A resurgent Mongol Yuan Dynasty, still ruling a hostile populace that had been close to ejecting it, was not right. Not given her last information. Their empire should have been splintering, falling. At the very least, it should not have been stronger.
She asked, “Who are they marching against this time? I did not hear much before I left.”
“Foreigners. Always foreigners.”
“Yes, but which?”
“Does it matter?” In the look he gave her, she caught a glimpse of the temper that must always have been strung tight under his skin.
She sipped her wine, looking down. Finally, he said, “They are having problems, too. I know the dockmaster of Hangzhou. He drinks with the brother-in-law of the governor.” Osia took care to look impressed. “He has never seen the governor so worked up.”
“Rebellions?” she asked.
“Religious problems,” he said, darkly. “Barbarian sects. Idiocy.”
“You think that will mean more conscriptions?”
“It would be bad enough if they just sent soldiers. But they raise taxes. They demand silk and brocades, porcelain, silver. They draw chalk lines across old and noble Han households, and take everything on one side.”
“Spending so much time at sea must give you some relief.”
“Yes. But not my family. It’s been so long since I left. Out here, I have nothing to do but have nightmares about how things might be. When I left, my brother was on the edge of selling our home in Hangzhou.”
Osia said, “Being out of contact is not so different from being dead.”
“Or living in Hell,” he said, and poured himself more wine.
Osia’s digestive sacs processed alcohol quickly, but couldn’t get rid of the smell. When she returned to her boat after supper, her constructs noticed. They didn’t hide their annoyance. It was understated, unspoken jealousy. She couldn’t get drunk, but they could. She had made the mistake of allowing alcohol aboard only once.
As the patrol junk pulled its boarding ramps, Ira asked, under his breath, “Is that enough play-acting for another five years?”
She had even less patience for him now. “If I didn’t need to play-act, you wouldn’t be here.”
That sent him stomping, muttering. She only reminded her constructs of their artificiality when she wanted peace.
She returned to the railing, watched the patrol junk unfurl its sails against the sunset. It would be making its course by the stars before it put any significant distance between them.
So would she. She craned her neck, studied the false comet. One of the many effects the comet had on this world was that it washed out the nearest stars. It complicated navigation at sea.
Dark robbed the horizon of its distinctions. The black of the ocean washed into the sky. She knew now what that feeling of electricity, of coiled tension, had been. Nervous energy, almost anxiety. Her thoughts were coiling into new shapes. Not trying to solve a puzzle, not exactly, but to find an answer other than what she’d already arrived at.
Something that had been sleeping was waking. Another fugue ending.
Coral settled by her, leaning on the railing. Unlike Ira and Braeloris, thi waited for Osia to speak.
Osia said, “I should have been paying more attention.”
Coral said, “That’s what we’ve been telling you.”
“I didn’t mean to you,” Osia said, though she said it with more kindness than she might have.
“I didn’t necessarily mean to us, either,” thi said, with a smile.
Thi might have felt like thi was making a breakthrough, and maybe thi was, but it would be a long time before Osia felt like returning that smile.
Her boat had become a stone, plunging into the dark. Tonight, the black depths of the ocean opened wide.
In zero gravity, her native environment, there was no difference between resting still and falling into the void.
She looked again to the comet.
“I think it’s fucking with this world again,” she said.
Coral was silent for a moment. Thi did not have to ask to know she meant Ways and Means. “Are you sure this is something you want to care about?”
“I’m human enough that I don’t choose what to care about.”
“Do you think it’s worth the cost of doing something about it?”
A curious question. An astute one. Coral knew how much pursuing this was going to hurt Osia.
Osia looked down. Coral followed her gaze. The water was calm enough, but for a few ripples around the lip of the prow. It made a near-perfect mirror image of the comet.
She said, “I don’t know. All I want to do, for now, is find out why.”
6
Mechanical clocks were marvels. Fia had only heard of them, never seen them, before taking up with Antonov’s Company. They were one of the few pieces of booty she’d obsessed over. She’d saved most of them. She’d had one on a brass pillar painstakingly set up in her pavilion.
She’d stopped collecting them when the ticking of mechanical clocks started to underline everything Fia did. Sleeping, speaking, planning – it was always there, in the back of her mind, in the lower reaches of her hearing. The past dripping away. Opportunities slipping through her fingers like silver coin, clattering on the ground.
Every day, every moment, was significant. She didn’t need a device to remind her that the enemy was coming.
She had always been on a schedule, but this was something more. This was a deadline.
When and where depended on how fast she and the company could move.
Fia’s lungs still burned from smoke. Soot stained her cheeks, turned the sweat on her forehead grimy. Every time she dabbed at it, her wrist came back gray.
Six dozen men waited for her in front of the corporals’ tent. Cavalrymen and infantry, new men, the top performers of their cohort. This last raid could hardly have been called a battle, but these men had been promised a sermon after their first action with the company. They would get it.
