The Red Knight

Gawin choked. He sat up, and cursed. A slow thread of scarlet worked its way across his groin. ‘No!’ he muttered.

The captain nodded. ‘Yes. If it makes you feel any better, we’re only half brothers,’ he said.

‘Sweet Christ and his five wounds,’ Gawin said.

The captain came to a decision – the kind of decision he made, where he threw out one set of options and adopted another, like life on the battlefield. He moved his chair closer to his half-brother. ‘Tell me this terrible fucking thing you did in Lorica,’ he said. He took Gawin’s hand. ‘Tell me, and I’ll forgive you for killing Prudentia. She already forgives you. I’ll explain sometime. Tell me what happened in Lorica, and let’s start again, from age nine, when we were friends.’

Gawin lay back, so that their eyes broke contact. ‘The price of your forgiveness is steep, brother.’ He was suddenly red as blood. Then he hung his head. ‘I am deeply ashamed. I would not confess this to a priest.’

‘I’m no priest, and I have plenty of which to be ashamed. Some day I, too, will explain. Now tell me.’

‘Why?’ Gawin asked. ‘Why? You’ll only hate me more – add contempt to the list of your grievances. I played the caitiff, I was craven and I grovelled under another man’s sword.’ Tears came down his face. ‘I failed and lost. I was nothing. For my sins, Satan sent this,’ and he pulled down his shirt to show the scales that had grown from his waist to his neck on the right side.

The captain looked at his brother – still so proud, even after such a thing happened, and all unknowing of his own pride. So easy to understand others the captain thought with wry amusement. And surprising sorrow. He couldn’t keep his emotional distance with Gawin.

‘Losing is not, in and of itself, a sin.’ The captain rubbed his beard. ‘It took me years to learn that, but I did. Failure is not sin. Wallowing in failure-’ he hung his own head ‘-is something at which I can excel, if I allow it to myself, but that’s more like the sin.’

‘You sound like a man of God,’ Gawin said.

‘Fuck God,’ the captain said.

‘Gabriel!’

‘Seriously, Gawin, what has God ever done for me?’ the captain laughed. ‘If I awaken after a sword thrust with the eternal flames burning my sorry arse, I’ll spit in the maker’s face, because that’s all I was ever offered in a rigged game, and I will have played it anyway.’

That blasphemy ended all conversation for a long time. The sun was setting.

Gawin rolled his hips a little. ‘My groin is bleeding again. Can you re-wrap it? I can’t stomach the nursing sisters wrapping my groin.’

‘Crap,’ the captain said. What had been a thread of scarlet was now a rapidly spreading stain – a pool of blood. ‘Jesus wept! No, I’m getting expert help.’ He laughed. ‘We’ll both likely die of the family curse – overweening pride – but I don’t have to actively help you die.’ He scraped his chair back. ‘Amicia?’ he called. ‘Amicia?’

She came so quickly that he knew – knew from her face, as well – that she’d heard every word they had said.

And she had a length of boiled linen in one hand and a pair of sharp scissors in the other. ‘Hold him down and this will go faster,’ she said, all business.

Gawin turned his face away.

‘Really,’ the captain said, when the bandage was off, ‘you should enjoy having such a beauty work on your groin.’

Amicia paused. He looked into her eyes for the first time in days and felt like a fool. ‘Sorry,’ he muttered weakly.

But she held his gaze. And then he saw her wink at Gawin. ‘A secret for a secret,’ she said, with that not-a- smile in the corner of her mouth. She bent over the long wound on the young knight’s leg, and when her lips were a finger’s width from his thigh, she breathed out – a long breath – and as she breathed, the wound closed. The captain saw the power flow through her, a great pulse of power, as great as anything he’d ever handled.

In his sight, it was bright green.

She looked up from her work and just a flicker of her eyes, and in them was a charge and a promise and in that flicker of a heartbeat he accepted both.

‘What did she do?’ Gawin asked. The captain’s broad torso was blocking his ability to see. ‘It’s all numb.’

‘A poultice,’ the captain said cheerfully. The room suddenly smelled of summer flowers. She was wrapping fresh linen around the wound, sponging off the fresh blood and the older dried blood.

Gawin tried to sit up, and the captain held him down. Under his left hand, something felt very wrong with his half-brother’s shoulder, and he rolled the edge of his shirt collar back.

Gawin’s shoulder was finely scaled, like a fish, or a wyvern. The captain ran his hand over it, and behind him, Amicia’s breath came in a sharp gasp.

Gawin groaned. ‘And you think you are cursed by God?’

Amicia ran her hand over the young knight’s scales, and the captain found himself instantly jealous.

‘I have seen this before,’ she said.

Gawin brightened perceptively. ‘You have?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ she said.

‘Can it be cured?’ he asked.

She bit her lip. ‘I really don’t know, but it was not uncommon among . . . among . . .’ she stammered.

The captain thought that an astrologer would have said it was a day for secrets, and their revelation.

‘I will look into it,’ she said with the assurance of the medico, and she swept from the room, the pale grey of her over-gown fluttering behind her.

Gawin watched her, and the captain watched her and then. ‘She used power,’ Gawin said quietly.

‘Yes,’ the captain said.

‘She is-’ Gawin let his head fall back. ‘I was headed north,’ he began. ‘The king had dismissed me from court for shooting my big mouth off. I fell in love – oh, I am telling this badly. I was trying to impress the Queen’s Maid-of- Honour. She . . . never mind. I said something I shouldn’t have said to the king and he sent me off to the Wild to gain glory.’ Gawin shook his head. ‘I have a great name as a bane of the Wild. You know why? Because after we killed you – well, we thought we did – I rode away to die in the Wild. Alone.’ He laughed. ‘A daemon attacked me, and I killed it.’ His laugh was a little wild. ‘Hand to hand. I lost my dagger in the fight, and I battered it to death, and so men call me Hard Hands.’

‘Pater must have been very proud,’ the captain muttered.

‘Oh, he was,’ Gawin answered. ‘So proud he sent me to court so the king could send me away. I rode north to Lorica, and put up in an inn.’ He turned his head away. ‘I’m not sure I can tell this while I look at you. I took rooms. A foreign knight came with a retinue – I don’t know how many, but it was a hundred knights, at least. Jean de Vrailly, God curse his name. He called me out into the courtyard, challenged me to combat, and attacked me.’ Gawin fell silent.

‘So? You were always a better swordsman than I,’ the captain said.

Gawin shook his head. ‘No. No, you were the better swordsman. Ser Hywel told me after you died; you’d pretended to be inept.’

The captain shrugged. ‘Fine. You were, and are, a fine man-at-arms.’

‘Ser Jean imagines himself to be the very best knight in all of the world,’ Gawin said.

‘Really?’ the captain said. ‘How very dangerous.’

Gawin snorted. ‘You really haven’t changed.’

‘I have, you know,’ the captain said.

‘I never thought I’d be able to chuckle while I told this. He was in armour – I was not.’

The captain nodded. ‘He would be, being a Galle. I was just fighting there. They take themselves very seriously.’

‘I only had a riding sword – by Saint George, I make too many excuses. I held him – took a wound, and he punched my sword into one of my squires. My own sword killed my sworn man.’ Now all the humour was gone, and Gawin was somewhere between toneless and sobbing. ‘I lost all sense of the fight, and he mastered me – pushed me down into the dirt. Made me admit myself bested.’

How that must have tasted, the captain thought. Because he had imagined doing exactly that to this man a thousand times. He sat by the very man’s bedside and tried to think what had changed in