A Plague of Swords
Page 40
“If we win, I’d free you all, except that I suspect you like this life,” he said. “Maybe we’re related,” he went on. “Because God knows I like it. There, eat that. Nice bit of mouse. Oh, don’t be like that. That mouse is completely fresh.” Silence. “Swallow the tail, you look ridiculous.”
She moved off because he would have heard her giggles, and saw that Anne, his page, was standing close by. They exchanged looks, and both had to cover their mouths.
He did, however, collect a dozen messenger birds and send them off in all directions, and at least two of them left for Venike with carefully written directions for materials and space for a wedding. Two weddings.
Other birds went to his brother, now nearing N’gara far to the west; for Jules Kronmir, who was with Il Conte Simone and Magister Petrarcha at Berona; for Harmodius at Harndon, for the queen, for the Faery Knight and Tamsin, for Pavalo Payam and his fleet, for Du Corse who was now heading north in Galle, marching on Lutrece and swimming in a sea of refugees and terrified survivors.
In the great stern cabin, looking at maps, Michael shook his head. “Three armies coming from three directions, all much smaller than the enemy?” he asked. “Doesn’t that invite defeat?”
Gabriel blinked once. He shrugged. “It does,” he admitted.
“Why not all our troops together in one place?” Michael asked.
“Many reasons,” Gabriel said. “Above all, the amount so many men eat. The Necromancer’s forces will have stripped the country. They are a plague of locusts, and their enemy will outnumber us whatever course we take. And because surprise remains our best weapon. I intend to make the Necromancer’s lieutenant as uncomfortable as possible. So he’ll make mistakes.”
“You think the Odine make mistakes?” Mortirmir asked.
“They lost to the dragons,” Gabriel said. He smiled at Blanche, who was rereading his master plan for the thirtieth time.
She looked up. Everyone in the cabin knew the plan, or at least the outline of it.
“And N’gara?” she asked.
“My brother will attack into Ash’s preparations. That should hold Ash.” Gabriel was still writing.
“Because?” Michael asked.
“Because Ash is a cautious beast at heart. And a little like a house cat and other predators I’ve known. He really doesn’t like to tangle with anything his own size. He wants the other big players to finish each other off. He will not expect an attack.”
Michael blew out a breath. “Risky,” he said.
“It’s all risky!” Gabriel spat. He shook his head. “We can’t afford a single defeat.”
Michael winced. “We’ll get one, though. Everyone loses sometime.”
Gabriel frowned. “You’re cheerful,” he said.
“I’m just being honest, Gabriel, and you’d better think about it.” Michael shrugged. “You are developing a...fatalism. I don’t think that’s a winning mind-set.”
“I am. I’m trying to build a world where everyone works together. We only need one nice defeat and some of our allies will start thinking about slave soldiers and alliances with evil.” Gabriel shrugged. “We not only need to keep winning, we need to appear invincible. There’s people in Etrusca and Galle who’ve allied with the enemy. The Patriarch of Rhum is almost certainly working against us. He has enormous influence and an army.”
Sukey made a face.
Michael shrugged. “I understand why you think it is important. I’m merely saying that there’s very little butter spread very thin over a great deal of toast.”
Gabriel tugged his beard. “Yes,” he said.
“I don’t think Gavin and the Faery Knight can stop Ash at N’gara.” Michael shrugged.
The emperor was leaning on the chart table looking out over the sea. He put his face in his hands a moment. “They don’t have to win,” he said patiently, after a deep breath. “They just have to keep Ash busy.”
Michael crossed his legs and looked at Kaitlin a moment. “And, in the meantime, what are we doing about the dragons?”
“Nothing,” Gabriel said. “If we beat the Odine, by a miracle, then and only then can we talk about the dragons. Not my enemy! Not my problem.” He shrugged. “I need a swim.”
“Don’t get eaten by a sea monster,” Michael said. “If Ash isn’t what you are worrying about and the dragons aren’t your problem, why do you look so grey?”
The emperor had very quickly become a young man wearing nothing but linen braes.
“Where is the Necromancer?” he asked.
Michael froze.
