He stopped, slanting a look over his shoulder. "I don't work for free, carissima. It's mine now."
She held the herb bag behind her. "A fair exchange. Your plague perfume for my silver."
"I'll buy another herbal."
"Without going in amongst people?"
He turned slowly to face her, a look upon him that sent a chill to her heart. "Monteverde goose," he said softly, "I can take it from you before you can draw breath."
"Then slit my throat if you must!" she cried defiantly. "And be damned for it! Plague or murder, it makes no mind to me. I'm dead no matter what I do." Her voice began to quaver on the last words, and she shut her mouth, lifting her chin.
Allegreto was impossible to read, his black eyes watching her. "You work for the Riata, don't you?" he asked slowly. Cara tried to stare him down. For a moment he only studied her—then something in his expression changed, grew more penetrating.
"I didn't see you when we found the hunchback dead." He said it with a voice of discovery. His hand curled over his dagger. "You were already gone from the camp."
She managed to keep her breathing even. If her life was over, she should commit her soul to God, but in the moment of peril all she could do was think that he was too young and comely to be what he was.
"And you took money with you—you knew you were leaving. You were already running. Oh, Mary, Mother of God—" He took a step. "Why?"
She didn't answer him. She only closed her eyes and waited for him to kill her.
"What did you do? Was it poison?" A note of panic hovered in his question. "Did you try to poison her?"
His concern for his evil mistress sent a spurt of wild rage flooding through her. "Yes, you harlot—I tried to poison her. And if she hadn't sickened for death of plague as you tell me, I would try again, God forgive me, to save my sister!"
In three steps he had her: "Was it the cockles?"
She tried to jerk free, and could not. He shook her until her teeth rattled and her head rang, and stopped with a jerk.
"Was it the cockles?" he asked, in a voice so quiet and soft that it turned her limbs into water.
She nodded, trembling. He stared down at her with horror, with that same frenzy that he had of plague.
"God save me." He let her go and turned, breathing like a winded stag. "She's not dead. Oh, Mary; oh, God and Jesus, she contrived it. She isn't dead." He dropped to his knees, his fists pressed to the side of his head. As Cara watched in shock, he tore his fingers down his face, drawing blood. "I let her fly, she's not dead, she's not dead, she's not dead! My father!" With a mortal groan he lifted his face to Heaven. "Lord God have mercy on me!"
ELEVEN
Thin golden chains fastened to her garters held up the long muddy toes of Melanthe's boots. They were not intended for the march; she could feel every pebble and twig through the soft soles, but she barely noticed that. It was too good to be free.
She had no fear. That was not quite rational, she knew—her knight was plainly of the opinion that there was much to cause alarm, but such was the disposition of any worthy watchdog. She enjoyed treading along beside him, skirting grass tussocks and pushing branches aside, hiking her skirt to leap little puddles and rivulets. In spite of her gown, she was not much more encumbered than he in his armor. She guessed it must weigh half a hundred pounds and surely affected his stride, checking him to a speed she had no trouble to maintain.
They didn't speak to each other beyond necessity. Although the hunt had seemed to Melanthe to have created some momentary degree of intimacy, softening the edge of awkwardness between them, he'd stung her with his suspicions. She supposed that she wouldn't look him out a wife after all.
His mail chinked in a rhythm that worked its way into her brain in the hours of silent march. The horse's hoofbeats changed from soft thumps to thuds as the marshland rose to higher ground. Meadow gave way to open woods, gray and black, straight young birch trees like a thousand cathedral columns springing up from a strange undulating floor of hawthorns and green winter grass.
"Tilled field," he said, breaking the quiet. He gestured with his mailed hand to the furrows and edges that spread like huge ripples in the earth, the massive ghosts of peasants' plows, birch trunks growing out of the spines and hollows.
"Mary," Melanthe said softly. "Abandoned?"
"Twenty years and more, on measure of the trees."
"The Death."
"Yes, my lady. Was never a much peopled place, I think. What souls were left—" He shrugged. "Why keep it, when they might find better livelihood to the east, where men were wanted to work easier lands?"
