Blaze of Silver (19 page)

“Did you see his body?” Ellie felt her voice was very far away.

“I didn't need to.”

“Then maybe—” Ellie tried to say more but Hosanna suddenly threw up his head and they heard the sound of voices. At once, Will put his fingers to his lips and pulled Ellie and the horses deeper into the trees. “Kamil,” Elli murmured, but Will shook his head. One voice was familiar. It was not Kamil's.

Less than a minute later Amal appeared, together with a couple of soldiers looking this way and that. Now Ellie clutched at Will and fought not to scream for in Amal's belt, clearly visible, was Kamil's triangular knife. Ellie could not take her eyes off it. The men drew to a halt and the two soldiers began to talk both at once.

At first Will too was mesmerized by Kamil's knife, but soon something quite different caught his attention. It was quite a time before he realized what it was. The men were not speaking Arabic as he expected but were still speaking German. It was odd since there was no need to pretend anymore. He leaned cautiously forward, straining his ears to make sure he was not mistaken. No. They were definitely speaking German and
they were speaking it as if it was their native language. He drew back, wanting to whisper to Ellie, to see what she made of it, but before he could do anything Shihab stirred. She resented standing still and restlessly swished her tail. At once Will put a hand on her nose, thinking to warn her, but she shook him off and, as if to spite him, raised her head to grab a few dead leaves from an overhanging branch. The branch pinged down and immediately the soldiers' eyes sharpened. Dismounting, and with Amal in the vanguard, they inched forward. Shihab sneezed.

“You stupid, stupid horse!” Will was frantic. There was only one thing to do. He smacked her rump and sent her straight out so that she emerged from the thicket like an apparition. Amal yelped and caught her reins as they swung past. The men, chattering noisily, gathered around her, pointing to her back. Where was her saddle? Amal seemed as confused as they were but instead of ordering a search of the clearing began to explain, occasionally punctuating his narrative with actions that would have been comic had not their meaning been so appalling. Though Will, peeping through the undergrowth, could understand very few words, the gist of the old spy's tale was only too clear. He seemed to be telling how Kamil, struck by several arrows, had fallen and how his throat had been cut with his own knife and then how Shihab, frightened by the crash of the body, had run away. The girth must have come undone, Amal said, when Kamil's corpse was dragging through the water. To illustrate his story, Amal drew out Kamil's knife, brandished it about, inspected it and, when the story was over, shook his head a little as if genuinely
sorry. That shake of the head, so neat, so economical, was more chilling to Will than any description. It smacked of the truth.

The men soon lost interest in hanging about and after a few more words Amal, with unexpected spring, pulled his skeletal frame onto Shihab's back. Will expected all the men to ride off together but they did not. Instead, once again Amal drew out Kamil's knife. Once again he gave that little shake of his head, only this time the name he mentioned was not Kamil's, but Richard's. The men nodded. This was something that had clearly been spoken about before. There was a hurried farewell and without any more ado, Amal clapped his heels into Shihab's sides. For one breathless moment, Will thought the mare was going to turn around and give them away, but although she scowled in her habitual complaint, she obeyed her rider. The soldiers waited until she had vanished, then whipped up their own horses and made their way back to the sea.

At once he was pushing Ellie toward Sacramenta. “We've got to get to the king,” he said, “we've got to get to Speyer before Amal. He's going to kill Richard. I know it.”

But Ellie could not think about anything except Kamil. She clung to Will, the pain in her arm temporarily forgotten. “What did they do to him?” Horror gouged cavities into her face.

Will avoided her eyes. “We've got to get to Speyer before Amal,” he kept repeating. “He is going to use Kamil's knife to kill the king.” But Ellie would not get up. She beat one fist into the soil and groaned like an animal. At first Will felt helpless, then he could bear it
no more. His voice rose as he seized Ellie and shook her, forcing her to listen to him. “Jesus help us! Can't you see what's going on? The Old Man's revenge isn't finished yet. Not that he's going to chase us. Of course not! He's not interested in us and never has been. But he's not yet finished with Kamil. Kamil's body may be dead—I can hardly think Amal would have dared to leave him alive—but the Old Man now wants to destroy his reputation. Amal will kill Richard with that triangular knife and make sure to leave it behind. Anybody who knew Kamil will identify it at once. Kamil will then be both thief and murderer and the Old Man will claim that he was an Assassin all along. It's diabolical.” He set Ellie down and quickly began to prepare the horses for mounting. “We've got to ride now, Ellie, not for ourselves but for Richard and Kamil. Can you do it?” He did not know what would happen if she could not or would not.

