CHAPTER
THE TWELFTH
The elder of the two men who had met in a Northumberland graveyard on a recent dark night moved about the suite of rooms assigned to the men and women brought out from York by Archbishop Harold. In his guise of a humble, un-speaking servant, none of the occupants really took notice of him. There were so very many servants, after all, in the sprawling, multistoried, palatial country residence, and still more of them arriving with each new party of guests.
The pretended servant was worried. The projector hidden in the graveyard many miles from here had been carefully set and painstakingly calibrated and would perform that act of projection of all living persons within the bounds of the suite upon his activation of the remote-control device secreted on his person. But it needs must be done soon, very soon, else he must travel back down to that graveyard and reset the projector.
At no time when he had been able to get away from his mundane duties and come up to this suite had the elder one been able to find all twelve of the occupants within its confines. Even now, as he puttered about, giving the appearance of being busily employed at lighting tapers and lamps against the encroaching dusk, there still were two missing— one man and one woman.
But still, this was the largest number he ever before had found within the rooms at once, and so, pressed as he was for time, he decided to act. Perhaps he and the younger one could find a way and a time and a place to project the missing two back. For now, however, he could be certain that these ten, at least, would shortly be back when and where they belonged. Smiling, he bowed his way out of the suite, took a few paces down the hallway, and activated the projector.
Simon Delahayle was of gentle birth, though a younger son of a younger son. He had been as well reared as his family’s modest means had allowed, had fostered for a few years at the hall of a more prosperous distant, but noble, relative, then had gone overseas with a scion of that noble house and soldiered a few years in foreign lands. The scion he had helped to attend had been slain, but Simon had lucked onto a wealthy knight, and the proceeds from that ransom had seen him back home in Sussexshire with a fine small farm, a wife, children, a couple of good horses to ride, a decent sword, and the respect of all his neighbors, both great and small.
Because of his long-ago but still unforgotten foreign military exploits and experiences, it had seemed but natural that the earl should have sent a galloper directly to his door, urging him to raise a troop of horse and join with the earl’s own force to go to the aid of the young king and the regent in London.
Captain Delahayle’s troop had become a part of Monteleone’s Horse and, with that elite unit, had raided deep into lands loyal to the Usurper, Arthur Tudor, harrying the rebel army, burning standing crops and painfully gathered supplies, running off horses and cattle, slaughtering swine and sheep, and otherwise creating havoc until that fateful day when they had ridden into the jaws of a trap set and sprung by the wily, Satan-tutored Arthur.
Stripped of his arms, armor, boots, and everything else of any value, Simon had been left for dead on the stricken field whereon Monteleone’s Horse had been virtually exterminated and brave Monteleone himself had been slain.
Somehow, Simon must have staggered off that field and into a place of hiding, but he could not remember doing so. Indeed, he could recall nothing until a good three years after
that battle, when he regained his memories of his previous life. That he had neither starved nor frozen, betimes, could be attributed to the fact that he had been delivered in a very poor condition by the folk who found him to a small country monastery. The monks had nursed him and cared for him and shared their own frugal sustenance with him for years, white the civil war and crusades raged ail about them and their tiny haven of refuge.
With the cessation of general fighting, last year, Simon had left the monastery and had tramped the roads as a sturdy beggar and itinerant farmhand, slowly working his way back east and south, bound for Sussex and home. On a particular rainy, windy night in southern Yorkshire, in need of shelter from the elements, he chanced across an ancient, untended, unkempt graveyard.
Being of a bent unusual for his time, Simon had no fear of the dead or of the ground wherein they moldered. He had right often slept in graveyards, and the only time he had been in fear in one was when an elderly sexton had loosed a crossbow at him, then set his dog at him. The quarrel had scored a clean miss, and though the hound had bitten Simon, he had strangled the beast and borne the body with him, dressed it when at a safe distance and feasted well for a couple of days on fat dog. He’d also rough-dressed the skin and sold it to a tanner in a nearby town. He still wore the dog’s upper and lower fangs strung about his neck and impressed those who asked by asserting them the fangs of wolves—one from each one he had slain with his stout cudgel and his long, heavy-bladed all-purpose knife.
Pushing through the high weeds and the brambles, cursing under his breath at the profusion of briers that pulled at his foot wrappings and tattered breeches, Simon made his way through the outer ranks of weathered headstones and cracked crosses—some of them so old as to be of Danish or even Celtic design—until he came to what he thought to have glimpsed in the dimness, a stone-built tomb wherein he might spend this coming night dry and safe from biting winds.
Once there had been a grille to protect the door—the rust-stained rectangles left by the hinges still marred the stonework—but grill and hinges were long since gone, probably stripped off in daylight by roving ironmongers. But the arms of a noble house still were carven over the door, though so far gone in erosion as to be indecipherable to Simon’s eyes. The iron bolts, too, had been torn from off the doors, and those doors now were held closed by only a half-dozen head-sized chunks of rock, which Simon shoved or lifted aside.
The odors which came to him when he gaped open those doors were not those associated with death and decay, but those of caves, of places long denied sunlight. Surely this was a very old tomb indeed, he thought, as he paused with his head inside, waiting for his vision to adjust to the darkness of the interior.
The inside dimensions of the aged tomb were about what he had had reason to expect—twelve broad, stone steps led downward into a flagged chamber some eight feet across and ten or twelve long. Each side wall was pierced by four tiers of four openings, each wide and high enough to slide in a coffin, and a few of the coffins still were in place, but all that were were of wood and scattered bits and pieces of ancient bones littered the flags.
It was an old story. In these lawless years, with no lord about to periodically inspect the tomb of his ancestors or place men to guard it, it had of course been stripped and plundered, probably many times over. The grave goods had gone first, of course, then the leaden coffins and the metal fittings from the wooden ones. None of the loot was of any use to the long dead. Living men and women must eat to stay alive, and scrap metal brought money. Simon had himself sold bronze hinges and nails and decorations torn from off a coffin in a tomb where he had slept up north.
Gathering up a handful of splintered wood, mostly by feel, he took flint, steel, and tinder from his beltpouch and soon had a small, cheery fire ablaze on the steps. By its light, he found bigger pieces of wood to feed it and propped himself against the lowest step wanning his back and wishing he had something to eat and drink in this comfortable nighttime bivouac.
In an effort to take his mind off the ferocious growling of his empty stomach, Simon got up and began to explore. He would, in any case, need more pieces of coffin wood to keep the fire going throughout the night, and mayhap the looters who had come before him had missed a bauble or two in the evident haste of their depredations. Leaving his cudgel on the steps below the fire, he took hold of a coffin at about head level and began to worry it out of its deep niche in the wall of the tomb.