The Red Knight Read online

  ‘It won’t come back,’ she said.

  The captain shook his head. ‘Stay awake anyway. Just for me.’

  Bad Tom smiled and blew a kiss at Sauce. ‘Just for you,’ he said.

  Her hand went to her riding sword and with a flick it was in her hand.

  The captain cleared his throat.

  ‘He treats me like a whore. I am not.’ She held the sword steady at his face, and Bad Tom didn’t move.

  ‘Say you are sorry, Tom.’ The captain sounded as if it was all a jest.

  ‘Didn’t say one bad thing. Not one! Just a tease!’ Tom said. Spittle flew from his lips.

  ‘You meant to cause harm. She took it as harm. You know the rules, Tom.’ The captain’s voice had changed, now. He spoke so softly that Tom had to lean forward to hear him.

  ‘Sorry,’ Tom muttered like a schoolboy. ‘Bitch.’

  Sauce smiled. The tip of her riding sword pressed into the man’s thick forehead just over an eye.

  ‘Fuck you!’ Tom growled.

  The captain leaned forward. ‘Neither one of you wants this. It’s clear you are both posturing. Climb down or take the consequences. Tom, Sauce wants to be treated as your peer. Sauce, Tom is top beast and you put his back up at every opportunity. If you want to be part of this company then you have to accept your place in it.’

  He raised his gloved hand. ‘On the count of three, you will both back away, Sauce will sheathe her weapon, Tom will bow to her and apologise, and Sauce will return his apology. Or you can both collect your kit, walk away and kill each other. But not as my people. Understand? Three. Two. One.’

  Sauce stepped back, saluted with her blade and sheathed it. Without looking or fumbling.

  Tom let a moment go by. Pure insolence. But then something happened in his face, and he bowed – a good bow, so that his right knee touched the mud. ‘Humbly crave your pardon,’ he said in a loud, clear voice.

  Sauce smiled. It wasn’t a pretty smile, but it did transform her face, despite the missing teeth in the middle. ‘And I yours, ser knight,’ she replied. ‘I regret my . . . attitude.’

  She obviously shocked Tom. In the big man’s world of dominance and submission, she was beyond him. The captain could read him like a book. And he thought Sauce deserves something for that. She’s a good man.

  Gelfred appeared at his elbow. Had probably been waiting for the drama to end.

  The captain felt the wrongness of it before he saw what his huntsman carried. Like a housewife returning from pilgrimage and smelling something dead under her floor – it was like that, only stronger and wronger.

  ‘I rolled her over. This was in her back,’ Gelfred said. He had the thing wrapped in his rosary.

  The captain swallowed bile, again. I love this job, he reminded himself.

  To the eye, it looked like a stick – two fingers thick at the butt, sharpened to a needlepoint now clotted with blood and dark. Thorns sprouted from the whole haft, but it was fletched. An arrow. Or rather, an obscene parody of an arrow, whittled from . . .

  ‘Witch Bane,’ Gelfred said.

  The captain made himself take it without flinching. There were some secrets he would pay the price to preserve. He flashed on the last Witch-Bane arrow he’d seen – and pushed past it.

  He held it a moment. ‘So?’ he said, with epic unconcern.

  ‘She was shot in the back – with the Witch Bane – while she was alive.’ Gelfred’s eyes narrowed. ‘And then the monster ripped her face off.’

  The captain nodded and handed his huntsman the shaft. The moment it left his hand he felt lighter, and the places where the thorns had pricked his chamois gloves felt like rashes of poison ivy on his thumb and fingers – if poison ivy caused an itchy numbness, a leaden pollution.

  ‘Interesting,’ the captain said.

  Sauce was watching him.

  Damn women and their superior powers of observation, he thought.

  Her smile forced him to smile in return. The squires and valets in the garden began to breathe again and the captain was sure they’d stay awake, now. Given that there was a murderer on the loose who had monster-allies in the Wild.

  He got back to his horse. Jehannes, his marshal, came up on his bridle hand side and cleared his throat. ‘That woman’s trouble,’ he said.

  ‘Tom’s trouble too,’ the captain replied.

  ‘No other company would have had her.’ Jehannes spat.

