Speak to the Devil bm-1

by Dave Duncan

  A faster splatter of hooves at his back and Notivova rode up alongside. “My lord!” He looked worried.

  “Constable?”

  “We should have met the returning squad before now, my lord. They’re supposed to wait at the post until their relief arrives, but they never do. They all want to get home early.”

  Anton raised a hand to signal a halt. “You told anyone that I would be making a personal inspection today?” The post garrison might even now be standing in rows, ready to salute their new commander and impress him with their incredible devotion to duty.

  “Not a soul, my lord.” If the same image had occurred to the trooper, he did a fine job of keeping a straight face.

  “How far to Long Valley?”

  “We’re in it. Half a mile or so to the border post. If Your Lordship can see those tall firs? They grow on a small mound in the marsh, the only really dry land hereabout. The post is there. Then there’s another mile or so of this muck on the way to the lake head and the Wends’ landing stage, where the ferry barges come. The lake’s ten or twelve miles long.”

  Anton glanced around the scenery. “God made this place to stage ambushes.”

  “He certainly did, my lord!” Notivova showed relief that his commander had enough sense to see that.

  For the new count to take fright and run away before he had reached his objective would just be good sense. It would also be rank cowardice by chivalric standards. Yet to charge ahead and be mown down would throw away the lives of his five companions, and worthy leaders did not do such things. Anton had no choice. If there was one thing a brainless Magnus colt like him could not tolerate it was a challenge like this. Omnia audere! Other men might call him an idiot, but success would make him a hero in the eyes of the garrison, and he would need true loyalty when the attack began.

  “Then let’s see if we can turn the tables. I’ll be bait. Wait behind these trees. Stand still and make no noise. If I come back with the wolves on my heels, try to shoot them and not me, all right?”

  “My lord!”

  “You have your orders.” Anton wanted no argument that might weaken his resolve. His heartbeat was disgracefully fast already.

  He reached for the crossbow slung on his back and tore off the cover. It was designed for use on horseback, being small and spanned with a goat’s foot lever. Now it was already spanned, and he loaded a bolt in the groove. The chances of hitting a target were remote, but just holding a weapon was a comfort. A lance would be even better.

  He reminded himself that Caesar, Hector, Alexander-all great leaders-had been men of suicidal courage. If the city shaver sent by the king could prove that he had real balls, then the garrison would follow him to a man. There would be no more sad muttering about Count Stepan and Sir Petr.

  Prodded into motion, Avalanche leaped forward, glad of the chance to show his paces. The big fellow was a hunter, able to choose his path, and he swerved around the corduroy patches, preferring to take his chances in the muck.

  The trail wound like a snake between ponds and swamp and the little aspen groves. The dark firs were farther off than Anton had guessed, and the ambushers, if they existed, might already have closed the road behind him. His excitement now was as intense as sex. His groin burned with it. Omnia audere! This was what a Magnus did. He had felt some of this battle lust going down the hill at the hunt, but here he had no Wulf to save him. This was his legend, live or die. Ancestors, behold! Even Vladislav might approve of him now.

  Where was the enemy? What a fool he would look if he arrived at Long Valley to find the guards drawn up in rows, saluting their count.

  Thirty yards off to the right, a man emerged from cover, running toward him as fast as he could struggle through the mud.

  Some brainless Wend sounded a hunting horn, three long blasts to mean that the dogs were on a good trail. The woodland hatched about a hundred horsemen, like dragon teeth, a dozen riding out from behind a copse before him, more from trees behind him, on both sides. Some distant, some close. How could he possibly have missed seeing so many?

  He swung Avalanche like a sword and headed for the running man. It was the Englishman, Llywelyn, bloodied and clutching a wounded arm to his chest with his free hand. Two enemy men-at-arms were converging on him and seemed likely to cut him down before Anton could arrive.

