by White, Gwynn
The sight of him up close shocked her. He looked like he’d slept in his clothes, and smelled like he’d bathed in lager. His glazed eyes lit up in recognition.
“Fuck me. Grant. Looking good. What’ve you been up to?”
He thought Leonie had been binned, too. Guilt over her comparative good fortune made her decide on the spur of the moment not to let him know he was wrong. “Bit of this, bit of that. What about you?”
“Myself? I’ve gone into volunteer work. There’s a lot of bars between here and Belfast that need propping up.” He cackled, a grotesque echo of his old easy humor. “It’s a hard life, love. You wouldn’t have a fag on you?”
Leonie shook her head, full of pity and embarrassment. They’d never got on, but now that didn’t seem to matter. His face reminded her of Armagh, overlaid with the creases and stubble of the monumental, liver-destroying bender he’d apparently been on ever since he went outside. “Didn’t they make you a better offer, then?”
“Depends what you call better. They offered me a ticket to Khmeria. So I told them to get fucked. So …” Floyd fumbled with his muffler, pulled the collar of his coat far enough down to expose the angry pink edge of a circle of scar tissue.
A blank brand.
Floyd had resigned his fealty to House Wessex.
People who broke their oaths by running away, getting an asset-stripper to remove their brands, could sometimes get back into the system if they found a sympathetic recruiter. But Floyd was not a runaway, he was forsworn. He would never work again. He was no longer even entitled to his pension.
“You’re fucked, mate,” Leonie said honestly.
“Well, I’ve got plenty of company,” Floyd said, cackling.
The queue edged forward.
They can’t’ve just let him wander off, knowing everything he knows. Don’t they care anymore? Or …
“Floyd, you’ve forgotten your anti-surveillance training,” she whispered. “You’ve not once checked for a tail.”
“I thought that’s what you were,” Floyd said. “You’re having me on …”
A bugle blast announced that the fight had started. From here, they could see fuck-all. People rushed towards the ring. Men hoisted their girlfriends onto their backs. Little kids riding on their dads’ shoulders waved flags, a sea of Wessex-crimson. Floyd wasn’t even looking in the direction of the ring.
“What are you doing here, Floyd?”
“Came to see the fight, didn’t I?”
“It’ll be over by the time we get our drinks.”
Floyd smiled, rocking on his heels. “Look; look up there. No, there.”
“What? Who?”
“The Black Mother. She’s always in at the death.”
“Ooh yes, I see her,” Leonie said. “Riding sidesaddle on a pink elephant. Floyd, you need help.”
“Up there,” Floyd insisted, pointing, but all Leonie saw was a few mingy crows sitting on the wall of the arena.
“Floyd, maybe you should’ve gone to Khmeria.”
He didn’t even look at her. “Old folks say you’d see her on battlefields during the invasion.” He was referring to the conquest of Great Britain by the Saxon Lords, a thousand years ago. “She’d appear in the middle of it all, amidst the breaking of swords and the chargers with their great hooves flailing, and take the hand of any warrior she wanted for her own. Now here she is again. It’s a sign.”
“A sign of what?”
“How would I know? Saints, I need a drink.”
The queue had collapsed as people ahead of them gave up and flooded back towards the ring. They were more conspicuous now. If Floyd did have a tail, and she were seen talking to him …
“I’ll tell you what I do know,” Floyd said. “The king knows what he’s about.”
“It’s political.”
“It’s not that. It’s a sacrifice.”
“Who’ve you been hanging out with, Floyd?”
“They won’t have me back, the fuckers. I’ve worked for the English, I’m a traitor. Ah, here we are.” Floyd fished coins out of the folds of his shabby coat. He bought two cups of lager and gave one to Leonie. “Cheers.” Lager slopped on her hand.
“You should get in touch with the Company, Floyd, if you think the boyos are planning something.”
“Ah, this stuff is dishwater … What could I tell them? The Black Mother’s loose again and her daughter’s gone into hiding at Lowena? The daughter’s seeking the Worldcracker to kill her own mum? Should I tell them that? HM knows, anyway. You think he’s daft? I don’t. He’s making a sacrifice to her. Trying to get her on his side. Sure she’d be a powerful ally if it ever comes to war.” Floyd hoisted his paper cup. “No more war,” he cried.
