The Red Knight

Flicking his eyes away from the priest, the captain reviewed the riches of the abbey with the eye of a money-lender sizing up a potential client. The abbey’s income was shown in the cobbled courtyard, the neat flint and granite of the stables with a decorative stripe of glazed brick, the copper on the roof and the lead gutters gushing water into a cistern. The courtyard was thirty paces across – as big as that of any castle he’d lived in as a boy. The walls rose sheer – the outer curtain at his back, the central monastery before him, with towers at each corner, all wet stone and wet lead, rain slicked cobbles; the priest’s faded black cassock, and the nun’s undyed surcoat.

All shades of grey, he thought to himself, and smiled as he climbed the steps to the massive monastery door, which was opened by another silent nun. She led him down the hall – a great hall lit by stained glass windows high in the walls. The Abbess was enthroned like a queen in a great chair on a dais at the north end of the hall, in a gown whose grey had just enough colour to appear a pale, pale lavender in the multi-faceted light. She had the look of a woman who had once been very beautiful indeed – even in middle age her beauty was right there, resting in more than her face. Her wimple and the high collar of her gown revealed little enough of her. But her bearing was more than noble, or haughty. Her bearing was commanding, confident in a way that only the great of the land were confident. The captain noted that her nuns obeyed her with an eagerness born of either fear or the pleasure of service.

The captain wondered which it was.

‘You took long enough to reach us,’ she said, by way of greeting. Then she snapped her fingers and beckoned at a pair of servants to bring a tray. ‘We are servants of God here – don’t you think you might have managed to strip your armour before you came to my hall?’ the Abbess asked. She glanced around, caught a novice’s eye, raised an eyebrow. ‘Fetch the captain a stool,’ she said. ‘Not a covered one. A solid one.’

‘I wear armour every day,’ the captain said. ‘It comes with my profession.’ The great hall was as big as the courtyard outside, with high windows of stained glass set near the roof, and massive wooden beams so old that age and soot had turned them black. The walls were whitewashed over fine plaster, and held niches containing images of saints and two rich books – clearly on display to overawe visitors. Their voices echoed in the room, which was colder than the wet courtyard outside. There was no fire in the central hearth.

The Abbess’s people brought her wine, and she sipped it as they placed a small table at the captain’s elbow. He was three feet beneath her. ‘Perhaps your armour is unnecessary in a nunnery?’ she asked.

He raised an eyebrow. ‘I see a fortress,’ he said. ‘It happens that there are nuns in it.’

She nodded. ‘If I chose to order you taken by my men, would your armour save you?’ she asked.

The novice who brought his stool was pretty and she was careful of him, moving with the deliberation of a swordsman or a dancer. He turned his head to catch her eye and felt the tug of her power, saw that she was not merely pretty. She set the heavy stool down against the back of his knees. Quite deliberately, the captain touched her arm gently and caused her to turn to him. He turned to face her, putting his back to the Abbess.

‘Thank you,’ he said, looking her in the eye with a calculated smile. She was tall and young and graceful, with wide-set almond-shaped eyes and a long nose. Not pretty; she was arresting.

She blushed. The flush travelled like fire down her neck and into her heavy wool gown.

He turned back to the Abbess, his goal accomplished. Wondering why the Abbess had placed such a deserable novice within his reach, unless she meant to. ‘If I chose to storm your abbey, would your piety save you?’ he asked.

She blazed with anger. ‘How dare you turn your back on me?’ she asked. ‘And leave the room, Amicia. The captain has bitten you with his eyes.’

He was smiling. He thought her anger feigned.

She met his eyes and narrowed her own – and then folded her hands together, almost as if she intended to pray.

‘Honestly, Captain, I have prayed and prayed over what to do here. Bringing you to fight the Wild is like buying a wolf to shepherd sheep.’ She looked him in the eye. ‘I know what you are,’ she said.

‘Do you really?’ he asked. ‘All the better, lady Abbess. Shall we to business, then? Now the pleasantries are done?’

‘But what shall I call you?’ she asked. ‘You are a well-born man, for all your snide airs. My chamberlain-’

‘Didn’t have a nice name for me, did he, my lady Abbess?’ He nodded. ‘You may call me Captain. It is all the name I need.’ He nodded graciously. ‘I do not like the name your chamberlain used. Bourc. I call myself the Red Knight.’

‘Many men are called bourc,’ she said. ‘To be born out of wedlock is-’