Dragon Tree

by Canham, Marsha

  The simple villagers who had never seen an albino whispered among themselves that he was surely a demon, a satyr, an incubus. They hid when they saw him, fearing he might steal their souls and barter them to the devil. When it was further discovered that he practised the art of alchemy, some bundled the few belongings they possessed and fled the village, leaving Taniere Castle to the dragons and demons.

  Those who remained did so because they had no where else to go. When none were turned into toads and lizards, they began to venture into the castle, wary, but as tenants were obliged to give three days a week in service due their liege. The knight went further and offered coin to the workers who repaired walls and cleaned rooms and after a while he was judged to be fair and affable, though withdrawn.

  The new lord had no pressing desire to scrape the outer walls clean of moss or cut down the tangled thickets grown like a ring of thorns around the island. Only the barest of necessities inside the domicile were restored. The great hall was swept clean of rot and filth, the tower rooms were made habitable, the cook house was restocked with ironware and clay pots. And wine. The alehouse was pressed into service almost at once for it was a rare night in those early months that the lord of the keep did not drink himself into a stupor and have to be carried to his bedchamber by the tall, hooded seneschal.

  The only cheerful face amongst the new residents was the squire, Roland, who went to great pains to assure the villagers that his lord was not the devil and that the cowled albino, named Marak, was not a follower of Beelzebub. Roland himself was a distant cousin to Lord Tamberlane, who was in turn the nephew of William de Glanville, brother to the late chief justiciar of England, Ranulf de Glanville, who had died while fighting alongside his king at the siege of Acre.

  Once Lord Tamberlane’s name was revealed, it was whispered with mixed emotion by the villagers who, even though they abided in the farthest corner of God’s green earth, had heard the tales and feats attributed to one of Christendom’s mightiest crusaders. It was said the Lionheart had dubbed him Dragonslayer for his ferocity in battle, and that he was one of only two knights who had survived the slaughter at the Battle of Hattin, where over two thousand Christian soldiers had been captured and beheaded. It was said he fought at Richard’s right hand side, that he had saved the king’s life when Saladin had sent his assassins into the Christian camp in the dead of night.

  But then there were the other whispered tales. Rumors of cowardice, of disobeying orders, of spitting on the Beauseant—the holy banner of the Templars. It was said he deserted the king's army in Arsuf, that he wandered the desert and lived with the paynims for several months before he presented himself before the Grand Master and faced the charges against him.

  Returning pilgrims told of a great trial wherein the Dragonslayer was condemned to death and only spared at the last possible moment by the king himself. In the end, the punishment meted out to the knight was to be stripped of his secular mantle, excommunicated for his sins and cast from the Order of priestly warriors.

  Defrocked and disgraced, he had returned quietly to England, where his presence had been commanded before his uncle and while the meeting was held in private, with not the keenest of ears able to hear what was said, a month later he had arrived at Taniere Castle to take up residence in a solitude likened to exile.

  Not everyone agreed with the charges, and not everyone obeyed the tribunal's edict to shun and ostracize. Over the ensuing weeks, it was not just the villagers who crossed the drawbridge to Taniere to take up service to their new liege, but soldiers and men at arms. Knights who had served with Tamberlane in Outremer and disdained the accusation of cowardice began to appear at the gates, kissing a ring he did not offer willingly, pledging loyalty with vows he did not actively seek. Some came marked by a weariness of bloodshed and war. Others simply carried too many nightmares in their heads and needed the peace and tranquillity of Taniere’s isolation to grapple their demons to ground.

  The villagers who worked inside the castle were also able, eventually, to overcome their fear of the tall, robed seneschal who, while he could still chill blood on a mere turning of his cowled head, proved to be a practiced healer. A maid who had burned her arm horribly with a spill of boiling oil was treated with a thick unguent that not only took the pain away upon the instant, but within days had soothed the blisters and encouraged fresh new skin to grow over the wound. Similarly, a young boy with a caul over his eye was made to see again. A miller with a scrofulous boil on his neck was healed after wearing one of the albino’s poultices, and a woman who had labored in childbirth for three days and would surely have bled to death following the breech delivery, allowed him to pack her womb with special herbs and was working in the castle a month later, her babe comfortably asleep in a sling across her back.

