The Bishop’s Heir (17 page)

“I think we'd best find out why,” he said, wiping the back of a linen-clad forearm across his mouth. “You say they're headed toward Carcashale?”

“Aye—unless they turn east at Colblaine, which I doubt.”

“'Tis Carcashale for us as well, then. Caball, how many men can we muster in time to head them off?”

“Mayhap a dozen,” his father's castellan replied. “I wish I could give ye more, but two patrols are out already—an' many hae headed to their ain hames for th' winter. It's a bad time o' year, lad.”

“Aye, but there's no help for that. We must ride wi' what we have.” Dhugal sighed. “Tomais and Alexander, I'll ask that ye join us—an' Ciard as well. Will ye see to it, Caball?”

“Aye, Dhugal.”

As the men left to do his bidding, leaving only the clan piper and Kinkellyan the bard in the hall with the old chief and his heir, Dhugal turned back to his father. The old man's eyes were troubled beyond his physical pain as he reached out a hand to clasp Dhugal's.

“This does nae sound guid, lad. I dinnae like it. Th' priests an' bishops hae been at Culdi all th' past month. What cause has another priest tae come in secret this way? An' tae come by sea this time o' year—”

Tight-lipped, Dhugal nodded, stripping off linen and kilts to don riding leathers and light armor which his gillie brought.

“Aye, I dinnae like it either, Da. An' the king would've told me if he'd known of it. This smacks of treachery. But we've no choice but to investigate.”

“Aye, ye have not. But—be careful, lad. Th' clan needs its chief.”

Dhugal forced a grin as he squeezed the old man's hand.

“We'll hear no more o' that, Da. The clan
has
its chief, an' will for many a year, the Lord willing. Besides, I've nae finished my apprenticeship with ye.”

The old man nodded and smiled as Dhugal pulled away to let Ciard finish arming him, but both of them knew it was a charade. Dhugal pretended to adjust a strap on his brigandine while Ciard looped a sword baldric over his head and brooched a heavy, fur-lined cloak at his throat.

Then Dhugal was drawing on gauntlets and striding out of the hall, raising a hand in final farewell as he went. Minutes later, the Transha warband rode out the castle gates toward Carcashale.

Two hours later, Dhugal and his men sat their shaggy border ponies stirrup to stirrup across the mouth of Carcashale pass—a position which would bring the approaching foreigners within a dozen yards of the Transha line before they were even aware they were not alone. Dhugal held the center of the line, Ciard at his left with his personal standard and Caball far to the right with the Transha banner. The silks were almost gaudy against the grey December sky.

From the point above, the signal came. As Dhugal drew his sword and raised it, steel slithered from a dozen other scabbards in answer. He shifted the leather-faced targe on his right arm and collected his pony's reins. As the first of the black-clad intruders rounded the curve and faltered at the unexpected array awaiting them, Dhugal kneed his mount a few steps forward.

“Stand, in the name of the king, and state your business!” he said, letting his sword rest lightly against his left shoulder. “You trespass on the Earl of Transha's lands.”

But the men ahead were not inclined to parley. Even as Dhugal realized that, wheeling his pony in strategic retreat, they were spurring their larger mounts from trot to gallop, bunching around the two unarmored men in their midst and drawing weapons as they came.

Dhugal signalled his men to scatter as he fled, trusting that the quickness of their border ponies and intimate knowledge of the terrain would at least enable them to escape. The charging men did not fan out in general pursuit, however. To Dhugal's astonishment and horror, the men at the head of the band made directly for him, the outriders brushing off his more lightly mounted and armed men with devastating results while the leaders drove straight toward him.

“MacArdry, to me!” he cried.

His men tried to rally. Ciard got separated from him by a man on a particularly large and nasty bay which kicked and tried to bite, and Tomais darted desperately behind to take his place and shield him. But the strangers cut down the scout with hardly a wasted effort and then crashed their mounts into Dhugal's, bowling it off its feet. Dhugal fell hard. He lost his helmet, but somehow he still had his sword in his hand as he scrambled to his feet. He glanced around wildly to find himself totally surrounded by the enemy.

He threw away his targe. Catching at the reins of one of his attackers with his free hand, he jerked and forced the animal to its knees, spilling its rider even as he blocked another man's sword blow.

