That Way Lies Camelot

  Trionn recognized her gift when the cats at his heels fled her presence. Silent as shadow, they stalked off in stiff-backed irritation. The scullion watched their retreat. A chill brushed his skin; as if he, too, sensed the power over beasts that this gypsy sorceress could command, and his spirit raised hackles in protest. The hounds did not run. Fickle creatures that they were, bred over generations to subservience, they converged in a pack of wagging tails, tongues lolling in canine enthusiasm. They reacted as if the strange woman in her dusty, faded finery had been the mistress they had obeyed since their whelping; as indeed she could be, if she chose. No dumb beasts, and few men, were proof against a gypsy caller's craft. But unlike humans and cats, dogs set small value on independence. Like whores, they flocked in unabashed eagerness around the woman's boots, begging and whining to be dominated.

  Trionn threw down his rags, oblivious to the fuss as servants and guests, and at last the Lord himself took loud-voiced notice of the intruder. The scullion unseen in his corner did not follow the woman's words as she announced herself, but heard only the silvery timber of her voice. The pitch set up echoes inside him that no amount of clamor could still. He saw courtiers eagerly joining the circle of dogs, who were now belly down and begging. Yet Trionn's senses gave back false sight. In place of hounds and gentlefolk, his mind could not throw off the vision of the silver-dun stud with his grand neck bowed in submission.

  Sudden tears stung Trionn's eyes. His stomach heaved. The blood on the grass had not been the horse's; better by far that it had been. The Lord who had died a cripple had insisted many times that death held the keys to final freedom.

  * * *

  Moonlight washed over the meadow. It limned soft silver over the stallion who grazed content in tall grass. Trionn sat outside the fence, his lap encumbered by sleeping cats. His hand caressed the bone handle of the butcher's flensing knife, stolen after dark from the closet. Over and over, Trionn stroked the blade's edge, checking its razor keenness. He turned the weighty steel in his hands, and remembered the kick of a pig held pinned in his arms as it died. He licked dry lips, and sighed as he tested the resolve he had made in desperation, and found himself wanting. He lacked any kind of brash courage. The fate of the horsebreaker did not haunt him, nor fear for his own life and limbs. He simply knew. When the dun stallion bent his knees and laid down to rest, Trionn had no will to creep through the fence and cut the creature's throat to forestall its misery. Whatever freedom death might offer could not compensate for the pound of wild hooves, or the ripple and play of muscles burnished like shining silk under sunlight. The stallion would live to be broken, for Trionn did not have in him the requisite hardness for murder.

  He sat in the calm of the night, surrounded by cats and the chirp of crickets, and miserably wished he were bold enough to run away. Yet far as a lifetime of travel, though he crossed the rocks of the mountains beyond the sands, the memories and the visions would follow him, locked inescapably in his mind. The gypsy caller's powers would sting him, no matter where, and he would ache for the stallion's lost spirit. Like the cling of the cats, the persistence of his dreams could not be shed.

  The deepest and worst of his misery was that he could not even turn the steel upon himself. The pain did not deter him, nor the dying, but the strange, insistent surety that the cats would be left bereft. Wise as the creatures could be, they would not understand why he should desert them for the sake of one horse's lost liberty.

  * * *

  The butcher recovered the purloined knife after Enith, returning from her nightly tryst in the hayloft, caught Trionn in the yard by the kitchens. Particular to a fault when it came to his cutlery, the butcher's shouted obscenities progressed to extra work as punishment. Trionn was assigned the task of sharpening every tool left dull in the course of shearing Silverdown's weeds and grass.

  Left wary after the slaughtering that Trionn was practiced at haring off, the butcher took no chances. He locked the scullion in the tool shed with a half-filled bucket and a whetstone. The cats could find no way in, however hopefully they sniffed and circled. In time they were compelled to settle in disgruntled bundles on the door stoop.

  Inside, the shed was suffocatingly hot. Hedged by darkness inadequately beaten back by a bark spill soaked in resin, Trionn set to with the whetstone. He braced the bucket between his knees, and worked the marred edge of a sickle, his mind consumed by awareness of the cats' balked desires. He was powerless to ease their unhappiness.