But Ellie was already hauling herself on. Her arm throbbed unmercifully yet she was glad of the physical pain. Perhaps if, when they had emerged at the top of the cliff, she had not wasted time, Kamil would not have been caught. He may have done wrong but he did not deserve to die like a dog. Perhaps if she had condemned a little less and understood a little more, as Will had, she would not be seeing, in her mind's eye, Kamil's body lying untended for the vultures to pick at.

Will did not try to comfort Ellie. He simply urged Hosanna into a gallop and took some comfort of his own from the sound of Sacramenta's hooves behind. He too mourned for Kamil with his whole heart, his old jealousy forgotten. Unlike Ellie's, however, his mourning
was not full of regrets, it was full of promises. Whatever the cost to himself, he vowed to avenge the man he still thought of as his friend. He knew the vow would involve sacrifices but he knew too that he could not live with himself unless the sacrifices were made. God would surely ensure that such sacrifices were not impossible to bear. He had to believe that.

A mile ahead, Amal sat on Shihab, a shrunken old man with too much on his conscience. But he had the knife, he had his orders, and there was nothing else to do except carry them out.

Returning to his ship, the Old Man of the Mountain sat on his golden cushions and mused. His revenge on Kamil may have suffered a glitch, but the glitch had turned out to be nothing for Amal had assured him that the boy was dead and now only the final destruction of his reputation remained. The Old Man had, on the whole, recovered his temper, cheering himself with the thought that by the time Amal had finished, Kamil's name would be so blackened that when history came to be written, nobody would have a good word to say about him. That was just the kind of revenge the Old Man liked—the kind that lasted. His musings were not, at this moment, concerned with Kamil. Instead he was wondering whether he should or should not go after William de Granville, Earl of Ravensgarth, to punish him and the girl for their insolence. He did not believe that even if Will got to Richard he could prevent the king's assassination. A knight was no match for an Assassin. Yet it went quite against the grain for an Assassin to allow any slight, even the smallest, to go unpunished. So the Old Man could not decide. Will and
Ellie were not really his enemies and, now that Kamil was no longer under their roof, they had nothing that he wanted. But they had not been polite. He began to crack walnuts, then changed his mind and clapped his hands to send, as usual, for oranges. A flunky scurried up from below with a bowlful. The Old Man chose three and began to toss them. Up, up, up they went but when he caught them in his round white hands they dissolved, one after the other, into a sticky mass of pulp and discolored juice. They had gone moldy on the journey. The Old Man let out a piercing shriek and drummed his small heels on the deck. The whole ship rocked with consternation. Men stopped their ears. When the Old Man shrieked, they knew he would not desist until he had made somebody else shriek louder.

The orange-bringer trembled the most. He ran for a bowl of warm water but, in his terror, spilled some of the water and soaked the Old Man's towel. Desperate, he shook out his hair and offered it instead, crouching low and trying not to moan as he felt those sharp fingers curling, twisting, and pulling. It took him some time to realize that the drumming was less insistent and even longer to realize that the hair tugging had, in fact, ceased and the Old Man's shriek had faded into a hum. Eventually, he felt two fingers lift up his chin. “Hair,” said the Old Man dreamily, his face like that of a fat round robin. “Do you know, my good man, I suddenly have a fancy for hair.”

The orange-bringer gave praise to Allah. He was only going to lose his hair! He made cutting signals but the Old Man batted him aside. “No, you clumsy idiot, not your hair,” he said, “but that girl's. That's what I
want. I want you to go ashore and follow William de Granville and his little friend. You must find them and when the girl is asleep you must cut off her hair as close to her scalp as possible and bring it to me. They must not see you. They must suspect nothing. When they awake, it must be as if the devil has visited them. That's the way to punish them! For ever after, my shadow will hang over them, day and night. If they see you neither come nor go, they will never sleep easy in their beds again.”

