Bloodheir

II

Aewult nan Haig’s army was a lethargic thing. It woke out of a cold night slowly, discouraged by the gloomy sky and the sharp-edged wind that was gusting off the sea and carrying tiny, hard flakes of snow. Long after dawn, when they should have been formed into columns or already on the move, men were still clustered around fires, arguing over trifles or silently eating gruel. The whole army stank of resentment and reluctance.

The invisible sun climbed higher. The snow grew heavier and cast a white dusting over the town, the army’s camp and the road north. At last, with abundant ill humour, the host began to move. They trudged in their thousands around and through Kolglas, choking every street and farmland path, spilling into the fringes of the forest.

Taim Narran was posted a little way north of the town, five hundred of his men flanking the road. He sat astride his horse and watched Aewult’s army pass. He saw some companies he would count as ready for battle: straight-backed spearmen who marched behind a Vaymouth banner; Taral-Haig riders, their mounts clad in stiff hide bards; a loose crowd of skirmishers from the Nar Vay shore, exuding a murderous enthusiasm. Most, though, appeared short on both vigour and spirit. Heads hung low, feet dragged. Few had clothing fit for the wintry conditions. Taim could see canvas wrapped around boots that were too thin now that snow was falling. Many men had removed their helmets and replaced them with warmer, softer caps. The warriors of the Kilkry Blood would have done much to strengthen and fortify this host, Taim reflected, if Aewult had permitted them to gather and march.

Aewult nan Haig and his Palace Shield were like a glittering precious stone set in the tawdry sludge of his army. The shieldmen had evidently been polishing their breastplates. Aewult’s magnificent horse — a huge beast — had its mane plaited, and its head encased with moulded, hinged silver armour. Some of the shieldmen were beating their drums, though the snow and wind conspired to thin out the sound and rob it of its force.

The Bloodheir peeled away from the column and came cantering up to Taim’s position. His Shield followed and drew to a halt in a long, bright line.

“Enough to do what needs to be done,” Aewult said with a flourish of his arm. It was not a question.

“I hope so, lord,” Taim said.

“You’re not to move from this position, whatever happens. I’ll send word to you if your company is needed. If my messengers do not find you here, it will count against you when all this is done.”

“Of course,” Taim said tightly. “I will be here until I am commanded otherwise. Or until night falls.”

“Ha!” The Bloodheir turned his horse hard about. “This’ll be done long before nightfall. You’ll see.”

“Dusk comes early at this time of year,” Taim murmured, but Aewult was already gone.

As the snow grew heavier, Taim had his men set up tents and move most of the horses into the fringes of the forest for shelter. Fires were lit and pots of broth set over them. A band of Haig warriors detached themselves from the passing army and demanded food and a place by one of the fires. By the time Taim got there and ordered them away, fists were being clenched and insults thrown. They were not the only ones to split away from the great, slow column. A dozen or more sick-looking men sat down by the side of the road and huddled there, despondent and apathetic, while the snow settled all around them.

Taim saw other small groups simply turn around and head back down the road towards Kolglas, like stubborn fish swimming against the current. One such band of reluctant warriors — men from the far west of Ayth-Haig to judge by their accents, and better than half-drunk to judge by their loudness — was intercepted by a harassed-looking captain in the midst of the column, and commanded to resume the march. There were threats, and shouting, and eventually violence. Two men were dead and others wounded before the mutinous company was compelled to obedience. Taim watched all this with a cold sense of trepidation settling over his heart.

The falling snow thinned. The sky lightened a fraction, the wind eased and fluttered back and forth as if unsure of its destination. Taim had dismounted and was sharing a loaf of bread with some of his men. He glanced up, and thought for one moment that he even glimpsed the globe of the sun, smeared through the clouds. It had begun its descent towards the horizon now; half the day was gone. The swirling wind was carrying a faint hint of sound on it. All around, men were waving at their companions to silence them, angling their heads to try to catch whatever message the erratic wind sought to deliver. Taim, like all of them, recognised the sound well enough. It was a formless thing, but he knew of what it was made: feet and hoofs, blades and cries, the clatter of shields and press of bodies. Somewhere far up the road, the head of Aewult’s army had found the battle it sought.

