by Judith Tarr
“He sounds like a very devil,” Turpin said.
“Indeed he is possessed of Shaitan,” said Musa.
Turpin laughed. “Then I’m your man, sir! For exorcisms are my stock in trade.”
They were very well agreed, just then. Side by side, with their men riding before and behind, they went in search of the bull.
They found his track not far from a huddled scrap of village: a few houses, a flock of goats, and not a cow to be seen. Where perhaps one or two had been, was a broken wall and a confusion of trampled earth.
They followed his spoor from there, along a path that seemed made by goats, up the slope of a ridge and into a maze of tumbled hills. Small wonder that the bull had yet to be caught, if he could take refuge here.
Musa had with him a man who professed to know this country well. This man led. The rest followed as they could, often singly in steep defiles and down sudden drops. It was admirable country for an ambush, if anyone had been minded to lay one. Sarissa spread her senses wide, but nothing human stalked them. They were alone in the waste, except for the birds of the air and the small creatures that crept and crawled on the earth. And, ahead of them, the black bull.
Her horse had elected to follow close behind Roland’s grey stallion, sometimes nose to tail. Roland might have been riding down a clear road in Francia. His back was erect, his seat light in the saddle.
On a brief level, Tarik left his perch on Sarissa’s saddlebow and settled on Roland’s. She thought she caught a flash of a smile. Those two, she thought rather sourly, seemed to have formed a fast friendship.
They found the bull, or the bull found them, in a circle of sand and stones rimmed by low hills. The bull was trotting purposefully toward the edge of the valley, where the hills opened on a glimmer of greenery. Sarissa’s senses, still at full stretch, caught the scent of grass and water.
There was his lair, she thought. There was his safe place. At Musa’s swift command, a company of his men set off at the gallop, sweeping around the bull, aiming to cut off his escape.
He was as startlingly fast as his kind could be, but he could not outrun the swift Berber horses. He stopped in a spray of sand and wheeled snorting, shaking his heavy head and his long wicked horns. His back was a mass of scars; one ear was a tatter. No peaceful cattle, this. He was a fighting bull, with a taste for human blood.
Roland’s Franks were ready to run baying to the kill, but he held them back. “Wait,” he said. “Watch.”
They growled but obeyed. Those who had bows had strung them. The rest had loosened swords in sheaths and unslung lances, balancing them for use.
Roland sat quiet though his stallion was fretting, roused by the sight and smell of the bull. Spanish horses had been fighting his kind since long before Rome. Veillantif might never have done so, but his bones knew this for an old, old enemy.
Musa and a handful of his men closed in on the bull. They were mounted, all of them, on Veillantif’s kin, sturdy ram-nosed stallions with tails that brushed the ground. For all their thickness of body, their massive necks and deep barrels, they were as quick on their feet as cats.
The bull lowered its head and pawed. The horses circled, dancing. One of the riders darted in suddenly, lance uplifted, striking down into the bull’s hump.
The bull wheeled away. The lance fell useless. The rider poised, off guard. His horse half-reared. The bull snorted explosively. The horse shied and veered and bolted.
The rider rolled as he fell, eluding the trampling hooves and the bull’s charge. He should have escaped, but the bull went after him. Heedless of lances that stabbed but failed, bodies of horses reeling out of his way, men shouting in confusion, he went for the downed man, swift as a storm in summer, relentless as a wave of the sea.
Sarissa sent her mount leaping forward. There was another beside her: grey horse, white-faced man, fierce high song of a sword. He with sword, she with lance, fell on the bull from either side. She felt her lance bite flesh, grate on bone. The bull’s recoil twisted it painfully from her hand. Her horse scrambled away from the deadly horns.
There was a man on the bull’s back, riding the surge and heave of it. One hand gripped a horn, twisting the head back. The other swept the bright blade of a sword across the thick throat.
Blood sprang, flooding the dun earth. The bull’s bellow died in a bubbling sigh. It stumbled and fell to its knees. Roland leaped free. The bull swung its horns in one last fading arc, tongue lolling, eyes glazing over. It was dead before it struck the ground.
