The hermit went to his knees, folding his hands for a benediction. Ruck dismounted, kneeling with the rest. Even Allegreto fell to the shelly bank, both hands pressing his herbal over his mouth. During a long prayer of thanksgiving for their successful crossing, Ruck took another count with his head bowed, considering each of the men-at-arms while repeating paternosters, deciding on the day's order of march. Once, his lowered gaze wandered to Princess Melanthe's litter: he saw the curtain pulled slightly back and her eyes upon him instead of closed in prayer.
The curtain dropped, hiding her. Ruck felt his body flush and harden with the chance of what her thoughts might be. She'd been looking at him, staring. He lost the sequence of the prayer, his "amen" coming too late and loud after the rest.
"Thou," Allegreto said imperiously from behind his smelling-apple. "Hermit! Hast thou heard tell of pestilence in this region?"
The man betrayed no sign of understanding. Ruck repeated the question more respectfully, in English, and got a negative shrug.
Allegreto wasn't satisfied. "The atmosphere is corrupted here. I feel it."
"We move onward," Ruck said, to forestall any enlargement on this unsettling topic. He gave orders, placing himself at the head of the cavalcade once more, the litter midway back and protected on both sides. With Allegreto's and Hawk's reins firmly in one hand, Ruck lifted his arm and shouted, "Avaunt!"
As they moved off the sandy shore and into the trees, Allegreto leaned forward, holding the rouncy's thick mane, keeping his bag of herbal protection pressed across his mouth and nose as he bumped along. "The recluse was bloodless, thinkest thee not?" he demanded through his bag. "He sickens."
"I saw aught of such," Ruck said in a deliberately disinterested tone.
"He sickens. He was ashen. By nightfall he is dead."
Ruck cast him a glance. "What is this? Thou art now a physician, whelp?"
"The miasma is infectious!" Allegreto insisted. He let go of the horse's mane and dug in his mantle, pulling out another bagged smelling-apple. He offered it to Ruck. "I have three. I've given my lady's grace the other."
Ruck lifted his brow in surprise. "Hast thou no need of it thyself?"
"Take it," Allegreto said. "I wish thee to have it, knight."
Ruck gave him a one-sided smile. "Nay. Keep it for thine own. The plague never touches me."
Allegreto crossed himself. "Say not so! Thou wilt call the wrath of God upon thee!"
"I speak only the truth," Ruck said mildly.
The youth changed hands, holding his apple with the left.
"Cramped arm?" Ruck asked, hard put not to smile.
"Yea," Allegreto said seriously. "It is a most wearing thing to hold."
Ruck raised his hand, signaling a halt. He drew the cart horse up even with him. "Where is thy scarf?" He leaned over and dug under the youth's furs, pulling the dagged silken scarf from his shoulders. With a few knots he made a cup in the middle of the length and reached for Allegreto's smelling-apple. "Hold in thy breath."
The boy reluctantly released the bag, making a small, choked sound of protest as Ruck dumped out the amber apple. As quickly as he could, Ruck secured the herb bag and apple within the scarf and reached over to tie it round Allegreto's mouth and head.
"There. Thou art safe from pestilent airs, whelp."
Allegreto looked down over his bright blue mask and tucked away his spare bag of herbs. "God grant you mercy," he said behind the scarf, the most courteous words he'd yet spoken to Ruck.
He answered with only a short nod. Allegreto looked foolish in his sapphire kerchief; foolish and young. Ruck wondered if it was possible to make a cuckold of a castrato—his mind pondered on the wordplay until he realized what he was thinking. He slapped Hawk overhard with the reins and yelled the order to move.
"Thou hast seen plague, then?" Allegreto asked from inside his muffle.
"Yea," Ruck said.
"I was but a child when it came again. My father took me into the country, away from the malignant atmosphere."
"Give thanks for that."
"How comes it thou art certain it touches thee not?"
Ruck rode in silence, watching the trees ahead for any sign of hazard.
"Hast thou a charm?"
"Nay. None of man's making."
"What, then?" Allegreto urged. "What protects thee?"
"Nothing." Ruck frowned at the sandy track ahead.
