The Red Knight ttsc-1

by Miles Cameron

  He was not the sort of man who malingered.

  ‘Me, too. You’ve lost a lot of blood.’ The captain sat on his counterpane.

  ‘Your nun – the pretty one-’

  The captain felt himself blushing. ‘Not my nun-’ he stammered.

  Atcourt smiled like a schoolteacher. ‘As you say, of course.’

  It was odd – the captain had remarked it before. The commonly born men-at-arms – leaving aside Bad Tom, who was more like a force of nature than like a man, anyway – had prettier manners than the gently born. Atcourt had especially good manners.

  ‘At any rate, the lovely young novice who gives orders so well,’ Atcourt smiled. ‘She healed me. I felt her-’ He smiled again. ‘That is what goodness feels like, I reckon. And she brought me this to read, so I am reading.’ He made a face. ‘Perhaps I’ll finish up a monk. ’Ello, Tom.’

  Bad Tom towered over them. He nodded to his friend. ‘If that arrow had struck you a hand’s breadth lower, you could ha’ been a nun.’ Then he leered at the captain. ‘The tall nun’s awake, and stretching like a cat. I stopped to watch.’ He laughed his great laugh. ‘What a set o’ necks she has, eh?’

  The captain turned to glare, but it was nearly impossible to glare at Tom. Having sat, the captain could feel every tired muscle, every one of his six bruises.

  ‘We all saw you charge those archers,’ Tom said, as he turned away.

  The captain paused.

  ‘You should a’ died,’ Tom went on. ‘You got hit what – eight times? Ten? By war-bows?’

  The captain paused.

  ‘I’m just sayin’, lad. Don’t be foolish. You ha’ the de’il’s own luck. What if it runs out?’ he asked.

  ‘Then I’ll be dead,’ the captain said. He shrugged. ‘Someone had to do it.’

  ‘Jehannes did it, and he did it right,’ Tom said. ‘Next time, raise your sword and tell someone to ride at the archers. Someone else.’

  The captain shrugged again. For once, he looked every heartbeat of twenty years old – the shrug was a rebellious refusal to accept the reality of what an adult was trying to teach him, and in that moment the captain was a very young man caught out being a fool. And he knew it.

  ‘Cap’n,’ Tom said, and suddenly he was a big, dangerous man. ‘If you die I much misdoubt we will ride through this. So here’s my rede: don’t die.’

  ‘Amen,’ said the captain.

  ‘The pretty novice’ll be far more compliant with a living man than a dead one,’ Tom said.

  ‘That based on experience, Tom?’ Atcourt said. ‘Leave the lad alone. Leave the captain alone. Sorry, m’lord.’

  The captain shook his head. On balance, it was difficult to be annoyed when you discover that men like you and desire your continued health.

  Atcourt laughed aloud. Tom leaned over him, and whispered something, and Atcourt doubled up – first laughing, and then in obvious pain.

  The captain paused to look back, and Tom was taking cards and dice out of his purse, and Atcourt was holding his side and grinning.

  The captain ran down the steps, his leather soles slapping the stone stairs, but she wasn’t there, and he cursed Tom’s leer and ran out into the new darkness.

  He wanted a cup of wine, but he was sure he’d go to sleep. Which he needed.

  He smiled at his own foolishness and went to the apple tree instead.

  And there she was, sitting in the new starlight, singing softly to herself.

  ‘You didn’t come last night,’ he said. The very last thing he wanted to say.

  She shrugged. ‘I fell asleep,’ she said. ‘Which, it seems to me, might be a wise course for you. My lord.’

  Her tone was forbidding. There was nothing about her to suggest that they’d ever kissed, or had intimate conversation. Or even angry conversation.

  ‘But you wanted to see me,’ he said. I sound like a fool.

  ‘I wanted to tell you that you were perfectly correct. I plotted to meet you outside her door. And she used me, the old witch. I love her, but she’s throwing me at you. I was blind to it. She’s playing courtly love with you and substituting my body for hers. Or something.’ Amicia shrugged, and the motion was just visible in the starlight.

  The silence stretched on. He didn’t know what to say. It sounded quite likely to him, and he didn’t see a way to make it seem better. And he found he had no desire to speak ill of the Abbess.

