The sun was peeping over the valley, long shadows stretching across the fields. Through the round window of his eyeglass, quivering slightly with the trembling of his hand, Leo could see the flags, the spears, the lines of men on top of the two hills. The rocky bluff crawled with activity now, like a distant ant heap. The long, low hill had at least twice as many soldiers on it as the night before. One flag in particular, black with a golden sun, flew above the rest. A lord marshal’s personal standard.
“He took me for a bloody fool,” breathed Leo. “He played me for time, knowing he had men on the way.”
He felt a sudden cold shock. Had that woman Teufel tricked them? Had she been loyal to the king all along, lied about his strength then taken the secrets they’d merrily blabbed to her straight back to him? Had Orso been well aware of that as he smirked across the table and tried to drive a wedge between Leo and his allies? Between Leo and his own wife?
“Fuck!” He flung the eyeglass across the hillside and it bounced once and clattered from one of the wagons with a tinkle of broken glass.
Shock turned to a reassuring fury that burned all the night’s doubts away. He was the Young Lion, damn it! He’d no business dithering when there was an enemy ahead.
“What should we do?” asked Isher, plucking at a loose thread on his embroidered cuff as he stared towards those suddenly well-held hills.
“Attack!” snarled Leo. “Now!”
“Finally!” Barezin mashed his fist into his palm. “My Gurkish Legion will be on that bluff before lunchtime! You can depend on it!”
“I am bloody depending on it,” Leo forced through his gritted teeth.
Barezin gave a cavalier salute, caught hold of his saddle horn, bounced a couple of times and then, with some subtle shoving from one of his aides, hauled himself up and turned his mount towards the west.
Leo took Isher by the shoulder. “I don’t care whether it’s a Gurkish legion or a phalanx of Sipanese whores,” he hissed into his pale face, “I need men up on that bluff in force and ready to attack Stoffenbeck from the west as soon as possible. Do you understand?”
Isher wiped sweat from his forehead and gave a stiff salute. “I do.” And he strode somewhat unsteadily to his horse.
Leo pulled Antaup close, pointed over the orchards towards the rocky hill, one flank bright with the dawn, the other cast into shadow. “First the Open Council drive them back on the right and take that bluff.” He shoved forward with his fist, from the neat battle lines of Angland and across the open fields towards Stoffenbeck. “By the time we attack Orso in the centre, they’ll be in a position to outflank him.” He stabbed his finger towards the wheatfields, the gentle green hill beyond with those new banners at its summit. “Before they shore up the centre, Stour will hit them on the left.”
Antaup grinned as he flicked that loose lock of hair out of his face and it dropped straight back. “Yes, Your Grace!”
“Let the Anglanders know!” And Leo sent Antaup charging down the hill with a slap on the back. “Greenway?”
He slouched over, giving a mockery of a Union salute. “Young Lion.”
“Tell Stour we’re attacking from right across to left. He goes last.”
“Last?” sneered Greenway.
“It’s a battle plan, not a race.”
“Don’t reckon Stour’ll like going—”
Leo grabbed a fistful of Greenway’s cloak and snarled the words in his face. “He doesn’t have to like it. He just has to do it.” And he shoved the man away and made him slither on the dewy grass. He only just righted himself before he fell, and slunk off with bad grace.
“Might not be wise to treat him with so little respect,” murmured Jin.
“I had a go at being wise,” snapped Leo. “It doesn’t fucking suit me.”
Jin laughed and thumped him on the shoulder. “That’s the spirit!”
Leo looked towards the low ridge, the high bluff, the town with the crescent of diggings in front, a fierce smile on his face. He liked this plan. Simple. Aggressive. It played to his strengths. He wished he’d done it last night, but last night wasn’t coming back. They were ready now and had the whole day ahead of them. He felt like a new man.
“We could’ve beaten him last night.” He curled his fingers into a trembling fist. “But we’ll crush him today instead. Someone get my horse!”
Fools’ Errands
Orso stood at the parapet of Stoffenbeck’s clock tower, trying to frown out manfully to the north while feeling like an utter impostor in his gilded armour.
