Tunny raised one brow. “Well, I don’t suppose they’ve turned out for me.”
“Your August Majesty!” gushed the mayor as Orso’s party approached, collapsing in a bow so low his chain of office feathered the cobbles. “I cannot find the words to describe the privilege of hosting you! The honour for me and the entire town of Stoffenbeck is quite indescribable.”
“Not at all, my dear sir, yours is a delightful burg.” Orso gestured towards the buildings about the square. Several fine old houses, a guildhall with a marble façade, a tavern with a half-timbered upper floor, a covered marketplace with its sagging roof held up on squat pillars. Progress had largely left this corner of the Union alone, it could barely have changed in two centuries. “The very quintessence of rural Midderland! In happier times I would delight in a tour, but I hope you will forgive me…” Orso tipped his circlet towards the ladies and gentlemen and kept his horse moving ever so gently northwards. Stop for one moment, and they have you. “Rebellions don’t crush themselves, you know!”
“Of course, Your Majesty!” The mayor took a few shuffling steps after him. “If there is anything you need, you have only to ask. Anything at all!”
“Ten thousand soldiers and an accurate weather forecast?” muttered Orso, under his breath.
“The honour is quite indescribable.” Tunny mimicked the mayor’s delivery with uncanny accuracy.
“Believe it or not, there are still people in the world not yet sick of the sight of me.”
“I wonder if he’ll reckon it such a privilege when his town hosts one of the largest battles ever fought on Union soil.”
“My dear Corporal Tunny, you underestimate the sycophancy of the stout Midderland burgher. My guess is he will still be happily genuflecting when arrows darken the sky…”
Jokes made him feel a little better, especially ones in poor taste, but they seemed rather foolish in light of the spectacle as they emerged from the town. There must have been thousands of men working furiously in the fields to the north. Men of the Crown Prince’s Division, fortifying a great crescent between the gentle hill and the steep bluff, sharpening stakes, shoring up walls, throwing up barricades, digging trenches and pits.
Overseeing the work with the same total lack of emotion with which he had once overseen the hanging of two hundred Breakers, white clothes pristine in the afternoon sun, was Arch Lector Pike.
Orso reined in beside him, surveying the vast building site. “Hard at work, Your Eminence?”
“Indeed, Your Majesty. I find men rarely work with such tireless dedication as when their lives depend on the results.”
On their left, the river drained into boggy shallows and was met by another stream with orchards planted on both banks. Over to the right, fields thick with ripe spring wheat sloped gently away towards woodland. In the centre, straight ahead, the crops had just been harvested, a patchwork of stubbled fields turned rich brown by the recent rains. A great cloud of starlings twisted in the sky, pouring down into the trees around a farm a mile or two away, then whirling up into the haze again.
Orso swallowed. There seemed to be something of a lump in his throat. “So this will be our battlefield.”
“I doubt we’ll find a better,” said Forest.
Orso shaded his eyes, peering north towards a single hill on the far side of the fields, a building jutting from its summit.
“What’s that tower there?”
“An old fortified manor house,” said Pike. “Belongs to a Lord Steebling. Minor nobility.”
“Bad luck for him,” murmured Orso. He thought he caught the twinkle of steel. “We have men there? Watching for the enemy, I suppose.”
“Those are the enemy, Your Majesty.”
“What?”
“Their first scouts.” Forest rubbed at his grizzled jaw. “Even with the roads in the state they are, their main body should be with us before sunset.”
“Bloody hell…” breathed Orso. That brought it all home, somehow. There they were, rebels fixed on his destruction, with only a few miles of flat Midderland earth between them. “When can we expect reinforcements?”
“A detachment just arrived from the Siege School in Ratshoff,” said Tunny. “They brought twenty-four cannon with them.”
“Don’t those things have a nasty habit of blowing up?” The flash as Curnsbick’s engine exploded was unpleasantly fresh in Orso’s mind.
“I’m assured these new ones are more reliable…” Though Forest looked less than convinced. There had not been much to rely on of late.
