The Fell Sword (90 page)

After a warm night and a lot of stolen food, the army marched again at dawn.

The town, stripped of preserved food, pack animals, and grain, watched them go in surly silence. Even the presence of their Emperor could not make them cheer.

‘If you ever come to rule Thrake, that town will belong to you,’ Father Arnaud said, as they rode west.

‘Then I’ll do something nice for them. Father, I am aware that you are a good man, and, despite appearances, I like to think of myself as a good man. In fact, I pride myself on it. We are, if you will pardon me, in a situation that cannot be resolved by prayer or a noble cavalry charge. So could you, perhaps, leave me alone?’

Father Arnaud smiled savagely ‘Never, Gabriel. I will never, ever leave you alone.’

The Red Knight put his hand to his head, which throbbed as if he had spent several nights drinking.

The army marched west, moving as fast as two thousand tired soldiers and their women and baggage animals could manage.

‘You swore he wouldn’t make it across the Penults,’ Aeskepiles said quietly.

Demetrius was looking down at the town below him.

‘Now his army is between us and Lonika,’ Aeskepiles went on. ‘How much of a garrison does your capital have?’

Demetrius chewed on his thumb. He worked on the callus, biting it, chewing the bits. ‘Son of a bitch,’ he said.

‘We have to catch him in the plains,’ Dariusz offered. ‘The road will be clear, and good.’

Ser Christos shook his helmeted head. ‘We’re haemorrhaging men.’

‘So is he,’ Demetrius said. They’d picked up a dozen city stradiotes who’d simply surrendered as soon as they could. They’d already captured almost a hundred stragglers.

Ser Christos let out a long, harsh breath, but said nothing.

‘Advance the banner,’ Demetrius said. ‘Get the scouts well out. Put all the Easterners out. Let us make the usurper’s life a living hell.’

Chapter Eighteen

Harndon – The Queen

F
our days after Christmas, three ships came sailing in to Harndon port. On board was Ser Gerald Random, and he brought the entire Morean fur trade with him, minus only his concessions to the Etruscan merchants, as well as fifteen tons of Wild honey. The Etruscan banks in the city received into their coffers some thousands of leopards in loans, and trading – gambling, some called it – in the value of some elite commodities changed tenor rapidly.

Ser Gerald was seen to go to the palace and place in the King’s hands a quantity of pelts, honey, and gold.

In the great marketplace at Smithfield, outside the western gates of the city, workmen began to construct the scaffolding for a truly titanic set of lists, including bleachers for seats. Loads of lumber came downriver, the great logs simply heaved in and floated down the Albin from the edge of the Wild.

Ser Gerald’s furs were sold for good quantities of silver – many to Harndon’s Etruscan merchants, who paid a higher price but no doubt had ways of passing the cost onto their customers. But the flow of silver was steady, and, just as the first warmth of spring melts the snow and causes the frozen streams to develop to a trickle, so the silver began to flow into the King’s new mint, which bore a startling resemblance to Master Pye’s work yard.

The dies were ready, and Edmund began striking slugs of silver as soon as the first shipment reached him. Outside Master Pye’s gate, a full company of the Harndon trained men stood guard, less proud now in their half armour than they had been on Christmas night. Keeping a hundred apprentices and journeymen ‘idle’ so that they could play soldier in winter was expensive and boring and cold.

But there were no attacks on the fledgling mint, and the coins began to flow.

Almost as soon as the new coins appeared – sacks of them – in the trade squares, they changed the nature of commerce. They were solid. They were heavy.

They had an excellent silver content.

The King couldn’t share Master Ailwin’s triumph as he neither understood it nor, really, respected it. But he did notice the change in the faces of his interior councillors, and he was delighted to hear them vote him the funds to carry on his tournament for the first of May.

If the new Bishop of Lorica listened with a sour face and referred to the whole exercise as ‘usury’, the King could afford to ignore him.

But if the King was victorious in Cheapside, he was less sanguine about the palace. And the months after Christmas passed in petty defeats for the Queen as her belly grew rounder and her King grew more indifferent. Galahad d’Acre was arrested and thrown in the tower – although no one seemed to actually suspect him of the murder of Lady Emota. Another of the King’s squires simply vanished. Some said he’d been murdered, others that he had gone home to his father’s estates, afraid for his life and reputation.

The pace of the slanders increased, and the Queen began to seriously suspect that she might have a rival – that the King might have taken a mistress. Such things were done, and it was her duty to ignore such behaviour.

