What other choice was mine? I was a landless man, and there was nothing lower, nothing less vulnerable. One was attached to a castle, serving some great lord, or one was nothing. We merchant venturers, we were the first of a new kind of man, creating a new kind of wealth.
We drew up, shivering a little, for the night was damp and chill, and stared up at the walls, which were very high. Guido, who had gone to the main gate, returned.
“Tournemine is here. They came back before us.”
“So be it. The attack goes forward.”
We moved down, side by side, no whisper between us. I glanced at Johannes with his spear. What had seemed a simple feat suddenly grew large and dangerous, for the wall was high, the outline of the battlements difficult to make out.
Johannes stepped down, and we cleared his line for him. He held the javelin, sighting at the wall, then he took several quick, running steps and threw it hard and high into the night.
We waited, holding our breaths, but there was no sound. Johannes took up the line and pulled on it until it was taut. The spear had fallen inside and was now caught across the embrasure, a lucky stroke, as it might have come through the embrasure point first.
Peter tied the heavier line to his waist; then taking the line in his hands, he began to walk up the wall. There was still no sound from within. Were they waiting for us with drawn blades?
Peter disappeared into the darkness above, and suddenly his line slackened and the heavier line shook with his signal. Instantly, I grasped the line and went up, hand over hand. My acrobatic training proved its value, and I climbed swiftly.
Almost at the embrasure I heard a gasp, then a body fell past me.
Swinging through the embrasure, I glimpsed Peter down on his face, whether dead or wounded I could not guess, and then a half-dozen men ran along the wall walk toward me.
There was no use being quiet now. I let out a savage yell: “A Kerbouchard!” And sprang at them.
My shout startled them, that unexpected but feared cry stopped them where they stood. The shock of that cry saved my life. I was closer behind Peter than expected, and that cry, so unexpected after all this time, brought Tournemine’s men a shock. My blade leaped at them, and a sword came to meet it. I was in a desperate fight with the three closest men, but the walk was narrow, and all could not reach me at once.
Behind them and from the postern, which opened on the castle yard, there was a shout and a clash of blades. Again the men facing me faltered, and my thrust went by the blade of the nearest man, taking him in the throat, above his breastplate.
He went to his knees, interfering with those behind him. Again I shouted, “A Kerbouchard!” The old war cry of my father’s men. It seemed to strike fear into those opposing me. I pushed forward, thrusting and slashing, and then Johannes was beside me.
He swung a great loop over the men before me and jerked it tight. One fell, another, his arm pinioned, could not lift a blade to stop mine.
Now our men were swarming over the wall, and from the yard I heard the great gates creak open. A fire sprang up, and someone tossed brush on the flames. Beyond them, firelight dancing on his scarred face, was my enemy.
Tournemine stood in the doorway of the keep, staring at the fight in the castle yard as if he could not believe what was happening. A glass was in one hand, a bottle in the other.
“A Kerbouchard!”
Down a ladder I went, and Tournemine sprang back and tried to close the door, but my shoulder struck it, and he fell back. I followed him through and faced him, at last.
“You are not he,” he said; “you are not Kerbouchard.”
“I am Kerbouchard, and you carry my mark on your face.”
His fingers went to the scar, then dropped to his sword. “So I shall kill you at last!”
“No, Tournemine, I shall kill you. You have taken down the table.”
He went white to the lips. How that insult must have rankled! How many nights he must have stared in hatred at the table he dared not move, that evidence of his submission, of his weakness.
Yet now he was confident. I was only the boy he had seen escape across the moors. He came at me, a smile of contempt on his lips, and I began with care, for he had the reputation of being a swordsman.
He turned my blade and lunged, but I parried his blow, and for an instant he was out of position. I could have killed him then, but his quick death would not satisfy me. So I struck him on the side of the face with the flat of my blade, a ringing blow that staggered him.
My taunt was deliberate, and in a burst of fury he came at me, and I was fighting for my life. Desperately, at times almost wildly, I fought off his rush. He nicked my wrist, narrowly missed my throat, and moved in steadily. Suddenly, I shifted my feet, feinting as I had been taught in Córdoba. He reacted instantly, according to pattern, and my point touched him over the eye. I felt the point touch bone, and blood showered over him. He drew back and I moved in, trying for his throat.
There was bleeding from my wrist, and I was afraid the blood would make my grasp of the hilt slippery. Outside, there were sounds of fighting, and we might yet be defeated, for the men of Tournemine must now outnumber our own small force.
How long did we fight? Who had the better blade? Up and down the room we fought, but then my constant training began to tell, the hours of training, the tumbling and acrobatics as well as my time at the oar. Also I saw that my Moorish tricks bothered Tournemine, for he knew them not.
To simply kill him was not enough. He must taste defeat, savor it like bitter ashes in his mouth. I wanted it there in his teeth. I wanted him to know, this man who murdered my mother, killed our family servants, and destroyed our home. I wanted him to taste defeat.
So I pressed Tournemine harder, relying upon the Moorish style of swordplay. My point touched his throat, drawing blood; then slashing down swiftly, I nicked his thigh. His steel mail prevented me from running him through the body, narrowing my target.
