Authors: Miles Cameron
‘Not your usual contract, ser knight,’ she said.
‘Damn it, my lady, this
is
my usual contract: it’s a war between rival barons, except that this time the rival baron can’t be negotiated with or turned from his path or
simply murdered, and they are all good ways of avoiding a knock-down fight. But in every other respect you and the Wild are feuding border lords. You’ve taken a piece of his land, and in turn
he’s raiding you and threatening your home.’
As the captain spoke, his officers trickled in – Bad Tom, Ser Milus, Ser Jehannes, Wilful Murder, and Bent. The others were either asleep or on patrol.
The Abbess was brought a chair.
‘Park wherever you can,’ the captain said. ‘I’ll try and make this brief. I’d say we’re almost surrounded, and our enemy hasn’t bothered to build trench
lines and trebuchets. Yet. But he’s got enough force to close the woods and every road around us. He’s got Outwallers – who are those men and women who live in the Wild, for you
godless foreigners.’ The captain gave Ser Jehannes a mirthless smile. ‘I’m guessing he has a hundred or more Outwallers, a thousand irks, and perhaps fifty to a hundred other
creatures of the types we’ve already seen – wyverns, daemons and the like.’ He shrugged. ‘I’m guessing our enemy is a potent magus.’
Bad Tom whistled. ‘Lucky we didn’t get ourselves killed trying for their camp then.’
The captain nodded. ‘When you move fast and plan well, you deserve a little luck,’ he said. ‘But yes, I’d say that getting away with that raid seized our luck with both
hands.’
‘So now what?’ Sauce asked.
‘First, Jehannes, you are now the constable. Ser Milus, you are now marshal. Tom, you are now first lance. Sauce, you are now a corporal. In one sweep, I’m short three knights.
Milus, are there any likely lads in your refugees? The merchants?’
Milus scratched under his chin. ‘Archers? Hell, yes. Men-at-arms? Not a one. But I’ll tell you what there is down in my little kingdom – there’s two wagon loads of armour
in barrels, and some nice swords, and a dozen heavy arbalests. All for sale at the fair, of course.’
‘Better than what we have?’ the captain asked.
‘White plate – the new hardened breastplates.’ Ser Milus licked his lips. ‘The swords are good, the spearheads better. The arbalests as heavy as anything we
have.’
The Abbess smiled. ‘Those were for me, anyway.’
The captain nodded. ‘Take it all. Tell the owners we’ll give them chits for it and settle up at the end if we’re still alive. How heavy are these arbalests?’
‘Bolts a forearm in length and thick as a child’s wrist,’ Ser Milus said.
‘Put them on frames. Two for you and the rest up here for me.’ The captain looked at the Abbess. ‘I want to build an outwork.’
‘Anything you like,’ she said.
‘I want to put all your farmers and all the refugees to work and I want your help seeing that I get no insolence from them. I need them to work quickly and be quiet.’ The captain
took out a scroll of parchment and unrolled it.
‘My squire is a gifted young man, and he drew this,’ he said. Michael flushed uncontrollably. ‘We want a deep V-shape of walls on both sides and ditches outside the walls;
built three hundred paces from Bridge Castle, where the road from the Lower Town starts up the hill. It will allow us to send soldiers and supplies freely back and forth from the Lower Town to
Bridge Castle. Put boards all along the bottom so men can walk quickly, without being seen, and put three bridges over it, so our sorties can move easily about the fields. See this cutaway? A nice
hollow space under the boards. Good place for a little surprise.’ He grinned and most of the soldiers grinned back.
‘We’ll
also
put a wall along the Gate Road, running all the way to the top. We should have done it in the first place, anyway. Towers here and here, on earth bastions.’
He rubbed his beard. ‘First, we put in covered positions for these new frame crossbows – here and here – so that if they attack while we’re building, it’s all a trap
and they lose a couple of their own for nothing. Last, we improve the path from the postern gate to the Lower Town.’
All the soldiers nodded.
Except Tom. Tom spat. ‘We don’t have the fucking men to hold all that wall,’ he said. ‘Much less in both directions.’
‘No we don’t. But building it will keep the peasants quiet and busy, and when our enemy attacks we’re going to make him pay for it, and then let him have it.’
Tom grinned. ‘Of course we are.’
The captain turned to the others. ‘I’m assuming that our enemy doesn’t have a lot of experience in fighting men,’ he said. ‘But even if he does, we won’t have
lost much with these distractions.’
