‘My lord,’ breathed Lady Clarissa de Sartres. She was leaning forward, her lute clutched against her. The King had risen from his stool in his private receiving room – and put his hand on her shoulder.
He leaned down and ran his lips across the exposed nape of her neck and she stiffened. She scrambled away, her hand straying to the amulet that her great-uncle Abblemont had given her, and her thumb touched the disc at the base of the crucifix.
The King was small but he was strong and very quick, and he had both of her hands, and then he pushed her against the fruitwood side table and pulled her veil off her head and put his mouth on hers. She stumbled, and used the stumble to cover a kick to his knee – and he threw her roughly to floor.
She screamed.
Abblemont came into the private solar without undue haste a few of her terrified heartbeats later. Clarissa was under the King, and he had her skirts above her knees and she was weeping. Abblemont left the door open.
‘People are coming, Your Grace,’ the Horse said. ‘Let Clarissa up, please.’
The girl had enough spirit to slap the King as soon as he released her hands, and he slammed the heel of his hand into her chin.
Abblemont dragged him off her. He was a head taller, much heavier, and he trained constantly. He managed to lift the King clear of the ground and set him on his stool without doing him much harm.
‘Get up and go – before the Queen comes,’ Abblemont said over his shoulder to his niece.
The King sucked in a deep breath, as if he had just awakened. ‘She made me!’ he said.
Abblemont turned on his niece. ‘I told you never to be alone with him,’ he said.
She clutched her ruined dress to herself and sobbed – and reached for her instrument. But when she attempted to lift it, it became clear that it had been shattered in the struggle, and a litter of discordant strings cut her sobs.
She ran from the room.
‘She seduced me,’ said the King, his eyes steady. ‘That strumpet.’
Abblemont contemplated regicide, and let the moment pass. ‘Your Grace, there is a letter from the Captal, and the Queen is on her way to this room. Are you prepared to receive her? She has some notion that Clarissa was present.’ His words were clipped and careful. He was, at some remove, quite fond of his niece – but he was altogether fonder of the peace and prosperity of Galle.
The King sat up.
His wife came in, as if summoned. ‘Ah,’ she said. She was ten years older than the King, and the daughter of the man reputed to be the richest in Christendom. Her clothes and her jewels were the finest in the world, and her grace and deportment were the toast of poets in three countries. When she was fifteen, the Lady of Flowers, as she had been called then, had danced alone, accompanied only by her own voice, in front of a crowd composed of her father’s friends, a thousand knights and their ladies, to open a great tournament, and the fame of that great feat remained her cloak and her armour.
Her expression was such that the exclamation ‘ah’ was enough to throw the King into a rage.
‘You have no right to be here, you witch!’ he shouted, like a boy at his mother.
The Queen of Galle came all the way into the room, her cloth of gold gown and the collar of emeralds she wore making the King look like a small boy. ‘Abblemont,’ said the Queen, with a slight inclination of her head.
Abblemont sank into a deep bow, his right knee on the floor, his eyes down.
The Queen sniffed slightly. ‘I would think,’ she said, ‘that you would have more care for your niece.’
Abblemont kept his eyes down.
‘She came after me like a bitch in heat!’ said the King.
‘Of course,’ said the Queen quietly. In two words, she somehow expressed disbelief, and an utter disinterest. ‘Abblemont, see to it that I never hear her name mentioned again.’
The Horse didn’t raise his eyes. ‘Of course, madame.’
Clarissa de Sartres stood on the bridge below the nunnery and watched the dark water move implacably – deep, and very cold.
An hour ago, she had considered suicide. Her immortal soul was as ruined as the rest of her – she had little interest in God, or a life of contemplation. Or anything else. And as if God had granted his permission, she found her room unlocked for the first time – and the postern gate of the nunnery unlocked as well. No one had seen her cross the courtyard. Perhaps no one cared.
But the water looked cold, and her imagination – always her bane – spun her a hell of eternal cold; dragged down to the bottom of the river and resting there for ever. With the Bain Sidhe of her nurse’s tales.
