by Mary Stewart
They both heard it at the same moment. Over the water, in a lull of the breeze, came a sound, soft and dreadful, that dispelled the illusory peace of the night. A long, keening ululation of grief and fear. On the island. A woman crying.
Bedwyr cursed under his breath. Mordred drove the paddles in hard, and the clumsy boat jumped and lurched, swinging broadside onto the rock of the shore. He shipped the paddles and grabbed at the rock in one spare, expert movement. Bedwyr jumped past him, his sword ready in his hand.
He paused for a moment, winding his cloak round his left arm. "Beach her. Find his boat and sink it. If he dodges me, stay here and kill him."
Mordred was already out, and busy with the rope. From the black wooded bank above them the sounds came again, hopeless, terrified. The night was filled with weeping. Bedwyr, treading from shingle to pine needles, vanished in silence.
Mordred made the boat fast, drew his own weapon, and moved quietly along the shingle, looking for the other boat.
The island was tiny. In a very few minutes he was back at his starting-point. There was no boat. Whoever he was, whatever he had done, he was gone. Mordred, his sword at the ready, climbed fast after Bedwyr towards the noise of weeping.
The fire was not quite out. A pile of ashes still showed a residual glow. Beside it, in its faint red light, the woman sat, hunched and wailing. Her hair, straggling unbound over a torn robe of some dark color, showed pale. The fire had been kindled on the island's summit, where a stand of pine trees, clinging to what seemed to be bare rock, had laid down a carpet of needles, and where a cairn, built long ago and fallen apart with time and weather, made some sort of crude shelter. The grove appeared to be empty but for the crouched and mourning figure of the woman.
Mordred, many years younger than the other man, was close behind him as he reached the grove. The two men paused there.
She heard them, and looked up. The starlight, and the faint glimmer from the fire, showed that this was no girl, but an old woman, grey-haired, her face a mask of fear and grief. The wailing stopped as if she had been struck in the throat. Her body stiffened. Her mouth gaped wider, as if for a scream.
Bedwyr put out a hand and spoke quickly: "Madam -- Mother -- don't be afraid. We are friends. Friends. We have come to help."
The scream was choked back on a strangled gasp. They heard her breathing, short and ragged, as she strained white-eyed to see them.
They moved forward slowly. "Be calm. Mother," said Bedwyr. "We are from the King--"
"From which king? Who are you?"
Her voice was breathless and shaking, but now with the exhaustion of grief, not fear. Bedwyr had spoken in the local tongue, and she answered in the same. Her accent was broader than Bedwyr's, but the language of Less Britain was close enough to that of the mother kingdom for Mordred to understand it easily.
"I am Bedwyr of Benoic, and this is Mordred, son of King Arthur. We are King's men, seeking for the lady Elen. She has been here? You were with her?"
Mordred, while Bedwyr was speaking, had stooped to pick up a handful of pine drift, and a broken spar of wood. He scattered the stuff on the ashes, and a flame spurted, caught and held. Light nickered up redly, and showed the woman more clearly.
She was well, though plainly, dressed, and was perhaps sixty years old. Her clothing was dirtied and torn, as if in some sort of struggle. Her face, grimed and distorted with weeping, showed a big discolored patch of bruising over one cheek, and her lips were split and crusty with dried blood.
"You come too late," she said.
"Where has he gone? Where has he taken her?"
"I mean too late for the Princess Elen." She pointed towards the tumbled cairn of stones. They looked that way. Now in the strengthening light of the fire they could see that something -- someone -- had been scrabbling in the thickly heaped pine needles. Some of the smaller stones from the cairn had been pulled down, and pine cones and needles scattered over them.
"It was all I could do," said the woman. She held out her hands. They were shaking. The men looked at them, stirred by horror and pity. The hands were torn and bruised and bloody.
The two knights went across to the cairn where the body lay. It was imperfectly hidden. Beneath the scattered stones and pine needles the girl's face could be seen, streaked with dirt and agonized with death. Her eyes had been closed, but the mouth gaped still, and the neck, with the death marks on the throat, hung crookedly.
