Eldain hoped merely that Ice wasn’t involved in some dirty double-dealing. The Rinns weren’t exactly champions in terms of loyalty. But to go as far as to suppose an agreement with the Empire... No, if he let his mind wander down that avenue, he knew he’d never get to the end of it. He could only hope Adraman might at least manage to delay the withdrawal of the troops. And if Mordraud proved right, then the troubles could be sorted out.
Eldain folded the parchment up, melted the wax ready for his seal – a tower surrounded by ears of wheat – and took the stamp. His hand was trembling slightly, as usual. But that evening his arm too was shaking, unable to apply strength to his grip. Eldain clenched his teeth in discomfort and completed his work. The light was poor and his weak eyes could barely make out the attendant at the corner of the door. When he noticed him, he handed over the letter and dismissed him with a gesture. He felt his heart lurch, and if he’d spoken at that moment, the servant would have noticed. His voice would have been a broken quiver, the voice of a weary and decrepit old man. Eldain could never veer from the role of the man with the iron hand. His whole body desperately pleaded the contrary. He needed some rest, to stay in bed a few days, to relax. All things he hadn’t done for years. For decades.
And perhaps he never would do these again.
“Adraman, make sure you’re careful,” he muttered with a cough, after the attendant had already left. “You too, Mordraud... And get a move on, for love of the Gods!”
XXIV
Heavy stinking rain pressed down on the thick treetops and swelled the sodden land. The row of soldiers moved compactly, their bows raised and arrows nocked. The mood was sombre, contrasting sharply with the rich green of the leaves; so intense was the colour it seemed painted. Anyone who’d had the misfortune of spending a few months at the front would perceive the hues of the world free from the yoke of winter as entirely unnatural.
“Down here!” yelled a lad at the end of the perfect line the soldiers were tracing through the wood. Dunwich heard the crack of dozens of arrows, along with the deadened thump of a couple of prey falling to the ground. The raindrops were so huge he seemed to be wading in a lake, rather than walking between the trees. The skies were stormy and low on the horizon.
‘They’ve got the freeze, us the rain. It’s like living inside a ghoulish fairy tale...’ he reflected, drying his face on the edge of his cloak. All the armour creaked from rust, in an annoying and off-key concert.
“Behind the bushes!” cried another soldier. Dunwich had given up on remembering names and faces, or life-stories. In any case, he’d have to wipe clean all he knew of them every two or three shifts, and make room for the new arrivals.
Better jumping on a fire than joining the Lances! was a saying that had grown popular in that period.
The chanters, the councillors and the army captains. They all, excluding none, had seriously underestimated the new trick devised to finally crush Eldain and his relentless band. The Long Winter was showing itself as what it really was – what he’d always said it was.
A hugely idiotic undertaking.
The trouble had started a few months after the chanting began. Hordes of wild beasts had fled Eld’s forests, heading for the lands left untouched by the big freeze. Frightened, confused and rabid animals. If they’d been squirrels or hares, Cambria wouldn’t have taken the faintest notice. The problem was that most of them were wolves, bears foxes and martens, plus hundreds and thousands of rats and mice. The Empire’s roads and forests had suddenly become the most dangerous places on the continent. Whole villages were surrounded by large packs of hungry wolves. Peaceful hilltop communities, with people hardly aware their region was at war, found themselves besieged by this army of beasts.
Loralon, as usual, played down the emergency and left his governors to handle the trouble. They assigned the task to the town guards, who, in turn and without thinking twice, off-loaded the unwelcome job on the soldiers. The captains of the battalions stationed in the invaded regions asked Loralon what they should do, and he simply set the cogs in motion again. When they all finally realised they were faced with a grim problem, another, far more disastrous one, came close on its heels.
The rain.
The sky in the east was permanently clouded over, from the very first day of the Long Winter. Black clouds laden with snow, as vast as hovering oceans of ice. A chill wind began to blow from the rebel territories, day and night. Dawn practically never came, smothered by the storms on the horizon towards the east. Until those ominous clouds began menacingly bordering on Cambria.
