Dragon Tree (5 page)

Inside the
wall, a large grassed common formed the outer ward and was ringed
with stone outbuildings that contained, among other things, the
stables and smithy. Entry to the inner ward was through a second
sturdy curtain wall that divided the grounds in half, requiring
visitors to pass through yet another arched gateway.

Oddly enough,
despite the strength and extent of the fortifications, the castle
was not located in a strategically important area. The vast forests
of Lincoln were to the north, the sea to the east, the richest
baronies in England to the south and west. The lake was less than
three hectares in size, surrounded by an outer ring of greenwood so
dense it would take an army months to hack its way through.

Taniere’s
existence had never appeared as anything more than a passing
notation in the crown’s registry. No king had ever visited. No
rival barons had ever vied for its possession. It had no real
strategic value and before Tamberlane's arrival, had stood empty
for several decades. The walls had became overgrown with brambles
and lichen. The vaulted passageways and chambers had become home
for invading hoards of birds and spiders, the latter spinning huge
blankets of white filaments from beam to beam, doors to sills.

The
inhabitants of the village that had sprung up along the shore of
the lake told the usual stories of ghosts and dragons and unsettled
spirits to discourage children from crossing the draw and possibly
tumbling to their deaths from the high stone walls. Those children
grew into the men and women who cautioned their own offspring to
stay well away from the hulking ramparts. Several of the village
men went so far as to raise the drawbridge and bolt it to the wall,
ensuring that whatever demons dwelled within the walls remained
there.

So it had
remained, silent and steeped in shadow, until one spring day the
villagers awoke to the sound of grinding chains and groaning
timbers. The drawbridge was being lowered, and, waiting patiently
on shore was a knight dressed in plain armor. He had arrived with a
small caravan of four wagons, a meager handful of servants, and a
strange assortment of retainers, one of whom proved to be a
dark-skinned woman whose cheek was horribly disfigured by a
puckered scar. Clutched in her arms was a small child, his eyes
wide with awe as he watched the huge draw being lowered.

Standing
beside the knight was a tall figure completely swathed head to toe
in flowing black robes. Even his face was shielded by an elongated
hood and it was not until later that the villagers learned he was
completely devoid of any coloring whatsoever. His hair and skin
were white, his eyes were a transparent gray rimmed in pink and
shielded by white lashes.

The simple
villagers who had never seen an albino whispered among themselves
that he was surely a demon, a satyr, an incubus. They hid when they
saw him, fearing he might steal their souls and barter them to the
devil. When it was further discovered that he practised the art of
alchemy, some bundled the few belongings they possessed and fled
the village, leaving Taniere Castle to the dragons and demons.

Those who
remained did so because they had no where else to go. When none
were turned into toads and lizards, they began to venture into the
castle, wary, but as tenants were obliged to give three days a week
in service due their liege. The knight went further and offered
coin to the workers who repaired walls and cleaned rooms and after
a while he was judged to be fair and affable, though withdrawn.

The new lord
had no pressing desire to scrape the outer walls clean of moss or
cut down the tangled thickets grown like a ring of thorns around
the island. Only the barest of necessities inside the domicile were
restored. The great hall was swept clean of rot and filth, the
tower rooms were made habitable, the cook house was restocked with
ironware and clay pots. And wine. The alehouse was pressed into
service almost at once for it was a rare night in those early
months that the lord of the keep did not drink himself into a
stupor and have to be carried to his bedchamber by the tall, hooded
seneschal.

The only
cheerful face amongst the new residents was the squire, Roland, who
went to great pains to assure the villagers that his lord was not
the devil and that the cowled albino, named Marak, was not a
follower of Beelzebub. Roland himself was a distant cousin to Lord
Tamberlane, who was in turn the nephew of William de Glanville,
brother to the late chief justiciar of England, Ranulf de
Glanville, who had died while fighting alongside his king at the
siege of Acre.

