The Second Empire

TWELVE

The town of Berrona had always been an unremarkable place, tucked away on the north-western border of Torunna not far from the headwaters of the River Searil. Some six thousand people dwelt there in the shadow of the western Thurians, their only link with Torunna proper a single dirt road which snaked away to the south across the foothills. With the fall of Ormann Dyke, they had become technically behind the Merduk lines, but thus far in this winter of carnage and destruction they had remained untouched. They were too far out of the way, closer to Aekir than to Torunn, and cradled by the long out-thrust spurs of the Thurian Mountains so that the war had passed them by and was a matter of tall tales and rumours, no more. A few of the survivors of Aekir’s fall had somehow made their way there and had been welcomed, holding forth to packed audiences in the inns of the town and chilling the listeners with tales of war and atrocity. Get out of here, the Aekirians said. Cross the Torrin river while there is still time. But the townsfolk, though they shuddered appropriately at the stories of horror the refugees had to tell, could not believe that the war would touch them. We are too out of the way, they said. Why would the Merduks want to come this far north when the armies are fighting way down on the plains about the capital? We will sit the war out and see what happens.

The Aekirians, shocked, broken travesties of the prosperous city-dwellers they had once been, merely shook their heads. And though they were invited to stay with genuine compassion by the folk of Berrona, they refused and resumed their weary flight west towards the shrinking Torunnan frontier.

But the people of the town were proved right, it seemed. As midwinter passed and the new year grew older they were indeed forgotten and left undisturbed. They hunted in the hills as they had always done in the dark months, bored fishing holes in the ice that crusted the Searil and ate into their stores of pickles and dried meat and fish and fruit. And the world left them alone.

“Horses, Arja! Look! Men on horses!”

The girl straightened, pressing her fists into the hollow of her back as though an old woman, though she was not yet fifteen. She shaded her eyes against the glare of sunlight on snow and peered out across the white hills to where her younger brother was pointing with quivering excitement.

“You’re imagining again, Narfi. I can’t see a thing.” She bent to knot the rawhide rope about the firewood she had gathered, dark hair falling about her face. But her brother Narfi tugged at her sleeve.

“Look now! I’ll bet you can see them now! Anyone could.”

Sighing, she slapped his hand away and stared again. A dark bristle of movement, like a spined snake, off in the distance. They were so far away it was impossible to tell if they were even moving. But they were definitely men on horses, a long column of them riding half in shadow, half in sunlight as the scudding winter clouds came and went before the wind. Even as she watched, Arja saw the fleeting sparkle as the sun glittered off a line of metal accoutrements. Lance points, helmets, breastplates.

“I see them,” she said lightly. “I see them now.”

“Soldiers, Arja. Are they ours, you think? Would they let me up on a horse?”

Arja abandoned the firewood and grasped her brother’s arm roughly. “We have to get home.”

“No! I want to watch. I want to wait for them!”

“Shut up, Narfi! What if they’re Merduks?”

At the word “Merduks” her brother’s round face clouded. “Dada said they wouldn’t come here,” he said faintly.

His sister dragged him away. When she glanced back over her shoulder she could see that they were bigger. The dark snake had broken up into hundreds of little figures, all glittering in long lines. And farther away-back where the cloud and the distance rendered all things hazy-she thought she saw more of them. It looked like the line of a faraway forest undulating along the slopes and hollows of the hill. An army. She had never seen one before but she knew instantly what it was. A big army. She gulped for air, prayers flitting through her head like a tumble of summer swallows. They would ride on past. No-one ever came to Berrona. They would pass by. But she had to tell her father.

That afternoon the column of horsemen rode into the town as though they were triumphal warriors returning home. There were hundreds of them, perhaps even thousands, all mounted on tall bay horses and clad in outlandish armour, their lance points gay with silk streamers and a pair of matchlock pistols at the pommel of every saddle. The silent townsfolk lined the streets and some of the riders waved as they rode past, or blew kisses to the more comely of the women. They came to a halt in front of the town hall and there the leading riders dismounted. The town headman was waiting for them on the steps of the hall, pale as snow but resolute. One of the more gorgeously caparisoned horsemen doffed his helm to reveal a brown smiling face, his eyes as dark as sloes.

“I bring greetings in the name of Aurungzeb my Sultan and the Prophet Ahrimuz, may he live for ever,” he cried in a clear, young voice. His Normannic was perfect, only a slight accent betraying its origins.

“Ries Millian, town headman,” the white-faced figure on the steps said, his voice wavering with strain. “Welcome to the town of Berrona.”

