When the Saints Read online

  “Is that all?” Anton demanded. “We are beset by enemies on both sides and Marek has been murdered. Anything more to brighten my day?”

  Wulf stood up. “Not so far. If you mean has anyone else died of pestilence, then such has not been reported.”

  “Don’t even speak of that!” Anton snapped. “Whatever that trollop died of, it was not plague!”

  The Speaker looked him over coldly. “That bruise suits you, but I suppose I’d better cure it, just to preserve your confounded dignity as lord of the march. Did I improve your teeth at all?”

  “This one’s loose.” Anton pulled down a lip.

  The pain disappeared. Wulf turned on his heel and stalked out, shutting the heavy door with a bang.

  Otto stood up also. “He’s taking Marek’s death very badly.”

  “It’s tough on all of us.”

  “You’re not blaming yourself, and he is. He’s starting to doubt his Voices.”

  Then Anton realized.… “He didn’t Speak to anyone! He cured my lip and my tooth, but he didn’t say anything. He used to pray aloud to his saints.” Or Satan.

  Otto shrugged. “He doesn’t do that anymore.” He took two steps toward the door and stopped. “He’s in terrible danger, you know. The Wends will be after him, and so will the Church. I’ve been trying to talk him into going away, somewhere very far away. He refuses.”

  Of course he refused. He wanted Madlenka.

  “I hope,” Otto continued, “that we can win this war without having to ask for any more aid from him.”

  “If it comes from the devil, yes.”

  “I’m going to go and help Vlad. You should come and be seen making an inspection. Put your sword on.”

  Anton reluctantly grunted agreement and went back into the bedroom. The bed-curtains were open and Madlenka’s face was just visible between quilt and pillow. Her smile of welcome failed to convince.

  “Just came for my sword,” he said. “Havel Vranov is laying siege to the south gate. I’ll ring for your maid.” He hauled on the bell rope and went out to join Otto. He would rather have waited until the maid arrived, because Wulf might pop up the moment his back was turned. Although his earldom came directly from the king, not from his marriage to the late count’s daughter, he would be the laughingstock of the kingdom if his wife ran off with his younger brother.

  CHAPTER 3

  Marching along the dim, cold corridors of the keep at Anton’s elbow, Sir Ottokar, thirteenth Baron Magnus of Dobkov, recalled with ironic amusement that he had decided to visit on a mere whim. Normally the journey here and back would have required about three weeks on horseback, but when he had a Speaker in the family both willing and eager to transport him anywhere in the blink of an eye, why not take advantage? True, the Church might thunder that he was imperiling his mortal soul by dealing with the devil, but he found it hard to take that seriously when the reward being offered was so trivial. More important, Otto had known he was the only person who could hope to keep peace in the family. Anton had barely had time to find the latrines in his new castle and was well out of his depth trying to defend it against predatory foes like Duke Wartislaw of Pomerania. Sir Vladislav was a superb warrior, but he had the tact and grace of a hungry bear.

  Another smoldering fuse, even more worrisome, was the head-over-heels infatuation between Wulfgang and Madlenka, which they considered love but others might see as first-time adolescent infatuation. Very likely the girl would soon cave in to social and religious pressure and start being properly respectful of her husband. Very few heiresses could choose who they married any more than a sheet of parchment could dictate the terms of an agreement written on it. Men had choice and men could fight for what they wanted. Men fought over women more than they did over anything else except honor—ever since Troy, and probably before that. All Magnuses were stubborn, but since infancy Wulf had set new standards in pigheadedness. Where Anton was the ultimate lecher, Wulf was virtuous and highly disciplined. Love for him, as for his namesake the wolf, would be a lifetime matter, as it was for Otto himself.

  Just in case Otto might be tempted to throw up his hands and go home, Anton had admitted that the German mercenaries had fled the town because they believed there was plague there. Otto dared not return to his beloved Branka and the children before he was sure that the rumor was false. If it was.

