The Enchanter General 03 - Merlin Redux

by Dave Duncan

  Richard summoned the innkeeper, who understood some French, and demanded to know the name and style of the lord who owned the castle. He was told that it was Count Engelbert of Gorz.

  “Then summon a strong lad to carry this message to the noble count, and tell him that Hugo the merchant and his companions seek hospitality this night in the name of God.” Whereupon he handed the man a purse.

  “Aye, my lord, I shall send my son, who is both strong and honest.”

  After that everyone settled down to drink while the drink lasted and eat whatever the man’s wife and daughters could cook as soon as they produced it.

  I suppose it was near to an hour later that the fevered seer in the corner suddenly opened blank eyes and croaked, “My liege!” Whispered calls for silence spread out through the crowd like ripples on a pond. And again I croaked, “My liege!”

  The king said, “What do you see?”

  “It was too much! That ring was too rich a gift. He has guessed who sent it.”

  I vaguely remember farseeing the swarthy count with the shaven chin and thin moustache. I remember him frowning as he opened the purse and gazing in wonder at the ruby ring he took from it. In what language he spoke, I do not know, but old Myrddin Wyllt understood for me.

  “No mere merchant sent this! Describe this man!”

  The stammering, cringing youth described the red-bearded giant he had left back in the inn.

  “Only a king would own such a treasure, and I know of only one king who might venture into these parts, and only because he is returning from the crusade. The emperor himself ordered me to arrest him, but I will not break the Truce of God. Give him back his gift and bid him God speed.”

  As soon as I had quoted Engelbert’s reaction, I stopped talking and went back to sleep. To provide hospitality to travelers, especially pilgrims and crusaders, is any Christian’s sacred duty, but Engelbert was being unusually devout in defying orders to the contrary from his liege. Every other landowner from there to Barcelona must have received such orders also, and few would have made the choice he had. On the other hand, given Richard’s fearsome reputation as a warrior, Engelbert might reasonably have declined to rally his own small troop of knights and send them down to seize the royal fugitive by force. Would he clear his conscience by sending word of this encounter on ahead to higher authority, so that a larger force could be arrayed in ambush?

  We did not tarry to find out. I was later told that nobody, not even our highly skeptical Father Anselm, suggested that my farseeing should be ignored. In a mad rush, everyone wrapped up again and went out to saddle the poor tired horses. Unfortunately, someone remembered to fetch me.

  The rain had stopped, the sky was icily clear, and the moon was at, or very close to, the full, and eastward its light glittered on icy peaks. We rode off into the forest again, heading northwest. I remember even less of the ensuing day than of the one before. I do recall being fevered and very hungry, for that bleak land held few inhabitants, and those few had little spare food to sell. I remember cursing Myrddin Wyllt root and branch. Late in the day we reached another town, Udine, but news of our coming had preceded us.

  A castle on a hill overlooked the town, of course, but Richard now knew better than to seek hospitality in castles.

  We found an inn, a larger place than the previous night’s, and the landlord was happy to board such a large company this late in the year. Our horses were in worse condition than their riders, for they had been given little time to graze, so the king distributed money and sent men off to acquire as many fresh mounts as possible before curfew sent everyone home to bed. They wanted to take me along as interpreter, but I refused and the king forbade me to go anyway. He, being of memorable stature, wanted to stay out of sight, and no doubt he also wanted to keep his eye on me in case I began raving again. I remember the two of us in a dim room, on either side of a crackling fire. We were both feverish and exhausted. I had the uneasy sensation that he was using me as a guard dog, relying on me to bark prophecies whenever danger threatened.

  There were others present, of course, guarding their liege. I was the only one not armed, but I did not feel strong enough to lift a sword, let alone swing one. My head ached, my throat burned. I floated in and out of consciousness—yet once I roused myself slightly, forced my eyes to focus on Richard, and muttered, “Lord, where is Argentan?”

