The Red Knight (51 page)

Out in the yard, a dozen archers and a pair of squires were gathered around a girl, and they were all furiously peeling carrots.

Lissen Carak – Father Henry

The priest watched the sell-swords come out of their leader’s room. The captain, the source of infection.
She
came out first, and the Bastard was holding her hand
like they were lovers. Perhaps they were – if he was an imp of Satan then pleasuring an old whore would be just his mark. Aristocrats. Birds of a feather.

Bile flooded his throat, and his hands shook a little to think that he had – he had—

He ducked his head to avoid looking at them, and went back to his sermon. But it was a long time before his hands were steady enough to scrape the old parchment as clean and thin as he needed it
to be.

And when the biggest of the sell-swords came down the steps, he caught the priest’s eye and smiled.

Henry felt fear go through him like a wave of cold and dirty water. What did the man know?

He got up from his work-table as soon as the giant walked off, and he slunk across the chapel to the prie-dieu in the chapel. Reached under the altar cloth to make sure it was still there. His
war-bow. His arrows.

He sagged with relief, and hurried back to his work table, imagining one of his shafts in the giant’s groin. Listening to him scream.

Dormling – Hector Lachlan

The fast horsemen hadn’t learned enough to change Hector’s mind. He looked at the rough sketch of the country and shook his head. ‘If I go east, I’d as
well take my beasts over the mountains to Theva,’ he said. ‘And I don’t intend to do that. I have customers in Harndon and Harnford waiting for their cattle. West of the
mountains, there’s no way to pass a few thousand head except the road.’

The Keeper had spent the night dancing and drinking his own ale as well as some nasty foreign spirits and his head was pounding. ‘So wait here and send a message to the king,’ he
said.

Lachlan shook his head. ‘Sod that. I’ll be away in the first light. What can you give me, Keeper? How many men?’

The Keeper grimaced. ‘Perhaps twenty helmets.’

‘Twenty? You have a hundred swords here, wasting your money and standing about idle.’

The Keeper shook his head in turn. ‘The Wild’s coming,’ he said. ‘I can’t just drift away like some. I have to hold this place.’

‘You can hold this place with thirty men. Give me the rest.’

‘Maybe thirty like you – thirty heroes. Normal men? I need sixty.’

‘So now you’ll give me forty? That’s better. Forty brings me near a century strong – enough to watch both ends of the herd and still leave a sting in my tail.’
Lachlan looked over his sketch. ‘When we come down out of the hills, it’ll be worse – I’ll want horses. So I’ll take fifty of your swords and two hundred head of
horses.’

The Keeper laughed. ‘Will you now?’ he asked.

‘Yes. For a third of my total profit.’ Lachlan asked.

The Keeper’s eyes widened. ‘A
third
?’

‘Of the profit. In silver, payable when I’m standing on your doorstep on my road home.’ Lachlan was smiling as if he knew the punch line to a secret joke.

‘And nothing if you’re dead,’ said the Keeper.

‘I confess, paying my debts won’t matter so much to me if I’m dead,’ Lachlan answered.

The Keeper pondered a while. The tall serving woman came in, and the Keeper was surprised to see that nothing but the blandest of smiles passed between them. He’d been
sure
the
dark-haired woman was the drover’s type.

‘I need your trade, and you’re a well-known man,’ the Keeper said. ‘But you’re trying to take all my horses and half my fighting strength on a wild-haired adventure
with little profit and a great deal of death.’ He rubbed his head. ‘Tell me why I should help you?’

Lachlan kicked his sword blade around his chair and sat back. ‘If I told you I was going to make the greatest profit in my family’s history by getting this herd through to the
south—’ he said.

The Keeper nodded. ‘Sure, but—’ The drover’s cheerful arrogance annoyed him.

‘If I said that success would leave the king in my debt, and open new markets for my beef,’ Lachlan said.

‘Perhaps,’ the Keeper said.

‘If I said I lay with your youngest in the night, and she carries my son in her womb, and that I’ll do this for her bride price and be your family?’ Lachlan said.

The Keeper sat up, rage crossing his face.

‘Don’t you lose your temper with me, Will Tollins. She came to me free, and I’ll wed her and be happy on it.’ But Lachlan put his hand on the hilt of his sword just in
case.

