Joris of the Rock [The Neustrian Cycle, Book II] (Forgotten Fantasy Library) Read online

  THE NEUSTRIAN CYCLE, BOOK TWO

  JORIS OF THE ROCK

  By

  LESLIE BARRINGER

  A Renaissance E Books publication

  ISBN 1-58873-620-2

  All rights reserved

  Copyright © 2005 Renaissance E Bools

  This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part without written permission.

  For information:

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  PageTurner Editions/A Futures Past Classic

  CHAPTER I. THE WAY OF JORIS OF THE ROCK

  "My birthday," grumbled Tiphaine de Ath. "My birthday, and I may not even buy me a grooch with my own money."

  Eighteen-year-old Tiphaine was brown-eyed, dark and comely, plump as a partridge, and stubborn as a mule. About her roared the Olencourt Midsummer Fair; before he, on the counter of the booth, glittered the brooch of lapis lazuli and silver; beside her, in the gray habit of the Friars Minor, her father's brother smiled with anxious kindliness.

  "Come now, Tiphaine," he coaxed. "This purse I hold as it were in trust for you; we must not squander your gold at idle inclination. We should press on; it is already near the hour of nones. And I entreat you, pull up your hood; we are all God's creatures, made in His image, but Satan waits to peer from unregenerate eyes in such an hour and place as this."

  Satan – or maybe his lieutenant Momus, fiend of mockery – peered from the solitary unregenerate eye of the wizened stall keeper; gnarled fingers beat a whimsical tattoo on either side of the bright gaud, and a wisp of beard wagged knowingly toward the girl's ear.

  "I yield to none in admiration of the Rule of Blessed Francis," wheezed the stall keeper, "but it is very bad for trade."

  "Uncle Blaise," began Tiphaine, but the friar lifted a thin hand to check her speech.

  "Brother Eugenius," he amended gently. "Brother in God."

  "Uncle Blaise," repeated the girl with emphasis, turning from the counter to confront her companion. "I will not call you Brother Eugenius; you are my uncle now and always. And I will not pull up my hood; I believe you wish me marked with smallpox, that no man should look twice at me. Besides, it is too hot. And I will not pass by the pretty booths as though they were dungheaps; I am no Poor Clare, nor mean to be one. It is a sin to be young and – proud of the face and form that were given me by the Sieur God?"

  "It is no sin to be content with them, Tiphaine."

  "Oh, you can twist my every word to put me in the wrong and make me angry and ashamed. I have listened for leagues to tales of saints and miracles and swift conversions and dread pilgrimages; can you not bide an hour to let me look my fill? I do not want the brooch any more; if I wore it now I should think Saint Francis wept each time I looked upon it."

  "Tiphaine!"

  The remonstrance came in little more than a whisper; beneath his long sleeves the friar clasped his hands in grief, but his mild weather-beaten visage set a strange blot of calm amid the thrust and uproar of a peasantry half crazed with annual license. Blue eyes met brown – the man's frank and tender, the maid's flickering and sullen – and Tiphaine shrugged unrepentant shoulders and made to move aside.

  "Tiphaine!"

  She collided with a bulky figure, and the Franciscan's mournful tender exclamation was echoed above her in a comical bass. Tiphaine looked up past a gold-studded belt and a broad blue velvet chest; the tall young man who blocked her path stared greedily down at her, cocking his pointed hunting hat awry on his thick auburn hair.

  "A lovely name for a lovely demoiselle," he said; and the girl was shyly aware of his bold hazel-coloured eyes, of the pale full lips above his formidable chin.

  "I pray you, lordling, let us pass," chirped the little friar.

  "We must reach Vautrem by sundown, and my not tarry longer. Of your kindness, do not delay us."

  "Vautrem, eh? – bravely cackled the gray goose," muttered the young man derisively; but he stood back, and Tiphaine shrank from him as his big thumb and finger nipped her arm above the elbow.

  She heard the laugh deep in his throat; them shocked, and sobered, with beast on her tongue and fury in her heart, she caught at her kinsman's girdle of white cord and followed it through the throng as best she could.

  "Who is blue Goliath?" asked one man of another as she passed them.

  "Blue whataway?" came the amused response. "Why, blockhead, do you not know him? Gason de Volsberghe, and no other."

