Keeper of the Dream (62 page)
The place stank, of old blood and rotting entrails. The fire had destroyed the roof, so that the night sky showed dark and shadowy through the fallen timbers overhead. “We’ll stop here a moment, my lord,” Taliesin said. “Just till the pursuit dies off a bit.”
Hugh stirred, brushing against Raine’s legs. “What the hell am I lying in?”
“Rushes,” Raine said.
“It smells worse than dung.” Hugh took a deep, hitching breath. “No, you’re right, it smells like summer. Summer grass. I used to watch you … you and Sybil—” He gasped in pain. “What a jest this is. I’m dying from an arrow meant for you.”
“Christ, Hugh, no one ever died of an arrow in his arse.”
After a short silence, Hugh said, “Is that where it is? How embarrassing.”
Raine tried unsuccessfully to smother a laugh. “I’m sorry.”
“Aye, you would be … always so damned noble.” He drew in shallow, rasping breath. “I hate you. I’ve always hated you.
“No, you don’t.”
In the distance Raine heard more shouts and the patter of running feet.
Hugh groaned. “Christ … It hurts enough, I ought to be dying.”
“Look at it this way, little brother—you’ll be left with a scar that will certainly intrigue the ladies.”
Hugh heaved a ragged laugh. “Still, it’s a pity, mayhap, that I am not dying. Since I have no heirs, Chester would go to Sybil and the king would become her guardian. Then he could marry her off to some other poor ass who would have to share his bed with you.”
“I was never in your bed, Hugh.”
“You were there. You were there.”
Taliesin’s white face suddenly appeared before them.
“My lord, the search is coming this way. There’s a boat waiting for us beneath the Southwark bridge and horses on the other side. But we’ll have to make a run for the river.”
“My brother can’t run.”
A ragged laugh came from the bed of rushes. “What did I tell you? Noble. A noble fool.” Hugh’s hands reached up to grab Raine’s tunic. “Listen, big brother … about me and Arianna, we—” But whatever he was about to say remained trapped behind his lips, for in the next instant he had fainted.
“My lord,” Taliesin said, grabbing Raine’s arm. “Your brother the earl will be all right for the time it takes me to lead the king’s men away from here. Then I’ll come back for him. Even if the king’s men find him, Henry can do naught but bluster against the earl for helping you to escape. Chester is too powerful an enemy to make.”
Raine looked down at his unconscious brother. He hated Hugh for what he had done to Arianna, but as usual a part of him couldn’t let go of the Hugh he had fought and played with, and yes, loved when they were boys.
“But you, my lord, must leave now,” Taliesin was saying, beginning to sound a bit panicked. “Give me the cassock and I shall lead them off your scent. Here, you take this.”
The squire pushed his golden helmet against Raine’s chest. Raine took it, turning it over in his hands. The metal felt warm, hot, in truth. It felt alive. “Arianna is convinced this thing is magic and that you are a wizard.”
The boy hooted. “Females! The notions they get sometimes.”
A man’s bull-throated shout echoed though the burnt-out shell. The king’s men were indeed getting closer. Raine was turning the helmet over and over in his hands, thinking of Arianna. “Aye … the notions they get.”
Taliesin tugged at the cassock, jerking it off over
Raine’s head, for his master was being sluggish in getting out of it. “You are not to let your pride stop you from going to her,” he said, sounding like a king issuing a command.
Raine’s lips tightened, but he said nothing.
“Whatever she did, it was done for love of you.” Taliesin stared at him, his eyes glittering moonsilver from out of the darkness. Raine had the oddest thought that they were no longer eyes at all, but stars. Stars shining for all eternity in a perpetual night.
Taliesin spoke to him from out of this night, nearly singing the words. “For love of her, you gave up all that you once held dearest—your title, your land, your honor embodied in the fealty you owed your king.” The star-eyes shimmered, brightened. “Do you regret this sacrifice, my lord?”
“No!” Raine said on a sharp expulsion of breath.
“Then do not make her regret hers.” The strange light in the squire’s eyes dimmed. He turned aside, draping the cassock over his head. “This is your final trial, my lord, please do not bungle it,” he said, his voice muffled by the heavy wool. “For this time I cannot be there to see you through it.” He heaved a bellowy sigh. “I don’t mind telling you these last few years have been very taxing on my feeble strength, what with your pride and my lady’s stubbornness. It’s no wonder—”
Raine grabbed the boy’s shoulders and propelled him through the arch. “Taliesin, if you are going to be a diversion, for the love of Christ, quit flapping your jaws and go be it.”
