by Paul Kearney
She wanted to die.
But would not. She had a son in her belly. Not Corfe’s child, but something that was precious all the same—something that was hers. For the child she would stay alive, and she might even be able to do something to aid Corfe and the Torunnans, to help those who had once been her own people.
But the pain of it. The sheer, raw torment.
“Shahr Baraz,” she said without turning round.
“Lady?”
“I need. . . I need a friend, Shahr Baraz.” The tears scalded her eyes. She could not see. Her voice throbbed with a beat like the sob of a swan’s wing in flight.
A hand touched the top of her head gently, resting there only for a second before being withdrawn. It was the first touch of genuine kindness she had received for a very long time, and it broke some wall within her soul. She bowed her head and wept bitterly. When she had collected herself she found Shahr Baraz on one knee before her. His fingers tapped her lightly on the fore-arm.
“A Merduk queen is not supposed to weep,” he said, but his voice was gentle. He smiled.
“I have been a queen for only a morning. Perhaps I will get used to it.”
“Dry your eyes, lady. The kohl is running down your face. Here.” He wiped the streaked paint from her cheeks with his thumb. Her veil fell away.
“A man who touches one of the Sultan’s women will have his hands cut off,” she reminded him.
“I will not tell if you do not.”
“Agreed.” She collected herself. “You must forgive me. The excitement of the morning . . .”
“One of my daughters is about your age,” Shahr Baraz said. “I pray she will never have to suffer as I believe you have. I would rather she lived out her days in a felt hut with a man she loved than—” He stopped, then straightened. “I will have your maids sent in, lady, so that you may repair yourself. It is inappropriate that I should be here alone with you, even if I am an old man. The Sultan would not approve.”
“No. If you want to do something for me, then have the little Ramusian monk sent here. I wish to speak with him. He is imprisoned in the lower levels of the tower.”
“I am not sure that—”
“Please, Shahr Baraz.”
He nodded. “You are a queen, after all.” Then he bowed, and left her.
A queen, she thought. So is that what I am now? She remembered the hell of Aekir at its fall, the Merduk soldier who had raped her with the light of the burning city a writhing inferno in his eyes. The terrible journey north in the waggons, John Mogen’s Torunnans trudging beside them with their necks in capture-yokes. Men crucified by the thousand, babies tossed out in the snow to die. All those memories. They made part of her mind into a screaming wilderness which she had walled off to keep from going mad.
She was alone in the room. For a blest moment she was alone. No gossiping maids or spying eunuchs. No gaggle of concubines intriguing endlessly and bitching about petty slights and imagined neglects. She could stand at the window and look at what had once been her own country, and feel herself free. Her name was Heria Cear-Inaf and she was no queen, only the lowly daughter of a silk merchant, and her heart was still her own to bestow where she pleased.
“Beard of the Prophet, what does this mean? Are you here alone? God’s teeth, this will not do! Where is that scoundrel Baraz? I’ll have him flogged.”
The Sultan of Ostrabar strode into the chamber like a gale, accompanied by a knot of his staff officers. He was dripping with jewells and gold once more, and a rich, fur-lined cloak whirled about him like a cloud. Silver tassels winked on the pointed toes of his boots.
Heria refastened her veil hurriedly.
“Shahr Baraz is off running an errand for me, my lord. Do not blame him. I wanted to see if he were truly mine to command.”
Aurungzeb boomed with laughter. He bristled a kiss through her thin veil that bruised her lips. “Well done, wife! That family needs humbling. They take too much of the world’s troubles upon themselves. Have you tumbled to my jest, then? The officers’ quarters are buzzing with it. A Baraz as a lady’s maid! Keep him on the tips of his toes—it will do him good. But you are still in your bridal gown! Get those ancient rags off your back. Tradition is all well and fine, but we cannot have my First Wife looking like a beggar off the steppe. Where are your attendants? I’ll kick Serrim’s fat arse next time I see him.”
“They are preparing my wardrobe,” Heria lied. “I sent them all off to do it. They are so slow.”
