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Wyrm I.VIII
🕑 Added 2023-05-28 17:08:42 +0000 UTCChapter VIII: Mortimer’s Dagger
On the fourth night of the march to London they made camp outside the town of Radcot on the west bank of the Thames, just north of the old stone bridge. The river ran dark and swift, though its shallows were skinned with ice, and a dismal rain fell on their tents. A pair of shrikes and their riders surprised a huge, cantankerous gullet fishing the river and the three great wyrms raised holy hell hissing and roaring at each other until finally the gullet slunk into the water and submerged, slapping the surface with its massive tail as it went. The noise of it was such that dozens in the column were complaining of a ringing in their ears as late as the next morning.
Will’s ears were ringing that night when sir Ralph threw him down on the pallet. They were ringing as the older man spat and slicked himself and guided his cock up against the taut ring of Will’s anus and then past it, stretching Will until he could hardly draw breath for fear of tearing open. “You think Pole and de Vere will let you steal a touch like I did?” sir Ralph growled in his ear. “They’ll gut a pretty thing like you as quick as blinking.”
Will wished sir Ralph would just forget about the practice yard. It made him feel a strange sort of embarrassment in the pit of his stomach whenever the older man brought it up, a sense that in some way sir Ralph needed him to be weak, to be pitiful. “They will,” he agreed, biting his lip as the sense of fullness in him grew beyond pain and into something almost holy. After, as sir Ralph lay snoring while Will wiped the blood and fluids from his thighs and the cleft of his arse, he thought of his mother’s last fevered days, of her glassy eyes flickering between imagined phantoms as she babbled in the Norman dialect of her small hometown on the coast. Sir? Sir? I am not certain, sir. I am afraid. Please don’t. Please. Please.
You see what she drives me to?
“I could be a better wife to you,” he whispered to the darkness, but the only answer was a snort as sir Ralph turned onto his side. Will dressed, wrapping himself in one of his master’s furs, and crept out of the tent. It was cold, bitterly so. At the camp’s edge the mallards, hobbled and tethered, ate dried hay and watercress from a rough-hewn trough and huddled together for warmth, rumbling and cooing gently in the dark. Guards walked the camp’s perimeter in islands of flickering torchlight. In the stillness Will could hear the hushed voices of soldiers talking in their tents, of lovers touching, kissing, sighing. They were more like him, these men, when no one was watching.
Will went to stand with Lady, stroking her snout as he watched the farmers of Radcot drive their herds north into the hills by moonlight, the beaked and crested raptors known as nurses hemming in the flanks and snapping at dawdlers and strays. A bull duckie trumpeted long and low, the air itself reverberating with the bass frisson of its mournful cry. Sheep trailed dutifully after the wyrms, cloud banks scudding at the edge of the wind. He thought of Lizzie covering his mouth, tears in her eyes. He thought of the cheap jewelry she’d brought him. Copper, tin, and colored glass. The stolen dresses.
Don’t die.
It was nice, to be loved like that.
A light streaked blinking overhead, drawing restive grunts and honking from the mallards. A pennon coming in, shuttered lantern lit and signaling. Another followed close behind. A third. A fourth. Will watched them circle, descending on a nearby hill. Half an hour later, as he trudged cold and weary back toward his tent, he heard the sound of running footsteps. Peter, red-faced and panting, sprinted toward him. A light snow had begun to fall.
“What’s wrong?”
“You’d best wake sir Ralph,” Peter gasped. “He’s wanted by his lordship.”
“We’ve been betrayed,” lord Thomas said. His face was a bloodless mask of rage in the lantern-lit gloom of the command tent. His knights and counselors, the rest of his rebel band, stood puffy-faced and haggard around the low map table. “The king’s men are near. They’ll be on us by morning. Give the men another hour, or make it two, then get them up and armed and moving. I want them hot and fresh come dawn.”
Lizzie stood across the tent beside lord Thomas. She looked even more gaunt than usual, dark circles under her eyes. She and the other pennons must have flown hard to catch them so quickly. The knights and lords fell to debating, moving little wooden markers from one quadrant of the map to another, retreat, parlay, advance, dig in.
In their dark corner, Will took Peter’s hand and squeezed it tight.
The light was gray. The wind blew chill and cutting. Soldiers wore thick scarves to cover noses turning red with frostbite. The breath of men and wyrms steamed in the frigid air. On the shallow hillside overlooking the river valley, Will sat Thunderbolt beside sir Ralph on Lady. The rebellion’s architects and marshals, the “lords appellant” as they had coyly named themselves, sipped mulled cider and spiced wine in the saddle, furs draped over their mail and arming jackets, while signal drummers pounded out formation and their host assembled itself into great blocks of men and steel and whispering nerves. Sergeants bellowed orders. Mallards cried. The tricornes, hooded and with straw batting slipped over their horns, ate contentedly from feed bags in their ranks among the soldiery. Archers planted arrows at their feet, sowing the reapers’ scythes of their volleys.
As the sun crept over the distant treeline, past the town of Radcot, fluttering blue banners with the device of the golden cross swayed up into view over the ridge. A moment later the light glinted off the first spearpoints and helms. Men gained the ridge. Hundreds. Thousands of them. They uncurled along the valley like a giant’s armored fist, unshipping their shields, planting their spears. Their tricornes, Welsh hydda with their fans of bony spikes and dark gray plumage, fanned out in lines of six, tossing their heads and bugling as men climbed into the archers’ harnesses slung over their backs. The earth shook faintly, even so far away. Their drummers pounded their great kettle drums in a low, throbbing rhythm that made Will’s arms prickle with gooseflesh.
