Standard of Honor (60 page)

The hunting party would ride initially only as far as the entrance to the stretch of forest that was fenced and reserved for Isaac's personal use, a distance of something less than three miles. Beyond that point they might either ride or walk, depending upon conditions and the prey available for hunting, which could range from small game like hares and roe deer to larger deer, wild boar, and even bear. André walked to where Sylvester, the master huntsman, stood alone making his final preparatory assessments, running his eyes over the entire party, one at a time and missing no single detail of the checklist that he carried engraved upon his memory after many years of supervising parties like this one.

“Ready?” André asked, and the huntsman nodded, feeling no need to speak. André nodded back. “So be it. Let's move them out. Will it rain heavily, think you?”

Sylvester started walking towards the wide stable doorway, and André went with him, thinking that the man's reputation for being taciturn was well deserved, but when they reached the open doorway Sylvester braced one hand against the wall on one side and leaned forward, looking up at the lead-gray skies.

“Trouble with clouds like this,” he said in a low voice, “is that you can't always tell what they're going to do. It's solid cover, so there's not much chance of the sun breaking through … not before noon, at least. But it's high, too, so there's no danger of getting rained on within the hour, either. It will all depend on what the wind gods do. If they decide to blow the right way, we could hunt all afternoon in sunshine. If they blow the other way, we could all drown trying to reach home again.” He glanced at André. “Your guess is as good as mine. But it's your hunt.”

André grunted, glancing back over his shoulder to make sure no one had come up behind them to listen to what they were saying. “Well, there was never any option of not going. The King was adamant about wanting the ladies out from beneath his feet today, so let's get them started.”

“Master St. Clair, do you intend to cancel our outing today?” The voice was Joanna's and it rang out clearly from the depths of the stables, cool and imperious. André turned smoothly, forcing himself to smile widely as he did so.

“No, my lady, I was merely checking the weather with Master Sylvester. We are all ready, and the weather is in God's hands as it should be, so mount up, if you please, and let's be about it.” Moments later they clattered out onto the cobbled surface of the road leading to the city gates, the main party of Joanna, Berengaria, and their two huntsmen, accompanied by André and Sylvester. Behind them, and present more for
the sake of protocol and appearances than for any need of protection, rode their military escort, a twelve-man squad of armored pikemen led by a sergeant and a standard-bearer carrying Richard's personal lion rampant banner. And following those, bringing up the rear, came the two wagons with their attendant crews of butchers and laborers. André's eyes darted about incessantly, searching for signs of military activity as they moved along from the stables towards the gates, but although he saw soldiers busying themselves here and there, he sensed none of the anticipation that would indicate large-scale preparations for war or even for battle, and he quickly decided that if any major developments were in the offing, they would not take place until later in the day. He stopped watching for alarums and turned his attention to the business in hand.

By mid-morning the hunt was well under way, and André had been impressed by the hunting prowess of both women. While stalking the woods mere minutes after starting the hunt and gliding slowly and silently through the misty, dew-wet stillness of a coppice of trees, Joanna had suddenly frozen, waving her companions to silence with a flick of her wrist. André, crouched behind her on her right, had turned his head gently to look at Sylvester, who had frozen in mid-step and was now looking at him, the expression on his face showing clearly that he had no idea what Joanna had sensed or found. But almost in that same instant, and in utter silence, a magnificent stag had surged to its feet from the low clump of bushes in which it had been browsing and
stood listening, its head cocked towards the north, away from the hunters, and its body poised for flight. They were slightly behind and to one side of the animal, fewer than forty paces separating it from Joanna in the lead. André began to hear the beat of his own heart as he fought to keep still, and then he felt a tickle in his nostril, the earliest beginnings of an urge to sneeze.

