SirenSong (23 page)

“God willing, he will.” The voice of the infirmarian was
troubled. “But the fever is worse than I expected, and the wounds, especially
that in the shoulder which had to be cut to remove the arrow, are greatly
inflamed.”

“Will you take me to him?” Mauger asked.

“Yes, of course,” the brother said. He summoned an acolyte
and told him where to take Mauger, warning him again not to go into the room or
at least, not to speak to William. “They have such strength in their fever,” he
remarked, walking to the door with Mauger, “that they can do what weakness
would prevent otherwise. If seeing you should remind him of some duty he
thought left undone or some slight unavenged, he might rise from his bed and
open his wound or take a chill. That would be a disaster.”

“No, no,” Mauger assured him. “I will not speak to him.”

It was unfortunate for Mauger that the acolyte had heard the
brother’s instructions. Although William was alone, tossing and muttering
incoherently, Mauger did not dare try to send his guide away or step into the
room while he watched. As he rode back to camp he cursed the Earl of Hereford
bitterly for an overactive conscience. Just because he had agreed that William
should lead the raid was no reason for all this special attention. In a way it
was all to the good, however. He had noticed William’s gear in the room. This
time there would be no mistake. He would see to it himself that the fevered man
fell on his own knife while fighting dreams.

Manger ate a leisurely dinner, mulling over various plans
for seeing that Raymond followed William into the grave. Afterward, he
disported himself with one of the better whores in the camp and, just before
dark, rode off with Egbert, with whom he had had a few words on the subject of
stabbing the wrong man. The words had not been too sharp. Mauger realized that
Egbert had to work fast and in the dark. Besides, his hatred of William had
grown with each check and now he was looking forward with real enjoyment to
plunging a knife into him.

No one raised any question when Mauger passed through the
abbey gates. So many men from the camp came to visit comrades or to collect
belongings of those who had died to send to relatives that the gateman paid no
heed to single incomers. Egbert rode around to the small postern in the west
wall that led to the abbot’s residence and tethered his horse out of sight. He drew
his hood over his head so that his face was shadowed and rang the bell. This
gate was always kept locked, but a brother who worked in the abbot’s house was
assigned to answer the bell. He was annoyed when Egbert stated the cause of his
visit and told him he should have gone round by the main gate. When Egbert
begged pardon humbly and said that he had walked far and was afraid the gates
would be shut before he could get around to them, the brother admitted him.
Having relocked the gate behind Egbert, he pointed the direction to the guest
house and went back to his own work.

A shadow followed him out of a patch of darkness in the
direction he had pointed. Egbert watched, then lifted the key from the hook
where it hung, unlocked the gate, replaced the key. That was all of Egbert’s
task this time, but he did not slip out. Of late, he had failed too often.
Mauger had been unusually pleasant about it, but he did not intend to take any
chances this time. He found a shadowed nook in the abbot’s garden from which he
could see the gate and sat down to wait. It might be several hours until Mauger
could finish Sir William. If by some chance a late visitor should arrive, the
gate might be discovered to be unlocked and the oversight remedied. Then Egbert
would have to unlock it again.

Although Sir William had been alone when Mauger looked in on
him, he was not alone long. Raymond’s absence had been brief. The killing in
the infirmary, about which he had heard when food was brought for him to break
his fast, had brought his suspicion to fever pitch and sent him off to
Hereford. Both remembered the infirmarian saying he had planned to move William
to the window. That was not proof that someone had died in William’s place, it
could have been a coincidence. A man bent on murder seldom stops to steal
knives and purses. Still, it was a strange coincidence.

Raymond’s first reaction had been to move William again, at
once, but Hereford objected. Such desperate efforts to be rid of William could
not be stopped by moving him. They would merely continue as soon as his new
position was discovered. It would be far better, the earl insisted, to catch
whoever was trying to kill him.

