by Tony Roberts
However that may also work in favour for Mazag, and they would sit and wait and see how events unfolded in Bragal. They also would make sure nobody else moved in on Bragal as they clearly desired it for themselves. The alliance was an assurance of that; it gave Mazag legitimacy to attack Venn if the latter moved on Kastania’s lands which they coveted for themselves.
Jorqel was glad that he only had one foreign enemy to think of. The Tybar were unlikely to ally with the eastern kingdoms as they saw all as their enemies. So far the western tribal people had crept eastwards from the edge of the world, and nobody really knew from where they had come, only that there was supposed to be nothing beyond the western mountain chain. Clearly there was something and legends spoke of horrors and monsters. The mountains had provided a border and barrier for centuries, and only in two places were there passes, and both of these had been fortified and blocked.
What had happened to those was anyone’s guess, and if in time Kastania’s troops ever got that far, they would have to try to block them once more. Some spoke of great beasts that lived there, monsters that belched flame. Dragons, they had said. He didn’t believe in dragons, any more than witches, but the superstitious maintained both were real, just like fantors, the mythical behemoth that soldiers rode into battle and crushed all before them.
Why people continued to insist they were real was beyond him. If they did exist, why was it that none had been seen? The world was finite. To the west, the mountains. Far to the east, the land stopped and a great un-crossable ocean lay. To the north, the lands were bordered by a huge sea of sand that nobody had been able to penetrate. Many had tried and none had returned. To the south the lands became colder until it was too cold to live. That was a land of eternal ice, dominated by snow, ice and an immense forest that covered nearly everything.
Within these boundaries the world existed. Kastania had a place within that world. It may no longer be the dominant player, but it had the right to be there. He and his father would ensure that, and those that came after them would continue this policy. He thought of his two half-brothers, Argan and Istan. Only seven and four, or more accurately nearly eight and five. He’d not seen either for four years. He could hardly remember either. He’d been constantly kept up to date with their progress by his step-mother, Isbel, the empress, but what they looked like now he had no idea. It was certain that neither would recognise him either.
And what of his sister, Amne? Three years his junior, the girl – or woman as she should now be described – was well beyond the age of marriage. She was due to be wed very soon, to a member of a prominent noble family, which would ensure their loyalty to the Koros. Jorqel felt a pang of agony. His own marriage was now doubtful, thanks to Sannia’s abduction. He had to surrender Slenna, his town. He’d be damned if he would. To kneel to petty rebels and their demands would wreck all the hard work done in the last four years. He thought long and hard over his dilemma. How to rescue his beloved and to defeat the rebels?
Military action. The way of warriors. Show the people of Kastania that he, Prince Jorqel Koros, was not a man to mess about with. The problem of course was that should he move south with his army, then Lombert Soul would execute Sannia. He must learn more of where this man’s hideout was. What was his source of recruitment? Who joined his force and why? Those questions would surely be brought to him by Gavan once he returned from Niake.
He went to the window overlooking the countryside beyond the new walls. Farmland that rose gently up the slopes into the distance, and was lost to view. He knew, though, what lay beyond. The land changed once it went far enough from the coastal strip. It became rugged, more barren. The only farming up there was done by pasture, herd beasts and wool beasts grazing. Nothing much else could grow up there, and the rainfall became less the further inland it went. Eventually there were mountains and steep valleys and gorges, and then it became the domain of the Tybar.
The Tybar. Jorqel looked thoughtfully out over Lodria. Everyone had thought the Tybar would have appeared over that horizon by now, yet they stayed away. Why was that? They had overwhelmed province after province, flowing from the Western Mountains like a plague. Kastanian armies had been swept away and cities lost.
Yet, just as it seemed everything was lost, they had stopped. Why was that? He needed to know. What was going on behind the frontier? Were they building up a massive army to engulf what was left of the Empire? He needed a large force to combat that possibility. The problem with that was a seemingly unsolvable issue which was a lack of manpower. He had five hundred men under his command which wasn’t a great number if one took into account he had to garrison Slenna and patrol the entire province of Lodria with them, and possibly deal with any invasion or rebellion as well.