Sarissa hardly noticed. She had fallen to her knees beside Roland. He was covered in blood.
It was all bull’s blood. None was his own. He looked into her face with clear recognition and an utter lack of surprise. He sat up, rising, moving past her, bending over another huddled figure in the sand.
Musa’s man was alive. His leg was broken, caught by the bull’s hoof as it wheeled to meet its new attackers. Otherwise he was bruised and winded but well enough.
“The lady who rode with us is a healer,” Turpin said to Musa. “I can send a man to fetch her.”
Sarissa opened her mouth to reveal herself, but Roland said, “I have a few arts. I’ll do what I can. Then we can carry him back to the lady’s more capable hands.”
He had more than a few arts, damn him. He set the leg and splinted it with swords wrapped in cloaks, had the men fashion a litter of spears and cloaks, and saw that the wounded man was borne safely back to Musa’s holding. The bull came behind: his head, his tail, his hide and the meat of his bones. The rest they left for the vultures.
They would feast on the bull’s flesh tonight, and once more Roland would sit in the place of honor. It seemed that Sarissa, or rather the man whose semblance she wore, would be expected to sit beside him; and yet they would be looking for her to tend the wounded man.
“Feed him a sleeping potion and leave him in the care of his friends,” Roland said as they rode. She had said not one word to him of what she was thinking, but he knew. Just as he knew what face she wore in truth.
“You should have let me speak,” she said.
Roland lifted a brow. “And let them all know what you can do if you choose?”
“I can protect myself,” she said stiffly.
“Here, you can,” he said. “But my people have no love for such arts. Devil’s sleights, they call them. You could be harmed if they knew.”
“They know what you are,” she said.
That gave him pause, but not for long. “I belong to them. You—”
“I am a foreigner,” she said, but she shook her head. “They can turn on you, too. Maybe worse, because they’ve loved you.”
“Not today,” he said. “Not soon, if God is kind. You would not have that grace.”
Little as she liked it, that was true enough. She set her lips together and rode beside him in silence. He seemed content with that. Smug, insufferable man. There was a spatter of bull’s blood on his cheek, drying dark against the white skin. She caught herself just short of reaching to wipe it away.
It struck her as she rode through those brown hills. It was not the king she wanted. It was this one—this man whom she neither liked nor trusted. But her body sang when it was near him, and her heart paid no heed at all to doubts or suspicions. It envied Tarik, who in hawk-shape could perch on his armored shoulder and bask in the warmth of his presence.
Even the champion’s sword, even Durandal, had fallen before him. Was it so astonishing that her heart had, too?
CHAPTER 17
Pepin had been biding his time. He studied; he learned whatever he was taught. He waited upon his moment.
Now his enemies were gone on the king’s embassy, and Pepin’s time had come. He had discovered by degrees, by asking among the tale-tellers in the camp, what the Grail was. It was a weapon, a thing of power, so strong that he who held it could rule the world. Ganelon had nearly had it once, but been cheated of it. This time he meant to have the victory.
But first he had to find it. Sarissa was the key to that. Ganelon had bidden Pepin gaze into the basin a dozen times since she came to Saragossa. Pepin had never seen anything useful. The tower and the dying king were the same as they had always been. Other things that Ganelon bade him look for were not forthcoming.
Still, Ganelon persisted. This morning Pepin had seen the lady in a house he had not seen before, eating grapes and soft white cheese. It was pleasant to watch her; she was very beautiful, and she wore a light robe that revealed the shape of her body. But Ganelon did not want to hear of that. “Is anyone with her?” he demanded.
“No one,” Pepin had to answer.
Ganelon sent him away after that. “Go. Be a boy for once. Do whatever boys do. Leave me in peace.”
Pepin escaped in a kind of guilty delight. No letters to copy today. No endless pages of spells, either, in languages that made his head ache, but Ganelon had made it clear: if he wished to learn magic, he had to learn the words that made the magic.
