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

by Leslie Barringer

  "See there!" screeched Rufin, pointing. "See there, you tweaker of tails!"

  Like a flash Rufin was gone. Joris looked over his onus shoulder; the crest of pasture toward Ger was fretted by line after ragged line of horsemen, their short surcoats buttercup yellow as they charged fanwise over gorse and grass toward Gramberge.

  Red Anne's voice came strongly to him; "Joris, this way – there is time yet!" Amid the rush of his shouting men he gained the gray mare's flank, gripping a stirrup leather as Anne tightened rein for flight. Away they raced together, Joris still swinging his sword; and before and behind and about them scurried the wrack of his power, while from beyond the hamlet swelled vengefully a continuous roar of "Ger!"

  "Straight upslope if it kills her," said Joris between his teeth; and beyond the clinging ploughland loam the mare crashed into the thickets. Half-light enveloped the man; the world was shrunk to a steep hillside, where briers tripped him and alders buffeted him – where mud slipped beneath his feet, and the mare's sweating shoulder jarred his own. He was forced to sheathe his sword, to unsling his bow from his shoulder and carry it or use it as a staff; quiver and horn and scabbard hung awry, hampering him in that ungainly flight. From time to time he leaned perforce against Anne's sturdy thigh; and below them rang the sounds of pursuit, that if it were successful might turn the beauty of Anne to a charred horror, and would doubtless wrench to hideousness the throat of Joris of the Rock.

  * * * *

  "Better dismount," said the man an hour later. "Else she will die in her tracks and throw you. Well for us they did not purser across open moor."

  Red Anne awoke from sullen reverie to fling herself out of saddle and stamp away her stiffness in the sodden heather. Curiously she eyed her lover, for Joris was almost gay.

  "Ivo in that hour of vision said only I could break you," she reminded him. "Only I, who wished you never any harm. By Mahound, Joris, I have nearly broken you. It is time you bought more runes, or parted from me in haste."

  Joris glanced aside at her; it was strange to see Red Anne forlorn and savage in defeat.

  "For this pass," he declared, "I have to thank not you but devilkin Ivo. Him we shall see no more, I warrant; I hope they caught and hanged him. Adelgar I could spare; for Osmund I am angry, and fiend knows how many more. When we reach that rock ahead I pause to hold a muster. But this I know and say – I have not yet done with that little fighting weasel of a count."

  "It seems ill done of him. But I have not yet done with that renegade vixen Lys."

  "You will not lightly reach her in the keep of Ger."

  "Not lightly; but there are spells to move so mired a spirit as hers. Be sure she will know herself cursed by me; that is the best beginning. Give the count joy of his rescued beauty!"

  "Why did you plague them so, these two who have turned and stung you?"

  "Because their love was slavish. Because they were with me above Alanol and too often reminded me thereof. Because I was known for kindness and hugged that one rich cruelty. Because I taught them witchcraft and they feared Christ less than I do."

  For that strange self-indictment Joris found no easy words.

  "Yet you purpose revenge on Lys?" he demanded at length.

  "Ay, even so. She knew too much to desert me scatheless. Come to the Singing Stones to-night, as you had first intended."

  "H'm. That depends."

  "On what?"

  "On Rufin, among other things. Observe him at the muster."

  So saying, Joris unslung his bugle horn and blew a rousing rally. The stumbling men ahead stood fast, the laggards pulled themselves together; Madoc, astride a pony in the rear, assembled thirty mounted like himself and brought them swinging along to the hollow where Joris had chosen to halt.

  Sixty-one they numbered in all, who at dawn had been a hundred and seven. Madoc grimaced at the figure, and then stepped swiftly to the side of Joris; for Rufin spat loudly and lounged to confront the latter.

  "A word with you, Joris, in all men's hearing," brayed Rufin, jaunty no longer. "I say you were mad or bewitched to lead us upon Gramberge. Pledge us here and now to keep to honest thieving; mix no more with witchcraft and churchcraft that defeats it. Or straightway release me, and as many as will come with me, from further obligation to serve Red Anne through you who are her mouthpiece. What was the demoiselle to you, that you strove to recapture her?"

