by K. M. Grant
Laila nods and gives a small skip. “It is,” she says, or that is what Raimon understands her as saying.
The lantern swings and Aimery shoves it at Laila, motioning her to take it to the plateau, leaving just himself, Raimon, and the knife poised between heaven and hell.
A strange dance is now performed on this narrow sill. Aimery jabs out with the knife, knowing he is too far away to draw blood but hoping to make Raimon jump. Raimon cannot jump, but his feet splay and he hears a few pebbles of displaced rock tumble down, down, and down again, like the distant rattle of timpani. His joints, shocked almost into paralysis by this sudden and protracted activity, hardly obey him. His head swims. Everything seems unreal.
Aimery laughs softly as his face shines out of the gloaming, his beard glistening in the rain that continues to sweep over them. Raimon shakes his head and is temporarily blinded as his hair whips back and forth. The wind cannot decide in what direction to blow.
Now Aimery is speaking. “There’s really nowhere for you to go,” he says, and moves quickly, his fist gripping the knife harder. He is smiling. Raimon raises his arms—and oh, how heavy they feel. His shoulders can barely take the strain. A thought emerges. He must free his limbs, so he crouches and with an effort he can hardly manage, pulls the black habit over his head. This was a movement Aimery had not expected. His knife misses its target.
Without the habit, Raimon feels as though a skin has been removed. Yet it is certainly easier to move, and he does not drop the garment. Rather, burying his fists into the black wool, he holds it out like a toreador facing a bull. Aimery is again disconcerted. He loses his smile and jabs with more ferocity. Raimon raises his black shield and the point of the knife rips it down the middle. The wind bites his ears.
Aimery creeps along the skinny crag, and in an exact mirror image, Raimon creeps back as far as he is able to go. Another thought forces its way into his head. If he tries only to defend himself, he will die. He must attack. If he cannot shove Aimery off the ledge, he must at least push him onto the wider plateau so that they can fight properly instead of teetering like acrobats on the head of a pin. Ignoring his body’s protests, he whirls his arms so that the black cloth winds more securely around them and then moves forward, adopting an aggressive stance. Automatically, Aimery sets his feet wider apart, one on each slippery edge, and begins to raise his knife once more. His mistake this time is to expect Raimon to hesitate, because Raimon does not. Instead, smoothly dropping his shielded fists, he punches up from underneath and causes Aimery almost to lose his balance. When the knife descends, though it cuts into Raimon’s shoulder, it misses his neck. Raimon forges on, for to stop is to be lost. While Aimery is righting himself, Raimon drives forward and punches again from below. This time, however, Aimery is forewarned, and his knife bites deep into Raimon’s collarbone. Grinning, Aimery twists the blade and as the bone snaps, Raimon staggers. He feels no pain, only a terrible weakness.
Yet the thrust also loses Aimery the advantage, for as Raimon staggers, he hooks his right leg around Aimery’s left, bringing them both crashing down. They are barely six inches from the drop. He hears Laila scream as he crunches Aimery’s elbow against unforgiving rock and watches his fist fly open. Neither hears the knife clanging its way to the bottom of the ravine.
The rain stops suddenly as both men struggle to get up. Now it is just a bare-knuckle fight, and Raimon drops his cloth shield. This time it is Aimery who is hampered by the habit he has no time to discard, and he begins to pull at it as they swipe at each other like boxers.
Raimon, his strength fading, must find a new trick. He forces himself to believe that he is fit and well and fighting on the widest, flattest surface in the world. Ignoring the blood now flowing down his arm, he squares his shoulders and lunges. Aimery lunges back immediately. They briefly grapple but to no effect. Both men are breathing very fast. The drop is always waiting.
Laila places the Flame on the grass and stands poised, her eyes pinned to Aimery. Every time he threatens to topple, she gives small yelps of anxiety. Both men fall to their knees, and now Aimery has begun to roar. There will be no truce. They both know that. They slug at each other like exhausted boxers, slipping and sliding as the stone begins to dry. Gradually, the cloud clears and they can see rocks miles below. Raimon can no longer pretend. He is losing. “Yolanda!” he cries silently.