  Gason de Volsberghe had pinched her arm and grinned into her face! Tiphaine's blush burned less wrathfully as distance grew between herself and the son of the great northern duke; for in the lists the Sieur Gaston was likened to a lion, although in the streets his name might oftener be linked with others of the brute creation.

  Nevertheless, it was not until her companion led her clear of the last fringes of the crowd that Tiphaine recovered curiosity to pause and look back. From where she stood, on the dusty road that mounted toward the forest, the whole tumultuous fair ground sprawled in view; meadow and river bank were patched and barred with multi-coloured booths and huts and tents that shaped an immobile core for the shifting swarms of purchasers and merrymakers round them.

  Below the eating sheds the press was thickest; there they were bloodily baiting bears, and at moments the barking and yelling dominated every other sound. Closer at hand the archery butts gave off sharp intermittent cheers, and here and there a troupe of minstrels or musicians was ringed with onlookers or dancers. Hoarse-voiced jugglers and acrobats and farmers on monstrosity, beggars and fortune-tellers and cheap-jacks of every kind, were charming bronze and silver from peasant pouches; beyond the rim of the great pool of sound and colour the gateway of the Olencourt barbican stood open for men-at-arms and grooms and serving maids to come and go between the fair ground and the machicolated sheer of Count Fulk's great castle behind it.

  Swans preened themselves along the water-lilied moat that was a broad dike cut across the neck of a horseshoe bend of river; hawk-eyed Tiphaine watched a gay-clad group of the count's family and guests move slowly across the lowered drawbridge. Gaston de Volsberghe, too, must have come that way to laughe at the crude pleasures of the commonalty.

  "But he called me 'demoiselle,'" reflected Tiphaine. "He knew I was not just a peasant wench, in spite of this old dusty cloak and kirtle. I wish I had my samite cote-hardi and the other headdress with silver filgree on it… Oh, if my father had to be a knave, why could he not be skilful in his knavery?"

  For Tiphaine was born of the lesser nobility; her father, a vavasor's second son, had abused his post as comptroller to the Duke of Ahun. He and his artless peculation being finished by the tusks of a wild boar, his motherless and solitary daughter had cause to weep before a vindictive duke and I revealing roll of household charges. Thrust forth from castle gates in the clothes she wore – with a little purse of gold nobles which the kindly duchess had crammed down between her breasts in the moment of farewell – Tiphaine sough out her young uncle, the Franciscan, whom chance had brought to the Ahun house of his Order a month before. Until that day she had seen him seldom enough, for the friar had offended her father by refusing to eat good food in a tavern with a duke's comptroller; but he had readily obtained permission to take charge of her, and uncle and niece passed northward together, aiming for the Tower of Ath in Basse Honoy, where the late comptroller's elder brother bore sway over a strip of cornland and a wedge of forest.

  Castle-bred Tiphaine had hoped to ride thither upon a horse, or at the least upon an ass; but in giving her purse into the keeping of Brot
her Eugenius she reckoned without his share of the family obstinacy. Inflexible adhesion to the Franciscan Rule she could respect, but after a day or two of the friar's meek company Tiphaine believed his valid reason for her travelling on foot to mask an oblique attack upon what she called her self-respect, and he, her worldly vanity.

  "Hoofs bespeak money," he pointed out. "The safest armour of the wayfarer is poverty."

  And since Tiphaine had too much regard for her kinsman to grab at his hood and recover her purse by force, she had trudged five leagues a day with him for three days on end. Her fair skin freckled, her muscles hardened, and her exasperation grew; for Brother Eugenius lost no chance of inveigling a soul from the way of Nature into the way of Grace. Alternately adroit and simple in his use of holy violence, he drove Tiphaine at last into a half-day's silence; and it was with a real desire to ease her load of inarticulate wrath that he led her into the midst of the Olencourt Fair.

  "I must stop staring before he reminds me of the Sin of Sloth, Lot's Wife, and the Foolish Virgins," mused Tiphaine; and she turned and set her face toward the Forest of Honoy.

  "The peasants think us mad to be coming away from a fair that is just begun," she remarked a little later, as raucous comment drifted back from descending groups of farm and forest folk. "And so are we," she added sulkily beneath her breath.

