The Red Knight ttsc-1

by Miles Cameron

  ‘Come for the fair,’ Milus said. He made a face. ‘They say there’s five convoys behind them.’

  The captain turned and looked at Michael, who grimaced. ‘We don’t even have all the farmers in,’ he said. ‘Fifty, you say? And their wagons?’

  ‘And I’ll bet they don’t have any food,’ the captain said. ‘I’ll guess they have carts full of cloth and luxury goods, because they’ve come to buy grain.’ He looked around. ‘How many more mouths can you take, Milus?’

  The older knight narrowed his eyes. ‘I can take all of ’em,’ he admitted. ‘And thirty more like ’em. But I’ll need more grain, more salt meat, more of everything to do it. Except water. We’ve plenty of that, out of the river.’

  Back up the hill he went to report to the Abbess. A heavy military wagon was raised from the cellars and reassembled, then loaded to heaping with food and provender, and hand-hauled down the steep slope, teams of men on gate winches letting it down a few feet a time. The captain disarmed, handing his harness to his squire. His hips were screaming, and once it was finally off he felt light enough to fly away.

  Even as they increased the supplies to the lower fort, more merchants arrived. Some were angry at the interruption of trade, and some were clearly already terrified. The captain went back down the hill and wasted the morning trying to calm them. He finally told them to send a deputation up the hill to the Abbess.

  Then he made the climb back up to the fortress to hide in his Commandery, a small cell with a door directly onto the courtyard and a pair of arched windows separated by a fluted column. Open, the windows let in a spring breeze carrying the scent of wildflowers and jasmine, and he could see fifteen leagues to the east over the low hills.

  Today, instead of turning to the parchment scrolls full of accounts that awaited him, he unbuckled his sword and hung it on the man-high bronze candelabra and leaned his elbows on the sill of the leftmost window.

  Booted footsteps announced Michael. ‘Your armour,’ the young man said quietly.

  The captain turned to see two archers with a heavy wicker basket, and his valet with an armload of dressed lumber. While he watched, the archers argued about which pre-cut peg went in which hole and the valet stared off into space while idly providing the correct piece, even when the archers asked for the wrong thing. Before the sun had moved the width of a finger, they had assembled a rack for the captain’s armour, man sized, a little taller than the man himself, and Michael dressed the heavy wooden form carefully. A good arming rack could speed a man into his harness by precious minutes. And with every inch of the fortress convent crammed to capacity and past it with soldiers and refugeees, his office was his sleeping room.

  When the archers and the valet went back out, the noise vanished and the captain returned to his window.

  ‘Will that be all, ser?’ Michael asked.

  ‘Well done, Michael,’ the captain said.

  The younger man jumped as if he’d been bitten. ‘I – that is-’ he laughed. ‘Your valet, Jacques, did most of it.’

  ‘The more credit to you that you give him credit,’ the captain observed.

  Emboldened, Michael came forward and, very slowly, leaned into the right hand window. His stealthy progress was not unlike that of a convent cat the captain had observed that morning, which had been intent on stealing a piece of cheese. He smiled. It took Michael as long to rest in the window as it had for the three men to build the armour rack. ‘We’re fully provisioned,’ Michael said carefully.

  ‘Hmm. No commander facing a siege ever admits being “fully provisioned”,’ the captain said.

  ‘So now we wait?’ Michael asked.

  ‘Are you a squire or an apprentice captain?’ the captain asked.

  Michael stood up straight. ‘My pardon, ser.’

  He grinned wickedly. ‘I don’t mind an intelligent question, and especially not when it helps me think. I do have to think, young Michael. Plans don’t just come full-blown into my head. Next we’re going to use a powerful magic, something potent, grave and dire. The Archaics used it well and often. All the histories describe it, and yet no romance of chivalry ever mentions it.’

  Michael pulled a face that told the captain he’d wit to tell when he was being baited.

  ‘What spell?’ he asked.

  ‘No spell,’ the captain advised. ‘But it’s a kind of magic nonetheless. We’re provisioned and armed, we’ve repaired our fortifications, and the enemy are not yet at the gates. So what shall we do?’

