Gabriel grinned. He couldn’t help it. This was the life he craved. His family, of his own making. “The better for seeing you, Tippit,” he said. “Heron? Outwaller?”
“Huran,” the young man said proudly. He had a company surcoat over a good padded arming coat, but instead of hose he had deerskin leggings and a breechclout, and he had a small axe in his belt instead of a knife or sword.
Gabriel nodded. “How are you fixed for tobacco?” he asked.
The Huran shrugged. “I have none,” he admitted.
“I might be able to fix that,” the Emperor of Man said. This was how he commanded—by knowing them all, by being part of their lives. Not by being bowed to. It was good to remember.
Heron grinned and slapped his back. “That is good!” he said with enthusiasm.
Archers turned away to smile. Outwallers had very few outward signs of respect; they believed in an equality that the ancients would have envied.
Gabriel laughed, put a hand on the Huran’s shoulder, and was introduced to other newcomers: Iris, a tall irk with bright yellow hair, and her war brothers, Elaran and Sidenhir. He watched them shoot, and smiled at their overly perfect High Archaic.
“They fart flowers,” No Head said. “Or leastways, Iris does.”
Long Paw nodded in agreement. “Good archers, though,” he said.
Gabriel looked back at the three irks. “How are the Venikan marines about the irks?” he asked.
“Fine,” Long Paw said, suggesting that the issue was complicated and a good captain would not ask again.
Gabriel knew all about questions not to ask. He followed Long Paw through the rest of the archers, to the barricades at the main gate of the camp, where fifty men-at-arms in full harness were standing or sitting. A single pair were sparring, carefully, with sharp swords. Their slightly old-fashioned armour, fine maille and not much plate, marked them as Occitans. Again, Gabriel didn’t know them.
Tom Lachlan, known to most of the world as Bad Tom, stood at the barricades in full harness. He’d got a new harness in Venike; it was a magnificent blue-black, with latten trim burnished to a bright gold. The words Lachlan for Aa were engraved over and over all the way around the latten edging, along with a particularly complex charm that Gabriel could see in the aethereal.
“Very nice,” Gabriel said.
“It is, at that,” Tom agreed as if they’d been talking all morning.
“This is the quarter guard?” Gabriel asked.
“Aye. The archers shoot and the knights ken their swords and spears,” Tom said. He smiled. “An’ we practice that little trick ye insisted on. The one fer stormin’ a bridge.”
Gabriel nodded. “A bridge?”
Lachlan shook his head. “Ye really love yer secrets, but I ken a bridge crossing when I see one. A mickle great bridge wi’ a road atop her, twenty feet wide wall to wall. Eh? Am I right?”
Gabriel smiled back. “Ahh. That bridge.” He refused to be drawn. “Ready to move?” he asked.
“Aye,” Tom answered and then suddenly leaned forward and shouted, “Is that a lilly wand? Are ye a knight?” at the two combatants.
One of the Occitans struck the other a very hard blow. The other covered, and sparks flew.
“I don’t really need to lose any more men-at-arms,” Gabriel said.
Tom shrugged. “Ye want killers, ye must make ’em train. Training costs in time, kit, and blood. When’s the last time ye swung a sword?”
“I fought in a tournament two weeks ago. I fought you in my shirt a few days before that. I poked at Michael yesterday.” Gabriel was watching the Occitans again. Both were fighting better—half-swording very close—and suddenly they were grappling.
“Ye should exchange a few blows wi’ Long Paw,” Tom said. “He fair skewered me last night.”
Long Paw looked pleased with himself.
“I’m here on business,” Gabriel said. “I’m taking you with me.”
“Who’s taking command?” Tom said.
“Sauce,” Gabriel said.
There was a moment of silence.
Tom shrugged. “Right then,” he said.
Gabriel wanted to hug him.
Instead, he turned to Long Paw. “Care for a few blows?” he said. “I only have my flying kit.”
Long Paw nodded, leaped over the barrier with a fair display of agility for a man over fifty, and picked up a light bassinet with a very elegant, high back point and a spiky-beaked faceplate. He was wearing maille over an arming coat and an expensive, velvet-covered brigantine.
