by Judith Tarr
The gate had shut behind the last of the infidels. But there would be people within, surely, waiting to take them back again. Turpin, trapped in the middle of the fight, divided his mind between defending himself and making what headway he could toward the gate. It might at last be vulnerable; it might open if they feigned to be men of the city.
It was a small enough hope, but it was the best they had had since the siege began. Turpin needed Roland for it—or Sarissa. Someone who spoke the infidels’ tongue.
The fight was fierce. Many abandoned their horses, or were unhorsed, and grappled hand to hand. Roland kept the saddle by skill and by the flashing power of the sword; he was hard beset, the focus of the strongest attack. They must know that if they took him down, they dealt a stunning blow to the honor and the courage of the Franks.
He was singing as he fought. His sword sang the descant. Between them they wrought a deadly harmony.
Turpin’s borrowed sword notched on a Saracen helmet and broke. The spear was lost, he did not remember where. The way back was barred by struggling men. The way ahead was full of flashing steel. He was closer to the gate than he had been, but not enough. And he had only his fists to win his way there.
He saw the blade fall, and veered, whirling, but the fight was too close. He could not escape it.
A second blade caught it and beat it aside. Sarissa struck down the swordsman, swooped, wrenched the sword from his hand. She tossed it toward Turpin.
There was no time for thanks or courtesy, nor even for astonishment. By the fortune of battle, the way to the gate was almost open. Turpin sprang toward it.
A wall of flesh and steel closed in about him. The enemy were falling back, were retreating to the gate. “Break through!” Turpin roared. “Franks! Beat them down! Break into the city!”
They gathered as they could, but the Saracens had drawn back too quickly. They defended the gate with all the strength that was left to them. Those in the rear won their way to it and vanished within. Those just ahead of them followed, and so to the front, like water draining from a broken vessel.
Turpin flung the Franks against the last of them, driving for the gate, but as soon as the last enemy had leaped or fallen within, it slammed shut. Turpin threw himself at it. The gate rocked but held. Bars grated into place.
They had slain a fair number of Saracens, and there were wounded to take captive, but they had gained nothing of substance. They had not broken into Saragossa.
CHAPTER 26
“And what,” the king demanded, “did you hope to accomplish by that?”
Roland knelt as a penitent at Charles’ feet. He had come straight from the battle, covered with dust and blood, limping from a wound or two or three. Only his sword was clean. He had seen to that first of all, as a good swordsman should do.
He was profoundly and quite unreasonably happy. It was difficult to suppress the smile; he hoped he was not grinning too foolishly up at his king.
Charles cuffed him hard enough to make his head ring. “Have you completely lost your wits?”
“Sire,” Roland said, “I think I may have.”
“It’s a wise man who knows his own folly,” Charles said. His face was stern, but his eyes had begun to glint. “What were you doing? Getting yourself killed?”
“It would seem so, sire,” Roland said.
“You failed,” said Charles. He pulled Roland to his feet and examined him thoroughly. “And hardly a scratch on you. God loves you.”
“Or hates me,” Roland said, but without bitterness. “I gained little enough in the venture. Men are wounded. I—”
“There are no Frankish dead,” Charles said, “and a full score of Saracens fallen. Most of those, I’m told, fell at your hand.”
“Not all,” said Roland, “or even most.”
“Let men tell their tales,” Charles said. “You go wash. Rest. Come to your senses. I’ll speak with you again come morning.”
“He let you off light,” Olivier said as the servants finished filling the great copper basin that the king had sent. The water was barely warm, but that was not so ill, in this heat.
Roland let himself be stripped rather unceremoniously and tipped into the basin. Olivier, like the king, was not light-handed. He paid little heed to bruises and minor wounds. There were no greater ones. “And that’s the good fortune that attends madmen,” his battle-brother muttered. “Not that I mind a good fight, at all, but whatever possessed you to ride out there alone?”
