by Linda Howard
“I suspect this to be a ruse to draw most of the men away from the castle,” Niall said quietly. His mouth was a grim, thin line, his eyes narrowed and cold. “The Hay will likely attack as soon as he thinks us well away. I canna think he’s close enough to watch, nor do I think the clumsy oaf that canny. I will take fifteen with me; the others will remain here, under your command. Be watchful.”
Artair nodded, but his gaze was worried. “Only fifteen? I heard the woman say thirty—”
“Aye, but we’ve had the training of these lads, have we not? Two to one are not fair odds, for we’ve still the advantage.”
Artair smiled wryly. The Hay clansmen would be fighting against unknowing, unsworn Templars, for Niall, with his help, had trained them well. Most Scots roared into battle with little thought other than to slash or stab whoever was in front of them, but the clanless men at Creag Dhu attacked with a discipline that would have done a Roman legion proud. They had been taught strategy and technique, had it hammered into them by the most fearsome warrior in Christendom, if they but knew it. They knew only that since he had appeared in the Highlands none had defeated Black Niall, and they were proud to serve under him. All their clan loyalty, their sense of kinship and belonging, had been transferred to him, and they would unhesitatingly fight to the death for him.
Satisfied that Creag Dhu was well defended, Niall chose fifteen of his men and led them out of the gates, then rode hard into the dawn. He pushed both man and beast hard to overtake the raiders, for he suspected their intent was to lead him as far away from Creag Dhu as possible. His face was grim and hard as he rode. The Hay clansmen had made a fatal mistake by committing their thieving, raping, and murdering on land Niall considered his own. He had taken Creag Dhu, fortified it, remade it for his purposes; the Treasure was safe there, and no one was going to take it from him.
Huwe was a fool, but a dangerous one. He was a blustering bull of a man, quick to take offense and too stubborn to admit when he was outmatched. Niall was a soldier by both nature and training, and despised the heedlessness that cost unnecessary clan lives. Though he usually tried not to cause such an uproar in the Highlands that Robert would be called upon to intervene, for he knew it would mean trouble for his brother when he refused to oust the renegades and broken men from Creag Dhu, Niall’s patience was at an end. By threatening Creag Dhu, the Hay now threatened the Treasure—and he would die because of his foolishness.
A good horse could make the difference between victory and defeat, and Niall had made a point over the years of providing the best mounts possible for his men. By stopping only to water the sturdy beasts and allow them a moment’s rest, he overtook the raiders at mid-morning.
The raiders were in the middle of a glen, laden with the goods they had stolen and driving a straggling herd of stolen kine before them. The morning sun glittered on the mist that still hung overhead like a veil. There was no place for them to take shelter, and when Niall and his men first thundered out of the wood toward them the raiders milled about in a moment of panicked confusion.
The old granny had guessed aright, Niall saw; the enemy numbered more than forty, making the odds close to three to one, but almost half the forty were on foot. His teeth bared in a savage grin. Seeing the relatively small number of pursuers, the raiders would no doubt turn to meet them—a move they would have leisure to regret for only a short time.
As he had expected, there was a flurry of shouts and the company gathered, then charged across the glen, shouting and waving a variety of weapons, claymores and axes and hammers, even a scythe.
“Hold,” Niall said. “Let them come to us.”
His men ranged on either side of him, spreading out so that they weren’t clumped together and thus couldn’t be flanked. They held, the horses stamping restlessly and tossing their heads, while the screaming attackers poured across the misty, sun-dappled glen.
But a good three hundred yards had separated the two groups, and three hundred yards is a long way for a weary man to charge, especially when he has been about the tiring business of raiding all night and has not slept, and has been traveling hard to evade pursuers. Those on foot soon slowed, and some stopped altogether. Those who pushed stubbornly on were no longer shouting, no longer borne onward by battle fever.
