“No need to—
“Shut up. And memorise this moment in great detail, because I promise you it won’t be repeated.”
Now he stirred in the opposite direction, pulling himself toward her, and kicking up billows of ash. “But the blame is not yours to shoulder. The idiocy is mine. I should never have trusted that woman, Petrine Guillame. She batted those fine eyelashes my way, and I lost all suspicion. The poets say a beautiful woman must by nature have a soul to match, but now I know that’s wrong.”
“I thought there was only an eighth of a chance she was leading us in the right direction, but still I went along, because I wanted to take action. That makes me a much bigger fool than you.”
“No, I am the bigger fool!”
“Horse manure!”
“That’s a fine and eloquent retort.”
“Close your hole!”
The next day, for a few minutes at a time, they both were able to stand on their own, without their legs giving way. They counted the casks of ale: they had enough for three more days, if they drank sparingly. The dried meat would last for ages; neither Angelika nor Franziskus had recovered their appetites. Rain, colder and harder than the day before, pelted them for hours. They staggered to a dry corner, under a piece of platform that remained intact. They shivered in their shelter.
“Do I look better now?” Franziskus asked.
“Better than when?”
“My face. Is it less swollen and bruised?”
She appraised him at some length. “Less swollen, more bruised.”
Franziskus sighed in disappointment.
“In all honesty, you look like a crushed grape,” Angelika said.
“I’m grateful for the encouragement.”
She shrugged. “You asked.”
She looked like she was on the mend. Purple ringed her eyes, and scabs crisscrossed her face. But underneath, hints of her usual skin tone were returning.
She pulled some dried meat from her belt, bit off a piece, chewed it unhappily, then spat it back out. She stared at the leathery morsel as it lay in the wet ash. “I did not mean to abuse you, yesterday.”
“I understand.”
“But this is what you’ll suffer, if you keep on in this way, dogging my heels. I’m not a person out of a storybook, either. Not like those heroes you read about. Though sometimes I forget myself and act as if I am, by plunging into fights that are too big for me. And every so often—like now—I am forcibly reminded of my own fragility. I’ve asked you this many times, Franziskus.”
“I don’t want to hear it.”
“But this time, you can see where it will lead you. Wretchedness and misery. You want to protect me. You can’t.
“All you’ll earn is a share of my fate. Promise me. When we get ourselves out of this hole, you’ll go back home.”
“I’m not going back.”
“Then go somewhere else. I don’t care where, just get away from me before I get you murdered.”
“It doesn’t matter how many times you say it, but I’m not budging, so you might as well stop.”
“You wish to kill yourself, is that it?”
“A share of your fate is exactly what I desire. Your foolishness will be my foolishness. I’ve thrown my lot in with you. Your knife, my sword.”
“Whether I like it or not?”
“I’m sorry if I was churlish with you, and did not accept the apologies you wished to make. I’m yours to command. I’ll endeavour to please you better from now on.”
“Then swear you’ll leave me.”
“I’ll follow every order but that one.”
“But I’ll get you killed.”
“Then I promise not to die.”
She knew she was getting better when night came and her sleeplessness came not from pain, but from bottled-up energy. The moon was bright and shone down on them. She stood and stretched her arms behind her, as far as they could go. They did not hurt until they were almost fully extended. She walked to the side of the pit, placed her hands together against the timbered wall, and pushed off from it, testing the muscles of her legs. She cried out and fell, landing on her knee. Franziskus woke and leapt to her side. She sat up, kneading her calf muscles. He tried to take over the massaging duties, but she fended him off.
“I feel a return of vitality and purpose,” she said. “I feel ready again. Except that my legs disagree. You’re not ready, though, are you?”
“For what?”
“We’ll go together to the Castello. I’ll leave you there at the cottage, then I’ll—
“You’re forgetting: the Castello’s under siege.”
She groaned as her fingers found an especially sore spot. “That will be lifted by now; I guarantee it.”
