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

by Leslie Barringer

  But carnal triumph grew suddenly foul and spoiled and evil. With barely a word spoken between them he stood at length above her, loathing her body and his own, swept by a flood of despairing rage that baffled him with its blackness. One hand clutched his dagger hilt, the other groped in his purse; better to press the affair to one limit of baseness now, before he sounded a beastlier depth and struck what he fondled.

  A florin flashed in the flattened grasses; the girl snatched it and grinned up at him with the silver coldly bright between her white teeth. With a sound between a groan and a curse he tuned on his heel and shambled away, utterly wretched, almost physically sick, yet aware of a dumb protest in his heart – a protest that what was accounted gay should prove such a bleak misery.

  "Saints forgive me," he muttered; "I do not even know her name. and forgive her too – but she is like an animal – which makes it seven times worse."

  Everything seemed different, yet everything was the same, from the banners of Ger and Marckmont that drooped above the distant towers, to the faint squealing of children in the hayfields a quarter of a mile away. The sameness itself abashed him, the difference being his own; he was vaguely surprised that no one read his sin from his unhappy face, or that Piers should sleep so soundly that night while he lay awake and stricken with remorse.

  Early next morning he confessed, alone in the cold gloom of the chapel with kind old Father Paul, who was village priest and castle chaplain in one. A light burned on the altar, another by the door; in the white mist beyond the window slits the pigeons whirred, cooing as though appalled by this enormity of wrong.

  "Boy, I can see you are shaken by honest repentance," came the mild voice from above Juhel's head. "But do not magnify your sin to gratify your pride. The one id grievous enough without its giving rise to the other. Now you are in this danger – that having lost bodily innocence, you may next be tormented with lecheries of the eye and of the mind. If this befall you, seek cold water, and if you cannot bathe, the dip your head in wholly, saying inwardly an Ave and a Paternoster, and thinking of the corruption and stench that attend the brightest flesh in death…"

  Somehow Juhel felt that the old priest dismissed too lightly his yesterday's impulse toward murder. A miserable conviction shook him; surely he was accursed, whose desires were brutally commingled.

  "Is that also a vanity?" he wondered when he was alone. "Shall I gradually forget my horror, and in a month or two months seek her, or another, away in the quiet woods? I did not think Marckmont to be a place of peril."

  Place of peril or no for Juhel, it was now a place of moment to all the realm; for early on that morning had died King Rene in Huatarroy.

  At dusk of the same day three horsemen came full tilt up the road Olvay. A single clang of the alarm bell brought Count Raoul out above his castle gateway. Leaning between two merlons beside his lord, Juhel saw Barberghe red-and-black and felt his pulses quicken.

  "Who is he?" demanded the count.

  "The Chevalier de Medrincourt, my lord. He holds my own tower for my lord of Barberghe."

  Men at arms clustered below on the drawbridge; half-armoured De Medrincourt wasted no time in formality.

  "Bid your lord make ready!" he shouted. "Say to him from his friends: Down portcullis!"

  Then he was wheeling his mount on the cobbles below the castle mound; and with a wild clatter he rounded the nearest angle of the incline and was spurring along the causeway, followed by his two men. The racket of horses' hoofs waned and died in the excited stir below, and Raoul of Ger crossed himself.

  After a moment Juhel crossed himself also, realizing that King Rene was dead, and that this must be Gaston de Volsberghe's signal to strike for Conrad of Burias.

  The count turned to a rampart door as John Doust lumbered out of it. The Englishman's blue eyes twinkled, and he pursed up his slit of a mouth.

  " 'Down portcullis,'" he quoted jovially. "And stand from under," he added for himself. Then, Juhel being there, he spoke with more ceremony: "My lord, shall we begin?"

  "Yes, Captain," said Raoul of Ger, with the smile that had lately grown infrequent. "If further messengers find us at work, they must not pass northward. Since De Medrincourt asked for no change of horses, I suppose Gaston has set relays in the villages. Well, first for a muster of boats; the list is with Nino."

