The Iron Tempest

by Ron Miller

  “Who goes there?” he called into the darkness. There was no answer, but the sudden stillness sounded, in its vacuity, exactly like someone holding their breath. “Who—who goes there?” he repeated. “Answer me!”

  There was only more silence and he was about to make his third and last challenge when he again heard the crunch of frozen ground. He jumped in surprise for the sound seemed to come from not more than three or four feet in front of him. He’d swear to the Prophet Himself that it had been well within the circle of light cast by the torch that guttered above his head. Yet there was nothing to be seen. In spite of the cold he felt a sudden prickling of hot perspiration break out from head to toe. He mistrusted this ungodly land and had no doubt that it was overrun by fiends and evil jinnis. He clutched his spear tightly, though it shook like a willow wand, and offered his final warning to the wind: “Who—who goes there? Friend or foe?”

  Foe! came the answer.

  “Allah save me!” he prayed—it had been a woman’s voice, as though the wind itself had whispered the awful word. There was a sudden puff of moist warmth on his ear. Where is Rashid? the air whispered. He dropped his spear at the same moment he felt his bladder empty, spilling its hot contents down his legs where it splashed over his feet. The urine began to freeze before it could begin to soak into the earth. He could hear it crackling like cellophane.

  Where is Rashid? the air repeated.

  “R-Rashid?”

  Yes. Rashid. The great paladin. You know who I’m talking about. There’s only one Rashid. Where is he?

  “I-I-I . . .”

  A blow to the back of his knees threw him to the ground, where he collapsed like a deflating balloon. He began to sob. The tears froze in his moustache and beard.

  Stop that, ordered the infernal voice. No harm will come to you if you answer my question.

  “I-I-I have answered it!”

  No you haven’t!

  “I haven’t?”

  No. I’ll only ask you one more time. Where is Rashid?

  “I-I don’t know!”

  You know who I’m talking about?

  “Of course! Everyone knows who that great knight is!”

  Is he in this camp?

  “I don’t think so.”

  Is he in Paris?

  “How would I know that? Eek! Have mercy on my poor soul!” he squealed as he felt the sharp edge of an invisible dagger pressed against his larynx.

  If you’re lying, I’ll haunt you ‘til the day you die!

  “Then I won’t trouble you for long because I believe I’m going to die now.”

  There was no answer, only the chilly susurration of the wind. “I said ‘I’m dying now’,” he repeated, but there was still no answer. He rolled himself into a many-layered airtight ball, like a frightened armadillo. “O Allah!” he whimpered fervently into the folds, “I wish I were dead already!”

  Bradamant might have been inclined to fulfil Ibn Wanah’s wish had she heard it, since he was, after all, an enemy soldier and a pagan to boot, but she was already striding into the Saracen camp, as she had entered innumerable others, fully confident in the invisibility made possible by the ring she had tucked into her cheek. She was not even certain she had not been in this encampment before. There were so many and they all looked pretty much alike.

  When Rashid had first been carried off, the dumbstruck warrioress had wandered more or less aimlessly, through shady forests and sunny fields, through farmsteads and villages, over hills and plains, looking everywhere for her lover, enquiring of everyone she met. She rued every moment her eyes were not open and searching. She dared not fail to interview even the dullest peasant or youngest child. Who knew what uncomprehending eyes might have caught a glimpse, however unawares, of her knight? Rashid might be hidden in that fleeting shadow or sleeping in that deserted barn. She dare not overlook anything. Her search took her in ever widening circles, like a spider’s web, but all to no avail.

  Remembering Brunello’s magic ring, she took to secretly invading the Moorish camps, hundreds upon hundreds of them, whose numbers grew greater and denser as they approached the besieged city of Paris.

  But of all the places she searched, she could not and would not look for him among the dead. If he’d died, she was certain she would have heard of it. “The downfall of a man so great”—she told herself so often it had became a kind of litany—“would have been heard from the Indus to Ultima Thule.”

  Her health, all her life as perfect as any human’s had a right to be, began to suffer. She did not eat well nor often, usually only when chance placed some food at hand. And then she would mechanically gulp down whatever happened to be before her, untasted, scarcely chewed. She grew thin, then gaunt, then sallow. Yet her determination seemed to harden in proportion to the growing weakness of her body until it surrounded and supported her like the chitinous shell of an insect or crustacean.

  Whether the camp she was now entering was the thousandth or ten thousandth she had searched, or if it was a camp she had already searched once or ten times before, she neither knew nor cared; she had no intention of scrutinizing it any less thoroughly. Rashid could be anywhere.

  She went from tent to tent systematically, occasionally whispering in the ear of some sleepy soldier her perennial question: Where is Rashid? Ibn Wanah was not the first by any means who had been driven to panic, or even madness, by that quiet, insistent voice. She looked into the face of every man on the chance that it might be Rashid, his memory ensorceled, his features perhaps disguised—she was confident that she would be able to recognize him no matter how much Atalante might attempt to change his form—she was certain that Rashid’s disappearance had been engineered by the old man. And, of course, she still possessed Melissa’s magic ring, which ought to remain proof against the sorcerer’s spells. She searched infantry and cavalry and officer’s quarters and quartermaster’s stores. She examined maps and letters and journals and secret orders—she might have won the war for Charlemagne if she had not been so single-mindedly looking for Rashid’s name.

