They brought rumors. There were companies beyond the Alps, mercenary companies whose names she’d never heard, who’d begun to speak of Saint Renatus. Soldiers all over Italy knew her name.
The Company of the Hook and Emerik’s Company stayed broadly to themselves. They grew onto the camp rather than into it. The ditch and barricades stretched farther than she could see. Emerik’s men watched her, wide-eyed. Outside of her control, the proportions of Saint Renatus stretched into legend. His story was alive of its own right, spreading from war camp to war camp like pestilence. These men were no more accustomed to seeing women in armor than to seeing Saint Renatus’s prophetess walking amongst them.
They didn’t know to treat her as a soldier. They would learn.
Another group of travelers tracked the company by the burning fields in its wake. Grecians, Croats, Arabs, Romans from crumbling Constantinople. There were fallen crusaders and exiles. They brought news, tribute, small treasures. All of them were fervent believers in Saint Renatus. These men had been waiting throughout the winter to travel.
They were as much pilgrims as messengers. Fia thought of herself as a single company commander. Easy to forget, during their long and isolated winters, how far her story had spread. She was not in control of it. But she was at its center. None of these men had seen her before. The way they looked at her made her fidget. They would not be around long enough to learn better.
All told, she did not have many believers throughout the world, but the believers were all soldiers. They had power. More power than they had recognized before she’d shown them.
Her soldiers had no spiritual home. Going on crusade had once been supposed to grant a man a stay in paradise. The Crusades had crumbled and the papacy had been revealed as a sham. The only crusade the papacy had declared recently was against the condottieri of Italy.
The sermon Fia gave them was one had delivered a hundred times before, about all of the armies Saint Renatus had served in. The details meant nothing. She could recite them without thinking. She paid attention to the ways they looked at her instead.
She did not have the time for anything more. The company drew closer to Siena by the hour.
The Via Francigena lanced the cultivated hills and valleys surrounding Siena. Every few miles, the road grew wider. Travelers’ hospices lined the path. A town with an expansive market ran parallel to the road. All abandoned. For once, the Company of the Star had not outpaced word of its arrival. And for once they had not tried. They needed to maintain battle order, and that meant a measured march.
The refugees could not take anything. The company’s vultures took furniture, iron tools, cauldrons and plows, anything that might be sold to the buzzing clouds of merchants that swirled around the treasure train. The company’s pioneers ran loose in the fields, burning. Anything that could not be taken had to be destroyed, all in the interest of strategic suffering.
They did not meet any opposition until they reached the walls of Siena.
Those walls had been heightened since the last time Fia had visited. She could no longer see the buildings of the city, only a few steeples and the broad white facade of Siena’s cathedral. A row of men in beaked helmets stood among the wall’s crenelations – raised quills along the city’s spine.
For the first time in weeks, Fia donned her armor.
Her back pain had diminished, but had not gone away. She gasped as Caterina fitted the padding over her shoulders and let the weight rest. The metal turned to oven plates under the sun. It was not long before her armor’s inside padding was damp with sweat.
Nothing was as comfortable as it used to be. Fia’s armor had been a gift from her patron. It had been fitted and refitted, but the pain in her back had changed her bearing. Caterina pretended not to notice Fia groan. She was good at not noticing those things.
Most of her corporals were convinced that Caterina could not talk. Fia knew better. She heard Caterina muttering to the horses. She whispered under her breath while she fit Fia’s gauntlets to her forearm plate. Her voice was weak, unpracticed, a flutter, but it was there.
Caterina gripped Fia’s wrist and squeezed before fitting her second gauntlet. Fia set that hand on Caterina’s shoulder.
It took another soldier to help Caterina hoist Fia onto her courser’s saddle. Caterina gave Fia her commander’s baton. On Fia’s way to the vanguard, she passed Antonov.
Antonov was unmounted. He wore his breastplate, but not his shield or any weapon other than his riding dagger. He held his own baton limp under the crook of his arm.
