He sat up again. Of course, Danielle was right. The worst of it was, though, that now that he had recognized the itch feelings, they redoubled, as if fiendishly and consciously determined to drive him crazy. He forced his body onto all four of its legs. If Brian could remain motionless with a hornet buzzing. around the inside of his helmet, he ought to be able to ignore a little itching.
On his feet again, he could now smell the coming day—not an odor he could identify precisely, but a generally damp, fresh variation in the night breeze that was blowing in his direction. His ears caught the faint sound of paws on ground, and suddenly Aragh was before him.
"They all awake in there?" growled the wolf, softly. "Time they were moving!"
"I'll tell them."
Jim turned toward the inn door; but just at that moment it opened, and Giles stuck his head out.
"Sir James?" he asked, quietly. "Have you seen the wolf?"
"He has," snapped Aragh. "I'm here. What are you whispering for, Sir outlaw?"
Giles pulled his head back in and shut the door without answering. He had not, in fact, been whispering. His voice had only been lowered—as had Aragh's a second before. Almost immediately, the door opened again and Giles with his lieutenants came out, followed by Danielle.
"Dick Innkeeper's gone to put his armor on, and harness the horses," she told her father. "His men have the cart already loaded. Sir Brian's still with him, over at the stables."
"All right. Jack, will you tell the knight that we're ready to move?" Giles asked. "The rest of you go assemble your lads."
Jack went down along the building toward the stables; the other lieutenants moved out into the darkness, to where the rank and file of the outlaws had set up camp.
Fifteen minutes later, they were on the march. Brian on Blanchard, Giles on one of the inn horses that gleamed a strange, pale grayish-white in the murkiness, and Jim on foot, led the march. Behind them came Dafydd and Danielle, followed by the wagon driven by Dick, then the general body of the outlaws. Aragh had disappeared into the darkness of the forest at their first movement, growling that he would meet them at the edge of the forest facing the castle.
The promise of daylight began to deliver itself as they moved. It was a good hour yet till sunrise when they left the inn; but as they wound their way among the trees, the taller trunks began to emerge from the darkness as the sky overhead lightened. As these two things happened, the light wind dropped, just as Dafydd had predicted, and the mist filling the lower levels of the forest gradually became visible; it was a landscape of white, black, and gray they moved through—a land fit for spirits and night demons. In the semi-gloom of the emerging day, the earth underfoot was a dark platform and the mist a ghostly blanket reaching twice a man's height up into the trees, so that to the right, left, and all about, things were hidden. Even the gradually brightening sky was swag-bellied with thick, cold clouds.
They moved with little talk, the mist, clouds and darkness acting like a smothering blanket upon any enthusiasm. The wagon, weapons and armor jingled. The hooves of the horses thudded on the earth. Their breath—and Jim's—smoked as white as the mist in the damp, cold air. Gradually the light became true daylight and the mist began to thin; and almost before Jim was ready for it, they reached the edge of the wood looking out on the plain where Malvern Castle stood. The last mist still trailed in streamers across the open ground, and the tops of the stone walls and towers rose from it like the upper parts of some castle half drowned by the sea. Suddenly, even as they halted and looked, the first rays of the rising sun slid through the treetops to the east and struck at a long slant into the mist, thinning it further.
Slowly, the plain began to become fully visible, everything on it sharply seen, down to the very stones at the base of the battlements.
Jim glanced up once more at the sky. The heavy cloud cover was beginning to be torn open in places by the upper winds, although the air was still calm at ground level. Enough of the clouds remained, and hung low, however, so that for the first time it occurred to him that he would not be able to fly high in approaching the castle. If he was to come in by air to the top of the keep during the next half-hour or so, he would have to fly at little more than a few hundred feet; and there would be no disguising to those on watch about the castle walls and towers that a dragon was coming—nor the destination to which that dragon was heading.
Chapter Sixteen
"Right!" said Brian, loudly and cheerfully. "Everybody present? How about Sir wolf?"
