The Falcons of Montabard (32 page)

'Where's my son?'

She went to fetch Guillaume from the cradle. He made a peevish complaint and fisted his eyes, but thankfully did not resort to outright wails as she bore him to Gerbert. Sitting on the edge of the bed, she held him at her husband's good side.

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'God in heaven, he has grown!' There was pride and astonishment in Gerbert's voice.

'Of course he has. If he is to be as tall as his father, he has to begin now.'

'When we were under attack, I thought of you and him . . . indeed it was all that was in my mind. I mustn't give up, I mustn't die.' His voice cracked and tears oozed through his lashes and down his fever-glazed face.

'Hush, it's all right.' She spoke to him in the soothing tones of a mother to a child. 'You are home, you're not going to die.' She glanced at Sabin. He had moved away and turned his back out of decency, but he was not deaf. The fact that he was lingering meant that he had more to tell her, and she was not sure she was going to be strong enough to hear it.

Montabard's physician arrived with his satchel of nostrums. He was a young Italian named Luigi who had rested at the keep on his way home from Jerusalem two months ago and ended up remaining longer than a night. Annais returned Guillaume to his cradle. Awake but crotchety with tiredness, he began to wail, but Soraya rocked the cradle with her foot and spoke softly until the wails subsided to small, sleepy grumbles. Thanking her with a look, Annais went back to her husband.

Examining the wound was a difficult chore, for Gerbert was obviously in agony and even to touch the bandages made him catch his breath and groan. However, Luigi gently persisted. When laid bare, the injury had an unpleasant smell that rose in waves of heat. Pus oozed between the stitches and poisonous red streaks stretched into the healthy flesh north and south. Luigi's expression did not change. His only sign of concern was a single click of his tongue.

'Can you do something for him?' Annais rubbed her hands together then clasped them at her mouth as if she were praying.

'I can try, madonna. The poison in the wound is spreading into his body and must be stopped. I have to open up the stitches, clean his flesh and rebind it. The rest is in the hands of God who has been merciful enough to spare him thus far.'

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She nodded and compressed her lips.

He gave her a compassionate look from large dark eyes. 'You do not have to stay if it disturbs you too much, madonna.'

Annais shook her head. 'No, I am accustomed to caring for the sick. I was raised in a convent, and although elderly nuns are different from a full-grown man, I am not squeamish.' Her expression grew fierce. 'Besides, he is my husband.'

Luigi nodded approvingly.

By the time he had finished, Annais wished that she had never agreed with such pride to stay. She and Sabin pinned Gerbert to the bed and Luigi did his work. Probing the wound, which made Gerbert arch like a bow and scream, revealed a shard of steel from the blade of the scimitar. Red-fingered, Luigi held it aloft in triumph. 'This is what was causing the trouble,' he said. 'With good fortune and rest he will heal now.' He proceeded to wash the deep slash in salt water and stitched the macerated flesh back together. A honey poultice was packed over it and soft linen bandages wrapped around the arm. Gerbert had been given white poppy in wine and, as it took effect, he subsided into a restless doze. Luigi sat at the bedside to watch his patient and from his satchel removed a dog-eared vellum book, a medical treatise, he said, written by a Greek physician called Paul of Aegina. Within moments, his nose was buried.

Feeling sick and faint, Annais moved to the embrasure to draw in lungfuls of clean air. Sabin brought her a cup of wine and gently pushed her down on the stone seat beneath the window. 'He will be all right,' he said gently.

Annais found a wan and meaningless smile and turned the cup in her hands. The wine rippled and shook, but Sabin had been wise enough not to fill it to the brim and it did not spill. She wanted to weep, but could not afford to ... not until she knew everything. Standing at her side, Sabin was quiet, but it was not an easy or comfortable silence. He was waiting to speak, allowing her to gather her second wind. She took a trembling sip of the wine and looked at him. There was a bruise the colour

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of spilled woad at his temple, and weary smudges beneath his eyes. She realised that he was still wearing his mail.

'You should unarm.'

'Presently,' he said. 'Truth to tell I have worn it for days on end and an hour more will make no difference.'

Annais drew a deep breath. 'There is more, isn't there? You have not told me the whole.'

