The Abbess had taken Parcival the eagle on her wrist, and she was stroking his plumage and cooing at him. While the arm of her throne-like chair helped support the great raptor, the captain was impressed by her strength. She must be sixty, he thought.
There was something about the Abbess – the Abbess and Amicia. It was not a similarity of breeding – two more different women could not be imagined, the older woman with an elfin beauty and slim bones, the younger taller, heavier boned, with strong hands and broad shoulders.
He was still staring at Amicia when the Abbess’s staff thumped the floor.
The word hermetic rolled around the captain’s busy brain, and curled itself in the corner of Amicia’s mouth. But the staff took his attention.
‘Assuming I believe you – what does your huntsman say?’ the Abbess demanded.
The captain sighed. ‘That we got the wrong one. My lady, no one but a great Magus or a mountebank can tell us why the enemy acts as they do. Perhaps one of them is calling to others for reinforcements. Perhaps you have a nest of them. But Gelfred assures me that the signs left by Sister Hawisia’s killer are not the same as those of the beast we slew and my men – all of them – are exhausted. It will take them a day to recover. They’ve lost a gallant leader, a man they all respected, so I am sorry, but we will not be very aggressive for a few days.’ He shrugged.
She looked at him for a long time, and finally crossed her hands on the top of her staff and laid her long chin on them. ‘You think I do not understand,’ she said. She shrugged. ‘I do. I do not believe you seek to cheat me.’
He didn’t know what to make of that.
‘Let me tell you my immediate concerns,’ she said. ‘My fair opens in a week. The first week of the fair is merely local produce and prizes. Then the Harndon merchants come upriver in the second week to buy our surplus grain and our wool. But in the second and third weeks of the fair, the drovers come down from the moors. That is when the business is done, and that’s when I need my bridge and my people to be safe. You know why there is a fortress here?’ she asked.
He smiled. ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘The fortress is merely to guarantee the bridge.’
‘Yes,’ she admitted. ‘And I have been lax in letting my garrison drop – but if you will pardon an old woman’s honesty, soldiers and nuns are not natural friends. Yet these attacks – I hold this land by knight service and garrison service, and I do not have enough men. The king will send a knight to dispense justice at the fair and I dread his discovering how my penny-pinching ways have put these lands at risk.’
‘You need me for more than just monster-hunting,’ he said.
‘I do. I would like to purchase your contract for the summer, and I wonder if you have a dozen men-at-arms – archers, even – who could stay when you go. Perhaps men you’d otherwise pension off, or men who’ve been wounded.’ She shrugged. ‘I don’t even know how to find a new garrison. Albinkirk used to be a fine town – and a place where such men could be found – but not anymore.’ She took a deep breath.
He nodded. ‘I will consider it. I will not pretend, since we are being honest with each other, that my company does not need a steady contract. I would like to recruit, too. I need men.’ He thought a moment. ‘Would you want women?’
‘Women?’ asked the Abbess.
‘I have women – archers, men-at-arms.’ He smiled at her chagrin. ‘It’s not so uncommon as it once was. It is almost accepted over the sea, on the Continent.’
She shook her head. ‘I think not. What kind of women would they be? Slatterns and whores taught to fight? Scarcely fit companions for women of religion.’
‘You have a good point, my lady. I’m sure they are far less fit as companions then the sort of men who are attracted to a mercenary company.’ He leaned back, stretching his legs to ease the pressure on his lower back.
Their eyes met, sharp as two blades crossed.
She shrugged. ‘We are not adversaries. Rest if you must. Consider my offer. Do you need a service for the dead?’
For the first time, he allowed himself to feel warmth for the lady Abbess. ‘That would be greatly appreciated.’
‘Not all your men reject God as you do?’ she said.
‘Much the opposite.’ He rose to his feet. ‘Soldiers are as inclined to nostalgic irrationality as any other group – perhaps more so.’ He winced.
