Unless, of course, they were expecting her to see through this, and had something else in mind. She so rarely fought condottieri of Hawkwood’s class that she felt unsteady in her footing.
Caterina brought her remaining armor and her brown courser. She donned her gauntlet and gloves while her courser fought Caterina, jerking its head, and bashing it into her shoulder. She had not had the time to properly acclimate the company’s horses to the sound of cannon fire. Practice would have alerted Hawkwood’s many spies. Her courser calmed only when she climbed on his back. She slipped her helm on, visor down.
Finally, she hoisted her commander’s baton, and rode to the van. Corporals and sergeants barked as she passed, ordering their lines to reform around her. Laskaris’s order was getting around.
As she rode past the front lines, a few crossbow bolts bit the dirt about her. None landed closer than thirty feet. A taunt. She was meant to charge now that it appeared it would be another minute before those skirmishers could rewind their weapons.
She waved her baton, and rode.
From out ahead, she got a better look at the field. Her battle lines had folded into a crescent. So had Hawkwood’s. On an unopposed march, the wings would meet first. Their formations were offset from each other, though, and Hawkwood’s was outsized. But nobody was marching. Fia’s men did not travel farther than her.
The enemy was waiting for her to come out from the center, just like this, and pincer her. She did not have long to study their disposition before more trees and hills interceded. Hawkwood’s skirmishers had chosen this route for that reason. She wouldn’t be able to see his wings as they folded on her.
The enemy crossbowmen who’d already fired ran behind their comrades, who knelt and took aim. They were still too far to fire with much effect, though this time Fia heard a gasp and choke behind her. They were tantalizingly close. A fast cavalry sweep would knock them down…
Surrounded by walls of trees, she felt blinded. A nervous tension burned her legs, and got worse each second she stayed. She waited until just after it became unbearable. Then she held her baton up, flat, and waved it backward. Halt and retreat.
She’d given the signal just in time. She saw, as she returned to a clearer part of the battlefield, that the enemy wings had moved faster than she’d guessed. In the time since she’d lost sight of them, they’d covered half the distance they’d needed to pincer her. The same trees that had blinded her to them had also kept them from seeing that she had retreated until it was nearly too late.
Her soldiers on the wings were rushing headlong to meet them.
Hawkwood’s men had taken themselves out of the ideal alignment to face a frontal assault. Their heavy cavalry had sprung toward Fia’s position, leaving their infantrymen open. The company’s skirmishers rode within range, dismounted, and loosed a storm of projectiles.
The company landed a good sucker punch, but hardly decisive. By the time she returned to where she’d started, the enemy’s cavalry had doubled back to their positions, and her men had fallen back.
Before long, the skirmishers crawled forward again, firing. Taunting. Fia pretended once more to chase after them. Again, their wings fell out of formation. Her men darted out to meet them, though this time Hawkwood’s men had left some of their cavalry behind. The Company of the Star scored a handful of casualties, but little else.
Upon her return to the battle lines, she turned commander of the center skirmishers over to the corporal she’d brought with her, the only man who hadn’t volunteered to fight Bloody Robert. Now that she’d demonstrated how to dance, he had little trouble following suit. Test them like they thought they were testing her, tire them out. Fia led the infantry who’d accompanied her to the water carts. Fresh troops took their place.
She rode back to the rear, hoping to find Antonov. She found Laskaris instead. “We can’t keep that up for hours,” Laskaris pointed out.
“Neither can they,” she said. From back here, she had a good enough view of the front lines – enough to see that the enemy, in their dance, had covered more distance than her men. She wondered how long it would be before they figured out that she wasn’t taking their bait or probing for weaknesses – she was just exhausting them. Stalling.
Her only strategy was to delay. The Company of the Star only needed to hold Hawkwood and Robert long enough for her next strike to land.
It was long enough in coming.
