Blood Of Ambrose Part 3

"Then this is simply a ceremony, not a trial. Or is that what you've been telling me?"

The Protector's silent smile was ominous.

Now both knights had repositioned themselves at opposing ends of the lists. The heralds' trumpets sounded three times, the call to attack. Then both champions charged into the narrow field, their spears at rest. As they drove toward each other the Red Knight's lance swung back and its point struck full on the white device of the black shield. But the Red Knight's spear shattered like gla.s.s and the black knight rode past unshaken.

No one dared cheer. But the silence grew as dense as the clouds of dust rising to obscure the noon-bright air.

"A good shield is worth its weight in spears," Wyrth remarked cheerfully to the King, who smiled doubtfully.

The delay between pa.s.ses was greater this time, as the Red Knight needed a new spear. Finally the trumpets sounded again; the combatants thundered again into the lists, their armor gleaming dimly through the descending mist of dust.

Spear-points wavered in the air, then one struck home. The Red Knight's spear hit the black knight just under the helmet, a killing blow, throwing Ambrosia's champion from the saddle. He struck the dusty ground, his armor singing like the cymbals of Winterfeast, and he lay there.

The tension in the crowd perceptibly relaxed. There were mutters of relief and sighs that were unmistakably disappointed. Ambrosia's champion had fallen as so many of theirs had fallen, so many of their kinsmen, sacrifices to the prowess of the Red Knight.

Ambrosia's iron-gray gaze was as impa.s.sive as ever, and still fixed on the fallen knight.

Wyrth's gaze followed Ambrosia's, and he laughed aloud. The black knight was moving. "The old fool was right!" he muttered.

Meeting the King's astonished eye, he explained, "You see, Your Majesty, Morlock insisted on making his own armor for the combat. That's why he was late for the trial. I said it was a waste of time, and they'd be stringing his sister's guts across the gateposts of the city before he got here. He got this look on his face-you've probably seen Ambrosia wear it-and we did things his way. It probably saved his neck just now."

"Dead or defeated, it does not matter," the Protector said, rising. "The combat is over."

"Your champion doesn't think so," the dwarf retorted. "Look!"

The Red Knight had turned to contemplate his dead opponent. Seeing the black knight alive seemed to drive him to fury, and he turned his horse about to charge down on the dismounted knight. Only by rolling to the side of the lists did the black knight avoid being trod under the hooves of the Red Knight's horse.

A rumble of discontent, even contempt, arose from the crowd.

"This is not the game, as it was handed down from days of yore," the dwarf remarked, "is it? Why, if a combatant tried a trick like that back in the Vraidish homelands, north of the Blackthorns, the Judge of the Combat would have his head on the spot."

"We are not in the Vraidish homelands," replied the Protector, sitting down again.

"Evidently not. Here he comes again."

The Red Knight indeed had turned his horse and was charging down the lists again, intent on trampling his opponent. The crowd watched in stony silence; even the Protector seemed ill at ease.

But the black knight had not remained lying in the dust. He had recovered his spear, at least (his horse was down at the far end of the lists), and stood with it in hand, awaiting the Red Knight's onset. When the Red Knight's horse was almost upon him he dodged across its path with an agility that was astounding in a fully armored man and, lifting his lance like a club, struck the Red Knight from the saddle.

A roar of spontaneous applause drowned the crash of the Red Knight's fall. Wyrtheorn crowed with delight, then shouted, "Ambrose! Ambrose! Merlin's children!"

A sudden silence followed this shocking slogan, which reminded the crowd of the political realities behind this combat. Since that was what Wyrtheorn intended to do, he continued to shout into the silence, "Ambrose and the Ambrosii! The Royal House!"

"The King," suggested someone near at hand. Wyrth thought he recognized his friend Genjandro's voice.

"The King!" Wyrtheorn agreed vociferously. "Justice for the King! The King!"

There were a few faint echoes in the enclosure, but no answering roar. Still, there was a frozen thoughtfulness on many faces in the crowd. Wyrth had hoped for no more and sat back satisfied. The glittering stare of hatred the Protector had fixed on the squirming King did not escape him. But he doubted anything he could do would intensify the Protector's already lambent hatred for the last descendant of Uthar the Great.

The Red Knight had risen from the ground, meanwhile, dust like wreaths of smoke in the air about him. He said nothing, but drew the heavy sword swung from his belt.

The black knight, waiting at one side, lightly tossed away his spear and drew his own blade, narrow and long, with a deadly point.

The King looked curiously at Wyrth.

