by Leo Carew
“Hafdis,” she said, placing an arm at the back of the woman next to her. Hafdis was tall (though still several inches shorter than Keturah) and attractive, with an upturned nose, blue eyes and chestnut hair that fell midway down her back. Her beauty was tempered by an almost constant expression of distaste that she wore, as though perpetually disenchanted with those around her. But her clothes were finely woven layers of overlapping wool, her boots softest leather, and she was paying for her goose eggs in a rare currency: bolts of silk. This was Hafdis Reykdalsdottir, wife to Uvoren the Mighty.
Hafdis turned to Keturah and managed a watery smile, embracing the younger woman. “My, my, Keturah. Are you well?” Without waiting for a reply, she said, “Isn’t it dull with the legions away?”
“There’s certainly less laughter in the household since my father left,” said Keturah. “Though that was mostly him enjoying his own company. But I’m glad that the Sutherners are finally being challenged.”
“Oh, yes. I suppose you’re looking after your mother,” said Hafdis carelessly. “It’s too warm today.”
Keturah was too used to Hafdis’s wandering mind for it to bother her unduly, though privately she thought that of course it was warm beneath all those layers of wool. Out loud, she said sweetly: “You’re dressed for cooler weather, my dear. I hear Unndor and Urthr were married: my congratulations.”
The look of distaste on Hafdis’s face magnified several times. “I had hoped for better for both of them. A nobody from House Oris and another from House Nadoddur? My husband has a great deal to answer for.”
“Did the boys not want the marriages?”
“Neither had met their wife before the betrothal. Both girls are dull and plain: there is little desirable about the arrangement.”
“I’m so sorry,” said Keturah, shaking her head and suppressing the look of sardonic amusement with which she would usually have greeted such news. In Roper’s absence, Uvoren had sought to increase his hold over the Hindrunn by marrying his two sons to prominent daughters of undeclared houses. House Oris and House Nadoddur were both minor and unable to lend much weight to Uvoren’s cause, but it increased the momentum behind his claim for the throne. Roper must surely fail in the field, but Uvoren was ensuring that, even if Roper returned to the Hindrunn, popular support would overwhelmingly be his. The move was relentless. With the odds so firmly in his favour, there was scarcely a need to garner yet more support. Uvoren had his foot on Roper’s throat and was only intensifying the pressure. But Unndor and Urthr were both, by all accounts, furious at the arrangement. Keturah had even heard that Unndor had spent his wedding night well apart from his new bride.
“I must get back to my mother, dear Hafdis, but will you come and share some wine with me overmorrow? It would be my great pleasure to see you.” Hafdis agreed it would be a great pleasure while Keturah privately congratulated herself on the levels of self-sacrifice she was prepared to undergo for her new husband. She chose her friends carefully and Hafdis was not the company she would usually have sought, though there could be nobody better to provide her with Uvoren’s secrets than his disillusioned wife. Another ally of Keturah’s: this battle was going rather well.
She was about to depart when the atmosphere around her changed abruptly. Silence rippled through the chattering stalls. Traders fell quiet and turned towards Keturah, the collective attention of that portion of the market focusing on a point above her right shoulder. Hafdis had gone very still.
Keturah turned, knowing what she would find, and came face to face with Uvoren the Mighty, standing directly behind her. He wore a great deal of steel for a man not dressed for war. His belt was studded with plates of it, his woollen shirt fastened at the front with thick clips of it. A great sheathed strip of it hung at his side: a long dagger that he never wore during battle. His cloak was fastened by it and a fine coil of it held his hair in that high ponytail, reserved for lords and members of the Sacred Guard alone. The sight caused Keturah to raise her eyebrows: Uvoren was certainly flirting with the borders of excessive personal adornment.
The silence that had spread was replaced with an excited muttering and Uvoren flashed a grin over the marketplace. “Good morning, my friends. Please, carry on!”
The marketplace barely reacted beyond a slight flutter.
With Uvoren stood Baldwin Dufgurson, the Legion Tribune. Tall, black-haired, thin of face and narrow of limb, he surveyed Keturah imperiously, as though suspicious that Roper’s wife was in such close proximity.
