by Robert Adams
"You impale living, struggling men on lances and spears, hack and slash and cut and stab with the sword, gape open skulls with the ax, crush them with mace or morning-star, blow them apart with horse pistol or arquebus, and then on to your next opponent, heedless of the wounded and dying man your horse kills or further injures under his steel-shod hooves."
"And there's that particular barbarity, too, here. In my world, most military units of most of the more civilized countries looked with at the very least official disfavor upon the mistreatment of wounded foemen, and their medical services quite often gave those wounded care in no way inferior to that that they gave their own wounded. But not here, not in this world."
"Of course, as Krystal long ago pointed out, what passes for medical care here is so basically useless if not actually harmful that it's often a real mercy to put down wounded men just as you put down badly injured horses—far better a bullet or a quick dagger thrust than a lingering, hideous death of sepsis or gangrene. Even so, that was one current custom that came damned devilish hard to me when first I came here . . . still does, for that matter. But I do it when I have to."
The Duke of Norfolk would have certainly been even more perturbed, just then, had he been aware that his obvious reluctance to grant the mercy stroke or shot to wounded foemen on many occasions had been drastically misread. He was widely considered to be a hard, cold man, utterly callous and unfeeling when it came to enemies, even suffering, wounded enemies. His galloglaiches loved him for these supposed qualities. Other men deeply respected him and strove to remain on friendly terms with him, for all that they found so patently cruel a man difficult to truly like.
Bass hung the breastplate back on the rack and took down a spauldron that seemed a little dull to his eye.
"It's not really the killing that tears me up, though. I'm at least that much of a realist. I know that if I should pull my stroke or consciously miss my shot, the man I spare will possibly kill me or one of my friends or retainers. No, it's the thinking about it all later, when those dead men whose names you never knew, those men with the twisted, bloodless faces come into your mind and dreams in the dark of night, sometimes with weeping women and starving children, and you wake up sweating and gasping or screaming."
"But even that worst part has gotten better—I hope, I pray—with time; I don't get that kind of nightmare nearly so often now as I did two, three years ago. I think those long talks with Hal helped immensely. Our Archbishop of York is a damned good shrink in addition to his many other talents."
"No, the facing of armed men in battle is one thing. I've had to learn to live with it and more or less accept it. It's the same with killing wounded, too; when a man arms and goes into a battle, here and now, he has to expect to lose his life in one way or another. I've even—God forgive me—learned to live after a fashion with using the misericorde, though my personal preference for the act is a pistol."
"But what's going on ashore, there, is another thing entirely. The turning loose of armed men, especially of those heartless galloglaiches, on a trapped, terrified, and mostly unarmed civilian populace constitutes to me an unforgivable crime that I know will haunt me—waking and sleeping . . . if I ever can sleep again, after this, that is—for the rest of my life. I can think of nothing that would in any way justify what I just have countenanced doing to those poor Spanish civilians of Gijon-port, and I'm more a criminal than those sailors, soldiers, and galloglaiches, for I know that it's wrong . . . yet I am condoning it all. I doubt that even Hal has the ability to ease my mind of this enormity."
Duca Timoteo di Bolgia thanked his private gods that this contract did not call for him and his command to make a fighting landing in Ireland, for if it had, they all would have been slaughtered on the beach like so many helpless sheep. Mercenary companies almost invariably marched from one contract to the next, and consequently precious few of his officers, sergeants, or other ranks had ever been aboard anything more prepossessing than a mule-drawn canal barge or the Neapolitan craft in which they had been towed over to Sicily from the Italian mainland.
As a mercantile-minded Cardinal d'Este might have put it, the goods failed to travel well. Most of Timoteo's company became ill shortly after leaving Palermo harbor, though a largish proportion had recovered, gained their "sea legs" as it were, by the time the coast of the Caliphate of Granada hove into view on the western horizon. But as the small fleet passed through the Gates of Hercules and breasted the heavier, less predictable seas beyond, if mal di mare took its toll once more, even harder this time, striking down not only the recently-recovered victims, but claiming others who had seemed immune on the relatively placid waters of the inland sea they had just traversed.
