The Red Knight by Miles Cameron
Most of all, she knew how to sew.
She liked to work early, when the first full light of the sun struck her work. The best time was immediately after Matins. If she managed to get straight to her work – and in forty years of being a lay sister, helping with the altar service in her village church, of tending to her husband and two children she had missed the good early morning work hours all too often.
But when she got to it – when cooking, altar service, sick infants, aches and pains, and the will of the Almighty all let her be – why, she could do a day’s work by the time the bells rang for Nones in the fortress convent two leagues to the west.
And this morning was one of those wonderful mornings. She’d been the lay server at church, which always left her with a special feeling, and she had laid flowers on her husband’s grave, kissed her daughter in her own door yard and was now home in the first warm light, her basket by her side.
She was making a cap, a fine linen coif of the sort that a gentleman wore to keep his hair neat. It wasn’t a difficult object and would take her only a day or two to make, but there were knights up at the fortress who used such caps at a great rate, as she had reason to know. A well-worked cap that fit just so was worth half a silver penny. And silver pennies were not to be sneered at, for a fifty-three-year-old widow.
Mag had good eyes, and she pricked the fine linen – her daughter’s linen, no less – with precision, her fine stitches as straight as a sword blade, sixteen to the inch, as good or better as any Harndon tailor’s work.
She put the needle into the fine cloth and pulled the thread carefully through, feeling the fine wax on the thread, feeling the tension of the fine cloth, and aware that she pulled more than the thread with each stitch – every one gathered a little sun. Before long, her line of stitches sparkled, if she looked at it just so.
Good work made her happy. Mag liked to examine the fine clothes that came through to Lis the laundress. The knights in the fortress had some beautiful things – usually ill-kept but well made. And many less well-made clothes, too. Mag had plans to sell them clothes, repairs, darning—
Mag smiled at the world as she stitched. The sisters were, in the main, good landlords, and much better than most feudal lords. But the knights and their men brought a little colour to life. Mag didn’t mind hearing a man say fuck, as long as he brought a little of the outside world to Abbington-on-the-Carak.
She heard the horses, and her eyes flicked up from her work. She saw dust rising well off to the west. At this hour, it could never bode well.
She snorted and put her work in her basket, carefully sheathing her best needle – Harndon work, there was no local man who could make such – in a horn needle case. No crisis was so great that Mag needed to lose a needle. They were harder and harder to get.
More dust. Mag knew the road. She guessed there were ten horses or more.
‘Johne! Our Johne!’ she called. The Bailli was her gossip, and occasionally more. He was also an early riser, and Mag could see him pruning his apple trees.
She stood and pointed west. After a long moment, he raised an arm and jumped down from the tree.
He dusted his hands and spoke to a boy, and heartbeats later that boy was racing for the church. Johne jumped the low stone wall that separated his property from Mag’s and bowed.
‘You have good eyes, m’ame.’ He didn’t smirk or make any obvious gesture, which she appreciated. Widowhood brought all sorts of unwelcome offers – and some welcome ones. He was clean, neat, and polite, which had become her minimum conditions for accepting even the most tenuous of male approaches.
She enjoyed watching a man of her own age who could still jump a stone wall.
‘You seem unconcerned,’ she murmured.
‘To the contrary,’ he said quietly. ‘If I were a widowed seamstress I would pack all my best things and be prepared to move into the fortress.’ He gave her half a smile, another bow, and sprang back over the wall. ‘There’s been trouble,’ he added.
Mag didn’t ask foolish questions. Before the horses rode into their little town square, shaded by an ancient oak, she had two baskets packed, one of work and one of items for sale. She filled her husband’s travelling pack with spare shifts and clothes, and took her heaviest cloak and a lighter cloak – for wearing and sleeping, too. She stripped her bed, took the bolster and rolled the blankets and linens tightly around it to make a bundle.
‘Listen up!’ called a loud voice – a very loud voice – from the village square.
Like all her neighbours she opened the upper half of her front door and leaned through it.
