Collected fiction, p.571
Collected Fiction, page 571
And it was a face Boyce had seen before—seen very recently. A face of haunting familiarity. This was nothing out of his dreams or his forgotten memories. He knew this face.
“Your name, stranger?” Sir Guillaume demanded peremptorily. Boyce was aware of a sudden flush. He did not like the man. It was more than any quick surface dislike. There was antagonism between the two. He saw it on the Crusader’s face and felt it on his own.
“I am called William Boyce,” he said shortly.
At Sir Guillaume’s shoulder a black-browed woman in green leaned forward. She was looking from the knight’s face to Boyce’s.
“A moment, Sir Guillaume,” she said softly. “I think—is it only my fancy, messires, or is there a likeness here?”
The others stirred in their chairs and bent to follow her gaze. But Boyce understood even as the woman spoke. He knew—and the knowledge was a flash that almost stunned him—what lay at the root of the familiarity in Sir Guillaume’s face and voice. This was impossible—it could happen only in such a dream as he walked in now.
Sir Guillaume was himself, given a few more years of age and a life-time of arrogance. The face and the voice were his own!
Guillaume was gaping at him. Now he rose and glared under bent brows into Boyce’s eyes, and they were exactly of a height. Blue eyes scowled at blue eyes. Identical mouths set angrily.
“Even to the names, Sir Guillaume!” the woman in green said. “He is called by your name in the English tongue, William du Boyce—”
“I am Guillaume du Bois, certainly,” the knight growled, still staring in the other man’s eyes. “But if there is likeness here I do not admit it!”
A young page, kneeling on the edge of the dais, had been polishing a great Norman shield. Godfrey bent and snatched it up.
“Look, Sir Guillaume,” he said.
Guillaume stared for a long moment into the mirrory steel. He glanced at Boyce and then back again, and his face began to suffuse with rage and something like terror.
Suddenly he flung down the shield. It struck the floor with a hollow clang and above the noise Guillaume roared with anger.
“Sorcery! By the Lance, this man’s a sorcerer! Seize him!”
GODFREY’S big hand closed on Boyce’s arm. Boyce himself, too bewildered to think clearly, shook it off with angry violence. The old French forsook him in his anger, and he could only shout in English,
“Let me go, you fool! I’m no sorcerer! I—” His voice was swallowed up in the roars that swept over the dais as the men upon it scrambled to seize him. Two of the women screamed, and the greyhounds lounging by the fire sprang up with yelps of excitement. A moment of pandemonium reigned upon the dais.
Then above it a great, deep voice rose commandingly.
“Let him go, messires! Let the man go, I say!”
Reluctantly the turmoil subsided. Boyce, looking up with the rest, saw a tall man in black robes standing in a doorway at the head of the dais. Without being told, he knew who it must be—Tancred the Mage.
There were cabalistic symbols on the dark robe the magician wore and his head was turbaned like that of an eastern prince, but the face beneath the turban was not what Boyce had expected. Tancred’s beard was white and long, but his brows were black and met above his nose in a perpetual, imperial scowl. He wore emeralds in his ears and his fingers were heavy with flashing stones. He looked like a man who could command men even without the power his magic gave him.
“Is there no peace at all in Kerak?” he demanded in a deep voice. “Even while the castle still rocks on its foundations from the assaults of sorcery, must we have brawling on our dais?”
“All sorcery is not without the walls, Tancred,” Sir Guillaume said loudly. “Look upon this man and me, and judge whether the City has not sent us another spy to—”
Tancred laughed and came down the dais slowly.
“Spy he may be, Guillaume, But there are other ways than sorcery to make two men alike. Are you so certain, Guillaume, that no kin of yours walk the earth?”
Guillaume was not to be appeased.
“I know magic when I see it. This stretches coincidence too far.”
Tancred paused before Boyce, pulling at his white beard thoughtfully. Black eyes burned into Boyce’s.
