The Red Knight by Miles Cameron
Some time passed, and he was standing between Sauce and Bad Tom, and the King of Alba’s body lay between his feet. The last rush of the monsters had been so ferocious as to rob the word of all meaning – an endless rain of blows, which only fine armour could repel, because sheer fatigue had robbed muscles of the ability to parry.
Tom was still killing.
Sauce was still killing.
Michael was still standing . . .
. . . so the captain kept standing too, because that’s what he did.
They came for him, and he survived them.
There finally came a point when the blows stopped. When there was nothing to push against, no fresh foe to withstand.
Before he could think about it, the captain slapped his visor open and drank in the air. And then bent down to check the king.
The man was still alive.
The captain had had a leather bottle, just an hour ago. He started to search his person for it with the slow incompetence of the utterly exhausted.
Not there.
He felt an armoured back against his, and turned to find the Captain of the King’s Guard – Sir Richard Fitzroy. The man managed a smile.
‘I will build a church,’ Michael chanted. ‘I will burn a thousand candles to the Virgin,’ he went on.
‘Get the crap off your blade,’ Tom said. He had a scrap of linen out of his wallet, and he was suiting action to words.
Sauce didn’t grin. She took a handkerchief from her breastplate and wiped her face. Then she took in what her captain was doing and handed him a wooden canteen of water, pulling it over her shoulder on a strap.
He knelt and gave water to the King of Alba.
Who smiled.
The knight who reined in above him provided some shade. His giant war horse had a hard time standing securely on the shifting pile of dead boglins, and his rider curbed him savagely and swore in Gallish. He looked around, as if expecting something.
The king grunted something, and the captain bent over further, his shoulder screaming at the effort, the helmet and the aventail on his head and neck feeling like the weight of a lifetime of penance.
The king had a horny talon between the plates of his fauld, buried deep in his thigh, and his blood soaked the ground.
‘I have saved you,’ said the knight who towered over them. ‘You may take your ease – you are saved.’ Indeed, as far as the eye could see, a wave of knights were dispatching the last creatures too foolish or too bound by Thorn’s will to flee. ‘We have won a mighty victory today. Where is the king, please?’
The captain was able for the first time in hours – it felt like hours, and later it would prove to be only a few minutes – to look around.
His company—
His men-at-arms were gone. They lay in a ring, their white steel armour, even matted with gore, brilliant when surrounded by the green, grey, white and brown of their adversaries.
But their red tabards were very like those worn by the king’s knights.
The king’s household knights were intermixed with them, and the Knights of Saint Thomas in their black. Many of the latter were still standing – more than a dozen.
‘The king is right here,’ Fitzroy said.
‘Dead?’ the foreign knight asked.
The captain shook his head. He could easily come to dislike this foreigner. Galles were superb knights but very difficult people.
His mind was wandering.
Don’t give him the king, said Harmodius.
The captain stiffened in shock. How did you do that? Prudentia never spoke to me outside the memory palace.
Do I look like Prudentia? Harmodius muttered. Do not give this man the king. Take him to the fortress, yourself. Take him to Amicia, with your own hands.
‘Give him to me,’ said the foreign knight. ‘I will see he is well guarded.’
‘He’s well-guarded right here,’ said Sir Richard.
Bad Tom leaned forward. ‘Sod off, son.’
The captain reached out a hand to steady Tom.
‘You need manners,’ said the mounted knight. ‘But for my charge, you would all be dead.’
Tom laughed. ‘All you did was to lower my body count, pipkin,’ he said.
They glared at each other.
The Prior waded over to them. ‘Ser Jean? Captal?’
De Vrailly backed his horse. ‘Messire.’
‘A litter for the king.’ He waved.
Other knights rode forward – there was the banner of the Earl of Towbray, and there was the Count of the Borders. They came in a rush, now that the king had been discovered. Towbray found the king’s squires and the Royal Standard, and raised it, covered in ichor.
There was a low cheer.
A long line of infantrymen came over the field of the dead. They had to pick their footing, and they weren’t quick about it. As they came, the captain and Michael got the king’s breast and back off, and got his hauberk up. Bad luck had slit a dozen rings – worse luck to receive a second blow that bent the fauld and penetrated the leg. There really was a lot of blood.
Do I have anything left?
You can stop the blood flow. But I’ve been squandering your power, keeping you alive, for a long time now. Amicia?
I’m right here.
The captain smiled, knelt, placed his hand on the king’s bare thigh when Michael peeled back his braes and his hose, and with no conscious effort he released Amicia’s power.
Harmodius did the actual casting.
It made the captain feel a little sick, as if he was three people.
You feel sick? The dead Magus laughed in his head.
And then the footmen of the Royal Guard were there – everywhere around them – and the king was lifted high, placed on a cloak across two spears . . . and he held onto the captain’s hand. So they walked, hand in hand, across the stricken field. It was the longest walk the captain had ever taken – the sun was beating down like a new foe, the insects descended like a plague, and the footing was impossible.
But eventually, they were free of the corpses and were climbing the long road to the fortress.
