The Quest for Saint Camber (52 page)

“Thank God!” Kelson whispered, as he and Dhugal hobbled toward the source of the breeze, gulping in deep lungfuls gratefully. “Dhugal, we did it! We're free!”

But before they could get their bearings or go more than a dozen paces, they burst from the mouth of the cave into a clearing peopled by a score of shocked, startled men lounging around a bonfire. Both groups simply froze and looked at one another for an interminable instant, one of the men by the fire surreptitiously crossing himself. The motion freed at least the voice of another man, who started backing off, murmuring, “
An spiorad!
The dead walk!”

“They aren't spirits!” another snapped. “They're brigands. They've tried to rob the
tuam coisrigte!
Take them!”

“Robbers! Sacrilege!” the others took up the cry, as suddenly all of them were drawing weapons and swarming toward the two.

Kelson never had time to do more than wonder why they were under attack, too stunned even to draw the odd short sword at his belt—if, indeed, he had had the physical strength. Dhugal had the presence of mind to draw his weapon, at the same time shouting for their attackers to hold off, that this was the king—but no one seemed to be listening.

Kelson struggled weakly as they were overrun, trying to tell them that he was no robber but their king—for surely the river could not have swept them all the way out of Gwynedd—but he was overshouted by frenzied orders to secure and bind them, not to listen to the words of blasphemers and perpetrators of sacrilege.

As they bore him to the ground, some of them babbling in a dialect Kelson did not understand, he caught a brief glimpse of a flailing Dhugal disappearing under a heap of at least six men, one of them with a choke-hold on him from behind, and Dhugal's freckled face going red.

But then, as Kelson continued fighting for his own life, already disarmed and his pounding head threatening to do him in, even if his captors did not, he saw the flash of a dagger in a burly fist, coming toward his head.

He tried to avoid it, to at least fend it off, but he could not move fast enough or far enough. Pain exploded through his head, in the same area he had hit his head before, and everything immediately went black.

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY
-T
HREE

Fear not the sentence of death, remember them that have been before thee, and that come after
.

—Ecclesiasticus 41:3

Dhugal, too, was roughly handled, but he never lost consciousness during his capture—though he came close, when one of the men bore him backwards in a choke-hold, with others pinning his arms. In hopes of curtailing any further violence to his person—for it was clear he could not hope to escape, at least for now—he made his body go limp and feigned unconsciousness. The hands searching him were no less thorough after that, stripping off his cloak and belt after they had spread-eagled him on the ground, but at least the arm across his throat was released, and he was struck no more.

Even so, it was one of the most difficult shams Dhugal had ever had to maintain—for he had seen the king go down, and the deadly glitter of a dirk above him. He had not been able to see what part of the weapon touched Kelson, or where, but the king had ceased struggling immediately.

Heartsick, Dhugal prayed that they had not killed him and concentrated all his energy on trying not to react to the tears scalding behind his closed eyelids. Though he longed to explode in one last burst of defiance, he knew it would not help Kelson—if anything could—and would only get him roughed up more and possibly killed. Alive, Dhugal might eventually be able to talk his way out—though the men's shouts of sacrilege and thievery did not bode at all well for their willingness to listen.

Nonetheless, Dhugal managed to maintain the charade of unconsciousness while they continued to search him. Thinking him oblivious made his captors garrulous, too, though they spoke a quick, oddly inflected dialect of which he could understand hardly one word in ten. A word that he did catch was, “
Rightire
,” as they discovered his golden spurs—surely a close cognate to the border word for
knight
. They removed the spurs, as he had known they must—for spurs could be used as a weapon, aside from the value of this particular pair—and then, apparently as an afterthought, they started on the boots themselves.

Removing the boots, with no care for his injured ankle, nearly made Dhugal swoon in earnest, but he knew it was reasonable from their viewpoint to reduce the likelihood of his escape. Barefoot and unarmed in what must be rugged mountain country, they would know he could not go far. They also stripped off his leather jerkin, leaving him with only shirt and breeches against the cold.

