Count Scar - SA

C DALE BRITTAIN

ROBERT A, BOUCHARD

ROBERT A, BOUCHARD

COUNT SCAR

COUNT SCAR

Chapter One ~ Caloron

Chapter One ~ Caloron

1

1

Snow had fallen steadily all day, muffling the sounds of hooves. As we sat around a blazing hearth, celebrating New Years, we did not even realize anyone had arrived until the guards brought them into the hall: the messengers come to tell me I was going to be count.

Everything was as abruptly transformed as if the wintry night had been ripped away to reveal the summer sun. A few minutes ago I had been staring unseeing into my wine glass, thinking that the purposeless and fruitless year just over was about to be replaced by another equally purposeless, but now in an instant possibilities and opportunities waited on every hand. I was too startled at first to show any emotion at all.

My nephews were the most excited. "A count! With your own county! Can we come visit you, Uncle? Is it as good as being emperor?"

My older brother the archduke, far more exalted than any count, tried his best not to seem patronizing. "A place of your own at last, Caloran!" he said, resting his elbows benevolently on the trestle table before him. Was there the slightest emphasis on "at last"? "Well, after all your service to the emperor and to me, God knows you deserve it."

His wife, my sister-in-law, was less successful in the sincerity of her congratulations. "Isn't that the little county up in the mountains your grandfather came from originally?"

"I understand he was delighted to be able to come north and become an archduke." She paused to finish delicately biting the flesh from a roasted bird's wing. "I'm sure you'll be glad to be down there, however, where you won't always have to wonder if you're in our way."

The messengers had pulled off their travel cloaks and stamped the snow from their boots and now warmed their hands by the fire. Their skin was darker than anyone's around here, and their eyes black and shadowed. They watched me as though intensely interested, although I had the least to say of anybody. The bouteillier brought them hot mulled wine, and they continued to observe me as they sipped it.

My niece had retreated shyly behind her mother when they first came in, but now she darted across the rush-strewn floor and threw herself into my lap. "Are you really going away, Uncle Caloran?"

There were tears at the corners of her eyes, but as I bounced her on my knee I felt a wash of pure joy pour over me. A county of my own, land and income of my own, a castle and knights to direct as I pleased. No more sharp comments from a sister-in-law who would clearly have preferred that I never existed, no more landless service to an older brother whose constant and rather forced good-humor toward me seemed intended to make it seem that he had forgotten what neither he nor I could ever forget.

And maybe as a count in the south, something more than a scarred and landless man, I would find women, well-bred and elegant women, who would tolerate my attentions. After all, I tried to persuade myself, plenty of men came back from the wars every year with much more disfiguring scars than mine.

"I'll miss you, Gertrude," I told my niece, meaning it but unable to keep from smiling. Her blond braids had worked out from under her little bonnet as I bounced her. "Yes, I shall have to go away."

She reached up then and touched the left side of my face, the large reddish patch whose texture was more like leather than human skin, where the beard would never grow. Gertrude's brothers had each in turn asked about my face when they had first reached the age of wondering about the adults around them, rather than simply accepting whatever they had found in the world when they came into it. Gertrude had never asked, but then she was still very young.

"If you're leaving, Uncle Caloran, I want to ask you something first. Why does your face look like this? And," turning in the circle of the arm that held her, "your hand?"

"It's an old burn," I said easily, as I had said before to my nephews. "From a fire a long time ago, when I wasn't much more than a boy. Did you know you're named for someone who used to live here in this castle," I added as though irrelevantly, "someone also named Gertrude? Your parents will tell you about her some time when you're older."

For a second my brother Guibert looked toward me, but he cast his eyes down before they met mine.

"Does it hurt?" asked Gertrude with grave concern.

"Not now. It hurt horribly once, of course—and watch how you stand on my legs, or you will hurt me even more!" I laughed as I seated her again on my lap. "It's never kept your old uncle from being a good fighting man, as my years in the emperor's service proved."

"You're not so
very
old, Uncle," she protested.

But one of the messengers interrupted before I could answer. "You are the emperor's sworn man?"

"Of course," I said, surprised at the note in his voice. "I fought up and down the Empire for five years as his liege man."

The messengers conferred for a moment in lowered voices. I had already noticed that they had a trace of an accent, and what they spoke now did not sound like any language I knew. I felt a brief moment of doubt. In spite
of the great fire on the hearth, in spite of the warm lump of Gertrude—shy again—on my lap, my brothers hall was chill on this cold night, and drafts found their way through the carpeting covering the narrow windows. Would the men who were going to be under my command even understand the orders I gave them?

"You see, my lord," said a messenger, and it took me a second to realize that he was addressing me and not my brother, "Duke Argave expects all the counts of the region to swear liege homage to
him
. His honor demands it. But down in the south the Empire is distant enough that it may not matter that you once took an oath to someone else."

And the emperor was unlikely ever to hear about it, or care if he did. Five years in his service was all he wanted before taking on a fresh crop of noble fighting men to captain his soldiers.

"Duke Argave?" I repeated aloud. I realized I knew virtually nothing about the county which I had just inherited. My grandfather, himself a younger brother, had come from there originally, but he had already been old when I knew him, and I had had scarce time as a boy for an old man's stories. That had been, of course, before the fire.