“Tom Molineux,” said sir Ralph with an affected chuckle, jerking his chin toward the pennants rippling from lance tips and standards over the approaching ranks. “That streak of shite on the royal breeches must be sweating now. Sure, he meant to prance his way to London unopposed.”
Lord Thomas said nothing. The other great lords likewise remained silent, and as sir Ralph’s face turned that familiar brick-red shade, Will had an ugly realization. Oh, he thought, a little saddened but somehow unsurprised. He’s no better than I am.
Gloucester spat out part of a withered winter apple. “Rotten,” he pronounced, nose wrinkling. “Send in the horns, Tom, and have done with it.”
Lord Thomas looked to his signalmen. “Tricornes,” he said.
The signalmen blew two long blasts on his trumpet. The second was still fading when the drummers took it up, pounding out the charge, and the stable crews began removing their charges’ hoods and batting. The ill-tempered wyrms squealed and stamped their massive feet, tricorniers prodding them in the soft, sensitive pouch of skin behind their armored frills until at last they lumbered forward, soldiers shying back. The drummers redoubled their pace. Will thought of Hugh, who he’d known only a few months in the stables under Meeks, who had died screaming after one of the brutes heaved him up over the fence of their paddock like a bale of hay. Upside down, jammed fast between the posts, his guts hanging around his purpling face.
Molineux’s forces ground into motion. His lancers spread out. His tricornes advanced. The earth was shaking hard enough that Will’s teeth chattered a little if he didn’t clench them. Thunderbolt shifted beneath him, spooked by the noise and by his unfamiliar rider. Will tightened his grip on the reins. The tricornes cleared the lines on both sides of the valley. Birds and littlejacks and butchers’ boys burst from the trees and flurried in a scudding cloud over the battlefield as the huge wyrms picked up speed on open ground, thundering toward each other, feet churning the frozen earth as though it were soft mud.
The tricorniers beat their mounts about the heads with their long-hafted billhooks to keep them on course. At fifty yards the archers strapped to the wyrms’ flanks commenced to loosing volleys at one another until there were more dead men flopping in harness than live ones. The shafts only maddened the wyrms, though one of lord Thomas’s archers caught one of Molineux’s tricorniers through the mouth and turned the squealing beast in a quick circle as the dead man leaned hard on his billhook. The lines crashed together with a sound like oaks coming down in a thunderstorm. Steel-sheathed horns punched through armor and hide, muscle and bone. The massive wyrms bellowed and squealed as they heaved against each other, horns locked, metal squealing against metal. Blood sheeted from their wounds. The dead lay down, their bulk pulling their killers with them, men crushed beneath their weight and screaming, screaming. Crawling over the huge bodies to stab and hack at one another, wrestling among the churning treetrunk legs.
“Lances!” bellowed Gloucester.
“Lackland,” said lord Thomas, white in the face, “we’ve ample protection. Go and join the charge, will you? We need a good arm there to put a hole in Molineux’s left flank.”
“Get after it,” FitzAlan grunted.
Sir Ralph’s face betrayed no expression. “My lord,” he said, voice flat, and thumped his heels hard against Lady’s flanks. The mallard surged forward with a booming honk. Will barely had time to heft up sir Ralph’s lance before she thundered past, the musk and warm hay smell of her near overpowering. The knight snatched the length of fired ashwood, letting it smack against his armored shoulder, and looked back at Will with a wild grin. “Come and see, my girl,” he shouted, a high color in his cheeks. “Let’s make a man of you.”
Will heeled his own mount, though not hard enough to stir the speckled gelding. He wet his lips and tried again, digging his spurs into the wyrm’s huge ribs. Thunderbolt bellowed and lurched into motion, loping down the shallow slope to where the rest of the lancers were arming at speed, drinking hot spiced wine to numb themselves to the bitter cold. Hotspur was with them, his shrike Belial unmuzzled and pawing at the ground in excitement, ropes of drool hanging from his razor teeth. His rider grinned at them, flashing golden teeth.
“Good day for it, aye Lackland?”
“Always,” sir Ralph hollered back.
The nearest signalman raised his horn. He inhaled deeply, cheeks reddening, and blew the charge. A long, flat, booming note. Knights heeled their mallards forward. Belial shrieked and broke into a loping run, and then Thunderbolt was trotting after the other mallards, his rocking gait devouring ground at a frightening pace, each step jolting through Will. Across the battlefield Molineux’s cavalry poured down the ridge. The world shook. Thousands of tons of wyrmflesh picking up speed, honking and bleating, closer and closer, Will remembering his sword and fumbling it from its scabbard in an ecstasy of panic moments before the collision.
Lances snapped like greensticks. Huge bones broke with sharp reports. Mallards grappled, spiked thumbs punching through tough hide, riders knocked from the saddle and crushed underfoot. Belial ripped out a spotted hen’s throat with a savage jerk of his head. He caught a knight in the chest with a swipe of one meathook arm and laid the man open to the bone. Flesh crumpled together. A sword left a shallow cut across Will’s cheek, soft as a lover’s lips, and he thought of the old men kissing their sons, come back, come back, come home to me, and crying.