  "Here is a lover gallant but confused," mocked Joris, glad of an outlet for wrath. "Rufin would come to the Singing Stones, but Rufin's pretty one fails him; avaunt all damnable witchcraft, cries Rufin. Hearken, you oaf; if my band were reduced to the two of us, you should not leave me unbidden. Think you I want a ghost of myself botching raids in the hills?"

  "Not yet a ghost," growled Rufin; and in one quick movement he ripped out his dagger and flung it at the heart of Joris. Joris shrugged, but not quickly enough; the blade sank into the outer side of his left upper arm, dropping beneath the weight of its hilt before he tore it out and tossed it to earth. A dozen swords were at Rufin's throat and breast, but the leader waved them aside and plucked forth his own weapon. "Stand back all, and keep a ring about us. Rufin, draw and defend yourself! Have at you, ape!"

  Steel flashed and kissed and sang; Rufin was a crafty swordsman, and after a first fierce onslaught played to let the dagger wound help him. But Joris attacked like a whirlwind; backward and forward they stamped and slid in a sudden wind-blown drizzle of rain. Rufin's mouth was first to open, but he snicked the tip from the golden beard and cut Joris below the knee before and upstroke found his armpit and forced a breathless groan from him. He tossed his hilt to his left hand and pierced the leader's jerkin at the right shoulder, barely grazing the skin; the stiff leather gripped the sword and gave him over to death. Into his undefended side went the leaping point of Joris; Rufin grunted and staggered back, clearing his blade and missing the golden head with a last strong back-handed blow. Then he was down on flank and elbow, with life soaking redly into the peat. For a moment his fierce eyes held the laughing eyes above him; then they dimmed, and Rufin spoke as though to the heather.

  "Prosper your witch," he said clearly, 'for I think she will ruin you soon."

  Then his head drooped and sank on his arm, and his eyes shut and opened again.

  Joris stood staring down at him, the words caught at a fading memory – the memory of a girl who called down a curse and fled on horseback through the forest. For a second the threat weighted sharply; then Joris looked up at grave Red Anne, and round at the eyes of his attentive men – his men now, one and all, whatsoever had been in their minds when the fight began.

  "We will go on," he announced, stabbing the earth with stained steel and sliding the latter, cleansed, into its scabbard.

  As he turned his foot struck the dagger – the silver-hilted dagger which once he had borrowed from Rufin. Flicking his own from its sheath he dropped it and picked up the other; somehow it pleased him to claim that forfeit again at last.

  "Let me bind your wounds," said Anne, producing a kerchief; and presently all were in motion again save the shape that had been Rufin.

  A raven sailed from nowhere, gigantic in the first spring dusk. Men averted their eyes and plodded swiftly away. Madoc whistled a little tune, and the weary horse of the bailiff of Gramberge whinnied as though in fear.

  'By the bones of Goliath of Gath," said Joris to Anne beside him, "I feel as though I had left ill luck with that dead rogue behind us."

  "Maybe," replied the woman absently; and, looking at her, Joris realized that for her the day was barely begun.

  * * * *

  Toward midnight Anne parted from Joris in a cave three hundred yards upslope from the Singing Stones. Together they had crept from their camp, leaving Madoc in charge of the weary men; for two hours, with uncanny precision, the woman has guided her lover through wind and rain and glancing starlight – turning this way or that at the first squelch of a bog, choosing a path among rocks that seemed to bar all advanc
e, tramping surely across jet-black peat or dim gray or gorse-encumbered sand.

  "By my hilt, you know your parish," swore Joris, striding in rear. "I think you can go where the Devil cannot, between the oak and the rind."

  The words were out before he found them grotesque by reason of his errand; then he laughed, to point or excuse them as Anne might please, but Anne's response was matter-of-fact.

  "Wheresoever flesh can go the Devil has been before," she said. "Ay, even to Paradise; wherefore we pray in the Black Mass–"

  She broke off with an ugly little sound of tongue and teeth, and Joris found nothing to say. Until the last possible moment he resisted the uneasiness which sundered him from this strange resolute companion who yet was his love of a hundred nights; but when the tops of the upright dolmens cut irregular shapes against a reach of sky swept momentarily clear, he set hand to his sword and scouled at the blur which was Red Anne's face.

