The Wild Hunt

eyes fixed on Guyon with bleak loathing.

'Couldn't you leave her alone? If not for you, she'd still be alive and my wife!'

Guyon flinched. 'I did not know that she was coming to Ravenstow,' he defended himself. 'If I had, I would have stopped her. Christ knows, I tried to warn her.'

'You should have tried harder!'

'How much harder?' Guyon spat. 'How much would you have tolerated? Short of locking her up, there was nothing I could ever have done to hold her.'

'Then what in Christ's name was she doing here at Ravenstow?'

'She came to invite us to your wedding,' Judith said, trying to calm the sparks between the men that were threatening to flare into violence and violate God's altar and the dead who sought sanctuary there, 'and to talk of Heulwen's future.' It was not the whole truth, but she felt no remorse at withholding what could not safely be said.

'Neither matter was so pressing as to warrant this!' Prys gestured towards the row of corpses, and it came to Guyon that the young Welshman was as filled with guilt as himself, for he too had not been there to prevent this dreadful crime and rage was a bolt hole to be dived into rather than face the unfaceable.

Prys pushed past him and Judith. 'Which one?' he demanded. Judith opened her mouth to say that he should not look, but Guyon forestalled her by pointing to the nearest shroud.

'Walter de Lacey was the man responsible,'

Guyon said softly. 'I'm going to tear Thornford down stone by stone and make of that keep a burial mound.'

The young man drew back the sheet and fell to his knees at the side of the bier. 'Ah Rhosyn, cariad, no!'

Father Jerome set a comforting arm around Prys's shoulders, although there was nothing that could comfort the sight laid out before their eyes.

Guyon gently drew the cover over Rhosyn again. Prys shuddered and crossed himself.

Trembling, he rose to his feet and stared at Guyon.

'I'm a merchant,' he said, voice unsteady with unshed grief, and savage. 'I wear a sword for my protection, but I'm clumsy using it ...'

Judith drew a frightened breath, thinking for a mad instant that the Welshman was going to challenge Guyon to a trial by combat in order to assuage his grief. Guyon must have thought so too, for she felt him tense beside her.

'I want you to teach me to wield it properly. If you are going to march on Thornford, I am coming with you. They told me outside ... about Eluned. No worse can be done to Rhosyn, she's beyond it now ... but God alone knows what he will do to the child ...' He choked and compressed his lips.

'Be welcome,' Guyon said, his own voice constricted. 'I'll lend you a hauberk from the armoury.'

The chapel was cold and almost entirely dark.

The candles on the altar and around the biers made splashes of light in the pre-dawn blackness. Guyon stared at the flames until his vision blurred and repeated the prayers he had known by rote since childhood. Rote without meaning. The reality was the flagged church floor pressing cold and hard against his numb knees, the smell of incense cloying his nostrils and Rhosyn's desecrated body stretched out before him.

He had tried time and again to believe it was a dream, nothing more than a nightmare from which he would wake up sweating with relief. Ave Maria, gratia plena ... He had only to lift the linen sheet to know it was not.

The candles flickered in a draught and light rippled over the bier, giving Rhosyn's shroud the momentary illusion of movement. His hair rose along his spine and he stopped breathing. A gentle hand squeezed his shoulder and he jumped and stared round.

'Guyon, come away,' Judith entreated. 'It is all but dawn now and if you are to lead the men, you need to be rested. Prys sought his pall et an hour ago.' She held out his cloak and he saw that she was wearing her own over the gold wool gown of yesterday. She had been kneeling in vigil with him most of the night, but he had not marked her leaving, or indeed Prys's.

'There is a tub prepared above. You must be frozen stiff.'

The words ' sensible Judith' floated amongst the disjointed flotsam of the upper layers of his mind. He was suddenly aware of exhaustion seeping through his body just as the iciness of the flagged floor was seeping into his knees. 'To the soul,' he muttered, genuflecting to the altar and rising stiffly to his feet. 'To the pit of my soul.'

Staggering with weariness, he let her lead him up the stairs to the main bedchamber. She dismissed the maids with a swift gesture and, as the curtain dropped behind the last one, began unbuckling his swordbelt.

As the belt slipped into her hands, he took her by the shoulders and tipped up her chin to examine her face. The dim light concealed some of the ravages, but not all . Mauve shadows marred the clarity of her eyes and the bones of her face were sharp, suddenly reminding him of the first time he had seen her.

He was a sleepwalker, jolted awake. 'Ah God, Judith,' he said on a broken whisper and pulled her tight and close.

'I met her on the day before it happened,' she said into his breast, her voice cracking. 'God's love, Guy, I was so jealous, I wanted to scratch out her eyes, but I couldn't. She was so ... so honest, and she did not deserve what they did to her!'

She burst into tears, digging her fingers so hard into Guyon's hauberk that the rivets cut deep semicircles against her knuckles.

'Judith, love, don't!' Guyon pleaded, kissing her wet face while tears spilled down his own. 'Do you want to break me?'

'I can't help it!' she sobbed. 'Since that night in Southwark, we have not had a moment to ourselves that has not been marred by fear and strain and war!' She struck his hauberk with her clenched fist.

Guyon seized her hand in one of his and clamped the other around her waist, holding her tightly, aware through his own shuddering of hers.

At length, sniffing and tear-drenched, she pulled away to look at him. 'I meant to be calm and strong when you came home,' she whispered,

'and instead I shriek like a harpy. The tub is growing cold and you are still in your mail.'

'Never mind the tub,' he said, his whole body shaking with cold and the delayed reaction of shock and fatigue. 'I have lived without creature comforts for so long that another night and day does not matter. Just help me unarm and come to bed.'

Judith wondered whether she should persuade him to eat some food and decided that, for now, she just did not possess the energy. The battle could be taken up again once they had both slept.

'Judith.' He stretched out his hand to her in supplication. With a soft cry she returned to his embrace, stood tightly enclosed within it for a brief moment, then set about helping him remove his mail.

CHAPTER 27

The dawn sky on the horizon was barred grey and cream and oyster shell , striated like marble.

Smoke from cooking fires hazed the immediate air. Fatty bacon sizzled. A loaded wain of new bread from Ravenstow creaked into the camp.

Men were hearing mass, their bellies rumbling.

Guyon watched the mangonel launch another boulder at Thornford's curtain wall . There came the crash of stone splintering on stone and a high-pitched scream from within.

'It is a great pity to see such fine new defences reduced to rubble before we take them,' Eric murmured at his side.

'Do you have a better suggestion?' Guyon growled. 'If not, go and find out what's taking those miners so long and get me a cup of wine before my throat closes!'

Eric lifted long-suffering eyes towards heaven and fetched the latter first accompanied by a mutton pasty.