The Ravens’ Banquet (29 page)

In that moment, we locked eyes on one another. I, half-cowering and they, pistols spanned and ready to give fire. An instant later, sparks flew from the lead rider’s chest as an iron-headed crossbow bolt bounced off his breastplate and he dropped his pistol in amazement and pain. The second man was only just taking in what had happened to his comrade when a second bolt struck him through his hat, adding pheasant fletchings to his ostrich plume. He tumbled out of the saddle and hit the ground. The remaining rider jerked his reins back and turned about, even as he drew sword to face the unseen foe.

All about me muskets cracked, shouts of alarm echoing. I caught a glimpse of a figure in brown kersey running through the trees and followed. The Sisters had not abandoned me. They had set up an ambush. I heard a woman’s scream abruptly curtailed. And then more shouting, the shots came less as the musketeers took time to charge their pieces and the horsemen now had drawn steel and holstered pistol. Off to my right, I spied two soldiers, one with a Sister held tight in his grasp. His comrade cut her throat and she slipped to the ground.

I began to run again. I was in the middle of battle but not yet part of it. The cries continued, some strangled, other screeching, and so too the occasional cry of a man in pain. But it was all Chaos. I wanted to find Rosemunde and save her, but now I was wholly confused and lost. I gathered my wits long enough to finally draw my sword and to fix my courage to seek her out.

I nearly ran into him. My old comrade and the last of my command, he who had now betrayed the coven. A smile touched his lips as he saw me. The soldier next to him, his musket turned around as a club, didn’t hesitate but came straight for me. A tall figure came from behind them both, fast as a cat, and seized the soldier. It was Maria. She held a dagger in one hand, the other clinging to the soldier’s neck. They grappled and fell. And I went for Christoph, my sword raised over my head.

He sidestepped my headlong rush without effort, but missed me with his counterstroke as I hurtled past. I checked my run and made a vicious slice at him as I wheeled. But Christoph had already turned and run off. I swore an oath and followed, even as out of my left eye I spied the musketeer strike down Maria, her arms raised, a few yards away.

I was gasping by now, chest heaving, as we crashed through the undergrowth, shoulders striking trees. But I was catching up to him. No fool, he knew this, and rather than find a sword in his back, he stopped and raised his blade into a hanging guard to meet my blow. Even as I closed, my boot struck a root and I was flying through the air, striking him and taking us both down into the stinking moss, mud, and bracken.

We grunted as each struggled to raise his sword up. But these were near useless now and I lost my grip on mine and began to pummel his head with my closed fist.

“Bastard!” I spat at him.

He kneed my belly, missing my bollocks, and pushed me back. Far more practised than I, in a blink he had reached behind his back to draw a dagger. I threw my arm forward to catch his wrist as he struck, my other hand snatching a fistful of his long lank hair. Both of us had gained our knees now, pushing one against the other. His head shot forward to strike my nose, sending lights dancing before my eyes. I cried out in pain but still I would not release his wrist or hair. To loosen my grip would mean a ripped gut.

I could feel my grip slipping, his own hand pulling on my wrist. I released his head and smashed my forearm and elbow into his cheek, snapping his head back. Reaching over to double my grasp upon his dagger hand, I leaned into him with all my might and strained to force his hand down. I snorted blood and felt it pouring from me into my mouth.

He gave a cry and I felt his grip weaken for a moment. I turned his dagger – three hands upon its hilt – and plunged it down into his doublet. Quickly, his sallow skin, blotched with red, drained away to ashen. I felt his grip on the dagger relax. My fingers were wet with his blood. It now ran from his side covering both of us as we embraced, still straining.

“Well struck, comrade,” he said, half gasping with the effort. “That’s how you repay me for saving you at Münden? Miserable son of a whore!”

And I, more in surprise than regret, pulled back from him, still on my knees even as he doubled over on his, clutching at the dagger hilt that protruded from his side. A groan issued from him, full of rage, and he shook his head as if to shake off an excess of drink.

“Christ, look what you’ve done to me, you bastard,” he hissed at me, eyes filling with tears. “You wanted her. Now you can both burn together when they take you back to Goslar!”

And then he laughed, a cackle that became a retch quick enough. “More devil than gentleman in you, Englishman. I always knew that.”

“Christoph...” I mumbled, dazed to speak with a man I had just knifed.

He pounced on me with new strength born of hate. Both his hands squarely about my throat, I was thrown backwards with him over my chest, his blood splattering me as it poured from his mouth and his chest.

“Witch! You fucking miserable witch!” he cried, throttling me with a strength that I feared was not his alone.

This dying monster had found a grip of iron and I could not pry his hands from my throat. I flailed about wildly, slapping his head and face. My thumb sought out his eye socket but he tossed his head to frustrate this.

“Nay, not good enough, comrade,” he wheezed. “No, you won’t burn with the others! I’m going to take you down with me!” And he leaned in all the harder, pressing with all his might.

My head throbbed, my limbs had become pudding. I could feel my fight sapping away, I was sinking down through the mud and moss. I was dying. And then, his brows furrowed as he looked into my face, and I watched as the life went out of him, like the snuffing of a candle. He fell on me and rolled off, and I coughed and sought to drink in breath at the same time. My arms were shaking as I pushed myself up, retching and looking into his dead eyes, still focused in rage.

Too late did I notice the figure that darkened my side. And even as I turned to face him, the musket stock struck me full on my head. And all was blackness.

T
HE JANGLE OF
keys again preceded the arrival of my keeper, but this morning I had a visitor wholly unexpected. As the door creaked open, the gaoler strode in barking at me. “Stand, sirrah! Stand now!”

I rose up off my cot and looked to the doorway. There stood Colonel Obadiah Wharton dressed in a fine russet suit, his black cloak thrown over his arm.

