The Dread Wyrm by Miles Cameron
He walked over to the company. They were as still as if on parade—a rank of knights and men-at-arms, and then a rank of squires, a rank of archers, and finally a rank of pages. Ready to receive a wyvern or a cavalry charge. Or bad news.
The captain stood in the rain. He raised his head and looked at them. “When we make mistakes, people die,” he said. “When we do our jobs well, other people die. Death is part of our trade—always there. And, like wages, it’s not fair. Why the baby? Why not someone old, like Cuddy?”
A few daring souls tittered.
The captain looked around. “I don’t know. I don’t know why Arnaud died, instead of me. But at another level, I know exactly why Arnaud died, and why Robin died and why we’re standing here in the rain. We’re here because we chose—we chose to fight. Some of you joined the company to fight for something you liked. Some of you fight for each other. Some for gold coins and a precious few fight because mayhap we’ll do some good, whatever good is.” He looked around. “The baby didn’t choose to fight, though. Nor the mother.”
He shrugged. “My point is, we know who killed them. We’re in the middle of a fight. The bishop reminds you of God’s mercy. I will only say this: I will not forget why they died, and when the moment comes…” He took a deep breath, and the men and women in the front row could see the red clash of his eyes. “If I am spared to that moment, my sword will not sleep.”
A sigh escaped the company, as if the whole body were a single person.
The Bishop of Albinkirk turned away in anger.
The captain squared his shoulders. “Company!” he called, as if his voice had never trembled with emotion.
They snapped to attention.
“Take your proper,” he called, “distance.”
The corporals slipped out of the front line and went forward three paces.
The three red lines turned about, and walked off—three paces for the second line, six for the third, nine for the fourth.
He signalled Ser Bescanon, who walked out from the officers’ rank and unsheathed his sword. He saluted with it, and the Red Knight returned his salute and walked off into the rain.
Ser Bescanon’s high cheekbones and long Occitan nose were dripping under his faceless cervelleur. “Have a care for your armour!” he bellowed. “Company—dismiss!”
They ran for shelter. Squires and pages cursed.
The bishop went and stood beside the captain under one of the eaves of the stable. “Revenge?” he asked. “Is that how you motivate them?” His voice was flat with anger.
The captain’s slightly reptilian green eyes seemed to sparkle. “My lord bishop, today—for the first time in a long time, let me add—revenge is what motivates me. They will follow.”
“You spurn everything for which that gentle man stood,” the bishop said.
The captain stood for a moment, tapping his riding gloves impatiently on his armoured thigh. He seemed on the edge of saying something but, instead, he held his peace, and his face became a smooth mask.
Then the mask failed him. The captain leaned close, his eyes very slightly tinged with red, and the bishop had to force himself to stand his ground. “You know,” he said softly, “that gentle man was killed by a shaman—a creature who had been bound. Magisters call it turning. You know it? A creature’s own will is stripped away, and replaced by the control of another. I killed the shaman, my lord bishop, but he was as helpless and as guiltless as your Jesus as a babe. He was a tool. I’m sick of it. I’m sick of being a tool and of using others as tools and the whole bloody game.”
This was so far from what the bishop had expected that he had readied a very different argument. So he had to fold away his text, and take a deep breath.
“Then don’t play,” he said.
The captain’s eyes were a calm green again and the threat of emotional violence seemed to have subsided. He shrugged. “Do you know the questions that are asked of a knight at his making, my lord?”
The bishop nodded.
“I believe in those questions,” the captain said. “Who will protect the weak? Who will defy the enemy? Who will defend the widow and the orphan, the king, and the queen? Even, when forced to it, Holy Mother Church?”
The bishop blinked. “Jesus said we should turn the other cheek. Jesus said nothing of a triumph by violence.”
“Yes, well.” The captain smiled. “I think Jesus would have had a hard time with Bad Tom.” His riding gloves struck the steel of his cuisses with a snap.
