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To the members of the Compagnia della Rose nel Sole
Prologue
Across the north of the Nova Terra and the Antica Terra, spring came. It came, too, in Galle and Etrusca, in Arelat Arelat, where men had begun to learn to fear the night again, and in Iberia, where it came early. But it came first in the fields of Occitan, where husbandmen and goodwives got down to the serious work of manuring and planting fields as soon as the ice in the old furrows was thawed and the ground began to soften. Depending on the wealth of the farmer, from yeomen with stone houses and two ploughs’ worth of oxen or big horse teams, to tiny huts on the edge of the debatable lands, where a young couple would harness themselves—together—to a homemade plough and the biggest child would drive it, furrows were cut in the cold ground, and every day those furrows crept north, from Occitan’s early sun to the borders, and in some cases fire-blackened fields of Jarsay, and then north again to the Albin and the Brogat, where there were fewer peasants and more yeomen, but also more farm labourers with no land at all; where big iron ploughs cut the earth deeper to make up for the later sun.
South to north, then, the earth was turned wherever the hand of man reached.
And the same sun that warmed the fields warmed the tiltyards. In the castle courtyards, or by the stables, or under the outermost walls, or in the old castle ditch were the fields of Mars, the hard places where young men and a few women learned to be hard. Older men stretched aching muscles and warmed winter-stiffened joints and cursed their fading youth or their blossoming age. Men who lived by war looked at the increase of their waists and worked harder during the abstention of Lent, and their strokes at pell and quintain were quickened by war and the rumour of war. In the west of Occitan and Jarsay and the Brogat, spring brought raids from the Wild; hungry men and worse things dared the fickle weather to strike at isolated holds and forest homes, and some knights had more than practice by the first Sunday in Lent. The same dragon’s-eye view that might have shown the peasants turning the earth would have shown smoke rising from burned steads all along Man’s western frontier with the Wild.
In safe places farther from the threat of irks and boglins, the fighting professionals heard of the King’s tournament in Harndon, and dreamed about it. New harnesses were made or fitted; mail was repaired, older harness polished and mended and polished again as warriors prepared to join the retinues of the great lords who would fight before the King of Alba himself. Words of the preparations for the tournament were spread by jongleurs and troubadours and singers and whores, tinkers and mercenaries and sheriffs and monks and any other man or woman who travelled the hideous mud of the thawing roads.
And, from Occitan to the Brogat, rumour said that in Morea, the Red Knight had won another surprising victory before the ground thawed and made himself master of the whole country. In Occitan, men sang a new troubadour song about him and his Red Company, and when a troubadour sang that he was recruiting, twenty younger sons hugged their mothers and donned their armour and rode north to a far-off place called the Inn of Dorling.
It was spring, and young men’s fancy turned to war.
Chapter One
The Inn of Dorling—The Company
Sauce was standing on a table in a red kirtle that laced up under her left arm—laces that showed she wore no linen under it. She was singing.
There’s a palm bush in the garden where the lads and lassies meet,
For it would not do to do the do they’re doing in the street,
And the very first time he saw it he was very much impressed,
For to have a jolly rattle at my cuckoo’s nest.
Aye the cuckoo, oh the cuckoo, aye the cuckoo’s nest,
Aye the cuckoo, oh the cuckoo, aye the cuckoo’s nest,
I’ll give any man a shilling and a bottle of the best,
If he ruffles up the feathers on my cuckoo’s nest.
Well some likes the lassies that are gay well dressed,
And some likes the lassies that are tight about the waist,
But it’s in between the blankets, that they all likes the best,
For to have a jolly rattle at my cuckoo’s nest.
I met him in the morning and he had me in the night,
I’d never been that way before and wished to do it right,
But he never would have found it, and he never would have guessed,
If I had not shown him where to find the cuckoo’s nest.
I showed him where to find it and I showed him where to go,
In amongst the stickers, where the young cuckoos grow,
And ever since he found it, he will never let me rest,
’Til he ruffles up the feathers on my cuckoo’s nest.
It’s thorny and it’s sprinkled and it’s compassed all around,
It’s tucked into a corner where it isn’t easy found,
I said, “Young man you blunder…” and he said, “It isn’t true!”
And he left me with the makings of a young cuckoo.
Her voice wasn’t beautiful—it had a bit of a squawk to it, more like a parrot than a nightingale, as Wilful Murder said to his cronies. But she was loud, and raucous, and everyone knew the tune and the chorus.
Everyone, in this case, being everyone in the common room of the great stone inn under the Ings of Dorling, widely reputed to be the largest inn on the whole of the world. The common room had arches and bays, like a church, and massive pillars set straight onto stone piers that went down into the cellars below—cellars that were themselves famous. The walls were twice the height of a man, and more, hung with tapestries so old and so caked in old soot and ash and six hundred years of smoke as to be nearly indecipherable, although there appeared to be a great dragon on the longest wall, the back wall, against which ran the Keeper’s long counter where the staff, and a few favoured customers, took refuge from the army of customers out on the floor.
