Jirel of Joiry

JIREL
MEETS MAGIC

Over
Guischard’s
fallen drawbridge thundered
Joiry’s
warrior lady, sword swinging,
voice
shouting hoarsely inside her helmet. The scarlet plume of her crest rippled in the wind. Straight into the massed defenders at the gate she plunged, careering through them by the very impetuosity of the charge, the weight of her mighty warhorse opening up a gap for the men at her heels to widen. For a while there was tumult unspeakable there under the archway, the yells of fighters and the clang of mail on mail and the screams of stricken men.
Jirel
of
Joiry
was a shouting battle-machine from which
Guischard’s
men reeled in bloody confusion as she whirled and slashed and slew in the narrow confines of the gateway, her great stallion’s iron hoofs weapons as potent as her own whistling blade.

In her full armor she was impregnable to the men on foot, and the horse’s armor protected him from their vengeful blades, so that alone, almost, she might have won the gateway. By sheer weight and impetuosity she carried the battle through the defenders under the arch. They gave way before the mighty warhorse and his screaming rider.
Jirel’s
swinging sword and the stallion’s trampling feet cleared a path for
Joiry’s
men to follow, and at last into
Guischard’s
court poured the steel-clad hordes of
Guischard’s
conquerors.

Jirel’s
eyes were yellow with blood-lust behind the helmet bars, and her voice echoed savagely from the steel cage that confined it, “Giraud! Bring me Giraud!
A gold piece to the man who brings me the wizard Giraud!”

She waited impatiently in the courtyard, reining her excited charger in mincing circles over the flags, unable to dismount alone in her heavy armor and disdainful of the threats of possible arbalesters in the arrow-slits that looked down upon her from
Guischard’s
frowning gray walls. A crossbow shaft was the only thing she had to fear in her impregnable mail.

She waited in mounting impatience, a formidable figure in her bloody armor, the great sword lying across her saddlebow and her eager, angry voice echoing hoarsely from the helmet, “Giraud! Make haste, you varlets! Bring me Giraud!”

There was such
bloodythirsty
impatience in that hollowly booming voice that the men who were returning from searching the castle hung back as they crossed the court toward their lady in reluctant twos and threes, failure eloquent upon their faces.

“What!” screamed
Jirel
furiously.
“You, Giles!
Have you brought me Giraud?
Watkin
! Where is that wizard Giraud? Answer me, I say!”

“We’ve scoured the castle, my lady,” said one of the men fearfully as the angry voice paused. “The wizard is gone.”

“Now God defend me!” groaned
Joiry’s
lady. “God help a poor woman served by fools! Did you search among the slain?”

“We searched everywhere, Lady
Jirel
. Giraud has escaped us.”

Jirel
called again upon her Maker in a voice that was blasphemy in itself.

“Help me down, then, you hell-spawned knaves,” she grated. “I’ll find him myself. He must be here!”

With difficulty they got her off the sidling horse. It took two men to handle her, and a third to steady the charger. All the while they struggled with straps and buckles she cursed them hollowly, emerging limb by limb from the casing of steel and swearing with a soldier’s fluency as the armor came away. Presently she stood free on the bloody flagstones, a slim, straight lady, keen as a blade, her red hair a flame to match the flame of her yellow eyes. Under the armor she wore a tunic of link-mail from the Holy Land, supple as silk and almost as light, and a doeskin shirt to protect the milky whiteness of her skin.

She was a creature of the wildest paradox, this warrior lady of
Joiry
, hot as a red coal, chill as steel, satiny of body and iron of soul. The set of her chin was firm, but her mouth betrayed a tenderness she would have died before admitting. But she was raging now.

“Follow me, then, fools!” she shouted. “I’ll find that God-cursed wizard and split his head with this sword if it takes me until the day I die. I swear it. I’ll teach him what it costs to ambush
Joiry
men. By heaven, he’ll pay with his life for my ten who fell at Massy Ford last week. The foul spell-brewer! He’ll learn what it means to defy
Joiry
!”

