Brother Cadfael's Penance (26 page)

It was still good policy to hug the walls when moving about the ward, though in the night the rain of missiles had ceased, and only the occasional fire-arrow was launched over the wall to attempt the diversion of a roof in flames. Cadfael circled the mass of the keep and came to the almost deserted north-western corner of the ward, where only the wall and the brattice were manned, and even much of the noise from the turmoil at the breach was strangely withdrawn into distance. The keys had grown warm in his hand, and the air this night was not frosty. Tomorrow, after the surrender, they might be able to bury their dead, and rest their many wounded.

The narrow door at the foot of the tower opened to the first key without so much as a creak. Two flights down, Philip had said. Cadfael descended. There was a flare in a sconce halfway down the winding staircase; nothing had been forgotten here, even in the stresses of siege. At the cell door he hesitated, breathing deeply and long. There was no sound from within, the walls were too thick; and here no sound from without, only the dim light pulsating silently as the flare flickered.

With the key in the lock, his hand trembled, and suddenly he was afraid. Not of finding some emaciated wreck within the cell; any such fear had long since left his mind. He was afraid of having achieved the goal of his journey, and being left with only the sickening fall after achievement, and the way home an endless, laborious descent into a long darkness, ending in nothing better than loss.

It was the nearest he had ever come to despair, but it lasted only a moment. At the metal kiss of key in lock it was gone, and his heart rose in him to fill his throat like a breaking wave. He thrust open the door, and came face to face with Olivier across the bare cell.

The captive had sprung erect at the first inward movement of his prison door, and stood braced, expecting to be confronted by the only visitor he ever had now, apart from the gaoler who attended him, and confounded by this unexpected apparition. He must have heard, funnelled downwards through the slanting shaft from the ward to his cell, the clamour of battle, and fretted at his own helplessness, wondering what was happening above. The glare he had fixed upon the doorway was suddenly softened and shaken by bewilderment; then his face was still, intent and wary. He believed what he saw; he had his warning. But he did not understand. His wide, wild, golden stare neither welcomed nor repelled; not yet. The chains at his ankles had clashed one sharp peal, and lay still.

He was harder, leaner, unnervingly bright, bright to incandescence with energy frustrated and restrained. The candle on its shelf of rock cast its light sidelong over him, honing every sharp line of his face into a quivering razor-edge, and flaming in the dazzling irises of his eyes, dilated with doubt and wonder. Neat, shaven clean, no way defaced, only the fetters marking him as a prisoner. He had been lying on his bed when the key turned in the lock; his burnished black hair clasped his olive cheeks with ruffled wings, casting blue shadows into the hollows there beneath the smooth, salient bones. Cadfael had never seen him more beautiful, not even on that first day when he had glimpsed this face through the open gate at the priory of Bromfield, stooping suave cheek to cheek with the girl who was now his wife. Philip had not failed to respect, value and preserve this elegance of body and mind, even though it had turned irrevocably against him.

Cadfael took a long step forward towards the light, uncertain whether he was clearly seen. The cell was spacious beyond what he had expected, with a low chest in a dark corner, and items of clothing or harness folded upon it. "Olivier?" he said hesitantly. "You know me?"

"I know you," said Oliver, low-voiced. "I have been taught to know you. You are my father." He looked from Cadfael's face to the open door, and then to the keys in Cadfael's hand. "There's been fighting," he said, struggling to make sense of all these chaotic factors that crowded in on him together. "What has happened? Is he dead?"

He. Philip. Who else could have told him? And now he asked instantly after his sometime friend, supposing, Cadfael divined, that only after that death could these keys have come into other hands. But there was no eagerness, no satisfaction in the voice that questioned, only a flat finality, as one accepting what could not be changed. How strange it was, thought Cadfael, watching his son with aching intensity, that this complex creature should from the first have been crystal to the sire who engendered him.

"No," he said gently, "he is not dead. He gave them to me."

He advanced, almost cautiously, as though afraid to startle a bird into flight, and as warily opened his arms to embrace his son, and at the first touch the braced body warmed and melted, and embraced him ardently in return.

"It is true!" said Olivier, amazed. "But of course, true! He never lies. And you knew? Why did you never tell me?"