Bedwyr, still with the gentleness that Mordred would never have suspected in him, said, half to himself: "She has a lovely face. God give her rest." Then, turning: "Don't grieve. Mother. She shall go home to her own people, and lie in royal fashion, at peace with her gods. And this foul beast shall die, and go to his, for his just reward."
He took a flask from his belt and knelt beside her, holding it to her lips. She drank, sighed, and in a while grew calmer. Soon she was able to tell them what had happened.
She did not know who the ravisher was. He was not, she affirmed to their relief, a foreigner. He had spoken but little, and that mostly curses, but he and his followers were unmistakably Bretons. The reports of a "giant" were not so very far wrong: He was a man huge in every way, stature, girth, strength, with a loud voice and a bellowing laugh. A bull of a man, who had burst out of cover with three companions -- roughly clad fellows, like common thieves -- and slain four of the princess's escort with his own hands before they had well had time to recover from their surprise. The remaining three fought valiantly but were all killed. Herself and the princess were dragged away, Elen's other woman ("a poor thing, who wailed and screamed so, if I had been one of those beasts I would have killed her on the spot," said the nurse trenchantly) had been left alone, but the attackers, riding off, took the party's horses with them, so had little fear of pursuit.
"They brought us to this place, at the water's edge. It was still dark, so it was hard to make out the way. One of them stayed with the horses on shore, and the others rowed us across to this rock. My lady was half fainting, and I tried to tend her. I had no other thoughts. We could not have escaped. The big man -- the bull -- carried her up the rocks to this place. The other fellows would have dragged me after, but I dodged them and ran, and when they saw that I had no intention of trying to leave my lady, they let me be."
She coughed, and licked her cut lips. Bedwyr held out the flask again, but she shook her head and presently continued: "The rest I cannot speak of, but you can guess at it. The two fellows held me while he -- the bull -- raped her. She was never strong. A pretty girl, but pale always, and often ill during the cold winters."
She stopped again, and bent her head. Her fingers twisted together.
After a while Bedwyr asked gently: "He killed her?"
"Yes. Or rather, what he did with her killed her. She died. He cursed, and left her yonder by the stones, and then came back to me. I had made no outcry -- they shut my mouth with their stinking hands -- but I was afraid that now they would kill me also. For what they did then...I had hardly thought...I am past my sixtieth year, and then one should be...Well, no more of that. What is done is done, and now you are here, and will slay this animal while he lies sleeping off his lust."
"Lady," said Bedwyr forcefully, "he shall die this night, if he is to be found. Where did they go?"
"I do not know. They spoke of an island, and a tower. That's all I can tell you. They had no thought of pursuit, or they would have killed me, too. Or perhaps, being animals, they did not think. They threw me down beside my lady, and left me. After a while I heard horses going. I think they went towards the coast. When I could move, I gave my lady what burial I could. I found a place in the stones of the cairn where someone, fishermen perhaps, had left flint and iron, and so made a fire. Had I not been able to do that I should have died here. There is neither fresh water nor food, and I cannot swim. If they had seen the fire and come back themselves, then I should have died sooner, that is all." She looked up. "But you -- two young men like you against that monster
and his fellows... No, no, you must not seek him yourselves. Take me with you, I beg of you, but do not seek him out. I would see no more deaths. Take my story back to King Hoel, and he--"
"Lady, we come from King Hoel. We were sent to find you and your lady, and punish the ravishers. Do not fear for us: I am Bedwyr of Benoic, and this is Mordred, son of Arthur of Britain."
She stared in the dimming light. It was apparent that she had either not heard before, or had not understood. She repeated, still only half believing: "Bedwyr of Benoic? Himself? Arthur of Britain?"
"Arthur is here, not far away, with a troop of soldiers. King Hoel is sick, but he sent us to find you. Come now, Lady. Our boat is small, and none too seaworthy, but if you will come with us now to safety, we will return later and carry your lady back for a seemly burial."
