- -
- 100%
- +
Many men die without ever learning it.»
From that day onward Gavel never again confused his own invulnerability with the safety of those who fought beside him.
Years later, when he commanded not ten men but entire companies, he would first ask not what he himself could endure, but what ordinary men under his command could survive.
He would never again send men into an assault merely because he could survive it himself.
By midwinter von Teschen’s army went into winter quarters in a ruined border town whose name Gavel never properly remembered. Too many such towns looked alike: half-collapsed palisades, burned roofs, and inhabitants who watched a foreign army with the peculiar mixture of fear and exhausted submission.
For the first time in months, Gavel had enough time not merely to fight and survive, but to think.
He wrote to his father twice that winter — short letters dictated to a military clerk because Gavel’s own writing remained uncertain and his sword-weary hands did not obey the pen well.
No answer came.
He assumed the letters had been lost. Wartime correspondence was unreliable.
He did not know the truth.
Spring brought the war back in full force.
There were marches, skirmishes over crossings, and a siege of a small border fortress that lasted two miserable months of hunger, lice, and rain.
Gavel took part in three assaults.
During the last, when the walls finally fell, he commanded a small group of young warriors rather than fighting only for himself.
Von Teschen had begun to notice something besides the young man’s strength.
He noticed his calm.
«You are no madman,» the old knight told him after one battle, wiping his blade on the edge of a dead man’s cloak.
«You are not a boy charging forward for the sake of a minstrel’s song.
That is rare.
There may be something in you after all.»
Thus passed Gavel’s first year of war.
He had left Waldeck a beardless young man.
He returned from that year as a warrior whose name was beginning to travel beyond his own small company.
The real fame — and with it the real danger — was still ahead.
The Night Visitor
The first attempt on his life came a year later, in a frontier camp, on the night after a brief lull in the fighting. The camp stood on the bank of a shallow, stony river among scattered pines, its rough canvas tents smelling of smoke and sweat and crowded in rows along a hastily dug ditch.
Gavel woke not to a sound, but to a shadow — to the slight disturbance of air above his face, caught by senses far sharper than any ordinary man’s a heartbeat before the blow. He rolled aside, and the dagger aimed at his throat tore only through the edge of the bedroll stuffed with dry grass.
The struggle was brief and filthy, fought in the darkness of the tent among tangled straps and overturned campware: a metal cup, a wooden bowl, a saddlebag. Gavel overcame the attacker with his bare hands, breaking his wrist and pinning him to the ground with a knee before his companions came running with torches.
The assassin was a wiry man dressed in plain dark clothes without any identifying mark. They questioned him until dawn. He was tough and silent, but not tough enough to withstand everything men experienced in questioning prisoners knew how to do to a man whose attempt had nearly killed a noble knight. Near morning he gave the name of an intermediary — a merchant known for doing business with church landholders — and then, before he could say more, he suddenly sagged and died without regaining consciousness, as though something inside him had simply snapped.
Gavel stood over the body for a long time, unable to decide what disturbed him more: the attempt itself, or the ease with which someone’s will had reached even into the interrogation pit to silence a hired killer.
He had no time to solve the mystery. Three days later, a letter arrived that changed everything.
A House Without a Master
The messenger found him after a short truce — a weary man covered in road dust, wearing a battered cloak bearing the arms of the local judge. The news was dry, almost burned into the paper: Sir Konrad von Waldeck had died, and all his property — lands, castle, livestock, servants — was to pass into the possession of the Church under a deed of gift he had drawn up himself.
The first thing Gavel felt was not grief, but shock: an inner silence, as though the world around him had stopped making a sound. He read the deed three times, tracing the lines with one finger as though the letters might rearrange themselves into something else if he looked again. The messenger, receiving neither question nor answer, shifted awkwardly and cleared his throat, saying he would carry back a reply if there was one. Gavel said nothing. He stared at the judge’s seal at the bottom of the page as though that lump of wax were the only thing left of his father.
Grief came later, in the saddle, two hours into the journey home. It came suddenly and whole, crashing over him so hard that he nearly dropped the reins. He remembered not his father’s final years, when the man had seemed dimmed and withdrawn, but the years before: a warm hand on his shoulder after his first successful sword stroke, the smell of smoke and wine clinging to his father’s cloak when he was a child, the voice that had read aloud a story about a hero who fought a serpent to save a maiden.
He remembered that, as a boy, he had feared only one thing: that his father might fail to come and wish him good night. Now his father would never come again, and the simple finality of that thought stopped Gavel’s breath as sharply as a blow beneath the ribs.