Not that it was as cold as it was at the front. By contrast, if anything, the trouble was the contrary. The air was warm, hot even, but was relentlessly saturated with rain. The fields flooded and crops rotted. The farm livestock lived like prisoners, hiding from the wild animals, and so had fewer young. And made less milk. And stopped fattening up.
‘We’ve gone too far... and they’re realising it only now!’ mused Dunwich while his eyes followed a patrol as it separated off from the row to circle a victim.
‘The Long Winter for the rebels... The Sodden Autumn for us... It’s all so absurd.’
Any action to stem the tribulations always came too late and was poorly reasoned. And so, to respond to the wolf emergency, the Empire set up and armed village posses assigned to watching the countryside and woods. An enticing wage was promised to convince locals to join up. Even too enticing. Many farm-hands saw their opportunity and deserted the fields, which they didn’t own but merely had the right to use. The more it rained, the more the presences in the fields dwindled. The wild animals grew thinner in number but of course didn’t vanish. And the few survivors were even more aggressive. And the problem of communities being cut off didn’t disappear.
What had gone astray was the last link in a chain of unfortunate events. The refugees. First alone, then grouped in small packs, hundreds of men, women and children fled from the deathly cold in the hope of finding something to eat, or a thicket of forest to hide in. Already debilitated by the winter, many fell sick from the damp and the accursed endless rain. Wolves occasionally swept the board clean, but never quite completely. The evacuees began to join forces to survive, made vicious by disease, hunger and sleepless nights.
The patrols of improvised hunters ventured ever deeper into the forests. They weren’t aware they were about to end up surrounded by prey, which, banded together in great number, had become the predator.
The picture was complete.
Cambria’s men dealt with the fugitives the same way they treated the wolves. They slaughtered them on the spot. Too many mouths to feed with too small a pie. But some of the patrollers died, now and then. And the Emperor’s weapons began to fall into the wrong hands. Loralon was still rejoicing at his ingenious idea of the rounds when the first news of assaults on villages came. No longer carried out by wild beasts, but by famished humans. The ‘frying pan’ was by now a distant memory. Instead, the fire was always a new one, and never seemed to burn out.
“I want to go back to the front,” Dunwich whimpered in despair. A group of soldiers was yelling and pointing around a chunky tree: an oak as large as a building. The archers raised their arrows, took aim and fired.
Six bodies thudded heavily into the mud, like over-ripe fruit.
Two children, a woman and three men. The arm of one of them was black from untreated frostbite.
“I want to go back to the front... I want to go back to the front...” Dunwich murmured, averting his eyes.
The woman was pitifully young. And from the colour of their curly fair hair, those two could only be her children.
***
Hannrinn welcomed Eldain’s delegation with folded arms and looked the other way. The river the city was named after flowed swiftly beneath the immense stone bridge providing access from the lands in the south-east, which were so rich and fertile as to have earned them a reputation as Cambria’s granary. Yet the rain Adraman had experienced on his skin
in person in recent days was threatening to jeopardise that fame. Another point against the Alliance, he thought in concern.
After announcing themselves at the city entrance and once they’d been thoroughly searched, Adraman and his men had to swallow the first in a long series of rejections. Rinnion wouldn’t meet with them, and had no desire to welcome them. The inns refused their currency, while and the hovels left them outside their doors. They were like plague victims at a celebration. Adraman had to draw on all his proverbial patience to bear the humiliation of having to sleep in the corner of a public square, like a common beggar. His horsemen attempted pulling the card of old family friendships, but failed miserably. Hannrinn wanted them out of its belly – and as quickly as possible.
Every morning, Adraman would go to the doors of the Rinns’ palace, alone and clutching his crutch. He’d asked to be heard each time, and would leave after yet another refusal. He even came down with a nasty bout of ‘flu, due to the lashing rain that was such a vivid echo of those snow blizzards whipping the Rampart’s territories. But Adraman knew how to wait, and he did so until the right moment. Which was the sole day of sunshine after weeks of choking water.
