The Dread Wyrm by Miles Cameron
From where she stood, the Queen could see that every letter held the Count D’Eu’s seal.
“Do you think he would seal his love letters?” muttered the Queen.
“Who knows what traitors and heretics think?” spat the archbishop. “Confess, and avoid the stake, your grace.”
“Confess what?” Desiderata asked. “I am guiltless. I carry the King’s son. I have never ceased to strive for this kingdom, and the Count D’Eu was never even my friend, much less my lover. This is all absurd.”
The King was reading one of the letters, his face a flaming red. “That you would dare!” he shouted, and threw it in her face.
“Confess to the murder of D’Eu, and the King, in his mercy, will spare your life.” The Sieur de Rohan stood easily, his voice bored. “See to his majesty. He is over-wrought.”
The King was reading another letter.
Desiderata was closer to panic than the old horror under the palace had moved her, but she held her ground. “Your grace, those letters are palpable forgeries. Your grace. You know my hand!”
The King whirled on her, and raised his fist. But he lowered it, his lips quivering with rage, his jowls—had he long had jowls?—making him look more sad than angry. “I thought that I knew you,” he said. “But de Vrailly was right. Take her from my sight.”
“Where, your grace?” asked de Rohan.
“The deepest pit of hell, for all I care,” said the King. He seemed to have aged ten years before their eyes.
The Queen drew herself to her full stature—not just in the real, but in the aethereal.
The archbishop clasped the talisman at his breast. “Do your worst, whore of Satan!” he said. “I am protected against all of your kind.”
Desiderata smiled with all the scorn she could muster. “The difference between you and I,” she said, “is that I would not stoop to destroy you if doing so would save my soul. I make and heal. I bring light to the dark. And when I do, your kind scuttle for the narrow places the light will not reach.”
She took a single step forward, and the archbishop stepped back unconsciously.
She tossed her head. “Where are you taking me?”
As the door closed behind her, she heard de Rohan’s oily voice say, “But your grace, now we must take thought for her brother.”
The Queen whirled. “Your grace!” she shouted.
The sheriff—cowed by her rank and her condition—let go her elbow.
The door opened. Again, the King was framed in it.
The Queen raised her chin. “I demand a trial,” she said.
Her husband paused. Their eyes met.
“I am absolutely guiltless, my lord. No man has known this body save you.” The Queen did not plead. Her anger was plain—and to most men, proved her innocence. No one could act such a part.
“Take her away,” whispered de Rohan.
“This is Alba, not Galle,” said the Queen. “I demand a trial, by my peers, in public.”
Wat Tyler slipped into Harndon amidst the chaos of the arrival of the Galles. His clothes were ruined, and his face wore the marks of heavy weather and constant strain. A gate guard might have questioned him for the great bow on his back alone, but the movement of a thousand armed Galles through the streets had stripped the gates of all but a token force, and those men still on the gates cared for nothing but what was going on inside their city.
As his new ally had promised him.
He crossed the First Bridge with the flood of morning market customers and farmers, and helped unload a wagon in East Cheaping before he walked uphill into the stews behind the docks. He saw more poverty than he remembered from his last visit, and more beggars.
He exchanged a sign with a beggar-master.
The man nodded at his bow. “That won’t win you no friends with the magistrates,” he said. “Only a citizen of Harndon—”
“I know the law,” Tyler said.
“You look like you’ve been in some hard places, brother,” muttered the beggar-master. In fact, he was more than a little afraid of Tyler, who smelled like the wilderness.
Tyler shrugged.
The beggar-master took him to chapter, a gathering of beggars—sanctioned since Archaic times by dukes and kings, and now held in the old agora by the Tower of Winds. The Beggar King sat on the steps of the old Temple of Ios. There, three Archaic stele formed a natural throne of incredibly ancient white marble.
The Beggar King wore a crown of leather. Unlike most kings, he sat alone. He had no court. Nor was he big, nor ferocious-looking. In fact, he was so nondescript in his dirty leathers and old wool, his lanky brown hair shot with grey and his long beard, that he might have been any peasant or out-of-work farmer on the streets.
“Wat Tyler,” he said. “Last I saw you, you was off to win a great victory against the King.”
Tyler shrugged. “We lost.”
The Beggar King nodded. “Well. And now you’re back.”
“Not for long. Does my place still hold?” Tyler asked.
The Beggar King looked around. The senior beggars and beggar-masters grinned.
“Aye, Wat. Your place still holds.” The King laughed.
Tyler took his great bow off his back and leaned on it. “I’ve walked from N’gara,” he said. “I’d be right thankful for a jack of ale and a bowl of something.”
“N’gara?” the Beggar King said. Silence had fallen. “Next you’ll be telling us you met the Faery Knight.”
“Somewhat like that,” Tyler answered.
A fat woman put a jack in his hand.
He raised it in thanks and drank deep. “Comrades,” he said. “That’s the first ale I’ve had in many a month.”
“You were far off in the Wild,” the Beggar King said. “And now you’ve come back—a hard road. You never was a real beggar, Wat. What are you here for this time?”