  The butcher jammed a wedge under the sill outside. Until he chose to return, or someone else happened by to fetch a tool, Trionn's imprisonment was complete. The likelihood nobody would visit the shed before the spill burned out did not matter. Silverdown's servants had left for the meadow, the reason for their gathering a distress that already fretted the scullion raw. He dipped the stone and resumed honing, relentless in his determination. He would not think upon what must inevitably happen when the gypsy raised her powers to subdue the stud.

  And yet the moment touched him, all the same.

  The tones of the gypsy witch's call clamored through him like the struck chime of a bell. The whetstone slipped from Trionn's fingers and splashed into the bucket. Droplets warm as blood trickled down his shins. He did not feel their wetness. Nor did he notice as the spill flickered out, leaving him kneeling in darkness. His eyes were vision-bound to a sunlit meadow, and the form of the slate dun stud shaking back his mane, his ears snapped forward to listen.

  The gypsy sorceress repeated her call, lower now, almost wheedling.

  Trionn felt the resonance of her tone play through the marrow of his bones. He remained oblivious to the ribbon of true blood that laced his wrist, from the knuckle laid open on the sickle.

  His eyesight remained locked as his mind: on the horse, who twitched glossy skin, as if to drive off flies. But it was no insect that stung him. From her perch half on, half over the fence, the gypsy crooned out a binding. The stud's ears flattened and he stamped, where once he would have thundered into a run with his teeth bared in fury.

  The call came again, compelling. As if whipped, the stallion started. He edged one step forward, then two, while in the soundless isolation of the shed, Trionn winced. Sweat rinsed his cheeks and his nails gouged his palms as his fingers clenched to fists in the throes of unasked for empathy.

  Now the gypsy began a sing-song rhythm that raised the hair at Trionn's neck. He shivered and jerked in concert with the stud as need swelled into compulsion. The horse lowered his proud crest. His hooves raised no dust as he advanced. To Trionn, the gypsy's magic squeezed and confined, as if the leaping flame of a bonfire were compressed down into one spark. His breath jerked in gasps from his chest.

  'No,' he whispered. 'No.' He closed eyes that had long since stopped seeing. 'No!'

  Yet his physical cry could not alter the spell. The stallion moved inexorably onward. He had crossed half the distance to the fence, and the woman, tasting victory, climbed down with her hand outstretched.

  The murmurs of the servants, and the Lord's triumphant laugh rang brittle as breaking ice against the deeper vibration of the summoning that continued to draw its victim in.

  One touch from the witch would seal the stallion's submission. Trionn understood this in a gut ache of intuition, and something inside of him snapped.

  He bit his lip, knees clasped, as his body spasmed with the same wrenching sickness he felt at the slaughtering of the pigs. Only this time, the cramping and the agony were a thousand times more severe. He fought to breathe, fought to think, while the sweat mingled unnoticed with his blood and pattered on the dusty floor.

  The stallion was a half-stride away from defeat. His lowered muzzle brushed the grass tips. His eyes were dull, unfocused, and his tail, as lackluster as any gelding's.

  Trionn knew a spearing agony that threatened to rip away his reason. He clamped his hands over his sweat-slicked face and forced a half-strangled breath. 'No.'

  Before his heart could burst, bef
ore the great dun could nuzzle the woman's outstretched brown fingers, he imagined the horse as he had been, a creature of terrible beauty that no man in his right mind dared touch.

  Trionn pictured the stallion with his head upflung, and his eyes rolling white rings in hatred.

  There followed a moment of torment, as if the inner fiber of his being was seared by a whirlwind and torn apart. He had no voice to cry out, and no thought beyond a pinpoint awareness that centered on the slate-blue stud.

  For a second he seemed to be that horse, his senses overwhelmed by the scent of summer grass, and a second, sourer odor left by a trespassing human. Trionn saw through the stallion's eye? the vista of the fence, and the crowd that lined the rails in maddening noise. He felt the unleashed tension that whipped through the horse as the gypsy's near-finished binding snapped like so much spun thread.

