by Paula Guran
It reared up, stark and peculiar against a tin-colored sky.
The lower portion was carved from the native rock-base of a conical hill. This rose into a plethora of walls and craning, squinnying towers, that seemed somehow like the petrification of a thing once unnaturally growing. A causeway flung itself up the hill and under an arched doormouth, barricaded by iron.
No movements were discernible on battlements or roofs. No pennant flew. The castle had an aura of the tomb. Yet not necessarily a tomb of the dead.
It was the camp that had more of the feel of a mortuary about it. From an oblique quarter emanated groanings. Where men were to be found outside the tents, they crouched listlessly over fires. Cook-pots and heaps of accouterments plainly went unattended. By a scarlet pavilion two knights sat at chess. The game was sporadic and violent and seemed likely to end in blows.
Cassant drew rein a space to the side of the scarlet pavilion, whose cloth was blazoned with three gold turrets—the insignia of Towers. A boy ran to take charge of the horse as its two riders dismounted. But Renier remained astride his horse, staring at Jaisel. Soon he announced generally, in a herald’s carrying tone: “Come, gentlemen, welcome a new recruit. A peerless knight. A damsel in breeches.”
All around, heads lifted. A sullen interest bloomed over the apathy of the camp: the slurred spiteful humor of men who were ill, or else under sentence of execution. They began to get up from the pallid fires and shamble closer. The fierce paused and gazed arrogantly across with extravagant oaths.
“Mistress, you’re in for trouble,” said Cassant ruefully. “But be fair, he warned you of it.”
Jaisel shrugged. She glanced at Renier, nonchalantly posed on the steel-blue horse, right leg loose of the stirrup now and hooked across the saddle-bow. At ease, malevolently, he beamed at her. Jaisel slipped the gaudy dagger from her belt, let him catch the flash of the gilt, then tossed it at him. The little blade, with its wasp-sting point, sang through the air, singeing the hairs on his right cheek. It buried itself, where she had aimed it, in the picket post behind him. But Renier, reacting to the feint as she had intended, lunged desperately aside for the sake of his pretty face, took all his own weight on the yet-stirruped leg and off the free one, unbalanced royally, and plunged crashing to the ground. At the same instant, fully startled, the horse tried to rear. Still left-leggedly trapped in the stirrup, Renier of Towers went slithering through the hot ashes of a fire.
A hubbub resulted—delighted unfriendly mirth. The soldiers were as prepared to make sport of a boastful lord on his ears in the ash as of a helpless girl.
And the helpless girl was not quite finished. Renier was fumbling for his sword. Jaisel leaped over him like a lion, kicking his hands away as she passed. Landing, she wrenched his foot out of the stirrup and, having liberated him, jumped to the picket to retrieve her dagger. As Renier gained his knees, he beheld her waiting for him, quiet as a statue, her pack slung on the ground, the thin sword, slick with light, ready as a sixth long murderous finger to her hand.
A second he faltered, while the camp, ferociously animated, buzzed. Then his ringed hand went to the hilt of his own sword. It was two to three thirds its length from the scabbard when a voice bellowed from the doorway of the scarlet and gold pavilion: “Dare to draw upon a woman, Renier, and I’ll flay you myself.”
Gasping, Renier let the sword grate home again. Jaisel turned and saw a man incarnadine with anger as the tent he had stepped from. Her own dormant anger woke and filled her, white anger not red, bored anger, cold anger.
“Don’t fear him slain, sir,” she said. “I will give him only a slight cut, and afterward spare him.”
The incarnadine captain of the camp of Towers bent a baleful shaggy lour on her.
“Strumpet, or witch?” he thundered.
“Tell me first,” said Jaisel coolly, “your title. Is it coward or imbecile?”
Silence was settling like flies on honey.
The captain shook himself.
“I never yet struck a wench—” he said.
“Nor will you now, by God’s wounds.”
His mouth dropped ajar. He disciplined it and asked firmly: “Why coward and why imbecile?”
“Humoring me, are you?” she inquired. She strolled toward him and let the sword tip weave a delicate pattern about his nose. To his credit, having calmed himself, he retained the calm. “Coward or imbecile,” she said, drawing lines of glinting fire an inch from his nostrils, “because you cannot take a castle that offers no defenders.”
