The Red Knight

Despite the halts, they made good progress. Individual knights would ride away – sometimes at right angles to the line of march – and unerringly find them again.

The thing the two king’s messengers found hardest to understand was the silence. The Knights of St Thomas never spoke. They rode in silence, and their horses were equally silent. They had no pages, no valets, no servants and no squires. Forty spare horses – a fortune in war horses – followed the main body, packed with forage bags and spares, but otherwise without bridle or lead. Yet the spares followed briskly enough.

It was, as the older messenger said, uncanny.

Still, it was a bold thing, to be riding through the North Country with the Knights of St Thomas. Galahad Acon had been named for the saint’s church in London, and felt he was almost one of them. His partner, Diccon Alweather, had been a professional messenger in the old king’s day, a weathered man with more scars than a badly tanned hide, as he liked to say himself.

The messengers were used to a hard day riding and no company but their horses, but it was a hard day, even for them – fifteen leagues over broken country that challenged their horsemanship every hour. The knights didn’t seem to tire. Many of them were older than Alweather.

Towards evening, one of the youngest of the knights rode back to the main body, and led them off to the right, north, and then up to a steep hill.

Without a word, every knight dismounted. They drew their long swords from their saddle scabbards, split into four groups of fifteen, and walked off.

The Prior waited a moment, looking at the two messengers. ‘Wait here,’ he said, aloud. The first words Galahad had heard from any of them since they left the Royal Camp.

The black-clad knights vanished into the woods.

An hour passed. It was cold – the spring evenings were longer, but not much warmer, and Galahad couldn’t decide whether he was cold enough to take his great cloak out of the bundle behind his crupper or not. He didn’t want to be caught dismounted at the wrong moment. He cursed the Prior and his silence.

He kept looking at the older messenger, Alweather, who waited, apparently calm, without fidgeting, for the whole hour.

‘Here they come,’ Galahad said suddenly.

The Prior walked up to his horse and sheathed his sword on the saddle. ‘Come,’ he said. He was smiling.

He walked off up the steep hill, and all the horses followed him.

‘Uncanny,’ Alweather said. He spat, and made an avert sign.

They wound around the hill, widdershins, climbing as they went around. It seemed a tedious way of getting to the top, but in the very last light, Galahad could see that the crown of the hill was steep and girt in rock.

The horse ahead of him shied, and then was quiet. Galahad looked down and saw a corpse. And then another. And another and another.

They were not human. He wasn’t sure what they were – small and brown, with big heads, and cords of muscle, beautifully worked leather clothes and huge wounds made by two-handed swords.

‘Good Christ,’ Alweather said aloud.

There was the smell of fire, and then they came over a crest.

The top of the hill was hollow. It was like a giant cup, and the knights had three fires going, and food cooking. Galahad Acon’s stomach, outraged by the inhuman corpses and their red-green blood, now seized on the smell of food. Pea soup.

‘Unsaddle your horse, and curry him,’ the Prior said. ‘After that, he’ll see to himself.’

Alweather frowned, but Galahad refused to be moved by the older man’s caution. Galahad was suffused with joy. He was living one of his secret dreams.

Alweather, clearly wanted to go back to the king.

‘They fought a battle,’ Galahad said, his eyes sparkling in the firelight. ‘And we didn’t even hear them.’

The Prior smiled at Galahad. ‘Not really a battle,’ he said. ‘More of a massacre. The irks didn’t see us coming.’ He shrugged. ‘Have some soup. Tomorrow will be harder.’

Lissen Carak

It was a quiet night. The besieged collapsed into sleep. Sauce cried out in her dreams, and Tom lay and snored like a hog. Michael muttered into his outstretched arm, sleeping alone. The Abbess wept softly in the dark, and rose to kneel, praying at the triptych that sat on a low podium in the corner of her cell. Sister Miram lay on her stomach to sleep, exhausted from healing so many wounded men. Low Sym woke himself up repeatedly as he shouted, and then lay with his own arms wrapped around him staring at horrors in the dark until the pretty novice came and sat with him.

But however long and dark the night was, the enemy was quiet, and the besieged slept.

In the first light of morning, they struck.

The Siege of Lissen Carak. Day Nine