Asking for more men was met with refusal from Kastan City. The Koros had promised to spend money on the infrastructure rather than the military which had mollified those Houses who wanted trade to improve. They saw a large army as an unaffordable expense, and the fact no invasion had happened for a few years had eased the immediate fears of the populace. Jorqel wasn’t fooled; the danger still existed out there and the paradox of regaining Lodria for the Empire was that their forces were even more thinly spread now. Bathenia had a force of perhaps five hundred as well, so a thousand troops to police their own territories and to look out for an invasion was woefully inadequate.
If the Tybar were massing an army it would outnumber anything Kastania could put into the field. They would have to face an enemy they had never defeated and which had greater mobility, and would choose the place and time to invade. Kastania just didn’t have the resources to meet the threat. In the east there were more troops but they had a bigger area to police, and like here in the west there were rebel forces at large that needed to be contained and then defeated. It looked an impossible task, yet it was a task that had to be completed.
He stood looking over the countryside, his mood as dark as the expression on his face.
CHAPTER THREE
The wagon rumbled along the road, pulled by a single small equine. There were two occupants seated on the driver’s board, a man and a woman. The man drove, a middle-aged individual who looked older than his forty years. A clay pipe was stuck in between his teeth and he was swathed in bulky, shapeless peasant’s clothing. His eyes were watchful, however, scanning both sides of the hard-packed earthen road.
His companion, a young woman, was strikingly attractive. Red-haired, green-eyed and of eighteen years of age or thereabouts, she sat quietly, her head bowed. Like the man she was dressed in peasant’s clothing. A scarf covered her head and she wore a long skirt of faded light blue that fell to her ankles. She had a woollen tunic of dull brown on that was covered by a coat of grey that was made of cured skin of herd beasts.
The roadside was occasionally marked with a hut that was occupied by the militia. The road, which ran from Niake to the port of Aconia, had been the scene of raids by the rebels under Lombert Soul recently, so the governor of Bathenia, Evas Extonos, had put every available man he could spare to patrol the road. It made it safer to travel along that road but conversely the other roads in the province were now unpatrolled and unguarded.
The wagon rolled to a halt and the man peered along the horizons. To the right the land generally sloped downwards to the distant sea which could occasionally be seen in the distance, but to the left it rose in a series of rolling hills, some of which were wooded.
“Why have we stopped?” the girl asked, suddenly alert.
“I need a rest,” the man grunted. “And a leak.” He jumped down onto the roadside and stretched. His arm muscles cracked and he sighed in relief.
The woman winced. “Will you be long?”
“Nah. Just need a bit of a walk. Will be back shortly. Don’t leave the wagon.” He stiffly walked off the road and picked his route through the long grass that waved in the breeze. As he went he pulled out of his pocket a few pieces of something and pushed it into the bowl of his pipe. The g
irl, Clora, knew what that was. She was glad he was going to smoke it away from her. The man, Zonis Kalfas, was suffering from an incurable lung disease which was slowly killing him, so to ease the pain he smoked a dried plant from the west that had a painkilling property. It also dulled the senses but Zonis cared little for that. To Clora the smell, a sweet, cloying aroma, was mildly unpleasant and the face she had pulled the first time he’d smoked in her company had resulted in him smoking away from her.
Clora didn’t know a great deal about him, except that he had been someone important once in the army, before the series of defeats that had led to the loss of so much of Kastania to the Tybar. He was the older brother of Demtro, her guardian, patron and lover. Clora had been a whore in the Black Rodent tavern in Niake where Demtro had first seen her and had taken her in.
She’d left him briefly but when the tavern had burned down he’d taken her back and she had been with him ever since. He was a merchant and also worked for the Koros, which excited her. To her the ruling House were almost gods. It would be wonderful if one day she got to meet them. It had been very recently that Demtro had brought his older brother to the house and explained that he needed a home and that he would be taking Clora on a dangerous mission.
