Joris of the Rock [The Neustrian Cycle, Book II] (Forgotten Fantasy Library)

by Leslie Barringer

  For strength can woo if prayer be vain,

  And smiled when o'er the mailed array

  His banner took the wind again,

  Remembering, as he tightened rein,

  A song she sang of old Provence,

  A ballad with a strange refrain

  'Plus faict douceur que violenz.'

  "When sank the sun on flame and death

  He held her on the saddle's bow;

  She cried Our Lady 'neath her breath

  And snatched at steel; he foiled the blow

  And kissed her pallid face aglow,

  But silent scorn was her response;

  The winds of twilight whispered low

  'Plus faict douceur que violenz.'

  "In carven chair before the fire

  Alone and grim he sate all night,

  But tore his soul from out the mire

  And freed her in the glowing light.

  Yet ere her troop had spurred from sight

  He saw the maid look backward once

  And heard the gale cry down the height

  "Plus faict douceur que violenz.'

  "Lady, yourself the tale shal end.

  Lied that old singer of Provence

  Down the long years this word to send:

  'Plus faict douceur que violenz.'"

  "A fitting song for the occasion," mocked Lys when it was done.

  "As fitting here as in the keep of Campscapel," retorted Ivo.

  "Yet not entirely out of place in either," muttered Red Anne, so low that only Joris caught the words.

  Then, in a moment, his world changed; Anne's right hand, that had lain in her cross-kneed lap, came down upon his own left hand in a gesture hidden from their companions. The fingers of Joris closed in a mighty clasp; the blood throbbed in his ears, and all that was left of his boyhood leaped in him. He scarcely heard Anne's voice as she bade Lys and Ivo play together; the plaints of harp and flute were joined beyond the fire, and Anne leaned a little toward him, whispering under the lonely sounding music.

  "Joris, are you still of your old mind concerning me?"

  "Yes."

  "And if I give you my love, will you rage if I leave you at times?"

  "No, if it be not too often."

  "Tell me, is there a pool to bathe in below the camp? I saw none deep enough when I doused my face at noon."

  "Not in the stream," breathed Joris. "But up the slope behind, and down the other side, beyond the larches and under the oaks, there is a pool where deer drink. It is over my head in the middle. There is deep grass about it, but the edge is sand. Shall – shall I show you?"

  "No. I will find my way. Give me the quarter of an hour and then come if you will."

  "If I will. When?"

  "Oh, let the fire burn low, and your men finish their drinking. And I must find me a towel; I am not yet altogether savage, though I saw in your face that I have changed."

  "Not – not in my heart."

  "Eh, have you fashioned and Anne that does not change?"

  "No."

  Harp and flute were silent; Osmund, with wine in his gray beard, was stuttering maudlin approval, but the deepened tone of his chief put a period to his words. Anne recaptured her hand and raised it in air.

  "Ivo, bring me the harp," she commanded; and then, taking the instrument from him, she looked up at the boy's grim face.

  "What will please you, Ivo?" she inquired, half smiling.

  "Your own pleasure, my lady," responded Ivo smoothly.

  "Spoken like a courtier. Lys, what will you choose?"

  " 'Brisingamen,' my lady," came the cool high answer.

  " 'Brisingamen?' Spoken like a nun. Have your will, though it be dreary."

  Joris lay stark and enchanted, bound by the first deep note of a "discord," a song almost rhymeless of a rhythm strange to him.

  "Between the timeless roots of Ygdrasil

  Where seven metals hissed in shining veins

  From gloom to vaulted gloom around their dinging anvils

  Laboured the four swart gnomes.

  In fume and sweat, with rage of craft and cunning

  Deep, deep in the Kingdom of Stone,

  The wrought Brisingamen.

  "Brisningamen, the god-desired necklace,

  A chain of burning and melodious diamonds

  Compact of stolen rainbow-shards and sunbeams,

  Foam from the moon-path of the midnight sea,

  Ice from the splintered helm of the Frost King.

  "Athward the fields in airs of windy evening,

  Over the murmuring grass from the world's rim,

  Bruising the clover that kissed them

  Moved to the smoking earth-cleft,

  The cream-white feet of Freya.

