It was
Over seven hundred corpses littered the field, and of those only thirty were from Corfe’s command. Duke Narfintyr’s army was a dismembered wreck. More than a thousand prisoners taken, scores more ridden down and killed in the pursuit all the way to the outskirts of Staed. A few hundred had mustered some shreds of discipline and had fought their way clear of the trap. They were in the hills now, their way to the town barred by the heavy cavalry. They could stay there. Corfe’s men were hollow-eyed and quaking with tiredness, the adrenalin of the battle dying. And they had lost heavily in horses: the carcasses of more than eighty of the big destriers littered the field.
Corfe stood beside his steaming, quivering horse, grimacing at the flap of flesh some blade had taken out of its shoulder. This was the worst part, the part he hated, when the glory of the fight gave way to maimed men and animals and the trembling aftershock of battle. When one had to look at the contorted and broken faces of the dead, and see that they were one’s fellow countrymen, killed because they had been ordered to leave their small farms and do the bidding of their noble masters.
Andruw joined him, bareheaded, his blond hair dark with sweat. His usual jauntiness was subdued.
“Poor bastards,” he said, and he nudged the body of a dead boy—not more than thirteen—with his foot.
“I’ll hang Narfintyr, when I catch him,” Corfe said quietly.
Andruw shook his head. “That bird has flown the coop. He got on a ship when word of the battle reached the town. He’s out on the Kardian, probably making for one of the Sultanates, and half his household with him. The piece of shit. But we did our job, at any rate.”
“We did our job,” Corfe repeated.
“A night cavalry charge,” Andruw said. “That’s one for the history books.”
Corfe wiped his eyes, knuckling his sockets until the lights came. The tiredness was like a sodden blanket which hung from his shoulders. He and his men were shambling ghosts, mere wraiths of the butchering demons they had been during the fight. He had two hundred of them overseeing the slow, limping progress of the prisoners back to town, whilst the rest looked after their wounded comrades and scoured the battlefield for anyone who might have been overlooked and who was lying still alive under the sky. Others under Ebro were commandeering Narfintyr’s castle and all it contained, setting up a crude field hospital and collecting anything in the way of provisions that Staed had to offer. So many things to do. Clearing up after a battle was always much worse than the preparation for one. So many things to do . . . but they had won. They had defeated a force many times their own, and at such slight cost to themselves that it seemed almost obscene. Not a battle, but a massacre.
“Have you ever seen men such as these?” Andruw asked him wonderingly. He was staring at the Cathedrallers who shambled about the field leading their worn-out horses, their armour cast in the strange and barbaric style of the east. They looked like beings from another world in the morning light.
“On horseback? Never. They make Torunnan cuirassiers look like boys. There is some. . . energy to them. Something I have never seen before.”
“You have made a discovery here, Corfe,” Andruw said. “No—you are creating something. You have added discipline to savagery, and the sum of the two is something awesome. Something new.”
They were both drunk. Drunk with fatigue and with killing. And perhaps with more than that.
“A few of the surviving local notables are waiting for us in the town,” Andruw said more briskly. “They want to treat for peace and hand in the arms of their retainers. They have no stomach for fighting, not after this.”
“Do they know how few we are, the shape we’re in?” Corfe asked.
Andruw grinned evilly. “They think we’ve two thousand men out here, everyone a howling fiend. They don’t even know which country we hail from.”
“Let’s keep them in ignorance. By God, Andruw, I’m as feeble as a kitten, and I feel like lord of the world.”
“Victory will do that,” Andruw said, smiling. “Me, I just want a bath and a corner to pitch myself in.”
“It’ll be a while before you have either. We have a busy day ahead of us.”
A LBREC had never known any soldiers before, not even the Almarkan troops of the Charibon garrison. He had assumed that men of war were necessarily crude, rough, loud and overbearing. But these men, these Fimbrians, were different.
A blinding white snowscape that reared up in savage, dazzling mountains on both sides. Snow blew in flags and banners off the topmost peaks of the Cimbrics to his right and the Thurians to his left. This was the Torrin Gap, the place where west met east, an ancient conduit, the highway of armies for centuries.
Fimbrians had marched here before, back in the early days of the empire when they had been a restless, eternally curious folk. They had sent expeditions north-east into the vast emptiness of the Torian plains where now Almark’s horse-herds grazed. They had been the first civilized men to cross the Searil River into what was now Northern Torunna, and their parties of surveyors and botanists had crossed the southern Thurians into what was now Ostrabar. They had been a nation full of questions once, and sure of their own place in the world. Albrec knew his history; he had pored over untold volumes relating to the Fimbrian Hegemony when he had been assistant librarian in Charibon. He knew that the western world as it presently existed had largely been created by the Fimbrians. The Ramusian kingdoms had each been provinces of their empire. The capitals of the western kings had been built by Fimbrian engineers, and the great highways of Normannia had been constructed to speed the passage of their tercios.
So he felt strangely as though he were back in time, lost in some earlier century when the black-clad pikemen of the electorates had reigned supreme across the west. He was in the company of a Fimbrian army marching east, something which had not been seen in four hundred years. He felt oddly privileged, as if he had been given a glimpse of a larger world, one in which the rituals of Charibon were archaic irrelevancies.
But he was not sure what to make of these hard-faced men who were, for the moment, his travelling companions. They were sombre as monks, laconic to the point of taciturnity, and yet generous to a fault. He and Avila had been completely outfitted with cold-weather clothing and all forms of travelling gear. They had been given mules from the baggage train to ride when every man in the army marched on foot, even its commander, Barbius. Their hurts had been doctored by army physicians with terse gentleness, and as they were completely inept their rations were cooked for them at night by Joshelin and Siward, the two soldiers who seemed to have been assigned to look after them: two older men who had been relegated from the front rank of fighting infantry to look after the baggage train, and who accepted their extra duties without a murmur.
“An incredible society, it must be, in Fimbria,” Avila said to his friend as they rode along near the back of the mile-long column.
“How is that?” Albrec asked him.
“Well, so far as I can make out, there is no nobility. That’s why their leaders are called electors. They have a series of assemblies at which names are put forward, and the male population
“Strange,” Albrec said. “Equality among all men. Have you noticed how free and easy the men are with our friend the marshal, Barbius? He has no household worth speaking of, no bodyguards or retainers. And he keeps no state, except for a tent where the senior officers meet. But for the fact that they do as he says, there’s no difference between him and the lowliest foot-soldier.”
“It is incredible,” Avila agreed. “How they ever conquered the world I’ll never know. Were they always like this, Albrec?”
“They had emperors once, and it was the choosing of the last one that sent the electorates into civil war and provided the opportunity for the provinces to break away and become the Seven Kingdoms.”
“What happened?”
“Arbius Menin, the emperor, was dying, and wanted his son to succeed him even though he was a boy of eight. Sons had succeeded fathers before, but they had been men of maturity and ability, not children. The other electors wouldn’t stand for it, and there was war. The empire crumbled around their ears while Fimbrian battled Fimbrian. Narbosk broke away from Fimbria entirely and became the separate state it is today. The other electorates finally patched up their differences and tried to win the provinces back, but they had bled the country white and no longer had the strength. The Seven Kingdoms arose in place of the empire. The
