ALTDORF (The Forest Knights: Book 1) Page 6

  “Where does the name Gissler hail from? It sounds familiar,” Leopold asked.

  Gissler’s face brightened. “Here in the Aargau, my lord. My family is steward for one of the King’s estates near Sursee. Perhaps you know of my father? Hubert Gissler? Or, I suppose it possible my older brother Hugo is now chief steward.”

  Leopold pursed his lips and turned to his man Klaus. The old soldier thought for a moment and then cleared his throat. When he finally spoke, his voice sounded like gravel sliding down a rock slope.

  “King Albrecht granted that land to a French Count years ago. Brought in his own people to run it. Man named Lafayette is steward now.”

  The light in Gissler’s eyes faded as quickly as it had appeared.

  “They may still be working the land,” Count Henri said. “And if not, someone there would surely know where to find them.”

  Gissler nodded slowly.

  The crowd cheered again as the ringmaster called the combatants to their marks.

  “Come Klaus. We must be returning to Kussnacht,” Leopold said.

  “You will not stay and see the outcome of the tourney?” Count Henri asked.

  Leopold waved his hand. “I have my wedding to prepare for, and besides, the outcome of the tourney was decided the moment our Hospitaller entered. For who can compete with someone who has God on his side?”

  The young Duke held the trace of a smile in his eyes but did not wait for an answer as he turned to take his leave. At the last moment, seemingly as an afterthought, he turned back and said, “Gissler, once you have sorted out your family affairs, come to Habsburg castle. Perhaps I will have work for you.”

  Klaus strode a few steps ahead of Leopold, cutting a path through the crowd with wide sweeps of his tree-limb arms, as they made their way to a waiting carriage with an armed escort of a dozen mounted soldiers clothed in the Habsburg colors of black and red. Two flag-bearers, one carrying a standard with the red lion of Habsburg, and the other a black bird of prey on a field of yellow, the colors of the Holy Roman Empire, stood nearby. A lithe figure with green hair twisted its way through the hundreds of spectators and was waiting at the carriage door seconds before Leopold arrived.

  By late afternoon Leopold’s predictions had materialized, for no knight at the country tourney could stand before Gissler’s speed and skill. He dispatched his opponents with a ruthless efficiency, never taking longer than one or two minutes, except on those occasions when he decided a knight needed to be toyed with and publicly humiliated. Every man who faced him sustained injuries and limped, crawled, or was carried from the circle. By the final matches, Gissler’s ferocious reputation did as much to defeat his opponents as his sword blows.

  After the final match, while a young knight still lay on the ground, his feet twitching in unconsciousness, Gissler took his prize purse and walked away.

  He left the championship cup and pennant sitting on the table.

  Chapter 6

  SPRING BURST upon the Alps like God was determined to thaw the Devil’s glaciers and drive the mighty stone crags back into the recesses of the earth once and for all. The green-covered slopes erupted in golden clusters of cowslips, interspersed with patches of blue grape hyacinths. Sparkling streams of the sweetest water trickled down every hill, and what seemed like an endless assortment of wild game suddenly appeared.

  To Thomas and Pirmin, after a lifetime of campaigning in the deserts of the Levant, it seemed like a miracle. They welcomed the heat and worked better in it.

  Thomas had convinced the old ferryman to sell his barge for twice what it was worth, making Thomas wish Max had been there to help him negotiate. During his life with the Order Thomas had very little experience with money and business dealings had always made him uncomfortable. It did not help matters when Pirmin finally saw the old barge Thomas had spent most of his savings on.

  “Thomi, Thomi. I agreed to help you fix up a boat. Not build one from scratch.”

  It was really no more than a rectangular raft of log floats covered with thick decking, most of which was rotting and in need of repair. It was large enough to carry five or six horses and perhaps ten men. The ferryman had connected it to a come-along system of ropes and pulleys hitched to a team of oxen on land. He was able to transport people across a narrow arm of the lake, and though it proved a safe way to cut almost two hours off the trip around the outside of the lake via the road, it could only cross at the same point every time.

