And then the captain led them back to the gate by much the same road, crashing though a line of desperate irks trying vainly to defend themselves with spears which splintered on steel armour. Right through, and on to the edge of the fortress hill, where twenty valets waited with fresh horses.
Michael was mystified. His elation was ebbing quickly to be replaced by fatigue and the thumping pain of his ribs, jarred by the gallop and barely held together by his cote armour.
All of the men-at-arms and many of the archers were changing horses. The men on the walls were cheering them.
The captain rode up to him and opened his visor. ‘You’re moving badly,’ the captain said bluntly. ‘In fact, you look like shit. Fall out.’
‘What? Where-’ Michael spluttered.
Jacques took his reins. Michael noted that the valet was in armour – good armour – as Jacques got him out of his saddle and Michael wanted to cry – but at the same time, he couldn’t imagine fighting again.
Then Jacques swung up on a heavy horse of his own – an ugly roan with a roman nose. ‘I’ll keep him alive, lad,’ Jacques said.
So Michael stood there and watched as they changed horses and formed up, and then to his surprise they turned away from the beaten enemy and rode south, along the edge of the rising sun, moving at a canter. They rode straight for the Bridge Castle’s gate, and it opened as if by magic letting them pass through, canter over the bridge, and vanish onto the southern road.
Even as he watched, Gelfred, the master of the hunt, left Bridge Castle with three men and a cart. The men each took a brace of dogs – beautiful dogs – and moved briskly off to the west with a dozen archers covering them.
Just as the first starlings and ravens began to appear, gyrfalcons began to soar into the heavens over Bridge Castle, one after another. Up on the walls, a great eagle leaped into the air with a scream that must have chilled every lesser bird for three leagues.
Gelfred had struck, and the Abbess with him.
Braces of hounds emerged from the cover of Bridge Castle, running flat out for the leverets and the coneys and any other animal that lurked at the edge of the woods, and the gyrfalcon, Parcival the eagle and the lesser birds – well-trained birds brought from Theva to sell at the fair – struck the starlings, the ravens, and the oversized doves, ripping through their flocks like a knight through a crowd of peasants, and feathers, wings, blood and whole dead birds fell like an avian rain.
It took Michael half an hour to climb back to the fortress gate. The valets ignored him, and he stumbled many times, until someone on the walls saw the trail of blood he was leaving and a pair of archers appeared to hold him up.
Amicia cut the sabatons off his feet, and found the flint javelin which had cut deeply into the muscle at the back of his leg. Blood was flowing out like beer from an open tap.
She was speaking rapidly and cheerfully, and he just had time to think how beautiful she was.
Lissen Carak – the Abbess
The Abbess watched the captain’s sortie head east along the road, moving so fast that they were gone from sight before she recovered her eagle.
I have certainly given away my station to every gentleman here, she thought. She wondered if the siege would leave her any secrets at all.
Parcival, her magnificent Ferlander eagle, was killing his way through the flocks of wild birds like a tiger let loose in a sheepfold. But she could see the big old bird was tiring, and she began to cast her lure. Just to be sure.
She whirled it carefully over her head, and Parcival saw it, turned at the flash of Tyrian red, and abandoned his pursuit of his defeated enemies. He came to her like a unicorn to a maiden – shyly at first, and finally eager to be caught.
His weight was far too much for her, but young Theodora helped her, and got a faceful of wings for her trouble as the creature bated and bated again, unused to his mistress having a helper. But she got the jesses slipped over his talons, and Theodora put the hood on him, and he calmed, while the Abbess said, ‘There’s my brave knight. There’s my fine warrior – you poor old thing.’ The eagle was tired, grumpy and very pleased with himself, all at the same time.
Theodora stroked his back and wings and he straightened up.
‘Give him a morsel of chicken, dear,’ the Abbess said. She smiled at the novice. ‘It’s just like having a man, child. Never give him what he wants – only give him what you want. If he eats too much we’ll never get him into the air again.’
Theodora looked out from the height of the tower. The plain and the river were far below them, and the eagle’s sudden stoop from this height had shattered the lesser birds.
Amicia appeared from the hospital with a message from Sister Miram. The Abbess looked at it and nodded. ‘Tell Miram to use anything she needs. No sense in hoarding.’
Amicia’s eyes were elsewhere. ‘They’re gone,’ Amicia said. ‘The enemy’s spies. Even the wyverns. I can feel it.’
Theodora was startled that a novice would speak directly to the Abbess.
The Abbess seemed untroubled. ‘You are very perceptive,’ the Abbess said. ‘But there’s something I don’t like about this.’ She walked to the edge of the tower and looked down. Just below her, a pack of nuns stood on the broad platform of the gatehouse and watched the end of the rout below and the disappearing column of dust that marked the captain’s sortie.
One nun left the wall, her skirts held in her hands as she ran. The Abbess wondered idly why Sister Bryanne was in such a hurry until she saw the priest. He was on the wall, alone, and praying loudly for the destruction of the enemy.
That was well enough, she supposed. Father Henry was a festering boil – his hatred for the captain and his attempts to discipline her nuns were heading them for a confrontation.
But the siege was pushing the routine away, and she worried that it would never return. And what if the captain went out and died?
‘What do you say, my lady?’ Amicia asked, and the Abbess smiled at her.
‘Oh, my dear, we old people sometimes say aloud what we ought to keep inside.’
Amicia, too, was looking out to the east where a touch of dust still hung over the road that ran south of the river. And she wondered, like every nun, every novice, every farmer and every child in the fortress, why they were riding away, and if they would return.
North of Albinkirk – Peter
Peter was learning to move through the woods. Home for him was grass savannah, dry brush and deep-cut rocky riverbeds, dry most of the year and impassable with fast brown water the rest. But here, with the soft ground, the sharp rock, the massive trees that stretched to the heavens, the odd marshes on hilltops and the endless streams and lakes, a different kind of stealth was required, a different speed, different muscles, different tools.
The Sossag flowed over the ground, following trails that appeared out of nowhere and seemed to vanish again as fast.
At mid-day, Ota Qwan stopped him and they stood, both of them breathing hard.
‘Do you know where we are?’ the older man asked.
Peter looked around. And laughed. ‘Headed for Albinkirk.’
‘Yes and no,’ Ota Qwan said. ‘But for a sailor on the sea of trees, you are fair enough.’ He reached into a bag of bark twine made into a net that he wore at his hip all the time, and drew forth an ear of cooked corn. He took a bite and passed it to Peter. Peter took a bite and passed it to the man behind him – Pal Kut, he thought the man called himself, a cheerful fellow with a red and green face and no hair.
Peter reached into his own bag and took out a small bark container of dried berries he’d found in Grundag’s effects.
Ota Qwan ate a handful and grunted. ‘You give with both hands, Peter.’
The man behind him took half a handful and held them to his forehead, a sign Peter had never seen before.