Night Creatures Read online

  He went forth seeking no one-sided bargain, he assured himself as he mounted and rode leisurely toward the Château Gavaret, and his interview with his beloved’s sire.

  Hilaire de Gavaret, Lord Constable of Acre, sat at late meat upon the terrace outside the square keep of his walled house. The Galilean moon encrusted rooftops of the lower houses and the spires and turrets of the greater buildings with a coat of silver; a slim, soft-footed page renewed the red Greek wine in his cup; impassive Syrians held their torches high and washed the terrace with a flow of orange light that veiled the stars. Hilaire drank deeply, but not thirstily. Rather, his drafts were like those of a man who seeks to drown his apprehension. At dining-time he had been startled by the howling of a wolf outside the house, and wolves in a walled city were as rare as monks who liked not victuals or soldiers who cared naught for loot. At first he had been sure his ears deceived him, but when the sergeant of the watch assured him that he saw the beast and that it tried to force an entrance to the house he felt a chill of apprehension.

  When Sylvanette was but a babe in arms an Arab sand-diviner had foretold that ere she reached the full bloom of her womanhood some great misfortune would befall her, and the wolf’s cry at his door seemed like an omen. Thrice he had sent a messenger to his daughter’s bower. Three times the word brought back had been the same.

  She had ridden to the foothills of the Lebanons with a company of young companions, and had not yet returned. Who had been her saddlemates? Her tiring-women could not say, but they believed young Gaussin de Solliès was one. Small wonder if he was. The lad was like Sylvanette’s shadow. Presently he would come suing for her hand, belike, and Sire Hilaire would inquire what he had to feed a wife withal, how he proposed to equip a house and provide bread and meat for retainers. Then with a show of great reluctance he would yield, and give them his blessing, for Sylvanette’s dowry was enough for two, and he was widowed and without another heir. By the blood and bones of good Messire Saint James, he liked the lad, and——

  ‘My Lord,’ a Syrian servant bowed with deference at his elbow, ‘young Captain de Solliès begs for admission——’

  ‘Bid him come, and quickly,’ interrupted Sire Hilaire. ‘By sainted Denis’ sainted head, ’tis time he brought my daughter home!’

  ‘Holà, good Messer Jackanapes,’ he greeted Gaussin as the young knight stepped out on the terrace, ‘what ill wind blows thee hither? Or belike it is a good breeze wafts thee here, and thou art come to tell me that thou leavest for Antioch or Tyre or Constantinople. The blessed saints in Paradise grant that it be a right good distance——’ While he was speaking he looked toward the doorway to the house, made sure he saw the flutter of a gown, and smiled more broadly.

  So that way lay the wind, eh? The wench was hovering in the offing while her lover made his request for her hand? Now for the aspect of a stern, uncompromising sire! He choked a chuckle rising from his belly and put on a fierce look. ‘What would’st with me, sirrah?’

  ‘It is about thy daughter, Messire,’ Gaussin replied nervously. ‘I am come to——’

  ‘My daughter, quotha? And where is she? Report has come that thou rode off with her this morning while the dew still sparkled on the grass. Say, hast thou brought her back unharmed?’

  The blank expression on the young man’s face brought his mock-bluster to a halt.

  Gaussin was looking at him open-mouthed, something like dawning terror in his eyes. The muscles tightened at the angles of his jaw, his fingers clenched the carved arms of his chair as if they clung in desperation to a tower parapet. ‘She—she is not here?’ Fear, consternation—utter panic—forced the question from him.

  For a moment they stared at each other, young knight and old campaigner. Their eyes met and nothing moved in their faces. It was as if each looked at a graven image incapable of looking back.

  At length Sire Hilaire licked his lips and spoke in a voice hard and raucous as the sound of ripping parchment. ‘Say’st thou that she rode out with thee and thou hast dared return without her?’