  Assail a wounded man, would they? Anton spurred Avalanche cruelly. He dropped the reins, guiding his mount with his knees and using both hands for the bow. He must hold his aim until he could be sure of hitting the foe and not Llywelyn, but on horseback that might be forever. At the last possible moment, when the nearer Wend had his saber raised to strike, Llywelyn threw himself flat. The bow cracked, and must have sent the bolt right through the hussar, for he toppled back, dropping his saber and unbalancing his horse. Anton had no time to reload. He dropped the bow and drew his sword.

  The second attacker veered away from Llywelyn to meet the danger. He was a small man who would not match Anton in brute strength, so Anton ducked low and swung upward. Their sabers rang as the horses passed, and he managed to continue his parry into a backhand riposte at the enemy horse’s rump. That would make it unresponsive for a while. He reined in Avalanche alongside Llywelyn, who was upright again, white eyes staring out of a muddy mask. Llywelyn grabbed for the saddle with his good hand, Anton reached down to grip his cuirass strap, and they both heaved.

  With the wounded bowman draped over his withers, Avalanche made a game effort to run, but he was grievously overloaded and the footing was treacherous. Help was coming, though. Horn sounding, Notivova was leading his gallant band to the rescue. By luck or inspiration, he and his four riders had spread out and the aspens made it hard to judge how many they were. The Wends were fewer than they had seemed at first sight, maybe thirty or forty, but now half of them were between Anton and his rescuers.

  “The odds are good,” he shouted cheerily. “Good for a good fight, I mean.”

  Llywelyn was whimpering with pain, probably because his wounded arm was trapped underneath him and he needed his other hand to hold the saddle, lest he slide off, headfirst or feetfirst.

  “Very grateful, my lord.”

  “I’m only doing my duty like you were. Hang on.”

  Two Wends were converging on Avalanche, timing their approach so they could strike simultaneously. Anton prepared to take the one on his right, a big, ugly, hairy brute.

  It wasn’t going to work, though. He had no shield, nothing to parry the other attack with except his vambrace, so he might well come away from this encounter with a broken arm. He might even lose a hand.

  Shock!

  He wheeled Avalanche to meet the other assailant, but his sword had disappeared. Blood was trickling out of a round hole in his right rerebrace. And also from a matching hole on the other side of it. He had apparently taken a quarrel through his upper arm. It was strange that he could feel no pain. He was spouting blood. He might lose his arm. He was thinking in patches. What should he do now?

  Finding his way blocked, Avalanche had stopped, puffing hard and flickering his ears at the stench of blood. Llywelyn uttered a groan and slid to the ground. He tried to land on his feet, but collapsed in a heap among the reeds.

  “Yield, my lord?”

  A ring of mounted Wends surrounded them, with a dozen spanned crossbows aimed at Anton Magnus’s heart. Not a likely-looking nobleman among them. Yield to a commoner? If he had a sword he could try to take one of the vermin with him. But black mist was starting to swirl around him, and even Vlad had yielded at the Battle of the Boundary Stone.

  “I yield.”

  “Wise of you, Count Magnus.” The new voice came from his left, and apparently from a priest, since he wore a jeweled pectoral cross and bore no arms or armor. He was clad in black robes and an odd pot-shaped hat; even his horse was black. Above a black pillow of beard his right eye was watching Anton with amusement and contempt; his left was studying the mountains.

  “I don’t yield t
o priests.”

  “You will yield to death very shortly if you don’t get down and let us attend to your arm.”

  His accent sounded like pottery in a waterwheel, but what he was saying was probably true, and descending voluntarily would be more dignified than falling off in a faint. Anton kicked out of his stirrups and leaned forward to pull his right leg over. From habit he put weight on his right arm. That brought on the missing pain. He screamed, fell off Avalanche, and landed on top of Llywelyn.

  He could not have been unconscious very long, but long enough for his captors to strip off his spaulder, vambrace, and rerebrace to expose the wound. A soldier who looked like a swineherd and smelled like the swine was stitching one of the wounds with a needle and gut. Another man was holding the other hole shut until it could be treated. There was no lack of pain now, murderous thunderclaps of agony.

