by Paul Kearney
Hold your new position. Do not engage the enemy under any circumstances. Infantry will be with you tonight. We will assault in the morning.
Corfe Cear-Inaf
Commander-in-Chief
There. It gave Corfe a sick feeling in his stomach to hand the return despatch to the courier, and as the man set off again he almost thought better of it and recalled him. But it was too late. The tribesman was already a receding speck soon lost to view. It was done. He had just consigned the citizens of Berrona to a night of hell.
“W HAT are we to do with the prisoners?” Ranafast asked as the endless column of trudging men filed past.
The infantry had come up, and after the briefest of rests was on the move again. The sun was already westering, and they still had a long way to go to effect the rendezvous with Andruw and the Cathedrallers. But not a single man had dropped out, Ranafast and Formio had informed Corfe. The news that they were about to pitch into the Merduk raiders had filled the troops with fresh energy, and they stepped out with a will.
“Let them go,” Corfe said. “They’re nothing but a damned nuisance.”
Ranafast stared at him, dark eyes glittering over a hawk nose and an iron-grey beard which looked as though it had been filed to a point.
“I can have the men take care of them,” he said.
“No. Just set them free. But I want to talk to them first.”
“Sir, I have to protest—”
“I won’t make the men into murderers, Ranafast. We start slaughtering prisoners out of hand, and we’re no better than they are. The men will have plenty of chances to kill themselves a Merduk tomorrow, in open battle. Now have the prisoners sent to me.”
“I hope you know what you’re doing, General,” Ranafast said.
The captives were a miserable looking bunch, guarded by a couple of Fimbrians who regarded their charges with detached contempt. They cowered before Corfe as though he were their executioner. Part of him was longing to order their deaths. He held no illusions about what they had been doing up here in the north, but at the same time he was thinking of the peasant army he had slaughtered down at Staed. Narfintyr’s tenants, small farmers forced to take up arms for a lord they barely knew and who regarded them as expendable chattel. It had sickened Corfe, the slaughter of such poor ignorant wretches, and these Merduks were the same. They had been conscripted into the Sultan’s army, leaving families and farms behind. Some of them did not even possess Merduk blood. He would kill men like these in their nameless thousands in the days and months to come, but that was the unavoidable consequence of war. He would not stain his conscience with their cold-blooded murder. He had enough blood on his hands already.
“You are free to go,” he told them. “On the condition that you do not rejoin the Merduk army, but instead try to find your way home to your families. I know you did not join this war by choice, but because you were forced to. So be on your way in peace.”
The men gaped, then looked at one another, jabbering in Merduk and Normannic. They were incredulous, too astonished to be happy. Some reached out to touch his stirruped feet and he backed his horse away from them.
“Go now. And don’t come back to Torunna ever again. If you do, I promise that you will die here.”
“Thank you, your honour!” the man Corfe recognised as the battered Felipio shouted out. Then the Merduks broke away, and as a group began running towards the long shadows of the Thurian Mountains in the north, as if trying to get away before Corfe changed his mind. The marching Torunnans watched them go, some of them spitting in disgust at the sight, but not a man protested.
Corfe turned to Ranafast, who still sat his horse nearby.
“Am I a bloody fool, Ranafast? Am I going soft?”
The veteran smiled. “Maybe, lad. Maybe you are just becoming something of a politician. You know damn well those bastards are going to try and rejoin their comrades—they’ve nowhere else to go. But if they make it, the news that the Torunnans treat their prisoners well will spread like a wildfire in high summer. If the Merduk levy thinks it will receive quarter when it lays down its arms, then it may not fight quite so hard.”
“That’s what I was hoping, I suppose, though I’m still not convinced of it. But I’ve come to a conclusion, Ranafast: we can’t win this war through force alone. We need guile also.”
“Aye, we do. Doesn’t taste too good in the mouth though, does it?” And Ranafast wheeled his horse away to rejoin the army column. Corfe sat his own mount and watched the freed Merduks running madly up into the foothills until they were mere dots against the snow-worn bulk of the Thurian Mountains on the horizon before them. For a crazed, indecipherable moment, he almost wished he were running with them.
C ATHEDRALLER scouts guided them in that night. The weather had deteriorated into a face-stinging drizzle which was flung at them by winds off the mountains, but the wind would at least muffle the sound of their marching feet and clinking equipment. The men had their heads down and were dragging their feet by that time, and in the blustery darkness half a dozen pack-mules had somehow broken free from their handlers and been lost, but in the main the army was intact, the column a trifle ragged perhaps, but still whole. Andruw had found a level campsite some five miles north of the town. There was a stream running through it, a boon to both horses and men, but as the weary soldiers filed into the bivouac their heads lifted and they peered intently at the southern horizon. There was an orange glow flickering in the sky there. Berrona was burning.
Andruw greeted Corfe unsmilingly, his face a pale blur under his helm marked only by two black holes for eyes and a slot for a mouth.
“Their cavalry entered the town several hours ago,” he said. “They took the men off to the south. Now they’re having a little fun with the women.”
Corfe rode up close until their knees were touching. He set a hand on Andruw’s shoulder.
