The Minstrel and the Mercenary

by David Scoles

Radu wore a padded coat, one well stained by travel and many battles. Esteban’s slash cut away the coat’s fabric as easily as a scythe through wheat, parting enough to show the chainmail links beneath that gleamed as brightly as if newly forged.

  A slash from such a thin blade, even one forged in Toledo, was no match for the finely wrought chainmail of Nuremberg. Radu grinned. Esteban panicked. From behind Esteban came the cries, grunts and screams of both Otto and Renaud as they fought against the Franciscan. It was only a matter of time, Esteban knew, before they were overwhelmed. As if to put paid to his thoughts there resounded a meaty thwack from the battle between monk and Navarran brothers.

  Esteban risked a glance and saw that part of Otto’s head was no longer there and a reddish mass of torn and crushed tissue remained. Renaud watched uncomprehending as his brother toppled backwards like a felled tree. His slack jawed mouth drooled from his own exhaustion as he fought to find words. The Franciscan grinned a fierce, merciless grin at the surviving brother. “God works in mysterious ways, but he must have been drunk when he created you.”

  Renaud roared wordlessly, dropped his sword and rushed the Franciscan barehanded. Caught by surprise the Franciscan didn’t bring Baptizer up to defend. Both men crashed to the ground in a flurry of fists, kicks and curses. Tables were smashed. Wine, ale and blood spattered the walls. Candles went out casting part of the Inn into darkness.

  Gwilym watched everything unfold with a steady heart. He was pleased that he had held his nerve for so long. The plan had been that he, being a simple and non-threatening troubadour, would keep Esteban and his lackeys busy while Radu and the Franciscan circled wide around the village. Naturally, he had argued, but he had relented when he imagined the slaughter of the Swanne Hill townsfolk should Radu and the Franciscan simply charge in. No, stealth and secrecy would work best.

  The two mercenaries would avoid being spotted by any hidden watchers and scour Swanne Hill for any more mercenaries, as it could not be determined how many there were. Then Radu and the Franciscan would steal upon the Inn and fall upon the rest that Gwilym lulled into complacency. Radu needed the Castilian alive. Questions needed to be answered, questions which their assassin prisoner had been unable to answer before Radu had coldly broken the foreigner’s neck.

  The companions followed the Franciscan’s sparse information about the English deserter in the hopes it would truly lead to Esteban of Castile. Gwilym felt skeptical, especially when the Franciscan admitted he had heard of the bounty second hand from another. However when Radu spotted the distant road watcher, he felt in his bones he had found the right place.

  “I ask for quarter!” Esteban threw down his weapons and raised his hands above his head. “I give up! Spare my life and I shall tell you all!”

  “Oh?” said Radu with a sneer, not yet ready to sheath his ax or sword. “What is it I wish to know, Spaniard?” Radu inched forward, neither lowering his blade nor letting on that he wanted Esteban alive.

  “The Nachzehrer, I know where he is!” Esteban cried. He licked his lips when Radu growled. “To hell with him I say, he is a demon and a maniac! I hold no loyalty to such a man. I only rode with him because of the gold!” Esteban ceased talking, but the Inn was not yet silent. Upon the floor, the Franciscan finished strangling the life from Renaud, whose blackened tongue protruded lifelessly from his mouth.

  “I am no physic, but I believe the man to be dead, Brother,” said Gwilym, not trying to keep the sarcasm from his voice. Standing in such close proximity to still warm corpses no longer drew the solemn gravity it had a mere fortnight past. With a grunt, the Franciscan heaved himself to his feet and sighed.

  “By God, I’m thirsty.” He turned and eyed the two cringing girls near the bar and smiled. “Be at peace, young mistresses, but if this establishment should have naught but water or spoiled milk to drink then one of ye had best be Saint Brigid of Kildare and render it unto wine!” He gave a great laugh then and winked.

  The younger girl burst into tears and threw herself into the Franciscan’s arms. He shushed her, patted her head, and spoke to her softly in surprisingly decent French. Her older sister sagged to her knees exhausted and offered a prayer of thanks to Mother Mary. Gwilym shook his head at the irony that a man who had just strangled another to death was now a hero. He turned to see what Radu had decided as to the fate of Esteban of Castile.