  ‘I’m sorry that I spoke so brusquely, anyway,’ he said.

  ‘Brusquely?’ she asked, and laughed. ‘You mean, you are sorry that you crushed my excuses and made light of my vanity and my piety? That you showed me up as a sorry hypocrite?’

  ‘I didn’t mean to do any of those things,’ he said. Not for the first time, he felt vastly her inferior. Legions of willing servant girls hadn’t prepared him for this.

  ‘I do love Jesus,’ she went on. ‘Although I’m not always sure what loving God should mean. And it hurts me, like a physical pain, that you deny God.’

  ‘I don’t deny God,’ he said. ‘I’m quite positive that the petty bastard exists.’

  Her face, pale in the new moonlight, set hard.

  I’m really too tired to do this, he thought. ‘I love you,’ he heard himself say. He thought of Michael and winced.

  She put her hand to her mouth. ‘You have a funny way of showing it,’ she said.

  He sat down suddenly. Like saying I love you, it wasn’t really a decision. His legs were done.

  She reached out a hand to take his, and as their fingers met, she flinched.

  ‘Oh!’ she said. ‘Gentle Jesu, messire, you are in pain.’

  She leaned over him, and she breathed on him. That’s how it felt.

  He opened his defences, running into the tower. Prudentia shook her head, but her disapproval could be taken for granted for any woman, and he opened the door, secure that the walls of the fortress would protect him from the green storm.

  No sooner did the door open, then she was all around him.

  But the green was right behind her.

  She was very distinct, and she looked the way ignorant men supposed ghosts to look – a pale and colourless picture of herself.

  He reached out and took her hand.

  ‘You are letting me in?’ she asked. She looked around, clearly amazed. She curtsied to Prudentia. ‘Gracious and Living God, my lord – is she alive?’

  ‘She is alive in my memory,’ he said, with some dissimulation. He had some secrets too evil to share.

  She twirled. ‘It’s magnificent! How many sigils have you?’

  ‘Sigils?’ he asked.

  ‘Signs. Workings. Phantasms.’

  He shrugged. ‘More than twenty,’ he said. It wasn’t a lie. It was merely an encouragement to underestimation.

  She chuckled. She was bigger here, her face slightly more elfin and slightly more feral. Her eyes glowed like a cat at night, and were just faintly almond-shaped. ‘I knew you when I first saw you,’ she said. ‘Wearing power like a cloak. The power of the Wild.’

  He smiled. ‘We are two of a kind,’ he said.

  She had his hand, and now she took it and put it on her right breast – except that things here were not of the world. His hand didn’t find her breast. Rather, he found himself standing on a bridge. Beneath him flowed a mountain stream, burbling a dark, clear brown, full of leaves. The trees on either bank were rich, verdant green, towering into the heavens. Now, instead of the grey raiment of her order, she wore a green kirtel and a green belt.

  ‘My bridge risks being swept away by a spring flood,’ she said. ‘But your tower is too confining.’

  He watched the power flow under the bridge, and he was a little afraid of her. ‘You can cast all of this?’

  She smiled. ‘I’m learning. I tire quickly, and I don’t have your twenty workings.’

  He smiled. ‘You know, unless Prudentia has misled me, now that we have been to each other’s places we are bonded.’

  ‘As lon
g as that armoured door of yours is closed, I can’t even find you,’ she said. She gave him a flirtatious frown. ‘I’ve tried.’

  He reached out for her.

  As his hands closed on her shoulders, her concentration slipped, or his did, and they were sitting on the bench in the apple-scented darkness.

  They kissed.

  She laid her head on his arming cote and he opened his mouth.

  ‘Please don’t talk,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to talk.’

  So he sat, perfectly happy, in the darkness. It was some time before he realised she’d magicked his bruises. By then she was asleep.

  Later, he had to pee. And the stone bench was icy cold, despite the warm spring air. And the edge of the bench bit into the back of his thigh at a bad angle. Gradually cut off the flow of blood to his leg, which began to go all pins and needles.

