[Florin & Lorenzo 01] - The Burning Shore

by Robert Earl - (ebook by Undead)

  “Yes, sir,” Orbrant snapped a salute, the gesture as neatly executed within this bloody chaos as if it were a parade ground. “And what are your orders for the water carriers, sir?”

  “Water?”

  “After a battle men are always thirsty. It’s as well to give them water, especially as we have no wine.”

  “Yes, of course. All right, you get on with forming up the pairs, I’ll organise the water.”

  “Yes, sir,” Orbrant saluted again, and Florin, realising how comforting that sign of normality was, snapped a salute back.

  “Made it through, then boss?” Lorenzo’s voice made the gesture seem ridiculous, and Florin dropped his fist as he turned, a tired smile lifting his bloodstained face.

  “More or less. It’s going to be one hell of a laundry bill when we get back.”

  Lorenzo, for once, seemed to be lost for words. Then he rallied. “The butcher’s bill looks a lot higher.”

  “Yes,” Florin agreed, taking another look at the massacre amongst which they stood. What a victory, he thought bitterly. I’ll be damned if I ever play this game again. The decision made, he shook himself back into action.

  “Well, I haven’t got time to stand around here all day chatting,” he said. “And neither have you. Come on, we’ve got to find men and buckets and start passing water around.”

  They gathered a handful of men on their way to the cooking tents, bullying them down to the stream with the company’s palm leaf buckets whilst others lit the fires beneath the cauldrons.

  Florin’s detail worked mechanically, taking empty pails down to the stream, then back to the boiling sterility of the cauldron, then from the cauldron to their comrades, then from their comrades back to the stream.

  It was hard, mind-numbing work, which was good. Anything was better than sitting and contemplating the ruin of their companies. Many of those ragged regiments had formed little worlds within which the men had lived for decades, the nearest thing to a family a mercenary could get.

  The sun was sinking mercifully into the west, bringing an end to this hideous day, when Florin and Lorenzo found Lundorf.

  “Avoiding all the hard work, I see,” Lorenzo said as he dragged the last scaly corpse off the officer. “Typical aristo.”

  Lundorf scowled as he struggled to sit up, his clothes so soaked with the blood of the slain saurus that they squelched when he moved.

  “Hold your tongue, peasant,” he snapped and started to say something else, but the effort was too much for him. Eyes rolling back upwards, Lundorf collapsed back down into unconsciousness.

  “Why did you have to say that to him?” Florin scolded Lorenzo, who remained unrepentant.

  “You weren’t so delicate,” he defended himself. “Anyway, if it hadn’t been for me we’d never have found him.”

  Florin sighed and knelt beside his old friend, rolling him over to see where he was wounded. There was a bone-deep cut along the side of his ribcage, but it seemed to have already clotted, thank Shallya. There was also a bruise as big as half an apple on the back of his skull, although Florin doubted that that would do much harm to a Marienburger.

  “He’ll live,” he decided, his surge of relief giving him an idea. “Although we’ll need to find him a minder until we get back to the ships. Lorenzo…”

  “What?”

  “You’re it.”

  Keeping the smile firmly off his face as his servant’s protests degenerated into muttered curses Florin turned and left. It had gradually dawned on him that, with the Colonel dead, there was nobody to give the decision to leave.

  Well, he’d soon see about that.

  Compared to the council of war they’d held the previous day, tonight’s was a depressing affair. The Colonel was dead, his body vanished. So was Kereveld. Lundorf, bandaged and propped up against one of the chests of gold, slipped in and out of consciousness. And Graznikov…

  Well, nobody knew where he was. Graznikov had disappeared.

  Nobody had seen him leave, nor had any sign of his body been found. The only clue to his fate had been when they’d come to the Colonel’s old tent and found the pile of treasure disturbed, although even Florin had to admit that that could have been done by anybody.

  “I say we go,” Castavelli said, breaking Florin’s chain of thought.

  “No point now,” Thorgrimm shook his head and, despite the burn marks which cascaded down the left side of his body, lit his pipe. He inhaled, his bare cheeks bellowing out beneath the few scorched hairs that were all that remained of his beard. It occurred to Florin that he’d never actually seen a beardless dwarf before.

