17

 

Fia should not have gotten away with it. Should not have been getting away with it.

But for once her doubts did not win the world over.

Her charge trampled Hawkwood’s lines. She bowled over a pikeman who’d run out of formation, slashed a crossbowman before he could drop his spent crossbow and grab his sword. From atop her armored courser, she might as well have been atop the clouds. There were no cavalry around to dispute her. The crossbowmen who hadn’t spent their bolts yet couldn’t take aim this close.

This was expected. She had found a weak point, a moment of opportunity. She had expected a swift reaction. Hawkwood had plenty enough of his own cavalry to ride in and force a retreat. But the counterstrike never came.

Even without her baton, she had command of the field.

The screaming in her head faded, leaving only a fading impression, a long echo. There were no longer any clocks ticking. The sound had been with her so long that she had stopped hearing it. Pain pulsed through her head. It was intermittent, but sharp enough that she wondered if the lightning was real – if she had been knocked on the head or was suffering a stroke.

Even in the middle of battle, though, she saw men turn to watch the sky. More than one of whom she cut down while they were doing it.

She had trouble thinking straight, but so did most of the enemy she faced. They were running, tumultuously, away from the chaos. Her own men had lost their order, too. The nearest of the company’s banners was so far that she couldn’t see it but as a splash of color.

She had not realized how deeply into enemy lines she had driven. She saw swords everywhere, but none flashing at her. She could not stop. She had to drive farther, and deeper. Faster. It was like being washed away in a current.

Before she realized what was happening, she broke free. Her courser galloped into a vacuum of men like a clearing in the forest. She saw the sun. Suns. There were two. She raised her hand.

When her fingers blotted out the light, she saw the shape underneath one of them: a spider, tearing across the sky. It was halfway to the horizon before she realized she was seeing anything at all. It was multifaceted. From this angle, it looked like a hawk. It shrank to a sparrow.

Then it was gone. It left a curvilinear white cloud behind it. The sky growled, deep-voiced. Thunder, at last. It lagged behind the creature as it ripped across the sky.

Her courser kept its composure. It did not seem to care what was happening. It rolled its nose back to her, impatient for her to stop gawking.

Hawkwood’s reinforcements should have reached her, crushed her, but they weren’t coming. His men continued to fall back. His formation broke. And his wasn’t the only one.

Her baton was lost somewhere in the scrum. She could not have directed this chaos anyway.

 

Both companies left a good number of dead on the grass. And then they broke. Fia rode across her line and tried to convince her men to pursue. She shouted that the daytime star had been a sign meant for them, but she could not convince enough to follow.

The shock had been too convulsive. No one saw her. By the time she had organized a semblance of a cavalry squadron, the remnants of Hawkwood’s army had fallen back too far to pursue.

One of Fia’s corporals, a condottiero whose contract had brought fifty men into her service, reined up beside her. “I’m pulling my men from the lines. Right now.” For as much as that was in clear violation of his contract, she could not find the breath to argue with him.

These men would claim, to a man, to be Christian. More than that, they believed in her, and in Saint Renatus. They thought themselves the bearers of tomorrow’s world. She would have thought that they would interpret a miracle as a sign that God favored them. Same with the true believers among the papal forces, those who had come to clear their slate of sins on Crusade.

But there had been more to the miracle than a flash in the sky. She had felt it herself. A snap of disconnection. A pulse of dislocation. The pain in her head, like a stroke. Something more than light had affected her, and all of them.

It had been impossible to think about anything more than the moment. She had nearly lost herself among the enemy. If they had been any less confused than she, they would have killed her.

Her inner voice no longer screamed, but it was back, curiously affectless. This is the end of our world.

She did not answer, though it succeeded in unsettling her.

She found Laskaris and Antonov at the same time that they found her, galloping across the rear lines. From their sweat and their wild eyes, she knew what they were thinking. They had expected to get crushed. The miracle, as they saw it, had not been to allow them to rout the enemy. The miracle was that they were allowed to get away.

With the sense of betrayal still hot within her, Fia could not disagree. The clocks had not started ticking again. The silence in her head was an iron weight, heavier than her helmet.

Her inner voice said, There won’t be any more battles.

The Company of Saint George was only a line on the horizon now, hardly distinguishable from trees. There was not going to be any decisive clash of arms today. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe never. But she was damned well not going to stop.

“Raiding parties,” she snapped. “Light cavalry. Remind the officers that Hawkwood’s treasure train is still in disarray.”

Antonov glared at her, but Laskaris galloped off before Antonov could contradict her.