  As for the knight who now called Taniere Castle home, a five year old scruffy child could see him dismount to dry a tear off her face, yet a word of thanks from that child's parent could send him awkwardly back onto his horse without another word. An occasional hunt would lure him across the draw but he favored his own company. He rarely went to the village, and never attended the daily masses held in the castle chapel. His chambers occupied the entire east tower and while there were many a maid who would have joined him there with a crook of a finger, none were ever invited.

  So it was that when Tamberlane returned from the ill-fated hunt that day, the men and women working in the wards stopped what they were doing to turn and stare at their overlord as he rode past, plainly startled to see an injured maid cradled in his arms.

  While Roland held the reins of the destrier steady, Tamberlane threw a leg over the front of his saddle and landed on the ground with the surety of a big cat. With the wolfhounds close on his heels, he carried the unconscious girl inside the keep, his boot heels ringing off the stone floor as he traversed the great hall and climbed the narrow corkscrew staircase into the west tower. Roland was a step behind and opened the heavy door at the top before Tamberlane could kick his way through.

  As usual, the seneschal's chamber was dark, the shadows thick and black. There was a solitary candle flickering insipidly in the far corner of the chamber, a low fire glowing red in the hearth which provided barely enough light to discern one shape from the next.

  Marak was there, dressed in his long black robes. He sat in the far corner grinding some herbs together with a mortar and pestle, but at the sound of the door swinging open, he looked over.

  While Tamberlane and Roland waited for their eyes to adjust to the gloom, Marak calmly set his pestle aside and raised the hood of his robe to shield his face as he came into the stronger light.

  “You mentioned you might be going hunting this morning. You did not say your game would be two legged.”

  “She has an arrow through her shoulder.” Tamberlane said. “Can you help her?”

  “One of your arrows?” Marak inquired, looking down.

  The sublime reference to Tamberlane's skill with the bow was answered with a snort.

  The seneschal’s eyes, unseen beneath the hood, studied the girl’s limp body, while a pale hand touched the side of her neck to search for evidence that the blood still pulsed through her veins. Tamberlane was unsure himself, for he had not felt her move, had not heard a breath or a whimper over the last mile of their journey.

  With a gesture that did not promise much hope, Marak skimmed his fingers over the blood-soaked tunic. “She is almost bled dry.”

  “Can you help her?”

  “If I say not, will you toss her over the rampart and go about the rest of your day?”

  Tamberlane looked startled for as long as it took the seneschal to echo the earlier snort and point a long finger at a table close to the fire. While Roland cleared the board of assorted bottles and pots, Marak lit several more candles from a taper, all of them fitted with special metal shields that would shine the light downward, away from his sensitive eyes. As the gloom lifted, rows upon rows of clay vessels and pots that c
rowded the many shelves along the walls were revealed. Mysterious powders from Africa sat beside those brought at great cost from the Orient. Wings of small creatures sat in bottles neatly marked with Latin script. Next to them were pots of dried eyeballs and venom from a dozen variety of snakes; in another jar a tiny orange toad was suspended in some greenish liquid.

  As soon as Tamberlane laid the girl out on the table, the seneschal adjusted the light shields and pushed his sleeves above his wrists.

  “The arrow,” he murmured, leaning over the object in question to inspect it more closely. “You have not disturbed it?”

  “No more so than was necessary to bring her to the castle.”

