The Red Knight

The room was the same. He was almost afraid to enter it, but it looked better. The moss was gone from the floor, and Prudentia’s statue was repaired, and now occupied a niche that hadn’t existed before.

The Magus stood on the plinth in the centre of the room.

The captain by-passed him, and walked to the door.

‘Think on what you do, boy,’ said the dead Magus. ‘She is a Power, neither more nor less than you.’

The captain ignored him, and opened the iron-bound door.

And she was there.

And he was healed.

She looked at the plinth and her eyes widened in horror. ‘My God,’ she said. ‘What have you done?’

And she was gone.

North of Lissen Carak – Peter

They stopped in a clearing in the woods. The ground had been rising steadily to the north, and they were running almost due north, and that was all Nita Qwan knew except that, as usual, he had never been so tired in all his life.

They all lay down in a muddle and slept.

In the morning, Ota Qwan stood up first, and they ran again. The sun was high in the sky before they straggled over a ridge, and young warriors were sent back without their baskets to fetch the matrons and mothers of newborns who had lagged behind.

And when the last of the women was over the ridge, fires were lit carefully and the people made food, and ate.

And when Nita Qwan felt as if life might be worth living, Ota Qwan came to the centre of the ring of fires with a spear. And Little Hands, the senior woman, came and faced him.

He handed her the spear. ‘Our war is over,’ he said. ‘I give you the spear of war.’

Little Hands took it. ‘The matrons have it, ready for any enemy. Our thanks, Ota Qwan. You have surprised us, and done well.’

No one said anything more – there was neither applause nor censure.

An hour later, they were running north again.

Chapter Seventeen

Ranald Lachlan

Lissen Carak – The Red Knight

Days passed.

Wounded men were healed, and slept.

Dead men and women were mourned, and buried.

The creatures of the Wild were burned, and their ashes spread over the fields.

The company was not entirely dead. A few men-at-arms were found wounded, and healed. Ser Jehannes and Ser Milus had not been part of the charge; Bad Tom and Sauce were untouched, although they each slept for more than thirty hours after their armour was stripped. But the archers were still alive, many of the valets and a few squires.

The captain was very difficult to find. Some said he was drunk, and some said he was with his pretty novice, and some said he was taking service of the king, or of the Knights of Saint Thomas.

None of these things were true.

The captain spent a great deal of time weeping, and when he buried his company dead, he invited no others. They lay in neat rows, sewn in white linen by Mag and her friends, who now stood silent in a light rain. Dora Candleswain stood with Kaitlin Lanthorn, and the Carter sisters stood watching their surviving brother who, with Daniel Favor, was in the ranks of the company.

And the knights of Saint Thomas appeared from the rain. The Prior came out at their head, and said the service for the dead. Bad Tom, Sauce, Ranald and the captain himself lowered the bodies. There was Carlus the Smith, smaller in death but no lighter; there was Lyliard, no longer the company’s handsomest man. They went into marked graves with headstones, each of them marked with the eight-pointed cross of the Order. It made a great difference to many of the man and women – better, in fact, than most mercenaries ever imagined.

One corpse absorbed the captain, and he wept. He wept for all of them, and he wept for his own errors, and the ill-judgement of others, and a thousand other things – but Jacques was his last tie to childhood, and was gone.

Your mother’s still alive, lad. Doesn’t she count? said the old Magus in his mind.

‘Could you shut up?’ muttered the captain to the interloper in his head.

Sauce looked at him, because he muttered to himself a great deal, lately, and because Sauce helped Dora Candleswain to stop screaming every night. She was sensitive to the other men and women in the company who were near the breaking point, or past it. Not all wounds bled.