The Dragon, the Earl, and Read online

  "You stood and watched?" snapped Geronde. "And did nothing?"

  "I am an English wolf!" said Aargh. "What is it to me if you people kill or take from each other?"

  He looked around at all of them; but then he went on in a slightly less grim tone. "But as it happened, Geronde," he said, "I was barely upon them before the action started. Though I had heard them speaking among themselves here and all their other noises, as well as the approach of the people they slew—let alone the approach of your own men."

  "But when they went, you did nothing!" said Geronde.

  "What difference would it have made?" said Aargh. "Would it have brought the dead back to life? Do not judge me by your own two-legged standard, Geronde!"

  "I thought," said Geronde icily, "even a wolf would have more honor than that!"

  "Honor is nothing to me," said Aargh. "I know all like you live and die by it; but to me it is nothing. Kill and be killed is the way things have always been; and as they always will be. I, too, will die some day—as these have died."

  "Hush, I say!" said Angie in a loud but angry whisper. "Listen!"

  She moved her horse forward a few more steps, until it was almost beside the closer of the two dead serving women who had been obviously accompanying the knight and the lady of rank with him. She did not glance at the body below her, which was of a somewhat stout, middle-aged woman in lower-class clothes, who had obviously also been killed instantly, with an arrow clear through her chest. A second serving woman lay some little distance off, huddled up, with an arrow driven through her from the back, so that she seemed as if she must have been hunched over on the ground when it was shot.

  And then they all heard the sound.

  It was a thin, small noise, but coming in a moment of silence between their own voices, it was clear enough. Only, it was not clear from where around them it was coming. It had that odd quality, which some sounds possess, of seeming to come from any direction surrounding.

  "I do not like it," muttered Alfred.

  But Angie was already off her horse and starting to run toward the second serving woman. She took the body by the shoulder and rolled it aside, turning it over on its back revealing the face of a girl no older than her mid-teens, but with large breasts swelling the front of her dress, even with the layers of clothes she had been wearing for this wintry travel through the woods.

  Paying no attention to the dead girl, Angie snatched up what seemed to be a sort of bundle that had been hidden—almost protectively hidden—by the girl's body; and as she did, the piping sound came again, but more clearly, and was immediately identifiable as the cry of a baby.

  "A babe!" cried Geronde; and, catching up the reins of Angle's animal, she led it forward the necessary few paces to where Angie stood, hugging what still looked very much like a bundle stiffened by a board at its back.

  "Mount, Angela! You are in danger on the ground!"

  "Not while I'm here," came the harsh voice of Aargh, who had kept pace with Angie, Geronde and the two horses. Geronde turned on him.

  "You knew it was here all the time!" she said. "Why didn't you tell us?"

  "I was waiting to see how long it would take you to find it for yourselves," said Aargh. His mouth was open in a silent lupine laugh. "But I would not have waited so long that the pup would die. Indeed, I would even have saved the girl who carried it, for that she tried to protect it with her body."

  "Hand me the child, Angela!" said Geronde commandingly; for Angie was trying to climb on to her horse without letting go of the baby she held in her arms.

  Reluctantly, Angie passed the baby up to Geronde, who held it until Angie swung into her saddle and immediately took the child back.

  "Did you hear that?" said Angela. "She tried to protect her baby with her own life—and they killed her anyway!"

  "She was a wet nurse, no more!" said Geronde, almost impatiently. "See, the child has been over-swaddled with a strip of the finest wool—wool as fine as that which clothes her dead parents behind us here. The wench was only a wet nurse. Look at her servant's clothes!"

  But Angie was not listening. She was cuddling the infant in her arms, in spite of the awkwardness of the board at its back, to which it was swaddled. Surprisingly, for a child which had been dumped into the snow and left there—although it had fallen on its back, and the board behind it had kept it from direct contact with the white stuff—it was apparently making cheerful noises back to her through the small slit in the cloths that folded almost together over its face and hid its features completely. But after a few moments, the cheerful replies faded out and a little fretful crying began.

  "It must be hungry!" said Angie.

  "Well, there are no nurses among us!" said Geronde decisively. "But I have some fine sugar among the things I brought. We can mix that into a little water and twist the end of a cloth to make a teat the child can suck at."

  "The water must be boiled!" said Angie swiftly.

  "Boiled!" said Brian. "My Lady, we're in the midst of a wood with night coming on and Edsley Priory still some distance off. We can hardly make camp just to boil some water. There is snow enough around us that can be melted in a moment. But boiling it is another matter—"

  "In truth, Brian is right, Angela," said Geronde.

  "It must be boiled!" said Angie stubbornly. She looked at Jim.

  "Yes!" gabbled Jim, instantly getting the message. "It must be boiled in this case, to—to keep the simulacra of these deaths from disenfranchising the child's future!"

  There was no argument. The magician had spoken, and in words that were so completely impossible to understand that there could be no thought of arguing with them. Brian immediately set to ordering the necessary events.

  "Alfred," he said, "gallop ahead, tell them to take one of my steel helms, put enough of snow in it for a cup of water—a cup only, Alfred, mark you—and set it to boiling over a fire. It must be boiling by the time we get there!"

