'Without horses we can only die hard,' said Gino flatly in his own tongue.
Hélie looked desperately at Durande. She was doomed too. She had learned too much. Composedly she drew the bow from her belt and strung it, swung her quiver round and counted seven arrows. 'Do we stand or run?'’ she asked calmly.
Rags of a crazy, desperate plan fluttered across Hélie's brain, so crazy that its improbability gave it a semblance of hope. Horses they must have at any risk, and there was only one source. He glanced quickly about him in the thinning twilight. Here would serve, where trees and rocks would split pursuit and they had light and space. He could have made use of a rope to play Fulbert's trick, but they had nothing with which to improvise one. Gino was stooping for stones.
'Durande, you must bait the trap. As they ride past show yourself up yonder on the top. Then slip down into the gully and creep back here through the bracken. Since horses are our lives' price, we must take them.'
Gino straightened, his hands full of likely stones and his black eyes kindling. 'God's Life, we might!'
'A poor chance—'
'I would die trying rather than wait like a sheep to have my throat cut!'
'Durande, if we fail, we will hold them here while we live. Run for it, lass; walk in water, and then climb a tree and wait for night. Bear westward—’
'I have seven shafts and no wish to be your widow.’
'Durande, if God be gracious you bear my seed within you. Grant me to die saving you—’
She leaned closer and kissed the angle of his bristly jaw, and he closed his arms fiercely on her as love and fear tore his inwards. With her to defend he would fight as he had never done in all his days. One last look sealed her image on his memory; every bead of sweat on her smoke-grimed face, every separate strand of the hair she had bundled into a rough plait at her nape; the quivering of her tightly-gripped lips. 'Heart’s darling, forgive me!’
'A day and a night of your love is worth the rest of a dreary lifetime!’ she murmured in his ear, and then was running up the hill, her gown kilted into her girdle and the plait thumping between her shoulders. He watched her reach the top and drop from sight.
'The Saints take us all into their keeping, now and in death’s hour,’ he prayed aloud, and he and Gino crouched apart in cover. Peering through arching bracken-fronds, he watched the track, while the sky flushed crimson and the light strengthened, and the shadows retreated under the trees. Then he heard the click of iron on stone, the jingle of a bit-chain, and dim shapes flickered between the trees and then breasted the rise, a long bow-shot away.
The unlawed dog ran mute in leash, and Osbern trotted on his spindle-shanks that bore his paunch with unexpected lightness. After him loped the virago Gytha like vengeance embodied in fierce flesh, and eight or nine straggling behind, hard to discern by the dawnlight in their dingy homespun and dull leather. Skirts swung about bare legs; there were twice as many women as men, fleeting ruthless as wolf-bitches in a winter pack. Among them, yet not of them, five horsemen rode in a compact body, two and two behind Oliver de Collingford. Hélie clenched his empty fists at sight of that worried weasel-face. The nervous gaze flicking this way and that passed unseeing over the bracken, and he leaned to speak to Gytha by his stirrup. Hélie nodded savagely. His heart hammered.
The poacher’s dog, nose-down and eager, ran past the outcrop and the fresh scent, and Hélie relaxed a little as the hunt swept past him and down the further slope. Then a bow uttered a single deep harp-note, and a shaft sang. The dog yelped shrilly and rolled over, snapped at the arrow transfixing it and lay still. A howl of alarm and anger lifted. 'Oh, well done indeed, lass!’ Hélie whispered, admiration for the cool sense that had improved on his orders almost choking him. Oliver screeched something, and the five riders wheeled and spurred up the slope, yelling like Saracens.
'Kill them! No quarter! Let none escape!’ Oliver shouted, and stormed clattering among the rocks.
