Roselynde (26 page)

"Now do not begin to ask, 'What have I done?'" she said
tremulously. "The answer is still, 'Nothing.' You have not said a word or
looked a glance at me that spoke of love."

Simon ran a hand through his hair. "No," he agreed
drily.

There was danger in this seemingly calm acceptance. Simon was not
the kind of man who would calmly accept what he would consider an act of
dishonor in himself. Alinor passed her tongue across her lips, which felt a
little swollen.

"You cannot blame yourself," she whispered urgently.
"The only thing you did was to be the kind of man you are. Oh, Simon, if
you had known my grandfather, you would know why I had to love you."

Something stirred the mask his face had become. Simon knew he was
not so senile as to be attracted to young girls. There were more than enough of
them at Court and not one had aroused a single flicker of interest in him. If
Alinor had not been what she was—sure of her place and her authority,
headstrong and passionate—a rebirth of the image of the

Queen that he had carried in mind and heart for nearly forty
years, he would never have loved her, either. So great a coincidence, that she
should be his image of love and he, hers, was too great a coincidence. Simon
was not very religious, but he did not deny that God's foreknowledge ruled the
universe. He knew passion conquered him when honor barred the way. If God had
planned this union— If that thought was not merely a salve on a sick
conscience—

"I should have taken you to Court at once," he said
uncertainly. "Surrounded by old men all your life, what could you know of
what a younger one, even so little younger as I, could wake in you."

Alinor laughed softly and took his hand. "Do not talk so
silly. I had no idea I loved you until we came to Court and I had someone to
compare you with. It was only after I had danced and talked with all those
smooth-tongued, well-dressed, empty heads that I realized what a prize I had in
you. I assure you, I did not fall blindly into love with your pretty face. Nor
am I any grand lady who desires a sighing troubadour. Simon, bend your mind to
how we can come to marriage."

To Alinor's surprise he did not burst into angry protests that she
would then need to argue down. He began to gnaw his lower lip until she thought
he would tear it. She put a hand to his mouth to pull the lip from between his
teeth, and he kissed her fingers. Yet he did not look at her, but past her into
the black shadow cast by a small grove of fruit trees. Alinor was frightened,
thinking someone was watching, and she glanced over her shoulder. There was
nothing, only the gently moving leaves all silvered by the moonlight. The
silence stretched.

"No," Simon said at last, and his voice shook a little.
"I will do nothing. I will not think of it. If it is God's will, I will
accept His great gift gladly, but I am not sure. Likely I should go to the
Queen and tell her I have failed in my trust—"

"Simon," Alinor exclaimed, "I—"

"Do not threaten me," he warned. There was that in his
voice with which Alinor dared not contend. "I will not do that
either," he continued, "because there is something in what has
happened between us that I do not understand. I will leave it in God's hands.
Little ill can come of my neglect to speak. I will be gone tomorrow, or the
next day at the latest."

At that reminder, Alinor's breath caught. "Simon, you will
not seek out danger? You would not—"

He laughed at that quite naturally. "What? Lose the campaign
to die romantically—and fail the King's trust as well as the Queen's? Child,
you read too many lays. I go to fight the Welsh, and a dead man is a poor
leader."

The horrible notion that he might deliberately seek to die was set
aside. Simon might be the type to seek the peace of death if his emotions were
too disordered, but not if that peace would stain his honor or interfere with
his duty. Still, a troubled mind is not the best armor to carry into battle.
Simon's own household guard was small, but Alinor could provide three hundred
men who, upon her order, would fight around him. Alinor returned to the idea
that had brought her into the garden in the first place.

"Why did you laugh when I suggested the men-at-arms from
Roselynde should go with you? Is it so silly a notion? They are good fighting
men. Sir Andre will vouch for that."

"It is not silly at all. It is a very generous notion,
Alinor."

She looked aside briefly so that he should not see the fear in her
eyes. "How is it generous? They are paid to year's end already. I cannot
get the money back. Sir Andre could not know King Henry would die and I would
be taken into wardship. There they sit, eating my beef, mutton, and fish, fighting
among themselves, and plaguing the serfs' women. If you take them, they will
cost me less at least by eating the King's food, and they can plague the Welsh
women. But Simon, why did you laugh?"

He began to laugh again. "Because you are so young, and so exquisitely
beautiful, and you took me by the hand and led me into a most romantic garden,
all sweet-scented and silvered—and then you began to talk like a grizzle-haired
war comrade of fifty years."

"Say rather a white-haired war lord of eighty years and you
will be right," Alinor said, smiling. "It is my grandfather you hear
talking." Suddenly she put her arms around him and buried her face in his
breast. "But, oh, Simon, Simon, there is a young maid here also, and she
is very aware of the moonlight and the flowers and of how very near she is to
parting from her love. Have a care to yourself, Simon. Have a care to
yourself."

Simon wiped the wet from his face and wriggled his shoulders
gently to try to unstick his wet, clammy undergarments from his equally wet and
clammy skin. The gestures were totally unconscious as were the blasphemies that
trickled from his lips as he listened to the report his forerider was making.
There was no one and nothing in the village, if one could dignify the twenty or
so mud and wattle huts with the name village, ahead of them.

Nonetheless there was a hopeful aspect to the report. There had
been horses there, and not too long since. Such a village would not have
horses; the people were too poor to need riding animals, and the agricultural
work would be better done by oxen. So, some fighting force had been there.
Mortimer, Simon knew, was ranging out from Wigmore, and Braose should be even
farther south, somewhere west of Montgomery. The force here must be Welsh.

