by Paul Kearney
Abeleyn grunted. “The Fimbrians were never an equestrian people. Sometimes I think that is why they have never bred an aristocracy. They walk everywhere. Even their emperors tramped about the provinces as though they were infantrymen. What else? What news of home?”
There was a pause. The bird preened one wing for several seconds before the old wizard’s voice issued eerily from its beak once more.
“They burned six hundred today, lad. The Knights Militant have more or less purged Abrusio of the Dweomer-folk now. They are sending parties out into the surrounding fiefs to hunt for more.”
Abeleyn went very still.
“Who rules in Abrusio?”
“The Presbyter Quirion, formerly Bishop of Fulk.”
“And the lay leaders?”
“Sastro di Carrera for one. The Sequeros, of course. Between them they have carved up the kingdom very nicely, with the Church in overall authority, naturally.”
“And the diocesan bishops? I always thought Lembian of Feramuno was a reasonable man.”
“A reasonable man, but still a cleric. No, lad: their faces are all set against you.”
“What of the army, the fleet?”
“Ah, there you have the bright spot. General Mercado has refused to put his men at the disposal of the council, as these usurpers style themselves. The tercios are confined to barracks, and Admiral Rovero has the fleet well in hand also. The Lower City of Abrusio, the barracks and the harbours are no-go areas for the Knights.”
Abeleyn let out a long breath. “So we can make landfall. There is hope, Golophin.”
“Yes, sire. But Mercado is an old man, and a pious one. The Inceptines are working on him. He is as loyal as a hound, but he is also intolerant of heresy. We cannot afford to lose any time, or we may find the army arraigned against us when we reach Hebrion.”
“You think a Pontifical bull could have arrived there already?”
“I do. Himerius will waste no time once he hears the news from Vol Ephrir. And therein lies your danger, sire. Refusing to obey the will of a few trumped-up, would-be princes is one thing, but remaining loyal to an absent heretic is quite another. The bull may be enough to sway the army and the fleet. You must prepare yourself for that.”
“If that happens I am finished, Golophin.”
“Nearly, but not quite. You will still have your own lands, your own personal retainers. With Astarac’s help you could reclaim the throne.”
“Plunging Hebrion into civil war while I do.”
“No one ever said this course would be an easy one, sire. I could wish that we had made better time in our journey, though.”
“I need agitators, Golophin. I need trusted men who will enter the city before me and spread the truth of the matter. Abrusio is not cut out to be ruled by priests. When the city hears that Macrobius is alive and well, that Himerius is an imposter and that Astarac and Torunna are with me in this thing, then it will be different.”
“I will see what I can do, lad, but my contacts in the city are growing thinner on the ground day by day. Most of them are ashes, friends of fifty years. May the lord God rest their souls. They died good men, whatever the Ravens might think.”
“And you, Golophin. Are you safe?”
Something in the yellow gleam of the bird’s eye chilled Abeleyn as it replied in the old mage’s voice.
“I will be all right, Abeleyn. The day they try to take me will be one to remember, I promise you.”
Abeleyn turned and stared back over the taffrail. Astarac was out of sight over the brim of the horizon, but he could just make out the white glimmer of the Hebros Mountains ahead, to the north-west.
Astarac, far astern of them: the kingdom of King Mark, soon to be his brother-in-law. If there were ever time for weddings again after all this. What was waiting for Mark in Astarac? More of the same, perhaps. Ambitious clerics, nobles leaping at the opportunity to rule. War.
A sea mile astern of Abeleyn’s vessel two wide-bellied nefs, the old-fashioned trading ships of the Levangore, were making heavy going of the swell. Within them was the bulk of Abeleyn’s entourage, four hundred strong; the only subjects whose obedience he still commanded. It was because of them he had taken the longer sea route home instead of trying to chance the snowbound passes of the mountains. He would need every loyal sword in the months to come; he could not afford to abandon them.
“Golophin, I want you to do something.”
The gyrfalcon cocked its head to one side. “I am yours to command, my boy.”
