The Iron Wars

by Paul Kearney

  The long column of filthy, yawning cavalry and silent mules wound down from the higher land overlooking the capital and came to a halt outside the city walls amid the tented streets of the shanty town. The folk of Aekir stared at the hollow-eyed barbarians on the tall warhorses as if they were creatures from another world. Corfe stared back at them, the white lightning-fury searing up in him at the sight of the muddy children, their ragged parents. These had once been the proud citizens of the greatest city in the world. Now they were beggars, and the Torunnan government seemed content to let them stay that way. He felt like dragging King Lofantyr out here and grinding his face into the liquid filth of the open sewers. When the warmer weather came, disease would sweep through these camps like wildfire.

  He turned to Andruw and Marsch. “This is no damned good. Get the men bedded down beyond the camps, away from this.”

  “We’ve no bedding, no food—not even for the horses,” Andruw reminded him. As if he needed reminding.

  “I’m aware of that, Haptman. I’m going into the city to see what can be done. In the meantime, you have your orders.” He paused, and then added reluctantly. “You might want to slaughter a couple of the pack mules. The men need meat in their bellies.”

  “God’s blood, Corfe!” Andruw protested quietly.

  “I know. But we can’t expect too much. Best to prepare for the worst. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

  He turned his horse away, unable to meet Andruw’s eyes. He felt as though the anger in him could set the world alight and take grim satisfaction in its burning, but it left him feeling empty and cold. His men depended on him. If needs be he would lick the King’s boots to see them provided for.

  The sentries at the main gate forgot to salute, so outlandish did he appear in his crimson Merduk armour. He turned over the options in his mind and finally pointed his horse’s nose towards the courtyards and towers of the Royal palace. His patron would, perhaps, be able to do something for him. He had passed the first test she had set him, at any rate.

  “C OLONEL Corfe Cear-Inaf,” the chamberlain announced, a little wide-eyed.

  The Queen Dowager turned from the window. Her hands fluttered up over her face and hair. “Show him in, Chares.”

  Her chamber was warm with braziers and blood-coloured tapestries. A pair of maids sat quiet as mice in a corner. At a look from her they rose and left by a concealed door. She awaited him with regal poise, though her heart thumped faster in her breast, and she felt a winged lightness there she had not known in many years. It both cheered and irritated her.

  He clumped in. He seemed to love that outlandish armour of his, but at least he had doffed the barbaric helm that went with it. He was a mud-stained, bloody harbinger of war, out of place, uncomfortable-looking. His face had aged ten years in the few weeks since she had seen him last. The light in his eyes actually unnerved her for a moment, she who had faced down kings. There was a strength and violence there she had not noted before, a reined-in savagery.

  “So,” she said quietly. “You are back.”

  “So it would seem.” Then he collected himself, and went down stiffly on one knee, clods of dirt falling from his boots. “Your majesty.”

  “I told you before, I am ‘lady’ to you. Get up. You look tired.”

  “Indeed, lady.” He rose as slowly as an old man. There was blood on him, she noted, and he stank of old sweat and horse and burning.

  “For God’s sake,” she snapped, “couldn’t you have bathed at least?”

  “No,” he said simply. “There was nowhere else to go. We have only just got in.” He swayed as he stood, and she saw the deep bone-weariness in him. Her lips thinned, and she clapped her hands. Chares entered at the main door, bowing. “Your highness?”

  “Have a bath brought here at once, a fresh uniform for the Colonel and a couple of valets who know their job.”

  “At once, highness.” Chares withdrew hurriedly.

  “I haven’t the time,” Corfe said. “My men—”

  “What do you need?” she demanded.

  He blinked stupidly, as if the question had caught him unawares.

  “Quarters for three hundred men, and food. Stabling for nearly eight hundred horses and two hundred mules. Fodder for them, too.”

  It was her turn to be taken aback. “Horses?”

  The shadow of a smile. “Spoils of war.”

  “I’ll see to it. You have been busy, it seems, Colonel.”