Will rode straight into the haft of an outstretched spear, all the air gusting out of him in a single wheezing breath as he folded up around the fired ash and bore it with him from its wielder’s hand to the churned-up mud of the battlefield. A mallard’s foot came down a bare inch from his head, trapping hair that had escaped his coif, and it tore from his scalp with a bright, stinging pain that brought tears to his eyes as he rolled away. Huge bodies all around him. He labored to his feet, buffeted by lumbering wyrms, another nauseating shock as a thumb spike grazed his back in passing, tearing rings from his mail and piercing boiled leather and quilted jacket. Outriders on ostri-back flitting past and through the press, the slender wyrms leaping and climbing their larger cousins as their riders loosed arrows point-blank into the enemy — unless they were themselves the foe. Will snatched his sword up from the mud and staggered forward, skirting a dying mallard shuddering with a broken lance driven deep into her breast, her huge eyes dark and soft and full of terrified confusion. Her rider’s leg was crushed beneath her bulk. An outrider shot the man and then was gone into the press.
Come back, come back, come home to me.
Lizzie squinted against the brass guard of the Bavarian spyglass Joan had given her, watching the distant battle unfold. It made her sick to think of Will out there among the ant-like figures crawling over the field on the river’s bank, tricornes ploughing through their ranks, knights on mallardback charging, circling, charging again. It looked like a curio from her vantage. She lowered the glass. The other pennons and their kites crowded the escarpment where lord Thomas had dispatched them to wait for his signal, the kites worrying at their unfamiliar new tack and shifting restively. Chauntecleer had been moody and sullen since the incident on the landing field, but even he seemed on edge now, sensing their nerves.
“Take a watch,” she said to Sarah Sweet, who took the spyglass without comment. The other girl’s face was ashen, her eyes bloodshot from lack of sleep. At the edge of their cramped little roost Carolina de Masard lay flat on her belly as she vomited over the edge of the rock promontory, her red-breasted kite sir Geoffrey standing anxious guard over her. The others picked their cuticles and chewed clover and one, Magda Sculler, who had been Lizzie’s bunkmate in their first year at the house, wound her coarse black hair around her finger, tighter and tighter, before ripping it out with a grimace and a grunt.
Lizzie hated this, the powerlessness of it. She wanted to
reach out across that distance and smash the king’s armies like God smiting Gomorrah. She wanted to swell huge and scaly and belch fire over the frozen ground until the enemy danced through swirling sheets of Hell, eyes burning in their skulls. She wanted to snatch Will up in Chauntecleer’s claws and carry him away from all of this, away from his brute master, from the knighthood he would never win, and take him somewhere he could belong to her.
“Carolina,” Lizzie barked as the other girl rolled onto her back and sat blearily upright. “Bread and honey, now. I won’t have you fainting before we’re in sight of the battlefield.”
“Yes, sir,” Carolina murmured, wiping her mouth and then struggling to her feet. Sir Geoffrey gave her an encouraging push toward their piled supplies with his head. For a while they sat and listened to the morose sound of one mouth chewing, a sucking, mushy sound that always put Lizzie on edge. She was about to snap at the younger girl when Sarah suddenly lowered the spyglass, her face bloodless.
“Signal,” Sarah whispered.
“You’re certain?”
Sarah nodded.
Lizzie blew out a long breath. The wind was picking up. It would be a hard flight for all of them, but harder for any swordbills flying cover for the enemy. “Pennons,” she said, her mouth dry, “light your lanterns and set your bombs. We’re up.”
Stephen heeled Socrates through the fray, clinging for his life to the saddlehorn as the ostri hurtled across the battlefield. They went like lightning through a broken formation of Molineux’s men, the shock of repeated impacts exploding up Stephen’s sword arm as he leaned down in the saddle to take heads. An ostri was perhaps a twentieth a mallard’s weight, with neither thick hide nor the mallard’s savage spurs, but they were fast, faster than the continent’s horses. A blow from the sword of a knight atop one of the fragile wyrms at a full gallop could cleave helmet and skull, if the knight knew enough to keep his seat. Stephen knew enough.
They left the lone formation behind in a trice, men fallen and screaming in their wake, and pelted through a hail of arrows. He thought of father Alfonse planting vetch seeds every spring, of the old monk’s back bending, his hair thinning, his beard growing gray. I planted my own seeds, he told himself. This is a necessary thing. A holy thing, in its way.
A pikeman with Molineux’s cross on the breast of his arming jacket looked up just as Stephen bore down on him. He was sixteen, perhaps. Stephen’s sword caught him just above the ear and he tumbled away, head split and spilling. Little hills of dirt. Seeds pressed down with a strong, dark thumb. Dead now, more than likely. Worms crawling through the sockets of his eyes.
A good life. A good family. Do not cry, my son.
He glimpsed sir Godfrey standing in his stirrups atop Nightingale a hundred yards away, the ostri’s ornate spray of tail feathers smoothed back into a brush of gold and blue by the wind as she pounded over the frozen ground. The knight had been a good friend to him. A good companion. They had lain together, once or twice, but Stephen had no passion for it. He preferred the lash. The cane. The slow, constricting cord. To be in pain was to know yourself, and to become yourself.
A shadow passed over him. He glanced up, catching a glimpse of a kite’s underbelly as it flashed past overhead. He kneed Socrates closer to sir Godfrey and Nightingale, flexing his sword hand to work the stinging numbness from it. On the hillside’s gentle slope another company of Molineux’s archers had come up double-time behind the crush of infantry at the hill’s base, a knot of stabbing, shoving men trampling their own dead as they fought for inches of frostbitten ground. The kite passed over them and suddenly shot upward, backing air.