“After dinner, my lord Rinnion will grant you a moment of his time,” the guard at the entrance replied at last, less aggressively than usual, thanks to the lovely day. Adraman returned to his men, beaming, and made ready as best he could, washing himself and eating something in an attempt to recover a little strength. A lump of bread sandwiching a slice of pork cost him a fortune, also because he had to convince the innkeeper to allow him inside his tavern. They all knew who those birds of ill omen were – bringers of the worst misfortune. Men sent by Eldain: the head of an alliance that had already crumbled among the masses even before the break-up had been made official by his captains.
Rinnion was a haughty and terribly petulant old man, always ready to spit judgements from a puckered thin-lipped mouth. The grand old days of the glorious Rinn brothers – the architects of the good fortune of all their long-lived and complex family – were in the distant past. Adraman was careful to avoid using the old alliances as leverage to befriend him, as he already knew Rinnion’s interest lay quite elsewhere. Among the rebel members, he was perhaps the only one who, from the outset, had joined forces simply because he dreamt of taking possession of Cambria, and all its lands. As if it were a plausible enterprise, rather than the asinine folly of a blind mind. Now that the weight of the war was shifting onto his city, but not onto his men – who primarily comprised mercenaries from the South – dear old Rinnion wanted to pull his oars in. Something Adraman had to prevent at all cost.
“I thank you for receiving me, sir. I am here to deliver a letter on behalf of Eldain.” Adraman avoided presenting his commander with more flattery. Rinnion was prone to taking offence at the smallest trifle.
“You could have left it with the attendant who showed you in!” brayed the old nobleman. Thin, white-haired and compact. Numb in the chest as if he were guarding a bag of gold.
“I ask you the great courtesy of reading it in my presence, so that I may clarify any doubt you might have.”
Adraman didn’t manage to kneel, so he prostrated himself awkwardly, using his wooden crutch to prop himself up. He couldn’t hold his position for any length of time, and the pain forced him to indiscernibly grit his teeth.
“I’ve no desire to waste my time reading a letter!” Rinnion went on with his usual tone, as irritating as a thorn beneath a fingernail. “I’m already exonerated from any possible commitment to Eldain. I’ve given him my best soldiers for years. Now’s the time to think about my own people!”
‘What a spew of falsehood,’ Adraman would have liked to utter. Instead he had to nod in silence, and decided to draw on the simplest and most effective tool he’d brought with him on that journey. Outright obstinacy.
“The entire Alliance is grateful to you, sir. Otherwise I wouldn’t be here to respectfully petition you to consider an alternative.”
“What do you mean?! Does Eldain have a proposal to offer?” Rinnion asked, leaning forward on his tall wood and iron chair. The audience hall was huge, smothered in fine rugs and tapestries. That warm, closed-up air made Adraman’s skull throb, accustomed as he was to the horrific Rampart climate. He slowly swayed his head and stretched out his hand with its letter, waiting for an attendant to take it.
“I wouldn’t know. It’s all written here.”
“Give it to me!”
A boy in grey livery took the scroll and offered it up to the old regent, who pounced on it as he curled up on the throne-like seat. Rinnion broke the sealing-wax with a bony finger and squinted in his strain to read Eldain’s clean calligraphy. He must be practically blind by now, Adraman considered in consolation. Thus, in order to understand it, he would be forced to listen to his words.
“I believe Eldain wishes to propose an advantageous exchange.”
“I gather that, you lame man!” Rinnion burst out. “But what, exactly?”
If Eldain had kept to the game plan, the letter contained vagaries, nothing specific. Adraman was the one who had to discover what Rinnion wanted. Once he’d won over the old man, the next step, to coax both Rinns – Hannrinn and Cambrinn – to change idea, would be within their stride.
“Sway, control... possessions...”
“PAH! The only sway you can offer comes with wine. I already control all the south-east... And I possess as much land as I could wish for!”