“Did everyone buy new armour in Venike?” the captain asked.
“Close enow,” Tom said. “You did. Or leastways, whur the solid gold stuff come from? Eh?” He looked out at the next combatants: Ser Danved and a knight Gabriel didn’t know in a very fine harness.
“Is that Lord Wimarc?” Gabriel asked.
“Tis. Danved is going to make his noble arse sweat.” Bad Tom turned. “Why? Why are ye pullin’ me?”
Gabriel had been carrying his flying helmet, and now he put it on his head and snapped the hinged cheeks down over his neck. “For a fight,” he said.
“Oh aye then,” Tom said, smiling. “I thought I’d cocked up.”
Long Paw was flexing a gauntlet. His squire, a handsome boy-man of fourteen or fifteen with bright gold hair and a new coat of maille, came over.
“I don’t know anyone,” Gabriel complained.
“Yon’s Hamish Comyne. One o’ the lads who joined us out of the Brogat. He’s got Hillman blood in him; he’ll grow.” Tom pointed out at the two Occitans. “Ser Oliver and Ser Matteos.” He watched the two currently in the lists exchange blows and then stagger apart. “Stop being sae polite, Wimarc! Gi’ him a blow!”
But Danved was utterly the slim aristocrat’s master, and in another moment, Wimarc was on his back in the grass, with Danved’s poleaxe at his throat.
“That’s enow! Out o’ the lists!” he called. And then, to Gabriel. “Why Sauce? She’s ne’er had a big command.”
“That’s why,” the captain said. “Listen, Tom. I have maybe twenty of you I trust. Who know the whole plan. When I go down … if I go down … it’s on you all. Sauce has to be able to command an army.”
There was a pause. “Aye,” Tom said. “She’s going to fight the Patriarch?”
“Yes,” Gabriel said.
“Damn it all,” Tom said. “I wanted that fight.”
“You come with me and Morgon to get the Necromancer,” Gabriel said.
A slow smile spread over Tom’s face. “Oh,” he said. “That’s grand. When?”
“As soon as Long Paw and I cross blades,” Gabriel said. “I can’t let the Necromancer combine with the Patriarch and the Duke of Mitla.” He leaned very close. “There’s a theory that there’s another one. Another … foe.”
“Christ on the cross. Tar’s tits.” Tom’s slightly mad eyes met his friend’s. “Another power?”
“Yes,” Gabriel said.
“Ye can’t let ’em combine.” Tom whistled. “And we have twenty days?”
“Or less,” Gabriel agreed. “Du Corse is marching east from Lucrece. Mortirmir has the Necromancer to within a dozen leagues. Payam rode back this morning; I hope he’ll be going north from the coast. We’re going to race west.”
“Wi’ what troops?” Tom asked.
“The Guild Levy and the imperial household and all the garrison of Arles,” Gabriel said. “The duchess and Sauce get all the company and the Venikans and the Beronese.”
Tom was pulling his beard. “It’s not much,” he said. “We didn’a ha’e much to start, and now we’ll have less.”
Gabriel shrugged. “We’re really just along to be bodyguards for Mortirmir,” he said. He put a hand to his visor. “Although I’d like Ash to notice all the shipping I’m moving to western Galle, and how we’re all marching in that direction. I need him focused on my attempt to return by sea.”
Tom grunted. “Last I heard he didn’t see
you?”
“Not me, personally. But all of us, and Mortirmir especially, must burn like the sun in the sense of potential enmity.” He shrugged. “I hope so anyway,” he said, and pulled his visor down and walked out onto the springy turf.
Long Paw followed him out, wearing a different pair of gauntlets. He flexed his fingers several times and then nodded to indicate all was well. He knelt, and Gabriel saluted him, and Gabriel was painfully aware that a thousand men and women were watching him.
So he was cautious.
He and Long Paw circled for a long time.
Then Long Paw came closer with a slow circling step.
Gabriel tossed a cut at Long Paw’s hands.
Long Paw covered and stepped in, his sword perfectly skidding down the length of Gabriel’s as Gabriel stepped back, attempting to leave the bind.