  He wondered if it was his duty to wake her up and send her to bed. Or if he was supposed to wake her up and attack her with kisses. It occurred to him that the loss of a night’s sleep was not a wise move on his part.

  Later still, he realised that her eyes were open.

  She wriggled off his lap. He considered a dozen remarks – all variations on being warmer than her gentle Jesus, but then dismissed them all.

  He was, after all, growing up.

  He kissed her hand.

  She smiled. ‘You pretend to be far worse than you are,’ she said.

  He shrugged.

  She reached into her sleeve, and put something in his hand. It was a plain square of linen.

  ‘My vow of poverty isn’t worth much, because I have nothing,’ she said. ‘I did a little to ease the tire-woman’s joints, and she gave me this. But I’ve cried in it. Twice.’ She smiled.

  He hoped that he wasn’t seeing her in the first light of morning.

  ‘I think that makes it mine,’ she said.

  He crushed it to his heart, pushed it inside his arming cote, kissed her hand.

  ‘What do you want?’ she asked.

  ‘You,’ he said.

  She smiled. ‘Silly. What do you want out of life?’

  ‘You first,’ he said.

  She smiled. ‘I’m easy. I want people to be happy. To live free. And well. With enough to eat. In good health.’ She shrugged. ‘I like it when people are happy.’ She smiled at him. ‘And brave. And good.’

  He winced. ‘War must be very hard on you.’ Winced again. ‘Brave and good?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. She shook her head. ‘You don’t know me very well, not yet. Now you. What do you want?’

  He shook his head. He didn’t dare tell the truth and didn’t want to lie to her. So he tried to find a middle ground. ‘To defy God, and my mother.’ He shrugged, sure that her face had just hardened, set in automatic anger. ‘To be the best knight in the world.’

  She looked at him. The moon was up – that’s all it was, not daylight – and her face shone. ‘You?’

  ‘If you can be a nun, I can be the best knight,’ he said. ‘If you, the very queen of love, can deny your body to be a nun, then I – cursed by God to sin – can be a great knight.’ He laughed.

  She laughed with him.

  That’s how he liked to remember her, ever after – laughing in the moonlight, without the shadow of reserve in her face. She held out her arms, they embraced, and she was gone on soft feet.

  He didn’t even stop to shiver. He ran up the steps to the commanderies, drank off a cold cup of hippocras that had once been hot. But before he let himself sleep, he woke Toby and sent him for Ser Adrian, his company secretary. The man came softly, in a heavy wool overrobe.

  ‘I don’t mean to whine,’ said the scribe, ‘But do you know what time it is?’

  The captain drank another cup of wine. ‘I want you to ask around,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what I’m looking for, but I’m hoping you can find it for me. I know I’m not making sense. But there’s a traitor in this fortress. I have suspicions, but nothing like a shred of proof. Who here can communicate with the outside world? Who has a secret hatred of the Abbess? Or a secret love of the Wild?’

  He almost choked on the last words.

  The scribe shook his head. Yawned. ‘I’ll ask around,’ he said. ‘Can I go back to bed?’

  The captain felt foolish. ‘I may be wrong,’ he said.

  The scribe rolled his eyes – but he waited until he was out of the captain’s door to do it.

  The captain finished his cup and threw himself, fully dressed, on his bed. When the chapel bell rang he tried not to count the rings, so he could pretend he’d had a full night’s sleep.

  The Siege of Lissen Carak, Day Three.

  Michael could hear the captain snoring, and envied him. The archers said he’d ‘been busy’ half the night with his pretty nun, and Michael was vaguely envious, vaguely jealous, and desperately admiring. And mad as hell, of course. It was unfair.

  The third day had been so without event that Michael had begun to wonder whether the captain was wrong. He’d told them the enemy would attack.

  All day, the wyverns flew back and forth.

  Something monstrous belled and belled, a high, clear note made somehow huge and terrifying in the woods.

  No action today. We watched the enemy assemble rafts to replace the boats we burned. The captain warned us that they will eventually assemble machines of war – that the men among the Enemy would traitorously teach the monsters to use them. The fog kept up all day, so that, while the sentries on the fortress walls can see many leagues, almost nothing can be seen of the fields immediately around the castle. The men say that the Abbess can see through the fog.

