She got up and began walking down toward the villa. She could see the rider's blond head by now. Bjarni was flogging that poor horse. And it wasn't really up to his weight in the first place.
'To arms, all of you!' she heard him bellow.
By the time she got to the house, the Vinlanders were strapping on bucklers and breastplates.
'What is happening?' she demanded.
'Corfu town is under siege,' he said, wrestling with a recalcitrant breastplate strap. 'And there are bands of marauders out looting and burning the great houses.'
'Who?' She tugged the strap through for him.
'How do I know? All these continentals look the same to me. All I know is that the one group I saw had red sashes on, and horsehair plumes on their helmets. There's a bunch of them not half a league hence and I think they saw me.'
He turned to one of the men. 'Olaf, go up onto that little knoll behind the house. Give Sven a wave if you see them coming. Gjuki, open that front door. There are not more than twenty of them. We'll give them a welcome. I want men with arquebuses hidden at the upper-story windows.'
He pointed to the dark-haired Kari. Kari's mother had been an Osage tribeswoman, tall, strong, and handsome—no mean hand with a bow and a knife herself—and she'd raised her boys in many of the tribal ways. Kari and his brothers had been trouble all the way across to Europe, and through it. Now they would come into their own.
'Kari, you take your brothers out by the outside wall. I want this place looking open, deserted. Svanhild, you go back up to the knoll with Olaf.'
Svanhild nodded. She also took a bow with her, and a belt-knife she hadn't worn since she'd left the holding on the Mississippi.
The marauding horsemen had indeed spotted Bjarni. They came on at a ground-eating canter, riding huge, magnificent horses. There were in fact only eighteen of them and they were loot and captive hungry. So far they'd met no resistance, and they needed to beat the Croats to as many more villas as they could find.
They yelled in delight and eagerness, seeing the villa with its open front door. It was plainly a wealthy nobleman's residence. The looting of Venetian villas had so far been a very profitable business indeed. Much wealth flowed into the Venetian Republic up the Adriatic, and not a little of it stayed here in this colony. Corfu was fertile, and had a good climate, and all the trade passed through it.
The doorway was fortunately too low or they might have ridden into the house itself. Instead they scrambled from their mounts in their haste for loot, yelling like banshees. The first eight were in through the door when Svanhild heard Bjarni yell: 'Fire!'
There were six arquebusiers at the upper windows, all veterans of Vinland campaigns. All of them could shoot, and shoot well. Kari and his three brothers leapt over the wall and pulled down the only Magyar knight who hadn't dismounted or been shot. They attacked the last of the knights who was on foot outside, before hurtling into the fray inside the house.
From the knoll Svanhild could hear the boom of a wheel-lock pistol and clash of metal, mixed with screams.
She saw, briefly, someone emerge at a run from the front doorway and leap for a horse. It was a well- trained animal, and the rider was a great horseman. Almost flat on the horse's neck the rider clung, and spurred it to a gallop.
Svanhild took careful aim.
The horse ran on. But the rider lay dead, sprawled on the track, a feathered shaft between his shoulder blades.
Bjarni came striding out of the house. 'Get the horse!' he bellowed.
Svanhild loosed. But neither aim nor heart was in it. She loved horses and this one was a beauty.
'God rot it, Hildi!' said Bjarni furiously. 'Now they'll have a riderless horse coming back to tell them that someone is killing these useless
He brightened perceptibly, when she came up to him. 'At least we have got some nice horseflesh out of it. And Gjuki hit one of them on the head—we can find out just what is going on here.' Bjarni cracked his knuckles explosively. 'He is going to be telling us. Or I'll pull his ears off and force-feed them to him.'
It wouldn't be ears he'd be pulling off, if he left the work to Kari. The
'Where are we going to go, Bjarni?' asked Svanhild, hastily scrambling down to him.
The huge blond Vinlander shrugged his shoulders. 'Let's see what the prisoner tells us. We can base our decision on that. But I suspect we'll have to hide out in the mountains to the north.'
* * *
Unfortunately, the domicile from which Fianelli ran his operations had been built right against the fortifications. The walls of Fianelli's kitchen rattled every time the Citadel's cannons fired. So, at least, it seemed to Bianca.
'You get used to it,' grunted Fianelli. He raised the bottle, offering her some more, but she declined with a little wave of her hand. Bianca Casarini didn't have a good head for wine, so she never drank more than a glass at a time. Half a glass, when she was in the presence of men such as Fianelli and his goons.
Fianelli set down the bottle, after refilling his own glass. 'Been through it before,' he said. 'Twice.'
Bianca frowned. Fianelli was only in his mid-forties. 'Corfu hasn't been attacked in—'
'Not here. Someplace else.'