“You look surprised to see me, Colonel,” he said. “Will you speak with me, sir?” I nodded, dumbstruck by his arrival, but quickly surmised the worst for the purpose of his visit. He walked into the cell, followed by a red coated trooper, and I watched him as he took in the surroundings of my little place.

“I’m sorry that I have but one chair to offer you, Colonel,” I said.

“No matter,” he said, hefting it with one hand and moving it to where I stood next to the cot. He turned to the gaoler. “Leave us.”

The oaf hesitated a moment, calculating a proper response, but then quickly left without a word, the door loudly rattling on its hinges as he pulled the iron ring behind him. The trooper took up station in front of the latch.

“Sit, Colonel, please,” said Wharton, gesturing to the cot. And then he pulled in the chair underneath him, scraping it on the stone floor.

I lowered myself upon my rack, the ropes creaking beneath me, and I placed my arms on my knees wondering what was about to come.

“How mends your wound, sir?” Wharton asked.

“Well enough, I hope,” I answered.

Wharton nodded. “We’ve both suffered worse blows over the years, have we not? Do you remember the cannonading we took at Stralsund alongside the Scots? I’m lucky that I’ve still got all my limbs after that one.”

“But that was a long time ago and we were both younger men.”

“Aye, the summer of twenty and eight. Not so long ago really.” He smiled at me. “I convinced you then to come over with me from the Danes and sign up with the Swedes. Got you a captaincy besides, didn’t I?”

“That you did,” I replied, a small smile coming to my lips as well. And the memory of those times rose up again. I recalled the years among the Swedish army, of serving Gustavus Adolphus, of advancing through the German lands and finally of gaining rank and fortune. It was a time when Wharton and I called each other friend.

“I come to you again…” he said, leaning in close to me. “and again, I offer you the chance to follow me. Follow me back to Fortuna’s bounty, as it was before. You may still do so. Just tell me you will take up the chance when I offer it to you in the presence of the Committee. Take a commission from Parliament, man! The offer will be made.”

I looked into his face. He was, it seemed to me, unchanged in aspect even after all these years, the same brave cavalier who had ridden alongside me into battle. But it was I who no longer was the same.

“Fortuna dwells not in England anymore,” I told him softly, “and this war is not like any other. Old friend, your offer is a generous one, but one that I cannot accept with either heart or head.”

He pursed his lips. “You’re a stubborn fellow indeed, Treadwell. But think well upon this offer, for time is running short. You know full well this judicial duel that you crave is madness. Even if it is granted, what chance is there that you’ll come out alive?”

“God has already decided my Fate,” I replied, “and I must meet it, come what may.”

Wharton slowly straightened up, placing his hands on his thighs, hips loudly cracking. “Then I pray that He is kinder to you then you are to yourself, my friend.”

A
GENTLE BREATH
blew upon my face, soft like a playful lover puffs on the eyelids of her sleeping beloved. To my ears came the short insistent whistle of a sparrow, so close by my head that surely it spoke to me alone. My nostrils were filled with the scent of freshly cut straw, pungent and comforting to the soul. Surely I was at the back of the kitchen garden, beyond the hedge and lying on the grass, hidden from my father's mistrustful eye. Blissfully shirking my work, flat on my back on a warm summer’s afternoon.

I opened my eyes. Though my other senses were deluded, my sight restored to me the true knowledge of my situation. From where I lay, my head rested not a foot from the narrow slit of a pane-less window, an arrow loop that funneled in a faint breeze on me. And on its tiny ledge a sparrow was indeed perched, cocking its head as it eyed me, blinking. And the straw that I had smelled, even as I slumbered, was but a thin bed upon a harsher stone floor. My head still ached from the blow of the musket stock and my probing hand found a lump like an egg at the top of my head, the latest for my sorry skull. Though I remembered my duel with Christoph, and then the shock and flash of being clubbed by a soldier, I could not recall anything afterwards. Now, I found myself in surroundings wholly new.

I rolled over and surveyed my prison. I was in a gigantic stone keep, the circumference of which was greater than any I had beheld before. The walls were fully seven feet thick and indeed it was this very space between window and inner wall that formed my cell. I lay in this vee-shaped window ledge, my ankle shackled by a chain no more than a few feet in length and fastened to a ring and pin in the stone.

My eyes looked over to the other window ledges yet they held no other prisoners. The vast wooden floor of the keep was bare except for two things: the columns that supported the floor above and some machines that caused me worry. Dead centre of the room, like some horrid serpent, a rope stretched up to the ceiling and through a block and down again to coil upon the floor. My mind was filled instantly with visions of the fat merchant we fine fellows had strung up
strappado
fashion months ago. It would be God’s justice if I was to suffer the same fate and I grew cold at the prospect. And though I had never seen one before, I was sure the wooden contraption with windlass near to the block and tackle must surely be a rack for the stretching. I stirred myself, now in full awareness of the place I was in, and hauled myself up painfully, leaning on the cool stone.

Two men sat at a table near the stairway and railing at one side of the room. They were playing at cards, a large jug placed between them, and they laughed and swore as the hand was played out. I called out to them, my voice as ragged as a beggar’s.

“You two, there! What place is this?”

They both looked to me and commenced laughing anew.

“Why friend, you be in the
Zwinger
, the warmest hostelry in Goslar,” said one, shouting across the huge room. “We’re here to wait on you and to see that you come to no harm. Is your accommodation to your liking?”

He didn’t wait for my answer but burst into such guffaws with his companion that he nearly fell off his stool. I walked forward until I felt the chain about my leg go taut, which put me not a pace beyond the stone cell.

“Tell me what has become of the others that were with me. The women. Where are they?”