by Gordon Ryan
“Maybe. Or maybe Niels wants that knoll so he can survey the battlefield when the real fighting breaks out. Or maybe he’s hoping to hide some men in the tent. They’ll charge out once I’m fighting Borisenko’s champion.”
“If it looks like they’re breaking the rules, we give the signs,” Peter said.
“Just to be clear on that,” Lars said. “One glove means a retreat and two gloves means attack?”
“Right,” Tess said. “Any one of the three can make the call to retreat. We’ll have one guy watching you at all times. You see anything funny, you give the signal. We’ll do the same. Send your men out and help us fight back inside. Think you can see if I pull off my glove from this distance?”
Lars looked at Niels’s men working down by the tournament field. “Sure, no problem.”
“But don’t signal an attack. That’s my call. And if I do, under no circumstances push further than the trebuchet. Drag off the beam and any threaded or tooled pieces you can find. Knock up the counterweight, too, if you have time. Then fight like hell to get back inside. We simply don’t have enough men to risk an open battle outside the castle.”
“Got it,” Lars said. Peter nodded.
“But that’s not the plan. We’re going to play this thing straight, so long as Niels does the same. I’m going to check my equipment,” Tess added. “Peter, can you talk to Dmitri? I want those two on alert the entire time. I’d rather have Yekatarina in chains in the dungeon, but since she’s not, for god’s sake, don’t leave her alone for one second. Tell Dmitri.”
“What about Nick?” Peter asked. “He was dying when I told him he might not see the fight.”
“I talked to him about five minutes ago. I told him he could watch, but only if he listened to Lars.”
“You want me to watch the kid?” Lars asked. “And study the field of battle at the same time?”
“He knows Daria LeFevre and Rick McIves,” Peter said. “I’ll send them up to help.”
“Right, but you’re in charge,” she told Lars. “Anything happens, take Nick right up to the top of the gatehouse. No, back to his room in the keep. I don’t care if you have to send someone to escort him. We’ll lose a defender if we have to.” She looked at Peter. “Not that I can afford to lose any. But I don’t want him up here if missiles start flying, and I don’t want him running up and down the stairs.”
“Right,” Peter said. “Maybe I should just send him to his room right now.”
“And what? Leave him alone up there? Who knows how long before we come back? We’d still have to send a man to watch him. I’d rather he was up here, with Lars.”
“So I am babysitting,” Lars said.
“Don’t tell me the big strong Viking is afraid of a six year-old,” she said. “What would Erik Bloodaxe say?”
“Erik Bloodaxe wasn’t stuck babysitting.”
“You want to bet? You think a Viking woman never shoved the kid into Dad’s arms and said, ‘You can pillage and rape with your friends after you change the messy diaper?’”
Peter clapped a hand on Lars’s shoulder. “You want me to see if Dmitri will change places with you? I’m sure he’d come up. Standing outside Yekatarina’s door, he won’t even see the fighting.”
“Well, no.”
“Come on,” Tess said. “I’m ready to kick some ass.”
#
Ten minutes later and Tess stood in front of the portcullis. She adjusted her helmet, then her chain mail. She tied and retied her jerkin. The mail fit better now that she’d removed the paint packs; it wasn’t a battle to the death. She’d move faster and fight longer if she could just drop the helmet and mail altogether, but better to lose the match than lose some ribs.
A trumpet sounded on the wall above her. The chains clanked and the portcullis rose. Tess put a gloved hand on her sword and stepped out of the castle with long strides. Peter walked at her side. Five more men followed behind.
She didn’t like leaving Nick and Yekatarina in the castle together while she was out here. And all the attention turned toward the gates and the fight on the tournament pitch. But Tess had given Dmitri clear instructions. Didn’t matter if Yekatarina started bleeding from her ears. She wasn’t to leave that room until Tess returned.
Tess didn’t stop at the pitch, or make eye contact with Niels’s men raking out the mud. She verified that none of the men at the pitch was Niels or Borisenko, then continued toward the tent on the knoll.