  "Freya, Odin's golden daughter,

  Calm with doom-wise calm of Asgard,

  Deep, deep in the Kingdom of Stone,

  Bought Brisingamen.

  "Athward the fields of mist of windless morning,

  Over the silent grass to the world's rim,

  Brushing tears of dew from the shamed clover,

  Wandered the bruised feet of Odin's daughter.

  "Four times looped around her golden shoulders,

  Hiding the earth-stains on her shining shoulders,

  Freya bore with grave greed

  The chain of burning and melodious diamonds,

  A furfold fury of frozen fire,

  Smiling with white light

  The groaning gates of Asgard.

  "When her eyes, proud and haunted,

  Bright above the earthling splendour,

  Glowed in sight of the hero-kindred,

  Age withered the brow of Odin.

  Hoenir hushed the Harp-lilt,

  Tyr gnashed his Sword-hilt;

  Thor let the Hammer fall

  And Earth trembled to the shock;

  Doom-wind yelped in the high hall

  With fore-blast of Ragnarok."

  Vaguely Joris knew names and stories of the old Northland gods; no fret of ignorance disturbed his hearing of the ancient song. But indeed the words barely mattered, save for the shapes they lent to Red Anne's marvellous voice.

  Once he glanced away from her glowing head; the gloom between the two fires was patched with the stricken faces of his men as they stood or crouched to listen. No sound of breath or steel or leather invaded the hearkening trance of the ravine; the splash and murmur of the stream seemed muted, and the owls had ceased to call amid the woods. Old Osmund's mouth was open, and his pig's cheeks were creased as with pain. Ivo's staring eyes were alive with worshipping torment. Beyond Ivo the girl Lys had lost her shrewish mask; if malice prompted the choice of that song it had recoiled upon her, for tears spilled slowly into the hollows beneath her downcast lashes.

  "The Kingdom of Elfin," thought Joris, "is wheresoever Anne sings. Anne, Anna, Diana – Diana Queen of Elfin – and now none other can lift voice when she has ended. This is the wedding song of Joris of the Rock."

  Half an hour later he sat in his tent, that was made of stakes and boughs and tarred felt bound with strips of hide and weighted with stones. A star winked through a gap in the wall; Joris tugged at his beard and groaned, and bit one hand to stem the sudden shivering of his body. Of all things he had deemed himself readiest for this; yet twice he reached to the felt door flap before he jerked himself to his feet and gained the tranquil outer air.

  A sharp ring of metal on stone told him his camp guard stirred beside the ashes of the further fire; along the lonely valley a stag belled faintly. As Joris turned to the steep larch-crested slope the moon slid slowly from a pallid bar of cloud; three paces, and he was checked by a strange sound from the second shelter a dozen yards from his own. The boy Ivo had lain down at its entrance, but he was not to be seen; and presently Joris knew that Ivo lay weeping within. Lys was there with him, and pity and impatience blended in her voice.

  "Why do you stay to be tortured?" she demanded. "Have you not arts e
nough to make a living alone? Go to, you know you have. Do you think by dwelling in fire to become a salamander?"

  The choked reply was unintelligible. Joris curled a contemptuous lip and soundlessly strode uphill.

  At the top was breath of wind that drowsed among the larches. Moonlight played softly golden on smooth boles and sound-deadening carpet of needles; autumn odours assailed the outlaw, and pallid mists defined the nearer hollows, while in the east the blue-black sky was fretted by jet-black rocky heights above the limits of the Forest of Honoy.

  Joris inhaled deeply; the night air was wine of triumph, the hand that had trembled was firm on his belted sword. Below was agleam as of a gold, sharp-cut goblin oak boughs; Joris trod swiftly downhill, godlike in strength and desire. Beneath his feet the whisper of larch needles gave place to the driven rustle of grass; trunks of the oaks seemed shifting to impede him, and his eyes dazzled at the shaken glitter of the moon's reflection in the pool. Red Anne's names began to hammer in his head, with such long-buried foolish words as his mother had used before he grew too tall to run to her for comfort to run to her for comfort.

