Adam of Albion (16 page)

But
that anger gave her another burst of strength. As the last of the fire was
ebbing out, she formed a clear mental picture of Theodora’s face, and placed it
on the bundle of twigs like projecting a slide. With clenched teeth, she wound
up and hurled a fist-sized chunk that caught it dead center.

The
brittle twigs crackled, with bits flying off. The torch tipped off to the side,
swung downward, hung there swaying—and then dropped to the floor. She was on it
like a cat on a mouse. In another few seconds, the twigs were crackling with
flames.

Artemis
found a flat stone slab that was dry and didn’t appear to be anything’s living
quarters, and plunked herself down on it. She felt like she’d just finished a
marathon. The twigs burned fast but the torch itself was a pitch knot that
settled into a smoother, steadier flame. Its light was dim and smoky, but so
wondrous it could have been coming from Aladdin’s lamp. If it lasted long
enough, at least she wouldn’t be trapped here all alone and in the dark when
she died of starvation or snakebite.

But
she’d made it this far—a lot farther than she would have believed half an hour
ago, let alone when she and Adam and Orpheus had first landed here.

And
while the Sisters were still crazy and evil—there was at least some truth to
the verse.

In
darkness find flint, with fire find glint.

Darkness,
flint and fire all were here, just as it promised—next came glint.

Sure.
No problem.

She
got painfully to her feet, wincing as her scrapes and bruises reminded her of
their presence, and started off to search for something that glinted, besides
the beady eyes watching her from the rockpiles.

She
hadn’t taken many steps before she spotted something light-colored, lying on
the floor ahead. She hurried toward it excitedly—there was no glimmer to it,
but at least it was different than the darkness everywhere else.

Then
she stopped, numb with dread. It was a skeleton, of a small human being—say, a
young woman—with rat-chewed tatters of a black robe still clinging to the
bones.

When
she got her nerve back enough to keep on walking, she realized that the
skeleton was only one of many. Some were mostly intact, others just scattered
bones. There was no way to count them, and she didn’t try. She didn’t want to
know.

King
Richard lay wallowing in a stone tub of water, still wearing his tunic. Several
big chunks of ice floated around him like rubber ducks, and smaller ones
clinked in his wine goblet as he swilled from it. He seemed as happy as he’d
been grumpy when Adam first arrived.

Cristof
was reading aloud to him the letter that Adam had brought from Saladin,
translating it as he went—Richard couldn’t read Arabic, and for that matter, as
he himself cheerfully pointed out, he could barely read English. The message
was courteous but not obsequious, repeating the Sultan’s assurances that he’d
had nothing to do with the uproar at yesterday’s truce meeting, and hoping that
they would reconvene as soon as possible.

Then
Cristof bent close to the King’s ear and read the last part in a whisper. When
he finished, both men looked at Adam. He felt his face redden with
embarrassment and a touch of fear. It seemed that Saladin must have said
something about him. But neither of them mentioned it—they turned their
attention back to business.

“Well
and good,” Richard said, with a wave of his hand. “Write him back, Cristof—you
know what to say far better than I. When shall we set the time to meet again?”

“Why
not tomorrow, my lord? The longer we wait, the longer Gerard has to stir up
trouble.”

“And
the more of my ice melts. Done!”

Cristof
made a slight bow and stepped out of the tent—leaving Adam alone with the King.

Richard
flopped back in the tub with a contented sigh.

“Haven’t
felt so good since this accursed fever set in.” He thrust his goblet toward
Adam. “Another of these, there’s a good lad. With plenty of ice, mind you.”

“Yes,
sir. Uh—is it okay to call you ‘sir?’ Or should it be, like, ‘your majesty’ or
‘my lord?’”

“You
may call me your Uncle Dick for all I care—just keep my tankard full!” the King
growled jovially.

Adam
hurried to the leather wineskin hanging from a tent pole and tried to figure
out how to pour from it without spilling.

“Where
do you come from, Adam?” Richard asked—the wine seemed to be getting him into a
chatty mood.

“A
place called Montana, sir. A little town called Albion.”

The
king’s face swung toward him, looking surprised. “Albion? That’s the ancient
name of England.”

“Really?”

Richard’s
brow furrowed. “But I’ve never heard of this Montana. Is it so named because of
mountains?”

“Yes,
there’s lots of them.”

