The Second Empire

FOURTEEN

It was raining as the long column of weary men and horses filed through the East Gate, and they churned the road into a quagmire of shin-deep mud as they came. An exhausted army, straggling back over the hills to the north for miles-an army that had in its midst a motley convoy of several hundred waggons and carts, all brimming over with silent, huddled civilians, some with oilcloths pulled over their heads, others sitting numbly under the rain. Almost every waggon had a cluster of filthy footsoldiers about it, fighting its wheels free of the sucking muck. The entire spectacle looked like some strange quasi-military exodus.

Corfe, Andruw, Marsch and Formio stood by and watched while the army and its charges filed through the gate of the Torunnan capital. The guards on the city walls had come out in their thousands to watch the melancholy procession, and they were soon joined by many of the citizens so that the battlements were packed with bobbing heads. No-one cheered-no one was sure if the army was returning in defeat or victory.

“How many altogether, do you think?” Andruw asked.

Corfe wiped the ubiquitous rain out of his eyes. “Five, six thousand.”

“I reckon they took another two or three away with them,” Andruw said.

“I know, Andruw, I know. But these, at least, are safe now. And that army was crippled before we gave up the pursuit. We have delivered the north from them-for the time being.”

“They are like a dog which cannot be trained,” Formio said. “It lunges forward, you rap it on the muzzle and it draws back. But it keeps lunging forward again.”

“Yes. Persistent bastards, I’ll give them that,” Andruw said with a twisted smile.

The army had virtually destroyed the Merduk force they had encountered outside Berrona, charging down on them while they were still frantically trying to form up outside their camp. But once they had been broken and hurled back inside the campsite the battle had degenerated into a murderous free-for-all. For inside the tents had been thousands of brutalised Torunnan women, inhabitants of the surrounding towns gathered together for the pleasure of the Merduk troops. Ranafast’s Torunnans had run wild after the discovery, slaying every Merduk in sight. Corfe estimated the enemy dead at over eleven thousand.

But while the army had been embroiled in the butchery within the camp, several thousand of the enemy had managed to flee intact, and they had taken with them a large body of captives. Corfe’s men had been too spent to follow them far, and snow had begun to drive down on the wings of a bitter wind off the mountains. The pursuit had been abandoned, and after digging four hundred graves for their own dead the army had re-formed for the long march south. The waggons had slowed them down, and they had shared their rations with the rescued prisoners. With the result that not a man of the army had eaten in the last three days, and half the Cathedrallers were now on foot. As their overworked mounts had collapsed, they had been carved up and eaten by the famished soldiers. Six hundred good warhorses were now mere jumbles of bones on the road behind them. But the campaign had been successful, Corfe reminded himself. They had done what he had set out to do. It was simply that he could take no joy in it.

“Beer,” Andruw said with feeling. “A big, frothing mug of the stuff. And a wedge of cheese so big you could stop a door with it. And an apple.”

“And fresh-baked bread,” Marsch added. “With honey. Anything but meat. I will not eat meat again for a month. And I would sooner starve than eat another horse.”

Corfe thought of the Queen’s chambers, a bath full of steaming water and a roaring fire. He had not taken his boots off in a week and his feet felt swollen and sodden. The leather straps of his armour were green with mould and the steel itself was a rusted saffron wherever the red paint had chipped away. Only the blade of John Mogen’s sword was bright and untarnished. He had Merduk blood under his nails.

“The men need a rest,” he said. “The whole army needs to be refitted, and we’ll have to send south for more horses. I wonder how Rusio has been getting on while we’ve been away.”

“I’ll wager his backside has not been far from a fire the whole time,” Andruw retorted. “Send out some of those paper-collar garrison soldiers next time, Corfe. Remind them what it’s like to feel the rain in their face.”

“Maybe I will, Andruw. Maybe I will. For now, I want you three to go on inside the city. Make sure that the men are well bedded down-no bullshit from any quartermasters. I want to see them drunk by nightfall. They deserve it.”

“There’s an order easily obeyed.” Andruw grinned. “Marsch, Formio, you heard the man. We have work to do.”

“What about you, General?” Formio asked.

“I think I’ll stand here awhile and watch the army march in.”