"Worry about yourself, Sir knight," answered the voice of Aragh. "I've been here long enough to kill twenty sheep."
"All right," said Brian. "Make ready, then. Master Giles, you know your men and your bow work. I know my part. Do you take charge of your archers, including the Welshman. Sir James, Dick, wolf—to me here."
The expedition split into two groups.
Dafydd, a few yards off by himself, was carefully unwrapping one by one the cloths in which he had individually cased the arrows on which Jim had seen him working at the inn. He handled the shafts delicately, planting six of them before him point-down in the earth and sliding the other two into his quiver. Dick descended from the horse he had ridden here; and now that Jim saw it clearly in the daylight, he noticed that the light-brown animal had been liberally powdered with flour or some other white substance to lighten it to something like Blanchard's color. Brian swung down from Blanchard now and began transferring to the smaller, whitened horse the breastplate and body armor his charger customarily wore.
"Like rider, like steed," he said. "You and your mare here will be a pair for unfit armor, Dick. The chaufrain's too wide for her head, the crinet too long for her neck. But she can carry them a short while without too much trouble. The petrel's also too wide for her chest, but that can hang loose. On the other hand, I can buckle the flanchards tight around forearms and shoulder and they'll carry almost as well as they do on Blanchard."
"It's still not going to hang well," said Danielle. "And that horse's coloring is poor. I don't see why you don't just let the innkeeper ride your horse."
Brian frowned.
"Wish me no bad luck, mistress," said Dick, cheerfully, out of the depths of his helmet. "I've stabled such horses before. I can ride most beasts; but I'd not throw leg over one like Blanchard for a hundred pounds of silver. Not only would he not endure for a moment anyone but his master on his back, but having thrown me, he'd hardly be content to stand. He'd turn on me with hooves and teeth, as he's been trained, until either he had me killed, or I managed to escape."
"Quite right," said Giles, turning from his own men. "The knight knows what he's about, Danielle. Try not to command everyone, for once. Horses such as Blanchard wouldn't be worth the duke's ransom they are, if they were the sort that could be found on any farm. I'd wager Sir Brian paid a heavy penny for this one."
"My full inheritance," grunted Brian, hard at work fastening the second horse's straps. "The armor's my father's; but all else that came to me went to buy Blanchard. Never made a sounder move. He'll face lance, battle-axe, mace or sword, and defend me if I'm down against any man or beast that lives. I can ride him with knees alone and both hands busy with shield and weapon. And damned few other warhorses can match him for weight or strength."
He glanced at the innkeeper.
"No offense to you, friend Dick," he said. "But even if Blanchard'd carry you, I'd not let him. He's my horse alone."
"No fear, Sir Brian. I'm happier on Bess here, in any case." Dick hesitated. "But will you not at least wear a chain shirt under your cloth one?"
"Chain shirt alone won't do, anyway, if I run into Sir Hugh in full armor," said Brian. "He's a whoreson, but he knows how to fight. And if one of his men should think to search me early and find the mail, the alarm'll be sounded ahead of time. No, best to take the chance and dress later."
"You don't make the most likely innkeeper, either," Danielle remarked.
That much, Jim thought, was true. Sir Ja
mes was clad in tight leather breeches with belt and sheath knife that had originally belonged to Dick's son, a loose gray shirt and a clumsy, thick, dark cloak. As clothes, nothing was wrong with them. They would have looked all right on someone like Dick, himself—assuming that the breeches could have been gotten to fasten around the innkeeper's relatively thick waist. But the trouble with them on Brian was the way he wore them. Jim's earliest impression of the knight had been of piercing blue eyes, the erect carriage that comes from living in the saddle and bearing armor, and an aggressively jutting chin. All these were still very visible, in spite of the humbleness of the garments that now clothed him.
"I've the beard, here," said Dick, producing it from among the load in the wagon. "It's not an exact match for your hair, Sir Brian; but then it's not unknown for a man with brown hair your color to have a beard touching on the red. These threads go over your head under your own hair to fasten in on… and if you then comb your own hair forward to mingle with it in front, as the player showed me… Let me assist you, Sir Brian…"
Together, they got the beard on. It did, indeed, go a long way to disguise the knight, giving him an unkempt, raffish look above which the blue eyes looked merely villainous.
