No Man's Son

by Doris Sutcliffe Adams

  The Englishman scrubbed his sleeve violently across his eyes, caught Rodriga’s hand and kissed it. “I am your man, my lady,” he whispered.

  “My name is Rodriga de Parolles. What is yours?”

  “Wulfric Oswinsson, my lady.”

  “Come with me, Wulfric. Piers, I would not be discourteous, but you endanger too much by lingering. Leave us, will you? Come tonight after dark.”

  He flushed, bowed from the saddle, and obeyed a little sulkily. He had not liked his firm dismissal, and he was certainly conscious of having been found wanting. Rodriga, who gave less attention to a young nobleman’s susceptibilities than was a demoiselle’s duty, smiled at her new acquisition and started briskly back to camp. He came in a daze, behind her and a little to the right as an escort should.

  “What were you?” she asked.

  “Archer, my lady.”

  She nodded; no need for comment on that. “Your lord?”

  “Sir Bertrand of Ravensthorpe. Slain.”

  She nodded again; it was much as she had expected, and no lord with any claim to humanity would have turned adrift a man maimed in his service. “Your arm—should the Hospitallers see to it?”

  “They have done, my lady. Kept me until I was near healed. But there is so many—and they ha’ fed me ever since.”

  “How long since you were wounded?”

  “Seven—eight weeks, my lady. ’Tis all but mended. I will not be a burden, truly!”

  “Why, no. Food and rest are your need, and when that arm is fully healed you shall have an iron hook for hand.” She looked keenly at him, noted that his breath came hardly and his feet dragged at every stride, and moderated her impetuous pace. He followed like a man sleep-walking, with a dumb trust that stirred Rodriga’s heart. Her father would accept him unhesitatingly. He never disputed her decisions, and his charity was ready and boundless. For once in their erratic lives she had not even to consider whether she could afford to assume this charge.

  When they reached the camp Wulfric was stumbling with weariness, and she took him by the arm and steered him to the best shade-patch in the camp, evicting Diego by one fiery glance and sending him for food and wine. She stood over him protectively, and not until he had swallowed a little wine and eaten a piece of bread did she announce, “This is Wulfric, who joins our household. He will learn to cook.” The Englishman gazed at her as if she were a vision that might vanish from his sight, and she smiled and touched his rough head. “Lie down and sleep,” she commanded, and went to the store-tent to rake through their scanty resources for clothing to cover a man who would make two of her scrawny Catalans or the original Saracen owners of their spare garments, once he had replaced the flesh on his bones.

  A small fierce body swerved round her and planted itself directly before her. “My lady,” said the affronted Diego, “am I not to cook any longer?”

  “You never have done,” Rodriga said with brutal truth. The boy loathed the duty their poverty imposed on him, performed it in the most perfunctory manner and ignored all instruction, but none the less furiously resented the outspoken criticism and occasional chastisement bestowed on him by his elder brothers. He was quivering with rage and wounded pride.

  “I am cook!” he choked.

  “That has been our penance,” she agreed grimly, with weeks of charred roasts, half-boiled stews, wood-hard stockfish and other culinary atrocities behind her to add emphasis to her words. Then, seeing the outrage in his face, she relented. “Now we have so many horses we need you more as groom,” she told him, knowing how he scamped all other duties to spend his time with the horses. “That is now your task, so Wulfric becomes cook.”

  The boy’s face cleared slightly. “You mean I am to take charge of the horses?” he asked proudly.

  She nodded, straight-faced. It was not so very long since she had been Diego’s age. “It is the more important duty.”

  “But that man has only one hand!” he blurted.

  “Diego, you would not grudge honest employment to a brave soldier maimed by the Saracens?”

  He had given no thought to Wulfric, and as understanding came to him he flushed and hung his head. “No—oh no!”

  “Then you will give him all the aid and kindness in your power?”

  “You know I will, Lady Rodriga!”

  “Of course I know.” She cuffed him lightly, and resumed her fruitless search. Presently she gave it up. Her father had but two tunics and was inside the worse, and since he and Wulfric were much of a size the easiest solution was to buy Landry a new one and relegate the other to the Englishman. Again she made her way to the market, but this time, with Piers’s protests in mind, she paid grudging heed to the conventions and rode there with Diego as groom.

