This Forsaken Earth

by Paul Kearney

  “Your war is running out of steam,” Rol said quietly.

  “On the contrary; our war is running full-tilt. I meant what I said to that old fool; I mean this campaign to be the end of it.”

  “One way or another.”

  “Bar Asfal has stuck his head back out of his hole; we’ve been waiting for that a long time. We will go to Gallitras, pick up troops, and relieve Myconn. Bar Asfal will die before its walls. One way or another.”

  “When did you become a general, Canker? What did she do to make that out of you?”

  The Thief-King laughed. “We live in a wicked world, Rol. A thief may make a better general than you think.”

  “I still do not see what is my role in the midst of these heroics.”

  “Ask your sister, when you see her.”

  If anything, Arbion was even uglier in daylight: a sea of serried ruins, gray as a woodlouse’s back and mirrored by a lowering winter sky which was already spitting sleet. With the morning, they could see that there was reconstruction work going on here and there, but it seemed pitifully inadequate compared to the scale of the destruction.

  Hass had wanted to provide them with an escort for the road, but Canker demurred. He accepted horses and provisions instead, and spent half an hour closeted with the governor whilst Rol, Creed, and Giffon outfitted their mounts, and Gallico looked on, grinning. “How many of you old sea-salts have ever ridden one of these damned things anyway?”

  Rol swung himself up into the saddle of a restive bay gelding. It was eight years since he had ridden a horse, but he found that it came back to him easily enough. Creed and Giffon had never sat on a beast’s back in their lives, and they regarded their steeds with a mixture of dismay and suspicion.

  “Gallico,” Creed said, staring at some undefined space between his horse’s ears, “if this son of a bitch takes off on me, I want you to punch it in the head.”

  “Just yank on the rein; I’ve heard that’s like backing topsails.”

  Canker joined them. He had found means to change into a leather cuirass and canvas breeches. A shabby-looking short sword hung at one hip, balanced by a long knife on the other. Over all he had thrown a heavy fur-lined cloak fastened with a brooch of niello-worked silver. He patted it in some complacency. “All happy? Then let’s be off!”

  Hidden by cloud, the sun did little but brighten several shades of gray in the sky above them. Canker pressed the pace to a swift trot, and it took a while for Creed and Giffon to learn to stand up in the long stirrups instead of bouncing like sacks in the saddle. Gallico jogged alongside them tirelessly, his keen eyes missing nothing. Travelers on the road stood aside and let the little cavalcade pass in rapt astonishment, and oxen rolled wild eyes while their drovers stared.

  It was a wide, flat country of dark earth and green grass, with tall hedges whose bases had been thickened with laid courses of stone. Most of it seemed under pasture, though there was little livestock in the fields, and often they saw farmers plowing with their children and womenfolk serving as draft-animals. The people they passed were a good-looking, dark-haired folk, pale-faced and gray-eyed. Like Rowen, Rol realized with a start.

  “So these are the Imperials,” Giffon said. He had picked up the essentials of horse-riding more quickly than Elias and now had time to look about himself. His wide, pallid face was tired but happy. It was still an adventure to him. “They look ordinary enough to me.”

  “The eldest nation of men,” Canker told him. “That’s what they call themselves. That notion has set them at war with half the kingdoms on Umer at one time or another.”

  “And with us,” Elias Creed added. “I hope we’ve been sending the right side to their graves of late. Bionari all look the same to me.”

  They halted at a fine, stone-built inn for lunch, and though the fare was frugal and the beer watered, they admired the place for the grave courtesy of its proprietors and the beauty of their daughters. Many of the local people came and went as they sat there nursing their aching thighs, and Rol noticed several of them making the sign to avert evil behind Gallico’s back.

  Saddling up again, they pushed hard all afternoon, while above them the clouds knuckled in slate thunderheads and snow began to fall, fine and thin and stinging in their faces as the wind picked up. They had covered perhaps six leagues since dawn.

  “How long until Myconn?” Rol asked Canker.

