The Shadow of Tyr

by Glenda Larke

  ‘I’ll be there,’ he growled at her. ‘Stop nagging. And I will ride part of the way on my horse, even if it is just down a damned towpath.’ He looked at her, and Arrant wondered if he were searching for the right words to say goodbye, to say all the things one should say to a friend before you both go to fight a war. But perhaps he was wrong, because all Gevenan said in the end was, ‘You were right about the stirrups, by the way.’

  Gevenan turned his attention back to the barges and his men, shouting orders. Ligea hid a smile. As they began to move a few minutes later, Arrant caught a wisp of her emotions and realised with shock just how fond she was of the Ingean soldier. ‘But they’re always arguing,’ he said in protest to Tarran under cover of the cheers of the crowd.

  That doesn’t mean much. She was always arguing with Brand, too. And Temellin. That’s what she does with people she likes.

  The remark did not make him feel any better. He didn’t like it when his mother was too friendly with men other than his father, even Gevenan. And he remembered the Altani, Brand. When he’d been five years old and they’d arrived at the rebels’ stronghold in Altan, a nameless place built mostly of woven reeds and thatch, the man called Brand—warned by sentries—had been waiting on the floating dock. The moment Ligea saw him, her body took on a golden sheen of joy. No one else seemed to notice, but Arrant did. The only other time he’d seen her look quite like that was the day Temellin had come to Ordensa to meet them. Worse, it seemed to Arrant that the way she eyed this Altani giant was no different from the way she had looked at his father.

  Even after all these years, Arrant’s memory of that moment was vivid.

  Brand leaping on board as the boat docked, and whirling Ligea into his arms, laughing and hugging her, then kissing her on the lips with a passion he hadn’t tried to disguise. Ligea laughing and pushing him away. Arrant seeing her happiness, feeling it as a personal stab in his heart, a betrayal.

  Thinking: She shouldn’t do that. Papa wouldn’t like it.

  He could still recall the Altani’s appearance. A large man, tall and muscular and bronzed. His size had been so intimidating, it had been a while before Arrant even noticed the withered arm. Even now, his stomach churned with cold and dislike at the memory.

  He didn’t have time to think about it, though, because Foran came up just then, saying, ‘Time for you to go back and work, young man. You need to perfect your ward-making. You aren’t doing nearly enough practice. This is a battle we are heading towards!’

  As if he didn’t know. As if it didn’t made him sick just to think about it. He just couldn’t see the sense in practising all the time when it never resulted in the slightest bit of improvement.

  Three days later, in spite of his lack of reliable success with ward-building, he left for Tyr with Ligea’s forces.

  Forbidden to speak except in a whisper, they walked under a night sky, the stars a bright splendour in the plush of moonless black. The only sound was the occasional splash; they walked ankle-deep in water. Even though the snow-season was over and the great plains of the Tyr valley were warm with a desert-season sun during the day, the coldness of that mountain water numbed their bare feet. At least the stones were water-worn smooth, easy on softened soles.

  They carried no lights, but Arrant could see the stone walls on either side, waist height to the average man. An adult could have reached out and touched them both at the same time, so closely did they hem in the marching line of men. The soldier in front of him was humpbacked in the dark, his food pack and buckler making him appear misshapen as he marched through the water using his spear as a staff. His sandals were slung around his neck, his cloak wrapped tight.

  In front of him was another man, similarly burdened, similarly clad, and another, and another, as far as Arrant could see. Just as there would be behind, if he cared to look.

  Ants, he thought. We’re just like a line of ants marching off to make war on another nest…and miles to go before dawn.

  Somewhere at the back was Foran, using his senses so that they would not be surprised from behind; somewhere up ahead Ligea led them, her senses alert as well.

  And here I am in the middle, because that’s the safest place.

  At least he had persuaded the two of them to allow him to come. Not to fight, of course. Just to be there. He hadn’t really wanted to, but he knew there was no choice. Not really. Not for someone born to be a Mirager. He had to prove himself, and what other way did he have when his powers were so unpredictable?