  In the last light the fishermen of Marckmont dragged their little vessels, of hollowed wood or wickerwork and hide, into a row along the sandy beach beneath the castle mound.

  "No man," commanded the count, "must use or take away his boat without leave from myself or from Captain John Doust."

  But his own two flat-bottomed hunting barges he set in charge of picked men-at-arms, and east and west from the causeway they began to patrol the marsh, each bearing peasants to row and archers and crossbowmen to enforce the injunction that none should traverse the main water. At the far end of the causeway six men watched all night by threes in the darkness; but the strip of shore at the near end, between the hold itself and the three tall poplars which stood above the cobbled road at the mere's edge, was clear as day with firelight and torchlight.

  Juhel and Piers, ordered to bed, fell asleep to a sound of hammering and knocking. When in the morning they awoke and peeked out, the causeway was already stoutly defended; on the masonry itself, a score of yards from land, stood a chevaux de frise of heavy timber, railed and chained to a framework of stout trestles, and presenting a northward bristle of iron spikes and jags. A few paces behind the chevaux de frise two rows of barrels, filled with sand and standing five abreast, were set between the low stone parapets, and buttressed and locked in place with logs and sacks of earth. Mantlets of wood and hide were being fastened in front of them, and planks nailed across their tops; there half a dozen archers could find room.

  More mantlets were set up along the sand, so that other archers in perfect safety could shoot obliquely along the flanks of the causeway; and as the sun came up a mangonel was wheeled from its lean-to shed in the gloomy courtyard and halted on the paved strip of ground between the priest's house and the water's edge.

  There, with its throwing lever like a great iron-bowled wooden spoon, the engine rested until every other defence was completed. Not until late in the afternoon did the sweating men cease from toil and stand to watch the trial shooting.

  The mangonel's crew strained at their levers; back and back leaned the tall spoon until it gaped at the cloudy sky. Then a round stone was placed in the bowl – "as though an archangel had laid an egg," said Nino Chiostra – and John Doust, standing on the causeway barricade where no one else dared go, waved a hand for the discharge.

  With a dull thudding impact the spoon sprang upright against the padded crossbar; the stone whizzed in a wicked curve toward the causeway. The Englishman's fair hair gleamed strawlike in the westering light as he turned his head. Juhel, staring from the ramparts, saw the stone skim the further parapet by a yard and strike the water with a mighty splash.

  "Well placed," roared John Doust down the rising wind. "Her tail six inches to your left, and try again."

  At the fourth shot a stony smack resounded; a multiple splash and a seration in the parapet proclaimed a hit, and a cheer went up that scared the wild duck from the reeds for two hundred yards each way.

  That night twin cressets burned on the marshward towers, with iron shields behind them that their flames might not dazzle the watchmen; and on the causeway itself an iron-screened brazier stood beyond the outermost defences, casting a flickering glow along the narrow way, filling the wind-whipped water beneath it with uneasy startings of reflected flame. from time to time a boat put out with fuel for its replenishment; then a steep-capped figure would swarm dimly up a ladder, and a shower of sparks would slant to perish out along the mere.

  Dawn came on with a spatter of blown rain; the smoke from cressets and chimneys flattened out and whirled amid the bending willows. Piers shook the sleeping Juhel's should, and Juhel awoke with a start, findin
g himself afraid. To-day he must help to confront, and maybe to withstand, Gaston de Volsberghe and Gaston's embattled host.

  It troubled Juhel not at all that his beloved master had betrayed and was now more actively to betray the traitorous lords who trusted in him; indeed, it amused him to know that Gaston de Volsberghe and the Count of Montcarneau were wasting a fifth of the rebel power by marching it down toward Belsaunt, believing Marckmont unguarded and the Count of Ger their friend.