“What are you doing here, Tekoasdottir?” he asked coldly.
Keturah pretended to look startled and surveyed her surroundings. “How odd, Tribune, I thought I was in the market. Wait …” She cast around again. “Yes, I am in fact in the market. So I’m trading.” She treated him to her iciest look.
Uvoren laughed, giving Baldwin an affectionate shove which the latter did not seem to appreciate. Then his eyes came to rest on his wife. He maintained his smile. “And you? Why are you here?”
“Buying eggs,” said Hafdis, uncertainly.
“Shouldn’t you be weaving?”
“I was tired of weaving.”
“Well, now you’ve had your break, you can return to it,” said Uvoren, still smiling. Hafdis glanced at Keturah, bade her a quiet farewell and headed for home, a basket of eggs clutched beneath one arm. Uvoren’s eyes had moved onto Keturah and lingered there as his wife moved out of sight. “What are you trading, Miss Keturah?”
She shrugged. “Some timber arrived from Trawden, Captain, to be sold. And I needed yarn. Yarn and goose eggs.”
He smiled. It was a smile so charming, so full of warmth and confidence that she almost forgot who he was. She almost liked him. “You intend to spend some time weaving yourself?”
“With my mother. It is hard for her, when my father is gone. She needs distraction.”
“Ah! Well, I hope she finds it.” Uvoren glanced at Baldwin, who was still wearing his supercilious expression. “Off you go, Baldwin.” The Tribune swept past Keturah and into the marketplace. Uvoren watched his back for a moment and then drew a little closer to Keturah. She stood her ground. “I pray your husband returns victorious.”
“Of course you do, Captain.” Keturah was very tall but, up close, Uvoren the Mighty was truly enormous. Even unarmoured and unhelmeted, his shoulders seemed to have the breadth of an eagle’s wingspan and his arms were thick as the chains that raise the portcullis of the Great Gate. Even Keturah, used to the presence of Tekoa and Pryce—men who others found quite as intimidating as Uvoren—felt daunted by this monstrous individual. When he spoke, his voice seemed to reverberate through her chest and up her throat.
“It must be hard for you, being left by both Roper and your father. Especially with your mother so unwell.” Keturah still stood her ground, even as he drew very close. “You are always welcome in my household, if you ever feel too alone.”
She laughed at that, placing a hand on Uvoren’s chest, at first lightly, as a caress, then brought the palm more firmly down and pushed him backwards. With the laugh, he was disarmed and sweetened. With the push, he was defeated. He allowed himself to be pushed backwards, infected by her laugh, smiling a little and playing the game.
“Come, come. Surely you have no loyalty towards the boy Roper yet?” he said.
“He is the Black Lord,” Keturah replied, raising her eyebrows at Uvoren and still smiling. “I thought we were all loyal towards him.”
“Black Lord in name alone. We both know what’s going to happen to him.”
“I thought you prayed for his victory?”
“I do. But victory or not, he isn’t coming back through the Great Gate. You don’t need to think about him.” He spoke consolingly, as though his advice was a balm to her.
Keturah tucked her hair back behind her shoulder and sighed. “I am the paragon of a dutiful wife,” she said. “While my husband lives, I think about him.”
“Well, we’ll see what we can do about that
. Perhaps—”
“Your wife seems unhappy, Captain,” interrupted Keturah, softening the change of subject with a half-step towards him.
“She always is,” he said.
“Perhaps you should see to that?” she suggested sweetly.
“Not possible.”
“Well, then, you can help me—” she looked pointedly at the box of eggs and straw—“I have forgotten my cart.”
Uvoren grinned and gave an ironic bow. “My lady.” He bent to pick them up and she led him back towards Tekoa’s household. Under normal circumstances, Keturah would have moved from her father’s house to Roper’s upon marrying him. But these were not normal circumstances. Her mother needed care, her father needed the estate to be looked after while he was gone and Keturah needed some defence while her allies were out of the fortress. All were easier in Tekoa’s household.
She and Uvoren walked side by side for a time, Uvoren making jests, she providing a tart audience. After a time, she interrupted him again. “So what’s going to happen to my husband when he returns?”
