by Paul Kearney
“Until now. This time,” Avila said grimly.
“Yes. Until this day.”
“What changed their minds, I wonder?”
“Who can say? Lucky for us something did.”
Joshelin came alongside them leading his train of mules, his weathered face aflame with the cold and the pace of the march.
“You sound like a student of history,” he said to Albrec. “I thought you were a monk.”
“I used to read a lot.”
“Aye? What about that book you were so keen to get back from the marshal’s tent? Is it worth reading?”
“Whatever it is, it doesn’t concern you,” Avila said tartly.
Joshelin merely looked at him. “Only the ignorant are too poor to afford courtesy,” he said. “Inceptine.” He slowed his paced so that the two monks drew ahead of him again.
Albrec touched the ancient document that was once more hidden in the folds of his cloak. Barbius had given it over with not even a question as to its content. The little monk had received the impression that the Fimbrian marshal had a lot on his mind. There were couriers—the only Fimbrians who ever went mounted—coming and going every day, and camp rumour had it that they were in contact with General Martellus of Ormann Dyke, and that the news they bore was not good.
Soon the time would come when the two monks would have to break away from the army and strike out on their own towards Torunn, whilst the column continued to follow the eastern road to the Searil River and the frontier. Already, Albrec was rehearsing in his head what he would tell Macrobius the High Pontiff. The document he bore seemed like a millstone of responsibility. He was only a humble Antillian monk. He wanted to turn it over to someone else, one of the great people of the world, and let them bear the burden. It was too heavy for him alone.
The two clerics rode south-east in this manner with an army as escort. Three more days of sitting foul-tempered mules, sharing the nightly campfires with the soldiers, having their slow-to-heal injuries dressed by army physicians. The Fimbrians were all but quit of the Torrin Gap by that time, and were setting foot in Torunna itself, the wide, hilly land bisected by the Torrin River that rolled for a hundred leagues down to the Kardian Sea. It was largely unsettled, this region, too close to the blizzards that came ravening out of the mountains and the Felimbric raiders that sometimes came galloping down in their wake, even in this day and age. The most populous towns and settlements of Torunna were on the coast. Staed, Gebrar, Rone, even Torunn itself, were ports, their eastern sides flanked by the surf of the Kardian. The interior of the kingdom still had great swathes of wilderness leading up to the mountains where none went but hunters and Royal prospectors and engineers, seeking out deposits of ore for the military foundries to plunder and turn into weapons, armour, cannon.
The Fimbrians left the snow behind at last, and found themselves marching through a country of pine-clad bluffs which teemed with game. Antelope, wild oxen and wild horses abounded, and Barbius allowed hunting parties to leave the column and pot some meat to eke out the plain army rations. But of the natives of the kingdom, the Torunnans themselves, they saw no sign. The land was as deserted as an untouched wilderness. Only the ancient highway their feet followed gave any sign that men had ever been here at all.
But the highway forked, one branch heading off east, the other almost due south. The eastern road forded the Torrin River and disappeared over the horizon. Some sixty leagues farther, and it would end at the fortress of Ormann Dyke, the destination of this marching army. The southern way had three hundred winding and weary miles to go before it too ended, at the gates of Torunna’s capital.
The army camped that night at the fork and Albrec and Avila were invited to the marshal’s tent. They ducked under the leather flap and found Barbius awaiting them, but he was not alone. Also there were Joshelin and Siward, and a young officer they did not recognize.
“Take a seat, Fathers,” Barbius said with what passed for affability with him. “We soldiers will stand. Joshelin and Siward you know. They have been your . . . guardian angels for some time now. This is Formio, my adjutant.” Formio was a tall, slim man of about thirty. He seemed almost boyish compared to his comrades, though perhaps this was because he lacked the traditional bull-like build of most Fimbrians.
“We have come to the parting of the ways,” Barbius went on. “In the morning the column will continue toward Ormann Dyke, and you will go south to Torunn. Joshelin and Siward will go with you. There are all manner of brigands in these hills, more now since Aekir’s fall and the war in the east. They will be your guards and will remain with you as long as you need them.”
