Authors: Miles Cameron
On the fifth evening, the advance guard caught a pair of Ruk crossing a frozen stream. The giants had to be careful of their footing, and the scouts began to pelt them with crossbow bolts.
As the rest of the company came up, the soldiers crowded to the stony bank and shot volleys of bolts. The men were excited – charged with spirit, animated, eyes glittering as they spanned and shot, spanned and shot, and the men-at-arms awaited the inevitable moment when the giants rushed their tormentors. But the twenty heavy crossbows made short work of the monsters. The larger went down last, screaming with rage, and yet the final look welded to its broad features was one of baffled puzzlement, like an old dog confronted with a strange new thing.
The men fell silent.
Sister Amicia rode up the column, looked at the dead creatures in the stream, and then at Ser John.
‘They had to die,’ he said defensively.
Amicia met his eye and he flinched. ‘If they’d got among us—’ he said.
She pushed a tendril of hair back into her hood. ‘Ser John, I will not debate military matters with you.’ More quietly, she said, ‘But the Ruk are as biddable as children, and I could have sent them about their own business as easily as you killed them. They were ensorcelled. I can feel it.’ She shook her head. ‘It is a crime,’ she added. ‘A crime to make them into tools, and a crime to murder them.’
The soldiers around her were dismayed, and they reacted in all the ways men react when dismayed. Some grew angry. Others turned their heads away.
Ser John shook his head. ‘Listen, sister. I understand – the Wild is not a simple enemy. But neither can we stop to bargain with the Wild.’
‘Men are always in a hurry,’ she said. ‘And they kill what they do not understand.’
The next day, Amicia said mass. It was odd, to say the least, for many of the soldiers to take communion from a woman, but it was odd to be in the Wild in mid-winter and Ser John made no scruple to kneel and take the host from her hands. Her mass was well attended.
The company marched away as the red ball of the sun peeked above the mountains to the east across the lake.
About the time the bells would have been sounding for nonnes at Lissen Carrak, they rolled into a heavy snow shower.
Amicia drew on her second hood, and Ser John reined in beside her. ‘We’re less than a day from Ticondaga,’ he said. ‘Can you foretell the weather?’
She steadied herself. ‘I can try,’ she said. She reached out—
She gasped. ‘There is something malevolent – in the woods.’ She paused. ‘Virgin protect us – they’re ahead of us and around us—’
Ser John loosened his sword in its sheath. ‘How close?’
She shook her head. ‘Let me pray,’ she said.
‘Stand to!’ shouted Ser John, rising in his stirrups.
Conversation stilled. The wagons halted. The Etruscans leaped onto their wagon beds and untied heavy ropes and then lifted wooden shutters into place, making their four wagons into small fortresses full of crossbowmen in the twinkling of an eye. Horse harness jingled, and the bowmen spanned their weapons.
‘It is north of here, moving—’ She paused. ‘Moving west. I hid myself. Ser John – it is— There is already fighting. Hurry.’
‘What kind of fighting?’ he asked.
‘People are under attack,’ Amicia said. ‘Come!’
She rode ahead.
‘Damn it!’ Ser John cursed. ‘Cover her!’
Amicia bolted away and was lost in the soft curtain of snow, and the vanguard of the column cantered after her.
‘Contact!’ shouted a man in the main column, far behind him.
‘Shit,’ Ser John said. He heard crossbows snapping away. Behind him.
The convoy was his duty, but the
belle soeur
was his friend.
‘Follow me!’ he roared, and galloped into the snow after the mad nun and her palfrey into a snowfall that got worse by the second.
Men were riding hard, struggling to get frozen fingers into steel gauntlets as they rode through blinding snow, and none of them had their visors closed. It was a recipe for disaster.
He heard Amicia’s shout. Then she said – quite distinctly –
Fiat lux.
He almost lost his seat at the burst of light. Behind him, a mounted knight and his horse went down on the road. It was as if he was at the centre of the sun.
Something hit him in the head, and darkness brushed his face – he felt a burning, and his sword arm acted. He connected – the thing screamed, his horse reared under him and he managed to get his visor closed by slamming his chin down onto his breastplate as the winged darkness descended again.
He cut at it, wondering what in the name of hell he was fighting.