Peter took her sleeve. “Slow down. I should be first.”
A man stepped out of the tent. He wore a sword and a breast plate. He pulled on gloves. His breastplate was painted with a black horse.
Peter drew up short and Tess nearly ran him down. “Kirkov, is that you?” Peter asked.
“That’s right. Sasha wants me to take on Tess this morning.”
“But Sasha said you were in Moscow, that you had to watch the oil ministry.”
“He changed his mind last minute. My name was on the approved list.”
Tess looked at Peter. He studied Kirkov with his eyes narrowed. “Okay, he can tell me about it later. Where is he?”
Kirkov nodded over his shoulder. “In the tent. He woke with a nasty headache. Grunberg gave him something and he’s resting until it goes away.”
“Where is Niels? What’s going on here?”
Niels appeared in the doorway to the tent. He didn’t come all the way out. “Sorry. I think we might have eaten some bad meat last night. Some of us aren’t feeling well.”
He looked pale. There was a spot of blood at one corner of his mouth. Bruises under his eyes.
Tess kept the alarm from her face. “Is that why you aren’t facing me yourself?”
Niels nodded. “Right. Sorry to disappoint you.” He supported himself against the tent pole. There was movement behind the canvas.
“Who else have you got in there?” Peter said. Kirkov didn’t move out of the way to let them past. “I’d like to have a look. Make sure you’re not hiding half your army in there.”
“Does this mean you’ve let Yekatarina inspect your gatehouse?” Kirkov asked. “Or did you lock her up where she can’t see anything useful?” He nodded. “Right. You let us inspect your defenses, and we’ll let you search our tents.”
“You’re not in charge here,” Peter said. “Let me talk to Sasha.”
Tess put her hand on his wrist. “Forget it, Peter.”
Peter pulled his wrist free. He looked up to the tent. “Niels, tell Borisenko to come out, or let me come up. One or the other.”
“You don’t knock it off,” Tess told him, “and I’m going back to the castle, you can fight this guy yourself.”
“Fine, whatever.” Peter, Tess, and the five guards walked back to the pitch.
“This is crap,” he told her when they were out of earshot of Kirkov. “Did you see the look on Niels’s face? He’s hiding something. And if Sasha is so sick he can’t come out to see me we should get him on a boat and send him to the hospital. You can’t tell me there’s nothing going on.”
“There’s something going on,” she agreed. “Did you see the bruising around Niels’s eyes? And there was blood at his mouth.”
“He said he’d been sick.”
“With what, the plague?” She shook her head. “Whatever that was, it wasn’t food poisoning. Looks to me like he was in a fight.”
“You think he and Sasha went at it?”
“Maybe. And maybe Borisenko is back there with broken ribs or something and doesn’t want us to see him.” She thought it over. “Could work to our advantage.”
“So you don’t want to call it off?”
“No, not yet.”
And she wanted to take Kirkov. Wipe that smug look off his face. He must have heard how she’d beaten Niels, which meant he thought he was better than the German. It made her nervous, but not so nervous she wanted to back down.
They reached the tournament field, roped around the perimeter. Peter’s tent sat on the
north side, just a few tens of yards from the castle gates.
Tess took off her cloak and handed it to Peter. She lifted the rope and stepped onto the pitch. The ground was still soft and wet. Most of the sod was gone. She didn’t like the conditions. Her advantage was quickness and mobility. The wet ground would negate some of that. She noted both the drier parts and the higher spots of ground. When in trouble, she would retreat to these positions.
Kirkov approached a few minutes later. He spoke a few words to the handful of men allowed to watch from close range. As per Peter’s response last night, they were not armed. Kirkov pushed down the rope with his boot and stepped into the tournament field. God, he was a big man. And light on his feet.
Peter waved to the men on the castle walls. They shouted Tess’s name. “Come on, Tess,” he said. “Kick his ass.”
Tess drew her sword. Kirkov drew his own. It was longer and heavier. He gripped it with two hands.
“So,” he said. “Are you as good as they say?”
