The Stone Rose (37 page)

De Roncier side-stepped nimbly and lifted his lips in a snarl. ‘You think not?’

Jean made another stroke. ‘They’ll know who did this.’ François lunged, aiming for the knight’s heart. Jean turned his opponent’s blade aside with a grace that brought a smile to Waldin’s lips.

‘Neatly done, brother,’ Waldin breathed approvingly, and started clearing a path towards them.

‘The Duke will suspect,’ Jean ground out, ‘when it comes to light that we’re at odds in his lawcourt.’

François shook his head.

‘Who else would dare break the Duke’s peace? This land is his, and his writ is absolute here.’

François held up a mailed hand. ‘If you’ll hold off a moment?’

Jean nodded and shifted his sword to one side, eyes wary, but listening.

A wolfish gleam fired in the ruined hazel eyes. ‘You must know that a band of pirates have taken to mooring their ships in the Small Sea,’ François said. ‘They’ve been working their way up the estuaries, of which yours is but one. They take cover in the forest. I think you’ll find it’s the pirates who shoulder the blame for this, not I.’

A blond hulk blocked Waldin’s view, and made a pass. Waldin turned it aside without conscious thought, and tried to forge towards his brother and the Count, but the hulk had a long reach and barred his way. Waldin swore, for his mind was set on purging the world of the parasite that was de Roncier.

His brother and the Count re-engaged. Little by little, de Roncier was driving Jean back to the gaily tiled hearth. Waldin frowned. Another step and Jean would be dancing on hot ashes. He saw his brother’s sword sweep wide of the mark, and his frown deepened. That was not his brother’s style, a four year-old could have done better. What was he up to?

But almost before that question had finished forming, Waldin’s febrile mind threw up an answer. Jean was not even trying. Staring at his brother, it dawned on Waldin that for months they’d been gazing at the face of a man who had already suffered a mortal blow and was scarcely keeping body and soul together. Behind the front, his brother had crumbled to dust. Jean had relinquished responsibility for military matters, and he had not merely been providing a bored brother with something to stop him twiddling his thumbs. The delegation had been total. Jean had had the stuffing knocked out of him. He had lost interest in life, he had given up. He remembered the moves – witness that brilliant warding pass he had made a few moments ago – but he was not choosing to use them. Since the day his wife had died, Jean had been a shell of a man.

Waldin flicked his wrist, and severed an artery in the neck of a de Roncier trooper. Petrified, the soldier stared at Waldin with the eyes of a man who knew that he had been dealt a mortal blow. He toppled slowly, soundlessly, his blood pumping into the rushes. Jean was practically in the fireplace. Stepping over the fallen man and forcing his way through the scrimmage, Waldin went to give him aid. It was far better to go on your own home ground, he thought grimly. Far better to go fighting for a brother you loved than to die on a stranger’s land for a cause you had no share in. He would have his warrior’s death, and it would be a burning, glorious, defiant death. He’d fight to the bitter end, and if he couldn’t take François de Roncier with him, he’d have to trust in God to see that that swine’s felonies did not go unrewarded.

Crouching in the doorway, Gwenn stared at a scene from the mouth of Hell.

Gone was the well-ordered hall she had sat and sewed in with her mother. Pallets still strewed the floor, mute testimony to the unexpectedness of the attack. Lying across the bedrolls were bodies; but the bodies were broken, bloodied bodies, and the sleep those men were sleeping was not one from which they would ever awaken. Men were screaming. Men were groaning. Men were chillingly silent. Transfixed with horror, Gwenn was unaware that her sister had left the women and was climbing down the winding stairs after her.

Catching sight of Roger, her father’s squire, for one moment Gwenn fancied him festooned with red silk ribbons. Then she realised the lad was beribboned with his own guts. Her gorge rose and she reeled back. She forced her gaze back to the conflict. She was rigid with fear for her father. She had to see for herself that he was numbered among the quick. And where were Waldin and Raymond? Were all the men she loved dead already? What of Ned? At first she could not mark any of them among the seething mass of fighting, living men. Her eyes were skimming the lifeless forms sprawled over pallets and rushes, when the fray cleared in front of her and she was granted a clear view of her father.

Jean and Waldin were standing hip to hip, measuring swords with a man whom Gwenn did not recognise. She had picked up enough knowledge of arms from her menfolk to know at a glance that the man’s hauberk and helm were out of the ordinary. This must be the detested Count de Roncier. He shouted hoarsely, and in an instant four soldiers were at their lord’s side, their swords directed at the St Clair brothers.

