Spira Mirabilis (26 page)

‘Is this your progress?’

‘No, but it illustrates the problem with the Tartaruchi; they can attack when and where they want, then disappear underground where we can’t pursue.’

‘Frustrating, I imagine.’ Leto was uninterested; he was eager to get on.

‘Terribly. Well, I finally realised I just had to block the bolt-holes and find the right bait to lure them out.’

Leto began to see how isolated they were. Just them and the river. ‘Geta …’

‘The little thug in charge is spoiling for a fight. He wouldn’t miss a chance to assassinate the Commander of the Grand Legion. The Tartaruchi hears everything, but just to be sure, we’ve been spreading the news in the taverns and whorehouses ever since you arrived.’

In every direction Leto looked, he could see surly young men bearing black flags emerging from the alleyways. The unfeigned panic of his men drew the bandieratori on.

‘I hope you’ve brought some stout hearts, Spinther. This
will
get hot!’

‘You reckless fool—’

‘Have you forgotten how to use a blade?’

When Leto unsheathed his sword, he laughed. ‘Good lad! You’re not dead yet! Ready, boys: ring a rosy round your beloved general!’ He pushed the gunner beside Leto and ordered, ‘Hold your fire till it’s needed, there’s a good fellow.’

He turned back as the half-circle tightened around them like a noose. There were some thirty of them, boys mostly, but capable-looking.
‘Come on, you pigeon-livered curs!’ he shouted. ‘Let’s have at it!’

He stopped shouting abruptly when Uggeri stepped forward.

‘So you’ve finally come for that duel, boy? Be warned, this isn’t my first.’

Uggeri held his banner so tightly that his knuckles stood out. ‘I’d love to, but a friend of mind has a greater claim.’ He withdrew into the ranks and a giant shadow stepped forward. His neck and shoulders ran into one arch of muscle. His face was grim. To Leto, snatching glimpses between his ring of bodyguards, it looked as though he was holding two massive hammers; it took him a moment to realise that in fact the hammers were connected to his forelimbs: they
were
his hands.

‘Ah,
le Roi
. You’ve become quite the artist with your new tools.’ This wasn’t idle praise; Geta had become well acquainted with Jacques’s handiwork. ‘What’s the matter? You don’t enjoy flattery? Cat got your tongue?’

Geta wished to madden the giant before he attacked, but for all the effect his taunting was having he might have been deaf as well as dumb. Seeing this, he abandoned caution and dashed forward, his sword drawn back.

Jacques waited calmly, and when the thrust came, he batted it carelessly aside. The other hammer punched a dent in Geta’s chestplate and sent him flying. He landed awkwardly and rolled – and sat up to see Jacques bearing down on him.

Bewildered to find no sword in his hand, Geta looked around. The blade caught the sun and twinkled – just out of reach – and he leaped for it just as Jacques’s hammer crushed the cobblestone he’d been sitting on seconds before. He stumbled to his feet and risked a glance over the heads of the watching bandieratori.

No, not yet.

He ducked a blow meant to stave in his head and neatly stabbed
the giant’s deltoid. He went down to the bone, and twisted the blade as he pulled it free. ‘Stings, eh?’

With a contemptuous swipe, Jacques broke the blade in two.

Geta lost his footing, and though the blow rattled his arm to numbness, he managed to hold on to the hilt of his broken sword. ‘Barbarian!’ he cried. ‘That was
Damascene
steel – you never forged such a weapon in your life!’ And so saying, he plunged the blade-stump into Jacques’ kneecap.

A strange animal sound filled the piazza and Geta scrambled to his feet with the roaring giant limping behind, his death-dealing arms swinging like a capsizing windmill. Geta ran towards the inner circle and pushed his way in until he faced the cannoneer, who was holding his weapon with shaking arms. Geta dived to one side, crying, ‘Fire!’

Jacques presented such a massive target that even a hasty shot couldn’t miss, and though Uggeri shouted, ‘Watch out!’ he was already far too late.

The hammer knocked the gunner’s head sideway with a crack nearly as loud as the cannon’s report. For a moment Jacques remained erect, his arms still swinging, then he exhaled a little cloud into the cold morning and crashed to his knees.

