The Sword and The Swan (41 page)

"So you are here, Soke," Stephen remarked coldly. "Why do you protest? Would you rather see another strong keep in rebel hands?"

A tide of color surged up Rannulf's throat and stained his face. He, too, had little to gain from saving Malmesbury, but though he had been rejected he could not see Stephen destroy himself. The king believed in this plan and in the men who supported it. Rannulf feared that Stephen's spirit could not endure another breaking of faith.

"It is not meet nor fitting to ask a man to destroy his home and his livelihood," Rannulf began reasonably. "This storm cannot last above a day or two. The Angevin's men will suffer from it as much as we. Bid the men of Malmesbury to hold firm. If we cannot fight tomorrow or even the next day, it will be very soon."

"My loyal friend Jordan has agreed willingly to this plan," Stephen replied icily, "and we will requite him in full measure and overflowing for his loss."

How could a man be requited for the lands he had loved and the place in which he had spent his life? What would Stephen have to give after this disaster? This was the last chance the king would have to fight Henry with his full strength. Leicester had said, and Leicester was usually right, that a defeat would turn the tide in the Angevin's favor. To withdraw was to be defeated without even the chance of victory offered by battle.

"But wherefore this haste to destroy what was not lightly built? Perhaps if we had come here before the Angevin and our force was so feeble that we knew we could not withstand him, such desperate measures would be called for. Why should we act as if we are defeated before we even cross swords? Let us wait until the storm passes and then fight."

The men whose lands were farthest west began to look questioningly at the king, and one said, "It is true enough that a day or two cannot matter. A keep may be destroyed at any time."

"Aye," Rannulf continued stubbornly, "and it must be considered that, while Jordan is loyal and willing, his men, who do not understand so well, may be loath to set flames to their home without apparent reason."

"Why do you ever oppose my will?" Stephen shrieked. "I have heard you say I am mad. Doubtless you have repeated that tale to all to break my men's faith in me. I am not mad! There is reason good and sufficient for what I do. Malmesbury is set too near the rebels' strongholds. Even if we were to drive them off, they would return. I cannot be forever running to the west to support one keep."

In the absolute silence that fell, Rannulf had more than enough time to wish his tongue had been cut out in his youth. He had exposed something far more dangerous than a little madness in the king. Stephen's courage had broken. He wanted Malmesbury destroyed because he was afraid to fight.

Rannulf watched the faces of the men of the midlands turn to stone. They realized that Stephen was prepared to cede the west of the kingdom to Henry of Anjou and that their keeps would become the outer ring of defenses. Some may have wondered why Stephen had marched west at all, but Rannulf knew. Eustace still desired to be king, and Stephen could deny his son nothing—in his presence. The trouble was that when Eustace was gone, the impetus was gone also.

By the next morning Rannulf had recovered from his misery of guilt. He had spent the past two weeks bringing himself to acknowledge that he was a useless and dangerous encumbrance to his family. Catherine was neither timid nor helpless; she could scheme better than he could and her connection with the rebel cause would stand her in good stead. Geoffrey knew nearly all there was to know of military science, and Leicester would stand behind him as a political bulwark. Rannulf became almost cheerful, driving his wretched men from the miserable shelter they had been able to find with the grim humor of impersonal despair.

The wind was such that they could scarcely move against it at all, and sleet fell in silver sheets. Rannulf's fur cloak was glazed with it and pressed on his shoulders with five times its normal weight; water, melted from the ice by his body heat, trickled down his helm and face, making its way under his mail hood to send chill rivulets onto his back and chest. Andre's mount fell and could not rise on the sliding, ice-coated ground without help; Geoffrey's placed one foot awry and slid uncontrollably down a small embankment oversetting his rider into a little stream. Rannulf laughed heartily at both mishaps while he directed the small rescue operations, making both his son and his devoted retainer long to kick him.

They could see nothing funny in the situation at all, and it became less and less humorous as they struggled to advance toward the ford. The bank, which sloped gently into the water, was now a smoothly glazed slide, well coated with an even more treacherous layer of rolling hail. No horse or footman could prevent himself from careening down into the water once that surface was trodden on.

