Heritage of Fire Page 15

  Gerd didn't quite smile. It had become almost a game. "The agenda for the meeting should be posted next week. The Charter requires two weeks notice of motion."

  "All right," grunted Sankey. "I'll be the dummy. What's an agenda? And what's a motion?"

  "An agenda is the list of things to be discussed at the meeting. And a motion is a suggestion that the meeting votes on." Gerd paused. "Don't tell me you don't know what a vote is."

  "All right, I won't, if you say not to." Sankey looked around at the untroubled horizon, the mountain to their left, the sea on the right. "Funny, I seem to remember that they made me a corporal, a while back. I was told it meant I didn't have to take orders from spearmen any more."

  "Ah, but I'm also a Brother Knight," said Gerd. "Even the Captain has to take orders from all of us put together."

  "All of us put together, eh? You left out the bit where we all get together and say it, all at once."

  "That's what the meeting is for."

  "Oh, I see. Oh, yes. Yes indeed. Only I think the Captain has got that one worked out. Meetings are for telling him what to do, says you. Now, if you was the Captain, how many meetings would you have, eh?"

  "One a year, anyway. At midsummer. Like it says in the Charter."

  Gerd glanced at Sankey as he said that, but Sankey made no reply. He simply twitched his shoulders again and stumped on.

  They reached the fort late in the day, reported in and were dismissed. Most of the patrol were going to the tavern - the march had been long, hot and dusty. Gerd had the barrack-room to himself.

  He opened his footlocker, took his writing materials out, and drew the folded skin from his pack. He hadn't liked folding it, but he had to carry it and the originals with him. Now he stacked two footlockers to make a writing surface, sat down on his bed, and copied out the last two sentences of the Charter, forming the letters with care, trying to follow the same hand as the original, only larger and in bold black letters. He was using a whole goatskin to copy the complete text on to, and he was nearly finished. It would be half the size of a blanket when it was unfolded.

  Half an hour passed before he sat back. There, it was done at last. He looked around the barrack-room.

  There were decorations of one sort or another on the stone walls, here and there. Some of the men liked to paint their shields with some sort of special design, as well as the white cross of the Company, and they hung them at the heads of their beds. Two of them could draw, and had sketched designs or drawn pictures in charcoal on the squared-off blocks of the wall itself. Others had written their names in fancy script. The Captain hadn't objected.

  A wooden rod was easy to get. Gerd had bought a stave from the carpenter two days before. Turning the top of the parchment over and sewing it in a loop was a few minutes' work. The rod passed through the loop, and the copy of the Charter could then be hung from a hook on the wall at the head of Gerd's bed. And there it was, plain as paint for anyone who could read.

  Gerd stepped back from it. He had copied some parts of it in red ink, and they stood out. And tomorrow was barracks inspection.

  It would be lights out in a little while. Gerd lay back on his pallet, put his hands behind his head, and contemplated the ceiling. After a while he rolled out again and began cleaning and polishing his gear. This time, of all times, it had to be perfect.

  He was still at it when the others began to drift in by ones and twos. Some of them couldn't read, of course, but most could make a fist at it. The barrack-room was deeply familiar to all of them, and anything new was noticed. They looked at the new wall-hanging, spelled through it - it could be read from across the room, as Gerd had intended - and then they looked at each other.

  Nobody said anything. Nobody needed to. By common, unspoken consent men took cleaning kits out of their lockers and packs, and spent the last half-hour before lights out in the same busy, silent activity. The room took on the scent of neat’s-foot oil and vinegar and pipeclay, as well as the burning lamps. Later, Gerd could still smell it in his dreams, but somehow it had become mixed with the smoky reek of the dragon's cave with its heap of treasure, and with the spilled ale of that last night in the inn at his home village.

  The captain could smell it, too, apparently. When he walked in, the following morning, his eyebrows rose. The room was as clean as a pebble in a stream bed. Every last thing in it had been scrubbed, polished, whitewashed, waxed, scoured or oiled, to suit. Every man's kit had been laid out with painful exactness. Every man stood rigidly by it, as if posing for a statue of the ideal soldier. Even Berry, the squad sloven, had been forcibly washed, and his equipment completed, repaired, cleaned and arranged. The effect was unnatural. It was meant to be.

  The captain stopped in the doorway. His face went perfectly still, and then it assumed the expression that Gerd had seen before, the lips pursed, the eyebrows a little raised, the eyes blank. He ran his gaze over the double rank of men, looking for something, but just then Corporal Sankey snapped an order and the squad stamped to attention with a crash. That might have been what got the captain moving again, the routine of exchanging salutes, the moment of bustle while Sankey took up position at his left elbow, thumping and stamping as if twice his weight. The captain was shrewd, and he would have known something was up, but it would have taken more than shrewdness to know exactly what it was.

  By chance, Gerd's pallet stood by a buttress jutting out from the wall. Only the left-hand edge of the new wall-hanging could be seen from the door, and he had carefully placed himself to cover that. By the time the captain could see that there was something there, he had already passed two sets of wall-hangings. Nevertheless, he paused in his stride when he caught sight of this one. His eyes flickered over it, and then slid to Gerd's face, but found nothing there.

