The Red Knight

by Miles Cameron

  Amicia’s eyes were elsewhere. ‘They’re gone,’ Amicia said. ‘The enemy’s spies. Even the wyverns. I can feel it.’

  Theodora was startled that a novice would speak directly to the Abbess.

  The Abbess seemed untroubled. ‘You are very perceptive,’ the Abbess said. ‘But there’s something I don’t like about this.’ She walked to the edge of the tower and looked down. Just below her, a pack of nuns stood on the broad platform of the gatehouse and watched the end of the rout below and the disappearing column of dust that marked the captain’s sortie.

  One nun left the wall, her skirts held in her hands as she ran. The Abbess wondered idly why Sister Bryanne was in such a hurry until she saw the priest. He was on the wall, alone, and praying loudly for the destruction of the enemy.

  That was well enough, she supposed. Father Henry was a festering boil – his hatred for the captain and his attempts to discipline her nuns were heading them for a confrontation.

  But the siege was pushing the routine away, and she worried that it would never return. And what if the captain went out and died?

  ‘What do you say, my lady?’ Amicia asked, and the Abbess smiled at her.

  ‘Oh, my dear, we old people sometimes say aloud what we ought to keep inside.’

  Amicia, too, was looking out to the east where a touch of dust still hung over the road that ran south of the river. And she wondered, like every nun, every novice, every farmer and every child in the fortress, why they were riding away, and if they would return.

  North of Albinkirk – Peter

  Peter was learning to move through the woods. Home for him was grass savannah, dry brush and deep-cut rocky riverbeds, dry most of the year and impassable with fast brown water the rest. But here, with the soft ground, the sharp rock, the massive trees that stretched to the heavens, the odd marshes on hilltops and the endless streams and lakes, a different kind of stealth was required, a different speed, different muscles, different tools.

  The Sossag flowed over the ground, following trails that appeared out of nowhere and seemed to vanish again as fast.

  At mid-day, Ota Qwan stopped him and they stood, both of them breathing hard.

  ‘Do you know where we are?’ the older man asked.

  Peter looked around. And laughed. ‘Headed for Albinkirk.’

  ‘Yes and no,’ Ota Qwan said. ‘But for a sailor on the sea of trees, you are fair enough.’ He reached into a bag of bark twine made into a net that he wore at his hip all the time, and drew forth an ear of cooked corn. He took a bite and passed it to Peter. Peter took a bite and passed it to the man behind him – Pal Kut, he thought the man called himself, a cheerful fellow with a red and green face and no hair.

  Peter reached into his own bag and took out a small bark container of dried berries he’d found in Grundag’s effects.

  Ota Qwan ate a handful and grunted. ‘You give with both hands, Peter.’

  The man behind him took half a handful and held them to his forehead, a sign Peter had never seen before.

  ‘He’s telling you that he respects the labour of your work and the sacrifice you make in sharing. When we share pillaged food – well, it never really belonged to any of us to begin with, did it?’ Ota Qwan laughed, and it was a cruel sound.

  ‘What about the dinner I cooked?’ Peter asked, ready to be indignant.

  ‘You were a slave then!’ Ota Qwan thumped his chest. ‘My slave.’

  ‘Where are we going?’ Peter asked. He didn’t like the way Ota Qwan claimed him.

  Skadai appeared out of thin air to take the last handful of the dried berries, he, too, made the gesture of respect. ‘Good berries,’ he said. ‘We go to look at Albinkirk. Then we hunt on our own.’

  Peter shook his head as the war captain moved on. ‘Hunt on our own?’

  ‘Yesterday, while you rutted like a stag – wait, do you know even who Thorn is?’ Ota Qwan asked him, as if he were a child.

  Peter wanted to rub his face in it, but in truth, he’d heard the name mentioned but didn’t know who he was. And he was increasingly eager to know how his new world worked. ‘No,’ he said, pouting.

  Ota Qwan ignored his tone. ‘Thorn wishes to be the lord of these woods.’ He made a face. ‘He is reputed a great sorcerer who was once a man. Now he seeks revenge on men. But yesterday he was defeated – not beaten, but bloodied. We did not follow him to battle because Skadai didn’t like the plan he heard, so now we go east to fight our own battles.’