A pair of small, dark things trailing streamers of fire and smoke fell from the kite’s tack and tumbled through the air for a handful of breathless seconds. One exploded perhaps ten feet above the ground, a brilliant red and orange cloud of flame spitting trails of smoke and shards of broken crockery. Archers screamed and fell and clawed at themselves, skin blistered and burned. The second struck ground before detonating. The noise of it was deafening, a bone-deep whump that sent Socrates staggering with a shriek of terror and swallowed up the archers in a huge column of dust and smoke, clods of frozen earth raining down all around. Stephen felt a hot, quick stinging just under his eye. He raised his free hand to his cheek and found it gashed and streaming blood, as though someone had knifed him. He had seen poleguns and cannon used before, but never anything like this.
He turned Socrates to skirt the edges of the crush, men now coughing, staggering from the smoke. A maddened tricorne barreled through their lines without regard for faction, its tricornier beating at the base of its skull with his goad and only succeeding in driving it to fresh heights of savagery. Men flew through the air like leaves in a gale. Another earsplitting boom as a second kite loosed its bombs over Molineux’s foot. Another. Stephen’s head rang with the thunder of it. Socrates darted and juked beneath him, shying away from the tricorne and the flashing spears that split the smoke around it.
Godfrey and Nightingale burst from the cloud. They were in among the rattled archers, moving fast. The Hospitaler struck a man’s head from his shoulders. He caught another across the face, splitting his skull from mouth to ear and sending him tumbling with an agonized scream. Stephen’s heart leapt. He turned Socrates, the ostri squawking in protest, and heeled him straight into the carnage.
The world was burning. Will didn’t know if it had been a year or only minutes since he’d been knocked from the saddle, but his body hurt as though it had been forced into a barrel full of gravel and kicked down a rocky hill. He was standing now only because he had his arm through the harness of the man ahead of him, a bluff and bearded footman who let out a wild, oddly high-pitched scream every time he struck at an enemy. They advanced over burning bodies, men cut apart by flying shards of tin and masonry, the injured trying to reattach their severed limbs or dragging bloody stumps behind them as they crawled on through the mud. Smoke abraded Will’s lungs and stung his eyes until he could hardly see, the soldiers all around him just dark, howling smears of skin and mail and leather.
A knight on mallardback thundered past, his lance taking the man to Will’s right through the breastbone with a sharp, clean crack and bearing him on into the blowing smoke. Will sobbed, sucking air with ragged lungs and coughing until he saw stars. Men ahead. He clung to the soldier in front of him as the man squealed and stuck his sword into an enemy. A funny gasp. Pull out the steel. Advance. Will flailed at someone coming toward their line from the right flank. His sword met something hard and bounced away, the impact numbing his whole arm.
Come home. Come home. Come home to me.
A man. A man. Molineux colors. Pockmarked cheeks. Smoke-reddened eyes. Will lost his grip on Squealer as the man pushed into him, driving him on the edge of his shield. Will bit his tongue as the iron rim caught him under the chin. He spat out blood and without meaning to caught Pockmarks full in the face, blinding him. Will pushed his shield aside and stabbed him gracelessly between the ribs, the way he’d scored his touch against sir Ralph. The man groaned, sagging, and fell into Will’s arms. For a moment they staggered together, locked in an embrace. Then the man fell and did not move again. Will coughed, tongue stinging, mouth full of the taste of copper. There was no sign in the blowing smoke of the rest of his line. He picked a direction and limped forward.
He came out of the blowing dark at the river’s edge, far from the nearest pocket of fighting. He fell to his knees and dry heaved in the frozen mud. He knelt there for a long time, spitting and retching, bringing up his meager morning gruel and bread. My angel, his mother had called him, her hand cool against his fevered cheek. Mon ange.
It was a long while before he realized the river had begun to tremble, the thin crusts of ice covering its shallows crinkling and breaking free, the current throbbing with ripples. He looked up as a deep trumpeting bellow rose up from beyond Molineux’s retreating forces, blotting out all other sound, and then the flash of the dying sun on shifting plates of scratched and battered steel. Slowly, a nightmare gained the enemy’s ridge. A titan, a hundred feet and more of fat and muscle, its great armored neck soaring higher than five men atop each other’s shoulders could have reached. The howdah on its back might have housed forty archers, perhaps more, and its trunklike legs and barrel belly were banded in armor, while atop the howdah’s swaying mass of wood and canvas stood a scorpion crewed by enginers who turned it by way of some clever clockwork contrivance to track the duke’s lines even as Will watched.
The first bolt punched through a tricorne’s head. The beast went down with a rumbling crash, its skull plowing into the dirt, and the tricornier tumbled over its crest and impaled himself on its left horn. He pawed at the length of ivory for a moment, coughing up great gouts of blood, and then his chin sagged to his chest and he went still. On the crest of the hill fresh troops flying the crown and stars of Robert de Vere, the king’s favorite, cavalry ambling to the front, pennants bearing the crown-and-stars, Molineux’s golden cross, and the spear-struck kite of Wake, the king’s cousins on his mother’s side, fluttering from their lances. Fresh foot. Fresh archers. An entire second army.
Will rose trembling to his feet. He had no thoughts left, really, only the aching absence of being he had come in recent weeks to recognize as his fundamental nature. For as long as he could remember the world had beaten all the dreams and softness out of him, had broken his girlish voice, his childhood fancies. It had grown him into this misshapen thing, this useless, gawky boy-child emptied of everything and unable to take into itself the hard, hot musk and thrusting temper of real manhood. He had come out of childhood and into nothingness.
