Fire and Steel

by Anita Mills

  “There are enough left within the walls to bury them, my lord,” Guy told Roger. “If he was here but hours ago, I’d go after him.”

  They ate and slept without a fire, their pallets unrolled on the forest floor among trees so dense that there would be no way mounted riders could come through. Seeking the solace of solitude, Guy had laid his bedding some distance apart from the others and he sat on his blanket and ate salted fish and dried biscuits in the darkness and tried not to think of what he’d seen.

  He lived a nightmare, it seemed, an endless dream whereby his body was punished and his mind tortured in his pursuit of Robert of Belesme. As he sat there, he pondered the end to it. If they did manage by some stroke of fortune to corner him, what then? Could even one born of Belesme take him?

  He heard the crunch of boots behind him and turned to stare upward in the moonless night as someone stood over him. And somehow he knew that it was de Brione, not by anything he could see and not by spoken word. It was more a sense of presence.

  “You give yourself too hard a task, Guy.”

  When Guy did not answer, Roger dropped down beside him to sit cross-legged on his pallet. For a time both were silent, and then Guy could stand it no longer. “That I would bring in Belesme?” he asked warily.

  “Nay—the other. You cannot carry a burden of what you fear to be.”

  Guy stared hard into the pitch-darkness and tried to see the other man’s face, but even with eyes that were adjusted to the lack of light, he could make out nothing but the faint glitter of de Brione’s eyes. His stomach knotted in fear of what Roger must be thinking.

  “I have watched you, and I have ached for you, knowing how it must be for you.”

  “Nay. No one knows how it is for me, my lord. Nothing I would have ever came to me without my fighting for it: my life, my lands, Catherine—nothing. And yet each time, I fought hard and won, but this time I cannot. I do not think I can take him.”

  “You could—despite what is said of him, he is neither Satan nor Satan’s spawn, Guy. I have fought him since I was but fifteen, and I can tell you that he is a man like any other, save that he is more clever and more skilled than most. But…” Roger’s eyes caught whatever light there was as they met Guy’s soberly. “But I’d not have you fight him if it can be helped. I’d not have you kill someone of your own blood.”

  “Jesu!” Guy exhaled sharply, his whole body arrested as time stood still. “You must hate me for it,” he managed finally in a hollow voice.

  “Nay. ’Tis you who would hate yourself. You cannot be faulted for whose blood you bear—only for what you become, Guy, and you need have no shame for what you are.”

  “How did you know?” Guy’s heart thudded as he wondered if Belesme could be seen in him.

  “Eleanor. She knew him better than any, and she thought there was a resemblance in ways she could not explain to me. At first, I thought it but her woman’s fancy, and scoffed at her for it.”

  “But later?”

  “But later, as I have lived with you these nine weeks past, I came to see what she saw.” Considering the matter, Roger sat very still for a time, and only the sounds of insects at night broke the silence. “I think,” he said after a time, “that you look much as he once did, but everyone forgets all but how he appears now, so ’tis unlikely that Henry will note it. If anything, ’tis that you and Robert both could draw people with your handsomeness, but would turn them away, Belesme from arrogance, and you from caution. You fear love and he disdains it.”

  “Aye, I fear it,” Guy admitted. “But I accepted that Catherine was everything to me before he came to Rivaux. I’d not tell her—I’d not have her turn from me.”

  “My daughter is proud and willful, but she is fair. I think you fear for naught.”

  “I’d not have her know that I gave her a son of his blood.”

  Roger sighed and rose with an effort. “We all must struggle with the demons within us, and you mayhap more than most. But I see no madness or evil in you, and I expect none. Nay, but I am proud to claim you for my son, Guy of Rivaux—you are what you have made yourself, and I like what you have become.”

  “You think Cat will forgive me, that she will not care?” Guy asked incredulously.

  “She had naught to forgive. But I suppose I have to leave you to discover that for yourself.”

  “Wait…” Guy pulled himself up with a low branch and dusted his hands. “I’d not tell her, still.”

