The captain stood in the rain. He raised his head and looked at them. “When we make mistakes, people die,” he said. “When we do our jobs well, other people die. Death is part of our trade-always there. And, like wages, it’s not fair. Why the baby? Why not someone old, like Cuddy?”
A few daring souls tittered.
The captain looked around. “I don’t know. I don’t know why Arnaud died, instead of me. But at another level, I know exactly why Arnaud died, and why Robin died and why we’re standing here in the rain. We’re here because we chose-we chose to fight. Some of you joined the company to fight for something you liked. Some of you fight for each other. Some for gold coins and a precious few fight because mayhap we’ll do some good, whatever good is.” He looked around. “The baby didn’t choose to fight, though. Nor the mother.”
He shrugged. “My point is, we know who killed them. We’re in the middle of a fight. The bishop reminds you of God’s mercy. I will only say this: I will not forget why they died, and when the moment comes…” He took a deep breath, and the men and women in the front row could see the red clash of his eyes. “If I am spared to that moment, my sword will not sleep.”
A sigh escaped the company, as if the whole body were a single person.
The Bishop of Albinkirk turned away in anger.
The captain squared his shoulders. “Company!” he called, as if his voice had never trembled with emotion.
They snapped to attention.
“Take your proper,” he called, “distance.”
The corporals slipped out of the front line and went forward three paces.
The three red lines turned about, and walked off-three paces for the second line, six for the third, nine for the fourth.
He signalled Ser Bescanon, who walked out from the officers’ rank and unsheathed his sword. He saluted with it, and the Red Knight returned his salute and walked off into the rain.
Ser Bescanon’s high cheekbones and long Occitan nose were dripping under his faceless cervelleur. “Have a care for your armour!” he bellowed. “Company-dismiss!”
They ran for shelter. Squires and pages cursed.
The bishop went and stood beside the captain under one of the eaves of the stable. “Revenge?” he asked. “Is that how you motivate them?” His voice was flat with anger.
The captain’s slightly reptilian green eyes seemed to sparkle. “My lord bishop, today-for the first time in a long time, let me add-revenge is what motivates me. They will follow.”
“You spurn everything for which that gentle man stood,” the bishop said.
The captain stood for a moment, tapping his riding gloves impatiently on his armoured thigh. He seemed on the edge of saying something but, instead, he held his peace, and his face became a smooth mask.
Then the mask failed him. The captain leaned close, his eyes very slightly tinged with red, and the bishop had to force himself to stand his ground. “You know,” he said softly, “that gentle man was killed by a shaman-a creature who had been bound. Magisters call it turning. You know it? A creature’s own will is stripped away, and replaced by the control of another. I killed the shaman, my lord bishop, but he was as helpless and as guiltless as your Jesus as a babe. He was a tool. I’m sick of it. I’m sick of being a tool and of using others as tools and the whole bloody game.”
This was so far from what the bishop had expected that he had readied a very different argument. So he had to fold away his text, and take a deep breath.
“Then don’t play,” he said.
The captain’s eyes were a calm green again and the threat of emotional violence seemed to have subsided. He shrugged. “Do you know the questions that are asked of a knight at his making, my lord?”
The bishop nodded.
“I believe in those questions,” the captain said. “Who will protect the weak? Who will defy the enemy? Who will defend the widow and the orphan, the king, and the queen? Even, when forced to it, Holy Mother Church?”
The bishop blinked. “Jesus said we should turn the other cheek. Jesus said nothing of a triumph by violence.”
“Yes, well.” The captain smiled. “I think Jesus would have had a hard time with Bad Tom.” His riding gloves struck the steel of his cuisses with a snap.
“For now, though, the answer to those questions is-I will. I will defy the enemy. I’ve finished sacrificing my pieces one at a time.” He shook himself.
The bishop smiled. “You aren’t even talking to me, are you?”
The captain shrugged.
“I’m going to send you a new chaplain,” the bishop said.
Snap went the gloves.
“Make sure he’s a good jouster,” the captain said.
Ser Alcaeus was drawn to the walls. In his life, he had known much sweetness and much horror, but no experience had equalled the intensity-and the terror-of the minutes after the walls were breached in the siege of Albinkirk. He went to the stretch of northern walls that he had held, and met there-to his stupefaction-a young crossbowman he had known during the siege.
“By Saint George,” Ser Alcaeus said. He embraced the man. “Stefan?”
“Mark, and it please my lord,” the young man said.
“I thought you were dead,” Ser Alcaeus said.
Mark shrugged. “I thought so, too. I fell from the wall.” He shrugged. “I woke up hungry and with two broken legs.” He shrugged again. “Nothing found me to eat me, I guess.” He barked an uncomfortable laugh. “Now I guard the same stretch of wall.”
They looked out over the north and west together.
To the north, the Wild stretched on like a dark carpet, the great trees in the middle distance fading into the tall mountains of the Adnacrags and their white-clad peaks. A single road, wide enough for one wagon, wound out of the wooded hills at the edge of sight along the stable banks of the Canata river that came, cold and black, out of the mountains and descended into the valley through abandoned farmsteads and newly colonized steads and a handful of tilled fields from families that had survived the siege and planted last season.
There was a convoy on the road, glittering with spear points. It was still a good league from the walls, and yet it seemed to flare with colour.
To the south-west, the Royal Road ran up from the great ford at Southford and up to the south gate of Albinkirk, and then west out the west gate and on the north bank of the Cohocton. The north road-often a pair of wagon ruts-joined the Royal Road almost a half a league out from Albinkirk’s walls, where the flooded waters of the Canata ran south from the mountains and poured under the three stone arches of the ancient bridge, which the prosaic inhabitants called Troy, a hamlet of nine houses and a fortified tower.
Out on the Royal Road beyond Troy, a party of three people on horses-or perhaps donkeys-ambled in the clear spring air. The downpour had swept the sky clear and the wind had driven the clouds south. The heavy downpour had flooded the streams, but it had stripped the last ice out of the shaded corners of the fields.
“They must be damp,” Alcaeus said. He turned to young Mark, who shrugged.
“Sometimes I think of killing myself,” Mark said suddenly. His voice was flat.
Alcaeus looked at him carefully. He had things to do, and plots to weave. But this was a man who’d faced the wave of monsters with him.
So Alcaeus leaned casually back against the cold merlons of the curtain wall and tried to look nonchalant. “Why?” he asked quietly.
The young man looked out over the fields. “It’s all I think about.” He shrugged. “There’s no time before it. The attack. It is just… dark.”
Alcaeus nodded. “You think that perhaps this is not the best job for you?” he asked. “The same piece of wall?”
“They all died,” Mark said. “Everyone I knew. Everyone but me.” He turned and looked out over the fields. “I think that I died, too. Sometimes that’s how I make sense of it. I’m dead, and that’s why-” His voice had begun to rise in pitch.