But his astonishment at the Trurill badge on the surcoat beneath the fallen man's mantle threw him off stride; and before he could collect his wits, the steel-shod hoof of another man's horse caught him in the thigh with near bone-crushing force. Even as he gasped with the pain of it, trying not to fall under yet another horse's hooves, another rider kneed him in the chest, knocking the wind out of him and cracking ribs. Dimly he recognized his attacker as the Trurill sergeant with whom he had ridden only a fortnight before.

“Gendon!” he gasped, stunned.

Wheezing desperately for air, and feeling horribly betrayed, he staggered to his feet and managed to deliver a bloody but shallow cut to the arm of another attacker, but already injured, he was too slow to avoid the hooves of another horse which tumbled him to the ground—or the sword hilt which struck his temple with a solid, sickening thump as the Baron of Trurill himself grabbed him by the neck of his brigandine and yanked him up across the saddle. He tried to struggle through the fog of pain which shrank his vision to a narrow tunnel, but his fingers uncurled from his sword hilt and let it fall as the pain pounded with every heartbeat.

“Pull back, or I kill the boy!” his captor bellowed, jerking him up straighter in the saddle before him and laying the flat of his sword against Dhugal's throat. “Will your chief thank you for a dead heir? I swear, I'll kill him!”

Dhugal's eyes would no longer focus, and he could feel the bitter bile burning in his throat as waves of nausea pulsated with the pain. Even drawing breath sent jagged fire lancing through his chest, and his slightest attempt to struggle only made his captor's arm clamp tighter over his broken ribs, adding to the agony. Dimly he was aware of the sounds of battle ceasing, and then Caball's voice, breathless and desperate.

“Yield yer prisoner, sir, in th' name of King Kelson of Gwynedd! Ye have attacked th' king's just representative wi'out cause.”

“A heretic king!” an irate voice behind Dhugal shouted. “And the heretic king has forfeited his rights by making heretics his allies. Stand aside and let us pass, or the boy dies!”

Weakly, Dhugal tried again to struggle despite the pain it cost him. He could not think clearly, but instinctively he sensed that to allow these men to escape was a thing which must be prevented at all cost, even his life.

“No!” he managed to cry out. “Don't let them—”

But the sword hilt crashed into his head again before he could finish, and he felt his world going dark around him, his body totally refusing to obey him any longer. He knew more pain as his captor pulled him higher across the saddle to thrust a gauntleted hand through the back of his belt, and he heard Clan MacArdry's warcry as they tried to answer his command.

But then consciousness was slipping away even as his captor charged into the fray again, and he knew no more.

Caball MacArdry and the remnants of Dhugal's command limped their way back through the gates of Castle Transha just at dusk. They brought two dead with them, and not a man among the living had escaped unscathed. One prisoner they had managed to take, lashed to the saddle of Dhugal's protesting pony, but only because he had been too badly injured to ride with his comrades. Were it not for the fact that they hoped to question him, Caball gladly would have cut his throat without further ceremony.

All during the slow, painful ride back from Carcashale, the devastated Caball had rehearsed the possible ways of telling old Caulay that his son was captured. In the end, he could only let Dhugal's absence speak for itself. He dared not meet the old man's eyes as he and the five other survivors still able knelt at the foot of the chief's chair in the great hall. Caulay stiffened as his rheumy eyes searched the faces of the six and did not find Dhugal.

“We met them at Carcashale, sair,” Caball said in a low voice, blood seeping between his fingers where he clutched at a wound in his right shoulder. “Brice of Trurill led them. He has turned traitor.”

“And my son?” Caulay managed to rasp.

“Taken,” was all Caball could whisper miserably.

He tried to tell Caulay that they believed Dhugal still to be alive, though wounded—and that Caball would send out the fiery cross to summon the clan and pursue—but the news was the final blow to Caulay's already frail health. Without uttering a sound, the old man clutched at his chest and sagged in his chair, eyes rolling up and out of sight. He died within seconds, cradled in the arms of Kinkellyan the bard, his helpless kinsmen able to do nothing.

