by Tarr, Judith
By noon a grey drizzle had begun to fall. They pressed on as hard as they might, following the white shape of the elf-hound. At last they surmounted a hill, and the trees dwindled away before them. Jehan whooped for delight, for there below them in a wide circle of fields stood a village.
It was splendid to ride under the sky again, with no dark ranks of trees to hem them in and the wind blowing free upon their faces. Jehan’s gelding moved of its own accord into a heavy canter; the grey mare fretted against the bit. Alf let her have her head.
They did not run far. A few furlongs down the road, Alf eased Fara into a walk. He smiled as Jehan came up, and stroked the mare’s damp neck. “We’ll sleep warm tonight,” he said.
o0o
The village was called Woodby Cross: a gathering of houses about an ancient church. Its priest took the travelers in, gave them dry clothes to wear after they had bathed, and fed them from his own larder. He was rough-spoken and he had little enough Latin, and the woman who cooked for him had at her skirts a child or two who bore him an uncanny resemblance. But he received his guests with as much courtesy as any lord in his hall.
“It’s not often we see people of quality hereabouts,” he told them after they had eaten and drunk. “Mostly those go eastaway round Bowland, to one of the lords or Abbots there. Here we get the sweepings, woodsfolk and wanderers and the like.”
“People don’t go through the forest?” Jehan asked.
He shook his head. “It’s a shorter way, if you don’t lose yourself. But there’s bad folk in it. They’re known to go after anybody who goes by.”
“They didn't bother us.”
The priest scratched the stubble of his tonsure. “So they didn’t. But you’re two strong men, and you've got good horses and yon fine hound.”
Thea raised her head from her paws and wagged her tail. Her amusement brushed the edges of Alf’s mind.
He ignored her. He had been ignoring her since he had turned in his bathing and found her watching him with most unhoundlike interest.
“The King,” Father Wulfric was saying. “Now there’s someone who could sweep the outlaws out of Bowland, if he’d take the trouble. But he’s away north, chasing those rebels who broke out while he was on Crusade. You’ll have a fine time finding him.”
“Actually,” said Jehan, “we’re looking for Bishop Aylmer; but that means we have to look for the King. They’re always together. Two of a kind, people say. Fighters.”
“That’s certain. But I think my lord Bishop ought to pay a little more attention to his Christian vows and a little less to unholy bloodletting."
Jehan carefully avoided saying anything. The woman and the children had left, ostensibly to return to their own house. The children had looked surprised and fretful; one had started toward the curtain that hid the priest’s bed from public view, before her mother dragged her away.
He shrugged a little. Alf had not spoken, either. He was gazing into the fire, eyes half-closed. Something in his face spoke to Jehan of Alun’s presence.
The novice yawned. “Whoosh! I’m tired. It’s a long ride from the Marches.”
“And a fair way to go yet," said Father Wulfric. “Me, I’m a lazy man. I stay at home and mind my flock, and leave the traveling to you young folk." He rose from his seat by the hearth, opening his mouth to say more.
He never began. Alf stirred, drawing upright, taut as a bowstring. Firelight blazed upon his face; the flames filled his eyes. “Kilhwch,” he whispered. “Rhydderch." It was a serpent’s hiss. “He rends the web and casts it to the winds of Hell.”
Thea growled. His eyes flashed toward her. “War, that means. War. I can delay no longer. I must go to the King.”
“Tomorrow.” Jehan’s voice was quiet, and trembled only a little.
“Tonight.” Alf reached for his cloak, his boots. “War comes. I must stop it.”
Jehan held his cloak out of his reach. “Tomorrow,” he repeated, “we ride like the wrath of God. Tonight we rest.”
The wide eyes scarcely knew him. “I see, Jehan. I see.”
“I know you do. But you’re not leaving tonight. Go to bed now, Brother Alf. Sleep.”
The priest backed away from them, crossing himself, muttering a prayer. He remembered tales, demons in monks’ guise, servants of the Devil, elf-creatures who snatched men’s souls and fled away before the sunrise. Even solidly human Jehan alarmed him: soul-snatched already, maybe, or a changeling mocking man’s shape.
