by Peter McLean
“Tomas Piety,” he said. “I never thought I’d see you again.”
I shrugged.
“It takes more than a war to finish the Pious Men,” I said. “I’ve got a couple of wounded here for you.”
The doc crouched down beside Hari, who was now the color of a cheap tallow candle, sick-looking and breathing in shallow gasps of shock and pain. Black Billy wasn’t so bad off, so he’d have to wait.
“He’s lost a lot of blood,” Cordin said, as though that weren’t obvious. The left leg of Hari’s britches was soaked with it, and it was pooling on the floor around his boot. “Someone carry him into the kitchen, and find him something to bite on.”
I looked down at Hari and saw that he had passed out in the chair. I let a couple of Jochan’s lads see to him, and they disappeared into the kitchen with the doc. Jochan himself was still drinking, and I went over to him.
“That’s your man in there,” I said quietly. “That’s your man about to scream for his ma when the doc starts cutting. Maybe you should be with him.”
Jochan gave me a look, and I held his stare until he backed down and followed his lads into the kitchen. He took the bottle with him, I noticed.
Different ways of leading men, as I said.
SIX
The next morning Hari was still alive, and I gave thanks to Our Lady for that. Black Billy was sporting a row of neat stitches in his arm, and in a few weeks he would have another fine scar to show the girls. Billy was a good man. He was the bastard son of a merchant trader from Lady only knew where, someplace across the sea where men are black as night. He grinned at me when I went to check on him.
“I’m fine, boss,” he said, flexing his muscular arm to prove it.
“Don’t burst those stitches or they’ll only have to be done again,” I warned him, and clapped him on the shoulder.
He was the first of my crew to be wounded as a Pious Man rather than as a soldier, and his lack of reaction was telling. That was a good sign—I didn’t want anyone feeling like too much had changed, at least not yet. I went through to the kitchen to see Hari for myself.
He was lying on a straw-stuffed pallet bed on top of the long table, his leg swathed in bandages. He was breathing, but he was still deathly pale and clammy-looking. There was blood soaking through the cloth, but not too much. Doc Cordin was still there, which surprised me. Jochan was passed out drunk in a chair, and that didn’t surprise me one bit.
“Is he going to keep the leg?” I asked the doc.
Cordin pursed his crinkly old man’s lips and drew his shabby old cloak closer over his threadbare nightshirt. “If the wound doesn’t go bad, aye,” he said. “If it does, he’ll die. It’s too high up for me to take his leg off. If that wound goes bad, Tomas . . . you might have to do him a kindness.”
I nodded. A quick death from a knife in the heart was better than a slow one from gangrene and madness, after all. If it came to it, that was what would be done. Sometimes a man needed help to cross the river peacefully. We had done it for friends before, in Abingon. It’s a hard thing, but sometimes it’s for the best.
“Aye,” I said. “I know you’ll want paying, and you will be paid. I just need to find my aunt.”
“Enaid?” the doc said. “You’ll find her at the convent.”
I gave him a look. “Are you being funny with me?”
“No, Tomas, I’m not,” he said. “Your aunt took holy orders a year ago.”
“Then who the fuck,” I said softly, “is running my businesses?”
“I don’t know,” Cordin said, “but they ain’t yours no more. You saw what happened here. The boardinghouses are still open, and the inns and the Golden Chains, but there’s new faces in them. The brothel burned down, and traders are paying their taxes elsewhere now.”
“What about my fucking racehorse?”
“It broke a leg,” he admitted. “They cut its throat. I . . . I’m sorry, Tomas.”
I stared at him.
Everything was gone, that was what he was telling me. That I had lost all my businesses, everything except this one tavern that I had just taken back. That was hard news, but what had been built once could be built again, to my mind. The Tanner’s Arms had been the important one. This was the first business I had taken on, when I turned my back on bricklaying. The Tanner’s Arms was special.
I left the doc watching over Hari and went to find Bloody Anne. She was in the main room where the crew were tucking into salt pork and breakfast beer, even Billy the Boy. At least Alman had managed to keep the place stocked during the shortages. That meant the black market was still healthy if nothing else, and that was good.
“Come with me,” I murmured in Anne’s ear. “Nice and quiet.”
She got up without a word and followed me through to the back, into the brick-built part of the building. I led her down the corridor to the smallest of the three storerooms.
“What is it, Tomas?” she asked.
I looked at her for a long moment, weighing her in my mind.
“I need to trust you with something,” I said at last.
“I was your second, before your brother came back. I’d like to think you can trust me with anything.”
In battle I could, I knew that. In the army I could. This might be different, I knew. This was vitally important.
“I want you to watch the door,” I said. “Be subtle about it, but don’t let anyone in here till I come out. Not even Jochan. Can you do that for me, Bloody Anne?”
She nodded. It was the measure of her that she didn’t ask why or for how long. She just stepped back out into the narrow corridor and closed the door behind her.
It was dim in there, with only one tiny window letting in grayish light through its filthy pane, and I wished I had thought to bring a lamp with me. All the same I found what I was looking for, a pry bar of the sort used to open crates and dry storage barrels. It was covered with dust and cobwebs, but it would serve. I weighed the iron bar in my hand and turned to the back wall of the room. It was a good wall, that.
