The Iron Wars

TWO

By God, Corfe thought, the man had known how to breed horses.

The destrier was dark bay, almost black, and a good seventeen hands and a half high. A deep-chested, thick-necked beast with a lively eye and clean limbs. A true warhorse, such as a nobleman alone might ride. And he’d had hundreds of them, all three years old or more, all geldings. A fortune in horn and bone and muscle-but, more importantly, the makings of a cavalry army.

His men were encamped in the pastures of one of the late Duke Ordinac’s stud farms. Three acres of leather tents-also the property of the late duke-had been pitched in scattered clumps by the four hundred tribesmen who remained under Corfe’s command. The makeshift camp was as busy as a broken ants’ nest, with men and horses, the smoke of cookfires, the clinking of hammers on little field-anvils, the vastly intricate and familiar and to Corfe wholly invigorating stink and clamour of a cavalry bivouac.

The gelding danced under him as it seemed to catch the lift of his spirits and he calmed it with voice and knees. He had mounted pickets half a mile out in every direction, and Andruw was two days gone with twenty men on a reconnaissance towards Staed, where Duke Narfintyr was arming against the King with over three thousand men under his banner already.

Stiff odds. But they would be farmers’ sons and lesser nobles, peasants turned into soldiers for the day. They would not be the born warriors that Corfe’s savage tribesmen were. And there were very few infantry troops on earth who could stand up to a heavy cavalry charge, if it were well handled. Professional pikemen perhaps, and that was all.

No, Corfe’s worst enemy was time. It was trickling through his fingers like sand and he had none to spare if he were to find and defeat Narfintyr before being superseded by the second army that King Lofantyr had sent south.

Today was the third of the five Saint’s Days that scholars had tacked on to the last month of the year to keep the calendar in step with the seasons. In two days’ time it would be Sidhaon, the night of Yearsend, and then the cycle would begin anew, and the season start its slow turn towards the warmth and reawakening of spring.

It seemed long overdue. This had been the longest winter of Corfe’s life. He could hardly remember what it was like to feel warm sun on his face, to walk on grass instead of trudging through snow or quagmire. A hellish and unnatural time of the year to be making war, especially with horse-soldiers. But then the world had become a hellish and unnatural place of late, with all of the old certainties overturned.

He considered this second army on its way south to deal with the rebels it was his own mission to destroy. A certain Colonel Aras, one of the King’s favourites, had been given a tidy little combined force with which to subdue the southern nobles, as the King had clearly expected Corfe to make a hash of it with his barbaric, ill-equipped command. He had enemies behind as well as in front, more to worry about than tactics and logistics; he had to be something of a politician as well. These things were inevitable as one rose higher in rank, but Corfe had never expected the intricacies and balances to be so murderous. Not in a time of war. Half the officers in Torunn, it had seemed to him, were more intent on winning the King’s favour than on throwing the Merduks back from Ormann Dyke. When he thought about it, a black, beating rage seemed to hover over him, an anger which had had its birth in the fall of Aekir, and which had been growing silently and steadily in him ever since without hope of release. Only wanton murder could hope to ease it. The killing of Merduk after Merduk down to the last squalling dark-skinned baby until there were no more of them left to stink out the world. Then perhaps his dreams would cease, and Heria’s ghost would sleep at last.

A courier cantered up to him and, without flourish or salute, said: “Ondrow come back.”

He nodded at the man-his tribesmen were picking up quite a bit of Normannic, but still had little notion of the proper forms of address-and followed him as he cantered easily up the hill that dominated the bivouac. Marsch was there, and Ensign Ebro, with three pickets. Ebro slapped out a salute which Corfe returned absently.

“Where away?”

“Less than a league, on the northern road,” Marsch told him. He was rubbing his forehead where the heavy Ferinai helm had begun to chafe it. “He’s in a hurry, I think. He pushes his horses.” Marsch sounded faintly disapproving, as if no emergency were important enough to warrant the maltreatment of horses.

“He’s swung round then,” Corfe said approvingly. “I’ll bet he’s been taking a look at our rivals in the game.”

