This Forsaken Earth

by Paul Kearney

  “I don’t know, sir. Many. More than I have ever counted.”

  “Is it all in one block?”

  “The main part is, sir. It’s like a tower, hex-shaped. It rises high over the river, just by the Palace Bridge.”

  “And who built it? How old is it?”

  But the man clamped his mouth shut at a glare from his companion. After that they strode along in not-so-companionable silence, except for grunts from the soldiers to indicate the way. Rol’s head began to swim again, and he had to halt and be sick in the pot of some tall standing plant. Not much left to come up but bile. He fingered the black bump on the side of his head and staggered on.

  Lower down, the stonework was more massive, and obviously older. Whereas the upper levels had been built for the pleasures of the nobility, it seemed that these parts were more akin to a fortress. And they had seen recent fighting. Rol could see blackened spots in the walls where shells had impacted, holes with the dull gray fragments of lead bullets still embedded. He guessed they dated from Rowen’s seizure of the palace from its former owner. There were more men in the livery of the guard here also, dour-faced bastards for the most part; they reminded him somehow of Miriam’s musketeers, obviously wedded to their duty and missing a sense of humor.

  “Here,” his own particular dour-faced bastard said, pointing to tall double-doors of black bronze-bound oak. These, too, were pitted with bullet-holes, but the evidence of battle seemed merely to make them seem more indestructible. The wood of their making reminded Rol of the Revenant’s hull, and he realized that they were not oak, after all, but black Kassic teak, the same as that which comprised his ship’s timbers. He patted the doors affectionately as he passed through them. It was like the glimpse of an old friend in a strange place.

  The legendary arrogance of the Bionari was reflected in their architecture. They were drawn to high, vaulted ceilings and broad pillars, platforms and daises that sought to embody authority in the relative heights of men’s eyes. Thus it was that Rol found Gideon Mirkady staring down at him from behind a long black desk of teak which looked almost as old as the door outside. This was set on a four-foot dais, and coming and going from its black height were dozens of guardsmen with messages and the like. Rol wondered how many were here to stride self-importantly about the palace, and how many were out in the snow and shrapnel of the city defenses, facing Bar Asfal’s army.

  Mirkady was a good-looking fellow with economically padded bones and black ringleted hair which fell past his collar. He stared down at Rol and raised one eyebrow with just the right mixture of boredom and disdain.

  “We meet again. Cortishane, is it not? I trust your quarters are adequate.”

  “You have something of mine,” Rol said, and in the corners of the grand lobby about the dais, guardsmen paused discreetly to listen.

  “What might that be?”

  “A sword. I’ll have it back, thank you.”

  Mirkady blinked. With a flash of his old training, Rol realized that he was weighing how far he could go. This man had been Rowen’s lover, and obviously was besotted by her. The arrival of a brother, a rival for her affections and her patronage, had goaded him into a single act of viciousness, and he was wondering if he had already overplayed his hand.

  “By all means,” Mirkady said frostily. “A mere oversight. It should have been sent on to your quarters.” He leaned aside and spoke to a guardsman standing next to him with a pregnant bundle of papers. The man nodded, hurried off.

  Rol stepped up to the dais; he did not appreciate being looked down on by a man like Mirkady. “How goes the siege?” he asked.

  “As well as can be expected.”

  “I’d have thought these popinjays of yours would be better employed out on the walls than running about in here conveying paperwork.”

  Mirkady flushed, but give him credit, he managed a civil smile through the hatred in his eyes.

  “We all do stints on the walls, but the business of a great city must go on, even in times such as these.”

  Rol looked around the imposing chamber. It was hung with meaningless heraldic tapestries and antique weapons. The place was unheated, and cold as a tomb. The only windows were louvered openings high up on one wall, and through their slits he could see the dark blue of a winter’s afternoon nosing down into dusk. Oil lamps burned on the dais and in sockets on the walls, but by their smell, they were fueled more by tallow than anything else. Perhaps the siege was having an effect, after all.

