The King's Coin: Ambition is the only faith (Visigoths of Spain Book 2)

by Paula Constant

  Neboulos shot him a sideways glance. “I have heard he answers to the Spanish bastard.”

  Leofric made a contemptuous sound. Theo quelled him with a frown. “All men in Sebastopolis are bought by someone. Kyros might answer to Oppa, but he has reason enough to fight for us.”

  “A man who can be bought will sell to highest bidder,” said Neboulos, unmoved.

  Silas’s white teeth shone in the daylight. “Ah,” he said, smiling, “but when those paying him also escort his wine through the mountain passes – and ensure it reaches those who are prepared to pay for quality – they are hard to outbid.”

  Neboulos looked between Theo, Leofric, and Silas and smiled reluctantly. “You will take men scouting tonight?” he asked.

  “With your permission.” Theo nodded. “I have the men for the job.” He gestured behind him. A murmur of assent came from the men ranged about the cooking fires.

  “So.” Neboulos stood and slapped the dirt from his bare thighs. Despite the chill in the air, he never wore more than the brief tunic of the Greeks, and his legs were broad, thick, and hairy beneath it, scarred with the marks of a hundred battles. “Now we sleep.”

  It was not a hot day, yet Theo found it hard to rest. Oppa’s voice taunted him: What do you think will happen when you return, Theudemir? Do you think my father will welcome to his court the son of a traitor, the man betrothed to the granddaughter of another traitor? Do you think you will still be Theudemir of Aurariola after your brother has been dragged through the streets or blinded as punishment for his treachery and your father lies dead on a battlefield?

  The thought of Aurariola lost, his brother humiliated as a traitor, brought a visceral surge of anger every time it crossed his mind. Theo, lying on his back and staring up as clouds chased across a cerulean sky, gritted his teeth, pounded the hard ground impotently with clenched fists, and wished he could ask Laurentius, and his brothers, for advice. He did not trust Oppa. But in Sebastopolis, a place where there was no trust to be had, perhaps duty to Spania might be the only thing to which his loyalty could truly belong. No man could remain unmoved by what they had seen. Not even Oppa. My father believes the Arabs pose no threat to Spania, he had said. Theo tried to imagine how it would feel to tell someone about the Arabic forces, to have fought against them and to be told they posed no threat. He made an angry sound aloud at the thought of it.

  Would that not be enough to change a man? he wondered, as he had so many times since talking with Oppa. He thought of King Egica’s legitimate son and the fact that Oppa, no matter how high he climbed, would never be more than a royal bastard, favoured but not honoured. His own time away from Spania had changed the way Theo thought of his home country, had made the petty squabbles and pretensions of the nobility seem irrelevant to the greater objective of saving Spania itself. If his own perspective had so altered, Theo wondered, was it not possible that Oppa’s, too, had changed? And would it not make sense, so far from home, for him to wish to ally himself with those he believed understood the real threat Spania would one day face – and who endeavoured to build the resources to combat that threat?

  For I can do nothing at all, Theo thought in frustration, if my family are denounced as traitors, Aurariola is gone, and I no longer have a voice.

  Theo tossed restlessly on the hard ground. One hand touched the hard ridges of skin on his face, smooth and burnished with time and weather but forever a reminder to all men of the brutal lick of Oppa’s whip on his skin. Leofric and Silas, too, had felt that evil touch, and Theo understood why they could not forgive the man who had wielded the whip. But for Theo it was different. He and Oppa shared a life, no matter how distant Spania was, nor how they had been on opposite sides of their country’s affairs. Still, they were both Spaniards. And Theo, who had been raised above all to respect the Chrismon-and-peacock symbol of Mater Spania, could not so easily dismiss that shared allegiance.

  He touched the coin at his neck that bore the profile of Geila, his grandfather, who had once ruled Spania, albeit briefly. Beneath it, the smooth bone amulet Lælia had given him was warm against his skin. He stroked it, not daring to recall the touch of her mouth under his on the day she gave it to him. His longing for Lælia combined with confusion over Oppa’s suggestion of alliance. The agitation and tension of war seemed to have made his body eternally aflame, and even the most casual recollection of Lælia, the curve of her body, the supple heat of her, set him afire with longing he had no way of assuaging.