A response then. A beefy paw thrust up to flick the sword away from him and out of her hand. But the sword was too quick. Now it rested horizontally on the air, tip twitching a moment at his throat. And now it was gone back into its scabbard, and merely a smiling strange-eyed girl was before him.
“I already know enough of you,” the captain said, “that you are a trial to men and an affront to heaven is evident. Despite that, I will answer your abuse. Maudras’ last castle is defended by some sorcery he conjured to guard it. Three assaults were attempted. The result you shall witness. Follow, she-wolf.”
And he strode off through the thick of the men who parted to let him by, and to let the she-wolf by in his wake. No one touched her but one fool, who had observed, but learned nothing. The pommel of her dagger in his ribs, bruising through mail and shirt, put pain to his flirtation.
“Here,” the captain barked.
He drew aside the flap of a dark tent, and she saw twenty men lying on rusty mattresses and the two surgeons going up and down. The casualties of some savage combat. She beheld things she had beheld often, those things which sickened less but appalled more with repetition. Near to the entrance a boy younger than herself, dreaming horribly in a fever, called out.
Jaisel slipped into the tent. She set her icy palm on the boy’s forehead and felt his raging heat burn through it. But her touch seemed to alleviate his dream at least. He grew quieter.
“Again,” she said softly, “coward, or imbecile. And these are the sacrificial victims on the altar of cowardice or imbecility.”
Probably, the captain had never met such merciless eyes. Or, perhaps not so inexplicably, from between the smooth lids of a young girl.
“Enchantment,” he said gruffly. “And sorcery. We were powerless against it. Do you drink wine, you virago? Yes, no doubt. Come and drink it with me then in my pavilion and you shall have the full story. Not that you deserve it. But you are the last thrown stone that kills a man. Injustice atop all the rest, and from a woman.”
Abruptly she laughed at him, her anger spent.
Red wine and red meat were served in the red pavilion. All the seven knights of the Towers camp were present, Cassant and Renier among the rest. Outside, their men went on sitting around the fires. A dreary song had been struck up, and was repeated, over and over, as iron snow-light radiated from the northern summer sky.
The captain of the knights had told again the story Cassant had recounted to Jaisel on the slope: The three castles razed, the final castle which proved unassailable. Gruff and bellicose, the captain found it hard to speak of supernatural items and growled the matter into his wine.
“Three assaults were offered the walls of the castle. Montaube led the first of these. He died, and fifty men with him. Of what? We saw no swordsmen on the battlements, no javelots were fired, no arrows. Yet men sprinkled the ground, bloody and dying, as if an army twice our numbers had come to grips with them unseen. The second assault, I led. I escaped by a miracle. I saw a man, his mail split as if by a bolt shot from a great distance. He dropped with a cry and blood bursting from a terrible wound. Not a soul was near but I, his captain. No weapon or shot was visible. The third assault—was planned, but never carried through. We reached the escarpment, and my soldiers began falling like scythed grain. No shame in our retreat. Another thing. Last month, three brave fools, men of dead Montaube’s, decided secretly to effect entry by night over the walls. A sentry perceived them vanish wi
thin. They were not attacked. Nor did they return.”
There was a long quiet in the pavilion. Jaisel glanced up and encountered the wrathful glare of the captain.
“Ride home to Towers, then,” she said. “What else is there to do?”
“And what other council would you predict from a woman?” broke in Renier. “We are men, madame. We’ll take that rock, or die. Honor, lady. Did you never hear of it in the whorehouse where you were whelped?”
“You have had too much wine, sir,” said Jaisel. “But by all means have some more.” She poured her cup, measured and deliberate, over his curling hair. Two or three guffawed, enjoying this novelty. Renier leapt up. The captain bellowed familiarly, and Renier again relapsed.
Wine ran in rosy streams across his handsome brow.
“Truly, you do right to reprove me, and the she-wolf is right to anoint me with her scorn. We sit here like cowards, as she mentioned. There’s one way to take the castle. A challenge. Single combat between God and Satan. Can the haunting of Maudras refuse that?” Renier got to his feet with precision now.
