“This is very ill-tied,” she said firmly, and wound the clumsy rag afresh. Marco silently materialised at her elbow and moved as though to thrust between them. Rodriga darted one scorching glance at him, and he stood swinging his captured sword, his menacing gaze on the giant. Giacomo shook slightly, and a sudden chuckle rumbled through the cavern of his chest.
“True, it is not fitting,” he remarked in a sort of muted bellow, like distant thunder. Rodriga looked up from her task, and saw that he was grinning vastly, his intimidating dark eyes all laughter-crinkles at their corners. “No need you say it, Marco. It is the lady’s will.”
“As fitting as when I did as much for you!” Rodriga snapped as Marco turned his cold and deadly face to the whore-monger and softly said something in Italian which was beyond her slight acquaintance with that tongue.
Giacomo’s chuckle rumbled through him again. Perversely he upheld his part of the argument in French, that Rodriga might understand. “Insult? Me, I know what courtesy is due to virgin daughter of a knight.”
“Be sure you practise it this once at least!”
“It is that I have not the habit,” Giacomo said cheerfully, obviously enjoying the situation. “Not that I wish your knife in my belly, Marco. The lady honour me.”
The lady, about equally divided between anger and amusement, worked swiftly over the bandage, and said over her shoulder to her self-appointed protector, “My father watches, and all his men. Are they not guard enough?”
He did not answer. The giant grinned placidly into his dangerous face and jerked down his sleeve over his massive arm. “No cause to quarrel, Marco,” he said amiably. “Put up your sword.”
“Are you afraid of him?” exclaimed Rodriga, forgetting all courtesy as she saw how he dwarfed the slender renegade.
He nodded. “Too fast,” he explained cheerfully. He slapped his vast midriff. “Too big—what is it?—target. Marco have my liver out before I reach dagger.” He bowed his thanks to Rodriga. “Donzella, very great honour. Your servant always. Not fit you should look on me, but command me. No offence in that, Marco?”
“It is an offence that your filthy traffic should even approach my lady!”
“I did the approaching! What ails you, man?” impatiently demanded Rodriga, who had rubbed shoulders with all manner of sinners since she could walk alone.
“Soured virginity, belike,” suggested Giacomo, grinning at the frozen dark face. Whatever he pretended, he was not in the least afraid of Marco. He caught Rodriga’s look of incredulity at the mere notion of masculine virginity outside a cloister, grinned wickedly at the renegade, now baited rather than the baiter, and explained. “No stomach for whore, only whore stomach Marco. Eh?” He waved his hand affably at both, unhitched his adze and lumbered back to the ramparts as the gongs and cymbals signalled another charge. Rodriga, keeping her eyes averted from Marco’s rigid face, watched him go with great goodwill and much appreciation of that final thrust, which bore all the ring of unpalatable truth.
Diego came scurrying back through the press, followed by Wulfric, both burdened with sheaves of arrows, bundles of food, and a couple of skin bottles full of sweetened fruit-juice and water, an excellent invention of the wine-abjuring Infidel. Rodriga, who was desperately thirsty but had avoided the wine lest it impair the clearness of her brain, seized on that thankfully.
“May I stay to help?” Wulfric asked anxiously as she lowered the bottle and wiped her lips.
“Give out the arrows where they are needed and then help me with the wounded,” she accepted him, and saw his worn face lighten as he ran forward.
Again and yet again the Saracens hammered at them, but never broke the line. The ditch filled with debris and bodies, and they floundered over their own dead and hurt to gain the rampart and be hurled back. Exhausted, melted with heat and spent with blows, the Christians beat them off; the world was an inferno of noise and dust, murderous faces and swinging steel, but the impetus of the earlier assaults was waning, the pauses between them lengthened and the numbers diminished.
Fewer wounded came, and Rodriga was a watcher again. Her father and the other Catalans were still unhurt, and Wulfric had found himself a spear and blooded it; he dragged himself wearily from the embankment with a look of grim content on his haggard face and sank down by Diego, too spent to do more. The fair little trollop went to and fro with wine, and he watched her. Rodriga noted that she approached knights and squires, rather than unprofitable men-at-arms and archers. The fragile fellow whom Giacomo had left in charge of the barrels was sitting against one, coughing in sick spasms, while the two haggard women dipped up the last of the wine with pitchers for the wenches.
