Felt like the end of the world.
“He wants you to hold,” growled out the Young Lion’s pet Northman, Whitewater whatever, “until he gives the—”
And everyone turned at a great low rumble. There was a flap and flutter as birds took off from the trees, then another rumble, and another, like thunder close at hand, loud enough Clover could feel the earth quiver through the soles of his boots. But then, they were a little worn.
“What’s this?” snarled Stour, striding to the treeline and staring off across the wheatfields. Far away, on the big bluff over on the other side of the town, puffs of smoke were going up and floating out across the valley.
“Fire engines, I reckon,” murmured Clover. A few of the older fellows looked as unhappy about it as he was. They’d seen ’em used at Osrung, maybe, and hadn’t much enjoyed the experience.
But Stour had slept through Osrung in his mother’s belly. His eyes shone as he watched the smoke puff out. “They call ’em cannons now,” he murmured, then turned about. “Get the men ready.”
“Eh?” said Greenway.
“You heard me.” Stour grinned out across that sea of windswept wheat towards that sloping green ridge with the flags at the top. “I want that hill.”
Clover winced. What the hell Stour planned to do with a hill in the middle of Midderland was anyone’s guess. Graze sheep on it? But the Great Wolf wanted it. So that was that.
Whitewater was staring at ’em all like they’d parted from their senses. Which they probably had, some months before, when they all consented to Stour being king. “Didn’t you hear me? The Young Lion wants you to—”
“I fucking heard you, boy.” Stour’s eyes slid across to him. “But I’ve had quite enough o’ the Young Lion’s pleasure.” It was almost a surprise that menacing slaver didn’t drip from his teeth. “He wants me to stop, he can come over here and stop me himself. No? Didn’t fucking think so.” He turned to roar into the trees. “Weapons, lads! War cries, you bastards! Time for you fuckers to fight!”
And there was a great clattering and hissing as swords were drawn and shields raised and spears hefted. A great growl and murmur of war curses and prayers to the dead, shouted orders echoing from further off as the call to arms spread down the long line. A great jingle and rustle as mailed warriors crunched through the brush to the very edge of the trees. Stour brushed Brock’s man out of his way and strode forward himself into the golden wheat, drawing his sword, and his gilded bastards crowded after, all falling over themselves to show how thirsty they were for blood.
“By all the fucking dead,” whispered Whitewater, staring after Stour and dragging at his red beard so hard he looked fit to tear it out of his jaw.
“Look at the sunny side.” And Clover slapped a sympathetic hand down on his shoulder. “After today, one way or another, I doubt you’ll have to deal with the idiot again.” He puffed out his cheeks as he drew his sword. “Some of us are stuck with this madness. Downside! Get the boys ready to charge!”
The sudden cannon-thunder had turned the headquarters into a mass of plunging horses. One of Leo’s guards had been thrown, dragged to the back with a broken arm. The first casualty of the day. But surely not the last.
A stone whizzed over the orchards and into the dirt, sending up a spray of mud. Another struck a tree and Leo flinched at the great cloud of splintered wood that rained down on the cowering men, now pinned more hopelessly than ever. A moment later, the great crack of the impact echoed across the fields.
“Damn it,” hissed Leo. If they waited for the Open Council to get across that river they’d be waiting till nightfall.
“What the hell?” he heard Mustred say, gazing over to their left. Leo followed his eyes.
A great mass of Northmen had emerged from the trees and was wading steadily through the ripe wheat towards the low ridge. Carls, with their round shields, and bright mail, and the sunlight glinting on the blades of axe and sword and spear.
Leo stared in mute amazement. He couldn’t even find the words to swear.
The plan had been so simple. How could it have come apart so badly? Confusion in combat was one thing, but he’d lost control of his army before they’d made the slightest contact with the enemy. He stared over at the Open Council’s self-inflicted chaos on the right, then at Stour’s self-inflicted chaos on the left, then at the earthworks straight ahead. He took a long breath.
“Everyone!” His voice sounded surprisingly calm. He’d always been at his best when there was only one thing to do. “Sound the advance!”
