The Captain looked out the window, wrinkling his nose in frustration at having to reveal anything of his plans. But he finally looked at Michael and grinned. ‘It may yet come out that way,’ he admitted. ‘But it’s not how I want it to go.’
Ser Michael chewed on that for a moment. ‘It’s not?’ he asked. He looked at Father Arnaud, who looked equally surprised. In fact, he looked like a man who’d just made an important connection.
The Captain propped his chin on his hands, elbows on his knee which was in turn propped on a stool, and looked surprisingly human. ‘Sometimes I have to change my plans,’ he said. ‘This is one of those times. For various reasons, I’d say that yes, we’re going to the Queen’s tournament, and no, I don’t think I’ll marry the princess.’ He raised an eyebrow. ‘I’m sorry about your pater. I liked him.’
Michael shrugged. ‘I left for many reasons. I’m here because of them, and I shan’t go running off. I think I am glad you didn’t tell me until my wedding was over.’ He took a deep breath. ‘I think I’ll go and tell my wife,’ he said. He rose, found that the world was stable, and bowed. At the door he paused. ‘May I call you Gabriel?’ he asked.
‘No,’ said the Duke.
‘Yes,’ said the priest. ‘At every opportunity.’
Ser Michael nodded. ‘Got it,’ he said, and withdrew.
The priest turned to his new charge. ‘To the best of my understanding, you’ve chosen to be a human being again. Having a name is part of that.’
The Captain’s face was still balanced on his hand. He was looking out the window. ‘Is it an act?’ he asked. ‘Or do you think that if I spend enough time pretending to be a human being, I’ll become one?’
Got it in one, muttered Harmodius – his first comment in days.
The priest came and stood by him.
‘Who gave you power over me?’ Gabriel asked, but his voice was not unfriendly.
‘The Bon Soeur du Foret Sauvage sends her greetings,’ he said.
The second day after the party, the army – now including almost two hundred local Morean stradiotes – rode into the hills towards Thrake. The Nordikans had ponies, and the entire company was remounted. They moved fast, covered almost twenty miles, and returned through the hills to the west without meeting any opposition. Selected men were counted off and practised storming a small castle that had been built to the purpose – it was only waist high, but rooms were laid out clearly.
Watchers noted too late that they went out without Gelfred’s men and returned with them, as well as a wagon and twenty prisoners.
On the following day, the feast of Saint George, they drilled in the Great Square – even the stradiotes. There were sword drills, and spear drills, and tilting by the mounted men. The Vardariotes came and shot from horseback, joined by a handful of Gelfred’s men and some pages who had become interested in mounted archery – or had been ordered to take an interest. Gelfred’s men vanished for two hours and returned to announce that they all had new hose and new doublets – all green, not red.
Workmen came and built a toy castle – just two towers and a timber hall. None of the buildings had walls – just skeleton structures, so that the crowd could watch all the fighting inside. Forty picked men stormed the castle, to the cheers of the onlookers.
The newly recruited knights jousted with the likes of Bad Tom and Sauce and the Captain, to the satisfaction of all the old company men. Ser Bescanon was unhorsed so hard that he was knocked unconscious – Bad Tom was the culprit.
Thousands of citizens of the city watched, and cheered.
The stradiotes tilted at rings and cut fruits in half with their swords and did some trick riding.
The Nordikans cut through their drill posts with their real axes so fast that the crowd laughed to see pages and Ordinaries running about trying to fit new posts.
The Scholae demonstrated their skills, from wrestling to swordsmanship, and then a team of six of them jousted in borrowed armour. Giorgios Comnenos, who had received a fair amount of private coaching from Ser Michael, managed to keep his seat and score against Ser George Brewes. Ser Alison unhorsed Ser Iannos Dukas, deftly knocking his lance to the ground in a display of perfect martial control, and the crowd cheered her and threw flowers. Moreans were growing used to a female knight.
Morgan Mortirmir, in borrowed armour, ran three courses with Ser Francis Atcourt, scoring on the older knight’s helm in the first pass, exchanging shattered lances on the second, and being unhorsed on the third. Out of practice, he fell badly.
The twenty prisoners sat alone and untended in solitary cells beneath the palace. They were not tortured on the feast of Saint George. They were merely kept awake.
Kronmir had seen the wagon coming back into the city, and he knew what that meant.
He sat thoughtfully with his fingers steepled for some time. He contemplated how long it would take for the foreigners to break his agent, and what that agent could tell them. He reviewed his message system, and assured himself from his code book that he knew the ‘cease all activity’ messages for his three most important agents. Then, when his inn had fallen quiet, and even the lowliest serving maids were asleep, he emptied his room, packed his valise, and pondered the deaths of the innkeeper, his wife, and the young woman Kronmir had slept with from time to time. Killing the three of them would leave the enemy with no witnesses to his presence, but he disliked such waste and he had his own rules. He smiled wryly and admitted to himself that he liked the girl and he couldn’t really muster the sang froid to kill her. Instead, he carefully blocked the chimney in the inn’s common room with flammables and relaid the fire for morning, taking care to relay it exactly the way the night maid had put it down.
He walked past Nianna’s bordello and left a white cross in chalk on the door of the saddler’s across the street. He walked through the deserted streets to the slums by the warehouses on the eastern shore, and left a lamda inside a circle in white chalk on a door across the street from a man who was still recovering from his wounds – the captain of the professional assassins he’d hired from Etrusca, who’d almost died storming the palace.
Then he sat in a waterfront soup house for an hour, watching his back trail, before walking uphill to the old aqueduct, removing a stone, and leaving forty silver leopards in a bag in the gap behind it. He replaced the stone, walked down the hill, and stuck a silver pin into the olive tree that stood in the centre of a tiny square near the assassin’s house. He placed the pin so that it was very hard to see – but easy to find if a man leaned casually against the tree to prise a stone from his shoe.
Then he walked along the sea wall and left two more lamda-in-circle signs tucked in among the graffiti of a hundred generations.
He sat on the wall and waited to see if he had been followed. He walked right down his back trail – bad practice, but he was in a hurry and the sun would be up soon. Then he went to the drop where his Navy Yard contact left his messages – badly spelled, scrawled on leather, rolled up and fitted inside an abandoned clay water pipe from a system half a thousand years old. Kronmir knelt in the dark, felt the presence of leather, and nodded. He withdrew the report, put it in his valise, then put a bag of gold in its place, sealed the pipe, and sketched a broad black ‘X’ in charcoal across it.
He had other agents, but they could rot or be captured. None of them had ever seen him – nor had they ever provided him with anything worth having. And he didn’t think the butcher knew they existed.
Then he walked across the city to the western walls, where the lampmaker’s guild had failed for years to keep the walls in good repair. His rope – cunningly woven of grey and brown horsehair – was right where he wanted it to be. He slipped over the wall, and climbed the ditch, cursing middle age and the sword at his side. He climbed the outer wall at its most ruinous point and jumped down the far side, walked half a league across the fields to a farm, and stole a horse.