Saga of the Old City (28 page)

“If I come this way again,” he said, “I’ll bring a hundred-mark or so dogs with me to guarantee safe passage!”

“You will need more than that to escape us again!” a voice called back. There was some laughter at that.

“Scurry, mouse!” another hillman shouted defiantly. “Else we might forget a dead man’s word!”

At that, Gord kicked his horse into a trot and slapped the girl’s mount as he drew parallel with it. Together they cantered around the boulder ahead of them, out of the narrow passage and onto a better path beyond, as the last rays of the sun painted the sky with a sanguine hue.

“You seem unaffected by what just occurred,” Evaleigh said in a small, distant voice.

“What is there to be troubled about, my dear one?” Gord replied casually. “After all, I defeated that fool, took his comrades’ jibes and insults, and we rode free! That is fitting… the way of things in such places as this.”

“I see,” the girl said softly, and then spoke no more.

Gord insisted that they keep going well into the night, for he suspected some of the hillmen would attempt to find them during darkness and gain revenge. He walked ahead, leading both mounts, as Evaleigh dozed in her high-backed saddle.

After they had traveled in this fashion for a couple of miles, the narrow track met another, which grew into a road. Gord was confident that this route must lead to somewhere they could stay, and he wanted to make good time. He woke the sleepy girl and jumped back aboard his mount. The tired horses were brought into a trot by much urging, and within an hour the pair rode into a tiny cluster of huts-a place they later learned was called Owlsthorpe.

Dogs barked frantically as they entered the place, and several lights were visible behind shuttered windows. Someone shouted out, demanding to know who trespassed in the community, and Gord replied simply that friendly and tired travelers sought refuge from the night. The only reply was a slamming noise, indicating that the inquirer had shut and probably barred fast the shutter he had opened to ask. All around them, the lights inside the huts were doused.

“At least we aren’t being attacked this time,” Evaleigh observed ruefully.

Gord shrugged to himself in the dark and moved his gelding ahead, peering at the dark shapes around them. Evaleigh followed, and they advanced to the far edge of the hamlet without further incident. Here they came upon a small farmhouse and barn that were somewhat isolated from the other buildings. Gord dismounted in front of the barn door and used his dagger blade to carve through the simple lock holding it closed. Gord and Evaleigh led their horses inside, Gord barred the door with his sword blade, and soon both weary wayfarers were asleep in the straw therein.

A pounding on the secured door awakened them a few hours later, in the early morning. An outraged owner demanded to know who was in his barn. Gord and Evaleigh roused themselves, brushed off a few bits of clinging straw, and greeted the fellow cordially. After a few bronze zees clinked into his hand, the man was civil, although by no means friendly or informative-that required a few more coins. Eventually they learned where they were, how far away the next community was, and how to get there.

After paying yet more for a meal, the two left Owlsthorpe and rode east through the remainder of the Flinty Hills toward Knurl and Count Blemu’s castle there. They saw a few gnomes, fleetingly, and met no threat during their passage through the region. The land became a series of green, rolling hills then, and travel was swifter.

In two days they came to the ferry across the upper reaches of the Harp River. They crossed the river just as the sun was setting, and Evaleigh told Gord that they were now only half a day’s ride from her home. That night they spent in a hostel near the crossing, making love desperately. Gord wasn’t certain why, but for some reason a deep melancholy had settled over Evaleigh during the last two or three days. She had refused to elaborate on her mood on the few occasions when Gord chanced to bring it up, sometimes passing it off as a fleeting thing and at other times simply ignoring, or pretending not to hear, his questions.

Gord felt himself beginning to be overcome by the same bleak mood, which was frustrating because he did not know its cause and because he had expected both of them to be happy now that they were so close to their goal. Their intimate contact in the hostel on the eve of Evaleigh’s homecoming heightened rather than lessened the mood, and he slept little that night, his brief periods of slumber troubled by evil dreams.

