by Ben Blake
*
It wasn’t that simple, of course.
Supper was a fish stew every bit as good as Kendra had promised, thick with fresh vegetables and washed down with wine from last summer’s vines. Raigal Tai had two mounded helpings, both of which he dispatched at speed while chattering about the old times in Tura d’Madai. Half an hour later Calesh was back down at the harbour, where torches had been set in every available bracket, and more wedged into cracks in walls or driven into the quayside. It was full dark now, but soldiers bustled all around, unloading armour and weapons, food crates and tight-bundled packs, then loading them onto carts to be taken through the town. More men swung the last of the horses off the ships in large slings, the animals snorting through their nostrils. Once ashore they whickered and pawed unhappily at the ground, vexed to find it still and steady for the first time in weeks. Calesh had taken a mount from the stables next to Raigal’s inn, picked out for him by Japh. It was too small for a warhorse, and he thought its best days were long behind it, but at least its hooves knew where the floor was.
A fair number of the dockside labourers worked alongside the Hand, eager to put in more hours at the end of the day in return for good coin. No doubt that was where the carts had come from. The Hand of the Lord always paid fair prices, unlike some of the other Orders, and because people knew it they were usually willing to help. Vendors were still out as well, and a few soldiers were sitting on the edge of one cart eating cold meat pies, while others passed baggage along a line of hands and into the back.
“At the estate north of the town, sir,” a soldier said when Calesh asked where he could find Amand. “Through the arch and up the main street a ways, then turn right just after the apothecary’s and follow the track.”
“Thank you,” Calesh said. He swung into the saddle.
“Sir?” The soldier’s face looked very young in the torchlight. “Is there really going to be a war?”
“There usually is,” Calesh said, “somewhere or other. As for here, we’ll just have to see, won’t we?”
There was no need for Calesh to find his own way to the camp. All he had to do was locate the apothecary’s, and then follow the tracks left by hundreds of horses and scores of wagons. He wasn’t entirely surprised when an escort of six mounted men fell into a loose half circle behind him, kite shields angled over their left legs and their faces concealed by helmets. There was danger here, just as much as there was in Tura d’Madai, and the men would know it. More importantly, Amand would know it, and that man never missed anything. Calesh was almost sure it was his aide who had told men off to escort him.
Parrien normally had a lively nightlife, mostly due to students who slipped out of the Academy for an ale or two in the taverns, but now the streets were quiet. A few people were out, but less than half the numbers Calesh would have expected. Citizens had a knack for scenting trouble, and the arrival of an army usually meant that. Folk caught sight of armour and hid their valuables and their daughters; usually, he thought with a wry chuckle, in that order.
The riders caught up to a pair of wagons jouncing up the track, and slowed to keep pace with them.
A sack fell off the wagon as it hit a rut, and split open to spill flour over his horse’s hooves before Calesh could move away. He controlled the animal with a muttered curse, then inhaled a lungful of flour and started to cough. His eyes teared. He had not expected his return to be like this.
But still, he knew he was home. It was a feeling as much as anything else, a sense of something inevitable that had been too long delayed. That was strange, because in eleven years in Tura d’Madai he’d never wanted to come home. There was nothing here for him. But now he was aware of tangible things, some of which he had almost forgotten about until now. He could smell the land, dark earth heavy with burgeoning crops, and hear the faint rustle of olive groves and trees on the hillsides. Tura d’Madai was almost wholly treeless, and those which did grow were mostly poor, scraggly things, dotted in ones and twos wherever a crack in the rock allowed a trickle of water to seep to the surface. There was the scent of water, too: only someone who had travelled the great arid wastes of the east was likely to know that water could be smelled. But it was there, wet earth and leaves slick with moisture, damp mulch huddled beneath a fallen tree, and the long, slow seepage beneath the surface. Calesh felt a sudden glad surge within him: he was home. He was home.
A squad of soldiers stood in the light of half a dozen lanterns, flanking the gateway to a meadow. They waved the cart through after only a cursory inspection, then caught sight of Calesh behind it and snapped off rapid salutes. He nodded impassively in return. Tonight a little laxness was understandable, and nobody was likely to attack them for a few days yet. He’d have to make sure it didn’t become a habit though. Even a small amount of sloppiness had a way of taking a heavy toll when it came time to fight again.
