H'ard Starts: The Early Waldrop, page 7
Jean came to life in a blaze of action. His foot swung up, catching my twin in the stomach. The impostor doubled over and fell. Jean came to his feet just as the impostor rose and drew sword. He stepped back, drew his rapier with a smooth motion and parried the impostor’s thrust. It was impossible, but somehow the shot fired by my twin had missed Jean. He had only pretended death to catch the impostor off guard!
All eyes were on the combatants; never had I seen such swordplay! The impostor skipped back. Jean feinted, then bored in with motions too swift to follow. The impostor lunged, and Jean barely saved his face with a parry from the basket-hilt of his rapier. The high whine of steel on steel filled the ballroom as the two players of the deadly game moved and danced. Then the impostor thrust, and Jean’s sword flew in under his guard. The bloody point of Jean’s rapier came to sight between the impostor’s shoulder blades. His arms went limp, and Jean stepped back, empty handed. His sword, like an arrow, was thrust through his foe’s body.
For an instant, my mirror-twin clung to the rail. Then he fell back, his feet came off the floor, and he fell twenty feet to the ballroom floor, landing with a dull thud. Jean’s rapier snapped under the impact.
Later, as Jean and I made our way back to the barracks, he explained to me how he had found me in the tavern.
“When I was hit on the head,” Jean explained, “I went very limp. My friend, I consider myself a brave man, but I have never thought it becoming to me to be dead. I have always thought that I could do more for people alive, so I lay very still until all of our attackers had left, thinking me dead. Then, following you to the tavern, I … eh … acquisitioned some garments from one of the lower class there. Obtaining some putty and the eye patch, I modeled my face after that of a delightful little rogue I once dueled. Quite simple, really,” Jean said, twirling his mustache.
“But how did you discover the identity of the impostors?” I asked.
“You remember that each time jewelry was stolen,” Jean started, “it was after an affair of state or a ball that it was found to be missing? That, and the fact that no one of low character was seen at these affairs led me to believe that some noble or military person had perpetrated the robbery. The more I thought on it, the clearer it became that it was the work of a master impersonator. Then I remembered something that had slipped my mind for days. Unfortunately, I thought of it at a most inopportune time: during the attack in the alley. Do you remember that frightful affair we attended last week? The one thrown by that Duchess visiting her summer villa?” he questioned, a twinkle in his eye.
“Ah, yes!” I answered. “But it wasn’t so frightful, as I recall. There was a young la… yes, I remember it. Why?”
“Do you remember the Duchess telling us how wonderful it was to see you and me, Anjou, and the other members of the Brotherhood?”
“I vaguely remember,” I said, still failing to see the point.
“ … and how nice it was to see Pierre and the young lady with him?”
I clapped my hands to my head. “Pierre! Pierre? But he had hurried off late that afternoon, telling us that he had received word that his mother was ill! Pierre was nowhere near Paris! Why, that was the impostor! But why should they pick me? Why didn’t they detain me by some other means?”
“For one thing,” Jean said, “this was to be their last theft. They needed someone who could be trusted by all. Not even the Count would object to your being upstairs, for as everyone knows, your honor is spotless. For another thing, he had to study your face carefully. We owe the solving of the thefts to your impossible face!” Jean laughed. He dodged, and my fist just missed him
“But come, Charles,” he said, unconcerned, “we must go by the weaponer’s. I fear I have broken my best rapier. And,” he said. scratching his sides, “I want a bath and to get out of these dreadful clothes!”
Vale Proditor!
Prologue
Geldric came frothing like a mad dog into the kitchen of the great hall, cursing and raging in his anger, and behind him the noise of pursuit closed like the sound of doom, each scream or shout or sound of blows making him wince and throb that much more.
The kitchen maid dropped the knife she had been using to peel potatoes and screamed at the sight of the wizardling in such a rage. She put her hands to her face as a shield and tried to think what she could have done to deserve the beating she was expecting, such as the ones Geldric sometimes handed out to those too slow for his liking.
