Fair Blows the Wind (1978) (37 page)

Recovering instantly, I pressed the attack. Blood stained his shirt and ran down his side. And now his coolness was gone. He had been hurt; I had actually drawn blood. In a fury he came at me and for several wild minutes I was hard put to defend myself.

As he came on fast, I circled and stepped in a spot of blood. I slipped. Instantly he was upon me, his sword lifted for a killing thrust.

As he stabbed downward I threw myself at his legs, and he staggered back. Coming up fast, I grasped his sword arm and pressed him back.

He laughed, and deliberately began to force his arm down. The strength of the man was prodigious. He was laughing at me now, laughing with a terrible rage as he forced my arm down and down, bringing his blade closer and closer to my throat. Yet the years had done much for me, and I was no longer the boy he had fought that first time. The long months of fencing with Fergus MacAskill, the climbing in the mountainous crags of the Hebrides, and the years in the wars, all had conspired to make me a different man.

Suddenly I began to shove back. Harder and harder I pressed and my arm ceased to move downward. His blade stayed firm and then inexorably I was pushing him back.

He could not believe it. Nothing in his life of continual triumph had prepared him for what was happening now. My strength was not only equal to his, but was surpassing it. His arm went back, and suddenly he sprang away, jerking his wrist from my grip and striking out with a wild slash that ripped wide my shirt and left a bloody gash across my stomach.

Swiftly he pressed his attack. He thrust hard and I felt the point of his blade in my side. Another twist of the blade and he had cut my cheek. He was a fighting fury now, filled with hatred of the threat I presented to him.

Nothing I could do seemed to stop him. He came on, pushing hard. Suddenly I gave way, and he came in, closing the distance. My next lunge took him by surprise. I risked all ... but the blade caught him coming in and thrust deep.

For a moment he stared, unbelieving. Then he leaped back. For an instant he swayed, drenched now along his lower side and leg with the red blood of his wound.

He lifted his sword, threw it in the air and caught the blade, then threw it like a spear!

Yet my blade lifted and caught his, throwing it aside. I went at him then, standing close to the rail, and he stood, braced to meet me, no weapon in his hands. Then his left hand went behind his back to his belt and came from under his jerkin with a knife, a sword-breaker such as Fergus had carried!

I feinted, and he moved to catch my blade but I swept it down and then up, ripping the inside seam of his breeches and cutting half through his wide leather belt.

Blood was pooling beneath him. He crouched, teeth bared in anger. Then suddenly like a flash he turned and threw himself over the rail and into the water!

Leaning over the rail, I saw blood on the water. His body had gone down, his blood mixing with the bubbles of the sea.

The pinnace had stopped not fifty yards off. Our guns were bearing on her; our men stood with lighted matches ready for a broadside.

The pinnace held still, and for an instant I believed they might chance it.

Long I stared at the water, yet I saw no further sign of Rafe Leckenbie. He had gone down, bleeding profusely, into the depths. Then, as if impelled by his disappearance, the pinnace began slowly to back off.

We held our fire, waiting.

The house of gray granite sits in the hollow of a green hill with all the bay and the rocks below it. A strong walker may climb to where the old fort lies, its black stones made blacker still by the blood of those who died there, and the burning of the fires that ate away its heart more times than one, yet each tune by a son rebuilt.

Ours is a quiet place with the gray sea before us, rarely still, and the black rocks and islets rising from it. Here and there lies a patch of green where the grass grows or a tree.

To this place have I come after my wandering years.

My father died somewhere near but where his body lies no man knows. It matters not, for his spirit haunts these gray rocks, resting or moving among them as he forever did. By now he knows that I have come again, bought back the old place and some of the land around. And if my name is another's the hearth at least is mine, and my sons will grow tall from the same deep roots.

You have not failed me, Father, for you gave much, asking only this in return: that I come again and rebuild the old fires that the name and the blood shall live.

Guadalupe is here, and my firstborn, and a fine lad he is, named for you, my father.

The chests I brought back from America were fatly filled, and the Irish folk know me for who I am and say nothing, but greet me gently as they pass. The English whom I also love, although it seems traitorous to some, think of me as a sailor from the days of the Armada, a sometime prisoner in Spain, and a wanderer come home.

My fine Irish horses graze on the salt green grass, and there are cattle here, and sheep. The chests are not empty although I have bought lands here and some in France. And we live quietly but well, going only now and again to Dublintown or Belfast, and mayhap to Cork or London.

Long ago there was a lady left money with me. She has never returned and when I tried the name she gave me and the place, nothing was known, but someday needing it, she will seek me out. She will find lands she owns and a house here and there, and each year I study the money and judge what must be done with it, for she was a woman who trusted at least one man and shall not regret it.

