This Forsaken Earth

by Paul Kearney

  “I thought you said Bionar was a rich, settled country,” Rol told Canker as they trooped out of Corbie and passed the endless lines of supply wagons being loaded and unloaded for garrisons to the north and south.

  “It was,” the Thief-King responded. “But it’s taken a bit of a battering of late. Most of the civilian population has fled either to Myconn itself or to the towns nearer the coast. No point squatting in the middle of a battlefield, especially when your crops have been trampled and your house put to the torch. It’s better this way. The men no longer worry about fighting with their own people in the line of fire. Southeast Bionar has become a vast, brightly lit stage upon which we act out our play without need or desire for an audience.” He held up a gloved hand and panned it like an actor expressing a theatrical point, grinning.

  Rol watched Canker and remembered him fighting Psellos. When it came to skill in pure murder, he did not believe the Thief-King was a match for Rowen, and at one time he himself had been close to besting her—but that was a long time ago. He was not sure he would be able to kill Canker if the need arose, not unless the thing within him decided to come roaring out at the world again at just the right moment. His own training had been too brief, and it was too long ago. He did not doubt that both Canker and Rowen kept their skills perfectly honed, but his own were mere cobwebbed memories—despite his prowess on the bridge at Ruthe.

  He recalled Psellos’s contempt for the ordinary run of humanity. Cattle, he had called them, as though folk of the Blood were the only rational creatures in the world. He had tried to inculcate that attitude in Rol, too, and though he had largely failed, it still reared its ugly little head at times. But Rol did not truly believe it. Deep down, he knew that he craved acceptance and respect—and yes, love—from those he sometimes affected to despise. He hated himself for craving it, and he hated himself for his contempt of them. That was part of Psellos’s legacy which had sunk deep.

  “When you talk,” he told Canker, “you remind me of Michal Psellos.”

  “Perhaps I will take that as a compliment.”

  “You can take it any way you like.”

  “Psellos was a mighty man, though not, strictly speaking, a man at all. He was a colleague of mine in many ventures on Gascar—as you know. He betrayed me, or tried to, and yet I bear his memory no ill will. Make of that what you like.”

  “A man who does not resent betrayal will not find it far to stoop to become a betrayer in his turn.”

  “Possibly. I will do whatever is necessary to survive in this life, without evasion or contrition. All else is hypocrisy. We are animals, Rol, and in the end, all we care about is the worthless carcass in which our spirit finds itself imprisoned.” Canker turned in the saddle to bring the full regard of his rat-bright eyes to bear. “Life is cheap—the lives of men. There is nothing cheaper or more tawdry. I am at bottom an ordinary man myself, so I should know. But if it is in you to refashion these lives by the thousand—by the hundreds of thousands—then there is some meaning there. The only meaning in a world abandoned by God.” His attention drifted. He stared out over his horse’s ears, frowning. Then, collecting himself, he made a smile; a false note.

  “Thus, I serve Rowen, and I will do anything she deems necessary to put her at the head of the greatest nation on earth. Why? Because I believe she is worthy of that position, and I am not. I also believe that you have a place there beside her. I believe—truly, Rol—that you and she are greater than I, in the very essence of your humanity—or in your lack of it. So don’t lose sleep at night, worrying about betrayal. It is not part of this man’s plans.”

  “What in hell are you, then, Canker; have you become converted to the worship of the goddess Rowen?”

  “I am willing to acknowledge reality,” Canker said, gazing off into the distance again. “A man needs some kind of truth at the foundation of his life. I have found that I am a formidable man.” He smiled wryly. “But it would seem I am not the stuff of which kings are made. Kings of Thieves perhaps, but not kings who make a mark on history.”

  Something in Canker’s voice, his words, made the blood run cold about Rol’s heart. “Canker, what has Rowen become?”

  The Thief-King shrugged. “Give it a few days, my lad. A few days and a little carnage, and you shall find out.”

