But Roper was making things difficult. He had won an overwhelming tactical victory and, for the people of the Black Kingdom, martial achievement trumped all else. So Uvoren used that to his advantage. Subtly, through a dozen sources scattered about the Hindrunn, a new rumour began to circulate. It was being said that after Roper’s latest victory, the Sutherners had approached him with a deal to share the eastern lands and that Roper had accepted. It was all the fortress spoke of for days: had you not yet heard that the Black Lord planned to make peace with the Sutherners, in exchange for a fat slice of the east?
But in the end, it was Roper himself who eliminated the need for Uvoren’s machinations. On the twenty-third day after Roper had left the fortress, new tidings reached Uvoren. They started faint and unconfirmed, then became a little more persistent. Finally, there could be no doubt. Roper, having marched to Githru and sought to bring the Sutherners to battle there, had suffered a cataclysmic defeat.
It had been tactical incompetence; no more. Reportedly, he had held a strong defensive position and legionaries in good morale but, spooked by something, he had tried to withdraw at the last minute. The Sutherners had unleashed their knights and the narrow battlefield had seen a slaughter.
And now they were retreating. The remnants of Roper’s legions were withdrawing to the Hindrunn, hounded by the Suthern army. Roper was fighting a desperate rearguard action with what forces remained to him and a column of wounded men were beginning to draw near to the Hindrunn. Uvoren rode out to meet them himself.
Wagons, stuffed with the injured, were trundling by the dozen along the road back to the Hindrunn. Even to Uvoren, this was a pitiful sight. It seemed they had retreated so fast that the surgeons had not even had time to address their wounds. Shrivelled intestines lay sprawling from several legionaries, who were pale and still. Most were evidently dead already. Blood, both dried and fresh, stained everything and the men groaned and writhed as the wagons jolted over ruts and stones in the track. Some of the men were bandaged in linen strips stained rust-red, many just hunched and unmoving. Few of them would survive much beyond their return to the Hindrunn.
“Not many of them,” observed Uvoren.
“The rest are dead, lord,” responded the wagon-driver. “These were all we could save.”
“Almighty god,” said Uvoren, mouth twitching. He stared at the driver in incredulity, keeping his horse level with the man. “How many does Boy-Roper still have?”
“Few enough, lord. Fifteen thousand, I would guess.”
Uvoren coughed and spluttered. “Fifteen thousand! The Hindrunn will not be pleased.”
So that was that. Roper’s nerve had failed him, as Uvoren had known it would, and he had thrown away his warriors and his chance of ruling the Black Kingdom. Uvoren did feel the glow of triumph that he had expected, but also a wave of hot anger. Incompetence: that was all that had killed those legionaries. Roper had no business being a ruler. He was weak.
“I bet the first victory was Tekoa,” he suggested to Tore, legate of the Greyhazel, as the two rode back to the Hindrunn together. There was a chill on the air and Uvoren, like all good Anakim, was enjoying the cold. That was why there was so little glass in the Hindrunn: to be warm was to be insulated from the wild. The Anakim had a word for this insulation: fraskala, the feeling of being cocooned. The opposite, expressed as a positive, was maskunn: exposed.
“He would have known that Roper could not be trusted and would have kept him on a short leash.”
“And Tekoa let him off his leash for the second battle,” agreed Tore. “With the result that Roper spent twenty thousand legionaries.” He spoke bitterly. It was a terrible waste and even if they could still repel the Sutherners from their lands, it would take generations to recover from such a loss.
“Let the legions know!” said Uvoren, glee and rage vying for control of his voice. “Tell them what Roper has done, Bera,” he addressed Tore by his haskoli nickname. “Do you know, we might get away without destroying Roper’s forces? I doubt they’ll fight for him after a second disaster. If we kill Roper, the others will join us.”
“Probably. But kill Roper in front of the gates and we can see how his remaining legionaries react.”
“Very good. A couple of cannon will do nicely.”
“And what about Tekoa? How’s he going to react to all this? If he’s even alive.”
“He’ll have survived,” said Uvoren, confidently. “He’s not one to die in a losing cause. He’ll have seen which way the wind was blowing. We’ll take him in. Give him a nice position and some influence and he’ll be happy. And with his daughter widowed? Maybe I’ll take her in too.”
“You have a wife,” observed Tore.
“Yes,” said Uvoren impatiently. “But think about the authority invested in a child that was half-Lothbrok, half-Vidarr. That’d be a lineage to rival the Jormunrekur.”
“With or without the Vidarr, we can rule for a thousand years.”
The two men returned to the fortress. The wagons of wounded that trundled through the gates and straight into the surgery shortly after them would be the last soldiers allowed in whilst Roper still lived. Behind them, the locking bars clunked into place and the portcullis, lowered only when a hostile army approached, slid down in front of the Great Gate.
The legions were summoned. The two regular legions, the Blackstones and the Greyhazel, assembled on the wall either side of the Great Gate, prepared to receive Roper’s men with a show of force. The others, the auxiliaries, formed up closer to the middle