The clouds soon thickened and reasserted their grip. The world was returned to a kind of twilight gloom. The wind swung back into the west and drove fresh snow in off the sea. Taim led his horse into the shelter of a clump of bushes and waited there, in silence, with a knot of his most experienced warriors. They watched, without surprise, as the flow of the mighty Haig army along the road faltered and fragmented. Fewer and fewer warriors were trudging up from Kolglas, and ever more of those who did were stopping and flinging themselves down, pulling cloaks over their heads and curling in their protection like soft boulders. Wagons had got stuck in the roadside ditch. The tide of the army slackened. For a short time, there was nothing more than a scattering of men, disorganised and unmoving, strung out along the road. Then the tide was ebbing and, though Taim had heard no command given, men were no longer marching out from Kolglas but back towards it.

Soon after that, the messenger came to Taim: a young man, with blood on his face and a feverish urgency in his eyes. He struggled to control his panting and foaming horse as he shouted his message.

“You’re to bring every man you have to the Bloodheir. At once, without delay.”

Taim swung up onto his horse and set about unbuckling his shield from where it lay across his back.

“Where is the Bloodheir?” he asked. Already, his men were hurrying to ready themselves.

“Glasbridge! Make for Glasbridge!” The messenger sounded almost angry, though perhaps it was only the backwash of fear. “You’ll find the Bloodheir that way.”

Taim grimaced up at the waves of snow tumbling down. “I’ll be lucky to find him anywhere,” he muttered.

“Every man you have!” the messenger cried as he spun away and was carried off by his distressed mount.

“Three hundred,” Taim shouted after him, then as much to himself as anyone: “No more. I’ll not blindly lead all the strength my Blood has left into this storm.”

The wind died as they rode. Fat, heavy snowflakes thronged the air like congealed fragments of cloud. Hundreds upon hundreds of warriors, some exhausted, some wounded, some merely lost, crowded the road. It was as Taim and others had told Aewult nan Haig: this would be snowfall enough to still the world, to confound all the intents and desires of men. Even the rocky shoreline was acquiring a white dusting in the space between each set of waves. The sea receded into obscurity as ever more dense curtains of snow rolled in from the west. The mills and cottages on the landward side of the road faded behind wintry veils. It was, Taim kept thinking as he led his men on along the coast, weather fit for disaster. With every pace his horse took, the road was disappearing beneath its hoofs.

There were corpses — and perhaps the living too, for it was not always easy to tell the difference — here and there along the roadside: black bundles heaped up and now coated with white. Arrows, bolts and broken spears were scattered around, and a few dead horses. Once, without warning, a shower of arrows came skimming out of the snowstorm. There was no way of telling their source. A couple of men cried out, horses screamed. A few riders set off in search of the unseen archers but Taim called them back.

They came to a great swathe of the dead. Bodies were piled up along the line of a ditch and bank — now little more than great white undulations in the earth — that had been thrown across the road. The wounded were crawling around, clambering over their fallen comrades. Some were weeping, some crying out for help. One man, his left arm broken and torn, was stumbling around stabbing feebly, one-handed, with his spear. Perhaps he was killing the enemy wounded; perhaps he was killing the already dead. A score or more of injured Haig men had gathered together, huddling in the ditch, watching one another die.

“Where is the Bloodheir?” Taim shouted down at them.

They looked up at him, and he saw shock, fear, emptiness in their faces.

“Have you a healer?” one of them asked him. “We need a healer.”

“Tell me where the Bloodheir is first,” he insisted.

They did not know, but Taim left three of his men to give them what aid they could, and get those who would live back to Kolglas. He rode up and over the bank. Beyond, the ground as far as he could see was strewn with bodies. Hundreds had fallen here, warriors of the Black Road and the True Bloods alike, but the battle had moved on. It was somewhere out there, in the grey-white clouds of snow. Taim took his men onwards in search of it.

