by Eric Flint
They’d been along steep mountain trails for weeks now, and while those on the worst places had been fitted with windlasses, they’d replaced the brake blocks on the wagon once already. This slope looked steeper, and in worse condition. Mindaug had learned to trust his servant’s judgment on such matters more than he did his own. The ex-miller had a great deal of practical common sense, more than most men of education.
Tamas kicked the snow. “It could help, if we put something to drag behind us. If there’s ice, that could be treacherous. There are some eight- to ten-cubit logs beside the shed, waiting to cut for the fire. We could chain one to the tail, to make a broad anchor to drag in the snow behind us.”
“Let us do that then.”
Emma had come out to join them. “But is it right to take their log of wood, master?”
The count almost laughed, but she wasn’t joking. And…he needed their respect and goodwill, as he’d come to realize.
“Of course, we’ll pay for it. Do you think a silver penny fair for the lodging?” Mindaug had no idea what a reasonable price would be for such a thing.
“Oh, that’s far too much, master. We only used twelve of their fire logs, and I have given the place a good cleanup.” She sniffed disapprovingly. “I’d say two coppers for lodging and one for their log. And, if it please you, there’s porridge and honey ready for you to break your fast. I’ve baked some pot bread for the road, too.”
One day, thought Mindaug, he’d get used to their way of thinking. But he doubted if he’d ever be able to share it. In many respects, he was still a nobleman of Lithuania, and always would be.
Using the log as a snow anchor, they crept their slow way down the pass. It took care, ropes, patience, and Tamas’s inventive and practical skill to get them down, but they managed. Count Mindaug was glad of it, because there was an inn at the foot of the pass as well as a border watchman, who was happy to have his palm silvered. The little mountain village was not much of a place, but it was warmer. The air seemed warmer here, too. They had lost a lot of altitude. The border guard seemed mostly interested in collecting money and was not concerned with invasion, even if he was mildly incredulous that anyone could have been crazy enough to bring a wagon over the pass in the snow. At least, that was what Mindaug thought he was saying. His Frankish was so accented that it was hard to tell.
Still, it was without let or hindrance that they proceeded lower, and to the west. The count was beginning to think of finding a good place to stop traveling now, somewhere on the borders of the Lion of Etruria’s territory. That would hopefully make it possible to flee there if there was an attack, but not so close to Venice as to call attention to himself.
Sooner or later he would have to wield power, build himself a demesne, or find himself a protector. And, of course, build a bolt-hole. In that regard, Northern Italy had several possibilities: Padua with its university and library sounded attractive; Milan had a ruler who was recruiting magicians; and Verona was, from what he had read, a beautiful and cultured city—although one always had to be wary of the city’s ruling family. The Scaligeri who ruled Verona were prone to lawlessness, even by the standards of Italian nobility.
He had to sneer at himself, a little, in an amused way. Going west had made him soft. The Holy Roman Empire worked on their roads and bridges, policed their little towns, hunted down bandits, and had nothing worse than toll posts for a traveler to deal with. In Lithuania, he could not have undertaken such a journey without a troop of horsemen.
As they rounded the spur, it was brought home to him that this was no longer part of the Empire, but was one of the Italian principalities—and Scaligeri territory, known for brigandage.
It had been a steep upgrade, and the horses weren’t moving very fast, when the horses shied and one man jumped out of the thick bushes at the roadside and grabbed their bridles. His companions bundled out of the brush on either side of them, armed with what peasants-turned-thieves had—cudgels and knives. From the way the first one thrust at the count, it was apparent that this wasn’t a holdup and robbery. This was intended to be the murder of a few travelers—they’d rape Emma in the bargain before they killed her as well—followed by dumping their bodies in a ditch after stealing what they had.
