The barn was now merrily afire, the flames shooting up into the star-studded sky. Simon listened, hearing a dull rumbling roar from across the fields. It was a roll of voices, gathering momentum, like impending thunder. And then the sound became distinct. It was the panicked chant of "Fire!" on the tongues of a great crowd. People poured into the yard, men and women, armed with buckets, flails, pitchforks.
One of the Ravenspeare men gave a sudden unearthly shriek and fell to the cobbles, a knife jutting from his arm. At the sight, the crowd, who had come ready for anything, charged into the melee, to the rescue of the sons and husbands of their own villages.
"Oh, God, you have to stop it!" Ariel was suddenly at Simon's side, her face black with soot, her hair flying from its pins. "They're going to kill each other. All of them. It's a Romany fight."
The local people loathed and feared the gypsies. Brawls were constantly breaking out, and it would take little to start a full-scale battle between the two camps. And the wounding of one of their own was all the tinder needed.
"Ravenspeare! Call off your men!" Simon bellowed over the noise. "For God's sake, man, this is no good for anyone."
Ranulf's eyes glittered. "Call off yours, Hawkesmoor. The horses 'are mine. Get out of here and take my damnable sister with you, and I'll call off my men."
Ariel jumped forward and was pulled back with an unceremonious jerk as Simon grabbed and hung on to her arm. "You murdering bastard!" she gasped at her brother. Words were futile but they were ad Simon was allowing her. "You wouldn't give a tinker's damn if every man here died."
"Why should I?" he laughed. "Yield your horses, sister, and I'll grant the lives of your precious peasants."
"Jack, take my wife." Simon thrust Ariel from him and she spun into Jack Chauncey's arms, too startled for a minute to speak.
Simon drew his sword. He took a step toward Ranulf. "So, it must be as it's always been, Ravenspeare." His voice was without a trace of expression and his eyes were cold and flat. "We will settle this in blood, as such things have always been settled between our two families."
Ranulf drew his sword inch by inch from his scabbard, his mocking gray gaze never leaving his brother-in-law's. "You think I can't best a cripple, Hawkesmoor?"
"Yes, I think that." Simon stepped back, clearing a space around them with a sweep of his sword. "Ted your pander to cad off your men first."
Ranulf's mouth twitched at this contemptuous epithet. But his eyes were greedy, too greedy for revenge upon the Hawkesmoor to defend his best friend too strenuously.
He bellowed over his shoulder, his voice rising above the tumult. "Cad off your men, Oliver. I have a better way of settling this."
Oliver, emerging from the fray, looked stunned. But he had danced to Ranulf's tune for too many years to question the notes, even now in the midst of this splendid mayhem that he alone had created. He turned with a slashing sword back to the fray, cursing and beating through the throng.
"Quell it, Jack." Simon spoke quietly as he stood waiting. The cadre moved into the fray, using their swords with quiet, unemotional efficiency as they would when quelling a riot. Men fed back, bleeding, moaning, the wildness dying from their eyes as they realized how lost they had been in the blood madness.
Ariel stood still, her heart in her throat. The barn's damp thatch was now sullenly smoldering, and the torches threw garish light over the stableyard as the two men paced out a dueling piste. From all sides, eyes watched them.
How could Simon match Ranulf in an even contest? Ranulf had two sound legs. He was fast. He was not plagued with debilitating aches and pains.
Why were his friends not fearful? She could see nothing on their faces as they conferred with Simon and paced the piste.
Then Jack took Simon's hand, pressed it, and stepped back, the others joining him beside Ariel. She looked up at Jack, unable to frame her fear, and he gave her an almost quizzical smile and took her hand.
Ranulf looked over his shoulder at his two brothers, standing behind him. He grinned at them. "The final game of the tournament, my brothers. A fitting end to our wedding celebrations, I believe."
Ralph sniggered. Roland merely raised an eyebrow.
Simon lifted his sword in salute. Ranulf returned the courtesy.
The two women hastened, breathless, along the uneven lane. The sounds of mayhem, the smell of smoke, the clash of weapons, grew ever closer and more immediate, drowning out any words Jenny formed. Her mother's hand was on her arm, guiding her because they were going too fast for the younger woman's blind feet to step true. Ahead of them the hounds barked, every now and again turning back as if to herd the women onward.
Sarah had heard the sounds first. So faint behind the snug walls of the cottage, for a minute she believed she was imagining them, except that the dogs had raced to the door and stood, ears cocked, every line of their graceful, powerful bodies straining.
And then Romulus had thrown himself at the door, raising his voice in a great baying cry of anxiety and distress. Remus had promptly followed suit.
"What is it? What's the matter with them?" Jenny had rushed over to them, trying to calm them, but they had continued to batter the doors, giving vent to that unearthly cry.
Sarah had fetched her cloak from the peg, and Jenny, in bewilderment, had donned her own. The minute she had opened the doors, the hounds had shot out like gray cannon-bads, and as the women had hurried in their wake, they returned again and again, rounding them up, herding them along toward the smoke-filled skyline and the sounds of battle.
"Is it Ariel, Mother?" Jenny's voice was barely a whisper. Sarah merely took her hand in a tighter grip and hurried her along.
They reached the stableyard just as the violent hubbub seemed to be dying down. Jenny blinked as if she could somehow clear her blind eyes as she stood clutching her mother's hand. Ad around her, Jenny could feel the press of people. She could smell the reek of blood and stale humanity, and the stench of fear twitched in her nostrils. But she could hear no words to help her form a coherent picture of her surroundings. Her mother's hand gripped hers, and Jenny clung to it as the only solid beam in a frightening maelstrom that had no shape for her.
Sarah stepped a little forward into the yard. She saw the two men with their drawn swords, facing each other in the torchlight. She saw the circle of faces, eager, curious, malicious, surrounding them, watching the spectacle of death. She saw Ariel, the dogs now at her side, although she seemed unaware of them. She seemed to Sarah to be in a trance, her face bloodless, her lips blue.
Swords clashed and Ariel jumped as if it wasn't the sound she'd been expecting. Nausea was bitter in her throat, filling her mouth, and she thought she wouldn't be able to stay on her feet. And then she saw what was happening.
Simon wasn't moving. He stood rock solid, foursquare on the cobbles, and he was driving back Ranulf's attack with the sheer power and force of his upper body. But then she saw that he was moving, but they were small sideways shifts, mere flickers of his torso, taking him out of the line of Ranulf s snaking blade. And again and again, he caught his opponent's blade and forced it back.
It was as if Ranulf's opponent were a many-armed Hercules, Ariel thought in disbelief. Wherever her brother placed his blade, Simon's blade was waiting for it. Neither man was using the slender tempered steel of a dueling rapier, but Simon's weapon seemed somehow thicker, sharper, broader, and yet it moved as if with a life of its own.
Ranulf feinted, lunged beneath Simon's arm, trying to throw him off balance, hoping that he could slide behind him, forcing him to turn. Simon sidestepped. It was more of a hop than a step, and for one impossible second he was poised on the ball of his strong foot. Then his great cavalry sword flashed up and under, the blade crashing against the underside of Ranulf's hilt, and the other man's sword crashed to the ground.