"You might try slouching a bit," said Danielle.
"Like this?" asked Brian.
He tried, without any great success.
"I'm not a damned jack-o-motley, you know!" he fumed at them all, finally. "Leave be! I'll either coney-catch Sir Hugh and his men, or not, as God wills!"
He got up on the seat of the wagon, and picked up the reins of the two horses harnessed to it.
"Ready?" he demanded.
"Ready, Sir Brian," said Dick, who was already mounted on the whitened and armored Bess.
"Give me a good lead, now, so that they don't see you having to hold Bess back from catching me."
"Yes, Sir Brian."
"And you, Giles, don't forget to leave a party on the gate. If Sir Hugh's first warning is to look out his chamber window and see fighting within the walls, he'll stop to arm and armor himself before all else. Once he shows up, full-accoutered, make sure those in the gate party stand back and try only to keep him from a horse, until I myself—"
"Or I," interrupted Aragh.
Brian glanced at him, impatiently.
"Sir wolf," he said, "what might you do with a man in full armor?"
Aragh snarled softly, leaping up to settle himself in the wagon.
"Sir knight," he said, "someday you may see."
"At any rate," Brian went on, turning back to Giles, "hold the gate and keep Sir Hugh from horse!"
"Fear not, Sir Brian," said Giles. "I've some little knowledge of such things."
"Doubtless. But saying it makes all certain." Brian flipped the reins he held, starting his wagon horses forward. "Now—for God and my lady!"
He drove out of the woods.
Out on the small plain surrounding the castle, the last of the mist had now disappeared and the gray stone walls were warmed by the clear yellow light of early day. Brian whipped the wagon horses into a trot, and then into a clumsy gallop along the tracks leading toward the castle gate.
"Not yet, Master Innkeeper! Not yet… Now!" snapped Giles; and Dick kicked Bess into movement, clanking out from the screen of trees at what was already a gallop.
Giles glanced at Jim.
"Yes," said Jim, "I'd better get started."
He badly wanted to stay and see whether the gate would be opened for Brian and Aragh, and whether Dick would be able to turn and get back safely. But he must take off in the opposite direction to approach the castle from an angle and altitude where he would not immediately be spotted.
He turned, accordingly, and ran back some distance in the wood before leaping into the air and mounting to just above treetop level. Looking back over his shoulder, he saw he was now far enough from the castle so that the trees hid him from the viewers on the battlements, and commenced to fly in a wide circle toward the back of Malvern.
Shortly, he caught his first thermal. Circling up on this, he found himself just under the cloudbank, which was unbroken here but showed openings toward the north and west. On impulse, he decided to fly up through the clouds and see if it was possible to get above them.
It turned out to be so; although he had to climb nearly twelve hundred feet to achieve it. Once above the clouds, he headed directly toward the castle, looking for a gap in the white masses below him through which he could orient himself. Locating one, he soared toward it and looked through at an angle that gave him a view of both the plain and Malvern. No wagon or armored figure on horseback was in sight, but there was a patch of sunlight on the ground to the west of the castle, indicating another rift in the clouds somewhere above it.
He lifted his head, searched for this other rift from above and found it, not far off. He soared to it, saw the castle at a sharper angle below and identified the roof of the keep. He was about three-quarters of a mile from it and about a thousand feet above. He went into a dive, not through the rift, but through the clouds just beyond it, directly above the castle.
For a long moment he was wrapped about and blinded by cloud mist. Then suddenly he was back in open air again and the castle was right under him. Half folding his wings, he dropped like a stone from a catapult, arcing to its target. At the last moment he pulled up and, with a thunderclap of cupped air, slammed down on the top of the keep.