“You are drunk, Renier,” the captain snapped.
“Not too drunk to fight.” Renier was at the entrance. The captain roared. Renier only bowed. “I am a knight. Only so far can you command me.”
“You fool—” said Cassant.
“I am, however, my own fool,” said Renier.
The knights stood, witnesses to his departure. Respect, sorrow, and dread showed in their eyes, their nervous fingers fiddled with jewels, wine cups, chess figures.
Outside, the dreary song had broken off. Renier was shouting for his horse and battle gear.
The knights crowded to the flap to watch him armed. Their captain elect joined them. No further protest was attempted, as if a divine ordinance were being obeyed.
Jaisel walked out of the pavilion. The light was thickening as if to hem them in. Red fires, red banners, no other color able to pierce the gloom. Renier sat his horse like a carved chess figure himself, an immaculate knight moving against a castle on a misty board.
The horse fidgeted, trembled. Jaisel ran her hand peacefully down its nose amid the litter of straps and buckles. She did not look at Renier, swaggering above her. She sensed too well his panic under the pride.
“Don’t,” she said to him softly, “ride into the arms of death because you think I shamed your manhood. It’s too large a purge for so small an ill.”
“Go away, girl,” he jeered at her. “Go and have babies as God fashioned you to do.”
“God did not fashion you to die, Renier of Towers.”
“Maybe you’re wrong in that,” he said wildly, and jerked the horse around and away from her.
He was galloping from the camp across the plain toward the rock. A herald dashed out following, but prudently hung some yards behind. When he sounded the brass, the notes cracked, and his horse shied at the noise. But Renier’s horse threw itself on as if in preparation for a massive jump at the end of its running.
“He’s mad; will die,” Cassant mumbled.
“And my fault,” Jaisel answered.
A low horrified moan went through the ranks of the watchers. The iron barricades of the huge castle’s mouth were sluggishly folding aside. Nothing rode forth. It was, on the contrary, patently an invitation.
One man yelled to Renier across a hundred yards of gray ground. Several swelled the cry. Suddenly, three quarters of the camp of Towers was howling. To make sport of a noble was one thing. To see him seek annihilation was another. They screamed themselves hoarse, begging him to choose reason above honor.
Jaisel, not uttering a word, turned from the spectacle. When she heard Cassant swearing, she knew Renier had galloped straight in the iron portal. The commotion of shouting crumbled into breathings, oaths. And then came the shock and clangor of two iron leaves meeting together again across the mouth of hell.
Impossible to imagine what he might be confronting now. Perhaps he would triumph, re-emerge in glory. Perhaps the evil in Maudras’ castle had faded, or had never existed. Was an illusion. Or a lie.
They waited. The soldiers, the knights. The woman. A cold wind blew up, raking plumes, pennants, the long curled hair, plucking bridle bells, the gold sickle moon in Jaisel’s left ear, the fragile lace at her wrists, and the foaming lace at the wrists of others.
The white sun westered, muddied, disappeared. Clouds like curds forming in milk formed in the sky.
Darkness slunk in on all fours. Mist boiled over, hiding the view of the castle. The fires burned, the horses coughed at their pickets.
There was the smell of a wet rottenness, like marshland—the mist—or rotting hope.
A young knight whose name Jaisel had forgotten was at her elbow. He thrust in her face a chess piece of red amber.
“The white queen possessed the red knight,” he hissed at her. “Put him in the box then. Slam the lid. Fine chess game here in the north. Castles unbreachable and bitches for queens. Corpses for God’s knights.”
Jaisel stared him down till he went away. From the corner of her eye, she noticed Cassant was weeping tears, frugally, one at a time.
It was too easy to get by the sentries in the mist and dark.
Of course, they were alert against the outer environs, not the camp itself. But, still too easy. Discipline was lax. Honor had become everything, and honor was not enough.
