ALTDORF (The Forest Knights Book 1)

Chapter 5

Chapter 5

Aarau, capital city of the Aargau region

   THE TWO ARMORED MEN, thronged by cheering spectators, circled each other. Both let their shields drop slightly to ease their aching arms and sucked in ragged breaths to prepare for the next assault. Then, one man charged forward to swing his hand-and-a-half sword down upon the other’s shield.

 “I never understood what the point is in hitting another man’s shield,” Leopold said, holding his goblet out to be refilled by a servant standing ready with a pitcher of honeyed wine. “Why not simply aim where the shield is not?”

 “Intimidation,” Berenger Von Landenberg, the Vogt of Unterwalden said, taking a pull off his own mead. “Shake a man’s shield arm to the core and it takes the fight out of him.”

 He sat forward in his high-backed chair, but not because the match enthralled him. Landenberg was a large man with a rounded salt and pepper beard and the soft, blackened teeth of a noble who had eaten too much white bread. Though he wore no armor, squeezing his girth between the armrests of the wooden chair, if possible, would be far from comfortable. In his early fifties now, he watched the competitors with disdain and undisguised jealousy.

 Count Henri of Hunenberg also sat on the raised platform with the young Habsburg Duke and the Vogt, albeit in a plain chair that lacked the intricate carvings of the other two men. The ever-present Klaus, Leopold’s man, stood at the bottom of the platform’s stairs, unmoving as an iron rod driven straight into hard-packed earth.

 The crowd groaned as one of the competitors missed an overhead strike leaving himself open and his opponent brought his own blade crashing down across the man’s back, knocking him to the ground and ending the match.

 “Sweet Mary. Finally. This match should have been finished long ago,” Landenberg said, standing to fart and stretch his joints. “Wine,” he said thrusting out his mug. “I have a mind to send for my own armor.”

 Leopold was in no mood for Landenberg’s blustering. Granted the man had his uses, especially when it came to keeping order in the backward villages and mountain settlements of Unterwalden. Violence and intimidation were all those people understood, so they deserved to be governed by a filthy boar of a man like Landenberg.

 The ride back from Salzburg had been long and wearying, made even more so because Leopold had to suffer the company of the Fool. His eyes scanned the crowd and immediately picked out the little man’s purple hair and white and black outfit doing a dance in front of some shabbily dressed peasants, who seemed to have forgotten their miserable lot in life and were enjoying his antics.

 “Our tournament days are over, Berenger.” Count Henri said, invading on Leopold’s thoughts. “This is a young man’s domain.” Although much smaller than the hulking Landenberg, Henri still had the fit body of a knight. He had been fighting off and on in the Holy Lands for almost twenty years and had returned to the Aargau five years ago when his father died. He inherited his father’s lands: three lucrative estates in the Aargau and one rocky tract of land at the head of the Gotthard Pass. Not exceptionally rich titles, but Leopold was in negotiations to acquire the Gotthard land to add to the Habsburg family’s holdings. Henri’s family connections with landowners in Uri, where Saint Gotthard’s Pass was located, had proved valuable when Leopold had purchased land at the head of the pass last year. The same land where Leopold currently had fifty stone masons constructing a fortress that would be his new home. He needed some farmland to support the fortress, and poor though it was, Henri’s small estate should do nicely. Henri’s Connections would prove useful in the coming years if Leopold were to bring the pass under Habsburg control.