There were half a dozen men-at-arms in the square, all mounted on big horses and wearing well-polished armour and scarlet surcotes. With them were as many archers, all in less armour with bows strapped across their backs, and as many valets.
‘The lady Abbess has ordered that the good people of Abbington be mustered and removed into the fortress immediately!’ the man bellowed. He was tall – huge, really, with arms the size of most men’s legs, mounted on a horse the size of a small house.
Johne the Bailli, walked across the square to the big man-at-arms, who leaned down to him, and the two spoke – both of them gesturing rapidly. Mag went back to her packing. Out the back she scattered feed for her chickens. If she wasn’t here for a week, they’d manage, longer, and they’d all be taken by something. She had no cow – Johne gave her milk – but she had her husband’s donkeys.
My donkeys, she reminded herself.
She’d never packed a donkey before.
Someone was banging at her open door. She shook her head at the donkeys, who looked back at her with weary resignation.
The big man-at-arms stood on her stoop. He nodded. ‘The Bailli said you’d be ready to move first,’ he said. ‘I’m Thomas.’ His bow was sketchy, but it was there.
He looked like trouble from head to foot.
She grinned at him, because her husband had looked like trouble, too. ‘I’d be more ready if I knew how to pack a donkey,’ she said.
He scratched under his beard. ‘Would a valet help? I want people moving in an hour. And the Bailli said that if people saw you packed, they’d move faster.’ He shrugged.
Off to the right, a woman screamed.
Thomas spat. ‘Fucking archers,’ he snarled, and started back out the door.
‘Send me a valet!’ she shouted after him.
She got a produce basket down from the shed and began to fill it with perishable food, and then preserves. She had sausage, pickles, jam, that was itself valuable –
‘Good wife?’ asked a polite voice from the doorway. The man was middle-aged, and looked as hard as rock and as sound as an old apple. Behind him was a skinny boy of twelve.
‘I’m Jaques, the captain’s valet. This is my squire, Toby. He can pack a mule – I reckon donkeys ain’t much different.’ The man took his hat off and bowed.
Mag curtsied back. ‘The sele of the day to you, ser.’
Jacques raised an eyebrow. ‘The thing of it is, ma’am – we’re also to take all your food.’
She laughed. ‘I’ve been trying to pack it—’ Then his meaning sunk in. ‘You mean to take my food for the garrison.’
He nodded. ‘For everyone. Yes.’ He shrugged. ‘I’d rather you made it easy. But we will take it.’
Johne came to the door. He had a breast and back plate on and nodded to Jacques. To Mag, he said, ‘Give them everything. They are from the Abbess, we have to assume she will repay us.’ He shrugged. ‘Do you still have Ben’s crossbow? His arming jack?’
‘And his sword and dagger,’ Mag said. She opened her cupboard, where she kept her most valuable things – her pewter plates, her silver cup, her mother’s gold ring, and her husband’s dagger and sword.
Toby looked around shyly, and said to Jacques, ‘This is a rich place, eh, master?’
Jacques smiled grimly and gave the boy a kick. ‘Sorry, ma’am. We has some bad habits from the Continent
But you would under other circumstances, and anything else you fancied, she thought.
Johne took her by her shoulders. It was a familiar, comfortable thing, and yet a little too possessive for her taste, even in a crisis.
‘I have a locking box,’ he said. ‘There’s room in it for your cup and ring. And any silver you have.’ He looked into her eyes. ‘Mag, we may never come back. This is war – war with the Wild. When it’s done, we may not have homes to return to.’
‘Gentle Jesu!’ she let slip. Took a shuddering breath, and nodded. ‘Very well.’ She scooped up the cup and ring, tipped over a brick in her fireplace and took out all her silver – forty-one pennies – and handed it all to the bailli. She saved out one penny, and she gave it to Jacques.
‘This much again if my donkeys make it to the fortress,’ she said primly.
