Camber the Heretic (71 page)

The man bowed his head, a sob catching in his throat. “I couldn't tell, my lady. It was too dark to see faces. Mercifully, too dark.”

With a little whimper of dread, she seized his near boot and pulled it out of the stirrup. “Get off. Give me your horse. And stay here with the children until we send it's safe.”

As she spoke, the man was obeying, jumping off the animal on the other side and scurrying around to make a stirrup of his clasped hands. Ansel gaped at her, shocked, and urged his horse closer.

“Evaine, is this wise, in your condition? The child—”

“What of my other child, my firstborn?” she countered, struggling to raise her bulk into the saddle and settling there with a sigh of relief. “Aidan may be down there. And if he is, he may still be alive. I have to find out.”

With a shake of his head, Ansel grabbed a torch from one of the guards and moved out in front of her. “All right. Thomas, you and Arik stay here with the litter and the sumpter horses. You can begin moving down into the valley as soon as it's a little more light, but don't bring the children inside until I tell you it's all right.”

Thomas, who had no desire to see the castle again, nodded vigorously. “Aye, m'lord. You don't want these little ones to see what's down there.”

The children, seven-year-old Rhysel and the baby Tieg, peered sleepily out of the litter, and Evaine blew each of them a kiss.

“Stay here with Thomas and Arik, darlings,” she said tightly. “They'll bring you to Mummy as soon as they can.”

Young Rhysel, golden-haired and wise for all her seven years, gazed up at her mother guilelessly. “Are you going to look for Aidan, Mummy? I don't think he's down there.”

“We'll see, Rhysel,” she managed to murmur, though her heart sank at the implication of her daughter's words.

Then, with a slight wave to the children, she was gathering the reins of Thomas's chestnut in her cold-numbed hands and kicking the animal into a painful trot down the slope to the valley below, Ansel scurrying to get in front of her in case her horse should slip. Behind them came the other two attendants, each bearing his torch, the four of them making a tight little knot of shadow and fading brightness as they picked their way down the hillside far faster than it was safe to go.

The first light of true dawn was just beginning to stain the snow around the castle as they approached the gatehouse, but already they could see some of the previous day's gruesome work. Outside the walls, six or eight mail-clad bodies lay in silent, snow-shrouded heaps where they had been thrown off the castle walls to die on the rocks below. Amid the splintered floes of ice in the moat, several more bodies floated just below the surface, and in one place a bloated face was lodged beneath a clear patch of ice, the eyes open and staring in death. Evaine controlled a shudder and pulled her cloak more closely around her as she urged her horse to take its first steps onto the lowered drawbridge.

The attackers had burned the castle, in addition to their other bloody work. Timbers of the guardroom above the gatehouse had collapsed in a still-smouldering tangle, nearly blocking one half of the gateway, but it was inside that the fire had done its major work. The roof of the tower keep and great hall were still smouldering, and the barracks, which had been built of timber against one curtain wall, was nothing but a charred heap of support beams, and still burning. The barracks door, barred from the outside, still stood in its jamb, mute evidence of the fate of those who had been inside. Bodies dotted the castleyard, each given a merciful shroud of new snow during the night, but the snow had not been able to cover the cloying stench of burned flesh hanging heavy in the air, or the scent of blood.

With grim determination, Ansel swung down from his horse and began checking the closest bodies, the hand on the hilt of his sword increasingly white-knuckled as he and the two guards found death after death, each more grisly than the last.

Several of the men had been stripped and dragged behind horses, so that there was scarcely an unbroken bone or a scrap of skin intact on the cold, bloody bodies. A venerable, silver-haired old priest had had his hands and feet cut off and his eyes gouged out, and had been left to die of blood loss in the snow—which was, perhaps, one of the more merciful forms of death.

In the kitchen yard, Ansel came upon the bodies of two servant girls who had been raped and then split open from crotch to breastbone with swords. One of them had been big with child, and the dead infant lay in a pool of congealed blood beside its mother, nearly cut in two by the same blow which had ended her life.

