“To remind you henceforth what honour is due to a noble lady, this!” he said icily, and stamped upon his face.
His screech strangled in the spurt of blood from shattered nose and mouth, and he writhed in agony, his hands over his wrecked face. A yell answered from below, and as the three leaped out onto the balcony they heard the clatter of feet on the stair and three mailed men burst through the curtain there. They raised a yell at sight of their quarry and charged.
Marco caught Rodriga’s hand and tugged her the length of the gallery. The noise below hushed, and faces gaped up at them. Marco swung his long legs over the rail and dropped on all fours at the feet of a recoiling couple, rebounding as lightly as a cat. He held up his arms, and the girl, realising instantly what was required, began scrambling over the rail, hampered by her skirts and the cloak bundled round her head and shoulders. Giacomo seized her like a baby, leaned over and dropped her neatly into his waiting arms, just as the first man-at-arms pounded at him. For a moment Rodriga was clasped to a hard breast, then she was on her feet, while Marco snatched an earthen cup from a palsied hand and hurled it at the foremost head above. Lothaire de Gallenard had tottered out and was mouthing strange noises, but none heeded him. As the first man staggered, half-stunned by the cup that shattered against his skull, Giacomo snatched him off his feet and threw him at his comrades, bowling them all headlong in one tangle. Then he too vaulted over the rail with a thump and a grunt.
The bemused couple fell back before Marco’s dagger, stumbling over the feet behind them. All over the room men and women had sprung up; wine-cups were sent flying, pitchers toppled, a bench crashed; wenches screeched and men shouted. A cup flew past Marco’s head and bounded from the wall in a spurt of powdered plaster. Two or three patrons moved to hold the door against them, but the flash of his dagger destroyed their enthusiasm, and a roar from Giacomo, storming up behind the fugitives, scattered them out of the way. They reached the door without striking a blow and whisked through it into the narrow street. It slammed solidly behind them, and Rodriga and Marco fled hand-in-hand round the first corner and into a narrower alley.
If pursuit came they outdistanced it, for no sound reached their ears. Presently Marco slowed to a rapid walk, and Rodriga caught her breath, loosened the cloak she clutched about her face and gasped, “God reward Giacomo and you, Marco!”
“He has done, with your safe deliverance.”
“Will Giacomo be harmed?”
“Giacomo did as his manhood demanded, and the rest is with God.”
“God guard him! Marco, did he send for you? How could he know, before I was abducted?”
“Guessed when that viper made his arrangements for your ravishing, I suppose. I went secretly through back ways, which delayed me, and saw that recreant carry you through the door. So I climbed in at the back.”
The rest she knew or could imagine, including that wild scrimmage at the stair foot when he overset the waiting men-at-arms and their light together. She tightened her grip on his hand. They trotted through the twisting alleys, where the moonlight scarcely penetrated, through the stinks and the noise, past the blank faces of houses whose windows all turned inwards away from the street. They saw scarcely a soul, only an occasional shadow slinking through the night, and the only living thing that disputed their passage was a gaunt scavenging cat which bristled and spat at them and then bounded up a crumbling wall and away. Rodriga began to hope that her absence had not yet been discovered; it could not be more than a half-hour since she had gone to the gate, and found Lothaire de Gallenard there. Briefly she told Marco what had happened.
They came to the main street leading to the inner harbour, and she knew her whereabouts. At its far end a brightly coloured company was advancing by the light of many torches. “Melek Ric,” said Marco briefly, as they flitted across it. Then they were in the quiet street where they lodged, and she hoped fervently that her father had been spared the distress of knowing her taken. She caught up her skirts to run.
She had not gone far before she heard men’s voices, and then recognised her father’s; the words were indistinguishable though the note of anger and alarm was plain. Robert de Veragny answered, and as she reached the projecting corner, round which shone the glow of torchlight, she caught at his words in mid-sentence.
“—Already heard my terms, and no argument will abate them. Abandon that bastard whelp’s affairs altogether, and hand over to me the renegade’s carcase alive or dead. It is no matter which—”
“Because you would instantly murder him!”
