by Paul Kearney
Corfe had no idea why he was here.
A palace flunkey, all lace cuffs and buckled shoes, had shown him the way soon after he had received the summons. He stood alone now in the private tower of the Queen Dowager, utterly at a loss.
There was a click, and a part of the wall opened to admit the Queen Dowager Odelia. It shut behind her and she stood serenely looking Corfe up and down, a slight smile on her face.
Corfe remembered his manners and bowed hurriedly; he was not of sufficient rank to kiss her hand. Odelia inclined her head graciously in response.
“Sit, Colonel.”
He found himself a stool, absurdly conscious of the contrast between his appearance and the lady’s. He still looked rather as though he had just trudged off a battlefield, though he had been in Torunn for two days. He had no money, no way to improve his wardrobe, and no one had offered him any advice or help in the matter. Macrobius had been borne away on wings of policy and state, and Corfe had had it brought home to him exactly how insignificant he was. He longed to be back at the dyke with his men doing the only job he had ever been fit for, but could not leave until he had the King’s permission, and getting to see the King was well-nigh impossible. He was baffled, therefore, by the Queen Dowager’s summons; he had thought himself entirely forgotten.
She was watching him patiently, a glint of what might have been humour in the marvellous green eyes. Carnelian pins secured her golden hair in a stately column atop her head, emphasizing the fine line of her neck. Corfe had heard the rumours; the Queen Dowager was a sorceress who preserved her looks through judicious use of thaumaturgy, sacrifices of new-born babes and the like. It was true she looked a good deal younger than her years. She might have been Lofantyr’s elder sister rather than his mother, but Corfe could see the blue veins on the backs of her hands, the slightly swollen knuckles, the faint creases at the corners of her eyes and on her brow. She was attractive, but the signs were there.
“Do you believe me a witch, Colonel?” she asked, startling him. It was almost as though she had followed his train of thought.
“No,” he said. “At least, not as the rumours have it. I don’t believe you slay black cockerels at midnight or some such nonsense . . . your majesty.” He was not sure of the right way to address her.
Something black scuttled along one of the beams above his head, too quickly for him to catch more than a glimpse of it. So they have rats even in palaces, he thought.
“Lofantyr is ‘Majesty,’ ” the Queen Dowager said. “To you I am just ‘lady,’ unless there is some other epithet you would prefer.”
She seemed to be deliberately trying to disconcert him. The realization irritated him. He had no time for the games of the Torunnan court.
“Why did you summon me here?” he asked bluntly.
She cocked her head to one side. “Ah, directness. I like that. You would be amazed how little of it there is in Torunn. Or perhaps you would not. You are a soldier pure and simple, are you not, Colonel? You are not at ease here in the intricacies of the court. You would rather be hip-deep in gore at Ormann Dyke.”
“Yes,” he said, “I would.” There was nothing else he could say. He had never been any use at dissembling, and he sensed it would do him no good here.
“Would you like some wine?”
He nodded, totally at sea.
She clapped her hands and the door through which Corfe had entered opened. A willowy girl with the almond-shaped eyes and high cheekbones of the steppe peoples—a household slave—entered bearing a tray. She set out a decanter and two glasses in silence and then left as noiselessly as she had come. The Queen Dowager poured two generous glassfuls of ruby liquid.
“Ronian,” she said. “Little known, but as good as Gaderian if it is well cared for. Our southern fiefs have fine vineyards, but they don’t export much.”
Corfe sipped at the wine. It might have been gun oil for all he tasted it.
“General Pieter Martellus thinks highly of you, Colonel. In his dispatches he says you made an excellent defence of Ormann Dyke’s eastern bastion ere it fell. He also adds that you seem to work best as an independent commander.”
“The general flatters me,” Corfe said. He had not known that the dispatches he carried from the dyke had included a report on himself.
“You are also the only Torunnan officer to have survived Aekir’s fall. You must be a man of luck.”