“Three loyal members of the Open Council are a few miles away to the west.” Pike pointed off beyond the orchards. “Lords Stenner, Crant and Ingenbeck, with perhaps a thousand men between them.”
“And we expect two regiments of King’s Own from the east.” Forest stood in his stirrups and frowned towards the gentle hill, the wind making waves in the long grass on its flanks. “Might get here during the night, maybe the morning. Lord Marshal Rucksted is bringing four more in from the south, mostly cavalry. Forced march from Keln and they’ve a lot of ground to cover. If we’re lucky and the weather holds, they might get here late tomorrow, but… well…”
“You wouldn’t want to bet a kingdom on it?” ventured Orso, turning at the sound of hooves behind. “Ah, Inquisitor Teufel! So glad you could join us.” She did not look very glad to be joining them, but then Orso had never seen her look glad about anything. He even found it rather reassuring. Negotiation, planning or collapse of a nation, she faced them all with the same flinty resolve. “Did you speak to the Young Lion?”
“I did,” she said. “And to his wife, Lady Savine.”
“She’s with him?” He had to cough back a ridiculous desire to ask whether she had looked well.
“Heavily pregnant but still sharp as a dagger.”
“What are we calling her?” asked Pike, with a twisting of his burned features that might have been a smile. “The Young Lioness?”
Orso gave an unhappy grunt. An apt name, as it turned out. From what he understood of the species, the males had the big reputations but the females did all the killing.
“I told them a tale,” said Vick. “That you’re disorganised and short on men. That Brint has prevented any chance of reinforcements. The Lioness had her doubts, but her husband swallowed it whole, I think.”
“Excellent work!” said Orso. If they could have been reinforced with another dozen Vick dan Teufels they might have avoided fighting altogether. “But… you look less than delighted.”
“Our rebels have struck a deal with the Breakers. They’re planning uprisings across Midderland.”
An ugly pause. Orso took it with remarkable fortitude, he thought. Or perhaps he had no room to hold any more bad news. Like pouring wine into a glass already full, it simply flooded over the sides. “Have we heard of any uprisings? Any more, I should say…”
“None,” said Pike, “but…”
It was left to Tunny to say what everyone was undoubtedly thinking. “The first warning would be when our reinforcements don’t arrive.”
Orso could not help himself. He burst out in a carefree chuckle. “Well, we can only fight one war at a time, my friends. The Breakers can be tomorrow’s problem. Right now, several thousand rebellious noblemen, disgruntled Anglanders and slavering Northmen demand all my attention.”
“Twenty thousand, according to Brock’s own estimate,” said Vick.
Another ugly pause. From the concerned looks on the faces about him, Orso gathered that was more than they had hoped. “How many are we?” he asked, unable to keep a wheedling note from his voice.
“As it stands,” said Forest, grimly, “no more than twelve thousand. But we’ve got the ground.”
A great deal of faith to put in earth. Orso gave a long sigh as he considered the grassy hill, the gently rising, gently waving fields of wheat before it. “Lord Marshal Forest, I would like you to command the right wing.”
Forest raised his bushy brows. “
I’m a general, Your Majesty.”
“If the High King of the Union says a man’s a lord marshal, who’s to deny it? Brint’s early retirement has left a seat empty on the Closed Council, and I can’t think of a better man to sit there. Consider yourself promoted.” The way things were going, it might be his last official act.
Forest stared at him, mouth slightly open. “Closed Council…”
“Congratulations,” said Tunny, punching Forest on the arm. “You should get a baton, or something.”
“Only just got me a general’s jacket.”
“Well, you’re on your own there,” said Orso. “I can pluck new lord marshals from the air, but jackets cost money.” He frowned over at the rocky hill on their left, a few more steep bluffs beyond it. The ground in front of those was more difficult, planted with overgrown orchards and cut in half by that swampy tributary of the river. “Our left might be held by a smaller force, I think.”
“Especially if we place our cannon there,” came Gorst’s piping voice. He coloured faintly as everyone turned towards him. “I… saw them used at Osrung.”
“You’d want a ruthless commander,” said Tunny, considering the hills. “Someone who scares our men more than the enemy.”
