Gwendolyn's Sword Page 26

  “Let the boy go. He doesn’t understand what he’s seeing. He is an innocent. Spare one life today.”

  Walter’s face softened as he turned to face her again. “I pity you,” he said. “I did my best to teach you, to show you the power of cruelty. John understands this. He has been a truly excellent student.” Walter flicked his gaze back toward Michael momentarily. “I require a witness, someone credible to vouch for what has happened here today, that the sword is indeed Caliburn. Michael is here to be that witness. He will live while I have need of him.”

  Walter looked down at the slumbering shape of William and bit his lip distractedly, narrowing his eyes.

  “A little encouragement, perhaps,” he mused, then turned on his heel and struck Gwendolyn across the face with his fist. It was like being struck with a club, and she heard the bones in her cheek crack. She fell over backwards and struck the back of her head on the stone floor as she went down. She breathed in gasps, struggling against the blackness that seemed to want to swallow her, feeling her face explode with pain. From far away she heard Michael screaming again.

  Walter paced the floor between her and William, his agitation growing.

  “I don’t understand! Why isn’t it working?” He walked back over to her and kicked her hard in the ribs, but this time she reacted. She grabbed his boot in both hands to anchor herself and swung both her legs around hard to Walter’s knee, tumbling him off his feet and onto his back.

  William’s eyes flashed open across from her.

  “Your sword!” he rasped weakly.

  She sprung to her feet, drew the blade from its scabbard, completely restored, and plunged it down through Walter’s chest and into the stone floor beneath him.

  For a moment Walter looked at the protruding end of the sword with a funny, puzzled expression, and then she saw understanding form in his eyes. Her brother-in-law smiled at her with something like relief.

  “You did it,” he said gently and closed his eyes. Before her, his body recovered the ruddy tones of ordinary flesh as the spell was broken, and Walterus de Cardinham died as peacefully as if he had gone in his sleep.

  She pulled the sword free, and the sound of Caliburn dropping to the floor rang through the chamber as she fell to her knees by William’s side and cradled his head in her lap. His body rocked with his shallow, panting breaths, and he tried to calm her tears with soothing words. Michael arrived by her side, his own tears flowing.

  “Hush, Gwendolyn. I’ve had worse,” William lied softly.

  She growled through her tears at him and turned to Michael.

  “Can you make it back to Arundel?”

  Michael nodded bravely. She tore a strip of fabric from the hem of her tunic, wrapped his hand tightly to slow the bleeding.

  “Ride Edmund’s horse, it knows the way. Send Nigel. Go!”

  Michael jumped up, took one last, worried look, and sprinted down the passageway into the darkness.

  A movement near the hearth reminded her of the beast, and she gasped, fetched her sword and spun around, the blade raised high and ready.

  A smallish hound, black with a funny-looking gray, whiskery muzzle, stood looking at her with shining brown eyes and wagged its tail expectantly. She burst into a fresh sob mixed with laughter and sheathed her sword. Taking her response as encouragement, the dog came up to her and stopped beside William, then began licking his face. Gwendolyn knelt beside him again and nudged the dog aside. The hound walked around to the other side of William, sat down, and watched them with ears pricked forward.

  “Tell me how to fix you,” she said stubbornly.

  William opened his eyes and struggled for breath.

  “You did it. It’s up to you now,” he whispered. She watched him close his eyes and try to relax his gasping breaths.

  It became immediately clear to her that William was preparing himself to die, here in this cave. He was giving up.

  “No!” she roared defiantly, and the dog scampered a few paces away, then turned to watch again from a safe distance.

  She gathered a fistful of his shirtfront and pulled him upright to a sitting position, pulled his arm across her shoulders and reached with her near arm around his back. She jammed her shoulder into his armpit and pushed up with her legs, grunting loudly under the strain.