  Alfred thundered off through the trees.

  "Four of you others," said Brian to the rest of the men-at-arms, "make a hurdle from the branches you can find here, and use it to drag the bodies of the dead knight and the lady back to where the rest wait for us. We will take those two to Edsley Priory for Christian burial. Let all those not needed for that come back with us, now."

  He crossed himself and muttered a few words of what were obviously prayers, looking at the bodies in the snow. Geronde followed his example, and they turned their horses back toward the road. Jim and Angie with the extra men-at-arms followed. They moved their horses decorously at a walk, not so much for their own comfort, as because Angie refused to go any faster while she was carrying the baby, for fear of shaking it unnecessarily.

  Once rejoined with their original party, they found the fire lit. The melted snow was taking the benefit of its flames, the helmet ingeniously propped up on the ends of two logs too thick to burn all the way through before the water was brought to a boil.

  The water itself, of course, was not yet boiling. Nobody commented on this, however. In any case, the men were excluded at some distance—and happy to be so—while Angela, Geronde and their own three serving women fussed over the child in the process of getting some sustenance into it.

  Some little time went by.

  "Damme," said Brian; but in a low voice and only to Jim, whose horse was fidgeting beside Brian's horse as they sat a little apart from the men-at-arms. Brian sighed. His eyes met Jim's. "Oh, well!"

  Just then, however, the infant's crying ceased; and shortly after that, the women rejoined them with a baby that they were informed was sleeping.

  The rest of the ride in the fading daylight to Edsley Priory was a somewhat tense process. Angie was finally persuaded, mainly by Geronde, that a baby that had been carried on horseback as far as it obviously had been before its parents' death would be familiar with the motion of a trotting horse. Reluctantly she gave in. They all made better time; and the sun was still above the horizon when they came out
of the trees into the open space surrounding the dark stone buildings of the priory—in fact a small stone castle in itself—to which they were admitted without delay as soon as Brian's and Jim's names and rank were announced to the gateman.

  Jim was extremely happy to ride his horse through the gateway into the interior courtyard, and even happier to abandon the horse to one of the men and go through into the already rush-lit interior hallway of the priory. But it was almost as cold inside as it had been outside—except that here the icy breeze could not get at the marrow of his bones, the way it had seemed to be doing outside.

  The men-at-arms had already been taken off to the stables, where a great deal of straw, and the clothes they had with them, should enable them to burrow in and make nests that would keep them from freezing during the night. If they could not, the priory would necessarily regret the fact, but it would be the will of God. The two squires—Jim's and Brian's—came into the priory itself, to be housed in a closet-sized room near the kitchen.

  Jim and his companions encountered only a few fireplaces, with meager fires in them, as they were led through the building; but there was a good fire burning in the stone-walled room with one narrow, tapestry-covered window, which was made available to Angie and Jim.

  Jim, however, found himself almost immediately banished from that warm place; it was immediately turned into a nursery populated by Angie, Geronde and the servant women only. There were all sorts of things to be done for the infant, particularly as it had come into their hands with no spare clothing, or anyone to nurse it.

  Jim remembered vaguely that it had been ascertained back on his twentieth-century world that even otherwise childless women could produce milk for infants, if the proper stimuli were there. Angie, of course, would know about that. Meanwhile, it turned out—though he had no idea about how the message could have been passed so quickly—that the priory was already sending out to the surrounding lands it owned for a nursing mother to come in and feed the baby while it was in residence.

  Jim himself was sent to join Brian in the cubicle—it could hardly be called a room—where he had been put. However it, too, did have a fireplace, and the room was small enough so that the fire was already making it comfortable.

  Brian had made himself comfortable, Jim saw, with food and wine—which had probably been produced automatically by their hosts—that now sat on a small table. The wine was a bright, cheerful-looking red liquid, probably a vintage reserved for guests of quality. But the food consisted of a plate with several stockfish—as dried herring were commonly called—which Jim could smell the moment he entered the room. For the moment at least, Brian was ignoring them. A lenten dish indeed.

  "Drink up and sit down, James!" said Brian. He was sitting at his ease in a padded barrel chair with his legs outstretched, their lower extremities propped on part of his baggage so that the sodden soles of his riding boots—in appearance more like half-socks of leather, in their heelless fourteenth-century design, were toward the flames in the fireplace.

  "No," he went on, "not from the pitcher. From the flask behind it. I brought some fine wine with me; and it would be a shame to waste it on just any chance guest at the Earl's who happened to visit my room there."

  Jim immediately followed instructions. He sat down with a cup in the room's only other piece of furniture besides the bed, a similar barrel chair already placed before the fire. He pulled out a flask of Angie's boiled water from his own baggage, and added a polite dollop of it to the wine in his cup and drank gratefully.

  The heat from the fireplace struck him comfortably in the face, warmed his hands and started to warm the rest of him; while the wine from Brian's flask did the same service for his throat and stomach. It was, indeed, a good wine, Jim recognized, remembering how he had only differentiated between wines on the basis of their color when he had first come to this world.

  He sighed gratefully.