Yet when the gray geese fly west for Iceland, bound on to Greenland and then to Labrador, there is sometimes in the heart of me a longing for distant shores and the beat of waves upon the long golden sands, and the distant view of mountains, far and blue against the horizon, and always the winds that whisper of enchantments beyond the purple ridges.

I shall not go. Guadalupe is here, and my son. My destiny lies here. Like my father before me I shall walk these old paths with my son and show him where the Skelligs lie and old Staigue Fort and the ruins of Derryquin Castle. I shall speak to him of Achilles, Hector, and Conn of the Hundred Battles, of the old kings who lived at Tara and mayhap of a bloody man who went over the rail into the waters behind the cape at Lookout.

Of Jacob Binns I have seen no more, but my door stands open always for him, or for Fergus MacAskill or even for Tosti Padget.

Kory comes sometimes, with Porter Bob and Porter Bill, and we trade a little and lie a little and talk of the old days that are better gone.

Of Emma Delahay I have no word. Gone she was and gone she is, and some small money with her, although most was accounted for by Captain Dabney of theGood Catherine. Was she murdered? Fled? I know not, although sometimes I wonder.

Last year in London a lovely girl crossed the floor, holding out both hands to me. "You are Tatton," she said, "and I am Eve Vypont, and I wish you to know that our horse came back, and you may walk in my forest when you will!"

Silliman Turley keeps a tavern in Ballydehob and sometimes when theGood Catherine sails into Roaring Water Bay, we meet there to share a bottle and a loaf with Captain Dabney. So all things at last come to an end.

Guadalupe beside me wears her golden medallion that I took from the deck of a long-lost ship in a far place beyond the sea.

Now I shall go back from the hills to sit beside my fire in the house my own hands built, and sometimes I shall lift my eyes to see the firelight play upon the silver handle of a sheathed sword that hangs there above the fireplace. And when the fire crackles upon the hearth I shall look down from the window to where the gray ghosts of the rainstorms sweep across the distant sea, like veiled women to their prayers. I have come home again, and I go now to where love lies waiting...

About the Autho
r
"I think of myself in the oral tradition--of a troubadour, a village taleteller, the man in the shadows of the campfire. That's the way I'd like to be remembered--as a storyteller. A good storyteller."

It is doubtful that any author could be as at home in the world recreated in his novels as Louis Dearborn L'Amour. Not only could he physically fill the boots of the rugged characters he wrote about, but he literally "walked the land my characters walk." His personal experiences as well as his lifelong devotion to historical research combined to give Mr. L'Amour the unique knowledge and understanding of people, events, and the challenge of the American frontier that became the hallmarks of his popularity.

Of French-Irish descent, Mr. L'Amour could trace his own family in North America back to the early 1600s and follow their steady progression westward, "always on the frontier." As a boy growing up in Jamestown, North Dakota, he absorbed all he could about his family's frontier heritage, including the story of his great-grandfather who was scalped by Sioux warriors.

Spurred by an eager curiosity and desire to broaden his horizons, Mr. L'Amour left home at the age of fifteen and enjoyed a wide variety of jobs including seaman, lumberjack, elephant handler, skinner of dead cattle, assessment miner, and officer on tank destroyers during World War II. During his "yondering" days he also circled the world on a freighter, sailed a dhow on the Red Sea, was shipwrecked in the West Indies and stranded in the Mojave Desert. He won fifty-one of fifty-nine fights as a professional boxer and worked as a journalist and lecturer. He was a voracious reader and collector of rare books. His personal library contained 17,000 volumes.

Mr. L'Amour "wanted to write almost from the time I could talk." After developing a widespread following for his many frontier and adventure stories written for fiction magazines, Mr. L'Amour published his first full-length novel,Hondo , in the United States in 1953. Every one of his more than 100 books is in print; there are nearly 230 million copies of his books in print worldwide, making him one of the best-selling authors in modern literary history. His books have been translated into twenty languages, and more than forty-five of his novels and stories have been made into feature films and television movies.

His hardcover bestsellers includeThe Lonesome Gods, The Walking Drum (his twelfth-century historical novel)Jubal Sackett, Last of the Breed , andThe Haunted Mesa . His memoir,Education of a Wandering Man , was a leading bestseller in 1989. Audio dramatizations and adaptations of many L'Amour stories are available on cassette tapes from Bantam Audio Publishing.

The recipient of many great honors and awards, in 1983 Mr. L'Amour became the first novelist ever to be awarded the Congressional Gold Medal by the United States Congress in honor of his life's work. In 1984 he was also awarded the Medal of Freedom by President Reagan.

Louis L'Amour died on June 10, 1988. His wife, Kathy, and their two children, Beau and Angelique, carry the L'Amour tradition forward with new books written by the author during his lifetime to be published by Bantam well into the nineties--among them, four Hopalong Cassidy novels:The Rustlers of West Fork, The Trail to Seven Pines, The Riders of High Rock, andTrouble Shooter .

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