"My regrets to my lord Duke," said the Count sternly, "but I cannot ride with him to-day."
"Name of God!" growled the Sieur Gaston, stepping forward to tower above the startled boy. "Ger, what is this lad's name?"
"Juhel de Ath," was the calm reply; Count Raoul's strange eyes were very much aware of the Volsberghe's face, but the Volsberghe regarded Juhel only.
"Boy, had you ever a sister named – rot me, what was her name? – Tiphaine?"
"No sister, my lord, but a c-cousin," stammered Juhel, crimson and aghast.
"I can believe it," boomed Gaston. "Ger, you were mightily fooled just now – and I more mightily still. Dietrich Halbern is no Franconian merchant. This boy's face has unlocked my memory – our fawning Dietrich Halbern is Joris of the Rock!"
Count and page stared at the Sieur Gaston. Juhel turned sick with mingled surprise and gage, but clenched his fists and stood upright to receive rapid command.
"Run boy, to my lord Archbishop's officer of the gate, and ask if my men saw which way the Franconian went with his fur cap and his casket. You to the Franconian Envoy, Sieur Gaston; I to the Provost of Hautarroy to have the gates shut and the city combed."
"Well said," barked Gaston de Volsberghe. "And as for our other business, I think we are agreed."
"We are agreed," said Raoul of Ger; and Juhel heard no more, for he was already trotting away.
The few Franconaian merchants who admitted to knowing Dietrich Halbern swore that his eyes were brown and his hair of a gingery shade. No sergeant of pikeman saw the mock-Dietrich pass before the gates clanged fast; but no one bearing his likeness could be found beneath the spires of Hautarroy.
CHAPTER X. THE GLORY OF JORIS OF THE ROCK
"But how did you win into and out of the city?" asked Red Anne.
"I came on this Dietrich Halbern in the forest," explained Joris, "and we slew him and his three men – fools to travel so few together – and from his letters of credit and introduction I learned that he was new to Hautarroy. What then? His clothes fitted me; no one noticed the sewn gash beneath the left armpit of his good green gown. Gandulf rigged himself up as my servant. I tell you, Anne, I had a tickling between the shoulder blades in those thronged streets, yet it was sport of a rare kind. And although I did not know how the devil to go about a leather-merchant's business, I was lucky to strike acquaintance with a gentleman of the Duke Conrad's household. Conrad himself bought a belt, only two days before the quarrel at the tourney."
"And coming out?"
"We bribed a lout who drove a wagon; I lay among piled hides, and faugh! They stank to heaven. Gandulf rode by the carter; no one remembered him."
"But why should Gaston de Volsberghe recall a meeting so many years gone by? A good thing your hair was dyed."
"He has not often been thwarted, that one. A maid and a horse."
And Joris told Red Anne the tale of Tiphaine de Ath as he remembered it – even to the curse with which she fled from him.
The pair sat on the grass near the lip of the Rock; Anne listened in silence, gazing out into the quiet autumnal twilight. She herself seemed a sturdy Spirit of Autumn, with her flaming hair and rosy face and man's clothes – this time of deep brown beneath a faded purple cloak; for upon her were gathered more brightly the hues of heather and bracken and falling leaves that filled the forest and moors, and even the gray sheen of a distant tarn found counterparts in the steel disk of her cloak pin and the silver pommel of her broad dagger.
Since that night, eighteen months before, when Joris fled from the Singing Stones, their relationship had undergone no change; Red Anne had ignored the outlaw's midnight desertion, and once when Joris voiced a fighting man's impatient doubt she startled him by a mild acquiescence. Also she went less often to the devil-worshiping assemblies, and wandered more quite solitary in the hills.
"I must believe your antics touch and wake strange powers," he had growled, "but I will not believe you govern any but the least of them. Your deadliest force is in your voice and face and under your clothes' and then in your arrow shot, and last of all in drugs and spells and dancing. Is it not so?"
"It is so," Anne had answered deeply, turning to him the invitation of her strong round arms. "And you are not afraid of Rufin's last words to you? 'Prosper your witch, for I think she will ruin you soon.'"
"Not I," said Joris joyfully. "The dying rat bites hard until he stiffens. Who would not blast his slayer, if a threat could achieve it? At the least I am not ruined for nothing – hey?"
