The Mistress of the Coven pushed up her cow's mask like a visor; her anger against traitress Lys awoke a loud assenting outcry, but Joris heard therein little more than flattery and fevered expectation. Rioc and Blanche were present, it seemed – they and another had seized the horses of the Count of Ger and his companions that grazed in the priest's orchard at Gramberge, and had fled first of all, not trusting the outlaws to leave them their mounts should they give the alarm. So, Ivo, too, was proved a traitor; yet Anne made nothing of that, for all her fury was turned against Lys.
"Lys betrayed her, and Ivo me," thought Joris very grimly; and under his excitement crept a gray blur of fatigue. "Anne uses me," he muttered; and then: "She is made of iron as well as of earth and air and fire. Hey, what is that in her hands? A barnyard cock for sacrifice?"
One loud indignant squawk went up, and a gust of brutish applause. Then human sounds died down, and with them – as though by merest chance – ceased the light rain and lessened the eager wind, so that the blowing of the Stones sank to a murmur tremulous and forlorn.
Anne made wide passes over the reddened step, between the steadying blue-white flares, before the feet of humped and silent yaan. Her voice broke suddenly for the again, grew hoarse with effort and command, compassed strange-sounding names:
"Aamon, Trimasel, Marbas, Agares … Sargatanas, Sidragrosam, Agaliarept …
"Shake her with wind and bellowing thunder … blast her with breath of furious flames … rot her with reek of poisonous marsh vapours … choke her with slime of foul worm-breeding waters … smite her with showering elf-shot from all the coasts of the world…"
Joris had his wish at last; he saw Red Anne in power beside the Singing Stones. The dining curses shook his hardihood, vaguely he wondered why she called on elementals while one who was surely greater than they sat watching, but as the thought formed in his mind Yaan stirred and reached out for a rod – a spear – that had been stuck in earth beside the altar.
Yaan rose from his squatting posture with powerful ease; the shaggy blackness of him towered aloft, casting a grisly shadow on either upright of the easternmost trilithon behind him – and as he towered he shook the spear, stamped one long cloven hoof, and roared the name of Lys to the dark sky.
Then Joris felt the sweat start out on his temples; a wail of ecstatic dread ran sharply through the assembly, and Anne herself backed aghast against the altar.
Alone in face of that Satanic panoply, ignoring all who gaped and huddled beyond her, the slim untroubled shape of Lys outraged the smoky light and mocked the swirl of fury and terror that thickened between the Stones.
Fascinated, bereft even of unspoken oaths, Joris crept forward to the verge of darkness, his eyes fixed on that strange white-clad figure – for Lys was clad almost as if for penance, in nothing but a single robe of some fine stuff that clung wetly about her thin body. Her unbound hair was dragged to wisps and streaks by its own dripping weight; her queer pale eyes kept a sparkle of the old malice as steadfastly they looked upon Red Anne.
The Mistress of the Coven laughed a ringing laugh that hushed all other voices. Above and behind her Yaan hugged himself and the spear whose broad blade flashed at his shoulder; each brutal detail of his ritual accoutrements glowed and gleamed in the upflung light. Lys glanced from Anne to Yaan and back again, and Yaan gave bray of merriment.
"Traitress, you have well chosen!" he boomed. "Your body's end shall now be swift that had else been lingering. You have sought sanctuary beneath the emblem of my Enemies; did you hope to escape me at the last?"
But Red Anne took a lurching stride from the altar step, her great golden voice clashed through the musical rumour that still hung overhead.
"Why do you show your sickly rat's face here?" she belled. "Who bade you come again, little renegade thieving whore?"
"None bade me come again," came the strange shrill reply from the livid lips of Lys. "I am beyond you and your power, I think forever. Abate your bloodshed and cursing; they are rites of vain observance. I am not so damned as I thought; nor are you, Red Anne. Nor is any human creature, save those who bloat and enfeeble their souls by preying on weaker souls about them; they indeed, floating at last alone, burst like foul bubbles and are loss in the Night of Unknowing. But those who possess their souls apart earn choices stranger than paradise or Purgatory or Hell!"
"'Possess their souls apart'!" rose the mocking roar of Yaan. "Do you possess your soul apart, soused herring that you are? Is there no Pact to steer your spirit when all those runaway bones are broken?"