There was a spate of recoveries whilst the fleet sat in the calm harbor of Anfa Antiqua, taking on fresh food and water and waiting for the small contingent of Afriquan mercenaries to get themselves, their gear, and their animals aboard the ships that would be joining the fleet. As Timoteo wisely let his officers and men go ashore for a while, recovery was complete by the time the fleet was ready to set sail northwestward for Ireland.
However, as luck would have it, the first of what was to prove a seemingly endless succession of fierce Atlantic Ocean storms struck them only two days out of Anfa Antiqua, and before even this first tempest had run its course, Timoteo had five shiploads of men whose highest present aspiration was to immediately die. And before it was done, before the battered fleet finally reached its Irish destination, some of those men were dead. Most of them had perished of the effects of utter dehydration—being unable to hold even water on their stomachs—some sufferers crept up from the foul 'tween-decks to be swept overboard by the towering, crashing seas that swept the vessels end to end and necessitated constant, twenty-four-hour use of the pumps by the overworked seamen and the few mercenaries capable of it. Some of them found a dagger thrust preferable to ceaseless, unbearable suffering.
So the proud, justly famous company that had departed Palermo landed on the river quay in Ireland as a sorry-looking, draggle-tailed lot indeed. Many of the wan, cadaverous-looking men were too weak even to crawl up the ladders from the holds and had to be hoisted up and over onto the quay, some dozen or so at the time, in cargo nets. Those who essayed to walk stumbled and swayed on weak and wobbly legs, looking like nothing so much as helpless, hapless inebriates as they sprawled on the slimy stones of the quay. Timoteo, who had for long prided himself on having the best, the hardest-fighting, the most victorious, and the finest-appearing company in the length and breadth of Italy, was appalled at the sight of the filthy, unkempt, emaciated men in their unwholesome rags and tatters, his sole consolation being that the Afriquan mercenaries looked, if anything, far worse.
The horses, on the other hand, had survived the long voyage in fine flesh. Only a single charger had been lost of all the horses belonging to the officers of Timoteo's company—that of his brother, Roberto—along with a couple of coursers and one saddle mule. No one of the Afriquan contingent's mounts had died, but some few were in poor flesh and would require nursing ashore before they could be ridden.
Timoteo had not allowed himself to become ill during the whole of the voyage. Lacking his steely self-control, Roberto di Bolgia and Sir Ugo both had succumbed during the spate of fearsome storms, but both were again in fine fettle by the time that the fleet had docked in Ireland. Therefore, it was these three, plus le chevalier, who donned their finest attire, mounted led horses, and accompanied the guard of honor sent down to fetch them by King Tamhas only some hour after the first ship had sailed up the river to the quay and begun to discharge passengers and their gear.
King Tamhas proved to be a tall, slender man with a full head of hair—once raven's-wing black, but now thickly interspersed by strands of white—a double-spade chin beard, and a thin, drooping mustache, their blackness in distinct contrast to his wan, sallow face and his pale, watery-blue eyes. He had no Italian, of course, and Timoteo owned only a smattering of the guttura
l, difficult Irish tongue, but it soon developed that this kinglet did speak an archaic dialect of Norman French quite fluently, which fact made for ease of conversation between the monarch and his new-come captain-general. Of conservative tastes, as are many professional soldiers, il Duca di Bolgia silently deplored this pocket king's taste in clothing. That it was long out of date was something to be more or less expected in this cultural backwater so far from the true center of the civilized world, but that was not the worst of it. The outfit was so garish as to set edge to edge the teeth of any modern man with a sense of the proprieties and an innate eye for the balancing of colors.
The old-fashioned slashed doublet was of umber lined with a glaring, flame-red silk, while the separate slashed sleeves were lined with green silk, but two different shades of the color, one shade to each arm. The slashed breeches were of gold brocade all interwoven with silver threads and trimmed with seed pearls, the lining being of a saffron hue . . . but not the same saffron hue as either of his stockings. The ankle-high shoes were of an elaborately tooled purplish-crimson leather, with gilded heel and sole edges, which also were set all around with semiprecious gemstones. Among the ten fingers of his monarch's hands could be counted sixteen jewel-set rings. A ruby-set earring and a tourmaline stud decorated his right ear; he was missing his left ear. More jewels and large pearls depended from links of the solid-gold chain that rested on his shoulders, held in that unnatural drape by bronze brooches of ancient designs, all inlaid with turquoise and mother-of-pearl.
