Roselynde (20 page)

Simon rode on past. His horse could not have checked in time in
any case. As he turned his beast, he whirled the hanging morningstar. A trail
of red droplets followed it, but its charge was soon renewed as it took the
middle rider, who was struggling to control his startled horse, in the back and
neck. This was no game of knightly endeavor in which men politely circled each
other to meet face-to-face.

The third rider had managed to avoid the plunging horses of the
other two and was circling also. He thought he had taken Simon's measure, but
he had erred in failing to take account of Simon's destrier. On signal, the
battle-trained stallion reared upward and turned short. The sword cut aimed to
take off from behind the arm that wielded the morningstar struck the bottom
edge of Simon's shield, slid down, and scored his calf. Perhaps that sight was
a brief comfort before the morningstar came down again.

Bereft of opponents, Simon looked about for more. He was breathing
hard but more with fear that Alinor had been, or would be, carried away while
he was thus occupied than with effort. He had fought many better skilled and
more dangerous opponents in the past. First, far in the rear, in the direction
from which he had come, he saw his own troop and Alinor's, Ian urging his
flying horse to still greater effort and Beorn thundering along just behind.
His intent was so fixed that he did not regard them either as help or
hindrance. There was only one thing Simon sought.

Then Simon found his objective. He did not yet see Alinor, but
from various directions the horsemen were converging upon one spot. Simon
clapped his spurs to his mount's already sore sides and it leapt forward,
breasting the thinned spot in the brush where Alinor and the squire had forced
a path. Down beyond he saw her at last, her back to the wall of the shepherd's
hut. It had no door. Four men ringed her, but not too close for one was nursing
a hand from which blood dripped. Another held the five horses. He was the first
to die there. He did not even have time to cry a warning. He had not looked
around, expecting more of his companions and finding the scene before the hut
of more interest. The morningstar caught him full in the chest. Blood filled
his lungs and burst from his nose and mouth. The horses, suddenly freed and
affrighted, galloped away.

Startled at the sound of pounding hooves so close, one man turned
from Alinor and shrieked a warning. He was the second of that group to die.
None of the men had drawn a weapon. Perhaps had Simon seen, he would have held
his hand, but his eyes had only taken in Alinor's bloody face and hands and
torn clothing. When the man-at-arms fell, he had no face. The third, Simon
brained with a single downward thrust of his shield. The man had not pulled his
helmet on over his hood. What was there to fear from a single girl?

The fourth and fifth fled without even drawing swords. They were
not cowards. Two men afoot were no match for a knight mounted on a war-wise
destrier. Across the field those who had been coming slowly began to spur their
horses onward, but the shouts of Ian and Beorn and the men who followed made
them pause. When they saw the size of the troop, most of the men riding with
lances fewtered, they did more than pause. They turned their horses and rode
away at the best pace they could make.

Simon pushed the loop of the morningstar off his wrist, flung
himself from his mount, and caught Alinor to him, gasping between rage and fear
for her.

"Let me go," she cried, her voice high, hysterical,
terrified.

Alinor did not fear the man who seized her—she feared for him. She
had recognized Simon as soon as the man-at- arms screamed a warning to his
comrades. But the blood! Her love was covered in blood. It seemed to Alinor—who
had seen men hacked to pieces—that she had never seen so much blood in her
life. Simon misunderstood. He thought she was dazed by fear and did not know
him.

"Alinor! It is I, Simon. Beloved, do not struggle so. No one
will hurt you now. You are safe. My love, my love, when I find who has done
this to you, it will take him ten years to die."

"My God, my God," she sobbed, "no one has done me
aught. But look at you! You are covered in blood. Where are you hurt, dear
heart?"

"
I
am covered in blood!" Simon exclaimed,
relaxing his grip so that he could look at Alinor.
"You
are covered
in blood." His face turned ugly, but his voice was soft as to wheedle a
frightened child. "Beloved, tell me who beat you. I swear on my life that
man shall take no revenge upon you."