“Mate, I’ve got to go. You drink this for me.” She shoved her cup into his hands and skittered away.
The commentator was yelling over the PA system, spouting combat-ese at a hundred words per minute: “S’ Guy takes it on the forte and returns the backhand, S’ Brant looking good on the floor …”
She reached the end of the row of concession stands and doubled back behind them. If anyone had been following Floyd closely, it was no one she knew by sight. But she could’ve been seen from up in the stands. Ed would have no problem grassing on her. She dared not stall another minute. She twitched her scarf aside from her collar mic. “Backdraught,” she murmured, head down, barely moving her lips. “I have a possible suspect. Ex-Company body, personally known to me. His name is Floyd Ayrett. Early thirties, dark, checked coat, jeans, no hat. I’m on the ground, static behind the concession stands. Advise.”
Floyd, Floyd, I’m sorry.
“Zero. Backdraught, this person is known to you?” That was Alf on the ops desk.
Click-click, she double-pressed to confirm. Sorry, Floyd, sorry, but what else can I do? The way he’d been talking, it sounded like he had been back north, where he came from. Probably mingling with his own people. He’d have been telling them his tale of woe. And possibly … just possibly … getting offered a new job …
You could hide a gun under a coat like that.
Alf told her to hold the trigger, told Ed and Stray to get down there and back her, told them that he was alerting the stadium’s security guards.
With a screen of people in front of her, she watched Floyd drain his first cup of lager, looking like a comedy drunk on telly with one cup in each hand. He emptied his second cup of lager, cast it down, and lurched off. “Suspect is walkabout,” Leonie muttered. “Intending the north exit.” Why couldn’t he have picked the south exit, where the security guards were? “Backdraught is following, sighted.”
Alf’s response was lost in a roar that engulfed the stadium. People around Leonie screamed, too, even though they couldn’t see what had happened. “Disarmed!” the PA system parped. “S’ Brant’s disarmed, and S’ Guy… steps back and waits for him to pick his sword up! What a stunning display of chivalry from Sir Guy! Three atteints for that in a tourney bout, but this isn’t tourney, Sir Guy!”
Floyd vanished into the exit. Leonie moved faster. A wedge of spectators charged out of the tunnel, caught up in the excitement and rushing to get closer to the action. She elbowed through them to the corridor that ran all the way around the stadium. “Backdraught. I’m unsighted!” she hissed. Which way had Floyd gone? Overflowing garbage cans offered no hiding places. Maybe he’d just needed the loo. She barged into the men’s toilets, drawing cries of outrage and a couple of obscene invitations from punters who shook their dripping junk at her.
“Zero,” Alf came back on the net. “Security has the exits covered. He can’t get out of the stadium. Hunter, do a walkaround on the ground floor. Killer, second tier walkway. Backdraught, get up those stairs.”
Leonie climbed. Ben Corr was high. The tree line petered out in stunted pines and you had to struggle on up slopes of shale, clambering over outcroppings worn by the wind to the shapes of viscera, as if the mountain’s petrified guts were bulging out of ancient wou
nds. Her toes felt like sponges drenched in acid. She burst out into the sunlight on the third and highest tier, and Floyd was nowhere. The walkway was jam-packed, everyone out of their seats and craning to get that bit nearer the fight.
“And Sir Guy is retreating. His footwork still looks good, but he’s favoring his left leg …” Sounded like first blood to Sir Brant. Must’ve happened while Leonie was on the stairs. Still, the two knights must be evenly matched, for the fight to last this long. The punters were getting their money’s worth.
Leonie spun in a slow circle. She saw Princess Madelaine leaning over the front of the royal box. There was another box on the opposite side of the stadium, draped with bright green banners. Faces clustered in it, mouths open wide and black in inaudible shouts. Nearer, Leonie saw a little girl with her whole face painted crimson, black lions on her cheeks, her expression oddly tranquil. To little kids today, what with the television and all, this kind of thing must be a right bore … It’s a sacrifice, Floyd had said. She hoped he got away and found somewhere nice and quiet to drink himself to death.