Uvoren looked wry. “We both know that it depends on how he approaches the gates.”
“I’m not sure it does,” said Keturah. Both spoke as though the topic was amusing to them. To Uvoren, Keturah thought it genuinely might be. For her, it was only a lifetime of habit which kept her voice light. “You’re going to kill him whether he comes as a supplicant or a warlord.”
Uvoren just smiled, staring straight ahead, which Keturah took for confirmation.
“There are better ways to die than sticky-fire,” was all he said. She supposed that meant that if Roper came as an invader, he would be killed in a conflagration before the gates.
“Are there? I’m sure it’s painful, Captain, but for all that it’s quick. A few moments of pain is nothing next to the life you have lived. People get too worried about the act of dying itself: it is usually brief.”
“It’s better not to know that it’s coming,” said Uvoren.
Keturah tutted impatiently. “Why? You can prepare yourself and those around you if you know it’s coming. You can die as you’d planned; in the way the person you’d like to be remembered as would die.”
Uvoren raised his eyebrows. “You’ve experienced a lot of death in your twenty years, Miss Keturah?”
“Not as much as you, I daresay, Captain,” said she. “But I’ve seen it close and I’ve seen many of the faces it wears. It is better to know that it is coming.”
“If you say so.” They crossed over the running track that skirted the Hindrunn just before a pack of women ran by, wearing the black tunic of the Academy that marked them out as historians. Uvoren turned back, eyes following them. Most stared back and a few smiled, looking at the captain as they passed and sparing a glance for Keturah, wondering what they were doing together.
“Eyes front, Captain,” Keturah said. “And what about my father?”
“I hope your father will come round to my side when Boy-Roper falls.”
“He’s a stubborn man,” said Keturah. “A change of mind is not something that comes to him readily.”
“I respect your father,” said Uvoren, with a shrug that made the box in his hands heave. “He’s just chosen the wrong side. With a man like him, I could be generous. With Boy-Roper? He is no loss to anyone really.”
They had reached Keturah’s household. “Leave the box there, Captain,” said Keturah, indicating a spot next to the door, which she opened before turning back to Uvoren. “Thank you. Look after your wife: the poor woman just needs a little care.”
“You are ever wise, Miss Keturah,” said Uvoren. She raised an eyebrow, eyes humorous as she shut the door. Then her face dropped and she leaned against the wood.
Have I given him too much? She did not know, but she thought she knew him and that the push she gave him would barely have made an impression. He would remember the laugh and the caress that had preceded it. He would not remember the push. She had to give him a little more each time. Enough so that he would think that he might be able to win her by charm and not have to resort to force; not so much that she ran out of room before her father returned. She needed him back soon. Time was running out for her.
Keturah took a deep breath, tucked her hair behind her ears, straightened her back and walked to the hearth, by which her mother sat staring into the fire. “Mother,” she said, giving her a kiss, “what shall we do this afternoon?”
9
Guard Him
Bellamus and Lord Northwic had taken their horses a little way up the side of the northern end of the valley. Spread beneath them was a butcher’s floor. A grisly carpet of corpses lay darkly at the valley base and the river, choked with bodies and shattered wagons, was beginning to swallow the surrounding land in glittering water. Some of their soldiers were picking over the remains, dragging survivors clear of the rising waters and furtively looting in equal measure. They did what they could for the wounded, but often what they could was as simple as a knife to the heart. The seagulls and crows had already descended and were picking out the eyes, lips and tongues from the fallen. They wheeled beneath the gathering clouds, resembling the specks of dust in a column of light.