  Disarmed, Esteban no longer appeared the intimidating mercenary he had at first. His hair and mustaches were in disarray. His eyes were nervous and his hands shook when he sipped from a cup of wine that had miraculously not been spilt during the tumult.

  “He is in Paris,” Esteban said. “Not for the French King. No, he sides with the Blind King. They are in league together, though I was not amongst them long enough to learn the details of their plan. I daresay, knowing him, he may not even honor whatever agreement they have.” Esteban leaned forward then and whispered, but Gwilym, who had moved closer to the conversation, heard.

  “He isn’t human. The… things… he has done.” Esteban shook his head in disgust. “I could no longer stomach it. I slipped away in the night during High Spring.”

  The Blind King. That could only be King John of Bohemia. Gwilym had heard of the man. A fierce warrior who, though blind, sought out battlefields upon which to fight.

  “That was months ago.” Radu said. “How is it you still know he is in Paris?”

  Esteban shook his head. “I told you, he and the Blind King plan something and it involves both King Philip and King Edward….”

  “His Majesty?” Gwilym interrupted. He frowned. “What does he plan with the King of Bohemia that involves two more kings?”

  Esteban glared hatefully at Gwilym. “I do not know. I only know that if the Nachzehrer is involved it will probably be their deaths.”

  “You still have not answered my question.” Radu growled at Esteban, who flinched in response.

  “The King of Bohemia sides with France in this war with England. Eventually they will leave the safety of Paris’ walls and sally forth to do battle.” Esteban looked Radu full in the face and frowned. “And if you know him at all, you can be assured that he will be involved when such a battle takes place.” Gwilym blinked in surprise when Radu nodded his agreement at Esteban’s pronouncement. The tall mercenary leaned thoughtfully back against the wall, arms crossed. Esteban waited a moment then dared to ask.

  “I have told you what you wanted, yes? Continue to move towards Paris as your crown hungry King undoubtedly intends and you shall meet the one you seek. May I go now?” Radu ignored him, his brow furrowed. Gwilym angrily spoke up.

  “When you held these women and undoubtedly their whole town hostage, you ask that? What has become of their parents?”

  It was the Franciscan who remarked offhandedly. “There was a man’s head out back with a mouth full of piss. Was that your father, girl?” The Franciscan asked this innocently, if not tactfully, of Big Sister. The younger sister sat upon the Franciscan’s lap unwilling to retreat from the familiar safety of a monk, even one covered in blood.

  “Our grandfather,” Little Sister said so softly Gwilym barely heard. “He was not a good man. He gave offense to this one here.” Her finger stabbed accusingly at Esteban, her lower lip trembled. “So he killed him and tossed his carcass to the pigs.”

  “Do you let the tears of mere peasant children concern you then?” Esteban sneered and waved a dismissive hand in the direction of the sisters who had both found the courage to glare back. “By Heaven, I should have taken this girl and beaten some respect into her! A stiff length of manhood thrust between her legs. She’d have wailed helplessly as her sister watched, and both would have been taught a woman’s proper place!”

  Esteban forced a conciliatory face in Radu’s direction and made himself say, “I see little reason to make the concerns of female chattels your own. So what if an old man is dead? What possible difference can it make what I, or some men I barely knew, might have done?”

&nb
sp; “Chattels?” hissed Gwilym angrily. “You ignore laws set down long ago by both Church and royalty that protect women, common or not!”

  “Aye.” Esteban said. “Yet what are laws but mere words if not enforced? What are women if not property to be kept as surely as a King keeps his mistresses? Surely as a minstrel you are familiar with Tristan and Yseult? What was Yseult if not first the property of her father, then the Irish knight Morholt who took her then passed her on to Tristan who had defeated Morholt only to pass her again to his own uncle?”

  “I would not expect you to understand a poem about romantic love when clearly you know little of the subject,” Gwilym answered coldly.

  “What is your name, girl?” Radu interrupted. His abrupt question made Big Sister jump.

  “Adeline. My sister is called Hannah.”

