Once dry, I sat on the bed and said, “I’ll rest a bit. Take off your dress and join me.”
“I thought you’d never ask.”
Much later I said, “That was good, wench. Very good. ”
“Thank you, my lord. Ah. There’s the dinner bell. We must dress.”
“Right.” I got into my tunic and hose. “Uh, what is your name?”
“Annastashia.”
At dinner I met Sir Bodan, a friend of my father, and he introduced me to Sir Frederick and Sir Stefan. They each sat down with a woman by their sides, so I bid Annastashia join me.
“I believe I’m still senior here and so am in command,” Sir Bodan said. “Sir Vladimir, I observe that you have arrived late. In punishment for this, you shall take the graveyard shift and watch the gate from matins to prime.”
“This seems just, my lord.” I downed a bowl of beer and motioned for it to be refilled.
“Well, somebody has to do it.”
“I make no complaint. But tell me more of this Sir Conrad.”
“He does seem to be the main subject of conversation hereabouts,” Bodan said. “First off, he rides a mare.”
I stifled a giggle. “A mare?”
“A mare. Furthermore, they tell as many stories about the horse as they do of the rider. She refuses to be shod and goes without horseshoes, yet she gallops over rocks without splaying her hoofs. She doesn’t soil her stall, but removes the bar and goes out in the bailey like a house-broken dog. Then she returns to her stall, and replaces the bar!”
“Incredible!”
“She is fully war-trained and Conrad claims that two of his kills were made by her alone. Yet she has no objection to wearing a horse collar and working with the peasants. And under her influence, Count Lambert’s best stallion hauled logs last winter, two warhorses guided by a single little peasant girl. The commoners here claim the mare is so intelligent that she can talk!”
“What?”
“Oh, it’s just a matter of shaking and nodding her head. Yet she does it in response to questions; myself, I think it just a carnival trick. ”
“But what of the man himself? Who are his people?”
“That’s another mystery. It seems that some priest laid a geise on him, that he may not tell of his origins. Some say that he is a socialist, though it is not clear just what that means. It might refer to his country, his military order, or his religious sect. Myself, I think it must be a religious sect, for he is uncommonly gentle with children, peasants, and other animals.”
“All we really know is that he came out of the east in the company of a merchant, Boris Novacek.”
“Ah. I know the man.”
“Then you know that Boris is no fool and that he wouldn’t lie unless there was a profit in it.”
“True.”
“Well, Boris claims he took this true belted knight out of a monastery in Cracow, where he was engaged in writing books.”
“A knight who can read and write? That’s unmanly!”
“There’s nothing unmanly about him, though he claims to have spent seventeen years as a student in schools.”
“Indeed. How old is this Conrad?” The beef stew was excellent.
“He claims to be thirty, but he looks no older than you and there’s not a scar on his body. Then there is his equipage. They say he has a pavilion light enough to hold in the palm of your hand; it’s said to have the property of keeping out noxious insects. He has silver pots and plates, lighter than a cobweb. He has a knife with a dozen blades that fold to a size smaller than your finger. He has another instrument of the same size that produces fire at the touch of a lever and a sleeping cloak that grows shut to keep the cold out. He gave Sir Miesko a device with a needle that always points north, to guide him in the dark. That needle burns with a green fire but never is it consumed.”
“I could have used that last night,” I said. The beer was truly fine.
Sir Bodan ignored me. “He gave Lambert an object that makes far things look close. Some of the girls here can show you incredibly tiny needles they had of him. And the peasants! He gave hundreds of parchment packages of seeds to the peasants, each package with writing and a beautiful painting on it. Most of the seeds are sprouting and there are some damn strange shoots coming up in Okoitz!”
“He must be a man of great wealth.”
“Fabulous wealth. He arrived here with a chest of gold and silver worth 120,000 silver pence!”
“Then … then why does he stay in a back woods place like Silesia?” I asked around the bread in my mouth.
“Who knows why a wizard does what he does?”
“Ah, yes. I saw his wheels and loom. He’s a mighty wizard.”
“Yet there’s no magic in those machines in the great hall. I’ve been over every inch of them and there’s naught there but boards and thread. They’re clever, mind you. Damned clever. But they’re still just things of wool and wood.”
“Indeed?” A wench refilled my bowl.
“Then there’s Conrad’s sword. It’s a skinny thing with but a single edge, yet with it Count Lambert-in front of a hundred witnesses took the head off a fully grown pig with a single blow; and when Conrad became angered with a blacksmith, he chopped the anvil in half.”
“Well, I can sympathize with that,” I said. “But you haven’t told me much about the man himself.”
“I was coming to that.” Bodan took another pull of beer. “He is huge and must duck his head to walk through that doorway. His hair is a dark blond and he wears it very short, inches above his shoulders. He has a proper moustache, but he shaves the rest of his face every day with a strange knife that never goes dull. Mostly, he wears ordinary clothes, but sometimes he dons garments of a thin, eldritch cut, with hundreds of buttons, clasps, and closures. There’s something odd about his boots, though I haven’t heard a good description of them.”
“You mean you haven’t seen him yourself?”
“What? No. None of us have, except for Sir Stefan and the wenches. Looking forward to it, but all I’ve told you is hearsay. Oh, yes. Besides all else, Conrad’s a surgeon, a mathematician, and a great chess player. He beat Count Lambert for the first two dozen games they played and no one but he has beaten Lambert since. Ah. I’ve talked until my food got cold. You, girl! Throw this back into the pot and bring me more that’s goodly hot.”
“Well, I know that foul warlock right well,” Sir Stefan said. “Too well! I’ve served here since Christmas, almost every night from dusk to dawn without relief and I know the bastard for what he is.”
“Dusk to dawn?” I said. “Long hours! Weren’t you to serve with Sir Miesko?”
“Sir Miesko took Conrad’s place in the service of a merchant, to do an errand for Count Lambert. Then Conrad bewitched Lambert with dreams of wealth and fame and spent his days building the warlock’s gear that you see in the hall and bailey. I was forced to stand guard seven nights a week and they were long cold nights!”
Sir Bodan said, “I’ve already shown that there’s no witchcraft in those looms.”
“No witchcraft? Do you realize that Conrad used this very table we’re now eating from and drenched it with human blood!”
“I was there,” Annastashia said quietly. “One of the men from the village was hurt while cutting down trees. His foot was all smashed. Sir Conrad had to cut it off and sew him up to save him.”
“And that peasant was dead within a month! The witch’s rite didn’t help much!” Stefan shouted.
“But, Sir Conrad was trying…”
“Shut up, wench!”
We were quiet for a bit, then Annastashia said softly, “I remember Sir Conrad at the funeral of a peasant child. He cried.”
Chapter Two
Two weeks slid pleasantly by. The weather was lovely; supplies of food and drink seemed inexhaustible; my fellow knights were excellent comrades; and the ladies, ah the ladies. I’d sampled them all by that point, but in the end I found that the best was at the beginning. I spent most of my nights with Annastashia. Well, my evenings at least, the graveyard shift being what it was.
Often Annastashia would come to me when I was on duty; sometimes we would talk and sometimes we simply held hands and watched the stars wheel by. I was quite taken by her, although of course nothing could come of it. For all her absurd status as a “lady in-waiting,” she was a peasant and I was a knight and my parents were very … traditional in their outlook. Yet … yet I tried not to think about my departure from Okoitz.