“It was a good fight,” Roland said. “Wasn’t it?”
“It was splendid,” Olivier admitted, “once we all got into it. Did you honestly think you could win Saragossa all by yourself?”
“I’m supposed to be a champion,” Roland said. “But what have I done to prove it? What am I for, if not to do what I did?”
“To fight for the king, as the king commands,” said Olivier, who had never yet refused a fight for any cause.
By accident or intent, his fingers dug deep into the worst of the bruises, the one along Roland’s side. Ribs were cracked, Roland thought distantly. Maybe broken. The pain was exquisite.
It cleared his head a little. The dizzy exhilaration of battle had begun at last to fade. “I’m not sorry I did it,” he said.
“You probably should be,” said Olivier. “Though it seems it didn’t hurt you with the army. They’re starting to think you’re not the Devil’s firstborn—maybe only a greater minion.”
“That is a good thing,” Roland said, sliding down in the water. Once the wounds and scratches had stopped stinging, it was a delicious pleasure. He only needed—
No; he had separated himself from her. For her sake. That had not changed because he had done a mad thing, a thing that Franks could understand.
“So,” said Ganelon. “So, indeed.”
Pepin had been deep in study of a language so ancient that its name was forgotten in this age of the world, when a clamor drew him blinking and stumbling out of the old man’s tent. Men were running, shouting. There was fighting by the city’s walls. At first he thought his father had broken the siege at last, but this was a skirmish only.
He had but to follow the fierce fixity of Ganelon’s stare to find the center of it. Roland. Of course. Who else would, as Pepin learned a little after, have ridden alone against the whole of that strongly guarded city?
Ganelon watched every moment of that battle with eyes as rigidly intent as a hawk’s on its prey.
“Master,” Pepin said when it was over, when Roland had been led away and they had gone inside the tent again, “did you make him do it?”
Ganelon spread a clean sheet of parchment for one of the king’s endless, niggling letters, and took up a freshly trimmed pen. Pepin held his breath. An answer would come, or it would not. He could never be certain which it would be.
This time Ganelon chose to speak. “He did nothing against his will.”
“What did he do, then?”
Ganelon, it seemed, was in a mood to suffer questions, though his replies were never direct. “He proved that I have been blind and a fool.”
Pepin widened his eyes. “You, master? You would never—”
“Do not flatter me,” Ganelon said, soft and cold. “I am not a king, to be open to such blandishments. I cast my vision elsewhere, and reckoned myself clever. And there was he, full before me, with that of all swords in his hand, and all the tales that have been told of him. Merlin’s get. Merlin’s. And I dismissed him. He has power, boy. Be sure of it. He was able to deceive me.”
That, his tone said, was a very rare thing. He was not angry. If anything, he was amused.
Pepin’s heart was sinking fast. This was his enemy. Not Ganelon’s. Yet Ganelon was claiming Roland for his own.
“Betrayal begotten of betrayal,” Ganelon murmured. “Even the face—such was that other, the child of my spirit, when he was young.” He rounded on Pepin, so swift that Pepin gasped. “The basin! Fetch it. I need your eyes.”
Pepin’s feet dragged, but not too much. He did not dare defy the master. He knew what he would be asked to do. Only his heart could resist it. His eyes had to see what they were commanded to see.
“Borel,” Ganelon sighed. “He slew Borel. Of course. Oh, I was a fool! So much power, so skillfully warded—he is a true child of his forefather.”
“Will you kill him?” Pepin asked.
Ganelon’s glance was pure contempt.
But he is mine! Pepin wanted to cry. He bit his tongue till it bled.
Ganelon had forgotten him. The two silent servants were there, though a moment ago they had not been. “Watch the hawk’s child,” Ganelon commanded them. “Do not harm him; above all do not let him discover your presence.”
They bowed low and went to do his bidding. If any fear touched them, any memory of their brother’s death, they showed no sign of it.
