Wonderful

by Jill Barnett

“Aye.”

  “Good, I’ll fetch—” She turned around.

  “But I’m not thirsty for ale, my lady. Not while it’s my time on guard.”

  She stopped. The man had integrity. Amazing. She began to walk away in frustration.

  “My lady?”

  She paused and peered back over her shoulder.

  “A cup of water would be welcome.”

  “Water,” she repeated in a dull tone.

  “Aye. Water from my lord’s new well.”

  She nodded. Water, she thought. From his lord’s new well. She walked back toward the keep, then sent a servant for Sir Isambard’s water.

  A few moments later she was inside the hall and walking up the steps to the upper chambers. She paused and looked down at the gate. The old knight was still standing guard, stiff and straight and immovable as the portcullis behind him.

  So his lord gave orders that she was not to leave the castle. She scowled out the loophole. She was a prisoner.

  Not a happy prospect. And she resented the highhanded way he treated her. There was no reason why she could not go outside the gates. She had left plenty of times to gather herbs and roots in woods. What did he expect? A troop of infidels to come thundering to their walls and snatch her away?

  This was not the East. He’d been too long in the sun and too long at war. Did he think the world was at war with him?

  Sighing in frustration, she crossed her arms on the loop opening and rested her chin atop them. She stared at the gate guard. There was no way he would let her pass.

  Frustrated, she tapped her fingers impatiently on the stone ledge. “I wonder what would happen if I were to stand on the barbican wall right above the guard and tip a bucket of … hmmmm … a bucket of fresh eels? Perhaps. A pail of week-old flounder tails? Maybe …”

  As it turned out, Clio did not have to pour fish parts on the loyal knight’s head to gain her freedom.

  Instead she had concocted a truly wonderful idea!

  She wrapped her hair in a length of heavy linen and twisted it into a fat turban. On her face and hands she smeared fine black sap from the outer shells of some walnuts that were stored in the granary.

  By the time she was finished, she looked like a Turk. Almost. The final touch was a long striped robe she pilfered from the castle laundry.

  Then Clio had set out to blithely ride through the castle gates on Lord Merrick’s favorite Arab horse, with its white blaze and stockings blacked over with more walnut sap.

  No one had suspected. She was just congratulating herself for her most brilliant of plans, when she happened to glance back over her shoulder.

  Pitt was swinging on the horse’s tail. “Pitt!” she hissed. “Get off.”

  But he clung to the tail with his beak and talons, swinging back and forth the way he loved to swing on her braid.

  She looked ahead of her. The late gate was only a few paces away. Fortune had been with her that no one had seen him yet, since her pets were the subjects of jest with the men.

  She slid from the horse, pretended that she was checking a hoof, then stood and strolled to her mount’s tail. She whipped open her robe and whispered, “Get in here!” She snatched up Pitt and hid him inside the robe.

  After remounting, she prodded the horse forward and could feel Pitt nestle comfortably into her side. She rode through the gates with ease, and into the market crowd.

  ’Twas almost too simple, she thought. Once she was out of clear sight, she leapt off the horse and opened her robe. She let Pitt perch on her shoulder and walked over pillowy downs of rabbit warrens and grasses so springy they made the movement easier and gave a light bounce to her step.

  Pitt walked off her shoulder and down her arm. He hopped onto the Arab’s head and perched there, perfectly happy. She laughed at him. Pitt seemed to feel the freedom of the outlands as she did.

  Mere moments later she tucked up her skirt and ran barelegged in the warm sunshine.

  Free! She was free!

  With a sense of pure joy she kicked off her shoes and ran in carefree circles around the Arab horse that had followed her and was grazing in a lush little dell between two gently sloping green hills.

  There was still dew deep in the spongy grasses; it was cool and tingled the soles of her bare feet. She laughed aloud and spun ’round with her arms out like a quintain.

  Her laughter was free and easy and seemed to rise up with the air the same way a breeze would capture and lift the tiny feathers of a dandelion puff. She looked up high into the heavens, closed her eyes, and savored her freedom.