“Thank you. Now please have all the people in this town assemble in the square here. I have an announcement to make.”

Millian hesitated, but only for a moment. “What is it you wish of us,” he asked.

“You will find out. Now do as I say.” The Merduk officer turned and rapped out a series of commands to his men in their own language. The column of horsemen split up. Some two hundred remained in the square before the town hall whilst the rest splintered into groups of one or two dozen and set off down the side streets, the hooves of their horses raising a clattering din off the cobbles.

The headman was conferring with other men of the town in whispers. At last he stepped forward. “I cannot do as you say until I know what you intend to do with us,” he said bravely, the men behind him nodding at his words.

The Merduk officer smiled, and without a word he drew his tulwar. A flash of steel in the thin winter sunlight, and Ries Millian was on his knees, choking, his hands striving in vain to close his gaping windpipe. Blood on the cobbles, squirts and gouts of it steaming like soup. The headman fell on his side, twitched, lay still. In the crowd a woman shrieked, rushed forward and cast herself on to the body. The Merduk officer gestured impatiently and two of his men lifted her away, still shrieking. In full view of the crowd that had gathered, they stripped her, cutting the clothes from her body with their swords and slicing flesh from her limbs as they did so. When she was naked, they bent her over and one thrust his scimitar up between her legs with a grunt, until only the hilt of the weapon was visible. The woman went silent, collapsed, and slid off the end of the blade. The Merduks grinned and laughed. He who had killed her sniffed his bloody sword and made a face. They laughed again. The Merduk officer wiped his tulwar off on the headman’s carcase and turned to the paralysed huddle of men Millian had been conferring with.

“Do as I say. Get everyone here in the square. Now.”

The day drew on into an early winter evening, but for the folk of Berrona it seemed that it would never end.

The Merduks had cleared out the town house by house, stabling their horses in the humbler dwellings. The menfolk had been separated from the women and children and marched away south over the hills by several hundred of the invaders. Then there had been the sound of gunfire, crackling out into the cold air endlessly. It had gone on for hours, but none of the women could or would agree on what it meant. A few of the local shepherds had been dragged in by the invaders, bloody and terrified. They said that there was a huge Merduk army encamped out in the pastures to the south of the town, but few of the people believed them or had time to consider the ramifications of such a phenomenon. Their own tragedy filled their minds to overflowing.

Arja had seen some women dragged off into empty houses by groups of the laughing soldiers. There had been screams, and later the Merduks had emerged restrapping their armour, smiling, talking lazily in that horrible language they had. One woman, Frieda the blacksmith’s wife who was held to be the prettiest in the town, had been stripped and forced to serve wine to the Merduk officers as they lounged in the headman’s house. Her husband they had searched out and trussed up in a corner so that he was forced to watch as they finally raped her one by one. In the end they had killed her. But they blinded and castrated the blacksmith before leaving him a moaning heap on the floor. No-one had dared help him, and he had bled to death beside the violated corpse of his wife. Arja knew this because some of the other women had been treated in the same manner as Frieda and then released. They had seen it happen.

Perhaps fifty of the women of the town had been herded up and were now in the town hall. They were the young, the pretty, the well-shaped. Outside, night was drawing in and the Merduks had lit bonfires in the streets, piling them high with furniture from the empty houses. They were sacking the town, looting anything of value and destroying what they could not carry away. Many buildings had been burnt to the ground already, and it was rumoured the Merduks had locked most of the old people inside them first.

Arja had not seen her father since the men had been taken away. Her brother, though barely eight years old, had been taken along with him. Now she was alone with a crowd of women and girls, imprisoned in the dark. A few of the women were sobbing quietly, but most were silent. Occasionally there were whispered conversations, most of them consisting of speculation on the fate of their husbands and fathers and brothers.

“They are dead,” one woman hissed. “All dead. And soon we will be too.”

“No, no,” another said frantically. “They have taken away the men to work for them. Why would they kill their labourers? The men are digging defences out beyond the town. Why kill those who can work for you? It makes no sense.”

This straw of hope seemed to cheer many of the women. “It is war,” they said. “Terrible things happen, but there has to be a sense to it all. Soldiers have their orders. So we are under the Merduks now-they have to eat too. We will adjust. We can be useful to them.”

A scraping and thudding as the double doors of the town hall were opened. It was full night outside, but the saffron light of the bonfires flickered in and the sky was orange and red with distant flames as the outskirts of the town blazed. The women could see the black silhouettes of many men outlined by the flames. Some held flasks and bottles, others naked swords. There was no talk of usefulness now.

