The Red Knight

The captain looked more closely. ‘Are those things new?’ he asked, reaching for the glass spectacles.

‘Ground by the apothocary right here,’ Walter said. ‘Hurt the nose like anything, but damn me, I haven’t been able to read this well in years.

The captain put them on his own nose. They wouldn’t really stay, the heavy horn frames merely pinching. There was a fine steel rivet holding the two lenses together so that they pivoted – the captain knew the principle, but had never seen them in action.

‘I . . . that is, we-’ La Tour looked wistful. ‘I might stay here, Captain.’

The captain nodded. ‘You’d be well suited,’ he said. ‘Although I doubt me that you are too old to chase nuns.’

‘As to that,’ Walter said, and turned crimson. ‘I am considering taking orders.’

The things you don’t know. The captain smiled and clasped the man’s free hand again. ‘Glad to see you better,’ he said.

‘I owe God,’ Walter said, by way of explanation. ‘They saved me, here. I was dead. That behemoth crushed me like an insect, and these holy women brought me back. For a reason.’

The smile was wiped from the captain’s face. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I, too, owe something to God.’

He moved on down the line of cots. Low Sym lay with his face to the wall, his back carefully bandaged. Justice tended to be instant, in the company. He moaned.

‘You are an idiot,’ the captain said with professional affection.

Sym didn’t roll over. He moaned.

The captain was merciless, because next to La Tour and the others, Sym’s pain was like the sting of a fly. ‘You picked the fight because you wanted the girl. The girl didn’t want you, and beating up her brothers and her fellow farm-hands wasn’t going to ever make her like you. Eh?’

Moan.

‘Not that you care, because you are not above a spot of forced love, eh, Sym? This is not Galle. I didn’t approve of your way in Galle, my lad, but this is our country and we are all holed up in the fortress together, and if you so much as breathe garlic on a farm girl, with or without her permission, I’ll hang you with my own hands. In fact, Sym, let’s be straight about this. You are the single most useless fuck in my whole command, and I’d prefer to hang you, because the message that I mean business would cost me nothing. You get me?’ He leaned forward.

Sym moaned again. He was crying.

The captain hadn’t been aware that Low Sym was capable of crying. It opened up a whole new vista.

‘You want to be the hero and not the villain, Sym?’ he asked very quietly. Sym turned his head away.

‘Listen up, then. Evil is a choice. It is a choice. Doing the wicked thing is the easy way out, and it is habit forming. I’ve done it. Any criminal can use force. Any wicked person can steal. Some people don’t steal because they are afraid of being caught. Others don’t steal because it is wrong. Because stealing is the destruction of another person’s work. Rape is a violence against another person. Using violence to solve every quarrel-’ The captain paused in his moralizing lecture, because, of course, as a company of mercenaries, they tended to use violence to solve every quarrel – he laughed aloud. ‘It’s our work, but it doesn’t have to define us.’

Sym moaned.

He captain leaned close. ‘Not a bad time to decide to be a hero and not a villain, Sym. Your current line will end on a gallows. Better to end in a story than a noose.’ He thought of Tom. The man was a hillman – easy to forget, but his notions of word fame lingered. ‘Finish in a song.’

The small man wouldn’t look at him. The captain shook his head, tired and not very happy with his job.

He got up from the nursing stool by the archer and stretched.

Amicia was right behind him. Of course. There he was, the prince of hypocrites.

She looked down at Sym, and then back at the captain.

He shrugged at her.

She furrowed her brow, and shook her head, and waved him on his way.

He stumbled away, cast down.

He made an exasperated sound, and stepped out into the corridor that ran from the recovery beds to the serious patients’ ward. He walked a few paces and turned the corner only to find himself standing by Gawin Murien’s bed. The younger man had one leg bandaged from the crotch to the knee.

He sat by Ser Gawin’s bed. ‘No one will look for me here,’ he said in bitter self-mockery.

Gawin’s eyes opened.

This is not my day, the captain thought.

There was a pause long enough for vast conversations. For debate, argument, rage. Instead, they stared into each other’s eyes like lovers.

‘Well, brother,’ Gawin said. ‘So it seems you are alive, after all.’

The captain made himself breathe in and out. ‘Yes,’ he said, very quietly.

Gawin nodded. ‘And no one knows who you are,’ he said.

‘You do,’ the captain said. ‘And the old wizard, Harmodius.’

Gawin nodded. ‘I gave him a wide birth,’ he said. ‘Would you help me sit up?’

The captain found himself obligingly raising his brother on his pillows – even fluffing one of them. His brother, who had killed Prudentia at his mother’s orders.

‘Mother said she was corrupting you,’ Gawin said, suddenly, as if reading his mind. But even as he got those words out, his voice broke. ‘She wasn’t, was she? We murdered her.’

The captain sat back down before his knees could give way. He wanted to flee. To have this conversation another day. Another year.

The truth was that the truth was too horrible to share. Shameful, horrible, and deeply wounding to everyone it could possibly touch. The captain sat and looked at Gawin, who still believed that they were brothers. That lie, at least, was intact.

‘Prudentia knew something she shouldn’t have,’ the captain found himself saying. He sounded remarkably calm. He was quite proud of himself, just for a moment.

Gawin made a choked noise. ‘So Mater got us to kill her,’ he said, after another mammoth pause.

‘Just as she egged you on every day to torment me,’ the captain said bitterly.

Gawin shrugged. ‘I realised that, even before you left. Richard never saw it, but I did.’ He looked out the arrow slit by his head. ‘I did something terrible, down in Lorica. I got some good men killed and I did something despicable.’

Suddenly the captain found Gawin’s eyes locked on his again. ‘When I was kneeling in the mud, acting the craven, I realised that I had to avenge myself or go mad. And – and let me fucking say this, brother - I realised in one flash that I had been the instrument of your destruction, as surely as if I’d killed you myself. You think it didn’t touch me? When we found your body, and how did you pull that off? – when we found your body, I rode away into the Wild. I was gone – off my head. I knew who killed Lord Gabriel. I did. Dickon and I did, together. We hated you into death, didn’t we?’ He shook his head. ‘Except now you are not dead, and I’m not sure where that leaves us. You are a magus?’ he asked.

The captain sighed. ‘Mater had me trained as a magus,’ he said. ‘By Prudentia. Even while telling you two how effeminate I was, and what a poor knight I made. I had sworn never to reveal my studies – to her, to God, to all the saints.’ He laughed bitterly.

‘Oh, my God,’ Gawin groaned. ‘Prudentia was a magus. So . . . oh, my God. Mater provided the arrow.’

‘Of Witch Bane,’ the captain said.

Gawin was whiter, if anything, than when the captain had first seen him. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘We both knew you loved her.’

The captain shrugged.

‘Gabriel-’

‘Gabriel, Viscount Murien is dead,’ the captain said. ‘I am the captain. Some men call me the Red Knight.’

‘Red Knight? Like some nameless bastard?’ Gawin said. ‘You’re my brother, Gabriel Moderatus Murien, the heir of the Duke of the North, son of the king’s sister.’

‘Oh, I’m the son of the king’s sister all right,’ the captain said, and then clamped down, before any more came out.