Because on this, the coldest spring night of Martius yet, with snow outside on their tents, the Company of the Red Knight—that is, that part of the company not snug in barracks back in Liviapolis—packed the inn and its barns to the rafters, along with several hundred Moreans, some Hillmen from the drove, and a startling assortment of sell-swords and mercenaries, whores, travelling players, and foolish young men and women in search of what they no doubt hoped would be “adventure,” including twenty hot-headed young Occitan knights, their pet troubadour and their squires, all armed to the teeth and eager to be tested.
The crowd standing packed on the two-inch-thick oak boards of the common room floor was so dense that the smallest and most attractive of the Keeper’s daughters had trouble making her way to the rooms behind the common. Men tried to make way for her, with her wooden tray full of leather jacks, and could not.
The Keeper had four great bonfires roaring in the yard and trestle tables there; he was serving ale in his cavernous stone barn, but everyone wanted to be in the inn itself, and the cold snap that froze the water in the puddles and drove the beasts of the drove to huddle close in the great pens and folds on
the Ings above the inn was also forcing the greatest rush of customers he’d ever experienced to pack his common room so tightly that he was afraid men would die or, worse, buy no ale.
The Keeper turned to the young man who stood with him on the staff side of the bar. The young man had dark hair and green eyes and wore red. He was watching the common room with the satisfaction that an angel might show for the good works of the pious.
“Your blighted company and the drove at the same time? Couldn’t you have come a week apart? There won’t be enough forage for you in the hills.” The Keeper sounded shrill, even to his own ears.
Gabriel Muriens, the Red Knight, the Captain, the Megas Dukas, the Duke of Thrake, and possessor of another dozen titles heaped on him by a grateful Emperor, took a long pull from his own jack of black, sweet winter ale and beamed. “We’ll have forage,” he said. “It’s been warmer in the Brogat. It’s spring on the Albin.” He smiled. “And this is only a tithe of my company.” The smile grew warmer as he watched the recruiting table set against the wall. The adventurous young of six counties and three nations were cued up. “But it’s growing,” he added.
Forty of the Keeper’s people, most in his livery and all his kin, stood like soldiers at the long counter and served ale at an astounding rate. Gabriel watched them with the pleasure that a professional receives in watching others practise their craft—he enjoyed the smooth efficiency with which the Keeper’s wife kept her tallies, the speed with which money was collected or tally sticks were notched, and the ready ease with which casks were broached, emptied into pitchers, the said pitchers filled flagons or jacks or battered mugs and cans, all the while the staff moving up to the counter and then back to the broached kegs with the steady regularity of a company of crossbowmen loosing bolts by rotation and volley.
“They all seem to have coin to spend,” the Keeper admitted grudgingly. His elder daughter Sarah—a beautiful girl with red hair, married and widowed and now with a bairn, currently held by a cousin—stood where Sauce had been and sang an old song—a very old song. It had no chorus, and the Hillmen began to make sounds—like a low polyphonic hum—to accompany her singing. When one of the Morean musicians began to pluck the tune on his mandolin, a rough hand closed on his shoulder and he ceased.
The Keeper watched his daughter for long enough that his wife stopped taking money and looked at him. But then he shrugged. “They have money, as I say. You had some adventures out east, I hear?”
The Red Knight settled his shoulder comfortably into the corner between a low shelf and a heavy oak cupboard behind the bar. “We did,” he said.
The Keeper met his eye. “I’ve heard all the news, and none of it makes much sense. Tell it me, if you’d be so kind.”
Gabriel paused to finish his ale and look at the bottom of his silver cup. Then he gave the Keeper a wry smile. “It’s not a brief story,” he said.
The Keeper raised an eyebrow and glanced out at the sea of men. Ser Alcaeus was being called for by the crowd, and his name was chanted. “I couldn’t leave you even if I wanted,” the Keeper said. “They’d lynch me.”
Gabriel shrugged. “So. Where do you want me to begin?”
Sarah, flushed from the effort of singing, came under the bar and took her baby back from her cousin. She grinned at the Red Knight. “You’re going to tell a story?” she said. “Christ on the cross, Da! Everyone will want to hear!”
Gabriel nodded. Ale had magicked its way into his silver cup. The magick had been performed by a muscular young woman with a fine lace cap. She smiled at him.
“It’s not an easy story to start, sweeting.” He returned the serving girl’s smile with genteel interest.
Sarah wasn’t old enough to take much ambiguity. “Start at the beginning!” she said.
Gabriel made an odd motion with his mouth, almost like a rabbit moving its nose. “There is no beginning,” he said. “It just goes on and on into the past—an endless tale of motion and stillness.”
The Keeper rolled his eyes.
Gabriel realized he’d had too much to drink. “Fine. You recall the fight at Lissen Carak.”
Just behind the Red Knight, Tom Lachlan roared his dangerous laugh. Gabriel Muriens snapped his head around, and Lachlan—the Drover, now, almost seven feet of tartan-and grey-clad muscle, with a broad, silver-mounted belt and a sword as long as a shepherd’s crook—flipped the gate back on the bar and stepped through. “Boyo, we all remember the fight at Lissen Carak. That was a fight.”
