Behold the Dawn (2 page)

In front of a
wedge tent
striped in green, he drew to a stop and dismounted, his bones creaking. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he had hoped the mild southern air would ease the pain of old wounds. But some things went too deep for healing.

He ducked to peer into the tent but could find no sign of Peregrine Marek, the Glasgow lad indentured to him after he had rescued the little thief from an irate shopkeeper three years before. He wasn’t surprised. Marek had the bothersome habit of never being anywhere Annan wanted him when he wanted him. He growled, out of habit more than anger. Tossing his heavy purse into the tent, he turned to untack his horse.

He had already unbuckled the muddy caparison and stripped it from his mount by the time Marek finally trotted around the tent at the end of the row.

The lad’s quick eye found Annan in a moment, and he slowed, pushing through the crowd with the stiff stride he invariably used when trying not to attract attention or appear in any haste. Even from across the camp, Annan could see the darting of Marek’s eyes. He was fidgety about something.

Marek managed to dodge
squires
and knights alike and duck beneath the necks of a dozen skittish
chargers
without tripping himself or anyone else. At last, he stopped next to the tent pole and planted his hands on his belt. “Well. And how’d it go?”

Annan glared at him.

Marek huffed a breath. “And how’d it go,
sir
?”

Annan tried to ignore the inevitable sourness in his stomach as he tossed the caparison into the lad’s chest. Crowing about the blood on his hands had never brought him much joy. “
Mayhap
you’d like to be explaining why you weren’t waiting here when I told you to be?”

Marek shook out the heavy green brocade, dragging the edge in the dust at his feet. “If you’d any idea the fuss that’s about to befall that fair city, you wouldn’t waste time wanting explanations.”

Annan turned away and slung his horse’s reins over a tree branch. Marek’s theatrics were rarely worth the effort of playing along. “It’s a tourney town today, laddie. When isn’t there a fuss?”

“It’s a wee bit more’n a fuss this time. More like an unholy uproar. Didn’t you hear anything about it when you was picking up your prize money?”

Annan glanced at the city’s walls. Beyond the workmanlike clamor of the camp, he could hear only the shouts of knights galloping into town to drink their own health. “No.”

“That Count Heladio—or whate’er his name is—you know the bucko in charge of this here tourney thing. Well, appears his nephew got himself killed out there today. In the last hour or so, they say.”

“They can’t know that. The bodies won’t be collected ‘til morning light.”

“Well, all I know is this count person seemed to know what he knew. And he’s none too rejoiced over it, neither. He’s got him about half a score o’ men-at-arms, and he’s riding out to find the man what did the deed.”

“It’s a tourney. Men die all the time.” Annan looked down at the dirt and blood crusted in the mail links on the back of his gauntlet, and he flexed the stiffness in his sword hand. “Matters not to us, anyway. Unsaddle the horse and rub him down before he binds up.”

Marek made a face. “How many’d you kill today?”

“A few.” He tugged the glove from his hand. “One for certain.”

Marek lifted both eyebrows, and Annan knew what the lad was thinking before he could give it voice. “Master—”

“Crusade. I know.” As if a Crusade could be enough to ransom him. He yanked the glove from his left hand. The leather underside had ripped earlier that day, and a dark bruise filled his palm.

Marek tossed the caparison over the destrier’s flanks and flopped the stirrup onto the seat of the saddle. “I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. All the priests swear it’s true. Take the vow, kill a few infidels, and the name of a tourneyer becomes as good as that of a saint.”

Annan stared at his palm, at the deepening shadow of purple. “The priests delude themselves.”

“How would you know?”

“I know. Let us leave it at that.”

Marek loosened the girth with a grunt. “Well, I’ll tell you something else
I
know.”

“And what’s that?” Annan unfastened his belt with one hand and, with the weight of his sword in the other, joined both ends behind his back. He turned for the shade of the tent. Tomorrow, he and Marek would be traveling on to another tourney somewhere. But for tonight, all he wanted was meat and wine and the abyss of sleep.

“Count Heladio has other reasons to be unhappy.” Marek yanked the saddle from the horse’s back. “The Baptist is here.”

