by Col Buchanan
‘Aye.’
The clouds were brightening above their heads. They moved almost imperceptibly, though the longer Bull stared at them, the more he felt that it was he that was moving, and the rest of the world beneath him.
In the distance, another voice was cut off in mid-shout.
‘You should be glad, Bull. What is better? To die like this next to your broken charta, or to rot away in a cell for the rest of your life?’
‘This is hardly a glorious end here, pinned to the ground by an erection.’
‘Don’t,’ chuckled the man again. ‘It hurts, very badly, when I laugh.’
Bull winced at the shaking weight of him.
‘You did not tell me what you did – to deserve such a punishment as that.’
Bull smacked his dry mouth. His throat was burning from thirst. ‘I killed a man,’ he said. ‘A hero of Bar-Khos.’
‘A hero? And what had he done to you, this hero?’
‘He took advantage of my younger brother. And then he broke his heart.’
‘Ah, now I see.’
For a while he listened to Ersha’s breathing as it grew ever-more shallow. The man was struggling to remain conscious.
Bull had met Adrianos once, hero of the Nomarl raid. Two years ago, when the crowds had come to watch Bull take on the champion from Al-Khos. He had liked the man and his quick wit, had even felt a measure of admiration for what he’d accomplished against the Imperials.
Bull’s younger brother had admired Adrianos too, when he’d first become a Special under his command. Last year, only twenty-four years of age, he had died in a fight in a taverna, a fight he’d started when a group of Adrianos’s friends had walked in proclaiming the man’s virtues. Bull had been shocked out of his mind by his younger brother’s death; even more so when he’d discovered the reason for the fight and for his sudden hostility towards Adrianos.
He felt his anger start to rise just in recalling it.
Bull turned his head to one side and breathed the memory out of him. Through his tears he could see nothing but bodies, a carpet of them in every direction he cared to look. He hoped that Wicks was all right. He hoped the lad wasn’t lying here somewhere amongst the fallen.
A pair of boots stepped into view. Bull blinked his eyes clear, looked up to see two soldiers leaning on their spears and gazing down at him.
‘Here’s one,’ said the shorter of the two men, and hefted his spear and aimed the bloody warhead at Bull’s neck.
Bull refused to flinch. He waited with open eyes, only wishing for it to be swift.
‘No,’ croaked Ersha, and the great man twisted his neck to look at them. ‘This one – this one is mine.’
The soldiers squinted, taking in the giant man’s condition.
‘They gave the order,’ said the shorter of the two. ‘No slaves to be taken. Kill all save for officers.’
‘I don’t give a shit for their orders,’ growled the tribesman. ‘This one is mine, do you hear me?’
‘Yours? You’ll be lucky to see the end of the day.’
The tribesman tried to reach his side. He swore, then jerked something free. A black string hung from his grip.
Ersha wheezed as he placed the necklace about Bull’s head, pulled it down onto his neck. The necklace carried a stone marker.
‘Mine,’ he said through gritted teeth.
Ché and Ash spoke little as they travelled through the lowland hills bordering the Silent Valley, trying to distance themselves from the scene of battle by skirting west along the valley’s course. Even higher ground rose to the south of them, and beyond it mountains with spindly peaks covered with ice, glimpsed through the boughs of trees as the pair traversed ravines and sage-choked valleys.
Both of them had reversed their white cloaks so the grey inconspicuous lining faced outwards. Ché led the zel while Ash rode in the saddle. The farlander was still weak. Often he called for a halt so that he could be sick amidst plumes of his own breath.
They had nothing to eat between them. Ché plucked berries as he they went, though Ash refused them, claiming he would not hold them down. It was a concussion all right, and Ché knew that the last thing he should doing was moving the old man like this. But another night in the freezing cold might be even worse for him. Ash didn’t have the look of a man who would survive that.