  Then it occurred to him that he was staring. And that Thorgrimm was staring back.

  “Why is there no point, menheer?” he asked as he hurriedly looked away.

  “Because we’ve beaten the enemy. They couldn’t stand against the expertise of my lads’ gunnery. I didn’t even have to use my axe on them.”

  “They withdrew,” Florin forced himself to correct the dwarf. “Because Kereveld exploded and sent their monster berserk. They’ll be back, though.”

  “How do you know?”

  Florin was trying to think of a good enough reply when the sergeant the Kislevites had sent interrupted.

  “No matter, all this,” he said, tired of trying to follow all of these ridiculous accents. “Me, my comrades, we go at dawn. Want gold now.”

  “So do we,” Castavelli nodded his head eagerly.

  “Lundorf?” Florin asked, and the Marienburger nodded.

  “Yes, of course we’ll go,” he said, wincing with the pain of nodding his head.

  “Good. You see then, Master Thorgrimm, that despite our respect for you, it’s four to one. We go in the morning.”

  “No.”

  “What do you mean, no?”

  “You can go if you want to. Me and my men will stay here.”

  “Why?” Florin’s voice rose in frustration, and he lowered it. “The lizards will return, and they’ll overcome you. There are so many of them… Why won’t you come with us?”

  For the first and the last time since Florin had known him a look of uncertainty passed across the dwarf’s face. He reached up to stroke the frazzled stubble which covered the square block of his jaw, and sighed.

  “No, we must stay in this wilderness. For at least a year.”

  Florin and Castavelli exchanged a mystified glance. Then the Tilean shrugged.

  “I understand. All right, you make a good bargain for your men. How much percentage you want to come home with us? My boys, we are very civilised, prefer life to gold. How much you want?”

  “Stop,” the Kislevite burst out, not sure if he had understood. “We all take same gold. Contract.”

  But Thorgrimm waved both their arguments away. He shifted his pipe from his right hand to his left and felt the naked skin of his cheek. The three of his kinfolk that the comet blast had killed had been the lucky ones. Not for them the humiliation of… of beardlessness.

  In fact, Thorgrimm was beginning to wonder if the charm that had saved them from the fire might actually be elvish. Not that it mattered.

  “You humans can go,” he said with a miserable sigh. “With our blessing. You weren’t bad, for your kind. But my brothers and I must stay in this wilderness. Our honour demands it.” .

  “We can take your gold, yes?” The Kislevite asked eagerly, and Thorgrimm’s hand moved in a sudden blur. There was the hum of sliced air, a flash of mirrored steel, and his axe thumped quivering into the corner post behind the Kislevite’s head.

  “No,” the dwarf said, taking another draw on his pipe. “We’ll keep our gold.”

  The meeting broke up soon after.

  * * *

  Mage Priest Xinthua Tzequal was content. After the unsettling events with which the battle had been concluded he had immediately sent out runners to all of the surrounding military outposts. Then, after a fortifying meal of tree frogs, he had sat back and reviewed his failed plan of attack.<
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  As he compared the projections he had made for the skirmish with the actual reality, turning each element this way and that within the deep ocean of his intelligence, it became clear to Xinthua whose fault the defeat had been. It had been his.

  No feelings of guilt attached themselves to the thought. Such an emotion was as alien to his ancient soul as was pity. Instead he focused on what had caused the errors in his calculations. As always, he decided, it boiled down to a mismatch between the gross physical world and the model of it which he had so carefully built up within his head.

  In other words, he had underestimated the enemy, and overestimated his own forces.

  Pleased by the elegance of this lesson, Xinthua sent some of his attendants down to the. river to find him a dessert of water snakes. Now that he had seen where he had gone wrong, he had nothing to do but to sit back and wait for the forces he had summoned to arrive.

  As the sun set, and as the first of the defanged snakes his skinks had brought crunched between his teeth, the first elements of the army arrived. Xinthua sent them to rest and then, for the first time in half a century, closed down his own mind to get a full night’s sleep.

