Fire Dance

by Delle Jacobs

  "'Tis odd," said Chrétien. "I would have completed the wall before beginning the tower."

  Alain thought the same.

  "The wooden palisade was only recently replaced with the wall," Thomas replied. "Lord Fyren sought to build both at once. I think he had not expected a siege."

  Chrétien tested the newness of the mortar with a fingernail. Alain nodded his tacit understanding. He saw no moss, no discoloration of the stone. Why build if one did not expect a siege? Rufus was probably right. An insurgence had been brewing.

  An anxious page hurried up to Thomas's side and waited with great patience to be noticed until he was permitted to announce the nearness of the supper hour. Alain took the opportunity to dismiss Thomas to his other tasks, noting Thomas's unexpressed relief. They watched the man scurry after the page, down the steps into the bailey.

  "They appear amiable," Chrétien mused. "But they are closed to us."

  "They do not know what to expect of us. Thomas stands as a ready sacrifice to my anger. I wonder why."

  "It speaks of courage."

  "And loyalty. To someone, at least, though not the dead lord. Mayhap to the missing lady."

  "Do you believe it? The suicide?"

  "Naught in the man's character allows it."

  Chrétien folded his arms and leaned against the crenellated outer wall. "His castle wall is unfinished and vulnerable. Mayhap he was caught too far off his guard, and faced certain failure. Or his knights would not back him against Rufus. None seem to have any love for him."

  "Few have any love for Rufus. But they follow him."

  "Mayhap he really did go mad after killing the priest. Those things also happen."

  "Only a man with a conscience goes mad from guilt."

  "Murder, then?"

  "More likely. As you said, something is afoot, and it behooves us to learn what, if we are to keep our skins."

  "Do you think, then, this missing bride poses a threat to you? She might already be on her way to Scotland. Malcolm would not hesitate to add both Northumbria and Cumbria to Scotland, so he would easily welcome her aid against Rufus."

  "Aye, and more so if she has the skill and loyal knights behind her to assemble a rebellion. Yet she puts herself to disadvantage by ceding the castle and giving me time to secure my position."

  "Thomas said she wants peace. Might she be as he claims?"

  "Then would it not benefit her more to ally herself with the English king through her husband? But without the bride, Chrétien, this castle and its demesne cannot be secure."

  "Those loyal to Fyren might well use her as their rallying point."

  Alain shook his head. "Men do not rally to a dead man. Fyren is quite dead. And I am impatient to get on with things."

  Alain wasted no more time surveying his domain. As the supper chime clanged, he hurried down the steps, deciding to set himself immediately to the business of the hall. He would bring in both Thomas and Gerard to assist in establishing his authority, for both of them knew the knights who would now fall vassal to him. It would be a tricky task to unite them all, and he had his suspicions of all the Saxon contingent. But they had little to gain by opposing him now that the old lord was dead.

  * * *

  Alain already loved this spot atop the curtain wall with its expansive view of his new demesne, best viewed as now, in the setting sun.

  "What news?" he asked of Chrétien as his friend took the stone steps two at a time and joined him on the allure.

  "Naught, Alain. She cannot have gone far, yet none admit seeing her."

  "And you searched all roads?"

  "Aye, such as they are."

  "Villages? Cottages?"

  "All that are about. But I do not think the knights of this holding will betray her, and we know not how to spot her even if we see her."

  Alain accepted the news with silence. His knights had been about the task since dawn, and like the others, Chrétien also brought back only weariness.

  They leaned against grey blocks of limestone and surveyed what was before them, all blushed red by the brilliant sunset. Beyond the curtain wall and dry moat spread the village that had grown up around Fyren's castle, hugging the slope of the craggy hill, and stretching out to touch the green dale below.

  "I see why Rufus wanted this fortress," said Chrétien.

  "Aye. It commands the passage to England, a fine buffer against the Scots and Strathclydes."

  "And access to Northumbria. The folk say many of their fathers fled here from the Conqueror's raids."

  "That land is still so bleak and scarred."

  " Perhaps it will never recover, Chrétien."

  "The Normans may never be forgiven for that."

  "Perhaps not. But I will hold my demesne anyway."

  Below, an eerily silent procession wound down the hill from the castle, following an ancient wooden cart drawn by oxen and bearing a coffin. No wails. No death knell. Even Alain’s own priest, Father Hardouin, had refused to give last rites. Alain could not recall any other burial not blessed by the Church.

  Alain remembered how the coffin had rested all day in the center of the hall, nailed shut with more iron nails than he had ever seen put to a casket. Those few who entered the hall had eyed it warily, but none had approached it, nor shed a tear.

  Yet, if none had a care for the lord, why did they now follow his coffin to the grave?

  With a quick gesture for Chrétien to follow, he rushed down through the bailey and out beyond the gate.