And now, as Red Anne listened to the tale of dead Tiphaine, her eyes grew dark with brooding and decision, so that Joris paused in his tale and looked a question.
" 'Your hag of hell betray you,'" she quoted very softly; then, rounding on the man, she smiled.
"Will you essay a bout with powers of darkness?" she demanded, "knowing that if you fail I have betrayed you, who yet would serve you very well? For now I would betray those powers to you – for us – then I shall have led you to your undoing. Will you risk a gruesome failure, and a very ugly death, and maybe an after-death of the kind that blackens the heart to imagine?"
Joris, stretched on his cloak in the dusk, took a stalk of red sorrel between his strong white teeth.
"What for?" he demanded curiously, half scenting a jest.
"I will tell you. You know Prince Thorismund holds his state at Hastain? On all Saints' Eve he comes to the Singing Stones."
"By the chimes of hell! Why? And how?"
"Jaded with hunting, and also, I take it, with his new and sobered way of life. At least I am told he is coming, secretly, maybe disguised, to look on at the rites and taste a new excitement."
"And how many with him?"
"I know not. Few, I should say; the thing would shake from his party some who now abide by him."
"Then, Anne, if this be betrayal send me more of it quickly."
"Now I have told you, what do you purpose to do?"
"You know. And Yaan, who threw spear at a ghost, shall not stay me – or think you he will?"
Red Anne was silent for a moment.
"I do not know,' she confessed at length. "I have not seen a profanation of the rites save when Lys stabbed one who mocked at her; and Yaan let that pass, since I asked it of him."
Joris held up his stalk of sorrel, bitten now in twain, and laughed abruptly and low.
"I will earn me a shrine in Saint Andreas at Hautarroy," he said. "Saint Joris saves the young prince from the Devil. There is red blood in the rip, for he took and gave shrewd clouts in the mellay. I knew he sulked at Hastain – it is said, because Conrad finds greater favour not only with old Rene, but also with Yolande de Volsberghe, Gaston's sister."
"You saw her?"
"Oh, ay. A likely wench enough, but over-thin. She looked me in the face; yet by the beard of Goliath of Gath my pulses quickened more when I met Brother Gaston."
It was Anne's turn to laugh.
"Eh, man," she muttered, "you are nearly as doomed a husband as little Raoul of Ger."
"Perhaps. His lady would have shivered had she known how many fingers itched for his windpipe there in the archbishop's palace."
" 'I warn you, strive not with Herluin,' said Lys. And Joris, I think she was right. Until you mist, pit not your luck against the luck of Raoul of Ger. He has served your turn in his time.:
"In faith he has," agreed Joris. "But I would have gutted him at Gramberge, and given his maid to my men. Yet I think my turn will come… 'Make me a duchess, you said. Ivo…"
he paused, and the woman smiled; this was the first time Joris had admitted memory of Ivo's halting prophecy.
"Ivo," Red Anne reminded him, "said only I could break you. His word added to the words of Lys and Rufin – again, are you not scared to sup and sleep beside one so charged with menace for you?"
Joris caught the strong name of her sunburned neck in one hand, and shook her gently to and fro.
"Come down and she," he growled. "Herodias, Diana,
jade, sorceress – come down and see."
* * * *
More than a week before All Saints' Day Red Anne rode to the northward. She was to meet Joris and his men at a fixed point in the moors between the Singing Stones and Dondonoy. The outlaw chieftain watched her go with a frosty smile on his lips, and turned to make his own arrangements for so late an autumn expedition.
"Maybe my last," he told himself. "Princeling, I think you are set on a journey stranger than you look for."
The band had grown again to eighty stout ruffians; this time he took them all, breasting half-risen Varne at his old crossing place near Pont-de-Foy. The weather was cold and misty; it needed all of three days to reach his trysting place.
There, in the heart of the sullen and desolate moors, his love came to him again, but not as he expected. She stumbled on foot through wet bracken in an hour of cloudy morning, while the dark screes behind the outlaw bivouac echoed the sharp cry of the grouse and magnified the snarl of a stream in the deep ravine below. Joris strode forward to meet her, and saw she was somehow stricken; her eyes encountered his indeed, but presently seemed staring through him at a thing she loathed and yet must look upon.