  Florin was woken at dawn by Lorenzo who, perhaps for once remembering that he was a servant, had brought him a cup of black tea. It was good and sweet, and Florin drank deeply before looking up at his friend.

  The hot liquid slopped over the sides of the mug as he burst into a peal of laughter.

  “What’s so funny?” the smaller man demanded, drawing himself up with a series of clinks.

  “How far do you think you’ll get with that?”

  “Far enough,” Lorenzo sniffed, with a metallic jingling. The fragments of gold which he had strapped to himself clanked like armour as he turned, gleaming queasily beneath the greasy sheen his fingers had left on them.

  “It must weigh a ton,” said Florin. “And don’t forget, you’ll have to help Lundorf.”

  “Lundorf’s back with his own company. Now that the gold’s been divided, nobody’s going to waste energy on someone else’s wounded.”

  Florin slurped his tea and nodded. It was understandable. They already had too much treasure to carry out with them. The mercenaries might be willing to sacrifice their own wounded comrades’ weight in gold, but not somebody else’s.

  “And are the men ready to set off?” Florin asked, getting stiffly to his feet and hobbling over to pull back the thatched mat of the door. Like almost everybody the rigors of yesterday’s battle had left him feeling as weak and arthritic as an octogenarian.

  “All ready to go,” Lorenzo nodded, following his master out into the morning mist.

  The shapes of the company were dark shadows in the whiteness before him. Those who weren’t ready with crudely built stretchers were stooped and hunchbacked, their gargoyle forms bent beneath the weight of their treasure. With the stench of rotting flesh that hung in the air, and the buzzing of the flies, it could well have been a scene from purgatory.

  There was a sudden, savage cry from the left, and for a moment Florin jumped. Then he realized that it was just a mule, its distress quickly soothed by somebody with a Bretonnian accent. Florin frowned.

  “Does Thorgrimm know we’ve got one of his mules?” He asked Lorenzo suspiciously.

  “Yes, of course he does,” Lorenzo said hurriedly. “Shall we get a move on? The Tileans left half an hour ago.”

  “In a moment. First of all, I want to find Orbrant and do a head count. Make sure we’ve got everyone. Would you go and tell Thorgrimm we’re off, by the way. And thank him for the mules.”

  “About that…” Lorenzo began, and licked his lips. “The thing is, I knew that you wouldn’t want us to steal from the dwarfs. So we bought the mules from him.”

  “Good idea,” Florin agreed. “They’re worth all the gold we couldn’t carry.”

  “We didn’t pay with gold,” Lorenzo said, starting off into the mist.

  “What did you pay with, then?” Florin called after him.

  “Gunpowder.”

  “What!”

  But Lorenzo, hidden by the billows of rolling fog, didn’t appear to hear him. Neither did he care to return until Florin and Orbrant were in the midst of counting off the remains of the company, the pitiful few survivors filing past them and into the first inklings of the rising sun.

  There were eleven walking men, in all, not counting Orbrant. They carried with them five of their comrades whose injuries were too great for them to walk, and the two mules, one of which helped to drag another survivor along behind it.

  Despite the fact that they were rich men they walked with the lowered heads of destitutes, dragging their feet like dockside beggars. Even Orbrant seemed subdued. He had taken the lead with the grim tread of a chief mourner at a funeral. He’d sheathed his warhammer, the gromril of its head as useless as the gold which weighed down the company, as they hacked a path through the undergrowth.

  It was almost noon by the time they’d climbed, struggling and slipping, to the clearing which overlooked the pyramids. Some of the men, staggering by now under their loads, begged for a stop. But Florin, the certainty that the lizardmen were in pursuit combining with the fleeting memory of his capture in this place, refused.

  They pushed on, some taking a single backwards glance at the temples. They looked as stark and alien now as they had on the first day they’d seen them. Despite the mercenaries’ efforts they seemed untouched by their scraping excavations, unsullied by the litter of rotting bodies they’d left behind.