‘I’m sorry my lady, that was rude, in response to your very kind offer. We have no chaplain. Ser Hugo was a gentleman of good family who died in his faith, whatever you may think of me. A service for the dead would be very kind of you, and would probably do much to keep my people in order – ahem.’ He shook his head. ‘I appreciate your offer.’
‘You are really quite sweet in your well-mannered confusion,’ she said, also rising. ‘We will get along well enough, Ser Captain. And you will, I hope, forgive me if I counter your blatant lack of respect for my religion with an attempt to convert you to it. Whatever has been done to you, it was not Jesu who did it, but the hand of man.’
He bowed. ‘That’s just where you are wrong, my lady.’ He reached for her hand, which she offered, to kiss – but the imp in him could not be stopped, and so he turned it over and kissed her palm like a lover.
‘Such a little boy,’ she said, but she was clearly both pleased and amused. ‘A rather wicked boy. Service tonight, I think, in the chapel.’
‘You will allow my company into the fortress?’ he asked.
‘Since I intend to employ you as my garrison,’ she replied, ‘I will, in time, have to trust you inside the walls.’
‘This is a sharp change of direction, my lady Abbess,’ he said.
She nodded and swept towards the inner door to the convent. ‘Yes it is,’ she said. She gave him a very straight-backed courtesy. ‘I know things, now.’
He stopped her with his hand. ‘You said the Wild is closer now. I’ve been away. Closer how?’
She released a breath. ‘We have twenty farms which we have taken from the trees. There are more families here than when I was first a novice – more families. And yet. When I was young, nobles hunted the Wild in the mountains – expeditions into the Adacrags were a knight errant’s dream. The convent used to host them in our guest house.’ She glanced out the window. ‘The border with the Wild used to be fifty leagues or more to the north and the west of us, and while the forest was deep, trustworthy men lived there.’ She met his eyes. ‘Now, my fortress is the border, as it was in my grandfather’s time.’
He shook his head. ‘The wall is two hundred leagues north of here. And as far west.’
She shrugged. ‘The Wild is not. The king was going to push the Wild back to the wall,’ she said wearily. ‘But I gather his young wife takes all his time.’
He smiled. And changed the subject. ‘Tell me what the book is?’ he asked.
She smiled. ‘You will enjoy puzzling it out for yourself,’ she said. ‘I wouldn’t want to deny you that pleasure.’
‘You are a wicked old woman,’ he said.
‘Ah,’ she smiled. ‘You are beginning to know me, messire.’ She smiled, all flirtation, and then paused. ‘Captain, I have decided to tell you something,’ she said. She wasn’t hestitant. She was merely careful. ‘About Sister Hawisia.’
He didn’t move.
‘She told me that we had a traitor in our midst. And that she would unmask him. I was supposed to be at the farm that day. She insisted on going in my place.’ The Abbess looked away. ‘I’m afraid that monster was meant for me.’
‘Or your brave sister unmasked the traitor and he killed her for it. Or he already knew she intended to unmask him, and set a trap.’ The captain hadn’t shaved in days, and he scratched absently under his chin. ‘Who knows of your movements and decisions, my lady?’
She sat back. Her staff smacked against the floor in real agitation. Their eyes met.
‘I am on your side,’ he said.
She was fighting tears. ‘They are my people,’ she s
aid. She bit her lip and gave her head a shake that moved the fine linen folds of her wimple. ‘Bah – I am not a schoolgirl. I will have to think, and perhaps look at my notes. Sister Miram is my vicar, and I trust her absolutely. Father Henry attends me at most hours. Sister Miram has access to everything in the fortress and knows most of my thoughts. John le Bailli is my factor in the villages and the king’s officer for the Senechally. I will arrange that you meet them all.’
‘And Amicia,’ the captain said quietly.
‘Yes. She attends me at most hours.’ The Abbess’s eyes locked with the captain’s. ‘She and Hawisia were not friends.’
‘Why not?’ asked the knight.
‘Hawisia was gently born, nobly born. She had great power.’ The Abbess looked out the window, and her bird bated slightly at her movement.
‘Put him back on his perch, please?’ she asked.