The Keeper held his eye. And they sat there, diamond cut diamond, for a long time.

And then the Keeper smiled. ‘Welcome to my family.’

Lachlan held out a great hand, and the other man took it.

‘Forty-five swords, and all the horses I can raise by tomorrow, and I get half your profits – a quarter for my own and quarter for Sarah’s bride price. And you wed her
today.’ He had the drover’s rough hand in his own, and he felt no falsehood in it.

Hector Lachlan, the Prince of the Drovers, withdrew his hand, spat and held it out, and Will Tollins, the Keeper of Dormling, took it, and the Inn of Dormling rang to a second night of
revelry.

On the next morning, Lachlan led his tail and all his herds out onto the road into the watery sunlight. Every man had a shirt of shining rings, every ring riveted closed on a forge, every
hauberk fitted to its wearer over a heavy cote of elk hide quilted full of sheep’s wool, and every man had a heavy bow or a crossbow, a sword at least four feet high to the cross, and some
had axes as tall as they themselves were, over their shoulders. Every man had a tall helmet with a brim that kept the rain off your face and a sharp point at the top, and a cloak of furze, and long
leather boots like leather hose that went to the hip. The Keeper’s men wore hoods of scarlet with black lines woven in, so that they made a check of red and black, and Lachlan’s men had
a more complex weave of red and blue and grey that made a colour that seemed to change with the trees and the rain. And Sarah Lachlan stood in her father’s door-yard with a wreath of spring
jasmine in her hair, kissing her man again and again while the flame of her hair lit the morning like a second sun. Her former suitor, the farmer, stood in the watery sun with a great axe on his
shoulder, determined to go and die rather than face life without her.

Lachlan put an arm around him. ‘There’s other girls, lad,’ he said.

Hector Lachlan took his great green ivory horn and put it to his lips and blew, and the deep note sounded up the vale and down it to the Cohocton, over leagues of ground. Deer raised their heads
to listen, and bears paused in their orgy of spring eating, and beavers, surveying the dams broken by the spring rains, looked up from calculations. And other things – scaled and taloned,
chiton brown or green – raised their heads and wondered. The horn call rang from hillside to cliff edge.

‘I am Hector Lachlan, Drover of the Green Hills, and today I set forth to drive my herd to Harndon!’ Hector shouted. ‘Death to any who oppose me, and long life to those who aid
me.’ He sounded the horn again, and kissed his new wife, and took a charm from around his neck and gave it to her.

‘Wish me luck, love,’ he said.

She kissed him, and gave him not one tear. But she looked at her father defiantly and was shocked to find him smiling back.

Then Hector crushed her to his burnie, and then he was walking out the gate. ‘Let’s go!’ he shouted, and the drive lumbered into motion.

West of Albinkirk – Gerald Random

Gerald Random scratched his head for the tenth time that morning under his linen coif and wished that he could stop his convoy for long enough to wash his hair.

The Magus rode by his side, all but asleep in the saddle. Random couldn’t help looking at him with the same proprietary air a man might look at a beautiful woman who’s suddenly
consented to sleep with him. Having the Magus by his side was incredible luck, like a tale of errantry come to life.

The convoy was down a wagon this morning – the farrier’s cart had been parked badly, had sunk in the rain and both oxen’s throats had to be slit. The farrier himself was dry
eyed, as his tools had been distributed among forty other carts and he’d been promised a place on the return. Altogether it was a small loss, but the whole column was exhausted, and Random
was, for the first time, seriously considering turning around and going back south. The total loss of the convoy was a risk he could not really afford – his financial losses if the convoy
failed but the stock survived would merely set him back ten years. But if it was destroyed, he’d be ruined.

And dead, you fool
, he thought to himself.
Dead men never become lord mayor, nor sheriff.

Set against that, he’d brought them through an ambush and one straight-up fight and last night most of them had snatched a little sleep. He was reasonably sure that, with the Magus at his
side, they could cut their way to the fair at Lissen Carack.

But what if they arrived to find no fair? The farther north-west they went, the less likely it seemed that there was a fair at Lissen Carack. Or even a convent.

On the other hand, going back seemed both craven
and
dangerous. And the old Magus had been very clear: he was going to Lissen Carack, not back down the river to the king.

