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their cooking fires still smoldered in the outer bailey beside the gates.
    Gates did I say? There were no gates, no walls, only two twisted piles of wood and iron that had once held the drawbridge chains, from which the great beam sagged now too low for man on horseback to pass underneath. The towers that had stood on either side scarcely reached waist high, black with soot and smoke, and all the walls that had stretched beyond were tumbled down into the courtyard, filling it with stone. And on the cliff side, the fallen blocks fanned out, like to a giant scree.
    But there was worse. Where the walls, or what was left of them had stood at the steepest side, things were still hanging. I averted my eyes, but not before I had seen the rusting chains, the stains they left, the foul and rotting things they held. I turned and heaved my heart upon the ground. And fear and grief, and something darker I cannot name, blew like a great cold wind upon the distant moors.
    When I looked up, the work was done. For what revenge was worth against those wretched creatures, squatters all, within the castle ruins? Lord Raoul had known it, yet had not, could not, prevent it. All were victims here, of revenge, of cruelty, of blood. Already Raoul had summoned his own men back. They picked their way carefully among the fallen rubble, no easy work to run and fight in boots and spurs with all your harness on.
    I had not thought Henry to have done so much.
    That said it all. Henry the King. This was his answer then, his safe passage promised, his kiss of peace. It must have been a bitter thought. And I could not help remembering how, through all of my childhood dreams, dark and hideous, I had seen Cambray and Sedgemont, sacked and destroyed. No nightmare had ever been as real as this, these broken towers.
    Still sitting on his horse, which pawed the ground as if it scented blood, Raoul was withdrawn and silent. His eyes were their darkest gray, almost without focus in their intent. He had sheathed his sword and his ungloved hand beat nervously upon the saddle rim. I had seen him thus once before, when battle's heat or rage or despair so took him that it numbed him to all else. But there could be no battle here, with only dead men left. Those whom he should fight were already gone, marched safely home when their butcher work was done. He fought today against shadows.
    And, against my will, the thought came again how, once as a child, Raoul had seen an army attack his castle here. Count Geoffrey, Henry's father, it had been at that time, whose troops had milled about the walls.
    They fired the vines. For spite. Because they could not get in they destroyed all they could, Raoul had told me. Like beasts then, that tear and ravage for sport. And now, raving this time by luck or skill got in, they still must despoil, still must ravage.
    I cannot say how long Raoul sat upon his horse, hunched forward as if in thought. Perhaps it was no longer than a moment, and it was I who saw that moment stretched out as if it would have no end. Or perhaps for him time moved as slowly, and before his eyes passed all that he must remember of Sieux. He had last seen it as a boy when, come to the age of sixteen on his grandfather's death, he had returned to England to take up arms for Stephen. He had known before the last campaign, before King Stephen's death, that Henry had seized Sieux. But seized only, not sacked. This devastation must have a later date.
    You could see grass already green among the stone some pale yellow flowers grew at the cliff top, and there were paths beaten down among the boulders. How much later then had Henry sent more men to destroy Sieux? And how much later, or was it at the same time, had he ordered the castle guard dragged from the dungeons below and hanged on the shattered walls? The household guard, friends of Raoul's childhood, his companions, men he had hoped to see again, he would be remembering them,