by Dave Duncan
Madlenka herself took charge of the stretcher-bearing teams, partly because she thought her authority would get help to the wounded faster, partly because she dreaded the horrors of blood and pain that would unfold in the hall. In a way, she was being cowardly in choosing the danger of the battlements, and she remembered Father telling Petr that courage usually sprang from fear of being thought a coward.
Halfway to the barbican she realized that her mother had blundered when she set up the infirmary in the keep, for it was too far from the north gate. She should have consulted one of the Magnus brothers, any of whom would probably have advised her to requisition St. Sebastijan’s church, which was much closer. And as soon as this skirmish was over, they must organize another hospital near the south gate, probably in St. Petr’s. People forget how to fight wars after too many years of peace.
When she arrived at the fighting, Madlenka had no trouble sweeping up the casualties on the curtain wall, but collecting them from the roof of the barbican was a challenge that required every glint of aristocratic arrogance she could summon. Carrying loaded stretchers down a spiral staircase would be both slow and dangerous, so she moved her first-aid station into the machine room and issued orders that the porters taking materials up must not come down empty-handed. Soon screaming wounded were arriving piggyback, or over shoulders. The bolts had been falling at very steep angles, so the wounds were mostly in shoulders and feet. More than one man had been temporarily nailed to the floor, though, and one even had his helmet spiked to his skull; he died on the stretcher.
If anyone had asked her yesterday, she would have said that such gruesome sights would throw her straight into hysteria, yet in the heat of battle she found herself so caught up by the urgency of moving these suffering men to relief as fast as possible that she never lost her nerve for a moment. Neither the blood on her hands and clothes nor the crossbow bolts going zang! off the stonework distracted her.
She was only dimly aware of what was going on outside, but she knew that the Wends must either climb over the battlements above or force the main gate below, and in either case the fighting would head for the machine room. The thick stone walls muffled the noise, the shouted orders, the cheers and groans, the clamor of firearms and crossbows. But she registered the roar when the ladders fell.
Jubilation reigned. The defenders screamed their lungs out in triumph. The emergency was over for the day, and soon the Wends withdrew, leaving hundreds of dead behind them. Most of the defenders were allowed to stand down, and promptly rushed away in search of beer, song, and other means of celebration. The last of the wounded in the machine room were carried off to the infirmary, and Madlenka breathed for the first time in too long.
She wiped her forehead with the back of her wrist and smiled at Giedre, who looked a freak. Her hair hung in a tangle, as if her head covering had gone for bandages. Her clothes and hands were filthy and bloodstained. Madlenka could be in no better shape, although at least she had retained her tur [ain a tanglban. They had survived their first battle. Please God that it be their last!
“That seems to be all, my lady,” Giedre said, probably the first time anyone had used Madlenka’s title in … how long? An hour? Two?
“We’d better check.” She headed for the spiral staircase, just as Dali emerged from it. He carried his sallet under his arm, but he seemed to be unwounded, and was grinning as widely as any human being ever could, rattail hair plastered over sweat-streaked face. Forget transient visitors like Sir Vladislav Magnus. Officially Dalibor Notivova was in charge of the defenses of Castle Gallant and had just repulsed a major assault. One more for the history books, and perhaps the greatest moment in his entire life.
“Well done, constable!” she said. “Or are you Sir Dalibor now?”
“Not yet, my lady.” Incredibly his grin grew even wider. “But Sir Vlad has promised to dub me—tonight in the hall!”
Not too many years ago, when she was a child and he was a married man, she would have given him a hug over news much less grand than knighthood, but now it could not be. She congratulated him. So did Giedre. Was that a slight blush under her grime and bloodstains? Why did Dali abruptly put his sallet on, hiding his face? Madlenka had not suspected … but she had been too drowned in her own troubles. And why shouldn’t they? Dali needed a stepmother for his children, and Giedre could no longer count on accompanying Madlenka to some far-off land when she married some distant noble. Madlenka was going to be staying right here till the day she died.