He was violently ill at that, retching repeatedly onto the snow until there was nothing more in his stomach to vomit up. As he regained control of his rebellious gut, wiping his face with a handful of clean snow to try to clear his head, he thought he had seen the worst. Then he spotted a thin young form standing more or less upright in the yard before the stable. Somehow he knew it was Aidan, even from that distance and in the dim light.

He whipped off his cloak and managed to wrap the small, naked body in its folds before Evaine saw him, to ease the pathetic little form from the stake which had impaled it and lay the boy out on a clean patch of snow. Only the face was unmarred, the pale golden hair riffling slightly in the cold morning breeze which began to rise even as Evaine fell heavily to her knees beside her son. Though the eyes were closed, at least sparing her that, the body was frozen in the configuration of its terrible death, the white skin of chest and limbs criss-crossed with the marks of the scourging he had suffered before his murderers went on to other sport. From this angle, Evaine could not see the damage done by the stake, but Ansel was not quick enough to place his body between her and the implement of her son's death, and he saw her blanch as she glanced at the bloody wooden upright and saw the slick of his blood frozen around the base.

He could not bear to look at her as she bent over the boy, her golden hair shifting like a pale, metallic curtain around them as she took the still-beautiful face between her hands and stared at the closed eyes. Still fighting down a terrible sickness of heart as well as of body, he looked away, another part of him wondering why Aidan had been done to death in this manner, and here, in the stableyard.

Then, in the shadows at the entry to what had been the stables, he saw why. Stunned, his jaw working convulsively in his effort to maintain control, he rose and crossed slowly to the stable doorway. Now he knew what had happened to Adrian MacLean.

If the captors of the castle had been brutal with Aidan and the castle's garrison, they had been savage with the castle's lord. They had beaten him, like Aidan, but that was the very least of the atrocities to which they had subjected poor Adrian. He had been stripped and flogged, branded with hot irons over a great deal of his torso, and even his eyelids deftly removed so that he must see every further act of wanton cruelty to the bitter end. They had tied ropes around his wrists and ankles and lashed him to the uprights of the stable entrance, hoisting him off his feet so that he hung spreadeagled a few feet off the ground. Whether they had castrated him before or after opening his belly to let his innards spill out, Ansel could not tell.

In a terrible flash of insight, he guessed at their intentions: degradation and torture for the lord of the castle, both in his own person and by being forced to watch the torture and slow death of the boy they had taken for his son—for Aidan and the still-missing Camber MacLean were similar enough in appearance to be brothers rather than cousins.

With a hoarse cry of outrage, he crossed the remaining steps to the stable entrance and drew his sword, to begin hacking at the ropes which bound Adrian's ankles and wrists. When the last rope was severed, and the frozen corpse fell to the bloody ground below, he turned and raced back to where Evaine still knelt with the body of her dead son cradled against her swollen abdomen and began hacking at the stake, his breath sobbing in his lungs, until the stake was chopped in two and lay in a pile of wood chips and blood-reddened snow. Then he sank to his knees and wept, his hands braced on the quillons of the sword and his head bowed in bitter grief.

When he looked up, Evaine was recovered sufficiently to begin looking around dazedly. Bartholomew, the oldest of their men-at-arms, had removed his cloak and spread it over Adrian's body. Damon, the other guard, was checking a pair of corpses lying near the ruined gatehouse, but then Ansel saw him look up at the raised portcullis and freeze for just an instant, then scramble to his feet and gaze upward into the shadows with a look of new horror on his face.

“Lord Ansel!” the man's cry came, almost strangled in its emotion.

Ansel lurched to his feet and ran to Damon's side, following his upturned gaze high among the smouldering beams of the collapsed guardroom floor. A pair of naked legs dangled, the toes flexing jerkily on one bruised and bloody foot. Up a little higher, he thought he could see a small white hand outstretched at an odd angle, the fingers cramped and clawlike and also twitching.

With a bellow for Bartholomew to attend them, Ansel began scrambling over the smouldering debris of the fallen timbers, accepting a leg up from Damon as he climbed. He reached a point where he could swing up on the portcullis, using its wooden crossbars as a ladder; but as he drew nearer to what he had seen from the ground, he almost faltered in his climb.