“Yes, yes, you must be firm with them, you know. Have a few of them flogged, and they’ll start to jump right smartly.” Aurungzeb embraced her. The top of her head came barely to his chin, though she was tall for a woman.
“Ah, those beautiful bones! I do not know how I shall keep myself from them till the babe is born.” He nuzzled her hair, beaming. “I must be off, my Queen. Shahr Johor, hunt out those damn maids. My wife is here alone like a mourner. And get the furniture sent up—the things from Aekir we had shipped.” Aurungzeb looked around the room. It had been part of Pieter Martellus’s chambers in the days when the dyke had been Torunnan, and was as bare as a barracks.
“Poor surroundings for a woman, though it’s better than a tent out in the field. We’ll have to prettify the place a little. I may just let this tower stand, as a monument. I must be off. We are to dine together later, Ahara. I have invited the ambassadors. We are having lobsters sent up from the coast. Have you ever tasted a lobster? Ah, here is Shahr Baraz. What do you mean by leaving the Queen alone?”
Shahr Baraz stood in the doorway. His face was expressionless. “My apologies, Sultan. It will not happen again.”
“That’s all right, Baraz. She’s been playing with you I think, my western doe.” And in an aside to Heria: “He looks so much like his terrible old father, and he’s just as stiff-necked. Keep him on the hop, my love, that’s the way. Well, I must be off. Wear the blue today, the stuff the Nalbeni sent us. It sets off your eyes.” And he was gone, striding out of the room with his aides struggling to keep up, his voice booming down the corridor beyond.
B Y the time Albrec had been brought to the new Queen’s chambers she had cast aside her sombre marriage garments and was swathed from head to toe in sky-blue silk, a circlet of silver sat upon her veiled head and her eyes were as striking as paint could make them. She reclined on a low divan whilst around her half a dozen maids perched on cushions. A tall Merduk of advanced years whom Albrec had never seen at the court before stood straight as a spear by the door. The room’s austere stone walls had been hung with embroidered curtains and bright tapestries. Incense smouldered in a golden burner and several braziers gave off a comfortable warmth, the charcoal within their filigreed sides bright red. Three little girls kept the coals glowing with discreet wheezes of their tiny bellows. The contrast between the delicate sumptuousness of the chamber and the disfigured poverty of the little monk could not have been greater.
Albrec bowed at a nudge from Serrim, the eunuch.
“Your Majesty, I believe I am to congratulate you on your wedding.”
The Merduk Queen took a moment to respond.
“Be seated, Father. Rokzanne, some wine for our guest.”
Albrec was brought a footstool to perch himself upon and a silver goblet of the thin, acrid liquid the Merduks chose to call wine. He did not take his eyes from the Queen’s veiled face.
“I would have received you with less ceremony,” Heria said lightly, “but Serrim here insisted that I begin to comport myself as befitting my newly exalted rank.”
Albrec cast his eyes about the chamber, a cross between a barracks and a brothel. “Admirable,” he muttered.
“Yes. Come, let me show you the view from the balcony.” Heria rose and extended a hand to the little monk. He rose awkwardly off his low stool and took her fingers in what remained of his own hand. The women in the chamber whispered and murmured.
She led him out on to the balcony and they stood there with the fresh wind in t
heir faces, looking down upon the ruin of the fortress. Already the Long Walls were demolished, and thousands of soldiers were working to dismantle their remnants and float the cyclopean granite blocks on flatboats across the Searil. The foundations for another fortress were being laid there on the east bank of the river. The tower in which Heria and Albrec stood would soon be all that remained of Kaile Ormann’s great work. Even the dyke itself was to be dammed up and filled in through the labour of thousands of Torunnan slaves. The minor fortifications on the island would be rebuilt, and where the Long Walls had stood would be a barbican. Aurungzeb was constructing a mirror-image of the ancient fortress, to face west instead of east.
“Tell me about him, Father,” Heria murmured. “Tell me everything you know. Quickly.”
