A helpful middle-aged neighbour who still kept an appreciative eye for a lively lass, as soon as he learned how they were placed, lent her three men-at-arms to augment their disabled force, a kindness for which she was doubly thankful because it enabled her to decline a similar offer from Robert de Veragny. The cripple’s earnest desire to help was indeed an embarrassment; it was intolerable to Rodriga to accept favours from a man whom she disliked and worked to destroy. At least his final offer, on the second evening after the battle, of Lothaire de Gallenard’s personal services to command her camp, had the merit of bringing Landry tottering unsteadily from his bed to assert his complete recovery.
His presence served to deter that practised amorist from proffering his more outrageous compliments, but when he turned instead to teasing her about the graceless inadequacy of hasty youth in the lists of love, a passing reference to hulking louts convinced her that he had somehow obtained a description of her preferred visitor. Fortunately big fair squires were not such rarities in the enormous camp that he should guess his identity. She parried his thrusts and occasionally retaliated, in a fever of dread that Piers should walk heedlessly into their midst.
He did not appear that night, though she and her father sat late in the tent doorway. “Has the young hot-head at last learned to curb his impatience, do you think?” Landry asked at length.
“More likely out of charity with me,” Rodriga replied, and related what had passed between them after the battle.
“He will return when his pride ceases to smart,” was Landry’s verdict. “So take heart, lass. But do not try him too highly. To champion that renegade against him—”
“Should I have condoned murder?”
“From all I have seen, that Marco is very well able to protect himself. And Piers would not reckon it murder to destroy such vermin. I do not mean I condone it—probably could not have stomached it either—but to take that half-breed’s part was no way to handle a lofty-headed cub in his hot pride.”
She grimaced. She knew she had been too impulsive, but the crazy surge of sympathy for Marco had swept away all prudence. “I did not care what he thought of me,” she declared.
“An attitude that has its charm; contrary brutes, men. But show him a judicious kindness now. And I must go back to haunting my Poitevin priests; if witnesses are to be found in Acre they will not come seeking me. Time for me is running out, Rodriga. I must see you wedded before I again engage Saladin’s screeching devils. However my heart rejoices in it, this old carcase is beyond exchanging handstrokes through a pitched battle.”
"You have set your heart on the match?” she asked soberly.
“It is your only chance, lass, of achieving a marriage befitting your birth. The pup is a likely pup, and Rionart a worthy fief. If he has an ounce of gratitude in him he will wed you and thank God. What ails you? If you had been bred and dowered according to your birth, it is unlikely you would have set eyes on your chosen husband before the wedding day!”
She grimaced again; she had never envied the tedious and strictly ordered lives of the gently bred demoiselles who dared pity her, and had asked nothing better than to accompany her father in his erratic wanderings over the face of Christendom, without thought for the future. Now the future was pressing close upon her. She would be seventeen in December, and it was high time she was married. Landry’s wanderings must end soon in death or beggary; he was nearing sixty, friendless and penniless, without hope now of future employment. If she wedded Piers, he could face encroaching age serenely, honoured and secure, on some small estate of Rionart. She let go the vague, insubstantial dreams that had beguiled her hard, gay life. Piers was young and vigorous, courteous and kind, whatever his failings and his lack of humour. He would be good to her, and would grow to discretion and self-control. In marriage any woman should be thankful for so much, and when her unblinded judgment reminded her that he was not truly adequate in any but physical qualities, she told herself grimly that a dowerless wench must thank the Saints that she was granted a presentable husband, and not hanker after a paladin or a paragon.
“As for that Marco,” Landry interrupted her musings, “time someone did cleanse Acre of him! But I will admit to the Fiend’s own curiosity as to why he lurks about us! Gives me a damnable creeping itch between the shoulders to know that knife is at my back. What ails him?”
“A painful attack of gratitude, by his own account,” Rodriga answered. She had not recounted her conversation with Marco in the stress of more urgent affairs; indeed, she had been reluctant to recall it for her own consideration. Moreover, by warning the renegade she had disobeyed her father, and because he trusted her so completely she was usually punctilious in conforming to his few commands. Now she told the whole, and he was stung to incredulous wrath.