So the host of horsemen who charged ahead of the stragglers barely outnumbered Niall and his men. Niall’s gaze targeted a bullish young man who rode in front, his wild tangle of sandy hair flying behind him. That would be Morvan, the Hay’s ill-tempered, brutish elder son, and the spit of his father. Morvan’s small, mean eyes were likewise locked on Niall.
Niall raised his sword. The claymore was, for most men, a two-handed weapon, but his strength and size gave him the power to swing the six-foot blade one-handed, freeing his left hand for yet another blade, or a Lochaber axe. Seizing the reins with his teeth, he took up an axe. His well-trained horse quivered beneath him, muscles bunching. When Morvan and his men were a mere thirty yards away, Niall and his men charged.
The impact was swift and staggering. Once he had fought with shield and armor, a hundred pounds of mail weighing him down, but now Niall fought free and wild and savage, his eyes burning with a fierce light as he blocked a sword with his axe and then went in under the man’s defenses with his own sword, spitting him. He always fought silently, without the yells and grunts of other men, instinctively sensing the next attack while he was still dealing with the present one.
Before his sword was free he turned, swinging the axe up to block another blow. Metal clanged as a sword struck the axe head, and the force of it jarred his arm. One powerful leg pressed and his horse turned, bringing him around to face this new challenge. Morvan of Hay pressed forward, using all his considerable weight in an effort to unhorse Niall.
Niall shifted his horse back, away from Morvan’s weight. With a curse the younger man straightened, his yellowed teeth bared as he drew back the claymore for another attack. “Diolain!” Morvan hissed.
Niall didn’t even blink at being called a bastard. He simply swung his own sword to parry, then buried his axe in the oafs head, cleaving it almost in two. With a jerk he freed his weapon and turned for another adversary, but there was none. His men had worked as efficiently as he, and the Hay clansmen who had been mounted were no longer astride their horses, but lay sprawled in the indignity of death, limbs exposed, their blood turning the sweet earth to mud. The familiar stench of blood and waste marked their death.
Niall’s black gaze swept over his men. Two were wounded, one seriously. “Clennan,” he said sharply, drawing the attention of the man who had taken a wound in the thigh. “Care for Leod.” Then he and his thirteen remaining men charged to meet the Hay clansmen who were on foot.
It was a rout, for a man on horseback had an enormous advantage over one afoot. The animals themselves were weapons, their steel-shod hooves and massive weight simply crushing those who could not move out of the way. Niall vaulted from his horse’s back, the blood lust singing through him as he swung sword and axe, twisting, parrying, thrusting. He was a dark blade of death, unutterably graceful as he moved in his lethal dance. Five men fell before him, one beheaded by a massive sweep of the claymore, and Niall did not even feel the shock in his sword arm as the blade sliced through bone.
The carnage lasted two minutes, no more. Then quiet fell across the glen, the clash of swords replaced by an occasional moan. Swiftly Niall took stock, not expecting his men to have escaped unscathed. Young Odar was dead, lying sprawled beneath the body of a Hay clansman. His clear blue eyes stared sightlessly upward. Sim had taken a sword cut in the side and was cursing luridly as he tried to stanch the flow of blood. Niall judged him well enough to ride. Goraidh, however, was unconscious, his forehead bloody. All suffered from small cuts and bruises, himself included, but those wounds were as nothing. With two wounded in the first attack, he had ten healthy men remaining, and two would have to stay behind to help with the wounded and herding the cattle back to Creag
Dhu.
“Muir and Crannog, remain with Sim and Clennan to help with the wounded, and the cattle.” The two he had named did not look pleased at having to remain behind, but knew it was necessary.
They could not ride as hard as they had before, for the horses were tired. Niall kept them to a steady pace, his warrior’s heart beating fierce and wild in his chest as he rode to another fight. The wind lifted his long hair, drying the sweat of battle. His thighs were clamped to the powerful animal beneath him, heat meeting heat, flesh against flesh. The thick wool plaid kilted about his waist gave him a freedom that braies and hose and hot sheepskin undergarment had denied him, and he exulted in his unfettered wildness.