The maids and eunuchs were watching them. Albrec kept his voice so low the wind rendered it almost inaudible.
“I have heard it said that he is John Mogen come again. He sits high in the favour of the Torunnan Queen—it was no doubt she who made him commander-in-chief. This happened after I left the capital. He fought here, at the dyke, and in the south. Even the Fimbrians obey him.”
“Tell me how he looks now, Father.”
Albrec studied her face. It was white and set above the veil, like carved ivory. With the heavy paint on her eyelids she looked as though she were wearing a mask.
“Heria, do not torment yourself.”
“Tell me.”
Albrec thought back to that brief encounter on the road to Torunn. It seemed a very long time ago. “He has pain written on his face and in his eyes. There is a hardness about him.” He is a killer, Albrec thought. One of those men who find they have an aptitude for it, as others can sculpt statues or make music. But he said nothing of this to Heria.
The Merduk Queen remained very still, the cold wind lifting her veil up like smoke. “Thank you, Father.”
“Will you not come in from the balcony now, lady?” the eunuch’s high-pitched voice piped behind them. “It becomes cold.”
“Yes, Serrim. We will come in. I was just showing Father Albrec the beginnings of our Sultan’s new fortress. He expressed a wish to see it.” And to Albrec in a quick, hunted aside: “I must get you out of here, back to Torunn. We must help him win this war. But you must never tell him what I have become. His wife is dead. Do you hear me? She is dead.”
Albrec nodded dumbly, and followed her back into the scented warmth of the room behind.
FOURTEEN
I T was raining as the long column of weary men and horses filed through the East Gate, and they churned the road into a quagmire of shin-deep mud as they came. An exhausted army, straggling back over the hills to the north for miles—an army that had in its midst a motley convoy of several hundred waggons and carts, all brimming over with silent, huddled civilians, some with oilcloths pulled over their heads, others sitting numbly under the rain. Almost every waggon had a cluster of filthy footsoldiers about it, fighting its wheels free of the sucking muck. The entire spectacle looked like some strange quasi-military exodus.
Corfe, Andruw, Marsch and Formio stood by and watched while the army and its charges filed through the gate of the Torunnan capital. The guards on the city walls had come out in their thousands to watch the melancholy procession, and they were soon joined by many of the citizens so that the battlements were packed with bobbing heads. No-one cheered—no one was sure if the army was returning in defeat or victory.
“How many altogether, do you think?” Andruw asked.
Corfe wiped the ubiquitous rain out of his eyes. “Five, six thousand.”
“I reckon they took another two or three away with them,” Andruw said.
“I know, Andruw, I know. But these, at least, are safe now. And that army was crippled before we gave up the pursuit. We have delivered the north from them—for the time being.”
“They are like a dog which cannot be trained,” Formio said. “It lunges forward, you rap it on the muzzle and it draws back. But it keeps lunging forward again.”
“Yes. Persistent bastards, I’ll give them that,” Andruw said with a twisted smile.
The army had virtually destroyed the Merduk force they had encountered outside Berrona, charging down on them while they were still frantically trying to form up outside their camp. But once they had been broken and hurled back inside the campsite the battle had degenerated into a murderous free-for-all. For inside the tents had been thousands of brutalised Torunnan women, inhabitants of the surrounding towns gathered together for the pleasure of the Merduk troops. Ranafast’s Torunnans had run wild after the discovery, slaying every Merduk in sight. Corfe estimated the enemy dead at over eleven thousand.
But while the army had been embroiled in the butchery within the camp, several thousand of the enemy had managed to flee intact, and they had taken with them a large body of captives. Corfe’s men had been too spent to follow them far, and snow had begun to drive down on the wings of a bitter wind off the mountains. The pursuit had been abandoned, and after digging four hundred graves for their own dead the army had re-formed for the long march south. The waggons had slowed them down, and they had shared their rations with the rescued prisoners. With the result that not a man of the army had eaten in the last three days, and half the Cathedrallers were now on foot. As their overworked mounts had collapsed, they had been carved up and eaten by the famished soldiers. Six hundred good warhorses were now mere jumbles of bones on the road behind them. But the campaign had been successful, Corfe reminded himself. They had done what he had set out to do. It was simply that he could take no joy in it.