Leto, stepping forward, said, ‘What an extraordinarily chivalric display.’ He swiped his blade, neat as a surgeon, across the giant’s throat and Jacques’ head rolled back as a torrent of blood bathed his torso and legs. He stared into the kingless kingdom of the clouds as his giant heart hammered its last.

Leto stepped back from the spreading puddle in disgust. ‘What’s next, a joust?’

‘A massacre,’ said Geta, ‘I hope.’

‘
Forza Rasenna!
’ Uggeri shouted as he led the charge.

The circle reformed and Geta dived inside, shouting gaily, ‘Protect your general, lads!’

An impact –
whoomph!
– and a collective groan. The circle
swayed backwards, then forwards. The world became very small: half-uttered oaths and screams, the press of men, toes trodden upon, fresh sweat. The sudden warmth of blood or piss splashing legs and arms – please, Madonna, not yours – and the
whoop whoop whoop
of the flags doing their deadly work. The circle buckling, the gaps widening; the faces of the snarling bandieratori crying for their blood—

—and in another world, a horn sounded.

The pressure on the centre immediately relented. The bandieratori backed off and turned. Leto didn’t know what was happening, only that he wasn’t dead and second chances in battle are rare. He pushed his way through the protecting circle and plunged his sword into the spine of a bandieratoro whose attention was elsewhere; his men finally got the idea and did likewise.

The bandieratori retreated slowly, and now Leto saw why: the bandieratori were themselves encircled.

He had always considered Geta a lucky fool whose successes were due to dash rather than intelligence, but he was impressed at the Hawk’s Company’s cunning deployment. They advanced in three curved rows: the first consisted of a dozen men, widely spread; the second had some thirty men; the third row had yet more.

A Concordian battalion faced with encirclement would have massed to break through at one spot, but the bandieratori had made an art of fragmentary fighting. Uggeri didn’t need to give the order; it was always each man for himself. Some bandieratori made it through the first row’s gaps, only to be struck down by the second. Very few even got to see the third row.

Uggeri himself was one of the few who defeated the odds and escaped the piazza. It only cost him an ear and a nasty arm wound. He dived into familiar alleys, suddenly so confusing.
That blood-trail was reflecting slivers of sunlight – where was it coming from? Oh,
him
. He doubled back a little and tore a piece from his shredded flag, all the while listening for footsteps, and tied off his arm before climbing into an empty statue niche. The condottiere raced by without noticing him, intent on the trail, slowing as he came to the next corner. He turned abruptly, just in time to see the stick, but not quick enough to avoid it.

Uggeri jumped down and raced on, heading for a nearby bolt-hole. The bleeding … he couldn’t go on much longer.
Grazia Madonna
, it was close, just around this corner …

Suddenly he stopped and threw himself against the alley wall, forcing himself to breath. His mind was fogged with recrimination, guilt and anger, but he made himself
think
– about how Geta had drawn them out in a way that ensured none would escape.

He peeked round the corner. Yes, there is was, a final gauntlet: a trio of waiting hawks. He guessed that every exit in the south would be similarly guarded. If anyone did manage to escape Piazza Luna, none would make it back underground. He needed to find an empty tower to hide in until dark.

He found his way to Tower Vanzetti by a winding route and from the upper storey, where looms once wove proud flags, he watched as the day’s dead were thrown into the Irenicon. The last time he’d stood here, he told Pedro that he wanted to see what defeat looked like. That wish had been answered.

Barabbas 4

The furiously burning bonfires made the men’s faces red as devils. Each tribe had its own circle. Largest and noisiest was the Naphtali’s. Their nasi stalked around the flames to the martial beat of the drum declaiming,

Sofia wandered smiling between the circles talking to the men, praising their bravery, letting Iscanno be passed around like a trophy, laughing at their jokes. She felt like screaming.

Sofia caught the Cat’s gleeful eye as he concluded the tale, telling how the Napthtali had raced to the Sicarii’s aid and found their allies had destroyed the Lazars almost to a man. She had
presented Mik La Nan with the blade that killed Basilius and now he proffered it to the moon like a talisman.

