III
Rycerz Telek Rydz herbu Bojcza watched his men relieve the Teutonic invaders of their weaponry. With each sword taken, a small weight was lifted off him, though he exercised as much restraint in hiding his relief as he had earlier in hiding his apprehension. Despite the forced joviality he projected, he knew that no good thing could come from the presence of the Order’s knights in Masovia. Christ only knew what carnage they had wrought on the far side of the river, or to what end.
But the last thing he wanted—the last thing his uncle wanted, and, for that matter, the last thing Duke Siemowit III wanted—would be a convent of dead knights giving the Order a pretext to resume the hostilities that had ended a decade ago, breaking a peace that had only just been ratified by a treaty between the Order and the Duke’s brother, Casimir.
Whatever horror these knights had wrought across the river from Gród Narew, he couldn’t help but think that the men he saw had fared worse than their opponent. The stench of defeat hung upon them like a shroud, and the fact that Brother Heinrich had come here and surrendered was testament to how badly things had gone.
Without direct confirmation from Brother Heinrich—and Telek supposed he would have to wait for a bishop to receive that—he estimated Heinrich’s original party as numbering at least a score of mounted knights. If Brother Heinrich had originally had a full convent of warrior monks with him, that would have accounted for about twelve of that number. The rest would be either probationary members who had not yet taken their final vows as monks, or more secular knights looking to buy a way to Heaven with the tip of a sword—though those were more often seen in the Order’s periodic crusades against the pagan Lithuanians.
The survivors looked to be either knights of the Order or probationary members. The tabards were all white and black, and if Telek remembered his German heraldry correctly, the men who wore an incomplete cross were probationary monks who hadn’t taken their final vows. What he didn’t recognize was the wolf’s head that marked the upper left quadrant of Brother Heinrich’s tabard.
Telek guessed it was some obscure signifier of the monk’s rank in the Order. Either that, or the Order had given up the one thing it shared with the Poles: a distaste for the chaos of personal devices that seemed to plague the German nobility. A black cross on a white field was good enough for all the members of the Order, just as the triple cross was good for all the families of clan Bojcza.
When his men had retrieved all the swords and crossbows, Telek raised his arm and gestured a circle above his head. The watch up on the fortress wall would let his uncle know that things had concluded peacefully. He turned to one of his men and said, “Ride back. Send down stable hands to take charge of these horses and a party to help tend to the wounded here, with a cart to carry them back up the hill.” He glanced up and saw one of the servingwomen from the fortress standing on the hillside, watching them. He pointed to her. “You, woman: come down and assist us with the wounded.”
Negotiating the transfer of fourteen knights from the riverside up into the fortress consumed the bulk of the morning hours. Telek supervised every detail, from the washing and binding of wounds, to walking the Germans’ horses into a walled pasture, to loading the wounded into a hay cart.
By the time his uncle’s guardsmen led the last of the knights back to Gród Narew, he was left by the river with sixteen swords, a half dozen crossbows, and a pile of random armor—damaged, gore-stained, and already attracting a host of flies.
He also had two corpses, men who had died in the Order’s retreat from—
“From what?” Telek said.
“Sir?” one of his men said from behind him. Telek turned around and saw that the man had just finished loading the Order’s weapons into another cart.
“What were those men fighting?” Telek asked.
“I don’t care to know, sir. Deadly evil business it is.” The man spat and gestured to ward off the evil the Order’s men had brought with them.
“They’ll only bare their souls to a bishop.” Telek looked back at the bodies and the damaged armor. “Perhaps they rode through Hell itself.”
“Sir, should you jest about that?”
Telek laughed. “Son, you sound like one of those monks.”
“But their wounds. They’re more like bites, claw marks …”
“They likely ran afoul of a mountain cat.” Telek thought of the odd addition to Brother Heinrich’s tabard. “Or a pack of wolves.”
“Have you looked at these weapons?”