Gabriel paused, his eyes on Blanche. Then his gaze shifted to the map, and then his eyes met Michael’s. “I’ve bet the farm on meeting this threat here,” he said. “And thanks to Al Rashidi, not only do we have a chance of winning, but I have an insanely nasty plan to win the whole tournament. But...what if the Necromancer has done what we’ve done? Gone off to Occitan? It’s only four hundred leagues off his west coast.”
“Oh Christ,” Michael said, and crossed himself.
“Harndon? Liviapolis?” Gabriel said.
“Stop,” Michael said.
Gabriel nodded. “I was happy when I thought that whatever the greatest evil sorcerer of our time was doing, it was directed at Dar as Salaam.” He shrugged. “Now we don’t know where it is.” He nodded softly. “So I confess, I’ve been in a panic since we left Dar. As far as I can see, the Necromancer is betting everything on Arles. But I could be wrong.” He shrugged. “If I’m wrong...”
Blanche was trying to put her unruly hair up. She stopped, arms over her head. “So what do we do?” she asked.
“Swim,” Gabriel said. “However I worry, we’re committed, and we can’t change now.”
When he left the cabin, Blanche looked at Michael. Michael shook his head. “He’s changed,” Michael said. “He’s...desperate.”
Blanche had tears in her eyes. “No, Michael,” she said. “He’s fey. He knows when he’ll die.”
Kaitlin put her hand to the cross at her breast. “Blessed Saint Anne!” she said. “He does?”
Blanche nodded. “Yes. At least since Dar. Perhaps before.” She shrugged, and then began to cry.
* * *
They raised the south coast of Etrusca in the dawn, and Michael found Gabriel on deck. He and Tom were playing dice.
Michael was wearing only braes and a shirt, like a peasant at harvest time. But he went and sat with them. A pair of sailors were sitting close by, wagering on the side.
“Tom says I’m a fool,” Gabriel said.
“I said you were a loon. I ha’ always said so. It’s no news.” Tom cast the dice and grunted.
Michael wasn’t sure what game they were playing, and his slightly sleep-addled brain made him feel as if perhaps this were a dream. “Isn’t it early for dice?” he asked.
Gabriel shrugged. “I had a bad dream,” he said.
“Christ on the cross, what do you call a bad dream?” Michael asked.
Gabriel gave him the grim smile he remembered best from the siege of Lissen Carak. “Is this part of your lessons?”
“I don’t know,” Michael shot back. “Is it?”
Gabriel nodded. “Very well. I was on a throne, sitting above the world. Spread at my feet was a chart—and the pictures that Miriam drew us from the chamber at Lissen Carak. I could see them clearly. And a woman came...not a woman I know, but I knew who she was. You know how dreams are?”
Tom laughed. “He didna’ tell me this bit,” he said. “But aye, I’ve had a dream or two of a lass.”
Gabriel swatted at Tom.
“She was Tyche,” Gabriel said. “The Archaic goddess of fortune.”
“Tar,” Tom said.
Gabriel shrugged. “She was fortune,” he said. “And while I was looking at my picture and my chart, she said, ‘Would you be lord of all the worlds?’”
Michael nodded. “Sure, this happens all the time in my dreams. What did you say?”
Gabriel laughed
. “I said no. And she took me and put me on a great wheel, like a mill wheel, and it rolled, and I, who had been so high, came down with a crash, and the wheel rolled over me. And a gate opened...and there were the Odine, waiting.” He looked around. “And I woke up.”
Tom nodded. “Well, aye, the meaning is as plain as the nose on my face. Ye ought to ha’ said yes.”
Michael put his bearded chin in his hand. “What was on the chart?” he asked.
Gabriel shrugged. “It’s funny. I haven’t made it yet. I mean to make a chart of the gates. But on the chart, there were arcs, as if each gate...” He stood up.
High above them, a lookout called that he could see Neroponte clear on the port bow.
“As if each gate...” Gabriel said again.
Time seemed to freeze.
Tom laughed and Michael put a hand to his shoulder. “Shhh,” he said.
“Would you be lord of all the worlds,” Gabriel said softly. “Damn, damn, damn.”