  And again, although for a new reason, the boy found everything strange. Armour and gear, the simple furniture of his chamber, stood aloof from him; as for his leaders and comrades, they seemed of a different race. There was the Sieur Count, whistling, as he combed his thick brown hair and Captain John playing with two deerhound puppies while he waited t break his fast. Master Nino, yawning as Juhel unarmed him, turned aside, before he stumbled to bed, to scowl at his lump of rock crystal, which now began to take the shape of a stretching leopard. Grave Master Hubriton, the secretary, irked by an unfamiliar corselet, grinned at himself in a mirror before he sat in to the board. And Piers was content as usual, serving as deftly as though this war were a holiday.

  Juhel himself was dry in the mouth and scarcely able to eat. His fingers were thumbs for battle harness, but no one troubled to chide him. Up got the sun, out went the candles, down slid the broth and venison and wine…

  One of the barges moved away and landed two men at arms, with their horses, as scouts on the opposite shore; and all the morning scores of eyes scanned the well-known sandy spits, the swaying poplars and clumped lesser trees, beyond the brown expanse of reed-patched rippling water and beneath the dark foothills of the Forest of Nordanay.

  By Marckmont the windmill sails went creaking round, and the ox-drawn wains hauled home the last of the good hay. Swine grunted as they were driven out to near pasture; cowbells tinkled, and cocks crowed, behind the cottages and barns. Men listened to these sounds as thought they heard them for the first time, then forgot them as the sharp note of a horn from a turret was answered by the sombre boom of the gateway bell. Not for forty years had Markmont looked upon the face of war.

  "My helmet, Juhel," said Raoul of Ger.

  When that duty was accomplished a glad excitement shook the boy, so that he almost ran down the steep stair and out of the courtyard. Somewhere above him he heard Nino Chiostra bawling for Piers to arm him; men who had watched in the night were tumbling from their quarters. When Juhel reached the barricade John Doust was calmly posting the archers, while serfs, handling leathern buckets, drenched wood and hides and timber with water. With Gaston de Volsberghe you never knew; he might bring Greek fire on a wagon, or any other devilish invention.

  On the opposite shore the scouts were coaxing their horses on to the barge; one animal refused to board, and was dragged into the water by its bridle, thereafter swimming dutifully astern as the oars flashed and fell for safety.

  There came a stir and a sparkle amid the distant trees. Horsemen galloped out upon the sandy margin, their voices faint but clear as they hallooed to the unanswering crew of the returning barge. Presently half a score came pounding straight along the causeway, checking their gallop to a trot as they saw the obstacle before them, checking the trot to a walk as they took in the steel-clad shapes of count and captain on the barricade, the glittering caps of archers and pikemen, the crossbowmen behind the mantlets of the second barge, now moored to flank their approach – and last, the laden spoon of the mangonel reclining for its spring.

  At a distance of a hundred yards the leader of the group drew rein and barked an order. Immediately his men and he turned about and clattered back along their path; and now the sandy reaches behind them were alive with shifting spears. There was hurried conference at the far end of the causeway: then, at the head of a score of riders in full panoply of plate, there loomed along the stony track a mighty figure in gilded armour, astride a huge black horse. With gray eyes steady and cool beneath a lifted visor, Gaston de Volsberghe halted his troop and rode alone to the chevauz de frise.

  "In God's name, my lord," muttered an archer, "bid me let fly."

  "It were as well," counselled John Doust on the count's other side.

  But the count stood and waited, with his how visor cocked aloft; and above the mass of timber and pointed iron the leaders met and held each other's stare.

  "So Ger had chanced his mind?"

  The great bass voice boomed crisply, almost jovially, in the windy marshland silence; and rapidly the even tenor answered it.

  "Ger changes mind less easily than Volsberghe changes surcoat."

  For Gaston's short coat was not azure of his house, charged with its golden gryphon, but the sable of Hastain bearing the golden portcullis.

  "What of your bond, rat?"

  "Oy, let me split his face groaned the kneeling archer; but the count lifted a gauntleted hand in restraint, and Juhel, close behind him, heard his teeth snap shut before he replied.

  "What of your loyalty, you wolf?"

  "Then you refuse allegiance to our lord King Thorismund?" roared Gaston, his gaze leaving Raoul's to sweep the line of defence.

  "That trick is useless, De Volsberghe; for one here heard you plot his ruin in the Hotel de Ahun at Belsaunt."

