by Leo Carew
Gray sheathed the sword in the ensuing silence. Then he shrugged. “But who cares what I say? This is all irrelevant if I don’t live as I talk. Worse than irrelevant.” Two quick spoonfuls and he had finished his hoosh. He stood, face crumpling slightly, and deposited his bowl by the fire. “I’m going to relieve the sentries. Well fought today, all of you. Especially you, my lord.” The guardsmen thumped their feet again and Gray departed.
Later, Pryce left the fireside and headed for the outer rim of the camp. He collected a thick leather roll of supplies: bleached linen strips, phials of vinegar in which betony had been soaked, spools of silk and catgut thread, curved steel needles, four tweezers (two needle-nosed, two flat-nosed), several leather tourniquets and a sharp knife. He skirted the camp perimeter, raising a hand to the sentries who hailed him, and soon found Gray staring out into an ink-black night. The moon and stars had vanished without trace behind dense cloud.
“Old fool,” Pryce said irritably.
“What?”
“Show me your leg.”
Gray lifted his chain-mail skirt to reveal a jagged wound in his thigh; deep and clotted thickly with blood. “Sit,” commanded Pryce. Gray sat, stretching out the injured leg before him, and Pryce began to clean it with a linen cloth, soaked in the betony vinegar. “How did you get this?”
Gray took a deep breath and closed his eyes as the vinegar seeped into the wound. “Doing what you should be doing now; protecting the Black Lord.”
“He’s safe,” said Pryce dismissively.
“Not without you,” said Gray urgently. “Today’s victory has put him in greater danger than ever. Uvoren will hear of this soon and he will know that Roper has become a genuine threat. Gosta and Asger will be looking for an opportunity to kill him; all Uvoren’s friends will.”
“Uvoren is safe inside the Hindrunn with thirty thousand soldiers,” said Pryce. “He has no need for underhand tactics.”
“Even Uvoren would rather avoid the necessity of obliterating half the legions before the walls of the Hindrunn,” insisted Gray. “He will try to have him killed, and soon. Before he can make any more of a name for himself.”
With the clotting cleaned away, Gray’s wound was now bleeding freely again. Pryce looked at it thoughtfully, wiping away the blood, and then bade Gray press a wad of linen against it whilst he threaded one of the needles with silk. He washed his hands in vinegar, removed Gray’s palm from the wound and began to stitch it together.
“You needn’t worry, Gray. I can stop Gosta,” he said, finishing a stitch and blotting the wound. “And Asger. I’ll even stop them together, if I have to.” He bit his lip as he focused on the work.
“You can only stop them if you’re with him. I won’t leave unless I have to, but one of us must always remain and it should be you. I won’t defeat Gosta one-on-one.”
“Nannying,” said Pryce angrily. “How long am I to stay diligently by his side?”
“As long as is necessary,” said Gray, simply. “You are a Sacred Guardsman, are you not? Guard him.”
“Get someone else to do it.”
“There’s no one else I trust. Maybe Helmec, but I do not know him well enough for his loyalties to be clear.”
Pryce shook his head, tightening a stitch sharply and causing Gray to take a sudden breath. “Sorry,” he muttered. He finished the stitching in silence and then began winding a linen strip around the wound, finishing the dressing with a tight knot.
“Thank you, Pryce,” said Gray.
“So I must watch over him now?”
“Now and until we’ve worked out how to be rid of Gosta and Asger. But you think you could fight the two of them?”
“Perhaps,” said Pryce, frowning.
“Well, then maybe they’ll make it simple for us and attack whilst you guard him.”
“I wouldn’t do this for anyone else, Gray,” said Pryce, getting to his feet and swinging the leather roll onto his back. He looked angry and clearly wanted to say more. “I’m certainly not doing it for Roper.”
Gray stood with a little grunt of pain and took Pryce’s hand. “I know,” he said, turning back to the darkness.