That enabled them to find his Saint Camber medal and the
shiral
crystal that had been his mother's, both of which they took. They had already divested him of his MacArdry signet. After that, they rolled him onto his stomach and drew his arms high behind him.

In this, too, they knew what they were doing, for they lashed his wrists with the hands back to back and took an extra turn around his thumbs, so that it would be impossible for him to lower them even to waist-level, much less use them to untie his bonds. The manhandling made his wrist ache, even though he had thought it nearly healed, but he was able to bear that pain. It was his ankle that made him groan, as they bound his legs at ankles and knees and pulled his feet toward the small of his back, passing an end of the rope from his feet, under his wrist bonds, and around his neck, so that if he tried too hard to move he would choke himself. And when, at length, two of them rolled him on his side and hoisted under his back to carry him off, the rope tightened across his throat and he did pass out.

The distant, muffled murmur of voices pricked Dhugal back to awareness. Groggy, still half choking from the rope around his neck, he came to his senses in a small, semidarkened room, lying on his left side and with his face pressed against a mat of woven rushes, fresh and fragrant. A gag bit across his cheeks, not making it any easier to breathe, and his left shoulder was so numb from pressure on the unnatural angle caused by his bonds that he whimpered a little in the back of his throat from the movement it cost to ease the rope—though at least his head cleared after a few seconds.

And his next thought, with his own immediate condition stabilizing, was for Kelson. The room was not totally dark—a little light leaked in from under a door not far away, beyond which the voices continued to converse—but Dhugal could see little else from his present angle. He nearly choked himself again, trying to rear up on his hip for a look around, and had to arch his back and roll on his stomach in the end, so that he could twist his head to see the rest of his surroundings.

A similarly trussed Kelson was lying on his side not far away, however, eyes closed but breathing shallowly.

Thank God!

Immensely relieved, Dhugal eased his chin back down to rest on the matting and closed his eyes, his feet in the air, giving himself as much slack as possible on the rope around his throat. He must evaluate their new situation.

First of all, and on the positive side, he seemed no worse injured than he had been since this whole misadventure began—though he did not know whether he could say the same for Kelson. The king appeared to be unconscious, and being hit on the head again would not have done his original concussion any good.

Also on the positive side was the fact that the two of them had gorged on the bread and ale they found in the last tomb. That would not make them any more popular with their captors, who already believed them to be tomb robbers and desecrators of sacred ground, but Dhugal could feel new strength coursing in his veins already, as his body greedily took nourishment from what he had eaten. He would have preferred something with more substance than bread—like a haunch of venison, or a brace of partridges, or at least a pigeon pie or something else to stick to the ribs. But after days of nothing but water, fish, and wine—and only wine, recently—the bread had been like manna from heaven. Nor had the ale fuzzied his perceptions, soaked up by all the bread, so he would not have to use precious energy to neutralize the effect of the alcohol.

Another effect of the ale, more annoying than really troublesome—and one for which he had no realistic solution, at least for now—was that his bladder was filling. Nor was there any way to relieve himself in a genteel manner, trussed as he was like a spring lamb ready for slaughter—an apt imagery for Lent, he supposed, if indeed Lent was not already past, for he had no idea how long he and Kelson had wandered underground. His condition was not yet urgent, but it would become more and more of a distraction as the hours wore on.

Very well, then, he must get free—though to tend the injured Kelson and get them both out of here, rather than for any point of false vanity. Escape just might be possible, if he were given the time to work on the problem—for the sounds outside the room were winding down, their captors apparently getting ready to turn in for the night. Dhugal judged that it must have been early evening when they were captured and so guessed that no disposition would be made of them until morning—though he did not want to think about what that disposition might be, if they could not convince their captors of their benign intentions.

So, which to try first? To get free of his own bonds or somehow to worm his way to Kelson's side and see whether he could do anything to ease him?

