Elissa was sitting on a barrel entertaining half the garrison with a lewd story. But her youngest sister wasn’t there.
Mary was drinking wine in the Western Tower with Lis the laundress, Sukey Oakshot, the seamstress’s daughter, Bad Tom, Ser George Brewes, and Francis Atcourt. There were cards and dice on the table, and the women were laughing hard. All seven looked up when Michael leaned in.
‘She’s not here,’ Tom yelled, and guffawed. The other men-at-arms laughed indulgently, and Michael fled.
‘Who’s not here?’ Lis asked.
‘His leman. Boy’s in love.’ Tom shook his head and his great hand, under the table, chanced against Sukey’s ankle. She kicked him. ‘Which I’m a’married,’ she said, apparently unafraid of the largest man in the castle.
Tom shrugged. ‘Can’t fault a man for trying,’ he said.
‘Who’s his leman, then?’ Lis asked. ‘One o’ your slatterns? He’s too nice for an oyster, ain’t he?’
‘Oyster?’ asked Mary.
‘A lass as opens and shuts with the tide,’ Lis said, and drank more wine.
‘Like you, eh?’ said Mary.
Lis laughed. ‘Mary, you’re a local girl. Boys think you are easy. That’s a long chalk from what those girls do.’
Francis Atcourt shrugged. ‘They’re people like everyone else, Lis. An’ they play cards and go to church.’ He shrugged. ‘Sorry. I got a deep draught of mortality today.’
Tom nodded. ‘Drink more.’
Mary looked at Lis, caught beween admiration and anger. ‘So what you do—’ she said.
‘What I do is live my life wi’out being ruled by a man,’ Lis said. ‘Men is good for play and not so good for anything else.’
Tom laughed.
Ser George tossed his cards on the table, disgusted. ‘What is this, philosophy hour?’
‘And it’s your fucking sister the young squire’s riding,’ Lis said. She wasn’t sure just why she was angry.
Mary stood up, affronted. ‘That’s just like Fran – make a rule and then break it herself.’
Lis laughed. ‘Not Fran.’
Mary stopped dead. ‘Kaitlin? She’s not – she wouldn’t! She’s—’
Lis laughed.
Michael found her in the stable with three other girls, all younger. They were dancing. He went from horse to horse, looking them over. The girls stopped dancing, and one suddenly shouted that she was an evil monster and started shrieking, and the other two were laughing, or crying.
And then one of them was screaming, and Kaitlin was soothing her. Michael had been fooled by the screams, but he was over the stall and with them in a moment.
Kaitlin’s eyes met his. She had the little girl pressed against her.
‘We’re going to be eaten,’ bawled the child.
Kaitlin rocked her back and forth. ‘No, we’re not,’ she said firmly. She raised her face to Michael.
Michael knew she was asking something of him, but neither of them were sure exactly what it was. So he knelt with them. ‘I swear on my hope of being a knight and going to heaven, I will protect you,’ he said.
‘He’s not a knight, he’s just a squire,’ said the other girl, with the dreadful truthfulness that afflicts the young. She looked at Michael with enormous eyes.
Kaitlin’s eyes met his.
‘I will protect you anyway.’ Michael said, keeping his voice light.
‘I don’t want to be eaten!’ said the first girl. But the sobs were fading.
‘I’ll bet we’re gooey and delicious!’ said the second girl. She grinned at Michael. ‘And that’s why they attack us!’ she said, as if this solved a deep, difficult problem she’d been having.
Kaitlin hugged them both. ‘I think some people are silly,’ she said.
The third girl threw a clod of horse manure at Michael and he was caught in an odd dilemma. He wanted Kaitlin alone and yet, watching her with children, he wanted this moment to go on forever. And for the first time, he thought – I could marry her.
Amicia reached out. His door was very slightly open and she slipped through, a wraith in the green light. The Warlock who laid siege to the fortress was so powerful that he shone like a green sun in her woods, and the green light battered his tower door.
He was there, standing by the statue of a woman.
‘I was just coming to look for you,’ he said happily. And yawned.
