The Fell Sword (53 page)

The Duke nodded. ‘Do you – perhaps – have anything of his?’

To Ser Michael, it was that moment when your opponent was a little too eager to draw the next card. The Duke was up to something.

‘When he left—’ The cutler shrugged. ‘He left all his work things. When he came into his powers.’ He looked away. ‘He was already thirty years old. Very late.’

Wine was served, and sugared nuts.

A tall woman appeared with a bundle. ‘Two work smocks, and a cap.’ She smiled ruefully. ‘I made him the cap, before he was so high and mighty. Kept sparks out of his hair.’

The Duke took the cap carefully – almost reverentially. ‘Such a famous man,’ he said.

Harmodius released control of his host and slammed his aethereal fist into his aethereal palm.

The Captain was shaken – scared, and betrayed. ‘How dare you!’

Harmodius raised an aethereal eyebrow. ‘You want rid of me. I want to be out of you. I have a plan. Sometimes, I need your body to make it move along.’

The Captain felt as if he might vomit. But it was – again – his body.
He surfaced not in conscious control and found that he was sitting in a chair. In the moment of confusion, his body had apparently let go a cup of wine. Ser Michael was looking at him as if he’d grown a second head – Gavin was standing with a hand on his shoulder.

‘Brother?’ he asked. ‘You were not yourself.’

The Megas Ducas grunted. ‘You don’t know the half of it,’ he said.

He looked down, and in his right hand, wound around his index finger, he had a hair – a thick, coarse black hair.

Don’t lose that!
Harmodius said.

Nor was that the limit of the Duke’s odd behaviour.

He made some odd stops. He spent so much time in a street of apothecaries and alchemists that the rest of the company moved on and began selecting fabrics for Kaitlin’s dress, a subject on which, it turned out, every knight had an opinion. But when Kaitlin and her sisters had found a shop they liked, they went in with Mag the seamstress and Lis the laundress and didn’t emerge until the Duke was long returned from the alchemists. He bought scarlet wool for the company, and brocades for others; velvet for a purse, and a few other pieces.

Quite late in the day, Father Arnaud watched him. ‘Are you unwell?’ he asked.

The Duke turned to Father Arnaud. ‘May I refresh your clothes, Father?’ He met the priest’s eye easily enough. ‘I’ve been better. But I’m hoping to – rid myself of a malady.’

Arnaud was leaning against an ancient column that helped to support a booth that sold nothing but silk gauze. He nodded. ‘If you offer me charity, you gain in honour; if you mean to make me look better as an adornment of your power – well, you still gain, I suspect.’ He smiled. ‘Either way, I’d very much appreciate a new cloak.’

The Duke reached down and lifted the hem of his chaplain’s cloak. ‘It’s good cloth, but something lifted the black dye—’ Indeed, the whole lower half of the cloak was dun brown instead of the deep, rich black of the order.

‘Giant shit,’ the priest said carefully.

The Duke’s eyebrows shot up.

The priest leaned in. ‘I have letters for you. I assume you are spending all this money to a purpose?’

The Duke managed a thin-lipped smile. ‘Yes,’ he said.

Arnaud shrugged. ‘I know you aren’t used to having a chaplain, but I have this task as a penance and I mean to do it.’ He leaned forward. ‘What malady?’

The Duke’s eyebrows shot up further and he furrowed his brow a moment, as if listening to someone. Then he shrugged. ‘I might like having someone to bounce things off,’ he said. ‘As long as you aren’t too talkative.’ Kaitlin and Michael had their heads together and were as pretty as a picture of two saints. ‘Will you marry them?’

‘Saint Michael, it would be a sin
not
to wed them. Of course I will.’ The priest smiled.

‘We’re spending money to show what nice, rich mercenaries we are. We need to win these people over, and lately I’ve been losing.’ The Duke smiled at Sauce, who was waving a beautiful piece of scarlet velvet.

‘Are you expecting to be attacked?’ the priest asked. He was losing track of the number of conversational threads that his new employer could weave at one time.

‘Only six people knew where we were going after the Patriarch,’ the Duke said. ‘If one of them has turned, I’ll know it in an hour.’

‘You are the only soldier I know who doesn’t swear,’ Father Arnaud said.

‘Is that a sin? God and I have our own arrangement.’ The Duke’s smile was cold as ice. ‘My company needs a chaplain. I do not happen to need a confessor.’

