The Red Knight ttsc-1

by Miles Cameron

  ‘Then-’

  ‘It’s what I’d do. Bleed us with the easily replaced critters and save the others. He needs them to fight the king. This was all just to fix us in place.’

  ‘We can hold until the king comes,’ the Prior said. He was pulling his sodden arming cap off his head and paused to slap a mosquito.

  ‘Despite wyverns and daemons? I hope so,’ said the captain. He got to his feet. ‘Michael – tell the valets to serve beer and maple sugar.’ He smiled at the Prior. ‘It’s going to be a long night.’ He looked around. ‘Gelfred?’

  ‘My lord?’ Gelfred said.

  ‘I need you to do something insanely brave,’ he said.

  Gelfred shrugged.

  ‘Can you get a message to the king?’ the captain asked.

  ‘In the dark? Through a host of enemies?’ Gelfred smiled. ‘I can with God’s help. And by my faith, messire, if you make a crack about God not caring, you can take your cursed message yourself.’

  The captain got to his feet and gave the huntsman his hand. ‘I am rebuked, Gelfred.’

  Gelfred shrugged. ‘Join me in prayer,’ he said.

  ‘Let’s not get carried away,’ the captain replied.

  Gelfred laughed. ‘Why do I like you so much?’ he asked.

  The captain shrugged. ‘The feeling is mutual.’

  Half an hour later, Gelfred went straight into the river from the docks. He swam for fifteen minutes in the dark, and then went with the current for a while to rest. He heard, or felt, a wyvern in the dark air overhead, and he went under the water and stayed down as long as he could. When he surfaced, his heart was beating so fast that he had to head for shore.

  ‘There goes the bravest man in all my company,’ the Red Knight said to the Prior.

  ‘Because he faces his fears?’ the Prior asked. ‘He has God’s aid.’

  The captain shook his head but said nothing. Only watched the darkness, and wished he was in the castle. He touched the soiled handkerchief pinned to his arming cote. It was no longer white, indeed, it held the blood and ichor of several foes, and it was cut almost in two.

  Lissen Carak – Amicia

  Amicia tried not to go to the gate. She tried not to look out the window. When a party of men-at-arms clattered in on exhausted horses, she forced herself to wait until the wounded came in.

  Ser Tancred told her that the Red Knight was spending the night in the Bridge Castle.

  When the last wounded were healed, she knelt in the chapel by the Abbess’s bier and prayed. She opened herself, as the nuns had taught her, to God. And she made God a hard, heartfelt promise.

  Somewhere – Gelfred

  He was tired and cold and very, very scared when he heard the sound of men’s voices on the other bank, and he struck out for them. He swam quietly, as well as he could.

  They had boats.

  After some time, he swam to the boats, and a sentry saw him.

  ‘Halt! Alarm! Man in the water!’ A crossbow loosed, and the bolt passed somewhere near him.

  ‘Friend!’ he spluttered. He was short of breath. ‘From the fortress!’

  They were too alert, but they weren’t great marksmen. He swam in, shouting that he was a friend. Eventually, they stopped loosing their bolts at him, and strong arms pulled him into a big barge.

  ‘Take me to the king!’ he said.

  A big man with a hillman’s accent pulled him over the side and put him on a bench. ‘Drink this, laddy,’ he said. ‘You’ve found the Queen, not the king.’

  Chapter Sixteen

  Ser Jehannes

  Lissen Carak – Michael

  Michael watched the captain sleep. It was dawn, or near enough, and he cursed that he was awake. He rose, pissed in a pot, drank half a glass of stale wine and spat it out into the courtyard.

  The place stank like a charnel house, and most of the soldiers had slept in rows in the tower. In their harness.

  He walked to the table, opened his wallet, and took out a pair of wax tablets, withdrew his stylus, and wrote:

  The Siege of Lissen Carak. Day Fifteen

  Yesterday the enemy tried to storm Bridge Castle and, despite putting monsters inside, was repelled. We lost more than forty men, women, and children of the convoys, and three men-at-arms and two archers, as well as four men of the militia. These are our worst losses so far.

