by Dan Abnett
Nithrom shrugged. ‘I never had cause to ask.’
Fithvael’s unease deepened. If it came to a siege, in the inner fence… without water? ‘What size is the dog-soldier band?’
‘It varies. Last year, it was two hundred.’
Two hundred… against twelve, if you counted Gaude.
‘You can go back any time you like,’ Nithrom told him lightly, seeing his expression.
THEY ENTERED THE fringes of the woods. Spruce, laburnum, elm, beech, years old and rich in leaf. Birds called through the sunlight patches under the soothing green canopy. They sighted deer several times, timid and fleeting in the glades off the track.
Bruda pulled out a curved bow and dropped one with swift, experienced grace. They would eat that night, at least.
The track spiralled down through the woods for six leagues. They passed gurgling streams that lapped over mossy stone beds under the bent limbs of twisted elms. Twice they passed groups of ancient standing stones, bearded with lichen, forgotten in the old woodland. Some of the stones had marks cut in them, intaglio carvings almost weathered smooth by years of rain and frost - spirals, sunbursts, stars, goddesses.
Fithvael saw how Nithrom nodded to each stone reverently as they went by. Madoc did too, though presumably for somewhat different reasons.
They reached a wider stream in late afternoon as the shadows began to lie long. Wood pigeons and cuckoos warbled and called in the quiet woodlands. They watered the horses at a shingled ford in the stream. The water was clear like fluid glass and the stones were all polished smooth; dark and shiny under the flow, pale and dry out of it.
Flies buzzed around the drinking horses. The company dismounted and flexed their limbs.
Several of the company were refilling waterskins. Vintze and Cloden both withdrew and lay down on the lush grass by the stream. Harg dunked his huge, scarred head into the water and shook silver pellets of spray from his beard and hair like a dog as he rose.
Le Claux wandered off into the woods. Dolph and Brom, the twin warriors, sat and played dice. Bruda began to gut the deer she had brought down.
Fithvael wandered over to the nervous boy Erill. ‘I’ll take a turn at driving the wagon, if you like.’
The youth seemed surprised at the offer, surprised that any of the company should even talk to him.
‘Thank you. I’d like to ride for a while.’
Fithvael nodded and tethered his horse to the wagon’s backboard as Erill loosed his own, undernourished steed.
‘A change of drivers!’ Nithrom called, seeing this. ‘Who else will take a turn?’
Brom and Dolph both volunteered, trading places with Harg and Gaude.
Fithvael climbed up onto the driving seat and untied the pack-reins.
‘Do we go on?’ he said to Nithrom.
‘Wait,’ the old ranger said mysteriously, watching the trees around them.
Fithvael sat back and waited, dropping the reins into his lap.
Twenty minutes passed. The company began to collect themselves and return to their mounts. Even Le Claux reappeared from the woods, looking somewhat bewildered, knots of foliage tagged into his armour joints.
Suddenly, Vintze swung around, his sword drawn in a blur. Fithvael started. How could a human react so fast? What had he seen? Bruda and Madoc were also armed suddenly, watching the same part of the tree line.
Am I getting so old, Fithvael wondered, so old I miss the signs? Now he could hear movement in the undergrowth, sounds that at least three of the company had heard before him.
‘Put up your blades,’ Nithrom instructed, his voice commanding but calm, and walked towards the source of the quiet movements.
For a moment, for one wonderful moment, Fithvael thought Gilead had rejoined them.
But the elf warrior, who emerged from the trees leading his beautiful, steel-armoured stallion, was not the son of Tor Anrok. He was an unforgettable figure in polished armour of silvered ithilmar, his plume red and proud, a noble elf, as if stepped out of a myth.
‘Well met, Caerdrath Eldirhrar tuin Elondith,’ Nithrom said in the high elven tongue.
‘Well met indeed, Nithrom te tuin Anrok. I am most pleased you waited for me.’ The new elf’s voice was musical and soft.
Nithrom looked around at the assembled company and continued speaking in the humans’ own language. ‘Our thirteenth sword, Caerdrath. He felt it best to meet us out here. Human towns are not for him.’