  Richard’s gaze flickered, for he never took well to being questioned. “A small town in Normandy. I remember family Christmases there, when I was a child.” He probably then asked why I had asked, but I doubt if I replied.

  Morning came, and a grubby, hungry rabble of fugitives roused themselves to gulp down a wine and rye bread snack. At best we faced more days of backbreaking travel, at worst early graves.

  Suddenly the mood changed. The landlord appeared, bowing to Richard and presenting a well-dressed young man. “A gentleman wishing to speak with you, Goodman Hugo.”

  He withdrew, but the newcomer just stood there, staring in shock at the king as if he knew him. Hands slid to sword hilts. Even I roused myself from my stupor.

  “What can I do for you, fine sir?” asked the fake Hugo.

  “I . . . I was told to look for . . . if it please, you, sir, I am Sir Roger of Argentan.”

  The group of locals at the far end of the room were watching and listening, for they must sense the tension, although they probably could not understand the French being spoken—the unmistakable Norse-adulterated French of Normandy. The king glanced at me and then back to the intruder. “God be with you, Sir Roger, but you have yet to tell me how I may serve you.” He was a terrible actor, his tone completely lacking the humility of a merchant addressing a knight. He should be up and bowing, or else down and kneeling.

  “I was told to inspect the inns in town to look for a man going by the name of Hugo, calling himself a merchant.”

  “Then you have found him.”

  Roger shook his head. He glanced at the angry glares surrounding him and whispered, “I think not, my lord. I was only a child, and you did not have that beard . . .”

  “Who,” asked the king, “told you to look for me?”

  “My liege,” Roger said, as if that must be obvious. “Count Meinhard, my wife’s uncle. He is also the brother-in-law of Count Engelbert of Gorz, who sent word that . . .” Sensing the sudden upsurge of rage, he stopped.

  I felt a stab of despair, but the Lionheart would not despair if his head were on an executioner’s block. “You are mistaken, Sir Roger of Argentan!” No merchant would speak to a knight like that, clasping his sword hilt so menacingly.

  Roger seemed close to tears. “I sang for you, Your Grace. In the choir . . . at Christmas.”

  Obviously, pretense was not going to work. Richard released his sword. “And now you will go back up to that castle and sing about me, instead of for me?”

  “No, no! My lord I know who you are, and my family has served yours for untold generations, ever since Duke Robert. I will not betray you, but the word is out, Your Grace, the word that you are in town! I do beseech you not to tarry here.”

  Richard nodded and gave up the merchant pretense in favor of regal charm. “I must know of your family? Name some of them!”

  Roger nodded eagerly and named two grandfathers and a great-uncle. Truthfully or not, Richard said he remembered them and named some of their campaigns. Greatly relieved, Roger even offered to give up his own horse, but the king declined the gift tactfully. Roger went on his way, swearing in the name of Our Lady of Rouen that he would not betray him.

  The moment he was gone, the king turned to me. “Well?” For once I just closed my eyes and summoned a vision. It was gone in a flash, but I had seen and heard enough. “Not at all well, sire. He will try, but he is a bad liar. Count Meinhard will not believe him. You should leave town while you can.”

  I wanted to scream at the thought of another winter day on horseback, but surely anything must be better than an Austrian jail. I went back to
sleep while I had the chance. Perhaps I still hoped that I would be overlooked and left behind, but alas, I was the king’s seer, and too valuable to abandon. I was even given a fresh horse, for the scouting party had managed to acquire around ten new mounts, and Richard now split us into two groups. Most of the best fighters were left with the exhausted beasts who had brought us from Aquileia, and they perforce lagged behind as a rearguard. The rest of us pushed on into the forest.

  Count Meinhard dispatched the knights of his militia after us, and inevitably they caught up with the laggards. In the forest gloom they may have failed to notice that Richard was not present, but in any case, the king’s men were not about to let the locals past, so there was a battle. Men were captured, wounded, or killed. I never learned the exact tally. They had done their duty and the Lionheart had escaped again.