Fia’s stomach lurched. Antonov shook his head. He had waited for her, wanted her to see that he was not coming along.
His absence would be noted. But not for long. For years, more of the company’s eyes had been on her than on him. They both knew it. He was too old to be a proper fighter any more.
Fia was not so ostentatious that she enjoyed drawing the enemy’s attention to herself. Even with her basinet visor open, it was not obvious, at a distance, who she was. She had to hold her commander’s baton high. Men shifted their horses to make room for her. Zvonimirov Kristo found her, fell into his usual place beside her. He would be her personal guard.
The company’s armored cavalry held their lances ready, a wall of spines. It was a vivid, if faintly ridiculous, show of force. Lances would be of little help against earthwork and stone. From the stilling of activity along Siena’s walls, though, she knew the display was having an effect.
The Company of the Star was not fit for sieges. Fia had been in very few. Sieges required artillery trains and other tools her army of raiders was not equipped to haul around. Easier to raid the countryside on which a city depended.
She’d been in enough sieges, though, to know that confident defenders did not stand quiet. They waved. They mocked. Perhaps these city-dwellers were so accustomed to losing to condottieri that they could not imagine another way of being. That, too, was an advantage.
Her other commanders could read their silence, too. That had been the only reason some of them had agreed to this attack. Like her, they had little experience attacking cities. For all their bravado, they were conservative fighters, and hated doing things they didn’t understand.
The rest came along because she told them to. She had them under her power. For now.
She had not stayed around those other cities long enough to break them. The company had extorted their bribes and gone away. Siena was different. She had public and private reasons for wanting to break it.
The public reason was that Siena had to be made to pay.
The company had come at the request of Orvieto, but that was by far the least important reason. Orvieto had offered them their contract to damage a rival, but mostly to keep the company away. The company already had its debts to collect from Siena. The last time it had raided the countryside around Siena, the city’s priors had promised a payment of fifteen thousand florins. Nine thousand had been paid in advance, with the rest due in rigid installments. Those payments had stopped long ago. The few Sienese notables the company had got hold of claimed that the city was bankrupt.
The first lesson Fia had learned about condottieri politics was that no city was ever truly bankrupt. It could always be made smaller, more humble. Rich men complained about bankruptcy from their manses, but none had seen the inside of an orphanage or almshouse.
They did not understand the way that she and other faithful of Saint Renatus were remaking their world. In the best days of the Roman Empire, emperors had quaked in fear of soldiers.
They could not sit and wait for the city to starve. Hawkwood was too close. They had to smash Siena now or not at all.
Her men understood all that. Their greed had been charged and primed by the thought of Siena’s wealth.
She would have to explain her other reasons to seize Siena later.
Her inner voice had not spoken to her in weeks. Now it said, without prompting, Your service has been incomparable.
It
had chosen to speak when she had the least amount of time to answer. She held her baton forward. The trumpeters hardly had time to signal the advance before a terrible noise went up along the front ranks. The war cry, all around her, was as close and hot as a bear’s jaws on her neck.
In the back of her mind, there were so many clocks that their ticking blended together, lost their rhythm. It was just a cacophony.
The pounding hooves were a thunderstorm. A vicious wind whipped through her visor. A spatter of her horse’s saliva picked up in the wind, struck her helm.
More theater. Horses were no more useful against a wall than lances. But, for the men on the wall, the clouds of dust must have looked as though the earth had folded up and was unraveling upon them.
A bolt’s flight from the wall, the men reined in, dismounted. Fia joined them. The drop jarred her ankles. Someone took her reins. Through the slit in her visor, she could not tell if Caterina had kept up, or if another page had seen an opportunity to serve her and taken it. The pages kept their mounts near, ready to match a sally from Siena.
The charge resumed, this time more deliberate, a hammer strike. Pain bit her back. But the pain did not matter for long.
