Chapter Twelve
Yves scrubbed the slime from his cheek and brow in awed and fascinated silence, round eyes fixed all the while upon the face that fronted him across the sprawled body of his tormentor. The faint starlight caught the gleam of white teeth, and bright eyes that shone like amber. The capuchon had fallen back from ruffled black hair that did not curl, but curved and clasped in a thick cap about a shapely, vigorous head. Every line and every movement cried out his youth and audacity. Yves gazed and lost his heart. He had had heroes before, his own father among them, but this one was new and young, and above all, present.
“Give!” said his ally briefly, and snapped demanding fingers for the length of linen, which Yves hastily surrendered. An end of the cloth was shoved briskly into the guard’s open mouth, the length of it whipped about his head to make him blind as well as dumb, and secured round his shoulders to the belt with which his arms were already pinioned. For want of a cord to bind the prisoner’s legs, the lacings of his leather jerkin were stripped out in a moment, made fast around his ankles, and doubled back to tie his feet to his wrists in the small of his back. He lay like a package made compact and neat to be slung one side of a pony for carriage. Yves watched, great-eyed, marvelling at the economy of the movements involved in the process.
They eyed each other, in the breathing space that followed, with mutual content. Yves opened his mouth to speak, and was hushed by a forbidding finger on lips still reassuringly smiling.
“Wait!” said the deep, serene voice, just above a whisper. Whispers have no identity, but carry alarmingly. This muted murmur reached no ears but the boy’s. “Let’s see if we may leave the way I came.”
Yves crouched, charmed into stillness, ears pricked, listening and quivering. His companion lay flat over the trap, an ear to the wood, and after a few moments cautiously hoisted one edge to peer down into the timber- scented darkness of the tower below. From outside, about the bailey and the guard-walk along the stockade, came the sounds of movements and voices, from a garrison on the alert, but below among the shadowy beams there was silence and stillness.
“We may essay. Follow close and do as I do.”
He lifted the trap and swung himself down the ladder by his hands, agile as a cat, and Yves scurried after him. In the dimness of the floor below they froze again, backs to the darkest wall, but nothing moved to threaten them. There were fixed stairs, rough but solid, from the corner of this level. They had reached the middle of the flight and could hear the hum and bustle of activity in the hall, and see the flickering of torches and firelight round the rim of a great door below. One more flight, and they would be in the base of the tower, and level with the hall, only that door between them and Alain le Gaucher and his outlaws. A long arm drew Yves close, and again held him still to listen and watch.
The base of the tower was half of rock and half of beaten earth, and the air that came up to them was colder here than between the massive timbers above. Peering down fearfully, Yves could see in a far corner the foot of a deep embrasure, and felt the strong draught that blew from it. There was a narrow outer door upon the night, surely the door by which his rescuer had entered, and if they could but reach it unobserved they might yet make their way back by the same route, out of this enemy stronghold. He would not be afraid, with this superb being as a guide, even to venture the traverse of the rocks in the dark. What one had done alone, surely two could do together.
It was the first tread of that final staircase that undid them. Until then all had been solid and silent, but as soon as a foot was set on this warped board it tilted and settled again with a loud clap, and the echoes took the impact and flung it about the tower in a chain of hollow reverberations. In the hall someone cried out an alarm, there was a rushing of feet, and the great door was flung open, spilling forth firelight and armed men.
“Back!” snapped the stranger instantly, and whipped round without hesitation to hoist the boy before him up the flight they had just descended. “Up to the roof, quickly!” There was no other way of retreat, and the brief check below to accustom eyes to the darkness after the lighted hall could last only a moment. It was already over, the foremost man loosed a great bellow of alarm and rage, and came for the stairs in a bull’s rush, with three or four more on his heels. The blast of the uproar they raised almost blew the fleeing pair up the steps of the tower.
Where the long flight ended, the ladder in sight, Yves felt himself lifted and flung halfway up to the open trap, and that was the height of a tall man. He gripped and climbed, but looking over his shoulder and hesitating, loth to leave his companion behind, until he was ordered sharply: “Go! Up, quickly!” He completed the climb in a wild scramble, and flung himself down on his belly by the trap, craning anxiously over the rim, just in time to see, in a confusion of shadows further confused by the starlight through the trap, how the foremost pursuer came lurching up the narrow wooden treads of the stairway, drawn sword flailing. A big, bulky man, blocking off from view those who followed him.
Yves had not even noticed, until that moment, that his ally already wore a sword. The one they had taken from the guard still lay here on the roof, though Yves had possessed himself of the dagger and buckled it proudly to his belt as substitute for the one taken from him. The brief flash of a blade, like distant lightning, stabbed the darkness below, a trick of starlight following its slashing course. The outlaw loosed an outraged yell, his short sword struck from his hand and flung below to clatter on the boards. The next moment a braced foot took him in the chest and hurled him backwards while he was off balance. Down he went in a long, echoing fall, and swept his followers down with him. The stairway was narrow and unguarded, two or three went backwards under their leader’s massive weight, one at least went over the side, to a heavier fall below.
The young man turned without another glance, and sprang halfway up the ladder to the roof, and in a moment was beside Yves. The naked sword he swung glittering along the ice of the roof, and leaned to grip the uprights of the ladder with both muscular hands, and haul it aloft after him. As soon as Yves had recovered his wits he leaned eagerly to clutch from rung to rung and help to hoist the weight. With all his might, and all the breath he had regained, he heaved and exulted. The ladder had been braced against a wooden bar both below and above, but not fixed. It rose blithely, out of reach of the tallest long before the first of the attackers erupted furiously below and leaped to try and hold it.
The lower end rose clear, tilted aside and clattered on the roof, ringing a glassy cry from the splintered ice. The roars of anger below fumed out of the open trap, and Yves leaned to drag the cover over to shut them out, but his ally waved him aside, and the bewitched boy drew back obediently. Whatever his hero did would be right and wise.
And his hero, palpably smiling, though the smile was hidden in the dark, simply took their prisoner, now uneasily stirring in his bonds, by the cord that bound his feet to his wrists in the small of his back, dragged him to the trap, upended him judiciously so that his head should not take the impact below, and tipped him almost gently through the trap to fall upon his friends, and lay two or three of them flat on the boards. Their startled and aggrieved outcry was cut off when the trap was clapped into place above.
“Quick, now,” said the placid voice almost chidingly, “here with the ladder, here over the trap. So! Now you lie there upon that end, and I upon this, and who will shift us?”
Yves lay as he had been ordered, flat on his belly on the ladder, his face buried in his arms, panting and shivering, for a long time. The boards under him throbbed to the din below, spent in ugly fury six feet short of reaching the trap. And if they did rear something that would enable them to reach it, how were they to shift it or
