Cloud Walker, All Fools' Day, Far Sunset (13 page)

‘How so?’

‘It is simple. He did not know that he possessed an heretical work. He is glad to be quit of it. Also, he, too, will speak for you. He bade me say that, while he supports Holy Church in the rooting out of heresy, fools are with us always and may be relied upon to accomplish their own destruction.’

‘He is most kind.’ Kieron, remembering his last encounter with Fitzalan, thought the seigneur was exceptionally kind.

‘He is, above all, a practical man,’ said Alyx enigmatically. ‘He is prepared to pay a reasonable price to achieve his ends … Kieron, I have news for you. It is both bad and good.’

Kieron knew before she told it. ‘Master Hobart?’

‘Is dead. He left a document.’

‘I know. How did he die?’

‘He hanged himself … Holy Church will not burn you. The document absolves you from blame. Add to this those who will speak for you, and the Church is powerless.’

Kieron was weeping. He turned towards the cell door. ‘Brother Sebastian,’ he shouted, ‘you hear me! Better for you to leave the seigneurie if I am acquitted. For if you do not—’

‘Kieron!’ Alyx spoke sharply. ‘Indulge your grief, but do not undo the work for which a good man died.’

Kieron hid his face in his hands. ‘Alyx, I am sorry. Hobart was as a father to me, and—’

‘And,’ said Alyx, ‘he will be remembered for his last work, which was his greatest. You gave him some assistance, I recall. You are his monument, Kieron. Be worthy of him. That is all.’

Kieron looked at her, red-eyed, the tears streaming down his face. ‘I will try to be worthy of him. But who can say if I succeed?’

‘Time will reveal, Kieron. I must go now.’ She smiled, and suddenly threw caution to the winds ‘My father drives a close bargain … But kiss me, so that I will remember it.’

Kieron was aghast ‘But, Brother Sebastian?’

‘Brother Sebastian is of little account, now. His days are numbered. And Kentigern is true to the house of Fitzalan. Kiss me. Indulge a woman’s fancy. I have dreams, premonitions.’ She shuddered. ‘Kiss me.’

Kieron held her close, felt the warm young breasts against him, kissed her lips, her cheek, her ear, her neck. He, also, had premonitions, He knew that he would not hold the living Alyx Fitzalan again.

Kieron slept badly, tormented by dreams. He was a child, with Petrina, in late summer. There was some question of following bees to find their honey, or to seek apples and plums. Eventually, they decided on apples and plums.

The dream dissolved. Now it was a fine October morning, with the sky blue, and the castle rising out of the mist; and the boy Kieron, carrying a deerhide bag, was walking to Master Hobart’s house. He saw a dandelion clock, plucked the stem and blew the seeds away through the still air.

A great voice that seemed to fill the world said: ‘So you want to fly, do you?’

Kieron, terrified, looked all around him. There was no one to be seen. But it seemed advisable to make an answer. ‘Yes, I want to fly.’

There was laughter. ‘Birds fly. Men walk. Put away such dreams.’

Again he could see no one. Frightened, he continued on his way to the house of the painter.

Mist and darkness. Then more sunlight. He was riding through the sky, then falling, falling. The sea was cold and there was a sharp pain in his leg.

And suddenly, Brother Sebastian was looking at him. Brother Sebastian’s face was as large as the castle. His eyes were cold. ‘Heresy, Kieron! Men burn for heresy. Burn! Burn! Burn!’

Brother Sebastian’s face became a black fog. No, not a fog. A column of smoke. Kieron could smell the smoke. It was choking him. He cried out, opened his eyes. But he could still smell the smoke, and the cell was entirely dark. Now he was aware of noises, shouts, screams, the sound of thunder. Or was it something other than thunder?

His mind would not work, but the smoke was real. In the darkness, he coughed agonisingly and his eyes streamed tears. He needed air; but there was no air. Only smoke, choking smoke.

The screams and the shouts and the thunder seemed not so near now. Everything was farther away. He was alone in the darkness, choking, choking.

He tried to shout, but there was only a pitiful rasping gurgle in his throat. He goaded his dulled mind, seeking an explanation. He found one.

