Hand of the King's Evil - Outremer 04 (6 page)

That much Anton could live with, as he must do. There would be weeks more of it to come. He urged his mount and a few chosen companions forward, to ride in the columns vanguard and so escape the sidelong glances, put some little distance between himself and the muttering boys; but that only provided the chance that broke him for this day. They met a priest on the road and gathered about him for his blessing, threw back their hoods to show the strength of their vows — and Anton saw an accusing finger rise to point him out, heard his own infamy declaimed.

'You! I know your face and style, however you try to mask yourself in holy robes. I had heard that you ran to the Ransomers for sanctuary, that you sought to flee the Kings justice by buying a place among their ranks; I had not thought to see you ride out so brazenly, in defiance of all honour. You are a marked man, Anton d'Escrivey. Your dress and vows may shield you from your desserts, though it is shame to the Order that it granted you so much favour; they will not shield you from your disgrace.'

'My disgrace is my own,' as was his sudden fury, though that at least he did try to mask behind the chill of a long-practised voice, 'for me to carry as I may. My soul and honour are given, not sold, to the God. As are yours, if your own dress speak you true. My sins have been confessed,' or some of them, those that the world twisted in whispers, 'and I have served penance for them all. Do you not believe in redemption, that the Church says may be granted to all who repent?'

'I believe in the King's law, that says murderers shall answer for their crime, and suffer death when it is proved against them.'

'So do I, but the God's law takes precedence even over the King's. Besides, I am sorry to disappoint you, but I have never yet been a murderer. Now stand aside, or I may have a better case to answer.' He could keep the anger out of his voice, but his body rebelled against control; his hand touched the hilt of his sword Josette.

'Would you threaten a priest, sworn to the God's service?'

'No, but I see no priest here. Only a man whose words deny his robes, who sets public gossip before the teachings of the Church, whose blessing would taint our venture. Stand aside, or I will ride you down.'

He urged Alembert forward; the man scurried to the side of the road in a swirl of skirts and dust, as Anton's companions closed around him. At their backs, they heard a shrill curse sent against them. Some made the sign of the God superstitiously against brow or breast; Anton kept both hands on the reins, and his eyes firmly on the horizon.

'Anton, was that well done?'

'No, probably not. But it has been done, and may need to be done again and yet again before we come to Surayon. You need not ride beside me, if you fear the curses of the stupid.'

It was a sign of how things had so recently changed for him, that his confreres laughed at that and promised to stay close. It was a sign of how he was not so immune as he had thought himself, that he led them deliberately slowly until others could catch up, Marshal Fulke among them.

'Magister,' he said then, 'the sun will be setting in an hour; it might be good if some few of us rode a
little
ahead, to find a place where the army may camp for the night. Unless you know this land
...
?'

'Not I. All Outremer is new to me. But I had thought to press on until we reached Allansford. We will be late, but we can say the service as we ride, the Order has dispensation to do that on campaign; and the preceptors messengers told men to gather there
...'

'All the more reason to avoid it until the morning. If we arrive tonight, in the dark, it will be chaos and we'll get no rest. Come the light they'll be looking for us, and we can arrange the column as we wish.'

Fulke nodded slowly. 'Ride on, then, see what comfort you can find. The knights will want ground to pitch their tents, no doubt, and the animals will want water. You know what is needful, Sieur Anton. Go and seek it, with my blessing.'

Was there perhaps an extra meaning to that, as though the marshal had met a raving, cursing priest beside the road? Anton wasn't certain, but he said his thanks more gracefully than he might otherwise have done, before he spurred forward to rejoin his companions.

Anton knew this country little better than Fulke did. He had travelled all the length of Outremer, which few of his generation could claim, but only the once and only to reach Roq de Ran con, to be as far as the land could take him from any word of home. His mind had not been on the landscape then, his eyes had been focused on matter less solid and more real than the trees and fields he had passed by. He had almost no memory of those weeks, only that he had ridden his horse and himself to exhaustion every day. He must have bought or begged food on the journey, but could not remember a meal; he must have slept, but only when he was too weary to sit the saddle any longer. He thought he did remember toppling to the ground more than once, and waking next morning where he had fallen.

Now he gazed about him as he rode, and saw fields of corn and millet on either side. Alembert
’
s hooves splashed through streams in the valley bottoms; where the land rose too high and dry to support crops, ancient fig and olive trees spread their twisted branches above twisting roots. He began to wonder whether they would find any stretch of ground clear enough to make an encampment for even this small force, these few hundreds of men; whether they might not after all have to ride on in the dark till they came to the township at Allansford.

After another valley with an infant river in its cleft, though, there came another ridge; and the road climbed higher than ever yet, through olive-groves to a rocky summit too bare to nourish any tree. There was no water, but the beasts could be picketed along the river-bank below while the men made camp on the height. If the baggage-wagons must come up with his confreres' tents and kettles, no doubt the brothers could haul them.

'This will do,' he said, turning his eyes southerly and seeing nothing better in the long, late shadows that cloaked the road. 'Torres, will you ride back and tell the marshal what we have found? Quickly, before the sun sets? Say your prayers with him; and tell him that we will make a beacon here, to catch the eyes of the Order and promise rest after a long day's ride.'

He had no right of command, but the knights listened to him now, where they had only laughed before. Torres nodded, turned his mount and went swiftly back down the ridge.

'Come, then! Hewers of wood and drawers of water we must be, while the sun lingers. Raffel, will you take the horses down to drink, while we gather windfall branches for a blaze?'

'Gladly, if Tomas will assist. Give me your reins here. A knight may care for his mount and his companions' at need, but gleaning wood is brothers' labour. Brothers or peasants, and I am neither.'