Mustred leaned closer, waving doubtfully towards Stoffenbeck. “They’re well dug in, Your Grace. They’re ready for us. Without the Open Council flanking them—”
Leo clapped the old lord on the shoulder. “We’ll have to outfight the bastards.” He turned in his saddle to roar at the men around him. “Lift the standard, lads! Beat the drums! It’s time!”
He saw Savine standing on the hillside. He smiled, and raised his arm, and gave her a last wave.
Then he wrenched his horse around towards the enemy.
Bugles blared, and with a mighty tramp that shook the troubled ground, the army of Angland began to move south.
Even back here the noise never stopped now. Jolting wagons, bellowed orders, thumping hooves, the throbbing fury of the cannons. Someone kept screaming, high and thin and broken. Behind them, far from the fighting. Accident among the supplies, maybe.
Over on the left, the great mass of Northmen were forging ahead through the golden wheat, leaving it brown and flattened behind them. Over on the right, fires were burning in the orchards, black smoke from the trees meeting white smoke from the cannons and throwing a grey shroud over the whole battlefield.
“What’s happening?” whispered Savine.
“I’ve fought in five sieges and three pitched battles,” said Broad. “Never saw one yet where I had a clue what was happening.”
The air had a sharp smell. A tang of Gurkish Fire, and metal, and fear, and shit. Someone had dug a latrine pit way too close to camp and a couple of slumping wattle screens weren’t doing much to hide the sight of men’s waste, let alone the smell of it.
“Bloody traitors!” roared that old bastard with the gouty leg. “The King’s Own’ll cut you to pieces!”
Broad frowned up the hill. “He’s a charmer.”
“Lord Steebling owns most of this land,” said Savine through gritted teeth. “Leo says we’re here to support his rights, not to take them away.”
“That’s not why I’m here.”
“Why are you here?” asked Zuri.
Same question Broad asked himself when he climbed the ladder, time after time, and men looked at him like he was mad. He’d given up on causes in Styria. He’d given Savine all he owed and more when he risked his life speaking to Judge. He’d never promised to fight. Promised not to, in fact. And yet here he was.
“Gunnar,” said Savine. “Could you do something for me?”
“I can try.”
“Follow my husband.” She stared off to the south. Towards where the fighting would soon be hottest, sliding her hands around her belly. She looked strangely helpless, suddenly, in the midst of all this. “Try… to make sure…”
“I understand.” Trying to keep a man alive in a battle was the very definition of a fool’s errand, but it would hardly be his first. “Just one thing I’ve got to do first. Think you could look after these for me?” He unhooked his lenses from his ears, gently folded them and handed them to Zuri. She’d always struck him as a woman you could trust with something delicate. Then he strode up the blurred hillside towards the dark smudge of the tower, carefully rolling up his sleeves. Helps to have a routine.
Steebling squinted as Broad’s shadow cast him into darkness. “We Steeblings aren’t easily intimidated, you— Ah!” He squawked as Broad caught him by the ear and dragged him from his chair.
The old nobleman hopped and slithered as he was marched back down the hill, whimperin
g whenever his weight went onto his gouty leg. Broad strode to those wicker screens and kicked one out of the way. He was glad for once that he couldn’t really see, so he didn’t have to look at the overflowing latrine pit in all its glory. But he could certainly smell it.
To Steebling, plainly, it was a new experience. He shrank away, one arm across his face. “What’re you—”
Broad shoved him in.
He vanished below the surface for a moment then bobbed up, his velvet cap lost somewhere under there and his grey hair plastered to his face with the shit of men he’d been laughing at a moment before.
“You bastard!” he frothed, retching as he tried to drag himself out.
Broad was already walking away, headed for Stoffenbeck, a dim ghost now through the dust of marching men.
“What should we do?” he heard Bannerman calling after him.
“Whatever you like,” he said, not even slowing.
He told himself it was loyalty. Told himself a good man has to fight. Same things he’d told himself when he headed off to Styria. But he knew a battle was no place for good men.
