back and they were stumbling over hewn tree-stumps, cleared space. Before them, the sagging and skewed posts of the stockade stood deserted, and there was a stink of burning in the air, the reek of corruption. Beyond the clearing, they could glimpse the sea through the trees.
“Hello!” Murad shouted, his voice cracking with strain. “Anyone about?”
The gates of the stockade had been smashed flat. A litter of bodies was scattered here, an arquebus trodden into the mud. Blood stood in puddles with a cloud of midges above every one.
“Lord God,” Hawkwood said. Murad covered his eyes.
Fort Abeleius was a charnel-house. The Governor’s residence had burnt to the ground and was still smouldering. Remnants and wreckage from other huts and buildings were scattered about in broken, splintered piles. And there were bodies and parts of bodies everywhere, scores of them.
Bardolin turned aside and vomited.
Hawkwood was holding the back of his hand to his nose. “I must see if the ship, survived. I pray to God —”
He took off at a run, stumbling over corpses, leaping broken lumber, and disappeared in the direction of the beach beyond the clearing.
Murad was turning over the bodies like a ghoul prowling a graveyard, nodding to himself, making a study of the whole ghastly spectacle.
“The stockade was overrun from the north first,” he said. “That split our people in two. Some made a stand by the gate, but most I think fell back to the Governor’s residence…” He shambled over that way himself, and picked his way through the burnt ruins of the place that he was to have administered his colony from.
“Here’s Sequero. I know him by the badge on his tunic. Yes, they all crammed in here’—he kicked aside a charred bone—‘and when they had held out for a while, some fool’s match set light to the thatch, or perhaps the powder took light. They might have held out through the night otherwise. It was quick. All so quick. Every one of them. Lord God.”
Murad sank to his knees amid the wreckage and the burnt bodies and set the heels of his hands in his eyes. “We are in hell, Bardolin. We have found it here on earth.”
Bardolin knew better, but said nothing. He felt enough of a turncoat already. There had been over a hundred and forty people here in the fort. Aruan had said the ship would survive. Who manned it now?
“Let’s go down to the sea,” he said to Murad, taking the nobleman by the elbow. “Perhaps the ship is still there.”
Murad came with him in a kind of grieved daze. Together they picked their way across the desolation, gagging on the smell of the dead, and then plunged into the forest once more. But there was that salt tang to the air, and the rush of waves breaking somewhere ahead, a sound from a previous world.
The white blaze of the beach blinded them, and the horizon-wide sea seemed too vast to take in all at once. They had become used to the fetid confines of the rainforest, and it was pure exhilaration to be able to see a horizon again, a huge arc of blue sky. A wind blew off the sea into their hot faces. A landward wind, just as Aruan had promised.
“Glory be!” Bardolin breathed.
The
Murad had sunk down upon the sand. “Well, mage,” he said in something resembling his old manner. “At least one of us is happy. It is time to leave, I think. We have outstayed our welcome in this country. Thus ends New Hebrion.”
But Bardolin knew that this was not the end of something. Whatever it was, it had only just begun.
FOUR
T HE King was dead, his body lying stark and still on a great bier in the nave of Torunn’s cathedral. The entire kingdom was in mourning, all public buildings decked out in sable drapes, all banners at half mast. Lofantyr had not reached thirty, and he left no heir behind him.
T HE tyredness buzzed through Corfe’s brain. He stood in shining half-armour at the dead King’s head, leaning on an archaic greatsword and inhaling sweet incense and the muddy smoke of the candles that burnt all around. At the King’s feet stood Andruw in like pose, head bent in solemn grief. Corfe saw his mouth writhe in the suppression of a yawn under the heavy helmet, and he had to fight not to smile.
The cathedral was thronged with a murmuring crowd of damp-smelling people. They knelt in the pews or on the flagged floor and queued in their hundreds to have a chance to say goodbye to their monarch. Unending lines of them. They were not grieving so much as awed by the solemnity, the austere splendour of the dead King’s lying-in-state. Lofantyr had not ruled long enough to become loved, and was a name, no more. A figurehead in the ordered system of the world.
Outside it sounded as though a heavy sea were beating against the hoary old walls of the cathedral. Another crowd, less tractable. The surf-roar of their voices was ominous, frightening even. A quarter of a million people had gathered in the square beyond the cathedral gates. No-one was quite sure why—probably they did not truly know themselves. The common people were confused. Palace bulletins stated that the recent battle had been a victory for Torunnan arms. But why then was their King dead and eight thousand of their menfolk lying stark and cold upon the winter field? They felt themselves duped, and were angry. Any spark would set them off.
And yet, Corfe thought, I am expected to take my turn standing ceremonial guard over a dead man, when I am now commander-in-chief of a shattered army. Tradition. Its wheels turn on tyrelessly even in a time like this.
But it gave him a space to think, if nothing else. Two days since the great battle of the Torunnan Plain. “The King’s Battle” they were already calling it. Odd how people always thought it so important that a battle should have a name. It gave some strange coherence to what was, after all, a chaotic, slaughterous nightmare. Historians needed things neater, it seemed.
Twenty-seven thousand men left to defend the capital—the Last Army. Torunna had squandered her soldiers with sickening prodigality. An entire field army destroyed in the sack of Aekir. Another decimated in the fall of Ormann Dyke. And even this remaining force had lost nearly a third of its number in the latest round of blood-letting. But the Merduks—how many had they lost? A hundred thousand in the assaults on Aekir, it was reckoned. Thirty thousand more in front of the dyke. And another forty thousand in the King’s Battle. How could a single people absorb losses on that scale? Numberless though the hordes of the east might be, Corfe could not believe that they were unaffected by such awful arithmetic. They would hesitate before committing themselves to another advance, another around of killing. That was his hope, the basis for all his half-formed plans. He needed time.
Corfe and Andruw were relieved at last, their place taken with grim parade-ground formality by Colonels Rusio and Willem. Corfe caught the cold glance of Willem as he marched away towards the back of the cathedral. Hatred there, resentment at the elevation of an upstart to the highest military command in the west. Well, that was not unexpected, but it would complicate things. Things were always complicated, even when it came to that most basic of human activities, the killing of one’s fellow man.
C ORFE was unburdened of his armour by a small regiment of palace servitors in the General’s Suite of the palace. His new quarters were a cavernous cluster of marble-cold rooms within which he felt both uncomfortable and absurd. But the general could no longer be allowed to mess with his men, drink beer in the common refectories or pick the mud off his own boots. The Queen Dowager—now Torunna’s monarch and sole remaining vestige of royalty—had insisted that Corfe assume the trappings of his rank.
It is a long time, Corfe thought to himself, since I shared cold turnip with a blind man on the retreat from