  The days were relatively few indeed, but they seemed long. Endless days of marching along the same road, watching the column of men and mules and guns proceed south with a kind of sullen stubbornness. Nights of freezing cold, where the campfires petered out long before the dawn through lack of firewood, the countryside around them picked clean as a desert carcass and forsaken by anyone who did not bear arms, or who did not in some way service those who did.

  There was the odd, isolated inn still doing business and serving as a waystation for messengers of Canker and Rowen’s new empire. Usually it was the only inhabited building within a skew of ruined streets, though sometimes enterprising folk set up bordellos in the less broken houses nearby; and tired though the troops were, when the army halted for the night in the vicinity of these establishments there was a steady trickle of grimy men willing to spend their money there and have their needs seen to by a motley crowd of sad-eyed girls.

  A week after leaving Gallitras, they found the Embrun River arcing round across their line of march again, flowing southeast to northwest. It was a narrower water here, and faster flowing, but still enough of an obstacle that the bridges over it were important militarily. Another smashed town, this one named Forminon, and another host of many thousands dug in along the banks and in the ruined houses, artillery emplaced in gabion-walled revetments, and the land all around them cratered and shell-scabbed under its merciful covering of snow. The army entrenched at Forminon was huge—to Rol’s eyes, at least. Its tented city, butting onto the river, covered many acres, and the streets between the encampments had roads of corduroyed logs to keep the ubiquitous supply-wains from plunging axle-deep in the mud below. Fifteen thousand men, Canker said, garrisoned Forminon—for this was now more or less the front line. The land beyond was contested by both sides right up to the siege-lines about Myconn itself.

  Once again, Canker requisitioned troops right and left, though this time the local commander protested with more spine than Moerus had shown at Gallitras. They stayed in Forminon two days, mostly to rest the animals of the baggage train and refill the wagons they drew. When they set off again they were more than ten thousand strong, and one of the new regiments was mounted: a thousand armored men on tall, half-starved horses. It took the better part of a day to merely clear the bridges, and once on the southern bank the army sent out flanking companies, whilst the cavalry rode ahead some half a league of the main body, sniffing for trouble. Ahead of them, the mountains loomed up closer than ever, and the ground rose steadily under their feet. They thought they had become accustomed to the cold, but now it deepened around them, a raw, dry chill that no blanket or campfire could keep out of their marrow.

  Hitherto, Rol had viewed the army as a kind of snake. The column it made was defined by the road upon which it traveled. But now that changed. The snake grew legs, antennae. The formations opened up, and spread out over the blasted land, undulating with the rise and fall of the terrain, clotting at ruined farmsteads, trickling over drystone walls like lines of ants. In the rear of each company fire-bearers carried thick-walled clay pots that housed the embers of the nightly fires, so that their comrades would quickly be able to light the match of the arquebuses if the enemy should hove into view. When Rol remarked on the multiplicity of formations, Canker only grinned, doffing his feathered hat. “March divided, fight concentrated,” he said. “I got that out of a book.”

  When they were ten leagues from Myconn the order was passed down the line that there would be no more campfires, no cooking of food. They would chew on raw salt-beef and biscuit, and shiver in their inadequate blankets through the long, frost-sharp nights. By day the army spread out still farther. Only the wheeled
traffic kept to the roads, the wagons and the guns. The infantry advanced over the empty, low-hedged fields in broad-fronted field-columns. These moved in shadowed masses upon the white vividness of the snow, except when a gleam of sunlight passed over them and set all the thousands of metal accoutrements the soldiers carried to winking brilliance.

  And still, there was no sign of the enemy. The countryside about them was as unpeopled as a wilderness. They were marching across the Vale of Myconn, which Rol had heard of in stories and songs all his life. It had been a densely populated, fertile, well-watered and well-tilled region, but now it was a snow-blasted waste.

  Gallico had been here before. Rol joined him on the wagon, along with Giffon and Creed, and the quartet watched the world creep by around them as the army drew ever closer to Bionar’s capital. The halftroll’s skin was a paler shade of green now, and flesh had melted from his huge frame so that the bones were more pronounced, but the awful rasp and wheeze of his breathing had subsided. His eyes had regained some of their old mischief. He stared about himself with acute interest as the mountains came closer.