The mist clinging to the fields was clearing, the sun rising bright into a sky holding only a few lonely puffs of cloud. A rather lovely day might have been in the offing. Had it not been for the thousands of heavily armed men poised to murder each other within the next few hours, of course.
The forces of the Open Council were gathered on the far left. Yellow blocks, red blobs, blue wedges, bright flags streaming overhead. Their wondrous variety suggested a lack of coordination, but also spoke strongly to the breadth of the coalition against him.
The army of Angland was deployed below the hill on which Steebling’s tower-house stood. Dark, business-like blocks so ominously neat they might have been drawn with a ruler. Men who last year had been heroes, struggling against the Union’s enemies. Men Orso had done his best to help. Men he had utterly failed to help, driven now to open rebellion against him.
Of Stour Nightfall’s Northmen there was no sign. Lurking in the woods, no doubt, waiting to pounce, as Northmen so loved to do. The Young Lion and the Great Wolf had been bitter enemies, fighting each other to the death but a few months before. Now Orso had achieved the apparently impossible and united them in mutual hatred for him.
By the Fates, when did he get so many enemies?
“I tried to do the right thing,” he murmured, striving to make sense of it. “Broadly. The best I could, under the circumstances. Tried to find… reasonable compromises?” It would have made a feeble battle cry. Forth, men, to reasonable compromises!
He tried again. “I mean to say… I realise that I’m hesitant, occasionally oblivious, running to fat, certainly not the most inspiring king a subject could ask for but… I’m hardly despicable, am I? I’m no Glustrod. No Morlic the Mad.”
Grunts and grumbles of firm denial as he glanced around the roof. But what could a king expect from his courtiers except bland agreement on every point? Tunny, he noted, stayed silent.
“If I may, Your Majesty?” offered Lord Hoff, rubbing his hands like a horse-trader spying a simpleton upon whom to palm off his lamest nag. “The roots of this particular rebellion dig back into history. To your father’s time. To his father’s time.” Mutters of agreement. “You, I fear, have been unfortunate enough to reap the harvest. Discontent has been swelling for many years.” Heads bobbed as men nodded. “The seeds were sown in the war against Black Dow. The wars against the Snake of Talins. The war against Uthman-ul-Dosht, even.”
“Now that was a war,” came a voice.
“Master Sulfur.” Orso was less than entirely delighted to see the magus step out onto the roof of the clock tower. “You always seem to arrive at moments of high drama.”
“Never the slightest peace, Your Majesty. I have been in the North, doing my best to put an end to this rebellion before it began.”
Orso raised a brow at the thousands of armed men facing them. “With limited success, it would appear.”
“Alas, the younger generation refuses to honour the debts of the older. The debts that put them where they are. My master will ensure there is a reckoning, depend on that.”
“A huge comfort,” said Orso. By that point, there was every chance they would all be dead. “I don’t suppose you could do to Leo dan Brock’s army what you did to the Burners at the demonstration of Curnsbick’s engine, is there?”
Sulfur turned those strangely empty, different-coloured eyes upon him. “The magic leaks from the world, Your Majesty, and there are limits to what e
ven I can achieve. An army is far beyond my powers.”
“Just the Young Lion himself, maybe?”
“A great risk with an uncertain outcome. My master prefers safe bets.”
Orso puffed out his cheeks. “Why he got into banking, no doubt.”
“That and so he could furnish you with the means to settle your problems by… more traditional methods.”
“For which I am immensely grateful, of course.” Orso had seen Sulfur rip a man apart with his teeth. He knew Bayaz had made a wreck of half the Agriont and killed thousands. He was sure Valint and Balk had done even more damage in the years since, with far less spectacle. Truly, he had made a pact with devils. But a man lost in the desert, as the Gurkish say, must take such water as he is offered.
Sulfur was surveying the battlefield. “We are expecting reinforcements, I take it?”
