Miles Cameron - The Fell Sword

The cliff was imposing, but it was the sight of twinkling lights like distant faery folk that raised the shouts. Somewhere – somewhere within reach, at last – there was light, and warmth.

Aeskepiles looked at the stumps of the ice bridge abutments and cursed.

‘How strong is he?’ he asked aloud. And after a small ritual of gathering, he built a single bridge.

Demetrius pointed his sword. ‘He made three,’ he said.

‘I must conserve my power,’ Aeskepiles said. ‘If he squanders his, all the better.’

Amphipolis was the name of the town, and her gates were stormed. The veterans of the company offered no warning and no formal summons to surrender – and the town had no idea that an enemy army was above them in the mountains. The veterans put ladders against the low curtain walls before sunrise, just as if they’d been in Arles. Fifty Thrakian soldiers died very quickly on the wrong side of the main gate, tricked, trapped, and annihilated. Ser Jehan didn’t bother taking prisoners.

Father Arnaud and Gelfred sat on their horses in the central square and shouted at the Red Knight until they were joined by the Emperor, and together with a hundred men-at-arms he led them to clear the archers – the victorious archers – out of the streets.

‘If you let this town be destroyed, you are no knight,’ Father Arnaud said.

The Red Knight leaned over and vomited in the snow.

‘Is he drunk?’ Arnaud cried.

Toby shook his head.

Ser Michael grabbed the priest’s bridle. ‘He’s tired. And this, pardon me, padre, is war.’

‘We don’t make war like this on the Wild!’ Father Arnaud said.

‘The Wild doesn’t have silver candelabra or handsome girls,’ the Red Knight muttered. ‘Damn you and your moral certainty. We are not fucking paladins. We are soldiers, and this town is an enemy town taken by storm. These men are cold, and exhausted, and an hour ago they had almost no hope of warmth.’ He pointed as John le Bailli kicked in a door and led three armoured men in emptying the cowering family and their servants out into the snow. Then a dozen of the company’s women took the house.

While they watched that drama, Ser Bescanon dragged Wilful Murder out of a building while a dozen other men with leather buckets tried to put out the fire he’d started.

‘This is senseless. If I cannot appeal to God, I’ll appeal to your basic humanity,’ Father Arnaud said.

‘Who says I have any humanity at all?’ the Red Knight shouted in the priest’s face. ‘You want me to save the world, and you don’t want any innocents killed? It doesn’t work like that. War kills. Now get out of my way, because I have tomorrow’s atrocities to plan!’

Toby waited until his lord was gone into what had been the mayor’s house.

‘He’s not doing all that well,’ he said. ‘He’s sick, and he’s worried. In case you gentleman can’t tell. You’re all very helpful, I’m sure.’ He shrugged, seized an apple from a basket that a looter ran past carrying, and took a bite. Then he followed his lord inside.

After a warm night and a lot of stolen food, the army marched again at dawn.

The town, stripped of preserved food, pack animals, and grain, watched them go in surly silence. Even the presence of their Emperor could not make them cheer.

‘If you ever come to rule Thrake, that town will belong to you,’ Father Arnaud said, as they rode west.

‘Then I’ll do something nice for them. Father, I am aware that you are a good man, and, despite appearances, I like to think of myself as a good man. In fact, I pride myself on it. We are, if you will pardon me, in a situation that cannot be resolved by prayer or a noble cavalry charge. So could you, perhaps, leave me alone?’

Father Arnaud smiled savagely ‘Never, Gabriel. I will never, ever leave you alone.’

The Red Knight put his hand to his head, which throbbed as if he had spent several nights drinking.

The army marched west, moving as fast as two thousand tired soldiers and their women and baggage animals could manage.

‘You swore he wouldn’t make it across the Penults,’ Aeskepiles said quietly.

Demetrius was looking down at the town below him.

‘Now his army is between us and Lonika,’ Aeskepiles went on. ‘How much of a garrison does your capital have?’

Demetrius chewed on his thumb. He worked on the callus, biting it, chewing the bits. ‘Son of a bitch,’ he said.

‘We have to catch him in the plains,’ Dariusz offered. ‘The road will be clear, and good.’

Ser Christos shook his helmeted head. ‘We’re haemorrhaging men.’

‘So is he,’ Demetrius said. They’d picked up a dozen city stradiotes who’d simply surrendered as soon as they could. They’d already captured almost a hundred stragglers.

Ser Christos let out a long, harsh breath, but said nothing.

‘Advance the banner,’ Demetrius said. ‘Get the scouts well out. Put all the Easterners out. Let us make the usurper’s life a living hell.’

Harndon – The Queen

Four days after Christmas, three ships came sailing in to Harndon port. On board was Ser Gerald Random, and he brought the entire Morean fur trade with him, minus only his concessions to the Etruscan merchants, as well as fifteen tons of Wild honey. The Etruscan banks in the city received into their coffers some thousands of leopards in loans, and trading – gambling, some called it – in the value of some elite commodities changed tenor rapidly.

Ser Gerald was seen to go to the palace and place in the King’s hands a quantity of pelts, honey, and gold.

In the great marketplace at Smithfield, outside the western gates of the city, workmen began to construct the scaffolding for a truly titanic set of lists, including bleachers for seats. Loads of lumber came downriver, the great logs simply heaved in and floated down the Albin from the edge of the Wild.

Ser Gerald’s furs were sold for good quantities of silver – many to Harndon’s Etruscan merchants, who paid a higher price but no doubt had ways of passing the cost onto their customers. But the flow of silver was steady, and, just as the first warmth of spring melts the snow and causes the frozen streams to develop to a trickle, so the silver began to flow into the King’s new mint, which bore a startling resemblance to Master Pye’s work yard.

The dies were ready, and Edmund began striking slugs of silver as soon as the first shipment reached him. Outside Master Pye’s gate, a full company of the Harndon trained men stood guard, less proud now in their half armour than they had been on Christmas night. Keeping a hundred apprentices and journeymen ‘idle’ so that they could play soldier in winter was expensive and boring and cold.

But there were no attacks on the fledgling mint, and the coins began to flow.

Almost as soon as the new coins appeared – sacks of them – in the trade squares, they changed the nature of commerce. They were solid. They were heavy.

They had an excellent silver content.

The King couldn’t share Master Ailwin’s triumph as he neither understood it nor, really, respected it. But he did notice the change in the faces of his interior councillors, and he was delighted to hear them vote him the funds to carry on his tournament for the first of May.

If the new Bishop of Lorica listened with a sour face and referred to the whole exercise as ‘usury’, the King could afford to ignore him.

But if the King was victorious in Cheapside, he was less sanguine about the palace. And the months after Christmas passed in petty defeats for the Queen as her belly grew rounder and her King grew more indifferent. Galahad d’Acre was arrested and thrown in the tower – although no one seemed to actually suspect him of the murder of Lady Emota. Another of the King’s squires simply vanished. Some said he’d been murdered, others that he had gone home to his father’s estates, afraid for his life and reputation.