  He slept beneath a flowering apricot tree, through which dappled sunlight played over his eyes. The shadows playing through the broad canopy entered his dreams. Unwelcome images of Elpis were chased by brief, tantalising glimpses of Lælia, her face hidden from him. Where Elpis appeared in his dreams in vivid, disturbing clarity, Lælia’s figure was clouded and distant, unreachable. The two figures chased across his mind, one pulling him like a magnet, yet ever elusive, the other terribly present and available. In his mind Elpis seemed entangled with Oppa, as if by taking one he accepted the other. Theo felt their combined pull tugging him away from Lælia’s fading presence across a divide from which he feared he could never return.

  He woke at dusk with his cloak tangled about his ankles, drenched in sweat, to find Leofric observing him with thoughtful eyes.

  “You speak much, schnecke, when you sleep.”

  Theo turned away and busied himself with his weapons. “That is why I choose to sleep at a distance to the camp. You should, perhaps, not bother yourself with accompanying me.”

  His tone was curt. He bent his head to splash water over his torso, expecting to find Leofric gone. But when he raised his head, the Slav was standing unmoved, arms over his chest, still eyeing him.

  “When we return, you will take a woman, if I pay the coin myself.”

  “It is not your concern.” Theo tossed a stone across the ground with more force than necessary.

  Leofric clicked his tongue. “In war, schnecke, the only concern worth having is for the man at our side. I do not like to see that man distracted. Especially when the distraction is an itch that is easily scratched.”

  Theo fixed him with a hard eye. “Have I ever given you reason to doubt my sword arm?”

  Leofric huffed as he turned away. “Take a woman, schnecke,” he said over his shoulder, eyeing Theo darkly. “Before your distraction becomes the sword you die on.”

  It had taken days for them to scout the monastery. Now Kyros led three donkeys about the narrow, winding, rocky path. A small detachment of soldiers surrounded him. They marched with the desultory interest of paid guards and gave the impression of dull muscle. Below them, hidden beneath the lip of the cliff, Theo’s men crept along a second, even more precarious pathway, every step calculated not to disturb the dry shale and alert watchers to their presence.

  It was doubtful any observed them, however. Few ventured to the eastern side of the mountain, and the Arabs themselves would have won the monastery from the south, the same way Theo had initially attacked. Their lookouts were focused on the western and southern approaches, with a few eyes scattered also to the barren plains in the north. The east was mountainous territory inhabited by rebels ill equipped to launch direct attacks on the caliph’s formidable fighting forces. The occasional smuggler carrying wine was overlooked in exchange for a small fee. Kyros had paid his fee and more, many times. His donkeys were a familiar sight, as were his wares a welcome relief. His special brand of arak was prized amongst the Maronites. He brewed it in an old wine cellar amongst the ruins outside Sebastopolis, and it was whispered that more than one Arab contingent had purchased it also, despite the brew being made from fermented raisins and thus prohibited under Muslim law.

  Now Kyros plodded silently along the pathway, head down, clucking to his donkeys as they picked their way surefootedly amongst the stones. At a particularly wide bend in the wall of the mountain, he halted, ostensibly to alter one of the donkey’s loads. He moved along the small caravan, pushing and adjusting,
and paused at one spot, seemingly absorbed in his task. “That is the place,” breathed Theo in Silas’s ear. They waited until the donkeys had moved on again and listened to the night air. A casual watcher would not have noticed that the man who led them away was not the same as the one who had led them there.

  Little moved. The creaking of the donkeys’ harnesses was audible far into the distance, the only sound discernible in the silent night. The moon was dark, and little moved in the stillness. Far away a bird cawed. The sounds of the Arab encampment were shut behind the mountain. Silently, Theo and his men crept up the steep hillside to the narrow opening in the rock by which the man had paused. One by one, they slipped inside, leaving two men at the entrance. Those faded into the large boulders close by, appearing to anything but the closest of scrutiny merely more bulges in the rock face.

  Inside, the passage was tight and black. “No Slav was made to fit in here,” grunted Leofric as he squeezed behind the slender form of the Maronite rebel leading the way.