  The captain looked at his marshal. ‘Now Jehannes,’ he said. ‘Be serious. Who would have Tom? He’s killed more of his own comrades than Judas Iscariot.’

  Jehannes looked away. ‘I don’t trust her,’ he said.

  The captain nodded. ‘I know. Let’s get moving.’ He considered vaulting into the saddle and decided that he was too tired and the show would be wasted on Jehannes, anyway. ‘You dislike her because she’s a woman,’ he said, and put his left foot into the stirrup.

  Grendel was tall enough that he had to bend his left knee as far as the articulation in his leg harness would allow. The horse snorted again. Toby held onto the reins.

  He leaped up, his right leg powering him into the saddle, pushing his six feet of height and fifty pounds of mail and plate. Got his knee over the high ridge of the war-saddle and was in his seat.

  ‘Yes,’ Jehannes said, and backed his horse into his place in the column.

  The captain saw Michael watching Jehannes go. The younger man turned and raised an eyebrow at the captain.

  ‘Something to say, young Michael?’ the captain asked.

  ‘What was the stick? M’lord?’ Michael was different from the rest – well born. Almost an apprentice, instead of a hireling. As the captain’s squire, he had special privileges. He could ask questions, and all the rest of the company would sit very still and listen to the answer.

  The captain looked at him for a moment. Considering. He shrugged – no mean feat in plate armour.

  ‘Witch Bane,’ he said. ‘A Witch-Bane arrow. The nun had power.’ He made a face. ‘Until someone shot the Witch Bane into her back.’

  ‘A nun?’ Michael asked. ‘A nun who could work power?’ He paused. ‘Who shot her? By Jeus, m’lord, you mean the Wild has allies?

  ‘All in a day’s work, lad. It’s all in a day’s work.’ His visual memory, too well trained, ran through the items like the rooms in his memory palace – the splintered door, the faceless corpse, the arm, the Witch-Bane arrow. He examined the path from the garden door to the front door.

  ‘Wait on me,’ he said.

  He walked Grendel around the farmyard, following the stone wall to the garden. He stood in his stirrups to peer over the wall, and aligned the open garden door with the splintered front door. He looked over his shoulder several times.

  ‘Wilful!’ he called.

  His archer appeared. ‘What now?’ he muttered.

  The captain pointed at the two doors. ‘How far away could you stand and still put an arrow into someone at the front door.

  ‘What, shooting through the house?’ asked Wilful Murder.

  The captain nodded.

  Wilful shook his head. ‘Not that far,’ he admitted. ‘Any loft at all and the shaft strikes the door jamb.’ He caught a louse on his collar and killed it between his nails. His eyes met the captain’s. ‘He’d have to be close.’

  The captain nodded. ‘Gelfred?’ he called.

  The huntsman was outside the front door, casting with his wand over a large reptilian print in the road. ‘M’lord?’

  ‘See if you and Wilful can find any tracks out the back. Wilful will show you where a bowman might have stood.’

  ‘It’s always fucking me – get Long Paw to do it,’ Wilful muttered.

  The captain’s mild glance rested for a moment on his archer and the man cringed.

  The captain turned his horse and sighed. ‘Catch us up as soon as you have the tracks,’ he said. He waved at Jehannes. ‘Let’s go to the fortress and meet the lady Abbess.’ He touched his spurs ever so lightl
y to Grendel’s sides, and the stallion snorted and deigned to move forward into the rain.

  The rest of the ride along the banks of the Cohocton was uneventful, and the company halted by the fortified bridge overshadowed by the rock-girt ridge and the grey walls of the fortress convent atop it, high above them. Linen tents rose like dirty white flowers from the muddy field, and the officer’s pavilions came off the wagons. Teams of archers dug cook pits and latrines, and valets and the many camp followers – craftsmen and sutlers, runaway serfs, prostitutes, servants, and free men and women desperate to gain a place – assembled the heavy wooden hoardings that served the camp as temporary walls and towers. The drovers, an essential part of any company, filled the gaps with the heavy wagons. Horse lines were staked out. Guards were set.