The utter humiliation of being banished from court – for ever – for the sin of being attacked by the King. Her throat closed, and her hands shook, and she gagged and the darkness closed on her again.
Not quite raped. Her imagination supplied whatever hadn’t happened, and the speed with which she’d been jettisoned by her uncle – and the sheer ferocity of the joy of the other women at court at her degradation – had been telling.
God doesn’t give a fuck, she thought. And in that moment she thought of a very young man in her father’s courtyard, saying those words. More than a year ago, in Arles. And how she had despised him for it.
She looked up at the nunnery on the mountain, and at the Rhun River flowing at her feet. She realised in that moment that she hadn’t escaped – she had been allowed to come here, so her inconvenient version of events would perish. For a few heartbeats, she was utterly consumed in hatred – an emotion she had seldom felt before.
If I kill myself, they win, she thought.
Open Ocean west of Galle – Ser Hartmut.
The crossing itself was not without incident. Ser Hartmut had never sailed in the north, and he exclaimed with joy to see great hills of ice sailing by like so many white ships of war. But the wind was fair, and ten days sweet sailing brought them off Keos, the northernmost of the islands of Morea, and they bore north and west into the setting sun. It was late in the year, and de Marche had plotted a conservative course, making each crossing of the empty blue between islands as brief as he could allow, but no storm troubled them.
West of Keos, they saw a ship’s sail – apparently a great lateen, according to the sailors – nicking the far western horizon, but when the next day dawned they were alone in the great bowl of the ocean.
Seventeen days into the voyage, and they had had no weather worse than a rain squall. The three ships were still together, well in sight; La Grace de Dieu was well in advance, with her two consorts trailing in an uneven line, each ship at least a mile from the last.
Ser Hartmut was on the deck, fully armed, as he appeared every day at daybreak and remained all day until the sun set. He had wrapped the mainmast in a thick linen canvas quilted hard, and he practised at this informal pell all day, cutting, thrusting, hammering away with a pole-axe. He would take long breaks in which he merely sat in the bows and watched the sea. Sometimes, Etienne or Louis de Harcourt, his other squire, would come and read to him. At other times they would spar with him, matching blunted swords or spears up and down the deck.
Ser Hartmut never spoke to the sailors but they had developed a healthy respect for him as a fighting man. Despite his size, he was as fast as a cat; despite his girth, he had excellent wind, and could usually fight long after his squires began to grow pale and raise their hands in token of submission.
His men-at-arms were no different, and they trained hard enough that every day had its tale of broken bones, sprains, and bruises.
Some of the sailors began to practise with their spears too – but never in the open glare of the Black Knight.
But this day saw nothing of the sort. It was hot, and the sailors were bored – many were in the rigging, simply hanging there, waiting for a slight breeze to cool them. After nonnes such a breeze arose, and from the east, so that the ship began to move, and the water whispered along the ship’s bluff cheeks.
The sun began
to set.
And then everything happened at once. Whales appeared under the round ship’s counter; great leviathans rising from the deep and sounding around them.
De Marche was on deck in a moment. ‘Rig the nets! To arms!’
Etienne was pale with fatigue and had a black eye. But he ran up the ladder to the aft castle in full armour and managed a good bow. ‘Ser Hartmut asks – what is the purpose of this alarm?’
De Marche leaned over the side. His servant had his breast and back open on the hinges and his shirt of mail held high, and de Marche didn’t wait on courtesy, but put his head into the mail and then his arms. From deep in the steel mesh, he said ‘The Eeeague. They follow the whales.’
‘Eeeague?’ asked de Vrieux.
‘Silkies, sir.’ De Marche’s head popped through the neck of his hauberk and he leaned out over the wall of the castle as the boarding nets went up. Crossbows were coming out to the hold at a fair speed, and men on the deck were arming.
‘Land-ho!’ shouted the lookout. ‘Land, and three ships. Ships are hull up.’ The last report was sullen – the sound of a man who knew he’d failed in his duty.