  But the king is coming. Knights of the Holy Order of Saint Thomas came at nightfall on the thirteenth day to tell us we were saved. And yet we fought all day and the king did not come.

  Where is the king?

  Michael looked at the last line. He took the butt of the stylus to rub that line out. Then he shook his head, and went to wake the captain.

  Near Lissen Carak – The King

  The sun was an arc of fire in the east.

  The king’s magnificent golden armour and brilliant red and blue heraldry caught the first rays of the sun so that he seemed to catch fire.

  Behind him stood three hundred of the most heavily armoured knights Alba had ever seen, their heavy horses left in camp.

  The golden helmet moved to the right and left, examining the dressing of the long line of chivalric warriors that vanished into the woods on either flank, each with his heavily armoured squire at his back.

  His golden gauntlet was raised high, and fell, and the line of the vanguard advanced along the line of the old Bridge Road. The three hundred knights were each a man’s height apart, their line was a half-mile long, and the men at either end had hunter’s horns – noted horns, which they played back and forth like huntsmen.

  The figure of the king seemed to dance forward joyfully.

  He pressed through the woods, and the woods parted before him. There is nothing in the woods that can impede a man in full harness – no branch, no trailing vine, no bank of thickset canes, no matter how thorny, will stop a man in armour. Or slow him.

  The line ground forward at a walking pace.

  Half a mile.

  A mile.

  He raised his hand and his own horn bearer played a long note and the line stopped.

  Men-at-arms raised their visors and drank water, but the morning was still early and it was cool in the dark woods.

  Men pulled the branches out of their knee-armour, out of their elbow cops, out of the joints in their faulds.

  And then, with the sounding of two horn calls, the line swept forward again, like a great boar hunt.

  A mile behind them, the rest of the army lurched into motion.

  The van pressed forward into the woods. Led by the king, in person.

  Bill Redmede – Jack of the Jacks – saw the armoured figures coming on foot, armoured cap a pied, and the bitterness in his heart was enough to melt steel.

  So much for Thorn and his contempt for men.

  Jack turned to his lieutenant – Nat Tyler, the Jack of the Albin Plain. ‘Bastard aristos have a spy, brother.’

  Tyler watched the inexorable approach of the armoured men. ‘And we’re in deep brush.’

  ‘Thorn said they’d be mounted on the road,’ Jack said. ‘Fuck!’

  ‘Let’s loose and get gone,’ Tyler said.

  ‘This is our day!’ Jack argued. ‘Today we kill the king!’

  Seventy yards away, the king stood virtually alone. He stood in a shaft of light in the deep forest, and he raised his arms – he had a four-foot sword in one hand and a sparkling buckler in the other.

  Redmede drew his great bow and, suiting thought to deed, loosed.

  Beside him, Nat Tyler’s bow twanged deep, the harp of death.

  All along the line, Jacks rose from ambush and loosed at the king.

  The king’s figure twinkled as he pivoted on his back heel and spun, his buckler sweeping over his head, his sword scything through the first fall of arrows.

  All around him, men-at-arms broke into a dead run, charging the line of archers.

  The king stood his ground – stepped and swung, stepped, cut, and then ran forward.
/>   ‘Good Christ,’ Jack muttered. Not a single arrow had gone home. ‘Too far – too damned far!’

  But the Jacks were robbers and partisans, not battlefield men, and they turned and ran.

  A hundred paces to the rear, the line of Jacks steadied. Nat Tyler got them into a line at the edge of a meadow of flowers a third of a mile long and two hundred yards deep – an ancient beaver meadow, crisscrossed by a stream. Bill led them over the stream, emerging wet to the waist, and they formed a new line on the far side.

  ‘Better,’ Nat Tyler said with a grim smile.

  The men-at-arms must have paused to drink water and rest. The sun was much higher when they came – and they came all together. Forward in a line. This time the captain yelled at them to pick their targets and leave the king to the master archers, and the shafts flew thick and heavy over open ground.

