Winter Song (21 page)

By the time Ernaldus’s horse was saddled, the moon was high
and there was light enough on the road. A sleepy guard let him out without
question at the small gate which led to the docks. Elegantly dressed gentlemen
were not likely to be thieves, and anyway his work was to keep dangerous
persons out. The guard went quickly back to his shelter. He did not notice that
the man who had asked to leave to board a ship did not ride to the docks but
along the road.

Ernaldus knew the road well. He had no trouble finding the
place to turn off into a small wood. The bare branches did not block much of
the moonlight, and the undergrowth was dead and brittle so that, aside from the
unevenness of the ground, riding was not much more difficult than on the road.
Among the last of the trees he tethered his horse. His passage had not been
silent, but he did not believe the walls would be patrolled. That would be a
ridiculous precaution in a time of peace where there were at most twenty
men-at-arms.

His guess was quite correct, and no sound beyond the crackle
of twigs and dead brush marked his walk from the wood to the wall. The only
anxiety he felt was over in a few minutes when the key he held at last turned
in the stiffened lock. For a minute or two he had feared it was rusted closed,
and he would be deprived of his revenge. The screech of the wards gave him
another moment’s uneasiness, and he paused before pulling the door open;
however, the sound seemed to have gone unregarded. Ernaldus entered the narrow
passage, cursing the door, which had screeched even louder than the lock when
he opened it.

Here it was black as pitch. Ernaldus was prepared for that.
He pulled a short candle and flint and tinder from his purse and crouched to
make a light. When the flame was steady, he drew the door shut, cursing again
at the squeal of unoiled hinges. Still there seemed to be no reaction. Either
there were no guards at all or, at the distance they were, the sound was
distorted so that it seemed to have a natural cause. There was another door at
the end of the passage, but this yielded to the same key. The noise sounded
worse here but worried Ernaldus much less. No sound could penetrate the heavy
walls and thick floors of the old keep.

Once he had the door open, he cursed emphatically. Although
his candle had given adequate light in the narrow passage, the glow was
swallowed up completely in the huge open space. Then Ernaldus shrugged. The
small radius of candlelight would have an advantage later. He left the door
open halfway and began to work his way forward cautiously. Somewhere ahead of
him was an old strongroom. The cooking staff, which Alys had driven out, had
come to him for help. Before he had told them to “go and be damned” since he
had no further use for them, he had discovered that the strongroom had been
fitted with a new door and the twelve men-at arms were imprisoned there.

Ernaldus hurried forward across the dark expanse, nearly colliding
with one of the thick pillars as his confidence increased to overconfidence.
That act of carelessness made him gasp with fright, for he suddenly remembered
the castle wells and the fact that their covers might have rotted. He went more
cautiously thereafter, eventually coming to a stone wall. Ernaldus cursed
again. He had lost his way in the dark. He turned right along the wall, knowing
that this was what he should have done at first. Eagerness had wasted time.

Only it had not. Just a few steps farther, his candle lit a
heavy, double-barred door. Ernaldus smiled in triumph. His information had been
correct. The cursed blonde bitch and her husband had not thought the
men-at-arms worth the cost of installing a lock. He lifted the bars and swung
the door open, his lips twisting wryly when there was no rush for freedom.

Then he stepped back with a grimace. What had rushed out was
a fetid stink.

“It is Master Ernaldus,” he announced into the dark
interior. “I have come to free you so that you may take your revenge and remove
this blight. When the bitch is dead, you may have your places back, as before.”

Then there was a rush through the door and a babble of
voices, which Ernaldus quickly ordered into silence. He did not fear detection,
but merely wished to set his plans into action with the least delay and without
listening to stupid questions and complaints. He told the men quickly that Lord
Raymond was gone from the keep. Most of the guards had gone with the lord, and
discipline would be lax. They should be able to seize weapons and kill the few
remaining castle guards without difficulty. Most important, however, they must
first kill Lady Alys.