Bellamus shivered. The wind was picking up and it felt as if more rain was on the way. He had been right, of course. Roper’s attack in the south was nothing but a diversion to draw their forces swarming away from the wagon park in the north. Then the Anakim cavalry had thundered into the valley, sweeping away the feeble resistance they encountered and tipping the precious wagons of supplies into the river. Bellamus had begged Lord Northwic for a force to take north and counter the attack he saw as inevitable, a request the lord had graciously granted. On the way, Bellamus heard the horn desperately calling Enemy Attacking from the north, but nobody had responded, assuming it was merely a delayed echo of what was occurring in the south. He arrived to find the attack, which had clearly been wonderfully synchronised, long concluded. Bellamus left his men there to guard against the cavalry returning and hastened back to find that Lord Northwic was clutching at shadows. Roper’s diversionary force had retreated soon after Bellamus had departed, and though Northwic had pursued, they had been less well prepared than the Anakim, were moving through unfamiliar land, and were evidently not as fit.
The losses sustained had barely impacted the number of men at their disposal. Even so, this was a hammer blow. It was scarcely possible to maintain a supply train through such a hostile land. The food now saturated by the river had been instrumental to their hopes, a fact obvious to all within the valley’s steep walls. Bellamus had seen how the gait of his men had changed in the aftermath of this defeat. They moved in little more than a shuffle, heads so resolutely dipped that it looked as though they feared the valley would pour ferocious soldiers down on top of them, if only they were to raise their eyes to the valley rim.
“What’s the tally?” asked Bellamus.
“Tally?” asked Lord Northwic with a sniff. He looked across at Bellamus with more than a little suspicion. “Twelve thousand men are dead. More numbers for those records of yours.”
Bellamus did not much care about Northwic’s tone. It could have been worse than twelve thousand.
“More,” continued Lord Northwic quietly.
“More what?”
“It’s more than twelve thousand. We have twelve thousand dead, but now we’ve been crippled so dismissively, we’ll lose twice as many again through desertion.”
Bellamus was sceptical. “They’d be fools to leave. Sutherners alone, north of the Abus? They’ll be lucky to survive a night.”
“‘Sutherners?’ You have spent too long among your spies.”
“You are being cold, Ced, though I have no idea why since I played more than my part today.”
Lord Northwic was silent a while. “I know.” He continued staring down at the scene below. He shook his head bitterly. “I know.”
“There’s nothing we can do now,” said Bellamus, his voice mor
e gentle. “We have survived. Now we must resupply. We still far outnumber this Anakim force, we still have our knights. We will fight again another day and we will triumph.” He looked across to Lord Northwic and was surprised to see tears brimming in the old man’s eyes. They built absurdly, threatening to overflow the eyelids until Lord Northwic blinked and cuffed at them. He looked pale and was hunched into his horse, eyes shadowed by a heavily laden brow and hands clutched tightly before him.
“It feels … it feels as though my lungs are bruised,” he said, voice growing thinner and thinner as though he scarce had the heart to finish the sentence.
Bellamus supposed this had weighed particularly heavily on Northwic, who bore ultimate responsibility for this army. It was his organisation which had been so ruthlessly exposed by this attack. Bellamus knew how that felt. He had seen defeats that left him utterly bereft; empty to the extent of feeling physically shrivelled, each breath like trying to swallow butterflies. At that moment, Bellamus himself felt more as though he had been slapped in the face. The word Northwic had used to describe this raid had lodged in him. Dismissive. The masters of this dreamworld had appeared at last and treated their efforts with contempt. Northwic and Bellamus had torched their way through the Black Kingdom, and the response had been silence. In retrospect, that silence seemed ominous.
There was a bitter taste in the valley. Though Bellamus would not admit it, he was beginning to feel lost in this wasteland. From afar, the Anakim had fascinated him. In context, surrounded by an order that was alien to Bellamus, they were more disturbing than fascinating. The haughty, snow-dusted peaks were the overseers of this capricious wilderness, at whose whim you operated. On their return from pursuing Roper, Northwic’s forces had turned a corner on one of the tortuous Anakim roads and startled a grazing aurochs. The enraged bull had marauded through their ranks, lobbing soldiers over the heads of their fleeing compatriots and killing four of them, wounding another score before retreating back into the trees. Every day they lost a dozen foragers to packs of startlingly ferocious wolves, or rogue giant bears that did not behave like the beasts on the south side of the Abus. It was not clear to Bellamus what his men were doing wrong, or how they incurred the wrath of these predators, who seemed to tolerate the Anakim so peaceably.