By late afternoon they halted on a high ridge with their eyes narrowed against the biting wind, and looked down onto the broad floodplain known as the Reach. The fertile land was dusted white with frost and snow. Farms and villages dotted the open fields, and stands of birch and yellowpine and tiq. Amongst them, pillars of smoke rose from burning fields where immature crops still grew. Along the dirty scratches of roads, families were pulling carts and driving cattle as they left their homes behind them.
The air was startling in its clarity today. He could just make out Simmer Lake ten or so laqs to the north-west, where the city of Tume floated as a pale smudge, a sliver of black rising from the heart of it; the ancient citadel, he presumed. Directly to the north, the frozen Cinnamon snaked its way towards the lake, accompanied by the straighter line of the main road. The road itself was clogged with trudging men; the Khosian army in retreat.
‘They head for Tume,’ Ché declared.
He squinted, taking in the great lake again and the island city. A black dot was moving in the air above the citadel. A skyship.
He looked up at the clouds growing ever darker, suspecting it would snow soon. Ché glanced back at Ash in hope that the old Rōshun might offer a suggestion. The farlander’s head, though, was nodding in exhaustion.
‘Sparus and the army will be coming through here soon enough,’ Ché muttered, almost to himself. Then, louder, so that Ash might hear him: ‘No choice for it,’ and he tugged the zel along as they set off towards the city.
‘Sweet Mercy,’ declared Kris, hitching her medico pack higher on her back. ‘I think my feet are about to drop off.’
Curl looked at the older woman and found she hadn’t the energy to think of a response. Her own feet ached terribly, made only worse now that they were crossing the hard planking of the floating bridge that led into Tume.
They were surrounded by the walking wounded, battered soldiers who limped and shuffled and helped each other along as best they could. Like Curl, the men were too far gone for talk now. Their dull expressions were filthy with grime and blood save for where their helms had covered their faces. Their eyes looked blasted, as though they’d been staring hard into a furnace all night. Curl felt a fierce camaraderie with these fighting men now. Together they had come through the worst of it. Today, she found that she no longer carried herself like a civilian, but as one of them.
Against the flow of the army, a much more presentable stream of Tume citizenry were pushing and pulling their belongings along as they attempted to flee the city. They glanced nervously at the soldiers in passing, seemed to see them not as saviours but as harbingers of defeat. Curl wasn’t certain that they were wrong.
She tugged her cloak tighter about herself against the falling sleet. Her hair was pasted wet across her skull and her ears burned from the cold, making her wish dearly that she had a hood with which to cover her head. She swiped her face clear and kept her narrowed eyes focused on the back of the soldier before her. The man was shivering, his own cloak gone and his arms clutched tight around his sides. His breath rose over a bloody bandage wrapped about his skull.
Past him, along the far-reaching lines of trudging men, a fortified gatehouse stood at the end of the bridge with its gates cast open. Tume sprawled beyond it and ranged far to either side.
Only the citadel stood on firm ground, the walls and turrets built on a prominence of rock that rose high above the rooftops. The rest of the buildings of the city, all of them constructed of wood like the bridge itself, floated on great rafts of what Kris had simply called lakeweed; some form of vegetation natural to the lake, which filtered the water for minerals and nutrients and k
ept it clear as a mountain pool. Curl could see all the way to the muddy bottom, the algae-covered rocks and plantlife down there. Near the surface, she glimpsed shoals of fish nibbling on the loose tendrils at the edges of the floating weeds.
It was clear to her now why the lake had been given its name. It bubbled in parts, particularly along the southern shoreline, where the surface churned and boiled and released wafts of mist into the cooler air.
‘If you go down to the shoreline there,’ Kris said, noticing her interest, ‘you can dig a hole, and wait for the water to seep into it, and then cook your breakfast.’
Curl managed a nod. She wondered how anyone could even think about eating in such circumstances, when the air smelled so badly of rotten eggs.
Ahead, she noticed that some of the men were looking off to the east and the far shore there. Curl could not see what they were looking at for all the citizens passing by.
‘Listen,’ said Kris, and she did. The breeze across the water shifted, and the sounds of it came to her, dull cracks of gunfire.
‘They’re coming,’ said Kris.