  After some hours that felt like the years of Methuselah, I disgraced myself by going to sleep and falling out of the saddle. Luckily, I broke no bones. After that, either William Legier or Conon de Béthune—or, when the road was wide enough, both of them—rode alongside, ready to catch me if I tried it again. If this sounds as if I were a soft-boiled, feeble, good-for-nothing unfit for such manly pursuits, that is exactly how I felt at the time. I was not the only one with fever by then—the king, especially, was suffering, perhaps in a relapse of a relapse of his serious sickness in Haifa. My only excuse, although I refused to mention it and no one else did, was that I was close to fifty. Richard was thirty-five, and very few of the others were older than he was.

  The brief day ended but we pushed on by moonlight. Late in the night we found ourselves following an old Roman road, wide and straight. Like all such ancient highways it was in higgledy-piggledy condition, barely passable for long stretches, separated by patches of what it once had been, smooth and wide enough for four or five men to ride abreast. And after a while, the shade of Myrddin Wyllt came to our rescue. I have no memory of it myself, but I was told later that I suddenly pointed off to the right and declaimed, “Behold shelter and safe haven in the care of holy St. Gall!” If this is true and not just a joke made up later to tease the old man, I did it in my sleep.

  Word was passed to the king and, sure enough, a track angled off to wind up the hillside. It was a steep climb, but we came at last to the Benedictine Monastery of San Gallo. We found the monks awake, having just completed their office of Lauds. I do have clear memories of Abbot Pio, tall and stark like a frosted pine tree, with an incongruous smile on his craggy face.

  “All travelers are welcome, my lords, and especially those who have striven against the heathens in holy places. You may rest safe here in the Truce of God.” He was telling us that Duke Leopold’s warrant had been proclaimed even there, but he was going to ignore it.

  He was as good as his word. The beds were hard but clean and the food plain but plentiful. We ate, slept, and prayed with the brethren. One of the novices found a stick with a branch that would make a handle, and shaped it into a cane for me. My other had vanished in the shipwreck.

  We were all very grateful for such Christian charity, after the two counts’ rapacious behavior. I know that the king left a sizable donation, and I added one of the coins that Queen Eleanor had given me so long ago, out of the few I had been hoarding. We waited until moonrise before leaving to continue our journey toward a fearsome mountain range.

  I knew the little hills that the English call mountains, and had caught glimpses of real ones from afar since I embarked on crusading, but these looming peaks were close and menacing. If winter snows began while we were in their midst, we might be stranded there until springtime. The Lord answered our prayers by granting us dry weather. Our road followed the valleys, and we never had to tackle serious slopes. Moreover, the winds were growing colder—and continued to do so as we headed north— while we were mostly wearing clothes that had been brought from Outremer.

  The villages were small and unimpressive, the people suspicious, but more surly than aggressive, so that I felt that they would be no more inclined to cooperate with our enemies than they were with us. Their fields were stony, their herds sparse. Early on our pilgrimage, they mostly spoke a form of corrupted Latin, but the German elements grew more pronounced as we progressed. As I have said, I already knew a smattering of the words, and rapidly learned more.

  “Truly,” the king said after we had bought some bread at a lonely inn, “you are a most useful tool, Lord Durwin—an ax, a sword, a scythe, and a razor, all in one.” He had dropped back to ride beside me for a while, as he did with all of us by turns.

  “Jack of all trades and master of none, Lord King.”

  “Nay, master of all. I am ashamed that I doubted you when we first met. You have amply proved your worth since then. I should have trusted my mother’s judgment of you. Have you any new prophecies to impart?”

  I shook my head. “Nay, sire, but that may be a good sign. They seem to come mostly in time of danger.” One of Myrddin Wyllt’s prophecies still remained unfulfilled, and that was my vision of Richard celebrating Christmas in Duke Leopold’s castle. I did not mention that, but he must have been thinking of it also.

