The Iron Wars

animated. He gave her a brief outline of the short campaign, neither boasting nor deprecating. When he was done she looked at him in some wonder.

“So the Felimbri make soldiers. If we’d known that twenty years ago it would have saved the country some grief. You are down to three hundred now, you say.”

“Yes, plus some two dozen wounded I had to leave with Aras.”

She smiled, glad to be able to give him the news. “It’s lucky your savages acquitted themselves so well. There are a thousand more of them currently awaiting you at the North Gate. News travels fast in the mountains, it appears.” Better not to tell him that these men had almost been sent to the galleys by the King. He would find out soon enough.

His eyes were glittering, fingers whitening around the wine glass. “By the Saints—” He bowed his head and for an astonished instant she thought he might weep, but she heard him give a strangled laugh instead. When he looked up the relief was engraved in his features like the words on a tombtop. She saw then how tautly strung he was, and had some inkling of the strain that bent him.

The wine glass shattered in a spray of scarlet.

“Forgive me.” He shook the liquid from his fingers, grimacing. His palm was gashed and trickling blood.

“Corfe. . .” she said, and took his bloody hand, pulled him across to her. It was like tugging on the branch of an unyielding tree for a moment, before he gave in. He knelt on the floor and buried his face in her lap with a sigh. Summoning the Dweomer, she smoothed away the slash in his palm, restoring the skin as though she were shaping warm wax. As the spell worked the energy in her flickered. She felt her years dragging at her limbs, age baying for her life.

He would have risen, but she held him there, suddenly needing his youth close to her.

“You can rest a while. The Merduks have drawn half their army off from the dyke. Campaigning has finished for the winter. I will see to it that your men have all they need.” Stay with me.

“No.” He raised his head. His eyes were dry. “It’s just begun. I believe they’ve outflanked the dyke somehow. Martellus is in trouble, I know it.”

The soldier again. He had retreated from her. She let him go, and he rose to pace about the room, pausing to stare at his healed hand and then at her.

“You are a witch then.”

“Indeed,” she said wearily. “What nonsense are you talking about the dyke?”

“It’s a feeling, nothing more. Has Martellus sent any dispatches lately?”

“Not for ten days. But the roads are bad.”

“He’s cut off already then.”

“Oh, for God’s sake! Are you an oracle, who knows this through intuition alone?”

He shrugged. “I know it. For what purpose would the Merduks mobilize a great army in the depths of winter? They are making another assault, that’s clear—but not a head-on one this time. They’re doing something else, something we have no idea of. And time is not on our side. I must go north.”

She saw she could not move him. “You need rest, you and your men. I’ll have couriers sent to the dyke. We’ll find out the truth of it.”

He hesitated. “All right.”

Their eyes locked. Odelia knew there was greatness in him, something she had glimpsed before with John Mogen. But there was something else, too. An injury that refused to heal, old agony which racked him yet. She thought it might be that pain which drove him on, which had changed him from the lowly ensign of Aekir to the man who stood here now, his star on the rise. But still, the pain was always there.

She rose in her turn and padded over to him, wrapped her arms about him and kissed him on the lips, crushing her mouth against his.

“You will come to bed now.”

He was still tense, resisting her. “I have not yet reported to the King. And I must see these new recruits . . .” He faltered. “Why?” he asked. There was genuine puzzlement in his voice.

She grinned fiercely. “I want you there, and you need to be there too.”

At last he smiled back.

• • •

F IFTY leagues, a crow might fly, nor-nor-east from the room where Corfe and the Queen Dowager shared a bed. Across the empty hills which bordered the Western Road, itself a brown swampish gash across the earth with old corpses littering its length. Thousands had died along that road, lying down in the mud and rain in the retreat from Aekir and the trek from Ormann Dyke, relinquishing their grip on a life which had become a waking nightmare.

But now Ormann Dyke was burning.

The smoke could be seen for miles, a black, thunderous reek of destruction. Men were fighting in the midst of it. A thousand Torunnans, valiant with despair, struggled vainly to stem the onslaught of the Merduk army. The enemy had already crossed the Searil in force and was overrunning the three-mile length of the Long Walls, which for the first time in their proud history were about to fall to an assault.

The rest of the dyke’s garrison was in full retreat, its artillery spiked and left behind to burn, its stores destroyed, the men marching with nothing more than the armour on their backs and the weapons in their hands. Their comrades left behind at the dyke were buying time with their lives, precious hours of marching which might yet save what was left of Martellus’s army.

The army moved in a vacuum. Around it, the countryside was alive with harassing clouds of enemy light cavalry which severed communications with Torunn and the south. No one in the capital even suspected that Ormann Dyke had fallen. The Merduk light horse had already slain half a dozen couriers which Martellus, in desperation, had sent south.

 

T HIRTY leagues away, another column of troops, this time black-clad Fimbrians, their pikes resting on their shoulders, their fast pace eating up the miles in a deadly race. They were coming in from the north-west, the last direction the Merduk High Command was looking. Their mule-mounted scouts ranged far ahead of the main body, seeking out the whereabouts of the third army in the region, striving to come to grips with it before it might descend upon Martellus’s flank and complete the destruction of the dyke’s garrison.

 

A ND the third army, the largest of the three, had left behind the ships which had transported it across the Kardian Sea and was steadily making its way north-west to cut off Martellus’s retreat. In its van rode the elite Merduk cavalry, the Ferinai, and behind them the shock troops of the Hraibadar, armed now with arquebuses instead of the spears and tulwars with which they had assaulted Aekir. War elephants by the score marched like mobile towers in their midst, and others in the rear hauled huge-bored siege guns through the mud whilst alongside strode the men of the Minhraib, the feudal levy of Ostrabar, and regiments of horse-archers from Ostrabar’s new ally the Sultanate of Nalbeni. A hundred thousand men moving in four columns, each several miles long. And in the middle of this moving multitude trundled the chariot of Ostrabar’s Sultan, Aurungzeb the Golden; to its rear were the eighty heavily laden wagons which transported the Sultan’s household, his campaigning gear and his concubines. Aurungzeb liked to go to war in style.

 

“T HEY’VE gone,” Joshelin said with low harshness. “You can get up off your bellies, priests.”

Albrec and Avila rose out of the tall grass they had been skulking in. Behind them Siward stood and slapped out the burning end of his slow-match, then replaced the end in the wheel lock of his arquebus.

“What were they?” he asked his fellow Fimbrian. “Foragers, or scouts?”

“Scouts. Merduk light horse, a half-troop. A long way from the main body, I’m thinking. Where are the Torunnans? Looks like they’ve given over the whole damn country to the enemy.”

Albrec and Avila listened to the exchange in shivering silence. They were wet through, mud-stained and hungry and their legs wobbled under them, but the two old soldiers seemed to be built out of some other substance than mere human flesh. Twenty years older than either of the two monks, and they were as fit and hardy as youths.

“Must we go farther today?” Avila asked.