He begged his commander for a short leave and rode home for three days without stopping, changing horses at every posting inn and allowing himself no more sleep than horse and rider required to keep from collapsing. The road wound through forests already turning yellow, past villages where children shrank back against fences at the sight of a rider hurrying along in a travel cloak. With every mile, the heavy, inexplicable dread in Gavel’s chest grew thicker.
He saw the castle from a distance — and did not recognize it. The gates stood wide open, something he had never seen even in broad daylight. The granaries gaped empty, as though they had been gutted from within. In the courtyard, where training swords had once rung, strangers in dark ecclesiastical robes moved about methodically, recording what remained of the household’s possessions on wax tablets for removal.
There were at least a dozen of them — scribes and servants of the bishop’s chancery in plain robes. At their head, seated in the middle of the yard on a carved stool apparently brought from the lord’s hall, sat a man Gavel had never seen. He was middle-aged and heavy, clean-shaven, with a ring on one plump hand. He later introduced himself as Brother Gunther, the diocesan steward, sent to «put in order and take possession of the lands bequeathed to Holy Mother Church by the late Sir Konrad von Waldeck of his own free will and for the salvation of his soul.» Beside him stood a younger scribe reading aloud an inventory: «family shield, darkened, one; mail shirt, old and repaired, one; swords, two, one blunt and unserviceable; chest of linens, one; empty chest…» His voice was flat and bored, as though he were reading an ordinary market register rather than the last possessions of another man’s life.
Gavel dismounted at the gate and walked slowly into the yard. The first thing he felt was not yet rage, but the same numbness that had seized him when he read the judge’s letter. It did not last long.
«What is happening here?»
His voice was quieter than he intended, but in the silence it carried across the whole courtyard.
Brother Gunther looked up without surprise, as though he had been expecting the young Waldeck and had prepared himself for the meeting.
«Ah,» he said with the particular polite boredom of a well-fed man speaking to someone whose grief could not touch him. «So you are the young Waldeck. We are taking an inventory of property transferred to the Church under the lawful deed of your late father. Everything is being done according to the rules, young man. You need not worry.»
«This is my father’s house.» Gavel did not move, but steel had entered his voice. «My house.»
«It was your father’s house,» one of the scribes corrected mildly without raising his eyes from the tablet. «It is now, according to the deed signed and sealed by Sir Konrad himself before witnesses, the property of the diocese.»
«Show me the deed.»
Brother Gunther sighed like a man for whom such scenes had long ago become an exhausting but unavoidable part of his work, and waved to the younger scribe. The man handed over the scroll. Gavel unrolled it with fingers trembling from restrained fury and saw his father’s signature, uneven and hurried, nothing like the firm hand with which Konrad had once signed household accounts.
«This is not his hand,» Gavel said quietly, though somewhere inside he already knew he was wrong. The writing had been distorted not by forgery, but by illness — the trembling that had seized his father during his final, terrible days.
«Witnesses will confirm the signature in any ecclesiastical court, young man,» Brother Gunther said, rising from his stool and brushing his robes. «I would not advise you to challenge the will of the dead, particularly when the deed was made for the salvation of his soul. A pious and commendable act. Many sons in your position would be grateful that their father cared for his fate in the next world rather than leaving everything to worldly disputes.»
«Pious,» Gavel repeated. Something in his voice made the nearest scribes glance up. «You call this pious? Taking inventory of a dead man’s last shirt while his son has not even learned where his body was buried?»
Something shifted in the courtyard. The scribes exchanged looks. Someone looked away. For the first time Brother Gunther did not answer at once, choosing his words more carefully.
«You should ask the parish priest about the burial,» he said at last. There was a note in his voice Gavel could not yet fully identify — something between discomfort and warning.
Gavel stepped forward, and his hand settled of its own accord on the hilt of his sword — not yet to strike, but plainly enough that the two armed servants accompanying the Church commission shifted their halberds into a more ready grip.
«Young master,» came a familiar voice behind him. «Not here. Not like this.»
The Steward’s Truth
Old Mirek, the village headman, was a man of about sixty, his face cut by wrinkles and his hands hardened by fieldwork. He was the only one who recognized Gavel without looking away. He drew the young man aside, beyond the hearing of the strangers, around the corner of the empty stable, gripping his elbow almost painfully until they were far enough from the Church men.
«Don’t give them a reason,» he whispered urgently. «Not here. Here they have the law and the deed. You have only a sword and anger, and that is not enough against the Church. Believe an old man.»