  ’Twas quiet this day, peaceful. The sky was blue as a hedge sparrow’s egg, and the clouds thin and puffy and the color of lambsdown. You could taste the out of doors, clear and clean and so alive. There was only the barest of sounds: the tinkle of a sheep’s bell, the flapping wings of wild swans flying overhead and the distant cry of a plover.

  Over the next hillside she went with the horse following behind her like Thud’s suckling pigs. Here, near the forest, the grass was thicker, sweeter, freshly mown and edged with harebells.

  At the rim of the Great Forest, woodpigeons hovered in the sessile oak trees and sparrows and larks flitted from branch to branch. Insects hummed a constant tune from deep within the forest depths like mysterious sirens calling out and saying, “Come, come … come, come …”

  She tied Lord Merrick’s fine Arab horse to the limb of a giant chestnut tree.

  A horse chestnut.

  She found that terribly witty. She held out her hand to Pitt, but he ignored her. He was happy as could be, just perched on the horse’s rump. “Fine, my feathered friend. You may stay here.”

  She gave him a stroke, then did the same to the Arab’s muzzle, and took off into the woods, her skirts held high in her hands and a jaunt in her step while she hummed an offkey song about a woman’s wicked cleverness.

  It was cool in the forest and the air damp; the mosses and lichens smelled savory and verdant and as if they could give her ale the rich touch of magic. From the base of a massive tree, she gathered some medicinal plants and pungent weeds for flavoring and stuck them in a leather pouch that hung from a delicate chain of silver on her belt.

  She then moved onward, deeper into the forest.

  Here, the trees were so dense they blocked out the sun. In the dark, dank corners of the woods, wild mushrooms with lacy edges grew beneath oak and beech trees, and the elms had huge, thick crowns that made it seem as if it were night and not just a little past Sext.

  She paused when a copse of leafy bushes thinned and beyond stood a dark bower where the ground was overrun with pale heart’s ease and white mignonettes. She bent down and picked some pretty yellow honey-flowers, then plucked their lush grasses with nothing on her mind but her romantic dreams of Merrick de Beaucourt, the famous and brave knight who would sweep her away. She had truly thought he would be a man of poetry and fine words, a man who would give to her his heart.

  Had she only known then that he was not man of sweet words and gallantry. He had few words, except orders or questions. He was not cruel, but neither was he gentle and kind and attentive.

  He did not open up his heart and talk to her. She did not know who he was. She only knew that he was so terribly different from her. She wondered now if he even had a heart to give.

  She sighed for what might have been, for dreams dashed in reality and for her worry about her future, a worry that sometimes appeared as dark as this deep forest.

  She stopped dallying and moved on. Soon the darkness began to disappear. The path between the trees and bushes grew lighter; the air grew warmer and less still. Shafts of yellow sunlight broke onto the path ahead. Spindly willow trees arched over the narrow path and were twisted with clematis on one side and wild guelder roses on the other.

  Between the vines sunlight broke through in golden chutes, and falling blossoms floated down like fairy favors. It was almost mystical.

  She moved through it, as though it were a bri
dal bower. The trampled path led into a broad meadow clove in two by a stream that flowed down from the purple mountains in the distance, where small caps of ice still remained.

  Under the shade of a spreading hawthorn tree, she sat down near a tuft of privet and listened to the sound of the water bubbling over the rocks.

  She hugged her knees to her chest and dug her bare toes into the lush green grass while she watched a small brown water rat scurry up the bank and lose itself in a thicket of lush and drooping ferns.

  The sound of the water rushing over a mound of scattered rocks was as soothing as a cool drink of mountain water on a hot summer’s day. Through the breaks in the leaves of the tree, bright sunny rays warmed her shoulders. She turned her face toward the sun, then remembered the blackening sap.

