He couldn’t help but like this lad. Wicks reminded him of his younger brother: feckless and afraid of no one. He’d been one of the few to approach Bull and converse with him during the march so far; a thief playing at being a soldier, he’d told Bull, as he showed him the branding scar on his wrist, told him how he’d been released from a military stockade on the day the army had marshalled outside Bar-Khos.
Bull looked at the wineskin in his hands and said, ‘I thought you were skint. Have you been thieving again?’
‘I went swimming,’ he told Bull. ‘Over by the temples. If you go when the sun’s still up you can see the coins lying along the riverbed.’
‘You fool,’ growled Bull. ‘It’s bad luck to steal people’s offerings. You want to bring a curse on your head?’
Wicks waved his hand. ‘What difference does it make? They throw the coins away and never see them again.’
There was no point trying to explain it to him. The lad simply had no concept of tradition or belief.
Again that roar of throats in the night. It sparked a decision within him.
Bull climbed slowly to his feet.
‘Where are you going?’ Wicks asked in sudden interest.
‘To pick a fight,’ he told him as he cast his cloak aside. ‘Want to come?’
‘Wait a minute,’ said Wicks, and tried unsuccessfully to get to his feet. Bull had to help him up in the end. ‘We should pool our coins. I’ll lay the bets for you.’
‘Wicks,’ Bull said with a grin that split his face from ear to ear; and then the smile vanished in a flash. ‘You really think that anyone’s going to bet against me?’
Bahn was walking a little easier tonight. The pains in his calves and back from riding all day were no longer excruciating, as they had been on the previous nights of the forced march, for he was finally getting used to the saddle again. They were covering almost twenty laqs a day at their present pace. It was as hard as General Creed dared to push the army, for they still had days of travel ahead of them. The Lord Protector wanted the men fighting fit once they engaged.
In front of Bahn the general and Halahan strolled side by side. They were in good spirits tonight, having reached Juno’s Ferry on schedule, where the army had joined the two thousand men of the Hoo. The mood of the men too seemed especially boisterous. They had crossed the Chilos, and now faced a march through the lands of the Reach, hard-bent on closing with the enemy. Tonight the reality of their situation was beginning to hit home. They were in need of some distractions.
Bahn could smell the hazii weed from Halahan’s pipe as they walked. He didn’t smoke the stuff normally, but tonight he would have welcomed a proper pull on a hazii stick. Now that they had crossed the Chilos, he too had felt a sense of cold reality coming over him.
‘They’re approaching Spire, according to our scouts,’ Creed was saying before him. ‘Following the Cinnamon as we expected. In a day or two they’ll be entering the Silent Valley. We’ll engage them there, before they reach Tume. If it goes badly for us we can fall back to Tume and regroup.’
‘Vanichios will be glad to see you,’ Halahan drawled, causing Creed to shoot him a dark look.
Bahn recalled the name. There was history between the general and the Principari of Tume, though his recollections were vague on the subject. Something about a duel.
‘The reserves from Al-Khos,’ Halahan ventured from beneath the wide brim of his straw hat. ‘Do we know when they’ll reach Tume?’ His crippled leg was causing him to limp more than usual this evening, a result, he had said, of his knee playing up in the falling temperatures.
‘If they’re pushing hard enough, they should be halfway there by now. That is, of course, if that fool Kincheko doesn’t dither around.’
‘You think he will?’
Creed gave a shake of his head. ‘Who knows with that fool? He might linger for a day or two just to show his contempt for my orders.’
‘It was a greater fool who made him Principari of Al-Khos in the first place.’
‘Aye, well Michine blood is thicker than wine.’
A squad of Specials, just arrived in from the ferry, tramped by burdened with their backpacks and arms. They nodded in turn as they stepped past the general in a ragged line. One of them knew Bahn, an old friend of his brother Cole. The man surprised him with a warm embrace and words of good luck, before hurrying to catch up with his squad.
‘What’s going on over there?’ Creed had stopped, and was studying a crowd of men gathered in a clearing of poplars next to the river. The men were Volunteers and Greyjackets mostly, cheering and jostling each other as they watched two men stripped to the waist slugging it out.
A detachment of Red Guards was attempting to break them up, led by an officer on zelback, though the Volunteers shouted the officer away, jeering at him and spooking his zel by waving their hands at it. The animal reared, almost tossing the rider from the saddle. Other Volunteers were stepping in between them to try to diffuse the matter. Bahn saw the general’s eyes narrow.
‘Look at them. Always disregarding discipline at the first opportunity. This is why we Khosians have the finest chartassa in all the Free Ports.’
Halahan chuckled by his side. ‘They’re only having their fun while they still can.’
‘Fun? It isn’t fun they need, Colonel. This is an army here, not a rabble.’
‘Oh, come now, once its morning again and we’re back on the march, they’ll be as tame as kittens.’
Creed snorted.
They walked on, the general showing his face to the men and seeing for himself how they fared. He spoke to some of the animal handlers in the corrals where the war-zels were quartered, and to the quartermaster as he flustered over the supplies being ferried across. They even stopped at one of the skyships that had landed for the night, asking the crew if they needed anything, careful not to show them his frustrations at the lack of skyships accompanying the army; a mere three of them and a handful of small skuds, hardly adequate for controlling the skies.
Amongst the Hoo, the men of the elite chartassa, Creed sought out Nidemes, the colonel who had fought with Creed and Tanser-ine in Coros. Creed talked with the small quiet man alone for a time, while Halahan smoked his pipe and leaned on his knee while he talked with some of the men, veterans all of them; and Bahn blinked across the flames at heavily scarred soldiers with hard eyes, who sat wrapped in their purple cloaks, saying nothing.
‘He’s worried,’ Creed told Halahan when they continued onwards. ‘He wanted to know our plan of attack.’
‘What did you tell him?’
‘The truth. That I’m still thinking on it.’
Halahan chuckled drily, and the sudden sound of it irritated Bahn for some reason.
‘These men face an army of forty thousand,’ he heard himself say. ‘And you laugh because you haven’t a plan yet.’
Halahan plucked the pipe from his mouth and flashed his mocking eyes at him. ‘And I’ll be there with them, won’t I?’
Bahn closed his mouth in exasperation.
‘What’s bothering you, Bahn?’ asked the general. ‘Speak up. Spit it out, man.’
Bahn lowered his tone of voice. ‘It just seems to me, General, that we’re marching into certain defeat here, and that you’re both happy enough to be doing it.’
Creed started walking again, more briskly now. The other two strode after him.
‘Nothing is ever certain, Bahn,’ Creed snapped over his shoulder.
‘No. But you can always consider the odds.’
‘ Pff. Odds? We lost those a long time ago.’
He didn’t wish to push him any further. When all was said and done, he still had every faith in this man.
Bahn had fought on the Shield in those early days of the war, after all. Back then, General Forias had still been Lord Protector of Khos, that decrepit nobleman who had gained his role through family connections. Even before the siege had begun, when the Mannians had first taken Pathia to the south and refugees had flooded
