The Running Vixen (20 page)

The horses threshed free and with harnesses trailing bolted into the midst of the panic. A flying sliver of wood shot into the eye of Miles’s stallion, and with a scream of agony it reared, forehooves pawing the sky. Miles tried to cling on to the reins and pommel, but a lifetime separated his reflexes from Renard’s and he was flung from the saddle, landing hard against the shattered carcass of the wain.

Outnumbered and outmanoeuvred, it was quickly and bloodily over for the Normans. The Welsh leader, big and broad, with the legacy of the Irish Norse revealed in his sturdy bones and bright blue eyes, nudged his horse around a mailed corpse and drew rein before the smashed ruins of the wain where a dead youth, his neck broken, sprawled close to the stallion’s hooves. He pressed his knees and let the horse pick its way delicately around the body to the other side of the wain. For a moment he was filled with a sickening disappointment, thinking that his scheme had come to nothing, but then the man on the ground moved feebly and groaned.

Davydd ap Tewdr dismounted and bent beside the old man to examine him with the swift thoroughness of one accustomed to doing battle on the run and dealing with its casualties. ‘Naught save cracked ribs and bruising,’ he announced with relief in which excitement trembled, ‘but he’s bruised and badly shaken. Twm, bring a blanket. We’ve got to coddle him as tenderly as one of our own until we can exchange him for Rhodri.’

Adam couched the lance beneath his arm, held the shield well in to his left side leaving no gap, clapped his heels into the stallion’s belly and shouted, ‘Hah!’

Vaillantif leaped from his hocks like an arrow from an arbalester’s wound bow and sped down the tilt yard. Adam’s lance struck the quintain a solid blow. He ducked as the sandbag flung round and parted the air over his crouched frame. He turned Vaillantif in a compact swirl of hooves and repeated the move with an effortless liquidity that had the spectators envying him his accomplished grace, and the young Welsh hostage viewing his own imminent attempt at the quintain with trepidation.

Adam lit down from the saddle with only the slightest hint of stiffness to mar his movement and suggest a recently healed wound. Walking Vaillantif over to the youth, he handed the lance up to him. ‘Remember to keep your head down, your shield in tight, and don’t sit up too soon afterwards or you’ll get your skull well and truly rattled.’

‘And I aim for that red triangle in the centre?’ Rhodri sighted down the tilt, voice matter-of-fact, mouth nonchalant, eyes dubious in the extreme.

‘That’s right.’ The corners of Adam’s eyes crinkled for a moment before he schooled his expression to a teacher’s benign neutrality. ‘Not just the red triangle, but the dead centre of it, your enemy’s heart. Good fortune.’ He slapped the borrowed black destrier’s glossy shoulder and stepped back.

Beside Adam, Heulwen paused on her way back from the somewhat neglected plesaunce where she had been planning some new herb beds. Linking her arm through his, she felt the small, unseen ripple of laughter make his body tremble.

‘What’s amusing you?’ she demanded.

The fact that she had spoken to him gave him the excuse he needed to break into an open grin. ‘I know what’s coming next.’

‘What?’ She watched the young man’s throat move as he brought up the lance.

‘It takes months and months of practice at the quintain to avoid that sandbag. The beginners can’t divide their attention between aiming and ducking. They can’t co-ordinate it all. He’s in for a bruised back at the very least. Most likely he’ll end up on the ground.’

‘But I was watching you. It looked so easy!’

He chuckled. ‘It is when you know how, but you learn the hard way, believe me.’

‘As in all things,’ she said with a small, almost sad sigh, and fell silent to watch Rhodri ap Tewdr gallop down the tilt to a rendezvous with his inevitable fate.

More by luck than judgement, he almost succeeded in being one of the elite few to cheat the sandbag on their first occasion - nearly, but not near enough. The spear tipped the target just slightly off centre, its impact unbalancing him, so he was a fraction too slow when he ducked and the sandbag fetched him a buffet across the back of the neck that swiped him out of the saddle and jarred him to the ground.

The black destrier jogged to a halt, and after one curious look over its shoulder, bent to nose at a tuft of grass. A grinning Austin ran out to catch the bridle.

‘Not bad,’ Adam admitted judiciously as he bent over the groaning, bruised young man. ‘We’ll have you jousting in Paris yet.’ He took the reins from Austin and enquired with the faintest hint of challenge, ‘Want to try again?’

The Welsh youth threw him a burning glance, then turned aside to spit out a mouthful of bloody saliva. ‘Go to hell!’ he snarled, but struggled unsteadily to his feet. He caught his horse and pulled himself into the saddle, and prepared to attack the quintain once more.

