by Paul Kearney
Some screamed, some were dully passive. The Merduk troopers walked amongst them looking into their faces and running their hands up and down their bodies as though testing the mettle of an auctioned horse. When they found what they wanted they took the woman by the wrist or the hair and dragged her outside. When half the women had been taken, the doors were closed again and those who remained huddled in a corner embracing each other, bereft of speech.
Shrieks in the night. Men laughing. Arja cowered with the rest, her mind a white furious blank. Every sensation seemed to be dragged out, as in some hideous dream. She could not believe that this day had happened, these things. It was all utterly beyond anything she had ever known or imagined before, a window into another world she had not known could exist. Was this what war was like, then?
What seemed like hours passed, though they had no way of telling the passage of time, and their estimation of what constituted hours and minutes seemed to have been skewed and twisted until all frames of reference were useless in this new universe.
The screams died away. No-one slept. They sat with their arms about one another and stared at the black doors, awaiting their opening.
And at last the clumps and scrapes as their turn came and the portals of the town hall swung wide once more. Arja was almost relieved. She felt that she had been stretched so taut in the black time of waiting that soon she must snap like a green stick bent too far.
The selection procedure was swifter this time. A shadow which reeked of sweat and beer and urine seized Arja’s arm and drew her outside into the hellish light of the bonfires. There were waggons parked in the square filled brimfull of naked women who hid their faces with their hair. Some had blood matting them. A few bodies, con torted out of all humanity, sprawled upon the cobbles with their innards piled like glistening heaps of mashed berries around them. In one of the bonfires what looked like the trunk of a small tree burnt, but the sickening stink of its burning was not that of charring wood.
Arja’s captor plucked at her clothes. He was a small man, and to her surprise he was not dark-skinned or dark-eyed. He looked like a Torunnan and when he spoke it was in good Normannic.
“Take them off. Quickly.”
She did as she was bidden. All over the square women were undressing whilst a crowd of several hundred men watched. When she had stripped down to her undershirt she could go no further. The numbness was eaten through and she felt a moment of pure, incapacitating panic. The Torunnan-looking Merduk chuckled, swigged from a bottle and then ripped her undershirt from her back so that she stood naked before him.
Some of his comrades gathered with him, eating her up with their eyes. When she tried to cover herself with her hands they slapped them away. They were laughing, drunk. Some had their breeches unbuttoned and their members lolled and shone wetly in the firelight. Again, the panic beat great dark wings about Arja’s head. Again, a sense of the unreality of it all.
The soldiers spoke together in the Merduk tongue, as easy and unforced as men who have met in an inn after a long day’s work. Two of them grabbed her by the arms. Two more forced her knees apart. And then the little Torunnan-like trooper took his bottle and thrust it up between Arja’s thighs.
She screamed at the agony, struggled impotently in the grasp of the four soldiers who held her. The small trooper worked the bottle up and down. When he pulled it out at last the glass was red and shining. He winked at his fellows and then took a long draught from the bloody neck, smacking his lips theatrically.
They bent her over a pile of broken furniture, splintered wood piercing her breasts and belly. Then one mounted her from behind and began thrusting into her torn insides. There was only the pain, the blooming firelight, the hands grasping hers so tightly they were numb. Something soft was pushed against her lips and she pulled her head back from the smell, but her hair was grasped and a voice spoke in Normannic: open up. She took the thing into her mouth and it grew large and rigid and was pushed back down her throat until she gagged. They thrust into her from both directions. Warm liquid cascaded down her naked back and the men cursed and laughed. Liquid pulsed into her mouth, salty and foul. The thing in there softened again and slid out between her lips. She vomited, the taste of her bile somehow cleaner, though it scalded her lips and tongue.
The hands released her and she slumped on to the hard cobbles. They were cold and wet beneath her. It is over, she thought. It is done.
Then another knot of soldiers strode up, pushing aside the first group, and she was seized upright once again.
