The Fourth Horseman (6 page)

“
This way, my lord.” One of
Amaury’s men gestured that Gareth should follow him.

Amaury and the soldier who’d brought the
message met Gareth, Evan, and Gruffydd at the gatehouse. At
Amaury’s nod, the messenger urged his horse into a trot and led
them through the open gate. Once on the road that passed in front
of the castle, the man turned east. Gareth glanced west, in the
direction of the Welsh encampment. If Gwen had been with him, he
might even have turned that way to ensure her safety before he
continued on with Amaury. But he knew Gwen wouldn’t have liked it,
and he supposed she was safe enough with Prior Rhys.

A quarter of a mile from the castle, the
gatehouse to the friary appeared on Gareth’s left. Both the Lyme
Brook and the road to London bisected the Friary grounds, which
encompassed lands to the north and south of the road. Amaury rode
by the entrance without a glance. Another half-mile on, the small
company left the road for the woods that lined the Lyme Brook.
Another hundred yards and the scout pulled up in a small
clearing.

Gareth swallowed down a grunt of disgust. A
man lay face-up on the ground, blood pooling beneath him, though
he’d been killed long enough ago for much of the blood to have
soaked into the ground. A horse cropped the grass nearby. They all
dismounted, careful to step lightly as they approached the
body.

“
At least one other horse
was tethered in the clearing.” The scout pointed to hoof prints set
deep in the soft earth under a nearby tree. “It’s gone
now.”

“
I can see that.” Amaury
said.

The man looked down at his feet. Woe to the
underling who wasted Sir Amaury’s time with obvious truths. Gareth
caught Evan’s eye and nodded. Evan elbowed Gruffydd, and the two
Welshmen headed towards the river. The man who’d spoken followed,
along with three more of Amaury’s men who’d been waiting by the
body for further orders.

Gareth and Amaury contemplated the dead man.
Like David, the deceased was twenty years older than Gareth, though
from a distance, his blond hair would have hidden the gray at his
temples. He’d pulled back his hair and tied it at the nape of his
neck with a leather thong, which had since come loose, the ends
trailing in the dirt on which he lay.

Gareth crouched beside the body and turned
the man’s head towards the sky with one finger at his bearded jaw.
The man’s eyes were closed in death, and Gareth wondered who had
closed them—the killer or one of Amaury’s soldiers, unable to bear
his stare. The killer had stabbed the man’s heart, indicating that
they’d fought face-to-face.

“
Just what we need. Another
dead man.” Amaury ran his hand through his hair and then dropped
his arm in a gesture of frustration.

“
A dead body is one thing.
Murder another.” Gareth felt Amaury’s concentration and glanced up
at the Norman knight. “You know him, too, of course.”

“
His name was John,” Amaury
said.

Gareth licked his lips, debating whether to
ask straightforwardly for more information or if it would be better
to draw Amaury out gradually. Gareth decided to take the long way
around, to see if Amaury would volunteer what Gareth wanted to
know. “He knew his attacker.”

“
For him to get that close,
he had to,” Amaury said.

Gareth waited through five heartbeats and
then said, “The killer took the knife.”

“
Perhaps it could identify
him,” Amaury said.

That Amaury wouldn’t say outright that John
was dead because Alard killed him presented Gareth with a dilemma.
Amaury appeared reluctant to admit the possibility. It would be an
assumption at this point, and assumptions were nothing without
proof. Still, Gareth decided it needed to be said. “This looks like
Alard’s work.”

Amaury sighed. “My men will comb the
countryside for him.”

Gareth straightened, studying his
surroundings. The trees were fully leafed, and here in the shade
beside the river, the ground remained damp even when the sun was
out.

“
Over here, Sir Gareth!”
Evan didn’t leave off Gareth’s title as he might have done had they
been alone.

Gareth turned to Amaury. “He’s found
something.” Without waiting to see if Amaury would come with him,
Gareth crossed the clearing to where Evan and Gruffydd had entered
the woods. Thirty feet on, he reached the two men. Evan crouched
near some footprints on the bank, while Gruffydd hovered near a
cluster of reeds growing at the water’s edge.

