Humphrey, staggering back to the track amidst his men’s helping hands, halted and howled. “The girl! She’s run!” The truth hit him. “God’s Head, she’s tricked me! After her—catch the lying trollop—”
In spattering rain and blinding dark they struggled with frightened horses and scrambled astride. Humphrey snarled at Hubert. “Lend a hand to tie this arm up—I’m bleeding like a stuck hog! Take a look, one of you, for that red devil—here’s the moon again—”
“We’ll need daylight, m’ lord. But it’ll have carried him straight down into the sea. Savior Christ, no man could live—”
“After the girl, then! She deceived me, the jade—”
Hooves jarred past her head, and their clatter faded down the slope. Julitta scarcely waited. As the clouds blew from the moon’s face she was leaning at the broken edge, peering and listening, her lips moving in prayer. Stones and earth might go plunging senselessly into the sea, but not a man with hands and feet to save himself, not her young leopard. And if God had seen fit to spare that murderer Humphrey, could He destroy her gallant fool who had gone over the cliff for her?
“Sancta Maria, Mater Dei, ora pro nobis peccatoribus, nunc et in hora mortis nostrae,” Julitta said aloud, hitched up her skirts to her knees and tightened her belt to hold them, and slid cautiously down the crumbling earth and rubble, over the cliff’s edge. Loose stones went rattling into the dark, but she set her teeth and went on.
The drop was not sheer, but a broken slope offering hand and foot holds in plenty. After the first heart-stopping movements, pressing close to the rocks with all four limbs extended, she found she could progress easily enough, if she kept her mind from the depth below. Once she called softly, “Adam!” and then bit her lips at the fear he would never again hear her use his name. Then she pushed that dread from her and bade herself think. He would automatically have tried to fling himself aside from the fall, so she clung to a jutting rock and peered left and right through the deceptive shadows. The moon, swept clean of cloud, shone on stone faces and tufts of tenacious plants that rooted in their crevices. Down the slope, to her left, on the edge of the fall’s dark scar, a white bar winked at her. With a choked sob she scrambled and slid to the little dagger that had saved him once already.
He sprawled face down against the outcrop that had held him from the drop, a spreading stain under his head. He did not answer when she called his name, but he moaned faintly when she moved him, gripping his shoulder to turn his face up. Had he been conscious she would have kissed or clouted him in wild relief, but now she set her arm under his shoulders and rolled him as gently as she could on to his back, his head in her lap. She had not known she was crying until her tears splashed into his upturned face, blackened with blood and bruises.
He stirred, and mumbled indistinguishably. “Adam!” she cried joyfully, her tears dripping faster, and he blinked open one puffy eyelid and peered up at her. “God be praised, you’re not dead!
The other eye opened, and he shifted his head more purposefully. “Wha’—Julitta?” He tried to rise on one elbow, and subsided with a grunt, screwing his eyes shut.
She smeared her tears away with a sleeve and cautiously felt along his arms, and then over his ribs. His legs lay naturally, with no visible distortion. A broken leg would be as fatal as a broken neck, but it seemed that the cracked head was the worst of it. Blood was warm on her thigh, soaked through her gown, but the flow was slackening. Scalp wounds always bled alarmingly.
She looked up at the cliff edge above, calculating grimly. Folie would probably never check her running until she reached Chivingham’s familiar gates, and with her start there was a good chance that Humphrey would pursue her there before discovering she was riderless. Then he would know where to search for her, and return slavering for vengeance on them both. They could never get over the hill, through Arnisby and along the shore without betrayal; the dogs roaming on guard through the night would give the alarm. Nor could they escape over the moors or through the woods; at first light horsemen and hounds would be on their trail. Her belly lurched as she looked down the fall. It would be much harder than climbing up, she did not even know whether Adam could move at all, but she accepted that being shattered on the rocks was preferable to recapture.
She gripped her husband’s shoulders. “Adam! Adam! Rouse up! We must move.” He groaned, and she shook him pitilessly.