He looked at it for a moment. Bit it. And flipped it to the boy. ‘You heard the lady,’ he said. He nodded to her. ‘I’m the captain’s valet, ma’am. A piece of gold is more my price. But Tom told me to see to you, and you are seen to.’ He gave her a quick salute and was out her door, headed for Simon Carter’s house.
She looked at the boy. He didn’t seem very different from any other boy she knew. ‘You can load a donkey?’ she asked.
He nodded very seriously. ‘Do you—’ he looked around. He was as skinny as a scarecrow and gawky the way only growing boys can be. ‘Do you have any food?’ he asked.
She laughed. ‘You’ll be taking it all anyways, won’t you, my dear?’ she asked. ‘Have some mince pie.’
Toby ate the mince pie with a determination that made her smile. While she watched him, still packing her hampers, he ate the piece he was given and then filched a second as he headed for her donkey.
A pair of archers appeared next. They lacked something that Ser Thomas and Jacques the valet had both possessed. They looked dangerous.
‘What have we here?’ asked the first one through the door. ‘Where’s the husband, then, my beauty?’ His voice was flat, and so were his eyes.
The second man had no teeth and too much smile. His haubergeon was not well kept, and he seemed like a half-wit.
‘Mind your own business,’ she said, her voice as sharp as steel.
Dead-eyes didn’t even pause. He reached out, grabbed her arm, and when she fought him he swept her legs out from under her and shoved her to the floor. His face didn’t change expression.
‘House’s protected,’ said the skinny boy said from the kitchen. ‘Best mind yourself, Wilful.’
The dead-eyed archer spat. ‘Fuck me,’ he said. ‘I want to go back to the Continent. If I wanted to be a nurse-maid—’
Mag was so stunned she couldn’t react.
The archer leaned down and stuck his hand in the front of her cotehardie. Gave her breast a squeeze. ‘Later,’ he said.
She shrieked. and punched him in the crotch.
He stumbled back, and the other one grabbed her hair, as if this was a practised routine—
There was a sharp crack and she fell backwards, because the archer had released her. He was kneeling on the floor with blood pouring out of his face. Thomas was standing over him, a stick in his hand.
‘I tol’ em that this house was protected!’ the thin boy shouted.
‘Did you?’ The big man said. He eyed the two archers.
‘We was gentle as lambs!’ said the one with dead eyes.
‘Fucking archers. Piss off and get on with it,’ the big man said, and offered her a hand up.
The two archers got to their feet and went out the back to collect her chickens and her sheep and all the grain from her shed, all the roots in her cellar. They were methodical, and when she followed them into the shed, the dead-eyed one gave her a look that struck fear into her. He meant her harm.
But soon enough the boy had her donkeys rigged and loaded, and she put her husband’s pack on her back, her two baskets in her arms, and went out into the square.
From where she stood, her house looked perfectly normal.
She tried to imagine it burned. An empty basement yawning at the sun. She could see the place where she rested her back when she sewed, rubbed shiny with use, and she wondered if she would ever find such a well-lit spot.
The Carters were next to be ready – they were, after all, a family of carters with two heavy carts of their own and draught animals, and six boys and men to do the lifting. The bailli’s housekeeper was next, with his rugs – Mag had lain on one of those rugs, and she blushed at the thought. She was still mulling over her instinctive use of his name – his Christian name—
The Lanthorns were the last, their four sluttish daughters sullen, and Goodwife Lanthorn, in her usual despair, wandered the village’s column of animals, begging for space for her bag and a basket of linen. Lis the laundress was surrounded by soldiers, who competed to carry her goods. But she knew many of them by name, having washed their linens, and she was both safely middle-aged and comely, an ideal combination in the soldiers’ eyes.
At last the Lanthorns were packed – all four daughters eyeing the soldiers – and the column began to move.
Three hours after the men-at-arms rode into Abbington, the town was empty.
Albinkirk – Ser Alcaeus
Ser John gave him a company of crossbowmen – members of the town’s guilds, all of them a little too shiny in their guild colours. Blue and red predominated, from the furriers, the leading guild of Albinkirk. He might have laughed to think that he, cousin to the Emperor, was commanding a band of common-born crossbowmen. It would have amused him, but . . .