He had easily cast aside the physical accoutrements of the Knights, let his hair grow long, shaved his beard, discarded the hated sheepskin. Though he had become one of them, there had always been a place in his soul that yearned for Scotland, for the wildness and freedom, the mountains and mists, the sheer lustiness of youth. The life of warfare offered by the Knights had appealed to him, and as he had grown older he had learned what they did and accepted the burden, the sheer faith, but still Scotland had lived within him.
He was home, and though he reveled in his physical freedom he was bound now by a far heavier burden, one that ruled his life far more rigidly than before. Why had Valcour chosen him, an unwilling though faithful Knight? Had Valcour suspected how easily and eagerly he would rejoin his former land and life, giving no hint that he’d once been a Templar and thereby better protecting the Treasure? Had Valcour guessed the secret relief with which Niall had accepted his freedom from all his vows, save one? But that one was the greatest of all, and the most bitter, for it served to protect those who had destroyed the Order.
Why could not Artair have been chosen? Of necessity he had shaved his beard and grown his hair, for to do otherwise would have been courting death, but other than that he held still to the vows he had taken, to chastity and service. Artair never doubted, never cursed God for what had happened, never turned from the faith to which he had sworn. If he had hated, at first, he had long since found peace and released his hatred, finding solace in prayer and war. Artair was a good soldier, a good companion.
He would not have been a good Guardian.
Niall had not forgiven either the Church or God. He hated, he doubted, he cursed himself and Valcour and his own vow, but in the end he always came back to the same truth: he was the Guardian. Valcour had chosen well.
To protect the Treasure, Niall rode to face Huwe of Hay, well aware that a blood feud had started that day and determined that most of the blood would leak from Hay clansmen. Huwe wanted war? Very well, then, there would be war.
Part Two
Niall
Chapter 12
“FEAR-GLEIDHIDH,” GRACE MUTTERED TO HERSELF,MOVing the words around on the computer screen and trying to make sense of the sentence. Fear-gleidhidh meant “guardian”; she was familiar enough with that word to recognize it at a glance. Over the past several months she’d spent so much time with these blasted Gaelic papers that she’d learned to recognize a lot of the nouns, though sometimes the spelling threw her off. Even with the help of a two-hundred-dollar set of tapes that promised to teach her how to speak Gaelic, and which she’d bought in a useless hope that it would help clarify the murky medieval Gaelic syntax, it could still take hours to translate a few sentences.
But what on earth did cunhachd mean? Running her finger down the page of the Gaelic/English dictionary, she couldn’t find any such word. Could it be cunbhalach, which meant “steady,” or cunbhalachd, which was “judgment”? No, it wouldn’t be the first, for if she was reading it correctly the sentence was “The Guardian has the Cunhachd.” The capitalization didn’t necessarily mean anything, but the sentence certainly wouldn’t be “The Guardian has the Steady.”
“The Guardian has the Judgment”? Grace rearranged the words on the screen once again, wondering if she had misread the verb or tangled the syntax for what seemed like the millionth time. Without the benefit of classes, it was taking her more time to learn Gaelic than any other language she had studied. She was getting better at it, though.
She rechecked the paper, bending close and using her magnifying glass to study the faded letters. No, the verb was definitely “has.” Cunhachd was the stumbling block. She turned her attention to it, and noticed that the n was smeared. Could it be an m instead? Returning to the dictionary, she looked up cumhachd, and a surge of triumph went through her. Cumhachd meant “power.”
“The Guardian has the Power.”
She raked her hands through her hair, lifting the long strands and letting them sift through her fingers. What were some synonyms for power? Authority, right, might, will. All of those would fit, yet each differed somewhat in meaning. If she interpreted the sentence literally, then what power did the Guardian have? Power over the Treasure, absolute control of it? Money was power, as the old saying went, but the chronicles had also said that the Treasure was “greater than gold.” It followed, then, that though there had likely been a monetary treasury, that wasn’t the Treasure referred to so reverentially.