  ‘Defeated? By whom?’ Peter looked around. ‘Where was this battle?’

  ‘Six leagues from where you rutted with Senegral, two hundred men died and twice that number of creatures of the Wild.’ He shrugged. ‘Thorn has ten times that many creatures and men at his beck and call and he summons more. But the Sossag are not slaves, servants, bound men – only allies, and only then when it suits our need.’

  ‘Surely this Thorn is angry at us?’ Peter asked.

  ‘So angry that if he dared he would kill us all, or destroy our villages, or force Skadai to die in torment.’ Ota Qwan cackled. ‘But to do so would be to forfeit the alliance of every creature, every boglin, every man in his service. This is the Wild, my friend. If he had won we would look foolish and weak.’ Ota Qwan gave a wicked smile. ‘But he lost, so it is he who looks foolish and weak while we go to burn the lands around Albinkirk, which was built on our lands many years ago. We have long memories.’

  Peter looked at him. ‘I assume you were not born a Sossag.’

  ‘Hah!’ Ota Qwan sighed. ‘I was born south of Albinkirk.’ He shrugged. ‘It boots nothing, friend. Now I am Sossag. And we will burn the farms of the city, or what Thorn has left of it. He wants the Castle of the Women, which interests us not at all.’ Ota Qwan gave a queer smile. ‘The Sossag have never been to war with the Castle of Women. And he has failed.’ Ota Qwan looked into the distance, where the mountains rolled like waves on the sea. ‘For now. And Skadai says, let Albinkirk see the colour of our steel.’

  The words thrilled Peter, who thought he should be too mature to fall for such things. But war had a simplicity that could be a relief. Sometimes, it is good merely to hate.

  And then Peter thought that Ota Qwan was an injured soul who had fallen into the Sossag to heal himself. But the former slave shook his head and said to himself, ‘Be one of them. And you will never be another man’s slave.’

  At nightfall on the second day they were in sight of the town. Peter sat on his haunches, eating a thin rabbit that he’d cooked with herbs, sharing it with his new band. Ota Qwan had complimented his cooking, and had admitted that their new band of war-brothers – Pal Kut, Brant, Skahas Gaho, Mullet and Barbface (the best Peter could do with his name) were gathered as much for Peter’s food as for Ota Qwan’s leadership.

  Either way, it was good to belong. Good to be part of a group. Brant smiled when he took food. Skahas Gaho patted the ground on his blanket when Peter hovered by the fire, looking for a place to sit.

  Two days, and these were his comrades.

  Skadai came to their fire towards true dark, and sat on his haunches. He spoke quickly, smiled often, and then surprised Peter by patting him on the arm. He ate a bowl of rabbit soup with his fingers, grinned, and left them for the next fire.

  Ota Qwan sighed. The other men took sharpening stones from their bags, and began to touch up their arrowheads, and then their knives, and Skahas Gaho, who had a sword, a short, heavy-bladed weapon like a Morean xiphos, made the steel sing as he passed his stone over it.

  ‘Tomorrow, we fight,’ Ota Qwan said.

  Peter nodded.

  ‘Not Albinkirk,’ Ota Qwan said. ‘A richer target. Something to take home with us. Something to make our winter shorter.’ He licked his lips and Brant asked him a question and then guffawed at the answer.

  Skahas Gaho kept sharpening his short sword, and men began to laugh. He was stroking it tenderly, with long, lingering strokes of the stone. And then shorter, faster ones.

  Brant
laughed, and then spat disgustedly and unrolled his furs.

  Peter did the same. He had no trouble getting to sleep.

  South and East of Lissen Carak – Gerald Random

  Random had been ready for ambush for five days, and it didn’t matter when it happened. His men almost won through.

  Almost.

  They were now riding through deep forest, and the western road was a double cart track with the trees sometimes arched right over the road. However, the old forest was open, the great boles of the trunks sixty feet apart or more with little enough underbrush so his flankers could ride alongside, his advance guard could clear the trail a hundred horse-lengths wide, and his wagons were moving well – it was the fifth straight day without rain, and the road was dry except in the deeper ruts and puddles and some deep holes like muddy ponds.