"No one. No one," Alinor assured him, and threw her arms
around his neck, and kissed him.

Simon's mind could hold no more at the moment than the bloody
fight, his terror for Alinor, the pain that was beginning to press upon him.
Overriding all when Alinor touched him came a wave of unthinking passion. He
tightened his grip again and his mouth responded to hers, hard and dry at first
with the thirst of battle, then softening as his blood answered to this new
demand and left the fighting muscles to course through groin and mouth.

Alinor had kissed the lips of many men, young and old. She had
kissed them in greeting and parting in her grandfather's day, and she gave the
kiss of peace to her vassals and liegemen. A kiss to her had been a physical
contact little more meaningful than a pressure of the hands. Occasionally, as
when she kissed Sir Andre, she had felt a stir of affection.

Nothing had prepared Alinor for the sensations that enveloped her
now. It was as if her flesh had developed nerves in new places. Her breasts
rose and the nipples filled; her loins grew warm and soft. Regardless of the
fact that Simon was crushing her to him so hard she could scarcely breathe, she
attempted to press still closer. His lips parted; hers followed. His tongue
touched hers; the tip of hers slid under his, caressed its root.

In his life Simon had had many women, willing and unwilling. There
had been the greensleeves and the prizes of war; the serf girls who had
fulfilled a sudden animal need and the castle ladies who had wished to taste a
new delicacy. But before he had seen Alinor, Simon had loved only one woman
deeply and devotedly—the Queen—and he had never, even in his dreams, associated
her with sexual passion. Topping the physical stress of battle and fear, the
onslaught of combined love and lust nearly felled him. His knees trembled and
tears filled his closed eyes and oozed under the lids to mingle with the sweat
of exertion on his face.

Through mail and clothing, Alinor felt him shake. New to passion,
she did not associate the trembling with desire. The last image fixed in her
mind was the bright, wet blood on Simon's gray surcoat. The trembling of a
wounded man meant weakness to Alinor. Anxiety drowned passion. She disengaged
her lips gently.

"Beloved, beloved," she murmured, "sit down here.
Let me tend to you. You are hurt."

Simon opened glazed eyes that slowly began to fill with horror.
"What have I done?" he said faintly.

Alinor understood. "Nothing," she soothed,
"nothing. A kiss to comfort me." She stroked his cheek. "Come.
Sit. Let me see to your hurts. No one saw. We are alone."

"Alone?" Revulsion thickened his voice. To take
advantage of a frightened girl was disgusting. Simon bit his lips, still soft
and warm from her kiss, and stared at her. Perhaps he had not been the first to
take advantage. "Who has torn and bloodied you?" he cried.

"No one. Simon, love, listen to me. I ran through the thicket
to escape the boy and the branches and brambles scratched me and tore my
clothes. That is all. No man laid a hand upon me." Alinor looked at the
three bloody corpses that lay so near. "And you have paid them well
already who only threatened me."

She took his hand to lead him around the hut, suddenly remembering
how bitterly he had spoken about blood and terror. Alinor knew that some men
were taken with a sickness after battle and could not, for a few hours, bear to
remember or look upon what had been done. And the blood was still welling from
his right side.

"Come, beloved, come away from this abattoir," Alinor
urged gently. "Let me stanch your bleeding."

"Oh, God!" Simon put up a hand to his face. "Do not
use those words to me."

"What words?"

"Do not—You called me beloved," he choked.

Alinor bit her lip. She had not realized. It was indeed necessary
that she be more careful. "No, no," she agreed quickly. "I will
call you 'my lord' or 'Simon' when we are among others. Do not fret, my lord.
Only come with me and let me attend to your hurts."

He searched her face and found there only a desperate anxiety.
"I am not hurt," he assured her, a little relieved.