“You’ve recovered your certitude, I see.”
“The Kopfs will have made their point and gone home. They won’t waste resources with an orc army on the way. I’ll drop you there and continue on.”
“To where?”
“I don’t yet know, but there’s got to be some way to pick up the trail again.”
“Lukas’ trail?”
“Who did you think I meant?”
“How will we find him now? We’ve been here for days. Toby’s had time to well and truly hide him.”
“If you want to help me, stop reminding me of things I already know.”
“And if you do find him—you’re no match for Goatfield now. He’ll turn you to pulp.”
“There will be no more frontal assaults, believe me.”
“But—you said it was folly. You said you’d learned your lesson.”
“It is, and I have. But, still, I can’t have a little worm like him staining my conscience for the rest of my stinking days. I’ll find him, turn him loose, and that will be the end of it, for once and all.”
“You can’t.”
“I’ve got to.”
The next day, they sorted through the ash for planks that had not burned too badly, and they leaned them up against the pit wall, to make a ramp. Angelika walked halfway up before growing light-headed. She lay flat against the boards and slid down.
The day after, they were strong enough to get out of the pit. But then they collapsed on the edge, panting and gasping. They lay there for a while, then stood up, and tottered out of the clearing and into the woods. Franziskus had to stop and sit on a rock. Wolves howled. They went back into the pit again to sleep away the night.
The day after that, they got out, and kept going.
CHAPTER TEN
Crow calls echoed through the pass.
“Don’t say it,” Angelika told him.
“I had no intention of saying it,” said Franziskus.
They cleared the sides of the now-abandoned rock cut leading to the Castello, and stepped into the basin, where the besiegers had been. Curls of fog hugged close to the muddy basin floor; it lay trampled and scored with the crisscrossed paths of a hundred carts. There were no more Averlandish soldiers, or their auxiliaries. Absent, too, were the vendors, looters, spectators, whores and flagellants. Trash heaps smouldered, the smoke conjoining with the fog. Wild dogs, of mottled brown, grey, and black, fought over sheep bones and the entrails of chickens. The wheel of an upturned, broken cart squeaked on its axle; it was turning slowly, lazily propelled by a hot breeze from the south. An old, plump woman, her hair a white and unkempt mop, sat in the cart’s meagre shade. She wore a dirty lace shift that had fallen down around her waist, and was banging a chunk of wood against the side of her head as she muttered and sang. One of the smaller wild dogs, which had been losing his battles anyway, trotted over to her, and regarded her quizzically. She snarled and it yelped away.
Up in the rocks bordering the basin, lonely figures prowled furtively. Whether they were refugees staring down at the ruins of their homes, or timid looters waiting for more smoke to clear, Angelika could not say. Whenever she squinted to make them out, they hid behind trees or dropped low into the grass.
They
looked to the Castello. It looked like the bottom of the pit they’d just crawled from. Its walls were down; collapsed into a jumble of scorched timber and severed planks. One of the wooden towers that once flanked the gate was now a broken skeleton of bare and blackened supports. The other had disappeared entirely. Inside the walls, the jumble of hovels and shacks Franziskus and Angelika had so often threaded through was now only half recognisable. Many of the small flimsy structures seemed to be missing altogether; others stood half-smashed—missing walls or roofs. The occasional cottage of stone or brick stood as before, but with its outer surfaces blackened, or its doors and shutters torn away.
“Where did all the people go?” Franziskus asked.
Angelika shrugged. “North would be the only sensible direction. I wonder if the Averlanders planned on sending several thousand refugees to swell through their own border.”
The two of them made their way swiftly across the field, giving a wide berth to the dogs and madwoman alike. When she reached a point two-thirds of the way across, Angelika halted. She strode to a low mound of earth that was dry and recently turned. Its shape was rectangular; it was about eighty feet long and forty feet wide. Lime dust had been sprinkled on top.
