Mapping Cartographers

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Mapping the Cartographers (a Croatia AAR)

Mapping the Cartographers​

Introduction - The Game players of Hrvatska​

Chapter 1 - Ode to a Grecian Urn​

Chapter 2 - Casus Belli​

Chapter 3 - This is an Intervention​

Interlude - Naima​

Chapter 4 - Other People's Wars​

Chapter 5 - The fourth head of Cerberus​

Chapter 6 - Italiani Brava Gente​

Interlude - Africaine​

Foreword

This story's objective is a narrative based loosely around the Kingdom of Croatia. The focus is not so much the larger fates of kingdoms and duchies (though they're definitely not omitted and not unimportant to the story), but the characters who decide or fail to decide said regions' fates. As such, outside of the introduction, I've tried to avoid blatant "data dumps," walls of worldbuilding information that border on the out-of-context. Information is brought into play through the dialog and actions of characters, and levels of information are scaled to reflect the level of knowledge the perspective character has in his or her possession.

Historical authenticity is pursued, but only so much as does not hinder the narrative. I am not a scholar of history; feel free to point out the more gaping inaccuracies. In the pursuit of portraying realpolitik, the level of formal tense and ritual in the speech and actions of characters may not adhere very strictly to a historical standard.

Characters may seem more skeptical and/or cynical about the roles of religion than anyone truly was (or dared let on) at the time. Don't get me wrong, there are true believers among the cast, but for the most part, religion is portrayed a tool of, and a player in, the same grimy, secular forces every other organization was beholden to at the time.

Comments and suggestions are more than welcome!

The players (as of the introduction)

The Trpimirovic Dynasty
(Bold text indicates blood relation to the Trpimirovic household)

Dmitar Zvonimir Trpimirovic (dead) – King of Croatia
Wed to 1st wife Ilona Arpady (dead)
Their daughters:
Lovorka Trpimirovic (dead)
Mihaela Trpimirovic
Wed to Albrecht von Babenburg (dead) – Holy Roman Emperor
Their son:
Borna von Babenburg - Holy Roman Emperor

Wed to 2nd wife Hajnal Arpady (dead)
Bore no children.

Wed to 3rd wife Vasilia – Steward to the Kingdom of Croatia
Widow to Prince of Epirus Theodoros Adrianos, with whom she bore:
Romanos Adrianos – Marshal of the Croat armies
Stanislava Adrianos – Spymaster for the Kingdom of Croatia
Helene Adrianos – Chancellor for the Kingdom of Croatia

Her children with Dmitar:
Zdeslav Trpimirovic (dead) – King of Croatia
Wed to Kunigunde von Zahringen
Their children:
Gavril Trpimirovic – King of Croatia (current)
Vesna Trpimirovic
Wed to Kyros of Dongla – Count of Naxos
Ljubomir Trpimirovic – Archbishop
Wed (before ordination) to Ermyntrude de Hauteville – a Norman
Their sons (before the vow of celibacy):
Zvonimir Trpimirovic – Religious student
Ivo Trpimirovic – Military student
Petar Tripimirovic – Courtly student
Irina Trpimirovic (dead)
Wed to Emich von Lenzburg (dead) –
Their daughter:
Anna-Maria von Lenzburg

Dmitar’s bastards:
Bajan (dead)
Daniil (dead)
Petar (dead) – Marshal of the Croat armies
Dragomir – Former count of Belgrade, banished by Zdeslav.
Wed to Andja Thopia – a Serb
Their son:
Rad Trpimirovic (dead)


Those of common birth

Rolf – Swabian light infantryman
Kunst “The Scholar” – Swabian sergeant, Rolf’s commanding officer
“Reader” – an itinerant monk from Verona
Pere de Flor – Iberian of unknown birth, Condottiere of the Gray Landser Company, a Venetian mercenary company
Isaac “the Khazar” – Turkish soldier in the Gray Landser Company, second-in-command to Pere de Flor

 

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Introduction – Game players of Hrvatska

Krizevci, capital of Croatia, 1127 AD

Gavril Trpimirovic watched them beatify his father’s corpse.

The clergy moved with practiced care and slow shuffle, pallid arms sliding out from under the folds of their sackcloth robes only when the golden urns were hefted by their chains. They clattered like dolorous wind chimes cast of tin, gouts of incense spewed forth to slowly creep up into the haze that collected along the vaulted ceiling. The mourners who filled the floor to virtual capacity nearly drowned out the priests’ droning Latin with their restrained sobs and controlled chokes, some more practiced than others.

Zdeslav Trpimirovic, King of Croatia, Duke of Bosnia, Carinthia, Dalmatia, Pecs, Salerno and Wallachia. Western Christian saint.

Gavril sat in a high position, surrounded by his mother, two aunts and uncle, the people who had secured his father’s position on the Croat throne and then served as the core of his small council for all of his 31 years in power. When he was 13, Gavril was summoned by his father and told as much. He was also told that they would do the same for him without hesitation, something about blood.

In reality, Gavril had at least nine aunts and uncles. His grandfather, Dmitar Zvonimir Trpimirovic, had been a prodigious man in that respect. He had three consecutive wives to his name: Ilona, a Magyar who bore him two daughters, Hajnal, another Magyar who produced no children and no one talked about and finally Vasilia, Gavril’s grandmother. Vasilia was the Slavic widow of a Roman strategos named Theodoros Adrianos when Dmitar wed her. With her she brought three young children from the Hellene. She then bore Dmitar two sons, Uncle Ljuobomir and Zdeslav, Gavril’s father.

Dmitar produced three bastards as well, all male. Bajan and Daniil had died early into childhood, while the third, Dragomir, still lived. Like the three Adrianos children, Grandfather dealt with Dragomir as a full member of the brood as much as could be permitted under the law of God. Dragomir and Zdeslav became great friends as young children.

Gavril had heard whispers during his court education that his father had actually idolized Dragomir, who was something of a prodigy and excelled at near anything he attempted. Whatever the case, the bond lasted into adulthood. In the middle part of his reign, Zdeslav presented Dragomir with the title of count to Belgrade, a region the youthful king had recently wrested from schismatic Hellene control during the Troubles that plagued the Romans at the time.

Soon afterward, Dragomir saw fit to declare independence from the Croat crown along with the neighboring heretical bishop of Rama. The details of what happened next, besides its unimaginative name of Dragomir’s Revolt, were hazy to Gavril, and most others not among Zdeslav’s closest cabinet, he imagined. Some said Dragomir, with his elder status and genius intellect simply thought he was better qualified to occupy the throne at Krizevci.

Others whispered Dragomir simply wished to secede and begin a second dynasty in the Balkans. Around the time of the revolt, his sole child, a son by the name of Rad Trpimirovic, died in infancy. It was an open rumor in all of Croatia among high and low folk that Dmitar Zvonimir Trpimirovic had assassinated the first two of his wives and bastards, sparing Dragomir out of guilt and the fact that Zdeslav had already been born by that time.

Gavril’s aunts and uncles only gave him withering stares and sighs when he asked. Their unanimous lesson to him was that it was an uncharacteristically foolish move by Dragomir. Belgrade was still relatively devastated by the previous war and he could barely raise half a thousand men to defend the county. What _was_ widely known was that Gavril’s father and his half-uncle, Romanos Adrianos, marshal then and now, made quick work of Dragomir and the heretical bishop. The latter was given to Rome, where he promptly disappeared. The Adrianos clique and Gavril’s mother, Kuningunde, implored Zdeslav to execute the bastard traitor. He could not do it. He banished Dragomir and his Serbian wife instead, telling them to never let themselves or their heirs appear in Croatian holdings ever again.

The last Gavril heard, in the weekly reports of spy master Stanislava Adrianos, Dragomir was a courtier in the court of the Capets, deep in the heart of France. He was in his late 40s and produced no more heirs. He was not invited here today to his half-brother’s funeral.

Aunt Stanislava touched a gentle hand to Gavril’s shoulder now. A hand that so many now knew engineered and authorized tragic illnesses and suicides for her stepfather and half-brother—the crown, always for the crown. She whispered in her native Greek, the “secret cipher” she had taught to Gavril as a game at age five. “Gavi, who do you see?”

Gavril squinted through the curls of smoke, but kept his posture and neck straight the way he had been taught as not to betray any emotion. “Uncle Ljubomir, of course.”

Ljuobomir, Zdeslav’s only legitimate brother, was leading the prayer in full bishop’s regalia. He faced the pews, like Gavril and the council.

“Look at the pews, Gavi.”

He looked. “A whole lot of dukes and counts.”

“Name the dukes, you should know them all by now.”

He did, they were the wardens of the half dozen duchies that remained as autonomous entities in Croat rule. Commoner and noble alike referred to the dukes as The Six. At the forefront knelt Branimir Kosaca, holder of the peculiar title Duke of Croatia. The Kosacas were the oldest, most loyal family to support Gavril’s grandfather back when he was only the duke of Slavonia and consequentially the holders of the sole dukedom in native Croatia not integrated into the crown’s direct control.

The rest were Germanic, collectively the caretakers of at least half the bulge of territory between the Capet dynasty and the Western Empire that comprised German Croatia.

“Von Thuringen and von Venis the Toothless Ones.” Gavril called them by the secret nickname the closed council, his aunts, uncles and mother, had designated them. The two families held claim to Alsace and Thuringia respectively. Of the two, von Venis was the more formidable, having a personal demesne of two fiefs, opposed to Alsace’s one. Neither family had any vassals, though, and as a result stood little chance of opposing the throne in the near future.

“Duke von Hohenfel and Duke von Lothringen, of Swabia and Upper Lorraine.” These two were proper duchies. The Swabians and Lorraine both watched over several wealthy counties. They had both fought long, vicious wars of independence against France and the Imperials, their holdings standing literally back-to-back pinioned in between the two massive powers. Together they fought the two thrones to a standstill truce and together offered their vassalage to Gavril’s father, who had already recently accepted that of the Duke of Carinthia. It was obvious the two duchies’ primary motivation in bending the knee was to obtain a shield against the two powers in Northern Europe, but Gavril’s pragmatic father was not interested in motivation so much as loyalty on the field and in the tax book.

Which brought Gavril to the last of the Six, Rudolf von Zahringen. He could not help the involuntary shudder that coursed almost invisibly down his spine.

The teetotaler, 60-year-old German held not one, but two ducal titles, an unheard of precedent under Croat rule. In Zdeslav’s reign, he had held not two, but, amazingly, three titles. The Duke of Baden, Carinthia and Verona to boot. At the time of his vassalizing, von Zahringen was, without hyperbole, among the richest men in northern Europe in terms of prestige, realpolitik and raw military power. He was more famous than several kings of the time, arguably more so than King Zdeslav. His agreement to become a vassal was inexplicable to many across Europe.

Grandmother Vasilia and the Adrianos children hated him from the very beginning. It was the dilemma of grasping comes and strategoi in the Eastern Empire that had shredded to ribbons the themes, lost the throne to Rurikovich pretenders in Rus and gotten unfortunate loyalist Theodoros Adrianos killed and posthumously censured in the first place.