“Better. As you’ll soon find out.” She positioned her feet at shoulder width, rested her weight on the balls of her feet, and held her sword out.
He approached and she stepped back, then moved to the center of the pitch. They circled each other. He was watching her, noting how her sword twitched in anticipation whenever it looked like he would attack. Tess’s nervousness increased, but she didn’t want to make the first move. Let him show his strategy, first. Would he try to batter her down? Win through finesse and speed? Cut her down in the first flurry of blows? She had a dozen strategies. They all depended on his strengths and weaknesses.
“Interesting,” he said. “You think you can overpower me.”
“Huh?”
“You don’t respect my strength. I can see it in your stance.”
“You’re wrong. I respect your physical strength,” she said. “Too bad you’re so weak in the mind.”
He came at her. His first blow was a simple step-swing. He closed and slid his sword off the shoulder to crash into her defense. But it came with such speed and power that some of the blow shuddered through her sword into her shoulders. She closed inside the range of her enemy’s longer sword and punch-blocked with her hilt as she might have done with a shield.
Her counterattack only lasted a split second and then she was on the defensive. Head, shoulder, chest. Kirkov pushed her out of range and then onto her heels. Tess ducked an especially fierce blow and his sword glanced off her shoulder. A sharp pain.
She fought herself free, then looked at her shoulder with a frown. He’d sliced through the jerkin. She bled from her shoulder. Tess looked at his sword with disbelief.
“What the hell? Your sword is sharp.”
Kirkov stood a pace back and panted slightly. He grinned. “Glad you noticed.”
“Peter!” she shouted. “It’s a trap.”
Kirkov came at her again, and this time she knew she was in serious trouble. He knocked aside her blows and slammed her with his shoulder. She staggered back, nearly fell. She blocked a thrust. Their hilts tangled and he pushed into her face, so close she could smell the onions and eggs he’d had for breakfast.
“Time to die, bitch.”
Chapter Twenty-eight:
Niels had tried to pass a message to Tess and Peter. Henri Fournier stood behind Niels with a dagger at his back and an implied threat. Say anything stupid and I’ll shove this knife right through your rib cage.
Niels tried to blink his distress. But Peter and Tess focused only on Kirkov’s unexpected challenge. Tess would see his bruises and his drawn, exhausted face.
Kirkov had given swords—some blunt, others sharpened—to most of the men in the camp. Others, of suspect loyalty, like Niels, he’d separated from the army. Might have even killed some of them.
Niels stood in the threshold of the tent while Tess and Kirkov walked down to the tournament pitch. Henri stood at his back, his knife still in hand. There was a guard outside, but nobody else in the tent. Borisenko, if he was still alive, remained in the camp.
“For what it’s worth, I think you’re with us,” Henri said. “Or will be.”
Niels turned with a raised eyebrow. “Yeah?”
“You know it can’t stand.”
“The world, you mean?”
“Right. Humans are like a hoard of locusts, with no predators. They’ll keep eating and eating until the ground is stripped bare. There will be nothing left. Maybe if there were only a few hundred million of them and if we could control who reproduced and who didn’t, we’d stand a chance. But for now, there are just too many of them and they’re growing in every way.”
“The only way to save civilization is to destroy civilization,” Niels said.
“Exactly,” Henri said. “We can’t go on like this forever. Exponential growth. It’s insane.” There was a twinge in his voice, almost religious in tone. Peter got that tone sometimes.
“I know what you mean,” Niels said. “I’m just not sure this is the best way to do it.”
“It’s the only way. It’s like a bone that sets wrong. You’ve got to break it, make it straight. Then let it heal.” He shook his head. “No, that’s not right, because the bone hasn’t broken yet.”
“Should I give you a minute to work on your analogy?” Niels asked.
“I know what you’re going through, because I was the same way. I needed a lot of time. I kept playing the argument in my head. Eventually, I saw that Black Horse was the only way. Just sweep everything aside. Famine is grim, but it’s better than a nuclear bomb for clearing out populations. Doesn’t touch the ecosystem.”