  “That is your right to decide. I did but come to tell you that if we manage to make Robert fight, I will try to take him myself. God knows, but there can be no stain on my soul for it.” Roger reached to clasp Guy’s shoulder quickly and then dropped his hand. “Your secret is safe with me, Guy. I’d not betray you.”

  As Roger’s footsteps faded in the forest, Guy lay back down, turned on his side, and pulled his blanket over his shoulder. The ground was hard, but he was so tired that it was difficult to care. Roger knew and professed not to care. Roger knew Robert was his father. The thought whirled through his mind, repeating itself over and over. It was impossible that he could not care—impossible. But Roger was the most honorable man Guy knew. “Your secret is safe with me. I’d not betray you,” echoed again in his mind. Roger knew and would protect him.

  Yet when he finally did drift into the netherworld between consciousness and sleep, it was neither Roger nor Belesme who came to him there. He pulled his blanket closer and could smell the roses in Catherine of the Condes’ hair, could feel the warmth of her skin beneath his, and could hear her whisper love words to him alone. The tension eased somewhat as his mind gave her presence beside him, but in the last instant before he dreamed, he was afraid.

  40

  Peasants who had fled into the forests came out cautiously to tell them that Belesme had passed but an hour or so before. The story was the same—villeins ridden down in the fields where they worked, their wives and children either burned in their huts or dragged forth to be slaughtered. Guy thought that a man ought to become inured to the suffering and destruction after a time, but it had not yet happened. His gorge rose, sticking in his throat as he looked around at the pitifully broken bodies. He’d seen men cleaved nearly twain, their guts spilling onto the ground, their brains spattered on other men’s shields, but at least those men had fought sword against sword with a chance for survival. Now he was faced almost daily with the destruction of the innocent and unprotected.

  Brian had disappeared behind a still-smoldering hut, and Guy thought he’d gone to be sick. Following him to comfort him, he saw the younger man bending over a woman impaled by a pitchfork, her agonized moans more moving than screams. As he watched, Brian spoke to her, made the sign of the Cross over her, and drew his sword to end her death throes. When Brian turned back, Guy could see tears streaming down his face.

  “Brian—”

  “He is the Devil, Guy—he is! Once I did not care, but now I can see ’tis God’s will that we find him and kill him even as he has killed! I care not what my father has said—he has to die for this!” He bent to wipe his bloody sword on blackened grass. “I pray ’tis I who strike the blow—I do.”

  “We have to catch him first,” Guy reminded him soberly. He looked at the blood that spilled from where Brian had sliced across the woman’s neck, and his eyes turned a bleak, cold green. In single combat, Brian was no match for Robert of Belesme. And his newfound love for Roger de Brione was too precious to lose. Nay, if anyone took Count Robert, it would have to be himself. “Come on, we are not far behind.”

  “Are you ready to ride?”

  Roger came around the hut and stopped, his blue eyes taking in the woman’s body and Brian’s drawn sword, before traveling to his foster son’s face. Wordlessly he moved to drape a comforting arm about Brian’s shoulders, and together they walked back to their standing horses. Guy reached for the pitchfork, removed it with an effort, and tossed it aside. God in his mercy would have to forgive him, but he was going to put an
end to Robert of Belesme’s evil if he had to kill him.

  “How many do you see?”

  Guy stretched in his saddle to look below, where Belesme and his men openly took their ease on the bank of a small spring. Belesme himself had dismounted to wash his hands in the water. “Mayhap seventy, mayhap more,” he answered Roger.

  “We’ll lose too many of our own,” Roger muttered.

  “I say we ride him down now,” Brian urged. “He is on foot and can be taken.”

  “Nay. He’ll see us ere we can reach him. ’Twould give him time to mount. And there’s too great a risk that he will escape again.” Roger shook his head and continued to stare at the scene below. “I do not think he knows he is followed yet, and I’d surprise him.”

  “They build a fire—mayhap they mean to stay here,” Guy observed. And then, even as he watched, he saw several men unpack tents.

  “God’s blood, but he’s bold. He must think there are none to dare.”