  To Florin, they looked triumphant. He spat in their direction, then followed the last of his men into the jungle beyond, kicking aside a golden goblet one of them had dropped in the path.

  Thorgrimm and the remaining dwarfs breakfasted well that morning. After the last of the humans had gone they had built a huge fire pit and burned the remains of their shacks. When the flames had died down into red glowing embers they’d strode amongst the bloody harvest of the enemy, hacking off great steaks of lizard meat to throw upon the sizzling coals.

  The blackened steaks were as tough as leather but as succulent as chicken, especially when washed down with wine the Tileans had left. Thorgrimm watched his brothers as they gorged themselves on lizard meat, trying not to stare at the nakedness of their faces as they tried not to stare at his. Grease ran down their uninsulated chins, an obscene sensation that had them constantly dabbing at their faces with strips of cloth.

  After the meal, the hot breeze cool on their chins, they took the armour they’d gathered along with the meat and began to build a forge. None of them mentioned what it was they were doing, or why. They didn’t need to. It was clear to all of them what needed to be done.

  .The waning sun combined with the heat of the forge to slick their bodies with sweat as they worked, so that, to the watchers in the trees, their pale bodies gleamed like the cogs of a well oiled machine. An anvil was hacked out of a fallen granite boulder, a trough dug out and filled with water, golden bowls emptied and cleaned to be used as alloy vats.

  A few hours later Thorgrimm tried out the first example of their rough, battlefield craftsmanship.

  It was perfect. The chief smith had fastened a simple hinge to either side of his helmet and, attached to that hinge, a long, beard-shaped faceplate. As yet there was no decoration on it, none of the scrolling steel curls which each dwarf had imagined, but that didn’t matter. Elegance was the last thing anybody needed in such a prosthetic.

  Thorgrimm’s eyes gleamed with a flinty satisfaction above the top of his new beard, and he nodded his approval. The production line immediately went into operation, work continuing even when the scurrying and crashing in the surrounding jungle became too much to ignore. In a rush of activity the last dwarf was handed his modified helmet, and, even as he crammed its burning weight onto his head, the tree-line split asunder beneath the juggernaut of the enemy.

  They caught up with the Tileans at the river where they’d first seen the skinks.<
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  “Hey, you there,” Florin cried out as the last of them splashed across to the far bank.

  “What do you want?” the mercenary, red-faced and grimacing beneath the weight of a golden statue, growled.

  “How about some creamed ice?” Lorenzo sniped, but the Bretonnians were too exhausted to laugh at his wit.

  “Where’s your captain?” Florin asked the Tilean, who was ploughing on into the jungle beyond.

  “Ahead.”

  “How far?”

  The Tilean shrugged, the effort of hunching his shoulders beneath the weight of his loot bringing a wince of pain to his face.

  Florin decided to leave him in peace, and contented himself with following silently in the man’s footsteps. The elephant grass that lined this track had already started to grow back, the new shoots fresh and green. Hidden amongst them, ready to turn treacherously underfoot, were abandoned pieces of gold. Orbs and cups and bundles of twisted wire, each of them worth a fortune back in the Old World, had been left to sink back into the earth’s soft embrace.

  Florin was tempted to stoop and take at least one of them, but the leather stitching of the satchel he carried was already squeaking beneath the weight of the golden ingots he’d taken. There were a hundred of them, each as long as a man’s thumb, covered in the same blocky hieroglyphs that he’d seen in the temple.

  He was looking at a piece of jagged shrapnel which stuck out of the tree ahead like a sign post, the metal already orange with rust, when he stumbled forward over another object. Steadying himself, he turned and kicked the offending object and was surprised to hear, instead of the clink of gold, the dull thud of leather. A water bottle, perhaps, or a wine skin.

  “All right boss?” one of his men said as he filed past.

  “Yes, fine thanks,” Florin said, and stooped to find the object he’d just kicked. In fact it wasn’t a canteen of either water or wine, but Kereveld’s book.

  The edges of the pages were scorched and stained, and the front cover hung from a thread, but it was still legible. Florin flicked through the damp pages as the last of the company marched into the path the Tileans had cleared.