By that time, my headache was only a shadow of what it had been. And interestingly, I was actually feeling pretty casual about the situation. I'd either be dead tomorrow or alive, and right then I wasn't all that worried or afraid. Which seemed a bit strange to me, but I wasn't going to argue with it. Instead I closed my eyes again, to rest and hopefully sleep some more.
The next time I opened them, my guard was asleep on one of the other mattresses. The lamp had burned down to a fluttering glow. Something had wakened me, and I sat up. Looking around, I couldn't see anything that might have done it.
Then I felt a draft, and the lamp blew out. The draft had been from the wrong direction for the window or door, and it srnelled musty. Someone or something was behind me now, I was sure of it. I could sense something there, and for a few seconds my hair felt as if it were standing up like wires. It's got to be Moise, I told myself, and the spooky feeiing passed.
Why Moise? And how could it be him?
Then a knife tip touched the side of my neck from behind, and callused fingers touched my face. My heart almost stopped. There was the whispered word, "Who?", in Provencal.
I barely breathed my name.
The hand withdrew, and the knife. "Is the other one your guard?" he whispered.
"Yes."
Dimly I saw my visitor slip past me toward the Norman guard, and kneel. After a minute I heard a long shuddering sigh. My visitor stood again and came over to me, "Come," he murmured. "Your guard is dead."
Now I recognized the voice: It was Moise!
I rolled to my knees and got up. "My hands are shackled," I whispered, "but the guard has no key."
"We can free them later," he murmured, then took my arm and turned me around. There was an opening low in the wall, with a faint glow on the other side. Moise led me to it and we went through on hands and knees. The other side was a passage not more than three feet wide. A girl was standing back from the opening, maybe twelve or fourteen years old, holding an oil lamp. I couldn't tell what she looked like because, like most of the other women and older girls I'd seen here, she wore a cloth over her face from the cheeks down.
Moise, still on his knees, pushed the door closed. It was mortared slabs of rock, looking like the stone blocks of the wall but split thinner. It seemed to move on some kind of bearing, maybe stone balls in rounded holes. The slight grating sound of its moving was what had wakened me.
If it hadn't been for Moise's voice, I wouldn't have recognized him. In the lamplight, I saw that he was wearing a hooded Saracen robe and slippers.
We got up then, and Moise said something to the girl, in Arabic I suppose. She answered him, and I followed them along the passage, A few yards farther we came to stairs that led steeply down maybe fifty or sixty steps. At the bottom the passage continued level, its ceiling low enough that I had to stoop a little. The girl stopped after maybe a hundred feet and pointed upward. Moise pushed where she pointed, and a trapdoor opened overhead. We helped each other up, and I found myself in a round room with a ceiling that barely allowed me to stand erect. The place smelled kind of like grain smells on Evdash.
A tall, powerful Varangian was sitting there against the wall, hauberk, sword, and all. His legging was cut away from one leg, up to the knee, and his calf was bandaged. "Ketil!" I whispered, and going to him, I shook his hand awkwardly with both of mine. It seemed to me he might be the only Varangian left alive here. I realized then that he hadn't been at the banquet; in fact I hadn't seen him since we'd arrrived at the castle.
I turned to Moise. "How did you get here?" I asked, still softly. "How did he get here? And who's the girl?"
"Her name is Layla. She is the daughter of the Saracen who was steward of this castle. He was killed fighting the Normans; so was his master. She and her mother work here now.
"She was told to take care of Ketil, and then the Normans apparently forgot about him. So when she heard that the Varangians had been massacred, she brought Ketil here to hide. After the battle of Misilmeri, her father showed her the hidden passageways and every hiding place. She even knows a hidden way out of the castle. Just above us is a large grain storage vault. Sometime in the past, a false floor was put in it to form this secret chamber."
He stopped there as if that was all of it. "So how did you get out of the hall?" I asked. "And run into her?"
"It was you who made it possible. But first I must explain that I did not even taste the drink. Then, seeing the Varangians falling drugged, I pretended to be drugged too, and let my head drop onto the table.
Before you fell, you killed several of the Normans with your stunner. Unfortunately, Gilbert was only touched by it-he was probably ducking beneath the table as it reached him. I heard some Normans saying that Gilbert could neither move nor speak, though his eyes were open.
"His wife took charge then, screaming orders to the knights who still lived, and the castle's foot soldiers. More orders than there were Normans to carry them out, some of them impossible or contradictory. I felt hands drag me from the room and leave me in a corridor. When I opened my eyes a slit, a minute later, there were only myself and two Normans lying there, and my belt things had been taken. So I got up and fled. I didn't know where to go, so I went outside, intending to hide in the shrubs and plan what I might do.
"But Layla, who was going home from working in the kitchen, saw me leave and followed me. She brought me here and gave me this." He took a sheathed knife from inside his robe. "And brought me the robe as well," he added. "Then a few minutes later, she brought Ketil. I described you to her then, and told her I wanted to rescue you. And Tarel."
"What about Tarel?" I asked.
"He is somewhere with no hidden passage. Only three rooms open on a passage, and by luck, you were in the third of them."
"Ask her if she can think of a way we can get to him and get him out."
"I have. She tells me there is no way short of searching, and taking him by force."
"Okay," I said, then examined my wrist irons. There was no lock. They'd simply been bolted, the nuts turned so tightly they'd been burred. I gestured. "Can Layla get a hammer and chisel? Now?"
Moise turned and spoke to her in Arabic. She shook her head as she answered. "Not tonight," he told me. "She would have to go to the smithy and steal a chisel, and there will be men about, searching for me."
Then Ketil spoke, questioning, and Moise answered in Greek. Next Moise said something in Arabic to Layla, who nodded, raised the trapdoor, and stood waiting, looking at him.
"What?" I said.
"Ketil has an idea for freeing you. We will go and bring something, Layia and I." Then they left, the trapdoor closing behind them.
Ketil and I sat waiting for quite a while, neither of us saying anything. Ketil looked as if I wasn't there, as if he were alone with his thoughts. Grim thoughts. His two-handed sword was in his fists now, fists that looked enormous to me. Finally the trapdoor began to lift again, and Ketil raised his sword in readiness for whatever might appear.
The first head through was Layla's, and Ketil relaxed. A block of firewood followed her, then Moise, who closed the trapdoor.
"There," he said to me. "Kneel down and put your chain on the block."
I got the idea, and knelt. The chain was only about three inches long. When I put it on the block, my wrists were less than three inches apart. Ketil had gotten up. I looked up at him, and my thought, in Norman, was God, let him be accurate.
Because the ceiling was low, he got down on his knees. Then he raised the heavy sword as high as the ceiling allowed and swung hard while my eyes squinched shut. There was an impact that jerked my wrists, and my eyes popped open. The chain had been cut and the block half split, and although each wrist still had its iron cuff, my hands were free.