by Paul Kearney
Andruw and Formio were staring around with something of Corfe’s wonder. Neither had ever set foot on a boat before and they had thought that the transports which were to take them upriver would be glorified barges. But the grain freighters, though of shallow draught, displaced over a thousand tons each. They were square-rigged, with a sail plan similar to that of a brigantine, and seemed to the landsmen to be great ocean-going ships. They had a crew of two dozen or so though their own captain, Mirio, confessed that they were short-handed. Some of his men had jumped ship and refused to take their vessel north into what was widely seen as enemy-held territory. As it was, the ship-owners had been well-paid out of the shrinking Torunnan treasury, and some of the soldiers who constituted the cargo of the sixteen craft Corfe had hired would be able to haul on a rope as well as any waterman.
Inside these sixteen large vessels were some eight thousand men and two thousand horses and mules. Corfe was bringing north all his Cathedrallers—some fifteen hundred, with the recent reinforcements—plus Formio’s Fimbrians and the dyke veterans who had served under him at the King’s Battle. It was, he gauged, a force formidable enough to cope with any enemy formation except the main body of the Merduk army itself. He intended to alight from the freighters far up the Torrin, and then thunder back down to the capital slaughtering every Merduk he chanced across and delivering north-western Torunna from the invaders—for a while, at least. Awful stories had been trickling south to Torunn in the past few days, tales of rape and mass executions. These things were part and parcel of every war, but there was a grim pattern to the reports: the Merduks seemed intent on depopulating the entire region. It was an important area strategically also, in that it bordered on the Torrin Gap, the gateway to Normannia west of the Cimbrics. The enemy could not be allowed to force the passage of the gap with impunity.
And the last reason for the expedition. Corfe had to get out of Torunn, away from the court and the High Command, or he thought he would go quietly insane.
Marsch appeared out of one of the wide hatches in the deck of the freighter. He looked careworn and uneasy. It had taken some cajoling to get the tribesmen aboard the ships: such a means of transport was entirely inimical to them, and they feared for the welfare of their horses. Those who remained out of Corfe’s original five hundred had been galley slaves, and they associated ships with their degradation. The others had never before set eyes on anything afloat which was larger than a rowboat, and the cavernous holds they were now incarcerated within amazed and unsettled them.
Corfe could see that the big tribesman was averting his eyes from the riverbank that coursed smoothly past on the starboard side of the vessel. He gave an impression of deep distaste for everything maritime, yet he had greeted the news of their waterborne expedition without a murmur.
“The horses are calming down,” he said as he approached his commander. “It stinks down there.” His face was haunted, as if the smell brought back old memories of being chained to an oar with the lash scoring his back.
“It won’t be for long,” Corfe assured him. “Four or five days at most.”
“Bad grazing up north,” Marsch continued. “I am hoping we have enough forage with us. Mules carry it, but eat it too.”
“Cheer up, Marsch,” Andruw said, as irrepressible as ever. “It’s better than kicking our heels back in the city. And I for one would rather sit here like a lord and watch the world drift past than slog it up through the hills to the north.”
Marsch did not look convinced. “We’ll need one, two days to get the horses back into condition when they leave the”—his lips curled around the word—“the boats.”
“Don’t let Mirio hear you calling his beloved Seahorse a boat.” Andruw laughed. “He’s liable to turn us all ashore. These sailors—your pardon, these watermen—are a trifle touchy about their charges, like an old man with a young wife.”
That brought a grin to all their faces. Corfe detached himself from the banter and made his way aft to where Mirio was standing taking a stint at the helm. The river-captain nodded unsmilingly at him. “We’re making three knots, General. Not as fast as I would have hoped, but we’ll get you there.”
“Thank you, Captain. You mustn’t mind my men. They’re new to the river, and to ships.”
“Aye, well I’ll not pretend that I wouldn’t prefer to be shipping a hold full of grain instead of a bunch of seasick soldiers and screaming horses, but we must take what comes I suppose. There, we’re past the last of the river-batteries and the Royal naval yards.”
