C dale brittain, p.1
C. Dale Brittain, page 1
Brittain, C. Dale - Count Scar
C DALE BRITTAIN
ROBERT A, BOUCHARD
COUNT SCAR
Chapter One ~ Caloron
1
Snow had fallen steadily all day, muffling the sounds of hooves. As we sat around a blazing hearth, celebrating New Years, we did not even realize anyone
had arrived until the guards brought them into the hall: the messengers come to
tell me I was going to be count.
Everything was as abruptly transformed as if the wintry night had been ripped away to reveal the summer sun. A few minutes ago I had been staring unseeing into my wine glass, thinking that the purposeless and fruitless year just over
was about to be replaced by another equally purposeless, but now in an instant
possibilities and opportunities waited on every hand. I was too startled at first to show any emotion at all.
My nephews were the most excited. “A count! With your own county! Can we come visit you, Uncle? Is it as good as being emperor?”
My older brother the archduke, far more exalted than any count, tried his best
not to seem patronizing. “A place of your own at last, Caloran!” he said, resting his elbows benevolently on the trestle table before him. Was there the
slightest emphasis on “at last”? “Well, after all your service to the emperor and to me, God knows you deserve it.”
His wife, my sister-in-law, was less successful in the sincerity of her congratulations. “Isn’t that the little county up in the mountains your grandfather came from originally?”
“I understand he was delighted to be able to come north and become an archduke.”
She paused to finish delicately biting the flesh from a roasted bird’s wing.
“I’m sure you’ll be glad to be down there, however, where you won’t always have
to wonder if you’re in our way.”
The messengers had pulled off their travel cloaks and stamped the snow from their boots and now warmed their hands by the fire. Their skin was darker than
anyone’s around here, and their eyes black and shadowed. They watched me as though intensely interested, although I had the least to say of anybody. The bouteillier brought them hot mulled wine, and they continued to observe me as they sipped it.
My niece had retreated shyly behind her mother when they first came in, but now
she darted across the rush-strewn floor and threw herself into my lap. “Are you
really going away, Uncle Caloran?”
There were tears at the corners of her eyes, but as I bounced her on my knee I
felt a wash of pure joy pour over me. A county of my own, land and income of my
own, a castle and knights to direct as I pleased. No more sharp comments from a
sister-in-law who would clearly have preferred that I never existed, no more landless service to an older brother whose constant and rather forced good-humor
toward me seemed intended to make it seem that he had forgotten what neither he
nor I could ever forget.
And maybe as a count in the south, something more than a scarred and landless man, I would find women, well-bred and elegant women, who would tolerate my attentions. After all, I tried to persuade myself, plenty of men came back from
the wars every year with much more disfiguring scars than mine.
“I’ll miss you, Gertrude,” I told my niece, meaning it but unable to keep from
smiling. Her blond braids had worked out from under her little bonnet as I bounced her. “Yes, I shall have to go away.”
She reached up then and touched the left side of my face, the large reddish patch whose texture was more like leather than human skin, where the beard would
never grow. Gertrude’s brothers had each in turn asked about my face when they
had first reached the age of wondering about the adults around them, rather than
simply accepting whatever they had found in the world when they came into it.
Gertrude had never asked, but then she was still very young.
“If you’re leaving, Uncle Caloran, I want to ask you something first. Why does
your face look like this? And,” turning in the circle of the arm that held her,
“your hand?”
“It’s an old burn,” I said easily, as I had said before to my nephews. “From a
fire a long time ago, when I wasn’t much more than a boy. Did you know you’re named for someone who used to live here in this castle,” I added as though irrelevantly, “someone also named Gertrude? Your parents will tell you about her
some time when you’re older.”
For a second my brother Guibert looked toward me, but he cast his eyes down before they met mine.
“Does it hurt?” asked Gertrude with grave concern.
“Not now. It hurt horribly once, of course—and watch how you stand on my legs,
or you will hurt me even more!” I laughed as I seated her again on my lap.
“It’s
never kept your old uncle from being a good fighting man, as my years in the emperor’s service proved.”
“You’re not so very old, Uncle,” she protested.
But one of the messengers interrupted before I could answer. “You are the emperor’s sworn man?”
“Of course,” I said, surprised at the note in his voice. “I fought up and down
the Empire for five years as his liege man.”
The messengers conferred for a moment in lowered voices. I had already noticed
that they had a trace of an accent, and what they spoke now did not sound like
any language I knew. I felt a brief moment of doubt. In spite of the great fire
on the hearth, in spite of the warm lump of Gertrude—shy again—on my lap, my brothers hall was chill on this cold night, and drafts found their way through
the carpeting covering the narrow windows. Would the men who were going to be under my command even understand the orders I gave them?
