worn and tired, as if every step was a fight against something. He was too weary of the struggle to continue.
He wandered through the city for a while with no clear aim in mind, but something in him must have known whither he was bound for he found himself at the Abbey of the Orders as it was called, though once it had been the headquarters of the Inceptine Order alone. But that was before Macrobius had come into the city, and the black-clad Ravens had taken wing for Charibon rather than kiss the ring of a man they saw as an impostor, a heresiarch. This was now the palace of the High Pontiff, or one of them.
Corfe was admitted by a novice Antillian with white hood and dun habit. When asked his business he replied that he was here to see the Pontiff. The Antillian scurried away.
An older monk of the same order popped out of a nearby doorway soon after. He was a tall, lean man with a sharp little beard and dirty bare feet slapping under his habit.
“I am told you wish to see the Pontiff,” he said, politely enough. “Might I ask your business with him, soldier?”
Of course. Corfe could not expect to see the head of the Church on demand. Much water had flowed under many bridges since he and Macrobius had shared a turnip on the nightmarish retreat from Aekir. Macrobius had become one of the figureheads of the world since then.
“My name is Corfe,” he said. “If you tell His Holiness that Corfe is here, he will see me, I am sure.”
The monk looked both taken aback and amused. “I will see what I can do,” he said. “Wait here.” And off he went.
Corfe was left just within the gate of the abbey, kicking his heels like a beggar awaiting charity. A dull anger grew in him, a tired resentment that was becoming a familiar feeling.
The monk came back accompanied by an Inceptine, a plump, well-robed figure who must have stayed to take his chances with this new Pontiff when his fellows flew the coop. He had a mouth like a moist rose and his fleshy nose overhung it. His eyes were deep-set and dark-ringed. The face of a debauchee, Corfe thought sourly.
“His Holiness is too busy at the moment to see anyone,” the Inceptine said. “I am Monsignor Alembord, head of the Pontifical household. If you have any petitions you wish to place before the Holy Father then you can place them through me. Now, what is your business?”
Corfe remembered a blind old man whose empty eye-sockets had been full of mud. A man whose life he had saved at risk to his own. He remembered sheltering under a wrecked cart and watching the rain pouring down on the displaced tens of thousands who walked the Western Road.
“Tell His Holiness that I hope he remembers the turnip.”
The two clerics gaped at him, then closed their mouths and glared.
“Leave this place at once,” Alembord said, his jowls quivering. “No one makes mockery of the head of the Holy Church. Leave or I shall call some Knights to eject you.”
“Knights—so you are getting those together again, are you? The wheel comes round once more. Tell Macrobius that Corfe will not forget, and that he should never forget either.”
The renegade Inceptine clapped his hands and shouted for the Knights, but Corfe had already turned on his heel and was walking through the gate, some small, odd sense of mourning twisting in him. Ridiculous though it was, it felt like the loss of a friend.
T HE rest of his day was spent in the fog and mire of administrative matters, problems which he could get his teeth into and worry until they stopped kicking. It helped. It filled in the time, and kept his mind from thinking of other things.
Corfe managed alternately to bully and wheedle the Commissariat into issuing his men a week’s rations for the march south. He divided his men into five under-strength tercios, each under a man recommended by Marsch as a leader, or
Twelve men had to be rejected as unfit; the galleys had broken them too completely for them ever to undertake active service again. These men Corfe sent on their way, giving them their rations and telling them to go home, back to the mountains. They were reluctant to leave because, Marsch said, they had sworn the oath along with the rest and would be bound by it until death. So Corfe asked them to act as recruiting agents once they regained their native valleys, and to send word of how many other tribesmen would be willing to take service under his banner when the spring came. He knew now that Lofantyr would never give him regular Torunnan troops. His command would have to be self-supporting.
As for the banner they would fight under, it took some thought. The tribesmen were pagan, and would baulk at fighting under the holy images which dominated the banners of the Ramusian armies, even if such banners were allowed to them. Corfe finally solved the problem in his own way, and had a seamstress in the garrison run up a suitable gonfalon. It was hastily done, and somewhat crude in conception as a result, but it stood out well atop its twelve-foot staff. Bright scarlet-dyed linen, the colour of sunset, and in sable at its heart the horned outline of the cathedral of Carcasson in Aekir. It was as Corfe had last seen it, a stark shadow against a burning sky, and the tribesmen were happy with it because to them it seemed the representation of Kerunnos, their horned god whom they worshipped above all others. Torunnan soldiers who saw the banner as it twisted lazily in the breeze saw only the outline of the cathedral, however, not its other, heretical, interpretation, and in time Corfe’s men would be given a name because of that banner. They would be called the “Cathedrallers.”
Now this last day in Torunn was wheeling to a close. The sun had disappeared behind the white summits of the Cimbrics in the west and Andruw was seeing to the last details of the command’s organization. Corfe set off for the Royal palace and his audience with the Queen Dowager, and so preoccupied was he with the events of the day and the planning for tomorrow that he did not take off the scarlet Merduk armour, but wore it through the corridors of the Royal apartments to the bafflement and dismay of footmen and courtiers.
“L EAVE us,” the Queen Dowager Odelia said sharply when Corfe was shown into her apartments by a gaping doorman.
They were not in the circular chamber this time, but in a broad hall-like room with a huge fireplace occupying one wall, logs the thickness of Corfe’s thighs burning within it and iron firedogs silhouetted against the flames. The fire was the only light in the room. Corfe sensed rafters overhead, invisible with height. The walls were heavily curtained, as was the other end of the room. Rugs on the floor, soft under his boots after the stone of the palace corridors. The sweetness of a gleaming censer hanging by long chains from the ceiling. Crystal sparkling with firelight on a low table, comfortable divans drawn up to the fire. The place was how Corfe imagined a sultan’s chambers might be, upholstered and draped and hidden, hardly any bare stonework visible. He took off his brutal helm and bowed to the golden-haired woman whose skin seemed to glow in the hearthlight.
“You look like a bogey-man destined for the terrifying of children, Corfe,” Odelia said in that low tone of hers. A voice as dark as heather-honey, it could also cut like a switch.
“Take off the armour, for pity’s sake. You need not fear assault here. Where in the world did you get it from anyway?”
“We must make do with what we can get, lady,” Corfe said, frowning as his fingers sought the releasing straps and buckles. He was not yet familiar with the working of this harness, and he found himself twisting and turning in an effort to take it off.
The Queen Dowager began to laugh. “We had a contortionist come to amuse the court with his antics last spring. I swear, Colonel, you put him to shame. Here, let me help.”
She rose to her feet with a whisper of skirts, and Corfe could have sworn he saw something black scuttle from beneath them into the shadows beyond the firelight. He paused in his struggles, but then Odelia was before him and her nimble fingers were searching his armour for the straps which would loosen it. She had his back-and breastplates off in a twinkling. They thumped dully on the rug, and after them in swift succession came the vambraces, the baldric which supported his sabre, his gorget, pauldrons, thigh-guards and gauntlets. He was left standing amid a pile of glinting metal, feeling oddly exposed. He realized he had enjoyed the sensation of her hands working about him and he was almost disappointed when she stepped back.
“There! Now you can sit and sup with me like a civilized man—if a badly dressed one. What happened to the fine clothes I had the tailor run up for you?”
“These are my campaigning clothes,” Corfe said awkwardly. “I take my command out at dawn.”
“Ah, I see. Have a seat then, and some wine. Stop standing there like a graven image.”
