The Falcons of Montabard (39 page)

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stairs from the darkness beneath them and Gregor's sword swiped. The tip of the steel rang against the wall, but the blade connected and the man screamed and fell. Another guard following hard on his heels tried to back and run, lost his footing and tumbled down the stairs, becoming wedged at the next turn. Gregor pounced upon him, seized his head, jerked with the knife and stepped over his shuddering body. Sounds of raised voices and a scuffle caused the three men to quicken their pace. The stairs turned again and opened into a dimly lit anteroom with two barred doors at its end. One chamber was open and the old man who had been carrying the food lay dying across the threshold, his blood soaking into the flat loaves of bread.

Within the room someone was retching and choking. Sabin rushed forward and saw Joscelin, lord of Edessa, throttling his guard with the chain of his manacles. A second guard was slumped against the cell wall, run through by his own lance. There was a sound like the snap of a thick, dry branch and the Saracen dropped, a dark patch flooding the front of his breeches as his bladder relaxed.

'Never underestimate the wolf, even when he is chained!' Joscelin snarled at the corpse and kicked it. He glared at the men standing in the doorway. The other knights who shared his cell crowded at his shoulders, ready to fight.

'My lord.' Gregor went down on one knee, swiftly followed by Sabin and Pieter. 'My lord, we have come to free you.'

'Hah, and about time!' Joscelin's voice was a roused snarl. 'Get me out of these things.' He thrust out his manacled wrists. Pieter produced a short axe from his belt, and Gregor a spare sword. Within moments, the lord of Edessa was free, armed and ready for a fight.

Sabin stooped to the strangled guard and prised the ring of keys from the man's fingers. Striding to the other door, he sought to unlock it. Behind him Saracen reinforcements pounded down the stairs, intent on foiling the escape. Joscelin was waiting for them with a bared sword and a store of bitterness. One of his

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knights had the fallen guard's scimitar, the other a lance.

Trying to blot out the clash and swipe of weapons, knowing that at any moment he might feel a blade at his back, Sabin thrust the next key in the line into the lock and grated it round. 'My liege, your rescue has come!' he bellowed at the top of his lungs, lest Baldwin take it into his head to use his chains as Joscelin had done. Setting his shoulder to the door Sabin barged it open and stumbled into a fetid-smelling cell. His eyes widened upon the hollow-eyed, gaunt-faced men staring back at him. For a moment he recognised none of them for, when last seen, they had been well-fleshed warriors, richly clad for a day's hunting. The same garments clothed them now, the brave hues now as filthy and discoloured as beggars' rags. After an instant of shock, Sabin rallied. 'My liege.' He did not go down on one knee and bow his head. There wasn't time with a full-blown battle raging at his back.

One of Joscelin's knights, arrived with the axe and, seizing it, Baldwin set about springing himself and his men. Sparing a rapid glance around, Sabin sought and found Strongfist among the gathering, thin as a cadaver, but his eyes burning with life beneath the craggy brows. Heartened, Sabin plunged out of the cell and joined the fight, followed moments later by the freed prisoners. It was bloody and grim, but brief. . . and this time, to balance the battle on the banks of the Euphrates, the Franks were victorious.

Gaining the courtyard, Sabin discovered it strewn with the bodies of the garrison. The two 'priests' of earlier were laughing and slapping each other, their swords reddened to the hilts. A grinning Gabriel strode up to Sabin and punched his shoulder. 'Kharpurt is ours, let no man doubt it!' He shook an exultant fist. 'Not a Saracen left alive in the place. This is a spear up the arse for Balak!'

Sabin blotted his perspiring brow on the back of his wrist, and having wiped his sword, sheathed it. 'What of their commander?' He had known that there would be little mercy shown, but it was unusual to massacre every last soldier,

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especially if rich ransoms were to be gained.

'Ah, that was none of our doing.' Gabriel's smile broadened, but behind it lay unease. 'He was murdered in his bed by one of the Frankish slave women from the harem . . .'

Strongfist looked at the heap of chains that had so recently dragged him down and now lay at his feet like a shed snake-skin. He rubbed his chafed red wrists. 'I had begun to think that I was doomed to die in this place,' he said. 'Keeping hope alive on promises is not always easy.'