“You see, my lord,” said a messenger, and it took me a second to realize that he
was addressing me and not my brother, “Duke Argave expects all the counts of the
region to swear liege homage to him. His honor demands it. But down in the south
the Empire is distant enough that it may not matter that you once took an oath
to someone else.”
And the emperor was unlikely ever to hear about it, or care if he did. Five years in his service was all he wanted before taking on a fresh crop of noble fighting men to captain his soldiers.
“Duke Argave?” I repeated aloud. I realized I knew virtually nothing about the
county which I had just inherited. My grandfather, himself a younger brother, had come from there originally, but he had already been old when I knew him, and
I had had scarce time as a boy for an old man’s stories. That had been, of course, before the fire.
“We are the duke’s men. Did you not hear us say so? It was he who chose you.”
I almost expected my brother to make some jovial comment about he and Duke Argave being fellow dukes, but for once Guibert was silent. They might once have
met at the royal court, however; when I had him alone I would have to ask.
“There was a choice?” I asked the messengers slowly. “I was not the only possible heir?”
“The countess’s death being so sudden, of course, and with some saying—” The messengers had been suave and assured, but now their assurance cracked. “But here,” pressing a sealed letter into my hand. “You can read about it yourself.”
I sent Gertrude back to her mother. My sister-in-law had started laughing and talking to her boys again as they ate, as though uninterested in my county.
Guibert, however, was not even pretending not to listen.
The parchment roll was sealed with red wax, impressed with the image of a man on
horseback. Around the image, very tiny, were the words, Argavius dux. I broke the seal with my thumb and unrolled it slowly.
My new liege lord the duke might have men who spoke a language I couldn’t understand, but his chancellor wrote a fair hand. The letter started with flowery invocations of the triune God, told me that it was an honor to be the first to address me by my new title of Count, and then got down to the hard details.
“The countess’s sudden death left the county without a head at the worst possible time,” Duke Argave told me, “just when there are rumblings from those
despicable fools over the border, and rumors that the heretics may be spreading
their spew again, not just back in the mountains but in the towns themselves.”
I
had no idea what he was talking about. “And a second death so soon after the first makes it even worse. Her husband, of course, acts as though it has never
occurred to him that doubt might fall upon him, and was outraged when he learned
I would not accept him as successor. When you have met him, I would like to learn your opinion of him. I think you can guess mine.”
I looked toward the fire, not seeing it. There were suspicious circumstances, then, surrounding the death of my predecessor the countess, my own second cousin, a woman I had never even met. And not all of my new subjects might welcome me gladly since there was apparently another claimant to the county.
Visions of lying back in the warm, soft grass under the olive trees, several silk-robed maidens arrayed around me, faded before I could even begin to enjoy
them. I knew how to talk to children and how to talk to soldiers, not to politicians and learned men of law. I took a deep breath. It appeared I would be
learning soon. “You can’t be harder to face than the emperors enemies—or for that matter the emperor himself,” I muttered to the distant duke and turned back
to his letter.
“My messengers will escort you to your new home,” Duke Argave concluded.
“Make
whatever preparations you may need and come as quickly as you may. I shall expect you each day I do not see you.” He had drawn a monogram for his signature, a tall “A” with the other letters dangling off it, in a heavy hand that left a wider line from the quill than his chancellor’s.
I leaned back, slowly starting to smile again. The duke with his insinuations might have meant a dozen things, but by the time I had learned what he really believed I would be lord of my own castle.
The snow fell heavily that night and kept the roads closed for the best part of
a week, and I spent the time making my preparations, but I could have done them
all in a single day. For thirty years I had been a son of this castle, and yet
how little effort there seemed now in preparing to leave it behind me.
When I had first gone off to the imperial court, as a little boy who had scarcely begun to trace his letters on a wax tablet, I remembered my mother and
her ladies spending frantic weeks in the preparation of my clothes and supplies.
When I had gone again to the emperor’s court, this time as a young man sworn to
fight in his service, there had been months spent in readying the armor, the weapons, and the warhorses, not just for me but for the knights who would follow
my banner. Both my parents had been gone by then to the convent in the next valley— my father to the mausoleum, my mother to pray among the nuns for another
two years yet—but my brother Guibert had followed all my preparations closely,
grudging, I knew, everything I spent because it all came from his budget, but refusing to say that he begrudged it.
Now there was little to do but pack a few warm clothes for the journey—I would
buy new in the south, where I had heard they had recently started wearing shoes
with long pointed toes—polish my armor, and sharpen the excellent sword I had received from the emperor’s hands. The messengers had brought spare horses with
them, distrusting northern steeds, and everything else could wait until I reached my county. I would take nothing this time from Guibert. It was easy now
to leave the castle because it was no longer my home. It was his alone and his
sharp-voiced wife’s.