Vaguely he was aware of Damon and Bartholomew watching from below, of Evaine joining them, her face upturned in dumb amazement, but he dared pay them no more attention than that, for there
was
life above him, tenuously held, but there.

The marauders had crucified Camlin MacLean, Adrian's son. Ansel might not have recognized him, had he not known the boy so well from summers spent at the same family retreats. They had nailed him to the portcullis, hammering heavy spikes through the slim wrists and into the dense timber backing of the portcullis grid, before hoisting it aloft and setting the gatehouse afire. And of course, before that, they had stripped and beaten him and perhaps committed other atrocities upon his young body that Ansel could not see, though he could guess at what might have been done.

There the marauders had left him to die, barely standing on tiptoe on one crossbar of the portcullis until fatigue should force his legs to give way and the full weight of his body hang suspended from his arms, gradually to collapse the chest and suffocate him.

But they had not reckoned on the action of the fire in the gatehouse above, sending the timbers crashing down around their victim, and they had not reckoned on young MacLean's massive will to live. For somehow the boy had managed to swing his left leg up and over one of the fallen beams, to support the bulk of his weight there instead of on his arms, and to brace the other knee against a second beam. The pain must have been excruciating, for he would have had to dangle with his full weight on his arms until he could work up enough swing to gain the support of the fallen beams, and every tiny movement would have been agony.

There would have been danger of burning, too, though the fire did not seem to have gotten terribly near. In fact, the warmth from the fire was probably what had thus far saved the boy from dying of exposure. What a miracle of coincidences seemed to have conspired to save at least this one young life amid the other carnage!

Ansel gained the boy's side and touched the bruised forehead, probed, felt the answering, groggy response of dim awareness. With a few orders snapped to the men waiting below, he sent Bartholomew to find tools for somehow removing the nails from the boy's wrists, while Damon came aloft to locate the portcullis mechanism and slowly begin lowering the grille to the ground. Working quickly, Ansel cleared away as much as he could of the debris that might interfere with the smooth descent of the portcullis, finally hooking one arm through the grillework and supporting the boy's body with the other.

The boy moaned and passed out fully as his weight was shifted, but Ansel knew that it was for the best. It took nearly a quarter hour to free him, once the portcullis reached ground level. By the time they had wrapped him in Damon's cloak and Bartholomew had carried him into the lee of a wall, out of the wind, he had begun to regain feverish consciousness. Evaine had torn strips from the edge of her under-shift while they worked to get him down, and had bandaged the mutilated wrists, but blood was soaking through. While Bartholomew stripped down to his tunic and held the cold little body close against his chest for warmth, Ansel and Damon began rubbing the boy's legs and upper arms in an attempt to restore circulation. Evaine knelt beside them and gently touched the boy's brow, but he tossed his head and nearly threw off her hands.

“Can you help him?” Ansel asked, laying another cloak over the boy's bruised and blood-streaked torso.

“I don't know,” she replied. “He has a great will to live, but I'm not a Healer. Camlin, can you hear me? Camlin, listen to me,” she insisted, as the swollen eyelids flickered open and then were closed almost immediately with the pain of returning consciousness.

Damon unstoppered a water flask and held it up, and she nodded.

“Just a little for now, Camlin,” she whispered, bracing herself to reach out with her mind and take hold of the pain as the boy managed several tortured swallows.

Camlin gave a few pathetic whimpers, but slowly he began to relax under Evaine's touch and she knew that she was getting through, that there still remained a will to help, as well as a will to live. More forcefully, she reached out and intensified her hold on the edges of his mind, nodding a little in confirmation as his shields slipped a little further and he responded.

“Camlin, can you hear me?” she whispered. “Is the pain a little less?”

Slowly, painfully, the boy opened his eyes—eyes so like Aidan's—his breathing ragged and tentative from the strain of overtaxed chest muscles, but apparently with his discomfort at least a little controlled.