The Second Empire: Book Four of The Monarchies of God Page 14

  “I know. I can see that.”

  “And the disease you live with—it is not an affliction, either. Do you see that?”

  Bardolin lifted his head and stared at her. “I believe I do, Griella. Perhaps your master has a point.”

  “You are my master now, Bardolin,” she said, and kissed him on his cracked lips.

  M URAD’S town house had survived the war intact but for a few shot-holes in the thick masonry of the walls. When the heavy door was finally opened under his furious knocking the gatekeeper took one look at him and slammed it shut in his face. Murad broke into a paroxysm of rage, hammering on the door and screaming at the top of his lungs. At last the postern door opened to one side, and two stout kitchen lads came out cracking their knuckles. “No beggars, and no madmen allowed at this house. Listen you—”

  Murad left them both groaning and semi-conscious in the street and strode through the open postern, pushing aside sundry servants and bellowing for his steward. The kitchen staff scattered like a flock of geese before a fox, the women yelling that there was a maniac loose in the house. When the steward finally arrived, a cleaver in his hand, Murad pinioned him and stared into his eyes. “Do you know me, Glarus of Garmidalan? Your father is a gamekeeper on my estates. Your mother was my father’s housekeeper for twenty years.”

  “Holy God,” Glarus faltered. And he fell to his knees. “Forgive me, lord. We thought you were long dead. And you have . . . you have changed so—”

  Murad’s febrile strength seemed to gutter out. He sagged against the heavy kitchen table, releasing the man. The cleaver clanged to the floor. “I am home now. Run me a bath, and have my valet sent to me. And that wench there”—he pointed to a cowering girl with flour on her hands—“have her sent at once to the master bed-room. I want wine and bread and cheese and roasted chicken. And apples. And I want them there within half a glass. And a message sent to the palace, requesting an audience. Do you hear me?”

  “Half a glass?” Glarus asked timidly. Murad laughed.

  “I am become a naval creature after all. Ten minutes will do, Glarus. God’s blood, it is good to be home!”

  T WO hours later, he was admiring himself in the full-length mirror of the master bed-room, and the weeping kitchen maid was being led away with a blanket about her shoulders. His beard and hair had been neatly trimmed and he wore a doublet of black velvet edged with silver lace. It hung on him like a sack, and he had to don breeches instead of hose, for his legs were too thin to be revealed without ridicule. He supposed he would put weight on, eventually. He was hungry, but the food he had eaten had made him sick.

  His valet helped him slide the baldric of his rapier over his shoulder, and then he sipped wine and watched the stranger in the mirror preen himself. He had never been a handsome man, though there had always been something about him which the fair sex had found not unattractive. But now he was an emaciated, scarred scarecrow with a brown face in which a lipless mouth curled in a perpetual sneer. Governor of New Hebrion. His Excellency. Discoverer of the New World.

  “The carriage is ready in the court-yard, my lord,” Glarus ventured from the door.

  “I’ll be there in a moment.”

  It was barely midmorning. Only a few hours ago he had been a beggar on a sinking ship with the scum of the earth for company. Now he was a lord again, with servants at his beck and call, a carriage waiting, a king ready to receive him. Some part of the world had been put back to rights at least. Some natural order restored.

  He went down to the carriage and stared about himself avidly as it negotiated the narrow cobbled streets on the way to the palace. Not too much evidence of destruction in this part of the city, at least. It was good of Abeleyn to see him so promptly, but then the monarch was probably afire with curiosity. Important that Murad’s own version of events in the west was the first the King heard. So much was open to misinterpretation.

  Glarus had told Murad of the war, the ruin of the city and the King’s illness while he had pounded his seed into the rump of the whimpering maid. A lot had been happening, seemingly, while he and his companions had been trekking through that endless jungle and eating beetles in order to survive. Murad could not help but feel that the world he had come back to had become an alien place. But the Sequeros were destroyed, as were the Carreras. That meant that he, Lord Murad of Galiapeno, was now almost certainly closest by blood to the throne itself. It was an ill wind which blew nobody any good. He smiled to himself. War was good for something after all.