He scratched his itching head again.

He was seven leagues west of Albinkirk, if his notions of the road were accurate. About two days travel to the fords of the Cohocton, and another full day at oxen speed up the north side to the
Convent.

The sun rose fully and the sky was truly blue for the first time in three days. Men’s clothes dried, they warmed up, and the chatter of a well-ordered company began to spread. Men ate
stale bread and drank a little wine, or small beer if they had it fresh, or hard cider if not, and the column rolled briskly along.

The soldiers were twitchy – Old Bob had a dozen mounted men spread a hundred horse-lengths wide in the trees ahead of the wagons, and the rest covered the rear in a tight knot ready to
charge in any direction under Guilbert.

They didn’t stop to eat a noonday meal, but rolled on.

When the sun was well down in the sky, Old Bob rode back to report that they were coming to one of the turn fields, the cleared fields maintained specifically for the fair convoys to camp.

‘Looks like hell,’ he said. ‘But it has fresh water and it’s clear enough.

In fact, raspberry prickers had grown up over most of the field, and while one small convoy seemed to have made camp there a few days before, they had stayed to the edge by the road and cut no
brush.

Guilbert sent his men out into the raspberry canes in armour, to cut armloads of the stuff with their swords, and he had the archers lash them in bundles on the sturdy Xs of a pair of fascine
horses, cradles made of heavy logs where armloads of brush and prickers could be wrapped tight. In the last three hours of daylight, while the boys cooked and brought in water and the older men saw
to the animals and circled the wagons, the soldiers build a rampart of raspberry cane bundles.

And then, the evening being dry, they set fire to the rest of the field. The canes went up like dried wood, burning into the edge of the trees in a few minutes.

The Magus came awake to watch the sparks rise into the clear night air.

‘That was extremely foolish,’ he said.

Random was eating a garlic sausage. ‘Why?’ he asked. ‘Clear field for archery. No cover for the little boglins and spider irks.’

‘Fire calls strong as naming,’ the old Magus said. ‘Fire is the Wild’s bane.’ He glared at the merchant, and his glare held weight.

Random had been glared at all his life. ‘Convoy’s safer with a clear field around,’ he said, like an angry boy.

‘Not if six wyverns come, you idiot. Not if a dozen golden bears decide you’ve intruded – not if even a pair of daemon wardens decide youy’ve broken the Forest Law. Then
your clear field will not save you.’ But he looked resigned. ‘And irks have nothing to do with spiders. Irks are Fae. Now – where’s my patient?’

‘The young knight? Sound asleep. He wakes up, talks to himself, and goes back to sleep.’

‘Best thing for him,’ Harmodius said. He walked around the circle of wagons, found his man, and looked him over.

Harmodius put the blanket back after a long look, and then the younger man’s eyes opened.

‘You might have just let me live,’ he said. He looked pained. ‘Sweet Jesu – I mean you might have let me die.’

‘No one
ever
thanks me,’ the Magus agreed.

‘I’m Gawin Murien,’ he said. Groaned. ‘What have you done to me?’

‘I know who you are,’ the Magus said. ‘Now they can call you Hard Neck.’

Neither man laughed.

‘I don’t really know what I did to you. I’ll work it out over the next few days. Don’t worry about it.’

‘You mean, don’t worry that I’m gradually turning into some loathsome God-cursed enemy of man who will try to slay and eat all my friends?’ Gawin asked. His voice strove
for calm, but there was panic in it.

‘You have a vivid imagination,’ Harmodius said.

‘So I’ve always been told.’ Gawin looked at his own upper left arm and recoiled in horror. ‘Good Christ, I have scales. It wasn’t a dream!’ His voice rose
suddenly, and his eyes narrowed. ‘By Saint George – my lord, must I ask you to kill me?’ His eyes went far away. ‘
I was so beautiful
,’ he said, in another
voice.

Harmodius made a face. ‘So very dramatic. I seized the power to heal you from something of the Wild.’ He shrugged. ‘I wasn’t really fully in control of the power, but
never mind that. Without it, you’d have died. And whatever you may feel about it right now, death is not better!’

The young knight rolled away, closing his eyes. ‘Like you would know. Go away and let me sleep. Oh, Blessed Virgin, am I doomed to be a monster?’