They were all four of them handsome young lads, not a day over twelve, fair of face and form, dark of eye and hair, with fresh complexions and erect carriages. They were almost similar enough to have passed for brothers. Johanna wondered if they’d been chosen for their looks, a matched set to enhance their lord’s consequence.
The table was also near enough that their conversation was clearly audible to her, and whose first words held her transfixed. “My lord Ambroise will not be best pleased if he gets to hear of this. He told us to mind our manners in Avignon.”
“At least until he gets what he wants from John,” another said.
“God’s balls,” the third said, “we’ll be here until Christmas.”
“What does he want from the Pope, anyway?” the fourth said, and found his already abused ear soundly boxed by the first. “Ouch! What did you do that for, Bernart?”
“Because, Guilham, my lord does not want his business bruited about the streets,” Bernart said, looking around, and Johanna made sure her face was over her plate when he looked her way. “If you cannot learn discretion, perhaps you do not belong in his service.”
Guilham, his face red with anger, lurched to his feet and stumbled away. Most fortuitously, he stumbled in Johanna’s direction, and more fortuitously still he tripped over a stool and fell face forward on her table, knocking over her cup of small beer and breaking the cheese plate.
She sprang to her feet with an exclamation of dismay. “Sir! Are you hurt?” She picked him up and set him on his feet again, where he stayed, none too steadily. “Here, let me help you.” She made a show of brushing the bread crumbs from his tunic, waiting for him to raise his head. When he did, she gave him her best smile. “Are you well?” she said. “Perhaps a drink to refresh yourself.” She contrived to sit him on a stool, the very one he had tripped over, and motioned to the host, who arrived posthaste with a pitcher this time of small beer and another, larger plate of bread and cheese. She poured the boy a cup, broke off some of the blue-veined cheese and put it on a piece of bread and served him so, with yet another smile as an appetizer. He was still blinking from the first one.
“What, Guilham, and who is your new friend?”
Johanna looked up with all the surprise she could muster showing on her face. “Gentlemen?” She took in their livery with an awed glance, and looked at Guilham. “Ah, I see. You are comrades. Please, join us.”
They did, Bernart looking her over very frankly. She knew what he saw, a young woman dressed for the road in well-made clothes who didn’t look hungry enough to sell herself by the hour. She did wear insignia, the characters of Wu Company, on her shoulder, which meant she was not without protection. Still, she was alone, and this led him into error. “A professional lady, is it? Perhaps you can find time to, ah, fit all of us in,” he said, elbowing one of the others, who sniggered dutifully.
“Sir,” she said, in a voice she copied from one of the khan’s wives at Cambaluc, chill enough to freeze the small beer pouring out of the pitcher, “you labor under a misapprehension. I am trader, a merchant, in fact, and my company even now sets up our stalls in the marketplace.”
Bernart wasn’t quite convinced—after all, no respectable woman went about in public without at least one servant to lend her consequence—but he was willing to play along. “Where are you from?” he said.
She looked him in the eye and said firmly, “Cathay.”
He laughed. She did not. The other three boys leaned forward. “Cathay? Truly?”
She produced another dazzling smile, directed this time impartially around the table of eager faces, not neglecting Bernart. “Truly.”
After that all she had to do was simper, and tell some of the more sensational tales from her grandfather’s book. She ordered more small beer and two more platters of food, because food was a guaranteed way into the confidence of boys of this age. In combination with the admiring attention of an attractive older woman, it proved irresistible. “Where are you gentlemen from?” she said, refilling their mugs with a generous hand.
They responded with names of four different Frankish-sounding places. She eyed their uniforms. “Yet you all wear the same livery.”
“We are in service to the Lord of L’Arête,” Guilham said.
She produced a look of abject admiration. Her mouth might even have dropped open. “Truly? You serve at a noble court?”
They preened as only boys on the verge of manhood can. “Indeed,” Bernart said, with what he imagined was just the right amount of hauteur. He was so very young. They all were.
“Imagine!” she said. She dropped her eyes and said modestly, “I’m merely a trader, a traveling merchant, you know. I’ve never even been inside a nobleman’s house.” She paused to let the difference in their stations sink in, and then said, with hushed reverence, “Is L’Arête a, well, a castle? No, really?”
She had learned a great deal indeed by the time the bell sounded vespers and a shadow darkened their table. They looked up, to behold an older man wearing their colors in richer fabrics, a man with a strong, hard face and heavy gold around his neck and on his fingers. “So, gentlemen,” he said, “you have found a friend. How nice.”
Johanna looked at Guilham, and saw his face had gone white.
“I believe we were to have met before none in the Rue Peyrollerie,” their lord said. There was a leather whip coiled at his waist, and he allowed one hand to toy with its end, which had more than one tail. “And yet I find you not there, but here.” He affected a slight bow toward Johanna, his eyes flickering over her person, noting the quality of her clothing and her badge and then dismissing her in the next moment. “In charming company. Which would no doubt provide its own excuse. For some other, less demanding lord.”
