Guillaume took one look at them and spat in disgust. “Tradesmen, rustics, a brave lady or two, and some broken-down tapsters,” he sneered, “we might repel one rush, but that’s it. Prepare to die, boys.”
“They’re just trying to protect their families,” said Felipe with something like pity in his voice, “the Gods help them, and us.”
* * * *
In the bowels of distant Silverback, Fulk the No Man’s Son was about to work the most powerful sorcery he had ever attempted. He had spent the past three days preparing for it.
The floor of his private study was covered in strange runes and diagrams mapped out in salt, the meaning of which he only half-understood. Much of Fulk’s talent was instinctive, and he had made little attempt to study the science of sorcery, fearing what he might discover.
Edith sat on the step of the doorway and watched, anxiously twisting her beads through her fingers. She was worried for Fulk, gravely worried, as anyone might be when their lover refuses to eat for three days and spends much of that time sitting cross-legged with a staff across their knees. He had barely moved from that position except to take a little water, and spoken not a word.
Before beginning his strange ritual Fulk had banned servants from his private quarters. Even Templars were not allowed to enter, and he had only allowed Edith to remain due to his infatuation for her.
“If you stay, you will be in great danger,” he had warned her, “for I will be walking alone down dark paths, and cannot protect you.”
“We share our dangers,” she answered with the stubborn expression that he knew so well, “as we share everything else.”
So now she sat on the step and watched, fearful of the gathering shadows in the room and steadily thickening atmosphere, as Fulk entered the final stage of his meditation.
Edith reckoned herself immune from most earthly fears, having survived the abuse of a savage father and the sadistic rules of the sisterhood Fulk had rescued her from. But fears of the spirit were something else, and she experienced them now as the candles burned low and darkness slowly engulfed the room.
This was no mere absence of light. Edith’s mind began to play tricks on her, and she thought that some of the gathering shadows on the walls took on a mockery of human shapes, twisted and grotesque, as if deformed. Spindly shadow-fingers seemed to reach for her, and silent mouths gaped in a parody of mirth. The silence and the creeping cold were overwhelming, broken only by Fulk as he babbled an apparently meaningless torrent of syllables under his breath.
As always when he practised sorcery, his face had changed, drained of human warmth and becoming pale and angular, as if carved from bone. His head was bowed and his mouth drooped open with a thin tendril of saliva hanging from his lower lip.
As Edith clasped a shawl around her for warmth and prayed for courage, he slowly lifted his right arm and curled his hand into a fist.
* * * *
The wind had dropped. Felipe glanced up in amazement at the sails of the Glory, saw they were hanging limp, and looked about for the nearest sailor.
“You there!” he shouted at a grizzled old forecastle hand named Chabal, his thinning grey hair clubbed into a greasy pigtail that trailed down his back. “What’s happening, where did all the wind go?”
Chabal shook his head, baffled. Felipe turned back to the rail and saw the pirate vessels were becalmed in the suddenly still waters, from surging sharks to wallowing turtles in the blink of an eye.
“Well, that was bloody odd,” said Guillaume, scratching his bald head, “but it only means we get to live for a bit longer. They’ll use their oars now.”
The enemy captains were already shouting orders to that effect, and frantic movement could be seen aboard the pirate vessels as their crews scrambled to break out oars.
“The air is not right,” said Jean, holding up his forefinger and touching it to his tongue. “There is a strange taste to it.”
Felipe grimaced. “You’re right...it tastes of blood, almost, or copper.”
The three knights looked at each other. The long history of the Temple’s persecution of witches had taught them that the presence of sorcery made the air taste metallic.
“Impossible,” said Guillaume, “Fulk doesn’t have that much power. He can’t have.”
A sudden blast of wind swept through the ship, only it was not wind but a sound, a sound so powerful that it almost had a physical force. At first it was akin to a roar, as if from the throat of some massive beast, but steadily grew more high-pitched until it resembled the shrill shriek of a million kettles coming to the boil at once.
