Hawkwood's Voyage

like gore-crows. There were women, pathetically haggard, who were offering themselves to passers-by for food or money, and here and there some callous souls were playing dice on a cloak thrown over the mud.

Corfe glimpsed violence, also. There were groups of men with long knives extorting anything of value from fellow refugees, once the Torunnans had passed by. He wondered if Pardal’s comrades had made it this far.

What he saw disturbed him. There seemed to be little order within the fortress, no organization or authority. True, men in Torunnan black were on the battlements, their armour gleaming darkly, but they appeared thin on the ground, as though the garrison were not up to strength. And no effort had been made, it seemed, to bring the mob of fleeing civilians under control. If Corfe were in command here, he’d have them herded west, well clear of the dyke, and then perhaps try and rig up provisions for them and police the camps with what men he could spare. But this—this was mere anarchy. Was Martellus still in command, or had there been some reshuffle which had engendered this chaos?

He found a spot to stop in the shadow of one of the eastern revetments, kicking a couple of sullen young men from the space. They left after a hard stare at the sabre and the ragged remnants of the uniform, but Corfe was too weary and troubled to care. He collected pieces of wood—there were plenty lying about, and he guessed that the refugees had demolished some of the inner stockades and catwalks—and got a fire going with the greatest difficulty. By that time the light was beginning to fail, and across the open ground within the fortress campfires were flickering into life like lambent stars, whilst if he stood up he could see across the Searil river to where the lights of the dyke burned by the thousand. People were crossing the bridge by torchlight in an unending procession and the eastern gates remained open despite the dimming light, which seemed to Corfe to be the merest madness: in the dark, Merduks might mingle with the swarm of civilians entering the fortress and gain access to the interior. Who was in command here? What kind of fool?

Ribeiro was uncommunicative and seemed shaken by the fact that Macrobius had not immediately been recognized. He sat with his swollen head in his hands and stared into the flames of Corfe’s fire as though he were looking for some revelation.

Macrobius, however, was almost serene. He sat on the wet ground, the firelight making a hideous mask out of his savaged face, and nodded to himself. Corfe had seen that look before, on men about to go into battle. It meant they no longer feared death.

Could this crazy old man really be the High Pontiff?

His stomach rumbled. They had eaten nothing in the past day and a half, and precious little in the days before that. In fact, the last time he had eaten a solid meal . . .

The last time, it had been Heria who had prepared it, and brought it to him at his post on the wall of Aekir. It had been dark then, as it was now. They had stood together on the catwalk looking out at the campfires of the Merduk thousands, smelling the tar and smoke of the siege engines, the stench of death that hung over the city continually. He had begged her to go once more, but she would not leave him. That had been the last time he had ever seen his wife; that heartbreaking smile, one corner of her mouth quirking upwards, one eyebrow lifting. He remembered her going down the steps from the wall, the torchlight shining on her hair.

Two hours later the final assault had begun, and then his world had been utterly destroyed.

He felt a hand on his arm and started. It was wholly dark but for the fire. The open ground within the fortress was a flame-stitched blueness in which shadows moved aimlessly.

“She is gone to God’s rest, my son. You no longer have to fear for her,” Macrobius said softly.

“How did you—?”

“You had relaxed, as though in a dream, and then I felt your muscles go as rigid as wood. I am good, I find, at recognizing suffering in others these days. She is with Ramusio in the company of the Saints of heaven. Nothing more can touch her.”

“I hope so, old man. I hope so.”

He could not voice, even to himself, the fear that Heria might yet be alive and suffering torment at the hands of those eastern animals. And so he prayed that his wife was dead.

He stood up abruptly, shaking off the priest’s hand.

“Food. We have to eat if we’re to be good for anything. Ribeiro, look after the old man.”

The young monk nodded. His face was shiny and discol-oured, like a bruised fruit, and he kept spitting out bits of teeth. Privately Corfe did not give much for his chances.

He strode off between the fires, stepping over exhausted bodies lying unconscious on the sodden ground, brushing aside two women who tried to solicit him. It was only in extremity that the true depths and heights of human nature were visible. Folk who had been civilized, upright, even downright saintly in Aekir before its fall were now whores and thieves and murderers.

And cowards, he added to himself. Let us not forget cowards.

No man could truly say what he was until he had been pushed to the edge of things with the precipice of his own ruin staring up at him. Things changed that close to the brink, and people changed too. Rarely, Corfe believed, for the better.

He turned aside at the approach of two Torunnan troopers, twitching his sabre behind his body so it would not be seen. He was not sure what his position might be with the army, whether he was a deserter or a mere straggler, but he felt guilty enough in his own mind not to want to find out.

He had not been afraid on abandoning Aekir. He had seen most of the men he commanded slaughtered on the walls, and had been caught up in the headlong retreat that followed. After that, knowing Heria was lost to him, one way or another, he had merely wanted to leave the blood and the smoke behind. It had been a bitter thing, but he could not remember being afraid. He could not remember feeling anything much. The events in which he had been caught up had seemed too vast for human emotion.

But away from the roaring chaos of that day, he was not so sure. Had it been fear? At any rate, his duty would have been to stay with Lejer’s rearguard and fight on. He would be dead by now in that case, or marching east under a Merduk capture yoke.

“You there!” a voice barked. “Halt where you are. What’s that you’re carrying?”

Two fellow Torunnans. They had noticed the sabre after all. Corfe contemplated running for a second, but then smiled at the absurdity of the idea. He had nowhere else to go.

The Torunnans were in black and scarlet, their half-armour lacquered so that it was like shining ebony. Sabres that were the twin of Corfe’s hung by their sides and they wore the light helms with beak-like nose guards that were typical of their race. One also carried an arquebus over his shoulder, but the slow-match was not lit.

“Where did you get that weapon?” the one without the arquebus demanded.

“From a dead Torunnan,” Corfe said carelessly.

The man’s breath hissed through his teeth. “You God-damned vulture, I’ll stick you like a pig—” But then his companion stopped him.

“Wait, Han. What’s that he’s wearing?”

They both stared, and Corfe could almost have laughed at the dawning comprehension on their faces.

“Yes, I am Torunnan also. John Mogen was my general, and I saw him die on the eastern wall of Aekir. Any other questions?”

I T puzzled Corfe that he was being taken so seriously. He paced the stone floor of the anteroom, listening to the voices rising and falling on the other side of the door. The two troopers had brought him here at once, across the crowded Searil bridge to the dyke and into the very heart of the fortress on the western bank.

Here the chaos had been even greater than it was across the river. The refugees had set up a kind of shanty town of sticks and canvas and whatever else they could find within the fortress, and it spilled beyond the towering walls out into the surrounding countryside. Everywhere fires glittered in the night, stretching far across the land and roughly following the line of the Western Road. Everywhere there was the hubbub and stink of an enormous camp.

It troubled Corfe to see Ormann Dyke in this state. He had always thought of it as impregnable, but then he had thought the same about Aekir in the months before its fall. He had a hollow feeling in the pit of his stomach as he waited to be called in by General Pieter Martellus, the commanding officer. He had seen the long lines of waggons waiting in the drill yards piled high with supplies, and he had seen the activity along the horse lines, the blacksmiths working through the night, their forges like little hell-lit caverns. He had a feeling the dyke was being