“Come on, Corfe, get in and out of the rain,” Andruw cajoled. “They won’t march any faster with you standing here.”

“No, you three go on ahead. I want to think.”

Andruw clapped him on the shoulder. “Don’t philosophize too long. You may find all the beer drunk by the time you walk through the gate.”

Andruw and Marsch mounted their emaciated horses and set off to join the column, but Formio lingered a moment.

“We did all we could, General,” he said quietly.

“I know. It’s just that it never feels as though it’s enough.”

The Fimbrian nodded. “For what it is worth, my men are content to serve under you. It seems that Torunna can produce soldiers too.”

Corfe found himself smiling. “Go on, see to your troops, Formio. And thank you.” He realised that he had just been given the greatest professional compliment of his life.

Formio set off in the wake of Marsch and Andruw without another word.

Corfe stood alone until the rearguard came into sight almost an hour later, then he mounted his horse and trotted down to join them. Two hundred Cathedrallers under Ebro and Morin, their steeds’ noses drooping inches from the ground.

“What’s the storey, Haptman?” he asked.

Ebro saluted. The pompous young officer Corfe had first met the previous year was now an experienced leader of men with the eyes of a veteran. He had come a long way.

“Five more horses in the last two miles,” Ebro told him. “Another day and I reckon we’d all be afoot.”

“No sign of the enemy?”

Ebro shook his head. “General, I do believe they’re halfway back to Orkhan by now. We put the fear of God into them.”

“That was the idea. Good work, Ebro.”

The scarlet-armoured horsemen filed past in a muddy stream. Some of them looked up as they passed their commander and nodded or raised a hand. Many had shrivelled Merduk heads dangling from their pommels. Corfe wondered how few of his original galley slaves were left now. He sat his horse until they had all passed by and then finally entered the East Gate himself, the last man in the army to do so. The heavy wooden and iron doors boomed shut behind him.

It was very late by the time he finally entered his chambers. He had visited the wounded in the military hospitals, racking his brains to try and address every man by his name, singling out those whom he had seen in battle and reminding them of their courage. He had gripped the bony fist of one wounded Cimbric tribesman as the man died then and there, in front of him. Those days in the open, eating horseflesh, rattling in agony in the back of a springless waggon, only to lose the fight when placed at last in a warm bed with clean blankets. The tribesman had died saying Corfe’s name, understanding no word of Normannic.

Then there had been the dwindling horse-lines, seeing to it that the surviving mounts were well looked after, and then a half-dozen meetings with various quartermasters to ensure that the freed prisoners Corfe had brought south were being looked after. Most of them had been billeted with the civilian population. And at the last there had been a beer with Andruw, Marsch, Formio, Ranafast and Ebro, standing in a rowdy barracks and gulping down the tepid stuff by the pint, the six of them clinking their jugs together like men at a party whilst around them the soldiers did the same, most of them naked, having cast off their filthy clothes and rusted armour. Corfe had left his officers to their drinking and had staggered off towards the palace, both glad and reluctant to leave the warmth and comradeship of the barracks.

It seemed a crowd of people was waiting for him when he arrived, all bobbing and bowing and eager to lay hands on him. For once he was happy to have a crowd of flunkeys around, unbuckling straps, pulling off his boots, bringing him a warm woollen robe. They had built a blazing fire in the hearth and closed the shutters on the pouring rain beyond the balcony. They brought in ewers of steaming water and trays of food and drink. They would have washed him too if he had let them. He ordered them out and performed that task himself, but he was too tyred to use the towells that had been left out and sat alone watching the flames with his bare feet stretched out to the hearth, a puddle of water on the flagged stone of the floor below him. His skin was white and wrinkled and there was still dead men’s blood under his nails, but he did not care. He was too weary even to pick at the tray of delicacies they had set out for him, though he poured himself some wine and gulped it down in order to warm his innards. So good to be alone, to have silence and no immediate decisions to make. To just feel the kindly wine warm him and hear the rain rattling at the window.

“Hail, the conquering hero,” a voice said. “So you are back.”

He did not turn round. “I’m back.”

The Torunnan Queen came into the firelight. He had not heard her enter the room.

“You look exhausted.”