Giacomo rolled up from the trench during a lull, grinned at the impassive renegade, and spoke quietly to the sick man, a hand on his shoulder. Some of the girls were moving among the wounded who had already been tended with wine and food. Giacomo straightened, looked over them, and then moved with soundless speed. The little fair girl was sitting on her heels beside a young squire with a bandaged arm, who was obviously not too badly hurt to be unappreciative of her attention, conversing and fondling very merrily as he neglected his cup. Giacomo pounced on her from behind. He gripped a vast fistful of yellow curls, a bunched mass of soiled blue linen skirt, and heaved her to her feet in one jerk. She squealed piercingly. He bent her forward and dealt her half a dozen resounding slaps on her hinder end, rating her in a savage growl. When he thrust her off, she picked up her pitcher and cup and stumbled away snivelling to serve others. Enlightenment came to Rodriga, and she nodded approvingly. Giacomo had sounder views than his wenches on the time and place to transact business.
Behind her a voice muttered an oath in English, and she turned to see Wulfric, dead-white under his tan, glaring after Giacomo and fumbling for his dagger. To anyone who had not seen the preliminaries his must have appeared an act of wanton brutality, and she put out a hand to check him. “No concern of yours!” she warned him.
He subsided. “Sorry, my lady! But she is like—she reminds me of an English girl. And so young!” He mastered his generous anger, and as the giant went heavily back to the trenches his eyes were narrowed and murderous.
The Turks were charging again, but as the weary defenders braced themselves to withstand another attack, they discharged a flight of arrows and wheeled away. Someone raised a jubilant shriek, and then all along the ramparts men were trying to cheer with throats so parched that they could scarcely croak. The great mass of Saladin’s horsemen were splitting, disintegrating, melting into the dunes. The last squadron sullenly drew off, and the Christians stood watching them go, suddenly conscious that the distant uproar at their backs had stilled also. Rodriga looked over her shoulder at the indomitable bulk of the Accursed Tower, still flying its Infidel banners. So the French attack had failed. Now the last riders vanished into the trampled sandhills, leaving the ditch and its approaches littered with dead. Already men were ranging out to loot the bodies.
Landry came limping back more heavily than usual, leaving a trail of dark drops in the dust behind him. Rodriga’s breathing checked for a moment, and she ran to him, her dark eyes enormous in a colourless face. He grinned reassuringly at her and sat down heavily, stretching out his left leg. The hose was heavy and sodden with blood.
“Only a scratch,” he said. “A spent arrow. God’s Grace, but that was a battle to boast of to one’s grandsons! Pouf, but I grow too old for these sports, lass!”
He was grey and trembling with exhaustion, and under his blood-caked mail he must be bruised all over, but his face was cheerfully content. Rodriga drew breath in a gulp, and when she had uncovered his wound she uttered a little laugh of sheer relief. It was no more than a cut, and had almost stopped bleeding. She laughed again, a little wildly, and tears rushed to her eyes. Her father looked up sharply.
“Tie it up before you are blind with blubbering,” he advised bracingly, and she gulped, sniffed, gave him a watery smile and obeyed. A Parolles did n
ot indulge in hysterics before ribalds, harlots and renegades. Then she drew a long breath, steadied herself with an effort, and looked about her.
Miguel and Esteban were competing for plunder in the trench, among the camp-followers and other ghouls who were stripping the dead Turks and casting out their corpses for the jackals who would come with the night and for the vultures already circling overhead. She grimaced. The Saracen losses had been heavy indeed, but thanks to heavier armour and the advantage of position, their own had been less than she had thought. The disorderly assembly of wounded, laid where their bearers had found space, was already being dispersed; some to their own tents, the more gravely hurt and those requiring surgery to the Hospital. The Knights of Saint John were conspicuous in their black tunics as they went from one to another, and here and there priests were on their knees shriving the dying. Their comrades were carrying away the Christian dead, and a few women and old folk were wandering forlornly in search of their kindred. Tears tingled behind her eyelids and thickened her throat, and for one wild moment Marco’s blasphemy came to her mind; was even the Holy Sepulchre worth all the blood and pain and grief, when this small skirmish had been won at such cost?
