Tossing his pack aside, Joris struck out for his base; for two days he covered the ground as though he knew wolves had wind of him. Saint-Aunay was grumpy neighbour enough, but his countess was an Olencourt; there would be stirring doings betimes if Fulk the castellan moved against Alanol.
"Is Gandulf home?" he snapped, when on the morning of the third day his camp guard stepped from lair in the fogbound limestone defile.
"Not yet, Chief."
"Has Madoc news from northward these six days?"
"Ay, that he has. The Saultes and Olencourts are mustering along the Butcher's marches … you know Saint-Aunay taken?"
"Yes. No more?"
"Not that I know."
So Joris sat and cursed the weather; and while he cursed, slim Gandulf entered the far end of the gorge, for Gandulf was skilful as an animal in tracking across moor and forest.
"Ay, it is all as you say and Madoc hears," croaked Gandulf, flinging himself down by the chieftain's fire. "But you have not the half of it. Saint-Aunay, his lady, and twoscore more were haled to the hold above Alanol, and there they were bloodily tortured to death … and then the story goes mad. I waited two days in Montenair to hear some sense in it, but not a shred could I find. Men gaped and goggled, and the new young Count of Montcarneau came flying to the castellan, and as I came away I saw him riding northward again, bound for the warden at Ger. But from Alanol blew this tidings – that the morning after the torturing they f-found the Butcher dead…"
"Dead? The Butcher dead?"
"Ay, dead in front of chained and dead Saint-Aunay. And his body servant was dead behind him, and none knows how they were slain. Red Anne swears it was Red Jehan; Red Jehan accuses Red Anne; and both deny it roundly. Some have it the Devil came in person and slew the Butcher himself – being jealous, maybe, of the doings in Lorin's hall. The Riders of Campscapel are divided, but most hold with the Lady Anne, and some of the townsfolk openly call her their countess, whilst others come riding daily to Saulte and the castellan bawling to them in the king's name to come and – and end the business their way…"
"Death to Red Anne and Jehan alike?" demanded Joris harshly.
"Ay," finished Gandulf shortly, with a flicker of red-rimmed eyelids; and in the one word Joris heard compressed the tumultuous menace of a thousand voices.
"Fiend swallow this fog," he growled in his golden beard; for Rufin and a score of men were absent, raiding westward, and Joris needed his full power and clear weather for action. Black had blundered, Black was riven; place must be found for Gold in this strange coil to northward.
"Pile up the fires," he commanded. "To-night we will have sport and feasting."
Sport and feasting they had to curb their leader's impatience. Fog forbade archery and crag climbing, but there was wrestling and tug-of-war, and a kind of cock-fighting in which men were seated and bound sole to sole to batter each other with quarter staves until one of the pair fainted. Also there was sword dancing to the groan and squeal of bagpipes; and when the fog was thickened with smoke the shadows of the dancers danced beside them, writhing across the gold-shot murk like spectres from the slovenly mounds beneath the dark foot of the Rock.
Joris sat by the mouth of his cave, drinking deeply, swearing gaily by the bones of Goliath of Gath and by the chimes of hell. After supper came roaring songs; he himself sang "The Lay of Fastingal," beating time with a dinging war hammer on gyve chains formerly stricken from one of his men.
"This is he on the gallows tree
Whom shadows long befriended,
Stiff and stark at the edge of dark
With all his cantrips ended.
"Body and limb and heart of him
His strength hath now forsaken;
Every crow in the vill doth know
That Fastingal is taken.
"Bonny and tall was Fastingal,
And blithe and free he wandered;
He could slit your purse and help you curse
To find good silver squandered.
"He mocked at the priest, at man and beast
And flood and flame and thunder;
He tumbled a wench on the blacksmith's bench
With the blacksmith dead there under.
For a crimson rose he tore his hose
On a wall of the bailiff's garden,
But he stood to die for a pigeon pie
Before the crust could harden.
So here spins he by the gallows tree
Whom fortune long befriended;
And his eyes and his nose are torn by the crows
And all his cantrips ended."