She shook her head. ‘Go to sleep. You didn’t even renew your powers this morn.’
He shook his head. ‘One hour with you—’
She backed away. ‘Good night,’ she said, and she shut the door. From outside.
He fell asleep so quickly he dreamed of her.
Michael leaned down and placed his mouth tenderly on hers, and her lips opened under his.
‘I love you,’ he said.
She laughed. ‘Silly.’
He grabbed her chin. ‘I’ll marry you,’ he said.
Her eyes grew huge.
The door of the next stall flew open. ‘Kaitlin Lanthorn!’ shrieked her sister. ‘You little bitch!’
Green light exploded in the sky outside the stables, and a thunderous concussion shook the walls.
‘To arms!’ shouted twenty voices on the walls.
The captain leapt from his bed without knowing what had awakened him, and found himself standing by his armour rack with Michael, who had never gone to bed, getting him into his hauberk. He wasn’t even awake and Michael was pulling the laces as tight as he could at the back, and then he had his old shoes on over bare legs and was racing along the wall.
‘Bridge Castle,’ Bent shouted from the tower above them. Michael was trying to get into his brigantine while simultaneously watching the starlit sky and the walls.
The fog was gone – it had been swept away in a mighty gust of wind. The captain felt the wind, and knew it for what it was. He smiled into it.
‘Here we go,’ he said.
Two beacon fires were alight, and there was a lot of shouting – the distinctive sound of men in danger, or anger.
‘We need a way to communicate with the Bridge Castle.’ The captain leaned on the wall as Michael, now secure in his brigantine and feeling the pain from his ribs, knelt to buckle his knight’s metal leg harnesses on – a pair of valets were carrying the armour along behind them as the captain moved. It might have been comical, if the situation hadn’t been so terrifying.
Michael gradually got the captain into his harness as the infuriating man moved from position to position throughout the fortress. He made off-colour jokes to nursing sisters and he clasped hands with Bad Tom and he ordered Sauce to mount up in the new covered alley in the courtyard – covered, Michael assumed, to keep the wyverns off the horses. It was the same sortie he’d prepared the night before, and ordered to stand down.
An hour later, the west tower ballista loosed with a sharp crack. As far as Michael could see the bolt had no effect out in the dark.
Michael got the rest of his own armour on, paused to rest, and fell asleep standing up at the corner where the west wall intersected the west tower.
He awoke to a loud roar. A sea of fire stretched almost to his feet and screams pierced the full-throated bellow of war. The captain’s hand closed on his vambrace. ‘Here they come!’ he shouted. ‘On my mark!’
Michael looked up, and saw a man leaning far out over the west tower edge, and the sky was not light, but it was grey.
‘Welcome back,’ the captain said cheerfully. ‘Have a good nap?’
‘Sorry,’ Michael mumbled.
‘Don’t be. Real soldiers sleep every minute they can, in times like this. Our attackers are making an attempt on the Bridge Castle and the Lower Town, while, I assume, sending men to look at what we built yesterday. Or perhaps to burn it.’ He sounded quite happy about the prospect.
Michael took a deep breath. A valet put a cup of warm wine into his hand and he drank it off.
The captain leaned well out over the wall. ‘Loose!’
he called.
The trebuchet in the western tower creaked, and the whole tower moved by the width of a finger.
‘Hail shot. Watch this.’
Michael had sometimes entertained his brothers and sisters by throwing handfuls of stones into water. This was like that, only multiplied many hundreds of times, with larger stones, and instead of striking water most of them hit the ground. The rest fell on chitinous hides and flesh and blood, having fallen several hundred feet.
‘Again!’ the captain called.
Down in the Bridge Castle, both of their heavy onagers loosed together, throwing baskets of stones the size of a man’s heart out into the trenches built the day before.
Screams rose out of the churned ground.
‘You seem very pleased with yourself,’ the Abbess said. She was fully dressed and looked exactly the same as she did in the height of a calm day. She had come around the corner by the west tower, attended by stretcher-bearers and a pair of nursing sisters.
