The Green Count

by Christian Cameron

  When we debated plans, they came down to two. We could go in very quietly, and try the rescue – just our own people. John knew the castle well enough.

  As a side plan, we looked at the possibility of making a winter camp in the area and watching the castle, and grabbing the emperor if he emerged.

  But … Every time we got to that point, I would emerge from the sheer glory of such an attempt to the cold reality that I had almost two hundred men in my employ, and if they were good at one thing, it was escalade.

  Our second group of leave-takers went to Pera with Miles, and returned. We had had a total of two desertions – both difficult bastards we could live without.

  We practised our Christmas pageant, passed out a few sweets to local children and tried to convince their parents to come, and held an inspection which was much derided by the other routiers.

  We picked our men. I’ll be honest – we told them nothing. We offered triple pay for a three-day raid, and they accepted. I took all the best men, and left l’Angars, who deserved to be with us, to stay and watch the rest. We took ninety men.

  John left first, with a horse herd and all of his own men. They already had sheepskin coats, I noticed.

  John was making a detour south to look for the Turks. Then he would ride cross country, inland, to Aikos. A long way, but the thing we knew by then is that the Bulgarians were no more fond of making war in winter then we were ourselves.

  Nerio took the third rota to the ship, and three days before Christmas he set sail for Pera, exactly on schedule, in case anyone was watching. The men left behind continued to practise for the Passion Play of Christ’s birth, which I understand was quite well received.

  I wasn’t there to see it.

  It was a fine day; a stiff, cold wind was coming out of the north, but the galley sailed east until Mesembria was lost behind us in the morning haze, and then the captain promised every oarsman three days’ double pay and a week of leave in Pera. They groaned, but they accepted, and the galley turned north and rowed, well out of sight of land – rowed all day and all that night too, warmed by wine heated on braziers.

  I know.

  I was there, in my harness. I’d boarded dressed as an archer with Rob and Mark, helping to carry the folding scaling ladders that every routier knew how to use.

  Morning showed us the northern coast of Bulgaria. We were north of Varna already, and we hovered off the mouth of the great Danube – one of the hundreds of mouths – and this was where our expert Genoese pirate was worth his weight in gold. At sunset we turned towards land and raced the sun into the estuary on a light westerly, and if there were herdsmen or guards to see us, that was a chance we had to take. The sunset showed us trees stripped of leaves and some snow, even in the delta.

  In truth, when you make a plan like the one we’d made, you usually have no idea what can cause your plan to fail. In my case, I had no notion of the sheer complexity of the estuary of the mighty Danube – so many islets, so many little towns, and havens, fishing villages and mud flats. We spent half the night being lost, and our capitano fully knew what he was doing.

  But as the dawn star came bright on the horizon, two full mornings after we set sail, and the morning of Christmas Eve, the timonier spotted the landmark for which the capitano had been looking, a stone cross set in the ground hundreds of years before, and before a priest could say half a Mass, we were ashore in the freezing early morn.

  We had six horses, and we used them to find a flock of sheep and two shepherds. We killed and cooked two sheep on the shepherd’s own fire, and pressed into their byre to pass the day in frozen misery. The shepherds Nerio and I questioned separately.

  We were in the correct place. We were about six miles from the castle. Neither shepherd would admit to ever having seen a patrol from the castle.

  Lazy soldiers. Bless them all.

  It sounds so bald, told like this. But in a great hazard, a great risk, you are not in control of events. I had counted on an empty, winter countryside. It was thus around Mesembria, and let’s be honest, it’s just as empty in the countryside of Cumbria or Yorkshire or Wessex, in the dead of winter. Who goes out of their home, whether hovel or castle, when the wind howls?

  And rain, freezing rain, is the absolute enemy of armoured men. The cold water finds every joint in your harness, and little by little, the cold wetness seeps into your arming clothes, and once you are soaked, you can never get warm. You could throw yourself into a fire, and before you burn to death you still wouldn’t be warm.