Albrec chanced a look at Joshelin, that grizzled campaigner, and was rewarded with a glare. Clearly, the old soldier was not enamoured of the idea. He remained silent, however.
“Thank you,” the little monk said to Barbius.
The marshal poured some wine into the tin cups that were all to be had in camp. He and the two monks sipped at it, while Formio, Joshelin and Siward sat staring into space with the peculiar vacancy of soldiers awaiting orders. There was a long, awkward silence. Clearly, Marshal Barbius was not a believer in small-talk. He seemed preoccupied, as if half his mind were elsewhere. His adjutant, too, seemed subdued, even for a Fimbrian. It was as if the two of them were burdened with some secret knowledge they dare not share.
“It only remains for me then to wish you Godspeed and good travelling,” Barbius said finally. “I rejoice to see you both in such good health, after your travails. I hope you find journey’s end what you wish it to be. I hope we all do . . .” He stared into his cup. In the dim tent the wine within seemed black as old blood.
“I will not keep you from your sleep then, Fathers. That is all.” And he turned from them to the table, dismissing them from his mind. Joshelin and Siward filed out silently. Avila looked furious at the curt dismissal but he drained his wine, muttered something about manners and followed the two soldiers outside. Albrec lingered a moment, though he was not sure why he did.
“Is the news from the dyke bad, Marshal?” he asked.
Barbius turned as though surprised to find him still there. “That is a matter for the military authorities of the world,” he said wryly.
“What should I say to the Torunnan authorities if they ask me about it?” Albrec persisted.
“The Torunnan authorities are no doubt well enough informed without seeking the opinion of a refugee monk, Father,” the younger adjutant, Formio, said, but he smiled to take the sting out of his words, un-Fimbrian in that also.
“The dispatches I send out daily will have kept them up to date,” Barbius said gruffly. He hesitated. There was some enormous pressure on him; Albrec could sense it.
“What has happened, Marshal?” the little monk asked in a low voice.
“The dyke is already lost,” Barbius said at last. “The Torunnan commander Martellus has ordered its evacuation.”
Albrec was thunderstruck. “But why? Has it been attacked?”
“Not as such. But a large Merduk army has arrived on the Torunnan coast south of the mouth of the Searil River. The dyke has been outflanked. Martellus is trying to extricate his men—some twelve thousand of them, all told—and lead them back to Torunn, but he is being caught between the two sides of a vice. He is conducting a fighting withdrawal from the Searil, pressed by the army that was before the dyke, whilst the new enemy force comes marching up from the coast to cut him off.” Barbius paused. “My mission as I see it has changed. I am no longer to reinforce the dyke because the dyke no longer exists. I must attack this second Merduk army and try to hold it off long enough for Martellus’s men to escape to the capital.”
“What is the strength of this second army?” Albrec asked.
“Perhaps a hundred thousand men,” Barbius said tonelessly.
“But that’s preposterous!” Albrec protested. “You have only a twentieth of that here. It’s suicide.”
“We are Fimbrian soldiers,” Formi
o said, as if that explained everything.
“You’ll be massacred!”
“Perhaps. Perhaps not,” Barbius said. “In any case, my orders are clear. My superiors approve. The army will move south-east to block the Merduk advance from the coast. Mayhap we will remind the west how Fimbrians conduct themselves on the battlefield.”
He turned away. Albrec realized he knew he was ordering his men to their deaths.
“I will pray for you,” the little monk said haltingly.
“Thank you. Now, Father, I wish to be alone with my adjutant. We have a lot to do before morning.”
Albrec left the tent without another word.
FIVE
P OWER is a strange thing, the lady Jemilla thought. It is intangible, invisible. It can sometimes be bought and sold like grain, at other times no amount of money on earth can purchase it.
