by Dave Duncan
“It would be an improvement.”
“Or your late father’s, even? He is a relative, is he not?”
She hadn’t thought of that and she felt herself blushing. Dalibor was a widower. But the idea was absurd—she could neither inherit the title nor pass it on to her husband. “I’ve known Dali all my life. He taught me how to groom a horse. He is distantly related to me, yes—third or fourth cousin. He’s the only surviving male relative I know of. Of course, his claim would be through the female line and wouldn’t be valid … would it?”
“Possibly not,” the bishop admitted. “Arturas the herald could tell you. But the direct male line is certainly extinct, which means that the king will have to appoint another lord of the Cardice marches. A local man and a distant relative, even on the distaff side, might have a chance. But Dalibor Notivova doesn’t, because he is a commoner and His Majesty has certainly never heard of him.” Ugne peered at her suspiciously. “Or did you mention his name when you sent the report to Mauvnik?”
“No. He … My informant made me promise not to. To mention his name, I mean! He refused to say why.” The devious cleric was tying her in knots.
Now the parrot had a cracker. The bishop smiled. “Then I have been misjudging him, just as you may be misjudging Count Vranov. You had no prior word that he was coming? I mean, it is both normal and commendable for a neighbor to come and pay his condolences after such a tragedy.”
“Not a word! The counts of Kipalban and Gistov both sent couriers with expressions of sorrow and promises to endow prayers for their souls, but not Vranov. Not a word. So why is he here with an army?”
“Your definition of an army may not agree with the constable’s, Madlenka. But on my way here I encountered Captain Ekkehardt, who was heading to the barbican to discuss this very problem with the constable. So why don’t we go there and see what our military experts have decided?”
God be thanked! Until this disaster of her father’s and brother’s deaths, Madlenka had never expected to feel grateful for the presence of the landsknecht mercenaries in the town. But if Constable Kavarskas was to prove false, the Germans might prove a counterweight to his treachery. Delighted at the thought of action, she darted across to one of the chests and began hauling out clothes, hurling them aside, burrowing ever lower, until she had found the winter robes. She kept her mother’s sable for herself—she was in mourning, after all—and tossed a dark brown fox fur one to Giedre.
A glance at the mirror called for a sigh. Black was definitely not her color; it made her pale face look like a skull. And the fur was not quite the same shade of black as her hat. She lowered her veil, so no one could see her at all. “Quickly, then!” she said.
Bishop Ugne had already opened the door and beckoned for the countess’s nurse, who had been sent out to wait in the dressing room.
Madlenka, Giedre, and Bishop Ugne left the keep by the upper door, and were saluted by the sentries. They crossed a drawbridge high above a street and then climbed some steps to the top of the curtain wall, where they were brutally assaulted by the torrent of wind that always blew there. The reverent bishop muttered something in the vulgar tongue and grabbed his miter just before it disappeared. His vestments billowed and flapped. Madlenka wondered if she dared offer to carry his crozier for him.
Heads bent into the gale, they hurried along the wide parapet with the black slate roofs of the town below them to their right. On their left, outside the battlements, the wall dropped sheer for thirty feet to a cliff about ten times as high, and below that lay the rocky bed of the foaming Ruzena River.
Had their eyes not been watering so hard, they would have seen the great valley ahead of them, widening southward until the embracing hills fell away and it merged with the forests of the Jorgary Plain, clad that day in fall gold. Fields and vineyards, villages both large and small, lay well concealed, for even high church spires failed to overtop the trees.
According to tradition, on his way to the Third Crusade the Emperor Barbarossa had acclaimed the shelf on which Castle Gallant stood as “designed by God to hold a fortress.” The great rocky slab blocking the western half of the valley had held a castle even in Barbarossa’s day, but in the three centuries since then, many successive rulers had worked hard to take advantage of the Lord’s generosity. The entire top of the little plateau had been fortified, and its sides chiseled and shaped. With steep cliffs rising above it on the west and the foaming waters of Ruzena flanking its other three sides, Cardice was renowned as one of the most secure castles in Europe. It had fallen to treachery twice, but it had never been stormed or starved into submission.