Though numbed almost beyond further reaction, and weak from his own injuries, Caball had the alarm rung and summoned the remaining clansmen at Transha to the great hall—young boys and old men, for the most part, though some of the women came to tend the wounded. Stripped to the waist so his own wounds could be cared for, Caball sat on a stool beside the slumped body of the dead chief as the others gathered before him, one hand gripped tight on the edge of the table against the pain: As castellan and next in succession after Dhugal, it had become his grim duty to assume the leadership of the clan until Dhugal's condition should be learned. He winced as his wife and Kinkellyan began washing out his wound, trying to ignore the bard's troubled muttering.

“Young Dhugal is our chief now,” he told the assembled men, “
if
he lives. I dinnae know what his captors will do wi' him, but since they didnae kill him when they first threatened, we must hope he is still alive.”

“We should go after!” one of the men rumbled. “If young Dhugal still lives, then he must be rescued—an' if he be dead, then he must be avenged!”

“Aye, an' where is the prisoner?” another demanded. “Before we gae chargin' off tae take on rebel knights, we should first find oot wha' we be dealin' with.”

“Ciard, bring him,” Caball ordered, waving off those tending his wound as the gillie and another clansmen went to do his bidding.

The prisoner's face was pale as whey, his sword arm splinted and bound to his chest, but he managed to stay on his feet as he was marched roughly to the dais. Though they had stripped him down to woolen singlet and boots and breeches beneath his black mantle, he still wore a rust-stained arming cap on his head. He bit back a groan as he was shoved to his knees before Caball, only barely catching himself on his good hand.

“On yer knees an' uncovered before yer betters, man!” Ciard barked, yanking back the man's coif and shoving his head closer to the floor.

The man's lank hair was cut in the bowl-shaped hairstyle favored by many warriors, but a tonsured spot gleamed at the crown. As the significance registered, Caball seized a fistful of hair and yanked the man's head up look at his face, heedless of the blood streaming down his wounded arm.

“By the good God, he's a cleric an' come armed among us!” Caball breathed. “Look a' the tonsure! What's yer name, priest? Wha' master d'ye serve, who sends priests armed into the king's lands?”

The man merely grimaced and closed his eyes as Caball twisted the handful of hair harder.

“Speak up, priest! I hae little patience t'day.”

“I have nothing to say,” the man whispered.

“Dinnae waste yer time wi' such slime, Caball!” one of the clansmen snarled. “He's a traitor. Let's gie 'im a traitor's reward.”

“Aye, hang him, Caball!”

“Touch me and your lands go under Interdict the instant my master hears of it!” the prisoner responded, opening blue eyes defiantly. “He'll excommunicate the lot of you. I claim benefit of clergy and the right to ecclesiastical trial. You have no authority to judge me.”

“Interdict?” one of the men murmured, as several others crossed themselves.

Caball gave the man's hair another vicious twist.

“Mind yer tongue, priest! Yer traitor master cannae save ye here! Speak up. Who are ye?”

Consternation flickered across the man's face for just an instant, but still he shook his head stubbornly.

“I do not have to answer to you.”

“No, but ye may well wish ye had,” Caball replied, releasing the man with a shove that overbalanced him into a groaning heap on the floor. “An' there is one to whom ye
will
answer.”

Caball backed off unsteadily and leaned against the edge of the table, catching Ciard's eye as he let his wife and Kinkellyan return to their ministrations.

“Ciard O Ruane, as gillie to our young laird, I give ye the charge o' tellin' the king what has occurred. Spare neither self nae steed, sae lang as ye reach Rhemuth quickly. If the king is nae there now, he will arrive shortly, so wait.”

“Aye, Caball.”

“As for the prisoner,” he smiled menacingly as he turned his eyes back on the defiant captive, “a suitable escort shall follow ye tae Rhemuth on the morrow. 'Tis only for this that we spare ye, priest. An' know that th' king is bloodkin to our young laird, an' will be greatly wroth if any further harm should come to him. Ye'd best pray that yer master does nothing rash. Take him out.”

As the prisoner was jerked to his feet and led none too gently from the hall, a grim Ciard following, Caball collapsed back against the edge of the table. Behind him, a gillie handed Kinkellyan the cloth-wrapped end of a glowing iron.