“Le’—lemme be—don’—”
“Adam! For your life—rouse up!” She slapped him, and he blinked up reproachfully, mumbling her name. She set both arms about him and heaved him from her knees, and some of her urgency pierced to his wits. He caught at the rock and dragged himself up to sit against it. She seized his arm. “We must go down. This way—lean on me—” She braced him with all her strength, and clumsily he twisted to hands and knees and crept at her bidding along the rock.
Afterwards Julitta marveled that she ever accomplished it. The climb would not have been easy in daylight, unencumbered; now she had to guide and support a dazed and injured man who was never more than half-conscious; a tall man, and heavy. Their salvation was his obedience, as though he surrendered all his will to hers. When clouds covered the moon she waited, holding him in her arms and huddling her cloak about them both against the drumming rain. Sometimes she left him and went ahead to pick the way. Once they slithered and bounced and scraped at a terrifying rush down a kind of rain-washed gully, and fetched up battered and breathless against an outcrop where they lay panting a long time. She had to use Adam ruthlessly to drag him away, whimpering herself in pity and misery.
She concentrated on steering him from hold to hold. She had no time to think of danger, no time to pray. She could only work down step by step, guiding his hands and feet. Her soft shoes split, her hands and knees were skinned and cut, her nails broken. Every time they had to wait out a rain squall it was harder to move. Below them, louder and nearer, the sea roared among the rocks, and they groaned together against the surges. The moon was high in the south; presently it would swing westward behind the cliff, leaving them blind in his shadow, but Adam could make no better speed. She marveled that he could move at all.
Again they cowered in the lee of a rock against cold rain, and she shielded him as best she could with her sodden cloak, propping his dizzy head with her shoulder. He mumbled something she could not catch.
“Hush!” she whispered, and laid a hand over his mouth as the wind carried other sounds to her ears. High and far off, hooves struck on rock and men shouted; too high for words to reach her, but they rang angrily and she knew their portent. Some part of Adam’s brain responded yet to danger; his mumbling ceased, his head came up to listen. She stared up the height, but she was too close to the cliff’s face to see anything. The rain blew out to sea and the moon returned; the shouts passed back and forth a little while as men searched and called to each other, and then abandoned the futile exercise. Hoofbeats died away.
“The Ladies’ Delight?” Adam asked rationally. “After us?”
“They’ll not follow us before daylight. Come, Adam!” She caught his hand. “We must get down.”
The last thirty feet were the worst of the climb. The cliff-face was wet with spray, below tide-line the rocks were hung with treacherous weed and crusted with limpets and barnacles that tore unwary flesh, and the boulders and scree at the bottom were a menace to stumbling feet. Somehow they won down, and at last trod soft sand, water seething about their ankles. The tide was coming in. Julitta had traversed northward during the climb whenever she could; fifty yards across a little cove lay the point, and over that the harbor and Erling’s long ship. She pulled Adam’s arm over her shoulders and set her face towards it. She could count on Erling. As she looked, something moved against the sky, blotting out the stars. She steered Adam to the nearest rock-face, propped him against it and drew the dagger.
“Who—leave me, Julitta! Hide yourself!” he whispered, rousing again to danger.
Someone was scramb
ling down the slope, someone agile and sure-footed, to risk such a pace in the dark. A low voice hailed them, in good French with a Norse accent.
“Lady Julitta—and my lord with you?”
He splashed through the shallow waves, black against the black headland; she could discern only his legs in the yeasty water, the loom of him in the night. She stepped out, lifting an arm in signal, and he churned towards her. “It’s help!” she gasped, her voice cracking with relief. Adam sighed and quietly began to slide down the rock.
The man thrust past her, caught him before he could souse into the sea and heaved him up in his arms, making naught of his weight. Julitta looked up at his towering height, at his pale head, and knew him for Hakon. A sob of thankfulness choked in her throat, and tears blinded her.
“If he had died,” said Hakon slowly, “I would have borne you away to my own land and cherished you for all time. Even now, if you will it … “ A jerk of his head at the creaming waves finished his sentence.
“He is my husband,” she answered simply.
“Since you brought him down the cliff that is proof enough. I am at your service, my lady.”