“If you prefer to keep your own hands clean.”
Rodriga came round the corner. Just beyond her the cripple leaned on his crutch; behind him eight spearmen stood stolidly, one holding a torch. Landry faced them, half-dressed, distraught and furious, with Ramiro and Esteban at his back. All were so intent on the dispute that none noticed the silent newcomers.
“Give up a guest under my protection to be slaughtered—you call that clean?” Landry snarled, clenching and unclenching his hands in an agony of rage and terror. “God blast you with His lightning, you venomous monster!”
“Then the Saracen’s spawn is more to you than your daughter?”
“It is a matter of his honour, which is beyond your understanding !” Rodriga said harshly, and ran into her father’s arms.
Landry gave one great yell, “Rodriga!” and plunged towards her, seizing her in a bear’s embrace and kissing her fiercely, tears running down his face. The cripple swung round, recoiled from his rush and almost fell. He stared incredulously from her to Marco, his heavy face ghastly. Ramiro and Esteban, recovering from their first shock of joy, exchanged murderous glances and slipped forward, their daggers catching the red torchlight as though already dipped in blood. The men-at-arms closed on either side of their master. Landry recovered himself and checked his men with a word as he held Rodriga to his side. “Get you gone while I remember you cannot fight, my lord,” he growled.
Robert de Veragny did not seem to hear. He looked at the two of them with the cold inhuman stare of a serpent, and then his eyes lighted with bitter malice on Marco.
“You again? The Devil must have spewed you from Hell to thwart me! Have you killed my seneschal, so that I may hang you?”
“He lives,” Marco answered, “but love of women is henceforth only his for a dear hiring.”
He suddenly sprang to Rodriga’s side, half-turned to face the way they had come, and she heard padding feet and harsh breathing. Then the torchlight fell on Lothaire de Gallenard, reeling and hideous. Only his fair hair and vicious eyes were recognisable; his nose was a shapeless smear of purple flesh across the middle of his swollen bloody face, and the lifting of his split and puffy lips in an involuntary snarl disclosed that front teeth there were none.
“Very fair work, Marco,” Landry judicially commended him, while all others stood speechless. “Should charm the wenches as much as a crocodile.”
“Laugh now,” said the frightful apparition, as ferociously as he could for the lisp that impeded his utterance, “while you have breath for it!” And he felt for his swordhilt, his hungry gaze on Marco’s face.
Rodriga stepped between them. “Was it by your consent,” she demanded savagely of the cripple, “that he bore me to a brothel to ravish me and sell me as a harlot?”
“That is a lie!”
“That was his intent. An improvement on yours, he called it!”
“By God’s Truth, it is a lie! I gave no consent to ravishment—he was to put you in safety!”
“And you trust to his word? A recreant who seeks nothing but his own advantage? That was his obedience to your commands!”
He turned on Lothaire de Gallenard, half-dazed and still fumbling with his sword-hilt. “I bade you keep her safe from all harm!” he snarled. “Is this your loyalty?”
“Loyalty?” his seneschal sneered thickly. “Did I deserve no reward, and no revenge? The little trollop owed me payment!”
; “You owed me—”
“I do your fouler tasks and get no payment, eh? So I choose to pay myself. You owe me more than a cheating strumpet, you one-legged rat, and remember it! Threaten me, and you will learn who has the last word! I could ruin you—”
The crutch swung like an enormous mallet and caught him just behind the ear. He fell as a tree falls, all his length in the dust. His feet twitched slightly, and then he lay still, face-down. The cripple was seized and supported by one of his men until he could recover his balance and set his crutch under his arm again. Landry silently drew his daughter to his side and stepped back.
“Should have done that years ago,” he commented grimly.
“No man betrays me, or threatens me!” muttered Robert de Veragny. “He drove me to it. I have taught him his lesson—”
“For all time,” said Marco coolly. “He is dead.”