Once Lord
Tamberlane’s name was revealed, it was whispered with mixed emotion
by the villagers who, even though they abided in the farthest
corner of God’s green earth, had heard the tales and feats
attributed to one of Christendom’s mightiest crusaders. It was said
the Lionheart had dubbed him Dragonslayer for his ferocity in
battle, and that he was one of only two knights who had survived
the slaughter at the Battle of Hattin, where over two thousand
Christian soldiers had been captured and beheaded. It was said he
fought at Richard’s right hand side, that he had saved the king’s
life when Saladin had sent his assassins into the Christian camp in
the dead of night.

But then there
were the other whispered tales. Rumors of cowardice, of disobeying
orders, of spitting on the Beauseant—the holy banner of the
Templars. It was said he deserted the king's army in Arsuf, that he
wandered the desert and lived with the paynims for several months
before he presented himself before the Grand Master and faced the
charges against him.

Returning
pilgrims told of a great trial wherein the Dragonslayer was
condemned to death and only spared at the last possible moment by
the king himself. In the end, the punishment meted out to the
knight was to be stripped of his secular mantle, excommunicated for
his sins and cast from the Order of priestly warriors.

Defrocked and
disgraced, he had returned quietly to England, where his presence
had been commanded before his uncle and while the meeting was held
in private, with not the keenest of ears able to hear what was
said, a month later he had arrived at Taniere Castle to take up
residence in a solitude likened to exile.

Not everyone
agreed with the charges, and not everyone obeyed the tribunal's
edict to shun and ostracize. Over the ensuing weeks, it was not
just the villagers who crossed the drawbridge to Taniere to take up
service to their new liege, but soldiers and men at arms. Knights
who had served with Tamberlane in Outremer and disdained the
accusation of cowardice began to appear at the gates, kissing a
ring he did not offer willingly, pledging loyalty with vows he did
not actively seek. Some came marked by a weariness of bloodshed and
war. Others simply carried too many nightmares in their heads and
needed the peace and tranquillity of Taniere’s isolation to grapple
their demons to ground.

The villagers
who worked inside the castle were also able, eventually, to
overcome their fear of the tall, robed seneschal who, while he
could still chill blood on a mere turning of his cowled head,
proved to be a practiced healer. A maid who had burned her arm
horribly with a spill of boiling oil was treated with a thick
unguent that not only took the pain away upon the instant, but
within days had soothed the blisters and encouraged fresh new skin
to grow over the wound. Similarly, a young boy with a caul over his
eye was made to see again. A miller with a scrofulous boil on his
neck was healed after wearing one of the albino’s poultices, and a
woman who had labored in childbirth for three days and would surely
have bled to death following the breech delivery, allowed him to
pack her womb with special herbs and was working in the castle a
month later, her babe comfortably asleep in a sling across her
back.

As for the
knight who now called Taniere Castle home, a five year old scruffy
child could see him dismount to dry a tear off her face, yet a word
of thanks from that child's parent could send him awkwardly back
onto his horse without another word. An occasional hunt would lure
him across the draw but he favored his own company. He rarely went
to the village, and never attended the daily masses held in the
castle chapel. His chambers occupied the entire east tower and
while there were many a maid who would have joined him there with a
crook of a finger, none were ever invited.

So it was that
when Tamberlane returned from the ill-fated hunt that day, the men
and women working in the wards stopped what they were doing to turn
and stare at their overlord as he rode past, plainly startled to
see an injured maid cradled in his arms.

While Roland
held the reins of the destrier steady, Tamberlane threw a leg over
the front of his saddle and landed on the ground with the surety of
a big cat. With the wolfhounds close on his heels, he carried the
unconscious girl inside the keep, his boot heels ringing off the
stone floor as he traversed the great hall and climbed the narrow
corkscrew staircase into the west tower. Roland was a step behind
and opened the heavy door at the top before Tamberlane could kick
his way through.

As usual, the
seneschal's chamber was dark, the shadows thick and black. There
was a solitary candle flickering insipidly in the far corner of the
chamber, a low fire glowing red in the hearth which provided barely
enough light to discern one shape from the next.

Marak was
there, dressed in his long black robes. He sat in the far corner
grinding some herbs together with a mortar and pestle, but at the
sound of the door swinging open, he looked over.