  Laughing at her success, she unwrapped her hair, then knelt at the edge of the brook. A pink speckled trout broke the surface and snatched a fly from midair. The thought crossed her mind that trout would make a fine meal that evening.

  Clio bent over the peat moss that fringed the bank and washed her face and hands in the cold, clean water. With her eyes squeezed tightly shut, she groped around on the grassy ground, trying to find the linen so she could wipe the sap and icy water from her eyes.

  She turned, now on her hands and knees, and she moved to where she had tossed the cloth. Her hand touched the linen and she grabbed it, then moved back and bent over the stream, her loose hair falling all about her.

  Humming off-key a ballad about a mystical knight with a green horse who claimed the heart of his lady, she vigorously scrubbed her face, then tossed the cloth aside and placed her hands flat on the river’s edge.

  She leaned over and peered down at her reflection in the silver water. Her hair was in the way, so she tucked it behind her ears and stared back down at the silvery water.

  Over her right shoulder appeared a man’s dark face.

  Clio took a deep breath and screamed.

  Chapter 15

  Welshmen rushed out from the bushes and trees like ghosts appearing from thin air. They were a wild-looking lot, stocky and rough, with no helmets and hair that hung past the leather quarrel slings on their backs. Cocked over their shoulders were longbows that were almost as tall as a man, and not a one of them wore armor.

  Their leather jacks and braies were weathered, smudged with dirt, and appeared to be the same color as the forest, brown and deep green. The men wore no spurs, rode no horses, and like the ancient savages in a troubadour’s ballad of war, they were barefooted and their eyes empty like those of the just dead.

  They stared at her and laughed without humor, a cruel laugh that warned they could not be kind.

  She screamed again.

  But it wasn’t their appearance that frightened her, wild and wolflike though they were. They moved with such menace, in a pack, closing in slowly like predators going for the final kill.

  The man whose face she had seen in the reflection suddenly gripped her by the shoulders. Another prowled toward her with a double-bladed Welsh knife, hooked in deadly angles at the blade tips.

  Her eyes locked on the dual blades, and she went completely limp. Still.

  The man behind her laughed with victory.

  She twisted suddenly, catching him off guard. Kicked at him once, then she ran. Right between two of the men.

  “Rhys! Grab her!” Someone shouted.

  She didn’t look back. She darted in and out of the woods and trees, her gown clutched tightly in her fists. Birds scattered from the brush as she ran past, flapping up into that clear blue sky and telling the men exactly where she was.

  Her feet crunched on the fallen leaves and fir needles, and her breath came out in hollow pants and gasps; the sound of her breathing, like the birds, was giving away the direction in which she ran.

  Her heart pounded in her ears. Her breath came harder and more edged. She could hear them behind her, grunting like savage animals as they chased her.

  So near.

  How near?

  One man shouted. It sounded as if he were right next to her. Running. Shouting at them to follow her. “Don’t lose her! Owen! To the west! There!”

  Oh, God …

  “Do not let her escape!”

  Her chest burned and her feet felt like rocks.

  “Kill her!” One of them called out.

  Kill her?

  Fear gave her speed, made her strain her legs for longer strides.

  Her small size let her race through narrow openings that the bigger men had to run around. She ran and ran, faster and faster.

  An arrow whizzed past her shoulder and thumped into a tree trunk.

  She ducked down, hunching as she moved. Then she hit another clearing and raced across it, turning sharply to the left when she saw the river and open land in the distance.

  Another arrow sped by her head, a third past her feet. She glanced over her shoulder. A mistake.

  She stumbled and straightened to keep her balance.

  An arrow hit her. In the back of her shoulder. Sharp. Piercing.

  She cried out and looked down at her shoulder. She saw the hard shaft protruding from her back.

  ’Twas the strangest thing. It hurt terribly, yet at the same time she felt distant, as if this were happening to someone else and she was just watching it all unfold.

  She kept running, driven by little more than instinct. They would catch her. She could not stop. She would die. She glanced back at the arrow in her shoulder. She could die from her wound.

