The Red Knight

like the prosperous men they were. And he had ten professional soldiers he’d engaged himself, acting as his own captain – good men, every one of them with a King’s Warrant that he had borne arms in the king’s service.

Gerald Random had such a warrant himself. He’d served in the north, fighting the Wild. And now he was leading a rich convoy to the great market fair of Lissen Carak as the commander, the principle investor, and the owner of most of the wagons.

His should be the largest convoy on the road and the best display at the fair.

His wife Angela laid a long white hand on his arm. ‘You find your wagons more beautiful than you find me,’ she said. He wished that she might say it with more humour, but at least there was humour.

He kissed her. ‘I’ve yet time to prove otherwise, my lady,’ he said.

‘The future Lord Mayor does not take his wife for a ride in the bed-carriage while his great northern convoy awaits his pleasure!’ she said. She rubbed his arm through his heavy wool doublet. ‘Dinna’ fash yourself, husband. I’ll be well enough.’

Guilbert, the oldest and most reliable-looking of the hireling swordsmen, approached with a mixture of deference and swagger. He nodded – a compromise between a bow and a failure to recognise authority. Random took it to mean something like I have served great lords and the king, and while you are my commander, you are not one of them.

Random nodded.

‘Now that I see the whole convoy,’ Guilbert nodded at it. ‘I’d like six more men.’

Random looked back over the wagons – his own, and those of the goldsmiths, the cutlers, the two other drapers, and the foreign merchant, Master Haddan, with his tiny two wheel cart and his strange adult apprentice, Adle. Forty-four wagons in all.

‘Even with the cutlers’ men?’ he asked. He kept his wife there by taking her hand when she made to slip away.

Guilbert shrugged. ‘They’re fair men, no doubt,’ he said.

Wages for six more men – Warrant men – would cost him roughly the whole profit on one wagon. And the sad fact was that he couldn’t really pass any part of the cost on to the other merchants, who had already paid – and paid well – to be in his convoy.

Moreover, he had served in the north. He knew the risks. And they were high – higher every year, although no one seemed to want to discuss such stuff.

He looked at his wife, contemplating allowing the man two more soldiers.

He loved his wife. And the worry on her face was worth spending more than the value of a cart to alleviate. And what would the profit be, should his convoy be taken or scattered?

‘Do you have a friend? Someone you can engage at short notice?’ he asked.

Guilbert grinned. It was the first time that the merchant had seen the mercenary smile, and it was a surprisingly human, pleasant smile.

‘Aye,’ the man said. ‘Down on his luck. I’d esteem it a favour. And he’s a good man – my word on it.’

‘Let’s have all six. Eight, if we can get them. I have a worry, so let’s be safe. Money is not all there is,’ he said, looking into his wife’s eyes, and she breathed out pure relief. Some dark omen had been averted.

He hugged her for a long time while apprentices and journeymen kept their distance, and when Guilbert said he needed an hour by the clock to get his new men into armour – meaning they’d pawned theirs and needed to redeem it – Random took his wife by the hand and took her upstairs. Because there were so many things that were more important than money.

But the sun was still in the middle of the spring sky when forty-five wagons, two hundred and ten men, eighteen soldiers, and one merchant captain started north for the fair. He knew that he was the ninth convoy on the great road north – the longest to assemble, and consequently, the last that would reach Lissen Carak’s great supply of grain. But he had the goods and the wagons to buy so much grain that he didn’t think he’d be the loser, and he had a secret – a trade secret – that might make him the greatest profit in the history of the city.

It was a risk. But surprisingly for a man of money, as the lords called his kind, Gerald Random loved risk as other men loved money, or swords, or women, and he set his sword at his hip, his dagger on the other, with a round steel buckler that would not have disgraced a nobleman, and smiled. Win or lose, this was the moment he loved. Starting out. The dice cast, the adventure beginning.

He raised his arm, and he heard the sounds of men responding. He sent a pair of the mercenaries forward, and then he let his arm fall. ‘Let’s go!’ he called.

Whips cracked, and animals leaned into their loads, and men waved goodbye to sweethearts and wives and children and brats and angry creditors, and the great convoy rolled away with creaking wheels and jingling harness and the smell of new paint.

And Angela Random knelt before her icon of the Virgin and wept, the tears as hot as her passion of an hour before.

Lissen Carak – The Red Knight

Seven men had died fighting the wyvern. The corpses were wrapped in plain white shrouds because that was the rule of the Order of Saint Thomas, and they gave off a sickly sweet smell – corruption and zealous use of sweet herbs, and bitter myrrh burned in the censors that hung in the front of the chapel.

The whole fighting strength of his company stood in the nave, shifting uneasily as if facing an unexpected enemy. They wore no armour, bore no weapons, and some were very ill-dressed; not a few wore their arming cotes with mail voiders because they had no other jacket, and at least one man was bare-legged and ashamed. The captain was plainly dressed in black hose and a short black jupon that fitted so tightly that he couldn’t bend over – his last decent garment from the Continent. His only nod to his status was the heavy belt of linked gold and bronze plaques around his hips.

Their apparent penury contrasted with the opulence of the chapel – even with the shrines and crosses swathed in purple for Lent, or perhaps the more so because the purple of Lent was so rich. Except that nearer to hand, the captain could see the edge of a reliquary peaking out from beneath its silken shroud, the gilt old and crazed, the wood broken. Tallow, not wax, burned in every sconce except the altar candelabra, and the smell of burning fat was sharp against the sweet and the bitter.

The captain noted that Sauce wore a kirtle and a gown. He hadn’t seen her dressed as a woman since her first days with the company. The gown was fine, a foreign velvet of ruddy amber, somewhat faded except for one diamond shaped patch on her right breast.

Where her whore’s badge was sewn, he thought. He glared at the crucified figure over the altar, his pleasant, detached mood destroyed. If there is a god, how can he allow so much fucking misery and deserve my thanks for it? The captain snorted.

Around him the company sank to their knees as the chaplain, Father Henry, raised the consecrated host. The captain kept his eyes on the priest, and watched him throughout the ritual that elevated the bread to the sacred body of Christ – even surrounded by his mourning company, the captain had to sneer at the foolishness of it. He wondered if the stick-thin priest believed a word of what he was saying – wondered idly if the man was driven insane by the loneliness of living in a world of women, or if he was consumed by lust instead. Many of the sisters were quite comely, and as a soldier, the captain knew that comeliness was in the eye of the beholder and directly proportionate to the length of time since one’s last leman. Speaking of which-

He happened to catch Amicia’s eye just then. He wasn’t looking at her – he was very consciously not looking at her, not wanting to appear weak, smitten, foolish, domineering, vain . . .

He had a long list of things he was trying not to appear.

Her sharp glance said, Don’t be so rude – Kneel, so clearly he almost felt he had heard the words said aloud.

He knelt. She had a point – good manners had more value than pious mouthing. If that was her point. If she had, indeed, even looked at him.

Michael stirred next to him, risked a glance at him. The captain could see that his squire was smiling.

Beyond him, Ser Milus was trying to hide a smile as well.