He had decided to run a fatigue-banishing spell first, then see if he could summon enough power to work his bonds loose. He was working on the former when the door opened, laying a stripe of golden light across him from behind, quickly blocked by several silhouettes. He stiffened minutely, immediately realizing he could hardly feign to be unconscious still, with his feet in the air above his back, then rolled awkwardly onto his side with a muffled grunt of pain to see who had come in. Two of the men looked familiar from the altercation outside the tombs—grey-cloaked minions who only followed the orders of others—but the third was of a different sort.

He reminded Dhugal of old Caulay in his prime—sun-browned and bandy-legged from years in the saddle, forearms corded with muscle where they emerged from a soft, full-sleeved saffron shirt, and trews of an unfamiliar grey-black tweed. Over the shirt, a pale grey jerkin of quilted leather was laced close to the man's body, with quilted leather boots coming nearly to his knees and a silver-mounted dirk hanging close along the right thigh. He had a full beard of rich chestnut, the moustaches frosted with grey, like a cat's whiskers, and his thick mane, also threaded with silver, was bound in a clout not unlike Dhugal's border braid. A silver chief's torc gleamed at his throat.

“So, then,” the man said very softly, not taking his eyes from Dhugal's, “these be the villains as sacked Sagart's tomb, eh?”

“Aye, an' profaned the holy places, Bened-Cyann,” one of his henchmen replied. “We willnae know th' full extent o' their sacrilege until th' morrow. Brethairs be lookin' o' th' damage.”

The other man, glum and aloof in a grey cloak that fell from shoulder to ankle, muttered something quick and impassioned in the dialect that Dhugal could not understand, for all its similarity to several other border dialects he knew, and the first man went tight-jawed, his glance flicking briefly to the still-unconscious Kelson before returning to Dhugal.

“Yer partner in perfidy has th' better part, young brigand,” he said softly, “for when we burn th' both o' ye fer yer blasphemy, methinks he willnae feel th' flames.
Ye
, on t'other hand—”

With a contemptuous snort, he turned and left, the other two measuring Dhugal with their own hard looks before turning to follow, closing the door behind them. Dhugal's heart sank as he heard a bar drop in place with a hollow thunk, and he arched his back to take the strain off his throat as he tried to find a more comfortable position on his side.

Flames. Their captors were going to burn them, apparently with no chance to speak in their own defense. He had no idea who this Sagart was whose tomb they had profaned, but apparently he had been a man of some import locally. And the sentence smacked not of fanaticism, but of simple logic. A crime had been committed by two strangers—never mind any extenuating circumstances—and burning was the penalty for that crime.

The sheer unfairness of it made Dhugal angry, and he lay there fuming for several minutes before he was able to turn his anger to something more constructive—like getting loose. Adrenaline fueled his body while anger fueled his mind, so that within a few minutes more, he had loosed the knots with his powers and was easing his wrists from their bonds, unlooping the choking rope from around his neck, removing his gag and the ropes binding his legs.

Before even checking on Kelson, Dhugal crept silently to the door and crouched down to try and peer beneath. The light was dimmer now, and whatever chamber lay beyond had begun to reverberate to the sound of snoring. Praying that no one would come to look in on them again, Dhugal eased to his feet and started back to Kelson, pausing in a corner to relieve himself, then knelt beside the motionless king to free him. He conjured a faint sphere of handfire to see by, and Kelson stirred in his arms as Dhugal finished.

Don't speak aloud
, Dhugal spoke in Kelson's mind as the grey eyes fluttered open, laying his finger across Kelson's lips to underline the order.
I think we're going to be left alone for the rest of the night, but it sounds like there's a whole hall full of guards sleeping just outside
.

Kelson nodded weakly as Dhugal took his finger away, but Dhugal could see by the light of his handfire that the king's pupils were reacting unequally again. A new bruise purpled his temple, not far from where Dhugal had lifted the first skull fracture, and Kelson nearly gasped aloud as Dhugal touched it lightly with a fingertip.