  “Did your grandfather give you to this man here?” Everyone still living in the Inn looked at Radu uncomprehending. He continued unabated. “Before his head was removed, did your grandfather give you to Esteban either as a wife or servant? Was your grandfather paid any coin by him?”

  “No….” Adeline murmured.

  “Do you know what Salic Law is?”

  “Now wait a moment, how in God’s name would she….” Esteban began.

  “SILENCE!” Radu snarled at him, which caused Esteban to belt up immediately. Then Radu turned back to Adeline. “It is the reason why the English have come to your country, girl, but it also means that you have no rights. Esteban here is correct: you are a woman and therefore can inherit no property or title. You are property.”

  Gwilym kept silent. He was no lawyer, but he was certain Radu was taking things too far in his statements. Yet he held his tongue for he noticed a peculiar look had come over Radu’s face as though the man remembered some painful memory. Then Radu leaned in close to Esteban and whispered in his face, eye to eye.

  “But then a law is just so many words unless it is enforced.” Radu’s fist snaked out catching Esteban on the side of the head. Esteban’s head snapped back. Radu trussed the unconscious mercenary to the chair with some of the leather straps he always seemed to have on his person. While he worked he spoke to Adeline.

  “I leave it to you to make your own laws concerning this man, girl. He has a pouch here at his side filled with coin and you may wish to search the others for anything valuable before the cowards down in your village come to pick them clean for themselves.”

  “I shall remain here awhile, I think,” said the Franciscan. Gwilym glanced at him in surprise. The Franciscan smiled a broken toothed smile at Gwilym and set little Hannah down from his lap. “Someone must give these men and what’s left of their grandfather a burial. A job for Eurastes, I think. I’ll also see to it these girls are not taken advantage of by any in the village. I am feeling overly Christian today,” he joked.

  Radu snorted and Gwilym chuckled shaking his head. “Do we return to the King?” Gwilym asked Radu. “It seems we now know who killed those tenants in the Countess de Montfort’s manor. Those killers who set upon us, and now Esteban, point us all to the same man. The Nachzehrer is a far reaching foe.”

  Surprisingly Radu shook his head. “No.” With that, he turned and walked out the door. Gwilym gaped and hurried after on his heels. Gwilym caught up to Radu as he walked towards the spot where he and the Franciscan had left their horses.

  “What do you mean, ‘No?’ Are you saying that it is not the Nachzehrer who is our foe? Did not Esteban ride with him and did not those assassins lay in wait for us at the manor in Saint Josse?”

  “Yes, yes and no.”

  “What?” Gwilym said and stopped in his tracks. “Pray enlighten me as to what you mean then. We cannot all be as introspective as you!”

  Radu sighed. “How would he have known we were in Saint Josse? Those killers, aye, they were his, but were they his alone? No, someone else knew where we were going and directed them. Think Gwilym. Those knights in black in Caen you saw who slit old Vladimir’s throat. Then trying to burn us alive in that manor. That is not the Nachzehrer’s way. Someone is trying to keep us from some truth. Someone who knows our movements as well as we do!”

  Gwilym gasped. Of course! Radu was right. It was too convenient, too carefully planned. Why had he not seen it before? He sent his thoughts racing back to Caen and that alley. Those knights in black….

  “Compte d’Eu! Those men had a rope leading over the wall into the Compte’s estate!” Radu nodded in assent.

  “They were awaiting someone. Someone who wanted to meet with the Compte in secret.”

  “The knights were English.” Gwilym winced. He felt a terrible unease creep up his spine.

  “And the Compte had dealings with the Nachzehrer. For his own gain?” Radu mused.

  “Or at the behest of another?” Gwilym finished. Both minstrel and mercenary shared a look.

  “We need to speak to Compte d’Eu,” Gwilym concluded.

  “Even if he isn’t already dead, I doubt he knows anything,” Radu answered somberly. “But it may be all we have at the moment.”

  The two men mounted their horses and sped down the horse path leaving Swanne Hill behind. What worried Gwilym wasn’t whether the Compte lived. Who with the English army would assassinate a nobleman to keep him silent? It was apparent that whoever it was had already decided that a mercenary from Transylvania and a Welsh minstrel were two people who would be better off dead.

