The Red Knight (46 page)

He was not going back.

He’d rid himself of his yoke. It was easier than he’d expected – given time and some large rocks, he’d simply bashed it to flinders.

Like all slaves, and many other men, he had heard that there were people who lived at peace with the Wild. Even at home, there were those who did more—

Best not to think of those people. Those who sold their souls.

He didn’t want to think about it. But he went north, the axe over his shoulder, and he walked until darkness fell, passing a dozen abandoned farmsteads and stealing enough food that he
couldn’t easily carry more. He found a good bow, although it had no arrows and no quiver. It was odd, going into the abandoned cabins along the trail – in some, the steaders had
carefully folded everything away; chests full of blankets, plate rails full of green glazed plates from over the eastern mountains, Morean plates and cups and a little pewter. He didn’t
bother to steal any of these, except a good horn cup he found on a chimney mantel.

In other houses, there was still food on the table, the meat rotting, the bread stale. The first time he found a meal on the table he ate it, and later he burped and burped until he threw it
up.

By the twelfth cabin, he’d stopped being careful.

He went into the barn, and there was a sow. She’d been left because she was heavy, gravid, and the farmer was too soft hearted – or just too pragmatic – to try and drive her to
Albinkirk in her condition.

He was wondering if he was hard-hearted enough to butcher her when he heard the barn’s main door give a squeak.

He saw the Wild creature enter. It was naked, bright red, its parody of hair a shocking tongue of flame. It had an arrow on its bow, the iron tip winked with steel malevolence, and it was
pointed at Peter’s chest.

Peter nodded. His throat had closed. He fought down his gorge, and the shaking of his arms, and managed to say, ‘Hello.’

The red thing wrinkled its lips as if he smelled something bad and Peter’s perspective shifted.
It
was actually a man in red paint, with his hair full of some sort of red mud.

Peter turned slightly to face the man. He held up his empty hands. ‘I will
not
be a slave,’ he said.

The red man raised his head and literally looked down his nose at Peter, who shivered. The arrow, at full draw, didn’t waver.

‘Ti natack onah!’ the red man said in a tone full of authority. A human voice.

‘I don’t understand,’ Peter said. His voice trembled. The red man was obviously a war-leader of some sort, which meant that there were others around. Whatever kind of men they
were, they were not what Peter had expected. They raised his hopes, and dashed them.

‘Ti natack onah!’ the man said again, with increasing insistence. ‘TI NATACK ONAH.’

Peter put his hands up in the air. ‘I surrender!’ he said.

The red man loosed his arrow.

It passed Peter, missing him by the width of his arm, and Peter felt his bowels flip over. He crouched, his knees going out from under him, and he put his arms around himself, cursing his own
weakness.
And so quickly I am a slave again.

Behind him there was a scream.

The red man had put an arrow into the sow’s head, and she twitched a few times and was dead.

Suddenly the barn was full of painted men – red, red and black, black with white handprints, black with a skull face. They were terrifying and they moved with a liquid, muscular grace that
was worse than all his imaginings of the creatures of the Wild. As he watched, they butchered the sow and her unborn piglets, and he was pulled from the barn – roughly, but without malice
– and the red man lit a torch from a very ordinary looking fire-kit and set fire to the shingles of the barn.

It lit off like an alchemical display, despite weeks of rain.

More of the warriors came, and then more – perhaps fifty arrived within the hour. They passed through the cabin, and when the roof fell into the raging inferno of the barn, they gathered
half-burned boards into a smaller fire, and then another and another, until they had a fire that ran the length of the small cabin, and then staked the unborn piglets on green alder and some iron
stakes they found in the cabin and roasted them. Other men found the underground storage cellar, and pushed dried corn into the coals, and apples – hundred of apples.

By now there were a hundred painted men and women, and darkness was falling. Most had a bow and arrows; a few had a long knife, or a sword, or even, in one case, a pair of swords. A few had long
falls of hair in brilliant colours, but most had a single stripe of hair atop their heads, and another across their genitals. They looked odd to him, but it was only after his brain began to grow
accustomed to them that he realised that they had no fat on their frames.

No fat.

Like slaves.

