The Dread Wyrm by Miles Cameron
Amicia got to her feet. “I think—” she began unsteadily.
Ser Thomas rose. “Don’t go, lass. It’s just Foliak’s usual way of goin’ about things—lead wi’ his tongue. Eh, Kit?”
“Good sister, I apologize for my—” Even Chris Foliak wasn’t sure what to say.
But luckily for everyone, Sister Mary chose that moment to moan, and awake.
“Oh—Amicia!” she said weakly.
Amicia took her by the hand and led her to their tent. There were only a hundred people in the whole party, and fifteen wagons—so their tent was not so hard to find. By it, Sister Katherine was leading a dozen young men and women in prayer. She flashed Sister Amicia a smile.
Sister Mary was so tired from riding that it was all she could do to get undressed to her shift. Amicia laid her down, covered her and watched her fall asleep unaided by any hermetical wisdom.
Katherine rose from her knees, coral prie-dieu in hand, and dusted herself off. “Blessed Virgin, Mary is going to hate horses tomorrow morning,” she said. “This household has no chaplain since Father Arnaud died.”
Amicia nodded.
“Well—you have a licence to say mass, Sister. I don’t.” Sister Katherine grinned. “Father Arnaud said mass every morning, I gather. They’re not all impious rake-hells like their captain.”
Amicia nodded, not sure whether she should defend the captain or join the attack. “You know I’m on this journey because my licence has been declared heretical,” she said.
Sister Katherine nodded towards the large red pavilion. “I gather there’s wine?” She smiled. “Listen, I’m related to half these men. I won’t err or fall on my back for one, but I’d like to spend a week riding and talking about something other than laundry.”
Amicia might have scolded her, but instead she laughed, too. “We can watch each other,” she said.
The pavilion fell silent as the two nuns entered.
“Par Dieu, gentles,” Ser Pierre said. “We’ll have to watch our oaths and our manners.”
“Good practice for a tourney before the King and Queen,” Ser Michael said.
On the last line, the captain came in. Amicia noted that he smelled of sweat—male and horse—and of something metallic. As he entered, Nell appeared and put a cup of wine in his hand. Other men rose—not all together. No one bowed, but the deference was there. When he sat, they all sat.
He smiled at Amicia. “No need for guests to pay me so much courtesy,” he said.
She returned his smile. “No one was ever hurt by too much courtesy.” Other people had gone back to their conversations and she had his attention. “Would you like me to say mass for your people, while we are on the road?” she asked.
He looked around. “Yes. Yes, I suppose I would. If you’re declared a heretic, will we all go straight to hell?”
She shook her head. “No, I imagine all the sin will fall on my shoulders.”
He nodded. “Excellent, then. Any time you’d like to take on some more sin…” He paused. “No, that was asinine.”
“Yes,” she said, frankly. “I tell you what—you pass on all forms of double-entendre and I’ll forbear easy religious comments about your life of violence.”
He nodded. “Done. I’m not that good at double-entendre anyway.”
He looked around. “Gentles,” he said, and they were quiet. His easy exercise of power disturbed her. He did it too easily. He didn’t wait for them to finish what they were saying, as Sister Miriam might have, or join another conversation and wait his turn. He paused, and they reacted.
He made a motion to Toby, and all the squires and pages left the tent.
“As I entered, Ser Michael mentioned that we would need our best behaviour to be at court with the King and Queen.” He looked around. “What I have to say does not leave this table. It is not meant for the pages and squires, nor is it for the peasants who sell us food.”
Now he had their attention.
“The King has arrested the Queen on charges of witchcraft. She is accused of murdering the Count D’Eu by sorcery.” His voice was bland—he might have been discussing the weather.
Ser Michael turned pale. “Christ on the cross,” he said. “Is he insane?”
The Red Knight shook his head. “Friends, I have been too slow. I should have recognized—never mind. But I no longer know what we’re riding to—war or peace, a tournament or a darker contest.” He looked around. “I think most of you have some idea where Ser Gelfred is. So you’ll understand that we have news.”
