“Bad Tom,” No Head shouted.
“You’re in the wrong valley, you loons!” Bad Tom roared back. “Tar’s tits, we almost gave up on you!”
Chapter Seventeen
Albinkirk-The Company
The arrival of the Queen and the young King should have been a wonder in the streets of Albinkirk, but the threat of imminent war-war with the Wild-was distracting, and the distraction was personified by the soul-splitting shrieks that emanated from the citadel. The citizens should have grown used to them, after three weeks, but they couldn’t-the sounds were always discordant and sudden, and there was neither rhyme nor reason to them-just the endless screams of an anguished soul in the fires of hell, or so many said to one another as they looked at their terrified children and their equally terrified cats and dogs, ears back, hissing or barking.
The Queen entered her city of Albinkirk on the second Wednesday after Easter. She rode easily with her babe on her lap, and the Red Knight rode by her side. She was attended by a dozen ladies, and at their backs came more than two hundred knights, led by the Red Knight’s retinue, and then the Royal Guard, both in scarlet, and they were followed by the riot of armorial bearings that marked the lords of the northern Brogat-Lord Wayland with his knights and retainers, and the Squire of Snellgund and his men, and a dozen lesser lords. Behind them came the archers of the company, such as were present, and then companies of archers from throughout the north and east of the realm-twenty small companies that the Red Knight had gathered on the road, or that had already made camp in the fields around the chapel at South Ford.
Last of all-a post of honour-came two dozen knights of the Order of Saint Thomas, led by their Prior. They had already gone as far west as Lissen Carak and returned in the night, but whatever they had said to the Queen and her captain was known only to a few. Men marked that they looked grave.
Blanche Gold was one of the few. She rode close to the Queen, ready to take the babe if required, and carrying water and a cup in case the Queen had need. That morning, Toby had brought her a fine riding horse with a new saddle, and she had not spurned it.
“For the entrance,” he said, and he grinned.
She accepted it. In the midst of war, and peril, her own troubles had sunk away to nothing. The Queen’s insistence that she be treated, not as a servant, but one of her ladies, had met with no resistance. War changed many things. The Queen’s court was a riding court, and by the time she passed under the archway that marked the stained old gates of Albinkirk, Blanche was Lady Blanche in every way that mattered.
She liked it. Come war and Wild, she was happy enough.
To Blanche, the town looked dirty and ill-used. It was hard to hide that it had been taken-brutally-by the Wild the year before. A few house fronts were new-the Etruscan merchants had frescoed the fronts of their houses, and rebuilt the fine porticos that had once lent the street distinction. But for every house repaired, five looked at the street with gaping empty windows and broken doors. The cobbles themselves were ill kept, and raw sewage ran down the middle of the High Street.
It was all rather provincial to a woman from Harndon, with deep cisterns, sewers that functioned most days, and where a stream of effluvium like this was only seen by the poor north of Cheapside.
But Blanche took her cues from the Queen, who beamed with apparent pleasure at everything, smiled at children however furtive, and raised her son to be cheered by even the thinnest, meanest crowds.
They were well up the High Street when the first scream echoed down from the citadel. Men flinched. Women hid their heads.
The Queen looked around as if she’d been struck.
The Red Knight made a face. Blanche found she spent far too much time looking at him, assumed everyone knew she did it, and cursed herself for it, but one result was that she’d learned he had a repertoire of facial expressions he used when he thought no one was looking, or perhaps he didn’t care-at any rate, she knew that one, and it told her he knew what the noise was. Even that he was responsible for it. He didn’t say anything, though, and it was not repeated.
In the main square-scorched and broken and marked by last year’s battle-the Queen stopped before the gates of the citadel and met the city’s sacred lord-the Bishop of Albinkirk. He escorted her to mass in the once great cathedral, which currently had a roof only over part of the nave. The knights of the Order did a great deal to aid the singing, as did a dozen monks and nuns who’d followed the Queen from Lorica.
Blanche enjoyed mass-the first proper mass in a proper church that she’d seen since the Troubles, as she had privately christened them, had begun. She enjoyed the thing, well done, with proper responses and good singing, and she reminded herself to go to confession as soon as ever she could-and then mass was over and she was swept along with the household, the Queen’s household, into the nooks and crannies of a fortress on the edge of war that had never, on its proudest day, expected to receive even a very small court.
The citadel had barracks space for two hundred soldiers and perhaps as many servants and support staff, and maybe-at full stretch, and sharing beds-maybe forty knights and noblemen.
The staff were overwhelmed immediately. The absence of their master-Ser John, the famous Captain of Albinkirk-was a disaster, and he had no master of household, no wife, no kin to oversee. He was his own steward.
As a result the Queen stood, almost forgotten, in the great hall-a great hall almost completely undecorated.
Blanche watched her temper rise. She had come to see that Desiderata was not unmarked by nights in a dungeon and a day waiting to be burned at the stake. Some of her light-heartedness was gone, perhaps forever. And she felt slights where none were intended, where before she had been immune, and sunny.
Blanche gave her wine from the glass flask in her basket. There was none for the other ladies.
Blanche waited as long as she could. It had only been moments-two hundred heartbeats-but the Red Knight was already sitting-he was reading a report and issuing orders at a great rate, and he appeared to have forgotten the Queen, and Blanche knew they were headed for trouble.
She made an attempt to work through the staff-but they had closed against outsiders, and a senior woman-a cook or a laundress-stood at the end of the hall and told Master Nicomedes that there were simply no rooms for the Queen or any of the great knights. Blanche caught a glance from Nicomedes-it made her bold.
She walked up behind the Red Knight as he sat on a camp stool surrounded by his own men. Ser Michael was clerking, writing quickly. Prior Wishart had a fine, five-fold ivory tablet, each tablet holding a sheet of fine beeswax, and on it he took rapid notes. A very handsome young man of her own age stood waiting, surrounded by other men congratulating him-his face beamed with the happiness of heroic accomplishment. He wore a mail shirt and thigh-high boots and no weapon but a dagger. Behind him was another such-almost as handsome, but she didn’t know him.
Ser Michael saw him first and put a hand on his captain’s hand. “Galahad D’Acon,” he said.
The Red Knight stopped dictating orders. In fact, all conversation stopped.
“You made it,” Ser Gabriel said. He rose to his feet even as D’Acon dropped to one knee.
Blanche gathered her courage and hissed, “The Queen.”
The Red Knight’s head snapped around. He saw her-smiled, she treasured that-and then nodded.
“Ser Michael, be so kind as to fetch the Queen to hear her messenger,” he said. Then, suddenly realising where the Queen was standing, he spoke rapidly to Toby. Toby grabbed Blanche’s arm and together with Nell and Lord Robin and a dozen squires, they swiftly stripped the hall of stools and chairs. A great chair was taken from under the very nose of the hall’s senior servants, who protested that it was Ser John’s chair…