Coolly, deliberately, I began to teach him what he did not know. Sweat beaded his brow, mingling with the blood that trickled into one eye and down his cheek.
“You should keep to killing women, as you murdered my mother. You will die soon, Tournemine, and when you do I shall sink your body in the Youdig quagmire of the Yeun Elez.”
He had lived in Brittany and knew the Youdig was believed to be the entrance to Purgatory and that the bodies of traitors and evil beings were cast into its bottomless sinks.
His face paled, but his eyes flashed with hatred. He lunged at me, but I turned his blade and laid open his cheek.
The doors opened, and Johannes entered with Guido. Their blades were sheathed. So, we had won.
Have done then I decided. I feinted, but Tournemine’s wrist had tired, and his point came up too slow to parry. I ran him through the throat and let my mother’s murderer slide off my blade to the floor.
The Hansgraf entered. “Was that the man?”
“Yes, that was the man.”
Remembering, I asked, “Peter? How is Peter?”
“Sore wounded and like to die. That is why I have come for you. If there is help that will save him, do what you can.”
“Johannes? I want the body of Tournemine. I want nothing else from this place. Only that body.”
So I turned from the dealing of death to the saving of life, anguished at the little I knew of healing.
Tournemine was dead; Peter must live.
28
MY WAY LED westward and south to complete my vow, so I drew off from the column and watched them pass, the body of Tournemine across the saddle of my spare horse.
Peter von Gilderstern lay in a litter between two horses, his wounds bandaged. He had lost blood, but I had given him salt water to drink, which was good for shock, we believed, and helped to replace lost blood.
They wo
uld return to their caravans and then proceed to the fairs. When I disposed of the body of Tournemine, I would hope to join them.
“Allow me to ride with you,” Johannes suggested. “I would share your trouble.”
“No, this task is my own. I ride alone.”
So I watched them go, driving the cattle, the sheep, and horses packed with the loot from the baron’s fortress. When they were but a thread of darkness on the road, I took my way.
It was long since I had seen those rugged Arré and the Huelgoat forest, but with the light rain falling it was a fit time for such a ride to such a place.
In summer the moor was overgrown with purple heather, but now the heather was dark with rain, the earth soft beneath my horses’ hooves.
Days later, under somber skies, I rode into the barren solitudes of the Arré. It was a brooding land, a dark land, an ancient land of haunted hills, mysterious fens, of dark morass. Here the Druids held their weird rites under the oak trees, of which a few remained mingled with beech, fir, and pine. Here they had cut the sacred mistletoe from the limbs with a golden sickle, catching it in a white robe as it fell.
The Elez stream flowed from the dreaded bog called Yeun Elez, trickling away to become, in a farther land, a merry, friendly stream that gave no hint of its origin at the very mouth of the nether regions. Here was the Youdig, a seething, sucking hole where anything dropped therein is sucked down. Many believed it the mouth of Purgatory or something worse, where we Bretons had cast witches and other malefactors. A treacherous quagmire supposed by legend to be unfathomable.
Here one might see the dreaded Ankou, the death spirit, female and a skeleton, that we Druids knew to be the survival of the Death-Goddess of the dolmen builders.
Where the Elez flows from the quagmire it was a dark and sullen stream, its banks haunted by black dogs with eyes of fire who rushed upon travelers who chanced upon the region unawares. Here were the haunts of werewolves and vampires, all manner of unclean things.
No tracks saw I, either of man or beast except a lone raven who dipped a black wing at me with a hoarse cry of warning as it flew by.
A gloomy, cloud-shrouded land where the soil was thin over rocks, and clumps of dark woodland gleamed with the eyes of teursts, those black and fearsome things, or of gorics, evil creatures only a foot high who guard treasures in secret caves or ruined castles.
At each stream crossing I rode wary of night-washers who wash the clothes of the dead in streams at night, and who drag unwary travelers into the water to help them wash. If the traveler refuses, or attempts to escape, they break his arms and leave him to drown. Evil things they are, with hollow eyes that stare from black and empty sockets into one’s very soul.
As a child I had been brought to this place by my mother’s uncle, himself a Druid, a priest, diviner, and magician, said to be possessed of all human as well as supernatural wisdom. It was said he could bring storms or illness, and I, who had been bred in the tradition, was taught some of what he knew.
Darkness came, lightning flashed weirdly in the sky, and I came at last to the Youdig. Getting down from my horse, I unleashed the body of Tournemine and carried my grisly burden to the stone only we Druids knew, the stone that marked the only path to the Youdig.
Thunder rolled among the sullen hills, and rain whispered among the dark pines and over the empty moor. Step by step I carried his body along the narrow way, each step taken by number, each with care until directly before me lay the pit.
It was flat and ugly water, occasionally bubbling, rank with corruption. This was the heavy lip of the nether world. Holding Tournemine’s body high above my head, I held it so until lightning flashed, then with all my strength I heaved it outward, and it fell, landing with a splash on the dark, ugly water.
The arms flailed loosely as it fell; the black body struck the surface lit green by lightning. It lay there, the rain falling upon the wide-open eyes, and slowly the body sank, the face upturned and last to submerge, dark water flowing into the open mouth and eyes.
