The way down from the mountain passed through a well-maintained, working forest. The air was laden with the smell of sap and wood, and the sounds of saws and voices told the party that they were nearing their destination. They followed the track that turned into a logging road and could see the city wall below them. The men made their way toward the second city gate where fewer caballistas were assembled or loitering. There was no love lost between the military police and parties of traveling armed men. Follett, Pearlbinder, and Alvarez had had conflicts with the caballistas in the past; if they were recognized, it would be perilous to their mission. Their departure from the wilderness into civilization had not been authorized. Follett had been told in advance that this undertaking had nothing to do with the powers that ruled this land. It was none of the Caballista’s business. The cargo was beyond explanation. So they hid their arms out of sight but kept them within easy reach. Follett’s spear was camouflaged as a staff with a dead rabbit tied to its shaft.
The morning was bright; only a few patches of snow remained at the corners of the buildings and the roads. As the mercenaries approached the two-story gatehouse, they could hear the hubbub of the festivities deeper in the town. The celebrations increased in pitch and volume, climaxing with a mock joust between the two teams of Carnival and Lent. The gatehouse was almost empty. All the populace were crowded into the city square, waiting for the ritual to begin.
Follett led the horsemen as they slowly approached the gate. In single file they rode: Tarrant behind their captain, Alvarez with the prize, and Pearlbinder guarding the rear. They lowered their eyes and slumped in their saddles as they passed through. Even Pearlbinder managed to shrink an inch or so, but he had refused to change his turban for the ratty headwear that the others sported.
Two guards were talking inside the gate, three more lingered around the apron of the town, while another pissed against a wall. Follett had cleared the gate unnoticed, and Tarrant was just behind him. Alvarez was midway through when the Oracle let out a long, loud “Cooee,” as if to announce its arrival. The sound bellowed in the archway, and all the guards turned toward its strangeness, one with his cock still in his hand. None of them looked ready to fight, blinking through their sickening hangovers.
But they did cease talking and started to be interested or annoyed. The Oracle’s voice had stopped, but the unearthly pitch of the call continued to resound in the arch and in the guard’s memories, where it tried to find a dovetail or recess of understanding—somewhere to fit. Since the sound was strange and unknown, it roamed about uncomfortably, generating disquiet, irritation, and fear. Pearlbinder quickly brought his mount up alongside Alvarez. A guard stepped in front of Follett, holding up his hand to stop his entrance. Two guards behind him drew their swords.
A ten-minute walk from the gate, through the maze of compacted homes and shops, in the main square, the ritual was about to begin. Meg’s husband, Cluvmux, in the role of Carnival, was perched and slithering on his great hogshead barrel, which was being pushed on a heavy sledge of ancient wood. He was coming adrift before the first joust sounded. Cluvmux balanced a pie on his head and rested a lance—actually the iron spit taken from the rotary roasting frame, its cooked meats still attached and dripping—across his prodigious stomach. A tightly corseted shabby green jerkin tried to constrain the bulge of his belly, but it was held together more by stains than by the thin, breaking laces. Carnival’s squire, the Dutch Ovenor, halted his topple by pushing his knight upright on the barrel without ever losing the rhythm of his fart-wanking instrument, which he worked furiously with the grave solemnity of a dedicated virtuoso. Wisely, Ovenor had tied a string through his device, so that it hung about his neck, allowing him to play one-handed, if necessary.
The opposing team, Lent, was on the other side of the square. Their squat red wagon, ready to grumble forward on its crude hand-carved green wooden wheels, was pulled by a grim-faced couple, one dressed as a monk and the other as a grotesque woman. The bitter-faced Lent jouster sat on a high-backed chair, wearing the tattered costume of a threadbare nun. He barked ragged orders to his crew between biting his lip in concentration and balancing two stinking fish on the palm of a long wooden paddle that he used as a spear. His miter, worn to announce his dignity, was a hive of spluttering bees that had tuned themselves to match the ringing in his ears. He pointed his spear at his adversary and yelled, “Charge!”
High in his saddle at the rear, Pearlbinder saw what was going to happen next, so he put the reins between his teeth and his hands on the hilts of the two scimitars scabbarded close to his horse’s flanks.
“What have you got there, stranger, that makes such an ungodly call?” asked the closest guard.
He had been making his way toward Alvarez while asking the question, but he suddenly confronted Pearlbinder, who had moved forward and blocked his path.
“You all together here?” the guard asked, looking around to mark the other’s position in the potential fray.
“Hey, shit-bonnet, stand aside, let me see what your dark-skinned sister is hiding there,” the guard barked. A mail-clad hand grabbed Tarrant’s saddlebag, causing his horse to flinch and neigh. The Oracle joined in the cry, and the soldiers shrank and twisted sideways, but they didn’t let go.
