Onfroi swabbed his brow with the fold of his velvet sleeve. He could not even begin to imagine what form Wardieu’s anger would take. Having witnessed all extremes in his ten years as sheriff of Lincoln, he was not certain which to dread the most: the cold, icy calm that caused an offender’s bowels to turn to jelly; or the hot, rampaging fury that resulted in flesh and tissue being splattered in all directions. The man was a spawn of the Devil, no doubt about it. Unreadable. Unpredictable. Unfriendly. And unflinchingly possessive of his property. How should he be expected to react to the kidnapping of his bride?
Halt. Swivel. Pace.
There had to be a reasonable explanation of how thirty armed guards could allow themselves to be taken by surprise, stripped of everything of value, and herded out of the woods like guinea fowls, dressed only in shirts and chausses … but what was it? By what possible reasonable logic could he, Onfroi de la Haye, hope to explain how an outlaw had managed to dig himself a forest lair that had defied discovery for nigh on two months now? How could he begin to explain the existence of a spectre in black wolf pelts who struck and vanished, struck and vanished and never left so much as a turd behind to show he had ever been there? Men could not track him. Hounds could not track him. Armour —no matter how thickly forged—could not deflect his bowmen’s arrows, nor could the swiftest of horses outmaneuver the silent death that stalked them from the greenwood.
Halt. Swivel. Pace.
Reasonable? The very word mocked him. Why, by the Devil’s loins, could he—Onfroi de la Haye—have not contented himself with the two small estates his father had bequeathed him? Why, by the fruit of those same viperous loins, had he allowed Nicolaa to push and prod and manipulate him into seeking the appointment as reeve of Lincoln?
Nicolaa! Bah! A beauty to look at, but long ago corrupted by greed, ambition, and a lust for immortality. She was a clever bitch. Cold and conniving. And so in love with herself it was no surprise she had little room for anything else in that frigid heart of hearts. Onfroi knew he was a laughingstock because of Nicolaa’s excesses. Truth be known, it was just as well she sought her perverted pleasures in every other bed but his own; truth be told, he was more than a little afraid of where those perversions might lead someday. Blood and pain delighted her; torture was viewed as an evening’s entertainment; a victim’s disembowelment was a prelude to a hearty feast.
A bitch, a reclusive warmonger, and a vengeful wolf’s head. Was it any wonder his blood had turned sour and his belly ran liquid from morning till night?
Halt. Swivel …
Freeze!
Onfroi stood stock-still, his eyes briefly startled wide enough to show the red-veined whites. A low and distant rumble was drifting toward them from the east, carried on a breeze that smelled of sweat and anger.
Christ Almighty! Could it be Wardieu already? If so, he must have ridden out of Bloodmoor in the dust of the messenger, and by the sound of it, brought his entire castle guard!
A panicked glance around the campsite caused the veins in Onfroi’s neck to swell and pulsate. Half of his guards were lounging about in blank-eyed boredom, the others were gathered about a tapped keg of ale.
“Insolent oafs!” he screamed, kicking viciously at two men who were stretched out, fast asleep. “Up! Get up, damn you!”
He ran across the grass, boots and fists launching out at anyone foolish enough to remain in his path. “Lazy, insolent oafs! I’ll see how easily you sleep with hot irons poking out of your skulls! Arrest those men!” he shouted, pointing at the two unfortunates. “Get them out of my sight before I take a knife to them here and now!”
“God curse me for a fool,” he continued, ranting to himself, searching for more flesh to abuse in the scattering troops. “It is no wonder that damned wolf’s head has no fear of the forest. He could be a dozen paces away … pissing into the soup pot! … and not one of these oafs would notice!”
Onfroi ran out of obscenities just as the thunder of hooves rounded the sweeping mouth of the valley. Wardieu’s destrier commanded the lead; a huge white beast, a trained ram-pager hewn from solid muscle, with the blazing red eyes and flared nostrils of a demon bred in hell. His master was hardly less fearsome. Riding tall in the saddle, his blue mantle rippling out from broad, armour-clad shoulders, Lucien Wardieu wore an expression of cold, grim fury. Directly behind were his squires, their mounts less formidable but still throwing back clods of torn earth on every galloped pace. In heir ominous wake, two score of armoured knights appeared, each wearing surcoats embroidered with the Wardieu dragon, but carrying kite-shaped shields emblazoned with their own distinctive crests and arms.
