The Red Knight (66 page)

The Captain of Albinkirk sat at his glazed window, and watched the distant woods.

Michael the Squire

East of Albinkirk – Thorn

T
horn sat cross-legged beneath the tree that bore his name and watched the world.

He couldn’t pretend that he liked what he saw.

He had suffered a crushing defeat the day before – the little army that the sisterhood had hired, led by the dark sun that could extinguish itself – had combined with the last convoy
coming upriver to crush his best mobile force.

Even now, he couldn’t reach any of his chieftains among the irks. Boglins were coming back across the river. But the losses had been staggering.

And he could feel the waves of sheer power that still rolled across the sea of trees from the fight. Someone almost as great as him had loosed powers that were better left unloosed. That power
sang through the Wild like a clarion call. And Thorn knew the taste of that power.

I should have been there
, he thought. His stone mouth creased in a near smile.
My great apprentice, free from his tower and loose on the world at last.
He flexed the reins of his
spell of ensorcellment, but the reins hung slack, severed at the far end, and he reeled them in.
I wonder how the boy worked it out?
He thought. But he didn’t waste much thought on it.
His apprentice had tricked him once and would never, ever best him again.

But his rebellious apprenctice wasn’t the only problem. Someone had killed three of the dhags which men called trolls, the great cave giants armoured in stone of the high mountains. He had
only bound a dozen to serve him, and now three were slain.

And perhaps the worst blow of all was the Sossag’s defection. Their chiefs had deserted him, and gone east to fight their own battle. Had they been present with his force, none of this
would ever have happened.

Thorn wheeled his starlings and doves in the sky, and looked down from their eyes, and knew that he had been misled by the powers in the old fortress. The assault of the birds of prey had pushed
his little helpers away. And he had been blind.
For one scant hour.

But in his hand was a precious jewel. His friend had, at last, sent him word. Detailed word.

Despite the defeat, he now had the true measure of his enemy, and his enemy was not as strong as Thorn had feared. He didn’t like the taste of their power, but he didn’t need to fear
their soldiers. They were too few.

Thorn had not risen to power by ignoring the causes of defeat. He didn’t accept false pride. He acknowledged that he had been fooled, and beaten, and immediately altered his plans.

First, the Sossag had won a victory that would serve his ends – and they were badly hurt and their leaders looked fools. This was the time to force them back to their allegiance to him. He
needed them, and their ruthless human cleverness – so very different, and so much more cunning than the irks and bogglins.

He needed to consult with his allies among the Qwethnethog daemons, and he needed to convince them, with a show of force, that he was still the master of these woods. Lest they slip away
too.

He savoured the irony. He was attacking the Rock for them, and yet they threatened to defect.

He sighed, because all these petty inter-plays of emotion and interest resembled the very politics that had driven him away from other men, when he was a man. The Wild had been his escape and
now proved the same.

It was foolish that he needed a victory to convince the unwilling when he could take the lives of most of his allies merely by reaching into the essence of their Wildness and
pulling
—

He remembered one of his students admonishing him that you could not convince men by killing them, and he smiled at the memory. The boy had been both right and wrong. Thorn had never been very
interested in convincing anyone.

But reminiscence would solve nothing. He withdrew his attention from the doves and the lynx and the fox, the hares were all dead, taken by dogs, and he moved his thinly distributed consciousness
back to the body he had made for it.

A dozen irks stood guard over him, and he acknowledged them. ‘Summon my captains,’ he said in the harsh croak he now had as a voice, and they flinched and obeyed.

West of Albinkirk – Gaston

The army that now trailed north on the last stretch to Albinkirk, was many times larger than the elite force that had left Harndon a week before. And much, much slower.

Gaston sat his horse in the midst of a road blockage bigger than some towns in his home province and shook his head. He was watching four men who sat hunched under a bridge, eating a side of
bacon.

‘It’s like the rout of a beaten army,’ he said in low Archaic. ‘Except that it is still headed towards the enemy.’

The king was virtually unapproachable, now, as the entire knight-service of the country had reported in, and all of his great lords surrounded him. No longer could Jean de Vrailly pretend to
threaten the king with his three hundred knights – his convoy was no longer the largest. The Count of the Borders, Gareth Montroy, came in with five hundred knights, hard men in lighter
armour than the Galles but just as tall, and five hundred archers as well. The Lord of Bain’s banner led another two hundred knights, with the popinjay Edward Despansay, Lord Bain, at their
head. They were the great lords, with uniformed retinues of professional warriors who trained together, but there also were hundreds of individual knights from the counties under the King’s
Lieutenant’s banner, and almost a hundred of the king’s own Royal Knights, his elite bodyguard that also canvassed the countryside as justices and monster hunters under the king’s
trusted bastard brother, Ser Richard Fitzroy. There were another hundred knights of the military orders, priests and brothers and lay brothers of Saint George and Saint Maurice and Saint Thomas
whose discipline was as good or better than any company Gaston had ever seen, riding silently in their black-robed armour under the Prior of Pynwrithe and his marshal.

