Arsen Ademian figured that the booze had finally done it; he must surely be hallucinating. At one moment, he had been stretched out on the deep carpet on his back, absently stroking his oud, his sole remaining grip on reality. At the next, he was slammed down on his back on hard ground, as if he had fallen several feet. Above him, the gilt-plaster decorations of the suite’s ceiling had gone, to be replaced by the waving branches of what looked from the distinctive leaves to be a maple tree!
He lay stunned for a moment, hearing screams and shouts all about him, in voices he recognized . . . and in one that he did not. Then he sat up, the precious oud tumbling unnoticed from his lap … and decided immediately that he was not just haliucinating-drunk, he had lost his marbles completely and was probably sitting in truth in a padded cell somewhere, maybe in Eastern State Hospital for the Insane in Williamsburg, Virginia.
John the Greek stumbled up to Arsen, limping, still holding a huge leather-and-iron-bound volume. “What in hell is going on? Where are we, Arsen? What happened? Were we drugged and brought out here, do you think?”
Ignoring the man and the questions, Arsen looked around him. He and John were in a smallish clearing surrounded by brush and treeboles. He was sitting in a pile of half-rotted leaves, their sogginess soaking the seat of his pants with a
cold moisture. A small stone building sat across from him at the other side of the clearing; it looked old and weather-worn and totally lacked windows or any other visible openings on the two sides he could see.
Somewhere off in the forest to his right, the girls were all screaming their silly heads off, and somewhere closer by, voices he could recognize as those of his cousins, Al and Haigh, were praying aloud and loudly in church Armenian.
Then, from out of the hidden side of the little stone building, a man emerged. He was shaggy and unkempt and dressed in tattered rags. He grasped a heavy-looking length of dark wood in one hand, but he looked around him with an expression every bit as dazed as Arsen felt. He needed a bath, too, badly. Arsen could smell him the full width of the clearing. “Arsen . . .” began John the Greek, plaintively.
But Arsen interrupted him, knowing beforehand just what the plaint would be. “John, / don’t know where we are or what happened or how we got here any better than you do, dammit! Maybe that guy does, though. Let’s go ask him, huh?”
Arsen would have fallen back down when he stood up had the trunk of the maple tree not been close to hand. He felt dizzy for a minute, then a sharp pain commenced in his back, shoulders, and buttocks, as if somebody had beaten him across them with an ax handle. Nevertheless, he pushed away from the trunk and slowly hobbled toward the strange, shaggy, smelly man, John trailing after him.
Closer, he could detect wisps of pale smoke issuing up out of the little stone building to be borne away by an upper-air breeze that he could not feel.
At speaking distance, he said, “Mister, where in hell are we? Do you know why they brought us here? Do you work for whazizname, this archbishop fellow?”
By way of answer, the shaggy man shouted something Arsen could not understand and charged down upon him and John, his stick drawn back for an overhand blow. All pain forgotten, Arsen himself countercharged, running in under the crude weapon to grab the man’s hard-muscled arm, take him on the hip, and throw him, very hard, to the ground. The violent stranger still managed to retain his grip on the stick, but when Arsen kicked him in the armpit, his next kick was able to send the stick spinning across the glade.
Seeing the man’s left hand gliding toward his front midsec-tion where Arsen thought he had spied a scabbarded knife of respectable size, he next kicked the man in the head. The stranger shuddered the entire length of his body, then became utterly limp.
“Jesus H. Christ!” exclaimed John the Greek. “Where in the devil did you learn to do that, Arsen? Did you kill him?”
“In the service, John, in Vietnam. I thought I’d forgot. I guess I got a better memory than I ever thought I had.” He squatted and placed two fingers below the angle of his former opponent’s jaw. “Naw, he’s not dead. God, he stinks, though!”
Roughly, touching the man and his tatters only with his foot, he rolled the inert body over and disarmed it of the big knife. Then he walked on around the small building, but warily, the knife held ready for thrust or slash. There could well be another of the smelly man’s kind inside.
CHAPTER
THE THIRTEENTH
Only six or eight weeks were required to convince Timoteo di Bolgia that the only troops upon whom he and his employers could depend in any crisis were his own company, the Afriquan company, the fortress garrison, and, just possibly, King Tamhas’s personal bodyguards, the Fitzgerald Squadron. His attempts to impose real discipline—the firm foundation of which any army needs must be built—on the rascally galloglaiches and the unhung criminals who were known as bonaghts had resulted ultimately in mutinies, murders and attempted murders, and arson. These had of course been punished by hangings, floggings, and other corporal punishments, the impositions of which had bred large-scale desertions, with concomitant disappearances of weapons, equipment, and horses.
Therefore, Timoteo requested and almost immediately received an audience with the Papal legate, Giosu£ di Rezzi, Archbishop of Munster. Di Bolgia had had a brief meeting with the frail, slender man shortly after his arrival in the Kingdom of Munster, but since then, Sir Ugo D’Orsini had been the condottiere’s liaison with the representative of Rome and the Papacy. Sir Ugo accompanied di Bolgia to this second meeting.
The unnaturally pale little man greeted them both graciously enough, gave them and their purpose a quick blessing, saw them served with a decent wine and a tray of sweetmeats,
then sat in silence, regarding them with pale gray eyes, his long, slender fingers steepled.
Thinking once again that this pitiful specimen of a man was even the more pitiful when compared to what he, Timoteo, recalled of the legate’s illustrious elder brother, Captain Barone Mario di Rezzi, a now deceased Bolognese condottiere of some note in the last generation, rich in goods, honor, and victories won, di Bolgia went directly to the sore point of the matter.
“Your grace di Rezzi, the so-called army of King Tamhas is no such thing. It would better be called what it is—a war band made up of the dregs of society, banditti, murderers, parricides, rapists, robbers, sneak thieves, and cutpurses, along with an unwholesome assortment of berserkers and out-and-out madmen. I have been a soldier, have lived mostly in camps and garrisons, for the most of my life, your grace, and I never have seen a worse aggregation of men than this Royal Munster Army. 1 have seen them do things in broad daylight that dumb beasts would be ashamed to do in the dark of a moonless night!
“They possessed no shred of order or discipline when I arrived here in Munster, and discipline is, as your grace assuredly knows, the keystone in the arch of victory. My attempts—mild ones, at that—to instill discipline upon them have resulted in mutiny, murder, arson, executions, and floggings, and now in a vast number of thefts and desertions.
“Naturally, the king is mightily displeased; any man would be to watch his war band dissipate like dew under a hot sun. Naturally, he blames me directly for everything. That too is to be expected, since I am both a foreigner and a stranger. But he had best not be too openly wroth at me, your grace, for 1 and my companies are now the only troops left that can be depended upon to defend him and whatever portion of his realm can be held.
“Which point, your grace, brings me to what I really sought audience with you to say. Your grace, should King Brian march south again this summer, Munster is his for the plucking. There simply is no way in which I can hold off an army of the size his is reputed to be with the force now available to me, not for any longer than it took King Brian’s army to surround that Munster force and butcher it, and I have never been of a suicidal bent, your grace.
“Now, all things considered and weighed out, it is just possible that this capital city could be held, especially in light of the fact that Impressionant and the other ships give us the complete command of the river and we thus are guaranteed a means of resupply while under siege. But are we to contemplate even this, we must start to work, now, which means that your grace must have words with King Tamhas, immediately.”