They signed themselves properly and prayed before they went to bed, Latin, a murmur of holy names. He was not comforted. They slept to all appearances as men slept. He knew; he watched them.
The novice did not move all night. The other, the pale one with the face like an elf-lord, dreamed nightlong, murmuring and tossing. But Wulfric could not understand his words, save that some of them were Latin and some might have been names: Morwin, Alun, Gwydion; and often, that name he seemed to hate. Rhydderch.
When they roused before dawn, he had their horses ready. They acted human enough; stumbling, blear-eyed, yawning and stretching and drawing water to wash in though they had bathed all over only the night before. They helped with breakfast, and ate hungrily, even Alf, who looked pale and ill.
Nor did they vanish at cockcrow. In fact it was closer to sunrise when they left, with a blessing from the monk and a wave from the novice. Well before they were out of sight, the priest had turned his back on their strangeness and gone to his work.
9
Alf rode now for three kingdoms. Jehan had caught his urgency, but the old gelding, for all its valiant heart, could not sustain the pace they set. In a village with a name Jehan never knew, Alf exchanged the struggling beast for a rawboned rake of a horse with iron lungs and a startling gift of speed—a transaction that smacked of witchery. But it all smacked of witchery, that wild ride from the borders of Bowland, errand-riding for the Elvenking.
o0o
Three days past their guesting in Wulfric’s house, they paused at the summit of a hill. Fara snorted, scarcely winded by the long climb, and tossed her proud head. Almost absently Alf quieted her.
This was a brutal country, empty even of the curlew’s cry: a tumbled, trackless waste, where only armies would be mad enough to go. An army in rebellion and an army to break the rebellion—hunter and hunted pursued and fled under winter’s shadow.
Rumor told of a hidden stronghold, a fortress looming over a dark lake somewhere among the fells; the rebels sought it or fought in it or had been driven out of it, always with the King’s troops pressing close behind them. Fifty on either side, people had whispered in the last village, no more; or Richard had a hundred, the enemy twice that; or the rebels fought with a staggering few against the King’s full might.
Truth trod a narrow path through all the tales. The rebels had taken and held the town of Ellesmere, and the King had laid siege to them there; driven forth, they had fled away southward, pursued by four hundred of Richard’s men.
Neither force could have gone far, for this was no land to feed an army. The enemy were starved and desperate, ready to turn at bay, the King eager to bring the chase to its end.
Alf gazed over the sweep and tumble of the moor, casting his other-sight ahead even of his keen eyes. "They’re close now,” he said: “to us, and to each other.”
Jehan’s nostrils flared, scenting battle. “Do you think they’ll fight before we get to them?”
“More likely we’ll arrive in the middle of it.”
The novice loosed a great shout. "Out! Out!”
The echoes rolled back upon him in hollow Saxon. Out! Out! Out! Out! He laughed and sent his mount careening down the steep slope.
Before he reached the bottom, Fara had passed him, bearing Alf as its wings bear the hawk, with Thea her white shadow. The rangy chestnut flattened its ears and plunged after.
In a fold of the hills lay a long lake, grey now under a grey sky. Steel clashed on steel there; men cried out in anger and in pa
in. Voices sang a deep war-chant.
A jut of crag hid the struggle until the riders were almost upon it. There where the lake sent an arm into a steep vale, men fought fiercely in the sedge, hand to hand. Those who were lean and ragged as wolves in winter would be the rebels, nearly all of them on foot. The King’s men, well-fed and -armed, wore royal badges, and mailed knights led them, making short work of the enemy.
Alf found the King easily enough. Richard had adopted a new fashion of the Crusader knights, a long light surcoat over his mail; royal leopards ramped upon it, and on his helm he wore a crown. He of cross and keys in the King’s company, wielding a mace, would be Bishop Aylmer.
A hiss of steel close by made Alf turn. Jehan had drawn his sword; there was a fierce light in his eyes.
Battle sang in his own blood, gentle monk though he was, with no skill in weapons. It was a poison; he fought it and quelled it. “No,” he said. “No fighting, Jehan.”