‘The trial is over,’ he told himself calmly. ‘The trial is over, and I was pronounced guilty. I am no longer in the cell. The smoke and heat have dulled my wits. I am at the stake, and I am burning. Why is everything so dark?
Perhaps my eyes were the first to suffer. Well, then, this is the end of Kieron-head-in-the-air. It is not so bad as I thought.’

He fell down, groping on the cell floor, coughing monstrously, but still conscious. ‘I am in my cell,’ he told himself. ‘I am in my cell. No. It is an illusion.’

The stones of the cell floor were warm. He felt them against his face. ‘It is an illusion. It must be an illusion. The dying man seeks to escape his fate. What a pity I cannot tell—’

He slumped unconscious.

Outside his cell, out in the streets of Arundel, the screaming and the shouting and the banging and the burning continued. But, mercifully, Kieron was oblivious of it all. He lay on the cell floor, his open mouth touching the stone, his lungs still pitifully striving to suck in what little air remained. He was like to have choked on the smoke, had not two things happened in rapid succession. A wild, bearded, blood-stained man with an axe battered down the smouldering door and thrust a blazing torch through the doorway so that he could see if the room contained anything of value. The torch flickered and died for lack of air; but before it died, the intruder was able to discern what appeared to be a dead man on the floor. Coughing and spluttering and cursing, the bearded man retreated. A corpse did not merit his attention.

Shortly after that, the wind changed, and the smoke was drawn out of the cell.

Kieron had been near to death; and it was many hours before he returned to conscious life.

There were blisters on his hands and feet and face. The pain was abominable. Every movement he made caused him to cough excruciatingly. But, somehow, he dragged himself to his feet and staggered out of the cell, out of the House of Correction. He trod, unheeding, on the body of Brother Sebastian. Brother Sebastian’s throat had been cut. But Kieron did not notice.

It was shortly after daybreak.

He went out into the streets of Arundel.

It was a dead town. Dead, with the wreckage of its houses still smouldering. Apart from the crash of falling timbers, the crackle and spitting of charred wood, there was no sound. No sound of humanity. Arundel was deserted by the living, and the dead lay where they had fallen.

The nightmare that had followed the dreams was real.

His conscious mind numbed by shock, and like one who had taken too much strong spirit, Kieron lurched towards the castle. The main gate hung in fragments, destroyed, apparently, by some explosion.

He clambered over the remains of the gate and the corpses of the men who had tried to defend it His mind refused to work. He tried to think. But his mind simply refused to work.

He followed his instincts only. And his instincts led him to seek out Alyx.

He found her.

And then he wished he had not found her.

She lay in the great hall, below the minstrel gallery. She lay on the floor of the great hall with her nightdress flung over her head and her legs wide apart. She lay with a sword that had passed through her navel pinning her to the wooden floor.

Kieron inflicted on himself the supreme punishment. He drew back her nightdress and looked upon her face. A pale, bruised stranger was revealed, her eyes wide with a horror now beginning to glaze in death, her mouth now open and slack, and the blood dried upon lips that she had bitten in her torment.

Kieron was man enough to understand the terrible fashion of her death, and boy enough to be shattered by grief. Letting out a great cry of anguish, he fell to his knees, and stooped to kiss the cold forehead. His tears fell upon her face and, half-crazed with grief and horror, it seemed to him that she wept also.

‘Alyx! Alyx!’ he sobbed. ‘Would that I lay dead with you.’ Then another thought pricked through his anguish, pricking deep like the thrust of a sword. ‘No, by the hammer of Ludd, I will stay alive and seek those who have done this thing. And, if I find them, I will find a means to inflict a terrible punishment, or I will perish. This I swear.’ Then he closed her eyes gently and eased the sword out of her body. It had a narrow blade. No blood came.

‘I will keep this sword,’ he said aloud, ‘to return to those who have left it.’ He straightened Alyx Fitzalan’s limbs, smoothed her nightdress down decently over the outraged body. Then he stroked her hair a while. Presently, he murmured: ‘Rest quiet now, my dear one. I must look to the living; though the dead shall never be forgot.’

Sword in hand, he moved cautiously through the castle. The devastation
and carnage appalled him. Many of Seigneur Fitzalan’s men lay dead, with weapons in their hands. Many strangers, also. Strangers in strange clothes, with black skins, white skins and brown.

