by Paul Kearney
“Merduk armour,” he said as the realization smote him. “But what is it doing here?”
“Trophies of war,” Passifal said. “Been here sixty years, since we threw back the Ostrabarian Merduks after they overran Ostiber. That was Gallican of Rone, if you remember your history. A good general. He beat them as they were approaching the Thurian Passes and sent twenty thousand of the black-hearted bastards to join their precious Prophet. The King staged a triumphal march for him here in Torunn, parades of prisoners and so on. And he shipped back a thousand sets of armour to display during it. When it was over they were dumped here and forgotten. Been here ever since. I had been meaning to get rid of them—we’re pressed for warehouse space, you see . . .”
Corfe dropped the old helm with a clang. “You expect me to dress my men up as Merduks?”
“Seems to me you haven’t a lot of choice, son. This is the best I can do. You’ll not find a better offer in the city, unless you can persuade the Queen Dowager to stump up the necessary cash.”
Corfe shook his head, thinking.
“It’s not honourable, sir, dressing up as heathens,” Ebro said passionately. “You should decline the command. It’s what they want you to do.”
“And what you want me to do also, Ensign?” Corfe asked without turning around.
“Sir, I—”
“We’ll take the armour,” Corfe said briskly to Passifal. “But we can’t let the men wear it as it stands; folk will think we’re the enemy. Have you any paint, Quartermaster?”
Passifal’s white eyebrows shot up. “Paint? Aye, tons of it, but what for?”
Corfe retrieved the helm he had thrown down a moment before. “We’ll paint this gear, to distinguish ourselves. Red, I think. Yes—a nice shade of scarlet so that the blood won’t show. Excellent.” He was smiling, but there was little humour in his face. “My men have no transport facilities. I’ll have them here within the hour and they can pick out their armour themselves. Can you have the paint waiting by then, Quartermaster?”
Passifal looked as though he had been let in on an enormous joke. “Why not? Yes, Colonel, the paint will be here. It’ll be worth it to see your five hundred savages dressed up in Merduk armour and splashed crimson.”
Again, the mirthless smile. “Not only the savages, Quartermaster. Ebro and I will also be donning Merduk gear.”
“But sir, we have our own,” Ebro protested. “There’s no need—”
“We’ll wear what the men wear,” Corfe interrupted him. “And I shall have to think up some sort of battle standard, since the regular Torunnan banners will, it seems, be denied to us. Good. All that remains now is to meet the General Staff and receive my specific orders. After that, we can begin to plan.”
“No waggons or mules, no transport for our gear,” Ensign Ebro said, a last-ditch effort.
Corfe grinned at him, unexpectedly good-humoured. “You forget, Ebro, that our command is composed of savage tribesmen from the mountains. What need have they of a baggage train? They can live off the country, and may God help the country.”
Passifal was watching Corfe as though he had just that moment recognized him from somewhere. “I see you intend to pick up the King’s gauntlet, Colonel.”
“If I can, Quartermaster,” Corfe said flatly, “I intend to throw it back in his face.”
NINETEEN
“W hat a pretty picture a burning city makes,” Sastro di Carrera said, leaning on the iron balcony rail of the Royal palace. Abrusio spread out beyond his perch in a sea of buildings, ending almost two miles away downhill in the confusion of ships and buildings and docks which butted on to the true sea, the Western Ocean which girdled the known edges of the world. It was twilight, not because the day was near its long winter sleep, but because of the towers of smoke that shrouded the sun. Sastro’s face was lit by the radiance of the burning, and he could hear it as a far thunder, the mutterings of the banished elder gods.
“May God forgive us,” Presbyter Quirion said beside him, making the Sign of the Saint across his breastplate. Unlike Sastro, who was immaculately tailored, Quirion was grimed and filthy. He had lately come from the inferno below, in which men were fighting and dying by the thousand, their collective screaming drowned out by the hungry roar of the holocaust, the tearing rattles of volley-fire.