Slowly, he began to walk back toward the fray. Lord Thomas’s lines were re-forming closer to the enemy, reserves marched up and lancers fed and rearmed. The ground shook with slow, deliberate rhythm as the titan drew nearer. As Will neared a company of archers, raising a bloody hand in greeting, a bolt from the wyrm’s scorpion spitted two of them and maimed a third in the leg. The injured man loosed as he fell and put a shaft through the throat of the man ahead of him, who stumbled through the ranks and crashed headlong into a pikeman, knocking him into the path of a returning tricorne. The wyrm’s right horn punched through his chest. It squealed, furious, and heaved him aside to pinwheel through the air and strike the ground among his fellows like a broken doll, head and arms flopping at grotesque, impossible angles. Someone nearby was screaming for his mother.
“Signal!” someone bellowed over the cacophony. Will couldn’t see who. “Signal, signal, signal!”
A tall, tow-headed longbowman lit a tarred arrow from the torch planted beside him, drew back in one smooth motion, and loosed the blazing shaft. It arced over the battlefield, brilliant against the early morning light.
The world shook as the titan neared the fray. Even from a hundred yards away the size of it was overwhelming, straining Stephen’s mind. He might reach one of its great ankle bones if he stood on his toes. All that steel clanking, shifting. The beast would have been gorged on late peas, neeps, honey, and goat’s milk no later than the night previous, or else it would have gone off cropping trees and chewing cud, ignoring its handlers’ whips and goads for the demands of its ravenous stomachs. Whole villages could have lived for months on what the king’s men must have fed it. He wondered if the thing would die once all was said and done, guts knotted by fear and alien diet, hide scraped raw, infected, cooking in its armor.
He and sir Godfrey flashed past Roger Mortimer astride Eustache, the harvestman swinging his great scythelike claws through ranks of screaming soldiers, arrows bristling from his oily, matted plumage, men at arms swarming in his wake, hacking and shoving at de Vere’s troops with grim determination. Socrates cut wide around the press, that awful mass of grunting, pushing men which brought to mind the pier on the coast of Flanders where on an overcast July day, years ago, he’d cut his knighthood from the starving bodies of a dozen Flemish peasants who had thrown themselves at him and his men with such abandon that they overflowed the jetty and pushed one another screaming off into the water, where they drowned. To be closer than lovers to a man you were killing was no little thing. Stephen often dreamed of the press, of the acrid stink of the breath of starving men, the unwashed reek of flesh, the blood and shit and the inches of bare wood they’d fought and killed for as the bishop’s ships took on supplies, the bishop himself watching from the prow.
He had learned that day, with William of Wykeham’s sword on his shoulder, that knighthood was only a word, that valor and brutality were two heads of the same serpent. He had learned so much on that blood-slick pier, and then, years later, a chance errand had brought him to the offices of lord chancellor Pale, and he had learned one final thing. A secret, hidden deep within the belly of the Ark, waiting for the right person to pull it out into the light. To complete a work that had begun five centuries ago in a land now lost beneath the waves.
Arrows hissed past all around ostri and rider. Stephen sank low in the saddle as Socrates darted around a pair of mallards standing locked together in combat, stabbing and raking with their thumb spikes, their riders clinging for dear life to their reins. Blood poured from a dozen gruesome wounds. Clouds of choking smoke rolled slow across the battlefield. Through one, grit rattling against his mail, and then they were in among a company of archers. A man stepped into Stephen’s sword and fell gushing red from breast and throat. Socrates pecked at another, shattering his arm and knocking him head over heels. They blew through the broken unit’s dregs, sir Godfrey striking down a pair of fleeing men, Stephen cutting through the arm and throat of a third. More dead trampled underfoot. Arrows raining down now from the archers in the titan’s howdah. The enginers atop it fit a fresh bolt to their scorpion.
Lizzie clung with all her might to the pommel of Chauntecleer’s saddle. Her thighs burned with the effort of straddling his back without the aid of the saddle’s lattice of thick leather straps.
Just ahead, Sarah loosed her bombs. They plummeted in silence for a moment, the clay housings tumbling end over end, fuses like little stars in the dusk. One exploded a few yards ahead of the titan, throwing up a tower of dust and smoke as tall as the great wyrm itself. The titan trumpeted in terror. For a moment Lizzie thought it would rear up, but it only turned aside with a long, fluting bellow. The second bomb struck its shoulder and shattered, stray grains of powder catching fire with a fizzling crackle.
Swordbills rose up from the enemy camp in a shrieking cloud of white and black, their blue throats vibrant in the morning light. One whipped past a yard away or less, its scream faint, then ear-piercing, then fading again as it banked to come around. Another darted toward them and Chauntecleer folded his wings and dove to meet it. Lizzie flattened herself. Her fingers were numb. Her thighs felt as though they had been filled with molten lead. The swordbill tried to swerve aside, but too late. The point of Chauntecleer’s bill punched through its breast like a spear. The kite shook off the dying wyrm, which spun away like crumpled paper, and at Lizzie’s tug on his reins opened his wings and leveled out, streaking over the battlefield at a terrible speed.