As it disappeared, one pale hand remained above the mud and water, seeming to clutch one last time at the life it left behind and to all things of this earth.
“There, Tournemine, destroyer of homes, murderer of women, evilest of evil creatures, there by my promise you sink into the Youdig, swallowed by the morass of evil.”
After a long moment alone, I stood, a dark figure amid the darkness, then I turned and picked my way back. My horses, frightened by this place, welcomed me eagerly. Mounting, I rode away down the faint track to the north.
Not until long after did I know that a son and a nephew of Tournemine had fled the castle during the fight, going east to the forest of La Hunaudaye, where deep in a trackless wood, haunted by wild boar and deer, they built another castle that may be seen there yet.
Westward lay my homesite, and that night rain fell on its roofless floors, its fallen stones. The house where I had grown up. Before our time it had been a Roman villa, and who knew what else before that. In Brittany all things are timeless, and whatever lies before is only a page in what lies before that and before that. I, trained in the ancient lore, knew history before history, where no beginning is, and no end will be.
We know there are shadows for the shadows of things, as a reflection seen in a mirror of a mirror. We know there are circles within circles and dimensions beyond dimension. Reality is itself a shadow, only an appearance accepted by those whose eyes shun what might lie beyond. We of the Druids know the lore we have withheld and kept for ourselves alone, passed down father to son, from times beyond memory. We few hold this knowledge in trust for those who can grasp the awfulness and incompleteness of time.
Along the high trail, among the barren hills, along the lonely moors I rode with my two horses. Lightning flashed, then ceased, and thunder died rolling away to mutter among the far-off hills. The rain ceased to fall, and I drew up and removed my helmet to let the last few drops fall upon my head.
I was empty now; Tournemine was dead. He who knows his enemy is dead feels a loss as much as he who buries a friend, and the thought of Tournemine had long haunted my memory.
Nothing lay behind me now but the shell of a ruined house and the grave of my mother. The moors where I had run and played and hunted as a boy, they lay behind me.
My way was eastward. My father might yet live, and if so he must be found, whatever the circumstances, whatever the cost.
Now I could go as a warrior goes, with a debt paid, the blood of my mother avenged.
Eastward.
First, the caravan, the fulfillment of my duty to Safia.
And so I rode from the vile sink of the Youdig, nor did I look back.
29
THERE IS A saying that one should “Trumpet among the elephants, crow among the cocks, bleat among the goats.” For a man traveling in a strange land it is good advice.
Far to the north was the caravan with my goods, and with Safia. It was many days distant, and days add to miles. The people were strange to me, and I to them, and in many languages the words for stranger and enemy are identical.
My armor was battered, my clothes nondescript, but my horses were of the finest, although disguised somewhat by their winter coats. My sword was of the best, and in my pocket there was gold.
Yet a man is often betrayed by his heart, and lout that I am, I am often taken in by those who plead, by those who suffer. It is a wise man who tends to his own affairs, but who is wise always? One is betrayed by his own memories of hardship.
There was a night when I arrived at an inn. Stabling my horses, I went inside.
A fire blazed on the hearth, the bare board tables were wiped clean, and a few men sat about, not talking, looking downcast and beaten.
When I entered they glanced up, then shifted their eyes quickly, for such as these had no good to expect from a roving soldier. The poor
devils had been robbed often enough.
The host brought, at my order, a loaf, a hand of cheese, and a haunch of mutton, good fare for the time.
“Wine,” I said, “a flagon of wine.” My eyes went past the innkeeper and it seemed the sitting men were lean in rib and flank, hollow in the cheek. They stared hungrily, then averted their eyes. “Join me,” I said, “there will be a glass for each.”
They came, willingly enough, accepting the wine and glancing hungrily at my mutton, so I cut a slice for each.
“It is little enough we find to eat or drink,” one fellow said, “a gruel of millet and a carrot or two. They take our sheep and cattle, and today they took our honey which we planned to take to the fair.”
“We are tenants,” another said, “but you would not believe it to see how we are treated. The maire, the agent who presides over the estates, he takes all, and the lord never comes to see how we fare.”
“The honey,” the first man said, “was from bees we hived of an evening, and the bees gathered nectar from the heather. The maire had no claim upon it, but it was taken, and you may be sure the lord will never see it.”
After they had gone and I still sat, enjoying the fire, the host came over, and I invited him to join me, which he did.
My host was a proper man with a proper gift of tongue, and he talked freely when drinking another man’s wine, although never a drink did he offer to buy himself.
“Poor fellows! It is little enough they have and few who come this way offer to share, as you have. You noticed Jacques, did you not? He put his slice of meat in his pocket, and bread, too, all the while making believe to chew so you would think him eating? He will take the bread and meat to his wife and children and swear to them he ate his while here.
“Jacques it was, and Paul. They hived the bees and hid them, planning the yearlong to sell the honey at the fair to buy clothing for their youngsters, and then the maire took it from them. He’s a skinflint, that one, you will never see such a hunger for money as his.”
The Walking Drum (Louis L'Amour's Lost Treasures) Page 22