Behold the Dawn (30 page)

Marek turned to look at him. “Brother, tell him. Finding and killing this man cannot help him.”

Werinbert pursed his lips. “Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord God.”

“Sometimes vengeance is the only way to justice,” Annan said.

“Annan—” Anger, darker than any of his exasperated fits had ever been, hardened Marek’s voice. “I
know
you, and I know what this is all about.”

Annan leveled his gaze at him. “Do you?”

“Aye, I do! You fell in love with her. How, I know not, because I never thought you capable of it, but you did. And now the only thing you know to do to kill the pain is to wash it away in a sea of blood.” He stopped. “But that won’t work.”

“Finding this man and killing him cannot save your wife,” Werinbert said. “And it will not save you.”

“I’m past saving.” He turned to mount the courser, holding his sheathed sword out of the way as he swung his leg over. He looked once more at the hermit and at the cell beyond him where Mairead slept. Perhaps he would never see her again. And perhaps it wouldn’t matter, because he might never return.

Marek exhaled. “Annan.” He came forward and stood at his stirrup. “You think this is that bishop’s doing, don’t you?”

Gethin’s warning whispered in his ear:
Perhaps Hugh will even yet teach you the truth of my words about the bishop’s ravaging.

He steeled his jaw. “My fight is not with the bishop.” Mairead’s murderer he would find and kill. Hugh de Guerrant he would slay. But he
would not
repeat Matthias’s mistake at St. Dunstan’s. Roderic could wallow in his sins come the Apocalypse, but it was not Annan’s concern.

He stared down at Marek. “I’m trusting you.”

“St. Jude help us.”

Annan forced a nod and wheeled the courser around. Iron-shod feet drummed a rhythm upon the sod beneath him, and he set his face to the gray-shrouded green of the mountains. He didn’t look back; he would not turn back. But God knew they would need better than St. Jude’s help.

Chapter XXI

HUGH DE GUERRANT stood in the shadow-flooded cell of earth and cursed. His left hand clutched at the hilt of his sword. “Bertrand, you’re a fool. This is the last time. The
last
time!” He spun to face his unfortunate lieutenant.

Bertrand didn’t cower. As always, he would face whatever punishment Hugh meted out and accept it as his due. It took all the self-control Hugh possessed to keep from beating the man to a cringing, whining pulp right where he stood.

They had lost
again
. Bertrand vowed the Lady Mairead’s wound had been the artful blow Hugh had demanded—not a killing stroke, but deep enough to put her life in doubt.

But, apparently, Bertrand’s opinion of “art” was not up to Hugh’s standards. The wound had either been light enough that Annan had risked moving her, or so deep that it mattered not. Whatever the case, Marcus Annan and his company had fled, leaving Hugh once more with nothing but shadows to clench in his fists.

He ground his teeth. So often had he ground them since their arrival at this bloody hermitage that his jaw ached as though it had been smashed in by a
cudgel
. He ground harder.

Bertrand winced. That one tiny display of weakness was enough to make Hugh relax his expression, if only slightly. Little did Bertrand know how much pain that one flinch had spared him.

Hugh opened his hand upon his hilt, stretched the fingers beneath his glove, and turned to the window. “Fetch the hermit.”

“Yes, m’lord.” Bertrand stepped to the door. “Bring him in.”

Esmè, one of Hugh’s personal
retainers
from Normandy, and one of the men-at-arms provided by Bishop Roderic entered with the gawky little monk suspended between them. They threw him on his face at Hugh’s feet and left him there.

“Look at me.” Hugh kicked the man’s shoulder. Judging from the pained groan and the way the arm flopped, the joint was already separated. Hugh pressed his lips together. Perhaps now this foolish little Saxon would speak. “What’s your name?”

“I am Brother Werinbert.” The monk struggled to his knees and pulled both flopping arms into his lap. “You do wrong in persecuting me, my son.”

“I am not your son, hermit. I serve a higher authority.”

“But not the highest, I see.” The monk looked absurdly like a bird, his bulging eyes fixed wide open, and his wispy hair mussed into tufts above both ears.

“As far as you’re concerned,
I
am the highest.”

Werinbert shook his head.