Aimery launches a final assault. Raimon sees it coming and suddenly drops. Aimery, pitched over, does a complete somersault. Momentarily confused when he finds Aimery no longer in front of him, Raimon turns in time to hear Aimery scream. He is fumbling and grabbing at one of the twisted tree roots, his legs punching out into nothingness. “Help me!” he cries, although he must be able to see that his opponent can barely help himself.
Nevertheless, without hesitation, Raimon offers Aimery his hand. In this dire peril, it is unthinkable not to. Aimery grabs the hand with fingers like wire and with the superhuman strength of terror, hauls himself partway back onto the ridge. Now, however, he lets go of Raimon’s hand and seizes his ankle, trying to repay the favor by pitching his savior off the other side. Raimon kicks out feebly, his strength almost gone, but it is enough for Aimery, not yet quite firmly reestablished, to be forced to let go and grab another root. Still on his knees, Raimon crawls away, dragging himself toward the relative safety of the plateau. He is barely aware of reaching it, and the last thing he sees is not the Flame, though this is what he seeks, but a hawk hovering, hopeful of an easy dinner.
Aimery’s feet are still paddling and although his forearms are stretched flat against the stone, more of his torso is off the ridge than on. The strain as he inches himself up tears his tendons. “Laila! Help me!” he bellows. Where is the girl, damn her?
A shadow falls. Laila is above him. He gives her a lopsided grin. “Help me up, and let’s finish him off.”
Laila’s hand is welcome. He finds a foothold and then the small slice of rock sheers off. “Hold tight!” he gasps, but her hand slips away.
“Can’t you kneel so that I can get my arm around your neck?” He is as angrily desperate for solid ground as a drunken sailor for a steady deck.
She kneels, just too far away. “Come on!” he shouts at her. “You need to be quick.”
“Quick?” says Laila in a strange voice. “I wonder if Ugly died quickly.”
Aimery almost has one leg back on the ledge but the Cathar habit he never managed to discard is caught and he has to shake it free. His legs swing again. The drop is awesome. “Ugly? Oh, that hideous dog. What on earth made you suddenly think of her?” His legs are scrabbling and his arms cramping. “Come closer, for God’s sake.” His grip loosens. He drops an inch.
“I think of her all the time,” Laila replies without moving.
“No, you don’t.” His toes can find no purchase.
“Yes, I do.”
“Lean down, damn you. She was just a dog.”
“And you are just the knight who killed her.”
It takes Aimery a long second to understand the implication of Laila’s words, but she sits prim as prim, quite content to wait. After all, she has waited many months for this moment, some of it terrified that it would be snatched from her. Now that it is here, she intends to enjoy it.
Aimery tries to find the authoritative voice that will command this guttersnipe to obey him, but it has vanished. The wind ruffles his hair. He thinks of Laila’s clever fingertips smoothing it in the night. She can follow his every thought and deliberately twirls her corkscrew curls as if they were on a picnic.
Aimery slips a little more, grunts, and with a gargantuan effort, finds more solid tree roots. His legs stop flapping. He concentrates. He can do this. As he heaves himself forward, Laila stands up, and he thinks she is going to walk away, but she does not. Instead, she smiles her cat smile, then flicks her skirt and displays ankles made more shapely by the purple shoes she is thankful not to have discarded. Now she comes very close to him. He does not dare move his
hands again. His chin is lodged on a stone. Laila bends gracefully, touches her own knuckles to her lips, and then touches his. “Good-bye, Aimery,” she says.
“Christ in Heaven, Laila! I didn’t kill your dog.” He aims the words individually, like arrows.
“You didn’t care!” She tosses hers like boulders.
“And nor did you, at least not for long. My God, girl, but you’re a demon.”
“Well then, I’ll look forward to seeing you in hell.”
Aimery feels one tree root loosen, and his voice pulses to a shriek. “All right, all right. I apologize for Ugly. It was my fault. I’ll build a church for her. I’ll ask the Pope to make her a saint. What else can I do?”
Laila smiles almost sadly. “Nothing, Aimery. Nothing at all.” She begins to walk away.
The tree root loosens further. “Please, Laila. Don’t go. After I’ve delivered the Flame, the king has promised to make me a great man at the French court. I’ll marry you! You can be a great lady. The greatest. You can have castles and servants and jewels. You can have a whole pack of ugly dogs. Anything you like. Anything.”
