The Fell Sword (7 page)

The Sieur de Rohan flushed. ‘I mean that it is not my way to converse with a lowborn of no consequence.’

Random reached up and none too gently pulled the man’s beard. ‘I think you are just afraid.’ He laughed. ‘Come and issue me a cartel, when I’m whole. Or shut up and go home.’ He smiled at the Captal. ‘I hope I’ve made myself clear.’

The Sieur reached for his dagger.

The Captal caught his wrist. ‘Ser Gerald lost a foot in a feat of arms that any of us would envy,’ he said. ‘You will restrain yourself.’

‘I’ll kill him!’ Rohan said.

Gaston d’Eu materialised out of a side room and placed himself between Rohan and Random, who was standing his ground. He bowed to Random. Random returned his bow and hobbled away.

‘We’re in for some hard times,’ he said to Master Pye.

Ten Leagues North of Albinkirk – Ser John Crayford

Ser John was not dressed in armour.

In fact, he lay on the bank of a small stream dressed in hose so old that the knees had layers of patches, and a cote he’d bought from a peasant farmer ten years before. It was a nameless colour a little lighter than the fur of a barn mouse, and very warm in the late summer sunlight.

Rain had fallen in the night, and there were drops of water caught in the streamside ferns. They caught fire in the rising sun, like tiny, magnificent jewels burning with hermetical fire against the early morning transparent black of the stream that rolled slowly by.

In his right hand he had a rod four paces long, and from it dangled a horsehair line half again as long, and at the end was a hook with a tuft of feathers. He moved cautiously, like a man hunting deer – or something more dangerous. His eyes remained on the wonder of the water-jewels caught in the ferns and he watched them, his heart overflowing, for as long as the effect lasted – a few dozen heartbeats.

And then they became mere drops of water again as the sun’s inexorable rise changed the angle of light, and he moved over the low ridge at the edge of the stream, saw the rock that marked his spot, and his wrist moved, as delicate as a sword cut and as skilled, and his fly sailed back, over his head – he felt the change in tension as his line loaded – and he flicked his rod forward. The line unrolled as if from a drum, and his fly settled on the still black water with the delicacy of a faery harvesting souls.

Even as he released the breath he hadn’t known he was holding, a leviathan exploded from the deeps in a deep green and rainbow-coloured explosion of power, seized its prey and fled for the depths—

Ser John stood straighter and lifted the tip of his rod, sinking his hook home.

The trout resisted the tug, fled, and then leaped clear of the water. Sir John turned the fish over, trying to keep it from putting its full weight on the braided horsehair. He felt the weight gather and stepped to the right, the way he would if facing a deadlier adversary, taking the fish off line and turning it slightly so that it couldn’t get a firm purchase on the water with its fins. It tipped onto its side – and he pulled.

In a moment he had the fish on the bank – in another he’d pinned it with his left foot, and then he drew his roundel dagger and slammed the flat disc of the pommel into the back of the fish’s head, killing it instantly.

Whistling, he extracted the precious fish hook – the work of a master smith – and checked his horsehair line for splits or frays before drawing another knife from the strap of his pouch. He slit the trout from anus to gills, stripped its guts out with his thumb, and tossed them into the stream.

Before they could sink, something with a large green beak snapped them down into the depths, and was gone.

Ser John’s hand went to his sword hilt. It was fewer than sixty days since he’d cleared the last irks from the fields south of Albinkirk, and the new settlers were only now starting to arrive. He was still jumpy.

Just a snapping turtle
, he reassured himself.

But as the sun rose over the edge of the wild, it occurred to Ser John that the snapping turtle, the otter, the beaver – and the trout – were as much creatures of the Wild as the irk, the boggle, or the troll.

He laughed at himself, put his first fish of the day into his net bag and staked it in the stream – carefully, so that he’d know if a snapping turtle was intending to take the fish. He had a spear. If he had to, he could kill the turtle.

‘I love the Wild,’ he said aloud.

And cast again.

The Manor of Middlehill had never been a great one, and the whole was held for the service of a single knight, and had been for ninety years. Helewise Cuthbert stood by the ruins of her gatehouse and her tongue pushed against her teeth in her effort not to weep, while her young daughter stood closer than she had stood in many years.