They sat there watching the score of horsemen galloping up the muddy northern road with the clods dotting the air behind them like startled birds. In ten minutes the party had reined in, the horses’ nostrils flared and red, their necks white with foam. Mud everywhere, the riders’ faces splattered with it.

“What’s the news, Andruw?” Corfe asked calmly, though his heart had begun to thump faster.

His adjutant tore off his helm, his face a mask of filth.

“Narfintyr sits in Staed like an old woman at the hearth. Farmers’ boys, his men are, with a few nobles in fifty-year-old armour. None of the other nobles have risen-they’re waiting to see if he can get away with it. They’ve heard of Ordinac’s fate, but no one thinks we are regular Torunnan troops. The gossip has it that Ordinac ran into a war-party of Merduk deserters and scavengers.”

Corfe laughed. “Fair enough. Now, what news from the north?”

“Ah, there’s the interesting part. Aras and his column are close-less than a day’s march behind us. Nigh on three thousand men, five hundred of them mounted-cuirassiers and pistoleers. And six light guns. They have a screen of cavalry out to their front.”

“Did they see you?” Corfe demanded.

“Not a chance. We crawled on our bellies and watched them from a ridgeline. They’re bound by the speed of the guns and the baggage wagons, and the road is a morass. I’ll bet they’ve cursed those culverins all the way south from Torunn.”

Corfe grinned. “You’re beginning to talk like a cavalryman, Andruw.”

“Aye, well, it’s one thing firing them, quite another coaxing them through a swamp. What’s to do, Corfe?”

They were all looking at him. Suddenly there was a different feeling in the air, a tenseness which Corfe knew and had come to love.

“We pack and move out at once,” he said crisply. “Marsch, see to it. I want one squadron out in front as a screen. You will command it. Another to herd the remounts, and a third as rearguard under Andruw here. The lead squadron moves out as soon as they can saddle up. The rest will follow when they can. Gentlemen, I believe we have work to do.”

The little knot of riders split up, Andruw’s party heading for the horse herd to procure fresh mounts. Only Ebro remained beside Corfe.

“And what am I to do, sir?” he asked, half resentful and half plaintive.

“Get the baggage mules sorted. I want them ready to move out within two hours. Pack everything you can, but don’t overload them. We have to move quickly.”

“Sir, Narfintyr has three thousand men; we are less than four hundred. Hadn’t we better wait for Aras to come, and combine with him?”

Corfe stared coldly at his subordinate. “Have you no hankering for glory, Ensign? You have your orders.”

“Yes, sir.”

Ebro galloped off, looking thoroughly discontented.

The perfect industry of the bivouac was shattered as the officers rode around shouting orders and the tribesmen hurried to don their armour and saddle their horses. Marsch had found a store of lances in the late Duke Ordinac’s castle and the troopers ran to collect theirs from the forest of racks that sprouted between the tents. The tents themselves were left behind, as they were too heavy to be carried by the pack mules that comprised Corfe’s baggage train. The stubborn, braying beasts had enough to bear: grain for a thousand horses for a week, the field-forges with their small anvils and clanking tools. Pig-iron for spare horseshoes, and extra lances, weapons and armour, to say nothing of the plain but bulky rations that the men themselves would consume on the march. Twice-baked bread, hard as wood, and salt pork for the most part, as well as cauldrons for each squadron in which the pork would be steeped and boiled. A million and one things for an army which was hardly big enough to be an army at all. Ordinarily, a field force would have one heavy double-axled ox-drawn wagon for every fifty men, twice that for cavalry and artillery. Corfe’s two-hundred-strong mule train, though it looked impressive en masse, could barely carry anything by regular military standards.

The vanguard moved out within the hour, and the main body an hour after that. By midday, the bivouac they had left behind them was populated only by ghosts and a few mangy dogs who hunted through the abandoned tents for left-behind scraps of food or leather to gnaw on. The race had begun.