  "You hear the singing?" she asked, pausing beneath a low scarp where bushes hugged the boulders and little caves yawned drily to the thrust of an exploring longbow.

  "Ay," said Joris gruffly. "Your stage is fairly set."

  For amid a rustle of heather and a hiss of waving hawthorns went up the long, strange harmonies, the boom and whistle and mock-plangent humming, pressed and torn from the Singing Stones by the angry midnight wind.

  "Now I go," came Anne's voice, with a note in it as of stifled laughter. "Wait until you hear the song of invocation; then, if it please you, creep forward to watch. You are sure you will not have me make you know?"

  "Ay, that I am. This is no play of mine."

  "Then farewell – when all is done, you are still my Joris, and I am still your Anne."

  They kissed strongly in the darkness; then she was gone, and Joris chose a rocky hole wherefrom he could observe the broken uprights towering three hundred yards away from him. Before his love had time to reach the dolmens, lights woke among them; Joris and she had come a more desolate way than any, meeting or overtaking none of the figures which seemed to spring to life in the sudden flickering radiance.

  All in a moment the Singing Stones were a medley of black and orange-gray, starred with waving torches that streamed and sparkled and smoked, patterned with crazily changing shadows along the planes of the great trilithons; the ruined circle filled with a rumour of greeting and laughter that blended with its own ghostly organ song. A confused welcoming roar told Joris that the Mistress of the Coven had been seen; immediately the mingled din died down, and the torches appeared to assume a rough alignment – some being stuck in the holes and clefts of the uprights, others held aloft by hand. A squall of thin rain swept across the ink-black ranges; through the faint sheen of its wavering mist the outlaw saw the shifting assembly clot to stillness amid the lesser stones of the inner ring.

  "By the chimes of hell," he swore, "I will not wait like a slave."

  The words of his apposite oath wrung a grin from him, for as he pulled his hood down over his eyes the voice of Red Anne chimed in the wind; and by the time he had gone a dozen yards the whole throng was singing. Joris was not much given to thrills along the spine, but the swell of that deep chant raked him from loins to base of skull; breathing strongly, using his unstrung bow as a staff, he trod with slackening speed toward the bright and sounding mystery.

  He had refused to let Anne show him to her friends, saying that in Nordanay too many owed him a grudge for him to trust his undefended back among the witches and their acolytes. Then Anne had laughed and asked him if men stabbed each other in church; and the implication of her question only hardened his resolve to keep himself aloof in spirit from whatsoever might take place that night. And now, as he approached the eastern quarter of the stone circle and saw more clearly the blur of facts, he was more than ever glad of that refusal. For something of ancient hope and sorrow and greatness, something old and true as the very building of the Stones, streamed in the wavering torch glare and groaned in the surging hymn.

  "Bah!" he whispered against the wind. "The most part of what Anne called them – snivelling outcast whores, who creep here and endure a discipline for greed of assuagement only to be had by devils in the dark. Yet someone attends to their singing–"

  Then he stopped still in his tracks; for at either end of the long low step the massive altar stone leaped up strong blue-white flares. The kindlier torchlight paled before them; nor might the wind do more than slant the two strange little flowers of fire and whirl their thick sulphurous fume away into the dark. Between them stood Red Anne, her proud face sharply silvered; in front of her the crowd lurched solidly to its knees.

  The new and ghastly glow beat strongly into the drizzling blackness, but no eye in face of it could hope to see tall Joris standing in partial shadow thirty yards from the nearest tumbled megalith. He drew close in to a hawthorn bush, and watched Anne raise both hands to help herself with a beast-head like that which has swung at Ivo's shoulder above Gramberge; but Ivo's mask had been a dog's, and Anne's was a horned cow's. With her movement the hymn rose to a crash and stopped; the wind and the Singing Stones together took up their soft forgotten parts, to be whelmed again the instant after by a new and rapid chorus. Joris, fascinated by the trim cow-headed figure that now beat time with a strange brazen-flashing rod, suddenly found that he understood the words; for the hymn had seemed to him gibberish. But this must be the song of invocation; its quickening quadruple beat set his pulses galloping.

  "Ha! Ha! Sieur Yaan!

  Sieur Yaan! Sieur Yaan!