Richard
grinned. “With loads of ice?”

Adam
smiled back shyly. “As far as you can see in the winter, and some of them all
year round.” He managed to get the hang of the wineskin, then hurried to the
table where Cristof had left ice for the King’s drinks, and added several
slivers to the goblet.

“Well,
unless someone attacks someone else today, I’ve nothing to do but loll around,”
Richard declared. “I understand war quite well, but beyond that, my brain is
dull and my heart is rough. I’m a soldier by nature and a king by birth, but no
more.”

“That’s
actually quite a lot, sir,” Adam pointed out. He was tempted to add that
Richard would go down in history as a legendary figure, but that might be TMI.

Richard
grunted. “It keeps me busy. But when it comes to diplomacy and that sort of
thing, I leave it to Cristof. You notice that I think highly of him?”

“I
can see why. He seems really—” Adam groped for the right word. “Really smart.
But more than that. It’s like the kind of strength you
feel
even though
he doesn’t show it off.”

“The
Muslims call it
baraka,
” Richard said with a nod. “It’s a mysterious
power—they believe it’s linked directly to God. Well, Cristof earned his
baraka, and not easily. He was born a peasant in Alsatia. The Hospitallers
allowed him to join them because he’s valuable—a fearsome fighter, and well
learned besides. Instead of roistering in his free time, he reads everything he
can get his hands on, and he speaks a dozen languages. But some of the nobles
don’t like having a knight of humble birth in their ranks, and it’s all the
worse when he outshines them.

“One
day, some years ago, he was riding alone not far from here, and he was ambushed
by several men. They overwhelmed him by surprise, cut him down and left him for
dead. If you see him without his tunic on, his scars look like a Saracen
mosaic.

“That
much is fact. The rest is rumor—Cristof himself has never spoken of it. There’s
a mysterious Sisterhood who live in a hidden fortress somewhere in these parts.
Very few even know where it is. They found him, saved his life, and taught him
their healing arts as he recovered.” Richard smiled slyly. “And, I suspect,
taught him a few things about the arts of love as well. At any rate, that was
what sparked his interest in medicine, and since then, he’s devoted himself to
it—although he’s as deadly as ever with his sword.

“I
also suspect that his attackers weren’t Muslims, but other Crusaders, jealous
of this low-born upstart. He hasn’t settled the score—yet. But once the truce
is made, I have no doubt that his monks will be busy with their shovels, after
all.”

The
connection with the Templar who’d barged in wasn’t hard to make.

“Do
you think Gerard de Chavirage—” Adam stumbled a little over the pronunciation—
“was one of them?”

“Let’s
just say that when Cristof smiles at a man like he did at Gerard, it’s the
smile of death, and Gerard knows it full well.”

And
then, abruptly, the King’s good humor seemed to vanish. His gaze fixed on Adam,
with that grim forceful look. Adam had been starting to relax, but that
vanished, too. Richard was notorious for sudden mood swings—he could go from
mellow to furious in an eyeblink, and he didn’t seem to need a reason.

“Saladin
had a word to say about you in his letter,” he rumbled. Then he rose to his
feet in the tub, towering like a giant with water streaming from his beard and
tunic. “Boy! Bring me my sword.”

Adam’s
heart almost stopped. He had to force himself to move at all, and when he did,
it was even harder to keep from bolting out of the tent and running for it. But
he grasped the huge broadsword in both hands—it was almost as tall as he was,
and so heavy it was hard to believe that men could swing these things for hours
at a time, let alone with other men swinging theirs back—and gave it, hilt
first, to the king.

The
blade rasped like a knife on a sharpening stone as Richard drew it from its
sheath.

“Kneel
and bow your head,” he commanded.

Trembling,
Adam sank to his knees and closed his eyes.

“The
Sultan entrusted you as his envoy to restore the truce process—a very important
mission and a dangerous one, what with Chavirage and his men in the wings. But
you’ve carried it out with courage and sound judgment, and brought me a
priceless gift in the bargain.

“Therefore,
I, Richard, King of England, Lord of—oh,
damn,
I almost forgot, I need
my crown for this part. Fetch it, will you? It’s over by my chair.”

Adam
felt like he was floating in a dream as he stumbled to the table where the
gold, jewel-encrusted crown rested. It looked like Richard had tossed it there
as casually as a baseball cap. Adam picked it up carefully and brought it back
to the king, who crammed it on his head with one hand.