  “Or else he means to draw us out, Brian.” Guy turned to Roger to add, “I heard in Wales that it was a favored ruse used to bring the Welsh into the open. I’d pull back eight or ten furlongs and wait for nightfall.”

  “Aye.”

  “Nay—he has prisoners,” Brian protested. “They have brought women for sport.”

  “Holy Mary.” Guy looked again, and even from the distance he could see girls pushed from where they had been hidden by the horses into the open area. “So he has.”

  Roger’s eyes were troubled as he considered the discovery of prisoners. “Aye, you may be right that he means to draw us out—’twould be like him to have his blood sport and wait for us at the same time. Or it may be he truly does not know we are here. And I know not how to tell which it is.”

  “’Tis evening. I’d wait and fall on them—I’d give them no more chance than they give,” Guy decided.

  “But they will kill the women,” Brian reminded him.

  “Aye, I know it.”

  “And you’d let them?” he asked Guy incredulously.

  “I doubt he will kill them forthwith, for he has been known to keep the comely ones for days,” Guy answered brutally. “I’d not see them dead, but neither would I lose my men and not get him. I cast my lot for waiting until night falls.” His eyes were heavily flecked with green as they met Brian’s. “I’d listen to screams for a few hours rather than scatter Belesme and his men now and risk that he gets away to raid again.”

  “I’d not expected you to be so harsh, my lord.”

  Guy was torn by the plight of those below him, but held his ground. “Nay, but I’d not lived had I been soft, Brian.”

  Roger looked from one to the other. Like Guy, he realized the need to wait, but he sympathized with Brian’s horror. “Aye, we move back until night falls,” he decided finally.

  “So you cannot hear them?” Brian gibed.

  “’Tis not likely they will survive the melee anyway,” Roger answered him.

  Saddle girths were tightened, blade edges were honed, and pitch was melted over a small fire as the men milled around, tensely awaiting darkness. The archers, who would be useless at night, busied themselves helping wrap the horses’ hooves to damp the sound of them. And in his own way, each man there prayed it would soon be over. This was what they’d waited for, suffered for, and striven for in the nine week since they’d left Rouen. They’d live or die trying to take Robert of Belesme. And there was scarce a man among them unafraid.

  Alan spat past the fire and cleared his throat diffidently. Though knighted at Rouen, he still was in awe of Roger. “My lord, do we do as Normandy asks—do we take him alive?”

  “If ’tis possible—aye.”

  Alan’s face creased thoughtfully. “’Twill be difficult to note which is Belesme in the dark, and he will be hard to take, I think.”

  “Roger…” Guy waited for his father-in-law to turn around. “’Tis twilight. By the time we reach them, ’twill be blackness.” His eyes searched the darkening horizon. “Aye, there is no moon tonight.”

  “Then we ride.”

  At the signal, everyone mounted quietly while a few prayed silently. Guy’s squire and one of the men-at-arms handed up the unlit pitch-wrapped torches as the others filed past. Once they began to ride, there would be no speaking, no sounds other than the metallic chinking of mail and the plodding sound of the wrapped horses’s hooves on the hard ground. Even the spurs of knighthood that most of them wore were either packed in saddle pouches or the rowels were deadened with thongs to keep them silent.

  Sixty-three men rode double file slowly along the narrow rutted road until they were less than three furlongs from Belesme’s camp, and Roger reined in. With precision, the line widened, stretching across the crest of the hill above the spring.

  Below, sentries paced near where the animals were tethered, their hazy figures dimly outlined by the small fires that warded off insects. Guy studied the seeming peacefulness of the scene beneath them and thought of how many times his father must have fallen on his victims in similar circumstances. The night sounds chirruped in his ears as Roger finally shouted, “For Normandy, men!”

  They came down over the hill like a small horde of metal-clad men, riding breakneck for the center of the camp. The startled sentries gave up cries of alarm as they fell, either cut down by swinging maces or trampled beneath the wrapped hooves. Brian swung his sword to cut the ropes that penned Belesme’s horses, loosing them and running them ahead to confuse those who hastily rolled from pallets or emerged from the tents. With his eye on the largest tent, Guy leaned to light his torch from one of the fires. The pitch caught and flared even as he flung it. Behind him, Alan did the same, as did others, and soon the silk was engulfed in flames. A woman screamed hysterically from within.