Most of the company looked on in amazement. Fithvael knew why. It was rare for him to set eyes on a true son of Ulthuan, let alone for this motley rabble.
‘Then he’s riding to the wrong place,’ Vintze sneered suddenly.
Caerdrath looked over towards the lean human swordsman. His eyes, shielded behind their helmet slits, were fire-bright.
‘I would not choose to do so ordinarily, rank man. But I owe Nithrom an old debt, and so I am here with him.’
‘Elves!’ spat Vintze and turned away.
They mounted up and moved on then, crossing the ford and crawling away into the woods beyond. Caerdrath rode alongside Fithvael’s wagon for a moment.
‘Brother,’ Caerdrath said with a tilt of his head.
‘I am called Fithvael, also of Tor Anrok. It is good to meet with you this day.’
Caerdrath nodded and spurred his fine steed forward, away down the track.
THE SUMMER NIGHT came down late and slow, and swifts shot like darts against the darkening sky, between the silhouettes of trees. The band made camp in a hollow near a forest pool. Bruda’s buck was spit-roasting by the time the stars came out.
Nithrom set a watch rotation, but left out Le Claux, who had been drinking from a wineskin since dusk and was now snoring by the fire. Fithvael fell into a light but easy slumber, his patched, travel-worn cloak pulled around him.
Brom woke him with a shake deep into the night, to take his turn at the watch. It was cool now, and the fire was guttering low. Fithvael rose, stretched out his limbs, took a swig of water from his flask and made a circle of the sleeping camp, silent in the undergrowth. Hunting owls hooted in the dark woods around. The dish of the night sky above was so clear and so full of stars it looked like beaten silver.
Fithvael flexed his aching limbs. The night air was still and without breeze or any sound except the owls, the whisper of nocturnal insects and the crack of the fire. Moths fluttered around the flames like wind-billowed snowflakes.
The veteran warrior noticed that Caerdrath was absent. Somehow that did not trouble him. He had not expected the noble elf to share their camp.
Fithvael knew he was meant to take this watch with the Carroburger, Cloden, and now he saw the human, lurking in the spinney above the hollow. He found a path up to him, through the knee-deep ferns.
Cloden glanced around as he heard the elf approach, a sharp gesture that relaxed when he made out Fithvael’s face. The man had unlaced his polished black breastplate and puff-sleeved jerkin, and his greatsword was stuck tip-down in the soil to his left like a small tree. Despite the sharpness of his eyes, Fithvael could see little of Cloden’s face; just the suggestion of pale skin between the darkness of hair and goatee. Cloden’s eyes were lightless, uninviting hollows.
Fithvael paused next to him and exchanged a nod. Cloden offered a flask of apple schnapps from Nuln, and a sip of the liquor, crude though it was by elven standards, warmed Fithvael’s belly.
‘Anything?’
Cloden shook his head. ‘I doubt we’ll meet much out here.’
A short, stuttering cry rose behind them from the camp and they both snapped around. Le Claux called out again in his sleep, wriggled uncomfortably, then slumbered once more.
‘He worries me,’ Cloden said shortly as they both relaxed.
‘Do you mean his drinking?’
‘Not so much his drinking, as why he drinks.’
They were silent for a long while.
‘I did not expect you to join us,’ Cloden said at length. ‘Not when y
our comrade snubbed us so hard. I thought you would depart with him.’
Fithvael looked up into the brilliant zodiac of the sky as if he might read some augury there. ‘I thought so too,’ he answered, realising it for the first time.
‘Why did not you? I thought you were bound and close by tradition, you… your kind.’
It was as if he couldn’t say the word.
‘We are. Master Gilead and I, bound together for so many years, so many troubles. Have you never had a comrade like that?’
‘Never. Never had time for it. War tends to limit the length of friendships.’
‘That is true enough. War… and time.’
Cloden nodded. ‘So why? Why did you leave him back at Vinsbrugge and take this path? After all those years and troubles?’
‘Because of those years and troubles, I think,’ Fithvael mused. ‘There comes an hour in any life that you need to make an account. To wonder which path to the grave is the best for you. I believe I had journeyed with Gilead far enough. It was an empty road. Nithrom’s path has a purpose at least. Besides, I am indebted to Nithrom.’
