Gerfalcon [The Neustrian Cycle #1]

  1

  Leslie Barringer Gerfalcon

  THE NEUSTRIAN CYCLE, BOOK ONE

  GERFALCON

  By

  LESLIE BARRINGER

  A Renaissance E Books publication

  ISBN 1-58873-582-6

  All rights reserved

  Copyright © 2005 Renaissance E Books

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

  For information:

  Publisher@renebooks.com

  PageTurner Editions/A Futures Past Classic

  The sunlit streets of Hautarroy

  Are filled with ladies, fair and free;

  By garth and pleasance of Honoy

  The roses riot on tower and tree.

  The wine's deep red in Beltany,

  And many a lance is splintered there;

  But five to me the northern sea

  And the iron crags of windy Ger.

  –Raoul's Ballade of Ger.

  CHAPTER I

  SHADOWS AT SANCTALBASTRE

  "The Countess Adela of Ger has a face like a horse!"

  Black-haired Rogier spoke reflectively, with no intent to wound. Red-haired Thorismund took no notice; he was leaning over the low wall of the fish-pond, spitting with precision at the water-lily leaves below. But Raoul propped against the trunk of the nearest tall sycamore behind them, gasped and sat upright, hardly believing his ears. Then he waited for Thorismund to turn on Rogier; and Thorismund continued to collect saliva with all the gravity of eleven summers. The Countess Adela was Thorismund's great-aunt and Raoul's grandmother; she it was who gave Raoul the knife with which he carved toy ships from odds and ends of wood collected in the monastery workshop.

  A moment more, and Raoul got to his feet, sliding the cherished blade into its sheath at his belt, and hiding a tiny cherished blade into its sheath at his belt, and hiding a tiny half-shaped boat amid the spreading roots beside him. His queer little face had flushed and greyed beneath its ivory brown skin; fists clenched, eyes glaring at the tense hindquarters of the unconscious Rogier, he stepped softly forward…

  * * * *

  At Sanctalbastre time was bounded by the monastery bells, space by the blue mountains of Baraine and by the roofs and spires of Hautarroy. The minster, with its precious relic – a shard of that vessel broken by Saint Mary Magdalen above the head of Sieur Jesus – towered between moat and river, on a wedge of fertile silt beneath the royal fortress of Ingard; and on a night soon after his twelfth birthday Raoul dreamed that the river-banks were widened, and that island, castle, monastery and all were sailing merrily southward against the stream … and then awoke to hear the ivy hissing in the breeze outside the dormitory window, to see the moonlight eerie on the steep roof of the minster nave, and to remember that his uncle Armand, Count of Ger, was coming to the capital at the bidding of Rene the King…

  At Marckmont were the marshes, and the four towers crowning the low mound above the causeway; there grey skies lowered, and at dusk the poplars swayed against yellow streaks westward. There, too, the land ran strangely in long wooded flats and shoals amid the water; in misty autumn weather all the light was doubled by reflection, and at a breath of wind everything trembled upside down. It was a silent, happy place, for in the castle above the sleepy hamlet were only Countess Adela and a handful of old servants, with grizzled men-at-arms who remembered the battle at Harksburg, when the King was captured and the army ran away. That king was grandmother's brother; King Rene was her nephew. Marckmont, once of the king's demesne, was granted to the Countess Adela and to the heirs of the body of her younger son; one day it would be Raoul's own…

  At Ger, where the grey hold stood out upon terrifying crags, was never any silence; there the waves came shouldering slantwise into the eastern cove, thumping ceaselessly amid the caves, or hurling tall shapes of spray against the dark cliff-walls and across the breakwater that masked the little harbour on the western side. There sea-gulls wheeled and screamed, and mists marched over the inland heather, and men cursed as they watched, from battlemented wall or dizzy window-slit, the dim shape of an Easterling pirate scudding far out along the lonely coast…