‘Trolls!’ shouted one of his knights.
Ser John had time to think that whatever he was fighting was no troll.
He put his spurs into his mount as he was struck a third time – his horse burst forward, and he passed behind Sister Amicia, whose hands were the centre of a circle of radiance. As he rode through it, the black thing vanished from around his head and he caught – in the interrupted peripheral vision of his visor – a glimpse of a wing with barbed black feathers.
There
were
two trolls in the road, towering over a red puddle, and then he struck two-handed and his great sword shattered – but so did the nearest troll’s arm. The thing roared, its bottomless violet gullet illuminated by Amicia’s working.
Its other fist knocked him from the saddle and he landed heavily. All that saved him was the snow, and even with a foot of the stuff over the rock, he hit hard, there was pain in his back and his head struck a projecting stone hard enough to deform his helmet.
He had no idea how long he’d been out and he made himself move. His back screamed. He couldn’t rise to his feet, but had to roll onto his stomach and get to his knees, and with every heartbeat he was conscious that the two trolls were just a horse length away in the snow. Men were screaming, and blood was pouring out of his nose.
Another wave of brilliant golden light. The nearest troll turned and counter-cast a purple-green fog, and where the two workings met they sparkled like metal struck with a hammer on the forge and there was a long
crack
like lightning striking close by – except that it went on and on. Ser John, who was old in the ways of pain, got his left foot under his left hip and pushed himself erect. His horse was screaming, down the bank, its shrill neighs speaking of pain and panic.
His pole-axe was on his horse, and he didn’t think he could negotiate the deep snow. So he drew the heavy dagger at his hip, and ploughed forward towards the nearest troll, all the while cursing himself as a fool.
The one he’d wounded was face down in the road. That made him smile despite the pain.
The second one was fully engaged with a blur of gold – the noise the two made was like a hundred savage dogs fighting. Ser John couldn’t make out who his new ally was, but he stumbled forward – turned his whole body to look north, in case there was a third – and the black shape descended from the sky.
This time he was more ready. The dagger flicked out and feathers fell to the ground – there was a discordant shriek that pierced even through the awesome sounds the troll and its adversary made.
The great black bird-thing stooped, wings spread, and a thick line of molten gold came out of the snow and struck it in the middle of its black breast. It –
exploded.
Ser John was knocked flat. This time, he didn’t lose consciousness and so he was aware as the whirlwind of the fight passed over him. The troll planted a foot by his head, and Ser John rolled, fuelled by desperation, and he plunged his dagger in behind its hip with both hands driving the hilt. The steel shrieked—
Ser John felt his leg break, saw the armour buckle as the troll’s foot flashed out and caught him, but he didn’t lose his grip on the dagger, sunk like a piton in rock, and he fell pulling on the hilt with two hands.
The troll toppled. It fell across him, and its arm struck his chest, denting his breastplate and snapping ribs in a cascade of raw pain.
But he saw the troll’s end with almost religious clarity. He didn’t pass out – that mercy was denied him – and, instead, he was almost preternaturally aware as the troll went into the snow, the heat of its body sending up a cloud of steam and suddenly there was a golden bear in its place gripping a club, or perhaps a warhammer, and it struck so rapidly that its motions were a blur, and so hard that stone chips flew as if the great bear was a mason shaping marble.
There was a final, sharp crack, and the troll shrieked and turned to sand and rock.
The enormous bear stood over Ser John.
‘That was unexpected,’ it said. ‘I think p’raps you saved me.’
Or perhaps Ser John merely imagined that the bear said that. He expected to die.
It raised its hammer again.
The convoy reached the scene of carnage – three dead knights, Ser Anton badly wounded and the others all torn to shreds, and three damp sand-spots, and what appeared to be tens of thousands of black feathers.
Sister Amicia stood over Ser John, who was once again able to speak. She’d flooded him with healing and he was alive. Willing hands got him into a wagon. He was cold – cold all the way through. It had taken time for the bear to break him loose from the dead stone that had been a living troll.
‘We rescued bears,’ Ser John said. ‘Sweet Christ, sister – you risked us all to save some fucking bears.’
‘Some day they may save you,’ she said, more sharply than he’d heard her speak. ‘Now lie quietly.’