  William cried out with pain—a good sign, she hoped. The pain would keep him awake. Bearing his weight and yelling at him to move his legs, she got the both of them down the passageway to the opening that led to the narrow tunnel. She paused for a moment to lean him up against the opening. She would have to go first and drag him through behind her, using her legs to pull. She could only see out of her right eye; the left had swollen shut and throbbed sharply. The dog ran ahead of them, then stopped and looked back over its shoulder and barked at her as if it scolded her for dallying. She wedged herself into the passage, then reached back and took hold of William by the arm and another fistful of his mail tunic and pulled him in after her.

  “Come on!” she yelled, both at herself and William. His eyes flickered open for a moment, then rolled closed again. She took another small sidestep, then dug in her heels and pulled with all her strength. She was breathing hard from the struggle, but she kept working them slowly down the passage. She had been careful to turn William’s wounded side away from her so that she did not cause him to lose more blood with her rough tugs on his arm and shoulder as she dragged them both along. Step by step, foot by foot, she worked in the confined blackness. Step, shift, dig in, pull. She was out of breath and her lungs and arms burned, but she could not stop to rest. Something inside her, bewildered by what she had witnessed, knew she would be lost without William, that she fought for both their lives and for something more than that, something she could not begin to know or understand yet.

  She heard the dog run off and disappear ahead of her, then a bark and footsteps approaching at a run.

  “Hello? Gwendolyn?” a confused but familiar voice called out. She had brought them more than halfway down the length of the passage, and she looked up to see an orange glow at the end of the narrow corridor. Nigel appeared carrying a torch, his face pinched against the stench as he peered into the darkness. The dog stood at his feet.

  “Nigel! William’s dying!”

  Nigel’s eyes flashed wide as he registered the situation. He laid the torch down where he stood and propelled himself into the opening, reaching her almost instantly. He blinked when he saw the disfigurement of her face, then took her by the hand and hauled her bodily down the corridor. She stood at the narrow opening and held the torch aloft, shining the light for him as he dived back in to get William. Moments later he emerged again, blowing hard, with William at his side, leaning against him. He crouched down, bent William’s body across his thick shoulders, and stood back up. She carefully led the way up the rocky steps back to the cave opening, moving as quickly as she dared while the dog ran ahead of them barking. Outside, the three guards from the Tower waited for them, holding their horses. Using their shirts, the guards improvised a bandage for the wound in William’s side. They all knew that William’s chances of arriving at Arundel still alive were slim, and that sliver of possibility made them work all the faster. By her own orders, Gwendolyn sat behind William on his warhorse, holding him up in the saddle with one arm pressing his body against hers, holding the horse’s reins with the other. One of the men led Bedwyr. None argued her authority, and they galloped back to Arundel, horses’ hooves flying, as the coming dawn lit the horizon like polished steel ahead of them.

  Arundel’s guards cleared the way for them as they raced through the gatehouse into the castle yard. Gwendolyn steered William’s horse straight for the surgeon’s tent, where the surgeon himself and Arundel’s men-at-arms met her to receive William into their arms and carry him inside. The surgeon found a pulse, faint but beating. William still lived.

  Steam rose from the trembling and exhausted warhorse, and Gwendolyn felt herself almost swoon from the pain
of her cracked and broken bones as she lowered herself to the ground while one of the grooms held the reins. The pain of the jarring ride back had taken her beyond any limit she might have thought herself capable of enduring. She felt her legs tremble beneath her, and one of the squires ran over and tried to lead her to one of the other tents to await the surgeon. She grunted angrily and pulled her arm out of his grasp.

  “Water,” she rasped, searching with her good eye for the surgeon’s tent again and heading back that way.

  Walter de Coutances ran down from the keep, his long cloak flowing behind him. The archbishop arrived flustered and out of breath, and he cringed at her misshapen face when she turned toward him.

  “William?”

  “He is alive, barely. The surgeon is doing what he can.” She stared straight ahead, focused on the pain in her skull, the fire in her side where Walter had kicked her, to quench the emotion that she felt well inside.