So it was done. Two litters were improvised from pine boughs, and on them the girl's body, decently shrouded in a cloak, and the old nurse, collapsed into a feverish sleep, were sent to Kerrec under guard. The remainder of Arthur's force, guided by Bedwyr, rode for the sea shore.
It was low tide. The sand stretched wide and flat and grey, shining faintly under the darkness. They splashed across the river mouth where the lake water and the tide mingled, and then, away ahead of them to seaward in the breaking dawn, they saw the steep cone of the sea-islet which, by Bedwyr's reckoning, must be the "island tower" of which the ruffians had spoken.
Since the old woman had been abandoned to die on the lake island, the tide had flowed and ebbed again, so there were no guiding marks on the sand, but inland on the flats where the river wound its way through its delta of salt turf to the sea, the tracks of horses were plain to be seen making straight for the shore and the rough causeway that led across, at low tide, to the island. Its high rocks, cloudy with trees, loomed out of a calm sea, the tide, just on the turn, creaming along the island's base and between the stones of the causeway. No light showed anywhere, but they could just see, guided by Bedwyr's pointing finger, the outlines of a tower at the summit.
The King regarded this, sitting his horse at the sea's edge, motionless but for the knuckle that tapped thoughtfully at his lip. He might have been contemplating the making of a rose-bed in the Queen's garden at Camelot. He looked no more warlike than he had done on that "peace mission" to Cerdic, when Agravain had inveighed so bitterly against the apparent tameness of the "duke of battles." But Mordred, at his side, watching with interest and a rising excitement that he found hard to conceal, knew that he was seeing for the first time, at last, the Arthur of the legends; this was a professional, an expert at his trade, the man who alone had saved Britain from the Saxon Terror, deciding how best to set about a very minor matter.
The King spoke at last. "The place looks half ruined. The fellow is a brigand, holed up here like a badger. This is not a case for siege, or even attack. By rights we should take hounds and bay him out like a boar."
There was a murmur from the others, like a growl. They had all seen the girl Elen's body as it was carried ashore. Bedwyr's horse reared suddenly, as if sharing its rider's tension. Bedwyr's hand was already at his sword, and behind, among the Companions, metal gleamed in the chill dawn light.
"Put up your swords." Arthur neither glanced aside, nor raised his voice. He sat relaxed and quiet, knuckle to lip. "I was about to say that this was a matter for One man only. Myself. Do not forget that the Princess Elen was kin to me, and I am here for King Hoel, whose niece and subject she was. This beast's blood is for me." He turned then, stilling the renewed murmur. "If he kills me, then you, Mordred, will take him. After you, if it becomes necessary, then Bedwyr and the others will do as they wish. Understood?"
There were assenting noises, some of them obviously reluctant. Mordred saw Arthur smile as he went on: "Now listen to me, before we scale the island. There are apparently at least three other men with him. There may be more. They are your meat; tackle them how you will. Now, they may have seen our approach; they will surely suspect it. They may come out to face us, or they may try to barricade themselves in the tower. In that case it will be your task to bay or burn them out, and bring their leader to face me." He shook the reins, and his horse moved forward, fetlock deep in the sea. "We must cross now. If we delay longer the tide will be over the causeway, and they will come down to take us at a loss as we swim our beasts ashore."
In this he proved wrong. The gang, secure in their knowledge of the rising tide, and, with the stupidity of their brutish natures, unheeding of pursuit, were all within the tower's walls, and had set no watch. Round the remains of their supper fire they slept, four of them, in a litter of gnawed bones and greasy remnants of food. The leader was still awake, nearest the fire, turning over in filthy hands a pair of golden bangles and the jeweled charm that he had torn from Elen's pretty neck. Then some sound must have caught his ear. He looked up, to see Arthur in the moonlight beyond the tower doorway.