  Gerd had had time to prepare for this, but the captain had not. It would come as a surprise to him. Somehow Gerd had known that surprise would be needed. The captain might make a mistake if he were surprised, and almost anything he might say or do now would be a mistake.

  The captain paused, and for a moment it seemed that he was about to make the mistake. He might have been about to order it taken down. Gerd was ready to spring to obey, the total obedient soldier, for then matters would have been made clear to even the dullest. If the captain gave that order, he would be saying that the Charter that they had all sworn to uphold was not in force. That it was in fact outlawed. But if that was so, what was in force? And if there was no Charter, didn't that mean that their oaths to uphold it were all worthless, and therefore they themselves were liars.

  But the pause went on. The captain's eyes hooded over and became unreadable once more. The silence in the barrack-room stretched out. Then the captain turned and passed on. He said nothing whatever, except to mutter to Sankey when he reached the door again. Sankey saluted again, stamping his feet. The captain gave a last glance around the room, turned left towards the stairs and disappeared. He hadn't looked at Gerd particularly.

  13

  Night watches were usually boring, but the worst was the middle one on a moonless night. It was the four hours of deepest darkness, pacing the walls and staring at the black sea and the even blacker land, with only the stars for company. No torches or cressets were allowed - they'd ruin the sentry's night sight - and the few dots of light in the town winked out one by one as midnight approached and passed.

  Gerd had been put on the seaward corner wall, the one that looked toward the town on the right hand and the sea on the left – the longest beat. He spent the watch staring, shifting places on the wall and staring again. Sentries were supposed to walk a regular beat, but Gerd preferred to be a bit less predictable about it. And he set himself to watch what was happening close by, as well as far out in the bay.

  The only way to tell the time was by the stars and the tide. Still, Gerd thought the watch had gone quickly when he heard the tramp of boots on the stairs from the bailey below. There was the relief already. Perhaps he had had plenty to thi
nk about.

  Shadowy forms climbed the stairs, three of them. Gerd could see the spear-shafts against the starfield and hear the quiet rasp of mail. The cloaked figure at the head of the line gestured to the next below him. Gerd could see only the shape of the man's head and shoulders as he came up, but something about the way he stood told him that this was not Sankey, who was the Corporal of the Guard that night.

  "Who goes there?" The challenge was drilled. It was what you were supposed to say. But something was whispering in Gerd's ear, and he had turned about to face the sound. His spear was in his hand, but that hand slid down the shaft. There it hovered, near the hilt of his sword. He couldn't have said why.

  "Relief. What of the night, Brother?" That was what you were supposed to hear back, but Gerd knew that voice. It was Corporal Hergan, who was file-leader from third section. But this wasn't third section's turn for the middle watch.

  "All's well, Brother," said Gerd, his voice answering for him, and Hergan sauntered a little closer.

  It was the other man who gave the lie - the one who was pretending to be Gerd's relief. It was too easy, too casual. The man hadn't realised how sharp eyes can become, after three or four hours of darkness - after all, he'd just been in a room with a lamp. The gleam of the short blade as he drew it was faint in the starlight, but it was enough.

  Hergan was already inside the reach of Gerd's spear, and that made the spear almost useless. Except that Hergan hadn't seen Gerd's movement, and didn't know that Gerd was standing on the balls of his feet, waiting, ready. Hergan reached the head of the stairs and stepped sharply to the side, to make room for the man behind him. They would take Gerd from both sides, Hergan flinging an arm around his neck to pull him off balance, bending him backwards while the man with the blade slit his throat.

  So Hergan was already going the right way. He was moving, off-balance, and Gerd's shoulder struck him in the chest just as he moved to the right of the stairs. A hard shove, and Hergan pitched over the edge. It was a good twenty feet to the bailey below. And now Gerd was at the head of the stairs, with the others at least a step below him.

  Those stairs had been built with defence in mind. They were steep, and only wide enough for one man at a time. Whoever the second man was, he wasn't too quick on the uptake, and he’d been expecting this to be easy. He had his shortsword half-out when Hergan toppled off the guard-walk a pace or so away, but he froze in shock. Gerd could see the whites of his eyes, suddenly wide in the starlight.

  It was too close to use the spear. Gerd dropped it and drew his own sword in the same motion. "Alarm!" he bellowed. "Turn out the guard!"

  The man on the stairs cursed. He already had his sword out, and now he also dropped his long spear. The clatter it made on the stone added to the noise. There was no way that the thing could be done quietly now. He snapped a cut at the dimly-seen figure of Gerd, at the head of the stairs above him.

  Gerd's sword-drill bore fruit now. Perhaps the endless hours in the sun marching back and forth under a load of armour and a pack helped, too. His shield was in the way, and his opponent’s sword met it with a sullen thump, wedging stuck for a moment. Gerd pressed the sword back, the way he'd been taught, and his opponent had to step backwards or be shoved off balance. And now Gerd's own strike came, overhand, aiming for the gleam of the headpiece, and in the darkness his target couldn't be certain of where the blade was. The man jerked his shield up over his head, trying to get the rim of it in the way. If the strike had bitten into that, it might have caught and trapped the blade, but Gerd turned the sword. The edge scraped down the shield, came off the bottom edge as his attacker raised it high, and then continued down. There was a meaty thunk!