The next morning was bright and clear, and-much to Gord’s surprise and pleasure-Evaleigh seemed to have thrown off her sadness. Smiling and radiant, she urged him to hurry, and the two raced their mounts along the well-kept highway. At a crossroads hamlet, Faselfarm, they spurred left, Evaleigh laughing as stray fowl squawked and flapped as they got out of the path of the thundering horses, and dogs pursued them, barking. Soon Gord saw the towers and battlements marking Castle Blemu. They too were seen, and amidst a sounding of brazen horns, mailed riders came forth to meet them. Evaleigh shouted her name joyously, and the challenging patrol quickly became a guard of honor for the long-lost Lady Evaleigh’s triumphant return.

Chapter 21

A light shone in the distance, growing brighter as it came nearer. Then a loud rasping split the still, dark air, followed by the groaning creak of rusty metal grating on rusty metal. Torchlight flooded into the cell through the partially opened door and seemed, to the prisoner within its radiance, as bright as noonday sun. Gord shuffled forward to the full extent of the chain binding his left leg to the hasp set in the granite wall farthest from the door, shielding his eyes from the brightness, but eager to get the scant rations promised by this event.

Each day was the same for him, consisting of darkness infested by rodents, insects, and arachnids, broken only by this event-the doling out of a pannikin of water and a bit of food dished into his wooden bowl. This time he received a soupy mixture of vegetable peels and some unidentified stuff. Gord didn’t worry about the ingredients at all, accepting the stuff and swallowing it down quickly. A small piece of hard, black bread was included in his ration, but this he intended to save for later.

The heavy door was slammed shut and the bolt once again shot home with the familiar rasping bang. The torchlight receded, and soon Gord was in total blackness again. He picked up the piece of bread for safekeeping, sat back and, as per his routine, allowed his system to begin digesting the food he had eaten. Soon he would begin his silent exercises, and then came the game of bread and rats. Sometimes the rats won, and carried off their feast, but usually an incautious rodent provided Gord with the protein he needed to stay alive and reasonably healthy in this dungeon.

How he had come to be in this place was something Gord could scarcely believe and understand, no matter how many times he turned it over in his mind….

When they had arrived in the outer bailey of Blemu Castle, Evaleigh had been whisked off by the seneschal, with a covey of twittering ladies-in-waiting and maids fluttering after. Gord was taken to a small waiting room of some sort, while grooms led their sweating horses to the stableyard for care and stalling. A servant brought him a flagon of wine and some tidbits for his refreshment during his wait, and Gord settled back and thought about the speech he would give before Count Blemu when the time came for his audience.

After a dozen such mental rehearsals, however, Gord began to wonder was going on. It could have taken an hour for Evaleigh to ready herself to greet her father, and another hour to relate to him the events of her kidnapping, imprisonment, and rescue. But now the purple of twilight was showing through the arrow slit that pierced the wall of the antechamber in which he was cooling his heels, and two hours had dragged into more than twice that length.

Just as Gord was getting up to venture forth to see if he had somehow been forgotten in the excitement of Evaleigh’s return, the door to the room flew open, and armed soldiers filled the opening. An officer of the guard called him forth by name, stating that Gord was to come with him and receive his reward for his part in Lady Evaleigh’s rescue. Gord was somewhat surprised at the stern and official manner of these men-at-arms, but then he knew nothing of nobility and their ways, save what little he had learned through Evaleigh, so he shrugged to himself and complied without question.

The officer and his six soldiers took him to yet another room, somewhere in the interior of the great castle, and there he was ordered to divest himself of weapons. When Gord hesitated, swordpoints pressed against him from behind, and the officer laughed at the consternation Gord evidenced.

“That you are a baseborn thief and masterless villain, our lord knows well. We were warned that you are dangerous with sword and dag, fellow, so this ploy was simply to disarm you without harm to any of His Noble Grace’s loyal guardsmen.”

Gord couldn’t believe his ears. He tried to convince himself that this was not actually happening to him, but was merely another of the fretful dreams that had plagued him of late. “You are going to be in trouble, my good man, when this stupid error is set right,” he said. “I think you should speak with Lady Evaleigh immediately, and save yourself and your fellows further embarrassment.”