Her breath was coming in fast, uneven gasps. She tried to swallow, couldn’t. Though it was unnecessary, for the brothers had seen de Roncier, she tried to shout a warning. The words lodged in her throat. Her legs were unable to support her, and she sank to her knees.

A shadow fell over her. A blood-smeared face stared wildly into hers and her heart dropped and thumped about in her stomach. Under the red streaks, the face was pale, and one that she knew. ‘Ned!’ she blurted, giddy with relief, for she had feared that her last moment had come.

‘Get upstairs!’ Ned gasped, pointing with his sword.

Without his gambeson he looked alarmingly vulnerable. He had a helmet, but it was dented. His tunic was torn and hanging off one shoulder. His knuckles were scraped raw.

‘Ned...’ Sick with fear, Gwenn pinned her eyes on his face, for bloody and changed as her father’s captain was, he was at least recognisable. Nothing else in that hell of a hall was the least bit familiar.

‘Move, Gwenn.’ He was so concerned for Gwenn’s safety, that not only did he forget the title that was her due, he reinforced his command by giving her a bruising kick on the thigh. ‘Get upstairs,’ he said, and groaned in frustration when she didn’t obey him.

‘Papa!’ White as bone, Gwenn looked past Ned at the figures grouped round the fireplace. Ned’s fist clenched. ‘Papa!’ she repeated, on a rising note. She shot Ned a look of agony. ‘Where’s the glory in this?’

‘Gwenn, you
must
–’

‘This is butchery, not glory. Look! Five against two!’ Ned whirled round ‘Give them aid, Ned. Please.’

It was then that Katarin reached the comfort of her sister’s skirts.

‘Katarin!’ Gwenn exclaimed, and her hands came up to shield Katarin’s eyes.

‘I’ll help them,’ Ned said. ‘But you
must
go up. For your sister, if not for yourself.’

Gwenn nodded and, sword up, Ned dived back into the mêlée.

If Gwenn was rigid with fear, Katarin had slipped into another world altogether. The little girl’s sixth sense had informed her that today was going to be worse than the day her mother had died. Afraid that Gwenn might be stolen from her too, she had crept after her. The women upstairs had tried to restrain her, but Katarin had wanted Gwenn, no other would do. Katarin wound her arms tight as bindweed about her sister’s narrow waist.

Ned fought his way to the fire. ‘Sir Jean! I’m with you!’

Jean grunted acknowledgement. Both he and his brother had a crimson-tipped sword in one hand and a dagger in the other. They were fighting like Saracens, but it was only a matter of time before one of them went down.

‘Get out, Ned!’ Jean gasped between strokes.

‘Sir?’ Ned shouldered an iron candlestand onto one of de Roncier’s company, and found himself smiling when the man backed onto Denis the Red’s blade.

Jean jerked his head at the stairwell. ‘Gwenn...’

Ned’s heart missed a beat, for Gwenn had not gone up as she had promised. She and her sister were kneeling, and Gwenn was staring straight at them, watching them like a frightened rabbit watches the hound that is about to tear it limb from limb.

‘Get her out!’ Jean yelled. Sweat poured down his forehead and into his brown eyes. ‘Get them upstairs!’

De Roncier lunged, and a thin ruby line sprang across St Clair’s lean cheek. The blood mingled with his perspiration.

Clashing swords with a de Roncier henchman, Ned saw another drop to his knees. Waldin was giving a good account of himself.

‘To me!’ François de Roncier bellowed. ‘To me!’ And two more of his company sprang out of nowhere like dragon’s teeth in the ancient fable. Both these men were confident enough to be grinning, and one of them had been causing havoc with an axe. He was no stranger to Ned.

Ned gulped. ‘Malait!’

Recognition flared in the cool Nordic eyes and, astonishingly, the flailing axe paused. ‘Greetings – Fletcher, isn’t it? You switched horses once. I take it you’re not of a mind to do it again?’

The only response was a deft twist of Ned’s wrist, a trick Waldin had taught him. It sent Ned’s blade slicing through the air and wiped the smirk from the Viking’s lips. To save his nose, Otto leapt backwards and, slipping in some blood, went sprawling.

‘Fletcher!’ Jean roared. ‘Run, damn you!’ Breathing hard, he punctuated his words with wide, sweeping sword strokes. ‘God curse you...I’m commanding you... Run! Take Gwenn, and run.’

‘Wh...where?’

‘The woods. Christ’s wounds, anywhere but here! Do what you have to, but keep Gwenn and the children safe.’ Never had Ned received an order more to his liking, but he hesitated, and a razor-sharp blade whistled past his ear. ‘Well? Do you obey me?’