  When she returned Wulfric was already fussing round the fire, under Urraca’s resentful eye. He looked up shyly at Rodriga, answered her grin with a hesitant smile, and bent his head over Diego’s unscoured pots and inadequate fuel. He had the root of the matter in him; already he had a compact little blaze going in the firepit, and was feeding it judiciously. The old woman glared from him to her mistress and uttered a biting comment on the folly of wasting food and employment on a handless beggar. It was aimed at Rodriga, who had dared to introduce the man into their camp without consulting any authority but her own, but it was Wulfric who flinched, and Rodriga was suddenly furious on his behalf. She was not in the habit of paying heed to the old woman’s constant carping, but this time she had gone beyond tolerance. She opened her lips to blast her for unchristian cruelty, recognised the retort on sentimental softness ready on her expectant lips, and for the first time in her life flung the weight of her status against the old harridan who misused the privilege of her years.

  “Since you have so much leisure for what does not concern you, you may assist him in his work!” she snapped.

  She stiffened, and her little dark eyes darted a malevolent look at Wulfric. “This from my son’s fosterling? Degrade me in my old age—me that received you into my hands from your mother’s womb?”

  “Neither my mother nor I is to be blamed for that!” retorted Rodriga, war now fairly joined. “You will earn your bread at last!” That was harsh but true; Urraca grudgingly washed and sewed for her mistress, whose scanty wardrobe required little tending, but did not demean herself by setting hand to any task about the camp, where she was as well-loved as a scorpion.

  “And what will your father say to this starveling who is to eat his bread unbidden?” she sneered. “And your treatment of me when I would consider his purse?”

  “He will say that he grudges his bread less than yours!”

  “Next you will cast me forth in my old age to beg!”

  “There is always work for washerwomen if you cannot stoop so far!”

  She was worsted, and turned away sullenly. Rodriga drew a deep breath. She had broken free of one childhood bondage, now Urraca acknowledged herself her servant and no more. The Englishman, who had been frowning anxiously as he tried to follow the unfamiliar Catalan which was so like the Langue d’oc, said in his halting Norman-French, “I—I would not cause dispute, my lady. Your father—if I am not wanted—”

  “You stay, and never doubt that you are welcome,” she said swiftly. “We are of one mind, my father and I, even if we be out of that mind together.”

  “Well said, lass!” Landry chuckled behind her, and eyed Wulfric in friendly curiosity. The Englishman flushed, but met his scrutiny steadily. “So you are our new cook, eh?”

  “I am no cook, my lord, but—but the lady said I might learn. If you would have me go—”

  “Go? Abandon us to that pup? Not if we have to tether you to the fireside! English, by your speech? Villainous rheumatic climate you keep there, but it breeds fighting men.”

  He dropped onto his cushion with a grunt of relief and stretched out his legs. Rodriga brought him wine. “How did you sell your horses?” she asked practically, sitting beside him.

  He grinned and unfa
stened his purse from his belt, tossing it into her hands. It weighed heavier than it had done in many years. “Take it in charge,” he said. Of old-established custom she was custodian of their money; as he frankly admitted, silver had a way of running from his hands like water. She took most of it to add to the casket’s contents, and he turned to watch her. “Keep it safely,” he told her soberly, “for if I am killed, that is all the dower you will have, Rodriga, and little enough to win you a worthy husband.”

  The deep regret in his voice drew her instantly to his side, her hands held out. He lifted her pointed chin and studied her troubled face gravely and tenderly. “Yes, you are very like your mother,” he said to the child of his middle years, of his wildest folly, of his one great love. “Very like, but she was beautiful. I never for one moment regretted wedding her. I regret nothing of all my life—all my follies I committed with a high heart, and enjoyed them mightily —but for you, heart’s darling. If I end in Acre’s ditch, I have gone my own way and earned all that came. Only for you would I have it otherwise, and God is merciful. He has sent me this last chance to establish you.”

