The Heretic Kings

TWENTY

They were an unlikely looking crowd, Corfe had to admit to himself. They had never been taught to form ranks, present arms or stand at attention and they milled about in an amorphous mob, as unmilitary a formation as could be imagined.

They were clad in bruised, holed and rusty Merduk armour of every shape and type, but mostly they had picked out the war harness of the Ferinai, the heavy cuirassiers of the east, as it was the best quality. And perhaps it appealed to some savage sensibility within them, for it was the armour of horsemen and these men had once been horsemen. Their fathers and grandfathers had raided the coastal settlements of the Torunnans time out of mind, swooping out of the Cimbric foothills on their rangy black horses-horses which were the product of secret studs high in isolated valleys. Cavalry was what these men ought to be. Horse-soldiers. But Corfe could no more provide them with horses than he could with wings, so they must fight afoot in their outlandish armour.

Armour which had been rendered even more strange-looking by the liberal addition of red paint. The tribesmen seemed as happy as finger-painting children as they splashed it over their armour and hurled it at each other in gore-like gobbets. A crowd had gathered to watch, black-clad Torunnan soldiers lounging in the Quartermaster’s yard and laughing fit to split their sides at the dressing up of the savages from the mountains, the ex-galley slaves.

As soon as the first Torunnan laughs were heard, however, the tribesmen went as silent as crags. A tulwar was scraped out of its threadbare scabbard and Corfe had to step in to prevent a fight which would quickly have turned into a full-scale battle. He called upon Marsch to calm his fellow tribesmen down and the hulking savage harangued his comrades in their own tongue. He was a frightening figure: somehow he had found a Merduk officer’s helm which was decorated with a pair of back-sweeping horns and a beak-like nose-guard. Lathered with red paint, he looked like the apotheosis of some primitive god of slaughter come looking for acolytes.

“Someone to see you, sir,” Ensign Ebro told Corfe as the latter doffed his heavy Merduk helm and wiped the sweat from his face. Ebro also wore the foreign harness, and he looked acutely uncomfortable in it.

“Who is it?” Corfe snapped, squeezing the acrid sweat from his eyes.

“Someone who has tasted gunsmoke with you, Colonel,” another, familiar voice said. Corfe spun to find Andruw there, holding out a hand and grinning. He shouted aloud and pumped the proffered hand up and down. “Andruw! What in the hell are you doing here?”

“I ask myself the same question: what have I done to deserve this? But be that as it may, it would seem that I am to be your adjutant. For what misdeed I know not.”

The pair of them laughed together while Ebro stood stiff and forgotten. Corfe mustered his manners.

“Ensign Ebro, permit me to introduce. . what rank have they showered upon you, Andruw?”

“Haptman, for my sins.”

“There you are. Haptman Andruw Cear-Adurhal, late of the artillery, who commanded the Barbican Batteries of Ormann Dyke.”

Ebro glanced at Andruw with rather more respect, and bowed. “I am honoured.”

“Likewise.”

“But what are you doing away from the Dyke?” Corfe asked Andruw. “I thought they’d need every gunner they could lay their hands on up there.”

“I was sent to Torunn with dispatches. You have been seeking officers, I hear, driving the muster clerks mad with your enquiries. Apparently they decided that by seconding me to your command they could shut you up.”

“And how goes it at the Dyke? Can they spare you?”

Andruw’s bright humour faded a little. “They are short of everything, Corfe. Martellus is half out of his mind with worry, though as always he hides it well. We have had no reinforcements to replace our losses, no resupply for weeks. We are a forgotten army.”

Andruw’s gaze flicked to the weirdly garbed savages of Corfe’s command as he spoke. Corfe noticed the look and said wryly: “And we are the army they would like to forget.”

There was a pause. Finally Andruw asked: “Have you had your orders yet? Whither are we bound with our garish warrior band?”

“South,” Corfe told him, disgust seeping into his voice. “I had best warn you now, Andruw, that the King expects us to end in some kind of debacle, fighting these rebels in the south. We are of small account in his plans.”