“Let’s
see, where were we?” he muttered, impatiently motioning Adam to kneel again.
“Lord of this and that, I can never remember, in recognition of your service to
the throne, and so on and so forth—I dub thee Sir Adam of Albion. Your emblem
shall be a mountain peak—covered with ice.”

The
flat of the blade came to rest briefly on each of Adam’s shoulders, almost
brushing his ears as it passed over his head. Then Richard sheathed it again,
set it aside, and, still wearing the crown, sank back into the water.

“Arise,
Sir Adam, and fetch your liege another drink,” he said, banging his goblet on
the rim of the tub.

As
Adam filled it from the wineskin across the tent, his hands trembling with
disbelief, he could just hear a tiny voice at his back whisper sarcastically:

“Well,
I guess
somebody’s
going to be pretty full of himself after
that.
”

Artemis
was starting to hear a new sound—an echoing murmur like rushing water, getting
louder as she moved cautiously toward it.

The
caution paid off—the sound was coming from a chasm with a sheer dropoff.
Apparently, there was a fast-moving river running through its depths. She
couldn’t see it, even when she stretched out flat on her belly and held the
torch down over the edge—the feeble light just faded into more blackness.

She
stood, picked up a good-sized rock, and dropped it over the edge, silently
counting:
one-one thousand, two-one thousand
. . .  A faint splash
came as she mouthed the second
thou.
Gravity would accelerate a solid
object like that about fifteen feet in the first second, and it was picking up
speed at thirty-two feet per second squared—she couldn’t calculate the distance
exactly under these circumstances, but it must be somewhere around thirty feet.

She
could
barely see the chasm’s other side—that was about twenty feet away, a sheer
stone wall just like this side. It was too far to jump, and there didn’t seem
to be any other possible way to get across. And why should she even try? She
still hadn’t seen a hint of anything glinting, and she could keep on not
finding it just as easily on this side as over there. She started walking along
the edge, wary of weak spots that might crumble out from under her—and she
realized that the chasm was arcing in a large circle, with the other side an
island that it enclosed, like a medieval castle inside a moat.

She
stopped to rethink. Rivers, whether above or below ground, did not naturally
cut channels that were regular circles or straight lines. They didn’t form
walls like those, either—which, although rough, were vertical and evenly spaced
apart. No, the channel had been intentionally carved out of the rock. It must
have been a tremendous job, with years of backbreaking work down in this dank
pit. But why, and why in a circle? If it was for a water supply, it would run
straight from one point to another, wouldn’t it?

The
only other explanation that came was that it
was
a moat—a barrier
deliberately built to safeguard something inside—and the something must be very
important. People didn’t go to this kind of enormous labor just because they
were bored.

It
was looking like the glint might be over there, after all—but how to get to it?
She had the distinct, sick feeling that the skeletons were candidates who
hadn’t figured that out. But there had to be a way—unless this was all just a
lie and sham, Theodora and the other Sisters had passed this test, which meant
they’d
found it.

For
the umpteenth time, Artemis reminded herself of Adam’s advice: gather
information, think it through, and don’t give up. She started walking again,
with her gaze scouring everything in range. After ten minutes, she confirmed
that the moat was circular, and guessed the diameter at somewhere between a
quarter and a half mile. But there was no sign of anything that might help.

She
kept going for another fifteen minutes and was just about convinced that she
was on a fool’s errand, when she spotted a slight variation in the far wall. It
was a shallow niche in the stone, the size of a soup bowl, with an inch-thick horizontal
bar across its face. About three feet below it there was another one, and she
could just make out a third one below that.

Excitement
gripped her as she realized what they were: handholds. Rungs of a ladder, maybe
six inches wide, carved into the wall—a way to climb up out of the rushing
river far below.

A
very difficult, precarious way—if the handholds even went down that far.

Balance
the choices, she thought again, but there wasn’t much to balance. As far as she
could tell, they boiled down to two. Stay here with the skeletons—or jump and
risk the swim and the uncertainty of the ladder.

 And
if it was a trick—if the glint was here on this side after all—get trapped
there on the little stone island, with no way to get back.

The
Goddess smiles on the brave,
Theodora
had said. But there certainly hadn’t been any sign of the Goddess so far. Would
risking this be brave, or just stupid? That distinction, she was coming to
realize, could be a very thin one.

