“What other side?” Osia asked.
Coral blinked. “The Sarrathi. The partisans.”
Osia held her makeshift spear rigid. The deck shifted. She rolled her heels, still adjusting to her makeshift means of controlling them. For too long a moment, she could not find any answer.
The Sarrathi partisans had been her constructs’ old nemeses, the villains of the serial Coral and her crew had come from.
12
Betrayal was a fact of condottieri life. Betrayal was how they kept the communes on edge. The threat of it convinced the cities, kingdoms, and communes who hired them to pay richly and to always promise more.
It was all part of the racket.
When Fia’s night bodyguards stirred her awake with news that Captain Mirko Blazovic’s soldiers had been stealing out of camp in ones and twos, with excuses of errands, she knew what was happening.
She rolled, stiff-limbed, from her nest of Milanese linen and ermine furs. The furs had been a gift from Naples, a small but significant part of the bribe Queen Joanna had paid to entice the company’s exit from Neapolitan territory. The pain in the small of her back helped center herself.
She told her guard, “Wake our corporals. Have them offer departing officers contracts with the Company of the Star at one and a half times their usual monthly rate. Cap at six florins for a man-at-arms, ten for officers, unless known by reputation to be worth more. Offer stands only so long as the rate remains secret.”
She couldn’t have her other officers knowing how much she was willing to pay. Secrecy of pay rates was another condottieri device. All of her officers were well used to keeping their pay a secret, each believing themselves to be making more than his neighbor.
Pain pried at her. She had been too exhausted to wash her hair well. Some blood had dried in it, made a painful tangle on her scalp. That blood come from a man struck by a bolt beside her. She’d bled plenty enough herself over the past few days. Her left shoulder was a mat of scabbing. A mace had glanced off her armor, landed a spike between its joint. She still could not stand to raise that arm higher than her shoulder.
Exhaustion trumped pain. On another night, she could and would have gone back to sleep. But Blazovic’s had not been the only betrayal she’d tasted since coming to Siena. Coppery heat roiled on her tongue.
A blast of thunder resonated in her lungs. And then another. Reports from the artillery mounted on Siena’s walls. The city’s defenders fired at intervals, not to kill her men but to harry them. In turn, her men took shifts under the walls, shouting oaths and insults and playing marching instruments. Anything that might keep the Sienese awake.
It had been going on like this for a week. It could not go on for much longer.
When the sky lightened, the air was still and gray, choked with the ash of her camp’s fires. Captain Blazovic drew his company up in marching order by predawn. He halted outside the Company of the Star’s barricades. An array of Fia’s men stood at watch. Her soldiers were good at keeping their pay to themselves, but few other secrets. Long before dawn, every man had heard that Blazovic would be leaving a seven-hundred-man hole in their front lines. Her corporals had already drawn plans to fill it.
Fia was among the last to arrive at the barricade gates. Captain Laskaris trailed after her. He had become her new personal guard after Kristo’s death. Caterina strode beside her. She had hardly left Fia’s side since that first battle at Siena’s walls.
Fia must have looked like a horror, a demon. The blood in her hair had dried black. She stood straight, hiding the usual pain in her back and the stiffness in her arms and legs. She was pleased to see several of Blazovic’s officers, men with reputations, on her side of the lines. Blazovic must have noticed too, but he said nothing. He did not glance in their directions. The exchange of pieces was part of their game.
Blazovic bent at the knee when she signaled she was ready to address him. He looked to the ground, as he would before his lord. Fia tilted her head.
“Captain Fiametta of Treviso,” he said, formally, “it is only with my sincerest regrets that I take my leave of your mission today.”
Fia had not expected this treatment in the least. She said, “I am not a captain.” Antonov was nowhere in sight. She had not seen him in a day. Inevitably, word of this exchange would get back to him. Blazovic might even have been trying to drive a wedge between them.
“We all know you by the rank you’ve earned.”
“How much is Siena paying you?” Fia asked.
Blazovic quoted a sum of seven thousand florins, three thousand of which had been paid in advance. It was an impressive amount for a company his size, particularly given that, as was standard practice, he had not divulged the additional consideration that would be paid personally to him and his closest corporals. Fia said, “They’ll never pay the balance even if they survive. Siena has been in debt to us for years.”
“Their advance payment went a considerable distance to soothe my mistrust.”
“You’re open about your dishonor. Why are you bowing?”
“My aim has only been to serve you. But I do not need to go further here. The enemy is near.”
“You mean that you’re afraid of fighting John Hawkwood.”
“It would be better to say I am afraid no longer.”
Half of the battles condottieri fought against each other were that of threat and intimidation. Hawkwood’s sacking of Faenza and Cesena had made him into a monster even to men like Blazovic.
Though it was futile, she could not help but argue. “If we can get inside Siena’s walls, Hawkwood will be stymied.”
“We’re stymied now.”
She had hoped to take Siena quickly, by storm and by surprise. There still seemed a chance she could do it. It got slimmer every day.
She could accuse him of more dishonor, of treachery, malicious iniquity, and anything else she liked, but they both knew it would mean nothing. This was business. What was not business was the manner in which he treated her submissively even as he withdrew. He was ashamed. Ashamed, she realized, of abandoning his preacher.