He was free, and for once could do as he pleased. The light of day felt odd on his face, so seldom had he been out in it. His eyes blinked and watered.
The siege was accomplishing as little as ever. Even with all the king’s ruses to keep the men busy, there were still clots of idlers, soldiers with no fighting to do. They hung about, played endless games of knucklebones, and passed round such drink and women as they managed to find.
One such gathering hovered just on the edge of a quarrel. Most were Franks, but there were a few Bretons, slender black-haired men like their Count, save that their eyes were human as his were not. The Bretons had a fighting cock, which as Pepin paused, had just finished ripping apart the Franks’ feathered champion.
“And I say,” snarled the foremost of the Franks, “that it was not a fair fight. That’s a basilisk’s chick. It looked our bird in the eye, and he froze. We all saw it. It laid its spell on him and killed him.”
The leader of the Bretons, a tough and wiry man of no age in particular, laughed in the Frank’s face. “Your bird was a coward. He saw our bold warrior and went stark with fear.”
“He was bewitched. We saw it!”
“You oxen see witches everywhere,” the Breton said. “Especially when you’re getting your arses whipped.”
The Frank growled like a dog. Pepin stepped in front of him before he could leap. “There now,” he said. “There. What’s this?”
One small advantage he had found in his deformity: everyone knew him on sight. The Frank backed away quickly. The Bretons, insolent dogs that they all were, stood about grinning. One had the fighting cock under his arm. It was a black cock, and its eyes were a striking, fiery gold.
Those eyes inspired Pepin to do what he did. “Tell me now. Is it true? Is there witchcraft here?”
“Not likely,” the Breton captain said. And after a small but significant pause: “Lord prince.”
“That’s a lie!” the Frank declared. “They’re all witches where he comes from, everybody knows that. And that’s a witch he’s got under his arm, or a witch’s familiar. It killed our bird before he even struck a blow.”
“It is an unusual bird,” Pepin observed, peering at the cock. “Does it come from Brittany?”
“We found it in Pamplona, lord,” the Breton said. “We won it in a game.”
“You conjured it,” said the Frank. “You made it to win fights for you.”
“It looks very fierce,” Pepin said. “And . . . it’s odd. But—”
They all waited. He let them. It was a pleasure of rank, that men hung on his words.
At length he said it. “Isn’t it strange, how . . . Breton it looks? After all? Or rather, how much it looks like your Count?”
The Breton nodded and grinned as if he had no care in the world. “Yes, doesn’t it? We thought so when we won it. Mahon over there, he calls it Count Roland. It’s as great a fighter as the man it’s named for. But,” he added, “there’s no witchcraft in it. No more than there is in—”
“As to that,” Pepin said, “there are those who whisper—but no, that’s just rumors. He’s a great champion, your Count. Odd to look at, a bit, but when did that ever stop a man from being a good fighter? He’s never the Devil’s get, of course. That’s womanish nonsense. Have you ever heard his sword sing?”
The men looked at one another. Pepin laughed inside. Oh, he had done it. They had forgotten their quarrel, and found something else to think of.
They would keep on thinking, he thought. And wondering. And suspecting even the innocent, as they suspected the black cock. It was a simple earthly bird, for all the oddity of its looks—like Roland, as far as Pepin could tell. But he had those eyes, and others had spread whispers before Pepin, telling tales that could serve him very well indeed.
He walked through the army as a prince might, favoring the common folk with his presence. It was remarkable how often he could stop, work his way into a game or a gathering, and bring the conversation round to the one he hated. People loved to talk of that damnable man. Everyone had a story: a battle he had won when no one else could, a hunt he had excelled in, a heart he had touched, so that the man grew all misty and foolish in remembering it. They were all in awe of the sword, how it sang, how it shone when he drew it.
“God has blessed him,” Pepin would say, and they would all sigh and agree. Then he would add, “Unless you believe people who say it’s not only God’s doing.”
He had to be careful. People loved Roland, or claimed to. They could grow angry if they heard ill of him.