She nodded. So it had been everywhere, the marginal surrendered to desert when there were barely enough people to till the richest fields. She'd been nine years old. Her mother had died and left Melanthe and her little brother, Richard. Her father had wept, and never married again, nor smiled as gaily—and wept once more a few years later when Melanthe set out for Italy in the rich train Prince Ligurio had sent for her.
She had never seen her father after that day. But he had remembered her. He hadn't blamed her for Richard's death. In his will he had confirmed her as the heiress of Bowland. She couldn't recall his face—Richard's boyish grin intruded, Richard of the fond smiles and songs for the ladies. In the few months that Melanthe had kept him with her, she had basked in those smiles. She had loved him so easily, known him so surely, as if they had never been parted.
Another life. Other places.
She had been afraid. She had always been afraid, every minute, every hour of eighteen years since she had left home.
She felt a fierce will that the plague might kill them all, Navona and Riata, while she sojourned here in isolation and wildness. Perhaps she would never return, not even to Bowland. She and her knight would hunt dragons and battle wildmen of the woods, and never go back to the world of human things.
Here was nothing but peace, that she could see, and what danger there might be was her knight's charge and not her own. She wanted peace. Even more than she wanted Bowland.
She gazed at the silent English woods. When he had first told her what the peculiar ridges were, she had felt a quick superstitious dread of such eerie signs of long-dead men. But as she looked on them now, they seemed to signify the weakness of human power in this place, where trees grew without effort from the heart of men's hardest labor.
"In such remote desert we must find us a damsel in sore straits, Green Sire, and rescue her," she said.
"We must find us safe haven, lady," he said, pulling the horse on.
Melanthe picked up her skirt and came abreast of him. They climbed up a plow ridge and went down the side. "Nay—a damsel, passing fair, and in distress."
"Full enough in distress is my lady, I trust. We need none other."
She tugged her skirt free of a thorn bush. "Alack, sir, are you satisfied with such a small adventure? Where is our venomous serpent? Our fiery worm?"
"My lady doesn't wish to meet a dragon, in truth."
"You wound me! I do."
He shook his head. "You know nothing of what you speak."
She looked toward him, intrigued by the note of certainty in his voice. "Have you seen one?"
"Yes, my lady."
He said it in the same dispassionate tone that he might have said he thought it like to come on rain. Melanthe pursed her lips. "You won't fool me, Sir Ruck. My husband said that all such beasts were drowned in the Deluge."
He gave a faint snort and glanced at her. "I thought I heard my lady say she wished to war with one such."
"Tush, I'm but a woman," she said lightly, "full of a woman's fantasies."
"Oho," he said, and nothing more.
They walked along in silence. Melanthe freed herself from another thorn.
She listened to the steady chink of his mail. They went up one side of the ridges and down the other, up and down and up and down again. She slanted him a sideways look.
"So, knight—where did you behold this dragon?"
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He nodded in the direction that they walked. "To the north. Not far from here."
"Fie upon you! You undertake to frighten me!"
"Hah! My lady has no proper dread, not of wolves nor outlaws. Wherefore should I suppose a firedrake might make you shrink?"
"No firedrake abides in Britain still," she insisted. "My husband said me so. They're now all in Ethiopis and India and hot places."
He walked steadily onward. "Perhaps I slayed the last one," he said. "Perhaps it wasn't the last, though I've seen none since. I don't know that your lord husband could know so much of it, lest he spent the years that I've done in the hunting of the beasts."
"He read deeply. It may be that you were mistaken in what animal you slayed. It's said the likeness of a dragon can be forged on the carcass of a great ray."
He halted and turned with an exclamation of disgust. "It was not a fish!"
Melanthe stopped, facing him, her curiosity fully roused. "Describe it to me."
"I won't," he said, turning to go on.
She put her hand on his arm. "Sir Ruck, if it you like and please," she said, with her best coaxing grace, "tell me of your dragon that you slayed."
