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

by Leslie Barringer

  "Raoul of Ger is a fool after all," said Joris between his teeth. "Who but a fool would bid his men wear surcoats of that colour in clear summer weather – or indeed in any weather, on such an errand as theirs?"

  Hard on his scorn came a discomfort; what if he had been seen, and in his turn were meant to see that twinkle of buttercup hue against the green of the pines? But while the outlaw observed him the rider never turned his head to glance northward into the hills; it seemed pure chance that he should cross the track of Joris less than half a mile in his rear. With pine boughs Madoc and another had effaced the crowded hoof marks from the dusty track; and the distant horseman was so unhurried it seemed an outlaw's shame not to send a man or two back to stalk and shoot him.

  But as Joris watched, a second horseman, similarly coated, broke from toward Capel Conan and galloped to meet the first. The yellow specks made one for a long moment, then parted – each riding now his hardest; and Joris felt the breeze from the south play coolly on his scarred face, while over the green pine masses beyond the travelling riders came the first shouldering shapes of a mass of cloud.

  "Rain before morning," said Joris, sniffing the air with relish; and he steered a craftily chosen course into the trackless central wastes, aiming for certain high and hidden grassland where ponies would find food and water.

  The Conan beck must be crossed again where it ran from the east as though to burrow into Dondonoy; and under a slowly clouding sky Joris rode into the shadow of the mountain. Southward for a couple of hours the wider views were hidden, but when he gained a low spur of the great massif, and turned to looked back toward Alanol, he cursed at length and with precision.

  In a rough line from east to west, six heathery hilltops bore dainty plumes of northward-driven smoke under gray sky.

  For the first time since his early days of outlawry, so many years before, Joris knew a self-distrust that was not immediately overborne by habits of decision. Then he steadied himself with the thought of pursuers so scattered that they had not dared to attack him at the edge of the Forest of Honoy; and he turned his back upon Dondonoy and spent the remaining hours of daylight in driving northeastward toward the Forest of Nordanay.

  Dusk found him out of sight of any beacon flame, with thin rain beating up on a wind veering to southeast. His men were sullen and jumpy, and to light a fire was forbidden; but Joris called them about him and raised a jovial voice.

  "Mistake not chance for craft," he commanded. "Twice they have blundered upon us, but whom do you think they seek? Gaston de Volsberghe and others like him, although they may be willing enough to settle our score as well. Now, I mean to round Dondunor and work back toward Ververon across the naked moors. If any more wish to leave me, let them go now – on foot, for these ponies are mine."

  No one stirred or spoke until Joris reached for his meal bag. Later the drizzle abated, and the wind shifted again; by midnight it blew from the northeast, rustling loud in the heather.

  "Was I a fool at Pont-de-Foy?" Joris wondered sleepily. "No, this chase will tire the pursuers before it tires me. I have been down before, I shall be up again."

  He cuddled his long sword under his cloak, and smiled into the wind-filled dark; as well (he thought) question the wind's will as that of this fate that stalked the fells – this man for whom the world was made.

  Again the dawn was fine and clear; the wind sang chilly over the ridges and gave the foraging outlaws trouble in stalking a herd of red deer. But when they had slain seven and were feasting beside a tarn one man cried out and pointed eastward; over a sheltering brow came running the scout posted in that direction – and behind him, as though his trail, were plunging a score more of the deer, the antlers of five stags leading and the females streaming behind.

  "Who are they?" demanded Joris, getting to his feet.

  "There is no one I can see!" spluttered the man. "But the heather is fired for miles, and the fire spreading this way."

  Joris caught up a hunk of broiled venison, and stuffing himself as he strode, mounted the slope to stand at the top and stare at his enemies' work. The northeast hills were clouded with no ordinary cloud; weeks of drought were not to be remedied by one evening's drizzling rain. The white smoke shapes curled and checked and crept forward, sometimes stabbed with an unlikely looking tongue or two of orange flame. thinly along the striving wind came the first pleasant odours of burning; and as Joris watched, the moors began to yield their frightened creatures. Pewits shrilled and hurtled zigzagging westward; grouse raised a panicky shouting chatter as they broke overhead or burst from nearer cover; pleasant and wild duck joined in accidental formation; a raven croaked as though in distaste of such mixed company; and high in the blue sailed hawks and a buzzard, observant of the rout.