'We had to wait for the meltwaters to subside and the river to reach its lowest ebb,' Sabin said. 'And for Balak's attention to be elsewhere.' He gazed around the cell and could not suppress a shudder. 'I would have run mad within a week.'

'Some of us almost did,' Strongfist said wryly. 'But those with less imagination acted like that donkey to your stallion. We anchored them to sanity, and they gave us a purpose.' He managed a smile. 'I will never scorn a bathhouse again. Jesu, I am as lousy as a gutter orphan.'

And as starved.' Sabin started towards the door. 'I suppose we should have waited until after you had finished breaking your fast.'

Strongfist grunted with pained amusement. At the cell door he paused and kicked aside the straw to reveal the small tafel board he had carved in the dirt of the floor. He stood for a moment in contemplation. 'I do not want ever to play that game again,' he said, revulsion curling in his voice.

'I do not blame you.' Sabin waited patiently, his hands at his sides, while Strongfist took a final inventory and farewell of his prison. 'I am only relieved to have found you alive,' he said. 'After the battle on the riverbank, I did not know what happened to you . . .' He wondered how to broach the news of all that had occurred during the three months of Strongfist's captivity - starkly, without gentleness, or in stages, like forging the links of a chain. It was an unfortunate image and he gave an involuntary grimace.

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'Nor I you . . .' Strongfist raised his head and now made determinedly for the light. 'I thought you and Gerbert must be dead. The onslaught was too terrible to hold out hope of anything else.'

'I—' Sabin began and stopped. The words that had always come so easily to him as a courtier were elusive now when it truly mattered.

Strongfist climbed the stairs, all his breath given to the toil. Reaching the top, he emerged into the burning brilliance of the sunlight and clutched the wall for support while his eyes adjusted and his lungs recovered from their labour. Sabin followed him out, his own chest heaving, if for different reasons.

'Gerbert survived the battle,' he said, 'but he suffered an arm wound that would not heal. I took a blow to the head that knocked me senseless and the Saracens left me for dead.'

Strongfist slowly straightened and looked at him in dismay. 'You say Gerbert's wound would not heal?'

Sabin nodded. The words were bitter in his mouth. 'It took two months for the infection to kill him. If not for Annais's nursing and the skill of our physician Luigi, it would have been much sooner, I think, but they fought tooth and nail to keep him alive. There is little comfort in such news, I know, but at least he had the time to make his farewells and set his affairs in order.'

'And small mercies are to be appreciated,' Strongfist said, his mouth twisting.

'If I could have given my life for his, I would,' Sabin said quietly.

'Don't talk like a fool.' Strongfist's tone was harsh with the anger of grief. 'God has spared your life; you should give praise and use it to the hilt. I certainly intend to use mine.'

Sabin stiffened beneath the reprimand. It was justified, but he thought that Strongfist probably harboured such feelings of guilt himself, for he too had survived while others were dead. 'There is more that you need to know,' he said, approaching the eye of the storm.

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Strongfist looked at him from beneath tangled brows and the blue eyes, although hollow and bloodshot with exhaustion, were knowing. 'You sound like a bridegroom about to give his bride unwelcome news on her wedding night,' he said.

'In a way it is news of that kind . . .'

'Go on,' Strongfist said curtly.

'Before Gerbert died, he made provision for Montabard, and Annais and Guillaume . . .'

'As I would expect. You are telling me that my daughter is already remarried.'

'Yes,' Sabin said. 'To me.'

Strongfist stared. A sound started somewhere in his chest and rumbled upwards. It was laughter... of a sort. 'Dear Christ in His heaven!' Strongfist choked. Tears filled his eyes and streamed down his face. He had to clutch the wall again for support. 'When I warned you to stay away from her, I was pissing in the wind, wasn't I? I might as well have thrown you together on your first day out of Scotland.'

Sabin compressed his lips. 'We are legally wed in the eyes of the Church. I honour your daughter and I will do my best for her son . .. my stepson now. If it displeases you, I am sorry, but it was Gerbert's dying wish. We were wed a week after his death, but it was not until I left to come to Kharpurt that we shared a bed as man and wife. There has been no scandal or shame - nor will there ever be.'

