The Iron Tempest (10 page)

CHAPTER FOUR

In which Bradamant, her Heart broken, wanders the World, learns of Rashid’s great Peril and has a Dream

Ibn Wanah ben Zadrin picked goat gristle from between the few contiguous teeth he possessed less from need than as a slight distraction from the bitter cold. Slight though the diversion may be it was none the less appreciated—certainly more than he appreciated a European winter. It was a dreadful country, this Europe, cursed with a superfluity of water that fell from the sky in an appalling variety of forms, all of them obnoxious. If it wasn’t drizzling, it was foggy, if it wasn’t foggy it was snowing, if it wasn’t snowing it sleeted, and if it were not doing any of these things it was getting ready to. And when the sky wasn’t drooling something objectionable, moisture creeped from the ground itself and rotted one’s clothes and ruined one’s food and made fungus grow between one’s toes.

King Agramant had been laying siege to Paris for months, successfully blockading the Christian emperor and his army—although in reality the situation was a stalemate. Not even that, if one considered that Karl was not particularly discommoded, comfortably ensconced as he was in his palaces behind the sturdy walls of the city, surrounded by his court and in turn by his army. Palaces, Ibn Wanah reminded himself gloomily, that were warmly heated and well-stocked with every luxury. If anyone was suffering from the siege, he thought, it was himself and the thousands of others more or less like himself, condemned to stand watch in the abominable cold of these Boreal territories while gnawing on boiled goat jerky. And watch against what? As if Charlemagne had any intention of leaving his comfortable hiding place! Ibn Wanah could just imagine the emperor casually glancing from some tower window, seeing the tens of thousands of twinkling campfires that surrounded his city and laughing his head off. The damned pig, what about all that vaunted Christian charity?

Self-pity had ruined what little taste remained in the goat meat and he tossed the over-chewed bit of leather into the darkness. He heard it plump onto the frozen ground, then, almost simultaneously, the unmistakable crunch of a footstep.
Allah preserve me!
he thought. Some miserable son of a camel staggering back into camp drunk no doubt. The punishment for the consumption of alcohol was appalling, so much so that Ibn could not imagine why anyone would be tempted. No cold could be bitter enough, he had decided, to want to warm one’s gut at the price of seeing that selfsame gut wound on a spindle before one’s eyes. And the punishment for allowing a drunk soldier into the camp was no less severe. As much as he might sympathize with the poor devil out there in the freezing darkness, he had no intention of sacrificing his own hands, feet or eyes let alone his life on the altar of empathy. He was glad after all to be a Saracen and not under the obligations of Christian charity, which he could now see had its inconveniences. After all,
he
was managing to stand
his
post, even as he fervently wished he were thousands of miles to the southeast—he was a weak, sniveling coward as he was the first to admit, if only to himself. He would have to stop and hold whoever this was for the captain of the guard to arrest and may Allah have mercy on his miserable soul for doing what Ibn Wanah dared not.

“Who goes there?” he called into the darkness. There was no answer, but the sudden stillness sounded, in its vacuity, exactly like someone holding their breath. “Who—who goes there?” he repeated. “Answer me!”

There was only more silence and he was about to make his third and last challenge when he again heard the crunch of frozen ground. He jumped in surprise for the sound seemed to come from not more than three or four feet in front of him. He’d swear to the Prophet Himself that it had been well within the circle of light cast by the torch that guttered above his head. Yet there was nothing to be seen. In spite of the cold he felt a sudden prickling of hot perspiration break out from head to toe. He mistrusted this ungodly land and had no doubt that it was overrun by fiends and evil jinnis. He clutched his spear tightly, though it shook like a willow wand, and offered his final warning to the wind: “Who—who goes there? Friend or foe?”

Foe
! came the answer.

“Allah save me!” he prayed—it had been a woman’s voice, as though the wind itself had whispered the awful word. There was a sudden puff of moist warmth on his ear.
Where is Rashid?
the air whispered. He dropped his spear at the same moment he felt his bladder empty, spilling its hot contents down his legs where it splashed over his feet. The urine began to freeze before it could begin to soak into the earth. He could hear it crackling like cellophane.