“
What have you found?”
Gareth said.

“
Two sets of footprints.”
Evan pointed to the thick mud that bordered the brook.

The print of a boot was sunk deep into the
soil, indicating that a man had come out of the water there. Then
Gruffydd showed Gareth several damaged reeds, as if something—or
someone—large and heavy had passed through them.

The second pair of prints faced the brook,
indicating that the man coming out of the water had been greeted by
a second man, who’d perhaps grasped his arm to help him from the
brook. Following Evan’s pointing finger, Gareth traced the path of
the departing sets of footprints as they headed back to the
clearing. They followed a different path through the undergrowth
than the one Gareth had just taken.

“
We’ve got more, Sir
Gareth,” Gruffydd said. “Look at this.”

Amaury had followed Gareth from the
clearing, and now he peered over Gareth’s shoulder as they looked
at the spot on the ground that Gruffydd indicated. “I would say
that’s blood.” Amaury waggled a finger at the dark patches
speckling the leaves of several plants beside the trail.

“
Indeed. Someone is
wounded. If it’s Alard, it indicates that David may have fought
back.” Gareth turned his head to look at the riverbank. “If I read
the signs right, Alard left the brook here. A man greeted
him—”

Gareth broke off his sentence without
finishing it and ran back to the clearing. John lay as they’d left
him, with a lone guard standing over the body. Gareth crouched and
ran a finger along the bottom of John’s boot. His finger didn’t
come away clean, but it wasn’t coated in mud either.

Just to be sure, he tugged off John’s boot
and brought it back to the riverside. Crouching, he placed it in
the first print Evan had found, the one belonging to the man who’d
gone for a swim. Unsurprisingly, his boot didn’t fit the print.

Then Gareth placed the boot into the second
print, fully expecting it to fit, only to find that John’s boot was
two fingers’ width larger.

Amaury had watched Gareth’s antics with
interest and now leaned in. “Could the print have shrunk?”

“
The sun doesn’t shine in
here. The mud should have preserved the boot’s shape perfectly. If
anything, the print should be wider than the wearer’s actual boot
and deceive us into thinking it’s John’s.” Gareth straightened and
surveyed the water’s edge. “So Alard met a third man, who was not
John; I don’t have enough information yet to say how John fits into
this story, other than to say that it is likely that either Alard,
or the one who met him, killed him.”

The four men moved back to the clearing.
Unfortunately, the boot prints around John’s body had been smeared
and jumbled by all the activity, and it was impossible to link a
particular print to the man who had killed him. “My bet is on the
third man from the wall walk,” Amaury said.

“
Provided the one who came
out of the water was actually Alard,” Gareth said.

Amaury shot Gareth a puzzled look.

“
I’m not rejecting my
earlier supposition that Alard killed John,” Gareth explained, “but
the additional boot prints and the overall complexity of this
investigation have given me renewed resolve not to assume
anything.”

Amaury’s expression cleared. “Oh, I see. We
have prints and blood, but nothing suggests that either is tied to
Alard, except that he went into the water at Newcastle, and someone
came out of the brook here.” He pursed his lips. “It is well not to
assume. Thank you.”

“
We all have assumptions,
and sometimes those assumptions prove true, but with two murders
now, I think it might be best if we take it one step at a time and
focus on what we know,” Gareth said. “The more we learn, the more
we can explain, until the murderer reveals himself without us
having had to
assume
anything.”

Amaury gazed towards the river, though
Gareth didn’t think he was really seeing it. He was silent through
a dozen heartbeats and then said, “May I have a moment of your
time, Sir Gareth?”

“
Of course.” Gareth turned
to Evan and Gruffydd and spoke in Welsh. “Would you excuse Sir
Amaury and me? Perhaps if we are alone, he will tell me something
of the truth. So far, I don’t know that we’ve heard much of it from
anyone.”

Evan and Gruffydd nodded, and Amaury and
Gareth returned to the bank so they could be alone by the river.
Amaury jerked his head towards a tree that hung over a small
waterfall. When Gareth followed him to where he indicated, the rush
of the water grew even louder than on the trail. Amaury was right
in thinking that the sound would drown out their voices to all but
them.

