by Judith Tarr
She had come to the Franks in search of a champion. The war in which Roland was to fight was coming as surely as the moon swelled from new to full and shrank to new again. But in her arrogance she had reckoned that the enemy himself would be mustering forces far away, in his stronghold at the edge of the world. She had never stopped to think that he might be doing so here. In Spain. Full in the center of this army that the Franks had mustered to conquer the infidel.
This army. The infidels had seen the size and strength of it and regretted that they had ever begged the Frankish king to aid them against the rebels. It was a very great army—and it was founded on deception. Its men believed that they had come on crusade. But its king knew that he had been summoned as an ally of the infidel. What better weapon for the Father of Lies to take and wield?
She paced, fretting. A great part of her twitched to go out, to join the hunt. But Tarik was a better hunter than she, and far less obtrusive in the night. Come morning she would go after him, but not now.
She mustered her wits, which were far more scattered than they should be. The enemy’s influence? Or Roland, shattering the calm of her spirit, laying her open to confusion?
Was there a difference?
No doubts. Not now. She stood still and for a long moment simply breathed. Slowly her heart ceased its hammering. Her thoughts stilled and focused. She found her center again, and the light of magic in it.
It was well aware of the darkness in the camp, as it had been from the beginning. But where that darkness was, or what it was, it knew no better now than it ever had. It could not touch the source or come near it. It could only circle and snarl.
And yet that circle had a center. If she could come to it in the body, she would know. She was sure of that. She would recognize the enemy.
Would she? He had been stripped of everything about him that might be tempting to mortals: beauty, splendor, even the music of his voice. He would seem the most ordinary of men. A lesser lord, perhaps a priest—he had played the part of priests before. Those could come nearer kings than most, and were nearly always trusted.
She slept a little, by main force of will. Her body had need of rest, and it passed the remainder of the night. In the dawn she was up. Tarik had not come back, nor had she expected it.
She dressed for riding, for comfort and to escape the notice that a woman, dressed as a woman, would attract in this camp of war. She walked out calmly.
There was an altar near the king’s tent, set under a canopy so that the priests and the king and the highest lords were sheltered from the sun, but the lesser folk could see and hear if they chose. Sarissa held back among them, watching and listening as Turpin celebrated the rite. His acolytes this morning were monks and priests of notable rank, some of them warriors of God as he was, others attached to the king’s chancery. The king himself knelt in front of the altar, his silver-fair hair and broad shoulders unmistakable.
Roland’s battle-brother was there, the great golden ox whose wits were keener than anyone knew. Olivier was close by the king, guarding him without making a show of it. Sarissa had felt his eyes on her like the touch of both fire and ice: warmth of his recognition, cool reckoning of the danger she might pose to the king.
Beyond him, all but hidden in his shadow, she saw Roland. Her heart stopped, then began to beat very hard. Of course he had come to Mass on this, the first day after his return. He would have been a fool to stay away. Rumors of witchcraft and worse must falter in the face of his calm and faithful presence at the Mass.
Roland did not seem aware of her. He divided his attention between the rite and the king. Nothing else, that she could see, touched upon him. Which was well, she supposed. Her wiser self was glad. The rest was like to weep.
She steadied her mind once more, and made herself face the matter at hand. Between those two, Charles was as safe as he could be. She sensed no darkness in him. He had not been corrupted.
And yet . . .
It was close. Her awareness of it made it seem stronger. She searched the faces of the priests under the canopy. Plain human faces, bearded or shaven clean, pale clerks or ruddy warrior priests. None of them bore the marks of the dark angel. Nor did any cry out to her that he was the ancient enemy.
She slipped away before the Mass was done, tracking the darkness by the shudder in her skin. The trail, to her surprise and dismay, led to Turpin’s tent.
It was deserted. Turpin was still at Mass. His servants and his acolytes were attending him. No one else lingered there, not even a guard to protect its contents.
There was little enough to protect. Turpin’s armor on its stand; his weapons on their rack. A bed and a chest, a table and a lamp.
She paused on the threshold. Her nostrils twitched. Something here was awry. To the eye it was serene. She scented no fear, caught no stink of death. But her nape prickled.
Something ill had walked here. She tracked it by the flutter in her middle. From entrance to chest, and in the chest a silver chalice. Turpin had been celebrating the Mass with another, more ornate and less purely beautiful. This one he clearly cherished. It was old and full of sanctity. She who had held the Grail in her hands knew this for an earthly image of it, as every chalice was; but this one more than most.
A tarnish of shadow lay on it. She gazed down into it, seeking visions in the silver. They were blurred and scattered, but as she sharpened her eyes, they came clear.
She saw Roland in a wood that she recognized as Saxon. She saw the attack on him that began as seduction. She knew the face of the creature once it was dead. Yes—yes, that was the old enemy’s servant. And Roland had killed it.
The face of the one who had called up the image, she could just barely see. It seemed to be—not Turpin’s. She was glad of that, but not so glad of what it seemed to be. The king’s?
It was very like his, but younger. The face of a young man, hardly more than a boy. Shadow lay heavy on him.