“Imminently,” said Orso, wondering whether Lord Marshal Rucksted would reach the field before they were utterly overwhelmed. Fortunately, or perhaps unfortunately, he was spared from having to qualify the statement by a discordant mishmash of bugles, horns and shouted orders floating on the chill dawn.
“They’re advancing on the left,” said Tunny.
At this distance, the Open Council’s varied formations appeared to move with dreamlike slowness, inexorably southwards, through the patchwork of fields towards the tangled orchards around the river. It was hard to believe that all those tiny coloured dots were men. They seemed to flow like a fluid. Lurid shades of paint, perhaps, running together on the easel of a careless artist.
“They’re attacking,” said Hoff.
Orso gave him a withering sideways glance. “Oh, I don’t know, Lord Chamberlain. Perhaps they’re rushing forward to surrender.”
No one laughed, of course, not even Orso. It did not look as though it would be a day for laughs.
“Your Majesty?” A footman had appeared in purple finery, tray balanced on outstretched fingers, a selection of Visserine glassware gleaming with the morning sun. “A drink?”
There was something faintly horrifying about a tipple while men marched to their deaths. Epic disaster as light entertainment. “At a time like this?” asked Orso.
Officers glanced at one another, raised their brows, shrugged as if to say, What better time could there be?
Orso sighed. “I’ll take a sherry. Sherry, Master Sulfur?”
“Not for me, Your Majesty.”
“Of course, I forgot. Your highly specific diet…” And Orso winced as he looked back towards the battlefield.
Some of the better-disciplined formations had reached the orchards and apparently vanished. Others had scarcely moved at all, or were stuck at some hedgerow, some house, some stand of trees. Still others appeared to have twisted, drifted apart, become tangled with each other. Orso and his royal entourage watched in silence, sipping their drinks, while the movement of the great clock marked the passage of time with its steady tick, tick, tick beneath their feet.
“The forces of the Open Council appear to be in some confusion,” someone said.
Orso laughed so hard he snorted sherry out of his nose, had to submit to a dabbing down by his footman while he continued to helplessly giggle.
Hoff looked at him as though he had lost his reason. Perhaps he had. “Your Majesty?”
“Oh, you know. Good old Open Council. You can always count on them to act with total disunity, disloyalty and incompetence.”
“What are they doing?” muttered Savine, clenching her swollen fists so tight they trembled. “What the hell are they doing?”
She was no soldier, but it hardly took Stolicus himself to tell things had not started well. From the chaos over there, anyone would have thought the Open Council were fully engaged with the enemy rather than with some orchards and a slow-flowing tributary of the river.
“Seems your rebellion’s coming apart already.” Lord Steebling lifted his gouty leg onto a stool then sat back, grinning up at her with smug satisfaction.
“I wouldn’t count us out just yet,” she said, turning her back on him and stepping away.
The man was an utter shit, but Leo had insisted he be treated with every courtesy. They were here to uphold the rights of Union citizens, after all, and it was Steebling’s land they were fighting on, Steebling’s house they were using as their headquarters, Steebling’s bed they had been clumsily coupling in last night. The memory made her feel faintly and entirely inappropriately aroused. Faintly aroused and badly in need of a piss both at once.
The great wagons carrying the cannon had been held up on the clogged roads and were only now arriving. Teams of men and horses were struggling to shift them onto their trestles and get them pointed roughly towards the enemy. Savine grimly shook her head at the thought of what each of those had cost to make. At this rate, they would be set up just in time to fire a salute to King Orso’s victory.
Leo was not far away, dragging his horse impatiently back and forth, swarmed by a constantly shifting crowd of officers, messengers and panicked hangers-on. She wanted desperately to be down there with him. Being a powerless observer by no means suited her. But she knew no one would listen to her. No one was listening to anyone. Leo caught one man in the deep blue uniform of Isher’s soldiers and near dragged him from his saddle.
“What the hell is going on over there?”
“Your Grace, it seems someone tampered with the bridges—”
“Tampered?”