  The King received him in the palace gardens, amid the chittering of cicadas and the rustling of cypresses. A year before, Murad had sat here with him and first proposed the expedition to the west. It was no longer the same world. They were no longer the same men of that summer morning.

  The King had aged in a year. His dark hair was brindled with grey and he bore scars on his face even as Murad did. He was taller than he had been, Murad was convinced, and he walked with an awkward gait, the legacy of the wounds he had suffered in the storming of the city. He smiled as his kinsman approached, though the lean nobleman had not missed the initial shock on his face, quickly mastered.

  “Cousin, it is good to see you.”

  They embraced, then each held the other at arm’s length and studied the other man’s face.

  “It’s a hard journey you’ve been on,” Abeleyn said.

  “I might say the same of you, sire.”

  The King nodded. “I expected word from you sooner. Did you find it, Murad, your Western Continent?”

  Murad sat down beside the King on the stone bench that stood sun-warmed in the garden. “Yes, I found it.”

  “And was it worth the trip?”

  For a second, Murad could not speak. Pictures in his mind. The great cone of Undabane rising out of the jungle. The slaughter of his men there. The jungle journey. The pitiful wreck of Fort Abeleius. Bardolin howling in the hold of the ship in nights of wind. He shut his eyes.

  “The expedition was a failure, sire. We were lucky to escape with our lives, those of us who did. It was—it was a nightmare.”

  “Tell me.”

  And he did. Everything from the moment of weighing anchor in Abrusio harbour all those months ago through to mooring the ship again that very morning. He told Abeleyn virtually everything; but he did not mention Griella, or what Bardolin had become. And Hawkwood’s part in the tale was kept to a minimum. The survivors had pulled through thanks to the determination and courage of Lord Murad of Galiapeno, who had never despaired, even in the blackest of moments.

  The birds sang their homage to the morning, and Murad could smell juniper and lavender on the breeze. His storey seemed like some cautionary tale told around a sailor’s fireside, not something which could actually have happened. It was a bad dream which at last he had woken from, and he was in the sunlit reality of his own world again.

  “Join me for lunch,” the King said at last when Murad was done. “I also have a tale to tell, though no doubt you’ve heard a part of it already.”

  The King rose with an audible creaking of wood, and the pair of them left the garden together, the birds singing their hearts out all around them.

  T HE message was brought to Golophin in the palace by a breathless boy straight from the waterfront. He had eluded every footman and guard and was bursting with news. The Gabrian Osprey had returned at last, and her captain was having some precious form of supercargo sent to his tower in the hills. It would be there around midafternoon. Captain Hawkwood would like to meet with him this evening, if it was convenient, and discuss the shipment. The whole dockside was in a high state of excitement. The surviving crew members of the Osprey were being feted in every tavern that still existed in the Lower City, and they were telling tales of strange lands, stranger beasts, and rivers of gold!”

  Golophin gave the boy a silver crown for his pains and halted in his tracks. He had an idea he knew what Hawkwood’s cargo was. He snapped to an eavesdropping palace attendant that he w
anted his mule saddled up at once, and then repaired to his apartments in the palace to gather some books and herbs that he thought he might need.

  Isolla found him there, packing with calm haste.

  “Something has come up,” he explained. “I must leave for my tower at once. I may be gone a few days.”

  “But haven’t you heard the news? Some lord who went off to find the Western Continent has come back. He’s to be the star of a levee this afternoon.”

  “I had heard,” Golophin said with a smile. “Lord Murad is known to me. But a friend of mine is . . . is in trouble. I am the only one who can help him.”

  “He must be a close friend,” Isolla said, obviously curious. She had not thought Golophin close to anyone except perhaps the King himself.

  “He was a pupil of mine for a time.”

  A pageboy knocked and poked his head around the door. “The mule is saddled and ready, sir.”

  “Thank you.” Golophin slung his packed leather bag over one thin shoulder, clapped his broad-brimmed hat on his pate, and kissed Isolla hurriedly. “Watch over the King while I’m away, lady.”

