Wordlessly, Rupen reached into a side pants pocket and drew forth a silver money clip, then riffled through the thick fold of greenbacks. The driver smiled, his eyes lighting up. Nodding, he turned back to his driving.
“You’re the boss, Major. You tell me where you wanta go and that’s where we’ll go, by damn.”
Lucky at cards and dice, as ever, Rupen had left a high-stakes poker game at the main O-club at Fort Benning with something over twenty-three thousand dollars; the pudgy-looking bulge around his middle was, in reality, a moneybelt stuffed with hundred-dollar bills—around eight hundred and eighty dollars per month for a bit over two years of fear and pain and privation. And he still would have felt cheated at double the figure. World War II had been different to his way of thinking; he had gone willingly and had been basically responsible for all that had happened to him. But there was no truly adequate recompense for two years plus of involuntary servitude.
The inequity of it galled him, too. During World War II, damned nearly every swinging cock in the whole country had been in one of the armed services—those not too old, too young, or crippled in some way—and quite a number of women, too; it had been a truly democratic, citizen army. But those doing the bleeding and the dying in that slice of very hell called the Korean Police Action were mostly the unmarried and the unlucky minority, while the majority of American men stayed Stateside—fat and happy and healthy and unbidden, making money hand over fist and precious few of them giving a rat’s ass whether Korea was won or lost.
The address was a three-story house of the late-Victorian era on Floyd Avenue not far from the college. In comparison to the similar houses on either side, it looked a little rundown, shabby even, and Rupen wondered why; for what with her income from nursing and the monthly monies from him and the army, Marge should be able to live quite comfortably, and in any emergency, she knew she could always draw from his accounts or ask Papa for help.
The bell inset in the peeling door had been painted over so many times that it was a sure bet it did not work. Rupen tried the knob, turned it easily, and stepped into the foyer to peer at the names scrawled in dim pencil on the battered metal covers of some half-dozen small mailboxes. There it was, “Ademian 2fl rear.”
Major Rupen Ademian, mindful of the taxi waiting outside, started briskly up the shadowy stairs with their covering of cheap, threadbare carpet toward a horror that might have broken a lesser man.
The climb up the cliffs of rain-slick, crumbly rock from the shallow beach was costly to Sir Ali and his party of galloglaiches. Sir Sean Jernigan and a sergeant were resting briefly on a narrow ledge a bit over halfway up when that ledge abruptly tore loose from the cliff and plunged them both to their deaths on the rock-studded sand below. Moreover, debris knocked loose no less than three other climbers, and one of these unfortunates chanced to fall directly atop a man standing still on the sand at the base of the cliffs, breaking his neck. All that could be done was to strip the bodies of still-usable weapons, equipment, and supplies and leave their dead where they lay.
Once the survivors were atop the cliffs, they found themselves on a rocky plateau grown with tall, wiry grasses, gorse, and heather, almost flat and featureless as far as any could see through the cold, driving rain.
The sudden demise of Sir Sean left Sir Ali and his two English squires, along with a young Irishman who had been one of the Irish knight’s squires, as the only noblemen in the party with but some fourteen vintenary sergeants and three centenary sergeants to assist them in handling almost three hundred men who, though near-matchless fighters in actual breast-to-breast combat, were almost undisciplined, undisciplinable, and savagely insubordinate on occasion, and too many of whom spoke a variety of English that even native-born Northumbrians and Lowlander Scots had difficulty in understanding.
There were, however, a few points in Sir Ali’s favor with these rude galloglaiches. One was that they knew him to be not only the man of their chosen chief,” his grace of Norfolk, but a close personal friend of that worthy, as well, so they were unlikely to murder the Arabian knight or to see him harmed by enemies. One other favorable factor was that most of the sergeants and quite a few of the other ranks spoke a type of French—an archaic Anglo-Norman-Erse dialect still spoken in certain parts of Ireland and some of the Western Isles of Scotland—much better and more understandably than they did English, and Sir Ali spoke French, too. The third favorable factor was that all of these Royal Tara Gallowglasses had seen Sir Ali ibn Hussein fight, and they respected him, to a man.
Sir Ali also owned a matchless sense of direction, so that by dawn he and the raiders, now all draped over in white surplices adorned with reddish crosses, were almost under the northwest wall of the Castillo de Gij<5n. Although this pile had been described to him by the BanSn de Sao Gilberto, still the Arabian knight hissed softly through his teeth when he finally saw it close up. The place was built on, built into, the very stony core of an extrusion of the cliff line. For long previous centuries, it and the fortifications that had preceded it had been the stronghold of those men and families that had held Gij6n. In earlier parlance, the site of the present Castillo had been the motte and the older section of the upper town to the southeast of it had been the bailey. Probably, mused Sir Ali, much of the stone for the walls had been quarried on the spot, which fact would account for the broad, deep dry moat that encompassed it on all sides visible from his vantage point. The sides and verges of that moat seemed too regular to be natural. Before Sts. Rogiero di Pancetta and Bertramo al-lswid had given Believers the secrets of gunpowder, this castillo would have been impregnable, could only have fallen to treachery from within or lengthy, hideously expensive siege. Even today, in modern times, with siege guns, a determined garrison could hold that castillo almost indefinitely if attacked from this side, the northwest, as the land hereabouts offered little or nothing with which to try to fill that moat and allow attackers to get at any breach their guns might batter through the walls. The only alternative in this instance was guile, which method Sir Ali had planned to use all along. He would get himself and a few of his steadier men inside, then drop the bridge and open the gate to admit the bulk of his force. Leaving all but a score of his force concealed in a fold of ground some quarter-mile distant from those ancient walls, Sir Ali proceeded slowly, striving to appear utterly exhausted. He and the rest of the smaller party had deliberately torn some of their clothing and left most of their armor and weapons behind, though their long, full surplices adequately concealed others. A few men had inflicted dagger cuts in their own flesh just deep enough to bring sufficient blood to make their “bandages” look convincing. When ready, he and his score or so came up out of the declivity and slowly straggled on across the rough, brushy ground toward the castillo, taking pains to stay in plain view of sentries and to make noise. They apparently succeeded well in being noticed, for by the time they came to the verge of the moat opposite the raised bridge, a corporal’s guard were gathered on section of wall above the entry way, covering the strangers with arquebuses and cocked crossbows. “Alto!” rang the shout, “tQuien es?” Having fought both with and against knights from most portions of the Iberian Peninsula over the years, Sir Ali was become apt at aping not only their speech but their air of superiority, their overweening arrogance, and their utter contempt for any of nonnoble birth. In the Castilian dialect, he shouted a snarled “What the hell can I do save halt, you ill-begotten rogue of a ninny? Men walk upon clear air only in fairy stories. Inform your commander that Don Ali ibn Hussain de Al-Munecar y de Castro de Castilla and what is left of his retainers and crew have arrived at his gate, having survived shipwreck in that Satan-sent tempest last night, and drop the bridge, you peasant pigs, or it will go hard for you all. Hear me and heed my words, you nameless spawn of syphilitic goats!” The gentleman had clearly identified himself, and his manner and speech left no doubt as to what he was, so the most of the guards set themselves to lowering the bridge that spanned the moat and raising the portcullis, while one of their number ran to Don Pedro’s quarters to breathlessly gasp out the news to the old borracho. They all knew that it was invariably a most unhealthy practice to anger Castilian knights and noblemen, whose hot tempers and matchless cruelty were become a byword. God and ail the saints be praised that Don Pedro was not a Spaniard of any description, but a Leonese Basque like most of the rest of them.