Joanna, he now realized, had been advancing with an arrow nocked into the bow in her left hand, holding the shaft in place with her index finger, and now, with infinite slowness and patience, she began to raise the bow to the firing position. It seemed to take forever, and the stag stood where he was, looking away from her in three-quarters profile, his nose raised, sniffing at the air for anything resembling danger. André glanced at Sylvester again and noticed that the huntsman was frowning slightly and looking downward, towards Joanna's feet. He swiveled his own eyes to see what the other man was looking at and realized that Joanna, too, had stopped in mid-step. She had the bow up by now, but she was off balance, her right foot where her left should be, so that she could exert no pull on the bowstring. But even as he realized that she could not make the shot, Joanna achieved what he would have said at that moment was impossible: she straightened smoothly and stepped forward onto her left foot, pushing against the straining bow stave with her straight left arm and pulling the string smoothly back to touch her cheek. The stag flinched and began to leap away from the sound that it had heard, but the arrow
was already flying true. It smacked solidly into the beast's chest behind the point of the shoulder and burst its heart, dropping the creature where it stood. André could not even gather himself to congratulate Joanna on what she had done. He simply stood there, staring at her, open mouthed, and she returned his look with one of her own, raising her eyebrows quizzically as though to say, “There, you see?”

An hour or so later, he witnessed another demonstration of the same kind of virtuosity, this time from Berengaria, when a large hare broke cover unexpectedly. They had not known it was there, for they had been tracking a boar at the time, but suddenly there was the hare, bounding on its powerful hind legs and leaping nimbly from side to side as it raced for safety across the far side of the clearing they had entered. The Princess had been the first to see it and she spun easily to follow it, bow already fully drawn as she led it and gauged the timing and direction of its leaps, and by the time he had realized what was happening, André had also accepted that she was too late. But she released smoothly and her arrow struck the hare in mid-bound, piercing it cleanly and sending it tumbling half a heartbeat before it would have been safely out of reach among the long grass at the edge of the trees.

Soon after that, close to noon, Sylvester suggested that they stop to eat. They had lost the boar trail on stony ground and they were glad to stop and eat from the baskets of bread, fruit, and cold meats that the cooks had prepared for them. The sky was still covered by high, dull
cloud, and Sylvester asked the women if they wished to hunt on or if they had had enough and were ready to go home. There was no discussion. They would not be leaving here, Joanna said, until they had some good wild pig to take with them. She looked to Berengaria for confirmation, and the Princess nodded in assent, her attention focused on the cold roasted pheasant she was clutching in both hands. André watched and listened to all of this, content to say nothing, and greatly surprised at how much he was enjoying the outing.

It started to rain as they were preparing to resume the hunt, and at first it was light, a shower that everyone believed would soon pass over, but it did not, and as time went by, the downpour increased so that they were soon seriously inconvenienced. They were deep in the woods, in hilly terrain, and the roar of the downpour on the canopy above their heads was deafening, but the masses of leaves above merely intercepted the rain and deflected it so that instead of falling on the forest floor as normal raindrops, it tended to pool on the broad leaf surfaces and then spill from one leaf to another, gathering momentum and volume until it fell in solid streams, penetrating even the wax-scraped wiry wool of their foul-weather cloaks. André leaned close to Sylvester at one point and shouted into his ear.

“Were you the one who predicted heavy rain to Richard?”

The huntsman cupped his hand over his mouth to shout above the noise of the rain. “Aye, but I meant nothing like this. This is worse than I have seen in years.
There's a cavern about half a mile ahead of us, up on top of the scree slope, in the face of a cliff. Found it a few weeks ago, first time I came hunting here. It's a struggle to get up there, but it's big and dry inside and we can light a fire, if there are no bears in there.”

“A fire? Is there wood there?”

“Probably. Depends on who has been there recently. The locals have been using the place as a shelter for hundreds of years, and most of them stock the place with firewood before they leave. There was a pile there when I found the place.” He shrugged. “Of course, some people will use up every scrap of wood that's there and won't replace a stick. Do you want to try it?”