  The eyes of the Sieur Gaston widened, narrowed, and grew terrible; for the first time the deep voice jarred on a note of fury.

  "Think on this day when I impale you, little wasp!"

  Then, clashing down his visor and featly whirling his destrier, the constable's son spurred back along the causeway in a hail of bolts and arrows that rang and bounced and turned aside against his plate of proof.

  John Doust bellowed; the crash of the mangonel came a second too soon, the great stone thudding between Gaston and his wheeling troop, to roll along the causeway in front of the black stallion until flying hoofs could overpass it.

  "Never mind," said the count to the downcast archer nearest him, "I warrant you have another chance before long."

  All afternoon there was smoke and movement on the opposite shore, and the patrols of Marckmont ranged a league to east and west, knowing the marshes impassable save by treachery. At sunset the cressets were augmented by six great fires along the edge of the main water, and men lay under arms in boats that passed with muffled oars amid the reeds and dangerous banks, watching and listening for any sign of an attempted crossing by hastily built rafts where the meres grew wider. Near the far end of the causeway twenty campfires twinkled, but at midnight Nino Chiostra took a small boat right across and landed to reconnoitre, returning the news that of a dozen spied upon, two only of the fires had men about them.

  "We have given the king another three days for the mincing of Barberghe," said Raoul of Ger.

  But Gaston de Volsberghe and Alain, Count of Montcarneau, had hurried northward with their horsemen, turned back the foot that followed, and hurled the whole fifteen thousand of them westward in a forced march over the wild moors of Nordanay. Near Hastain they fell like a cloud burst upon the king's own army, saving the pounded Barberghes and driving Thorismund back in retreat that was half a rout, on Rambard and Ververon and toward the loop of Varne, where the Inn of Harmony stood up amid the willow holts beneath the edge of the forest.

  Thitherward also, from the south, retreated Saulte and the castellan, with Conrad and the constable pressing after, commanding double their numbers. The burghers of Alanol joined the king as he fell back past Ververon; the burghers of Belsaunt joined Raoul of Ger, when at length he left his inviolate barony and marched to re-enforce the royal armies as the rebel pincers nipped them to a junction on the field of Pont-de-Foy.

  CHAPTER XII. PONT-DE-FOY

  Somehow it was nightfall. Juhel turned slowly, conscious of terror and despair and a great heaviness of body. Ahead the muddy road ran grayly into half darkness – yes, it had rained this side of Belsaunt – and behind, the puddles caught a weird gleam from the last opal bars of afterglow. There the trees moved hideously –
the goblin traitor trees; all the deepening dusk was full of the wrack of a routed army. Try as he might, Juhel could not remember one detail of manoeuvre; but he knew that his dear lord count was slain, with Saulte and the Castellan and many more – that the young king was taken and every hope destroyed. Master Nino Chiostra had shrieked and drowned in Varne; only Captain John Doust had somehow rallied a grim company, driving into the forest through swathes of rebel dead. Hubriton, the glum clerk, had halted to lean against a tree, and as he stared at Juhel his eyes grew blank and his mouth fell open.

  "Piers!" bleated Juhel, and remembered a heap, a nothing with a flattened skull, half hidden in long grass beneath the trampled falcon banner.

  "Why am I not dead too?" demanded Juhel, blubbering miserably in the twilight. "I am all alone – ah, who are you? Oh, just and holy God?"

  For sliding through the forest beside him he saw his own white face and faintly gleaming corselet.

  "It is time," said a great voice from the sky. Then he was gripped by an invisible hand, and all about him was smitten to murk shot with the colour of blood.

  His eyes were open before he awoke, but in a second or two the murk was resolved into the canvas wall of the count's tent, and the blood colour to the light of the campfire beating upon it from outside.

  "It is time," repeated Piers, moving aside so that candle-light from behind him dazzled the younger boy.

  Suddenly trumpets shrilled far off; Juhel sat up, his face wet with tears, his heart still sick and weighted with the burden of the evil dream.