Tyler shrugged. “I’ll hide a month or two. Pick up some lads as want to fight. And be away before summer comes.”
“Same as always,” the Beggar King said.
“Aye,” Tyler said.
“And you aren’t just here because the tournament is upon us, and there’s money to be gained everywhere?” the Beggar King asked.
“Tournament?” Wat asked.
“Christ and his saints, man—you must have been in the land of the faeries. There’s a great tourney to be fought, a million sculls to pick the pockets of and a thousand shills to fleece.” He grinned. “If we’re not killed by Galle routiers first.”
“Routiers?” Tyler asked.
“Killing always did get your attention, Wat. The King’s champion, de Vrailly—”
“May he rot in hell,” Tyler said.
“Ah—sometimes we even agree. May he rot in hell—he sent to Galle for a fresh army. And they sent him one, but they ha’ troubles of their own, seemingly, and we get the tall knights and the scrapings of their jails. They kept all their proper soldiers home to fight boglins.” He laughed.
Tyler nodded. “Don’t talk to me about boglins,” he said. “I’ve had a bellyful.”
The younger of the female beggar-masters cackled. “You home to stay, then?”
Tyler shook his head. “No, Lise. I ain’t, like I said. I’ll be gone afore midsummer.”
“You’ll help us kill some Galles?” the Beggar King asked.
Tyler nodded. “You know me, King.”
“We know you,” the Beggar King said. “Lucky you came,” he admitted. “We don’t have the muscle we’ll need for these Galle bastards.”
Tyler nodded. “They die, pretty much as easy as any other man,” he said, his thumbs rubbing the beeswaxed wood of his great bow.
Lise stepped forward—a big, handsome ruin of a woman with a red nose and lank black hair. “One o’ my girls—robbed, throat cut. Scale Alley.” She folded her arms. “Three Galles, all new off the boat. Crack says he’d know ’em again.”
The Beggar King rubbed his hands together and looked at Wat.
“No,” the King said slowly. “No. You can walk away. You earned it a hundred times. But—if’n you want help, well, we want help, too.”
Tyler frowned, thinking of his task.
But some ties were thicker than blood or water. He turned his eyes to Lise without moving his head. “You tell me where to find ’em. Livery, lodging. All the usual.”
She came up and kissed him. “Some o’ we missed you, Wat.”
“I’ll bet you say that to all the hired killers,” Tyler said, with a spark of his ancient self.
The sway of her hips held no promise for him, though, and the spark died.
He was given a space on a floor under a tavern. And he began to eat, and enjoy being warm—the two greatest pleasures left him.
The Queen’s arrest was a wonder—an expected shock, but still a shock when it happened. The sheer number of Galles in the street was another shock to every Harndoner, and the sheer criminality of their servants and spearmen was beyond anything the people of Harndon had ever seen.
Thirty men and a dozen women died the first night. Twenty Gallish spearmen burned down an inn when they were thrown out—for theft. They killed every man who came through the door out of the smoke.
The High Sheriff went to the palace for soldiers with whom to make arrests, and never returned.
In broad daylight, a party of routiers stormed a jeweller’s booth in the market by Cheapside. They killed the man and his daughter and took all their gold, silver, and copper—including some fine enamels.
And then they swaggered through the rapidly closing stalls, picking valuables off other shop tables. A merchant who protested was stabbed and left kneeling in the muck, his guts spilling around his hands.
They sacked a dozen more shops, gathering adherents as they went, and then went down to the riverbank as if they owned the place, and laid their loot on blankets to divide it—exactly as if they were in a city taken by storm.
It was there that the Trained Band found them.
The Trained Band was a muster of all the very best trained and armed citizens of Harndon. Any man or woman who was formally signed as an apprentice to one of the seventy-three recognized guilds or trades was automatically made a citizen, with freedom of the city and the right to bear arms and travel, but many other people had the same rights; most householders who held in freehold, and most servants of the two great priories, and the King’s household and the Queen’s, and hundreds of others—fencing masters, for example, and school teachers. And a variety of men and women who’d been granted the status and cherished it—including some knights and nobles.
The muster of the city was the assembly of every man or strong woman who owned and could carry weapons. The Trained Band was the pick of the whole. The elite of the Trained Band tended to be from the guilds that made and used weapons; the bowyers, the fletchers, the butchers, the armourers and the sword smiths.
The Trained Band was ready at a minute’s notice to be the armoured fist of the city, but they generally worked at the behest of the Sheriff and the Lord Mayor, and they tended to obey the niceties of the law.
Michael de Burgh was a fencing master and owned a prosperous tavern. He had been a soldier, and it was rumoured that he ran a string of brothels. But he was one of the eight captains of the Trained Band, and he was the man on duty. The routiers on the riverbank gathered in knots, weapons in hand, as the Trained Band marched up to the edge of Cheaping Street.
De Burgh stepped out of the ranks of his spearmen.
“Throw down your weapons,” he shouted in a voice fit to wake the dead and make them do drill. “Throw them down and lie down. You are all—”
He looked down in surprise at the heavy arbalest bolt that had punched through his heavy coat of plates and the mail beneath it. He was not a slim man, and the bolt went into him up to the fletchings.