Taliesin started off. Then he turned back. He snatched the helmet out of his master’s hands and dropped it down on top Raine’s head. “On the off chance that it might indeed be magic, my lord, it would help if you were wearing it.”
Again he set off. Again he turned, and running back
ward, he lifted a hand in farewell. “Goddess be with you, my lord,” he whispered.
And Raine knew in that instant he would never see the squire again.
He took off running in the direction opposite of that Taliesin had taken. Before long he heard shouts and the pattering of running feet, but leading off away from him, and he knew the diversion was working.
He had gone about a hundred yards when a white mist began to curl up from the refuse-strewn streets. It seemed to thicken with each step he took, so that before long he was enshrouded in an impenetrable whiteness that was strangely, for mist, dry and warm.
He couldn’t see a damn thing. But he could tell where he was by the smell of what coated the streets’urine and dyes in Tanners’ Row, blood and entrails in Butchers’ Lane, and the sharp tang of acid in Glass Workers’ Street. In Goldsmiths’ Lane he nearly broke his neck tripping over a heavy chain that was stretched across the street to make the escape of thieves more difficult.
The mist muffled all sounds. Occasionally he heard the rattle of a watchman’s iron shaft and the creaking of signboards in the wind, but most of the time he was wrapped up in a swaddling of silence.
The slap of waves against the pier told him he had found the river. That and the smell, which was a noisome combination of night soil, rotting rushes, and fish guts. He found the boat. Across the river, the horse was there, where Taliesin had said it would be.
Raine suddenly realized that on this side of the Thames, the night was as clear and black as a Welsh lake. He looked back, expecting to see the walls and spires of London enshrouded in fog, and was shocked to see the moon hanging slender and silver as a sickle above the White Tower.
He tilted his head back and looked up at the stars. They filled the sky, shimmering and glittering like thousands of
diamond flakes tossed into a well. He sucked in a deep breath. He was free, as free as the stars.
He could go south to France, sell his sword to King Louis, perhaps earn himself a new title, a new castle. Or he could go west, toward Wales, where a castle already awaited him, attached to a new liege lord, and an old dream.
Aye, he could go home, home to Wales and Arianna … if his pride could but live with the knowledge of the price she had paid.
She stood on top a windswept hill, a bouquet of bell heather cradled in her arms. Above her a golden sun hung suspended in a sky of so vivid a blue it made her eyes ache. Yet within her there dwelled a choking grief, suffocating her heart. She had lost him, lost him, oh God, she had lost him.
In the distance, something moved … a man on horseback riding toward her. Hope flared within her, sharp and hot and brilliant, like a spark off flint.
The fiery wind blew harder, searing the skin on her face. The perfume of the heather tickled her nose. Closer he came, at a slow and easy canter. Tears blurred her eyes and she stretched out her arms. The wind snatched at the flowers, blowing them away in a swirl of blue and purple petals.
He reined in halfway up the hill, dismounting, and sunlight shone bright on his golden head. For a moment her disappointment was so sharp she cried aloud with the pain of it. But then he reached up with both hands to his head and she saw that it was a helmet he wore, a golden helmet. He tossed the helmet on the ground, and this time the sunlight glinted off the blue lights in his raven-black hair.
He looked up at her, tense and hesitant as if afraid to come farther, as if unsure of her, of her love, and the thought made her smile, for he was her man and her love
for him was indelible and eternal. He took a step toward her.
She laughed, hysterical with joy, and began running down the hill, running to her one true love. His arms wrapped around her, hard and strong, and she settled into his embrace as if coming home after a long, long time away.
His voice flowed over her, warm like the wind. “I love you, Arianna. God, God, I love you.”
She tilted back her head to see his face, the face of her beloved.
“I told you that I would wait,” she said.
“Aye.”
“I will always be waiting, Raine.”
“Aye,” he said again.
He held her tight and spun her around and around, and the wind took with it the sound of their laughter, so that it went on and on and on, carried along the circle of time.
It was a perfect day for seeing the floating island. The sky overhead was the deep blue of cornflowers, but a mist hugged the marshes and blanketed the sea in a soft, thick whiteness, like fleece.
The girl sat on a boulder, her arms wrapped around her knees. The boulder had once been part of the circle of standing stones at her back, though it stood no longer, having been stricken by lightning and knocked down during some long-ago storm. The girl came here often, to this place, to think. And to look out to sea on misty days like this one, hoping for a glimpse of the floating island.
“Arianna?”
Startled, the girl spun around, dropping her knees. A frail old man stood before her, stooped and bent. His pale hands were wrapped around a shepherd’s crook. His face was thin and yellow, like old parchment, and only a few white wisps of hair were left to decorate his head. She had never seen him before in her life.