She had some power now, some small store of it to wield as she saw fit. For a woman in the world she had been born into, it was impossible to possess the trappings of power as men possessed them. Armies, fleets, cannon. The impedimenta of war. It was said that the most powerful woman in the world was the Queen Dowager of Torunna, Odelia, but even she had to hide behind her son the King, Lofantyr. No Ramusian nation would ever tolerate a queen who ruled alone, without apology for her sex. Or they had not thus far at least. Women who possessed ambition had to use other means to gain their ends. Jemilla had realized that while she was still a child.
She held the lives of two men in the palm of her hand, and that power had gained her her freedom. Allowing herself to be taken by the two guards had been unpleasant but necessary. She blocked out of her mind the acts she had performed for them in the dark firelight of her chambers, and reminded herself instead that with one word she could have them hung. It was not permitted for palace guards to couple with noble ladies in their care. They knew it—they had done so as soon as their lust was spent and she had risen from the bed still shining with their effluent, laughing at them. Which was why she was free to wander the palace whenever one of them was on duty outside her door.
Such a simple thing. It worked with common soldiers as easily as it worked with kings.
It was well after midnight, and she was prowling the palace corridors like a wraith wrapped in hooded silk. She was looking for Abeleyn.
The Royal chambers were guarded, of course, but there were untold numbers of secret passageways and tunnels and alcoves in the palace, some of which predated Abrusio itself, and it was in search of these that she was out here creeping in the echoing dark. Abeleyn had told her of them months ago, one airless night in the Lower City when they were both spent and sweat-soaked with the late summer stars glittering beyond the window and two of the King’s bodyguards discreet as shadows in the courtyard of the inn below. He used the secret ways of the palace to come and go as he pleased, without fanfare or remark, and take his pleasure in the riotous night life of Old Abrusio below, as free and easy as any young man with a pocketful of gold and a nose for mischief. It was—had been—a glorious game to him to roam the backstreets and alleys of the teeming city, to wear a disguise and drink beer and wine in filthy but lively taverns, to feel the buttocks of some Lower City slut wriggling in his lap. And to be their king, and they not know it. Perhaps to forget it himself for a while, to be a young man with nothing tripping at his heels, a high-living gentleman and no more.
There had been a light to him, Jemilla thought, not without regret. Something that had nothing to do with being a king but was part of the man himself. He had been easy to like, pleasant to bed, the boy in him counting for more than the monarch. But then the summer had ended, and this winter had come hurtling down upon the world full of blood and fire and powdersmoke. And Abeleyn had changed, had grown. There were times after that when he frightened her, not with any threat or violence, but simply with the steady stare of his dark eyes. He had become a king indeed, much good it had done him.
Her feet were bare, slapping slightly on the floors. She carried her slippers under her mantle; they slipped and slid on the cold marble and were no good for speed. It was cold in the slumbering palace, and only a few oil-fed lamps burned in cressets up on the walls, throwing a serried garden of light and dark about her and making of her hooded shape a cowled giant down the passageways. One hand for her slippers, the other curved protectively about her swelling belly. One good thing about the nausea that overwhelmed her most mornings—it kept her thin. Her face was unchanged. Only her breasts had grown, the nipples often stiff and sore. Apart from her belly and breasts, the rest of her was as lithe as it had always been.
Except . . . oh, no. Not now.
Except for this thing. She appropriated a vase and ducked behind a curtain with it, then pulled her silks aside and squatted over it and sighed in relief as liquid gushed out of her. Oh, such a God that visited such indignities upon women.
She left the vase behind and pattered along as fast as she might. Abeleyn had told her how to come and go from his chamber to other rooms in the palace when he had been drunk, and she had been pretending to be. But it had been a long time ago, or seemed so. She was not sure if she could remember the exact places, the things to do. And thus here she was in the moonless chilly night, running along palace corridors in her bare feet, dodging sentries and yawning servants running midnight errands, and, absurdly, pushing at walls and feeling behind hangings and pressing loose stone flags. But it was somewhere here, in the guest wing of the palace. Some secret entrance which would admit her to the hidden labyrinth of passages and, finally, to the King’s presence. If the King still breathed and they had not had his corpse spirited away and secretly buried days ago. She would not put anything past the wizard, Golophin. But she had to know if Abeleyn were truly alive, if he were too maimed ever to recover—there were terrible rumours flying about the palace. Only then would she be able to decide what her own course of action might be.