The ridge, as Hélie had recognized, was no terrain for an uphill charge, and the most reckless rider must use it with respect. As he leaped from concealment the men-at-arms came plunging and bucketing past, each taking his own way. He had an eye-corner glimpse of Gino’s swinging arm and heard a metallic crash, but was too busy to heed. He launched himself at the rearmost, just scrambling past the rocks. An astonished face blew a strangled yell over a mailed shoulder. A shield-arm jerked, tugging at the bridle, and a spear lunged awkwardly. The horse swerved from him, hurling a startled whinny up the slope. The shield slammed at his head as he dived in. He grabbed past it, won his grip on elbow and knee, and heaved the fellow bodily from his saddle. He snatched the reins as the horse reared and vaulted astride it while the fall’s clatter still rang. Another clang resounded as he dragged down the frantic beast’s head and glanced about him.
Gino caught the bridle of a horse running free and swung himself up, wrenching the animal round on its haunches. Another clattered past Hélie, kicking in panic at its rider who jolted head-down, his foot fast in the off stirrup. Hélie lunged at it, grabbed the rein close to the bit and hauled it to a stop, snorting and trembling. Gino halted alongside, leaned down and jerked the stirrup clear of its grisly encumbrance. Durande was running towards them through waist-high bracken. The two foremost riders, high on the crest, had reined their plunging mounts about. She halted, drew and loosed in one clean sure movement.
One of the horses screamed, bucked, and bolted for the woods. Hélie and Gino swerved to meet her, checked to catch her up into the empty saddle, and drove headlong for the witches.
The ambush had been accomplished so fast that the peasants were still gathered about the dead dog in the track, gaping astounded. One or two raised bows, and then flung themselves aside from the iron-shod hooves clanging at them. Only Gytha ran at them, lunging with her son's boar-spear, but they were through and past beyond her reach, crashing down the slope between the scattered trees. An arrow sang over Hélie's head. Shouts pursued them but nothing more harmful. The trees thickened to shield them, and they slowed to an easy canter once sound and sight of their foes had been lost, the red dawn at their backs and the sky bright above them.
The ground tilted again to an open ridge, and they halted a moment by tacit consent, to draw free breath and survey each other. With the end of immediate peril came reaction, and consciousness at last of weary bodies, aching bones and raw hurts. Hélie's bare legs were scorched and blistered. Gino, having slept fully dressed, had been less vulnerable to fire but was lucky to have his ribs intact. All were seared by showering sparks. By rights they should all have been charred corpses in the lodge's embers, another regrettable accident contrived by a man cunning in such expedients. It was an odd irony that Osbern's own swinish habits had saved their lives.
Hélie looked at his wife with anxious compunction. This was a sorry morning-gift for the bride he had vowed to cherish. Her sombre dirty face brightened a little, and silently she joined her hand to his in a hard grip. Their love was above question, needed no reassurance. Shame and scandal could not stain their marriage; it was set apart and inviolate. And when they had been married many years and their children stood about them, Hélie thought confusedly, it would be good to look each into the other's mind and need no words for understanding.
Gino's horse stirred uneasily, and brought him to reality. He nodded to the two who should have been three, bitter remembrance of Stephen butchered in his place dispelling his thankfulness, and started his mount into a walk. His hand felt for his sword-hilt as he hoped that the blade should next be drawn against Oliver de Collingford. Durande ranged alongside him, stony-faced.
'I regret that he is your cousin, Durande.’
'Forget that when you do justice, Hélie.'
He shook his head. 'I shall remember that he forgot it first.’ He rode on in silence, picking his path over the rough ground. 'My head was too full of Fulbert to have room for sense!' he declared savagely. 'How could he ever have been the masked devil? This evi
l is rooted among the peasants, and he is a Norman outlander who cannot string a dozen English words into a sentence!'
'But it matches all I know of Oliver.'
Hélie enumerated the points that would have been obvious but for his blind obsession with the mercenary. 'Bred in this district, corrupted by a witch nurse, knowledgeable with simples, a widower with none to dispute his night-ranging. And, by God's Justice, willing to throw you to Fulbert to close his mouth!'
'I suspect,' said Durande mordantly, 'that Fulbert was marked for his next victim.’
'After us? I would give a deal to learn what Fulbert knows.'
'He knows that neither he nor I murdered Robert, and that is enough.'
