The Ravens of Falkenau & Other Stories (2 page)

With a grin, Lukan unsheathed his sword. It was lighter than mine, but longer, Italian in design, with a swept hilt. I hoped he wouldn't kill me.

He raised the blade in ironic salute, then stepped forward, the blade whistling past my eyes as I stepped back.

Then I went absolutely cold.

I swung at him with all my strength, connecting with his blade with a shock and a ringing sound like bells, flailing at him like a battering ram. His blade was faster, his responses much cleaner. I did not see or think, only reacted, as though my entire self were concentrated in my hand instead of my head, as though this was a dance I had known all my life.

I could not hear the crowd. All I could hear was the whistle of his blade, and the sound as it connected with the pommel of my sword, wrenching it from my hand and sending it clattering across the cobblestones.

"Hold!" the captain said.

I stopped, my breath loud in my ears.

Lukan lowered his blade. "This boy flails around like he's threshing wheat," he said.

"Like he's got a damned broadsword," the Dane muttered.

I felt something moving against my chin and brushed it away, surprised to see my hand come away bloody.

Lukan stepped across the distance between us. "I got you with the tip on my first attack. You didn't even feel it." He handed me a linen square from his pocket. It took me a moment to realize it was a handkerchief.

"Where do you come from, boy?" the Dane asked.

I dabbed cautiously at the cut on my chin, which still didn't hurt. "My father was in the service of the King of Saxony," I replied. "He was killed fighting the Tartars in Wallachia." Which was all entirely untrue, as my father was a cobbler and died when I was six.

The Dane raised skeptical eyebrows. "And then? You fell on hard times?"

I looked down at my shabby peasant clothes and tried to stand straighter, as befitted a young nobleman bereft of everything in the world but his name and his pride. "Very hard, sir."

The Captain frowned. "Have you no family to object to your taking a position as a common soldier?"

"None, sir." I did not have to lie about that. "My mother died recently. I have no other family."

Lukan looked at the Dane and shrugged. Shorty raised an eyebrow. I held my breath.

"Oh very well," the captain said. "Father, read him in and pay him. Shorty, you'll have to do something about that sword. He thinks it's the Goddamned Crusades. Read him in and pay him off." The captain turned and strode away.

That is how I joined Von Boren's company, when I was just short of sixteen. I know this, because it was March then, and I was born under the sign of the Bull in the fullness of spring in the year 1596.

That summer we fought for one of the
Lusatian
princes in his quarrel with his brother-in-law. I learned to fire a musket propped on a tripod, to disassemble it, clean it, and coat it with warm oil, to keep powder dry and match alight. I could hit the target better than some, but also worse than some, not that anyone hit often with those hideously inaccurate guns.

That fall we were paid in full, quartered decently, and in the spring we sacked Cottbus for the Margrave of Brandenburg. I won a horse there, which I could ride, and also killed two civilians, which made me sick, though not too sick to take their gold.

I was seventeen then, a man grown. I would never be large, as few of us Bavarians are, but my beard came in dark and glossy and covered the scar on my chin. I killed a Swede in a tavern fight in Prague after the captain was killed and the Duke turned us off, so it was all for the best that Marik and I, and three other men of the company, went up to Falkenau.

That night we made merry in the best inn in town, while the townsmen watched us suspiciously, as out of work mercenaries don't have a reputation for keeping the peace. Outside the snow was falling soundlessly. All you could see of the fortress were some distant lights on the crag.

Marik, of course, had found someone he knew who was in the Old Lord's employ and was offering him good wine by the fire and pumping him for information.

I sat staring idly out the front window, warming my hands around my cup and wondering why the barmaid was both unfriendly and a hag, listening to Marik and the guardsman with half an ear.

"Old days!" the guardsman said, lifting his cup, Marik following suit.

"Old days! Things aren't like they used to be!"

"No, indeed." The guardsman drank. "Everything goes from bad to worse."

"Does it?" Marik said. "I thought you had it good, with a nice permanent post at arms for a lord with money to spend."

"Not so much money as that," the guardsman said, and drank again. "And not much mood for spending it."

"Oh?" Marik asked, refilling his cup. "Why's that?"

"He lost his lady wife scarce a
sevenday
ago. Childbed. Poor woman threw five sons in a row, and not one of them saw his first birthday. Now she's had a girl and died of it. The Lord's like to lose his mind."

"A hard thing. Hard thing," Marik sympathized.

I took another long drink, waiting for the familiar feeling of the world tilting in good red wine.

The garrulous guardsman continued. "Most likely this babe will die, same as the others. Then he'll have no heir."

"No heir's the same as a girl child," Marik said.

"It's said she's a sickly thing," the guardsman said sadly.

The swirling snow made shapes out of wind. There were lights in the high towers of the fortress.

Somewhere up there the Lord in his comfortable rooms lost his wife in winter, and the last of his line lay near death, a sickly babe in a cradle lined in velvet.

"Death," I said softly, and toasted the distant lights in the snow.

It was nineteen years before I came back to Falkenau.

I took service with the King of Poland to hold back the Tartars, and spent four years fighting up and down Silesia for his gold and a long scar on my sword arm. I learned to ride like a Pole, which is to say as if I'd been born on horseback, and decided to live no other way unless necessity forced me. I loved a girl in Warsaw who played me false, and I went away to war again.

In Prague the young King of Bohemia, Frederick, and his Protestant English bride took on the might of the Holy Roman Emperor, and angry townsmen threw the Pope's men out the windows of the hall. I served Frederick and his bride, Elizabeth, the Winter Queen, with a joy I saw no reason for. It was right to me, and fair that her name was Elizabeth, and she was beleaguered and alone, but she was no tactician. In the end they fled, and Marik died in their last battle, covering the Queen's retreat, and I had had enough of queens.