The war is ending.

The afternoon fled before she could get a clear summary of the rest of the battle. Her men had engaged Hawkwood’s on multiple new fronts. Hawkwood’s men had fallen back where they should have pressed. No matter the heroic myths, soldiering was not a profession for individualists. Soldiers fought best with men at their sides. In their retreat, Hawkwood’s men had lost their formations, and died one at a time.

Those camp followers whose duty it was to count the dead reported a thousand dead or dying. The field already stank.

The harassment parties and those few stradiots who had limped free of the ambush reported easy kills among Hawkwood’s stragglers. Neither he nor Cardinal Robert had made any attempt to rally. They only fell back faster.

Hawkwood and Robert seemed to be acting on impulse, as though the strings animating them had fallen loose.

Fia understood how they felt.

Sunset stippled the distant hills. Red poured over the ridges, painted the valleys.

More and more condottieri took their leave. They traveled singly, or in small groups. She did not lose any other major commanders. Yet. But that time was coming. None of them spoke openly while she stood anywhere about them, but that did not disguise what they were thinking. They were afraid that, if they stuck around, if they didn’t take the opportunity that the miracle had afforded them, she was going to order them into another unwinnable battle.

Fear traced shadows under their eyes, tightened their lips. They had stared into the jaws of Hawkwood’s army once. They did not want to run back into it. Condottieri were good soldiers, renowned for their prudence. In other armies, their prudence would have been called cowardice.

She had never been able to find her baton. Her hands itched without it. When she had the opportunity, she stalked among the dead to search for it.

That was where she found Caterina.

For a moment, Fia couldn’t breathe. She had seen so many dead men’s faces that, for a moment, she imagined Caterina among them too.

But Caterina not only moved, she shivered. She reclined into the side of a stubby hill. The evening was not cold, but Caterina shook as though the ground was covered in ice. Her sleeve and her side were dark with blood.

Caterina’s eyes grew wide when she saw Fia, but she didn’t stop shaking. Fia recognized the look. She thought she was in trouble.

Fia knelt. Caterina held her right wrist unnaturally still. It was bent at a bad angle. Fia peeled back the sticky dried blood of Caterina’s sleeve. Whoever had cut her arm had struck deeply, exposed yellow bubbles of fat. Caterina, or someone, had scavenged enough cloth to wrap the wound, but had not washed it. Her forehead was already burning. There was no sign of Caterina’s sword.

We lost more than we thought we could have.

Caterina had no business being in battle. She must have charged off to fight, just like Fia had when she was a child. To help, or to prove herself, or both. She should have gone straight to a doctor. She must have figured a doctor wouldn’t help. Fia understood. When she’d first joined Antonov’s Company, she knew the surgeons wouldn’t prioritize a fool girl over a soldier.

Fia flagged over two men she recognized from the company, a Hungarian and a North African, had them carry Caterina to help despite her grunted and kicking objections. She followed them to the surgeons’ tents. There, her men had hardly begun to take count of salvageable hostages among the wounded when a messenger found Fia. Musa bin Hashim had arrived.

Musa’s two escorts were waiting outside her pavilion. Even in the dark, she knew who they were. Their long robes, sashes, and turbans left little doubt. They didn’t look at her as she pushed past.

Musa bin Hashim was not, officially, a representative of any Turkish potentate. He answered to the lord of Izmir, a city only recently liberated from papal crusaders. His allegiance was a fiction that allowed other powers, like the Turks, sufficient deniability to funnel funds westward, into campaigns like Fia’s.

Musa’s Latin came with an accent, but he spoke it comfortably and casually. His was the urbane, multiply cultured face his lord put on his dirty deals with westerners. Izmir had spent a half-century under an uncomfortable split rulership. Papal crusaders had held the town’s lower castle, and the Turks the upper. He had treated with soldiers from both worlds. The Turks had finally thrown the Christians out.

He had never bothered with the fiction with Fia. As much as she’d dreaded this meeting, she was glad he was here. With so many condottieri abandoning her, the company would need more resources to keep going. The Turks had always been her best, longest employer. Her treasure train was larger than it ever had been before, but much of its contents belonged, by rights, to her commanders. She had sold away most of her own goods and gold to support the attempt on Siena. She had counted on the spoils of the city to replace them.

From the few times Fia had caught Musa wearing gold and silver, she knew he was paid well. He had wisely not worn any jewelry on this journey. For all the dignity of his position, Musa was a young man, and paced with a young man’s impatience and recklessness. His sweeping robe had knocked over a golden helm, seemingly without his noticing. His long travels hadn’t tired him at all.