The valley ended abruptly about a mile north of the castle, under the ramparts of the Vysoky Range, which straddled the boundary between Jorgary and lands that had recently become part of Pomerania. Northbound travelers, whether pilgrims, merchants, or fighting men, had no choice of route. They embarked on the Silver Road at High Meadows. From there the trail climbed steeply up the western side of the valley, crossing gullies on log bridges, negotiating hairpins, edging around steep spurs on cuts barely wide enough for a single oxcart. Very few places on the whole ascent would allow two carts to pass. Eventually the road arrived at Castle Gallant’s southern barbican, with a sheer drop on one side and a vertical cliff on the other. There the count’s men collected the tolls.
Anxious to reach a point where she could see what was happening at the gate, Madlenka set a very fast pace into the wind. Bishop Ugne would have had to trot just to stay level. He had to shout after her. “I doubt if your haste is wise, Madlenka. Ladies should arrive with dignity, not steaming like a horse.”
Annoyed, she slowed to a walk. Giedre was staying back. The bishop took this brief privacy as a chance to do some more holy nagging.
“You say you ‘sent for’ Sir Karolis last night? Whose man is he?”
She blinked away wind tears to look at him. “Well, he was my father’s man, of course.”
“But now? God in His almighty wisdom has seen fit to gather your father and your brother to Him. Whom does the constable serve now? Every man must have a lord, Madlenka.”
“I am my father’s heir.” But a woman. What a difference that made! Petr had been a year younger than she, just sixteen, but had he lived, the entire castle would be jumping to his bidding without question, obeying the least gesture of his little finger. But men never did that for a woman, for a woman was a frail and foolish creature interested only in frippery and finery and tantalizing men with lust to lead them to damnation.
She missed Petr even more than Father. Never at rest, ever dashing about, always laughing—it was impossible to accept that he was not just around a corner somewhere, or just about to ride in from the hills with some fresh venison. Nobody said so, but she suspected the whole county mourned the boy more than the man.
“Your mother is his relic,” the bishop declaimed, “and will have a dower interest in his estate, after the king has claimed his heriot. You undoubtedly will inherit a rich portion of whatever is left, but not the castle, daughter! This is a royal fortress. It did not belong to your father.”
“Then whom do you believe the constable serves, my lord bishop?” Not Madlenka Bukovany, certainly.
“As your father’s deputy, he must serve the king himself until a new keeper is appointed. Yes, Sir Karolis’s duty is to keep the fortress safe until His Majesty sends someone to replace your father, may he rest in peace. But Karolis Kavarskas is not your servant, my daughter. He is a proud man. He fought well in Italy and Austria. His men here generally approve of him, as your father did. He cannot take joyously to an underage, unmarried girl sending for him.”
Pompous as a stuffed owl! She muttered an apology.
“Tell him so,” the bishop said, “not me. These are indeed hard times, Madlenka. The people have been troubled ever since your father brought in the landsknechte. They fear that war is coming, and now that your father and Sir Petr are gone, they are even more frightened. You must
come to Mass today, so that you can be seen.”
Seen while totally swathed in sable and black lace?
“And be patient if they try to mob you outside the cathedral to express their sorrow.”
“Yes, my lord bishop.”
“You should likewise show respect for Count Vranov. I agree that he is an odious sinner, but he is a man of power in the land, and someday—perhaps quite soon—Cardice may need his help.”
Madlenka choked back several possible rejoinders before she found a sufficiently respectful one. By then she had turned a corner and come to a place with a view of the south road. The invading force crawling up it was close enough now to make out details in the low sunlight. A liveried herald rode in the van, flanked by a standard-bearer, followed in turn by a party of eight or ten horsemen, and then a column of men-at-arms marching three abreast. The streaming banner was unreadable, but there was no doubt that this was the Hound’s army.
She paused to peer through a crenel. “How many?”