‘What was the thing with the feathers?’ he asked her.
She paused. ‘A Bargest,’ she said. ‘I didn’t think they were real.’
The men of the convoy were still in shock. A wave of boggles had struck the column and been defeated, but the shock of the attack and its aftermath – the dozen golden bears trotting along the flanks of the column while Amicia begged the bowmen to hold their shafts – had left men shaken, and some had gagged at the ruin of the knights killed by the trolls.
Amicia had kept them going – she wasn’t sure what else to do, and Ser John was so badly hurt that she feared to wake him, and the knights were all too young to take charge – Jarsayans with too little appreciation of the north.
And they all trusted her.
So she kept them moving – the reaction after the fight left men cold, and short of halting and gathering wood, the only recourse they had was food and movement. She ordered them to eat and men did, as if taking orders from young nuns was part of their military training. And when they’d eaten their bread or their bacon or whatever each man had, she ordered the column forward and they marched without much complaint.
Liveried cavalrymen met them – the light-armoured horsemen that Northerners called ‘prickers’ for their long spurs. They wore the Earl’s livery and they were entirely respectful.
‘Lady said there was a convoy in trouble,’ their officer said after a bow to Sister Amicia. ‘I’m Ser Edmund, sister.’
‘Your lady was right.’ Amicia was very proud of her little army – proud that they’d held together, proud that they hadn’t shot a golden bear by mistake. ‘But we won our skirmish.’
Ser Edmund nodded. ‘Didn’t think your lads looked beat,’ he said. ‘Damme! Is that John Crayford? He looks like shit.’
Alicia raised an eyebrow. ‘He’s had all the help I can provide,’ she said.
Ser Edmund nodded. ‘Well, I’m sure we can do better at the castle. I’d best be taking command, eh? You must have been terrified.’
Amicia thought of a number of replies, and settled for one she’d learned from the old Abbess. ‘Not at all,’ she said. And turned her horse and rode on, leaving the Earl’s officer sitting in the middle of the road.
Ser John was next aware when he was surrounded by stone – arches everywhere, and a pair of armoured men in green and gold livery.
‘Careful, there,’ Amicia said. ‘If those wounds open—’
‘Of course, sister!’ one man said.
Ticondaga was built on the same scale as Lissen Carrak – all grey stone and red brick rising into the heavens like a cathedral of war. The courtyard itself was twice the size of the yard at her convent, and the barracks building had the new internal chimneys and a lead roof.
Now safe in the greatest fortress in the north, they sagged to the ground in relief. The knights got themselves off their horses, and their squires – including the squires of the dead men – took their horses and then the castle’s men-at-arms flooded the courtyard, and the Earl Muriens was there, barking orders and offering hot stew – from a great bronze cauldron which he and another knight had hauled into the yard with their own hands.
‘You – lass. Out of those wet clothes,’ he barked at her. Then bobbed his head in an insolent parody of a bow. ‘Oh – you’re a nun. Well – here, drink this and then get out of your wet clothes.’ He leered. ‘You are the fucking lovesomest nun I’ve seen for many a year. Are there more like you?’ he asked.
He was big, with iron-grey hair and an attitude she knew immediately. The Red Knight might despise his father, but he certainly carried himself with the same air of cocky dominance.
‘I’ll see to the convoy first,’ she said. ‘My lord Earl. That worthy knight is Ser John Crayford, and he brought this convoy here to succour the fur trade.’
Amicia watched the old knight being carried into the castle. The Earl walked beside his stretcher for a few paces and said something, and she heard a weak grunt for Ser John.
‘That’s a fine man-at-arms. He must be fifty! As old as me – a good knight.’ The Earl grinned. ‘You his?’
Amicia laughed.
The Earl had the grace to be abashed by her laugh. ‘Well – there’s no fool like an old fool. So you’re here for our furs?’
‘If we can do it, it will save Albinkirk. As a trade town.’ Amicia tried to follow his mercurial changes, and was reminded . . .
‘Might save our trade, too.’ Muriens laughed. ‘I’ll take all the money I can get, but we haven’t a tithe of the furs we usually have. The trade went east to the fucking beg-your-pardon Moreans as soon as folk heard about the attacks in the south.’
‘You have no furs?’ asked Messire Amato.