by Col Buchanan
Ash knew there was only chance left to him now.
He released the stool and started to swim as the next wave came roaring in from behind. For a moment he thought he wasn’t moving fast enough to be taken by it, but then he felt his body lift, and with the last few strokes left in him he made one last surge.
The wave caught his legs, pulling them upwards behind him. He pointed his arms straight ahead, raised his chin free from the water as the wave-front rose and curled and carried him towards the beach.
Ash rode it all the way in with a grimace stretching his face, and the blood in his veins singing with exhilaration.
The wave dumped him onto the wet sand, left him there gasping in its hissing retreat back to the sea. Ash coughed to clear his lungs.
He was alive.
Captain Jute, commander of Pashereme’s coastal fort, peered from the battlements through the lashing rain of the storm and waited for another flash of lightning to illuminate the sea.
‘Are you certain?’ he asked again of his second-in-command, Sergeant Boson, a shiftless rogue of an individual whom Jute had come to distrust in all things, save for those matters which concerned his own skin.
‘As certain as day and night. They’re there all right. We’d better be clearing out of here right sharpish too.’
Thunder split overhead, and a bolt of lightning struck the sea out in the boiling bay. The captain hunched forward, clearing his eyes of rain, felt a punch of fear in his stomach as he saw them: ships, hundreds of ships, bobbing through the swells towards the beaches.
‘Sweet merciful Fool,’ he uttered, and gripped the stone battlements to steady himself. An invasion, he thought, suddenly giddy. A bloody full-on invasion!
‘Captain?’ came Boson’s voice through the fog of his shock.
The captain nodded, trying to think straight. He turned to the sergeant, and he couldn’t help that his voice trembled a little as he spoke. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘Light the signal fire, and get a bird in the air. We haven’t much time, lads.’
‘In this weather they might not see the fire, Captain. Better if we head to Olson’s fort and pass on the word there, I’d say.’
‘Just do it!’ bawled Captain Jute.
He turned back to the water of Whittle Bay, which was a smaller, sheltered inlet within Pearl Bay itself. On the slopes on the far side of this natural harbourage, the buildings of the fishing village were dark at this late hour. Jute prayed that someone in the village would spot the signal fire and get them all out in time.
Another flash, and the captain saw that boats had already landed on the beach below, and dark figures were scurrying through the dunes towards the hill upon which the fort stood.
Sweet Mercy, he thought to himself. There’re too many of them. All this time requesting more men for the fort, and now it’s too damned late.
‘No way we’re holding that many off.’ It was Sergeant Boson who spoke, returned from passing out the orders to the men. Jute looked to him, keen for once to hear what he had to say. ‘We need to evacuate now, Captain, or we’ll be under siege in no time, and with no way of holding them back. You know, don’t you, what they do to their prisoners?’
Jute’s wide-eyed stare darted towards his men. They had armed themselves with burning brands from the guardroom hearth, and were poking life into the signal fire that stood in an iron dish upon the battlements. Soaked with spirits, the wood caught well enough despite the wind and the rain. In moments it was blazing tall.
‘Has the bird been sent yet?’
‘Just now.’
‘And the logs? We must burn them too.’
‘In the fire, captain.’
‘Very well,’ said Jute, and took one last glance at the advancing figures below. Commandos, he saw, faces blackened for night work. ‘Let’s damn well get out here then, shall we?’
But when he turned to leave, the sergeant and the rest of the men were already gone.
‘You feckless bastards,’ he muttered to himself, and hurried after them.
When Ash came to, he was still lying where he had washed up on the beach, and crystals of sand caked his lips and face. It seemed he had passed out momentarily. The storm continued to rage, and the sea washed against his legs.
Ash’s body was a dead thing sprawled on the sand; limp, detached from his will, shaking from coldness and shock. His throat was raw from the seawater he had swallowed, and he turned his open mouth towards the rain to catch some of it against his tongue.
