The Fallen Blade: Act One of the Assassini (47 page)

“This is unusual,” Atilo protested.

“These are unusual times.” The king’s voice was mild, his smile warm. But there was a rebuke in his voice.

“Yes, majesty.”

Taking the baby, Prior Ignacio held it up. Maybe there was a ceremony legitimising bastards. Although Tycho suspected he was making it up as he went along. “You claim this boy as your lawful heir?”

“I do,” Leopold said firmly.

“You are this boy’s mother? As Prince Leopold zum Bas Friedland is his father?”

Lady Giulietta bit her lip.

“My child. We need your answer.”

“The boy is mine. I went to my husband’s bed a virgin. Nobody had bedded me before.” Her eyes slid to Tycho. “No man has shared my bed since.”

“Tell me if this is true,” Janus said.

Taking the child from Leopold, the Prior stared into the
distance. The old man’s face, initially blank, became increasingly puzzled.

“Well?” the king demanded.

“I sense Millioni blood in his veins.”

King Janus waited impatiently for what came next. Before realising that nothing did. The Prior could sense Millioni blood. That was it. The king looked at Leopold with new interest.

“I swear I tell the truth,” Giulietta said hastily.

In a handful of Latin, which was enough for the surrounding knights, Prior Ignacio named the boy Leopold’s heir, confirmed the marriage of his parents, named him Leo di Millioni de zum Bas Friedland, and offered a prayer for his future.

“You knew?” Atilo demanded.

An hour before dawn. To the others it was still dark. For Tycho it had long since become light. He’d watched the horizon change colour. Mountains edge through shades of black. Windmills standing stark on the plain. This was a country of squat stone towers with wide sails, on slopes so barren there was as much dirt as scrub. He could have liked it here.

It obviously hurt Atilo to approach his last apprentice.

The old man’s voice was as stiff as his shoulders, his question as cropped as his hair. He knew half the court watched them from a distance.

“I knew,” Tycho said.

“She was there in Ca’ Friedland?”

“In his bed, suckling his child.” The last was a lie; she’d been in her own chamber until the battle above disturbed her. But there was no need for the old man to know that.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“And get my throat cut? A Millioni princess in bed with the bastard of her family’s enemy? You sent me to kill the prince.
Chances were, you’d kill me for failing. But returning to say that? I might as well stand naked in the sun…”

“You think that idea didn’t cross my mind?”

“Maybe, but you’d be doing it to me. Telling you about Lady Giulietta and Leopold was doing it to myself.”

“
Leopold…?
He’s really a friend?”

In as much as anyone could be. Tycho didn’t bother to explain that bit of it. Besides, in any sensible world, Leopold and he would be enemies. Giulietta loved her husband. Tycho loved Giulietta. What better reason to hate a man than the very thought of his wife made your guts knot with longing?

“Where does that leave us?” Atilo said.

“There is no us. I could kill you but Janus wouldn’t approve. So I’m going to let the Mamluks do it instead. That way you die a hero…”

Turning his back, Tycho threaded his way between Crucifer knights and Cypriot courtiers. Finally reaching an alcove where Prince Leopold stood with his arm round his new wife.

“Look after Leopold,” she said.

“My lady…”

“I mean it. Protect him if you can.”

“Two things,” Tycho said, smiling. “One, does Leopold look like a man who lets others look after him? And two…” He indicated the coming dawn. “The battle will be over before I join it.”

“Your eyes get no better?”

“They get worse,” Tycho said.

“You’re changing,” Prince Leopold said. “Now, if you’d excuse us…”

Lady Giulietta pulled a face, but she let herself be steered towards the door, courtiers moving aside and bowing as she passed. As she disappeared under an arch, Leopold slapped her buttocks and laughed at her protest.

“The best of his family.”

Turning, Tycho found King Janus at his side.

“I wouldn’t know, majesty.”

“Take it from me. You fight beside him?”

“With luck.”

“If the battle lasts until dark?”

“You know about that?”

Janus shrugged. “Too delicate to face daylight. That’s what Isak boasted on his posters. Delicate isn’t the word I’d choose.” His grey eyes searched Tycho’s face. “Magically unable to face daylight, maybe. How did you and Leopold meet?”

“In battle, majesty.”

“You’ve fought together before?”

“I was sent to kill him. Giulietta asked for his life. I gave it.”

Glancing round, King Janus checked who might have heard the answer. His courtiers had dropped back. The Prior of the White was watching, his expression unreadable behind his beard.

“Walk with me.”

The battlements were overcrowded, The air still cold, but ready to warm with the approaching day. A sergeant, in rusting breastplate, turned to curse their pushing past and stopped, suddenly apologetic. He was old, one-eyed and crooked where his leg had once been badly broken.

Janus clapped him on the shoulder and kept walking towards a corner turret. A huge catapult had been dragged into position, and its plaited ropes were being tied to huge steel rings on the turret floor.

“The plaiting takes the shock?”

King Janus nodded his appreciation of Tycho’s guess.

“You beat Prince Leopold. A famous duellist. Then gave him his life because a woman asked you. And were, it seems, banished for so doing.”

Maybe the king was talking to Tycho. Maybe to himself. When Janus nodded, then nodded again, Tycho knew his second guess was correct and he’d been right to remain silent. “Tomorrow,” said the king, “decides everything.”

“Everything, majesty?”

“Until the next time. Of course, if tomorrow goes badly there will be no next time. No Cyprus. No Crucifer stronghold. No me, probably. No Giulietta or Desdaio except as slaves.”

“Leopold will take Giulietta. I imagine Atilo intends to do the same…”

“Into battle?” King Janus looked aghast.