Where is Rashid?
the air repeated.

“R-Rashid?”

Yes. Rashid. The great paladin. You know who I’m talking about. There’s only one Rashid. Where is he?

“I-I-I . . .”

A blow to the back of his knees threw him to the ground, where he collapsed like a deflating balloon. He began to sob. The tears froze in his moustache and beard.

Stop that,
ordered the infernal voice.
No harm will come to you if you answer my question.

“I-I-I have answered it!”

No you haven’t!

“I haven’t?”

No. I’ll only ask you one more time. Where is Rashid?

“I-I don’t know!”

You know who I’m talking about?

“Of course! Everyone knows who that great knight is!”

Is he in this camp?

“I don’t think so.”

Is he in Paris?

“How would I know that? Eek! Have mercy on my poor soul!” he squealed as he felt the sharp edge of an invisible dagger pressed against his larynx.

If you’re lying, I’ll haunt you ‘til the day you die!

“Then I won’t trouble you for long because I believe I’m going to die now.”

There was no answer, only the chilly susurration of the wind. “I said ‘I’m dying now’,” he repeated, but there was still no answer. He rolled himself into a many-layered airtight ball, like a frightened armadillo. “O Allah!” he whimpered fervently into the folds, “I wish I were dead already!”

Bradamant might have been inclined to fulfil Ibn Wanah’s wish had she heard it, since he was, after all, an enemy soldier and a pagan to boot, but she was already striding into the Saracen camp, as she had entered innumerable others, fully confident in the invisibility made possible by the ring she had tucked into her cheek. She was not even certain she had not been in this encampment before. There were so many and they all looked pretty much alike.

When Rashid had first been carried off, the dumbstruck warrioress had wandered more or less aimlessly, through shady forests and sunny fields, through farmsteads and villages, over hills and plains, looking everywhere for her lover, enquiring of everyone she met. She rued every moment her eyes were not open and searching. She dared not fail to interview even the dullest peasant or youngest child. Who knew what uncomprehending eyes might have caught a glimpse, however unawares, of her knight? Rashid might be hidden in that fleeting shadow or sleeping in that deserted barn. She dare not overlook anything. Her search took her in ever widening circles, like a spider’s web, but all to no avail.

Remembering Brunello’s magic ring, she took to secretly invading the Moorish camps, hundreds upon hundreds of them, whose numbers grew greater and denser as they approached the besieged city of Paris.

But of all the places she searched, she could not and would not look for him among the dead. If he’d died, she was certain she would have heard of it. “The downfall of a man so great”—she told herself so often it had became a kind of litany—“would have been heard from the Indus to Ultima Thule.”

Her health, all her life as perfect as any human’s had a right to be, began to suffer. She did not eat well nor often, usually only when chance placed some food at hand. And then she would mechanically gulp down whatever happened to be before her, untasted, scarcely chewed. She grew thin, then gaunt, then sallow. Yet her determination seemed to harden in proportion to the growing weakness of her body until it surrounded and supported her like the chitinous shell of an insect or crustacean.

Whether the camp she was now entering was the thousandth or ten thousandth she had searched, or if it was a camp she had already searched once or ten times before, she neither knew nor cared; she had no intention of scrutinizing it any less thoroughly. Rashid could be anywhere.

She went from tent to tent systematically, occasionally whispering in the ear of some sleepy soldier her perennial question:
Where is Rashid?
Ibn Wanah was not the first by any means who had been driven to panic, or even madness, by that quiet, insistent voice. She looked into the face of every man on the chance that it might be Rashid, his memory ensorceled, his features perhaps disguised—she was confident that she would be able to recognize him no matter how much Atalante might attempt to change his form—she was certain that Rashid’s disappearance had been engineered by the old man. And, of course, she still possessed Melissa’s magic ring, which ought to remain proof against the sorcerer’s spells. She searched infantry and cavalry and officer’s quarters and quartermaster’s stores. She examined maps and letters and journals and secret orders—she might have won the war for Charlemagne if she had not been so single-mindedly looking for Rashid’s name.