Hugh took a step forward, bile burning in his throat. This hermit had better be careful; Hugh could extract answers just as exquisitely as his men. “Do you wish to continue what was started in your tunnel?”

“No, Master Knight.”

Hugh stopped and rested his hand once more upon his sword. “Good. Now tell me, how recently did your guests leave—a man, a woman, and a boy?”

“Are you so certain I had guests?”

Hugh shot a look at Esmè. The man-at-arms smashed his mail-clad hand into the back of the hermit’s head and knocked him to the ground. Werinbert writhed, his useless arms unable to push himself aright. He made it halfway up, and Hugh shoved him back down with his foot. “You grovel well, monk.” Slowly, he knelt close to Werinbert’s shoulder until he could speak in his ear. “Tell me. I
know
they were here. You do them no disservice by admitting that.”

Werinbert’s breath rasped. He turned his head, still resting it upon the ground, to face Hugh. “If you know, then I hardly need say.”

“Answer me but two things, Brother, and not only will I see that your wounds are given the greatest attention, but I will personally give you any price you wish.”

A hacking sound that might have been a laugh quivered in Werinbert’s jowls. “Do you really think there is anything I would want that you could give me?”

“I can give you your life.” He leaned closer, his lips almost brushing the stubble in the hermit’s ear. “
Tell me
.”

Werinbert laughed again. The sound degenerated into a groan as he forced his body upright. “That depends on what your questions may be.”

“Just this. Was the Lady Mairead killed? And where have they gone?”

Werinbert closed his eyes, and a red-green worm of a vein in his temple quivered. “No, Lord Knight, I cannot tell you.”

Hugh roared at him and backhanded him so hard he skittered across the floor. “Take him!”

Esmè and his companion dragged the hermit out by his disconnected arms, the monk hanging half-conscious between them, blood from his temple interfering with the Pater Noster on his lips.

Bertrand started after them, probably hoping to avoid a similar edict spoken on his behalf. Hugh stopped him with a chopping motion. “Stay.”

“Lord?”

Hugh glowered. “Don’t think this is over.”

“Nay, my lord.”

“There
will
be tracks, and I will find her.” He would not fail Roderic and Veritas. And he would not fail himself. He filled his nostrils with the smell of the earth-laden air and rose to his feet. He came within a few steps of Bertrand and waited until the other man flinched beneath his hot gaze. “But this is the end for you.”

Bertrand’s lips parted, then sealed.

“You’re to return to the bishop.”

The man-at-arm’s features relaxed just visibly.

“Be glad for what faithful service you have given me in the past. Deliver a good report to Roderic, and tell him what you like about your dismissal.”

Bertrand saluted, his fist against his chest, and waited for the leave to go.

“Tell the men to tend the horses as soon as they have finished with the monk.” Hugh turned back to the windy sky outside the window. “And then, we search for tracks.”

Annan lost the murderer’s trail even before the first day was out. He kept to a mostly southern route, determined that he should run across him sooner or later. Rumor placed the Crusading army at Jaffa, and he set his face in that direction, knowing that was where Father Roderic was most likely to be found.

Where Father Roderic was, Lord Hugh would eventually come; and where Lord Hugh was, there also would be his blood-filthy minion. Annan would stamp out two at once, and leave Roderic only to gape in horror.

He was three days from the hermitage and approaching Antioch when he saw the unmistakably gay colors and banners of a tourney. For the space of just a heartbeat, his stomach warmed. He reined Airn to a halt atop the hill and braced both hands against the pommel, watching the pennons of green and red and yellow snap in the wind.

The tournament was encamped on the outskirts of Antioch, looking for all the world like a little city of its own, differing from its greater sister only in the glory of its spectacle and the transience of its dwellings. He could hear the clatter of arms practice, the stamp of restless hooves, and he smelled the smoke that came as much from the fire suddenly kindled within his own blood as from the dry wood burning in front of the various tents.

Airn lifted his head, ears pricked, and blew through both nostrils. Without looking down, Annan patted the courser’s shoulder. “Aye. The first sight is like that. One gets used to it.”

But why any sight at all? His brow furrowed. Since his arrival in the Holy Land, he’d had it on good authority, more than once, that this sort of thing wasn’t looked upon too highly by either man or God. Mayhap the Saracens were sponsoring it in an effort to lure a few more Christians to Hell. The curl of his lip was as close as he came to laughing at his own joke.

