Joris of the Rock [The Neustrian Cycle, Book II] (Forgotten Fantasy Library)

by Leslie Barringer

  Joris stood to his height, reading the threat in their eyes; Red Anne had once cried out, and these sprang up to defend her. Only Rufin among them could Joris count his own – but Rufin was unarmed, and already grinning aside at Lys whom he greatly admired.

  Anne turned and chuckled, showing the snake to her friends; weapons sank to earth, and laughter and words broke out around the cave mouth. Joris, to, summoned a laugh, and clipped his saviour around the body to kiss her in sight of all.

  Presently they were alone again, and then he was very thoughtful. Anne had been with him less than a month, and only the sorriest brutes of his following did not respond to her presence. She had dressed wounds and an injured limb or two, making her patients slaves for life; three of them, sitting about in the sunshine, had carved her a dozen skittles of bone with lopsided wooden balls to throw at them. There was scrambling to gather her arrows when she shot at the crude butts; and she knew half the men by name before her first week by the Rock was done. Her coming had buttressed the power of Joris, but not all his lover's pride could deaden the chieftain's instinct which told him that at Anne's word that power might also be sorely imperilled. And as though she read his mind, the woman made an end of her task and knelt beside her mate.

  "Joris, you are glum," she said. "Go in again and sleep."

  "Nay, I have slept enough," he replied, eased by her tone and her nearness. "But what should I have done had the viper waited a week?"

  For the time of Allhallows drew near, when Anne might be straying again; and reminder of her ungrudged liberty brought a faint unusual shyness to the witch's rosy face.

  "This time I stay with you," she promised – adding after a moment: "Unless you whip me forth because your men admire what here is yours alone."

  Joris caught at her hand and crushed it in his grip.

  "Gramercy, reptile," he growled to the dark dead shape in the dust.

  "Mother Eve will be angry to hear you thank her enemy," mocked Anne, tugging her hand away from him to nurse it.

  "Mother Eve and her daughters are little enough to me," affirmed Joris. "You are a daughter of Lilith, if ever there was one. Ay, and your Lys is another."

  "Your Rufin finds her one at least, although he might not say it so. Bid him take heed how he frets her; it is a dangerous slut in the sulks. She has pined for that strange lad Herluin who fled from the hold of Campscapel. She is most formidably chaste these days – ay, and when last we went to the Singing Stones she stuck steel in one of the covens who mocked her."

  A prospect of Rufin's early demise held no distaste for Joris, for the braggart tired him at times; but such an affair might lead to disastrous quarrelling. Winter beside the Rock was often a time of tension; fog-bound, sleet-bound, snow-bound, outlaw tempers grew short and outlaw weapons loose.

  "I will douse our Rufin's fire for a space," he promised. "I would not lose him yet – or you your sister in Lilith."

  "My little sister in Lilith … bah, Ivo should serve her turn," said Anne with the sudden brutality which sometimes darkened her beauty. "They are limp comrades now, the pair of them. Sometimes I wish…"

  "Wish what?"

  But Red Anne shook her head and would say no more.

  And limp comrades or no, Lys and Ivo were something of a problem during that cold season. Sometimes they quarrelled like cats; but unlike cats they came to heel at one lash of Red Anne's voice. Sometimes they were friendly, and then Joris felt a strain on their leashed hatred of himself. He had so long gauged the motives of his followers that it irked him a little to dwell in sight of those two comely heads whose thoughts eluded him; and only their joint devotion to Red Anne restrained him from gross experiment with girl and boy.

  Yet for the most part he lived in a contentment far exceeding any he had previously known; the tenuous golden thread of his lover that had held through so many dark and violent years, was now spun to a bright tapestry about him. Red Anne hallooed to her man across the frozen hills, knelt beside him above the stricken red deer, plunged in his wake through icy streams, and netted the stars in her unbound hair as she unmanned him with artful wild caresses. How these were learned he cared not; he gleaned from them a fury of joy that slew all other emotions.

