Ladyhawke (11 page)

Goliath merely turned from the road, picking his way up the narrow trail that wound to the top of the peak.

Phillipe halted before the abbey’s arching gate, studied its heavy wooden door. He looked up dubiously at the silent stone walls. “Hello! Hello in there!” he called. Sparrows flitted in and out of the ivy, the only sign of life he saw. What if the monk had gone . . . ? “For pity’s sake—” he shouted, “hello!”

“Lower your voice out there, damn you!” someone shouted back. “Do you think I’m deaf?” A wild-haired old man in the brown-and-gray robes of a monk peered owlishly from a parapet of the ruins. The monk’s eyes roved at random across the shadowed landscape, completely ignoring both horse and rider.

“Over here, Father!” Phillipe called. “Imperius—?”

The bloodshot eyes found him at last. The monk gazed down on him blearily. “Curious,” he mumbled, “that’s my name too.”

Phillipe realized with a twinge of dismay that the man was drunk. “I was told to bring you this bird. She’s been wounded.”

“Good shot!” Imperius cried heartily. “Bring her in and we’ll dine together.”

“We can’t eat this bird!” Phillipe shouted, his anger rising.

“We can’t?” Imperius shook his head. “Oh my God, is it Lent already?”

Phillipe took a deep breath. “This is no ordinary hawk, Father,” he said insistently. “She belongs to Etienne Navarre.”

Imperius blinked, stared down at them as if his mind had abruptly cleared. “Mother of God,” he whispered. “Bring her in! Quickly!” He turned away, pulling on the rope that unbarred the door below.

Phillipe dismounted, slowly and with difficulty, holding the hawk steady all the while. He turned, looking up at the stallion. “Wait here,” he said.

The stallion whinnied suddenly, swung around, and galloped away down the hill.

“Tell him we got here!” Phillipe yelled. “Tell him I did
my
part!”

“Hurry up, you cretin!” Imperius called. “Get her up here!”

Phillipe turned back and hurried through the gate. Striding up through the inner courtyard, he saw a drawbridge lying open before the abbey’s main entrance. Imperius stood on the bridge waiting impatiently for him.

As he started across the bridge, Imperius reached out, grabbing his arm.
“Careful,
you lummox!”

Phillipe looked down at the wide planks, seeing nothing abnormal, as Imperius pulled him over to the left side of the bridge.

“Walk on
this
side,” Imperius insisted.

Phillipe shrugged and obeyed, following him into the abbey.

Imperius led him through dim, drafty corridors and empty cells, up steps worn into hollows by countless feet. Phillipe wondered fleetingly why anyone, even a monk, would choose to live in this dismal ruin all alone.

At last they reached a small room behind a massive, decaying wooden door. Yellow candlelight showed him a plain, solid table and chairs, books and writing implements, a cot covered by sheepskins—Imperius’s own quarters, he guessed.

“Over there on the cot . . . easy . . .” Imperius directed.

Phillipe laid the bird on the bed with careful hands.

“Leave us alone,” Imperius snapped.

“But . . .” Phillipe protested, remembering Navarre’s threat with sudden vividness.

“Get out!”

Phillipe backed reluctantly toward the doorway and went out. The door slammed behind him, and he heard the sound of a lock clicking shut. He sat down on the stone floor of the hallway and pulled his dagger out of his boot. With its tip, he began to work at the locks on his manacles. Behind the door, he heard Imperius say softly, “Don’t be frightened. Navarre was right—I can help you . . . But we must wait.”

The monk came out of the room again and glanced down at Phillipe.

“Is there anything I can do to help?” Phillipe asked.

“No, boy,” the monk said brusquely. He shut the door and pointedly locked it from the outside before he hurried away down the hall. Phillipe went on working at his shackles.

Out in the monastery’s weed-grown garden, Imperius worked by the light of a bonfire, gathering herbs. His mind was perfectly clear now; he moved with confidence among the plants, hurriedly clipping the perfect leaves, in the precise amounts he needed. As he worked he looked out again and again across the valley, looking westward, his face furrowing with concern. He watched the final flash of day send streaks of ruddy afterglow lancing up between the clouds. The sun had set. Placing the last of the herbs into a small stone mortar, he started back up the hill toward the abbey.

The second shackle dropped from Phillipe’s wrist and clattered to the floor. He grinned with the satisfied pride of a skilled professional and shook out his hands. Climbing to his feet, he went back to the door of Imperius’s cubicle. He fingered the heavy lock thoughtfully, then slipped his dagger point into its keyhole and probed. In a matter of seconds the ancient mechanism clicked open.

