Behold the Dawn (12 page)

The courser, a muscled gray, snorted through distended nostrils, but he could not veer fast enough to escape Annan’s hand on the tie-line.

“Master Knight!”

At her cry, he spun to see the approach of the horsemen, dark against the ruddy sky. With one stroke of the saber, he severed the tie line and vaulted into the saddle, narrowly clearing the high cantle.

The Moslems swept through the camp, shouting their curses of vengeance, and Mairead turned to look up at Annan, eyes dark with the sudden horror that he was abandoning her already.

He shifted sword and reins all into one hand, fighting to keep the snorting courser from charging away. He reached out with his left hand and caught the countess’s outstretched arm. His wounded shoulder burned, and the tightness of the bandage nearly forestalled the necessary strength to swing her onto the
pillion
behind him.

She landed with a soft thump and let go of his wrist. Her arms came around his waist, her face against his shoulders. “
Go.
”

He laid his heels to the gray courser’s sides, and the horse lunged forward, dark mane unfurling against his rein hand. But this was a Western horse, bred for muscle and endurance. He had not the dexterity and fleetness of the Mohammedan war mares.

Behind them, the tattoo of hoofbeats grew louder yet, and Annan dared a look over his shoulder, past Mairead’s blowing hair. Only paces separated them from two infidel pursuers.

He spurred the courser again. The horse was fresh and responded with another lengthening of stride. But Annan knew they would never outpace their followers. He could only be thankful that these infidels were not that brand of Moslem archer famed for their accuracy on horseback, else the countess’s exposed back would already have become an easy target.

Not that it mattered. Once they drew near enough, the infidels would cut them apart at their leisure anyway.

He could not run. So he must fight.

Transferring the reins to his left hand, the sword to his right, he choked his eager horse to a halt and spun him around.

Mairead gasped and raised her face to look over his shoulder. “What are you doing?”

“Get off.”

“What—”

“
Get off
.”

With a breath, half of fear, half of resolve, she released her hold on his waist and slid to the ground.

Annan turned back to the Moslems and tightened his fingers round the strange grip of the infidel saber. Grinning savagely, he leapt forward to meet them. Caught off guard by the swiftness of his charge, they reined back momentarily. That was all the time he needed.

Leaning to the right as he neared the first, he dropped the reins and reached across his courser’s neck to seize the Moslem’s sword arm. The infidel blade hissed past him, tearing through the side of his loose tunic. He could feel its threatening chill against his skin as he dragged the infidel to meet him and drove his saber to its hilt in the war mare’s milk-white chest.

The horse staggered and toppled, tearing the saber from his grip, leaving its rider hanging across Annan’s saddlebow, sword arm still anchored in Annan’s right hand.

With his free hand, the Moslem scrabbled for Annan’s eyes. Annan pulled him closer still and twice hammered his elbow into a bare temple. The infidel’s eyes lolled in his sockets, his body went limp, and Annan cast him aside, pausing only long enough to catch the man’s saber from his limp fingers.

With a wordless yell, the second pursuer was on him, arm raised high above his head, ready to strike. Annan spun the courser and swung hard enough to catch the blade on his own and nearly knock the infidel from his horse. That brief moment as the enemy scrambled to regain his balance was the only moment Annan needed to switch the sword to his right hand and pick up his reins. Before the Moslem could look back up to meet his gaze, Annan plunged the blade beneath his armpit.

Muscles still humming with the tension of battle, he reined his dancing courser away and urged him into a trot. They passed the war mare, writhing in the dune where she had fallen alongside her unconscious master.

Lady Mairead rose to her feet. Deep lines creased her forehead, the angle of her narrow jaw tight. Her hand trembled as it thrust back her hair.

He stopped the courser next to her and held out a hand. Silently, she released her hair to the wind and slipped her fingers into his palm. He looked her in the eyes just once before pulling her up behind him, but it was a long enough look to know they held a new fear.

A fear of him?