Mindaug leaned away and hit the forearm of his attacker, before slipping his own knife up under the man’s ribs. To someone trained to survive murder in Lithuania, it was ludicrously easy. His two servants did not have his advantages, though. Tamas was down but not out of the fight, wrestling with two men next to the wagon. There was a knife being wielded. Emma, seized by a man who hadn’t killed her because a woman was a prize, was screeching like a wildcat and clawing and fighting—fiercely, but not very effectively.
Mindaug picked up the dropped whip and sent the lash around the throat of the man who had pushed aside his dying companion and was yelling for help with the count. A hard jerk and the scream stopped, suddenly. The pommel of the whip then cracked the one wrestling with Emma over the head.
Mindaug muttered a quick spell that slowed the three fighters—Tamas included—as if they were trapped in thick mud. There was no time right now to avoid magic, much as he would have preferred to. He stepped up to the trapped men and dealt with both of the attackers with his blade, and then pulled Tamas free and to the seat where Emma hauled him up. The lad was bleeding profusely.
Now there was just the varlet holding the horses—and half a dozen more men straggling out of the bush. The whip dealt with the horse holder, and the surging panicked horses did the rest. Mindaug gave them their heads, merely trying to keep the wagon on the road while they put some distance between themselves and the attackers. A keening Emma tried to deal with the injured Tamas, attempting to staunch the blood. Mindaug hoped he didn’t bleed on the books. Leaving aside the mess, it would not be wise with some of those books to let them taste human blood.
A mile or so further, the horses tiring anyway, he pulled them to a halt. There were open fields on either side of them and little chance for another ambush. “Look to see if there is anyone following,” he said to Emma. “I will deal with Tamas’s wounds as best I can.”
He was irritated with himself, and somewhat shaken as well. To let such a little incident break his cover! Those who watched this world and others for traces of magic might now be aware that Count Mindaug was not dead. Such a minor working would be hard to pinpoint, true, but he’d preferred them to think him dead, his corpse lying among the bodies on the steppe where Emeric’s forces had failed.
It would have been wiser to just let the bandits kill the boy. But…that would have left him short a loyal servant, which this journey had made him value. And, truth be told, Mindaug simply hadn’t thought of consequences at the time. He set about looking at the injured Tamas. He knew a thousand good ways to kill people, but had little knowledge and no experience at healing or even at dealing with the injured. He did have several books on medicine, simply because he collected books.
Tamas, it appeared, was at least not dying this instant. He was trying to sit up, and kept rubbing his eyes, which was not helping the cut on his forehead at all. He was plainly confused and ready to try and fight the count, too, by the way he milled his hands around. “Lie down and keep still,” Mindaug said sternly.
The wrinkling of his eyes did not help the bleeding; he was plainly trying to focus, and failing. But the familiar voice had an effect. “Yes, master,” said Tamas, in a slurred but plainly relieved tone. “Emma, is she…?”
“She’s fine. She’s safe. Lie still, I told you.”
Mindaug ripped aside the man’s rough shirt to expose considerable blood and a long wound—from midchest and onto the belly. It was bleeding…but he’d seen enough sacrifices to know that this was not the pumping out of major arteries. Emma was back at his shoulder, so he told her to fetch him water and cloths. A quick wash-down of the wound had Emma at his shoulder whispering prayers, wide-eyed because imbedded in the blood and torn flesh was a small, cheap
copper icon—a head of St. Arsenius, now with a slit in it. The overhand stab had been forceful enough to go through the leather jerkin, and hit the little saint’s medal and gone partly through it—which had undoubtedly saved Tamas from being opened up like a split carp.
Personally, Count Mindaug doubted divine intervention, but nothing short of a chorus of angels would ever convince Emma that the saint had not personally put his hand out to save her man. The rest of his wounds amounted to a nasty cut on the head, basically a split from the crack he’d got from the cudgel, and two other minor cuts on his arm and shoulder. The bandaging that Mindaug and Emma managed was rough, as the patient was not cooperative. Eventually, Mindaug fed the fellow a little poppy juice, and he did subside into uneasy rest, as they made their way to Vicenza later that afternoon.
