Without thinking, she ducked.
The attack was as silent as the approach. The air above her pulsed. It mirrored the jolt of her heartbeat.
She had lost her balance. Through the edge of her visor, she watched a mace head cut across the smoke-split sky.
Her inner voice said, This is not a good time for you to be reborn as a martyr.
She crashed to the earth. A knee to her back knocked her breath away from her. Exhaustion smothered her. For a dizzy moment, she could not stand.
A mailed glove grabbed the chin of Fia’s helm. It tried to pry her head upward, to expose her neck for a killing slash.
She swung her arm backward. Her armored elbow connected with plate metal. He let go.
Such armor meant her assailant was rich. Her sword had slipped free of her grasp, but she was too close to get a good thrust or swing anyway. She pulled her thirteen-inch dagger from its sheath. With immense effort, and her armor like an anchor, she hitched up onto one knee.
Her blade glanced off the shoulder of her opponent’s fluted plate, and upward. He foolishly lifted his head while he reeled. The edge slipped in his neck.
Though it would be profitable to keep a hostage, she snarled, pressed deep. Once again, she dripped with another man’s blood. Her arms were painted with it.
She did not have time to consider anything. A Sienese crossbowman stood by. He must have already tried to hit her, missed. He dropped his crossbow. He charged, the tip of his sword leading his way. He held it like it was a spear, like she was a dragon a dozen times her size.
Fia’s dagger was long, but not remotely up to the task of deflecting such a blow. Terror and fury coursed through her. They were tangible, real things. They brought the impossible within reach. Her armor weighed nothing. She forced herself to her feet, twisted aside. Her opponent stumbled past her.
A better time and place will come again.
If she had breath, those words would have taken it. Her inner voice had tried to kill her. It had confessed.
Killed while ascending the walls of Siena would have been a heroic death. Being clubbed in the back of the head by a mace was not.
As much as she wanted to, she did not need to strike the killing blow herself. By the time the crossbowman turned, more of her men had caught up with her. Laskaris spitted the crossbowman. Her officers led her out before she even saw her assailant fall. She spat in his direction, elbowed men who got too close to her. She could not understand why she was being led away. She did not have the words to ask.
Soon enough, she did not need to. The answer was obvious. They were in retreat. None of Fia’s men had gotten near the sally port they had aimed to take.
The defenders were still coming from around the bend in the walls. If there had been an effort to attack the inner portcullis, it had failed.
One of the clocks ticking away in the back of her head fell silent. Then another.
There was silence in the back of her head. Not since the crossbow bolt had nearly killed her had she heard anything like it.
She had failed.
Her inner voice said, You will grow in ways you never meant to, for purposes you cannot see.
13
The sextet of sentries posted along the Via Francigena held their pikes as rigid as if they faced a cavalry charge rather than a sauntering lone rider.
Meloku did not understand how the people of this plane became accustomed to riding. She had been on horseback since dawn, and it had not been long before she asked her demiorganics to block the pain. Now her demiorganics were flashing warnings at the corners of her vision. They would not allow her to continue ignoring the pain. The skin on her left inner thigh was chafed to the point of tearing. And if she continued to strain her right hamstring, it would not function properly if she dismounted.
When she dismounted, she allowed the pain to seep through the demiorganics to make for a convincing gasp.
Too convincing. She staggered.
These men wore red and white on their shoulders: the colors of the Company of Saint George. John Hawkwood’s men. They looked to each other.
She had been to Avignon, the home of Hawkwood’s employers, a lifetime ago. She still had contacts. No one she had affected like Queen Joanna, but people who feared her. They had provided her with a cover identity. They could not give her men.
Her shuttle had taken her to the region of Hawkwood’s camp. No one within miles of Hawkwood’s camp was selling horses. His men had stolen them all. Even half a day’s ride away, she had only been able to buy an old brown and white draft horse. The owner had been looking to sell fast, in advance of Hawkwood’s advance.
