The Tyranny of Distance
‘I can’t see a damn thing!’ hissed Finree’s father, taking a stride forwards and peering through his eyeglass again, presumably to no more effect than before. ‘Can you?’
‘No, sir,’ grumbled one of his staff, unhelpfully.
They had witnessed Mitterick’s premature charge in stunned silence. Then, as the first light crawled across the valley, the start of Jalenhorm’s advance. Then the drizzle had begun. First Osrung had disappeared in the grey pall on the right, then Clail’s Wall on the left, then the Old Bridge and the nameless inn where Finree had almost died yesterday. Now even the shallows were half-remembered ghosts. Everyone stood silent, paralysed with anxiety, straining for sounds that would occasionally tickle at the edge of hearing, over the damp whisper of the rain. For all that they could see now, there might as well have been no battle at all.
Finree’s father paced back and forth, the fingers of one hand fussing at nothing. He came to stand beside her, staring off into the featureless grey. ‘I sometimes think there isn’t a person in the world more powerless than a supreme commander on a battlefield,’ he muttered.
‘How about his daughter?’
He gave her a tight smile. ‘Are you all right?’
She thought about smiling back but gave up on it. ‘I’m fine,’ she lied, and quite transparently too. Apart from the very real pain through her neck whenever she turned her head, down her arm whenever she used her hand, and across her scalp all the time, she still felt a constant, suffocating worry. Time and again she would startle, staring about like a miser for his lost purse, but with no idea what she was even looking for. ‘You have far more important things to worry about—’
As if to prove her point he was already striding away to meet a messenger, riding up towards the barn from the east. ‘News?’
‘Colonel Brock reports that his men have begun their attack on the bridge in Osrung!’ Hal was in the fight, then. Leading from the front, no doubt. She felt herself sweating more than ever under her clothes, the damp beneath Hal’s coat meeting the damp leaking through from above in a crescendo of chafing discomfort. ‘Colonel Brint, meanwhile, is leading an assault against the savages who yesterday …’ His eyes flickered nervously to Finree, and back. ‘Against the savages.’
‘And?’ asked her father.
‘That is all, Lord Marshal.’
He grimaced. ‘My thanks. Please, bring further news when you are able.’
The messenger saluted, turned his horse and galloped off through the rain.
‘No doubt your husband is distinguishing himself enormously in the assault.’ Bayaz leaned beside her on his staff, bald pate glistening with moisture. ‘Leading from the front, in the style of Harod the Great. A latter-day hero! I’ve always had the greatest admiration for men of that stamp.’
‘Perhaps you should try it yourself.’
‘Oh, I have. I was quite the firebrand in my youth. But an unquenchable thirst for danger is unseemly in the old. Heroes have their uses, but someone has to point them the right way. And clean up afterwards. They always raise a cheer from the public, but they leave a hell of a mess.’ Bayaz thoughtfully patted his stomach. ‘No, a cup of tea at the rear is more my style. Men like your husband can gather the plaudits.’
‘You are far too generous.’
‘Few indeed would agree.’
‘But where is your tea now?’
Bayaz frowned at his empty hand. ‘My servant has … more important errands to run this morning.’
‘Can there be anything more important than attending to your whims?’
‘Oh, my whims stretch beyond the kettle …’
Hoofbeats echoed out of the rain, a lone rider thumping up the track from the west, everyone straining breathlessly to see as a chinless frown emerged from the wet gloom.
‘Felnigg!’ snapped Finree’s father. ‘What’s happening on the left?’
‘Mitterick bloody well went off half-drawn!’ frothed Felnigg as he swung from the saddle. ‘Sent his cavalry across the barley in the dark! Pure bloody recklessness!’
Knowing the state of the relationship between the two men, Finree suspected Felnigg had made his own contribution to the fiasco.
‘We saw,’ her father forced through tight lips, evidently coming to a similar conclusion.
‘The man should be bloody drummed out!’
‘Perhaps later. What was the outcome?’
‘It was … still in doubt when I left.’
‘So you haven’t the slightest idea what’s going on over there?’
Felnigg opened his mouth, then closed it. ‘I thought it best to return at once—’
‘And report Mitterick’s mistake, rather than inform me of its consequences. My thanks, Colonel, but I am already amply supplied with ignorance.’ And her father turned his back before Felnigg had the chance to speak, striding across the hillside again to look fruitlessly to the north. ‘Shouldn’t have sent them,’ she heard him mutter as he squelched past. ‘Should never have sent them.’