The Old Man was so pleased with this plan that he patted the orange-bringer's head, carefully wiping into it the last of the pulp. “Go now,” he said, “and don't return here until you can lay the girl's plait at my feet. You have some time. Storms are predicted. We shall wait until they pass before sailing home.” The orange-bringer began to crawl away. The Old Man stared at the horizon, then suddenly called him back. Now he was showing his teeth and the orange-bringer's heart sank. “I've thought of something to make your task even more amusing,” the Old Man said. “At the same time as stealing the girl's plait, steal that red horse's tail. I have a fancy to use it as a fly whisk.” The orange-bringer breathed again and ventured to give the Old Man an oily grin. “It's a pity Will de Granville is cleanshaven,” he said, and when the Old Man jokily wagged his finger at him, the orange-bringer's spirits soared and he ventured to stand up straight.

As soon as the Old Man heard the splash of the row-boat over the side, he began to tap his fingers. He had held off inspecting the ransom silver, saving it for a treat. Now, he felt, he deserved such a treat. His fingers
stopped tapping and began to itch. The anticipation was gloriously unsettling. When the itch moved along his fingers, up his arms, down his body, and even into his toes, the Old Man rose in a surprisingly graceful movement. Half an hour later, he was sitting in a sealed cabin that stretched half the length of the ship. The darkness was absolute, pushed aside only directly over the wagons by huge round lamps that swung slowly back and forth with the wash of the sea. The ransom wagons, painstakingly emptied, then floated on rafts to the galley before being hoisted aboard and refilled, were open and the Old Man was entirely alone. He climbed up onto the first, lowered himself into it, and lay down. The bed of stolen Christian silver felt better than the best goose-feather mattress. He buried his arms up to the elbow and his legs up to the knee. He trickled the coins over his palms and even juggled with a few silver artifacts, enjoying the dull clink as the precious objects dropped back into the great pile. He stood up and dropped handfuls of treasure over his head. Then he climbed onto the side and leaped lightly over, now landing in the wagon containing the Hartslove contribution. This the Old Man inspected with added interest because it was full of beautiful things, and when he came across the ruby brooch that Marissa had so reluctantly given, he took it carefully between his thumb and first finger. The red horse's head glowed gently as the Old Man held it this way and that. He read the inscription with Hosanna's name and inspected the ornament again. This was a fine piece. He liked it. He would wear it himself. Deftly, he undid the catch and pinned it to his tunic. Digging deep, he found a circlet of gold given
by an Anglo-Norman duke, carefully crowned himself, and began, in his delight, to dance. His shadow on the wall danced with him even though it wavered slightly. A squall was blowing in from the east. When the Old Man had finished dancing, he locked the wagons up again and went back to his golden cushions to wait for the squall to pass.

Once Marissa had fled from the convent, it had not taken her long to decide that she did not like her pony and also that in her determination to follow Hal and Elric to Richard she would not bother with any niceties of riding. Using her heels and a variety of threats, she kept the pony scrambling along, hating its rider but unable to get rid of her. Marissa's woolen habit was both a drag and a boon: a drag because when it got wet, which it did almost at once, it weighed her down, but a boon because when they saw it, nobody accosted her.

And Marissa spoke to nobody. When she wanted food, she held out her hands like a pilgrim beggar, and when she wanted shelter, she presented herself at farms and cottages, where her habit was treated with reverence rather than disdain. She did not need to ask for directions since she knew that Speyer was on the Rhine. If she just followed the river, she would surely get there in the end. This was more difficult than it looked, for though the river was bigger than any Marissa had ever seen in England, sometimes she had to leave it when the road veered away or when it had collapsed and become impassable. When she found the river again, she was nervous lest she had mistaken it and it was another waterway leading elsewhere. All the time she was not worrying
about the route, she rehearsed what she would say to Richard when she found him. This was all she could do for Will now and afterward, when Richard fully understood that Will was a hero beyond criticism, then she would begin her search for Hosanna, a search that would not finish until she either found him or dropped dead. She dwelled only briefly on Ellie and even more briefly on Kamil. Amal never entered her head at all.