Corfe’s face became a stiff mask. “I don’t much believe in luck, my lady.”
“But it exists. It is that indefinable element which in war or peace—but especially in war—sets a man apart from his fellows.”
“If you say so.”
She smiled. “Aekir has marked you, Corfe. Before the siege you were an ensign, a junior officer. In the months since you have soared to the rank of colonel purely on merit. Aekir’s fall may have been the counterweight to your ascent.”
“I would give all my rank, and more besides, to have Aekir back again,” Corfe said with some heat. And to have Heria again, his soul cried out.
“Of course,” she said soothingly. “But now you are here in Torunn, friendless and penniless, an officer without a command. Merit is not always enough in this world. You must have something else.”
“What?”
“A . . . sponsor, perhaps. A patron.”
Corfe paused, frowning. At last he said: “Is that why I am here? Am I to become your client, lady?”
She sipped her wine. “Loyalty is more precious than gold at court, for if it is to be real it cannot be bought. I want a man whom gold cannot buy.”
“Why? For what purpose?”
“For my own purposes, and those of the state. You know that Lofantyr has been excommunicated by the rival Pontiff Himerius. His nobles know Macrobius is alive—they have seen him with their own eyes. But some do not choose to believe what they see, because it suits them. Torunna is boiling with rebellion; men of rank never need much in the way of an excuse to repudiate their liege-lord. If nothing else, Corfe, I think Aekir and Ormann Dyke have burnt loyalty into you, whether you like it or not. That kind of loyalty, when it is accompanied with real ability, is a rare thing.”
“There must be some men loyal to the King in the kingdom,” Corfe growled.
“Men tend to have families; they put that loyalty first. If they serve the crown well, it is because they want advancement not only for themselves but for their families also. Thus are the great houses of the nobility created. It is a necessary but dangerous exchange.”
“What do you want of me, lady?” Corfe asked wearily.
“I have spoken to the Pontiff of you, Corfe. He also thinks highly of you. He tells me you have no family, no roots now that the Holy City is no more.”
Corfe bent his head. “Perhaps.”
She rose from her chair and came over to him. Her hands encircled his face, the fingertips just touching his cheekbones. He could smell the lavender her dress had been stored in, the more subtle perfume that rose off her skin. The brilliant eyes held his.
“There is pain in you, a rawness that may never scab over entirely,” she said in a low voice. “It is this which drives you on. You are a man without peace, Corfe, without hope of peace. Was it Aekir?”
“My wife,” he said, his voice half strangled in his throat. “She died.”
The fingertips brushed his face as lightly as a bee nuzzling a flower. Her eyes seemed enormous: viridian orbs with utter black at their core.
“I will help you,” she said.
“Why?”
She leaned down. Her face seemed almost to glow. Her breath stirred his forelock.
“Because I am only a woman, and I need a soldier to do my killing for me.” Her voice was as low as the bass note of a lute, dark as heather honey. Her lips brushed his temple and the hair on the back of his neck rose like the pelt of a cat caught in a thunderstorm. They remained like that for an endless second, breathing each other’s breath.
Then she straightened,
releasing him.
“I will procure a command for you,” she said, suddenly brisk. “A flying column. You will take it wherever I wish to send it. You will do whatever it is I want you to do. In return—” She hesitated and her smile made her seem much younger. “In return, I will protect you, and I will see that the intrigues of the court do not hamstring your every move.”
Corfe looked up at her from his stool. He was not tall; even had he been standing their eyes would just have been level with each other.
“I still don’t understand.”
“You will. One day you will. Go to the court chamberlain. Tell him you have need of funds; if he objects, tell him to come to me. Procure for yourself a more fitting wardrobe.”
“What of the King?” Corfe asked.
“The King will do as he is told,” she snapped, and he saw the iron in her, the hidden strength. “That is all, Colonel. You may go.”
Corfe was bewildered. As he stood up she did not move away at once and he brushed against her. Then she turned away from him.
He bowed to her slender backbone, and left the chamber without another word.
