58
“You knew?” Atilo demanded.
An hour before dawn. To the others it was still dark. For Tycho it had long since become light. He’d watched the horizon change colour. Mountains edge through shades of black. Windmills standing stark on the plain. This was a country of squat stone towers with wide sails, on slopes so barren there was as much dirt as scrub. He could have liked it here.
It obviously hurt Atilo to approach his last apprentice.
The old man’s voice was as stiff as his shoulders, his question as cropped as his hair. He knew half the court watched them from a distance.
“I knew,” Tycho said.
“She was there in Ca’ Friedland?”
“In his bed, suckling his child.” The last was a lie; she’d been in her own chamber until the battle above disturbed her. But there was no need for the old man to know that.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“And get my throat cut? A Millioni princess in bed with the bastard of her family’s enemy? You sent me to kill the prince. Chances were, you’d kill me for failing. But returning to say that? I might as well stand naked in the sun…”
“You think that idea didn’t cross my mind?”
“Maybe, but you’d be doing it to me. Telling you about Lady Giulietta and Leopold was doing it to myself.”
“Leopold…? He’s really a friend?”
In as much as anyone could be. Tycho didn’t bother to explain that bit of it. Besides, in any sensible world, Leopold and he would be enemies. Giulietta loved her husband. Tycho loved Giulietta. What better reason to hate a man than the very thought of his wife made your guts knot with longing?
“Where does that leave us?” Atilo said.
“There is no us. I could kill you but Janus wouldn’t approve. So I’m going to let the Mamluks do it instead. That way you die a hero…”
Turning his back, Tycho threaded his way between Crucifer knights and Cypriot courtiers. Finally reaching an alcove where Prince Leopold stood with his arm round his new wife.
“Look after Leopold,” she said.
“My lady…”
“I mean it. Protect him if you can.”
“Two things,” Tycho said, smiling. “One, does Leopold look like a man who lets others look after him? And two…” He indicated the coming dawn. “The battle will be over before I join it.”
“Your eyes get no better?”
“They get worse,” Tycho said.
“You’re changing,” Prince Leopold said. “Now, if you’d excuse us…”
Lady Giulietta pulled a face, but she let herself be steered towards the door, courtiers moving aside and bowing as she passed. As she disappeared under an arch, Leopold slapped her buttocks and laughed at her protest.
“The best of his family.”
Turning, Tycho found King Janus at his side.
“Take it from me. You fight beside him?”
“With luck.”
“If the battle lasts until dark?”
“You know about that?”
Janus shrugged. “Too delicate to face daylight. That’s what Isak boasted on his posters. Delicate isn’t the word I’d choose.” His grey eyes searched Tycho’s face. “Magically unable to face daylight, maybe. How did you and Leopold meet?”
“In battle, majesty.”
“You’ve fought together before?”
“I was sent to kill him. Giulietta asked for his life. I gave it.”
Glancing round, King Janus checked who might have heard the answer. His courtiers had dropped back. The Prior of the White was watching, his expression unreadable behind his beard.
“Walk with me.”
The battlements were overcrowded, The air still cold, but ready to warm with the approaching day. A sergeant, in rusting breastplate, turned to curse their pushing past and stopped, suddenly apologetic. He was old, one-eyed and crooked where his leg had once been badly broken.
Janus clapped him on the shoulder and kept walking towards a corner turret. A huge catapult had been dragged into position, and its plaited ropes were being tied to huge steel rings on the turret floor.
“The plaiting takes the shock?”
King Janus nodded his appreciation of Tycho’s guess.
“You beat Prince Leopold. A famous duellist. Then gave him his life because a woman asked you. And were, it seems, banished for so doing.”
Maybe the king was talking to Tycho. Maybe to himself. When Janus nodded, then nodded again, Tycho knew his second guess was correct and he’d been right to remain silent. “Tomorrow,” said the king, “decides everything.”
“Until the next time. Of course, if tomorrow goes badly there will be no next time. No Cyprus. No Crucifer stronghold. No me, probably. No Giulietta or Desdaio except as slaves.”
“Leopold will take Giulietta. I imagine Atilo intends to do the same…”
“Into battle?” King Janus looked aghast.
“Would you leave your woman to be defiled? If you knew defeat made that certain? Leopold won’t. I doubt Atilo will either.”
“My wife was poisoned.”
“Majesty?”
“She died a year ago. No, two years now.”
The king’s gaze unfocused. Such bleakness flooded his face it was like looking at a Greek mask, right down to the hollow space behind the eyes and the drag of his mouth. A single tear said this mask belonged to a man.
“It feels like yesterday.”
They stood in the near-dawn. On hastily fortified battlements. With a Mamluk fleet somewhere over the dark horizon. The men at arms had fallen back, unsure if the king’s grief involved Tycho or just the situation in general. Few of those in the castle expected to be alive next month.
The peasants would change sides.
Why not? No one asked them if they wanted to be ruled over. And the cost to them was much the same whoever did. Taxes and tithes, daughters taken, sons drafted into militias. A ruler who was strong but harsh was better than one who was kind but weak. Strong rulers gave stability.
“Can you really make a difference tomorrow?”
“I have a question of my own.”
King Janus sucked his teeth. “Maybe the Prior is right. I should have executed you and be done with it.”
“Answering my question might be simpler.”
“So like Atilo,” the king said. “Perhaps that’s the problem. The Moor trained you too well. So now he has no reason to exist.”
“He tried to kill me earlier.”
“If he wanted to kill you, then you’d be dead.” Janus caught Tycho’s expression. “And so would he, perhaps. So maybe he didn’t think his own life was a price worth paying to take yours. What’s your question?”
“Why were you troubled when I mentioned fire?”
“Ah, yes,” said King Janus, “the reason Prior Ignacio thinks I should execute you. Part of me fears he is right.”
It was, Janus told him, how Charlemagne, the greatest of the Frankish emperors, sent reinforcements from the Rhine to Roncevaux. Though his loup garou arrived too late to save Count Roland. And Prior Ignacio had told King Janus the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse would arrive through just such a circle. Tycho could see how the Prior might be worried.
“This is instant?” Tycho asked.
“I’m not sure I understand your question.”
“You step into a fire in one place and arrive instantly in the other?”
The king scratched his stubble and sighed. “We’re talking heresy,” he said. “Dangerous heresy at that. But, yes, I imagine it’s quick. Why?”
“I was wondering if it might take longer in some cases.”
“How much longer?”
“A hundred years,” Tycho said, and then shrugged at the king’s expression. “It was just an idea.”