Instead she saw the haunted, wild look in his eyes and heard the mumbling from behind his bearded chin as he stepped past her and went to the larder where he flung open the cabinet doors. Then dimly to the girl’s ears came the skirl of steel on steel, screams of agony, shouts of joy, and the padding of running feet. The maid then dimly realized the cause of the uproar – Lord Bruce had returned to claim his own.
Three years before, she remembered, the Duke of Westsan had gone awayto the Holy Wars with Richard Coeur de Lion and the other lords and nobles of England and Eire, leaving his younger brother, Geldric the Scholar, with the duties of the kingdom. Geldric at first had given nominal power to the old retainer lords who owned manors on Lord Bruce’s estate, and to the Duchess, so that he could have more time for his studies, and ever and anon would messengers come from the great monasteries and centers of learning, bringing with them books and documents which Geldric read ravenously. At times between the messengers, he would pace the halls of the castle and watch the horizon for sign of riders. Then slowly a change had come on Geldric. A new light came into his eyes. The messengers who brought the books wereno longerfrom the monasteries, but from places not named, and whenasked they would say, “I come from my master in the East, far beyond the Holy Lands.” Geldric then had taken more and more of the tasks ofthe dukedom on himself, until his power equaled that of the Duchess.
The maid remembered the day that Geldric received the messenger dressed all in mail and still wearing the accoutrements of the Crusader. After the conference, Geldric called together all the people of the dukedom, and from the high seat of the great hall he told them that their lord Bruce lay dead in the Holy Land. As was his right, he took then the title Duke of Westsan and began his reign. In a few weeks, he had hired mercenaries from Gascon, had forced the people into submission, and had taken the Duchess as his wife, forcing the abbot from a nearby poormonastery to perform the wedding.
Then had come the reign of fear and darkness in the land, and the old retainers were pushed off their holdings and the Gascons in Geldric’s favor were appointed to them. Geldric was seen less and less, keeping to himself and his books. The Duchess was virtually imprisoned. No more were there feasts in the great hall, nor were the people happy under the mismanagement of the foreigners who lorded over them.
The maid’s reverie ended as a shout from outside startled her. The din and clash of chaos drew nearerbeyond the kitchen door in the great hall. She was sure she heard the shout of even the oldest of the retainer-knights as they fought alongside their lord come back. She watched, stunned, as Geldric withdrew two white objects from the pantry. Cursing towards the din outside, he went through the side door of the kitchen and out into the courtyard, his mouth a-writhe and his eyes wild like those of a wolf at bay.
The maid turned and watched through the doorway as he half-ran down the path that led to the smith’s shop,
A scrape and crash behind her made her shriek. She backed against the wall and watched the coming of death. A man was standing in the doorway, his back to her, seemingly staring out into the great hall. By his armor and surcoat, he was one of Geldric’s mercenaries. In his right hand was gripped a sword.
Fascinated, she watched the Gascon’s left hand grip and ungrip the stones of the doorway facing, turning pale and then back to red as the grip relaxed. The right hand slowly unflexed and lost the grip on the sword hilt, and it slid to the floor with a dull clink and rattle. She saw that, just in front of one of his feet, a small red puddle was spattering and growing. The man slowly turned towards her, his left hand dropping from the doorway. As he turned, he began sinking to the floor …
The maid screamed and screamed again. The body had turned and the hands had gone up to a gash where a face had once been, where now there was only a staring eye and the corner of the mouth with protruding teeth remaining to show human semblance. The corpse sank to the floor and a pool of blood seeped out onto the stones.
Stepping across the body came Lord Bruce, his sword a-drip, covered from head to toe in blood-spattered mail, with the crest of the Duke of Westsan showing through. Lord Bruce towered over the girl like a giant, his eyes showing blue as steel through his mail cap, above the tangle of his red beard. There was only the battle-lust at the depths of his eyes to show he wasn’t the same gentle lord he was when he left – battle-lust and vengeance and animal rage now tinged those eyes.
