Speak to the Devil

by Dave Duncan

  Eventually Wulf spoke. “He warned me. He told me when Anton and I went to the monastery, ‘Anything the Voices do for you will turn to evil eventually!’”

  Otto and Vlad just nodded.

  Leonas! Who could have imagined that an imbecile could be a Speaker? They should have noticed that the knights didn’t stop him when he went to Madlenka in the hall. Why hadn’t they? Probably because they suddenly didn’t want to. Leonas had not deliberately done anything to them or to the countess. Like a small child, he just wanted things and expected them to happen. And in his case, they did. He had no nimbus, because that came with understanding, and he would never understand.

  Otto had his hands clasped as if he were still praying. “No wonder his father keeps close watch on him. He threw a tantrum at Count Stepan and his son and they died—when? A few days later, a couple of weeks later? Is that possible?”

  “You know as much as I do,” Wulf said. He felt as if he were standing inside a block of ice. Marek! Oh, Marek! “Seems anything’s possible.”

  Vilhelmas had certainly been a Speaker with a nimbus, but he might not have killed Stepan and Petr Bukovany. He was a distant cousin, so Satanism ran in the Vranov family also.

  Wulf put it in words. “Maybe Leonas’s curses took time to act. Or one day his father said, ‘Remember those two bad men who shouted at you at Cardice? You don’t like them, do you?’ Madlenka was kind to him, so she wasn’t affected. Leonas doesn’t like the old countess and he was close to her tonight. He doesn’t even know what he’s doing—but his father knows! Vranov uses him as a weapon, a puppet Speaker.”

  Otto shook his head in despair. “You mean that just now Vranov said, ‘Do you remember that funny little man with the shaved head who ran around in the banquet hall, shouting at us? He was the one who killed Father Vilhelmas. Go and tell him how much you hate him’?”

  Wulf nodded, tasting vomit. “The boy can’t be trusted in churches because the voices echo and sound like his Voices. He probably doesn’t understand what his Voices are saying.”

  “He scares the piss out of me,” Vlad said. “We’d better tell Anton.”

  “Tomorrow,” Otto said. “Right now we need a priest.”

  “What do you want me to do about this, Brothers?” Wulf demanded. “A Magnus lies dead. Do I avenge him? Go and kill that half-wit boy?”

  “No!” Vlad bellowed. “No, not now. It’s a trap. They’ll be waiting for you.”

  “Not ever, I think,” Otto said.

  “Why not? I’m damned already. Obviously my Voices came from Satan. I’ve killed two priests and now my brother has died because of what I did.”

  Vlad and Otto exchange shocked looks.

  “No!” Vlad boomed. “Never, never think that way! Your intentions were good.”

  Otto said, “But now you understand the dangers your Voices warned you against. To civic rulers like Anton you are a killer who can strike anyone, at any time. To the Church you’re Heresy Incarnate. You’re the Antichrist. You could start a great heretical movement like Jan Huss did, or overthrow the pope. Duke Wartislaw may not know about you yet, but you’ll certainly be his prime target as soon as he does. Even Cardinal Zdenek must disown you now. You could supplant him, or depose King Konrad and take the crown. You’re more dangerous than the Ottoman Sultan or the Great Pestilence. Can anybody or anything control you now, boy?”

  “Another Speaker,” Wulf said. “Azuolas would have beaten me tonight if Marek hadn’t come to my aid. A gang of them certainly could.”

  “You must leave Castle Gallant,” Otto persisted. “Tonight! Go far away and make a new life under a new name.”

  Wulf shook his head and reached for wine. “No.”

  “Remember what I told you about Joan of Arc being burned? Remember Julius Caesar, stabbed? Alexander the Great, poisoned? You’re a danger to everybody, Wulf! All power is unpopular but absolute power will turn every man’s hand against you.”

  “You must go, Wolfcub.” Vlad looked genuinely concerned.

  Wulf desperately wanted to do that, to be far away from Madlenka and the torment of seeing her as Anton’s wife. Now that he knew that the Wends had at least one Speaker guarding their great bombard, the chances that he could save Castle Gallant had dropped from slim to very close to zero. But there was no place to hide from Speakers. Brother Lodnicka knew his face now, so he could come to Wulf anywhere, at any time. He might be watching through his eyes right now, listening with his ears.

  “You’re absolutely right,” he said. “I don’t have to stay here and die. It’s Anton’s pissy castle. Let him defend it! So where shall we go?”

  “We?” his brothers barked in perfect unison.

  That seemed so funny that Wulf almost laughed, until he remembered that Marek’s corpse lay sprawled in the chair beside him. Oh, Marek, Marek! How were they going to explain this death to a priest?

  “Everything you said about me applies to both of you. Cardice is none of our business. So where shall I take us?”