  “I did what was expected of me, I believe.” Again, that ghost smile. This time she returned it.

  His armour was rusted to his back. The buckles had to be cut free by two owl-eyed palace valets while a flurry of others brought in a bronze hip-bath and filled it full of steaming water, kettle upon kettle of it until there was a mist hanging in the room. Others carried in fresh clothing and footwear. The Queen Dowager withdrew behind a screen, stifling a laugh when she heard Corfe curse away the flunkeys who fussed over him. She sat herself at her writing desk and in her swift, stabbing hand drew up the necessary orders, sealing them with her signet. It was the twin of her son the King’s. That much authority she retained. She snapped her fingers for a servant.

  “Give this to the Quartermaster-General,” she told him, “and be quick, too.” She raised her voice. “Colonel, where are your men?”

  A grunt, the clump of a boot hitting the floor. “By the southern gate, outside the camps. Haptman Andruw Cear-Adurhal commands at the moment. You’ll find them by the smell of roasting mule.”

  T HE attendants left at last, and she heard him splashing in the bath beyond the screen. It would be over the palace in minutes, that the Queen Dowager had a muddy colonel of cavalry bathing in her private chambers. It was a signal she sent out quite deliberately. People would tread more warily around her protégé as a result. It was his reward for the passing of the first test.

  And besides, she liked having him here.

  The splashing had stopped. “Corfe?”

  She peered round the screen. He was asleep in the bath, arms dangling over its sides, mouth open.

  She rose and approached him, silent as a spider in her court shoes. The floor around him was a mess of mud and water. As she crouched by his side it soaked the bottom of her skirts.

  Some of the lines faded when he slept. He seemed younger. His forearms were scarred with old wounds, and the bathwater was bloody where a more recent one in his thigh had reopened. She touched the wound, running her hand over him under the water. She closed her eyes and the gash healed under her fingers. The bleeding stopped.

  He came awake with a violent start that sent the bathwater spraying. His hand gripped her wrist. “What are you doing?”

  “Nothing,” she said softly. “Nothing at all.” She leaned over and kissed his bare shoulder and felt him tremble under her lips.

  “You don’t fear scandal much, do you?” he remarked.

  “As much as you.”

  His hand, calloused from rein and sword-hilt, caressed her cheek gently. For a second he seemed almost a boy. But the second passed. The lines settled in his face again. He hauled himself out of the bath and reached for a towel to cover himself. He seemed almost bewildered.

  “I must get back to my men.”

  “Not yet,” she told him, her voice becoming harder as she rose with him. “Your men are being looked after. You, I need here for now.”

  “For what, payment?”

  “Don’t be a fool,” she snapped. “Get dressed. We have much to discuss.”

  He held her eyes for a moment, and she was sure her need for him would betray her, spill out of her and plead with him. She turned away. The attendants had left decanters of Gaderian, a joint of venison, apples, cheese, fresh bread. She poured herself some of the blood-red wine whilst he towelled himself dry and pulled on the black Torunnan infantry uniform which had been left for him. As a cavalryman, he should have been in burgundy, and she thought it would suit him, but she knew also that he would prefer black.
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  “Eat something, for God’s sake,” she ordered. He was standing motionless as though on parade, obviously hating the court version of the uniform, the lace cuffs, tight collar and buckled shoes.

  He seemed to experience some kind of inner struggle. It flitted across his face.

  “Your men are being fed as we speak,” she said. “Stop playing the noble leader and get something into your own stomach. You look half-starved.”

  At last, he unbent. She saw it was all he could do not to wolf down the food like an animal. He made himself chew it slowly, and sipped at the wine. Again, the tiredness in his face making him look so much older. How old was he? Thirty? Not much more, perhaps even less. He took a seat by one of the glowing braziers with a brimming wine glass in one fist and a chunk of bread in the other, taking alternate bites and sips. Finally he paused, conscious of her eyes on him, and said, “Thank you” in a low voice.

