Eliciting information is another common reason for a beating. We were Greatcoats, so the three of us had plenty of information the Avareans might want – but since all they were doing was laughing and saying ‘se-renn-dur’ over and over again, that wasn’t the likely reason.
On the other hand, the laughter suggested our current situation might just be down to the fourth purpose of a beating: to have some Gods-damned good fun. This made the most sense, but as all the other men were doing actual work – lifting cargo, helping the migrants with their things – I didn’t think it likely that they’d let a few of their fellows have all the fun.
That left only one reason for the violence, and having worked it out, I allowed myself a private little smile on the inside. They were softening us up, a time-honoured and entirely practical application of violence. The last thing you want when transporting prisoners is any chance that one might escape their bonds and get in a lucky shot that leaves you or your fellow guards wounded or dead, so a few judicious boots to various parts of the anatomy serves to lessen both their capacity and their enthusiasm for escape.
What’s good about figuring out what the beating’s for? It gives you control of the situation.
‘Aarrghhh,’ Brasti screamed, a couple of feet away from me. He began letting out little puffs of breath, then his head lolled to the side. I was a little disappointed that he’d figured it out at the same time I had. The scream was to let his captors know that he was now severely injured, and the panting and lolling was to make them believe he couldn’t take much more.
Princess grunted something at Brasti’s opponents and one of them replied with a string of Avarean I assumed to be a commentary on the weakness of Tristians in general and his in particular.
First Kest and then I followed Brasti’s lead, and before long the Avareans were standing over us, laughing to each other as they doubtless commented quite unfairly on our lack of fortitude. Then Rosie – of course it had to be Rosie – lifted his woollen kilt and pissed on me. I’d had just enough warning to roll over, sobbing in agony, so I got it on my back rather than in my face.
We got to lie there for some time getting our breath back while they fetched chains for us, and in the meantime, the villagers just walked right on by. Some looked sympathetic, some looked smug. But it was the girl, Tillia, whom I had carried up the cliff-face in the makeshift sling of my greatcoat, now cradled in the arms of an Avarean warrior, who looked down at me and said, ‘My daddy was killed by Trattari.’
It’s the blows you don’t see coming that do the most damage.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Shan Steel
‘I have a question,’ Brasti said, his words a trifle slurred. He’d had less practise in the whole ‘taking a beating’ thing than I had and was looking a little the worse for wear.
‘Ask it.’
‘We’re magistrates, right? I mean, we’re the ones whose job it is to consider complex legal issues and render verdicts.’
‘True.’
‘And sometimes that verdict involves sending people to gaol, yes? Sometimes even to dungeons?’
‘Also correct. Where are you going with this?’
He pushed himself upright until he was standing on the rough platform, trying to avoid leaning against the freezing iron bars. ‘So why the fuck are we always the ones who end up in a cage?’
The Avarean warriors had tossed us like sacks of grain into one of the eight-by-four-foot metal and wood cages I’d assumed they used to haul supplies up and down the sheer mountainside. Thick ropes ran from heavy iron rings welded on top of the box to the pulleys that creaked and whined as we clattered our way up into the air.
‘Nice view, though,’ Kest said.
Watching the ground get further and further away from us left me considerably less enthused. I tried very hard to stay in the middle of the cage – it made no sense, but somehow it made me feel better.
After a moment I realised Kest was right: looking through the bars at the slopes below as the first hints of sunrise began to illuminate the icy landscape was an experience both inspiring and humbling – at least until Brasti moved to the front of the cage to get a better view, setting the whole thing swinging wildly.
‘Stop it!’ I moved backwards, trying to balance the box as it inched up the mountainside. ‘Saint Zaghev-who-sings-for-tears, you’re going to make me lose my dinner!’
‘Still dead, and we didn’t have any dinner,’ Brasti reminded me. ‘Besides, I think I’m having fun now. Those hairy barbarians should turn this into some kind of amusement for children. They’d make a fortune.’
‘I think they intend to use it for other things,’ Kest said, ‘such as moving troops and equipment quickly and efficiently when they invade Tristia.’
Brasti grinned at us. ‘That’s the genius of my idea, don’t you see? They could make so much gold from paying customers that they wouldn’t need the war.’
In addition to the joys of our mode of transportation, we had been assigned a guard, a great burly man with braided dark brown hair and a long, reddish beard, also braided, who sat on top of the cage, apparently much less concerned with the prospect of falling than I was. Reyek or Rayicht (I wasn’t clear on either pronunciation or spelling) was taking great pleasure in talking to us – or rather, at us, since he’d clearly overestimated his ability to speak Tristian.
‘I speak you language,’ he shouted down to me, as he did every time he began a sentence. ‘I speak you language. We near top, see?’
As the cage clattered to a stop some hundred and fifty feet up, it occurred to me that dealing with spies by opening the cage and pushing us out would be highly efficient – but I suppose they could just as easily have made us climb the damned mountain and then pushed us off the side rather than have some poor bastard pull us all the way up. That made me feel better.
