The Harp and the Blade (25 page)

He was not without humor, but he had a dominant and direct purposefulness that, seeing myself one of its stepping stones, I found embarrassing. I straightened up again and looked him in the eye.

“I may want you later,” I said, dimly envisioning a fort and hall of my own where this young fellow might have an. honored post, “but you came here looking for a niche for yourself, and the place isn’t mine. If Conan accepted you as my guest, that only holds good while you are convalescent. Once you are well enough to hold up your end there’s only one man you can work for here. That’s Conan. If ever I have an establishment of my own and positions to offer, it will be because I ask, and he grants, a favor.”

He nodded cheerfully when I’d finished. “It doesn’t matter from which of you I take orders. For once I know that I’m in a place where I have a chance to get somewhere. You’re my luck, and whatever you advise will be good for me.”

With some moodiness I looked after him. Every canon I had for judging character told me he was the sort of man you’d want around when the going got rough. But though I had an instinctive admiration for him I could not feel the warmth I’d experienced toward many another man. There was nothing wrong with his avowed lust for getting on in the world, yet I couldn’t see why he had to talk about it. If it happened, well and good, but if it didn’t, why, there are plenty of men, no less grand for being landless, to split a bottle with.

Conan would be a power because his natural efficiency set him to coping with conditions that angered him. He, however, took his abilities for granted and never palavered about them or the success they achieved. But I wasn’t being fair to the youngster in holding him up against Conan. Not many had the latter’s faculty for living in most good corners of life.

There was a clattering on the bridge, and I looked across the court to see the man himself enter the gates. He had dismounted and was walking toward me when a guard on the wall halted him. “There’s a rider coming,” the fellow called down. “He’s in a hurry, too.”

C
ONAN
stood undecided a moment, then went up on the wall to see for himself. These were days when a rider might well be bringing a message that would radically change the state of things. I went on with my work until I heard somebody yell: “No, there are two of them!” Then curiosity sent me up on the wall also, where I shouldered my way to stand beside Conan.

He nodded to me, and we silently watched them draw near, pushing tired horses hard. After a little my friend whistled and slapped his thigh. “It’s the Abbot, by Jesus! Take a good look, Finnian.”

I shaded my eyes. The rain the day before had laid the dust, so the still distant figures could be seen clearly enough in general outline. They were churchmen, all right, and one of them didn’t look like an ordinary monk. “It might be the Abbot,” I said cautiously.

He snapped his fingers, more excited than I had ever seen him. “Man! I hope it is!” he said with a fervor I understood. He’d been trying to win the Abbot as ally for a year now. If the prelate was coming to visit him it might mean that he had at last decided to seal the entente.

The Abbot was big news, and the possibility that he was arriving took everybody from work. Jabbering speculations, they swarmed up to point and stare. One child, with a boy’s genius for such things, fell off the wall into the moat. Even the Abbot couldn’t compete with that, and the laughter while the brat was being fished out served to lighten the waiting.

Conan’s attention had not been diverted, however. “It’s he, all right,” he said, quiet and contained now that he was sure. “Everybody off the wall except the guards,” he ordered. “And when he comes don’t crowd around him as if he were a dog fight.” He touched my sleeve, and we descended to the court. “Send him to us in the hall,” he told the gate warden.

It was nearly lunch time, but as the meal was to be served outdoors the hall was an empty place. Conan ordered wine which we sipped disinterestedly, in strange contrast to the night before. Most of the time he paced up and down while I tapped out tunes on the table with my fingers. Then we heard the horses coming over the bridge. Conan seated himself with a great show of nonchalance and turned his head with easy naturalness when the door opened. But it wasn’t for the Abbot. One of our own men entered.

“The Abbot says he’d like for you to come outside first,” the man told Conan. “He says he has something he’d like to show us all.”

That was a puzzler. Conan stuck out his lip, shrugged, and rose. Something strange, we saw at a glance, was undoubtedly in the air, and we approached the churchman watchfully, though with outward cordiality. The Abbot on his part was neither friendly nor inimical. He greeted us, but he was terse and hard-eyed.