The wind blew violently from the northwest, driving the sleet and hail so hard that it stung the eyes and lacerated the lips. To keep one's eyes open was torture; to close them was death. Both Andre and Geoffrey were willing to fight, but how they would be able to do so neither could imagine. Their sword hands were numb and they could not chance removing their cloaks. If the furred garments were laid aside, one invited death by freezing; to retain them, however, imprisoned one's arms and made fighting impossible.

The men grumbled and cursed, murmuring rebelliously that they would not fight. Even a madman like Stephen, they said, should see that God had set His face against this battle. Geoffrey and Andre rode up and down the ranks, speaking cheeringly, pointing out that it sleeted and hailed on the other side of the river as well as on theirs. True, the men snarled, but there the wind came from behind and, if it drove a man, drove him forward. It did not blind his eyes, nor numb his hands, nor freeze his heart. Andre made what replies he could, but he was chilled with a cold that had nothing to do with the weather. Never before had his confidence in his own skill and strength deserted him, not even on the bridge before Wallingford. When he met Geoffrey crossing through the ranks, he stopped and plucked at the huddled figure.

"Will you do me a favor?"

Geoffrey turned surprised blue eyes on him, tried to reply, and found that he could not speak because his teeth were chattering. Unwilling to display what might be taken as fear to his father's retainer, he simply nodded.

"If I come not alive from this meeting, will you greet your sister Mary from me and tell her—tell her—" Tell her what? He had no right to love, less right to confess that love to his lord's heir when he kept the secret from the earl—a remarkably foolish afterthought he realized, since to mention Mary's name was to confess. "Tell her," Andre said defiantly, "that my last thought was of her." If he died, it would not matter, and if he lived and Geoffrey carried the tale to Soke so much the better.

Again Geoffrey nodded, the surprise dying out of his eyes and a kind of romantic respect taking its place. As yet he, himself, had not been touched by the new-style passion called love, but the conventions of
l'amour courtois
,
although new, were already familiar to him from the tales he had heard. No wonder Andre was so brave and devoted to his father. He was doing his
devoir
to his lady.

Soon, the boy thought, I will find a lady of my own and I will be stronger and braver for her sake. No thought of marriage intruded into the romantic notion. Marriage was a thing apart from love, a thing to be arranged by one's father or one's overlord. Marriage was for the breeding of children, for the increase of lands, and for linking blood lines. Love, Geoffrey glanced at Andre’s face, love was something else.

Rannulf heard the men grumble also, but he made no attempt to lift their spirits or stiffen their courage. He shivered impatiently in the saddle, wondering why the farce of forming the battle lines had been ordered. Surely it was impossible to attack. He wiped the sleet from his face again, and then cursed himself as the hail stung more bitterly while a new coating formed. What were they waiting for? To freeze solid where they stood? It took him two tries to kick his horse into movement, because his legs were so numb he could not direct them, nor really tell when they had connected. When he reined in again, it was directly to Stephen's left, and he no longer needed to ask for what they waited. The group around the king sat with their eyes anxiously fixed on Malmesbury keep.

"Perhaps the flames will not rise in this storm," Stephen muttered.

"There should at least be some smoke," an unknown voice replied.

A cackle of near-hysterical laughter rose in Rannulf's throat and was suppressed. The king had believed Jordan. He was waiting so that his army could see the keep of Malmesbury destroyed, see the discomfiture of Henry's troops, and take heart from the knowledge that what seemed like an Angevin victory could be turned into a defeat by strategy. As if any man could take heart from seeing a castle wantonly destroyed, a strong haven leveled into nothingness.

If only it were not so cold! Rannulf pinned his eyes on the opposite shore, on the ranks of men drawn up to resist them if they tried the crossing. Brief snatches of sound came across in the blasts of wind, rough but good-humored curses and bursts of laughter. The force was smaller than theirs, but Henry's men were in good heart. There were sudden howls of cheerful greeting as a group of four men rode across the front of the line.

One of them, Rannulf thought, must be the young Angevin. They stopped nearly opposite Stephen's group and looked across the river. Some discussion was taking place; the voices were too low to be carried even by the fierce wind, but the gestures were open and confident. Rannulf watched with a growing sense of envy, the longing to follow someone sure and bold struggling with his old affection.

