Winter Song (24 page)

“Let him go,” Aelfric roared in his companion’s ear. “Go
thrust a torch into the fire and light all the others. We will go on like this
all night if we cannot see.”

Since the “enemy” had already disappeared into the dark and
it was useless to pursue farther, the man-at-arms felt Aelfric’s suggestion was
reasonable. He had almost been wounded already by one of his own companions and
had stopped himself by a hair from cutting down his own best friend when that
friend bellowed his name to still another man who was ready to swing at him. In
fact, it had already entered this man’s mind that the only people he had found
with weapons were men of his own troop.

As he began to light torches on his side of the hall, light
began to blossom from others at the far end. Soon it was clear that the only
armed men were those of Alys’s troop, and the confusion subsided rapidly. Any
servant was easily recognized by his new and relatively clean garments. These
were sternly bidden to stop shrieking and were thrust away to huddle together
while the filthy prisoners were surrounded, searched for, and dragged from
hiding places. The man cut down near the door was dead. Several others and a
few servants had been slightly wounded or bruised by falling, but there were no
other bodies.

“Eight!” Raymond exclaimed. “Where are the other four?” But
before anyone could answer, he realized the prisoners had come up the stairs
from the lower floor. “Alys!” he roared, and ran for the stair.

Since the noise of the falling distaffs had already
attracted the men in her direction, Alys did not need to worry about being
quiet in freeing the one she held. She wrenched at it fiercely, stepping
backward and then sideways. At the third pull, the foot came free. Meanwhile,
she had been screaming for Bertha to get the other women to attack the men. It
seemed to her that her voice was lost among the general shouting and crying,
and she dared not move her eyes from the advancing men to see whether Bertha
had heard her or had retained enough courage in the midst of the hysteria to
come to her assistance.

She could not fight them both, however. Alys began to sob
with panic, but it did not prevent her from lifting the distaff, foot upward,
over her head. The man with the candle was foremost, and Alys fixed her eyes on
him. She knew she would have only one chance. If she struck him when he was at
just the right distance, the foot of the distaff would hit him. That was the
only part heavy enough to fell him. If she missed and only the upright made
contact, it would hardly hurt him enough to delay him.

As if she were two people inside one body, one Alys could
hear her own voice screaming amid hysterical sobs. That Alys looked at the
advancing candle and tried to judge its distance, but the other Alys, the one
who was screaming and sobbing, could not wait.

Nearer? Let him come nearer? No! Alys struck—and missed! Now
nearly mad with fear, she stepped back to raise her weapon again. With abnormal
strength born of terror, Alys lifted the distaff, the man lunged forward, hand
outstretched, and the distaff foot came down again, hitting true. The man
dropped like a log, the candle falling from his hand, the flame dying. This was
what Alys had prayed for, hoping that in the dark she would be able to run away
quickly enough to escape the second man—but he was too close. Just as she let
go of the distaff and turned to escape, he seized her left arm. Alys began to
shriek again with fear, but instinct brought her right hand to her knife hilt
and she drew the weapon. She had half raised it to strike, utterly without
thought. If she had been able to think, she would have known the gesture was
hopeless, that the man’s other hand must be already stretched to seize her wrist
and wrench the weapon from her hand. Fear hunched her together and saved her again,
for she held the knife unthinkingly close to her own body where his groping
hand missed it and brushed her side. Still unthinking, Alys thrust directly
forward with her one free hand to push him away as he groped at her side in the
dark.

As Alys was straightening her arm, she heard a meaty thud, and
her attacker pitched forward right onto the knife. He screamed. Alys staggered
backward under his weight, twisting aside desperately as he released her arm to
clutch at the knife in his chest. Since the attacker’s fall against her knife
had driven her own elbow into her midsection and knocked the breath out of her,
Alys’s screams had been cut off abruptly. This permitted her to hear Bertha’s
voice crying her name.

Although Alys could not answer, she realized the blow that
had felled her attacker had been delivered by her maid. The knowledge that help
was near restored her to sanity. In the next moment she found enough breath to
squawk Bertha’s name, and they fell into each other’s arms.