  Half-clad men fought desperately, blocking Guy from Belesme’s fiery tent. He raised Doomslayer, swinging the heavy blade in arc after arc, hearing the sickening sound each time it bit through flesh and bone. Blood spattered from severed arteries, spraying his surcoat and his leg, as he fought his way to Belesme, waiting for him to emerge from the flames. Kicking away the last man in his way, Guy heard Brian curse and cut him down, and he dismounted. Inside the tent he could hear a man coughing, and he suddenly realized that if it were indeed Robert, he’d chosen to die rather than be taken.

  ’Tis forbidden you to kill your father echoed in his ears almost like the voice of God. “For the love of God, spare me!” the woman screamed as she staggered from the tent with her hair on fire. Guy grabbed her and threw her on the ground to smother her hair, and then he thrust himself through the fiery flap. Belesme was outlined in flames, lit from behind in red and orange light that made him look like a picture of Satan in hell. As Guy moved closer, the count doubled over, no longer able to breathe from the smoke. Guy dropped to the ground and crept to reach him as the wind caught the burning remnants of the tent and lifted them, sending showers of popping sparks all around him. His hands reached Belesme’s and he inched backward on his stomach, pulling his father after him through the burning grass. His head pounded and his lungs felt ready to burst before he himself was pulled feet first from what was left of Belesme’s tent. Brian grasped Guy’s singed head and rolled his body over Guy’s to smother his burning surcoat.

  “You fool—you would save him!” he shouted at him.

  “The woman—is she all right?” Guy gasped.

  “She’s bald, but she lives,” Brian muttered as he sat up on Guy’s chest. “Sweet Jesu, but you gave me a fright.” Looking over at where Belesme lay choking from the smoke, he demanded, “Why? Why did you not let him burn?” He leaned to grasp the sword he’d discarded when he’d rolled onto Guy, but Guy stayed his hand.

  “Nay, give him to Henry’s justice—he is unarmed.”

  Brian stared in disbelief, but he released the hilt.

  “Are you all right?” Roger dropped to kneel beside Guy, his blue eyes strangely reddened. “’Tis over, Guy. We have won—they are all
dead or taken.”

  “Our losses?” Guy asked, afraid to hear.

  “But three dead and eleven wounded. I thought to lose four when I saw you go in there, but Brian covered you, fighting like a madman and pulling you out.”

  Brian rose, still angered that they had not killed Belesme, and stalked away. “Aye, I disappointed him,” Guy managed through the ache in his throat and chest. “I am sorry for it.”

  Roger glanced to where his men already sought to secure Robert of Belesme’s hands. “If you think he will endanger you or Richard, I’ll do it still,” he offered in a low voice meant for Guy’s ears alone. “I am not above loosing him and letting him fight.”

  “Nay. To tell would be to defeat his purpose—I’ve naught to fear of him anymore.”

  “You are certain?”

  “Aye.”

  “Henry’s justice will be grim,” Roger promised him. “If he is fortunate, he will be executed, but ’tis more like he will face what faced your enemy de Mortain, and he will be blinded and imprisoned for life. For Robert, that will be hell.”

  His breath coming easier now, Guy sat up and partook of the fresh air. “Then ’tis meet that it happens this way, for he has no fear of dying. He would have stood in there and burned rather than be taken.”

  “He has enough enemies that ’twill be difficult to get him to Rouen.”

  “Roger…?”

  “Aye?”

  “Did any of his prisoners survive?”

  “About half of them.” Roger pulled up a handful of grass to clean Avenger’s blade. “It was a difficult decision not to fight earlier, but it was right. Armed, Robert would have fought and many more would have died.”

  “Brian did not think so.”

  “Brian has but lately thought himself a soldier. ’Twill take time for him to learn that we cannot right all wrongs, I think. But he will learn it.” Roger’s eyes followed with pride the man he’d fostered. “Aye, he will. When he had no purpose, I despaired of him.”