Harmodius laughed. It was a dreadful, terrifying laugh.
Oh, no, my boy. I am not that much of an ingrate. He picked it up and flourished it, like a boy with a new sword. It’s for me.
Mag missed her wagons. She missed the comfort and solidity of the brutes, but most of all, she missed having dry, warm feet. Sitting on a wagon – even in driving snow or freezing rain – kept your feet out of the wet.
Climbing a mountain pass leading a recalcitrant donkey had a different feel entirely.
John le Bailli was somewhere well ahead of her. The whole army was now a single animal wide, strung out over six miles of high ridges and steep-shouldered mountains. They were above the current snow line, which, in a way, made her life easier, as the ground was frozen. But her toes lost feeling every time she stopped, and she was fifty-one years old, and the great adventure now seemed like a horrible exercise in endurance.
At noon, they came to a stream – or what might, at other times of year, be a dry watercourse or a small trickle of water.
On the first of March, it was a stream twenty feet wide that flowed so fast that small rocks were constantly being rolled along the bottom. While Mag watched, a whole tree from somewhere upstream came by, bobbed, struck a boulder with a resounding crash and continued on its way.
The column was bunching up on the flat by the stream, and increasingly desperate men and women were trying to warm their feet by any expedient they could. It wasn’t even a cold day.
The Red Knight had taken most of the mounted across the traditional way – with ropes and horses. Two men had fallen in, and on the other side there were two great fires burning and parties of men trying to save the wet, cold victims.
Mag didn’t even pause to argue. She flung three bridges of ice across – one mostly acting as a dam, and the other two with high arches and redundant supports.
Corporals and veterans began to bellow orders. They’d all seen the tree in the current.
‘I can get you a horse,’ the Red Knight said. He’d ridden up to her where she watched the women crossing.
‘Can you get a horse for every woman?’ she asked.
He pursed his lips. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘The ice bridge is a nice trick. I need to learn that better. Mine wastes too much ops.’
She met his eye. ‘Is this really your plan?’
He shrugged. In full plate, with two great circle cloaks as a sheath of wool, he looked like a giant. The shrug barely raised the magnificent gold brooch on his right shoulder an inch. ‘My plan perished when Andronicus fielded five thousand men in the dead of winter. I didn’t expect that. This is my – hmmm – my third alternate plan.’ Just for a moment, the look of bland indifference he wore all the time cracked. ‘I was probably a fool to try this in winter. But – Master Smythe said we had to hurry. And Kronmir said they would kill the Emperor.’
Mag shook her head. People were watching them. ‘Another day and we might start losing people. Some of the Scholae aren’t used to this kind of life and there’s no forage for the horses. We have another day of food and fodder on the mules—’
‘—and then we eat the mules,’ he said. ‘I know.’
But he was as good as his word, and by the next halt, every woman was mounted on a spare horse. Including Kaitlin de Towbray, who had womanfully walked with her pregnant belly all the way up the east side of the mountains.
They didn’t stop at dark.
The Red Knight was seen to have a hurried conference with Ser Gelfred; fires were lit, and food cooked – or rather, cold food was eaten and hot tea, or just hot water, drunk in enormous quantities. And then they marched again.
Immediately after leaving their fires, the army started going down. They had been up and down the ridges for three days, but now they descended steadily, and the icy track, cleared by the exhausted Nordikans, became a two-rut track with less snow, and then a snow-covered stone roadbed.
An hour before dawn, when Mag was a jumble of old joints, nerves, lack of food and lack of sleep, they turned a long curve on a spur that stuck out from a mountainside – and every man and woman who came to the edge gave a gasp.
On their right side, a cliff fell away. The road continued, with enormous stone arches, buttresses in still more stone, cascading down the hillside like a waterfall frozen in rock, but the cliff was half a thousand feet high and the stream at the bottom was so far down in the darkness as to be lost except for the echoing thunder of its icy passage.
The cliff was imposing, but it was the sight of twinkling lights like distant faery folk that raised the shouts. Somewhere – somewhere within reach, at last – there was light, and warmth.
Aeskepiles looked at the stumps of the ice bridge abutments and cursed.
‘How strong is he?’ he asked aloud. And after a small ritual of gathering, he built a single bridge.
Demetrius pointed his sword. ‘He made three,’ he said.
‘I must conserve my power,’ Aeskepiles said. ‘If he squanders his, all the better.’
Amphipolis was the name of the town, and her gates were stormed. The veterans of the company offered no warning and no formal summons to surrender – and the town had no idea that an enemy army was above them in the mountains. The veterans put ladders against the low curtain walls before sunrise, just as if they’d been in Arles. Fifty Thrakian soldiers died very quickly on the wrong side of the main gate, tricked, trapped, and annihilated. Ser Jehan didn’t bother taking prisoners.
Father Arnaud and Gelfred sat on their horses in the central square and shouted at the Red Knight until they were joined by the Emperor, and together with a hundred men-at-arms he led them to clear the archers – the victorious archers – out of the streets.
‘If you let this town be destroyed, you are no knight,’ Father Arnaud said.
The Red Knight leaned over and vomited in the snow.
‘Is he drunk?’ Arnaud cried.
Toby shook his head.
Ser Michael grabbed the priest’s bridle. ‘He’s tired. And this, pardon me, padre, is war.’
‘We don’t make war like this on the Wild!’ Father Arnaud said.
‘The Wild doesn’t have silver candelabra or handsome girls,’ the Red Knight muttered. ‘Damn you and your moral certainty. We are not fucking paladins. We are soldiers, and this town is an enemy town taken by storm. These men are cold, and exhausted, and an hour ago they had almost no hope of warmth.’ He pointed as John le Bailli kicked in a door and led three armoured men in emptying the cowering family and their servants out into the snow. Then a dozen of the company’s women took the house.
While they watched that drama, Ser Bescanon dragged Wilful Murder out of a building while a dozen other men with leather buckets tried to put out the fire he’d started.
‘This is senseless. If I cannot appeal to God, I’ll appeal to your basic humanity,’ Father Arnaud said.
‘Who says I have any humanity at all?’ the Red Knight shouted in the priest’s face. ‘You want me to save the world, and you don’t want any innocents killed? It doesn’t work like that. War kills. Now get out of my way, because I have tomorrow’s atrocities to plan!’
Toby waited until his lord was gone into what had been the mayor’s house.
‘He’s not doing all that well,’ he said. ‘He’s sick, and he’s worried. In case you gentleman can’t tell. You’re all very helpful, I’m sure.’ He shrugged, seized an apple from a basket that a looter ran past carrying, and took a bite. Then he followed his lord inside.
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 my
self 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
Four 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.