  Her feet slowed of their own accord, as if her strength were being sapped away. She tried to will herself to run, but her body refused to obey her. Her breath was fast and labored. She could not hear them behind her anymore, but then she could hear little but her racing heart; it thudded like death drums in her head and ears and chest.

  She had nothing left but spirit. Her body would not mind her. She had no choice but to face these men.

  Let the last thing she did be to face them with a look in her eyes damning them to hell. She stopped and turned around, her head high. Proud.

  There came a loud and eerie sound so terrifying the world around her seemed to freeze. It was a war cry, human and real, that blew through the air louder than any herald’s trumpet.

  “A de Beaucourt!”

  There it was again, echoing upward to the very crowns of the trees as if cried out by a thousand men of war.

  But in truth, there was only one hard voice. One she recognized, like a sound you hear from far away when you are standing at the edge of a cliff with nothing around you but wind and air and water. A call of rescue at the one time when you are out of hope and luck.

  Horses’ hooves suddenly pounded the ground so hard it was as if the earth were about to crack apart.

  A man screamed out, “Er cof am Gwent!” Then he was oddly silent, his last words a hail to an ancient Welsh kingdom.

  Clio stood dreamlike.

  A massive gray warhorse reared up at the edge of the clearing, its hooves pawing at the air. The rider was a knight in full armor. With another cry he drew a long and shining battle sword that caught the light and made the knight and his mount look like God’s wrath.

  Even without the war call it would have only taken her a moment to recognize the red lion emblazoned on the trappings of the knight’s huge mount.

  Merrick was here.

  An instant later he swept through the band of Welshmen with deadly intent. His sword glinting from a shaft of sunlight as he raised it high above him, then slashed downward to cut down her attackers.

  A man cried out and went down, then another, and another. Arrows clinked uselessly against his protective armor plates and fell to the ground, where they were crushed and splintered by the huge and deadly hooves of his warhorse.

  She stood half in awe, half in horror as she watched him take on the outlaws. All of them. Until finally the last few Welshmen fled back into the forest, running for their lives the way they had made her run for
hers.

  Then, there was only the two of them, all alone in the small clearing. He turned his mount toward her and spurred it forward.

  She was acutely aware of the sudden lack of human sound. The silence from this man who had saved her. The air around her seemed to make her weightless.

  Inside her head, her reason spun slowly away, out of reach in flashes of half thoughts. She closed her eyes to stop the world from swimming before her very eyes. She concentrated on what she could hear. The creak of his saddle, the clinking of a harness and spurs, and the lathered breath of his mount.

  She knew he rode toward her. His horse pounded the ground with each step closer; it was a dull beating sound. Just like her heart.

  Finally she gave in and opened her eyes.

  The horse was barely a foot from her, and he reined it in and did not move, but sat there saying nothing, only looking down at her from the dark slits in the visor on his helm. His rapid breathing slipped out in misty threads through the small breath holes.

  He still held his sword in his hand.

  Blood dripped off of it and onto the mesh fingertips of his gauntlet. She understood his purpose. He wanted her to get a good look at the bloody sword before he sheathed it. As if it stood as an image for a lesson to her. Something horrible to be burned into her memory.

  His tactic worked.

  He had no idea how tremendously it affected her. She could not look away, even though the sight was the most gruesome thing she had ever seen.

  ’Twas as if she were rooted there, an ancient tree forced to see only that which passed it by. Unable to move or look away.

  Her life had been sheltered, and the tales of war she heard were tales of the romance of war, sung in pretty melodic ballads of bravery and chivalry by men who had never killed another.

  There was nothing glorious in what she had just witnessed. Nothing romantic. Her stomach rose in her throat and seemed to stick there.

  He flipped open the visor and stared at her with a look that did not bode well. Cold and blue, with barely contained anger lurking on the edge of his expression.

  His free arm rested on his saddle pommel as if he were relaxed. But she could see he was tense and tightly sprung, so taut it was almost as if he were ready to snap in two.