I won a blackened Italian rapier off a corpse in Brandenburg, and a fine Andalusian horse from the Palatine cavalry. I loved a girl in Ulm, left her with child, returned and found her dead, and I had had enough of women.

The Protestant princes allied against the Holy Roman Emperor, and the King of Sweden joined them. I had a company now, all cavalry, in buff and black. I wore French lace at my cuffs now, and sat in inns deciding who should live and who should die.

We joined the Catholic army when Gustavus Adolphus, the King of Sweden, landed. I could care less whose God won.

More interesting to me were the stars and their endless patterns, wherein a wise man could read the future and a foolish man see hopes. Alchemy interested me too, and history. My hand became fair from reading and writing dispatches, and at night when I could not sleep I read whatever came to hand — war and passion, descriptions of new lands across the seas for the winning, legends and bloody histories of things that happened long ago.

Sometimes, in the darkness, they took on life to me and it seemed that I had lived there and been a part of those tales. Somewhere in the west I had died in Templar's mail at a contested river ford, or hidden restless in high Scottish hills, a bowman fighting for an exiled king. It seemed I had knelt breathless before a red-haired princess, or in woman's body borne a child in white Alexandria under a scorching sun, stood veiled on a galley sailing through crystal seas. But these were fancies, and did little more than beguile my dreams when all I could think of were battles.

In the early spring just before my twenty-ninth birthday I was called into Prague. The Emperor had given command of all his forces to a new Generalissimo, Wallenstein, a mercenary who had begun fighting the Turks. He was the greatest soldier of the age.

He was in his fifties then, lean and supple with the bitter strength of a man who has spent his youth at war and his age in courts. He had black eyes and a firm handshake.

"Please sit down, Captain Von Marianburg," he said, gesturing to one of the two great carved chairs before the fire.

I sat down opposite him then, taking care not to singe the Belgian lace at my boot tops on the fender.

He wore a huge ruby on his hand that exactly matched the crimson sash of the Imperial army. "You come to me recommended," he said, "by Count Trcka, a very trustworthy soldier."

I did not answer, only waited for him to continue.

He watched me sharply. "You fought in Poland, I understand."

"I did," I replied.

"Against the infidel," he said.

"Yes," I agreed. "But I do not care much for all that. One God is as good as another."

Wallenstein laughed. "You are not a patriot, then."

"I am a mercenary," I said. "I fight for gold. If you have heard that I will not commit my men to a hopeless fight, it is a matter of economics, that's all. I would be foolish to squander my livelihood."

Wallenstein smiled thinly. "Yet you claim a nobleman's name and honor."

"As do you," I replied.

He laughed then and ordered the servant to pour us French brandy. Then he dismissed the man. "The Emperor," he said abruptly, "is a fool. So is the Pope. I could care less who sits on either throne. But I am Bohemian, and I have grown tired of Bohemia spoiled by eleven years of war. We must put an end to this."

I shifted restlessly in the carved chair. "I have no love for the Swede," I said, "or for the Emperor. What is it to me who rules Bohemia? My price is gold, nothing more."

Wallenstein watched me closely, pouring out a drop more of the brandy with long, elegant hands. "I have discovered," he said, "that men have more than one price. It occurs to me that there is something for which you might serve more faithfully than for gold."

I laughed. "And what would that be, sir?"

"Land," he said. "Land to call your own, to be your own and your heirs' forever, a hearth to retire to and money to sustain you when you are old." He spread his blue veined hands to the flames. "Believe me, you will be old."

I stared at him, scarcely believing what I heard. Land was of all things the most impossible. I may as well have set my price at a Cardinal's robe.

The Generalissimo continued on as though he had noticed nothing. "Those who serve me well, who are loyal to me, and through me to the Emperor, will be awarded lands of suitable size reclaimed by the Emperor from the rebel lords."

"I see," I said quietly, as unbidden to my mind came the picture of green hills, herds of grazing horses, church towers against the morning sky. There was a sword blade between me and them.

"Those who serve me faithfully," Wallenstein said.

"I am your true man," I replied. "My word is my bond."

"I would not have your bond," the old man said. "Hope of reward is better than any bond. Instead, I hold out to you this hope, and I give you command over two other companies besides your own. I have work for you, Captain."

We met General von
Mansfeld
at Dessau in April, a deathtrap on the Elbe River, the acrid cannon smoke yellow against the fog.
 
The fight was like a dream, scattered impressions of entrails in the mud, yellow streaks in the sky, and the booming of our guns.

I took a musket ball through the left thigh, shattering the bone just below the socket. My Second, a Scotsman named McDonald, stood the surgeons off with a knife when they tried to amputate, so I did not die, but the bone set wrong, leaving me with a pit in my thigh the size of a plum and a ragged, ugly limp that would last me the rest of my life.

It was nearly a year before I could walk again, and two before I could fight at all on foot. I learned to carry my authority from the saddle, as Wallenstein had made me a colonel when it was certain that I would live.

My hair and beard were streaked with white now, but my spurs were gilded and my doublet was of black velvet, with wide falls of lace at the throat. I commanded eight hundred men in the service of the Holy Roman Emperor.

Nineteen years had passed. In the spring of 1633 the tide of war again turned to Bohemia, and with the spring came my orders and dispatches. There, above Wallenstein's signature was the phrase. "In order to secure supply lines in our rear, and to break rebel support in the upcountry, you are hereby ordered to use whatever force you deem necessary to take the fortress of Falkenau."

The old lord of Falkenau was long dead, and the lands had passed to a distant cousin, Lord Jindrich, who was married to the old lord's daughter. They were Protestant, and Jindrich had led troops in rebellion against the Emperor. It was certainly well within our rights to attack the castle.