  The woods were so deep that it was difficult to gauge the passage of time, and he had no idea how far they’d travelled on the narrow track until Old Bob rode back to say that he thought he could hear the river.

  At that news, Random’s heart rose. Even though what he was doing was suicidally foolish, to aid an old Magus, and his wife would never approve when she found out.

  He was on the lead wagon, and he stood up to look – a natural thing to do, even when listening would have been more natural. But all he could hear was the wind in the trees overhead.

  ‘Ambush!’ shouted one of the vanguard. He pointed at a dozen boglins around a young troll, a monster the size of a plough horse with the antlers like a great elk’s and a smooth stone face like the visor on a black helmet. It was covered in thick armour plates of obsidian.

  The troll charged them, racing like a mad dog straight at the wagons. The horses panicked but his men did not, and quarrels flew thick as snow, and the troll screamed and slowed, seemed for a moment to be swimming through steel, and then suddenly fell with a crash.

  The boglins vanished.

  Random, standing on the wagon seat, took an arrow in the breastplate. It didn’t bite, but it knocked him off the seat and it hurt when he got to his feet – his shoulder hurt and his neck hurt like fire.

  Just ahead, the vanguard was abruptly locked up with more boglins.

  Old Bob was racing for the melee.

  Random watched as his soldiers crushed the smaller creatures with weight of horse and better weapons, better skill, and the boglins, as was inevitable, broke and ran.

  Old Bob shouted something, but his words were lost in the triumph of the moment, and the troopers turned as one to harry the fleeing boglins . . . and suddenly the trolls were on them – a pair, smashing in from either flank. Blood came off the melee like smoke as they struck, and horses died faster than they could fall to the ground.

  Random had never seen a troll before, but the Wild name for them – dhag – stuck in his mind, as did a picture in a Book of Hours he’d purchased in Harndon for the market – taller than a peasant’s house, as black as night or expensive velvet, with plates of black stone like armour and no face, topped with antlers like clubs. A troll could crush an armoured man’s breastplate in one blow and behead him in another, could move as fast as a horse and as quiet as a bear.

  The vanguard was dead before Random could close his mouth. Six men gone in a breath.

  Old Bob had a light lance, and he lowered the point – one of the monsters turned, almost falling as it skidded to a stop, feeling the vibration of the charging horse. It braced itself, head low, horn-clad feet still churning at the earth, and Random could see the great plate of stone that protected its skull.

  And then Old Bob’s horse was by and his lance, thrown, not couched, went into the beast’s side – struck deep between two stone plates, and the meaty sound of the heavy spearhead going home in the flesh carried across the distance.

  A dozen bolts hit the creature.

  Gawin had the rearguard up, forming to the right and left, with companies of guildsmen coming up next to the wagons on either side – not the smoothest, and their faces were as white as snow, and their hands shook, but they were coming.

  ‘Halt!’ Gawin shouted, and Guilbert came from the other side of the wagons with another five of the wagon guards.

  Guilbert took command with one glance. ‘Pick a target!’ he called.

  The woods were surprisingly silent.

  Old Bob had his horse around, but he never saw the dozen boglins coming. One of them put a spear into his horse effortlessly, like a dancer, the squat thing pirouetting as its spear skewered the beast, and the horse stopped its turn and gave a shrill scream as the wounded troll attacked. Its first blow ripped Old Bob’s lower jaw off his face under the brim of his open-faced helmet – then it crushed his breastplate so that a fountain of blood blew out of his open throat.

  The wounded troll slumped. The second one stopped and bent down to feed off both of them, its visor opening and a set of fangs showing sharp against the black of its mouth.

  The wave of boglins charged the line of bowmen and soldiers, and this time his men broke and ran.

  Random watched them with complete understanding, terrified and virtually unable to move his limbs too, and the sight of the old knight being ripped asunder by the troll seemed to have numbed his mind. He tried to speak. He watched as the guildsmen shuffled, cursed, and turned too. The guards had horses, and they put their spurs to their mounts.

  ‘Stand!’ Guilbert shouted. ‘Stand or you are all dead men!’

  They ignored him.

