Terminus Page 3

  The sky was clear. She had plenty of light to work by. The new comet shimmered overhead.

  She was not inured to discomfort, not really. But she could tolerate it. She had learned from watching the soldiers. She fought each day like a battle.

  Occasionally, she was visited by the voice from deep inside herself, the voice she had once mistaken for Pandolfo’s.

  Fight, it told her. The only way you’ll survive is by fighting.

  She fought. Everything she could turn to a contest became one. Working. Bartering. Marching. She competed with herself if no one else was at hand.

  There was no solidarity among the camp followers. Half of them shunned the others. But, like the soldiers, they were shared their suffering. Those of them who weren’t slaves could have dropped away at any moment. They chose not to. Everything outside was worse. The company, and others like it, made wastelands of the lands they traveled through. They would find no quarter if they tried to stay.

  There was misery enough here, but there was wealth, too. At Saint Augusta’s, Fia never would have been in a position to own a work animal, even a mule. Any animal would have quickly become the convent’s. She had become keenly aware of how much she had been a servant, a slave, even before the easterners.

  They were not so much barbarians as she’d been told. Pandolfo told worse stories about Italian soldiers. These men were irreligious, true. These days, everyone was. Church orthodoxy did not explain the things people wanted explained. After the new comet appeared in the sky, the church had preached an apocalypse that had never come. Failing to provide answers, it had left the way open for others to fill that need.

  Fia had given up looking to the church for answers about the Great Mortality. The mothers of Saint Augusta had had none. The Great Mortality had seeped through Italy, France, and Germany, like blood through a body. It followed the veins of commerce, along trade roads and aboard plague ships. Until suddenly it had stopped.

  All at once, as if by magic.

  No more buboes. No more coughing death.

  It had just ended. The pestilence hadn’t touched England. Much of Iberia had escaped. Scandinavia was totally unaffected. And everywhere there were rural areas far off trade routes who never felt anything.

  The people of Italy were no stranger to disease. Pestilence came in waves. It always recurred months or years afterward. But not this pestilence. It had despoiled their country once, and never again.

  The end of the pestilence had coincided with the arrival of the new comet.

  It crossed the sky in a regular schedule, every three years. It shone overhead now. She studied the comet. Her canvas shelter protected her from rain but not wind or dew, and so she was often too cold to sleep. The comet shone bright, almost as intense as the moon. Holding her hand up cast a thin shadow underneath it.

  The countries that escaped the pestilence had been left with their strength undiminished. Those struck had lost half their people or more. Antonov and his company were not the first adventurers to travel south, to take advantage of the depopulated lands.

  There was something going on beyond what the men of the cloth and their philosophers imagined. Fia was hardly the first person to think so. All the doomsayers, crackpots, and other odd people of the world had their own ideas about the comet’s meaning. The first few times the comet appeared, cities had burned so that one idea or the other might hold sway.

  The comet remained silent.

  The night’s ill winds turned to frost in her throat. They stifled her breath. Other people had their own beliefs and rationalizations about the comet, but they were wrong. There was no answer. She felt this as keenly as, two years ago, she’d felt the mercenary’s blade slice her.

  The only message was the fact of its presence. Something was here.

  Sometimes she was visited by knowledge. And that voice. Her own, or an echo. Like a memory of something she had yet to say.

  The church had proclaimed the comet a divine reordering of the world. Fia didn’t doubt that that was true. But the papacy’s words weighed a little less than they once had. It was based in Avignon, and Avignon had been mauled by the pestilence no less than anyone else. The papacy’s French patrons and defenders had suffered too. France stood on the precipice of its destruction.

  The English, who had escaped the pestilence, marched on Paris. English soldiers and adventurers raided the countryside around Avignon. The papacy had saved itself only by bribing them, paying exorbitant costs to “hire” them. It had sent the mercenaries into Italy, ostensibly to claim old papal lands, but mostly to be rid of them.

  While English mercenaries streamed into Italy over the Alps in the northwest, Albanians, Croatians, Serbians, and other easterners from as far as Russia crossed them in the northeast. They poured into an already-boiling mix of Italian condottieri, the mercenaries who had ravaged the Italian landscape for generations.

  The newcomers had taken after Italian condottieri readily enough. They switched sides on the eve of battle, or broke contracts the day of their swearing. Condottieri contracts were just another style of plunder. In the two years Fia had traveled with Antonov’s Company, Antonov had traded employers three times. He’d burned the countryside around Verona, the city whose money had brought him to Italy to begin with.

  She’d lost track of where the company was now. Somewhere in the hot and dry southeast. The Apennines crinkled the horizon. Ravenna was near. Every day of marching in this weather was a repetition of the same old sufferings.

  The week she’d bought her freedom, her left shoe, carried with her all the way from Saint Augusta, fell apart. She’d repaired it as well as she could, but the sole finally flaked to nothing. It had taken her three weeks to earn a replacement, enough time for the bloody callouses on her heel to become leather-thick. Now her right shoe threatened to do the same. She didn’t have the coin to replace it without selling her mule.