Long Paw was so-called for a reason. It wasn’t just the immense length of his arms but the speed with which he moved, his legs as well as his hands, all catlike. Despite Gabriel’s retreat, he closed the distance, and his sword point missed his captain’s armoured neck by the breadth of only three fingers as he won the bind and came on. Gabriel felt his hands rotate; he was in the weaker position, and to his immense consternation, Long Paw reached between his hands and plucked his sword away, disarming him.
He stood for a moment, blinking in an agony of outraged pride.
Long Paw handed him back his sword with a bow.
Gabriel hated to be mocked. He’d had a bellyful as a child.
“You alright?” Long Paw asked, his concern genuine.
Gabriel blinked away an irrational answer. “That was beautiful,” he admitted. “I just wish the victim had been someone else.”
Men were shouting; Oak Pew was applauding.
Both men made their reverences and saluted. Gabriel was now more cautious. He circled, he declined various provocations, and he tended to withdraw every time Long Paw advanced.
“Don’t be such a priss!” bellowed Tom.
Gabriel had forgotten how annoying it was to be surrounded by the judgments of men.
But when Long Paw attacked, a simple fendente, he covered and stepped forward strongly into the cover. He went for his dagger immediately, even as Long Paw’s left hand went for his sword and he let it go and tapped the lanky man on the helmet with the butt of his heavy dirk.
Long Paw laughed. “Ouch,” he said. “Well struck, Cap’n.”
Gabriel sheathed his dagger, his hands shaking, and stepped back to salute again.
Long Paw scared him in a different way to Bad Tom. Tom could hurt him, but Long Paw could defeat him. Gabriel lost a beat in the circling as he understood some implications of this.
A matter of mind-set.
Something that applied to the contest with Ash, too.
He went over to the attack, throwing combinations: one-two, one-two.
Long Paw parried, but didn’t attempt a difficult counter-time attack; Long Paw prided himself on a clean kill, and never, ever allowed himself to be “doubled” in the company sparring.
Doubling being when both companions struck each other in the same tempo. Both dead, with real blades.
So he parried and retreated, parried and retreated.
Parried and parried and stepped off-line, waiting for Gabriel’s flurry to exhaust itself.
Gabriel, on the other hand, was well fed, newly married, and had just been cured of a disease that was eating his lungs. He’d seldom felt so fit.
He threw a triple: three blows. He cut a diagonal from his own left to right, descending: a reverso. Then he cut from his forehand: right to left, flat, eye-level. Mezzano.
Long Paw parried hard, and the edges of the two sharp swords cut into each other.
Gabriel was grinning in his helmet. He let go his left hand from the hilt and pivoted the blade on Long Paw’s blade …
Reached to take it at the half-blade on the other side …
And watched in appalled wonder as Long Paw reached between his hands and caught his own blade at the half, the point at Gabriel’s throat, a perfect counter-time.
“Shit,” Gabriel said.
“I’ve waited my whole life to do that to someone,” Long Paw gloated. “By the Blessed Virgin!”
He let out a loud whoop.
Cheers rang out.
Gabriel wilted, but no one seemed to be mocking him, and he got his visor open. Young Hamish was gazing at Long Paw with something like adoration. Veteran swordsmen came and pounded his back; the company was the kind of place where the counter to the punta falsa was known, discussed, and practiced the way priests examined the Trinity.
But never performed.
Gabriel shook his head and his eye was caught by a man sitting, filing nicks out of the edge of his sword.
It was Philip de Beause.
No one seemed to want to talk to a defeated emperor, so he walked across the turf to de Beause.
The jouster rose and bowed. “Majesty,” he said.
“Philip,” the emperor managed. He couldn’t stop himself. “You died.”
De Beause shrugged. “Oh aye. I did.” He looked away. “And not for the first time, my lord.”
Gabriel turned to find Tom Lachlan at his shoulder. “He doesn’ae like to talk about it,” Tom said.
Gabriel nodded. But de Beause shrugged. “I had an amulet,” he said. “An old thing. It broke, the last time. I suppose the next time I eat a lance, I’m done for.”
“Like the rest of us,” Gabriel said.
Tom nodded.
De Beause said, “I thought I was brave.” He sighed. “Now I find I’m afraid of death.”
“Join the club,” Gabriel said.
