by Paul Kearney
They camped that night in the lee of a large pine wood. The horses and mules were hobbled on its edge and the men were able to trudge inside and light their first campfires in two days, the flames hidden by the thick depths of the trees. Eight thousand men required a large campsite, some twelve acres or more, but the wood was able to accommodate them all with ease.
Once the fires were lit, rations handed out and the sentries posted, Formio and four sombre Fimbrians brought the Merduk prisoners to Corfe’s fire. The Merduks were shoved into line with the dark trees towering around them like watchful giants. All about them, the quiet talk and rustling of men setting out their bedrolls ceased, and hundreds of Corfe’s troopers edged closer to listen. Andruw was there, and Ranafast and Marsch and Ebro—all the senior officers of the army. They had not been summoned, but Corfe could not turn them away. He realised suddenly that if it came down to it, he trusted the discipline of his own Cathedrallers and the Fimbrians more than he did that of his fellow countrymen. This night they were not Torunnan professional soldiers, but angry, outraged men who needed something to vent their rage upon. He wondered, if it came to it, whether he would be able to stop them degenerating into some kind of lynch mob.
He walked up and down the line of prisoners in silence. Some met his eyes, some stared at the ground. Yes, Marsch had been right: at least four of them had the fair skin and blue eyes of westerners. They were no doubt part of the Minhraib of Ostrabar, the peasant levy. Ostrabar had once been Ostiber, a Ramusian kingdom. The grandfathers of these soldiers had fought the Merduks as Corfe’s Torunnans were fighting them now, but these men had been born subjects of the Sultan, worshippers of the Prophet, their Ramusian heritage forgotten. Or almost forgotten.
“Who amongst you speaks Normannic?” Corfe snapped.
A short man raised his head. “I do, your honour. Felipio of Artakhan.”
Felipio—even the name was Ramusian. Corfe tried to stop his own anger and hatred from clouding his thinking. He fought to keep his voice reasonable.
“Very well, Felipio. The name of your regiment, if you please, and your mission here in the north-west of my country.”
Felipio licked dry lips, looking around at the hate-filled faces which surrounded him. “We are from the sixty-eighth regiment of pistoleers, your honour,” he said. “We were infantry, part of the levy before the fall of the dyke. Then they gave us horses and matchlocks and sent us out to scout to the north up to the Torrin Gap.”
“Scouting, is it?” a voice snarled from the blackness under the trees, and there was a general murmur.
“Be silent!” Corfe cried. “By God, you men will hold your tongues this night. Colonel Cear-Adurhal, you will take ten men and secure this area from further interruption. This is not a God-damned court-martial, nor yet a debating chamber.”
Andruw did as he was ordered without a word. In minutes he had armed men, swords drawn, stationed about the prisoners.
“Go on, Felipio,” Corfe said.
The prisoner studied his feet and continued in a mumble. “There is not much more to tell, your honour. Our Sub-hadar, Shahr Artap, he commanded the regiment, gave us a speech telling us that this was Merduk country now, and we were to do as we pleased . . .” Sweat broke out on Felipio’s forehead and rolled down his face in shining beads of stress and terror.
“Go on,” Corfe repeated.
“Please your honour, I can’t—”
Andruw stepped forward out of nowhere and smashed the man across the face with a mailed fist, bursting open his nose like a plum and ripping the flesh from one cheekbone.
“You will obey the General’s orders,” he said, his voice an alien growl which Corfe could scarcely recognise.
“That’s enough, Andruw. Step back.”
Andruw looked at him. There were tears flaming in his eyes. “Yes sir,” he said, and retreated into the shadows.
Another murmuring from the surrounding men. The night air crackled with suppressed violence. The firelight revealed a wall of faces which had gathered around despite Corfe’s orders. Naked steel gleamed out of the dark. Corfe met Formio’s eyes, and held the Fimbrian’s gaze for a few seconds. Formio nodded fractionally and walked away into the trees.
“On your feet, Felipio.”