They came at sunset, out of the setting sun.
The fields looked as if they were crawling with insects and then, without a shout or a signal the irks changed direction and were coming up the walls. Ser Alcaeus had never seen anything like it, and it made his skin crawl.
There were daemons among them, a dozen or more, fast, lithe, elegant and deadly. And they simply ran up the walls.
His crossbowmen loosed and loosed into the horde coming at them, and he did his best to walk up and down behind them on the crenellations, murmuring words of encouragement and praising their steadiness. He knew how to command, he’d just never done it before.
The first wave almost took the wall. A daemon came right over and started killing guildsmen. It was nothing but luck that its great sword bounced off a journeyman armourer’s breastplate and the man’s mates got their bolts into the lethal thing. It still took four more men down while it died, but the sight of the dead daemon stiffened the guildsmen’s spines.
They staved off the second wave. The daemons had grown careful and led from the back. Alcaeus tried to get his crossbowmen to snipe at them, but there was never a moment when they could do anything but fight the most present danger.
A guild captain came to him where he was standing, leaning heavily on his pole-axe because he knew enough not to waste energy in armour. The man saluted.
‘M’lord,’ he said. ‘We’re almost out of bolts. Every lad brings twenty.’
Ser Alcaeus blinked. ‘Where do you get more?’
‘I was hoping you would know,’ said the guild officer.
Ser Alcaeus sent a runner, but he already knew the answer.
The third wave got over the walls behind them, they heard it go. The sounds of fighting changed, there was sudden shrieking and his men started to look over their shoulders.
He wished he had his squire – a veteran of fifty battles. But the man had died protecting him in the ambush and so he had no one to ask for advice.
Ser Alcaeus set his jaw and prepared to die well.
He walked along the wall again as the shadows lengthened. His section was about a hundred paces, end to end – Albinkirk was a big town, even to Ser Alcaeus who hailed from the biggest city in the world.
He stopped when he saw three of his men looking back at the town.
‘Eyes front,’ he snapped.
More men turned and, just like that, he lost them. They turned, and then there was a daemon on the wall, killing them. It moved like fluid, passing through men, round them, with two axes flashing in its taloned hands – even as Alcaeus watched, one of the daemon’s taloned feet licked out to eviscerate a fifteen-year old who’d had no breastplate.
Alcaeus charged. He felt the fear that it generated – but in Morea knights trained for this very thing, and he knew the fear. He ran through it, blade ready—
It hit him. It was faster by far, and an axe slammed into his arm. He was well-trained and caught much of the blow. His small fortune in plate armour ate the rest, and then he was swinging.
It had to pivot to face him. The twitch of its hips took a heartbeat, and he swung his pole-axe up from the garde of the boar, like a boy swinging a pitchfork at haying, but with twice the speed.
Ser Alcaeus was as shocked as the daemon when his axe caught the other creature’s axe-hand and smashed it. Ichor sprayed and its axe fell. It slashed at him with the left, turned and kicked him with a taloned foot. All four talons bit through his breastplate and knocked him flat, but none reached him through his mail and padded arming cote.
A crossbow struck the daemon. Not a bolt but the bow itself, swung by a terrified guildsman.
The daemon bounded onto the wall, scattering defenders, and jumped.
Alcaeus got to his feet. He still had his pole-axe.
He was proud of himself for two breaths, and then he realised that the town behind him was afire, and there were two more daemons on the wall with him, and irk arrows were suddenly everywhere. Worse, they were coming from the town.
He had a dozen men by him, including the stunned looking man who’d hit the daemon with his crossbow. The rest of his fools were leaving the wall, running for their houses.
He shook his head and cursed. They were surrounded, half his men gone, and it was growing dark rapidly.
He made his decision. ‘Follow me!’ he called, and ran along the wall. He was headed for the castle, which towered over the western end of town by the river gate. It had its own defensive walls.