  He could no longer cut every arrow in the air, and heavy shafts rang off his buckler, his helmet – he was leaning forward like a man walking into a storm, but his heart was singing, because this was a great deed of arms. He laughed, and ran faster.

  The stream opened under his feet and he fell – straight down the banks and into a thigh deep pool.

  Two peasants stepped to the edge of the pool and loosed arrows at him from a few feet away.

  Gaston saw the charge falter and blew his horn. Men were falling into something – a line of pits, a hidden trench-

  An arrow rang from his breastplate, denting it deeply, and then he had an armoured fist on the king, and he pulled him straight out of the muddy pool in one long pull. By his side his squire, angered, threw his short spear across the stream and it struck – more by luck than skill – in the torso of a peasant, who folded over it and screamed. And the king got his feet under him and ran straight at the beaver dam – the only clear bridge over the stream.

  Gaston followed him, and every man-at-arms nearby followed, too. The dam was half in and half out the water – far from solid, just an animal’s hasty assemblage of downed branches and rotten wood. But the king seemed to skim across it, even as Gaston’s right leg went into water as cold as ice – and he lost his balance, flailed, almost lost his sword and an arrow slammed into his helmet.

  The king ran on, across the uneven top of the dam. The first half ran to a rocky island, and then the dam was even worse, the centre of its span under water, and yet the king ran across it, his feet kicking up spray in a brilliant display of balance – straight across the dam into the archers pouring shafts at him, and one got past his buckler to bury itself in his shoulder by the pauldron, and another rang off his helmet, and then he was among them, and his sword moved faster than a dragonfly on a summer’s evening. Gaston was struggling to catch him, breathing like a horse at the end of a long run, soaked, his left leg trapped in mud for a moment and then Gaston was with the king, through the line of archers, and the horns were playing the avaunt and the mort.

  He followed the king up the rise to the ridge that dominated the meadow, and more and more men-at-arms crossed behind them – and far off to the left, more men-at-arms had crossed the narrow footbridge on the road, and now the whole line of peasant archers was compromised, and they ran again.

  But even as they turned to run, the wyverns struck.

  Gaston saw the first one – saw the flicker of its shadow, and looked up in stunned unbelief, even as the wave of its terror struck him and the Alban knights with him. The Albans flowed through the palpable fear – and he refused to let himself pause, although for a moment it was so intense he couldn’t breathe – they surged forward even as the carthorse-sized monster killed a dozen of their number in a single flurry of talons and beak.

  There were three of the things.

  That was all Gaston could comprehend – that, and that the king was like a fiend, leaping forward at the first wyvern, and his sword sliced a wing through at the root and his back cut flayed a sword’s length of scales from the thing’s neck, and it whirled to face him but he was gone, under the flailing neck and his blade went up into its belly – ripped the thing open from anus to breastbone, and was gone again as its intestines fell free.

  Gaston followed him to the second one, where it crushed the Bishop of Lorica to the ground with one blow and ripped his squire’s head from his trunk with its beaked head. Gaston got his spear up, and spiked the head – lost his balance on the uneven ground, broken with the spiked branches the beavers had left – stumbled, and lost his spear, whirled and drew his sword as the head, trailing his spear, went for him.

  He cut into its snout with every muscle in his body.

  Its head knocked him flat.

  The head reared above him, with his spear and his sword stuck in it, and the king straddled him. Blood leaked from the arrow in his left shoulder, and the man cut one handed at the monster’s neck and severed its head.

  The surviving knights roared their approval and Gaston got slowly to his feet, drenched by the hot blood of the thing, and dug in its jaw for his sword – he had to kick it off his blade.

  The third wyvern was already airborne, leaving a trail of broken knights behind it, but after leaping into the air, he pivoted and collapsed on the king, bearing him to the ground.

  Every knight still alive in the meadow fell on the wyvern, and blows rained on it like a steel hail – pieces of meat flew free like dust rises from the first fall of rain.

  The wyvern hunched and tried to rise again into the air, but Gaston slammed his spearhead into its neck, and a few feet away, Ser Alcaeus hit the thing with a maul and staggered it. The king struggled from beneath it, staggered to his feet, and rammed his sword to the hilt in its guts before falling to his knees.