Dali thanked them both for caring for the wounded.
“Any left up there?” Madlenka asked.
“Two or three still linger, but can’t be moved. The rest are beyond your help, ma’am.”
Corpses were men’s business.
Madlenka sent Giedre off to the keep, with orders to turn back any stretcher parties she met coming this way. She ran up to the roof to check on those wounded who were not to be moved, and see if Wulf was there. He wasn’t, and had certainly not been among the wounded carried off to the infirmary, so he was probably with Anton, wherever that was.
At least a score of bodies lay around the roof with their faces covered, to show that they were indeed dead and had received the proper rites. Surely Dali or Vlad would arrange to have the corpses removed as soon as possible? There was no sign of the biggest Magnus. Beside the unfinished trebuchet, though, a priest was administering extreme unction to a casualty, and Baron Ottokar was kneeling beside him, bareheaded. As she drew nearer, she saw that he was holding the dying man’s hand, which seemed an oddly touching gesture from so hard a man.
The victim was little older than she; she knew him by sight but not by name. He must have tripped o [ave">
“I believe that’s all, Father,” Ottokar said, glancing around. “No, there’s one more over there, see?” He pointed to where someone was urgently beckoning, and the priest, having frowned disapprovingly at Madlenka, swished off to attend to another casualty.
Madlenka looked suspiciously at the unconscious man before her. She took his other hand and felt for a pulse. “I think he’s dead,” she said.
Ottokar nodded and laid the man’s arms gently on his chest. “You don’t happen to have a cloth on you, do you?”
She did, a spare bandage already badly bloodstained. She gave it to him and he covered the corpse’s face. Then he rose, and she did too. “How long has he been dead?” she asked.
The baron was very big, although not as huge as Vladislav. He was almost as tall as Anton, but much wider, and he had a broad, stony face, with very cold, dark eyes. On her first sight of him yesterday she had decided that he was both clever and potentially dangerous, and she saw no reason to change her mind now. But his eyes were red-rimmed and his face stubbled, reminding her of Father, the time he had been up all night directing a fire-fighting operation in the town.
“I have no idea,” he said softly. “He might have been dead when I got here.”
“You lied to the priest?”
He shrugged. “But now the holy man can in good faith tell the boy’s family that he died in a state of grace.”
She realized that a small smile was twisting the edges of His Lordship’s mouth. If it was mockery, it seemed to be directed less at her than at his own sentimentality. So there was a gentle side to this man after all? She had failed to find it at the banquet last night, when they had been seated next to each other.
“This is the worst part of battle,” he said, starting to stroll across the deck toward the northern battlements. “Counting the bodies, I mean. But thanks to you and your team, there may not be as many bodies as there might have been. I was watching. I congratulate you on a fine job.”
“Thank you.” She had only done what was needed.
“First aid is the best part of a siege. Sieges are the nastiest sort of war, you know, but at least the defenders receive decent medical care and aren’t left lying all night in the mud, waiting to have their throats slit in the morning.”
That did not sound like a hard man ta [a halign="lking, nor even like a warrior.
“And I congratulate you on a successful defense.”
He glanced down at her, sideways, and this time there was no doubt about the smile. “I don’t deserve any credit. That was a very dramatic end to the assault, wasn’t it?” He leaned into a merlon to peer down at the shambles in front of the gate. “No, don’t look,” he said, straightening up. “The plunderers are at work already.”
“The Wends took a bad beating!”
He leaned back against a crenel and folded his arms, regarding her quizzically. “Yes and no. They lost at least ten times as many men as we did.”
“That’s good, isn’t it?”
“Ye-e-e-s.” He dragged the word out. He might have been mocking her, but his smile seemed genuine enough. “But if they had more than ten times as many men to start with—twenty times, forty times as many? Most people would say that Wartislaw can afford to lose ten times as many men as Anton can.”