“For now, though, the answer to those questions is—I will. I will defy the enemy. I’ve finished sacrificing my pieces one at a time.” He shook himself.
The bishop smiled. “You aren’t even talking to me, are you?”
The captain shrugged.
“I’m going to send you a new chaplain,” the bishop said.
Snap went the gloves.
“Make sure he’s a good jouster,” the captain said.
Ser Alcaeus was drawn to the walls. In his life, he had known much sweetness and much horror, but no experience had equalled the intensity—and the terror—of the minutes after the walls were breached in the siege of Albinkirk. He went to the stretch of northern walls that he had held, and met there—to his stupefaction—a young crossbowman he had known during the siege.
“By Saint George,” Ser Alcaeus said. He embraced the man. “Stefan?”
“Mark, and it please my lord,” the young man said.
“I thought you were dead,” Ser Alcaeus said.
Mark shrugged. “I thought so, too. I fell from the wall.” He shrugged. “I woke up hungry and with two broken legs.” He shrugged again. “Nothing found me to eat me, I guess.” He barked an uncomfortable laugh. “Now I guard the same stretch of wall.”
They looked out over the north and west together.
To the north, the Wild stretched on like a dark carpet, the great trees in the middle distance fading into the tall mountains of the Adnacrags and their white-clad peaks. A single road, wide enough for one wagon, wound out of the wooded hills at the edge of sight along the stable banks of the Canata river that came, cold and black, out of the mountains and descended into the valley through abandoned farmsteads and newly colonized steads and a handful of tilled fields from families that had survived the siege and planted last season.
There was a convoy on the road, glittering with spear points. It was still a good league from the walls, and yet it seemed to flare with colour.
To the south-west, the Royal Road ran up from the great ford at Southford and up to the south gate of Albinkirk, and then west out the west gate and on the north bank of the Cohocton. The north road—often a pair of wagon ruts—joined the Royal Road almost a half a league out from Albinkirk’s walls, where the flooded waters of the Canata ran south from the mountains and poured under the three stone arches of the ancient bridge, which the prosaic inhabitants called Troy, a hamlet of nine houses and a fortified tower.
Out on the Royal Road beyond Troy, a party of three people on horses—or perhaps donkeys—ambled in the clear spring air. The downpour had swept the sky clear and the wind had driven the clouds south. The heavy downpour had flooded the streams, but it had stripped the last ice out of the shaded corners of the fields.
“They must be damp,” Alcaeus said. He turned to young Mark, who shrugged.
“Sometimes I think of killing myself,” Mark said suddenly. His voice was flat.
Alcaeus looked at him carefully. He had things to do, and plots to weave. But this was a man who’d faced the wave of monsters with him.
So Alcaeus leaned casually back against the cold merlons of the curtain wall and tried to look nonchalant. “Why?” he asked quietly.
The young man looked out over the fields. “It’s all I think about.” He shrugged. “There’s no time before it. The attack. It is just… dark.”
Alcaeus nodded. “You think that perhaps this is not the best job for you?” he asked. “The same piece of wall?”
?
Alcaeus had seen all the signs before.
“That’s why you should be dead, too, but you aren’t—” Young Mark stepped in close and went for the baselard at his waist, but Alcaeus, who had seen men broken by war and terror since he was a child, stripped the weapon from him and put the man down on the catwalk as gently as he could.
“Guard!” he called a few times.
The two roads met by the inn at Troy. The inn was small, nothing like the fortified edifice at Dorling, but the King’s Arms at Troy was a pleasant building with six mullioned windows newly replaced by the innkeeper, a tall, thin man whose Etruscan parentage showed in his straight black hair and aquiline nose. Sheer luck had preserved his roof and his floors from the forces of the Wild; he’d helped hold the walls of Albinkirk and done his best to fight fires. He’d poured his fortune into restoring his inn, preparing for what he hoped might be better times, and he’d watched with sickened apprehension as more and more reports came into his common room of raids on the frontier, of monsters and death.
