The Red Knight (57 page)

But the barrage of phantasm was more effective than the barrage of arrows had been.

The captain walked through the hospital ward in his arming clothes. The wounded were cheerful – as any man or woman might be, waking to find an ugly wound completely banished. Oak Pew, a
woman whose dark wood-coloured skin and heavy muscles had given her the name, lay laughing helplessly at one of Wilful Murder’s stories. Wat Simple was already gone, the captain had seen him
playing at piquet. Long Paw lay watching Oak Pew laugh.

‘Thought I was a goner,’ he admitted, when the captain sat on his counterpane. He showed the captain where a shaft had gone into his chest.

‘I coughed up blood,’ he said. ‘I know what that means.’ He raised himself, coughed, and looked at the nun in the corner. ‘Pretty nun says if it’d been a
finger’s width lower, I’d ha’ been dead.’ He shrugged. ‘I owe her.’

The captain squeezed Long Paw’s shoulder. ‘How do you feel?’ he asked. He knew it was a stupid question, but it was part of the job of being captain.

Long Paw looked at him for a moment. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I feel like I was dead, and now I’m not. It’s not all bad – not all good.’ He smiled, but it
wasn’t one of the archer’s usual smiles. ‘Ever ask yourself what we’re here for, Captain?’

All the time,
he thought, but he replied, ‘Sometimes.’

‘Never been that close to being dead before,’ Long Paw said. He lay back. ‘I reckon I’ll be right as rain in a day,’ he said. He smiled, a little more like himself.
‘Or two.’

The pretty novice was, of course, Amicia. She was slumped in a chair at the end of the lower ward. When he saw her, the captain realised he’d been hoping to find her in the hospital. He
knew she had power – had felt it himself, but he’d finally made the connection to healing when he saw her go in and out of the hospital building that adjoined the dormitory.

Her closed eyes didn’t invite conversation, so he walked softly past her, and up the steps, to see Messire Francis Atcourt. Atcourt was not a gently born man; not a knight. Rumour was
he’d started life as a tailor. The captain found him propped up with pillows looking very pale. Reading. The parchment cover with its spidery writing didn’t offer the captain a title,
but closer to, he saw the man was reading psalms.

The captain shook his head.

‘Nice to see you, m’lord,’ Atcourt said. ‘I’m malingering.’

The captain smiled. Atcourt was forty – maybe older. He could start a fire, trim meat, make a leather pouch, repair horse harness. On the road, the captain had seen him teach a young girl
to make a closed back-stitch. He was not the best man-at-arms in the company, but he was a vital man. The kind of man you trusted to get things done. If you asked him to make sure dinner got
cooked, it got cooked.

He was not the sort of man who malingered.

‘Me, too. You’ve lost a lot of blood.’ The captain sat on his counterpane.

‘Your nun – the pretty one—’

The captain felt himself blushing. ‘Not my nun—’ he stammered.

Atcourt smiled like a schoolteacher. ‘As you say, of course.’

It was odd – the captain had remarked it before. The commonly born men-at-arms – leaving aside Bad Tom, who was more like a force of nature than like a man, anyway – had
prettier manners than the gently born. Atcourt had especially good manners.

‘At any rate, the lovely young novice who gives orders so well,’ Atcourt smiled. ‘She healed me. I felt her—’ He smiled again. ‘That is what goodness feels
like, I reckon. And she brought me this to read, so I am reading.’ He made a face. ‘Perhaps I’ll finish up a monk. ’Ello, Tom.’

Bad Tom towered over them. He nodded to his friend. ‘If that arrow had struck you a hand’s breadth lower, you could ha’
been
a nun.’ Then he leered at the captain.
‘The tall nun’s awake, and stretching like a cat. I stopped to watch.’ He laughed his great laugh. ‘What a set o’ necks she has, eh?’

The captain turned to glare, but it was nearly impossible to glare at Tom. Having sat, the captain could feel every tired muscle, every one of his six bruises.

‘We all saw you charge those archers,’ Tom said, as he turned away.

The captain paused.

‘You should a’ died,’ Tom went on. ‘You got hit what – eight times? Ten? By war-bows?’

The captain paused.

‘I’m just sayin’, lad. Don’t be foolish. You ha’ the de’il’s own luck. What if it runs out?’ he asked.

‘Then I’ll be dead,’ the captain said. He shrugged. ‘Someone had to do it.’