  Kyros chuckled beneath his breath. “No Slav who drinks that terrible ale you like so much, anyway,” he said.

  “Ale is good for the body,” muttered Leofric. “And better it is, most definitely, than arak you savages drink.”

  “Ale is cow piss. And you are fat, my friend.”

  “Fat? I am Slavic,” replied Leofric, with as much dignity as could be managed whilst squeezing between rocks and trying to remain silent.

  “You will both be dead if you do not stop talking,” came Theo’s calm voice behind them.

  “Ho,” chuckled Silas richly, “hark the sparrow teaching the hawks how to fight.”

  Kyros held up a hand, and all sound subsided. He held up three fingers, then cut his hand three ways; silently the leaders split into lines, and the men followed them as they cut into the passages leading up to the monastery. Theo led the centre. He moved silently, intent upon the way, every inch of his body alert to sound and touch. A faint movement came from ahead, and a thrill raced through him, setting his skin on fire. It was a mad tension, the one of battle. Theo welcomed it. He had come to live with it as easily as he once had the waves of the ocean on the cliffs at Aurariola. It felt natural to him, and now he felt his body tighten with its call, readying for the moment when steel and death would dance.

  He reached the end of the passageway and moved into a dim cave filled with crates of stores. From behind the wooden door ahead came the muffled sound of voices. This was it.

  He waited until the men crowded silently into the room. They looked at each other in the faint light, mere shadows in the warm shelter of the cave. Theo nodded, and they raised their swords, faces pale and set. He pushed open the door, and hell itself was unleashed.

  The Arabs had been taken unawares, but they were not unprepared. The men were clad in mail, their swords close by. They were battle-hardened troops, veterans of Abd al Malik’s long campaign across Persia. Theo had a quick glimpse of pointed helmets and elaborate armour before the scimitars came swinging and he crouched to meet the attack. Then it was close fighting, hard and furious, just the grunt of men and the clash of steel. They met in the great hall of the monastery, but the fight soon spread to the terrace, where men fell from the dizzying heights to crash brutally on rocks below. In the courtyard to the west that led into orchards, men spilled in a bloody tangle, crashing into apricot trees, falling beneath olive trees planted before Christ walked the earth.

  Theo cut his way through the men before him, feeling the familiar blood-rush take him over so there was nothing but the sing of his blade and the fierce, delicious tension in his muscles, his body revelling in the fight. He wheeled and ducked, strangely exultant, his blade like a liquid extension of his own being, knowing with an almost supernatural instinct from whence the next cut would come. He saw the fear in men’s eyes as they faced him and felt it in their retreat before his attack, in the way they fell from his arm as if they knew it presaged their deaths.

  “Theo!” Kyros’s cry of warning came just in time for Theo to duck beneath the evil slice of a scimitar from behind. Snarling, he turned to retaliate. He saw the scimitar continue as the man behind it spun with the force of his own strike. Theo’s mouth opened to yell, but even as he moved to cut the man down, he saw the scimitar come down across Kyros’s chest, slicing him from shoulder to waist in a bloody gash no man could survive.

  With a roar of fury Theo cut the man down in a single blow and fell to his knees beside Kyros, who stared up at him with the startled awareness of his own impending death. “Theo,” he said, and amidst the heat of battle, his words seemed to reach Theo as if they were the only two men present. “I have to tell you –”

  “No,” rasped Theo, gathering up his bloody body. “Rest, now.”

  “Oppa.” Theo heard the urgency in the other man’s voice. “He paid me to watch you.”

  “I know,” said Theo, shaking his head. “It doesn’t matter now.”

  “I did not betray you.” Kyros grasped Theo’s arms, trying convulsively to raise himself up. “Coin is being stolen from the taxes we collect. Oppa wanted only to be certain you were not involved.”

  Despite the roar of men, the air around Theo seemed to still. He leaned in close. “Why?”

  “Oppa does not wish to see the treaty with the Arabs fail. But there are those who do, and one of them fights at your side.” Kyros’s eyes swivelled to Leofric, defending Theo’s flank. He slipped something into Theo’s tunic. “Your friend paid me for wine with this. Do not trust the Slavs,” he breathed. “Friend or no.”