“Perhaps it does.” The magician nodded. “But brawling give us no answers. There are better ways of smelling out City spies.” He glanced around the dais. and his eye moved past Boyce and paused. Boyce turned.
In a corner of the chimneypiece a young man sat huddled under a fur-lined cloak. It was not cold here, and Boyce saw that sweat stood on the youth’s pale forehead, but he shivered from time to time under the robe, and a shaking hand clutched at the collar to hold it close about him.
“Here is young Hugh,” Tancred said, his voice stem. “Most of you know the story of Hugh of Mandois. He went out scouting last week and the men of the City took him. He lived a week in the City.” There was loathing in the word. “And Hugh came back as all our men do—whoever return from the City. His wits half addled because of the things he saw.”
Tancred crossed the dais and bent above the huddled youth.
“Hugh, lad—Hugh.” The boy looked up. “Hugh, we have a question for you. Look at this man here, standing beside Sir Guillaume.”
Boyce met a pair of dazed blue eyes with shadows in them. For an instant he knew that look. He had seen it in the mirror in his own eyes many times, when he strove in vain to recapture some of the memories of his lost year. That same dazed blankness, with a hint of shadows beneath.
Had he himself ever walked the City, and looked upon the things that drove men mad?
“Tell us, lad,” Tancred’s voice went on. “Have you seen this man before? Do men in garments like his visit the people of the City? Is this man a spy, Hugh?”
Hugh of Mandois lifted his haggard stare again to Boyce, and for an instant Boyce was all but certain he would know him. He was all but certain that in his lost year he might indeed have walked those streets and met young Hugh upon them.
Too many strange things had happened to him already in the past few hours for him to feel sure of anything. His likeness in face and name to Guillaume was the final straw. Now he felt himself ready to believe or disbelieve anything Tancred might tell him of himself, so long as it offered a solution to the mysteries around him.
Hugh of Mandois let his shadowy, half-mad eyes rest a moment longer upon Boyce. Then he lowered them again, huddled the robe around his shoulders and shook his head dully.
“I do not know,” he said in a thin voice. “I do not know.” A shiver went over him and he turned back to the fire.
Tancred’s big shoulders lifted beneath the black robe in a shrug.
“For Hugh’s sake, I wish he could remember,” he said, half to himself. “For his own sake, I wish we could rouse him. Well—” He looked back at Boyce speculatively. “He must go to the Oracle, of course. He—”
“Wait a minute,” Boyce said abruptly.
HEADS turned, murmurs rose. The people on the dais stared at him out of angry, suspicious faces, Guillaume’s nearest and glaring with that inner hatred which the two men who bore the same name and the same face had felt so instinctively for one another.
“I’m no spy,” Boyce said, stumbling over the archaic French. “The Huntsman should have proved that—he tried to kill me. But I didn’t come here by choice. And I won’t—” Tancred laughed.
“Prove your point by the way the mist blows,” he said, “but not by anything the Huntsman does. His ways are more uncertain than the clouds. Still, if he hunted you here and failed to kill you, be sure he had a reason of his own.”
“Who is the Huntsman?”
Tancred’s face darkened. The black brow wrinkled together above the black eyes. “Perhaps you know better than we.”
“All right,” Boyce said in sudden anger. “Take me to your Oracle, then. Let’s have it over with whatever it may be, and then IT have some questions of my own that demand an answer.”
“Well spoken, stranger.” Tancred was smiling again. “Come.”
He swung aside with a sweep of the cabalistic black robes and waved a commanding arm.
Boyce moved after him half doubtfully. But Guillaume, grinning a wolfish grin beneath his drooping moustache, walked on one side of him, and Godfrey Long-shank stepped up on the other.
“Now we shall know the truth about you, spy,” Guillaume said. “March!”
Beyond the door through which Tancred had first entered a narrow stairway rose, winding in the thickness of the wall. Glancing behind him, Boyce saw that everyone who had been lounging on the dais was following them. The women picked their way up the steps delicately, holding their long skirts in ringed hands. The men shouldered after, whispering among themselves. The walls echoed with their voices and the shuffle of feet on stone.