  Thomas knew it was not much, but he had a weakness for boats of all shapes and sizes and in his mind he saw what they could be. He meant to unshackle this barge and sail her freely. To him anything still sitting above the water had a God-given right to sail.

  He was well versed in the mechanical laws that made sailing possible, but he did not credit their development to the ingenuity of men. Standing on the high side of a boat with the sails reefed in tight while she sailed almost straight into the wind was as close as one could get to God, for without His assistance, how else could a boat move forward with the wind blowing in your face, striving to halt your progress and spin you off in the opposite direction?

  “A little work never killed a man, but you never were one to understand that,” Thomas said, shaking his head. “Do not look down on her. She’s got good bones and once we fit her with a leeboard, mast and a lateen-rigged yard, she will cut through this lake fast enough.”

  “You mean to sail the beast? She will handle like what she is—a pile of logs held together with pitch! At least when she sinks and we have built up an appetite from our swim to shore, we will be able to eat the oxen.”

  “We could have…” Thomas said. “If I had the silver to buy them.”

  Pirmin groaned and held his head between his massive hands.

  “And where are you going to get good planks if you already spent all your coin?”

  Thomas picked up one of two old axes the ferryman had included in the deal. Holding it by the head, he pointed with the handle at the forest behind Pirmin.

  “We have a shipbuilder’s dream of resources. Have you ever in your life seen trees as tall and straight as that? Granted, it may take a little more effort than ready cut timber—”

  “You always insist on doing it the hard way, eh Captain?”

  “Ah, but the ability to work hard is God’s gift to the common man,” Thomas said smiling. The scar tightened on his skin, but under the hot sun and with only Pirmin standing before him, it felt good.

  They worked on the barge and lived in a tent on the water’s edge, rising before dawn and starting early to avoid the mid-day’s heat. Every day, they would watch in silence as the sun rose above the Alps and infused the Great Lake with light, turning the deep water a glimmering emerald green. It became a breathless ritual with them; one which involved no conversation for they could find no words to express how utterly different this life was from the one they had been living only a year ago.

  But they did not live in isolation. Every few days, whenever they tired of camp cooking, they would saddle up their horses and ride into Schwyz. They would buy supplies and take a meal at Sutter’s Inn, the same inn and tavern that they had stopped at the first night they had spent in Schwyz those few weeks past. The inn had been in the Sutter family for generations, but with the recent traffic increase over Saint Gotthard’s Pass, Sutter’s business grew to be too much for his family alone and he found himself hiring on a cook and another widow to help his wife make the ale and honeyed mead.

  “Sutter says he knows a man with a bitch that just had a new litter,” Pirmin said one night as they rode back from the inn, their bellies swollen with stew and ale. A half-moon hung over the Great Lake, sharing its other half with the water’s surface.

  The comment snapped Thomas out of the hypnotic trance brought on by the rhythm of Anid’s gait and he looked up at Pirmin’s silhouette. The size of the big man’s charger made Thomas feel like he was rowing a skiff alongside a war galley. Thomas’s stallion, Anid, was a pure Eg
yptian, a breed many Franks would consider too light to carry a fully armored man into battle. But Thomas had found Anid to have the perfect combination of strength and fearlessness for the role. And like most Arabian horses, Anid’s speed and endurance was far greater than any destrier Thomas had ever ridden.

  “You remember Zora?” Pirmin asked, his features unreadable in the dim moonlight.

  “Of course,” Thomas said.

  How could he forget? Every couple years Pirmin would bring up his childhood dog and talk about her. Usually when he was drunk. And once again, at the mention of Zora, a wave of exhaustion shot through Thomas’s body as his muscles remembered the long march from Schwyz to the shores of the Mid-Earth Sea.

  A blonde-haired, scowling boy walked beside Thomas and though his words were laced with an accent Thomas struggled to understand, the boy talked enough that Thomas soon grew accustomed to his speech.