The morning rain had been so heavy on the frozen ground that his lower basement had flooded, and he was down there, bailing with a bucket with all four of his scullery maids and both of his grooms, when his wife’s shrill voice summoned him to the common room. He pounded up the steps with the grooms at his heels and he took the long Etruscan halberd off its pegs behind the great fireplace as he passed and turned into the great low common room that was the centre of his inn—and his village.
There were neither irks nor boglins in the courtyard. Instead, framed in the doorway was a knight in the richest armour Giancarlo Grimaldo had ever seen. He bowed.
The young knight returned his bow. “You are the keeper?” the young man asked.
“My lord, I have that honour,” Giancarlo said, setting his halberd into the angle that the mantelpiece made with the wall.
“I am Ser Aneas Muriens, and my mother, the Green Lady of the North, wishes to take her midday meal in your establishment.” He inclined his head slightly. “We are wet, and my mother is chilled.”
“I will make up the fire and serve you only the best.” The yard outside was filled with men-at-arms and servants, and they would all need to be fed. It was two months’ business in a single convoy, and all he had to do was survive it.
He turned to Nob, his best groom. “Run along to Master Jean’s and ask for both his daughters. Quick as you can.”
His wife leaned forward and hissed, “And send Jean’s son Robbie to Lady Helewise at the manor house and see if you can get her girl and Jenny to serve the duchess. Fetch Lady Helewise herself if she can come.”
Nob was out the kitchen and running in heartbeats, spraying new mud as he went.
But the great Duchess of Westwall was not coming in. She was out in the stone-flagged street—stone flagged only to the limits of the village, and with the sewer running down the middle in stone-slabbed confines cleaned by an old stream—sitting on a magnificent, high-blooded eastern riding horse. Chatting with a nun on a donkey.
“Let her through!” Ghause snapped at her men-at-arms. Her tone of command gave way to the dulcet accents of seduction as she leaned down. “My gossip, the saintly Amicia. Give an old woman your blessing, my sweet.”
Amicia had had several minutes to recognize the banner, and the men-at-arms. She knew Ghause’s youngest son and her captain. She still found the impact of the woman enough to rob her of words.
Ghause Muriens, mother of the Red Knight and of Ser Gavin, wife of the Earl of Westwall, was not a tall woman, although few people remembered her as small. She was, in fact, just five feet tall in her stockings; though not so small when booted and spurred atop a tall horse. Her honey-blond hair was as unmarked by time as her face or the skin of her neck or the tops of her breasts, and she wore the very latest in Etruscan fashion, a long pointed hat with a great spray of ostrich plumes held in an heraldic brooch, a perfectly dry cloak in her own colours of green and sable, lined entirely in sable so black it looked hermetical and trimmed in royal ermine to which she had every right as the king’s sister. She wore gloves of dark green and two matching emerald rings in red gold, and her waist was clasped with a heavy knight’s belt of cockle shells in the matching gold, and a similar chain—the shells full size—lay over her shoulders and breasts under her cloak. Her spurs were gold like a knight’s, and she wore a great sword of war—an uncommon accoutrement for a woman even in Alba—the scabbard green and all its fittings gold.
Just behind her in the crowded street was a great bird, too big to be a hawk and possibly large even for an eagle, on a perch and jessed and belled and hooded. It was huge. The size of a big dog. It gave a mad screech that made horses shy.
The duchess glanced at it and turned back. She wore the value of the whole village on her back. The people came to their doors or lined the street to see her, and she waved politely and smiled.
Amicia took a deep breath, dismounted, and curtsied.
The duchess smiled. “You are really such a pretty thing. Don’t you think those breasts and those legs are wasted on God? He doesn’t care. Let him have the ugly old maids. Those legs were made for sport, sweeting.”
Ghause’s men-at-arms were used to her. No one leered. No one commented.