The Knights of Saint Thomas said that it was safe to return to their homes in the north, and had paid them well in tools and seed to return. Helewise looked at her manor house, and it looked like the skull of a recently killed man – the stone black from fire, the once emerald-green yard strewn with refuse that had once been their tapestries and linens. The windows, purchased with glass from Harndon, a matter of great family pride, were smashed, and the great oak door was lying flat, with a small thorn growing through its little lattice window.

Behind her stood twenty more women. Every one of them was a widow. Their men had died defending Albinkirk – or failing to defend it, or the smaller towns to the south and west of Albinkirk – Hawkshead and Kentmere and Southford and the Sawreys.

They gave a collective sigh that was close to keening.

Helewise settled her face, and gathered her pack. She smiled at her daughter, who smiled back with all the solid cheerfulness of age nineteen.

‘No time like the present,’ Helewise said. ‘It’s the work you don’t start that never gets done.’

Phillippa, her daughter, gave the roll of her head that was the dread of many a mother. ‘As you say, Momma,’ she managed.

Her mother turned. ‘Would you rather give it up?’ she asked. ‘A year’s work, or two, and we’ll be back on our feet. Or we can go be poor relations to the Cuthberts in Lorica, and you’ll become someone’s spinster aunt.’

Phillippa looked at her feet. They were quite pretty, as feet go, and the laces on her shoes had neat bronze points that glittered when she walked. She smiled at her feet. ‘I don’t think I’d like that much,’ she said, thinking of some of the boys in Lorica. ‘And we’re here now. So let’s get to work.’

The next hours were almost as bad as the hours in which they’d fled, while old Ser Hubert rallied the men of the farm to fight the tide of boggles. Phillippa remembered him a sour old man who couldn’t even flirt, but he’d waded into the monsters with an axe and held the road. She remembered looking back and watching him as the axe rose and fell.

Her views on what might be useful in a man had undergone what her mother would call a ‘profound change’.

Jenny Rose, one of the few girls her own age, found the first bodies, and she didn’t scream. These women’s screams were about spent. But other women gathered around her and patted her hands, and old crone Gwyn gave her a cup of elderberry wine, and then they all began to pull the pile of bones and gristle apart. The boggles went onto a pile to burn. The others—

They were husbands and brothers and sons. And, in two cases, daughters. They’d all been eaten – flensed clean. In some ways, that made the task easier. Phillippa hated clearing dead mice out of traps – so squishy, still warm. This wasn’t as bad, even though they were the bones of people she’d known. At least one set of bones belonged to a boy she’d kissed, and a little more.

Stripped of their flesh, they all looked the same.

They found a second pile of the dead later in the day, in the apple orchard. By then, Phillippa was more hardened to it. Or so she thought, until Mary Rose spat and said, ‘These is
midden heaps.
’ She spat again, not in contempt, but in her effort not to retch.

Phillippa and Mary and Jenny were the youngest women, so the three of them were given most of the heavy work. They were all pretty fair at using the shovels, and Phillippa was learning to cut with the axe, although using it raised calluses on her hands that would not please the boys in Lorica. If she ever went back to Lorica.

When the sun was past midday, her mother rang the bell – the monsters didn’t steal the really valuable things, the way reivers and skinners would do. So she went down the hill from the apple orchard. There was an intact rain-barrel under the eaves of the manor house, and she washed her hands.

Jenny Rose smiled. ‘You have nice hands, Phillippa.’

Phillippa smiled. ‘Thanks, Jen. Though I’m afraid they’re going to get worse before they get better.’

Mary Rose paused to dip her own hands. ‘What were the boys like in Lorica?’ she asked, bold as brass.

‘Mary Rose!’ said her sister.

‘Much like boys everywhere, I expect,’ said a new voice.

Standing by the corner of the house was a tall, slim woman in a nun’s black habit with the cross of Saint Thomas on it. She smiled at the girls. ‘Handsome, funny, angry, preening, stupid, vain, and wonderful,’ the nun continued. ‘Are you Phillippa? Your mother was worried.’

The three girls curtsied together. Jenny and Mary made a stiff obeisance, the kind that the village priest taught you. Phillippa sank down, back straight and legs apparently boneless. ‘Sister?’ she asked.