He was gone so swiftly that Michael couldn’t even catch his sleeve. But both men followed him into the day cabin. Both men stood at the table, ignoring Blanche’s soft snores.
Gabriel had his copy of the ancient parchment that Pavalo Payam had stolen from the Necromancer. He unrolled it and Tom pinned it with a thumb.
Blanche raised her head off the tasseled pillows. “What?” she asked.
Gabriel started to draw. He began to draw the formation of stars from Lissen Carak. “Our sky,” he said. “Damn, damn, damn. It’s not about gates. It is not about the gates here. It’s about all the gates. Look; six of these don’t seem to bear any resemblance to any constellation here. Harmodius thought as much; Al Rashidi suggested they were far to the east. But they’re in another sphere.”
He sat suddenly. “Oh God,” he said.
A month before, Michael had seen this man grin at his brother in expectation of nothing better than a fight. A dare. Now he wore the same grin, a look that might have given any sane man pause.
“There’s my loon,” Tom said.
“You have no fucking idea,” Gabriel said. “I’m going to be the loon of loons.”
Blanche cleared her throat. “Could someone demonstrate a little chivalry and hand me in a kirtle?” she asked from her closed bed-tent. “What are you talking about, my sweet?”
Gabriel was scribbling rapidly. Michael could read. His heart was in his throat. Tom understood too.
“You said you’d lead us to hell,” Tom said. He laughed. “Oh, we will make such a song!”
Michael put a hand on the parchment. “You’re serious?” he asked.
Gabriel shrugged. “Mayhap I have it all wrong. We won’t know until we win through to Arles and rain war down the Necromancer or his lieutenant. But by God—and I mean to include him...by God, Michael, if I put the key in the gate and see this constellation...” He looked around.
Michael shook his head. “Would you be lord of all the worlds?” he asked.
* * *
Venike rose out of the sea like a bride waiting for her groom, her magnificent churches towering amid a forest of ships’ masts. Everything was built of stone, and hundreds of statues adorned every facade. Like Dar as Salaam, there were tiles, but also frescoes, richly painted on every wall, a riot of colour and image covering the bride of the sea, and the sea’s highways, in the form of canals, came to almost every doorstep.
Blanche loved Venike from the moment she saw the first towers.
She and Kaitlin and a now-revealed Tancreda Comnena had worked for three days to sew garments to add to those they’d brought from Harndon and Liviapolis. The silks and cottons of Dar as Salaam were the most magnificent materials Blanche had ever worked, and the three women, along with Master Gropf and a dozen archers who had the most advanced sewing skills and a handful of Sukey’s girls, had turned the after cabin into a riot of satin and brocade and netting, small jewels and seed pearls.
Oak Pew had come in the second morning at sea, sat next to the master chart of the military campaign, and set up an embroidery frame. Kaitlin had never imagined that Oak Pew—Sally, when she was sober—could embroider, and yet, sober and meticulous, if a little shaky in her hands, Oak Pew proceeded to edge a silk-tissue veil with imperial eagles and dragons in alternating gold and black thread with a speed and skill and that suggested that her youth had been spent in a very noble house indeed, or perhaps a childhood indentured to an embroiderer. Whichever had been her point of origin, Oak Pew would not say.
Regardless, when the company began to disembark, the ladies were dressed as befitted their status, at least in the eyes of the richest mercantile city in the world. And as Blanche watched the company disembark, she understood why the captain had been so careful to uniform them in the best available cloth a month and more before. Despite almost three weeks in the holds of ships, they emerged with armour polished like mirrors and swords that shone like white light itself, in spotless red and white and green, to form four neat ranks along the edge of the sea.
A thousand men and women. Two hundred full lances, plus the casa, which now, as the emperor’s mailed fist, was fifty lances commanded by Ser Michael with Ser Francis Atcourt as his ensign.
And with them came another four hundred of the emperor’s Vardariotes, and a hundred of the Nordikaans, and all the surviving Scholae. And from Alba, a hundred royal foresters and almost two hundred of the Harndon Armourers’ Guild, the elite of the city’s trained bands, every man armed with the new bronze tubes on heavy staffs, the tubes themselves glowing like a golden haze in the sun, and four heavy, wheeled carts that held a further array of them in white iron and ruddy bronze.