  Joris, no less observant, but seeking different knowledge, chewed calmly at his venison and saw that there was time to finish one meal and provide for several more. With bulging cheeks his men strung bows and slaughtered as they pleased; and every arrow used came back to its owner's quiver.

  "Behold, the beaters are beaten," he jested half an hour later, when all were mounted and away with plump game at their saddlebows. But actually he was disturbed; the heather fire was a gesture both savage and methodical, and no bold words to his men could much longer reassure them.

  Coolly he pondered taking Madoc and deserting the rest that night; for Joris carried logic of the sword to its honest and unheroic conclusion, believing that men banded together only when chances of shared gain outbalanced the hope of solitary plunder. Hence his word of the coffer to Madoc; Joris could barely fathom the feeling which brought the little hatchet-faced ruffian back with his simple news of the proclamation. Red Anne had commanded his own loyalty, but that was as it were a gamble of the flesh; her comradeship he valued, yet felt it thrown into her side of their gallant bargain.

  But at last he had roused two warlike provinces to question the value he set upon himself; he who had lived by dissension forgot the danger of challenging unity. And in the late afternoon of that day, with a dozen miles of moorland smoking far behind him, he led his followers up the flank of the great ridge that linked the two mountains – to see, at the head of his chosen gully, a dozen men in yellow coats who kindled yet another fire and impassively watched the outlaws below them.

  Shadows were gray on the eastward grit and blue on the westward limestone. The men-at-arms moved clustering round a boulder, tugging and straining and slipping, with a rapid twinkle of steel. Joris swung his pony about and crashed off through deep heather; down the gully snored the boulder, tearing heather out of the peat, snapping hawthorns amid the rocks, scoring a lane in the dense bracken before it came to a stop. Outlaws yelled and reined aside, a few escaping by yards only; then they were out of the gully and fleeing behind the fleeing Joris along the difficult slope.

  The leader still could smile at himself for naming their enemies cowards; but one bully among his men was already losing nerve and crying out nonsense. Swift and adroit to rape and slay, he proclaimed that this rolling of rocks was unfair, and upbraided Joris for guiding them where such hellish practice was possible.

  Yet in the last dusk, when the ponies began to fail, and white coats sallied from a pine wood to bar their stumbling advance, this same bully retrieved his courage in face of the weapons he knew. Joris saw him ringed around and fighting upon his knees; it was Joris himself who failed that time, for he had spared his own beast and now was well rewarded. His charge carried him through the line of mingled horse and foot; and man, and two or three more he wounded. Another cried out his name, and Joris turned face to the nearest upward slope and flogged his mount with the flat of his sword, leaving the wreck of his company to fight it out in the heather. Ahead was open country; behind should be Madoc, but Madoc was not there. No one at all was there. Strange how it happened! After eighteen years, to be alone again.

  Something plucked at his attention – something he knew but did not wish to acknowledge – Madoc's voice t
hat squealed a claim that he, Madoc, was Joris of the Rock.

  "Daft comrade," said Joris kindly. "Well, I am through them and safe for a time – which is what he wanted. So Ivo saved Red Anne. It is strange, this itch for sacrifice. Now, where to sleep at the end of this tiresome day?"

  That question was more or less answered by the pony between his thighs; for the creature suddenly grunted and staggered and fell dead amid bents and field rush.

  Joris cursed its awkward manner, and fumbled for cloak and meal and ducks. Then he trudged back and forth awhile and finally found a gorse-screened hollow; and there he watched distant ribbons of fire, and presently slept as soundly as Dondunor itself/

  It was strange to wake in the morning with none to do his bidding any more, and stranger to see the raven that flapped up from the dead pony to see if fresher fare were ready. Joris picked up his bow and strung it, sending a shaft most sweetly through the ominous creature's gizzard. A helm cloud banded on Dondunor, but the rest of the heaven seemed clear; Joris sampled raw duck, and drank, and washed his face in a pool; and since he was suddenly lonely he addressed a remark to the mountain.