While
Tamberlane and Roland waited for their eyes to adjust to the gloom,
Marak calmly set his pestle aside and raised the hood of his robe
to shield his face as he came into the stronger light.

“You mentioned
you might be going hunting this morning. You did not say your game
would be two legged.”

“She has an
arrow through her shoulder.” Tamberlane said. “Can you help
her?”

“One of your
arrows?” Marak inquired, looking down.

The sublime
reference to Tamberlane's skill with the bow was answered with a
snort.

The
seneschal’s eyes, unseen beneath the hood, studied the girl’s limp
body, while a pale hand touched the side of her neck to search for
evidence that the blood still pulsed through her veins. Tamberlane
was unsure himself, for he had not felt her move, had not heard a
breath or a whimper over the last mile of their journey.

With a gesture
that did not promise much hope, Marak skimmed his fingers over the
blood-soaked tunic. “She is almost bled dry.”

“Can you help
her?”

“If I say not,
will you toss her over the rampart and go about the rest of your
day?”

Tamberlane
looked startled for as long as it took the seneschal to echo the
earlier snort and point a long finger at a table close to the fire.
While Roland cleared the board of assorted bottles and pots, Marak
lit several more candles from a taper, all of them fitted with
special metal shields that would shine the light downward, away
from his sensitive eyes. As the gloom lifted, rows upon rows of
clay vessels and pots that crowded the many shelves along the walls
were revealed. Mysterious powders from Africa sat beside those
brought at great cost from the Orient. Wings of small creatures sat
in bottles neatly marked with Latin script. Next to them were pots
of dried eyeballs and venom from a dozen variety of snakes; in
another jar a tiny orange toad was suspended in some greenish
liquid.

As soon as
Tamberlane laid the girl out on the table, the seneschal adjusted
the light shields and pushed his sleeves above his wrists.

“The arrow,”
he murmured, leaning over the object in question to inspect it more
closely. “You have not disturbed it?”

“No more so
than was necessary to bring her to the castle.”

Marak's pale
fingers rested over the girl’s brow a moment and he ordered Roland
to add several dried pieces of wood to the fire, bringing it to a
blaze again. With his hood pulled even lower over his face to
protect him from the glare, he gently took a knife to the girl’s
tunic, nicking the cloth at her neck first and cutting his way
across her breastbone and down her arm. The threadbare fabric, once
blue, was dark as ink where the blood had begun to dry, still shiny
and wet and red where the jostling had kept the wound leaking. With
the cloth peeled back, Marak could see that the quarrel had gone
straight through the meaty part of her shoulder, just above and to
the side of the right breast.

“She has lost
a deal of blood, my friend. She may lose a deal more if the arrow
has cut through the heart vein.”

“How will you
know if it has?”

The seneschal
glanced up. “If you see a gout of red when I take the bolt out...
you will know. Who is she? Her face is not familiar.”

“Her village
was raided this morning. She was the only one we found alive, and
may be the only one able to tell us why the vill was attacked and
all within its boundaries slaughtered.”

Marak stopped
what he was doing and glanced up. “All?”

“To the last
child and goat.”

"And the
raiders?"

"Three got
away," Roland said. "One with an arrow in his thigh."

The albino’s
eyes were shadowed by the hood, but Tamberlane could sense them
searching his face, then dropping lower to stare at the slash in
his shirtsleeve.

“Outlaws?"

“The leaders
were mercenaries. Brabancons. Not the type who would betray their
secrets too easily.”

“You show a
marked lack of faith in my skills,” Marak said dryly. Turning back
to the maid, and using the veriest tip of his finger, he touched
the arrowhead where it protruded through the front of her tunic,
carefully watching her face for any flicker of reaction. There was
none. Mumbling softly to himself, he fetched a small black kettle
and wandered along the wall of shelves, taking a leaf here, a pinch
of powder there, a few drops of some viscous liquid from a
stoppered bottle, and added them all to the pot. He mixed the
contents with water and hung the pot over the fire, pointing a bony
finger at Roland as he made his way back to the pallet.