The Abbess looked pained. Her eyes had a hunted look, and she turned away. ‘He is a man. Or he was, once.’
The captain winced. ‘We face a man?’
The Abbess nodded. ‘I have felt the brush of his thought. He has some small reason to – to fear me.’
The captain looked at her, gazing as intently as a lover into her flecked brown and blue eyes, and she held his gaze as easily as he held hers.
‘It is none of your affair,’ she said primly.
‘You are not telling us things that would be of value to us,’ the captain said.
‘You, on the other hand, are the very soul of openness,’ she replied.
‘Get a room,’ Tom muttered under his breath.
The captain looked at Ser Milus. ‘We cut the patrols down to two a day, and we launch them at my whim. Our sole remaining interest is getting any more convoys in here safely, or in turning
them away. Albinkirk is gone. Sauce – how far did you go today?’
She shrugged. ‘Eight leagues?’
The captain nodded. ‘Tomorrow – no, tomorrow we won’t send anything. Not a man. Tomorrow we dig. The day after, we send four patrols, in all directions except west. The day
after that, I’ll take half the company west along the road, as fast as we can go. We’ll aim for twenty leagues, pick up merchants or convoys we can, and get a look at Albinkirk. Then
back here, all with enough force to kill whatever opposes us.’
Tom nodded. ‘Aye, but against a hundred Outwallers, in an ambush, we’ll just be dead. And that’s without a couple of daemons and maybe a pair of wyverns and a hundred irks to
eat our bodies afterwards. Eh?’
The captain wrinkled his lips. ‘If we surrender the initiative and hunker down here we’re all dead too,’ he said. ‘Unless the king comes with his army to relieve
us.’
The Abbess agreed.
‘For all I know the Wall fortresses have already fallen,’ the captain said. His eyes narrowed, as if the subject had particular interest to him. ‘Whatever the case, we cannot
count on any help from the outside, nor can we hope that this is an isolated incident. We have to behave as if we have an unending supply of men and materiel, and we have to try to keep the road
east open. We need to lure our enemy into some battles of our choosing.’ He looked around at his officers. ‘Everyone understand?’ He looked at the Abbess. ‘We have to be
ready to destroy the bridge.’
She nodded. ‘There’s a phantasm to do it. I have it. It is regularly maintained: when a certain key is turned in the gate lock, the bridge will fall into the river.’
The officers nodded their approval.
The captain stood. ‘Very well. Ser Milus, Ser Jehannes, you are in charge of my construction project. Tom, Sauce, you will lead the patrols. Bent, get the arbalest frames up, and placed in
those four covered positions,’ he smiled, ‘where Michael marked them. Bent, take charge of running the rotations inside the fortress too. Don’t worry about who is a man-at-arms,
who’s a valet, who’s an archer. Just get the numbers right.’
They all nodded.
‘You planning to take a nap?’ Bad Tom asked.
The captain smiled at the Abbess. ‘My lady and I are going to raise a nice fog,’ he said. ‘She is a very potent magus.’
He had the pleasure of watching her eyes widen in surprise.
Jehannes paused. ‘And you? Captain?’
‘I am a modestly talented magus.’ He nodded to his new constable. ‘Ah, Michael. Please don’t go anywhere.’
The other officers rattled out, Michael stood uncomfortably by the door, and after a moment it was just the three of them.
‘What do you have to say for yourself?’ the Abbess asked.
Michael writhed. ‘I love her,’ he said.
She smiled, to his shock.
‘That is the best answer you could have given, under the circumstances. Will you wed her?’ she asked.
The captain made a noise.
Michael stood straight. ‘Yes.’
‘What a dashing young fool you are, to be sure,’ said the Abbess. ‘Who’s son are you?’
Michael’s lips tightened, so the Abbess beckoned to him, and he came to her side. She leaned forward, touched his forehead, and there was a magnificent burst of colour and sparkling
shards, as if a sunlit mirror had shattered.
‘Towbray’s son,’ she said, and laughed. ‘I knew your father. You have twice the looks and twice the grace he ever did. Is he still a weak man who changes sides with every
twist of the wind?’
Michael stood his ground. ‘Yes, he is,’ he said.
The Abbess nodded. ‘Captain, I will take no action until our war is resolved. But what I say now, I say as a woman who has lived at court with the great. And as an astrologer. This boy
could do much worse than Kaitlin Lanthorn.’
Michael looked at his captain, whom he feared more than ten abbesses. ‘I love her, my lord,’ he said.