He gazed out of the embrasure for the space of several heartbeats, then turned to look at her. 'Your father was captured with King Baldwin,' he said. 'Or at least we believe he was.'

Heat prickled at the back of her neck. She pressed her fingers against the cup, anchoring herself to consciousness by the hard pressure of hfr fingertips on the cold elated sides. 'Tell me.' she heard herself say, and, as if from a distance, listened to Sabin relay the story of their ambush and the fight that had followed. When he was finished, the silence fell again. If Annais had been filled with suppressed emotion before, now she was so swollen with it that she had grown numb, and it was a blessing.

'As soon as the meltwater has gone from the Euphrates, I am returning to Kharpurt and joining the Armenians. There is a plan to spring Joscelin of Edessa from captivity, and that plan must now involve King Baldwin and your father. It will be of more use than remaining here when there are men like Thierry and Malik and Durand to hold the keep. Besides, Gerbert will be on his feet soon enough.'

She set the cup to one side knowing that if she drank the wine she would be sick. 'You are certain that my father was taken captive?'

Sabin bit his thumbnail. 'We searched all the bodies,' he said. 'His was not one of them, and he was close to the King when the fighting began.' His expression was bleak but resolute. 'I will bring him home alive, I promise you . . . and I promise myself... or I will not come back at all.'

'Do not say that! It is tempting fate.'

He smiled. 'No more than usual. Don't worry, you won't be rid of me that easily.'

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He left to remove his mail and wash the sweat of travel from his body. She went to the bedside to look at Gerbert, deep-sunk in drugged sleep. Her stomach was a hollow cavern. She was terrified and she could show that terror to no one. Perhaps that was how Odile had felt; perhaps that was why she had preferred to remain closed in her chamber, cocooned from the blows of the world outside.

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Chapter 20

His heart slamming against his chest wall, his breath whistling in his throat, Strongfist obeyed King Baldwin's bellowed order to cast aside his shield and throw down his sword, thus baring them both to the lances and scimitars of the surrounding Saracens.

Through a blur of stinging sweat, Strongfist could see the bodies of his companions strewn along the riverside like flotsam; and each hard-drawn breath sucked the stench of the slaughterhouse into his lungs. Himself and five others surrounded the King like the points of a star. Everyone else was dead, or too badly wounded to fight on. He stared at the bristle of steel points and past them into the fierce dark eyes of turbaned warriors. A slim thread of command was all that stood between life and death for King Baldwin and the remnants of his bodyguard. Strongfist prayed with silent vehemence. It was one thing to die in the heat of battle, another to be executed as the blood cooled and a man had time to understand what was coming.

The Saracen ranks flurried and parted, the warriors bowing down to a man riding an exquisite black mare. His mail coat shone like polished sea-coal and was mirrored by his eyes. He wore an immaculate white turban set with a ruby the size of a pigeon's egg. Rubies adorned his fingers too, winking like clots of blood set in gold. The hilt of his scimitar was similarly blistered. A grey-bearded attendant on a pied mule accompanied him, and it was he who spoke out in accented French.

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'In the name of Allah the All Merciful, know that you are in the presence of the lord Balak, Prince of Saruj, lord of Khanzit. Yield yourselves to his great mercy and you shall be spared.'

Baldwin bowed his head. 'I yield myself and my men to the superior force of Lord Balak.' Although flushed and breathing hard, Baldwin had control of himself. Having been a lord of these wild north lands before he was king, he knew the rules and how to play by them.

The spears withdrew a fraction and Strongfist's tension came down a peg, although his heart continued to hammer in his chest. The lord Balak spoke, his voice harsh and dusty.

'The lord Balak says that he is pleased to offer you hospitality at his fortress of Kharpurt,' the translator declared. 'There is no need to visit in the secret of night when he can show you everything by the clean light of day. He is certain that you will be eager to see your kinsman and he promises that you and your knights will be kept in the same luxury as Joscelin of Edessa . . . until a suitable ransom can be agreed.'

The words were as smooth as honey, but there was no mistaking the underlying threat. Strongfist wondered grimly what form a 'suitable' ransom would take. For Joscelin, Balak had demanded the fortress of Edessa, and had it flung back in his face. What would he seek for the King of Jerusalem?

