Читать книгу The Bastard of Orleans - Gardner F. Fox - Страница 5

WITH THE blonde woman riding one of the brigand’s horses and Jean on the black gelding leading the spare, they moved along the dusty road toward Senlis. This was rolling farmland, with the river Oise to their right and the last traces of the forest world of Compiègne stretching away toward Soissons. From time to time Jean glanced at his companion, discovering a remoteness of spirit in her stare and in the lax manner with which she sat her saddle.

As if aware of his regard, she turned suddenly and smiled at him. “I ride with you without even knowing who you are. It speaks well for the determination in me.”

“Determination?”

“To kill my enemies, who are also your enemies.” Her gray eyes moved over his wide shoulders and lean hips. “You look like a fighting man. Are you?”

“I fought at Beauge four years ago when the English whipped us. And again at Verneuil.”

“That was last year, wasn’t it? And it was another English victory. Why do they beat us all the time? Are we all cowards?”

He smiled faintly. “Some of us are fools. Ever since Crécy the English longbows have been cutting us down. I think we need a new idea, a new kind of weapon. Nobody’s come up with that new idea yet.”

“So you’re a soldier. You look like a nobleman.”

His shoulders moved inside the leather jerkin. “In a way, I suppose I am. My father was a duke, my mother the wife of a wealthy noble. Obviously then, I was born out of wedlock.”

His tone of voice dared her to make comment, but there was no emotion at all on her placid face. Bastardy was more common than not in her way of life. No one thought anything of it; indeed, most of her friends never knew whether they were legitimate or illegitimate, and, if they thought of it at all, it was with an utter lack of concern. Life itself was enough to give them worry these days. For a moment he studied her carefully, before deciding that she was unaware of his perturbation. Jean suppose he worried overmuch about his bastardy, yet the fact rankled in him like a sliver beneath the skin.

Out of that resentment he said, “I’d intended to be a cleric or priest and spend my days in a monastery. The Burgundians beat that idea out of me when they captured me in Paris during the Fourteen-eighteen Armagnac persecutions. They made me their prisoner. A year later I escaped, with the help of the jailer’s wife.”

“You don’t have much trouble with women, do you?”

“I like women. I like everything about them, sometimes even their perverseness.” He remembered Marie Louvet—he still refused to call her his wife—and sighed in melancholy fashion.

Her laughter rang out. “My name is Simone. What’s yours?”

“Jean. The Bastard.”

“You make it sound like a title.”

“It’s better than being ashamed of it.”

She considered him steadily while swaying to the rhythmic walking of her horse. “You know, I think you like being a bastard. It gives you a feeling of being put upon, an excuse for failure, as it were.”

He reached for her wrist so suddenly that she was dragged halfway out of her saddle before she knew what he was doing. The horses came to a stop, the gelding shaking its ringbits with up and down motions of its head. The blonde woman lay with a shoulder crushed to his chest, one foot completely out of the stirrup. If his arm released her, she would fall onto the road.

And yet she knew no fear. This young man was angry, but it was a controlled anger. He said to her blonde head, looking down at it, “I never fail. You understand? Jean le Bâtard never fails!”

“I was only testing you, seigneur.”

“Don’t call me seigneur.”

“Jean, then.”

“There’s straw in your hair. We’ll stop at the next brook and you can clean it.”

He lifted her back into her saddle and smiled. As if the touch of her body had struck some psychic spark inside him, he looked at her with the eyes of a man who finds a beautiful woman before him. Simone preened herself, letting the brown wool outline her heavy breasts, the curves of her solid thighs. A lone woman needed a protector in these lawless times, and Simone knew only one way to acquire one.

They moved on for another hundred yards; then Jean asked, “Testing me for what?”

“To see if there’s a fire inside your rib case. I think there is. I have an offer to make such a man.”

“Go on.”

“In the tiny village of Neufchâteau there lives an old soldier named Thibaud. He has an idea for a new weapon he calls a cannon.”

Jean hooted. “A cannon? The Black Prince used cannon against Calais nearly a hundred years ago, when Edward the Third invaded the north countries!”

“I know nothing about that. All I know is that he claims it’s new. It has something to do with the cannonball itself, I think.”

He pondered that, riding through the dust of early afternoon. He would like to believe the blonde woman, but common sense told him there was no merit in the idea. A new type of cannonball? One made of wood or glass instead of iron? It would serve no purpose. The idea was ridiculous.

