Devil's Lair (8 page)

Giovanni turned to William.
“You don’t need him.”

“We do need him.”

Nadja said to Marco, “I saw
you in a vision. You were holding the Grail. It is your destiny to seek it, to
find it, to bring it back to the world. With the Holy Grail you will heal the
land and save the people.”

The stranger seemed
troubled. “How did you find me?”

“We found your villa in
Rome,” said the friar. “We spoke to your majordomo. He told us you had joined
an army moving south.”

“You’ve been to my house?”

“Ten days ago.”

“You will take me there,”
Marco said.

“It is not on our way.”

“It is now.”

“Rome is to the north. We
must head south. South, to Lake Avernus. That is our calling.”

“Not mine.”

Nadja said, “You must lead
us to the Grail. That is the prophecy. I have seen it.”

“I’m going to Rome,” the
knight insisted, “and you will take me there.”

“We don’t have time,” said
the friar. “Apocalypse approaches. The Fourth Horseman rides the—”

Marco grabbed Nadja by the
hair and pulled her to his chest. She screamed. He clamped a hand over her
mouth and held the dagger to her throat.

Giovanni froze, not knowing
what to do. If he tried to free her, the girl could be killed.

The knight fixed William
with a venomous glare. “You will take me home.”

The friar raised his hands
in submission.

“Yes,” he said. “I believe
we will.”

CHAPTER 8

His
hostages were bound and gagged and moving north, taking Marco to find his
villa, which he could not remember.

The old man walked ahead,
leading the donkey. His hands were tied behind him by the sumpter’s leash.
Marco and the girl sat in the juddering cart. The knight held the dagger in one
hand, the hazel switch in the other. The girl’s wrists were tied with a rope
from the tool bag. The poet walked two spans behind the cart. His wrists were
bound by the friar’s belt, which also tied the girl’s ankles. If the poet
lagged, he would yank her from the cart; if he walked too close, Marco kicked
him in the chest. The knight had improvised other bonds from bricolage:
stockings and ribbons, laces and leather straps. The red floppy hat was stuffed
into the poet’s mouth and tied in place with particolored hose, but the poet
still gave him trouble. The fool would not stop humming.

“Quiet, you.” Marco smacked
the poet with the switch.

The poet glowered, then
looked away.

Marco’s skull throbbed.
Blood sang in his ears. He could feel his eyeballs pressing against their
sockets. His throat was dry and his stomach churned. His muscles were sore all
over. Each new breath felt like a kick in the ribs. Worse, the back half of his
body ached from sunburn. His woolen clothes chafed his blisters and every jolt
of the cart was a fresh torment.

The pilgrims had found him
on a battlefield, the friar had said. Marco recalled neither the battle nor the
field. His former life now lay in shadow. This road would take him back, and
put the test to the old man’s tale. If these people had agreed to take him home,
he would not have tied them up or frightened the girl. Instead, they forced his
hand. Now they understood what it meant to disobey him. Now they understood
that he was in charge. Now they feared him.

Marco liked the way it felt.

He smelled the battlefield a
mile before he saw it. The road cut through a thick swell of bloated corpses.
Some lay with arms or legs pointing to the road as if they had been dragged and
dropped. His hostages must have cleared the road themselves on their way south.

The stench roiled his gut,
but he had eaten nothing worth a second taste. Behind him the girl began to
heave, then choke. He stopped the cart and untied her gag. She spat vomit over
the sideboard as he slapped her between the shoulder blades to clear her lungs.
When she could breath well enough to mutter a thank you, he tossed aside the
soiled cloth that had silenced her, reached into a garment bag for another of
the poet’s pretty silks, and tied a new gag in place of the old.

They continued on.

Nothing about this place
seemed familiar. Marco needed to look around. He thought he might recognize
some of the faces, if any faces remained. Most had been ravened already by
birds and worms.

“Is this where you found
me?” he asked.

The old man nodded. His gag
would not permit elaboration.

Marco ordered a halt. He
intended to take the hostages with him into the field, but that meant leaving
the cart behind. If he had more rope he could hobble the donkey, but he’d
already used the friar’s belt and the rope from the tool bag to fetter the
hostages. The sumpter’s leash was too short to trammel its legs, and Marco saw
no trees or bushes to hitch the donkey to. Only corpses.

That might work.

Marco stepped down from the
tumbrel and nearly collapsed from the pain. His legs were weak. The soles of
his feet were sunburned. He had not walked more than three dozen paces since
waking to the world. Putting a hand on the cart to steady himself, he waited
until the earth stopped swaying, then went around to the front and untied the
friar.

“Get in the cart.”

The old man obeyed him.

Feeling a little better now,
and ignoring the arguments of his legs and feet, Marco started to tether the
donkey to a corpse, but the animal kicked and brayed, so he abandoned the idea.
He would have to block the wheels.

He saw no rocks of
sufficient size. Most were smaller than a child’s fist. He considered gathering
gravel to heap beneath the wheels, but that seemed a great labor for a meager
gain. Instead, he seized a corpse by the ankles and dragged it behind the wheels.
He grabbed a second corpse by the wrists, to block the wheels from rolling
forward, but one of the rotting arms tore free from the shoulder. The flesh was
too far gone. Marco examined the limb.
Even better.
He wedged the arm in front of the right
wheel. Now the donkey wouldn’t stray.

He retied his hostages so
they could walk as a group. “Show me where you found me.”

The friar nodded and led the
way. As the pilgrims wandered through the desolation, swarms of flies rose like
a black fog over a sea of flesh. Maggots squirmed in every orifice. Marco
recognized no faces. He had no memories of this massacre.