T HE dawn air was full of the smell of burning, the blue winter horizon smudged with smoke. The mobs of horsemen took their time to rub down their mounts, assemble in the square and root in their saddlebags for breakfast. Finally a series of orders was shouted out and the troopers mounted. Their horses were burdened with wineskins, flapping chickens, bolts of cloth and clinking sacks. Their officers were already outside the town, on a hill to the south. With them was a gaggle of splendidly accoutred senior commanders from the Merduk main body, their banner-bearers holding up bravely flapping silk flags in the freshening wind.
Finally the heavily burdened cavalry formed up and filed out of the gutted wreck of Berrona. Some were sullen and heavy-headed. A few were nodding in the saddle, and yet others seemed to be still drunk with the excesses of the night. They pointed their horses’ noses to the south, where less than two miles away a vast Merduk camp sprawled across the land. They rode with the rising sun an orange blaze in their left eyes and the town smouldering behind them. Near the rear of their meandering and straggling column half a dozen waggons trundled and jolted along, drawn by mules, cart-horses and plodding oxen. A conglomeration of naked, bleeding and sodden humanity crouched in the waggons, silent as statues. Around them some of the soldiers of the Sultan, light at heart, began singing to welcome the dawn of the new day.
Arja had her head bent into her knees to shut out the world. She and the other women of the town—those who had survived—huddled together for warmth and comfort in the beds of the waggons. Some of them were sobbing soundlessly, but most were dry-eyed and seemed almost to be elsewhere, their minds far away. Thus it hardly registered upon them when the Merduks stopped singing.
The waggon halted. Men were shouting. Arja lifted her head.
The Merduk column had coalesced into a formless crowd of mounted men who milled about in disorder. What was happening? Some of the Merduks were throwing their garnered loot from their saddles in panic. Others were fumbling for the matchlocks at their pommels. Officers were yelling, frantic.
Then Arja saw what had caused the transformation. On the hillside behind the burnt-out wreck of Berrona a long line of men had appeared, thousands of them. They were still a mile away, but they were coming on at a run. Black-clad soldiers, some carrying guns, others with shouldered pikes. They advanced with the drilled remorselessness of some terrible machine.
“The army is here!” one of the women called out gladly. “The Torunnans have come!” A nearby Merduk trooper hacked her furiously about the head with his scimitar and she toppled over the side of the waggon.
A few minutes of chaos as the Merduks hovered, indecisive. Then the whole body of cavalry took off to the south in a muck-churning, frenzied gallop. The waggons were left behind along with a litter of discarded plunder.
It was painful to regain interest in the world, almost like coming alive again in some agonising wrench of rebirth. Arja raised herself to her bloody knees the better to see what was happening. Tears coursed down her face.
The ground under the wheels of the waggons seemed to shake with a subterranean thunder. It was both a noise and a physical sensation. The Torunnans were bypassing the burnt-out streets of the town, their formation dividing neatly and with no loss of speed. But they would never catch up with the fleeing Merduk cavalry—they were all on foot. Arja felt a hot blaze of pure hatred flare up in her heart. The Merduks would get away. They had killed her father and her brother, and they wou
ld get away.
The thunder in the ground grew more intense. It was an audible roar now, as though a furious river were coursing under the stones and heather of the hills.
—And then they burst into view with all the sudden fury of an apocalypse. A great mass of cavalry erupted in a long line from behind a ridge to the south, at right angles to the fleeing Merduks. Arja heard a horn call ring out clear and free above the awesome rumble of the horses. The riders were armoured in scarlet, and singing as they came.
The Merduks looked over their right shoulders, and even at this distance Arja could see the naked terror on their faces. They kicked their mounts madly, tossing away booty, weapons, even helmets. But they were not fast enough.
The red horsemen ploughed into the mob of Merduk cavalry like a vermilion thunderbolt. She saw dozens of the lighter enemy horses actually hurled end over end by the impact. A thrashing Merduk trooper was lifted high into the air on the end of a lance. The enemy seemed to simply melt away. The red tide engulfed them, annihilating hundreds of men in the space of heartbeats. Only a few dozen Merduks broke free of the murderous scrum of men and horses, to continue their manic flight south towards their main camp. More were running about on foot, screaming, but the heavily armoured scarlet cavalry hunted them down like rabbits, spearing them as they ran or trampling them underfoot. Then there was another horn call and at once the horsemen broke off the pursuit and began to re-form in a neat line. A black and crimson banner billowed above their heads bearing some device she could not quite make out. The whole engagement had taken not more than three or four minutes.