Annan stopped and flicked his eyes to where the sunset backlit the city walls. “The Baptist—” The habitual lines in his forehead etched themselves deeper, and the dark-robed figure who had watched him from the edge of the tourney field flashed across his memory.

In the last year, the
mendicant
friar known as the Baptist had seemed ubiquitous. Everywhere Annan’s travels had taken him, this fire-breathing monk, who preached against the excesses of the Church with the assurance of the Devil, never traveled far behind.

Marek dumped the saddle next to the tent pole. “Ever get the feeling he’s been following us?”

“Why should he?”

“I dunno, maybe he likes tourneys. They say he’s a heretic.”

The Baptist’s railings against the Church, against the Pope, against the Holy War that even now raged in the East, were enough to bring
anathema
down on him from every quarter. But what made Annan’s skin burn cold was that the Baptist also raged against Roderic, bishop of Devonshire, the one-time prior of St. Dunstan’s Abbey—the man and the place that had hurtled Annan down the sunless path he now trod. Despite the sins of his past, Roderic had risen in the circles of English royalty until he counseled the king himself, an honor he little deserved.

Marek pulled a water bucket from a tree limb and lugged it to the destrier. “Mayhap we should catch a glimpse of him before we head our own way again. The count’ll throw him out sooner or later, and I never was one to oppose a good show. Eh?”

Annan unclenched his teeth. “I’ve seen him already.”

“What?” Marek stopped short and water sloshed against his chest. “Already?”

“He was on the field, watching.”

“So he does like tourneys, then.” Marek shoved the bucket beneath the destrier’s outstretched muzzle. “Can’t tell me this isn’t a ruddy sad world, when even monks are chasin’ after the tournaments.”

“It isn’t the tournaments.” Realization razored across Annan’s mind. “It’s me.” Without looking down, he buckled his sword back on. This monk knew him. When they had stared at one another across the tourney field only an hour before, the intensity beneath the man’s cowl hadn’t been mere curiosity. Somewhere in the shadows of the past, the Baptist had known him.

Annan caught his saddle up from the ground and lugged it to where Marek’s
palfrey
stood stomping at flies.

“Hey. Where is it you’re off to?” Marek craned a look over his shoulder.

“To find out what he’s after.”

“How about me? Don’t you think I want to see the count throw him out on his ear?”

“You’ll wait here.” He tightened the girth and drilled Marek a look. “And when I say wait here, I mean wait.”

“You always say that. But what if there’s extenuatin’ circumstances you’re not foreseeing?”

“Your extenuating circumstances always end up sounding like excuses.” He took the reins and swung aboard. “Just stay here. I’ll be back before night falls.”

Marek huffed. “Well, when Heladio does decide to throw Master Gethin the Baptist out of town, please don’t go trying to rescue him and get us all into trouble.”

Annan’s heavy hand on the reins choked the palfrey back to a halt. In his veins, his blood grew thick. “Gethin?”

“Gethin the Baptist. That’s what they’re calling him back in the town.” Marek shrugged. “You weren’t thinking his name was John, now were you?”

Annan let his breath out. “Stay here,” he said and spurred the palfrey.

The name rang in his ears. Wasn’t it one he had once known as well as his own? For sixteen years, it was a name he had believed belonged to a dead man. Had Marek told him John the Baptist had indeed walked across the centuries to resume preaching, the numbness in Annan’s soul could have left him no colder.

At the city gates, Annan found him. The tourney crowd swarmed around and beneath the gate arch, laughing and yelling. Filmy twilight was falling over the city, and the gay festival colors had reverted to everyday grays and browns. A few men, already deep in their cups, staggered and swore, looking for one more fight before the day ended.

Just outside the gate, his back against the sand-colored bricks of the wall, the dark-robed monk stood atop the overturned half of a barrel. The shadow of his cowl hid his face, and his hands buried themselves in his opposing sleeves. At his feet, a score of people had gathered, faces upturned to hear him speak. His voice, deep almost to the point of hoarseness, rumbled across the distance, audible in tone, if not in word. He stood as if cast in stone; he did not move, did not gesture. Only the rise and fall of his voice held in check the throng that surrounded him.