‘Bravo, lad,’ Adam murmured, watching with calculating eyes the strike, the mistimed duck and the way he strove to stay aboard his mount before finally conceding defeat and sprawling on the tilt yard floor, the last of the wind driven from his lungs.

Adam collected horse and spear and brought them back to him. Rhodri braced himself on his elbows, retching and fighting for air, wasted some of it on cursing Adam, but nevertheless got doggedly back on the horse as soon as his body was capable of obeying his will.

Rhodri turned the stallion in a quarter-circle and galloped not at the quintain, but straight at Adam, the lance levelled and deadly. Heulwen screamed. Adam’s whole body tensed to move faster than he had ever done in his life if he had misjudged his man. At the last moment, the spear tip changed direction and the horse swerved. A string of foam globbed Adam’s gambeson. He smelt the strong odour of stallion sweat and was swept by hot breath as the destrier passed within a fraction of trampling him down.

‘Jesu God!’ Heulwen cried furiously. ‘He might have killed you!’

‘I don’t think so.’ Adam turned to where two of the watching knights had seized Rhodri’s horse and were dragging him out of the saddle, pinning his arms and ramming them behind his back.

‘All right, Alun, leave him be.’ Adam gestured.

They let him go, but almost as roughly as they had seized him. The young man shook himself like a dog and rubbed one of his bruised arms. Blood smeared and stained his chin. His lower lip was swollen and dark. ‘How did you know I would stop?’ he demanded belligerently.

Adam smiled briefly. ‘A gamble on your nature and a guess that you wanted to live beyond a brief moment of glory.’

Rhodri spat blood at Adam’s feet. ‘Rumour says that if my brother does not come, you are going to hang me from the highest tree on the demesne.’

‘Does it?’ Adam gave the youth a bland look, and taking Vaillantif ’s reins from Austin, swung smoothly into his own saddle.

‘He won’t swallow it, you know. He’d rather see me swing.’

‘Then you’ll have to hope the rumours aren’t true, won’t you?’ Adam took up a lance and turned from his hostage to canter with negligent grace down the tilt and lightly rap the shield in the dead centre, avoiding the sandbag with insouciant ease and swerving to an elegant halt at the end of the run. Rhodri scowled at him and touched his swollen, tender mouth.

‘Why did you bait him? I thought you were dead for sure.’

Adam threw down the balled-up wisp of hay he had been using to rub the horse down, wiped his hands on his tunic, and looked round at Heulwen. ‘I wanted to test his mettle. I was curious to see if he would get up and try again after that first humbling in the dust.’

‘Your life would have been a high price to pay for finding out!’ she snapped. ‘Did the King know how rash you truly were when he sent you to fetch his daughter?’ Fear gave her voice a shrewish timbre, and hearing it, she clamped her mouth shut and glared at him.

Adam slapped Vaillantif ’s ruddy satin hide. ‘Never buy a chestnut horse or have truck with a red-haired woman,’ he quoted with a grin. ‘They’re both nags. I appear to have committed both crimes, don’t I?’

‘Adam . . .’

He looked at the brimming temper in her eyes, their colour dazzling and sea-tinged against her flushed, furious face, and set his arm across her shoulders. ‘Oh Heulwen, don’t be such a scold for so small a crotchet.’ He kissed her cheek.

She wrenched free of him. ‘You’re just as irresponsible as Ralf,’ she snapped. ‘And when I complain, you make light of it, put me at fault!’

Adam opened his mouth to defend himself, saw how rigidly she was standing and realised that in a moment she was going to run from him and they would reach another impasse. Before she could bolt, he grabbed her resisting hand and drew her around the stallion and into the empty stall next door, where he dumped her down on a mound of dusty hay, evocative of the scent of summer and the memory of thundery sunshine.

‘Look,’ he said, throwing himself down beside her, ‘I did not know for certain that he was going to ride at me. If I had turned and run, it might have tipped the balance and made him drive that lance straight between my shoulder blades.’

Her anger was unassuaged. ‘You should not have goaded him into that state in the first place.’

‘I was testing his character. If he had remained down that first time, I’d have considered him short on guts - no staying power. The fact that he kept on getting up tells me he’s got courage and a stubborn streak,’ and then wryly, ‘and the fact that he rode at me is proof that he’s foolhardy.’

Heulwen sniffed. ‘That sounds like a pot calling a cauldron black!’