“When the first units tried to cross the river, they collapsed—”
“No one thought to check?” Leo grabbed Antaup by the shoulder, stabbing towards the orchards with a finger. “Get over there! I don’t care if they have to raft men across. I don’t care if they have to build new bloody bridges! Get over there and make sure those bastards move!”
“Best stay back, Lady Savine.” Broad stepped carefully in front of her as Antaup thundered past, teeth gritted. Zuri slipped a hand around her elbow and guided her ever so gently away from the milling horses, to a clear spot on the hillside.
“Shall I have Haroon bring you a chair?” she asked.
“How could I sit through this?” snapped Savine, standing with jaw, fists and bladder clenched in a paralysis of helpless fury.
Isher, Barezin and the rest were making an utter turd of it. She had been so worried about their loyalty she had not given nearly enough attention to their competence. She tore open the button at her collar. She could not get a proper breath.
“Calm,” she whispered. “Calm, calm—”
She jumped at an almighty crash. Someone dived aside with a despairing cry as a cannon slid from its wagon and thudded to the turf, rolling down the hill and leaving a trail of wreckage, a tangle of ropes and pulleys dragged through a campfire after it.
Somewhere behind her, over the madness, she could hear Lord Steebling’s laughter.
“Now, Arch Lector?” asked the chief engineer, breathless.
Pike gazed down towards the orchards. He couldn’t have been calmer if he’d been timing an egg. “A little longer.” He leaned over to murmur to Vick, “I sent a few men down to the river last night to chisel the keystones from the bridges. I do admire a skilled mason, don’t you?”
Vick had nothing to say. Her appreciation for stonework felt rather beside the point.
“I doubt they’ll take the weight of more than a few men,” said Pike. “A company of soldiers trying to cross will soon find themselves swimming. I was a quartermaster in my inglorious youth, and I can tell you for a fact that armies run on details. Without the keystones, those bridges come apart. Without the bridges, their whole plan comes apart. So much of failure is a failure to consider the details.”
The military chorus came oddly distorted over the distance, sounding now close, now far away. Farting bugles and bumbling drums. Voices echoed up so clearly at times Vick could hear the words, then faded to a witless burble as the wind changed.
The chief engineer glanced beseechingly at Vick, sweat g
listening on his forehead. “Now, Arch Lector?”
Pike thoughtfully narrowed his eyes. The wind picked up, whipping streams of smoke from the slow-burning match-cords in the hands of the nervous boys beside each cannon. “Not quite yet.”
“How long’ll he wait?” whispered Tallow, voice squeaky with fear.
Vick silently shook her head. From where they stood, she could just see the top of the clock tower. Hard to believe how little time had passed since the Open Council’s troops began to move. The trees on the far bank were swarming with soldiers now, their order entirely gone, columns crowding haphazardly in from behind to add their weight to the confusion. But the near bank still looked as peaceful as it had at dawn.
“Now, Arch Lector?” begged the engineer. Not so much that he wanted to do it, as that he couldn’t stand the tension of waiting.
Pike paused, considering the chaos around the river, hands clasped behind his back. “Now,” he said.
The man looked taken aback, as though he’d only just realised what he’d been asking for the last half-hour. He licked his lips, then turned unsteadily towards the north.
“Cannon will fire in order from my right,” he roared, holding up his fist, “and continue firing until the order is given to cease!”
The aproned engineers, the burly men who handled the shot and powder, the boys who held the poles and sponges, all started to screw pellets of rag into their ears. Pike was doing the same.
Stiffly, cautiously, the engineer at the first cannon took match-cord from powder boy and gingerly touched the flame to the pan. The crew all turned away, hunching down, covering their heads. Vick winced. There was a pathetic little splutter and a puff of sparks.
“That’s it?” said Tallow, looking up.
The cannon jolted on its trestles, fire spurting from its mouth. There was a thunderous, barking explosion, as painfully loud as anything Vick ever heard. A moment later, the next cannon fired, and the next.
She shrank down against the hillside, clapping her hands against the sides of her head, and felt her skull buzz, and her palms tremble, and the very ground shake.
The Trouble with Peace Page 50