He took a long breath through his nose and snorted it out with a growl. Snorted it out like a bull.
When he wept at his own front door, back in the loving embrace of his family, he’d thought he was done with blood. Thought nothing could ever get him back onto a battlefield. But it seemed Judge knew him better than he knew himself. Trouble was like hunger to him. Stuffing your face till you’re sick one day doesn’t mean you won’t want lunch the next. All you do is sharpen your appetite. And here he was, in spite of all his empty promises, back at the table again with his cutlery ready, clamouring to be served.
He slid the warhammer from his belt and felt the steel haft tight in his grip. Fit there, like a key in a lock. He bared his teeth and walked faster.
The Little People
Peck felt a slap on his shoulder and he worked his eyes open, peeled his hands from his ears and—once he’d worked out which way was up, which took longer than you’d think—looked up.
Sergeant Meyer stared back, white lines through the black soot around his eyes where he’d been squeezing ’em shut and one side of his beard a little singed, mouth moving like he was shouting at the top of his lungs. Through the rag-buds in Peck’s ears and the whomp and burble of the other cannons and the rush of his own breath and the thudding of his heart and the constant high whine which seemed to be everywhere now, he heard a hint of Meyer’s voice.
“Sponge ’er, Peck!”
“Oh.” He stumbled up and nearly fell and only kept his balance clutching on to one of the trestles. “Yes.” Where’d he put the sponge? He snatched it up, tearing some grass up with it. “Sir.” Where’d he put the bucket? He nearly tripped over it twisting around looking for it. Why was he even saying yes? He couldn’t hear himself. How could anyone else?
The air was thick with the stink of Gurkish Fire, his mouth sticky with the tang of powder, his throat raw and his eyes smarting. At times, he could hardly see the next cannon along. Their crews were ghosts, crawling around their pieces, swabbing ’em, towelling ’em, loading ’em, feeding ’em powder, tending to their every screaming whim like a bunch of filth-smeared nannies to a nursery full of overgrown metal babies. Babies that spat death.
He stumbled past an engineer fiddling with some broken instrument, careful not to touch his cannon ’cause he’d already burned himself three times, it was that hot. Thick smoke curled from its mouth and he slopped water out of the bucket, dashed the crust of smouldering powder away from the maw, hefted his pole then flinched as a cannon a couple down the row fired, flame spouting, ground shaking.
It had all been such good fun at the Siege School. Good luck to end up there. Better’n working in a mill. Damn sight safer, too. Didn’t seem safer now, needless to say.
Something better not thought about.
“Sponge ’er, Peck!”
He didn’t like calling the cannons “her.” Like they were women. Added a hint of the disgusting to the already unpleasant. Naught motherly about the bastard things that he could see. Murder’s men’s work mostly, after all.
The sponge streamed black water as he shoved it into the cannon’s smoking barrel and gave it a ramming, spraying himself each time. He was soaked with sponge-water and smeared head to toe with soot and his shirtsleeves torn and flapping wet at his chafing wrists, but you leave even a smear of burning powder behind and when they put the new charge in, the lot of you will be blown to hell.
Something else better not thought about.
He could see soldiers below them, through the drifting smoke. Lord Crant’s men, he thought. A ragged-looking regiment, stretched out crooked across the hillside. They’d tried to dig in but had about three good shovels between ’em and the rocky ground wasn’t offering much help. No one was. They were cowering now, at the thunder of the cannons behind them and the masses of enemy somewhere in front. Trapped betwixt hell and hail, as Peck’s granny used to say. They’d flung their weapons down to cover their ears, faces twisted with pain and terror. Peck had seen a couple try to run and be dragged back to their posts. Seemed a feeble sort of defence, if those rebels ever got across that river and up the rocky hillside.
One more thing best not thought about. Awful lot of those in a battle.
Like the Arch Lector, standing in his pure white coat on the summit of the hill. That hard-faced woman, too. Most frightening pair o’ bastards he ever saw. Looked like they never felt a human thing between ’em. He swallowed as he glanced away, swabbed the cannon down and left it steaming.