Ramiro lightly touched her hand, and the familiar tight-mouthed smile that had comforted her childhood woes warmed her. “My pups have chewed their bones long enough,” he said calmly. “We will all be better in our own place.” He started back to the trench. Landry uttered a sudden grunt and looked past him.
“The saints send him sense! Here comes young wooden-wits seeking you, like a sucking calf seeking its dam! Now it only wants that lame spider and your slimy admirer to join our company!”
Rodriga looked from the hastening Piers to the immobile Marco and realised that this was indeed a dangerous assembly. Piers was being idiotically reckless, and she was not disposed to excuse him on account of any anxiety for her. A gently reared demoiselle might have been flattered, but Rodriga was too clear-sighted not to see that this impulsiveness imperilled her father and herself and said little for his consideration on their behalf. Robert de Veragny, debarred from personal participation in battle and moved by genuine concern, was quite likely to seek them. She gestured to Landry, painfully heaving himself up, to stay where he was, and started forward to meet the squire. She almost bumped into Marco, who stepped back quickly.
“Your pardon, my lady.”
Here was another complication, but the thought came swiftly that, however insolent he had been towards the men, and despite considerable provocation, he had treated her with punctilious courtesy and shown no resentment for her ingratitude. She softened a little towards him. “Marco, I do thank you for my life,” she said quickly, “and for all the service you have done me.”
“But I have overstayed what welcome I had,” he finished coolly, his mouth twitching into a slight wry smile. “My lady, I promised to do him no harm.” He looked at Piers, thrusting through the crowds heedless of the work on hand.
“That promise might prove hard to keep,” she answered bluntly, and his smile widened a little.
“Not a young man of many ideas, but singularly tenacious of those he holds,” he commented. “I will relieve you of one problem, my lady.”
His path was blocked by a sorry little procession, two litters borne by serving-men of the Hospital, a knight in the black surcoat stiffly blotched with dry blood, a priest and a weeping woman with a half-grown girl clinging to her skirts. He checked to let them go by, and Piers, who had lumbered into a weary run at sight of Rodriga, broke his stride as he saw who stood beside her, stumbled, recovered himself and scowled at him. It was too much to hope, thought Rodriga, that he would let his enemy depart in peace.
Marco glanced once at him and quietly started round behind the sobbing woman. “Halt there, you renegade hound!” Piers yelled. Marco paid no heed, and Piers gestured to a nearby archer, who nocked and aimed in eager obedience. “Halt, or take a shaft between your shoulders!”
Marco swung round. “Your kinsman’s taste for murder by proxy is infectious,” he observed disdainfully, his narrowed eyes watching both men.
Rodriga saw the intention in the lad’s furious face, and leaped forward. “Piers, he saved my life! No!” she cried. Out of the tail of her eye she saw a slight movement from the archer, and swung her javelin like a mace, beating down his left hand, bow and shaft together. He yelled, the arrow thudded into the earth a couple of paces away, and she turned on him in red rage. “Who are you to kill at any stranger’s nod, you fatherless son of folly? Get you back to your own place!” She struck again and again at the obliging archer, who tried to ward off the blows or to catch her weapon, until a shrewd crack across the skull convinced him that termagant demoiselles were not for him to deal with, and he fled.
Marco could have departed unremarked while Piers was still paralysed by shock, but no male creature’s silly pride ever permitted him to evade a challenge. Rodriga could willingly have belaboured the pair of them, making a public show of their enmity when it was urgently necessary that no one should know she was acquainted with either, but it was too late for anything she might say to bring them to their senses.
“If you dare again to force your foul company on this lady,” Piers ranted, his hand on his swordhilt, “it will be the last offence of your vile life!”
Marco’s colour receded a little from his swarthy face, but his voice remained level. “You will set another to shoot me in the back?”
“What?” Piers spluttered. “You expect a gentleman to defile his sword in a Saracen’s by-blow?”