Such was the paralyzing force of Ambroise’s tongue that Johanna thought for a moment none of the four boys were ever going to be able to move again. She wasn’t all that sure about herself.
“Gentlemen,” he said. “With me. Now.”
The last word cracked like the whip at his side would have, and there was a clattering scramble that knocked over all four stools and a babble of apologies, directed not at her but at their lord. They were really afraid of him, Johanna saw, and it was manifestly obvious that the lord Ambroise enjoyed their fear.
At that moment another quarrel broke out on the other side of the square and everyone turned involuntarily to look. She took advantage of the confusion to slip away into the dusk and was so late she nearly got her robe caught in the city gate as it closed behind her. There she was pounced on by an infuriated Shasha. “Where have you been all day?”
“Gathering information,” Johanna said airily. She grinned. “And meeting the lord of L’Arête.”
“What!”
They gathered back at the inn, crowding into the cramped room and speaking only so loud as to be able to hear themselves over the roistering going on in the common room next door. Someone had foraged for better food than could be had from their landlord and they sat in a circle around a roast chicken and a rice and shrimp dish seasoned with saffron, and apples and cheese to follow, talking as they ate. When they were done Shasha passed around a damp cloth for them to wipe their hands and faces.
“So,” Johanna said, summing up. “Félicien isn’t with them. She was left at home, I would imagine under close guard of those of his personal guard he didn’t bring with him. Ten of them, according to the boys.”
“And how long does he remain here in Avignon?”
“The boys don’t know. One of them said they’ll stay as long as it takes to get what Ambroise wants from Pope John.”
“Do they know what he wants?”
Johanna gave an impatient shrug, but said, “They think it’s something to do with his wife. He married her for L’Arête, but it sounds as if their church has to formally invest lordship in Ambroise. Because she’s the heir. Something like that, I didn’t really understand all of it, and I couldn’t ask too many questions or the
y would have become suspicious.”
“Perhaps this Pope was named in Félicien’s father’s will,” Alaric said. “He might have stood as her guardian, should she be yet unmarried at the time of her father’s death.”
“But she was.”
Alaric shrugged. “Lords tend to secure their succession by soliciting the endorsement of the marriage of their heirs by the most powerful lord of the land. In these parts, that’s the Pope.” He shook his head. “L’Arête sounds like a rich property, and Provins is a rich region. Any liege lord would want the allegiance of the lord of L’Arête, if only to be able to tax its profits.”
“The point is that Félicien is in L’Arête, and right now, this minute the lord isn’t,” Jaufre said. He sounded as if his patience was fraying.
“Under heavy guard,” Alaric said, without much hope.
“Those boys?” Johanna said. “They are terrified of him.” She raised her eyes to look at Jaufre, and knew the same thought was in their minds. And if the lord of L'Arête gave his pages cause to be terrified of him, how much more cause would he give his runaway wife? “There used to be five of them. Five pages. I gather one of them died recently.”
Jaufre made an impatient gesture. “Sad, if true, but what has that to do with us?”
Firas was quicker. “Did Ambroise give him flying lessons?”
“They wouldn’t say specifically, just that he died.” She paused. “They are terrified of him,” she said again. “I’ve never seen such fear.”
“And if L’Arête has left orders from its lord not to admit troubadours?”
“The boys did not say so. And Ambroise isn’t home.”
“But how will we get out again?” Alaric said, a little querulously.
“We can’t know that until we see the place,” Firas said.
“I’ve found someone who knows the way and is willing to guide us,” Jaufre said.
“Someone trustworthy, I hope?” Alaric said.
“Someone for hire,” Jaufre said. “He has a boat and will bring us across the river and then guide us to L’Arête.” He looked around at their faces. “We leave tonight. And Alaric and I will be accompanying you to L’Arête.”
“What!”
“By the round-eyed Christian god—”
“Jaufre—”
“Jaufre, please be reasonable.”
“You’ll get us all killed!”
“Wait,” he said. “They won’t know us. Trust me.”
His smile was thin but it was the first smile any of them had seen on his face since Sant’ Alberto, and it was enough to silence them long enough to listen to what he had to say.
11
Provins, October, 1325
When the bells rang lauds they donned packs filled with the bare minimum of food and necessities and crept out of their room, picked through the offal-strewn yard and down to the river’s edge where a small, open boat waited for them. “This is Pascau,” Jaufre said in a low voice.
The boatman, of middle age and wary mien, gave a curt nod and motioned them into the boat without further delay. They were almost too much of a load for it, and Johanna was sure they were all thinking of how many boats they’d almost swamped to date during their journey west, and if this was going to be the last one. Pascau stood in the stern, wielding a single oar with an offhand competence that was marginally reassuring.
Their passage across the river was swift and silent and unwitnessed so far as they could tell. The current left them considerably downstream on the opposite shore, but there was a neat moorage which hid the boat beneath a dense thicket of willow that argued steady usage.
There was a small clearing up the bank beneath more willows. “Sleep here,” Pascau said. “Leave at first light.”