So what had the Treasure been, and what sort of power had the Guardian wielded because of it? If Black Niall had been the possessor of such mighty power, why had he spent his life as a renegade in the remote western Highlands? How had a Templar, supposedly a religious man, become a man as renowned for his sexual appetite as he was for his skill with a claymore?
Two more hours of work still left her in the dark. The Treasure was either “a knowing of God’s will,” something that was certainly ambiguous enough, or “proof of God’s will,” which was equally unenlightening. It possessed the power to “bow kings and nations before it,” and “vanquish evil.”
She read aloud the words on the screen. “The Guardian shall pass—or travel, or walk—beyond the bounds of time, or season—in the way of Our Lord Jesus Christ, to do His battle with the Serpent.” That sounded as if the Guardian would emulate Jesus’s struggle with Satan, which hardly translated into any great power, but rather an effort to live an honorable, blameless life—something difficult enough, and from what she’d read about Black Niall he hadn’t even tried.
So what was the Treasure, and what was the Power? Religious myth? Parrish evidently believed the gold was real; on the surface that was motive enough, yet she kept coming back to the Treasure that was greater than gold, and wondering if more than wealth was involved. If so, what? No Templar had ever betrayed the secret of the Treasure, though some of them had been hideously tortured. Perhaps most of them hadn’t known anything to tell, but certainly the Grand Master had known, and he had gone to the stake with the secret untold. Instead he had cursed the King of France and the Pope, and within a year both Philip and Clement had died, giving credence to the superstition of the time that the Templars had been in league with the devil.
Slowly Grace paraphrased the unwieldy sentence. “The Guardian shall walk beyond time to vanquish evil.” Sometimes putting the words in a more modern context helped her see through the lapsed centuries to find the most logical translation. She tried again. “The Guardian shall pass the season in battle against evil.” What season? The years following the destruction of the Order? Was the Guardian supposed to fight Philip and Clement on behalf of the Order? If so, Black Niall had instead fought his skirmishes in bed and in the mountains and moors of Scotland.
It didn’t make sense, and she was too tired to keep at it. Grace saved the file, then turned off the computer. In six months she had translated all the tales of Black Niall’s battles and conquests, the Latin and French and English, but parts of the Gaelic still defeated her. Come to that, some of the Latin didn’t make sense, because for some reason a diet had been included. What did a carefully regulated consumption of salt have to do with a history of the Templars? And why was the amount of water they drank based on their weight? But there it was, right in the middle of a long passage on the duties of a Guard
ian: Victus Rationem Temporis, the diet of time, or for time.
She paused in the act of removing her sweatshirt. Time. What was this about time, that it cropped up in both Latin and Gaelic? Come to think of it, there had been something similar in the French documents. Swiftly she returned to the rickety table she used as a desk, flipping through the documents until she found the page she sought. “He shall be unbound by the chains of time.”
Walking beyond time. Unbound by the chains of time. Diet for time. There was a common thread here, but she couldn’t make sense of it. They had all been fixated on time, but was it in a metaphorical sense, or a conceptual thing? And what did time have to do with the Templars?
Well, it wasn’t a puzzle she was going to solve by worrying at it; she would have to complete her translations, a project she could see the end of now. Another three weeks, perhaps a month, and she would have the Gaelic section completed. Gaelic was so difficult she’d saved it for last and she couldn’t be certain of her translation, but she’d done the best she could. Whether it would tell her anything beyond the supposed location of the Templars’ gold remained to be seen.
After undressing for bed, she neatly placed the computer and all her papers in the computer case, and set it within easy reach beside the bed. If she had to leave abruptly, she didn’t want to waste time gathering everything together.
She turned out the light and lay on the narrow, lumpy bed, staring out the dingy window at the softly falling snow. The seasons had changed, summer giving way to fall, color dulling into the monochromatic shades of winter. It had been eight months since her old life had ended. She survived, but she couldn’t say that she lived.