  She sat down opposite him wishing she’d had time to ready a few rejuvenating spells. She was very aware of the liver spots on the backs of her hands. She hated herself for feeling so absurdly self-conscious.

  “You are your own courier, it seems,” she said. “I take it the business in the south was concluded satisfactorily?”

  He nodded. “Aras is still down there. I left him the last of the mopping up.”

  “Your tribesmen did well.”

  “Amazingly well.” For the first time some real warmth came into his voice, and his face became more animated. He gave her a brief outline of the short campaign, neither boasting nor deprecating. When he was done she looked at him in some wonder.

  “So the Felimbri make soldiers. If we’d known that twenty years ago it would have saved the country some grief. You are down to three hundred now, you say.”

  “Yes, plus some two dozen wounded I had to leave with Aras.”

  She smiled, glad to be able to give him the news. “It’s lucky your savages acquitted themselves so well. There are a thousand more of them currently awaiting you at the North Gate. News travels fast in the mountains, it appears.” Better not to tell him that these men had almost been sent to the galleys by the King. He would find out soon enough.

  His eyes were glittering, fingers whitening around the wine glass. “By the Saints—” He bowed his head and for an astonished instant she thought he might weep, but she heard him give a strangled laugh instead. When he looked up the relief was engraved in his features like the words on a tombtop. She saw then how tautly strung he was, and had some inkling of the strain that bent him.

  The wine glass shattered in a spray of scarlet.

  “Forgive me.” He shook the liquid from his fingers, grimacing. His palm was gashed and trickling blood.

  “Corfe. . .” she said, and took his bloody hand, pulled him across to her. It was like tugging on the branch of an unyielding tree for a moment, before he gave in. He knelt on the floor and buried his face in her lap with a sigh. Summoning the Dweomer, she smoothed away the slash in his palm, restoring the skin as though she were shaping warm wax. As the spell worked the energy in her flickered. She felt her years dragging at her limbs, age baying for her life.

  He would have risen, but she held him there, suddenly needing his youth close to her.

  “You can rest a while. The Merduks have drawn half their army off from the dyke. Campaigning has finished for the winter. I will see to it that your men have all they need.” Stay with me.

  “No.” He raised his head. His eyes were dry. “It’s just begun. I believe they’ve outflanked the dyke somehow. Martellus is in trouble, I know it.”

  The soldier again. He had retreated from her. She let him go, and he rose to pace about the room, pausing to stare at his healed hand and then at her.

  “You are a witch then.”

  “Indeed,” she said wearily. “What nonsense are you talking about the dyke?”

  “It’s a feeling, nothing more. Has Martellus sent any dispatches lately?”

  “Not for ten days. But the roads are bad.”

  “He’s cut off already then.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake! Are you an oracle, who knows this through intuition alone?”

  He shrugged. “I know it. For what purpose would the Merduks mobilize a great army in the depths of winter? They are making another assault, that’s clear—but not a head-on one this time. They’re doing something else, something we have no idea of. And time is not on our side. I must go north.”

  She saw she could not move him. “You need rest, you and your men. I’ll have couriers sent to the dyke. We’ll find out the truth of it.”

  He hesitated. “All right.”

  Their eyes locked. Odelia knew there was greatness in him, something she had glimpsed before with John Mogen. But there was something else, too. An injury that refused to heal, old agony which racked him yet. She thought it might be that pain which drove him on, which had changed him from the lowly ensign of Aekir to the man who stood here now, his star on the rise. But still, the pain was always there.

  She rose in her turn and padded over to him, wrapped her arms about him and kissed him on the lips, crushing her mouth against his.

  “You will come to bed now.”

  He was still tense, resisting her. “I have not yet reported to the King. And I must see these new recruits . . .” He faltered. “Why?” he asked. There was genuine puzzlement in his voice.

  She grinned fiercely. “I want you there, and you need to be there too.”

  At last he smiled back.