  Bur Ger and Marckmont were year-old memories; Raoul was one of a score of noble ragamuffins who the monks of Sanctalbastre strove to rear in ways acceptable to God and to the Neustrian king. Half the boys were nothing less than hostages for good behaviour; King Rene was old and fat, but he knew his Counts of Barberghe, Montecarneweu and Ger. The brief and ghastly Jacquerie of Nordanay had somewhat sobered these restive lords; the Constable, who marched to their assistance, found no difficulty in returning with the heir of each house suspect of flirtation with archducal powers beyond the frontier. So Sanctalbastre had become a school; the King had placed therein his nephew Thorismund, Duke of Hastain and heir presumptive to the throne, and sons and wards of this and that great officer of state had followed Thorismund. So arrived Rogier de Olencourt, brother of Fulk the Castellan of Montenair. Presently from the south came Conrad, son of the Countess of Burias – Conrad, whose birth had so enraged the Count that the latter promised his lady a dozen lashes for each month of the year he had spent away from her when the event occurred. But King Rene intervened, taking mother and child under his own protection; and then the Count of Burias died of a fever in foreign parts. As for little Conrad, the older he grew the more the King regarded him and loved him; but he and his mother were ignored by the Prince Rene and hated by the Queen…

  Last of all, Raoul, called of Marckmont, was brought to Sanctalbastre by his grandmother, who welcomed an alternative to placing him in the household of her elder son, Armand, the ruling Count of Ger. Failing Raoul and his sons, Marckmont would revert to the crown, and Armand of Ger was in no way his nephew's heir – a fact which angered him, but also, in feudal law, gave him a claim to wardship as the boy's non-inheriting next-of-kin. This claim, however, Armand did not press whilst his own son Charles was beneath the eye of the King at Sanctalbastre; moreover, whilst the Countess Adela lived he had no right to administer the barony. Being hasty as well as avaricious, he had once audibly wished his nephew in hell; thereafter the old Countess had kept Raoul out of her son's way. Nevertheless, the time came when Armand of Ger, having obeyed the summons to Hautarroy, rode down from Ingard to the monastery gate and sent for son and nephew.

  They came, an ill-assorted pair. Charles was ruddy and round and dull, taller by half a head than his companion. Raoul was pale and slim; at Sanctalbastre he was sometimes called Gipsy, because of his faintly Eastern cast of features, and because he was born in Egypt, during the siege of Ajetta; but his parents, before they died, saw in their son a strange resemblance to that great stone devil which sat, hands on knees, staring out across the ruined temple-court where Raoul first drew breath – the great stone devil with the weird half-smile, who took no heed of woman's travail in the shadow, or of knights and emirs at death-grips in blazing sunlight by the water-gate two hundred years beyond. For Raoul, as he grew, showed the same forward slant of a narrowing chin, the same big delicately-chiselled mouth with its hint of a smile at the corners, the same broad forehead and high cheek-bones, the same deftly-tilted eyelids; but there was nothing of the devil of Ajetta in his eyes. The latter were wide and strange, being grey-green with little amber flecks in them. Thorismund of Hastain called them cat's eyes, and already most women looked twice at them; but at this time they were disproportionately large, making of the heir of Marckmont a blend of elf and owl and boy…

  And into those same timid eyes Count Armand looked with less than his former disfavour, for that morning had healed the breach between himself and the King's Majesty; the Count of Ger wou
ld return to his eyrie as Warden of the Coat March.

  "Less muscle than I hoped to find in either of you," was his comment. "You, Charles, are flabby; and you, Raoul, are puny. Dough may be turned to account, but thin air may not. Do you run and wrestle when you should?"

  The question was aimed at Raoul, who stood tongue-tied with downcast face. The plump Viscount sniggered and spoke.

  "Half his time he spends in fashioning toys or reading books. But it is true that only Conrad beats him at archery."

  "So? But the book is for clerks, and the bow for churls. What of the quintain?"

  Charles laughed aloud, and went on:

  "A week ago he was knocked clean out of his saddle, and lay down all the afternoon!"

  Raoul's head came up; a spot of colour showed on each cheek-bone, and his big mouth twitched.

  "I ride as well as you," he muttered.

  "Better than I," amended his good-natured cousin. "But I can take a fall more featly."

  "More fatly also," was the Count's gruff rejoinder. "Boy, when I come again you ride with me to Ger. As for Raoul, he seems headed for the cloister. But maybe I shall yet make men of both of you."