He left his horse with the guards and entered the camp, neat rows of tents made shadows by the night, and studded with the flickers of cook fires. Here the scents were of frying bacon and sausage, and the sounds of murmured conversation. Beyond the meadow Calesh could make out the blocky shape of a farmhouse, with a long dormitory running away to the right and a row of tall barns behind. Lights glowed in the windows. The officer here was awake then. Probably Amand had set him to work, and the other man was cursing him for it.
Soft chanting came from another pool of lantern light, and by squinting Calesh could make out a robed figure surrounded by the kneeling forms of men. Someone had found an Elite already, then, to guide them in their prayers. He started towards it without thinking, suddenly certain the Elite would turn out to be Luthien, holding his last ceremony before he belted on his sword once more.
It wasn’t Luthien, of course. This Elite was a woman, golden-haired and pretty, and Calesh had never seen her before. He ought to have expected that. He felt a moment of disappointment, but then he went forward and knelt among his men. The fellow on his left shifted along in the grass to make room for him. Calesh waited until he was sure he knew the place in the chant and then joined in, keeping his voice almost too soft to hear. Soldiers had an uncanny knack for knowing when an officer was among them, even in the dark, and just for a moment he didn’t want to be an officer. Just a man trying to catch a fleeting sense of his God, like the brush of a finger on his ravelled soul. The same as everyone else, he supposed.
The chanting ended. Afterwards the night seemed very quiet. A handful of cicadas chirruped in the grass, too foolish or too excited to realise the light had gone out of the day.
“I will not keep you,” the Elite said into the near silence. The darkness made her green robe seem almost black. “You men have fought the infidel in the name of God, and it’s not for me to tell you what to do, or how to be. You know Belial the Adversary made this world of matter, as he made your bodies of flesh, but it was God who made your souls. God knows all your names, my friends. Just remember, in the days to come, that the kingdom of God is not in Tura d’Madai, or even in Heaven beyond the Gate of Angels. It is in you, in your hearts, and there you may hear God speak. If you bring that forth, if you nourish your souls and spirits, they will save you.”
She lifted her hands, palms upward, and finished with the ritual words. “You have suffered me to speak, and this shall be your consolation. Go in love.”
The men rose, already beginning to talk among themselves before some of the nearer of them noticed Calesh. The murmur of their voices rose in pitch. Calesh affected not to notice; word that he had been there would spread soon enough, and to good cause. Soldiers liked to know their commander shared their lot, whether it be risk in battle or cold, unsatisfying rations after a hard day. Or communion with God. Not that their approval was why he had prayed.
Amand joined him by the first of the tents, his cadaverous figure taking on form as he stepped from the gloom.
“Seems she was in the farmhouse,” Amand said, inclining his head towards the Elite. “Coincidence,
I’m sure, but a happy one. The men haven’t had a proper service since we left Tura d’Madai.”
Calesh nodded. “And a soldier takes solace when he can, since it may always be his last. Any news for me?”
“We have a number of requests from townsfolk who want to join the Hand,” Amand said as they began to walk. “Seventeen, at the last count. Most of them are youngsters, of course, but several are older men. They heard why we’ve come home, and they want to help defend their land.”
“Naturally,” Calesh murmured.
“I can’t see any reason to turn them down,” Amand said in neutral tones.
Calesh could. The coming war was not likely to be long, unless something unexpected happened, but it would be bloody and brutal, and almost all the pain would be on the side of the Sarténi. Eleven thousand men, however well trained, couldn’t hope to stand against two or three times as many, despite what he’d said to Ando Gliss. Anyone who joined the Hand of the Lord now, or enlisted with the Margrave’s Guardsmen, would be placing himself at enormous risk with very little chance that it would count for anything.
Still, he had to admit that it might count. Half of soldiering was watching and waiting for events to turn in your favour, and there was never any telling when they would, or how. You just had to be ready when they did. Besides, every extra sword made that slim possibility of success a fraction larger. If the men who carried them knew more or less what they were doing, anyway, at least enough not to get in the way of the serious soldiers. Calesh hesitated.