The sky grayed, shadowed. The rain clouds got near enough to provide shade. For a while she worried rain would come and revitalize the enemy, wasting her efforts at tiring them. Then she saw the motion she’d been waiting for: a wavering in the enemy’s rear, a heat mirage. She could not see individual men from this distance, but soon they moved in bulk, like water receding from a beach. Groups of men peeled off from Hawkwood’s rear in pell-mell order. The cluster of men to the far west that Laskaris identified as Hawkwood’s reserves were also moving.
She was watching so closely that she nearly didn’t see Antonov arrive. He’d come from the direction of the Via Francigena. Messengers coming down the road would have found him first.
She asked, “The stradiots found their mark?” He nodded.
Her army looked small when it stood against Hawkwood’s – but it should not have looked this small. She’d kept her heavy cavalry and infantry close at hand. The moment she’d heard Hawkwood had departed the road, she’d sent her stradiots along the other side.
Like her, Hawkwood was accustomed to fighting the defenders of cities, or native condottieri. Conventional Italian armies. But the Company of the Star was not conventional, and its leadership was just as foreign as he was. He had not often fought light cavalry as crude, swift, and effective as Albanian stradiots. She had sent them after Hawkwood’s treasure train.
Like her, he had accumulated riches as he had pillaged his way through Italy. He dragged them with him. He did not trust the papacy enough to transport it back to Avignon. Her scouts had located his train fifteen miles behind the main body of his force. It was guarded, but not sufficiently so against massed attack.
Now word of the attack had reached Hawkwood’s front lines, too. Hawkwood wasn’t the only commander to keep his treasure with the train. His other companies’ captains, his own contracted condottieri, kept their property on the treasure train. Their loot was what was important to them. Not the battle. His reserves were breaking.
Now both of the enemy’s wings formed into marching order. Hawkwood or Robert, or both, must have lost patience with skirmishing, trying to lure Fia into a trap. The furious shouts of their officers carried across the land.
As blood seeping from an open wound, the enemy began to advance. Slow, at first.
The Sienese artillery fired again. All six cannons sounded in rapid succession. Two gaps abruptly split the enemy’s right flank. None of the other shots had any effect that she saw.
One of the blasts had not sounded right. One of the artillery piece’s plumes of smoke was twice as large, gnarled by twisted roots: the debris trails of something large blasting apart. A cannon had misfired, exploded. The smoke covered at least a dozen men. Fia wondered how many had died.
Tension squeezed her chest. Hawkwood’s army looked so vastly huge against hers, and, for the first time, she wondered if she should have sent the stradiots away. But the stradiots were not well matched against Hawkwood’s heavy cavalry.
She placed her hand on the cantle of her horse’s saddle, but did not haul herself up. This battle would not end with the initial clash. The older she got, the more she was aware of how limited her energy was. She needed to hold herself in reserve.
She did not have to wait long.
Another of Antonov’s messengers found him, and far faster than she would have expected news to travel fifteen miles. Antonov listened, shaken. The stubble outlining his mustache stood out all the stronger against his pale cheeks. He said, “I sent this man only an hour ago. He had to turn back. The Via Francigena has been cut off.
” A body of men, light skirmishers and armored pikemen, had appeared as if from nowhere. They flew the banner of the Company of Saint George.
So her army was not the only one that looked smaller than it should have. Hawkwood, too, must have been missing a number of his regular cavalry and pikemen. Fia and Antonov spent a minute figuring out what must have happened. Hawkwood had left them in concealment to the east of the Via Francigena. An ambush. He’d known that she was sending men that way.
She’d still caught him off guard. He must have been expecting her to try to flank him. He’d positioned his ambush to cut off regular infantry and cavalry. He hadn’t realized that she would send raiders straight through to his treasure train. The stradiots had ridden right past the ambush. But now Hawkwood’s men were moving to cut off the stradiots’ retreat.
