Campaigns
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In the lands of the maritime republics,
who ply the seas with trade and spread rumour to every port from Venice and Genoa to Marseilles and Manila, stories have become a sort of currency. In dockside taverns, grim captains may begin their discourse with the weather, but talk inevitably turns. When it does, it turns to gods and monsters, heroic knights and villainous pirates. The manufacture of legend is as much the sailor's trade as it is the bard's, and they all have a tale or two about the Bastard of Mantua.
It may be an off-hand mention; he was with so-and-so, serving this-or-that company, fighting for one city or another. Time and again he turns up, like a tarnished penny that one can't seem to spend. He is never the subject of the tale, but a supporting figure, lending credence to the wild claims—for he is no legend, but a man of flesh and blood. Unlike those tales, this one is his own, and belongs to no other. It is the song of salt and steel, of blood and wine, and all men carry a similar tale in their hearts—either as memory, or as fate.
I. The Unusual Cruelty of Signore Spatafore
If my story was short and simple, I wouldn't be the man that I am now. If I had been the son of a baker, or a chandler, things might have turned out different. Maybe if I had grown up in some castle with a family and servants and food in my belly, I might have been a knight like my father. But I didn't, and I'm not, so there's no use mewling about it.
The only thing I know about my father is that he was a killer, and a good one. Like I said, he was a knight, only he'd lost his lands somehow, wherever he came from. Somewhere up north. France, or Normandy, or maybe England, I don't rightly know. What I do know is that he came to Italy and served the House of Gonzaga for a time, long enough to put me in a whore's belly. The Gonzagas ruled Mantua, sometimes fairly, sometimes not; sometimes with gold and sometimes with steel. My father had spilled enough blood in their name to quit the mercenary business. I'm told he went to Germany, where he settled down with a nice little family. I got left behind.
I don't know who my mother was, only that she was a whore; she must have died when I was very young, because I have no memories of her. As a favor to my father, the Gonzagas took me in and raised me—not among their children, though, for they were almost royal, while I was the bastard son of a mercenary knight. They gave me to their huntsman, a hard man by the name of Spatafore, and he raised me. Not like a son, but like a hound; after all, he didn't have children of his own, so he didn't know how to raise them. But he had plenty of hounds.
I grew up with those dogs, and spent most nights among them in the kennels, because I didn't like sleeping in the house of Signore Spatafore. He was a cruel man, and an angry drunk; he'd spent his whole life beating hounds, and now he had a child to beat. It was a new experience for him, and one that he relished. Once a week, whether he was drunk or not, he'd take me to the yard and lay me under with a leather strop. That was how he beat the insolence out of the hounds, he said. I screamed and cried the first few times, but as I got older, I learned to take my licks in silence.
That's not the only thing I learned, either; I learned how to manage the dogs and the horses, I learned how to hunt with the spear, how to find my way through the woods, and how to keep the lord's hawks. The falconer was an old Florentine named Pazzi who treated me kindly. He'd give me little wooden toys from the village, and called me Astore, which meant goshawk. I wish he could have raised me instead of Spatafore. As good as I was at hawking and hunting stag, my true strength was boar. I knew how to rustle them from their dens, and I never flinched from their charge. I would look into their pitiless black eyes, beady but intelligent, and I always held the boar-spear straight. Pazzi said I liked to look into the eyes of death. I suppose that hasn't changed.
One day I was called to the yard where Spatafore and Pazzi were waiting for me. We were going out on a big hunt, they said. Our lord, Francesco Gonzaga, was feasting his friends and retainers, and he wanted to show them the runs of his game trails. I remember it like it was yesterday. It was summer, hot and humid, and the country estate was too far from the coast for any breeze. On the fifth day of the hunt, we flushed an enormous boar from the thicket: brindled and black, it was a true forest lord, but it was also the third boar of the hunt. In a show of his generosity, Gonzaga made a gift of it to Signore Spatafore. The hounds were in a frenzy, filling the air with their baying as Spatafore squared off and took the boar's charge. He missed his thrust and fell to avoid the rake of the tusks, and he might have been gored to death if I hadn't gotten its attention. It charged me after that, only I didn't miss my thrust. I never do.