Ser Alcaeus smiled knowingly. Bad Tom shrugged.
The Red Knight leaned back and sipped his wine. “As we get closer to Harndon, we’ll get better and more accurate reports. But if what I have today is accurate, and what Ser John Crayford had two days ago tallies with it, the Prince of Occitan is riding into southern Alba.”
“And there’s raids all along the frontiers,” Bad Tom said.
“Master Smythe said: go to the tournament.” The Red Knight shrugged. “Every bone in my body tells me to sit tight in Albinkirk and raise an army, but mayhap—with a great deal of luck—mayhap we can save something.” He shrugged. “Any road, we’ll be cautious, and move as if in a land at war.”
The men all groaned.
Ser Michael shook his head. “I don’t like it. Is the King… possessed?”
Since it was treason to propose such a thing, a certain hush fell.
Ser Gabriel leaned back and looked into his wine cup. “I thought I knew what was going on. The arrest of the Queen…” He shrugged. But Amicia noted that he merely sipped his wine. She had seen him drink more heavily. He was very carefully controlled.
Ser Michael looked over at Ser Thomas. “Send for the company,” he suggested. His suggestion was stated in fairly imperious tones.
Ser Thomas wrinkled his nose.
Ser Gabriel managed a thin-lipped smile. “I’m tempted. But—if we take an army into the Albin, then we’re the ones doing the provoking—and to all the people, all the merchants and yeomen and farmers, it will always seem that we provoked the King. The rightful King.” He looked around—at Ser Christos and Ser Alcaeus. “We have a good force—enough knights to defeat any casual attempt to take us. And we have friends.”
“And where exactly is Master Kronmir?” Ser Michael asked.
“Exactly where we need him to be, of course,” Ser Gabriel said, with something of his old arrogance.
Two days of intermittent rain turned the roads to a froth of mud and leaves. The gorge road that ran along the ridge top had good rock under all the mud, and the wagons continued to move well enough. Twice, Amicia rode along a path so narrow that she looked down to the left and wished she had not, and once, she and Sister Mary, who was feeling a little more human, had to dismount and put their backs against a cart to keep it from taking a wagoner and two mules into the gorge. The second time they got covered in mud, they had to accept dry clothes from the pages.
Sister Katherine laughed. “I could wear hose and a jupon every day,” she said. “If it weren’t so infernally difficult to pee.”
Nell smiled. “You get used to it,” she said.
Sister Mary looked at Amicia, with her hair under a man’s hood, and Katherine, with her curly red hair badly captured by an arming cap. “We will all be burned as heretics,” she predicted.
Waking among the captain’s household was as different from waking in the nunnery at Lissen Carak as could be imagined. It started with animals—the whole company was mounted, and a hundred men and women had three hundred animals—mules, horses, two pairs of oxen, a cow for milk; a pack of dogs led by a pair of mastiffs who belonged to Bad Tom but never seemed to be with him, and some cats who lived on the wagons, and the captain’s falcons and Ser Michael’s and a few terrified chickens. Morning came suddenly and almost violently, as the sun roused the animals to a chewing, barking, calling, biting, farting, neighing clamour.
Sister Katherine slept through it effortlessly. Sister
“And all the men are looking at me. All the time.” Sister Mary shuddered.
Sister Amicia forbore to comment and sat up. In the convent, they all went to careful lengths, as hospitallers, to be perfectly clean. They also dressed carefully so that as little flesh as possible showed at any given step. The Order had long experience of various passions and a very realistic view of what might happen to large communities of young men—or women—all working together.
The life of a military camp made most of these practices impossible. Men and women had to dress outside their tents, unless they wished to take so long that the captain’s master of household might order the tent taken down around them, which had almost happened to Mary on their first morning on the road. Nicomedes was a Morean—tall, very thin, a scholar. And a hermeticist of some small talent, as Amicia quickly discovered. But he was the captain’s major-domo, and he made sure that tents went up and down, fires were started and quenched, and food was cooked on time. He and Miss Sukey—Mag’s daughter—ran almost every aspect of camp life, and if they ever quarrelled, Amicia never saw it.