  “How far is it to the walls from here?”

  “Just under a league. You’re quite safe, I assure you.” Rol and Gideon smiled at each other. A moment of complete understanding, almost a kind of respect. Here, Rol knew, was a man he would likely one day have to kill. He did not even question why.

  The guardsman came back with Fleam, still in her scabbard. He handed the scimitar to Rol and wiped his hands down his breeches after, as though he had been touching something unclean. Some tense tightness about Rol’s chest loosened as he buckled the weapon at his waist. The sword felt warm against his thigh, and he patted it as a man might the head of a faithful hound. Mirkady’s eyes blazed up in brief, unalloyed interest.

  “That’s a fine weapon.”

  Rol did not reply, but turned and stepped down from the dais, walking away. He could almost smell the anger he left in his wake, and it made him smile.

  Fourteen

  PICTURES IN THE DARK

  THE QUARTERS ASSIGNED TO GALLICO, CREED, AND GIFFON looked to have been those of palace servants at one time. They were warm enough, situated next to the kitchens, but lightless, poky places. The trio hardly cared, being content to have eaten their fill along with the kitchen-staff, regale goggle-eyed maids with tall tales of derring-do, and then stretch out like logs to sleep without dream or fear of cockcrow. When Rol found them, they were back at the long refectory table in the kitchen; the immense cooking hearths to their rear were banked down to sulking coals, and they were supping on heavily watered, steaming oatmeal leavened with salt and a little barley spirit. Around them the night shift was turning up for duty, yawning and stretching and stirring the fires and consulting lists.

  Rol stood in the doorway of the place, felt the welcome heat of it soak into his bones, and sucked in the smells, savoring them. This beat any palace. In places such as this, he felt he could almost be himself, and leave behind the sneering little doppelganger of Michal Psellos, which sat on his shoulder ever more often these days.

  “If you two are going to stay here, then you’d best sit down and loosen those tight collars,” Rol told his escorts. Sweat was trickling down their faces already. One shrugged, and they did as he suggested. They were served bowls of food without comment, and tucked in with a will, supping the watery porridge with horn spoons.

  Looking around at the growing bustle of the kitchens, the low, buttressed ceilings, the hanging hams and onion-strings, Rol wondered that his friends had been accommodated down here, treated like folk of a lower order than himself, but he decided not to dwell on it.

  “Oatmeal gruel, is that all we have for supper?” he asked Gallico. The halftroll sat cross-legged on the floor but his eyes were still on a level with the maids’. They seemed unabashed by his appearance and flirted outrageously with Creed and Giffon as they prepared food around them; more results of the siege perhaps. Creed was grinning but Giffon had his nose almost in his gruel, and his ears were scarlet.

  “We had a decent feed earlier, but most of the good stuff goes upstairs, it seems,” Gallico told him, wiping his mouth. “Almost four months they’ve been blockaded, but the cooks tell me that a great deal of foodstuff still makes its way in through the hills on pack-mules by night. Merchants from the west pay Bar Asfal’s soldiers to look the other way, and are recompensed by the great and the good here in Myconn, in gold, silver, family heirlooms, whatever they’ll take. You can pay a silver minim for a chicken, they tell me. The poor, they live on lentils and oatmeal and horsemeat. They’ll be s
kinning cats soon.”

  “We’ve eaten worse,” Rol said. Like most mariners, he was fairly indifferent to what he put in his mouth as long as it did not poison him. He joined his shipmates and the two guardsmen at the table and leaned his elbows on the smooth wood. A knot of the kitchen staff gathered in the corner and whispered and peered at him, and whispered again. He still felt too sick to eat, and pushed away the steaming bowl that was set down in front of him, but smiled at the girl who set it there. She looked like a rabbit made to wait on a fox. Rol sighed, and rubbed his face with the palms of his hands, squeezing bursting patterns of amorphous light behind his eyelids. The heat of the long room was soporific, tempting him to lay his head down on the table.