W INTER was harsher in the foothills of the northern Cimbrics than it was in the lowlands of Torunna. Here the world was a brutal place of killing grandeur. Twelve thousand feet high and more, the Cimbrics were nevertheless shrinking, their ridges and escarpments less severe than further south. Trees grew on their flanks: a hardy pine and spruce, mountain juniper. In this land the River Torrin had its birthplace. It was already a slashing, foaming torrent two hundred feet wide, an angry spate flushed with the offpourings of the mountains, too violent in its bed to freeze over. It had a hundred and fifty leagues to run before it became the majestic and placid giant which flowed through the city of Torunn and carved out its estuary in the warmer waters of the Kardian Sea beyond.

But here in its millions of millennia of flood it had broken down the very mountains which surrounded it. Here it had carved out a valley amid the peaks. To the north were the last heights of the western Thurians, the rocky barrier which held in the hordes of Ostrabar so that they had been forced in their decades of invasions to take the coastal route in order to break out to the south, and had come up against the walls of Aekir, the guns of Ormann Dyke. To the south-west of the river were the Cimbrics, Torunna’s backbone, home of the Felimbric tribes and their secret valleys. But this gap, carved by the course of the Torrin, had for centuries been the link between Torunna and Charibon, west and east. It had been a highway of Imperial messengers in Fimbria’s days of empire, when Charibon itself had been nothing more than a garrison fortress designed to protect the route to the east from the savages of Almark. It was a conduit of trade and commerce, and in later days had been fortified by the Torunnans when the Fimbrian Hegemony came crashing down and men first began to kill in the name of God. And now there was an army marching along it, an infantry army whose soldiers were dressed in black, who carried twenty-foot pikes or leather-cased arquebuses. A grand tercio of Fimbrian soldiers, five thousand of the most feared warriors in the world, tramping through the blizzards and the snow-drifts towards Ormann Dyke.

That was the noise he heard and could not account for. It was a sound he had never before heard in his life, and it carried over the creak of wood and leather, the clink of metal on metal, even the crunch of the snow.

Feet. Ten thousand feet marching together in the snow to produce a low thunder, something felt rather than heard, a hum in the bones.

Albrec opened his eyes, and found that he was alive.

He was utterly confused for a long minute. Nothing about him was familiar. He was in something that swayed and lurched and bumped along. A leather canopy over his head, chinks of unbearably bright light spearing through gaps here and there. Rich furs encasing him so that he could hardly move. He was bewildered, and could not think of any events which might have added up to the present.

He sat up, and his head exploded into lights and ache, clenching his eyes tight shut for him. He struggled an arm free from his coverings to rub at his face-there was something about it, something strange and whistling in the way he breathed-and the hand appeared bound in clean linen. But it was wrong, it had no shape. It was-

He blinked tears out of his eyes, tried to flex his fingers. But he could not, because they were no longer there. He had a thumb, but beyond his knuckles there was nothing. Nothing.

“Merciful God,” he whispered.

He levered free his other hand. It, too, was bound in cloth, but there were fingers there, thank the Blessed Saints. Something to move, to touch with. They tingled as he wiggled them, as though coming to life after a sleep.

He felt his face, absurdly shutting his eyes as if he did not wish to see what his touch might tell him. His lips, his chin, his teeth in place, and his eyes the same. But-

The breath whistled in and out of the hole which had been his nose. He could touch bone. The fleshy part of the feature was gone, the nostrils no longer there. It must look like the hole in the face of a skull.

He lay back again, too shocked to weep, too lost to wonder what had happened. He remembered only shards of horror from a faraway land of dreams. The fanged grin of a werewolf. The dark of subterranean catacombs. The awful blankness of a blizzard, and then nothing at all. Except-

Avila.

And it came back to him with the speed and force of a revelation. They had been fleeing Charibon. The document! He fumbled frantically with his clothes. But his habit was gone. He was dressed in a woollen shift and long stockings, also of wool. He threw aside his furs and crawled over them, lurching as whatever he was inside swayed and bumped along. He scrabbled at the knots which held shut the leather canopy at his feet, the tears finally coming along with the realization of what had happened. He and Avila had been caught by the Inceptines. They must be on their way back to the Monastery City. They would be burnt as heretics. And the document was gone. Gone!

