The Harp and the Blade (6 page)

A moment passed, and, though with a terrible finality, his arm dropped, he remained where he was. Once he had stopped he couldn’t force himself to go on again. I saw him turn toward his pursuers, waiting.

Miserable with indecision, I shook my head. Meanwhile the baying of the hounds had taken on a horrible quality, now that I knew what they were after. They would soon be out of the woods, too; and I had better get away from there if I didn’t want to watch the fellow torn down before my eyes. “Oh, well, Hell!” I swore bitterly.

“Look,” I said after I’d boosted him into the saddle and scrambled up behind, “if you know any good places to go take us to the nearest!”

I was glad that I had traveled leisurely all afternoon. The bay retained strength enough to carry us, big men both, at a good pace. I looked behind as we started and saw the first dog break out of the trees, nosing the trail. Very likely the hounds would have a difficult time figuring out what had happened to their quarry at the point where he’d mounted. They might have to wait for the men to straighten them out, which would give us a little extra time.

My unwanted companion appeared to know where he was taking us. I would have liked to know myself, but he had no breath to spare for speech. We cut across fields toward the forest at a long tangent, and my physical discomfort as I bumped along astern of the saddle was only equaled by my uneasiness and disgruntlement. For a man who tried conscientiously to stick to his own concerns I seemed to be getting into an awful lot of trouble.

The pack cry of the hounds had dissolved into puzzled yelps, but as I looked back for about the fifth time, riders came over the rise. They shouted at the sight of us, the dogs started whooping over the new scent, and the sight hounds rushed to the fore. The bay was doing wonderfully considering the load he was bearing, but they were perceptibly gaining. “Have you any friends close by?” I asked the man in front of me; but he shook his head.

Reaching the forest, we skirted it while he searched for something. This turned out to be the hardly noticeable remains of a road, and we swung into it, threading through trees whose branches slapped and scraped us. The horse stumbled once and slowed to a canter. We goaded him on, but he never regained his full stride. He wouldn’t be much use to us soon.

No doubt it wasn’t actually so very long before we emerged into another spacious clearing. I only know we eventually did, and that I looked hopefully for a fortress. Instead there were only the ruins of a great stone building and that air of desolation peculiar to abandoned manholdings. As we passed the old house to go down the slope beyond I saw that the dogs had us in sight again.

I was about to tell my companion that we might as well turn, find a corner of the ruin, and die as best we could when he halted our mount in front of an arched stone vault in the hillside. The front wall had fallen, but it was otherwise sound, with a narrow front two men might defend—for a while, at least.

He slid from my saddle and lunged toward the vault, motioning for me to go on; but once having thrown in with him I could not leave him to it. Unloading my belongings I hit the bay so that, lightened of us both, it hastened out of the way of the imminent dogs to disappear in the nearby fringe of woods.

I watched him vanish, then reached the vault in time to be ready for the first hound. In his excitement he leaped right on the point of my sword, and I threw him off to watch him kick out his life. I was then tired of being chased by dogs and killed two more with savage pleasure. After that the rest decided to wait for the men and stood around barking and snarling.

Seeing the situation was temporarily in hand, my companion had disappeared in the gloomy rear of the vault and so was not apparent when the first rider arrived. He looked at me and at the dead hounds; but the bay was not in sight, the swath in the weeds showed he had gone on, and I was no one he knew.

I jumped him before he could come to any conclusions. “Are those dogs yours?” I roared.

He was a bulky, hard-faced, red-haired man who didn’t like to be roared at, but he was still uncertain. “Yes,” he said surlily.

“Well, if you want any of ‘em left,” I snarled, “teach ‘em to tree what they’re after.”

A group of three more joined him as I said that. “He’s probably the fellow who picked Conan up,” one suggested.

“If he is we can run him down later,” the red man said, “but Conan’s the one we’re after, and if he’s riding the horse alone now he has a chance of getting away. Get the dogs going.”

More horsemen had joined them during their brief counsel and still more appeared as the hunt streamed away. “We may be back for you,” one of the first called tome.