  Anton had already learned his way around his labyrinthine castle. He strode past a staircase without hesitation and brought Otto to a gateway on the same level. The porch was guarded by two men-at-arms, whose breath smoked and whose surcoats were white with frost. They saluted the count, and Otto noticed that Anton remembered to smile in acknowledgment as their father had taught his sons. From there a high drawbridge led across a street to the battlements of the curtain wall that surrounded the town.

  Castle Gallant stood on a rocky platform that occupied half the width of the valley. Snow had fallen in the night, so the snow line that had been a third of the way up the mountains yesterday was now down to the tussocky moorland of the valley floor. Steep slopes or cliffs closed off the valley on three sides, with the peaks of the Vysoky Range as a backdrop and the Ruzena River emerging from a gorge about half a mile north of the castle. When Otto leaned through a crenel to peer down the outer face of the wall, he could see it frothing and foaming on its way south to the plains. But between wall and river was a cliff, two hundred feet high.

  “It’s an incredible site,” he said. “If we can’t hold it, we deserve to see our heads on pikes.” He shivered. “Does the wind always howl like this?”

  “It hasn’t stopped in the five days I’ve been here. Come and see this, though.” Anton headed southward along the parapet until they were clear of the keep and had a view of the town. “We’ll have to tear down houses to make firebreaks.”

  Like any walled city, Gallant was a warren of roofs and alleys without a square inch of unused space. The keep towered over it at the eastern edge, with the cathedral nearby and three lesser spires spaced around. One taller building might be the bishop’s palace.

  “Stone walls,” Otto said. “What are the roofs made of?” They were white at the moment, with black patches where the snow had already slid off. Chimneys smoked in the sunlight.

  “Slate, all of them.”

  “Then you don’t need firebreaks. Fire arrows won’t do much damage on stone and slate, especially with all this snow around. And if the enemy breaks in, you want to make them fight door-to-door. Tharotto-doort’s the worst sort of fighting there is. I saw a little of it when the French took Bordeaux. How good is your water supply?”

  “Excellent. Never fails, so I’m told.”

  “Then forget fire arrows. Set the women and children to topping up water buckets. Order all window shutters to be kept closed, maybe. Not yet, though. Sounds like Vlad’s got them busy already. Let’s go and see.”

  They carried on along the top of the wall, urged forward by the spiteful wind and heading for the sounds of hammering. When they moved around to the south side of town, Anton pointed out High Meadows, which was summer pasture, normally abandoned in winter. The Hound’s camp was there now, west of the river, an array of bright tents and pavilions, with colored pennants thrashing in the wind. Only part of it was visible, though, the rest being hidden by a spur of the Hogback.

  “Five or six hundred men-at-arms,” Otto said confidently, “at least. There could be thousands more we can’t see. Better them than me at this time of year.” But cold weather meant less chance of dysentery, which took more lives than fighting ever did. “How many have you got?”

  Anton shrugged. “About five hundred. I called in the levy, but less than half of them have arrived, and now of course they can’t. Given time, Havel can probably muster four or five times that many. Our civilian workforce must number two or three thousand. That’s including women and boys.”

  So the odds were bad, and if the departed landsknecht mercenaries had gone over to Havel, they widened even further. H
eaven alone knew how many thousand Wends Wartislaw might have brought.

  Beyond High Meadows the valley widened and descended to merge with the forested Jorgarian Plain. High Meadows was a staging post on the Silver Road, one of the great highways of Christendom, a major trading route between the Adriatic and the Baltic. It climbed the side of the Hogback to the south barbican of Castle Gallant, and the work that had gone into its construction must have rivaled the building of the castle itself. In many places it had been chiseled out of near-vertical cliff, and it spanned gaps with high trestle bridges.

  “I should have taken out those bridges,” Anton grumbled. So he should have, but it was unlike him to accept blame, even when he’d earned it. He and Wulf were both learning that good intentions were not enough. Welcome to adulthood.

  “Tearing up the Silver Road in peacetime would be going a bit far,” Otto said reassuringly.

  Putting guards on it would have been a smart idea, though. Anton had blundered badly in not foreseeing an attack from the Pelrelm side. Pickets stationed down at High Meadows could have warned the castle of approaching danger; they could have made a fighting withdrawal while destroying the bridges behind them.

