Ships from the West

but must be borne in a palanquin like some kind of aged libertine.

'Have you heard the rumours too, Aria?'

'About my wedding? Yes, Mother.' The girl's eyes fell. 'I am to be married to the King of Torunna, and Nasir is to marry his daughter.'

'You know then. I am sorry. You should have heard it from me.'

'It's all right. I know what is expected of me. I suppose it will be quite soon now. In the kitchens they are talking about a caravan being prepared for Torunn, and Nasir is to lead an army to help King Corfe. Imagine Mother, Nasir leading an army!' She smiled. She was a quiet, grave girl, but the smile lit up her face.

Heria looked away. 'He will be fine, as will you.' 'Will you be coming with us?'

The question rocked her. 'I -1 don't know.' A maniac notion filled her head, a vision of herself at her daughter's wedding, flinging herself at the groom, begging him to remember her. She blinked her stinging eyes clear. 'Perhaps.'

Aria took her hand. 'What is he like, Mother? Is he very old?'

She cleared her throat. 'Corfe? He is - he is not so old.' 'Older than you?'

She gripped her daughter's fingers tightly. 'A little older. Some years older.'

Aria looked thoughtful. 'An old man. They say he is lame, and bad-tempered.'

'Who says?'

'Everyone. Mother, my hand . . .' Heria released it. 'Are you all right, Mother?'

'I'm fine, my dear. Tired. Ask the maids to bring in a blanket. I believe I may well lie here and doze a while.'

Aria did not move. 'They've been giving you more of their drugs, haven't they?'

'It calms me, Aria. Don't be worried.'

Don't be worried, she thought. You are to marry a good man. The best of men. She closed her eyes. Aria eased her back on to the divan and stroked her hair. 'It will be all right, Mother. You'll see,' she whispered, her lovely face grave again.

Heria slept, and from below her closed eyelids the tears trickled down soundlessly.

There was an hour before the dawn, in the black throat of the night, when even a city as large as Torunn slept. Corfe's horse picked its way through the streets unhindered and he rode it with the reins loose on its neck as though the tall gelding knew the way better than he. And perhaps it did, for the bay destrier brought Corfe unbidden to the North Gate, where he saluted the sleepy gate guards and they, grumbling and unaware of his identity, opened the tall postern for him to lead his mount through. Once beyond the city walls he let the gelding have its head, and it burst into a fast canter. The moon was riding high and gibbous in a star-brilliant sky, but it was just possible to make out the glimmerings of the dawn speed­ing its way up over the distant ramparts of the Jafrar in the east. Corfe left the pale ribbon of the Kingsway and headed north, his steed dipping and rising under him with the undulating ground. But he kept his knees clamped to the gelding's sides and a loose bite on the reins, and almost it seemed that he might be afloat in a grey moonlit sea upon some bobbing ship, save for the eager grunts of the horse and the creak of the saddle under him.

He reined in at last, and the steam of his mount's sweat rose around him, clean and acrid at the same time. Dismounting, he hobbled the gelding with the ease of long practice, and after he had slipped off bridle and saddle, he rubbed it down with a wisp of coarse upland grass. The gelding clumped away, happy to nose at the yellow grass and sniff for better fare. And Corfe sat on the swell of the hill, grey in the moonlight, and stared not east at the gathering dawn, but west to where the Cimbrics loomed up dark and forbidding in the dregs of the night.

Tribesmen's tales told of a hidden pass in those mountain fastnesses, a narrow way where determined men had once forged a passage of the terrible mountains. The journey was semi-legendary - the reputation of the Cimbrics as the harshest peaks in the world had been well-earned - but it had happened. And Corfe had a map of the route.

Almost four centuries before, when the Fimbrians had been lords of the world, they had sent out exploratory expeditions to all corners of the continent. One of those expeditions had had as its mission the discovery of a pass through the Cimbrics. They had succeeded, but the cost had been horrend­ous. Albrec, High Pontiff of Torunna and all the Macrobian Kingdoms, had discovered the text of the expedition's log in the Inceptine archives of Torunn cathedral. He seemed to consider the discovery of unique and ancient documents to be part of his calling. Or perhaps it was a hobby of his. Corfe smiled at the moonlit night. Even now that Albrec was a middle-aged man at the head of a large and influential organ­isation, there was something of the enthusiastic boy about him when it came to a dusty manuscript or mildewed grim-oire. This ancient record, an untidy bundle of dog-eared and mouldering papers, he had shown to Corfe on a whim, never guessing how important it might prove.