“Two hundred?” Bishop Ugne said hesitantly. “About enough to fill the lady chapel. Not many are knights, though; mostly mounted archers.”
“They can’t do us any harm as long as the constable keeps the gates shut, can they?”
Ugne made a scoffing noise. “They couldn’t break in if they had fifty times their number. Captain Ekkehardt alone has two or three times as many men.”
But if the constable had turned traitor, what then?
As they approached the barbican, she heard the clanking of the chains raising the gate. So the deed was done. They were too late!
She drew back beside Giedre to let the bishop enter first and receive the sergeants-at-arms’ salutes. At this level the tower was a single large room, dusty and echoing, lit dimly from the doorway by which she had just entered and narrow slits along the side walls. It was dominated by the gigantic gears and treadmills that raised the three successive gates that an enemy must pass to break into the city. Mercifully, the porters who had to work the system had almost finished their work on the outer gate, and in a moment the deafening racket ceased. The boss threw on the brake, and the men could relax, puffing and sweating from their work.
In addition to the porters and the normal sergeants-at-arms, there were at least a dozen soldiers present, half of them Cardice men and the other half landsknechte. The two were easily distinguished, because the locals wore conventional half armor of mail shirt and cuirass.
The mercenaries, on the other hand, were big, bearded Germans or Swiss, who seemed even bigger in their heavily padded armor—velvet or velour doublets and hose decorated with pleats and piping, slashed to expose linings of contrasting bright colors. No man was ever foolish enough to laugh at those, or at the gold chains around their necks or their wide, floppy hats with trailing ostrich plumes. Landsknechte were elite fighting troops, respected and feared all over Europe.
Ekkehardt’s band had been hired in the summer by Petr, when he visited Mauvnik. They had arrived about a month ago, six hundred fighting men complete with wagons, horses, wives, children, and the usual foul mob of loose women. The town, where nothing exciting ever happened, had been packed to the rafters since. There had been surprisingly few fights so far, but ill feeling rumbled like a mountain thunderstorm.
Only two men in the room mattered, and they were peering out through adjacent loopholes at the advancing troops. Constable Kavarskas was a lean timberwolf of a man, a seasoned warrior of around thirty, with a scar on his forehead, iron streaks in his hair, and deep furrows flanking his mouth. He had lost his left hand fighting in Italy, and a hook replaced it.
Ekkehardt, in all his glory of blue and yellow, was a thickset badger by comparison. If he was shorter, it was by very little, and the padding of his clothes merely emphasized the meaty bulk inside them. His beard and flowing mustaches were the color of ripe grain. Kavarskas turned away from his loophole just as Madlenka arrived behind him.
“Sir Karolis!”
He reversed his turn and looked down at her as if she were something underfoot. “My lady?”
“Do you still intend to let that army into the castle?”
“Of course not. Whatever gave you that idea?” He glanced at Ekkehardt with an expression of long-suffering bewilderment.
“The constable,” the landsknecht said in his heavy Saxon voice, “would never be so foolish, my lady.”
They were laughing at her.
“No doubt this is Count Vranov arriving in person to convey his respects to the countess,” Kavarskas continued, explaining carefully. “And your gracious self, of course. Such would be normal neighborly courtesy after so great a tragedy. He may have brought his wife, or some other family members along. A bodyguard is only a sensible precaution in these troubled times.”
“Sir Karolis,” Ekkehardt said, “suggested an honor guard of twenty knights to be admitted. This was too much, I thought. We agree Vranov should be allowed a token escort of five knights.”
“Once admitted,” the constable said, “he will be a guest protected by the laws of chivalry. To refuse him entry would be a gross discourtesy … my lady.” Karolis did not need to address her as if she were ten years old, but he always did. He was right, though, curse him. To refuse the Hound admission would be a serious insult.
