by Leo Carew
Bellamus stayed silent.
The next morning, Bellamus was pleased to find that the kennels were empty and the slaves had been confined to the barn. He did his best to organise payment for the innkeeper, digging out a silver altar-cross and hacking off an arm. He spent the morning creating a cyphered message for the queen, detailing the Anakim invasion, their numbers and their latest location, supplied by the band of horsemen he had trailing them. He rearranged the pieces on his map of Suthdal, received a dozen messages and copied the information into a thick ledger. One was from a new and valuable informant whom Bellamus was blackmailing for information. He had arranged for one of his female agents to seduce the officer, who was married, and then threatened to expose the affair if he did not cooperate. Bellamus was proud of that: using the rigidity of Anakim society and the huge scandal the affair would have caused as a weapon. He was getting better at it. Two of the other messages were from spies who believed they were working for the Kryptea, on the side of the Black Kingdom. Their handlers had come to them with the sign of the cuckoo, and these loyal Anakim subjects had been eager to obey.
Throughout his work, Bellamus was distracted, pausing frequently and tapping the parchment with his quill. He went to fetch a skin of wine which he drained while writing out instructions to an agent near Lincylene. He found the cypher harder to construct than usual. When he realised he had ruined it for the third time with a speckle of random dots, he threw down his quill. “For heaven’s sake,” he muttered, donning his cloak and abandoning the empty wineskin.
A moment later, he was hammering once more on the door to the barn. The old innkeeper stormed out almost at once, bristling and ready for a confrontation, but stopped short at the sight of Bellamus’s face. “What now?”
“I wish to spend some time with your hybrids,” said Bellamus, not quite sure how to explain his purpose.
“Why?”
“I’d like to tend to the sick ones.”
“I tend to the sick ones,” said the old man.
“Please indulge me,” said Bellamus, producing another penny. It was snatched away and the old man turned inside. Bellamus followed him, shutting the door behind him. He remembered this place. He had not set foot inside it since hanging two of his men for stealing from the old man. The timber crucks from which the ropes had swung met above him, and the milking stools he had kicked from beneath their feet were set against the wall. It smelt of dust and hay and dung.
At the far end was a high platform on which the old man had set up his own bed, and in a stall to his left, three oxen were engaged in the serious business of obliterating a haystack. In the far stall were three shaven-headed slaves, all shivering in a nest of blankets. “Where are the healthy ones?” asked Bellamus.
“I put them up in my son’s house,” said the innkeeper, opening the stall and gazing pointedly inside.
Bellamus stepped in, the stall sealed behind him. He crouched to examine the nearest slave. Because the head was shaven, it took Bellamus a moment to realise this was a woman. Her eyes were shut tight and she was moaning faintly as she shivered. There was a bluish hue to her lips and ears, her breathing was laboured, and a feeble cough rattled her thin frame. “She will die,” said the old man, looking over the stall gate.
Slave-Plague did not seem to be plague at all; not as Bellamus recognised it. Rather it resembled an extreme version of a winter flu. He stayed in the stall for a while, the old man supplying him with a pail of mixed milk and water before departing the barn. Bellamus fed the watered milk to those who could manage it, and tried to make the unconscious woman comfortable as her cough became wretched, producing a pink foam. All the while her face acquired a bruised hue, and though he did not really have time for this, Bellamus found he could not leave. He sat in the stall with the three slaves, shackled even in their ill-health, and watched the woman fade. Her breathing grew faster and shallower. Her face gathered into a desperate frown. And then, she relaxed. Her countenance was calmed. Her chest stilled, and peace, unmistakable and unexpected, descended on the stall.
By the teaching of the church, these creatures were half-demon. She had been born irredeemably sinful, and there was only one destination for her soul. Her life had been wretched, and her death would be no better. Even so, Bellamus leaned forward, placing a hand on her cooling forehead and said a small prayer for her. Her nose was streaming onto the blanket beneath her head, and Bellamus stared at the little stream for a time. Then he wiped at it carefully with a finger, inspecting the shining fingertip for a moment. He touched a tiny cool drop of the fluid to the inside of his lip. To be certain.