“God in heaven,” Onfroi muttered, and fought to suppress the urge to cross himself. It was worse than he thought: Among the warlike faces of Wardieu’s vaunted army of mercenaries, was the one countenance in particular that caused his sphincter muscle to lose control.
D’Aeth. A huge, brooding bulk of a man whose face was so hideously scarred it went beyond the normal bounds of ugly. As bald as an egg, as broad as a beast, he was Wardieu’s subjugator, and there, dangling from his saddle like a tinker’s wares were the dreaded tools of his profession —iron pincers for the crushing of bones and testicles, leather straps and studded whips, a long thin prod with a wickedly barbed five-pointed tip (the purpose of which did not bear thinking). Who was Wardieu planning to have tortured?
De la Haye willed away a wave of nausea as the baron’s warhorse pounded to a halt in a swirl of grass and flayed earth. Wardieu sat a long moment, glaring around the makeshift camp, then swung a leg over the saddle and vaulted to the ground.
“M-my lord Lucien,” Onfroi stammered, rushing over at once. “I did not anticipate your arrival so soon.”
The piercing blue eyes came to rest on the sheriff’s sweating face. “Obviously there were a great many things you did not anticipate these past two days, De la Haye.”
Onfroi repressed a shudder. The baron’s voice was calm enough, but then so was the wind in the eye of a hurricane.
“You have prisoners?”
“P-prisoners? No, my lord. Unfortunately no, the outlaws moved too swiftly. By the time the survivors had reached us at the fens, the men who had perpetrated the ambush were scattered in a hundred different directions. That is their habit. To strike with the speed of vipers and vanish in the undergrowth as if they had never been.”
Wardieu’s face was as blank as a stone. “You know them well enough to have established their habits? Then this is not the first time this particular band of vermin has appeared in these woods?”
A violent tic in Onfroi’s cheek closed his left eye completely. “Th-there have been rumours, my lord, nothing more. Rumours of a man who dresses in wolf’s pelts and plagues the merchant caravans traveling to and from Lincoln Town. But they are only rumours. You yourself are aware of how these local peasants exaggerate the smallest incident into an adventure of epic proportions, especially when the outlaws perpetrate their crimes in the name of Saxon justice.”
“The Bishop of Sleaford will be pleased to hear you refer to his mishap last month as a ‘small incident,’” Lucien remarked coldly. “As will the Lady Servanne.”
Onfroi’s tongue slid across his lips. “There is no proof the two crimes can be attributed to the same villains, my lord.”
“Oh? Then you would have me believe there are two packs of wolves hiding out in these woods? Two separate packs who have managed to elude your patrols for … how long? A month? Two months?”
“We have searched, Lord Lucien,” Onfroi whined. “The patrols have been doubled and their frequency increased. Hounds have been put to the scent every day. Foresters have been brought from the villages to aid the search. No one sees anything. No one hears anything. Spies do not return, and, if their bodies are found, they have had their throats slit and their tongues pulled through the gap. The Saxon rabble do nothing to help. Why, only last week we burned an entire village to the ground and hung the peasants one by one, but none wo
uld betray the outlaws. Not a single man, woman, or child would speak to save his own life.”
Wardieu’s lips compressed around a grimace. “Your methods are as crude as your abilities, De la Haye. Did it not occur to you that slaughtering an entire village would only provoke this Black Wolf—if he is one of them—to retaliate twofold? Did it never occur to you to warn me that guests traveling to my demesne might have some reason to fear for their safety?”
“The men ambushed this time were your own!” Onfroi blurted unthinkingly. “Christ above! Who would have thought for an instant that Bayard of Northumbria could not outwit a band of half-starved woodcutters and thieves! He was well aware of the threat, if you were not. He at least ventured out of the castle now and then to listen to tavern gossip!”