It was, of course, impossible to move a whole troop into the
abbey. Even if Hereford could have overborne the abbot’s objections, such an
action would almost certainly warn the intended murderer, who would put off his
attempt. In the end, it was decided that Raymond should watch by Sir William’s
bed and four men would hide in each adjoining room and the rooms opposite ready
to rush to Raymond’s aid should he cry for help.

The first hitch in this plan occurred ten minutes after full
dark when Raymond lit a candle. William had been lying quietly, but minutes
after the faint light appeared he began to toss and mutter. Raymond bathed his
face and gave him a drink, but he could not quiet him. William’s eyes roamed
from side to side, watching the shadows cast by the flickering candle. Suddenly
he began to scream warnings of an attack from dark doorways.

The shouts brought Hereford’s guards rushing into the room,
weapons drawn, which excited William so much that Raymond had considerable
difficulty holding him in the bed. After some confusion, he explained what had
happened to the guards and begged them not to come in again unless he himself
called them with certain agreed-upon words. Having got them out and William
relatively quiet, he put out the candle which seemed to have caused the
trouble.

Although William remained on the bed, he continued to mutter
and even strike out from time to time, so that Raymond did not dare light the
candle again. He did not dare to do anything else either. As soon as he moved
in his chair, William reacted. The sick man’s hearing seemed preternaturally
acute.

The enforced stillness was making it very difficult for
Raymond to stay awake. He had carried more burdens, both physical and
emotional, in the past two days than in his entire life before. As the slow
minutes passed, his head began to nod. Three times he caught himself and forced
his eyes open. Eventually, however, his head sank forward on his breast and he
slept.

Not quite an hour later, the latch of the door clicked
softly. Raymond twitched uneasily and then sank back into sleep. William’s eyes
opened, glittering with fever. The moon had not yet risen, but a luminance from
the starlit sky cast a faint shadow from the window onto the wall opposite.
William’s muscles tensed. He was vaguely aware of pain, but all his senses
concentrated on the shadow. Somewhere outside of his direct focus of vision he
was aware of movement. He shifted his eyes, but his fever-sharpened senses were
also distorted and unreliable, and he was caught in a nightmare in which arrows
flew out of a high darkness. He looked higher while Mauger silently opened the
door.

Mauger’s footsteps were soft enough not to disturb Raymond.
William heard, but the sound did not fit with his fever dream and caused a
whirling confusion. He lowered his eyes and saw the darker shadow advancing on
him. This did not fit with any hallucination in his mind, and he watched it
advance with puzzlement. He did not move or protest when Mauger pulled off the
light blanket that Raymond had laid over him. There was a familiarity in that
action, which, even fevered as he was, he associated with his own good. The
brothers uncovered him when they cleaned him and rebandaged his hurts.

It was when Mauger bent low to clap a hand across William’s
mouth so that he should not cry out that William saw his neighbor’s face.
William jerked his head away, not because he suspected Mauger wished to harm
him but for the contrary reason. Mauger had taken care of his men. Mauger had
done his best to procure extra comfort for him. Now, he assumed, Mauger had
come to nurse him. He could not bear it.

With the strength of madness, William pushed Mauger away.
The suddenness of his action, coupled with the abnormal strength of the shove,
sent Mauger staggering backward. A chest against the wall caught him just
behind the knees so that he sat down with a thump. This sound wakened Raymond,
but he was so dazed with sleep that he could not account for what he had heard
and he stared wildly around the room, missing Mauger, who, immobile with
surprise, was no more than a slightly darker darkness in the dark room.

Meanwhile, William had struggled upright. “No,” he cried,
“no! I am quite well, quite well.”

Raymond leapt to his feet and grabbed for William, but
William had gotten out of the bed and stood up. Still befuddled, Raymond leaned
too far so that he fell forward on the bed, and then, instead of jumping up and
running around the end to grab William—he still had no idea that Mauger was in
the room—he began to crawl across the bed, thinking it the quickest way.
William, however, had not stood still. Somehow his fever-moiled brain had come
to the conclusion that courtesy required him to walk to the door with Mauger
and that that act would serve the double purpose of proving he was well enough
to dispense with Mauger’s nursing.