“You must procure a meeting with Rovero and Mercado. You must let the army and the fleet know the truth of things. If the Hebrian navy is against me, then we will never get to within fifty leagues of Abrusio.”
“It will not be easy, sire.”
“Nothing ever is, my friend. Nothing ever is.”
“I will do my best. Rovero, being a mariner, has always had a more open mind than Mercado.”
“If you must choose one, then let it be Rovero. The fleet is the most important.”
“Very well, sire.”
“Sail ho!” the lookout cried from the maintop. “I see five—no, six—sail abaft the larboard beam!”
Dietl, the master, squinted up at the maintop.
“What are they, Tasso?”
“Lateen-rigged, sir. Galleasses by my bet. Corsairs maybe.”
Dietl blinked, then turned to Abeleyn.
“Corsairs, sire. A whole squadron, perhaps. Shall I put her about?”
“Let me see for myself,” Abeleyn snapped. He clambered over the ship’s rail and began climbing the shrouds. In seconds he was up in the maintop with Tasso, the lookout. The sailor looked both amazed and terrified at finding himself on such close terms with a king.
“Point them out to me,” Abeleyn commanded.
“There, sire. They’re almost hull up now. They have the wind on the starboard beam, but you can see their oars are out too. There’s a flash of foam along every hull, regular as a waterclock.”
Abeleyn peered across the unending expanse of white-streaked sea while the maintop described lazy arcs under him with the pitch and roll of the carrack. There: six sails like the wings of great waterborne birds, and the regular splash of the oars as well.
“How do you know they’re corsairs?” he asked Tasso.
“Lateen-rigged on all three masts, sir, like a xebec. Astaran and Perigrainian galleasses are square-rigged on fore and main. Those are corsairs, sir, no doubt about it, and they’re on a closing course.”
Abeleyn studied the oncoming ships in silence. It was too much of a coincidence. These vessels knew what they were after.
He slapped Tasso on the shoulder and sidled down the backstay to the deck. The whole crew was standing staring, even the Hebrian soldiers and marines of his entourage. He joined Dietl on the quarterdeck, smiling.
“You had best beat to quarters, Captain. I believe we have a fight on our hands.”
THREE
A T times it seemed as though the whole world were on the move.
From Ormann Dyke the road curved round to arrow almost due south through the low hills of northern Torunna. A fine road, built by the Fimbrians in the days when Aekir had been the easternmost trading post of their empire. The Torunnan kings had kept it in good repair, but in their own road-building they had never been able to match the stubborn Fimbrian disregard for natural obstacles, and thus the secondary roads which branched off it curved and wound their way about the shoulders of the hills like rivulets of water finding their natural level.
All the roads were clogged with people.
Corfe had seen it before, on the retreat from Aekir, but the other troopers of the escort had not. They were shocked by the scale of the thing.
The troop had passed through empty villages, deserted hamlets, and even a couple of towns where the doors of the houses had been left ajar by their fleeing occupants. And now the occupants of all northern Torunna were on the move, it seemed.
Most of
them were actually from Aekir. With the onset of winter, General Martellus of Ormann Dyke had ordered the refugee camps about the fortress broken up. Those living there had been told to go south, to Torunn itself. They were too big a drain on the meagre resources of the dyke’s defenders, and with winter swooping in—a hard winter too, by the looks of it—they would not survive long in the shanty towns which had sprung up in the shadow of the dyke. Hundreds of thousands of them were moving south, trekking along the roads in the teeth of the bitter wind. Their passage had had a catastrophic effect on the inhabitants of the region. There had been looting, killing, even pitched battles between Aekirians and Torunnans. The panic had spread, and now the natives of the country were heading south also. A rumour had begun that the Merduks would not remain long in winter quarters, but were planning a sudden onslaught on the dyke, a swift sweep south to the Torunnan capital before the heaviest of the snows set in. There was no truth to it. Corfe had reconnoitred the Merduk winter camps himself, and he knew that the enemy was regrouping and resupplying, and would be for months. But reason was not something a terrified mob hearkened to very easily, hence the exodus.