But they loved to tell stories, and some of the stories were more than useful for Pepin’s purposes. There was one—a man of the king’s guard told it, and he was well enough gone in wine that the king would be most unhappy if he knew. “I saw once,” he said, slurring the words, but they were clear enough. “I saw him out riding by himself. You know how he likes to do that; he’s a wild thing, and solitary, if he’s allowed to be. He went away out of sight, but I was following, because I was tracking a deer. It was a doe, and when I found her she had a stag, a dark stag, almost black, and his eyes were almost gold. And the Count was nowhere I could see.”
“Did you shoot the deer?” someone asked.
“I loosed an arrow,” the man said, “but they were gone before it struck. Vanished like a wind in the trees.”
“Deer do that,” the other man said. “You’re not telling us the stag was—”
“Well,” the king’s guardsman said, “I’m not saying it and I’m not not saying it. But I found his horse in a clearing, and no rider, and his clothes packed away in its saddlebag. That horn of his, that he always carries, was slung over his saddlebow. And the only tracks there, except for the horse’s, were the tracks of a stag.”
Pepin could have hugged himself with glee. People did not believe the man, of course. They called him a liar and a drunkard. But the words were said. No one could unsay them. The seeds were planted. He had but to watch them grow.
And what, he wondered, if after all they were true? What if Roland was more than Pepin had taken him for? Ganelon did not consider him worth noticing, except that he had the sword. He was mortal, the old man declared. He had no magic in him.
Magic could conceal itself from Ganelon. Pepin would not have been gazing into basins else, and telling the old man what he saw.
Pepin knew the words now, and the way of it. He could not get hold of the basin—he had already tried that. If Ganelon himself was not in the tent, guarding its contents both visible and hidden, one of his servants was there, silent and formidable.
Pepin had a thought, a wicked thought, but one that so excited him, he could not but follow where it led. There was a silver chalice. He had seen it raised in the Mass: striking, and memorable, because so many chalices were of gold and heavily ornamented, but this was a simple bowl of pure silver, kept polished till it gleamed.
Pepin did not think Archbishop Turpin would miss the thing, since he was away on the king’s embassy. Wat
er from the river was a simple matter. Solitude was harder, but there was the archbishop’s tent, conveniently and comfortably deserted. Turpin kept no more state than was required of him as the king’s servant. His bed was a simple cot, his belongings few and poor enough, except for the silver chalice.
It was exhilarating to work sorcery in surroundings so priestly. Pepin set the chalice on the lid of the chest in which he had found it. He had had to bring in lamps, since Turpin only had one, and there was no oil in it. That had taken a little time and a deal of stealth, but Pepin managed.
Now the lamps were arranged and lit. He poured the water into the cup, murmuring the words exactly as Ganelon did. Words and accent, timbre and cadence, were vital to the spell. Pepin had a good ear. It served him well in this.
He nearly laughed aloud when the water stirred and shimmered, just as it did when Ganelon spoke the spell. Pepin firmed his will as he had been taught, and fixed his mind on the one he wished to see.
Water shimmered in the water, an expanse of lake or river, rippling like silver. A sword rose up out of it. He knew the blade, like ice made steel, and the hilt with its white stone. A falcon descended, small and swift: a merlin. It perched on the hilt and spread its wings. Pepin could only see, not hear, but he fancied that it loosed a high fierce cry.
The image shifted and changed. Pepin held his breath. There at last he saw Roland. The Breton Count was standing in a wood, alert, intent on something that came toward him through the trees. His eyes were the hawk’s eyes, golden and wild.
Again the image altered. The wood was the same, but Roland lay in the leafmold. A woman’s body writhed over his. There was no doubt at all as to what they were doing.
At first Pepin thought it was she, but this was a black-haired woman, with skin like olives rather than dusky cream. She was as supple as a snake. Roland seemed passive, until suddenly he blurred and—changed. The merlin shot up from beneath her. It seemed intent only on escape, but at the height of its ascent it paused. It clapped wings to its sides. It plummeted.