  Close by, Notivova and Big Herkus were tending Llywelyn.

  “If you live,” remarked the priest, watching from horseback, “then you will have some loss of strength in that arm. But a wound like that is very likely to lead to lockjaw or gangrene or just severe wound fever. You had better speak with your confessor as soon as you get back to Gallant, my lord.”

  “You are sending me back?”

  The priest laughed. His age was hard to assess under that beard-mid-thirties, perhaps. “We don’t have a jail handy, and you do more good for our cause botching up the defense of Castle Gallant than you would rotting in a cell in Pomerania. Who would bother to ransom you, Anton? We shall empty the Bukovany coffers soon enough without selling carrion to the castle.”

  “Who are you and why is a priest leading a band of raider scum- Yeaew!”

  “Beg pardon, my lord,” said the surgeon cheerfully. “Did I pull on that too hard?”

  The priest was still smiling. “I am merely a humble servant of the Lord, Anton, doing good works in His name. Do not mock, my son. I just saved your life. My unkind companions wanted to leave you there, bleeding to death.”

  The surgeon tied the last knot and trimmed the ends of the blood-soaked string with a dagger. Another man wrapped the arm with a strip of Anton’s shirt.

  “His own men can dress him,” the priest said. “Let us be on our way home to report a successful day’s work. Tomorrow morning, Anton, you must send a party under flag of truce to collect your dead. After that, any Jorgarian found near here will be put to death. Go with God, my son. I suggest you leave warfare to grown men in future.”

  He made the sign of the cross, but he did it from right to left, backward.

  CHAPTER 19

  The rain had stopped. The afternoon was sunny and not far off being warm. Wulf insisted that he was well enough to get dressed and go outside. Madlenka insisted that he was not.

  “I’m as good as I ever get,” he retorted. “Or do you mean I should go outside before I get dressed?”

  It was very childish humor, but one of the surest ways to recognize lovers was how easily they laughed at each other’s jokes. What he felt for Madlenka Bukovany went far beyond mere attraction. It was more than lust or admiration or friendship. It was the best thing that had ever happened to him. It was an all-consuming, once-in-a-lifetime passion. Nothing else in the world mattered. He would do anything to win her or please her, and he was certain that she felt the same about him. Neither had mentioned it. They did not need to, and must not. It was a forbidden, impossible match, and perhaps that was the very reason the madness had come upon them so quickly. Giedre knew all this as well as they did, and scowled disapprovingly in the background.

  So, wearing clothes that had belonged to Petr Bukovany and trying not to show how every movement hurt somewhere, Wulf emerged on the curtain wall battlements, escorted by the future countess and her lady-in-waiting. The air was cool and sweet, the sun warm, the snowy mountains both menacing and beautiful. A steady trickle of families was heading down the road to High Meadows, but Anton would not be displeased to see those extra mouths depart, even if he lost some strong men in the process. His edict putting the town on a war footing had roused the warlike and scared the peaceable.

  Down in the bailey a hundred more-or-less able-bodied men were being outfitted from a heap of all the arms and armor that a thorough ransacking of the attics of Cardice had turned up. Wulf ought to be down there, helping. Tomorrow, perhaps.

  “This is a very beautiful place,” he said, studying the scenery as he strolled along the battlements with his love at his side. The urge to offer his arm or take her hand was a torment, but they were visible to half the town, and Giedre was walking close behind, so it must be resisted.

  Madlenka said, “Ha! It’s cold and bleak. All my life I have dreamt of living in a gentler land, in a big city with gaiety, with music and dancing.”

  He looked at her quizzically. She was as tall as he was and in other shoes might even be taller. That would not have bothered him, had things been different. And it certainly did not matter now, since the king had decreed that she marry Anton. “Vienna? Florence? Rome?”

  “Mauvnik, probably.”

  “Mauvnik doesn’t compare with those.”

  “You’ve seen them?”

  Anton would say of course he had, and describe them, quoting stories he’d heard.