For Corfe intended to use the log to take an army across the Cimbrics and win the war at a stroke.

It was a huge gamble, of course; the log might be a fiction, or at the least hopelessly out of date. But the alternative to such a bold stroke would be either a full frontal assault on the Thurian Line, or a fall back to the purely defensive business of holding Gaderion and hoping for the best. To try and break through the Thurian Line would be foolhardy to the point of lunacy. It was too heavily fortified, and the defenders would outnumber the attackers many times over. As for the magni­ficent works at Gaderion, formidable though they were, Corfe placed little faith in the merits of a static defence, and had done since Aekir, all those years ago. He had seen supposedly impregnable cities and fortresses fall too often to be sanguine about the chances of containing the Himerians up at the gap.

There was snow still clinging to the flanks of the Cimbrics. It glowed in the bright moonlight, and the mountains seemed to be disembodied, luminous shapes that hung suspended over the shadowed expanse of the darkened land at their feet. Deep in the midst of the range, the snow remained inviolate all year round, and even among the lesser peaks the drifts would still be deep and cold. Spring took its time in the high places.

The Fimbrian expedition, three hundred strong, had started out in the Year of the Saint 117, with the melting of the first snows, and once they had fought their way into the centre of the range they had travelled along the backs of huge glaciers as though they were a network of roads amid the tall peaks which spawned them. Crevasses and avalanches had killed them by the score, but in the end they had won through thirty leagues of the most forbidding terrain in the world, and had come finally to the shores of the Sea of Tor, and the trading post of Fort Cariabon as it then was. Even with the renowned stamina and endurance of the Fimbrians, they had been two weeks on the mountainous section of the journey, and half of them had been left frozen corpses upon the flanks of those mountains.

Corfe had been mulling over the log for months, and had interviewed a succession of Cimbric tribesmen to test its veracity. Nothing they had told him about the region con­tradicted the account, and he was convinced that the route was still feasible, if difficult. He could see no other way of winning this war.

His horse, bored with the winter-dry grass, nosed his neck and its warm breath blew down his nape. He rubbed the velvet-soft nostrils absently, and turned his head to peer eastwards.

The rising sun had still to clear the Jafrar, but its promise was clear in the lightening sky. A skein of cloud had caught in the summits of the eastern mountains and looked as though it had been set afire from below. Behind it the sky was palest aquamarine, a pink glow riding up it moment by moment.

He turned his gaze north-east, to where the Thurians stood, the first flush of the dawn beginning to pale their eastern sides. The world he knew was defined by the brutal majesty of mountains. The Cimbrics, the Thurians, the Jafrar. They gave birth to the rivers which watered the world. The Ostian, the Searil, the Torrin. Somewhere out there in the low country leading down to the Kardian Sea there stood Aurungabar, capital of Ostrabar. He had been there as King and had seen the huge labour of rebuilding which the Merduks had under­taken. Myrnius Kuln's vast Square of Victories still remained, opening out from the foot of what had been the cathedral of Carcasson; but it was called Hor el Kadhar now, Glory of God. The old Pontifical Palace was now the pleasure garden of the Sultan wherein his harem had been installed. And somewhere among those buildings there slept right at this moment the woman who had been Corfe's wife.

Why he should find himself thinking about her at this moment he did not know, except that it was usually on waking and on going to sleep that he saw her most clearly. Those ill-defined periods of the day between darkness and light. Or perhaps she was lying awake herself in the pre-dawn murk, and thinking of him. The thought made his heart beat faster. But the woman he pictured in his mind was young, not much more than a girl. She would be almost out of her thirties now, a mature woman. And he, he was a greying martinet with a halt leg. They were strangers, complete and utter. And yet the pain remained.