The Dread Wyrm

by Miles Cameron

De La Marche looked at Thorn for a fraction of a heartbeat. “Our wizard will melt us a road?”

  Ser Hartmut shook his head. “No,” he said. “Our Huran captives—those ones who will not submit—will walk ahead of us.” He waved one iron-clad hand. “They will tramp the snow flat. And cut the trees and make a road, all the way down the western shore of the lake.”

  De La Marche took in a great breath. “And where will they camp?” he asked. “With our men?”

  Ser Hartmut shook his head. “Camp? They will work until they die. And then we will send more ahead of us.” He waved his hand. “They are not Christians. Not subjects of my King. They’re not even really people. Let them die.”

  De La Marche sighed. “You will walk three thousand women and children to death to build a road for your army?” he asked.

  Ser Hartmut nodded. “They defied me,” he said. “Now they will pay. This is absolutely within the Rule of War.”

  De La Marche looked back and forth between Ser Hartmut and Thorn. “Of the two of you, I doubt that I can tell which is the worse,” he said. “I will go and walk the snow with the poor savages you send to their deaths. I cannot live and watch you do this to them.”

  Ser Hartmut shook his head. “Do not, please, be a sentimental fool.”

  “I am a man,” De La Marche said. His tone said what his words did not.

  Even Thorn felt a tiny pinprick of anger in reponse. “We act on a stage so vast that you cannot perceive it,” Thorn said. “Already my forces are south of Albinkirk, pinning our foes in place. A few Outwallers more or less—”

  De La Marche nodded. “I thank God I do not perceive what you can,” he said. He turned rudely and walked away.

  Ser Hartmut turned to his squire. “Take him. Beat him unconscious and have him bound. Do not let his sailors see you do it.” His squire walked away into the snow, and Ser Hartmut turned to Thorn. “He has become a fool. But if I allow this idiot martyrdom, his sailors will be wasted. They will not fight well, and they are my best troops, in a siege.”

  Thorn was weary of the whole matter and all the petty inversions that went with human interaction. “Two days,” he said.

  Ser Hartmut nodded. “Two days.”

  Ser John Crayford awoke in a strange place. It took him a long moment to identify where he was. The ceiling was white, and had a spider web of cracks around a marvellous old beam that had been carved in whorls like a hundred intertwined dragon’s tails. His eye followed the whorls and the cracks.

  There were two narrow windows with archery shutters—thick oak shutters that let in very little light. Each was pierced with a cross, so that either a longbow or a crossbow could be used on attackers.

  As he looked at the windows, he knew where he was. Close by his right arm lay Helewise, naked. She was not asleep.

  “Did I snore?” he asked.

  She laughed. “Only when you were asleep,” she answered.

  “You were going to send me away when we finished.” Ser John smiled.

  She smiled back. “I’m an old woman,” she said. “And yet I’m not sure that I am finished, even yet.” She leaned over and threw a leg over his, and they kissed—the warmth, the foul to fair kiss of morning, a night shared.

  Instantly aroused, Ser John laughed in his throat. “And last night you put out the candle,” he said.

  “Not every man is full aroused by sagging breasts and widening thighs,” she whispered.

  “Why are women so cruel to themselves?” he asked.

  “Why, we learn it all from our lovers,” she said. But she took the strength of his arousal as compliment enough.

  They played the music again, as they had played the night before, although Ser John was more conscious of the noise the bed frame made this time—so conscious that he began to flag, and then to move softly. But he suited her so well that at last she made a sound somewhere between the contentment of a cat and the cough of a leopard—a surprising, unladylike sound.

  And then she laughed.

  “Imagine, a prisoner of the pleasures of lust at my age!” she said.

  “Will you confess it to the little nun?” he asked.

  “Would that embarrass you, bold knight?” she asked in return. She put a hand on his chest—and pushed. “Do you think any woman in this house doubts where you spent the night? There’s no hiding anything in a house of twenty women.”

  Ser John looked abashed. “I thought—”

  Helewise rose. She threw back a shutter. “Wilst marry me, Ser John?” she asked.