It was not in her character to accept a rival. Nor to accept the staging of a passion play about the whore of Babylon, performed under her window, and loud with the laughter of Jean de Vrailly. And the King. And the Sieur de Rohan, whose hired Etruscan players said the unsayable and sang the unsingable with panache.

Lady Almspend spent her days practising small acts of hermeticism and reading the old King’s papers – and those of his hermetical master and several of his other ministers. She declared her reading fascinating, and took copious notes while her royal mistress paced up and down in her solar and Diota cleaned and tidied uselessly.

Eight weeks into the New Year, Desiderata sat down at her writing table – covered in Rebecca’s stacks of musty documents and crisp, new notes – and took a sheet of new vellum, idly wondering how many sheep died for her correspondence.

Dear Renaud
she wrote. Her brother, hundreds of leagues to the south, in L’Occitan.

She looked at those words, and considered every argument she had made when she had accepted the King of Alba’s proposal of marriage. And his replies. His anger. His desire for conflict.

Calling to Renaud for help would be an irrevocable action.

She stared at the words on the parchment, imagining her worthy brother raising his knights and leading them north. Imagining his western mountains unguarded against the Wyrms and Wyverns and worse things that infested them.

Imagining him fighting her husband.

She chewed on the end of her stylus.

‘You’ll have ink in your mouth, and then what will people say?’ Diota asked.

‘My belly is as big as a house, woman. No one will look at me anyway.’ Desiderata didn’t like being pregnant. Things hurt, the morning sickness was oppressive, her bladder was always full and, worst of all, she had lost the regard of the knights of court. They didn’t
look
at her. The whispers were bad enough. But the loss of that worship was like torture.

She considered the tournament. The subject made her tired. It had been her idea in the first place, and now—

Now the King’s mistress might be the Queen of Love. And she would merely be the Queen. The very heavily pregnant Queen whose husband suspected her of an unspeakable betrayal, and seemed disposed to laugh it off.

She was just framing the thought that she could invite her brother for the tournament when one of Rebecca’s dusty parchments caught her eye.

She ran her eyes along the Gothic script automatically. Even without Rebecca’s skills, she’d begun to be able to pick up on the hands of the various major players. This was the infamous traitor Plangere.

Her eye caught on the word ‘rape’.

She choked at what she read, and closed her eyes and her mouth filled with bile.

She bent over as far as she comfortably could and rested her head on her writing table.

The door to her solar opened, and she heard Almspend’s light steps and her intake of breath. ‘Oh,’ she said.

The Queen made herself sit up.

Rebecca’s deep eyes were drawn with concern. ‘I’m a fool,’ she said. ‘I hadn’t meant to leave that out.’

The Queen stared at her.

‘I couldn’t bear to destroy it, because it is history,’ Almspend said.

‘My husband,’ the Queen said. She had trouble drawing a breath. ‘My husband,’ she said again.

‘Madam – it was many years ago. He has doubtless done his penance and made his peace with God.’ Almspend held her hands tightly.

But the Queen’s world – her very ideas of who she was and who the King was – was collapsing like dams under the force of mountain torrents in springtime. She tried to breathe.

‘The King my husband,’ she croaked. Her fingers found the parchment. ‘Raped his sister. She cursed him for it. Oh, my God, my God.’

Almspend took the document, and smoothed it. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘He wasn’t King yet,’ she added. ‘He was quite young.’ She looked at her Queen and tried a different tack. ‘It’s only what Plangere writes, and he was a traitor.’ She looked at the date on the note.

The Queen put her hand to her chest and sat back. She struggled to pull in a breath. Her hands grew cold. She felt her baby kick, and she cried out, and Almspend put her hand on the Queen’s head.

The Queen looked at her, eyes wide as the realisation hit – the moment at Lissen Carrak when— And she cried out again, as if in pain.

‘Of course!’ she said. ‘The Red Knight is his
son
.’

The Imperial Army – as the Red Knight styled their force – arrived on the plains of Viotia as the last snow melted in the shadowy corners of the neatly walled fields. But the frozen ground was still hard as iron, and rang under their horses’ hooves.

They swept into the rich lands a day ahead of the enemy, and marched north and west on the ancient stone road.

Eavey – or ‘Eves’ as the soldiers called it – opened her gates for them. It was not quite the miracle it seemed; the near sack of Amphipolis had grown in the telling. And the Emperor was there in person this time, beautifully dressed in crimson and purple silk over fur. He wore a small gold crown over a magnificent fur hat.

The people came out to cheer him when the gates were open and it was clear that the soldiers were not going to punish them.