«Mirek,» Gavel said, forcing his voice lower, «where is my father? Where did they bury him?»
Mirek was silent for a long time, twisting an old hare-fur cap in his hands. The silence told Gavel more than any answer could have.
«Your father…» Mirek began at last, struggling for the words. «In the final month he lost his reason almost completely. Every day he went to Father Oswald, and later he began going to the square as well. He shouted that Satan himself had tempted him in the Holy Land, that an evil spirit had entered him through some pagan temple and had never let him go. And then — forgive me, master — he said the same mark was upon you. That the Devil had marked you too, through his blood.»
Gavel stood motionless, as though all the air had been drained from him. He heard the headman’s words, but they reached him as though through deep water — distant, muffled, stripped of the sharpness they should have carried.
«To save your soul, that is what he said publicly, he gave everything he owned to the Church. He signed the deed before witnesses. And then…»
Mirek stopped. He did not need to finish. Gavel could already see the answer in his face.
«Tell me,» Gavel forced out. His voice sounded strange, as though someone else were speaking through his mouth. «Tell me everything, Mirek. I have to know.»
«He drove a sword into his own chest. In front of everyone. They took the body from the square before noon.»
Mirek crossed himself before continuing, as though the words themselves might bring danger upon him.
«Father Oswald refused him a Christian burial. A suicide, he said. The Devil had touched him, and such a man could not be laid in consecrated ground. They took the body beyond the town wall, past the old ditch where they bury hangmen’s victims and unbaptized infants. No service. No cross. No stone to remember him by.»
Something happened inside Gavel then — not like a blow, but like a collapse, slow and irreversible, as though the ground beneath his whole life had opened.
He understood with terrifying clarity that he could not visit his father’s grave, because in the ordinary sense there was no grave. He could not order a memorial service, because no priest in the district would pray for a soul declared damned. He could not even set up a simple wooden cross, because that nameless ditch beyond the wall was meant to accept nothing but oblivion.
He remembered all the years his father had knelt in the little wooden church, moving his lips in the silent confession he had never been able to finish. Now Gavel understood what that confession had been about. He understood the burden his father had carried alone for two decades — and how, in the end, that burden had crushed him, while the Church, instead of offering comfort, answered with a refusal even to grant him a final resting place.
«The lands belong to the Church now, master,» Mirek continued more quietly. «Anyone who tried to object was branded a heretic. Two men were burned at the stake before your father’s blood had even dried. Old Jost nearly suffered the same fate. He was the only one brave enough to call the deed extortion in public, but the whole garrison stood behind him, and the Churchmen did not dare challenge fifty armed men at once. They merely drove him beyond the gates without a penny.»
In those centuries, heresy was an astonishingly flexible weapon. It could be used not only against open dissent, but against the simple refusal to obey a powerful ecclesiastical landholder. Burning a condemned heretic was formally a matter for secular authorities under canon law — a distinction that offered little comfort to those who died at the stake.
Gavel remained silent, staring at the empty windows of the castle where his father had once told him stories of the Crusades and checked that the shutters were barred against the winter wind. He did not weep. Something warm and human inside him seemed to freeze forever in those minutes, giving way to something harder and colder.
He felt as though he stood on the edge of an abyss. He could fall into despair, madness, into the same oblivion to which the Church had already consigned his father by denying him even the right to be remembered. The only thing holding him back was neither faith nor hope, but a blunt, animal stubbornness — the strength that Jost had once said came not from training, but from somewhere deeper inside.
«What am I supposed to do now, Mirek?» he asked at last, not so much of the headman as of the emptiness around them.
«Run, master. Run east, to distant lands where the Church’s hand is short. Or become stronger than it. But in all my years, I have never seen a man do that.»
Gavel stared for a long time at the ruined courtyard — the strangers in robes methodically finishing their inventory, Brother Gunther settling again onto the carved stool with the air of a man whose day was nearly done and who had only to seal the papers.
Something in Gavel’s gaze froze at last into something hard as his father’s blade, tempered in cold water.
«To run would mean admitting they are right,» he said quietly. «That my father truly was cursed. That his blood bears the Devil’s mark, rather than the blood of a man who carried too heavy a secret for too long. I will not run, Mirek. I will not give them that victory as well — not after the house, not after his final resting place.»
Gavel gave a tired smile without humor.
«Then I will be the first man who proved stronger.»
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен ООО «Литрес».
Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на Литрес.
Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.