‘Jehannes did it, and he did it
right
,’ Tom said. ‘Next time, raise your sword and tell someone to ride at the archers. Someone
else.
’

The captain shrugged again. For once, he looked every heartbeat of twenty years old – the shrug was a rebellious refusal to accept the reality of what an adult was trying to teach him, and
in that moment the captain was a very young man caught out being a fool. And he knew it.

‘Cap’n,’ Tom said, and suddenly he was a big, dangerous man. ‘If you die I much misdoubt we will ride through this. So here’s my rede: don’t die.’

‘Amen,’ said the captain.

‘The pretty novice’ll be far more compliant with a living man than a dead one,’ Tom said.

‘That based on experience, Tom?’ Atcourt said. ‘Leave the lad alone. Leave the
captain
alone. Sorry, m’lord.’

The captain shook his head. On balance, it was difficult to be annoyed when you discover that men like you and desire your continued health.

Atcourt laughed aloud. Tom leaned over him, and whispered something, and Atcourt doubled up – first laughing, and then in obvious pain.

The captain paused to look back, and Tom was taking cards and dice out of his purse, and Atcourt was holding his side and grinning.

The captain ran down the steps, his leather soles slapping the stone stairs, but she wasn’t there, and he cursed Tom’s leer and ran out into the new darkness.

He wanted a cup of wine, but he was sure he’d go to sleep. Which he needed.

He smiled at his own foolishness and went to the apple tree instead.

And there she was, sitting in the new starlight, singing softly to herself.

‘You didn’t come last night,’ he said. The very last thing he wanted to say.

She shrugged. ‘I fell asleep,’ she said. ‘Which, it seems to me, might be a wise course for you. My lord.’

Her tone was forbidding. There was nothing about her to suggest that they’d ever kissed, or had intimate conversation. Or even angry conversation.

‘But you wanted to see me,’ he said.
I sound like a fool.

‘I wanted to tell you that you were perfectly correct. I plotted to meet you outside her door. And she used me, the old witch. I love her, but she’s throwing me at you. I was blind
to it. She’s playing courtly love with you and substituting my body for hers. Or something.’ Amicia shrugged, and the motion was just visible in the starlight.

The silence stretched on. He didn’t know what to say. It sounded quite likely to him, and he didn’t see a way to make it seem better. And he found he had no desire to speak ill of
the Abbess.

‘I’m sorry that I spoke so brusquely, anyway,’ he said.

‘Brusquely?’ she asked, and laughed. ‘You mean, you are sorry that you crushed my excuses and made light of my vanity and my piety? That you showed me up as a sorry
hypocrite?’

‘I didn’t mean to do any of those things,’ he said. Not for the first time, he felt vastly her inferior. Legions of willing servant girls hadn’t prepared him for
this.

‘I do love Jesus,’ she went on. ‘Although I’m not always sure what loving God should mean. And it hurts me, like a physical pain, that you deny God.’

‘I don’t deny God,’ he said. ‘I’m quite positive that the petty bastard exists.’

Her face, pale in the new moonlight, set hard.

I’m really too tired to do this
, he thought. ‘I love you,’ he heard himself say. He thought of Michael and winced.

She put her hand to her mouth. ‘You have a funny way of showing it,’ she said.

He sat down suddenly. Like saying
I love you
, it wasn’t really a decision. His legs were done.

She reached out a hand to take his, and as their fingers met, she flinched.

‘Oh!’ she said. ‘Gentle Jesu, messire, you are in pain.’

She leaned over him, and she breathed on him. That’s how it felt.

He opened his defences, running
into the tower. Prudentia shook her head, but her disapproval could be taken for granted for any woman, and he opened the door, secure that the walls of the
fortress would protect him from the green storm.

No sooner did the door open, then she was all around him.

But the green was right behind her.

She was very distinct, and she looked the way ignorant men supposed ghosts to look – a pale and colourless picture of herself.

He reached out and took her hand.

‘You are letting me in?’ she asked. She looked around, clearly amazed. She curtsied to Prudentia. ‘Gracious and Living God, my lord – is she alive?’

‘She is alive in my memory,’ he said, with some dissimulation. He had some secrets too evil to share.

She twirled. ‘It’s magnificent! How many sigils have you?’

‘Sigils?’ he asked.

‘Signs. Workings. Phantasms.’