All together the king had more than two thousand knights and as many again men-at-arms, plus three thousand infantry who varied in quality from the superb – the green clad Royal Huntsmen
rode ahead of the column and covered its flanks, dashing silently through the increasingly dense brush on specially trained horses, although they fought on foot as archers – to the
ridiculous: county levies with spears and no armour who served for twenty days or until their side of bacon was eaten.

The men at his feet were eating as quickly as they could.

His beautiful cousin was riding at the head of his convoy. He wore his full harness – all the Galles did – and rode a war horse. But the last few days, the Alban knights had begun to
do the same – not all at once, but in fits and starts. And in the evenings, they had begun to practise with their lances and with their swords, with their horses formed in great long
lines.

And de Vrailly went from group to group, praising some and challenging others. He praised the diligent and ignored the lazy, and men began to speak of him.

Knightly men. Not this sort.

Gaston watched the men under the bridge, and they watched him, chewing and swallowing as quickly as they could manage, forcing the cooked bacon down their gullets.

He gave his horse some rein and she picked her way down the grassy bank to the stream. The men under the bridge began to pick up their belongings, but he raised a hand to forestall them.

‘We haven’t done nothing,’ a sandy-haired yokel with a short beard said, raising two greasy hands.

Gaston shook his head. ‘Answer me the one thing,’ he said carefully. Speaking Alban always left him feeling muddled.

The sandy-haired one shrugged. Gaston noted that he hadn’t said one word of polite greeting – neither saluted, nor bowed.

Albans. A nation of fools and outlaws.

‘Why are you so anxious to eat your cooked ham and scurry home?’ he asked. He walked his mare forward another few steps so that they could hear him better. He looked down at
them.

All four of them looked at him as if he, not they, was the fool.

‘Cause my wife needs me home?’ said one.

‘Cause it’s going to be haying in another ten day, if the sun keeps on,’ said the second man. He had a fine linen shirt and a silver ring on his finger. By Galle standards,
Alban farmers were rich, fat and very ill-mannered.

‘Cause my duty says I can go home when this here bacon is et,’ said the third, a long-haired old man. His hair was mostly white and Gaston could see the outline of a crusading badge
on his tunic, carefully removed.

‘You have fought before, eh?’ he asked.

The older man nodded, his face still. ‘Right enough, boyo,’ he said. Here under the bridge, their voices echoed.

‘Where?’ Gaston asked.

‘In the East,’ the old man said, and took another bite of bacon. ‘And before that, under Ser Gilles de Laines, against the Paynim. With Lord Bain, too. And under the old king,
at Chevin. Ever heard of it?’

Gaston smiled. ‘You are pleased to make game of me,’ he said pleasantly.

‘Nah,’ said the old archer. ‘You foreigners don’t really know much about war, and you haven’t ever seen a big fight like Chevin. If you had, you wouldn’t be
asking us these tom-fool questions. We’re eating our bacon so we can get home and not fight. Because it’s going to be horrible, and I, for one, know just fucking how it’s going to
be. And my son-in-law and his two friends here will all come with me.’

Gaston was shocked by the man’s tone, and by the murderous gleam in his eye. ‘But you – you have been a
homme armé.
You know what honour is – what glory
is.’

The man looked at him, finished his chunk of bacon, and spat. ‘Done. Time to go home.’ He wiped his greasy hands carefully on his leather quiver and the bow case on his six-foot
bow.

‘If we lose,’ Gaston said, looking for a way to reason with this arrogant peasant, ‘if we lose, your farms will be lost.’

‘Nah,’ said the younger man with the beard. ‘If you’n lose, they’ll squash the north flat. We ain’t northerners.’ He shrugged.

The old archer shrugged.

The other two grinned.

The old archer came over to the knight’s stirrup. ‘Listen, ser knight. We stood our ground at Chevin, and a lot of folk died. The old king told us we was done, for our lifetimes.
Well, I’m holding him to that promise. Right? Here’s some advice from an old soldier. When the boglins scream and charge you, say a good prayer. Cause they won’t stop coming, and
there’s a lot worse behind them. They eat you while you’re still alive. There’s creatures that’re worse, and eat your
soul
while you’re still alive. So it
don’t even matter if you heard Mass, does it?’

Gaston had considered killing all four of them for their insolence, but the old archer had touched on something, and instead, he found himself nodding.

‘I will prevail. We will prevail,’ Gaston said. ‘You will be sorry you were not there, for our day of glory.’

The old archer shook his head. ‘Nope. That’s just what gowps like you never see. I won’t be sorry, but I do wish you luck.’ He chuckled. ‘We had twenty thousand men
when we went into battle at Chevin.’ He nodded again. ‘The king has what – four thousand?’ He laughed, and it was a nasty laugh. ‘Can I offer you a bite of
bacon?’