  He rode in silence for a while, his face drawn, his eyes bright with fever. If Duke Leopold did not catch him, the fever might. Then he said, “Abbot Pio told me that it will take us at least a week to reach the great Danube River. That will be difficult to cross, for it is wide and our foes will be watching all the ferries. Another two or three days beyond that and we shall enter the realm of the Duke of Bavaria. He owes allegiance to the emperor, but they are not on good terms, and his lands run with the Duke of Saxony’s, who used to be married to one of my sisters. So in ten days, God willing, we shall be able to hold our heads up and breathe freely again.”

  I had lost exact track of the date, but I was sure that ten days must put us past Christmas.

  I kept expecting to see troops of armed men riding after us, or lined up across our path, but they did not appear. Our rearguard had never caught up with us, so they must have lost the battle outside Udine. Whatever the outcome, Count Meinhard of Udine would certainly have sent the news to his liege, so it probably passed us while we were taking refuge in San Gallo’s monastery at Moggio.

  We crossed a difficult pass, where the road was more mythical than passable, then descended into richer lands, although still mountainous. Here there were silver mines and prosperity, so there were more people in the valleys, with farms and even some grand houses. At every town gate, strangers were required to identify themselves before being allowed to enter, and we tried to pass as merchants. At a sizable town named Friesach, the trap was sprung.

  Some hours before, William Legier had eased his horse close to mine, interrupting my daydreams of rest and hot food.

  “From now on,” he said, “whenever we enter a town, you and I are to stay close to the king. If necessary, the others will create a diversion to let him escape, but he wants us both with him.”

  I digested the news. Me, yes. I spoke the language—after a fashion, at least better than anyone else. But William was one of the deadliest fighters, so why not keep him in the rearguard?

  We knew each other so well that he guessed what I was thinking and scowled. “You speak German,” he said. “I speak Horse.” Ah, that made sense! Every knight in Christendom understood horses, but William was superb with them. Many years ago, back in Helmdon, I had seen him almost frozen with fear on a horse’s back, but—with his usual talent of being outstanding at anything he tried—he had since mastered every aspect of horsemanship. No doubt he had benefitted from the experience he had gained while helping his father as King Henry’s chief forester. “But Richard only speaks King?”

  He laughed. “He surely was not fluent in Merchant!”

  We were allowed into the city, but throughout his life, the Lionheart was very rarely outwitted, and his contingency plan worked perfectly. He and his chosen two companions split off from the others, and the larger group made themselves c
onspicuous. Like a bull turning to a red rag, the Austrian troops pounced on them in the market square. There was a fight, and meanwhile the fugitive king, guided by his seer, slipped unnoticed out of town.

  Friesach was obviously the last town we would escape, though. I was unarmed, and the king’s distemper was waxing steadily worse. I think that any other man would have given up at Friesach or soon after. Not he! He set a merciless pace, so that for three days and nights we hardly stopped. It almost killed me, and was even harder on the horses. Without William’s skill, I am sure they would all have foundered beneath us. He kept rotating them, so that each suffered an equal share of the king’s greater weight. He gave them brief grazing breaks at night, but never enough to satisfy them. Despite his care, they developed saddle sores, and so did I. A couple of times we purchased human food at isolated inns or hamlets, eating it while we rode.

  If you consider it impossible for three horses to have gone so far in so little time, I will admit that there were moments when I wondered about that myself. For instance, I found myself riding a piebald for some hours, and could not recall seeing it before— or, indeed, after. Sometimes, and especially at night, William would suggest that our mounts needed a rest, and he would scout ahead. When he returned, he was often astride something new. Neither Richard nor I ever spoke of the matter, for it would have been treasonous to suggest that the king of England was now a horse thief.

  Following his lifetime practice of astonishing me, William had so distinguished himself in the Battle of Jaffa that he had become a royal favorite. He was almost as old as I, and thus around ten years older than the king, but it was his endurance and determination, as much as his horse sense, that carried us through that nightmare.