  ‘Compel the rest of the peasants into the walls?’ Michael asked.

  ‘No. That’s done.’

  ‘Build outworks?’

  ‘We lack the force to man them, so no.’ The captain paused. ‘Not so bad, though.’

  Michael’s frustration was obvious. ‘Summon a tame daemon?’ he asked.

  The captain scratched his pointed beard. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Although if I knew how to I might.’

  Michael shrugged.

  ‘Two words,’ the captain encouraged him.

  Michael shook his head. ‘Higher walls?’ he asked, knowledge of his own inadequacy making him sound petulant.

  ‘No.’

  ‘More arrows?’

  ‘Not bad, but no.’

  ‘Find allies?’ Michael asked.

  The captain was silent a moment at that, looking east. ‘We have already summoned our allies, but that’s not bad at all,’ he said. ‘A very useful thought, and one that I may pursue.’ He looked at the fashionably greenclad scion of the aristocracy and added. ‘But no.’

  ‘Damn,’ Michael said. ‘Can I give up?’

  ‘As squire, or as apprentice captain?’ the captain asked. ‘You started this, not me.’ The captain picked up the short baton of office that he almost never carried. It had belonged to the previous captain, and had some history and authority to it – enough that the captain suspected it might have a touch of phantasm about it. ‘You have thirty-one lances, give or take; sixteen elderly but competent sergeants and one well-constructed, if elderly, fortress on good ground. You must defend a ford, a bridge, a constant flow of terrified merchants and a vulnerable Lower Town with inadequate walls. Tell me your plan. If it’s good enough, I’ll claim it’s my own and use it. There are stupid answers but there’s no right answer. If your answer is good, you live and make a little money. If your answer is bad, you fail and die and just for extra points, a lot of harmless people, some actual nuns and a bunch of farmers will die with you.’ The captain had an odd look in his eyes. ‘Let’s hear it.’

  Michael had sprouted enough hairs on his chin that it might honestly be called a beard and he played with them for a while. ‘All in our current situation? Fully provisioned and so on?’

  The captain nodded.

  ‘Send messengers for aid. Enlist allies from local lords. Button up the fortress, tell the merchants to go hang themselves, and prepare for the enemy.’ Michael looked out over the woods to the east while he thought on.

  ‘Messengers sent. Allies cost money and our profit on this is slim as it is. We were in pretty desperate straits before we got this job. And those merchants represent a source of cash to us. I leave aside the morality of the thing. We can make them pay for protection and split the money with the abbess. Fair is fair – it’s her fortress and our steel.’ The captain’s gaze was out the window, on the distant woods.

  The sun moved in the sky.

  ‘I give up,’ Michael admitted. ‘Unless it’s something very simple like more rocks for siege engines, or more water.’

  ‘I think I’m glad that you can’t find it, lad, because you have a brain and your family has a lot of war craft. And if you don’t see it, perhaps they won’t see it either.’ The captain pointed out the window.

  ‘They? The Wild?’ Michael asked quietly.

  The captain scratched at his beard again. ‘Active patrolling, Michael. Active patrolling. Starting in about six hours, I’m putting our lances out in fast-moving patrols. In all directions
, but mostly east. I want to be familiar with the terrain, to relocate our foe, and then I’m going to ambush, harass, irritate, and annoy him and his minions until they go elsewhere looking for easier prey. If they choose to come here and lay siege to us I intend to have them leave a trail of blood – or whatever they have for blood – through that forest.’

  Michael was looking at his hands, which were trembling. ‘You intend to go out into the Wild?’ he asked, incredulous. ‘Again?’

  ‘If the initiative is in the woods, I’ll seize it in the woods,’ said the captain. ‘You think the enemy are ten feet tall and made of adamantine. I think they have a corps of men as servants, archers and woodsmen, who have so little war-craft that I can see the smoke of their dinner fires from here.’ The captain put a hand on his squire. ‘And ask yourself – why is the main body of our enemy to the east?’ He looked out. ‘Gelfred is out there right now,’ he said quietly.

  Michael whistled. ‘Blessed Saint George. Have they passed us by?’