Corfe looked out towards the eastern bank. The shore—the river was big enough to warrant that name for its banks—was some to two cables away. The walls of Torunn came right down to the riverside here, protected by a series of squat towers which hid countless heavy cannon. Jutting out into the Torrin itself were dozens of jetties and wharves, most of them empty but a few busy with men unloading the small riverboats that plied back and forth across the river here. And sliding behind them now he could glimpse the Royal naval yards of Torunna. Two great ships, tall, ocean-going carracks, were in dry-dock there, their sides propped up by heavy beams, and hundreds of men swarmed over them in a confusion of wood and rope.
“How far is it to the sea?” Corfe asked, peering aft over the taffrail. Behind the Seahorse the remainder of the expedition’s vessels were in line astern, the foam flying from their bows as they fought upstream against the current.
“Some five leagues,” Mirio told him. “In times of storm the Torrin is brackish here, and sometimes ships are blown clear up the estuary from the Kardian.”
“So close? I had no idea.” Corfe had always thought of Torunn as a city divided by a river. Now he realised that it was a port on the fringe of a sea. That was something to remember. He must talk to Berza when the admiral returned to Torunn with the fleet. If the Merduks could transport armies by sea, then so could he.
T HE wind freshened through the day, and Mirio was able to report with visible satisfaction that they were making five knots. The capital had long disappeared, and the transports were moving through the heavily populated country which lay to its west. Farmers here reared cattle, planted crops and fished from the river in equal measure. But while the southern shore seemed prosperous and untouched by war, many houses and hamlets to the north were obviously deserted. Corfe saw livestock running wild, barn doors yawning emptily, and in a few places the blackened shells of burnt villages off on the horizon.
The freighters always moored for the night, for the risk of running into a sandbank in the dark was too great. Their practise was to moor the bows to stout trees onshore and drop a light anchor from the stern to keep the vessel from being swept into the bank by the current. The men could not be disembarked en masse, but on Marsch’s insistence Corfe saw to it that a few of the horses and mules were brought ashore in shifts all night and exercised up and down the riverbank. It was also an effective way of posting mobile sentries, and the duty was popular with the men who found their squalid quarters in the depths of the freighters less than congenial.
F OUR days went by. The Torrin arced in a curve until it began to flow almost directly north to south, and then it turned north-west towards its headwaters in the Thurian Mountains. They could see the Thurians on the northern horizon, still blanketed by snow. And to their left, or to larboard, the stern white peaks of the Cimbrics reared up, their heads lost in grey cloud. There were no more farms on the riverbank; this region had been sparsely settled even before the war. Now it seemed utterly deserted, a wilderness hemmed in by frowning mountains and bisected by the surging course of the young river.
The Torrin was barely two cables wide here, and occasionally during the fourth day they had felt the keel of the heavily laden freighter scrape on sunken sandbanks. In addition, the current had become stronger and they averaged barely two knots. On the morning of the fifth day Corfe finally decided to leave the ships behind, to the obvious relief of both soldiers and watermen, and the sixteen huge craft sp
ent an anxious morning edging and nudging their way to the eastern bank before dropping every anchor they possessed in order to hold fast against the efforts of the river to shove them downstream.
What followed was a prolonged nightmare of mud and water and thrashing, cursing men and panicky animals. Each of the freighters possessed floating jetties which could be winched over the side to provide a fairly stable pathway to the shore, but they had not been designed for the offloading of two thousand horses and mules. The animals were hoisted out of the holds by tackles to the yardarms and set down wild-eyed and struggling upon the pitching jetties, with predictable results. By the time the last mule and man was ashore, and the army’s supplies were piled in long rows on dry land, it was far into the night. Two men had drowned and six horses had been lost, but Corfe counted himself lucky not to have lost more. The eastern bank was a sucking quagmire of mud and horse-shit for almost a mile, and the troops were hollow-eyed ghosts which staggered with weariness. But they were ashore and essentially intact, having covered over eighty leagues in five days.