They went up a long way. Boyce began to suspect that they might be mounting to the top of the donjon-keep that towered highest of all over Kerak. Through slit-like windows he caught glimpses of the misty plain spread out far below, of the last rings of magical fire dying away around the foot of the crags like fading rainbows in the fog. And across the valley the City was a blur of colored lights veiled and revealed again as the blue-green clouds drifted over it The light had not changed here since his wakening. He wondered if they had day and night in this mysterious, incredible land, or if the same dim half-brightness dwelt always over the fog and the mountains.
An arched hallway opened up before the climbers. Boyce, between his two guards, cleared the last of the steps and followed Tancred’s broad back down the hall. A hush had fallen over the crowd now. Even their feet no longer shuffled. They walked almost on tiptoe, and he could hear Godfrey breathing fast beside him. Whatever the Oracle might be, the castle people seemed to hold it in something like dread.
There was a curtained doorway at the end of the hall. Purple velvet hangings embroidered all over in a pattern of silver webs hid what lay beyond. Tancred laid one big hand weighted with rings upon the heavy folds. He turned then, his eyes searching the crowd. There was a rustling among them, and one quickly drawn breath seemed to sweep the throng.
“Stand forth, stranger,” Tancred said in his deepest voice. “Stand forth and face the Oracle!”
CHAPTER V
Spy From the City
THE velvet curtains swept back. Boyce had one moment of wonder and involuntary dread, as he realized that Guillaume and Godfrey had released his arms and stepped quickly back so that he stood alone, facing Tancred and the door. Then he saw what the doorway framed and all other thought went out of his mind.
He did not know what he had expected. Certainly not this—this small stone room beyond the curtains, nor that which filled it. That delicate webbing of fire . . .
It was the webbing that caught his eye first. The fiery strands were woven into a hollow framework of exquisite pattern that moved as he watched. A living framework—a living cage.
And in the cage of animate fire—a woman. No, a figure of marble. No—a woman, after all. Wax, or marble, or flesh—he could not be sure. She was not alive. That much the quickest glance assured him. The cage around her was living and fiery, but the woman within had neither life nor warmth.
She stood as a statue might stand, motionless, hands clasped before her, facing the crowd. Her long white robe was no whiter than her face and her hair fell in a cascade of pure marble pallor, straight and unbroken over her shoulders.
The face had a purity of line that seemed to rob it of all likeness to humanity. No mortal face ever turned such flawless planes to the beholder. The eyes were closed. The lips were closed too, on a lovely line that looked as if it could never have parted. Boyce thought he had never seen a figure so coldly remote, so utterly empty of life.
For a long moment there was no sound in the hall. Very faintly, standing this near, Boyce could hear a fine, thin humming from the cage, as if the fiery bars of it sang among themselves. But from the crowd came only the silence of caught breath, and from the woman—the statue—no sound could ever come.
“What do you ask of me?”
Boyce had to look again to be sure the voice had come from those marble lips. They scarcely moved. The eyelids did not move at all. But surely no other lips in the world could have spoken in such a voice of cold remoteness. Such infinite, distant calm. A chill went over him at the sound of that gelid tone.
Tancred’s voice was soft and strangely tender.
“We have reason to think a spy may stand here among us,” he said. “We bring him before you that you may judge if he speaks the truth.”
No sound, no motion, as his voice fell silent. The marble girl faced them with closed eyes and clasped hands, not moving even to breathe. But the wait was a listening, searching wait. Even Boyce held his breath, half-believing against his own reason that this waxen thing could see and know and answer—if she would.
The wait lengthened. She stood there deathly in her coldness and her pallor—no, not even deathly, for nothing can die that has never known life, and it was impossible to believe that breath had ever stirred those marble nostrils or blood ever pulsed beneath that marble skin.
Then with barely perceptible motion, the waxen lips parted. The voice that chilled the listener like a breath of wind over ice was clearly.
“Yes, the man lies.”