Ned put on a ragged smile, remembering how St Clair had warned him off his daughter. ‘Aye, sir. I’d die for Mistress Gwenn.’

‘I hope...’ Jean was tiring ‘...it won’t come to that. If...if it come to the worst...take them north... Relatives...north...’

‘Where?’

‘Gwenn knows.’ Jean gasped, and his cheeks went grey. The blade of his opponent dripped scarlet. Dropping his dagger, the knight clapped a hand to his ribs.

Ned started forwards. ‘Sir Jean!’

Waldin caught Ned’s left hand and thrust something at him. ‘Go, lad! Take this. Don’t let her look back.’ And the champion booted Ned in the small of the back, leaving him no choice but to race for the stairs.

Ned thrust whatever it was that Waldin had given him down the front of his tunic.

Jean flung a dazzling smile at his foes and made a dreadful pass a limbless leper could have evaded. François de Roncier’s men closed in for the kill. The final blow, when it came, was greeted with another of those extraordinary smiles.

Blackness. Tumult. Screaming. Pressed to her sister’s side, Katarin’s mind was spinning faster than a wheel. Her sister had made a blindfold of her hands, and had covered her eyes, so she could see nothing. She felt Gwenn’s body jerk as though she’d been hit. Someone screeched. To the child, the screaming sounded like the end of the world. Who was it? Not Gwenn? Not Papa? There was no comfort in the blinkered dark behind Gwenn’s hands. Katarin felt smothered. Was not death dark? A war had broken out in her father’s hall, and she had to see.

Impulsively, she shoved at Gwenn’s hands. They fell at the first push. Her hazel eyes blinked into flaring torchlight which made monsters of the men upon whom she gazed. Katarin’s heart banged louder than a drum and seemed to add to the uproar.

One of the monsters was tearing towards her. His eyes shone like blue lamps and his helmet was askew. His cheek was streaked with red paint, and there was more of it daubed on his hair. It was a moment before Katarin realised that the monster was Captain Fletcher. She whimpered. And because his expression was more frightening than the darkness beneath Gwenn’s blanketing hands, she looked beyond him and saw what no child should ever see.

She saw her father as the cold steel of his enemy’s sword was buried in his chest. Katarin saw everything – the sudden gush of bubbling blood on her father’s lips, the gloating triumph lighting the eyes of the shining metal man towering over her father, and the impotent rage which distorted her uncle’s face. She even saw her father’s final, serene smile.

How peaceful Papa looks, Katarin thought, in all this horror. Death sits well on him. And with a pang, she wondered if Papa would be able to talk to Mama now he had joined her. Katarin would like to be peaceful too...

Ned hauled on Gwenn’s arm, trying to lift her. Terrified that she and her sister were to be torn asunder, Katarin squeaked and buried her face in the warmth of Gwenn’s breast. She clung like fury. She’d seen enough.

Blackness. Tumult. Screaming.

‘Come, Gwenn. Come with me,’ Ned said urgently. Katarin felt herself lifted. She shuddered. Was there no peace left on the earth? Katarin only wanted to be quiet, and peaceful.

‘Take Katarin.’ That was Gwenn’s voice. Katarin screwed up her eyes in case they should open without her willing it. Didn’t Gwenn want to be with her? Releasing her sister, Katarin slapped her hands over her ears. She’d heard enough. Outside her own, small self, there was nothing. With eyes and ears closed, Katarin began stumbling about in her mind for a quiet place where she could hide from the ravening monsters. And while Ned carried her up the endlessly twisting stairs, she found what she was searching for. It was a refuge, a haven, deep in a secret part of her she had not visited before. It was heaven, for no one could touch her when she was there. She was safe. Her eyes remained closed. The rosebud mouth relaxed. Her private retreat was all brightness and calm. There were no dark shadows which might shroud the Devil. God was not there either, because since last August when her mother had died, Katarin had stopped believing in God. But there was peace in abundance, peace and quiet. And because peace was all Katarin wanted, she resolved never to leave her sanctuary; never, ever again.

Casting a final look round her father’s devastated hall, Gwenn noted, with the cold detachment of one who has taken more than she could stomach, that Raymond had fallen. Her brother lay on his belly in the rushes, still as death. His sword had been knocked from his hand, and his head was twisted to one side, brown hair half concealing a gaping wound across temple and ear. Even at this distance Gwenn could see it glistened with blood. The rest of him was pale as alabaster. The Archangel Gabriel could not help him now.