  “See that gray smudge off to the northwest? That’s Widnell, or what’s left of it. I worked there for a while in a traveling carnival, lifting and breaking things and snarling like a maniac for crowds of farmers. There’s roads under this snow, besides the one we’re traveling on, but the blizzards have covered them and no one must be using them anymore. Those ruins? That’s a town as well; I forget the name now. The mill still has a sail on it. It’s maybe fifteen decades since I was in this part of the world, and nothing but the mountains looks the same.”

  They listened to him talk, glad to hear him sound like his old self again. That night they shared a skin of army wine and traded stories and memories all had heard recited a dozen times before. Many of the Bionese soldiers drifted over to them, bringing their own wine and losing some of their habitual reticence. One sang a song, and they joined in though they did not know the words. The soldiers were hard-bitten men, veterans of many battles who had followed their officers and leaders up and down an increasingly devastated country getting on for three years now. Though they had traveled together all this time, Rol had never had so much as a conversation with one of them.

  Gray-eyed and dark-haired for the most part, they were a grave, stolid bunch who listened more than they spoke. Perhaps it was the proximity of the capital, and the inevitability of the battle they would be fighting before it, but they traded jokes and anecdotes now with the easiness of men who have been laboring together through a long day’s toil. Only when Canker arrived did the soldiers’ faces close again. They stood up as one, saluted him with real respect, and trooped off to their lines without another word, taking their wineskins with them. The Thief-King nodded at them with a crooked smile upon his face, and then gathering his cloak he turned away again, but gestured Rol to follow him.

  Elias Creed came, too, weaving a little from the wine, and the three of them trudged up a low rise beyond the bivouacs of the army. There were clouds scudding across the face of the stars, and a sliver of a new moon. The mountains hung like phantom gods on the horizon, and under their feet the snow crunched like glass in the aching cold.

  “I hope this is worth it.” Creed hiccuped, and Rol steadied him with one arm. They stood on the brow of the hill sharing each other’s warmth while Canker stood a little apart, smothered in his scarlet cloak, which hung black in the starlight.

  “Canker—” Rol began irritably.

  “Hush.” Canker held up a gloved hand. “Do you hear that? Listen.”

  They did so. The snow creaked under their feet, a sound very like that a ship’s rigging made when under sail. Somewhere in the woods beyond the road an owl hooted, as forlorn a sound as could be imagined below the frozen emptiness of that black sky. But there was something else also.

  Rol caught it first. A faint rumbling off at the edge of the world. Thunder, or the sound of an avalanche in the mountains—though they were still too distant for it to be that.

  “Do you hear it?” Canker asked, rapt. “That sound?”

  “What is it?” Creed asked, frowning.

  “The guns of Myconn.”

  Twelve

  CLIMBING A WALL

  THE CAVALRY CAME BACK AT DUSK, THE HORSES BLOWN and stumbling, their riders hollow-eyed in the saddle. Their commander at once reported to Canker whilst his men unsaddled their mounts and rubbed them down, a haze of steam rising up from that vast overworked mass of muscle and bone. The rest of the army was still extending its flanks, and some of the more distant regiments were almost out of sight in the failing light. Four ranks deep, an (understrength) infantry regiment of a thousand men, with gaps for runners and the like, took up a frontage of three hundred yards—or a cable and a half, if one was nautically minded. Canker had nine of these regiments, plus the cavalry, plus three batteries of artillery, and a cloud of teamsters and cooks and smiths and stretcher-bearers and various other artisans who stayed back with the wagons. An impressive force; with three regiments held in reserve it still had a frontage of some half a league. Looking at it, Rol felt that armies such as this might change the very nature of the ground they walked upon. And, of course, they had.