"Why break into another man's life, midway, when he is already in noble transit and on his way to glory? One breath of a contrary wind might have driven you off course." Cadfael stood him off between his hands to look closely, and kissed the hollow oval cheek that leaned to him dutifully. "All the father you needed you had from your mother's telling, better than truth. But now it's out, and I am glad. Come, sit down here and let me get you out of these fetters."

He kneeled beside the bed to fit the last key into the anklets, and the chains rang again their sharp, discordant peal as he opened the gyves and hoisted the irons aside, dropping the coil against the rock wall. And all the time the golden eyes hung upon his face, with passionate concentration, searching for glimpses that would confirm the continuity of the blood that bound them together. And after a moment Olivier began to question, not the truth of this bewildering discovery, but the circumstances that surrounded it, and the dazzling range of possibilities it presented.

"How did you know? What can I ever have said or done to make you know me?"

"You named your mother," said Cadfael, "and time and place were all as they should be. And then you turned your head, and I saw her in you."

"And never said word! I said once, to Hugh Beringar I said it, that you had used me like a son. And never trembled when I said it, so blind I was. When he told me you were here, I said it could not be true, for you would not leave your abbey unless ordered. Recusant, apostate, unblessed, he said, he is here to redeem you. I was angry!" said Olivier, wrenching at memory and acknowledging its illogical pain. "I said you had cheated me! You should not so have thrown away all you valued, for me, made yourself exile and sinner, offered your life. Was it fair to load me with such a terrible burden of debt? Lifelong I could not repay it. All I felt was the sting of my own injury. I am sorry! Truly I am sorry! I know better now."

"There is no debt," said Cadfael, rising from his knees. "All manner of reckoning or bargaining is for ever impossible between us two."

"I know it! I do know it! I felt so far outdone, it scalded my pride. But that's gone." Olivier rose, stretched his long legs, and stalked his cell back and forth. "There is nothing I will not take from you, and be grateful, even if there never comes the day when I can do whatever needs to be done in your worship and for your sake. But I trust it may come, and soon."

"Who knows?" said Cadfael. "There is a thing I want now, if I could see how to come by it."

"Yes?" Olivier shook off his own preoccupations in penitent haste. "Tell me!" He came back to his bed, and drew Cadfael down beside him. "Tell me what is happening here. You say he is not dead, Philip. He gave you the keys?" It seemed to him a thing only possible from a deathbed. "And who is it laying siege to this place? He made enemies enough, that I know, but this must be an army battering the walls."

"The army of your liege lady the empress," said Cadfael ruefully. "And stronger than commonly, since she was accompanied home into Gloucester by several of her earls and barons. Yves, when he was loosed, rode for Gloucester to rouse her to come and rescue you, and come she most surely has, but not for your sake. The lad told her Philip was here in person. She has vowed, too publicly to withdraw even if she wished, and I doubt she does, to take his castle and his body, and hang him from his own towers, and before his own men. No, she won't withdraw. She is determined to take, humiliate and hang him. And I am equally resolute," said Cadfael roundly, "that she shall not, though how it's to be prevented is more than I yet know."

"She cannot do it," said Olivier, aghast. "It would be wicked folly. Surely she knows it? Such an act would have every able man in the land, if he had laid down his weapons, rushing to pick them up again and get into the field. The worst of us, on either side, would hesitate to kill a man he had bested and captured. How do you know this is truth, that she has so sworn?"

"I know it from Yves, who was there to hear it, and is in no doubt at all. She is in earnest. Of all men she hates Philip for what she holds to be his treason."

"It was treason," said Olivier, but more temperately than Cadfael had expected.

"By all the rules, so it was. But also it was more than simply treason, however extreme the act. Before long," said Cadfael heavily, "some of the greatest among us, on both sides of the argument, and yes, the best, will be accused of treason on the same grounds. They may not turn to fight upon the other side, but to leave their swords in the sheath and decline to continue killing will just as surely be denounced as treachery. Whatever his crime may be called, she wants him in her grasp, and means to be his death. And I am determined she shall not have him."