The Torunnan infantry were running past the waggons now, panting men with sweat pouring down their faces and their eyes glittering like glass. They kept their line as though connected by invisible chains, and as they ran a great animal growl seemed to be coming from their throats. One man hurriedly seized Arja’s hand as he passed by and kissed it before running on. Others were weeping as they ran, but all kept their ranks. The smoke from their lit match hung in the air after they had passed, like some acrid perfume of war. As they reached the ranks of the cavalry ahead, the horsemen split swiftly in two and took up position on their flanks. Then the united formation advanced again, at a fast march this time, and began eating up the ground between them and the Merduk camp with the calm inexorability of a tidal wave.
It seemed to Arja in that moment one of the most glorious things she had ever seen.
THIRTEEN
T HE ceremony was a simple one, as befitted the steppes where it had ultimately originated. It took place in the open air, with the Thurians providing a magnificent backdrop of white peaks on the northern horizon. The ruins of Ormann Dyke’s Long Walls glowered nearby like ancient monuments, and the Searil river rushed foaming to the west.
Two thousand Merduk cavalry, caparisoned in all the finery they possessed, surrounded an isolated quartet of figures, making three parts of a hollow square about them. On the fourth side a special dais had been constructed and canopied with translucent silk. The wind twisted and turned the fine material like smoke, giving glimpses of the Royal concubines seated on scarlet and gold cushions within, the eunuchs standing to their rear like pale statues. A host of gaudy figures clustered around the foot of the dais, fleeting flashes of winter sunlight sparkling off an emperor’s ransom in gems and precious metals. To the rear of the surrounding cavalry, a dozen elephants stood, painted out of all recognition, hung with silk and brocade and embellished with gold and leather harness. On their backs were wide kettle-drums and a band of Merduk musicians gripping horns and pipes. As the ceremony began the kettle-drums rumbled out with a sound like a distant barrage of artillery, or thunder in the mountains. Then there was silence but for the wind hissing over the hills of northern Torunna.
Mehr Jirah stood before Aurungzeb, Sultan of Ostrabar, and Ahara, his concubine. The Sultan held the reins of a magnificent warhorse in his right hand and a worn and ancient-looking scimitar in his left. He was dressed in the plain leather and furs of an ancient steppe chieftain. Ahara was clad as soberly as Aurungzeb, in a long woollen cloak and a linen veil.
Mehr Jirah cried out loudly in the Merduk tongue, and the two thousand cavalry clashed their lances against their shields and roared out in affirmation. Yes, they would accept this union, and they would gladly recognise this woman as their Sultan’s First Wife. Their Queen.
Then Aurungzeb put the reins of his warhorse in Ahara’s hand and set the scimitar which had been his grandfather’s at her feet. She stepped over it lightly, and the whole host cheered, the musicians on the backs of the elephants blasting out a cacophony of noise. Mehr Jirah offered a bowl of mare’s milk to the couple and they sipped from it in turn, then kissed. And it was done. Aurungzeb, the Sultan of Ostrabar, had a new wife: one with a child growing in her belly who would one day be the legitimate heir to the throne.
T HEY had cleared a new set of apartments for her in the tower of Ormann Dyke. Their windows looked east over the River Searil towards Aekir and the Merduk lands beyond. She sat at the window for a long time whilst a small army of maids and eunuchs hurried back and forth lighting braziers, moving furniture, setting out arrays of sweetmeats and wines. Finally she became aware that someone stood behind her, watching. She turned from the view, still dressed in the sombre steppe costume in which she had been married, and found Serrim, the chief eunuch, standing there, and beside him a tall Merduk in leather riding breeches, a silk tunic and a wide sash about his middle with a knife thrust into it. He was weather-worn and gaunt, his beard as hoary as sea salt. His eyes were grey like her own but he was staring out of the window over her shoulder and did not meet her appraisal. He looked to be in his sixties but his carriage was that of a much younger man.
