Sword of the Bright Lady (16 page)

“But enough of the past,” the old man said. “She's riding high now. She's a good woman, and sooner or later some clever fellow will notice, and then I'll have to find a new girl to cook for me. Just as soon you will leave, and I'll have to find a new novice to trouble me. In the end, they all leave.”

Before Christopher could respond, Svengusta called for another round and soon had the tavern patrons singing a rough, rude song.

9.

A FLOCK OF GULLS

In the morning he threw himself into his new career, attacking the manure pile with shovel and pickax, and staggered home with a barrel of filth and a head full of plans. Not knowing how to best refine his ingredients or even precisely what proportions to combine them in, he would reduce the problem through brute force: by trying everything he could think of and keeping what worked. Thus was science born.

Science first had to contend with the housemaid, however. Helga took one whiff and drew a bath. The process was unbelievably difficult, requiring repeated trips to the frozen well with bucket and ax, and the amount of firewood involved was horrifying to the man who had to split it.

Helga poured a final kettle of steaming water into the half-barrel laid out in the kitchen and looked at him expectantly. He waited for her to leave, before realizing there was nowhere for her to go. There were, after all, only three rooms in the entire building.

Svengusta intervened. “Why don't you run up to the Widow Fenly's and buy some apples? You can make us a pie for tonight.”

Excited at the chance to bake, Helga bundled herself in several layers and bustled off.

“City-bred, I suppose,” Svengusta said, handing him a bar of soft soap and a dishrag.

“Yes,” Christopher agreed, happy to have an excuse supplied.

“A strange city, by my lights.”

“You have no idea,” Christopher said, sinking gratefully into the hot water. It was the first time he'd been truly warm since he had arrived.

“And by others'. You mystify everyone you meet. People react with caution or fear to the unknown. You cannot blame them.”

“I don't.” That the villagers kept their distance did not bother him. He did not want to get close to anything here. His goal was to find a way out, not fit in.

“I have put my finger on your oddness. You carry yourself as one born to privilege. You did so, even before you were ranked.”

Christopher came from solidly Middle America, not the one the politicians talked about but the real one, of factories and six packs, small towns and city apartments. Mechanical engineering paid well enough, but he'd never thought of himself as a privileged class. Even being aware of how lucky he was to be born into a rich country, instead of some Third World hellhole, even understanding how lucky he was to be born in the twentieth century instead of the second—although currently he seemed to have backslid on that one—none of this added up to putting on airs. Svengusta wasn't accusing him of being a snob.

The privilege he took for granted was that he thought he was just as good as anyone else.

“I think everybody deserves to be treated the same. Is that really so bad?”

Svengusta grinned at him. “No, but only because of the color of the robe you wear. Were you anything but a priest of the White, you would be dead within hours.”

Christopher, luxuriating in the heat, nodded in agreement. That did, in fact, describe his experience so far.

“Yet when you came to us, you were not a priest. How did you survive the first decades of your life with such an attitude?”

Before Christopher could frame an answer, Svengusta shook his head.

“Never mind. It is sufficient for me that Krellyan has accepted your past. I do not need to know, and perhaps I do not wish to know. Knowledge brings danger. Let you and the Saint bear it without me, if possible. Now get out; it's my turn.”

When Helga returned, she trimmed his beard while Svengusta dressed for their usual pilgrimage to the tavern. Tonight three strange men sat at the bar, nursing mugs. An old codger was trying to spark a conversation but failing.

“Greetings, Paters,” Big Bob said. “Perhaps you can talk these mummers into a performance.”

The men looked Christopher and Svengusta up and down. It did not appear to improve their mood. Christopher couldn't blame them. He looked like a beggar, despite the sword, and Svengusta, in his old, stained coat, was no better.

The men lifted their mugs and drained them. One spoke to the tavern keeper.

“The weather is too cold for a show. We'll settle our account in the morning and be on our way.”

“As you will,” Big Bob replied. The men stood, and with a polite “Paters,” left the room.

“A sorry lot,” Big Bob said when they were gone. “Even their womenfolk were nothing to look at.”

“Helga will be disappointed,” Christopher said. To be fair, so was he.

Svengusta waved away his concern. “We'll have pie tonight all the same. Better than the bawdy, raucous prattle of layabouts.”

“For that we have Uncle Abjorn,” Big Bob said. “And no need to tip him for it.”

The old codger sputtered. “Insolent wretch! And to think I held my tongue and spoke no ill against the swill you've poured today. Enough is enough.” He slammed down his mug. “I'll not drink another drop in this hovel!”

Christopher tuned out the argument. They did it every night.

“What would they have done?” he asked Svengusta.

“They had the look of jugglers or acrobats more than players. Perhaps their women would have danced. I fear you would have found it tame, compared to an evening in a townie's tavern.”

Christopher wondered what Svengusta and Helga would make of a movie. But that made him think of popcorn, which made him think of all the things he had lost. Every day he spent here would be another defeat for Maggie. It was the cruelest fate he could imagine: her hope would die the death of a thousand cuts.

Through dinner and pie he struggled to smile, for Helga's sake. With kindness she and Svengusta pretended not to notice, leaving his pain to fade on its own.

Some latent martial-arts skill woke him in the night. A shadowy figure loomed over him, arm raised to strike. The menace was palpable, the wrongness terrifying. He reacted instinctively, putting up an arm to block the downward blow. Letting slip the syllables of the spell imprinted on his brain—he'd been memorizing a different one every day to see what they did—he took his fear in his hand and threw it back, forcefully, into the face of nightmare.