The canopy fell open as he yanked at the drawstrings with his fingered hand, and he fell out and thumped face first into the rutted snow.

He clenched shut his eyes. There was warm breath on his cheek, and something soft as velvet nuzzled his ruined face.

“Get away there, brute!” a voice said, and the snow crunched beside him. Albrec opened his eyes to find a black shape leaning over him, and behind it the agonizing brightness of sunshine on snow, blinding.

Another shadow. The two resolved themselves into men who seized his arms and hauled him to his feet. He stood as confused as an owl in daylight.

“Come, priest. You are holding up the column,” one said gruffly. The pair of them tried to stuff him back into the covered cart he saw he had been riding in. Behind them, another such, drawn by an inquisitive mule, and behind that a hundred more, and a thousand men making a dark snake of figures in the snow, all in ranks, pikes at their shoulders. A huge crowd of men standing in the snow waiting for the obstruction ahead to be cleared, the cart to begin moving again.

“Who are you?” Albrec demanded feebly. “What is this?”

They perched him on the back of the two-wheeled cart and one disappeared to take the halter of its mule. They started off again. The column moved once more. There had been no talk, no shouting at the delay, nothing but patience and abrupt efficiency. Albrec saw that the second man who had helped him, like the first, was dressed in knee-high leather boots rimmed with fur and a black cloak which looked almost clerical with its hood and slit sleeves. A plain short sword was hanging from a shoulder baldric. Attached to the harness of the mule he led was an arquebus, its iron barrel winking bright as lightning in the sun, and beside it was a small steel helmet and a pair of black-lacquered metal gauntlets. The man himself was crop-headed, broad and powerfully built under the cloak. He had several days of golden stubble glistening on his chin, and his face was ruddy and reddened, bronzed by days and weeks in the open.

“Who are you?” Albrec asked again.

“My name is Joshelin of Gaderia, twenty-sixth tercio. That’s Beltran’s.”

He did not elaborate, and seemed to think that this should answer Albrec’s questions.

“But what are you?” Albrec asked plaintively.

The man called Joshelin glared at him. “What is that, a riddle?”

“Forgive me, but are you a soldier of Almark? A-a mercenary?”

The man’s eyes lit with anger. “I’m a Fimbrian soldier, priest, and this is a Fimbrian army you’re in the midst of, so I’d be watchful of words like ‘mercenary’ if I were you.”

Albrec’s astonishment must have showed in his face, because the soldier went on less brusquely: “It’s four days since we picked you up-you and the other cleric-and saved you from wolves and frostbite. He’s in the cart behind me. He was less beaten up than you. He still has a face, at all events, just lost a few toes and the tips of his ears.”

“Avila!” Albrec exclaimed in joy. He began to scramble down from the cart again, but Joshelin’s hard palm on his chest halted him.

“He’s asleep, like you were. Let him come to himself in his own time.”

“Where are we going, if not to Charibon? Why are Fimbrians on the march again?” Albrec had heard rumours in Charibon of such things, but he had dismissed them as novices’ fancies.

“We’re to relieve Ormann Dyke, it seems,” Joshelin said curtly, and spat into the snow. “The fortress we built ourselves. We’re to take up the buckler where we set it down all those years ago. And scant gratitude we’ll get for it, I shouldn’t wonder. We’re about as well trusted as Inceptines in this world. Still, it’s a chance to fight the heathen again.” He clamped his mouth shut, as if he thought he had begun to babble.

“Ormann Dyke,” Albrec said aloud. The name was one out of history and legend. The great eastern fortress which had never fallen to assault. It was in Northern Torunna. They were marching to Torunna.

“I have to speak to someone,” he said. “I have to know what was done with our belongings. It’s important.”

“Lost something, have you, priest?”

“Yes. It’s important, I tell you. You can’t guess how important.”