Father Arnaud leaned close. ‘But you like a challenge,’ he said.

‘I do,’ said the Duke.

‘Me, too,’ said the priest.

They made it back to the palace without being attacked, having spent a staggering sum on jewels, another on gloves, and yet more on cloth. Even the pages had new daggers. The Duke insisted on taking them back to the square of armourers so that they could all see the model for his new breast and back, in the new Etruscan style.

The priest rode with Ser Alison. She’d craved a blessing from him as soon as he joined them, identifying herself as one of the few truly devout knights in the company, not so much by her words but actions.

‘I haven’t seen him so happy in a long time,’ she said to the priest. ‘It’s a little scary.’

Father Arnaud nodded. ‘I met him the day after the siege was lifted – in the stable. He didn’t seem this dark.’ The priest looked at the woman in armour. ‘You’ve had your hand on your sword this last half an hour. Do you know something I should know?’

Ser Alison laughed her full-throated laugh. ‘See the leather bag under my right leg?’ she said. ‘Full of gold coin. Sixty thousand florins, give or take.’

Father Arnaud paused, and then whistled. ‘Sweet gentle Jesus and all the saints. That’s what he did at the jewellers.’

Sauce grinned as the guard called out their challenge and the Duke answered. ‘You’re quick, Father. You’ll fit right in.’

They rode into the palace with all their purchases, and all their friends, intact. The group of Academy students had swelled as they went, picking up anyone they knew, and many of them returned to the Outer Court of the palace. By ancient tradition, students at the Academy were allowed in the Outer Court. The Duke broached a cask of wine and served them himself, to the scandal of the Ordinaries, and later that night there was dancing in front of the stables. Nordikans, Scholae, and the company mingled with their camp women, their wives, and their whores and a hundred Academy students.

The Princess Irene leaned against a window seat set in the walls of the Old Library, watching the Outer Court. Eventually, her ladies found her, and Lady Maria came and bowed.

‘My lady,’ she said carefully.

‘Why can’t I put on a plain dress, go down and dance?’ she asked.

Lady Maria sighed. ‘Because an assassin would put a dagger in your back before you crossed the yard.’

‘He’s right there – like a beacon. Look at him!’ The Princess Irene pointed at a figure in a scarlet doublet and hose. As she pointed, he leaped a bonfire and whirled in the air.

Lady Maria sighed again. ‘Yes – he is very flamboyant.’ Not for the first time, she cursed her son’s choice of leaders. The man was too intelligent and too charismatic by far.

Mercenaries had made themselves emperors before. And one of the easiest paths lay between the thighs of a princess.

‘I
will
go,’ Irene said.

Lady Maria balanced her options, as she always did. Any lover would supplant her instantly; that was a game she’d played herself. For an elderly matron to hold the position of favourite was rare, and in this case, an artefact of events.

She was bound to lose her position. But it mattered enormously to whom she lost it.

In addition, the threat of assassination was not an idle one. Two of the princess’s ladies had been killed in just a week.

‘If I promise to find you an occasion to attend and dance informally, will you restrain yourself tonight and go to bed, Majesty?’ She tried to remember what it was like to be so
young.
The princess had skin like ivory, breasts as high as the branches of an oak, eyes without a single mark of age. Her entire being yearned for the Outer Court – for fire, and dance. And for a man.

But Irene was a warrior, in her way. She had already made difficult choices and lived with the consequences. And she’d been tutored well in the ways of the ancients. She stood straight and faced her favourite. ‘Very well, Maria,’ she said, so quietly that it was almost a whisper.

Half an hour before midnight the gate watch rang the alarm bell on the orders of the Megas Ducas. In a twinkling, the entire garrison formed on the square – drunk or sober, armed or stripped for dancing. Most of the Nordikans were half-naked and their muscles gleamed in the dark, while the Scholae looked like the courtiers that many of them were. The company were in all the colours of the rainbow – most of them in drab everyday clothes, a few nearly naked. They had been wrestling.

Two archers rolled a cask to the middle of the Outer Court. The Academy students were standing in a huddle by the stables, unsure what to do, and they were reassured when the Megas Ducas himself – in stripped-down scarlet – walked by and winked at them.

Then he leaped up on the barrel.

