The Red Knight

‘Jesu does not care what you give up, but rather, what you give him,’ Sister Miram replied, and Jehannes smiled shyly at her.

She returned his smile.

The captain released a heavy sigh. ‘Ladies, you may well cure all of our souls yet, but it must wait until the hoardings are up and all your people are safe. Michael, you are in charge of them. I recommend that my men live in the towers and galleries – if we have time, we’ll build them beds.’

‘My people will go four to a room,’ the Abbess said. ‘I can take the older girls and single women from the farms into the dormitory, and all the men and their families will go in the hall. Overflow into the stables.’

Michael nodded. ‘Yes, my lady,’ he replied. He turned to the captain. ‘I’m at your orders.’ He looked back and forth. ‘Will we hold the Lower Town?’

The captain stepped up onto the gate wall and looked down at the four streets of the town, a hundred feet below.

‘For a little while,’ he said.

Albinkirk – Ser Alcaeus

Ser Alcaeus passed a bad night and drank too much wine in the morning. The man whose daughter had been abducted sat in the garrison barracks and wept, and demanded that the garrison send out a sortie to her rescue.

The mayor agreed with him, and hot words were exchanged.

Alcaeus didn’t want any part of it. They were too alien – the commoners were both too servile and too free, and Ser John was no knight. Even the churches were wrong. Mass was said in low Archaic.

It was disorienting. Worse than the convoy of slaves had been, because he could ignore them.

Mid-morning, as he finished his ablutions – he, the Emperor’s cousin, washing without so much as a servant or slave to help him – he heard the mayor’s shrill voice in the guardroom, demanding that Ser John come out.

Alcaeus dressed. He had spare shirts because the boy had saved his packhorse, and he’d see the page richly rewarded for it.

‘Come out of your hole, you doddering old coward!’ shrieked the mayor.

Alcaeus was trying to lace his cuffs by himself. He had done his own in the past, but not since he became a man. He had to press his right hand against the stone of the castle wall and pin the knot in place.

‘Master Mayor?’ he heard. It was Ser John, his voice calm enough.

‘I demand that you gather all the useless mouths you call your garrison and go out and find this man’s daughter. And open the gates – the grain convoys are on their way. This town needs money, though I’m sure you’ve been too drunk to notice.’ The mayor sounded like a fishwife – a particularly nasty one.

‘No,’ said the captain. ‘Was that all?’

Alcaeus couldn’t, in that moment, decide exactly what he thought of the knight. Over-cautious? But memories of yesterday’s ambush were still burned onto the backs of his eyelids.

He reached for his boots – uncleaned, of course. He pulled them on, and fought with all the buckles, his head suddenly full of irks and boglins and worse things. The road. The confusion.

He had been trained to fight the Wild. Until yesterday, he’d only fought other men – usually one to one, with knives, at court.

The images in his head made him shudder.

‘I order you!’ the mayor screamed.

‘You can’t order me, Master Mayor. I have declared martial law, and I, not you, am the power here.’ Ser John sounded apologetic rather than dismissive.

‘I represent the people of the town. The burgesses, the merchants, and the artisans!’ The mayor’s voice sank to a hiss. ‘You don’t seem to understand-’

‘I understand that I represent the king. And you do not.’ Ser John’s voice remained level.

Alcaeus had made his decision. He was going to go support the low-born knight. It didn’t matter what the two men were debating – it was their manners. Ser John was knightly. He might even survive at court.

Alcaeus tested his feet in his boots, and took his heavy dagger and put it in his belt. He never left his rooms without a dagger. Then he went out into the hall – a hall crowded with garrison soldiers listening to the argument in the main room below. He ran light-footed down the stairs.

He’d missed an exchange. When he entered, the mayor, red-faced, thin and tall and blond as an angel, was silent, his mouth working.

Ser Alcaeus went and stood behind the old knight. He noted that the mayor wore a rich doublet of dark blue velvet trimmed in sable, and a cap to match, embroidered with irks and rabbits. He smiled – his own silk doublet was worth about fifty times the value of the mayor’s.

The irks in the mayor’s cap were ironic, to say the least.

‘This is Ser Alcaeus,’ Ser John said. ‘The Emperor’s ambassador to our king. Yesterday his convoy was attacked by hundreds of Wild creatures.’

The mayor shot a venomous glance at him. ‘So you say. Go do your fucking job, sell- sword. Aren’t you even a little humiliated to think that this man’s daughter is the plaything of monsters while you sit and drink wine?’

The man – who stood behind the mayor with a dozen other men – gave a sob and sank to a wooden bench, his fist in his mouth.

‘His daughter has been dead since yesterday and I won’t risk men to look for her corpse,’ Ser John said with casual brutality. ‘I want all the woman and children moved to the castle immediately, with victuals.’

The mayor spat. ‘I forbid it. Do you want to panic the town?’

Ser John shrugged. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘In my professional opinion-’

‘You have no professional opinion. You were a sell-sword – what? Forty years ago? And then a drinking crony of the king’s. Very professional!’ The mayor was beside himself.

Alcaeus realised the man was afraid. Terrified. And that terror made him belligerent. It was a revelation. Alcaeus was not, strictly speaking, a young man. He was twenty-nine, and he thought he knew how the world worked.

Yesterday had been a shock. And now today was a shock too. He watched the fool mayor, and watched Ser John, and understood something of their quality.

‘Messire mayor?’ he asked in his stilted Gothic. ‘Please – I am a stranger here. But the Wild is real. What I saw was real.’

The mayor turned and looked at him. ‘And who in God’s name are you?’ he asked.

‘Alcaeus Comnena, cousin to the Emperor Manual, may his name be praised, the drawn sword of Christ, the Warrior of the Dawn.’ Alcaeus bowed. His cousin was too old to draw a sword but his titles rolled off the tongue, and he was annoyed by the mayor.

The mayor was, for all his belligerence and terror, a merchant and an educated man. ‘From Morea?’ he asked.

Alcaeus thought of telling this barbarian what he thought of their casual use of Morea for the Empire. But he didn’t bother. ‘Yes,’ he shot back.

The mayor drew a breath. ‘Then if you are a true knight, you will go and rescue this man’s daughter.’

Alcaeus shook his head. ‘No. Ser John is correct. You must call in your out-farmers and move the people into the castle.’

The mayor shook his fist. ‘The convoys are coming. If we close the gates, this town will die!’ He paused. ‘For the love of God! There’s money involved.’

Ser John shrugged. ‘I hope the money helps when the boglins come,’ he said.

As if on cue, an alarm bell sounded.

After the mayor pounded out of the castle, Alcaeus went out on the wall and saw two farms burning. Ser John