Joshelin shrugged. “I know nothing about that. Siward and I were told to look after the pair of you, that’s all. I think they burned your habits-they weren’t worth keeping.”

“Oh God,” Albrec groaned.

“What is it, a reliquary or something? Were there gems sewn into your robes?”

“It was a story,” Albrec said, his eyes stinging and dry. “It was just a story.”

He crawled back into the darkness of the shrouded cart.

The Fimbrians marched far into the night, and when they halted they deployed in a hollow square with the baggage wagons and mules in the middle. Sharpened stakes were hammered into the ground to make a bristling fence about the camp, and details were ordered out of the perimeter to collect firewood. Albrec was given a soldier’s cloak and boots-both much too large for him-and was sat in front of a fire. Joshelin threw him cracker-bread, hard cheese and a wineskin, and then went off to do his stint as sentry.

The wind was getting up, flattening the flames of the fire. Around in the darkness other fires stitched a fiery quilt upon the snow-girt earth, and the loom of the mountains could be felt on every horizon, an awesome presence through whose peaks the clouds scudded and ripped like rolling rags. The Fimbrian camp was eerily quiet, save for the occasional bray of a mule. The men at the fires talked in low voices as they passed their rations out, but most of them simply ate, rolled themselves in their heavy cloaks and fell asleep. Albrec wondered how they endured it: the heavy marching, the short commons, the snatches of sleep on the frozen earth with no covering for their heads. Their hardiness half frightened him. He had seen soldiers before, of course, the Almarkan garrison of Charibon, and the Knights Militant. But these Fimbrians were something more. There was almost something monastic in their asceticism. He could not begin to imagine what they would be like in battle.

“Hogging the wineskin as usual, I see,” a voice said, and Albrec turned from the fire.

“Avila!”

His friend had once been the most handsome Inceptine in Charibon. There was still a fineness to his features, but his face was gaunt and drawn now, even with a smile upon it. Something had been stripped from him, some flamboyance or facet of youth. He limped forward like an old man and half collapsed beside his friend, wrapped in a soldier’s greatcloak like Albrec, his feet swathed in bandages.

“Well met, Albrec.” And then as the firelight fell on the little monk’s face: “Sweet God in heaven! What happened?”

Albrec shrugged. “Frostbite. You were luckier than I, it seems. Only a few toes.”

“My God!”

“It’s not important. It’s not like we have a wife or a sweetheart. Avila, do you know where we are and whom we are with?”

Avila was still staring at him. Albrec could not meet his eyes. He felt an overpowering urge to put his hand over his face, but mastered it and instead gave his friend the wineskin. “Here. You look as though you need it.”

“I’m sorry, Albrec.” Avila took a long swig from the skin, crushing in its sides so that the wine squirted deep down his throat. He drank until the dark liquid brimmed out of his mouth, and then he squirted down more. Finally he wiped his lips.

“Fimbrians. It would seem our saviours are Fimbrians. And they march to Ormann Dyke.”

“Yes. But I’ve lost it, Avila. They took it, the document. Nothing else matters now.”

Avila studied his hands where they were gripped about the wine-skin. The flesh on them had peeled in places, and there were sores on the backs of them.

“Cold,” he muttered. “I had no idea. It’s like what we were told of leprosy.”

“Avila!” Albrec hissed at him.

“The document, I know. Well, it’s gone. But we are alive, Albrec, and we may yet remain unburned. Give thanks to God for that at least.”

“And the truth will remain buried.”

“I’d rather it were buried than me, to be frank.”

Avila would not meet his friend’s glare. Something in him seemed cowed by what they had been through. Albrec felt like shaking him.

“It’s all right,” the Inceptine said with a crooked smile. “I’m sure I’ll get over it, this desire to live.”

There were soldiers around them at the fire, ignoring them as if they did not exist. Most were asleep, but in the next moment those that were awake scrambled to their feet and stood stiff as statues. Albrec and Avila looked up to see a man with a scarlet sash about his middle standing there in a simple soldier’s tunic. He had a moustache which arced around his mouth and glinted red-gold in the firelight.