“ ‘And now,’ ” he said quietly, “ ‘is Hell come to earth, and in the ashes of its burning will totter all the schemes of greedy men. The Beast, in coming, will tread the cinders of their dreams.’ ”
“What in the world are you talking about, Quirion?” Sastro asked.
“I was quoting an old text which foretells the end of the world we know and the beginning of another.”
“The end of the Hibrusid world, at any rate,” Sastro said with satisfaction. “And think of the prime building land the fire will clear for us. It will be worth a fortune.”
Quirion looked at his aristocratic companion with un-concealed contempt. “You are not King yet, my lord Carrera.”
“I will be. Nothing will stop me or you now, Presbyter. Abrusio will be ours very soon.”
“If there’s anything left of it.”
“The important parts will be left,” Sastro said, grinning. “What a blessed thing a wind is, to blow the flames out to sea and take with it those heretical traitors and rebel peasants in the Lower City who defy us. God’s hand at work, Quirion. Surely you can see that?”
“I do not like to ask God to intervene on my behalf; it smacks of hubris to assume that the Creator of the universe will think me, out of all His creations, worthy of attention. I merely try to further what I believe to be His divine will. In this instance, I needed two hundred barrels of pitch to set the Lower City alight.”
“A practical kind of faith you Knights profess,” Sastro said, raising his scented handkerchief to his face so that his mouth was concealed.
“I find it answers well enough.”
The handkerchief was tucked back inside a snowy sleeve. “So how goes the fighting then, my practical Presbyter?”
Quirion rasped a palm over the stubble on his scalp. “Severe enough at times. Your retainers have been acquitting themselves well since I stiffened their tercios with contingents of Knights. The trained Hebrian troops are better, of course, but they are distracted by Freiss’s men in their rear. He has three or four hundred arquebusiers holed up in the western arm of the Lower City cheek by jowl with the Arsenal, and they have had to tie up almost a thousand troops to keep him bottled in his bolthole.”
“What of the navy? There was a lot of activity in the Inner Roads this morning.”
“They were merely warping their ships off the docks; by now the fire will have swept down to the water’s edge. They tried a few ranging shots at the palace this afternoon, but the distance is too far. We have a boom across the Great Harbour covered by the forts on the moles; it should suffice to keep the navy at bay, and their guns out of range of the Upper City. Abrusio was built to be defended from a seaborne attack as well as from a landward one. That works in our favour. And the confined nature of the battlefield means that our disadvantages in numbers are not so apparent.”
“How far has the fire advanced?”
“As far as the Crown Wharves in the Inner Roads. It should almost be licking at the walls of the Arsenal itself. Mercado has had to set aside over three thousand men as firefighters, and another dozen tercios are overseeing the evacuation of the Lower City’s population. He is as hamstrung as a bull caught half over a gate.”
“His concern for the little people is laudable, but it will prove his undoing,” Sastro said.
“The little people are fighting side by side with the city garrison, Lord Carrera,” Quirion reminded him. “The population of the Upper City has remained neutral, but I would not place much faith in the nobles.”
“Oh, they’ll bend with the wind, as they always do. There’s not a great house in Hebrion—even the Sequeros—who will tangle with us now. And the Merchants’
Guild is being rapidly won over also. Gold is a marvellous comforter, I find, and the concessions that a future king can grant.”
“Yes . . .”
The steady roar of the flames mixed with furious exchanges of arquebus fire made a collective wailing which at a distance seemed like Abrusio herself crying out in agony because of the inferno gnawing at her bowels. Warfare on this scale had not been seen west of the Cimbrics for twenty years, but now the Five Monarchies were being ripped apart by internal dissension and religious struggle: civil war in everything but name.
There were rumours that Astarac was going the way of Hebrion, the nobles fighting to depose the heretic King Mark and elect one of their own to the throne, helped, of course, by the Inceptine Order and the Knights Militant. And Torunna, as well as being menaced by the vast Merduk army which had lately been stalled at Ormann Dyke, had uprisings of its own to contend with. And Almark’s king was dying—perhaps dead already—and was said to be intent on leaving his kingdom to the Church.