  “To marry me to Piers, you mean?”

  “If we win him Rionart, can he refuse? Rodriga, I grow old, and once I am gone, what are you to do? I have dragged you through all the filth of camps and sieges and bickerings, and what husband of your rank is to be found so? You have neither lands nor portion, not even beauty to tempt men in their stead!”

  “There have been offers,” Rodriga said wryly, wrinkling her nose at him.

  “Rodriga, never will I consent to your disparagement, to your joining the blood of Parolles with any of inferior breeding! As for your becoming any man’s leman—”

  “I keep my javelin at hand for that!” she finished grimly.

  “Then you understand that this is an opportunity sent by Heaven?” She wrinkled her nose again in a comical grimace of distaste. “It smells too much of bargaining.”

  “Lord Above, how else do folk arrange marriage?” he expostulated.

  “You did not.”

  “I am more of a fool than the common run of men,” he stated truly. “First time I offered to kiss her, she cracked my head with a pitcher,” he added reminiscently. “What else could a man do with such a vixen but marry her? Luckiest fit of madness ever I had!”

  “But not one that is likely to overtake Piers.”

  “No, you are right. No craziness in him. But he has a mind to you, lass. You and Rionart together, eh? And your blood is as good as his, dower or no dower.”

  “Will he regard it so—Moorish blood?”

  “What is amiss, girl? You like him, do you not? I will press no match you find distasteful!”

  “Oh, I like him. I like him very well,” Rodriga said slowly, trying to assess her own feelings for the pleasant boy who had rushed to her rescue by the sea’s edge. She enjoyed his admiration, and found his youthful impulsiveness engaging. “Only—only I had not thought of wedding him.”

  “Personable, and a sound enough pup,” said her father in temperate praise. “He needs schooling. But he will grow up. Nothing to match a tough campaign for turning whelps into seasoned hounds. Think of it, Rodriga. You could make something of him. And if I can get you worthily married, I can look at the next Saracen head-lopper with heart at rest.” He nodded at the great blade which had won Robert de Veragny’s fancy, and grinned hopefully at her.

  She could not deny that appeal for her approval, and pulled his face to hers and kissed him, stifling her misgivings. Remorsefully she remembered, as his arms closed on her in a bear’s embrace, that he thought only of her welfare. This marriage, if he could arrange it, would be his supreme achievement for her, and she determined in that event that Rionart should also provide for the man who won it back. It did not matter that she did not desire a husband she could make something of, an immature boy in need of schooling. Her dreams of a man who would love her as crazily as her father had loved his Moorish vixen must be banished for sober reality.

  When the mid-day heat had abated slightly they went forth together to learn whether the hermit had come to preach again by the Patraria of God, but he had remained in his wilderness since their last encounter. They moved on then to see how the siege-works progressed now that King Richard was laid by. King Philip of France, who had been languishing under a combination of fever, jealousy and mortified pride, had been most marvellously restored by news of his rival’s condition, so that he emerged from his tent openly declaring that he would teach the Normans and Poitevins how to conduct a siege.

  “The lesson will doubtless be instructive,” Landry sardonically commented on hearing that, “but it is one I would rather witness than participate in. Come and see, lass.”

  Their arrival could hardly have been better timed. For days the French engineers had laboured to construct a heavy pent-house to be pushed up to the walls, where it would support and cover a great ram. It was the pride of King Philip’s heart, his answer to critics who compared him unfavourably with his magnificent Plantagenet vassal, and today it had been completed under his personal direction. Now teams of grunting soldiers heaved it forward on rollers, covered by dozens of crossbowmen behind their mantlets, while others had filled in a causeway across the ditch with brushwood, stones and baskets of earth. The monster lurched forward to the verge of the counterscarp, rocking and shuddering as the straining men threw their weight on the levers or thrust at it with all the force in their bodies. On the unstable filling it reeled and staggered like a ship in heavy seas, while the air filled with arrows and the arbalesters, behind their loopholed mantlets, methodically searched the battlements for Saracens who exposed themselves to shoot. The French began to cheer as the unwieldy monster squatted fairly on their causeway and jolted unsteadily over the last few yards.