Olivier thought for a moment, gnawing his knuckles and frowning. Then he said: "It would be well, for her more than any, that someone should prevent." He turned the intensity of his troubled stare upon Cadfael. "You have not told me all. There is something more. How far has this attack gone? They have not broken through?" The use of 'they' might simply have been because he was enforcedly out of this battle, instead of fighting for his chosen cause with the rest, but it seemed to set him at an even greater distance from the besiegers. Cadfael had almost heard the partisan 'we' springing to mind to confront the 'they'.

"Not yet. They have breached one tower, but have not got in, or had not when I came down to you," he amended scrupulously. "Philip refused surrender, but he knows what she intends to do with him..."

"How does he know?" demanded Olivier alertly.

"He knows because I told him. Yves brought the message at his own risk. At no risk to me I delivered it. But I think he knew. He said then that if God, by chance, should choose to forestall the empress, he must take thought for the men of his garrison. He has done so. He has handed over the charge of La Musarderie to his deputy Camville, and given him leave, no, orders!, to get the best terms he can for the garrison, and surrender the castle. And tomorrow that will be done."

"But he would not..." began Olivier, and cried out abruptly: "You said he is not dead!"

"No, he is not dead, But he is badly hurt. I don't say he will die of his wounds, though he may. I do say he will not die of his wounds in time to escape being dragged aloft, whatever his condition, in the empress's noose, once she gets into La Musarderie. He has consented in his own shameful death to procure the release of his men. She cares nothing for any of them, if she has Philip. She'll keep the castle and the arms, and let the men depart alive."

"He has consented to this?" asked Olivier, low-voiced.

"He has ordered it."

"And his condition? His injuries?"

"He has badly broken ribs, and I fear some lacerations inside from the broken bones. And head injuries. They tossed in a crate of lumps of iron, broken lance-heads, cinder from the furnaces. He was close when it struck and burst. A bad head wound from a piece of a lance, and maybe foul at that. He came to his senses long enough to make his dispositions, and that he did clearly, and will be obeyed. When they enter, tomorrow, he will be her prisoner. Her only prisoner, for if FitzGilbert agrees to terms he'll keep his word."

"And it is bad? He cannot ride? He cannot even stand and walk? But what use," said Olivier helplessly, "even if he could? Having bought their freedom he would not make off and leave the price unpaid. Never of his own will. I know him! But a man so sick, and at her mercy... She would not!" said Olivier strenuously, and looked along his shoulder at Cadfael's face, and ended dubiously: "Would she?"

"He struck her to the heart, where her pride is. Yes, I fear she would. But when I left him to come to you, Philip was again out of his senses, and I think may well remain so for many hours, even days. The head wound is his danger."

"You think we might move him, and he not know? But they are all round us, no easy way out. I do not know this castle well. Is there a postern that might serve? And then, it would need a cart. There are those in the village that I do know," said Olivier, "but they may be no friends to Philip. But at the mill by Winstone I'm known, and they have carts. Now, while the night is black, is there anywhere a man could get out? For if they get their truce, by morning they'll cease their close watch. Something might yet be done."

"There's a clear way out where they've breached the tower," said Cadfael, "I saw sky through it. But they're still outside there with the ram, and only held outside by force of arms. If a man of the garrison tried to slip out there, it would be one way of dying quickly. Even if they draw off, he could hardly go along with them."

"But I can!" Olivier was on his feet, glowing. "Why not? I'm one of them. I'm known to have kept my fealty. I have her badge on my sword-belt, and her colours on my surcoat and my cloak. There may be some there who know me." He crossed to the chest, and swept the covering cloak from sword and scabbard and light chainmail coat, the links ringing.

"You see? All my harness, everything that came with me when I was dragged out of Faringdon, and the lions of Anjou, that the old king gave to Geoffrey when he married his daughter to him, clear to be seen, marking me for hers. He would not so much as displace the least of another man's possessions, though he might kill the man. In chainmail and armed, and in the dark, who's to pick me out from any of the other besiegers outside the walls? If I'm challenged I can openly answer that I've broken out in the turmoil. If not, I can keep my own counsel, and make for the mill. Reinold will help me to the loan of a cart. But it would be daylight before I could get it here," he checked, frowning. "How can we account for it then?"