He shrugged. ‘More than twenty,’ he said. It wasn’t a lie. It was merely an encouragement to underestimation.

She chuckled. She was bigger here, her face slightly more elfin and slightly more feral. Her eyes glowed like a cat at night, and were just faintly almond-shaped. ‘I knew you when I
first saw you,’ she said. ‘Wearing power like a cloak. The power of the Wild.’

He smiled. ‘We are two of a kind,’ he said.

She had his hand, and now she took it and put it on her right breast – except that things here were not of the world. His hand didn’t find her breast. Rather, he found himself
standing on a bridge. Beneath him flowed a mountain stream, burbling a dark, clear brown, full of leaves. The trees on either bank were rich, verdant green, towering into the heavens. Now, instead
of the grey raiment of her order, she wore a green kirtel and a green belt.

‘My bridge risks being swept away by a spring flood,’ she said. ‘But your tower is too confining.’

He watched the power flow under the bridge, and he was a little afraid of her. ‘You can cast all of this?’

She smiled. ‘I’m learning. I tire quickly, and I don’t have your twenty workings.’

He smiled. ‘You know, unless Prudentia has misled me, now that we have been to each other’s places we are bonded.’

‘As long as that armoured door of yours is closed, I can’t even find you,’ she said. She gave him a flirtatious frown. ‘I’ve tried.’

He reached out for her.

As his hands closed on her shoulders, her concentration slipped, or his did, and they were
sitting on the bench in the apple-scented darkness.

They kissed.

She laid her head on his arming cote and he opened his mouth.

‘Please don’t talk,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to talk.’

So he sat, perfectly happy, in the darkness. It was some time before he realised she’d magicked his bruises. By then she was asleep.

Later, he had to pee. And the stone bench was icy cold, despite the warm spring air. And the edge of the bench bit into the back of his thigh at a bad angle. Gradually cut off the flow of blood
to his leg, which began to go all pins and needles.

He wondered if it was his duty to wake her up and send her to bed. Or if he was supposed to wake her up and attack her with kisses. It occurred to him that the loss of a night’s sleep was
not a wise move on his part.

Later still, he realised that her eyes were open.

She wriggled off his lap. He considered a dozen remarks – all variations on being warmer than her gentle Jesus, but then dismissed them all.

He was, after all, growing up.

He kissed her hand.

She smiled. ‘You pretend to be far worse than you are,’ she said.

He shrugged.

She reached into her sleeve, and put something in his hand. It was a plain square of linen.

‘My vow of poverty isn’t worth much, because I have nothing,’ she said. ‘I did a little to ease the tire-woman’s joints, and she gave me this. But I’ve cried
in it. Twice.’ She smiled.

He hoped that he wasn’t seeing her in the first light of morning.

‘I think that makes it mine,’ she said.

He crushed it to his heart, pushed it inside his arming cote, kissed her hand.

‘What do
you
want?’ she asked.

‘You,’ he said.

She smiled. ‘Silly. What do you want out of life?’

‘You first,’ he said.

She smiled. ‘I’m easy. I want people to be happy. To live free. And well. With enough to eat. In good health.’ She shrugged. ‘I like it when people are happy.’ She
smiled at him. ‘And brave. And good.’

He winced. ‘War must be very hard on you.’ Winced again. ‘Brave and good?’

‘Yes,’ she said. She shook her head. ‘You don’t know me very well, not yet. Now you. What do you want?’

He shook his head. He didn’t dare tell the truth and didn’t want to lie to her. So he tried to find a middle ground. ‘To defy God, and my mother.’ He shrugged, sure that
her face had just hardened, set in automatic anger. ‘To be the best knight in the world.’

She looked at him. The moon was up – that’s all it was, not daylight – and her face shone. ‘You?’

‘If you can be a nun, I can be the best knight,’ he said. ‘If you, the very queen of love, can deny your body to be a nun, then I – cursed by God to sin – can be a
great knight.’ He laughed.

She laughed with him.

That’s how he liked to remember her, ever after – laughing in the moonlight, without the shadow of reserve in her face. She held out her arms, they embraced, and she was gone on soft
feet.

He didn’t even stop to shiver. He ran up the steps to the commanderies, drank off a cold cup of hippocras that had once been hot. But before he let himself sleep, he woke Toby and sent him
for Ser Adrian, his company secretary. The man came softly, in a heavy wool overrobe.