‘Master Louis, the lookout is to be listed for punishment,’ de Marche snapped. He sprang on to the rail, swung up into the rigging, and climbed a stay, hand over hand despite the weight of his mail, until he stood on the small platform at the midpoint of the tall, single-piece aft mast. ‘Where away?’ he shouted.
The lookout in the mainmast fighting top pointed. ‘West-north-west,’ he shouted, obviously eager to be forgiven for his dereliction. ‘Bare poles,’ he called. And then, almost to himself, ‘And I’d have seen ’em sooner if they carried any sail, anyway.’
De Marche found them quickly enough. He watched them as long as his eyes could stand the sun-dazzle, and then he watched the water below his feet. From this height, he could see the great dark shapes of the whales, and the smaller shapes flitting in and out among them. Herdsmen? Tormenters?
The red flag burst from his own gallery. The Grace de Dieu heeled and began to turn, picking up the wind on her quarter she turned south – but round ships didn’t turn particularly well, and the whole process was glacial.
Two miles astern, another red flag flashed; after a few heartbeats, the middle ship, Saint Denis, answered.
Men with crossbows were lining the sides of his fore and aftercastles. A round ship was a ship shaped like half an egg, with great towers built fore and aft to raise archers and crossbowmen, and give them the height advantage they needed, whether they fought men – or things.
Amidships, in the low waist, the men-at-arms and their squires and pages, already armed, waited with axes and spears.
De Marche picked a halyard, made sure of it, and then lowered himself to the deck, landing neatly just two Gallish cloth yards behind Ser Hartmut. The giant knight turned when he felt the wood under his feet move, and found the merchant captain, wearing his hauberk, bowing to the deck.
‘Master Etienne!’ he shouted. ‘Ask your master if he has fought Eeeague.’
The steel giant raised his visor.
Etienne appeared. ‘Never,’ he admitted.
De Marche shrugged. ‘Neither have I. I thought they were something that the Etruscans made up, to warn us off their trade. None in the Middle Sea? Nor Ifriqu’ya?’
De Vrieux looked a question at his master, and spread his hands.
Ser Hartmut spun his pole-axe. It was so small, compared to the man himself, that it looked like a toy. Close up, de Marche could see it was almost half again the size most of the marines carried.
‘Come, sweet friends, and let us say a prayer together!’ Ser Hartmut called out, and all of his men-at-arms and their people knelt on the deck. ‘Let our sweet and gentle Jesus send us a good fight and a worthy enemy! Amen!’
De Marche ran back up the ladder to the aftercastle, and two of his mates got his breast and back on him and closed it. The buckles took time – too much time.
‘Oh Christ,’ said a sailor behind him.
Crossbows snapped – the strings sang with almost the same sound that a sword blade makes when it strikes the pell. His men had heavy arbalests, capable of putting a bolt right through a ship’s side – or through a man in armour.
‘Sweet Jesus Sweet Jesus ohmygodohmygod,’ moaned a sailor behind him.
The tine of the last buckle under his arm slipped home, and his man Lucius slapped his back. Master Henri had his steel helmet, an open-faced bassinet with a sun-bill of steel, and a fine steel chain aventail. He got it on de Marche’s head even as the sailors behind him began to scream.
Lucius put his bill-hook into his hand and he turned.
Half the sailors at the rail were already dead.
He almost missed the arm coming for him – and then he cut with the bill-hook. He had a hard time grasping the shape of the creature – it was nearly transparent, a ghastly pink and green mottling over glistening translucence.
He slammed his bill into the thing’s organic centre – if that was its trunk, and not a continuation of its limbs – it was difficult to register its physiology in combat. His bill splurted into the trunk and blew out again in a satisfying shower of gore – but every splat of the thing’s corporeal form that touched metal ate away at it, and Lucius tore his own helmet from his head and cursed.
The head of his bill began to deform, flaking away and rusting even as he slammed it into the thing for a second time.
The port-side crossbowmen were snapping their heavy bolts into the creature from a range of a few feet – spattering their hapless mates with the sticky, deadly gore, and sometimes with the bolts themselves, and doing the thing little harm.