  The sound of the distant artillery was no longer notable; they had been hearing it for hours, ever since they had broken camp that morning and begun inching their way south, the regiments fanning out into lines, the gunners cursing and beating their mules to try to keep cannons and limbers from falling behind, the ox-drawn wagons of the supply train plodding doggedly in the rear. Now they had deployed across a rolling expanse of low hills, the regimental formations kinking here and there where companies followed the lines of hedges and stone walls, or bent out to occupy roofless farmhouses, or curved to follow the bend of a half-frozen stream. Men took these things into account when they picked a place to make their stand. They chose small rises in the ground, sunken lanes. A copse of trees assumed new significance when soldiers made it the center of their formation; it became part of the architecture of their morale.

  Canker beckoned Rol over, and Rol nudged his horse into a stiff-limbed trot toward the Thief-King, where his scarlet cloak stood out among the drab, badly dyed livery of his officers. Once scarlet themselves, the surcoats of the men were fading to a dingy pink mottled with brown and darkened with sweat and melted snow.

  Canker had unrolled a scroll of parchment upon which was a black-inked diagram. He bade one of the officers bend over and used the man’s back as a desk, writing and drawing with a clipped quill which he refreshed from an inkwell in his buttonhole.

  “Myconn,” he said. “It’s over the hill, gentlemen, barely five miles away. Adlar’s scouts got to within a mile of the siege-lines—without being spotted, he assures me. Bar Asfal is overconfident, and his men are none too keen to leave the comfort of their tents, and the security of their trenches. This is the lie of the land at present.”

  The officers craned their necks to look as Canker’s brown-skinned fingers deftly scored quill across parchment.

  “See, Bar Asfal has drawn his lines up to within a half mile of the city walls, but he’s only dug them out from the Palestrinan Hills to the Corbians, an arc of some eight miles. The hills themselves are too rough for wheeled traffic or guns, and he patrols them with bodies of light infantry; sword and buckler men and peltasts. There are three main camps. One, the closest, guards the Gallitran Road; one in the west, the Palestrinan Road; and in the east, a small one between the Destrir River and the Corbian Hills. Asfal’s standard is in the middle camp, on the Gallitran Road.” Canker paused. “Adlar reckons the enemy strength at some thirty-five thousand.”

  Murmurs at this. The Bionese officers looked at one another. Significant nods, silent acknowledgments.

  “We need to get word to the Queen that we are here. We need to coordinate our attack with a sortie from the city itself. We will have them between two fires.” Canker smiled, rolled up his map, and clapped the shoulde
r of his living desk. The man straightened, face impassive.

  “Rol here will enter the city tonight, under cover of darkness, and take tidings of our arrival and deployment to the Queen in person.”

  Rol met Canker’s eyes coolly, though his heart had begun to hammer in his chest. Something told him this had been Canker’s plan all along. Perhaps Rowen’s too.

  “Very well,” he said. “But I don’t know Myconn. I’ll need a better idea of it than what’s given in that scrawl of yours.”

  “You shall have it,” Canker said.

  “If the man is a stranger to the city, how can he be expected to find his way in and then get to the palace?” one of the officers demanded.

  “Don’t you worry yourself, Colonel,” Canker retorted, and his eyes marked down the man’s face for future reference.

  “Young Rol here is rather adept at finding his way in the dark.”

  And dark it was. There was a half-moon that night, but the clouds rolled in to obscure it as if by arrangement. Canker had his men build a shack of brushwood spread with oilskin tarps to the rear of the battle-line, and within it was able to light a lantern while all the rest of the army lay in their thousands outside in the black, penetrating cold. There, he briefed Rol about his mission in rather more detail.

  “A better map, this, though a little out-of-date.” He spread the tattered vellum on the ground, avoiding the slush spreading by the base of the hissing lantern. “See, Myconn in all its glory. Half a million lived here, in better days, and as many more in the suburbs and outlying villages. But it’s different now. The suburbs were razed to the ground to create fields of fire, and the villages are gone the same way. But the basic geography remains the same.” His finger touched points lightly on the map.