Some screamed, some were dully passive. The Merduk troopers walked amongst them looking into their faces and running their hands up and down their bodies as though testing the mettle of an auctioned horse. When they found what they wanted they took the woman by the wrist or the hair and dragged her outside. When half the women had been taken, the doors were closed again and those who remained huddled in a corner embracing each other, bereft of speech.

Shrieks in the night. Men laughing. Arja cowered with the rest, her mind a white furious blank. Every sensation seemed to be dragged out, as in some hideous dream. She could not believe that this day had happened, these things. It was all utterly beyond anything she had ever known or imagined before, a window into another world she had not known could exist. Was this what war was like, then?

What seemed like hours passed, though they had no way of telling the passage of time, and their estimation of what constituted hours and minutes seemed to have been skewed and twisted until all frames of reference were useless in this new universe.

The screams died away. No-one slept. They sat with their arms about one another and stared at the black doors, awaiting their opening.

And at last the clumps and scrapes as their turn came and the portals of the town hall swung wide once more. Arja was almost relieved. She felt that she had been stretched so taut in the black time of waiting that soon she must snap like a green stick bent too far.

The selection procedure was swifter this time. A shadow which reeked of sweat and beer and urine seized Arja’s arm and drew her outside into the hellish light of the bonfires. There were waggons parked in the square filled brimfull of naked women who hid their faces with their hair. Some had blood matting them. A few bodies, con torted out of all humanity, sprawled upon the cobbles with their innards piled like glistening heaps of mashed berries around them. In one of the bonfires what looked like the trunk of a small tree burnt, but the sickening stink of its burning was not that of charring wood.

Arja’s captor plucked at her clothes. He was a small man, and to her surprise he was not dark-skinned or dark-eyed. He looked like a Torunnan and when he spoke it was in good Normannic.

“Take them off. Quickly.”

She did as she was bidden. All over the square women were undressing whilst a crowd of several hundred men watched. When she had stripped down to her undershirt she could go no further. The numbness was eaten through and she felt a moment of pure, incapacitating panic. The Torunnan-looking Merduk chuckled, swigged from a bottle and then ripped her undershirt from her back so that she stood naked before him.

Some of his comrades gathered with him, eating her up with their eyes. When she tried to cover herself with her hands they slapped them away. They were laughing, drunk. Some had their breeches unbuttoned and their members lolled and shone wetly in the firelight. Again, the panic beat great dark wings about Arja’s head. Again, a sense of the unreality of it all.

The soldiers spoke together in the Merduk tongue, as easy and unforced as men who have met in an inn after a long day’s work. Two of them grabbed her by the arms. Two more forced her knees apart. And then the little Torunnan-like trooper took his bottle and thrust it up between Arja’s thighs.

She screamed at the agony, struggled impotently in the grasp of the four soldiers who held her. The small trooper worked the bottle up and down. When he pulled it out at last the glass was red and shining. He winked at his fellows and then took a long draught from the bloody neck, smacking his lips theatrically.

They bent her over a pile of broken furniture, splintered wood piercing her breasts and belly. Then one mounted her from behind and began thrusting into her torn insides. There was only the pain, the blooming firelight, the hands grasping hers so tightly they were numb. Something soft was pushed against her lips and she pulled her head back from the smell, but her hair was grasped and a voice spoke in Normannic: open up. She took the thing into her mouth and it grew large and rigid and was pushed back down her throat until she gagged. They thrust into her from both directions. Warm liquid cascaded down her naked back and the men cursed and laughed. Liquid pulsed into her mouth, salty and foul. The thing in there softened again and slid out between her lips. She vomited, the taste of her bile somehow cleaner, though it scalded her lips and tongue.

The hands released her and she slumped on to the hard cobbles. They were cold and wet beneath her. It is over, she thought. It is done.

Then another knot of soldiers strode up, pushing aside the first group, and she was seized upright once again.

The dawn air was full of the smell of burning, the blue winter horizon smudged with smoke. The mobs of horsemen took their time to rub down their mounts, assemble in the square and root in their saddlebags for breakfast. Finally a series of orders was shouted out and the troopers mounted. Their horses were burdened with wineskins, flapping chickens, bolts of cloth and clinking sacks. Their officers were already outside the town, on a hill to the south. With them was a gaggle of splendidly accoutred senior commanders from the Merduk main body, their banner-bearers holding up bravely flapping silk flags in the freshening wind.