  “Magnuses do not run away!” Vlad roared.

  “No, we don’t,” Wulf said. Of course, when the castle was about to fall, he would rescue Madlenka and move her to somewhere safe. But then he would come back and stand with his brothers. It was the Magnus way. He raised his glass. The other two saw what was coming and raised theirs.

  They proclaimed the toast together: “Omnia audere!”

  Before the wine touched their lips, a fist banged on the door. Vlad hurtled across the room to open it, using his bulk to block the newcomer’s view of Marek. He also hid Wulf’s view of the newcomer, but Wulf recognized the voice of Dalibor Notivova.

  “Campfires, Sir Vladislav! Down at High Meadows. The lookouts spotted a couple just after dark and now there’s at least a score of them. Seems an army’s moving in, pitching camp!”

  “High Meadows?” Vlad said. “You mean south of us? Not the Wends, then?”

  “No, sir. Pelrelmians, maybe. Can’t be king’s men, or they’d come to the gate.”

  “Vranov!”

  “Seems likely, sir. But a lot more men than he had there last weekend.”

  Vlad boomed out a laugh. “Well, Dali my lad, that’s good news! Excellent news! I am exactly in the mood to head out and kill somebody! Let’s find me a warm cloak and you and I will go have a look.” He glanced over his shoulder. “You two clean up here.” He chivvied Dali out ahead of him and closed the door.

  HISTORICAL NOTE

  Jorgary is entirely imaginary. Outside its borders I used real place names, but you will not be able to fit them to any atlas, modern or historical.

  The story takes place around 1475. The Middle Ages had ended. The Reformation was still almost fifty years in the future.

  Michelangelo was born that year. His future patron, Lorenzo the Magnificent, ruled Florence, and Pope Sixtus IV was building the Sistine Chapel. England was embroiled in the Wars of the Roses. Ferdinand and Isabella had not yet driven the Moors from Spain. Louis XI (known as the Spider) was ruling France, while his archenemy, Charles the Bold—duke of Burgundy from 1467 to 1477, was changing the nature of warfare forever.

  As late as the Battle of Agincourt, in 1415, the cream of French chivalry attempted cavalry charges against English bowmen, with results even more disastrous than those their ancestors had suffered doing the same thing at Crécy two generations earlier. In fact, the days of the armored knight on horseback had been waning since 1314, when lowly Scottish infantry clobbered English cavalry in the Battle of Bannockburn.

  The fighting horse had become too vulnerable and too expensive. The whole concept of knighthood was fading, so that commoners and aristocrats became lumped together as men-at-arms. They were usually grouped in “lances,” consisting of two men in armor to wield the actual lance and a youth to look after the horses. Both infantry and archers would ride to battle, but fight on foot. Cavalry could be used to raid the enemy’s baggage train or ride down the fugitives when his forces tried to flee the field.


  The old feudal levies, where a vassal owed his liege forty days’ knight’s service a year, were already largely replaced by taxation, which the king could use to hire mercenaries. In the fifteenth century the mercenaries began to give way to full-time professional national armies with their own uniforms and insignia—the first standing armies since Roman times. The new system was largely introduced by Charles the Bold, but the changes did not happen at the same time everywhere. My fictional King Konrad employs regular cavalry troops but hires mercenaries as well. Out in the sticks, at Cardice, the landowners are still calling up feudal levies.

  Pomerania was a duchy occupying parts of modern Poland and Germany. It was ruled by many successive dukes named Wartislaw, a name I could never invent. Wends was a name applied to various peoples of Slavic descent.

  Guns were first used in battle in Europe in the fourteenth century, but they were primitive, and often more dangerous to the gunners than the targets. Only in the fifteenth century did they become effective. Henry V of England took several hundred guns with him when he invaded France in 1415. He used them in his siege of Harfleur, but they appear to have been of limited help. In 1453 French canons devastated English bowmen at the Battle of Castillon, and that same year the Ottoman Turks used guns to breach the ancient walls of Constantinople. Handguns followed later. In 1498 the senate of Venice decreed that in future its forces would be armed with firearms instead of crossbows. Modern warfare had arrived.

  The “Dragon” gun in this book is based on the giant bombard Mons Meg, still on display in Edinburgh Castle, Scotland. According to Wikipedia, it was made in about 1452 and fired 400-pound, 22-inch stone balls for up to two miles. Notably, the barrel has no trunnions to fit it to a gun carriage. It would have been transported on a cart and then “emplaced” on the battlefield.

  For an account of the change in warfare, see: A Brief History of Medieval Warfare: The Rise and Fall of English Supremacy at Arms, 1314–1485 by Peter Reid, Running Press, 2008.

  And, finally: horses have to be trained to trot, and in those days they mostly ambled or ran.