The distraction gave Follett enough time to unleash his lance, dig his spurs deep into his horse, and shout, “Take them!”
Pearlbinder needed no further encouragement after being called “shit-bonnet.” The scimitars cleared their scabbards as he turned his horse, spinning heavily to increase the ferocity of the curved blades’ slashing sideways and outward.
Follett lowered his lance, shook off its disguise, and charged into the tight group of three men. Tarrant leaned down, thrusting his tomahawk into the guard who still held his saddlebag but who had turned his head away, toward Follett’s screamed command.
The first vibration of the cart’s wheels on the cobblestones sent one of the fish sliding off the paddle end of Lent’s spear. The gormless youth, who was supposed to wave the flag marking the beginning of the battle, woke up and brandished his banner with great vigor. Both the cart and the barrel were suddenly pushed and pulled into action, their sluggish momentum charging headlong into each other’s attack. They bumped and creaked forward with the urgency of a crippled tortoise. The yellow-clad candlemaker, Ingisfort Pleumps, provided most of the movement on Carnival’s side; the tin cups he held clattered like dull bells with every shove from his strong, dim body. On the Lent side, the pull was taken up by Mewdriss van Keulen’s idiot brother, his nun’s costume sweatily chaffing and his breath huffing as he tugged the complaining wagon into the fray.
The nun’s paddle slapped into the pig’s head and the dangling sausage that decorated Cluvmux’s spit. The impact sent the remaining balanced fish flying through the air into a pusher’s grinning face, where it burst, splattering its yellow and gray guts everywhere. The first applause erupted from the crowd and found its way back to the gatehouse just as—
Pearlbinder’s blade sliced horizontally through the face and head of the guard who had called him a shit-bonnet, just as he would have cut off the top of a soft-boiled egg. The reversed bowls of the guard’s eyes, forehead, and hair flew backward, exposing a perfect cross section in stunningly clear anatomical detail, before it seethed into a pulsing, open wound. The man fell to his knees, already dead. In their panic to get out of the way of Follett’s charging mare, two caballistas collided, muddling themselves. One lifted his sword above his head as if to fend off any harm, which gave Follett the target of a lifetime. He kicked the horse harder and brought the tip of his lance down into the guard’s armpit and ribs. It plunged through his screaming body and continued to nuzzle deep into the bowels of the second man. He had skewered both on one lance with one joust, a legendary achievement for a cavalryman, akin to an archer splitting the first bull’s-eye arrow with his second shot. The fierce charge continued, pushing its victims like skipping, spilling puppets.
The Lent nun bellowed a curse louder than all the onlookers in the square, making his unshaven, emaciated face even more grotesque, and shaking his beehive miter sideways, spilling a vanguard of irritated bees into the crowd. His pushers had fallen out of the way the moment the lip of the wagon dug into their raw heels, but seeing their master’s anxiety, they picked themselves up, waving their arms to shoo off the enraged insects. The sledge, beer barrel, and wagon finally collided.
Cluvmux and his adversary looked surprised, and vaguely sober, just before they started to poke at each other with their long, unwieldy weapons. The most dangerous sequences they performed were verbal. Almost face-to-face, they swore blue and purple while trying to unseat each other, sending the disgruntled bees far away to escape the offensive language.
The Oracle was buzzing inside the protection of his box while all around were covered in blood, even Alvarez, who had never drawn a weapon while taking care of the Blessing, was soaked from the spouting artery in the guard’s neck. The wound had been inflicted by Tarrant’s lightning-fast tomahawk, just before he hacked the man’s hand away from its fingers that still stupidly gripped his saddlebag. Alvarez guided his horse between Pearlbinder’s slashing blows and the devastating pecks of Tarrant’s ax.
Follett had finished the third guard by stabbing him through the eye as he gawped at his dancing comrades. The caballistas now lay dead or dying, one still with his cock in his hand, as the riders cleared the arched portal and were inside the city’s walls.
The mock battle had finished in the square and a great applause arose, close enough for Follett and his men to share. Follett stopped and turned to face his men, sitting proud on his charger, grinning, his lance upright and scarlet, pointing at the blue sky. The two punctured men were sitting on the steaming red grass; holding each other, rocking gently like children praying for sleep to come soon.
Follett’s men were enraptured with blood and success; they had almost completed their mission, and this last little skirmish had heightened their purpose after all the time spent in the wilderness of snow. They steadied themselves as the bells of the great monastery sounded above the boisterous rabble, telling them which way to go to triumphantly receive their reward.
Cluvmux lay giggling in a waste of food. He did not know if he had won or lost. Neither did anybody else. They had performed the ritual, and now they were running out of time for drinking and sucking on all the pleasures of Carnival before the austerity of Lent closed its strict gates. He got up, forgetting to look for Meg before he found his fellow revelers.