  In the sports which filled the finer days Anne took her part with a skill that delighted him. When they made a snowman far up the ravine, she stood two hundred and fifty yards away and drove four arrows in succession into the white lumpish face and body; only Joris himself, and a dozen of his men, did better than that. Rolling great snowballs to the cliff edges to floor the men who raced and dodged beneath – flying on the rough game sledges down white steeps of the frozen hills – curling with flat stones, or swaying on crude bone skates across the dark ice of the lonely tarns – the witch who had ruled as a countess romped like a carefree boy. Sometimes after the evening meal, she sang to the whole throng; but oftener in the cave of Joris, she played to him and a few others, crooning strange airs against monotonous choruses hummed by Ivo and Lys. Also she worked mild magic for his diversion – making a puppet talk, and conjuring with knives and coins and kerchiefs; so that winter seemed half gone before Joris was aware.

  Then, on a still night about the time of Christmas, he drank more deeply than he intended, and overstepped restraint of his old curiosity.

  "Tell my fortune," he said, "if you cannot achieve clear vision of your own. The two must interlock; and my runes have served only thus far. Rufin, another log; and Gandulf, another wine skin. What do you say, Anne?"

  Red Anne set her drinking horn aside and looked levelly at him. Beneath that gaze he grew restive, aware that never before had he challenged her witchcraft in presence of others.

  "Do you really ask it of me?" she demanded curiously.

  "Joris was silent for a second or two; then he roughened his voice to efface that hesitation.

  "Ay, that I do," he replied. "A fortune not of the fairground sort."

  "The other is not easily done," rejoined the woman deeply.

  "But what I can I will achieve. Lys?"

  Lys shook her head, and it seemed to Joris that the cheeks of Lys grew paler in the lights of torch and pine logs.

  "Ivo, are you willing?"

  The boy nodded, blushing, and then stared into the fire.

  "But–" began Lys, and checked her words, for Anne turned sharply upon her.

  "Hold your craven tongue," she commanded. "The thing can but be tried again. Once more, Joris – you wish it?"

  Joris peered at her face and the faces of her companions; and again it was as though he were a dog, and they three cats who watched him. Resentment of mystery fretted him, and he grinned at the startled interest of his sprawling lieutenants. Adelgar was not there, but Gandulf and Madoc and Rufin sat awaiting what might befall.

  "Yes," he growled sharply; and Red Anne shrugged her shoulders.

  Then she lifted an iron spit and gathered the peats and logs to one bright central blaze. Facets of limestone gleamed through the murk, eyes red-rimmed with the stinging smoke shone in bronzed faces; at Anne's imperious gesture Ivo got to his feet, his shadow spreading and dwindling as he rounded the fire and sank to a sitting posture with back to the glow and face toward Red Anne. An expectant silence fell, and from the outer darkness drifted the faint noise of the stream and the thin clamour of song from the caves below.

  "A candle," said Red Anne to Joris, "and let the torches be quenched. Lys, will you hold the flame at least?"

  "As you please," replied the girl, her face a mask of indifference as she sidled behind her lady. Joris passed her the lighted candle, and folded his hands round his knees; when all was set he found he could see the features of Anne and Ivo in profile. Red witch and haggard boy sat cross-legged and close together but not quite opposite, so that Ivo's left knee lay on Anne's, while Lys crouched on her heels behind Anne's left shoulder, holding the flame out of Anne's sight but full in Ivo's face.

  "Joris, your sheathed sword hither," belled Anne. "Lay i
t beside me – so. Now silent and motionless all, whatosever betide us; a word or a cough may spoil the whole. Ivo, are you ready?"

  "Ready, my lady," croaked the lad.

  "Then look at me for a moment."

  Ivo shivered and looked; Red Anne twitched a hand to the strings of her tunic and swiftly laid bare the curve of her left shoulder.

  "Take my right hand in yours, and watch the flame," she bade him. "Set your left hand on my shoulder, and stop trembling, fool. Empty your soul of sadness, your mind of present knowledge, your heart and loins of desire. What do your hands feel now?"

  "Your flesh," muttered Ivo flatly.

  "Forget I am Red Anne. Forget you are Ivo. Forget the joy you had of me, the shame and tears I brought you, the first hour in the keep of Campscapel, the last hour in the forest. Forget the time and place and season…"

  Joris stirred and swallowed hard, but none paid heed; he was no longer master in his own cave. Suddenly quite sober, he bit on his new knowledge; Ivo, that glum-faced rat – the thing was flung in his face, so that before his lieutenants he must pretend he had known.