The multiple clink of the down-flung chain was drowned in a shout of applause; Joris was not so often genial that his men should fail to play up to his humour.
"Nay, now," protested Madoc, grinning half ruefully, "that I call a death's head of a song."
Joris drained a wine skin and threw it at the other's head.
"Take heart, Madoc," he laughed. "You and I shall fall in battle or die never; by potency of that last draught it is revealed to me."
"Die never?" demanded Osmund, one of the oldest of the band, whose piglike eyes were drunken-dull above the red blob of his nose. "How mean you, Joris, 'die never'?"
"Why never die, man," shouted Joris. "Dry up and blow away instead, after the manner of wood ash. Madoc, your turn – give us the Dies Irae!"
But Madoc grinned again and struck up "Huon's Hunting," whereof fourscore outlaw voices proclaimed the thunderous chorus.
" 'No,' she said, and 'No,' she said,
'I tell what I have seen.
Werewolf's eyes are ravening-red,
But Huon's eyes are green!'"
Soon after midnight, when fires sank low and the chasm grew silent, a cold wind stirred from the southwest, shredding the wreaths of fog and whining with rising force through the deep forest. By dawn, the first November gale was tearing leaf wrack from the trees and hurling shower after icy shower against the gray flank of the Rock; by lowering noon the half-drowned Rufin and his men had struggled back to shelter, and Joris knew that no lord or league of lords could make effective any threat against Red Jehan de Campscapel until the spring should come.
At the first lull in a month of storm he slipped out with a dozen men and ranged the bank of swollen Varne. His usual crossing place – disused for near Pont-de-Foy – was quite impassable, and half his men could not swim; while the bridge was newly guarded by a barricade of timber covering either end. Dejected-looking men-at-arms splashed to and fro in the village, and the priest's house flew a pennon showing the red and yellow bars of the great house of Saulte, charged with the crescent "difference" of a younger son.
"There you are stuck, my Chevalier," said Joris when he saw it. "And here, by the chimes of hell, am I stuck also. For months ahead Red Anne and roaring Jehan stand in peril only of each other."
But Anne's danger from Count Jehan troubled Joris very seldom. He felt her to be easily a match for the strange monster who for years had cowered in his corner tower for fear of her arts. It was said that Red Jehan's peculiar dread was to be turned into the shape of some wild animal – although no man knew of an animal wilder than Jehan himself when a fighting mood was on him.
And because of his runes, that now seemed near fulfilment, Joris was not too savage during that cold winter by the Rock. The element of reverence in his love for Anne excluded all pity; Red Anne pitiable was a thing unthinkable. Yet to Joris life as a whole seemed an affair of fists and belly and loins; not without pleasure he counted Anne's loss as favouring his own cause with her. After all (so he told himself), she was a woman, needing her man like another; witch or goddess or elemental could not escape the call of the prisoning body. And Anne was born to rule, as he once told her; to Joris it seemed that a woman could never rule alone.
* * * *
"It is a man," said Gandulf, checking his shambling gait to pucker face against the bitter wind that roared in the iron-gray woods and drove down the white hil
lside beneath them.
"More like the stump of a tree," growled Rufin, shifting the long stag-weighted spear shaft that lay on Gandulf's shoulder and his own, and dropping the point of his own shorter spear to break the lumps of impacted snow from the boards nailed under his wooden shoes.
"It moved them; I tell you it is a man."
"Well, leave it there. It will not be a man long after sundown."
"Gracefully said," boomed Joris as he strode up behind them. "Unburden yourselves and come with me."
The stag's brown body sprawled in the track, with black hooves crossed on the spear, pink tongue lolling, and wonder and reproach fast-frozen in the jelly of an upturned eye. Behind, the little procession of trudging hunters and game laden sledges slacken to a halt; Joris and his two lieutenants creaked and rustled forward, leaving a furrowed and flattened wake on the slope of virgin snow.
Then wind hacked at their fur-clad limbs and whipped the good of the fallen wandered across his blue-white face. When they bent above him his stiff lips chopped at faltering words impossible of comprehension; Joris squatted down, swung a mittened hand to his girdle, and stemmed the muttering with the mouth of an uncorked flask.