  The night was as brutally cold as Ibn Wanah imagined. The seven months since Rashid’s abduction had carried the world deep into winter. The nights were filled with razor-like air and brilliant, unwinking stars like chips of ice. The days were gloomy and dark, with grey colorless dawns passing after a few hours into an equally grey twilight with no sign of the sun in the meantime. The wind cut through man and beast like the indiscriminate blade of a guillotine. Bradamant took little notice of the cold, but instinct had fortunately provided her with a few layers of purloined woolen robes.

  This particular camp proved as barren of Rashid as had its countless predecessors. Bradamant climbed to where the high riverbank overlooked Paris. She took the ring from her mouth, carefully placed it back on the cord that hung from her neck and wearily gazed at the walled city that lay less than a mile away, a hundred plumes rising from its chimneys, from the blazing hearths and stoves beneath, the glimmering lights of its windows the only warmth in a landscape as hard and colorless as a woodcut. What would Karl think, she wondered, if he suspected that she was so near to him? No doubt any number of her brothers and cousins were there, too. Did they think she was dead? She suddenly had an overwhelming sense of the duty and trust she had betrayed; a backlog of guilt and fatigue washed over her, forcing her to her knees beneath its weight. She collapsed like a marionette whose strings had just been snipped. She clasped her hands to her breast, wringing them until they crackled like icicles in the cold, as tears poured from her mad eyes, glazing her hollow cheeks with ice. She looked like a sculpture in blown glass.

  “Oh, Melissa!” she croaked. “Why did you ever tell me of Rashid’s love? Before then my misery was sweet, but now my longing is a living death.”

  Melissa! Why had she not thought of the sorceress before? Melissa could relieve her of her unhappiness as easily as she had begun it. I will return to Merlin’s cave, Bradamant decided, and there I’ll scream so loudly that th
e very marble of his tomb will be moved to pity! I’ll rattle those old bones like an osteomancer and see what new fortune turns up for me! And I’ll discover once and for all if Rashid is still alive, or whether death—that ultimate necessity—has cut short his happy years.

  No matter that Ponthieu—the town nearest the Valley of Joyousness—was more than a week’s journey from Paris, most of it through wild and virtually uninhabited country, no matter that she was ill and weak or that food, shelter and warmth would be difficult or impossible to find—once Bradamant had made her decision, there was nothing for it but to clamber painfully to her feet and begin the trek.

  She headed south and no one challenged her passage, either because no one noticed her or, more likely, because the shambling, hunched figure elicited no interest in a country infested with refugees. She’d been on foot since losing Frontino months earlier (she’d awakened one morning to discover the horse gone—no doubt stolen in the night; an uncharacteristic lack of alertness that had been the first indication of her burgeoning obsession); she’d done nothing about replacing the animal.

  Not many days after leaving the vicinity of Paris, the sky became overcast and the temperature seemed to rise a little. Before long, large flakes of snow began to flutter around the struggling girl. Though it was marginally warmer, the damper atmosphere penetrated deeply and she wrapped the rags around herself more tightly, though to little effect. She tied a scarf over her nose and mouth; it soon became encrusted with her frozen breath. Tiring of having to endlessly break this crust away, as it interfered with her breathing, she finally tore the cloth from her face. She could now breath freely but painfully. Sharp crystals of ice would suddenly form between her lips, the heat of her breath insufficient to melt them. Each inhalation felt like a white-hot razor plunged into her mouth and down to her lungs.

  She developed a dry cough; every movement was accompanied by an intolerable pain. She perspired freely in spite of the terrible cold and the heat leaked from her body as though from a sieve.

  The first night out she had been fortunate enough to find an abandoned haycock. She had burrowed deep within it, finding warmth in the dank core of decomposing vegetation. The next two nights, however, she was not so lucky. She was turned out of a stall by an irate peasant, who was adamantly deaf to her entreaties; others refused to even open their doors to her, either ignoring or threatening her until she finally gave up the effort and shuffled away. When she looked back over her shoulder, she could see blurred faces peering at her through panes of milky isinglass. Even in her weakness she was still strong enough to have taken a bed if she wanted to. It never occurred to her.

  After three days, the landscape was hidden beneath a blanket of snow two feet deep. Bradamant was sickened by the whiteness of everything; the uniform brilliancy made her tired; it made her giddy; the road seemed to wave beneath her feet with no fixed point on the immense white surface. She felt as one does on shipboard when the deck suddenly gives way beneath the feet. Her limbs grew torpid, her mind dull. She waded through the drifts like a sleepwalker; a slip or a sudden fall would only momentarily rouse her from her sluggishness. She tried to eat a mouthful of snow in an effort to slake her feverish thirst, but it was too cold and she felt as though she were suffocating, choking as though a mass of cotton had been stuffed between her jaws.