  Armour is good for one thing, in winter. It cuts the wind. If your helmet is well lined and you have a good cloak, you can tolerate some cold. If you have a warm horse between your thighs, and a great cloak that covers both man and horse, your level of warmth goes up.

  Thanks to l’Angars and a Genoese banker, we had excellent cloaks. So we huddled in our sheep cots, built fires from other men’s cut wood, and tried not to get our feet wet for a long day of freezing rain and snow.

  At sunset, we moved off in two columns, with six of us mounted to keep the columns moving together – no torches, and the two shepherds as guides, promised a hundred golden ducats for success and death for failure. And my guide, Ionnis, came very close to death when he marched us into a frozen swamp. But I had terrified him, and he was having a difficult time thinking. And the whole area was swampy.

  But from his trembling and confusion I assumed it an honest mistake. Try marching terrifying foreigners over your countryside in the dark.

  Midnight, and I knelt to pray. It was the night of our Saviour’s birth, and in the Castle of Aikos, the garrison feasted.

  We could hear them.

  Aikos had a pretty little town with red tile roofs and two churches, both well lit for the birth of the Saviour. The town wrapped around two sides of the walls, and we gave that a wide berth and made for the long curtain wall that faced across a water-meadow towards the estuary.

  The Bulgarians were singing in Greek.

  Mark was afraid of breaking his bow in the cold, and wanted us to start a fire to warm the bows.

  ‘Even drunk men will note a fire under their walls,’ I said.

  ‘Quarter?’ Rob said.

  Everyone looked at me.

  The night of my Saviour’s birth.

  Escalade.

  ‘No quarter until we have the emperor,’ I said. I didn’t like it.

  But the profession of arms has some dark moments. Every man nodded.

  ‘Take anything you like,’ I said. ‘But when we have the emperor, we’re leaving.’

  Every man nodded again.

  ‘Don’t get left behind,’ I said. ‘When we have the emperor, we will leave like snow in the sun.’ I looked around in the darkness, but all I could see were ragged turbans on helmets that were now painted or rusted brown. We looked like routiers again.

  ‘Let’s go,’ I said.

  We’d gone over the first ten minutes several times – on the galley, and then in the sheep byre.

  We knew who was raising the ladders, and who was going up them, and who was opening the postern gate, and who was racing for the north tower, where the emperor was. We were, in the first moments of Christmas Day, the best organised routiers in history.

  I looked to the right and left in the starlight on the snow. We were under the wall, and I thought for a moment of Pont-Saint-Esprit and other times I’d done this. No one gave the alarm.

  The wall looked very high.

  ‘Ladders up!’ I called.

  Forty men raised two ladders that had been meticulously bolted together. Only then did I smell smoke; Mark had lit his fire, despite my orders.

  The ladders went up and up.

  The walls were tall.

  So were the ladders – wide enough for three men to climb together, with a broad base on wheels, all in parts.

&n
bsp; With a scraping loud enough to wake the dead, the ladder closest to me struck the wall and bounced. Despite my fears – heights, ladders, archery, the Hungarian – I had a foot on the ladder while it was still moving, and then I was climbing, and thirty men were climbing with me. I had Fiore at my shoulder and Marc-Antonio behind me.

  I don’t remember the climb, except that it was dark, that the wind coming up into my braes was brutal, and I knew better than to look down. My ladder was taller than the crenellations, and I went all the way to the top and jumped down onto the battlements, and I was in the castle.

  There was no one on the wall. No one.

  Talk about a Christmas miracle.

  Fiore was there as soon as I, or even earlier, and we took a moment to get our bearings. There was a door in the next tower. John’s description of the interior had not included the intervening tower, or the shape of the courtyard, or the inner bailey. So we’d stormed the outer wall, but the north tower lay off to the right, inside its own smaller fortress, so to speak.

  We were in the wrong place. I have said many things about John; he is a wonder. But never ask a Kipchak for advice on a fortification.

