He was like a madman, and the other Occitan knights were as bad. Each one seemed to require a siege. The sun rose, and they were still fighting. The surviving Occitans drew into a ring in the middle of their camp-about twenty of them. They were surrounded by tent stakes and ropes and fallen tents, and the Galles and Albans had to dismount to face them. The blue and gold knight was still on his feet, although blood was seeping through some of the joints in his harness.
Du Corse, bleeding from a smart thrust to the inside of his left elbow, sent them a herald.
He came back. “They call us all cowards and caitiffs. They say there is no parley with evil.”
“Christ, what fools,” muttered Du Corse. “Bring up crossbowmen and shoot them down, then.”
Forty feet away, de Vrailly led a fourth charge at the tight circle of Occitan knights. Again, as in his first three attacks, he put one down with a great blow of his poleaxe-his almost inhuman speed at the moment of contact, his size and his deceptively long reach made him lethal. His axe slammed, almost unimpeded, into an Occitan knight’s faceplate-the visor crumpled backwards, destroying the man’s face.
But the circle closed, and the Occitans were too well-trained to lose another man. De Vrailly took a blow and then another, and had to stumble back, baulked of his prey-the Occitan banner.
De Vrailly saw the red-and-blue liveried crossbowmen moving at the edge of his vision, limited as it was by his own visor. He gritted his teeth and turned and clanked back to where Du Corse sat on a fresh horse.
“You cannot do this,” he said.
Du Corse spat. “I can, my lord, and I will. I need lose no more knights.”
“We are the better men.” De Vrailly was enraged. “By God, ser knights, do you doubt this?”
Du Corse shook his head. “Not in the least, my good de Vrailly. But in this case-these men are like assassins. They have drunk wine or taken opium or something like it. They intend to fight to the death. I see no reason to give them any more of my knights.”
De Vrailly looked up at the new marshal. “I was against this surprise attack. And look, Marshal. It was no surprise. The Occitan prince was warned, and he has slipped away-leaving a handful of very brave men to die.”
“A foolish choice.” Du Corse was resentful. He might have said, amateurish.
De Vrailly spat. “As God is my witness, my lord, you have erred grievously in this. And the Prince of Occitan left these men to lure us to shame. Shame! I say, he left a few good knights to prove that we were base. And par Dieu, monsieur, so we have proved ourselves to be.”
“The Occitan prince’s cause has been found wanting on the field of battle,” Du Corse said. “That is all.”
“Let me take my squires,” de Vrailly pleaded. “Let me fight them. Man to man. One to one. Until we have killed or taken them. We will-Deus Veult. I know it.”
Du Corse motioned at the captain of his crossbowmen. “Monsieur de Vrailly, you may have a very different fight tomorrow.” He nodded. “We cannot have you exhausted for the Queen’s trial.” He pointed at de Vrailly’s foot. “You are wounded. I insist you retire.”
The crossbowmen were just thirty yards from the tight circle of Occitan knights. The Occitans saw them, but at first refused to believe it.
As the crossbowmen-most of them Albans-spanned their heavy arbalests, the Occitans called insults.
Clear in the cool spring air, one accented jibe carried to Du Corse. “These are the Gallish knights of whom our fathers told us?”
One of the Occitans had a wine cup from somewhere. He held it aloft, his visor up, and he laughed and drank.
The Occitans began to sing. They were big men, but men who trained in singing as well as in fighting, and their voices rose in a polyphony.
De Vrailly’s face darkened and grew mottled with rage. Occitan and Gallish were different enough in pronunciation-but the words were clear enough.
The crossbowmen leaned their spanned weapons on the tops of their great pavises to steady them.
“No!” bellowed de Vrailly.
“You can send your squires to fight the survivors, if you insist,” Du Corse said. He turned in his saddle. “Loose!”
Desiderata was very far gone when the woman came.
She was scarcely able to distinguish between the real and the aethereal anymore. At first she thought the woman was Blanche, come to help her. Reality and the aethereal had all but merged to her sight, and she had begun to overlay the aethereal version of the world on the real, so that the shadows were darker where the thing called Ash seemed to pool, and the bright green coils that some other power was laying, hideously, about her and what bloomed inside her showed stark against the walls of her cell.
But despite the crisis in her sanity-and her outward attempts to repel her enemies, if they were not creations of her mind-she was also aware that it was Easter-the greatest festival of the Christian year. And the moment of rebirth in all the old ways. The moment when young spring killed old winter.
In between her prayers to the Virgin-a ceaseless litany-she thought of her springs. Of her riding out in spring with fifty knights to make the May come in. Of the fecund earth, and the dances. The green of the grass.
It was with these two thoughts in her head-the green of the leaves of spring and the Virgin-that she first saw the woman come through the door of her cell.
The closed door.
She did not shine. In the aethereal, she appeared solid, and in the real, she appeared insubstantial. There was no outward sign of power about her-a tall, grave woman who wore a simple kirtle of rich brown.
But as Desiderata looked at the brown, she thought it was perhaps a foreign textile, some wonderous silk of Morea or farther afield. The brown was itself made up of a thousand tiny patterns-there, of flowers, a riot of colour covering whole fields, if only for a few days, and then another portion with a border of birds so cunningly wrought that they appeared to move and sing, and another, a lady on horseback, riding with a hawk on her wrist…
The lady had a dignified face. The face of mature wisdom, and fecund strength. Motherhood and virginity, or perhaps something older and better than mere virginity-a serenity of strength.
Desiderata was on her knees, and her mouth was already saying the Ave Maria.
She raised her hands to the woman.
Who smiled.
“Oh, my child,” she said sadly. “Would that I might tell you they know not what they do.”
Her voice was low and clear, vibrant with energy. Just to hear her made Desiderata straighten her back.
The woman bent, a hand on Desiderata’s head and another on her back.
All of Desiderata’s pains fell away, leaving her only the ache of knowing how near to term her pregnancy was.
The pools of black became palpable, and manifested.
“Tar, you hypocrite!” said the dark voice.
“Ash, you try me.” The woman moved a hand.
“You interfere as freely as I do,” Ash said.
The woman interposed herself between Desiderata and the pool of darkness. “No,” she said. “I obey the ancient law, and you break it.”
Ash laughed, and nothing about the laugh was like a laugh save the outward sound. “The law is for the weak, and I am strong.”
The woman raised her arms. “I, too, am strong. But I obey the law. If you flout it, it will punish you. Stronger immortals than you-”
“Spare me your mythology,” Ash said. “I will have the child. Now you have interfered directly, breaking the compact. Now you are as much a law-breaker as I.”
“Spare me your immaturity. I did not strike the first blow, or the tenth. And you know-you must know-how tangled has become this skein.” She brought her arms together.