  Ever mindful of the horse's speed and power, the woman was faster than her predecessor. She dropped and rolled, even as the stallion screamed in rage. He reared. His shadow raked over the onlookers, driving them back in a panic as his forehooves slashed through air. The woman was no longer there, but already through the fence in a whirl of motley robes. The stallion spun, and from his hind legs launched himself into a gallop. A bolt of silver fury, he ran. His mane flew, and his tail whipped behind like the curl and twist of a war banner.

  The shouts of the irate Lord of Silverdown seemed insignificant before the racing tattoo of hooves.

  In the tool shed, Trionn woke to himself, sobbing beyond all control. The finger unwittingly sliced on the sickle was stinging in the salt of his sweat. He splashed water from the bucket over the cut, and found his limbs heavy with weariness. His lungs hurt, as if he had been racing on foot alongside the galloping horse. The fact he had not been seemed unreal. Still weeping, he lay back against the rolled burlap used to save seedlings from the last blighting touch of spring frost. His soaked hair plastered to his forehead, he fell into a dreamless oblivion nearer to unconsciousness than sleep.

  * * *

  The day waned. Trionn wakened to a slap. He gasped, started upright, and, dazzled by the glare of low sunlight, saw the butcher standing over him.

  'Lazy lout!' the man was shouting. 'All day you were in here, and nothing to show for your time. I should have guessed you'd pass the hours sleeping if you could!'

  Trionn propped himself up on one arm. He blinked, rubbed his aching cheek, and glanced around to locate the cats, who should have stolen their chance to bolt inside the instant the door was cracked open.

  No cats were in evidence.

  For the first time in his life that he could think of, his feline friends were not there. The stone stoop was empty of their presence, and the butcher was still howling nonsense.

  If Trionn was grudging with his speech, he was equally adept at not listening. He rubbed his arms to ease the chill that swept his skin. If the cats had left due to the butcher's ranting, the troubling fact remained: none of them lurked in the shadows behind the seed sacks, or crouched with flattened ears beneath the shovels.

  Above anything else, Trionn dreaded to know what awaited when he ventured out of the shed.

  'I should be throwing cold water at your head, boy, to snap you out of your stupor!' The butcher raised the handle of the bucket, prepared to act on his threat, when a second voice cut him off.

  'There you are, Trionn!' hollered the cook, his fat bulk damming the small band of light that made its way through the doorway. 'Been following cats into crannies all afternoon, and it's here you've been skulking all along!' Oblivious to the butcher's prior grievance, the cook barged past and grabbed his errant scullion by the wrist. 'Get moving, you lunk. There's a stack of pots need scrubbing, and his Lordship in a temper since that cheating snip of a gypsy disappeared and can't be found.'

  Distracted from his ire over scythe blades, the butcher thumped down his bucket, it's true, then? The woman was a charlatan?'

  'The fact she ran off makes you think so.' The cook jerked Trionn after as he plowed a path toward the door. 'The Lord's set his riders to find her. When she's caught, I'd guess there'll be a hanging.'

  'And the horse?' Turned thoughtful, the butcher fished his whetstone from the water, and reached for an unsharpened sickle. 'What's to become of the stallion?'

  'Dogmeat,' the cook affirmed, his head cocked over Trionn's shoulders. 'The captain at arms was told to down the rogue with an arrow, next time the kennelman needs a carcass.' Then, bothered back to priorities by his scullion's dragging feet, the cook turned his invective upon Trionn. 'You heat sick, boy? Pick yourself up and walk, else I'll pack your bones for the knackerman along with that devil of a stallion's.'

  Engrossed in miseries far removed from the cook's irritation, Trionn stumbled through the wicket gate into the courtyard. No cats came flying to greet him. Not even the mackerel striped tabby sunning herself on the wall. Dread left him the appearance of listlessness. He responded mechanically to the cook's yanks and prods, not wanting to test what change might have touched him while he had been locked in a tool shed, and a gypsy had signally failed in the taming of a man-killing stallion.

  The entry to the scullery loomed ahead. On the stoop lolled two white-muzzled hounds, skinny and scarred, but not too old or too proud to disdain begging for scraps. Enith leaned against the doorlintel, sampling a slice of sausage, while the hounds tipped their heads at her and rolled their moist brown eyes.

  Trionn stiffened, half-wild with trepidation.

  'Are you daft, boy?' exploded the cook. He gave an abusive yank. The scullion gripped in his meaty fist stumbled forward with a breathless cry.