Bellamus stood, marvelling at how desperate he had become, experimenting with such things in this mournful barn. He wondered, beyond being immune to it himself, what he hoped the results of his enquiries would be, and decided to think no more of it. He left, returning to the barn an hour later with two bowls of shredded rabbit soup and some hard bread for the surviving slaves.
He retired to the Cobweb for the evening, keeping his friends and the Thingalith at a distance and burying himself in his codes to take his mind off the foolishness of what he had done in the barn. Even Stepan was banished, Bellamus eating some of the soup alone at his table with another skin of wine. By the time the moon had risen and he had retired to bed, he had almost convinced himself that it was the end of a normal day, the notion betrayed by a ringing silence at his core. He awoke the next morning in a state of instant self-assessment. He breathed normally. He did not feel hot, or feverish. Was his heart beating a little fast? Perhaps, but the only thing to do was carry on.
15
The Empty Lands
“There it is,” said Gray, nodding to a huddle of wattle, daub and thatch, nestled between distant hills. They had smelt woodsmoke a mile before, noted the nettles on their route which always seemed to grow near Suthern villages, and so anticipated this sight. Roper, Gray and Pryce had mounted so they could keep pace with the army’s outriding Skiritai, and grinned at each other as they raked back their spurs.
They lunged out before the Skiritai, thundering down a slope and towards the edge of the village. There was a woman there, hacking some weeds clear of a dyke. She looked up at the sound of their hoofbeats, and her mouth fell open. She scrambled back, abandoning her billhook and sprinting into the village, the shawl over her head slipping off and falling onto the road.
The Anakim plunged after her, into narrow streets bordered by walls of rough, crumbling daub. A man emerged from an alley to their right, a look of surprise on his face as Pryce’s horse bore down on him. He had no time to react further. He was smashed flat by the charging courser, head rattling off the cobbles. The noise startled a cluster of pigeons pecking at the ground in front, which scattered before the Anakim horsemen. Behind the flapping and the feathers, another man emerged from a barn further up the street. He saw the riders and leapt back inside, slamming the door.
Roper pointed at the door, the guardsmen shouted their agreement, and the three reined in next to the barn. Two more Sutherners emerged from a door on the other side of the street: a man and a woman holding hands, who fled out of the village. The Anakim let them go, interested in one thing only.
They dismounted and Pryce pushed at the barn door, which flexed a little but did not open. “Barred,” he said. He and Gray linked arms and kicked at it together, synchronising their blows once, then twice. On the second kick they heard a crunching noise, and with a third the door burst inwards. The wooden arm that had sealed it cracked in the middle and was ripped from its socket. Skiritai were thundering through the street behind them, Ramnea’s Own legionaries with them, and the three of them drew swords and advanced into the barn.
The man was waiting for them just behind the door, eyes wild and a pitchfork clutched in his hands. He lunged at Roper, who did not react to the blow, letting it hit his cuirass. The dull iron tips made no impression whatsoever on the steel, but one of the tines snapped off the pitchfork. “Give me that,” sa
id Roper, seizing the shaft and ripping it out of the man’s hands. He hurled it into a corner and Pryce booted the man in the stomach. He staggered back five yards, sprawling in the hay and moaning on each breath. “Efficient,” Roper commended.
The three of them turned their eyes away from the groaning Sutherner, and towards their real objective in this town: the barn’s shadowed interior. All armies require vast quantities of food, and though the Anakim usually lived off the land when in the north, that was scarcely possible when in Suthdal. The country had been so tamed and manipulated by agriculture that most wild foods were competed out of existence. Instead, the Anakim would need to rely on the same food as the Sutherners, which meant they would have to take it from them directly. It should have been the easiest hunting they had ever done.
But the barn was empty.
“Not again,” said Gray, sniffing at the hay dust.
“Check the hay,” said Roper. The three of them ran their swords through the hay piled about the edges of the barn, but found nothing. No livestock. No concealed grain. As with every barn, granary, pastureland and homestead encountered so far, this place had been stripped of food. On the route here, they had ridden across fields of ash, with even the green crops in the fields torched. “What are these people living off?” Pryce demanded, kicking at the hay.