“We can’t do it—not tonight. The men are done up. We’ll hit them at dawn, Andruw.”
Andruw nodded. “I know. We must be sensible about it.” His voice was cracking with strain.
“Have you scouted out the main body?”
“They’re still bivouacked to the south. Their camp is full of the loot and women from half a dozen different towns. These lads have been having a fine old time of it up here in the north. It must seem like a kind of holiday for them.”
“It ends tomorrow morning with the dawn, I promise you. Now get the officers together. I want you to tell us all you know about the dispositions of these bastards.”
Andruw nodded and started to move his horse away. Then he halted.
“Corfe?”
“Yes?”
“Promise me something else.”
Andruw’s voice was thick with grief but it was too dark for Corfe to read his face. “Go on.”
“Promise me that tomorrow we will take no prisoners.”
The wind and the subdued clamour of an army settling down for the night filled the silence that stretched between them. Politics, strategy, his talk with Ranafast; they rose like a cloud in Corfe’s mind. But smouldering there under all the rationalisations were his own anger, and his friend’s grief. When Corfe finally responded, his voice was as raw as Andruw’s had been.
“All right then. Tomorrow there will be no quarter. I promise you.”
TWELVE
T HE town of Berrona had always been an unremarkable place, tucked away on the north-western border of Torunna not far from the headwaters of the River Searil. Some six thousand people dwelt there in the shadow of the western Thurians, their only link with Torunna proper a single dirt road which snaked away to the south across the foothills. With the fall of Ormann Dyke, they had become technically behind the Merduk lines, but thus far in this winter of carnage and destruction they had remained untouched. They were too far out of the way, closer to Aekir than to Torunn, and cradled by the long out-thrust spurs of the Thurian Mountains so that the war had passed them by and was a matter of tall tales
and rumours, no more. A few of the survivors of Aekir’s fall had somehow made their way there and had been welcomed, holding forth to packed audiences in the inns of the town and chilling the listeners with tales of war and atrocity. Get out of here, the Aekirians said. Cross the Torrin river while there is still time. But the townsfolk, though they shuddered appropriately at the stories of horror the refugees had to tell, could not believe that the war would touch them. We are too out of the way, they said. Why would the Merduks want to come this far north when the armies are fighting way down on the plains about the capital? We will sit the war out and see what happens.
The Aekirians, shocked, broken travesties of the prosperous city-dwellers they had once been, merely shook their heads. And though they were invited to stay with genuine compassion by the folk of Berrona, they refused and resumed their weary flight west towards the shrinking Torunnan frontier.
But the people of the town were proved right, it seemed. As midwinter passed and the new year grew older they were indeed forgotten and left undisturbed. They hunted in the hills as they had always done in the dark months, bored fishing holes in the ice that crusted the Searil and ate into their stores of pickles and dried meat and fish and fruit. And the world left them alone.
“H ORSES, Arja! Look! Men on horses!”
The girl straightened, pressing her fists into the hollow of her back as though an old woman, though she was not yet fifteen. She shaded her eyes against the glare of sunlight on snow and peered out across the white hills to where her younger brother was pointing with quivering excitement.
“You’re imagining again, Narfi. I can’t see a thing.” She bent to knot the rawhide rope about the firewood she had gathered, dark hair falling about her face. But her brother Narfi tugged at her sleeve.
“Look now! I’ll bet you can see them now! Anyone could.”
Sighing, she slapped his hand away and stared again. A dark bristle of movement, like a spined snake, off in the distance. They were so far away it was impossible to tell if they were even moving. But they were definitely men on horses, a long column of them riding half in shadow, half in sunlight as the scudding winter clouds came and went before the wind. Even as she watched, Arja saw the fleeting sparkle as the sun glittered off a line of metal accoutrements. Lance points, helmets, breastplates.
“I see them,” she said lightly. “I see them now.”
“Soldiers, Arja. Are they ours, you think? Would they let me up on a horse?”
Arja abandoned the firewood and grasped her brother’s arm roughly. “We have to get home.”
“No! I want to watch. I want to wait for them!”
“Shut up, Narfi! What if they’re Merduks?”
At the word “Merduks” her brother’s round face clouded. “Dada said they wouldn’t come here,” he said faintly.
His sister dragged him away. When she glanced back over her shoulder she could see that they were bigger. The dark snake had broken up into hundreds of little figures, all glittering in long lines. And farther away—back where the cloud and the distance rendered all things hazy—she thought she saw more of them. It looked like the line of a faraway forest undulating along the slopes and hollows of the hill. An army. She had never seen one before but she knew instantly what it was. A big army. She gulped for air, prayers flitting through her head like a tumble of summer swallows. They would ride on past. No-one ever came to Berrona. They would pass by. But she had to tell her father.
T HAT afternoon the column of horsemen rode into the town as though they were triumphal warriors returning home. There were hundreds of them, perhaps even thousands, all mounted on tall bay horses and clad in outlandish armour, their lance points gay with silk streamers and a pair of matchlock pistols at the pommel of every saddle. The silent townsfolk lined the streets and some of the riders waved as they rode past, or blew kisses to the more comely of the women. They came to a halt in front of the town hall and there the leading riders dismounted. The town headman was waiting for them on the steps of the hall, pale as snow but resolute. One of the more gorgeously caparisoned horsemen doffed his helm to reveal a brown smiling face, his eyes as dark as sloes.