  "Why?" asked Chrétien, hurrying along at his side.

  "Would not a daughter come to see her father buried?"

  "But they say she hated him."

  "Perhaps all the more reason to see it done."

  Soon they caught up with the procession, remaining at the rear of the small group. A knight without his armor, the Norseman Thorkel, watched them with narrowed eyes.

  The procession traveled along the narrow dirt lane beyond the church and its small yard, past the village green, the smithy, the tannery, and a collection of stone cottages, to the crossroads.

  "They fear he will haunt them," Chrétien commented.

  "Aye. They bury him at the crossroads to confuse his spirit, but it will take far more than that to confuse that old demon. More likely he has already been welcomed into Satan's Hell."

  Beyond lay pasture land of the lord's demesne, where the grave was dug. No priest stood beside the grave, nor did any other intone either eulogy or dirge. Alain searched the faces.

  In unison with the five other knights, Thomas lowered the casket into the earth. His mouth was drawn tight, jaw set hard and rigid. Several women stood near the grave, Edyt among them, all studying the coffin with grim concentration as it was lowered into the grave. When the ropes were pulled loose, the girl bent forward and scooped up a handful of the loose earth. She held her hand over the grave, then opened it quickly to drop the dirt. She turned and walked away.

  Others did the same. Each tossed one handful of earth to the grave, then departed. Man or woman. Vassal or villein. Mayhap it was a custom with these people.

  "Well?" asked Chrétien.

  "Well, he is buried. I do not know what else can be said."

  "But the lady?"

  "She could have been here, I suppose, but I saw only common folk among the women."

  "She could be dressed as one of them. Yet I think she would not risk coming at all if she fears being caught."

  "Mayhap." Alain still stood beside the grave, watching as villeins spaded in the loose dirt. "Mayhap," he repeated. "Do not forget the faces you have seen here tonight. I counted twenty-seven women, most of them of the hall, and some about the right age. But I saw none who looked excessively fearful or secretive. Certainly none shed tears. And none gave the appearance of a lady."

  "Then she must be already gone."

  "Aye. But if she is still here, we will see her again. Watch the women of the hall and village who were among the crowd tonight."

  Ch
rétien's face screwed into a puzzled frown. "Yet surely your lady would not be toiling with her hands. Surely that would distinguish her."

  "Or mayhap she is slyer than we think."

  CHAPTER 3

  The Normans rode out from the castle, their helms shining like mirrors in the early morning sun. Twenty knights in their hauberks, erect and proud astride their big war horses, rode with Alain in pairs across the wooden bridge into the village. With Chrétien d'Evreaux at his side, Alain rode at their lead. The handsome purple cloak he had taken from Fyren's corpse caught the wind, billowing behind him like a Viking sail.

  Thomas, his silver hair glinting like the discs on his Saxon hauberk, directed the Norman knights along the track of the stream that gurgled downhill. Dark peaks, first gently rounded, then suddenly steepening into stark crags, framed the grassy dale.

  "Down to where the beck joins the river, then back up into the fells," said Thomas. His hand waved in a wide arc to indicate the vast green space before them, outlined by the curve of the river.

  Without comment, Alain added the strange new terms to his knowledge of this strange land. Beck meant stream. Fells were mountains. It was almost like learning a new language.

  He raised his hand and drew his mount to a halt, letting his gaze sweep across the majestic valley and up to the knobby tops of the fells. He could not get enough of their rugged beauty.

  This land that rolled out before them was the richest land of his domain, now sown in oats, barley and rye, and bright with the new green of spring. Beyond on the fallow lands, black-faced sheep grazed. Farther up on the fells, the animals blended with the ragged grey rocks and cliffs, and sometimes were distinguishable only by their movement.

  His land. His demesne. He had waited long for this.

  Thomas pulled ahead, turning the armed knights to the west, then back again to the north, following upstream the track of another beck from where it intersected with the river. The trail grew more rugged, and narrowed as it passed between tall pines and ash trees and rambled near steep cliffs, forcing the knights to follow in a single line behind the steward.

  "An extensive forest," Alain said, when he could draw up beside Thomas.

  The steward nodded.

  "The hunting is good?"

  "Aye, lord. And adequate timber. None of the forest is being cleared, for the demesne is not in need of more pasture land. And little of it is suitable for the plow. We go there, now."

  "I do not want to be afield too long," he reminded the man.

  "Nay, lord. We shall return before sext. There is much to see, but the rest must wait, for the holding is large."

  "Very well. We shall take it a piece at a time."

  Thomas nodded pleasantly, not at all the way a man would who intrigued against his lord. Alain had seen enough conspiracy at court to know even the slyest of schemers gave away their intentions in their demeanor, if watched long enough. He had learned, when turning away at the end of an encounter, to suddenly turn back again as if something had been forgotten. One could see the oddest changes in a man's face, then.