The night was as brutally cold as Ibn Wanah imagined. The seven months since Rashid’s abduction had carried the world deep into winter. The nights were filled with razor-like air and brilliant, unwinking stars like chips of ice. The days were gloomy and dark, with grey colorless dawns passing after a few hours into an equally grey twilight with no sign of the sun in the meantime. The wind cut through man and beast like the indiscriminate blade of a guillotine. Bradamant took little notice of the cold, but instinct had fortunately provided her with a few layers of purloined woolen robes.

This particular camp proved as barren of Rashid as had its countless predecessors. Bradamant climbed to where the high riverbank overlooked Paris. She took the ring from her mouth, carefully placed it back on the cord that hung from her neck and wearily gazed at the walled city that lay less than a mile away, a hundred plumes rising from its chimneys, from the blazing hearths and stoves beneath, the glimmering lights of its windows the only warmth in a landscape as hard and colorless as a woodcut. What would Karl think, she wondered, if he suspected that she was so near to him? No doubt any number of her brothers and cousins were there, too. Did they think she was dead? She suddenly had an overwhelming sense of the duty and trust she had betrayed; a backlog of guilt and fatigue washed over her, forcing her to her knees beneath its weight. She collapsed like a marionette whose strings had just been snipped. She clasped her hands to her breast, wringing them until they crackled like icicles in the cold, as tears poured from her mad eyes, glazing her hollow cheeks with ice. She looked like a sculpture in blown glass.

“Oh, Melissa!” she croaked. “Why did you ever tell me of Rashid’s love? Before then my misery was sweet, but now my longing is a living death.”

Melissa!
Why had she not thought of the sorceress before? Melissa could relieve her of her unhappiness as easily as she had begun it.
I will return to Merlin’s cave,
Bradamant decided
, and there I’ll scream so loudly that the very marble of his tomb will be moved to pity! I’ll rattle those old bones like an osteomancer and see what new fortune turns up for me! And I’ll discover once and for all if Rashid is still alive, or whether death—that ultimate necessity—has cut short his happy years.

No matter that Ponthieu—the town nearest the Valley of Joyousness—was more than a week’s journey from Paris, most of it through wild and virtually uninhabited country, no matter that she was ill and weak or that food, shelter and warmth would be difficult or impossible to find—once Bradamant had made her decision, there was nothing for it but to clamber painfully to her feet and begin the trek.

She headed south and no one challenged her passage, either because no one noticed her or, more likely, because the shambling, hunched figure elicited no interest in a country infested with refugees. She’d been on foot since losing Frontino months earlier (she’d awakened one morning to discover the horse gone—no doubt stolen in the night; an uncharacteristic lack of alertness that had been the first indication of her burgeoning obsession); she’d done nothing about replacing the animal.

Not many days after leaving the vicinity of Paris, the sky became overcast and the temperature seemed to rise a little. Before long, large flakes of snow began to flutter around the struggling girl. Though it was marginally warmer, the damper atmosphere penetrated deeply and she wrapped the rags around herself more tightly, though to little effect. She tied a scarf over her nose and mouth; it soon became encrusted with her frozen breath. Tiring of having to endlessly break this crust away, as it interfered with her breathing, she finally tore the cloth from her face. She could now breath freely but painfully. Sharp crystals of ice would suddenly form between her lips, the heat of her breath insufficient to melt them. Each inhalation felt like a white-hot razor plunged into her mouth and down to her lungs.

She developed a dry cough; every movement was accompanied by an intolerable pain. She perspired freely in spite of the terrible cold and the heat leaked from her body as though from a sieve.

The first night out she had been fortunate enough to find an abandoned haycock. She had burrowed deep within it, finding warmth in the dank core of decomposing vegetation. The next two nights, however, she was not so lucky. She was turned out of a stall by an irate peasant, who was adamantly deaf to her entreaties; others refused to even open their doors to her, either ignoring or threatening her until she finally gave up the effort and shuffled away. When she looked back over her shoulder, she could see blurred faces peering at her through panes of milky isinglass. Even in her weakness she was still strong enough to have taken a bed if she wanted to. It never occurred to her.