  Ser John, looking at her in the stream of sunlight, thought he had never seen anyone so beautiful. “I would be most pleased to marry you, lass,” he said.

  “And all your other wives?” Helewise asked. Under the banter, he could hear a more sober note.

  “Nay—I have no other lovers,” he said. “Mayhap ten years gone, there was a head on my pillow some nights.”

  “Ten years?” she asked. She had a robe on now. “No wonder you find me beautiful.”

  She stepped out from behind her screen. “I mean it, John. I’m no light o’ love and I have a daughter who’ll know by evensong what her mother did this night. Plight your troth—or don’t come into my bed again.” She flung her hair and gave him an odd look. “My daughter is flirting with your Red Knight’s youngest brother—you know that? If I play the fool with you…”

  Ser John sat up. He shook his head. “I might say that I didn’t push you here, my lady.”

  “Nor you did. I am a lustful mortal, as God made me.” Helewise stretched. “But I’ll not make a slut of my daughter through misjudgment.”

  Ser John rose, naked and more grey than brown, and kissed her. “Hush, lady. I don’t need threats or admonitions.” Naked, he knelt at her feet. “I beg you to marry me and be my love.”

  She smiled. “Oh, John.” She bent to kiss him. Her robe fell open to the last button and her earthy smell hit him.

  “Mercy,” he said. “I’m an old man. I might die.”

  “The old plough runs the deepest furrow,” she whispered.

  “You made that up,” he growled back.

  Later, dressed and armed, he met his escort—knights and squires of far-off Jarsay—in the yard. The younger women of the manor all seemed busy with laundry—busy in a way that required their presence in the yard. He smiled beneficently as one does when all is right with the world, and he noticed with some amusement that many of the younger men in armour would not meet his eye.

  His squire, Jamie the Hoek, had his great horse saddled and everything prepared just the way he liked it. From a gawky adolescent who knew little or arms and nothing of horses, Jamie had grown into a tall man of gentle manners who was welcome wherever he went—and was the best squire a knight could ever want. He was quiet, he worked very hard, and he had learned every skill of management, maintenance, repair and replacement that a squire might ever need to know. He could sew. He could even do a little embroidery. He could take the dent out of a helmet.

  He could kill a boglin while covering his master’s side.

  He bowed. “Ser Captain, we understand congratulations are in order.”

  Ser John bowed back. “Gentles, you have the right of it. Lady Helewise and I will be wed at midsummer.”

  Now all the young men met his eye, and his hand was shaken, and he thought, What a nice lot of boys these are. We were a rougher crowd in my day. He’d taken a few days to warm to Ser Aneas—a cold young man—but the boy’s infatuation for Heloise’s daughter Philippa was—charming.

  The youngest Muriens received a stirrup cup from his lady love.

  “I think it’s horrible,” she said. “My mother—at her age!”

  Aneas Muriens had a different kind of mother. “I think it—splendid,” he said.

  Philippa gazed at him a moment. “You do?” she asked.

  They looked at each other so long that other knights chuckled, and Ser John had to clear his throat.

  Long before the sun reached the a
pex of her travels across the sky, Ser John led his company out of the restored gates of the manor and past the new stone barn that the master masons were just completing. It had been warm enough for foundations to be dug, and new stone barns were rising across the whole of the area west and south of Albinkirk to replace the wooden barns burned the year before.

  They rode north through the countryside, passed over two streams in roaring full spate by means of careful scouting and a willingness to get very wet. A dozen huntsmen—all professionals—rode well ahead, and they paused to look at every track on the road, or rather, the mud slide that passed at this time of year as a road.

  Early afternoon. Birds sang, and the spring flowers were in full bloom, and Ser John, who had in truth missed a great deal of sleep the night before, began to feel its lack. He turned to say something about a nap to Jamie, when he saw one of the huntsmen coming along the verge of the road where the ground was harder. The man had his rouncy moving at a trot—when the ground was hard, he cantered.

  Ser John had faced the Wild on too many patrols. “Gauntlets and helmets!” he called. “Lace up!”