  “Yes, of course. But Golophin—”

  And he was gone. Isolla could have stamped her foot with frustration and curiosity. Then again, why not indulge herself? Much though she liked Golophin, she sometimes found his air of world-weary superiority infuriating.

  She would miss the levee and the explorer’s tales, but something told her that Golophin’s urgent errand was tied into the arrivall of this ship from the west.

  Isolla strode off to her chambers. She needed to change into clothes more suitable for riding.

  ELEVEN

  T HE army woke up in the black hour before the dawn, and in the frigid darkness men stumbled and cursed and blew on numbed fingers as they strapped on their armour and gnawed dry biscuit. Corfe shared a mug of wine with Marsch and Andruw while the trio stood and watched the host of men about them come to life.

  “Remember to keep sending back couriers,” Corfe said through teeth clenched against the cold. “I don’t care if there’s nothing to report; at least they’ll keep me updated on your location. And don’t for God’s sake pitch into anything large before the main body comes up.”

  “No problem,” Andruw said. “And I won’t teach your grandmother how to suck eggs, either.”

  “Fair enough.” The truth was that Corfe hated to send the Cathedrallers off under someone else’s command—even if it were Andruw. He was beginning to realise that his elevated rank entailed sacrifice as well as opportunity. He shook the hands of Marsch and Andruw and then watched them disappear into the pre-dawn gloom towards the horse-lines. A few minutes later the Cathedrallers began to saddle up, and within half an hour they were riding out in a long, silent column, the sunrise just beginning to lighten up the lowering cloud on the horizon before them.

  By midmorning the remainder of the army, some six and a half thousand men in all, was strung out in a column half a league long whose head pointed almost due east. In the van rode Corfe, surrounded by the fifteen or so cuirassiers who were all that remained of Ormann Dyke’s cavalry regiment. His trumpeter, Cerne, had insisted on remaining with him, and Andruw had ceremoniously left behind a further half-dozen of the tribesmen as a kind of bodyguard. Behind this little band of horsemen marched five hundred Torunnan arquebusiers followed by Formio’s two thousand Fimbrians, and then another group of some three thousand arquebusiers under Ranafast. After them came the mule train of some six hundred plodding, bad-tempered, heavily laden animals, and finally a rearguard of almost a thousand more Torunnans.

  For the first few miles of their advance they could actually glimpse the Cathedrallers off close to the horizon: a black smudge in an otherwise grey and drear landscape. But towards noon the country began to rise in long, stony ridges across the line of march which slowed their progress and obscured their view of the terrain to the east. By early afternoon the cloud had broken up and there were wide swathes of sunlight come rushing across the land, let slip by fast-moving mare’s-tails high above their heads. At the eastern limit of sight, they could see black bars rising straight into the air and then leaning over as they were taken by the high altitude winds. The smoke from the towns aflame along the River Searil. The infantry stared at the smoke as they marched, and the winding column of men toiled along in simmering silence.

  Camp was made that night in the shelter of a tall ridge. Sentries paced its summit and Corfe allowed the men to light fires, since the high ground hid them from the east and south. It was bitterly cold, and the sky had cleared entirely so that above their heads was a vast blaze of stars, the larger winking red and blue.

  A courier came in from Andruw at midnight, having been five hours on the road. The Cathedrallers were bivouacked in a fireless camp some four leagues south-west of the river. They had destroyed three roving bands of Merduk scavengers at no loss to themselves, and were now turning south-east, parallel with the Searil. There was a large town named Berrona there which seemed not to have been sacked yet, but from the increasing numbers of the enemy that Andruw was encountering, he thought that their main body must not be too far away and Berrona would be too plump a target for the Merduks to pass by.

  Corfe sat by his campfire for a few minutes whilst the courier snatched a hasty meal and some of the cuirassiers rubbed down his horse for him and saddled up another to take him back.