“Hence the quaint war harness.”

“It’s all they would let me have.”

Andruw forced a grin. “What is it they say? The longer the odds, the greater the glory. We proved that at Ormann Dyke, Corfe. We’ll do it again, by Ramusio’s beard.”

Later that afternoon, Corfe reported to the Staff Headquarters for the detailed orders that were to send his command into its first battle. The place was busy with sashed officers and bustling aides. Couriers were coming and going and the King was closeted in conference with his senior advisors. No one seemed to recall any orders for Colonel Cear-Inaf and his command, and it was a maddening half-hour before a clerk finally found them. One unsealed roll of parchment with a scrawling, illegible signature at the bottom and a hasty impression of the Royal signet in a cracked blob of scarlet wax. It was in the stilted language of military orders not written in the field.

You are hereby directed and obliged to take the troops under your command south to the town of Hedeby on the Kardian Sea, and there engage the retainers of the traitor Duke Ordinac in open battle, destroying them and restoring their master’s fiefs to their rightful allegiance. You will march with due haste and prudence, and on accomplishing your mission you will occupy the town of Hedeby and await further orders.

By command of the Torunnan war staff, for His Highness King Lofantyr.

That was all. No mention of supporting troops, timings, supplies, the hundred and one pieces of information which any military enterprise needed to function smoothly. Not even an estimate of the enemy’s numbers or composition. Corfe crumpled the order into a ball and thrust it inside his breastplate. His look wiped the sniggers off the clerks’ faces. No doubt they had heard about his strange soldiers and their stranger armour.

“I acknowledge receipt of my orders,” he said, his voice as cold as a winter peak. “Please inform the staff that my command will march at daybreak.”

He turned to go, and one of the clerks let him get as far as the door before saying: “Sir-Colonel? Another message for you here. Not part of your orders, you understand. It was brought this afternoon by a lady-in-waiting.”

He collected this second message without a word and left with it bunched in his fist. As he closed the door he heard the buzz of the clerks’ talk and laughter, and his face gnarled into a grimace of fury.

The note was from the Queen Dowager requesting his presence in her chambers this evening at the eighth hour. So he must dance attendance upon a scheming woman whilst he was preparing to take an untried and ill-equipped command into the field. His first independent command. Dear God!

Better if I had died at Aekir, he thought. With honour and in comradeship with my countrymen. My Heria would have met me in the Saint’s company and we would have shared eternity together.

Oh, dear God.

On an impulse, he veered away from the path back to the barracks where his men were stationed. He felt worn and tired, as if every step was a fight against something. He was too weary of the struggle to continue.

He wandered through the city for a while with no clear aim in mind, but something in him must have known whither he was bound for he found himself at the Abbey of the Orders as it was called, though once it had been the headquarters of the Inceptine Order alone. But that was before Macrobius had come into the city, and the black-clad Ravens had taken wing for Charibon rather than kiss the ring of a man they saw as an impostor, a heresiarch. This was now the palace of the High Pontiff, or one of them.

Corfe was admitted by a novice Antillian with white hood and dun habit. When asked his business he replied that he was here to see the Pontiff. The Antillian scurried away.

An older monk of the same order popped out of a nearby doorway soon after. He was a tall, lean man with a sharp little beard and dirty bare feet slapping under his habit.

“I am told you wish to see the Pontiff,” he said, politely enough. “Might I ask your business with him, soldier?”

Of course. Corfe could not expect to see the head of the Church on demand. Much water had flowed under many bridges since he and Macrobius had shared a turnip on the nightmarish retreat from Aekir. Macrobius had become one of the figureheads of the world since then.

“My name is Corfe,” he said. “If you tell His Holiness that Corfe is here, he will see me, I am sure.”

The monk looked both taken aback and amused. “I will see what I can do,” he said. “Wait here.” And off he went.

Corfe was left just within the gate of the abbey, kicking his heels like a beggar awaiting charity. A dull anger grew in him, a tired resentment that was becoming a familiar feeling.