  Other than the handful of the remaining orphans she’d come with, she had no friends among the camp followers. But that didn’t mean she was isolated. The march gave her plenty of opportunity to eavesdrop. There was a raid planned for the night the new star reached its zenith.

  Everyone in Italy reworked their prophecies around the comet’s passage. Everyone said they knew what the comet portended, and the mercenaries were no exception.

  Fortune. Plunder. Relief. Escape.

  Money for a shoe.

  The next morning, she went straight to Captain Antonov’s pavilion.

  The pavilion was the largest shelter the company carried with them. It was as much a repository of stolen furniture and trophies as living space. Its canvas walls were double-layered. At night, Antonov’s Russian bodyguards slept in the folds. It was an estate away from the estate. Antonov owned no land. When it came time to put down roots for winter quarters, he had little trouble appropriating country manors. Otherwise, he lived here.

  Fia brushed through the flap, and stopped to allow her eyes to adjust. Men melted out of the shadow. Her heart jolted. She had not expected so many to be here. Plenty of officers, and more. Rich-looking men in civilian clothes. Accountants. Antonov’s lawyer. A scribe. Some of the men were caught in their own private conversations, but others looked at her. Antonov’s mastiff and greyhound didn’t look up. They were accustomed to her.

  Leading a free company was often like leading a nation, but, still, his subordinates weren’t always all in attendance. As Antonov’s favored servant, Fia had the right to enter his pavilion, but not the privilege. She dropped her basket of iron-pressed tunics on an oak table.

  Captain Temur Antonov was a lean man. For as long as Fia had known him, he had been getting leaner. It had not done his features any favors. His beard could not hide the concave arc of his cheeks. The pockets under his eyes could hold coins. But his gauntness was partly illusory. He had the voice of a young man. His eyes, in the dark, were querulous.

  She said, “You’re planning a raid to coincide with the comet reaching its zen
ith.” Not a question. An accusation.

  He didn’t bother to hide it, though the company was in its allies’ land. “The Ravennese promised food and fodder at fair market prices. It was part of our terms of safe passage through this land. The people of the countryside have not provided it. Those in the town ahead hissed at my messengers. And Ravenna is always in arrears of payments.”

  She would not have disputed his cause even if he’d had none. “I want to fight with you.”

  Those among the corporals who were still watching snorted, stopped paying attention. She’d said this too many times for it to be a joke any more.

  “Do you hear that?” Antonov asked. “The sound of no one laughing.”

  “I’m tired of living on scraps and laundry. I can take my share.”

  “Everyone here – except me, for now – thinks you’ve taken more than yours already,” he said, and turned back to his corporals.

  Fight, her inner voice said.

  She asked, “Who’s paying you to go to war?”

  He looked back to her. They both knew the only answer he could give. The company was once again in the service of the lord of Padua, who was anxious to acquire new feudatories amid the chaos. But that wasn’t the question she’d asked. Fighting for Padua was a battle. The war was the company’s campaign in Italy.

  There was a difference between an open secret and an undiscussed secret. It was an undiscussed secret that Antonov hadn’t come all this way from Russia at the behest of Verona, or any Italian city. Fia had not needed to ask. She had only read the silences.

  An extraordinary tide of eastern mercenaries had washed into Italy of late, flush with silver and gold. Someone was paying them to come here. The lucre of the raids convinced them to stay.

  Fia hadn’t asked the question expecting an answer. She’d asked it to let him know that she could. She usually used a softer touch. He was an officer and a man. Both halves enjoyed preening.

  He asked, “Why do I let you get away with this?”

  “Come on. What made you come all the way to Italy?”

  He said, “I think you understand. I could not live in the country where I was born.”

  Antonov’s history was the other kind of secret, the open kind. She’d heard talk of it easily enough. His family had been lords in their own lands. They’d made the poor choice of backing their feudal masters over foreign invaders. Most of the men of his grandfather’s generation were dead. Somehow, one of their daughters had secreted away some of the family’s wealth, but she hadn’t been able to hold it. Not even naming her son after one of the horde’s leaders – a misguided effort if ever Fia had heard of one – would persuade the invaders to let the family keep it. So Antonov had set out for the chaotic West to make a name as an adventurer.

  Fia had her doubts. After leaving Russia, Antonov had not wandered. He headed straight for Italy. He’d arrived full of cash and free from concern for family left behind. But there was probably enough truth in the story to use.

  She said, “You went to war because you needed to liberate yourself. Elevate yourself.” She tried to keep her voice as steady as a bowman’s grip. “I need to fight for the same reason.”

  “You can leave any time you like. You’re no slave.”

  One of his corporals suggested, “Pack your little tent and start walking.”

  She turned, and asked, “Could you do that?”

  At once, she regretted it. The only reason these men hadn’t ejected her was Antonov’s long tolerance. For men like them, answering a provocation was the same as picking a fight.

  Antonov said, “Women are a liability on the battlefield. You’ve seen yourself the violations that women suffer when they end up on one.”

  “The men, too,” she said, turning back. Hers was a position in which she could safely speak the unchivalric truths that soldiers rarely spoke of around a campfire.