The girl sank to the floor, weeping, relief flooding over her for the three years of suffering as she realized that her master, her true master, had come back. Geldric was no longer a threatening tyrant; aye, no longer a threat to Westsan or the Duchess or the people. Soon, Geldric would be a threat to none. She pointed down the path to the smithy, and as Lord Bruce followed her pointing finger, she slumped to the floor.
Lord Bruce, like the juggernaut of doom, turned and walked out the door and down the path.
Geldric had just finished placing the two objects he had taken from the pantry behind a barrel, and was wiping out three concentric chalk circles as Lord Bruce came through the doorway.
Geldric drew his own sword and pulled a shield from a pile of repaired weapons stacked in one corner ofthe smith’s shop, then looked up at his brother with his wild, mad eyes, and laughed. The laughter echoed like mirth from the halls of hell through the room. Then he came across the smithy floor, shield up, sword to the side and level.
“So, my brother comes back to see my end? Surely, surely, you wouldn’t kill your only brother?” Again Geldric laughed, and the bark of the demon hound was in his voice.
“I kill my only brother as he would try to kill me, except that I am man enough to do it myself. I send no hireling to stab you in the back with a poisoned dagger and leave you sick for a year and too weak to come back and claim your own, do I, brother?” Bruce gritted out between clenched teeth, the anger and impotent fury of a year of sickness and grim vengeance coming to the surface. Then he charged, his two-handed broadsword swinging up and back.
Geldric was small and tight muscled, and quick as a fox in his movements. He brought the shield up and skipped to the side, and Bruce went off balance as his sword ricocheted off the shield’s rim. Geldric swung his own sword at his brother’s exposed side, but futilely, as his armor gave him full protection from the sword’s edge, and Geldric grunted as his sword stopped dead. Lord Bruce slowed his swing, reversed his blade, and brought an underhanded sweeping cut up under Geldric’s shield. Blood spattered on the ceiling as Geldric’s left arm went limp, and the shield fell away from fingers grown numb where tendons were severed.
The younger brother backed off, babbling. His eyeswent from demonic pinpoints to wide-eyed desperation. He jumped to the top of a bench above Lord Bruce and screamed.
“Yes, yes, you’ll kill me, brother, I already know. But I have something far better than death planned for you, Bruce – grief! And you won’t get to see it. No!” Then his words fell away to the demonic laughter once again.
Geldric jumped from the bench to the pile of unlit coals heaped in the forge.
“Not your sons, Bruce, but your sons’ sons will pay for this. In fifty years Westsan will be as dead as Troy or Carthage, only it will never be rebuilt! They’ll say, ‘Geldric did this, and Bruce couldn’t stop him!’ Remember, Bruce my brother, it’ll be your name that will kill Westsan! Ha!”
Lord Bruce went into a red blind rage. He swung his broadsword two-handed at Geldric’s feet. The younger brother’s parry came too late. Bruce felt his blade bite through cloth and skin and bone, and Geldric screamed and somersaulted onto his back in the dust of the smith’s shop, blood covering him from knee to foot.
“Your sons’ sons, Bruce! Remember … !”
The taunt ended as Lord Bruce leaned both hands on the pommel of his broadsword and pushed the blade through his brother’s neck. He turned and walked out into the fresh morning air, where his victorious followers and the freed Duchess waited for him.
Lord Bruce never told what happened in the smithy. Over the years the smith shop was abandoned because Geldric had died there, but part of the walls stood, and the roof was left, and it became choked and grown over with weeds.
The Tale of Dermott
Lord Dermott looked down from the small hill above the keep of Westsan and watched as the funeral procession wound to the churchyard within the outer walls of the castle. Smoke was still drifting up from here and there about the castle, and the walls around the windows were blackened and sooty. A few carrion crows were picking over what the fire had not taken. The morning mists hid the village at the foot of the hills, but the smell of cinders and ash was heavy in that direction. The people of the castle and the town were at the funeral, most of them with their few belongings tied to their backs. Dermott watched the procession. As the bodies of Duke Robert and Duchess Eleandor came below him, he turned away to look at the unicorn which stood cropping grass beside him.