A shocked screech.
But he knew his duty. “Under—arrest…” he managed before he pitched over.
The men behind him in the Band knew their duty, too.
Battles are generally the result of someone making a serious mistake. The Battle of Cheaping Street was the result of two sets of mistakes. On the one hand, the routiers had never encountered resistance from townspeople or peasants. Their experience in Galle was that the only men who would face them were knights. All other resistance would melt away before their ferocity and superior equipment and skill.
The men of the Trained Band were used to facing opponents who were better trained—or monstrous. They made up for their disparity in fine equipment and discipline. But they had never experienced a hard fight in their own city. Out in the Wild—yes. Not in the streets around the market.
The routiers charged with a yell of fury that shook the windows around the market.
The left end of the Band’s line didn’t loose a single bolt, as they were unready for immediate violence. They hadn’t seen Captain de Burgh get hit, and they had no idea what was going on. Many men at the left of the line were still shrugging into hauberks and buckling their breast-and-backs. Men had sausages dangling out of their mouths.
At their end, the routiers struck like wolves at a flock of sheep, and men—especially the rear rankers—broke, ran and were cut down. Most of the routiers had bills or poleaxes, and they used them cruelly, killing the wounded on the ground, hacking militiamen down as they turned to run. A generation of fletchers’ apprentices died in seconds. The Butcher’s Guild lost a master, four journeymen and a dozen apprentices as the line caved in.
At the other end of the line, the result was utterly different. The armourers had been right behind the captain. They had been the first men called, and the first in armour.
The Captain of the Crossbows—a stepping stone to the command of the whole Band—ordered his men to loose their bolts.
Sixty arbalest bolts struck the front rank of the charging routiers. The volley was sufficiently crisp that the bolts striking home sounded like a wooden mallet striking meat.
The armourers, on the word of command, levelled their heavy spears and charged.
Edmund—front rank, right marker, corporal—was calm enough to spare a glance at the crispness of his front rank before he caught a screaming Galle under the chin with his heavy spear. The blow almost tore the man’s head from his body, and Edmund shortened his grip, pulled the weapon clear of the corpse and stepped forward so as not to impede the men in his file behind him.
Thirty routiers went down in a few seconds. Their ferocity was flayed by the crossbowmen—when they hesitated, the young, strong, and extremely well-armoured apprentices and journeymen of the Armourer’s Guild reaped them like ripe wheat.
The fight turned like a pinwheel, and a full minute had not yet passed.
But as most such fights do, the result rested on spirit. The routiers had no reason to stay, beyond loot and pride. The Band were protecting their homes and livelihoods. They held.
The routiers broke. They ran into the market—overturning tables and slaughtering anyone who stood near enough to be reached with a blade.
The Band—that part of it that had held together—gave chase.
The market became a scene from hell.
As the butchers—who had broken and now reformed—turned on their tormenters for revenge, the massacre began to spread down Cheaping Street in both directions.
Captain de Burgh was down. In fact, his life was gurgling out of him. There was no one to give orders.
The whole of the “Battle of Cheaping Street” lasted less than two minutes. But the massacre that followed went on for hours, as a mob of apprentices and militia began to hunt and kill every Galle—or anyone who looked to them like Galles. The rumour spread that the Galles had seized the Queen and that added a new fuel to the fighting.
By the time Holy Thursday dawned, five hundred Harndoners were dead and as many Galles, most of them servants, grooms, whores, and other relative innoce
The last fires didn’t go out until noon, at which point the whole city, Harndoner and Galle, subsided into surly exhaustion.
De Vrailly stood in an embrasure of the palace, looking out over the rising smoke by the river—smoke so thick it mostly obscured First Bridge and the areas across the river. Only the masts of the great Venike cogs—all of which had slipped their cables and re-anchored in midstream—could be seen above it.
“This is the Queen’s doing,” de Vrailly told the King.
The King nodded.
“Her partisans were primed for this rebellion.” De Vrailly shook his head. “I have lost good men—loyal men—to the canaille of this accursed town.” He was so angry he could barely speak. “I would like to strike back at these mutineers.”
De Rohan handed him a set of scrolls. “Your grace, these are orders for the arrests of the ring leaders,” he said. “They are exhausted—sated with their depravity. We can strike now, with our retainers and the Royal Guard.”
The King appeared confused. He had chosen to read the arrest documents. The scroll he’d opened bore the name Gerald Random.
“Ser Gerald is one of my most loyal knights,” the King said.
De Rohan shook his head vehemently. “Not at all, sire. He’s a renegade—a traitor in service to the Queen.”
The King made a face. “Rohan, you have the oddest notions. He is the master of the tournament. A Royal officer—”
“He was in the streets all night in armour, leading the town’s rabble of a militia against my men,” said de Vrailly.
“There is some mistake,” the King said. He crossed his arms. “I will not sign an arrest warrant for Ser Gerald Random.”
De Rohan looked at de Vrailly.
The King leaned out over the wall. “How many men do you have?” the King asked.