  Chapter 4

  All the next day and most of the one after Radu the Black and Dafydd ap Gwilym rode their horses as much as their backsides and horses’ legs could bare. They stopped little and ate only the food they had taken from the Swanne Hill Inn. Conversation was also lacking, though Gwilym would from time to time amuse himself by making up little ditties that as always were more tawdry than romantic.

  Mirth has not completely fled my soul, Gwilym mused. There were still good things to appreciate in life, living itself always foremost. Gwilym couldn’t deny that he owed that life to Radu, whom he still wasn’t sure whether to call friend or not. They were both more at ease with one another now, that was certain.

  Radu no longer eyed Gwilym with open mistrust. He still spoke with thinly veiled derision about what he felt was the ‘wasted enterprise of singing poetry about pointless things.’ Radu would, however, occasionally listen whenever Gwilym strummed cords upon his lute or rhymed words about… well… pointless things.

  “Why a minstrel?” Radu suddenly asked. After several hours of riding over many a hill and dale, they stopped to feed the horses and seat themselves upon some grass to chew on hard bread and salted herring.

  “My father is a minstrel.” Gwilym said easily, crunching into his fish with relish. “My family has a long tradition as Welsh poets. Why should I not follow in my father’s footsteps? Although, I should admit that being of noble birth I am excluded from belonging to any Guild,” Gwilym added. The question had caught him off guard, coming out of the blue as it had, yet he was delighted to have his first casual conversation with the tight-lipped mercenary.

  “Have you any other family?” Radu asked to Gwilym’s continued surprise.

  “My mother, Ardudfyl, is one of the fairest Matrons of Ceredigion which is near Brogynin where I was born. My uncle Llewellyn is a King’s Constable. It is to him I owe much of my education. There is… also my older brother, Gam.”

  “You are not the heir then.”

  “No… no, yet I state most sincerely that it suits me. I once believed as a second son my destiny was to be thrust into an ecclesiastical sect of lifelong misery and boredom. Indeed, I spent well over a year studying at a monastery for such a life. Thankfully, twas not to be.”

  “Oh?” Radu asked with an eyebrow raised.

  “I dallied with a novice. There was a nunnery not five miles from the monastery I would often… wander by. The novices there often bathed in a lake bed in naught but their clean white shifts!”

  Gwilym let a smile spread across his face as he recalle
d the memory. Peeking through the bushes at wet, white cloth clinging to supple young bodies. It had been a sight that made Dafydd ap Gwilym fully aware of the wondrous differences between men and women. It was a memory he had only ever before shared with friends, he realized.

  “How old were you then?”

  “I was twelve years old. Ah, by Saint Agnes of Rome’s chastity belt I tried to resist!” Gwilym cried in a sing song voice. He thrust out his arms in a storyteller’s pose. “Those hips, those lips, those nipples dipped in linen white and translucent as Heaven!”

  “Bravo,” Radu clapped sarcastically, but Gwilym’s grin grew wider.

  “What of your family? What occurred after your father killed Barbat and became Prince? Did he have many children besides yourself? Who was your mother?” The mood change was instant. Radu’s brow furrowed and Gwilym swallowed.

  “Naturally, we need not discuss your own personal matters. Forgive my prying.”

  “Mine is a more complicated series of misfortunes and destiny. Would that fucking a nun be all I might be judged for.”

  “Well, she was not precisely a nun at the time….” Gwilym began, but Radu waved him off. Then sitting back they both watched their horses nibble on grass awhile and Radu began to speak.

  Chapter 5

  When the Cumans first descended from the Carpathian Mountains, Tihomir was first among them. They passed through many miles of forest, pitiable villages and barren roads with naught but the bells from monasteries to guide them through an unfamiliar land. After Tihomir killed the Barbat, he assumed rulership of Poenari Citadel, the Barbat’s former seat of power.

  Poenari Citadel was… is a forlorn place: high walls of dark stone reinforced with brick, steep steps that had to be traversed afoot— far too difficult for riding. The Citadel itself was not that old, however, the Barbat had allowed much of it to waste away and it seemed that the most used feature up to that point had been the dungeon and that was little more than a pit covered in black iron bars and filled with the bones of the dead.