  “I’ve seen Mauvnik. It’s much bigger than Gallant, I admit.”

  “Father always talked of marrying me into some noble family with influence at court. He almost never went to court himself, because his duty was here. A voice near the king’s ear was important, he said.”

  “Near the crown prince’s ear might matter more now.” Or Cardinal Zdenek’s, although nobody knew how long the Scarlet Spider would remain as first minister when the crown changed heads.

  “But now the king has sent a personal friend to marry me, instead,” Madlenka said wistfully. “So I must forget my dream duke in Mauvnik. I must live and die here in Cardice. Still, I should not complain. Your brother is young and handsome. I could have done very much worse.”

  Or very much better, Wulf thought sadly. And never as well as she deserved. No man was that good.

  “And Giedre,” she continued, “has refused a hundred suitors here because she planned to come with me when I went away to marry my dream duke. She was to be mistress of the robes.”

  The wind was at their backs now, blowing up the valley, and Giedre would not be able to overhear.

  “She’s very pretty,” Wulf said. “But I would never call her beautiful. I have only ever met one girl I would call truly, breathtakingly beautiful, like a dream of angels.”

  Madlenka ignored that. “The rest of our plan was that Giedre would marry the duke’s younger brother, who would be even handsomer.”

  “Well that part came true. Being handsomer, I mean. And if she fancies a serf’s cottage in Dobkov, then marriage might be negotiated. But staying with you would not be on the table. I am going away in a couple of days.” It was that or go crazy.

  The lady bit her lip. “That’s probably a good idea. And one of us must go indoors now. Not because I don’t enjoy your company, Squire Wulfgang, but because we have been seen together long enough. You are my fiance’s brother, after all.”

  “I am. And I love you.”

  He hadn’t expected to say that.

  Madlenka walked on, staring at the ground. The wind had reddened her cheeks. “You must not say that.”

  “I swear as I hope for salvation that I never said it to any woman before, but I do love you. I don’t know how it happened-I think it was the first moment I saw you. Oh, I must sound like a fool! I’m sorry.”

  “Keeping talking, fool,” she said quietly, so the wind snatched away her words. Would it spread them everywhere?

  “You too?”

  She nodded.

  She loved him! He didn’t know if he should turn cartwheels or jump off the battlements. “Truly? You love me also? Say it, please, just once.”

  “I love you. I wish it were you I am to marry, not your brothe
r. But it is madness! We must not even dream of it. The king has decreed that I will marry Anton.”

  Who cared nothing for her, who would cheerfully marry Medusa herself if she brought him an earldom. Wulf had not asked his Voices to make Madlenka love him. He would not ask them to interfere at all. He must not! Anton was his brother. Anton was a wealthy noble, outranking Otto and probably much wealthier, while Wulf was a penniless younger son, a mere esquire.

  Marek had warned him: the girls will follow. “It is love,” you will tell yourself, and you will ask your Voices to bring her to you, or even to make her willing. Had any prophecy ever been fulfilled faster?

  No, he must not think about it. No more Speaking!

  But were she promised to any other man than Anton…

  “Squire!” Giedre shouted, running closer. “My lady! Look! Coming down the north road. Only four of them? Isn’t that your brother on the white horse, squire?”

  Yes it was, and two of the others were riding close on either side, as if they had to hold him in the saddle.

  “He’s been hurt!” Madlenka said. “Run! Ring the bell.”

  Giedre hoisted her skirts and took off at a very unladylike sprint toward the north barbican, but the watchers there had seen the newcomers and the alarm bell began to toll.

  “Go to him,” Wulf said. “I’ll follow as fast as I can.”

  Following would be a mistake. He did not go down to the city gate, nor even to the bailey. Anton would not slump on a horse that way unless he was seriously hurt, and he would never let them take him to that pesthole infirmary. So Wulf made his painful way back to the keep and started looking for whatever bedroom Anton was using until he could evict the ailing dowager countess from the master suite.