ALTDORF (The Forest Knights: Book 1) (9 page)

After a grueling three-month journey by land and then sea, the army of children was marching on a dusty road, less than five hours from the gates of Acre, when slavers came for them.

An avalanche of boulders and smaller rocks careened down the steep hillside, crushing a knight and the handful of children in its path. A deafening rumble echoed all around them and dust billowed up and choked the gorge. Then, a hundred men appeared and swarmed down into the ravine like so many ants, yelling and screaming in various languages.

All around Thomas was chaos. Dust hung in the air like smoke and children were running, screaming, trying to escape the slavers who seemed to be everywhere with ropes and leather collars. Thomas saw one of the black knights pinned to the ground with a spear, and two more fighting in the distance, several bodies at their feet.

Thomas pressed his back up against the rock wall of the canyon, trying to disappear, as he watched Zora savage the throat of one of the slavers that moments before had been dragging Pirmin away by his hair. Pirmin snatched up the dead man’s war axe and leveled it at a heavyset man with a full beard and dark, fleshy circles under his eyes who stalked warily towards the snarling dog.

The man raised a heavy crossbow and shot an iron bolt into Zora’s side, lifting her up and throwing her away from the dead man. She yelped, her feet scrambling briefly to find purchase on the rocky ground before her strength gave out and she toppled over on her side.

Zora raised her head once weakly to bite at the shaft lodged deep between her ribs. Shaking with the effort, she was unable to reach it, and finally her head dropped hard to the ground, as though it were made of stone. She panted a few times. Then, with a whole-body shudder, she died.

Pirmin, eyes wide and chest heaving, charged the man with his axe while screaming something in his strange accent that Thomas could not comprehend. The heavy man dropped his crossbow, sidestepped, and caught the axe shaft twisting it out of the young boy’s hands. Then he whipped the butt-end across Pirmin’s face. To the man’s surprise, the enraged boy took the blow, threw his arms around the slaver’s upper legs and drove his head into his stomach, knocking them both to the ground. Pirmin straddled the man and rained blows down upon the man’s face and chest.

Although big, Pirmin was still just a boy and his adversary outweighed him by at least a hundred and fifty pounds. His blows were ineffective and once the man recovered from the fall to the ground and the surprise of the boy’s ferociousness, he rolled the boy over and beat him without mercy until Pirmin’s hands fell limp at his side and blood flowed freely from his mouth and nose.

The slaver stood up quickly, as though embarrassed, and produced a rope from his belt with several leather collars strung along its length. He kicked the stunned Pirmin over on his stomach and kneeled to slip one over Pirmin’s head, cinching the metal buckle in place at the back of his neck. The boy coughed into the dusty ground and moaned, but other than that did not try to fight back.

Thomas stared at the big dog’s still form. Zora was dead, and already at that young age, Thomas knew well the consequences that went along with death. It meant that as soon as she was out of his sight, he would never see her again. And somehow he understood, without the smallest doubt that the man kneeling over Pirmin intended to take Thomas’s friend far away, to a place Pirmin did not want to go.

“Good folk, the Sutters,” Pirmin said, bringing Thomas back to the moment. These days, Thomas hardly noticed his singsong Wallis accent, but others did. Especially women.

“Their girl has a fondness for you,” Thomas said. “Though she is not much more than a child.”

Pirmin laughed, a deep, honest sound that bubbled up from his soul and would put at ease anyone within earshot.

“I have done nothing to encourage that. And even if I had, Mera will be of a marrying age in another season.”

“Do not even think it. She is a child, and you older than her father.” Though, Thomas admitted to himself, Pirmin looked ten years younger than his age and his boyish good looks had faded little over the years.

“Ah but she’s a beauty that one. Might be just the woman to pluck me out of this monk’s life I have been living all these years.”

Thomas grunted. “I think you do not fully grasp the meaning of the word
monk
. Monks do not sleep through matins because they have been out all night whoring.”

“Whoa. Easy now, Captain. I would appreciate it if you did not put me in the company of the common soldier. I do not have anything against whores, a necessary trade if you ask me, but one I prefer not to support. In fact, I have paid for a woman only twice in my life, once—”

Thomas interrupted. “Once before you knew you could get it for free, and another time when your lovemaking was so rigorous you were sure you left the woman with child. I have heard the story more times than you have told it.”

“Ah, yes of course. I know how you and the rest of the lads would whisper about me in the dark of the barracks after I had snuck out.”

Thomas shook his head in denial, but there was some truth to the big man’s words. From a young age Pirmin had developed an appreciation for the fairer sex, and they for him, and so had a tendency to stray from the converted stables that had become the boys home in Acre’s Hospitaller fortress.

By the time he was thirteen he was taller than most men and seemed to know every tavern and shopkeeper in the crowded city. How he managed to escape the fortress at night after the portcullis had been dropped, no one knew, but it was well known that he was the main supplier of goods sold by Max, who ran his own secret merchant stall in the barracks. For many boys, as well as some of the monks, who had lived most of their lives inside the Hospitaller fortress, Pirmin was their link to the outside world, and he played the part well.