"Something it must be. Tell me." When he got no answer, he raised his voice. "Tell me, Englishman!"
"I know only that all about me died, and I lived," Ruck said at last. "In the last pestilence my man sickened. I stayed with him when the priest refused to come, but it never touched me."
"The hunchback? He sickened and lived? He is protected, too?"
Ruck shrugged.
Allegreto urged his horse a little closer. "By hap thy presence confers some immunity."
"Haps." Ruck looked at him with faint amusement. "Stay close, whelp."
He kept the company to a brisk pace, not caring to tarry long outside the sound of bells and habitation. But the mist yet lay heavy in the late morning, and Princess Melanthe demanded frequent rests from the sway of the litter. Ruck held to his austere outer composure, but he smoldered inside. He was regretting his decision to chance the Wyrale with such a small guard. This persistent vapor could hide too much. It seemed to cling, salty and still, hanging as close as Allegreto clung to Ruck. The company said little, but he could feel their nerves, and Allegreto was strung as tight as a lutestring. Only Princess Melanthe seemed careless of the atmosphere's malevolent influence. Ruck half wondered if she'd called the mist herself.
They left the forest to cross the marsh far later in the afternoon than he had intended. Moorland stretched away into white nothingness ahead. The vapor closed behind them. When the maid sent word forward that Princess Melanthe's falcon was restless and Her Highness wished to pause again, he threw Allegreto's reins to the sergeant-at-arms and dropped back to ride abreast of the litter.
"Your Highness, I pray you," he said to the litter's closed drape, "if it displease you not—I advise all haste to continue."
"Iwysse, then let us do so," she agreed in English, a disembodied voice from the curtain. "I will calm Gryngolet well enough."
Such an easy capitulation was not what he had expected. He was left with an unfocused sense of impatience, a restlessness that seemed to call for something more to be said.
"I mind your safe conduct, madam," he said, as if she had argued with him.
Her fingertips appeared, swathed in ermine, but she did not pull back the drape as the litter rocked along. "I give myself to your will, Green Sire," she answered modestly.
He gazed at the fine elegance of her fingers and looked down at his own mailed glove resting atop Hawk's saddle bow. The contrast, the delicacy of her hand set against his metal-clad, cold-leather fist, sent a surge of carnal agitation through his body.
In a low voice, past the hard rock in his throat, he murmured, "Passing fair ye are, my lady." He stared at the reins in his hand. "My will burns me."
As soon as he said it he wished it retrieved—repelled and aroused at once by his own boldness.
Her fingers disappeared. "Faith, sir," she said in a different tone, "me like not such runisch men as thee. Study thou on my gentle Allegreto and save thy love-talking for thy horse."
For a long instant Ruck listened to the steady thud of Hawk's hooves in the sand. Her words seemed to pass over him—coolly spoken, unreal.
Then mortification flashed through him, a fountain of chagrin. He closed his fist hard on the reins: his large and rough and runisch fist, green and silver in her colors, darkened with mud in her service, stiff with cold, with shame and passion.
"I am at your commandment, Your Highness," he said rigidly and spurred Hawk to the fore.
* * *
As Cara prepared Melanthe's bed, she said, "My lady's grace took pleasure in the cockles this morn?"
Mel
anthe looked up from painting silver gilt on Gryngolet's talons. Her pot gleamed in the light of the half-closed lanthorn. "Nay—I had not the stomach for cockles this day. I made a present of them to our knight."
Cara gave it all away—all of it—in the instant of horror that crossed her features. It was gone in a moment, but too late. They both knew. Cara sat still as stone.
Melanthe smiled. "Dost thou suppose he will enjoy them?"
"My lady—" The maid seemed to lose her voice.
"Thou art a very foolish girl," Melanthe said softly. "I believe I shall loose Allegreto on thee."
Cara wet her lips. "My sister." She whispered it. "They have my sister, the Riata."
Melanthe hid a jolt of shock at the news. "Then thy sister is already dead," she said. "Look to thine own life now."
"My lady—ten years have I served you faithfully."