The people of Tume could hear it too. A murmur passed along their column, then shouts of alarm. Some began to turn around, to return to the safety of the city. Others began to push harder, wanting to be clear of there.
The army marched onwards, thinking only of shelter and a hot meal.
CHAPTER THIRTY
Burning Bridges
It was said that the tortoise was three hundred years old, as old as the citadel it had known all that time as home. In its long and ponderous life, the creature had lived through times of famine and prosperity, of peace and war, even of revolution. Its eyes had witnessed the ruling family of Tume grow old and die within these damp walls of stone, one generation after the other. It had seen the bloody births of children, the grand balls and banquets, the bitter arguments, the feuds, the affairs, the mortal illnesses, until it had become a part of living history itself, a connection to ancestors gone and descendants still to come.
The tortoise seemed hardly concerned with such prestigious things as it balanced awkwardly against a low table on its hind legs, its neck stretched long and leathery as it reached for a green apple in a bowl of fruit, fastidiously ignoring the many soldiers seeking spaces for themselves around the walls of the great hall.
So calm was its temperament that it even ignored the pair of gauntlets that crashed onto the table next to the bowl, and the man marching past the table without breaking his stride. The tortoise dragged the apple to the floor, began to munch away on it as the figure marched towards the people gathered around the fire in the central hearth.
The man looked huge in his anger and his great bearskin coat.
‘Where are my damned reinforcements?’ General Creed hollered to the Principari of Tume, his voice ringing beneath the domed ceiling of the hall. ‘The Al-Khos reserves?’ he shouted, as he saw the man turn from the flames to confront him.
Vanichios opened his eyes a fraction wider beneath the brim of his blue velvet cap, his face bare of the paint usually worn by the Michinè.
The Principari gave a nod of his head to dismiss the men gathered around him, all clad in the grey garments of advisers. He clasped his hands behind his back and waited as Creed approached him, his diamond jewellery glittering within the sheen of his silk robes.
Creed stopped before him out of breath. He was surprised when Vanichios held out his hands, and offered a kiss on each cheek as though they were still friends. The Principari smelled faintly of elderberries and soap.
‘General,’ Vanichios said in his smooth voice, appraising Creed’s condition with concern. ‘Come, we must speak.’
Without waiting for a response, he led the way to an alcove free of soldiers, where his wife, Carine, oversaw a group of servants removing paintings and precious books from the shelves that were nestled there.
‘Carine,’ said Vanichios softly to his wife, ‘Please, leave it all. You and the children must make yourselves ready.’
Carine brushed the grey hair from her face, and stared at Creed as her husband introduced them.
‘Welcome, General,’ she said with a nod. ‘Please, make yourself at home, you must be exhausted.’
There was no rancour in her voice, only civility. At once, Creed felt abashed at his loud words, standing there in his reeking armour with his men making themselves at home all about her. He bowed his head in reply, not knowing what to say.
In truth, he’d expected a cooler welcome in this hall of the Prin-cipari, this man who had once been his friend, when both had been bachelor officers in the ranks of the Red Guards. They hadn’t spoken in fifteen years. Not since the day of the duel, and Creed’s subsequent marriage to the woman they had fought it over.
As Vanichios bade his own wife to depart – and with the duelling scar still clearly visible on his right cheek, his face drawn tight and haggard by sleeplessness and worry – Creed realized that of course all that was so much water under the bridge; that he’d stomped angrily into the home of a man who bore him no ill any longer, the home of a family suddenly beset by the arrival of war. He watched the looks exchanged between the two of them, the bond they shared, as Carine turned to leave.
Marsalas felt a pang of longing, though not for this woman. For his own.
‘The reserves,’ prompted Creed, quietly now, as Vanichios gestured to a chair then sank himself into the one opposite. ‘Why are they not here?’
‘Because they are as yet four days’ forced march away,’ announced the Principari as he gently settled himself, and tossed a corner of his robe about his lap. ‘They left Al-Khos only yesterday.’
‘What?’ exclaimed Creed.
