The Witch of Torinia

by Clifford Beal

  “Look at the state of you,” the soldier mumbled. “You must have done something wicked to merit this treatment.”

  Strykar reached for the wreck of a meal and wiped off the worst of the ash flecks. “I had the ill fortune to be taken alive. I should have known better. How close are we to Livorna?”

  The man looked about him, fearful to be seen talking with the enemy prisoner. “Look here, won’t make much difference to you from what I hear tell. But I reckon we will reach the walls tomorrow, after meridian. You won’t have any reason to want to get there.”

  Strykar rearranged himself on the ground, grunting. It was as he thought. He’d always doubted he would be ransomed back to his brother in the south. “Oh, Livorna is a lively place despite the blackrobes. You’d like raising a cup of wine there. Not that you or your lot will ever get the chance.”

  The man reached down and swept up the now empty water skin in his hand. “You think so?” He smiled. “You’ll have a good vantage to see us take the place if talk be true.” He shook his head and turned to walk away. “You poor bastard.”

  The night descended slowly, an eternity of purple skies, and Strykar lost track of time. The noise of the camp subsided except for the laughter and light emanating from where the tallest tents were pitched, those of the noblemen, Lazaro included. As darkness fell totally, a canopy of stars overhead, Strykar gave up trying to free his ankle from the shackle. He’d tried pulling his foot out of the boot, easing it bit by bit, but to no avail. He even tried shifting the iron stake but it was deep and he had only one arm that could stand the strain. He muttered a curse on himself, for his own impetuousness into battle, a thing that had undone them all.

  The rowdiness in the tents grew louder as the drink flowed. He had finished his chunk of bread, lying in the shadows, waiting for exhausted sleep to overtake him and his pain. He lifted his head as he became aware of some soldiers making their way towards him through the sea of tents and wagons. Drunken laughter and cursing floated to him, the stuff of every military camp. But he knew they were looking for some entertainment and it became clear very quickly that they were headed in his direction. He scrambled up onto his feet and squatted, hands on thighs, to await their arrival. A torch bobbed in front as the party neared. They were soon around him, a group of some seven men-at-arms, Messere Lazaro at the lead.

  “Ah, my wilted Black Rose!” laughed Lazaro as he stood over Strykar. He was almost tottering, the smell of wine and acqua vitalis wafting from his blood-red quilted doublet as he waved his arms. He covered his mouth in a gesture of embarrassment. “I’m afraid I let slip to the Duke that I had bought a Coronel of the Black Rose, and he was not best pleased to hear how you had insulted his lady. Not in the least.”

  Strykar kept silent, taking in deep breaths through his nose, preparing for what might come. The others were laughing again, jostling one another for a look at this high officer now brought low. “So... I’m giving you to him!” announced Lazaro, who finished the statement with a burst of laughter. “My gift to the Duke, soon to be our king.” He paused and leaned down towards Strykar. “What are you staring at? You pile of dung!” He gave a backhand blow with all the drunken force he could muster, striking the mercenary across the jaw and sending him down. “Don’t you dare look me in the eye!”

  Strykar shook his head and struggled back up to his knees. The metallic taste of blood filled his mouth where his lip had ripped across his teeth. Lazaro turned to his men. “To think, I paid only ten soldi for him. As cheaply bought a gift as there ever was for a duke, no?”

  Strykar raised up one knee and placed a foot on the ground. There was an unwritten code among the free companies that after hostilities, bloodletting ends. After all, they were all men of business fighting for whom they chose. Ransom was to be honoured and parole granted for those who could afford none. Even between the Blue Boar and the Black Rose, such convention had held. That had now been trampled like his men on the field.

  Lazaro reeled and asked for a drink. Quickly answered by a soldier, he drank deeply from the clay bottle. He waggled a finger at Strykar. “I don’t think you ever said you were sorry for what happened at Pernato. Did you?” The kick took Strykar by surprise. The boot caught his stomach and his balls and he collapsed with a groan, curling himself as the pain surged through him. The kicks came furious as he lay there, coiling himself tighter in a futile act of self-defence. He vomited up his bread and water, retching away as the men-at-arms jeered. After a minute, Lazaro must have become mindful of his prize. “Enough! Leave off the wretch or I shall have to make apology to the Duke!” He wiped his sleeve across his mouth and barked out another laugh. “That would spoil the show for Livorna. And such a spectacle he has planned!”