It came to him slowly, vaguely, that he would die of exposure if he stayed here.
Ash groaned as he pushed himself to his knees. Standing was a deliberate process, moving one muscle after the other until at last he swayed on his feet. His legs trembled, ready to buckle at any moment.
When our legs are spent we must walk on our will, he recited in his mind, as the rainbow flicker of exhaustion played around the edges of his vision, and he stumbled onwards.
Other shipwrecked survivors were dotted along the beach; sailors, soldiers and camp followers. They walked to and fro as though in a daze, with their feet leaving confused, meandering trails in the sand. Wails of grief added to the high keen of the storm. They were all wretchedly exposed here, from the wind and rain that lashed so thickly it felt as though Ash was breathing water again. He wiped a hand across his face, blinked to see clearly. On his right, people huddled together amongst the dunes; ahead, others were setting off towards the bay.
Once more he wiped the rain from his eyes. The rainbow colours were expanding, creating a tunnel in his vision. He was aware of staggering into the dunes to seek some place to lie down out of the wind. Lightning sheeted overhead – he saw the sloping sand beyond his feet studded with pits from the impacts of rain.
Ahead a woman’s voice shouted out in anger, and others joined her. A scream. The laughter of men. The wind shifted and carried away the sounds, and Ash sniffed. His nostrils caught the lingering scent of woodsmoke.
A fire!
On all fours he struggled up the slope of a dune, panting ragged like a dog. At the top he righted himself. His eyes narrowed, taking in the scene below – a group of men, short glints of steel in their fists; a group of women being set upon before a fire.
The hope of warmth and shelter revived Ash momentarily. He focused on what he was seeing, and made out an older woman, wild-haired and defiant, shouting at the men and fighting them off with a length of driftwood. The men – sailors, he thought – seemed only to be sporting with her.
‘Ho!’ Ash shouted, and every face turned to look up at him.
Lightning flashed again. He thought it an apt moment to sweep his blade from its sheath.
With a sudden nervousness the sailors eyed each other and backed away from the women. The older woman dropped the length of wood and gathered her girls around her.
Run, you bastards. I have not the strength for this.
They were waiting to see what he would do next. Ash took a step down from the dune, was hardly surprised to feel his legs buckle beneath him. He was quick enough to get his other foot out in front in time, and to turn his fall into something that approximated a downward rush. In his plummet he held his blade out for balance.
When he collapsed in front of the fire he was relieved to see the backs of the sailors fleeing into the night. He was shivering hard, and another gust flattened the flames across the wood, causing the embers to glow brightly. When the wind subsided, the flames crackled with renewed effort. The heat warmed Ash’s soul.
‘You,’ he croaked to the older woman. ‘Have you water?’
The woman ignored him. As he sat up she fussed over her girls, setting them around the fire beneath a stretch of canvas. There were five of them in all, and she talked to them curtly, businesslike, as though she was an old aunt to them. Satisfied, she wrapped a shawl over her head and shoulders and came across to join him. He saw a flask in her hand, which she offered freely.
Her eyes took in the colour of his skin.
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‘Only rhulika,’ she said, settling down next to him and readjusting her dress. ‘Good for starting fires and warming the belly. Drink, old farlander. It’s the least I can offer you.’
He would have preferred freshwater just then but he drank it down anyway, his teeth chattering against the wooden spout. He swallowed the whole lot in one go, and the alcohol flared in his stomach, sent tendrils of heat threading through his spent limbs.
The flask dropped from Ash’s limp fingers. The rush of alcohol crashed against the weight of his exhaustion.
Close to his face, the woman’s pale features were reeling in and out of focus, her mouth moving quickly, saying something.
With a groan, Ash toppled forwards and fell through the world.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Paintings of Memory
The echoes of his own footfalls bounded ahead of Bahn as he rushed through the endless corridors of the Ministry of War, his hobnailed boots offering little purchase on the polished floors of marble. Bahn slid clumsily as he rounded a corner, regained his footing, and pounded towards the doors of the general’s office, too breathless to shout aside the guards standing there at attention.