T HE last of the horses had been settled down for the night and the army’s campfires were scattered about the dark earth like some poor counterfeit of the stars overhead. The ground was hard as stone here, a mile from the riverbank, which would make for easy marching, but the cold was difficult to keep at bay with a single blanket, even with one’s feet in the very embers of the fire. Strangely, Corfe felt less tyred than at any time since the King’s Battle, for all that he had snatched barely four hours’ sleep a night on the voyage upriver. It was the freedom of being out in the field with his own command. No more conferences or councils or scribbling scribes, just a host of exhausted, chilled men and animals encamped in the frozen wilds of the north.
The men had meshed together well. They had fought shoulder to shoulder in the King’s Battle, guzzled beer together in the taverns of Torunn and endured the unpleasantness of the river journey north. Now they were a single entity. Cimbric tribesmen, Fimbrian pikemen, Torunnan arquebusiers. There were still rivallries, of course, but they were healthy ones. Corfe sat by the campfire and watched them sleep uncomplainingly upon the hard earth, their threadbare uniforms sodden with mud—and realised that he loved them all.
Andruw picked his way through the fires towards him, then dug into his saddlebags. He handed his general a wooden flask.
“Have a snort, Corfe. It’ll keep the cold out. Compliments of Captain Mirio.”
Corfe unstoppered the neck and had a good swallow. The stuff seemed to burn his mouth, and blazed a fiery path all the way down his gullet. His eyes watered and he found himself gasping for air.
“I swear, Andruw, you’ll go blind one of these days.”
“Not me. I’ve the constitution of a horse.”
“And about as much sense. What about the powder?”
Andruw looked back across the camp. “We lost six barrels, and another eight are wet through. God knows when we’ll have a chance to dry them.”
“Damn. That eats into our reserves. Well, we’ve enough to fight a couple of good-sized engagements, but I want Ranafast’s men made aware that they can’t go firing it off like it’s free.”
“No problem.”
Two more figures came picking their way out of the flickering dark towards them. When they drew closer Corfe saw that it was the unlikely duo of Marsch and Formio. Formio looked as slight as an adolescent beside the bulk of the towering tribesman, his once dapper sable uniform now a harlequin chequer of mud. Marsch was clad in a greasy leather gambeson. He looked happier than he had for days.
“What is this, a meeting of the High Command?” Andruw asked derisively. “Here you two—have some of this. Privileges of rank.”
Formio and Marsch winced over the rough grain liquor much as Corfe had done.
“Well, gentlemen?” their commanding officer asked.
“We found those stores that were lost overboard,” Formio said, wiping his mouth. “They had come up against a sandbank two miles downstream.”
“Good, we need all the match we can get. Marsch?”
The big tribesman threw the wooden flask back to Andruw. “Our horses are in a better way than I thought, but we need two days to”—he hesitated, groping for the word—“to restore them. Some would not eat on the boats and are weak.”
Corfe nodded. “Very well. Two days, but no more. Marsch, in the morning I want you and Morin to saddle up a squadron of the fittest horses and begin a reconnaissance of the area, out to five miles. If you are seen by a small body of the enemy, hunt them down. If you find a large formation, get straight back here. Clear?”
Marsch’s face lifted in a rare smile. “Very clear. It shall be so.”
Andruw was still gulping out of Mirio’s flask. He sat, or rather half fell, on his saddle and stared owlishly into the campfire, leaning one elbow on the pommel.
“Are you all right?” Corfe asked him.
“In the pink.” His gaiety had disappeared. “Tyred though. Lord, how those boats did stink! I’m glad I’m a cavalryman and not a sailor.”
Marsch and Corfe reclined by the fire also. “Makes a good pillow, a war saddle does,” Andruw told them, giving his own a thump. “Not so good as a woman’s breast though.”
“I thought you were an artilleryman, not a horse-soldier,” Corfe baited him. “Forgetting your roots, Andruw?”
“Me? Never. I’m just on extended loan. Sit down, Formio, for God’s sake. You stand there like a graven image. Don’t Fimbrians get tyred?”
The young Fimbrian officer raised an eye-brow and then did as he was bidden. He shook his head when Andruw offered the wooden flask to him once again. Andruw shrugged and took another swig. Marsch, Formio and Corfe exchanged glances.
“Do you remember the early days at the dyke, Corfe? When they came roaring down from the hills and my guns boomed out, battery after battery? What a sight! What happened to those gunners of mine, I wonder? They were good men. I suppose their bones lie up around the ruins of the dyke now, in the wreckage of the guns.”
