Next he looked angrily round, for it seemed as though Dodart and Ingolard spoke of him, softly and near at hand. But nothing was there beneath the oaks – nothing, not even a chattering squirrel or any kind of bird.
Joris sword and headed southward, talking to himself aloud lest he hear those mocking voices again; but three days passed before they ceased to trouble him.
* * * *
A nun, gray-robed, with huge starched coif of spotless white, bore an empty basket through a beech wood on the wide estate of the great convent of Vautrem. She had taken alms to the squalid village where lived the convent serfs, and now, in the last light, she picked her way with bent head amid moss and beech mast and the gray roots splashed with sunset gold.
She was sturdily built, and valiant apart from any confidence in her cloth; for when she saw the ragged scarecrow stealing upon her between the trees she paused and tuned to take a step toward him. And her blue eyes, set widely in a worn but still enchanting face, focussed with directness startling as a squint.
"Why, Joris," she exclaimed, her deep voice muted with caution, "I heard you were slain three days gone by; each night and morning since I prayed for your soul – but your body is not safe here!"
Joris leaned against a tree and bent a wolfish glare upon her. His mind reeled to the shock of encounter, but past brooding quickened his speech.
"And think you that yours is safe here?" he demanded, grinning with rage.
"Safe as anywhere else," returned the noon, drooping her basket in front of her.
Her gray sleeve, caught up on the wickerwork handle, revealed the end of a ghastly weal on one strong cream-white forearm. Joris felt his eyes swell and heard himself utter a groan; Herodias at Hastain had become Diana in the deep forest, and now was changed again to Magdalen at Vautrem.
"You – you–" he stammered, and then achieved a difficult control of his astonished wrath, and took a stride toward her.
"So Thorismund hid you here when he turned you out of his bed? How long was it before he tired, that royal rider of so many shapely mares?"
"Avaunt your foulness and folly," said she who had been Red Anne. "The prince had nothing of me, save that he wept in my arms from weakness and shame of his sins; and I had nothing of him save entry into the convent and a shortened term of novitiate. Believe it or no, Joris; I swear it on my rosary."
She loosed the basket with one hand, and caught at beads and crucifix. And there was that gesture, in the strange and implacable gentleness of her vivid fearless face, which twisted the outlaw's heart to belief and brought him a crippling pang of despair. For all his pride in evil living, all dark self-righteousness of men for whom the world was made, could not reconcile Joris to sight of another's escape out of wickedness by a path hidden from his own understanding.
"And what – what wrought this change in you, whose bully was Grand Master of the Covens of Nordanay, whose lovers were Lorin de Campscapel and Joris of the Rock?"
"Maybe I had played long enough at being a man, who in the end am only a barren woman. And remember, I too had a prophecy – a prophecy no less strange than your runes."
"You knew my runes were a sham?"
"I knew they were told in Hastain when I was a child; I knew they are told again since Pont-de-Foy. You had the truth of them; let Thorismund have his. But how can I tell you what befell me, before I passed into the shadows of the Hill with its three Trees? Lys had her share in it, and Ivo who died for him, and Thorismund himself, who in his deadly sickness forgot all light loves and cried only upon his mother – ay, in his raving he took me for herself."
"You have hair much of a colour, you and he and Judas Iscariot. But it is true I shall not be edified to learn the manner of your conversation. What to do you think to do in the convent there?"
"Work, and fast, and pray for a measure of forgiveness. It is true my offerings are damnable, but all damnation is not so deep as the mercy of that central Tree. And if the Anne you know still fights, and is conquered by inches only, be sure that the peace I sometimes grasp is a more fearful thing to know than all delight of body and mind."
"Ha! There spoke Red Anne indeed, who having squeezed both earth and hell, takes Paradise in greedy hands and will have the last of that also! You would be abbess, would you not?"
"No, Joris. Henceforth I school myself to obey the word of others to my life's end."
She stood gravely before him, looking steadily into his eyes. The great white headdress dusked her face. The stiff linen cupped her strong round chin, the gray robe hid the gracious body whose curves his hand once knew as it knew the hilt of his own sword.