“Graves,” Franziskus said. Angelika nodded. Then the young Stirlander saw a small hand, twisted and broken, in the middle of the mound; it had been exposed by the wind. The hand was a woman’s, entwined by a bracelet of copper discs.
Angelika and Franziskus looked at one another, sharing a silent understanding: this was a battlefield she had no interest in plundering, and there would be no need for the usual debate on the ethics of scavengery.
“How many?” he asked.
“Many,” she said.
They kept on, toward the broken town.
“It is madness,” Franziskus said. “How can man slay man, when inhuman enemies wait to slaughter us all?”
“Absolutely—who needs orcs, when we have each other?”
They reached the boulder-lined road that led up to the front gate. It was littered with cannon balls, the broken hafts from various pole weapons, and countless arrows, most with burned tips. Angelika bent to pick one up, and show it to Franziskus.
“They used archers to set the walls alight.”
She looked at the high rock wall that served as the fortress’ backdrop. Soot coated it. “And there’s no back way out.” The cliff was supposed to provide protection, but it had trapped the defenders inside. They approached the collapsed, blackened walls, skirting a corpse clad only in a leather jerkin. Dogs had already been at it: the leg bones were exposed. The travellers’ still-healing muscles rebelled as they clambered over fallen planks and into the ruined town. They saw that it was true: many cottages and hovels past the Castello walls had indeed been flattened by cannon fire.
“What was the point?” Franziskus asked, looking at a scatter of broken timber that used to be a cramped and tiny hovel. Though he’d never spoken to the people who lived in it, he remembered them as a large clan beset by unruly, howling children.
Angelika kicked idly at a board, flipping it over so that its many nails pointed dirtward. She shrugged. “Practice for the artillery? The joy of finding an ideal target for cannon fire? Sheer malice?”
“The latter, I’d say.”
She cupped her hands around her mouth and called out: “Anyone here? Anyone here?”
A crow alighted atop a mud-daub wall, where a thatched roof had been burned away. It squawked a congenial hello at them and commenced to calmly groom its wing-feathers.
They walked to their cottage, which was far from the walls, and found it still standing, but stripped of rugs and furnishings. They’d lost nothing they’d miss; its worn floor coverings, uncomfortable bedding and lopsided chairs had come with the place when they’d rented it.
They made their way to the tavern. They found its sign, the one with the wretch screaming in his coffin, broken in two and strapped to a dead man’s back.
“He must have thought it a valuable souvenir,” Franziskus mused.
They turned the man over; they recognised him as a regular occupant of Giacomo’s benches but did not recall his name. Franziskus couldn’t find any wounds on him.
“It was apoplexy, not a weapon, that killed this one,” Angelika said. “Probably one of the Sabres came at him and he died on the spot, of fear. You can tell by the way he’s all purple and splotchy.”
“As usual, you brim with charming information.”
To their surprise, Giacomo’s bar was largely unscathed, save for its missing sign and a pile of broken glass beside its front steps. “Anyone in there?” Angelika called. She moved up onto the steps, kicking aside the severed neck of a brandy bottle. It landed in the heap of glass and shattered.
She stepped inside the tavern, Franziskus behind her. Someone had chopped huge wedges from the top of the bar with an axe or hatchet. The tables were overturned; the benches, missing. The shelves, naturally, had been stripped entirely; the victorious soldiers would have greedily drained every drop of alcohol they could find.
Angelika walked behind the bar. Flies buzzed around a bucket. She peered into it. Giacomo’s head lay inside it, his face upturned and imploring. She frowned and held up a palm, warning Franziskus to stay away, but he came to take a look regardless. It made him blanch, but he succeeded in suppressing the urge to rush outside and vomit.
“We should give him a proper burial, at least,” he said, when he was sure of himself.
“I’m not sure it counts as proper, with only this much of him to put below ground,” she said. “But he kept a decent brandy, and we should show respects to someone, I suppose.”