The Carroburger laughed, coarse and hard. ‘Is there anyone of this company who isn’t? Isn’t that, in truth, why we all ride to our deaths with him?’
‘You think that is what waits for us at Maltane?’
‘Like enough,’ Cloden said. The dark twang of his accent made his sour words more bitter. ‘And if not death, not glory either.’
Fithvael was about to reply when Cloden stiffened and plucked his sword out of the loam. It shone in the starlight like ice. He was stooped low, like a stalking wolf.
Fithvael had no need to ask why. He had heard it too: a low, haunting sound that drifted up from the woods beyond the hollow. Not a sound at all, in truth. Just a tremor in the air, a ghostly sigh that trembled the edge of hearing.
Fithvael drew his own blade and they hurried down the far side of the rise, running low, shadowing the trees. Fithvael was utterly silent, and several times Cloden, for all that he moved skilfully and quietly for a human, had to look askance to check the elf was still with him.
The sound came again, and hung on the still night air. It was as subtle and thin as the sound of thawing frost. And just as cold. It came from the watering pool.
The pair moved downwards, through the black trees. There was a scent in the air Fithvael could not place, and a deepening chill.
Ahead of them, through the deep grey silhouettes of the trees, the oval of the pool glowed like a silver mirror, bright with starlight. A white caul of mist hung around the water’s sides and drifted like a phantom through the trees. Cloden scrambled round behind an oak’s broad trunk to get a better view and Fithvael slid in beside him. He sensed the human was about to exclaim, and deftly clamped his hand across Cloden’s opening mouth.
Below them, the noble elf, Caerdrath, stood in the pool, thigh deep, clad only in white luminae robe. The starlight seemed to lend his slender form a phosphorescence. Silver glittered as he raised his ancient blade from the water and held it aloft. Chains of bright water danced off its length and down his arm.
Cloden pulled at Fithvael, trying to break free and advance forward, but Fithvael tightened his grip and drew the Reiklander back, away from the pool.
When they were a good distance back, Fithvael let the human free.
‘Why did you stop me?’ Cloden hissed.
‘Because we should not trespass. Caerdrath is baptising his blade for war, as was done in the old times. It would not be right for us to intrude.’
Cloden seemed dissatisfied with this answer, but made no move to go back. ‘Should you not do the same?’ he asked with a sneer.
‘I find that Caerdrath’s ways are as… unfamiliar to me as they are to you.’
Cloden turned and took a last look down the rise to the ghostly pool. Once more, the odd note fluttered the air.
Cloden spat into the ferns and made his way back up the rise to his watch.
Fithvael followed him after a moment or two. He knew he would never forget what he had seen. A sliver of the distant past, of the old ways, of the traditions and lore that he and his western kin had long since forgotten. It made him feel honoured and humble, all at once. And it made him feel older and more worn than he had ever felt before.
DAWN WAS EARLY, and as pale and hard as steel. They woke to mists and ribbons of birdsong. As the sun climbed and steamed the mist away, they were moving again, with Erill, Gaude and Harg driving the teams as before. Le Claux rode silently, lolling clumsily in his saddle as if nursing a black depression or a sore head, or both. Several times he fell behind the main group. At a bend in the track, half an hour after they had set out, Caerdrath rejoined them, armoured again, gleaming and fresh in a way that made them all feel dirty and dishevelled.
They rode up through water meadows and onto higher plains where old vine terraces, weed-blooming pastures and untended lemon groves were returning to the riot of nature. Skylarks, high and invisible, sang above them in the pale blue sky.
The track skirted a small clutch of crofts on the hillslope where a dirty, half-naked child and twenty moon-eyed goats watched their passage past with silent mystification. An hour later, they followed the track in a loop around a ruined broch that had once defended this impoverished scarp-land. Defended whom from what, though, none could say.
As they passed the lonely ruin, with its tumble of travertine stones and tufts of weed, Caerdrath rode along past Fithvael. He nodded to the older elf.
‘I offer you my thanks,’ he said in a low, harmonious voice.
