“Oramen!” Tove said, slapping him on the back and thumping down on the bench beside him, depositing two leather tankards of beer in front of them with a slop and slosh of spillage. “You should take a turn!” He punched Oramen’s arm.
“I told you I didn’t want another drink,” Oramen said, raising the tankard and waving it in front of Tove’s sweatily gleaming face.
Tove leaned closer. “What?” It was very noisy.
“Never mind.” Oramen shrugged. He put his old drink to one side of their table and sipped at his new one.
“You should!” Tove shouted at him as another of their company put the balancing stick on his chin and waited for the first serving girl to fill the tankard on top. Meanwhile the tankard of ale Tohonlo had transported from one gallery to the other was duly delivered to him by the second serving girl, who then skipped back upstairs, neatly avoiding most of the slaps aimed at her behind. “You should take a turn!” Tove told Oramen. “Go on! Take a turn! Go on!”
“I’d get wet.”
“What?”
“Wet,” Oramen shouted above the din. The lads were clapping loudly and rhythmically.
“Well of course it’s wet! ’S the idea!”
“Should have worn an older tunic.”
“You don’t have enough fun!” Tove said, leaning close enough for Oramen to smell his breath.
“I don’t?”
“You don’t come out as often as you ought, prince!”
“Really?”
“I hardly see you! When was the last time we went out whoring, for fuck’s sake?”
“Not for a bit, I’ll grant.”
“You can’t be fed up with it, can you?”
“With what?”
“Girls!”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“You’re not becoming a man-fucker, are you?”
“Indeed not.”
“You don’t want to fuck men, do you?”
“Heaven forfend.”
“So what’s the matter?”
“I have other things to do, Tove. I’d love to spend more time with you but I—”
“You’re not becoming some fucking man-fucker, are you? They’re worse than fucking republicans.”
“Listen: no.”
“Because I fucking love you, prince, seriously, but I fucking hate fucking man-fuckers, I really fucking do.”
“Tove, I believe you. It would be hard not to. I do not want to fuck men. Please; believe. Even just remember.”
“Well then, come on out with us. Come and have some fun!”
“I shall, I promise.”
“But do you promise?”
“Will you listen? I promise. Now stop being—”
They hadn’t even seen the fight break out. Next thing they knew, tankards and glasses were flying and men were falling over each other and themselves. Blades were supposed to be left at the door, but in the sudden mêlée Oramen thought he saw the flash of sunlight on a steel edge. He and Tove both instinctively sat back and grabbed their tankards as a man — an especially substantial and well-built man — thudded back towards them, half stumbling, half falling.
Their bench was joined by spars to the table in front of them, so everything still went flying, including them; however, Oramen had remembered that bench and table were one even as the fellow came clattering and staggering towards them, and had pulled his legs up and started swivelling on his buttocks as the man’s back and head collided with the empty bench and full table in front of them; Oramen was able to roll out of the way as the whole assemblage went careering backwards taking Tove with it, crashing into another bench and table set behind, causing curses. Oramen even saved most of his ale, which was an achievement; every drink still on the table and the one in Tove’s fist went splashing back, mostly over the people sitting at the table behind, to their unalloyed and most vocal consternation. Tove and the people at the table behind were addressing each other:
“You fucker!”
“Fuck yourself!”
Oramen stood up, then immediately had to duck as a thrown glass sailed through the air where his head had been.
Tove and the people of the bench behind were still conversing. Oramen took a sip of his beer, checked for flying objects and took a step back. It was a most impressive fight. He liked the way you could see the smoke sort of roll and part when people went flying through it. Two burly knights charged forward and came between Tove and the argumentative inhabitants of the table behind, getting briefly tangled up with him.
Tove extracted himself and stumbled over to Oramen, wiping beer off his tunic. “We’d better go,” he said. “Follow me.”
“What?” Oramen protested as Tove grabbed his arm. “I was just starting to enjoy myself.”
“Time for that later. Now’s time to run away.” Tove pulled him by the sleeve round the side of the main fight, across the floor — the two serving girls were screaming from either gallery, encouraging, disparaging, throwing tankards both full and empty at the chaos of brawling bodies below — towards the back door which led to the yard and the toilets.
“But this is fun!” Oramen yelled at Tove, still trying to pull his arm free.
“Some of these fuckers might be anarchists; let’s away.”
A glass shattered on the wall near Oramen’s head. “Oh,” he sighed. “All right.”
“Seeing sense. Late than never.”
They clattered down some steps towards the courtyard and got to the door. Tove stopped in the narrow passageway and said, “After you, pr—”
“Oh, get out there,” Oramen told him, pushing him one-handed.
They burst through a door into the intense afternoon brightness of the tavern’s yard. Oramen caught the sudden stench of a nearby tannery.
A man swung round from one side of the door and sank a long dagger into Tove’s belly, ripping quickly upwards.
“Not, not me!” Tove had time to bubble, then he dropped as the man who’d struck him stepped around him and — with a second man — pulled his arm back, blade aimed straight at Oramen.