The troop of thirty Torunnan heavy cavalry were escorting a clumsy, springless carriage over the crowded roads, battering a way through the crowds with the armoured bodies of their warhorses and warning shots from their matchlocks. Inside the carriage Macrobius III, High Pontiff of the Western World, sat with blind patience clutching the Saint’s symbol of silver and lapis lazuli General Martellus had given him. Nowhere in Ormann Dyke could there be found material of the right shade to clothe a Pontiff, so instead of purple Macrobius wore robes of black. Perhaps it was an omen, Corfe thought. Perhaps he would not be recognized as Pontiff again, now that Himerius had been elected to the position by the Prelates and the Colleges of Bishops in Charibon. Macrobius himself did not seem to care whether he was Pontiff or not. The Merduks had carved something vital out of his spirit when they gouged the eyes from his head in Aekir.
Unbidden, her face was in Corfe’s mind again, as clear as lamplight. That raven-dark hair, and the way one corner of her mouth had tilted upward when she smiled. His Heria was dead, a burnt corpse in Aekir. That part of him, the part which had loved her, was nothing but ash now also. Perhaps the Merduks had carved something out of his own spirit when they had taken the Holy City: something of the capacity for laughter and loving. But that hardly mattered now.
And yet, and yet. He found himself scanning the face of every woman in the teeming multitude, hoping and praying despite himself that he might see her. That she might have survived by some miracle. He knew it was the merest foolishness; the Merduks had snatched the youngest and most presentable of Aekir’s female population on the city’s fall to be reserved for their field brothels. Corfe’s Heria had died in the great conflagration which had engulfed the stricken city.
Sweet blood of the holy Saint, he hoped she had died.
The outrider Corfe had dispatched an hour before came cantering back up the side of the road, scattering trudging refugees like a wolf exploding a flock of sheep. He reined in his exhausted horse and flung a hurried salute, his vambrace clanging against the breast of his cuirass in the age-old gesture.
“Torunn is just over the hill, Colonel. Barely a league to the outskirts.”
“Are we expected?” Corfe asked.
“Yes. There is a small reception party outside the walls, though they’re having a hell of a time with the refugees.”
“Very good,” Corfe said curtly. “Get back in the ranks, Surian, and go easier on your mount next time.”
“Yes, sir.” Abashed, the youthful trooper rode on down the line. Corfe followed him until he had reached the bumping carriage.
“Holiness.”
The curtains twitched back. “Yes, my son?”
“We’ll be in Torunn within the hour. I thought you might like to know.”
The mutilated face of Macrobius stared blindly up at Corfe. He did not seem to relish the prospect.
“It starts again, then,” he said, his voice barely audible over the creak and thump of the moving carriage, the hoofbeats of horses on the paved road.
“What do you mean?”
Macrobius smiled. “The great game, Corfe. For a time I was off the board, but now I find myself being moved on it again.”
“Then it is God’s will, Father.”
“No. God does not move the pieces; the game is an invention of man alone.”
Corfe straightened in the saddle. “We do what we must, Holy Father. We do our duty.”
“Which means that we do as we are told, my son.”
The wreck of a smile once more. Then the curtain fell back into place.
T ORUNNA was one of the later-founded provinces of the Fimbrian Empire. Six centuries previously, it had consisted of a string of fortified towns along the western coast of the Kardian Sea, all of them virtually isolated from one another by the wild Felimbric tribesmen of the interior. As the tribes became pacified Torunn itself, built athwart the Torrin river, became an important port and a major fortress against the marauding steppe nomads who infested the lands about the Kardian Gulf. Eventually the Fimbrians settled the land between the Torrin and Searil rivers by planting eighty tercios of retired soldiers there with their families to provide a tough buffer state between the prospering province to the south and the savages beyond.
Marshal Kaile Ormann, commander of the Eastern Field Army, dug a huge dyke at the only crossing point of the swift, gorge-cutting Searil river and for forty years it was the easternmost outpost of the Fimbrians, until the founding of Aekir on the Ostian river still farther east. The Torunnans themselves were thus direct descendants of the first Fimbrian soldier-settlers, and the great families of the kingdom all traced their origins back to the most senior officers from among those first tercios. The Royal family of Torunn was descended from the house of Kaile Ormann, the builder of Ormann Dyke.