‘The enemy has just fallen into our little trap with both feet.’ He turned to Bent. ‘We’ll get one more round off. Then raise both red flags. At that signal everyone – everyone in the garrison except you and the engine crews – attacks down the road. On me.’
The captain then managed to combine a bow to the Abbess with a duck under the lintel of the West Tower door. The valets had Grendel saddled, and the captain took his place at the head of Sauce’s column. Michael, still fuzzy headed and with his ribs burning in his chest, tried to keep up with him.
Jacques was standing by Michael’s horse. ‘You looked like you needed your sleep,’ the man said, with a smile. ‘Don’t get fancy, youngster. Those ribs will kill you.’ He leaned close. ‘So will kissing girls, if it costs you sleep.’
Then Michael was up, Jacques’ hand shoving his rump to get him into the saddle, and he was out of the low stable gateway and into the courtyard. Toby was holding the captain’s helmet while eating a half-loaf of bread, and the captain was pinning something – a white linen handkerchief – on his cote armour. It was very white against the scarlet velvet.
Michael grinned. ‘What is that?’ he began.
‘Honi soit qui mal y pense,’ said the captain. He winked, took his helmet from Toby, gave the boy a smile, and wheeled Grendel with his knees. ‘Listen up!’ he called.
The sortie quieted.
‘Once we’re through that gate kill everything that comes under your sword,’ the captain said. ‘The trench edge will be marked in fire so remember your route. If you lose me, follow the route. When you hear Carlus sound the recall, you turn and come back. Understand me?’
And with that as a speech, they rode from the gate as the trebuchet sprayed another rain of death out over their heads.
The hour was on the knife edge between day and night, and the trebuchet’s great baskets of stones had obliterated life over a swathe of ground that was roughly the shape of a great egg – creatures had been turned to a bloody or ichorous pulp, and the ground itself was littered with the stones – softer ground had deep pock-marks. Bushes and grass were pulverized. In the half-dark it was a vision of hell, and the sudden burst of balefire in the new-dug trenches added to the terrible aspect.
Especially when viewed through the slit of a closed visor.
There was no fight in the men or the monsters that struggled to win free of the beaten ground, or routed away from the hail of missiles still pelting them from the Bridge Castle. They were streaming for the woods, over a mile distant.
The captain led his sortie well to the south, right along the river, along the smooth ground, and then formed them up in a single rank and brought up his trumpeter and his great black banner with the lacs d’amour and the golden collars – his personal badge – and drew his sword.
‘All the way to the edge of the wood, and then form up on me.’ He had his visor up, and he looked around – Bad Tom was at his back, Sauce to one side, and Ser Jehannes was close.
‘Kill everything that comes under your sword,’ he said again. Michael didn’t think they’d lost a single man getting here. The war machines had utterly shattered the enemy attack. He took a deep breath, and the routed enemy flowed past them, running on exhausted feet – or talons or claws or paws – for the woods.
‘Charge!’ he roared, and the banner pointed at the enemy and the trumpets sounded.
Michael had never been in a charge before.
It was exhilarating, and nothing on the ground seemed to be able to touch them. They swept over the irks and the broken men and a single larger creature, something nightmarish that gleamed a sickening green hue in the first light of the sun, but Bad Tom put his lance tip precisely in the thing’s ear-bole as it turned its talons on Grendel, and his lance tip – a spear point as long as a man’s forearm and as wide as a big man’s palm – ripped its brain pan from its lower jaw.
‘Lachlan for Aa!’ the big man roared.
The monster died, and the line of knights swept over the pitiful resistance and then into the running men – and things.
By the time the sun was above the horizon, they had reached the wood’s edge, and the creatures and men of the Wild were a bloody mangle on the grass behind them – or rather, any they’d chanced on were a bloody mangle, while hundreds more ran around them to the north or south, or lay flat and prayed as the horses thundered over them.
And then the captain led them back to the gate by much the same road, crashing though a line of desperate irks trying vainly to defend themselves with spears which splintered on steel armour. Right through, and on to the edge of the fortress hill, where twenty valets waited with fresh horses.