10
The Pass Beside the Sea
The first thing the Sacred Guard did before their day began was to pray. They lived lives more intimately connected with their own mortality than almost any other man in the army; only the berserkers died with greater regularity than the guardsmen. The accepted wisdom was therefore that, at all times, each guardsman had to be at peace with the idea that the breaking day might be his last. He must be able to accept his end without complaint or disgrace to his comrades. He must consider every action he took in the knowledge that it might not be long before he had to stand his ground before the Almighty and answer for each one of them.
The clouds in the east were growing lighter and Gray, the rest of the Guard kneeling behind him, led the prayers that morning. Roper had taken to praying with them and found himself kneeling beside Asger. The disgraced guardsman stole belligerent glances at Roper whilst dutifully reciting the prayers. Roper paid no attention, considering Asger broken. Gosta was on Asger’s other side and he neither prayed out loud nor shut his eyes. He just stared unblinkingly at the back of the guardsman in front of him.
Other legionaries, particularly the auxiliaries, would come and watch the Sacred Guard at prayer, fascinated. They did not often get the opportunity to campaign with these heroes. The Sacred Guard were the most glorified echelon of Anakim society and the auxiliaries took every opportunity to observe their alien practices. They would stare greedily at the eye engraved on a guardsman’s right shoulder-plate, or the silver-wire wolf embedded in his cuirass, or his steel helmet through which he had threaded his long ponytail. Their eyes would linger on the guardsmen’s sword-hilts, which had, embedded in the pommel, a ring particular to the Sacred Guard, gifted by the Black Lord himself to symbolise the mutual obligation between guardsman and lord. If the guardsman had a Prize of Valour, signified by a silver arm-ring, they were more glorified still.
The auxiliaries would watch the way the guardsmen moved in pairs; still bonded, mentor and protégé, to fight together on the battlefield. They would listen anxiously to anything a guardsman might say, seeking to understand some essence of what made these men so special; how they had achieved such contentedness in the face of death and skill before the enemy. They knew each guardsman’s name. They knew the name of his sword; what deeds it had performed. They would fight all the harder if they knew they were watched by one of these heroes.
This was another reason for the Sacred Guard’s piety; before the Almighty alone could they appear humble. They were so elevated and glorified among other men, it was considered important that they show utter deference to a higher power, to which they were exposed each day through prayer.
“Until we walk with you,” finished Gray, at last. Most of the Guard stood and moved off to prepare breakfast, but some, including Gray, remained kneeling, eyes shut for a while in personal prayer. Roper, inspired by Gray’s example, had begun to do this as well. Kynortas had not been a pious man; indeed, he had had little patience for the religious devotion of the Sacred Guard. That was why he had allowed Uvoren so much licence with it; the two of them agreed it was unnecessary.
Roper prayed for his brothers in the northern haskoli. He prayed for the souls of his father and mother. He prayed to become a better man. He prayed for a secure throne from which he might rule the country justly and effectively. But, no matter how much he prayed, he was always finished before Gray, who would stay kneeling towards the east, eyes closed, mouth framing the softest of whispers.
Roper stood. Something was towering in the corner of his eye: a dark silhouette that blocked out the day’s grey light. A huge figure was watching over the guardsmen still at prayer: a man who must have been a foot taller than Roper himself. There was nothing unusual about another warrior watching the Guard; a dozen or so were doing it at that moment. But Roper knew
this one. He had spotted him several times before, watching the Guard. The plate on his chest bore a dog-headed angel that wielded a sword and his left shoulder was unarmoured, with an iron band affixed around his upper arm instead. These signs marked him out as a lictor in Ramnea’s Own Legion but, elevated as that position was, there were many of them. It was his unnatural height and the position of his sword on his right side, showing that he was left-handed, which marked this man apart.
This was Vigtyr the Quick.
He was not as famous as Uvoren the Mighty or Pryce Rubenson or Leon Kaldison or one of those heroes but, to those who knew what they were talking about, Vigtyr was the best of them all. It was said that this left-handed monster had not been beaten in the practice ring for decades: other warriors simply could not match his speed, his reach or his precision.