"To your life's end, hey?" he rasped, with all the serf's blood in him curdled to venom. "That schooling should not be too hard. I pass your betrayal of our old companionship, for at least you led no foremen to my Rock. But I for eighteen years have had no benefit of clergy, and never shall Holy Church have any gift of me. If she be the Bride of Christ on earth, she shall lack to-night a gem of her arrayment – a tarnished gem, I grant you but one she will mourn to lose."
With that, and wilder comment beside, he tore his blade from its scabbard. If Anne prayed, her prayer was silent; she did not even drop her basket, but lifted her chin a little, and almost began to smile.
"I wear a corselet of penance," she warned him; and that was the last thing she said. Indeed, the iron thrust and for a moment her eyes daunted him; but hardship and loss, and corruption of power, whipped up the wolf whose dearest lust was only to destroy.
Presently very few could have told that even the uncoifed hair was Anne's, for it had been trimmed like a boy's, and moreover was streaked with gray. The vesper chime stole out across the fields, staying the hand of Joris to loosen a tongue that gibbered a moment before he could command it.
"You will be late!" he snarled – and turned and blundered away between the beeches that struck at him as he passed, toward the westward shapes of cloud that dabbled beastlike in the lifeblood of the sun.
* * * *
It was true believed Joris dead. A tall rogue late of his company, with beard and colour not unlike his own, had been trapped in a burning hut near Santloy. Between the fire and the fallen ridge beam, the fellow's head was charred and flattened beyond recognition; but most of Ger's army were heartily sick of that prolongation of arduous service, and no one grudged the men who claimed it their share of the king's reward.
So Joris lay for two more days more half crazed and very hungry in the woods near Ververon, and watched his former pursuers march up or down the roads toward their homes. When he ventured forth the country seemed empty; he robbed a forester's hut of food and pressed southward toward Pont-de-Foy.
He came out on the river bank in a misty mild-morning when pale sunlight began to find the first yellows of September foliage. Varne rippled beneath the willows, banding the dim woods with a curve of brown and silver; fifty yards away from silent-stepping Joris, a young stag glided into the water, dipping an antlered head to its blurred reflection, drinking swiftly but placidly, and finally turning to regain the bank and vanish like a ghost.
The outlaw examined the ford's approaches, and found no recent footprints of man or beast. The white of broken branches was dimmed; the bracken and grasses had repaired the trampling havoc of Ger's passage in the previous June. Joris had been prepared to wait until dusk and swim for it, but his secret seemed his own for the day; nothing stirred on the opposite bank, that cleared a little as he watched it.
Presently he was up to his armpits, grimacing at the chill of the stream, prodding with his sword point to hold to the narrow way. His late killings had ceased to trouble him; given respite from fatigue and hunger, Joris was always able to find ease in doing the next thing. He had long ago wrested a trick of religion to simplify his problem of conduct; he had not so much forgotten God as become a god to himself. That any within his power should dare withstand him seemed to him almost blasphemous. True, there were shreds of a mad misery floating about in
his mind, but freedom of action and stress of river passage combined to restore a gleam of bleak contentment to the haggard aquiline face that moved slowly forward above the whispering tide.
At length he was climbing the sandy margin of the southern bank of the river. His clothing clung and gleamed and dripped; his naked sword, that was slightly oiled, shed a shining slackening succession of fat drops beside the firm damp imprint of his striding brogues; and there were now ten nicks upon the hilt of horn.
On the brow of the first slope, when his footfall crackled among pine needles, he halted and turned and shook his glittering blade at the shore he had abandoned.
"Hey, by the chimes of hell," he laughed, "I have fooled the armoured lot of the."
A sound fell on his quick ear, and he spun round on his heel. A dark boy, bow in hand with a black gerfalcon on his yellow tunic, was trotting a pretty chestnut nag toward him between the sun-kissed trunks of the pines.
* * * *
"Behind I heave for Hautarroy," had said the Count Raoul, "I will set in train at Pont-de-Foy the building of a chantry chapel for John Doust."