“Beer,” Andruw said with feeling. “A big, frothing mug of the stuff. And a wedge of cheese so big you could stop a door with it. And an apple.”
“And fresh-baked bread,” Marsch added. “With honey. Anything but meat. I will not eat meat again for a month. And I would sooner starve than eat another horse.”
Corfe thought of the Queen’s chambers, a bath full of steaming water and a roaring fire. He had not taken his boots off in a week and his feet felt swollen and sodden. The leather straps of his armour were green with mould and the steel itself was a rusted saffron wherever the red paint had chipped away. Only the blade of John Mogen’s sword was bright and untarnished. He had Merduk blood under his nails.
“The men need a rest,” he said. “The whole army needs to be refitted, and we’ll have to send south for more horses. I wonder how Rusio has been getting on while we’ve been away.”
“I’ll wager his backside has not been far from a fire the whole time,” Andruw retorted. “Send out some of those paper-collar garrison soldiers next time, Corfe. Remind them what it’s like to feel the rain in their face.”
“Maybe I will, Andruw. Maybe I will. For now, I want you three to go on inside the city. Make sure that the men are well bedded down—no bullshit from any quartermasters. I want to see them drunk by nightfall. They deserve it.”
“There’s an order easily obeyed.” Andruw grinned. “Marsch, Formio, you heard the man. We have work to do.”
“What about you, General?” Formio asked.
“I think I’ll stand here awhile and watch the army march in.”
“Come on, Corfe, get in and out of the rain,” Andruw cajoled. “They won’t march any faster with you standing here.”
“No, you three go on ahead. I want to think.”
Andruw clapped him on the shoulder. “Don’t philosophize too long. You may find all the beer drunk by the time you walk through the gate.”
Andruw and Marsch mounted their emaciated horses and set off to join the column, but Formio lingered a moment.
“We did all we could, General,” he said quietly.
“I know. It’s just that it never feels as though it’s enough.”
The Fimbrian nodded. “For what it is worth, my men are content to serve under you. It seems that Torunna can produce soldiers too.”
Corfe found himself smiling. “Go on, see to your troops, Formio
. And thank you.” He realised that he had just been given the greatest professional compliment of his life.
Formio set off in the wake of Marsch and Andruw without another word.
C ORFE stood alone until the rearguard came into sight almost an hour later, then he mounted his horse and trotted down to join them. Two hundred Cathedrallers under Ebro and Morin, their steeds’ noses drooping inches from the ground.
“What’s the storey, Haptman?” he asked.
Ebro saluted. The pompous young officer Corfe had first met the previous year was now an experienced leader of men with the eyes of a veteran. He had come a long way.
“Five more horses in the last two miles,” Ebro told him. “Another day and I reckon we’d all be afoot.”
“No sign of the enemy?”
Ebro shook his head. “General, I do believe they’re halfway back to Orkhan by now. We put the fear of God into them.”
“That was the idea. Good work, Ebro.”
The scarlet-armoured horsemen filed past in a muddy stream. Some of them looked up as they passed their commander and nodded or raised a hand. Many had shrivelled Merduk heads dangling from their pommels. Corfe wondered how few of his original galley slaves were left now. He sat his horse until they had all passed by and then finally entered the East Gate himself, the last man in the army to do so. The heavy wooden and iron doors boomed shut behind him.
I T was very late by the time he finally entered his chambers. He had visited the wounded in the military hospitals, racking his brains to try and address every man by his name, singling out those whom he had seen in battle and reminding them of their courage. He had gripped the bony fist of one wounded Cimbric tribesman as the man died then and there, in front of him. Those days in the open, eating horseflesh, rattling in agony in the back of a springless waggon, only to lose the fight when placed at last in a warm bed with clean blankets. The tribesman had died saying Corfe’s name, understanding no word of Normannic.