No one was watching him. He was no threat, but he was also no use. He had a dozen opportunities to run, and he went as far as the edge of the clearing, where the farmer had been hacking down
trees older than his own grandfather to make room for his crops. Then he stopped, lay on the low branch of an apple tree, and watched.

Before the ruddy sun was gone from the sky, he stripped off his hose and his braes – cheap, dirty, torn cloth – and walked back among them in his shirt. A few of them had shirts of
deerskin or linen, and he hoped that he was making a statement.

He still had the wallet hanging over his shoulder, and the axe.

And the bow.

He came and stood near the barn-fire, feeling the warmth, and his stomach did somersaults as he smelled the burning pig-flesh.

One of the painted people had set fire to the cabin, and there was laughter. Another painted man had burned himself stealing pinches of pigs flesh from the sow’s carcass, and all the
warriors around him were laughing like daemons.

If there was a signal he didn’t hear it. But suddenly, they all fell on the piglets as if a dining bell had sounded, and ate. It was like watching animals eat. There were few sounds
besides those of chewing, ripping flesh from bone, punctuated by the spitting out of burned bits and cartilage and the continuing sound of laughter.

If it hadn’t been for the laughter, it might have been nightmarish. But the laughter was warm and human, and Peter found he had stepped closer and closer to the fires, drawn by the smell
of food and the sound of laughter.

The red man was close to him. Suddenly, their eyes met, and the red man gave him the flash of a grin – almost a grimace – and waved a rib at him.

‘Dodeck?’ he asked. ‘Gaerleon?’

The other warriors close by turned and looked at Peter.

One man – taller than most, painted an oily black, with oily black hair and a single slash of red across his face – turned and grinned. ‘You want to eat?’ he said.
‘Skadai asks you.’

Peter took another step forward. He was intensely conscious of his legs and neck and face, naked and very different from theirs.

The red man – Skadai – waved to him. ‘Eat!’ he said.

Another warrior laughed and said something in the alien tongue, and Skadai laughed. And the black warrior laughed too.

‘Was it your pig?’ the black warrior asked.

Peter shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I was just passing through.’

The black warrior appeared to translate this to his friends, and handed him a portion of pig.

He ate it. He ate too fast, burning his hands on the skin and his tongue on the meat and fat.

The black warrior handed him a gourd that proved to be full of wine. Peter drank, sputtered and then handed it back. The burns on his hands suddenly hurt.

They were all watching him.

‘I was a slave,’ he said suddenly. As if they could understand. ‘I won’t be a slave again. I’d rather be dead. I won’t be a slave for you.’ He took a
deep breath. ‘But short of slavery, I’d like to join you.’

The black warrior nodded. ‘I was a slave, too,’ he said. He smiled wryly. ‘Well – of sorts.’

In the morning, they were up with the first tendrils of dawn, moving down the narrow road that Peter had climbed the day before. They moved in complete silence, their only
communication via whistles and birdcalls. Peter attached himself to the black warrior, who called himself Ota Qwan. Ota Qwan followed Skadai, who seemed, as far as Peter could tell, to be the
captain. Not that he issued any orders.

No one spoke to Peter, but then, no one spoke much anyway, so he focused on trying to move the way they did. He was not a noisy man in the woods, and no one cautioned him – he followed Ota
Qwan as best he could, across an alder swamp, up a low ridge dotted with stands of birch, and then west along a deer trail through beech highlands, with a lake stretching away to the right of the
long ridge and the great river stretched out to the left.

They moved across the face of the wilderness, sometimes following trails and sometimes following the flow of the terrain, and their paths gradually made sense to Peter – they were
following a relatively straight course west, and avoiding the river. He had no sense of how many of them there were, even when they made camp, because that night, they simply stopped and lay down,
all nestled tightly in a tangle of bodies and limbs. No one had a blanket, few had shirts, and the night was cold. Peter found he despised the touch of another against him, front and back, but his
revulsion was quickly forgotten in sleep.

In the rainy grey of not-quite-morning, he offered some very stale bread from his sack to Ota Qwan, who accepted it with gratitude, took a small bite, and handed the crust on. Men watched it
eagerly, but no one protested when the bread ran out before the mouths did. Peter hadn’t even had a bite. He had expected it to be handed back. But he shrugged.