For a moment he thought Jehan would break free and gallop to his death. But the novice sighed and sheathed his sword. Reluctantly he followed Alf around the clash of armies, evading stray flights of arrows, seeking the King’s camp.
When they had almost reached it, a roar went up behind them. The rebels’ leader had fallen.
Alf crossed himself, prayed briefly, rode on.
o0o
Richard had camped on a low hill above the lake, open on all sides and most well guarded. But no one stopped a pair of youths on hard-ridden horses, errand riders surely, trotting purposefully toward the center of the camp.
They sought the horselines first and saw to their mounts. There again, no one questioned them.
Folly, Thea decreed, watching Alf rub Fara down. A thief could walk in, take every valuable object here, and walk out again as peaceful as you please.
Alf glanced at her. What thief would come out here?
Who knows? She inspected a bucket, found it full of water, drank delicately. What are you going to do now?
Jehan asked the same question aloud at nearly the same time.
“Wait for Bishop Aylmer,” Alf answered them both. He shouldered his saddlebags, laden with books and with Morwin’s letter to the Bishop, and slapped the mare’s neck in farewell.
They walked through the camp. It was nearly deserted except for a servant or two, but one large tent seemed occupied. As they neared it they heard screams and cries, and Alf caught a scent that made his nose wrinkle. Pain stabbed at him, multiplied tenfold, the anguish of men wounded in battle.
He had meant to wait by the Bishop’s tent, but his body turned itself toward the field hospital. Even as he approached, a pair of battered and bloody men brought another on a cloak.
There were not so many wounded, he discovered later. Thirty in all, and only five dead. But thirty men in agony, with but a surgeon and two apprentices to tend them, tore at all his defenses.
“Jehan,” he said. “Find water and bandages, and anything else you can.” Even as he spoke, he knelt by a groaning man and set to work.
He was aware, once, of the master surgeon’s presence, of eyes that took him in from crown to toe and marked his youth and his strangeness and his skillful hands. After a little the man left him alone. One did not question a godsend. Not when it was easing an arrow out of a man’s lung.
The power that had forsaken him utterly with Alun rose in him now like a flood tide. He fought to hold it back, for he dared work no miracles here. But some escaped in spite of his efforts, easing pain, stanching the flow of blood from an axe-hewn shoulder. He probed the wound with sensitive fingers, seeing in his mind the path of the axe through the flesh, knowing the way to mend it—so.
He raised his hands. Blood covered them and the man beneath them—young, no more than a boy, wide-eyed and white-faced. There was no wound upon him.
Thea touched Alf’s mind. You'd better make him forget, little Brother, or one of two things will happen. You'll be canonized, or you'll be burned at the stake.
“No,” Alf said aloud. He forced himself to smile down at the stunned face. “Rest a while. When you feel able, you can get up and go."
The boy did not answer. Alf left him there.
Little Brother—
He slammed down all his barriers. Thea yelped in pain, but he did not look at her. The shield not only kept her out; it kept his power in. There were no more miracles.
o0o
Somewhere in the long task of healing, word came. The battle was over. The last few men who came grinned beneath blood and dust and told proud tales while their wounds were tended.
Alf caught Jehan’s eye. The novice finished binding a sword-cut and joined Alf near the tent wall. They washed off the stains of their labors and slipped away.
o0o
Weary though the King’s men were, they prepared to consume the night in wine and song and bragging of their victory. Even the King drank deep in his tent and listened as one of his knights sang his triumph: a mere hundred against a thousand rebels, and the King slew them by the ten thousands. Legends bred swiftly about Richard.
Bishop Aylmer did not join in the carousing. When he had seen to the dead and dying, he sought his tent, close by the King’s and but little smaller. His priest-esquire disarmed him and helped him to scour away the marks of battle, while his monks waited on his pleasure. That was to pray and then to eat, and afterward, to rest alone.
o0o
Alf waited until the Bishop was comfortable, half-dreaming over his breviary but still awake, with the lamp flickering low. There was no guard in front of his tent, for trust or for arrogance. Alf raised the flap and walked in, with Jehan and Thea behind.