For all that he had made up his mind to escape, that shame troubled him. Desperation shone steady in his eyes. More than most, Captain Blazovic had been changed by Saint Renatus.
He said, “I will continue sharing with the world what you shared with me. I will tell them the stories.”
“Go, then,” she said. “Do that.” She did not stay to watch him march off, or her corporals fill the gap he’d left.
She had better things to do. A siege to manage, a battle to prepare for.
She had not taken her commander’s baton to meet Blazovic. That would have looked pathetic, trying to exert authority over a man who would not listen. Now she went back to her pavilion to fetch it.
In truth, Fia was surprised that it had taken so long for her first commander to desert her. Her sentries had reported spies sneaking out of Siena’s walls, disappearing into her camps. No doubt some of them were diplomats.
A score of battered men-at-arms and crossbowmen milled about her pavilion. They knew it would not be long before she gave the order to renew the assault. Many of them were scabbed and scarred too. One man walked with enough of a limp that he should have had a cane. Fia suspected a broken arch. He and a number of others shouldn’t have been out.
No one wanted to miss their chance to loot Siena. Every morning, men expected this to be the day she’d finally surmount the walls. Condottieri could not live on pay alone. They needed loot. But they also needed comrades in fighting shape.
Without prompting, her inner voice said, Every time you go to battle, you are reborn.
That was true. And yet Fia had a hard time finding the comfort in it this time. Fia whispered, “If I had done as you suggested, I would have been torn apart – like Kristo.”
It said, It would not be a bad thing to be reborn a martyr.
Had she died below the walls of Siena, her religion, her ideals, would survive
. The Cult of Saint Renatus had spread far beyond the Company of the Star. Soldiers everywhere needed to hear what she had said. She would survive as a story, a legend. Maybe an end in battle would be better for the story, if not for her.
“It would not be me,” she said. “It would be other men’s ideas of me, and their words that would be put in my mouth.”
There are many ways to live on. Not all of them leave you intact.
Her inner voice had not been this talkative in a while. She did not like it.
Captain Antonov was inside the pavilion, stripping his boots. He breathed hard and walked on stiff legs, as though he had spent the night on horseback.
“I’d started to think you’d run away, too,” she snapped. Just irritation. She knew where he’d been.
“I’ve been at war,” he said, and nodded to their oak table. A rough linen sack lay half-open upon it, spilling gold florins.
Caterina filled a wash basin from a waiting bucket. While Antonov told Fia about his adventures, Fia finally took the time to douse and dip her hair. It had become so encrusted and tangled that fire lit along her scalp whenever she tugged it.
On another week, she would have cared more. Today, a deep, bone-biting weariness had seized her. Easier to absorb the pain than to take the time to trim the tangles out.
Antonov and his foragers and pioneers had ranged the Via Francigena, robbed and burned what hostels and farms remained near the road. He had been gone for longer because he had dived back into the marshes and grazing lands of the Maremma. He had stormed and burned monasteries.
As she washed, he told her about a fishing village. The people there had stampeded for their boats. Only they hadn’t had enough boats to hold them all. They’d cast off with men and women clinging to the undersides. By morning, so many of them had drowned. Still they had refused to return to the piers. The peasants and fishermen of that impoverished little village had so feared being taken hostage that they were willing to face long odds on death.
Fia’s stomach churned. “We must have raided the town recently and not remembered it,” she said.
“Not us,” Antonov said. “John Hawkwood was there four years ago.”
Fia said nothing, though her stomach turned still sourer. She wished she could forget that name. Every time she heard it, one of her clocks ticked louder.
Antonov noted, “He could be here by now, if he wanted. Pinching us between Siena’s walls and his army.”
Fia knew it. Her scouts had brushed against his foragers and pioneers days ago. “Hawkwood may have his special commission from the papacy, but he is condottieri. He’ll put himself first. He has his own special grievances with Siena. He does not mind seeing the Sienese suffer.”
Antonov said, “He most likely aims to sweep up Siena after he finishes with us.”
“Most likely,” Fia agreed. “Let us both exhaust each other first.”
Hawkwood knew how to hurt other condottieri. He had fanned raiders along the Via Francigena, attacked merchants coming to trade with the company’s treasure train. Their food supply had tightened. Fia had tried to institute rationing, but the company’s hodge-podge system of independently contracted condottieri was ill-equipped to oblige. Hoarding was rampant. Fia doubted meat ever reached the infantrymen. The company was as much besieged as besieger.
Caterina lifted Fia’s breastplate. Her arms trembled with the weight. Antonov glanced at her. While Fia could read his disdain, he knew better than to say anything. Fia usually kept her anger restrained, but she loosed it for Caterina’s sake. Fia had once struck an officer when he had dared grab Caterina’s hair like she was a moppet rather than Fia’s page and member of her casa. Fia had since given Caterina a mace, a hunting dagger, and a short sword, as well as time to practice.
The grunts and exclamations Caterina made while practicing belied the idea that she was mute. At the same time, it did not seem an affectation, or a choice. Maybe it was better to think of it as a difficulty. Fia was no stranger to difficulties. She had not chosen to crash so violently those years after she had first joined the company.