“Let’s ask,” said Roper. The man who had attacked him with the pitchfork was on his belly, trying to crawl back out into the street outside, which rang with screams, shouts and crashes as the legionaries ripped into the town. Roper took him by the scruff of the neck and hauled him upright. “Your food,” he demanded in Saxon. “Where is it?”
“Gone, lord,” wheezed the Sutherner, still fighting for breath after Pryce’s kick.
“Where?”
“Taken… by a hybrid,” the Sutherner panted for a moment. “With a gang of armed men. He told us you were coming… Said he was taking our supplies to Lincylene… and our good iron, so you couldn’t get it. Said we should go too, if we didn’t want to starve.”
Roper glanced back at Gray, eyebrows raised. “Describe this hybrid.”
“Enormous,” said the man. “Violent… A cloven nose, bright blond hair… He said if we did not surrender the food, he would destroy our village himself.”
“The Eoten-Draefend,” said Gray.
At the name, Pryce gave a little skip of irritation. “What is he saying?” he demanded.
“That his food was taken by a blond hybrid with a cloven nose,” Roper translated. Garrett Eoten-Draefend, the hybrid warrior whom Gogmagoc wanted dead. Once a servant of King Osbert, he had turned his back on the king and sided with Bellamus. The long-edged sword he wielded had been made from Bright-Shock: the sword that had been Roper’s father’s, until he had died with it undrawn in its scabbard. Bellamus had found the body and claimed the sword. Roper still wanted that weapon back, and Garrett’s head with it.
He dropped the prisoner back to the floor. “We keep searching,” said Roper. “Garrett can’t have taken everything.”
The three of them emerged back onto the street to see smoke already billowing through the thatch of several buildings and forming a filthy column in the sky. Two feral dogs ran out of one building, barking madly and tearing down the street. The legionaries would clear away resistance. The Skiritai would search for food, and then ignite each building once they knew it was empty. In a few hours, this village would be ash. Those villagers who had not needlessly antagonised the Anakim would survive and be pushed onto the road to spread fear and herald the Anakim invasion.
One of Roper’s favourite foods in the berjasti had been wood-ant larvae. To get them, he would rip apart the mound in which they lived and spread its innards over the swept forest floor, bordered by logs. Then he waited. After an hour or two, Roper would flip over each log and discover that the ants had helpfully collected and condensed the scattered larvae in the log’s shadow. From there they could be scooped up at leisure, fried in fish oil and enjoyed with warm bread. This had inspired his strategy for the early part of the campaign. They had plunged into the guts of the land with the aim of creating chaos. They would burn and scatter, and inevitably, the Sutherners would gather all that was most precious to them and retreat to the nearest log: Lincylene, their great northern city. There, Roper could scoop them up. It saved his army being weighed down by baggage and prisoners before they had a place to keep them, which meant they could move fast, and take much of Suthdal before resistance had time to form. Lincylene’s walls had been razed during the last Anakim invasion and their most recent information, from a raiding party the previous year, was that there were still no walls about the city.
But though Roper had expected the Sutherners to make some effort at concealing their food, he had not anticipated that it would be removed entirely. They were a week into Suthdal, and every village before this one had been similarly stripped, most of them abandoned too. The only explanation for this was that the Sutherners had known they were coming. How they had known and been so prepared, Roper could only guess.
They walked the streets, the buildings either side beginning to crackle with flames. One man lay sprawled in the mud, his guts spilling out beneath him and two silver candlesticks, which he had evidently tried to preserve, lying with him. He need not have bothered: the Anakim were not interested in silver. Some Skiritai were trying to draw water from a well at the end of the street, but the first three buckets they brought up contained sodden chicken carcasses.
“Garrett again,” said Pryce, glaring at the sopping feathers. The carcasses would have corrupted the water, but still, it would not be wasted.