When, inevitably, the German lord felt he had reaped all the benefits of Croat protection against the French and Imperial yoke, he sent a curt letter to King Zdeslav, informing him that the three duchies were appreciative of his five years of patronage and needed it no longer. With them went almost half of the military muster the kingdom could, on paper, mobilize. It was a stunning, if not unexpected coup. Stanislava had been furious with Zdeslav for not making a play sooner. In those stomach-churning days immediately after the letter’s arrival she and her sister Helene had both threatened to resign from the closed council and the kingdom altogether to look for positions on some Hellene prince’s dole. Stanislava predicted that Rudolf’s astronomical prestige would allow him to lay claim to the Croat crown itself in short order.

It was Vasilia’s sharp actions that prevented a total fragmentation of the council and germinated the roots of the crown’s response.

-----

I did not leave Epirus until after your first father was executed, she had yelled in sonorous Greek front of the entire council, all of them her own children, three by Theodoros, two by Petar, save herself. And even then they had to banish me, with you three in tow. Do you think either of you have a chance of finding a benefactor as generous as your second father was in embattled Hellas?

They were stunned into silence. Only Ljubomir, the young bishop, attempted to speak into the wall of ice that had replaced the council room’s stagnant air. Mother, he began in Greek.

She pointed at the two sisters and Romanos next to them, who had remained stone silent for two days now. You have no home left in this world save this one. She pointed at the smoothed stone around them, then to the eastern window, damp with condensation. That monstrosity ruled by Varangian pretenders is no empire.

This is your home, she said again, this time in Croatian, which she had spent years to learn by herself, then taught her children.

---

The quelling of Rudolf’s Revolt was said to be Romanos Adrianos’ most impressive campaign. The dozen counts aligned under Rudolf marched with their armies from the north, intent on sweeping past Venice and down into Illyria in short order. It was not to be. Romanos split the 30,000-strong native Croat forces in half. With his half, the marshal marched to the rocky lands only a scant few miles east of Venice, leaving the other half to King Zdeslav and Duke Branimir.

Borna von Badenburg, the western emperor, just so happened to also be one of the grandsons of Dmitar Zvonimir Trpimirovic and nephew to Zdeslav. He was reportedly happy to refuse passage to Carinthian and Baden columns looking for a shorter passage through eastern Imperial territory. The effect was a bottleneck by way of the pestilent swamps that surrounded Venice. A point at which Romanos and his rested, entrenched host was waiting.

With Rudolf’s vassal armies held in virtual impasse, Zdeslav and Branimir made short work of the triple duke’s personal forces and hold him at ransom within the walls of his castle itself. Rudolf was no martyr for independence, he had seen an opening and bolted for it, but the door had swung back shut on his tail. Gnaw the tail off to keep the skull intact.

Zdeslav knew he could not geld the duke completely, nor could he grant a full pardon and repatriation. Rudolf signed a contract reintegrating his holdings and himself as vassals of the crown, sans the title to Carinthia. The enormously powerful title became that of the Croat king. All the counts sworn to the dukedom’s allegiance were granted a full pardon on the condition of forever reporting directly to the king himself. Baden and Verona were wealthy duchies, no doubt, but neither was large enough to field much in the way of regiments.

To seal the treaty, Zdeslav wed Rudolf’s eldest daughter, Kuningunde. They had but two children, Vesna and her elder brother, Gavril.


Back in Krizevci, in 1127, King Zdeslav was still dead. Stanislava patted the 16 year old on the shoulder.

“Excellent. And who is the king in attendance? Besides yourself, of course.”

King Borna of the Western Empire sat in an unassuming location near the rear of the church. Beside him sat Mihaela, his mother and Gavril’s aunt. He looked every part the German king, but his face and posture under the robes could not conceal the Trpimirovic signatures.

Uncle Ljubomir proceeded into the closing motions of the mass. Everyone bent to kneel a last time.

This time it was Vasilia who knelt by Gavril’s ear.

“You must meet your German cousin after this.”

“Yes, Grandmother.”

---

A hundred and fifty miles southwest from Jerusalem, 1128 AD

Ljubomir Trpimirovic sat in the sand and mopped his sweat.

The Holy Land sun baked men in their armor. He was glad to be in the light mail and boiled leather padding the vast majority of native Croat soldiers wore while on campaign. Those wealthier Italians and Hellenes from the Dalmatian coast seemed positively miserable in their polished cauldron-like plate. In a way, he could not blame them for abandoning the campaign the way they did nearly a week ago now.

He heard his adjutant’s sandals rasping from behind. Merely turning his head burned the rashes running along his neck underneath the linked chain.

“Speak, child.” Ljubomir tried to keep the sigh out of his voice. The 40-year-old diocese bishop for the Croatian crown still did not feel distinguished enough to speak like such a patriarch.

“The men are expecting you for evening mass.”

“Of course.” He struggled back to his feet, knocked the sand free. “Tell the boys to prepare the materials.” He turned away from the northern horizon and followed back to camp, his sheathed broadsword weaving a trail in the sand behind him.

The Soldier Priest, he thought to himself as he had many times before since the months on the feluccas coming here. Weighed unspoken at the back of his throat it was bittersweet, like the sacramental wine he kept in a skin in his luggage. He was so close to the city held sacred by Western Christian, Israelite and Muslim alike (yet strangely indifferent for those Greek Christians), but never felt so far from the Trinity as he did now.

As second (legitimate) son of the former King of the Croats, his father had shunted him away to a classical, safe education at the monastery of Zagreb. His elder brother and two half brothers, Zdeslav, Romanos and Dragomir respectively, enjoyed the adolescent thrill of martial education.

Romanos, the adept at logistics and grand strategies, became King Dmitar and Zdeslav’s mythical marshal, almost single handedly establishing the kingdom’s military as it existed today. King Zdeslav was the man who had embarked on this entire campaign to the Levant, an act before considered the province of French and German dukes with too many pieces of gold in their keeps.

And the Lord created irony, Ljubomir thought to himself, touching a thumb to the bare brass pommel of his sword. Zdeslav was dead now, killed in disputes between the crown and seditious dukes from Magyar and Germanic stock, as usual. To his credit, Ljubomir’s brother never did issue a decree he was not willing to perform himself. The eastern territories they held in vassalage now were acquired by nine thousand Croats and Germans personally led by Zdeslav. Only he left halfway through the campaign, returning with all haste to the Balkans at the word from their half sister Stanislava that the syphilitic, heretical Duke of Pecs had declared independence. Crossing the river from Zagreb into Pecs by night, Zdeslav caught an arrow through his mail and lingered in a fever haze for a week before ending his three decades of rule at 47 years of age.

Weaving between the tents and pavilions of camp. Men spat and grumbled to their sergeants and each other. Everything permeated with the heavy cloud of burnt wood, animals, leather, sweat and excrement both animal and human. Camp smell. The supply of palm incense Ljubomir took with him from monastery was down to its last sticks.

Last count placed their numbers at 2,667. Ljubomir had done the maths a dozen times in his head before. Walking through camp, he did them again. He had sailed to the Levant with 6,000. A good third of those were the Greek-speaking Lecce regiment, which was long gone and sailing back for the Adriatic. At least 1,200 then could be chalked up to combat casualties, the fever and desertions. He was still confident he could relieve Hranimir, the spitting militant bishop and effective governor of Jerusalem, who propped up the walls of the city with 900 local levies for a good three months now. Any further conquests and occupation of Fatimid provinces would likely be a catastrophe, though. The few infidel vassals Zdeslav claimed here were too devastated and wary to provide any sort of effective reinforcement for Ljubomir’s errant crusaders. They barely had enough to resupply their own local militias, much less several thousand seasick Europeans.

The faces he crossed paths with rarely bared any distinctions of age past 16 or 17. They offered him half smiles and as many “Father” salutations as “General” salutations. His own three were in Krizevci, safe by their blood and family name.

He’d fathered them with Ermyntrude, a woman from the de Hautevilles, a Norman family that possessed Sicily and Southern Italy and fought more wars of inheritance over their hardscrabble holdings than Zdeslav ever did against his more notorious dukes. That was before Ljubomir had taken the vow of celibacy, before his elevation to bishop. The marriage was arranged by Zdeslav. Ljubomir always knew the arrangement was a political move by his brother, a complete power play to slide into possession of Calabria, the most powerful duchy to successfully secede from the Sicilian crown and the obvious new power in Southern Italy. He was a man of God, but no fish drowning on dry land either. He was also his father’s son, exactly like Zdeslav.

He did not much care either way. He loved his three sons and Kuningunde was likeable enough. She had taken a close male friend in one of the Croat court’s more obscure courtiers, another absentee landlord taken on by the crown for his claims to some fief or another. Ljubomir did not begrudge her that, it was not as if he had concealed the vows he took from her or his children. If inheriting a swath of Italy and Sicily for his eldest provided his sons with a secure position from which to approach the future, then so be it.

It was said that the predominant trait of a Trpimirovic was pragmatism in all things.

He reached his tent, thanked his aide and sent him on his way. The sun was finally beginning to drown itself into the sea, but through the south-facing flap it was already dark and cool within. The dusk light momentarily bled over his spare belongings before the flap fell back again. He helped himself out of his armor and began to collect the materials for the mass in a practiced routine that pressed a relieving wedge of comfort into his breast.

His nephew and new king, Gavril, was the one who sent him here. The 16-year-old saw fit to continue the campaign endeavored by his father at suggestion or command by the Pope. Court rumor said Zdeslav had been eager to carry out His Holiness’ will out of guilt. A guilt spawned from claims that their father had ordered enough assassinations to fill Purgatory and limbo twice over, not counting his or his subjects’ own immortal souls either. Ljubomir had heard the most notorious of them: that King Dmitar had his first two wives killed in their sleep, in the same bed when they would produce him no heirs and that the death of Petar Trpimirovic’s only son in infancy was a plot of Dmitar’s to secure the throne for Zdeslav.

Ljubomir’s half-sister assumed duties as puppeteer of spies in the brief two years Dmitar sat on the throne. It was doubtless she had full access to the logs of the closed council at her fingertips. Doubtless that she had told Zdeslav the truth behind every rumored plot. Ljubomir had never asked her. He did not want to know.

 

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Chapter 1 – Ode to a Grecian Urn

Dalmatia, Royal Harbor, Winter 1130 AD

The new queen of Croatia was shipped in on a drizzling day.

She came on a repurposed galley of the finest Hellene design. The flawless smoothed and angular broadsides and jagged, jutting prow gave the impression of a push blade, carved from a single gargantuan log. Undaunted by white froth and winter chop it sliced clean through the blue-black on a course for where King Gavril, his council and an escort of decked out halberdiers stood.

“You’re sure you don’t want to wait somewhere out of this mist?” Gavril’s mother stood a head shorter than him. She watched her only son pace along the fringe of the stone dock. Thin as a matchstick.

“I’m fine,” he said. Shaking some of the moisture from the sable fur along his collar, he looked back at her for the first time that day. “It’s you that I’m worried about.”