They were attacked soon after. Seventy or eighty assailants came howling out of a scrawny stand of trees. Not many of them had any armour, or even proper weapons. Fearless, they swept down on Taim’s column, brandishing sickles and axes, cudgels and long knives. Many stumbled and fell in the snowdrifts; many others fell as soon as they came within reach of the Lannis men. Enough closed up to turn a short stretch of the road into a brutal little battle. Taim kept his horse on a short rein. He worked methodically, hacking down one attacker after another. It was soon over.

The further up the coast road they went, the more uneasy Taim became. He heard bursts of battle from further inland, never close or clear enough to tempt him towards them. Aewult’s great army had been engulfed and dismembered by the snowstorm. A frightened band of Haig warriors came streaming down the road from the direction of Glasbridge. Many of them were wounded, others had cast aside their weapons. As they barged their way past, Taim leaned down and seized one of them by the collar.

“What’s happening?” he demanded of the man. “Where’s the Bloodheir?”

“Who knows?” the warrior cried, and tore himself free.

More figures were rushing down the buried road in the footsteps of the fleeing Haig company. These were different, though: matted hair, hide jackets adorned with fragments of bone and ivory, long spears with extravagantly barbed points. Tarbains. Taim had fought them once or twice in his youth, when he was scouting into and beyond the Vale of Stones from Tanwrye. He knew how best to meet them. He swung his sword above his head and charged the tribesmen, crying out as he went. His men followed. The Tarbains halted. Some of them launched spears that arced down into the mass of horsemen. Breaks and contortions in the rolling thunder of hoofs told Taim that more than one of the missiles found its mark, but the Tarbains were not inclined to test their skills against mounted men. The whole ragged band of them scattered from the line of the road, streaming inland over a flat, blank white field.

Taim reined in his mount at once, and a single shouted command was enough to call back his warriors. There was no point in wasting time and the horses’ strength trying to run down Tarbains in deep snow. They had a more important purpose here. Taim allowed himself to wonder only briefly how he was supposed to fulfil that purpose, if he could not even find Aewult nan Haig. There was nothing to do put press on down the gullet of this great wintry beast.

The air was now so thick with snow that sight failed beyond two score paces. Taim’s world had collapsed to this strange, enclosed white space, beyond which strange sounds — indistinct but terrible — rose and fell. He turned his head this way and that, trying to make some sense of what he heard, but the same blurred cacophony seemed to lie all around beyond the curtain of falling snow. He glimpsed figures and raised his sword; they were gone at once, as if they had been mere momentary darkenings in the air’s featureless expanse.

His men were clustered together behind him. Their silence betrayed their apprehension. Taim peered this way and that. Even the course of the road ahead was lost, hidden beneath a white blanket. Anger — a clenched ire born out of anxiety — knotted his stomach. It was impossible to fight like this, half blind and half deaf. He had not led the survivors of Gryvan’s war against Igryn oc Dargannan-Haig all the way here just to throw their lives away.

He was on the point of turning his company back when a surge of sound reached him, holding its shape in his ear long enough for him to fix its direction. There was battle somewhere close ahead. He urged his horse forwards, gesturing for the others to keep pace with him. And soon enough there was a trail they could follow: corpses; a broad field where the snow and earth and blood had been churned into a filthy, trampled mess; and voices, screaming and shouting above the ringing of blades and shields. There was a heaving mass of figures. It was a formless thing, a dark, turbulent thundercloud pressed down by the weight of tumbling snow. Amidst it, Taim glimpsed momentary flashes of armour, a torn banner swaying back and forth like the mast of a tempest-shaken ship. It was Aewult’s Palace Shield, beset. And where his Shield was, the Bloodheir must be.

“Here you are,” Taim cried over his shoulder to his men. He rattled his sword against the face of his shield. “Here’s battle for you! Here’s the Black Road, that killed your Thane and burned your homes!”

