“I need at least a day. Two, probably,” he replied.
“Very well.”
Corfe turned to go, but she called him back.
“One more thing, Colonel—two more, in fact. For the first, there is a Fimbrian grand tercio on the march out there, trying to intercept the southern Merduk army. It may well be closer to you than Martellus is. I shall not presume to teach you tactics, but it might be best to combine with it ere you launch into the enemy.”
Corfe nodded. His mind was racing, juggling the information, trying to make a plan, a sense of it.
“And the other,” the Queen Dowager went on. “I shall write out a commission for you which will await your return. If you can save Martellus and the Fimbrians, you shall be a general, Corfe.”
He looked at her unsmilingly. I am tasting the carrot, he thought. When shall I feel the stick? But all he said was “Goodbye, lady,” before striding out the door.
H IS men had been billeted in an empty warehouse down by the river. They were lying there with nothing to cover them, on a stone floor which was inadequately strewn with straw. Heaped around their sleeping bodies were opened barrels of salt pork and hardtack and kegs of the weak beer which the Torunnan military quaffed daily. They had torn down some of the timber sidings of the building’s interior to make smoky fires. In the collective fug of the warehouse, the tribesmen stank and the smoke smarted Corfe’s eyes. He roused Andruw, Marsch and Ebro, and the trio stared at him as though he were a ghost, their eyes red-rimmed pits, the filth of the march north still slobbering their clothing.
“What ho, the popinjay,” Andruw said, rubbing his eyes, managing a tired grin.
Corfe began removing the court uniform and donning his old one. He felt furiously ashamed to be clean and well dressed while his men lay like forsaken vagabonds upon the straw-strewn stone. “I thought you would be billeted in regular barracks,” he said, savagely angry.
“It’s all they could find, apparently,” Andruw told him. “I don’t give a damn. I’d have slept in a ditch, the men too. The horses are being well looked after, though. I made sure of that. They too have straw to lie on.”
“Let the men sleep. You three come with me. We have work to do.”
His three officers obeyed him like laboured old men. The expression on Corfe’s face quelled any questions they might have had.
Torunn in winter, like all the northern cities, was a choked quagmire, the streets running with liquid mud, commoners splashing through it ankle-deep, their betters on horseback or carried in sedan chairs or sitting in carriages. It was a weary trek through the crowds under a thin drizzle, but the rain woke them up. Corfe was glad of it. He could still catch the scent of Odelia on his skin, even over the stink of his scarlet armour.
Companies of Torunnan regulars elbowed aside the crowds of civilians at frequent intervals, all heading towards the city walls. The capital was crawling with activity, but there seemed to be no panic, or even unease as yet. The news of Ormann Dyke’s fall was not yet common knowledge, though it was known that the refugee camps about the city walls were about to be broken up. As the foursome made their way to the northern gate, Corfe filled in his subordinates on the situation. Andruw became silent and glum. Like Corfe, he had served at the dyke, but for longer. He had friends with Martellus. The dyke had been his home. Marsch, by contrast, seemed uplifted, almost merry at the thought of meeting a thousand more of his fellow tribesmen.
The prospective recruits were encamped a mile from the walls, out of the swamp of the refugees. They had posted sentries, Corfe was gratified to see, and as he and his three comrades puffed up the slope to meet them a knot of riders thundered out of their lines, coming to a mud-splattering halt ten yards away. The lead rider, a young, raven-dark man as slender as a girl, called out in the language of the tribes, and Marsch called back. Corfe heard his own name mentioned, and the dark rider’s eyes bored into him.
“I hope they don’t put too much store by appearances,” Andruw muttered. “We should have ridden.”
The dark rider dismounted in one fluid movement, and came forward. He was shorter even than Corfe, and he wore old-fashioned chainmail of exquisite workmanship. A long, wickedly curved sabre hung at his side, and Corfe noted the light lance dangling from the pommel of his horse’s saddle.
“This is Morin,” Marsch said. “He is of the Cimbriani. He has six hundred of his people here. The rest are Feldari, and a few of my own people, the Felimbri. He has been elected warleader by the host.”
Corfe nodded.
The dark tribesman, Morin, launched into a long and passionate speech in his own language.
“He wishes to know if it is true that his men are to fight the Merduks only,” Marsch translated.
“Tell him it’s true.”
“But he also says that he will fight the Torunnans too if you wish. They tried to enslave his men when first they arrived, and had them disarmed. Three were killed. But then they were released again. He”—here Marsch sounded apologetic—“he does not trust Torunnans, but he hears you were an officer under John Mogen, and so you must be an honourable man.”
Corfe and Andruw looked at each other. “Torunnan military courtesy is as famed as ever, I see,” Andruw murmured. “I’m surprised they didn’t bugger off back to the mountains.”
“They want to fight,” Marsch said simply, whilst beside him Ensign Ebro, a prime example of Torunnan military courtesy, glowered at the ground.
“Tell Morin,” Corfe said, holding the eyes of the dark tribesman, “that as long as his people serve under me, they shall be treated like men, and I shall speak for them in everything. If I break faith with them, then may the seas rise up and drown me, may the green hills open up and swallow me, may the stars of heaven fall on me and crush me out of life for ever.”
It was the ancient oath of the mountain tribes which Marsch and the rest of the Cathedrallers had once sworn to him. When Marsch had finished translating it to Morin, the dark tribesman instantly fell on one knee and offered Corfe the hilt of his sabre—and Corfe heard the same words coming back at him in the rolling tongue of the Cimbriani.
His little army had just grown by a thousand men.
I T would take not two days but three to get the command ready for the road north. Thirteen hundred men and almost two thousand horses, plus a baggage train of some two hundred mules. The entire column had been fitted out in the discarded Merduk armour which lay mouldering in a quartermaster’s warehouse, and the new men’s gear was lathered in red paint, just as that of the original Cathedrallers had been. They had looked somewhat askance at the Merduk equipment at first. Unlike Marsch and his five hundred, they possessed their own weapons and wore finely wrought mail hauberks, but Corfe had insisted that they don the same armour his original command had fought in down south. Also, he wanted heavy cavalry, the shattering impact of an armoured charge. Half of the newcomers had powerful recurved compound bows of horn and mountain yew and bristling quivers hung from their cantles, but they were now outfitted with the lances of the Merduk heavy horse. They were to be shock troops, pure and simple.
Thirteen hundred men, a thousand of whom had never been part of a regimented military command before. Corfe organized them into twenty-six troops, fifty strong each, and sprinkled the three hundred survivors of his original command throughout the new units as NCOs. Two troops made up a squadron, and four squadrons a wing: thus three wings, plus a squadron in reserve to guard the baggage and spare horses. Corfe made Andruw, Ebro and Marsch wing commanders, Ebro almost speechless with gratitude at being given a real command at last.
All very well on paper, but the reality was infinitely more complex. It took a day and a half to equip the new men and reorganize the command. Morin, it turned out, spoke good Normannic and Corfe detailed him as his adjutant and interpreter. The tribesman was none too pleased at not having command of a wing, but he knew nothing of the tactics that Corfe meant to employ, and had to be content with the promise of a field command at a later date. As it was, his pride was satisfied with relaying Corfe’s orders as though he had given them himself.
The command was heterogenous to an extreme, liable to sub-divide along the lines of tribe. The new men saw themselves as Cimbriani or Feldari rather than Cathedrallers, but once they had a few battles under their belt, Corfe knew that would change.