A monk from the Priory of Dor, a famous architect, rode south with the count of Angmer, and lodged there in the inn with him, talking little but sketching a lot. So that Juhel found black lead and paper once more at hand, and knew a reawakening of that deep satisfaction n drawing which he had almost forgotten. Each day he rode past the blackened ruins of the Inn of Harmony, whose master had lately thriven for all that he lived in his own stable that had escaped the fire; and by learning the ground of the great battle and going over in his mind the many stories he had heard from men who fought in the left and centre, Juhel made many crude pictures, some of which he gave to the count's secretary Hubriton – who oiled them cunningly to fix the smudgy lead and pasted them into his chronicle which Juhel loved to read.
The boy was now legal ward to Raoul of Ger, and once, during that late summer's work of ranging through the hills, he had ridden to his own Tower of Ath with the gray-headed chevalier whom the count had sent as seneschal until Juhel should be of age. That day Juhel was very silent; he looked askance on his serfs, and they on him. When the seneschal and he came together to the gloomy little chapel, Juhel asked to be left alone; and there for a long time he knelt and prayed, or simply listened to the wind that sang quietly in the worn stone. The future, not the past, oppressed the latest Sieur de Ath; his overlord would be Ger, not Barberghe, but the thought of his own wide powers-to-be brought anything but pleasure. He had no desire to command men, or to obey any lord because he was a lord; he wanted somehow to live to himself, with employment peculiar to his own hands, and without the disturbances raised by women.
He was glad to leave Ger that last time, and more glad to leave his domain of Ath; but at Angmer he found a deeper content than any he had known since Piers fell. Raoul of Ger, and Nino Chiostra, and Hubriton the secretary, and Com Blaise the architect of Dor were each of them men to be served with respect and listened to with pleasure. And on the day before their intended departure Juhel rode westward along the river bank to revisit the scene of that last gallop before the holding of Pont-de-Foy.
His bow he took from habit, and a pheasant hung at his saddlebow before he wheeled the chestnut for return. Sitting motionless among the pines, he stared awhile at the ford, meaning to make a drawing that night of the crossing he remembered. And so he saw the solitary figure whose beard shone faintly in the sunlight.
"Some forester of the Duke of Saulte's," he reflected, watching the slow-moving head and shoulders with their attendant ripple. Then: "Saints, but he is tall. Too ragged for a Saulte man. Besides, he bears no badge. Now, is he an outlaw, so far escaped and chancing the unlikeliest way for any of his kind? I think I had better see him close at hand.
"And I wish I were not alone. But it cannot be helped."
He flicked an arrow from his quiver, gripped it against the bowshaft with a doubled forefinger, and jogged sturdily forward to do his duty.
* * * *
"Stand, fellow!" he called. "Tell me, who are you?"
Joris regarded him and his bow and judged it best to dissemble; here at least was a horse, and no other rider in sight. Juhel observed one great red hand tip the last water from a leathern scabbard, while the other swung a long blade into place and drove it home. The matted gray-and-gold head came up; Juhel drew rein and gasped to see the red-rimmed heavy-lidded eyes, the weathered savage face and tangled beard.
"Dietrich Halbern!" he cried sharply. "I know you – you are Joris of the Rock!"
He dropped rain and bent his bow. Joris laughed and tore out his dagger, dodging aside amid the pine trunks to leap diagonally forward. His aim was at once to frighten the horse, to keep its head in the rider's way, and to lessen the twenty yards between them for surety of a throw. But the brown-eyed boy with the sunburned face was not to be fooled that way; he danced his mount on its white-stockinged legs, but his sighting and hands were steady.
The fierce twang, the streaking shaft, the splitting lancing pain as he sprang, were all one to Joris; ducking to let the arrow pass over, he met it, and stumbled on his face, with the feathered butt sticking out of the hollow behind and above his right collar bone.