  • • •

  F IFTY leagues, a crow might fly, nor-nor-east from the room where Corfe and the Queen Dowager shared a bed. Across the empty hills which bordered the Western Road, itself a brown swampish gash across the earth with old corpses littering its length. Thousands had died along that road, lying down in the mud and rain in the retreat from Aekir and the trek from Ormann Dyke, relinquishing their grip on a life which had become a waking nightmare.

  But now Ormann Dyke was burning.

  The smoke could be seen for miles, a black, thunderous reek of destruction. Men were fighting in the midst of it. A thousand Torunnans, valiant with despair, struggled vainly to stem the onslaught of the Merduk army. The enemy had already crossed the Searil in force and was overrunning the three-mile length of the Long Walls, which for the first time in their proud history were about to fall to an assault.

  The rest of the dyke’s garrison was in full retreat, its artillery spiked and left behind to burn, its stores destroyed, the men marching with nothing more than the armour on their backs and the weapons in their hands. Their comrades left behind at the dyke were buying time with their lives, precious hours of marching which might yet save what was left of Martellus’s army.

  The army moved in a vacuum. Around it, the countryside was alive with harassing clouds of enemy light cavalry which severed communications with Torunn and the south. No one in the capital even suspected that Ormann Dyke had fallen. The Merduk light horse had already slain half a dozen couriers which Martellus, in desperation, had sent south.

  T HIRTY leagues away, another column of troops, this time black-clad Fimbrians, their pikes resting on their shoulders, their fast pace eating up the miles in a deadly race. They were coming in from the north-west, the last direction the Merduk High Command was looking. Their mule-mounted scouts ranged far ahead of the main body, seeking out the whereabouts of the third army in the region, striving to come to grips with it before it might descend upon Martellus’s flank and complete the destruction of the dyke’s garrison.

  A ND the third army, the largest of the three, had left behind the ships which had transported it across the Kardian Sea and was steadily making its way north-west to cut off Martellus’s retreat. In its van rode the elite Merduk cavalry, the Ferinai, and behind them the shock troops of the Hraibadar, armed now with arquebuses instead of the spears and tulwars with which they had assaulted Aekir. War elephants by the score marched like mobile towers in their midst, and others in the rear h
auled huge-bored siege guns through the mud whilst alongside strode the men of the Minhraib, the feudal levy of Ostrabar, and regiments of horse-archers from Ostrabar’s new ally the Sultanate of Nalbeni. A hundred thousand men moving in four columns, each several miles long. And in the middle of this moving multitude trundled the chariot of Ostrabar’s Sultan, Aurungzeb the Golden; to its rear were the eighty heavily laden wagons which transported the Sultan’s household, his campaigning gear and his concubines. Aurungzeb liked to go to war in style.

  “T HEY’VE gone,” Joshelin said with low harshness. “You can get up off your bellies, priests.”

  Albrec and Avila rose out of the tall grass they had been skulking in. Behind them Siward stood and slapped out the burning end of his slow-match, then replaced the end in the wheel lock of his arquebus.

  “What were they?” he asked his fellow Fimbrian. “Foragers, or scouts?”

  “Scouts. Merduk light horse, a half-troop. A long way from the main body, I’m thinking. Where are the Torunnans? Looks like they’ve given over the whole damn country to the enemy.”

  Albrec and Avila listened to the exchange in shivering silence. They were wet through, mud-stained and hungry and their legs wobbled under them, but the two old soldiers seemed to be built out of some other substance than mere human flesh. Twenty years older than either of the two monks, and they were as fit and hardy as youths.

  “Must we go farther today?” Avila asked.

  “Yes, priest,” Joshelin told him curtly. “We’ve done scarcely eight leagues today by my pacings. Another two or three before dark, then we can lie up for the night. No fire, though. The hills are crawling with Merduks.”

  Avila slumped. He rubbed a hand over his face and said nothing.

  “Do you think the capital is safe yet?” Albrec asked.

  “Oh, yes. These are merely part of the enemy screen. He sends out light cavalry so that we can learn nothing of his movements, while he learns all about ours. Basic tactics.”

  “How ignorant we are, not to know such things,” Avila said caustically. “Can we ride now?”