by Mary Gentle
On the far seat, the black-haired young woman lay asleep. One heeled, black boot peeped out from under her six or seven layers of skirts. A thin coil of hair pasted to her cheek.
Abiathar’s voice carried over the rattle of coach wheels, springs, team-harness, and the driver’s cries. "Let her sleep if she can. Don’t you be bothering her."
"I won’t. I wouldn’t."
"I don’t say like father like son, mark."
His cheeks heated. Abruptly spurring the gelding, pulling its head round, he galloped away up the track. Almost a quarter-mile separated first and second coaches now, Abiathar’s weighed down by the luggage and one mercenary guard on the roof.
Bess, Lady Winslow, pulled her mare aside as he passed. Her gloved hand went up as if she would have flourished her plumed hat in usual flamboyance. She arrested the gesture and rubbed awkwardly at her mouth. Cold stung tears, leaking from the corners of Bevil’s eyes.
Strung out along the moorland road, point and guard, nearly twenty riders paced the coaches. The bright dots of satin and brocade startled the morning, scarlet and viridian against the muted browns of snow-pasted shrubs and low wooden fences.
"Be well enough if we reach London by Tuesday."
Startled by a close voice, he rubbed the back of his gloved hand across his face and turned in the saddle.
The Master-Physician White Crow rode straight-backed, draped in a heavy leather cloak. She raised one hand to push her ermine-lined hood back from her face, and loosen the neck-clasp.
"Madam." Bevil stood in the saddle and bowed. Chill air cut through the worn places in his silver-embroidered blue silk breeches. "You think the snow will hold off until then?"
"Trust me."
He stared uncomprehendingly, hearing an acidity in her voice and not knowing why. She shook the grey horse’s reins, moving to pace him, to one side of the snow thrown up by the lead coach.
"You’re wise not to choose to be rattled about inside one of those." He looked up shyly from under fair lashes, frantic to steer the conversation. "You must be more comfortable riding—"
"I am not. You try riding a horse in this condition, why don’t you?"
Bevil Calmady hesitated, bemused by what he was not entirely certain was a rhetorical question.
The White Crow added, "You don't happen to have a couple of kerchiefs I could borrow?"
Bevil hooked the reins over the saddle-horn and searched his pockets, finally extracting two darned silk kerchiefs. He passed them to her, watching as she tucked them down the front of her doublet.
"What are you doing?"
She took her hand out of her shirt and unkinked her elbow. "Leaking, if it's any of your damn business!"
"Oh." Face bright red, Bevil busied himself with the gelding’s reins. The big horse skittered, one hoof skidding on a patch of ice. He recovered, spurring ahead.
"Boy!"
He found himself level with the lead coach’s window. Inside, Pollexfen Calmady looked up from where he and the Lord-Architect Casaubon sat either side of a let-down card-table dealing One-and-Twenty, slammed the window-frame down, and leaned his head out.
"Is the bitch dead, or like to die? No? No! Then stop giving me those whey-faced looks!"
Confusion and anger choked Bevil’s voice. He shook his head rapidly, fair hair flying.
"Well, damn you, then! For a puppy who won’t own his own father!"
"Who would?" His voice broke, squeaked into childish registers.
"Can’t a man make a plain mistake? And what is she but some cast-off camp whore of Huizinga’s or Sforza’s? Gods! Sanctimonious boys—"
"We’ve missed the road, I think." The White Crow’s voice cut across the shouting. Bevil leaned forward in the saddle, seeing her ride at the coach’s opposite window and snap her fingers for the Lord-Architect’s attention.
The fat man, bundled to the chins in a fur-trimmed red velvet morning-robe, leaned his elbow on the window-frame and stared where she pointed. His copper-gold hair, scraped back and tied with a string of black velvet, shone with grease, and the swell of the robe over his belly was stained with old vestiges of egg and soup. He sniffed.
"You may be right, little one. Pull over ahead there, and I’ll discover."
Blind with a thundering pulse, Bevil Calmady rode ahead.
The sun, low in the winter sky, touched stonework with a paleness that hardly deserved to be called warmth. Cold air froze his wet eyelashes. He blinked. The burnt-out shell of a moorland church stood in a hollow, snow whitening walls and rubble. Shattered glass lined one pointed window. The weathercock still stood on the half-demolished spire.
