The Wild Hunt

CHAPTER 26

Guyon shifted in the high saddle and loosened the reins to let Arian pick his way between the trees. The afternoon light was as golden-green as the best French wine. Coins of sunlight and leaf shadows scattered and sparkled among the troop of men who rode with steady haste towards Ravenstow and preparation for war in the marches.

Now that Arundell was theirs and de Belleme effectively cut off from his support abroad, the King intended to move upon de Belleme's chain of grim Shropshire strongholds with the purpose of clearing them out one by one and Guyon was returning to Ravenstow to support him in that endeavour.

As they emerged from the trees on to the waste land, all eyes were drawn to the gleaming limewashed wall s of the keep dominating Ravenstow crag. Guyon's gaze at this, the core of his honour, was both admiring and rueful. It was de Belleme's design and it followed that winkling the Earl of Shrewsbury out of the other strongholds he had also designed, but held in his own hand, was going to prove difficult. God knew, Arundell had been a tough enough nut to crack.

A cowherd touched his forehead to Guyon and tapped the cattle on their mottled backs with a hazel goad to keep them moving. His dog went wagging to investigate the horsemen and was whistled sharply back to place. At the mill , the mill er was transferring sacks of flour to an ox-drawn wain; he paused to wipe his brow and salute the passing soldiers, cuffing his brawny son into similar respect. His wife ceased beating a smock on a stone at the stream to curtsy, her expression apprehensive. She touched the prayer beads on the belt at her waist and raised them to her lips.

Guyon eyed the woman curiously and wondered anew at the speed with which news of impending war travelled. He did not believe de Belleme would attack Ravenstow - he was too busy strengthening his own fortifications - but the Welsh were always ready to harry, loot and burn and de Belleme had several Welsh vassals who would be only too pleased to stock their winter larders at Ravenstow's expense.

The drawbridge was down to admit them and the portcullis up. Guyon shook the reins, urging Arian to a trot and they emerged again into the late sunshine of the shed-crowded bailey. A woman was feeding twigs beneath a giant outdoor cauldron, the girl beside her plucking a wrung chicken to go into the pot. She looked up at the men, nudged her companion and made the sign of the cross upon her breast. The older woman straightened and crossed herself too, her eyes full of pity before she turned to stare at the forebuilding from which Judith was running.

Cadi barked and sprang joyously to greet her, tail swishing like a whip. Guyon dismounted and threw the reins to a groom. The young man said nothing but, with a look over his broad shoulder at Judith, dipped his head and led the grey away to his stall .

Guyon watched his wife hurry towards him and felt his spirit lighten. Her braids trapped the sunlight and glowed like molten bronze and her face was becomingly flushed from the effort of running down several flights of twisting stairs and across the ward.

And then she was facing him and his admiration fell away as he saw the look in her eyes and the set of her mouth.

'Rhosyn's dead,' she said without preamble. 'I have been wondering how to tell you, but there is no way to make it any easier.' He looked at her blankly. The sun was warm on the back of his neck but suddenly he felt frozen from crown to toe. 'They were attacked on our land, on the Llangoll en drovers' road yestereve. I gave her the escort she requested but they were all cut down. Father Jerome is in the chapel attending to what needs to be done ...' Her words stumbled to a halt.

He stared at her while everything slowed down and ground to a halt. 'Dead?' he repeated in a blank voice.

She grasped hold of his sleeve like a sighted person taking hold of someone blind. 'Guyon, come within and I will try to tell you what I know. Heulwen is safe. Eric's brother Godric saved her. They were the only two to survive ...'

He all owed her to lead him. Most of her words washed over him like an incoming tide, leaving only a residue of scouring grit and the words 'Rhosyn's dead' indelibly printed on his mind.

Judith gave him wine, lacing it liberally with aqua vitae. He sat down mechanically, looked at the cup, set it aside and raised disbelieving eyes to her.

'Tell me again,' he commanded. 'I don't know what you said.'

She repeated her words. His face never changed but, as she finished, he covered it with his hands. 'I am sorry, Guy,' Judith whispered. 'Truly I am.' He did not respond. 'At least you have Heulwen.'

He looked up at that. 'Yes,' he agreed tonelessly, 'at least I have Heulwen.' And then he laughed and shook his head and buried his face again.

Judith knelt beside him, her arm across his mail-clad shoulder. 'I wish I knew what to say, or how to ease the pain, but I don't ...'

'Then don't say anything,' he muttered and, after a moment, withdrawing from her grasp, he stood up and moved towards the door.

'Where are you going?'

'To the chapel, where else?'

'No, Guy!' She sprang after him. 'Wait at least until you have rested. I'll have a tub prepared and see to your comfort.'

