The losses sustained had barely impacted the number of men at their disposal. Even so, this was a hammer blow. It was scarcely possible to maintain a supply train through such a hostile land. The food now saturated by the river had been instrumental to their hopes, a fact obvious to all within the valley’s steep walls. Bellamus had seen how the gait of his men had changed in the aftermath of this defeat. They moved in little more than a shuffle, heads so resolutely dipped that it looked as though they feared the valley would pour ferocious soldiers down on top of them, if only they were to raise their eyes to the valley rim.
“What’s the tally?” asked Bellamus.
“Tally?” asked Lord Northwic with a sniff. He looked across at Bellamus with more than a little suspicion. “Twelve thousand men are dead. More numbers for those records of yours.”
Bellamus did not much care about Northwic’s tone. It could have been worse than twelve thousand.
“More,” continued Lord Northwic quietly.
“More what?”
“It’s more than twelve thousand. We have twelve thousand dead, but now we’ve been crippled so dismissively, we’ll lose twice as many again through desertion.”
Bellamus was sceptical. “They’d be fools to leave. Sutherners alone, north of the Abus? They’ll be lucky to survive a night.”
“‘Sutherners?’ You have spent too long among your spies.”
“You are being cold, Ced, though I have no idea why since I played more than my part today.”
Lord Northwic was silent a while. “I know.” He continued staring down at the scene below. He shook his head bitterly. “I know.”
“There’s nothing we can do now,” said Bellamus, his voice more gentle. “We have survived. Now we must resupply. We still far outnumber this Anakim force, we still have our knights. We will fight again another day and we will triumph.” He looked across to Lord Northwic and was surprised to see tears brimming in the old man’s eyes. They built absurdly, threatening to overflow the eyelids until Lord Northwic blinked and cuffed at them. He looked pale and was hunched into his horse, eyes shadowed by a heavily laden brow and hands clutched tightly before him.
“It feels … it feels as though my lungs are bruised,” he said, voice growing thinner and thinner as though he scarce had the heart to finish the sentence.
Bellamus supposed this had weighed particularly heavily on Northwic, who bore ultimate responsibility for this army. It was his organisation which had been so ruthlessly exposed by this attack. Bellamus knew how that felt. He had seen defeats that left him utterly bereft; empty to the extent of feeling physically shrivelled, each breath like trying to swallow butterflies. At that moment, Bellamus himself felt more as though he had been slapped in the face. The word Northwic had used to describe this raid had lodged in him. Dismissive. The masters of this dreamworld had appeared at last and treated their efforts with contempt. Northwic and Bellamus had torched their way through the Black Kingdom, and the response had been silence. In retrospect, that silence seemed ominous.
There was a bitter taste in the valley. Though Bellamus would not admit it, he was beginning to feel lost in this wasteland. From afar, the Anakim had fascinated him. In context, surrounded by an order that was alien to Bellamus, they were more disturbing than fascinating. The haughty, snow-dusted peaks were the overseers of this capricious wilderness, at whose whim you operated. On their return from pursuing Roper, Northwic’s forces had turned a corner on one of the tortuous Anakim roads and startled a grazing aurochs. The enraged bull had marauded through their ranks, lobbing soldiers over the heads of their fleeing compatriots and killing four of them, wounding another score before retreating back into the trees. Every day they lost a dozen foragers to packs of startlingly ferocious wolves, or rogue giant bears that did not behave like the beasts on the south side of the Abus. It was not clear to Bellamus what his men were doing wrong, or how they incurred the wrath of these predators, who seemed to tolerate the Anakim so peaceably.
What kind of people belonged to such a world? In the south, Bellamus had been determined to deconstruct them; certain he nearly understood them. Here, he felt as wide-eyed as any of his men and had felt the breath catch in his throat when the horn had called Enemy Attacking through the mist-smothered camp. He had been foolish. He had not thought any harder than the animal desire to defend, and that had been used to pluck something precious from them. It was a lesson for which he was not sure he could afford the exorbitant fee.
“There is not a single Anakim body down there,” said Lord Northwic. “I was looking. Monsters.”
“So now we know that the Anakim are clever, not indestructible.”
Lord Northwic looked flatly at the younger man.
“Warfare of the mind,” elaborated Bellamus, unwillingly. “They lost men. Of course they did. But they’ve removed the bodies to discourage us for the next time we fight them. They want us to believe they are invulnerable.” Both were quiet