  "See how the willows droop in the stream, said the friar cheerfully. "Varne runs high for the season, and only the aspens stir. Do you know why? Whet the Sieur Jesus walked in the woods near Jerusalem, all the trees trembled for grief at what had to come, save only the aspens. And the Sieur Jesus looked sadly at the aspen; and the unhappy tree has trembled ever since."

  Presently the pair of them were climbing slowly through sun-flecked shadow of oaks and beeches; alder blossom was dense that year, and its sickly odour hung heavy along the river bank. Dragon flies glittered above the murmuring brown water; Tiphaine fell into a reverie, went daintily clad and softly shod, wore jewels bright as dragon fly's mail, and with her beauty plagued great lords to madness and despair.

  None of them dared look on her as Gaston lately looked; for one, the bravest and most courteous of all, was infallibly her slave, sworn to her service through all peril and despite. The Duke of Ahun himself would shift uneasily in his chair to know that she commanded the arm of such a paladin; The Duke of Volsberghe would claw at his coppery beard when his tall son hurtled athwart the tilting barrier at shock of the lance of the lover of Tiphaine.

  "I shall know him when I see him," she told herself, "and he will know me – ay, though he find me tired and shabby, shamed by my father, angered by this feckless uncle who dreams himself brother to all mankind. Saint Catherine send my kinsman of Ath is shrewder than his brethren."

  That kinsman had a son who was already a chevalier. Was it he who would right her before the world? If not, there were nobles and gentles enough in Basse Honoy.

  Tiphaine smiled at herself; but behind the smile was a conviction that the Blessed Virgin, and the saints whose names had starred her prayers since she could speak, would not fail to guard and cherish so exceptional a maiden as Tiphaine de Ath.

  Meanwhile, the din of the Olencourt Fair died out behind the travellers; in its stead were only the piping of birds, the hum of insects, and the lightest stir of wind in the dense forest. For miles of their way Tiphaine and Brother Eugenius had not been out of sight or hearing of their kind, but now they were alone. The girl drew closer to her companion, and he, as though divining a first nervousness in her, spoke tranquilly of the Count Fulk de Olencourt as keeper of roads and upholder of strict justice.

  "They say patrols of mounted archers ride each day between his castles and his marches," added Brother Eugenius, peering ahead as though by sheer good will to conjure green coats. Sown with silver lilies, from the gray trunks that palisaded all the western view. "Saw you how underbrush was razed as we drew near his ploughlands? I doubt not he aims to trim this track in a like manner."

  "I would he had done so already," confessed Tiphaine. "Last night, in the abbey guest house yonder, the woman who served the broken meats was talking of this grim murderer and robber whom they call Joris of the Rock."

  "Ay, me!" said the friar sadly – as though loth to admit that, Christ being fourteen centuries risen and Francis eight-score years a saint, some shreds of cruelty and rapine yet persisted upon earth. "A grievous worker of ill, if truth be told of him. I have heard that he first fell into sin through some injustice of the monks of Medrincourt…"

  For the first time that day a dimple started in the pink cheek of Tiphaine.

  "The monks might call this Joris rogue enough to be a friar," she murmured slyly. Then": "Tell me, uncle mine – had you the power, would you betray him into the gyves of the Count Fulk?"

  The Franciscan's mild blue eye accused her of mockery, but his scrupulous mind accepted the challenge, and his face grew more than ordinarily worried.

  "That would depend," came the hesitant reply, "upon what – what possibility of repentance and amendment I discovered in him. It is vain to judge by hearsay."

  Tiphaine groaned in humorous vexation; but before she had time to rebuke such dangerous charity a measured beat of horse hoofs woke and drew along the rearward road. Friar and maiden halted and turned to gaze.

  "Count Fulk has sent a man-at-arms to be our escort," said Tiphaine drolly. "It is discourteous in him not to have allotted us a troop. He shall be roundly chidden when I–"

  The mild pleasantry was slain upon her lips. Round a sharp leafy angle of the way, astride a gaunt black mare that swerved obedient to a jagged azure bridle, Gaston de Voisberghe breasted the sun-dappled gloom and bore unhastily toward the watchers.

  Instinctively they drew together. Brother Eugenius fingered his beads; Tiphaine felt a curious stir along her spine, a sudden shortening of breath. Dark hoofs wrought havoc in the wayside bracken; the mare came pounding to a halt. Thick lips twitched in a friendly grin; the Sieur Gaston opened a great brown hand to show a brooch of gold, supporting amethysts that gave a violet flame against the shadows of summer foliage.