'Do you think I care about that?'

'No, but I do.' She took hold of his sleeve.

'Let me go.' Shrugging her off, he continued on his way.

'Guyon, no ... It's not ... I mean ...' She drew a shuddering breath and momentarily closed her eyes. 'She did not die cleanly.'

'Stop treating me like a nursling!' he snarled and lengthened his stride.

Judith caught up her cloak and went after him. He might not be a nursling but he was inadequately prepared for what would greet him in the chapel.

Guyon looked at the row of shrouded pallets laid out before the altar, ten in all , white mounds of recent humanity.

Father Jerome fussed anxiously in the background. 'A terrible business,' he ventured, 'but they are at peace now.'

Guyon drew back one of the sheets to look upon the face of Herluin FitzSimon, a promising young man who had served with him during the Welsh campaign and who would one day, in his middle years, have captained a keep garrison. All wasted now on the edge of a sword. The linen shift in which he had been clothed did not cover the gaping wound in his throat or the sword slash that had laid his face open to the bone.

'At peace, are they?' Guyon enquired icily, replacing the sheet.

Father Jerome blenched. 'You must not doubt it, my son,' he said, putting out his hand to comfort.

Guyon stepped aside. 'I would rather you left me alone.'

The priest hesitated. Judith lightly touched his arm. 'Go to,' she said. 'It may be that he will need you later. I will stand surety for now.'

Relieved, the priest pressed her arm and quietly left her alone with Guyon. Judith squared her shoulders and went to her husband. He was staring down at Rhys.

'If Godric had not survived, the bodies would not have been discovered for some time. I was not expecting the escort back for at least three days and no search party would have been sent out before five.'

'You are telling me that this is fortunate?' he said huskily, as he drew the sheet back over Rhys's face.

'It could have been much worse. At least they were saved being despoiled by foxes and crows. Heulwen owes her life to Godric.'

'Sensible Judith,' he snarled. 'Guyon, stop it!'

'Do you interfere for pleasure or because you cannot help yourself?' he demanded savagely. 'In Christ's name, Judith, leave me alone!'

'In Christ's name, no!' she retorted with equal vehemence. 'I'll not be your scapegoat!' Going to the last pall et, she drew back the cover herself.

'Look and have done and come away!' she said brutally.

He flinched and his complexion turned the colour of ashes. Despite the work of Judith and the priest, Rhosyn's body was still not a sight for the squeamish. She had fought hard for her life and her beauty was marred by the livid bruises and distortions of strangulation. Her body beneath the shift was mauled and mutilated and her braids hacked off. Judith covered her up again.

Guyon swallowed jerkily. 'Where's Eluned?' he asked, fighting his gorge.

'De Lacey took her with him.' Judith compressed her lips. Guyon whitened further at the implications.

'My lord ...' said Father Jerome and was barged aside before he could say more by a wild-eyed, travel-stained young man.

'Where is she?' the newcomer asked hoarsely, his French so thickly accented with Welsh and filled with raw emotion that at first Judith stared at him without comprehension. His gaze flickered over the row of bodies and the vigilance candles.

'My Rhosyn, where is she?'

' Your Rhosyn?' Judith's expression sharpened. 'Then you must be Prys--'

'I went to fetch her father for burial and now I am told that I must bury her too, and the lad ...' The wild eyes fixed on Guyon with bleak loathing.

'Couldn't you leave her alone? If not for you, she'd still be alive and my wife!'

Guyon flinched. 'I did not know that she was coming to Ravenstow,' he defended himself. 'If I had, I would have stopped her. Christ knows, I tried to warn her.'

'You should have tried harder!'

'How much harder?' Guyon spat. 'How much would you have tolerated? Short of locking her up, there was nothing I could ever have done to hold her.'

'Then what in Christ's name was she doing here at Ravenstow?'

'She came to invite us to your wedding,' Judith said, trying to calm the sparks between the men that were threatening to flare into violence and violate God's altar and the dead who sought sanctuary there, 'and to talk of Heulwen's future.' It was not the whole truth, but she felt no remorse at withholding what could not safely be said.

'Neither matter was so pressing as to warrant this!' Prys gestured towards the row of corpses, and it came to Guyon that the young Welshman was as filled with guilt as himself, for he too had not been there to prevent this dreadful crime and rage was a bolt hole to be dived into rather than face the unfaceable.

Prys pushed past him and Judith. 'Which one?' he demanded. Judith opened her mouth to say that he should not look, but Guyon forestalled her by pointing to the nearest shroud.

'Walter de Lacey was the man responsible,'

Guyon said softly. 'I'm going to tear Thornford down stone by stone and make of that keep a burial mound.'