So, on a damp morning with rain threatening, Amicia had to force herself out of her warm blankets—roll them tight against further damp, and put them in a sleeve of waxed linen to go behind her saddle—and then leave the tent in the light rain in her sleeping shift, which was also her second shift and bid fair to be her only shift if she tore out the shoulder in the better one.
From there, though, her convent training stood her in good stead. No matter how many pages and squires made time to watch her dress, she could get into her man’s shirt and hose under the shift without showing her knees, much less anything more exotic. The boyish clothes didn’t please her—the wool hose were prickly against her legs and the loose gowns of the Order offered a certain freedom—but the men’s clothes were much easier on horseback. She and Katherine were dressed in heartbeats, and set about folding, brushing, and tying everything in their small camp. Katherine, by far the better horsewoman, went to fetch their mounts.
Nell came early with her boy. He was handsome, large-eyed and hard-muscled with something of the feral ferocity of all young men, but an edge of gentleness and care for Nell that Amicia liked. He held out three wooden bowls with sausage and eggs and two-day-old bread, toasted and buttered.
Amicia went into the tent where Mary was dressing carefully. “Don’t forget to eat,” she said.
That night, their fourth on the road, they had camped at a beautiful wagon circle right at the edge of a great bluff that looked south over the magnificent green and gold quilt of the well-farmed Albin highlands. She had found a little arbour a few paces to the west of the wagon circle, and she led her little congregation there, still munching her sausage, and as the sun swelled—red-gold and still threatening more rain from the east—she said mass with Mary as her only server from plain wooden dishes and the captain’s silver cup. Ser Michael was there and Ser Christos and also a dozen drovers, ridden over from their own camp to the west, where the vast beef herds lowed like lost souls and the sheep baaa’d on and on, punctuating her sung benedictus and making her laugh—they all laughed as the sheep sounded so much like a choir of animals.
She was surprised to see Ser Christos—the Morean church had even firmer rules about mass than the Alban church, when it came to women. But it was a nice congregation, and she enjoyed it immensely.
Marcus, the Etruscan knight’s squire, and Toby, the captain’s, both came and gave her courtly bows. The archers all waved. Cully, the leader, and Cuddy, his boon companion, and Flarch, a dangerous man and a lecher, all paused to pay their respects.
“What’s a handsome piece like you doing in a place like this, Sister?” Flarch asked with a leer.
“The work of God,” Amicia said. “A pity it can’t be said of all of us.”
“That’s you told,” Cuddy hissed as the three archers walked off to their horses.
Through the trees, the captain’s trumpeter polished his trumpet with a cloth. Everyone knew that was the last thing he did before blowing it, and Nicholas Ganfroy was no longer so young, or so poor at playing the trumpet. The company had other new recruits to haze.
Amicia emerged from the trees to find that Katherine had her horse saddled and in hand. Cupped in her own hand was the last shred of consecrated host, which she gave to Katherine with a blessing.
Katherine bowed, chewed, swallowed, and sung a prayer.
Nicholas Ganfroy, who now knew his business, looked them all over carefully before putting his trumpet to his lips. He blew the first note, and every page and groom led his charges—all the horses in his lance—to their places on the parade. The knights, men-at-arms, fighting pages and the handful of archers walked steadily out to their places in front of the line of horse holders.
Even while the company formed, there were already half a dozen outriders watching for them. Stavros’s cousin Mikal, now a sort of under-officer, led two files of Thrakian light horsemen along the parallel ridges, linking up with Ser Thomas’s Hillman scouts to the west.
Amicia, who enjoyed seeing things done well, enjoyed it all.
The captain came across the field even as Nicomedes and a dozen servants dropped his pavilion—the first tent up and the last tent down. He strolled across the parade ground and stopped at Ser Michael’s lance to look at the new archer, Nell’s friend.
