillage and Bedouin tribes swarmed in to raid impartially, the flames of burning villages made beacons at night from Grand Cairo to the sea.
In the kaleidoscope of lawlessness, Paul Davies had been assured that the only safeguards were a British passport or a strong armed escort. Having neither of these, he was well content to follow after the marching Greeks, who might guide him to some place safe for Christians. When the sergeants at the rear of the small column began to stare back at him curiously, he slowed his pace to drop farther behind.
Somewhere on this African shore he had to find a man. The person he sought might be in the streets of Alexandria or up the Nile at Grand Cairo, or out in the desert. If Paul could cross his track, he should not be hard to find. But Paul could not let it be known that he was seeking for him. Nor could he waste time in his s
earch. He had to ransack the town for a trace of his quarry, and having found the trace, to follow it to his man. And to contrive a meeting as if by happenchance. So much he had reasoned out in his slow fashion while still at sea on the deck of the Neapolitan packet.
But here, afoot in the streets, his task seemed to be hopeless, unless luck gave him a hand. And he had the ill luck to lose the Greeks. Climbing a flight of steps to a wide sun-drenched street, he saw no trace of them except dust drifting away. Nor could he catch an echo of their footsteps. On either side the buildings seemed to be empty ruins.
In one of these-where massive red stones bore carved inscriptions-Paul sighted a slender man stretched at ease beneath a broken statue of Hercules.
"Well?" observed this foreigner, brushing away the flies indolently. Unshaved, in worn smart clothing, he had an air of being at home in the ruin, and the clipped voice of an Englishman of breeding. Silver gleamed on the butt of the pistol in his sash. Seeing it, the Yankee felt a surge of familiar fear. With his sleeve he wiped at the sweat above his eyes.
"Where," he asked cautiously, "can I find a quiet lodging-place?"
"There, sir." The Englishman's fan pointed at a bare rise set with tiny slabs of stone. "It has no equal."
Studying the distant slope, Paul nodded, his gray eyes amused. "Besides the cemetery, sir, is there any decent lodging in this port?"
The Englishman, who had been contemplating him through half-closed eyes, moved his head from side to side. "Decent, sir, there is none. I have quartered myself upon these gods of Greece. If you still have money, try the Devil's Coffee-House across the way. It may still be there. Ask for Eugene, but on no account make a wager with him. Especially-" he added bitterly-"upon the physical momentum of a knife-blade against a playing card in the air. It cost me eight pounds to discover that Eugene can stick the blade through the card. Mind you, he can accomplish the seemingly impossible in other ways. But he will not steal from you."
Paul nodded, amused-and fancied that he had hit upon the explanation of the missing men. "The armed platoon-the Greeks-turned into this coffee-house?"