My blade was in the garde the Order calls ‘the long tail,’ way out behind me, dragged there by the dying crossbowman as he fell off the point.
The Hungarian snapped another kick into Marc-Antonio’s face, breaking his nose and two teeth.
Marc-Antonio hung on.
I snapped a rising mezzano cut at the Hungarian’s head. He wasn’t in armour and I was, and I didn’t need to be as good as he was. All I had to do was get close.
He parried, but his parry brought us close, and he could still only move one foot.
I let his parry push wide, and he accepted and pushed his blade right into my face …
A superb blow …
Against a man without armour. His point scraped across my visor and failed to go in my eye slit.
He was so fast that even after he realised that he had wasted his blow, he got his point back to cover my thrust to his face. I could smell his breath.
I had my sword at the half blade then, and I pried his point aside, cutting his hands. He couldn’t move his left foot. He had a long time to know what was coming, and he was very strong.
‘Fuck you,’ he said, at least twice. ‘I’ll kill you all.’
I let my sword slide through my left hand just a little, cutting myself in the process, again; his head snapped aside to avoid getting my point in his face, and that wrecked his balance. Suddenly my left wrist was at his throat, my sword a bar of iron to help my throw, and I turned and threw him so hard that I heard his knee joint break, because Marc-Antonio still had his leg.
And then he lay at my feet. His left leg was badly broken and my gauntlet had flayed his face.
He screamed.
‘William!’ Nerio called.
‘Here!’ I roared.
Nerio came in with Stapleton behind him.
‘Fiore’s on the floor,’ I said. ‘Save him. Marc-Antonio …’
‘You …!’ spat the Hungarian. ‘You …’
I got my foot on the Hungarian’s sword hand and I stepped with all my weight.
‘You can’t kill me,’ he said grimly. ‘I’m worth far more alive. Do you know what Geneva’s done, William Gold? I know …’
Two of our Gascons lifted Fiore and he groaned.
Nerio tilted Marc-Antonio’s head back. My squire was still alive, although he looked like a revenant with the front of his face removed. Nerio had slung his heavy winter cloak; the guardroom had spears, and he and Stapleton began to make a little stretcher.
‘You have the emperor?’ I asked.
Nerio kept wrapping.
Stapleton nodded. ‘Already out,’ he said.
‘Visconti?’ I asked.
The Hungarian twitched.
‘We will kill everyone you know, and your stupid English prince,’ the Hungarian said.
Nerio looked up from folding the cloak. ‘What did I tell you?’ he snapped, and for a moment he was that very dark man that I could almost fear. He looked at me.
I shook my head.
‘You can’t kill me!’ the Hungarian said with satisfaction. ‘I know everything.’
Those were his last words. John the Kipchak is right – there is a place where there is no longer room for mercy. I killed him, as I had not killed the Comte d’Herblay.
Perhaps I should not have killed him. Perhaps he really did know all the terrible things that awaited us. The words ‘English prince’ certainly resonated for years.
I have never lost an instant’s sleep on the subject, my friends.
Nor did I forget to collect the sword I’d thrown. Or to find young Visconti, either.
But if getting in was relatively easy, we still had to get out. Fiore was down, maybe dead; I was not leaving him. Marc-Antonio had, in my estimation, just won his spurs, for all he had half the skin of his face hanging in shreds and several wounds.
‘The hall?’ I asked Nerio. He was opening every casket and case in the room where the Hungarian lay dying.
‘I left it to Master Stone,’ Nerio said.
I ran back down the stairs, my foot just beginning to hurt me. Men were looting the tower, which was fine with me. Except that we were leaving.
‘Rally!’ I roared. I was out of the door and hobbling across the icy ground. I didn’t fall, mostly because the edges of my sabatons bit into the snow like the iron ice-creepers my horrible uncle used to wear in winter in London.