All over the Glory, people fell to their knees and clapped hands over their ears, gasping at the pain of the unbearable noise driving through their skulls. Felipe dropped like all the rest, clenching his teeth against the agony, but managed to keep his eyes open long enough to witness what came next.
A vast, spectral flame appeared in the sky, bigger than any castle, translucent as the faintest rainbow. Felipe and those others who saw it moaned in fear, thinking that some God had chosen this moment to vent its fury on the world. The flame steadily rose, higher and higher, as the ghostly scream tearing through the ship increased to skull-bursting levels.
Few of the pirates seemed to notice the ghastly apparition hovering above, but those that did screamed in terror as they pointed upwards. More faces turned up to look, only to see the flame rapidly descend like a colossal hammer.
The impact was appalling. Ships were hurled into the air as the ocean exploded, crumbling and breaking apart like matchwood, flinging their doomed crews into the sea. Felipe thought he might go mad at the sight of the vast tidal wave that ensued, soaring high above the Glory and threatening to crash down and engulf her. He could see the bodies of pirates suspended above him in that enormous wall of water, twisting and wriggling as they drowned, like worms on the end of a hook.
“Don’t let me drown!” he heard Guillaume scream above the awful noise, “Gods help me, I cannot drown!”
The monstrous wave did not come down. Instead it hung there. The sound of rushing water was like an avalanche, mixed with distant screams, but still the wave stayed as motionless as any wall.
By now the air was so greasy and metallic Felipe felt as though he could reach out and grasp chunks of it.
“Sorcery,” he whispered to himself, “is this what he is capable of? Then he has the power to tear out my living soul, if the mood takes him.”
Slowly, slowly, the tidal wave began to shrink and recede, as if someone could mould water like clay and was calmly picking the vast structure apart. In the restored atmosphere of a flat calm, with no wind and not a sound aboard the Glory, the endless expanse of the sea quietly resumed its natural shape.
Of the fifteen pirate ships, there was little sign except a few spars of timber and shredded canvas floating on the peaceful waters. Here and there bobbed the corpse of a drowned pirate, while the miserable few that had somehow survived clung to bits of floating wreckage.
Amid the stunned silence Guillaume the Bastard got to his feet, panting like an old bullock, and winced as he rubbed his injured arm.
“I need a fucking drink,” he said.
* * * *
Fulk slowly toppled onto his face, staff falling from nerveless fingers, and then rolled onto his side, like a man suffering from too much drink. He made no sound, but sweat dripped from his flesh, which in a matter of moments had lost the bloom of youth and become flaky, wrinkled, and loose. His hair, too, jet-black only moments before, had faded to thin grey stubble.
Only Edith was present to witness his fall. With a cry, and disregarding the shadows in the room that seemed to claw and snatch at her, she knelt by his side and tried to lift him up, to revive him.
He was a dead weight, unconscious and barely breathing. She was forced to call for help, and eventually servants came, drawn by her desperate shouts. Between them they managed to lift his heavy frame and half-carry, half-drag it onto the bed in the adjoining room.
There he lay, blind and unresponsive, with Edith as his devoted nurse. Only the faint tremor of his heartbeat assured the people of the mountain that the Grand Master still lived.
6.
From his vantage point high on the hill, Hoshea patted the neck of his horse—an equine he hand-picked for its speed—and watched the enemy host stream into the fields below.
He was wearing a knee-length mail shirt, which was too heavy and scratched uncomfortably. On his head was a plumed helmet that didn’t quite fit, and from his belt hung a sword that he didn’t intend to use.
As he had many times pointed out to his master¸ General Saqr, Hoshea was no soldier. In his more eloquent moments he liked to say that when the embalmers opened his body the word CIVILIAN would be found embroidered on his heart. Saqr found this irritating, and often threatened to personally carve the letters on his secretary’s heart. Hoshea would smirk and deftly change the subject.
However, even to a committed non-combatant like himself, certain elements of the current military situation were obvious.