“There’s land and land, sir... and there are roads too: trade routes that could be opened up...”
“Are you reckoning on trapping me with your alluring words?!” Rinnion spat heartily on the floor. “I already have an agreement with Cambrinn. The Alliance no longer has fruits to entice our family. We don’t want that wretched winter of yours on us!”
“The winter will end. We’ve found a way to stop it. It’s only a matter of days,” explained Adraman, oozing confidence from every pore.
“Heed this: our patience has run out! The truth is that Eldain hasn’t a scrap of anything to offer, because even his arse must have frozen off by now! It’s Cambria that’s hurled this curse at you, and only Cambria can release you from it... using the method we’re all aware of! And I’d rather get myself out of the mêlée before it all happens.”
The bastard’s uncouthness was appalling, thought Adraman in disgust.
“There is a way,” he went on, unintimidated. “We’re already working on it, with our best men...”
“And how?! Bah, I’m wasting my precious time with you... and we’ve squandered quite enough of it already! Go beg at the door of that swine Calhir, if you can’t stand on your own legs...” Rinnion chuckled at his own miserable joke.
Adraman thought he almost saw it, his prey poking its nose outside its den. It had spotted the bait. Now he just had to coax it to bite.
“I’ve heard Calhann has forbidden any fleet to use the branch of the Hann leading to the Inland Sea...”
And here was the arrow in his quiver. Yet Adraman was beginning to seriously doubt whether Rinnion had problems to settle with anyone. He’d taken care to gather information during his trip. Calhir, Calhann’s regent on the Inland Sea Strait, was bunging things up with colossal movements of goods that many took a cut from. Too many.
“Mutts full of cow dung. Nothing but slimy schemers! They think the river’s for them alone, and even though we’ve ALWAYS been the best of friends to them, now they’re playing the gits!” Rinnion gesticulated in fury, sputtering left and right. “We were selling them grain at TWO Scudos a cartload! A crazy arrangement! Rock-bottom prices. And look how they return the favour...”
“Now I think about it...” Adraman gauged his words carefully, his hand beneath his chin, his eyes lost in the distance. His leg was howling out about that unnatural pose, but he let none of it show. “Eldain did mention talks were in progress with Calhir, precisely about this concern...”
“Concern?! It’s a CATASTR
OPHE!” Rinnion yelled in despair. “Now we’re forced to send our caravans by road heading west, and it costs us the earth. And all because of this wretched putrid war!”
“Isn’t there anything about it in the letter? I thought that was what Eldain wished to propose...”
“Yes, of course...” grunted Rinnion, waving the parchment. “I was just reading it...”
“Eldain obviously undertakes to convince Calhir to re-open the trade routes on the river, but in return he asks that support from the powerful Rinn family isn’t diminished.”
“LET’S NOT OVERDO IT!” the ruler replied, wagging a finger in the air. “If the matter stands in these terms, then we could perhaps delay our withdrawal... while we wait for Eldain to persuade Calhir...”
“With the end of the winter, these temporary strains between Calhann and your family will certainly fade away...”
“But can we really be sure Eldain has the means to convince Calhir? And what’s this business about the winter, and your discovery...” inquired Rinnion, jutting forward on his chair like a blackbird on its perch. Adraman smiled and prostrated himself further.
“We’ve found how to defeat the scourge of the winter,” he answered, holding in check his joy about the victory. “An infallible plan.”
Rinnion had revealed his weakest side. His vulnerable flesh.
Greed.
***
“Did you manage to make it beyond the wood?”
“No, sir.”
Just the answer he didn’t want to hear. Dunwich cursed through clenched teeth, while Asaeld received the news with his usual composure.
“I really cannot understand you!” Dunwich hissed once the messenger had departed. “We’re doing nothing but fail, and you don’t even try to worry about it!”
“There’s nothing to worry about,” the general replied with an unconcerned air. “These are just scuffles. We don’t need to push any further. You’ll see, it’s merely a matter of time.”
Mordraud, Book One Page 50