“See you out,” he mumbled, staggering forward. “My thanks.
No need. See you out.”

Mauger could believe neither his ears nor his eyes. After
fighting him off as if he knew what was intended, William was coming toward him
with hands outstretched. Mauger’s own guilt made him interpret William’s
delusion as suspicion.
A trap
! his mind shrieked.
He knew all along
what you were trying to do and set a trap
. Mute with terror, Mauger leapt
to his feet, made one violent thrust at William with the knife he held, and
dropped the weapon. He burst past William, flung open the door, and ran out.

At that moment, Raymond swung off the bed behind William. He
saw the violent gesture, realized for the first time that there was someone in
the room beside himself and William, and leapt to attack. But William, who had
been stabbed in the left arm, staggered back into his arms, bellowing with
rage, pain, and surprise. Thus, Raymond’s first call for help was drowned in
William’s outraged cry. What was worse, the blow catapulted William into an
entirely different hallucinatory sequence and he began to fight Raymond.

Twice more Raymond shouted to Hereford’s guards that the
assassin was escaping. Unfortunately, the first time William landed such a blow
in the young knight’s midsection that the warning was choked off into a howl of
anguish. The next time Raymond called, he received instant response, but it was
too late. Although the men needed no more than a word to send them hunting
through the rooms and corridors and into the garden, Mauger was already out of
the postern. Egbert had smiled grimly when he realized his master had also
failed. He was very glad he would not be in the camp when Mauger returned to
it. Silently he slipped around to the front of the main building and then into
the stables where he settled down beside his master’s horse, which he would
dutifully bring to camp the next morning.

Chapter Twelve

Alys chose a tally stick from the bundle she had been
translating into written accounts. This was not because she distrusted Martin’s
honesty or accuracy. Each stick was clearly marked with the nicks and scratches
that identified the merchant or farmer to whom it pertained and the amounts
were clearly incised in large and small notches. She chose to make a written
record for several reasons. One leaf of parchment took much less space than a
bundle of sticks. Moreover, written records produced awe and suppressed
arguments. The villeins and serfs, at least, seemed to regard them as magic, as
if the fact of writing a thing down on parchment made it true or inevitable.

She was sufficiently absorbed in her work that Martin had to
clear his throat to draw her attention. She finished inscribing the line and
looked up.

“There is a messenger from Wales.” Martin said.

Alys smiled and said, “Well, send him in. Papa is a most
faithful correspondent. I had a letter from him only five or six days ago.”

She spoke before she thought, before she saw the unnatural
glitter in Martin’s eyes. The fact that the steward’s eyes were full of tears
came to her simultaneously with his words.

“The letter he carries is not from the master.”

“Dead?” Alys shrieked, leaping to her feet. “Papa is dead?”

“No!” Martin exclaimed, scuttling around the table to take
hold of her. “But he was hurt, sore hurt.”

“You lie! You wish to make it easy. He is dead,” she
whimpered.

“No, lady, no,” Martin assured her, stroking the hand he
held. “He was alive when the messenger left. The letter is from Sir Raymond.”

The panic that had closed Alys’s throat and made her heart
pound until she thought her breast would burst receded a little. There was a
comfort in hearing Raymond’s name. She did not think about that but ran eagerly
out into the hall to question the messenger. She tore the folded parchment from
his hands, ripped off the seals, and began to read.

The haste undid her. At first she could not make out more
than a few words. Although the hand was clear and firm and she could
distinguish each letter, they combined all wrong and made nonsense words, full
of
z
’s, that she could not understand. Weeping with frustration, she
sounded out a sentence to Martin, crying, “What does it mean? What does he say?
Has he writ in Latin?”

“Not Latin,” Martin replied. He could not read or write
himself, but he had heard enough Latin in his years at the monastery that he
understood it a little. What Alys had spoken was not Latin. The sounds were
harsher, like— “Lady! He has writ as he speaks, not as we speak,” Martin
exclaimed.