He let the gelding pick a way down towards it, reins resting. The animal’s body warmed his booted legs. The Lord-Architect plodded down through the ankle-deep snow, voluminous robe flying and padded arms waving for balance. "Boy—"
Bevil Calmady gritted his teeth. "Sir."
One fat, gloved hand beckoned. He nudged the mount the few paces. The fat man’s head was on a level with his knee, his breath clouding the air. It took Bevil a second to realise that the object held up to him was a metal flask.
"Try it, my boy. You look as though you need it."
Abruptly, he grabbed the flask and took a deep swallow. A honey taste stayed on his lips. "Th—"
Tears leaked out of his eyes; he coughed, muffled it, coughed again, and finally wheezed air into his lungs and seared throat.
"—thank you. Sir. What is that?"
"A recipe of my own," the big man said smugly. He lifted his face. Cold blotched his cheeks and chin. Startlingly acute blue eyes fixed on Bevil. "No reason why you shouldn’t ride in the other coach. Abiathar always complains she could use help with the baby, and my little one there is thinking of other things now."
Bevil followed his gaze to the White Crow. The woman sat her horse still, staring at the snow-covered hills. She stripped the glove from one hand and held up her fingers for the feel of the air to inform her.
"Will she trust me with the baby?"
"She did last night."
"That was before." The gelding nosed fruitlessly at snow- covered heather. "Sir, if I hadn’t seen it . . . It’s a tavern or whorehouse joke, isn’t it? A wench raped sleeping or unwilling. If I hadn’t seen it. Oh god, how could he!"
Lithely, he kicked feet free of the stirrups and slid to the ground. The earth hit the soles of his boots, no give in it, and he staggered, for the first time aware that this is the winter ground that breaks bones.
"He’s my father! I’m ashamed."
The Lord-Architect Casaubon said nothing. He placed one heavy arm, with immense gentleness, around Bevil Calmady’s shoulders. After a moment, Bevil nodded.
"Tell me, sir, how do you hope to find direction from this?"
A spatter of musket-fire rang out.
Mounted, spurring, all ingrained instinct; the gelding wallowing knee-deep in an unsuspected hollow. The top of the rise came on him before he realised. Bevil reined in, sword drawn. Far, far back—sounds carry over snow—puffs of flame briefly showed. Too far to smell the powder. A cluster of riders. He narrowed his eyes. One scout in saffron brocade waved a feathered hat: signalling few and driven off.
Beside the coach, where the team of six horses stamped and breathed plumes of white air, Captain Pollexfen Calmady raised his sword and brandished it once. A rider began to canter back from point. He looked up at the still-mounted Master-Physician.
"Yes, madam. Chessboard wars, as you say, between gentlemen-mercenaries. But do you prefer the reign of footpads and highway robbers or the conditions of civil war? I’d wager that you don’t. Ubi solitudinem faciunt pacem appellant: they create a desolation and call it peace."
The redhaired woman made no answer. She turned her head, looking past Bevil to the Lord-Architect, where he stood by the ruined church.
"Well? Are we in our way, or out of it?"
Bevil Calmady looked at the sun-yellowed stone. The Lord-Architect stood before t
he walls, arms crossed, the folds of his red velvet robe wet and white with snow. He sniffed, and with a sideways motion of the head wiped his nose on the black fur collar. A silver trail smeared. Casaubon straightened his massive shoulders and called up to the weathercock:
"Which way to London-town?"
Metal shrieked. The hammered brass eagle swung on its broken pole, creaking to face down the lefthand fork of the track. The bas-relief beak flashed back sunlight. It cried:
"East and south! Mark me, mark me! East and south from here!"
That day and night the skies remain cloudless, free of snow.
Two days’ dirt engrained the whorls of her fingers.
The White Crow sat against a half-demolished brick wall, arms on knees, blinking at her snow-washed hands. The bonfire’s blast seared at her face. Dawn froze her back. Above, a sky clear as water and early as sin birthed light.
"Sleep?"
She glanced over at Lady Arbella Lacey. The woman’s nose showed in midst of rolled blankets and cloak, nothing else visible. The White Crow grinned. "About an hour before midnight. Too cold after. You?"
"Madam, not a wink."