The charge was reckless and wild, across treacherous ground strewn with the dead, through the blizzard. There was no time to tell friend from foe, only to stab and slash as they crashed into the throng of warriors. Taim’s horse reared and stamped, lunged on into the fray. Men and women went down before it. Taim swung and his blade sent someone’s helmet spinning away. A spear lanced in across the front of his hips. He hacked down on the shaft and cracked it. His shield shook, and he saw a crossbow bolt fixed there. Another spear punched into his horse’s shoulder and stayed there for a moment, dragged from its wielder’s hands. It fell away as the horse staggered, sinking, before surging up and on again. Someone — a woman — was running past, fleeing perhaps. Taim cut at the back of her neck.

He could see the Palace Shield, surrounded by a thick press of Black Road warriors. He cut his way towards them, trusting his men to follow. His horse stumbled and its forequarters plunged down. It twisted onto its side, throwing Taim. The snow was deep and it smacked, wet and cold, into his face. It filled his mouth and clung to his face. His body acted without the need for thought. He kept hold of his sword, rolled, and then he was on his feet, spitting snow, in time to turn the first spear thrust aside with his shield. Another came in from his flank, but he was already stepping back and out of its path. A backhanded swordstroke hit the spearman on the shoulder and knocked him down. In the empty, still part of his mind that took over at such moments, Taim registered his own warriors surging past, saw the mounted figure of Aewult nan Haig up ahead. He heard his horse struggling to rise behind him, spun around and flung a leg across the saddle. It bore him up.

The Lannis-Haig men broke through to what remained of Aewult’s Palace Shield. Many of the shieldmen were already dead, crumpled in the snow, their breastplates smeared with dirt and blood. The survivors were fighting desperately to keep the teeming masses of the Black Road from their master.

At first Taim was not certain whether Aewult recognised him. The Bloodheir’s eyes were wild.

“Sire, come away,” Taim shouted. His horse was tossing its head, shaking. He could not tell how badly it was injured; how much longer he had before it fell again.

“We can’t keep you safe here,” Taim cried. “There’s already fighting far behind us. We must fall back to Kolglas.”

Taim saw such loathing, such visceral hatred, in Aewult’s face then that he feared the Bloodheir was about to attack him. Instead, Aewult wheeled his massive horse and made for safety. Most of his Palace Shield broke away and followed in his wake, barging through the ranks of Taim’s men. A few of the huge armour-clad warriors were too entangled in the fray to escape so easily. Even as Taim watched, one of them went down, a long-handled axe hooking his neck and hauling him backwards out of his saddle.

Aewult was instantly out of sight, vanished into the white void that surrounded them. Taim swept snowflakes from his brow with the back of his sword hand. There was nothing to be gained by fighting on here. The Black Road warriors were too numerous, and dozens of them were already spilling out over the snowfield in pursuit of the Bloodheir.

“With me, Lannis!” Taim cried, and drove his horse after Aewult.

One of his own men crashed to the ground in a spray of snow and earth. Taim turned to help him, but was too late. Half a dozen Black Roaders fell upon the Lannis man like hounds on a stricken boar. Taim battered them aside and killed one with a single blow to his head. The dead rider’s horse struggled to its feet and hobbled a few paces before slumping down again.

“Inkallim!” Taim heard someone shouting.

He looked. The last of the Bloodheir’s Palace Shield to have remained behind was unmounted, standing with his feet widely spaced and both hands on the hilt of his upraised sword. It was a stupid pose, Taim though. Either the man was ill-trained, or his mind had been clouded by shock or fear. Blinking through the falling snow, Taim saw the mass of the enemy back away. Inexplicably, a space opened, a moment of silence stretched itself out. Then a figure was coming, out of the crowd, out of the snow: a tall, rangy woman with hair as black as ink tied tightly back. She came with long strides. Snowflakes spun about her, tumbling in her wake. She wore a rigid dark cuirass of hard leather. Two swords were sheathed on her back. As she came up to the shieldman she reached back over her shoulders and swept the blades free.