Her hand goes to her breast, where Hugh’s necklace is secreted. She keeps walking.
“Laila! We can have such a future together.”
She walks three more paces.
“Laila!”
She turns and then she is running back. “Aimery of Amouroix! There’s no need to plead. Of course I wouldn’t leave you like this. What do you think I am?” The sun turns her eyes turquoise. His face is luminous with relief. “There’s only one trouble about the future, though,” she says. “Yours is behind you.” And then, sporting her most unreadable smile, she raises her hem again, only this time Aimery has no time to admire her ankle before, taking deliberate aim, she plunges a high heel first into the back of one of his hands, then the other.
The effect is instant and dreadful. Aimery’s fingers cannot hold. The final slide is surprisingly slow, which gives Laila ample time to witness the appalling contortions of his face as he hopelessly bangs and scratches, to see the blood on his chin as his beard scrapes away and to watch his mouth opening, fishlike, as he gasps for help that he knows will never come. “It’s as it should be,” she repeats to herself in her hardest voice as she braces herself for the final catastrophe. “A death for a death.”
Nevertheless, the unearthly shriek that is forced from Aimery’s lungs as, at last, his fingers close on nothing but air, and his head tips into the chasm, has her cringing. She thought she would continue to look but she cannot. She tries to listen but she cannot do that either. She tries to rejoice. But in the event, all she can do is fold herself up and chant Ugly’s name like a mantra until the wind has whipped Aimery’s last rasping sob so carelessly from mountaintop to mountaintop that there is nothing left to toss into the valley after a body broken into pieces that will know no burial.
After that Laila does not dally. Pelting back to Raimon she yanks off her habit and her shoes, for both are repulsive to her now. “Hurry,” she urges as she rips Raimon’s shirt into bandages to bind up his wounds. “Hurry!” But he is dead to the world and it takes her an age to raise him. Even then, he has to lean so heavily against her that their progress is too slow for her liking. She pinches and hits him, sometimes with her arms, sometimes with the Flame’s lantern, until the ridge and the plateau disappear as if they never were. Only then does she slow. She has had her revenge, yet instead of basking in it, she finds herself angry, furious even, that it does not taste nearly as sweet as it should.
14
Face-to-Face
Days later, Raimon and Laila sit together in a clearing in another valley some way from the pog, hidden from both the fortress and Hugh’s soldiers—hidden, indeed, from everybody who does not chance upon them. Laila has managed several small miracles of theft from a hamlet and a traveling peddler, but though Raimon is now in marginally better shape, his bone does not mend and his wound festers. If only Laila had her box of tricks he could be as good as new in no time, but without it, she can do very little. Not that she gives any indication of worrying. They sit silently, not through anxiety but because when they are not silent they argue. Laila has recounted with pride the details of Aimery’s death, and Raimon has not bothered to mask his shock and revulsion. “It was inhuman, Laila. Inhuman.”
“What he did to Ugly was inhuman.”
“Ugly was a dog.”
“Don’t insult dogs.”
He still seems almost unable to believe it and cannot leave it alone. “You flirted with him, followed him all the way here—I believe you’d even have married him—and all for that?” He shudders.
“Well, do you wish he were still alive?” This is always her final, tart defense, because she knows it is impossible for Raimon to say that he does. Aimery was a schemer when he should have been a knight, a stoat when he should have been a stag. Who could mourn such a creature? Yet he was Yolanda’s brother and Raimon cannot help wondering how it will look to her that he, with all his pretensions of knighthood, was there when Aimery was killed by a girl yet was too enfeebled to prevent it. Occasionally he is aware of a fleeting shadow crossing Laila’s face, and this alone affords some relief. Deep in Laila’s multicolored soul there is a dirty smudge of shame. What he cannot know, of course, is that Laila’s shame has nothing to do with Aimery at all and rests entirely in a necklace Raimon has never seen and she will never show him.