Kunigunde had filled the role of the king’s steward after Vasilia died, almost two years ago now. She was an adept at sums, almost as talented at bleeding coin out of the most inert stones as Vasilia had been, but she wore the labor of the position less than well. Having grown up lavished upon first by her richer-than-Croesus father Rudolf, then Zdeslav, who was eager to duck his own father’s reputation for brusque relations with his spouses, the day-to-day duties of tracking and processing the movement and stagnation of every sundry mundane good and copper coin within a kingdom that occupied the western end of the Balkan coast and shot northwards into the continent in an expanding sliver of lands was something of a shock.

She smiled a weak smile. It accentuated the mauve rings and wrinkled furrows under and around her eyes. “Musn’t waste your attention fretting over every last detail of your council.”

“Thicker than water, right?” An angry wave leaped past the top of the harbor and slapped the stone forty feet away where the squadrons of dock workers skittered about preparing for the mooring of the Hellene galley. Every Croat sailors’ curse rang out over the water’s rumbling. Bundles of hempen rope and men not used to dry, unmoving land went flying across the cobblestones with thrashing limbs.

Gavril couldn’t help flinch, very un-regal, before continuing. “And my whole council is blood, right?”

They all wore the finest attire befitting their positions. For once, Gavril thought, they looked the part: the ruthless Trpimirovic and Adrianos clique.

Ljubomir, who had returned from the Holy Land in the same harbor not half a year ago, was still a degree darker in complexion and demeanor under his white and red robes. For a moment he looked ready to say something, but did not. Instead he looked back toward Zvonimir, his eldest, who stood in the officer’s position by the soldiers.

Helene Adrianos, chancellor, spoke instead. “Best look to your queen first, now.” She made a small motion with her chin towards the water.

The galley was inside the reach of the piers. Sailors appeared on the flat deck, tossing ropes and moving like finches on a roof awning.

“Look,” Stanislava said, stepping forward, “you can still see old sigils on the hull.”

The heraldry on the hull, a resplendent, terribly idealized cataphract on a rearing black destrier, stood for the so-called Kingdom of Georgia. One of the diadochi.

Gavril looked closer through the sea spray. The stark white the painted cataphract stood upon could not fully conceal the distinct shape and pigment of the Eastern Empire’s old gold and maroon crosses.

His wife-to-be was first to come onshore, escorted by two well-built Varangians in ceremonial arms and armor. Beside her was a middle-aged man of a regal composure. His demeanor cut against the grain of his wide-shouldered build, perfectly shaven pate and thin needle-like eyebrows. Gavril knew very well who it was, but let his chancellor speak.

“Prince Loukas of Thrace,” Helene put on her best, most Imperial Greek, “welcome to Croatia.”

The prince’s face was unreadable stone until his daughter scaled the final stud in the gangplank and touched the pier with both feet. Like wine to water, it changed to the most festive of smiles. Gavril scarcely saw his leathery face move.

“Helene! And Romanos and Stanislava! Why, the last I saw any of you, you were this tall—But where are my manners?” Loukas shook his head and prostrated to one knee. “Your Majesty.”

His daughter followed suit, not an easy task burdened with so many very Hellenic veils and baubles. The Varangians did not kneel, but nodded their helmeted heads. Gavril hadn’t expected them to do even that much.

Time to take up the part. “Please, please. Up off that oily wood with you.”

He could not see her face for the veils, but clearly her neck craned upwards to look toward him. “You speak Greek?”

---
Krizevci Castle

Stanislava wanted to meet in the castle’s ornate chapel, but Ljubomir refused. A bishop had to maintain some semblance of standards.

The sun was a rare commodity in King Dmitar’s old solar. Ever since the newly crowned Zdeslav had announced his desire to never step into it again, many autumns’ worth of dead leaves collected in the concavities of the high painted glass ceiling. The few thin shafts of yellowish light highlighted the dust alive in the air. A fresh clout of snow crumbled and sluiced down the painted glass. Ljubomir watched the light on his father’s old books ripple.

“Father built this place back when every other part of the fortress was no stronger than well-sanded ash wood.” The table they sat at was carved of the same lumber. “Do you remember that time?”

Stanislava laid the cups on the table. “Of course. That palisade that couldn’t keep the hunting hounds out, or in.”

They had a laugh. Strangely, it did not seem to echo as it would have off the high walls of the chapel or the great hall, but absorbed into the clammy silence.

Stanislava poured from the pewter carafe. “So I believe I know what you called on me for.”

She laid the carafe back down, took her cup. “Try the wine.”

He did and barely squeezed back a wheezing cough. He bent forward. “You—“ the chair’s legs squealed.

“From the Doukas’ personal stock,” she said, “Thrace’s finest.”

The fire in the throat receded. “You Hellenes and your wine.” He wiped at his mouth. “Civilization. Really now?” He made the stations of the cross across himself.

His half-sister laughed and quaffed without a wince. “Usually you would cut it with some water.” Another quaff. “Usually.”

A pregnant pause passed between them. The walls were sturdy throughout, but de-contextualized shreds of the commotion below seeped through the cracks in the stone to hover like the dust in the air.

Stanislava broke the silence, rapping a nail against the checkerboard heraldry of the Croat crown embossed on the pewter. “So what kind of problems can we expect?”

“Should it not be me asking that of you?”

“You know what I mean.”

He sighed. “Well, of course, she is from a family of schismatics.”

“Nevermind that Constantinople and the Patriarch are in the grasp of the Rus pretenders.” She referred to the Rurikovich house that had happened upon the Basileus title through some trickery or craft of the game that no one fully understood. What everyone knew was that it was the reason the Eastern Empire had fragmented so violently in a death spiral for almost a decade. It was one of the reasons their nephew was marrying a Doukas that day.

“Anyways, I don’t think it will be so much of a problem. Loukas has said that she will take her divine authority from Rome, right?”

“Right.” Stanislava and Helene had seen to that since the very start of the negotiations. Rome grew more powerful every year with the Eastern Patriarch’s preoccupation in diadochi squabbles. They remembered the misery Vasilia had been dragged through when the letter came from the papacy demanding the King of Croatia eliminate the schismatic nature of his marriage on threat of annulment. “So you can still hold the mass?”

The Duke of Thrace and his whole retinue would not have sailed here if there were any possibility of me saying no to that question. He nodded, tried another sip. “Rome has no problems with Doukas or their Kingdom of, er--”

“Georgia.”

“Ah yes.”

Stanislava poured more of the Doukas’ vintage for herself. The stuff looked like blood in the sallow light. “I didn’t think they would. Loukas’ father is probably the Hellene with the best legalistic claim to the Purple,” she frowned, and not at the wine, “but in every other sense they’re weak. Land-wise they have Thrace and some tundra north of the Caucasus under their sole vassal family. At least half the military strength they put down on paper would have to come from those frozen lands. They surround Constantinople from the western approach completely, but they have no one under their stead in Anatolia.”

“No vassals… truly? What of the rest of the military—what is it you and Romanos call them?”

“Military aristocrats,” said Stanislava, referring to the Hellenic families that had made mints in the cattle business on the old Anatolian frontiers, back before Alp Arslan’s throttling of the Eastern Empire’s holdings there. “They’re all pledged to Eusebios of Dongla now. Paraspondylos in the Isles, Palailogos in Achea, Sarantenos in Athens, Chrysaphes of Epirus, Batatzes of Karuna, Laskaris in Nicea. The only unbowed prince as of now, I believe, is Diogenes.”

“Eusebios has all of Hellas and the former Imperial territories in Anatolia then.”

“Hellas, Bulgaria and Anatolia. Truth be told, he is Basileus in all but name,” her wry smile was dipped in a tincture of amusement.

Ljubomir understood. He had been present at the union of Gavril’s only sibling Vesna to Eusebios’ eldest after all. “But he has no legitimate claim to it.”

“They’re barely even Hellenes, truth be told,” she shrugged. “The ‘Kingdom of Nubia.’ I’m surprised any of his new vassals can stand it.”

“The Empire in all but name. My question to you is then: why didn’t you and Hellene negotiate a betrothal of some daughter of Eusebios’ to Gavril instead?” Ljubomir knew the answer as soon as the question passed his lips.

“There are different types of power, brother. This is what you did not learn in the abbey.” He frowned a bit, but let her continue. “Eusebios reassembled a facsimile of the Empire out of almost nothing. No one can deny his force of arms and diplomacy now, but in terms of blood-inherited, God-given titles he is still a sniveling upstart.

“Now look at Doukas. All the primogenital power to inherit the throne, but none of the steel and manpower needed to take it. Nikephoros, Loukas’ father, would need an ironclad, militarily able ally to ever stand a chance at achieving a revolt.”

Ljubomir looked up from the table, eyes alight with understanding. “That is why—“

“That’s what they hope we will be, I suspect. Hellene and I chose them for a different reason anyways. Doukas is still a prestigious house.”

And our young, modest liege needs all the prestige he can collect. Gavril had received the same type of education Ljubomir had. It did not foster debutantes. “And you’ve hedged your bets with Vesna wed to Eusebios’ son.”

“Of course.” The banter leaking through the stone grew in volume. They would have to be returning to the fray soon. “You are a man of God, brother, but you’d do good to remember that being a vassal to a man means you must pay him homage, not love him.” She drained her cup and touched at a loose hair along her face. “Still, I must give credit to the Rus. They’ve created what none of the Hellenic families were able to create.”

“What is that?”

“A dynasty.”

---

Lying in the high-posted marriage bed next to a guttering fire, Gavril could hear only the faintest moan of the wind outside. Grandfather was quite the architect.

Cheilous turned onto her side next to him. “I need a drink.”

“Was there enough wine at the reception? It seemed to me we ran a bit short.” He remembered it despite his own fuzzy head, sandwiched between one emperor and a would-be emperor in the midst of a full-scale drinking war. Borna, like every German Gavril had known, could drink, but the 62-year-old Nikephoros Doukas met his every challenge until the Western emperor sagged in his regalia and almost fell into the lap of Sicily’s king, an 11-year-old Norman with whom Gavril was to forge a close alliance. The boy’s governess was not amused, though there was not much she could say to admonish an emperor.

“I never drink when I need to keep my wits about me.” She stretched her thin arms over her head, touching the nearest post. She paid no heed towards preserving her modesty as the sheet fell from her. “Besides, did you think that was the finest from my grandfather’s vineyards?”

He observed her sidelong. Careful here. “Perhaps my palette isn’t so refined. The weather here does not lend itself to grapes after all.” Another groan of wind rose, as if to punctuate his words.

Her hair unbound was at shoulder length. It was the same black Gavril assumed the bare-headed males of the Doukas line must have had. Eyes much the same color, regarded him without apprehension or anything overtly readable. Her mouth however, was a thin slit curved in the slightest of increments towards displeasure.

“It’s not as if I’m my father’s firstborn daughter.” Her voice held a trace of sullenness that was not miniscule. What had Stanislava told him? Doukas pride. “And Grandpa Niko’s only other hobby besides drink is pretending that he can balance his ledgers.”