I T was a featureless, windswept land. Flat salt marshes spread out for miles in every direction but the sea. The only sounds were the piping of marsh birds and the hissing of the wind in the reeds. Off to the north-west the Hebros Mountains loomed, their knees already pale with snow.
The longboats were ferrying the last of the stores from the ship. The soldiers had lit fires on the firmer of the reed islands and were busy constructing shelters to keep out the searching wind. Abeleyn stood by one of the fires and stared out at the skewed hulk of the beached carrack. Dietl was beside him, his eyes red-rimmed with grief and pain. They had sealed his stump with boiling pitch, but the agony of seeing his ship in such a pass seemed to have affected him more than the loss of his hand.
“When I come into my kingdom again, you shall have the best carrack in the state fleet, Captain,” Abeleyn told him gently.
Dietl shook his head. “Never was there such a ship. She broke my heart, faithful to the last.”
They had heaved the guns overboard as the ship took on more and more water, then the heavier of the stores and finally the fresh water casks. The carrack had grounded upon a sandbar with the sea swirling around her hatches, and there had settled, canting to one side as the tide went out. It was a narrow bar, and as the supporting water withdrew her back had broken with an agonized screeching and groaning that seemed almost sentient.
Abeleyn clapped Dietl on his good shoulder and walked away from the fire. “Orsini!”
“Yes, sire.” Sergeant Orsini was immediately on hand. He was the only soldier of any rank remaining with Abeleyn’s company: the officers had gone down fighting in the two nefs.
“What have we got, Sergeant? How many and how much?”
Orsini blinked, his mind turning it over.
“Some sixty soldiers, sire, maybe a dozen of your own household attendants, and the remaining crew of the carrack numbers near thirty. But of that total, maybe twenty are wounded. There’s two or three won’t last out the night.”
“Horses?” Abeleyn asked tersely.
“Drowned in the hold, most of ’em, sire, or shot through with splinters in the battle. We managed to get out your own gelding and three mules. It’s all there is.”
“Stores?”
Orsini looked at the mounds of waterlogged sacks, crates and casks that were piling up on the little island and its neighbours, half hidden in the yellow reed beds.
“Not much, sire, not for a hundred men. Supplies for a week if we’re easy on ’em. Ten days at a pinch.”
“Thank you, Sergeant. You’ll have a guard rota set up, of course.”
“Yes, sire. Nearly every man salvaged his arquebus, though the powder’ll take a while to dry.”
“Good work, Orsini. That’s all.”
The sergeant went back to his work. Abeleyn’s mouth tightened as he watched the parties of soaked, bloodied and exhausted men setting up their makeshift camp on the soggy reed islands. They had fought a battle, struggled to bring a dying ship to shore, and now they would have to scrabble for survival on this remote coast. He had heard not a word of dissension or complaint. It humbled him.
He knew that they had beached somewhere south of the Habrir river; technically they were in Hebrion, the river marking the border between the kingdom and its attached duchy. This was a desolate portion of Abeleyn’s dominions though, an extensive marshland which reached far inland and was crossed by only one or two causeway-raised Royal roads. There would be villages within a day’s march, but no town of any significance for fifteen leagues—and that the city of Pontifidad, back to the north-east. Abrusio was over fifty leagues away, and to get to it overland they would have to cross the lower passes of the Hebros, where the mountains that were the backbone of Hebrion plunged precipitously into the sea.
A swoop of wings, and he turned to find Golophin’s gyrfalcon perched on a thick reed behind him.
“Where have you been?” he asked shortly.
“The bird or I, sire? The bird has been resting, and well-earned the rest has been. I have been busy, though.”
“Well?”
“Rovero and Mercado are ours, thank the Blessed Saints.”
Abeleyn muttered a quiet prayer of thanks himself. “Then I can do it.”
“Yes. There are other ramifications, though—”
“Talking to birds again, sire?” a woman’s voice said. Golophin’s familiar took off at once, leaving a barred feather circling in the air behind it.