And yet—

Sometimes a man had to snatch at straws so that he might bring victory from despair, strengthening them with the fiber of his will and his own strength as straw itself is mixed with clay and sand to give bricks greater cohesion. And nowhere in all France, he thought, was there a man more despairing than himself.

“How far is this Neufchâteau?”

“A score of leagues away, near the River Meuse.”

“This man could be dead by now.”

Simone looked willful. “He may. I haven’t seen him for five or six years. But if you mean what you say—that you’re a soldier and need some fancy new weapon to fight Englishmen and Burgundians—I should think you’d want to make the trip.”

“I also want to kill the men who murdered my father.”

“Now there I cannot help you.”

Jean grinned wolfishly. “Maybe you can, at that.”

She asked questions, but he would say nothing until they reined in on the bank of a small stream that twisted through the ploughland country to meet the Oise near Creil. Beech trees grew all around, forming a little glade. Where the banks of the brook sloped downward, a wide plat of blue gentians bloomed in woodland splendor.

“We’ll eat here from the food you put in the saddlebags,” he told her, reaching up his arms to help her off the horse.

He watched her walk with swaying hips toward the brook, long hair flowing down her back. She knelt and bent her head, letting the water take the golden strands. Her hands moved in the stream, washing out the burrs and bits of straw. When she was done she put her head to one side, hands wringing the water from her thick hair, kneeling in graceful indolence and smiling up at him.

“There are cold turnips in the bag, and cheese with bread and some fruit,” she told him. “Or do you want me to fetch it?”

Jean stirred himself, remembering his role of gentleman adventurer. It was hard to play at being two men, for he was so used to being waited on by servants he forgot that a commoner had no one to fetch and carry for him. With a grin he went and lifted down the saddlebags, and brought them to her.

Her yellow hair was spread fanlike across her back and shoulders. It glinted in the sunlight as if spun from faery gold, framing her slant gray eyes and ripe red mouth. Sitting beside her, he let her break the manchet loaf and pass half to him with a wedge of homemade cheese.

“If you’re what you say you are,” she murmured, “and your father was a duke, why are you dressed like an ordinary soldier?”

He saw that disbelief was strong in her. Impishness made him lift the leather aumonière at his belt, open it and shake out the livres tournois in a golden shower. Simone sat up straighter, crying out in awe. When he caught the signet ring set with the nettles of Orleans, she took it in her hand and regarded him steadily.

“You might have stolen it.”

“I didn’t. My father gave it to me.”

“The duke?”

“Louis of Orleans.”

She bent forward with laughter so infectious that he joined in her merriment. When she could talk, she wiped tears of mirth from her cheeks with the back of a hand and said, “You aim high, in God’s name! Louis of Orleans? Why—that makes you cousin to the Dauphin!”

“The Dauphin made me Seigneur of Vaubernais and one of his counselors. A little later he named me Grand Chamberlain of France.”

“Fou!” You’re mad, utterly mad!” Her eyes went to the ring as she turned it over and over. “If you’re all these things, why are you here?”

“To kill my father’s murderers. I quarreled with Arthur de Richemont, who is Constable of France. I had my belly full of court life. I wanted to get away from it.”

And from Marie Louvet who became your wife in name only, Jean? To escape the witchery of her dark eyes and red mouth, the mere sight of which always caused an agonizing pain to stab your heart?

He said thoughtfully, “In a way, I think I was looking for death. Perhaps I hoped one of the men who killed my father would kill me, too. None has, so far. Within the week I’ll give another of them the chance.”

“I almost believe you,” she said, handing back the ring, lifting the leather pouch and filling it with the golden coins.

“Étienne Aymon lives in a small manor house near Montmirail, which is not so far from here we could not stop by on our way to Neufchâteau. He’s one of the men who hacked my father to pieces on the Rue Vielle du Temple.”

He looped the aumonière to his belt and stood, looking down at her. “Well? Are you coming with me?”

Simone held up her hands so he could raise her to her feet. Her eyes were somber. “You said I could help you, a while back. Now tell me how.”

“I’ve reason to believe these murderers communicate with one another. They know I’m somewhere between Paris and Artois. They’ll be expecting me, but they won’t be expecting me to have a wife with me.”

“Ah, you begin to make sense.”

She pushed a sandaled foot into the stirrup and rose to the saddle, her brown woolen skirt riding back from a bare and shapely leg. Jean bent and kissed the smooth skin of her thigh.