Seeing his mood, Conan waived ceremony. “My man said you had something you wanted to show us.”

“I have.” The prelate beckoned to his follower, who stepped forward with a sack of soft leather. “Yesterday,” the Abbot announced, “a peasant of the abbey’s brought me this. He said a horseman gave it to him with the message that it was from Chilbert and that I should pass it on to you after taking what was mine.” He had spoken in a loud, resonant voice; and, looking around, I noticed that every man and woman in the place was watching and listening from some point or other.

Conan never took his eyes from the churchman’s face. “From Chilbert,” he murmured. “So!”

“So!” the other repeated after him. “I looked in the bag, and this is one of the things I found.” Grimmer than ever, he opened the sack with great deliberation, looked to see what he wanted, then thrust in his arm. When his hand came out it was holding the head of a man by the hair.

The bloodless thing had belonged to no one I had ever seen; but Conan’s oath was terrible with wrath and sorrow, the women shrieked, and the men groaned. This was one of the men who had gone into Gregory’s fort with Conan. We had been so sure that Gregory would dare do nothing to them, and-apparently
he
hadn’t. It was Chilbert who had sent the message.

The Abbot nodded bleakly, handed the head to the monk with him, and reached in again. Even though those assembled were anticipating the other two they could not forbear to curse and moan when the sightless heads emerged without their bodies.

“Now I’ll show you my gift,” the Abbot said, looking from Conan to me; and before we had time to wonder he drew out a fourth and held it high. It was my turn to cry out in helpless rage. Sardonic even in death, Father Clovis was smiling horribly. I felt nauseated with grief and shame. He had been murdered, alone with them all against him in Gregory’s fort, and it had been at my request that he had entered the trap.

Conan and I looked at each other wretchedly, then turned back to the waiting priest. “What happened?” he asked, his voice suddenly harsh with emotion. “This is all I know.”

“Come on inside,” Conan said, and we led him between us, snarling at anybody who wasn’t quick to jump out of our way. “Fulke!” Conan barked. “Post men at the doors with orders to let nobody enter; nobody at all! “

Without speaking to each other we marched to the table, and I poured wine for the Abbot. Pointedly he pushed it aside. “Not until I hear,” he said. We made no comment, for we were on trial, and we knew it. A man of his had gone in to help us, we had got off comparatively unscathed, and the man had been left behind to die.

“You know the first of it, brother,” Conan muttered, so I gulped some wine and delivered a detailed account of what had taken place after we’d left the abbey. Later Conan took up the tale with careful circumstantial accuracy. The narrative took some while, but in all that time the Abbot said not a word. He just sat there, shifting his eyes from one to the other of us constantly. If we’d been telling anything short of the strict truth I don’t think we could have finished.

“And the last thing we know,” Conan concluded, “is that he told Fulke where we wanted the horses. He was in no danger then, certainly, or if he was he didn’t know it. There was nobody to stop him from heading straight on back to the abbey.”

To our infinite relief the Abbot reached out and thoughtfully began to sip his wine. “Clovis went back,” he said, looking as if he was actually seeing what had occurred, “because he didn’t want anybody to connect him, and therefore the abbey, with your escape. Those were my orders. But he disregarded his orders at one point, and that’s what tripped him. Somebody must have seen him talking to you when he met you coming up the hill.”

I groaned inwardly, knowing that it was on my account that Clovis had taken unnecessary chances. “Even if they did see him,” Conan objected, “why shouldn’t he talk to us? They couldn’t have caught him at anything else or they would have stopped him. The abbey has no quarrel with me, and the mere fact that he didn’t betray me on sight couldn’t be taken as proof that he helped me.”

“No,” the prelate agreed. “But don’t forget the heads were sent not by Gregory but by Chilbert. He’d be an angry man at finding, and Gregory a humble one while admitting, that his prize was gone.”