The squat Merduk rose unsteadily, his face a swollen, scarlet mess through which bone gleamed. One eye was already closed.
“How far north did your regiment go—clear up to the gap?”
Felipio nodded drunkenly.
“Are there any other Merduk forces up there? Is it true your people are building forts?”
Felipio did not answer. He seemed half conscious. Corfe watched him for a moment, then moved down the line of prisoners to the next fair-skinned one.
“Your name.” This one was little more than a boy. He had pissed in his pants and his face was streaked with tears and snot. Not too young to rape, though. Corfe seized him by the hair and drew him upright.
“Name.”
“Don’t kill me, please don’t kill me. They made me do it. They took me off the farm. I have a wife at home—” He started sobbing. Corfe reined in an urge to strike him, to let loose his own fury and hatred and beat his stupid young face into a bloody morass of flesh and broken bone. He lowered his voice and whispered in the blubbering boy’s ear.
“Talk to me, or I will hand you over to them.” And he gestured to the press of silent men.
“There are other regiments up north,” the boy bleated. “Four or five of them. They are building a big camp, walls and ditches. Another big army is coming north . . . they are going to—to the monkish place by the shores of the sea. That’s all I know, I swear it!”
Corfe released him and he sagged, hiccuping and crying. So the Merduks were going to launch an expedition against Charibon, and they were fortifying the gap. Something worth knowing, at last. He turned away, deep in thought. As he did a large group of men advanced out of the shadows, the wall of faces dissolving into a crowd which surged forward.
“We’ll take care of them from here, General.”
“Get back in ranks!” His bellow made them pause, but one stepped forward and shook his head. “General, we’d follow you to hell and back, but a man has his limits. Some of us have lost families and homes to these animals. You have to leave the scum to us.”
At once another knot of figures appeared, with Formio at their head. Sable-clad Fimbrians with their swords drawn. Cimbric tribesmen in their scarlet armour. They positioned themselves with swift efficiency about Corfe and the Merduks as though they were a bodyguard. Formio and Marsch stood at Corfe’s shoulders.
“The General gave you an order,” Formio said evenly. “Your job is to obey. You are soldiers, not a mob of civilians.”
The two bands of armed men faced each other squarely for several moments. Corfe could not speak. If they began to fight one another he knew that the army was doomed, irrevocably split between Fimbrian and Torunnan and tribesman. His authority over them hung by a straw.
“All right, lads,” Andruw said breezily, materialising like a ghost from the surrounding trees. “That’s enough. If we start into them, then we’re no better than they are. They’re criminals, no more. And besides, are you willing to see the day when a Torunnan officer is obeyed by Fimbrians and mountain savages and not by his own countrymen? Where’s your pride? Varian—I know you—I saw you on the battlements at the dyke. You did your duty then. Do it now. Do as the General says, lads. Back to your bivouacs.”
The Torunnans shifted their feet, looking both embarrassed and sullen. Corfe moved forward to speak to their ringleader, Varian. Thank God Andruw had remembered his name.
“I too lost a home and family, Varian,” he said quietly. “All of us here have suffered, in one way or another.”
Varian’s eyes were hot blazes of grief. “I had a wife,” he croaked, hardly audible. “I had a daughter.”
Corfe gripped his shoulder. “Don’t do anything that would offend their memory.�
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The trooper coughed and wiped his eyes roughly. “Yes, sir. I’m sorry. We’re bloody fools, all of us.”
“So are all men, Varian. But we were husbands and fathers and brothers once. Save the hatred for a battlefield. These animals are not worthy of it. Now go and get some sleep.”
Corfe raised his voice. “All of you, back to your lines. There is nothing more to do here, nothing more to see.”
Reluctantly, the throng broke up and began dispersing. Corfe felt the relief wash over him in a tepid wave as they obeyed him. They were still his to command, thanks to Formio and Andruw. They were still an army, and not a mob.