  “From Arbion, Royal messengers with fresh horses at the posting stops have been known to do it in four days. But that’s a killing pace, even in time of peace. The road is not what it was, especially as one goes farther south. If we can make Gallitras in five days, I’ll be pleased. Forminon, over the Embrun River, is as far again, and Myconn itself is thirty leagues beyond the river.”

  “Between two and three weeks, then.”

  “Depending on how many enemy armies there are in between,” Canker said dryly.

  “Tell me, Canker, how did you come to get here? Last time I saw you, you were on your way to reclaim Ascari.” Rol was irritated with himself for asking; he felt like a callow youth begging stories off a veteran, but he had to know. It had been gnawing at him.

  The Thief-King did not answer at once. He slowed their pace to a brisk walk, the horses’ sides steaming, their breath a frosted cloud about their muzzles. The cobbles of the road had become flea-bitten with fine snow under them.

  “I sought Rowen out,” Canker said at last. “Ascari was lost to me, the Feathermen split, mercenaries brought in to restore order, the creatures on the Council dividing the city up like it was a cake. For almost two years I wandered the face of Umer like a vagabond. Going back to my roots, you might say. While you were sailing the seas, I was cutting throats in alleyways. Armidon, Cavaillon, Oronthir—I became useful to many powerful men, and moved on before they started to resent that usefulness.

  “There are guilds of Feathermen all over the world, but one cannot simply walk in among them and demand a place by the fire. It was hard graft. I relearned many old skills. Finally, I heard of strange happenings in Bionar, talk of the Lost Heir, rumbles of strife about the throne. When I found out that this pretender was a woman, a famed beauty who was nonetheless an accomplished killer, I made my way to the Imperial cities, and looked up my old colleague.”

  He smiled. “Once more, I made myself of use. I became Rowen’s knife in the dark—for as she grew in importance she could no longer undertake certain tasks herself. It took three years of intrigue and secret murder before she was ready to declare open war. And now we are in our third year of that war. We hold the east and south, Bar Asfal the north and west. We hold the mines, he the farms. Thus our troops are well armed, but hungry and dwindling in numbers, whilst he has the grain-fields and farmlands of Canossa and Palestrinon and Flamigrie with their big populations. His generals have been throwing lines of farm-boys into the mouths of our guns for over two years now, and the weapons we turn out from our manufactories have been cutting them down, campaign after campaign.”

  “Has every city you’ve taken gone the way of Arbion? Is that how you do it, Canker, blasting them all into submission?”

  “Yes, Rol. That is how we do it. A necessity of war. When Bar Asfal fled the capital, he managed to take the Treasury with him. His money buys what his armies cannot take. Now that Phidon has gone over to him, we are pushed back to the east of the Embrun River, and hold the towns along it in force; any attempt at a large-scale crossing would likely result in a massacre. But Myconn is outside the loop of the river in the south, and is more vulnerable. Asfal knows this. Raiding parties cross the river regularly to try to disrupt our supply lines, but the main assault will come on the capital.”

  “Then why is Rowen sending troops away from it?”

  Canker smiled. “Your sister is making a gamble, I think. For almost a year now, Bar Asfal has stayed largely out of sight, for fear of assassination. If he dies, it is all over—the war is won. Now as he gains in confidence he raises his head above the parapet again.
Rowen has drawn him out.”

  Four days passed, and as the party traveled farther south, the weather grew colder and the aspect of the land changed around them. On their left the Eastern Myconians reared up white and forbidding. Fifteen thousand feet high, they ran down the entire seaboard of Southeast Bionar without a pass or a cleft. Deemed impassable until they reached the latitude of the Goliad, they were one of the reasons Urbonetto, on their far side, had been able to declare its independence from Bionar in centuries past, and they contributed to the mystery of Ganesh Ka’s location.

  The travelers passed endless convoys of army wagons drawn by famished oxen and piled high with rations and ammunition. Broken versions of these vehicles littered the roadside, though they were little more than skeletons. Rol saw children with little hatchets chopping them up for firewood.