To begin with, General Anma had a lot more men. Some twenty thousand under her banner of the leaping lion had marched unopposed all the way up the ancient Imperial Highway, crossing the rivers and hills that separated General Saqr’s lands from her own.
Deciding to stake everything on one pitched battle, Saqr had stripped the border forts and garrisons, recalling every able-bodied man to join his main army mustering at Hasan.
Hoshea shifted in his saddle as he considered some more uncomfortable facts. Even after scraping together all the troops he could, including the conscription of foreign Northerners, Saqr’s own host was still outnumbered two to one. Deferring to Hoshea’s advice, he had resorted to conscripting farm boys and civilians, and now these rag-tag amateur soldiers crowded in their hundreds on the ridge, a last-ditch reserve if all else went to pot in the coming battle.
The General himself, mounted on his favourite white stallion, was a little way off, surrounded by his officers and staff. Hoshea had left them to be alone with his thoughts for a while, and because he couldn’t bear to listen to their pompous military talk.
Entice and Crush was the name Saqr had given to his battle-plan. He had marched his army out of Hasan and drawn them up on a high ridge a few miles north-west of the city. The ridge was the only swell amid a glorious expanse of lush, flat, low-lying grassland known as the Field of the White Bull. It was named after the age-old custom of sacrificing a young white bull every year by the banks of the river to ensure the land would yield rich crops. But there were no crops at this time of year, and the only harvest today was likely to be one of human lives.
The army had their backs to the broad waters of the River Nephrates, which ran in a twisting ribbon all the way through miles of green pasture to a distant line of hills to the north. Between the foot of the hill and the banks of the river was a patch of boggy ground where Saqr’s men had thrown up rough palisades of stones and sharpened stakes. The hasty barricades were guarded by as many peltasts as could be spared, consisting of archers, slingers, and javeliniers.
“So they cannot outflank us, gentlemen,” the General had explained to his officers in his tent the night beforehand, “and our rear is guarded by the river.”
Taking no chances, Saqr had also ordered the wings of his army to be protected by ditches and more lines of stakes, presenting a formidable barrier to Anma’s troops as they toiled up the flanks of the hill. Only the centre was left unguarded, and this, Saqr insisted, was his masterstroke.
“Entice and Crush!” he cried, slapping the map of the field with his cane. “The bitch Anma dare not attack our flanks, and so will be forced to try and attack our centre. Her men will have to fight on a narrow front, uphill, with the sun in their faces and in the teeth of every missile we can throw at them! They will break and break and break, like the tide against a rocky shore…and like the tide, they will inevitably recede!”
It was an eloquent speech, and Hoshea had been mildly impressed by the simple logic of the plan. Still, he had his doubts. Twenty years in Saqr’s service had taught Hoshea not to trust his master’s judgement, which was why he had invested in the fastest horse available and had a servant with remounts waiting in the rear.
His gaze wandered over Anma’s army pouring into the fields below, column after column of tiny doll-like figures, armour gleaming in the hot midday sun, and then to the expendable men who had been given the task of holding the line against them.
The Northerners, amongst them the three Templars.
* * * *
“I have warned you before,” growled Guillaume, “cease that damn piping. My head is aching enough already.”
He was sitting cross-legged on the grass with his sword across his knees, rubbing his sore head, the result of too much coarse wine the night before, and chewing on an apple. Before him the ground sloped sharply down to the fields where General Anma’s army was massing.
Jean de Riparia carried on piping regardless of Guillaume’s headache. He had chosen a simple repetitive five-note melody, but the tune was a haunting one, somehow capturing the desolate spirit of his homeland.
When he had finished, a murmur of approval rippled through the ranks of knights and men-at-arms. A few of them also came from the far North of the Winter Realm, and had whistled along to Jean’s pipe.
“That was pretty,” said Felipe, currently grateful for any distraction, “what was it?”