Corfe stared into the fire. The artillerymen of Ormann Dyke, Ranafast had told them, had been part of the thousand-man rearguard which had covered Martellus’s evacuation of the fortress. None of them had escaped.
A curlew called out, spearing through the night as though lost in the dark. They heard a horse neighing off along the Cathedraller lines, but apart from that the only sounds were the wind in the grass and the crackling of the campfires. Corfe thought of his own men, the ones he had commanded in Aekir. They were a long time dead now. He found it hard to even remember their faces. There had been so many other faces under his command since then.
“Soldiers die—that is what they do,” Formio said unexpectedly. “They do not expect to fall, and so they keep going. But in the end that is what happens. Men who have no hope of life, they either cease to fight or they fight like heroes. No-one knows why; it is the way of things.”
“A Fimbrian philosopher,” Andruw said, but smiled to take some of the mockery out of his words. Then his face grew sombre again. “I was born up here, in the north. This is the country of my family, has been for generations. I had a sister, Vanya, and a little brother. God alone knows where they are now. Dead, or in some Merduk labour camp I expect.” He tilted up the bottle again, found it was empty, and tossed it into the fire. “I wonder sometimes, Corfe, if at the end of this there will be anything left of our world worth saving.”
Corfe set a hand on his shoulder, his eyes burning. “I’m sorry, Andruw.”
Andruw laughed, a strangled travesty of mirth. His eyes were bright and glittering in the flame-light. “All these little tragedies. No matter. I hadn’t seen them in years. The life of a soldier, you know? But now that we are up here, I can’t help wondering about them.” He turned to the Fimbrian who sat silently beside him. “You see, Formio, soldiers are people too. We are all someone’s son, even you Fimbrians.”
“Even we Fimbrians? I am relieved to hear
it.”
Formio’s mild rejoinder made them laugh. Andruw clapped the sable-clad officer on the back. “I thought you were all a bunch of warrior monks who dine on gunpowder and shit bullets. Have you family back in the electorates, Formio?”
“I have a mother, and a—a girl.”
“A girl! A female Fimbrian—just think of that. I reckon I’d wear my sword to bed. What’s she like, Formio? You’re amongst friends now, be honest.”
The black-clad officer hung his head, clearly embarrassed. “Her name is Merian.” He hesitated, then reached into the breast of his tunic and pulled out a small wooden slat which split in two, like a slim book.
“This is what she looks like.”
They crowded around to look, like schoolboys. Formio held an exquisite miniature, a tiny painting of a blonde-haired girl whose features were delicate as a deer’s. Large, dark eyes and a high forehead. Andruw whistled appreciatively.
“Formio, you are a lucky dog.”
The Fimbrian tucked the miniature away again. “We are to be married as soon—as soon as I get back.”
None of them said anything. Corfe realised in that moment that none of them expected to survive. The knowledge should have shocked him, but it did not. Formio had been right in what he said about soldiers.
Andruw rose unsteadily to his feet. “Gentlemen, you must excuse me. I do believe I’m going to spew.”
He staggered, and Corfe and Marsch jumped up, grasped his arms and propelled him into the shadows, where he bent double and retched noisily. Finally he straightened, eyes streaming. “Must be getting old,” he croaked.
“You?” Corfe said. “You’ll never be old, Andruw.” And an instant later he wished he had never said such an unlucky thing.
EIGHT
G OLOPHIN wiped the sweat from his face with an already damp cloth and got up from the workbench with a groan. He padded over to the window and threw open the heavy shutters to let the quicksilver radiance of a moonlit night pour into the tower chamber. From the height whereon he stood he could see the whole dark immensity of south-western Hebrion below, asleep under the stars. The amber glow of Abrusio lit up the horizon, the moon shining liquid and brilliant upon the waves of the Great Western Ocean out to the very brim of the world beyond. He sniffed the air like an old hound, and closed his eyes. The night had changed. A warmer breeze always came in off the sea at this time of the year, like a promise of spring. At long last, this winter was ending. At one time he had thought it never would.