  The Abbess’ door ward had pointedly refused to allow the mercenaries through her gate. The mercenaries had expected nothing else, and even now hardened professionals were gauging the height of the walls and the likelihood of climbing them. Two veteran archers – Kanny, the barracks room lawyer of the company, and Scrant, who never stopped eating – stood by the camp’s newly-constructed wooden gate and speculated on the likelihood of getting some in the nun’s dormitory.

  It made the captain smile as he rode by, collecting their salutes, on the steep gravel road that led up the ridge from the fortified town at the base, up along the switchbacks and finally up through the fortress gate-house into the courtyard beyond. Behind him, his banner bearer, marshals and six of his best lances dismounted to a quiet command and stood by their horses. His squire held his high-crested bassinet, and his valet bore his sword of war. It was an impressive show and it made good advertising – ideal, as he could see heads at every window and door that opened into the courtyard.

  A tall nun in a slate-grey habit – the captain suppressed his reflexive flash on the corpse in the doorway of the steading – reached to take the reins of his horse. A second nun beckoned with her hand. Neither spoke.

  The captain was pleased to see Michael dismount elegantly despite the rain, and take Grendel’s head, without physically pushing the nun out of the way.

  He smiled at the nuns and followed them across the courtyard towards the most ornate door, heavy with scroll-worked iron hinges and elaborate wooden panels. To the north, a dormitory building rose beyond a trio of low sheds that probably served as workshops – smithy, dye house and carding house, or so his nose told him. To the south stood a chapel – far too fragile and beautiful for this martial setting – and next to it, by cosmic irony, a long, low, slate-roofed stable.

  Between the chapel’s carved oak doors stood a man. He had a black habit with a silk rope around the waist, was tall and thin to the point of caricature, and his hands were covered in old scars.

  The captain didn’t like his eyes, which were blue and flat. The man was nervous, and wouldn’t meet his eye – and he was clearly angry.

  Flicking his eyes away from the priest, the captain reviewed the riches of the abbey with the eye of a money-lender sizing up a potential client. The abbey’s income was shown in the cobbled courtyard, the neat flint and granite of the stables with a decorative stripe of glazed brick, the copper on the roof and the lead gutters gushing water into a cistern. The courtyard was thirty paces across – as big as that of any castle he’d lived in as a boy. The walls rose sheer – the outer curtain at his back, the central monastery before him, with towers at each corner, all wet stone and wet lead, rain slicked cobbles; the priest’s faded black cassock, and the nun’s undyed surcoat.

  All shades of grey, he thought to himself, and smiled as he climbed the steps to the massive monastery door, which was opened by another silent nun. She led him down the hall – a great hall lit by stained glass windows high in the walls. The Abbess was enthroned like a queen in a great chair on a dais at the north end of the hall, in a gown whose grey had just enough colour to appear a pale, pale lavender in the multi-faceted light. She had the look of a woman who had once been very beautiful indeed – even in middle age her beauty was right there, resting in more than her face. Her wimple and the high collar of her gown revealed little enough of her. But her bearing was more than noble, or haughty. Her bearing was commanding, confident in a way that only the great of the land were confident. The captain noted that her nuns obeyed her with an eagerness born of either fear or the pleasure of service.

  The captain wondered which it was.

  ‘You took long enough to reach us,’ she said, by way of greeting. Then she snapped her fingers and beckoned at a pair of servants to bring a tray. ‘We are servants of God here – don’t you think you might have managed to strip your armour before you came to my hall?’ the Abbess asked. She glanced around, caught a novice’s eye, raised an eyebrow. ‘Fetch the captain a stool,’ she said. ‘Not a covered one. A solid one.’

  ‘I wear armour every day,’ the captain said. ‘It comes with my profession.’ The great hall was as big as the courtyard outside, with high windows of stained glass set near the roof, and massive wooden beams so old that age and soot had turned them black. The walls were whitewashed over fine plaster, and held niches containing images of saints and two rich books – clearly on display to overawe visitors. Their voices echoed in the room, which was colder than the wet courtyard outside. There was no fire in the central hearth.

  The Abbess’s people brought her wine, and she sipped it as they placed a small table at the captain’s elbow. He was three feet beneath her. ‘Perhaps your armour is unnecessary in a nunnery?’ she asked.

  He raised an eyebrow. ‘I see a fortress,’ he said. ‘It happens that there are nuns in it.’