If she knew her stradiots, she wouldn’t see many of them again. When they saw that the road had been blocked, they would take whatever treasure they’d stolen and keep going. That had always been the risk of sending crude foreigners after a rich target. But her strategy had been so rigid she’d had to count on getting them back. And now…
“I didn’t give those riders their orders until late last night.” Only her officers knew where the stradiots had gone. Even Antonov had only known later. It had been one of her many plans he’d only given his acquiescence. An ambush like that took time to set up. Hawkwood would have had to have given his orders at the same time she’d given hers. “Finding that out would take more than spies. It would take–”
Abject treachery, her inner voice supplied.
Someone very close, intimate to her, would have to have told them. Not Antonov. Not Laskaris. Even they had found out too late.
Her inner voice did not deny the idea that came to her.
Before Laskaris could answer, she said, “Never mind. Best we can count on now is for the stradiots to be a distraction.”
Laskaris’s mustache dripped with sweat. “What do we do now?”
“Charge,” she said. It was a terrible idea, but it was better than staying still. There was a very slim path forward, like an escarpment: solid rock to one side, and an unguarded fall on the other. “We’ll win through strength of arms. We tired out their vanguard. And we drove a good part of their reserves away. If any of the stradiots are able to make it through, we’ll pinch them between us.”
“They can’t,” Antonov said. “They won’t.”
The stradiots had likely already scattered. And if the men Hawkwood had sent to hold the road turned back and joined the fight, the weight of the enemy’s numbers would be impossible to hold back.
Already, the tips of the armies’ flanks met, clashed, and curled around each other. But Hawkwood’s army was larger. He was bracketing the Company of the Star. The screams carried over the barking officers. Hawkwood’s flanks would envelop her army if they did not find a way to straighten their ranks.
She glanced to Antonov and Laskaris. Laskaris seemed frozen. No color had returned to Antonov’s face.
“We’re not dead men yet,” she told them, though she knew they couldn’t believe her. She seized her baton from under her arm and rode ahead, toward the center lines. She did not look back.
Smoke poured over the battlefield. The Sienese cannon coughed soot and ash. The misfired cannon had sparked a fire. Fia felt as though she had ridden into an ocean. The battle was a gray sea under gray clouds. Waves of smoke curlicued overhead. Enough to get lost in.
Her inner voice whispered to her, helping her keep her bearings, telling her where to go.
She used her baton to lash men about their shoulders or helmets, and yelled for everyone who could hear her to rush to the wings. She pulled through a bank of smoke. Suddenly the enemy was ahead, less than a stone’s toss away.
Steel men on armored horses turned to her. The infantry following her planted their pikes in the ground, braced to receive a charge. Bolts split the air, peppered the ground.
Her visor hid everything except what was in front of her. She had no idea what was happening on the other wing, or the overall state of the battle. She knew with a sudden and weighty certainty that she had been herded here.
The battle had been lost the moment Hawkwood had cut off her stradiots. Or before, when she had failed to subdue Siena. Her enemy moved with a swiftness that meant that someone had fed them information.
And she knew who had betrayed her.
Her inner voice was real. She had always treated it as such, even as she recognized that it seemed just as much within her as her own thoughts. It knew too much. It said too many things she couldn’t have invented.
She had never, until now, grappled with the implications of that. If it was real, then of course it could talk to other people, too. It had just, until now, not chosen to.
Her inner voice started to speak. It never finished the first word.
It screamed.
Lightning strobed overhead, blinding white and searing hot.
She reflexively clapped her hands over her helm to try to block the scream inside her head, but that wouldn’t have worked even had the noise been real.
There was a second flash, and then a third, but no bolt. She heard no thunder. The clouds pulsed with light but remained silent. No thunder. It was not because the scream blotted the noise. The scream was a thought, not a sound. She could hear the yells of the men about her, the snap of the crossbows.
Silence reigned in the skies. The sky was livid with light, but she was sure that whatever was happening wasn’t a storm. The shriek died away.
