Squire's Blood

by Peter Telep

  The monk put his palm on Wynne’s neck and held it there, closing his eyes and concentrating on some­ thing. Then he said, “She lives.”

  Brenna lifted her gaze to the monk, his face reflecting what looked like genuine concern for Wynne. Brenna’s thoughts were in chaos, her body leaping with adrenaline, and she found her mouth working, but was not aware of what came out of it. “We were just … I wanted to see Christopher at Shores. We were not going to take anything. We didn’t want to cause … I’m sorry,” and with that, Brenna began to sob.

  Mavis had warned her about coming. It was mad. It was a fool’s trek, and now Wynne, poor, sweet, fright­ ened Wynne lay here, her eyes unwilling to open.

  It’s my fault! It’s all my fault! Curse love! Curse Christopher for going away! Curse everything! Why did this have to happen? All I wanted to do was see Christopher. All I wanted was to be happy! Oh, God, please let Wynne be all right. She is my friend and she is young and she only wanted to help. Do not punish her for that. Do not punish her for being scared. Punish me. It was my fault. Do something to me. Hurt me in some way. I want Wynne’s pain. I deserve it now.

  “Let us worry about your friend now,” the monk said. “I once saw a mason fall from a scaffold. They did not move him until a doctor arrived. I think it best we do the same. Stay here, and I will fetch a doctor.”

  Tearfully, Brenna said, “Thank you.”

  The monk slid open the stable door and ran off across the yard toward the abbey house as a bell atop the highest tower knelled the commencement of matins and lauds.

  Brenna stroked Wynne’s cheek, looked down at her hand, then noticed that it trembled. “You will be all right, Wynne. He’s gone to fetch a doctor. You’re going to be all right.”

  8

  Seaver scowled at Darrick. The mangonel operator sat fingering his bleeding gum behind the corroded iron bars of a dungeon cell. Seaver had already decided he would kill Darrick, but he would learn the names of the traitors first. That, he knew, would take time. A very pain ful time for Darrick. He would enlist Kenric’s aid in Darrick’s torture, and make sure that he and Kenric confronted Renfred with the news. Renfred would make an appeal to the men to stop their rebellion and stand behind Seaver. Renfred would do that, or, Seaver suddenly decided, he would die as well.

  They will know my wrath. They will fear me!

  He shifted away from Darrick’s cell and strode down the hall toward the chief guard, who stood before the cell of the captured Celt. Save for Darrick and the Celt, the stone boxes of pain and suffering to his left and right were empty-the way they should be. There would be no one serving “sentences” as long as the Saxons reigned here. There would only be slaves. It was not a matter of tyranny; it was a matter of economics. Manacled prisoners were unproduc­tive. Slaves produced something.

  “Here he is,” the guard said, opening the door. “And he reeks of ale.”

  Seaver stepped into the cell. The Celt archer lay naked on his side, bruises purpling his cheeks, neck and arms. His eyelids were swollen, and blood was dried and crusted throughout his thin mustache and beard. His nose was dark blue and leaning slightly off center. Seaver looked at the archer’s hands; both were uniform, perfect. “Fetch me a hatchet and hot spatha. This archer has yet to be humbled.”

  The guard bowed, then ran off.

  Seaver leaned over the Celt, fumbling in his head for the right words. The memory of a spring day flowered in his head, the sun gleaming down on his former lord’s head. Garrett had been a great soul, though a poor battle strategist. He had been the only Celt Seaver had ever admired. He had taught Seaver the Celt tongue, and now Seaver saw Garrett’s mouth forming words, sentences, phrases in his head. It had been too many moons since Seaver had spoken the words, but it was essential that he practice now, since he stood on lands once occupied and still surrounded by Celts.

  “Am I to understand correctly that you came here alone?” he asked the Celt, pausing haphazardly as words came to him in clumps.

  The Celt made the tiniest of moves, turning his head, flickering open a fat, crimson eyelid. He stared at Seaver with a face too raw to form an expression, and uttered faintly, “Kill me. Please.”

  Seaver frowned, then shook his head no. “We need young men such as yourself to defend this fortress. Killing you would be a waste.” The foreign language was alive in Seaver’s mind. He had reached far down into his well of memory and the bucket had finally risen to meet his hands. With growing confidence he added, “This was probably once your home. It still is. You simply serve a new king now, King Kenric of Shores, the first Saxon ruler of Britain.”