  The dogs immediately stiffened and turned their heads. They saw Trionn. Enith and her sausage were forgotten as they shuffled into a lope, tails wagging, and eagerness in their cloudy old eyes.

  Trionn flung back from their rush, appalled to a burst of speech. 'No,' he croaked, 'not this,' as the dogs rushed to him and leapt for joy around his knees. They whined and nosed at his fingers, as if greeting a long-sought friend.

  'What's happening?' yelped the cook, put out afresh by confusion. He threw off the scullion and the dogs, hands raised in nervous trepidation. 'Always before it was cats.' His tone held a bite of accusation as he added, 'Or have the Lord's bitches gone crazy?'

  Enith shifted a lump of sausage into the back of her cheek. Around chewing, she said, 'Looks uncanny to me, as if that gypsy witched the dogs instead of the stallion.' Then she fixed hard eyes on Trionn. 'You never said you could talk.'

  'Oh, he can,' supplied the cook. 'He just hates to. When he was little, his parents beat him for stubbornness. Didn't do any living good.' He raised a booted foot and kicked the nearest dog, which yelped and bounded back, to shelter behind Trionn's knees. The scullion flinched from its touch, hunched and unaware as the discussion continued around him.

  'Enough foolishness now, Trionn,' berated the cook. 'The pots aren't getting any cleaner while you stand out here acting foolish.'

  'If he fakes being dumb, maybe he's not so stupid,' Enith suggested, while the cook pushed the scullion reluctantly toward the kitchen doorway. She stepped disdainfully aside to let them past, adding, 'Are you stupid?'

  He gave no answer.

  When the dogs sought to barge through on Trionn's heels, both she and the cook howled in chorus. Ousting the dogs required all their attention, and until the door to the kitchen was secured, neither one noticed that Trionn had not retired to his corner to silently, doggedly, scrub pots.

  'He slipped out the side way,' snitched the Lord's page, idle at the table chewing sausage. He gave a hopeful smile toward Enith, who responded with a flounce, cut short as the cook had a fit.

  'I'll have the both of you washing pots!' he roared in fist-waving fury.

  The page snickered, as if the threat was a joke. An instant later, he found himself installed at Trionn's washtub, cursing the stink of tankards and plates left awash in skins of rancid grease.

  * * *

&
nbsp; Well beyond earshot of the fracas in the kitchen, Trionn ran as a man might when driven by whips. Wherever he went, the cats in their turn fled his presence. Uncannily choosy by habit, they recognized precisely what the gypsy caller's gift had wakened in him. A horse had been wrested from her spell by his bidding, and of humans with such powers they were chary. Trionn knew pain beyond words. The dependable warmth of the cats' companionship was lost to him, reft away by an afternoon's longing that in ignorance, he had never known to fear.

  In his passionate wish to keep the stallion wild, he had never guessed that desire by itself could afflict him. He raged to admit what the cats knew, and the dogs by their mindless fawning: that the caller's talents had been somehow thrown awry by his meddling. The taint of her mystery had touched him. He did not know if the fluke could be reversed. Though his lungs ached and his muscles burned, he pressed on in useless exertion. For the inevitable outcome had not altered. The kennelman was promised a carcass, and the huntsman's arrow must fly. However far Silverdown's scullion drove his body, the vision pursued and harrowed him. Still, he saw blood in the grass, the scream of the stallion's dying an echo that resounded through his mind.

  Dusk found him crouched on the rise above the meadow, his forehead cradled on crossed wrists. He had decided to break down the gate, a desperate act that would ultimately not solve anything. Loose, the dun stallion was a liability. He would steal mares from all but the sturdiest paddocks, and kill any fool who interfered. In the end, he would be chased down. The archer's shot would take him, but in the open, as he ran in all his pride and splendor.

  If Silverdown's scullion escaped the fury of the horse he resolved to set loose, what should befall him at the Lord's hand for presuming such interference defied imagination. In his misery over the desertion of the cats, Trionn did not care. His fretting over the stallion's fate had long since destroyed his peace; the pain of spirit he already suffered could hardly be made any worse. All that remained was to endure until the darkest hour before moonrise.