Simone laughed and pushed him away. “What man kisses his wife’s leg when he sees a bit of bared flesh?”

“A newlywed,” he grinned.

Her eyebrows arched. “You think of everything, it seems.”

Then she reined the heavy horse away from the brook and kicked it into a canter. Jean watched her for a long moment, lips pursed. This idea that had come to him so suddenly was not so poor in merit, at that. True, his wife would need more clothes than she wore at the moment to act out the part he had in mind, but his purse was heavy with livres tournois. Excitement began to build in his blood.

The common room of the Inn of the Gray Mule, which lay on the Montmirail road just beyond the town, was heavy with excitement in this early hour of the evening. A dozen young bloods from neighboring manor houses were crowding about the dice table, where Étienne Aymon was meeting a run of bad luck. Already a large pile of gold ecus lay before a swaggering young cockerel, whose laughter rang out with uninhibited delight. The rattle of the dice was loud in his cupped hand. Except for the patter of the barmaid’s feet as she carried a tray of wine bottles across the rush-strewn floor, it was the only sound in the room.

“I win again!” the young man in the leather jerkin shouted, as the dice rolled to a stop.

“Devil take it,” snarled Aymon.

“Mayhap the devil does take it, milord,” whispered a slim, sly man at Aymon’s elbow.

Jean le Bâtard reached across the gaming table. His hand closed down on the shirt front of the speaker and dragged him halfway across the tabletop. His dagger point pressed against the man’s throat.

“We French burn scorcerers, mon ami,” he whispered softly to the terrified man, who lay staring up at him with bulging eyes. “I wouldn’t like to think some careless words of yours might bring me to the stake.”

Aymon growled, “My Pinchon only joked.”

“I spoke to Pinchon, milord. Let him answer for himself.”

Pinchon nodded, sweat staining his pinched face. He could read death for him in the hard eyes and sun-browned face above him. The others—the young ones from the manor houses—were just drunk enough to regard it as a good joke. He had seen evidences of the crude humor of the young bloods before now. His good friend Gilles Drouet had had to have a leg cut off because a group of nobles’ sons had staked him out in an outer court during a snowstorm and then forgot about him.

He babbled, “I jested, good sir, as milord Etienne says. A jest, young lord. Only a matter to laugh about.”

Jean grinned down at him mirthlessly. “Have you ever seen anybody burned alive, Pinchon?”

Pinchon shook his head back and forth.

“I have. A young woman accused of being a witch, in Dauphiné. It wasn’t a pretty sight.”

His hand yanked the man across the gaming table to fall at his feet. “I think we ought to give you a taste of the flames yourself to teach you proper manners.”

The young bloods began to laugh and talk among themselves. Jean hoped they would not like the idea too much; he threatened only to rouse Etienne Aymon to the protection of his manservant. His quarrel was with the older man, not with the servant.

Aymon came forward, as Jean had intended. “Here now, no need to go to such lengths. No need at all. There’s no harm done. My Pinchon spoke in jest. You heard him yourself.”

“He accused me of serving the devil!” Jean rasped.

“Non, non!” Pinchon begged on his knees. “You misunderstood. It was only a figure of speech.”

“Pah!” Jean snapped, thrusting the man away and reaching for the pile of golden ecus on the table. “Your master’s a poor loser, Pinchon. You only spoke to placate him.”

Étienne Aymon made a long face. “You’ve a sharp tongue there, young man. It might be necessary for you yourself to take a lesson in good manners.”

The younger men shouted, scenting blood. Jean paused amid their cries and laughter, his hands over the gold coins. His dark eyes raked the older man as he said, “If you weren’t old enough to be my father, I’d call you out for that, seigneur”.

Aymon grinned coldly. “I was killing men while you were in swaddling garments. I haven’t forgotten the knack.”

“With odds of seventeen to one in your favor, it takes no courage to hack a man to bloody bits.”

Étienne Aymon paled and looked about him. Few men these days knew he was one of that band who’d cut down the Duke of Orleans outside the Hotel Montagu in Paris, eighteen years before. Ever since this handsome upstart had crossed glances with him earlier in the evening, he had been aware of his strong dislike. He thought now that dislike might be too mild a term. What he read in that hard face was actual hatred. For a brief moment he wondered if he faced The Bastard himself, Jean de Valois, that headstrong son of Louis of Orleans who had adopted the task, so gossip went, of ridding the world of the men who had taken Burgundian gold to slay his father.