He began to walk. But he glanced aside at her and didn't pull away from her touch. "It was in a hard winter," he said. "The bulls came and bears, and boars from the high fells. Only a man outlawed would occupy such a wasted place as this. But the warring did not wroth me as the winter, so much. Shed the clouds sleet, and I slept, my lady, on the raw rocks, rigged in my arms, with hard icicles hanged over my head like serpents' teeth. It was too terrible to say a tenth of it." He nodded toward the grass that carpeted the undulating forest floor. "Not as now."
"But say me of the dragon." She walked beside him, balancing on the top of a ridge while he went in the furrow, her hand resting on his shoulder. "How did it appear?"
"My lady, if you would discover what manner of beast it was, then would you not know its habitation, and what weather likes it? So I'm telling you."
"Ah. I crave your pardon. The winter was a harsh one, then, that drove the wild creatures down from the hills. Dragons, I've read in the beastiaries, dwell in sweltery places."
"Swelter did I not, my lady, that eventide. For harbor I halted in a hollow below cliff, where the stones sloped down perilous steep. I fettered Hawk, to forage for his fodder, could he find it, but I broke not even hard bread to brace me. Black night befell us, of all brightness wanting." He stared ahead as he walked, his eyes narrowing, as if he could see it. "Thus in pain and plight full unpleasant in truth, I dropped down as if I were dead and lifeless, but that I shivered and shook, sore with cold."
Melanthe pulled her mantle closer about her as they came to the end of the curving ridge. At the base of it a tumbled wall of stone was succumbing to hawthorn, and beyond that the furrows lay perpendicular to those they traversed. He turned along the wall, taking Melanthe's arm and prompting her to walk before him down the trench.
"Weary sleep shunned me, I say you, my lady. Blew appalling airs out of that black atmosphere, tolling awful tunes to terrify a hunter." A freshening breeze swept the bare branches above. He raised his eyes, watching them. "I believe it was the breath of the beast."
Melanthe glanced up. The shadow of new clouds raced across the woods, throwing a chill into the wind. At her feet she realized there was a subtle dirt track in the bottom of the furrow, as if theirs were not the only feet that passed this way.
"Were there lightnings?" she asked. "Perhaps it were an unseasonal storm, far off."
"Yes, there were lightnings, my lady," he said from behind her. "Lightnings and luminaries as the long hours passed. My bed of boulders grew to burn me. Sat I straight up, with my skin blistering, smarted by hot steel where skimmed my armor. And I heard then a hiss, my lady, so hideous and vast that my heart haled to the heels of my feet."
"The wind might make such a noise."
"Came it out of the cliff, from a cavern deep, and a wind with it as you wish, my lady, weirdly reeking."
"Of burning brimstone, I think?"
"No—" He paused, and then said thoughtfully, "More like to the smell of a siege in the summer heat—when the bodies of the dead grow bloated and burn with the sack of the city."
"By God's self," Melanthe murmured. "How pleasant."
"My lady has read of some beast with such a breath?" he asked.
"Several might have such," she said. "A manticore, a griffin. They are found in Ethiopis. The basilisk of India may kill by no more than its smell."
"Not slayed by the scent of this serpent was I. I shocked out my sword from the sheath, my lady. The rocks rained down about me, for rattled the earth itself. The air grew ardent, and out of the opening, coiling and curling like a cable, a great serpent came—colored comely blue, and carried into the sky."
She stopped, holding up her skirt as she looked around at him.
"Over the wall, my lady, if it please you," he said in an ordinary tone, with a slight bow of his head.
Melanthe looked down and saw that the faint dirt track made a turn at a place where the stones were broken down. He gripped her arm to steady her as she stepped across, and then tugged the horse after them through the gap.
As the great hooves cleared the stones and thumped down into a bed of damp leaves, she said, "It was colored like the sky?"
"Yea, but shining, my lady. In the night it nigh glared."
"Shining!" She frowned. "The serpent called the Scytale glows, so that it may stupefy its victim by its splendor."
"Bedazzled was I to beholden it, my lady."
"And the air about it grew hot?"
He made a heartfelt sound of assent. "Heat such as Hell might hurl, my lady. All my iron afflicted me, as if afire was I. By what work I wielded my sword, I know not. Marks it made upon my palm for months thereafter."