  Squinting in the firelight, Corfe scrawled a reply. Andruw was to scout out the environs of Berrona with one or two squadrons only, keeping the rest of his men out of sight. The main body would force-march to his location in the morning. Corfe estimated it was some thirty-five miles away, which would be a hard day’s going, but his men would manage it. Then they would await the turn of events.

  If the army was to return to Torunn in any kind of fighting condition, then this was the only chance Corfe had to bring a large Merduk force to battle. Another two days, three at most, and they would have to head for home, or start cutting rations even past the meagre amount they were subsisting on at present. And that would almost certainly mean that the horses would start to fail, something which Corfe could not afford to let happen.

  The weary courier was sent on his way again. He would reach Andruw just before dawn, with luck, having ridden seventy miles in a single night. How he found his way in a region wholly unknown to him, over rough ground, in the dark, was a mystery to Corfe. He and Andruw had taken a series of maps north with them, only to discover that they were years out of date. Northern Torunna, in the shadow of the Thurians, had always been a wilder place than the south of the kingdom. It had few roads and fewer towns, but strategically it was as vital as the lines of the Searil and Torrin rivers. One day, when he had the time, Corfe would do something about that. He would make of the Torrin Gap a fortress and build good roads clear down to the capital for the passage of armies. The Torunnans hitherto had relied too much on what the Fimbrians had left behind them. Ormann Dyke, Aekir, Torunn itself and the roads which connected them—they were all legacies of the long-vanished empire. It was time the Torunnans built a few things of their own.

  T HE army was on the march again before dawn. Corfe and his Cathedraller bodyguards rode ahead of the main body, leaving old Ranafast in charge behind them. They passed isolated farmsteads that had been burnt out by Merduk marauders and once came across a lonely church which had inexplicably been spared the flames, but within which the enemy had obviously stabled their horses for some considerable time. The charred remains of two men were bound to a stake in the churchyard, the blackened stumps of their legs ending in a mound of dead embers and ash. Corfe had them buried and then rode on.

  They halted at noon to rest the horses and wait for the infantry to come up. Corfe gnawed salt beef and bit off chunks of hard army biscuit while ceaselessly searching the eastern horizon for signs of life. Around him the tribesmen talked quietly in their own tongue to each other and their horses.

  A solitary horseman appe
ared in the distance and the talk ceased. He was riding at full, reckless gallop, yanking up his mount’s head when it stumbled on loose rock, bent low in the saddle to extract every ounce of speed out of the beast. A Cathedraller, his armour winking like freshly spilt gore. Corfe waved at him and he changed course. A few minutes later he had come to a staggering halt in front of them, his horse spraying foam from its mouth, nostrils flared and pink, sides heaving. He leapt off his steed and proffered a despatch case.

  “Ondruw—he send me,” he gasped.

  “Good man. Cerne, give him some water. See to his horse and get him a fresh one.” Corfe turned away and shook out the scroll of tattered paper Andruw had scrawled his despatch upon.

  Merduk main body sighted three leagues south of Berrona. Some fifteen thousand men, plus two thousand cavalry out to their front. All lightly armed. My position half a league north of the town, but am withdrawing another league to the north to avoid discovery. Looks like they intend to enter Berrona this afternoon. Citizens still unaware of either us or the Merduks. How soon can you come up?

  Andruw Cear-Adurhal

  Colonel Commanding

  Corfe could sense the desperate plea in Andruw’s words. He wanted to save the town from the horror of a Merduk sack. But men can only march so fast. It would be nightfall before the army was reunited, and Corfe did not intend to launch the men into a night attack after a thirty-five-mile march, against a superior foe. What was more, he could not even afford to let Andruw warn the townsfolk of the approaching catastrophe—that would give away the fact that there was a Torunnan army in the region, and when his men came up in the morning they would find the Merduks prepared and ready for them.

  No, it was impossible. Berrona would have to take its chances.

  There had been a time when he might have done it, when he had less braid on his shoulders and there was not much more at stake than his own life. But if he crippled this army of his, Torunna would be finished. He scribbled a reply to Andruw with his face set and pale.