  Marak's pale fingers rested over the girl’s brow a moment and he ordered Roland to add several dried pieces of wood to the fire, bringing it to a blaze again. With his hood pulled even lower over his face to protect him from the glare, he gently took a knife to the girl’s tunic, nicking the cloth at her neck first and cutting his way across her breastbone and down her arm. The threadbare fabric, once blue, was dark as ink where the blood had begun to dry, still shiny and wet and red where the jostling had kept the wound leaking. With the cloth peeled back, Marak could see that the quarrel had gone straight through the meaty part of her shoulder, just above and to the side of the right breast.

  “She has lost a deal of blood, my friend. She may lose a deal more if the arrow has cut through the heart vein.”

  “How will you know if it has?”

  The seneschal glanced up. “If you see a gout of red when I take the bolt out... you will know. Who is she? Her face is not familiar.”

  “Her village was raided this morning. She was the only one we found alive, and may be the only one able to tell us why the vill was attacked and all within its boundaries slaughtered.”

  Marak stopped what he was doing and glanced up. “All?”

  “To the last child and goat.”

  "And the raiders?"

  "Three got away," Roland said. "One with an arrow in his thigh."

  The albino’s eyes were shadowed by the hood, but Tamberlane could sense them searching his face, then dropping lower to stare at the slash in his shirtsleeve.

  “Outlaws?"

  “The leaders were mercenaries. Brabancons. Not the type who would betray their secrets too easily.”

  “You show a marked lack of faith in my skills,” Marak said dryly. Turning back to the maid, and using the veriest tip of his finger, he touched the arrowhead where it protruded through the front of her tunic, carefully watching her face for any flicker of reaction. There was none. Mumbling softly to himself, he fetched a small black kettle and wandered along the wall of shelves, taking a leaf here, a pinch of powder there, a few drops of some viscous liquid from a stoppered bottle, and added them all to the pot. He mixed the contents with water and hung the pot over the fire, pointing a bony finger at Roland as he made his way back to the pallet.

  “Guard that it does not boil.” And to Tamberlane, he asked, “Has she wakened at all?”

  “Once. Back at the river.”

  “Was she able to speak?”

  Tamberlane nodded. “A few words only. But they were tumbled and made no sense.”

  Marak fetched a large square of linen from one of the shelves and tore it into two equal strips. Folding them into two thick wads, he sprinkled more herbs and powders between each layer and by the time he finished, steam was rising off the surface of the posset. He removed the pot from the fire and divided the contents evenly between the two poultices.

  As carefully as he could, Marak cut away the gut string tethers binding the iron arrowhead to the shaft. He felt gingerly beneath the girl’s shoulder and found the splintered bits of wood where the bolt had snapped in her fall over the river embankment. Straightening again, and without further ado, he used his forefinger to push the shaft quickly through the flesh and pull it out the other side. Both ends of the wound filled instantly with fresh blood, but there was no gushing. He then took one of the herb-soaked poultices and laid it beneath her shoulder, the other one on top, and pressed down with much of his weight for several counts of ten before easing off and peering under the corner of the uppermost wadding.

  Satisfied that the heart vein had not been severed, he finished cutting away the shreds of her tunic.

  Roland, who had seen many a naked maid, scarcely followed the proceedings. He was anxious to be away, to join the hunters in regaling the castle minions with tales of the attack and their bravery in foiling it.

  Tamberlane, whose experience with female nudity had been severely limited by his vows of celibacy, found it disconcertingly easy to stare at the pale white body if he allowed himself to do so. To avoid the temptation, he moved back and stood beside the hearth. After unbuckling his belt and pulling his tunic over his head, he tossed the bloodied garments at Roland with a nod to indicate the squire could leave. He then leaned over a large bowl of water and used another scrap of cloth to wash the girl’s blood off his chest and shoulder. The gash on his arm was neither deep nor debilitating, but the skin would require a few knots of thread to hold the edges together while it healed.