  Strykar rolled over onto his back, his ankle chain loudly adding its own ridicule. A padded arming doublet was no substitute for body armour and he reasoned, dimly in the swirl of his pain, that he had a few ribs cracked now to add to the wounds of the battle. Not that his wounds were of much consequence now. Lazaro had let slip what his fate would be: execution before the walls of Livorna. A taster before the siege and a warning to the defenders. He watched as his tormentors retreated back to their tent, swearing and laughing. The sky above blazed with milky brilliance and as he stared at the endless firmament he slowly drifted away into an exhausted, fitful sleep.

  At some point, the sound of his chain rattling woke him. He rolled over to see a dark figure squatting down near the ground spike. Strykar started, pushing himself into a sitting position, prepared for the dagger that might be about to flash. But the figure instead slowly extended an open hand, warning him to be silent. Strykar could dimly make out the man before him in the reflected torchlight of the camp: a veteran, white-whiskered with a bald head, a short black cloak pulled about his shoulders. As Strykar sat motionless, he saw the soldier muffle the ankle shackle with one hand while he inserted a long key into the lock. Jiggling it, he then gave it a turn and the shackle opened. The soldier looked at Strykar and put a finger to his lips. Strykar pulled his leg back and braced himself with his hands as he tried to gain his feet. Friend or foe, he knew not what to expect next. The man gave indication of neither and he swallowed hard, debating what to do next. But the soldier whispered to him.

  “Some of us remember Caglia. Some of us remember Pernato. When you be a soldier, like us, over the years you can have many masters. The wheel goes around. But you never forget your comrades be they Boar or Rose. Now, get out of here!” He stood, scanned the sea of tents and then quickly disappeared around a wagon. Strykar found his feet and rising, swayed. But he was whole even if stiff. He listened. There was none of the earlier carousing now; just coughing, the occasional sound of voices in low conversation, the snoring of tired drunken men. He remembered he was near the road and beyond this, across a grassy meadow, a forest spread towards the north—escape a stone’s throw away. He wiped his nose with his thumb and forefinger and looked towards the high tent some yards away. The nobleman’s tent.

  He entered the tent from the back, crawling underneath where the pegs had not been secured properly. Light from the still burning braziers out at the front cast a dim illumination—enough for him to discern his surroundings. A wooden stand for harness and swordbelt, a table, a bed off to the side, a snoring man in it. A shadow swayed outside the tent: no doubt a guard. Strykar clenched his fists for a moment and then crept across the carpeted ground towards the bed. He peered over Messere Lazaro’s slumbering form, the wine stench wafting upwards from him. As he stared at Lazaro, all his rage and his shame welled. Shame for his hubris, his boastfulness, his carelessness, and his foolishness. Foolishness that had led good men to their deaths. Foolishness that had got him captured, the abased plaything of others.

  He leaned in, knees on the bedframe, and slapped a meaty hand over Lazaro’s mouth. Instantly, the knight’s eyes shot open, a muffled exclamation stifled as Strykar pressed down. And Strykar knew Lazaro recognised him even as his other hand g
rasped the nobleman’s throat. The bedframe creaked with the pressure of his exertions as he squeezed. Lazaro twisted and kicked even as his eyes bulged with fear. Strykar stared back into those eyes, his own face a mask of darkness as he held fast and throttled the life out of his enemy. The sound of the crushing of the windpipe, a delicate crack felt underneath his hand, was audible to just the two of them. Lazaro’s eyes lost their focus, looking beyond Strykar as the man’s body went limp. The mercenary lifted his hands away and the rattle from Lazaro’s collapsing chest sounded like a quiet sigh of relief.