She could tell that the sentries’ thoughts mirrored the horse-seller’s. They both thought she would be robbed before the day was over. These men were starting to think they might just be the type of men to do so. She brandished her letter. They didn’t need to be literate to recognize the papacy’s seal.
She explained that she had been sent by the only woman in Italy who would be ludicrous enough as to send a woman on these roads: Catherine of Siena, prophetess of Avignon, professional eccentric. Catherine had been an adviser of all the popes since the Great Mortality, and pretended to advise the rest of Europe as well.
Meloku explained her escorts had deserted her when they had discovered where Catherine had sent them, but that she had been steadfast enough to carry on. She was not carrying anything valuable. The sentries quickly decided she was not worth the trouble.
They sent two men with her – one as a messenger, and one as an escort.
She had been around enough military camps to judge their size by their odor. Her escort led her through the scent of cooking and wood fires, latrines, and manure. Some intersections smelled like chopped onions, others like wood. John Hawkwood’s camp was not that bad as these things went. That was one of the damnable. things about war on this peninsula. The condottieri armies were not that large – five or ten thousand at extremes. In the east, she’d seen armies of millions. A determined polity could fend off mercenaries like these. But Italy was no determined polity.
The armies of Italy’s cities and communes stayed tucked behind their borders while condottieri ravaged their neighbors. Then those neighbors returned the lack of favors, or, worse, employed the condottieri themselves. Leagues against the mercenaries lasted no longer than a year. It was pathetically easy for condottieri to game.
Soon, the smells grew stronger – and not because there were more men about. It had been baked into the earth. Latrines had been buried and redug. Refuse accumulated. This camp had been here longer than these men were accustomed to staying in place.
Her escort stopped outside a bright orange pavilion. He lifted the corner of the tent flap. For the first time, Meloku noticed that three of his fingers had been cleaved at the knuckle. He smiled unkindly when he noticed her staring.
Dahn’s voice leapt unbidden into her ears: “What are you doing?”
She had known it was inevitable that he would track her. She hadn’t checked in since she’d traveled to see Habidah and Kacienta. Of all the times he could have picked, though, he’d called at the most awkward.
That implied that he knew it. And that meant that he had been watching for longer.
“Investigating,” she sent.
“Interfering,” he said. “I can see who you’re visiting.”
“I need to find out something,” she said. If he said anything else, she stopped paying attention. She stepped inside the pavilion.
She was accustomed to walking into places and pretending that she belonged. She had some advantages over the natives. Her eyes did not need to adjust to the dark. Infrared showed her all four people. Two were seated. Two, a pair of bodyguards, stood by the tent flap. She waited, expectantly, for them to turn to her.
Nothing happened. No one looked up. The bodyguards hardly stirred. In spite of the ever-present risk of assassination – Italian warfare did not scruple at poison and hidden knives – th
ey did not consider her worth the trouble of searching.
She pursed her lips. She ought to kill someone on her way out, teach them a lesson.
Smoke lingered in the air, though the fire was only warm embers. There was not much evidence of the treasures the Company of Saint George had collected. Some gold and brass goblets, a sword and helm meant for display, a fine table. The real treasure the papacy had promised him was land.
She recognized the man seated farthest away, unfortunately. She could not have followed papal politics without knowing him. He was overweight but well sculpted, a look the natives considered handsome. He did not hide his disgust at her intrusion. He knew Catherine of Siena better than Hawkwood.
He was Cardinal Robert of Geneva, and he shouldn’t have been here.
Robert and Hawkwood were the butchers of Faenza and Cesena. Hawkwood had tried, not entirely successfully, to deflect the blame for those massacres onto the other. Hawkwood was only following orders, the story went. It was Cardinal Robert who had supposedly been so furious at the murder of a handful of mercenary soldiers that he had ordered the massacre of townsfolk. Hawkwood had pretended disgust. As part of the performance, he shouldn’t have been traveling with Robert again.