An anonymous voice from another roll of blankets observed, "Then you stay awake damn noisily, and snore while you do it!"
The White Crow rubbed her hands against her frozen cheeks.
The quietness and expanded senses that come with outdoor sleeping enveloped her, and all campaign reflexes—the ability to wait, and wait again, without impatience; to talk; to draw on inner resources; to think nothing, only to act— all filled her with a familiar ease. She stared through bitter air at the coach, the fire, the hobbled horses.
"—and then they both stopped in the hallway, in front of a suit of armour."
The black-haired Lord Rule’s voice rose. He gestured, one hand in its embroidered gauntlet pinning down Lord Gadsbury, where they both stood stamping their feet on the other side of the fire.
"Too drunk to know their own names, both of them, and Bess looked up at this thing, all six foot of it, fall plate armour and helm, and she said—"
"—‘I want to hear it talk before I fight it!’ " the short man completed, grinning. "Man, they were drunk? I was standing right next to you when that happened, and you too ratted to know it."
"I admit I may have been a little inconvenienced."
Rule adjusted his cocked hat, caught the White Crow’s eye, and removed his hat again to bow, making much play with the plume.
"Madam: good morning."
"Morning." She nodded to both: Gadsbury a head shorter than the younger man; both in mud-marked lace and satin, wrapped around with thick woollen cloaks. An effort shifted her from the wall. Movement chilled her: she rubbed at her arms and stood.
Now the burnt-out cottage showed as little more than a floor plan: a few walls no more than waist-high, acting as shelter for the slumped forms of sleeping gentlemen-mercenaries and horses. Numb with cold, her feet knocking against broken bricks, she went aside to relieve herself. Empty moorland stretched away under haze and snow.
"Rule’s ridiculous." The tall redhead, Bess, fell into step beside her as they finished, and walked back through the deserted and burned herb-garden, lacing up her doublet. "This is the man, mark you, I once heard in the thick of an artillery barrage, telling young Bevil he should please not sweat, since he’d be spoiling a five-hundred-pound suit of clothes!"
The White Crow chuckled. Aches shifted in her shoulders and back, shaken loose by walking. Anticipating later sleep in the coach, when the sun should be high and the day as warm as winter might make it, she wrapped her hands about her arms and nodded towards the fire, where the Marquis of Linebaugh and Bevil Calmady now stood.
"The hell with that: can he make coffee?"
Bess, Lady Winslow, looked down her prominent, frost- reddened nose at Lord Rule, where he squatted over a boiling can at the fire. "Indifferent bad coffee, madam, and distinctly worse tea; but what would you? He was hardly born to this."
Bevil Calmady tipped a shot of brandy into his tea mug and clinked it against Gadsbury’s. "The Queen and her Hangman."
"Listen to the boy, will you? He thinks he’s a soldier." Gadsbury appealed to the cold morning. Arbella Lacey, rumpled and newly risen, chuckled. Gadsbury stabbed a blunt finger at her. "You’re no better. I remember you in your first battle—‘Oh, sergeant, they’re shooting at us!’ "
The woman grinned. "Yes, and what did you say?" "That’s all right, girl, they’re the enemy. They’re allowed!’ "
"When I was a Scholar-Soldier—"
Light flashed. The White Crow broke off.
The green-painted coach stood with its window-curtains drawn, no sign of the Lord-Architect or Abiathar waking. Light flashed again beyond it. She walked rapidly across the frosted, exposed cottage floor, sliding into automatic concealment behind the coach. Her dirt-grained fingers’ reached to her empty belt.
Hobbled, the older of the coach-horses stood mouthing in its feedbag. Jared sat astride, bareback, short legs jutting out horizontally. His small shoulders taut, and both cold-reddened hands clenched about the hilt, he held up a curved hanger.
The blade flashed pale light, wobbling, weighty.
"You cut thus, forward and down . . ." Pollexfen Calmady reached up, pointing. Dried mud marked the green woollen cloak about his broad shoulders, staining his curled periwig and the braid on his plumed hat. One gauntleted hand moved, mirroring the small boy’s tentative lowering of the blade.
"Here." He reached up and took the sword: a large man, bulky, ponderous. Her breath came short, anticipating the sudden metamorphosis; always there, always shocking: movement from the shoulder and so quick—wrist, arm, shoulder in sudden motion; coordination too swift to be recognised. The metal whipped in figure-eight arcs, bright against the dawn.
