The Fell Sword (34 page)

Never seen . . . made of fewkin’ money . . . with his parts hanging in the air . . . look at the tits on her! Most beautiful thing . . . made by gods or men . . . that bow’s too heavy to pull . . . no, you stupid sod, it’s a chariot . . . they used to wear those things . . . not solid gold . . .

Harmodius stirred, deep inside his head.
May I speak?

The Red Knight sighed a little.
Go right ahead. How can I stop you?

This is far more dangerous than I had imagined. The hermetical energy here is very like the Well at Lissen Carrak. I can feel the University. Across the square at the Academy are thirty men and two women each as puissant as I am – perhaps not quite, but very close.

There is a strong user in the palace, and more than a dozen competent weaker users.

I have never seen such a concentration of hermetical talent in one place . . . well, perhaps in my youth.

The Red Knight felt the pleasure in the other man’s thought as if it was his own.
Where was that, old man?

Harmodius laughed in his head.
Ifriqu’ya, lad. Dar-as-Salaam, the abode of peace. The very best hermetical study centre in the known world.

The Red Knight sat on his horrible gelding and watched the gates. The horse shifted and shifted again, grunted, tossed his head and tried to spit out the bit.

At the Captain’s shoulder, Ranald Lachlan spat – a more contemplative spit than the horse’s. ‘By all that’s sacred. It is like seeing the dragon. Like rain on a mountainside and the sun over the lakes. Is that a statue of Lady Tar? By the Blessed Virgin, is that sort of thing allowed?’

His cousin chuckled. ‘Boyo, I look around this square and all I see is a customer that can pay.’ Bad Tom grinned. ‘Mickle sly they are, to make us wait and drink yon in. Mayhap to make us know our place, eh?’ Despite his words, Tom looked where Ranald had pointed – spotted the golden statue of Tar with the green emerald eyes, and made a sign.

‘Christ on the cross!’ Ranald said. ‘We’ll all be burned as pagans.’

‘You spent too long in Harndon, cousin.’ Tom’s eyes crossed Ranald’s. Neither man flinched – but both put their right hands unconsciously on their hilts.

The Captain didn’t turn his head. ‘Gentlemen? While I will be the first to admit that a duel here in the Imperial forum would probably excite the locals, I suspect we’ll win greater love from the lady here if we behave with decorum.’

Bad Tom curbed his charger and laughed. ‘Just fun, Captain.’

Ranald said, ‘He didn’t get enough fighting today,’ and some of the archers laughed.

The Red Knight stood in his stirrups and called in his battlefield voice, ‘Eyes front!’

The company stopped its bickering, its commenting, its art criticism, and stood silently in the evening air. The horses’ tails swished at the late summer flies. A mule farted. A woman sighed.

Silence.

Men shifted, unlocked their knees – Sauce loosened her sword in her scabbard and her new warhorse, confused by the shift in her weight, stepped out of the column and she blushed. Wilful Murder, leading a hand of archers, tried to whisper to them about their pay, and his failed attempt to whisper floated like the sound of a small saw-mill over the column until Oak Pew leaned forward and flicked his ear with the force and accuracy of a schoolteacher. He yelped and subsided.

Silence.

A single horse hoof struck the stone flags in impatience, and rang out like a hammer blow. It echoed off the statues – across the square, in front of the Academy, stood a great bronze of the pagan god Cerebus, the multi-headed dog. It seemed to bark.

The sound of marching feet could be heard on the far side of the palace wall. They were marching in step – an art virtually unknown in Alba. The thin sound of a flute rose over the great walls.

A drum beat slowly. It was a low drum, and very large. Alien. Combined with the sound of the flute it was beautiful and wild.

Two smaller drums joined in, rattling like crazed woodpeckers. Prrrr-thump with the larger drums.

And the great gates began to open.

The Outer Court beyond the gates was a mass of torchlight – torches flared in more than a hundred brackets, illuminating the mosaics which adorned every flat surface – the front face of the Imperial stables, the Mayor of the Palace’s offices, the barracks, the apartments of the Ordinaries. The image of Christ Pantokrator, hand raised in benison, in royal robes of purple and red; the image of the harrowing of hell, with Satan being driven from the field by a Christ armed with a longsword; the Virgin Mary dressed as an Empress, or the Queen of Heaven, in lapis and gold, glittered and seemed alive. Even the tiles underfoot were astonishing – black and white marble in a magnificent and endless geometrical pattern that stretched away from the viewer at the gate to run like a maze of mazes into the entrances.