The captain thought of the note in his gauntlet, and of what the Abbess had just said – he’d felt the power of her words, which had bordered on prophecy.
‘Very well,’ he said. ‘All the best romances bloom in the midst of a good siege. Michael, you are not so much forgiven as pardoned for this. Your pardon does not include
further tumblings of said girl in my solar. Understood?’
The Abbess looked long and hard at the squire. ‘Will you marry her?’ she asked.
‘Yes,’ said the squire, defiantly, bowed and left the room.
The captain looked at the Abbess and grinned. ‘And the sisters will go with her? They’ll liven up castle life, I have no doubt.’
She shrugged. ‘He should marry her. I can feel it.’
The captain sighed. And sighed again when he realised that there was no one to help him disarm.
‘Shall we go and make fog?’ he asked.
She extended her hand. ‘Nothing would please me more.’
Lissen Carak – Bad Tom
Bad Tom stared at the captain’s steel-clad back, slim as a blade, as he squired the Abbess down the corridor to the steps. Jehannes made as if to pass him, and Tom put his
arm up and blocked him.
They glared at each other, but if they had had fangs they’d have been showing.
‘Give it a rest,’ Tom said.
‘I don’t like taking orders from a boy,’ Jehannes said. ‘He’s a boy. An inexperienced boy. He’s hardly older than his squire. That
gifted young
man.
’ He spat.
‘Give it a rest, I said.’ Tom spoke with the kind of finality that starts fights, or sometimes ends them. ‘You were never going to be captain. You haven’t the brains, you
haven’t the hard currency, and most of all, you haven’t the birth for it. He has all three.’
‘I hear the boy almost lost the castle because he can’t keep his hands off some nun. He was off billing and cooing while you were out with the sortie. That’s what I
hear.’ Jehannes leaned back and crossed his arms.
‘You know what makes me piss myself laughing when I watch you?’ Tom leaned forward until his nose was almost touching the older man’s nose. ‘When he issues his orders,
you just fucking obey like the trained dog you are. And that’s why you hate him. Because he’s born to it. He’s not new at this, he’s the bastard of some great man, he grew
up in one of the big houses, with the best tutors, the best weapons masters, the best books, and five hundred servants. He gives orders better than I do, because it’s never occurred to him
that anyone would disobey. And you don’t. You just
obey
. And later, you hate him for it.’
‘He’s not one of us. When he has what he wants, he’ll go.’ Jehannes looked around.
Tom leaned back, shifted until his shoulders fitted neatly along a line of stone. ‘That’s where you are wrong, Jehan. He
is
one of us. He is a broken man, a lost soul,
whatever crap you want to call us. He has everything to prove, and he values us. He—’ Tom spat. ‘I like him,’ he said. And shrugged. ‘He’s a loon. He’ll
fight anyone, anytime.’
Jehannes rubbed his chin. ‘I hear you.’
‘All I ask,’ said Tom. He didn’t do anything obvious, but a subtle shift of his hips cleared the corridor. Jehannes stood straight, and then, quick as thought, his rondel
dagger was in his hand – poised at shoulder height.
‘Not planning to use it,’ he said. ‘But don’t threaten me, Tom Lachlan. Save it for the archers.’
The knight turned and walked away, sheathing his dagger easily.
Tom watched him go with a slight smile on his lips.
‘Catch all that, young Michael?’ he said, levering his giant form upright.
Michael blushed.
‘Not for his ears – hear me? Men talk. Sometimes with their bodies, sometimes like old fishwives. Not his business.’ He looked at Michael, who was not quite cowering in the
doorframe.
But Michael was afraid, yes, but also determined. ‘I’m his squire.’
Tom rubbed his chin. ‘So you get to decide some things. If you hear two archers talking about stealing from a third, would you peach?’
Michael managed to meet his eyes. ‘Yes.’
‘Good. And talking about raping a nun?’ he asked.
Michael held his eye. ‘Yes.’
‘Good. And talking about how much they hate him?’
Michael paused. ‘I see what you mean.’
‘He’s not their friend, he’s their captain. He’s pretty good at it, and he’s better every day. But what he don’t know won’t hurt him. Get me?’ Tom
leaned in close.
‘Yes.’ Michael didn’t back away. He tried to stand tall.
Tom nodded. ‘You’ve guts, young Michael. Try not to get dead. We might make a man-at-arms out of you yet.’ He grinned. ‘Nice, that little chit of yours. Best act quickly
if you want to keep her for yourself.’