  Strykar looked to the front of the tent. The guard had not moved, probably asleep where he stood. He moved to the armour stand and gently lifted off the scabbarded sword and belt. He then spied a long woollen field cape slung over a stool. He flung it on, bundled the weapon in his arms like a small child, and left the way he had entered. Moving at a walking pace, he negotiated the tents and wagons around him, just another man-at-arms looking to relieve his bladder in the deepness of the night. He cast a look over his shoulder a few times as he walked the tall grass of the meadow but the moon had long since set and he was a shadow amongst shadows. The great forest loomed before him and he cast one more glance behind towards the camp of the Torinian host. Strykar leaned against a great beech, his cheek pressing the tree like it was a lover. He knew he had to move deeper into the forest before the dawn. They would pursue him if they could. Buckling on Lazaro’s side-sword, the jewels of its hilt glinting dully, he made his way slowly, like a blind man, into the tangled root-strewn maze of the great wood.

  His last strength, drained by stumbles in the dark, gave out shortly after the rays of day began to bring light to the forest around him. He was almost too tired now to care if he was caught. He settled into a deep sleep, nestled in the vee of a double-trunked tree. Sometime later he awoke to the sound of birdsong above—a cuckoo’s mocking. He raised his head, his throat parched and his stomach groaning. And then he heard another sound. A sound he knew well, and no more than a dozen paces away. The unmistakable creak of a longbow being drawn.

  Eighteen

  ACQUEL HAD FINALLY found him near the makeshift workman’s shack that sagged against the north wall of the Temple Majoris. Here, under a carpenter’s lean-to surrounded by planks, stumps, mallets, saw-horses and curly wood shavings he found the old monk labouring.

  “Days from attack and I find you here—carving... a tree branch!”

  Ugo Volpe lifted the adze from the long slightly kinked length of bough, yellowish-white, the colour of flesh-stripped bone. He sighted down its length, three feet long and flattened now from shaving, almost blade-like. He ignored Acquel’s outburst and reached for a curved knife mounted on a long wooden handle. He carved out a notch near one end and reached into his robe for a disc of silver which slid down from the pointed end of the stick pressing it into place a hand’s width from the opposite end. Acquel now saw that the old monk had fashioned a sword. A sword of wood.

  “If we are to hunt a mantichora, brother,” said Volpe calmly, “then we must be prepared.”

  “What? Are we going to play a game of fetch with the creature? This is a tree branch.”

  “It is sorbo wood. I was not even aware that a sorbo grew up here on the Ara and there is but one. Another sign that God is with us, Brother Acquel.”

  Acquel reached out and touched Volpe’s arm, halting him in his work. “Explain.”

  The monk nodded. “The sorbo is a tree of protection. Some call it the rowanis tree. Narrow leaves, red berries that bear a five-pointed star. You have probably walked past it a hundred times without realizing its significance.”

  “And how are we to offend an enemy with a wooden sword?”

  Volpe gave an indulgent smile. “Some things fear this wood more than they fear steel. And some fell creatures it will cut like the sharpest blade. The old religion had their trees and we have ours. The sorbo is one of them.” He picked up the long brown leather strip that lay coiled on the workbench, slick with wet glue. He began wrapping the hilt, slowly and carefully as if he was a swordsmith of longstanding. “Hand me that pommel, just there” he said. Acquel gritted his teeth and complied, hefting the almond-shaped lump of metal and handing it over to Volpe. The old man’s gnarled fingers deftly threaded the pommel with a long metal screw and with a pair of tongs he began to slowly turn it into the haft of the bough, tightening the pommel to the end.

  Acquel watched him, still in doubt, as the odd-looking weapon was finished. It looked like the practice swords the aventura used. He decided then that he would be carrying the real thing into the forest and nothing less. “And how will we find the mantichora? The wood is vast west of Livorna.”

  Volpe shrugged as his fist smoothed down the leather grip of the sorbo sword. “How did you find it last time?”

  “The creature found us.”

  “Well, there you are. It will find us again in that case.”

  “I still don’t understand what the mantichora can tell us about the Old Faith and della Rovera’s plans. That’s assuming it will talk to us and not devour us instead.”

  Volpe set the sword down on the bench. He looked up at Acquel. “You must have more faith in my knowledge. What I’ve seen. What you have seen of late. The mantichora are tied to Valdur from time immemorial. They have witnessed the battles between the people of Elded and those of the Death Tree. They sniff out the winds of change and they have seen much over the aeons. I am hoping your creature will share a secret with us. Some weakness of the old ones, of their demons that plague us.”

