Power of Darkness by Doris Sutcliffe Adams

Author:Doris Sutcliffe Adams
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2016-06-18T04:00:00+00:00

8

THEY burst out of the water, half-drenched and triumphant, the white track curving empty before them. Hélie gave the stallion his head and chanced a quick glance over his shoulder to grin jubilantly at Durande. She was still laughing, her face alight. All at once laughter changed to wild alarm, and she cried out in warning. Something like a bar of iron caught him across the breast, plucked him from the saddle and flung him down with a jarring crash flat on his back. Track, woods and sky whirled about him into blackness. The wind beaten out of him, he sprawled half-stunned. Briefly he glimpsed the legs and underbelly of a horse, rearing above him, and then sight went out.

A heavy weight dropped on his chest, forcing the last air from his labouring lungs in a strangled wheeze. Hands tugged at him. He blinked up at brilliant white clouds upon an enamelled blue sky, fretted with golden-green leaves. Then a face came between him and the sky, a hairy face with a villainously bent nose and a ferocious grin. He choked and squawked like an agonized fowl, and a sharp voice said through the roaring in his ears, ‘Take your great rump off his chest, fool, and let him breathe!’

The weight shifted and settled solidly on his belly, which was small improvement. He fetched a couple of crowing breaths, found his aching lungs functioning again, blinked once more and stared up. His distempered vision took in a thicket of legs, a broad body in iron-sewn leather astride him, pinning down his arms with bony knees, Durande gazing anxiously down at him, held by both wrists from behind, and beyond her a man untying one end of a rope from a breast-high hold on a tree-trunk by the track. He knew then what had befallen, and fury and shame scalded him. He had blundered unpardonably in underestimating his adversary.

The circle of legs broke to admit another pair in good brown hose and short, gilt-spurred riding-boots. Hélie lifted his spinning head a couple of inches to scowl defiance at Fulbert of Falaise, who stood tenderly massaging his midriff and regarding him with an expression oddly compounded of amusement, dismay and respect. He was pale under his tan, and he stooped a little to ease his afflicted belly, but he grinned wryly at Hélie and drew back his foot. Hélie braced himself for a kick, but it was directed at the ample backside straddling him.

'Up, Baldwin! Is a tenant-in-chief among us to serve you as a cushion?'

The fellow removed himself with alacrity beyond the length of his captain's leg. Hélie heaved himself up on one elbow and looked fiercely about him for Gino. He was lying nearby with his nose in the dust, squirming ineffectually while a routier kneeling on his spine finished cording his wrists at his back. Some measure of relief reached through Hélie's shame; at least none had come by bodily hurt, however abased in pride. He looked up into Durande's gravely impassive face and said stiffly, 'I am sorry for bungling, my lady.

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