Nauseated by the bombast, Sofia retreated from the fire. She came upon Bakhbukh, sitting alone in the shadows, staring into nothing. His hands were still bloody. He had got his wish and perhaps now he was realising that he’d ended the bloodline he’d once sworn to serve.

She left him alone with his grief.

She too had gone too far. The ‘heat of battle’ was a weasel phrase offering no excuse, no absolution. She’d been hunted for so long that being the one
inspiring
fear for once had been irresistible – but the rush of victory had soon passed and she knew that those anguished, accusing wounds would be waiting when she closed her eyes tonight, including the face of one young Lazar whose voice she had recognised when he had begged her for mercy. She had bandaged the boy’s wounds on the night of All Souls, just a year ago. He had cried and pleaded, but there could be no exceptions.

Just beyond their campfires, the cold eyes of the feral dogs shone like jewels. The Darkness was watching her, even here, even now. She turned and looked up at the cave of the Old Man.

Ezra’s words came back to her: ‘
Such a victory I pray to never again behold
.’ He’d confessed the full truth – even though he must have
known how she’d react. Now she knew why: he’d been warning her that the Darkness was most dangerous when one believed one’s cause was righteous. She thought back now to her first meeting with him, at the dock in Ariminum – she had been trying to escape after discovering John Acuto’s part in the rape of Gubbio. How self-righteous she’d been – and where was John Acuto now, in Heaven, or the other place? When the toll was totted up, how much did his final hour count for: one moment of mad idealism against a life of cynical betrayal and avarice. What was the rate of conversion in that exchange?

Ezra was exactly as she’d left him, huddled over his book in the cave. Without looking up, he asked, ‘Did you win?’

‘I thought that book told you everything.’

He looked up. ‘I see it was a glorious victory. Those are always the most terrible,’ he said. ‘You heard my confession, Sofia. There was never such a sin as mine, but there has never been such atonement either. I’m not asking for forgiveness. I must earn that yet. For both of us, a great trial remains.’

‘Iscanno is bound to suffer most. You said I needed you, Ezra. For what?’

‘It will be easier to show you.’

*

She told Bakhbukh that she would be gone a while and left Jabari in charge of Iscanno. Bakhbukh nodded numbly and did not enquire where she was going.

The Benjaminite territory was close to Jerusalem, but it would always have been easy to find: all they had to do was follow the wind. They rode to a mountain in Emmaus just west of the city. Ezra was a nimble climber, but the higher they got, the more the wind assailed them.

At the summit, he let her get her breath back. The winds enmeshed the distant city like coiling yellow serpents, now howling, now painfully screeching. They were on the very border
of that storm. Patient birds of prey hovered overhead, borne on the updrafts that tumbled her hair. Sofia kicked a stone over the edge experimentally and it floated in mid-air for a moment before tumbling down.

She had to shout to be heard. ‘Does it ever stop?’

‘It blows as men do: fitfully, and without rules. It’s a small part of a great wave. You’ve touched it before, but mere awareness is not enough. The battle is won, but to win the war you must go further. You mastered your fears in Rasenna, but fear has myriad forms. When Iscanno was born it stole back into you.’

‘It’s not wrong to care for my son.’

‘Of course not – but
fear
helps neither of you.’

He pointed to the city. ‘That was the mountain to which Man ascended and He descended, where both could walk together. David took it from the Jebusites and Solomon built a temple. It was an embassy in a land ruled by another king.
Bet Yahweh
, the Ebionites called it: God’s House. Like all embassies, it acquired secrets. Solomon employed three hundred attendants to guard them and keep the lamps burning, and whenever an attendant died, his son took over. Purity became their idol: clean food, clean hands, clean feet – and hearts too tired to love. They became as blind as the Jebusites from whom David took the mountain. The Temple was destroyed and rebuilt and destroyed again, and all that was left were three hundred ghosts enslaved by their rituals. In times of war, the embassy is burned and the ambassador who does not flee is killed.’