I knew they’d be back. It wouldn’t take them long to find that the bay was riderless, but I could use the short reprieve. Unbuckling my sword, I commenced stacking the loose blocks of stone to form a rampart.

A loud splashing told me that there was water in our refuge; which was good news. In another minute my ally reappeared with dripping hair. He started to help me, but I waved him aside. “Rest up,” I ordered. “You’ll get plenty of exercise pretty soon.”

He sat down and for the first time since I had met him he spoke. “I’ve had some exercise already.”

He was a fine-looking chap now that he wasn’t gasping like a fish on a sun-hot rock. He had a long, powerful body topped by a long, exceedingly keen face, weathered but clear-skinned under his mop of light brown hair. His age, I judged, was about the same as mine, and he looked no more like a Frank than I did, either. Both from his name and appearance I picked him for a Breton.

Putting another block in place, I straightened and pointed to my scrip. “There’s food in there. You’d better eat something if your stomach’s stopped jumping.”

“Thanks—and for the other thing, too. I’m sorry you didn’t go on.”

“There wasn’t much sense in going on,” I answered truthfully. “The horse was spent, and they would have had to follow me to make sure I didn’t go for help.”

“Yes.” He moved his sword out of the way and reached into my scrip. “I shouldn’t have got you into this, but I wanted something to put my back against.”

I knew how he must have felt with those dogs getting steadily nearer. “Don’t blame you,” I said.

He took a huge bite of bread and meat, swallowed and took another, thinking hard. “Maybe,” he said after he’d gulped down a third, “they’ll let you go if I explain that you’re a stranger who doesn’t so much as know who I am.”

“They won’t listen,” I told him. Besides, I’d begun to remember how the Abbot had spoken to me of a man named Conan. There couldn’t, I reasoned, be many men so called thereabouts who were important enough to be hunted by a small army. And I knew who was chiefly against him. “Are those lads Chilbert’s by any chance?”

He nodded. “Oliver, the red-haired stench, is one of his chief lieutenants.”

“Then they’ll soon know,” I snickered drily, “that I not only tried to save your neck but took you up on Chilbert’s own pet horse.”

He stared at me. “Why of course it was! How the devil did you get hold of it?”

“I liked it better than my own.” I might have known, I thought, that Chilbert would continue to haunt me. That man had been fatal to me from the first.

My little wall was now nearly waist high, and I stopped there. “You’re Conan the Breton with power in these parts,” I said. “Is there any chance of friends finding you?”

He shrugged, not bothering to ask how I knew about him.

“They’ll start looking, soon, I suppose. I was on a wolf hunt, lost the others, my horse broke a leg, and I got lost myself, what with no sun to go by. Then I ran foul of Oliver. I managed to hide from him first, but he got the dogs. My men won’t know where to begin looking.”

I went to get a drink then returned to listen. “They’re coming back now,” I informed him.

He rose to stand beside me. “What’s your name?” He put his hand on my shoulder when I had told him. “Now we’ll show them that it’s one thing to corner and another to kill.” He had recovered his wind, and the respite had given him time to call on the reserve strength of a mighty frame. In spite of the weariness he must have felt he looked very capable indeed.

I cut my cape in two and we each wrapped a half around our left arms to give them some measure of protection. We had just finished when they all came in sight, one of them, I saw with regret, leading the recaptured bay. Oh well, I conceded with wry philosophy, I would soon have no use for horses.

I felt very quiet. Nothing seemed quite real, and things happened with preternatural slowness. I was not bitter at being irretrievably trapped in a quarrel whose interests were not mine. Causes were no longer important in face of the actuality that was soon to be.

They halted in a cluster, the men in front and the dogs behind this time. “We’re going to take you, Conan,” Oliver announced.

“You may,” the man with me said, “but first we’ll take some of you.”

The riders were looking the situation over and were not as cheerful as they might have been. Their horses would be useless, and not more than four or five could come at us without getting in each other’s way. The red man looked at me. “We’ll let you go free,” he offered.

I spat. “Naturally. And you’ll give me back Chilbert’s horse, too.” Conan laughed, and Oliver cursed me as grace before getting down to business.