“My—my lord’s service is mine, Hakon,” she whispered, her voice shaking. He nodded over Adam’s senseless body. There was no more to be said.
He stalked through the deepening water, and she trotted to keep up. The scramble over the point was nothing after that grueling climb, and the paling gray over the sea spurred her. Presently he spoke, in an undertone that would not carry five paces. “My father saw you moving on the cliff in the moonlight, hours ago. No chance of finding you until dawn. That fair hound came back raging with his arm bound up, and had everyone out of house and ship, searching the town.”
“He’ll be back at first light,” Julitta said grimly. Daybreak would reveal traces of her climb in the fall’s moist earth, prints of foot, hand and knee; would show where Adam had lain and the signs that she had helped him away. Her trickery was an affront beyond pardon to Humphrey’s vanity, the most vital part of him, and knowledge that folk were sniggering would drive him to monstrous vengeance.
Erling waited by the bulk of his ship, stranded high-prowed on the crunching shingle. He growled concern and lifted Adam from his son’s hold. Adam groaned and muttered, shifting his head against Erling’s shoulder.
“A cracked head’s the worst of it,” Julitta said quickly, reassuring herself as much as the seaman. “They beat him too. Will you—can you help us away—before daylight—before they search again?” Panic fluttered against her ribs; the veriest landsman must recognize that the ship could not be refloated until the tide returned, and it was now not half-full.
“The skiff?” Hakon suggested, nodding at the small boat dancing at the end of a painter from the ship’s stern.
“They’d slaughter the rest of us and burn the old Greylag for vengeance,” his father grunted. “Cunning alone will serve.” His crew had drifted together, and he issued a few low-toned instructions in his own tongue. “We’re making repairs,” he told Julitta. “Caulking spewed, and a mastblock splitting. And the sail would be the better of new reef points.”
She could not imagine how such matters might help, but the men moved purposefully. Erling knelt on the shingle, holding Adam across his knees, and felt him over for broken bones as Julitta had done. Hakon brought ale and bread, which she accepted thankfully. When she tilted the horn to Adam’s lips he gulped automatically, opened his eyes and croaked, “Julitta—”
“Here with you, Adam. Drink this.”
He gulped again, lifted his head from Erling’s shoulder and put up his hands to hold it on. “Hell’s Teech!” he mutter-red, gingerly exploring his blood-clotted hair, and a giggle of near hysterical relief escaped her to hear his familiar oath again. The horn tipped, and as ale trickled over her fingers she forced control on herself and offered it again. He put a sticky hand over hers and drank more temperately. He looked about in the murky dusk that lightened with every moment, his senses back in his skull.
“I remember—fighting the Ladies’ Delight—and the cliff fell,” he said slowly. “No more. How…”
“Your lady brought you down the cliff,” Erling told him.
“My own vixen,” he murmured, his hand tightening over hers on the horn. As he lifted it to drink again, his lips secretly touched her fingers. He finished the ale, shook his head at the bread, and sat up to survey their position.
Two seamen were scooping out a trough in the shingle to larboard of the ship, hidden by her from the cottages, bridge and castle; a shallow grave that Julitta regarded a moment in puzzlement, until she caught one man’s measuring eye on Adam’s legs and comprehension came. One spread a cloak in it, and then Erling helped Adam to lie full length, face down, and she joined him in the trench. The sail’s salt-caked, board-solid canvas was hauled out and spread flat. A little judicious shifting and packing of pebbles, and then it was dragged over them, shutting down weightily as a coffin lid. Erling chuckled. “Not a sign,” he declared, and his feet creaked away.
Even mitigated by a fur-lined cloak, the shingle made villainously uncomfortable lying. Adam was shivering, and she pressed closer to warm him, her knowledge of medicine setting another worry to nag at the back of her mind. He stirred, and the thick voice that she would hardly have recognized croaked, “My light in black darkness, Julitta.”
