The sound of frightened, mail-clad soldiers in headlong retreat dwindled away, and soon all that could be heard was the hiss and crackle of the burning brush and wagons. For a moment, the forest seemed to watch and wait with breath abated, and then the scouring of the king’s road began.
Seven men carrying spears leapt over the burning logs and into the fiery corridor. Clad in green cloaks, the hooded men made quick work dispatching any wounded animals. They then signalled the rest of their band, and within the space of six heartbeats, twenty more men and women crept out from hiding in the surrounding wood. Likewise dressed in long green cloaks with leaves and twigs and bits of rag sewn onto them, they were the Grellon: King Raven’s faithful flock.
Quickly removing their cloaks and hoods, the Grellon set about quenching the flames of the burning wagons and surrounding vegetation—using hides that had been soaked in the stream. As soon as the fires were out, torches were lit and sentries posted, and the flock fell to their appointed tasks with silent and urgent efficiency.While some of the band butchered the horses and oxen where they lay, others led the living animals away into the forest. Once the animals had been cared for, the workers unloaded the still-smouldering wagons, carefully examining the cargo. Much had been damaged by the flames, of course, but much remained unharmed; everything was carried off to be hidden in the wood for later use.
Once the vehicles had been unburdened of their baggage, the iron-bound strongboxes were prised from the planks before the wagons themselves were broken apart and hauled into the forest. The useable parts—wheels, harness, yokes, and iron fittings— would find their way back into service, and the rest would be scattered, hidden, and left to rot.
While the wagons were being dismantled, the discarded bits of armour and weapons, saddles and tack—as well as anything else of value—were heaped together in a single pile that was then sorted into bundles and carried off. Meanwhile, the leavings of the butchered animals were placed in a ready-dug pit near the road, which was then filled in and covered with bracken and moss, freshly dug elsewhere and transplanted. When everything of value had been salvaged, the tree trunks blocking the road were removed—an arduous task made more difficult by the necessity of having to work in darkness—and the pitch-bearing logs were rolled back into the underbrush; any scorched branches were carefully trimmed back to green growth.
Their work finished, the forest dwellers gathered up the meat of the slaughtered beasts and crept away, melting back into the darkness from which they had sprung.
When the sun rose upon the forest the next day, there was little to mark the odd, one-sided battle that had been fought in that place—saving only some singed tree limbs that could not be reached, broken earth, and a few damp, dark patches where the blood of an ox or a horse stained the road.
Loss of all goods and chattels under your care, loss of horses and livestock, loss of church property and sacred relics—not to mention loss of the treasure you were sworn to protect,” Abbot Hugo de Rainault intoned solemnly as he stared out the window of the former chapter house he had commandeered for his own use. “Your failure is as ignominious as it is complete.”
“I lost no men,” Marshal Gysburne pointed out.
“Mon Dieu! ” growled Hugo. “Do you think Baron de Braose will care about that?” He levelled a virulent stare at the knight. “Do you think at all?”
Guy de Gysburne held his tongue and waited for the storm to pass. Of the two men before him, the abbot was the more outraged and possessed far greater ability to make his anger felt. Next to the fiery Hugo’s scathing excoriations, the irate Count Falkes seemed placid and reasonable, if perturbed.
“At the very least, Gysburne, you will be imprisoned,” said Count Falkes, breaking in.
“At worst, you face execution for malfeasance and gross neglect of duty,” said the abbot, concluding the thought in his own way.
“We were ambushed. I did my duty.”
“Did you? Did you?” demanded Hugo. “No doubt that will be of great comfort when your head is on the block.”
“Execute a knight in service?” scoffed Guy; the bravado was thin and unconvincing.
“Do not imagine such a fate unlikely. The baron may think it worthwhile to make an example of you.”
Guy, standing at attention with his hands clasped behind him as he bore the brunt of their anger, now turned in appeal to the count. “Lord Falkes,” he said, “you saw the place of ambush; you saw how—”
“I saw very little indeed,” Falkes replied with cool disdain.
“A few bloodstains and some withered foliage.What is that?”
“It is my point exactly,” insisted Guy, his voice rising with frustration. “Someone removed the wagons and oxen— removed everything!”
“Yes, yes, no doubt it was this creature—this phantom.”
“I did not say that,” muttered Guy.
“Phantom?” asked Abbot Hugo, raising one eyebrow with interest.
Falkes gave the priest a superior smile and explained about the birdlike creature haunting the forest of the March. “The folk of Elfael call it the Hud,” he said. Waving his hand dis-missively, he added, “I am sick of hearing about it.”
“Hood?” questioned the abbot. “Is that what you said?”
“Hud,” corrected Falkes. “It means sorcerer, enchanter, or some such. It is a tale to frighten children.”
“Something attacked us in the forest,” the marshal said. “It commanded wild pigs, killed oxen, and burned our wagons.”
“Yes, yes,” replied Falkes impatiently, “and then carried everything away, leaving nothing behind.”
“What do you want of me?” demanded Guy, tiring of the interrogation.
“I want the baron’s money back!” roared Falkes. Guy lowered his head, and Falkes let out a sigh of exasperation. “Mon Dieu! This is hopeless.” Looking to the abbot, he said, “Do what you will with him. I am finished here.” With a last condemning glance at the miserable Guy de Gysburne, he paid the abbot a chilly farewell and strode from the room.
In a moment, they heard the clump of hooves in the yard as the count rode away. “A man in your precarious position, Gysburne,” said the abbot quietly, “might rather ask what I can do for you.” Clasping his hands before him, he regarded the dishevelled knight with a pitying expression. “I do not know what happened out there,” Hugo continued in a more sympathetic tone, “but I see that it has shaken you and your men.”