"The warrior lucky enough to capture this bugger," thought Timoteo, "would not need to wait for a ransom, by God. That chain alone would buy a rich county, and the worth of those rings would keep a man in luxury for life and his heirs thereafter. Only a fabulous fighter or a cocksure fool would display so much wealth about his person."
After a few minutes of conversation, Timoteo decided he distrusted this Irish kinglet and could easily dislike him as well. For one thing, Tamhas seemed ever unwilling to give a man a look into his eyes, keeping them carefully averted at all times whilst he spoke on any subject at all, a habit which in di Bolgia's wide experience indicated a man with something he hid, did not tell, or at least failed to tell in full.
The advisers present were an unprepossessing lot, to be very charitable in the phrasing—one tall and lanky, one shifty-eyed like the king with a head too small for his corpulent body and pudgy limbs, one short and ferret-faced and endlessly rubbing his hands together. All three, when introduced, bore the same patronymic as the royal personage and so were surely related to him, dependent on him, and therefore likely to tell him always what they knew he wanted to hear rather than the truth, which made for damned poor advisers.
Moreover, despite their protestations, Timoteo was dead certain that at least one of his advisers had a command of Italian, for when he was translating a remark to his brother—who was experiencing some difficulty with the archaic francese creolo, peppered as it seemed to be with Germanic and Gaelic loan words—and chanced to refer to the fat adviser as il maialesco that worthy reddened and glared balefully at them both. Immediately, Timoteo switched his translations and asides to the Umbrian peasant dialect. Even born Romans and Neapolitans had trouble understanding that one.
"That king is no irlandais," remarked le chevalier to Timoteo, Roberto, and Ugo, as they all rode back to the ships. "He's a Norman. I've an uncle who is his spit and image. So far as is known, my grandpere never visited Irlande . . . so, mayhap his majesty's grandmere . . ."
Le chevalier perforce broke off as his mount, stung by a forceful dig in the flank by the dull point of the metal chape of Timoteo's sword sheath, reared and essayed to bolt. When he had once more brought the beast under control, the captain drew up close beside the French knight and spoke rapidly, in a low voice and in modern French. "Pour l'amour de Dieu, Marc, watch your tongue, if you'd keep it and your head! This is not France, nor yet one of the Italian states, wherein sophisticated humor is enjoyed. Had I allowed you to finish that which you had started and had one of those with us taken it back to this kinglet or, worse, one of those so-called advisers, you could have put us all into a pretty pickle. A few outsized boulders from the bombards up there"—he gestured with a gloved hand at the crenellated walls of the glowering stone riverside fortress—"would put even your galleon on the bottom of this muddy river. Then I'd likely be stuck in this cold, damp, foggy backwater for the rest of my natural life . . . and I'm homesick for Italy already, Marc; hell, even those bare, brown Sicilian hills would look good to me, just now! And our just-concluded audience with this monarch has bred in me a vague but gnawing presentiment that this will be an ill-starred contract."
At the indictment hearing, no single tenant of the Floyd Avenue house would admit to having heard enough of the proceedings on the day that Evelyn Mangold had beaten Marge Ademian to death to be able to identify the voices of the persons then within the apartment, even as to whether they both were female. In the end, all that the well-meaning and thoroughly frustrated young Commonwealth Attorney was able to do was to get the woman indicted and convicted of resisting her arrest and assaulting two police officers while in performance of their duties. She was sentenced to eight months in the city jail, but given credit against this sentence for the nearly four months she had spent in jail awaiting trial.