“But you don’t?”
“Not necessarily. Armies are funny things.… The Cardician men are fighting for their families, their homes. They’ll go on to the last drop of blood, and their sons and wives and daughters beside them. The Wends are fighting for money, mostly. A couple of bad maulings like this one and they’re apt to start recalling things they forgot to do before they left home. Their best leaders will have died or been wounded. I’ve seen armies lose faith and just melt away, even mercenary armies.”
“But they won’t make the same mistake again, will they?”
He shrugged. “If they knew how little ammunition we have left … You’re not planning to go out there and minister to injured Wends, are you?”
The thought had not even occurred to her. “Is that normal?”
“I’ve never heard of it. If their flag of truce gets here before the scavengers deal with them, they can rescue their own. They’d better hurry, though.”
His manner to her was somehow fatherly but not patronizing, confiding but not gossipy. He was certainly not talking down to her; in fact he was almost speaking in riddles, encouraging her to question more deeply. “Have you ever seen ladders fail like that?”
His eyes twinkled. “No. Oh, I’ve seen ladders break, but never with such dramatic results. But then, I’ve never seen an assault attempted against a wall so high in such a narrow space. Rash, it was; asking for trouble. They knew that road was a killing ground; they knew the castle’s history.”
“The ladders’ collapse was unusual, though?”
He shrugged. “I think so, but I won’t go around talking about it.”
He was talking with her about it. Why? If it had been Wulf’s magic that broke the first ladder, how many men’s deaths must he now have on his conscience? But how many defenders’ lives had he saved by preventing a sack?
If it had been Wulf’s doing.
“We’re all very stubborn, us Magnuses,” Baron Magnus remarked, turning his head to stare across the valley at the snowy mass of Mount Naproti. “Notoriously so. I expect Vlad and I were holy terrors when we were children. Don’t remember. Marek never was. Marek was always owlish, bookish; didn’t give a spit about weapons or training or even horses, much.”
Madlenka hadn’t seen Marek around all morning. She wondered where he was. A man in holy orders couldn’t fight, but he should have been helping in the infirmary.
“Anton was,” his brother said thoughtfully. “A holy terror, I mean. Drove the castle staff crazy. And Father. Even Vlad and me.”
So the abrupt change of subject was a lead-in to a litany of Anton’s virtues and pending sainthood, was it? She thought she already knew quite as much about her husband as she ever needed to.
“We were all,” the baron said. “Or almost all, glad when he discovered puberty. At least that channeled his villainy along predictable lines. But Wulf…” Ottokar sighed.
It was not to be a lecture about Anton. She waited.
“Until he was about seven, Wulf was a bull; a small bull, but deadly. When he charged, you couldn’t stop him. You just had to get out of his way, although sometimes you could distract him by waving a red flag, or a honey cake, in his case.” Otto turned to peer up innocently at the bulk of the Hogback, rising almost vertically to the clouds above them.
“And after he reached seven? A little young for puberty, surely?”
“I’m not at all sure he’s reached puberty even yet.”
“I am.”
“Well, he’s growing up fast,” the baron told the sky. “After he reached seven, he was more like a bulldog than a bull. Once he got his teeth into something, there was never any way to get them out again.” Otto sighed and then smiled at her. “No way at all.”
So what was he hinting? Was this a warning or encouragement?
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“We must all be very grateful to him for what he did today,” she said. “If he did it, I mean.”
“If he did it,” the baron agreed.
“And he cured Anton’s injuries on Tuesday.”
This time it was the baron who remained silent.
Was he hinting that Anton ought to step aside and let Wulf marry Madlenka, or was she just reading too much into an offer of friendship and perhaps support? Something, almost certainly this morning’s victory, had changed Otto’s attitude since last night, when he had plainly disapproved of Wulf’s intrusion into the Anton-Madlenka match.