No, that thought was madness. This was no more than an ordinary soldier of fortune with a sharp tongue. He could not visualize the cousin of the Dauphin coming to a lonely tavern in Brie alone, without retainers, clad in plain leather and cavalier boots, with only a longsword at his side and a new bride waiting in an upstairs solar.

He said gruffly, “Come, now. We’re all friends still, I trust. No need for lost tempers.”

Jean smiled coldly. “A sensible about face. Lost tempers often result in lost blood.”

The older man roared, “By God, young one! Don’t force me to cut you down. You’re on your honeymoon, you said. Go upstairs to your wife with your winnings and account yourself lucky.”

Jean swept the last of the coins into the sack. Still on the gaming table was a silver brooch and a ring, which Aymon had lost on the final toss of the dice. Jean palmed them, swept them into the sack as well. He drew the tie strings and knotted them.

He turned on a heel and moved toward the outer hall, past one of the long tables still laden with overturned wine goblets and the dregs of a meal. He looked triumphant and pleased with himself, but inside he seethed with anger. Somewhere he had bungled, he knew. By now, Étienne Aymon should be standing out in the inn yard with him, naked swords in their hands. Instead the murderer was going home to his manor house while he went upstairs to Simone.

Eh, bien! He would make another try tomorrow.

“Stranger!”

The voice rang clear and loud across the common room. Jean turned in the doorway, not troubling to conceal his feelings. He did not know it, but there was an imperious manner to his Valois stance that was like a slap in the face to these country seigneurs.

Aymon growled, “I was about to ask you to share a last hanap of claret with me, but now I’m damned if I will.” His face revealed the tortured thoughts that ran through him as his eyes assessed this hard-bitten stranger.

“It’s just as well. I only drink with equals.”

Ah, that did it! Aymon was halfway across the room now, taking great, pounding steps, hands outstretched to come to grips with his tormentor. Jean stepped sideways with the instincts of the swordsman and shoved the older man sideways into a table. For a moment Aymon hung there, gasping for breath, face flushed with rage.

“You’ll pay, young one!” he roared when he could, straightening and waving an arm at Pinchon. “Outside in the yardway, with cold steel.”

Jean bowed. “I’ll fetch my blade at once.”

He moved into the hall and up the worn wooden stairs, triumph making him tread lightly. Within the hour Étienne Aymon would join his comrades of that long-ago night in death by his hand. There would be two left then, two out of the original seventeen. Those he himself had not accounted for had died by this time, and lay in graves from Ponthieu to Navarre.

His hand thrust open the door to their bedroom. Simone was standing in one of the three kirtles he had bought for her at a mercer’s stall in Soissons, head turned to study the drape of her long skirt in a hand mirror propped on a chest. Her thick yellow hair was piled carelessly atop her head. He paused to study her.

She laughed when she saw him and made a pirouette, the skirt flying above bare knees. “Am I not the lady of quality? Oh, I’ve never had anything as wonderful as these clothes!”

She ran to him, caught him in her arms and kissed him gratefully. Under the blue velvet she wore nothing at all, not even the thin linen camisa which most highborn ladies adopted as an undergarment. The low neckline exposed the upper slopes of pallid breasts. Jean had not made love to her as yet. Vengeance was an exacting taskmaster, he was discovering.

“Aymon’s challenged me,” he told her. “It took a bit of doing, but we’re meeting in the inn yard shortly. I’ve come for my sword.”

Fright gleamed in her slanted eyes. “Suppose he kills you? I’ll be left—no, that’s selfish of me.”

He removed the aumonière from his belt and pressed it into her fingers. “There’s a fortune in ecus in this purse. I won more from Aymon at dice. It’s all yours if what you fear comes true.”

“I don’t want your gold. I want you.”

He kissed the corners of her mouth, then moved her aside so he could cross the room and lift the plain scabbard that housed his Missiglia blade. He frowned.

“There’s always a chance those young men belowstairs may interfere if the swordplay grows too heated and I have Aymon on the run. If that happens, they may thirst for my blood as I thirst for Aymon’s.”

She waited, scarcely breathing. When he hesitated, she said, “Then we ought to be prepared to leave as soon as the duel begins.” Her peasant common sense made him grin.

“You understand, ma cherie,” he murmured.

Simone sighed and looked at her reflection in the little mirror. “I’ll pack and be ready in the stables. Peste! I knew I’d never get a chance to enjoy these gowns.”

