“Aye, Wat. Your place still holds.” The King laughed.
Tyler took his great bow off his back and leaned on it. “I’ve walked from N’gara,” he said. “I’d be right thankful for a jack of ale and a bowl of something.”
“N’gara?” the Beggar King said. Silence had fallen. “Next you’ll be telling us you met the Faery Knight.”
“Somewhat like that,” Tyler answered.
A fat woman put a jack in his hand.
He raised it in thanks and drank deep. “Comrades,” he said. “That’s the first ale I’ve had in many a month.”
“You were far off in the Wild,” the Beggar King said. “And now you’ve come back-a hard road. You never was a real beggar, Wat. What are you here for this time?”
Tyler shrugged. “I’ll hide a month or two. Pick up some lads as want to fight. And be away before summer comes.”
“Same as always,” the Beggar King said.
“Aye,” Tyler said.
“And you aren’t just here because the tournament is upon us, and there’s money to be gained everywhere?” the Beggar King asked.
“Tournament?” Wat asked.
“Christ and his saints, man-you must have been in the land of the faeries. There’s a great tourney to be fought, a million sculls to pick the pockets of and a thousand shills to fleece.” He grinned. “If we’re not killed by Galle routiers first.”
“Routiers?” Tyler asked.
“Killing always did get your attention, Wat. The King’s champion, de Vrailly-”
“May he rot in hell,” Tyler said.
“Ah-sometimes we even agree. May he rot in hell-he sent to Galle for a fresh army. And they sent him one, but they ha’ troubles of their own, seemingly, and we get the tall knights and the scrapings of their jails. They kept all their proper soldiers home to fight boglins.” He laughed.
Tyler nodded. “Don’t talk to me about boglins,” he said. “I’ve had a bellyful.”
The younger of the female beggar-masters cackled. “You home to stay, then?”
Tyler shook his head. “No, Lise. I ain’t, like I said. I’ll be gone afore midsummer.”
“You’ll help us kill some Galles?” the Beggar King asked.
Tyler nodded. “You know me, King.”
“We know you,” the Beggar King said. “Lucky you came,” he admitted. “We don’t have the muscle we’ll need for these Galle bastards.”
Tyler nodded. “They die, pretty much as easy as any other man,” he said, his thumbs rubbing the beeswaxed wood of his great bow.
Lise stepped forward-a big, handsome ruin of a woman with a red nose and lank black hair. “One o’ my girls-robbed, throat cut. Scale Alley.” She folded her arms. “Three Galles, all new off the boat. Crack says he’d know ’em again.”
The Beggar King rubbed his hands together and looked at Wat.
Wat sighed. “You making me pay dues, King?” he asked.
“No,” the King said slowly. “No. You can walk away. You earned it a hundred times. But-if’n you want help, well, we want help, too.”
Tyler frowned, thinking of his task.
But some ties were thicker than blood or water. He turned his eyes to Lise without moving his head. “You tell me where to find ’em. Livery, lodging. All the usual.”
She came up and kissed him. “Some o’ we missed you, Wat.”
“I’ll bet you say that to all the hired killers,” Tyler said, with a spark of his ancient self.
The sway of her hips held no promise for him, though, and the spark died.
He was given a space on a floor under a tavern. And he began to eat, and enjoy being warm-the two greatest pleasures left him.
The Queen’s arrest was a wonder-an expected shock, but still a shock when it happened. The sheer number of Galles in the street was another shock to every Harndoner, and the sheer criminality of their servants and spearmen was beyond anything the people of Harndon had ever seen.
Thirty men and a dozen women died the first night. Twenty Gallish spearmen burned down an inn when they were thrown out-for theft. They killed every man who came through the door out of the smoke.
The High Sheriff went to the palace for soldiers with whom to make arrests, and never returned.
In broad daylight, a party of routiers stormed a jeweller’s booth in the market by Cheapside. They killed the man and his daughter and took all their gold, silver, and copper-including some fine enamels.
And then they swaggered through the rapidly closing stalls, picking valuables off other shop tables. A merchant who protested was stabbed and left kneeling in the muck, his guts spilling around his hands.
They sacked a dozen more shops, gathering adherents as they went, and then went down to the riverbank as if they owned the place, and laid their loot on blankets to divide it-exactly as if they were in a city taken by storm.
It was there that the Trained Band found them.
The Trained Band was a muster of all the very best trained and armed citizens of Harndon. Any man or woman who was formally signed as an apprentice to one of the seventy-three recognized guilds or trades was automatically made a citizen, with freedom of the city and the right to bear arms and travel, but many other people had the same rights; most householders who held in freehold, and most servants of the two great priories, and the King’s household and the Queen’s, and hundreds of others-fencing masters, for example, and school teachers. And a variety of men and women who’d been granted the status and cherished it-including some knights and nobles.
The muster of the city was the assembly of every man or strong woman who owned and could carry weapons. The Trained Band was the pick of the whole. The elite of the Trained Band tended to be from the guilds that made and used weapons; the bowyers, the fletchers, the butchers, the armourers and the sword smiths.
The Trained Band was ready at a minute’s notice to be the armoured fist of the city, but they generally worked at the behest of the Sheriff and the Lord Mayor, and they tended to obey the niceties of the law.
Michael de Burgh was a fencing master and owned a prosperous tavern. He had been a soldier, and it was rumoured that he ran a string of brothels. But he was one of the eight captains of the Trained Band, and he was the man on duty. The routiers on the riverbank gathered in knots, weapons in hand, as the Trained Band marched up to the edge of Cheaping Street.
De Burgh stepped out of the ranks of his spearmen.
“Throw down your weapons,” he shouted in a voice fit to wake the dead and make them do drill. “Throw them down and lie down. You are all-”
He looked down in surprise at the heavy arbalest bolt that had punched through his heavy coat of plates and the mail beneath it. He was not a slim man, and the bolt went into him up to the fletchings.
A shocked screech.
But he knew his duty. “Under-arrest…” he managed before he pitched over.
The men behind him in the Band knew their duty, too.
Battles are generally the result of someone making a serious mistake. The Battle of Cheaping Street was the result of two sets of mistakes. On the one hand, the routiers had never encountered resistance from townspeople or peasants. Their experience in Galle was that the only men who would face them were knights. All other resistance would melt away before their ferocity and superior equipment and skill.
The men of the Trained Band were used to facing opponents who were better trained-or monstrous. They made up for their disparity in fine equipment and discipline. But they had never experienced a hard fight in their own city. Out in the Wild-yes. Not in the streets around the market.
The routiers charged with a yell of fury that shook the windows around the market.
The left end of the Band’s line didn’t loose a single bolt, as they were unready for immediate violence. They hadn’t seen Captain de Burgh get hit, and they had no idea what was going on. Many men at the left of the line were still shrugging into hauberks and buckling their breast-and-backs. Men had sausages dangling out of their mouths.