The
torch was burning lower, and her own energy was starting to flag. She wasn’t
really tired yet, but that was like being outside in freezing weather and
suddenly realizing with surprise that you weren’t even cold—it meant you were
about to be.

If
she was going to do it, it had to be soon.

Well,
dammit, everything was pointing toward the island. The skeletons on this side
obviously hadn’t fared very well, and it was far better to go down fighting
than to waste away pitifully.

Okay,
brave is good, but be smart, too,
she
could almost hear Adam say. Don’t just jump—think it through step by step. She
stood there staring at the chasm’s other side, across that infinite twenty-foot
distance, trying to turn her fear into clearheaded determination.

She’d
have to hit the river well upstream, so the current would carry her to the
ladder. In the darkness down below, she’d need help finding it, but she
couldn’t very well take the torch with her, and trying to throw it accurately
to the other side was too chancy. It wasn’t going to last much longer,
anyway—best to leave it here on the bank to mark the spot directly across from
the ladder. That would leave her without light, but getting hold of those rungs
was all important—if she missed, she was done for. She couldn’t wear her robe,
either, it would drag her down. But when—if—she climbed out wet and shivering,
she’d want it badly. A solution came that made her feel a little better: wrap
up the robe and sandals with a chunk of flint inside to give the bundle weight,
and throw it across. Accuracy wouldn’t matter with that, and if she could find
a striking surface over there, she might even be able to start another fire.

Too
bad she couldn’t just wrap herself up in there, too.

She
also had to make sure which way the current was flowing—she couldn’t tell by
the sound. That took a moment of brain-racking, but then an idea came. She
wedged the torch between two rocks, snapped off a burning chunk, and kicked it
out over the edge. The flame disappeared almost as soon as it hit the water,
but she could tell her that it was moving swiftly left to right.

This
was it, then.

She
found a flint that was the right weight to throw, wrapped it up in the robe
with the sandals, and hurled the bundle across like a discus, exhaling with
relief as it thudded and skittered on the far side. Then she rested for a
minute, gathering her strength and slowing her breathing to normal.

Artemis
went upstream a hundred feet and stepped to the dropoff, curling her toes over
the edge as if she was just making a sporting dip into a swimming pool—but
fighting off sudden images of rocks jutting up out of the river, or even iron
spikes set into the wall to impale falling bodies, like in some medieval
castles.

Shut
up!
she fiercely told her whimpering
imagination. She filled her lungs and exhaled all the way, once, twice, three
times—and with the fourth lungful, she leaped.

It
was a long, long drop, and hitting the river was like getting clubbed with a
baseball bat made of freezing rain. The current caught her instantly and it was
even stronger than she’d thought, sweeping her along with alarming speed. She
fought her way to the surface and sidestroked to the far wall. Her left hand
found its stone surface and she tried to cling to it and slow down, but there
was nothing to hold onto. Shaking water from her blurry eyes, she managed to
spot the torch on the bank. It seemed to be sailing through the air in her
direction—fast.

She
slapped her other hand against the wall and groped frantically with both,
sweeping them around from the river surface to as high as she could reach.
Nothing, nothing, nothing,
oh, God,
she must have already missed the
rungs—

Then
the fingers of her right hand slipped into a space—and her knuckles felt a
stone bar across it. She managed to hook her forefinger around it barely long
enough to get a firmer grip with her left.

She
hung there gasping for several seconds, stretched horizontal by the current
that beat at her and tried to yank her loose. With an
unnhhh
of effort,
she wrenched her upper body out of the water and found the next highest rung.
Another hard pull and she went up again, with her foot on the bottom rung,
clinging like a sodden Spiderman to the sheer vertical face. Now she was
getting weak, sapped by the cold swim, with her shoulders aching and her
scraped palms smarting as they gripped the rough handholds. But she had to keep
her momentum going, and she drove herself on—rung by rung, hand over hand, up
the thirty feet that had seemed so long on the way down, but now seemed like
Mount Everest.

At
last, she pulled herself over the edge. She crawled on hands and knees until
she found the robe, unknotted it with trembling hands, and pulled it on. She
lay there shivering, teeth chattering, waiting for her body warmth to seep
back.

And
watched the dying torch on the other bank, seeming to symbolize the life she’d
left behind.