She was slipping a white arm free of the downfalling kirtle as he paused in the doorway to stare. “You’ll have plenty of time to play the lady on the road to Neufchâteau, I promise. For now, dress for a fast ride. I may be starting at shadows, but I’d rather be prepared than be caught napping. Have the horses saddled just inside the livery stable so I’ll know where to find you in a hurry.”

Her ripe white breasts hung naked above the fallen bodice as she nodded. Simone caught the sudden longing in his eyes and smiled lazily. For the past two days, on the road to Montmirail, she’d begun to wonder about this young seigneur; most of the men she knew would have thrown her on her back in a roadside ditch long ago. She supposed noblemen did things differently than common folk, though.

Just the same, he might be a little more ambitious where she was concerned, she thought, watching the door close behind him. A woman liked to think she was desirable to a man, especially to such a man as Jean le Bâtard. Her hands pushed the dress down as she lifted a slim white leg from the pooling velvet. Almost without thought she turned her head to gaze at her reflection in the hand mirror. Simone giggled at what she saw.

Étienne Aymon and the others were waiting; beneath the wooden sign carved in the shape of a mule and hung on creaking, rusted chains. Behind them the yardway stretched for fifty feet, opening onto the coach-house apron. It made a good place for a duel. As he advanced toward his opponent, Jean reflected that a lot of hot blood had been cooled on this narrow stretch of ground.

Aymon was scowling, waving his sword back and forth as Jean faced him. “First blood or death?” he wanted to know.

Jean said, “You name it, seigneur.”

“First blood, then. I’ll be merciful to you.”

There were no rules of nicety to govern swordplay between two enemies in this year of 1425. It was flail away with the steel until arms grew weary and one man faltered. The heavy shields that were carried into battle were rarely available at these tavern quarrels, and a style of swordplay was beginning that made the blade point and shield at the same time. In Saxony and Bohemia, guilds of swordsmen were already banding together to teach this new style of fence.

One of these Germans, a member of the Marcusbruder guild in Frankfort, had tutored The Bastard in his formative years. A bond had grown up between the old soldier and the lonely child, a bond which, begun in the castle courtyard at Angers with cold steel, had flowered into a firm friendship. For more than a dozen years old Rodolf had taught Jean as much as he knew about the longswords.

Now as he faced Étienne Aymon—as he had faced Guillaume the Fleming and François of Anjou—Jean once again blessed old Rodolf for his painstaking thoroughness. In his big brown hand the sword was more than an inanimate length of steel. It flashed in the lamplight with seeming life as it touched the blade of his opponent, disengaged and came flying in with a sidewise slash at the older man’s unprotected flask.

Aymon managed to leap out of the way, but it was a near thing. Nervous sweat stood out of his forehead as he came stamping in, swinging his blade with overmuch gusto and little wisdom.

Jean caught the slicing blows, turned them aside with a twist of his strong wrist. He let Aymon expend his energy in a series of bull-like rushes before he took the attack, driving forward with a guile that made his darting blade seem a living thing as it parried and thrust and hurtled through the air in overhead molinellos.

The fear of death was clearly readable in Aymon’s eyes now. He gave ground swiftly, betraying the fact that fright was a nausea in his belly. He yelled aloud in his fear, his face pale and wet, mouth twisted into a caricature of terror.

“Raimond! Arnaud! Peleria! Aid me for sweet Jesu’s sake! He only plays with me. Pinchon was right. He’s in league with Satan!”

Jean laughed harshly. “As you were yourself when you slew my father, seigneur? Oui—Louis le duc! Ah, you remember it, do you? I’m glad because—”

His sword was swinging down at a defenseless face when three of the young men who had been in the common room came bounding from the shadows, swords bared. Jean was forced to turn from the older man in midstroke to catch their flying blades and deflect them. He backed away slowly, parrying and disengaging, listening to Étienne Aymon pant as he leaned a shoulder against the inn wall. Fury was a fire in his middle.

The murderer had escaped him! In his terror he’d called out to his young hotbloods, urging them to take over his quarrel. Blind anger fueled Jean’s arm. He cut and slashed until one of the three men facing him went down screaming in pain, his swordarm sliced to the bone.

The others drew back and stared at their kneeling friend. They had not counted on being hurt themselves. It was sheer sport to take up the Sieur Aymon’s quarrel, sport to bring this stranger to his death in the inn yard. Now, however—

Jean whirled and leaped for Étienne Aymon in this moment of their bemusement. The older man saw him coming just in time to stop the sword slash, which would have cloven his head from his body. As it was, the edge cut deep into his shoulder.