The boy blushed. He stammered something.
The captain laughed and put a hand on his shoulder, and Ser Michael made a note on a wax tablet.
Then he walked straight across the soldiers to where all the women and non-combatants waited with their horses. There were not as many as usual. Sukey, Mag’s daughter, now led the contingent. She’d ridden in—alone—a day before with no explanation on why she was late to the column. A year or two ago, Amicia would have assumed that all of the camp women were whores—and ministered to them anyway. But even four days on the road showed that they were the company’s reserve of expert labour—they sewed. They seemed to sew from morning to night, when they weren’t doing laundry, tending to the injured, or helping the pages with the horses. They also—mostly—had their own tents.
Amicia was a woman. Women’s lives interested her more than men’s.
The company had a great many women—in the ranks, and out of them.
Amicia assumed that the captain was coming to address Sukey on some matter of march discipline, but instead, after a bow to his head-woman, he walked up to the nuns. He smiled.
She smiled back.
“I think you have my cup, good Sister,” he said.
She knew she blushed. But she held her smile. “It is the best in the camp,” she said.
“I really don’t mind loaning it to God,” he said. “But He’s got to give it back.”
Sister Mary’s harshly indrawn breath clashed with Sister Katherine’s chuckle.
She handed him the cup. He raised it as if in a toast. “Just give it to Toby tomorrow,” he said. Then he paused. “May I show you something beautiful this morning? Come ride with me.”
If she had been prepared, Amicia would have found it easier to refuse. She didn’t intend to be alone with him—then, or ever again.
But he was smiling…
She found that she had taken her rouncy from Sister Katherine—who gave her a lopsided smile—and walked over to join the captain, Toby, and the trumpeter.
Ganfroy raised his trumpet to his lips a second time, and the call to mount rang out.
The captain vaulted into his saddle while people cheered. Toby met her eye and shrugged.
“He’s a terrible show-off,” she said, loudly enough to be heard.
Ser Gabriel laughed. “I am, at that,” he admitted.
Forty paces away, Nicomedes swung onto a tall wagon next to Sukey, who raised her riding whip and waved it.
Ser Gabriel waved to Ser Michael, who walked his horse over to them.
“Th
Ser Michael nodded to Amicia. “You have a long spoon, Sister?” he asked.
She laughed and was surprised at how she sounded—a little wild. She clamped down.
Ser Michael took the staff of command from Ser Gabriel and held it aloft. He waved it at the Moreans—their ranks moved, anticipating the trumpet.
Then the trumpet crashed out, one more time, and the whole company rolled into motion.
“It’s more like the convent than I would have believed,” she said.
Down the column, each file moved smoothly into place except the last—Ser Michael’s. Robin rode well, but the new archer was mooning and he was late moving forward. His horse caught his inattention and jumped—Sukey, in the lead wagon, had to rein in after her animals had done the work of getting the heavy wagon rolling.
“You useless sack of pig-shit. Someone tied your balls in a knot last night and now you can’t find ’em?” Sukey’s voice was mild—it was too early for anyone to manage real invective.
The boy flushed with anger and then swallowed it, and got his horse into the column. He was a poor rider.
“Just like the convent,” Ser Gabriel said.
“Are you kidding?” Amicia laughed. “Miriam can manage all that in one half-raised eyebrow.”
“Perhaps I could send her all my file-leaders.” He wasn’t paying her any attention at all. He was focused on his column.
During the siege, this had fascinated her. She had had her share of swains as a lass—and by and large, they mooned. Gabriel had his own ways of mooning, but he seldom took his attention off his work to do it and, as a woman, she preferred his focus to the puppy-dog behaviour of younger men.
Side by side they rode. The day was clearing from its early dampness to a good blue-and-white-skied April day.
“Any chance of fish for Friday?” she asked.
He looked at her.
She shrugged. “I’m easy in my conscience about a little dried sausage when breaking the fast of the night. But Friday is Good Friday and many of your people will not want to eat meat.”