"No, Your Majesty," the dwarf said, answering the unspoken question. "That is not the accursed sword Tyrfing. Tyrfing is not merely a weapon but a focus of power; to kill with it is an act with grim consequences. Morlock would not carry it into a combat such as this. Besides, the ban on magic forbids it."

"Tyrfing is a fable," the Protector remarked, "and Morlock is a ghost story. I wonder who is really wearing that armor-some p.a.w.n of Ambrosia afraid to use his own name, I suppose."

The King looked fearfully at his Protector, as if he had thought the same thing. Wyrth laughed, but did not argue.

The knights on the field awaited no formal preliminaries to the second part of the combat. Before the heralds had raised the trumpets to their lips, the Red Knight's broadsword had crashed onto the black-and-white Ambrosian shield. The black knight thrust forward simultaneously with his bright deadly blade and the Red Knight was forced to retreat. The blade of the black knight gleamed red as he leapt forward in pursuit.

"First blood to Ambrosius!" Wyrth said grimly. "You see, Lord Urdhven, the ghost story that is sweating down on yonder dusty field learned his fencing from Naevros syr Tol, the greatest swordsman of the old time. He is not like anyone your champion has met before."

The Protector was still smiling. "They have all been different," he remarked. "They all came from different places, wearing different colors, skilled in different skills. They have one thing in common, dwarf: Hlosian killed them all."

Wyrtheorn shrugged and turned back to the fight. Urdhven's wholly una.s.sumed confidence disturbed him more than he was willing to admit. It also disturbed him that there was no doubt in the faces of the crowd. They watched in fascination, but there was no suspense. They clearly expected the Red Knight's victory, though he was wounded in three places now.

The clash of steel against steel continued as the sun sank from its zenith and the heat of the day grew worse. When the black knight had wounded the Red Knight at least once in each limb, and twice in the neck, he began a furious offense clearly aimed at bringing final victory. Sword strokes fell like silver sheets of rain, varying with sudden lightning-bright thrusts.

The Red Knight backed slowly away two more steps under this onslaught and was wounded several times-it was hard to say how many, because blood did not stand out on his red-enamelled plate armor. But his manner hardly changed throughout the fight, despite his wounds. It occurred to Wyrtheorn that he was waiting for something.

The dwarf glanced over at the prisoner's stake and saw that Ambrosia's gray eyes were fixed on him. He shrugged uneasily, but her expression did not change. She looked back at the combat.

She knows something, Wyrth thought. What puzzles me does not puzzle her. He drummed his fingers on his knees and looked meditatively back to the field.

The black knight's a.s.sault slowed visibly. He had actually hacked holes in the Red Knight's plate armor over his right arm and left leg. But Sir Hlosian Bekh still defended himself with the same lumbering vigor and the same mediocre skill.

Then it happened. The black knight's sword-no longer bright and keen, but notched along its edge and stained dark with drying blood-lashed out in an attack on the Red Knight's sword arm. The black knight's sword caught in the gap between the forearm plate and the upper arm plate, where the Red Knight's chain mail was visible. Instead of retreating, the Red Knight trapped the black shield with his own and struck a thunderous blow with his heavy sword on the black knight's helm.

Ambrosia's champion staggered like a drunk. The Red Knight braced himself and struck out with his shield. The black knight was forced back a step. Hlosian struck again with sword and shield, and again the black knight was forced back.

"It is always the same," the Protector's voice said. Wyrth turned to him: the golden lord seemed almost sad as he returned the dwarf's glance. "Your friend, whoever he is, fought well. Better than any I have ever seen, perhaps, and I have been coming to the combats for thirty years. Hlosian, as you have seen, does not fight well. But he always wins."

"He has magical protection," the dwarf guessed.

The Protector replied, with a shrug, "He is strong enough to outlast any opponent, and he is not afraid of death. That is all the magic he needs. Look at the crowd, dwarf. This is nothing new to them. They have seen it all before."

Stonily, Wyrth turned his gaze back to the field. But he could not help noticing, with the corner of his eye, the patient, unsurprised faces of the crowd. They were fascinated, but they were not really in suspense. To them this was not a combat but a ritual death. They had seen it before.

Wyrtheorn was seeing what he had never seen before: the black knight being driven back, step by step, toward defeat. The Red Knight now had his back toward the Victor's Square, and he was forcing his opponent toward the far border of the lists. If forced across, the black knight would be defeated.

"It will be over soon," the Protector said thoughtfully. "I hope he does not try to flee under the rail. It is unpleasant to see a friend killed while groveling on the ground-"

"Morlock Ambrosius will never flee," the dwarf said flatly.

"He, or whoever is pretending to be him, has never faced Sir Hlosian Bekh. There is something frightening about Hlosian, something different."