He conceded a shrug. ‘It was a calculated risk. A man is always wise to study the temper of a weapon before he puts it to use.’

She frowned at him. ‘What do you mean?’

A groom led another horse into the stables, peered over the partition and, clearing his throat, apologised and went out again.

‘Miles and I had several discussions before he left - about replacing Davydd ap Tewdr with his younger brother.’

‘So what will you do, kill him when he comes to ransom the boy?’ she enquired, her lip curling.

‘It’s a nice thought,’ he admitted, ‘but it wouldn’t work. Rhodri would turn on us as you saw him turn just now, and he wouldn’t stay his hand. Even if I killed him, it wouldn’t be the end of it. We’d just have all the other big fish crowding the pool to feed on the small fry. No, if Davydd comes, I drive a hard bargain, as close to the bone as I can get. If he doesn’t, I foster the doubts in Rhodri’s mind and start needling my way into Davydd’s territory.’ He stopped speaking and studied her almost desolate expression. ‘What’s wrong? What have I said now?’

Heulwen shook her head. His eyes had lost their ruthless gleam and were filled with nothing more dangerous than anxiety. She could not say that she had just seen his father’s legacy in him and that it frightened her far more than his rashness to hear him plan like this, his gaze as bright and impersonal as that of Renard’s hawk. It was still bright now as he looked at her, but far from impersonal. Lowering her lids, she was aware of the rapid rise and fall of his chest and knew that it was not just an anxiety of the mind that awaited her response.

‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘It is a side of you I have not seen before.’ She gave him a guarded look. ‘Although we grew up together, I don’t really know you, do I?’

‘You could learn,’ he said hoarsely, and touched her cheek, then before it was too late, withdrew his hand and started to get up. That particular avenue was fraught with pitfalls. They had made love several times since the first night of their homecoming, and while the experiences had not been disasters, neither had they spoken of overwhelming success.

Heulwen was a willing enough partner - willing but not involved - happy to pleasure him, but reticent with her own responses. Part of it, he suspected, was that after Ralf she was wary of giving too much of herself away unless surprised into it. Certainly she seemed relieved rather than frustrated by his faster, more open response, but it did nothing for his pride. Give her time, Miles had said to him, but Adam did not know how long he could be patient.

As he reached Vaillantif ’s headstall, her arms suddenly came around his waist from behind, and he felt her cheek press hard against his back. ‘I could try,’ she murmured so quietly that he had to strain to hear, ‘but Adam, I’m frightened.’

He turned around, reversing the embrace, and tipped up her face to study it. ‘Surely not of me?’ His heart lurched.

‘I don’t know.’ A small shudder ran her length. She could not say to him that with Ralf the learning had led her out of love and into misery, and she was terrified of it happening again. ‘No . . . but of what the future holds.’ She tightened her grip on him and stood on tiptoe to reach his lips.

‘Sire, come quickly!’ Austin tore into the stables, his eyes so wide that the hazel iris was completely ringed by white.

Adam and Heulwen jolted apart and started at the squire. ‘The carrier’s here and he’s got a wounded man with him - sore wounded.’

Adam released Heulwen and set his hand on the youth’s quivering shoulders. ‘Take your time, lad.’

Austin swallowed, gulped more air, and added, ‘The wounded man’s the driver of Lord Miles’s baggage wain. They were hit by the Welsh, so he says, stripped and massacred, saving Lord Miles whom they took away with them.’

‘No!’ cried Heulwen. ‘No, oh no!’

‘All right, Austin,’ Adam said evenly. ‘Fetch Father Thomas, then tell Sweyn to get the men mounted up. Tell him also that we’ll need pack ponies and ropes.’

‘Yes, sire.’ Austin ran. So did Adam, but in the direction of the gatehouse, not the keep, with Heulwen struggling behind him and cursing her skirts as they hindered her.

The injured man had been brought in slumped across one of the carrier’s ponies like a half-filled sack of cabbages. Now he lay on an oxhide stretcher, his face the colour of grey clay and his breathing rapid and shallow.

‘He’s done for, poor bugger,’ muttered the carrier from the side of his mouth. ‘That wound in his arm’s mortal nasty.’

Heulwen knelt beside the stretcher, gently raised the covering blanket, then winced. The man’s right arm was bare to the shoulder, the sleeve ripped away and nothing to see of the muscle below it but a shredded, clotted mess, inflamed and swollen. Torn between anger and sick pity, Heulwen bit her lip. ‘Couldn’t you have washed and bound it better than this?’ She shot an accusing look at the itinerant merchant.