Hardly the way to talk about the legitimate claimant to the Roman throne.

 

[unmerged(109996)]

Chapter 2 – Casus Belli

Rolf charged into single combat.

Some fog or steam hung like spider’s webbing around the hulking black-barked pines. His opponent came at him clanking like a moving smithy. The flanged mace in the left gauntlet caught what little light there was on its black edges.

But Rolf felt no fear. A dim spark at the deeper end of his mind told him he should make haste in the opposite direction from this steel demon, but the thought grew no to no more than a spark. He drew his blade, a cruciform sword whose steel shone as violently as silver. The steel-on-scabbard shriek echoed off the trees, pine needles seemed to fall.

He rolled beneath the first swipe. The right greave of his foe brushed the back of his hand, cold as ice. Digging his heels into the ground, he stopped the roll and swung over his head. Steel touched steel and the din exploded on his ears. The recoil trembled, almost sweetly, up the length of his arm. The knight staggered.

Time enough for Rolf to jump back to his feet and try a piercing strike against the thin back plate of the armor. Clank. It dented, but did not go through into flesh. The knight seemed unfazed by a blow that should have at least shoved the wind from his lungs. Then the mace came flying up at Rolf at an almost impossible angle—how did the arm pivot to reach that position, much more sheathed in all that armor?

Rolf stepped back a degree, but there was no time to move his sword to a guarding position.

Clang.

The black mace head tore the blade from his hands, sent it flying to impale the closest pine on the right flank.

Then the knight was on his feet once more, and charging with mace in a high stance to crush Rolf’s skull from the crown on down. The cacophony of moving armor was deafening now, almost loud enough to drown out the ancient tree’s roars of displeasure.

Rolf ran to the right. He felt the breeze of the passing mace tickle his left cheek. Another swipe thumped into the earth beside him, seemed to shake it like a quake. He stumbled, gasped, fell, eyes locked on the sword in the pine all the while.

Then the ground below him turned to sand. His right cheek slapped into it, stung like his mother’s backhands. There was grit between his gum and tongue. Mind no longer thinking, he rolled, kicking up a dervish of sand from his coat, and produced a balanced dagger from below his collar.

The knight’s advance seemed to slow to a molasses crawl. Red blood or enamel bled from the lip of the helmet’s eye slit. When did I strike him? Rolf threw the dagger, not waiting to see where it planted itself.

Then the sand wanted to consume him from the boots on up. He fought. The lowest branches of the pine reached down to the sword piercing the trunk. Their gnarled fingers strained and tried to pull the foreign steel from its breast.

When Rolf extracted the blade it came without protest or struggle. The tree’s cries died like those of a man whose neck was snapped. Rolf turned, steel in hand, to see another Rolf stabbing the spiked head of a halberd into the gap between the knight’s gorget and helmet. The visor flipped up of its own accord and he bled morning mist, cried words so foreign they could not but condense into brackish syrup that splashed onto the once-immaculate breastplate.

---

Verona, March 1131

Then Rolf woke up. The sun shot through the trees and stabbed him in the eye. Someone’s boot kicked him in the small of the back.

“Argh,” he said. He covered his eyes and rolled onto his back.

“Up with you. We’ve a ways to go.” Kunst towered with gloved hands on hips.

“Of course, of course,” Rolf muttered. He rose from his bed of twigs and earth. Reaching under his shirt to scratch at the small of his back, he bent down and picked up his gambeson. He relieved himself between two trees who did not seem to mind.

The cloth armor had once been sturdy enough that a fingernail striking the stiff fabric would emit an audible click. Perhaps it had been, at some time before Rolf ever laid eyes upon it. A score of ragged scuffs and re-stitched gashes pockmarked it. Several owners’ worth of accumulated travel, melee and exposure to the northern elements had reduced the coat to a shapeless sack that seemed to slump with exhaustion under its own weight. A dye or paint once colored the coat a stark black that could lay flush against a clouded night’s horizon. As Rolf unwrapped his spear from the folds and shrugged his only protection on, he saw more of the color sprinkle loose like chips of enamel. What was once black was now a pallid blackish gray, speckled with veins of white where the color had fled completely.

Kunst was already dressed. His rusty vest of mail was more orange with rust than metallic gray. The hand axe he kept tucked between folds of his self-made belt was as pristine as a campaigner’s implements could get, though, save for the pock marks where the thin edge or blunt face had bit iron, stone or bone. The scabbard tied to his leg was of no great luxury either, devoid of the gold filigree and false stone ornaments the knight class was so susceptible towards. Rolf had been in enough scraps beside Kunst to know that the dirk sheathed within was no less oiled and maintained than the axe. It was a blunt thing of peasant’s iron, like the head of Rolf’s spear, but sturdy enough to bludgeon heads and shatter a shin through mail.

Had they still been in a full regiment, neither one of the men would have bothered to make such a show of walking around everywhere weighed down by arms and armor. A year ago, they would have tossed the heaviest, least valuable of their panoply onto the ox carts and marched only with the best of the loot and most convenient of weapons. Reduced to two as they were now, a man had to display as much as he could to deter would-be road robbers.

“Haven’t I told you to be rid of that knife with the overlong handle?” Kunst said as they walked out of the wood back onto the road south. He gestured with his sharp chin at Rolf’s crude spear.

“Many times,” he replied, “and every time I’ve told you that I like to keep my distance from the buggers.”

“Right.” They hopped the stack of flagstones that passed for a fence along the road. “And every time you’ve said that to me, I told you that you’ll regret lugging the thing around when we find a company to join up with and the lord commander decides to define you as a halberdier. Real sweet duty, that is, hold that stick dagger up, stand stock still and wait for a couple hundred pounds of horseflesh and plate mail and lance to run into you.”

“If we find a company to run with, you mean.”

“Right.” Kunst took the lead five paces ahead of Rolf, as if he were still a sergeant and leading twenty men on a march. Rolf could only see the back of his cropped black hair past the bloated burlap sack the ex-sergeant wore over his back. Inside, he knew, were all the books Kunst had collected during pillage runs on campaign up north. At any other time, Kunst was a normal, tight-lipped veteran type with little to say about his passions or compulsions. During an assigned forage or any sack, however, his back hunched, his eyes narrowed to slits and to any unaccustomed to the ritual seemed like a fabled well poisoner in his single-minded determination. Before coin, precious stones or women, Kunst would duck into chambers searching for any tome or trace of parchment. He would kick down or smash apart iron-reinforced estate doors and flimsy pine doors in deconsecrated abbeys with equal gusto.

Kunst’s favorites were adorned with vivid illustrations on the borders of every page. The colors raking and tracing the parchment seemed deeper and more intense than the hues of the world they ostensibly represented. Rolf had seen Kunst up at unchristian hours at many a camp and inn, unblinking eyes locked on whichever tome he had open that night, a calloused finger tracing the loops and curls of the symbols that meant words and the shapes that meant art.

Rolf quite simply never understood it. Neither of them could read. He was quite certain neither of them had ever served with a man who could read a word in any language. The pictures were pretty in their queer, meandering way, but the agonizing intricacy of them made Rolf’s head shout in the language of pain and his wrist ached in sympathy for whichever clergyman had drawn it all.

“Do you mean to sell all those dusty things?” Rolf knew they were worth a ducal treasury to the right people.

“No.”

“You’re not going to bring them onto the boat are you?” If there was any place more foolish to bring a sack full of valuables, it was a galley crewed by Mediterranean freebooters.

“Of course not.” Kunst made a circular motion with a finger around his head. “These lands are run by a bishop, right?”

Rolf had heard something vaguely to that effect.

Kunst continued, not waiting for a response. “Then there must be humble men of the cloth all over, right?”

“Suppose so.” Rolf glanced over his shoulder. He’d met some men of the cloth who were less than humble. Nothing was behind them but the snaking road.

“Men who can read.”

Rolf understood. He frowned. “What makes you think any of them would just give the things back to you after they’ve paged through it all?”

Kunst did not answer that. Rolf clicked the haft of his spear against a passing flagstone, knocking it into the brush.

---

Krizevci Castle

Old wounds come to life before anything else. The ache is felt first, before sight, smell, touch, hearing or taste, so that for a moment it is like a Socratic Form, perfectly ineffable and unadulterated by those deceivers called the senses. It is a torch’s light in an infinity of one-dimensional black, floating free of any flambeaux; bright, but casting no illumination on anything. Heat without light.

Ljubomir woke and saw his right hand already clenching his left in a bloodless grip. He saw the curved scar there, white as snow or the face a strangled man. It licked upward across the ball of his shoulder to end over the collarbone, where the Fatimid scimitar had found the resistance Ljubomir’s chainmail had not provided. Next would be his right leg, at the two arrowheads left furrows in the meat of the thigh.

“Imitatio dei,” he muttered, crossing himself while sitting up in the bed.

The room’s simple oak table was covered in papers he did not remember being there last night. Ermyntrude.

She was not in the room as far as he could make out in the dim light. Struggling out of bed, he pulled open the heavy felt curtains to let in predawn light.

The room’s window faced out toward the marshalling square. Below, the parapets were alive with the changing of the guard. Below the walls, Ljubomir could make out his eldest, Zvonimir, dressed in a simple sparring tunic and trousers despite the morning chill. He sat in the gravel with his back to one of the trees, wooden training sword leaning beside. Soon enough Romanos would be outside to begin the morning’s instruction.

The door pulled away from the frame with a sound like a sarcophagus pried open. Ljubomir turned.

Ermyntrude’s face was a starker white than usual. Her mouth was set in a narrow line. It would have been an expression of some sort of grief without the eyes, set like polished turquoise stones in turbulent thought.

“What is it?” Ljubomir’s mind came to life on its own. His first thought was to their two youngest. His stomach lurched and the throb in the arm grew to a thumping agony.

He saw her hurry towards him, laying a rolled parchment on the table. He felt her uncalloused hands gripping his unscarred arm and helping him to his feet and back to the bed. He did not remember staggering to his knees.

“Little Petar is fine,” she said, “Ivo as well. It’s not them.”

He did not remember mentioning their children either. “Then why—“

Her hair was down and undone in a stream reaching down her back as it was when she slept. She pushed back a handful of it from her face. Bags under her eyes did not drain them of the appealing, mildly threatening intelligence creeping round the edges of the pupils. For a moment she looked almost disappointed at his apparent ignorance. Then just as quick it was replaced with the smile she would look at Zvonimir with when he was still an infant and wracked with illness. “Blayve. Baby Blayve.”

Blayve de Hauteville, Ermyntrude’s younger brother, sat as Sicily’s 12-year-old king.

She stood from the bed and walked to the window. “Uncle Nigel made his move.”

Nigel de Hauteville, the Duke of Calabria, the Sicilian crown’s most prominent duchy.

Ljubomir did not know what to say. “Your brother?”