“You can’t control everything,” Luthien had told him once, as they snatched a cold supper on a dusty roadside with soldiers pitching tents all around them. “You certainly can’t control the choices men make. Save your energy for the things you can control, Calesh, or you will gnaw yourself away with remorse and be no use to anyone at all.”
“Let them join,” Calesh said in the damp meadow, “as long as they look capable of holding a sword without stabbing themselves in the foot. Detail someone to find them weapons and gear, and someone to train them too.”
“At your orders,” Amand agreed, this time sounding pleased. His presence was much of the reason why Calesh had managed not to gnaw himself away, in fact; the gaunt man had a boundless supply of energy, never seemed to need sleep, and took care of endless minor details before Calesh could even think of them. His judgement was impeccable. Having him as second-in-command was like Calesh owning four pairs of arms.
“You wanted a message sent to Baruch Caraman in Mayence,” Amand went on. “With your agreement, I suggest we send one of the new men, and keep the experienced soldiers together.”
“Makes sense,” Calesh said. “Pick someone and tell him to be at Kissing the Moon an hour before dawn tomorrow. There’ll be a letter for him.”
“So early?”
“I want to outrun the news,” Calesh said. “Word will spread soon enough that all the Hand has come back from the East. There’s only a little time before that, and I want to use it.”
“Very good.” Amand frowned as a youthful soldier hurried across the grassy aisle between tents with a brimming bowl in his hands. The young man caught his glare and blanched, spilling water on the ground. “I’ve also picked out a squad to make the run south you wanted, across the mountains into Alinaur. Might I ask why it’s necessary?”
“Mercenaries,” Calesh told him. “Alinaur is thick with companies of soldiers for hire, from the ragged and unwashed to some more capable groups. If we can hire a few, it will even the odds a little.”
“Not much,” Amand muttered.
“We do what we can,” Calesh said with a shrug.
“And how will this be paid for?”
“Promissory notes from Tura d’Madai,” Calesh answered, “though I’d rather you didn’t bruit that about. They’re in the chest. Trust me.”
Amand’s gaze was sharp. “There are some companies of the Hand down in Alinaur as well.”
He sighed in mock dismay. “I can’t hide anything from you, can I? All right. Yes, the squad will also carry notes from me calling the Hand home. It’s only around two hundred men, but –”
“We do what we can,” Amand finished for him. “And you didn’t mention this because you don’t want the men to pin their hopes on aid from the south?”
“Right,” Calesh said.
“They’ll hear nothing from me.”
“Then I’m for bed,” Calesh said. “Wake me two hours after midnight to take over. You know where I’ll be.”
“I can manage,” Amand said.
A smile tugged at the corners of his mouth. “Don’t be stubborn. You can’t control everything, Amand, and if you try you’ll only gnaw yourself away to nothing. Just when I most need to rely on you, too. Wake me.”
“At your orders,” Amand acknowledged.
Calesh clasped hands with his aide and turned back towards the town, and the winding road back down to the harbour and Kissing the Moon. He didn’t feel like riding back, though in truth he was surprised at how weary he felt. He’d done little or nothing for weeks, really, ever since boarding the ship back at Jedat. Prowling up and down the ship for day after day hardly counted as work.
The real work was about to begin. Funny that it should come here, back in Sartene, where he had never thought to set his feet again. Calesh had joined the Hand of the Lord when his father died, six years after Calesh’s younger brother; his mother had been dead so long he could not remember her face. Just a recollection of auburn hair above him in the darkness, and the crooning of a lullaby, though now he had forgotten the words and only the tune remained. There had been nothing to keep him here, nowhere he wanted to live, now the ramshackle farmhouse was filled with nothing but memories and long-ago voices, ricocheting around the walls like trapped flies. So he had gone to the desert, crusading for a church in which he had no belief, perhaps seeking death and perhaps a new life. Luthien might know, or think he did, but Calesh did not.
