Brother Cadfael 09: Dead Man's Ransom

baulks after long exertion and great weariness. When he was ready the cords of his throat would soften and warm, and words find their way out without creaking.
    'Your manchild held open his eyelids,' said Aline cheerfully, eyeing his every least move as he ate and warmed, 'until he could prop them up no longer, even with his fingers. He's well and grown even in this short while, Cadfael will tell you. He goes on two feet now and makes nothing of a fall or two.' She did not offer to wake and bring him; clearly there was no place here tonight for matters of childhood, however dear.
    Hugh sat back from his meal, yawned hugely, smiled upwards suddenly at his wife, and drew her down to him in his arm. Constance bore away the tray and refilled the cup, and closed the door quietly on the room where the boy slept.
    'Never fret for me, love,' said Hugh, clasping Aline to his side. 'I'm saddlesore and bruised, but nothing worse. But a fall or two we have certainly taken. No easy matter to rise, neither. Oh, I've brought back most of the men we took north with us, but not all, not all! Not the chief, Gilbert Prestcote's gone. Taken, not dead, I hope and think, but whether it's Robert of Gloucester or the Welsh that hold him, I wish I knew.'
    'The Welsh?' said Cadfael, pricking his ears. 'How's that? Owain Gwynedd has never put his hand in the fire for the empress? After all his careful holding off, and the gains it's brought him? He's no such fool! Why should he aid either of his enemies? He'd be more like to leave them free to cut each other's throats.'
    'Spoke like a good Christian brother,' said Hugh, with a brief, grey smile, and fetched a grunt and a blush out of Cadfael to his small but welcome pleasure. 'No, Owain has judgement and sense, but alas for him, he has a brother. Cadwaladr was there with a swarm of his archers, and Madog ap Meredith of Powys with him, hot for plunder, and they've sunk their teeth into Lincoln and swept the field clear of any prisoner who promises the means of ransom, even the half, dead. And I doubt they've got Gilbert among the rest.' He shifted, easing his stiff, sore body in the cushions. 'Though it's not the Welsh,' he said grimly, 'that have got the greatest prize. Robert of Gloucester is halfway to his own city this night with a prisoner worth this kingdom to deliver up to the Empress Maud. God knows what follows now, but I know what my work must be. My sheriff is out of the reckoning, and there's none now at large to name his successor. This shire is mine to keep, as best I may, and keep it I will, till fortune turns her face again. King Stephen is taken at Lincoln, and carried off prisoner to Gloucester.'
    Once his tongue was loosed he had need to tell the whole of it, for his own enlightenment as much as theirs. He was the sole lord of a county now, holding and garrisoning it on the behalf of a king in eclipse, and his task was to nurse and guard it inviolate within its boundaries, until it could serve again beyond them for an effective lord.
    'Ranulf of Chester slipped out of Lincoln castle and managed to get out of a hostile town before ever we got near, and off to Robert of Gloucester in a great hurry, with pledges of allegiance to the Empress in exchange for help against us. And Chester's wife is Robert's daughter, when all's said, and he'd left her walled up in the castle with the earl of Lincoln and his wife, and the whole town in arms and seething round them. That was a welcome indeed, when Stephen got his muster there, the city fawned on him. Poor wretches, they've paid for it since. Howbeit, there we were, the town ours and the castle under siege, and winter on our side, any man would have said, with the distance Robert had to come, and the snow and the floods to hold him. But the man's none so easily held.'
    'I never was there in the north,' said Cadfael, with a glint in his eye and a stirring in his blood that he had much ado to subdue. His days in arms were over, forsworn long since, but he could not help prickling to the sting of battle, when his friends were still venturing. 'It's a hill city, Lincoln, so they say. And the garrison penned close. It should have been easy to hold the town, Robert or no Robert. What went astray?'
    'Why, granted we undervalued Robert, as always, but that need not have been fatal. The rains there'd been up there, the river round the south and west of the town was up in flood, the bridge guarded, and the ford impassable. But Robert passed it,