“Boghos and I pondered writing to you, among other measures, but we at last agreed that Marge was just too far gone in drugs, perversion, and serious mental disorder for your presence here to do her or you any good. Anyway, there was continual talk of an impending cease-fire in the news and we both figured that you’d be back soon enough; nobody here had any idea that they’d drag that cease-fire business out for as long as they did.
“Boghos thought of getting Marge committed—to a private place, not Eastern State, Rupen—and he and his attorney did get her into Tucker’s … for a little less than three weeks, then the Mangold woman went in there, told everyone that she was Marge’s sister, and signed her out to go downtown shopping, and that was the last that anyone at Tucker’s saw of either of them, of course.”
Rupen cradled his face in his big, powerful hands, elbows on knees, his voice muffled, cracking slightly. “I’m sorry, Mariya, Brother Boghos, I should’ve known you both would do the best you could. Well, poor little Marge is at peace now, thank God. Now I have to see to it that that conniving harpy pays full measure for the life she corrupted, ruined, degraded, and finally took away.”
The sack of Gij6n-port, such of it as was not either blazing or heaps of smoldering ashes, was necessarily brief, for both Bass and Sir Paul Bigod were frantically anxious to be out of the deathtrap harbor, away from the rockbound coast and well out to sea before a guarda costa came sniffing along or some troops of better quality than the grand duke’s “crusaders” marched over the surrounding hills, it being a certainty that numerous riders had gone out in every landward direction during the initial bombardment.
Had it been entirely up to him, Bass would have allowed no sack of any duration or description, but Sir Ali, Sir Liam, Sir Calum, and even Nugai pointed out that all of the soldiers, sailors, and noblemen expected one, eagerly anticipated an opportunity to get themselves a little loot and engage in a little casual rapine, and that to deny them, especially the half-savage galloglaiches, could easily breed trouble. Bass had had no option; he had acceded.
Sir Paul Bigod, like most people at most times in this world, had completely misunderstood the motives of the Duke of Norfolk, attributing it not to other world squeamishness and hatred of bloodshed, but to a high degree of caution regarding the welfare of his ships. “Look you, your grace, four galleons, your carracks, and one flute are all that are in the harbor anyway, and these be ready to cut cables and beat out to sea with a minimum of work, should that prove needful. Any foeman that would make to block that channel would firstly have to deal with the galleon and the other, larger ships standing out just off it. Furthermore, all my sloops and smaller vessels—flying various ensigns, of course—are patrolling west and east from this place all a-watch for incipient trouble from the Spanishers, never you fear.”
Bass did not fear; he would, indeed, have welcomed any diversion that would have brought the raiders back aboard the ships and then caused the ships to put out to sea. After a few quick, long-distance glimpses of what was going on in the steep streets, terraces, and plazas of the port town by broad daylight, he put away the binoculars and tried to find other things to occupy his hands and mind, but nothing seemed to work.
Locked in his flagship cabin, lest his squires or servants see what he was about and horrifiedly relieve this high nobleman of the inappropriate manual labor of burnishing a breastplate, he tried to think out the matter of the sack and his feelings on the subject.
“In my world, most of the killing and maiming in formal warfare had been placed on a long-distance, completely impersonal level. Since it was so damned seldom that flyers or artillerymen ever got a close look at the people they were killing and wounding, the making of war had become a job very much like any peacetime, civilian activity for them— hard work, sometimes, and not always done under ideal conditions, in ideal surroundings, but virtually bloodless.
“Even the men in infantry or armored units often did their work at long range, directing their fire—rifle, machine gun, rocket, mortar, recoilless rifle, and so on—toward places where they had been told there were groupings of enemies, not toward men they could actually see.
“But warfare here, in this world, is bloody and savage and very, very personal and done at such close range that a slain man’s lifeblood often splashes onto the man who kills him. Now in the heat of battle, when it’s your life or his and your life is clearly on the line, natural instincts take over, invariably, and you do what you have to do, anything that you have to do to make damned sure that he dies for his beliefs instead of you for yours. And you do what you do then instinctively, without regrets.
“You impale living, struggling men on lances and spears, hack and slash and cut and stab with the sword, gape open skulls with the ax, crush them with mace or morning-star, blow them apart with horsepistol or arquebus, and then on to your next opponent, heedless of the wounded and dying man your horse kills or further injures under his steel-shod hooves.
“And there’s that particular barbarity, too, here. In my world, most military units of most of the more civilized countries looked with at the very least official disfavor upon the mistreatment of wounded foemen, and their medical services quite often gave those wounded care in no way inferior to that that they gave their own wounded. But not here, not in this world.
“Of course, as Krystal long ago pointed out, what passes for medical care here is so basically useless if not actually harmful that it’s often a real mercy to put down wounded men just as you put down badly injured horses—far better a bullet or a quick dagger thrust than a lingering, hideous death of sepsis or gangrene. Even so, that was one current custom that came damned devilish hard to me when first I came here . . . still does, for that matter. But I do it when I have to.”
The Duke of Norfolk would have certainly been even more perturbed, just then, had he been aware that his obvious reluctance to grant the mercy stroke or shot to wounded foemen on many occasions had been drastically misread. He was widely considered to be a hard, cold man, utterly callous and unfeeling when it came to enemies, even suffering, wounded enemies. His galloglaiches loved him for these supposed qualities. Other men deeply respected him and strove to remain on friendly terms with him, for all that they found so patently cruel a man difficult to truly like.
Bass hung the breastplate back on the rack and took down a spauldron that seemed a little dull to his eye.
“It’s not really the killing that tears me up, though. I’m at least that much of a realist. I know that if I should pull my stroke or consciously miss my shot, the man I spare will possibly kill me or one of my friends or retainers. No, it’s the thinking about it all later, when those dead men whose names you never knew, those men with the twisted, bloodless faces come into your mind and dreams in the dark of night, sometimes with weeping women and starving children, and you wake up sweating and gasping or screaming.
“But even that worst part has gotten better—I hope, I pray—with time; I don’t get that kind of nightmare nearly so often now as I did two, three years ago. i think those long talks with Hal helped immensely. “Our Archbishop of York is a damned good shrink in addition to his many other talents.
“No, the facing of armed men in battle is one thing. I’ve had to learn tolive with it and more or less accept it. It’s the same with killing wounded, too; when a man arms and goes into a battle, here and now, he has to expect to lose his life in one way or another. I’ve even—God forgive me—learned to live after a fashion with using the misericorde, though my personal preference for the act is a pistol.
“But what’s going on ashore, there, is another thing entirely. The turning loose of armed men, especially of those heartless galloglaiches, on a trapped, terrified, and mostly unarmed civilian populace constitutes to me an unforgivable crime that I know will haunt me—waking and sleeping . . . if I ever can sleep again, after this, that is—for the rest of my life. I can think of nothing that would in any way justify what I just have countenanced doing to those poor Spanish civilians of Gij6n-port, and I’m more a criminal than those sailors, soldiers, and galloglaiches, for I know that it’s wrong … yet I am condoning it all. 1 doubt that even Hal has the ability to ease my mind of this enormity.”