“Few people die of famine,” Niels said. “What happens is people grow weak and they start to die of dysentery and other diseases.”
“Yeah, well that would be even better. But nobody had any luck engineering a super bug. Sounded easier than it was.”
“My god, you’re talking about the death of hundreds of millions of people in the same way you’d talk about spraying for mosquitoes.”
Henri gave him a hard look. “You think it can all be saved, just because you feel bad about a few people dying?”
Niels backed down at once. “No, you’re right, civilization is doomed. It deserves to fall. But how does Black Horse help anything? You can kill a couple of billion people, but it’s temporary. Humans will rebuild and then we’ll repeat the same cycle.”
“That’s just the point!” Henri said. “It sounds callous, but it’s going to happen, so why not position ourselves to control the fall? We’ll be in place organize a better system, one that doesn’t rely on six billion locusts behaving in an enlightened way.
“The hard part,” Henri continued, “will be holding on for dear life until things calm down in five or ten years. Then we can reassert control.”
“Seems nearly goddamn impossible, if you ask me.”
“Gold and oil,” Henri said. “That’s the key. Got enough of those things and you can do anything you want.”
What Niels really wanted to know was what the castle had to do with any of this. They were going to attack, kill a bunch of people, then what? How would that do anything for Black Horse?
He was still trying to decide if he could risk asking the question directly when the battle started on the tournament pitch. Kirkov came with a flurry of blows that Tess only managed to turn aside. Any hope that the Russian had overestimated his own skill disappeared in an instant. Niels clenched his jaw, willing Tess to move out of Kirkov’s grasp. He was too strong. She couldn’t trade blows.
Niels pulled back inside the tent. “You can watch if you want,” he told Henri. “Just tell me when she’s dead.” He moved unsteadily to sit on the cot.
He was sore, he was exhausted. But he was not as sore and exhausted as he showed Henri. Niels caked a slack look on his face and let his eyes droop. Underneath, his muscles tensed. He was like a rat trap, ready to break the back of his prey.
Henri watched him sit, then turned back to the action.
He showed the back of his head. Niels spun on his heel. He grabbed Henri by the hair with his left hand. His right punched at the man’s larynx. The blow came from the shoulder.
Henri crumpled to the ground. Niels took no chances. He wrested the man’s dagger from his hand, pulled back Henri’s head by the hair and dragged the dagger across the man’s throat. The Belgian was dead without a cry. Outside, shouts, the clash of swords.
Niels pulled the tent flap closed, then wiped the dagger on his pant leg. He moved to the back of the tent and shoved the dagger into the canvas and started to saw. He made an opening just wide enough to escape, then slipped out the back of the tent.
There were men all around, most of them directly behind him at the camp. Any one of them could have seen him come out the back of the tent. But all eyes turned toward the battle on the tournament pitch. Niels pulled up his hood and walked back toward the tents and fires of his own camp. Nobody challenged him.
#
Inside the castle, Dmitri turned to the other man guarding Yekatarina’s door. “Pointless for both of us to be here, don’t you think? You want to go watch Tess kick some ass?”
The other man didn’t know it, but cutting out of his job was the only thing that would save his life. His name was Tim Forester and he had a colorful history. From Vancouver originally, he’d spent the early nineties in Seattle in a grunge band. When the band fell apart, he spent a few years in the military, then worked for a group of private contractors—mercenaries—based in South Africa.
“Tess’ll be pissed if I leave,” Tim said. “You see the steam coming out her ears this morning when she talked to those guys who fell asleep on the watch last night?”
“She’s a college professor,” Dmitri said. “What’s she going to do, flunk you out of school? Anyway, we don’t both need to be here. This door is barred from the outside, and Lady Borisenko is unarmed. What could happen?”
At that moment there was a shout from outside the window at the end of the hall. Ignoring the draft, Tim had pushed it open as soon as they’d arrived. They had no view of the tournament pitch from the window or he’d no doubt want to lean out the window, but through it they could hear shouts and jeers from the men on the walls.