The boy who held the smouldering match-cord was crying. Streaks through the soot on his face. Wasn’t clear if it was the smoke in his eyes or he was hurt or he was crying ’cause this was so horrible. Peck slapped a hand down on his shoulder, dirty water slopping from his bucket. No point saying anything. The lad gave a helpless little smile, then Meyer snatched the match-cord out of his hand and shouted something.
“Oh, no.” Peck dropped on his knees again on the shaking hillside and clapped his hands over his ears, turning the burble to an echoing hiss, like the sound you get when you hold a seashell to your head.
The one thing you could say was that it was better to do the shooting than to be shot at. But the poor bastards their piece was pointing at were another o’ those things it was better not to think about.
At a time like this, best not to think at all.
He squeezed his eyes shut.
There was a sound like a whip cracking in Suval’s ear, there was a great shower of stinging splinters and he cringed as something bounced off his back. A branch fell from a tree nearby and crashed down among the wreckage.
“God help us,” he whispered, lifting his head. Someone was crying. Someone was shouting. Someone was burning. He saw him totter writhing down to the water’s edge and flop in. Someone was trying to drag a limp man back by his armpits. Suval saw him fall with the wounded man on top of him, and struggle up, and struggle on. Desperate to save his friend’s life. Or desperate for an excuse to save his own.
Suval picked up his dented helmet with trembling hands, put it on, dumping dirt on his head and hardly noticing. He spent a moment trying to fasten the buckle on the chinstrap before he realised it was broken. He stared about, no idea where his spear had fallen. But there was a sword nearby, so he picked that up instead. He had no idea how to use a sword. He’d never even held one before.
Murezin had said they would never have to fight, only dress up for some vain man who wanted to say he had a Gurkish Legion, and they had laughed about it while they drank bad tea together. You could not find good tea anywhere in this damned country. Murezin had been wrong about the fighting. But Murezin had also fallen in the river when the bridge collapsed, along with several others. A couple had washed up drowned on the bank, but of Murezin there was no sign.
Suval had said it was just as well the Gurkish Legion would not have to fight because he had never fought i
n his life and was not Gurkish and, indeed, barely even spoke their language. But it could not be worse than living in the slums in Adua where no one would hire you if you had a dark face. He had been a scribe in Tazlik, where the sea breeze had cooled his clean little office. He had copied religious texts, mostly, with some accountancy work, which was all very boring but paid well. How he prayed now that he might live to be bored again. He hunched down at another ear-splitting crack somewhere over on the left. God, that was a different life, and had happened to a different man in a different world from this one. A world that was not exploding and on fire. A world that smelled of salt sea and blossom rather than smoke and terror.
“God help us,” he whispered again. There were a lot of men praying. A lot of men crying. A lot of men screaming. One sat silent, in the dappled shade of the trees, looking exceedingly surprised, blood streaming down his face. Suval knew him a little. He had been a tailor in Ul-Khatif. No sense of humour. But senses of humour were not at a premium here.
He turned over and shuffled through a slurry of fallen fruit to a twisted tree trunk where several other Kantics were sheltering, along with a Union man in the oddest uniform, half-green, half-brown. He realised as he got close that the man was dead, and the brown half was blood from his arm, which was utterly mangled. He pushed the corpse away with his shoe and wriggled into the place it had occupied, and did not even feel ashamed at his mistreatment of the dead.
He could ask God for forgiveness later.
Someone offered him a flask and he drank gratefully, handed it back. Smoke wafted across the river. Some men had rafted over and now they were huddled trembling on the far bank with one spear between them, one of them pale and bleeding, the raft come apart and its timbers drifting away. Now and again a body would float past, face up or face down, turning gently with the current.
Furious shouting behind them, the sound of terrified horses. They were driving wagons through the carnage. They had rolled one into the river already. Trying to make a bridge, so they could get across. And what? Fight? Madness. All madness. A man they had all thought dead gave a gurgling scream as a wagon’s wheel crunched over his leg.
The Trouble with Peace Page 51