It was said too that Vigtyr craved the Sacred Guard with a desperate thirst. That was why he watched this morning. He was the most skilled warrior in the country but would not get that recognition until he wore the Almighty Eye over his right arm. Roper paused and watched him for a moment. Vigtyr had not noticed. He had eyes only for the kneeling guardsmen.
“Vigtyr the Quick,” said a voice behind Roper. He turned and found Tekoa standing immediately behind him.
“How quick is he?” said Roper.
Tekoa placed an arm behind Roper’s back and steered him towards the fire to join the other legates. “Not as fast as Pryce,” he said. “But he looks faster because his movements are so economical. That man has perfected sword-craft. He’d skewer Pryce.”
“So why isn’t he a Sacred Guardsman?”
“He isn’t a good man. Everyone owes him favours and he knows all their secrets: nobody wants him any more influential than he is already. He could have almost anyone in the kingdom before the Ephors for judgement if he wanted it, and sometimes he does. Many of the darkest events of the past few decades have had the whiff of Vigtyr about them. When you’re under the kind of stress that the Guard gets placed under regularly, he is not the person you want at your back.”
Roper wanted to know more but, as they sat, the legates began to demand his attention. He helped himself to a breakfast of boiled oats while they fed him their most recent information. It had been four days since their victory against the Sutherners and, in that time, Roper had given the Suthern horde space. Though it was only the cavalry who had been engaged in strenuous fighting, his men had all marched hard both before and after the attack. Some were still recovering from the wounds they had sustained, while most of the Sutherners had barely exerted themselves in their last encounter. Before the two sides met again, Roper wanted his men as fit as possible. In the time they waited, short rations would drain the Sutherners of energy and make them more vulnerable to disease.
But there was another reason he gave the Sutherners space. Roper had reasoned that in order to negate the enemy’s superior numbers, he would need an advantageous position from which to fight, where their flanks were well protected. He knew that Lord Northwic’s response to losing his supplies would probably be to retreat to the more reliable harvest provided by the sea. So tethered, that was where they could be destroyed and Roper had asked Tekoa to locate just such a battlefield at the coast.
If the battlefield could be found and the Sutherners persuaded to use it, Roper had dared to feel confident of victory. He had dared to look past the next battle, and forward to how he was to re-enter the Hindrunn afterwards without Uvoren eradicating him and his soldiers. The Hindrunn’s Outer Wall was riddled with cannon and crowned with all manner of siege-breaking weapons. The wall itself was solid granite, one hundred and fifty feet in height and fifty feet in depth at the base. It would be guarded and manned by thirty thousand warriors, every bit as ferocious and professional as the ones under Roper’s command and, with its full fury unleashed, would atomise Roper’s forty thousand.
When Roper had voiced these concerns to Gray, he had not received much sympathy. “Stop worrying about the Hindrunn, my lord,” Gray had said sternly. “If you consider anything other than the next battle, it will be the end of you, me and the Black Kingdom as a whole. You have badly wounded the Suthern army; they will be exhausted and malnourished and perhaps even diseased, but never underestimate the danger of the wounded beast. They will have nothing to lose. They will outnumber us by thousands. They will not be conservative. They will try and overwhelm the legions and you must be equal to the task, or all we have achieved so far will be for nothing. Forget the bloody Hindrunn.”
“I can’t, Gray. I know I should and I try, but all I can think about is that fortress and the man who holds it.”
“You are not thinking about the Hindrunn,” responded Gray. “Not really.” His expression softened a little. “I have tried to warn you about this. This is why you must do away with your hatred; it will overwhelm you in the end. What occupies your mind is Uvoren, not the fortress he controls. Why do you want to be the Black Lord?”
“To serve,” said Roper, automatically. Gray waited. “And perhaps because if I fail, I will die. It is also my purpose; my function in this world.” Gray waited. “And maybe to defeat Uvoren.”