She was watching Zvonimir at his martial instruction. “Oh he’s still alive, for now.” Her hand pressed the glass. “The household guard slew two hired daggers not three steps from his bedchamber. A third escaped. The next day a herald came to Apulia announcing Uncle’s official secession and his intent to install himself as king.”

That was no idle boast by an upstart. Ljubomir knew through Stanislava that Nigel de Hauteville’s fiefs provided what now used to be the vast majority of the Sicilian crown’s military muster, almost all of the hosts of fearsome Norman knights. “What is his rationale?”

“He accuses Blayve of being baseborn.” As the eldest child, Ermyntrude had always felt partly responsible for the boy king’s security. “Provides pages and pages of sophistry and charts of lineage that he very well knows mean less than a Pecheneg’s promise.”

The pain was begging to recede from Ljubomir’s scars. He reached down and rubbed his leg where the arrows had bit two years ago. “We’re in alliance with your brother. Gavril—“

“Will have to intervene, yes.” She turned from the window, faced her husband.

“How do you know all of this so soon?”

Her smile was wry this time, the light of intellect was brighter than the still-struggling sun she had her back towards. “Stanislava is not the only woman in this castle who has her whisperers.”

He remained silent to that.

She gestured with her chin toward the table. “I have there a letter stating that the count of Salerno has joined Uncle Nigel’s cause.”

He looked at that pile of parchments. Of course, it was all in dense Norman, he could not read it. “Gavril has that one Italian among his court. The one with the overlong mustache and paunch.”

“Sforza. The man has clung to his ragged little claim on Salerno for years now; almost as hard as he clings to our nephew’s robes.” She pushed back more hair. “My family has laughed at the man for as long as he’s pressed his claim.”

Until now, perhaps. “Will Blayve be willing to give up Salerno in exchange for our aid?”

“I can make him be willing, if need be. Just as I could make a man join a rebellion against his liege, if need be.” A queer thing for a woman to say. But having been around Stanislava had accustomed Ljubomir to it. "If only Great-Uncle Rob were still here."

Salerno is not a part of Calabria, he thought to himself, watching Ermyntrude walk to the table and attempt to organize the mess there, paper scraping and rustling against the wood. Nevermind, he did not want to know. He already knew too much. He mouthed a short, silent prayer to himself.

“Blood killing blood,” he muttered, crossing himself.

She was back on the bed sitting next to him. She smoothed the sheet idly with her hand.

He had not been able to carry out certain points of his husbandly duties to her since his ordination and vow of celibacy. They remained in union regardless, though. At first it was for their three sons. Later, they came to realize they simply enjoyed each others’ company, a rarity in Trpimirovic unions.

Ermyntrude touched her forehead to his, as she had when their first son was born and later when he confessed to her that he had taken the vow. Her unkempt hair tickled on his forehead.

“That troubles you? Well, then you haven’t kept close company with many de Hautevilles.”

 

[General_BT]

Okay, I just read through all three updates of this story, and I have to say, you are an impressive narrative writer! I'm definitely looking forward to what happens next!

 

[Enewald]

This definetly looks goodl.

But maybe you could split the updates into smaller ones?
Would be a bit easier for the readers.

 

[unmerged(109996)]

(Your wish is my command. This chapter is a thousand or so words smaller than past two. Easier on the eyes, I hope.)

Chapter 3 – This is an Intervention

Krizevci Castle, April 1131

Parchment as far as the eye could see. The row of candles lit along the side neared the end of their tallow wax lives.

Romanos Adrianos breathed a sigh and rubbed between his eyes. The silver brooch that marked him as marshal of all King Gavril’s military lay next to his wine cup. He watched the flickering reflections of amber on the polished metal as he took another quaff.

The council chamber was as empty as he had ever remembered it. The U-shaped table and the throne standing at its head were both virtually empty. On the throne leaned the king’s sword, scabbard and haft alight with gold detailing. At the table sat only Steward Kunigunde, Stanislava and Romanos himself.

He set the cup back down and looked to Kunigunde. “Four months.”

“Without bankrupting ourselves? Four months.” His sister-in-law looked more beleaguered every month. The announcement of the Sicilian crisis had not helped. But there was no one else in the court nearly as qualified to supervise the king’s purse. An expression must have passed his face in his fatigue. She inclined her head. “Will that not be sufficient?”

“Perhaps if I had twelve thousand instead of eight.” Four thousand were coming from the Vidin Regiment, a good, reliable pack of veterans, and another four from Senj, a wealthy port province with many swaggering knights and plenty of lowerclassmen with the means to purchase armor and horse. Romanos’ adjunct, Kocelj, was out with a token escort raising them as they spoke.

“Not an option, Romanos.” She was the one who sighed now. “Did I not explain this to you an hour ago? Any more than eight thousand and your time frame will shrink to much worse. You are lucky that the winter wheat from last year was such a bumper as to give us as much as four months to sacrifice in the fields this season. Who ever heard of a campaign in the Spring?”

“My uncle, apparently,” said the voice from behind Romanos’ shoulder. He leaned around and saw Ermyntrude on one of the long benches that lined the sides of the council chamber. Her back rested slack against the wall, eyes heavy with sleep. He had thought she was still asleep this whole time. “He has no such compunctions. I doubt any of you have seen the amount of merchant ships packed with food that land in Syracuse from Carthage, but I have. Uncle Nigel could campaign in Italy until Christmas if he so desired.”

Romanos turned his chair to face her. The legs screeched against the floor. “What are the chances he knew we’d be hamstrung like this?”

Ljubomir and Ermyntrude’s youngest, four-year-old Petar, lay curled on her lap, fast asleep. She passed a hand through the fair brown hair of his that matched her own. “He already knew Sforza is among Gavril’s court.” Sforza had wanted to attend this very meeting, offering to provide all the paperwork to his claim on the county of Salerno. Helene had managed to use her chancellor’s privileges to divert him. “So I’d say the chances are very good. We de Hautevilles have always had proficient whisperers. Almost as proficient as the Trpimirovics’ own.”

Stanislava looked unfazed by the rueful smile from across the room. “It makes no difference whether Nigel planned it or not at this point. Tell me how many he can muster again?”

“Fifteen thousand or so. Seven thousand from Calabria and Lucania on the mainland. The other eight on boat from Sardinia, Sicily and Tunisia. Before you ask, they’ve already arrived in Calabria.”

Stanislava was the one who smiled now. “That we knew.”

Romanos had trained all his life to be a winner of wars, not a peace broker. So now he sufficed with clearing his throat and pulling his chair back to where it partially blocked Ermyntrude’s view of the table.

“With four months and eight thousand I can take Salerno. Easy as piss. I cannot guranatee Blayve’s continued independence, though.”

He could see what Stanislava wanted to say shoot through her eyes for a brief moment. To Hell with Blayve de Hauteville. The boy was never the chief objective of this. But she did not dare with Ermyntrude in their presence. “Unfortunately, keeping King Blayve afloat on the throne of Sicily is our chief goal. Gavril cannot be seen to be a do-nothing ally, not now. He agrees.”

“His Majesty also insists to me that he cannot be seen as an empty suit of armor either,” Romanos said, “he wishes to command one of the columns.”

“That is not an option.” Kunigunde glared at her brother-in-law. Gavril was king, but he was also her only son.

“If we wish to gather prestige for the young liege…”

“Zdeslav was beatified and made a saint,” she said, “and he’s still dead.”

It’s not easy, being the only son a saint, a tipsy Gavril had told Romanos in lilting Greek at his own wedding feast, the new queen Cheilous impassive next to him. It must not be easy being his widow either, Romanos thought.

He had seen the queen at the official council where Gavril announced his declaration of war against the Duchy of Calabria. Her abdomen was already bulged with prominence. Helene had been sure to position her in the chambers where all the whisperers from foreign courts could see as much. The young queen had maintained her usual inscrutable, neutral expression, but he noticed one of her willowy hands stroking her stomach for all to see. In reality it meant little. If Gavril were to die today, Ljubomir would take the throne for a decade at the very briefest. The same Ljubomir who, upon returning home from the Jerusalem Campaign, confessed to Romanos that he intended never to take up sword or shield again.

“Very well,” he said, not wishing to push it any further. It was late. “Kocelj can lead the regiment from Senj. Ermyntrude, how many men does Blayve have mustered?”

A choke, cough and cry came from behind Romanos. The echoes careened off the room’s high ceiling. Petar was up and squalling.

Kunigunde stood from her chair and went to the bench. “Here, here. I’ll take him.” Ermyntrude touched her forehead to the child’s before handing him gingerly to her sister-in-law. He wrapped himself around her shoulders from the front.

She sat up and stretched a kink out of her back as Kunigunde left with the sobbing Petar. The tall doors opened with one of the guards’ tugs and a click of wood on stone. They could hear Kunigunde whispering to the child. “Now, now , no more of that. Should we go see your daddy?” The voice faded down the hall. A German song.

Romanos turned back to Ermyntrude. She nodded. “From the provinces still pledging allegiance to him? Nine thousand perhaps.”

“Well then, let’s hope Nigel decides to split his forces.” Even though his reasons to do so are none.

Stanislava spoke. “Can you kill enough of his fifteen thousand to force him to the negotiating table after four months?”

“It’s possible, if Blayve’s marshal is willing to be the anvil to our hammer.”

Ermyntrude nodded. “He will be.”

He just hoped the men would not revolt before time came to sack Salerno.

 

[phargle]

“Well then, let’s hope Nigel decides to split his forces.” Even though his reasons to do so are none.

Stanislava spoke. “Can you kill enough of his fifteen thousand to force him to the negotiating table after four months?”

A good first line - and the second can actually play out in Crusader Kings. Sometimes, killing enough bad guys is all it takes to get peace - or to buy time for your liege to arrive.

This sub-forum hosts a plethora of narratives with a mishmash of names, and that can make it hard to keep up with all the Romanoses and Stalislavs and Dukases running around. You're making a good start of it, though.

 

[Enewald]

Easy to get troops, or hard to pay them. Or the otherway.

 

[General_BT]

I dunno... I didn't mind the long updates, more goodness to read!

 

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Phargle: Yeah, I've been trying to keep the surname alphabet soup to a minimum by having a minimal amount of perspective characters. I wasn't even going to have Romanos as one, or anyone from the closed council for that matter, but I figure it was more important to not have the king present at that logistics meeting. A thing I really love about the game is how it deconstructs the myth that European monarchs had direct and absolute control over their kingdoms. I wanted to reflect that with a sense that the kingdom continues to machinate and Play The Game even as the royal family sleeps.

Enewald: The way the game handles "recruitment" of troops is great. There's so much subtext behind clicking that little soldier icon. How many of those 4,600 boobs from Podunk, Italy are serfs, nouveau-riche merchant sons looking for glory, prisoners dredged out from the provincial dungeon and offered amnesty or semi-professional soldiers like Rolf and Kunst who break soft feudal laws by jumping fiefs looking for wars staffed with generals known for lenient pillage policies? I wanted to think of a reason for why calling them up is so unsustainably expensive (I don't think they were being paid very much, were they?) so I figured the cost reflects all the commerce lost in a demesne because of the drain on the male population.