Ganelon seemed darkly pleased, but restless, too. He paced the confines of the tent, shaken for once out of his stillness. “This is a sign,” he said. “The time is coming. The champion, the sword . . . how blind I was! How complacent. How easily duped by a child’s magic.”
Pepin set his lips together and kept silent.
But Ganelon did not spare him for that. “You did badly to incite the army against him—but it will serve us well enough. They fear him already. In time, when I have his soul in my hand, they will destroy him.”
“I did as I saw fit,” Pepin said stiffly. Outrage was his refuge against the other thing, the shock that Ganelon had seen everything that he did, and known its intent.
Ganelon’s dark eyes pierced him through. “You are young. Your judgment is weak. For that I suffer your folly.”
“Do you remember, my master,” Pepin said through clenched teeth, “that my father is king here.”
Ganelon bowed with deepest irony. “My lord prince, I do not ever forget it.”
Roland had not meant to sleep. Once he was bathed and dressed in a clean tunic, he submitted to Olivier’s strong arm, and lay on his cot. Olivier refused to go away until he slept. He shut his eyes and feigned the flutter of a snore.
When he opened his eyes again, the light in the tent had shifted. The lamps were lit. The walls were dark. Sarissa sat on her heels beside the cot, still as a stone image.
Roland’s whole heart and soul yearned to surge across the space between them and clasp her in his arms. Such sense as he had kept him where he was, lying on his side, drinking in the sight of her. In a moment he must be cold; he must consider her honor. He must send her away. But not quite yet.
She stirred and roused as if from a dream. All at once she was there, the whole of her, focused on him with a fierce, almost angry intensity. “What you did,” she said, “was the most profoundly foolish—”
“It was very satisfying,” Roland said.
“You’re mad.”
“Everyone’s saying that.” He stretched, wincing as his body remembered all its bruises. “I did one thing well. I gave the army a reprieve from boredom.”
“It won’t matter in the end,” she said.
He sat up so abruptly his head spun. “You don’t care,” he said. “Do you? You don’t care if we win or lose this war.”
She did not answer him, but she did not deny the accusation, either.
Anger gusted through him. It was no more reasonable than the impulse that had taken him to the walls. It came from the same place inside him. “For a year,” he said, as low and level as he could trust his voice to be, “I have carried your sword. I have fought precious few battles with it. I have seen this war—which you helped to instigate—dribble away into nothing. There has been no call for a champion. Why, then? Why trouble at all?”
She did not answer that, either. Somehow he had not expected her to.
“I was never meant to fight for Spain,” he said. “Was I? This is something else. I’m meant for another purpose.”
Her eyes lowered to her hands. They were quiet on her thighs, her body at ease. But he could feel the tension in her.
“Is there another war?” he asked. “Do you have an enemy? Or have you rejected me because I’m not my king?”
Nothing. Roland was the silent one, the one who spoke only when he must. It was strange to be battering at her with words, but meeting only that wall of stillness. She was as recalcitrant as Saragossa.
Roland hissed in frustration. He would never be so rude as to dismiss a lady, but there was nothing to prevent him from dismissing himself. He left her there without a word, rose and dressed and went out, it little mattered where.
The king was still at dinner. There were dancers tonight, and a troupe of jugglers from Francia—nothing Spanish, nothing Saracen, all pure Frankish, as if to put out of his mind all memory of this intractable country. Roland found a place that was none too conspicuous, found wine, bread, roast meat and pungent cheese.
The men near him were either asleep or oblivious. There was an odd comfort in that, in being unknown for once. This must be what it was to be a plain fighting man of the Franks. It was pleasant, and somewhat disconcerting.
Roland was hungry—starving. He ate till he was sated, washing it down with more wine than he was used to. He could sleep here, he thought. No one would mind, or much notice. By morning surely she would be gone from his tent.
He still loved her. He wanted her—oh, terribly. But he could not endure that silence. Whatever she wanted of him, she should trust him enough to speak.
