The Rogue Knight (43 page)

France dropped from view, while fog hid England’s shore. Then, out of a bank of rolling mist, sailed two huge cogs with black sails. Ragged mobs of cutlass and pike-men swarmed aboard the two ships.

“It’s Eustace the Monk!” wailed the captain.

Lamerok blanched, as did everyone else aboard. All had heard of terrible Eustace. The huge monk had foresworn himself, loving women and wine more than Holy God. Years ago, they’d thrown him out of his order. In retaliation, he’d gathered his noble brothers, cousins and uncles, and had returned to burn the monastery to the ground. Chased from his native lands by outraged folk, Eustace had taken up piracy and some said the black arts. Now he was one of the most successful pirates in the English Channel.

The leaky barge never had a chance. Even so, Lamerok urged the Norman knight from Sicily to fight. They agreed. Alas, knights lacked a seaman’s training. With his two ships, Eustace cunningly swept upon the leaky barge from both sides. Grappling hooks thudded onto the railings and soon pirates swarmed from all directions. Enemy arrows swept the deck. Pirate archers who stayed upon their fore and aft-castles shot down sailors. A mob of pirates soon pulled down the Norman knight. A toothless old pirate ignobly stabbed out the knight’s eyes, killing him. Huge Eustace swaggered up, roaring orders as he clubbed the pirates swarmed over Lamerok.

“He’s good for ransom, you fools,” the huge old pirate bellowed. Because of unlimited wine and good food, Eustace was a mountain of flesh with massive forearms. He wore black silk and had eyes as dark as the coals of Hell.

“And what’s this?” Eustace bellowed. His men twisted the prelate’s arms behind his back.

“Hang him!” shouted the pirates.

Eustace nodded. “Aye, hang him. I hate priests.”

The prelate from Rome wailed in agony, screaming that he was worth more gold than Eustace had ever seen.

“How can this be?” Eustace asked.

The prelate turned foxy and said he could only tell Eustace.

That enraged the pirate, who guzzled wine as he spoke, letting it dribble down his chins. He fell upon the poor prelate, clubbed and kicked him, knocking out his front teeth. Then he roared orders to throw the knight, the squire and the priest into the hold.

Lamerok soon found himself tossed into the smelly underpart of the ship. Wet sand filled the hold, while huge black rats and lice prowled everywhere. Lamerok examined the priest and knew that soon the man would die.

“I must tell you,” the priest whispered, ungluing his bloody eyelids. “Then you must tell Eustace.”

Lamerok marveled at the prelate’s will to live. He wondered if perhaps the man feared Hell or didn’t welcome Heaven enough.

“You’ll tell Eustace, yes?” whispered the priest through his mangled lips and jagged remains of teeth.

“Tell him what?” Lamerok asked.

“The secret of Gaius’ Golden Treasure,” whispered the priest.

“Rest,” Lamerok said. He knew the priest was dying. “Pray to God.”

“Listen,” whispered the priest. “Listen well.” He chuckled in an odd and terrifying way. “Then go tell Eustace that I can barter for my life.”

“Very well,” Lamerok said, wishing to please the dying man.

The priest relaxed and smiled a most hideous smile. From somewhere he gained strength. Such was his power, his will and his story that it wove a strange web around Lamerok and his squire.

“It began with a letter,” whispered the priest. “I’ve read that letter. Ah, I’ve read and pondered it for over two years. Gaius’ ghost has spoken to me and shown me the end.”

Lamerok and Hugo his squire made the sign of the cross. It helped them not at all. Rather, they should have plugged their ears. For here was the story the priest told them:

In a distant age, the jailers showed Gaius the papyrus sheets. The dying prisoner shook his head. The jailers cursed, and almost slapped Gaius across the face. Weakly, he grinned up at them, blood staining his white patrician teeth. That stilled their muttering. He moved his lips, trying to whisper loud enough so they could hear. One of them finally bent low.

Gaius almost choked on the jailer’s overpowering scent of garlic. By an act of will he forced himself not to cough, which would have brought up more blood.

“Bring me vellum,” Gaius whispered. “...And a hammer,” he added, knowing how crafty the praetor of the II Augusta Legion could be.

The jailers argued for only a moment. The telling point in the end was that Gaius Julius Maximums’ father was a highly ranked senator back in Rome. It wouldn’t be prudent to deny his only son his dying wish, even if that son was a military tribune who had deserted with eight other patrician youths.

Gaius closed his eyes. Every wheezing breath brought him pain. He had almost made it back out of Ordovices territory with a whole skin—back out of the wilds of Wales. A barbarian’s bone-tipped arrow had ended all that. Now, despite everything that the physicians had done, the bone-chip and an un-removable inch of shaft was lodged in his lungs, the reason he was dying.

He prayed to Phoebus Apollo, the god of healing, that he be allowed to linger a little while longer. He had to tell his father what had happened. His secret could help lift the family out of its current troubles and back into the rarified strata of the truly powerful.

