Adrian (26 page)

 

He slapped at the flames and flung himself onto his back as a pair of screaming pillars of fire ran past him, but Roman could barely hear them above the loud squeal the explosion had stuffed into his pounding, spinning head. They weren't flaming pillars; they were men.
Men on fire.

 

He came awake with a gasp, inadvertently sucking in some of the silty dirt from the floor of the cave. Roman fell into a coughing fit as he sat up fully, noticing that he clutched at his shoulder out of habit. He released his arm and reached for the now nearly empty skin of wine the Spaniard had left behind for him.

“To pass the time, yes?” Valentine Alesander had said with a wry grin as he'd tossed it down from atop his horse. Then he'd disappeared down the trail in the spreading dusk.

A bird's short, creaking chirp echoed in the cave, interrupting the memory.

Roman gained his feet and walked to the opening of the cave where the hunting falcon was tethered. He stroked Lou's back with one gentle finger as he looked down on the walled city of Damascus that would soon lie in shadow once more. Three days. Valentine Alesander had left Roman in the cave three days ago.

“They will be praying soon,” Valentine had said. “It is my best opportunity.”

Roman scrubbed a hand over his bristly face as if he would wipe the thick air and his troubled thoughts away. Then he sighed and placed his hands on his hips. It was of no use; the cave seemed to be full of ghosts now: days past living on in his dreams, voices in his head.

Something had gone wrong. Either the Spaniard had been caught, or he had not even attempted to gain entry into Saladin's prison to free Adrian Hailsworth and Constantine Gerard. Perhaps he had instead maneuvered his horse around the wall and gone on past the city, taking the sack of Chastellet coin with him. He'd already proven he could disappear into the native population—Roman had nearly killed Alesander himself upon their first meeting, thinking him Saracen.

Roman stalked to the back of the cave, squatted down and checked his bag again—it was still cinched tightly, the other sack of gold secure inside. Then Roman rose and paced the width of the crude shelter.

Whether Alesander had absconded with the coin or been captured himself, there was clearly no one to rescue Roman's friends. And if the Spaniard
was
caught, his blood was on Roman's hands. Roman's shoulder ached where the man had reseated the joint for him, dislocated for weeks, and he kneaded the bicep which seemed so much smaller than it had been only weeks ago.

Valentine Alesander had rescued him from the midden heap of Chastellet—its cisterns stuffed with corpses and its walls adorned with carrion birds; rescued him from the cesspool of his own mind which echoed with screams of the dying; the sounds of arrows finding deep flesh; the shame of being the one left behind, the one left alive. The Spaniard had made Roman's body whole again, despite the healing gashes and still-dark contusions beneath his tunic and chausses. And he had led Roman to Damascus, where the only two men on earth Roman could claim as friends were being held by the conquerors of Chastellet.

If they weren't already dead.

Roman, like Chastellet, had fallen. Had he not been struck so many times to the temple, perhaps he would have realized the true folly of dragging himself into the exposed bailey once more to save the life of the hunting bird left abandoned and tethered to its perch—the same one that now stood guard at the cave's entrance. But in Roman's swollen, fevered reasoning, there had been naught else for it. His weakness and injuries had rendered him incapable of saving Chastellet, but there had been a creature before him—one totally innocent of man's folly and politics—that he
could
save. He had decided to let the attempt be on his soul then, and damn him if it would.

Lou chirped again—a questioning sound—and Roman went once more to the falcon, who had come to mean so much to him since that bloody day.

“Naught else for it again, is there, Lou?” he said quietly, stroking the bird's feathers. The falcon tolerated Roman's touch, but Roman knew he was impatient. Lou needed to fly. And so did Roman.

He looked back to the opening of the cave. If he did nothing to save the three men hidden somewhere in the city below, he might as well return to the ruin that was Chastellet and drop from a rope hung from its highest crumbled wall. It would be better than rotting here in this cave, waiting for the Spaniard who was clearly not coming back.

Roman returned to his satchel again, picking it up and looping the strap over his back before donning the leather hood that fit tightly over his skull and draped onto his shoulders like a short cape. He had no robe, no cloak, nothing else to disguise his large body and Anglo coloring. The hood would have to do. The guards would likely kill him as soon as he passed through the gates any matter, if even he made it that far.

He had no gauntlet for Lou, but the falcon had been content to ride upon Roman's shoulder from Chastellet. He picked loose the leather tie keeping the bird captive, and then leaned down, easing the falcon onto the edge of the leather hood.

“Going on an adventure, Lou.”

The bird didn't respond, but sidled a bit higher on Roman's shoulder, closer to his ear. Roman found the weight of the creature, the grip of its talons, comforting, as if he truly had a comrade in the falcon.

“I'll not keep hold of your tether though,” he said, turning and walking out of the cave without hesitation and setting his boots upon the narrow, twisting animal path that led down the hillside. “I'm likely walking into my own death, and I'd not have yours on my conscience, as well. I'll remove your hood before I enter the city. You'll be free.”

Roman considered as he tromped down the mountain in the lengthening shadows that, if he were being truly magnanimous, he would remove the bird's blind now. But he could not yet bear it—the thought of being totally alone at what could again be the last hour of his life. It had been that way since he was a boy, had it not—the alone? He thought with some shame that he should be used to it by now.

He walked quickly among the dunes dotted with scrubby brush at the base of the mountain, seeking the shortest path to gain the packed road leading into the city. Roman guessed that a lone man afoot with nothing more than a single bag was unlikely to draw immediate scrutiny from the guards atop the wall. The sun was swiftly sliding down the sky behind him, throwing a long, deep shadow on the road before him, and Roman hunched into it, made it his companion along with the falcon on his shoulder.