'There's no disgrace in labour. Brother.' A hard word for Anton to say, and he meant it hardly. And would you deny our confreres a light to fix their eyes on, a sign of journey's end? They'll welcome it, I swear to you
...'

He spoke li
ghtly, teasingly against Raffel’
s pride, but Anton meant it deeply. It was what he had looked for every night from the
castle
walls and been denied, what he had truly never hoped to see, a glimmer of hope in the darkness. He could offer to others what no one offered to him, and that was another change in him, he thought.

Sherard carried an axe at his saddle-bow, but would not use it. 'No sense in angering the master of these lands. They are not our trees to fell. And if they were, still I would not touch them. Older than us, older than the Kingdom: some of these olives are older than your family, d'Escrivey, or mine. Some might have been rooted here before the God walked this country. Would you cut that thread of history, would you kill a tree that the God Himself might have seen and touched and eaten from, for the sake of a fire on a hot night?'

'Not I,' Anton murmured, smiling. 'Olives as old as these will drop their branches under the suns weight as a boy with cracked knuckles drops his sword. Let s gather what they've let fall, and be thankful.'

Collecting wood meant unaccustomed labour, scrambling over steep slopes with uncertain footing, dragging awkward branches. Anton was not the first to strip off his heavy cloak and mail, nor the last to envy Raffel and Tomas their easier task with the horses.

Eventually, though, Anton could strike a light from flint and tinder, to coax a fire into life. As the boughs began to catch, he straightened and turned his back to the rising flames, in time to see the last red touch of the sun flare across the distant line of the sea.

Back at the Roq, a day's travel behind them, Frater Susurrus would be tolling the hour, calling the
castle
's complement to service, brothers and guests alike. On the road, Marshal Fulke would lead his army's voice in prayer as he led its body towards war. Here there was only Anton to do that work, and only his few companions to hear. That would not matter to them, nor to the God; he wished that it did not matter to him. He remembered praying in his own quarters, with Marron's soft voice joined to his; he remembered one morning when they had prayed together as they lay together in his bed. The Church would call that heresy. At the time he'd thought, he'd even said that the God would not. Now he wasn't so sure, he wasn't so proud in himself; all that he was sure of, he would hear Marron's whisper answer him every time he led anyone in prayer again.

It had to be done, though, none of these would steal the lead from him. And so it was done, althoug
h his soul could have taken littl
e profit from it. He had turned his eyes to the altar more and more in the days since
Marron
had been lost, since evil work and demon-possession had stolen the boy away; he had believed that worship could outrank love, military and spiritual ardour between them could burn out physical desire and enchantment. He did still believe it, perhaps. Adoration of the God was both simpler and more noble than any human love; it ought surely to have a fire's power over flesh, to sear and destroy. If so, he felt little heat from it tonight. He could thrust his arm into these leaping flames beside him and watch it blacken and wither, feel its slow death; he tried to thrust his haunting affection for Marron into the furnace that tempered souls, but felt nothing beyond a queasy wrongness, as though they inhabited two separate worlds and could not be brought together.
As though Marron has no place in the God's eye, for sin or for salvation —
but that again must be heresy, for the God's eye watched over all. The fault was his own, then, and easily found: an offering snatched back from the altar, a gift withheld. Whatever his private protestations, however deep his loathing for the Surayonnaise and their witchery, he still didn't want or perhaps couldn't bear to let Marron go.

And still wouldn't confess it, even now; and so his prayers were tainted and his burden unrelieved.

'Go down,' he said to his confreres after the last words of the appointed ritual had died into the night, after they had stood respectfully silent in the firelight for a minute longer, after he had sought and failed to find any sense of solace or release within himself. 'Go down and meet the men in the valley, when they come. I will tend our beacon.'

They went, with smiles and warm words but also a prompt obedience, all three of which Anton still found hard to fathom. Had he really changed so much, to force such a change towards him? He didn't believe so. Perhaps it was that the world had changed around them all, demanding new dispensations
...

New, but not so new. He still found himself alone on a height, and by his own arrangement. The fire blazed, the wood crackled and spat, he felt his skin tighten in a rush of heat; in a rush of memory he heard young boys screaming as they died and almost saw Marron's face this night as he had seen it then, across a distance and through the flames, frozen ice-hard and close to shattering.

Turned hastily around and saw shadows instead: soft and liquid shadows flowing all around him as the flames weaved among the boughs they burned, like the shadows beneath a tree in leaf as the leaves dance in a wind; and striking solid through that shifting tapestry of light and dark like the trunk of a tree lay one single shadow that blurred only at its edges, which was his own.

Through the snapping and shifting sounds of burning wood he heard noises rising distant but clear from the valley below, voices and the jingle of harness, the creak of wheels; and thought how this must look to the arriving men, how he must look, a figure silhouetted against a flaring light. He had said that he would set a beacon, to draw their eyes like a promise; he had not intended that it should be himself.

Then he heard the tread of booted feet climbing the road, one man alone. He'd thought that his confreres would come up together in a laughing, grumbling mass, twisting and stretching and rubbing their sores after a full day in the saddle; or else that they'd send their squires scrambling ahead with kettles and packs.

Anton moved back into the shadows. His eyes were so seared by the blaze, he could see nothing but the faintest moving outline to distinguish black from black, but he needed no more, not so much. One man coming up alone and no one following, that had to be by order. Only one man could give such orders in this army, and would do it only on his own behalf.

The road drew him up into the light; Anton bowed - just slightly, a touch more than a nod, as though he were on horseback still and saluting from the saddle - and said, 'Magister. I hope that you find this satisfactory. It's a hard bed, but every man has a blanket, and we can spread as far as we need along the ridge. I thought it best to leave the horses below; if we watch from up here, we can see any danger that threatens long before it reaches them.'