The Fortunes of Garin by Mary Johnston (romantic novels in english .txt) 📖

the inaccessible wall of Roche-de-Frêne. Black Tower and Eagle Tower seemed among the stars. There was a gulf between them and those small, hidden, defended entrances. The strained gaze could see naught but some low, out-cropping bushes and a trailing vine. Up there the men who had brought them to that side of the gulf might yet be gazing outward, listening with bated breath for any token that that dragon was awake and aware; but they could not tell if it were so. Up there was the friendly world, down here the hostile. Up there might be troubadour-knight and princess, down here stood jongleur and peasant.

They stood yet a moment at the foot of the crag, then she who was dressed as a worker among the vines or a herd to drive and watch the flocks turned in silence and began to descend the moonlit boulder-strewn declivity. She was light of foot, quick and dexterous of movement. Garin, who was now Elias of Montaudon, moved beside her. They came down the steep hill, bare and blanched by the moon. The dragon had no outpost here; did he plant one, the[290] archers upon the town wall might sweep it away. But the shafts would not reach to the wood—there perhaps they might hear the dragon’s breathing. They went without speech, and with no noise that could be helped of foot against stone.... Here was a slight fringe of pine and oak. They stood still, listened—all was silent. They looked back and saw Roche-de-Frêne and the castle of Roche-de-Frêne bathed by the grey night.

“Cap-du-Loup and his men hold in this quarter,” said the woman in a low voice. “We had a spy forth who got back to us three days since. Cap-du-Loup’s tents and booths are thrown and scattered, stony ground and seams in the earth between the handfuls. He does not keep stern watch, not looking for anything of moment to descend this way. Hereabouts is the ravine of the brook of Saint Laurent, and half a mile up it a medley of camp-followers, men and women.”

She had not ceased to move as she spoke. They were now in the midst of a spare growth of trees, under foot a turf burned by the sun and ground to dust by the tread, through half a year, of a host of folk. Some distance ahead the night was copper-hued; over there were camp-fires. They were now, also, in the zone of a faint confused sound. They moved aside from the direction of the strongest light, the deepest, intermittent humming, and came, presently, to the brook of Saint Laurent. It flowed through a shallow ravine with rough, scarped banks.[291] Down it, too, came faint light and sound, proceeding from the camp of followers.

“Our aim,” said she in peasant dress, “is to be found at dawn among that throng, indistinguishable from it, and so to pass to its outermost edge and away.”

They were standing above the murmuring stream. Overhead the wind was in the pine-tops. There were elfin voices, too, of the creatures of the grass and bush and bark. All life, and life in his own veins, seemed to Garin to be alert, awake as never before, quivering and streaming and mounting like flame.

“I am Elias of Montaudon,” he said. “I understand that, and how to play the jongleur, and that if peril comes and stands like a giant and questions us, I am no jongleur of Roche-de-Frêne nor allied there—”

“Say that you are of Limousin.”

“I have not dropped from the sky into the camp of Cap-du-Loup, but have been singing and playing, telling japes and tales, merry or sad, vaulting and wrestling elsewhere in the host—”

“With the men of Aquitaine. Say that in Poitou Duke Richard himself praised you.”

“And should they question me of you?”

“I also am of Limousin. There I watched sheep, but now I am your mie and a traveller with you.”

“By what name am I to call you?”

“I am Jael the herd. You will call me Jael.”

They were moving this while up the stream. Did[292] any come upon them now, it would hardly be held that they had flown from the battlements of Roche-de-Frêne. The ground was rough, the trees, crowding together, shut out the light from the moon, while the fires at the end of vistas grew ruddier. The muttering and humming also of the host in the night increased.

Jael the herd stood still. “It will not suit us to stumble in the dark upon some wild band! Here is Saint Laurent’s garden of safety. Let us rest on the pine-needles until cock-crow.”

They lay down, the jongleur wrapped in his mantle, the herd-girl in hers. “We must gather sleep wherever it grows,” said the latter. “I will sleep and you will watch until the moon rounds the top of that great pine. Wake me then, and look, Elias, that you do it!”

She pillowed her head upon the scrip or wallet which she carried slung over her shoulder, and lay motionless. The jongleur watched.... The barred moon mounted higher, the night wheeled, eastern lands were knowing light. Garin, resting against a pine trunk, lute and wallet beside him on the earth, kept his gaze from the sleeper, bestowed it instead upon the silver, gliding boat of the moon, or upon the not-distant, murky glare of unfriendly fires. But gaze here or gaze there, space and time sang to one presence! Wonder must exist as to this night and the morrow and what journey was this. Mind could not but lift the lanthorn, weigh likelihoods, pace[293] around and around the subject. That quest drew him, but it was not all, nor most that drew.... Jael the herd! Jael the herd! Here came impossibilities—dreams, phantasies, rain of gold and silver, impossibilities! He remembered clearly now a herd-girl, and that when he had asked her name she had answered “Jael.” Many shepherdesses trod the earth, and a many might be named Jael! Moreover sheer, clear impossibility must conquer, subdue and dispose of all this mad thinking. She who lay asleep was like that herd-girl—he saw it now—shape, colouring, voice—That and the name she had happened to choose—that and the torn, shepherdess garb—to that was owed this dizzy dreaming, this jewelled sleet of fancy, high tide of imagination, flooding every inland.... Things could not be different, yet the same—beings could not be separate, yet one—or in some strange, rich world, could that be so? But here was mere impossibility! Garin strove to still the wider and wider vibrations. The Fair Goal—The Fair Goal!... The moon rounded the top of the pine tree.

He crossed to the sleeper’s side, knelt, and spoke low. “My liege—” She stirred, opened her eyes. “My liege, the moon begins to go down the sky.”

With her hand pressed against the pine-needles she rose to a sitting posture. “I slept—and, by my faith, I wanted sleep! Now it is your turn. Do not again call me liege or lady or princess or Audiart. The wind might carry it to Cap-du-Loup. Say always[294] to me, ‘Jael.’ And now lie down and sleep. I will wake you when the east is grey.”

Garin slept. The Princess Audiart rested against a tree, and now watched the moon, and now the fires kindled by her foe and Roche-de-Frêne’s, and now she watched the sleeping man. The attire which she wore, the name she had chosen for the simple reason that once before she had chanced to take it up and use it, brought brightly into mind a long-ago forest glade and a happening there. But she did not link that autumn day with the man lying wrapped in Elias of Montaudon’s cloak, though she did link it with Jaufre de Montmaure who had kindled those fires in the night. It came, a vivid picture, and then it slept again. There was, of need, a preoccupation with this present enterprise and its chaplet, necklace, girdle, and anklets of danger, no less than with its bud of promise which she meant, if possible, to make bloom. Her own great need and the need of Roche-de-Frêne formed the looming presence, high, wide, and deep as the night, but, playing and interblending with it, high, wide, and deep as the day, was another sense.... She gazed upon Garin of the Golden Island lying wrapped in the jongleur’s cloak, and the loss of him was in the looming night, and the gain in the bud of promise and the feeling of the sun. To-night, her estate seemed forlorn enough, but within she was a powerful princess who did not blink her own desires though she was wise to curb and rein and drive them rightly.

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