She told him, “It was damned stupid to travel so far with such a small escort.”

He turned. There was a spark in his eye when he saw that she had entered alone, but it didn’t last. The first few times they’d met and made their deals, he’d angled to take her to bed afterward. Fia had refused. She wasn’t interested in sex. With anybody.

He said, “Better to take the risk to meet you now than to be too late.”

She said, “We met John Hawkwood in battle today. We roundly beat him, and killed thousands of his men.” Exaggeration was the key to fundraising. Describing inconclusive battles as victories was a time-honored condottieri tradition. “We’ll need more florins and arms to–”

He cut her off. “Do you think I haven’t heard what happened? I don’t care. Word is that you mean to turn against us.”

Fia’s blood iced. “Why do you think that?”

Her inner voice said, Everything we know is falling apart.

“The Cult of Saint Renatus has spread into our boundaries. My lord feels this could not have happened without your active support.”

Fia scoffed. “I don’t control which soldiers pick up our creed.”

“If you wanted to stop it, it would stop.”

“That’s not how belief works,” Fia said. “I preach. Soldiers do with it what they will.”

“My lord has come to believe you meant for it to happen. That you mean to convert our soldiers exactly as you have in Italy and Greece. He has a source in your army who insists you mean to head east once you’ve secured your cult in Italy.” By contrast with his fidgeting hands, his eyes were leaden. His gaze was a stone on her chest. “He wanted to cut ties with you at once. I talked him into sending me out here, to ask you myself.”

She had only told Antonov of her plans to strike eastward. Caterina and Kristo may have been in earshot, but Caterina couldn’t speak and Kristo was dead. She knew Antonov hadn’t given her away, either.

The weight and the pain of this betrayal was again familiar.

Her inner voice said, You and I have made plans for this day.

Her inner voice had done this. It had told the Turks. She did not know how, or why, but it had turned against her.

The day had been too long. She was too exhausted to be a good liar. The skip in her pulse had become a catch in her voice. “It is absolutely a lie,” she said. Musa held her gaze in his for too long a moment.

“I see,” he said.

“I don’t think any of us sees a damned thing about what’s actually happening here.”

He tilted his head minutely. “Excuse me?”

She could not find the words to explain the weight on the back of her mind. “There are…” She had been about to say forces, but stopped. “There are problems I’m still trying to work through. It’s been a difficult battle. I would have an easier time treating with you in the morning.”

She had always thought of the voice as her inner voice for a reason. It had seemed a part of her, even as it spoke in its own words. If she could not trust it, she could not trust herself.

“As you prefer it.” He departed with a flourished and unnecessarily deep bow.

The weight had moved behind her eyes, made them too heavy for her to lift. She only took the time to remove her boots before finding her mattress.

 

The next morning’s meeting with Musa did not last long. She and Musa each backed down, ate some of yesterday’s words. Musa promised to tell his lord that he had seen no evidence that Fia was planning to strike eastward. Fia had vowed to send orders to rein in her believers. But that had been a dance. A way for both of them to tell if they had fooled the other. Neither of them had.

He had seen everything he’d needed the night before. She could count on no more support from his quarter.

You must realize that you have been compromised.

She felt as though she were falling. Her casa’s guards waited unobtrusively close to the pavilion flap. One of them would no doubt relay these developments to Antonov.

She found Antonov by the surgeons’ tents. She expected him to start on the meeting, Instead, he said, “You ought to know there’s every likelihood Caterina won’t survive. The officers I spoke to said she had charged through the center lines, going after you.”

Fia stared. She knew what Caterina had done. He knew it. And he knew what had happened in that meeting. He’d seen that Fia had left the pavilion reeling and unbalanced. He hadn’t needed to pile on.

He had done it to hurt her.

It had worked.

She could not stop staring, could not make her mouth work. She would rather have fallen against Hawkwood than bear these moments.

Compromised or not, you have become too valuable an asset to discard.

She needed a long moment to make sure that her voice would be steady before she spoke. She could not find the strength to challenge him. “What do we do now?”

“The Company of the Star, as it was, is over,” he said. “We can’t fight like we’ve been fighting. We can’t keep existing without giving Hawkwood and the papacy more reason to keep coming after us. If we break apart, Hawkwood has nothing to go after.”

“Then where do we go?” she asked.

“There’s only one place left in the world I want to go,” he said. Fia knew. His home. In far and foreign lands.

Her inner voice kept speaking over her, as if she were not already in conversation.

But you will have to change.