“Dead—no!” He gaped at the prone body for a moment, and then signalled to one of his men. He ran to turn it over, and as it rolled limply to his rough tug, one arm flopped slackly sideways. The open eyes, fixed in an empty stare, admitted no argument, but the torch-bearer held the light close, and the fellow on his knees thrust a hand into the breast of his tunic to feel for heartbeat or breath. The cripple hobbled nearer. Rodriga and her father stood staring in horrified fascination. They could feel no regret, but this had been a potential witness. Marco backed to Landry’s side and jerked his head urgently at their own house, but astonishment still held the older man in its grip, and his wits did not work with their normal speed.
Robert de Veragny spun round on his crutch and rasped, “Take them!” At once his men flung themselves upon the little company. Marco’s preference for a wall at his back this time betrayed him; he was hurled back against it with no room to evade them. Rodriga was wrenched away from her father, swung round, seized and clutched against a mailed body, and a hand twisted her right arm up behind her. She kicked and twisted, her head pressed into iron ring-mail and a bristly chin rubbing her brow. She stamped on flinching toes, ducked her head and jerked it up again so that teeth snapped audibly together, and managed to writhe round in the arms that held her. Someone was screeching, “Murder! The Provost! Murder!” Her father was sitting in the dust with a spear-point at his belly; Ramiro was backed against the wall facing two more; Esteban sprawled at his feet with blood running over his face, and Marco, his tunic ripped to his belt, was held helpless by three men, one embracing his legs and the others twisting his arms behind him. Another was rocking to and fro on his knees, his hands over his face and blood streaming between his fingers, but as she looked he climbed unsteadily to his feet and struck at Marco. He jerked his head aside, evading the clumsy blow, and its dealer overbalanced and staggered towards the wall, where he leaned groaning.
Robert de Veragny, still screeching, “Murder!” swung to his side and twitched the knife from Marco’s belt. He bent over the corpse and drove it haft-deep under the dead man’s ribs, straightened and grinned malevolently at his prisoners. Already the night was resounding with shouts, doors were opening along the street, and lights advancing. Rodriga froze, and it seemed to her that her heart stopped beating as she realised the simple, deadly aim in the cripple’s mind.
Oaths and the sound of running feet sounded beyond the corner, and round it plunged King Richard. He pulled up short, his sword swinging in his hand, his bright angry eyes going from one to the other in the glare of the torch. His own outdistanced company, pelting up behind him, provided more light, so that the street was brilliant with a ruddy blaze like that of Hell-gate. He thrust the sword back into its scabbard and strode forward. Garnier de Nablus slipped past him, took one swift professional glance at the long slack body, and shrugged as he saw that no earthly ministrations would be of use.
“By all Hell’s Devils, murder?” demanded the King. Landry started to splutter something, but his fall had half-winded him, and the King overbore his voice. “Sir Robert, what happened?”
“My seneschal,” that man stated heavily, nodding at the dead man. “The renegade stabbed him as he came out of this doorway, set on by his recreant master, I doubt not. There has been a quarrel between them over his trollop of a daughter.”
“You lie!” cried Rodriga, wild with rage and terror. “He did—”
A hand clapped over her mouth, flattening her lips against her teeth, and she writhed in anguished silence.
Landry grunted and tried to rise. “God’s Life, a lie indeed—” he began, and the man with the spear swung it and clubbed him over.
The King stepped forward, and glanced from Marco’s empty sheath to the dagger, driven up to its cross-guard in the dead man’s belly. The sharkskin grip made it an unmistakable weapon. He looked contemptuously into the calm dark face, and spat. “Take the whoreson renegade to the Provost for instant hanging and find him a priest, since he claims to be a Christian,” he ordered. “As for the miserable lying recreant who set him to it, if you are in Acre by dawn you shall swing beside him. And that is a mercy you do not merit!”