  Gaussin looked at him helplessly. He had left her at the cathedral before the sun went down. The streets were well patrolled by men from his own provost guard; besides, who would dare offer affront to the daughter of the Lord Constable? But he had left her—alone—to make her way unguarded and without escort through the darkling evening. True, she had wished it so, but he was a knight, sworn by oath unbreakable to guard all gentlewomen placed in his care until the sword fell from his unnerved hand.

  ‘Messire,’ he began, but the Lord Constable’s bellow drowned his faltering explanation.

  ‘By holy Michael his most puissant lance, thou callest thyself knight, thou cur, thou scurvy knave, thou false poltroon!’ His ruddiness gave way to a gray pallor as he leveled a taut forefinger at Gaussin. ‘Report thyself in close arrest to the Lord Provost, sirrah. Tomorrow I lodge my complaint before the Court of Chivalry—the good God grant me life until I see thy name struck from the roll of true sir knights!’

  All night Gaussin paced his quarters. Hour after hour he walked a frustrated diamond-shaped pattern on the black and white marble tiles. Inside his ears, as if it echoed from his broken, empty heart a cry reverberated: ‘Sylvanette!’

  Only this morning—or had it been a thousand years ago?—they were so happy in their new-found love. Now . . . ‘Sylvanette—Sylvanette!’ the syllables of her name reproached him, mocked him. Once, exhausted past endurance, he threw himself upon his couch, but scarcely had he closed his eyes when he rose with a dreadful cry. For at the moment sleep came, there came a troop of phantoms, men bedight in knightly armor, but with crests reversed upon their shields, and when they put their vizors up skull-faces grinned at him from their helmets. ‘Rise, Gaussin de Solliès,’ they bid him in deep, hollow voices, ‘rise and join our company, for we, like thee, were recreant to our chivalry, and now thou art become as one of us.’

  Then from a cave of blazing pitch and brimstone, demons brought a helmet glowing fiery red, a lance of poison thornwood and a shield of rag stretched on a frame of willow. ‘Dress thyself in the armor of thy infamy, O forsworn knight!’ cried the capering host of fiends. ‘Put on the panoply of degradation; ride the lists of infamy!’

  ‘Mercy!’ he screamed as they made to put the glowing helmet on his head. ‘Is there no hope, no relief?’

  ‘Aye, brother of the damned,’ a skeleton in armor answered, ‘that there is. When thou hast fought thy way across this fiery plain and conquered every foe sent out against thee, then climbed the wall of smooth and slippery ice that hems the field of the lost spirits, thou shalt find surcease from thy sufferings, not before. And mark thee, recreant knight, each time a foeman overthrows thee in the lists another thousand years is added to thy period of torment.’

  He wakened bathed in sweat and gazed about him with eyes glazed with horror. Then, as he realized he had dreamed, the furious beating of his heart subsided, and once more he began his pacing back and forth across the floor.

  Dawn came seeping into the gray murk of the sky like blood welling through a soiled bandage. From cathedral, church, and chapel came the chiming matins of the bells:

  Hail, Mary, full of grace,

  Blessèd art thou among women . . .

  He was weak with weakness greater than mere bodily fatigue when they brought him forth to stand before the Masters in Chivalry and hear the charge Sir Hilaire lodged against him. His companions of the day before were summoned to bear witness, and one and all they testified, all to the same effect: That he had ridden forth with them and with the damoselle Sylvanette de Gavaret; that he and she had dropped behind when they were scarce an hour’s ride beyond the city; that none of them from that moment had seen or heard of Sylvanette de Gavaret, and might the Lord do so to them, and more, if they spoke aught but the truth, and the whole truth.

  Defense? What defense could he offer? That he had let the wilful maid have her way, permitted her to tarry at the cathedral while he rode off t
o leave her to her own devices, and make her way unguarded through the night-bound streets? A half-wit three-year child would not believe a story such as that.

  The judge advocate advised him. He could not be degraded without a trial if he chose to stand upon his rights. He might have trial by ordeal, swear to his innocence, and take the exorcized bread in his mouth. If he could swallow it his guiltlessness would be assumed. Or he might have recourse to compurgation, bring twelve good men and true to swear that they believed him innocent. He might have ordeal by combat, and battle with de Gavaret’s champion to the death. Which would he choose?