The plain, balding man hunched over a desk, writing, could only have been Hawkwood. He didn’t look up. She could not see his face. The sentries’ advance messenger must have told him who she bore a letter from. This was a message, a signal of his interest.
She deposited her letter on Hawkwood’s desk. He still didn’t look up.
She discreetly looked over his writing. He was composing a letter addressed to the priors of Siena. A demand for payment of past due payments, to the sum of fifteen thousand florins, plus new indemnities to refrain from further raids.
She did not move. At length, Hawkwood sighed. “You are not a nun. Some other friend of Catherine’s?”
Robert of Geneva said, “No one I’ve ever seen with her.”
Meloku ignored the challenge. The best way to prove herself was to appear not to need to. “Do you intend to read my lady’s letter?”
“No,” Hawkwood said.
After all the trouble she had gone to forging that letter, too. Catherine of Siena fancied herself a meddler, sending letters to every power in Italy and beyond. Few of those powers paid any attention. Meloku had done a little research to prep for this visit. In Catherine’s last letter to Hawkwood, she had called him an “athlete of God,” serving the papacy against the heretical condottieri Cult of Saint Renatus. She had not mentioned the letter before, in which he had been a “son of Belial” for abandoning, however briefly, papal service in favor of Florence.
Meloku said, “She’ll expect an answer.”
“When time allows.”
“I can wait.”
Hawkwood didn’t take his attention off the page, but he was no longer writing.
Meloku enjoyed needling men like him. If there was one thing she could not stand about the natives, it was their vanity. It was her pleasure to puncture it, make farces of their displays and rituals.
She didn’t need to break Ways and Means’ rules and bring out her technology. Her cover gave her power enough. Catherine of Siena had the ear of the pope. It would not do to have someone in Catherine’s orbit unhappy.
Robert said, “Follow as you wish. You won’t like where we’re headed.”
“Really? It looks to me as though you’ve been sitting here for weeks while Siena burns.”
Robert did not answer. He could not admit, to one of Catherine’s agents, that he had countenanced Hawkwood’s delay.
She asked Hawkwood, “What do you intend to do with yourself after the Crusade?” The big question, the one that might help her determine who was manipulating these men, and why.
He ignored her.
She lifted her chin, this time exaggerating the movement to make sure he noticed her peering over his shoulder. “I doubt the priors have that much left. The Company of the Star is likely taking the last of what they have thanks to your inaction.”
Hawkwood reflexively slapped his hand over the letter. It smeared the fresh ink.
“Not accustomed to dealing with literate women?” Meloku asked. As a member of Catherine’s retinue, she would of course read Latin. After the telling pause that followed, she said, “My lady Catherine is under the impression that you intend to save her city from this Satanic cult.”
Hawkwood said, “The city of Siena is in arrears of payments promised to me and my company.”
Robert said, hastily, “Of course we bear no ill intent for any friend of the papacy.”
“Artful,” Meloku told Robert, with three times the sarcasm as would have sufficed. “Well saved.”
Hawkwood swept the ruined letter aside. He turned to her, and for the first time Meloku saw his face. Like many of the generals, murderers, and tyrants Meloku had met, he was entirely unremarkable. Maybe a little so much so as to be sad. Fat lips. Thin hair. A perpetual pout. His was a face that artists would have to work hard to misrepresent.
Hawkwood asked, “In God’s name, what do you want from me?”
“All my lady and I want is an answer. After this battle is over, what do you intend to do with yourselves?”
When Hawkwood and Robert looked to each other, Meloku thought she would need to prompt them again. Hawkwood said, “This is not a secret. I already have lands in the Romagna. Per my contract with His Holiness, I will have more when this campaign ends. They can be prosperous lands. But they need a lord and defender.”
“You don’t intend to press your conquests?” Meloku asked. “To reshape Italy?”
“What profit is there in that?” he asked, dryly.
