Century of the Soldier: The Collected Monarchies of God (Volume Two) by Paul Kearney Read Free Book Online

recognized as the rightful heir. And if Abeleyn were as near death as everyone supposed, then surely it made sense to secure the succession. Couldn't they see that? Or must they be made to see it?
    She lay naked on the wide bed in her suite. The short day was almost over and the room was dark but for the blaze of a fire in the huge hearth that dominated one wall. At least they had quartered her in the palace. That was something. She regarded her body in the firelight, running her hands up and down it as a man might with a horse he meant to buy. The swelling was visible now, a bulge that marred the otherwise perfect symmetry of her shape. She frowned at it. Childbirth. Such a messy, painful affair. Even messier if one sought to avoid it. She remembered the blood and her own shrieking the night she rid herself of Richard Hawkwood's first child. Nothing could be worse than that.
    Her breasts were filling out. She cupped them, ran her slender fingers down her abdomen to where the hair sprang in ebony curls at her crotch. She stroked herself there absently, thinking. She thought of her body as an instrument, a tool to be utilized with the utmost efficiency. It was her key to a better life, this flesh and all that it contained.
    She sprang up, pulled round her shoulders a robe of Nalbenic silk and padded barefoot to the door. A moment to gather herself, to rehearse her words, and then she yanked open the heavy portal in a rush.
    "Quickly, quickly - you there!"
    There were two guards, not one. She must have caught them as they were changing shifts. It made her hesitate, but only for the fraction of a second.
    "There's something in my room - a rat. You must come and look!"
    The two soldiers were members of the Abrusio garrison, veterans of the battle to retake the city. They were rough, untutored swordsmen who had not been told why they were to guard the lady Jemilla's door, only that her every move was to be reported direct to General Mercado. They hung back, and one said: "I'll get your lady's maidservant."
    "No, no, you fools. She can't abide rats any more than I can. Get in there and kill it for me, for God's sake. Are you men at all?"
    Jemilla was beautifully unkempt, one shoulder gleaming pale as ivory above the robe she clutched together at her breasts. The two soldiers looked at one another, and one shrugged. They marched into her chambers.
    Jemilla followed them, shutting the door behind her. The soldiers poked under the bed, along the wall hangings.
    "I believe it's gone, lady," one of them said, and then said no more but simply stared. Jemilla had dropped her robe and was standing incandescently nude before them, touching herself, her body undulating like a willow in a breeze.
    "It's been so long," she said. "Won't you please help me?"
    "Lady -" one of the men said hoarsely. He held out a hand as if to ward her off.
    "Oh, please. Do this thing for me, just this once." She approached them as they stood, thunderstruck. "Please, soldiers. Just this once. It's been so long, and no one will ever know."
    The men's eyes met for the briefest moment, and then they moved in on her like wolves on a lamb.

Four
     
    T HE MEN WERE drooping in the saddle when the lead riders of the screen came in sight of Staed. Corfe called a halt - it was by then the middle of the night - and after seeing to their mounts the tribesmen sank to the ground and slept without fires to warm them, pickets out every hundred yards around the bivouac.
    Corfe, Marsch and Andruw stole up to the rising ground that hid them from their objective and took a look at the port itself in the starlit night. It was bitterly cold, and flakes of snow were running before the wind like feathers. The ground was frozen stiff as stone, which was all to the good. It would be better for the horses. Nothing worse than a cavalry charge bogged hock-deep in mud.
    Staed was a largish port of some ten thousand people, one of the prosperous coastal settlements that the Fimbrians had