The Welsh Davids, who were as responsible a pair of men as I’ve ever known, had taken the gate of the inner bailey, and instead of looting, they were standing by the gate with lit torches – another Christmas Miracle. With them at my heels, I went out into the main courtyard, where the best men of my compagnia were slaughtering the garrison. I could make this sound more knightly if I suggested that it was a desperate struggle, a fair fight, but we’d taken them completely by surprise on Christmas night, and all I can say is that they were brave. They had no armour and most were drunk.
Just as I came into the outer yard, however, a gate opened and more of them poured in; I assume they were the town garrison, alarmed by the fighting.
They came charging in the main gate, which their friends opened for them.
It began to look as if we could not hold the outer bailey. The archers were running low on shafts, and they were forming a good line with swords and bucklers, shuffling back to the gateway, to the ramp up to the inner bailey. The newcomers followed, pushing us back. It was dark, but not dark enough – the light from the hall reflected on the snow. Men in polished armour reflect light in an odd way, so that they can appear to be wraiths in darkness.
My foot had begun to throb.
Then the men who had stormed the tower came at our backs, with the emperor and the wounded. Suddenly we had a dozen fully armoured men. Stapleton gave a shout I didn’t know he had, and we were at them, knights in front and archers pressing in behind, and the Bulgarians broke.
That should have been the end, but some idiot had left the main gate open after letting in the town garrison, and so, naturally, John and his Kipchaks came in the gate and began to shoot down any Bulgarian they saw in the yard.
We had the emperor. Nerio had Visconti, who had someone’s spare arming sword in his fist and looked like he wanted to kill every man in Bulgaria. The gate was open, and the postern – if we’d wanted, we could have owned the whole castle for the winter; the archers and the Kipchaks were minded to massacre the survivors.
I wasn’t. I had what I’d come for. There was no reason for further killing, and Miles Stapleton and I hobbled around the courtyard and demanded our people stop killing.
But all the bells in the town were ringing, and in the next town, audible across the snow. The emperor was probably the most valuable hostage ever taken; I had to assume there would be pursuit.
We took the emperor out of the postern, where John was waiting with a dozen more horsemen and twenty spare horses. This was the most expensive part of the raid, but bless John, he’d stolen most of them; expensive because we only rode back to where we’d left the sheep, and the ship. We left the forty horses for the local peasants or the garrison’s survivors, bowed to the emperor of Rome in a sheep byre at the break of Christmas Day, and hunkered down to await our ship.
And then our luck deserted us.
The ship was gone. We had men climb trees, and John rode all the way out the peninsula, and we could not find our ship.
The sky began to grow light; a pretty, salmon pink crept up the eastern sky.
We’d taken a pair of servants who claimed to be with the emperor, and they approached Stapleton with demands for the emperor’s comfort. I put him in the sheep byre with the shepherds.
After I set my pickets and sent a strong patrol under Fiore down our back-trail towards the fortress, I went and made my best bow. Up until then I had not spoken to him.
He smiled. �
��Is there wine?’ he asked, mildly enough for an emperor.
I sent Achille, Nerio’s squire, to Ewan, and wine appeared. Some men are natural looters, always capable of finding the right thing; Ewan produced hot hippocras, perhaps the most delicious ambrosia in the history of winter warfare.
The emperor drank his hot wine and then, quite spontaneously, offered me his hand.
‘Who sent you, sir knight?’ he asked. ‘My cousin of Savoy? We heard much of his approach.’
‘Your lady wife, Highness,’ I said.
He nodded. ‘I knew my wife and son would see to me,’ he said. ‘I will see you richly rewarded.’
I bowed.
He was a very dignified man, and he spoke very little. He may have said other things to me. I do remember that later, as the pink sky became a heavy, rain-swept day with too much wind, he told me a little about his captivity, which had alternated between guest-like comfort and dire confinement.
He also told me that the Hungarian had only taken over the duties of imperial gaoler in the last month or so; before that, there had been a pair of Bulgarian boyars, but they had gone off to serve in the army. But although His Highness knew a little of the Hungarian, yet the man had kept his distance, and the emperor had hardly ever seen him. To me, this was a sign that the Hungarian planned to kill him; you don’t get to know a man you have to kill, unless you are a monster. Of course, to me, the Hungarian was a monster, but even monsters have limits.