People were turning around, looking behind her. Leonie tracked their pointing fingers, and there was Floyd on top of the stadium wall, wobbling like a tightrope walker. Sponsored Emigration! said the billboard behind him. Only £500 Buys You a New Life! Swear On with the Khmeria Corporation!
And Floyd stretched out his arms, coat flapping like wings as he swayed like a bird about to take off into the wintry blue sky.
“O-o-ooh!”
Floyd grabbed the bottom corner of the billboard.
“He’s going to fall!”
“How the hell’d he get up there?”
“He must’ve climbed,” Leonie said. “You could do it if you stood on the backs of the top seats, look.”
A couple of yards away from the billboard, a crow perched on the wall. A crow? Too big. A raven. As black as the devil’s underpants.
Leonie thumbed the pressel. “Backdraught. I’ve got him. He’s up on top of the wall. Security needs to get up here. I’m going to try to get him down.”
“Fuck me,” she heard Ed say without identifying himself.
“Zero. Backdraught, does he have a weapon?”
“Not sure. Not that I can see.”
“Be careful. If …” But she didn’t hear what Alf was worried about because another roar rocked the stadium, and Leonie was already on the move anyway, shoving up the last flight of stairs. She climbed over the seats and the people in them to get directly under Floyd. Her fingertips fell a yard short of his feet.
“Floyd! Floyd! Come down from there, you silly fucker!”
He had almost reached the end of the billboard. He glanced down but did not seem to see her. Alf came back in her ear: “… shoot him. Do you understand? If he presents a threat, you are cleared to shoot him.”
Leonie almost laughed. She understood, all right. They were afraid Floyd had gotten himself up high to either snipe at the VIPs, or ‘appeal to the saints’—an old English tradition. When you just couldn’t take it anymore, you made a list of your grievances, found someplace high like the roof of a saint’s shrine in a village square, and started denouncing the fuckers who were getting you down. But she didn’t think Floyd had anything like that in mind. He took a faltering step beyond the safety of the billboard, and everyone around Leonie groaned.
“Come down,” she begged. “Come down, let’s talk!”
“Out of the way, love.” A burly man shoved her aside and bent his knee to make a step. His mate hopped up, grabbed the struts of the billboard, and swung up onto the wall, just as Floyd himself must have done. “Come on, cully, grab hold!” He stretched, but without leaving the support of the billboard, he couldn’t quite reach the back of Floyd’s coat.
With a terrified jerk, Floyd took another step, and another. His mouth moved as if he was talking to the bird that perched ahead of him. Appealing to it.
“—takes the point in his shoulder, uses his own flesh as a shield, and the riposte strikes hoooome! A clean thrust to the heart!”
The bird bounced into the air. Leonie felt the downdraught and smelled the mossy, peaty reek of bogwater. The bird flew straight at Floyd, beak gaping.
He opened his arms to meet it, pirouetted on one foot, and swan-dived off the wall. The wrong, long way down.
Leonie groaned. “He’s jumped,” she shouted over the noise of the crowd. “Backdraught. Suspect has jumped. Check the parking lot.”
The bird winged off into the sky.
“… mortal blow! And it’s over, over! The victory goes to Sir Brant Yates-Briggs, champion of House Wessex!”
19
Oswald
Thirty Seconds Later
Oswald hurtled down the stairs to the armory.
“Make sure the media can’t get in here,” he barked.
Guy lay on his back on the only clear bit of floor in the armory, miraculous relics positioned at the five points of his body, with an extra two under his elbows. The outcome of the fight hadn’t surprised Oswald. Both combatants were world-class swordsmen, both had a personal stake in the fight, but Brant also had the adamantine endurance of the career soldier. He had worn Guy down, sapping the younger man’s energy by keeping his distance, and ended it with the simplest of all strokes, the sacrificial lunge, taking Guy’s blade in his left shoulder and trapping it with his flesh for the instant he needed to run his own point into Guy’s chest. You would never use that technique in tourney, since wounds counted as atteints against you. Guy’s very mastery had let him down.