The two guards took one look at his fevered face and his hands waving them out of his way, surmised that he had little intention of stopping – or indeed, was even capable of doing so in time – and smartly sidestepped out of his way.
Bahn flung himself through the heavy oak doors in a panting burst of drama. ‘They’ve landed!’ he declared to the room beyond.
General Creed, standing in the early morning light by the opposite expanse of windows, and facing an easel over which his hand hovered with a brush, inclined his head slightly, but said nothing.
‘General,’ Bahn tried again. ‘They—’ but the brush flicked across the page: once, twice, three times, and Bahn faltered.
Creed inspected the result of the strokes closely, then nodded, and set down the brush.
He turned and took the measure of Bahn in one burning glance. ‘Where?’ rumbled his heavy voice, and he grabbed up a rag and began to clean his hands with it.
Now that he was required to speak, Bahn found the words sticking in his throat. ‘Here,’ he managed to say. ‘At Pearl Bay.’
‘When?’
‘Last night. The first birds from the bay forts have started to come in.’
‘Numbers?’
Bahn shook his head. ‘Conflicting so far. The fleet is still unloading. But by the size of it, at least forty thousand fighting men.’
‘Acolytes?’
‘Yes. And General, the Matriarch herself is leading them. Some of our rangers spotted her standard flying from the flagship. They also report seeing the standard of Archgeneral Sparus on the beach.’
General Creed tossed the blackened rag onto his desk and sat down in his leather chair. He inclined back and settled his boots on the varnished surface of the desk, with his long legs crossed and his hands clasped loosely, his thumbs toying with each other, his face a flinty cliff.
He takes it well, thought Bahn, whose stomach was still quailing inside.
He’d always supposed that composure was an excellent quality in a leader. Instead, right then, it made him feel like a scared youth.
‘Perhaps the death of her son has made her reckless,’ Creed mused, though Bahn offered no response, for the general was only thinking out aloud.
Bahn’s body wanted to move, to act. In nervous impatience, he gazed out the window beyond the general’s head. The Lansway and the Shield were visible from here, and he could even see the encampment of the Imperial Fourth Army, spread across the waist of the isthmus in its neat grid.
The lull in the fighting made perfect sense now. It had been more than an observance of mourning for the Matriarch’s son; they had been waiting for the invasion force to arrive, the hammer to their anvil, with Bar-Khos caught in between. Bahn wondered how long it would be before they renewed their assaults on the walls with everything they had.
At the thought of the fighting to come, his gaze turned to the easel and canvas next to the window, and the vision of peace the painting had captured. It was rendered in the minimal farlander style so favoured by General Creed. Rather than portraying the view outside, it was instead a scene from memory; gentle slopes covered in vines, rising towards distant mountains.
Bahn was reminded of a different bereavement, a different loss; the woman whose spirit, in painting these scenes time and time again, the general hoped most of all to recapture. General Creed had been married for thirty-one years when Bahn had first joined his staff as a junior aide. Bahn had met the general’s wife Rose only once at a staff function here in the Ministry; a small bundle of a woman, dignified in carriage and softly spoken. She had talked, briefly, of their vineyard on the southern slopes of the lower Alapolas, and of her wish for her husband to come home and visit her more often there. She had seemed lonely, and out of place in the lesser function hall of the Ministry. Bahn had stayed by her side until he’d managed to gain from her a shy smile, then introduced her to his own wife to take his place. The women had connected like two old friends.
Bahn looked away from the painting and saw the general’s sharp blue eyes locked on his own. They flickered towards a chair, and Bahn worked his way around it and sat.
‘Gollanse!’ bellowed the general.
The doors, still open behind Bahn, admitted the general’s ancient concierge.
‘Call a staff meeting, will you? I want everyone here within the hour.’
