Chapter 38: The Council of Merchants

The morning came up crisp and damp, with mist clinging to Auenstadt's stone the way it clings to anything old, and the city felt subdued, as though it were holding its breath for something that had nothing to do with any of them.

Waldric had them assemble in the inn yard an hour before they were wanted.

"You will say nothing," he told them, buttoning his coat. "Any of you. If a man addresses you directly, you look at me. If a man insults me, you look at me. If a man insults the Baron, you look at me."

"And if he insults us?" said Alden.

"Then you should be flattered, because it will mean they have noticed you exist, and they will not." The old knight pulled his gloves on. "This is not a hall. In a hall a man is judged by what he does. In a chamber a man is judged by what he can be made to do, and the trade consists entirely of making the other fellow move first."

He looked at Osric.

"That goes double for you."

"I'd worked that out."

"You have worked out the words. I want you to have worked out the feeling, because they will spend two hours arranging for you to have it." Waldric adjusted his sword belt. "They cannot beat the Baron's position. It is a good position, honestly come by, and there is nothing in law they can do with it. So they will not argue with it. They will arrange for one of us to lose his temper, and then the business will be about our temper, and the position will never be spoken of again."

Osric said nothing.

"You are the piece they will aim at. You are a serjeant in a room of lords and I have brought you in on purpose, because it says the Baron has soldiers and is not frightened of them knowing it. That was my choice. It also hands them a target, and that is the price, and I made it with my eyes open."

"Stand behind you and be a wall."

"Stand behind me and be a wall."

"I can be a wall."

"You can be a wall for about ninety minutes." Waldric's mouth did something dry. "I have watched you. Let us hope they are quick."

They went on foot, which was Waldric's decision and which he explained to nobody.

The way ran from the merchants' quarter along the cathedral road and into the heart of the city, and Auenstadt on a working morning was a great deal handsomer than Osric wanted it to be. Timbered upper floors leaned out over the lanes and nearly touched. Shop fronts stood open with their boards down. A woman came out of a doorway and threw water into the gutter and apologised to Waldric with the particular courtesy of somebody who has recognised good cloth.

The mist thinned as the sun got up. They passed under an arch of grey stone black-streaked with two centuries of soot, and the lane opened, and they came out into the great square.

Osric stopped walking for about a second and a half and then went on, and nobody noticed except Argilac, who noticed everything about his father now.

It was a fine square. It was paved in worn grey blocks and had a well-house at the northern end with a carved roof, and there were market stalls being set out along the eastern side, and pigeons, and a boy sweeping, and two women arguing pleasantly over a basket of pears.

Twelve years ago they had marched in through the eastern gate and up this same street and had come out into this square, and the square had been full.

He had been thirty-one and had not slept in three days and had a dead father and a brother who had another month to live and he had come round that corner with the rest of the column, and he had looked up.

They had used the beams of the guildhall arcade, because they were the right height and there were enough of them.

The rebel lord had been in the middle, which somebody had thought about. His two brothers to his left. His steward and his marshal and four of his household knights beyond them. And to his right, in order of age, his wife and his three sons and his daughter, and the daughter had been perhaps eleven or twelve, and she had been wearing a good green dress that somebody had dressed her in that morning.

Nobody in that column had said anything. Four thousand men had come into that square and gone through it and out the other side, and Osric could remember the sound of the boots and could not remember one single voice.

He had asked, years afterward, and had been told that it had been done by the city, not by the King's men. That the merchants and the aldermen had gone into the keep on the day the walls came down and had taken the family out and had done it themselves, before the army arrived, so that when the King's officers came they would find the business already finished and no further questions worth asking.

This story has been stolen from NovelPhoenix. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

They hanged a girl of twelve off a market arcade to shorten a conversation.

And then they swept the square and put the stalls back and elected a council, and here it is on a Tuesday morning with the pears out.

He looked at the arcade as they crossed. The beams were still there. They were beams; there was nothing to see and nothing on them but a rope-worn groove in one of them that might have been anything at all and probably was.

Waldric had slowed a little.

"You were here," he said. Not a question.

"I came in on the twelfth day."

"So the square was."

"Aye."

The old knight looked at the arcade for a moment and then ahead again.

"They will not mention it," he said. "Not one of them. There are men on that council who were in the party that did it, and they will sit in front of you this morning discussing wool tolls, and they will do it entirely without discomfort, because they long ago agreed among themselves that it was necessity and they have never once had to test the agreement in front of anybody who was there."

"And if I mention it?"

"Then you will have handed them a wild man from the marches who cannot leave the war alone, and they will thank you for it." Waldric did not look round. "But I shall not tell you that you may not. That is between you and whatever you believe in."