“Here is a state! Because you made the error of saving his life, he appoints himself your guardian devil!”
“This is the second time he has done us service at some risk,” she pointed out soberly.
“That is what enrages me! Galling to be beholden to a—a carrion eating hyena!”
“No hyena, that. He kills his own meat.”
“Devil fly away with me before I seek through the pages of your Bestiary for the appropriate monster! Humph. So that is his purpose. And any hound who molests you will need naught but burying-room with him at your back.”
She stared, taken aback by his sudden change of mind. “Then you permit him to keep watch on me, Father?”
“How am I to prevent him, short of bidding Ramiro shoot him on sight? And what waste of a guardian devil! How do you feel towards him, lass?”
She struggled to grasp her shifting, chaotic impressions, twisting the end of a long plait round and round her fingers. “I respect him,” she said at length, and was satisfied that was truth. The scoundrel had courage, intelligence and an odd hard honesty. He merited respect.
Landry eyed her shrewdly by the light of the smoky little lamp, slapped noisily at a mosquito, and shifted himself with a muttered curse. “And what has put you in sympathy with him?”
She repeated Marco’s account of his own paternity. He nodded gravely, and amusement was far from his face.
“Not pretty, no. A harlot’s many-fathered bastard. Accounts for him, I suppose; foul plants grow on dunghills. Yet he treated you with all courtesy?”
“Even when I provoked him.”
He uttered a grim little chuckle, picked up the lamp and wearily hoisted himself to his feet. “Reckon I know what ails him! But come to bed, lass, and let the Devil take care of his own.”
She was so glad to hear his laughter again that she forgot to ask him what he meant until she was lying sleepless on her hot pallet, listening drearily to his heavy breathing, the song of the mosquitoes and the occasional stir outside as the loaned sentry prowled the camp, reminding her of Miguel by his very presence. The thought teased her but for a moment; Marco was of infinitely less importance than the memory of her foster-brother, and she lay with tears running from under her closed lids until sleep overtook her unawares.
For three days she saw nothing of her odd guardian, and indeed was too busily occupied to think of him. Landry hobbled forth on his quest for elderly Poitevins, and later hobbled back swearing frightfully in all the tongues at his disposal, sat in the shade and nursed his leg. Though the wound had closed, the premature exertion had reopened it, and aggravated his pain. They sustained two more visits from the lord of Veragny and his seneschal, but Rodriga, aping the modest and dutiful daughter in a fashion that drew appreciative glances from her sire, stuck to Landry like a burr and steadily plied her needle, tactics which preserved her from the expert gallantries of Sir Lothaire.
Piers stayed away until the second evening after their discussion, and presented himself stiffly and formally. Landry treated him with a joviality which only Rodriga recognised as counterfeit, and thawed the stiffness out of him. Rodriga, mindful of her father’s wishes, set so effective a guard on her tongue that,
in the absence of controversial topics, he was completely mollified and equally eager to please. He commiserated with Landry on his lamed leg, earnestly besought him to refrain from exertion until it was mended, and made no inquiry into the progress of the quest. He condoled with Ramiro on his loss in most suitable terms, which did not greatly gratify that stricken father. He promised any assistance that lay in his power, regretting aloud the obligations to his own master that limited it. No mention was made of their quarrel or its cause, and he departed in perfect charity with all there.
It was probably the lingering flavour of that charity which led Landry next night into the blunder of permitting him to escort Rodriga on a brief walk abroad. He excused himself afterwards by declaring that no Saint in Paradise could expect an old war-dog like himself to curb his tongue while a pup of one-third his years and one-thirtieth his experience prated to him of siege-craft. He yielded to his entreaties, accepting his assurances that he would guard Rodriga with his life, keep her strictly from any neighbourhood where she might be exposed to questionable encounters, and avoid any likely haunt of those who must not know they were even acquainted.
