Vindobona. Eastern gateway of the Gothic Empire. Bastion against the Magyars to the east, the Turks if they should overtake Avaria, and the Golden Empire if it should ever begin to reach the breadth of the Undying Emperor’s desires. Once the northern gateway of the original Roman Empire – original, as Sigismund II was one of the emperors claiming to hold the imperial scepter of Rome (or, as the Sultan called it, Rum), and the Gothic Empire was sometimes called Roman.
Vindobona. One of the great cities of the Empire, arguably the greatest city of the Istros, which was without question the greatest river west of the mighty Kama. Not so great as Rome was, but a city of culture, learning, and intellect. It even had a university, one of the largest in Europe. Moreso than Oenipons, the capital city; the greatest mages and musicians of the Empire were said to gather in Vindobona. They would cluster and chatter in its cafes, bars, and – or so Lieutenant Quentin Gavreau told me – a few special clubs of ill repute. Bordellos, that is.
As an adopted French nobleman who had voyaged much of the navigable length of the Istros on his way to a theoretical inheritance in Wallachia, Quentin had been through Vindobona before. He’d also had a good education on it ahead of time, with his mother emphasizing the availability of Turkish-style coffee and the importance of avoiding any place where many women wore yellow squares on their shoulders. This was, he informed me with sparkling eyes, the mark required by local town authorities of a working woman.
Why he might have a particular interest in which women worked puzzled me – didn’t all women work, at least those who weren’t nobles? We were both embarrassed that he was required to explain what he meant. He told me a working woman was a woman working professionally as a woman. That is, paid to be a woman in the special ways that a woman is not like a man. He clarified further that he was not referring to a wet nurse, but a profession requiring a bit more exposure, and that he was not referring to a painter’s model, at which point I realized what he meant and Vitold spent what seemed like an hour laughing on his side.
My oldest available friend, Vitold – who I had promoted to lieutenant of mechanics – had grown up in a bakery in Lviv, near the western edge of the Golden Empire, and he was keen to taste the city’s breads, pastries, and (since Quentin had mentioned it) a delectable yellow-squared woman. He thought perhaps such a visit would do me well, as I had been looking morose lately and could hardly expect another naked noblewoman to mysteriously materialize in my bed for my entertainment.
Not that I had taken advantage of Carmen. I had been passed out cold from an excess of wine when someone – perhaps our erstwhile employer – deposited the drugged noblewoman in my bed, and not woken up until an older male cousin of Carmen’s barged into the room. No, I did not miss Carmen, nor did I wish for a repeat of that incident. Who I missed was Katya, the redheaded sharpshooter who had saved my life more than once.
I’d loved her – I still did. She’d loved me – I hoped she still did, but she’d been angry enough with me the last time I’d seen her to run off into the woods of Silesia… and we were hundreds of miles from there. Maybe I did need to find a woman wearing a yellow square on her shoulder to put Katya out of mind, but one of my older brothers once told me that a visit to a whore to cure a broken heart was as like to leave a man in need of having another part cured as to address the broken heart.
What I wanted to see was the university. I had not known I was a mage when I began my journey, and I knew that wizardry was a high learned art of great sophistication. Perhaps I could learn more about my gifts and how better to use them; I might even be able to find someone to tutor me, a teacher willing to travel with us for a little while and pass on his knowledge. I felt as if I was fumbling around in the dark.
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There were two problems with my desire to see Vindobona. The first was that almost all of my officers wanted to go to Vindobona, but we could not march a small army of soldiers through the city gates. The local authorities were concerned with the security of their city. The second was the crows.
When we had traveled by train, we had gone faster than a crow could fly and gone farther than any crow wanted to fly. But crows are inveterate gossips and they are able to describe men to each other quite well. Whether it was because of the battles I had fought, the distance I had traveled, or the fact that we carried a raven banner, the corvid grapevine had apparently been filled with stories of me. One or two birds had seen me napping at the train station, and then flown off to tell a couple of friends that I looked like the man in the stories, who each had flown off to tell a couple more birds, and by morning the little town across the river and up the hill from Vindobona was full of very curious crows.
They were all eager to get a look at this man they’d heard so much about and were crowding around and cawing out questions without the slightest sense of shame. Worse, many of them were poor listeners and not particularly creative thinkers, so many of them were cawing out the same questions, with more informed crows giving out the same answers. I found it annoying.
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My officers found it unnerving and recommended that I stay behind and supervise the troops. Obtaining entrance through the city gates might be complicated if they walked up accompanied by an unusually large murder of crows; indeed, it could be more alarming than trying to bring our artillery into the city. While I had only negotiated my way into one walled city before, I could see how being followed by a conspicuous corvid crowd might make things complicated.
