The Red Knight (14 page)

Gerald Random had such a warrant himself. He’d served in the north, fighting the Wild. And now he was leading a rich convoy to the great market fair of Lissen Carak as the commander, the
principle investor, and the owner of most of the wagons.

His should be the largest convoy on the road and the best display at the fair.

His wife Angela laid a long white hand on his arm. ‘You find your wagons more beautiful than you find me,’ she said. He wished that she might say it with more humour, but at least
there
was
humour.

He kissed her. ‘I’ve yet time to prove otherwise, my lady,’ he said.

‘The future Lord Mayor does not take his wife for a ride in the bed-carriage while his great northern convoy awaits his pleasure!’ she said. She rubbed his arm through his heavy wool
doublet. ‘Dinna’ fash yourself, husband. I’ll be well enough.’

Guilbert, the oldest and most reliable-looking of the hireling swordsmen, approached with a mixture of deference and swagger. He nodded – a compromise between a bow and a failure to
recognise authority. Random took it to mean something like
I have served great lords and the king, and while you are my commander, you are not one of them.

Random nodded.

‘Now that I see the whole convoy,’ Guilbert nodded at it. ‘I’d like six more men.’

Random looked back over the wagons – his own, and those of the goldsmiths, the cutlers, the two other drapers, and the foreign merchant, Master Haddan, with his tiny two wheel cart and his
strange adult apprentice, Adle. Forty-four wagons in all.

‘Even with the cutlers’ men?’ he asked. He kept his wife there by taking her hand when she made to slip away.

Guilbert shrugged. ‘They’re fair men, no doubt,’ he said.

Wages for six more men – Warrant men – would cost him roughly the whole profit on one wagon. And the sad fact was that he couldn’t really pass any part of the cost on to the
other merchants, who had already paid – and paid well – to be in his convoy.

Moreover, he had served in the north. He knew the risks. And they were high – higher every year, although no one seemed to want to discuss such stuff.

He looked at his wife, contemplating allowing the man two more soldiers.

He loved his wife. And the worry on her face was worth spending more than the value of a cart to alleviate. And what would the profit be, should his convoy be taken or scattered?

‘Do you have a friend? Someone you can engage at short notice?’ he asked.

Guilbert grinned. It was the first time that the merchant had seen the mercenary smile, and it was a surprisingly human, pleasant smile.

‘Aye,’ the man said. ‘Down on his luck. I’d esteem it a favour. And he’s a good man – my word on it.’

‘Let’s have all six. Eight, if we can get them. I have a worry, so let’s be safe. Money is not all there is,’ he said, looking into his wife’s eyes, and she
breathed out pure relief. Some dark omen had been averted.

He hugged her for a long time while apprentices and journeymen kept their distance, and when Guilbert said he needed an hour by the clock to get his new men into armour – meaning
they’d pawned theirs and needed to redeem it – Random took his wife by the hand and took her upstairs. Because there were so
many
things that were more important than money.

But the sun was still in the middle of the spring sky when forty-five wagons, two hundred and ten men, eighteen soldiers, and one merchant captain started north for the fair. He knew that he was
the ninth convoy on the great road north – the longest to assemble, and consequently, the last that would reach Lissen Carak’s great supply of grain. But he had the goods and the wagons
to buy
so much
grain that he didn’t think he’d be the loser, and he had a secret – a trade secret – that might make him the greatest profit in the history of the
city.

It was a risk. But surprisingly for a man of money, as the lords called his kind, Gerald Random loved risk as other men loved money, or swords, or women, and he set his sword at his hip, his
dagger on the other, with a round steel buckler that would not have disgraced a nobleman, and smiled. Win or lose, this was the moment he loved. Starting out. The dice cast, the adventure
beginning.

He raised his arm, and he heard the sounds of men responding. He sent a pair of the mercenaries forward, and then he let his arm fall. ‘Let’s go!’ he called.

Whips cracked, and animals leaned into their loads, and men waved goodbye to sweethearts and wives and children and brats and angry creditors, and the great convoy rolled away with creaking
wheels and jingling harness and the smell of new paint.