The Bishop looked up. They were a strange apparition in the gloom, two tall lads and a white hound, yet he showed no surprise at all. “Well?” he asked, cocking a shaggy brow. “What brings strangers here so late?”
Alf knelt and kissed his ring. “A message from the Abbot of St. Ruan’s, my lord,” he answered.
Aylmer looked him over carefully. “I know you. Brother...Alfred, was it? And you there, would you be a Sevigny?” Jehan bowed. “The second son, my lord.”
“Ah. I’d heard you’d turned monk. Not to your father’s liking, was it?”
Something in the Bishop’s eye made Jehan swallow a grin. “Not really, my lord.”
“It doesn’t seem to have hurt you,” Aylmer observed.
Alf held out Morwin’s letter. “From the Abbot, my lord,” he said.
The Bishop took it and motioned them both to sit. “No, no, don’t object. Humility’s all very well, but it wears on the exalted.”
As they obeyed, he broke the seal and began to read. “‘To my dear brother in Christ’—he’s smoother on parchment than he is in the flesh, that’s certain. Sent to me...plainly...What’s this? You have urgent business with the King?”
Alf began to reply, but Aylmer held up a hand. “Never mind. Yet. I’ve inherited you two, it seems; I’m to treat you with all Christian kindness and further your cause with His Majesty, ‘as much as my office and my conscience permit.’ ” He looked up sharply. His eyes were small, almost lost beneath the heavy brows, but piercingly bright. “Your Abbot plays interesting games, Brothers.”
“Of necessity,” said Alf. “He didn’t dare write the full tale in case the letter fell into the wrong hands. But there’s no treason in this. That I swear.”
“By what, Brother? The hollows of the hills?”
“The cross on my breast will do, my lord.”
Aylmer marked his coolness, but it did not abash him. “So—what couldn’t be written that needs Morwin’s best young minds and such haste that even a war can't interfere?”
For a moment Alf was silent. Jehan’s tension was palpable. Aylmer sat unmoving, dark and strong and still as a standing stone.
Alf drew a breath, released it. “It’s true that Jehan and I have been...given...to you. You asked for me. Jehan was never made to live in the cloister. But our haste rises from another cause. S
ome while ago, on All Hallows’ Eve, a rider came to the Abbey. He was badly hurt; and we tended him, and discovered that he was the envoy of the King of Rhiyana.”
The Bishop’s expression did not change, but Alf sensed his start of interest.
“This knight," Alf went on, “had been in Gwynedd with the young King, and had ridden into Anglia to speak with a lord there, seeking peace among the kingdoms. The lord with whom he spoke was preparing war; he meant to use our knight as a gauntlet to cast in Rhiyana’s face. The knight escaped to us, though in such a state that even yet he can’t leave his bed, and the Abbot took it on himself to send us with his messages to the King.”
“What sort of messages?”
“Kilhwch has no desire to go to war with Anglia. But a lord of Anglia has begun to raid in Gwynedd. If our King will refuse to join in the war and will take steps to punish his vassal, there can be peace between the kingdoms.”
Aylmer sat for a long while, pondering Alf’s words. At last he spoke. “But your man is from Rhiyana. Why is this struggle any concern of his?”
“Gwydion of Rhiyana fostered Kilhwch in the White Keep; he still takes care for his foster son’s well-being.”
Again Aylmer considered, turning his ring on his hand, frowning at it. "I think you’d better talk to the King. But not tonight. He’s celebrating his victory; he won’t want to hear about anything else. Tomorrow, though, he'll be sober and in a mood to listen to you. Though peace is never a good sermon to preach to Coeur-de-Lion.”
“I can try,” Alf murmured.
“I was right about you, I think. You were wasted in the cloister.”
“I was happy there. And I was serving God.”
“And here you aren’t?”
“I never said that, my lord.”
“No. You just meant it.”
“One may serve God wherever one is. Even in battle.”
“Would you do that?”
Alf shook his head, eyes lowered. “No. No, my lord. Today, I watched for a moment. That was enough.”