Melanthe gave a quiet laugh. "Naught but a moment it wants, to turn treacherous." She placed a careful brush stroke. "Yes, I believe I shall have Allegreto kill thee. Not tonight. I'm not certain when. But soon. Thou hast served me faithfully for such a span of years, I shall be kind. Thou needst not to beware it long."
Cara was sitting on her knees, staring at the pillow in her hands, panting with fear. Melanthe stirred the silver paint and continued with her task.
"Thou dost love thy sister greatly," Melanthe said in a mild tone.
Cara was shaking visibly. She nodded. A single teardrop of terror gathered and tumbled down her face.
"Such love is ruinous. Thou placed thy own sister in jeopardy by showing it. Now you are both doomed."
Cara's hands squeezed rhythmically on the pillow. Suddenly she turned her face to Melanthe. "You're the spawn of Satan, you and the rest of them," she hissed low. "What do such as you know of love?"
"Why, nothing, of course," Melanthe said, placing a careful stroke of silver. "I take good care to know nothing of it."
SEVEN
Allegreto's dread of plague was such that the youth forewent his place with the Princess Melanthe and bedded down so close to his living talisman that his hand curled, childlike, around Ruck's upper arm. What his mistress thought of this desertion was left unsaid. Ruck did not see her. As usual, she left her litter only after her tent was pitched, shifting from one silken cage to the other without showing herself.
As Ruck lay in the dark with the fire fading, staring upward into nighttime oblivion, he had a bitter thought that it might have been to his advantage that Allegreto had left the tent, if Ruck had possessed foresight enough to discourage this inconvenient transfer of the youth's attachment to himself—and if she had liked such runisch men as he. But she did not, and Allegreto went quickly to sleep in the blue mask, firmly holding to Ruck's arm, as effective as any governess in protecting his lady.
Not that she required protection, beyond a scornful tongue and that mocking laugh.
Ruck attempted to form a prayer, asking forgiveness of Isabelle and God for his carnal lust. But his prayers were never of the inspired kind; he could not think of much more to avow than he was full repentant and would do better.
Not that he ever did do better, for every confession day he had a penance laid upon him for lusting in his heart after women. Sometimes for the mortal sin of easing himself, too, which he would have done now, at the price of barring from communion and any number of Ave Marys and hours on his knees before the altar, if Allegreto had not had such tight hold of his right arm. He was not a godly man; his mind went where it would and his body had limits to its rectitude, but he had dishonored himself, and Isabelle, too, this day.
He had the Princess Melanthe to thank for saving him from committing real adultery—and that only because she liked not runisch men. It was no virtue of his own that had saved him. If she were to rise and call him now into her tent, he would go.
He felt sullen and ashamed, thinking of it. He should get away from her. He should go home, having nowhere else pressing to go at the moment.
* * *
He slept badly, dreaming plague dreams, old dreams, in which he was lost and searching. The howl of a wolf woke him, shaking him out of uneasy dozing. He lifted his head. The fire had gone to dead coals—there was no sign of a guard. The wind had come up, blowing off the vapor. By the height of the moon over the moorland, it was three hours to dawn. Pierre should already have woken him to share the last and most arduous watch. With a silent curse Ruck slipped out of his warm place. Allegreto's hand fell away from him.
He stood up in the frigid night, sliding his feet into icy boots. He'd ordered a double watch—but by moonlight he could see the silvered wind-sweep of marsh reeds and the whole company sound asleep. The hourglass glinted softly next to Pierre's place, white sand all fallen through. A loose tie fluttered on Princess Melanthe's tent.
He gave the fur-covered lump that was Pierre a light kick. It did not move. Ruck leaned down and tossed the mantle away.
A smell of vomit assailed him. Pierre lay with a terrible arch to his twisted back, his dead eyes rolled up to show the whites in the dim moonlight, a sheen of sweat on his face and his open mouth full of dark spittle. Ruck swallowed a gag and threw the fur back over him.
He turned away and stood for a full minute, drinking draughts of clear night wind. The fear of plague held him frozen on the edge of frenzy: the lifelong terror—to be left alone, to be the last, to die that way...