  Then Joris saw the youth's face, dead-white beneath wind burn and candle glow, with eyes whose pupils were unnaturally large and mouth that twitched with a queer repeated spasm. Anne made long stroking passes with her free arm/

  "What do your hands feel now?" she murmured at the end of silent minutes.

  "Nothing," came the reply, in a dull whisper.

  Anne's chin was shadowed from the fire by Ivo's body, but Joris saw a sparkle of sweat steal down the triangle of rosy brow between the masses of shining hair.

  "She looks like a fallen angel," he thought, and then: "I have loved her from head to heel and know not a tithe of her secret thoughts. I am only one of a daft procession … no, by the chimes of hell, she was right. Lorin she loved, and me she loves, and the rest were nothing, Ivo among them. It is my child she looks to bear."

  In each month since her coming to him Anne had one day pulled a faint particular grimace and Joris loved deeply enough to grieve awhile in her grief, although any sign of a child would soon enough have irked him. And now the fire of Anne was expended on craft that daunted him; fallen angel or no, she was grown to a deadly stranger.

  "What do you feel now?" she demanded a third time; and Ivo's answer was stronger, but toneless and slightly gasping as though with shortened breath.

  "A coming in the left hand, a going in the right."

  "Ay, and what do you see?"

  "Nothing. Black nothing that whirls to a standstill… Now it is still and very deep."

  "Is there a light in the blackness?"

  "No – yes – a star low down, and greenish blue. It grows. It is not a star, but a ball of luminous mist. It fills the darkness up."

  "Look in the mist for this cave," said Anne, and lifted her left hand to touch Ivo between the eyes with its extended thumb.

  "See!" she muttered fiercely; and then: "What do you see?"

  "I see the cave, and those therein, and my own body like a doll's. Round all the heads save yours and mine are cloudy trails of imagining, waving this way and that like drowned weeds in a stream. Some thoughts are plain, and some very dim. Your head is set in a sharp orange glow; sometimes it fades a little, and then you fan it up with a shiver of will. A thought breaks loose from the glow, and stabs round the cave like a comet, weaving a pattern of light in its going."

  "Ay. What thinks Lys?"

  "That this stress slays Ivo's body, unless you loose it soon, for Ivo loves you dearly and love impedes the vision."

  "What thinks Joris?"

  "The thought of Joris leaped sideways when he heard it was known. The backward-fading swirl holds Gandulf and Madoc his friends and all others here his foes. Now he bears on the runes that brought him to this pass, and quests the future with an anxious greed."

  "Ay. And Gandulf?"

  "Gandulf is cursing witchcraft. His thought blurs and writhes with shame, because since you began he has three times secretly signed the Cross."

  "And Madoc?"

  "Madoc pities Ivo, and things you truly a succubus born of–"

  "And Rufin?"

  "Rufin's mind also has leaped and twirled like a wounded weasel. But he bears stoutly on the thought that it would be good to bite the dainty neck of Lys. Also he is afraid; and he damns a louse in his left armpit."

  "So," and Anne groped at and caught up the sword beside her, drawing the hilt beneath her hand that clasped Ivo's.

  "Whose sword is this?" she asked quickly.

  "Joris of the Rock's."

  "Withdraw your sight from the present. What shall befall in a year's time?"

  Ivo's shape was silent for a moment, and Joris saw that Ivo's eyes had now a dreadful inward squint. At length the gray lips moved.

  "Many things … hidden turmoil in the realm … the king in – danger of sickness … lords in council, and a name on all their lips."

  "Whose name?"

  "Joris of the Rock's."

  "What shall befall Joris?"

  "The realm shall wait on his word: he holds great power in the moors; only you could break him, and you wish him never any harm, but where you move with him it is very dark."

  Lys nodded slowly behind the candle flame, so that the shadows fled and returned above her cheek bones and chin; her pale eyes glittered strangely, and only she seemed aloof from the moment's absorption.

  "Can you see beyond the darkness?"

  "Yes – yes – Joris laughing amain at the end of a great battle. Thousands of slain in the meadows, and the royal standard taken… Ay, and ten thousand men shall follow Joris. No, it is blurred and lost; but there will be a boy in the hills, the son of Joris of the Rock."

  Joris gasped and began an oath; Red Anne humped her shoulders a little and bent a blazing stare on her victim.