Erling creaked back and reported, “Daylight near on us. We can get to work.” He squatted cross-legged on the shingle close to their heads, heaved up the sail and started some operation on its upper surface, a regular plucking and twitching. Air and a measure of light came past his legs. Presently the crackle of a driftwood fire reached their ears, and after a while the reek of heating pitch tingled in Julitta’s nose. “We caulk her seams with pitched cowhair rammed tight,” Erling explained, as a steady hammering began. The light strengthened. Easy talk and occasional laughter indicated that the seamen had nothing on mind or conscience. Then a man raised a raucous voice in song about a King Harald who for a vow never washed nor cut nor combed his hair for seven years. The Norse was like enough to the northern English for Julitta to understand it except at speed. Very close at hand a sheep unexpectedly bleated protest. “They’ve come forth from the castle,” Erling said, and shifted something beside him that chinked on the pebbles. Julitta peered and saw the head of a formidable axe lying handily by his knee. Her heart jolted.
“They are riding out to the cliff-top,” Hakon’s voice announced, quite close. The hammering went on. The songster hummed tunelessly. The drum of hooves on the bridge sounded clearly. “Some of them are coming down this way,” Hakon said, and then, a little later, “They’ve gone out to the point. Two of them are sitting their horses on watch; the others have climbed down on the other side.”
“Small use that will be,” Julitta said. “The tide was in when we reached the bay.”
“They’ve reached the cliff-top now. I can see five men climbing down.”
“He’ll be a man or two short before an hour’s out if he sets them to that,” Erling prophesied.
“Four hours to high water,” murmured Hakon, shifting restlessly on the betraying shingle.
“Nothing you do will hasten it. Sit you down and stitch reef-points,” his father placidly bade him.
Now and again they informed Adam and Julitta of the search’s progress. Sometimes shouts came to them through the shrieking of the gulls. The distant rumble of another rock-fall ended the climbing, and, considerably later, eight men carrying two others in stretched cloaks crossed the bridge and tramped up to the castle.
The pebbles grew harder and knobbier with every passing moment. The risen sun beat upon the sail. Julitta’s clothes, from clammily chill, grew sticky with heat and clung itching to her flesh, and every muscle in her body ached separately with the strain of long lying in one position. Adam lay rigid beside her; she could guess at his misery of mind and body, and the only comfort she could offer was to lay her hand over his.<
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“They’re coming down to search the houses again,” said Hakon. “Seven—eight—there’s eleven of them. Nine of us.”
“Don’t be daft,” Erling squashed his aspirations. “Go on stitching.”
The searchers were working their way down from the bridge, house by house, turning their occupants out of doors. Hakon suddenly began to laugh. “There’s an old woman just chased two of the knaves out of a cottage with a broom,” he said. “A scrawny little beldame, but you can hear her screeching—”
“Hallgerd the midwife,” Julitta declared, as the shrill voice drifted to her, and smiled despite herself. “Afraid of nothing.”
The search worked nearer. The sun grew hotter. Julitta became aware of a faint purring that vibrated through the pebbles beneath her; the sea was returning. Gradually it increased to a grinding growl as the tide sucked through the shingle, stone gritting on stone until the ridge was astir under her. The sheep bleated again, the singer gave them a few more lines of King Harald coming to his own shearing with his vow accomplished, and then a clop of hooves, a jingle of harness, and a voice she knew well snapped orders.
“Hubert, down to the right, Ranulf, pull in that little boat and see if our pair are hiding in it. You whoresons, out of the ship and down by your stinking tar-pot!”
Erling clambered unhurriedly to his feet. “And what’s your wish, my lord?” he inquired with ironic courtesy.
“We’re searching your ship, huckster.”
“You searched her last night.”
“And we know our pair went down the cliff in the night, and since you are Red Adam’s partners in greasy chaffering I’ll go through your dirty tub again.”
“Down the cliff in the night? Nay, then, if they’re not dead on the rocks, you’ll have to wait for the tide to bring them back. A grievous end—a grievous end for the gallant lad and lass.”
Someone had floundered down the shingle; as Erling’s mournful voice ceased he shouted, “The boat’s empty!”
“Back up here then! Save your moaning, you old trickster; we’re searching every foul cranny of it!”
Red Adam's Lady Page 24