"Peace, fool," responded the elfin voice. "Your pacts, your threats, your visions, and your godhead are cobwebs in the doom blast that shall whelm you. If you would break the bones of Lys, go fish them from the falling tide along the Hardonek sandbanks – by dawn they should be floating beyond Capdelest."
Yaan grunted, twitched up his spear, and drove it full at the slender figure – that neither flinched, not stayed the weapon flight. The bright blade vanished in the peat, the haft quivered and stilled; a shuddering groan swept the assembly, and Joris felt his knees clap unbidden together. the thing that bore the shape of Lys had not stirred; its greenish features were still turned calmly toward the furious rosy face that Lys had loved.
"Will no place receive you?" cried Red Anne. "Are you condemned to blow about between the stars? At least if I cannot hurt you, do not daunt me; If I hear a voice cry 'Herluin' on the nightwind, I shall know it is you, poor misty monster, mourning those loveless nights in the hold above Alanol!"
"Red Anne, you have sorrow in you that anger cannot hide from me. I warn you, strive not with Herluin; power is sometimes given to him and to his kind that hope may never perish from the earth. If hope were gone, a jest is spoiled for always. How shall men dance, without a piping of hope?"
"You … whose jest … what power has Herluin?"
"Eh, but our little Herluin, who made sweet songs to you and blushed that we tended his pretty body – our little Herluin is not the great new Count of Ger. I will tell you what Ivo could not when you thrust him half beyond the Veil – it was Herluin slew Lorin de Campscapel on the night our old life ended. I gave him a potion to bring him to me, but it sent him killing mad instead. I might not be his woman, but if I watch and wait I may yet be the child of his love. Farewell."
The cool high voice died out along the breath of the Singing Stones' brown hair and livid body, pale eyes and silken garment, one moment held their place and the next were gone.
Joris found himself on his knees in the soaked bracken that lipped the outer megalithic ring. Nothing was as it had been; the witch-play seemed an evil farce beside that unbidden apparition and the passionless inconsequence of its message. But Joris reckoned without Yaan.
Yaan laughed aloud again, and took a flying leap from the altar. The outlaw, ducking to scramble away, attained the shadow of his hawthorn before he turned to watch. The whole throng was again in motion, and suddenly a drumbeat woke – a drumbeat curiously familiar to Joris.
Ta-rat, ta-rat, ta-rattle-ta-plat – ta-rattle-ta-plat, ta-rat, ta-rat – ta-rat.
"Hastain," the listener remembered. "The puppet show. The old granny who capered alone. The woman who grinned behind the shutter. There is shamming and juggling here, but there is more than that. Ay, now they dance…
Between the outer and inner rings took shape a circle of men and women, who linked hands and faced outward and clumisily pranced widdershins to the quickening beat of the drum. A flute woke a thread of melody amid the tapping and shouts and laughter. A horn warbled throatily, and an eldritch din of bagpipes broke out; Yaan was striding about the inner ring, wielding now a little whip, but Red Anne sat alone on the altar, her cow's mask pulled again over her face.
There was not room for all the crowd to dance in one circle; presently Joris saw a second circle whirling within the first. Four beast-headed members of the coven made the harsh gigging music; others ran yelling to and fro to encourage the dancers. One, dog-fa
ced and slim as Ivo himself, shot out from the leaping, staggering frieze and skipped and gambolled all alone amid the half-lit heather; another squatted on a fallen inner stone, diving first one way, then the other, to clutch at the hair and clothes of the passing women.
This, rather than anything that went before, was what Joris expected to see; but now the dance was well begun he found it madder than the singing and stranger than the ghostly visitation. His joints began to twitch; he swore, and gripped his bow, and found his fingers tightening separately and to rhythm. His head swayed on his shoulders, his teeth gnashed softly in time as though of their own volition, his breathing became involved with the beat of that mingled uproar that presently surged in full swing around the motionless Mistress of the Coven.