Yet it was her own honor that drove her, she was not immune. Nor immune to this sad region. She was full of guilt she had no need to feel, and full of regret for a man with whom she had shared only a mutual dislike, distrust, and some quick verbal cuts and quicker deeds of wrath. Renier had given himself to the castle, to show himself valiant, to shame her. She was duly shamed. Accordingly, she was goaded to breach the castle also, to plumb its vile secret. To save his life if she could, avenge him if not. And die if the castle should outwit her? No. Here was the strangest fancy of all. Somewhere in her bones she did not believe Maudras’ castle could do that. After all, her entire life had been a succession of persons, things, fate itself, trying to vanquish her and her aims. From the first drop of menstrual blood, the first husband chosen for her at the age of twelve, the first (and last) rape, the first swordmaster who had mocked her demand to learn and ended setting wagers on her—there had been so many lions in her way. And she had systematically overcome each of them. Because she did not, would not, accept that destiny was unchangeable. Or that what was merely named unconquerable could not be conquered.
Maudras’ castle then, just another symbol to be thrown down. And the sick-sweet twang of fear in her vitals was no more than before any battle, like an old scar throbbing, simple to ignore.
She padded across the plain noiselessly in the smoky mist.
Sword on left hip, dagger on the right. Saddle and pack had been left behind beneath her blanket. Some would-be goat might suffer astonishment if he ventured to her sleeping place. Otherwise they would not detect her absence till sunrise.
The mist ceased thirty feet from the causeway.
She paused a moment, and considered the eccentric edifice pouring aloft into overcast black sky. Now the castle had a choice. It could gape invitingly as it had before Renier the challenger. Or leave her to climb the wall seventy feet high above the doormouth.
The iron barricades stayed shut.
She went along the causeway.
Gazing up, the cranky towers seemed to reel, sway. Certainly it had an aura of wickedness, of impenetrable lingering hate . . .
White queen against bishop of darkness.
Queen takes castle, a rare twist to an ancient game.
The wall.
Masonry jutted, stonework creviced, protruded. Even weeds had rooted there. It was a gift, this wall, to any who would climb it. Which implied a maleficent joke, similar to the opening doors. Enter. Come, I welcome you. Enter me and be damned within me.
She jumped, caught hold, began to ascend. Loose-limbed and agile from a hundred trees, some othe
r less lordly walls, one cliff-face five years ago—Jaisel could skim up vertical buildings like a cat. She did not really require all the solicitous help Maudras’ wall pressed on her.
She gained the outer battlements in minutes and was looking in. Beyond this barrier, the curtain, a courtyard with its central guard—but all pitch black, difficult to assess. Only that configuration of turrets and crooked bastions breaking clear against the sky. As before, she thought of a growth, petrified.
The sound was of ripped cloth. But it was actually ripped atmosphere. Jaisel threw her body flat on the broad parapet and something kissed the nape of her neck as it rushed by into the night. Reminiscent of a javelot bolt. Or the thicker swan-righted arrows of the north. Without sentience, yet meant for the heart, and capable of stilling it.
She tilted herself swiftly over the parapet, hung by her fingers, and dropped seven feet to a platform below. As she landed, the tearing sound was reiterated. A violent hand tugged her arm. She glanced and beheld shredded lace barely to be seen in the blackness. The mail above her wrist was heated.
Some power that could make her out when she was nearly blind, but which seemed to attack randomly, inaccurately. She cast herself flat again and crawled on her belly to the head of a stair.
Here, descending, she became the perfect target. No matter. Her second swordmaster had been something of an acrobat—
Jaisel launched herself into air and judging where the rims of the steps should be, executed three bold erratic somersaults, arriving ultimately in a hedgehog-like roll in the court.
As she straightened from this roll, she was aware of a sudden dim glow. She spun to meet it, sword and dagger to hand, then checked, heart and gorge passing each other as they traveled in the wrong directions.
The glow was worse than sorcery. It was caused by a decaying corpse half propped in a ruined niche under the stairs. Putrescent, the remnants gave off a phosphorescent shine, matched by an intolerable stench that seemed to intensify with recognition. And next, something else. Lit by the witch-light of dead flesh, an inscription apparently chiseled in the stone beside it. Against her wits, Jaisel could not resist studying it. In pure clerical calligraphy it read:
