The Legends of Camber of Culdi Trilogy

by Katherine Kurtz

  Bethane could hardly ignore such a gesture. Besides, she could smell the food. She found the bread soft and pale, so kind to old, jagged teeth and aching gums—bread such as she had not tasted since her youth, when she and Darrell first were wed. And the cheese—how he would have loved that!

  With sweet memory for companion, she settled on a sunny ledge just outside the cave to enjoy the last morsels, basking in the summer warmth. The faint murmur of the children still playing in the meadow, the coolish breeze, and the glow of a full stomach soon lulled her to drowsiness, and the old eyes closed. With her wedding ring cradled close beside her cheek, she drifted. She could almost imagine she was young again, her Darrell lying at her side.

  He had been a handsome man, perhaps the more so for being of the magical Deryni race, though she had been afraid of him at first. He had risked his life to save her from a life she still chose to forget. The love which had grown between them became a beacon for her soul, a positive focus for the knowledge which before had threatened to destroy her.

  He had taught her things, too—a magic beyond the ancient lore of midwifery and conjuring and divination handed down to her by her mother and mother’s mother. Though many of their methods had been similar, his powers had come from an elsewhere that she had never tapped; and she, in turn, had taught him how to bid the elemental forces—more homespun magic than the exalted theory and ceremony of the mysterious and much-feared Deryni, but it had worked as well, if in different ways. Together, they had dreamed of shaping a better world, where differences would not give others leave to kill. Perhaps their children would not need to live in fear, as they had done.

  But there were to be no children; none that lived, at any rate. Too soon had come a renewed wave of madness in their village, condoned and even encouraged by the local lord. Darrell, unknown to be Deryni by most of their acquaintances, had been a teacher of mathematics in nearby Grecotha. With several of his Deryni colleagues, he also had been tutoring young children of his race in secret, though it was a capital offense against the law of Ramos if they were caught. They had been betrayed. Agents of the local lord, all armored and ahorse, had raided the small farmhouse where the Deryni schola met and slain the teacher schooling them that day. More than twenty children were captured and driven like sheep into a brush-filled pen in the village square, for the lord’s man and the village priest meant to burn them as the heretics they surely were.

  She remembered the smell of the oil-soaked wood in the pen, as she and Darrell huddled in the crowd which gathered to see sentence carried out. She saw again the looks of dull terror on the faces of the children, most of them no older than the girl Bronwyn and her brother now playing across the meadow. Her stomach churned in revulsion as it had so many years ago, as a line of guards bearing torches marched out of a courtyard behind the square and took up stations around the captive children. The guard captain and the village priest followed, the captain bearing a scroll with pendant seals and cords. The crowd murmured like a wild animal aroused, but the cry was not of horror but anticipation. In all their number, there was no one to plead the cause of these terrified little ones.

  “Darrell, we have to do something!” she whispered in her husband’s ear. “We can’t just let them burn. What if our child were among them?”

  She was just seventeen, carrying their first child. Her husband’s voice was tinged with despair as he shook his head.

  “We are two. We can do nothing. They say the priest betrayed us. Even the confessional is not sacred where Deryni are concerned, it seems.”

  She bowed her head against his shoulder and covered one ear with a hand, trying to blot out the pious mouthings of priest and captain as holy words were spoken and writs of condemnation read. All pretense of legality and justice was but excuse for murder. The child she carried beneath her heart kicked, hard, and she cradled her arms across her abdomen as she began to sob, clinging to Darrell’s arm.

  Hoofbeats intruded then, and a disturbance behind them. She looked up to see a band of armed men forcing their horses through the crowd, more of them blocking the exits from the square—stern-looking horse-archers with little recurve bows, each with an arrow nocked to bowstring and more in quivers on their backs. At their head rode a fair-haired young man in emerald green, surely no older than herself. His eyes were like a forest in sunlight as he swept the crowd and urged his white stallion closer to the captain.

  “It’s Barrett! The young fool!” Darrell whispered, almost to himself. “Oh, my God, Barrett, don’t do it!”

  Barrett? she thought to herself. Is the man Deryni? “Let the children go, Tarleton,” the man named Barrett said. “Your master will not take kindly to children being slain in his name. Let them go.”

  Tarleton gazed back at him agog, his writ all but forgotten in one slack hand. “You have no authority here, Lord Barrett. These are my lord’s vassals—Deryni brats! The land will be well rid of them.”

  “I said, let them go,” Barrett repeated. “They can harm no one. How can these infants be heretics?”

  “All Deryni are heretics!” the priest shouted. “How dare you interfere with the work of the Holy Mother Church?”

  “Enough, priest,” Tarleton muttered. At his hand signal, the men holding the torches moved closer to the pen where the children huddled in terror, fire poised nearer the oil-soaked brush.

  “I warn you, Barrett, do not interfere,” Tarleton continued. “The law says that those who defy the law of Ramos must die. Whether it happens to these now or later makes no difference to me, but if they die now, you doom them to die without blessing, their Deryni souls unshriven. You cannot stop their deaths. You can only make it worse for them.”

  No one moved for several seconds, the two men measuring one another across the short distance which separated them. Bethane could feel her husband’s tension knotting and unknotting the muscles of his arm, and knew with a dull certainty which ached and grew that Barrett was not going to back down. The young lord glanced behind him at his men stationed all around, then dropped the reins on his horse’s neck.

  “I never have liked the law of Ramos,” he said in a clear voice, casually raising both hands to head-level, as though in supplication.

  Instantly he was surrounded by a vivid emerald fire which was visible even in the sunlit square. The gasp of reaction swept through the crowd like a winter wind, chill and fearsome. Tarleton reddened, and the village priest shrank back behind him, crossing himself furtively.

  “By my own powers, which are everything those children have not realized, you shall not have those lives,” Barrett stated. “This I swear. I can stop you with my powers, if I must, and save at least a few, but many others are likely to die who do not deserve such fate.”

  The crowd was beginning to look around uneasily for an escape, but Barrett’s men had closed the perimeter even more tightly, guarding all exits from the square. There was no place to go.

  “I give you this choice, however,” Barrett continued, raising his voice above the rising murmur of dismay. “Release the children, allow my men to take them away to safety, and I will give myself into your hands as their ransom. Which will please your lord more? A handful of untrained children, who can do no harm to anyone? Or someone like myself, fully trained and able to wreak havoc any time I choose?—though I would not do so willingly, despite what I know you are thinking.”

  In the rising panic around them, no one heard Darrell’s choked, “No!” except Bethane. Tarleton let the crowd seethe and mutter for several seconds, then held up a hand for silence. He was obviously unnerved by Barrett’s implication that he was reading minds, but he put up a brave front, nonetheless. Gradually the crowd noises died down.

  “So, the aristocratic Lord Barrett de Laney is a Deryni heretic himself,” the captain said. “My lord was right not to trust you.”

  “Your lord must wrestle with his own conscience in the dark, early morning hours and answer for his own actions at the day of reckoning,” Barret
t replied.

  “A prize, indeed,” Tarleton continued, as though he had not heard. “But, how do I know that you would keep your part of the bargain? What good is the word of a Deryni?”

  “What good is any man’s word?” Barrett returned. “Mine has been my bond for as long as anyone has known me. I give you my word that if you allow my men to take these children out of here, I will surrender myself into your hands and I will not use my powers to resist you. My word on that. My life for the lives of those children. I am able to face my God on those terms.”

  “You must be mad!” Tarleton replied, a menacing grin beginning to crease his face. “But I accept your terms. Guards, allow His Lordship’s men to take the children. Archers, train your arrows on my Lord Barrett and see that he keeps his Deryni word. I have never heard that magic could stop a flight of arrows.” A half-dozen archers stepped from their vantage points on the roof to either side of Tarleton and covered the new hostage. The other guards murmured among themselves, but they obeyed, moving away from the pen to surround Barrett, though they would not approach too closely with the green fire of his magic still flaring close about him. Methodically, Barrett’s men rode in one at a time and took the children up in front of them, one to each man, until the pen was empty and the last double-mounted horse had disappeared at a gallop down the main street. Four men remained, arrows still nocked to their little recurve bows. One of them saluted Barrett smartly.

  “Sir, your orders will be carried out.”

  Barrett gave a quiet nod. “I thank you for your service and release you from all other orders. Go now.”

  The four bowed over their saddlebows, then wheeled as one and galloped off the way the others had gone. When the clatter of steel-shod hooves had died away, Barrett swung down from his horse and began walking slowly toward Tarleton. The crowd parted before him, even Tarleton and the priest backing off a few steps. When he had approached to within a few feet of them, he stopped and bowed his head. The fire died around him, and with his left hand he drew his sword hilt-first and extended it to Tarleton.

  “I keep my word, Captain,” he said, eyes blazing at the other man.

  Tarleton gingerly took the weapon and moved back a pace, and instantly half a dozen of his men were moving in to grasp Bennett’s arms and bind him.

  “His eyes!” the priest hissed. “Evil! Evil! Beware his eyes, my lord!”

  As the crowd took up the cry, Tarleton gestured curtly to his men and turned to lead them back into the yard. Barrett held his head high, but he stumbled as the guards manhandled him away from the crowd. Old Bethane shook her head in her quasi-dream, resisting the continued memory; but it continued to play itself out before her closed eyes, and she could not seem to open them and stop it.

  In the yard beyond the square lay a blacksmith’s shop, and just outside the shop, clearly visible from where she and Darrell watched in horror, a brazier held various implements of red-hot iron. To this place the guards of Tarleton led their captive, one of them pausing to pluck a glowing bar of iron carefully from the fire. Then the captive was hidden behind the ring of soldiers which closed in for his torture.

  She did not see them blind him, though she knew that it was done. His scream echoed through the square, making her stomach cramp and the child move in her womb. Even as she was squeezing her eyes shut and trying to stop her ears against ever more agonized screams, Darrell was leaning close and pulling a hand away, speaking in a stern, urgent voice.

  “I gave no word! I’m going after him. If I can get him out, I’ll take him to Saint Luke’s. Meet me there. God keep you, dearest.”

  And then, before she could hold him, he was gone, slipping through the crowd and vaulting onto Barrett’s horse, the golden fire of his glorious shields blazing up around him as he and the snow-white stallion surged through the crowd and into the yard beyond.

  Magic flared, shouts and screams choked off in mid-breath, and the crowd began to panic, pushing away through every exit from the square in mindless stampede. Bethane felt herself carried on their tide whether she willed or no, away from the yard, away from Darrell, and she wept, she raged.

  She caught just a glimpse of his horse in the entry to the yard, rearing and screaming and lashing out with battle-trained hooves—and a limp, bloodied form slung across the saddle in front of her husband.

  Then the rest of Tarleton’s men were pressing close around him, he was breaking away, and the archers were firing at him as he spurred the stallion toward a street on the other side of the square, people falling beneath the hooves and the archers’ arrows.

  The screams of those around her sent bolts of terror shafting through her mind like the arrows of the soldiers, and she was running with them and screaming and—

  Other screams broke through her consciousness, and she sat up groggily to see the child Bronwyn running toward her across the meadow, shrieking at the top of her voice.

  “Grand-dame! Grand-dame! Come quickly. My brother’s hurt! Oh, come quickly!”

  As Bethane struggled to her feet with the aid of her staff, she could see two of the boys bent over the third, far across the meadow. The child was coming far too fast to stop, and nearly knocked her down as she flung her arms around the old woman’s waist.

  “Oh, come quickly, please, grand-dame. He’s hurt! I think his arm is broken!”

  She did not want to go. These children were nothing to her but nuisance. But something in the little girl’s frantic entreaty reminded her of those other little faces in that long-ago village square, so she fetched her satchel of bandages and healing herbs and hobbled down the rocky hillside, the child tugging at her free hand all the while and urging her to hurry faster, faster.

  The others looked up as she approached, the young McLain boy standing almost protectively. It was the blond one who lay on the ground struggling to breathe. The split branch dangling from a high limb overhead told most of the story. A glance at the odd angle of the boy’s right arm told the rest. Kevin, the young earl, had had the foresight to slit the boy’s sleeve from wrist to shoulder, but the arm thus exposed was already purpling along the bulge of the broken angle. The boy himself was conscious, but breathing raggedly. The fall must have knocked the wind out of him, as well as breaking his arm. At least she could see no blood. That was usually a good sign.

  “Well, let’s have a look,” she said gruffly, heaving herself to her knees at the boy’s right and laying aside her satchel. “Can you feel this?”

  As she touched the arm above and below the angle of the break, he winced and nodded, but he did not cry out. She tried not to hurt him more, but his face went dead-white several times as she went about the business of assessing the damage.

  “Both bones are snapped clean through,” she said, when she had finished her appraisal. “It won’t be easy to set, or pleasant.” She looked across at Kevin. “I can tend it, but you’d best get back to your father’s and bring men with a litter. Once it’s been set, it mustn’t be allowed to shift before it’s had time to knit a little.”

  The young earl’s face was pale, but a touch of the old arrogance still lingered in the clear blue eyes. “It’s his sword arm, grand-dame,” he said pointedly. “Are you sure you can set it properly? Shouldn’t I fetch my father’s battle-surgeon?”

  “Not if you want it to heal straight,” she replied with a contemptuous toss of her head. “Most battle-surgeons would just as soon as cut it off. It’s a bad break. The wrong manipulation, and the bone could pierce the skin—and then be would have to lose the arm. I know what I’m doing. Now go!”

  The arrogance was gone. With a sincere and now thoroughly chastened nod of agreement, Kevin scrambled onto his pony and headed off at a gallop. Bethane sent the other two children to find wood for splints, then settled down cross-legged to resume her examination of the broken arm. The boy’s breathing had eased, but he still sucked in breath between clenched teeth when her fingers came anywhere near the area of the break. He would need a painkiller before s
he could do much more.

  She pulled her satchel closer and began rummaging inside for the appropriate drugs and herbs, glancing at the boy from time to time through slitted eyes. She left her selection to intuition and was astonished to see that one of the pouches she had withdrawn contained a deadly poison.

  Now why? she thought, staring at the pouch and trying to ken a reason. ’Tis but a boy, no enemy, no— Sweet gods and elemental lords! The boy was Deryni!

  All in a rush, the old bitterness came flooding back: Darrell dying in her arms with the archers’ arrows in his back; dying because he had felt compelled to try to save his Deryni comrade; dying because of those Deryni children.

  And their own child, stillborn in the awful after-anguish following Darrell’s death; and then, a long, long time that she lay sick and despondent at Saint Luke’s, not caring if she lived or died, and something had snapped inside, never to be mended …

  Darrell …

  A choked sob welled in her throat, the tears spilling down her weathered cheeks as she pressed the pouch to her withered breasts.

  Deryni children had cost Darrell his life. For Deryni children, he had taken the archers’ arrows and died. Now another Deryni child lay in her power, helpless to defend himself from her just vengeance. Could she not have just this one life in exchange for her love’s? She reached behind her for one of the cups the children had left after their meal. The first was empty, but the second still contained two fingers’ worth—enough to serve her purpose. The boy’s eyes were closed, so he did not see her pour the measured dose from pouch to cup, or stir the greyish powder with a handy twig. She might have administered the killing draught without a qualm, had not the boy opened his eyes as she raised his head.