Quirion sighed. He was at heart a pious man, and a profoundly conservative one. Deeply convinced though he was that the Church was in the right and had to snuff out heresy wherever it took root—even were it to sprout in the palaces of kings—he did not like to see what he considered to be the natural order of things so disrupted and torn apart. Sastro now . . . he relished any anarchy which might further his own ambitions, but the Presbyter of the Knights in Abrusio would rather have been fighting heathens on the eastern frontiers than slaughtering folk who, at the end of the day, believed in the same God as he.
It was a feeling he kept to himself and scourged himself for at every opportunity, flying as it did in the face of the directives issued by the Pontiff in Charibon, God’s direct representative on earth. He was here to obey orders which in the last analysis were equivalent to the will of God. There could be no shirking of such a burden.
T HE fire hurtled through the narrow streets of Lower Abrusio like a wave, a bright tsunami which exploded the wooden buildings of this part of the city into kindling and ate out the interiors and the supporting wooden beams of those structures which were composed of yellow Hebrian stone until they toppled also. A dozen massed batteries of heavy culverins could not have bettered the destructive work, and the efforts of the soldiers-turned-firefighters in General Mercado’s command to stem the onset of the flames seemed pointless, drops of maniac effort swamped in a sea of fire.
They were busy demolishing a wide avenue of houses southwest of the front of the conflagration, hoping thereby to form a firebreak which would starve the flames of sustenance. Engineers had laid charges at the cornerstones of all the buildings and were busy detonating them in a series of explosions which blasted the smoke into concentric rings, like the ripples of a stone-pocked lake.
While this went on, the fighting continued, the streets clogged with frantic, murderous scrums of armoured men who were being rained with cinders and burning timbers. Here and there companies and demi-tercios of arquebusiers had space to form up in lines and the opposing forces fired and reloaded and fired again only yards away from each other, the formations melting away under the withering barrage like solder in a furnace, to be replaced by reinforcements from their rear until one side broke and ran.
Wherever the regular Hebrian troops made a stand, the retainers of the Carreras and the Knights Militant who were with them could make no headway, though the Knights, their heavy armour some protection against bullets at all but the closest ranges, would form wedges of flesh and steel which would try to spear through the enemy lines by brute force. But they were not numerous enough. The firing lines opened to let them through after discharging a volley at point-blank range and those of the Knights who remained on their feet were swamped by scores of sword-and-buckler men to the rear.
And yet there was more to the battle than the mere contest between fighting men. Often in the middle of the carnage the combatants would cease their warring and as a body would seek shelter from the approaching holocaust. Men feared being burnt alive more than any other death, and would run into the enemy lines and be cut down quickly rather than remain to be consumed by the flames in their irresistible advance.
And civilians were there in the midst of the battling tercios and companies and demi-platoons. They fled their houses as the flames approached and died by the hundred as they ran through deadly crossfires or were caught by toppling buildings. Had anyone been in Abrusio who had also been at Aekir, he would have found the former more horrifying, for in Aekir men had been intent only on escape, on evading the enemy and the fire. Here they fought in the midst of the blaze, grappling with each other whilst the flames licked at their heads. Streets which were aflame from top to bottom but which were strategically valuable were defended to the last. The soldiers of Hebrion knew that by opposing the Knights they were labelling themselves heretics, the retainers of an excommunicate king, and that if they were captured, the pyre awaited them anyway. So no quarter was asked or given. The battle was more bitter than any struggle against the heathen, for the Merduks would at least take prisoners, intending them to swell the ranks of their slaves.
G OLOPHIN stood on the topmost column of Admiral’s Tower, a walled platform which housed the iron framework of the signal beacon. With him was General Mercado, his half-silver face alight with the sliding crimson reflections of the burning city. On the stairs below a knot of aides was collected, ready to take orders out to the various bodies of soldiery about the Lower City.