 

[unmerged(109996)]

Interlude – Naima

Southwestern France, 1956

“Messali! Over here!”

The rain was a trickle now. It would be a torrent in five minutes.

Messali counted seconds. One – two – three- four—f—

He bolted from behind the wall, somehow crouched and sprinting simultaneously, with his bolt action in a bloodless grip. The larger bit of shattered tile from the other end of the bath house crunched under his skittering feet. Three meters out into the road, he slipped, twisted an ankle.

The Government machinegun down the street belched and spat ugly orange fire. Messali saw the tracers like horizontal shooting stars. He crawled the rest of way until the apartment complex’s shadow ate his own and he knew he was out of LOS. He stood, hissing through his front teeth as the pain fired up the fine nerves of his lower leg. He limped to the opposite end of the narrow foyer, where the laundry room lay.

Inside, Rabih and a newcomer Massali had never seen before sat against the checkered wall. Between them on the single clean patch of floor in the room were the inner guts of the stripped Tokarev they were repairing.

“Where is she?” Massali said.

Rabih gestured with his head. “Through the back window. In the trees.”

Massali rapped a dirty fingernail against the side of his tin hat, like the Tokarev another thing scavenged from the Government. “Algeria.”

“Algeria,” Rabih muttered. The newcomer said the same.

Massali’s sister was where Rabih said she would be. Her machine pistol and belt of clips were leaning against a tree, almost a full meter away from where she dug. “What the Hell is this?”

She tore into the mud with the sharp brim of her helmet, throwing the mud over her shoulder and almost hitting Massali with it. “Look, look. I tripped over it just a minute ago. All this damned rain must have washed it this far up.” She shoved a hand into the mess.

Massali stared. Age had eaten away at the steel with great red-orange bite marks, leaving only a frail-looking skeleton of a blade, but the remnants of gold inlay were plainly obvious on the handle. Was that an uncut jewel on the pommel?

“Government would be livid if they found out about this!” She laid it down with some care. “Inshallah, you think we could get some money for it?”

“Inshallah .”

---

The Capets needed to re-maintain the roads in their demesne. Another crater sprayed sludge water high into the air and almost knocked the driver off the cart.

From the rear the passengers cursed his back in a half dozen languages. Up until then, the four of them had not spoken or looked at each other unless absolutely necessary. Now, the biggest, a broad blond man of Vyatich or Nordic stock, spat over the side. “I’m about ready to put this axe in that Frank’s back and take the reins myself,” he said in practiced German, the language they had all agreed on before leaving Anjou.

They all had a chuckle at that. They had somehow managed to arrange all their legs to face away from the sharpened end of the thing’s head.

The one other passenger who carried a weapon looked about ready to puke over the side he leaned against, had any of them eaten anything that morning. The limp-wristed youth settled on swallowing what little spit he had and rubbing streaks of sweat from his palms into his stained tabard. He kept his sword in an elegant, out-of-place burgundy scabbard.

Two days ago he had been the one to ask the stupid question. So why are you all headed to Hispania?

His only response from the other three was glares from dirt-stained faces, except for the only man among them who spoke passable French. Would any of us be riding in this pig cart if we wanted our identities known? Likely, they were all running from forces eager to find them on this side of the Pyrenees.

The fourth had seen it fit not to utter a single word in any language. His only interaction was to periodically pull a battered and curved wineskin from the folds of his coat and pass it to the rest. He did so now.

The French speaker took a mouthful. Wiping his mouth with his sleeve, he offered it to the boy, whose gulp seemed to distend his pallid neck. He shook his head. The skin passed to the big man.

“So then, why are you here?”

The boy looked up from his lap with a jump. The French speaker had a bald head, but looked no older than his mid-40s. His hooked nose resembled the beak of some meat-eating raptor and the lid of one brown eye seemed to hang lower than the other. The boy struggled to swallow again. “The same as the rest of you, I imagine? Seeking service under some Aragon lord, or a sheikh. It makes little difference—“

“We all know that part.” The bald man leaned closer. “But what are you running from?”

The boy’s lips twitched. “Who says I’m running?” His chin jutted several degrees upward.

“A noble wouldn’t be in one of these,” the bald man knocked an elbow on the wood, “unless he was running.”

“Who says—“

“This does.” The bald man tapped the burgundy-wrapped scabbard. “And this.” He flicked the boy’s jutting chin.

The boy looked angry, and caved much too soon, the bald man thought. “Lay with the wrong woman. My liege gave me a fortnight to disappear from his property.”

Probably this liege’s daughter. “You should thank the saints that your lord gave you the luxury of going into exile.” Instead of giving him a dagger’s point, a lord’s short answer to small affronts.

“He confiscated my land as well.”

“He could have confiscated your life at half the expense.” The noble-blood boy was acting like a noble-blood boy and it was grating on the bald man like whetstone on steel. He took a deeper breath and exhaled when the cart hit another crater. “So you won’t be going back then?”

The noble smirked with all the little intrigue he could muster. “Oh, I’ll return.”

“Oh will you now?”

“The gold I’ll see from the Moorish Wars will be more than enough to finance a revolt.”

The man with the wineskin choked in between sips, breaking into a chortle as purple sluiced down the sides of his mouth. The Nordic laughed too. Above the bald man the driver tipped his straw hat up and glanced over with a peasant’s worried expression.

The bald man scratched at the side of his beakish nose. “Well either you hail from a miniscule realm or whatever Aragon lord you’re pledged to now is richer than Croesus.” He saw the boy’s face and softened. “It’s a noble idea, regardless. One I used to like.”

“Used to?”

He realized the boy was around the age his own boy would have been now, if he were still alive. He ignored the question. “You’ll need to survive your new position. And you’ll not last ten minutes in a zone of war like the one we’re riding straight into with ornate baubles strapped to your belt.”

“This sword is a blood heirloom!”

“And it will be your blood on it first. Your own men will see you as the preening foreigner, knife you to take the thing, then say the Moor’s whisperers did it. Keep the blade, you can wrap that silver haft in canvas anyways. Give me that scabbard though.”

The bald man dug into his heavy burlap bag. Finally, he removed from it a sheathed sword of equal proportions. The three other men shifted, this was the first they had seen of any other weapon between them. “Look at that scabbard. Tan, oily, downright ugly, but durable. A real campaigner’s equipment, likely to get nods of approval from flea-bitten Spanish veterans.”

“That’s not quite a fair trade.”

“I suppose not. Here.” Hands went into the bag once again. They extracted a tabard, startling, bone white set against the muddy grime that caked everything and everyone on the cart. With practiced care, the bald man unfolded the vest and held out the heraldry that adorned the breast.

A castle with a single keep and gates opened wide, set on blue. Below the gates a cog with three white sails and oars like a porcupine’s spikes floated on red water.

“You’ll need to look the part of a nobleman in some fashion, yes?” The bald man said.

The boy looked down at his own soiled garment, devoid of any heraldry or icons. “I suppose. But I’ve never seen those arms before in my life.”

The bald man smiled as they made the exchange. “A minor county, of no great import. The count who presided over it is long dead.”

The burgundy sheath was two inches two short for his sword, useless. He noticed the boy eyeing it, the steel perhaps a little too well-honed for a common mercenary’s budget.

“Like I said, the count has been dead for ages now.” He tapped the flat of the blade. “And dead men need no swords, right?”

He threw it over the side of the cart and into the fallow, muddy fields.

 

[Enewald]

Dead men do not need swords, or do they?

What county are they speaking of?

 

[phargle]

An interesting contrast. I suspect the French in your timeline seized more of Algeria sooner than they did in our own. Did that sword really lie there for 800 years?

 

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Chapter 4 – Other People’s Wars

Apulia, Italy, May 1131

The flat-bottomed scows dug into Italian sand with a sickening lurch of inertia. Had anyone been watching the beachhead from the low bluff, they would have heard a frightful din of metal-on-metal and savage cries as the fully armed and armored men piled in each boat hurtled forward and into each other.

“Get the hell off my boat, silk-wrapped whores!” The pilot to one of the scows yelled in broken German.

Had anyone been watching the beachhead, they might have laughed. Five hundred professional soldiers stumbling off the ugliest small boats on the Adriatic, green of face and stumbling through the dawn low tide onto dry sand. One lifted the skirts of his mail hauberk up and away from the salt water. Another, one of the first to reach the sandbar, doubled over and vomited on Italian soil.

Kunst turned from the rest of his squad and lifted Rolf by the collar of his hideous gambeson. “What the hell?”

Rolf groaned and wiped his mouth. “I christen this beach as territory of the Gray Landser Company.”

“Captain Pere said we’re supposed to be cutting an intimidating image for the Normans.” In truth, Kunst was about ready to eject his own contents. Neither Swabian had ever been floating on a body of water until this campaign.

The only horse on the beach that morning was a tan steppe pony with a blond mane. She clomped up to where Rolf stood, kicking up arcs of wet sand. She was the skinniest horse Rolf had ever seen, but not emaciated like the peasant horses he knew back home. The muscle on her wrapped around the bones like water suspended in motion.

Her rider was a tan-skinned man with a full black beard that had trimmed to martial-looking thick stubble. He wore a weathered, blackened, but well-maintained vest of lamellar leather. The hard lacquered scales were covered in the straps that bound his equipment to him. A short, squat falchion was bound across his chest in the light cavalry style rather than dangling at the hip. Under the arm opposite from the falchion’s pommel hung a tarnished brass marshal’s horn. The manner of the straps on his steel cap helmet let it hang securely from his back, the leather pulling on the hard collar of the armor rather than strangling his neck. He was perhaps the only intimidating figure on the beach except for the screaming scow captains.

Rolf helped himself up to his knees. “Lieutenant Isaac.”

“Rolf,” he nodded. Somehow, he seemed to know every man in the Gray Landsers by name. “There seems not be any Normans on this beach at all, friendly or hostile. Save maybe that tower.”

On the left flank’s rocky outcropping slouched a squat guard post made from crumbling sandstone. Overall, it looked to be more of a threat to whatever sentries holed up inside of it than to any landing foes. Someone stuck their helmeted head out one of the black portholes.

“No one in here, Lieutenant!” He yelled across the beach.

Isaac dropped the reins and cupped his hand to his mouth. “Get back down here then!” The horse turned its head to watch as another man from Kunst’s squad doubled over and puked across the sand. “Some welcome.”

---

A few hours’ march brought the detachment to the outskirts of Bari, the Kingdom of Sicily’s temporary capital in the wake of Duke Nigel’s advances on Lecce. The other half of the Gray Landers, who had landed the evening before, were packed into one of the narrow grassy ways that passed for a commons in the city, waiting and looking no better than Isaac’s detachment. Apparently the boy king Blayve had seen it fit to let the soldiers of his Croat allies land straight into the city’s port, but the mutt mercenaries had to disembark hours away for fear of frightening the common folk.