  “John will be held accountable for this. His ambition and empty promises have brought undeserved ruin to this family.”

  “This was Walter de Cardinham’s doing,” she said coldly. “He offered himself as a sorcerer to John, caused everything you see here.”

  De Coutances considered her words and shook his head in bewilderment.

  “I’ve met Walter de Cardinham. He was a courtier and flatterer and a fool for John, but I never would have guessed him a charlatan for the black arts.”

  “He was no charlatan,” she replied in a low voice, staring ahead.

  De Coutances turned to regard her with a mixture of shock and disbelief, and she returned his gaze without waver or apology. A sword that should not have existed hung from her scabbard, warm against her body. The sword had come to her invisibly, impossibly. And whatever purpose the sword had chosen her for, she suddenly understood that her survival until its fulfillment depended on her staying hidden with it, concealing the truth of its origin. She realized that she must keep its secret, deny that it even existed. And to do so, she must also allow the darkness that Walter had found and spent his entire life nurturing to disappear with him. Walter de Coutances did not want to believe that these things existed and neither did she. But she no longer had the comfort of ignorance. She cleared her throat and spoke again, giving the archbishop the rational explanation he wanted.

  “Walter de Cardinham was not a charlatan,” she repeated. “He was a murderer, cold-blooded and ambitious. His body will be set out in the wilderness, food for the animals, and he will be forgotten.” De Coutances’s face shifted with an upwelling of pity at her words, and she knew that he would dig no further, lest he uncover a truth that he would rather have left unknown. She turned away, lifted the tentflap, and entered the surgeon’s tent to begin her vigil beside her faithful constable.

  A short time later a feisty, little black hound ran directly into the gatehouse passage and barked at the guards to gain entry, snapping at their ankles and spears until she came running and ordered them to allow it to pass. The mutt ran straight to the surgeon’s tent and lay down beside the tentflap opening, where it stayed for the next several days. Later that afternoon, Walter de Coutances sent Nigel and the guards back to the cave to retrieve the bodies of Walter and Edmund, and, on Gwendolyn’s insistence, to then pile up and set fire to everything inside. A group of masons would follow in the morning to seal off the entrance with rock and mortar.

  All of Arundel was in a state of mourning. Long bolts of black cloth hung from the towers and the battlements. Meals were taken silently, without song or verse. Walter de Coutances sent another messenger, a young member of the Arundel guard, on a swift horse to the d’Aubigni’s estate at Wymondham, Norfolk, to retrieve the eldest son of the late earl and Matilda. But de Coutances sent no word to the Tower. Arundel castle had been a favorite of Henry’s, and de Coutances had seen enough grief wrought upon this honorable family by Plantagenet schemes and greed. He would not risk some opportunistic transfer of the privilege of Arundel while the third earl was in transit.

  Gwendolyn sat inside the surgeon’s tent beside the pallet where William lay, only getting up to relieve herself or fetch a bite of bread. She tilted William’s head and lifted the surgeon’s strong tea to his lips, giving him small sips. He had not awoken, but he reflexively swallowed the pungent liquid. Michael had come in to sit with her, but she could see how anxious he became staring at the motionless warrior lying before him. The surgeon had had to cut away the stump of finger bone left behind by Edmund’s cruel torture in the cave, and Michael had fixed his jaw and not cried out, even though tears streamed from his eyes. Gwendolyn had never seen such bravery in a child, and she wondered at the man that would grow from such an unflinching, resolute boy. She laid a hand on top of his head and promised to come get him when William stirred. Nigel stepped inside briefly, and Gwendolyn sent Michael with him. William dozed through the night and into the next morning, but as the sun approached its highest point a fever set in, and he sweated and moaned in the bed. She wiped the sweat from his brow with clean, damp rags, and when the surgeon’s apprentice came to change the bandages around William’s chest, she helped the man shift and roll William’s body.