"What dreams Anne now?" wondered Joris – and then stood aghast, for his very thought came only in quadruple lilt, and words being found, rang through his head in daft continuous iteration. "What-dreams-Anne-now, what-dreams-Anne now, what dreams–"
Swiftly and more swiftly throbbed the music and flew the dancing feet. Voices died breathlessly; a girl tripped and went hurtling against the base of a megalith, but those who loosed her hands only reached out to take each other's, and no one heeded her as she lay dazed and bleeding. Joris, battling the mutinous body that bade him plunge into the riot, recalled the last words Anne had spoken to him – many hours ago it seemed – and felt a stir of rage against this lawlessness so different from his own. Joris, a skulking onlooker when great lords took the road, had come to skulk and look on in his own hills; he caught a movement at the possibility of staying such a scene with a quick hail of arrows from the surrounding gloom.
Quieter and more deadly grew the whirling double ring. Here and there sprawled those who had fallen out – some vomiting, some foaming at the mouth, some stark and still in a trance of exhaustion – but threescore at least were still rapt and dancing when two dog-headed devilkins stood up beside the blue-white flares and lifted each a leathern water bucket.
Yaan thundered unintelligible words from his place at the hub of the flying wheels; the flares disappeared with a stench and a fierce hissing. Torches were flung down, trampled out, or beaten dead against the lichened grit; to a whirl of sparks the dance formation was shattered into a formless mob. The music died in a dreadful chorus of yells; darkness stormed the Singing Stones and utterly overwhelmed them.
The last that Joris saw was the cow-headed figure of Red Anne, still seated motionless upon the altar slab, with frantic couples reeling and falling about her on the trampled grass. Then, when the binding rhythm was gone, when only the thrum and whistle of wind remained to deaden the lecherous tumult, a panic of disgust and loathing caught the outlaw by the throat. Killing and rape he understood as true prerogatives of me for whom the world was made; but this wild interweaving of song and dance and foul worship, of spectral admonition, of hatred and ravening lust, was too much even for Joris of the Rock.
If Anne's reserves and secret dreams centred around such beastliness, he felt his right to resent them. If she were mad with her childlessness, he could not cure her. and if she needed him in the dawn, she must seek him at his camp.
"It is against nature," Joris snarled – and turned, and fled into the night.
CHAPTER VIII. COLLOQUY AT BELSAUNT
For eighteen months Juhel de Ath learned lessons of life in the household of the Count of Barberghe. At first he shared his tasks with half a dozen others; then he became third page to the Viscount Robert, a sullen and spiteful young man who halted in spirit between his father's avarice and his mother's love of ostentation. Juhel served him deftly and well, receiving in return an occasional well-placed kick and many shrilled curses; it was hard to maintain the outward cheerfulness enjoined upon all junior gentlefolk in service of their superiors.
"God speed you, my lord," said Juhel demurely each morning, when he brought Robin Barberghe's clothes to Robin Barberghe bedside; but except for that one sentence he never opened his mouth in presence of the viscount unless the latter spoke to him. And Juhel's real feeling for Robin Barberghe was somewhere in the middle of the gradation of hatreds with which he regarded those about the two of them.
He hated his guardian, the foxy count, with a desolate realization of endless feudal contacts to come. He hated the haughty countess for her prying eyes and nagging voice, for the pride she took in her son, his immediate master. He hated most of the castle women, especially those who crept along the corridors to the viscount's bedchamber; sometimes they were still there when he roused sleepy Robin in the morning, and Juhel collected a queer little gallery of memories that scared and depressed him. He hated the chiefs of the household, who pounced upon his brief leisure for help in their several departments; only the chaplain and the master of the minstrels were his friends, and among the other boys he found it wise to pretend a dislike for the hours he spent in study of books and music. But chiefest of all Juhel hated Gavin and Guy, his fellow pages, who stood a head taller than himself and plagued him soundly and often.
Boastful Gavin liked to make Juhel weep with pain, for it became a task that required some skill and perseverance; treacherous Guy preferred a chicane of trips and pinches and jeers timed for embarrassment. The chaplain kept Juhel's ballad book and ring for him; apart from these, his small possessions were at the mercy of his companions, for he slept in their room and was seldom apart from them during the day. Juhel learned how to dance naked on a stony floor in winter; how to sleep in a bed which Guy had strewn breadcrumbs, cockroaches, or icicles; how to serve for half an hour in the hall with only one pair of points to hold up his plundered hose; and how to push a half-open door and step back to avoid the thigh boots or water bucket poised to drop on him. When the misdeeds of Gavin and Guy involved him in trouble with higher powers, Juhel blabbed without hesitation, thereby earning the name of "sneak" and providing his tormentors with moral justification for further violence.