The moon hung over him, cold and sane. He stared at it, struggling with himself.
Allegreto was sitting up, a faint outline against the light mist that still clung to the grass. Ruck felt the youth staring at him.
He suddenly began to tremble, letting go of his breath.
Not plague. It was not plague. The stink was wrong.
Ruck had smelled pestilence until the fetid black odor had burned itself into his brain—and this was not it. The loathsome stench of plague made poor Pierre's disgorgement seem halfway sweet. Ruck looked down at the shapeless mass and saw what his mind had not recorded a moment before—the white shapes of two opened cockleshells lying on the dark ground.
Horrible enough, if Pierre had purloined spoilt cockles and then choked on his own vomit, unable to call for help—but not plague. Not plague. Ruck took a deep breath. The reality of his man's death was beginning to reach him. Pierre, who had been with him for thirteen years, who filched small things, never more than a penny's worth, who'd learned to squire from Ruck, who'd always been an enigma, mute, faithful as a dog was faithful, but with no outward sign of affection.
Ruck glanced toward Allegreto. The youth was no longer visible sitting up against the mist. Ruck hoped he'd gone back to sleep. He bent down and gathered the furs about Pierre, keeping the small body wrapped close. His mind flashed over possibilities, trying to think of a way to hide this and prevent panic. Allegreto's fears and mask had the rest on tenterhooks—Ruck saw now that he should not have suffered any talk of plague at all.
"Is he dead?"
The youth's suffocated voice startled him, coming from behind, at a distance. Another man stirred.
"Of putrid shellfish," Ruck said quietly. "He could not call us. He choked, God give his soul rest."
"Thou liest," Allegreto hissed. "I saw him when thou lifted the mantle! He's warpened with death agonies. Has he the swellings?"
"Nay. Come thee and see for thyself." Ruck laid the body back down and threw off the cover. Now that he recognized what it was not, the smell was bearable.
Allegreto stumbled backward with a little cry, waking another man.
"Silence!" Ruck hissed. "Listen to me. There's no black eruption. The smell be not of plague, but only plain vomit. Not six hours past he was fit and walking like the rest of you. He stole cockles from the hermit and ate them. The shells are here on the ground. None other ate such, did they?"
No one answered. He knew they were all awake now. He tossed the blanket back over Pierre's dead face.
"He choked to death," he said softly. "Too quick it killed him,
for to be plague."
"Nay, I saw it take a priest in half an hour," came a shaky voice from somewhere in the shadows. "There were no black boils. He fell dead over the man he'd come to shrive."
"'Tis winter," said someone else. "The cockles be sweet now."
"The stench is wrong," Ruck said. They simply stared at him.
"Henri," he snapped in a low voice. "Thou quitted watch without the next man wakened." He took a stride, hauling the culprit out of his coverings by his collar. Before Henri had a chance to cower away, Ruck backhanded him so hard that he fell over his heels. "Tom Walter!" He scanned the dark for his sergeant. The man scrambled up. "Tie him, and John who was on duty with him. Ten lashes at first light. Relight the fire. And if any speak so loud as to wake Her Highness, tie him, too, and he shall have twenty." He swung his hand toward Allegreto. "Watch this one, also."
He paused, to see if they would defy him, but Walter was moving toward John to obey. Allegreto was only a motionless shape in the dark. Ruck looked toward the tent and saw a pale face thrust between the drapes at the entrance. He lowered his voice to a bare murmur. "My lady—she has not been disturbed?"
"Indeed, she has." It was the princess's amused voice. "How could I sleep in this uproar? What passes? Where is Allegreto?"
Her courtier made a faint sound, barely articulate.
"Your Highness, it is nothing," Ruck said. "I beg you will return to your rest."
Instead she pulled a cloak about her and emerged from the tent, standing alone without her gentlewoman. "What is it?" she asked, in sharper tone.
"My squire has died in the night."
She sucked in a breath, staring at him.
"My lady!" Allegreto's moan was like grief, like a plea for mercy, as if she could save him. "The pestilence."
"He died not of the pestilence, Your Highness," Ruck said. "The smell is wrong."