  The captain smiled. ‘Well guessed, young Michael. Our enemy has bypassed us – a tribute to our preparations and our little raid. But there’s a reason you don’t bypass a fortress, and I’m about to teach him. Unless,’ he smiled, and just for a moment, he showed his youth. ‘Unless it’s all a fucking trap.’

  Michael swallowed.

  ‘Anyway, his human allies are right there as well – to the east. Don’t point. I suspect that some of the birds are spies.’ The captain turned away.

  ‘Then they can see everything we do!’ Michael said.

  ‘Everything,’ the captain said with evident satisfaction. ‘Go to the refectory, find some parchment, write me a list of all of your notions for the defence of this position, and then go polish something.’ He smiled. ‘But first, get me some wine.’

  ‘I was afraid,’ the squire blurted. ‘In the fight with the wyvern – I was so afraid I could barely move.’ He breathed heavily. ‘I can’t stop thinking about it.’

  The captain nodded. ‘I know,’ he said.

  ‘But it will get better, won’t it? I mean – I’ll get used to it. Won’t I?’ he asked.

  ‘No.’ The captain shook his head. ‘Never. You never get used to it. You shake, vomit, foul your braes, piss yourself, whatever you do, every fucking time. What you get used to is the power of the fear, the onset of the terror. You learn you can face it. Now get me some wine, drink a couple of cups yourself, and get back to work.’

  ‘Yes, m’lord.’

  There was a constant flow of men and materiel up and down the hill, from the top of the fortress to Bridge Castle. The war engines on the towers lofted practice rounds into the fields, and trusted corporals took patrols out into the farmland – careful, wary patrols on fast horses. The closest farmers had responded well enough to the alarm bells and yesterday’s summons, and Abbington, the biggest of the hamlets, was clear, but the more distant had only sent children to ask for more information, and none of them had brought in any of their precious grain unless the soldiers had brought it themselves. The patrols either went to fetch in the timid or led out farmers who had believed it was merely a drill.

  And the more prosperous yeoman had other questions.

  ‘Who is going to pay for our grain?’ demanded a strong middle-aged man with an archer’s forearms and a handsome head of brown hair. ‘This is my treasure, ser knight – my precious store. What we scrimp and save up over the winter turns to silver when the merchants come in the spring. Who’s paying for it now?’

  The captain directed all such questions, firmly and quietly, to the Abbess.

  As the sun set on the third full day the cellars were bursting with grain. A further hundredweight lay at the foot of the track that ran up the hill to the fortress where a cart had broken loose and smashed to pieces, and now every wagon up or down ran with ropes attached to the gate winches – and the main gate had stood open all day.

  The hundredweight of grain had the curious effect of dragging birds out of the sky to eat the free bounty. Archers, led by Gelfred, netted them.

  The fortress was so packed with people that there were men and women planning to sleep on the stone flags on straw despite the briskness of the evening. Torches burned all around the courtyard and a bonfire burned in the centre, the flickering orange light reflecting off the towers, the donjon and the sparkling dormitory windows. Chickens – hundreds of chickens – ran about the courtyard and the rocks on the ridge below the gate. Pigs rooted in the convent garbage at the base of the cliff, nigh on two hundred of them. The convent sheepfold, hard against the eastern walls, was also full to bursting and in the last light a man standing in the Abbess’s solar could see the glitter of a dozen men-at-arms and as many archers, bringing in another thousand sheep from the eastern farms.

  The captain stood in the Abbess’s solar and watched patrols, the sheep, and the formal closing of the gate. He followed Bent’s craggy form as the big archer changed the watch in the donjon, marching the off-going watch around the whole circuit as he collected them and put fresh men in their places. It was an impressive and efficient ceremony, and it had the right effect on the villagers, most of whom had never seen so many armed men in their lives.

  The captain sighed. ‘In an hour’s time a virgin will have been deflowered and a husbandman will have lost his farm at dice,’ he said.

  ‘You have a virgin in mind?’ the Abbess asked.

  ‘Oh, I’m quite above such earthy concerns.’ The captain continued to watch, and he was smiling.

  ‘Because you are worried, you mean. You must be worried that nothing has come at us yet,’ the Abbess said.