  I cursed. Men were flooding the wall and they were not quiet.

  ‘Get the ladder up here,’ I said. ‘Pull it up!’

  Try lifting a siege ladder on a freezing cold night; try it in steel gauntlets, with numb fingers and the sound of your enemies singing in the hall beneath your feet. Time passed and we made no progress, and then Miles suggested we pass a rope under the base of the ladder like a sling. It proved, after ten minutes of fruitless pulling, that we needed two slings.

  It was incredibly difficult, and every moment I expected to be discovered and attacked.

  Moreover, and I add this for those of you who will command, it is tempting in a crisis to make hasty decisions. It was tempting to abandon the empris, or to simply storm the hall – anything to avoid discovery. Every beat of my heart, I was presented with different foolish solutions to my predicament.

  We got the ladder up and over the wall with a clash and a clatter, and down into the outer yard, where there was a frozen tiltyard and a row of pells for men to practise, and some miserable shacks that leaned against the walls like drunken men.

  In the centre of the courtyard was the great hall – a separate building, as it was at Blacharnae and other places in the Greek east. It stood by itself, with a few tall windows and two fine chimneys like those the Venetians build, so much more efficient than the open hearths of home.

  I was cold. That hall looked warm.

  Now our own training told, because as soon as the ladders were over the out-wall and down in the courtyard, men ran to the base of the ladder in the same order we’d gone over the first wall. Nerio dropped his own part of the initial plan and took command of the archers, whom he stationed opposite both the obvious exits to the great hall.

  We were just preparing to go over the second wall when one of the hall doors opened and a man stumbled out, laughing. He shouted something, raised the skirt of his gown, and began to piss in the snow. You could hear it – smell the urine in the cold darkness. Another man mocked him from inside.

  One of our archers, over-eager, put a cloth-yard shaft in the pissing man. He died, still unable to believe what had happened; he fell to his knees, and then full length in his yellow snow, now dyed red in the ruddy light of the door behind him, then black as the door closed.

  The man who had been laughing stumbled out. And saw the black blood on the white snow. He shouted – and died.

  ‘Go,’ I called.

  I ran up the ladder. I assumed that the Hungarian had orders to kill the emperor if there was a rescue, but then, I was not sure which side the Hungarian was on, or what purpose he served. It was totally possible he was working for Turenne, or Geneva, or even the Green Count, and had orders to protect the emperor.

  We’d spent the winter trying to figure out how all the plots worked. Nerio and Fiore each had theories.

  It was my plan to cut the Gordian knot. Take the emperor, and to hell with theory.

  I didn’t think of any of that just then. I just ran up the ladder, got to the top and jumped down onto my second set of battlements, except this time, they were covered in snow and ice, and I fell, slid, and stopped.

  But this time we were in.

  The steps down from the inner keep wall led to a very small yard, and the closed door of the tower. I took in that door in a moment; looked at all the other levels.

  One door.

  Well, if I was going to hold the emperor in a tower, I’d want a tower with just one door, too.

  The steps down were clogged with snow and ice, and in the end, I sat down and slid on my armoured arse to the small yard below, holding the back of my fauld between my legs like a man with a boy’s sled between his legs. It did me well enough, and then I got up the steps of the tower, with Fiore right by me and Cavalli and two Bretons just behind them.

  There was no longer time to think, or plan. But I did turn my head enough to catch Fiore’s eye.

  We might have been terrified of the attack, or perhaps we might have been full of the importance of our mission, but Fiore shot me a look of pure joy. Some men gamble, or race horses.

  My friends fought. I winked.

  I pulled the door and it didn’t open. I pushed it – of course it didn’t push open.

  But when I took pressure off it, someone inside began to push it towards me.

  Fiore caught the edge and wrenched it open, and I killed the man who’d opened the door for us; he was in maille, and I hadn’t time for mercy.

  Sword in the eye. Step over the corpse, and head for the steps. John hadn’t known anything about the layout of the tower. I was going on instinct.