“Gratitude becomes a man,” Madlenka said. “But it’s too late, isn’t it?” A handfasting was as binding as a marriage. “Would even gratitude help now?”
“I don’t know,” Otto said sadly. “I just don’t know.”
CHAPTER 8
Satisfied that there were no more casualties in need of transportation, Madlenka headed home along the wall walk, smiling to all the happy people she passed, listening to the laughter echoing up from the streets.
She was effectively alone! Since her handfasting three days ago, Anton had made sure that never happened—except for one precious moment last night, when she had exchanged a few words with Wulf. But otherwise she had always been escorted by her maids or Giedre or Noemi or Ivana or Mother or some combination. And now, just by chance, there was nobody watching over her. Except possibly Wulf? When she came to Fishermen’s Bartizan, the temptation was much too strong to resist. She turned aside and ran up the steps.
Because the curtain wall that enclosed both town and castle stood atop high cliffs, it could not be assaulted, and so had few watchtowers. Fishermen’s was about midway between the north gate and the keep, roughly at the northeast corner, and was so named because the drop below it was very nearly sheer. In theory you could lower a fishing line to the Ruzena River, although in practice the resident wind would never let it reach the water. When Petr and she had been young, they had tried dangling bait, in the hope of catching eagles. All they had accomplished was to get themselves thoroughly soiled with bird droppings and forbidden to go in there again—an edict they would conveniently forget in a month or so.
As always, the bartizan was deserted, just a small stone cage suspended from the lip of the wall. A drifting of snow hid the filth on the floor and the swallows had fled their nests in search of winter quarters. There was nowhere to sit, but she stood for a few minutes relishing her solitude. To the north she could see the mouth of the gorge. The Wends were building their gun emplacement there. The last ragtag survivors of the assault force were still slinking homeward, tails between legs.
If they did not quickly return under a flag of truce to collect their dead and wounded, there would not be any wounded. Already the Gallant scavengers were out on the road, stripping armor and weapons, slitting throats and purses. Undoubtedly some Wends must have ridden the ladders over the cliff, down to the riverbank. There was a small patch of forest there, an inaccessible corner between the base of the cliffs and the river. Ancient stories told of other assailants ending down there and long-ago bishops consecrating it as a
Christian graveyard.
The wind was making her shiver. Mother would notice her absence and raise a hue and cry. Still she lingered, wondering, hoping.… If she knew the names of Wulf’s Voices, she would pray to them to tell him that she was alone, so if he could spare a minute from important men’s work in this hazardous time.… But she didn’t know the names. Dreams, only dreams.
She turned to go and he was standing in the doorway, gazing at her.
They collided into each other’s arms in a rib-cracking embrace. Anton had taught her what a man expected from a kiss. Wulf did not know the details, but he proved to be a very fast learner. It was a wonderful, passionate, soul-consuming, never-ending kiss.
Yet nothing in the world lasts forever. They broke it off eventually and just hugged, chins on shoulders, cheek against stubbled cheek. She was as tall as Wulf was—too tall, really, but the right height for Anton. Nothing else was right about Anton.
“Oh, God!” he whispered. “I love you! I have never wanted anyone or anything as much as I want you.”
“Me the same.” If he asked her to go away with him, she would, and damn the consequences, terrible though those must be. But he knew that already, and for either of them to say so now would trigger disaster for both.
“Now I know why lust is such a popular sin.”
“Love, not lust! You think I kiss every man like that?”
Grunt.
“If your brother gave kisses like that, you think I’d be here with you?”
Wulf pulled back just enough to put them eye-to-eye, much too close to focus. “You mean you like my kissing better than Anton’s?”
“His are just slobber. Yours are heaven.”
“Lady, my experience of kisses can be counted on the thumbs of one hand.”
She gave him another one for practice. Not quite so intense, perhaps, but even better, more deliberate, even longer. When it was over—
“Don’t let go,” sh co,&er„ murmured. “I’ll fall down.”