“If you do not consider what drives you, you will not notice your own flaws. It is clear that you hate Uvoren and with that I have a great deal of sympathy. He is bad for the country, and hatred is the hardest emotion to control,” acknowledged Gray. “The advantage of acting through hatred is also its greatest disadvantage: there is no goal to achieve. No matter how successful you are in humiliating or perhaps killing Uvoren, your hatred for him will never dissipate. You can ignore fear and it will pass as you grow used to it. Grief will heal. Triumph will fade away, no matter how you try to hold on to it. But hatred will burn undimmed. It is like revulsion: a base reaction to everything you hold most in contempt. You cannot make yourself forgive when it is not in you. You must change who you are, so that those things that make you despise Uvoren are no longer hateful to you. Forget the Hindrunn, my lord. It is what it is.”
There speaks a man preparing for death, thought Roper, though he said no more. He thought Gray was right and his obsession with the fortress was based on his hatred of Uvoren; but he could not forget the Hindrunn. After dark, as the men around him lay still and silent, Roper stared at the sky, his mind dwelling on towers, walls and weapons. It felt like a canker within his mind, swelling and hardening as he explored it. It was invincible. It had been constructed as the foremost bastion of a paranoid race against an overwhelming enemy, and somehow Roper had to take it. His unbreakable home had turned against him and become a malignant presence in his mind.
Tekoa had started speaking, disturbing Roper’s reverie. “My men have discovered a battlefield for you, my lord.”
“Tell me,” said Roper, using his teeth to gouge a sticky clump of oats from the bowl of his bone spoon.
“Thirty leagues from here; a place called Githru. To get there, we must pass through the crossroads of Harstathur, which the poets have been claiming would be auspicious. They tell me Harstathur is the site of some nebulous ancient battle.”
“What ancient battle?” asked Pryce.
“The Battle of Harstathur,” said Tekoa flatly.
“Thank you for being so helpful.”
“I’m not a damned poet, that’s all I know.” Tekoa raised his hands to the general assembly, looking about the circle for someone who could shed some light on the Battle of Harstathur.
“Oh, come, come,” said Skallagrim. “Harstathur was the last and most important battle of the Uprooting, when the Anakim finally defeated the Sutherners to establish the Black Kingdom. They call Harstathur the Altar of Albion.”
“Do you know the poem?” asked Gray, who had finished his prayers and had come to sit with them. “I should like to hear it some time.”
“I know it well,” said Skallagrim. “I would be happy to sing it.”
“Perhaps later,” Roper intervened quickly. “What about the battlefield beyond Harstath
ur?”
“Githru. It’s a pass between the mountains and the sea. Rangers report that it is about two leagues across and falls away abruptly at the eastern side, with a steep cliff bordering the west; perfect for neutralising the enemy numbers. They have produced a map.” Tekoa reached down from the stump on which he sat and picked up two kinked sticks. He laid them parallel on the floor and Roper leaned forward to examine them. They would have meant nothing to a Sutherner, but the Anakim recognised these carved sticks as the outline of the pass being described. Each stick represented a border, with a pair of V-shaped notches signifying a river flowing into the sea, and further knots, bulges and kinks indicating the rise of the terrain, a perilous drop or, Roper was surprised to see, a risk of the sea flooding a portion of it. This map would not be a real representation of the field as it would appear to a circling crow. Rather, the size and distance of certain features would be exaggerated or reduced to reflect areas that the Skiritai who had produced it had thought would be important in the coming battle.
Roper sat back, scraping his wooden bowl clean with a frown. “Githru,” he said slowly. “What’s happening there?” and he pointed at the swelling that indicated a point where the sea might swamp the pass.
“They found some locals hiding out in the hills,” said Tekoa, “who said on a spring tide, the sea reclaims that area of the pass. With the moon as it is, probably not something we have to worry about. But luring the Sutherners to Githru might be difficult.”
“I doubt it,” said Roper. “It is we who can afford to wait, not they. Every day they delay weakens them. We will take up position and send them an invitation.” He knew that before the last battle, these men would have raised objections. Now there was a short silence, broken by Skallagrim.