  "Pity if one so dainty were altogether giftless from the fair," boomed the assured young voice. "Come, Demoiselle Tiphaine, for a ride upon my saddlebow. Your friar may spend an hour in prayer and meditation, while we seek out a higher glade for the improvement of acquaintance. Give me your hand – come!"

  Tiphaine stood white and motionless, with shoulders and hands set flatly to a beech bole; she shifted a fascinated gaze fro greedy hazel eyes to gold-girt gems and back again, finding no word for this abrupt and smiling invitation. But Brother Eugenius steeped between his niece and the stirrup of the Sieur Gaston; his lifted face was no longer worried, but calm and unafraid.

  "Lording," he said bluntly, "You speak very evilly, with purpose most unworthy of your rank and blood. I entreat you, turn aside and you go your way, setting your heel upon temptation of your youth and strength, shaming the Fiend who would destroy your hope of Paradise."

  "Likelier my hell will land upon your foolish face," came the serene response. "Down yonder I stood aside for you; stand you now aside for me, with no more parley."

  The little friar looked steadfastly into commanding eyes whose pleasantry was fled; then, dropping on his knees, he joined his palms together and prayed aloud to the blue lane of sky above him.

  "Sieur God, dear Jesu, Saviour of mankind, soften the heart of this proud man, for pity on Thine Own Mother and on the mother that bore him! Let him slay me so that he spare the innocence of this Thine handmaid…"

  And over his shoulder he shot an urgent groan: "Run, Tiphaine!"

  "No need," said a jovial resonant voice across the way; and a red hand, large as Gaston's own, came strongly on the azure bridle.

  Gaston with one foot out of stirrup and sword hand whipped to his hilt, Brother Eugenius kneeling in the dusty grass, Tiphaine half poised to leap into the alders – each scanned the fawn-clad archer who had come so suddenly an
d silently upon them.

  The archer was taller even than Gaston, but looser-limbed and narrower of build, his eagle's face was the colour of red sand, his blue eyes were frosty beneath bushy golden brows, and his moustache and curly pointed beard seemed spun of bristles of gold. There was insolence and menace in the drag of his heavy eyelids, in the cautionary snap of thumb and finger of his weaponless hand.

  "Sit still, lordling," he advised. "both my comrades here bear prizes from the butts."

  De Volsberghe glanced this way and that; two other fawn-clad me had slipped from cover, and sunlight touched their bended bows to sparkle on the arrowheads thereby. One was a fat greasy rogue with a broken nose, the other a little dark knave, hatchet-faced and bandy-legged; and each stared calmly and with relish at a chosen spot in the broad anatomy of the Sieur Gaston.

  "Whose men are you?" growled that nobleman, setting his hand disdainfully upon his hip/

  "These are my men, but I am no man's man," replied the golden-bearded leader crisply. "Down yonder we passed for foresters of the Duke of Hastain, but here that shift is needless. I am called Joris of the Rock. Come off your horse."

  For a second the Sieur Gaston hesitated. Tiphaine's brown eyes grew wide with apprehension, and Brother Eugenius – now squatting on his heels – flung out a quick restraining hand.

  "Spare him, friend!" he whinnied. "God sent you to aid us, but not to slay a man unshriven!"

  "Come off your horse," rasped the outlaw, still intent upon the brooding Gaston. "I will count six and no more. One, two, three – ay, I thought as much."

  The Volsberghe knew when he was beaten. Silently he swung a foot across the mare's neck and dropped to earth, and soberly he watched Tiphaine as the other turned to her.

  "Your brave friar counsels mercy, demoiselle," said Joris roundly; and again his voice held jovial contrast with his mien. "The judgement is in your gift. Do we kill, or do we send this lording hence on foot, unharmed?"

  A miracle vouchsafed! Did Joris wink at her? No, his left eyelid had a natural droop; and even at that moment Tiphaine found it strange to be incuriously regarded as if she were a man. But in one sweet breath she savoured power; her sunburned fingers clenched and her colour flooded back. Then her gaze fell on the kneeling friar, whose features were aglow with saintly expectation.