The Red Knight went directly to the Ducal residence – one of Andronicus’s lodgings, a magnificent forty-room castle with a Great Hall and marvellous woodwork. And ancient sculptures. The chamberlain admitted him, and he quartered the army in the castle.

He summoned Father Arnaud.

The priest came.

The Megas Ducas was sitting with the Emperor, who was dining while the Red Knight served him. Father Arnaud waited patiently to be called forward, as he had studied the Morean etiquette and had some idea what he might be in for.

The Emperor ate as if no one was watching him, and talked – politely – to Count Zac, who poured his wine, and Ser Giorgios, who held his napkin, and to Harald Derkensun, who stood with an axe on his shoulder. There were servants – actual servants – and for each of them there was a gentleman of the Scholae, who watched them the way cats watch mice.

The Red Knight turned and caught Father Arnaud’s eye and winked.

Father Arnaud was shocked, but also pleased.

The Emperor discussed the weather, and some differences between Alban and Imperial religious practice. Father Arnaud was surprised to hear how conversant the Red Knight was with Alban practice.

Eventually the Emperor ate something very sweet and sticky, and raised his hand for a napkin. He glanced at Father Arnaud and smiled. ‘Ah – the fighting priest. Please be with us!’

Father Arnaud came forward and made a deep bow.

‘It is the Emperor’s pleasure that you take command of a detachment of belted knights to police the city,’ the Red Knight said.

Father Arnaud nodded. ‘We intend to hold these walls and force a siege?’ he asked.

The Emperor smiled. ‘I would rather that my Megas Ducas used our army to force a battle, in which God might show us his mercy. But the commander of our armies has different intentions.’

The Red Knight picked up a dish and Father Arnaud discovered he found it disconcerting to see him waiting on the Emperor as if he was a servant. He bowed, and carrying the plate, which held the remains of two roast pheasants in saffron with their skins gilded so that they shone like birds of solid gold, he walked down the hall’s dais and out the door by which the noblemen and women were served.

Father Arnaud bowed to the Emperor, took a serving dish – rapini, or something like it, loaded with garlic – and followed the Red Knight.

The moment he crossed out of the hall, a pair of servants – real servants – took the dish from his hands with the obvious disdain of professionals for amateurs.

‘You serve beautifully,’ Father Arnaud said.

‘I had practice. I was my father’s page for years. Ticondaga is too far from civilisation for me to have been fostered, but while there I waited on many famous men.’ He followed the servants towards the kitchen, and as they entered he plucked most of a pheasant off the tray and stood in an alcove, eating.

Father Arnaud adapted his actions to his own needs and seized a large piece of slightly used chicken pie, with raisins, spices and sugar, from a serving tray where it sat idle and unwanted.

‘There’s wine in the pitcher,’ the Red Knight said. ‘I love kitchens. Well-run kitchens, anyway. I could live here.’

‘But we’re retreating,’ Father Arnaud said.

‘Yes,’ the Red Knight said. He’d finished his pheasant and now had sticky gold leaf on his hands.

‘You could hold this place,’ Father Arnaud said.

The Red Knight cocked his head to one side like a puzzled puppy. ‘You can’t have it both ways,’ he said.

Father Arnaud now had hands coated in ginger and sugar. ‘Both ways?’ he said. Boyhood habits count and he began to lick his fingers. The pie had been delicious.

‘You don’t want any towns to be sacked. You were right. I was tired and annoyed. And I was wrong. I needed to get my head together and control my men. But – now you want me to hold this place? Really?’ The Red Knight shook his head. ‘When we fight, I’ll make it as far from here as I can manage.’

‘The Emperor seems to think that you – and God – can win.’ Father Arnaud couldn’t find a cup, so he drank from the jug.

‘The Emperor is a kindly man, who is so
nice
that he can’t imagine that his daughter sold him out, his chamberlain betrayed him and his magister stabbed him in the back.’ He raised an eyebrow. ‘Are you staking some special claim to the wine, or will I get some if I’m especially good, or what?’

Father Arnaud handed over the wine. ‘He’s not a good strategist,’ he commented.

‘He’s not terribly bright,’ the Red Knight said. He paused. ‘He’s not of this world,’ he added. ‘That’s a kinder way of putting it.’

‘You
know
that his daughter betrayed him?’ Father Arnaud asked.

The Red Knight shrugged. ‘I wasn’t there. But I’d bet heavily on the notion. I can prove she sent messengers to Andronicus. And Kronmir thinks she was the original betrayer.’