He touched his spur to Airn’s side, and after one more snort, the horse lowered its head and started down the hill.

Annan detoured through the tourney camp on his way into the city. He kept Airn to a walk, his own shoulders hunched, as much to prevent anyone from recognizing him as from weariness.

The storm from the mountains had followed him to the seaside, and the clouds sagged with the humidity. The rain would descend soon, probably before the day was out.

A freckled squire walked past with two gaily bedecked horses, and Annan turned his head, watching them until they were far down the muddy alley between the tents. A burly, sun-darkened servant raised an eyebrow at his curiosity, but Annan let the look pass without even a frown.

Right now he had the feeling—a feeling every bit as old as he was himself—that everything would be right with the world if only he could gallop across a melee field, sword in hand, his legendary prowess clearing the field before him like the wind against a pile of chaff.

But no. He filled his lungs with the wet air, making himself douse the fire. All
would
be right with the world—for a few hours. But those few hours would just add to the cache of hours he had been gathering all his life, the cache that had held his sins from the very beginning.

He turned away and rode on. There would be no tourney this time. For once in his life, he had a greater purpose upon which to spend his rage. He pricked Airn’s side again, and the courser broke into a trot.

Even still, it beckoned.

Annan found an inn on the edge of town, close to the tourney, where the competitors’ gossip would be rifest. He left Airn bedded down in the stable and sought an empty table amid the shouted jests and dancing lantern shadows.

Sitting with his sword arm to the door, he nursed a pot of watered-down ale and waited until the innkeeper’s wife slid a wooden trencher onto the table before him. “Eat hearty, luv.”

He leaned back just enough to keep out of her way and grunted his reply. The simple fare of black bread and hard cheese was hardly the best he’d seen proffered during a festival week, but as he stared at it in the wavering light, it didn’t really seem to matter. His teeth ached, and even the motion of swallowing his ale hardly seemed worth the effort.

He swirled the dregs, wondering absently how much sludge he would find in the bottom. Someone at a table behind him erupted in raucous laughter, but he afforded them not a glance. It was careless to ignore his surroundings, he knew. If he’d ever caught Marek doing the same, he’d have scalded the laddie’s ears.

But he was tired. He was losing his edge. And if that was something to be worried about, he couldn’t remember quite why.

He sighed and rubbed his face. Sleep. He needed sleep. Things would be clear—or at least as clear as they ever were—come morning. He drained the last of the ale, and as he reached to gather his meal into his purse, a rosy-faced little knight stepped up to one of the empty chairs. “Mind if I join ye, good master?” His eyes twinkled in the redness of his wind-slapped face.

Annan nodded. “Make yourself welcome.”

“Thankee.” The man set his beaker on the edge of the round table and pulled his chair in close. He propped both elbows on the table, took a long draught of his ale, then peered at Annan. “Here for the exhibition then, are ye?”

Annan shook his head and pulled the flap of his purse down over his supper. “I think not.”

“Pity. You’ve the look of one who could be doing a fine job of exhibiting.” The man laughed and sipped his beaker. “If you haven’t an invitation I shouldn’t think ‘twould be too hard for a man of your sort to obtain one. They’d be glad to have ye, no doubt.”

“No doubt.” He pressed both hands against the edge of the table, ready to rise to his feet. But then he stopped and gave the knight another look. Here was as good an opportunity as any to seek a few answers. And this fellow was a good bit more talkative than the likes of the sullen innkeeper.

He settled back down and pulled his chair in closer. “Why’s there a tourney here at all? In the Holy Land, during a Crusade?”

“Not a tourney. As I said, ‘tis an exhibition.”

Annan’s brows came together. “Why? Is the army here?”

“Nay. Just some bishop or other.”

The hair on his arm prickled. “What bishop?”

“Roderic, I think. An advisor to King Richard.”

“Roderic.” Annan slumped against the back of his chair.

“That’s right. Not that I rightly care, you know. After all a bishop’s as good an excuse for a tournament as any other, hey?” The knight smacked his lips. “A little bit of play between battles is just the thing, I say, wot?”