Behind him Boyce could hear Guillaume’s deep rumble of triumph, instantly hushed. An involuntary ripple went over the crowd, and he heard feet shuffle with angry, impulsive motion and the whine of steel half-drawn from scabbards by quick hands.
“Wait,” the Oracle said coldly. “Wait.”
Instant hush. In the silence, the icy voice spoke on.
“One stands among you as envoy from the City. He came to kill. He waits now to kill.”
The anger among the crowd surged up again and its rumble of fury drowned out the thin, cold voice. Boyce braced his feet wide and wished ardently for a weapon.
“It’s not true!” he shouted desperately. “I’m no spy! I didn’t come to—”
The rising roar drowned out his voice too, and he knew one instant of that shattering self-doubt, that old wonder whether he himself knew what the truth might be. But there was no time for that now. Guillaume with both great arms lifted and a grin of triumphant hatred on his face was half a dozen paces away, and coming fast, and the crowd behind him was a swirl of shouting faces and angry eyes.
“Wait!” The clear voice, like an icy lash, cut through the noise in the hall. The marble girl’s face had not changed. The lips were parted no farther than before, the eyes were still closed. But the voice had the volume of a shout, yet was still a cold, thin murmur only.
Boyce saw the eyes of the crowd leave him and fasten on the white figure in the fiery cage. They paused, flushed and angry—but they paused.
“I did not name the man,” the chilly voice reminded them.
Bewildered murmurs answered that.
“He stands among you in a guise you know,” said the voice of ice. “He is no stranger. He is not this man before me.” She paused again. Then with an emphasis so biting that Boyce could all but feel the sear of cold upon his flesh, she said, “Must I name you, spy?”
The thing that happened then stunned them all. Boyce saw it most clearly, for he was half-facing the crowd. The others had to turn and were jostled when the first wild sound rang upon them from the back of the hall.
The sound was laughter.
A HUDDLED figure standing in the mouth of the stair-door shook with sudden, desperate mirth, flinging up a wild, pale face to stare at them. It was Hugh de Mandois, the half-mad refugee from the terror of the City.
In the first moment Boyce thought the lad was shaken with something like hysteria from the tenseness of the scene. Then he saw the bowed body under the heavy robe straighten—straighten and rise. His eyes refused to accept the height of the figure. They carried no message for a moment to his startled brain. He gaped blankly at that which stood in the stairway door.
For Hugh de Mandois was rising to a full stature that towered impossibly over the highest head in the crowd. The cloak fell back. The garments the young Hugh had worn were ripped and fell away, and it was no human figure that rose from the huddle which had been Hugh of Mandois.
What it was he could not be sure. Boyce saw it most clearly of them all, and not even he could give a name to it. None of them saw it for longer than an instant. In that brief interval the thing stood up before them, towering, terrible, a monstrous laughing figure mailed in something that might have been glittering scales or glittering armor, something so strange the eye could only translate it into familiar things like these.
Its laughter rang like a trumpet under the arched ceiling, filling the hall with sound. And then the creature leaped . . .
Afterward some said it fought with a sword and some said it wielded a flame instead of a blade. Certainly wounds were later dressed that looked like the ripping of heavy claws. And the smell in the hall was of scorched flesh as well as of blood. For the fight was terrible before they subdued the—the spy the City had sent among them.
Boyce fought with the rest. It seemed incredible that one being, however large, could have engaged them all. Its speed was that of light itself, its strength beyond imagining. The strange thing was that they did, in the end, after a desperate struggle, manage to prevail.
Boyce remembered only the feel of cold, smooth limbs tossing him aside and falling after him, and crushing him with great, careless blows. How he fought he was not sure. Bare fists seemed little enough against that fabulous being, and yet he remembered the feel of his knuckles sinking into the scaled body, the sound of a groan as the blows sank, the reek of a scorching breath in his face.
He remembered the numbing coldness of an edged something sinking into his flesh, the sound of ripping skin and the hot gush of his own blood flowing down over his chest.