“An old air called The Flowers of Spring,” said Jean, tucking the pipe into his belt. “Long ago, a band of young warriors spent a week feasting and carousing before riding out to fight an enemy clan. They were outnumbered and all but one died on the field. That one was blinded and allowed to go free. He became a bard, the first and most famous of the Bards of the Free North, and composed the tune as a lament for his fallen brothers.”
“The story seems apt,” said Felipe, “though I could have done with a few more days of carousing.”
He winced as the weight of his mail rubbed against his sore back. The past fortnight had been a living nightmare, and one he could not have anticipated.
Having been delivered from the pirates of the Isles, the King’s Glory had sailed for the north-western coast of Temeria, only to fall into the clutches of a fleet of Temerian warships.
Every able-bodied foreign male, the Admiral had declared in his awkward heavily-accented Northspeech when he boarded the ship, was now a subject of the Most High and Puissant General Saqr, and required to enter his service.
Some of the more robust souls aboard had resisted, including Felipe and his comrades, but the Temerian legionaries were too many and had overpowered them.
“Weigh these reluctant heroes down in chains,” commanded the Admiral, regarding the bruised Northerners with extreme dislike, “they shall soon learn the value of obedience.”
And so they had. A few days of painful marching in chains, urged on by the whips of Temerian sergeants, had persuaded Felipe and the rest of the benefits of entering the mysterious General Saqr’s service. Their backs raw with bloody stripes from the lash, wrists and ankles chafed sore by the weight of iron, they had at last submitted and agreed to sign their names to an indenture.
That done, they had been released and allowed to join the main column of some five hundred men, all of them refugees from the Winter Realm. Shepherded carefully by lines of Temerian horse-soldiers, they had marched deep inland, along a straight road that led through a country of rocky plains and valleys, with the white peaks of snow-capped mountains visible far to the south.
Eventually the land had softened and became lush and green, not unlike the Winter Realm during its brief Harvest season. Footsore and weary, Felipe did his best to take in the new country he was passing through, and wonder why Fulk had apparently withdrawn the protection of his sorcery.
“Perhaps he’s dead,” suggested Guillaume as they rested one night in the shadow of one of the old hero-tombs that were dotted alon
g the highway, “I hope so.”
Felipe had refused to believe it. “When Fulk dies, it shall be by my hand,” he said, “I want to see the light go out in his eyes as I press my sword home.”
“Careful,” grinned Guillaume, wiping the dust of the road from his face, “he might be listening.”
Felipe shrugged. “Fuck him, then. And I hope he heard that.”
* * * *
Their long march had ended here, on the ridge overlooking the crystal-clear waters of the Nephrates. When the Northerners arrived the hill was bare, but the following morning a dust-cloud had appeared in the south.
The dust was raised by the tramping feet of hundreds of Temerian soldiers marching from the city of Hasan, followed by hundreds more, brigade after brigade of infantry and cavalry. Felipe and his companions had never seen so many troops assembled in one place before, nor soldiers that wore such outlandish war-gear.
“I still don’t trust those buggers,” said Jocelyn, a raddled old mercenary with a vicious cleft in his jaw carved by an axe in some ancient battle, whom the Templars had befriended.
He was glaring suspiciously at General Saqr’s elite troops, known as the Grim Reavers. Saqr had stationed an entire legion of them in five brigades just behind the Northerners and on their flanks, to help them repel the enemy assault when it came.
“Nor me,” said Guillaume, “I reckon they don’t feel half as terrible as they look. Probably turn tail and leave us in the lurch as soon as things get tough.”
The Reavers certainly looked the part. Even by the standards of the Temerian military they were flamboyant. Each trooper wore a scale mail hauberk reaching to their knees, polished black leather boots with steel-plated greaves, and black breastplates covered in swirling patterns picked out in gold filigree. They carried hexagon-shaped shields inscribed with the symbol of Saqr’s family, a serpentine gold dragon swallowing its own tail, and wore faceless helmets of smooth black steel decorated with curling ram’s horns. For weapons they carried wickedly sharp halberds. The overall effect was sinister, inhuman, like figures out of a nightmare.
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