Both men were stirring. The one Alys had struck was groaning
and making scrabbling noises against the floor, seemingly trying to get to his
feet. The other was bending double around his agony but screaming more weakly.
Half-stunned by Bertha’s blow, he had fallen forward onto the knife, shoving it
far deeper into his body than Alys could have thrust it herself without his
dead-weight momentum. But Alys and Bertha did not know how badly injured he
was. They could see nothing, and the sounds of movement frightened them. Neither
was willing to approach to strike again, fearing to be caught. They backed
away, clinging to each other for comfort.

With the cessation of active pursuit, the maidservants had
also run together. Huddled in a tight knot, their hysteria diminished. The
violent shrieks died away to whimpers and sobs. Then, suddenly, the door burst
inward, knocking the man standing by it flat.

“Alys!” Raymond shouted. “Alys, where are you!”

“Here. Raymond, I am here,” Alys cried, letting go of Bertha
and whirling around, now carelessly turning her back on the men she had feared
so much.

Swift and joyful as her answer was, it was drowned in the
renewed cacophony of shrieks that rose from the maids. At first the cries were
merely the result of surprise on already terrified women. In the next moment,
however, the man Raymond had knocked down when he opened the door started to
rise. Casually, with a sidelong flick of the sword, without even turning his
head and still bellowing for Alys, Raymond took off the prisoner’s head. Then
the maids began to scream in earnest.

Raymond turned toward them to bid them be quiet and ask for
his wife, but his expression was not conducive to confidence. As one, they
shrank away, emitting even louder shrieks. Fortunately, before he did more than
take a few steps in their direction, a flicker of movement disturbed the
darkness ahead of him. He lifted the bloody sword, but Alys was not afraid of
that and ran right under it into his breast. Raymond, who had barely checked
the striking movement of his weapon, gasped with shock and clutched his wife so
hard she squealed with pain.

There were a few moments more of confusion while Raymond
kept asking whether Alys was all right and she could not answer for lack of
breath. At last, frightened by her silence, he relaxed his grip enough for her
to speak. Between tears and laughter, she assured him she was no more than
frightened and in the next breath warned him of the two other men.

Meanwhile, Bertha had heard Alys’s initial response to her
husband, even if he could not. Assured of safety and protection by the presence
of the lord, she had recognized that their immediate need was to be able to see
their enemies. Dropping the small table to which she had been clinging, she
followed on Alys’s heels, but not into Raymond’s arms. As soon as she could see
a little, she ran quickly to the wall and found a torch, which she thrust into
the fireplace. When it blazed, she went to light others.

The light and the fact that they finally recognized the
master who had never done them any harm quieted the maidservants. Raymond took
a torch from a holder and started toward the back of the chamber. When Alys
began to accompany him, he shook his head.

“Stay you here, love. You will get in my way. They are
unarmed and can do
me
no harm, but if one should seize you as a shield,
I would be undone.”

“They might not be completely unarmed,” Alys warned. “The
distaffs might be used as clubs, and one might have my knife.”

“Neither can do any good against a sword,” Raymond assured
her. “Now do as I bid you.”

The voice made the words an order that Alys did not dare
disobey. She watched the halo of light surrounding Raymond, saw the glitter as
his sword blade rose and fell, and uttered a small sigh of relief. One was
dead. But where was the other? Could he be hiding outside the range of the
torchlight? Raymond was not wearing his helmet. The mail hood would be little
protection against a smashing blow to the head.

Alys almost cried a warning as she saw Raymond stoop and
then go down on one knee. Common sense brought her hands up to stifle the cry.
If one of the men was missing, Raymond would be watching for him, not examining
the results of his own sword stroke. Then the horrible notion came to her that
she had forgotten to tell Raymond there were two men. She started forward when
that came into her mind, but just then Raymond rose to his feet and came back
toward her.

“One did, indeed, have your knife,” he said, holding it out
to her. “It was firmly planted in him. That was quite a stroke. The hilt itself
was buried. I must remember, my love, not to make you
too
angry.”

His expression was an odd mingling of pride, humor, and
distaste, but Alys was too shaken to notice. She shuddered.