While Fia donned her armor, Antonov asked, “Do you still intend to go east?”
Caterina paused, looked to Fia. Fia couldn’t remember how much of her plans Caterina had heard before. It didn’t matter. Fia said, “Mercenaries can only keep a single paymaster for so long,” she said. “Otherwise we’d be no better than a standing army.” A caged pet.
Antonov muttered, “We have been all along.” To the Turks. Their envoy was still on the way. Like Hawkwood, every time Fia thought of him, her mind turned to the clocks.
“We’re a free company. The best in Italy. The pay is an excuse. The company does what serves the company’s interests.”
“No – a mercenary company does what is in its leader’s interests. Mine.”
She stopped paying attention to the pinch of her armor long enough to look at him. For years, her position had been ambiguous. She helped decide the company’s path, made decisions with his voice, but always with his consent. “You really think I’m stealing your company? You haven’t been putting up much of a fight.”
He said, “I could countermand you. But not everyone would listen to me.”
She agreed, “It would split the company.”
“The company is my life’s labor.”
“Yours, or theirs?” Again, they both knew she meant the Turks. “I want to make it ours.”
“Your own,” Antonov said.
“If you won’t step ahead and take control, someone else will. If not me, then them.”
“We’ll see. You have one more day at this.” When Fia tilted her head, he said, “News about Blazovic’s defection is still spreading. It won’t have a chance to sink in until tonight. Then your commanders are going to have a better chance to think about how much worse their odds are now, and how much better for them it would be to take their bribe and go.”
He didn’t move to follow her after she finished donning her armor and left.
She did not pause long to review the morning’s assemblage. She knew she would not like what she saw if she looked deeply. Thanks to Hawkwood, food was in precious short supply, as were bolts and fodder. The grain and livestock Antonov had captured would help, but it had not been distributed yet.
Caterina helped her onto her courser. Laskaris rejoined her, fully armored but for his helm. He was unshaven, sallow, and harried. His page, Petrus, had vanished, most likely another casualty of a crossbow bolt. Laskaris must have borrowed another officer’s page for his armor this morning. She couldn’t figure out how he had asked. He had hardly said a word since Petrus disappeared.
The nightly noisemaking was not the only performance on the walls. The Sienese staged public executions atop them, in full view of the invaders. Early on, the Sienese had executed their criminals and deserters, as much a message for those within the walls as without. Now, though, they tortured and hanged Fia’s soldiers, men captured on sallies or during attempts to ladder the walls.
Fia recognized the whiplashed boy being led to the gallows at the wall’s edge. Petrus. His parents, Grecian like Laskaris, had aimed for Petrus to enter mercenary service. It was the only way for men of low heritage to make respected names for themselves in Italy.
Laskaris heaved a long breath. Fia had put men and women in cages before, threatened to drown them, but she had never actually felt compelled to do so. That would have been affording them more dignity and respect than they deserved. Only soldiers’ lives were worth enough to end, to breach the bounds of feeling and religion that kept any man from murdering his neighbor.
The thought of the Sienese doing the same or worse to Caterina made her vision darken. She clasped her sword though there was no one to fight.
Antonov had been right. Today was going to be their last day of trying to overwhelm Siena. Because today she was going to get through.
She held up her baton.
She had a surprise this morning. Her spies i
nside the city had helped a half dozen company men scale the walls. When she lowered her baton, a bevy of crossbow bolts lashed across the defenders above the city’s gates – from behind.
While confusion erupted among the Sienese, her men charged. Fia held her baton ahead, and dug her gilt spurs into her courser. She did not bother to look at the rest of them. She had learned at what point in a battle it was too late to affect things as a captain. She needed to be a commander. The men at her back needed to see her – especially those who had not knowingly seen a woman at war. Every time she fought, she felt the eyes on her, ahead and behind.
The half dozen men had just been the first inside. The attack on the gate was a distraction – not that any of the men involved knew that. The second group was to attack whichever sally port the defenders used this attack. They had orders to seize and jam or destroy the inner portcullis. A heavy responsibility, but with many of the defenders through and the rest distracted, their heroism might carry the day.
A bolt glanced off Fia’s armored shoulder, but it didn’t impart enough of its momentum to knock her from her mount. Pain shivered through her bones, down her back.
On the ground ahead, a hasty formation of Sienese men raced around the side of wall. Salliers. They’d rushed out to keep the company from taking advantage of the confusion at the gates. There were more of them than she expected. Fewer to defend the sally port and its inner portcullis.
She had left pain somewhere far behind, but she still could not raise her arm over her shoulder. She lifted her sword to swing to the side instead. She gave herself to the rage. The Sienese wilted under crossbow fire.
She lost track of the number of impacts on her armor. None of them bit. Someone grabbed her ankle, yanked hard, forced a dismount. She almost lost her sword in another man’s flesh, but managed the strength to yank it free before he toppled. The effort left her winded, distracted. Caterina must have been packing extra padding into her armor. It weighed more than ever before.
From behind, her inner voice said.
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