Odelia was dressed in a simple linen gown, and her hair hung loose around her shoulders, shining in the firelight. She looked like a young woman ready for bed.

“I waited for you,” she said, “but they said you were somewhere in the city, with the army.”

“I had things to do.”

“I’m sure you had. You have been nearly six weeks away. Could you not have found time to visit your Queen and tell her about the campaign?”

“I was going to leave it until the morning. I’m meeting the High Command at dawn.”

Odelia pulled a chair up beside him. “So tell me now, plainly, without all the military technicalities.”

He stared at the flamelight which the wine had trapped scarlet in his glass. It was as though a little heart struggled to beat in there.

“We found a Merduk army near Berrona, close to the Searil, and destroyed it. They had been ravaging the whole country up around there. They took the women and murdered the men. The entire region is littered with corpses, depopulated. A wilderness. The march back to Torunn was… difficult. The waggons slowed us down and we went short of food. Half the horses are gone, but our casualties were very light, considering. I believe the Torrin Gap is secure again, at least for a while.”

“Well, that is news indeed. I congratulate you, Corfe. Your band of heroes has done it again. How many Merduks did they kill this time?”

He thought of the unbelievable slaughter within the Merduk camp, all order lost, men squirming for their lives in the thick mud, shrieking. Ranafast’s Torunnans had captured two hundred of the enemy as they tumbled out of their tents and cut the throats of every last one. No quarter. No prisoners.

“What news here, in the capital?” he asked, ignoring her question.

“Berza’s fleet has defeated the Nalbenic ships in an action off the Kardikian coast. There will be no more ship-borne supplies for Aurungzeb’s armies. Fournier’s spies tell us that the Sultan has found himself a wife. He demolished Ormann Dyke and married her in the ruins. She is rumoured to be a Ramusian.”

Corfe stirred. “Ormann Dyke is-”

“No more. Yes. Kaile Ormann’s walls have been cast down, and the Merduks are busy rearing up another fortress on the east bank of the river. It would seem they intend to stay.”

“It could be a good sign-a signall that the Sultan is beginning to think defensively.”

“I am glad to hear it.”

“This wife of his. Why should he marry a Ramusian? He has a whole harem of Merduk princesses to bed, or so I had always heard.”

“She is supposed to be a great beauty, that is all we know.”

“Maybe she’ll have an influence on him.”

“Perhaps. I would not put too much store in the wiles of women! They are overrated.”

“Coming from you, Your Majesty, that is hard to credit.”

She leaned forward and kissed him. “I am different.”

“That I believe.”

“Come to bed, Corfe. I have missed you.”

“In a moment. I want to feel my feet again, and remember what a chair feels like under my arse.”

She laughed, throwing her head back, and in that moment he loved her. He shunted the feeling aside, swamped by guilt, confusion, even a kind of shame. He did not love her. He would not.

“Fournier has been busy in my absence, I take it.”

“Oh, yes. By the way, did you ever meet a little deformed monk named Albrec?”

Corfe frowned. “I don’t think so. No-wait. Yes, once, outside Torunn. He had no nose.”

“That’s the one. Macrobius has told me that the fellow went out to preach to the Merduks.”

“There is a fool for every season, I suppose. What did they do, crucify him?”

“No. He is something of a fixture in the Merduk court, pontificating about the brotherhood of man and such.”

“We seem very well informed about the doings of the Merduk court.”

“That is what I have been leading up to. Fournier has planted a spy there, God knows how. He may be a weaselly treasonous dastard, but he knows his business. Even I am not allowed to know our agent’s name. Twice in the past month a Merduk deserter has come to the gates with a despatch hidden on him.”

“He uses Merduks? A man for every message? He’ll be caught soon. You can’t keep that kind of thing secret for long. I take it there is no way to get a message to this agent?”

Odelia shrugged. “I fail to see how even Fournier can do that.”

“What about your… abilities? Your-”

“My witchery?” The Queen laughed again. “They run a different road, Corfe. Do you know anything of the Seven Disciplines?”

“I’ve heard of them, that’s all.”

“A true mage must master four of the Seven. I know only two-Cantrimy and True Theurgy. I may be one step better than a common hedge-witch, but I am no wizard.”