Ahead, the titan lumbered into the thick of the fighting. Its glacial tread crushed men, knocked soldiers from their feet, punched deep prints into the frozen ground. Its rust and golden plumage puffed out as it inhaled to sound again, its bone-shaking trumpet silencing all other noise for what seemed like minutes on end. Lizzie rose up just a little, thighs burning with the effort of holding a half-crouch at such velocity. Her exposed skin was chapped and raw, but cold weather gear would only slow her now, and they had only one chance at this. They passed over the titan, arrows whizzing all around them, the men working its scorpion compressed to arming caps and arms.
Lizzie kicked free of the saddle, letting herself fly back over Chauntecleer’s hind legs as he beat onward. For a heart-stopping moment she was nowhere, legs pumping at emptiness, and then she hit the platform just under the scorpion at a stumbling run, the shock of impact jolting her from heels to teeth, and nearly thrust her fingers straight into the teeth of the great piece of clockwork on which the siege engine was mounted. One of the crewmen turned toward her from his post at an oak-handled crank, eyes widening. She got her knife out of her belt and slashed at him, cutting his hand as he went for his mace. He staggered back, cursing, and she drove the blade through his arming jacket and into his belly. He looked confused as he fell on his rear and slumped against the clockwork platform, his breath slow and shallow, his lips already turning blue. A second later Annie Potter flew by just to the right of the howdah. She struck one of the iron struts supporting it and tumbled bonelessly into the churning smoke below.
Sarah Sweet was next. She hit the platform hard, arm caught beneath her. Lizzie ran to her and helped her cursing to her feet. Fingers stiff but flexible. Not broken. Knives out. Magda struck the planks a step ahead of them as they made for the ladder, arrows in her breasts and face. No time. No time. Up the ladder, hand over hand, vertigo seizing hold as she peered over the platform’s edge at the boots of shuffling enginers and past them to the field below. The scorpion loosed, string thrumming a bass note. Men died, far away.
A stupid fucking plan.
Will found Lady before he found sir Ralph. She lay struggling to rise from a churned patch of ground, her blood congealing in the dirt around her. The mallard had taken a spear to her left hindquarter. Arrows protruded from her flanks and tail and something, a harvestman, perhaps, or another mallard, had left bloody furrows over her upper ribs and shoulders.
“Lady!” Will screamed, all traces of his miserable fog burned away at once by hot, bright terror. He ran to her through the parting ranks of a sortie between lord Thomas’s foot and de Vere’s, ducking as arrows thunked into the turf around him, scrambling over the dead and the dying. He was almost to her when he saw the broken sword lodged under her right armpit, and the waterfall of red across her belly. He fell to his knees against her. “I’m sorry, girl,” he sobbed into her neck. Her mighty pulse was slowing, but she pressed her beak against his palm. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”
She let out one last rumbling sigh and then was still. Will clung to her a while longer as the fighting raged around them. Men were dying. One of the fires had spread to the treeline and kindled a dead pine, and now the forest had begun to smolder. The titan had reached the center of the valley, crashing through a pair of warehouses at the edge of Radcot Town on its way. Something was happening in the howdah. A body tumbled from its platform, tiny in the distance. That was when he saw sir Ralph. The knight was perhaps twenty yards away, the fight between them thinning just enough to let Will glimpse his sweat-slick forehead and set jaw. Blood streamed from a broken nose, drying on his upper lip and chin. He was fighting someone near the still-thrashing carcass of a shrike that had been partially decapitated. Its talons lashed the air. Its tail whipped back and forth. The other man was tall and dark, his helm gone to reveal a mane of thick black hair, his sword flashing in the firelight.
Will rose, feeling unbearably weary. A trio of outriders on ostriback blew past him at a loping gallop — he spied the Moorish knight who’d come to court among them — as he slunk around the edges of the developing crush. Swords and spears tented skin. Tore through it. Bodies opening like figs around hard steel. Men wrestling on the frozen ground, fingers hooked in mouths, hands scrabbling for stones and fallen knives. A soldier in de Vere colors came charging through the press at Will and he fled toward the titan’s shadow, losing the man in the thick of the action.
Coward. Invert. Baeddel.
He slipped. Fell among the wounded, crawling over bodies clutching at him, dead hands smearing gore across his face, dead mouths gaping. The wound across his back smarted and stung in the cold. Back on his feet, the titan looming over him and somehow still so far away, like a mountain hanging over the horizon. Broken spears and lances in its legs. Arrows embedded in thick hide, barely visible at distance. Its tail stretching on and on, tapering down to a coiling length of muscle that from time to time would come around as fast as a striking snake, the bullwhip crack of it echoing over the battlefield as it sent men flying broken through the air.
By the time he found sir Ralph again, the duel was over. The other man knelt bleeding on the ground, and as Will drew closer he spotted the king’s signet on his finger. It could only be de Vere himself. “Yield,” the man coughed, leaning his weigh ton his sword. “I yield.”
Sir Ralph kicked the blade away and de Vere fell on his face. He crawled perhaps a foot before sir Ralph trod on his outstretched hand. Fingers snapped beneath the knight’s armored boot. Sir Ralph caught sight of Will. “Help me get him back to his lordship,” he shouted over the din. The fighting around them had ebbed for the momen, herded north and west by Roger Mortimer and his blood-maddened harvestman. Will stumbled closer and took de Vere by the shoulder, hauling him to his feet with sir Ralph’s help.
“Lady’s dead,” said Will.