I didn’t spend too much time with the emperor. I saw to Fiore; all we could do was keep him warm. He was in shock, his pupils were pinpoints and his arm continued to weep blood.
‘Bolt has to come out,’ Rob said.
Stapleton came back with no news, and I sent Nerio immediately with another. It was full daylight now, and my beautiful plan was a smoking ruin.
So we cut the head off the bolt’s shaft as carefully as we could and took it out. If that changed anything I didn’t see it; there was more blood. And then less blood.
Nerio came back before mid-morning. ‘There’re men on the roads,’ he said. ‘Luckily the rain is covering tracks, but it’s just a matter of time. There’s already hundreds of them.’
I am not much of a sailor, but I had a notion that the stiff east wind was the cause of our troubles. I knew that I ought to move my people down the peninsula to the end, where we could hold out another day or two, but we had fires, most men were warm, and Fiore was dying.
I stayed by his side and sent Syr Giannis out with another patrol, and then John and his horsemen.
By that time, I had half my people cutting firewood in the rain, just to keep them moving. If we were taken, I suspected they’d kill the lot of us; my bold plan looked foolish.
Damn the boat.
John came back while the town bells tolled for Nones off to the east. The rain was turning to snow, and the temperature was dropping. He showed me a bow which had burst.
‘They saw us,’ he said, with a shrug of apology. ‘We killed a few. Listen. Give me emperor. I take him far, fast.’
I thought he was right. But John would have to thread through the whole kingdom of Bulgaria with the most wanted man in Christendom on his saddlebow. I didn’t like it.
Perhaps a cold winter’s day in Bulgaria doesn’t sound to you like the epitome of chivalry, but it was my proving ground. As the sun rose higher in the cold heavens behind a towering wall of cloud, I had to keep my people moving. They were exhausted; we had no food and little water and insufficient firewood.
So I moved around a great deal, talking, slapping backs, or just listening. Everyone was afraid. By the risen Saviour, I was afraid. I was afraid I’d bungled the whole thing; I could see the next act – a halter around my neck, approaching some ruthless boyar, asking for mercy for my people, most of whom had killed far too many Bulgarians in the fire-lit darkness of the night before.
But I set myself to be the confident knight; I told them that the east wind was keeping our galley offshore, probably just off the delta of the Danube, and that we’d be warm and dry in two days.
It’s odd that two days can seem like nothing when you are on leave or holiday, and an eternity when you are waiting in the freezing rain for a rescue.
Afternoon came. Fiore was still alive; he had half our blankets piled on him. He was not a ‘popular’ man, but he was a man who’d saved a lot of lives. We had a dozen other wounded men, and we pushed them into the back of the byre with the sheep dung and the emperor, and kept them as warm and dry as we could manage.
At mid-afternoon, I took a patrol up the ridge towards the castle. I was out of people to send. Nerio had dark smudges under his eyes and Stapleton was asleep in the byre. There were four big fires going and the piles of wood were no longer growing; no firewood collection was going to happen unless I led it in person.
We went up the ridge.
On the other side, we avoided the swamp we’d stumbled into less than a day ago. My dozen archers were cursing me by then – the only men who weren’t by a fire. But when we found the road, we saw an army. There must have been a thousand men clumped up on the road and there were big fires under the trees.
‘Good Christ,’ muttered Ewan.
We moved along their column, watching them. There were a dozen different bands, and I couldn’t understand a word they were saying, but they were not patrolling, and they were not coming over the ridge.
We slunk away without a fight, but I had been reminded of something important – the enemy thinks you are ten feet tall, too. They didn’t want to find us.
Back in camp, John begged me to give him the emperor. ‘No soldier in hundred miles take us,’ he said.