"But they would torture me again anyway," Juhel reflected, "and there is always the chance of a beating for them."
He prayed for disasters to overtake Gavin and Guy, yet was not surprised when the pair of them throve; vaguely he felt that, given the prime stupidity of his relation to the House of Bargerghe, a Providence so unreasonable could not be blamed for lesser misfortunes. By the eighteenth month of his life as a page, Juhel was an expert little liar, masking bitterness and bewilderment with an indifference demure or sullen or amuse; he rode and ran, swam and wrestled, no better and no worse than others of his age, and found some comfort in two or three secret and long-continued fantasies.
In one hour of the latter he lived again with Folquin at Saint-Eloy-over-Hardonek; a flash of moonlight, an undertone of wind, could witch him from the dreary hold of Barberghe into the gray priory above the northern sea. In another and stranger waking dream he lived in a silent castle whose surroundings changed with his mood and with the season of the year; armed and glittering he came to its kindly portal over great hills, across dim marshes, or through the cathedral aisles of a pine forest. He slew his dastard enemies of mornings, hunted in the afternoons, and painted magnificent manuscript decorations at night; at table he had the first cut of the joint, and nowhere in that existence were any women.
His Tower of Ath took no place in those days; it was a reality as unpleasant as the rest, especially after Gavin told him of the dishonour done to his family by Joris of the Rock.
"Unless you kill Joris," said Gavin gleefully, "no one will ever dub you chevalier."
But Juhel scarcely heard him, and at sight of Juhel's horror-stricken face even Guy was surprised and ashamed.
"You could not help it, Juhel," he pointed out, "and anyhow it is no honour to kill a villainous outlaw."
"Of course the child was your cousin," added Gaven, "But after all, the Duke of Burias himself was a bastard until the king married his mother."
Thenceforward a new and darker desolation clouded Juhel's thoughts of his heritage; he wondered if the
ghost of shamed Tiphanie would carry the ghost of her murdered baby about the gloomy tower until she was avenged by her sole surviving kinsman. The years of squirehood ahead were suddenly lightened by contrast; for long enough yet the domain of Ath could be forgotten.
Meanwhile Gavin and Guy constituted his chief problem; and when at length they quarrelled, the fact of their quarrel loomed larger in Juhel's eyes than the fact that they and he were to ride south in the train of the Count of Barberghe on a summer visit to the royal court at Hautarroy. Gavin half strangled Guy at the cost of two loosened teeth and a black eye; Juhel heaved with suppressed mirth when both were flogged by the count's chamberlain.
"Curse him!" wailed Guy on the morning of departure. "Here I must ride for four days at the least, as stiff as Lot's wife and as sore as Hamor the Hivite. And my lord Viscount will have capon roasted with syrup for his supper, if any innkeeper be slave enough to make the syrup – and I shall be roused at midnight by his bilious yelling. And at Hautarroy we shall have no sleep, any of us; once last year I slept for three hours out of forty-eight, and one of the three was in a gaming den."
Juhel, who then had stayed at Barberghe, now perceived that a little sober sympathy might gain him information undistorted by malice; he gave Guy some assistance in the last packing of Robin Barberghe's finery, and when at length the trumpets shrilled for the count's outgoing from his great hold, Guy and Juhel rode side by side near the head of the long procession. Gavin was somewhere behind them, having been detailed to watch the viscount's tilting armour, which went on a pack saddle of its own; and for the first time Juhel found equality with greedy brown-skinned Guy.
It was August, and long cloud shadows trailed over the ripening corn; abbey after lordly abbey spread its woods and vills and granges in the plain of Nordanay. Here and there was new building; sometimes a remnant of blackened stone roused whispers of the Jacquerie among the Barberghe men-at-arms. From the high-arched Bridge of Roray Juhel stared at the brown murmuring river; for at that place, thirteen years before, the great revolt had begun.
Joris of the Rock [The Neustrian Cycle, Book II] (Forgotten Fantasy Library) Page 16