It was one of the ironies of the world that Torunna was the first province to rebel against Fimbria and declare its independence from the Electors. It snatched Aekir for itself and was recognized by the then High Pontiff, Ammianus, as a legitimate state in return for four thousand volunteer troops, who were to become the forerunners of the Knights Militant.
Torunna was thus a cockpit of momentous history in the west, and during the long years of Fimbrian isolation following the empire’s collapse it had become the foremost military power among the new monarchies, the guardian-state both of the Pontiff and the eastern frontier.
A man coming upon Torunn for the first time—especially from the north—might see in it uncanny similarities to the layout and construction of Fimbir. The old city walls had long ago been enlarged and changed so that they bristled with ravelins, bastions, crownworks and hornworks designed for a later age of warfare, when gunpowder counted for more than sword blades; but there was a certain brutal massiveness about the place which was wholly Fimbrian.
It brought back memories for Corfe as his troop of horsemen and their trundling charge came over the final slopes before the city. A tangled riot of later building meant that Torunn was surrounded by unwalled suburbs beyond which the grey stone of the walls could be seen lying like the flanks of a great snake amid the roofs and towers of the Outer City. This was the place where he had joined the tercios, where he had been trained, where his adolescence had been roughly hewn into manhood. He was a native of Staed, one of the southern coastal cities of the kingdom. To him, Torunn had seemed like a miracle when first he had seen it. But he had seen Aekir since, and knew what a truly huge city looked like. Torunn housed some fifth of a million people, and that same number were now on the roads leading towards it, seeking sanctuary. The enormity of the problem defeated his imagination.
In the suburbs the press of people was worse. There were Torunnan cavalry there, struggling to keep order, and open-air kitchens had been set up in all the market places. The noise and the stink were incredible. Torunn had the aspect o
f one of those apocalyptic religious paintings which depicted the last days of the world. Though Aekir at its fall, Corfe thought bitterly, had been even closer.
Before the new, low-built city gates a tercio of pikemen had been drawn up in ranks and a pair of demiculverins flanked them. Slow-match burned in lazy blue streamers. Corfe was not sure if the show of force was to receive the High Pontiff or to keep the teeming refugees out of the Inner City, but as the carriage was spotted the culverins went off in salute, blank charges roaring out in clouds of smoke and spitting flame. From the towers above, other guns began to fire until the walls seemed to ripple with smoke and the thunderous sound recalled for Corfe the Merduk bombardment at Ormann Dyke.
The Torunnans presented arms, an officer flourished his sabre, and the High Pontiff was welcomed through the gates of Torunn.
K ING Lofantyr heard the salute echoing across the city, and paused in his pacing to look out of the tower windows. He pushed aside the iron grilles and stepped out on to the broad balcony. The city was a serried sea of roofs reaching out to the north, but he could glimpse the puffing smoke clouds from the casemates on the walls.
“Here at last,” he said. The relief in his voice was a palpable thing.
“Perhaps now you will sit a while,” a woman’s voice said.
“Sit! How can I sit? How will I ever take my ease again, mother? I should never have listened to Abeleyn; his tongue is too renowned for its persuasiveness. The kingdom is on the brink of ruin, and I brought it there.”
“Pah! You have your father’s gift for drama, Lofantyr. Was it you who brought the Merduks to the gates of Aekir?” the woman retorted sharply behind him. “The kingdom won a great battle of late and is holding the line of the east. You are Torunnan, and a king. It is not seemly to voice the doubts of your heart so.”
Lofantyr turned with a twisted smile. “If I cannot voice them to you, then where shall I utter them?”
The woman was seated at the far end of the tall tower chamber in a cloud of lace and brocade. An embroidery board was perched on a stand before her, and her nimble hands worked upon it without pause, the needle flashing busily. Her eyes flicked up at her son the King and down to her work, up and down. Her fingers never hesitated.