Michael was mystified. His elation was ebbing quickly to be replaced by fatigue and the thumping pain of his ribs, jarred by the gallop and barely held together by his cote armour.
All of the men-at-arms and many of the archers were changing horses. The men on the walls were cheering them.
The captain rode up to him and opened his visor. ‘You’re moving badly,’ the captain said bluntly. ‘In fact, you look like shit. Fall out.’
‘What? Where—’ Michael spluttered.
Jacques took his reins. Michael noted that the valet was in armour – good armour – as Jacques got him out of his saddle and Michael wanted to cry – but at the same time, he couldn’t imagine fighting again.
Then Jacques swung up on a heavy horse of his own – an ugly roan with a roman nose. ‘I’ll keep him alive, lad,’ Jacques said.
So Michael stood there and watched as they changed horses and formed up, and then to his surprise they turned away from the beaten enemy and rode south, along the edge of the rising sun, moving at a canter. They rode straight for the Bridge Castle’s gate, and it opened as if by magic letting them pass through, canter over the bridge, and vanish onto the southern road.
Even as he watched, Gelfred, the master of the hunt, left Bridge Castle with three men and a cart. The men each took a brace of dogs – beautiful dogs – and moved briskly off to the west with a dozen archers covering them.
Just as the first starlings and ravens began to appear, gyrfalcons began to soar into the heavens over Bridge Castle, one after another. Up on the walls, a great eagle leaped into the air with a scream that must have chilled every lesser bird for three leagues.
Gelfred had struck, and the Abbess with him.
Braces of hounds emerged from the cover of Bridge Castle, running flat out for the leverets and the coneys and any other animal that lurked at the edge of the woods, and the gyrfalcon, Parcival the eagle and the lesser birds – well-trained birds brought from Theva to sell at the fair – struck the starlings, the ravens, and the oversized doves, ripping through their flocks like a knight through a crowd of peasants, and feathers, wings, blood and whole dead birds fell like an avian rain.
It took Michael half an hour to climb back to the fortress gate. The valets ignored him, and he stumbled many times, until someone on the walls saw the trail of blood he was leaving and a pa
ir of archers appeared to hold him up.
Amicia cut the sabatons off his feet, and found the flint javelin which had cut deeply into the muscle at the back of his leg. Blood was flowing out like beer from an open tap.
She was speaking rapidly and cheerfully, and he just had time to think how beautiful she was.
Lissen Carak – the Abbess
The Abbess watched the captain’s sortie head east along the road, moving so fast that they were gone from sight before she recovered her eagle.
I have certainly given away my station to every gentleman here, she thought. She wondered if the siege would leave her any secrets at all.
Parcival, her magnificent Ferlander eagle, was killing his way through the flocks of wild birds like a tiger let loose in a sheepfold. But she could see the big old bird was tiring, and she began to cast her lure. Just to be sure.
She whirled it carefully over her head, and Parcival saw it, turned at the flash of Tyrian red, and abandoned his pursuit of his defeated enemies. He came to her like a unicorn to a maiden – shyly at first, and finally eager to be caught.
His weight was far too much for her, but young Theodora helped her, and got a faceful of wings for her trouble as the creature bated and bated again, unused to his mistress having a helper. But she got the jesses slipped over his talons, and Theodora put the hood on him, and he calmed, while the Abbess said, ‘There’s my brave knight. There’s my fine warrior – you poor old thing.’ The eagle was tired, grumpy and very pleased with himself, all at the same time.
Theodora stroked his back and wings and he straightened up.
‘Give him a morsel of chicken, dear,’ the Abbess said. She smiled at the novice. ‘It’s just like having a man, child. Never give him what he wants – only give him what you want. If he eats too much we’ll never get him into the air again.’
Theodora looked out from the height of the tower. The plain and the river were far below them, and the eagle’s sudden stoop from this height had shattered the lesser birds.
Amicia appeared from the hospital with a message from Sister Miram. The Abbess looked at it and nodded. ‘Tell Miram to use anything she needs. No sense in hoarding.’