It ought to be, I had built it myself.
If the room was a little bit smaller than it should have been for the shape of the building then it would have taken a keen eye to spot it, and thank Our Lady no one ever had. I counted the bricks, twenty-three along from the door and sixteen up. That one.
I pushed the end of the pry bar through the thin skin of dry, crumbling mortar and wiggled it until I got some purchase. The brick started to move, and I worked the bar back and forth, trying to be quiet about it. The crew were making plenty of noise over their breakfast beer out in the main tavern and I didn’t think they’d hear me unless I started shouting, but I didn’t want Anne hearing me either. I didn’t trust her that much, not with this I didn’t. If this went wrong, then I was done. I had promises to keep to the men, after all.
I worked the loose brick far enough out of the wall to get hold of it, then pulled it out and set it carefully down on top of a barrel of pickled fish. I stuck my hand into the cavity and stretched my arm down to the hidden shelf, feeling among the bags of coin.
The first I touched was gold, a bag half full of gold crowns. This was the secret of the Tanner’s Arms. This was why I had led my crew straight there, why I had fought and killed to retake this business above any of the others, even the Golden Chains. I didn’t trust banks. Banks came with tax collectors and questions, and so the Tanner’s Arms had become the golden heart of the Pious Men. No one knew that but me.
I didn’t want the gold, though. I groped blindly, my hand at an awkward angle through the narrow gap in the wall. I could feel the thick weight of gold crowns through the leather bag, heavy and difficult to move with so little mobility. Eventually I wormed my hand around enough to find another bag full of thinner coins. Silver marks, those were what I wanted. I lifted the bag, worked it out through the gap, and weighe
d it in the palm of my hand.
There were between two and three hundred silver marks in that bag, by my reckoning. A skilled craftsman might earn two marks a month in Ellinburg, if he was doing well for himself and had steady work. I nodded and dropped the bag into the big pocket in the inside of my robe. It was heavy, but I reckoned it would be getting lighter soon enough.
I worked the brick back into the gap in the wall and smeared as much of the loose mortar as I could into the cracks around it, then swept the rest carefully out of sight with my boot. It wasn’t perfect, but it would have to do. I hid the pry bar behind a cask of salt pork and opened the door.
Bloody Anne was leaning casually against the wall, picking her nails with a dagger and watching the corridor.
“Done?” she asked.
I nodded and reached into my robe. I took ten marks out of the bag and pressed them into her hand.
“You are my second, Anne,” I said. “There’s no was about it, and that means you get second’s pay. Just for the Lady’s sake, don’t let Jochan hear about it. He hasn’t replaced you, but right now I need to let him think he has. You understand that, don’t you?”
She looked down at the ten silver coins in her hand and back up at me. Her eyes narrowed. It took a sergeant a good long while to earn ten marks in the army, half a year or more. She pursed her lips like she was about to say something, then thought better of it. The coins disappeared into her pouch, and she nodded at me.
“Appreciate it,” she said, and that was how Bloody Anne became my second for real.
* * *
• • •
I wanted a word with my aunt, but first there were things to take care of.
In the kitchen I paid Doc Cordin a silver mark. That was too much, but I didn’t have anything smaller except a few coppers, which wouldn’t have been enough. It wouldn’t hurt to have him in my debt. Hari was staring up at me with a confused look on his death-pale face. I didn’t think he knew who I was, right then.
“Go home and put some clothes on,” I told Cordin, “then come back and look after Hari. I don’t know him, but he’s my brother’s man, and he got hurt fighting for me. That makes him my man.”
Truth be told, Hari had got hurt waking up when a bomb went off, but that wasn’t the point. The point was, if he lived, he’d be mine forever now. That would be one of Jochan’s crew I had taken, at least.
I looked at Jochan, still slumped and snoring in the kitchen chair. The empty brandy bottle was on the floor beside his boot. He had fought well the night before and I knew I shouldn’t take ill against him, but just having him back here under this roof again was reminding me of how little we got on. We had the horror of our childhood in common, but that had never made us friends as adults.
I went back into the common room and gave every man there three silver marks.
“Welcome to the Pious Men,” I told them. “You did well last night, all of you, and I won’t forget that. I told you there would be work for you here, and there is. It’ll be harsh work sometimes, I won’t lie to you, but harsh work pays well and it’s no worse than you did in the army.”
There was a moment of stunned silence before grins started to spread across their faces.
“Thanks, boss,” a lad called Mika said.
He was one of Jochan’s crew, and he had just called me boss. That was good. That might just have made it two. I clapped him on the shoulder and gave him another mark.
“Take that and find some tradesmen,” I said. “I want a new front door by the time I come back, and those broken windows replaced too.”
He nodded. It was enough responsibility to make him feel trusted and valued but not enough money to be worth running out on me for. That was how it was done, to my mind. A little trust, a little responsibility, increasing bit by bit until they were yours.
Cookpot and Brak and Simple Sam had been up half the night rolling corpses into the river and they were still snoring in the stable, so I let them be for now. I’d pay them later, and another mark each on top for losing those bodies for me. Once word got about that there was more money to be had for some of the harsher jobs, volunteers would be easier to come by. I knew I’d be needing them soon.