As luck would have it, the perfect man appeared to be within arm’s reach. “Arch Lector Pike?” asked Orso. “I believe you have experience on the battlefield?”
“In my younger days, in Gurkhul and the North,” said Pike. “I also oversaw the first experiments with cannon in the Far Country.”
“Then I can think of no one more qualified to take charge of my left wing. Could you ensure morale there stays high?” Or at least that the demoralised troops were too scared to run.
Pike inclined his head. “Morale is a speciality of mine, Your Majesty. With your permission, I will begin fortifying the position.”
“The sooner the better,” said Orso. Forest gave a sharp salute and spurred away towards the gentle hill. Pike turned his horse towards the steeper bluffs. Vick caught Orso’s eye, gave him a firmly committed nod which he rather appreciated, then followed His Eminence.
A breeze came up, and took the Steadfast Standard, and made the white horse against the gilded sun flap and ripple. The very flag under which Casamir had conquered Angland. Witness to so many military glories down the centuries. Orso wondered if there was any chance of it presiding over another.
“You’ve seen a fair amount of action, Tunny.”
“I’ve tended more towards inaction, Your Majesty. But yes.”
“How bad is it? And bear in mind I’m a king. You should be honest.”
“Begging your pardon, but I try never to be honest with a superior, and the higher up the chain of command I go, the less honest I try to be. One could hardly be higher up than a king. Unless you’ve got great Euz hiding somewhere.”
“If only,” said Orso. “An all-powerful demigod would be the very thing to balance the odds. How bad is it?”
Tunny ran his tongue around the inside of his mouth, glanced about at the hills, and the fields, and the men digging. “It’s bad.”
“But we have a chance?”
“If Rucksted arrives in time, and the enemy can’t stay together, and we’re lucky with the weather…” Tunny broke out that radiant grin of his, the deep lines crinkling around his eyes. “There’s always a chance. But any delay works in our favour.”
“Hmmm.” Orso narrowed his eyes towards that tower house on the hill, wondering if the Young Lion was at that very moment considering the position through his eyeglass. “Colonel Gorst?”
“Your Majesty?”
“I would like you to conduct Corporal Tunny and his Steadfast Standard across those fields. Seek out the intrepid Lord Governor of Angland! Seek him out with the most pomp, ceremony and military bluster possible. Tunny, I want your bloody salute to take an hour minimum.”
“And once I’ve saluted?”
“Then you invite the Young Lion to dinner. I may not be his equal with a sword, but I flatter myself to believe that I’m more than a match for him with a fork. My father used to say a good king should attend always to the opinions of his subjects. My mother would add that he should then entirely ignore ’em. Let’s hear the bastard out.” And Orso winked. “At great length.”
The men kept digging. Out across the fields, the starlings swarmed back up into the afternoon sky.
Bad Ground
“Bad ground,” said Antaup, thumping a fist worriedly on the ancient parapet.
From the roof of the tower-house, Leo could see the whole valley. Stoffenbeck nestled between two hills—a rocky bluff overlooking the river to the west, a gentle ridge above ripe wheatfields to the east.
“Ground we’ve got to cross to reach Adua,” said Jin.
That would’ve been easy in peacetime. Two paved roads converged on the town from either side of the hill the tower-house stood on, met in Stoffenbeck’s pretty market square and became one, then headed due south towards the capital. Trouble was, the country between swarmed with King Orso’s forces. They’d fortified a wide crescent in the freshly reaped fields north of the town, bristling with stakes and gleaming spear points. There was more metal, along with a few fluttering standards, spread out across the summit of the grassy ridge. Squinting through his eyeglass, Leo could see some men on top of the bluff as well. Wagons, too, maybe. He handed the eyeglass to Antaup. “How many men, do you reckon?”
“Hard to say. In the centre, they look well dug in, but the hills are weaker held. I see some King’s Own standards. Some others I don’t recognise.”
“More than we were expecting,” murmured Leo. Far more than they’d been hoping for. Looked like there might be a fight after all.