The council hall stood on the northern side of the square and was the finest building Osric had ever been inside.

It was not a palace and it was not a castle and it did not pretend to either, and its arrogance lay precisely there. It had been built by men with money and no titles and it announced them: three storeys of dressed pale stone under a steep

tiled roof, with a stepped and pinnacled gable running up above the roofline like a set of shoulders, and a slender tower at the western corner with a bell in it and a great iron clock face beneath, gilded, with one hand.

The ground floor was an open arcade of pointed arches where in bad weather the corn was sold. Above it the windows were tall and traceried and went up nearly to the roof, and the upper lights of them held coloured glass, and the colours were not saints. They were the arms of the guilds: the shears, the tun, the wool-sack, the hammer, the crossed keys.

"They built that in fifteen years," said Waldric, "out of tolls, and the cathedral behind it took a hundred and eighty and is still not finished. Look at the two of them and tell me who runs this city."

They went up broad stone steps worn hollow in the middle and in under a carved lintel where a stone lion held a shield with the checkered arms of the city on it, and a herald in a pressed surcoat met them in the vestibule with a scroll clutched in one gloved hand.

"Sir Waldric von Aelrich, in the name of Heinric von Aelrich, Baron of Valmarch. You are summoned to the Council's presence at the hour agreed." He bowed and straightened. "You may bring one man-at-arms apiece."

Waldric did not hesitate.

"Serjeant Osric will attend me."

The stair went up in a wide sweep with a carved oak rail and a runner of red wool held down by brass rods, and the walls beside it were hung with painted boards, one for every year, each bearing the names of that year's twelve in gold on black. There were a great many boards. The oldest were up near the ceiling and had gone dark.

At the top, a pair of doors of blackened oak, banded and studded, with the arms of twelve houses carved in relief across the two leaves.

The herald knocked twice and swung them inward.

Osric had expected a stone box like the Valmarch council chamber, and had prepared himself for a stone box, and stopped one pace inside the doors before he could help it.

The room ran the whole width of the building. Its ceiling was a ribbed vault of pale plaster springing from carved corbels, and the ribs had been painted: dark red and deep blue and a good deal of gold leaf along the bosses, and at the centre of each bay a boss carved as a flower or a face or a beast, and every one

of them different. The great windows he had seen from the square let in a light that fell across the floor in patches of green and amber and blue.

The walls were panelled in dark oak to the height of a man and painted above it. The paintings were not scripture. On the long wall opposite the windows a procession of figures went the whole length: a woman holding a pair of scales, a man with a measuring rod, a man breaking a sword across his knee, a woman pouring grain from one vessel into another. Justice, Measure, Peace, Plenty, done in faded reds and greens with gold behind the heads, and under each of them a line of lettering in the old tongue that Osric could not read.

In the far corner stood a stove of green glazed tile, taller than a man, moulded all over with vine and leaf, radiating a dry even warmth into the whole room. There was no smoke and no hearth-smell anywhere. Osric had never seen its like and had to make himself stop looking at it.

A long table of carved oak dominated the centre, polished to a low shine and worn pale along its near edge by generations of men leaning on it while other men talked.

Twelve figures sat around it.

Each wore a chain of office, different in size and make, all of them stamped at the breast with the same sigil: a minted coin flanked by scales. Osric knew none of them by sight. He had read the list four times on the road and had spent that morning matching names to chairs, and had got seven of them before the doors closed.

At the table's head sat the Council Lord: an elderly man with parchment skin and a crooked nose and sunken, entirely intelligent eyes. He did not rise. He lifted a bony hand a few inches off the wood.

"Sir Waldric von Aelrich. You are welcome to the chamber."

Waldric bowed with stiff formality. Osric inclined his head and took his place two paces behind and one to the left, where he could see the room and reach his lord's shoulder in a stride, and did not sit, because he had not been offered a chair and would not have taken one.

And there, at the table's centre, sat Wilhelm von Morav.

He did not rise either. He was not a handsome man. Broad of brow, with a heavy flat nose and deep-set eyes beneath brows that met too close, over a hard hooked mouth. His skin was a pale olive, pocked along one cheek by something old, disease or shrapnel or a bad year. His hair was jet black streaked with

silver at the temples, combed and tied at the nape with a precision that took a servant twenty minutes.

He wore a high-collared doublet buttoned to the throat, violet velvet over chain, and one silver ring with a garnet in it, and a dagger at his hip that had a working grip and a worn sheath.

Chain under velvet. In a council chamber, in his own city, two floors up behind three sets of guards.

That's not vanity.