There, she thought in a kind of sorrow, but in relief, too, that she had not misjudged so very badly after all. Turpin and the king, she would wager, were no part of this. Someone else, someone she barely knew, was the enemy’s victim. The enemy himself she could not see, but she had found the way to him.
She bowed to the chalice, wrapped it in its silken shroud and laid it reverently in the chest. She was gone from the tent before Turpin returned to it. No need to speak to him, or to bring him into matters of which he was better left innocent. It was enough that his treasure should have opened the path to the enemy.
The ways of the gods were strange, their humor incalculable. Sarissa saluted it as she went hunting the king’s eldest son.
He was easy to find. The last she knew, in Paderborn, he had been a rather fiercely solitary creature; apart from a few servants, he had made his way alone, and seemed content in it.
That had changed. There was a crowd about him now. Most were lesser lords and their attendants, but there were a few men of greater power as well. He held court with a kind of shy triumph, as if it were a distinction lately earned and never truly expected.
Their bond was hate. In most of them indeed it was not so strong. It was mere envy or rankling dislike. But in Pepin it was the pure metal.
Here was the source of the rumors against Roland. But she was not, just then, seeking that. She hunted for another thing, an older, darker, far stronger thing.
As she hovered on the edges of Pepin’s newfound court, veiled in anonymity, Tarik’s supple cat-form wove about her ankles. The sound that came out of him was not a purr, though it might have seemed so to ears less keen. It was a growl.
She looked where he wished her to look. Priests and monks were common enough near princes. These two in drab robes seemed odd in that flamboyant company. Odder yet was their pallor, and the way they moved and stood, shifting from wooden stiffness to an eerily supple sway.
Three serpents, the old enemy had had. Three servants of the Prince of Darkness, given to him to work his will. One was dead b
y Roland’s doing. These two yet lived.
There was another behind them. Sarissa’s breath caught. An ordinary man, a man of no visible distinction: small, pale, thin. A priest of the clerkly sort, not young if not terribly old. He had a cold wise face and long eyes under heavy lids. All his beauty, all his glory, were burned to ashes.
But he had taken this semblance to himself, accepted it, found the power in it—to seem so harmless, to invite men’s trust. Now that she had seen him, she knew him, oh, very well indeed. She saw what he had done, how he had chosen this one of the king’s children, the crooked one, the one who was vulnerable, and won him with ease that was like contempt.
And she, fool that she was, had never recognized him. She had let herself be blinded by a pair of yellow eyes. She had thought she knew the enemy in the face of his descendant. She had never looked for the old serpent himself.
The war had begun far sooner, and far more subtly than she had looked for, but there was no doubt of it. It stood before her in the Frankish prince’s shadow, wearing the face of a priestly counselor.
Tarik’s growl was the perfect measure of her thoughts. Had she been younger or more foolish, she would have essayed an attack, however minute her chances of succeeding. But she was too wise and too cold of heart. Even with that, it was all she could do to turn away from the enemy, to efface herself, to slip away.
CHAPTER 24
Roland had lived ten days in paradise. Now, for his sins, he languished in hell.
The Companions had drawn in about him. His own men, those who had ridden and fought with him, seemed determined to ignore the tales and rumors. But they were only a few in a large army, and a siege gave men ample compass for idle talk.
Roland had begun to think that he could easily and all too simply run mad. That of course was what they wanted—whoever they were who had turned the army against him. Therefore he clung to sanity, pretended a calm he did not feel, and performed his duty as he could, and when he could, just as he always had.
Always as he went about the king’s business, there were eyes on him, stares, whispers. He did his best to ignore them. But one morning a handful of days after he returned from Agua Caliente, he felt so fierce a burning of eyes that he started and spun.
It was not Ganelon or one of the demons who served him. It was a nun in a dark habit. And the fire in her glance was not hate. Not in the slightest. It was fascination.
He remembered her. She was one of the two who had come with Sarissa from Chelles. The younger one, who had been so discontented with her lot. She seemed even more so now. Her round pretty face was pinched and sour. Her flax-flower eyes were narrow.
He had smiled at her. She had taken it too much to heart. Then she had gone off among the women, and he had forgotten her.
He did not smile now. Nor did he speak. He went on his way, as incourteous as that might have been. It would have been worse if he had acknowledged her, he told himself. With what was being said of him now, his attention could only harm her.
He forgot her again once she was out of sight. The long day dragged on. He went early to his tent, looking for rest and a little solitude: Olivier was dining with the king, and the servants had been dismissed.
He undressed in the dim closeness of the tent. The sun had set, but it was still light without. The lamp’s glow was wan, the scent of its oil almost overpowering. He banished it with a breath of wind from a snowfield far away. The chill of it made him shiver, but it was a shiver of pleasure.
Unwise, maybe, if anyone could have seen him raising magic—now of all times. But he was alone. On small and wicked impulse, he set the wind to swirling slowly, cooling that place, filling it with the scent of snow.
Tarik appeared on Olivier’s cot, stepping neatly out of air. He was purring. When Roland lay on his own cot, the puca leaped across, landing with astonishing weight on Roland’s middle. He curled there, a warm furred presence in the wonderful, blessed cold.