Sir Ralph nodded. “Pity,” he said. “You’ll saddle Lightning tonight, get her ready for the march tomorrow. ”
He turned away, just for a moment, as one of the kite-borne bombs went off a hundred yards away, blasting dirt and smoke into the air around a pillar of flame. Will found his hand had gone to the hilt of his dagger. He thought of Lady nosing at his palm, of the way she’d closed her eyes and squeaked in happiness when he brought her fresh turnips, or an apple.
Come home to me.
Will drew the knife. Between them, de Vere lolled half-conscious, blood dripping from his split lips and the gash across his long patrician nose. Will adjusted the man’s arm over his shoulder, stepping just a little closer. That was when he felt it coming. A huge, dark form drew his eye. Thundering footfalls drawing closer. A tricorne, riderless and mad, dead men hanging hacked and shot full of arrows from its flanks, charged out of the smoke. The ground shook beneath Will’s feet. Bone and steel and flesh bore down on him, a living anvil thundering across the field. The tricorne whipped its massive head from left to right, squealing in agony and terror. Steel and ivory. Blood. An awful heat. Teeth breaking, tearing loose. A jagged flash of blackness split his skull, and then it was over.
Lizzie clambered up onto the siege platform, the howdah creaking and swaying beneath her, just in time to see Carolina launch herself from sir Geoffrey’s back and plummet straight into the arms of one of the stunned enginers, a red-haired man with a scarred lip and several missing fingers. The pennon had already stabbed him twice before he screamed, and by the time his fellows had their weapons Lizzie and Sarah were at their backs. Lizzie leapt onto the larger of the two, looping an arm around his muscular neck and stabbing wildly at his side and chest as he staggered over the pitching platform. Over his shoulder she saw swordbills catch sir Geoffrey as he banked. They mobbed him, their razor-edged beaks tearing his wings and needling his flanks, until he tumbled from the sky with a heart-rending shriek and plowed into the earth, a tangle of broken limbs.
Not Chauntecleer, she thought as she dragged the knife across the big man’s throat while he clawed at her arm. His blood ran over her wrist, hot and sticky. Not my baby.
The howdah groaned beneath them. Ahead, the armored serpent of the titan’s neck rose up as it inflated the bulbs of loose skin along its throat and let out a great bullfrog thrum that shook the entire structure like a knife tapped on cut glass. The huge man fell to his knees. Lizzie let him go, backing up quickly until her shoulders hit the scorpion’s extended arm. She was breathing too fast. Her head was spinning. One of the other enginers had cut Carolina across the stomach and knocked her sprawling with a vicious backhand. Sarah drove her knife into the small of his back. Blood dripping between the planks.
“Mother of God,” the man screamed, trying to reach the blade. His fingers brushed the hilt, but couldn’t close. He staggered back and fell over the platform’s edge, taking the knife with him, and then it was just the three of them. It had worked. The first part of it, at least. A stupid fucking plan.
“Sarah, on the crank,” Lizzie shouted. They would need to cock the scorpion’s arms before they fit a bolt. “Carolina, take a look over the edge, see if any of the archers have come up yet.”
The wounded pennon crawled to the platform’s edge and peered over, one arm clamped over her belly where blood had begun to soak her tunic. “I can’t see anyo—”
An arrow punched through the girl’s skull from below, the bloody point erupting from the back of her head. I did that, thought Lizzie. I did that. I did it. Dead. All dead. Will and Chauntecleer. My fault. She pushed the sucking blackness of it far away. One of Lord Thomas’s enginers had told her what to do, but it took her so long to find the right levers to engage the clockwork wheels beneath the platform. Slowly, shuddering and creaking, they began to turn. She locked them back in place and ran to Sarah, struggling to turn the crank. The locking tooth slipped slowly down another notch as they both threw their weight against it, the scorpion’s oaken arms trembling with the strain of the hawser’s tension.
Lizzie could hear footsteps from below. The archers were coming. They were running out of time. From the corner of her eye she caught a glimpse of Chauntecleer wheeling above, and with renewed determination dragged the crank toward her, the tooth slipping another notch. Her arms ached as terribly as her thighs now. Her palms were raw on the crank’s rough iron handle. “Pull,” she shouted. “Pull, goddamn you! Cunting pull!”
Don’t die.
Scuffling below. Closer now. Sweat ran down Lizzie’s face. It dripped freely from her nose as she hauled back with all her might, Sara red-faced and groaning beside her. The final notch. So close. She felt as though the skin would come off of her palms. She felt as though her shoulders would pop from their sockets. Finally, the ecstasy of that final all-important thunk of teeth engaging. Sarah fitting a bolt longer than she was tall to the string. Their hands clasped bloody over the end of the firing lever. The ladder creaked behind them. Lizzie didn’t look. No time.
“Move, damn you!” a man shouted from below.
Lizzie watched the titan. It felt as though she and it were the only things left in the world, connected by an infinite corridor along which she was hurtling at dizzying speed, roaring toward— The titan trumpeted again, dipping its head. Gaps opened up between the plates of hammered steel running the length of its serpentine neck.
“Now!” Lizzie screamed.
She and Sarah hauled back on the firing lever. The scorpion’s string snapped flush, arms whipping out, and its bolt punched through the back of the titan’s massive skull. The beast let out an echoing groan, a sound so all-encompassing that for heartbeats on end Lizzie couldn’t hear her own voice, couldn’t string her thoughts together or feel where the air ended and her skin began. Her teeth vibrated in her head. The whole world listed to the left as the wyrm stumbled, fifty tons of flesh coming down at a bad angle and snapping the wyrm’s fifteen-foot femur like a piece of kindling. The howdah pitched violently. Carolina’s body rolled off of the platform. Lizzie seized hold of the firing lever as the world tilted and slid, her stomach flipping at the sudden sense of weightlessness.