“That was not my doing. I was holding the knife when Bertha
struck him from behind. He fell onto it.”

“Oh. Did Bertha brain the other one, also? I finished him,
but I think he would have died, anyway.”

“No,” Alys said with a satisfaction that showed in her
voice, “that was my doing. I hit him with the foot of a distaff.”

“No wonder you warned me.” Raymond could not help laughing. “I
had no idea that spinning was so dangerous an activity.”

Alys laughed shakily, too. “Only when the spinner is
desperate,” she said.

By then all the wall torches were ablaze, and Alys could see
the bloody shambles. She was no longer afraid, but her mind was still numb with
shock. She could not really take in the meaning of what she saw, but it
offended her. She turned on the maids, silent now but still huddled together.

“I never saw such useless creatures in my life,” she exclaimed,
“running about like silly hens and squawking instead of defending yourselves.
Now get to work, and clear up this mess. Carry the bodies down to the men
below, and scrub the blood off the floor and quickly, or whatever you feared
those men would do to you will be a pleasure compared with what I will do.”

“Is it not natural they should be afraid?” Raymond asked.

“Of course it is natural,” Alys replied sharply. “I was
frightened out of my wits myself, but that did not make me run about screaming.
There were only four of them. If two women—”

“Four!” Raymond exclaimed. “Where is the fourth?”

“I do not know,” Alys replied, looking about nervously. “Bertha
threw her candle at him in the antechamber. Perhaps he is hiding there or—”

“Stay!” Raymond interrupted again, lifting the torch he was
holding and going forward.

Fear gripped Alys once more. She knew that there were many
things in the fully furnished antechamber and bedchamber that could be used as
weapons. However, before she had a chance to think further, she heard Raymond
exclaim in horror or disgust. She ran in and gasped with shock. The fourth man
was there, just beyond the door, but he was no danger to anyone. His body was a
blackened ruin. The burning hair had set the filthy, grease-laden tunic afire
while the man lay unconscious.

Possibly the pain had roused him and he had tried to crawl
for help, but all he had accomplished was to allow the flames to envelop him
completely. Whether he was dead or again unconscious neither Alys nor Raymond
knew, but it was not worth considering. Raymond made sure with one sword
stroke. Alys shrank back, shuddering.

The gesture soothed her husband, who knew he should be glad
she had managed to protect herself. If she had not had the courage to fight
back, he might have come too late to save her from rape or death. Nonetheless,
he found himself uneasy. Alys had said she was frightened out of her wits, but
it was clearly not true. She had wits enough left to fell one man and plan to
repulse another with her knife. And she was calm enough, the emergency being
over, to castigate her maids for lack of courage and order them to clean up the
mess, sounding as if dead bodies and blood were no more than a heap of garbage
spilled on the floor.

Even while he moved to seek the fourth man, Raymond had been
wondering what he had married. True, he had been fed too full of shrinking
violets who found a summer breeze too rough for endurance, but he had not
planned to take a tigress to his bosom. Alys’s cry of horror and shuddering
retreat erased that image, at least partially, from his mind. She was so small,
and now that he was looking at her rather than for an enemy, he saw her face
was pale and her eyes enormous. Hastily Raymond thrust the torch he carried into
a wall bracket and pulled Alys toward him into a protective embrace.

She tried to bury her face against him, but there was no
warm comfort to be found in his steel-clad body. She lifted her head. “Who let
them out?” she asked, and then in a higher, more nervous voice, “How does it
come that you are here in the middle of the night? Did your meeting go ill? Are
you pursued? Is there an enemy—”

“No, love, no,” Raymond soothed. “There is no enemy, and my
business went very well, indeed. I do not yet know how the prisoners escaped. I
am here…” He hesitated. At another time he would have told the truth, but he
felt foolish confessing a weak sentimentality to a woman who had nearly killed
two men. “Matters were settled between Oliver and Marsan,” he went on, “and I
did not wish to linger lest anyone have second thoughts. Let them grow
accustomed to the new state of affairs. Then if there are rough edges, I will
try to smooth them away.”