"What is amiss?" he barked. "Is Thorismund away? Where is your pony?"
"Thorismund?" she replied, in the flat voice of one half awakened from sleep. Why, no; all goes as you would have it in that affair."
"Then by the chimes of hell what ails you?"
"Ivo–" she wailed, in a manner very strange to Joris; then she pulled herself up, and brushed a mired hand over her forehead.
"Something to eat," she demanded brusquely; "then I will tell you. But now – something to eat."
And when she had eaten savagely, and drunken more than her wont, Joris drove Gandulf and Madoc away with a jerk of his head; and, alone with him in the lee of a grit crag, Anne twisted the string of her unbent bow between strong hands and told a halting tale in a hushed voice.
"I found him with a family of charcoal burners," she said. "still wearing his black tunic; but the rest of his gear he had changed. He looked at me as ever – as though I had fallen from heaven. And if I have, it is far as Lucifer's self…
"He pled to come with me again – fiends, how he pled! I told him you would wring his neck for those false tidings above Gramberge, and he begged at least to see me again on All Saints' Eve at the Stones. I told him that assembly was like to end in a fashion unusually grim, and he swore that if there was danger to me he must be there himself. I said no danger threatened me, and he laughed as the damned laugh, vowing the he feared you not if I were by. Lastly he wept – and came away with me. Ivo
"That night he slept in my arms – no, Joris, no! He might have been my son. He was my son between the dusk and the dawning. He seemed burned clean by suffering – not even a dirty little jest left in him. He was as strange and sweet as that young Herluin who was once his friend and now is Count of Ger. What am I that such boys trust and worship me?
"But Ivo, in the night, up in the heather – Ivo talked of a death in life, of visions of old merciless gods, of Christ more merciless than they. He talked of the stars, of the flight of birds, of wind song and tree blossom and of that ancient discord called 'Brisingamen.' I told him of Lys and her end, and of how she came once more among us. At what she had said he laughed, in a manner very weird to listen to. He tried to show me a mystery – a thing he had shaped in his heart alone in the hills and the forest. He claimed that Christ and God are at war with one another. That God created Christ and then grew old and afraid of Him. That Church and coven alike are nearer to God than Christ is. That Judas Iscariot was in truth a very godly man. But half of what he said I could not understand…
"And in the morning we met with Blanche and Sabelle of the coven, and heard their news of Thorismund. Blanche is a tavern wench in Hastain, and she will lead the prince to our assembly – the prince, and with him only Guy de Saulte, young brother to the duke."
Joris grunted approval, but said no word; and the witch went on.
"Thereafter Ivo and I – I see you marvel that I bore with him, since he betrayed us by Gramberge. But you know my anger does not last as even I would sometimes have it last; and, Joris, I have seen too many deeds or worth and villainy to blame men overmuch for anything they do. Besides – who passes from one way of life to another must always betray old comrades, if only by absence from them. Who am I to judge Ivo, I who play Judas to my coven?"
"It is not evil to betray evil," claimed the man; and then he laughed and caught up his own words. "Who but you, and myself, and my men behind there, would blame Ivo at all for the trick by which he broke us? Joris is evil, no doubt, and Yaan is evil incarnate; and the young prince is perched atop of a most glorious edifice of tyranny and greed and pride, which yields not to Yaan or Joris in the evil of its working. Say, Anne, then – where is good?"
"I do not know. At least I am not sure where it abides. I saw it two days since, as I am going to tell you. Ivo and I, the day being fair, held along the bank of Nordenne when we had better have taken to the hills. Several folk – farmers and foresters – saw us, and some knew me. far away we heard the Prior of Dor hunting; and in the mid-afternoon, when we had reached heather, a man hallooed from a hilltop behind us – and when we turned to look at him we saw he held leashed hounds and wound a horn to companions behind him. Whereat we made swiftly away, but when he was joined we saw the leashes slipped, and half a score of hounds – a whole relay – broke down into the gorge between, as it might have been there, and so."
Anne pointed and gestured, but Joris kept his gaze upon her tired face.
"Down they came, great hounds of chase, alaunts and mastiffs too; and away we went, Ivo running by the pony's head and plucking out the bow he carried. I had no bow, fool that I was. Joris, you have told me that twice men have chased you with hounds?"