It worked.
With a sound like a vast bonfire collapsing in upon itself, the titan heaved its last breath. The silence in its wake was deafening, with nothing but the archers’ tinny screams — it’s dead, it’s dead, oh Jesus, Mary — and the distant crash of the battle below to ring in its sudden absence. The massive beast tipped forward, crashing to its knees with such force that Lizzie nearly lost her grip on the lever. Beside her, Sarah clung white-knuckled to one of the scorpion’s arms, her feet briefly leaving the deck as the world tilted, crashed, and shuddered.
A shadow raced toward them over the churning battlefield below. Sarah’s kite, Guinevere. The wyrm slowed as she approached, backing air and shrieking. Sarah raced to meet her, leaping from the platform’s edge with a wild yell of fear and exhilaration. The archers below loosed just as Guinevere opened her talons to snatch her rider, shredding her wings and punching shafts through her skull and chest. The kite’s momentum carried her into the dying titan’s side. She plowed through the howdah’s west corner and broke her neck against the great beast’s armored flank, the wreck of her body still flapping and spasming, knocking her killers like pebbles out into empty air. There was no sign of Sarah. The smoke had swallowed her.
I did that. Pushed her. Shot Gwen. Kill and cut. Lizzie let out a hysterical sob. Across the platform, an archer’s goateed face appeared at the top of the ladder. Lizzie pawed at her belt, but her sheath was empty. She had lost her knife. She looked skyward, searching desperately for any sign of Chauntecleer. Please. Please. Don’t let me die. Don’t leave me here. She felt acutely conscious of the vastness of murdering the titan, of taking as much flesh as thirty generations of her family all living and working and loving and fighting and snuffing it out like a taper with her pinched thumb and forefinger.
Maybe it’s alright, she thought as the archer hauled himself up onto the platform, staring at her with cold hatred etched into the hard lines of his face. Maybe if I die here, God will spare Will and Chauntecleer.
“Fucking dirty minge,” he roared over the ongoing cacophony of the titan’s fall. Bones breaking under unimaginable weight. Convulsions twisting the great roadway of its spine. Parts of the howdah fell away below, iron and splintered wood plunging into the smoke. Lizzie could hear screams. The platform pitched under their feet, the man stumbling toward her as she clung to the lever, the scorpion groaning in its cradle, hawsers groaning, clockwork teeth twisting at odd angles. A rope snapped somewhere near, the braided hemp whipping between them, and the man had a knife and the titan was falling, falling, faces below looking up in pure terror, running as the giant fell to meet its shadow. The man had a dagger. He raised it even as he started to slide over the creaking, splintering boards.
Lizzie let go of the lever. She fell, the smoke from one of their bombing flights rising to meet her. The wind howled in her ears. It was high enough. She would strike the icy ground. Her own skeleton would tear through her organs in a heartbeat. The face of the archer receded so swiftly above her that he seemed more like part of a dream than another living, breathing person. Just a little wisp of nonsense spun by her sleeping mind. She closed her eyes.
You’ve saved a great many lives today. Do you know that, pennon?
A scream. A great wind. Something struck her in the back and shoulders, huge and hard and moving fast, and for a moment she spun disoriented in nothingness, spluttering in the smoke, and then she was out of it. They were out of it. Chauntecleer had her, his talons wrapped tight around her arms, drawing blood from her bruised skin, and he bore her up, up, up away from the smoke and blood and ruin, into the clear sky.
Will was on his back. How had he gotten there? Something terrible must have happened, because people were screaming all around him, but it was nice to look up at the circling kites, to stare at the clouds. After a time he realized that he was moving. There was a man at his feet and arms to either side of his head, which hurt very much to move, and he was on a length of canvas sewn around two stout ash poles. Someone was screaming. In the distance he could see the carcass of the titan. It felt as unreal to him as though someone had slain a hill, or a river.
Blackness again, then screaming in the blood and shit stink of a dimly-lit tent. Fighting a man who held him down while another pushed a thick bone needle through his cheek. A third man wrapped his arms around Will’s head from behind, forcing his jaw shut. Will felt the torn lips of his wound brush raw and slick against each other. “Lady’s dead,” he sobbed, but the words came out as mushy sounds that hurt to form, pricking his lips and sending fire crawling like worms under his hot skin.
Clean yourself.
Alone. Deep darkness of his tent. Sir Ralph’s smell strong and sour and warm. Low voices nearby, but muffled. Dick Preston speaking to someone else.
“What happened to Molineux?”
“Roger Mortimer caught him trying to swim the river,” sir Ralph replied. “Helped him up the bank with one hand, put a dagger in his ear with the other.”
Darkness. Dreaming of his mother sitting on his chest, her hand over his face. “Don’t die,” she whispered.
Come home to me.
He woke to harsh light cutting through the dark, a sliver falling through the tent’s parted flaps to cross his eye. Lizzie was asleep beside him on his pallet, her arms wrapped tight around him. Slowly, fingers trembling, he reached up to touch the ruin of his face.
Comments
Jerna Van Vooren
Why this isn't a big-budget TV-show on the scale of Game of Thrones yet, is beyond me.
PissmanCrothers
Amazing battle writing, can’t wait to pick this novel up if/when it gets a physical release