  In Thomas, he saw none of those things. Neither keenly narrowed eyes nor trained emptiness. Yet he knew the man held secrets. Of all those in the castle, Thomas would be most likely to know the fate of the missing Melisande. And he, of all those there, would know how Fyren died, and whether plots still lingered in the hall's mysterious, aloof atmosphere.

  Slowed by the steepness of the slope and rocks dislodged by the hooves of the forward animals, the knights rode on. The horses, whuffing their great gasps of air, climbed, following in single file around the slope, now up, now down, sometimes nearly level. The sparsely scattered trees became a thick mat of deepest green spread before them.

  Alain's charger seemed to sense its master's excitement at the magnificent land and renewed its labors. Alain pulled ahead of the knights to reach the narrow pass between the steep fells and gaze down at the sea of dark green, flowing like waves over the hills. Chrétien spurred his horse and rode up to Alain's side in the narrow gap at the pass.

  A whine, a thunk. Chrétien howled with pain.

  Chrétien clutched at an arrow's shaft protruding from his neck. His horse reared. Alain goaded his horse against Chrétien's big grey, lunged and steadied him. He snatched the grey's reins, pulled the beast up short.

  "Steady, Chrétien. I have it." Alain grasped the shaft, groped for the point. Not deep, stopped by Chrétien's sturdy mail. He jerked the arrow free.

  "On the ridge! There!" shouted the Norseman, Thorkel.

  Above them. High up, on the lobbed off peak where Thorkel pointed.

  "Thomas, see to this." Alain yelled, motioning to Chrétien's wound.

  "There's no trail up there!" shouted Hugh, springing down from his saddle. "The climb's too steep for the horses."

  "Take three men, Thorkel. Hugh, you go. See if you can catch him."

  The same flurry of brown skirted the knob of rock at the fell's peak, then again vanished. Hugh dashed up the slope after Thorkel.

  "Go, Alain," said Chrétien.

  Alain glanced at his friend. The bleeding was light. Thomas crammed a cloth between wound and hauberk, his silvery eyebrows furrowing as he bent to the task.

  Alain flung himself down from his saddle and climbed, clawing at rock and bracken until he reached the ridge just below the rounded knob.

  The four men stood on the ridge, breathing hard, staring at the wild tangle of rock, soil, bracken and pine that covered the far side of the fell. Swords drawn, ready. At nothing.

  "Naught?"

  "Nay, lord," said Hugh. "Not even a grouse disturbed."

  Alain trained his eyes on the knob where he had seen that flash of brown, climbed to it, and knelt to the ground from where he guessed the shot had come. White streaks on the dark stone suggested the scrape of metal. The thin soil showed the imprint of a knee among a tangle of shallow, pointed footprints. Downslope past the knob, two widely spaced prints showed the direction the man had fled. Nothing stirred beyond. The stony ground revealed no more prints.

  "One man only, I think," he said, more to himself than to his men. "Reason enough to flee after only one shot. And he could not have hoped to create much harm from such a distance."

  "He aimed for your face," said Hugh. "Chrétien merely rode between and caught the shaft in his neck."

  "An archer of some talent, then."

  "And one who would see the new lord dead. You must be wary of these folk."

  "Mayhap." Certain the archer was gone, Alain gave a sharp sideways jerk of his head for a command and worked his way back down the slope to the pass.

  "Chrétien?" he asked as he reached his friend again.

  "Well enough."

  "Only one link of the mail was severed, lord." Thomas daubed at the gash beneath the mail coif. "It should heal without trouble."

  "And you, Thomas?"

  "I, lord?"

  "What think you of this ambush? Mayhap you can tell us who conspires against us."

  "Aye, I can. There are those who have not pledged themselves. Those who fear losing their fiefs to Norman knights."

  "And well they might. But you, Thomas?"

  "By the Lady Melisande's wish, I have given mine, as you know."

  "And as you have led us into an ambush, shall I still give you my trust?"

  The man's wide mouth drew tight and thin, and his face set hard. "It is for you to say, lord."

  Their eyes locked gaze in fierce combat. Thomas stood his ground.

  "How would this man have known our direction?"

  "I know not, lord, but it would not have been hard to guess."

  "How so?"

  "The new lord would want to see his holding immediately. And it is well known the Normans are fond of their forests."

  "True enough," said Chrétien. "That is how you would have planned it."

  It was. And Thomas did not quail from his lord's hard gaze. "I shall reserve my judgment for another time. Chrétien
, do you ride?"

  "Aye, Alain. It is but a minor hurt."

  "Then, Thomas, do we return the way we came, or have we more surprises ahead of us?"

  "As you wish, lord. The way before us returns us sooner. But if you fear ambush, more chances lie in the wood ahead."