His innate sense of fairness, of rightness, deeply offended by this turn of events, this particular Commonwealth Attorney quickly became a willing—eagerly willing—accomplice of Rupen, Boghos, Mariya, Kogh, Bagrat, old Vasil, Boghos's attorney, a city police sergeant of Armenian antecedents, a local private investigator and his staff, and a sometime public defender from New York State (half Armenian, by chance happening) who still was galled by his belief in the innocence of a convicted client.
Large inputs of cash by Kogh, Vasil, and Boghos lubricated the gears of the device that mutual effort and a desire for justice had assembled. And Evelyn Mangold herself made it even easier, her first vicious actions upon her release from durance vile playing directly into the hands of the family she had wronged.
It was Rupen who received the first batch of obscene photographic prints, and it was all that his family could do to prevent him from throwing over the meticulously laid plans and going after the evil woman with tooth, nail, and hard, scarred knuckles.
Richmond attorney Greg Zaroukian—he who had once before tried to bribe Evelyn Mangold into leaving the state—telephoned the number included with the photos and set an appointment to meet with the murderous woman in his downtown office.
"Them pitchers got to the damn furrin bastid, din't they, huh?" crowed the tall, big-boned, flat-chested woman, a dirty grin on her broad face. "I got lots an' lots more of 'em, too, lawyer. An' I got some spools of tape, too, with her tellin' me how I'm a better lover than any goddamned man she ever had afore. I wants ten grand fer the lot, lawyer. But none thishere shit about me leavin' town, this time; I likes it here, I already got me a nice lil' gal lined up fer to move in with at a apartment up on Monument Avenue. Met 'er the same damn day I got outen met fuckin' jail, I did, too!"
Greg Zaroukian knew all about that part of it, although he was careful to keep a blank face. The investigator had found the "lil' gal" for them—an attractive actress, somewhat older than she appeared, with four years as a WAAF and a thorough grounding in combat judo behind her, plus a few more years in undercover aspects of law enforcement. Her services had not come cheaply, but the Ademians had been more than happy to foot the bill.
The purpose for the hired woman had been dual. For one thing, they had not wanted Evelyn Mangold to even consider leaving the Richmond area; for the other, the furtherance of their plans for her called for her to have immediate access to enough money to allow her continuance of her interrupted addiction to injected narcotics. Considering her history, Boghos had estimated that a mere two weeks would guarantee her being again firmly hooked.
"You know, you slimy bitch," remarked Greg Zaroukian, "I should im
mediately turn you over to the police. Extortion is frowned upon in this area, and you just might wind up on the Women's State Farm, a couple of hours' drive west of here. You wouldn't like it there, I think; no sitting around, like in the city jail. There they'd put you to work—hard, manual work, in the fields—and beat the crap out of you three times a day."
He placed a hand on the receiver of his telephone and regarded the ugly woman seated across from him as he might have some vile creature born of filth under an overturned rock. She sat stiffly, tensely, obviously ready to bolt from the chair in an instant, and he noted with some satisfaction the glitter of true fear in her muddy-brown eyes.
He slowly, grudgingly, removed his hand from the receiver. "But, alas, I have specific orders from my clients in your regard, you perverted sow. I can't get that large a sum for you at once, you understand. However, I should have it all in about a week. But I must insist, for that much money, that I receive all of the prints and the negatives as well, and also all of the copies of these tapes you just mentioned. Should you hold out on us and try this again, we will have no choice but to have you killed . . . slowly, painfully. Do you understand me, bitch?"
Evelyn Mangold was quite pleased in regard to her progress, so far. True, she had not yet managed to get into the new girl's pants, but that would come, and the girl was already regularly, obtaining prescription drugs for Evelyn's "affliction." The Monument Avenue apartment was large-roomed, airy, and exceedingly comfortable after that bare cell in the city jail and the Floyd Avenue dump that had preceded it.
She was convinced that Millicent Mavore had at some time been in bad trouble with the law, no matter how often and vociferously the girl denied it. She knew too much, understood too much for it to be otherwise, but Evelyn was assured that she'd get everything out of her latest victim, eventually. Silly women—and men, too, for that matter—would stupidly tell anything and everything to a lover, holding nothing back, even when it was clearly to their best interests to do so.