Piers was an attentive and agreeable escort. It was a novel and pleasing experience for Rodriga to wander idly in the dark thronged streets with a courteous young man to guard and entertain her. He did not offer obnoxious flattery, but he made it plain that her company delighted him. He bought her fruit and sweetmeats from a passing hawker, and they strolled to the market, where the merchants were still displaying their wares by the light of lamps and torches. They stopped to listen to a story-teller declaiming a victory of the Leper-King. Later Piers used his imposing bulk to force her a way into the front rank of a crowd watching a troop of tumblers, which included a lithe brown girl who could dance on her hands and somersault from one man’s shoulders to another’s.
Presently, though, the nature of the throngs changed. The merchants packed up their wares and extinguished their lights. Honest folk drifted away to their own places, and the night was given to roisterers and ribalds. A young and reasonably personable demoiselle of gentle blood was such a rarity in Acre that the task of escorting her was no light responsibility. The plain truth was that it was no time for a virtuous woman to be abroad, and though Piers had the escort’s requisite qualifications of stalwart physique and a ready sword-hand, the strain of deterring rivals from more than appreciative glances soon destroyed his enjoyment. Rodriga, by long usage impervious to lewd comments and appraising stares, contentedly nibbling a delectable confection of sugar, almonds and egg such as had seldom reached her lips, was a little while in realising it, for he exerted himself to please her. When enlightenment came she sought a fitting excuse and pleaded weariness. The relieved alacrity with which he extricated her from the crowds and started back by less-frequented ways showed how much his charge had weighed on him.
There were torches and lanterns in plenty on the main thoroughfares, where knights and great lords moved amid escorts, but in the darkened alleys prowled the vermin of Acre, the cut-purses, pimps and drabs who preyed on the weak or the incapable. The big squire with the ready sword-hand, sober and alert, was not for them; they were but slinking shadows vaguely glimpsed out of eye-corners. Sometimes they encountered drunken revellers reeling aimlessly, sometimes steady men returning briskly to their camps, sometimes the indefatigable beggars still whining for alms. Once a troop of men-at-arms passed them, hustling two bound and whimpering prisoners in their midst, and once a half-drunken girl, her bodice torn to her waist and her hair streaming, ran shrieking with strident laughter between the tents, pursued with hunting-cries by a pair of staggering men. Piers moved to come between them and Rodriga, who watched all with the same alert and unperturbed interest.
“I did wrong to expose you to such shocking sights, Rodriga,” Piers said, unwontedly humble.
“Oh, no matter. I am not shocked,” she answered reassuringly.
That was the wrong answer entirely, as he speedily made plain. “No delicate and gently born demoiselle could be aught but shocked by such depravity,” he stated austerely, a reply that in its turn could have been more fortunately phrased.
“My birth and my breeding are at odds,” she reminded him. “My life has been passed in camp and castle, where such conduct is commonplace.”
“I cannot abide the thought of it!” he exclaimed violently. “So fair and virtuous a demoiselle, exposed to such contamination! It truly horrifies me that you should be unmoved by sight of such evil!”
Rodriga had no taste for the pedestal onto which he seemed determined to thrust her. “If you had a gently bred demoiselle on your hands she would doubtless indulge your sensibility with a fit of violent hysterics, which you would not find at all entertaining,” she pointed out very reasonably.
He retained enough common-sense for all his fervour to be forcibly impressed by that. “By Saint Michael, no! Hysterics in the public street—Holy Saints forbid!” He said not another word on the conduct he would expect from gently bred demoiselles, and Rodriga thought she had won clear of that difficulty fairly well.
A scrawny, half-naked child, one of Acre’s host of horrid little pimps bred to evil from their first breath, pattered up behind them and plucked Piers by the tunic, whining the usual offer. Men already accompanying girls were not usually accosted, but there was a kind of desperate tenacity about this nasty brat. Piers thrust him away with a curt refusal and a shamed glance at Rodriga, and he dodged back, piping more explicit lewdness from beyond arm’s reach. Dismissed this time with an angry threat of a thrashing, he skipped back to the shadows, reappeared a few yards further on, and this time dared to compare Rodriga’s physical assets to their detriment with those of the wares he touted.