As he waited for the vellum—sheepskin turned into parchment by a careful process of scraping, washing, stretching and paring—the legion’s praetor marched into his cell.

The praetor, a wiry bald Roman of forty, bent low and implored Gaius to tell him why nine young patricians, all Italians of the highest quality, had deserted their posts and ridden hard into the wilds of Wales.

Gaius said nothing.

“Why did you alone ride back, Gaius Maximums?” the praetor asked. “Tell me what happened to the others so I may at least write their parents the truth?”

Gaius licked his lips. The truth was terrifying. Their ordeal had been one of horror, desperation and grim ferocity. If only the arrow hadn’t sunk into his back and deep into his lungs. They should have never left their posts, never listened to the intriguing rumors.

The praetor bent lower. “Where are they, Gaius? What happened to your friends, your close companions?”

Gaius stared into the praetor’s eyes. “Dead,” he wheezed. “They’re all dead.”

“How did they die?” asked the praetor, his warm, leathery hands gripping Gaius’ arm.

“A-a curse,” Gaius whispered. Then his midsection lurched upward as terrible pain lanced through his body. He spoke no more, and only revived after the jailers touched his hot skin with a rag dipped in vinegar.

A writing table now stood beside him. On it was vellum, a dispatch packet, wax, a flickering candle and his family signet. He blinked solemnly each time a jailer showed him an item.

“Hammer,” he whispered.

The jailers didn’t need to bend low to understand what he asked for. Instead, they demanded to know why he wanted a hammer. He gave them no answer, only stared at them until they shifted nervously. Finally, one of them ran out, and returned with a hammer.

Only then, did Gaius Julius Maximums clench his teeth and prepare himself for the final struggle. He prayed mightily, although silently, to Jupiter, King of the gods. By his recent actions, he had brought a stain upon his family. This stain he wished to erase, and more than that, he wished to bring honor and fame back to his family, and to make his father proud of what he had done.

His skin burned with the fever that raged through him. His strength seeped away with every breath. Still, he had his will.

With teeth clenched and fists knotted, he lifted his head off the straw-filled cot and then pushed himself upward with his elbows. The jailers stepped back, their mouths agape. Whatever color Gaius had faded away to a deathly white pallor, then turned a sickly hue of yellow. A terrible groan escaped his lips, but now he sat up, his hands clenched at the sides of the writing table.

“Lay back down,” one of the jailers urged, a man not noted for his sympathy.

Gaius stared at him with mad, fevered eyes. That jailer fled. The other stood rooted as Gaius, with a trembling hand, picked up a quill and began to write. As he did, his hand steadied and the yellow hue left his skin. He poured out his story in a process of dipping the ostrich quill into ink and then scratching upon the vellum as one possessed. He wrote in Latin.

After several minutes of watching this performance, the second jailer cried out in what seemed like supernatural dread. He too fled the cell.

If he had been able, Gaius could have stood up and walked away. The solid oak door was ajar. He didn’t even notice the opportunity, so absorbed was he in his final testament. When his strange tale was finished, Gaius sprinkled sand over the ink, waited, then rolled up the vellum and stuffed it into the packet. He heated wax with the candle, poured the liquefied wax onto the packet’s fold, stamped and sealed it with his family signet, an ivory stick with a carefully carved lion image on the end. He waited for the wax to harden. As he waited, his fevered skin once again turned a sickly yellow color. His hands shook as he lifted the hammer. He was terrified that he’d die before his last act was finished.

“Lord Jupiter, help me,” he whispered, with blood trickling from his mouth.

He brought the hammer down against the end of the ivory signet, but not hard enough. He wheezed another wet breath, steadied his shaking hand a final time, and cried out his father’s name as he swung the hammer. The lion carving on the end of the signet broke.

The hammer fell onto the floor. Gaius’ chin slumped against his chest. For a breath or two, he remained unmoving. Then he reached forward and pushed his last note beside the packet.

Done, he tried to lower himself onto the cot. That’s when he coughed a final gout of black blood and crashed to the floor in a heap. He twitched once and died, with a smile on his bloody lips.

The praetor returned an hour later. His mistake was in coming in the company of other ranked officers. The note beside the packet was read. It requested that the sealed packet be taken to Gaius’ father in Rome. The destroyed signet showed the officers that Gaius had desperately wanted only his father to read the letter. If someone broke the wax seal, another Maximums lion would never be stamped upon new wax.

“I must open this,” the praetor told his officers, “and see what fate befell the others.”

“You cannot do such a thing,” said a friend of Gaius’ father. He picked up the packet. “This must be given to the senator sealed, as his only son intended.”

The praetor argued a while longer, but in the end, he gave in to custom.

The packet was sent to Imperial Rome along with other letters, bulletins and dispatches from the II Augusta Legion stationed in Isca, which in centuries to come would be known as Caerleon, Wales.