  The captain pursed his lips and shook his head. ‘I’d rather be a ripe fool, the laughing stock of every soldier in Alba,’ he said, ‘then face a siege by those things. I don’t know where they are yet or why they let us get everyone under cover. In my dark moments I think our walls are already undermined, or they have a legion of traitors inside the walls-’ He raised a hand, making a warding-off motion. ‘But in truth, I can only hope they know as little of us as we know of them. The day before yesterday we were easy meat. Today, if sheer fear doesn’t break us, we could hold for a year.’ He glanced at her worried face.

  She shrugged. ‘How old are you, Captain?’

  He was clearly uncomfortable with the question.

  ‘How many sieges have you seen?’ she asked. ‘How many Wild creatures have you faced in combat?’ She turned towards him and stepped forward, boring in on her target. ‘I’m a knight’s daughter, Captain. I know these are not polite questions, but by God I feel I deserve to know the answer.’

  He leaned against the wall. Scratched under his chin for a moment, staring off into space. ‘I’ve killed more men than I have monsters. I’ve stood one siege and, to be fair, we broke it in the second month. I’m-’ He turned his head and met her eye. ‘I’m twenty.’

  She made a sound between a satisfied hrmmf and a snort.

  ‘But your divination told you that.’ He straightened from the wall. ‘I’m young, but I’ve seen five years of unending war. And my father-’ He paused, and the pause became a silence.

  ‘Your father?’ she asked quietly.

  ‘Is a famous soldier,’ he finished, his voice very quiet.

  ‘I’ve entrusted my defences to a child,’ the Abbess said, but she pursed her lips in self-mockery.

  ‘A child with a first rate company of lances. And there is, truly, no better sell-sword captain in Alba. I know what I’m doing. I’ve seen it and done it before, and I’ve studied it, unlike the rest of my breed. I’ve studied them all – Maurikos and Leo and Nikephoros Phokas, even Vegetius. And if I may say so, it’s too late to change your mind now.’

  ‘I know,’ she said. ‘I’m afraid.’ She drank her wine and, quite spontaneously, she took his hand. ‘I’m fifty,’ she admitted. ‘I’ve never withstood a siege, myself.’ She let his hand go and bit her lip. ‘Are you afraid?’

  He took her hand again and kisse
d it. ‘Always. Of everything. My mother made me a coward. She taught me, very carefully, to fear everything. Starting with her. See? You are become my confessor.’ He smiled crookedly. ‘I am the world’s expert at overcoming fear. Cowardice is the best school for courage, I find.’

  She had to smile. ‘Such a wit. Vade retro!’

  He nodded. ‘I’m too tired to get out of the chair.’

  Their laughter and light conversation lasted through the rest of her wine, and his. Finally she said, after looking out the window, ‘And what do you fear most?’

  ‘I fear failure,’ he said. He laughed at his own words. ‘But alone of the people in this fortress, I have no fear of the Wild whatsoever.’

  ‘Are you posturing?’ she asked.

  He stared into her fire for a little. ‘No,’ he said with a sigh. ‘I need to go look at the watch. I have tried something reckless tonight. I need to make sure my people are ready for it. You know that your enemy is using animals to watch us – yes?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, very quietly.

  ‘Do you know anything else, my lady? Anything that would help your very young captain save your walls?’ He leaned toward her.

  She looked away. ‘No,’ she said.

  He put his wine cup on the oak sideboard with a click. ‘I told you the truth.’

  ‘Let us have a few moments to marshal our forces,’ she said with a wan smile. ‘Go see to your watch. My few tawdry secrets are not in any way germane to our siege.’

  He bowed, and she waved him away, so he went out into the stairwell. It was dark.

  Her door closed, and he began to feel his way down the stone steps when a hand closed on his.

  He knew her in a moment, and pulled the hand to his lips – faster than she could take it away. He heard her sigh.

  That moment he considered crushing her against the stone wall. But it occurred to him that she must be there by the Abbess’ commission, and it would be rude, to say the least, to attack the novice outside the Abbess’ door. Or something like that went through his head – before her lips came down on his and her hands pushed against his shoulders.