Stamping of hoofs as he rolled in the pine needles, stamping of spurred boots as he wrenched himself up on one hand. The boy was running upon him with a short sword lifted high; there was still time to grope for the dagger and fling it left-handed, but the silver hilt clashed flatly against the trunk of a tree.
On his knees, with half-drawn blade, Joris suffered the first of a rain of clumsy blows. He leaned backward, shielding his face, and felt a breaking in the breast even as screamed words reached his consciousness.
"I am Juhel de Ath, you dog! That for my kinswoman Tiphaine – and that for Captain John Doust – and that – and that – and that for every other foul crime of your whole filthy life!"
Lying flat on his back now, the groaning Joris opened his eyes; he was still, as it were surprised that this should have happened to him, and although his life ran redly he still had skill to remember Tiphaine. And Juhel lowered his point, struck still with fascination to see beneath the heavy eyelids a flame of hideous and unconquered glee.
Joris lifted a maimed and wavering paw; if God had played this trick on Joris, there was still a trick to play on the lad. With his last breath he still could blast – as Rufin once had striven to blast – the life and fortune of his slayer.
But when he tried to speak he could not, for his mouth was full of blood. To Juhel the pale staring eyes lost glee and took on agony and horror; Joris spat and choked and spat again, clutching his great chest and writhing, bowing his crimsoned head in a last feral effort to spur his voice at will.
Dodart and Ingolard knew, and he had slain them both. Not the Church with its ban, or Red Anne with her treachery, or Raoul of Ger with ten thousand men and fire and famine to help him, could have brought this end upon Joris if he had not helped them to it. A spark of pride in grim achievement glowed in his head and was gone; power left his limbs, and the boy's face faded in a mist that whirled from red through brown to billowing blackness. Lungs and windpipe fused in a column of frantic pain, yet a trickle of breath obeyed him, and he spent it before he knew.
"God knows," he gurgled, and began to choke again. Blinding lights burst in the blackness, and a far-off booming shook the void. God knew; and the last thought of Joris was that he heard the laughter of God.
* * * *
"Ten thousand little fleeting devils!" cried Nino Chiostra from his saddle. "Lad, you have made a mess of him. Who in the name of–"
"This is the real Joris of the Rock," said the boy, lifting a white and wretched face. "I shot him down with the arrow, and then – and then – he was nearly helpless – and–"
"Ay," cut in the Tuscan crisply. "I know how it feels the first time."
"This is the last time too," muttered Juhel between clenched teeth; and turning about he swun
g his wet sword back and hurled it hard and high into the air. Twirling lazily as it fell, the weapon splashed in the waters of Varne; and Nino got to the ground.
"I never saw Joris but once," said Nino, "and then he was running away. But no doubt you are right, and my lord Count will confirm your judgement. Finish what you began, boy; off with his villainous head. The reward is given in error, but I doubt not you will reap another. Why did you throw your sword away? Here, take mine – or his own."
"I will not touch him again," muttered Juhel sulkily.
"Well, I must see you righted," said Nino with tranquil amusement; and stepping forward, he hacked off the wolf's head and cut a piece of the outlaw's sopping cloak to carry the grisly prize.
Juhel watched him oddly, with colour coming back into his face; and when the Tuscan had cleansed his sword and picked up the uncomely burden, the boy moved and spoke.
"Chevalier Nino."
"Hey?"
"You – you have taken the head of Joris. Will you take upon you my slaying of him, too? I want no credit or reward – whereas if you – if my lord – if the king hear that you had done it–"
"Well?"
"There – there is a matter in which I – we, all who know you – wish you great fortune, and would – would do what little we can to – to help–"
"Juhel, dear knave, have done. I would have given much to be the slayer of Joris, but think you, even for that other matter, I could accept such a fantastic gift of fame? And Juhel, keep you this secret, for now it rests only between my lord count and Hubriton and you and myself. This morning, after you were gone, a post rode in from Hautarroy. When I had read one letter, I took a horse to cool my blood a little, and that is how I am here."
Joris of the Rock [The Neustrian Cycle, Book II] (Forgotten Fantasy Library) Page 31