The charge was a collection of individual moments. Somehow she kept her head, enough to keep track of the various wings of her front line and gesture orders. But it all slipped away from her afterward, wiped clear.
Her soldiers again roared as they charged, though the distance between them and the wall was yet so long that they would run out of breath before they reached it. Fia yelled, too. She lost her words to the wind.
A slender wooden shaft snapped and skittered across the dirt ten feet ahead of her. Crossbow bolt. She almost held her hand out, as if to feel the first drop of rain before the storm. That was the kind of boorish joke that only chroniclers would appreciate, though. And the chroniclers could always be lied to afterward.
She was not the fastest among the company. Other men raced ahead. The moment she cast her gaze to the foremost, he bent backward and crumpled, as if his animating force had been plucked out in an instant. He was overtaken so swiftly that she did not even see if he was trampled.
Her men held their return fire. The crossbowmen carried their weapons wound, but they could not have reliably hit the defenders behind their cover. The defenders suffered no such disadvantage.
Fia called to close formation to fill the gaps and present a united front. And again. A third time.
Motion blurred the fringes of her vision. Bolts and arrows, too fast to track. More men fell. Some staggered and kept going, although Fia never saw for how long.
“Close formation!” she shouted for the fourth time. Men filled in to cover the gaps the bolts had opened.
A bright light detonated behind her eyes. Her basinet slammed against her temple.
For a moment that was both brief and eternal, she was lost.
She did not remember falling, but she was on the ground, crumpled. The blackout could not have lasted long. It seemed a slice of forever. She’d fallen as if a doll, legs folded painfully underneath her. Her armor’s joints knifed into her thighs and knees.
Men dashed past her. Kristo was at her side, saying something she could not hear. Her hearing rang as if she’d held it inside a cathedral bell.
She felt about the side of her helmet. She found no hole, no shaft sticking out of her skull. But there was a dent in the basinet’s side, by her temple. The bolt had not penetrated her basinet, just glanced off.
She heard voices, saw and tasted things that couldn’t have been there. They were single words, visions, flashes of emotion. Hatred for the men on the walls. Petty irritation that she had been struck so soon. Terror, concern about how this all looked. The visions didn’t all make sense. There was an impaled arm. A knife’s edge. A dog’s teeth, barred. Blood dripping into a pail of butter. A smell of vinegar. Part of her was dreaming.
It did not hurt much. Yet. She was sure that would be coming. Oddly, the worst pain seemed to be in her tongue. The oily blood in her mouth was real enough. It took her seconds to realize she’d bitten through it. She focused on the real. She made it lead her back.
Kristo held her by the shoulder, about to lead her away. She planted her gauntlet on his neck, stopping him.
Had the bolt struck her visor an inch to its left, Kristo would be trying to preserve her corpse. Chance had slammed the bolt into her, but chance had also saved her. A hundred times already today, she could have died. No – she had died. She knew, going out, that she would come back changed. Reborn.
She still remembered the phantom pain where, fifteen years ago, the soldier who had captured her had nearly sliced her open.
She could not hear the clocks any more.
She could not speak with words yet, so she pointed to where she wanted to go: a long, fat section of Siena’s wall.
It had been rebuilt recently, shored up. Its earthwork rampart was steeper. An amateur had probably thought that would make it harder to climb. But it was just steep enough that the defenders would have trouble shooting downward without leaning out, exposing themselves to counterfire.
Much of the front line raced toward it. Some of her officers had seen the same flaw she had. They pointed to the crenelations, shouting incoherencies that men nonetheless understood to be orders.
The company could not match the Sienese bolt for bolt. They didn’t need to. For the first time, the company returned fire. A flurry of bolts flew toward the wall Fia and her officers had indicated – targeted suppressing fire. The defenders ducked behind the crenelations or fell where they stood.
More of Fia’s soldiers reached the earthwork ramparts. The lead men carried weighted rope ladders. Armored men climbed as far as they could on the unsteady earthworks. In the section just ahead, four ladders leapt to the top. Two found purchase.