Standing in the courtyard were hundreds of men; the Guard. A hundred Nordikans stood in knee-length hauberks, with five-foot hafted axes on their shoulders and round aspides on their left arms. Every man of them wore a magnificent helmet in the ancient style, tall helmets of bronze and steel with hinged cheekplates and tall horsehair crests in red, white and black, and long cloaks of Imperial purple with the gold double-headed eagle of the Emperor embroidered on their left shoulders.

Across the courtyard from the Nordikans stood the Scholae; almost twice the number, with spears and teardrop-shaped shields. They wore blued and gilt bassinets and coats of plate covered in scarlet leather over bronze scale haubergeons and hip-high boots of red leather. Every man had the same Imperial purple cloak that the Nordikans had.

At the back of the yard, three hundred Ordinaries stood in matching scarlet gowns with gold buckles and white leather shoes.

It looked like a vision of a particularly martial heaven.

An officer stood forth, marched briskly to the centre of the gates, and called out in High Archaic.

‘Halt! Who is there? Who dares come to the gate of the Divine Emperor?’

Harmodius chuckled in the Red Knight’s head.
That must be really old. I don’t think we see the Emperor as divine any more – fascinating.

Could you shut up?

Bah.

‘The Duke of Thrake, Megas Ducas, commander of the Imperial Armies, and his bucellarii!’ roared the Red Knight.

The sound from within the courtyard was palpable. Men murmured.

The officer in the gateway paused, obviously at a loss.

The Red Knight sat on his horse and waited, enjoying the mess he’d just made.

That’s put the cat among the pigeons. Bucellarii – splendid scholarship.

Thank you, Harmodius. I was quite proud of it, I confess.

You are forcing her hand.

I am, at that. It would suit her to use me while keeping me at arm’s length – to retain the option of allowing the former Duke to return to the fold. I thought I’d save us all time.

You have a plan?

Yes.

Can I be of service?

I’d like to know why the Empire commands all this hermetical talent and these superb soldiers and yet remains so toothless.

See the boy coming out of the Ordinaries?

Ah, a message.

The boy was dressed in stark black and white parti-colour. Just like the Imperial birds – an Imperial messenger. He ran to the officer at the gate, knelt, and presented him a red ivory scroll tube.

The officer bowed deeply and kissed the tube. Then he opened it. He bowed again, and returned the tube to the messenger and pivoted sharply.

In High Archaic, he called, ‘General salute – the Megas Ducas enters the palace victorious!’

Six hundred feet stamped the ground. The drums rolled and rattled. Six hundred arms swept up in the Imperial salute.

The Red Knight didn’t even turn his head – he shouted, ‘March!’

The company – knights and squires, pages and archers and saddlers and armourers and priests and whores and wives and children and wagoners – marched neatly through the palace gates. If they lacked the formal dignity of the Nordikans or the magnificent plumage of the Scholae, they had a great deal of mirror-polished Gallish and Etruscan plate armour and their scarlet wool surcoats and matching white ostrich plumes in every hat or helmet made them any soldier’s envy.

It had been Mag and Lis who had provided every one of the company’s non-combatants with a neat red surcoat and a black wool cap with a white ostrich plume. The wool wasn’t the best and the boxwood dye would run in rain, but at night in a torchlit courtyard they looked like a magnificent embassage, or the retinue of a king.

The company rode to the centre of the great yard.

‘Halt!’ called the Captain. ‘Imperial salute!’

He was two horse lengths in advance of Ser Michael, who swept his lacs d’amour banner in a great figure of eight and then laid it across the marble parquetry under his horse’s hooves, the six-pointed star at the tip of the banner pole resting on the ground. Every man and woman in the company swept their right arms out straight from the shoulder, parallel to the ground and extending the line of the shoulder.

‘Ave, Kaisar!’ roared the company. They’d practised it in the hills, with Ser Alcaeus rolling his eyes at their bad Archaic and their lewd gestures. Tonight, by torchlight, in a two-thousand-year-old palace, it seemed – right.