  I’m cold and I’m scared and I wish I wasn’t here. It’s strange, but I feel lonely even when there are people all around me.

  A stray thought, but it was true. There were always other people around—yet, if it hadn’t been for Tarran, the loneliness would have seeped into his bones like the cold, leaving him bereft. He was surrounded by people who were heavy with the concerns of war, rather than the needs of a nine-year-old boy who wouldn’t be taking part in the battle.

  And even Tarran didn’t come as much as he would have liked.

  That worried him. He wished Tarran would tell him more. He tried to understand, but it was hard. What was it like to be a Mirage Maker? The others Tarran spoke of seemed to be so old. Older, maybe, than the stones of the Stronghold. Ancient. With such strange memories. And Tarran himself had never been human, never could be human.

  Arrant grappled with that. He resented the part his mother had played in it. No matter how often Tarran reassured him that he liked being what he was, Arrant grieved for what had been lost: Tarran’s chance to be a man.

  He walked on.

  Walking. And walking. It was boring, and endless.

  In the middle of the night they halted for half an hour’s rest. He leaned against the parapet and looked out into the darkness of the night. They were high above the ground; star-lit fields were spread out below in irregular shapes, like a flagstoned floor. Patches of fallow and growing crops, meadow grass and neat orchards—all dark and shadowy with night; farm buildings nothing more than black blocks scattered haphazardly on the land like the random roll of dice on the surface of a table. A distant river looped lazily, the glint of moonlight on water betraying its presence behind the bordering lace of trees. And below him—below there were stone arcades arching across the valley, holding this channel up in the air, just as Mount Candidrus, somewhere in the Alps, supposedly held up Elysium on its many peaks.

  Someone passed a pisspot down the line. Ligea had threatened them with dire consequences if she caught anyone contaminating the water with their bodily wastes. This aqueduct brought water to Tyr. They had to walk one hundred and twenty miles of it unseen and when they did reach the other end, this water would be what they drank.

  Just before dawn, to seek shelter for the day, they halted on top of a hill. Here, the aqueduct was no more than a stone-built ditch laid on top of the land, ploughing its way straight through a forest.

  Ligea sought Arrant out, and settled down beside him, back to a tree. ‘How are you doing?’ she asked.

  ‘Cold,’ he said. In truth he was desperately tired as well. His legs ached, yet it was all he could do to stay awake long enough to eat some of the rations he had: bread, cheese, olives and nuts, watered wine.

  ‘That’s what being a soldier is all about,’ she told him with a sigh. ‘Being tired and cold and hungry and wet. And having to sleep on the ground. Most of the time, you’re bored as well because nothing happens. Then when it does, you wish it hadn’t.’

  ‘Have you put up a ward?’ he asked.

  ‘Right around the camp. We can sleep well. Although the ground will be hard, I fear.’

  It was, but he slept most of the day anyway.

  The next couple of nights in the aqueduct were just a replay of the first. An army of men ankle-deep in water, marching thirty miles in the dark between walls of stone, a path as straight as an arrow’s flight. A path no one had ever thought necessary to guard. They would leave no signs of their passing, no footprints
to show an army had gone that way across the land, right to the walls of Tyr.

  ‘It was you who gave me the idea, Arrant,’ Ligea told him on the first day. ‘Do you remember? Last time we came to Tyr? You said the aqueduct looked like a road built on a long bridge. And so I had it checked. No guards until you come close to the walls. Just the occasional artisan who walks his allotted miles every few months, checking for leaks or problems.’

  He couldn’t remember what he had said so long ago, but he hugged the idea that he had been of use, that his five-year-old self had inspired battle strategy.

  After the second night’s march, when they left the aqueduct before dawn-break to descend from an arcaded portion, Ligea led them to a wood where her men had buried supplies to await their coming. On the third day, they hid under the arches of the aqueduct itself, deep in a rocky gully. Yet another night of walking brought them to a populated area where there was nowhere to hide.

  Here the aqueduct was built tall, with three arcade levels, lifting the water high above villas and farms and fields. Only closer to Tyr did the land rise up to meet the aqueduct—or was it the aqueduct stooping to meet the land?—until finally the channel disappeared inside the city walls, disgorging water into the city’s cisterns.