  She nodded. ‘If I chose to order you taken by my men, would your armour save you?’ she asked.

  The novice who brought his stool was pretty and she was careful of him, moving with the deliberation of a swordsman or a dancer. He turned his head to catch her eye and felt the tug of her power, saw that she was not merely pretty. She set the heavy stool down against the back of his knees. Quite deliberately, the captain touched her arm gently and caused her to turn to him. He turned to face her, putting his back to the Abbess.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said, looking her in the eye with a calculated smile. She was tall and young and graceful, with wide-set almond-shaped eyes and a long nose. Not pretty; she was arresting.

  She blushed. The flush travelled like fire down her neck and into her heavy wool gown.

  He turned back to the Abbess, his goal accomplished. Wondering why the Abbess had placed such a deserable novice within his reach, unless she meant to. ‘If I chose to storm your abbey, would your piety save you?’ he asked.

  She blazed with anger. ‘How dare you turn your back on me?’ she asked. ‘And leave the room, Amicia. The captain has bitten you with his eyes.’

  He was smiling. He thought her anger feigned.

  She met his eyes and narrowed her own – and then folded her hands together, almost as if she intended to pray.

  ‘Honestly, Captain, I have prayed and prayed over what to do here. Bringing you to fight the Wild is like buying a wolf to shepherd sheep.’ She looked him in the eye. ‘I know what you are,’ she said.

  ‘Do you really?’ he asked. ‘All the better, lady Abbess. Shall we to business, then? Now the pleasantries are done?’

  ‘But what shall I call you?’ she asked. ‘You are a well-born man, for all your snide airs. My chamberlain—’

  ‘Didn’t have a nice name for me, did he, my lady Abbess?’ He nodded. ‘You may call me Captain. It is all the name I need.’ He nodded graciously. ‘I do not like the name your chamberlain used. Bourc. I call myself the Red Knight.’

  ‘Many men are called bourc,’ she said. ‘To be born out of wedlock is—’

  ‘To be cursed by God before you are born. Eh, lady Abbess?’ He tried to stop the anger that rose on his cheeks like a blush. ‘So very fair. So just.’

  She scowled at him for a moment, annoyed with him the way older people are often annoyed
with the young, when the young posture too much.

  He understood her in a glance.

  ‘Too dark? Should I add a touch of heroism?’ he asked with a certain air.

  She eyed him. ‘If you wrap yourself in darkness,’ she said, ‘you risk merely appearing dull. But you have the wit to know it. There’s hope for you, boy, if you know that. Now to business. I’m not rich—’

  ‘I have never met anyone who would admit being rich,’ he agreed. ‘Or to getting enough sleep.’

  ‘More wine for the captain,’ snapped the Abbess to the sister who had guarded the door. ‘But I can pay you. We are afflicted by something from the Wild. It has destroyed two of my farms this year, and one last year. At first – at first, we all hoped that they were isolated incidents.’ She met his eye squarely. ‘It is not possible to believe that any more.’

  ‘Three farms this year,’ said the captain. He fished in his purse, hesitated over the chain with the leaf amulet, then fetched forth a cross inlaid with pearls instead.

  ‘Oh, by the wounds of Christ!’ swore the Abbess. ‘Oh, Blessed Virgin protect and cherish her. Sister Hawisia! Is she—’

  ‘She is dead,’ the captain said. ‘And six more corpses in the garden. Your good sister died trying to protect them.’

  ‘Her faith was very strong,’ the Abbess said. She was dry eyed, but her voice trembled. ‘You needn’t mock her.’

  The captain frowned. ‘I never mock courage, lady Abbess. To face such a thing without weapons—’

  ‘Her faith was a weapon against evil, Captain.’ The Abbess leaned forward.

  ‘Strong enough to stop a creature from the Wild? No, it was not,’ said the captain quietly. ‘I won’t comment on evil.’

  The Abbess stood sharply. ‘You are some sort of atheist, are you, Captain?’

  The captain frowned again. ‘There is nothing productive for us in theological debate, my lady Abbess. Your lands have attracted a malignant entity – an enemy of Man. They seldom hunt alone, especially not this far from the Wild. You wish me to rid you of them. I can. And I will. In exchange, you will pay me. That is all that matters between us.’