Half of her men’s eyes had turned skyward. So had the enemy’s. Only those locked sword-in-shield continued to fight. The nearest men looked to her for a signal, some cue as to how they should respond. Even some of the enemy glanced to her.
She wished she knew. She did not realize she had made a decision until she raised her baton. She hurled it.
It pirouetted end-over-end and landed behind one of Hawkwood’s bannermen.
The only way she was going to get her baton back was by charging Hawkwood’s lines.
Most of the enemy were too distracted to see what she had done, but her men weren’t. She’d made a statement. The shout they raised finally deafened the silence of the sky, and in her head. Fia slammed her boot into her courser’s side, and rode.
16
Joanna’s reedy servant girl was even more surprised to see Meloku the second time. Infrared showed the girl’s pulse jumping a measure. Had she been carrying anything, she would have dropped it.
She must have thought that the bear had gone into hibernation.
“The queen,” Meloku said, when the girl would be able to hear past her heartbeat.
The girl nodded.
A pair of guards blocked the queen’s bedroom door. They stood aside without a word when they saw “Veroncia.” The girl gingerly tapped a knock. Meloku, without waiting for an answer, pushed it open.
To Meloku’s relief, Queen Joanna was alone. No ladies-in-waiting, no courtiers. Good. Dawn was not far away. Meloku did not have the patience to be trapped here another full day. She and Joanna would have to be alone for this.
Joanna had risen early for Sunday Mass. Though a sovereign of her stature should have been attended by her ladies, Joanna had, as was her wont, chased them out. She was a solitary creature. She did not cope well with others. Or, most of the time, with herself. Joanna sat atop her bed, scowling. The instant she saw Meloku, her expression melted to guileless neutrality.
Meloku had caught Joanna halfway through the process of binding her hair with a pearl-studded veil. Her hair was already so tight that skin on her forehead paled. All of this would be easier done, and likely less painfully, with help.
Meloku turned to dismiss the servant girl, but the girl was already bounding down the hall. Meloku shook her head, closed the door.
She turned to Joanna and waited for her to say something. Joanna waited just as patiently for the same. Meloku kept hoping, every time, that
it would be different.
She gave in first. Joanna could have sat and stared for hours. “What do you think of me?”
Joanna opened her mouth. Then she stopped. The thought couldn’t form, let alone finish. It was not that Joanna felt either ill of her or well disposed. It was that Joanna could not think either of those things. Meloku was a hole in her imagination.
Meloku sat on one of the stools Joanna’s ladies would have used. “You ought to hate me, you know.”
Joanna looked at her as though she had not heard. It was quite possible that, if asked, she would not have remembered hearing it.
Meloku’s nun’s habit had voluminous outer sleeves. She reached inside one, and retrieved a black capsule. She turned it over in her hands.
“Would you like to hate me?” she asked.
Joanna’s brow folded. She looked as though she had bitten into a sour apple. But the question had gotten her mind churning. Meloku saw the churning stop. Joanna asked, “Do you want me to hate you?”
A meaningless question. Had Meloku said “yes,” Joanna might have pretended to hate. She couldn’t have felt it.
Meloku pressed her thumb to the capsule’s top. It clicked and split open. She plucked from the cushioned interior a thorny seed. Its spines softened at the touch of her palm.
In the glint of firelight, it luminesced an oily violet. Held from a different angle, the reflection turned green, and then bile black. It tickled her palm. The spines, as they brushed her skin, were constantly tasting her. Tearing away microscopic skin samples. Reading her DNA. Checking her identity.
Thirty years ago, the creature who had exiled Ways and Means to this plane had also burnt out her neural demiorganics. She’d had to get them replaced. This seed was a modified version of those given to Unity citizens as children. It could grow a complete set of demiorganics in weeks.
One of these had rebuilt her own demiorganics after she had been robbed of them. It had even repaired the burnt neural tissue. As a precaution against the creature returning, Ways and Means had given all of its agents these seeds.
Terminus Page 21