Telek shook his head and walked up to the back of the cart. With the swords and crossbows were a pile of daggers. He picked one up and drew it from its scabbard. The sunlight glinted from a wicked blade, ornately engraved with German script that Telek could barely read. He snorted. “A little ostentatious for someone who’s taken a vow of poverty.”
“Look at the metal, sir.”
Telek squinted at it and frowned. “Silver?”
“And this.” The man held up a quarrel for one of the crossbows. Telek sheathed the dagger and took the quarrel, looking at the head of the weapon.
It was silver as well.
“Is the Order so wealthy that they tip their bolts with precious metal?” He placed the quarrel and the sheathed dagger down in the bed of the cart and picked up one of the knights’ long swords. He gripped the scabbard tightly and paused before taking the handle, suddenly feeling some of the apprehension that his man was showing.
He slowly drew the blade clear of the scabbard—only a handsbreadth, but enough to see. Apparently the Order wasn’t wealthy enough to forge a whole sword blade out of silver, but the more common steel had been inlaid with the precious metal. The truly odd part of the design was the fact that the inlay was not on the flat, where most decorative engraving would go. It was on the edge. The sword blade was silvered a finger’s width back from the cutting edge on each side.
Perhaps he shouldn’t be talking too lightly of riding through Hell.
Telek was usually the largest and most intimidating figure in any gathering, except when that gathering included his uncle. Telek’s uncle, the Wojewoda Bolesław, the lord of Gród Narew, was a bull of a man, nearly a head taller than Telek and probably three stone heavier. He carried a full beard that had gone half silver, and in some places completely white. Telek’s uncle had not shaved in nearly fifteen years—not since, in a skirmish with their Teutonic neighbors, a mace had badly wounded the left side of his jaw. The beard covered the scars and the misshapen hinge of the badly healed bone.
As a consequence, Telek’s uncle always spoke deliberately, and had no love for the German Order.
When Telek entered his uncle’s chambers, Bolesław was standing by a narrow window, eclipsing the afternoon sun and plunging the room into shadow. “Our guests surrendered peaceably?”
“Yes, Uncle,” Telek said.
“Good.” Bolesław turned away from the window and stepped toward him. Suddenly the room brightened, both with the sunlight and with his slight, close-lipped smile. “A lack of drama and intrigue is always appreciated.” He walked over to an ornate chair that had been a gift from the Duke. It was debatable what creaked more when Bolesław sat—the carved oak chair or Bolesław himself. He settled himself with a sigh and asked, “Why are they here?”
“They refused to say.”
Bolesław grunted. “You accepted this?”
“They were willing to surrender their persons and their weapons. It seemed prudent to take them hostage and revisit the issue at a later time.”
“Yes, I am sure. Though, in their state, it seems foolhardy to antagonize us.”
“Unless the truth would be more provocative than their silence.”
“God’s teeth, I do not like this. The duchy might already be at war with the Order.”
“We’re on the frontier here. We would know.”
“But what if Casimir and the Order are at odds again? The Duke is still a vassal of his brother.”
“Uncle, they just signed a peace treaty.”
“Good until some fool gets an itch for more land.”
“I don’t think war’s at hand, Uncle. These men did not approach us as an enemy.”
“They were in no state to.”
“And, while they are currently silent as to their intent within Masovia, they gave conditions for revealing that to us.”
“Indeed? Conditions? I thought arrogance was a sin.”
“They require a bishop to give them leave to talk.”
“A bishop? Are they serious?”
“I have no reason to doubt.”
Bolesław closed his eyes and leaned back in the chair, which emitted an ominous creak. “No reason to doubt?”
“Their seriousness,” Telek said.
His uncle opened his eyes and stared at the ceiling. “Who am I to stand between these Germans and God? They wish a bishop, we shall fetch one. There’s a fine one in Warsaw. You can fetch him back after alerting the Duke of our troublesome guests.”