‘Well?’ Brasti asked, once six men had heaved the cage onto the flat area beside the winch. ‘Shouldn’t you let us out now? Or are we going back down?’
‘I speak you language. We take you now to the Magdan.’
‘Who’s the Magdan?’ I asked.
Reyek lifted his arms and shook them as if declaring victory. ‘Big fighter: fighter of all fighters.’
‘You mean one of your Warlords?’ Kest asked.
Reyek looked confused for a moment, then he grinned. ‘Magdan is Warlord. Only need one now.’
I found that hard to believe, but thought better of challenging Reyek’s obvious admiration of this new Warlord and instead asked, ‘Where will we find the Magdan?’
Our guard signalled to the men and only then did I see the large cart being pulled by two huge horses. I had to admire the ease with which the six men lifted our cage onto the back of the cart. Within moments we were rolling smoothly over the packed snow along a wide, well-made road.
‘Not far,’ Reyek said, pointing to a fort nearly hidden behind walls made from logs and ropes. ‘There you will see the Magdan. There he will see you. Then we will see.’
It was almost poetic in its odd foreign fashion.
*
‘I feel it’s necessary to point out that once again we’re headed for trouble because Falcio couldn’t keep his heroism under control,’ Brasti said as the cage bounced unnervingly on the back of the cart. The horses here had longer hair than our Tristian beasts, doubtless bred to deal with the colder weather. They were bigger, too, and made me think of Monster. I wasn’t yet sure how Kest, Brasti and I were going to make our escape, but I would have dearly loved Monster’s brutish strength and vicious temper on our side right about now.
As we approached the fort, Reyek pointed unnecessarily towards the open gates set in the great wall surrounding it. ‘We go inside now, Trattari?’ From his mouth the word sounded more like Traii-taraii. I didn’t bother to correct him.
‘We’re not Traii-taraii,’ Bra
sti said. ‘We stole those coats from men on the road. Killed them.’ He patted his own chest. ‘We good men – kill bad Traii-taraii. I personally have slain nearly fifty nasty Traii-taraii.’ He gestured to Kest then added, ‘He only kill twelve.’
‘You’re wasting your time,’ Kest said, the fingers of his left hand twitching as he limbered them up for when the time came to fight.
Brasti gave Kest a dirty look. ‘Hey, Saint Kest-who-fucked-the-plan, why did you give it away? You think these barbarians are too clever to be fooled? Or is it that you can’t follow any idea unless it’s Falcio’s?’
‘Neither,’ Kest replied. He looked at Reyek. ‘He has no clue what you’re saying.’
‘I speak you language,’ Reyek said, his face belying the statement.
‘Four words of it, anyway,’ I muttered to myself.
The cart pulled inside the walls, we got our first look at the fort and for the longest time, none of us spoke. Kest stopped moving his fingers, Brasti stopped complaining. I stopped thinking about escape.
The fort itself was plain enough – a hastily constructed affair made from felled timber lashed with ropes and seamed with some kind of thick glue maybe made from sap. It was typical of what we knew of Avares construction: sturdy, simple, and by and large looking like it had been designed by a child. Outside the fort proper was a vast courtyard of hard-packed snow marked by hundreds of wheel tracks. Perhaps two hundred men milled about – big men like Reyek, all with long hair and thick beards, sporting a motley collection of furs. Some were moving small carts laden with supplies in and out of the fort; others were practising with canfreks, the Avareans’ favoured blade: straight wide swords that came to an abrupt, almost flat end where the point of a normal sword would be. These were cutting weapons, meant for chopping off a man’s head or limbs. I watched as one of the men swung his canfrek and took a foot-long piece off a log. The sun glinted against the steel of the weapon.
That was my first sense that something was badly wrong.
‘Where are they getting proper steel from?’ I asked out loud. Avarean weapons are usually made of bronze, or a weak iron they mine that’s too full of impurities to smelt into proper steel.
‘That’s not just steel,’ Kest pointed out, ‘it’s Shan steel.’
‘How in hells would barbarians get hold of Shan steel?’ Brasti asked, staring through the bars. ‘Don’t those little bastards kill anyone who turns up on their shores?’
The Tristians might consider the Avareans uncivilised, but the Shan believe everyone who isn’t Shan to be barbarians. Though their small island lacked some resources, still they rarely traded with other nations.
‘You’re looking at the wrong thing,’ Kest said, taking my attention away from the blade.
‘What do you mean?’
He pointed to the other side of the courtyard where a group of about three dozen men were drilling with spears inside a hundred-foot training square. ‘So what?’ I asked. ‘They have Shan steel spearheads, too. I hardly think . . .’
My words trailed off as I realised that the problem wasn’t the weapons. The men were practising in formation, their every movement matched to the rhythm of a jaunty tune they were all singing as they stepped forward, thrust their spears then returned to guard, moving in perfect time. I remembered then that Nehra had wanted us to memorise any of their warsongs that we heard – despite my knowing barely enough about music to sing a verdict.
But watching the Avarean warriors on the training ground, I realised I now had much bigger problems to deal with.