"Yes, years gone by. Go on."
"Then you know – or if you do not know yourself, you may guess – how the terror grows as it grows in a dream. Someone must have told the prior that I who once escaped him was riding near; for a rout of horsemen crested the one rise as we fled over the next. Then it was up and down, up and down, athwart the silent ravines – who would have thought the prior hunted to east of the river that day? One dry bottom we crossed, and seemed to draw ahead, but after the next climb we dropped to ford a torrent and found the hounds gaining … Ivo!
"Across the angry beck was a rocky shelf, along whose edge we must flee to reach a transverse cleft in the high moor. Only fear kept the pony going, but Ivo seemed made of iron; as we plunged into the water he said something to me which I heard but did not understand. We dragged the pony through and I mounted; the sleuth dogs gave tongue on the slope behind, and the little beast bounded away as Ivo called out again.
" 'Forward, I follow fast,' he shouted, and I was round a corner, and on a returning curve beyond it, before I looked back. And when I thought to hear Ivo behind there was only a great baying. And a hound's body whirled downstream below me, with an arrow in its throat…
"Then I knew that Ivo had not followed at all, but was holding them at the crossing. And … Ivo!"
Until that moment Joris had never seen Red Anne in tears. The muscles of her face did not relax; but shining drops coursed down her cheeks and misted the pain in her eyes.
"I was afraid," she muttered. "More afraid than I have ever been. As I checked the pony I thought: If I go back then Ivo dies for nothing. So I drove the pony forward again, and could not forbear to look back.
"I saw, when the heather slope allowed, first three hounds still or kicking on the far bank, then another struggling in the water, then one that crawled and howled on the near side. Ivo had somehow crushed him with a stone. That made six dogs. Then – when I saw a rolling, thrashing heap that was Ivo and the four others, with Ivo's sword still feebly smiting and blood pouring free – for he must have aimed to cripple all rather than kill one…
"Then I brayed like a mule in a
nguish and horror, and beat the pony forward, and rode and rode till twilight – and no mound came after, so it seemed the main hunt was headed some other way. Nor horse nor hound nor man I saw, and my pony dropped between my knees, and I fell and jarred my body into a daze. But when I got up I found blood on the pony's pastern; Ivo had pricked it with an arrow before he turned on the bank. And then, too, I remember what Ivo said before he last called out. It was this: 'I will not come again to mock you, Anne, beloved!' He meant that he still loved me more than Lys did; and that I believe is true…
"So I travelled fasting all next day. And the Prior of Dor has lost ten dogs of value; and you have lost a pony. And Ivo's bones are stripped on the moor. And I am here – and by Mahound I know not who is the gainer."
"I for one," said Joris. "And you, when you have rested. Freely I forgive your Ivo; that was a very gallant finish. Take heart, Anne; there are great days to come."
Red Anne laid hand upon his arm, and he saw that he eyes were haunted.
"You do not understand," she said. "I am proved a coward, who was never a coward before."
"Pooh! Folly! I have fun away a score of times, and skulked and sweated, and laughed at it thereafter. Plague take it, Anne, the lad was paid again – for who stands to be torn to shreds without sufficient reason?"
"Ivo," muttered Red Anne, shutting her eyes; and without opening them she spoke again to Joris: "Yet was his sacrifice like no other that I have heard of."
"Still," Joris reminded her, "there is on my sword arm a scar…"
"No, Joris, it is not like. You fought very bravely that day – but with thought of earthly reward, did you not?"
Joris made an impatient movement, regretting his choice of example. Anne's eyes flew open, with tears still gemming lids and lashes; Anne's lips smiled a wise and rather dreary smile.
"You man for whom the world was made," she whispered, "you do not know what cowardice means, for you confound it with robber's caution. You do not know the bitter fog beyond the last dominion of striving gods."
"I do not," agreed Joris roundly. "But Herbrand and Osmund and many another of my men have died, as it were, for me, and do not haunt my memory; indeed when I think of them it seems they were good for very little else. See, Anne, both you and I were born to lead and to enjoy; what does it profit an omelette to mourn the broken eggs?"
Joris of the Rock [The Neustrian Cycle, Book II] (Forgotten Fantasy Library) Page 21