She had been given her instruction and training very intensely over the past few sevendays, and she was nervous about what lay ahead. It was a very important task she had to undertake, but had been reassured that Zonis would look after her. His role was that of her elderly uncle, taking her away from Niake because of a family issue. They were opponents of the Koros, so their story was to be told, and the girl’s father had been murdered because of that. So they were fleeing the city for fear of their lives.
A simple cover story, but one that should be accepted. Kastania was afflicted with factional divisions, each following one or more of the noble Houses, each intent on either maintaining the Koros as the ruling family or to replace them with a choice of their own.
Clora put her arms around herself. She was not that cold, but she needed the reassurance and comfort. She’d never been outside Niake before and it was all overwhelming and more than a little frightening. She was used to crowded housing, narrow streets, people, noise. Here, there were huge open areas, trees, hills, strange noises, and very few people. It was the emptiness of it all that unnerved her the most. She followed the path Zonis took, then lost sight of him briefly in a clump of trees. He emerged a few moments later on the other side, walking much more freely, and he climbed to the top of the rise that dominated the road they were travelling on and looked into the distance.
Eventually he retraced his steps and came back to the wagon. A cart rumbled past, heading in the same direction, and the occupants looked at them curiously, then went on their way. “Did you see anything?” she asked, not knowing what he had been looking for. He hadn’t given her much information on the journey so far.
“Nothing much,” he said, his breath bubbling in and out of his lungs. He coughed briefly, then got back on the riding board and took hold of the reins. “There’s a small rutted track up ahead so we’ll take that into the hills.”
“We’re not going to Aconia, then?”
Zonis looked at her for a moment. “Oh no. We could only get a ship from there and we haven’t got any money for the fare, and the ships tend to go to Kastan City or Efsia, neither of which we want. We need to go into the countryside of Bathenia, Clora.”
“Do you know where?”
“No, but I guess they’ll find us soon enough.”
Clora shivered and huddled even tighter as Zonis smacked the equine’s rump with the reins. The beast stoically plodded onwards and they soon came to the branching of the track that ran off to the left. They took it and the journey took on a much more uncomfortable and bumpy tone. Clora had to hold onto the rail to her side to stop herself falling off and found herself watching the route ahead.
They were soon lost to the road, moving into a long, wide valley. Trees grew along the slopes and a small stream chuckled through the stony bottom, winding in a careless way towards the sea. “Is everywhere like this?” she asked.
Zonis grunted. “No. Bathenia is one of the most beautiful regions of the Empire. It’s full of winding valleys, full of streams and brooks, and in places the woodland is all you can see. Of course if war comes to the region, much of it could be destroyed. Niake would be besieged and to make siege weapons would require wood, and so they’d strip the area of all woodland.”
“Oh.” Clora didn’t really understand what that meant. Suddenly a small creature burst out of a thick green bush by the side of the track and bounded across their path into a hole in the side of the grassy slope on the other side. “What was that?”
“Lupis,” Zonis said. “Tasty.”
Clora had seen long ears, squat body and a white short tail. “You’d eat that?”
“In a stew. Very good.”
Clora pulled a face. It had seemed such a sweet little thing, running in fright from their approach.
Zonis caught her look and shook his head. “If you were hungry enough you’d eat it, Clora. We’d even eat old Dullard here,” he pointed to the equine in front.
“Dullard? Is that it’s name?”
“It is now. Suits him.”
“You’d eat an equine? Do people eat them?”
“Anything, if necessity demands it. When I lived on the streets I ate anything I could get my hands on. Even rodents.”
“Ugh!”
“Not the most tasty of fare, I’ll grant you that, but edible. There have been some things I’ve eaten that would have eaten me if I’d’ve not been quick enough to kill them. Being outdoors teaches you that. Don’t go thinking everything out here is nice and cuddly. There are some things that are downright nasty.”
