The general seemed to read his thoughts. ‘The lesser walls are hardly the Shield, Bahn. They won’t stand long against modern cannon, and I’m fairly certain they’ve brought a few of those along with them.’
Bahn nodded, rubbing a hand across the back of his neck.
‘In the meantime, they’d slash and burn all of Khos from under us. If we sit and wait for them, there’ll be nothing left to protect save for this city.’
‘But in the field, sir,’ he blurted. ‘How can we possibly defeat that many?’
‘We don’t need to defeat them, Bahn. All we need to do is buy ourselves some time.’
Bahn massaged his tired eyes for a moment. It felt as though he was speaking in a different language to the man.
‘But, General,’ he said, as Creed began to pace back and forth before him. ‘Even if we mobilize every Khosian reserve that we can, even if we scrape the barrel, we can only put six or seven thousand shields into the field. Our resources of blackpowder have gone to the navy and the defence of the walls. Our field cannon are few. We don’t even have the guns to match them, never mind the men.’
The general stopped before the windows, his hands behind his back. In the light, his black hair shone with a near-blue lustre.
Whether he was looking at his painting or the silent walls of the Shield, Bahn couldn’t tell.
‘It’s a bad stroke they’ve given us, I’ll grant you that. I’d hardly credit the Matriarch with such imagination. And it’s too risky for Sparus to have thought of it. Perhaps old Mokabi has come out of his retirement, then. I sense his flair in this.’
Creed paused, and his head tilted towards the window: at the very instant that he had spoken the name of the retired archgeneral – the same man who had led the Imperial Fourth Army to the walls of Bar-Khos – a boom sounded from the direction of the Shield.
Another sounded, and then another, until the windows themselves were trembling from the rippling concussions.
The Mannian guns had started to fire on the Shield once more.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Beachhead
The woman held a mug of chee for him when he woke late the next day. Ash struggled to sit up, his chest feeling tight and sore. Cakes of sand fell from one side of his face as he coughed long and hard into his fist, his eyes watering from the pain of each convulsion.
Through his tears Ash saw that the storm had passed in the night, though a wind still blew strong from the sea. The breeze had dried his clothes and his skin, at least those parts he had not been lying on, and heat too wafted over from the small fire next to him.
When Ash stopped coughing long enough to take a tentative sip of the steaming chee, he found his spirits lifting.
‘My thanks for your help,’ said the woman on the sand next to him. ‘It was timely of you.’ She held out a hand to him. ‘Mistress Cheer.’
Ash shook it. She had a man’s grip, and it was not shy of strength. For a moment the air between them was a passing curtain of smoke, and he peered through it, taking in her features beneath her thick thatch of dark hair. She reminded him of his wife’s mother, of all people – Anisa, possessed of that rare attractiveness that seemed to improve with age and stature.
And then the smoke cleared, and Ash saw the curl of the old scar that clove through her upper lip – like a hair-lip, though running up to her face and across her left eye.
‘Ash,’ he said, somehow still taken by her looks.
She creased her lips with a smile. ‘A pleasure,’ she told him, and appeared to mean it.
Behind her, the young women she had been protecting the previous night were rifling through a collection of clothes chests. It seemed they were putting together outfits for the day.
Mistress Cheer gathered her skirt above her ankles and stretched her stockinged feet out to the fire with a sigh. ‘A fine mess they’ve made of the landing,’ she said with a gesture of her head towards the bay.
‘Where are we?’ Ash asked over the brim of his mug.
‘Khos. In a place called Pearl Bay.’
He’d been right then. Now, no doubt, the army would be heading for Bar-Khos in an attempt to take the city from behind. The boy’s mother lived near there, he recalled.
He kept his thoughts to himself as he drank down the chee. The wonderful sensation of warmth in his belly made him realize how long it had been since he had enjoyed a hot drink or a meal. Mistress Cheer squinted at him, taking in the dark tone of his skin. ‘What are you – a mercenary? You’re a little old for this work, don’t you think?’
‘Bodyguard,’ he said without thinking.
‘Oh? And your employer?’
Ash nodded in the direction of the sea.
She blinked quickly, evaluating his meaning, and said, ‘Then you’re a timely stroke of good fortune, is all I can say. Our own man couldn’t swim, though he thought it too unimportant to mention until we were neck-deep in water. My girls are in need of some protection, as you might have noticed.’
They both looked towards the girls she spoke of. He caught glimpses of them beyond the flames as they were dressing; the stretch of smooth calves and thighs; the sway of a heavy breast; lips being painted; a pair of dark- kohled eyes glancing across at him.
Ash looked away and cleared his throat.
Prostitutes, he realized, feeling thick-headed. Here to follow the army during its campaign.
Ash sipped his chee and considered her offer. It would take time to find his bearings here, and to discover a way through to the Matriarch. It could take days, he knew, if not longer. All the while, he would have to keep up with the army.
Ash could recognize a gift of fate when he came across one.
‘Pay?’ he enquired, though the question was merely for show.
‘Oh, we have money. I can pay you campaign rates of ten marvels a day, and meals on top of that when we get ourselves back on our feet.’
‘Fifteen,’ he said, again for the sake of appearances.
‘Agreed,’ she allowed him with a gracious nod of her head. ‘And thank you, again. Truly. That was a courageous act, stepping in to help us like that in your condition.’
‘It was your fire I was really after,’ he confessed, but she only smiled as though he was joking.
Ash left them to finish their preparations, and, with his sodden boots perched next to the fire, he went for a swim to clean and wake himself.
The beach appeared even more desolate in the light of day. Wreckage lay strewn in heaps amongst frayed cordage and seaweed; bodies too, the early crabs clambering over whitened skin. Birds shrieked in the air, squabbled over scraps on the sand. Ash walked to loosen his limbs, seeing how the beach curved inwards into the bay itself, where the fleet rode at anchor in the choppy waters, barely diminished, for all the battering the storm had given it. He could see rafts and boats bringing in men and supplies; even cannon poking out over the bobbing gunwales.
The invasion force stopped him in his tracks. The imperial army had established a beachhead on the white sands and the system of dunes behind them. Smoke drifted from a thousand campfires and more, and the ground swarmed thick with figures all the way to the first sloping pastures that rose between the tawny hills. A village lay in blackened ruins on a ridge that overlooked the far end of the bay, a bleak counterpoint to the smouldering fort on the opposite side of the beachhead.
Ash looked for any sign of Sasheen, and almost immediately spotted an army standard of a black raven on a white field, flapping on the beach amongst several others. Try as he might, though, he couldn’t see the Matriarch amongst so many.