Amaury leaned his shoulder against the trunk
of the tree, and Gareth stepped close, such that they stood only
two hand-spans apart. Gareth didn’t find it comfortable being so
close to the Norman, but if it was the only way to get him to talk,
he was willing to endure it. This had the makings of a secret worth
hearing.

Amaury thought for another count of ten, his
eyes on Gareth’s face, and then said, “What I have to tell you must
not go beyond you and your lords.”

Gareth nodded, grateful that Amaury
understood that Gareth was honor-bound to report everything he
learned to Prince Hywel.

“
And if someone asks how
you came by this knowledge, it didn’t come from me.”

Again, Gareth agreed. He clasped his hands
behind his back, patient and attentive. Finally, Amaury found it
within himself to speak, though he didn’t look at Gareth and stood
as he had when he’d delivered the bad news about Alard to Gareth
earlier in the great hall: “Once there were four men. The empress
called them her ‘four horsemen’, and to her they represented
everything you think of when you hear that phrase.”

If Amaury’s expression had been less
anxious, Gareth would have whistled through his teeth. He knew his
Bible, of course. At the ending of the world, the four horsemen of
the apocalypse would be visited on mankind: conquest, war, famine,
and death. That Empress Maud would refer to her men in such a
fashion made Gareth’s stomach clench. At the same time, maybe he
shouldn’t have been surprised. Unlike King Stephen, who had such a
fine sense of honor it was costing him the war, Maud was known less
for her piety than for her vindictiveness.

“
In what way did they work
for her?” Gareth said, more to say something than because he feared
Amaury wouldn’t tell him.

Amaury took in a deep breath through his
nose. “Remember the rebellion in the southwest of England in the
early days of Stephen’s reign? It forced Stephen’s focus away from
fighting Maud to fighting his own barons, when he wasn’t at odds
with the Scots or the Welsh.”

“
I remember,” Gareth said.
“I was fighting Normans in Ceredigion around that time.”

Amaury gave him a wry smile. “Who do you
suppose were instrumental in helping Earl Robert foster that
rebellion? Who infiltrated castles, made promises Maud might never
keep, and put steel in those half-Saxon spines?”

“
The horsemen, clearly, or
you wouldn’t be telling me this,” Gareth said.

“
I don’t know where she
found them, exactly, or in what fashion she gathered them together,
but they were her spies, and by that I mean they were trained to a
degree few men have attained. Two were Welshmen, another was a
Saxon, and the fourth was a Frenchman.”

“
I’d wager that David was
one of the Welshmen,” Gareth said, and at Amaury’s nod added,
“though Ranulf said he was his man, not Maud’s.”

“
Ranulf thought David
belonged to him; he was meant to think so,” Amaury said.

“
But you know differently?”
Gareth said.

Amaury gave him a long look, and when Gareth
didn’t add to his question, he said, “You need me to lay it
out?”

Gareth chewed on his lower lip, studying
Amaury’s face. “Your liege lord is Ranulf as well. Are you implying
that your allegiance is also broader, to the empress, just as
David’s was? Are you a spy for her too?”

Amaury coughed a laugh. “Hardly. I am a
knight, as you see.” He spread his hands wide. “But that does not
mean I am not party to certain information.”

Gareth hated such obliqueness, but he didn’t
want to throw Amaury off his stride. “I accept that. We were
talking about the four horsemen.”

Amaury nodded. “To continue, that man
there—” Amaury tipped his head towards the clearing where John’s
body lay, “—the Saxon, John, along with the second Welshman who
died years ago, were under Earl Robert’s authority.”

“
And the fourth, the
Frenchman, was … Alard?” Gareth said, seeing where this was
going.

“
He was a favorite of the
empress, a man she’d known for twenty years, ever since he was a
boy. He was the most trusted of the four,” Amaury said.

“
And Alard has now killed
both David and John,” Gareth said, “two of the four
horsemen.”

“
So it seems,” Amaury
said