  That miserable last day they had to spend crouched in water, high above the ground, unable to descend because there were too many buildings, roads and people around. At each of the access stairways, every mile, there was now a guard at ground level, so no one was allowed to speak above the lightest whisper, or sneak a look over the side. They had to be careful to sit in a way that didn’t block the water flowing down the centre of the channel. They were forbidden to stand for fear of revealing themselves. Several pisspots were periodically passed down the line and emptied over the side in a quiet spot when full. Men slept fitfully under a burning sun, shaken awake by their comrades if they dared to snore.

  And yet they were cheerful, these men. Every now and then Arrant’s sensing abilities would assert themselves and he would feel emotions drifting in the air around him: anticipation, excitement, joy, the ache of longing.

  Their origins varied. Some came from as far away as Inge. Each had their own story of how they had come to serve Ligea. Most were ex-slaves. Most were just men who wanted a way to go home, wherever home was. There were others, too, who exuded emotions Arrant didn’t like. Avaricious men, who foresaw the fall of an empire and wanted to be along to seize what they could from the ruins. The feel of such raw greed made him shiver.

  By nightfall of the following day, they should know the fate of the city. Of themselves. Of their distant families. Today they faced the thought of battle; tomorrow they could all face death, or the fate of traitors to the Exaltarchy—crucifixion or beheading, torture, disembowelment, enslavement in the galleys. Arrant knew; he’d heard the tales. He’d seen the dead in Prianus. There was never any mercy for those perceived to be traitors to the empire. Tomorrow many of these men would die.

  And I can’t help them.

  If Rathrox or the Exaltarch found him, his fate would be no different. It could be even worse.

  In the first light of the false dawn on that last day, Ligea left her army hunkered down in the water channel and climbed from the top tier of the aqueduct. There was no one around; her senses told her that much. Good.

  Once on the ground, she changed her wet clothing for a dry robe in her pack, the sort of thing a lowborn artisan’s wife might wear. She slung her baldric and sword, well wrapped in cloth, over her shoulder, and draped her cloak over the top to hide them. She put on her sandals and set off for the nearest barge dock.

  Gevenan stood out like a beacon to her probing mind. Which meant all was well, gods be thanked. He was supposed to have arrived at dusk the night before, too late to proceed into the city, and apparently he had. She walked briskly, using her positioning powers to dodge the odd person up and about that early: a milkmaid on her way to the cows, a farmer on his way to the city with produce.

  It still wasn’t fully light when she surprised Gevenan on his way back from the privy in the yard of the dock wayhouse.

  ‘Ocrastes’ balls, can’t I even visit the outhouse without you homing in on me like a kestrel on a mouse?’ he growled, still adjusting his clothing.

  ‘And that’s all the welcome I get?’ she said with a soft laugh. ‘Somehow I don’t exactly see you as a mouse, Gev. Is all well?’

  ‘Never, ever ask me to travel with a barge again. I have never been so bored in all my life.’

  ‘For an army getting to a battle, boredom is a good thing, Gev.’

  ‘Yeah, well. As soon as it’s properly light, we’ll be on our way. Come and have breakfast with me in the meantime. We have time.’

  ‘You have no idea how good that sounds. We’ve all been living on bread and cheese and cold water, with a few nuts and olives for variety. I swear, my feet are so cold and wrinkled I doubt they’ll ever be the same again.’

  ‘Thought a hot drink might appeal. No problems getting here?’

  She shook her head as he guided her to the stools and benches of a stall on the wharf. He ordered hot milk and bread and he sat beside her, laying his dagger on the bench top. The river ambled past, the waters low and brown with mud in the beginnings of the desert-season drought. A long line of barges were moored upstream of where they sat, decks covered with sleeping shapes. Soldiers wrapped in their cloaks. Her soldiers. She grimaced, and refused to think how many would die in the coming days.

  ‘No sign of the Jackals?’ Gevenan asked as they waited to be served.