  The Celt turned his head away and closed his eye­ lid. “I serve only God.”

  Seaver snorted. “Your God has failed you. You should pray to our many gods, most of all to Woden. Only he can help you now.”

  “You can help me,” the Celt said, his voice thin­ ning. “Put your dagger in my heart.”

  “You came here alone in the hope that we would kill you, is that it?”

  “Yes.”

  “How unfortunate.” Seaver hunkered down, trust­ ing that the Celt would not attempt to strike him. “But tell me. Why do you want to die?” Seaver was glad he did not have to kill the boy. He was an inter­ esting lad, not at all what he expected. Here was an archer who had thrown himself not on their mercy, but on their butchery. But he did not know every­ thing about the Saxons. Their butchery could be more accurately described as selective slaughter. And captured Celt men-at-arms were presently not on the slaughtering list.

  “What care is it of yours?” the Celt said, bitterness flooding his throat and befouling his words.

  “It is no care. Only a curiosity. I have been a scout for most of my life. It is my nature to probe, to find.” Footsteps echoed off the dungeon walls, announc­ ing the approach of the guard. Seaver stood, turned, and watched as the guard set down the hatchet in his right hand and unlocked the cell door. He moved inside and handed Seaver the hatchet. In the guard’s other hand was the scalding, orange-and-red spatha Seaver had requested.

  Turning the blade of the hatchet toward him, Seaver ran a finger along its edge; recently honed, the battle-ax would perform to perfection.

  The Celt’s bloodshot eyes were trained on him now, and he dragged himself slowly toward the rear of the cell. “If you’re going to use that, I beseech you, use it on my head, or my chest.”

  “Why?” Seaver asked. “Why do you want to die?” He reasoned that maybe the hatchet would draw an answer out of the Celt.

  “I betrayed my oath as an archer. I betrayed my oath as a member of King Arthur’s army. No man who has done what I have should live.”

  “There are easier ways to die than coming here,” Seaver noted. “Perhaps you still have a thirst for glory, and a desire to preserve your memory-and what I know you believe is your soul. I kill you, you go to that, that place of peace. The clouds. But if you kill yourself, ah, yes, you burn in the fires of a pit. I remember now.” Seaver brightened with the notion that he had finally figured out why the archer had let himself fall into their hands. “I’m right, am I not.”

  The Celt reached the rear wall of the cell and pressed his bare back against the mossy stone. “Just kill me. For if you do not, I promise you will live to regret it.”

  Seaver let out a laugh, then turned to the guard, whose face was also split by a grin. “Look at this poor oaf. He begs to die and then he threatens me. It’s true, he has yet to be humbled. Set down that spatha and hold him for me.”

  The guard placed the heated blade on the stone floor and joined Seaver. They converged on the battered Celt, whose eyes were blank with fear. The archer’s breath came in loud, short bursts as the guard knelt and grabbed the Celt’s left arm with one hand, reached around with the other, and pulled the boy’s face into his chest. .

  Seaver seized the archer’s right hand and pinned it palm down on the floor. He felt the boy’s arm convulse and listened to him whine faintly as he reared ba
ck with the hatchet, aiming for an imaginary line across the archer’s hand that separated the boy’s thumb and forefinger. But the fingers were not positioned right, and he would have to take them off one at a time.

  Something pure and heady coursed through Seaver’s veins. There was no true joy in inflicting pain, but there was that tremendous feeling … the power. He controlled the boy. His life dominated another’s. There was nothing in the realm that could replace the feeling, give him the same kind of chills or take his breath away in the same way. But there was a gnawing guilt-nothing that would prevent him from carrying out his duty-but a sense that he was, in some diminutive way, linked to the archer. He did, after all, understand the lad. And with that understanding came a small measure of respect. Indeed, the boy had made a plan. Be killed by the enemy, save himself from the grief of life, and save his soul from what he felt would be damnation. He was no oaf. He was a man. A man who had made some dire mistakes. A man whose life had reached a cliff, and Seaver was the only one who could abet him.

  But he was an enemy archer. And his talent must be taken away.