The monk came back accompanied by an Inceptine, a plump, well-robed figure who must have stayed to take his chances with this new Pontiff when his fellows flew the coop. He had a mouth like a moist rose and his fleshy nose overhung it. His eyes were deep-set and dark-ringed. The face of a debauchee, Corfe thought sourly.

“His Holiness is too busy at the moment to see anyone,” the Inceptine said. “I am Monsignor Alembord, head of the Pontifical household. If you have any petitions you wish to place before the Holy Father then you can place them through me. Now, what is your business?”

Corfe remembered a blind old man whose empty eye-sockets had been full of mud. A man whose life he had saved at risk to his own. He remembered sheltering under a wrecked cart and watching the rain pouring down on the displaced tens of thousands who walked the Western Road.

“Tell His Holiness that I hope he remembers the turnip.”

The two clerics gaped at him, then closed their mouths and glared.

“Leave this place at once,” Alembord said, his jowls quivering. “No one makes mockery of the head of the Holy Church. Leave or I shall call some Knights to eject you.”

“Knights-so you are getting those together again, are you? The wheel comes round once more. Tell Macrobius that Corfe will not forget, and that he should never forget either.”

The renegade Inceptine clapped his hands and shouted for the Knights, but Corfe had already turned on his heel and was walking through the gate, some small, odd sense of mourning twisting in him. Ridiculous though it was, it felt like the loss of a friend.

The rest of his day was spent in the fog and mire of administrative matters, problems which he could get his teeth into and worry until they stopped kicking. It helped. It filled in the time, and kept his mind from thinking of other things.

Corfe managed alternately to bully and wheedle the Commissariat into issuing his men a week’s rations for the march south. He divided his men into five under-strength tercios, each under a man recommended by Marsch as a leader, or rimarc as it was named in their own language. Marsch he made into an ensign of sorts, to Ebro’s glowering outrage, and Andruw as adjutant was entrusted with the rostering and organization of the command.

Twelve men had to be rejected as unfit; the galleys had broken them too completely for them ever to undertake active service again. These men Corfe sent on their way, giving them their rations and telling them to go home, back to the mountains. They were reluctant to leave because, Marsch said, they had sworn the oath along with the rest and would be bound by it until death. So Corfe asked them to act as recruiting agents once they regained their native valleys, and to send word of how many other tribesmen would be willing to take service under his banner when the spring came. He knew now that Lofantyr would never give him regular Torunnan troops. His command would have to be self-supporting.

As for the banner they would fight under, it took some thought. The tribesmen were pagan, and would baulk at fighting under the holy images which dominated the banners of the Ramusian armies, even if such banners were allowed to them. Corfe finally solved the problem in his own way, and had a seamstress in the garrison run up a suitable gonfalon. It was hastily done, and somewhat crude in conception as a result, but it stood out well atop its twelve-foot staff. Bright scarlet-dyed linen, the colour of sunset, and in sable at its heart the horned outline of the cathedral of Carcasson in Aekir. It was as Corfe had last seen it, a stark shadow against a burning sky, and the tribesmen were happy with it because to them it seemed the representation of Kerunnos, their horned god whom they worshipped above all others. Torunnan soldiers who saw the banner as it twisted lazily in the breeze saw only the outline of the cathedral, however, not its other, heretical, interpretation, and in time Corfe’s men would be given a name because of that banner. They would be called the “Cathedrallers.”

Now this last day in Torunn was wheeling to a close. The sun had disappeared behind the white summits of the Cimbrics in the west and Andruw was seeing to the last details of the command’s organization. Corfe set off for the Royal palace and his audience with the Queen Dowager, and so preoccupied was he with the events of the day and the planning for tomorrow that he did not take off the scarlet Merduk armour, but wore it through the corridors of the Royal apartments to the bafflement and dismay of footmen and courtiers.

“Leave us,” the Queen Dowager Odelia said sharply when Corfe was shown into her apartments by a gaping doorman.