Taim was held, gripped by this most awful of sights: a fell raven of the Battle, come like the very animating spirit of this gelid killing ground to mark his flight. Aewult’s abandoned shieldman steadied himself, prepared to meet this new opponent. He was huge, at least a head taller than her, and as broad-shouldered as she was lean. His sword snapped down, beginning its killing arc. And then there was only an instant’s blurred movement and the Inkallim was beyond him. She was lowering her twin blades, and she was staring at Taim. Behind her, the shieldman toppled.

Light blades, one a fraction shorter than the other, the old, appraising part of Taim’s mind noted. Single-edged, they had to be wickedly sharp to fell a man in such a way. And she must be a rare talent to wield them with such precision: one of those blades had opened the shieldman’s throat as it passed. Taim felt a cold challenge in the gaze that the woman fixed on him. Once, when he had been younger, it might have lit an answering anger in him; he might have sprung forwards to meet that challenge, whether it was imagined or real. Not now, though. He hauled his horse around and kicked it into a gallop.

The Lannis-Haig riders pounded through the ever-deepening snow. It was chaotic, dangerous. They could not see what lay before them, nor what came after them. They rode down several of the Black Roaders who were pursuing Aewult, but of the Bloodheir and his surviving Palace Shield there was no sign. As he charged along, forcing his way to the head of his straggling company, Taim locked his mind onto a single, sharp idea. He had done what he could for Aewult, discharged his duty; now all he cared about was bringing as many of his men as possible back to Kolglas. Whatever battles were still being fought out in the snowstorm, there would be no resolution. Friend and foe alike were blind, lost. The most anyone could hope for on this bloody, white day was to live, and see tomorrow.

He slowed his men to a walk, reordered them into a column. Their losses were not desperate, but enough to pain him; enough to hollow him out a little with premonitions of guilt, of sleeplessness. Then, allowing, just briefly, his head to hang down and his eyes to close, he grasped for the first time the full extent of his heart-sick weariness. He was, in a way that did not befit the highest warrior of his Blood, tired to his very bones of leading men to their deaths. He had thought it would be easier now that he faced the Black Road, a true and lasting enemy of his Blood, but it seemed even that salve for his uneasy heart was inadequate.

Taim lifted his head once more. A fresh wind was picking up, coming in off the estuary and swirling the snowflakes in a fiercer dance. The cold was numbing his face. He could hear the sea on the rocky shore off to his right, and that was enough for him to cling to. So long as they kept moving, and kept that sound close upon their flank, Kolglas was within reach. He laid a hand on his horse’s neck, and could feel the unsteadiness of its stride, the faltering of its muscles. It did not have long left, he thought.

They had to fight more than once. The blizzard had taken the battle and twisted it, crumbled it into the chaos of a hundred grim, brutal little struggles. Small bands of warriors stumbled back and forth through the blinding storm, flailing about in knee-deep snowdrifts, crashing up against one another, killing, dying. When Taim led his dwindling company back to the ditch and dyke that they had found covered with the dead and wounded on their journey out, fresh slaughter was being done there. New layers of corpses were being laid down over those — already snow-covered — that had fallen earlier.

Taim and his men cut their way through. He lashed out all around him, in a kind of surfeited stupor. Again and again he felt his sword jarring in his hand as it met flesh, armour or shield, but he hardly knew whether he struck friend or enemy. He constantly expected his horse to die beneath him, to pitch him down into the dark red slush. Somehow, it did not, and it bore him through the battle, up over the bund and across the ditch beyond. And then there was no one left to oppose them. There was only the snowstorm, and the long march back to Kolglas, and the hundreds or thousands of others, stunned and exhausted, lost and empty-eyed, who were trudging back in that same direction through the last dwindling light of the day.

At last there came a time when Taim was in a stable in Kolglas, and the blizzard was outside, beyond wooden walls, and he was hauling his saddle from his horse’s back with aching arms. The great animal shook. He went to fetch water and feed for it, but when he returned it had collapsed. So as night fell and the snow kept spinning down out of the darkness, he sent the stablehands away and stood in the light of a guttering oil lamp and watched his horse die there on the straw.