  He was older, perhaps eight, but already his stocky build hinted at the massive man he would become. At his side walked the biggest working dog Thomas had ever seen. She was shorthaired and largely black, with a powerful white chest and snout, and a square head with a mask of black surrounding even blacker eyes. She would have been terrifying if it were not for the rust-colored thumbprints above her eyes that softened her expressions. The draft dog was hitched to a cart that she pulled effortlessly with a nonchalant grace, as though trying to pretend it was not there.

  After a grueling three-month journey by land and then sea, the army of children was marching on a dusty road, less than five hours from the gates of Acre, when slavers came for them.

  An avalanche of boulders and smaller rocks careened down the steep hillside, crushing a knight and the handful of children in its path. A deafening rumble echoed all around them and dust billowed up and choked the gorge. Then, a hundred men appeared and swarmed down into the ravine like so many ants, yelling and screaming in various languages.

  All around Thomas was chaos. Dust hung in the air like smoke and children were running, screaming, trying to escape the slavers who seemed to be everywhere with ropes and leather collars. Thomas saw one of the black knights pinned to the ground with a spear, and two more fighting in the distance, several bodies at their feet.

  Thomas pressed his back up against the rock wall of the canyon, trying to disappear, as he watched Zora savage the throat of one of the slavers that moments before had been dragging Pirmin away by his hair. Pirmin snatched up the dead man’s war axe and leveled it at a heavyset man with a full beard and dark, fleshy circles under his eyes who stalked warily towards the snarling dog.

  The man raised a heavy crossbow and shot an iron bolt into Zora’s side, lifting her up and throwing her away from the dead man. She yelped, her feet scrambling briefly to find purchase on the rocky ground before her strength gave out and she toppled over on her side.

  Zora raised her head once weakly to bite at the shaft lodged deep between her ribs. Shaking with the effort, she was unable to reach it, and finally her head dropped hard to the ground, as though it were made of stone. She panted a few times. Then, with a whole-body shudder, she died.

  Pirmin, eyes wide and chest heaving, charged the man with his axe while screaming something in his strange accent that Thomas could not comprehend. The heavy man dropped his crossbow, sidestepped, and caught the axe shaft twisting it out of the young boy’s hands. Then he whipped the butt-end across Pirmin’s face. To the man’s surprise, the enraged boy took the blow, threw his arms around the slaver’s upper legs and drove his head into his stomach, knocking them both to the ground. Pirmin straddled the man and rained blows down upon the man’s face and chest.

  Although big, Pirmin was still just a boy and his adversary outweighed him by at least a hundred and fifty pounds. His blows were ineffective and once the man recovered from the fall to the ground and the surprise of the boy’s ferociousness, he rolled the boy over and beat him without mercy until Pirmin’s hands fell limp at his side and blood flowed freely from his mouth and nose.

  The slaver stood up quickly, as though embarrassed, and produced a rope from his belt with several leather collars strung along its length. He kicked the stunned Pirmin over on his stomach and kneeled to slip one over Pirmin’s head, cinching the metal buckle in place at the back of his neck. The boy coughed into the dusty ground and moaned, but other than that did not try to fight back.

  Thomas stared at the big dog’s still form. Zora was dead, and already at that young age, Thomas knew well the consequences that went along with death. It meant that as soon as she was out of his sight, he would never see her again. And somehow he understood, without the smallest doubt that the man kneeling over Pirmin intended to take Thomas’s friend far away, to a place Pirmin did not want to go.

  “Good folk, the Sutters,” Pirmin said, bringing Thomas back to the moment. These days, Thomas hardly noticed his singsong Wallis accent, but others did. Especially women.

  “Their girl has a fondness for you,” Thomas said. “Though she is not much more than a child.”

  Pirmin laughed, a deep, honest sound that bubbled up from his soul and would put at ease anyone within earshot.

  “I have done nothing to encourage that. And even if I had, Mera will be of a marrying age in another season.”

  “Do not even think it. She is a child, and you older than her father.” Though, Thomas admitted to himself, Pirmin looked ten years younger than his age and his boyish good looks had faded little over the years.