They were not in the circular chamber this time, but in a broad hall-like room with a huge fireplace occupying one wall, logs the thickness of Corfe’s thighs burning within it and iron firedogs silhouetted against the flames. The fire was the only light in the room. Corfe sensed rafters overhead, invisible with height. The walls were heavily curtained, as was the other end of the room. Rugs on the floor, soft under his boots after the stone of the palace corridors. The sweetness of a gleaming censer hanging by long chains from the ceiling. Crystal sparkling with firelight on a low table, comfortable divans drawn up to the fire. The place was how Corfe imagined a sultan’s chambers might be, upholstered and draped and hidden, hardly any bare stonework visible. He took off his brutal helm and bowed to the golden-haired woman whose skin seemed to glow in the hearthlight.

“You look like a bogey-man destined for the terrifying of children, Corfe,” Odelia said in that low tone of hers. A voice as dark as heather-honey, it could also cut like a switch.

“Take off the armour, for pity’s sake. You need not fear assault here. Where in the world did you get it from anyway?”

“We must make do with what we can get, lady,” Corfe said, frowning as his fingers sought the releasing straps and buckles. He was not yet familiar with the working of this harness, and he found himself twisting and turning in an effort to take it off.

The Queen Dowager began to laugh. “We had a contortionist come to amuse the court with his antics last spring. I swear, Colonel, you put him to shame. Here, let me help.”

She rose to her feet with a whisper of skirts, and Corfe could have sworn he saw something black scuttle from beneath them into the shadows beyond the firelight. He paused in his struggles, but then Odelia was before him and her nimble fingers were searching his armour for the straps which would loosen it. She had his back-and breastplates off in a twinkling. They thumped dully on the rug, and after them in swift succession came the vambraces, the baldric which supported his sabre, his gorget, pauldrons, thigh-guards and gauntlets. He was left standing amid a pile of glinting metal, feeling oddly exposed. He realized he had enjoyed the sensation of her hands working about him and he was almost disappointed when she stepped back.

“There! Now you can sit and sup with me like a civilized man-if a badly dressed one. What happened to the fine clothes I had the tailor run up for you?”

“These are my campaigning clothes,” Corfe said awkwardly. “I take my command out at dawn.”

“Ah, I see. Have a seat then, and some wine. Stop standing there like a graven image.”

She was different this time, almost coquettish, whereas before she had been intense, dangerous. In the kindly light of the fire she seemed a young woman, or would were it not for the veins thrown into vivid relief on the backs of her hands.

He sipped at the wine, hardly aware of it. The fire cracked and spat like a cat. He wondered if he dare ask her what he was doing here.

“The King knows of your. . patronage,” he said as she sat as if waiting for him to begin. Her gaze was alarmingly direct. It seemed to draw the words out of him. “I do not think he approves of it.”

“Of course he does not. He resents what he sees as my interference in his affairs, though they were my affairs before he was born. I am not a figurehead or a cipher in this kingdom, Corfe, as you should know by now. But I am not the hidden power behind the throne, either. Lofantyr grows into his kingship at last, which is good. But he still needs someone to watch over his shoulder sometimes. That is the burden I have taken upon myself.”

“You may have set me up for professional ruin, lady.”

“Nonsense. I knew you would equip your men somehow, just as I know that you and your command will acquit yourselves admirably in the fighting to come. And if you do not, then you are not worth worrying about and I shall cast about until I find another promising soldier to bring under my eye.”

“I see,” Corfe said stiffly.

“We are all expendable, Corfe, even those of us who wear crowns. The good of Torunna, of the whole of the west, must come first. This kingdom needs capable officers, not sycophants who know how to nod at Lofantyr’s every suggestion.”

“I’m not sure exactly what I’ll be able to accomplish with my five hundred savages in the south.”