Finally the heavily burdened cavalry formed up and filed out of the gutted wreck of Berrona. Some were sullen and heavy-headed. A few were nodding in the saddle, and yet others seemed to be still drunk with the excesses of the night. They pointed their horses’ noses to the south, where less than two miles away a vast Merduk camp sprawled across the land. They rode with the rising sun an orange blaze in their left eyes and the town smouldering behind them. Near the rear of their meandering and straggling column half a dozen waggons trundled and jolted along, drawn by mules, cart-horses and plodding oxen. A conglomeration of naked, bleeding and sodden humanity crouched in the waggons, silent as statues. Around them some of the soldiers of the Sultan, light at heart, began singing to welcome the dawn of the new day.

Arja had her head bent into her knees to shut out the world. She and the other women of the town-those who had survived-huddled together for warmth and comfort in the beds of the waggons. Some of them were sobbing soundlessly, but most were dry-eyed and seemed almost to be elsewhere, their minds far away. Thus it hardly registered upon them when the Merduks stopped singing.

The waggon halted. Men were shouting. Arja lifted her head.

The Merduk column had coalesced into a formless crowd of mounted men who milled about in disorder. What was happening? Some of the Merduks were throwing their garnered loot from their saddles in panic. Others were fumbling for the matchlocks at their pommels. Officers were yelling, frantic.

Then Arja saw what had caused the transformation. On the hillside behind the burnt-out wreck of Berrona a long line of men had appeared, thousands of them. They were still a mile away, but they were coming on at a run. Black-clad soldiers, some carrying guns, others with shouldered pikes. They advanced with the drilled remorselessness of some terrible machine.

“The army is here!” one of the women called out gladly. “The Torunnans have come!” A nearby Merduk trooper hacked her furiously about the head with his scimitar and she toppled over the side of the waggon.

A few minutes of chaos as the Merduks hovered, indecisive. Then the whole body of cavalry took off to the south in a muck-churning, frenzied gallop. The waggons were left behind along with a litter of discarded plunder.

It was painful to regain interest in the world, almost like coming alive again in some agonising wrench of rebirth. Arja raised herself to her bloody knees the better to see what was happening. Tears coursed down her face.

The ground under the wheels of the waggons seemed to shake with a subterranean thunder. It was both a noise and a physical sensation. The Torunnans were bypassing the burnt-out streets of the town, their formation dividing neatly and with no loss of speed. But they would never catch up with the fleeing Merduk cavalry-they were all on foot. Arja felt a hot blaze of pure hatred flare up in her heart. The Merduks would get away. They had killed her father and her brother, and they would get away.

The thunder in the ground grew more intense. It was an audible roar now, as though a furious river were coursing under the stones and heather of the hills.

– And then they burst into view with all the sudden fury of an apocalypse. A great mass of cavalry erupted in a long line from behind a ridge to the south, at right angles to the fleeing Merduks. Arja heard a horn call ring out clear and free above the awesome rumble of the horses. The riders were armoured in scarlet, and singing as they came.

The Merduks looked over their right shoulders, and even at this distance Arja could see the naked terror on their faces. They kicked their mounts madly, tossing away booty, weapons, even helmets. But they were not fast enough.

The red horsemen ploughed into the mob of Merduk cavalry like a vermilion thunderbolt. She saw dozens of the lighter enemy horses actually hurled end over end by the impact. A thrashing Merduk trooper was lifted high into the air on the end of a lance. The enemy seemed to simply melt away. The red tide engulfed them, annihilating hundreds of men in the space of heartbeats. Only a few dozen Merduks broke free of the murderous scrum of men and horses, to continue their manic flight south towards their main camp. More were running about on foot, screaming, but the heavily armoured scarlet cavalry hunted them down like rabbits, spearing them as they ran or trampling them underfoot. Then there was another horn call and at once the horsemen broke off the pursuit and began to re-form in a neat line. A black and crimson banner billowed above their heads bearing some device she could not quite make out. The whole engagement had taken not more than three or four minutes.

The Torunnan infantry were running past the waggons now, panting men with sweat pouring down their faces and their eyes glittering like glass. They kept their line as though connected by invisible chains, and as they ran a great animal growl seemed to be coming from their throats. One man hurriedly seized Arja’s hand as he passed by and kissed it before running on. Others were weeping as they ran, but all kept their ranks. The smoke from their lit match hung in the air after they had passed, like some acrid perfume of war. As they reached the ranks of the cavalry ahead, the horsemen split swiftly in two and took up position on their flanks. Then the united formation advanced again, at a fast march this time, and began eating up the ground between them and the Merduk camp with the calm inexorability of a tidal wave.

It seemed to Arja in that moment one of the most glorious things she had ever seen.