  It had almost touched the wall, and the waiting swarms had started forward howling triumph, when an irregular mass showed over the crenellations and an avalanche of boulders toppled down. They broke through the hide-covered roof, slewed the monster sideways, and then smashed it, a broken-backed ruin, into the ditch. A Saracen plummetted down, limbs asprawl, slithered down the wet hides and lay amid the rubbish in the ditch. More rocks hurtled over. The workers fled screeching to the shelter of the nearest mantlets, leaving several comrades crushed among the wreckage. Then smaller missiles fell, tongues of pale flame writhed over the debris, and the whole mass was ablaze in one sheet of fire that licked up the wall and sent a column of greasy black smoke billowing seaward before the hot wind from the desert.

  The misfortunes of King Philip caused more amusement than distress to a patriotic Poitevin. Landry glanced at the weeping, cursing Frenchmen, and sniffed distastefully at the vile stench of burning hides. “Time for the fox to take to his bed again with a convenient attack of fever,” he cynically observed. “Come, lass. A demonstration of how not to conduct an assault.”

  Before they had won free of that place of negative instruction, however, he was proved wrong. Infuriated beyond the exceeding caution that had made his name a by-word, King Philip was proclaiming a full assault on the unbreached city tomorrow at the sound of his trumpets.

  “An assault?” exclaimed Landry, hearing an excited squire shouting the King’s word. “Must have singed the fox’s pelt to some purpose! Humph. I thank the Saints who watched over my birth that I was not born a Frenchman. Rather follow a smiter like King Richard than be yelped at from behind by a schemer who never saw red on his steel! An assault—then the place for a veteran soldier of the Cross will be the outer trench, for Saladin will bear a hand. Come, lass. Make ready and bed betimes, after this day!”

  Though they were weary of the day, it had not yet done with them. Piers presented himself on the heels of darkness, and gratified and annoyed Landry together by spilling all the concern for Rodriga’s peril that had occupied his mind all day even as he came out of his saddle, before the matter of loot could be mentioned to divert him. In his heart Landry might have ackno
wledged a measure of agreement, but no qualms of conscience would make him meekly suffer being taken to task by an unschooled cub of less than half his years.

  “She was safer with me than in this camp of ravening wolves,” he perversely retorted at the end of a repetitive denunciation, though he could have set the boy’s mind at ease by informing him, as he had his ambitious Catalans, that some tricks only work once. “This plunder, now. Will you choose?”

  With a somewhat ill grace Piers turned his attention to the piles of loot. He would take nothing, though, but coined silver. His possession of any Saracen article would have to be accounted for to his lord, whom he preferred to keep in ignorance of his share in the venture. With that intention Landry heartily concurred; the tale of their audacity had run through the encampment, and none but those who had had part in it must know he had been one.

  “It was a mistake to let that Marco live,” Piers grumbled. “He knows too much—God’s Truth, he knows everything! He has but to blab to Robert, and we are all done!”

  “He swore that we were safe from him!” Rodriga protested. She grew weary of his insistence on this matter.

  “Swore? What faith can we put in the word of a half-bred renegade?”

  “He did us service last night,” she reminded him.

  “His own neck depended on it!”

  “He put it into danger to aid us!”

  “Peace, you cubs,” grunted Landry, sorting out Christian silver from Saracen. “No doubt it would be a meritorious act to rid Acre of the recreant if ever you have him inside your reach, but there is no profit in arguing over empty air. Here, boy. One fourth of the coined silver, if that satisfies you. Wonder how that masterless knave earns his bread?”

  “Treachery and murder,” Piers answered bitterly, “though he claims to trade in spices and unguents and drugs, to give some cover to his traffic.”

  Trade in those rare and costly wares should be lucrative enough to satisfy the greediest, Rodriga thought scornfully as they went to a better supper than Diego had ever served them. When they had washed their hands Landry commended Wulfric, thanked the Saints for their new acquisition, if not from the bottom of his heart from the bottom of his belly, and ambled off with him to the horse-lines, chatting of the Welsh Marches in villainous English.