  “All is not lost,” Otto said as the brothers drew cknethers dloser to the barbican tower. “Even if the Hound’s guns open a dozen breaches in the wall, they’ll do him no good at the top of these cliffs. He must attack along the road and break in where the gate is, which means he has to put his guns there, right there, where we can get at them.”

  He pointed to a spot little more than a hundred yards away, where the road disappeared around a spur of the cliff. The next section visible from the barbican was at least half a mile farther down the hill, and much lower. A good bombard could throw a ball from there, but its aim would be erratic and its impacts lessened by the angle of flight.

  Of course Vlad had worked that out, and was planning to hold the bend as his first line of defense. About thirty Cardician men were already building a breastwork across the road there, with more men jogging up and down the hill, ferrying supplies on their shoulders or in handcarts. Wagons would be impractical, because there were few places on the road where they could pass.

  Vlad had another team working on the top of the barbican tower, evidently building the trebuchets he had mentioned. Sounds of shouting and banging also came from below, where no doubt the main gate was being reinforced or walled up completely. A demolition team in the town was dismantling a building. Another gang was hauling its rafters and beams up on pulleys to the barbican roof to build trebuchets; its stones would supply their counterweights and ammunition.

  “I should have started this work days ago,” Anton said angrily, having to raise his voice over the din.

  “Perhaps, but your predecessor was more at fault. He’d been warned about both the Wends and the Hound, and he had months to prepare for an attack. He should have acquired guns. Cardinal Zdenek was caught napping too, and he knows it. Nobody’s blaming you.” Not yet, and if the castle fell Anton would likely die and be hailed as a dead hero.

  The barbican was a four-story tower, L-shaped in plan. Otto and Anton, going in through the big double doors on the parapet level, found themselves in the machine room, largely taken up by the gears and treadmills that raised the gates. As Otto had seen yesterday, there were two gates, inner and outer, both massive timber portcullises. Enemies breaking in through one then faced the second, and might soon find themselves trapped between them, being attacked through the many murder holes whose hatch covers showed all over the machine room floor. Even if the attackers managed to break though both those gates, they would still have reached only as far as the Quarantine Road, not the town itself. It was an ancient system, but still effective and deadly. A hundred years ago, or even fifty, Castle Gallant could have thumbed its nose at both Count Pelrelm and Duke Wartislaw while it waited for the arrival of winter and the Jorgarian army. Not anymore. The monster gun they called the Dragon would open a breach in a few hours.

  “We should find Vlad,” Anton said.

  “Let’s inspect the north gate first. Then we’ll know where we can be the most help.”

  “Shortcut. No need to go all ed d to gothe way back around.” Anton led him along the other arm of the L, a smaller chamber that held machinery to raise the third gate, which led from the Quarantine Road into the town. A door at the far end led out to the wall that flanked the town along its western side.

  Here the battlements faced the beetling cliffs of the Hogback across a narrow and gloomy canyon. Ancient moss grew down in the shadows. No one would want to live too close to the precipice, which wept moisture and must shed rocks from time to time, but obviously the way was kept clear for transportation.

  The brothers headed along the wall. “It’s a clever system. Questionable visitors can be let in here and sent on through without coming into contact with the good townsfolk. There are three gates across it, so that big caravans can be divided into sections. I think it was designed to make sure nobody sneaks by without paying his tolls.”

  “And to stop smuggling!” Otto suggested. “Never forget that your precious castle is basically a glorified toll gate.”

  The brothers had not walked far when they came in sight of a cataract, spraying down a notch in the cliff. The water was caught at about their height and diverted across the Quarantine Road on a narrow arch, well above the filth of the roadway. This aqueduct fed it through the wall, into the city.

  “Four of these,” Anton said proudly. “Good water, too.”