"Will he not allow his opponent to yield?" the little King asked sud denly. Wyrth, glancing at him, saw his eyes were wide with concern-he had probably never seen a man killed in combat before.

The Protector shook his head, smiling. "Sir Hlosian never offers mercy. Like defeat, it is foreign to his nature."

It seemed to Wyrth, as he looked back at the combat, that the black knight was giving way to panic. To the dwarf's way of thinking, the only chance the black knight had was to disable the Red Knight's sword arm or one of his legs. But the black knight had ceased attacking these entirely. From the looks of things (the Red Knight was partially eclipsing Wyrth's view), the black knight was hacking and stabbing repeatedly at his opponent's breastplate. The likelihood of breaking through this (and the chain mail that surely lay beneath) for a fatal blow was so slight that Wyrth had to believe the black knight was no longer rational.

The black knight ceased retreating, his heels at the border of the lists. The Red Knight let his shield fall to his shoulder and began to deal his blows two-handed. Very unwisely, in Wyrth's opinion, the black knight did likewise. This gave Sir Hlosian the opportunity to land a crashing blow on the black knight's right shoulder that drove him to one knee.

s.n.a.t.c.hing up his shield, the black knight leapt back to his feet. The Red Knight had recovered and struck again, a terrible two-handed stoke on the upraised shield of Ambrosius.

Visibly, the black knight's knees began to give way, then stood straight. But Wyrth saw with horror that he was holding his shield with both hands; he had lost his sword somewhere. (It didn't seem to be on the ground, but perhaps the dust was covering it.) The same thing was noticed by others; an antic.i.p.atory mutter ran through the crowd, a whisper of approaching death. The Red Knight landed another blow on the Ambrosian shield, which the black knight held over his head, as if to protect himself from a downpour. The blow drove him to his knees.

Wyrth watched in disbelief as the Red Knight raised his sword over his head for what would surely be the deathblow. He shuddered to think with what force that blow would fall. The Red Knight threw his head back; the flat beak of his helmet could be seen, outlined against the far sky. Wyrth wondered if the victorious knight was about to give a barbaric scream of triumph.

Then he bent back further, from the waist, and Wyrtheorn realized he was not bending, but falling backward. The black knight's sword protruded from the shattered red breastplate. In complete silence, the Red Knight fell back to the earth and lay still.

The crash of his b.l.o.o.d.y armor on the field was the signal for a thunderous outburst from the watching crowd. They rose, like the clouds of dust rising from the fallen knight, crying out at the top of their voices, heedless of the Protector and his soldiers-seized at last by surprise, by triumph, by their own secret anger. The invincible Red Knight who had killed so many of their own champions, defeated so many of their causes, was dead at last. They could not help but triumph; they could finally afford to hate.

But all such thoughts were driven from Wyrth's mind as he looked at the black knight. The victor remained on his knees, his helmet slumped back against the rail of the lists as if he were staring speculatively at the sky. His fingers had gone slack, and the battered black-and-white Ambrosian shield lay flat on the ground, its device shrouded with dust.

"With your leave, Majesty!" Wyrth shouted at the frightened child beside him and leaped down into the Victor's Square. He jumped from there down into the field and ran as fast as his short legs would carry him to where the knights were.

Wyrth paused by the Red Knight. He glanced at the cruelly notched blade buried in the dead knight's chest, marvelling that anyone could land one blow and begin another with such a wound. Then the smell hit himnot the blood (he had expected that) but mud-the unmistakable reek of mud and wet clay...

Wyrth whistled thoughtfully. Now he saw it all! Hlosian was a golemsomehow the black knight had realized it (probably from the smell of its blood, as Wyrth had), and that accounted for his attack on the Red Knight's breastplate. Only by severing or somehow destroying the name-scroll in the golem's chest cavity could the golem be beaten. The black knight had planted his sword in the golem's chest, and had lost his grip on it. The golem had severed its own name-scroll when lifting its arms to dispatch the black knight.

The dwarf turned toward Ambrosia's champion, fearing the worst as he approached. The victor was hardly moving, issuing knife-edged wheezing sobs in the dusty air, like a horse that has been ridden nearly to death.

"Morlock!" said Wyrth. "Morlock Ambrosius!"

There was no answer, but the sobbing sounds continued.

Dreading what he would see, Wyrth pulled back the visor of the black helmet.

Eyes closed, head resting comfortably against the rail, Morlock Ambrosius was snoring. Wyrth could smell the stale wine on his breath.

"You pig!" shouted Wyrth, really furious. "Wake up! There's work to do!"

CHAPTER FOUR.