The renegade turned rigid as stone, his face grey. Even his lips seemed stiff as he said very calmly, “Reserve your insults for my mother, since even she could not have told you who my father was.”
The hairs lifted on Rodriga’s neck in a thrill of horror, and even the squire’s rage was quenched as though someone had cast cold water over him. Then she was between them. This could not be allowed to go further. Her heart and mind revolted equally from that hideous declaration. She looked up into the deadly face of the killer, bound by his promise to her, and knew that only a personal appeal from her would move him. “Marco,” she said gravely, “I ask you to abandon this quarrel and go.”
Piers caught at her arm from behind to pull her aside, but she stood rock-fast and he could not shift her without violence. Marco’s rigidity relaxed.
“Yes, my lady,” he said simply, and went.
Piers made no attempt to prevent him, the first display of anything near wisdom he had yet achieved. He snarled wordlessly at the disappearing grey back, and then turned petulantly to Rodriga. She felt suddenly flat and empty, weary alike of this savage day and the half-raw boy who reckoned it no crime to order an enemy’s murder. “Piers, you had better go,” she said curtly. “If your step-brother—”
“I am not afraid of that cripple! Do you think so little of my regard—”
A commotion half a bowshot along the ditch checked him in midprotest; yelled curses, a scuffle and a cry, a frantic shout in Ramiro’s voice, a gurgling death-howl. Esteban screeched something that broke to a sob, and Rodriga chilled. She snatched up her skirts and ran.
The throng parted in sudden silence, and Ramiro came grey-faced towards her, bearing Miguel in his arms like a child. His legs dangled slackly, and his head lolled against his father’s breast. She reached them, took one look at the lad’s face, at the pulsing wound at the base of his throat, and froze. Landry and Pablo hobbled to join them, calling questions that hushed as they, too, saw.
“A ribald—tried to snatch—a ring!” gulped Esteban, and covered his convulsed face, jerking out his words between sobs. “After the battle—all the Saracens—and a Greek thief—stabbed him!”
Landry was shouting urgently to the nearest priest, who came at a run. Miguel shivered slightly, turned his head, opened his eyes wide on a stare of blank surprise and died before he reached them.
CHAPTER VIII
Miguel’s death was the first
great grief of Rodriga’s adult life. He had been closest to her in age of all her foster-brothers, less than two years the elder; the sharer of her childhood, companion in pleasure and punishment, her abettor in mischief then, her devoted slave as they grew to be mistress and servant. Not amiably responsible like Pablo, nor foolhardy like Juan, he had been a good-natured cheerful lad dear to everyone, and his death breached a gap in all their lives.
The brunt of practical living fell upon Rodriga. Ramiro, that silent, self-contained man, was dazed and broken by the bitter shock, and obsessed by the fact that his son had been despatched, not by the Saracens in battle, but by a fellow-Christian while engaged in looting the dead. “I know the Holy Father promised that all who die on Crusade enter Paradise,” he declared pitifully again and again to Rodriga, “and if he had been killed by the Unbelievers I should have been sure of it. But he died unshriven, daughter, and in the midst of sin! Does the absolution cover that? Murdered by a Christian, and no time to repent!” He moped inconsolably between the camp and the churches, while Pablo hobbled about stricken-faced, trying to find occupation for one hand, and Esteban dazedly drifted from one half-finished task to another, and Diego hid among his horses to weep himself nearly blind.
Landry had taken to his bed immediately they had buried Miguel, in a state of exhaustion that secretly perturbed Rodriga. As perturbing was his admission that age was mastering him, whose vigour hitherto had mastered age. It was Rodriga who took command; who paid for Masses for Miguel’s soul; who visited a recovering Juan in the ghastly overcrowded Hospital to break to him the news of his death; who tried to comfort the survivors and hide her own tears; who marketed for food and fodder, replenished their little armoury, exercised the horses and appointed guards. Mercifully her labours left her little time to brood on grief, and she thanked God daily for the willing service and practical good sense of Wulfric, who respected their sorrow but had been too short a time of their company to share it. Even Urraca had ceased from carping and went about her duties in glum silence.
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