Annan reined the palfrey to a halt just beyond the crowd. As the monk had watched him at work on the tourney field, he now watched the monk. His heart thudded against his breastbone, swelling until his chest seemed to hold nothing but its beat.

This monk, this Gethin the Baptist, could not be the man he had known. The Gethin he had once loved as a brother had died. He had been killed, murdered, cast out to feed the ravens and the dogs. For sixteen years, Annan had known this as certainly as he had known the weight of his sword in his hand. It could not be him.

He dismounted and led the palfrey to the edge of the crowd. He towered over the townspeople, the line of vision between himself and the Baptist unimpaired as the Baptist’s growl floated through the crowd to reach him.

“Thus saith the Patriarch, ‘By thy sword shalt thou live, and shalt serve thy brother; and it shall come to pass when thou shalt have the dominion, that thou shalt break his yoke from off thy neck.’” A white scar slashed the Baptist’s dark lips, twisting them into perpetual mockery. “And thus saith the Prophet—” The shadow of his hood tilted across his face, flashing a glimpse of shriveled, waxen horror. “‘Hear ye this, O house of Jacob, which swear by the name of the Lord and make mention of the God of Israel, but not in righteousness, not in
truth
.’”

The Baptist looked up, his eyes blazing with all the furor of a hunting falcon’s, and Annan’s blood stopped pumping. He knew these eyes. He knew this man.

The scar across the Baptist’s lips twisted harder, carving a serpentine into the albescent flesh. He stretched out his hands, and two young men lifted him to the ground. The crowd parted before him, scrambling out of his way, opening a path down their midst.

At the end of the path Annan waited. He had come to this country with the hope that his old wounds might find relief. Now, the oldest of his wounds ripped open before his eyes.

The Baptist limped toward him, every step contorting his body, his left hip collapsing beneath him, his toes dragging, then lifting, then dragging again.

“Gethin,” Annan whispered.

He knew now why, back on the tourney field, he had felt the urge to flee. Standing before him was the greatest enemy he had ever faced.

His past.

Chapter II

“SO YOU KNOW me after all.” Gethin the Baptist’s smile leered from the lower half of his face, somehow detached from the intensity of his eyes. “For more than a year, I’ve followed you, and yet you have never sought me out. Surely you heard my name.”

“I thought you dead.” Annan’s tongue cleaved to the roof of his mouth. Phantom images of long ago flitted through his memory:

Himself
—as a young
penitent
in the Abbey of St. Dunstan’s, bowed down beneath the grief of his sins, face against the cold stone floor.

Gethin
—kneeling beside him before the altar, praying the words Annan could not say for himself.

And then followed the images he had never seen with his own eyes, but which had, at one time, burned deeper within his brain than all the rest:

Gethin
—the skin flogged from his body, his bones broken into pieces, cast out as dead, because he had dared to believe in a cause.

“The years have changed you.” Gethin laughed, a single grating note. “But the strength of your arm and temper remain the same. Indeed, I am not surprised to find you chasing battles. Why have you avoided me all these years? Have you been running from me?”

“They told me you died at St. Dunstan’s.”

Gethin came nearer, and his twisted face glared up into Annan’s. “St. Dunstan’s. Now there is a name I am happy you remember. Tell me, do you recall any more names?”

Annan raised the fist that held the palfrey’s reins and clasped it in his other hand. The bruise in his palm throbbed. “You are much altered. Have you abandoned the quiet piety of a monastery to monger glory for yourself?”

“And you haven’t,
Marcus Annan
?” He spoke the name as if it were a curse. “Do you know why I have sought you out through all the kingdoms of Christendom? Why I have delayed my journey to Jerusalem, despite the desperate need of my presence to combat the enemies who gather there even now? Do you know why I sought
you
out first that I might warn you of what will soon come to pass?”

“I know not.”

Gethin snorted. “Indeed, you do not. There was a time, long ago, when you would have already snatched up the arms of truth and joined my battle against the hypocrisy of the Church. But no longer.”

The crowd shifted, their murmurs whispering at the edge of Annan’s hearing. Far away, down the road, hoofbeats rumbled. The palfrey nudged his arm with its muzzle, then shook its head, and the reins clanked against the bit. Annan stared at the Baptist, the evening’s warm breeze turning chill against his face.