Roland woke from the first proper sleep in days. The wind was still circling, the tent’s air chill. Tarik was gone. Olivier must have come back: a shadow moved across the light.
It was a smaller shadow than Olivier could have made except at high noon. Nor would Olivier have crept in beside him, pressing soft breasts against him, nibbling and licking and kissing him.
He recoiled. Sarissa was never as small or as soft or as importunate as this. Thick fair hair trailed across the coverlet where he had been lying. The plump pink-and-white body lay astonished, dimpled rump uppermost.
“Olivier is not here,” Roland said: the first thing he could think of to say, and foolish in the extreme; of course she would know that.
“I don’t want Olivier,” the woman said—a very young woman, and petulant, glaring at him through the curtain of her hair.
By that glare he knew her. His stomach clenched. This was the nun of Chelles. Sister—Emma? Rotsvit? Rotruda. He could not see her habit at all, nor any other garment, either. He snatched up a cloak, one of Olivier’s, and dropped it over her.
She curled in it like a sulky kitten. “This is magic, isn’t it? It’s cold in here!”
He did not answer. He pulled on shirt and drawers, tunic and hose, and boots for riding. He ran shaking fingers through his hair, making what order he could. He took up the bundle that was the nun from Chelles.
She wriggled out of the cloak and wrapped herself about him, arms locked round his neck. “If you take me out,” she said, “I shall scream. And tell them you lured me here with magic and took me by force. And—”
He pried her loose and set her sharply on her feet. He did not look at the ripe young body. He covered it again, more tightly this time, with Olivier’s cloak. “What do you want from me?” he demanded.
She straightened, shaking her spun-gold hair out of her face. She was quite lovely in her disheveled way; and she knew it. She let the cloak slip to bare the tip of a rose-pink breast. “Rescue me,” she said. “Save me from life in a tomb.”
His brows rose in pure astonishment. “You come to me for that?”
“Who else?” she shot back. “The stories are true, aren’t they? I saw you once. You were playing with the flames in the king’s campfire. Do you always do that when you’re bored?”
Roland started, and flushed.
She seized on that. She was not the silly fool she had seemed, at all. “Free me,” she said. “Turn me into a bird. I should like to be an eagle. Can you make me an eagle?”
“I can’t do that,” he said flatly.
“Why won’t you?”
“I can’t,” he said.
“Of course you can! Sister Beatrice says you can be a stag, a wolf, a hawk—”
“I can’t turn you into anything,” he said. “I don’t have the power.”
“So,” she said, sharp with temper. “Magic me away instead. You can do that. All sorcerers can.”
“And what do you know of sorcerers?”
“Everything!”
She was astonishing. She was dangerous, with her lordly kin and her holy vows and her presence here.
His eyes narrowed. “Who sent you here?”
“No one,” she said.
“I don’t believe you.”
She stamped her foot in a passion of frustration. “No one sent me! I want to be free. If you won’t let me fly, then marry me. You can send me off to Brittany and forget me, except when you want to make sons. Just get me out of these chains!”
“Do you think,” he asked her, “that even if the Church would release you from your vows, your kin would let you marry me of all men? They’d sooner mate you to the Devil.”
“If the Devil is rich enough,” she said, “and has lands enough, and will repay my dowry to the Church and dower my sister in my place, who is the most mealy-mouthed little saint you ever saw, my kin will happily match me with him.”
Roland struggled for calm. “Then you should find yourself a willing man, and persuade him.”
“If you say no,”
she said perfectly reasonably, “I will scream.”
“You will not,” said Roland.
“Magic me away, then,” she said, relentless. “No one will ever guess you did it.”
“No,” Roland said, flat and hard and well past any pretense of patience.
“Not even for my soul’s sake?”
“Your soul is best served by your staying in orders.”
Her eyes went perfectly wild. She flung herself toward his weapons. She had Durandal half drawn before he caught her, her small hands on that great hilt, and the blade shimmering in the lamplight.
He spun her about, away from the sword, falling in a tangle to the carpeted floor. She twisted beneath him, tearing at his drawers.
They tumbled up against a pair of booted feet. The voice that spoke above them was not Olivier’s. “Good evening,” said Sarissa.
Rotruda froze. Roland extricated himself from her softly clinging grip. He had never been more glad to be caught in flagrante.
“Sarissa,” he said. “Thank God. This woman—”
Rotruda began to sob convulsively. “He—he—he forced—he made me—he—”
“Stop that,” Sarissa said. Rotruda gaped at her. “Find your clothes and get out.”
“He tried to force me!”
“That man,” said Sarissa with acid sweetness, “is no more capable of forcing a woman than a holy angel. Now go, before I lay a curse on you.”
“You can’t do that!”
“I can turn you into a toad,” Sarissa said. “Go!”
Rotruda’s eyes sharpened. “Can you turn me into an eagle?”
“Not in this lifetime,” said Sarissa. “Will you go, or will you not?”
“I won’t,” Rotruda said. “I want to be free. I’ll fly if I can. Or crawl. Or you can magic me away.”
“Or?”
“Or I’ll tell everybody you’re even more of a witch than he is.”
