The Red Knight

The captain didn’t meet his eye because he’d noticed an open window across the courtyard, and seen the face framed in it. ‘Not yet, my honey. We are not in yet.’ He blew a kiss at the window.

The face vanished.

Ser Milus, his primus pilus and standard bearer, grunted. ‘Bad for business,’ he said. And then, as an afterthought, ‘m’lord.’

The captain flicked him a glance and looked back to the dormitory windows.

‘There’s more virgins watching us right now,’ Michael opined, ‘Then have parted their legs for me in all my life.’

Jehannes, the senior marshal, nodded seriously. ‘Does that mean one, young Michael? Or two?’

Guillaume Longsword, the junior marshal, barked his odd laugh, like the seals of the northern bays. ‘The second one said she was a virgin,’ he mock-whined. ‘At least, that’s what she told me!’

Coming through the visor of his helmet, his voice took on an ethereal quality that hung in the air for a moment. Men do not look on horror and forget it. They merely put it away. Memories of the steading were still too close to the surface, and the junior marshal’s voice had summoned them, somehow.

No one laughed. Or rather, most of them laughed, and all of it was forced.

The captain shrugged. ‘I have chosen to give our prospective employer some time to consider her situation,’ he said.

Milus barked a laugh. ‘Stewing in her juice to raise the price, is that it?’ he asked. He nodded at the door of the chapel. ‘Yon has no liking for us.’

The priest continued to stand in his doorway.

‘Think he’s a dimwit? Or is he the pimp?’ Ser Milus asked. And stared at the priest. ‘Be my guest, cully. Stare all ye like.’

The soldiers chuckled, and the priest went into the chapel.

Michael flinched at the cruelty in the standard bearer’s tone, then stepped forward. ‘What is your will, m’lord?’

‘Oh,’ the captain said, ‘I’m off hunting.’ He stepped away quickly, with a wry smile, walked a few steps toward the smithy, concentrated . . . and vanished.

Michael looked confused. ‘Where is he?’ he asked.

Milus shrugged, shifting the weight of his hauberk. ‘How does he do that?’ he asked Jehannes.

Twenty paces away, the captain walked into the dormitory wing as if it was his right to do so. Michael leaned as if to call out but Jehannes put his gauntleted hand over Michael’s mouth.

‘There goes our contract,’ Hugo said. His dark eyes crossed with the standard bearer’s, and he shrugged, despite the weight of the maille on his shoulders. ‘I told you he was too young.’

Jehannes eased his hand off the squire’s face. ‘He has his little ways, the Bourc.’ He gave the other men a minute shake of his head. ‘Let him be. If he lands us this contract-’

Hugo snorted, and looked up at the window.

The captain reached into the palace in his head.

A vaulted room, twelve sided, with high, arched, stained glass windows, each one bearing a different image set at even intervals between columns of aged marble that supported a groined roof. Under each window was a sign of the zodiac, painted in brilliant blue on gold leaf, and then a band of beaten bronze as wide as a man’s arm, and finally, at eye level, a series of niches between the columns, each holding a statue; eleven statues of white marble, and one iron-bound door under the sign of Ares.

In the exact centre of the room stood a twelfth statue – Prudentia, his childhood tutor. Despite her solid white marble skin, she smiled warmly as he approached her.

‘Clementia, Pisces, Eustachios,’ he said in the palace of his memory, and his tutor’s veined white hands moved to point at one sign and then another.

And the room moved.