The sky above the dripping trees was the same uniform gray at all
angles. The cloud cover was so heavy that there was not even a brighter area
from which one might judge the position of the sun. Nor could Simon guess at
the time by the state of his appetite. His stomach was clapping against his
spine, relaying an urgent message that it required to be filled; but it had
been doing that for days regardless of the hour of day or night. The weeks of
campaigning had eaten up the supplies Simon had carried even though they had
been carefully husbanded, and the Welsh, true to form, left nothing behind.
Parties went out to hunt, of course, but with little success. The Welsh had
thinned the game with remarkable thoroughness and had taken the salted and
dried meat with them also.

Simon tried to measure the hours since waking, but his fatigue and
frustration made him distrustful of his own judgment. He could no longer tell
whether his sense of time was going more slowly or more swiftly than reality.
He had been dozing in the saddle, too, which made the time more uncertain. The
nights were often broken by raids or, worse, alerts that never culminated in
raids. If the Welsh were not far ahead and could be brought to a meeting, the
fight would do the whole troop good. However, the whole thing might well be a
trap to draw them into the forest so that the Welsh could fall upon them in the
dark.

In this situation it was better to be safe than sorry, Simon
decided. A shrill whistle alerted the troop and he started forward toward the
village. At least they would sleep dry tonight and, if the light held, the
hunting parties might bring back something. To be warm and fed would also lift
the men's spirits. Simon grinned as the thought continued; it would not lift
them as much as killing a few Welshmen. But that happy consummation could not
be far ahead.

Now Simon could look back on the past Welsh campaigns with
gratitude, especially the two total disasters. He was not a military genius,
but he never forgot a lesson learned in action, either. He had not lost a
single man to the divide-and-conquer tricks the hillmen played so well, and he
had not been led into any of the many traps that had been set for his men,
either. With dogged patience he had separated false trails from true, and there
were strong signs that they were approaching the base encampment of this area.
This time the Welsh had underestimated the "stupid" English as
previously the English had underestimated the "barbarian" Welsh.

Simon's single real concern was whether they could bring the Welsh
to battle before the rage that was building up in the men, whetting their
appetites for fighting, would turn in upon itself. Once that happened, the
troop would begin to quarrel among themselves and, even worse, be afflicted
with a sense of hopelessness. Simon had seen that destroy a whole army once and
he was watching keenly for signs of the rot. There were none as yet.

The men grew silent without command as some lightening indicated
that the trees were thinning. They were approaching the grazing land that
surrounded the village. Simon could hear the creak of wet leather as the men
hopefully loosened their weapons and two or three low-voiced wagers were laid
on whether or not they would be attacked. Simon did not think so, but he was
pleased with the lighthearted tone of the remarks and even more pleased that
the exchanges were as often between his men and Alinor's as between the members
of each separate troop.

The two groups had worked in very well with each other. In fact,
Alinor's men seemed almost more anxiously devoted than his own. Simon had to
grin even while the hollow fluttering sensation that took him every time he
thought of Alinor made his breath uneven. He wondered what she had threatened
them with if any harm should come to him. That Alinor! She was not taking
chances on her property being lost or damaged. Nor was she taking any chances
on losing track of its condition, he thought grinning even more widely. After
every encounter, no matter how minor, he had found Beorn

Fisherman beside him, examining him from head to toe. It had
puzzled him until he found the man questioning Ian about what he ate and the
state of his clothing. Then Simon realized that the two messengers bearing
letters from Alinor were carrying back word pictures of his well-being.

Doubtless, Simon thought, his grin fading, that was not all the
information they were carrying back. Somehow all the time he had been with
Alinor he had not taken another woman. Aroused as he had been by her touch and
presence, it had never occurred to him to ease his frustration on one of the
many whores that serviced the Court. There had been no conscious impulse to
"faithfulness." Simply, Alinor's proximity had quenched casual
desire. With distance that restriction had lifted. Simon had made no secret of
the women he took to his bed. He was not playing the part of a faithful lover;
to the best of his ability he was acting exactly as he would if no thought of
Alinor had ever crossed his mind. He tried intermittently to erase the memory
of that moonlit encounter, especially on nights when he lay awake watching the
moon arise above the treetops.

Tonight at least he would not be troubled by the sight of the
moon. Simon stopped at the edge of the field and scanned the huddle of huts
still some distance away. The foreriders, some of Lord Rannulf's
hunstmen-turned-soldiers in answer to Alinor's need, had chosen the path well.
The troop would emerge where the fields were narrowest between the wood and the
village. To each side, the fields were wider—too wide for bowshot accuracy. If
anyone wished to attack them here, they would need to show themselves. Simon
touched his horse with his heels and rode forward. There would be no attack.

When at last the wet wood the men had gathered had been induced to
burn, Simon squatted naked on the damp mud floor of the largest hut. He was
shivering a little and coughing when the wet wind blew the smoke away from the
smoke hole in the roof and into his face. His mind was nearly blank as he
watched the steam rise from his clothing as it dried. In the saddle bag lying
near the wall were a couple of handfuls of rusty grain and three or four strips
of leather-hard dried meat. Simon's innards growled but he made no move toward
that unappetizing fare. Ian and the younger men of the troop were out. With
God's mercy they would bring back something. Even a squirrel or a crow would be
welcome.

Simon laughed softly. Beorn had been in a little while ago to
offer him a nice, plump rat. He had refused, but only after a moment's thought.
Simon's shoulders shook as he recalled the troubled frown on the ex-fisherman's
face.

"I should have skinned it," Beorn had said, his voice
replete with self-accusation. "You would have thought it was a hare and
eaten it then."

Whatever Alinor had threatened them with had a remarkable effect.
Simon's laughter stopped abruptly, and he rose to his feet, his head nearly
touching the low thatched roof. A hubbub of voices indicated something unusual.
But no danger; there were no cries of alarm. Simon licked his lips. Mayhap a
deer had been brought down. A single stride brought him to the doorway.