“I see. Then I would like to talk to these so-called Merduk deserters.”

“So would I. There is something odd going on at the Merduk court. But Fournier has hidden them away as though they were a miser’s hoard. He may even have disposed of them already.”

“You are the Queen. Order him to produce them, or the despatches they carried at least.”

“That would offend him, and then we might lose his co-operation entirely.”

Corfe’s eyes narrowed and a light kindled in them, red from the hearth glow. When he looked like that, Odelia thought, you could see the violence graven in him. She felt herself shiver, as though someone had walked over her grave.

“You mean to tell me,” Corfe said softly, “that this blue-blooded son of a bitch will deliberately withhold information which could be vital to the conduct of this war, simply out of a fit of pique?”

“He is not one of your soldiers, Corfe. He is a noble, and must be handled with care.”

“Nobles.” His voice was still soft, but the tone of it set the hair rising on the back of her neck. “I have never yet seen one who was worth so much as a bucket of warm spit. These deserters, or whatever they are, their knowledge of what goes on in the Merduk camps could be priceless to us.”

“You cannot touch Fournier,” Odelia snapped. “He is of the nobility. You cannot sweep aside the entire bedrock of a kingdom’s fabric just like that. Leave him to me.”

“All right then; if the kingdom’s fabric is so important I will leave him alone.”

What would he be like as a king? Odelia wondered. Am I mad to consider it? He has so much anger in him. He might save Torunna, and then tear it apart afterwards. If only he could be healed.

She set a hand on his brow. “What are you doing?” he demanded, still angry.

“Stealing your mind. What do you think? Now be quiet.”

Very well, do it. Take that plunge. She was no mind-rhymer, but she was a healer of sorts, and she loved him. That opened the door for her. She stepped through it with a fearful sort of determination.

It was like hearing distant thunder, a baying recklessness of baffled hurt and fury. She dove past scenes of slaughter, ecstasies of boundless murder. Corfe’s trade, his vocation, was the killing of his fellow man, and he was good at it-but he did not enjoy it. That gave her a vast sense of relief. His soul was not that of a bloodthirsty barbarian, but it was savage nonetheless. He was possessed of a deep self-loathing, a desire for redemption that surprised and touched her.

There-that was Aekir, burning like the end of the world. Go back further, to before that. And there was an ordinary young man with kinder eyes and less iron certainty in his heart. Wholly different, it seemed, and unexceptional.

She realised then that he must not be healed-not by her. His suffering had made him what he was, had forged a man out of the boy and rendered him steel-hard. She found herself both in awe of him and pitying his pain. There was nothing to be done here. Nothing.

She came out again, unwilling to look at the happiness there had been before Aekir, the fleeting images of the raven-haired girl who had been and would always be his only love. But the youth who had married the silk merchant’s daughter was no more. Only the general remained. Yes, he could be King. He could be a very great king, one that later centuries would spin legends around. But he would never be truly at ease with himself-and that was the mainspring, the thing that drove him to greatness.

She sat back in her chair and rubbed her eyes.

“Well?” he asked.

“Well, nothing. You are a muddle-headed peasant who needs to get drunk more often.”

His smile warmed her. There would never be passion there, not for her, but he esteemed her nonetheless. That would have to be enough.

“I think your magicks are overrated,” he said.

“Magic often is. I am off to bed. I am an old woman who needs her rest.”

He took her hand. “No. Sit with me awhile, and we will go together.”

She actually felt herself blushing, and was glad of the dimness of the room. “Very well then. Let us sit here by the fire and pretend.”

“Pretend what?”

“That there are no wars, no armies. Just the rain on the window, the wine in your glass.”

“I’ll drink to that.”

And they sat there hand in hand as the fire burnt low, as content with their common silence, it seemed, as some long-married couple at the end of a day’s labour.

It has become a bizarre habit for an old man, Betanza thought, this night-time pacing of wintry cloisters. I am getting strange in my twilight years.

Charibon’s cathedral bells had tolled the middle of the night away, and the cloisters were deserted except for his black-robed shape walking up and down, the very picture of a troubled soul. He did this most nights of late, marching his doubts into the flagstones until he was weary enough to finally tumble into dreamless sleep. And then dragging himself awake in time for matins, with the sun still lost over the dark horizon.