Wardieu halted in the act of removing his leather gauntlets. The look he gave De la Haye brought forth an immediate, gasped apology.
“God spare me, what I meant to say … I mean, what I did not mean to imply, er, to say … that is, what I meant was …”
Wardieu turned his back and signaled to one of his mercenaries. “Cull a dozen of your best men and go to where the ambush occurred. Search the area thoroughly. A man on his own can seem to disappear easily enough, but not a score or more, and not if they took women and packhorses. I want to know exactly how many are in this wolf’s pack, and in which likely direction they headed. And I want results, Aubrey de Vere, not excuses.”
“You shall have them, my lord,” declared De Vere and wheeled his big horse around.
While the selections were being made, one of the knights who had gathered with the other silent onlookers from the sheriff’s camp, limped forward, his gait favouring a wounded, bandaged thigh. He was neither tall nor especially pleasant-featured, but he was obviously a seasoned veteran of many battles, and when he spoke, it was with a voice that sounded like two slabs of rock grinding together.
“Sir Roger de Chesnai,” he said in answer to the question in Wardieu’s eyes. “I am captain of Sir Hubert de Briscourt’s guard, and was part of the escort sent to protect Lady Servanne.”
“I should not brag about a job ill done,” Wardieu said, removing his steel helm and pushing his mail hood back off the sweat-dampened locks of tawny gold hair.
De Chesnai blinked, whether to clear his eyes of the fever-induced moisture that slicked his brow, or to absorb the insult to his honour, it was not revealed by his expression.
“Command fell to me when Northumbria was slain,” he said, staring intently at the Dragon’s face. “I would ask for the opportunity to return to the site of the ambuscade with your men, if you will permit it.”
Wardieu glanced down at the blood-soaked bandaging. “Bayard was a good man. Before I would consider your request, I would know what happened.”
De Chesnai flushed and balled his fists. “They dropped on us out of nowhere, my lord. Northumbria had taken the precaution of sending men on ahead to ensure the way was clear, but they must have died between one blink and the next, with nary a cry or shout to mark their passing. We found the bodies later, all four of them pierced clean through the heart; a dozen more were lost the same way when the main party was ambushed. They just came upon us out of nowhere. No sound. No sight of them, not even after they had made good their first kills.”
Lucien waited until the wounded knight paused to grit his teeth through another fevered chill before he queried part of the story. “You said … their arrows pierced through armour?”
“Aye, lord. Some of the rogues use longbows, with arrows tipped in steel, not iron.”
“Steel?” Wardieu repeated, his brow folding with scepticism. “Woodcutters and thieves”—he spared a particularly venomous glance toward Onfroi de la Haye—“using steel-tipped arrows?”
De Chesnai met the blue eyes unwaveringly. “Yes, my lord. And while none were wasted, none were retrieved either, as if they were in plentiful supply.”
Wardieu recognized the importance of such flamboyance and rubbed a thoughtful finger along the squared line of his jaw. That the weapon of choice was the bow and arrow was not as much of a surprise as the fact that these outlaws used precious—and vastly expensive—steel in place of the softer, more readily available iron arrowheads. Iron had difficulty penetrating the bullhide jerkins worn as armour by common men-at-arms; they deflected harmlessly off chain mail worn by knights. Steel, on the other hand, tempered and hardened a hundredfold over crude bog iron, could slice through bull-hide like a knife paring cheese, and sever the links of chain mail with hardly more effort.
“Go on. What happened then?”
“The leader revealed himself, exchanged a few words with Northumbria, then slew him. Not without provocation, to be sure, for it was Bayard who loosed the first arrow, but I have it in my mind the outlaw would have slain him anyway. Something”—he looked steadily into Wardieu’s face—“in the eyes spelled death.”
“You said they exchanged a few words … what was said?”
“I was not close enough to hear, nor did they speak as if they desired an audience. But again, something in the outlaw’s manner made me believe he knew the captain, and that Northumbria was startled into a similar recognition.”