Gabriel shrugged. “The magister who now styles himself Thorn—” He smiled grimly, paused, and pointed at a glass-shielded candle on the cupboard. A dozen moths of various sizes flitted about it.
Across the press of the crowd, Mag felt the pull of ops. She tensed.
He stood on the bright new mosaic floor of his memory. Prudentia stood once more on her plinth, and her statue was now a warm ivory rather than a cold marble, the features more mobile than they had been in his adolescence and her hair the same grey-black he remembered from his youth.
He knew in his heart that she was now a simulacrum not an embodied spirit, but she was the last gift that Harmodius the magister had left him, and he loved having her back.
“Immolate tinea consecutio aedificium,” he said.
Prudentia frowned. “Isn’t that a bit… dramatic?” she asked.
He shrugged. “I’m renowned for my arrogance and my dramatic flair,” he said. “He’ll be blind and with a little luck, he’ll attribute it to the said arrogance. Consider it a smokescreen for our visitor. If he’s coming.”
She didn’t shrug. But somehow she conveyed a shrug, perhaps a sniff of disapproval, without moving an ivory muscle.
“Katherine! Thales! Iskander!” he said softly, and his memory palace began to spin.
The main room—the casting chamber—of his palace was constructed, or remembered, as a dome held aloft with three separate sets of arches. In among the arches were nooks containing statues of worthies; his last year as a practitioner had clarified and enhanced his skills to add another row.
On the bottom row were the bases of his power—represented by thirteen saints of the church, six men, six women, and an androgynous Saint Michael standing between them. Above the saints stood another tier, this one of the philosophers who had informed his youth—ancients of one sect or another from various of the Archaic eras. But now, above them stood a new tier; twelve worthies of a more modern age; six women and six men and one cloaked figure. Harmodius had installed them, and Gabriel had some reservations about what they might mean—but he knew Saint Aetius, who killed his emperor’s family; he knew King Jean le Preux, who stopped the Irk Conquest of Etrusca after the catastrophic collapse of the Archaic world; he knew Livia the empress and Argentia the great war queen of Iberia.
As he called the names, the statues he indicated moved—indeed, the whole tier on which they stood moved until all three tiers of statues had moved the figures he named to the correct position over the great talismanic symbol that guarded the green door at the end of the chamber. Recently, there had appeared another door, exactly opposite the green door—a small red door with a grille. He knew what lay there, but he went out of his way not to go too close to it. And set in the floor by Prudentia’s plinth was a bronze disc with silver letters and a small lever. Gabriel had designed it himself. He hoped never to use it.
“Pisces,” he said.
Immediately under the lowest tier of statues there was a band. The band looked like bronze, and on it were repoussed—apparently—and engraved and decorated in gold and silver and enamel a set of thirteen zodiacal symbols. This band also rotated, although it did so in the opposite direction to the statues.
Clear golden sunlight fell through the great carved crystal that was the dome above them, and it struck the fish of pisces and coalesced into a golden beam.
The great green door opened. Beyond it was a sparkling grate, as if someone had built a portcullis of white-hot iron. Through its grid cam
e a green radiance that suffused the casting chamber and yet was somehow defined by the golden light of the dome.
He grinned in satisfaction and snapped his fingers. Every moth in the great inn fell to the floor, dead.
Sarah laughed. “Now that’s a trick,” she said. “How about mice?”
Her son, just four months old, looked at her with goobering love and tried to find her nipple with his mouth.
Gabriel laughed. “As I was saying, the magister who now styles himself Thorn, once known as Richard Plangere, led an army of the Wild against Lissen Carak. He enlisted all the usual allies: Western boglins, stone trolls, some Golden Bears of the mountain tribes and some disaffected irks from the Lakes; wyverns and wardens. All of the Wild that’s easy to seduce, he took for his own. He also managed to sway the Sossag of the Great House, those who live in the Squash Country north of the inland sea.”
“And they killed Hector! God’s curse on them.” Sarah’s hate for Hector’s killer was as bright as her hair.
The Red Knight looked at the young woman and shook his head. “I can’t join you in the curse, sweeting. They have Thorn as a houseguest, now. They left him, you know. And—” He looked at the Drover. “The Sossag and the Huran would see us as the murdering savages who stole their land.”
“A thousand years ago!” Bad Tom spat.
Gabriel shrugged. At his back, Ser Alcaeus was playing a kithara from the ancient world and singing an ancient song in a strange, eerie voice. Because every word he sang was in the true Archaic, the air shimmered with ops and potentia.
Ser Michael slipped under the gate of the bar and found space to lean. Kaitlin, his wife, now so heavily pregnant that she waddled instead of walking, was already snug in one of the inn’s better beds. Behind him, Sauce—Ser Alison—glared at a Hillman until he pushed more strongly against his mates and made room for her slight form to ease by him.