She started to kiss him and he responded, she reached her wings forward and they caressed them together.
‘Come help me unharness.’ She picked up the armour from the table, and crooked one finger through an eyehole of her helmet. The buckle straps dangled – they had lines inked on them marking the correct settings.
I said, ‘Saker, if you’re coming to Wrought, I’m leaving in an hour and you’ll have to be incognito.’
Eleonora took his hand and they left the tent with wings interlinked and their arms around each other, unclipping plates of armour. I went to my own pavilion with Tern, washed and dressed in fresh clothes. Feeling light and unbelievably clean, I organised my Carniss mountain horse, bred to be unafraid of Rhydanne, and Saker’s spare Balzan, trained like the others. To Balzan’s saddle, the royal equerry buckled two quivers of arrows and two holsters behind them, for his new rifles.
Awian monarchs are expected to lead against the Insects. When Saker’s wife was crowned, she was given a diadem which never sees the light of day, and a sword she hardly ever sheathes. In Awia, royalty provides a link between us immortals and the fyrd. They need our expertise and experience, but a good king will be closer to his soldiers than we Eszai can ever be.
The equerry brought up our horses. Saker put out his palm, the latest Balzan nuzzled it, and he stroked its neck. His partiality for the best white Eske coursers costs him a fortune. He ran a finger along its breastcollar, letting the six shield-shaped pendants on each side hang loose.
‘I’m sure I said you should be incognito.’
‘Jant, how can I, riding beside a winged Rhydanne?’
‘You look very distinguished these days,’ Tern said to him. ‘I like it.’
‘Thank you.’
‘It’s swarming out there,’ Cyan said. ‘Have you got enough arrows?’
‘Yes, love.’ He embraced Eleonora and Cyan, while I spoke to Tern and kissed her. All this time Tornado had been bellowing, ordering the fyrd into parade to witness Thunder lighting the fuse.
I stepped up to Favel’s saddle, pressed the rein, and she lowered her head and turned tight left. Saker and I threaded our way round the rear of the assembled troops, and twisted in our saddles to watch.
Capelin raised the box and revealed the fuse end lying like a rope in the ceramic pipe. He set his taper to it – a brilliant white flare jumped and raced into the duct. Quickmatch burns at ten metres per second, a rate which as a Rhydanne I can see, but humans and Awians don’t have such fast flicker-fusion in their vision, so to everyone else the flash would have vanished instantly.
Saker pulled an elegant watch out of his inside pocket and looped its chain on the pommel. We passed between tents, the gates opened, and we spurred through onto the supply road. A fuse ten kilometres long, burning at ten metres a second, will take sixteen minutes to reach the charge.
We galloped, me with sword drawn, him with an arrow at string, past Insects surrounding the ca
he original Wall towered, gleaming white; the various breaches we’d made in it spilled down into chunks and rubble. We rode, dwarfed by its height and strength, and all the time Saker was checking his stopwatch.
‘Here we go. Five, four, three, two, one …’
The ground shook. Four blasts melded into a clap of thunder, and rolled over the moorland. From far behind the Wall, a thick stalk of soil and black smoke burst up – and began to mushroom out as if blooming. We gasped at the force of the tremor. Saker’s horse had shied sideways. He swore, but it was drowned in a massive hooray from the camp. The soldiers acclaimed Capelin, whistling, blowing bugles, chanting his name louder than the explosion.
‘He gave them a spectacle,’ said Saker.
‘And killed some Insects.’
‘Not enough. They’ll be fighting hard for weeks. Eleonora’s bringing up the Tanager fifth to twelfth.’ He shortened Balzan’s rein. ‘Ah, listen, Jant! Listen to them! The applause of the audience feels good, doesn’t it?’
‘There’s nothing like it,’ I said.
‘Yes! Yes! To hear your name hailed. To hear the crowded stands cheer you till the air vibrates! Until it deafens you! Don’t you feel you can do anything? Shout back at them like god! I remember it well! I loved it! … Once.’