It uncoiled something – an arm? A weapon? – at him, and he batted it aside with nothing but the headless shaft of his bill.
An alert ship’s boy acted on a hunch and poured a helmet full of seawater on Lucius, who stopped screaming.
Ser Hartmut vaulted up the ladder and stood like a tower of steel in front of the Eeeague. It turned to face him.
He drew his great sword, and it burst into flame.
A dozen sailors shouted, ‘The Black Knight!’
The thing snapped a tendril at him, and he batted it aside and cut back, right down the same line, into the monster. The thing had already endured fifty crossbow bolts and dozens of other blows, but now it screamed – and vanished down the side of the ship.
The stench of dead fish and decomposing flesh filled the air. There were six dead men on the deck, and Lucius was still having water poured over his head. He was as red as a beet and whimpering.
Just by their stern, a whale broached and a great fluke slammed into the water, showering every man on the aftercastle. The whale turned suddenly, and its great jaws opened.
Then closed.
In passing, it delivered a nudge to the great ship – one of the largest ships ever built in a Gallish yard – and the whole ship groaned, and wooden pegs carefully driven home with great oak fids sprang loose, and water sprayed in on the bales of bright red cloth.
It was too late to turn the round ship. And the whale was gone, hurtling away into the deep.
De Marche had never had to confront the three-dimensionality of the sea so forcefully, and he had a moment of vertigo as the whale vanished beneath him.
And then another of the tentacled things came at the forecastle.
By the fourth attack, two sailors had been thrown over the side, and the squires had fetched fire from the galley and made fire spears, wrapping dry tow dipped in oil around their boarding pikes and lighting them.
It was as well, because the fourth attack was the first one that seemed to be coordinated; six tentacled monsters came up the steep sides all together. Three of them went for the low waist of the ship as the easier target, and were greeted by Ser Hartmut. But the ship itself heeled – the things had significant weight. They were not just the spirits of damned and dead sailors, as had been shouted over the panic.
&n
bsp; One went up the forecastle, but the forecastle was the highest point on the ship, rising sheer over the bow, and the creature, for all its hellish strength and speed, had trouble getting over the boarding nets, and was impaled with fire spears and fled.
But two of them came up the aftercastle. They screamed like dead spirits, and the Etruscans’ name for them – the Eeeague – was explained. And their coming heralded a wave-front of pure terror.
De Marche stood his deck. He put a spear into one thing’s trunk and severed what might have been a translucent tentacle – Lucius had an iron bucket of hot sand, and he threw it into the beast, and another sailor – Mark, an Alban – sprayed it with oil to no effect and died.
It came right over the rail and down – de Marche took a blow and the pain shocked him – whatever hit him went right through his mail.
Like water.
He screamed, stumbled back, and let go the spear.
A tendril caught a ship’s boy and flipped him over the side, screaming.
The trunk seemed to open and inside it had a red-orange beak like a raptor concealed in its jelly-like flesh, and the boy . . .
De Marche drew his sword. He whipped it along the deck where the oil had been spilled, cocked it back in his strongest guard, and cut at the thing’s trunk as hard as he could.
Unlike the concussive weapons, the sword cut. It felt like cutting through pig fat – but the blow was well formed, and he sawed as fast as he could even as the thing sprayed his face – he screamed, ripped the sword loose, and slammed it back again.
Lucius threw water into his face.
The smell was grotesque.
But it retreated back to the sea, leaving a great hunk of its gelatinous flesh on the deck, burning its way into the wood.
The other one had killed a sailor and paused to eat him, the beak exposed and glistening red, obscene and active. The thing had no face, no limbs. It looked like wet silk.
His blade was pitting before his eyes, but he cut into the second thing, cut and cut again. Lucius called, ‘Swords,’ and men drew them and hacked with the desperation of terror. A man fell screaming to the deck with a tendril wrapped around him, his flesh boiling from his body as he screeched his hopeless terror.