Strongfist shook his head and wiped his brimming eyes. 'I believe you,' he said hoarsely. 'Against all odds, I do believe you. If I didn't, weak as I am, I would heave that sword out of your belt and smite you dead. And if you break your word, the same.'

'I won't break my word,' Sabin said with quiet intensity. 'If such a thing as love exists, then I love Annais. Whatever her pleasure and pain, they are mine too.'

Strongfist looked sceptical. 'And yet you had the strength to hold back when she was Gerbert's?'

'It didn't take strength,' he said. 'If I had made so much as

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one improper move, Annais would have taken that scramaseax of hers and thrust it hilt-deep into my heart. Besides, there is love at first sight - so the troubadours say - and there is the love that you take on piece by piece - like armouring yourself . . .' A thoughtful look crossed his face. 'Or perhaps like removing your armour. How many people would you allow within the space between your heart and your shield?'

Strongfist subjected him to a scrutiny that pierced like a lance and then drove inwards. 'I am a simple man and I live by simple ways,' he said flatly. 'Not for me the courtier's polished words. So often they are shells without a kernel, and how can you know whether such a shell is a guardian of the truth or a concealment? '

'You trust your intuition, not the man,' Sabin said. 'I would not blame you for holding my past against me.' He drew himself up. 'I know that I am hardly the son-in-law you would have chosen, but I will prove your fears ungrounded.'

Strongfist's mouth curved within the bushy straggle of beard and moustache. 'See that you do,' he said, extending his hand to clasp Sabin's forearm in a powerful grip - although not quite as powerful as it had been three months ago. 'If you were amongst a line of prospective husbands for my daughter, I may not have chosen you - too unpredictable and dangerous. I would have looked for someone like myself- like Gerbert. But since I have seen both sides of you, lad, and Gerbert saw fit to name you his successor while his son grows to manhood, it's a coin I can learn to live with.'

Sabin returned the smile, although it was a struggle. Strongfist's response was as near to good grace as he was going to get... and just now there were greater concerns about which to worry.

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Chapter 24

Baldwin and Joscelin had called an assembly in the main hall. Seated on a trestle table, grease and saffron in his beard from the chicken leg he was devouring, the King addressed the company. 'There are sixty-two of us all told,' he said. 'We command a fortress of medium stature in the heart of enemy territory. We can count on some support from the Christian villages in the vicinity, but not to the extent of rendering us secure. As soon as Balak receives the news of what has happened, he will bring his army up in force.' He broke the chicken leg in two; having demolished the thigh, he tossed the bone to a saluki hound hovering on the periphery of the gathering. The drumstick he pointed at his audience.

'Joscelin and two guides who know the lie of the land will go for aid. The rest of us will defend Kharpurt. In my estimation we can hold out against a siege until our own army arrives.' 'What about supplies?' Waleran of Birejek queried. He had been captured with Joscelin and was cousin to both him and Baldwin. He had the family traits of fair hair and sharp cheekbones. 'Is there enough food and water so that we are not driven to surrender by hunger or thirst?'

'There is enough and there will be no surrender.' Baldwin's voice was so quiet and steady that he might have been passing the time of day, but the narrow look in his eyes was chilling. 'Either we hold this place, or we die. Balak will not suffer the defilers of his harem to live, and the surrounding territory is

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too hostile for us to slip away unseen. Our strongest hope of success lies in holding these walls.'

A brief silence ensued as men digested his words. There were some frowns, but no dissent, for what Baldwin said was the brutal truth. Kharpurt was indeed their best means of protection until reinforcements could be brought up. If they could hold Kharpurt, it also meant that Baldwin would have a foothold in Balak's territory.

Sabin was aware of the sharp glance that Strongf ist had cast him and knew that the older man was thinking of his daughter and the duty owed to her. But done was done. No man could turn his back now unless he left as one of Joscelin's companions, and the chosen ones would be expert guides.

As they left the gathering, Sabin felt Strongfist's elbow in his ribs. 'You do not have to stay,' he muttered, head bent towards Sabin's ear. 'My daughter needs you more than Baldwin and Joscelin do.'

Sabin's eyes narrowed. 'I promised Annais that I would bring you home, and I will not break my word.'