A wall of flame hid the heights of Abrusio Hill, hid even the peaks of the Hebros beyond—a curtain whose topmost fringe dissolved into anvils and thunderheads of toiling smoke.
They started by burning books, Golophin thought. Then it was people, now it is the cities of the kingdoms themselves. They will consume the world ere they are done. And they do it in the name of God.
“I would curse them, but I have no Dweomer left,” he said to Mercado. “All I had, I used to divert the fire from the waterfronts. I am as dry as a desert stone, General.”
Mercado nodded. “Your work is appreciated, Golophin. You saved a score of the fleet’s biggest ships.”
“Much good they’re doing us at the moment. When is Rovero to assault the boom?”
“Tonight. He will send in fireships to cover his gunboats, and the troopships last. With luck, by tomorrow he will be bombarding the Upper City.”
“Bombarding our own city,” Golophin said bitterly. His eyes had sunk so far into his head that they were mere glints which were answering the bloody light of the fire. His face was skull-like below the bald scalp. He had over-extended himself in his efforts to save the ships of the fleet, more than two dozen of which had been in dock when the flames had begun licking round the wharves. As it was, six of them had been destroyed and could be seen burning, alight from truck to waterline, black silhouettes of phantom ships surrounded by saffron light, their guns going off in chaotic sequence. Six great carracks with almost a thousand men on board, men who had been cut off from escape and had leaped into the waters of the Inner Roads to drown like rats. Sailors did not swim. It seemed ridiculous, farcical. Their bodies, some ablaze, floated in the Inner Roads by the hundred. Hundreds more were living yet, clinging to spare topmasts or anything else they had had the presence of mind to fling overboard as the flames came ravening towards their vessels. No one could get near them: the fires had cut them off from land.
An unbearably bright flash, and seconds later the enormous boom of an explosion. The powder magazine of one carrack had gone up and the ship, hundreds of tons of wood and metal, had erupted into the air and was raining its dismembered fragments down on the waters of the harbour, starting fires on the other ships which had managed to put off from the blazing wharves in time to avoid its fate.
“If hell were a creation of man, it would be very like that picture below us,” Golophin said, awed by the spectacle.
“God has certainly no hand in it,” Mercado said.
An aide ca
me with a grubby parchment message. Mercado read it through, his lips muttering the words.
“Freiss’s men have attempted to stage a break-out. The fire is finally at the walls of the Arsenal. He is dead, and most of his traitors with him.”
“The Arsenal?” Golophin asked. “What of the stores within it? My God, General—the powder and ammunition!”
“We’ve shifted maybe a quarter of it, but we cannot get at the rest. First Freiss and then the fires have cut it off.”
“And if the fire detonates the powder stores?”
“The main stores are thirty feet below ground in stone cellars. They have pipes in them which let out to the harbour. If the worst comes to the worst I can order the pipes opened and the powder magazines flooded. They would take half the city with them when they went up. Don’t worry, Golophin—I won’t let that happen. But it will mean destroying our powder and ammunition reserves, leaving only the naval stores here in the tower.”
“Do it,” Golophin said grimly. “Abrusio is hurt badly enough as it is. We must preserve something of her for Abeleyn to reclaim.”
“Agreed.” Mercado called an aide and began dictating the necessary orders.
“Rovero has taken a squadron to Pendero’s Landing,” the General went on when the aide had left. “Two carracks, some caravels and a trio of nefs in which are three thousand marines and arquebusiers of the garrison. He is going to try and convince the King that a land assault over the city walls will be more effective than attempting to carry the Great Harbour. If we can break the boom tonight, then in a couple of days we will be assaulting from both land and sea and another squadron can give supporting fire to the overland force if they attack the walls near the coast. That is Abeleyn’s best bet, in my opinion. They have us pinned down here, by the fire itself and the guns they can bring to bear on us from Abrusio Hill. Also they are thin on the ground, and will be hard put to it to see off two attacks at once.”