The roar he gave was indeed like a bayed boar. And he was as swift, a giant of a man, with thews like a smith, and eyes blazing red as a wild beast's. The King would not have scrupled to kill him unarmed -- this was no fight, as he had said, but the slaughter of mad brutes -- but no sword could have been wielded within the tower's walls, so Arthur perforce stayed where he was, and let the man snatch up his weapon, a massive club which outreached the shorter man's weapon by inches, and rush out on him. His fellows, slower with sleep and surprise, tumbled out in his wake, to be seized by the knights who waited to either side of the tower door, and killed forthwith. Mordred, hand to hand with a burly fellow who stank, and whose breath reeked like an open drain, found himself forgetting all the knightly practice that the years had taught him, and reverting to the tricks that had once served the fisherman's son in the rough tussles of his boyhood. And it was two to one in the end. As Mordred, tripping, went down under the other man's weight, Bedwyr, joining him almost casually, spitted the fellow like a fowl, then stooping, cleaned his sword on the grass. The dead man's clothes were too dirty for the office.
The gang were all dead within seconds of emerging from the tower. Then the Companions stood back to watch the execution of the leader.
To their trained eyes it seemed obvious that he had himself had some kind of training in the past. A brute he was, but a brave brute. He rushed on Arthur, club against sword, and with the first tremendous swipe of the club outreached the shorter man's sword with a blow that sent the King reeling, and dinted the metal of his shield. The heavy club, sliding across the metal, took the giant for a moment with its impetus, and in that moment Arthur, recovering his balance, cut past club and arm, straight for the unprotected throat above the thick leather jerkin. The giant, for all his size, was quick on his feet. He jumped back, the club beating upward again and striking the sword out of line. But Arthur's arm and body went with the thrust, taking the blow higher, over the club and straight at the giant's face. The point just scraped his forehead, a short cut but a deep one, right above the eyes. The man yelled, and Arthur jumped back as the great club flailed round again. Blood spurted and flowed down the giant's face. It blinded him, but the very blindness almost proved Arthur's undoing, for the man, maddened by the sting of the wound, hurled himself straight at the King, ignoring the ready sword, and with the surprise of his rashness getting past it so that he came breast to breast with his opponent, and with his great weight and wrestling grip began to bear Arthur backward to the ground.
Perhaps Mordred was the only one there to appreciate the swift and very foul blow with which the King extricated himself. He wrenched out of the monster's grip, dodged the club again with apparent ease, and cut the man across the back of the knees. Yelling, the giant fell with a crash like a tree, thrashing about him as he went. The King waited, poised like a dancer, till the club's head thudded into the turf, then cut the wrist that held it. The club lay where it had struck. Before the giant could even feel the pain of the fresh wound the King stepped past through the gush of blood and stabbed him cleanly through the th
roat.
They recovered the princess's jewels from the tower, threw the bodies into it, and set fire to it. Then the troop rode back to catch up with their companions, and carry their heavy news to King Hoel.
5
One positive good came out of the tragedy of the Princess Elen. It was certain that Hoel's Prankish neighbors had had nothing to do with the rape, and, when it was known that the "giant" and his ruffianly companions were dead, the villagers and the forest folk who had suffered from the robbers' depredations dared speak out at last, making it quickly apparent that the recent raids and harassments had all been the work of the same robber band.
Accordingly, as soon as the funeral was done with, but before the time of mourning was past, Hoel and Arthur were able to sit down and discuss the demand made by the consul Quintilianus Hiberus. They decided to send an embassy to him, ostensibly to discuss the Roman emperor's proposals, but in reality to see for themselves what his strength was. Hoel had already sent to King Childebert and his brothers to find out if they had encountered the same demands, and if so, what stand they were prepared to take.
"It will take a little time," said Hoel, stretching his feet nearer the fire, and rubbing a hand over an arthritic knee, "but you'll stay, I trust, cousin?"
"To deploy my troops with yours in full sight, while your embassy goes to nose out Hiberus' intentions? Willingly," said Arthur.
"I'd hoped that you might lend some weight to the embassy, too," said Hoel. "I'm sending Guerin. He's as wily an old fox as ever wasted a council's time. They'll never understand half he says, let alone what his proposals mean. He'll make time for us, and meanwhile we'll get an answer from the Franks. Well, cousin?"