She chewed her lip. "A basilisk might cause such. They've been known to burn people up. I read nothing of their color as blue. They're striped in white. But they have wings and might fly." The slope of the land rose as they walked. She followed the path over another ridge and furrow.
"Wings it wore, yes," he said, "but it wafted as if the air arched it aloft, like autumn leaves, for its bulk was too big to bravely fly on wing. It shrieked as the sound of...as the sound of..." He paused for a long moment. "I can't think of a word. As the sound of..."
Melanthe kept walking, scouring her memory for what she had read of these things in the beastiaries, barely listening to him as he repeated the phrase beneath his breath.
"As the sound of—a scythe on a whetstone!" he exclaimed, with the tone of having solved some puzzle. "It shrieked as the sound of a scythe on a whetstone."
She tripped over a root and caught herself. As she looked up she realized that the ridges and furrows ended here. A darker forest lay ahead, the trunks older, thick and gnarled. She hesitated.
The steady beat of the destrier's hooves came to a halt behind her. "Will my lady ride now?" he asked.
Melanthe was not so certain that she wished to lead the way afoot into this woods. She nodded. He put his hands at her waist and lifted her up to sit aside on the saddle next to Gryngolet. For a moment he looked up at her, a phantom of his uncommon smile in his eyes.
It was an impossible thing to resist. She smiled back, but he cast down his look, moving away to lead the horse into the deeper wood.
They traveled steadily, following a muddy path that skirted bogs and roots, as sinuous as his dragon. The rhythm was brisker now, for she realized that he was after all not so weighted down by his armor that he couldn't stride along at a far more active pace than hers. She ducked branches, deep in thought, unable to conceive of what beast he had actually slain. His description was detailed enough: its size immense, its scales blue, its breath fetid, and the air about it scorching; its aspect like a great serpent, but head broad and flat, more like to a lizard with the teeth of a wolf, wings too small to hold it aloft.
She allowed
for exaggeration—what hunter didn't make his boar larger and fiercer with the telling?—but the more she pressed him for particular attributes, the more she began to think that he had killed a very large basilisk. Until he showed her the scars beneath Hawk's coat, three long ridges two full inches apart, that the monster had made as it fell upon the horse from its fiery height. Then her opinion wavered.
"A griffon hates horses," she speculated. "But say you its head was like to a lizard? Not an eagle?"
"No, my lady, nothing like. But my horse has the heart of an eagle. Sprang he up with a scream, striving to kill. Such strength did he spend that he splintered his chain. His loose fetter he flung, to flay as if it were a weapon. He smote the serpent and slashed it in its loathly eye. The dragon rebounded with a roar, ripping his hide." He laid his hand on Hawk's shoulder over the old scars, passing his palm down the horse's coat as he walked. "I plunged to impale the paunch that it bared. Mother Mary blessed me, I believe, and abetted me in that moment, for my sword struck the scales and slipped between. Bright blood boiled forth, but the creature coiled about my cuirass, choking my breath, wringing life from my limbs and light from my eyes. I discovered my sword divided and dragged from my hand. I felt the fetid air as the fangs locked upon my feet, in the way that a snake feeds on a field mouse."
He stopped speaking. Melanthe realized that her hands clenched the saddle, gripping it as if she could throw off the deathly coils herself.
"What did you do?" she asked, loosening her grip.
"I submitted my soul to Mary's sweet mercy." He glanced back at her. "Next I knew, I lay near dead. Beside me the beast was buckled, embedded with my sword in its breast, its lifeblood all about me. My sabatons it had sucked off my soles and swallowed my legs to the knee. I wrenched free and withdrew, and bowed down to bear thanks to God the Almighty. And thus in another day this adventure betided," he said. "I abidingly thereof bear witness, my lady."
"Good Lord! What became of the creature?"
"I'll show you, my lady."
"Wee loo! Show me?"
He nodded ahead. "My lady sees before us, through the trees? There's a chapel. Perhaps the creature's bones lie there yet."