“Put the relics closer to him!”
The hospitallers scuffled around Guy, arranging his limp arms over the heads of long-dead royalty brought from the Tower of London and the feretory caskets of nameless saints belonging to the stadium. A pair of plastinated hands with inset gold fingernails were laid on Guy’s chest. His tunic spread on either side of his body like broken wings, sopped in a dark pool. The wound in his chest looked too small to have spilled so much blood.
“Why are you doing this?”
Oswald turned his gaze. Colin Argent, that great friend of Guy’s. “He may be saved,” he said briefly.
“He’s dead. Oh, Guy!”
“You give up too easily. I’ve seen men and women saved with their stomachs ripped open by grenade shrapnel. I’ve seen a man live with his entire face blown off—he wished he hadn’t. That’s a clean wound. He has a chance.”
“Through the heart!”
“Death isn’t necessarily immediate.” Oswald looked at his watch: four minutes, the second hand sweeping relentlessly around.
“Oh my God!” Madelaine pushed past him in a swirl of sable-trimmed black. She fell to her knees by Guy’s side. “You stupid bloody man,” she railed. Oswald debated hauling her back, but decided against it—it would do no good for them to be seen quarrelling in public. “You daren’t die,” she whimpered. “Not you, too! I can’t lose everyone …”
“Why?” Colin said to Oswald. “Why do you want to save him?”
“For her,” Oswald admitted. “And for Piers, of course. All I can do for him now is save his brother. Well, try.”
“You’re dishonoring his sacrifice.” Colin plunged forward and stooped to lift Guy’s hands off the relics.
Madelaine screamed. Oswald seized Colin, dragged him away from Guy, and slammed him against a support pillar. “You and your House have already dragged the Sauvages to the brink of the abyss. Now you’d make Guy a martyr to your stupid, hopeless cause. Cretin.”
Madelaine wept quietly.
“I had to make it look good,” Brant Yates-Briggs said, limping in on the arm of his squire. He had a relic bound to his shoulder with gauze, the dressing discolored with drying blood. “The stands were crying for me to take his head.”
“Why didn’t you?” Colin sniffled.
Yates-Briggs yawned enormously. “It would have been too merciful. Think: if he lives, how bitter life will be to him, knowing that his defeat seale
d his brother’s fate! My triumph will be multiplied by the number of his days.” He slid out of his squire’s grasp and sat down on the floor. “Guilty, guilty: I’ve proved it on my honor.” He yawned again.
Oswald looked at his watch again. Six and a half minutes. It was probably hopeless. “I have to go. Darling, I’ll have the helicopter sent back for you.” No use asking Madelaine to leave Guy now.
The chief hospitaller bayed, “He breathes! A miracle, thanks be to the saints! He breathes!”
Oswald shoved the cleric out of the way and picked up Guy’s limp wrist. Holding his breath, he felt a thready, irregular pulse. “He’s not out of danger yet. I would ask you not to move him until he regains consciousness,” he addressed Colin and the other Sauvage hangers-on. Wasting his breath, of course; they’d bundle Guy into a helicopter and decamp as soon as Oswald turned his back.
On his way out, Oswald met a lady-in-waiting hurrying along the passage with Michael at her side. He paused to drop a kiss on his son’s forehead. “Make sure our relics get back safely to the Tower,” he told the lady-in-waiting. “That lot in there are quite capable of walking off with them.”
* * *
Given another month, even another fortnight, Oswald thought he would have been able to save Piers Sauvage, too. But the indecently short lead-up to the trial had outpaced even his planning skills.
He’d pushed the preparations for Operation PREDATOR as far as he dared, even to stockpiling ammunition and fuel at NatChiv. He could go no further without the king’s explicit permission. The alternative was to wait until the ROCK’s A and C Troops rotated back into the country. That would give Oswald a full complement of six hundred knights, if he delayed by a few days—perfectly doable—the scheduled departure of B Troop for Khmeria. But A and C Troops were not due back until the middle of December.
And so it had come to this.
One Sauvage brother half-dead, the other condemned to death, and the king seemingly determined to seal his own House’s fate.