  “Still some sleep to catch up on, I see,” the voice said, and he jerked open his eyes to see Rowen seated in front of him. The two guardsmen had risen to their feet in wooden alarm, but all the rest of the folk in the kitchen, Rol’s friends included, seemed wholly unfazed.

  Rowen took Rol’s untested porridge and began to eat it with every appearance of appetite. She jerked her head at the guardsmen. “Off you go, back to Mirkady. Cortishane has no further need of you.” The men bowed deep and left, tugging close their loosened collars and smoothing down their tunics as they went. Rowen went on eating her porridge composedly. She was dressed in dun-colored peasant clothes, and her long hair hung free down her back, a raven mane that shone in the firelight. A slim throwing knife hung from her waist in a wooden scabbard. She looked very young.

  Rol leaned back on his long bench. Creed glanced at him. “What’s up—you seen a ghost?”

  “Elias, this lady here—”

  “She served us our food last night, after we got in,” Creed interrupted. He winked at Rowen. “A handsome lass. But girl, you could do with a little more meat on your bones.”

  “I’ll bear that in mind,” Rowen said dryly.

  “Do you often slum it down here with the lower orders?” Rol asked her.

  “I like it here,” she said. “The staff are used to seeing me. I like the heat, the smell. I always did like kitchens. You should know that, Rol.”

  “I remember.”

  “What’s this?” Gallico said archly. “You know this wench, Rol—what is she, an old flame?”

  “In a manner of speaking.” A smile went between their eyes as Rol and Rowen stared at each other. She set her hand on the tabletop, and he placed his own down next to it so that their fingers touched. A moment, no more.

  “This is Rowen Bar Hethrun, Gallico. Some call her Queen of Bionar.”

  “And I’m the Queen of the May. Don’t let him mock you, lass.”

  “I won’t,” Rowen said. “And if he lacks the manners of his friends, I will not hold it against him. Some folk are not so well brought up as others.”

  “Aye.” Gallico grinned. “You must watch this one. He’ll have you on your back given half a chance, and then walk away afterward with nothing more than a wink and a fare-thee-well.”

  “See? Now you’ve been warned,” Rol told Rowen.

  “I will keep it in mind,” she said. She stood up, and seemed to hesitate a second. Then, leaning over the table, she took Rol’s face in her cold hands and kissed him, a feather touch, no more. “I must go. They want me upstairs.”

  Giffon was staring at her in open adoration, porridge dripping from his forgotten spoon. Rol knew now why she had billeted his friends down here. It was a place she felt comfortable.

  “They will want to talk to you later,” she said. The weariness was slipping back into her face now.

  “Who?”

  “The nobles. My officers. I’m sending couriers to Canker through the hills. In two days, we make our move.”

  Rol’s momentary happiness was snuffed out. He wanted her to stay there in the busy warmth of the kitchens, and exchange banter with his friends, and be an ordinary woman who touched his fingers with her own.

  “Until later, then.”

  “I see you got your sword back,” Rowen said, and with that she left. No fanfare, no roll of drums. Just another serving-maid.

  Gallico was sucking his teeth thoughtfully. “She was, wasn’t she?”

  “Yes, Gallico, she was. Elias, you just told the Queen of Bionar she needs fattening up.”

  Creed picked soggy oatmeal out of his beard. “Well, she does.”

  It was late, but Abel Harkenn was an insistent man, and Rol was too tired to argue with his deeply held conviction that a fellow invited to the Queen’s Council Chamber must look the part. So when the breathless page-boy came to fetch him, he found a tall man with pale eyes and a neatly trimmed beard, dressed in sable doublet and hose and bearing a light scimitar on a baldric of black leather. Buckled halfboots completed the attire. The clothes were a little musty from long storage, but the doublet had panels of dyed leather stitched in the shoulders and back, which supported Rol’s torso agreeably as he made his way through the bewildering passageways and corridors of the Bar Madivar Palace, steadily gaining height by way of staircase after staircase, until he stood before towering teak double-doors. Two guardsmen with silver-pointed halberds asked him his name and his business. The Queen of the May, he almost answered, here to steal away a serving-maid. But he took his tongue out of his cheek and told them.

