Speak to the Devil

CHAPTER 15

All his life, Anton had heard alarming stories about the perils of fatigue and how men did stupid things when overtired. He had never really understood this until that evening. Then the excitement and novelty which had sustained him all day suddenly drained away. All the previous night he had entertained Baroness Nadezda. For much of the night before his hard drinking messmates had feted the rookie for his triumphant near-suicide at the hunt. Now, close to sunset, his head pounded; the whole world seemed blurry and unsteady. He abandoned thoughts of persuading his betrothed to admit him to her bed without waiting for formalities. Tomorrow would be time enough for that.

Feeling as if he were carrying his horse, he climbed the steep and narrow spiral staircase in the watchtower at the top of the keep, stumbling several times on the worn steps. He had ordered two people to meet him up there. The moment he had completed his business with them, he would fall into bed and sleep. Sleep until Christmas.

As he emerged in the lookout, a chill wind spat raindrops in his face, but even that could not lift the deadening hand of fatigue. The walls were extra-high merlons topped with a conical roof, and the icy gale off the mountains whistled straight through the crenels between them. He registered that Dalibor Notivova was already there, saluting him. Luitger Ekkehardt had not arrived yet. Good. He wanted to deal with them one at a time.

He acknowledged the salute with a nod and began walking carefully all the way around, seeing his domain properly for the first time. The view was remarkable: a treeless moor flooring an upland valley cupped on three sides by rocky walls, close to vertical in many places. Behind that, to the north, stood ice-capped peaks. The Ruzena came foaming out of a gorge just north of the castle, curving around it almost directly below the tower where he stood, then surging and frothing off to the south.

The steep cliff that formed a backdrop to the west of the town was gouged by several vertical gullies that must hold running water from springs. An army at one gate could not reach around to threaten the other, so the defenders should never lack for food, either. At least three people had quoted Barbarossa’s judgment of the site to him, but that doughty old warrior would not have approved of what else Anton was seeing. As he moved around to the west, he was looking down on even more slate than he had feared. The entire space within the curtain wall was paved with roofs.

He reached Notivova. The youth saluted again. He wasn’t really a youth, though, probably a few years older than Anton himself. The chain-mail coif enclosing his head concealed everything except eyes, nose, and lips, but he seemed steady enough, showing only a trace of nervousness-which was quite natural when his superior was in a cell, awaiting trial for treason.

“Tell me about September fifteenth,” Anton said.

“Aye, my lord. The Feast of Our Lady of Sorrows. I had spent the night at my mother’s house, three miles from here. I had leave.” He waited for the count’s nod, then continued. “As I was coming back, across High Meadows, I saw a man riding very fast to the west, towards the Hlucny. That’s a tributary of the Ruzena that marks the boundary between Pelrelm and Cardice. I recognized trooper Tomas and I knew he was supposed to be on gate duty that morning. I wondered what he was doing.”

Again Anton nodded, struggling to make his weary brain concentrate. Men-at-arms despised men who betrayed their commanding officers, yet Notivova was impressing him.

“Did he see you?”

“I don’t think so, my lord. The wind was behind me and blowing rain, so it would have been right in his face. I couldn’t see him well-in fact, I only knew he was Tomas because I recognized his horse and his boots… he has red boots he’s very proud of. But when I rode in I was told right away that the count had been stricken, and Sir Petr had just been brought in, dead, may God grant them both peace. I asked the constable if word had been sent to the king, and he said it was too early to alarm Mauvnik; he was going to wait a day or so to see if the count would recover.”

“So you asked about this Tomas man?”

Notivova avoided his eye. “I didn’t ask Sir Karolis. I asked some of the others and was told he was on a mission for the constable.”

Then he had ratted. Good for him!

“Then what did you do?”

“I went and told the lady Madlenka, my lord. And she told me to keep my suspicions to myself, but she would take care of it. An hour or so later I saw young Gintaras riding out on one of the count’s own horses… my lord.”

Anton sighed and turned to lean his hands on the bottom sill of a crenel and stare out at the mountains glowing in their sunset finery. Weariness made him ache all over. “Young Gintaras did a fine job for his king.” He dared not be more specific, because the timing of events must be kept muddy.

“He’s a fine young horseman.”

“Has Tomas returned?”

“Not that I’ve heard, my lord.” A careful answer. A careful man.

Zdenek had backdated the king’s edicts, so he had foreseen the timing problem. No doubt Gintaras had been suitably bribed to keep him in Mauvnik. Or he could be in a cell, of course. The Scarlet Spider left no holes in his webs.

“And no other courier was sent to Mauvnik until the eighteenth?”

“Not that I know of.”

Tired or not, Anton must now determine how he was going to proceed. He was too exhausted to make major decisions, and this one might determine the success or failure of his efforts to defend Castle Gallant against the Wends. He could release Kavarskas and confirm him as constable; his hours in a cell would serve as a warning of who was in charge. Keep him there overnight, though, and his loyalty could never be trusted again.

Which meant that Anton didn’t trust him now, so he had already made his decision.