Oramen had had his hand at the small of his back all the way down the stairs, pulling his tunic top and shirt out, feeling until the warmth of the gun’s handle was there in his fist. He hauled it out, used his other hand to click the safety off as he’d practised a hundred times in his bedchamber and pulled the trigger in the face of the man who’d knifed Tove.
The man’s forehead formed a small round mouth which gave up a little spitting kiss of red; the hair at the back of his head bounced up and out, releasing a pink spray like a consumptive’s cough. He fell back as though he was collared, some charging beast just got to the end of his lead, jerking rearwards and falling on his shoulder blades and head, eyes staring up at the shining sky. The other man flinched at the incredibly loud bang the gun made and hesitated in his lunge, perhaps even took a half-step back. It was enough. Oramen swung his arm round and shot him — he was little further away — in the chest. He fell back as well, and stayed sitting on the strawy, shitty, uneven stones of the courtyard of the Gilder’s Lament.
The gunshots had left Oramen’s ears ringing.
Tove lay moving slowly, leaking huge amounts of dark red blood, which made a sort of rectangular graph-paper pattern along the spaces of the yard’s cobbles. The first man lay on his back, perfectly motionless, eyes fixed staring upwards. The man Oramen had just shot still sat upright, legs splayed in front of him, dagger dropped to one side, both his hands up at the small wound in his chest, his gaze directed somewhere on to the cobblestones between him and Oramen. He seemed to be hiccuping. Oramen wasn’t sure what to do and was not thinking straight, so he stepped forward and shot the sitting man in the head. He fell over like he’d thrown himself that way, as though gravity somehow wasn’t enough. Oramen hardly noticed that bang, his ears were ringing so.
There was nobody else about. He sat down too, before he fell down. The courtyard seemed very quiet after all the noise.
“Tove?” he said.
Tove had stopped moving. The graph pattern of blood moving along the spaces between the courtyard stones was reaching out towards Oramen’s outstretched feet. He moved them before it touched them, and shivered. There was a roaring noise which he took to be the continuing brawl in the room above.
“Tove?” he said again. It was surprisingly cold in the brightly sunlit courtyard.
Eventually, people came.
* * *
The Deldeyn had dug a series of canals and broad, water-filled ditches across their land, seeking to impede the land-based forces of the Sarl. Due to the direction the Sarl attacked from, itself determined by the Tower they had descended within, only one of these new obstacles lay in their way. They had already beaten off a massed attack by riflemen and grenadiers mounted on caude and lyge shortly after leaving the Night they had encountered near the Illsipine. The Deldeyn had attacked in good order and eventually had to flee in tatters, those who could. They fought bravely and the grenadiers in particular caused some damage and deaths, especially when a roasoaril tanker exploded, but they still had no answer to massed ground guns, which picked the slow-moving beasts and their riders out of the air like hunters firing into a tight flock of birds.
The Sarl’s own flighted forces were mostly held back until the Deldeyn fliers turned away in full retreat, then took off after them, harrying, shooting and tackling in mid-air where the riders were brave or foolish enough. The army dusted itself down and resumed its onward progress, the way marked by the commingled wreckage of dead Deldeyn fliers and their air-beasts. Tyl Loesp counted at least a dozen of the enemy’s to every Sarlian casualty.
They passed one mound of shattered bone, seeping gristle and leathery wing fabric lying on the dusty ground where the Deldeyn rider was still alive. Tyl Loesp himself noticed movement as they passed and ordered his command car stopped and the badly injured flier disentangled from his dead mount, a process which even done without deliberate roughness still caused him to scream hoarsely. They brought him aboard and set him on a litter at the rear of the open car where a doctor attempted to tend to him and an interpreter tried to question him about Deldeyn morale and their remaining forces. The man was near his end anyway, but found the strength to push the doctor away and spit in the interpreter’s face before he died. Tyl Loesp told them to push his body off the rear of the car without further ceremony.
* * *
The great plain stretched away to every horizon. The Sulpitine river was some twenty kilometres to their left. High clouds of faint pink stood against the too-blue sky as they came to the single wide canal which was the last defendable barrier between them and the region which held the Deldeyn capital city of Rasselle. The Deldeyn had stationed land forces on the near side of the canal but they had mostly fled on boats during the night. Their trenches were shallow and unshored, just as the canal was not properly lined and its banks were continually collapsing, leaving beaches of sand all along its length. The water was draining away in any case; only a diversionary feeder canal and hastily thrown-up breakwater affair further up the Sulpitine had kept the improvised water barrier supplied, and that had been destroyed by Sarlian sappers that morning, leaving the waters to drain back to the main river or just soak away into the sands.
Desultory artillery fire from the far side of the canal — from somewhere a good distance beyond it — mostly fell short and anyway seemed virtually unspotted. The Sarls had the air now; no Deldeyn fliers were rising to meet their scouts and patrols and spotters. The Sarlian artillery was mostly still being drawn up and the first few batteries were test-firing even now, finding their range. Tyl Loesp stood on the shallow berm of excavated sand, binoculars in hand, and listened to the explosions. The guns of the batteries fired in short order, almost rhythmically, like a troop of well-drilled riflemen, though the reports were naturally deeper-voiced. Such close-spaced regularity was a good sign. The spotters flew their grids, turning and swivelling in the air, signalling with heliographs where the shots from their allotted batteries were falling. On the far side, distant puffs of sand and veils of slowly drifting dust showed where the rounds landed.