  Seaver would do it as quickly and as mercifully as possible. He fixed his gaze on the archer’s forefinger, then brought down the ax.

  Chomp!

  “Ahhhhhhhhhhhh !”

  The Celt continued to scream as Seaver, grunting and gritting his teeth, slammed the ax onto the archer’s thumb.

  Chomp!

  The fingers lay separated from the Celt’s hand, pieces of flesh and bone that were still pink and warm.

  “Spatha now!” Seaver ordered the guard.

  The crying Celt’s hand bled profusely; the puddle grew and he had to stop it. With a stiff hand and vised grip, he lifted the archer’s wounded hand from the stone, received the spatha from the guard, then pressed it onto the Celt’s wounds.

  Though the rank scent of searing flesh and blood had found his nostrils before, this time, being so close, it made Seaver gag. And the noise produced, like water thrown into an empty, glowing cauldron, added to his nausea. With a single tug, he pulled the blade from the archer.

  It was over. Whimpering, the archer pulled the charred, deformed lump that was his hand to his chest, gripping it with his other, rocking and trem­bling with pain. Then, after a few breaths, he lapsed into unconsciousness.

  Seaver pushed back from the archer and rose unsteadily to his feet. Still pulsing with power, hor­ror, and nausea, the combination raging havoc inside him, he said, “Get him a pack for that hand, and a mattress to sleep on. When he wakes I want him fed.” Seaver eyed the fingers and the pool of blood. “And fetch a maid.”

  He turned for the door, making the mistake of inhaling again through his nose. He dropped the hatchet and shifted quickly out of the cell. Once in the hall, he found himself breaking into a sprint, but then he stopped, dropped to his knees, closed his eyes, and emptied the contents of his stomach onto the floor.

  9

  The night zephyrs grew into stubborn gusts as Christopher walked past tent after tent. Each of the thin shelters rattled loudly, their pitching twine pulled taut, their stakes threatening to pop out of the earth. Up ahead and farther away from the Cam, in an oval region of shoreline that fought back into the reeds, Christopher spied the king’s blue banner whip­ ping high above a tent top. He bustled forward, his gaze trained on the image of the Virgin Mary orna­ menting the flag. He inadvertently bumped into someone, then heard his name called out. Averting his gaze, he saw it was the bird, Phelan. Stripped of armor, Phelan wore only a ragged shirt and breeches with holes in the knees. His dirty feet were wrapped in sandals as frayed as his livery.

  “Phelan. You look … a mess.”

  “Our trunk was lost somewhere on the Mendips, and we have yet to find a generous soul willing to part with a simple shirt or pair of breeches.”

  “That’s true,” Neil chipped in, moving around a pair of peasant bowmen and arriving at Phelan’s side; he, too, looked as scruffy and haggard as a bailey sweeper. “But we have washed them, though I’m afraid the harsh water of this river has all but worn· them out.”

  Christopher smiled, affected by their playful tone. “You two are in good spirits, considering your appearance.”

  “A man with a full belly can always smile,” Phelan philosophized, patting his lean gut, which, judging from the looks of it, didn’t take much work to quiet.

  Neil, on the other hand, was pregnant with a mil­ lionscore past feasts. He tapped his lips. “You’ll only get a half grin out of me,” he complained. “It takes a lot more than boiled cabbage and a few pork ribs to satisfy this dragon.” He set a palm on his belly, the dragon flapping out beneath his shirt. “But a labor of love it is.”

  Phelan took a step closer to Christopher and low­ ered his voice. His expression grew serious. “I assume you couldn’t stop Doyle.”

  Christopher nodded, an uncomfortable charge list­ ing on his spine, a force generated from his helpless­ ness, his failure. “They have him. We all know what they’ll do. And if he doesn’t obey them, then he’s a dead man, sure enough.”

  Neil pursed his lips as though resigned. “All we can do then is hope and pray he survives until we breach the curtain walls.”

  But what if he doesn’t survive that long! What if we get inside and find him dead because we didn’t act sooner? He’s alive now, I feel that. I don’t know how, but I do. And there is no time to wait!