I N the middle watch of the night he did the rounds of the camp as he always did, exchanging a few words with the sentries, looking in on the horses. He took his own mount, an equable bay gelding, from the horse-lines and rode it bare-back out of the wood and up to the summit of a small knoll which lay to the east of the camp. Another horseman was there ahead of him, outlined against the stars. Andruw, staring out upon a sleeping Torunna. Corfe reined in beside him, and they sat their horses in silence, watching.
On the vast dark expanse of the night-bound earth they could see distant lights, throbbing like glow-worms. Even as Corfe watched, another sprang up out on the edge of the horizon.
“They’re burning the towns along the Searil,” Andruw said.
Corfe studied the distant flames and wondered what scenes of horror and carnage they signified. He remembered Aekir’s fall, the panic of the crowds, the inferno of the packed streets, and wiped his face with one hand.
“I’m sorry I lost my head back there for a time,” Andruw said tonelessly. “It won’t happen again.” And the anger and despair ate through the numbness in his voice as he spoke again. “God’s blood, Corfe, will it ever end? Why do they do these things? What kind of people are they?”
“I don’t know, Andruw, I truly don’t. We’ve been fighting these folk for generations, and still we know nothing about them. And they know as little about us, I suspect. Two peoples who have never even tried to understand one another, but who are simply intent on wiping each other out.”
“I’ve heard that in the west, in Gabrion and Hebrion, the Sea-Merduks trade and take ship with Ramusian captains as though there were no barriers between them. They sail ships together and start businesses in partnership with each other. Why is it so different here?”
“Because this is the frontier, Andruw. This is where the wheel meets the road.
“I stood ceremonial guard in Aekir once, at a dinner John Mogen was giving to his captains before the siege. I think that if anyone had some understanding of the Merduks, he did. I think he even admired them. He said that men must always move towards the sunset. They follow it as surely as swallows flit south in wintertime.
“Originally the Merduks were chieftains of the steppes beyond the Jafrar, but they followed the sun and crossed the mountains, and were halted by the walls and pikes of the Fimbrians. The Fimbrians contained them: we cannot. That is the simple truth. If we are not to fight one another into annihilation, then one day we shall have to broker a peace and make a compromise with them. Either that, or we will be swept into the mountains and end our days the leaders of roving homeless tribesmen, like Marsch and his people.”
“I must talk to Marsch. That mountain savage bit . . . I have to tell him—”
“He knows, Andruw. He knows.”
Andruw nodded. “I suppose so.” He seemed to be having trouble finding the words he wanted. Corfe could sense the struggle in him as he sat his horse and picked at its mane.
“They shamed us back there, Formio and Marsch and their men. There they were, foreigners and mercenaries, and they stood by you while your own people were almost ready to push you out of the way. Those men were at the dyke with us—they saw us there. A few even served under you in the barbican. There’s no talk around their campfires tonight. They have failed you—and themselves.”
“No,” Corfe said quickly. “They are just men who have been pushed too far. I think none the worse of them for it. And this army is not made up of Fimbrians and Torunnans and the tribesmen. Not any more. They’re my men now, every one of them. They’ve fought together and they’ve died together. There is no need to talk of shame, not to me.”
Andruw grimaced. “Maybe . . . You know, Corfe, I was ready to slit the throats of those prisoners. I would have done it without a qualm and slept like a baby afterwards. I never really hated before, not truly. In a way it was some huge kind of game. But now this—this is different. The refugees from Aekir, they were just faces, but these hills . . . I skylarked in them when I was a boy. The people up here are my own people, not just because they are Torunnan—that’s a name—but because I know how they live and where. Varian hasn’t seen his wife and child in almost a year, and he doesn’t know if they’re alive or dead. And there are many more like him throughout the troops that came from the dyke. They sent their families out of the fortress at the start, back here to the north, or to the towns around Torunn. They thought the war would never come this far. Well, they were wrong. We all were.”
“Yes,” Corfe said, “we were.”
“Are we doomed, do you think? Madmen fighting the inevitable?”