“Lead on! It's big enough, think you?”

“Oh, it's big, much larger than it looks to be from outside, because the entranceway is really very small, barely three paces across, compared to the space inside, which is about ten times that wide. And it's deep, too, with high roofs. There are three big connected chambers, one behind the other like beads on a string. Front one's the biggest, open to the outside. The back one has some light in it during the day—a kind of glow that comes down like a fading sunbeam from somewhere up above—and the middle one's always dark.”

André smiled at the huntsman. “Like a fading sunbeam … I like that. Let's hope there are no bears in there today.”

They approached the cave mouth with great caution, having picked their way carefully up the treacherous scree slope, and when they were all in readiness, with
arrows nocked and ready to draw, Sylvester threw a succession of rocks into the darkened cavern, pausing each time to listen for sounds that would indicate that the cave held tenants. Nothing emerged, and no sound disturbed the silent darkness beyond the cave mouth. Eventually Sylvester himself, carrying a heavy, springwound arbalest primed and ready at the level of his waist, stepped slowly into the entrance and paused there, framed in the opening and lit from behind, inviting any animal inside to charge at him. He remained there for a count of ten, and then he straightened slightly and disappeared into the darkness.

Minutes later, having made sure that no animals were lurking in the farthest recesses of the three linked caverns that stretched backward for at least sixty paces into the cliff, the two men stood together again, this time looking out into the driving rain. Behind them in the first cave, they could hear one of the other hunters chopping dry wood into kindling, while another of their number worked patiently with flint, steel, and finely chopped and shredded bark and grass to start a fire. The two women had gone into the farthest of the caves, the dimly lit one, and there Sylvester had shown them a cleft in the floor over an underground stream that offered a natural and pleasant latrine. He had then left them together to do whatever they needed to do.

“How far are we from the wagons, do you know?” André asked him.

Sylvester pointed off to their right, down the scree slope. “Half a mile, if you go that way, straight through
the brush and across a steep gully with a stream at the bottom, but it will be heavy going in this rain.” He flicked his hand towards the left, the way they had come. “If you go back that way, on the other hand, there's an easy path—we crossed it at one point, you may recall—that swings back around to where they'll be now. A mile and a half, perhaps two.”

“An easy path? Easy enough for the wagons to follow if we sent for them to come here?”

“Aye, to the bottom of the slope, at least, but if you wanted anything after that, you'd have to hump it up the slope on your back.”

“That's what men-at-arms are for, when they're not fighting. I think we should send for them.”

Sylvester turned slowly and looked at him. “Now why would you want to do that?”

André met his look squarely. “Because this rain shows no sign of slackening and we have two ladies with us. They may not look like ladies, dressed as they are, and they have not been behaving like ladies through all this, because neither one of them has made a single complaint, but sooner rather than later the discomfort of this weather is going to penetrate their calm, which has been admirable until now. The rain may ease soon—it certainly ought to, because it can't continue this way forever—but in the event that it does not, then we ought to be prepared for whatever eventuality might arise. And one of those eventualities, I believe, is that the lady Joanna might not change her mind about remaining here until she kills a
pig. If that happens, then we might end up spending the night here.”

“The King would not be happy with that,” Sylvester growled, but André shook his head.

“I don't know, my friend. I think you might be wrong there. You yourself put the notion into Richard's head yesterday when you told him it might rain heavily today, and that is why we brought a wagon filled with tents and blankets. It was the King's idea that we might be stranded by the weather, and he bade me be certain that I brought the necessities to keep the ladies dry, warm, and comfortable. He trusts us both implicitly in this. We have sufficient men to guard them, and we brought the cook along to feed everyone. So oblige me by sending your best man to find the wagons and their escort and to bring them here as soon as may be. I will inform the Queens of what is happening.” He hesitated. “By the way, the third cave, at the back, with the latrine. Is there an updraft in there? Could you keep a fire burning in there without choking to death?”