“You will do as you are told. Listen: Lofantyr has begun outfitting what he sees as the true expedition to bring the rebellious southern fiefs to heel. It will be under the command of one Colonel Aras and will march in a week or ten days. Two thousand foot, five hundred horse and a train of six guns.”

Corfe scowled. “A goodly force.”

“Yes. You are being sent to deal with Ordinac at Hedeby-not one of the most important rebels, but the king feels he will be more than capable of tying down your motley command; he can put over a thousand men into the field. By the time you have been trounced by him, Colonel Aras and his command will have arrived on the scene to pick up the pieces, send you back to the capital in disgrace and get on with the real work of the campaign, the defeat of Duke Narfintyr at Staed.”

“I see the King has everything planned in advance,” Corfe said. “Is there any hope for my men and me, then?”

“I can only tell you this: you must defeat Ordinac speedily and move on to Staed. Colonel Aras does not outrank you and thus cannot give you orders. If you both arrive together at Staed, you will have to share the conduct of the campaign between you and thus there will be a greater chance of success for you and your men.”

“What do you think of my chances, lady?”

She smiled. “I told you once before, Corfe: I think you are a man of luck. You will need all your luck if you are to prosper in this particular venture.”

“Is this a test you’ve had the King set for me?”

She leaned closer. The firelight made a garden of shadows out of her features, started up green fires in her eyes. Corfe could feel her breath on his skin.

“It is a test, yes. I promise you, Corfe, if you pass it, you will move on to better things.”

Abruptly she grasped his worn tunic and pulled him close. She kissed him full on the lips, softly at first and then with gathering pressure. Her eyes were open, laughing at his shock, and that suddenly angered him. He buried his fists in the gathered hair at her nape and crushed her mouth against his.

They were on the thickly carpeted floor, and he had ripped open the bosom of her dress while her laughter rang in his ears. Buttons flew through the air like startled crickets. The heavy brocade resisted even his hardened fists and she leapt up and down in his grasp as he sought to tear it off her.

Suddenly, the maniac absurdity of his position struck him, and he desisted. They crouched on the carpet facing each other. Odelia’s breasts were bared, the round breasts of a woman who has given suck. Her dress had ripped to the navel and her hair was in banners about her shoulders, shining like spun gold. She grinned at him like a lynx. She looked incredibly young, vibrant, alive. He craved the feel of her again.

This time she came to him, sliding the gown from her body as easily as if it were a silken shawl. She was surprisingly wide-hipped, but her belly was taut and her skin when his hands met it was like satin, a thing to be savoured, a sensation he had almost forgotten in the recent burning turmoil of his life.

He explored the hardness of her bones, the softness of the flesh that clothed her, and when they finally coupled it was with great gentleness. Afterwards he lay with his head on her breast and wept, remembering, remembering.

She stroked his hair and said nothing, and her silence was a comfort to him, an island of quiet in the raging waters of the world.

She said not a word to him when he rose and dressed, pulling his tunic on and buckling the strange armour. Dawnsong had begun, though it was not yet light. His men would be waiting for him.

Naked, she stood and kissed him, pressed against the hard iron of his armour as he slipped the sword baldric over his head. She seemed old again, though, her forehead lined, fans of tiny wrinkles spreading from the corers of her eyes and the soft flesh hanging from the bones of her forearms. He wondered what magic had been in the night to make her appear so young, and she seemed to catch the thought for she smiled that feral grin of hers.

“Everyone needs a smidgen of comfort, the feel of another against them every so often, Corfe. Even Queens. Even old Queens.”

“You’re not so old,” he said, and he meant it.

She patted his cheek as an aunt might a favoured nephew.

“Go. Go off to war and start earning a name for yourself.”

He left her chambers feeling oddly rested, whole. As if she had plugged for a while the bleeding wounds he bore. When he strode his way down to the parade grounds he found his five hundred waiting for him beneath their sombre banner, silent in the pre-dawn light, standing like ranks of iron statues with only the plumes of their breathing giving them life in the cold air.

“Move out,” he said to Andruw, and the long files started out for the battlegrounds of the south.