They wrapped themselves in their cloaks and made themselves as comfortable as they could on the bare ground. At dawn they broke their fast with bread and cheese and were off across a flat landscape of stubbled fields lined with tall plane trees. The day was gray, with a mist that hung low to the ground. They kept to the shadows and slept rough the next night, too. The second morning found them approaching a collection of rock piers in fantastic shapes.
Pascau gestured at the rocks. “The Valley of Hell.”
“Cheery,” Hayat said.
“Welcoming,” Johanna said.
Pascau’s face, set in uncommunicable lines, didn’t change. “No sense of humor,” Hayat said.
Rosemary, thyme and lavender grew in thickets from every available crevice, perfuming the air with their scents, long limbs grasping at the carelessly-placed boot. Shasha walked in a permanent crouch, rubbing leaves here, plucking branches there. The plane trees had given way to cypress, and here and there olives trees had scratched together enough dirt to make a living. All the trees were stunted and twisted and leaning southeast beneath the eternal abuse of the mistrau, and rocks, herbs and trees clustered so thickly together as to make the way very difficult. From the brief glimpses they caught of it, the trail would have made their journey a little easier, but not so much that they dared risk encountering other travelers by taking it. The mist had lifted and the late autumn sun blazed down without mercy and everyone’s clothes were damp with sweat and grimed with dust. Altogether an unprepossessing group, Johanna thought, looking them over. No self-respecting castle would let them in the door.
At mid-afternoon Pascau came scrambling back down a rocky incline and motioned to Jaufre. They held a brief, hurried consultation. “He says L’Arête is over this rise,” Jaufre said. “He says we must go carefully if we don’t want to be seen.”
“I don’t want to go at all,” Alaric said, but it was the barest grumble and easily ignored.
“He’s found a spot on the ridge covered with rosemary grown very tall,” Jaufre said. “We are to crawl into it and be very careful not to crawl out the other side.”
When they had climbed and crawled and slithered into place, they could understand Pascau’s caution.
“In truth, a very blade,” Firas said, after a long, awed moment of silence.
A massive stone of brilliant white, the southern end pointed, the northern end squared off, L’Arête appeared to have debarked from the mountains behind it to set sail on the flat plain below. Its sides were one continuous face, so smooth they looked planed by the same giant hand. Wave-like curls of vegetation clustered thickly all around its base, through which a single narrow road crept back and forth. Anyone on the road would have a sheer and certainly injurious, if not fatal drop on one side of them going and coming.
“They must have water up there,” Firas said. “They could never withstand a siege otherwise.”
“There is a small river in the valley below,” Alaric said, craning his neck.
“If they were under siege they would never be able to get to it,” Hayat said. “And it would be easy to poison.” Johanna knew she was thinking about the river upon which Talikan had been built. Ogodei’s first action had been to poison it.
“How high is the rock, do you think?” Shasha said.
“Five times the height of the towers of St. Mark’s, and that’s just the rock,” Firas said.
Everyone’s eyes raised to what grew from the top of the rock.
On a ledge close to the summit many tiny houses had been carved from the white rock of the precipice and roofed with orange tiles. Above them was the castle.
Johanna swallowed.
It increased the height of the freestanding ridge by a third. There were a dozen towers of varying sizes and shapes, sides pierced with multiple arrow slits. The towers were connected by a thick, high wall, built from more white rock. The wall was topped with a battlement defended by a parapet. Even at this distance she could see movement through the crenellations in the parapet. Guards. Ten spearmen that they knew of, but how many more?
Inside the wall roofs of buildings could be glimpsed, including a large square keep. Another wall ran around the village to connect with the castle wall on either side. B
ecause of the differences in elevation the doors into both were easy to identify. Neither looked welcoming.
L’Arête wasn’t just impregnable. It was unassailable. All its defenders had to do was lock the doors and rain down death on their enemies with mangonels, one of which was in plain view on the south end of the prominence.
They slid back down and gathered in a circle beneath a clump of cypress. Even Jaufre looked shaken.
“How are we going to get in there?” Alma said.
“How are we going to get out again?” Alaric said.
Jaufre squared his shoulders. “We go with Johanna’s plan. We’re an itinerant band of troubadours, looking for a place to sing for our suppers.”
“And if the Blade discovers our presence?” Alaric said.
“He’s not here,” Jaufre said.
“And we’d best be gone before he returns,” Firas said. He nodded at Pascau, who was sitting apart from them, an expression stolid indifference on his face. “Have you paid him yet?” By prior arrangement they spoke only Persian among themselves.
“No,” Jaufre said, affronted. “He gets paid when we return safely to the Avignon side of the river.”
“Is he coming with us?”
“No. He says he’ll wait here.”
“Tell him you’ll double his fee if he comes with us,” Firas said.
“Firas—”
The assassin shrugged. “It’s the only way to be sure he won’t hotfoot back to Avignon and sell us out to Ambroise.”
“He could sell us out to them instead,” Alaric said, jerking his head in the direction of L’Arête.
“They’d kill him, too, and he knows that,” Firas said, and looked at Jaufre. “Either he comes with us or someone stays here to see that he doesn’t run off. I nominate you and Alaric.”
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