And Angela Random knelt before her icon of the Virgin and wept, the tears as hot as her passion of an hour before.

Lissen Carak – The Red Knight

Seven men had died fighting the wyvern. The corpses were wrapped in plain white shrouds because that was the rule of the Order of Saint Thomas, and they gave off a sickly sweet
smell – corruption and zealous use of sweet herbs, and bitter myrrh burned in the censors that hung in the front of the chapel.

The whole fighting strength of his company stood in the nave, shifting uneasily as if facing an unexpected enemy. They wore no armour, bore no weapons, and some were very ill-dressed; not a few
wore their arming cotes with mail voiders because they had no other jacket, and at least one man was bare-legged and ashamed. The captain was plainly dressed in black hose and a short black jupon
that fitted so tightly that he couldn’t bend over – his last decent garment from the Continent. His only nod to his status was the heavy belt of linked gold and bronze plaques around
his hips.

Their apparent penury contrasted with the opulence of the chapel – even with the shrines and crosses swathed in purple for Lent, or perhaps the more so
because
the purple of Lent
was so rich. Except that nearer to hand, the captain could see the edge of a reliquary peaking out from beneath its silken shroud, the gilt old and crazed, the wood broken. Tallow, not wax, burned
in every sconce except the altar candelabra, and the smell of burning fat was sharp against the sweet and the bitter.

The captain noted that Sauce wore a kirtle and a gown. He hadn’t seen her dressed as a woman since her first days with the company. The gown was fine, a foreign velvet of ruddy amber,
somewhat faded except for one diamond shaped patch on her right breast.

Where her whore’s badge was sewn
, he thought. He glared at the crucified figure over the altar, his pleasant, detached mood destroyed.
If there is a god, how can he allow so much
fucking misery and deserve my thanks for it?
The captain snorted.

Around him the company sank to their knees as the chaplain, Father Henry, raised the consecrated host. The captain kept his eyes on the priest, and watched him throughout the ritual that
elevated the bread to the sacred body of Christ – even surrounded by his mourning company, the captain had to sneer at the foolishness of it. He wondered if the stick-thin priest believed a
word of what he was saying – wondered idly if the man was driven insane by the loneliness of living in a world of women, or if he was consumed by lust instead. Many of the sisters were quite
comely, and as a soldier, the captain knew that comeliness was in the eye of the beholder and directly proportionate to the length of time since one’s last leman. Speaking of which—

He happened to catch Amicia’s eye just then. He wasn’t looking at her – he was very consciously not looking at her, not wanting to appear weak, smitten, foolish, domineering,
vain . . .

He had a long list of things he was trying not to appear.

Her sharp glance said,
Don’t be so rude – Kneel
, so clearly he almost felt he had heard the words said aloud.

He knelt. She had a point – good manners had more value than pious mouthing. If that was her point. If she had, indeed, even looked at him.

Michael stirred next to him, risked a glance at him. The captain could see that his squire was smiling.

Beyond him, Ser Milus was trying to hide a smile as well.

They want me to believe. Because my disbelief threatens their belief, and they need solace.

The service rolled on as the sun flared its last, nearly horizontal beams throwing brilliant coloured light from the stained glass across the white linen shrouds of the dead.

The coloured light grew – and every soldier gasped as the blaze of glory swept across the bodies.

It’s a trick of the light, you superstitious fools!
He wanted to shout it aloud. And at the same time, he felt the awe just as they did – felt the increase in
his pulse.
They hold the service at this hour to take advantage of the sun and those windows
, he thought.
Although it would be very difficult to time the whole service to arrange it
,
he admitted to himself.
And the sun cannot be at the right angle very often.

Even the priest had stumbled in the service.

Michael was weeping. He was scarcely alone. Sauce was weeping and so was Bad Tom. He was saying ‘Deo gratias’ over and over again through his tears, his rough voice a counterpoint to
Sauce’s.