CHAPTER 12
Saker Micawater
Saker had aged fifteen years since he left the Circle and it was difficult to accept. Having been the only Archer, unbeaten since the Circle began; having held the position – no, lived it – for fourteen hundred years, losing him was a shock to us all, but it struck me the worst. He’d been my closest friend for two centuries. Now, he’s mortal, he’s aging … and he’s going to die.
When San dropped him, the Circle felt so different I sensed it for the first time. I became conscious of the Circle as a real entity and, since then, if I concentrate, I can feel my fellow Eszai.
A star had blinked out of a well-known constellation, and it no longer gave me my bearings. I missed him in the Castle. With his departure, and the new Eszai who joined us, filling spaces left by the deaths at Frost’s Dam, it took years to find some semblance of balance.
The papers had been harsh. They’d said Saker was guilty of dereliction of duty, that he’d harmed the Empire by giving his position to a semi-pro, that Cyan was just an average archer. He married Eleonora a few weeks after leaving, and these days lived mainly at Tanager Palace. Every time I visited on business I made a point of seeing him, and every time he looked a little different. Time’s changes were accruing. Then I was caught up in the preparations for Mine Twenty, and a year passed. I met him next, on the beach as Swallow’s pyre was being lit, and it took me a second to recognise him. He wasn’t as I’d remembered.
He was now forty-seven and, since we were so used to him being frozen at thirty-two for ever – I mean, he’d been thirty-two for fourteen hundred and fifty-three years – the changes in his appearance frightened us. Saker was supposed to be thirty-two! We didn’t want him to grow any older! We didn’t want him to die. We were afraid of the visual reminder of time’s passing, the time we were cheating; the effects time was having on him, it would be having on us, if the Emperor didn’t constantly hold us above its flow.
Saker was thirty-two in the year 620 when he won his immortality at the Games. He was thirty-two when I joined the Circle 1198 years later. He was thirty-two in the year 885 when Tornado joined the Circle, and damn well thirty-two in 2008 when Ata Dei gave him a night of lust on her ship. He was thirty-two in 622 when he was nearly killed in the Great Battle for Bitterdale, and thirty-two in 1993 holding the Front at Alula over the exact same ground.
He was thirty-two in 1485 when Shearwater took advantage of the famine to force him into a deal for his manor of Peregrine, and he waited five hundred and thirty years for Shearwater to die, so he could buy it back. He was thirty-two in 1414 when Ata built caravels, thirty-two in 2020 when we sailed a pair to Tris, and thirty-seven when Mist Fulmer scrapped them all in favour of clippers.
Now there were grey hairs throughout the blond, especially over his forehead. Grey among his stubble, grey feathers speckled his golden wings, but none yet in the array of long flight feathers of which he’s proud. Year by year he was changing. The lines delineating his cheeks to his mouth were deepening, his cheeks sagging down. So was the crease at the edge of his mouth where he often pulls one side of it taut in a half-smile. But they’re lines of wry humour, because someone who’s been alive for fourteen hundred years sees the droll side to our antics.
The fan of wrinkles at the corners of his eyes, once only visible after a night’s council of war, were now plain to see. He’s caused them by squinting into the bright distance, because when Saker isn’t slaying Insects in Lowespass he’s shooting deer on his estates – or targets with phenomenal accuracy, or very small birds a great distance away, because archery is still his passion.
But if age has made him look more fearsome, it’s misleading. Really, I think he’s mellowed; relaxes, smiles
, and laughs more readily, because he has the wife he always wanted. Most Awians find intoxicating the blend of still-unbeaten marksman, music connoisseur, rock hard soldier and loving father, so Saker’s sarcasm is less acerbic these days, they jump to attention at his slightest word.
Some changes were subtle and I only noticed them after an interval of years. In the summers of Lakeland Awia you’d first notice that his skin tans darker and a little more shiny, but his eyes are brighter from laughing at the world slipping by. There were more hairs to his eyebrows and nostrils, nowadays, and the skin wasn’t tight on his forearms. His biceps showed starkly with hollows at elbow and shoulder, as if his strength was surfacing. There were wrinkles at the side of his neck, hollows, too, around his collarbones. The ends of his fingers don’t heal so fast when gunpowder dries and splits them along the fingerprint whorls.