Spatafore was livid. In killing the boar, I had done what he could not, and therefore embarrassed him in front of his liege lord. He set to beating me bloody, right there in front of all the nobles. The baying of the hounds grew louder. The sight of the cruelty was distasteful to one of Gonzaga's knights, who drew his sword and made to intervene; Francesco stayed the man with a mere flick of his fingers, and looked on with a face as still as death. That was when I realized he was letting me defend myself. He was waiting to see what I was made of.
I had my spear in my hand, still wet with the blood of the boar, and I used it to skewer Spatafore through the stomach. I didn't flinch. I remember being surprised at how easily the spearhead penetrate his leathers, and the flesh beneath; I remember Spatafore's hands, slippery with blood, trying feebly to pull out the spear as he fell back. The moment he hit the ground, his hounds were on him. Hounds never forget a beating. I was fourteen years old.
"You are your father's son," said Francesco Gonzaga. "A true venator." That was the name he gave me henceforth. Venator. It meant hunter in Latin, and I've used it ever since. It was the only thing I got from my time with Signore Spatafore. That, and the boar's head.
II. The Traitor's Song
The sun beat down on their backs like the strident strokes of a blacksmith's hammer. This was a foreign land, all choked with dust. Even the gods were old and dead. Their own companies had been deployed between the river and the sea, drawn up in a defensive array that curled slightly outward on the flanks.
Across the dead plain, lost in a vague heat shimmer, the enemy approached. He could not see them, but he could hear them: the rhythmic tromp of ten thousand feet. He didn't know their banners, no more than he knew the banners that flew above him. He didn't much care.
"Why do you fight for us?" asked the boy beside him, like a mirror of his thoughts.
"Gold," said the man.
The boy thought for a moment. "I have never fought before. I'll die." His voice was almost a whisper.
"I reckon your first battle is always better than your last," said the man. He turned to look at the boy, and saw that he was a youth, perhaps fourteen years old; he was slight, shaking from nerves, and carried a spear. He wore no armor. "Don't go invitin' death," he continued. "Might be you'll survive."
"How?" asked the boy.
"Stay on the edges. See how the line forms a sort of crescent? That invites an attack at the center. Once they commit, we can close and encircle them. The first bit of a battle is naught but positioning; after that, it's all butcher's work."
"Stay on the edge," the boy repeated.
"Don't run from the cavalry. Knights like nothing better than riding down peasants. Stand firm, plant your spear. Kill their horses, if you can."
"Don't run," echoed the boy.
"Unless everyone else starts running. Then bloody well run. Most importantly, avoid the killers. In any army, most of 'em are going to be your average folk, with morals, with humanity. But there's always a few who don't mess about."
"How will I know the killers?"
"They'll be the quiet ones, once the battle starts," said the man. And then he said no more, for the battle had begun.
He and his companion walked the battlefield in a slow, trundling gait. They were thirsty, bleeding from poorly-bound wounds and weary down to their very bones. Beneath their boots, the loam of the soil was spongy with blood.
The calm of the aftermath was always unsettling, and every whisper of wind set the carrion birds to shrieking. Ugly as it was, this was necessary for survival: they picked their way among the corpses, their packs swollen with what they had pillaged from the dead. The man had not expected to see the boy again. He had almost forgotten him, but there he was. Dead. Gazing empty-eyed up at the sky.
The sunset had turned the world to bronze, and the boy looked like a statue, holding fast to his spear. The back of his head had been cloven by a terrible wound delivered from horseback. His hair was a wet mess of brain and bits of skull. All that he was, and all that he would never be, was scattered over the earth. Food for the crows.
"They rode him down," observed the man as he unsheathed his dagger. "He broke. I told him not to run."
"They always break," his companion said. "They always run."
"That they do," said the man, kneeling to cut a ring from the dead boy's finger. He spat into the dust.
III. The Knight of the Burning Sun
Forthcoming.
IV. Son of the Wind
Forthcoming.
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