Fithvael shrugged. ‘For what, lord?’
‘For respecting my ritual.’
Fithvael was about to reply, but Caerdrath had spurred on again towards the head of the column.
The land was getting ever higher now, dry and sparse, with thickets of gorse and thorn, and straggled stands of elms. The sun was still high and hot, but the sky was so pale that the blue was more a grey and stacks of flimsy clouds marched along the horizon. Buzzards and red kites turned and wheeled in the wild air and sometimes dropped like stones into the steep valleys. They saw occasional hares racing in the gorse, but all were too distant for the eager Bruda to take a shot, and had long fled by the time their party came to where they had been.
The track had become a road now, unmetalled but still a worn, wide, marching road cut by generations of migrating soldiers heading north for the fighting season and south again each winter. The bones of horses and mules could sometimes be seen in the scrub of the track. Twice, a lonely grave was marked by a cairn of white stones or a rusting helmet hung on a snapped spear shaft.
This was the hinterland of the great and powerful Empire, the crossing place where one territory ended and blurred into others: other kingdoms; scattered border principalities; loose, casual territories. Here, life was hard and meagre and maintained by ceaseless, thankless toil. They passed olive groves partitioned by dry stone walls, and several terraces of thin but decent vines, neatly maintained. Stringy cattle and lean goats grazed the slopes above the road, but the riders saw no herdsmen.
By late afternoon, the sun was slipped down into the western banks of cloud, as pink and raw as a sleepless eye. The light fell long and low, and their shadows were stretched out beside them. They climbed a last, steep line of flinty hills for another hour, then came out on a broad place where the road curled back on itself to descend again. Below was a wide valley bearded by woods. At its heart, three miles hence, was a mound, fenced and ditched, with a clutch of stone and wood structures nested at its summit. Bare tracks led into the place from the north, east and west, the northern one being the trail end of the road they followed.
Nithrom halted the party. ‘Maltane,’ he said plainly, with a vague gesture.
There was murmuring, none of it complimentary. All of the warriors, even Le Claux, stared down to get the measure of the place. Some dismounted. Some shielded their eyes with their hands. Vintze produced a small spyglass a
nd studied the view.
Fithvael took the time to get the lay. At the top of the mound, a good sized building of stone, well roofed, most likely the temple, adjoined a second, larger structure that was undoubtedly the main hall. They commanded a good position, and had a timber enclosure around them, inside a deep ditch cut into the hill’s crown. A wooden bridge span crossed the ditch and linked the main enclosure to the clustering homes and outbuildings built ramshackle down the outer slopes. Around them, at the base of the mound, an embankment and another, shallower ditch.
Beyond Maltane, the woods were thick and rose to southern hills with jagged crests. To the west and east, more woodland, following the bowl of the valley. In their direction, rough hills swept down towards the outer ditch. It was obvious their northern approach provided the most expansive clear ground before the town. Anyone approaching from the other compass points would be masked until they were but a furlong from the outer ditch.
Fithvael could see no sign of life in the town. No movement, no figures, not even a stray dog or wandering goat.
‘Tis dead,’ muttered Harg.
‘More than dead,’ Vintze said, closing up his spyglass. ‘Not even a hint of smoke. The day’s ending. There should be cookfires burning.’
‘They’re nervous, hiding,’ said Nithrom. ‘They have every reason to.’
‘Did they see us coming?’ Erill asked, speaking out loud to the group for the first time since Vinsbrugge.
‘No,’ said Madoc with utter certainty. ‘We would have known of it.’
Nithrom nodded and Fithvael knew Madoc was right. With the likes of Nithrom, Caerdrath and Vintze in the party, no spy could have evaded their notice, certainly not some simple herdsman or vine-farmer.
‘Let us presume the worst… that we are too late.’ Nithrom turned in his saddle to face them all. ‘We shall encircle before we go in. I’ll lead the teams down. Fithvael… if you would ride with Cloden and Madoc around to the eastern road and enter that way. Vintze, take Brom and Dolph and sweep to the west. Caerdrath, a full circuit to the south. You can move faster than most and quicker alone. The rest should come with me.’