“I bring greetings in the name of Aurungzeb my Sultan and the Prophet Ahrimuz, may he live for ever,” he cried in a clear, young voice. His Normannic was perfect, only a slight accent betraying its origins.
“Ries Millian, town headman,” the white-faced figure on the steps said, his voice wavering with strain. “Welcome to the town of Berrona.”
“Thank you. Now please have all the people in this town assemble in the square here. I have an announcement to make.”
Millian hesitated, but only for a moment. “What is it you wish of us,” he asked.
“You will find out. Now do as I say.” The Merduk officer turned and rapped out a series of commands to his men in their own language. The column of horsemen split up. Some two hundred remained in the square before the town hall whilst the rest splintered into groups of one or two dozen and set off down the side streets, the hooves of their horses raising a clattering din off the cobbles.
The headman was conferring with other men of the town in whispers. At last he stepped forward. “I cannot do as you say until I know what you intend to do with us,” he said bravely, the men behind him nodding at his words.
The Merduk officer smiled, and without a word he drew his tulwar. A flash of steel in the thin winter sunlight, and Ries Millian was on his knees, choking, his hands striving in vain to close his gaping windpipe. Blood on the cobbles, squirts and gouts of it steaming like soup. The headman fell on his side, twitched, lay still. In the crowd a woman shrieked, rushed forward and cast herself on to the body. The Merduk officer gestured impatiently and two of his men lifted her away, still shrieking. In full view of the crowd that had gathered, they stripped her, cutting the clothes from her body with their swords and slicing flesh from her limbs as they did so. When she was naked, they bent her over and one thrust his scimitar up between her legs with a grunt, until only the hilt of the weapon was visible. The woman went silent, collapsed, and slid off the end of the blade. The Merduks grinned and laughed. He who had killed her sniffed his bloody sword and made a face. They laughed again. The Merduk officer wiped his tulwar off on the headman’s carcase and turned to the paralysed huddle of men Millian had been conferring with.
“Do as I say. Get everyone here in the square. Now.”
T HE day drew on into an early winter evening, but for the folk of Berrona it seemed that it would never end.
The Merduks had cleared out the town house by house, stabling their horses in the humbler dwellings. The menfolk had been separated from the women and children and marched away south over the hills by several hundred of the invaders. Then there had been the sound of gunfire, crackling out into the cold air endlessly. It had gone on for hours, but none of the women could or would agree on what it meant. A few of the local shepherds had been dragged in by the invaders, bloody and terrified. They said that there was a huge Merduk army encamped out in the pastures to the south of the town, but few of the people believed them or had time to consider the ramifications of such a phenomenon. Their own tragedy filled their minds to overflowing.
Arja had seen some women dragged off into empty houses by groups of the laughing soldiers. There had been screams, and later the Merduks had emerged restrapping their armour, smiling, talking lazily in that horrible language they had. One woman, Frieda the blacksmith’s wife who was held to be the prettiest in the town, had been stripped and forced to serve wine to the Merduk officers as they lounged in the headman’s house. Her husband they had searched out and trussed up in a corner so that he was forced to watch as they finally raped her one by one. In the end they had killed her. But they blinded and castrated the blacksmith before leaving him a moaning heap on the floor. No-one had dared help him, and he had bled to death beside the violated corpse of his wife. Arja knew this because some of the other women had been treated in the same manner as Frieda
and then released. They had seen it happen.
Perhaps fifty of the women of the town had been herded up and were now in the town hall. They were the young, the pretty, the well-shaped. Outside, night was drawing in and the Merduks had lit bonfires in the streets, piling them high with furniture from the empty houses. They were sacking the town, looting anything of value and destroying what they could not carry away. Many buildings had been burnt to the ground already, and it was rumoured the Merduks had locked most of the old people inside them first.
Arja had not seen her father since the men had been taken away. Her brother, though barely eight years old, had been taken along with him. Now she was alone with a crowd of women and girls, imprisoned in the dark. A few of the women were sobbing quietly, but most were silent. Occasionally there were whispered conversations, most of them consisting of speculation on the fate of their husbands and fathers and brothers.
“They are dead,” one woman hissed. “All dead. And soon we will be too.”
“No, no,” another said frantically. “They have taken away the men to work for them. Why would they kill their labourers? The men are digging defences out beyond the town. Why kill those who can work for you? It makes no sense.”
This straw of hope seemed to cheer many of the women. “It is war,” they said. “Terrible things happen, but there has to be a sense to it all. Soldiers have their orders. So we are under the Merduks now—they have to eat too. We will adjust. We can be useful to them.”
A scraping and thudding as the double doors of the town hall were opened. It was full night outside, but the saffron light of the bonfires flickered in and the sky was orange and red with distant flames as the outskirts of the town blazed. The women could see the black silhouettes of many men outlined by the flames. Some held flasks and bottles, others naked swords. There was no talk of usefulness now.