He’s always had grace for such a big man, which is partly his noble background, mostly his martial pursuits. He hadn’t lost the deliberation in his posture, a great understanding of the presence of his body through having lived in it for so damn long. Nor had he lost his economy of movement, his incredible patience, nor his surety and nerve that allows him to stand stock still while Insects close in range.
He still uses the same bows, and packs the same strength at an eighty kilo draw, but is he slower to span them? Yes. He still has that freakish depth perception, but I fear there’s less perfect copperplate in his handwritten letters to me.
One thing he no longer does, is compulsively touch the scar on his palm from his marriage to Savory. The scar’s fading, and perhaps his memory of Savory is fading, too. Instead, he always makes a point of writing to his children, neat blocks of text around little sketches of the Front: peel towers, bastides and fortress. Remarkably lifelike Insects prowl the margins.
Age shouldn’t encroach on Saker, who’s escaped it for the longest time, but it is, and he feels it. He doesn’t seem to care that he’s going to die so soon. Aging will seem very fast to him. Life’s going to be brief. We were too afraid to breach a conversation on the issue. Nobody understood it but Eleonora, and, since he has her, he’s no longer lonely.
I hope Eleonora has resilient four-poster beds in Tanager to tie him to, because when Saker is getting more – and definitely more adventurous – sex than I am, something has really bloody changed.
‘Tern wrote to me about your drug use,’ he said.
‘The Emperor keeps sending me to the Shift.’
‘Yes. Hmm. Well, there must be an easier way in.’
‘There isn’t. Trust me.’
He looked at the barbed wire fences either side. ‘What are you doing in the Shift?’
‘Coordinating the war with Dunlin.’
‘Dunlin. Dunlin Rachiswater was my friend.’
‘I know.’
‘I wish I could see him.’
‘There’s no way.’
‘Come on, Jant, there has to be some way,’ he said ebulliently.
‘What did Tern say in her letter?’
‘It upsets her, seeing you unconscious … She runs to me, and I can’t bear to see her distressed.’
‘San needs to know where we are in relation to other worlds.’
‘It’s going to kill you.’
This was uncomfortable coming from Saker, who might only have twenty years left. I’m not sure about the fraternal attitude he’s adopted. I’ve never had a brother, so I’m not in practice. The best I can do is ‘fellow gang member’, and that doesn’t really fit. I said, ‘There’s a swarm building at Dekabrayer. Insects could burst through into the Paperlands or anywhere in the Empire. I can’t tell where they’ll emerge. We’ve got to be ready.’
‘Where’s Dekabrayer?’
‘It’s a Shift from Epsilon.’
‘Have you been there?’
‘No. I’d die.’
‘The Equinnes with their muskets …’ he said vaguely.
‘I’ve already told the Equinnes all about Cyan’s innovations. They’ll start to make rifles now. Or, they would, if Dunlin hadn’t introduced flying bombs and Sentient Drones.’
‘Tell them, a bullet with ridges round it will—’
‘No, Saker. We’re as backwards as Rhydanne in comparison. After Frost’s Battle the Vermiform told us she could taste saltpetre in the soil, okay, but also uranium. That’s what Dunlin’s looking for.’
‘Why?’
‘I haven’t the faintest idea.’
Once you’re past the last line of trenches, the road becomes paved. We passed through the checkpoint at Calamus Bastion and into Awia. Saker hung his bow on the saddlerack. ‘God, it’s good to see greenery after all these weeks.’
‘It’s just Oscen. We’ve seen it a thousand times before.’
‘Yes, but will I see it again?’ He looked at the gorse bushes, grassy hillocks and white tails of fleeing rabbits. On Oscen Hill, my semaphore tower was flexing out the symbols of a message. Saker watched it. ‘What’s it saying?’
‘That’s Eleonora’s call for reinforcements going down the Rachis line.’
‘Amazing.’
‘I’m pretty hooked on my telegraph.’
‘It’s the best thing since the Black Coach!’
The semaphore telegraph was another discovery I’d brought back from Tris. The Trisians have just one line, from Capharnaum to Salmagundi. Once I’d understood the principle, I networked it out across the Empire, and now I have fifteen lines, five hundred stations, and counting.