‘What’s the problem?’ Brasti asked. ‘They’re big men, but they’re not doing anything different; that’s just how any fool group of Ducal foot soldiers would do it.’
‘That’s the point,’ I said. ‘Since when do Avarean warriors fight in formation?’
Brasti looked like he was about to make a joke, then he stopped. ‘Shit.’
King Paelis’ best estimate had been that the population of Avares was only about a third of Tristia’s, but they had two warriors for every one of our trained soldiers. The only thing that kept them from overrunning our borders was a mix of tradition, religion and their unsophisticated military practices, which meant they had no inclination or idea how to fight in formation. There’s some saying in Avarean which I’d never learned, because – well, why would anyone want to learn their language? But the gist of the saying is, ‘No glory comes from more than one arm.’ They’d always fought individually, believing their singular God favoured only the boldest warriors.
Our cart stopped not far from the entrance as a small group of women came out lugging baskets that proved to have food for the training warriors. Then three more women came out, these wearing furs banded by leather and carrying their own canfreks.
‘Well, there’s something else I never expected to see,’ Brasti said. Avarean women are almost as big as their menfolk, but I’d never heard of any being allowed to take up arms.
‘It appears there have been a number of changes here in recent years,’ Kest remarked. I could see him thinking the same questions I was: how many of their women were now warriors? Ten per cent? Twenty per cent? How many battles would be won by that difference? How well could Tristia, with its broken Knights and ill-prepared soldiers, now fight off an invasion from Avares? How well would our idiot generals – mostly wealthy men with no real skill in strategy or experience in battle – fare against a real army for the first time in two hundred years?
As the women passed our cage I studied the little carts sitting inside the walls of the fort, until a clang startled me and the cage door opened. Reyek gestured at the four men with spears at his side, then motioned for us to come. ‘I speak you language,’ he said.
He surely did.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
The Magdan
I expected them to put us in a cell in the fort, but instead we were prodded to the edge of the training square as the warriors ended their formation exercises and began to assemble along the heavy wooden fencing.
‘If this is summary execution, then I’m going to be very disappointed,’ Brasti warned Reyek.
The red-bearded man just pushed him forward. The warriors had left their formations and were now taking up positions around the square. A low humming sound, almost a rumbling, began to arise from the onlookers and soon took on the shape of another song, or perhaps just the beginning of a song. The slow, thick notes evoked in my mind the tense moments just before a battle.
‘Odd buggers,’ Brasti commented.
Kest concurred. ‘They do appear to be almost as fond of singing as they are of killing.’
‘Oh, hells,’ I swore. ‘I almost forgot. On the off-chance we don’t die up here, Nehra wanted us to try and learn the tunes to their warsongs. I don’t suppose you could . . .’ A glance at Kest’s face told me he already had been memorising the songs. ‘She had Rhyleis ask you, too?’
‘No.’
‘Then why—?’
He shrugged. ‘Force of habit.’
Reyek gave me an extra-hard prod in the back. ‘I speak you language good,’ he reminded me.
‘I don’t suppose they plan to have us duel?’ Kest wondered aloud. His tone was wistful, and not just because it had been days since the last time we’d nearly been killed, but because the warriors of Avares, with their obsessive need to prove their pre-eminence, might just be stupid enough to give us back our weapons, let us kill off a few of their best warriors and then release us after we’d embarrassed their people enough.
We all get a little unrealistically optimistic sometimes.
‘There’s a chance we can fight our way out,’ Kest added.
‘Really? How in the world would that work?’
He looked briefly at the men with the spears. ‘I take one of the spears and kill two men. The others will converge on me, which will give you time to
get over there.’ I followed his gaze to where a number of swords were sitting on a small bench. ‘The other men will chase you, but if you can take down the first few quickly enough, then I might be able to evade the ones trying to kill me in time to grab that fire bucket and throw the embers up through that window. I can see cloth there. If it catches fire then—’
‘What are the odds of any of this happening before we’re killed?’
He did that counting in his head thing. When he was done he admitted, ‘Not good.’
Reyek put a big hand on my shoulder and pointed past me at a warrior walking into the training square. He wore brown and black furs and stood well over six and a half feet tall. He was bigger than Reyek, bigger than the spearmen behind us – hells, he was pretty much bigger even than bloody Shuran had been. The double-sided axe he bore would have sheared through a tree trunk with ease.
‘You stand here,’ Reyek said. ‘Watch. Not move. Watch the Magdan kill.’
‘Who’s the Magdan going to fight?’ Brasti asked.
Reyek shook his head. ‘Not say fight. I speak you language. Kill is kill, is not fight.’
So, an execution then, not a duel at all. So much for Avarean honour.
A second man entered the training square from the opposite side, his appearance obscured by one of the braziers billowing flame and smoke onto the field. He was tall, but slim for an Avarean, and shirtless. Four warriors with spears followed behind him, no doubt ready to stop him trying to escape his inevitable death.
‘Why is the Magdan doing this? What crime has this man committed?’
Reyek looked thoughtful for a moment then said, ‘Kriukath.’ He repeated it several times as if waiting for the word to translate itself.
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