  And then Ser Gawin laughed.

  The sound of his laughter didn’t stop the horrified men from running. It didn’t stop the mounted men from raking their spurs into their panicked mounts . . . but it did make many men turn their heads.

  His visor fell over his face with a click.

  His destrier took its first steps, already moving quickly, as any horse trained to the joust knows to do.

  His lance, erect in his hand, dipped, the pennon fluttering, and then he was moving like a streak of steel lightning across the ground between the wagons and the boglins. They, in turn, froze like animals hearing a hunter’s call.

  The feeding troll raised its head.

  The chief of the boglins raised a horn and it blew a long, sweet note. Other horns echoed, and Random was suddenly freed from the vice of fear that ground against his heart. He got his sword clear of its scabbard.

  ‘Hear me, Saint Christopher,’ he vowed,’ if I live through this, I will build a church to you.’

  Gawin Murien settled the lance in its rest. The boglin chief was standing on the dead troll’s chest, the one the crossbowmen had killed, and the knight’s heavy lance passed through him so quickly that for a heartbeat Random thought the knight had missed, until the small monster was lifted from its feet, all limbs writhing in a horrible parody of an impaled insect, and a thin scream lifting from its throat, and then it was crushed against the stone wall of the remaining troll’s head with a wet sound like a melon breaking, and the stone troll staggered under the imapact.

  It roared – a long belling sound that made the woods ring.

  Gawin thundered away to the right. He kept his lance, passed through a thicket and emerged to the far right of the wagons. His horse was moving at a slow canter.

  Guildsmen and soldiers began to gather again, their rout forgotten, and the boglins began to reach them in ones and twos, their desultory chase become a desperate melee in the turn of a card. A dozen guildsmen were cut down, but instead of spurring the others to run, the deaths of their comrades pulled more and more of the townsmen back to their duty.

  Or perhaps it was Gawin’s repeated war cry that did it, ringing as loud as the monsters roar. ‘God and Saint George!’ he shouted, and even the wagons trembled.

  The troll dipped its antlers, and spat something. Great clods of moss flew up, and a smell filled the air – a bitter reek of musk. Then it lifted its armoured head and charged, shoulders bunched from its first massive leap forward.

  Random swung his sword, his ri
ght arm seeming to function independently of his mind, and smashed a boglin with the blow. He backed a step, suddenly aware of a dozen of the things around him, and he got his sword up, point in line, left hand gripping it halfway down the blade.

  He charged them. He had the example of the knight before his eyes, and he only had faint a notion that there was more to a charge than bluster. He felt the pain of the first wound and the pressure of the blows on his shoulders and backplate, he also had the time to kill one boglin with the point, break a second with his pommel so that it seemed to burst, and then sweep the legs from a third in as many heartbeats. They had armour – whether it was their own chitinous skin or something made of leather and bone, he had no time to tell – but his heavy sword penetrated it with every thrust, and when it did, they died.

  Light flashed, as if lightning had pulsed from the sky.

  In a single heartbeat all of his opponents fell, and as they fell they turned to sand. His sword actually passed through one, and beyond his suddenly evaporated opponents, Ser Gawin rode directly at the troll. A horse length from collision his destrier danced to the right – and Ser Gawin’s lance passed under its stone visor to strike it hard in the fanged mouth, plunging his lance the length of a man’s arm into the thing’s throat and crossing the massive monster’s centre-line so that it snapped the lance and tripped the beast, which fell, unbalanced, its armoured head digging a massive furrow in the earth as Ser Gawin and his destrier danced clear.

  Lightning pulsed again, and two dozen more boglins spattered to the ground.

  ‘Rally!’ Guilbert demanded.

  The guildsmen were winning.

  And every boglin they broke, skewered, or sliced reinforced their growing belief that they might win this battle.

  Men were still falling.

  But they were going to hold.

  . . . until the horses and the oxen panicked, and shredded their column in ten breaths of a terrified man. A wagon plunged through the largest block of guildsmen, scattering them, and the boglins who had stopped, or slowed their charge, or simply balked at entering weapons range, suddenly surged forward. A dozen more guildsmen died at their hands, and the wall of wagons protecting the right of the column was gone.