  An odd thing happened to Christopher. Though he knew that all of it was unreal, his senses experienced every bit of it as reality. He stood facing the bird and the barbarian, among the racket of army and the howl of the wind. But those noises dropped off into silence. If there was activity in the background, he could no longer detect it. All was at an eerie stand-still. And in the quiescent moment there was one thought that burned so brightly that it had to be the thing numbing his senses.

  He would not wait for the siege to begin. He would assemble a group, breach the walls himself, and get Doyle out. He had confessed the desire to Orvin, then just a wild notion, but now, now it was real in his mind. Possible. And maybe, just maybe, he would find Marigween.

  “Christopher?”

  “Christopher, are you all right?”

  The archers spoke to him? Yes, they had spoken. He was with them on the shoreline of the Cam. “I’m fine. I was just, well wait now. You two grew up in Shores, just like me.”

  “What does that have to do with anything?” the barbarian asked.

  “Then you might know the castle as well as I, yes?” The bird smiled. “Better. There are passages within the curtain walls I believe the architect did not even know about. Neil and I have discovered them.”

  “Do not sit too high on your throne of secrets,” Christopher said, “for I, too, know of those passage­ ways, and of the tunnel under the north curtain wall. Remember Regan, the big jailer? He showed them to me once. I wonder if the Saxons have discovered them … . “

  Neil took a step back from Christopher. “I know what you’re thinking and I won’t do it. Besides, the king would never approve.”

  Phelan pitched Neil a quizzical look. “What is he getting at?”

  “Why don’t you tell him?” Neil asked Christopher, his voice burred with doubt and skepticism.

  “The plan is simple. We dress like Saxons. Enter the castle by night, then find and rescue Doyle and anyone else we can.”

  “Oh, that sounds simple,” Neil groaned. “And if we’re spotted we’ll simply take on their entire garri­ son. Let’s see, that’s probably about two hundred men for each of us.”

  “How do we make it to the north side of the moat without being spotted?” Phelan asked Christopher.

  “We don’t,” Neil answered.

  “Perhaps we’ll have the aid of the king for a diver­sion. I’m on my way to see him now.” Christopher beat a fist onto his thigh. “Come on. Doyle is as much your friend as he is mine. We must help him.”

  Phelan looked at Neil. The barbarian shook his hea
d negatively, his lips forming the word no.

  “Despite this dumpy mule’s cowardice,” Phelan said, returning his gaze to Christopher, “I will go with you.”

  The barbarian slapped a beefy claw on Phelan’s shoulder and yanked the wiry archer around to face him. “Dumpy mule? Coward? I know what you’re trying to do. You’re trying to shame me into doing this. I’ll tell you one thing. If we have the blessing of the king, I might consider it.”

  “We’ll have Arthur’s support,” Christopher said. His confidence was buoyed by a foundation of doubt and could crumble at any second, but his friends needed to see a sure, stone wall before them, and Christopher had ·masoned himself into such a ram­ part.

  He told the bird and barbarian he would meet them after his talk with the king, then bid them a terse farewell. Neil continued his plainting about the dangers of the rescue attempt, and Phelan answered his friend’s reservations by calling him once again a dumpy mule.

  And a coward. Christopher chuckled inwardly as he strode away from the bantering bowmen.

  A pair of heavily armored and heavily armed infantrymen stood guard at the entrance to Arthur’s tent. Two more men were posted at the rear of the tent. A wide, rectangular hearth lay opposite the shel­ter, the wood within charred, pinpricked with glow­ ing embers. The air still wore the rich scent of cooking. The king had dined heartily, something Christopher should have done instead of rushing his meal. The burning sensation in his throat conveyed that truth.

  He came near the entrance of the tent. One of the guards leaned over and pushed his head through the flaps. He said something softly, the words muffled to Christopher. The guard pulled his head back and said, “You may enter.” Both guards stepped aside and let him pass.

  Slicing through the flaps, he immediately noticed a new smell, one that was much different than the aroma of roasted game; it was a sweet odor that Christopher had never experienced before. Along with the smell came the warmth of the tent, and the cozy feeling the small trestle bed and traveling trunks created. All his lord needed was a fireplace, perhaps a four-poster bed to replace the trestle, some straw rushes for the floors, and a hound that would sit to be stroked at his side. Rank doth have its rewards and privileges.