  The country was as rich as before, at least to one used to the ocher, dust-blown fields of the south, but there were scars across it; burnt and blasted villages silent as cemeteries in the newly fallen snow. Roofless farmsteads, abandoned inns, and where several roads came together in one spot the party rode over strange undulations in the ground, hollows and bumps and holes.

  “Shellfire,” Canker said briefly. “We fought our way up this road on our advance to the capital, and the scars remain.”

  The land began to rise in a wide plateau winnowed by a bitter blast off the mountains. The snow thickened, powdered and blowing like smoke across the road, filling every crevice in their clothing, clogging the ears and eyes and nostrils of their patient horses. They pulled their cloaks over their heads, their feet numbing in the stirrups, and plodded on.

  They rode on in the dark for as long as they could because the days were short, quick to finish and slow to begin. Sometimes nightfall would see them in the relative warmth of a roadside inn, and sometimes they would camp in a ruined house or under the bare limbs of a snow-bound wood. Winter became an adversary, an enemy to be held at bay by any shifts necessary.

  “How can you campaign at this time of year?” Elias Creed asked Canker one evening as they huddled about an inadequate fire, their horses crowded around them, caked white with snow.

  “It’s miserable, I know,” Canker said, and he grinned, black eyes glittering like those of a cocksure rodent. “It used to be that war stopped for harvest, and started again after the first spring sowing. One of the reasons we have made what progress we have in this struggle is the willingness to break those rules. Day and night now, winter and summer, the war goes on.”

  “Your fields are empty,” Gallico rumbled. “It seems to me that your war is eating the people of this country as it goes. Without sowing and harvest, your armies will starve.”

  “Yes, they will,” Canker admitted. “They have been starving this last year and more—but you would be surprised how little a man can subsist on. It cannot go on forever, of course, but there is a year or two left in them yet. Enough to see the thing to a close.”

  “I wonder they fight for you at all,” Giffon told the Thief-King. His wide-boned face was drained of color, and his eyelashes were frozen white. He spoke through the jump and quiver of clattering teeth.

  “The Bionari are a disciplined people; they do as their superiors say.”

  “More fool them,” Creed muttered.

  On the morning of the sixth day’s travel they woke to a white, windless world. They threw off their blankets, and with them a good half foot of snow which had fallen in the night. The air was cold and still and clear, the sky as blue as a cornflower. Giffon’s mount had died in the dark hours, and lay a white, contorted heap in the midst of its fellows. The boy knelt by the dead animal’s head and wiped snow from the eyes, scowling. The others straightened like old men, shuddering and beating life into their limbs and staring about themselves at the changed world, a blank desert in which all features and landmarks had disappeared and all sounds had been tamped down.

  Almost all. As they saw to the surviving horses, there came from the south a staccato rattle of crackling noise, punctuated by louder booms. It went on as they packed their gear and rubbed down their half-frozen animals and Giffon cut choice gobbets out of his own dead mount.

  “Gallitras,” Canker said. “The city is only a few miles away now; they must be fighting at the river. The Embrun curves east ahead of us in a great salient, and with this weather it sometimes freezes over.”

  Fireless and breakfastless, they mounted up, Gallico lifting Giffon onto his shoulders as easily as if the boy were a newborn. The road was still discernible between its low-hummocked hedges, and they plowed doggedly along it. In places the snow had drifted so that it was above the horses’ knees, and there was a brittle surface crust which soon bloodied the poor beasts’ legs.

  They saw no human being that morning, though there were crows aplenty perched black in the trees by the side of the road. The ground continued to rise ahead of them in a low, blunt-shouldered ridge, and from the other side the sounds of battle came and went. For long periods there would be only a few isolated shots, and then a fusillade would rattle out, like a tremendous cart-wheel rolling across gravel.

  When they finally crested the ridge around noon, they found themselves looking down into an immense, shallow valley. A sword-gray river curled out of the west and then ran north for many miles, before disappearing westward again. East of the river a city stood, neatly confined by walls. It covered perhaps eight or ten square miles, a darker blot on a searingly white world. Such was the flatness of the country below them that even from their relatively low eminence they could see for twenty leagues in the glass-clear air.