There was murmuring at this statement, a few growls of
approving hatred and more weak whines from men who desired only to escape.
Ernaldus had his explanation all ready. The woman must be killed first because
the castle belonged to her. When she was dead, it was arranged that the
property was to go back into the king’s hands, not pass to her husband. Once
Blancheforte belonged again to the king, Ernaldus would again be the bailiff,
and thus the men would be restored to the sweet life that had been reft from
them.

The woman first, because once they attacked the guards, some
would surely rush to defend her, whereas if there were only women above it
would be easy, even without weapons, to wring her thin, white neck. This
picture was so enthralling and the men so accustomed to thinking of Ernaldus as
the master of Blancheforte that they accepted his statements without question.
None knew Alys had stripped him of power. They had been imprisoned before she
had done that. Nor did they know of the passage by which he had entered—or if
they knew, they never thought of it. All assumed that Ernaldus was a welcome
guest in the keep and had stolen down from his chamber to release them.

“I will give you the candle,” Ernaldus said to the leader,
who had been one of those eager for revenge even before he explained why it was
necessary to kill Alys. “I could get no more than the one without raising
suspicion. Let each man hold to the other until you find the stair so that none
be lost in the dark.”

The boldest who were most filled with hatred, lined up
behind the leader eagerly, each grasping the belt or arm of the man ahead of
him. The fearful and broken hung back, but as the leader moved forward and the
small sphere of light cast by the candle left them in darkness, they also
joined the line. To be left alone in the dark was more terrifying than to go
forward.

Ernaldus alone remained, smiling to himself as the point of
light from the candle moved along the wall. When it suddenly began to rise and
then disappeared and no cry of consternation followed, he knew that the leader
had begun to climb the stairs and turned a corner. Silently, feeling his way,
Ernaldus started along the wall in the opposite direction. It seemed very long,
and he was growing nervous, but he did, at last, slide into the passage through
the wall past the half-open door. He pulled it shut quickly and locked it, then
permitted himself to give voice to his malicious laughter.

Sweet, sweet. Revenge was truly sweet when it cost nothing.
From what he had seen of Alys’s men-at-arms, there would be no slackening of
discipline, and he knew only a few men had gone with Raymond, not most of the
troop. Those twelve idiots would be cut to pieces—but not until after the bitch
herself was dead. She would be strangled in her bed before any of her men even
knew she had been attacked.

Chapter Ten

To her dismay, Alys found it no easier to sleep the second
night she spent alone in her bed than the first. She was surprised at this, for
she had fallen asleep quite soon after going to bed. However, she had awakened
suddenly when she turned out of the small hollow of warmth that her body had made
onto the cold sheets where Raymond should have been. She snuggled back into the
warm spot, sighing with exasperation, and closed her eyes, but sleep would not
come again.
Perhaps
, she thought,
it is near morning and I have slept
myself out
.

Hugging the covers to her, she put out an arm and drew the
bed curtain aside. From the size and drippings on the night candle, she had
slept only two or three hours. There were nine or ten hours of dark still to be
gotten through before morning. Suddenly, a very faint metallic screech came to
her ears. She cocked her head, trying to associate the sound with something
familiar, and thought of the noise of rusty hinges. Was it one of the gate
guards entering or leaving the tower?
Those hinges should be seen to
,
she thought, trying to tuck the covers tighter around herself and determinedly
closing her eyes again.

A moment later, her eyes opened once more. It could not be a
tower door she had heard. Those were on the other side of the keep, across the
bailey. Here her chamber faced the outer wall. In fact, her chamber was part of
the outer wall. Alys could have sworn that the sound came through the narrow
window slit, but that was impossible. There was no door in the wall. It must
have been the door at the head of the stairs. Could it have been one of the
women sneaking down to the bed of a man-at-arms?