  A few minutes later they passed a heavily built gateway, capable of closing off the Quarantine Road. It also supported another aqueduct. Small wonder the castle was famed as invincible: if both barbicans, north and south, came under attack, the defenders could readily shift forces back and forth as needed. Of course, the dark side of that invincibility was that, if the Wends did manage to seize the fortress, then Pomerania would hold it for evermore. Which is why Cardinal Zdenek had been worried enough to grasp at any faint hope that might save Castle Gallant and his own neck, even an untried Speaker.

  The wind was gusty, eddying off the cliff, and the sky ahead was as black as iron. There would be more snow before long, praise the Lord. Freeze, Wartislaw, freeze!

  * * *

  Guided by loud hammering noises, they found Vlad on the roof of the north barbican, a mirror image of its southerly twin. The roof was flat and sheathed in lead, with its western side abutting the cliff face, and the other three crenelated. Some irregular blocks protruding from the lead would have puzzled Otto had Vlad not earlier mentioned foundations for trebuchets. That was what the big man was working on now, directing four carpenters in assembling something that might well grow up to be a monster-sized catapult. Other gangs were hauling up more balks of timber, obviously precut to fit together. Anton stopped and questioned a pimply apprentice, learning that somebody’s grandfather had remembered that a great pile of oak beams stored in the top story of the north barbican were the missing trebuchets. The boy did not know whether there would be enough to supply the south gate also. Anton thanked him and seastd him ant him on his way. Meanwhile a nearby house was being demolished for its stones.

  Staying clear of the bustle, Otto took shelter from the gale behind a merlon. He had experience with firearms in battle, especially at the Battle of Brusthem, but he knew almost nothing about trebuchets. Vlad’s military career had been longer and more varied.

  In a few minutes Anton joined him and pointed out the northward extension of the Silver Road, shouting over a wind that was either growing stronger or was just more noticeable up there. Again the trail had been hacked out of the cliff, but here more of it was clearly in view, gradually ascending. After half a mile or so, it turned a corner and disappeared into the gorge of the Ruzena.

  “You haven’t tried to build a redoubt up there?” Otto asked.

  “Course I did! We were too late. The Wends were there yesterday already. See them?”

&
nbsp; At that distance any figures would tend to merge into the rock, but Otto peered with wind-watered eyes and eventually made out a couple of lookouts sitting at the side of the road, inconspicuous against the cliff. A company of archers or arquebusiers would be on standby, sheltering around the corner, and any sortie from Gallant would be mowed down before it arrived.

  “If we could hold that bend, their damned bombard would be useless junk. Can we risk a night attack?”

  “I’ll leave that up to Vlad,” Anton said. So now he was ready to admit who was in charge of the defense, and that was good. “About five or six miles upstream, the gorge widens into Long Valley, where we have our border post, and where they almost killed me. The Pomeranian ferry dock is on the lake, a mile or so farther on.”

  “Wulf thinks he saw the Dragon at Long Valley last night, with at least one Speaker guarding it.”

  Anton shivered, as if that news was even colder than the wind. “Then it should arrive here today or tomorrow. Even if they need to reinforce bridges, I can’t see them needing more than two days.”

  “Less if they have Speakers to speed things along.” Otto blew through his fists to warm them. “If that bombard is as big as they say it is, then I don’t like this situation at all. The range is too great for bows, especially firing uphill and into the wind. Arquebuses might reach, although they would be hopelessly inaccurate.”

  “We only have three, with very little powder and shot. I expect Vlad will save them for the main assault.”

  But the Wend’s bombard was going to have both wind and elevation working for it. Properly dug in, it would put a stone ball on target every time. Even if it only fired six or seven times a day, in two days the barbican would be a rock pile. The defenders had nothing to oppose it except some hope of future trebuchets to throw rocks at it. Flying rocks might not hurt the gnd t hurt un itself, but they ought to delay its emplacement and flatten a few gunners.

  Realistically, all that a conventional defense would do now was delay the inevitable end for a few days. Gallant’s chances of survival depended on Wulf. Ever since Father’s illness had called him home from his youthful days of battle, Otto had assumed that he would eventfully die in his bed at home. Now he saw that this little junket to Cardice County might be the death of him. He might never return to Dobkov.