  She crawled into the hollow of a tree; it held her like a cupped hand might hold a kitten. It will make as good a coffin as any, she thought morbidly. She did not particularly want to die, for it would be the final separation from Rashid, who, as an unbaptized pagan would be barred from her heaven. She could see the sky clearly: the constellations brilliant and unwinking. Snow was falling from the glassy sky—she could see the stars plainly among the flakes—as though the galaxy itself had at last succumbed to the cold and was dropping to the earth in a gelid, milky drizzle.

  One of the flakes, caught perhaps in some vague current, hovered a few feet above the drifts, twinkling in the starlight like a windborne sequin. How pretty! the frozen girl thought as the crystal floated closer to her face. She could see the clinquant facets, like tiny mirrors woven into a delicate lace. No, she realized, it was not coming closer, it was growing larger. Spinning at first slowly and then ever faster, the snowflake seemed to shoot off sparks like a St. Catherine’s wheel. The flaming light grew too dazzling to bear and Bradamant squeezed her eyes shut against the actinic glare. When she reopened them, the sorceress Melissa stood before her, as limpid as an icicle in the moonlight.

  “My poor dear!” cooed Melissa. “What have you done to yourself?”

  “I’ve lost Rashid,” came the whispered answer, in a voice so weak that the sorceress could scarcely discern it from the sound of the drifting snow.

  “Silly girl,” she replied kindly. “Come on with me and we’ll get things fixed up.”

  She reached in among Bradamant’s layered robes to find a thin, cold hand.

  “I can’t,” said the girl.

  “‘Can’t?’ Can’t what?”

  “I—I can’t rise. I can’t go anywhere.”

  “But there’s no need, my dear. You are there.”

  Bradamant opened her eyes with enormous effort—they had been sealed with frozen tears. Her congealed lenses refused to focus and she struggled to make sense of the nebulous forms that swam before her. Meanwhile, warmth flooded painfully through her. The cold had been painless and numbing; the heat felt as though she were being imbedded with red-hot nails. The pain was unbearable as frigid blood began to flow again and nerves that had resigned themselves to death complained at their forced resurrection.

  She protested weakly as her friend gently unwrapped her, clutching feebly as the now-damp robes were removed—they came away like the skin of a scalded tomato and heat rushed into her body like a thousand needles. But the pain was evanescent; the needles seemed to melt, spreading a warmth that filled her like water saturating a thirsty sponge. She felt hard flagstones beneath her. They were as warm as toast.

  “Where am I?” she asked, thinking that Melissa had somehow managed to carry her to some nearby peasant’s hut.

  “In Merlin’s palace, of course.”

  “Of course,” Bradamant replied, oddly unamazed.

  She did not know how it was done, but she felt herself lifted by the sorceress. She knew that she was almost as tall as the woman and certainly heavier, but felt like an infant child in those slight arms.

  She was carried into a chamber that was filled with fragrant steam roiling around her in the kind of chubby clouds upon which artists like to pose cherubs. In the middle of the room was a low wooden tank, sloshing over with bubbling hot water. Melissa lowered the girl to the wet floor, still supporting her with an arm passed behind her back, and with her free hand began to finish the undressing of her patient. Bradamant protested weakly, but Melissa ignored her. Deft fingers flew over the fastenings of the armor, which fell away like the leaves of an artichoke, followed by tunic and undergarments. As the knight stood there naked, too dizzy to be embarrassed, she heard the sorceress say, with a shocked gasp, “Oh, dear! Oh, dear, dear, dear!” and wondered abstractly just what she saw that was so awful.

  She allowed herself to be lifted again and then lowered with infinite gentleness and care into the tub of water, which seemed to fizz around her like champagne. She sat on the bottom and leaned against the concave side; the wood felt like warm, firm flesh. The water came to her chin, lapping at her face like a friendly, slobbering dog. She held her right hand above the surface and was horrified to see that the fingers were black. She placed her left hand beside it and it was the same. Melissa reached over her shoulder and carefully pressed the hands back into the water.

  “Keep them there,” she said in her quiet, musical voice as she poured fragrant oils into the water. “Your feet are the same, if you are wondering. But they’ll be all right. Trust me.”

  “I trust you,” Bradamant replied through her tears.

  She must have fallen
asleep, for there was only a hazy sense of duration before Melissa lifted her from the water. This time, Bradamant needed only a little help to get to her feet and once erect stood in the mid-thigh-deep water without aid. She looked at her hands. The fingers were pink and flexible. She lifted a leg and took a foot in one hand. Healthy toes waggled happily back at her.

  “How do you feel?” Melissa asked.

  “I feel strong.”

  “Strong?”

  “Yes,” Bradamant replied, as she ran a hand over a hard biceps, over chest and breasts no longer sunken, flaccid, over stomach and thighs no longer hollow or shriveled, over ribs now decently buried beneath firm, shingled muscle. “And stronger here, too,” she added, pressing a palm to her left breast, beneath which her powerful heart beat like a trip hammer.

  “Good. Dry yourself off, then, and get dressed. You’ll find everything you need right over there. When you’re finished, go through that door. I’ll be waiting for you.”