Ser John shook his head. ‘I’m sorry for your loss,’ he said, not unkindly. He turned to the sergeants. ‘Sound the alarm. Bar the gates. And get me the mayor and tell him I’m imposing martial law. No one is to leave this town.’
East of Albinkirk – Peter
Peter woke at a jerk of his heavy yoke. It was a hand-carved wooden collar with a pair of chains that ran down to his hands, allowing some movement, and a heavy staple for attaching him to other slaves, and he’d slept in it.
Two Moreans, easterners with scrips and heavy backpacks, wearing hoods and the air of men recently released from fear, stood over him.
‘One survived then,’ the taller one said, and spat.
The shorter one shook his head. ‘Hardly a fair return on the loss of our cart,’ he said. ‘But a slave’s a slave. Get up, boy.’
Peter lay in abject misery for a moment. So, naturally, they kicked him.
Then they made him carry their packs, and the three of them started west along a trail through the woods.
His despair didn’t lasted long. He had been unlucky – or perhaps he had been lucky. They fed him; he cooked their meagre food and they let him have some bread and a little of the pea soup he’d made them. Neither of them were big men, or strong, and he thought he could probably kill them both, if only the yoke came off his shoulders.
But he couldn’t get it off. It had been his constant companion for a month of walking over snow and ice, sleeping with the cold and hellish thing while the soldiers raped the women to either side of him and waiting to see if they would take a turn on him.
He bruised his wrists again and again trying get free of the thing. He daydreamed of using it as a weapon to crush these puny men.
‘You’re a good cook, boy,’ the taller man said, wiping his mouth.
The thin man frowned. ‘I want to know what happened back there,’ he said, after drinking watered wine from his canteen.
The thicker man shrugged. ‘Bandits? Cruel bastards, no doubt. I never saw a thing – I just heard the fighting and – well, you ran, too.’
The thinner man shook his head. ‘The screams,’ he said, and his voice shook.
They sat and glowered at each other, and Peter looked at them and wondered how they managed to survive at all.
‘We should go back for our cart,’ said the thinner man.
‘You must’ve had a bump on the head,’ the fatter one said. ‘Want to be a slave? Like him?’ he gestured at Peter.
Peter hunched by the fire and wondered if lighting it had been a good idea, and wondered how these two could be so foolish. At home, they had had daemons. These idiots must know of them too.
But the night passed – a night in which he never slept, and the two fools slumbered after tying his yoke to a tree. They snored, and Peter lay awake, waiting for a hideous death that never came.
In the morning, the easterners rose, pissed, drank the tea he’d made, ate his bannock and started west.
‘Where’d you learn to cook, boy?’ the thicker man asked him.
He shrugged.
‘Now that’s a saleable skill,’ the man said.
The Toll Gate – Hector Lachlan
Drovers hated tolls. There was no way to love them. When you have to drive a huge herd of beasts – mostly cattle, but small farmers put in parcels of sheep, and even goats as well – representing other men’s fortunes, across mountain, fen, fell, swamp and plain, through war and pestilence, tolls are the very incarnation of evil.
Hector Lachlan had a simple rule.
He didn’t pay tolls.
His herd numbered in the hundreds, and he had as many men as a southern lord had in an army; men who wore burnies of shining rings and carried heavy swords and great axes slung from their shoulders. They looked more like the cream of a mercenary army than what they were. Drovers.
‘I didn’t mean to cross you, Lachlan!’ the local lordling pleaded. He had that tone, the one Hector hated the most – wheedling bluster, he called it, when a man who had pretended he was cock of the north started begging for his life.
Hector hadn’t even drawn the great sword that sat across his hip and rump. He merely leaned his forearm on the hilt. He stroked his moustache idly and ran a hand through his hair, looked back down the long, muddy train of cattle and sheep that extended behind him, as far as the eye might see on the mountain track.
‘Just pay me the toll. I’ll – see to it you ha’ the coins back soon enough.’ The other man was tall, well-built, and wearing a chain hauberk worth a fortune, every link riveted closed, strong as stone.
He was afraid of Hector Lachlan.
But not afraid enough to let the long convoy of beasts past. He had to be seen to try and collect the toll. It was the way, in the hills, and his own fear would make him angry.
Sure enough, even as Hector had the thought, he saw the man’s face change.
‘Be damned to you, then. Pay the damned toll or-’
Hector drew his sword. He wasn’t hurried by his adversary’s anger, fear, or the fifty armed men at his back. He drew the long sword at his own pace, and allowed the heavy pommel to rotate the sword in his hand, so that the point aimed unwaveringly at the other man’s face.
And punched the needle sharp point through the other man’s forehead with all the effort of a shoemaker punching a hole in leather. The armoured man crumpled, his eyes rolling up. Already dead.
Hector sighed.
The dead man’s retinue stood rooted to the ground in shock – a shock that would last a few more heartbeats.
‘Stop!’ Hector said. It was a delicate art – to command without threatening them and provoking the very reaction he sought to avoid.
The body crashed to the ground, the dead man’s heels thrashing momentarily.
‘None of ye need to die,’ he said. There was a thread of the dead man’s blood on the tip of his sword. ‘He was a fool to demand a toll of me, and every man here knows it. Let his tanist take command, and let us hear no more about it.’ Lachlan got the words out, and for a moment the men he was facing teetered on the knife-edge of doubt and greed and fear and loyalty – not to the dead man but to the code that required them to avenge him.
The code won.
Lachlan heard the grunt that signified their refusal, and he had both hands on his sword, swinging a heavy overhand blow at the nearest man. He had a sword in his hand, but was too slow to save his own life; the heavy swing batted his parry aside and cut through his skull from left eyebrow to right jaw, so that the top of his head spun away, cleanly severed.
Hector’s own men started to come forward, abandoning their places with his herd. Which meant that when this was over, with all the attending noise, violence, blood and ordure, a day would be lost while they collected all the beasts who ran off into the glens and valleys.
Someone – some ancient philosopher Lachlan couldn’t remember from the days when a priest came to teach him letters – had said that the hillmen would conquer the world, if only they would ever stop fighting among themselves.
He pondered that as he killed his third man of the day, as his retinue charged with a shout, and as the doomed men of the toll gate tried to make a stand and were cut down.
Lissen Carak – The Red Knight
The camp below the Abbey vanished as quickly as it had appeared, the tents folded and packed into the wagons, the wagons double-teamed and hauled up the steep slope into the fortress.
The first chore that face all of them was billeting the company. Captain and Abbess walked quickly through the dormitory, the great hall, the chapel, the stables, and the storehouses, adding, dividing, and allocating.
‘I will need to bring all my people in, of course,’ the Abbess said.
The captain bit his lip and looked at the courtyard. ‘Eventually, we may have to re-erect our tents here,’ he said. ‘Will you use the Great Hall?’
‘Of course. It’s being stripped even now,’ she said. She shrugged. ‘It is Lent – all of our valuables are put away already.’