  He looked about the circling lines of knights and ladies. No eye in all the throng looked at him with aught but scorn. No hope of compurgation there. He was already condemned by the audience.

  Wager of battle? He could scarcely keep upon his feet, and the cold he had caught as he stood bathed in sweat while he looked from his window yesternight had sent an enervating fever racing through his blood. In combat he would be no match for Beppo, the Lord Provost’s dwarf, much less a champion armed cap-a-pie and lusting to write Guilty on him with the sword.

  ‘I choose the ordeal by the corsned,’ he replied. Heaven knew that he was innocent of wilful wrong, he would have given his blood drop by tortured drop for Sylvanette. Let heaven witness to his innocence.

  The corsned, a small loaf of leavened bread about the size of a man’s fist, was brought, and while a kitchen villein kneaded and compressed it till it bulked but half its former size the bishop’s chaplain exorcized it by the ancient rite: ‘I exorcize thee, creature of wheat, may no evil spirit lurk in thee to aid the guilty with his wiles . . . may the power of the adversary, all the host of Satan, all evil attack, every spirit and glamour of the Devil be utterly put to flight, and driven far away. . . .’

  Wine was poured upon the compressed, unpalatable bolus, and Gaussin raised his hand. ‘Heaven witness I am guiltless of this charge against me. If it be not so may this bread lodge in my throat and strangle me, but if I be unjustly accused may I swallow it as featly as it were a sup of wine, and may it nourish both my corse and my spirit.’

  The chaplain thrust the kneaded dough into his opened mouth, and he strained at it, for to bite or chew it was forbidden. For purposes of swallowing it might almost as well have been a stone, but even so he might have forced it down had it not been for the cold caught the night before. With his throat stopped by the compact mass of bread he felt the sudden tightening of the pectoral muscles which precedes a cough, strove desperately to swallow, and bent forward suddenly, face suffused and shoulders heaving. Next instant he shook with the torsion of a cough, threw back his head in effort to get breath, and shot the wad of compressed bread from his mouth like a quarrel from a crossbow. Heaven had given judgment. He was guilty.

  Sentence was pronounced immediately: That his name and arms be erased from the roll of knighthood; that his golden spurs be hacked off with a scullion’s cleaver; that his armor be stripped from him and beaten to a shapeless mass with sledges in the hands of villeins; that his sword and lance be broken into pieces and with his knightly harness tossed upon a dung heap, and the shield that bore his crest be dragged through the muck of a pig-sty at an ass’s tail; that the embrocation of knighthood be washed from his head with lye and scalding water, after which he should be stretched upon a bier and carried to the chapel as one dead. If upon the morrow he were found within the city walls he should be pelted with manure from the stables by villeins.

  As he heard the dreadful sentence of his degradation Gaussin trembled like a man with ague; then, eyes ablaze with fever and indignation, ‘Messires, it was no will of heaven, but my cough that made me fail the ordeal, as you know full well,’ he told them. ‘Nevertheless, when a man is foredoomed he can look for little justice from his judges. My arms and gear are in my quarters. Do with them as thou wilt, but by’r Lakin, the first man to lay hand on me, be he of noble blood or villein base, goes straightway down to hell to tell the Devil of my coming!’ he roared, and leaping tiger-like snatched a sword from a sergeant and swung it naked in their faces.

  None hindered him as he walked from the council chamber, none sought to stop him as he marched with flaming cheeks and blazing eyes across the parade ground and to the city gate. The guardsmen at the portal forbore to salute him, for the rumor of his degradation had preceded him, but neither did they move to bar his way. And so, unlet, he came once more upon the highway to Tiberius where yestereve he and his dear, dear love had ridden with hearts overfilled with happiness.

  Once only he looked back, and saw the grinning lackeys of the guard regarding him. Ceremoniously he raised first one foot, then the other, shaking from them the dust of the city.