  We heard cutting and chopping all day.

  Towards sunset, a great force moved through the woods to the west. We could see the trees moving and the glitter of the late sun on weapons. And the roar of many monsters. The captain says a force is crossing the river. He ordered a sortie to form when another force, even larger, formed in the woods opposite our trench, but then dismissed us to dinner when there was no attack.

  Michael sat back. He wasn’t any good at keeping a journal, and he knew that he was leaving out important developments. Wilful Murder had shot a boglin almost three hundred paces away – shooting from a high tower, over the fog, on the dawn breeze. He was now drunk as a lord on the beer ration provided by his mates. But it didn’t seem to change the siege. Or be a notable or noble event. Michael had only the histories from his father’s library as his examples, and they never mentioned archers.

  The captain came in. He had dark circles under his eyes.

  ‘Go to bed,’ he said.

  Michael needed no second urging. But he paused in the doorway.

  ‘No attack?’ he said.

  ‘Your talent for stating the obvious must make you wildly popular,’ the captain said savagely.

  Michael shrugged. ‘Sorry.’

  The captain rubbed his head. ‘I was sure he’d attack the trench today. Instead, he’s sent something – and I worry it’s a strong force – south across the river, despite our burning his boats. There’s a convoy down there, he’s going to destroy it, and I can’t stop him – or even try – until I’ve bloodied his nose in my little trap, and my trap isn’t catching anything.’ The captain drank some wine. ‘It’s all fucking hubris. I can’t actually predict what the enemy will do.’

  Michael was stung. ‘You’ve done all right so far.’

  The captain shrugged. ‘It’s all luck. Go sleep. The fun part of this siege is over. If he doesn’t go for my nice trench-’

  ‘Why should he?’ Michael asked.

  ‘Is that the apprentice captain asking, or the squire?’ the captain asked, pouring himself more wine. He spilled some.

  ‘Just an interested bystander,’ Michael said, and casually, by mistake done-apurpose., knocked the captain’s wine off the table. ‘Sorry, m’lord. I’ll fetch more.’

  The captain stiffened, and then yawned. ‘Nah. I’ve had too much. He has to assume I
’ve filled the trench with men and that with one good rush he can overrun it and kill half my force.’

  ‘But you have filled it with men,’ Michael said. ‘I saw you send them out.’

  The captain smiled.

  Michael shook his head. ‘Where are they?’

  ‘In the Bridge Castle,’ the captain said. ‘It was very clever, but either he saw through the whole thing or he’s too much of a coward to try us.’ He looked in his wine cup and made a face. ‘Where’s Miss Lanthorn?’ he asked. Then he relented. ‘Why don’t you go see her?’

  Michael bowed. ‘Good night,’ he said. And he slipped out into the hallway and pulled his pallet across the captain’s door.

  He spent an eternity searching the torchlit darkness.

  Elissa was sitting on a barrel entertaining half the garrison with a lewd story. But her youngest sister wasn’t there.

  Mary was drinking wine in the Western Tower with Lis the laundress, Sukey Oakshot, the seamstress’s daughter, Bad Tom, Ser George Brewes, and Francis Atcourt. There were cards and dice on the table, and the women were laughing hard. All seven looked up when Michael leaned in.

  ‘She’s not here,’ Tom yelled, and guffawed. The other men-at-arms laughed indulgently, and Michael fled.

  ‘Who’s not here?’ Lis asked.

  ‘His leman. Boy’s in love.’ Tom shook his head and his great hand, under the table, chanced against Sukey’s ankle. She kicked him. ‘Which I’m a’married,’ she said, apparently unafraid of the largest man in the castle.

  Tom shrugged. ‘Can’t fault a man for trying,’ he said.

  ‘Who’s his leman, then?’ Lis asked. ‘One o’ your slatterns? He’s too nice for an oyster, ain’t he?’

  ‘Oyster?’ asked Mary.

  ‘A lass as opens and shuts with the tide,’ Lis said, and drank more wine.

  ‘Like you, eh?’ said Mary.

  Lis laughed. ‘Mary, you’re a local girl. Boys think you are easy. That’s a long chalk from what those girls do.’