The Elder Maximums read the tale six months later. It filled him with grief and shame at his son’s evil deed. Yes, maybe the Maximums family could use Gaius’ secret to advantage, but the senator was too proud to stoop so low as to accept his son’s treachery. How had he failed in training the boy? Treachery, and now a vile druidic curse—no, he wanted to stamp such things from the Maximums family. But this was his only son. As much as he wanted too, he could not destroy Gaius’ last and damning letter. So the senator sealed the letter in a clay jar, and along with Gaius’ things he had them mortared into a secret cache in the corner of his wine cellar.

A year later he died, many said of a broken heart.

The years passed, as did the centuries. Riots by the plebes, countless fires and political assassinations brought about by the Praetorian Guards changed the landscape of Rome time and again. The senator’s house withstood it all. The mighty Roman Empire finally split into East and West. Civil wars raged as the dreaded German barbarians knocked at the gates of civilization. Then, on 24 August 410 A.D., Alaric entered Rome and his Goths sacked it. The senator’s house was looted, but no one found the mortared cache in the cellar below. When Gaiseric and his Vandals ransacked Rome forty-five years later, so outdoing Alaric as to give civilization a new name for wanton destruction (vandalism), the senator’s house was almost burned to the ground. Only a timely rainstorm saved it. The Ostrogoths who followed in the wake of these various conquests soon controlled all of Italy. Emperor Justinian of Constantinople sent his two best generals, Belisarius and Narses the Eunuch, to win Italy back to the Eastern Empire. Savage wars, famines and several famous sieges all reduced Rome to a shell of what it had once been. The senator’s old home was at various times a ghost-house, a barn and a grainy. None of this had changed by the time Pope Leo III, on Christmas Day, crowned Charlemagne the new Western Roman Emperor in A.D. 800.

However, the event greatly enhanced the pope’s aura of power. With his increased prestige came the growth of the Vatican in Rome. Over the years, and the centuries, the city began to grow anew.

So it was that in the Year of our Lord 1262, the stone house of the dead senator was hammer-stroke by hammer-stroke destroyed. It was to make way for a new mansion of an important red-hatted cardinal.

The hidden cache was found. The clay jar destroyed. A priest read the incredibly brittle letter. Then it was hidden once again. That priest now lay dying in a cog that belonged to Eustace the Monk.

***

Lamerok stared at Hugo. “Do you believe him?” he whispered.

“What treasure?” Hugo greedily asked the dying priest.

“Gaius and his companions, led by a renegade apprentice druid, slew a coven of master druids and stole their centuries old treasure,” whispered the priest. “They stole their golden gutting knives, their golden blood-bowls and their golden head crushers. The renegade apprentice was slain out of hand because none of the patrician youths trusted him. Then they rode for freedom. Only they hadn’t slain all the druids. One of them must have lived, for soon all the natives gave chase.” The priest wheezed, but he was strong with the power of his tale. It almost seemed that he was filled with a supernatural will, a force that wouldn’t let him quit. “Gaius and his fellows cached the gold in a deep cave, shown them beforehand by the apprentice. Then they caused rocks to slide and seal up the cave.”

In the hold of the pirate ship, the priest sat up. His eyes were wide and staring as he clutched Hugo’s shirt. “There is a curse on the gold, so Gaius wrote. He must be right. Most of his friends died, with arrows in their chests. Finally, only two of them survived, crawling over rocks to flee the natives. That’s when Gaius fell upon his lifelong friend, stabbing him so only he, Gaius Maximums, could reclaim the golden treasure.

“Gaius cut down a native cavalryman and fled. He almost escaped whole, but in the end they put an arrow in his back and into his lungs.”

The priest laughed. “That’s part of the curse. You either die through treachery or with an arrow in your lungs.”

“You’ve not died that way,” Hugo said.

In moments, it became clear to Lamerok that his squire had understood the tale better than he had.

The prelate smiled, blood staining his teeth. Then he whispered to them the secret location of the cave and he told them how to remove the rocks. The Roman lads, it seemed, had been engineers and well understood such things.

Before either Lamerok or Hugh could do more, the trapdoor was flung up. A drunken Eustace roared, “A pox on all priests!” He aimed a crossbow and shot the priest through the chest.

“Now,” Eustace shouted at Lamerok, “we’ll talk ransom prices.”

***

After five days of listening to Lamerok, Cord and the others had learned this much of the story. They were deep in Owain ab Ifan’s land. Castle Gareth lay to the south.

“Where exactly is this cave?” Alice asked.

Once again, they sat in a forest glade, at night, a fire throwing flickering illumination over them.

“You truly wish to know?” Lamerok asked. “Even though the curse will surely kill all of us if I tell you?”

“The Old Woman of Bones,” Gwen said. “Aldora surely serves the same gods those slain druids did.”

Cord shivered with dread. All these days and nights in the wilds, listening to this strange story, had stoked his superstitions. Those druids had been alive during the time of Rome. No, Aldora couldn’t belong to such an ancient cult. It was impossible.

“You still haven’t answered my question,” Alice told Lamerok.

“Tomorrow,” Lamerok cryptically said. “Tomorrow you’ll learn the answer.”