He turned to look at Notivova. “You would repeat under oath what you just told me?”

“Yes, my lord.”

“Then I will have to hang Kavarskas.”

The man compressed his lips, staring down at the floor. After a moment he said, “Yes, my lord. I hope you won’t promote me in his place, my lord. I mean, it would look bad.”

“I’ll decide that later. If the facts were as you say, then you made the correct decision in a very difficult situation.”

“Thank you, my lord.”

“For the moment, keep taking your orders from the German. Tell me about the road from Pomerania.”

Notivova led him around to the north side of the tower so he could point. “As you can see, the trail from the barbican hugs the hillside to the mouth of the gorge, my lord. That’s about half a mile, uphill slightly, but we have it in clear sight all the way. Any enemy approaching is walking on a killing ground. After you get past the bend it twists a lot going through the gorge. There are four bridges and three fords. About five miles up you get to Long Valley, on the other side of this mountain, which we call the Hogback. There the country spreads out. The Wends say the border’s at our Long Valley outpost. We say it’s about a mile farther on, at their landing stage. We don’t fight over that mile.”

“And you-I mean, we-keep a garrison at Long Valley?”

He nodded. “We send out a troop of six every morning. They spend two nights, then ride back, so we always have a dozen men there, enough so they can spare a couple to bring back warnings if needed. Usually all they do is report on what caravans are coming. Very few, this late in the year.”

He knew his job.

Pause.

It must be Anton’s turn to say something.

“This’s an odd stronghold. Usually the value of a fortress is that an invader daren’t bypass it and leave a foe in his rear. So the enemy has to shed a chunk of his army to besiege it. But everyone insists that there’s no way to bypass Cardice.”

“A nimble man could, in summer,” Notivova said. “But he’ll find himself on the wrong side of the Ruzena, and it’s twenty miles down to the first ford. There are ways over the mountains west of us, but then he comes down in Pelrelm.”

But if Pelrelm and Pomerania were to join forces, Cardice would be caught in a vise.

“I want you to lead the Long Valley patrol, not tomorrow, but the next day. I’ll come with you.”

Notivova was surprised, but approving. “Yes, my lord.”

“Good. Don’t discuss our talk tonight with anyone. Dismissed.”

As the man’s boot steps faded, Anton drooped against a merlon. He was shaking with weariness, but if he sat down in a crenel he would go to sleep and topple out backward, and it was a long way down. Where was Ekkehardt? And why was it he had asked the man to come up here?

More steps. He turned to watch the landsknecht captain emerge through the trapdoor, massive in his padded linen armor, shrewd eyes glittering above a bush of yellow beard.

Anton straightened up. “Good evening to you, Kommandant.”

“And to you, Count.” The big man scowled through his hayfield. Looking up to other men must be a rarity for him.

“Come over here.” Anton led him over to the town side. “Barbarossa said this was a perfect place for a fortress, so I’m told.”

“Maybe it was-then.”

“How could Count Stepan have been so incredibly stupid as to let it fill up with houses like this? Even with slate roofs, the place is one big firetrap.” There should be houses for the garrison, yes, but most of the land inside the curtain wall ought to be open space.

Ekkehardt grunted, perhaps surprised that this weedy youth had worked that out. “Pestilence.”

“Explain.”

“I mean, it’s fifty years since pestilence last came through here to weed it out. The townsfolk breed like mice. The counts didn’t notice, or weren’t hardhearted enough to send them away. Who cares, in peacetime?”

That made sense, but it had been a terrible mistake, and Anton Magnus was going to have a hellish struggle to put it right before the Wends arrived and started sending fire arrows over the walls.

Now to more urgent business… “I haven’t had time to read over your contract, Kommandant, but I’m sure we can agree on some increase. What I want right now is your views on how to defend that north road when-”

The heavy guttural voice cut him off. “My advice you can have for free, my lord. But all the money in Jorgary will not keep me and my lads here. We’re packing now and will be gone at dawn.”

After a moment, Anton decided that he had heard that correctly. “Why?” he croaked.

“One of our women is sick. She’s an archer’s wife, so he says, but she takes on others and he gets a cut.”

“All armies have those.”

“But she’s sick, and now she’s showing black lumps in her armpits. We are leaving. No argument. I didn’t want to blurt it out in the church and start a panic.”

“Thank you,” Anton muttered. It was more than a century since the Great Pestilence had devastated Christendom, but local outbursts of plague still happened from time to time, reaping a dreadful harvest. Some wretches suffered for days, but a man in perfect health could find spots on his chest and be dead in a few hours. Livid spots on the skin or lumps in groin or armpit warned of imminent death. The invalids in the infirmary were probably approaching the final stages of the fever. Likely Wulf had caught it from them while he was there. Anton himself might have caught it, and that brainless doctor who had not yet diagnosed the problem was doomed.

When you think things cannot get worse, they always do. All his dreams of glory came tinkling down like icicles in sunshine.

Wulf would tell him that that’s what he got for accepting help from the devil.