Although Havel Vranov had never given her personal reason to hate or fear him, her parents had never spoken well of him. They rarely spoke ill either, preferring to change the subject whenever he was mentioned. Petr, more forthcoming, had said he was a savage and a monster. Gossip called him a prodigious lecher and adulterer. In odd-numbered years the lord of Pelrelm visited Cardice for a week or so to hunt with his counterpart, and in even years Father had returned the compliment. Normally that was the extent of their socializing, but this was Vranov’s third visit this year. He had come in the spring with a proposition that Madlenka marry one of his sons. Asked whether the one being exhibited was legitimate, he had pretended to be offended—not at the suggestion that he might have fathered children out of wedlock, but that he would honor his bastards with a noble marriage. He had also indicated that he had many sons and could, if legitimacy were not a problem, dig up others for Madlenka’s inspection. Count Stepan had declined both offers.
In the summer, after his return from Mauvnik, Petr had ridden over to the Hound’s den to pass on the news that the king expressly forbade any marriage connection between the two marches. Undeterred, Havel had returned to Cardice just a couple of weeks before the tragedy, offering yet another son. That time there had been words, and Father had sent him packing with threadbare courtesy.
But now Father was not there, and the Hound was.
“If we let him in, the rest of his men must go back down to the High Meadows!” Madlenka insisted.
Kavarskas sighed. “Arturas the herald has been so instructed and is down there now. Did you really believe that I would just throw open the gates to such a force?”
“You just did, didn’t you?” she yelled.
He glanced at the bishop as if hoping for sympathy or support. “My lady, the outer gate is always opened at sunrise in times of peace. It would be offensive to leave it closed when a friend is approaching. However, if you will look at the second windlass, over there, you will see from the lack of chain wound around it that the inner gate is still closed. These hatches in the floor cover murther holes, through which we can rain missiles or boiling oil down on intruders. The castle is still secure against anything short of a siege train.”
Madlenka felt her face flame behind her veil. She was virtually certain that last night he had told her that the gates would be opened “as usual.” Perhaps he had not actually lied, but he had certainly misled her and tricked her into making a fool of herself, raising an alarm where none existed. No doubt this was her punishment for summoning him.
Bishop Ugne was listening, smiling flabbily, and saying nothing. The wind had turned him even redder than the stones of the castle walls.
Ou
tside, the clatter of hooves died away and was replaced by a shrill silver fanfare.
“Now we shall see, my lady,” the constable said. “If they accept the terms Arturas offers, he will signal us to raise the inner gate. Perhaps you should go and warn your lady mother so that she can make ready to receive the visitors.” The constable knew very well that Edita was in no state to greet anyone.
Smarting with humiliation, dismissed like an infant, Madlenka turned to retrace her steps.
“Wait!” Bishop Ugne was addressing the two men, not her. “The last time Havel Vranov came to this castle, he was accompanied by a false priest, a Father Vilhelmas. That man is a heretic, a schismatic. You will not allow him back in.”
For a moment there was silence while Sir Karolis assessed this unexpected challenge. He glanced at the landsknecht captain and seemed to conclude that it was none of Ekkehardt’s business. Ekkehardt did not look anxious to intervene anyway. So it was up to Karolis to respond. The old enmity between church and state was back again.
“I agree, my lord bishop, that you are charged with protecting the souls of the good Christians of Cardice and keeping them safely in the bosom of Rome, but if Count Vranov chooses to convert to the Eastern confession, that—”
“Pomerania bows the knee to the Greek patriarch, but King Konrad has decreed that Jorgary will follow the true Catholic faith. Suppression of heresy is my business, not yours, constable, and my authority comes from the Lord of All. I say that the man Vilhelmas must not be admitted.”
The bishop was a proud man, accustomed to authority. So was the constable, and he must maintain his dignity before an audience made up of Ekkehardt’s mercenaries and his own troops. “On the contrary, my lord bishop: in matters of this world, mine is the authority. Until His Majesty appoints a new keeper, I shall continue to do my duty as the late count wished me to. He allowed the priest in and so shall I.”
Bishop Ugne’s face was now redder than sunset. “He did, and see where it got him! Within a fortnight, he was dead, his son was dead, his wife distracted, and his ancient line extinguished.”