“How—how did you know my name?”
He smiled. He had a nice smile. “You look like an Arianna I once knew.”
“Perhaps it was my great-grandmother. I was named
for her.” Excitement stirred the girl’s breast, for she had always been fascinated by her great-grandparents, and here was someone, besides family, who might actually have known them.
She patted the stone beside her. “Will you take a seat, good sir? What was this Arianna like? Have you stories to tell?”
A chuckle rumbled out of the old man, strangely deep and youthful to have come from such a thin, old chest. “Oh, aye, I know stories….” He settled onto the stone beside her, sighing softly. “Arianna knew a great love.”
The girl sighed, too, for this fitted so exactly all the tales she had heard of her great-grandmother.
“Aye. My great-grandmother was mad with love, they say, for her husband. He was a great knight,” she said with pride. “He was English, but he had a falling out with his king and so he became an honorary son of Gwynedd.” She pointed to a fortress of stone that sat on a bluff above the river. “He built that castle. Do you think she might be the same Arianna, the one you knew?”
“Well, it was a very long time ago.”
She searched his face. “Grandmother says they went to the floating island. Do you think this could be true? It is a magical place, the island, like the Isle of Avalon where King Arthur sleeps. Grandmother says that on the island Raine and Arianna are forever young and forever in love. And on misty days like this one, sometimes it parts, the mist does, and you can see the island floating right out there on the horizon.” She pointed out to the mist-enshrouded sea. “I’ve never seen it, though, have you?”
“Oh, yes. Many times.”
“Truly!” She squinted, trying to peer through the mist. “Well, I wish that I could see it just once.”
“You only have to believe in it, and someday you will see.”
The girl squeezed her eyes shut, believing, believing, and trying to will the island to appear.
The old man had a sack tied to the hook of his staff. He took it off now, opening it, and drew out a small, battered bowl. She wondered if the bowl was made of gold, for it shone brightly and its rim, she noticed, was studded with what looked to be real pearls. She thought the bowl must be very, very old. Like the man himself.
He held the bowl out to her. “This,” he said, “belongs to you. I have been keeping it for you.”
“Oh, I cannot accept that,” the girl said, shocked. For if the bowl was gold and those
were
pearls, then it must be very valuable.
“But I told you, it is not a gift—” He stopped himself, muttered something that sounded like
Why must
I
always get the stubborn ones?
then said, “Please. I am a very old man with no one to give things to. And besides, it belonged for a time to your great-grandmother.”
“It did? Truly?” She looked at the old, battered bowl with greater interest. Then, smiling shyly, she took it.
The old man coughed, cleared his throat. “Er … you don’t hold any odd prejudices, do you?”
She looked up from the bowl to the old man’s face. “Prejudices?”
“Aye. For instance, what would you say if your father were to tell you that you were to be wedded to a Scot?”
“A Scot!” She started to laugh and then she saw that he was serious and she shuddered. “I’d sooner marry the devil.”
The old man heaved an enormous sigh and this time mumbled something that sounded oddly like
Goddess preserve me.
He sat and ruminated in silence a moment, then asked out of nowhere, “Does your father have a bard?”
She laughed at the question. This was Wales, after all. “Yes. Of course.”
“Any good, is he?”
“I suppose so. He composes beautiful love songs.”
“But your father could always use another bard, couldn’t he?”
“I suppose so,” she said again.
Again the old man seemed to lose himself in thought. With a surprising spryness for such a very old man, he stretched to his feet. It took her a moment to realize he was leaving.
She sprang up after him. “Wait! I haven’t thanked you for … I don’t even know your name.”
He turned around. A boyish smile creased his weathered face and his black eyes glittered with a white light, as if slivers of the moon had been caught within them. “My name is Taliesin,” he said.
The girl watched the old man hobble down the beach. She looked down into the bowl she cradled in her hands. The metal felt warm against her palms and it seemed to surge and pulse as if alive.
As she looked down into the bowl’s golden depths she thought she saw a man and a woman twirling around and around on top of a hill full of heather, their mouths open in laughter. But in the next instant they were gone.
The girl laughed at herself. It was only the sun that made the bowl feel warm and the image she had seen of the whirling couple were the clouds reflecting in the bowl’s shiny bottom.
She looked down the beach again. But the old man was gone.
Then she saw it, far out to sea … the mist parted and there it was, the island! In the time it took her to draw breath, the mist closed up again and the island was gone.
But she was sure, oh yes, she was sure that she could hear a man and woman laughing.