Of the two younger Fitzalan daughters there was nothing to be seen. Perhaps they had been taken away, or had been killed elsewhere. Seigneur Fitzalan himself, Kieron soon discovered in one of the upper corridors. He lay on the floor, outside a chamber door, sword in one hand, dagger in the other, and with a great red stain on the fine linen that covered his breast, and a look of profound astonishment frozen on his face.

Inside the chamber, on a larger bed than Kieron had ever before seen, a bed whose fine silk coverings were now bloody and torn, lay the seigneur’s lady. Her clothes had been ripped from her; and, by the look of it, she had suffered as Alyx had suffered, perhaps even more horribly.

Kieron could not bear to look long, could not even bear to decently enshroud the dead woman. He had had his fill of terror. He stumbled from the room, feeling foul juices rise from his stomach to his dry mouth. He was sick in the corridor, but there was none to remark his weakness.

After he had vomited, his head felt more clear. He felt better altogether. Weak, but definitely better. He began to think. The devastation was terrible. Arundel and its castle had been laid waste; but not everyone could have been killed. Some must have fled to the downs; and the downs folk themselves – including his father and mother – should have had ample warning of the attack. With luck, there would be many who had escaped the night of madness. He must find them. He must find his own people, and learn the nature of the catastrophe and what could be done about it.

Sword in hand, Kieron wandered down long, dark passageways, dully seeking his way out of the castle.

He heard a sound, a deep groaning. He stopped and listened. The groaning came again. He went towards it.

The sound led him back to the great hall. Not far from where Alyx lay, a stranger lay also, dressed in outlandish clothes. There was much blood upon his stomach, the evidence of good sword thrusts. Kieron could not understand why he had not noticed him before.

The stranger had brown skin, and eyes that rolled horribly. He mumbled something in a language that Kieron could not understand. His fingers fluttered, as if in supplication.

It came to Kieron, as he regarded the man, that he might well have been one of those who had outraged Alyx.

Kieron was glad of the thought. Here, at last, was someone from whom he could extract vengeance.

He raised the sword that he held, the sword that had transfixed Alyx.

‘May Ludd have mercy upon you,’ said Kieron. ‘I will not.’

He thrust the sword home, once, twice, three times.

The brown-faced man grunted with each thrust. Then he uttered a great sigh and died.

Kieron exalted in his death. One blow for Alyx.

Then, hardly knowing where he was going or what he was doing, he somehow found his way out of the castle.

He was amazed to notice that it was a day of bright sunlight. Alyx and her parents lay dead in the castle, towns folk lay butchered in the streets and the remains of houses still smouldered. He gazed up at the blue sky incredulously and shielded his eyes from the glare. The sun was wrong. It should not have been a day for sunlight.

He tried to think what to do now. He must try to find Gerard and Kristen, anyone at all who remained alive. He must try to discover what had happened.

Wearily, still clutching the sword, he staggered away from the castle towards the downs. There had to be people left alive among the hills. Not everyone could have been killed.

He felt dreadfully thirsty. His throat was raw and sore, his lips blistered. Not fifty paces from the castle, he gave a despairing cry and fell on his face.

There had been sunlight, and now darkness was closing in. He was glad of the darkness. It came as a friend.

Kieron was near to his eighteenth birthday, the threshold of manhood; but the events of the last few hours had aged him greatly. Already he had seen much. More than a grown man might be expected to witness and yet retain his reason.

Kieron took refuge in the friendly darkness. It lay over him like a blanket of peace.

Sholto poured water between his lips. Petrina held his head. Someone was trying to take the sword from his hand but his fingers would not let go.

‘Peace, boy,’ said Sholto. ‘You are safe. I have carried you on my back with that sword like to pierce my foot at every step. Let it go now. You are with friends.’

Kieron sat up, blinked his eyes, licked his lips, trying to comprehend where he was and what was happening. Petrina kissed him, and he let her take the sword from his hand. His fingers ached – how they ached! He must have been gripping the sword very tightly.

He looked around him. He was in a woodland clearing, presumably in the downs. The sun was still high. There were many people in the clearing: downs folk and towns folk. Strangers and friends. He did not see his parents.