  Then he gave them his hand to kiss, and mounted and rode away, a masterful figure in the sunlight; and more than once in the fortnight that followed Raoul had marvelled that this grim Count, with his crimson face and blue-black jowl and six tough feet of body should be the father of the placid Charles, and should himself have once been a boy who sat on grandmother's knee.

  The Countess Adele was the only person alive whom Raoul both loved and trusted, unless it were Brother Ambrose (who had been to Rome, Jerusalem, and Constantinople, and was full of strange lore); and a sense of appalling outrage informed the kick which shattered the peace of afternoon beside the monastery fish-pond…

  * * * *

  Rogier yelped and spun round, staring. No one at Sanctalbastre took much notice of Raoul; Rogier was thirteen, waspish if attacked, and the rival of Conrad of Burias for leadership among the boys. But no one had before seen Roul's face grey with fury; and curiosity held Rogier rooted for a moment to the ground.

  "You – you said –" snarled the diminutive attacker.

  Rogier's surprise vanished. Rogier was a youth of few words.

  "Yes, little pig, I did," came his crisp affirmation.

  And the battle was joined before another word escaped them.

  "Hi! Hi! Conrad – Alain – everybody!" squealed Thorismund, capering joyfully round the combatants. "Rogier and Raoul are having a fight! Come on! Ahoo, smack in the eye!"

  A dozen other boys appeared amid the monastery barns or among the beechwoods above the pond; laughing and whooping they plunged down the slope to ring the fighters round, some cheering one and some the other. Rogier was not having it all his own way; his bleeding lip matched Raoul's half-closed eye before height and weight began to tell.

  Conrad of Burias stood in doubt, contemptuous of Raoul yet bearing no good-will toward Rogier. Conrad's faction, however, was of one mind, yelling shame on Rogier for his advantages and the time it took for him to show them. Sly Robin Barberghe and beautiful Alain de Montcarneau ranged themselves as Raoul's backers; and presently Robin was fingering a skipping-rope and whispering in Conrad's ear. Rogier had Raoul's head beneath his arm, and the smaller boy was crying and choking with rage and pain, when Conrad gave the word for action.

  "Stop it, you coward, you hulking bully!" he shouted. "Stop it … very well, we'll see how you enjoy a thump or two yourself."

  The conflict underwent a sudden transformation. Conrad gave Rogier a dexterous shove, Robin tripped him, two others sat on him' Alain twitched Raoul from his conqueror's grasp and thrust an arm in front of the advancing Thorismund. Deftly the phalanx closed on its struggling victim; the skipping-rope flew free and tightened…

  "Ramon – Enguerrand!" screeched the little Duke, battering with ineffectual fists at the laughing Alain. "Rescue – rescue! They're going to torture Rogier!"

  But Rogier's friends needed no such summons; a noisy mellay locked round the beech-trunk to which the captors strove to tie their prisoner. Raoul, crouching by the wall, paused in his angry sobbing, and saw his cousin Charles come lumbering up amid the straggling reserves. Charles was of Conrad's party, but in this fray he served it ill; someone immediately winded him with a shrewd thrust amidships, and he collapsed, to sit up later and watch the fight laughter and applause…

  Rogier's followers were losing ground, and Rogier was bound and helpless, when Raoul got to his feet again. What made him do it he never knew…

  Rogier, finding his late opponent's tear-stained face twelve inches from his own, gave a grunt of wrathful scorn.

  "Go on, sneak! Hit me now I can't hit back!"

  But Rogier's knife was out, and Raoul was hacking at the rope when Robin Barberghe leaped upon him from behind and tore the weapon away, flinging it into the reeds and kneeling fiercely on the ingrate's spine … whence Rogier, breaking free with a yell, plucked him to bowl him bodily at Alain. The two of them went down in a heap, and Rogier turned raging on the rest of his would-be tormentors. He knocked Conrad flat on his back, butted another assailant in the stomach and sent hi reeling and hiccoughing to the water's edge, and lifted his head for a whoop of victory which was never uttered.

  For above him on the grassy slope was a blaze of scarlet and a glitter of steel; three men had come unnoticed through the beechwood and out upon the scene of conflict. Raoul, still whimpering as he rubbed his bruises, became aware of Rogier's urgent voice.