At his order they all dismounted. Then five put their shields together and came at us. They had steel caps but no mail and muttered to each other, working themselves up to it. And suddenly anger rushed through me. My hour was near, but if it had to be I would kill meanwhile and like it.

“What’s the matter with the red dog?” I jeered. “He’s got his tail between his legs before he’s even been hit.”

Oliver ran forward at that and shouldered into the line just as it reached us. “That’s better!” Conan approved and sliced off part of his shield.

The wall protected our legs, but they had bucklers for the upper half of their bodies. I caught two swords with mine, dodged under an axe, and swept my counterstroke at their shanks to make them step back. One of the others had his foot on the wall, and Conan took it off at the ankle. They all withdrew a minute to carry the maimed man away.

“Good work!” I applauded.

Conan picked up the foot and hit Oliver in the back of the neck. “You left something,” he reminded them.

They were angry men when they came again, more swiftly. Holding shields together is sound defense; but it limits sword play, and they could only hack at me with overhead strokes which signaled themselves. The axe-man, however, was bothering me, for he kept trying to hit my blade and break it. But as axe work requires both hands he lifted his shield with every full stroke. With my left hand I drew my heavy-bladed knife and threw it underhand just as he was getting set for a blow. It stuck in his stomach, and he folded up, out of fighting for some days to come.

I had a couple of cuts but nothing worse, I saw, when they withdrew to get him out of the way; and Conan was only scratched. We had worked that time, though, and we were both panting a little. “That’s what I call giving a man his stomach full,” Conan cheered me.

“Did you nick any of them?”

He grinned. “Oliver hasn’t as much of one ear as he used to have. The only trouble with whittling away that man is you improve his appearance.”

He was enjoying himself, and I, too, was in a fine mood. We were no longer impersonal but good friends, and spontaneously we shook hands and laughed. They would wear us down, but meanwhile it was good to be giving them a rough time.

But they were in no hurry to come back, and it was easy to see why. The cloudy sky was bringing an early night, and the fact that we were in the vault looking out gave us a marked advantage of light that they naturally begrudged. They’d wait for morning, and I heard Oliver giving instructions about preparations for the night. But they had scarcely unsaddled their horses when rain started falling.

“That means my own dogs will be of no help in locating me now,” Conan said. “Still they probably wouldn’t have found me in time anyhow.” He raised his voice. “Hey, Oliver! Why don’t you come in here out of the rain?”

Save myself no one present liked that joke. They had to stay right before us in the open or lose us. So they huddled wretchedly in the rain, which soon became hard and steady. Their sorry plight was a constant source of joy to us in the shelter of the vault, and we commented frequently.

O
UR
last sign of them as a black night fell showed that they and the dogs had formed a close ring around us. We were fairly satisfied, however, that none of them would risk attacking us when he could not see to strike. “Sleep if you can,” I told Conan. “You’ve had a hard day.”

Rainy nights are warmer than clear ones, so it was not too cool. I could see nothing shortly, and the teeming blotted out other sounds; but I kept some sort of watch. In the end, though, the myriad splashings worked on my drowsiness, and I, too, slept until a mighty yawn of Conan’s reached through to me. It was still raining hard, and I could not perceive the hand I passed before my eyes to test the darkness. But the marked chill indicated it was well past midnight; and as it was, in fact, too cold for me to go back to sleep I sat up stiffly, shaking my head a little.

For the first time since having become involved in that disastrous affair I was neither too busy nor too tired to consider more than its factual aspects. Musing over the sequence of events responsible for leading me to where I then was, I couldn’t help but seriously ponder the extent of the Pict’s complicity. Well, if his had been the motivating influence he had certainly done a thorough job of fixing me up.

It was queer to sit blending with the night, conscious of savage reality that was yet rendered improbable by its silent invisibility. Out in the vague but proximate somewhere men were enduring the punishment of . ceaseless drenching in order to be sure of killing me come morning. They would be real enough then, but now, although ‘hey were hardly further off than I could toss a mountain, I wouldn’t so much as feel their vindictive presence, let alone picture them in their malice, fortitude and misery.