“I think I prefer to be in Niake.”
Zonis looked at her with a sideways glance. “I suppose then you’ve only got people to worry about being nasty to you. Oh, and the occasional mad canine. Same thing, really.”
Clora gave Zonis a long look. “Not everyone is nasty, Zonis.”
“Most are. They don’t care about much, except themselves. How to look after themselves above everything else, and to the pit of fire with everyone else. That’s how we’ve got into this mess. Too many looking out for number one. Now it’s time for the reckoning. Where are the structures built for the benefit of everyone? The army, the councils, the baths, the street lighting? The water supplies, the road maintenance? All gone, discarded as expenses those in charge could not afford to keep running if they were to maintain their fabulously rich lifestyles.” He sounded bitter.
Clora said nothing. She had little idea about what he was talking of, and decided it was best to say nothing. Demtro had told her not to get too involved in a discussion with his elder brother. He was full of anger and resentment against those who Zonis saw as being responsible for his position.
Zonis glanced at her again and then concentrated on guiding the animal along the track. It climbed gradually, passing through a copse of gnarled stunted trees, and then they were through into a wooded vale. The land rose fairly steeply on either side and was crowned by a sea of treetops. The track kept to the bottom of the valley and the sunlight filtered through the branches, lighting their way. Later in the season, when the leaves had come out, it would be darker.
They carried on, always climbing, and finally came to the end of the vale. A narrow gorge marked its end, the sides sheer in places and boulders littering the floor, but the track wound its way around them and they carried on. Zonis began humming softly to himself, his eyes frequently flicking to the high ground to either side. Clora was lost in her own thoughts and so it came as a shock to her when Zonis suddenly pulled on the reins, halting Dullard.
“What?” she asked, looking around, startled.
“Company,” Zonis said briefly and sat stock still.
Coming out from behind boulders, both in front, alongside and from behind, were armed men,
cradling bows. Two were armed with swords and they approached from the front.
“Say nothing unless you’re directly spoken to. Remember our story, Clora.” Zonis placed his pipe into his mouth and began stuffing more of the shredded material into the bowl.
The two swordsmen split to either side of Dullard and came at the wagon from two directions. One pointed his sword at Zonis. “You, off.” As Clora began to move he shook his head. “You, darling, stay where you are.”
Zonis climbed down and sucked on his pipe. It made a gurgling noise. The swordsman looked at it critically. “You a Leaf user?”
“Naw,” Zonis drawled. “Pain killer drug. Lungs gone.”
The swordsman regarded him for a moment, then jerked his head to the nearest two bowmen. “Cover this one. Make sure he don’t do nothing stupid.”
Zonis stepped away and coughed. His hand came away from his mouth with flecks of blood on it and he pulled a face. The swordsman saw it and nodded. He’d seen the lung disease often enough. This was genuine. He then turned to look at Clora. “So who are you, pretty one?”
“Marta,” she said, using the cover name she’d been given by Demtro. “From Niake.” Her accent was unmistakably Niakian, and, moreover, that of the slums which was where she had been brought up. Demtro hadn’t tried to give her elocution lessons as his use for her as a whore would look odd of she spoke like nobility.
“You don’t say?” the swordsman said. “So who’s the healthy guy?”
Clora looked at Zonis. “My uncle Sinoz.” Demtro had gone for the simple pseudonym of using his name backwards. “We’re refugees.”
“From who?”
“The Koros. They killed my father. We’ve run before we get it.”
The swordsman thought on it for a moment. He walked around the wagon, looking at it and Dullard. He looked in the rear. A cloth covered the contents. He pulled it aside and saw a collection of stools, clothes and a couple of items of furniture. They would have to be checked. “Alright, we’ll take you to camp but you’re still under suspicion. If we can confirm your story you’ll be allowed to join us. We’re fighting the Koros, all of us. We hate those bastards.”