  ‘Not that I’ve heard. After we are finished in Tyr, someone will have to go after them. There is no way Berg Firegravel will have eliminated them all.’

  Favonius is not so easy to kill. She didn’t know whether to take comfort from that thought, or to be worried. There was part of her that remembered his hard body against hers. The joyousness of their coupling. His pride. His courage. Not the kind of man to give up easily.

  ‘I know,’ Gevenan said cheerfully. ‘Leave it to me. If you have any particular orders with regards to the Legate who leads them, you’d better tell me. What’s his name again?’

  ‘Favonius.’ She shook her head. ‘No.’

  ‘I hear tell you were friends once.’

  ‘That ended a long time ago on his part. On mine, it ended the day I saw what he did to Prianus.’

  ‘Right. I’ll see to it, then.’

  ‘Good. Bator Korbus and Rathrox Ligatan are mine, though,’ she added as an afterthought.

  ‘Ah, yes. Revenge will be sweet, won’t it?’

  ‘Justice,’ she said firmly.

  His lip curled in familiar cynicism. ‘Call it what you will, but it is revenge, for all that. Do you think I don’t know? I’m an expert on the sweet taste of revenge.’

  She was startled; he so rarely mentioned his past, even obliquely. ‘You are?’

  ‘Even a slave has ways. My king was betrayed and his two sons murdered with him. The soldiers who did the killing, they were just doing their job. I had no argument with them. But the Ingean courtier who betrayed his king? I couldn’t let the bastard live out his life in complacent luxury, adviser to the Tyranian Governor of Inge. I couldn’t get near him—he was too wily for that and I was a stable slave at the time—so I killed his two sons.’ He paused to drink the milk the stall owner had deposited in front of him. ‘Don’t look so shocked, Ligea. They weren’t children.’

  ‘I—I don’t presume to judge you.’

  ‘Of course you do. All the time. Anyway, I paid for it, as you can imagine. The Governor thought death was too good for me, so I was whipped and sold as a galley slave to the worst brute of a shipmaster who ever sailed the Iss. I never saw Inge again. At the time, I considered it worth it.’ He shook his head with an ironic laugh. ‘Ligea, it’s a lie that revenge is sweet. The two years I spent in the galley were so hellish that even the memory of them scars each day I live.’ He fiddled with the hilt of his
dagger. ‘After this next day or two is over, you will look around at the dead, you will hear the injured screaming their pain, you will look for those you care about and fail to find them, and then you will wonder if you had a right to hurt so many people on the whim of your vengeance.’

  Something caught in her throat and it was a moment before she could snap a reply. ‘I do this for Kardiastan. For the land my son will one day rule. So they will be safe from Tyrans forever.’ For the man I love. For the end of slavery. Not just to feel my sword slide into Bator Korbus’ flesh. Not just to see Rathrox’s despair.

  ‘Good,’ he said, as a girl came out of the kitchen with the food. ‘Keep telling yourself that, and you may keep your sanity after tomorrow.’ He used his dagger to saw the bread in two and handed her half.

  ‘I was a Brotherhood Compeer once, remember? And I’ve seen plenty of blood spilled in the years since then, too.’ I can handle it. She tore at the fresh bread with her teeth. ‘Sweet Melete, but that is good.’

  ‘Tomorrow, it’s not just those who deserve to die who will. Not just those who kill others for a living who will end up being killed, Ligea. We are taking a city. A city full of people.’

  She put down her mug, suddenly remembering the girl with her throat slashed from ear to backbone, dead in her father’s arms in a wayside shrine. ‘Damn you to Acheron, Gevenan,’ she said.

  She looked over at the nearest barge. Her soldiers, awake now, were lined up along the edge of the docks, eating their rations, watching her with respectful eyes.

  Everyone knew the Exaltarch’s legions were scouring every village and town in southern Tyrans for more recruits, a desperate search that Ligea and Gevenan had banked on to provide a way for them to enter Tyr. Gevenan, posing as a legionnaire officer, had the right uniform, all the right answers and an official-looking scroll, supposedly from the Prefect of Nitida, indicating the delivery of two thousand men, as promised.