De Chesnai turned away for a moment, as if some part of his recollections had left a more disturbing impression.
“What is it? What are you remembering?”
Bayard of Northumbria had possessed the courage and fighting experience of ten men; who was he, Roger de Chesnai, to even suggest …
“He looked more than surprised, my lord. He looked shaken. As if he was seeing something that should not be there. In any case, he was certainly angered beyond reason, for he took up his crossbow and attempted to shoot the outlaw where he stood.”
“And the outlaw?”
“He managed to aim and strike dead centre of the eye before the captain had even released the trigger.”
“A fair bowman, then, you would say?” Wardieu questioned dryly.
“The best I have ever seen, my lord.”
Wardieu studied the knight’s haggard face a moment then stared out across the gold and pink avalanche of clouds rolling toward the setting sun. “Describe him to me. As clearly as you remember.”
“I did not have a clear view, my lord, and the shadows were thick, but I could see he was very tall. Equal unto yourself, I should say.”
“Hair? Beard?”
“Brown hair, my lord. Very dark. And uncut as the Saxons prefer it, although I would give pause to say the rogue was of that breed.”
“Why say you that?” Wardieu broke in quickly.
De Chesnai answered with a shrug and a frown. “A feeling, my lord. A sense that all was not as it was meant to appear to be. Also, he wore a sword, and had the stance of a man who knew well how to use it.”
Wardieu nodded, absorbing yet another bit of information. Common woodcutters and thieves would scarce be able to afford the steel to own a sword, much less possess the knowledge of how to use one to any effect.
“His face was coarsely shaven and well weathered. His eyes were of no special colour. Gray, perhaps … or dull blue.”
“Devil’s eyes, they was,” muttered one of the servants who had survived the ambush. “Not natural, they wasn’t. Gave a man a chill just ter look into them—as if Satan hisself were inside the body gawpin’ out.”
“How would ye be knowin’ that, Thomas Crab?” demanded a second voice, owned by a man who had the sense to keep his head lowered and his eyes downcast to avoid notice. “Ye had yer head tucked ’atween yer legs the minute ye saw that great bluidy bow o’ his.”
“Aye, an rightly so,” the first man countered. “Cursed be the fool who watches the flight of a left-thrown arrow! Satan’s own hand pulls the string, so it does.”
Wardieu had only been half attentive to the outburst, but at this last righteous declaration, he again held up a hand to interrupt De Chesnai and stared at the servant.
“What was that about a left-thrown
arrow?”
Before Thomas Crab could persuade his trembling legs to carry him forward to reply to the question, the pain pounding in De Chesnai’s temples relented enough to smooth the frown from his forehead.
“By God, the fool is right, my lord,” the captain growled. “The outlaw did favour the left hand. Why … there could not be five archers in all of England with his skill. Discover the name of the one who shoots with the Devil at his elbow and we will have the true identity of the rogue who dares to commit his crimes in your name!”
It was Lucien Wardieu’s turn to feel his composure shaken. “He … used my name?”
De Chesnai stiffened slightly, his dark eyes flicking to the sheriff, but Onfroi was still too engrossed questioning his own sanity at offering insult to the Baron de Gournay to worry that he had neglected to include this rather astounding claim on the outlaw’s part. Foremost in his mind, even as he sweated and twitched, oblivious to the conversation between the two men, was the expectant grin on D’Aeth’s face. The watery piglet eyes were glazed with thoughts of bloodletting, and De la Haye treasured every drop that flowed through his veins.
“Was there … anything else in his appearance that you recall?” Wardieu asked, his voice sounding forced and ragged. “Anything unusual? Any … scarring, or … obvious disfigurements?”
“No, my lord. He was in full possession of all his limbs and appendages. There were no scars or brands that I could see. He was a big brute, to be sure, but it was possible he was made to look more so by the vest of wolf pelts he wore.”
Wardieu forced himself to take a slow, steadying breath. For a moment there, he had almost thought the impossible. He had almost thought … but no. Despite the nightmares and the premonitions, the dead remained dead.
Robin Hood Trilogy Page 11