Isaac never bothered to get off the steppe horse. As the squads laid down on the dry grass, exchanging obscenities with the first detachment, he circled in front of them. “I’m riding to the keep to see what Captain Pere is up to. You can bet whatever teeth you have that we’ll be marching as soon as he’s done exchanging kisses with the Norman king. Any man not here when we return is being left behind!”

Later, Rolf looked up from stitching the latest holes in his gambeson. “Kunst, why the hell are the Croats up in all of this anyways?”

The sergeant was rubbing some sand he had pocketed across the patches of rust on his mail, making a terrible racket. “Are you questioning good money?”

The sun was relentless now. Hadn’t these people ever heard of a winter? Rolf wiped sweat from his brow. “Just curious.”

“I’m guessing it must have something to do with that Norman woman we saw before leaving. The priest’s woman, remember her?”

Rolf had seen her. The archbishop of Croatia had performed a ritual blessing of the Company’s men at the Royal Harbor of Dalmatia before they left. She stood far to the side in an alcove. Rolf would not have noticed her at all if the others in the squad did not point her out. Lengthy and unbound stark brown hair. Arms across her chest and a knowing smile of some sort on her white face.

“How could I forget?” Rolf watched two city women hurry past the pile of mercenaries, holding their baskets tight to their chests with one hand and crossing themselves with the other.

“It’s a shame she’s tied to a man she can’t do anything with.”

That man had looked like he’d been in a few scraps himself. The white robes of his office did not conceal the larger scars that crept up the side of his neck and across the backs of his hands.

Kunst’s hands were a raw, livid red after rubbing the last of the sand into his armor. He lifted the vest up and began shaking the granules from it into the grass. Whenever a respite from the marching came, his hands seemed frantic to busy themselves, now that his book collection was being pored over by a bribed monk in a Verona monastery.

It was only then that Rolf realized Kunst had changed the subject entirely.

---

Bari Castle

The castle was more martial than regal. It was terribly modern, finished only months ago.

It suited Isaac well enough. He nodded to himself in appreciation as the Norman courtier led him through its inner workings. Low, sloped walls with plenty of thick stone crenellations and arrow slits with wide arcs of fire. Then the courtier pushed open a heavy iron-reinforced door and they were on the battlements, Isaac’s eyes were stung with the glare and acrid brine in the air. The ramparts were wide, broad enough for five men to stand from the outer edge to the inner. Perhaps they could even mount small mangonels, use them to fire into that sharp blue harbor they have such a good view of.

Sicily’s 12-year-old Norman king sat with Captain Pere and a muscular man wearing the royal colors of Croatia. They were in the castle’s tallest tower. The room looked to Isaac like an armory hastily converted into royal chambers. The council table was small, the flat gray walls were covered over with those colorful chicken scratch tapestries of which Norman nobility was so fond. The painted wood carving near the unmade bed reminded Isaac of the Arab mosaic style. The carving’s subject looked suspiciously like traditional descriptions of the Guiscard, sitting with legs folded beneath him and a wine cup in hand.

Isaac went to his knee and lowered his gaze to the rugs on the floor. “Your Majesty, Captain.” He had practiced his Norman on the boat.

“Please, Isaac. A simple salute would suffice,” Pere said in German.

The king snickered at that and the Croat, despite his blockish appearance, comprehended enough to chuckle. The courtier did not looked pleased. He walked to the king’s side at the head of the table. “Please rise,” the king said.

“I’ve been talking to this representative of the Croat crown.” Pere made a gracious gesture toward the sandy-haired man in red and white checkers. “He tells me their eight thousand are already on the march south with His Majesty’s Norman regulars and levies.”

Isaac sat next to Pere. The courtier leaned down to the king’s ear and whispered something. The boy jumped a bit and began reciting a formal greeting he had forgotten. Isaac leaned over to Pere. “I thought you said their marshal is a Hellene.” He whispered.

“This is the marshal’s second. He’s a fool, but he has the second half of our advance, so play along, will you?”

The king finished with a smile, pushing back a handful of his thick brown locks. “Please, sirs. Continue.”

Isaac stifled a frown. This kid was who the Croats were paying hand over fist to preserve?

“Yes, yes, thank you, Your Grace,” the Croat officer began, “I am Captain Kocelj. I speak with the authority of Marshal Romanos of the Kingdom of Croatia.” His German was rough.

Isaac nodded. “Lieutenant Isaac, Gray Landser Company. Charmed.”

“Your condotierre is not exactly correct in his statement. The marshal marches with seven thousand, to be precise. The rest of our forces lay in wait slightly north of Salerno, under my command.”

Under your command, yet you’re sitting here on the northern coast with the bloody King of Sicily. “I see. Then you mean to escort us to the city we have leave to sack as per our contract-“

“No.” Kocelj crossed his arms.

“Not quite, I’m afraid.” Captain Pere rubbed at the shaved stubble on the back of his head, as he did whenever he had to give unpopular orders to the men.

Kocelj pointed to the map on the table.“The Gray Landser Company will attach to my regiment, under my authority, and we will pass through Benevento to push up into Taranto in a flanking maneuver.”

“A flanking maneuver,” said Isaac, “then I assume Marshal Romanos and his forces are in Lecce?”

“Correct. We know that Duke Nigel’s full forces are camped and foraging in Taranto. We also know the duke means to march directly on Bari to capture His Majesty and force a resolution in his favor while avoiding any more direct conflict with forces loyal to the Sicilian crown.”

The points connected in Isaac’s head. With the Landsers leaving Bari, the duke’s whisperers would tell him that the path to the capital is open. He would break camp with haste and begin a breakneck march towards the king. They would, however, pinion the fifteen thousand-strong Calabrian force in the middle of their march. “How do you know that the duke intends to march here first?”

“We have a reliable source,” said Kocelj, his eyes sliding for a second to the courtier who stood next to King Blayve.

Ah, the king’s master of whisperers. “From?”

“Within the duke’s council itself.”

With little else to discuss, they began to finalize the meeting. Kocelj offered to take them to where the second installment of the company’s monetary compensation waited, paid out of Romanos’ personal purse. “Oh, and one more important caveat.”

Pere winced. Isaac did not like the looks of that. “Do tell.”

“There will be no foraging in any Italic territory, regardless of allegiance.

It took all of Isaac’s little surviving patience not to slam the table with his fist. “What?”

It was the king himself, amazingly, who answered. “If half of my people rise up against me, then I should be setting a better example, right?” It would have been impressive if his voice was not a lilting mess of cracks and squeaks.

“Guh… of course, Your Grace. My only concern is that maintaining discipline will be difficult without foraging rights. Your Grace may not know this in his youth, but soldiers of fortune are lusty men, to face death as a profession.”

Kocelj answered. “Your men still have exclusive sacking rights to Salerno; after the routing or destruction of Duke Nigel’s host. Hold them over with that, they will fight all the better for it.”

Walking the ramparts afterwards, Captain Pere, who was always the consummate raconteur soldier, looked almost remorseful towards his lieutenant. “They outmaneuvered me, what can I say?”

“Hell, I would not have fared any better.” Isaac watched a Greek ship pulling into the harbor. “It’s a decent plan; provided the enemy is as stupid as they are huge.”

 

[phargle]

I like the contrasts. The negotiation in the presence of a king requires courtesy and forcefulness. Very delicate. Nice.

I'm a sucker for good mercenary stories, too. Thanks!

 

[Enewald]

Pillage, yay!

This gets odd. Evil normans. Too many of them.

 

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Phargle: Thanks! As for mercenaries, they're a great way to have a perspective that can float from conflict to conflict without having to dive into the heads of the locals at every war zone. The Gray Landsers are definitely a romanticized rendition, but it's hard not to romanticize the period's best badboys.

Enewald: D'oh! That's probably the fault of my overwriting. I'm trying hard not to have any true-blue evil characters, but maybe I'm making the Normans just a little too crafty? It was really neat in the game, they really did fragment as soon as Guiscard ("Uncle Rob" to Blayve and Ermyntrude) bought the farm. The impression I want to give of the de Hautevilles is of a sprawling, influential family (they really are huge in-game) whose members can't ever fully escape that influence no matter who they marry or to where they run off. Sort of proto-Habsburgs (though the Habsburgs do make an appearance later, sort of).

 

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Well, absolutely - wow! I've just discovered this, and even though I am personally not so fond of the contrasting leaps in time, I have to say that the narration is really impressive. Not sticking too rigidly with what happens in the game-play but stepping out of this narrow focus serves your story very well. I am definitely going to follow along.

 

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Chapter 5 – The fourth head of Cerberus

Ostrreich Castle, Austria, May 1131

“The Danube.”

Cheilous bumped him, a lazy play nudge against the shoulder. “You think I didn’t know that?”

Gavril shrugged under his formal coat. “Just checking.”

A hundred and fifty meters down the jutting rock face they stood upon, the gray water coursed. It was relentless on its way to the eastern border of the Western Empire.

---

An hour ago

“Now that the women are out of the way, we can really start talking, right?” The Western Emperor looked at home in his castle. He leaned forward in his Spartan sentry’s chair and rested his elbows on the parapet.

Gavril chuckled, hoping his nerves didn’t bleed through into his voice. It was the first time he had been sent on a diplomatic outing without the council in tow to fill the gaps. The Emperor had been very specific in his desire for this to be, what he called, an “informal” outing. No council members. He could not remember the last time, if ever, so many objectives had been dropped solely on his shoulders.

“You know, I was barely half your age when they crossed this water.” The Emperor pointed a finger down the rock face.

“So I’ve heard.” Eleven years before Gavril came into the world, the Magyars had poured over the Danube at three strategic points where the cliff faces were not so sheer. The Empire, for a brief moment, seemed at the mercy of the Maygars’ lightning war. Province after province yielded and ducal armies broke apart and collapsed like brittle chaff. Ostrreich itself, so close to the border, was one of the first provinces to fall. Siege engines surrounded the castle from the far bank and the fields to the west. The emperor’s progeny. Including his eldest son, Borna, would certainly not have survived had it not been for the system of tunnels that coursed through the mountains and into Innsbruck, the former Imperial province, acquired by the Croats back in Dmitar Zvonimir’s time.

Borna von Babenburg opened his hand now, made a sweeping motion towards the wooded bank on the opposite end of the river. “I remember those things they brought here to breach these walls with. I saw them on the eve we were snuck out, I thought they had brought a thousand dragons with flaming nostrils with them!”

“Mangonels, perhaps. Loaded with flaming pitch?”

“Perhaps. I never saw a single one fire. By the next day we were through the tunnels and riding across Innsbruck with armed guard. The mounts and the soldiers,” he smiled and patted Gavril on the shoulder, “provided by your father.”
Zdeslav had been the one who arranged for his sister’s marriage into the von Babenburg line. His nephew Borna was the most palpable result of that maneuver. Gavril knew there had been whispers at the time that his cousin stood as the best likely heir apparent to a unified Germany and Croatia. That was before Gavril was born and ended the dream.

“They say my father did love all his siblings and their children.”

“Yet none of the Adrianos three ever married or sired children. Have you ever wondered why that is?”

Gavril did not know the answer.