The old need less sleep than the young anyway, he told himself. They are that much more familiar with the concept of their own mortality.

There had been a thaw, and now instead of snow it was a chill black rain that was pouring down out of the Cimbrics, flattening the swell on the Sea of Tor and rattling on the stone shingles of the monastery-city. It was moving slowly east, washing down the Torian plains and beating on the western foothills of the Thurians. In the morning it would be frowning over northern Torunna, where Corfe’s army was still a long day’s march away from their beds.

Betanza paused in his endless pacing. There was a solitary figure standing in the cloister ahead of him, looking beyond the pillars to the sodden lawn they enclosed and the black starless wedge of sky above it. A tall figure in a monk’s habit. Another eccentric, it seemed.

As he drew close the man turned, and Betanza made out a beak of a nose and high forehead under the cowl. A hint of bristling eye-brows.

“God be with you,” the man said.

“And with you,” the Vicar-General replied politely. He would have walked on, not wanting to interrupt the solitary cleric’s devotions, but the other spoke again, stalling him.

“Would you be Betanza, by any chance, head of the Inceptine Order?”

“I would.” Impossible to make out the colour of the monk’s habit in the darkness, but the material of it was rich and unadorned.

“Ah, I have heard of you, Father. At one time you were a duke of Astarac, I believe.”

His curiosity stirred, Betanza looked more closely at the other man. “Indeed. And you are?”

“My name is Aruan. I am a visitor from the west, come seeking counsell in these turbulent times.”

The man had the accent of Astarac, but there was an archaic strangeness to his diallect. He spoke, Betanza thought, like a character from some old history or romance. There were so many clerics from so many different parts of the world in Charibon at present, however. Only yesterday a delegation had arrived from Fimbria, of all places, with an escort of forty sable-clad pikemen.

“What part of Astarac do you hail from?” he asked.

“I was originally from Garmidalan, but I have not lived there for many years. Ah-listen, Betanza. Do you hear it?”

Betanza cocked his head, and over the hissing rain there came faint but clear a far-off melancholy howl. It was amplified by another, and then another.

“Wolves,” he said. “They scavenge right into the very streets of the city at this time of year.”

Aruan smiled oddly under his hood. “Yes, I’ll warrant they do.”

“Well, I must be getting on. I will leave you to your meditations, Aruan.” And Betanza continued his interrupted walk. Something about the stranger unsettled him, and he did not care to be addressed in such a familiar fashion. But he was not in the mood to make an issue of it. He buried his cold hands in his sleeves and paced out the flagstones around the cloister once more, the familiar dilemmas doing the rounds of his mind.

– And he stopped short. The man Aruan was in front of him once again.

Startled, he actually retreated a step from the dark figure. “How did you-?”

“Forgive me. I am very light on my feet, and you were lost in thought. If you could perhaps spare me some of your time, Betanza, there are things I would like to discuss with you.”

“See me in the morning. Now get out of my way,” Betanza blustered.

“That is a pity. Such a pity.” And something preternatural began to occur before Betanza’s astonished eyes. The black shape of Aruan bulked out and grew taller, the hem of his habit lifting off the ground. Two yellow lights blinked on like candles under his cowl, and there was the sound of heavy cloth tearing. Betanza made the Sign of the Saint and backed away, struck dumb by the transformation.

“You are a capable man,” a voice said, and it was no longer recognisable as wholly human. “It is such a shame. I like independent thinkers. But you do not have the abilities or the vulnerabilities I seek. Forgive me, Betanza.”

A werewolf towered there, the habit shrugged aside in rent fragments. Its ears spiked out like horns from the massive skull. Betanza turned to run but it caught him, lifting him into the air as though he were a child. Then it bit once, deep into the bone and cartilage of his neck, nameless things popping under its fangs. Betanza spasmed manically, then fell limp as a rag, his eyes bulging sightlessly. He was set down gently upon the blood-spattered flagstones of the cloister, a puddle of black robes with a white, agonised face staring out of them.

Beyond the monastery, the wolves howled sadly in the rain.