"Who are you, and whence do you come?" he demanded shortly.
"I am called Flar … a smith of Alanol … fugitive these three days … I brained a Rider of Campscapel with a roof tile, praised be God … Help me or slay me, whosoever you be, for I starve and my feet are frost-black, and I have said what prayers I know."
"We could do with another smith," muttered Gandulf.
"Especially a smith from Alanol," added Rufin with a grin.
Joris stood upright and bellowed downhill. The first sledge, swept of its heaped furry load of deer and hare and coney, rasped from the trail and mounted toward them.
"Come to our hospice by the Rock," jeered Rufin aside.
"Ay," added Joris smoothly, "and be drawn thither by a son of Jehan of Campscapel.
The lifted gaze of Flar the smith was dull and stupid enough, but the sound of the dreaded name, and perhaps the face of Rufin, seemed working in his head; for later, clinging to the blood-fouled sledge, he talked feebly but clearly to Joris, who strode beside him.
Count Jehan was master of Alanol, and nothing of life or honour or gear was safe from his drunken fury. There had been armed resistance to one more than ordinarily savage edict; the result was fire and pillage through a quarter of the town. "The place is hell since Red Anne fled," said Flar, as Joris shaped a question. "Fled? When did she flee?" growled Joris, lurching closer.
"Nearly two months gone by – late November it was. With her, they say, fled the Demoiselle Lys and a page whose name I know not."
"Why did they flee?"
"Some bloody household brawl, I heard. Jehan too drunk at last to heed his old terror."
"You are sure? Red Anne is fled, not slain?"
"ay, sure enough. Red Jehan would have mounted her head on a pike, maybe her body as well, for all to admire his power. And now, next time God has a thunderbolt to spare, He well might use it on that accursed keep."
Joris laughed in the wind's teeth and slapped his belted sword hilt, staring ahead across white desolation where the tumbled woods receded to the first sharp sun-kissed rampart of the uplands of Honoy. "Red shall run ere all be done"; the shock of this news, the offence of his own ignorance, the sudden emptiness of that quarter of the sky and hills which in his heart belonged to Anne – these could not deaden the runic clang in his exultant breast.
His memory held Flar's latest words through that stir of emotion. And presently, slanting a not unkindly regard upon the supine refugee, Joris spoke from his outlaw's store of experience.
"No thunderbolts to spare for Jehan de Campscapel. God wastes too many on that little ironstone hump, between the limestone and the grit, northwest of Dondonoy. It is no place for priests up there – else we should have a tidy tale of why the hump is damned. Belike some wandering Apostle stubbed a toe on it."
Flar grinned in answer, forgetting the groaning panicky prayers that had lately broken from him. Devotion to Heaven soon wearied the hardy little smith; when his feet were cured he transferred his worship to Joris of the Rock.
* * * *
So Red Anne had vanished into the gales of that wild autumn, and Joris heard no more of her until full summer came again. Her earthly paramour being dead, it might be that she dwelt more evilly than before; the outlaw pondered old tales of the Kingdom of Elfin, and once, in a gust of sudden rage, let fly a yard-long arrow into one of the round hummocks that lay in groups about the eastern uplands and were accounted the dwellings of gnomes. The shaft sank feather-deep in the peaty mound, and Joris strode up and drove feathers and all from sight with one impatient prod of his foot.
"The Butcher is swept away," he mused, "and maybe by the Devil's self. Must I now contend with Satan for my love? Then may some elf take my arrowhead in his rump and scuttle howling to his master with tidings of Joris of the Rock."
But the mound was silent beneath his stout oiled brogues; only the spring wind stirred in the quickening heather, and a pewit screamed as he whirled between the brooding eyes of Joris and the Hell cloud darkening the distant slopes of Dondonoy.
For a desolate moment the man saw his love affair as a grotesque and slipshod folly, lacking all true relation to a life of valiant turbulence. Then again the faith of his runes struck outward from the core of him; remembered events fell into rank, marching to ordered music of destiny that gathered and rang to a cymbal clash at each bygone encounter with Red Anne.