Étienne Aymon screeched.

Jean was drawing back his blade for a deciding thrust when he heard the pound of boot heels. Half a dozen more of the young hotbloods were rounding the corner of the timbered inn, drawing steel as they ran.

“Until another time, seigneur!” Jean rasped.

He ran for his life, knowing that the slightest misstep or blunder would give his pursuers a chance to flesh their blades in his body. Pray God that Simone was packed and in the saddle. Pray God that his black gelding was eager to run!

He skidded on the yard pebbles, then raced for the open doorway of the inn livery stable. He saw Simone in a hooded chaperon, mounted on her gray—a fast mare he’d traded the two horses and a gold tournois for just outside the Abbey of Saint Madard in Soissons—and bringing the black gelding with her by the reins. Her face was flushed with excitement as she stared beyond him at the oncoming young men.

“Hurry, Jean!” she called. “Vite!”

He went up over the gelding’s cruppers with both hands spread on its croup and hit the saddle with a jarring shock that ran up into his backbone. He banged a toe into the black’s ribs.

Then Simone was a slim figure in her enveloping cloak half a pace ahead of him, bent low across the whipping mane of her fleet mare. They raced stirrup to stirrup out of the inn yard, swinging south on the winding road to Châlons. Jean blessed the foresight that had made him exchange those plow horses for the gray and the fate that had taught Simone, as a farm girl, to ride as well as himself.

They took the road at a driving gallop, dirt clumps flying up from under the thudding hoofs, the wind of their passage fluttering her cloak and cutting through his leather jerkin. His Missiglia sword lay in the inn yard, dropped in his feverish haste. Without it, he was defenseless.

Again he cursed those young hotbloods, under his breath but savagely, consigning them to hellfire for their efforts. To flee, like a terrified hare before the hounds, in front of Étienne Aymon and his Montmirail companions was a bitter mouthful for the proud Jean of Orleans. Twice he stood in the stirrups, turning to search the road behind him, both times seeing them hotfooting it after him, no more than a mile away.

His lips firmed. He must lose them! Without a blade he would be unable to defend himself or Simone. He knew enough of their kind to understand what would happen to Simone once they’d disposed of him. A sickness came into his middle at the thought. He’d grown fond of the blonde woman in the few days he had known her.

“Faster, faster,” he called, and touched a prick-spur to the gelding.

Both animals responded by lengthening their strides. Now, when he looked back, it became harder and harder to see their pursuers. The mile became two, then three. By dawn and with luck, they might shake them completely.

The road curved through a little woods here. The overhanging branches were so thickly entwined they shut out the moon, the sky and its stars. Te Jean it appeared they were running through a Stygian blackness with neither beginning nor end.

And then the world erupted around them.

Men came leaping from underbrush and thickets, from behind tree boles and fallen logs, dirty clapperclaws in stinking furs and wolfskins and untanned hides, unkempt and ragged. Their hands caught at bridles and reins, pulling the mare and gelding to a halt. Greasy fingers yanked at Simone, bore her from the saddle to the ground. Jean went backward himself, flailing with fists and legs, striking hard again and again before sheer weight of numbers pinned his back to the ground.

“Rich pickin’s!” howled a voice.

“Our luck be turned for fair!”

“The woman’s mine!”

“No—mine!”

They might have fought like the beasts they had become had not Jean cried out, “Wait, you fools! Wait! Listen to me!”

A hand cuffed him hard alongside his jaw, but he shook his head to free his numbing wits and cried, “If you want gold—listen!”

The word was a magic incantation that threw a hush over them. A burly brute whose naked chest and back was sheathed in thick hair came crowding through the others, leering. Behind him he dragged a shivering Simone, trying to be modest in the few tatters the lusting fingers had left on her

“What’s this talk of gold?”

Jean said, “I’m a runaway servant. The man I served is chasing us. I stole his mistress and his money. Here—see for yourselves!”

They let him go long enough for him to undo the tie strings of the purse in which he carried his dice winnings. His hand threw a score of the ecus d’or among the cutthroats. The men scrabbled in the dirt for the coins, but their hairy leader held his pig eyes tight on Jean, who had struggled to his feet and stood swaying among them.

The hairy man growled, “Oui, it’s gold. There’s more of it in the purse you carry.”

“And even more coming along the road with Sieur Aymon!”