Tom frowned. “What ha’e ye.” He looked at Gabriel. “You fear death?”
“All the time,” Gabriel said. “Death, decay, humiliation, torture, agony, failure, success … you name it, I fear it.”
Tom grunted. “I misdoubt ye.”
Gabriel nodded, and smiled at de Beause. “Since you are alive, I need the household with me. Atcourt’s near run off his feet.”
“I need a new archer,” de Beause said. But he rose. “But I’m still game.”
“Take the bogglin,” Tom said.
De Beause smiled. “I will, at that,” he said. “I like the little bug. Do you mind having him in the casa?”
Gabriel shook his head. “I can thole him,” he said in Hillman cant.
His attempt at Hillman was lost on Tom. “Good,” the big man said. “I don’t suppose we’ll all fit on yer flyin’ beastie?”
“No. Get the company ready to move, and send the imperials along the road with the food shipment.” He waved at the Scholae. “I’m leaving Comnena and Michael with Blanche to garrison Arles. And run things.”
“Aye. Because?” Tom asked.
“Because Michael is my replacement as captain and Comnena is my replacement as emperor,” Gabriel said.
“Aye,” Tom said. “Ye should crown young George.”
Gabriel smiled. “I forget how close you Hillmen are to the empire,” he said. “I should.”
Tom grinned. “I ha’e a tanist. And I don’ ha’e the weight o’ the world on my back. Just some coos.”
Gabriel laughed. He really laughed, better than he had in days.
“Food?” Tom said.
“There’s a four-hundred-wagon train coming up the pass right now,” Gabriel said. “Didn’t you wonder where Sukey was, Tom?”
“She tol’ me not to ask,” Tom said with a secret smile. “We still on our dates for … you know. The gates?”
“As far as I know,” Gabriel said. “I didn’t expect to have refugees to feed. At least, not so many. Otherwise, all is well. I mean, except that Ash keeps winning and the Necromancer is out there and Harmodius thought a month ago that there was a third player, whose hand has not yet been seen. And the plague is undefeated. And anything else we’ve forgotten. Aside from all that, everything is fine.”
Tom
laughed. “Well, I’d love to chat,” he said. “But I have a mort o’ work to do.”
Gabriel walked back to where Ariosto was polishing off the juicy hindquarters of what had once been a hefty bullock. No one followed him; the company remained the family it had always been, and he didn’t need courtiers here.
But there were two boys watching Ariosto. One offered to catch the griffon’s reins.
Gabriel smiled. “Don’t even think it,” he said.
The boys ran off and left him alone. Blessedly alone.
“You do kill them before you eat them?” he asked.
Ariosto purred. Always.
Gabriel nodded. He leaned on his mount’s saddle and watched the camp. The landing ground was also the parade ground; he was at the head of the camp. He saw a tall, lanky woman kissing No Head where she thought no one could see them. He saw two archers in a fight, both men throwing heavy, angry blows. They didn’t seem serious. Oak Pew was talking to Heron. There were people walking to the latrines, people washing clothes, people eating, people shooting bows or swinging swords. Two farriers worked on horseshoes.
And yet, even as he watched, things began to change. A whistle trilled; in the center of camp, near the command tents, a whole lance’s worth of wedge tents came down, one, two, three. The pavilion of the Primus Pilus rocked back and forth, and then suddenly it was being stripped, the outer walls removed.
A trumpet sounded. They had a new trumpeter—from Harndon. Gabriel had never met the lad, and he had an irrational temptation to go and introduce himself.
The new trumpeter was damned good. His call, “Break Camp,” rang across the grass, and tents came down. Some of the veterans had seen the emperor arrive and drawn the correct conclusion.
Harald Derkensun, wearing a long red tunic and not much else, ran to the head of a street of linen tents and blew a golden whistle. Big men boiled out of the tents.
Gabriel watched it all with a sense of heartbreak, of loss. His eyes filled with tears.
I will never have this again, he thought. I will have love and lordship. But not this.
Why so sad, boss? Ariosto asked. Gabriel had forgotten that the big beast could read his emotions, if not his thoughts.
I love these people, Gabriel said. He hadn’t ever really allowed himself the thought.