Page 36 of The Devils

Our Heavenly Calling

Jakob woke to a stab of agony and the taste of old blood.

So. Alive, still.

Every time he came to that realisation, it was with a hint of disappointment.

Agony and the taste of blood greeted him most mornings, of course, but his bed didn’t usually shudder this way, and when he tried to shift, then gave up with a groan, the pain redoubled, every jolt like a lance through his chest. And Jakob knew what a lance through the chest felt like.

He noticed a noise – a grinding clatter with the odd squeak, as of badly oiled axles – then a smell – an all-too-familiar spoiling-meat and slaughterhouse odour – and finally a hardness, as of wooden slats battering his sore shoulder blades – and it all became clear. He was in a corpse cart. Again.

How had he got here? A vague memory floated up of his company ambushed on the road to Carcassonne, a scream from the rear of the column … no, no, that had been years ago. He remembered the long days healing, limping around the cloister, and the inquiry, and the panel of frowning priests he’d told to fuck themselves.

Had he fallen fighting that troll, then, on the borders of Brittany? Never fight a troll, it’s the first thing they tell you. He remembered lying among the bodies, bloody fingers stretching for the little icon of Saint Stephen, broken from the back of his shattered shield … but that was even longer ago. Saint Stephen’s look had somehow changed from understanding to accusation during those three bad winters, and he’d tossed the icon into Khazi’s grave along with him. Told himself the dead needed its protection more than he did, when he meant they deserved it more than he did. That was before the oath of honesty.

Over the noise of the cart, he became aware of a cultured drone. ‘… all nations have their charms and I always loved Poland, but the rural life simply wasn’t for me. I wasted away in isolation like an orchid in the dark.’

‘Where am I?’ wheezed Jakob, but his voice was a croak, even he could scarcely hear it.

‘… Lucrezia saw it, of course – she was, for all her monstrous faults, a supremely perceptive woman – and she agreed to leave the estate. So our tour of the great cities of the Mediterranean began! Never too long in one place, for obvious reasons, my wife had a habit of wearing out her welcome. Sucking it dry, one might almost say …’

The wagon ground to a halt with a final jarring jolt and Jakob groaned, bloody spit flecking from his clenched teeth.

‘Ah! He’s awake!’

Baron Rikard’s face swam into view. He looked younger than ever, with just a hint of silver in his moustache, his brows, the dark hair that hung around his face as he smiled, showing his elegantly pointed canine teeth.

Another face appeared, as shocked as the baron’s was smug. A pockmarked man with an ugly hat. ‘Saint Bernard’s bollocks ,’ he said, making the sign of the circle over his heart, ‘he’s alive!’

‘I told you,’ said Baron Rikard.

‘Thought you were mad!’

‘Oh, I’m entirely mad. But rarely wrong.’

‘The count’ll want to see this,’ muttered the driver, ducking away.

‘A miracle indeed,’ murmured Rikard. ‘How do you feel?’

‘About …’ croaked Jakob, working his tongue around his mouth in an effort to make spit as desperate and doomed as most of his efforts, ‘like usual.’

‘As bad as that?’

Jakob felt his wrists gripped, and growled through an advancing regiment of throbs, stings, and stabbing pains as he was hauled up to sitting and squinted into the daylight.

The cart had pulled into a field hospital: a few sagging tents beside a stand of trees. He was sharing it with five others, all dead but still looking a good deal better than he felt. Nearby, a priest was giving water to a row of wounded men. Another was softly murmuring the last rites, licking her finger as she turned the page of a prayer book. Only the flies seemed happy with the arrangements. Somewhere behind he could hear the regular scrape of gravediggers’ shovels, but couldn’t bring himself to turn his head to look. Every grave looks much the same, after all. With the possible exception of your own.

‘What happened?’ he muttered, almost reluctantly, since the general answer was predictable and the specifics rarely comforting.

Baron Rikard leaned back against the cart beside him, grinning at the scene as though it was a village fair. ‘There was a fight.’

‘On the water?’ whispered Jakob, gingerly touching his chest where the worst pain was focused.

‘That’s right, well done! I stayed out of it.’

‘Wish I had.’

‘Violence rarely solves anything.’

‘Can’t disagree. Did I fight a duel?’

‘On the burning aftcastle!’ Rikard spread his hands to indicate a spectacle. ‘You always find the most dramatic stages for your battles to the death. You really are a loss to the theatre!’

‘Who did I fight?’

‘One of Princess Alexia’s cousins. Lots of jewellery. Constans, was it?’

‘Constans.’ Jakob shut his eyes. Their latest mission, or their most recent fiasco, was all coming back to him. The flames. The fluttering ash. The flickering steel. ‘He was good with a sword. No doubt he’d have won a fair fight.’

The baron raised his brows. ‘But who wants to fight those ?’

‘Saint Bernard’s bollocks !’ Boomed out suddenly, in the tone of a man used to shouting over others and getting away with it. The speaker clattered heedlessly between the wounded in highly polished armour, one big fist propped on the hilt of an oversized sword.