  Most of the southerners had learned to ride with their steel gauntlets on their hands, but very few men liked to ride about wearing their helmets.

  The squires and pages handed out lances—fifteen-foot spears tipped in hard steel.

  “Let’s go!” Ser John said, fatigue temporarily forgotten. He led the column along the edge of the road, single file—an invitation to ambush except that he’d seen his own scouts work the apple orchard on the other side of the lane’s wall.

  He met the huntsman at the corner of the old wall.

  “Boglins,” the huntsman panted.

  “Where away?” Ser John asked. “In broad daylight?”

  The huntsman shrugged. “Saw ’em mysel’,” he said. “Away over past the Granges.”

  Ser John looked under his hand.

  “Big band—fifty or more. Running flat out—you know, so their wing-cases stand up.”

  “On me!” Ser John roared. He turned in the saddle and caught Lord Wimarc. “Take the squires and sweep the hillside,” he said. “All the way down to the creek past the Grange. You know the ground?”

  Lord Wimarc nodded. Since the death of his knight, he had withdrawn on himself, and his eyes were sunken and he had dark smudges under his eyes, but he was alert enough. “Aye, Captain,” he said.

  “If you catch them, dismount and hold them. Don’t let them get at your horses.” Ser John waved to the other squires. “Jamie, stay with me. The rest of you—follow Lord Wimarc.”

  As he turned his horse on the muddy ground, the scent of new grass and mud gave him a flash of Helewise, above him, her breast…

  He flushed and focused on the reality of a warm day and a tired horse.

  Off to his left he saw Lord Wimarc stand in his stirrups. The man’s lance tip moved.

  There was something on the hillside.

  An explosion, like lightning—a ball of lightning…

  Then the crack of a distant whip and one of the squires and his horse were a butcher’s nightmare in an ugly instant.

  “Blessed Saint George,” muttered the knight behind him.

  Ser John balanced on a sword’s edge of indecision—he didn’t know what he was going into, but he knew as sure as he was a sinful man that halting to figure it out would cost him men and horses.

  He thought about his lady love, and laughed aloud as the thought stiffened his spine as if he was fifteen years old and had just seen breasts for the first time.

  “Forward,” he roared.

  His ten lances, shorn of their squires, rode single file around the corner of the tall stone wall and the whole of the hillside came into view—a patchwork of green and brown fields stretching away for more than a mile, and a thick fringe of trees at the top of the next ridge, like hair on top of a balding man’s head.

  As soon as he took in the terrain, he knew that the enemy was beyond his own forces.

  Almost at his feet, a mere bowshot away, was a pack of the new imps. Ser John had never seen them, but one of the Red Knight’s squires—Adrian Goldsmith—had a talent for drawing, and had rendered the lithe creatures, like greyhounds from hell, in livid detail. All the company men said they were as fast as anything in the Wild, and that they went for horses.

  Even as he watched, the dread creatures turned like a flock of birds and started across a newly turned field towards him. At his back were ten knights, ten archers and ten pages.

  The field was muddy, the earth heavy with melted snow and spring rain, black and shiny.

  There was a narrow ditch by the verge of the road. Behind them was the high stone wall of some farmer’s apple orchard. It was too high for a mounted man to get over.

  He gave the order before he knew what he’d committed to.

  “Dismount!” he called, pulling up. “Horses to the rear—all the way back to the last farmyard, Rory!” he called to the oldest page, who was as white as a sheet.

  He slid out of his saddle as the imps came on at the speed of an arrow from a heavy bow.

  Even as his feet touched the ground and he seized his fighting hammer from his saddle bow, he wondered if he had made a poor decision. If they would be in among his horses before—

  “On me!” he called. “On me! Archers in the second rank!”

  It was all glacially slow.

  But God was merciful. The imps—even the horrifying imps—were slowed in all that mud.

  They seemed to flow over the field, though, and there were more of them—and more still flowing out of the far hedgerow.

  “Let us ha’ three arrows in front o’ ye,” said the archer at his back.