Balak's warriors surged amongst them, searching and removing all weapons and anything of value. Strongfist had already discarded sword and shield, but now he was stripped of his meat dagger and the fine Saxon hunting knife that had belonged to his grandfather. His hands were lashed behind his back with rawhide cords and a Turcoman warrior took his stallion on a lead rein. Strongfist craned his neck and tried to gaze past him to the strewn dead, seeking the bodies of Gerbert and Sabin, but the Saracen took it as a sign that Strongfist was planning to escape and clubbed him with the blunt end of a lance. The blow struck Strongfist's temple hard enough to form stars and ran a long graze down his cheek. He reeled but

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instinctively gripped the saddle with his thighs, knowing that if he fell they were likely to kill him rather than let him become a hindrance. He prayed that either Gerbert or Sabin had escaped, for then at least Annais would know what had happened to him. If not. . . He had a vision of her confronting the loss of her husband, her father and her friend. His little grandson would lose three of his strongest protectors. A babe among wolves. He clamped his jaw to resist despair. His grandfather had endured the great battle of Hastings field and the loss of most of his kin. His progeny, by the very fact of their existence, had inherited his tenacity and will to survive . . . but although the thought was a crutch, it gave Strongfist little comfort.

Leaning against a merlon, Gerbert pressed his hand to his ribs and struggled to catch his breath Sweat glistened on his brow and his heart was beating so hard that it made his body tremble. Sabin knew better than to tell him he should not have climbed to the wall walk in the first place. The wound fever had left Gerbert as querulous as a woman in the week before her monthly bleed, and anyone who spoke a word out of line was dicing with his temper.

That Gerbert had made any kind of recovery from the wound was little short of a miracle. Sabin had been convinced he was going to die, but Luigi's skills as a physician and Annais's tender, diligent nursing had pulled him back from the brink. The wound still oozed and was not healing well; he was beset by an almost permanent low fever, but he had declared himself well enough to rise from his bed and inspect the castle's defences.

Gerbert steadied and drew himself upright. His chest still heaved and his lips were tinged with blue. 'You think I am being foolish,' he growled.

Sabin shrugged. 'What I think does not matter. I have been called a fool and worse on many occasions, but it always made me more determined to go my own way.'

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Gerbert gave a snort of reluctant amusement and turned to look out through the crenel gap on a land lush with the melt-water and greenery of spring. For a long time, he was silent and Sabin did not seek to intrude on his thoughts. Besides, given Gerbert's condition, there was no guessing what they might be. Sometimes they were lucid and clear, but on other occasions, depending on the level of his fever and how much white poppy he had consumed, he would ramble and lose his way.

'I have a boon to ask of you,' he said eventually, fixing Sabin with glittering eyes and red-branded cheeks. 'I bound you to me for but a year and a day. That time has long passed. I know I cannot keep you, but I ask you for the sake of my wife and son to dwell on at Montabard.'

Sabin paced along the wall walk and paused by the next crenel. The shahins were riding the air high above the walls on scimitar wings. He watched them and knew that Gerbert was watching him in his turn. 'You know that their lives are mine, saving that I go to join the rescue at Kharpurt,' he said quietly.

'You would swear a holy oath on that?'

Sabin turned his gaze from the falcons. 'If my word is not good enough for you, then neither is a holy oath. Why do you want me to stand protector when you will not trust me?'

Gerbert grimaced. 'I am in pain,' hesaid. 'Forgive my clumsy words. I do not doubt your honour. It is my concern for Annais and Guillaume that makes me zealous.'

'You could ask Aymer, Thierry, Durand ... or Malik. Their steadfastness is proven,' Sabin said curtly.

'So is yours.' Shuffling forward, Gerbert clamped a heavy hand down on Sabin's nearest shoulder. 'I did not intend to insult you. What I meant to say was that Thierry and Durand have sworn their oaths to me. I know that you are bound to no one save by your own choice, but I ask you, in friendship, to swear fealty to my wife and my son.' The hand squeezed, forestalling Sabin as he drew breath to reply. 'Think upon it,' Gerbert said. 'Say no more now. I do not have the stamina to listen, and your own thoughts may need consideration.' The