The man shrieked in terror, throwing himself away. He collided with something, fell, scrambled to his feet, and burst out of the door. Christopher came fully awake. They were under attack.

He reached over and grabbed his sword where it lay between him and the wall, courtesy of Karl's training. He caught the haft in one hand and rolled out of bed.

Someone pounced on him like a tiger. He wrestled, rolling to get away, felt the fire as steel sank into his shoulder where his neck had been but a heartbeat ago. He punched up, blindly but with full force. His tael had already closed the wound.

He had to release the sword, its length now a liability. He groped for the assailant's knife hand, tried to apply a lock. The hand slipped away, came back to strike again, piercing flesh. This time copious blood followed it out.

Christopher grabbed blindly for the throat, rolling under the man so he could see, and was dismayed at the sight of a second assailant maneuvering in the firelight shadows for a chance to strike. He brought his knee up, struck his grappler in the face without much damage, but it checked the motion and kept the attackers in each other's way.

Someone touched him from the left and he felt renewed. Svengusta had reached out from his bunk and healed him. The dagger came down again, striking into his exposed belly, but his replenished tael bound the wound and so he struck again with his knee. He felt the solid blow connect with the head, but the assailant shrugged it off and kept fighting.

Even in the midst of the fight he was astonished to see Svengusta produce some sort of farm implement with a short, curved blade. The old man swung it with both hands into the black-clad, black-masked assassin on top of Christopher. It was an awkward swing, from the horizontal position on the bed, but it drew blood.

The man grunted, issued an order. The other one leaped on Svengusta, going over Christopher, who reached up and caught a foot, but he could not pull the man off and fight his own. Again and again the dagger fell, blood spattering in its wake. Christopher realized he was losing everything; blood, the fight, and consciousness. He didn't think he could pull off a spell in these conditions, not without even one free hand. He could hear the old man's cries as the other dagger struck home, on the bed above him, so terribly far away.

Then there were other voices, angry ones. Hands lifted the man off him, clubs raining down. Villagers dragged the assailants into the kitchen, threw them to the ground, and pounded them with clubs like recalcitrant lumps of bleeding dough.

Christopher sat up and reached for Svengusta. He forced his mind to ignore the sounds from the next room, the pain from his own wounds. He touched the comatose old man, said the words of the spell.

Svengusta popped up like a puppet on a string. He looked about wildly, reached down for Christopher.

“No,” Christopher said, “I'll live. See to Helga.”

He was out of real spells, but he still had orisons, the petty spells that novices practiced with. One was sufficient to stop the bleeding, if not the pain.

Before Christopher could get to his feet, Svengusta returned. “She's untouched.” He unleashed his power into Christopher. The relief almost made the pain worthwhile.

Restored to health and vitality, Christopher picked up his sword and forced the crowd back so he could survey the kitchen.

The hoods had been stripped from the attackers. They looked vaguely familiar, but Christopher wasn't sure. Big Bob was there, crying, several men holding him at bay.

“They put my Charles down,” the tavern keeper sobbed. “Pater, they cut his throat like a pig.” In a flicker his grief turned to rage, his tears still flowing but now of uncontainable hatred. “Give them to me! I'll smash their brains for stew. Give me the beast that cut my boy!” The other men had to struggle to hold on as he lunged at the unmoving bodies on the floor.

“Calm yourself, Robert,” Svengusta ordered, kneeling over the bodies. “This one is dead already. This one lives to face the noose.”

“But my Charles,” the tavern master cried, his face a quivering mass of blubber. Christopher was unnerved by the transformation; normally the man was as cynical and stoic as any barkeep.

“We'll bring him back,” Christopher said. “I've still got three hundred gold. Surely we can raise the rest from the village.” Svengusta had said a revival cost a hundred tael. It would bankrupt him, but what was a pile of gold measured against a boy's life?

They all stared at him. Big Bob gulped for air, confused.

Svengusta, ever practical, asked, “Who else did we lose?”

“No one, Pater,” one of the men answered. “Bob was suspicious of the mummer folk, so he put us in one of the spare rooms in case there was trouble and set his boy to watch their door. In the middle of the night his ma goes to take him a snack and finds him lying on the floor. Bob had to bring him to the Pater just in case. But when we got here the door was hanging open, so Bob dropped the body and stormed the castle, and we had to follow.”

“My Charles!” the tavern keeper cried, and rushed outside.

Svengusta turned to the man. “Fargo, where are the mummer womenfolk?”

“I don't know, Pater.”

“Find them. Before Big Bob does. Go!”

The crowd cleared out of the chapel, leaving behind only Fenwick the stable-master.

Christopher stood guard while Svengusta and Fenwick turned over the unconscious man and bound him. Then they tore his clothes off.

“It's the only reliable way of searching them,” Fenwick explained.

Helga was crying on her bed. “I didn't hear them come in. I didn't wake up. I'm sorry, I'm sorry!”

“It's okay, Helga,” Christopher reassured her. “You did the right thing.” It made a screwy kind of sense. The girl, having no ranks, was no threat; they'd skipped her and gone straight for the high-value targets, as was the tactics of this world. And they hadn't barred the door behind them, thinking the villagers asleep, and in any case hardly more of a threat than the girl. “And you,” he said to Fenwick. “You saved us.”

“Of course he did. You're the most exciting thing Burseberry's seen for ages.” Svengusta grinned, but it was only a faint shadow of his usual humor. “This one needs to stay warm. Here, girl, let's put him in your bed.”

Helga scurried out of the bed while Christopher and Fenwick hefted the naked man into it. Svengusta covered him up with blankets, checked his breathing while sending the other two men into the main hall with the dead body.