The young man drew back the sheet and fell to his knees at the side of the bier. 'Ah Rhosyn, cariad, no!'

Father Jerome set a comforting arm around Prys's shoulders, although there was nothing that could comfort the sight laid out before their eyes.

Guyon gently drew the cover over Rhosyn again. Prys shuddered and crossed himself.

Trembling, he rose to his feet and stared at Guyon.

'I'm a merchant,' he said, voice unsteady with unshed grief, and savage. 'I wear a sword for my protection, but I'm clumsy using it ...'

Judith drew a frightened breath, thinking for a mad instant that the Welshman was going to challenge Guyon to a trial by combat in order to assuage his grief. Guyon must have thought so too, for she felt him tense beside her.

'I want you to teach me to wield it properly. If you are going to march on Thornford, I am coming with you. They told me outside ... about Eluned. No worse can be done to Rhosyn, she's beyond it now ... but God alone knows what he will do to the child ...' He choked and compressed his lips.

'Be welcome,' Guyon said, his own voice constricted. 'I'll lend you a hauberk from the armoury.'

The chapel was cold and almost entirely dark.

The candles on the altar and around the biers made splashes of light in the pre-dawn blackness. Guyon stared at the flames until his vision blurred and repeated the prayers he had known by rote since childhood. Rote without meaning. The reality was the flagged church floor pressing cold and hard against his numb knees, the smell of incense cloying his nostrils and Rhosyn's desecrated body stretched out before him.

He had tried time and again to believe it was a dream, nothing more than a nightmare from which he would wake up sweating with relief. Ave Maria, gratia plena ... He had only to lift the linen sheet to know it was not.

The candles flickered in a draught and light rippled over the bier, giving Rhosyn's shroud the momentary illusion of movement. His hair rose along his spine and he stopped breathing. A gentle hand squeezed his shoulder and he jumped and stared round.

'Guyon, come away,' Judith entreated. 'It is all but dawn now and if you are to lead the men, you need to be rested. Prys sought his pall et an hour ago.' She held out his cloak and he saw that she was wearing her own over the gold wool gown of yesterday. She had been kneeling in vigil with him most of the night, but he had not marked her leaving, or indeed Prys's.

'There is a tub prepared above. You must be frozen stiff.'

The words ' sensible Judith' floated amongst the disjointed flotsam of the upper layers of his mind. He was suddenly aware of exhaustion seeping through his body just as the iciness of the flagged floor was seeping into his knees. 'To the soul,' he muttered, genuflecting to the altar and rising stiffly to his feet. 'To the pit of my soul.'

Staggering with weariness, he let her lead him up the stairs to the main bedchamber. She dismissed the maids with a swift gesture and, as the curtain dropped behind the last one, began unbuckling his swordbelt.

As the belt slipped into her hands, he took her by the shoulders and tipped up her chin to examine her face. The dim light concealed some of the ravages, but not all . Mauve shadows marred the clarity of her eyes and the bones of her face were sharp, suddenly reminding him of the first time he had seen her.

He was a sleepwalker, jolted awake. 'Ah God, Judith,' he said on a broken whisper and pulled her tight and close.

'I met her on the day before it happened,' she said into his breast, her voice cracking. 'God's love, Guy, I was so jealous, I wanted to scratch out her eyes, but I couldn't. She was so ... so honest, and she did not deserve what they did to her!'

She burst into tears, digging her fingers so hard into Guyon's hauberk that the rivets cut deep semicircles against her knuckles.

'Judith, love, don't!' Guyon pleaded, kissing her wet face while tears spilled down his own. 'Do you want to break me?'

'I can't help it!' she sobbed. 'Since that night in Southwark, we have not had a moment to ourselves that has not been marred by fear and strain and war!' She struck his hauberk with her clenched fist.

Guyon seized her hand in one of his and clamped the other around her waist, holding her tightly, aware through his own shuddering of hers.

At length, sniffing and tear-drenched, she pulled away to look at him. 'I meant to be calm and strong when you came home,' she whispered,

'and instead I shriek like a harpy. The tub is growing cold and you are still in your mail.'

'Never mind the tub,' he said, his whole body shaking with cold and the delayed reaction of shock and fatigue. 'I have lived without creature comforts for so long that another night and day does not matter. Just help me unarm and come to bed.'

Judith wondered whether she should persuade him to eat some food and decided that, for now, she just did not possess the energy. The battle could be taken up again once they had both slept.

'Judith.' He stretched out his hand to her in supplication. With a soft cry she returned to his embrace, stood tightly enclosed within it for a brief moment, then set about helping him remove his mail.