‘Dismount!’ called the Captain, and the order was echoed by the corporals, and five hundred legs swept up and crossed five hundred saddles. The Ordinaries broke ranks and came forward to take the horses and in a moment the Outer Court appeared to be a riot of colour and movement, but it didn’t last. The Ordinaries had performed this task for hundreds of years, and the warhorses and palfreys were taken into the Imperial stables faster than the Red Knight would have thought possible. Indeed, he thought it was the greatest expression of raw power he’d seen yet – perhaps would ever see – that five hundred horses could be taken and stabled as fast as a man could say, ‘Hail Caesar.’

An officer of the Ordinaries appeared, along with the officer of the Nordikans who had stood in the gate and a pair of Imperial messengers – both, in this case, women.

‘Durk Blackhair, my lord Duke,’ said the Nordikan. His accent was thick enough to cut with a knife, even in Archaic.

The officer of Ordinaries bowed deeply. ‘My lord Duke, I am to take you to the throne. This would usually be the duty of the Mayor of the Palace but I regret to say that there is no such person at this time. No offence is intended. While I am unworthy to perform this task, I will make every effort to satisfy.’

‘You are the Captain of the Ordinaries?’ asked the Red Knight.

‘I have that honour,’ answered the Imperial servant. ‘May I add that your High Archaic is elegant? Bucellarii? The Imperial messengers had to consult a book.’ He gave the slightest nod to the two women and then bowed deeply and walked away into the torchlight.

‘Where will my people be placed?’ asked the Red Knight.

‘The Athanatos barracks were built for a thousand soldiers, and are currently unoccupied. As their former occupants have made some unwise choices, the Imperial will is that they be given to you. Bedding may be a trifle tight—’

The Red Knight caught Sauce’s eye and indicated that he wanted her. He turned to Toby, already at his shoulder, and as his squire took his helmet and gauntlets and changed his sword, he sent Nell for Ser Gavin and Ser Michael and Ser Thomas.

‘You cannot keep the throne waiting!’ said the Captain of Ordinaries.

‘I am not keeping the throne waiting. I’m seeing to my soldiers as quickly as I can, while preparing myself to greet the throne, which I cannot do in full armour.’ He smiled as graciously as he could. ‘Sauce, see to it that the wagons are only unloaded into the Athanatos barracks. Barrack by mess group; men-at-arms are responsible for the behaviour of their mess.’ He saw John le Bailli. ‘John! Collect the wagoners and barrack them together – draught animals to the stables. Mag – Mag!’

The seamstress was as self-effacing as usual, although when she stepped forward she was striking in her red surcoat over a black travelling gown. Her hat was – pert.

‘My lord Duke,’ she said with a curtsey that had just the smallest hint of mockery.

The Captain of Ordinaries grew pale.

The Red Knight, despite the throbbing at his temples, had to laugh. ‘Mag, can you see to all the non-combatants? I’ve meant to appoint you corporal – will you accept the job?’

‘At a corporal’s pay?’ she asked quietly.

‘Of course,’ he said.

She smiled. ‘I’ll have Kaitlin as a lieutenant,’ she said.

‘Place them all together. Best behaviour all round.’

His soldiers saluted with their free hands, and Mag dropped another curtsy.

‘We have food for three days,’ John le Bailli said quietly to the Captain of Ordinaries.

The palace officer puffed out his cheeks in relief. He turned to another Ordinary, this one distinguished by a loop of white braid or rope on his right shoulder. ‘Are you following, Stephanos?’

The man saluted.

The Red Knight had light leather gloves on his hands, a small fur hat with a gold enamel brooch and a white ostrich plume on his head and the baton of his captaincy in his hand. He bowed to his officers. ‘Ser Gavin, Ser Thomas, Ser Jehan, Ser Milus, Ser Alcaeus – on me.’

Toby just got his ermine-trimmed cloak over his shoulders as he turned away and followed the Captain of the Ordinaries. The Captain’s leg harnesses littered the ground, but they were off, and the sabatons, and the arm-harnesses too, so that the Captain looked as if he might be wearing his breast and back by choice.

They passed together from the Outer Court to the Inner. The Red Knight turned to Darkhair. ‘My pardon, Captain. I needed to see to my men.’

Darkhair was not an old man. He grinned, and showed a mouth missing a great many teeth. He was the same size as Bad Tom – the two giants were already sizing each other up. He pointed with his axe – moving the three-pound head and five-foot haft like a child flicking a straw – and beckoned six men from the rightmost two files of the Nordikans.