  I went up.

  At the head of the steps, my sabatons gave me away, and a man loosed a small crossbow, like a hunting bow, down the curving steps, but he was too hasty and his bolt clattered around, hit my helmet and vanished below. I got up the next three steps on will alone, and there was one of the pie-faced Slavs in a fine leather doublet. He had a short, heavy sword in his hand, and no armour, and he was full of wine, and he still managed to delay me through two parries. I caught my sword edge on his, rotated past his cover on sheer ferocity, and snapped his head back with my pommel. I threw him over my left foot and pinned him to the floorboards with my sword’s point while raising my head.

  Fiore passed me, with Orsini at his heels and Bill Vane behind him and Marc-Antonio last.

  There were two doors out of the tower’s guardroom, as it appeared to me.

  The leftmost door opened, and Vane put a shaft through the opening, and then, as quick as I can say it, he put another through the door. The dying man fell forward, because of the drag of the arrows caught in the pine, and the door fell open. A crossbow bolt killed Vane where he stood, pitching him back into Orsini, and Marc-Antonio went into the open door, with Fiore behind him.

  I got the right hand door open. It was a small room with fine furnishings and an icon of the Virgin on the near wall, and standing on the other side of a bed with hangings was a tall, handsome man with a dark beard.

  I saluted with my sword. ‘Highness?’ I asked, in Greek. ‘Rescue.’ In Greek and Latin.

  The flash of a smile was all the recognition I needed, and I turned my back on the emperor and back to the guardroom.

  Luck, and ferocity, had got me between the Hungarian and his prey.

  ‘Get him out!’ I called to Cavalli and Orsini. ‘With your lives!’ I said, and then I ran for the first door, jumped the cooling corpse, and went through the door in time to see …

  Marc-Antonio, making a one-handed cover against the Hungarian, and Fiore lying in a pool of blood, a crossbow bolt in his chest through his left bicep and his harness. Marc-Antonio was already wounded, his left arm limp at hi
s side.

  He made the cover. He had Fiore under him, and he would not retreat.

  I threw my sword. No sword is worth more than your best friend, and I told you – throwing your sword is what you do when you are desperate. Marc-Antonio didn’t have another parry in him; even as I threw, he fell to one knee atop Fiore, who lay as if dead.

  The Hungarian moved to cover my throw, and I saw the fourth man in the room; he was using a belt to cock his crossbow. I should have known – Fiore had been shot by someone.

  Fiore made us practise throwing swords – did I say that? I could throw mine like Jove’s thunderbolt.

  Still, the Hungarian was a great swordsman; he was in a low garde and he snapped his sword up to cover the thrown weapon. Marc-Antonio thought it was an attack and his sword came out, feeble but in time, and tapped against the Hungarian’s rising cut, slowing it, but the Hungarian was so fast that he got the blade up and covered most of the weapon.

  Bad luck, fortuna, fate, or God’s will caused the sword to rotate on the parry and the quillons to slash his face.

  I was still moving. From the moment I threw, I was going for Fiore’s right hand – extended in falling, slightly open, with a sword hilt still in it. Marc-Antonio, still game, fell forward and went for the Hungarian’s feet, making the man skip back. He cut at Marc-Antonio but geometry was against him, and his sword merely put a dent into Marc-Antonio’s backplate.

  I ignored him, scooped Fiore’s sword out of his extended hand, and killed the crossbowman with a straight thrust into the middle of the head. His loaded bow discharged into my right foot; a lance of pain shot up my leg. I rotated, the stable turn Fiore taught, removing my point from the dead crossbowman and turning to face the Hungarian on my good left leg. An odd thing – the crossbow bolt broke my foot under my sabaton. Aside from the initial pain, I never felt it until the fight was over.

  Marc-Antonio had the Hungarian by one ankle.

  Makkrow kicked him. He raised his sword at me. ‘I have something you want,’ he said.

  But the death of the crossbowman changed the balance of terror.