It was not a great army. But it was a beautiful one, in the very best equipment, and the Duke of Venike and his councilors received it with some trepidation and some relief and a great deal more concern.
The Duke of Venike was a very old man with a face like a death’s head. But even his skull-like jaw opened in a grin as he watched the company and the imperial regulars file down off their ships onto the broad, paved square. Blanche thought that it might be the largest paved area she’d ever seen. It was as big as the heart of Harndon, bigger than the palace there. And it was surrounded by tall buildings, as good as anything in Liviapolis: a magnificent basilica with nine tall towers; a long, low palace with hundreds of glass windows, unlike anything she’d ever seen; a library with arched porticos and a long stoa of ancient columns saved from the wreck of cities lost in the east. Venike was like a temple to the arts of mankind, but it was also a terrible reminder of all that had been lost.
The emperor was the last man but one to come down the gangplank of his ship. He wore a harness in the newest style, and only a very few men knew that most of the pieces had been made for the former King of Alba to wear in a tournament.
It was entirely plated in gold. Three lacs d’amour surmounted the imperial eagle and dragon in enamel on his breastplate, and Ser Michael, behind him, unfurled the imperial standard that had not flown openly in the Antica Terra in more than a hundred years.
The Duke of Venike bent his knee.
Every man and woman in the vast square did the same, although there was a hum of surprise and many muttered comments. Venikans did not often bend their knees.
All of the company’s trumpets sounded, and the heralds of Venike played a fanfare in return, and Gabriel Muriens avoided tripping on his spurs and managed to come down the gangplank to the edge of the square, where Ataelus, more than a little upset by three weeks at sea, waited restlessly.
He mounted in one explosive display of strength and horsemanship and rode along the ranks of his small army, and they cheered him, and then he rode to greet the Duke of Venike, who shocked his own councilors by kneeling again and placing his hands between the emperor’s.
If the emperor was shocked, he showed nothing of it. Rather, he put a hand under the duke’s elbow and raised him, leaned forward, and whispered in his ear, and the duke smiled. Ten thousand voices cheered.
“That’s all the troops you brought?” the duke asked. “I expected...ten times as many. Pretty as they are.”
“I hope you have the five thousand horses you promised,” the emperor replied. “I only brought one.”
* * *
Blanche awoke the morning of her wedding to find that nothing was actually ready.
While she sipped kahve and listened to Kaitlin outline where they were on all the lists the two of them had made, and Tancreda Comnena insisted that her brother was trying to humiliate her, Blanche looked out the great open windows, pane after pane of clear glass, at the magnificent canal that flowed almost at her feet.
“By Saint Mary Magdalene,” she said. “Who would not want to be wed on such a day and such a place?” She laughed. “I’ll marry him in my shift, with flowers in my hair,” she said. “Let us start ridding ourselves of what is impossible.” She sat with her lists and used a lead to put lines through things that were not ready and, in her view, were not worth the time to look into them.
Jeweled garters vanished, and a head net of Hoek lace, half finished, was left. Stockings of sheer Dar silk were abandoned as needing too much time to finish, although Kaitlin thought they’d be the most beautiful adornment her friend could imagine...
“No,” Blanche said. “And no,” she said, putting a line through a silver water bucket for the ceremony. The emperor, by which everyone meant Gabriel, had one in his camp equipage, and no one had the time to unload it all and look for it. The local Patriarch had to find his own.
Kaitlin frowned. “You aren’t getting enough fun out of this,” she said.
“Who says?” Blanche allowed. “I like lists.”
The Duchess of Venike was announced. Blanche had been introduced the day before, and her magnificent brocade skirts had hidden the trembling of her knees. Now she was in an old shift with a slightly torn shoulder, seven hours from her wedding.
Her eyes met Kaitlin’s.
Tancreda, bred to the highest etiquette, stood up straight. She had on an archer’s shirt with a short robe of emerald silk over it.