  The wyvern screamed.

  The king fell to the ground, his golden armour all besmirched with the blood of three mighty foes.

  Ser Alcaeus swung his maul up over his head, screamed his defiance, and slammed the lead head into the wyvern’s skull, and the beast crumpled atop the king.

  A dozen gauntleted hands scrambled to pull the dead thing off the king, even as trumpets sounded behind them and the mounted chivalry emerged from the tree line.

  Gaston ran to the king. He got the king’s head on his knee and opened his faceplate.

  His mad cousin’s eyes met his.

  ‘Am I not the greatest knight in the world!’ he roared. ‘And no craven, to basely let my liege be slain!’

  His eyes flickered. ‘Get the arrow out of my chest and bandage me tight,’ he said. ‘This is my battle!’ And then the light went out of his eyes.

  Gaston held his cousin tight while a pair of squires tried to staunch the flow of blood, stripping his breastplate and his haubergeon. The remnants of the vanguard pressed on.

  ‘He demanded it, this morning,’ said a voice behind Gaston, and suddenly the squires were bowing.

  The King of Alba stood there, in Jean de Vrailly’s cote armour.

  ‘He said he knew of a plot to kill me, in an ambush – and he wished the honour of taking my place.’ The king shook his head. ‘He is truly a great knight.’

  Gaston swallowed his thoughts, and wondered what his mad cousin had done. And why. But the mad eyes were closed forever.

  Near Lissen Carak – Thurkan

  Thurkan watched the king fall. His eyesight was tremendous and from two ridges away he and his clan watched the abnethog fling themselves on the knights.

  Of course, he had told them that he would support their attack.

  He’d told the Jacks much the same.

  But Thorn was doomed, and Thurkan had no intention of letting his people suffer any more.

  He turned to his sister. ‘If the men begin fighting among themselves, well and good – we will feast.’

  ‘I see nothing of the sort,’ Mogan said.

  ‘Nor I,’ Korghan said.

  Behind them stood forty of their kind – enough Qwethnethog to turn the battle. ‘Go tell the Sossag and the Abenacki that the battle is lost,’ Thurkan said to his sister.
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  ‘It isn’t lost unless we flee,’ his sister insisted. ‘By rock and flowing water – is that your will?’

  Thurkan frowned, deep creases appearing in his jaw. ‘Thorn must die – now, while he is weak. Otherwise he will hunt us down.’

  Mogan poked her snout close to her brother’s. ‘Do not let me believe that this is all the rivalry of two Powers,’ she spat. ‘I have lost kin – you have lost kin. We were promised a feast, and-’

  ‘We had a feast at Albinkirk and another on the road.’ Thurkan shook his head. ‘I do not do what I do lightly. Thorn must go. We are being-’ he flexed the talons on his forefoot, moving each digit in an intricate arc, ‘-manipulated. By something. I can feel it.’

  Mogan snorted. ‘Very well,’ she said. ‘I obey. Under protest.’ And ran off into the trees, as fleet as a deer.

  ‘West,’ Thurkan told his brother.

  ‘I can help you,’ his brother insisted.

  ‘Perhaps. But Mogan cannot lead our clan or fertilize new eggs. And you can.’ The great head turned. ‘Obey, brother.’

  Korghan flicked his tongue in anger. ‘Very well, brother.’

  The two clan companies started west, even as the Royal Household Knights began to climb the ridge towards them.

  Bill Redmede ran, loosed an arrow from his dwindling store, and ran again. His bodkin points were all but gone, and he had only hunting arrows.

  The God-damned aristocrats had more plate armour than he’d ever seen. And the monsters – he’d been a fool to ever trust them and no doubt imperiled his soul, as well. He was bitter – tired, angry, and defeated.

  But he’d seen the king fall. It was some consolation, but it didn’t seem to slow the rest of the aristos any, and like all his kind, he faced an ugly death if he was caught, so he waited a heartbeat, stepped from behind his tree and put a shaft under the arm of somebody’s fucking lord and turned, and ran again.