More than enough for that cool opportunist, Hélie reflected. The attempt to throw him to the man-killing stallion had completely betrayed Oliver to Fulbert, a hard man indeed to be rid of. Safest to pay the knave his price and await the chance to arrange another regrettable accident, but Hélie had disrupted the bargain, and now Oliver de Collingford must murder all three to save himself. He wondered where the man's vicious panic had taken him now, and instinctively drew closer to his wife.
They pressed the horses over the ridge and down through thick woods to a stream. They turned right-handed into it and rode in the water upstream until they reached a paved ford and a track running south-west, which they followed gratefully. The horses were weary, and none was up to Hélie's weight. He changed frequently with Gino, and in the rougher parts they all dismounted to lead them, but they had been hard-ridden half a day and a night and were near foundering. When he judged the pursuit fairly lost Hélie ordered a halt in an open hollow, stripped off their saddles, rubbed down their sweating sides with handfuls of grass and loosed them to roll and graze.
Durande, who had calmly disregarded her husband’s objections to her acting as groom, let her wisp of grass drift to the earth and stretched herself. She exchanged pregnant glances with Gino. The two were already in alliance, which both pleased and alarmed him for whose benefit they collaborated. Gino with ostentatious tact fussed with the lathered saddle-cloths, spreading them over bushes to air. Durande took Hélie by the hand and drew him to the shade of a thick-barrelled oak.
‘You must rest too, dear lord.’
She sank down between its mossy roots, her upturned face all concerned tenderness. It brought him to his knees beside her, and then with a queer sound between a grunt and a sob he sprawled out, rolled over and buried his angry, unhappy head in her lap. Her fingers moved in his singed, smoky hair, and he blurted his misery in a muffled gasp.
‘If I had not over-ridden him—’
Her hands clasped upon his nape, steady and firm, and his own gripped the rough stuff of her gown. She said no word, but he felt her stoop closer as though to shield him from the blame and regret he visited on himself. He twisted his head round.
‘I would have loved him,’ he muttered.
‘And your bitterest grief is that you know none,’ she finished softly.
She knew. This was not sorrow, but harsh disappointment, the loss of something he had desired and never known. He had liked Stephen for his forthright honesty, his independence, his pigheaded stubbornness; most of all, humanly and naturally, for the resemblance that had been his death.
‘If I had only listened—he wished to keep watch—'
‘He would have died the sooner. Would they have let a guard deter them?’
He heaved himself to his knees. After a moment he nodded grimly. She was right, and his heavy burden of self-reproach lightened a little. He met her eyes, and saw them brimming bright, her cheeks streaked with tears.
‘I liked him too,’ she said simply.
He drew her remorsefully to his shoulder, resting his chin on her thick hair. It was for him to comfort her, not selfishly to seek comfort. 'He was a man to like. Oh, Durande, what a Hell-assailed wedding-night!'
'Nothing can quench our joy,’ she murmured, her voice muffled against his tunic. 'But the rest—the malice and viciousness—Stephen dead, and that man I slew. I cannot put him from me—an empty carcase in an instant, dead in his sins. Foolish, I know—'
'Not foolish at all, dear girl, to regret a soul sent unrepentant to Hell.’
'You feel it so—a knight used to warfare?'
'Inadequately used,' answered Hélie, remembering the lad bred to evil whom he had hurled from scarce-tasted life to damnation, and whose face would come between him and sleep for many a night. 'The habit of bloodshed callouses men's hearts,' he admitted.
Her hand gripped his. 'I thank God yours is not calloused, Hélie.' She looked up in frank worship, and he flushed uncomfortably, uneasily wondering how she would regard him when she discovered him to be imperfect clay. And it was odd to be commended for a lamentable deficiency.
'What Gino reckons a young fool with a head full of moonshine,’ he said wryly, drew her head to his shoulder and smoothed the tangled masses of her hair.