Now a rider broke through the ranks of men and interrupted the talk of the four leaders. From his excited gestures it could be guessed that he was a messenger with important news. Rannulf, for one, did not need, although he heard nothing, to guess what that news was. The last drop of warmth faded from his being, the little spot that had clung to hope that men were not as weak and faithless as he expected them to be.

"There," Stephen cried excitedly, "the keep must be burning and we cannot see—Oh God, no!"

The drawbridge, plainly visible over the moat fed by a canal from the river, was being lowered. A hoarse, exultant cheer broke from the Angevin force, many of whom had turned their backs on Stephen's army to watch Malmesbury keep fall into their hands without a drop of blood being shed. Slowly a number of the men around Stephen drew back so that when the king turned his haggard face to his vassals, Rannulf was the closest man to him.

"He swore," Stephen choked, "on the Cross, on the Body and the Blood, on the relics of the martyrs. Traitor! All are traitors! He swore!"

There was a murmur of halfhearted consolation, an uneasy shifting of eyes and seats in the saddle. To some it did not matter at all; to some it mattered too much.

"Go and leave me alone," Stephen screamed, "That is what you wish to do. Go! Desert me! Traitors all!"

Now the murmurs and looks were angry on the faces of those in whom indifference did not rule. A number of men, some taking the words for a dismissal deliberately, some truly angered, lifted reins and set spurs to their mounts. Stephen's eyes, blazing, swept over the men who remained and fixed at last on the closest.

"What do you here, Soke? Do you remain to triumph over my discomfiture?"

"I remain to receive your further orders, my lord," Rannulf replied woodenly. So much he still owed Stephen, for he had caused at least part of the trouble. "Perhaps we can—"

"We can do nothing!" A sob broke the voice. "You warned me—you alone."

In a moment Stephen would begin to weep, and this was not the time or place for it. Rannulf spoke with deliberate stolidity. "Well, Henry cannot remain forever in Malmesbury, and it is profitless for him to move west. He must cross the river and come to us. If we withdraw and wait for him, we may yet withstand him. Even the attempt to do so will put heart into the lords of the midlands, and—"

Stephen was shaking his head stubbornly. "We have no food, no shelter, and it is so bitterly cold. I must have time, time to gather my strength and to think what to do. I will return to London."

It was useless to argue, useless to say that he understood the difficulties concerning food and shelter, useless to explain that standing firm would bolster men's faith while the defeatist move Stephen planned would drive more men into Henry's arms.

"Very well, my lord," he replied.

"Not you," Stephen said softly, and when he looked at Rannulf his eyes were clear and sane and knowing. "Can you not see that I am like a plague? Get you gone from me, lest the ill that I have become slay you. Go guard your own lands against Bigod, and release my son to come to me."

Rannulf swallowed sickly. If Stephen had spoken one more harsh word, if his eyes and heart had remained shuttered, perhaps he could have freed himself. Now he was bound to the death or prison or exile that was Stephen's future. It did not matter. No one else needed him. "I have taken the contagion already," he muttered. "Let me bide with you."

"No, for I cannot withstand him." Stephen did not name his son, but there was no one else of whom he could be speaking. "And through him I might do you a hurt. Only Maud could have saved us—and Maud is dead." Stephen's eyes held no tears, only such an emptiness of grief that Rannulf's throat closed and he could plead no more.

CHAPTER 19

If the day and night spent at Malmesbury had been a cold purgatory, the trip from Malmesbury to Sleaford was a freezing hell. It did not seem to matter whether Rannulf's troop drove their horses to exhaustion, as they did in the first stretch between Malmesbury and Oxford, or whether they waited patiently in a friendly keep. The storm that had caught them, as if it were some malevolent, half-intelligent thing, seemed to lie in wait until they showed themselves and then attack with renewed fury.

Rannulf accompanied the king from Malmesbury to Oxford, hoping that Stephen would change his mind and order him to follow on to London. Not realizing he was sealing his vassal's fate, Stephen urged him passionately to care for himself. As the despair grew in Rannulf's eyes, Stephen changed his tune. He spoke cheerfully of new meetings when the turning of the tide should come, but he did not rescind his original order. Rannulf waited on the weather at Oxford, having no particular desire to be anywhere except at home.