Читать книгу Graynelore - Stephen Moore - Страница 16

When the Elfwych woman turned her back on me and walked away, heading towards The Rise, and Staward Peel, I did nothing more than follow after her.

I walked a-foot. Dandelion came trailing behind me, her ears pricked but without complaint. If there was any danger remaining, it was far enough away now and of little enough concern to ignore.

The toning of the iron bells accompanied us.

‘You have another name, Elfwych?’ I called out to her, raising my voice to be heard.

For the briefest moment she faltered in her step, as if caught, surprised to find me still there. ‘Use your eyes and look about you, Wishard,’ she said. ‘Upon Graynelore people die for their names.’ There was a slow drawl to her speech that told me her head was still befuddled by the blows I had struck. Though it had not blunted her tongue; the way she spoke dared me to make an argument. It was a mute point.

‘Aye, well, listen to the bells…There has been enough of death,’ I said, honestly enough. ‘What do you say to an equal trade instead…a name for a name?’

‘Ha! Does that not depend upon the goods offered being of an equal value, and the trader not simply a common thief?’

‘Are you a thief then, Elfwych?’ I was goading her.

‘And is my name safe with you, Wishard?’

‘Rogrig…’ I corrected her. If I did not answer her question (I did not wish to lie). It seemed she did not want one.

‘I am called Norda,’ she said, without inference.

It was my turn to falter in my step. I turned my head aside, certain I could not easily conceal my reaction to her revelation. I knew the name, of course. Who upon the West or South March of Graynelore did not? This woman was Norda Elfwych, the elder daughter of Stain Elfwych, Headman of his grayne. It was she that Old-man Wishard had set his eye upon (aye, and his lust). She was the prize we were fighting for this day.

Suddenly the iron bells stopped their toning. One by one, they were quickly stilled. Their message was delivered.

The silence they left behind them lay thick and heavy upon the air. No natural sound was willing to intrude upon it. It seemed the world had taken a deep breath, and now held it, waiting upon an outcome.

We continued to walk on together, if always at a safe distance from each other; still wary enemies and adversaries, and neither of us quite willing to take our hands away from our concealed weapons. (No fighting man – or woman – wears but one.) Though I carried my sword sheathed.

‘I did not ask you for an escort home, Rogrig Wishard,’ she said, at last, determined to break the uneasy silence between us.

‘I did not offer you one, Norda Elfwych,’ I returned.

‘Am I to be your prisoner then…is that it? Or perhaps you are to be mine?’ She tried to laugh, only to falter as she stumbled again.

This time I did not move to help her – though she was not expecting me to – I was being deliberately cautious of her now. She shook her head as if to clear her befuddlement, put a finger to her ear as if to stop the ringing. There was blood. Her pain was more than obvious. Certainly, she must have endured more serious injury – she was a fighter, and by reputation more than equal to many a man – only the last strike of my sword had knocked her cold. That had, obviously, annoyed her. I could read it in her face each time she glanced my way. She was, after all, the daughter of a Headman, and a privileged member of her grayne. (A grayne that, no doubt, felt it had a rightful claim to the title of Graynelord.) In her eyes, she had been brought to ground by a clumsy, common fell-man, a poor soldier-thief without distinction. She had managed to stick me with her knife and could well have finished it. Only, I sensed there was still something more to this than her common annoyance alone.

You are not even aware of your own true nature.

Did I say it, did I even think it? Or did she? She was looking my way, but her mouth was not moving. There were no words spoken. I will swear to it. I am a plain man, but I am not an idiot.

It might have been the voice of the babbling stream (all this time we had continued to follow its course), or else it was the movement of the leaves on a tree, or the scuffling of a breeze as it ran off through the long grass.

For certain I had felt a connection between us, but I had not understood it for anything more than, what? At best a weak man’s physical desire for a woman. She had roared at me. Why? Was it for my ignorance? (I did not know.) I had mistaken that too. So she had wounded me and I, in my turn, had struck her down. We both might thank the fortunes I had not the wit to take my advantage of her while I might.

Again I heard the whispers of an unspoken voice:

How long have I waited upon another…

‘What?’ I said.

Look to Wycken…You must look there…

‘Wycken? What did you say, there? What is this trickery?’

But that was the last of it.

Before me, Norda Elfwych looked suddenly ashen. Her face had drained white. She fell to her knees and let go the contents of her stomach.

I chose then to stay silent. I chose to remain Rogrig Stone Heart yet awhile. I waited with her until she was done and had cleaned herself up, then we walked on. We remained always just out of arm’s reach of each other. I deliberately followed a few steps behind her and let Dandy make her own way, free of her reigns.

We were not travelling alone, nor had we been for some time now. There were many others coming off the killing fields, instinctively covering the same ground. Some were riding, but as many men went a-foot now, driving their over-laden hobby-horses before them: the hobbs made to carry more than their full weight of dead men slung across their backs. Elfwych and Wishard moving in the same direction…

The fighting was done with. The day was won and it was lost. We were nearing The Rise, and close to the tower of Staward Peel, where we would wait upon the pronouncement of the manner of our truce, that we might all take ourselves safely to our homes again.