“We’ve still got the numbers,” growled Jin, all Northern bravado. “Two to one, maybe.”
“Maybe.” But a good chunk of them Leo didn’t trust. Isher’s men were well drilled, but most of the Open Council’s forces had lovely uniforms but no discipline at all. Barezin had put together what he proudly called a Gurkish Legion, but he’d taken anyone with an exotic look regardless of whether they could even speak to each other, let alone had worn armour before. A good portion of Lady Wetterlant’s beggarly troops had most likely joined for a set of clothes then stolen away during the storm, taking their supplies with them. Then there was the Great Wolf, who every day seemed more likely to fight against Leo than for him.
“Might be we should attack now,” said Jin, squinting up at the sun. “There’s still a few hours o’ daylight.”
Antaup handed Leo the eyeglass. “Our men are nearly ready to go.”
“Good old Anglanders,” said Leo, watching their orderly columns tramp from the road and form neat battle lines at the base of the hill, the flags they’d fought under across the North and back flying overhead. Made him proud to see them. Made him proud to lead them. He scanned the fields they might soon be advancing across and caught sight of another flag, coming fast towards them. A white horse on a golden sun, flashing and twinkling at the head of two dozen armoured men.
“The Steadfast Standard,” murmured Leo.
Antaup raised his brows. “Looks like His Majesty wants to talk.”
Leo couldn’t have asked for a more splendid group around him: Lords Isher and Barezin and a good twenty other members of the Open Council, Lord Mustred and a dozen other noblemen of Angland, as well as Stour’s man Greenway and Rikke’s man Hardbread. And yet he felt very much alone as the king’s standard-bearer reined in his snorting mount on the hillside, the Steadfast Standard snapping majestically with the breeze and two dozen Knights of the Body in full battle armour clattering to a halt behind. He was a grizzled old veteran with a glint in his eye and a relaxed style in the saddle, but he produced the most impeccable salute Leo ever saw. Crisp, elegant, no self-regarding flourish. The lords of the Open Council, festooned with enough braid between them to rig a fleet, could’ve learned a thing or two about what a real soldier looked like.
&nb
sp; “Your Grace! My lords of the Open Council! Representatives of the North! I’m Corporal Tunny, standard-bearer to the High King of the Union, His August Majesty King Orso the First. Colonel Gorst, Commander of the Knights of the Body, I believe you all know.”
Being dragged from the Lords’ Round by his boyhood hero had taken away none of Leo’s admiration for the man. Had increased it, if anything. He was slightly hurt that Gorst sat frowning into the distance without even glancing in his direction.
“Corporal… Tunny?” Barezin’s jowls trembled as he scornfully raised his chin. “They’re wasting our time!”
“It’s his message that matters,” grumbled Mustred, “not his rank.” Leo would happily have swapped a few armchair generals for corporals of long experience.
“I’ve dabbled with higher, my lords,” said Tunny, grinning, “but it never suited me. Carrying His Majesty’s standard is as much honour as I can manage.”
“The Steadfast Standard,” Leo found he’d murmured, with not a little awe.
Tunny grinned up fondly at it. “The very one King Casamir rode under when he delivered Angland from the savages. Makes you think about the Union’s proud history. All that the provinces owe to the Crown.”
Leo frowned. “If men like Casamir still wore the crown, I daresay we’d have no quarrel.”
“Fancy that. No quarrel is exactly what His Majesty wants. In the hopes of getting there, he’s invited you to dinner.” Tunny gave Leo’s sprawling collection of allies a faintly amused glance. “Just the two of you, though, he wouldn’t want the conversation to wander too far from the matter.”
“Which would be?” asked Isher.
“Your demands and his possible concessions to those demands. The king knows men of your quality wouldn’t lead soldiers against him without legitimate grievances. His Majesty is fully prepared to fight, but he wishes at all costs to avoid shedding Union blood on Union soil.”
“He’s playing for time,” burst out Barezin. “I’ve a mind to order my men across those bloody fields and take my dinner in bloody Stoffenbeck without his bloody invitation!”
The Trouble with Peace Page 46