Soldiers stopped and bowed, or knelt. Men in the field had begun to sing the Te Deum, and its strains rose like the casting of a mighty phantasm from the fields below. The captain felt the king’s hot hand in his own, and tried not to think too much about it.
The Queen lay in the chapel – on the altar. She raised her head, and smiled.
The king released a sigh, as if he had been holding his breath.
The captain saw Amicia. She stood in the light of the window behind the altar. She appeared inhuman, a goddess of light and colour, and she was, to his sight, sparkling with power.
Christ. Look at her, boy.
The captain ignored the dead man.
He couldn’t take his eyes off her anyway.
She was healing each injured person brought to her. The power went into her as easily as breathing – she was drinking the unspent green from Thorn’s hammer blow, and from the sun streaming through the broken chapel window, and the well – taking all three streams of power and releasing it in a cloud of rainbow light so that soldier after soldier approached her, knelt, and arose healed. Most stumbled away and went to sleep in the arms of their comrades.
She passed her hands over the king as if he were any other soldier, any of the women wounded in the desperate defence of the courtyard, any of the children injured in the collapse of the West Tower – and he was healed.
And then she turned, and her eyes looked into his.
He couldn’t breathe.
He had the foolish impulse to kiss her.
She touched him. ‘You must open your powers, or I cannot heal you,’ she said. She gave him a smile. ‘You were not this powerful, a few days ago.’
He sighed. ‘Nor were you,’ he said.
The room was the same. He was almost afraid to enter it, but it looked better. The moss was gone from the floor, and Prudentia’s statue was r
The Magus stood on the plinth in the centre of the room.
The captain by-passed him, and walked to the door.
‘Think on what you do, boy,’ said the dead Magus. ‘She is a Power, neither more nor less than you.’
The captain ignored him, and opened the iron-bound door.
And she was there.
And he was healed.
She looked at the plinth and her eyes widened in horror. ‘My God,’ she said. ‘What have you done?’
And she was gone.
North of Lissen Carak – Peter
They stopped in a clearing in the woods. The ground had been rising steadily to the north, and they were running almost due north, and that was all Nita Qwan knew except that, as usual, he had never been so tired in all his life.
They all lay down in a muddle and slept.
In the morning, Ota Qwan stood up first, and they ran again. The sun was high in the sky before they straggled over a ridge, and young warriors were sent back without their baskets to fetch the matrons and mothers of newborns who had lagged behind.
And when the last of the women was over the ridge, fires were lit carefully and the people made food, and ate.
And when Nita Qwan felt as if life might be worth living, Ota Qwan came to the centre of the ring of fires with a spear. And Little Hands, the senior woman, came and faced him.
He handed her the spear. ‘Our war is over,’ he said. ‘I give you the spear of war.’
Little Hands took it. ‘The matrons have it, ready for any enemy. Our thanks, Ota Qwan. You have surprised us, and done well.’
No one said anything more – there was neither applause nor censure.
An hour later, they were running north again.
Chapter Seventeen
Ranald Lachlan
Lissen Carak – The Red Knight
Days passed.
Wounded men were healed, and slept.
Dead men and women were mourned, and buried.
The creatures of the Wild were burned, and their ashes spread over the fields.
The company was not entirely dead. A few men-at-arms were found wounded, and healed. Ser Jehannes and Ser Milus had not been part of the charge; Bad Tom and Sauce were untouched, although they each slept for more than thirty hours after their armour was stripped. But the archers were still alive, many of the valets and a few squires.
The captain was very difficult to find. Some said he was drunk, and some said he was with his pretty novice, and some said he was taking service of the king, or of the Knights of Saint Thomas.
None of these things were true.
The captain spent a great deal of time weeping, and when he buried his company dead, he invited no others. They lay in neat rows, sewn in white linen by Mag and her friends, who now stood silent in a light rain. Dora Candleswain stood with Kaitlin Lanthorn, and the Carter sisters stood watching their surviving brother who, with Daniel Favor, was in the ranks of the company.
And the knights of Saint Thomas appeared from the rain. The Prior came out at their head, and said the service for the dead. Bad Tom, Sauce, Ranald and the captain himself lowered the bodies. There was Carlus the Smith, smaller in death but no lighter; there was Lyliard, no longer the company’s handsomest man. They went into marked graves with headstones, each of them marked with the eight-pointed cross of the Order. It made a great difference to many of the man and women – better, in fact, than most mercenaries ever imagined.
One corpse absorbed the captain, and he wept. He wept for all of them, and he wept for his own errors, and the ill-judgement of others, and a thousand other things – but Jacques was his last tie to childhood, and was gone.
Your mother’s still alive, lad. Doesn’t she count? said the old Magus in his mind.
‘Could you shut up?’ muttered the captain to the interloper in his head.
Sauce looked at him, because he muttered to himself a great deal, lately, and because Sauce helped Dora Candleswain to stop screaming every night. She was sensitive to the other men and women in the company who were near the breaking point, or past it. Not all wounds bled.