  Seeing the last spark fade from Kyros’s eyes, Theo felt the battle snap back into focus around him at the same time as he heard Leofric’s cry of warning. With a savage snarl of rage and frustration, he leaped to his feet, sword in hand. A man was coming at him on the terrace, a tall Arab clad in rich armour. Beneath the helmet his face was lean and hawkish, and he strode at Theo with the lethal intent of a man accustomed to the business of killing. Theo met the man in a crash that jarred his every bone, and as they clashed again and again, he felt rather than saw men fall away, giving them space.

  They wheeled about each other cautiously, the mad battle-rush retreating in place of a cold, deadly calculation. Theo meant to kill him. Leofric’s face swam at the periphery of his sight, driving his battle rage into a dark place hitherto unknown. Even as he balanced steel in his hand and faced his enemy, he felt doubt and betrayal corroding all that carried him into war and a vicious desire to kill rising in its place.

  His opponent drove Theo backward, his curved sword flashing in rapid cuts that took Theo every ounce of his ability to counter. Rallying, Theo whirled beneath a stroke and came up with a savage thrust that lanced the man’s leg, eliciting a grunt of pain. Theo forced his retreat, his sword flashing in deadly, relentless pursuit, the man he fought barely managing to hold him off. The killing desire rose hot and hard inside him, all the fury he had felt since arriving in Sebastopolis flowing through his sword arm so he fought with bitter intent, the man’s face no more than a haze before him.

  Then the curved blade rose from nowhere, and Theo knew, as he saw it, that he was too late to counter the stroke.

  He contorted his body, twisting just enough to ensure the cut, though deep, was not lethal. He felt the searing cold lash his side, cutting through leather and linen to slice the skin. The pain served to cut through the final shred of restraint, touching something deep and visceral within. A furious snarl ripped from his belly. Theo rose from a crouch to leap through the air, his sword high and swift, whirling as he himself turned, cutting through skin and bone with cold ferocity. It seemed to Theo that the sweep of his steel sheared away more than life. It was as if his blade cut away the boy he had been, the Spaniard who had been raised to the dream of noble alliance made with men of honour. Theo cut through flesh and bone and with it cut away the last of the child he had once been.

  When he landed, catlike on the balls of his feet, the man’s head lay on the ground, hi
s body crumpled, lifeless, beside it.

  Theo barely paused to take it in, his sword flying now with deadly accuracy, about him men falling like stones in a river of blood. He ceased to be aware of the battle as a whole. His own sores were forgotten. Theo leaped and danced as if it were the sword that commanded him to do its bidding, and he knew no more where he was, knew only the triumphant thrill of the cut of steel and victory over the man before him.

  “Enough!” he heard dimly through the mist of blood in his mind. “Theo, stop. It is done, by God! Xristus! Hold him!” It was on the last that he realised the arms binding him were Leofric’s, and he was calling Silas to help; Theo threw them off with a savage growl. It was only when Silas bore him to the ground that he looked about him to see the dead littered all around and his own men leaning on their swords, panting and staring at him with something akin to awe – or fear.

  “It is done, wenkai,” murmured Silas in his ear. “Stop now.” But though Theo subsided, he pulled himself angrily from Silas’s grasp and turned his head from Leofric’s view until he regained control. The blood-thrill had not left his body. He felt oddly detached from the men about him. Even as he issued curt orders and managed the aftermath of the battle, he remained remote. The fury of death and betrayal within him was a lick of lightning that at any moment, Theo felt, could spark a blaze he could not control.

  He moved like a man possessed, driving his men ruthlessly to clean up the mess before dawn, organising a detachment to stay, leading the others back to the camp without permitting so much as a barrel of the wine to be opened.

  At camp Neboulos was waiting. “It is good you are returned,” he said. “A message has come from Leontios; we are needed back in port.” His face was dark. “I cannot keep leaving Sebastopolis,” he said in an uncharacteristic admission. “My people are not happy. They talk when I am not there. Too many, there are, who stir trouble. I am afraid how it will end.”