  West of the city a smaller settlement, a large village or small town, stood astride the river, the two halves of it connected by a pair of bridges. Thick ribands of smoke rose from this place, straight as spears in the still air, and both Rol and Gallico could make out formations of men in the streets and marching across the snow-bound fields around it. More columns were forging along the road from the city itself, and farther off on the western bank of the river there was what seemed to be a vast, tented camp overhung by a haze of woodsmoke. Everywhere across the snow-covered countryside, knots of men were running to and fro, those west of the river carrying the saffron and black fighting flag of Bionar, those in the east carrying banners of deep scarlet.

  “Gallitras,” Canker said again. He pointed. “There at the river is the town of Ruthe, and the Ruthe bridges.”

  “We seem to have stumbled upon a battle,” Gallico said.

  “Bar Asfal’s man in this region is Marshal Surion, a capable and intrepid commander. He’s trying to take the crossing.”

  Now, faint over the still air, there came the hoarse, faraway roar of men in the extremity of close combat, a vast crowd of them. They teemed on both banks of the river and seemed irresistibly drawn by the lure of the two stone bridges. These were crammed with struggling mobs of tiny figures, overhung by smoke and battle-flags. Volley-fire ripped out in a crackling line from the riverbanks, and powder-smoke rose up like a fog to drift in limp skeins across the water.

  “It must be very like hell down there,” Giffon said, awestruck.

  “There is no hell,” Canker said briskly. “There is only the here and now. Gentlemen, let us go down. Time to join the war.”

  Nine

  THE EMBRUN RIVER

  THE SENSATIONS OF BATTLE OPENED UP AROUND THEM. First came the smell: the drifting fetor of gun-smoke. It seemed to have soaked into the very snow, catching at the back of the throat and making the eyes smart and water as it congealed closer to the river. Then the noise. Isolated shots seemed sharper to the ear, and then they grew more frequent, overlapping, rolling through the air until they were a continuous tumult which hammered at the senses. And below that, the terrible, full-throated roar of the men fighting on the bridges, spiked now and again with high shrieks that carried over all.

  The horses bucked and fought their bits. Creed was thrown just as the party entered the northernmost streets of Ruth
e, while Rol’s and Canker’s mounts danced under them, white-eyed and blowing foam. They dismounted and hobbled the terrified creatures in the ruins of a house, then continued on foot. Squads of men in crudely made scarlet livery ran past them toward the river and a steady stream of broken bodies was dragged or stretchered in the opposite direction. The streets were littered with shattered roof-tiles, clumps of burning thatch, and shoals of broken brick. Smoke hung low in motionless clouds, and soldiers ran in and out of it like actors on the stage.

  Rol bent close to Canker’s ear and shouted over the mad cacophony that now beat upon them, “What are you doing?”

  “I must see the bridges, talk to these men’s commander. This is no raid—it’s a major assault.”

  Rol felt like bidding him good luck and turning around, but something kept him at Canker’s side. Curiosity, perhaps, and the determination to appear as unmoved by this mayhem as Canker seemed to be. He had known warfare of a sort before, on the decks of ships, but the epic confusion, the scale of this thing confronting him, was something else entirely. How could any commander impose order on such chaos?

  The town of Ruthe was a town no more; it was a mere husk of smashed stone and burning timber within which thousands of men were struggling to kill their fellows while remaining alive themselves. In the choked, smoke-filled streets it seemed impossible that Canker should be able to find his way, but the Thief-King led his doubtful companions unerringly toward the river, the epicenter of the storm that shook the air about them.

  Here and there they passed decimated companies re-forming in the shelter of the ruins, their officers haranguing them in barely heard shrieks. In less choked stretches of roadway gunners were manhandling artillery pieces yard by fearsome yard toward the river. Ambulance-wagons heaped high with the maimed and the dying were drawn eastward by groups of exhausted men. Horses lay dead in harness, or kicked and whinnied in the slick ropes of their own entrails. Parts of bodies were plastered across walls or ground under the boots of advancing battalions. Blood, smoke, and stone stirred in a vast cauldron and put to the boil.