The knight collected the great bird on his fist and transferred his great weight to the perch. ‘Surely he is a royal bird?’
‘I had a royal friend, once,’ said the Abbess, with a curl of her lips.
‘And Amicia is not gently born?’ the Red Knight prodded.
The Abbess met his glance and rose. ‘I will leave you to make such enquiries yourself,’ she said. ‘I find that I am uninterested in gossiping about my people.’
‘I have angered you,’ said the knight.
‘Messire, creatures of the Wild are killing my people, one of them is a traitor and I have to hire sell-swords to protect me. Today everything angers me.’
She opened the door, and he had a glimpse of Amicia, and then the door closed behind her.
Given an unexpected moment of freedom, he walked to the book. It stood under a window of Saint John the Baptist so he began to turn the pages, looking for the saint’s story.
The Archaic was painful, stilted, ill-phrased, as if a schoolgirl had translated the Archaic to Gothic and then back, making grievous errors in both directions.
The calligraphy was inhuman in its perfection. In ten pages, he could not find a pen error. Who would labour so over such a bad book?
The secret of the book merged in his mind with the secret that hid in the corner of Alicia’s downturned mouth, and he began to look more carefully at the lavish illuminations.
Facing the tale of Saint Paternus was a complex illustration of the saint himself, in robes of red, white and gold. His robes were richly embellished, and in one hand he held a cross.
In the other hand he held an alembic instead of an orb, and inside the alembic were minute figures of a man and a woman . . .
The captain looked back to the Archaic, trying to find the trace of a reference – was it heresy?
He stood up, releasing the vellum cover. Heresy is none of my concern, he thought. Besides – whatever that smug old woman was, she was no secret heretic. He walked slowly across the hall, his sabatons clinking faintly as he walked, and his mind still on the problem of the book. She was right, damn her, he thought.
Heading North – A Golden Bear
The mother bear swam until she could no longer swim, and then she lay up all day, cold to the bone and weary from blood loss and despair. Her cub sniffed at her and demanded food, and she forced herself to move to find some. She killed a sheep in a field and they fed on it; then she found a line of bee-hives at the edge of another field and they ate their way through the whole colony, eight hives, until both bears were sticky and drunk on sugar. She licked raw honey into the wounds the sword had made. Men were born without talons, but the claws they forged for themselves were deadlier than anything the Wild might give them.
She sang for her daughter, and called her name.
And her cub mewed like a animal.
When Lily was stronger, they went north again. That night, she smelled the pus in her wounds. She licked it and it tasted bad.
She tried to think of happier days – of her mate, Russet, and her mother’s den in the distant mountains. But her slavery had gone on too long, and something was dimmed in her.
She wondered if her wound was mortal. If the warrior man had poisoned his claw.
They lay up another day and she caught fish, no kind she recognised, but something that tasted a little of salt. She knew that the great Ocean was salted, perhaps the river had a spring run of sea fish.
They were easy to catch, even for a wounded bear.
There were more hives at a field edge, whose outraged human guard lofted arrows at them from his stone croft. None of them struck home, and they slipped away.
She had no idea where she was, but her spirit said to go north. And the river flowed from her home, she could taste the icy spring run off. So she kept moving north.
The Great North Road – Gerald Random
Gerald Random, Merchant Adventurer of Harndon, looked back along the line of his wagons with the satisfaction of the captain for his company, or the Abbot for his monks. He’d mustered twenty-two wagons of his own, all in his livery colours, red and white, their man-high wheels carefully painted with red rims and white spokes; the sides of every wagon white with red trim, and scenes from the Passion of the Christ decorating every side panel, all the work of his very talented brother-in-law. It was good advertising, good religion, and it guaranteed that his carters would always form his convoy in order – every man, whether they could not read or figure or not, knew that the God Jesu was scourged by knights in their guard room, and then had to carry his own cross to Golgotha.
He had sixty good men, mostly drapers’ and weavers’ men, but a pair of journeymen goldsmiths and a dozen cutlers, and some bladesmiths and blacksmiths, a handful of mercers and grocers too, all armed and well armoured like the prosperous men they were. And he had ten professional soldiers he’d engaged himself, acting as his own captain – good men, every one of them with a King’s Warrant that he had borne arms in the king’s service.