Borna made a cough deep in his throat and leaned back from the parapet. “But enough of all that! I know you did not come here to listen to an emperor go on about his superstitious thoughts as a boy.” He grinned. “Speaking of boy kings, how goes your adventure in the south of Italy?”

Gavril blew out a sigh. The point had been cut to all of a sudden. “To be honest, cousin, not all that well. That’s why I’m here.”

---

Taranto, Italy, May 1131

Riflemen of the Gray Landser Company in service of the "Aksumite" Helleno-Seljuq Republic prepare for an advance of Tsargrad cavalry outside Sofia, 1921​

“Hell.”

The horn seemed to reverberate from all directions, careening off the trees like the arrows that went astray. Another one tore by Rolf’s cheek, stabbing into the dirt a half meter from him, its feathered shaft trembling. He broke into another wind sprint.

“Hell.”

He passed a tree struck with a dozen arrows and impaled by a javelin. A splintered kite shield lying on the ground, its red-and-white chessboard heraldry washed over with a swath of blood. He lept over two bodies laying in their own pool, spears punched through either one and standing in the air like wooden headstones.

More arrows tore through the branches overhead. Bark and leaves rained on Rolf’s shoulders and everything reeked of fresh-cut vegetation. Smells like home. A distant part of his mind untouched by animal panic said. He would have laughed if he had any breath left in his breast.

“Hell.”

How far back was the rally point? He could have sworn he measured the exact amount of paces—

“Hell!” Something snared his ankle and sent him flying forward. He saw his right hand throw down the spear and wrap his face in the crook of his arm before it struck the dirt. Sharp rocks dug into the sleeves of his gambeson. The impact made his jaw ache.

The horn blew again. He rolled onto his back and saw six men crouched against a divot depression in the earth that had been imperceptible from the direction Rolf was running. One of them held him by the ankle with a mud-and-blood-speckled hand. Slowly, he recognized the rusting chainmail and scowling eyes under the helmet’s nose guard.

“Kunst.” He said between gasps for breath.

“You were running like every Norman knight in Italy was at your heels.”

“They weren’t?” He crawled to his knees, looked over the top of the depression. The arrow volleys had cut holes into the tree cover, but only narrow shafts of yellow moonlight cut down onto the forest floor. Through them he could not see anyone alive.

Another volley whistled through the air. Rolf skittered forward against the depression, rocks cutting into his palms. None landed near their position. He heard one arrow slap into a tree trunk.

Kunst spat. “They’re firing blind, Rolf. Trying to spook us the way you are right now.”

Rolf looked up, looked at the other men crouched behind the cover. He recognized Mastiff and the Catalan from their own squad, but he’d never seen the other three before.

He remembered charging out of the tree line in fighting order, the Croat regiment split to fill in the flanks of the Landsers’ advance. They deployed in a convex formation, intending to scoop the Calabrian host from behind as they stood occupied with a frontal assault by the main Croat force from Lecce. Instead, they had broken through the tree line to see the Calabrians waiting for them, no eight thousand-strong Croat-Sicilian army coming from the opposite end of their foe.

Kocelj, Marshal Romanos’ square-headed second, was commander of the two thousand-man “flanking” force, but Captain Pere de Flor seemed to be the one issuing the orders that afternoon. Sending out a few runners, he had the Croats on the flanks close off the front of the formation, so it resembled more of a delta than a bull’s horns. Their heavy shields and pikes held the initial ecstatic charge of Calabrian infantry.

Behind that wall, the Landers could move. Rolf had heard Captain Pere yelling orders to a wide-eyed Kocelj and the hundred or so Croat knights who shuffled about on the side of the delta. He had wanted them to charge the flank of the Calabrians pushing against the Croat infantry. Rolf knew enough about heavy cavalry to know the hundred lances would probably send the skittish Lights into a hasty retreat back to the Calabrian center, confusing the masses that were plainly moving askew to the Landers’ rear and tangling up into the rows of Calabrian archers, who had yet to fire a single volley.

Instead, the knights charged on their own as knights were apt to do, peeling off towards the cloud of Calabrian horse and Heavies moving off to the right. The Calabrian archers were finally given a clear target and snapped off their first volleys of the day. Rolf watched the Croat knights get shredded, falling from crippled horses at the feet of the Calabrian Heavies.

The right flank was thus slowed with their hurry to annihilate the knights, but the left continued on, undaunted in their move to cut off the withdrawal path in the forest. Irritated to no small degree, Pere shouted for Isaac. He sent the Turk with half the Landsers’ miniscule light cavalry squad, Catalan javelin hurlers, to the left to run circles and pepper them hard enough to draw away the mounted Normans. Pere himself took the other half of Landser horse to go and bother the right long enough to perhaps save some of the overzealous knights. His last order to the Landser infantry was for the Heavies to stand pauldron-to-pauldron with the Croat infantry until the Lights could withdraw far enough into the woods. Then they would withdraw themselves, pulling back till they passed the first rally point, where the Lights would then hold the Calabrian advance until the Heavies reached the next point. And so on.

Rolf turned back to Kunst. “How many times have we swapped places with the Heavies?” He wheezed.

“Hell if I know. You think I was counting?” The sergeant was pouring water from a skin onto his blistered hands. “Have a feeling it’s working though. Back when it was light they would have been on top of us already by now.”

“That was a bloody nightmare,” said the Catalan, taking the water skin from Kunst and swallowing.

“That was a bloody set up.” The Mastiff was glowering. He turned down the skin, handed it to Rolf instead. “Or else some Croat lordling in the command structure needs to get his pinky lopped off.”

The horn blared again, this time in such proximity that it hurt Rolf’s ears. He nearly choked on the water when the rider cut through the trees behind them, horn still held to his lips.

With his other hand the rider yanked the reins diagonally, pulling back the horse and shifting it to face the seven Landsers. Through moonlight Rolf could see the lather wet on the steppe pony’s coat.

“Lieutenant Isaac.” Kunst gave a small salute against the brim of his scavenged Norman helm.

“Scholar.” Isaac nodded. He looked like Hell. Vivid arcs of blood cut across his lamellar armor and the horse’s flanks. Mud and viscera clumped to her black hooves. There was an accumulation of pink gore where the mouth of the scabbard tied to his chest met the haft of his falchion. Two arrows stuck into the leather skin of his left shoulder guard. “You have about three hundred others to your left and right. The rest have withdrawn.”

“How many more times are we going to have to switch off with the Heavies? We’re losing cohesion—I’ve got three grunts here I’ve never seen in my life.”

“This should be the last, I think.” Isaac squinted out to where the scattering of corpses and arrows ahead. “They’ve probably given up chase by now. But stick around for another half hour before you pull back.” He pulled at the reins again.

“What about the flankers?”

“Oh, don’t worry about them.”

---

Borna nodded, as if to himself in deep thought. “So I’ve heard. Though I’ve also heard it might be one of Uncle Romanos’ schemes.”

Who did you hear that from? “I’ve got my faith in him, as always, but I figure at times it is best to let your officers to do their own work and submit the report afterwards.” Not to mention Gavril was hopeless when it came to the maneuvering of men and materiel.

“My mother was right, you are far too modest for your station, cousin! An interesting approach nonetheless, seeing as how they’re so apt to act on their own anyways.” Borna rubbed his trimmed beard. “Yes. Well, believe me when I say it’s a noble thing you’re doing down there, truly. And not without its potential profits, yes?”

“Yes.”

“But if you’re going to ask me to commit an expedition of Imperial forces, then I must—“

“No, no, no.” Gavril stopped himself and took a breath. “Of course not. You have enough to deal with in Flanders.”

“Yes,” Borna muttered, “the Capets and all.” The Franco-Imperial war was Borna’s baby.

“Friends have told us that the Duke of Calabria has had more than a few crises of faith in the past. We also know you have a special understanding with His Holiness in Rome…”

Borna controlled the man, as Gavril’s father had before he died. “We are great friends, as I hope we too can be, cousin.” The diplomat’s smile was back.

“Of course, and as friends I hope you would be able to do me this favor.”

“Lorraine.”

Gavril paused. He could hear the whistling of wind through the river bank and the distant metallic footfalls of sentries. “What?”

“Upper Lorraine. The dukedom.” Borna leaned towards Gavril now. He had no demon’s glint to his eyes as Gavril imagined he would. His white features were merely blank. “I want it in exchange for this.”

Lorraine was the oldest territory in German Croatia next to Swabia. Helene had told him that their attachment to the crown was always a bloodless thing compared to the hard-bitten Swabians. But this… “But as a friend I thought—“

Borna stood. “Cousin, when I said that, we were speaking as individual men. Now we’re speaking as leaders of men.” He began walking towards the nearest tower. “Men and women have friends. Empires and kingdoms have interests.”

Gavril followed him. Stanislava and Helene had not trained him for this sort of proposition. “The laws of God and men…”

“Should not be any problem.” From the tower they could see out to the distant checkerboard squares where the serfs laid down the new wheat. “Duke von Lothringen is a good man, a true crusader and consummate statesman. I hear from my friend in Rome that there is talk of sainthood.” Old Sigfried had been one of the men to sail to Jerusalem with Ljubomir to finish Zdeslav’s crusade.

Gavril leaned against the flagstones. “Yes. Our uncle says as much of him.”

“Uncle Ljubomir? Another good man, a true priest.” Borna put his hands on Gavril’s shoulders, the emperor stood half a head taller. “But I doubt he knows Sigfried’s folly.”

“A folly?”

“Oh yes. Have you not checked your own spymaster’s ledgers? The man is in his sixtieth year, with a radiant wife less than half his age, and he has yet to produce an heir. Yet to produce any child at all.” Borna released him and turned away. “Cousin, I will be honest and tell you I simply do not trust men who preoccupy themselves so visibly with matters of Christ, but constantly glance over their shoulder to make sure all us other mortals are watching and gawping. They all hide something and it is almost always in plain sight.”

Gavril did not need to ask what such a thing implied. “So who stands to inherit?”

“A man under my stead. A bit too Frankish for my tastes, but an honest man nonetheless. So you see now? You need not commit deceit here, simply allow God’s laws to carry through without incident.”

“Why Lorraine? Besides the serendipity of Sigfried’s… peccadilloes?”

“As you said yourself, the Empire has its own problems in Flanders. I need a second front against the Capets and my dukes in Marseille and Lombardy are far too bankrupt and blustering to provide it.”

“Swabia is far larger.”

“And difficult to manage. Not to mention Duke Berengar is still a boy, not a drooling old man, and that the house of von Hohenfel would sooner kneel to a talking housecat than the Imperial throne ever again. No offense.”

“None taken.”

The Emperor climbed onto the parapet and raised his arms out to balance, facing out toward the jagged cliffs and raging water. “Besides, I like your presence in Germania. The Reich in the east and west, the Franks in the far west, Deutches-Hrvatska square in the center and the Vyatich pagans to the north. A tetrarchy is good. Suggests balance, stability, don’t you think?”

A map of Central Europe around the time of the Calabrian War​