  Rory had just taken Iskander’s reins and was taking him to the rear, the war horse rolling his eyes and looking for something to kill. Ser John gave him a parting slap on the rump and stepped back.

  “Three shafts!” roared the master archer—one of the company men.

  The imps were a hundred yards away. They covered the earth like a pale green carpet of teeth and sinew. There had to be five hundred of them.

  “Loose!” called the company man.

  “Loose!” he said again.

  “Loose!” he said again.

  Three arrows in as many breaths. The imps were still far distant.

  “Keep shooting,” Ser John said. “Rory—get to the farmyard and send for help.”

  Rory, now mounted on Iskander, saluted.

  Send someone to bury us.

  Behind the wave of imps was a group of boglins, all pushing through and under the hedgerow. His tactic had worked beautifully—they had cut the enemy off.

  He wanted to choke the huntsman. This wasn’t a raiding force, but a small army. The sparkle of magic on the far hillside told him that the enemy had a sorcerer of some sort, too.

  The company archers were a blur of speed, their arrows leaving their bows as fast as their arms could move, their grunts rhythmic and almost obscene, like the rhythm of the old bed the night before.

  “Loose!” grunted the old bastard in front of him.

  “Loose!” he said again.

  “Exchange ranks!” Ser John roared.

  The archers dived for the rear, putting a wall of flesh and steel between them and the imps.

  “Over the wall!” called the old man.

  Most of the archers had no harness beyond elbows and knees and bascinets. The imps would flay them alive.

  An incredible number of the imps were already down. Worse, the ones pinned to the ground by the heavy shafts were dragging themselves towards the fight.

  Ser John set his weight without conscious thought, pole-hammer across his thighs, in the bastard guard.

  The imps had to leap the ditch to reach them.

  He killed two or three before one knocked him flat by momentum. But they were small and his faceplate and aventail kept him safe in the panicked seconds he was flat on his back. He drove his dagger into one—w
here had that come from?—got to his knees, and punched another with his steel fist. Something had his ankle, but that ankle was fully encased in steel.

  He drew his sword, stabbed down into the thing on his ankle, cut roundhouse to clear a space.

  An arrow clanged off his helmet. In the fall, his head had moved inside the padding and his vision was imperfect. He swung again, re-set his feet and got a hand up to push his helmet back on his head. There were two of them on his legs and one going for his balls, which had no armour. He shortened his grip, one hand on the hilt, one on the middle of the blade, and stabbed down, and down, and down, backing as he did, until he cut the creatures off his legs and killed them with blows to their spines.

  The archers were now sitting atop the apple orchard wall, shooting light arrows straight down into the fight and killing many. Their arrows decimated the imps, but the dog-like reptiles still came on over their dead, like carrion crows on a corpse.

  Ser John knew he had men down. There was too much room to swing his sword.

  He cut—left, right, controlled swings into guards to clear the ground around him, but the monsters were not like human opponents who would give ground. They merely came on. The result of his swings was the three of them got under his guard, one hanging from his left wrist. He dropped the sword, broke the back of the one on his armoured wrist and then kicked his steel feet clear of them, thanking God for his sabatons.

  His back grated on the stone wall. He had nowhere left to retreat to. A sword clicked into his right arm harness, and an imp fell away dead. He saw the familiar green and gold of the Muriens arms.

  His dagger was dangling from the chain at his wrist and he got it back, buried it in an imp that was trying to bite him.

  The arrows sliced down in front of him like a protective curtain. Out in the fields across the valley there was suddenly a light show—gold and green and purple and black.

  A horn sounded. It was not a human sound. The horn blew over and over like a human hunting horn, but its tone was deep and booming and had the knell of doom to it.

  Ser John got on with the business of killing. He pushed off the wall, accepted the price of friendly arrows slamming into his helmet, and he used his long dagger like a two-handed pick, his strikes accurate, his movements increasingly spare as he found the right way to fight the imps, using his armoured ankles and feet as a lure to draw them into the range of the dagger’s bite, defending his groin carefully.