"Always paying attention to the main purpose of a cavalry stroke, which is," he observed, "not to cut off your horse’s ears."
Over Jared’s surprised laugh, he added, "Madam, good morning. I find talent but no enthusiasm here; still, altissima quaeque flumina minimo sono labi: the deepest rivers flow with the least sound."
His voice blotted the others out.
"You—" Sudden cold bit her gut; forty-eight hours camaraderie vanishing with the return of memory. Shame tanged, a revulsion against speaking to the gentlemen-mercenaries, as if that could prove some collaboration in her. The White Crow walked towards the coach-horse, scenting old sweat and new perfume on Calmady’s clothes. Reflexes kept her a step outside his immediate range.
He slotted hanger into scabbard with a click that echoed across the morning, and stood with gauntleted hands on hips. "Do you think I’d harm a boy, and myself with my own son here?"
"Jarrie, tell Abiathar I’m on my way to feed your sister."
"Yes, mama." Swivelling his legs around with difficulty, the boy slid, dropped four feet to the ground, and walked towards the closed coach, tugging doggedly at his long coat to straighten it.
The morning quiet broke with noises. Voices called across the snowy, deserted landscape. One man coughed. Horse-tack clinked, being lifted onto mounts; Arbella Lacey hacked and spat. Meat sizzled on the fire and the smell filled the White Crow’s mouth with saliva.
Impossible, now, to walk back to the companionable fire.
"Stay out of my sight. If you can’t do that, don’t speak. Stay clear of me."
Urbane, the big man drew off one embroidered gauntlet, and wiped his mouth with the lace at his cuff. "I apologise if you find your husband somewhat surly this morning. Throughout our long acquaintance it’s been his desire to outdrink me; last night, as on many another occasion, I fear that he failed. My condolences."
"How he can drink with you—"
"Madam, I’ve known him long and long."
"He never spoke of you."
"No . . ."
The light of very early morning, pale as water, found a reflection in Calmady’s eyes. His lined face creased against brig
htness. The White Crow shivered, feeling every snow- covered wall, every frost-cracked tile of this burned-out and exposed kitchen, every mote of bitter air find its way into her bloodstream. Her hand moved absently in the lines of a magia sigil. Warmth glowed deep inside, where the shudders of sleeplessness and revulsion moved.
A sudden spurt of voices broke her concentration.
Cold rushed in, tingling at her fingers’ ends, and she raised her head, looking away from Pollexfen Calmady.
"Mistress Guillaime!" Abjectly enthusiastic, Bevil Calmady, bright in azure satin against the trodden mud and snow, offered his hand to assist the young woman back up the steps of the coach.
The White Crow abruptly stepped away, putting yards between herself and the boy’s father. She pulled her cloak over her doublet. Her knuckles tightened: white. Apology, appeal: all of this on her face before she could control her expression.
All gone unnoticed.
Clutching her oversize black coat about her thin body, laughing, Desire-of-the-Lord Guillaime tottered across the snow on borrowed, two-inch-heeled shoes a size too large. Cold reddened her cheeks and lips, made her dark eyes sparkle. She called something up to Abiathar, visible now at the coach-window, and put one bruised hand up to her sleek and curly black hair. Caught up on the crown of her narrow head, hairpins falling out, hair unravelled down; and she pushed at it and lost her grip on her coat, that swung wide. Layers of skirts flew.
A rough voice swore in a whisper. The White Crow recognised it minutes later as Pollexfen Calmady’s. Bevil Calmady froze. The young woman’s head whipped around.
Hollow-eyed, bruised, pinched with fear: she for one second faced him, long lashes soot against suddenly sallow-green skin. She stumbled clumsily up the steps and into the coach. The slamming door cut off a querulous, waking mutter from Baltazar Causaubon.
The White Crow walked on, past the horses. She stood staring into distance across the white moorland until the cold mottled her bare hands purple and blue, and her empty stomach growled.
A dry-mouthed thirst drove her back to the gentlemen- mercenaries around the fire.
Ten miles north of London the column shouldered a massive hill and the view of the London basin opened up: a thick green tide of forest washing up to the edges of the hills.