This clearing was the nearest thing to open space left at this particular campsite. Quiet followed her. It had been years since she’d had to stare at men until they fell silent. Good thing. She did not have the time to waste.
In the back of her mind, the mechanical clocks were always ticking.
In public, she stood straight as a lance. She bit back the pain driving up her back, hot as lightning. She was old enough for her body to turn against her. One bad hop off her horse, and now she couldn’t lie in bed without curling up. A small thing, but a warning.
She could not let it show. Bad enough that she had not been seen in her armor for two weeks. She pulled her commander’s baton from under her arm. It was a light wooden rod the length of her forearm, useless even as a club, but she never stepped out of her pavilion without it.
It was always a performance. She was always on, being watched. The demands of the performance varied per the audience.
New audiences needed to hear that something had been hidden from them. They needed to believe it. She said, voice sharp as glass, “The church does not tell you about men like Saint Renatus. The gluttons and simonists who occupy it now have never wanted you to know the power of your calling.” That other men were playing them for power. It was always true, everywhere, for soldiers.
She could have told the new men the story she’d made of Saint Renatus’s life. Now everyone who came to her knew it beforehand. “Saint Renatus had been born from the earth, and a deep cave, but the stories I’ll tell you don’t dwell on it. It mattered, it shaped him, but only his beginning. Just like your beginning – whatever farm you grew up on, whatever household you served – it made no difference the moment another man’s weapon touched his flesh. The bite of first blood made the man.”
Captain Antonov listened closely. He stood just close enough to see out of the corner of her eye. His battle with age had started to go sour. He had grown larger than she’d ever known him, but, in the past year or so, somehow dimi
nished. His cheeks were pale, his eyes darkened. His white beard could no longer hide the sharpness of his chin.
Fia had been a fair orator when Captain Antonov had elevated her to her position. She knew how to force her voice to carry without shouting, and when to make men strain to listen. She knew when to exalt men, and when to only promise exaltation. She had gotten rid of the last traces of her northern Italian accent.
“It was the power of that moment that made him holy. Not the circumstances and the miracles – though there were plenty of those. The miracles presaged the man. They confirmed who he was. They did not make him.”
That was the most important of the lessons she had to teach them. But she no longer had to tell these stories alone. The man waiting to speak after her had been a Benedictine monk before he’d joined. Giuseppe di Stefano was accustomed to berating men for their sins and inequities. While she raised them to the level of angels, he had become their sergeant, coring them out.
Giuseppe was a deceptively small bearded presence to her left. He spoke now. “Death claimed the man in his first battle. But in rebirth he found salvation. No one who calls himself a soldier will ever be saved by living the life he was born into. All of you must seek your own redemption.”
Fia said, “The church still thinks the comet presages the end of the world.” The papacy still held some power over men’s imaginations. It was imperative to remind them of its humiliation as often as possible. “They were partly right. Anything that dies can be reborn. The comet brought about the end of a world. But not the end of all of them.
“The comet presages us. Your world has ended. The way old men used to do things is gone, and it’s not coming back. Neither will the man you used to be. Whoever you were before you came here, that man is already gone.”
The first time Fia had sermonized, she had let her inner voice take over, tried not to think too deeply about what she was saying. Now the words were all hers. She enjoyed speaking.
But the clocks had not ceased ticking.
She let Giuseppe take over. He was the better storyteller. He traced the path of Saint Renatus’s lives, starting with his expulsion from the armies of Rome and its early confederates. Fia listened until she was sure the men had their eyes on him. Then she slipped away. Captain Antonov was not far behind.
As soon as she was past the next tent, she breathed out sharply. She arched her back. A hot needle poked into her back, made her gasp.
Antonov said, “Eyes still on you.”
Fia saw no one, but she did not stop to look. She squared her shoulders and went after him. The needle sank deeper. If it got any worse, she wasn’t going to be able to keep herself from stooping. “Is this what it’s like to grow old?” she said, goading him. “Getting crooked?”
“It’s worse than you know,” he said.
The corporals’ tents lined their walk to the pavilion. The company’s camps were far larger than they had been at the start of her career, but less organized. Even keeping the disorder at this minimum took great effort. The corporals’ tents were different sizes, shapes, fabrics. Some had servants standing guard. Others wouldn’t have been out of place among the slum tent city of the camp followers and the pioneers.
It was in the nature of a condottieri army. Very few men were pledged to her and Antonov in the manner of soldiers to a state. Her best men were independent, contracted, and their subordinates in turn contracted to them. There was not much point in maintaining set places for each man’s tent, either. Their contracts ended at different times, most often at the end of a season, and spring harvest was upon them.
Antonov said, “The monastery claims it can pay no more than nine hundred florins.”
“Less than last time.” It would hardly cover expenses for their march to Siena. And of course the monks did not have the cash with them. It would have to come from loans, entries to the church.