“At ease,” he said to his men, and they collapsed to the ground again. The newcomer then sat himself cross-legged at the fire beside the two monks.

“Might I trouble you for a drink of the wine?” he asked.

They gazed at him at a loss for words. Finally Avila bestirred himself and in his best frosty aristocratic tone said: “By all means, soldier. Perhaps then you will leave us alone. My friend and I have important matters to discuss.”

The man drank deeply from the proffered wineskin and pinched the drops from his moustache. “How are you both feeling?”

“We’ve been better,” Avila said, still haughty, every inch the Inceptine addressing a lowly man-at-arms. “Might I ask who you are?”

“You might,” the man said, unruffled. “But then again I might not choose to tell you. As it happens, my name is Barbius, Barbius of Neyr.”

“Then perchance, Barbius of Neyr, you will leave us, now that you’ve had your drink of wine.” Avila’s haughtiness was becoming brittle. He was beginning to sound shrill. The man only looked at him with one eyebrow raised.

“Are you an officer?” Albrec asked, staring at the man’s scarlet sash.

“You could say that.” Off in the darkness an invisible soldier uttered a half-smothered guffaw.

“Perhaps you would tell us what happened to our belongings then,” Avila said. “They seem to have been misplaced.”

The man smiled, but his eyes had the glitter of sea ice, no gleam of humour to warm them. “I might have thought some gratitude was in order. My men, after all, saved your lives.”

“For which we are duly grateful. Now our things, where are they?”

“Safe in the tent of the army commander, never fear. My turn for questions. Why were you fleeing Charibon?”

“What makes you think we were fleeing the place?” Avila countered.

“You were perhaps taking a constitutional in the blizzard, then?”

“It is none of your business,” the young Inceptine snapped.

“Oh, but it is. I saved your lives. You’d be frozen wolf-bait had my men not found you. I believe I am due an answer to whatever questions I have the urge to pose, plus some common courtesy in their answering.”

The two monks were silent for a few seconds. It was Albrec who finally spoke.

“We apologize for our lack of manners. We are indeed grateful for our lives, but we have been under some strain of late. Yes, we were fleeing the monastery-city. It was an internal matter, a-a power struggle in which we became embroiled through no fault of our own. Plus, there was a heretical side to it…”

“I am intrigued,” the Fimbrian said. “Go on.”

“I saved certain forbidden texts from destruction,” Albrec said, his mind racing as it concocted the tissue of half truth and outright lie. “They were discovered, and we had to flee or be burned as heretics. That is all there is to it.”

Barbius nodded. “I thought as much. The text you were carrying with you-is it one of these heretical documents?”

Albrec’s heart leapt. “Yes, yes it is. It still exists, then?”

“The marshal has it in his tent, as I told you.” He seemed to lose interest in them. His gaze flicked out to the surrounding campfires where his men lay close to the flames in weary sleep. “I must go. Call by the marshal’s tent in the morning and you shall have your belongings back. You may stay with the column as long as you wish, but be warned: we travel to Ormann Dyke, and the longer you remain with the army the worse the roads will become, the less easy for you to make your own way in the wilderness.”

“If you could spare us a couple of mules we could be on our way by tomorrow,” Albrec said eagerly.

Barbius’s cold eyes sized up the little monk squarely. “Whither will you go?”

“To Torunn.”

“Why?”

Albrec was momentarily confused, sure he had said too much, given something away. He faltered, and it was Avila who spoke, his voice dripping with scorn.

“Why, to throw in our lot with Himerius and his fellow heretics, of course. My enemy’s enemy is my friend, as they say. It’s a hard world, soldier. Even clerics have to rub along the best they can.”

Barbius smiled again. “Indeed they do. I will see you in the morning, then.” He rose easily, and it was Avila who called him back as he turned to go.

“Wait! Where is this commander’s tent? How shall we find it? This camp is as big as a town.”

The Fimbrian shrugged, walking away. “Ask for Barbius of Neyr’s headquarters. He commands the army, or so I am told.”