  "Indeed," said Brian, "it is good to be warm and inside, is it not, James? Who would have thought you and the Lady Angela would arrive at the Earl's with a child in your Lady's arms? Children are not brought to a Christmastide like this until they are old enough to run around and find the jakes by themselves; and even then, not ordinarily. However…"

  "Will we have much of a ride tomorrow to the Earl's?"

  "Less than half a day," said Brian. "If I know anything, you'd best plan on sleeping here with me. The Lady Angela's chamber will be full of busy women the night long."

  "You're probably right," said Jim. "I don't suppose there's any danger of running into trouble between here and there, now that Angie has this baby to take care of?"

  "No, no," said Brian. "It is mostly open country. You may relax now, and enjoy the drink and provender. I have no forebodings about the morrow."

  He stretched out the hand that was not holding his wine to the table which was just within arm's reach, picked up one of the dried herrings and began munching philosophically on it, gazing into the fire, washing down his bites with wine and obviously well contented with the moment.

  Jim sat drinking the wine, with something less than his friend's contentment. He ignored the stockfish, which smelled sickeningly and would taste worse. Brian had always been someone who took cheerfully whatever came, whether it be good or bad. Jim had never acquired that sort of self-discipline. Right at the moment his body might be here, but his mind was back in the room with Angie, the other women and the nameless child they had acquired.

  In spite of their air of frantic overwork, all the women had seemed happy with the newest member of their party. It would be understatement to say that Angie was happy. She was considerably more than that. That, in fact, was what was keeping Jim from a contentment equal to Brian's.

  Things were all very well for the present. But somewhere in the future Angie would have to give up the baby to someone else. Jim had no specific picture in his mind of what might result when that moment came; but his uncertain image was still an uneasy one.

  He had forebodings.

  Chapter 5

  "Well, this is more like it," said Angie.

  Jim agreed. Angie was referring to the two rooms they had been given at the Earl's—quarters that were far better than Jim had expected; but which they owed, evidently, to the fact that Jim was accepted as a Baron. That was a result of his own hasty lie in self-identification when he had first appeared in this world.

  He had claimed to be Baron of Riveroak; Riveroak being the small town that had held the college at which he and Angie had been graduate students and assistant instructors.

  Even that, he thought now, might not have entitled them to two rooms, if they had not had the baby in addition to Jim's title. Not that a baby by itself meant a great deal in this particular century, where an unthinkable percentage of them did not survive six months after birth—but a good story meant a great deal.

  And this was just that—the whole, romantic story of coming upon the slaughtered party in the woods; and the fact that the dead man was now identified from Brian's report of the coat of arms he had been wearing, as Sir Ralph Falon, the dreamy—who else but a gentleman with only half his wits would travel with so small an escort—but wealthy and therefore powerful, Baron of Chene. They had brought his body and that of the lady with him, who had turned out to be his third, very young wife, on to Edsley Priory for burial. The fact that she also had been killed and of the whole party this child alone had survived—all this made a tale to make remarkable the season and the gathering. Particularly, all this, hard upon the anniversary of the birth of the Christ Child, gave Jim's party almost a Biblical aura.

  All this gave the Earl the chance to act grandly and near-royally—an opportunity always appreciated in the upper ranks of society in medieval times. He had risen to the occasion by making a fuss over Jim, Angie and the child; and seeing they were supplied with the best of everything. Everything included these two rooms, which by medieval standards were large, clean, well furnished and even had tight shutters for the
two fairly good-sized windows, for it was high in the main tower.

  So, as things stood, Jim and Angie had what amounted to a small, private kingdom; one room of which could be given over completely to nursery purposes for the child and the wet nurse brought along from Edsley Priory—she being available because her own child had died—and the other room, which would be their combination bedroom-sitting room. Both rooms had adequate fireplaces and no shortage of fuel.

  In addition to that, they had the comfort of knowing that, because of the child, no drunken guest of the Earl was likely to come hammering at their door sometime after midnight, with convivial inclinations born rather from alcohol than from any common sense. They were even to be allowed to post a guard at their door.

  "Yes," said Jim, "it's much better than I expected."

  For the moment they were alone in the outer room, with its door to the passageway outside firmly closed. The inner room had no door; but a heavy tapestry had been hung on the opening between it and the room Jim and Angie were now in. The voice of the baby being fretful did come through to them, as well as other housekeeping sounds; but one could not have everything.

  "That mite," said Angie, sitting down in the barrel chair next to Jim's before the fire, and picking up the glass of wine that Jim had poured for her a good two hours before and she had barely tasted, "the Baron of Chene!"

  "I'm not sure whether he's legally the Baron right away, or not," said Jim. "…It may be that he has to be identified legally in some way; or even that he has to come to a certain age before he can legally inherit the barony." He paused, then went on, "At any rate, for now, he's a ward of the King."

  "The King!" echoed Angie, sitting up very straight.

  "Yes," said Jim, not looking directly at her. He had deliberately thrown in this piece of information to start preparing her for the fact that the child might pass out of her hands almost without warning. "In any case where a landed couple of rank are both dead and a child lives, that child becomes a ward of the King. He can assign that wardship to anyone he wants."