At first Alys grinned naughtily, thinking that nine or ten
days of good feeding and good treatment had drawn the devil’s attention to the
most unlikely objects of lust. Then she frowned. Although she did not believe
it likely that any person now in Blancheforte wished her ill, it was still a
dangerous precedent to allow free passage to and from the lower floor of the
keep while she, and Raymond when he was at home, were sleeping. Also, if a maid
was stealing downstairs, it meant that Aelfric and Edith, who slept across the
entrance to the stairwell in the great hall, had agreed to let the woman pass.
This laxness, Alys realized, could not be condoned. She could easily understand
the maids seeking to win favor with her men-at-arms and would not blame them,
but her own servants needed no favor. If Aelfric and Edith were venal enough to
take a bribe, the matter was serious.

Alys was out of bed and into her bedrobe in an instant. She
paused only to light a candle at the night light and went swiftly through the
antechamber and out into the main room. Examination of the maidservants’ beds,
however, showed no one to be missing. Several of the women woke, and Alys
signaled them to be quiet as she turned and went to the door. This was closed
as it should be. Curiously, Alys pulled it open, but it did not make a sound.
Reaching up, Alys felt the well-greased hinge. She should have known better
than to think Edith or Bertha would have neglected the door. It would have
driven them crazy, squealing each time it was opened or closed.

Then it could not have been a door she heard, Alys told
herself. Probably it was some animal cry that distance had distorted. Annoyed
with herself, she went back to her room, but she found herself very uneasy and
reluctant to get back into bed. Nonetheless, it was ridiculous to stand
shivering in the cold. Slowly she raised the candle to blow it out, fighting
the foolish feeling that she would be trapped once she was under the heavy
covers.

Quite unaware that their “liberator”, Master Ernaldus, had
abandoned them, the twelve men slowly climbed the stairs. They no longer held
on to each other. It was too awkward on the steep rise and was not necessary in
the narrow stairwell where a man had only to cling to the wall and feel for
each step with his feet. But these men were not in the condition they had been
when Alys had ordered that they be imprisoned. Over a week of near total
darkness and semistarvation had sapped both their strength and their
self-confidence. Hatred drove four of them, the most stubborn and stupid of the
men. The remaining eight, a few clever enough to sense something wrong in Ernaldus’s
argument, the others simply broken and frightened, were already thinking only
of escape. As the distance widened between the leaders and the reluctant group,
one man—one of the clever ones—balked. A second touched his foot when seeking
the next step and stopped, also. The first man reached back and squeezed the
second warningly. The light of the candle rounded another turn and disappeared,
but the afterglow showed a third and fourth shadow climbing and disappearing
around the turn, also. By then, the third and fourth men of the reluctant group
had come to a halt.

“This is madness,” the first man whispered. “We are unarmed.
Where will we find weapons?”

“Ernaldus!” the second hissed back in panic. “He is behind.
If we do not obey him, he will betray us!”

“How?” the first asked. “He dare not call out and be found
in our company. He cannot pass us. Where is he? Is he lost?”

The second man whispered a question down to the third, the
third to the fourth, and so on to the last man. Then names were whispered back
up the stairs, and it was discovered that Ernaldus was not among them. Since
the first man knew the bailiff had not preceded them up the stairs and knew
Master Ernaldus’s nature, he promptly smelled a trap. He communicated this
suspicion and received quick, nervous agreement from the others. All knew
Ernaldus and leapt to the conclusion that they were to be cat’s paws for his
benefit. Several of the men began to weep softly, but the first had a plan
which he whispered down to the rest.

The solution was simple. They need only cross the hall to
the outside stairs. In the bailey there would be sticks and small timbers which
could be used as clubs in case there was a man guarding the gate. Like as not,
no one would be there. What was there to guard against? Ernaldus probably had
lied about the guards to make them obey him. It was Ernaldus who would benefit
from the woman’s death, not they. Even if there were only a few men-at-arms and
they succeeded in taking back the castle, when the husband returned they would
all be tortured to death for a noblewoman’s murder. Better to open the gate,
killing the one or two men-at-arms there—and eight of them with clubs should
surely be able to do that—and flee.