Werreber came up in his land steamer, jumped out, said good day to some of tyl Loesp’s staff — keeping a respectful distance back from their chief — and strode on up to him.
“Question is,” he said abruptly, “do we wait for the water to drain or risk an attack now?”
“How long till it is drained sufficiently?” tyl Loesp asked.
“Perhaps till the start of the next short-night, when Uzretean sets. That’s a very short one; just three hours, then Tresker rises. The engineers are loath to commit themselves to exact times. Patches of the bed may remain muddy; other parts might be wadeable now.”
“Can we identify such variations?”
“We are trying to.” The field marshal nodded at a particularly large caude labouring its way low over the retreating waters, two men on its back. “That’s one of the engineers taking a look from above now. They seem generally of the opinion we should wait till dawn of Tresker. That would be prudent. Even if we can find a few dry paths sooner, crossing by them concentrates our attack to too pinched and vulnerable a focus. Better to attack broadly.”
“But would we not be well to attack sooner rather than later?” tyl Loesp asked. “If we have all our forces ready, I think we ought.”
“Perhaps. They don’t seem to have a lot of men on the far side, though there are reports of many roads and tracks; they might be there and well dug in.”
“Are not the fortifications on this side crude and shallow?”
“They are. That does not mean those on the far side are the same. They might even have left those on this side in such a poor state to lure us onwards.”
“We could be too cautious here,” tyl Loesp said. “The longer we wait, the more time they have to assemble what forces they have.”
“Our own reinforcements arrive too. And we can see any of theirs on their way. The scouts report none so far, though there is too much mist drifting from the great Falls to see further than thirty kilometres down the road. River mists may obscure matters here later, too, especially in the early morning of Tresker, though we may be able to use that to our own advantage.”
“I feel we should attack now,” tyl Loesp said.
“If the enemy are there in any numbers,” Werreber said, nodding at the far bank, “attacking now might lose us the war this afternoon.”
“You take too much care, Werreber. They are broken. We have the momentum. And even if they are there, even if we are temporarily thrown back, the war would not be lost. We have reached a stage where even on their homelands we can afford greater loss than they.”
“Why hurry? Why suffer such loss at all? By morning we’ll have pounded them all night and be set for a broad attack in overwhelming force that’ll trample them beneath us. The men and vehicles need resting anyway, tyl Loesp. To charge onward would be intemperate and risk severe attenuation. We can repel anything they choose to face us with, but only if our forces remain cohesive.”
“Nevertheless, to keep that momentum, even if we then halt and draw breath on the far side, we shall attack as soon as we have crossing points identified.”
Werreber drew himself up to his full, straight-backed height, staring down his hook of a nose at the other man. “I don’t understand you, tyl Loesp; you introduce delay by insisting on taking this circuitous route, then you drive us faster than a stooping lyge.”
“It is my way of maintaining a balance,” tyl Loesp said.
The field marshal looked frosty. “I advise against this attack, tyl Loesp.”
“And I note that.” Tyl Loesp smiled thinly. “Even so.”
Werreber gazed out across the expanse of shining sand and breeze-ruffled waters to the far bank. He sighed. “As you wish, sir,” he said. He inclined a small bow, turned and left.
“Oh, and Field Marshal?”
Werreber turned, f
rowning.
“Take no prisoners.” Tyl Loesp shrugged. “Save perhaps a few for interrogation.”
Werreber glared at him for a few moments, then gave the most cursory of nods and turned away again.
* * *
“You had not killed before?” Fanthile asked.
“Of course not!”
“Had you ever drawn blood, or been in a fight?”
Oramen shook his head. “Barely touched a sword, let alone a gun. My father never wanted me to be a warrior. That was Elime’s role. Ferbin was his reserve in that, though unsuited, perhaps through an overconcentration on Elime; my father felt Ferbin went to seed, from ripeness to spoiled almost before he was fully a man. I was too young to figure as a combateer when father was ascribing us our parts and planning his assault on posterity. My role was always to be the studious one, the thinker, the analyser, the futurian.” Oramen snorted.
Fanthile poured a little more of the sweet iced wine into Oramen’s crystal. They sat in the palace secretary’s private apartments. Oramen had not known who to talk to after the attack. Eventually his steps had led him to Fanthile. “Then you did especially well, did you not?” the palace secretary said. “Many a man who thinks himself brave finds he is not when faced with such expeditious assault.”
“Sir, did you not hear? I practically fainted. I had to sit before I fell. And I had the advantage; without my pistol, I’d not be here. Couldn’t even defend myself like a gentleman.”
“Oramen,” Fanthile said gently, “you are still a youth. And besides, you thought to arm yourself. That was wise, was it not?”
“So it proved.” Oramen drank deeply.
“And those who attacked you were not overly concerned with etiquette.”
Matter c-8 Page 25