In darkened hours of his own frustration he still could summon a smile at the news of frustration befallen others. In Ahautarroy old Rene's queen was dead, and shadowy factions were shaping behind Thorismund of Hastain, the lawful heir, and Conrad, a bastard son of the king. The youths themselves were firm friends; but old feuds and rivalries gathered force along the lines of the new cleavage. Saulte and the castellan were props of young Thorismund; by machination of their foes at court those two great lords were forced to stay their movements in the hill parts about Alanol. So that Joris was free once more of tracks into Nordanay, and Red Jehan ruled scatheless till the dry heat of June.
Corpus Christi came and went; in his great hold of Ger the Count Warden of the Coast March lay stricken by an apoplexy, while an untried boy, a nephew scorned and obscured sat uneasily in his place. For a week or two the dark hulls of Easterling pirates had crept this way and that along the northern coasts; on the octave of Corpus Christi they launched a great concerted raid on seaward towns and villages of Nordanay.
That octave, and its anniversary for long years afterward, was known in the north of Nuestria as Raoul's Day; for in its morning the Viscount Raoul, that untried boy from Ger, led horsemen through a rising tide to fall upon and utterly destroy four ships and crews of the raiders – and then drove straight-way southward over the moors to keep tryst with the desperate men of Alanol. By means of a secret stairway he and his falcon surcoats climbed into the keep of Campscapel; the town rose at his signal, and in a furious midnight fray the red Count Jehan died with four fifths of his ill-famed garrison.
"God's thunderbolts are not all of one kind," said awestruck Flar the smith to brooding Joris when they heard of it.
"Do you wish to return to Alanol?" Joris demanded.
The little smith shook his head.
"What life I had there is broken," he muttered, "but it is good to know Red Kehan in hell and townsmen in the wards of that accursed castle. The little viscount must be crazed himself, to hand its keeping over to the burghers. Also they say he protected the women."
Other words were on Floar's lips, but the darkened face of Joris restrained their utterance. Flar, too, thought of bruited witch flights explained by a secret stair, and wondered whence Raoul of Ger learned of that entry.
"Get to your anvil, Flar," commanded the chieftain, tossing a belt across the floor of his cave. "Mend me that buckle swiftly. To-morrow we
make for dead Jehan's marches. Townsmen should prove poor lords of a countryside."
* * *
Over the brow of a steep ridge appeared a cluster of black surcoats, only five hundred yards away from the uptoiling outlaw horde. Joris caught glimpse of a score before they vanished; and they were plainly soldiers, led by a soldier, for in a second all but one of them seemed nothing but steel caps and tilted buckler tops glinting here and there amid deep bracken and gorse.
In front of Joris was a single striding outlaw scout; and on the very skyline one tall half-armoured figure stood regarding them. The scout looked up and back, saw Joris halt, saw his comrades straggling to a standstill, looked up again at the black-surcoated watcher, and lost his head. His longbow rose, and a shaft streaked up the hill crest, quivering in the black shield lifted to meet it. Joris heard no word of command, but one went forth, for the scout collapsed like a sack emptied of sand, and lay huddled with seven feathered butts sticking from face and body.
"Fool," said Joris between his teeth, and wheeled to shout "No more!" – for one of his bowmen yelled with rage and let fly a long shot, the arrow falling short by fifty yards. Now the man on the hilltop had his empty sword hand in air; a faint hail broke across the bracken.
"Parley, whosoever you be. We seek no fray with you."
"Have parley, then," bellowed the outlaw chief. "Come forward alone and meet me. I am Joris of the Rock."
And in a waiting silence the leaders approached each other. The stranger's pallid feathers were vulturine but fleshy; his hard gray eyes and cruel mouth, with the soiled white lion that ramped across his sable surcoat, set the bleak danger smile upon the lips of Joris.
"I am Adelgar, late troop captain of the Count of Alanol," said the stranger when they came face to face above the tumbled corpse.
"Leading the last of the unhorsed Riders of Campscapel?"
Joris of the Rock [The Neustrian Cycle, Book II] (Forgotten Fantasy Library) Page 9