They cried out at that, turning to stare back along the forest road. Their leader grinned, showing blackened teeth.

“I can take your gold and their gold, no thanks to you,” he said, yanking Simone to her knees before him. “I’ll take your woman, too.”

“I can help you get the gold with little effort,” Jean said desperately, knowing the bitter taste of defeat. He watched the hairy man take a handful of Simone’s loosened hair and turn her face upward. “You won’t lose a man if you listen to me.”

The bandit chieftain laughed harshly. “What do I care for these pigs’ lives? Most of them have lived too long already.”

The men were muttering behind him. Jean read their hate and fear of this brutish man who led them. He spoke to them, ignoring the hairy man. “Well? What do you say? Will you let this two-legged beast browbeat you for the rest of your lives? Or will you use what little wits the good God gave you to grow rich in a single hour with my help?”

The brute roared and leaped, a dagger gleaming in his closed fist, but Jean had been expecting this; he pivoted on a foot and caught the hairy arm, brought it over a shoulder and whirled. The hairy man flew through the air ten feet to land hard on his back with the wind knocked out of him.

The clapperclaws stared from their leader to this surprising newcomer. Some of them grinned in delight at what they had seen. A few scowled. But all of them showed the light of greed in their eyes.

Jean said, “Gold for all. Gold to buy you wine or a tavern wench! Eh? What about it?”

Simone had crept across the road to kneel beside Jean’s legs. Jean smiled down at her, touched her head with his hand.

The outlaws looked from the woman to the man and then to their fallen chief. Indecision and doubt made them fidget from one foot to the other. Jean raised his hand.

“Listen! The Sieur Aymon comes at the gallop. Make up your minds. Is it my plan or not? Without yonder beast—his wits too addled to serve you now!—to command you, you’re no better than animals before a plow. Well? Do you follow my plan?”

“Oui!” said an old man.

“Oui Yes. Yes!” the others cried.

“Then back into the woods, and be ready to leap when I cry out, ‘À Valois for vengeance!’ You understand?”

They melted in among the tree boles with the stealthiness of those whose lives depend upon their silence. Two of them dragged the hairy man between them. The road was empty. Simone rose to her feet, the tatters of her blue velvet kirtle hanging in shreds about her white hips and long legs.

“They are beasts!” she whispered to him fiercely. “Ride now—while we can!”

His laughter was soft but savage. “And forget Étienne Aymon, who rides to slay me as he slew my father?”

Her gray eyes were wide with shock. “Would you risk both our lives to satisfy your blood lust?”

“I would! Now this is what I want you to do . . .”

When the Sieur Étienne Aymon and his nine companions came thundering into view along the forest road, they saw their quarry dismounted—the man bent above the near fore hoof of the gray mare as if to fix its shoe, the woman crying out and pointing, turning to flee.

Sight of the man made Aymon stand in his stirrups and wave his sword. Sight of the woman caused his hot-blooded companions to forget everything but her long yellow hair and the tantalizing glimpses of white flesh that gleamed through her torn garments.

The knight was aiming a downward stroke with his blade when Jean whirled and leaped for the headstall of his mount, shouting, “À Valois for vengeance! À Valois for vengeance!”

The horse reared high. Men exploded from the forests on both sides of the road, daggers in their hands and hot greed in their eyes. The road became a confusion of shouts and stabbings. Riderless horses went plunging through the melee, one or two dragging the corpses of their recent masters along the ground.

The Sieur Aymon rasped curses but was unable to still the frightened dancings of his horse. The man clinging to the bridle was darting this way and that, avoiding the thrusts of his blade, reaching up powerful hands to clasp them on boot top and breeches, yanking sideways overbalancing him.

Étienne Aymon gave a loud cry as he felt the saddle slipping out from under him. He sought to ward off the wild-eyed stranger whom he was beginning to suspect was Asmodeus come up from hellfire to slay him. He screamed and struggled when those fingers wrapped about his throat.

“For your murderous lusts, seigneur!” a voice panted at him. “For your foul treachery! For your lack of manhood, which made you call for help in an affair of honor!”

Madness rode Jean le Batard in this moment of his revenge. His fingers sank deep into soft flesh. His powerful arms bore the full weight of his body down on his enemy. Only when Étienne Aymon lay limp and lifeless under him did he roll free and kneel dazed and trembling in the bloody dirt.

Simone touched him with a hand.

“Jean—the hairy man!”