They rested in silence, half-dozing. The horses cropped the grass with a soft, tearing sound. Gino left the saddles and sprawled under a bush, his head discreetly averted and his sling under his right hand. Insects hummed. Somewhere a squirrel scolded. Dark clouds heaved up above the trees, but the sun shone with treacherous brilliance, and the heat smothered them like a damp blanket. Hélie, rousing, cast an apprehensive glance at the ominous sky. They had six leagues of rough going before them, and by the look and feel of it this would be a storm to record in chronicles for future generations' edification. If it broke upon them before they had struggled out of the forest their plight would be desperate. A heavy downpour in the hills would render the fords impassable and bring the floods over the road through the lower valley. And though he reckoned their trail lost to the witches, he had already sorely misjudged both their malice and their tenacity.
He pulled Durande to her feet, and they saddled up. The brief rest had scarcely refreshed the horses, yet they had no choice but to abuse them. The hill tracks were uniformly atrocious, and Hélie regretted more bitterly with every mile that he had responded to last night's alarm in nothing but a tunic; he was vilely saddle-galled. When they dismounted to spare the horses Durande cut and tore long strips from her ample skirts to protect their battered feet, and as they went they snatched blackberries and unripe hazel-nuts to ease the gnawing of empty bellies.
It was a gruelling journey, and he watched and worried over his young wife. She for her part swung along like a sturdy lad, accepting his aid over the roughest footing, not because she needed it but because the gesture pleasured them both. Her square face was caked with dust and streaked with sweat, her ruinous gown was hitched almost to her knees and her bare legs striped with scratches and blotched with nettle-stings, and as the miles fell behind them her eyes were dark-shadowed by fatigue, but she neither faltered nor whined. She was beauty's self to him. She held him heart and mind and body, and he looked forward fiercely to vindicating her honour in the teeth of Collingford and Warby and Trevaine itself.
They raced the storm along the hill paths and by the forest’s edge through the valley, and Saint Christopher stood their friend. The thunder-clouds piled higher, the colour of a day-old bruise, edged with white where the sun thrust spears of livid light through them. The close heat, held in by them as by a great fur, pressed heavy and thick. The horses, for all their careful husbanding, were lathered and exhausted. Yet the ways were dry, the fords as low as a rainless month had left them, and in the late afternoon they climbed the ridge between Trevaine and Warby and halted to look over the valley. Hélie's eyes went to the further ridge they had cautiously circled. From this height he could just discern the broken tower's topmost fang jutting above the young trees. Rohese's hovel was hidden in its thicket, but a thin plume of smoke wavered against the dark woods. His weary mouth hardened.
'Durande, will your cousin run or fight?'
'Fight.'
Her flat certainty did not match his brief acquaintance with Oliver de Collingfo
rd. 'You know him,' he said doubtfully.
'He is a weakling won to this power. Life and death are his to command, revenge for all slights, rule over these crazed peasants. It is a madness in his blood. He cannot cast it aside and run.’
He nodded soberly; she had insight and wisdom, his redheaded girl. ‘And he can have no idea we know he is the witches' devil in a goat's mask. For that, I cannot prove it—yet.' He gazed bleakly from Rohese's smoke to the ruin where Reginald de Warby's infamous spirit still ruled two generations after his body had returned to dust.
‘What will you do, Hélie?'
‘He sold you and murdered my brother. With God's aid I will tread him out and all his monstrous confederacy.'
She gazed into his inexorable young face, and crossed herself. ‘Amen to that.'
He took her hand, his tight mouth softening, and turned back to the drooping horses. Slowly, for the beasts were all but used up, they approached the crossroads and the track he had ridden from Trevaine three brief days ago that lay behind him like half a lifetime. As they came into sight of it he heard a brisk rattle of hooves, and drew rein, leaning to see. Then he growled suddenly in his throat as he recognized the nearer rider, and thrust his horse out before him.
A lance of ghastly sunshine stabbed the churning clouds and momentarily laid its weird light upon him, huge and savage and vivid against the murky gloom. The girl's red hair flamed like a torch as she prodded her mount alongside, her strung bow in her hand and her right foot kicked free of the stirrup. The leading rider jerked his stallion back upon his haunches, his hand leaping instinctively to his sword hilt, but with it half-drawn he slammed it back into the scabbard with an exasperated oath and spurred to meet them. Hélie awaited him unmoving. He slid to a halt within blade's reach, a familiar bird of ill-omen.
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