“You tried to settle in the Romagna before. You had to give it up when your neighbors kept making war on you.” Having lands to defend was bad for business. Raiding was better. “What makes you think this will go any better?”
Meloku knew immediately that she’d gone too far. Hawkwood’s simmering frustration exploded. “What the fuck does Catherine mean by this? Did she even tell you to ask?”
Without missing a beat, Meloku turned to Robert. “And you? Will you stop pushing after Siena?”
“The papacy intends to return to Rome, of course. Catherine knows this. She argues for it.”
This could be something. A geopolitical motive for Ways and Means to be manipulating events in this region. But it didn’t seem big enough. The papacy could be manipulated from Avignon as easily as Rome.
Before she could answer, Hawkwood scoffed. “And Catherine should know just as well that it will never happen. She and Pope Gregory are the only people in Avignon who want to leave. Avignon is filthy, but it’s safe. Rome is ruled by outlaws, and it’s poor. If Gregory tries to go, the cardinals will tie him to his throne.”
Robert bristled. “His Holiness has awarded you a more generous contract than I argued for, given your prior abandonment–”
“Even you would hold him back if you thought he would go,” Hawkwood said, and for the first time she heard the contempt he held for Robert.
Meloku’s retinal infrared said Hawkwood was right. The pattern of blood in Robert’s cheeks suggested that he was not actually offended or angry – only playing a role. In any case, she had seen enough now.
“You’re both such goddamned messes,” Meloku told them.
When Meloku had last been in the position of manipulating people on this plane, she had not been able to alter everyone as she had Joanna. She had chosen her targets not just for the power they held. Consistency, stability, and predictability were the most important traits of a good patsy. These men were none of those things. She wouldn’t have selected them, and was willing to bet that no one else would have, either. It was plain enough that they were in control of their own actions.
Just to make sure, she pulse scanned the area.
The results nearly robbed her of her composure.
Hawkwood’s pavilion was replete with technolog
y. Real tech. Unity tech. Their electronic signatures flared like torches. There were four sources nearby. One was underneath a table, another in a dresser, a third on a decorative silver helmet, and the last on the frame of Hawkwood’s bed. All objects that would be carted from camp to camp.
Eavesdroppers or the like. Maybe more than that.
Hawkwood and Robert were no longer listening to her, or she to them. She left them to argue.
Her escort had vanished. Outside, she stopped, and curled her nose at the fouled air. All around her, she smelled suffering. Bad food. Sweat. Sickness. The angry lethargy of men who’d been stuck in one place for too long.
Even the conquerors of this plane were miserable. The nearest man was a groomsman, likely a slave, tending to a palfrey worth ten times as much as him. He looked to her, and then quickly away.
Her pulse scan had captured more than technology. Every glint of metal, every coin, every helmet, every sword and arrowhead glittered in her mental map of the camp. She had quite an imagination, and thought she had grasped the scale of this place – but there were more weapons here than she would have guessed.
She had always held herself above these people. Over the course of her exile, she had started to realize that was a defense mechanism. There was so much suffering here. And so much ahead.
Meloku did not want to be a part of it. After Hawkwood beat Fiametta of Treviso, if he could, he would attack Siena just like she had. He would torch the countryside until he got his lucre.
Ways and Means was manipulating all of this. Meloku had done a lot she’d learned to regret, but even then, she never could have done something like Ways and Means was doing. Never been a party to it if she had known Ways and Means would cause it.
Now that she was outside, she took another pulse scan, this one long-range. She wanted to see how far Ways and Means’ reach extended. What she found took her aback.
The eavesdroppers were gone. Or apparently so. There was no more electronic activity, even in Hawkwood’s tent.
They were still there, of course. A third, more careful scan picked them up. Little bits of metal, alloys beyond the natives’ manufacturing capability. If she hadn’t been looking so closely, and hadn’t known what she was looking for, she never would have seen them. They had gone dead, silent, after the first time she scanned them.
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