His glazed eyes rose to find the bandits motionless, the dead bodies of the young hotbloods stripped and bare at their feet. Their eyes touched their leader, who was advancing slowly with a bared sword in his hand.

Jean moved his eyes this way and that before he caught sight of the Sieur Aymon’s fallen sword. His hand caught it up. The haft felt familiar; with a thrill of recognition he knew the Missiglia blade. At least Aymon had understood good steel when he saw it, he thought, and braced himself.

The hairy man charged, point ripping through the air to disembowel. Jean swung. Sparks flew as steel met steel. The bandit leader cursed, but Jean wasted no time in words. His arm completed its swing. Now his blade towered straight up into the air, a glittering length of death.

The brute screamed.

The steel sheared into his bare poll, splitting his skull with an overhand molinello. He crumpled and lay twitching in muscular spasms for several moments.

Jean stared at him, then looked around at the dumb faces of the riffraff. Awe and fear looked back at him from those brute features, together with an emotion that seemed very much out of place among such clapperclaws as these. After a moment Jean knew it for pride.

“You made us rich, seigneur!”

“Oui! You shall be our chief!”

“There’s none can stand against us wi’ you showing the way.”

Simone was warm against his arm, pressing close. “They’re telling you that you can give them their manhood back, Jean,” she whispered. “Most of them used to be soldiers, I gather from what little I heard of their talk while you fought.”

He snorted, “What need have I for leadership of such a pack? As well aspire to lead wolves.”

When he would have moved toward the black gelding, he found his way blocked. They were respectful but stubborn. Their hands stretched out, pleading. In their eyes he saw shame and guilt for sins without number, for murder, rape and torture.

“Lead us! Lead us!”

“We be your men. You won us in fair fight.”

“Killed Pol, you did. You take his place!”

Half of them wore the rotting skins of beasts, the other half were clad in little more than their own hides, hairy and unwashed. They clasped crude weapons—a knotted club, a rusted scythe blade, a barnyard ax. And yet Jean fancied that he saw, deep in their eyes, a tiny flicker of pride, lost amid the years of murder and rapine, that said these were men, not animals.

In anger at himself he cursed softly. “What do you want of me?” he shouted, counting heads. There were more than forty of them, each man seemingly more ragged and less human than the next. Lead such as these to pillage and steal? He shuddered.

“I fought at Beauge,” a man called out.

“And I at Verneuil!”

“This stump of wrist I came by at Agincourt ten years ago,” yelled a third, waving a handless arm over his head.

A tall man, lean with starvation but with a twinkle in his eyes, slipped to the fore. “We all be soldiers, lord. When there was no more fighting, we went home and found our homes burned, our wives and children slain. There was none to care for us. We had to care for ourselves as best we could.”

“And you stole and raped.”

The thin man grinned wryly. “It was the only way we knew. When we went to till our lands, the English and Burgundians came and whipped us, driving us off.”

“What do men call you?”

“Jean, lord. Jean of Lorraine.”

The Bastard grunted and looked at Simone. Her hands were idly braiding a strand of thick yellow hair, but he saw pity in her face.

His voice raised above the mutterings. “All right, all right. I’ll lead you if you want to be led. Where’s your camp?”

“In the deep woods, lord, where none but us can go.”

Jean shrugged and turned to Simone. “At least we can rest for the night in safety,” he told her. “Tomorrow we’ll worry about everything else.”

His cupped hands made a rest for her foot as she swung up on the gray mare. The blue velvet kirtle she had donned so proudly in the bedchamber of the Inn of the Gray Mule hung in tatters from her shoulders. Jean could see one pale breast in its entirety and a smoothly rounded hip where a dagger had slashed the velvet.

“We left so suddenly I had no time to bring other clothes,” she murmured, trying to pull the bodice together.

“I’m not complaining,” he grinned, and slid his palm along her smooth thigh. She did not push his hand away but only laughed, softly and provocatively.

The brigands lead the way on silent feet, moving like shadows between the tree boles. Overhead the moon was a yellow fruit, glimpsed between tree branches. An aura of fantasy held Jean in its grip. He swayed to the movement of the gelding, staring at the bare heads and shoulders of the men who surrounded him, wondering a little at the fate that had brought him so far from his estates in Dauphiné to this lonely Brie forest. Just beyond the bobbing head of his mount rode a woman he had not know a week ago, a woman whom he had passed off as his wife, who did not resent the casual manner in which he stroked her naked thigh.

He wondered about Marie Louvet.

And if he would ever see her again.