  He had a couple of copper minims for the page-boy, who scampered off brim-full of gossip and bursting to spread it, and the doors opened before him on soundless hinges, though they must have weighed a half ton apiece.

  Imperial Bionar, eldest of the Kingdoms of Men. Well, here it was, in all the pomp and finery it could muster.

  Tall windows, looking out onto darkness. Some were broken and boarded up, but enough remained to give a sense of the night looming beyond the glass. The snow was falling again, in the blue dark, and down at the walls men would still be trying to kill one another across a shell-holed purgatory of beaten ground.

  In here, the high ceiling was corniced and painted and hung with three tremendous chandeliers, fifty candles burning in each and reflecting off an infinity of faceted crystal. Three large fireplaces covered the length of the room. The fragrant tang of the flames within them caught at Rol’s memory. Peat, like that he had once burned in a cottage on Dennifrey. He had not known there were peat-bogs around Myconn.

  There was a long table, as long as the one he had sat at in the kitchens, but finer, and instead of benches there were twoscore gilt chairs with scarlet leather upholstery and a coat of arms painted on the back of every one. More candles, set at random in a forest of candelabras, and sheaves of paper, light-catching decanters, brass dividers, maps, inkwells of cut glass with silver rims, quills, and the knives for trimming them. The stuff of committees, of decision-making, of discussion. He wondered how much of it all was really necessary.

  The nobility of Bionar. Some two dozen men sat the length of the table, their eyes turning toward him as he entered. Rowen sat at the head. The serving-maid had disappeared, and in her place there was a severely elegant woman all in black, no ornament save a silver fillet in her hair. He knew now the reason for his new wardrobe; it matched Rowen’s perfectly. They were an exercise in sable.

  “Beside me, Rol,” she said, and patted the chair to her left. Rol took his seat, and found Gideon Mirkady’s handsome face opposite him. The Guard commander smiled and inclined his head slightly. Rol did likewise. He felt he had just walked onstage, and the curtain had risen.

  “Continue, gentlemen,” Rowen said. “Introductions can wait. In any case, you all know this man is my brother, Rol Cortishane. Lord Brage, you had the table.”

  A florid-faced man with a heavy nose, Lord Brage looked like a soldier who had fallen in love with the bottle. His stare outdid courtesy. For a naked moment, Rol sat at the end of the endless table, and the great men of this old, broken empire feasted the greed of their eyes upon him without shame.

  Collecting himself, Brage peered at a leaf of paper before him, eyes watering.

  “Yes, Majesty. To
continue, I must report that we lost thirty-eight men today, fourteen of those killed and only half a dozen of the remainder ever likely to fight again. That leaves our current strength at just over six and a half thousand, all told.” He looked up the table at Rowen. “The dysentery that plagued the sections around the Palestrinon Gate has been contained, for now. We filled in two wells, which seems to have done the trick.”

  “Very good, my lord. Gideon, how many of the garrison would you recommend we could take out without exposing the city completely?”

  Mirkady’s face was bleak. “We can barely maintain a defense of the circuit as it is, Majesty.” His hand flapped helplessly on the table. “If we left a bare minimum—a dangerous minimum—to man the barbicans and, say, one in four of the wall-guns, then we could sortie with some four and a half to five thousand.”

  The table murmured at this. Rowen’s face was unmoved. Her steel-gray eyes looked them up and down, and the murmuring ceased instantly.

  “Very good. We shall take out five thousand. Cavalry?”

  “Two hundred at most, Majesty. We’ve lost heavily in horses these last months.”

  “Ammunition?”

  “No shortage of that, or arquebuses either. We’ll outfit every man of the sortie with half armor and fifty rounds.”

  “Field artillery?”

  “Plenty of demi-culverins, twelve-pounders, but nothing to haul them with, Majesty. The wall-guns will support us.”