The man holding Marco’s legs stood up, and the others started to thrust him down the street as the King returned to his appalled and indignant friends. Rodriga, frozen with horror and agony, tried to bite at the brutal hand that gagged her and stared at Marco with enormous dark eyes in a colourless face. This was monstrous, unbelievable, impossible. Marco, her friend and comrade, could not be doomed so and foully murdered!
He smiled at her, and spoke quietly across the hush. “Melek Ric, before you hang me, look at the blood!”
The King swung on his heel, his bitterly scornful face flushing. “You dare offer me insolence, murdering renegade?”
“I have but one neck, Melek Ric. Look at the blood!”
The men-at-arms tried to drag him away, but he resisted fiercely, and King Richard signed to them to stand. All eyes indeed were on the body as it lay there, disfigured face upturned and fair hair clotted with dust. The blood had ceased to spread and was darkening round the knife-haft, but it was merely blood, nothing strange to any there.
“What Hell-born impudence—” King Richard began violently, when Garnier de Nablus interrupted with a sudden sharp exclamation and pushed past him with scant regard for his rank. He stared a moment at the dead man, then at Marco, and turned to the King with perfect comprehension illuminating his face.
“By Saint John, fair sire, the renegade is right!”
“Right? What under Heaven—?”
“The man was already dead and flat on his back when that knife was thrust into him!”
For the space while one might say an Ave there fell a silence as though everyone had suspended his breathing, and all eyes stared at the Grand Master of the Hospital. He gestured at the body in professional excitement, demonstrating as though instructing unintelligent novices. His voice was sharply emphatic, even impatient, as he proffered explanation of what should have been obvious enough to need none.
“Look at the blood, as he said! See how little, and in a ring about the knife where it has spread all ways evenly! You have all seen battle—you know that dead men do not bleed! Had he been alive and on his feet, all the blood in him would have gushed like a fountain! Down his tunic, over the ground, and over the man who stabbed him!” He bent and touched the dead man’s hand. “Warm and not yet stiffening; not dead half an hour,” he pronounced. “But this man did not kill him—it was no knife did it.” He was looking him over for another wound.
Robert de Veragny stood as if turned to a stone image of iniquity, his face the same colour as the dead man’s. The King made a violent gesture of revulsion and came closer to the corpse. “How did he die, then?”
“A crutch-blow to the skull,” Marco stated calmly. The man who had tried to strike him caught his head back by the hair and clapped a hand over his mouth, but too late. The Grand Master was already on one knee in the filth, lifting the loose head and running skilled fingers over it. He stiffened, and nodded grimly at Marco.
&nb
sp; “Here, fair sire; over the ear. Cracked like an egg, but no wound and no blood.” He looked intently at the padded head of Robert de Veragny’s crutch, the only weapon there that might produce such an injury.
The King, apparently speechless with disgust and wrath, turned upon the man who had clubbed Landry and felled him with one terrible blow in the face. He stooped and hoisted the shaken old man to his feet, holding him as he reeled until the Lusignan brothers recovered the use of their wits and sprang to his aid. The fellow who held Rodriga hurriedly released her and backed away. Humphrey de Toron yelled and started for the men who held Marco; the one who had embraced his legs was grabbing for his dagger with murder plain in his eyes. Marco kicked him in the belly, threw himself back so that his head smashed the knave behind him in the face, and tore free of the others with a rending of linen. He came forward, shrugging out of the upper part of his tunic that was now reduced to rags held together by his belt, and held out his hands for the King to see.
“There is no blood on them, Melek Ric.”
King Richard surveyed the slim half-naked man with something as near apology as Kings could admit. “Claim the patronage you asked when you please; I owe you that,” he said. He turned on Robert de Veragny, who had seen his vileness exposed, his honour so destroyed that no decent man would ever tolerate his company or believe his word again, his world in ruin about him. “Kill your own vassal to bait your trap, would you, recreant?”
“Only use anyone could make of that'' Landry growled. He had limped up, leaning now on Ramiro’s shoulder, and Esteban was on his feet and mopping blood from his cut brow. “Fair sire—”
No Man's Son Page 32