I looked at the emperor, sitting quietly between his two servants in the byre. Tall, ascetic, handsome. ‘He can’t live in the snow for two weeks,’ I said.
John shrugged.
John took his horsemen out again. He disobeyed me and shot up the horse herd of the men on the road over the ridge.
Naturally, this spurred the enemy into action.
But by then, the short winter day was over and darkness was falling. I got forty men moving up the ridge, and we dropped some arrows on our adversaries as they toiled up the ridge past the swamp, and they turned around and went back to the road. It wasn’t a fight – I doubt a single man died; our bowstrings were wet. I say ‘our’, because I was there with a looted crossbow, shooting bolts that mostly struck trees.
I couldn’t leave a picket on the ridge, though. It was too wet and too cold, and they would easily be cut off and massacred.
So I brought everyone back, and in the very last light, we cut firewood. We found two fallen oaks, and we dulled our axes cutting them, and then one of our shepherds saved all our lives by producing a big, heavy saw.
Darkness fell on the sound of a few archers and two men-at-arms sawing away with a clumsy, dull saw meant for two men. We were so tired that we used four. Out in the darkness, there were pops and cracks like ice breaking up on the Thames. The Kipchaks didn’t use the saw, but merely picked up dead branches and used the crotches in living trees to break them up into arm-length pieces, and our fires grew. A man produced a whole sausage and sold it for an ivory reliquary. Men gambled by firelight for jewels. I had a notion that some of the richest items were the emperor’s, and I said nothing.
Sometime late in the night, John and I went and walked all the way up the ridge. We could see the enemy fires in the next valley, a mile away, even through the trees, which was eerie.
Then we went back down to our camp. I didn’t go to sleep. I couldn’t. I sat with Fiore and Marc-Antonio. At one point I held Fiore’s hand.
At another point I thought he was dead.
Ewan boiled water in his copper canteen and brought me hot water, which I fed to Marc-Antonio. I dribbled a little hot water into Fiore.
I thought of all my many
sins, and everything I’d done wrong. If we’d ridden south the moment we had the emperor …
Eventually the army in the next valley would scout us, find how few we were, and come.
About an hour before dawn, I hunkered down by Nerio.
‘I am considering riding in and surrendering,’ I said.
‘To save Fiore?’ Nerio asked.
I shrugged. ‘Yes.’
He nodded. ‘Yes,’ he said slowly. ‘If they do not kill us all out of hand, it is the best plan.’ He shrugged. ‘Christ, I am cold,’ he said.
We were silent for a while. Then he said, ‘If I am taken, they will ransom me high.’
I had to agree. ‘Even if the Hungarian is dead,’ I muttered.
Nerio grunted. ‘They will kill the emperor. They all want him gone – have you seen this? If he was not the count’s cousin, he’d already be dead. They are all fools, the King of Hungary included – when the Romans are gone, the Turks will turn on Europe like the wolves they are. Your Prince Gatelussi is right.’
I couldn’t really follow him; he was tired, and the words ran out of him.
I shrugged. ‘Perhaps they will not kill us,’ I said.
Nerio smiled his wicked smile in the firelight. ‘Given what we have proven we can do,’ he said with a grim smile, ‘they’d be fools not to kill us.’
‘The Bulgarians may not even know who we are.’ I looked at the fire.
‘The King of Hungary’s men are there,’ Nerio said.
We let that hang there in the darkness, and then the slight brush of pink began to colour the horizon.
I rose. Everything was stiff, and my feet were soaking wet, and I was so tired that I was angry that I could not sleep. But I was damned if I was ready to surrender. I checked on Fiore, and there was life in him yet.
‘Getting more sleep than we are,’ was Nerio’s judgement.
I took Miles and Rob and went out into the dawn. One more time I forced my steel-harnessed legs up the damned hill above the byre. Up and up. I passed little landmarks I’d memorised in the darkness; they were ludicrously close together in daylight.
We crossed the ridgeline before dawn, and looked down into the valley. I could smell their food. My stomach rumbled.
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