"We are the duke's men. Did you not hear us say so? It was he who chose you."

I almost expected my brother to make some jovial comment about he and Duke Argave being fellow dukes, but for once Guibert was silent. They might once have met at the royal court, however; when I had him alone I would have to ask.

"There was a choice?" I asked the messengers slowly. "I was not the only possible heir?"

"The countess's death being so sudden, of course, and with some saying—" The messengers had been suave and assured, but now their assurance cracked. "But here," pressing a sealed letter into my hand. "You can read about it yourself."

I sent Gertrude back to her mother. My sister-in-law had started laughing and talking to her boys again as they ate, as though uninterested in my county. Guibert, however, was not even pretending not to listen.

The parchment roll was sealed with red wax, impressed with the image of a man on horseback. Around the image, very tiny, were the words,
Argavius dux
. I broke the seal with my thumb and unrolled it slowly.

My new liege lord the duke might have men who spoke a language I couldn't understand, but his chancellor wrote a fair hand. The letter started with flowery invocations of the triune God, told me that it was an honor to be the first to address me by my new title of Count, and then got down to the hard details.

"The countess's sudden death left the county without a head at the worst possible time," Duke Argave told me, "just when there are rumblings from those despicable fools over the border, and rumors that the heretics may be spreading their spew again, not just back in the mountains but in the towns themselves." I had no idea what he was talking about. "And a second death so soon after the first makes it even worse. Her husband, of course, acts as though it has never occurred to him that doubt might fall upon him, and was outraged when he learned I would not accept him as successor. When you have met him, I would like to learn your opinion of him. I think you can guess mine."

I looked toward the fire, not seeing it. There were suspicious circumstances, then, surrounding the death of my predecessor the countess, my own second cousin, a woman I had never even met. And not all of my new subjects might welcome me gladly since there was apparently another claimant to the county. Visions of lying back in the warm, soft grass under the olive trees, several silk-robed maidens arrayed around me, faded before I could even begin to enjoy them. I knew how to talk to children and how to talk to soldiers, not to politicians and learned men of law. I took a deep breath. It appeared I
would be learning soon. "You can't be harder to face than the emperors enemies—or for that matter the emperor himself," I muttered to the distant duke and turned back to his letter.

"My messengers will escort you to your new home," Duke Argave concluded. "Make whatever preparations you may need and come as quickly as you may. I shall expect you each day I do not see you." He had drawn a monogram for his signature, a tall "A" with the other letters dangling off it, in a heavy hand that left a wider line from the quill than his chancellor's.

I leaned back, slowly starting to smile again. The duke with his insinuations might have meant a dozen things, but by the time I had learned what he really believed I would be lord of my own castle.

The snow fell heavily that night and kept the roads closed for the best part of a week, and I spent the time making my preparations, but I could have done them all in a single day. For thirty years I had been a son of this castle, and yet how little effort there seemed now in preparing to leave it behind me.

When I had first gone off to the imperial court, as a little boy who had scarcely begun to trace his letters on a wax tablet, I remembered my mother and her ladies spending frantic weeks in the preparation of my clothes and supplies. When I had gone again to the emperor's court, this time as a young man sworn to fight in his service, there had been months spent in readying the armor, the weapons, and the warhorses, not just for me but for the knights who would follow my banner. Both my parents had been gone by then to the convent in the next valley—

my father to the mausoleum, my mother to pray among the nuns for another two years yet—but my brother Guibert had followed all my preparations closely, grudging, I knew, everything I spent because it all came from his budget, but refusing to say that he begrudged it.

Now there was little to do but pack a few warm clothes for the journey—I would buy new in the south, where I had heard they had recently started wearing shoes with long pointed toes—

polish my armor, and sharpen the excellent sword I had received from the emperor's hands. The messengers had brought spare horses with them, distrusting northern steeds, and everything else could wait until I reached my county. I would take nothing this time from Guibert. It was easy now to leave the castle because it was no longer my home. It was his alone and his sharp-voiced wife's.

Only one person from here would accompany me, Bruno, the old soldier who had fought under me and who had asked the emperor to release him to follow me home when I left imperial service.. Too stiff in the joints to be much of a warrior any more, he liked to think of himself as my bodyguard, but I thought of him as my friend.

"No more biting winter winds, Captain," he said with relish, "once we live among the olive trees down in the south."

Guibert took me aside the evening we finally decided that the weather had cleared enough to start in the morning. For a moment I wondered if he was going to talk at last about Gertrude, but of course he did not. "For your journey," he said gruffly, pushing a small jingling pouch into my hand.

I accepted it with a nod and without counting it. The money the emperor had given me when I left his service was long gone, and while I trusted the duke's messengers would have enough for the journey, something extra was never amiss.

"I met this Duke Argave once," Guibert said, "when we were both at the royal court at the same time." Over at this edge of the kingdom we served the emperor more than the king, but my brother was liege man of both— something he had never told either one, though they doubtless knew and didn't care, as long as the peace held
between them. "The duke asked quite a bit about our grandfather," he continued, "how he had come to marry an heiress and become an archduke. He seemed better informed on our grandfathers ancestry than I am myself."