The lady Jemilla was dressed in a long, fur-trimmed mantle of wool the colour of a cooling ember. She had let her thick mane of ebony hair tumble down about her face, emphasizing the paleness of her skin, and her lips were rouged. Of her pregnancy, some three months gone, there was as yet no visible sign.
Abeleyn’s temper flickered a moment, but he mastered it. “You look well, lady.”
“Last time you saw me, sire, I was prostrate, retching and green in the face. I should hope that I look well now, by contrast if nothing else.” She came closer.
“I trust my men have made you comfortable?”
“Oh, yes,” she replied, smiling. “They are such gallants at heart, your soldiers. They have built me a lovely shelter of canvas and driftwood, with a fire to warm it. I feel like the Queen of the Beachcombers.”
“And the—the child?”
One hand went immediately to her still-flat belly. “Yet within me, as far as I can tell. My maid was convinced that the seasickness would put paid to it, but the child seems to be a fighter. As a king’s child should be.”
She was verging on insolence and Abeleyn knew it, but he had ignored her lately and the last few days must have been hard on her. So he merely bowed slightly in acknowledgement, not quite trusting himself to retort with civility.
Her voice changed; it lost its hard edge. “Sire, I apologize if I disturbed you in your . . . meditations. It is only that I have missed your company of late. My maid has set a skillet of wine on the fire to heat. Will you not join me in a glass?”
There were a million and one things he should be doing, and he was with child himself to hear Golophin’s news; but the offer of hot wine was tempting, as was the other, unspoken offer in her eyes. Abeleyn was exhausted to the marrow. The thought of relaxing for a little while decided him. His men could do without him for an hour.
“Very well,” he said, and he took the slim hand she extended and let himself be led away.
From its perch on a nearby bulrush, the gyrfalcon watched with cold, unblinking eyes.
H ER shelter was cosy indeed, if a timber-framed canvas hut could be cosy. She had salvaged a couple of chests and some cloaks from the wreck; these did duty as furnishings.
She dismissed the maid and hauled off Abeleyn’s bloody, salt-cracked boots with her own hands, tipping a trickle of water out of each; then she ladled out a pewter tankard of the steaming w
ine. Abeleyn sat and watched the flames of the fire turn from pale transparency to solid saffron as the day darkened. So short, the daylight hours at this time of year. A reminder that this was not the campaigning season, not the proper season for war.
The wine was good. He could almost feel it coursing through his veins and warming his chilled flesh. He recalled Jemilla’s maid and ordered her to take the rest of it to the tents of the wounded. He saw Jemilla’s lips thin as he did, and smiled to himself. The lady had her own ideas of worthy and unworthy, expendable and indispensable.
“Are you hurt, sire?” she asked. “Your doublet is bespattered with gore.”
“Other men’s, not mine,” Abeleyn told her, sipping his wine.
“It was magnificent—all the soldiers say so. A battle worthy of Myrnius Kuln himself. Of course, I only heard it. Consuella and I were crouched in the stink of the lower hold under sacks; hardly a good post to observe the ebb and flow, the glory of it.”
“It was a skirmish, no more,” Abeleyn said. “I was careless to think we would get away so easily from Perigraine.”
“The corsairs were in league with the other kings, then?” she asked, shocked.
“Yes, lady. I am a heretic. They want me dead—it is that simple. Using corsairs to kidnap or assassinate me rather than national troops was merely to utilize a certain discretion.”
“Discretion!”
“Diplomacy has always been a mixture of cunning, courtesy and murder.”
She placed a hand on her stomach, seemingly unaware of the gesture. “What of King Mark and King Lofantyr? Were attempts made on their lives?”
“I don’t know. Possibly. In any case, when they arrive home they will face men of power who intend to take advantage of the situation. As I will.”
“It is rumoured that Abrusio is in the control of the Church and the nobles,” Jemilla said.
“Is it? Rumours are unreliable things.”