  "What of myself?" she breathed. "Myself apart from Joris? Is that son mine?"

  "I cannot see. I am bound and blinded by the mercy you once showed me. Ah – ah – a great pain severs us, and I see you pass into shadow. Shadow immense and dreadful, like nothing in the world. Your hair is quenched and lost to me; over the shadow stand three trees, very still among rocks against clear sky. No, they are not trees; they are– I dare not look. Turn me away or I perish."

  "Do I move beyond that shadow?" demanded Anne abruptly.

  "Ay, I see you again – spent and bloodless, but very happy."

  "Loose him," whispered Lys. "He is spent!"

  "Ivo," said Anne, paying no heed to her flame bearer, "what of yourself in a year from now?"

  "Nothing. I cannot see. There is uttermost blackness."

  "And of Lys?"

  "Blackness again; no, starlight, and foam of heaving waters. But – Lys too is not unhappy; no, it flashes away from me."

  "And – and–"

  Red Anne's voice grew hoarse; she was losing some grip of power, but still she drove on her way.

  "Ivo, cast your mind back to the slaying of Cound Lorin. How was that deed accomplished?"

  Ivo's face was contorted, and Ivo's body drooped, yet words began to crackle in his throat. Red Anne leaned forward to catch them, but behind her Lys snarled softly and blew out the flame of the candle.

  Ivo collapsed against Anne's outstretched arm. Bundling the limp figure roughly sideways, Anne turned on the girl and struck her full in the face with a clenched fist.

  "Bitch!" she belled in a fury. "Why have I borne so long with your accursed meddling!"

  Lys raised one hand to her smitten cheek but gestured calmly with the other at the foam on Ivo's lips.

  "Slay us both, then, she mocked, "and on to your sacred grove. If Joris has two friends here I have only one, and he dying."

  But Anne turned back to Ivo and took him in her arms calling him softly by name and chafing his thin body from pit of stomach to throat. Presently the boy stirred and spluttered; Anne whipped a kerchief from her bosom and wiped the foam away. Ivo came back into Ivo's eyes
, and, finding himself thus held, drooped lids and turned his face against Anne's shoulder' and at that the staring Joris got to his feet and spoke into the shadows.

  "Rufin, attend," he rasped. "If any word if this night's doings spreads beyond the seven of us, it will be yours, in wine or heedlessness or mischief. Let me hear a murmur or see a sign of betrayal and you are trusses and rolled from the Rock. Tell me you understand me!"

  "I understand you, Captain," responded jaunty Rufin. "But I shall not stand easily by to see harm done to the demoiselle, for it seems to me that she has ended a very beastly business."

  Lys shot a venomous glance at the speaker, and shrilled response to his chivalry.

  "Red-eyed hog of the forest, I give myself for my lady to cut in pieces before I take you for my champion!"

  "Lys goes unharmed," said Anne from the cave floor. "Joris, turn your men out – Ivo, go you with Lys – Lys, give him a cordial, the bittersweet and briony. And child, I did wrong to strike you, and you right to thwart me. and now, until morning, begone."

  Red Anne turned and threw herself flat on her cloak, with face buried against her forearms; and Lys, before she rose, bent forward and kissed the bowed resplendent head. Joris saw the cave emptied save for Anne and himself, and drew the felt and canvas door flap across its frame of wood. Then he turned to the prone and exhausted figure beside the fire.

  'Are you content?" came her deep voice, with an edge of something like scorn to its weight of weariness.

  "Yes," said Joris simply. "Even to know how greatly you pitied your Ivo. But I have tried you sorely; I shall ask such things no more. Yet some time I would see you rule beside the Singing Stones. And some time else, in this place or in a castle solar, I would see you nursing our son."

  Anne made a little sound between a laugh and a sigh, and presently Joris set the curtain open again to draw the smoke from the cave. Then he covered his love with blankets, and sat awhile beside her, listening to her quiet breathing as she lay flat and helpless in sleep. Once he touched a thick wide-flung rope of her hair; once he almost laughed aloud, foretasting the future half revealed to him. Then he shut and secured the door flap, and wrapped himself up to lie down by Red Anne, and in a while was dreaming of power and battle, and of a strange gnome who came to him in the hills and said, "I am the son of Diana and Joris of the Rock."