He hadn’t found death, though Calesh knew how lucky he was to have survived those first terrible months. He had been a boy, callow and half-trained at best, thrown into the desperate struggle to beat off the Madai who prowled around the rocky hills, their footprints concealed almost at once by wind that swirled endlessly through the dust. Then more soldiers came to help, disembarking in their thousands at Jedat and the half-built harbour of Pilgrim Castle, and everything was all right. For a time.
It was ironic, Calesh thought, that he had once been so glad to see the banners of the Justified and the Glorified, the two great military Orders which fought in Tura d’Madai. Within a month he had lost his liking for them. Within a year he loathed them more, by far, than he did the Madai. The Servants of the Justification of God, who justified nothing they ever did, however cruel or mean-spirited, except by the words in the name of God. The Knights of the Glory of Heaven, who polished their armour and washed their grey cloaks and curried their horses, but were always the last to ride out to face the enemy and the first to ride away. Afraid to get blood on their cloaks was what the Hand said of them, and the Glorified knew it. Just as the Justified knew the Hand said they skulked forever in shadows, afraid to come out into the light.
The Hand of the Lord had not been making friends, Calesh thought, even before Gidren Field.
He had truly thought death was there for him that day; for all of them, in fact, all the men of God who stood on the side of the valley and watched the far bank of the river teem with warriors. There were so many that they kept marching into one another, banners bobbing and tangling as their bearers tried to find space to deploy. Sometimes a good general could take advantage of that confusion, but not today, and not against such numbers.
By then Calesh had been a captain, and had seen enough blood to last him. He knew what the size of that army meant. In a head-on clash of armies, the outcome nearly always depended on numbers, unless one side was significantly better than the other. The All-Church soldiers were better than the Madai, in gen
eral, but probably not by enough. The army swarming beyond the river Gidren would annihilate them where they stood.
And among that mass, Calesh could see one banner of rich green, with a palm tree flowering in the centre. The banner of the Nazir infantry, the best in the whole Madai army, and their captain Cammar a Amalik, whose name alone struck fear into the hearts of the God-fearing. It was said he walked on water, and could not be killed by the weapons of mortal men. He sharpened his sword on the rays of the rising sun, and no armour could withstand it. Watching the banner move towards the centre of the Madai line, untroubled by the jostling and the arguments all around, Calesh had almost believed it himself.
Well, he had survived, and even become a hero of sorts. He hadn’t realised his name was known in Sarténe, though. It was one thing to be admired by your own men, and grudgingly by at least some of the men of the other Orders, but it was quite another to discover that troubadours composed songs in your honour and the Margrave himself had a painting of your deeds on the wall of his reception chamber. Calesh found that unsettling, if he was honest, and there were practical concerns too. It had always been likely that the priests in the Basilica would quickly learn that the Hand had left Tura d’Madai, and come home. If Calesh’s fame was so great then he thought they must have been watching, and probably knew already. He wondered if it would affect what they did.
He walked down the cobbled street through Parrien, glad now of the lantern light that spilled from windows to illuminate his way. It was late, and there were fewer people in the streets than ever, but those who were stopped to point him out and murmured behind their hands. Hooves clopped on cobbles as the soldiers riding a discreet distance behind Calesh moved a little closer, alert to the possibility of danger, however remote it might be. But it didn’t stop the pointing, or the whispers. He wished Ando had never written that ridiculous song, or that it had been someone else who killed Cammar a Amalik, there in the wreck of Gidren Field.
The harbour was still torchlit when he reached Kissing the Moon. Figures moved to and fro in the darkness, little more than silhouettes thrown into relief by yellow glows. Wagons waited in a line for their turn to be loaded with supplies, their drivers leaning idly against the boards. Calesh nodded to them and turned towards the inn.
From inside the hum of conversation was loud, and suddenly Calesh didn’t want to face the soldiers who had lodged there with him, to take turns as his escort. There had been no refuge on the ship, and he deserved quiet for once, before events crowded in on him. He slipped around the rear of the building, by the sea wall, and went inside through the back door that draymen and labourers used. A pair of soldiers on guard there hesitated in mid-salute when he held a finger to his lips. He pulled off his boots, standing on one foot at a time: Kendra wouldn’t thank him for tracking meadow mud through her house, and if she didn’t mind, he certainly did. He left the boots just inside the porch. Maybe he could wash them off when Amand woke him.