I gave Sir Eland a look.
“I’m going out,” I told him. “Chuck a bucket of water over Jochan and tell him he’s in charge till I get back.”
The false knight nodded, but I could see the resentment in his eyes. He thought he should be my second, I knew that. Maybe if I had trusted him then he might have been, but I didn’t and that was because he had never given me a reason to.
Bloody Anne had saved my life more than once in Abingon, and I hers, and that had forged a bond between us. Anne was my right hand. Jochan was my brother, for all that we didn’t get on, and that was a different sort of bond. Maybe it wasn’t a good one, but it was a bond nonetheless. He would never be my second whatever he thought, but I wouldn’t see him without a place at my side. I owed him that much, at least. That put him at my left hand, then. That didn’t leave Sir Eland a place at either of my hands, as far as I could see. He would follow behind a woman and like it or he could fuck off, it was all the same to me.
“Anne, Luka, come with me,” I said.
I led Anne and Fat Luka out into the yard behind the tavern. Anne and I saddled our horses, and Jochan’s as well for Luka.
“Where’re we going, boss?” Luka asked once we were done buckling the tack.
I shaded my eyes against the cold, watery morning sun and pointed to the hill that loomed over the west side of Ellinburg.
“Up there,” I said. “There’s a convent, up there. Nuns of the Mother.”
“Why?” Anne asked.
“Apparently my aunt has taken holy orders,” I said. “If that’s true, that’s where she’ll be.”
“And you need a woman with you, to get you in,” she said.
“Maybe, maybe not,” I said. “You’re coming because I trust you, Anne, not because of what’s between your legs.”
She gave me a sharp look.
“And that’s why you’re bringing me and not your brother?”
“I’m not bringing my brother because he’s passed out drunk, and ‘fuck a nun’ is one of his favorite expressions,” I said. “He wouldn’t be an asset.”
Fat Luka sniggered, and even Anne cracked a rare smile.
“All right,” she said.
She swung up into her saddle and we followed, and the three of us rode out into a fine Ellinburg morning. A fine morning in Ellinburg meant it wasn’t raining yet.
“Keep your eyes open,” I said quietly as we rode out of the alley and onto the narrow street, into shadows cast by the overhanging upper floors of the houses. “I can’t say for sure if last night’s message will have been understood.”
When I had given that message to the young lad I had let go the night before, I had still assumed that I had other businesses. Now that I had discovered that apparently I hadn’t anymore, I wondered if the threat might have sounded a bit hollow.
We were armored, all three of us, and I was wearing my priest’s cowled robe over my mail and the sword belt that held the Weeping Women. Fat Luka rode like a sack of turnips, unused to the saddle, but he had a big axe at his belt, and Bloody Anne had her daggers and her crossbow. I didn’t think anyone was likely to misunderstand our purpose that day.
“We’re making a stop on the way,” I said.
“We are?” Anne asked.
“We are,” I said. “Chandler’s Narrow.”
I led them off the road and up a winding alley between two towering tenements, our horses picking their way over the wide, shallow steps. Most of Ellinburg is hills, with steps and narrow passages between dark, looming buildings that seem almost to touch overhead. Near the top of the alley was a courtyard, with a boardinghouse on one side and a chandler’s
shop on the other. I cocked my head at the boardinghouse.
“Anne, go in and see about renting a room for tonight,” I told her. “I want to know who’s behind the desk.”
She gave me a look.
“Why me?” she said. “They’ll only think I’m a whore.”
I didn’t think they would. Anne was sitting her horse like she had been born in the saddle, wearing mail over boiled leather with two daggers at her belt and a crossbow and quiver hanging from her tack. I didn’t think anyone would be mistaking Bloody Anne for a whore anytime soon.
“Because you’re not from Ellinburg, and they won’t know your face or your accent,” I said, and she had to nod at that. Luka and me were both Ellinburg men, after all.
She grumbled but dismounted and pushed open the door of the boardinghouse. Luka and I sat and waited, holding our horses and hers around the corner out of sight. When Anne came back she had a look like murder on her face.
“You’re a cunt,” she told me.
I raised my eyebrows at that. Anne was my second, and she could get away with it, but only just.
“Why’s that?” I asked her.
“He thought I wanted a whore, and he told me I was too ugly for any of his girls. So thanks for that, boss. That’s made me feel good about myself.”
That was a lot of words at once, from Bloody Anne. That told me she was upset, and I couldn’t let that pass.
“Right,” I said. “Stay here.”
I threw my reins to Luka and got off the horse.
“Wait—” Anne started, but I ignored her.
Anne was a good soldier, and a good woman, and this had been my place of business. Even if it wasn’t mine anymore, and we would see about that, I wasn’t having her spoken to like that. She was my second, and I liked to think she was my friend as well.
I kicked the door open and marched into the dingy little room with my hands on the hilts of the Weeping Women, ready to deliver justice for the insult. There was only one person in there, a balding fat man of fifty or so years. He was facedown over his desk in a spreading pool of fresh blood.