“Would you leave your woman to be defiled? If you knew defeat made that certain? Leopold won’t. I doubt Atilo will either.”

“My wife was poisoned.”

“Majesty?”

“She died a year ago. No, two years now.”

The king’s gaze unfocused. Such bleakness flooded his face it was like looking at a Greek mask, right down to the hollow space behind the eyes and the drag of his mouth. A single tear said this mask belonged to a man.

“It feels like yesterday.”

They stood in the near-dawn. On hastily fortified battlements. With a Mamluk fleet somewhere over the dark horizon. The men at arms had fallen back, unsure if the king’s grief involved Tycho or just the situation in general. Few of those in the castle expected to be alive next month.

The peasants would change sides.

Why not? No one asked them if they wanted to be ruled over. And the cost to them was much the same whoever did. Taxes and tithes, daughters taken, sons drafted into militias. A ruler who was strong but harsh was better than one who was kind but weak. Strong rulers gave stability.

“Can you really make a difference tomorrow?”

“I have a question of my own.”

King Janus sucked his teeth. “Maybe the Prior is right. I should have executed you and be done with it.”

“Answering my question might be simpler.”

“So like Atilo,” the king said. “Perhaps that’s the problem.
The Moor trained you too well. So now he has no reason to exist.”

“He tried to kill me earlier.”

“If he wanted to kill you, then you’d be dead.” Janus caught Tycho’s expression. “And so would he, perhaps. So maybe he didn’t think his own life was a price worth paying to take yours. What’s your question?”

“Why were you troubled when I mentioned fire?”

“Ah, yes,” said King Janus, “the reason Prior Ignacio thinks I should execute you. Part of me fears he is right.”

It was, Janus told him, how Charlemagne, the greatest of the Frankish emperors, sent reinforcements from the Rhine to Roncevaux. Though his loup garou arrived too late to save Count Roland. And Prior Ignacio had told King Janus the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse would arrive through just such a circle. Tycho could see how the Prior might be worried.

“This is instant?” Tycho asked.

“I’m not sure I understand your question.”

“You step into a fire in one place and arrive instantly in the other?”

The king scratched his stubble and sighed. “We’re talking heresy,” he said. “Dangerous heresy at that. But, yes, I imagine it’s quick. Why?”

“I was wondering if it might take longer in some cases.”

“How much longer?”

“A hundred years,” Tycho said, and then shrugged at the king’s expression. “It was just an idea.”

“Prince Leopold says now would be a good time, Sir Tycho.”

Knuckles tapped at a box lid, then a soldier apologised roughly for his rudeness, cursed himself for cowardice and rapped harder.

“If you’re done sleeping, Prince Leopold says…” Atilo led the fleet, but Prince Leopold represented the king. From the bitterness in the soldier’s voice, Tycho took it the battle went badly. How badly he discovered when he reached deck and found himself surrounded by a broken fleet under a darkening sky.

Sailors were lashing Leopold’s ship, the
Lionheart
, to Atilo’s own.

Grinding into her sides, a Mamluk galley had buckled the
Lionheart
’s planks and widened her seams enough to flood the bilges. Archers who should be fighting were bailing. Just not fast enough to keep her afloat unless tied to another.

The sullen sun sinking into the far horizon was mirrored and mimicked by two dozen fires dotting the wine-dark sea around them. Mamluk ships burnt, but so did Cypriot and Venetian ones. The screams of shackled slaves could be heard across the water.

“Enjoy your sleep?”

There was strain in Leopold’s voice.

His jest was forced, almost insulting. His expression grim, and his face grimed with soot and his beard with blood. More blood oozed from an arrow’s gash on his arm, which had been tied above the elbow. The dark eyes that had melted Giulietta’s heart looked desperate. “Where is she?” Tycho demanded.

“You love her, don’t you?”

“Yes,” he said simply.

“She’s below. I should probably kill you, but…” Prince Leopold indicated the smoke and flames, the sinking ships being slowly swallowed by the sea’s flat surface. “There doesn’t seem much point. But I still want an honest answer.”

“To what?”

“My question. You knew Giulietta before that night, didn’t you? On the roof at Ca’ Friedland, you recognised her from somewhere else…”

Tycho nodded.

“Is the child yours?”

“
What?
”

Answer enough. Simply asking obviously left a taste in Leopold’s mouth because he turned his attention back to the burning wrecks around them. “Suggest something,” he said. “Suggest it quick. We can’t afford losses like this.”

The numbers were brutal. The Mamluks needed Atilo’s ship, the
San Marco
, sunk or captured. The Great Lion flying from her mast was prize enough to make a pauper rich, a soldier an officer, an officer a noble of rank.

The Mamluk’s pennant held the same value.

Sultans feared their sons, generals feared their staff. Their admiral’s second in command would be good at provisioning but useless in battle. His third in command would be a fighter, hated by his immediate boss, viewed with suspicion by his admiral. Hindered from treason by the fact he was the admiral’s nephew, second cousin or bastard son.

Although bastards were risky.

They hated their fathers as much as their legitimate brothers.

To destroy the Mamluk admiral’s flagship would weaken his fleet.

News of his death would strengthen those Crucifers remaining on Cyprus to defend it. Knights, should they survive, would gain titles, captains become knights, sergeants become captains if they fought well. Four to one at the battle’s start. The odds against Atilo now stood at six to one. Both sides having lost twenty vessels.

The odds could only get worse.

“Here they come again.” Prince Leopold’s voice was weary.

A huge Mamluk galley, its prow a castle, its copper-bound ram snaking a wake through dark water, was turning towards them, the oars along its side rising and falling in time to the beat of a drum.

“Their admiral.” Tycho pointed.