That was it, he thought. Trust. She did not trust anyone, not even a man she professed to love.
That was her sorrow. He would not make it his own.
CHAPTER 27
Sarissa was all too well aware of Roland’s anger and frustration. Still she held her tongue, though it caught at her heart to do it. He was a child. He did not know what she knew, nor was he ready to know it.
There were greater things afoot than he could understand. She could feel it in the earth and in the spirits of the men who slept on it. The enemy was awake and beginning to move.
Deep in the night, she sent a messenger. It was not Tarik. Tarik disapproved strongly of her choices. She sent a lesser creature, a spirit of air, swift and, for its kind, diligent. It swore a great oath to convey her message exactly, in the very voice in which she spoke it.
In the morning the king’s army woke differently. The skirmish had given them hope again, but the return to the drudgery of siege struck them the harder for the respite. Their mood was dark and turning ugly.
Charles’ council was a mirror of his army. “We are not going to break into Saragossa,” one said for them all. “Such bravado as we saw yesterday may delight the men, but it gains nothing. Those walls will not fall for aught that we can do.”
“We may bring them down in time,” said the man beside him. “But Spain is set against us. There is no hope of a clear victory. Shall we abandon Italy and Francia and the Saxon lands to devote ourselves to this conquest? Can we, sire?”
“You advise that I retreat?” Charles asked mildly.
Around the circle, faces blanched. Charles was smiling, but it was not a comfortable smile. Not at all.
They were prudent men, but they were not cowards. “Yes,” said the chief of them, “though I would not call it retreat. I would call it a return to lands where we are welcome, and abandonment of allies who abandoned us. We came in good faith. Let us depart in the same spirit.”
“Retreat,” Charles said.
“Then we stay,” said Turpin in the same mild tone as the king. “We shorten our rations. We drive the engines night and day. We break Saragossa. However long it takes. Whatever it costs us.”
“Don’t mock me,” said Charles. “I can see what’s in front of my face. There are no good choices here. We needed the Spaniards to succeed. They all deserted us. With even the Governor of Gerona and Barcelona gone over to the enemy, we’re alone in hostile country. If we persist, we’ll be fighting armies in back of us as well as in the city.”
“Then we’ll withdraw?” asked a lordly prelate.
“In good order,” Charles said, “and at our leisure.”
Sarissa, listening on the edges, marked the sigh of relief that ran through the circle. It spread, passed from man to man, till the army itself seemed to stretch and sigh and stand a little straighter.
Good soldiers knew when to withdraw as well as when to advance. They had all seen what had taken the council some while to admit. Once Al-Arabi had gone to the enemy, the war was lost.
And that, she thought, made Roland’s gesture even more pointed. He had tried to forge a victory in the only way left. The enemy had refused the challenge.
The Franks had hated Spain before. Now they despised it.
She would wager that Roland had known what would come of his recklessness. Roland was only a fool as far as it suited him.
“You forced my hand,” Charles said.
Roland was alone with the king. There were guards in plenty, attendants in multitudes, but they were on the river’s bank. Charles had breasted the current to an islet, a bit of sandy outcropping that sustained a twisted fragment of tree. He reclined there, a cloth that he had brought wrapped about his head.
Roland, who had had no such foresight, perched on a corner of the king’s cloth, knees clasped to chest. For no good reason, he remembered what Sarissa had said of him when he sat so. A bogle on a hearth.
The sun was as hot as fire, beating down on his back and shoulders. Charles’ fair skin was heavily freckled from days and weeks of it. He lay at ease on his back, hands clasped behind his head, but his words went straight to the heart. “You made me resolve this war.”
“Sire—” said Roland.
Charles cut him off. “No excuses. Only tell me why.”
“Because it was necessary.”
“You are entitled to judge that?”
“Am I not your champion?”
“At my pleasure,” the king said.