A natural entertainer, he told stories of tavern brawls and wild women that few believed, but they hung on every word nonetheless. And when he was led into the courtyard and forced to make what the Abbot termed the
march of shame
to the whipping post, he did so with his head held high and shoulders thrown back, like some mythical hero, as boys laughed and cheered him on. He never cried out when the strap bit into his exposed flesh and when it was done he would limp away, but not without smiling or winking at a few of the other children, as if to say
you know it was worth it.

The Schwyzers were inducted into the Order of Saint John as brother-sergeants; fighting men. They were required to take the Vow of Obediance, and the Vow of Poverty, but not the Vow of Chastity, and that Pirmin often said, was God’s way of telling him that it was his duty to share himself with the female populace. Thomas knew, of course, it merely showed that the Schwyzers were meant to be an expendable military arm of the Order and, since their life expectancy was so very short, nothing more was expected of them.

Still, living amongst monks and priests had had its influence, and unlike Pirmin, Thomas had taken his studies seriously. Women were the origin of sin and Satan’s ultimate instrument of temptation. One that Thomas had successfully resisted his entire life, though he saw little evidence of the Devil in most women.

“I wonder what he is doing now?” Pirmin said suddenly.

“Who?”

“You know, my son.”

“You cannot be talking about the whore you imagined you planted your seed in?” Thomas said.

“Of course. A man can tell when he has sired offspring, you know. Wonder if he looks like me? Or his mother…cannot rightly recall what she looked like though. Comely I think.”

Thomas shook his head. “If you left that woman with child she no doubt went to a witch and had it rooted out.”

“No,” Pirmin said, shaking his head. “I would have known. And why so negative brother? Jealous I have a son out there somewhere?”

“Probably a daughter. A seven-foot hulking brute of a daughter terrifying the countryside.”

Pirmin grimaced and clenched his teeth. The possibility of a daughter had never entered his mind.

“Nah, not possible. Definitely a boy.”

They rode on in silence for a while, the muted thudding of hooves on grass the only sound.

“You ever think about it Thomi? Having a family?”

“No,” he said.

“You should think on it. This would be a nice place to raise one, and I do not know how much longer I will be around. Have to push on to Wallis soon, I suppose.”

Thomas nodded, forgetting it was probably too dark for Pirmin to see the gesture. He would miss the man deeply when he left, though he would never let Pirmin know that. For over thirty years the Order had been his family, and it was strange to imagine being alone, truly alone. Strange, but not frightening, like he had once thought it would be.

A peace washed over him as he imagined living out the rest of his life as a ferryman on the shores of this lake, knowing he had served out his time as God’s soldier to the best of his ability. Perhaps this stage of his life was his reward for faithful service. A taste of Heaven here on Earth.

“Why so quiet? What are you thinking about Thomi? You make me nervous when you get like that.”

Thomas took a deep breath of the warm night air. He nudged Anid with his knees to pick up the pace. The stallion surged ahead.

They were both eager for home.

Chapter 7

G
ISSLER HOVERED at the edge of the trees looking at the small hovel in the distance. An aged man struggled across the muddy courtyard carrying a bucket of slop, each jerky step causing a foul splash down his leg. Finally, with a Herculean effort he upended the bucket into a pigpen’s trough, and a half dozen dirty sows squealed with delight.

The man was gaunt, a fact even the full grey beard and baggy russet clothes could not conceal. Gissler recognized the man as his brother only on some primal, spiritual level, for there was nothing left of the proud older boy he had looked up to as a child. Hugo was only five years older than Gissler, but the bent, misshapen figure shuffling about the pigpen looked to be in his sixties. Gissler could not remember even his father looking as old, or broken, as his brother did now.

The Gisslers had been a family with stature. Being stewards of land for three generations had given them a position of respect within the community and the right to a share of the land’s crops and animals. His father always talked about the peasant class as
those
people. He knew the Gisslers did not have any blue blood, but in his heart he felt they were much closer to the noble class than that of peasants.

He had been wrong. When King Albrecht rewarded a French count the estate, the Gisslers were unceremoniously forced to leave the land they had faithfully managed for more than fifty years. It must have been a devastating transition for his father to learn to rut in the mud as just another peasant, Gissler thought, and upon seeing the sorry living conditions of his elder brother, one that his father could not have survived.

“You come to talk with my papa?”

Gissler whirled at the sound of the voice to see a small girl no older than seven years old. Dirty bare feet stuck out the bottom of her grey, threadbare dress, which may have been pale blue at one time. She had a small mountain flower pinned in her hair and a few more clutched in one tiny hand. In the other she cupped a baby bird close to her chest.

“He is just over there, if you want to talk to him,” she said pointing with her chin.

“What is your name?” Gissler asked, surprised at the little girl’s fearlessness.

“Sara,” she said.

She had her father’s large brown eyes. They were the eyes Gissler remembered from his boyhood.

“Actually, I came to see you,” Gissler said.

Sara’s eyes narrowed. “Why do you want to see me? I am just a kid.”

Gissler laughed and the sound made Sara smile.

“A friend of your father’s asked me to give him something, but I am in a hurry. I was hoping you could give it to him for me. Would you do that?”

Sara shrugged. “I guess so. But I have to put this bird back in his nest first. I saved him from a cat, you know.”