Amicia rose from her curtsey. “No one could be immune to your grace’s flattery, or fail to perceive your meaning,” the nun said.
Ghause smiled. “I like you, my little witch. Come and share a meal with an old woman. You know my son is, by all report, in yonder fortress.”
Amicia smiled. “So I have heard.”
“You look tired,” Ghause said. “Too much prayer?”
Amicia was tempted to say that she’d been drained of her ops for two days and nights, but chose not to share that. She made herself smile. “Too many young lovers,” she said.
Ghause’s beautiful blue eyes almost bulged. There was a long silence, and then she snorted so hard that her horse started and she had t0 curb the animal. Then she laughed and laughed.
Amicia was not used to the level of service that the duchess provided. The duchess retired and changed into a yet more splendid dress of green velvet that left no man present in any doubt as to the shape—and tone—of her body. Her hair was brushed until it shone like the red gold of her jewels.
It came to Amicia that the great duchess was nervous.
The innkeeper and his staff were as courteous as the strain of twenty men-at-arms and forty more servants on a country inn could leave them, and she chose a strong red wine to steady her nerves, but the best tonic was the sight of Helewise—Lady Helewise to the older locals. She was the lady of a manor just to the south, and she came in quietly, wearing a good wool gown and an apron, with her daughter Phillippa and another girl the same age, Jenny, both pretty and blond and capable of being gentlewomen when called on to do so. After a whispered conversation with the innkeeper, Helewise went out into the yard and spoke to the captain of the duchess’s men-at-arms and took wine to Ser Aneas in person.
Ser Aneas gave her a deep bow. “You are no inn servant,” he said.
She smiled at him. “Nor I am, ser knight, but in a village, we all help each other. Especially in these times, mm?”
The men-at-arms were all gentlemen, and they had dismounted, and stood in knots in the yard. The inn was too small for them to all go in at once.
Through the windows, Helewise could see the keeper’s wife bustling to make the two common room long tables fit for gentry.
“We will have two tables ready for you in a moment,” Helewise said. “If you gentlemen would be kind enough to enter in files, and file to your seat, that would allow the duchess some privacy. And allow us to get you fed efficiently.”
Ser Aneas bowed.
Helewise took Ser Aneas’s glass. The duchess’s captain bowed. “I am Ser Henri,” he said with an accent as Venike as the glass.
Helewise dropped him a straight-backed curtsey without tilting her tray. “My lord does us honour.”
Ser Henri laughed. “By God, I’ve seen more courtesy in this inn yard than in a year at Ticondaga.”
Helewise nodded. “You’ll find that the keeper is your countryman, if I read your accent aright, my lord.”
“By the cross of Christ!” Ser Henri said. “Mayhap he has some of the wine of home, then. Goodwife? My lady?”
Helewise nodded. “Folk hereabouts call me a lady, ser knight. But my husband, while a good man-at-arms, was never a knight.”
She went in with her tray—but not before her eyes summoned her daughter and Jenny, who were basking too long in the admiration of twenty young men.
“What brings you to Albinkirk?” the duchess asked. She had a healthy appetite—she wolfed down half a rabbit, all of a capon, and moved on to a dish of greens in the new fashion, apparently oblivious to the miracle of the innkeeper having greens in late Martius.
Amicia ate more sparingly due to her Lenten vows, but the food was good and the wine better. She sat with the duchess, curtained off from the men-at-arms who were now seated and loud, ensconced at the two long tables nearest the door.
“My Abbess does not feel that she can travel just now,” Amicia said. “I will represent the Order at Ser John’s council.”
The duchess met her eye. “You are full of surprises, my love. Will you sit in Sophie’s chair and be the Abbess? By God, that might be enough power to turn my head away from marriage. Who wants men anyway?” She laughed, swallowed a morsel of truffle and sat back to sip wine. “Outside of the one thing they do well.”
“War?” Amicia asked.