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That is not to say that the crows didn’t complicate matters.
“Alright, men, present arms!” The infantry captain’s command voice pierced through the cawing loud and clear.
“Yes, ma’am!” they chanted back, voices mostly lower-pitched. Mostly.
I walked along the line slowly, looking over each recruit from head to toe, trying to commit their faces to memory. Today, the captain had felt ready to trust them with unloaded arquebuses. Yesterday, they’d been drilling with fork-rests. I paused, gently pulling a hand off of a firing lever here, a finger out from underneath a phoenix stone there. Some of the recruits had never held an arquebus before, and it showed.
The recruit at the end of the line had hair the color of aged cheese – a young beardless recruit in ill-fitting clothes and oversized boots, struggling to grip the arquebus and fork at the same time in too-small hands.
I frowned and then walked back to the infantry captain.
“What is the baron’s daughter’s maid doing here?” I asked under my breath, gesturing at the row of trainees. The maid had a close resemblance to the baron’s daughter, including hair the same shade.
“What do you mean, sir?” The infantry captain looked at me with a cool expression.
I pointed at the end of the line. The baron’s daughter’s maid’s face flushed pink, and she gripped something attached to a necklace under her ill-fitting men’s clothing.
“Georg?” The infantry’s captain’s voice quavered uncertainly. She looked at the baron’s daughter's maid with a puzzled expression. “Georg is a man, sir,” she whispered.
“Uh, what is the problem?” the baron’s daughter’s maid said, shuffling a few steps back in oversized boots. She looked uneasily over her shoulder. The crows had grown quiet and were staring at her with interest.
I frowned. “Georg, come walk with me,” I said, loudly enough that she didn’t have to pretend she hadn’t heard the whispered exchange between myself and the captain. With any luck, the other new recruits hadn’t been paying attention.
The baron’s daughter’s maid gulped nervously. For convenience, I will refer to her as Georg; I never learned her real name. It was not the custom of Gothic nobles to address servants by name if they could help it, or I might have learned it earlier. Georg stepped forward; I took her arquebus, handing it to the captain, and then walked uphill. She followed.
“Did you desert your mistress?” I asked, once we had put some distance behind us and the crows had returned to their raucous conversations.
“My mistress? What do you mean?” Georg was breathing heavily, a consequence of having to keep up with my stride on her short legs and ill-fitting boots.
Consciously, I slowed. “The baron’s daughter. I know you as her servant.”
Georg made an empty pinching gesture in front of her chin as if she had a beard to stroke. “And if I did work for her, what is it to you if I’ve left her service?”
“Trouble, if she misses you,” I said, stopping and turning to face her. “Or if the baron thinks you needed his permission. And that’s if you’ve truly left the baron’s service.”
George leaned heavily on her fork-rest, breathing heavily as she caught her breath.
“You strike me as the loyal type,” I said. I was lying; it was a wild guess, and I was hoping she would react.
She did. “I work for her. Not him,” she said. “Milady asked me to join you and send word back about where you went.”
“To spy on me,” I said.
“That … she doesn’t mean you ill, sir, I swear. Just wanted to know where you ended up next.” She looked at me so earnestly that I couldn’t help but believe her. “And I’ve always wanted to see the world, sir.”
“You do realize that you’ve signed up for a rather dangerous occupation?” I looked at the maid in her ill-fitting clothing and oversized boots. “Well, if the captain decides you pass muster, you can stay with us, but I wouldn’t be in this vocation if I had the choice of an easy life.”
“Really, sir?” she said. She looked puzzled. “But … didn’t you turn down …” She clamped her mouth shut. “Sorry sir, forgive me for my insolence.”
“Forgiven. I can accept insolence in private,” I said. Then I pointed down. “Get boots that fit better, or find yourself extra socks. Soldiers spend a lot of time marching from place to place. If anyone asked, I was talking to you about proper kit and fit, and alternatives to the arquebus. You are rather small.” I paused. “Do you ride?”
“Not as well as my mistress,” she said, deferentially. “But yes. And I have my letters.”
“Hm. Useful,” I said. “Well, do the best that you can for now. I’ll let the captain know you have other skills that might be useful. And remember about the boots.”
“I will, sir,” she said, giving me her best impression of a military salute of some kind.
I waved her away by way of dismissal and she walked down the hill in what would have been an awkward silence, if not for the continued chatter of the crows. It seemed like every crow within seven leagues had come to watch the famous Colonel Marcus Corvus.
“I wish I could visit Vindobona,” I said, eyeing the crows with irritation. “I’d trade the whole load of Krukov salt for an hour in the university’s library.”