The Red Knight

But the sun was still in the middle of the spring sky when forty-five wagons, two hundred and ten men, eighteen soldiers, and one merchant captain started north for the fair. He knew that he was the ninth convoy on the great road north – the longest to assemble, and consequently, the last that would reach Lissen Carak’s great supply of grain. But he had the goods and the wagons to buy so much grain that he didn’t think he’d be the loser, and he had a secret – a trade secret – that might make him the greatest profit in the history of the city.

It was a risk. But surprisingly for a man of money, as the lords called his kind, Gerald Random loved risk as other men loved money, or swords, or women, and he set his sword at his hip, his dagger on the other, with a round steel buckler that would not have disgraced a nobleman, and smiled. Win or lose, this was the moment he loved. Starting out. The dice cast, the adventure beginning.

He raised his arm, and he heard the sounds of men responding. He sent a pair of the mercenaries forward, and then he let his arm fall. ‘Let’s go!’ he called.

Whips cracked, and animals leaned into their loads, and men waved goodbye to sweethearts and wives and children and brats and angry creditors, and the great convoy rolled away with creaking wheels and jingling harness and the smell of new paint.

And Angela Random knelt before her icon of the Virgin and wept, the tears as hot as her passion of an hour before.

Lissen Carak – The Red Knight

Seven men had died fighting the wyvern. The corpses were wrapped in plain white shrouds because that was the rule of the Order of Saint Thomas, and they gave off a sickly sweet smell – corruption and zealous use of sweet herbs, and bitter myrrh burned in the censors that hung in the front of the chapel.

The whole fighting strength of his company stood in the nave, shifting uneasily as if facing an unexpected enemy. They wore no armour, bore no weapons, and some were very ill-dressed; not a few wore their arming cotes with mail voiders because they had no other jacket, and at least one man was bare-legged and ashamed. The captain was plainly dressed in black hose and a short black jupon that fitted so tightly that he couldn’t bend over – his last decent garment from the Continent. His only nod to his status was the heavy belt of linked gold and bronze plaques around his hips.

Their apparent penury contrasted with the opulence of the chapel – even with the shrines and crosses swathed in purple for Lent, or perhaps the more so because the purple of Lent was so rich. Except that nearer to hand, the captain could see the edge of a reliquary peaking out from beneath its silken shroud, the gilt old and crazed, the wood broken. Tallow, not wax, burned in every sconce except the altar candelabra, and the smell of burning fat was sharp against the sweet and the bitter.

The captain noted that Sauce wore a kirtle and a gown. He hadn’t seen her dressed as a woman since her first days with the company. The gown was fine, a foreign velvet of ruddy amber, somewhat faded except for one diamond shaped patch on her right breast.

Where her whore’s badge was sewn, he thought. He glared at the crucified figure over the altar, his pleasant, detached mood destroyed. If there is a god, how can he allow so much fucking misery and deserve my thanks for it? The captain snorted.

Around him the company sank to their knees as the chaplain, Father Henry, raised the consecrated host. The captain kept his eyes on the priest, and watched him throughout the ritual that elevated the bread to the sacred body of Christ – even surrounded by his mourning company, the captain had to sneer at the foolishness of it. He wondered if the stick-thin priest believed a word of what he was saying – wondered idly if the man was driven insane by the loneliness of living in a world of women, or if he was consumed by lust instead. Many of the sisters were quite comely, and as a soldier, the captain knew that comeliness was in the eye of the beholder and directly proportionate to the length of time since one’s last leman. Speaking of which-

He happened to catch Amicia’s eye just then. He wasn’t looking at her – he was very consciously not looking at her, not wanting to appear weak, smitten, foolish, domineering, vain . . .

He had a long list of things he was trying not to appear.

Her sharp glance said, Don’t be so rude – Kneel, so clearly he almost felt he had heard the words said aloud.

He knelt. She had a point – good manners had more value than pious mouthing. If that was her point. If she had, indeed, even looked at him.

Michael stirred next to him, risked a glance at him. The captain could see that his squire was smiling.

Beyond him, Ser Milus was trying to hide a smile as well.