  Antonov stepped around her, as if she were not there. He faced the other men. It was his way of letting her know that his pronouncement was final.

  She told him, “Going to war is a holy act.”

  His corporals made a show of no longer listening. They talked about their plans as though they had not heard her.

  Rage built under her throat, black and tasting like bile. She listened as long as she needed to before departing.

  That was the first time she had tried talking to him about the holiness of war in front of his corporals. He had not taken the bait. Four nights ago, they’d been in his pavilion with only his accountant, who was quietly tallying the proceeds of a captured river barge. He’d been more receptive. He had stopped talking, paid attention.

  “War breaks you,” she said. “It tears your skin, breaks your bones, bleeds you out. You see such awful things as you never thought could exist. If you live through it, you’ve become a different person. You’re reborn.”

  You will be reborn. Her inner voice often told her the same. It was telling her again, now, sliding words onto the tip of her tongue. Antonov stood, his fingers wrapped around his chin, watching his fire.

  She said, “War forces you to see men as they really are. It breaks the walls that they make around themselves. You see the wall you build around yourself. When you break it, you remake yourself.”

  He was no longer listening to humor her. She was stoking his ego by telling him these things, she knew. Deliberately so. She believed them regardless. She did not know which words were hers and which had come from her inner voice, but they weren’t lies.

  “Soldiering makes you privileged,” she said. “A special kind of man with a special kind of understanding of the world. You know what makes men function.”

  Antonov had spent his life in Russia destitute. In spite of the power he’d accrued, he’d spent his years here as an alien, a barbarian. He needed someone to recast his experiences as much as Fia needed his support.

  “I don’t need to be holy,” Antonov said. “A man has to be martyred before he’s made a saint.”

  “Every day you spend as a soldier, you already march through Hell.”

  Antonov had snorted, but did not laugh.

  Now she strode past the barricades, back to her shabby quarters. Hers was the only shelter still standing. It was time to pack up, to move. The soldiers had already told the prostitutes and laborers willing to serve as nurses to be ready for wounded men.

  Fia carried her most valuable possessions on her back: her coins and the North African crossbowmen’s yet-to-be-finished armor. She packed the remainder with a speed and fury that astonished even her. She was the last to begin to pack, but the first to march. She kicked her mule into moving.

  She had been at war all her life, long before Antonov’s Company. Every time she’d fought, the fighting had killed her. Dying and surviving, she was perpetually reborn.

  A martyr before a saint.

  Before long, she saw no riders, only spare horses led by pages. The vanguard had pulled ahead. She found another copse of trees, and led her mule to it. There, she hid.

  The crossbowmen’s leather armor barely fit her, but her stitching was finished enough to hold. She pulled a wide-brimmed infantry helm from her mule’s pack. She had taken the helm from a dead Orvientian skirmisher, kept it for herself. The kettle shape was meant to deflect blows from cavalry, but would also hide her face if she looked down.

  She had no weapons like the soldiers’, only a nicked six-inch dagger she’d bought for her own defense. The company’s infantry carried crossbows or swords. She hoped to scavenge from the dead.

  She tied her mule to the tree. For the first time since she’d set on this course, it occurred to her that she might not be back. No one would know where to come to find it. The still air felt hot as her breath, made her dizzy. Good weather for the rage that had never stopped burning. She tried to suppress it.

  You will be reborn.

  She already had been.

  Rage by itself was not enough. This was an opportunity. She had to remember that.<
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  She marched to join the rest of the company.

  The company’s target was a subject town of Ravenna, just large enough to have its own walls. Fia paused on a stumpy hillside, looking down. She didn’t even know its name. The town sat on a crossroads of trade routes. The bulk of its buildings conformed to the road. It made a cross in the middle of drought-browned grassland.

  Though the locals could not have had advance warning of the raid, they had assembled a defense just on word of the company’s passage. Perhaps they’d thought they would be putting on a show, a dog baring its teeth. They had not expected the company to announce its arrival with a cavalry charge.

  By the time Fia reached the town, the gates had been jarred open. Smoke poured from the nearest buildings. Flames curled over the top of the walls.

  Fia struggled to pick up her pace. She’d marched a long way just to get here. The hot walk under the burden of her stolen armor had sapped her. The smell of smoke quickened her breath, renewed her energy.

  A fracas erupted by the gates. A dozen locals had chosen that moment to make a breakout. She had no idea what they were trying to do. A counterattack seemed suicidal. Maybe they were just trying to run. Some were armed. Most were not.

  Crossbows snapped. An errant bolt whistled overhead. More bolts found their marks. Antonov’s soldiers emerged just behind the runners. Within seconds, half of the runners were down. Soldiers ran through the gates, singing and howling.

  Fia ran to one of the fallen men. He was younger than her, beardless, pinned by the weight of his too-large leather armor. A crossbow bolt had destroyed his nose, ripped loose his eye. He fought to sit and breathe. He still held his sword.

  She did not hesitate. She ripped his blade from his hand and ran it through his neck.

  Then she paused. Her hand shook, but not much. It had been easy – as easy to think as to do. Only in hindsight did the task seem remarkable.