They investigated Giacomo’s closet, where they knew he kept a spade, but it had been ransacked. They used the end of a board to dig a suitable divot in the resistant, sandy earth behind his place. Blocking her nose and breathing through her mouth, Angelika went inside to claim the bucket. Returning with it, she settled it gently in the hole. She shooed the flies away and laid a bar rag over the top of the head. Though its use as a burial shroud could be seen as a desecration, she felt reasonably sure that Giacomo’s soul would understand the gesture’s great sincerity.
Franziskus mumbled the words of Shallya’s blessing, which he’d been taught by his nursemaid, and used the board to paddle the dirt back around the bucket.
They headed in silence to the prince’s palazzo. Even from a distance, it was plain to see that it had been gutted. Its roof was gone, along with much of its front wall. The metal fence around the grounds had been uprooted—concrete moorings and all—and carted off, leaving behind a trench of moist earth. Angelika and Franziskus were about to pass it by when they saw a familiar figure sprawled face-down in this new ditch. His right boot rested about fifteen feet away from him, his lower leg still inside it. In a mocking gesture, someone had repositioned the boot, so that the stump pointed up.
“Halfhead!” Angelika cried. She ran to him. When he stirred, she jolted.
“Accursed bastard dogs,” the gateman growled.
“We were about to pass you by. You’re lucky the back of your head is distinctive.”
“Angelika?”
“And Franziskus is here, too. Do you want to roll over?”
“They’re the unholy farts of daemons, they are. My right leg. I can’t feel it. How bad does it look?”
“I’m going to help you roll over.” She frowned meaningfully at Franziskus. It took him a moment to figure out exactly what she wanted from him. Then he hopped to it. He pinched the boot cuff gingerly and picked up the severed portion of Halfhead’s leg. Then he set it respectfully behind a bush, where its owner couldn’t see it. The absurd thought popped into his head that the poor fellow might now have to rename himself Halfleg.
Angelika took Halfhead by the shoulder and turned him over in the ditch. His face was pale. The tip of his tongue eked its tentative way out onto dry, chapped lips. “Water?” he asked.
Angelika reached
into her pack and withdrew her waterskin. She unscrewed its pewter cap and poured some water onto the tail of her tunic, before dabbing it onto his lips. Only when they were well moistened did she pour any liquid into the wounded man’s mouth. She dribbled it in slowly.
Halfhead tried to lift his head for a look at his leg. Angelika leaned in, blocking his view. He laid his head back down. “I said, how bad is it?”
“Don’t take this the wrong way, but I’m surprised you haven’t bled to death.”
“My family, none of us is big bleeders. It’s an ancestral trait. We seal right back up.”
“How long has it been?”
Franziskus spotted a pile of old sacks; presumably left behind by a disappointed looter. He bundled them up and placed them under the gatekeeper’s head.
“They attacked at dawn. Yesterday,” Halfhead said. “I think. I ain’t been conscious the whole time, I don’t believe.”
“We have to get you somewhere out of the elements.”
“I took a smash on the head when the walls came down. Woke up later, with the looting in full swing. They took everything, the ungodly swine. Stupid me, I charged out of my hidey-hole, sword a-swinging, when I saw them working to bring down the fence. Sigmar’s privates, what possessed me?”
“Men act rashly at times like this,” Angelika said. These words were not especially consoling, she knew, but they were the best that came to mind.
“I suppose I was thinking I’d failed to protect the main walls, and I’d be damned if they took Davio’s fence, too. So I came at them and of course it was a dozen to one and they cut me down. I think I got a couple of them, though. Made them pay for the stinking fence. They’ll melt it down for scrap, I know they will. Accursed godforsaken fence.” He peeked around Angelika, at his leg.
“What of Davio? Did they get him, too?”
“I didn’t see it happen, but you can bet crowns to crayfish he got himself away. If there ever was a man who knew how to regroup, it’s old Davio. I guess I don’t have to call him prince no more, if the thing he was prince of is now a pile of smoking rubble. My leg’s clean off, ain’t it?”
01 - Honour of the Grave Page 19