Chilbert must, indeed, have slavered with fury, and at another time we might have enjoyed the thought hugely. We could laugh at nothing then, however. “All right,” Conan picked up and followed out the suggested line of speculation, “Chilbert had Gregory on the run, maybe he even accused him of selling me back to myself. In any case he wasn’t cutting much of a figure, and Chilbert treated him like a vassal, taking charge of his fort while he investigated the circumstances of the escape. He found that I had three men there, which would serve to clear Gregory perhaps, but he killed them out of spite. As for Clovis—”

“He might have shown he was amused at your escape,” the Abbot said sadly. “He would laugh, you know.”

“That,” I said, “or the coincidence of Clovis’ arrival a few hours before mine may have been more than he could overlook.”

“That’s likely to be it if he was convinced that you were the bard in question.” Conan refilled the cups and put his elbows on the table. “It would eat his brain, if he knew that the man who had hoodwinked him this time was the one who had previously clubbed him, stolen his pet horse, and snaked me out of a hot hole once before. It might well make him crazy enough to kill any possible accomplice.”

The Abbot nodded. “Be that as it may, my man is dead, and Chilbert is the avowed murderer. You have used the word ‘crazy,’ and the count never did a madder thing. No doubt he imagines in his growing power that he can intimidate the abbey by such a gesture.” He put both clenched fists on the board before him. “All he has done is to declare war. Had Gregory protested, or even killed Clovis, I would have been willing to concede some justice; but Chilbert was only a party to the business through duplicity and arrogance. He has murdered for spite, as you have said, and he will be paid for it.”

The Abbot next leaned forward a little. “Conan,” he said challengingly.

My friend’s voice was quiet. “Yes?”

“You have offered alliance in the past, and I refused to commit myself. Probably I was wrong.”

Conan waved the suggestion of guilt aside. “There was nothing, as you saw it, to be gained by fighting before you had to, and you argued reasonably that I was too much of an unknown quantity.”

“Exactly. But now I see that though the abbey will still gain nothing concrete by fighting, Chilbert means to swallow us if we don’t. And the fact that Gregory is now his man puts him in a good position for it. I always knew that the count wanted us to pay tithes to him, of course, but the killing of our envoy and the flaunting of that killing before us shows that he now thinks he has the force to crush us into helpless submission. I’d hoped that I could remain a balance of power that would leave us all free to guide our respective peoples as we see fit, but Chilbert won’t accept so rational a situation.”

“No,” Conan agreed. “I’m no fool to want empire. I only want my people to be let alone to live as men. Chilbert does want empire, and he wants nobody to live as a man except himself.”

The prelate slammed the table with the flat of his hand. “He wants to rule everything, so I say he shall rule nothing.” His strong face was seamed with lines of determination. “If you’ll ride with me now—for I think that now before he is ready to take the aggressive is the moment for the first blow—I pledge that the abbey will stand or fall with you.”

So the pact was made at last, and we would take pleasure and confidence from the idea later. Just then, however, we could only remember that it had been formed because of a man we’d rather have alive. Subduedly we drank to the entente, then Conan ordered lunch to be brought inside to us. We ate sparingly, each one mulling over plans and contingencies in silence, then Conan sent for Jean and Rainault. After a few words of explanation to them the council of war began.

“Chilbert will no doubt be south again on his own proper holdings,” the Abbot said. “He’ll be getting ready to move against us right after his harvesting.”

“We’re all waiting for that to be over,” Jean remarked. “Naturally there’s a temptation to gang and hammer them right away, but that means starving through the winter. There’s not much point in winning a victory if you’re going to be a skeleton after it.”

The Abbot signified agreement. “All right. But they are probably reasoning that we are so reasoning.” He looked at Conan, his eyes far back in his head. “We’ve both had men murdered by a dog who did it just to defy us. I think the best cure for the arrogance of that dog is to prove that we can carry the war to him.”

“That’s true.” Conan was thinking it out carefully. What with the harvest and the building of his new fort he had two vitally important projects that were occupying the full time of all his men. On the other hand the moral effect of an unexpected raid would put Chilbert and his allies healthily, if temporarily, on the defensive. And proof that Conan and the Abbot were acting in concert would give them much more to consider.

Meanwhile I also had been giving the proposition attention. If my knowledge of the situation and terrain had blank spots it was none the less generally sound. “Look, Conan,” I said. “That day I first met you; whose lands were you on?”