When it was all done, the knights of the company bore the corpses on litters made from spears, out of the chapel and back down the hill to bury them in the consecrated ground by the shrine at
the bridge.

Ser Milus came and put his hand on the captain’s shoulder – a rare familiarity – and nodded. His eyes were red.

‘I know that cost you,’ he said. ‘Thanks.’

Jehannes grunted. Nodded. Wiped his eyes on the back of his heavy firze cote sleeve. Spat. Finally met his eye too. ‘Thanks,’ he said.

The captain just shook his head. ‘We still have to bury them,’ he said. ‘They remain dead.’

The procession left by the chapel’s main door, led by the priest, but the Abbess was the focal point, now in severe and expensive black with a glittering crucifix of black onyx and white
gold. She nodded to him and he gave her a courtly bow in return. The perfection of the Abbess’s black habit with its eight-pointed cross contrasted with the brown-black of the priest’s
voluminous cassock over his cadaver-thin body. And the captain could smell the tang of the man’s sweat as he passed. He was none too clean, and his smell was spectacular when compared with
the women.

The nuns came out behind their Abbess. Virtually all of the cloister had come to the service, and there were more than sixty nuns, uniform in their slate grey habits with the eight pointed cross
of their order. Behind them came the novices – another sixty women in paler grey, some of a more worldly cut, showing their figures, and others less.

They wore grey and it was twilight, but the captain had no difficulty picking out Amicia. He turned his head away in time to see an archer known as Low Sym make a gesture and give a whistle.

The captain suddenly felt his sense of the world restored. He smiled.

‘Take that man’s name,’ he said to Jehannes . . . ‘Ten lashes, disrespect.’

‘Aye, milord.’ Marshal Jehannes had his hand on the man’s collar before the captain had taken another breath. Low Sym – nineteen, and no woman’s friend –
didn’t even thrash. He knew a fair cop when he felt one.

‘Which I was—’ he began, and saw the captain’s face. ‘Aye, Captain.’

But the captain’s eyes rested on Amicia. And his thoughts went elsewhere.

The night passed in relaxation, and to soldiers, relaxation meant wine.

Amy’s Hob was still abed, and Daud the Red was fletching new arrows for the company and admitted to being ‘poorly’, company slang for a hangover so bad it threatened combat
effectiveness. Such a hangover would be punishable most days – the day after they buried seven men was not one of them.

The camp had its own portable tavern run by the Grand Sutler, a merchant who paid the company a hefty fee to ride along with his wagons and skim their profits when they had some to share. He, in
turn, bought wine and ale from the fortress’ stores, and from the town at the foot of Lissen Carak – four streets of neat stone cottages and shop fronts nestled inside the lower walls
and called ‘The Lower Town’. But the Lower Town was open to the company as well, and its tavern, hereabouts known as the Sunne in Splendour, was serving both in its great common room
and out in the yard. The inn was doing a brisk business, selling a year’s worth of ale in a few hours. Craftsmen were locking up their children.

That was not the captain’s problem. The captain’s problem was that Gelfred was planning to venture back to the tree line alone, while the captain had no intention of risking his most
valuable asset without protection. And no protection was available.

Gelfred stood in the light rain outside his tent, swathed in a three-quarter length cloak, thigh high boots and a heavy wool cap. He tapped his stick impatiently against his boot.

‘If this rain keeps up, we’ll never find the thing again,’ he said.

‘Give me a quarter hour to find us some guards,’ the captain snapped.

‘A quarter hour we may not have,’ Gelfred said.

The captain wandered through the camp, unarmoured and already feeling ill-at-ease with his decision to dress for comfort. But he, too, had drunk too much and too late the night before. His head
hurt, and when he looked into the eyes of his soldiers, he knew that he was in better shape than most. Most were still drinking.

He’d paid them. It improved his popularity and his authority, but it gave them the wherewithal to be drunk.

So they were.

Jehannes was sitting in the door of his pavilion.

‘Hung over?’ the captain asked.

Jehannes shook his head. ‘Still drunk,’ he answered. Raised a horn cup. ‘Want some?’