“Her Ladyship, knave, was with Count Blemu when he gave the order for your arrest,” the officer sneered.

This statement left Gord dumbfounded, and he allowed himself to be stripped of his weapons, searched, and taken down to the castle’s depths without resistance or further word. There the soldiers turned him over to the warden of the dungeon, and a gaoler thrust him into the small cell he occupied now, manacling him to the back wall as further precaution before locking the iron-bound cell door.

At first, Gord had expected Evaleigh to appear and free him from this imprisonment. Surely, he told himself, this was a terrible mistake. But the days plodded past, one after another, slowly and heavily, without such intercession., Evaleigh did in fact send a message to him after a few days-reassurance that she would soon do something to help him, passed on to Gord in a whisper by one of the servants who brought him his pitiful daily ration of food.

There were a few more such meager reassurances during the following days, and Gord benefited from extra scraps of food sent by the girl to comfort and nourish her confined rescuer and former lover, but nothing else was forthcoming.

After a month or so, even these deliveries stopped, and Gord stopped keeping careful track of days.

In the early stages of his imprisonment, he had allowed himself to languish in depression, not even thinking about trying to escape-though he possessed the means to do so. He simply sat, wasting away mentally and physically in the damp and darkness of the dungeon cell, waiting gloomily for Evaleigh to make good on her promises to help him.

Then, when he realized that the messages from Evaleigh had stopped, Gord’s mood changed abruptly. He resolved to find a way to revenge himself on both Count Blemu and his daughter for this cruel ingratitude.

The guards had searched him thoroughly, but had not thought to make him change his clothes-and it was virtually impossible for a guard to find all of the small tools a thief could conceal about his person. Gord reached inside his boot, pulled forth a length of wire, and quickly had the lock of the leg iron open. Being free of the shackle gave Gord the freedom he needed to commence a regimen of exercise. This he did, always replacing it around his ankle afterward so that no one would suspect what he was up to.

It was impossible for him, however, to open the cell door immediately, for the portal was secured on the outside by a heavy iron bar that dropped down in its locked position and prevented any prisoner from working it back. To move it, the flat bar had to be first lifted from outside and then drawn back-or so the theory went.

When not building his muscles and practicing his acrobatics and similar skills, Gord worked patiently at the wooden door, slowly scratching out an elongated rectangle with the wire he used to pick the manacle’s simple lock. Eventually, he worked a piece of wood out in a long, thick splinter, giving him access to the second layer of wood beneath.

He kept working at flaking away the wood behind the piece he had loosened, using dirt and spit to glue the splinter back in place each day before his food came. It would take a long time, but eventually he would have a hole through the door, a passage large enough to enable manipulation of the bolt. The cell door was three inches thick, but its own substance-the chunk he had worked free-would provide him the tool he needed to lift the bar, and the stiff wire would then push back the metal bolt. Gord would eventually be free of the cell-of this he was sure.

Had Evaleigh pleaded with her father to spare Gord? Recalling how they felt about each other, Gord could not help but think that she had. It was certainly Count Blemu’s knowledge of their intimacy that had caused him to react as he did. Why Evaleigh had told her father about this, or under what circumstances, he could not imagine. That she had told her father too much about Gord was certain, and for this Gord blamed himself. He should not have spoken so freely to Evaleigh about his past, and he should have carefully coached her on what to tell her father about the rescue and journey.

Thoughts such as these, giving Evaleigh the benefit of the doubt, made Gord feel good about himself and provided him some comfort, but did not lessen his desire for evening the score. What became of her promise of undying love? Her pledge of reward for her safe return to her home? And certainly the “gratitude” of Count Blemu was another score to be settled-with interest! Gord came to grips, in a fashion, with the realization that there had never been real hope for him and Evaleigh, although he still thought that some elevation of his station, followed by a test of some sort, should have been allowed him. Success in this test should have been the measure of his actual worth, rather than judging him by artificial standards based on the perceived value of inherited rank that was so prized by these aristocrats. Well, Gord intended to show them the merit of his lowborn station!