  When they were alone, she allowed herself to draw the sword from her scabbard and inspect it closely. Slowly, she turned the shining blade over in her hands. In every respect the sword was identical to her own, down to the worn leather strap that wrapped the hilt. But the blade was something else entirely. It was forged of steel unlike any she had ever seen. The blade had a grain to it, in even, regular ripples more tightly formed and perfectly aligned than any swordsmith in England could produce. The pointed tip and edges of the blade were dangerously sharp, as she discovered the first time she touched it. But the most breathtaking discovery happened when she first swung the blade and the tip caught in the thick timber pole that stood in the center of the surgeon’s tent.

  The tip dug in and grabbed, but the blade curved gracefully into an arc and neither crimped nor snapped. When she pulled it free again, there was no bend or crease to the steel. The steel flexed back, like a willow, as true and straight as it had been forged. She stared at the blade, dumbfounded. Testing it again, she pressed the tip into the timber pole and then leaned her full weight against it. Again, the blade bowed and pushed back against her, then recovered its original, undistorted lines when she released it.

  She sucked in a shivering breath and stepped back. Tales of swords like these, rare and made from foreign steel, had come back with the crusaders a generation ago. But no one knew the secret of their making. She stared, her one eye unblinking, at the weapon in her hands, and felt a chill run over her skin. Indestructible, she thought, like truth. And in truth was there redemption? Was it the sword itself that undid Edmund’s spells and freed him in his last moment, just before death? William moaned and shifted beside her, his fever strong. She returned the weapon to its sheath, picked up the rag again and soaked up fresh water from the bowl beside her and resumed the slow ritual of mopping his head, chest and arms.

  By the morning of the fourth day, the fever broke and William woke up. He tried to speak, but Gwendolyn held the tea for him and told him to drink. He looked at her closely for a moment, as if he was unsure whether he was dead or dreaming, and then closed his eyes with a heavy sigh. She ran to find the surgeon, and within two more days, William had recovered enough of his strength to climb the battlements to the keep and the hall.

  De Coutances’s secretary returned that night from the Tower with word from Eleanor. From Arundel, John had fled to King Philip’s court in Paris and abandoned his supporters in England. With winter almost upon them, the Flemish mercenaries had given up their attempts to cross the channel to invade the English coasts. Only a handful of castles had held out for John. Eleanor had sent men to Tickhill and Marlborough, and those castles were again secure. William Marshal’s brother, John, had forfeited his life at Marlborough rather than renounce his loyalty to his lord, Prince John. Only the stronghold of Nottingham
remained in John’s control. Eleanor would not order a siege during the winter months, but would allow the keeper of that castle the hard season of snow and darkness to come to his senses. She prepared to leave for Germany to personally escort the treasure of her son’s ransom, and she ordered Walter de Coutances back to the Tower within ten days, along with William d’Aubigni, to travel with her. Hubert Walter, she announced, was to replace Walter de Coutances as Justiciar, effective upon their departure on Christmas Day.

  “Another archbishop at the head of Richard’s government,” de Coutances muttered to himself in disappointment after he finished reading the letter.

  They stood in the hall with only a handful of the lords of Arundel, barons from the nearby estates. The threat having passed, most families had returned to their manors, taking their empty stomachs and requirements of comfort with them. The castle clerk and chamberlain, stewards and kitcheners all moved a little more slowly, breathed a little more easily. No funeral mass was held for the earl or his family. Those ceremonies would be carried out at Wymondham Abbey, where no one would be the wiser as to how so many in one family had come to meet their untimely ends on the same day. Walter de Coutances planned to record their deaths on the last day of his office as Justiciar, December twenty-fourth, 1193, allowing plenty of time for the cart carrying their remains to arrive safely at their final resting place to the north.

  Arundel’s guard kept a regular watch at the towers along the curtain wall, and everyone in the hall snapped to attention as the guard sounded the call of approaching men, armed and on horseback. The call for the portcullis gate rang out, and the creaking of heavy wood and metal slamming into place rose to the keep.