  “And what if we make it back to find Livorna surrounded by the Torinians? What then?” Acquel knew he was being peevishly contrary, but to hang their fates on peasant magic of root and branch, crushed flowers and incantations, seemed a fool’s errand. His eyes dissected Volpe: his scabrous pig-bristled scalp, heavy brow, bulbous nose, thin desiccated lips perpetually red from wine. Was he truly to set off with just this old man and face down that ancient terror, one that had nearly torn him to bloody shreds only last summer? He barely knew this monk.

  Volpe scowled at him. “Elded’s beard, my brother! You expect me to have all the answers?” He mumbled something inaudible and picked up the wooden sword. He turned and handed it to Acquel, hilt first.

  Dubious, Acquel reached out and accepted it. It was as light as he had imagined but unbalanced by the weight of the silver hilt and pommel. Useless and likely to snap the second it was thrust at something, he thought. “A pretty curiosity. I hope you will not have second thoughts when the mantichora is picking his teeth with it.”

  And then, for just an instant, Acquel thought he felt the amulet upon his chest flash with gentle warmth. But just as quickly, it cooled again, dead metal upon his breastbone.

  POULE WAS FURIOUS. Dumbstruck that Acquel could think of leaving the city when an army of siege was on its way. And when he had recovered his voice it let loose a volley of profanity that even made Volpe blush in its raw expression. But, good soldier that he was, he obeyed the Magister’s command to continue preparations for the defence of the walls, walls already bristling with wooden shields, stacked rocks, braziers, polearms, and barrels of clothyard shafts fletched in black and white goose feathers.

  “We will be gone not more than a day and a night,” Acquel had told the mercenary. Poule, puffing his cheeks out, had shaken his head and replied, “Better pray you’re not late. You might find yourself hog-tied, put in the sling of a catapult and chucked back to us—alight.”

  Acquel and Volpe had slunk out the east gate in the low town on horseback early the next morning. Though he wore a breast and backplate, his side-sword at this hip, Acquel felt naked when he thought of the beast they might face. Volpe, confidence brimming as always, rode in his monk’s robes which he had hiked-up high to his thighs revealing his pasty white, hairy legs. His ever-present satchel was slung over his shoulder, the sorbo blade that lay tucked in his brown belt looked like some child’s toy. At Volpe’s urging, they ha
d avoided telling the High Priest of their mission outside Livorna. Volpe with a mischievous grin had reminded Acquel that it was easier to obtain forgiveness than to seek permission. Acquel knew anyway that Kodoris would not have looked kindly on their mad quest no matter how much he could have tried to justify its necessity. He had barely convinced himself.

  They had ridden west along the main road, past the point where he had tumbled down from Livorna in his escape the previous year and straight into the arms of Julianus Strykar. After half a day’s ride, the insects dipping and diving around them as they passed grassy flower-strewn meadows on their left, rising forest on their right, Acquel thought he remembered landmarks of his earlier passage with Timandra Pandarus. Since he had seen her shade upon the walls, he found it difficult to rid her from his thoughts. In his dreams, she pleaded and beckoned. And he would awake, distraught. What could she be trying to tell me?

  As the sun baked them in the saddle, Acquel at length halted and Volpe with him. The only sound was the countless drone of grasshoppers in the golden meadow. The old monk threw back the cowl that shielded his balding head. “Well, my brother, have you found your bearings?”

  Acquel shook his head. “I cannot remember for sure where we had turned off into the woods. Somewhere along here I think. It is all the same for me now.”

  Volpe flicked his reins. “Come on. It matters not. Mantichora have an unnatural sense of smell. He will find us before we find him of that I am sure.” They turned up into the forest of ancient oak and beech, a canopy of light and dark, green, smelling of good rich earth and moss. The horses struggled, picking their way over roots and the undulating vegetation, all hillocks and humps. Acquel’s mount began to paw and hesitate and finally he dismounted to lead it by its halter. Behind him, he heard Volpe grunt and land on his feet with a mumbled curse. The ground became steeper, the trees older and thicker. Light pierced the canopy in haphazard patches, the early summer foliage now grown full and lush above. They carried on, breathing heavily in their exertions, their horses snorting displeasure as they dragged them along.