He slipped inside, wincing as the door gave a loud groan even while he moved it with slow care so nobody in the common room would hear. An old memory made him want to laugh; he had crept home once after sharing a jug of apple brandy with his friends, aged about thirteen, and had made absolutely certain to slink into the farmhouse in total silence. He was sure he would have got away with it, except that he woke up next morning on the flagstones of the kitchen floor. Presumably he hadn’t made it as far as his bedroom. His father had already risen and gone out to work, but he’d tossed a blanket over his son. And left the pig bucket by Calesh’s head, and the shovel beside it.
Muffling his chuckles, he padded to the stairs and started up in the darkness. He remembered which door was his, and needed no candle to see his way. The first few stairs creaked outrageously under his weight, and abandoning stealth for speed he hurried up the rest and along the corridor. Perhaps the chatter in the common room would hide the noise, but he wanted to take no chances. He opened his door, went inside and closed it, all in one movement.
“Now you’re mine,” Farajalla said, “for a few hours.”
She rose from her seat at the table, where a lamp stood by a sheaf of papers. The curtains were drawn, shrouding the room in darkness except for that spill of light. She was wearing a simple robe of pale blue, cinched with a belt of filigreed silver in a pattern of interlocking crosses, and then she drew the linen down over her shoulders and it was hard to breathe. Her hair was damp and he could smell her scent, the rose water she used for bathing, and a faint hint of cinnamon. The world had changed in one step, or else was not the same world as the one outside this bedroom door.
He was home.
“I’m always yours,” he said.
She draped her arms around his neck. “On the ship this morning, you said this was a wonderful place to raise a child.” Her lips touched his, very gently. “Let’s try, my love.”
Four
Mayence
Five hundred years before, it had been one of countless little villages scattered through the rocky hills north of the mountains, the area known by locals as the Aiguille, in air heavy with lavender and olives and rosemary. Then the king of Gallene chose it for the site of a border fort, to guard against the outlaw bands hidden in their mountain fastnesses, and Mayence began to grow.
It was a sizeable town two centuries later, when the Tei-jo warriors of Jaidi swarmed out of the desert with their curved, jewelled blades to begin the conquest of Alinaur, south of the Raima Mountains. It wasn’t long, a generation perhaps, before they had taken almost everything up to the peaks, and seemed poised to cross them and fall on Sarténe. It was said they never lost. Only a few outposts remained of Alinaur, soldiers penned in mountain fortresses even the Jaidi couldn’t capture, or felt they could safely ignore. Refugees fleeing the war came to Mayence along the new road that wound out of the peaks, bringing new skills in metalwork and masonry and tanning, and a thousand other things besides. Artisans in the burgeoning city began to learn techniques never known before, or else forgotten for so long that nobody remembered them at all.
Men came the other way too, soldiers from Gallene and beyond, every land between the sea and the steppe. Some came from Rheven in the far north, big bearded men with heavy axes and round shields, who prayed to strange pagan gods as often as they went to a true chapel. But they were ready to protect the devout from the heathens pressing against the mountains, which was all that mattered in those days. Even the All-Church gathered fighting men, and sent them to guard against the new threat from the south.
There were fewer than a thousand of those, captured mercenaries and criminals as often as not, given a chance at respectability if they wore the white and gold tabard of the Church and risked their lives to defend it. Some promptly fled into the mountains to join the outlaw bands, and died there: the Jaidi were not tolerant of brigands. Those who remained became the first soldiers sworn to the All-Church itself, owing loyalty to no land or king, but only to the Hierarch. It was that seed which would one day give rise to the flowering of the Crusades to Tura d’Madai. Those first Church-sworn men became the Order of the Basilica. Others, sneeringly, called them the Shavelings.
But the Jaidi did not come. People gathered in the streets to wonder why, as one summer passed and then another, with no sign of the expected assault. Perhaps the Jaidi were exhausted by their efforts in Alinaur, or perhaps they had simply taken enough territory and desired no more. It was only later that Mayence learned of a schism among the Jaidi, an argument over some obscure point of religious dogma concerning the treatment of people in the conquered lands who did not share their faith. The invincible warriors had stopped their advance and fallen to killing each other instead. It was all rather peculiar, the chatterers agreed, but what could one expect from heathens?