Gysburne clenched his jaw and looked away.
“There will be hell to pay, of course,” resumed the abbot.
“Yet I can ensure that the brunt of this catastrophe does not fall solely on your shoulders.”
“Why should you help me?” asked the knight without looking up.
“Is not clemency an attribute of the Holy Church?”
Abbot Hugo smiled. Guy’s gaze remained firmly fixed on the floor at his feet. “If further explanation is needed, let us just say that I have particular reasons of my own.”
The abbot crossed to the table on which cups and a jar were waiting. He placed his hands flat on the table. “You will, of course, return to face the wrath of Baron de Braose,” he said. “However, I propose to send you with a letter informing the baron of certain mitigating facts which should be taken into consideration, facts which will ultimately exculpate you. Furthermore, I am prepared to argue, not for imprisonment or dismissal, but for your reassignment. In short, I might be persuaded to ask the baron to assign you to me here.
I would then be willing to take full responsibility for you and your actions.”
At this, the knight raised his eyes.
The abbot, pacing slowly around the small room of the former chapter house, continued, “After the debacle in the forest last night, de Braose will not refuse me. Far from it. He will think it a most salubrious suggestion—all the more when I offer to make up the pay for the workers out of my own treasury.”
“You would do this?” wondered Guy.
“This and more,” the cleric assured him. “I will request troops to be placed under my command. You, my friend, shall lead them.”
Abbot Hugo paused again to regard the unlucky knight.
He might have chosen someone older and more experienced for what he had in mind, but Gysburne had dropped into his lap, so to speak, and another opportunity might be a long time coming. All things considered, Sir Guy was not such a bad choice. “I trust this meets with your approval?”
“What about the count?”
“Count Falkes will have nothing to say about it one way or the other,” the abbot assured him. “Well?”
“Your Grace, I hardly know what to say.”
“Swear fealty to me as God’s agent by authority of the Holy Church, and it is done.”
“I swear it! On my life, I do so swear.”
“Splendid.” Hugo returned to the table and poured a cup of wine for his guest. “Please,” he said, offering the goblet to the knight. Guy accepted the cup, almost expecting it to burn his hand. Even if it had been offered by the devil himself, he would still be bound to receive it. The calamity in the forest had left him with no better choice.
The abbot smiled again. Distressing as the loss of his property was, the strange turn of events had nevertheless provided him a welcome means of increasing his authority.With his own private army, he would be the most powerful prelate in all Wallia. “As you will appreciate, I lost a very great deal last night. The church lost treasure of significant value. That cannot be allowed to happen again.” He poured wine into the second cup. “That will not happen again.”
“No, Your Grace,” agreed Guy. He raised his cup and wet his lips. Although greatly relieved not to have to return to Baron de Braose empty-handed, the knight had yet to obtain the measure of the abbot: less a saint, he thought, than a merchant prince in priestly robes. Job’s bones, he had met more holy-minded pickpockets!
Guy took another sip of wine, and his thoughts returned to the events of that morning.
As soon as he had regrouped his men—who were still exhausted and shaken by the unnatural events in the haunted wood—he had started out by dawn’s first light to bring the count and abbot the bad news. “It was most uncanny beginning to end,” he had reported. “On my life, it seems the very stuff of nightmares.” He then went on to explain, to an increasingly outraged and disbelieving audience, all that had transpired in the forest.
“Fool!” the abbot had roared when he finished. “Am I to believe that you think there is more to this affair than the rapacious larceny of the reprobate and faithless rabble that inhabit this godforsaken country?”
At those words, the unearthly spell surrounding the entire incident had relinquished some of its power over him. Guy de Gysburne stood blinking in the sunlight of the abbot’s reception room. It was the first time he had stopped to consider that the attack had been perpetrated by mere mortals only—cunning mortals, perhaps, but flesh-and-blood humans nonetheless. “No, my lord,” he had answered, feeling instantly very embarrassed and overwhelmingly absurd.
Obviously, it had all been an elaborate trap—from the dead creatures strung up along the roadside, to the flames and falling trees that had cut off any chance of escape . . .
But no.
Now that he thought about it, the ambush had begun well before that—probably with the broken wagon axle earlier in the day: the hapless farmer and his shrewish wife, loud and overbearing, impossible to ignore as they stood arguing over the spilled load, standing in mud where no mud should have been . . .
Yes, he was certain of it. The deception had begun far in advance of the actual attack. Moreover, the individual elements of the weird assault had taken a considerable amount of time to prepare—perhaps many days—which meant that someone had known when the treasure train would pass through the forest of the March. Someone had known. Was there a spy in the baron’s ranks? Was it one of the soldiers or someone else who had passed along the information?
As Guy sat clutching his cup, his heart burned for revenge. The offer of a new position with the abbot notwithstanding, he vowed to find whoever had ruined his position with the baron and make them pay dearly.
“Mark me, lord marshal, these pagan filth will learn respect for the holy offices. They will learn reverence for the mother church. Their heinous and high-handed deeds will not go unpunished.” Though the abbot spoke softly, there was no mistaking the steel-hard edge to his words. “You, Marshal Gysburne, will be the instrument of God’s judgement. You will be the weapon in my hand.”
Sir Guy could not agree more.
The abbot poured another cup and lifted it in salute. “Let us drink to the prompt recovery of the stolen treasure and to your own swift advancement.”
The marshal raised his cup to the abbot’s, and both men drank. They then put their heads together to compose the letter to be delivered to the baron. Before the wax was dry on the parchment, Guy was already scheming how to find the stolen treasure, expose the traitor in their midst, and exact revenge on those who had disgraced him and robbed the abbot.