  And suddenly he saw the witch – the faint sheen of her shoulders, the white pride of her lifted arms as she loosed from around her head the tight-coiled hair that still warred faintly with the all-silvering moonlight.

  "Hola, Joris!" she chanted quietly, turning toward him so that he saw her body very pale gold and barred with shadows of leaves and branches.

  "Joris," she said again as he stumbled forward, "Take me and make me forget for a while."

  "Forget what?" he muttered, pausing with nothing alive in him save eyes and heart and breath.

  "All that has gone before," she replied more strongly; and the shadows slid and altered and fled as she moved a pace forward, ankle-deep in the autumn grasses beside her tumbled clothing.

  "Are you not cold?" whispered Joris; as she shook her head and the down-rippling coils of her heavy hair, he laughed and fell on one knee and spoke again.

  "Said I not you came of the line of the old gods? Where are your dogs to tear me, Diana by the Pool?"

  But Red Anne only smiled, bending above him to kiss his brow and lips, standing arrow-straight again to draw his bearded face against her cool body. And then at length the blood rose up in Joris; he gasped and reeled to his feet and lifted her from the ground, gripping her so that she smiled and swore as he carried her under the trees.

  "Line of all gods or no," she murmured after a time, "I still am chiefly a woman. Joris, gold-bearded Joris, must I next be cast in a river, as was my marble sister whom they dug from the mound at Dor?"

  "A river of sleep, maybe," breathed Joris in her ear. "But you have called me gold-beard; listen at last to my runes."

  So Red Anne listened at last; and when he had told them and given his interpretation, she chuckled and tightened her arm across his breast.

  "You do not admire my runes?" demanded Joris, surprised.

  "Ah, yes – but I have heard them before."

  "Where?"

  "In Hastain as a child."

  "And what was said of them?"

  "Only what Ingolard said – that they foretold a doom to be accomplished in those parts by one to rule therein. Are you the one, think you?"

  "Maybe, if war were upon us, and my thieves a free company."

  "Am I then but a milestone in this lord's path?" mocked Anne softly. "The witch is mastered by the pool – another period in the progress of the Chevalier Joris."

  "You!" came a dire loverlike growl. "You are … a woman who shall see what things her man can do."

  "Great things, I swear, if your exploits be all to one measure. So shall we soar together, you and I? Eh, Joris, it is long since I was happy as I am to-night."

  "But you make light of my runes?"

  For a second time Red Anne was silent; then she chuckled again, and after chuckling sighed.

  "No, not I," she responded. "Red is contend with its new-shriven Gold. Yet there is nothing in your runes of three trees on a hill and a great shadow beside."

  "What trees are those? What shadow?"

  "I know not. Think you a witch does not seek to read her own future? Only another can read it, never one's self; and all upon whom I have worked have seen me pass into such shadow. And some have seen me happy beyond, but most have failed through terror. Do you remember the dwarf who was at Hastain with our puppets, the dwarf who brought you to me up in Alanol?'

  "Ay. What of him?"

  "He died striving to see for me. he prayed me to press him beyond the veil with all my powers; and I so pressed him, and he died."

  Joris was silent, tasting the first thin lees of triumph; flesh that had made them one cried out on spirit that mocked at unity.

  "I have not made you forget," he growled; and suddenly old curiosity stirred angrily within him.

  "since you speak of your craft," he went on, "tell me how you knew that the Riders of Campscapel were coming upon us that day at Capel Conan."

  "One of my falconers bore a carrier pigeon."

  "Ha! secret stairs and carrier pigeons…"

  "Ay, I read your mind. You think the most of my magic is adroitness? There is more than that in it, Joris."

  "And also … you aim to go on November Eve…"

  "Yes. To the Singing Stones. To meet the Devil."

  "Even so. Sometimes I have wondered if the 'black' of my runes was indeed the – the Count Lorin."

  "Do not speak of Lorin any more. We loved each other, he and I. The day he died I betrayed our love – no, I had no hand in his death; I gave myself in pity to another, and later stood apart from all that night's doings. Or Lorin might not have died. So speak no more of him. But since you, too, have lived me long and well, I tell you this: I am the mistress of my coven, Joris. I meet the Devil as an equal. I kiss him on the shoulder, and not often. You think of witches as a pack of snivelling outcast whores; many such there may be, but there are others, too. Little enough has our Devil had from me for what I have learned of him. Little enough save gold; ay, devils need gold, for I know of none who can make it."