Gerald Random had such a warrant himself. He’d served in the north, fighting the Wild. And now he was leading a rich convoy to the great market fair of Lissen Carak as the commander, the principle investor, and the owner of most of the wagons.
His should be the largest convoy on the road and the best display at the fair.
His wife Angela laid a long white hand on his arm. ‘You find your wagons more beautiful than you find me,’ she said. He wished that she might say it with more humour, but at least there was humour.
He kissed her. ‘I’ve yet time to prove otherwise, my lady,’ he said.
‘The future Lord Mayor does not take his wife for a ride in the bed-carriage while his great northern convoy awaits his pleasure!’ she said. She rubbed his arm through his heavy wool doublet. ‘Dinna’ fash yourself, husband. I’ll be well enough.’
Guilbert, the oldest and most reliable-looking of the hireling swordsmen, approached with a mixture of deference and swagger. He nodded – a compromise between a bow and a failure to recognise authority. Random took it to mean something like I have served great lords and the king, and while you are my commander, you are not one of them.
Random nodded.
‘Now that I see the whole convoy,’ Guilbert nodded at it. ‘I’d like six more men.’
Random looked back over the wagons – his own, and those of the goldsmiths, the cutlers, the two other drapers, and the foreign merchant, Master Haddan, with his tiny two wheel cart and his strange adult apprentice, Adle. Forty-four wagons in all.
‘Even with the cutlers’ men?’ he asked. He kept his wife there by taking her hand when she made to slip away.
Guilbert shrugged. ‘They’re fair men, no doubt,’ he said.
Wages for six more men – Warrant men – would cost him roughly the whole profit on one wagon. And the sad fact was that he couldn’t really pass any part of the cost on to the other merchants, who had already paid – and paid well – to be in his convoy.
Moreover, he had served in the north. He knew the risks. And they were high – higher every year, although no one seemed to want to
discuss such stuff.
He looked at his wife, contemplating allowing the man two more soldiers.
He loved his wife. And the worry on her face was worth spending more than the value of a cart to alleviate. And what would the profit be, should his convoy be taken or scattered?
‘Do you have a friend? Someone you can engage at short notice?’ he asked.
Guilbert grinned. It was the first time that the merchant had seen the mercenary smile, and it was a surprisingly human, pleasant smile.
‘Aye,’ the man said. ‘Down on his luck. I’d esteem it a favour. And he’s a good man – my word on it.’
‘Let’s have all six. Eight, if we can get them. I have a worry, so let’s be safe. Money is not all there is,’ he said, looking into his wife’s eyes, and she breathed out pure relief. Some dark omen had been averted.
He hugged her for a long time while apprentices and journeymen kept their distance, and when Guilbert said he needed an hour by the clock to get his new men into armour – meaning they’d pawned theirs and needed to redeem it – Random took his wife by the hand and took her upstairs. Because there were so many things that were more important than money.
But the sun was still in the middle of the spring sky when forty-five wagons, two hundred and ten men, eighteen soldiers, and one merchant captain started north for the fair. He knew that he was the ninth convoy on the great road north – the longest to assemble, and consequently, the last that would reach Lissen Carak’s great supply of grain. But he had the goods and the wagons to buy so much grain that he didn’t think he’d be the loser, and he had a secret – a trade secret – that might make him the greatest profit in the history of the city.
It was a risk. But surprisingly for a man of money, as the lords called his kind, Gerald Random loved risk as other men loved money, or swords, or women, and he set his sword at his hip, his dagger on the other, with a round steel buckler that would not have disgraced a nobleman, and smiled. Win or lose, this was the moment he loved. Starting out. The dice cast, the adventure beginning.
He raised his arm, and he heard the sounds of men responding. He sent a pair of the mercenaries forward, and then he let his arm fall. ‘Let’s go!’ he called.
The Red Knight ttsc-1 Page 10