They all stood there in the light rain – the survivors. Atcourt, and Brewes and Long Paw. Ser Alcaeus, who wore the red tabbard and stood with the knights; Johne the Bailli. Bent. No Head. Knights and squires and archers and valets, men and women, soldiers and prostitutes and laundresses and farm girls and servants. And to a man and woman, they looked at the captain and waited for him to speak.
Like a fool, he hadn’t planned anything. But their need was palpable – like a spell.
‘We won,’ he said, his young voice as harsh as the croaking of a raven. ‘We held the fortress against a Power of the Wild. But none of these men or women died to hold the fortress – did they?’
He looked at Jehannes. The older man met his glance. And gave him a small nod of agreement.
‘They died for us. We die for each other. Out there in the world, they lie, and cheat each other, and betray, and we, here, don’t do that.’ He was all too aware that sometimes, they did. But funerals are the time to speak high words. He knew that, too. ‘We do our level best to hold the line, so that the man next to us can live. We – we who are alive – we owe our lives to these, who are dead. It could have been us. It was them.’ He managed a smile. ‘No one can do more than to give his life for his friends. Every drink of wine you ever taste, every time you get laid, every time you wake and breathe the spring air, you owe that to these – who lie here in the ground.’ His eye caught the smallest bundle – Low Sym. ‘They died heroes – no matter how they lived.’ He shrugged and looked at the Prior. ‘I suspect it’s bad theology.’ He had more to say, but he was crying too hard, and he found that he was kneeling by the mound of damp earth that was Jacques.
Who had saved his life so many times.
‘Jesus said, I am the way, and the life,’ said the Prior in a calm, low voice.
The captain shut out the sound of his company praying.
And eventually, there was a hand on his shoulder. It was a light hand. But he didn’t have to open his eyes to know to whom it belonged.
He rose, and she stepped back. She smiled at the ground. ‘I thought you’d just hurt your back again, with all that kneeling,’ she said.
‘Marry me?’ he asked. His whole face ached from crying – and he knew she didn’t care how he looked, or sounded. It was the most remarkable thought.
She smiled. ‘I’ll tell you tomorrow,’ she said lightly. ‘Open to me?’ she asked, and he thought he heard an immense strain in her voice. He put it down to fatigue, and he opened his door, and she entered in. She kept her distance from Harmodius, and instead she pulled him out his own door and into the green wonder of her bridge – but it was no longer a simple green. Overhead, the sky was a golden blue, and the sun shone in splendour in heaven and the water that rushed under her bridge was clear as diamonds and the spray was as white as a the brightest cloud. The leaves of the trees were green and gold, and every tree was in flower. The smell was of clean water and brilliant air and every flower scent he’d ever imagined or smelled.
‘God,’ he said, involuntarily.
She smiled at him with her slightly tilted eyes, and she passed her hands over him, and a dozen small knots were eased, and the lump at the back of his throat passed away.
‘I’m not so arrogant as to heal your sorrow,’ she said.
He caught her hands. ‘You will heal my sorrow,’ he said.
She smiled, and put her lips on his, her eyes closed.
And after a time, she pulled away. ‘Goodbye,’ she said.
‘Until tomorrow,’ he said. ‘I – I love you.’
She smiled. ‘Of course you do,’ she said with a little of her old tone. Then she softened. ‘I love you, too,’ she said.
She walked away into the rain, and he watched her until the grey of her cloak merged with the sky and the stone and the hillside
And the captain found his services very much in demand. He accepted a contract in the east, serving among the Moreans with Ser Alcaeus. They concluded the contract just a week after the day of the battle, after an hour of loud and apparently angry bargaining that had featured several cups of wine and a warm embrace at the end.
Then he picked up the staff of his command and walked out of his tent – the company were back in their tents on the plain, so that the Royal Household could occupy the fortress – and mounted a pretty Eastern mare that had belonged to Master Random. No amount of miraculous healing could fix his partially-eaten leg, so the merchant would be bed-ridden for some time. He’d been delighted to sell the mare for a profit.
The captain rode up the familiar road to the main gate. Royal Guardsmen held the post, and he saluted them. They returned the salute.
He gave his horse to a newly minted Royal Squire – somebody’s younger son – and climbed the steps to the Commandery. No longer his office.
The Prior was at prayer.
The captain waited patiently.
Eventually, the Prior rose and put his rosary back around his waist. He smiled.
‘Your servant, Captain.’
The captain smiled back, reached into his wallet and fetched forth a pair of heavy gilt-bronze keys. ‘The keys to the fortress and the river bridge,’ he said. ‘They were placed in my keeping by the Abbess. I relinquish them to you in peace and triumph,’ he said formally. And then added, with a smile, ‘You owe me a sizeable sum of money.’
The Prior took the keys and settled into a seat. He waved the captain into another, and the captain had the oddest feeling – one of having lived this moment before, perhaps from the other side of the desk.
The Prior took a writing set, checked the pen for sharpness, used a little ink and began to write.
‘You would not consider turning to God, my son? Become a knight of my order?’ he asked, raising his eyes briefly.