Breathing threats and curses, she strode across the court, her men following reluctantly at her heels and casting nervous glances upward at the gray towers of
Guischard
. It had always borne a bad name, this ominous castle of the wizard Giraud, a place where queer things happened, which no man entered uninvited and whence no prisoner had ever escaped, though the screams of torture echoed often from its walls.
Jirel’s
men would have followed her straight through the gates of hell, but they stormed
Guischard
at her heels with terror in their hearts and no hope of conquest.

She alone seemed not to know fear of the dark sorcerer. Perhaps it was because she had known things so dreadful that mortal perils held no terror for her—there were whispers at
Joiry
of their lady, and of things that had happened there which no man dared think on. But when
Guischard
fell, and the wizard’s defenders fled before
Jirel’s
mighty steed and the onrush of
Joiry’s
men, they had plucked up heart, thinking that perhaps the ominous tales of Giraud had been gossip only, since the castle fell as any ordinary lord’s castle might fall. But now—there were whispers again, and nervous glances over the shoulder, and men huddled together as they re-entered
Guischard
at their lady’s hurrying heels. A castle from which a wizard might vanish into thin air, with all the exits watched, must be a haunted place, better burned and forgotten. They followed
Jirel
reluctantly, half ashamed but fearful.

In
Jirel’s
stormy heart there was no room for terror as she plunged into the gloom of the archway that opened upon
Guischard’s
great central hall. Anger that the man might have escaped her was a torch to light the way, and she paused in the door with eager anticipation, sweeping the corpse-strewn hall at a glance, searching for some clue to explain how her quarry had disappeared.

“He can’t have escaped,” she told herself confidently. “There’s no way out. He
must
be here somewhere.” And she stepped into the
hall,
turning over the bodies she passed with a careless foot to make sure that death had not robbed her of vengeance.

An hour later, as they searched the last tower, she was still telling herself that the wizard could not have gone without her knowledge. She had taken special pains about that. There was a secret passage to the river, but she had had that watched. And an underwater door opened into the moat, but he could not have gone that way without meeting her men. Secret paths and open, she had found them all and posted a guard at each, and Giraud had not left the castle by any door that led out. She climbed the stairs of the last tower wearily, her confidence shaken.

An iron-barred oaken door closed the top of the steps, and
Jirel
drew back as her men lifted the heavy cross-pieces and opened it for her. It had not been barred from within. She stepped into the little round room inside, hope fading completely as she saw that it too was empty, save for the body of a page-boy lying on the uncarpeted floor. Blood had made a congealing pool about him, and as
Jirel
looked she saw something which roused her flagging hopes. Feet had trodden in that blood, not the mailed feet of armed men, but the tread of shapeless cloth shoes such as surely none but Giraud would have worn when the castle was besieged and falling, and every man’s help needed. Those bloody tracks led straight across the room toward the wall, and in that wall—a window.

Jirel
stared. To her a window was a narrow slit deep in stone, made for the shooting of arrows, and never covered save in the coldest weather. But this window was broad and low, and instead of the usual animal pelt for hangings a curtain of purple velvet had been drawn back to disclose shutters carved out of something that might have been ivory had any beast alive been huge enough to yield such great unbroken sheets of whiteness. The shutters were unlatched, swinging slightly ajar, and upon them
Jirel
saw the smear of bloody fingers.

With a little triumphant cry she sprang forward. Here, then, was the secret way Giraud had gone. What lay beyond the window she could not
guess.
Perhaps an unsuspected
passage,
or a hidden room. Laughing exultantly, she swung open the ivory shutters.

