The Sword of the Spirits Read Free Page B

city.
    It was after we had put torches to the second field that they came out. I gave them no chance to assemble in battle array but rode down on them in the shadow of their own walls. We lost some men from arrows but once we had closed, the bowmen could not distinguish friend from foe.
    I was happy now, feeling the lifting pulse of battle. Hans rode near me, almost of human stature in the saddle, his voice deeply shouting. I saw fat Blaine rise in his stirrups and deal a Petersfield man a blow that almost severed head from body. For all his fatness he was immensely strong. A horseman, a Captain by his blazon, slashed at me. I parried with my sword which, sliding down from his, skinned his arm. I toppled a trooper from his horse with a thrust under the shoulder. Then they were scattering from us and the battle, if one could call it such, was over.
    They rode for their gates but we rode with them. We secured the North Gate and after that they were a beaten rabble.
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    Michael Smith had been a florid flashy man, a good talker who was proud of his voice and given to merry songs at banquets. He sang well even when drunk. But he was not singing now, or talking. His body shivered as Greene hung round his neck the wooden toys he had sent to me in mockery.
    I felt sick myself. I had no stomach for watching a man die in cold blood. But I also was being watched, by my own army and the people of Petersfield.
    I had been driven to burning the wheatfields, and the trick had worked. It was not so bad to break the rules as long as one won. And ruthlessness followed on from ruthlessness. He had rebelled against his Prince and slain his Prince’s lieutenant. He had earned his death. I only wished I did not have to see it.
    The day was ending with no sign of the sun. The wind had a cold edge and I could have shivered too, but schooled myself against it.
    Greene said in a loud voice: “Let all witness the proper end of a traitor!”
    He looked at me. I raised my hand and droppedit. Strong arms pulled on the rope that hung from the pulley of the gibbet, and Michael Smith gave a single gasp as his body was lifted up. His legs twitched as he hung there. They twitched for a long time before they were still.

TWO
PRINCE OF THE THREE CITIES
    I WENT TO VISIT EDMUND’S mother the day after we returned from Petersfield. I went unaccompanied and would not let the man-servant announce me. He was normal in shape except for a withered arm and had been in her service for more than twenty years. When her husband was killed and my father took the palace he could have stayed there, a high position for a polymuf, but had chosen to go with her to the little house in Salt Street into which she had to move. She was a woman who commanded affection.
    Charles, her elder son, had restored her fortunesto some extent, with bounty won in campaigns under my father and my brother. She lived in West Street now, in a bigger house though one still modest for someone who had been the Prince’s Lady. But she had never troubled herself over wealth or display. I found her in the kitchen, baking bread. She held, as few now did, to the old rule that this was something a housewife did not leave to polymufs. And she had trained her daughter, Jenny, to follow the same tradition. Jenny stood beside her at the well-scoured table, her arms like her mother’s covered with flour.
    Jenny started and looked confused at my appearance. She blushed, and it became her. She had been a plain, thin-faced girl when I had first known her and—an awkward newcomer to the court life which she had lost—had felt the edge of her tongue. She was quite pretty now, especially with her cheeks flushed from the heat of the oven and her present embarrassment.
    I said: “You have flour on your nose, Jenny.”
    It was not true but made her lift her hand automatically to her face. Her nose was floury then. I laughed. She said indignantly,