‘It would seem that Kincheko has been quibbling over the matter of releasing his reserves to us.’
Creed grasped for his forehead as though in pain. For some moments he composed himself, letting the import of the news sink in.
‘I’ll have his damned head for this.’
‘Not if I have it first,’ Vanichios replied, and Creed saw how incensed he truly was behind the cool facade of his manners.
The general straightened in his chair, his armour and the ancient stuffed leather both creaking. He fixed Vanichios with a stare. ‘We can’t hold this city. Not without the heavy cannon they’re meant to be bringing.’
Vanichios’s gaze was just as firm. He gave an almost imperceptible nod of his head.
‘We have the guns you sent us,’ he said.
‘Those field guns won’t be much use in the siege that’s coming. I was only hoping to keep them out of Mannian hands.’
He could see that Vanichios already knew this.
Creed blew out a breath of frustration and looked about the hall. He followed the smoke from the fire pouring up to the domed ceiling, filtering out through its circle of blackened chimney slots or recoiling from sleety gusts. Trees were growing up there, purple-leaved nightshades sprouting from the walls themselves and hanging out over the hall. Below their high canopy, his men sat or lay resting across the littered floor. Others were still coming in, collapsing wherever they could find a clear space on which to sleep.
‘Four days late,’ he mused, without looking at Vanichios. ‘What prompted him in the end?’
‘I threatened Kincheko to a duel if he did not send them.’
‘Hah!’ exclaimed Creed. ‘He must be a worse blade than you, then.’
Together they smiled in the midst of their troubles. Vanichios even flicked the scar on his cheek, mock indignation on his face. They laughed aloud, drawing the attention of the men around the chamber.
‘It’s good to see you are well and still in one piece,’ said Vani-chios, with warmth. ‘Truly, I mean that. We have left this reunion much too long, and now . . .’ he waved a hand in the air. ‘Now we are neck-deep in trouble, with no time to catch up at all.’
Creed wiped a tear of laughter from his eye. Yes, it was good to be here, he realized. Good to be speaking again
.
War could be many loathsome things, yet it cut through the ordinary nonsense of life like nothing else. Creed was reminded of the decency of this man before him, his humanity towards those less fortunate than himself when even Creed would see nothing but wretchedness. A result, he always supposed, of the fact that Vani-chios had grown up as the youngest of four brothers, the lowest position within the traditional pecking order of a Michinè family.
Vanichios had outlived his father and his brothers, and he’d found himself the lord of Tume after all; the last thing he’d ever wanted to be, Creed knew. Yet he wore the role well, Creed thought now. It fitted him.
Vanichios leaned forwards to narrow the distance between them. His voice was gentle as he said, ‘I sent my condolences. I hope you received them in time.’
‘Yes,’ said Creed, blinking. ‘I appreciated your words.’ He remembered that now. A letter had arrived after his wife’s funeral. In his black grief he had ignored it, and somehow over time it had become lost.
‘I wept, when I heard the news of her passing,’ Vanichios said bravely, then looked away quickly, as though to stop himself from saying more. He had loved Rose deeply himself.
Creed patted the arm of his chair, not knowing what to say in return. How poor he was at these things.
A puddle was gathering on the floor beneath him, his greatcoat shedding its melted sleet. Droplets plopped into it loudly. ‘They’re right on our heels, old friend,’ he declared. ‘We need to burn the bridge now, before they can storm it.’
Vanichios drew his hands together beneath his chin. Again that tiny nod of the head, his lips pursed.
‘That should hold them off for a few days at most until they string a new one across. After that . . .’ Creed shook his head, thinking on his feet. It was the talent he most relied upon. ‘We must begin a full evacuation of the city,’ he decided. ‘And we must begin it now.’
The Principari’s left eye twitched. ‘You really think our situation is as bad as that? I heard rumours that the Matriarch was dead.’
‘Rumours, aye. We don’t yet know for certain. Either way, they’ll want Tume before they push on for Bar-Khos. It’s too risky for them to leave us here at their backs.’