Phillipe opened the door quietly and entered the room. And stopped, staring in disbelief.

There was no longer a hawk on Imperius’s cot. Instead, the fair woman who had haunted his nights lay there, covered with a fur robe, her arms spread in imitation of the hawk’s wings. The crossbow bolt protruded from her shoulder.

Her eyes flickered open at the sound of his footsteps. She lifted her head to look at him, her eyes filled with agony. She tried to raise herself up. “Navarre! . . . Where is he? Is he . . .”

“He’ll be fine, my lady!” Phillipe said hastily, holding up his hands. “There was a terrible battle with the Bishop’s guards. Navarre fought like a lion. The hawk was . . .” He broke off, as his leaping thoughts suddenly caught up with the truth. He shook his head. “But . . . you know that, don’t you?” he whispered.

The woman lay back. “Yes,” she murmured, after a long moment.

Phillipe moved timidly to stand beside the cot. He looked down at her, astonished again at the heartbreaking beauty of her face. “Are you flesh?” he asked slowly. “Or are you spirit?”

Her fever-bright eyes fell away from him, staring at nothing. “I . . . am sorrow.”

The door opened behind him. Imperius entered the room and stopped, aghast. “How did you . . . ?” He crossed the room, seizing Phillipe by the arm. “Get out, damn you! And stay out this time!” The monk shoved him out the door and slammed it behind him.

Phillipe stood still in the hall for a moment, then suddenly leaned back against the door’s solid support, breathless and weak as the reaction to what he had just seen finally hit him. From inside the room he heard Imperius’s voice again, like a prayer: “Holy Father—after all that’s happened, You couldn’t possibly have brought her here to die.” Phillipe pushed himself away from the door and went hurriedly down the corridor, in desperate need of some fresh air.

He found his way out into the garden, stood studying the overgrown field and the makeshift outbuildings of the abbey yard in the bonfire’s flickering light. A mule and some goats drowsed in a pen; chickens muttered and pecked after grubs. On a scarred weather-gray tabletop he saw a curious assortment of apples and oranges arranged in rings, as if the monk had been playing some sort of game. He wandered down the hill to the table and sat on a bench, his fingers rapping on the wood, studying the fruit arrangements with half his mind . . . He supposed living alone in a ruin didn’t provide many interesting pastimes. He glanced up again at the looming skeleton of stone high on the hill above him; searched out the abbey’s single lighted room with restless eyes. A woman’s anguished moan carried faintly to his ears. Phillipe turned back to the table. He picked up an apple and bit into it nervously.

Imperius stood at the table in his room, mashing the herbs with a pestle, his eyes never leaving the woman’s face. Her own eyes were closed, and her arms shone with perspiration. She stirred and moaned again, drifting into a fevered dream. Imperius set down the pestle to lay a cool, wet cloth across her burning forehead. He returned to his work, held a candle beneath the mortar’s bowl to warm the poultice he had made. Somewhere in the night beyond the abbey walls a wolf howled mournfully; the woman’s body twitched beneath the coverings. Imperius glanced up, set the steaming poultice on the table. Turning back to the woman’s side, he packed the poultice around the wound as gently as he could. The woman opened her eyes, gazing up at him as he reached for the arrow with a reluctant hand.

In the garden, Phillipe took another bite from the apple, blinking tensely as he stared out into the darkness.

Imperius’s hand closed over the arrow and pulled it free. The woman screamed piercingly.

Phillipe jerked around, looking up; the apple fell from his nerveless fingers.

In Aquila Castle, His Grace the Bishop lunged upright in his canopied bed, wracked with terrifying pain. He stared wildly into the shaft of blinding illumination that spotlighted him in his private darkness; he looked down at himself in horror, and then in disbelief, as he found no wound, no blood, no assassin’s dagger. The coils of nightmare fell away from him, and he realized that it had been no more than a dream . . . this time. He clutched the silken sheets and embroidered comforters, gasping for breath. Slowly his hands loosened; he wiped perspiration from his face as his eyes adjusted to the light. He was in his own bed, safe within the castle walls . . . and a frightened young acolyte stood in the hallway outside his open door.

“I’m . . . sorry, Your Grace,” the young monk said. “You insisted on being told when he arrived . . .” He scurried away.