  The newly kindled flames in the hearth bathed his upper body in red and orange light, sparkling off the beads of water that clung to his skin. Long, flame-burnished waves of dark hair—grown thick and full over his once-tonsured pate—curled over broad shoulders that had been strengthened over the years to carry a hundredweight of mail and armor. Shorter, curlier hairs covered his chest like a breastplate, while smoother, silkier down darkened his forearms. He was a tall man, solid in the waist and hip. His legs were long and tautly thewed, his hands square and hard.

  No one who saw him doubted that he could slay dragons. Only Marak knew the mighty knight could be unravelled, undone, and brought to ground by a single touch from a lady’s soft hand.

  “Whoever cut this girl, had no love of women,” the seneschal remarked, frowning over the slashes that ran from the girl’s ankles to the juncture of her thighs.

  Tamberlane was drawn reluctantly into the circle of light again and followed Marak’s pointed finger to the cut above the golden thatch of pubic hair. The yellow curls were still pink with blood, bringing forth another memory of a painting he had been shown during his induction as a Templar, when it was declared that all women were the daughters of Eve. The monks were told that a woman’s sex was constantly bloody from their roles as whores and temptresses for Satan. They were also warned that good men, devout men had lost their wits, their souls, their very lives worshiping at the bloodied altar of carnal sin.

  The green eyes travelled higher, touching on the girl’s face.

  She did not look like Satan’s whore. She looked fragile, broken. The shape of the wound in her shoulder made him curious enough to pluck the arrowhead off the table and examine it.

  The points were hooked and jagged, the iron meant to tear the flesh rather than simply pierce it, thereby insuring that it would do more damage if an attempt was made to pull free. The girl was lucky insofar as it had been driven straight through.

  Tamberlane curled his fist around the arrowhead. His eyes rose, glowing an eerie green in the muted light, and he was not surprised to find Marak watching him.

  The seneschal had lowered his hood, the better to work without encumbrances. His hair was as white as sun-bleached parchment, surrounding a face that was long and thin, the skin devoid of color even to the lips that were lacking the smallest hint of definition. His eyes were as clear as well water, rimmed in pink, shielded by lashes that were fine and white.

  Anything stronger than muted candlelight caused excruciating pain to those sensitive eyes, and a beam of unfiltered sunlight could scorch his skin red after a few moments exposure. All of his vast knowledge, his experiments with alchemy and herbal medicines could gain him little relief from his own curse, condemning him to a world of shadows and heavy woolen garments.

  “The peasants committed no crime,” Tamberlane said, his e
yes searching Marak’s for an explanation. “It was just a poor village with nothing to hide.”

  “Nothing that you could see, perhaps,” Marak amended carefully.

  “Nothing worth searching for. They burned the huts without a care to what was inside. They slaughtered the people and livestock without pause.”

  “And you are thinking that perhaps they were not merely attacking the village.”

  “The vill is on my land.”

  “Not all blame for all crimes can be laid on your shoulders, Ciaran. If it was, indeed, an enemy seeking vengeance, he would surely have ridden up to the gates. It is no great secret where the Dragonslayer lodges."

  Tamberlane closed his fingers around the arrowhead and squeezed. "I was told that Hugh de Bergerette is back in England. He lost an arm that day on the road to Jerusalem. Perhaps he seeks a greater vengeance than the tribunal proscribed."

  Marak shook his head. “It does not make sense that he should come now. Not after all this time.”

  “Some men have longer memories than others.”

  Marak started to draw a sheet of linen over the girl’s naked body, but stopped. He looked at the golden triangle at the junction of her thighs then tipped his head to cast a curious look at the dull brown plait that grew from her head.

  “We have been in this fog-ridden England of yours for three years now,” he murmured, “and I have determined that your countrymen will attack almost anything or anyone without much provocation. That aside,” he dropped the sheet in place and turned to rinse his hands in the barrel, “the fact that you live and breathe solely because your veins flow with Glanville blood would be more than enough cause for some to pick up a stone and clout you with it.”

  “Then they should attack me, not innocent peasants.”