“I don’t know. I don’t care either, Andruw. All I know is how to fight. It’s all I’ve ever known. Perhaps one day it will be possible to come to some kind of terms with the Merduks. I hope so, for the sake of Varian and his family and thousands like them. If it does not prove so, however, I will fight the bastards until the day I die, and then my ghost will plague their dreams.”
Andruw laughed, and Corfe realised how much he had missed that sound of late.
“I’ll just bet it will. Merduk mothers will frighten children yet unborn with tales of the terrible Corfe and his red-clad fiends.”
“I hope so,” Corfe smiled.
“You think that snot-nosed boy was telling the truth about the Merduks marching on Charibon?”
“Possibly. It could be misinformation, but I doubt it. No, I think it’s time the army went hunting. The quickest road to the gap from Ormann Dyke lies two days’ march east of here. Tomorrow that’s where we’re going, with the Cathedrallers out in front under you and Marsch.”
“Any guesses on the size of the army we’re looking for?”
“Small enough for us to take on, I should think. The Sultan still believes the Torunnan military to be penned up in Torunn, licking their wounds, and Charibon has never been well defended. We may be outnumbered, but not by much, I hope.”
“We can’t stay out too long. We carry only enough rations for another three weeks.”
“We’ll go on half rations if we have to. I will not allow them to send an army through the gap. I’ve no more love for the Ravens of Charibon than the next man, but I’m damned if I’ll let the Merduks waltz over Normannia like they owned it already. Besides, I have this feeling, Andruw. I think the enemy is slowing down. We’ve blunted their edge. If they find they have to fight for every yard of Torunnan soil, then they may end up content with less of it.”
“An open battle will do the men good.”
“This is war we’re talking about, Andruw. A battle that will kill and maim great numbers of the men.”
“You know what I mean, Corfe. They need to taste blood again. Hell, so do I.”
“All right, I take your point.” Corfe turned his horse around with a nudge of his knee. “Time to get some sleep.”
“I think I’ll stay here and think a while,” Andruw said.
“Don’t think too much, Andruw. It doesn’t do any good. Believe me, I know.” And Corfe kicked his mount into a canter, leaving Andruw to stare after him.
A LBREC’S cell was sparse and cold, but not unbearably so. To a monk who had suffered through a Ramusian novitiate it seemed perfectly adequate. He had a bed with a straw pallet which was surprisingly free of vermin, a small table and rickety chair and even a stub of candle and a tinderbox. T
here was one small window, heavily barred and set so high up in the wall that he had no chance of ever seeing out of it, but at least it provided a modicum of light.
He shared his cell with sundry spiders and an emaciated rat whose hunger had made it desperate. It had nibbled at Albrec’s ears in the first nights he had been here, but now he knew to set aside for it some morsel of the food which was shoved through a slot in the door every day, and it had come to await the approaching steps of the turnkey more eagerly than he. The food was not appetising—black bread and old cheese and sometimes a bowl of cold soup which had lumps of gristle bobbing in it—but Albrec had never been much of an epicure. Besides, he had much to occupy his mind.
Every so often his solitary reveries were interrupted by a summons from the Sultan, and he would be hauled out of the cell, to the grief and bewilderment of the rat, and taken to the spacious chambers within which Aurungzeb had set up his household. The eunuchs would fetter him ceremoniously—more for effect than anything else, he thought—and he would stand in a discreet corner awaiting the pleasure of the Sultan. Sometimes he was left forgotten for hours, and was able to watch with avid fascination the workings of the Merduk court. Sometimes Aurungzeb was dining with senior army officers, or venerable mullahs, and Albrec would be called upon to debate with them and expound his theory on the common origin of the Saint and the Prophet. The Sultan, it seemed, liked to shock his guests with the little infidel. Not only were Albrec’s words, often translated by the western concubine, Heria, inflammatory and blasphemous, but his appearance was agreeably bizarre. He was a court jester, but he knew that his words and theories shook some of the men who listened to them. Several of the mullahs had demanded he be executed at once, but others had argued with him as one might with a learnt adversary—a spectacle that Aurungzeb seemed to find hugely entertaining.