“You have a good memory.” Antonov always seemed a little surprised when her mind worked as it should. They both knew it didn’t always. “Anyway, I believe them. They say they’ll empty their coffers to come up with two hundred, and hold the bishop in debt for the remainder.”
“You think the church will pay this time?”
“You and I know the church isn’t honorable, but they’ll try. They know we can turn back around and do worse.”
That was wishful thinking. Several cities – like Siena ahead – were in arrears. Antonov just wanted to leave. She said, “The church is marching to destroy us. They could be counting on their army and their mercenaries to end us before we’re paid.”
“The church won’t destroy us,” Antonov said.
“I never said they would,” Fia said.
Fia was not ungrateful for him, but he could be stifling, patronizing sometimes. She could not have managed her first few years in the company without him, and he knew it. He had given her the chance to speak to men who otherwise would not have listened – and more.
After she had traveled with Antonov’s Company for several years, before it had become the Company of the Star, Fia’s mind had turned unquiet. A black mood settled on her, impossible to move. And then the unrest. Antonov had shown parts of himself that she had not expected. He had been like a brother. In the worst of it, he reminded her to change her clothes, to cut her hair, to eat, to sleep, when thoughts of those things eluded her. They had been mutually dependent on each other by then: he as the company’s captain, she as the speaker for the company’s saint. She found out then how much he must have cared for the family he’d left behind.
But she was her own soldier. He had helped, but she had fought alone, and retrained her mind. Some part of her would always be unquiet, but that was her burden, not his.
Lowing carried over the barricades. A march of captured livestock, cattle and goats. Sometimes, the company ransomed the large animals. Not this time. They had to pay close attention to their food stocks. The spring harvest was a fragile season. It was the first opportunity the locals had to replenish their stores. After a winter as harsh as this last, their stomachs would be all but empty regardless.
That made this spring an ideal raiding season.
The wheat and oats her pioneers had burned today were the most valuable of the year. There were no stores to replace them. The company had engineered a catastrophe. Starvation would drive families from their homes, into the cities. Starvation fomented revolt. Revolt and unrest would weaken Siena, the city they were all headed to.
She remembered the bitter pain of starvation. When she thought of it, she felt a pang. Her inner voice stifled it. Another life, it told her.
The moment she stepped into her pavilion and relaxed her shoulders, a different kind of suffering found her. Agony sliced down the center of her back. She swallowed a groan. She did not care if the four men inside saw her wince. They were men of her and Antonov’s inner circle. They were allowed to see more of her – even the ones who weren’t her friends.
Szarvasi Janos asked, “Do you enjoy keeping us?”
Antonov shot him a warning look. Janos’s brother, Istvan, said, “Ignore Janos. We have not been waiting for long.”
“We don’t have time to wait at all,” Janos said.
Fia had almost booted the Szarvasi brothers from her camp after they arrived. Janos, the eldest, was curt at best. Nor was he a believer. He meant for nothing more than to turn the company against the rivals who’d exiled him from Hungary. But she needed his money, and so she’d given him a space to fight, allowed him to hire his own condottieri. He turned churlish at upsets, reacted poorly to bad news. Something must have happened.
His brother was his saving grace. Istvan was courteous and subtle everywhere that Janos was not. He listened. He was a believer.
For once, Fia didn’t mind Janos’s impatience. He was right to be. She had taken the centerpiece clock out of her pavilion long ago, but she still heard it. She said, “I take it there’s been news.”
Captain Mirko Blazovic said, “Yes. Min
e. My spies in Parma say Giovanni the Sharp requested safe passage there. He’s expected through Parma before the middle of May.”
Fia said, “His name is not Giovanni. It’s certainly not ‘the sharp.’ And safe passage means nothing.” It was a common condottieri tactic to send multiple requests for safe passage to different towns. It kept their enemies guessing. Sometimes cities nearby even paid bribes to keep the mercenaries away from a route they’d never intended to take.
Blazovic said, “He would not have given the date unless it was plausible.”
Mirko Blazovic did not belong to the Company of the Star, but another society of condottieri contracted to their mutual employer, Orvieto. He was more than an ally, though. He was a believer. Before he’d converted, he’d had a reputation for cruelty beyond even the standards of condottieri. Saint Renatus had changed him. The first time Fia had met him, he’d had a ferocious beard. Now he was clean-shaven, and kept the worst of himself in check.
There was one other man with a captain’s rank, Constantin Laskaris, but he had no company. Not any more. Laskaris shook his head, and said, “We’ll reach our target regardless. We’re far closer to Siena than they are.”
Laskaris was one of the many failed Greek military commanders. His failure hadn’t been his doing. His circumstances had been nigh insurmountable. He was Thessalian, formerly employed by the city of Soli, hemmed in by enemies on two sides. He’d managed a startling few successes before his position had inevitably crumbled. Fia had recognized talent when she heard news of it. He was both rough and roughly shaven. He was like Fia. He had good days and poor days, when melancholy subsumed him. This was one of his poor days. He did not enjoy living away from home.
Terminus Page 7