The Skiritai tossed aside the disintegrating chickens and began pouring the water over the earth near the houses, under trees and beside walls. If the Sutherners had recently buried any of their food, they would have had to put them near visible markers so that they did not lose them. The water would sink faster into freshly dug earth and betray the cache, showing the Skiritai where to dig.
“Has anyone been in here?” Pryce asked a ranger emptying a water pail, indicating the house to his left. The Skiritai shrugged, and Pryce left Roper and Gray, pushing open the door to the shadowed dwelling beyond.
This seemed a prosperous village, and the house had two storeys. The ground floor was empty but for a burnt-out hearth, a filthy bed in one corner, and a flight of stairs in the other. Pryce probed the bed with one of his swords, but the rough blankets covered nothing except a straw mattress.
Something trickled onto his head.
Looking up, Pryce saw a gap between the rough wooden floorboards above him, with something dark dripping between them. He raised a hand to the wet patch in his hair, and inspected the fingertips. They were crimson.
Gripping Tusk more tightly, he crept to the stairs, climbing the ash boards as silently as he was able. He raised his head above the floorboards to see two people on the upper storey. One was a Suthern man, lying still and bleeding onto the planks of his home, the steady drip, drip of blood now sounding from the floor below. The other figure was Vigtyr. He was bent low, a bloody sword in his left hand, his right fumbling at the man’s wrist. He removed something shining which rattled softly as he straightened up. Then he spotted Pryce observing him from the stairs, and gave a start.
“Oh, Pryce.” Vigtyr took a sudden breath. Then he grinned. “Bastard tried to kill me,” he said, nudging the corpse with his foot.
Pryce just looked back at the lictor for a time, face expressionless. “With what, Vigtyr?”
“The rope,” said Vigtyr smoothly, pointing to a length of it lying on the floor. Pryce stared at him a moment longer before turning away, creaking back down the stairs and out into the grey daylight.
In the street, he found Roper and Gray talking with Tekoa, and joined them.
“It’s been the same story at every village so far,” Tekoa was saying. “No food, water supplies tainted, most of the people gone, any metal that isn’t soft and worthless removed.”
He kicked irritably at the silver candlestick, which clattered over the cobbles.
“Are the Skiritai finding anything buried?”
“Nothing,” spat Tekoa.
Where Tekoa was angry, Roper seemed thoughtful. “If the Eoten-Draefend has gathered everything valuable in the city, then he’s done our early work for us,” he said. The only thing left was to harvest the larvae. “Let’s go and get it.”
The army, which had atomised over northern Suthdal, condensed that night.
Excited mutterings ran between the campfires as legionaries compared tales of what they had found in this strange land. There was a general opinion that the lack of food meant one thing: there would shortly be a battle, where they would fight the Sutherners for their supplies.
Roper ignored these rumours, and the matter of food. He had more pressing concerns.
He gathered his council together for the first time since they had crossed the Abus. There were dozens of them: legates, officers, historians and heralds, and they chattered raucously as they settled upon the great circle of logs that Roper had assembled around his hearth. Though they had found no food, the officers did not realise how long this campaign would be, and therefore how important fresh supplies would become.
“Peers,” Roper began, standing before them and raising a hand to quell the chatter. “Peers. Tomorrow, we turn for Lincylene.” Silence fell, the orange-lit faces turning towards Roper. He felt the weight of their stares and prowled about inside the circle, eyes flicking between hearth and audience. “As you have all found, the Sutherners somehow knew when we were coming. They have done their best to corrupt the water supplies and strip the country of food. This is nothing we can’t handle. They must be living off something, and we have reason to believe they have assembled their supplies at Lincylene. When we get there, we will find food and also, dare I say it, our first battle.” The legates grinned and Roper gave a wry smile. “I anticipate it quite as eagerly as you, I assure you. But before that, you should know why we’re going at all. You should know why we’re here.” Some of the faces around the fire had begun to frown. “I will be blunt. We are not here for a raid. We are not here for plunder, or revenge. We are here to stay. This is a mission of conquest. By the end of this campaign, we will rule over the country of Suthdal, and have flattened all resistance.”