  "Pax, pax, you fools! Get up, Alain – Ramon, leave him alone! The Cardinal Count is here – the Cardinal Count!"

  As though by magic came silence and an end of strife. Up the summer wind rolled a soft tide of sound – the tolling of the great cathedral bells of Hautarroy. A battered, sheepish rank of boys took shape beneath the calm stare of the Cardinal Count of Estragon; neither the disdainful smile of the tall Duke of Camors on one side, not the scandalised frown of the mild Sub-Prior of Sanctalbastre on the other, had power to draw the awed gaze of a single boy from the parchment face of the little Prince of the Church.

  The red robes stirred; gems flashed on a thin raised hand. Down bobbed a score of tousled heads before the sign of the Cross. By twos and threes they were raised again; the prominent grey eyes of the Cardinal count searched once along the line, and came to rest on the brightest head of all. A moment more, and his quiet melancholy voice went fluting up against the distant bourdon of the bells.

  "Peace be with you, children. And among you. Let the Prince Thorismund stand forward."

  A green-clad figure moved. Beneath the flaming hair was tilted a puzzled and obedient face. Those furthest away craned their necks. Prince Thorismund? He was prince, of course, but his style was always Duke…

  "My lord Prince, I and my lord Constable are sent to acquaint you with grievous news, and to bring you before the King's Majesty that now has need of you. To-day, it had pleased God to smite with a great affliction this kingdom and this people. An hour before noon, as he hunted in the Forest of Ecquerel, the Prince Rene was thrown from his horse and fell with violence, so that in a few moments he was dead. I charge you, my lord Prince – and you, my lord's companions – pray for his soul, who was the flower of this great realm. Pray too, each one of you, that if death come thus suddenly upon yourself, your name may be as fair as his among men and with the Blessed Saints."

  Thorismund gulped audibly, and blinked to check his tears. He was proud and selfish, but he had loved his jolly, noisy cousin.

  "Bid your friends farewell, my lord and come."

  The little duke wheeled, displaying wet blue eyes in a tragical pink face.

  "I do not want to go away!" he announced angrily.

  Into the momentary pause that followed came the excited whisper of Conrad of Burias.

  "But now you will be King."

  The Cardinal Count gave the whisperer a blank sidelong glance. The Duke of Ca
mors smiled in his grey beard. But Thorismund, squaring his shoulders, took no notice.

  "Farewell, all," he said. And then, less bravely: "Farewell, Rogier."

  "Farewell, Thorismund," came the ragged twentyfold reply.

  More like a prisoner than an heir-apparent, the dejected prince trudged away between the scarlet and the steel. Behind him erstwhile friend and foe stood at gaze or gathered in chattering groups; but Raoul sneaked off to find his precious knife, and presently was gravely whittling at his boat again…

  It was not long before a shadow fell across his hands. He looked up savagely; Rogier de Olencourt stood near, thumbs hooked in his belt, grey eyes quizzical but not unfriendly.

  "Why did you cut me loose?" he demanded curiously.

  Raoul coloured up and looked uncomfortably aside.

  "It was not fair," he mumbled. "Four to one, to begin with at least. And they pretended they were rescuing me, but they were not really. And then Alain is a brute, and Robin a sneak. Besides … I liked you till this afternoon."

  It was Rogire's turn to colour up. He moved a step nearer.

  "I am sorry, Raoul. I take back what I said … both times."

  The sulky elfin face, with its discoloured eye and stains of earth and tears, came up; Raoul smiled. That sudden bewitching grin was too much for Rogier; he stooped and hugged the smaller boy round the shoulders. Clumsily they kissed each other on the mouth; then Rogier straightened himself.

  "Now we shall always be friends," he said.

  Then he went gravely away; and behind him Raoul drew a deep shuddering breath and went on with his task. The solemn bells, the strange news, Thorismund's going, the gentleness of Rogier's bruised lips, whirled together in his head; bright blade and grubby fingers curved about the work, and Raoul was happy.

  Happy, but not for long. His thoughts ranged backward … till suddenly his hands were still, and he looked up again. Throughout his life he was doomed to suffer from acute perception of uncomfortable truth; and this, the first occasion of those subtle woundings, struck him rigid with bewilderment and pain.