  Hear and find us – loose and bind us,

  Rise and reach us – rule and teach us,

  Fast enslave us – smite and save us,

  Strike or spare, Yaan – help us dare, Yaan,

  Only thou, Yaan – guid'st us now, Yaan.

  Bread and wine, Yaan – ours but thine, Yaan!

  Bid us dance; let flesh and bone

  Wheel around the sacred Stone;

  Wheel and whirl and whirl and wheel

  Till the solid ground shall reel,

  Till the stars slip down the sky

  And the rooted hawthorne fly,

  Till in spate of furious glee

  Anguish all in praise of thee!

  Ha! Ha! Yaan! Yaan!

  Ya-aa-aa-aan!

  Ya-aa-aa-aan!

  YA-AA-AA…

  The final chord seemed never ending; presently Joris realized that voices took it up in relays, for now one note and now another rang more strongly, but still the whole chord never died away. He choked down a snigger; the greater part of the singers were women – townsfolk and peasants mingled, so far as he could see – for a moment he was reminded of a chorus of amorous cats. Yet after that moment amusement waned him; and very soon the sustained sound was not amusing at all. There was too much ferocity in it; and suddenly Joris gasped and swore, for the chord laid a torch of power upon his body. The notes were somehow spreading; they began to ring from the cloud wrack hurtling overhead, from the black masses of the hills on either hand, from the cave-pocked slope behind him, and from the very ground beneath his feet. Each separate gust of light rain in his face was a stroke of added sound; and around his chill-struck forehead seemed set a tightening circlet of iron.

  Again came a shock of silence, jarring him free; Red Anne half turned to the altar, and the blur of faces went weirdly out as cloaks or arms swung up and heads or hoods sank down. It seemed that none save Anne might look upon what came next – none save Anne and Joris, who stared in shaken curiosity from the outskirts of the light.

  Anne's voice went chanting up alone, in dreadful and sonorous prayer.

  "Pater noster qui erat in coelis…"

  Joris dropped his bow and clapped his hands to his ears. Holy Ratin was bad enough, but this…

  The cow-faced Mistress of the Coven held out her left hand toward the altar; and a tall Thing skipped from the shadow of the great trilithon behind it, vaulting deftly upon the stone to sit cross-legged upon it/

&n
bsp; Stag-headed with tremendous antlers, the black and brooding shape of Evil lifted a paw in benediction as the kneeling crowd raised heads and shouted acclamation. The name of Yaan was a shrill defiance, a roar of earthling challenge to heaven that reenforced mailed temporal tyrannies with spiritual demands on patience and obedience and toil. Since alewives and farmers' daughters welcomed this Yaan, it was not in his aspect to daunt Joris of the Rock; nevertheless the outlaw's mouth was dry, and the hand that groped for the fallen longbow was less steady than when it let the life from raging Rufin.

  The monster raised a hollow-sounding voice, thrusting himself backward until his tail hung down behind the altar; in a trice all were in motion, save Yaan himself and Red Anne, who bent to kiss the black shoulder and seated herself on the alter beyond him. A minor devil bearing a torch bounced round to their rear, standing to light the second act of that unseemly adoration. Stumbling, squealing, giggling, shoving the file of figures circled the flares – one man to every two or three women – and Joris laughed an uncertain laugh, being loth to admit to himself a disgust that curved so near Red Anne.

  Yet a man for whom the world was made will take the world as he finds it; and presently Joris felt an impatience for the end of that dreary rite. The greatness was gone from the play. Yaan and Red Anne wore dignity; not so that the fawning rabble.

  He squatted down on a boulder, glad of his cloak of frieze that Anne had borrowed and left with him. For a while it was hard to see what passed; Yaan spoke to this one and that in the press before him, his great voice booming praise and blame and laughter amid sharp bursts of applause from his audience. Recruits were thrust forward for rites of initiation, but Joris had no desire to see hysterical defilement of Crucifix and Wafer. He had killed a priest or two since that first revengeful slaying at Medrincourt in Base Honoy, yet his quarrel was with the Church, not with the Sieur God. Once indeed, while a scared girl piped up her responses, Joris yawned; but when Red Anne stood forth alone he got to his feet again.