  "Hey, Tooth of the North," he said, "I will live awhile in your caves. You at least will not betray me to the ax of Ger."

  As though the monstrous crags had heard, the flat under side of the cloud rippled, and drove downhill long shreds and streamers that linked and pressed toward him.

  "Thanks, my black-browed friend!" cried Joris – and turned, and stiffened where he sat, for far beneath him were little groups of white or yellow coats, that thinned into long single lines and crept across hill and hollow and along the edge and foot of precipitous crags.

  "They are more deadly seen like this than at the point of one's own sword," he told himself. "But certainly they mean to clear the country. I wonder, do they think the Rock is north of Varne?"

  He was momentarily sick for the sight of the wind-bitten limestone crag, for the drift and blur of his camp smoke in the depths of the winding ravine; but he checked the thought grimly.

  "Nay, that is past now, and only Anne and I had ever the fullness of it. Well, it is time to see the other side of the mountain."

  Moving with caution and skill, he neared his old haunts at noon; and as he lay in the heather clumps five hundred yards above the highest cave, he saw horses tethered amid the hawthorns and a slim dark-haired young man in half armour who knelt with a bowl in one hand and seemed to be cleansing his teeth.

  "Oh, dainty chevalier," said Joris, "I would gladly beat them down your gullet. If only you were alone I should try. But having arrived thus far, I mean to go on. As for you old Tooth of the North, you are too big to knock down anyone's throat but God's. Now I wonder – nay, I have mocked at God in my prosperity, and will not whine to Him in danger. Two or three days will see me out of this."

  * * * *

  But two or three weeks passed, or perhaps more – Joris did not know how many. Incidents ran together, gleamed sharply and faded again, when he tried to assemble them in any kind of order. From the time when he slew a boarhound by a tarn to the time when the little man in brown came on him in the birch wood he had lived in constant peril. There had been many welcome darknesses, but one long darkness was a faint, for he had slipped as he climbed down a crag and come to sprawling in dense alders that had broken his twenty-foot fall and saved his life. Again there had been fire – this time close to him, with smoke that choked and stung. Once he had crawled across ash and blackened roots and soil still hot from burning; then he had hidden for hours in one place, with leisure to examine the sable and gray and silver wreck that had been a clump of heather. But its roots, he noticed, were of healthy wood, cream and orange up to the peaty surface; in a year or two the plant would sprout as though there were no Joris and no Count of Ger to send ten thousand swords in quest of him across the desolate hills.

  Then there was dreadful baying of dogs and a shivering hour in a stream; once the outlaw crouched beneath an overhang of clay and hawthorn roots while a mastiff snuffled and sneezed a yard above him. And there were chilled or sweating moments in a land of thin orchards and little limestone farmsteads – farmsteads with roofed towers and loopholed gateways, with curs rattling uneasy chains and poultry rousing a comfortable clack and chuckle that searched the belly of a famished hunted man.

  Then the birches, silver and gray beneath their whispering green, and the mossed roots before your nose when you tried to rise and could not. And last of all the little man in brown woolen tunic and hose peering down with a face somehow familiar; but it was too much trouble to remember.

  "Jesu!" the little man growled. "Joris, do you not know me? I am Flar, the smith from Alanol, whom once you saved in the snow. Listen! Lie here till dusk and I will come to tend you. There is a loft where you shall hide – what? A thousand gold … be damned to that! I will fetch wine and a snack of cold porridge as soon as I am able. And I will bring my dog that he shall know you. I am the blacksmith now, in the village of Gomblay yonder. Be sure by midnight you shall lie in safety."