Only one guard met him. The man gaped, turned and disappeared down the stone stairway leading to the floor of the solar, below. Jim plunged after him, gained the solar and ducked in time to avoid a spear flung through the air. Instinctively, he struck out with a wing, and that powerful member literally picked up the man-at-arms and slammed him against a wall, to drop and lie still.
The dragon-blood of Jim—or Gorbash; under these conditions it was impossible to identify whose blood it was—was up and boiling!
He heard the sound of steel clashing on steel below him and plunged down the next flight of stairs to catch a momentary glimpse of a tall, slim girl in white holding a short pike and facing out an open doorway. He brushed past her as she cried something he could not understand and tried to stick him with the pike. But by that time, he was through the door and into a short corridor where Brian, wearing only a helmet and with the rest of his armor in a pile at his feet, was holding off three men-at-arms with his sword.
Jim slammed into the three and they went down.
"Thanks!" gasped Brian. "Hold the lower stairs, will you, Sir James? And aid the wolf, if need be. He's either opened the gate by this time, or they have him dead. Bring word as to which—if you can."
Snorting, long red tongue flickering out between parted jaws, and wings half raised, Jim hurled himself down the last flights of steps. At the bottom he discovered a large, dim hall to his right, somewhat divided by curtains, beyond which came the sounds of fighting (and the shouts of men. To his left was a doorway to open sunlight. He went through.
To his right now, around a curving wall of weathered logs, he saw the space of an interior courtyard and the castle gates, one of which was swung partway inward and open. Two fights were going on in the courtyard. One was over by some open sheds containing horses, where five of Giles' men were engaged with swords against about the same number of Sir Hugh's men-at-arms. Just inside the gate, a shouting semi-circle of nearly a dozen more men-at-arms had Aragh against the battlement, none of them apparently too eager to be the first to close with him, but all trying by sword feints and gestures to hold his attention long enough for someone else to get in a blow.
"ARAGH!" thundered Jim, using his full dragon-voice.
He plunged at the semi-circle, which disintegrated as he hit it. Immediately, he was fighting four men, Aragh was killing three others, and the rest were fleeing.
"Where's Giles?" Jim shouted at the wolf as he finished off three of his own four opponents and saw the other turn and run.
"Inside the hall," Aragh panted, "w
hen last I saw him."
"Sir Hugh?"
"No sign of him."
"He's not in the keep!" Jim said. "I just came from there. Brian's getting into his armor. I'll check the rest of the castle."
He leaped into the air and with one pump of his wings put himself atop the wall. To right and left he saw the bodies of several men-at-arms down and motionless, a single arrow through the chest of each. The battlements were abandoned except by the dead.
Jim wondered where Dafydd was. Still back in the forest? Or had he come in and joined Giles' men, who were fighting in the hall or otherwise?
At that moment, an entrance on the far side of the keep suddenly disgorged men-at-arms carrying the same sort of short pikes that the girl had brandished. They bore down on the fairly even battle that was going on near the stables between some of their comrades and the outlaws.
The dragon-fury was now completely in possession of Jim. He leaped from the wall at this new body of the enemy. None of them had been looking up and he cannoned into them without warning. Suddenly he was in the midst of battle, hissing, roaring, fighting with teeth, claws and wings all at once, balanced on his hind legs like some gigantic bird of prey.
They melted about him. It was like battling straw men armed with candy-cane weapons. The pikes broke at his touch; he flung the men who carried them about like dolls. A savage feeling of power flamed up in him. Out of the corner of one eye he saw Aragh again surrounded by a fresh group of Sir Hugh's retainers and thought of going to the wolf's aid as soon as he had finished matters where he was. What was it Aragh had said about seeing that Gorbash got back safely? But Jim needed nobody's help. Who could stand against a dragon? No one. He was invincible, and when this was over he would remind them all of that—wolf, outlaws, knight… Then, abruptly, the men-at-arms who had been attacking him began to shout and yell triumphantly. "Gorbash!" howled Aragh. "Gorbash!" Was the wolf calling for help? Jim looked and saw Aragh hard-pressed, but in no way badly wounded or in trouble.