His place was taken by a vision out of hell. A huge, brutal figure filled the doorway, blocking the light. The lines of a scar marred his cheek above his scraggly black beard. His heavy fur cloak was of wolf pelts. A necklace of wolves’ teeth circled his throat. He gazed at the Bishop with dark eyes far crueler than any animal’s.

“Cezar,” the Bishop said, and smiled.

C H A P T E R
Ten

T
he ruined abbey lay peacefully in the moonlight, as it had for centuries. The solitary black wolf limped to the line of a nearby ridge and stood gazing up at it from among the trees. Dried blood matted the thick ebony fur of the wolf’s shoulder and hind leg. The bitter wind swirled around him as he settled down wearily, to begin a vigil whose reason he could not even comprehend. He lifted his head and howled his anguish at the waning moon.

Safe within the abbey’s walls, Phillipe sat on a crumbling terrace step beside the bonfire, watching as Imperius poured a huge tumbler of wine with unsteady hands. The old monk glanced up at the darkness apprehensively as the wolf howled. Phillipe studied him through the dancing flames, suddenly very sure that the monk was not simply afraid of wolves. “It’s him, isn’t it?” he asked softly.
Navarre.
The monk didn’t answer. “The wolf,” he said again. “Somehow . . . it’s him.” Knowing that, the sound of howling no longer frightened him.

Imperius filled a second tumbler with wine, not even bothering to look at him. “Here. Get drunk. You’ll forget.”

Phillipe shook his head, leaning back against the stone step behind him. “An hour ago you were drunk. And you remembered.”

Imperius looked up at him. Phillipe’s eyes held the monk’s insistently. He had told Imperius his own part in this strange dance of fate, more or less completely. And by bringing the hawk here, he had earned the right to know the greater pattern. He waited, his stare unyielding. Imperius slumped where he stood, defeated. Picking up his own drink, he crossed to the fire, sat down with a sigh of resignation. Phillipe pulled his feet up onto the wall, waiting.

The old monk glanced toward the lighted window in the abbey. “Her name is Isabeau of Anjou,” he said finally. “Her father, the Comte d’Anjou, was an intemperate fellow who died slaughtering infidels at Antioch. She came to a cousin, I think it was, in Aquila.” He was silent again for a moment, looking into the past. A wistful smile pulled at the corners of his mouth. “I’ll never forget the day I saw her. It was like looking at . . . at . . .”

Phillipe shut his eyes, remembering. “The . . . face of love.” He smiled, too.

Imperius looked back at him, and his own smile widened sympathetically. “You too, little thief? Well, I suppose we were all in love with her in different ways. His . . .” the monk’s throat seemed to constrict, “Grace could think of nothing else.”

Phillipe’s eyes widened. “The . . . Bishop . . . loved her?” he said incredulously.

Imperius nodded, his hands clutching the tankard’s handle in a painful grip. His bleary eyes turned suddenly bitter. “As nearly as that evil man could come to the emotion of love. He was wild in his passion. A man possessed.”

Phillipe thought about what he knew of the Bishop—a holy man who had never known the meaning of true holiness, who reveled in luxury and sin while he ground the people he had sworn before God to serve under his heel. He taxed them until they starved, then hanged them for stealing food. He was a man with no soul at all; but even he had recognized the beauty of Isabeau’s spirit, and become obsessed by her . . . knowing that she was all the things he would never be.

“Isabeau shrank from his attentions,” Imperius went on morosely. “She sent back his letters unopened, his poems unread. Her heart had been lost to the Captain of the Guard.”

Realization ran through Phillipe like a shock. “Etienne Navarre,” he murmured.
Navarre standing alone with a faded letter in his hands and tears in his eyes . . . Navarre with the wounded hawk.
“The madman . . .” Suddenly he did not seem as mad by half.

“To Isabeau—a fine man, a worthy man,” Imperius said sadly. “Their love was stronger than anything which could stand in its way. Until . . .” Imperius broke off again, lifted the tankard and drank as if it were bottomless, or he wished it were.

“Until . . . ?” Phillipe asked impatiently.

“They were betrayed,” Imperius muttered. “A . . . foolish priest heard their confessions, and in that priest’s subsequent drunken confession to his superior, he . . . felt a holy obligation to unburden himself. The Bishop had refused to let them marry. He had commanded Navarre never to see her again. But they continued to meet in secret. The priest . . .” Imperius broke off again, forced himself to go on, “committed a mortal sin, by revealing their mutual vows of love to the Bishop.”