‘Yes, lord,’ replied the old man curtly.
To Bahn: ‘Has the council been informed yet?’
‘A runner’s been sent.’
‘And the League?’
‘Not as yet.’
The general nodded to Gollanse. ‘Dispatch a fast skud to Minos. Carrier birds too. Advise them that recent imperial fleet actions have been a diversion. The real thrust is here, on Khos. We’ll need all the Volunteers they can send us.’
‘Yes, lord. Is that all?’
‘Aye, and be quick about it now, no dallying for biscuits and chee.’
The old man raised an eyebrow, but said nothing as he shuffled from the room.
General Creed tilted his head back, calculating. ‘Pearl Bay. That’s a good hundred and forty laqs from Bar-Khos, with difficult terrain for the first thirty until they come down onto the Reach. They’ll need to take Tume, they can’t leave it at their backs. But they’ll push hard. Thirteen, fourteen days, maybe, before we start seeing their advance forces here. That’s hardly long enough for League reinforcements to arrive in time.’
Thirteen days. I could have Marlee and the children far away from Khos by then.
‘We can also expect a renewed campaign against the walls. They’ll press us from every quarter now, hoping to break us in between.’
‘General . . .’ said Bahn, searching for the right words. ‘What can we do?’
Creed unfolded himself from his chair. He placed his palms on the desk and rose to tower over Bahn, his eyes dancing. ‘Do? We must mobilize every man that we can, as quickly as we can do it. Any man who can still march and fight.’
‘You want to meet the Mannians in the field?’
‘What – you’d have us close the gates I suppose, and hunker down behind the walls to await their arrival?’
Yes, that was surely what Bahn would have done. The lesser walls of the city would at least provide them with some advantage against the approaching imperial army. But it was a short-sighted strategy, and Bahn dismissed it even as he thought it. He was merely considering the protection of his family, not any larger picture. This is why I would make such a poor leader, he mused.
The general seemed to read his thoughts. ‘The lesser walls are hardly the Shield, Bahn. They won’t stand long against modern cannon, and I’m fairly certain they’ve brought a few of those along with them.’
Bahn nodded, rubbing a hand across the back of his neck.
‘In the
meantime, they’d slash and burn all of Khos from under us. If we sit and wait for them, there’ll be nothing left to protect save for this city.’
‘But in the field, sir,’ he blurted. ‘How can we possibly defeat that many?’
‘We don’t need to defeat them, Bahn. All we need to do is buy ourselves some time.’
Bahn massaged his tired eyes for a moment. It felt as though he was speaking in a different language to the man.
‘But, General,’ he said, as Creed began to pace back and forth before him. ‘Even if we mobilize every Khosian reserve that we can, even if we scrape the barrel, we can only put six or seven thousand shields into the field. Our resources of blackpowder have gone to the navy and the defence of the walls. Our field cannon are few. We don’t even have the guns to match them, never mind the men.’
The general stopped before the windows, his hands behind his back. In the light, his black hair shone with a near-blue lustre.
Whether he was looking at his painting or the silent walls of the Shield, Bahn couldn’t tell.
‘It’s a bad stroke they’ve given us, I’ll grant you that. I’d hardly credit the Matriarch with such imagination. And it’s too risky for Sparus to have thought of it. Perhaps old Mokabi has come out of his retirement, then. I sense his flair in this.’
Creed paused, and his head tilted towards the window: at the very instant that he had spoken the name of the retired archgeneral – the same man who had led the Imperial Fourth Army to the walls of Bar-Khos – a boom sounded from the direction of the Shield.
Another sounded, and then another, until the windows themselves were trembling from the rippling concussions.
The Mannian guns had started to fire on the Shield once more.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Beachhead
The woman held a mug of chee for him when he woke late the next day. Ash struggled to sit up, his chest feeling tight and sore. Cakes of sand fell from one side of his face as he coughed long and hard into his fist, his eyes watering from the pain of each convulsion.