They cannot remain at odds, however, for Raimon depends on Laila for everything. As a respite from her, he gazes at the Flame, whose old regal intensity has gentled like the face of an old king tempered by time and the experience of loss. At night, in a rising fever that Laila cannot control, he thinks he hears snatches of the Flame’s old song. He wants to join in, but the song turns into torn paper and flutters away. Instead, he hears a lullaby that his mother used to sing and which he once taught to Yolanda when they were sleeping under the stars. Hot and uncomfortable one morning, he blurts out, “Where’s Yolanda’s ring?”
Laila does not bawl at him as he expects, but fiddles. “I haven’t got it anymore,” she says finally.
“You’ve thrown it away!” Does this girl’s heartlessness know no bounds?
“No, of course I didn’t.” She pauses. “Yolanda has it.”
“What?” He at once suspects her of lying. “You sent it to her?”
“No. I saw her. She came to Castelneuf.”
He is motionless. “When?”
“Before I came here.”
“You mean she’s at Castelneuf right now?”
Laila begins to braid her curls very fast. “I’ve no idea where she is now. All I’m saying is that I last saw her at Castelneuf.”
Raimon tries but fails to stand up. “She let you come here alone? Why? Not so that you could kill her brother.”
“I’m not going to talk about Aimery again, and don’t be so stupid. I told her Ugly was dead, but of course I didn’t tell her what I was going to do about it. I just—I just told her I was coming here, and she didn’t try to stop me.” She is as hot as Raimon and knows she is blustering.
Raimon says nothing until she has finished. His eyes are narrow and accusing. “Why didn’t she come with you?”
“She didn’t want to. And why should she? You’d gone off with Metta Moonface. She was hardly likely to want to congratulate you.”
Raimon winces but something still is not right. “You came without your box, and you’ve stayed with me although you don’t even like me.”
She tries to shrug his questions away. “What I do with my box is my own affair. And why not stay with you? I only hated you when I thought you’d thrown Yolanda over.” Now she is angry with everybody and everything for conspiring to make her feel guilty. She is not guilty of anything! “What does it matter anyway? It’s all over now. You’ve got the Flame. We can go back to Yolanda. Everything’s perfect.”
“Perfect? Are you mad? Perfect, with the French army battering the pog and a
ll those people holed up in the fortress?”
“So? Let them fight each other. This isn’t your war anymore.”
He longs to agree. He longs to pick up the Flame, carry it back to Yolanda at Castelneuf, and build a huge wall to keep the rest of the world out. But how can he? “My father’s up there, and Metta and Sir Roger. Sir Hugh’s still Yolanda’s husband.” He speaks slowly and pulls the Flame toward him. “Of course it’s still my war.”
“You can forget about your father, that girl, and Sir Roger. They’ve chosen their fates, poor ninnies.” Laila wriggles her bare toes before she adds, with studied guilelessness, “As for Hugh still being Yolanda’s husband, I don’t think she thinks of him as such anymore. I don’t think she even likes him.”
“Is that what she said? Is that why she came home?” His face flushes.
“Why else?” Laila says grandly, and then she expands, making circles with her ankles. “She understands everything, you know. I explained when I gave her your ring.”
“She didn’t get my message?”
“What message?”
“I sent a message.”
Laila shakes her head. “Well, it doesn’t matter now, does it.”
There are two bright spots on Raimon’s cheeks. “Why didn’t she come with you?”
“A girl has some pride, you know. Why should she come tearing after you? And anyway, as the wife of Hugh des Arcis, they would hardly have welcomed her into the fortress.”
“But she chose to stay with Hugh before. Why has she suddenly changed her mind?”
Laila stops twiddling her ankles. Then something so obvious occurs to her she cannot imagine why she has not seen it before. She has absolutely no need to feel uncomfortable or guilty. The truth is that she has actually done Raimon a favor. Yolanda is too softhearted. That’s why she stayed with Hugh in his hour of need. If she was ever to leave him properly, she needed to hate him, and after the night at Castelneuf, she will certainly do that. Raimon need have no fears. Never again will Yolanda think of her husband with anything other than loathing. And she, Laila, played her part! Far from feeling guilty, she should be blowing her own trumpet. Her fingers creep up her bodice. She has been far too fastidious. She can wear the necklace with pride. Yet she does not draw it out. Instead, she changes the subject. “Where’s Cador?”