  For thirty days Gaussin held to the highway, going ever northward, past Tyre and Beirut, Antioch and Tarsus, keeping from the walled towns, sleeping in the little villages along the way, or at the farmsteads bordering the road. Fortunately for him there had been some silver and a few gold pieces in the pocket hanging at his belt; so he lacked for nothing in the way of food or shelter, and once or twice he was enabled to increase his rate of travel by hiring transportation with a wagon train or caravan which headed toward Taurus and the Armenian states.

  He had started without destination or purpose other than to put as much distance as possible between him and the city of his humiliation. Of those who travel thus, without intention, the Moslems say they journey toward God’s gate, and so it proved for Gaussin. A month had passed, and he was in the country of the atabegs, the petty war lords of Edessa whose castles looked down on the red wheat fields and who sallied out to take their toll of passing merchant trains. The night he had spent in a cedar copse, for the caravansaries of the few wretched villages which grew like fungi on the ruinous remains of the old Roman road swarmed with vermin of prodigious appetite and thieves and cutpurses no less predatory. The changing light before the dawn was brightening nearby trees and rocks and distant crenellated hills into sharp definition as Gaussin sat up with a great yawn, stretched his arms, and dropped back on his couch of leaves. Then, all the luxury of languor gone from him, he crouched on one knee, sword in readiness, eyes narrowed warily. The crash of steel on steel, the hoarse shouts of contending men, and the thudding of mailed feet came to him from the road.

  Cautiously parting the branches he saw the combatants, one in lacquered armor who stood almost two ells tall and grasped a great sword in his hand and hewed a circle round him as if he were a scytheman standing in a field of growing grain; three men accoutered similarly lay face downward in the road, while round them surged a horde of Terkaris, lean, rapacious riders of the uplands, link-mailed and cimetered, retainers of some neighboring atabeg who had attacked these outlanders for loot, but now fought savagely for revenge for their losses. Across the stony field a herd of horses galloped riderless. Apparently the attackers had dismounted to creep upon their prey in silence, but had been discovered before they could strike.

  Gaussin shrugged his shoulders. Let them fight it to the death. It was the Devil’s business, not his. What had he to do with chivalry, or helping those beset by robbers? But the logic of his Gallic mind proved stronger than his bitterness. The robbers still were six to one, and though the giant fended them off mightily the result of the fight was forecast. If he were found by the victorious Terkaris while their blood-lust still ran at flood-tide . . . he was unmounted and without armor, and while he had no reason to love life there was no call to woo death needlessly. Besides, perhaps they would not kill him, but take him to the castle to be made a slave . . . to draw water and hew wood for some barbarous atabeg.

  ‘God wills it!’ he raised the Crusaders’ battle-cry and dashed from his ambush with sword in one hand, dagger in the other.

  Gaussin had had the best instruction in weaponry procurable, and it was well for him he had, for two of the robbers turned on him, and as he looked into their faces he knew them for hasheesh-eaters rendered fearless by the drug, and fierce
as hungry tigers. No followers of some small atabeg these, but fedawi of the Shaikh al Jebal, half-crazed followers of the Old Man of the Mountain. Broidered on their white surtouts he saw the crimson dagger of their lord and master, and with a quickly indrawn breath he realized that the fight he undertook was to the death, both now and afterward; for if he prevailed now he was a marked man, and the daggers of the secret killers would be whetted for his heart wherever he might go.

  This thought flashed through his mind like a reflex, and then there was no time for thought, for swords were flashing in his eyes and he must kill or be killed. With a tremendous down-stroke he hewed the sword-hand off the nearest foeman, and as the fellow staggered back drove his dagger beneath his pointed beard, so that the fellow dropped with a startled sheep-like bleat while his companion leaped at Gaussin.

  With a backstroke of his two-edged sword the young knight slashed across his adversary’s eyes, hewing through flesh and skull into the brain, and wheeling drove his dagger straight into the teeth of a third hemp-chewer who had tripped upon the body of his comrade and so missed the stroke which he had aimed at Gaussin’s heart.