The Red Knight

The captain had his head in his hands. ‘Never mind. We’re here now and so are they. It’s my guess that the Jacks, or the daemons, or both, were going to kill you and seize the Abbey in a coup de main; Hawisia ruined it all somehow, either by confronting the traitor or by taking your place. We may never know.’ He shook his head.

The Abbess looked at her hands. ‘I loved her,’ she said.

The Red Knight knelt by her and put his hands on hers. ‘I swear I will do my best to hold this fortress and save you. But, my lady, I still feel you know something more. There is something personal about all this, and you still have a traitor within your walls.’ When she didn’t answer him, he got up from his knee. She kissed his cheek, and he smiled. He handed her a cup of wine.

‘Not your usual contract, ser knight,’ she said.

‘Damn it, my lady, this is my usual contract: it’s a war between rival barons, except that this time the rival baron can’t be negotiated with or turned from his path or simply murdered, and they are all good ways of avoiding a knock-down fight. But in every other respect you and the Wild are feuding border lords. You’ve taken a piece of his land, and in turn he’s raiding you and threatening your home.’

As the captain spoke, his officers trickled in – Bad Tom, Ser Milus, Ser Jehannes, Wilful Murder, and Bent. The others were either asleep or on patrol.

The Abbess was brought a chair.

‘Park wherever you can,’ the captain said. ‘I’ll try and make this brief. I’d say we’re almost surrounded, and our enemy hasn’t bothered to build trench lines and trebuchets. Yet. But he’s got enough force to close the woods and every road around us. He’s got Outwallers – who are those men and women who live in the Wild, for you godless foreigners.’ The captain gave Ser Jehannes a mirthless smile. ‘I’m guessing he has a hundred or more Outwallers, a thousand irks, and perhaps fifty to a hundred other creatures of the types we’ve already seen – wyverns, daemons and the like.’ He shrugged. ‘I’m guessing our enemy is a potent magus.’

Bad Tom whistled. ‘Lucky we didn’t get ourselves killed trying for their camp then.’

The captain nodded. ‘When you move fast and plan well, you deserve a little luck,’ he said. ‘But yes, I’d say that getting away with that raid seized our luck with both hands.’

‘So now what?’ Sauce asked.

‘First, Jehannes, you are now the constable. Ser Milus, you are now marshal. Tom, you are now first lance. Sauce, you are now a corporal. In one sweep, I’m short three knights. Milus, are there any likely lads in your refugees? The merchants?’

Milus scratched under his chin. ‘Archers? Hell, yes. Men-at-arms? Not a one. But I’ll tell you what there is down in my little kingdom – there’s two wagon loads of armour in barrels, and some nice swords, and a dozen heavy arbalests. All for sale at the fair, of course.’

‘Better than what we have?’ the captain asked.

‘White plate – the new hardened breastplates.’ Ser Milus licked his lips. ‘The swords are good, the spearheads better. The arbalests as heavy as anything we have.’

The Abbess smiled. ‘Those were for me, anyway.’

The captain nodded. ‘Take it all. Tell the owners we’ll give them chits for it and settle up at the end if we’re still alive. How heavy are these arbalests?’

‘Bolts a forearm in length and thick as a child’s wrist,’ Ser Milus said.

‘Put them on frames. Two for you and the rest up here for me.’ The captain looked at the Abbess. ‘I want to build an outwork.’

‘Anything you like,’ she said.

‘I want to put all your farmers and all the refugees to work and I want your help seeing that I get no insolence from them. I need them to work quickly and be quiet.’ The captain took out a scroll of parchment and unrolled it.

‘My squire is a gifted young man, and he drew this,’ he said. Michael flushed uncontrollably. ‘We want a deep V-shape of walls on both sides and ditches outside the walls; built three hundred paces from Bridge Castle, where the road from the Lower Town starts up the hill. It will allow us to send soldiers and supplies freely back and forth from the Lower Town to Bridge Castle. Put boards all along the bottom so men can walk quickly, without being seen, and put three bridges over it, so our sorties can move easily about the fields. See this cutaway? A nice hollow space under the boards. Good place for a little surprise.’ He grinned and most of the soldiers grinned back.

‘We’ll also put a wall along the Gate Road, running all the way to the top. We should have done it in the first place, anyway. Towers here and here, on earth bastions.’ He rubbed his beard. ‘First, we put in covered positions for these new frame crossbows – here and here – so that if they attack while we’re building, it’s all a trap and they lose a couple of their own for nothing. Last, we improve the path from the postern gate to the Lower Town.’

All the soldiers nodded.

Except Tom. Tom spat. ‘We don’t have the fucking men to hold all that wall,’ he said. ‘Much less in both directions.’

‘No we don’t. But building it will keep the peasants quiet and busy, and when our enemy attacks we’re going to make him pay for it, and then let him have it.’

Tom grinned. ‘Of course we are.’

The captain turned to the others. ‘I’m assuming that our enemy doesn’t have a lot of experience in fighting men,’ he said. ‘But even if he does, we won’t have lost much with these distractions.’

The Abbess looked pained. Her eyes had a hunted look, and she turned away. ‘He is a man. Or he was, once.’

The captain winced. ‘We face a man?’

The Abbess nodded. ‘I have felt the brush of his thought. He has some small reason to – to fear me.’

The captain looked at her, gazing as intently as a lover into her flecked brown and blue eyes, and she held his gaze as easily as he held hers.

‘It is none of your affair,’ she said primly.

‘You are not telling us things that would be of value to us,’ the captain said.

‘You, on the other hand, are the very soul of openness,’ she replied.

‘Get a room,’ Tom muttered under his breath.

The captain looked at Ser Milus. ‘We cut the patrols down to two a day, and we launch them at my whim. Our sole remaining interest is getting any more convoys in here safely, or in turning them away. Albinkirk is gone. Sauce – how far did you go today?’

She shrugged. ‘Eight leagues?’

The captain nodded. ‘Tomorrow – no, tomorrow we won’t send anything. Not a man. Tomorrow we dig. The day after, we send four patrols, in all directions except west. The day after that, I’ll take half the company west along the road, as fast as we can go. We’ll aim for twenty leagues, pick up merchants or convoys we can, and get a look at Albinkirk. Then back here, all with enough force to kill whatever opposes us.’

Tom nodded. ‘Aye, but against a hundred Outwallers, in an ambush, we’ll just be dead. And that’s without a couple of daemons and maybe a pair of wyverns and a hundred irks to eat our bodies afterwards. Eh?’

The captain wrinkled his lips. ‘If we surrender the initiative and hunker down here we’re all dead too,’ he said. ‘Unless the king comes with his army to relieve us.’

The Abbess agreed.

‘For all I know the Wall fortresses have already fallen,’ the captain said. His eyes narrowed, as if the subject had particular interest to him. ‘Whatever the case, we cannot count on any help from the outside, nor can we hope that this is an isolated incident. We have to behave as if we have an unending supply of men and materiel, and we have to try to keep the road east open. We need to lure our enemy into some battles of our choosing.’ He looked around at his officers. ‘Everyone understand?’ He looked at the Abbess. ‘We have to be ready to destroy the bridge.’

She nodded. ‘There’s a phantasm to do it. I have it. It is regularly maintained: when a certain key is turned in the gate lock, the bridge will fall into the river.’

The officers nodded their approval.

The captain stood. ‘Very well. Ser Milus, Ser Jehannes, you are in charge of my construction project. Tom, Sauce, you will lead the patrols. Bent, get the arbalest frames up, and placed in those four covered positions,’ he