‘I thought it was time we all got to know each other,’ he said in good Archaic. Most of the soldiers laughed.

‘Tomorrow we will start training together – all four regiments. We will march through the countryside, we will practise riding over broken country, we will practise with arms at the wooden stake, we will shoot bows and throw javelins and cut things with axes. There will be tilting and mounted archery. And I’m going to trade men around inside the guard – so that there are Nordikans who have served with the company, and Scholae who have ridden with the Vardariotes. We will ride abroad every day where people can see us. We will take our meals in roadside tavernas. We will behave fearlessly, and if our enemies attempt to interfere, we will kill them.’

There was a nervous titter. Not much of one. Bad Tom said, ‘That’s the way!’ loudly enough to sound like a shout.

‘We’ve kept our heads down long enough. Time to do some work.’ He smiled genially, but in the torchlight he looked like Satan.

No one laughed, and no one cheered.

‘And next Saturday, the Feast of the Saint Martin, we will all relax and have a day of rest. During which day, we will conduct a pay parade in this very yard—’ the rumbling of a cheer began ‘—and see to it that every man receives his back pay to one year—’

‘
That’s more fewkin like it!
’

‘
Yes, yes!
’ Men were pumping their fists in the air. Oak Pew kissed Cully. This sort of thing was repeated in all directions, and not just among the company. The Scholae seemed delighted to be paid – amazed, even. The Nordikans smiled broadly.

‘And then, in the evening, we’ll hear mass – said by the Patriarch, no less. After mass, Ser Michael and his lady Kaitlin will be wed, right here in the chapel of the company barracks. The Athanatoi barracks. And we’ll have a little party.’ He smiled benignly, and all around him soldiers cheered.

‘Full discipline begins now. On parade, full kit, at daybreak. Any man who has questions about what full kit means is to ask the Primus Pilus. That’s Ser Thomas. On the word dismiss, go to bed. Any questions?’

A thousand men on parade. There was silence. Not a joke, not a titter.

Even the Academy students were silent.

The Megas Ducas bowed to the students. ‘You are all invited, as well,’ he said. ‘We will see you escorted home, unless some of you want to practise marching.’

He hopped down off the barrel, and Bad Tom emerged from the ranks. He was wearing a shirt of saffron linen over trews in black and red tartan, and he looked to be ten feet tall. He grinned at them.

‘I’m just this eager for morning,’ he said. He looked around in midnight silence. ‘Dis – miss!’

In heartbeats, the Outer Court was empty, the guardrooms crammed with men pushing to be off parade. The same joke was repeated in three languages, as old soldiers encouraged each other to sleep fast and hard.

Daybreak – and the sun was just a streak of pink and gold above the spires of the churches.

The gates of the Outer Court opened and the Guard poured out into the square. They formed long ranks, two deep – much less cramped than parading in the Outer Court – making up three sides of a square, and stood silently, at attention, in full armour.

The Nordikans wore hauberks which came to their knees, with hoods of fine mail, mail gauntlets and arms. Many had further reinforcements of splint or scale; a few wore Morean breastplates of moulded leather, both painted and gilt, and two wore the new Etruscan style mixed with their traditional mail. Their cotes were of dark blue, and they wore cloaks of Imperial purple, many decorated in gold – with gold plates, gold embroidery, gold scales, some with pearls or diamonds.

The Scholae wore red – red leather cotes or heavy, tailored tunics under breastplates and backs of bronze scale polished like gold, or alternating steel and bronze. Many of them wore arm harnesses in the new Etruscan style, and a few had leg armour as well. They were beautifully mounted on sturdy black horses.

The company were in scarlet too, but their only uniformity was in their surcoats. Most had breast- and backplates; they wore twenty styles of helmets, from Bad Tom’s towering back-pointed and brimmed bassinet to Cully’s fluted kettle hat. The men-at-arms were all in plate; most of the squires had the same. The pages wore lighter armour, although Morea was already having an effect – some few pages already had curved swords and scale cuirasses. The archers were more conservative, and only one man had a turban on his open-faced bassinet. The Captain stopped during the first inspection and looked at him – Tom ‘Toes’ Larkin, a new man in good, clean kit and spotless breastplate.

‘I like your turban,’ the Duke said.

Larkin flushed. ‘Sir!’ he said, eyes fixed firmly on a point somewhere out in the middle of the Great Square.