Piers uttered a snarl of outrage and leaped at him, a terrifying bulk impelled by murderous rage. The urchin squealed, ducked under his reaching arm and doubled back the way they had come. He almost collided with Rodriga, who made no move, and veering in mid-stride nearly fell into the hands reaching for him. He scudded in silent panic down the alley without start enough to dodge between the tents, the squire’s long legs gaining at every step. Then a dark slight shape impeded vengeance’s path, so that Piers floundered, waved his arms and all but sprawled headlong as he checked in full career. The brat vanished. Rodriga, whose own sense of outrage was deficient, stifled untimely laughter and hurried forward to intervene if needed. She had recognised Marco without requiring the confirmation provided by his deep voice offering courteous apology.
“The Devil roast you!” Piers raged. “You did that on purpose to let that whelp escape me!”
“My profound regrets; I had not realised he was worthy of your steel,” Marco replied pleasantly.
Piers choked. “Worthy—that hell-brat—he dared insult my lady!”
“He was less afraid of you than of returning empty-handed,” Marco answered reasonably, and moved lightly away from the middle of the alley, leaving Piers standing there alone and looking more than a little foolish.
“Afraid?” he repeated. “Afraid of whom?”
“Of those who sent him forth,” Marco said, and was gone while Piers still spluttered.
All at once the incident was no longer amusing. Rodriga knew with utter certainty what Marco’s childhood had been; hunger, terror and abuse. He had been a half-starved cringing brat begging and thieving in the reeking alleys of a Syrian seaport; he had solicited passers-by on behalf of his harlot mother, and dreaded to return empty-handed to punishment. She thought of the desperation that had driven a scrawny urchin to pester Piers at risk of his skin, and imagined the renegade as just such a shock-headed verminous brat, forlorn and savage. Her abhorrence of the evil little wretches was transferred to those who bred them to vileness for their profit; they were victims, and compassion moved her.
Some of her compassion spilled itself upon Marco, who had once been a victim, and she had very little to spare for Piers and his grumbles. Privately she considered that if he had
been made to look foolish he had only himself to blame; he should have learned not to exchange insults with one so infinitely his superior in that talent, whose wits had been burnished by years of precarious existence in a hostile world. She could not join in condemning Marco to the Hell that owned him with the necessary enthusiasm, and Piers was bound to mark it. The flavour of their evening was soured.
The whole Christian host was speculating now how many days Acre could hold out. The King of France had retired to his bed in the throes of rage, chagrin and fever, but the news of French failure seemed to have invigorated King Richard, who was again commanding his army from his litter and apparently much restored thereby. He had demonstrated on the very morning after the French attack that his marksmanship was unimpaired, by shooting down a Saracen parading on the wall in the armour of Alberic Clements, that hero who had vowed to enter Acre or die, and who had been overwhelmed when stranded on the wall by the breaking of a scaling-ladder. Just as his end had been the symbol of defeat that had led to the attack’s abandoning, so the death of one of his slayers served as a symbol of revenge and heartened the whole host to serve King Richard.
A fresh mine had brought down part of the Accursed Tower in an avalanche of masonry, but no practicable breach had been made. The King offered gold pieces to any man who would tear away a stone from the mass, but had to withdraw his offer when it proved too costly of reckless venturers. The air resounded with the ring of mallets as scaling-ladders, penthouses and belfries were constructed, and with the crash of missiles. Petrarias hammered night and day at the tottering tower and walls. Fresh mines were driven under their foundations, and tales went about the camp of wild hand-to-hand struggles in choking darkness under the earth when counter-mines broke through and filled the tunnels with maddened Saracens. Every night now one or two deserters from the doomed city crept to the outposts begging for baptism to save their craven lives, to the scorn of those who passed them to the priests.
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