  Safety! It smelled of tar and straw and rotting wood, the safety provided by Flar at the edge of the village called Gomblay. The loft had a shuttered window, but that Joris kept close; knotholes in its wood, cracks in the hard mud walls and the "owl's postern" beneath the thatch, gave ragged and partial light upon Flar's corn sacks and a few old broken barrels and boxes. Below was Flar's cowshed, empty now; the floor of the loft had a great trap door for entry, but Flar kept the ladder in his forge. Also, immediately above the cowshed door was a smaller uncovered opening, through which Joris could peer down on anyone standing in the doorway, but this aperture he generally shrouded with sacking left over from his rough bed.

  And there he lived for nearly a month, while his face and shoulder healed and his strength came slowly back to him. Quickly he learned which floor boards creaked, which spyhole gave completest observation in any direction and which way quicklime must be scattered to give some pause to the rats. By the end of his first week he knew the village of Gomblay – knew when the cattle were watered, when the miller's wife beat clothes on the bank of ht brawling stream, when the bailiff and the old priest would meet near the packhorse bridge, and when the sturdy hayward would slouch past with his long bow and short sword. And as party after party of men at arms and archers passed this way and that, or paused for clanging ministration of the smithy, Joris came to accept Flar's action as nothing very remarkable.

  At dawn, and sometimes after vespers as well, the smith would slip away from the door of the forge and unlock that of the cowshed adjoining it. then the foot of the ladder would rasp on the cobbles, and its head bump violently beneath the trap. Joris would raise the heavy door, and the two would whisper together, passing up and down the evidences of that close concealment. Flar would tell of the ceaseless search which still went on in the uplands – of three men taken here, and four men taken there, some being hung and some sent to the king's galleys.

  "The hills are black with the burning," said Flar. "The searchers are very weary now, but their leaders give them no rest. Yesterday – you saw? – I shod the horse of the Sieur du Veranger."

  "I saw him, the fat ox," growled Joris between his teeth. 'What was that outcry later by the Church?"

  "Ah, that is new vagabond law. There are three here who have sometime seen you, or say they have sometime seen you, besides myself, who say I have not. And Dodart the hayward and the bailiff's two constables must detain each wanderer on this road until one of these three has taken oath the fellow is not you. Yesterday's catch was a swart Jew who was flogged for bidding the bailiff admire his golden hair."

  "They spare no pains," breathed Joris; and Flar nodded and left him alone in the gloom and silence of the loft.

  "If I were in Flar's place," mused Joris, "I would have that thousand nobles. Yet what would the poor oaf do with it? He is only good for the work he has. But I – eh, wait for me snugly, you little chest of Saint Eloy's gold near the
road to Hautarroy!"

  CHAPTER XIV. THE SON OF JORIS OF THE ROCK

  Harvest time at Gomblay. The double daily procession to the cornfields – the men with scythe and sickle soon after dawn, the women and children a few hours later. Laughter and shouting, dying down to expectant silence; then the clang of the gleaning bell, and slow hours of peace in the empty village, until the loft was riddled with low sunlight and a second clang stayed what the first had begun. After that, the returning processions of tired folk, whose hearts were not so sluggish but that they would have missed a beat to know what cold blue eye observed them from the blacksmith's loft.

  An afternoon drowsier than any, when Joris sprawled on his sacking, watching the ducks manoeuvering in the pond beneath the windmill, he traced each sound he heard to its indubitable cause. Rats stirred, as ever, in thatch above and manger below him; gusts of cooing rose and subsided from the priest's pigeon cote, and now and again strong pinions whined and fluttered past the owl's postern. The gorge was fallen silent, for Flar had gone to the gleaning and taken with him his deaf assistant; and no creak from the mill came down the windless air. A cur trotted snarling up to a recumbent cat, adventured too close, and fled yowling toward the distant fields, whence came the faintly waxing, faintly waning of an active throng. Once a barefoot child padded up the street, bearing an empty jug to the stream; and young Dodart, the hayward, clumped solemnly from hiding, combing with brick-red fingers his dusty mop of hair.

  By the door of Flar's cowshed Dodart paused; there was a montoir there for use of those who patronized the forge and were too old or fat to climb unaided to saddle. Joris heard Dodart seat himself and sigh and spit with the resignation of one whose night's work lay before him. And presently the summer hush was lightly jarred by an approaching rhythm of clog and crutches.