Those warm lips, opening so readily, that little tongue— She had
only been aping his practiced caress. She did not understand. The words of
love—only relief. He had done no irrevocable harm, he told himself, yielding to
her pull and following docilely around the hut, out of sight of the carnage he
had wrought. There was no need for him to tell the Queen he was no safe
guardian. No need to yield his trust to another who would not really care for
her.

"Sit," Alinor bade him, ignoring the silly remark that
he was not hurt. She found to her relief that her knife was still in her hand
and smiled a little, thinking how the body responded to need without real thought.
When the strange man-at-arms had reached for her, she had stabbed his hand
before she even thought of doing so. Yet she had held her knife carefully atilt
all the while Simon embraced her and she him.

Simon was glad enough to rest for a while. The succession of
violent exertion and violent emotion combined with loss of blood was taking its
toll. He sank down, propping his back against the wall of the hut, lifting his
scabbard out of the way, and making sure his sword was loose in it. Although he
made preparations for defense automatically, he did not fear attack. His men
and Alinor's would not go far. He closed his eyes.

A sound of tearing cloth jerked them open again. "What do you
do?" he asked, seeing Alinor with her skirt above her thighs busily slitting
her shift to pieces.

"For shame," she laughed at him, "look away or you
will see me naked. It is the only clean cloth about me. I am all muddied from
crawling about through hedges, and I must have something to bind you
with."

"Bind me? Tush! I have fought half a day with worse hurts. It
is naught but a slit in my skin. Do not trouble yourself. A leech shall see to
me when we return to the Queen."

Alinor had had wide experience of the wounds of war and the filthy
leeches that attended the wounded men in the year during which her liegemen had
fought, sometimes bitterly, to keep her safe. Perhaps the leeches who served
the Court were wiser and cleaner, but Alinor was not about to chance Simon's
well-being on such a hope. She met his eyes.

"You are mine, to me," she said fiercely, "and none
but I shall see to you." Then seeing how startled he looked, Alinor smiled
and told him what she would say to others to convince them that she did no more
than her duty. "I have tended Sir Andre and Sir Giles and Sir John and
many others when they were hurt for my sake. Shall I do less for you who are
the warden set over me? Would you have men say that I hate you and wish you
ill?"

Simon looked away and Alinor went back to cutting up her shift. It
was reasonable enough, he thought, but that passionate "You are mine, to
me" disturbed him. Then he remembered when he had heard Alinor say that
before, and he began to laugh. God pity the man or woman who tried to interfere
with Alinor's inordinately powerful sense of possession; Simon understood that
he now belonged to her—just like her castles, her lands, her vassals, and her
serfs. For any and all of these she would work and fight. In a sense she loved
them all. Doubtless in that sense she loved him, too. It was safe to let her
tend him.

By the time Ian and Beorn and the men returned, Alinor's work was
also done. She had removed Simon's belt, lifted his hauberk and undergarments,
tsked over the gash which needed stitching but which she now saw was not
serious, and bound it firmly with pads and strips from her shift to reduce the
loss of blood.

"We could not catch them, my lady," Beorn lamented,
growing quite red with anger when he saw his mistress's disheveled condition.

"I think it is just as well," Alinor remarked calmly.

"We cannot hide this from the Queen." Simon sighed then
brightening. "Yes, we can. We can say you had a fall from your
horse."

"Ah, yes," Alinor agreed very gently, but with a
sarcastic lift to her brows, "and doubtless you were so enraged at my bad
riding that when you bent to lift me up, you burst. That is clearly why there
is a rent in your hide."

Simon guffawed with laughter, then gasped and clapped a hand to
his bandaged side. "Well, if you do not like my explanation, think of a
better one yourself. The Queen has no need to know of my bruises. If I do not
approach her until after we reach Windsor, a clean gown will cover all."

Alinor took his hand. She had made him remove his gauntlets when
she saw the marks they made upon her gown and his own face. "My lord, my
lord," she reproved him mischievously, "to save me a scolding you are
prepared to perjure yourself before your liege lady."