There was a gasp, from the men behind her. She did not hear it. She stood quite still, staring with incredulous eyes. For those ivory gates had opened upon no dark stone hiding-place or secret tunnel. They did not even reveal the afternoon sky outside, nor did they admit the shouts of her men still subduing the last of the defenders in the court below. Instead she was looking out upon a green woodland over which brooded a violet day like no day she had ever seen before. In paralyzed amazement she looked down, seeing not the bloody flags of the courtyard far below, but a mossy carpet at a level with the floor. And on that moss she saw the mark of blood-stained feet. This window might be a magic one, opening into strange lands, but through it had gone the man she swore to kill, and where he fled she must follow.

She lifted her eyes from the tracked moss and stared out again through the dimness under the trees. It was a lovelier land than anything seen even in dreams; so lovely that it made her heart ache with its strange, unearthly enchantment—green woodland hushed and brooding in the hushed violet day. There was a promise of peace there, and forgetfulness and rest. Suddenly the harsh, shouting, noisy world behind her seemed very far away and chill. She moved forward and laid her hand upon the ivory shutters, staring out.

The shuffle of the scared men behind her awakened
Jirel
from the enchantment that had gripped her.
She turned. The dreamy magic of the woodland loosed its hold as she faced the men again, but its memory lingered. She shook her red head a little, meeting their fearful eyes. She nodded toward the open window.

“Giraud has gone out there,” she said. “Give me your dagger, Giles. This sword is too heavy to carry far.”

“But lady—Lady
Jirel
—dear lady—you can’t go out there—Saint
Guilda
save us! Lady
Jirel
!”

Jirel’s
crisp voice cut short the babble of protest.

“Your dagger, Giles.
I’ve sworn to slay Giraud, and slay him I shall, in whatever land he hides.
Giles!”

A man-at-arms shuffled forward with averted face, handing her his dagger. She gave him the sword she carried and thrust the long-bladed knife into her belt. She turned again to the window. Green and cool and lovely, the woodland
lay
waiting. She thought as she set her knee upon the sill that she must have explored this violet calm even had her oath not driven her; for there was an enchantment about the place that drew her irresistibly. She pulled up her other knee and jumped lightly. The mossy ground received her without a jar.

For a few moments
Jirel
stood very still, watching, listening. Bird songs trilled intermittently about her, and breezes stirred the leaves. From very far away she thought she caught the echoes of a song when the wind blew, and there was something subtly irritating about its simple melody that seemed to seesaw endlessly up and down on two notes. She was glad when the wind died and the song no longer shrilled in her ears.

It occurred to her that before she ventured far she must mark the window she had entered by, and she turned curiously, wondering how it looked from this side. What she saw sent an inexplicable little chill down her back.
Behind her lay a heap of moldering ruins, moss-grown, crumbling into decay.
Fire had blackened the stones in ages past. She could see that it must have been a castle, for the original lines of it were not yet quite lost. Only one low wall remained standing now, and in it opened the window through which she had come. There was something hauntingly familiar about the lines of those moldering stones, and she turned away with a vague unease, not quite understanding why. A little path wound away under the low-hanging trees, and she followed it slowly, eyes alert for signs that Giraud had passed this way. Birds trilled drowsily in the leaves overhead, queer, unrecognizable songs like the music of no birds she knew. The violet light was calm and sweet about her.

She had gone on in the bird-haunted quiet for many minutes before she caught the first hint of anything at odds with the perfect peace about her. A whiff of wood-smoke drifted to her nostrils on a vagrant breeze. When she rounded the next bend of the path she saw what had caused it. A tree lay across the way in a smother of shaking leaves and branches. She knew that she must skirt it, for the branches were too tangled to penetrate, and she turned out of the path, following the trunk toward its broken base.

She had gone only a few steps before the sound of a curious sobbing came to her ears. It was the gasp of choked breathing, and she had heard sounds like that too often before not to know that she approached death in some form or another. She laid her hand on her knife-hilt and crept forward softly.

The tree trunk had been severed as if by a blast of heat, for the stump was charred black and still smoking. Beyond the stump a queer tableau was being enacted, and she stopped quite still, staring through the leaves.