About to deny the self-deprecating comment, Josse heard the rider approaching and, turning, saw him come into view; he had just emerged from an overshadowed stretch of the track out into the sunlight.
Brice had turned too.
Neither of them spoke; they both sat on their horses watching the rider. He was of slim build, he was dressed simply in a long tunic and he wore a soft, wide-brimmed hat that shaded and concealed his face. His horse was a pretty bay mare and on his left wrist, which wore a heavy gauntlet, sat a hooded hawk.
The man, clearly, had been hunting.
But there was a new element in the air; Brice, Josse realised, was sitting quite still and the tension in him seemed to sing through the air.
‘Who are you?’ Josse called, preparing to ride to meet the newcomer, but, swift as light, Brice shot out a hand to detain him.
‘It’s all right,’ he said quietly. ‘I know who it is.’ Then, turning to Josse — who was beginning to feel distinctly apprehensive — he added, ‘I was only just now wishing for someone who knew their way, my friend. Well, now we have our wish.’
And, in the midst of tension and anxiety, Brice let out a laugh. It was so unexpected and, in that moment, so alarming that Josse, thrown on to the defensive, reacted instinctively.
I have been betrayed, he thought, feeling for the sword at his side. I have admitted to Brice that I know his secret and he is desperate that I keep my silence. He has brought me here with the sole purpose of joining forces with some ally of his, some man of this secretive, dangerous family from which Galiena came. This huntsman, who even now is approaching. And, fool that I am, I fell right into his trap.
They will not take me without a fight!
Not pausing to think further, not even asking himself why he was so sure that Brice meant him harm, he drew his sword and, kicking Horace, shot forward to meet the hunter.
15
But Josse had reckoned without Brice’s swift reactions. Just as Horace lunged forward towards the slim man on the bay mare, Brice spurred his horse and, coming in hard from Josse’s right, leapt towards him, his right hand waving what Josse thought was a short sword in the air above him.
Horace took an instinctive avoiding step to the left.
It was not Horace’s fault.
He had been trained for war. He recognised an armed man advancing on him and he knew what to do so as to avoid the killing blow to his rider’s body. And in that moment of drama, he had not the time to look down and check on the ground beneath his large feathered feet. Why, indeed, should he? He was on a track, and tracks did not normally fall away to empty space under him.
Except that this one did.
Although the three people up on the road could not have known, the place from which Brice had elected to gaze out over the marsh was very dangerous. There were some stunted bramble bushes along its outer edge and they hid a spot right at the edge of the cliff where, in the spring rains, fast-flowing rainwater had eroded the chalk from around a huge boulder, which had tumbled away down the escarpment to the flat land below.
In dodging the threat from his right, Horace had put his forefeet right in the place where the boulder used to be.
Pitched forward alarmingly, the big horse tried to gather himself. But the momentum of the fall was too great for him to step back and his hind feet were borne over the edge of the cliff. Frantically scrabbling for purchase, Horace lurched forward down the steep slope and Josse, his left hand firmly grasping a hank of the horse’s mane, clung on as tight as a burr on a hound’s back and tried to throw his weight backward in a desperate attempt to help arrest their downhill flight.
He quite thought that it was the end of both of them and he spared a brief pitying thought that this wonderful animal who had served him so well for so long should be brought to his death by Josse’s mistake; he who should have paid more attention to that well-used, well-worn track up there!
But the slope was steepest right at the top of the cliff; after perhaps twenty paces — which felt to Josse as if he were falling totally out of control — the gradient eased. Horace, still travelling far too fast for a big, heavy horse going over treacherous ground, began to slow down.
And, as he took a final leap from the lowest slopes of the escarpment on to the flat ground below, Josse began to think that he wasn’t going to die after all.
There was a shout from above and Josse, turning, saw Brice at the top of the slope. The huntsman was beside him and both men were waving; Josse thought they were calling out to summon their companions down on the marsh. Hurriedly looking around him, he realised that he could still be surrounded if a party of riders approached from out on the marsh; making a swift decision, he turned Horace to the left and, spurring him on to a gallop, thundered off eastwards along the base of the cliff. He reasoned that in that direction lay the sea, and the sea meant ports and people. It might, he sincerely hoped, also mean safety.
After about a mile, he slowed down and stopped. As Horace’s fast breathing gradually calmed, Josse sat listening.
Other than the peaceful, natural sounds of a marsh in early summer, there was nothing to be heard.
And, now that the surging alarm of the flight down the cliff and the fear of armed men hunting him had abated, he wondered if he had judged the situation correctly.
Brice drew his sword! he reminded himself. He rode right at me.
But another interpretation had occurred to him. Brice had said, hadn’t he, that he knew who the newcomer was? And then Josse had drawn his own sword and ridden straight at the man on the bay. Well, if Brice did indeed know the man, then was it not perfectly reasonable to have defended him from Josse’s sudden onslaught?
‘I think, old friend,’ Josse said aloud, patting Horace’s sweaty neck, ‘that I have been a fool.’
And the worst folly of it all, he thought glumly as slowly he began to ride back the way he had come, is that I cannot now recall why it was that I should be so certain the newcomer meant me harm …
By the time he had returned to the place where he had slipped down the escarpment, there was no sign of either Brice or the huntsman. I am on my own again, Josse thought, and, thanks to my own recklessness, no further forward in my search than I was yesterday or the day before.
But there had been something, hadn’t there? Standing up above the marsh, Brice had said he thought he might have found the place they were looking for, only — what had he said? — it wasn’t where he expected it to be.
Well, Josse thought, if he could only picture in which direction Brice had been looking when he spoke, then that might provide a pointer. Staring up at the cliff top, he tried to remember.
And all at once an image slid into his mind. Just before Brice had raised his head to look along the track at the approaching huntsman, he had been staring straight down at the base of the escarpment beneath his feet.
He had mentioned a line of willows that ran along beside a stream. Slowly turning his head, Josse thought in amazement; and there they are! And the stream is there too; I have been jumping to and fro across it for two days.
Could it be? Was Brice right?
No, he couldn’t be because he had mentioned a corral and a long hall. There was no corral, unless that line of old, worn stumps had once supported a barricade. But, even if it had, where was the hall?