After short distance, he
stopped.

“I was never here.”

The friar did not argue.

Marco spat on one of the
melting faces at his feet. Staring back at the old man, the knight said, “We go
to Rome. If you lie to me again, I’ll kill you all.”

They descended to the valley
floor and came to a narrow bridge guarded by two men. One was tall, the other
short. The tall man was hatchet-faced. The other was ruddy and round, with
sweat glistening on his cheeks above an unkempt beard. The men wore oddments of
armor, ill-fitting sallets and byrnies and boots, all dappled with blood. They
carried swords in leather on their belts, but the small man’s weapon was poorly
placed: too far back for a proper draw.

Scavengers,
thought Marco.

The guards stood before the
bridge, eyeing the approach. When the friar and the donkey came to within a
dozen feet of the sentries, the tall man raised a hand, palm out.

“Stop.”

The friar eased the donkey
to a halt.

Marco rose to his knees and
shifted his weight to the balls of his feet, ready to leap from the cart. He
was not sure his legs would allow it. He felt stronger with every passing hour,
but knew he was not yet whole. If it came to combat, his body might betray him.
He flexed his fingers on the dagger’s grip, keeping the weapon low, behind the
sideboard and out of sight.

“Toll bridge,” said the
taller of the two.

The short man nodded. “Have
to pay the toll.”

“What’s the toll?” Marco
asked.

“Depends,” said the tall
man.

Recalling something the poet
had said, Marco told them, “I’m on a mission from the queen.”

“Queen Joanna?”

The name meant nothing to
him. “Transporting prisoners,” he said.

“You don’t look like a
bailiff.”

Good point.
Marco was dressed in a torn undertunic.
Half his face was sunburned and his head was bandaged. “I was robbed.”

“Robbed, eh?”

“My clothes, my sword, my
papers.”

“Papers?”

“A carnet from the queen.”
The words were coming to him now of their own accord. They made little sense to
Marco—what was a carnet?—but seemed to impress the bridgekeepers.

“They take your money?” the
short man asked.

“What little I had.”

A shake of the tall man’s
head. “Can’t trust no one on the roads these days. Pity, that.”

“Real pity,” echoed the
small man.

The tall man took a step
forward, hand on his hilt. “Show us your hands.”

Marco let the dagger drop to
the blanket and raised his empty hands. Even weak as he was, he could take
these thieves, but he needed information more than corpses.

The tall man walked up to
the cart and eyed the hostages. “Them ain’t nobles.”

His partner followed two
steps behind. “That one’s got a bit of fashion on him.”

“You can have that one,”
said Marco. “He’s a poet.”

The short man sneered. “What
good’s a poet?”

“We’ll take the girl,” the
tall man insisted.

Marco shook his head. “The
girl’s mine.”

“The bridge is ours.”

“The poet, or nothing.”

The short man spat on the
road. “A poet is worse than nothing.”

“Agreed,” said Marco.
“Nothing it is, sirrah.”

The tall man drew his sword.
It was a rusty piece of steel with a ragged edge. Marco was unimpressed. A man
who didn’t know how to care for a sword probably didn’t know how to use it.

The tall man proved Marco’s
theory by stepping too far forward and brandishing the point in Marco’s face.
That was his first mistake. His second was holding the grip in one hand instead
of two, which left a weakness at the fingers.

Marco raised his empty
hands, palms out, as if in submission, then clapped them together on the flat
of the blade, his left hand forward, near the center of the blade, his right
hand back, near the tip. The hilt popped out of the tall man’s grip. The sword
spun through the air, landing behind the cart.

The tall man, startled, went
for the missing sword. Marco took up the dagger as the man passed him. He
plunged the tip into the man’s left eye. For a moment the body dangled,
twitching, suspended on the upraised dagger. Marco tilted the blade down. The
body fell, the eye socket sliding from the steel.

The short man stood his
ground, his own sword drawn and raised and clenched in a two-handed grip. His
mouth went slack at the sight of his fallen friend. His eyes grew wide. He had
trouble breathing. “You, you, you, you—”

The long blade quivered in
his hands.

Marco wiped gore from the
dagger. “Run away, little man.”

And the little man ran away.

CHAPTER 9

In the heart of the forest,
in the depths of the vale, a tangled canopy swallowed the sky. Marco saw a
faint light ahead and in that light he saw a house, a meager daub-and-wattle
cottage fronting the road. Behind it lay a field where sunlight harrowed a
desiccated farm. He saw no animals in the field, no cottars about the house.
The door was shut and the window shuttered.

As the cart trundled toward
the glade, Marco studied the house. It seemed ancient and out of place. A
memory flickered at the edge of his awareness: a small, laughing boy chasing a
dog from a flock of chickens. The dog barked, chickens cackled, feathers flew.
Not much of a memory, but there it was. And then it was gone.

The thought of hens made him
hungry. There was little food left in the cart, and Marco was tired of living
on porridge and groats. He craved coddled eggs and a flitch of bacon.

He also needed better
clothes. The tall man’s clothes were an awkward fit. The byrnie stank of a
corpse. The belt worried his sunburn. The boots were bloody and tighter than
torture. If the cottars were home, Marco would ask politely for a hot meal and
fresh supplies; if they were away, he would take what he needed and continue
north.

The house looked peaceful,
but Marco felt uneasy. Doors held dangers. Might someone else be waiting
inside?
These hills must be teaming with outlaws.
Marco wished he had better interrogated those men at
the bridge, especially the one who ran off.
Be
smart,
he thought, and decided to
investigate the surround before he knocked.