He was drunk on the scenery. Where I saw a gorse bush, he saw vibrant yellow blooms, an intricate maze of prickles in which duellist birds hopped and strutted. When we passed the troops I’d sent south he saw fathers and brothers glowing with relief. They’d be even more glad to have escaped when the news of the slaughter reached them, as it soon would. They joked as they passed wine flasks down the line; they couldn’t wait to slap the dust off their jackets and go home to their families.
Their crowd thickened at Oscen Bridge. We trotted off the road and splashed through the water, up the bank and across fields of ripening wheat. It whispered around our horses’ chests and brushed our boots as we pushed through, leaving two tracks in the grass-gold field. We rode along the verge speckled with poppies and small sunflowers, and onto the baking highway. In the distance, Rachiswater River shimmered in the rising heat.
Saker threw open his arms. ‘Home!’
Since leaving the Circle he seemed so much more alive. He’d woken up. Becoming mortal shattered everyone’s expectations and allowed him the possibility of change. He was free from the trammels of our beliefs of what Lightning Saker should be like. The expectations had clamped down on Cyan instead. And he had the freedom he’d always wanted. The freedom to recreate himself.
It’s a shame he only has a finite number of seconds left to do so. But time’s only valuable when it’s running out. He doesn’t take minutes for granted any more. He’s determined to live every one.
With boundless joy we galloped downhill and swam our horses across the river. That night, we stayed in Rachiswater Palace, which he had largely refitted. The following day we continued down Barb Street and stayed overnight at the reeve’s house, then next morning we set off, before dawn, to Wrought.
CHAPTER 13
The Powder Mills of Wrought
Familiar landmarks in the pale dawn revived the level fields. As we passed through my wife’s manor, our horses’ hooves ground on the heavy, gravelled road, and the breeze cooled my damp hair. The tall chimneys of the steelworks poked up from the horizon in the direction of Wrought town. We turned at the Colliery Crossroads, out towards the coast, on a road running between beet fields with dark green hedges. They counterpaned into the distance, seguing into marshland, and there, among the fringes of the saltings, glittered the sea.
Fusain Gunpowder Works stood on its own in this flat farmland, surrounded by canals that convey the finished powder to hulking magazine ships anchored in the middle of the River Wrought.
A few gunpowder barges with red triangular sails were already gliding out to meet the current – as they passed behind hedges and trees, they looked like they were sailing on the land.
We passed the sign to Fusain, and rode between alder and willow coppices, where the wood for charcoal was being grown. Ahead of us, seagulls cried over the tawny reedbeds, around the myriad stagnant inlets of the sea. The gunpowder works was hidden by a pine plantation, and a single, stark birch tree stood among them, bone-white, as if it had been washed.
‘Can you hear that?’ asked Saker.
‘What?’
‘The grinding sound?’
‘It’s the incorporating mill. It mixes the powder, day and night.’
‘Constantly?’
‘We get through a lot of powder.’
Pleasant, lilac-grey smoke was rising from the charcoal furnace and, as all the gunpowder buildings were in their own parkland, it was peaceful and tranquil. Away from the Front, I’d had a good night’s sleep for once and felt refreshed.
The drying houses were setting up a thermal already, trailing clouds from their chimneys. High in the dawn sky, layers of cirrostratus were inked pink with the growing light, and the sun rose behind mist above the reedbeds.
We clopped across a stone bridge over one of the small canals that connected the complex. Two punts were passing under the arch; the puntmen in flat caps and braces paused with their poles and stared up at us. Their boats were loaded with barrels wrapped in oilcloth – they were taking unfinished powder to the next stage of processing. Their square sterns flew red warning pennants. Between them, the still water reflected the peach and powder-blue curdled sky.
We reached a high perimeter wall and reined in. I dismounted and walked to the wire link gate and had a few words with the guard. As he opened the gates I returned to Saker. ‘We have to walk.’
‘Why?’
‘No horses in the complex. A spark from the hooves could set it off.’
He swung his leg over and stepped down.
‘No metal,’ I unbuckled my sword belt. ‘No weapons, and no boots.’
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