Movement in the passageway ahead. She shrank into the shadows, heart beating wildly, bladder suddenly ready to burst again. Thank God for the darkness of her mantle.
“—no change, none at all. But I have seen this kind of thing before. We need not despair, not just yet.”
It was the wizard’s voice, that skeletal fiend Golophin. But who was with him? Jemilla edged farther down into the dark. There was a cold, bobbing light approaching which she knew was unnatural: the wizard’s unholy lantern. She found a heavy tapestry at her back, an alcove where the palace servants had stowed brushes and brooms away from the genteel eye, and she slipped in there gratefully, peering out through a chink she left for herself, watching the cold light approach.
Yes—Golophin. The werelight gleamed off his glabrous pate. But there was a woman with him in rich robes, a hooded mantle much like Jemilla’s own. Two pale hands threw back the hood and Jemilla saw a white face, the coppery glint of hair. An ugly woman, a face with little harmony to recommend it, but there was strength in it. And she carried herself like a queen.
“I’ll keep visiting him, then,” the woman said in a voice as low and rich as a bass lute. “Mercado’s men are still looking, I suppose?”
“Yes.” The wizard’s voice was musical also. A pair of beautiful voices, oddly matched. And at strange odds with the features of their owners. Who might this aristocratic but plain woman be? Her accent was strange, not of Hebrion, but it was cultured. It was of some court of other.
They were three yards away. Jemilla put her hand over her mouth. Her heart was thumping so loudly she could hear the rush and ebb of her blood in her throat.
“No luck, I am afraid,” the wizard went on. “The kingdom has been scoured clean of the Dweomer-folk. I doubt Hebrion will ever be host to them in any numbers again. We are a dwindling people, we practitioners of the Seven Disciplines. One day we will be only a rumour, a lost tale of ancient marvels. No, there will be no mighty mage uncovered in time to heal Abeleyn. They are all fled or dead, or lost in the uttermost west . . . And I am a broken reed at best. No
, we must continue to do what we can with what we have.”
“Which is precious little,” the woman said.
They were moving past her. Jemilla caught a hint of the woman’s expensive scent, saw the hair piled up on her head in great coils of copper fire, the only thing of beauty about her other than her voice. They then had turned the corner and were gone.
She waited a while, and then left her hiding place, her breath coming fast. As silently as a cat she retraced their steps, and came up against a dead end. The corridor ended with an ornate leaded window through which she could see the lights of the city below, the mast lanterns of ships in the ruined harbour, the glimmer of the cold stars.
She began investigating every inch of stone in the walls, tapping, pressing, poking. Perhaps half an hour she was there, her heart beating wildly, bladder painfully full again. And then she felt a click under her fingers and a section of the wall, perhaps a yard square, moved in with a suddenness that almost made her fall. She staggered as the grave-cold air came whispering out of a lightless hole in the wall. A glimpse of steps leading down, and then nothing but the blackness.
She shivered, her toes growing numb with the wintry blast. It looked an awful place to go in the dark hour of the night.
She padded quickly back up the corridor and took a lamp down from its cresset. Then she put her slippers over her frigid feet and, shielding the flame from the cold draught, she entered the passageway.
A metal lever here, on the inside. She pulled it down and the door shut behind her, almost panicking her for a second. But she cursed herself for a fool and went on, angry with herself, hating the composure of the plain woman who had been with Golophin, hating them both for being privy to the secrets of the palace, for being so close to the hub of power. Hating everyone and everything indiscriminately because she, Jemilla, must lurk and creep in cold passages like a thief though she bore the King’s heir. By the blood of the martyred saints, they would pay for making her do this. One day she would serve them all out. Before she died, she would call this palace her own.