They found an inn there. Mindaug decided he’d be wise to leave Emma with Tamas and search out some help. The young woman, distraught, was not good at making sense of the local bastard Frankish. It was hard enough for the count.
He found an apothecary, but two minutes’ talk convinced him the man was nothing but an ignorant fraud and that what he sold was close to worthless if not dangerous.
In the process, the count found himself wondering why he was taking so much trouble over a servant. He supposed the truth was that he’d probably spent more time in the company of this pair of servants than he had of anyone, since being a small boy. A few further questions of a merchant put him on the trail of a physician who was, by dint of coin up front, persuaded to come look at Tamas.
“He’s suffering from an impairment to his wits from the blow on the head,” said the physician.
“I needed to give you gold to tell me that?” muttered the count. “What can we do for it?”
“I would say bleed him to remove the excess phlegm,” said the physician.
“I should say he has bled enough,” said the count irritably.
“Oh,” the physician was plainly a little alarmed by the tone. “Well, he should recover with sufficient rest, unless the demons have taken hold of him. He may suffer terrible headaches. I can provide you with a preparation of my own for that.”
The count did not kick him down the stairs, but it was tempting. Demons! Ha. He knew more about demons than ten such idiots. Instead of buying his quackery, he went and dug out the books he had on medicine. It took a while, although each box had been labeled and the count had allowed a narrow passage down the center of the wagon. When he returned to the bed where they’d put Tamas, he found the man had thrown up and was, by his own account, feeling better if weak, and keen to see to the horses.
“The hostler has seen to them. You will rest,” commanded Mindaug.
Emma asked permission, timidly, to go and give thanks to God and the blessed St. Arsenius, and to pray for his healing. By the looks of her, she had been weeping, and Mindaug had nothing else that needed doing. So, he sat and read while Tamas slipped into a shallow sleep, and the count moved between Galen and Rhazes.
Emma came back with food for him. “They say there will be war soon!” she said fearfully. She could not tell him much, as she struggled with the language. But people were buying supplies against the possibility of siege. So, although it was early evening, the count went out again. He found what he was looking for quickly enough—a gunsmith. Next time the horses shied from a roadside bush, the count planned to be ready.
Not only could the gunsmith sell him two wheel-lock hand-cannons and tell him that, yes, the Scaligeri, long-time allies of Milan, would go to war against the usurper Carlo Sforza. That hadn’t yet been officially declared, but everyone knew it.
The gunsmith was quietly packing up. “They talk of rights—but this is Sforza they fight. I’m going to my cousins in the mountains until it is over, sir. So I’d be glad to let you have these at a good price.”
He and the count disagreed about the good price part, but Mindaug had been in cities under siege before. He, too, had heard of the reputation of Carlo Sforza, the Wolf of the North, the condottiere who had only ever been bested by Duke Enrico Dell’este and the Venetians together. And then only with magic added into the mixture. Sforza was perhaps not the master of grand strategy that Dell’este was, but his tactical strength was legendary. And he destroyed the cities and towns that resisted him.
So, it was time to move on again. Despite Tamas complaining of a terrible headache, and protesting about not being allowed to pole up the horses and do the other tasks he normally did for the count, they left early the next day, going west.
Mindaug waited until they were well clear of the town and in a clearing surrounded by trees that blocked sight and would muffle sound before getting Emma to practice with the hand-cannon. The count tried it out first. It kicked, and left the firer in a cloud of blue smoke.
Emma eyed it fearfully. “But…am I allowed to use such a thing, master?”
Mindaug knew King Emeric had strongly disapproved of an armed peasantry. Yes, they had knives and pitchforks, axes and billhooks and here and there an old spear, and many had bows, but weapons that could threaten a knight? No. Not to be tolerated.
“This is not Hungary,” he said.
She looked puzzled. “Yes, I know that. This place is not as good, of course, but it was…nice, in some ways. Until we were attacked. It is not safe here.”