She was nearest the leftmost. She focused on it. In the din, her inner voice stood out clearly: that one.
She had listened to her inner voice since it had saved her in her first battle, and it had never disappointed her. Climbing while armored would take all her strength, to the point that she doubted she could do it, but her inner voice believed it was the right thing for her to do.
She raced toward the ladder. Her step was sure, or felt like it. The world still seemed something other than what it had been, in ways she could not place. Her boots dug into the earthworks. The earth slanted sideways as she climbed, and she scrambled for purchase.
A flood of men had beaten her to each of the ladders. The first climbers were almost to the top. She grabbed at her gauntlets, about to shed some of her armor to make the climb easier, when Kristo’s hand found her shoulder. He pulled her back. With her poor balance atop the dirt, she couldn’t push back. The world tilted, and it was all she could do to stay upright.
Kristo still worried about the blow she’d taken. He would not let her climb first. He mounted ahead of her. He had not even asked. She could not speak over the ringing in her ears.
Sudden irritability swamped her. Fuck him. The other ladder was only two dozen feet away. She sidled along the earthworks.
A wooden creak and a shout above drew her attention. She looked up. A shadow leaned over the lip of the stonework wall, wide-lipped and bell-shaped. Its mouth was wadded with black and brown horsehair.
The device’s crew, three men, were straining with every muscle to orient it downward.
Fia had only seen bombards on an open field before. Never on a wall. But she recognized it. She shouted. Her reaction was delayed, leaden. She could not hear herself.
The two highest men had time to jump off. At that height, they would not land safely.
The ladder blasted apart. A lightning-fast line of black smoke ripped along the wall, tore men limb from limb and slammed into the base of the earthwork in a cloud of bloody ejecta.
The stone ball struck the earthworks and splintered, raining razor shrapnel on the men still climbing. The impact rocked the packed
earth under Fia’s boots. Her baton slipped from her hand. The blast knocked her senses loose and her steadying hand off the wall.
She fell flat onto her stomach. The blow stole her breath. Her armor’s padding hardly acted as a cushion. Helpless among an avalanche of rocks and dust, she slid the rest of the way down. She struck the ground and folded into a pile of limbs.
She could not hear anything over the ringing. Another blast of smoke shot up from the wall. Then a third. All along their defenses, the Sienese were rolling bombards into position. Black smoke mushroomed over them.
She had missed her guess about the oversized wall sections. They had been built oversized deliberately, to hold the heavy bombards.
None of the bodies underneath the ladder moved. She had not seen what had happened to Kristo, but he could not have survived.
Regaining her feet took all her strength. She could not have climbed any ladder like this. Her balance wavering, she climbed a few steps up the earthworks until she had a better view of her army. There were no significant gaps. The most effective bombard shot seemed to have been that which had taken the ladder. The same ladder her inner voice had told her to climb.
She had seen bombards on the field before. Bombards were unpredictable, fragile. They were not meant to kill men as much as to frighten them, to make them think a lightning bolt could pluck them at any moment. From her height, she could tell that it was working. The advance had stalled. Her men thronged in confusion. Crossbow bolts continued to fly toward them.
Her pulse pounded in her ears. Long-delayed pain slammed into her temples. The bleeding in her mouth had stopped, but she still tasted blood. Smelled blood, too. And burst bowels, and smoke.
She had only recently been thinking that she knew what betrayal smelled like. It was a little like this.
Her baton had tumbled only a few feet away. She raised it high. Blasts of trumpets and a raised shout interrupted her. The trumpets had come from somewhere east of the city walls, and the shout from above.
She did not need to wait for the Sienese banners to appear from around the bend of the wall to know that the sally was coming. She was already running toward her scattered lines, shouting, collecting as many men as heard her. She pushed her pain inside to take stock of later.
Terminus Page 13
