What was I to believe? I was a man of nature. The feel of a good sword in my hand, a horse between my knees, or of a ship’s steering oar—in these I could believe. These answered to something within me.
The swing of a gull’s wing across the sky, the lift of a far blue-shrouded shore, the warmth of the sun, the cold of a winter night, the salty taste of brine or sweat, the warm, wonderful feeling of a woman in the arms. In these I believed. There was no doubt that Mohammed was a wise man. Did he not marry a widow owning many camels? Such a man is worth listening to.
Returning to the inn, I took my robes and lay in a corner near the wall and not far from John of Seville. Under cover of my robes I drew my scimitar. Hassan was seeming to nod, but Hassan was a Bedouin from the desert and would be ready.
The long room where we were had but one entrance, that from the court. Our position would enable our blades to present a formidable wall of defense, yet something about the room disturbed me.
A soldier lay near me, seeming asleep. Watching, I detected a subtle, too careful movement of his hand. It was not the fumbling movement of a sleeping man but the slow, careful movement of a man trying not to be noticed.
My heart began to beat slowly, heavily. Suppose, just suppose, the soldiers were not what they seemed? Reaching out, I tugged the robe of John of Seville. His eyes opened and met mine, but he moved never a muscle.
Shaping the words with my lips, I said, “The soldiers are thieves.”
There was instant comprehension. His head moved but slightly, his eyes rapidly taking in the positions of the soldiers. One was within backstabbing reach of Hassan; another lay near the giant Negro who guarded the fat merchant. Each soldier was so placed as to kill a strong fighting man on signal.
My eyes fell to the knuckles of the nearest soldier. A flicker of firelight revealed his grip upon his sword. The time was now. Lying in the deepest shadows, I was beyond the eyes of any of them. With a catlike movement I came to my feet, sword in hand. My left gathered the robe with which I had been covered. At that instant I heard, from the courtyard, a sound that was of neither the wind nor the rain.
A step took me from the shadows. My blade touched Hassan lightly. He looked up, and my point indicated the soldier near the Negro.
A foot scuffed on the cobbles outside, and the soldier started to rise. Flicking the robe at him, I let go, and it enveloped him in its folds. Stepping forward, I stamped down hard on his knuckles.
As I attacked the soldier nearest Hassan, he drew back his sword and threw it like a javelin at the soldier nearest the Negro. As that soldier had started to rise, the sword caught him across the bridge of the nose, drenching him in blood. Hassan followed his sword, retrieving it.
John was on his feet, and as the soldier nearest the door reached to unbar it, John hurled a stool. Missing the soldier, it rebounded with force, and the soldier leaped back to avoid it. John struck upward to his kidney with a dagger.
Instantly, the inn was a place of madness. The fat man who rode with John of Seville proved better than expected, and seeing us fighting the soldiers, he threw himself on the one remaining.
A weight of bodies crashed against the door the attackers expected to find unbarred, but the Negro waited there with a heavy woodsman’s ax.
Around us there was a sudden silence. The man I enveloped in my robe was taken. Of the four soldiers John of Seville had slain one, his fat assistant another, and Hassan disabled a third. As suddenly as it had begun the fighting was over.
Outside, men were battering at the door. Moving a bench, I placed it across and just inside the door, leaving room for it to swing wide. “If we leave them outside, they will steal our horses and ride away,” I explained. “Lift the bar!”
The door slammed open, and men charged into the room, two of them sprawling over the bench, a third tripping over the legs of the fallen men. A fourth died from the ax, Hassan accounted for a fifth. Leaping through the door, I rushed for the stables.
At the inn our men were disposing of the brigands, but within the stable all seemed still, then came a rustle of movement.
A man stood with his back to the wall at the end of the stable. He had been saddling the horse of John of Seville. As John had ridden a mule, his horse had been led throughout the day and was in fine shape. A splendid sorrel it was, with fine limbs and every evidence of speed and staying power.
The brigand held a sword, but his face was in shadow. My point lifted, ready for a thrust. Within the inn, lights were lit, and the rays fell through the stable window and across my opponent’s face. It was the man who had robbed and enslaved me. It was Walther.
And I knew that I could kill him.
Mine was the stronger arm, the better blade. He had robbed me, sneered at me, insulted me.
“You!” he said. “I should have slit your belly that first day! I should have killed you rather than make you pilot. I knew it then.”
“You can try to kill me now.”
“You are too lucky. I shall not fight you.”
“Coward!”
He shrugged, watching me from under heavy brows.
“Who is not a coward sometimes? You will let me go. You robbed me of my ship—”
“How did you get that ship?”
“—and you sold me as a slave.” He leered at me. “I escaped before I could be chained. As for you, you have done enough.”
Angrily, I glared at him. He was a treacherous, cowardly man. Had he stood in my place, he would have killed me, but it was not in me to simply run him through.
“Get out! But drop your sword before you come near me, or I shall dirty my blade in your fat belly!”
The sword fell, then he darted past me into the courtyard. Somebody shouted from the inn, then I heard a rattle of retreating hoofbeats.
A sentimental fool … such an act would kill me someday … one’s enemies are better dead. Or was that true? Did not a man’s enemies make a sharper, more decisive man of him?
Remembering the scoundrel he was, I should have cut him down, then quartered him to be sure of his death, but with him at the point of my sword I no longer hated him. He was beneath contempt.
Hassan was at the door. “Did someone escape?”
“A thief, a coward and a thief who will suffer more alive than in dying.”
9
Dawn dappled the tawny hills with alternating sunshine and shadow. One by one the travelers emerged from the inn, gathered their belongings, and departed. The little world of the inn where we who until the night before had been strangers, who shared battle and blood together, now shattered like fragile glass. Again we would be strangers to recall only at intervals the events of this night.
Today, I rode beside John of Seville who believed himself in my debt for the warning given. As we rode, he explained much that was to prove important in the months to come, much that was to bear upon my own future.
We in Brittany knew too little of the world outside—our news coming only from passing travelers or men who returned from the sea, occasionally from a merchant caravan traveling the remnants of the old Roman roads to the great markets and fairs in the towns. As he talked, our world of ship, shore, and fishing began to seem small indeed, for he spoke of kings, castles, and Crusades, of ideas and the men who pursued them.
My father had returned from the sea with tales of swift attacks and bloody retreats, of faraway shores and strange beliefs, of silks, ivory and pearl, of battles and sudden death. These stories colored my youth, and I longed for such adventures myself.
Little did I know of kings and courts, or the means by which men became kings. Well I knew that Henry II was wedded to Eleanor of Aquitaine, and that Henry claimed our land for fief as he claimed much of the land of the Franks.
Of Louis VII, so-called Louis the Young, I knew little, but of Manuel Comnenus, ruler of the Byzantine Empire, the Roman Empire of the East, I knew nothing at all. Nor did I know this land through which we rode, but as we traveled John explained much that had set the stage for the situation that presently existed.