Mindaug had to think his way around the “not as good” part. It had never occurred to him that his servants might yearn for the fields and the mill, things they knew. But that was peasantry for you, where “safe” was life and death in poverty at your lord’s whim. At least it was certain, thought the count, like life in Jagiellon’s court had been certain. If you showed too much competence you’d be killed. Too little and you’d be killed. Sooner or later, you would step over one or the other boundary.
Neither Elizabeth Bartholdy nor King Emeric had been that different. Not quite as murderous as Jagiellon, but then, who was? Mindaug was beginning to like the idea of dying of old age, as unlikely as that possibility had ever seemed to him in the past.
“No one here cares, Emma. If you had had such a thing at the ready, you could have shot the man who attacked you.”
She plainly thought about this, nodding. Mindaug wondered suddenly if it was the idea of killing that worried her. He’d come across that notion in some books before. A curious concept.
But her reply showed that this was not the case.
“Yes, I could,” she said, quite thoughtfully. “I could have shot him and the man who attacked my Tamas—and you, master! I could have shot them dead. Show me.”
So he had, once he was sure there was no one to see what they were about. This time, in another clearing, Mindaug set up a target for her to shoot at. It was nothing fancy, just a dead branch propped against a tree stump. She was delighted when she blew the branch apart on her second shot—and her first shot had not missed by much.
Tamas had wanted to try, too, but the count had settled for showing him the mechanism and telling him to lie down again. Then he had Emma shoot a few more rounds against other targets he set up in the clearing. Despite the recoil, Emma was quite successful at hitting them. She had strong hands and wrists, and seemed to have a genuine knack for the handcannon.
There was a point, thought the count, in keeping these weapons from the commons or from the women. Women of rank had always used guile, poison or magic to win fights. These weapons—particularly if they got smaller and better—could change that.
Mentally, he shrugged. Mindaug was only worried about his own future, and even if his earthly foes were armed with hand-cannon, sword or spell, he could deal with most things. Let those who could not cope, deal with it in their own way.
* * *
On the other side of the pass, in Imperial lands, Von Stebbens and his men were still coping with the snow. Sleds and horses were moving about again, the trail was being cleared—but they were advised not to follow the pass that Count Mindaug had taken for some days yet. The magical watch
on the count continued. And, at last, they saw some sign of him using his powers.
“Deaths,” said Ritter Hartz, who had been the one gazing on the thaumaturgic sphere. “It was a small working, though.”
“But with Mindaug, there would be deaths, no matter how small his use of magic was,” said Von Stebbens grimly. “We push though the pass tomorrow, snow or no snow, Ritters. Or we will go further east and take a lower pass.”
So they did. The guard had gotten to the border watchtower fort barely an hour before the Knights did. Yes, someone had slept and stabled their horses there—and they had left some coins for payment. The guard produced the coppers to prove his claim. “Not everyone is so honest,” he said.
The Plocken Pass took the Knights most of the day to lead their horses down. Von Stebbens knew there was something of a delicate balance to their behavior here. They were no longer in the Holy Roman Empire and were mere travelers like anyone else. Not that most people or even the local nobility would interfere in their business. But it could cause complications, especially after the Knights had been used to unwittingly transport Chernobog’s demon into Venice. The Knights had redeemed themselves since, but they had a good reason not to start any diplomatic incidents.
They rode hard to catch up with Count Mindaug. Orders or no orders, the archimandrite was determined to take the man into custody now. The information about Baron von Wisselbacher had plainly been a false lead. Whatever associate Mindaug was heading for must be in Italy somewhere.
Only, as it proved, those few days’ lead that Count Mindaug had gained, had been crucial ones.
The city-state of Verona was at war with its neighbor, and military patrols were now guarding and setting up barricades on the roads. And the count and his wagon were on the far side of those barricades and patrols.
“Milan. He must be heading for Milan. We had better send word to Mainz.”
So once again magical communication was made.