As she took hold of his waist with one arm, he dismissed it. It mattered not what she thought of him. Their journey would encompass a few months at most. He would not harm her during that time; he would value her as the widow of perhaps the only man who had still called him friend.

Before setting his face toward freedom, he turned the courser around to check the distant camp. The sounds of death were only echoing wails now, and none rode in pursuit of the fugitives. He could see nothing—only desolation and the blowing robes of a man who stood at the edge of the camp, in the place where the courser had been tethered.

Annan laid the rein against the horse’s neck, his heel against its side, and the courser sprang into a canter once more, carrying them far away from Acre, its desecration, and its destruction.

Brother Warin rode bareheaded beneath the heat of the summer sun, his tabard snapping in the wind that blasted across Saladin’s corpse-strewn prison camp. From his position behind Bishop Roderic and Lord Hugh, he watched as the Christian leaders surveyed the remnants of the sultan’s swift retribution.

All echelons of Christendom were screaming that Saladin’s act was base treachery, that Richard had had every right to slaughter his prisoners.

And Warin did not argue. They were infidels; they had deserved to die. But his stomach, even hardened as it was by countless battles, had roiled as he had watched the Moslem prisoners fall. Men, women, children—all had died, not because of their ignoble religion, but because a Christian king refused to keep his word.

To that toll of death must now be added some 2,500 Christians. Warin blamed Richard and his counselors for those deaths more than he would ever blame Saladin.

Bishop Roderic’s dainty bay palfrey stepped away from the other knights to allow its rider a better glimpse at some point of interest amid the bloated bodies.

Warin compressed his sunburned lips. The bishop’s anger over the assassin Marcus Annan’s disappearance had not abated. Saints help him and Hugh if they could not find the man ere they reached Jerusalem.

Warin had seen the raw fear in Roderic’s eyes. It would not surprise him if the bishop abandoned the Crusade for the safety of some fortified European city. Crusades were all fine and well, but the holy cause paled next to fear for one’s own life.

Before they had departed Acre, Warin had tried in vain to contact the messenger Veritas, in hopes that he would have information about Annan. The man had seemed omniscient in the past, with his predictions of the Baptist’s whereabouts and his suggestions of subterfuge. But for the time being, that source remained silent.

He sighed and rolled his shoulders, the movement trickling a bead of sweat past his shoulder blade. His honor, and possibly even his life, depended on his finding Annan. And, before God, those were two things he had no intention of losing.

Something warm rested on his leg, and he glanced down at a cowled monk who stumbled along at his stirrup, his scarred face upturned, his eyes flashing like a hawk’s in the sunlight.

Warin’s brows came together in a frown. Something very disconcerting shone in that gaze. “What is it, Brother?”

“You think to find the assassin Marcus Annan among the dead?”

Warin’s throat constricted. “What?”

“Aye, I know of him,” the monk said. “I know that your master seeks him, and that is why I am telling you your assassin is not dead.”

“How do you know this?” Warin leaned over and gripped the man’s shoulder. “Tell me, how do you know?” Mayhap Roderic had been right all along, mayhap Annan had agreed to the wage of a murderer only to pass his knowledge on.

“I saw him escape.” The monk’s glance shifted just enough to include Hugh riding a length ahead. “With a woman. Tell your master.”

And then he slipped out from under Warin’s hand and melted back into the crowd.

“You there! Monk! Come back here!” Warin reined his horse around, but the crowd pushed him onward.

He craned his neck to search the jostling, faceless masses that surrounded him. But the monk was gone, taking with him any further secrets to which he laid claim. Warin whirled his horse back into line, his spurs pricking its sides, urging it forward, apace with the bishop’s palfrey.

How this strange monk knew these things, he could not tell. But no matter the messenger by whom it had come, it was an answer to prayer. He would tell Roderic of this discovery, and Roderic would send him and Hugh in search of this wayward assassin.

And Marcus Annan would be once more drawn into the battle, whether he chose to be or not.