‘Your Excellency, please,’ complained a priest hurrying in his wake, holding the hem of a very fine surplice above the muck, in the tone of a woman used to issuing chastisements to no effect whatsoever.

‘I’m sorry but, I mean …’ The big man grinned as he stopped before the cart and held both meaty hands out to its contents. ‘He’s alive!’

‘I told you,’ said Baron Rikard.

‘But, frankly,’ observed the priest, ‘we took you for a liar.’

‘The best liars don’t lie about everything . Who would believe them then?’

‘Forgive me,’ Jakob swallowed more blood, ‘but I’m still—’

‘Forgive me ! I … am Count Radosav!’ And the big man clapped his palm to his breastplate as if his being Count Radosav was of itself an awe-inspiring achievement. ‘Of Niksic and Budimlja, and this is Mother Vincenza, Vicar General to the Archbishop Isabella of Ragusa.’

Weighty titles for a man in Jakob’s state to absorb. He touched his fingertips to the back of his head, the hair there sticky with blood, maybe his own, maybe from the cart’s other passengers, and winced.

‘Honoured,’ he said.

‘No, no, the honour is ours. You, after all, are the celebrated Jakob of Thorn!’

Jakob winced harder. His vow of honesty didn’t give him much wiggle room there. ‘I am,’ he confessed. And he repented of it daily.

Count Radosav wagged a thick finger. ‘Your friend Baron Rikard has told us all about you!’

Jakob winced harder still. ‘Good things, I trust?’

‘What’s good at a dinner party is rarely good in a fight.’

‘And … don’t tell me …’ Jakob glanced towards the wounded, feeling the familiar sensation that things might be even worse than he’d supposed. ‘You’re in a fight.’

‘I am indeed! And you are a noted champion, knight, and general in the sworn service of the Pope!’

Baron Rikard leaned close to whisper in Jakob’s ear, his breath chilly as a winter draught. ‘I was obliged to talk you up.’

‘Are you any relation of the famous Jakob of Thorn who lifted the siege of Kerak during the Third Crusade?’

Jakob cleared his throat as he wondered how to answer that one without lying. Luckily, the baron clapped him on the shoulder first. ‘They share some blood, I believe!’

‘I knew it!’ The count shook his fist in triumph. ‘My grandfather was in the fortress at the time and never tired of telling the story! He said it was the finest damn charge he ever witnessed! The elves put to flight! Illustrious forebears, eh?’

‘Generations of military experience,’ said the baron, ‘and all at your disposal.’

Mother Vincenza looked to the skies. ‘The Saviour has rendered unto the righteous the tools they require for their deliverance.’

‘She has a habit of doing that,’ muttered Jakob, through gritted teeth.

‘Your associate has spoken to us of your holy mission.’ And Radosav piously circled his chest with a forefinger. ‘We understand you might be missing a princess.’

Jakob wearily patted his pockets. ‘I do seem to have one fewer than when I set out from the Holy City.’

‘Naturally,’ said Mother Vincenza, ‘we stand ready to give all possible succour to an emissary of Her Holiness.’

‘But not for nothing?’

The priest spread her hands. ‘Alas, we have holy missions of our own to discharge.’

‘To bring to heel Jovanka, the troublesome Countess of Pec!’ growled Radosav.

‘And to frustrate the ambitions of her backers from the Church of the East,’ added Mother Vincenza. ‘Damned wheel-wearers! Is there no end to the arrogance of the Archbishop of Dardania?’

Baron Rikard sadly shook his head. ‘When will those blasted priests stop interfering in politics?’

‘So, to sum up …’ Jakob dragged himself from the cart. ‘You’re in a border war …’ His knees nearly buckled when they took his weight, but he managed to stay standing. ‘With a neighbouring noblewoman …’ He painfully straightened, painfully clenched his buttocks, painfully worked his shoulders back, and stood as close to straight as he got. ‘One of you supported by the Western Church, the other by the Eastern.’

The kind of ugly proxy war that the squabbling sibling Churches had been fighting for the last three centuries. The kind, in fact, that their mission to Troy was intended to stop.

‘You see instantly to the heart of it!’ frothed the count, thumping the side of the corpse cart and making it rock on its axles. He was one of those men who could say nothing quietly and do nothing gently. ‘Perhaps we can assist each other?’

‘Let’s hope,’ muttered Jakob.

‘Help me humble the wayward countess on the battlefield, I’ll help you track down your runaway princess! How does that sound?’

It sounded like a disaster waiting to happen. Or, maybe, one that had already happened. ‘Honestly, these days, I try to avoid battlefields.’

Baron Rikard grinned. ‘But with such little success.’

‘However we might try to dodge our heavenly calling,’ said Mother Vincenza, ‘the saints will guide us back to it.’

The priest with the prayer book had finished with one corpse and begun to croon over another. Jakob gave a heavy sigh, and grimaced at the stab of pain where Constans’s blade had run him through.

‘Great,’ he muttered.