On his second night with the painted people he couldn’t sleep at all. It rained softly, and the sensation of wet flesh – paint, grit, and a man’s naked thigh against his own
– made him get up shiver alone. Eventually he crept back into the pile of bodies, disgusted but almost frozen.

The next day was agony. The whole group moved faster, running the length of a grass meadow curiously criss-crossed by an arterial profusion of canals the width of a man’s outstretched arm.
The painted people leaped them with ease, but Peter fell into several, and always received a hand out and a belly laugh for his troubles.

The painted people wore supple, thin leather shoes, often the same colour as their paint so that he hadn’t noticed them at first. His cheap slave shoes were falling to pieces, and the
great meadow was littered with sharp sticks pointing up from the ground. He hurt his feet a dozen times, and again, he was helped along and laughed at.

He was limping badly, exhausted, utterly unaware of his surroundings, so when Ota Qwan stopped Peter all but walked over him.

Just the length of a horse in front of them stood a creature straight from nightmare – a beautiful monster as tall as a plough horse, and as heavy, with a crested head like a helmeted
angel, a raptor’s beak and blank eyes grey, the colour of new-wrought iron. It had wings – small, but heart-breakingly beautiful.

Peter couldn’t even look at it, because for the third time in as many days he was terrified beyond his ability to think.

Ota Qwan put a reassuring hand on his shoulder.

Skadai raised a hand. ‘Lambo!’ he said.

The monster grunted, and raised a taloned claw-hand.

Peter had time to note that its left claw was wrapped in linen, the way an injured man’s hand would be wrapped in bandages.

Then the monster grunted again – if it spoke, the tones were too deep for Peter to understand – and then it was gone into the underbrush. Skadai turned and raised his bow.
‘Gots onah!’ he shouted.

There was an answering roar from all around them, and Peter was staggered to discover that there were dozens – perhaps hundreds – of painted warriors around him.

He grabbed at Ota Qwan. ‘What – what was that?’ he asked.

Ota Qwan gave him a wry smile. ‘That was what men call an adversarius,’ he said. ‘A warden of the Wild.’ He eyed Peter for a moment. ‘A daemon, little man. Still
want to be one of us?’

Peter took a breath but it was hard. His throat was closed again.

Ota Qwan put an arm around his shoulder. ‘Tonight we’ll be in a regular camp. Maybe we can talk. You must have questions. I know a little.’ He shrugged. ‘I love living
with the Sossag. I am one. I would never go back, not even to be a belted earl.’ The black painted man shrugged. ‘But it ain’t for everyone. And the Sossag are Free People. If you
don’t want to continue with them, well, just walk away. The Wild might kill you, but the Sossag won’t.’

‘Free People?’ Peter asked. He’d heard it said before.

‘You have a lot to learn.’ Ota Qwan smacked his shoulder. ‘Move now. Talk later.’

Dormling – Hector Lachlan

Hector Lachlan walked into the courtyard of the great inn at Dormling like a prince coming into his kingdom, and men came out to stare, even applaud. The Keeper came in person,
and shook his hand.

‘How many head?’ he asked.

Lachlan grinned. ‘Two thousand, six hundred and eleven,’ he said. ‘Mind you, master, that includes the goats, and I’m not so very fond of goats.’

The Keeper of Dormling – a title as noble and powerful as any in the south, for all it belonged to a big bald man in an apron – clapped Lachlan on the back. ‘We’ve
expected you a ten-day. Your cousin’s here to join you. He says it’s bad to the south.’ He added, ‘We were afraid you might be broke, or dead.’

Lachlan accepted the cup of wine that the Keeper’s own daughter pressed into his hand. He raised it to her. ‘I drink to you, lass,’ he said.

She blushed.

Hector turned back to the Keeper. ‘The Hills are empty,’ he said, ‘which trouble in the south explains. How far south? Is it the king?’

The Keeper shook his head.

‘Your cousin told me that Albinkirk was afire,’ he said. ‘But come in and sit, and bring your men. The pens are ready, even for twenty-six hundred and eleven beasts. And
I’m eager to buy – if I serve you a steak tonight, Hector Lachlan, you’ll have to sell me the cow first. I’m that short.’