For whatever reason, the Jaidi who came across the mountains were merchants, rather than the Tei-jo who had taken Alinaur. Mayence found itself the centre of a new, bustling trade, sending pepper, spices and silk north, bring
ing furs, amber and wheat to sell in the south. Figs and dates appeared in the markets, and nets of gutted herring from faraway seas. The town became a city, one in which different cultures mixed, if not always easily. For every chapel there was a Jaidi temple, topped with a brightly-painted onion dome. Minarets carved with date trees and palm fronds sprang up alongside older, square-cut towers, and pointed church steeples. The new Hall of Voices, where the city fathers met in debate, topped its stylishly traditional Galleni portico with a Jaidi dome.
Then the All-Church summoned warriors in the name of Heaven, to retake Alinaur for the glory of God.
Soldiers poured into Mayence, in military Orders formed in their homelands. The Servants of the Justification of God, commonly called Justified, wearing a white cross set against red. The Knights of the Glory of Heaven, or Glorified, with a red cross against a winter skyline. From the All-Church came the Order of the Basilica, the Shavelings, still clothed in white with a cross of gold. Sarténe formed its own order, based in Mayence, called simply the Hand of the Lord. They carried shields divided into halves of black and white, with a circle in the centre in which the colours were reversed. Good and evil, at war in the world.
There was no cross.
Most of Alinaur fell to the Orders, in the forty years that followed. The Jaidi had grown plump on the fruits of their conquest, as victors so often do, and after their years of bickering could no longer unite. Supplies and fresh troops came through Mayence on their way south, while wounded soldiers and booty passed the other way. Denied safe passage across Alinaur, Jaidi merchants from the distant deserts began to sail north instead, and the port of Parrien grew to accommodate them. The Margrave used some of his wealth to found an Academy in the town, in imitation of the universities common in ancient times; the All-Church had ordered them closed, centuries before, for fear they would produce heretics and unbelievers. After that the traders brought scrolls and books to sell alongside their spices. Jaidi scholars took posts among the staff. There were philosophers from Caileve in the east, mathematicians from Temujin on the distant steppes, theologians from Gallene and Boromil. The library was extended, then extended again.
Scholars were invited to banquets in noble houses, serenaded by musicians and poets who travelled from court to court. After a time the musicians began to be invited in their own right. Nobles elsewhere professed disdain for such mingling with commoners, but that hardly mattered, for as time passed Sarténe owed ever less fealty to Gallene. Instead she grew ever more tightly linked to the new, unofficial capital: Mayence. And gradually, in the midst of so much change, a new kind of cleric began to appear, teaching that God had created men’s souls but Belial, the shadowy Adversary, was responsible for physical matter, including men’s bodies. The forces of light and darkness were matched, and the balance was fought in men’s hearts. To be truly devout, one must abandon certain worldly things – meat, alcohol, physical love – and accept the Consolation of spirit in their place, becoming Elite. Material things could not be holy in themselves, not even so-called sacred ground, however consecrated. Only the soul could be divine.
And if this was so then Adjai, the Saviour at the heart of the All-Church’s faith, being clothed in tainted matter, in flesh, could not have been divine. Much less the son of God.
All-Church priests in Sarténe saw what was happening, but did nothing about it. They took their bribes and sold services to those with money to pay, and hoped the Basilica would not look too closely in their direction. Only a few sent messages to the Bishops, warning of this new cult that stole their worshippers and refused to accept the salvation of the God-Son. Too few to be taken seriously. Congregations fell; pews were empty even during the main services. Finally, with Church income falling across the province and a trickle of rumour becoming a flood, someone took the evidence to the Hierarch himself. The war in Tura d’Madai still absorbed most of the Basilica’s time and attention, but an emissary was spared to go to Sarténe and find out more. Six months later he was on his way back to the Basilica with his findings when he was murdered on the banks of the river Rielle, by a man in a broad-brimmed hat and cracked, heel-worn boots.