  The fellow was a hard man, no doubt about that. He only grunted as the blade chopped into his leading thigh just above the knee, but the leg at once bent under him, and he staggered backwards. The man behind him was dark-blinded even worse, or maybe he was slower-witted. He hadn't been ready, and now he staggered as his friend fell against him. Gerd helped from above with a shove from his shield, and the thing was done.

  Those stairs were steep. Even Gerd winced as the two men tumbled backwards down them with a series of thumps and clatters. A fall like that would mean broken bones or worse. But they didn’t cry out, despite all. It would have been better for them if they had. That might have confused the other men turning out of barracks in answer to Gerd’s call. They were from the ready squad, Gerd’s own, since it was their night to do guard duty; but they’d been in the guard room, and they, too, would be blind for a while.

  There was a confused hubbub, a rush of feet. Someone down there didn’t see Hergan lying there. Tripping over him caused a startled shout and a groan. In fact there was a series of shouts, then another. Here came Corporal Sankey, running up the stairs two at a time.

  “Any more of them?” he demanded.

  “They’re all at the bottom,” said Gerd. “At least, I think that’s all of them.”

  Sankey grunted and jerked his head. “Hergan. He wants to be Captain.”

  “This was his big chance to put his hand up, then. And the others?”

  “Two more from his section. Don’t know them, much.” Sankey glanced down into the dark shadows below the stairs. “One’s busted his leg, I think. Hergan’s looking a bit the worse for wear, too. They all had short blades in their hands, or empty dagger sheaths, which is the same thing. We won’t find the knives they dropped until light.”

  “They were going to cut my throat.” Gerd said it, and wondered at what he was saying.

  Sankey grunted again. “It seems you was ready for ‘em.”

  Gerd wondered why Sankey didn’t seem surprised. The corporal had clearly been expecting this. He seemed to think that Gerd had been expecting it, too. Gerd hadn’t been, not for a moment.

  And now here came the glow of a lantern approaching from the direction of the gatehouse on the other side of the courtyard. That was where the company office was.

  Sankey grinned. “This’ll be the Captain. Bet you he’s in his nightshirt, but he’ll have his boots on. Come on.” He pulled at Gerd's sleeve, but it was to urge him away from the steps, not towards them. They moved twenty paces up the wall, away from Gerd's set beat. Gerd wondered why, and he stared at Sankey, puzzled, but Sankey only shook his head and put a finger to his lips.

  Gerd said nothing, perplexed. What now? He watched the light move closer, bobbing in the hand of someone who was apparently jog-trotting. It was raised high as it came to the bottom of the steps, to shed some light on the injured men lying there. Silence. Then the Captain’s voice. “On the wall, there. What happened?”

  Gerd opened his mouth to reply, but Sankey nudged him to silence and answered for him. “Three men going over the wall, sir. The sentry stopped them. Must have been deserting, sir. Sentry says they had their knives out.”

  The captain’s got problems, thought Gerd, suddenly. No matter what excuse he thinks of, those three had no business to be here. And with that, he realised that he had accepted that the Captain had organised this. He had sent his own henchmen to murder a fellow Knight.

  But there was only silence for a long count of twenty. The gleam of the lantern had gone out of sight at the base of the wall, directly below them. Gerd started to move forward, to look over the edge of the guard walk, down into the dark castle yard. Sankey tugged him back, a hand on his shoulder.

  Gerd looked at him. Again he made to speak, and again Sankey waved him off, waiting. Silence. Then the Captain’s voice came again.

  “I don’t like this at all. Corporal Sankey, you and Penrose get yourselves down here. I’ve got three men hurt, one of them badly, and you’ve got some explaining to do.”

  Sankey smiled, a gleam of white teeth in the starlight. He nodded, just faintly, as if he’d heard what he wanted to hear. “Captain,” he murmured, “I think you’re the one who’s got things to explain.” But he jerked his head, for Gerd to precede him down the steps.

  By
the time they reached the bottom, someone had run for a surgeon and someone else had managed to tighten a belt on the wounded man’s leg above the slash made by Gerd’s sword. All three wounded were still lying where they had fallen, two at the bottom of the steps and Hergan to one side, where he had fallen straight down from the guard walk.

  Here was the Captain. Sankey had been right. He was in his nightshirt, but he had his boots on and a cloak over the top. “Get some more lights,” he snapped at one of the others. “You four, use your spearshafts and cloaks to make stretchers. Get the wounded into the guard room. Come on, move.” And then, to Sankey, “Put Penrose under arrest, for assaulting fellow members of the Company. I’ll deal with him in the morning.”

  “I don’t think so, Captain,” said Sankey. He said it calmly and quietly.

  Captain Mannon had started to turn away. His head snapped around. “What did you just say, Sankey?” His feet shifted. The hand holding the lantern lifted high.