The Exiled Blade (The Assassini) - By Jon Courtenay Grimwood Page 0,27

dying in their thousands. The vines of France were brittle fingers that would never regrow. The world might as well end, because there’d be nothing to feed those left alive when the snows melted.

“Hurry it up,” he shouted.

The men-at-arms at the back looked at one another and increased their speed. In a day or so they’d look at one another, shrug and one would give up and the other join him. He’d hung the last two to do that. There was nothing like a good hanging for keeping soldiers cheerful. Obviously he’d hung the two least popular men in his troop. Why make trouble for himself by hanging men people liked?

Morgan and Lyle had been new. Survivors of a troop massacred outside Palermo. He’d hung them naked so his men could watch them dance their way to hell, and both had pumped their seed on to the trampled snow, which everyone knew was good luck. Also, hanging stragglers meant more food for the rest. Towler trusted Prince Alonzo would be grateful for all the hardened men he could get, and a more hardened group than this it would be difficult to find. They’d fought in Italy, Austria, Sicily and France. They’d fought for the Medici boy one year and against him the next. That was the way of free companies. Their kind kept the world safe, and he was proud of it. Captain Towler had no fear of God.

In all his life he’d never eaten meat on a Friday. He said his prayers daily, made confession monthly and gave gold to rebuild any churches he’d been forced to destroy. More than one bishop had assured him he’d be welcomed into heaven when the time came. Which he hoped, trusting in God’s mercy, would not be for some years yet.

“Pull them up,” he told a soldier squatting by a tree. “Or have your bollocks drop off from cold.”

“Like that would make a difference,” someone muttered.

Another laughed and the crouching boy blushed.

“Crap your pants if you must,” Towler said more gently, knowing the real answer was don’t crap or piss at all. But the boy was human in a wind-whipped wilderness that made no allowance for that. This is the way the world ends . . . He’d heard a ragged preacher in the town before last say that. Sinners brought this on the rest. God was turning his back on the world.

The preacher was selling misery as enthusiastically as a baker sells hot cakes. Someone called him a liar, someone else said it was true. Towler was glad when the local Watch arrived and his preaching ended in a grunt and a slumping body. Towler had bedded his first whore in weeks that night. Fat and greasy and stinking of garlic and smoke, she swore she wasn’t really in the trade. What she lacked in looks she made up for in willingness and he overtipped disgracefully in gratitude. She’d been so shocked she sucked him for free. Perhaps she’d be his last. If he died on these slopes would it be so bad?

“That’s the cold talking,” Towler muttered. Seeing a man look across, he scowled back. For miles the cold had been telling them to sleep. All any of them had to do was lie down on its white feather bed and the cold would welcome them home. He couldn’t remember a winter like it. No one could. Even the old – who usually claimed that what happened to them was bigger, better or worth more – shook their heads at his question. Towler wanted to know. What others had survived could be survived again and lessons learnt earlier used this time, too.

In the last town the priest said a witch was to blame, and the old women said it was the priest’s fault for forcing people to abandon the old religion. On the day they marched out, Towler’s Company passed the manse burnt out and roofless. An accidental fire, the mayor said. So it might have been, if the priest’s front door hadn’t been nailed shut, with bars of charred oak still bolted across to stop him from escaping.

In five days they’d reach the Red Cathedral. He’d told his men three for obvious reasons. They had food enough for two and imagined themselves able to do the last day hungry. Tell them they had to survive three days without food and they’d realise they weren’t going to arrive at all. Since Towler was refusing to admit that possibility to himself