INTO THE DEAD HILLS.

he victorious knight made his painful way across the field, in the face of the now-silent crowd and the bristling rows of soldiery that stood beyond. Behind him his small but verbose herald dragged the dead form of his vanquished opponent, still fully armored.

The King of the Two Cities, watching him approach, noted almost superst.i.tiously that he limped and that his right shoulder was somewhat higher than his left. The battered chain mail jangled as he ascended into the Victor's Square. He paused there for a moment, then reached up and unbuckled his helmet, drawing it off.

The King still expected a monster's face and so was somewhat disappointed. The features, dark and weather-beaten, were streaked with human sweat and mundane dirt. The dark hair was unruly and matted. Only the eyes were strange: a pale gray, almost luminous in the afternoon shadow across his face.

"Sire," said the black knight in a dusty crowlike rasp. He paused, cleared his throat, and resumed in a clearer voice. "I am Morlock Ambrosius, your kinsman and the kinsman of your imperial ancestors to the tenth generation."

This being a ceremony, the King knew exactly what to do.

"Sir Morlock," he said, "welcome. What is your desire?"

"Sire," said the black knight, according to the forms, "I have proven the charges against my sister to be false. If any of her accusers remain, let them rise up and defend their words with the sword." He did not so much as glance at the Protector.

"Her accusers," the King replied, "have lost the right and the power of speech in this a.s.sembly. You have defended the right, and victory is your reward. The-that is, your sister is free this day." The King paused uncertainly. The forms required him at this point to require his ministers to set free the appellant. But the soldiers about him were all the Protector's Men.

Still, as if he had commanded them, a small party of City Legionaries set out across the lists to the pyre. Climbing up on the kindling, their captain untied the gag on Ambrosia's mouth and broke the chains at her wrists with his sword. Then he dismissed his squad and escorted Ambrosia to the Victor's Square. She said nothing, but placed a twisted hand on Morlock's upper shoulder, wincing with pain as she did so.

"Sir Morlock," said the King, "have you any other request of this company?" He asked this because it was the form; he knew all the forms and thought it his duty to keep them. He had never been to a trial by arms before, and he did not know the purpose of this question was to give the victor the chance to lay a countercharge against his princ.i.p.al's accusers.

The King did not know, but the crowd knew. They knew also that Ambrosia's accuser had been the Protector himself, and a mutter of awe ran through the crowd at the little King's bravery.

"Yes," said the black knight distinctly.

Silence fell.

The King sensed that something dangerous was in the air, but didn't yet know what it was. Then he turned and saw the Protector clenching his fists, his eyes as red as blood. The King's breath suddenly went out of him as he began to understand. But it was no longer his turn to speak; it was Morlock's, and he was taking intolerably long about it.

"Sire," Morlock said finally, "I ask that the Protector of the Imperial Crown, one Lord Urdhven," and he paused again, continuing, "I ask that he return the body of his champion to its blood-kin, who do not seem to be known in the city, so that they may dispose of it with their accustomed rites."

There was a puzzled silence, in which the King sensed rather than saw Lord Urdhven relax beside him, only to tense again at a shower of bitter laughter from Ambrosia.

"Lord Urdhven," said the King in a low voice, afraid to look directly at him.

"I'll see to it," the Protector replied curtly. "Tell them to go away."

Go away? The King had been a.s.suming that his Grandmother would take him home, that she would again protect him from his Protector, that everything would be all right again, or at least as right as it had ever been. ... Now he saw that would not be.

Dimly he wondered what would happen to him. Not a public trial like this-not with Ambrosia on the loose. Nothing anyone could come and save him from. A fall down a stairway, perhaps, or a sudden illness, like his mother and father.

"Grandmother," he said shrilly, moved by his own heart. (Was there a ceremony for such an occasion? Kedlidor had never taught it to him.) "Grandmother," he said again more slowly, "I'm glad you're free. Good-bye!" Then he put his hands over his face so that no one could see him weep.

His tears soon pa.s.sed, but he held his hands over his face still, hiding behind them-as he had often hid his face against his pillow while listening to strange noises in his room at night. He felt the Protector stand and heard him walk away. Still he hid behind his hands. He heard the crowd leaving and still he sat, hiding in the open. He sat until he felt the touch on his shoulder and a soldier's voice saying, "Come along now, Your Majesty. It's time."

"Perhaps you're exaggerating slightly, Wyrtheorn?" suggested Ambrosia, smiling.

"Madam, he was absolutely snoring. You heard me. And I heard hinz."

"What an evil pig you are, Morlock," Ambrosia remarked, "taking your ease when Wyrth had been working so hard on my behalf."