Chapter VIII

ALL DAY MAIREAD and the tourneyer Marcus Annan had ridden in silence, the last words to have passed between them being his terse order for her to dismount that morning. She had obeyed him numbly, pushing away from his body and landing in the sand, one hand outstretched to catch her balance. He had whirled the charger around and ridden away from her without a backward glance, and her heart had stopped beating.

Every fiber in her body shouted that this man—this tacit, unyielding warrior whose blood she had staunched, whose lips she had moistened with red drops of vinegary wine, whose life she had saved—had abandoned her. He had left her to her fate, there in the desert, with the screams gusting on the morning breeze and searing her ears. He had sacrificed whatever honor Lord William had thought him capable of possessing.

No doubt had clouded the blinding light of her certainty that there she would stay and die, while he made his way westward, alone, to collect the dowry she had promised him.

But he had not left her.

He had battled their infidel pursuers with a skill that spoke too well of his occupation, and then, instead of laying his heels to the gray courser’s dappled sides and galloping far away, he had returned to her and, without a word, held out his broad callused hand.

Now, as they rode together, the shadows of purple dusk settling all around them and the Orontes River whispering its secrets somewhere to their left, she almost wished she hadn’t taken the hand he had offered and allowed him to swing her onto the pillion behind him.

She was afraid of him, this huge man with his cold eyes and his impenetrable strength. She had not feared him when he had lain asleep beneath her ministering hands. And she had not feared him when first he woke and spoke to her, his voice deep and hoarse from his long unconsciousness.

But when he had come to her after Lord William’s death—when first she knew that here was the man who now held her life and her soul in his hands—she had seen the fierceness in his eyes. And she had feared him, her heart clenching in her breast, her skin tightening over her bones.

As the edge of the moon punctured the darkness of the eastern skyline, he at last drew their tired mount to a halt. “We’ll pass the night here.”

She nodded, though he couldn’t see it, and tried to stop the shudder that sliced through her body despite the heavy cloak she had tugged once more around her shoulders.
Oh, William! My lord— why did you leave me!
And why
this
man, this tourneyer—why leave her to his care? The night, dark and endless, loomed before her, and the cold ache of fear rooted itself behind her breastbone.

Annan sat straight in the saddle, his weariness visible only in his uninjured arm braced against the saddlebow. He was surveying the landscape, looking, listening. Though they had seen no one since he had killed the two Turks outside the prison camp, she had felt his caution radiating off his tense shoulders all day.

But there was no one here for him to see now. Only a man, a woman, and a gray courser.

An old familiar fear clawed at her innards, twisting so hard her stomach lanced with pain. Without waiting for his permission, she took hold of the cantle and slid down the horse’s sweat-roughened hindquarters. When the tips of her bare toes touched the ground, she dropped.

He glanced at her. But before he could speak, she turned away and started toward the bank of the river. Her throat burned with thirst, but she would not risk disease by drinking the water until she had no choice. She would have to wait for him to untie the wineskin the Baptist had hung across the saddlebow.

At the Orontes’ edge, she knelt in the damp pebbly sand and played her fingers across the brown surface of the water. Behind her, Annan dismounted with a painful exhale. They had gotten off the courser’s back only four times to give the animal a chance to rest, and no doubt the man ached as much as did she.

She bit her lower lip. Perhaps that alone would be enough to keep him away from her this night… She closed her eyes. She was his wife now; she had spoken the vows. In the sight of God and man, he could do what he would with her.

Her body tremored, and she clamped her eyes shut, willing herself to forget the night that had birthed all these fears and created the small, dark mound of earth she had been forced to leave behind somewhere in northern Italy.

Something smashed onto the ground behind her, and her heart bounced into her ribs. She turned just enough to see that it had been the saddle landing in the sand where Annan had dropped it. He rubbed the courser’s sweaty back with his sleeve, his eyes on the horse’s, the heel of his palm digging into the animal’s muscles.

She might indeed be his wife, and all of Christendom might see nothing painful or wrong in her hasty taking of his name, but that did not mean she would surrender herself to him. She would resist, just as she had almost a year before. And this time, she would fight until she died.