Only one person from here would accompany me, Bruno, the old soldier who had fought under me and who had asked the emperor to release him to follow me home
when I left imperial service.. Too stiff in the joints to be much of a warrior
any more, he liked to think of himself as my bodyguard, but I thought of him as
my friend.
“No more biting winter winds, Captain,” he said with relish, “once we live among
the olive trees down in the south.”
Guibert took me aside the evening we finally decided that the weather had cleared enough to start in the morning. For a moment I wondered if he was going
to talk at last about Gertrude, but of course he did not. “For your journey,”
he
said gruffly, pushing a small jingling pouch into my hand.
I accepted it with a nod and without counting it. The money the emperor had given me when I left his service was long gone, and while I trusted the duke’s
messengers would have enough for the journey, something extra was never amiss.
“I met this Duke Argave once,” Guibert said, “when we were both at the royal court at the same time.” Over at this edge of the kingdom we served the emperor
more than the king, but my brother was liege man of both— something he had never
told either one, though they doubtless knew and didn’t care, as long as the peace held between them. “The duke asked quite a bit about our grandfather,”
he
continued, “how he had come to marry an heiress and become an archduke. He seemed better informed on our grandfathers ancestry than I am myself.”
“What is this Duke Argave himself like?” I asked.
“Dangerous.” Guibert let the word hang for a moment. I had never credited my brother with much imagination, but perhaps I had underestimated him. “Watch yourself around him, Caloran. There are always rumors of intrigue from the south, and at least one new count riding up every year to swear fidelity to the
king long after unfortunate accidents to their predecessors, but Argave has so
far survived them all, for far longer than either you or I have lived.”
I would have to become the kings man as well as Duke Argave’s, then. Someone, I
hoped, would understand all my new responsibilities and deign to share the information with me. But any trips back to the north, I resolved, could wait until summer.
“Argave,” added Guibert slowly, “has, how shall I express this, the manners of a
dancing master, including both the elegance of style and the love of intrigue,
but the soul of an assassin.”
2
The trip south took close to a month, over roads either deep in snow or, as we
began approaching my new county, thick with mud. The inns were crowded and fetid; the monastery guest-houses were cleaner but the food there worse. Once among sullen gray hills we fought off an ambush, and another time we outran a pack of twenty bandits. Bruno’s horse broke a leg, and we were outbargained on
the price in buying a new one. Four times we became seriously lost, and once we
had to swim the horses across an icy river when the duke’s messengers could not
find the ford they insisted had been there when they came north.
Although I tried questioning them about my county, they resisted both open and
subtle questions. The closest I got to interesting information was one beginning
to tell me that my new castle had long been rumored to have hidden passages, maybe even lost treasures, but the other silenced him. They did, however, know a
number of delightful southern songs, some bawdy, some sweetly sentimental, which
they were happy to teach Bruno and me. We sang the bawdier ones in the evening
at the inns and the more sentimental ones at the monastery guesthouses.
As we continued south, even through treacherous countryside, I could feel dropping away behind me all the oppressive weight of living on the charity of my
brother. It was as though the scar itself was peeling away from my face, though
I could still see it there in the polished metal of my mirror. And if the thought of leaving Guibert’s castle further behind with every step was not always enough to push me forward, then I could always imagine the county waiting
for me.
The vision of the sun dappling the soft grass through the olive branches kept me
going as we left the snows behind for sleet and cold rain and started at last into the southern mountains, with their steep uphill climbs and jaw-dropping descents. The vision lasted until, after a long day’s ride up an increasingly rocky incline through barren fields, the messengers pulled up their horses to point.
“There’s your castle. There’s Peyrefixade.”
My mouth fell open. Bruno at my shoulder muttered, “It’s like somebody wanted to
stick a thumb in the eye of God.”
Thrust up from a knife-ridge of rock far above us, the dark red castle was the
best positioned for defense I had ever seen. The faint track of the road before
us twisted back and forth, back and forth, in its slow ascent. As we watched, a
dark rain cloud came down the ridge and obscured the castle from sight. Night reached us at the same time. I sighed, knowing in my thoroughly chilled bones that while dragging all the stones for the castle up to that peak no one had thought to install a modern fireplace.
That evening I was too tired to inspect my new castle properly. The castle seneschal greeted me and formally passed the huge iron key of the front gate into my keeping. He appeared gaunt, the skin on his neck and arms slack as though he had recently lost weight rapidly, but I was too exhausted to wonder about his troubles. I received the bows and murmured welcomes of the knights and