He patted the animal’s sides and neck, rubbed its flowing mane. He was still a little awed each time he saw the spiral ivory horn projecting outwards two feet from the unicorn’s forehead. Dermott knew, though, that he should hate this animal more than anything in this world.
Somehow, still, respect for the beast overcame the resentment he felt. Now that Helen was gone, it was the only thing of value he had left to him. Dermott’s world was turned against him because he was different from the rest of humanity.
His mind went back to those days a half yearago when he and his brother Robert had been the two greatest knights of their time, fighting with the best of all the lands.
Then one morning before all and sundry of the nobles and ladies were to set out on a stag hunt, a peasant had come screaming at the top of his lungs that he had seen the Lady of the Unicorn on a hill above one of the huts that morning. As one, all the nobles and knights had set out in search of the Lady. The Lady of the Unicorn wasa shadowed being, for each time she had been seen there followed the next day a calamity of catastrophic proportions. The Lady had first been seen one morning three years before, the day before the battle of the Five Kingdoms in which Dermott’s father, the old Duke of Westsan, the son of the first Duke Lord Bruce, had been killed; and Dermott and Robert had to fight like fallen angels to retain some semblance of a barony underfoot. And the Lady of the Unicorn had been seen near the keeps of each of the barons who had died in that battle. So the legend had started.
Nor had she been seen again until that morning three years later when the peasant had shouted the news. Some of the knights, the most gusty of the fellows, wanted to capture the Lady and find what made her appear as she did. Others were for setting traps and capturing the unicorn. It was agreed by all that chase should be given, so the whole mounted party had made a path straightway to the wooded hill where she had been seen.
They searched futilely all that dayand half the night, Duke Robert and Dermott riding side by side during the hunt, with neither they nor anyone else catching so much as a glimpse of the Lady. That night they camped in a clearing, and slept with the chill till the dawn.
Well did Dermott remember the next morning and the pain that came with it, for it still ached in his head. He had awakened early, as if by some noise, to see on the hill above them the Lady astride her magnificent animal. No one else was astir in the camp. Dermott sprang on his unsaddled mount and spurred it up the hill. He was dressed only in his tunic and pants with his sword at his side. The Lady of the Unicorn wheeled her mount around and it took off as if shot from a catapult.
For the first time Dermott actually saw the beautiful rider and her magnificent animal. He dug his heels into the horse’s flanks. The Lady’s hair danced in the wind like a pennon as she tore down the other side of the hill. The beast’s hooves pounded across the draw below, its two-foot horn gleaming in the early sunlight like a lance tip.
As Dermott reached the summit of the hill and thundered down, there arose shouts and the whinny of horses below in the camp. Dermott took this to be the noise of others waking to see him go after the Lady and the attendant fuss and bother of the others, mounting and following his lead. He heard his name once or twice, but gave no thought to it as he bent over his horse, intent only on the chase ahead. He grinned at the thought of the two prizes, the Lady and the unicorn, and wondered at the enigma of what the Lady was and why she lived such a phantom life.
The Lady looked back, and an expression of intent crossed her face, her lips set tight. Dermott had never seen a girl as beautiful even with such an expression. The unicorn was no farther than three lengths ahead of him. Then the Lady kicked her mount and as if by magic the distance began to grow with each of the unicorn’s strides.
Dermott saw his dream evaporating with distance. Desperately, he spurred his mount to even greater speed. Its hooves resounded like hailstones on the grass. Inch by inch he overtook the phantom. They flashed over a small rise and down a draw. Soon they were galloping parallel to the bank of a small stream which ran twelve feet below the trail in its bed. Suddenly the Lady turned the unicorn sharply and set off across a field. Desperately, Dermott tried to do the same.
For an instant he hung suspended in the air as the horse’s hooves scrambled futilely in the gravel at the bank’s edge. The mount and its rider cartwheeled off the high bank, the horse neighing in terror, dropping towards the shallow, rocky streambed. There was no time to get out of the saddle or kick away; the world turned twice, and Dermott hit as the horse came down on top of him. The breath flew out of him and he blacked out …