“Well?” Heria asked. Serrim had been a bully when she was a mere concubine. Now that she had been catapulted into the Merduk nobility he had quickly become a sycophant. She disliked him the more for it.
“Lady, His Majesty has sent Shahr Baraz to you to be your personal attendant.”
The lean Merduk hauled his gaze from the window and met her eyes for the first time. He bowed without a word.
“My attendant? I have plenty of those already.” Shahr Baraz looked as though he belonged on a horse with a sword in his hand, not in a lady’s chambers.
“He is to be your bodyguard, and is to attend you at all times.”
“My bodyguard,” Heria said wonderingly. And then something stirred from her memory. “Was it not Shahr Baraz who commanded the army which took Aekir? I thought he was an old man—and—and no longer with us.”
“This is the illustrious khedive’s son, lady.”
“I see. Leave us, Serrim.”
“Lady, I—”
“Leave us. All of you. I want the chamber cleared. You can finish your work here later.”
A procession of maids left the room at once. The eunuch padded off with them, looking thoroughly discontented. Heria felt a brief moment of intense satisfaction, and then the cloud came down again.
“Would you like some wine, Shahr Baraz?”
“No, lady. I do not indulge.”
“I see. So you are my bodyguard. Who do you intend to protect me from?”
“From whomsoever would wish to harm you.”
She switched to Normannic. “And can you understand this tongue?”
The Merduk hesitated. A muscle twitched in his jaw. There was a long, livid scar there that ran from one cheek into his beard.
“Some words I know,” he replied in the same language.
“Do you understand this, then? That I believe you are nothing more than a spy set here by the Sultan to keep watch over me and report my every move?”
“I am not a spy,” Shahr Baraz said heatedly.
“Then why would the Sultan place the capable son of such an illustrious father in such a menial position?”
His grey eyes had flared into life. His Normannic was perfect as he replied, “To punish me.”
&
nbsp; “Why would he want to punish you?”
“Because I am my father’s son, and he thinks my father failed him before this fortress.”
“Your father is dead, then?”
“No—I don’t know. He disappeared into the mountains rather than return to court to be . . . to answer for his actions.”
She switched back to Merduk. “Your Normannic is better than you think.”
“I am no spy,” he repeated. “Even the Sultan would not ask me to be that. My family have served the House of Ostrabar for generations. I will not fail the Sultan’s trust—nor yours, lady. I swear it. And besides”—here a glint of humour pierced his sternness—“the harem is full of spies already. The Sultan has little need of another.”
She actually found herself liking him. “Have you family of your own?”
“A wife and two daughters. They are in Orkhan.”
Hostages for his good behaviour, no doubt. “Thank you, Shahr Baraz. Now please leave me.”
But he stood his ground stubbornly. “I am to remain with you at all times.”
“All times?” she asked with one raised eye-brow. Shahr Baraz flushed.
“Within the bounds of propriety, yes.”
She felt a pang of pure despair, and abandoned the game. “All right.” The prison walls were still intact, then. She might be able to order about a flock of flunkeys, but her position was essentially unchanged. She had been a fool to think otherwise.
Heria turned to regard the view from the lofty window once more. The pain was there of course, but she kept it at bay, skirted around it as a man might avoid a bottomless quagmire in his travells. Somewhere over the horizon in the east the ruins of Aekir stood, and somewhere in those ashes were the remains of another life. But the man with whom she had shared that life was still alive. Still alive. Where was Corfe now, her one and only husband? Strange and terrible that the knowledge he lived and walked and breathed upon the earth was a source only of agony. She could take no joy in it, and she scourged herself for that. She bore another man’s child, a man who now called her wife. She had been ennobled by the union, but would live what remained of her life behind the bars of a jewelled cage. While her Corfe was alive—out there somewhere. And leading the fight against the world she now inhabited.