The nun had a beautiful smile. ‘Come,’ she said.

Jenny whispered, ‘Teach me to do that.’

Supper was ham and cheese and good bread that must have come from the fortress with the nun. The mill at Gracwaite cross was a burned-out ruin, and none of the towns around Albinkirk had had bread – fresh bread – in weeks.

There was a fine palfrey in the yard, and a mule.

The nun was a curiosity – neither particularly well bred, nor ill-bred. She was somehow too
robust
to be a noblewoman – her brown hair was rich but unruly, her lips were a little too lush, and her eyes had more of command than languor. But Phillippa admired her immensely.

The nun had a tonic effect on the gathered women. She seemed oblivious to the shadow over all of them, and she had brought seeds for late planting. The mule was to stay as a plough animal until the fortress sent oxen.

‘I gather that you have found quite a few dead,’ she said. She said it quite plainly, without the embellishment of false sentiment.

‘Almost all the men,’ Helewise noted. ‘We haven’t found Ser Hubert. I’d expect to know him. He had his brigandine on.’

‘I saw him fighting,’ Phillippa said, without meaning to. ‘I saw his axe. I never liked him. I wasn’t nice to him.’ Her voice cracked. ‘He died for us.’

The nun nodded. ‘Hard times change us all, in ways that are far beyond our little knowledge,’ she said. ‘They teach us things about ourselves.’ She frowned.

Then she looked up. ‘Let us pray,’ she said. When she was done, they ate in relative silence. And when she’d finished her share, the nun rose. ‘When we’ve washed up, let’s go bury the dead and say the service,’ she said.

Phillippa, who had never been a great one for religion, was surprised by how moved she was by the nun’s quiet prayers, her open-faced plea to heaven for the souls of the departed, and by her homily – on how deeply they’d all been touched, and how they must trust in God.

When the nun was finished, she smiled and kissed each woman on both cheeks. Then she walked to the pile of dead boggles. They didn’t smell, but they didn’t rot as men do – their leathery hides and the heavy cartilage of their ‘shells’ took time to return to the soil.

‘God made the Wild, as surely as he made Man,’ said the nun. ‘Although these were our enemies, we pray you take them to you.’

The nun raised her face to heaven, closed her eyes, and made the sign of the cross; the entire pile turned to sand.

Twenty women lost the ability to breathe for a moment.

The nun turned to Helewise. ‘The afternoon is yet young. Now, about the seed?’

Ser John had fished for too long.

He caught and killed more than ten pounds of trout – perhaps much more than ten pounds – and the fishing was superb, at least in part because most of the other fishermen were dead. He didn’t want to stop, but as the sun began to sink in the west he made himself pull his line off the water. He was a mile downstream from where he’d started – a mile from his horse, and, he suddenly realised, a mile from his spear.

Feeling more foolish than afraid, he plucked his harvest from the water and started back along the bank. The late summer sunlight was still strong and red, and the Wild had seldom looked less threatening but Ser John was too old in the ways of the Wild to be fooled by it, though. He moved quickly, making as little noise as he could.

He’d travelled a quarter of the distance back to his horse when something alerted him – a movement, perhaps, or a sound. He froze, and then, very slowly, lowered himself to the ground.

He lay still for a long time, watching, and the sun’s angle steepened. Then he rose and began to stride rapidly along the trail. Every stream like this one had a trail along its bank – men made them, and so did the Wild. They shared the trails.

When he was just a bowshot from his horse, he climbed a tree to have a look. There were no carrion birds but there was a persistent rustling away to the south, and twice he heard the distant crash of a large animal moving too quickly for stealth. And darkness was just an hour away.

He swung down from the tree, cursing his shoulder muscles, his age, and how much all this was going to hurt the following day – but he paused to pluck his bag of fish from the ground by the tree.

To his immense relief – he hadn’t even known how worried he had been – his horse was merely nervous, not boggle-food. He saddled the big riding horse – a failed warhorse – and fetched his heavy spear from the crotch of a forked tree where he’d left it at sunrise.

‘I’m an idiot,’ he said aloud. Calm again.

The Wild’s army was beaten, but the woods were still full of danger. He had been very foolish to leave his horse. He stood with it, calming it.