  "But – but in the rites, do you not give this – all this glory beneath my fingers…"

  "There comes a moment in the dance when that is the right, the only thing to do. It is a ritual woven very long ago. Strange powers rise from the ground while we dance it – powers of earth and night and fire. I do not often dance that dance; and when I do, my yielding is of ritual, not of lust."

  "Bur surely he – he delights in you above all others?"

  "Our devil gets his fill of women, Joris. I am only a part of his rites to him."

  "And, Anne … your devil … are there many devils of equal rank?"

  "May and many, each to his coven. But ours is Grand Master of the Covens of Nordanay. And he has taught me subtle things … and has promised me one thing I lack, and still lack that thing, so that I know not now if it be withheld by feebleness or malice."

  "What thing is that?"

  "A child,"

  Joris sat stunned and silent; his hands, that beneath Anne's cloak had plagued her lovely body, grew motionless on that warm tragic flesh.

  "But L – Lorin de Campscapel–" he stammered at length, and broke off in sullen vexation at having uttered the name.

  "Ay, Lorin never fathered any child," Anne murmured. "I laboured long enough to lift that enchantment from him. For that he bade me wander at will, knowing I strove to give him a son. But I myself am barren, Joris; oh, I am sure by now. I have eaten mandrake root enough and chanted a legion of spells. And for that I stayed your hand when we met in Capel Conan; no man hurts a child when I have power to prevent him. And no witch of my coven dares openly to cross me in that matter – or indeed in any other matter. No fat of babes at the Singing Stones – so purge your mind of that folly. And now, once more, Lorin is dead – and the others never counted. But you are here and alive; make me a duchess if it please you, but make me a mother to please myself, fierc
e Joris of the Rock."

  * * *

  "Give you good day, friend Adelgar," called Red Anne, when first she came into the limestone chasm; and Adelgar grew stiff and saluted, his pasty vulturine face going red at this recognition. A dozen others she remembered in the hold above Alanol; Ivo nodded easily at this man and that among them, and even Lys smiled faintly as they touched their steel caps a second time. But Joris felt for a moment that he had set foot in a quagmire; it angered him that these his followers should have seen Anne daily while he moved obscurely beyond her furthest skyline.

  Then he shrugged the emotion aside, and made for his comrade and love a lordly welcome to her new home beneath the Rock. Henceforth their cause should be one if he could so insure it; yet on a morning some weeks later he learned that his qualm was not without foundation.

  He slept in his rush-strewn cave, although it was near midday; for he had journeyed through a calm October night and reached the chasm at sunrise. Outside, by the frowning entry, Red Anne hummed a tune as she spread his shirts and her own to dry on bushes or boulders. White smoke rose thinly from the chieftain's own fire close at hand; farther down the ravine was thicker smoke from the ovens, and farther away again, beyond the tethered hill ponies, a score of men were playing a kind of football on the flat reach of sand and peat at the foot of the great crag. Close to them were mounds that hid the shattered bones of the unransomed dead; the core of their football was, indeed, a skull and its covering untanned cowhide stitched with hempen string. Some as they played swore loudly that ghosts were siding with their opponents, although even the hardiest jester avoided the place in the dark; now that the mists had gone the autumn sunlight was pleasant in that ominous cleft of the hills.

  So thought the viper that crawled near the highest fire, until its blunt black nose encountered a crumble of hot ash; then, to a wrathful hiss, the gleaming body twirled about and drove for the dark cave mouth.

  Red Anne, seeing it, uttered a deep and wordless cry and snatched up the club with which she had beaten the linen. Joris started awake and heard the viper's death blow; voices rapid footsteps approached as he dived into the sunshine and found the reptile's body with Anne bent grimly above it.

  Beyond Red Anne, as by magic, a dozen figures were gathering – Lys with arrow on half-drawn bow, Ivo clutching a dagger, Rufin and Adelgar and others, most of them poising ax or sword or guisarme.