  “Ah but she’s a beauty that one. Might be just the woman to pluck me out of this monk’s life I have been living all these years.”

  Thomas grunted. “I think you do not fully grasp the meaning of the word monk. Monks do not sleep through matins because they have been out all night whoring.”

  “Whoa. Easy now, Captain. I would appreciate it if you did not put me in the company of the common soldier. I do not have anything against whores, a necessary trade if you ask me, but one I prefer not to support. In fact, I have paid for a woman only twice in my life, once—”

  Thomas interrupted. “Once before you knew you could get it for free, and another time when your lovemaking was so rigorous you were sure you left the woman with child. I have heard the story more times than you have told it.”

  “Ah, yes of course. I know how you and the rest of the lads would whisper about me in the dark of the barracks after I had snuck out.”

  Thomas shook his head in denial, but there was some truth to the big man’s words. From a young age Pirmin had developed an appreciation for the fairer sex, and they for him, and so had a tendency to stray from the converted stables that had become the boys home in Acre’s Hospitaller fortress.

  By the time he was thirteen he was taller than most men and seemed to know every tavern and shopkeeper in the crowded city. How he managed to escape the fortress at night after the portcullis had been dropped, no one knew, but it was well known that he was the main supplier of goods sold by Max, who ran his own secret merchant stall in the barracks. For many boys, as well as some of the monks, who had lived most of their lives inside the Hospitaller fortress, Pirmin was their link to the outside world, and he played the part well.

  A natural entertainer, he told stories of tavern brawls and wild women that few believed, but they hung on every word nonetheless. And when he was led into the courtyard and forced to make what the Abbot termed the march of shame to the whipping post, he did so with his head held high and shoulders thrown back, like some mythical hero, as boys laughed and cheered him on. He never cried out when the strap bit into his exposed flesh and when it was done he would limp away, but not without smiling or winking at a few of the other children, as if to say you know it was worth it.

  The Schwyzers were inducted into the Order of Saint John as brother-sergeants; fighting men. They were required to take the Vow of Obediance, and the Vow of Poverty, but not the Vow of Chastity, and that Pirmin often said, was God’s way of telling him that it was his duty to share himself wi
th the female populace. Thomas knew, of course, it merely showed that the Schwyzers were meant to be an expendable military arm of the Order and, since their life expectancy was so very short, nothing more was expected of them.

  Still, living amongst monks and priests had had its influence, and unlike Pirmin, Thomas had taken his studies seriously. Women were the origin of sin and Satan’s ultimate instrument of temptation. One that Thomas had successfully resisted his entire life, though he saw little evidence of the Devil in most women.

  “I wonder what he is doing now?” Pirmin said suddenly.

  “Who?”

  “You know, my son.”

  “You cannot be talking about the whore you imagined you planted your seed in?” Thomas said.

  “Of course. A man can tell when he has sired offspring, you know. Wonder if he looks like me? Or his mother…cannot rightly recall what she looked like though. Comely I think.”

  Thomas shook his head. “If you left that woman with child she no doubt went to a witch and had it rooted out.”

  “No,” Pirmin said, shaking his head. “I would have known. And why so negative brother? Jealous I have a son out there somewhere?”

  “Probably a daughter. A seven-foot hulking brute of a daughter terrifying the countryside.”

  Pirmin grimaced and clenched his teeth. The possibility of a daughter had never entered his mind.

  “Nah, not possible. Definitely a boy.”

  They rode on in silence for a while, the muted thudding of hooves on grass the only sound.

  “You ever think about it Thomi? Having a family?”

  “No,” he said.

  “You should think on it. This would be a nice place to raise one, and I do not know how much longer I will be around. Have to push on to Wallis soon, I suppose.”

  Thomas nodded, forgetting it was probably too dark for Pirmin to see the gesture. He would miss the man deeply when he left, though he would never let Pirmin know that. For over thirty years the Order had been his family, and it was strange to imagine being alone, truly alone. Strange, but not frightening, like he had once thought it would be.