This Forsaken Earth Read online

  “It’s death to stay here,” Rol told her.

  Giffon was pressing grubby linen into his wounds. “Heave him up,” he said, and as they did he stuffed cloth into the gash in Rol’s back. He tried to lever Fleam out of Rol’s swollen fist.

  “No. Leave it.”

  The world was graying. This could not be—not now, not here. He fought to keep their swimming faces clear in his head. He could have howled in despair.

  Rowen leaned in close, and for a moment the battlefield disappeared. “It is you who must go, Rol. This is not your fight. I’m sorry I brought you to it.”

  “I stay with you,” he groaned.

  “No. You must live.” She smiled, the true smile he had always treasured. She stroked his bloody face.

  “We can run. We could be happy yet, Rowen, if you would leave all this behind you.”

  “No, Rol. You and I were not brought upon this earth to have happy lives.” She kissed him on the lips, her flesh as cold as one already dead. “I stay. I can do no other.”

  “I love you,” he whispered.

  “I know.” Her eyes filled. She straightened. “Gallico, Elias, take him. Get him out of here.” She raised her voice until it carried about the men who were gathering around her.

  “All who wish to can try to make their way back to the city, and seek whatever terms Canker chooses to offer. I am Bar Hethrun’s daughter, last of the line of Bion, rightful Queen of this kingdom. I mean to stay here and fight on in this place. It’s as good as any other.”

  Men stared at her in fear and awe and a kind of love. The ranks did not shift. Gideon Mirkady knelt at her feet with a smile on his face.

  “I serve the Queen of Bionar, to the last of my strength.”

  She set a hand on his head.

  A space, a gap; a gray intermission. When the world came back to him, Rol was hanging upside down and being pounded in the stomach. Six feet away, the shattered ground retreated at a great pace. He was across Gallico’s shoulder, and the halftroll was running.

  He squirmed. “No.” And more loudly, “No—put me down.”

  The halftroll halted, and brought him down from his shoulder into his arms. He was wheezing like a punctured bellows. “Rol, we have no time.”

  “Turn me around, Gallico. Let me see.”

  They were under the walls of Myconn again, and about them the roar of the battle had receded somewhat. Creed and Giffon stood gasping, leaning on each other. Rol turned his head to the north, and stared back into that fuming cauldron, that storm. The arquebus-fire was dwindling to a crackle of isolated shots, and the artillery barked sporadically, as if in bad temper. Dots of scarlet came and went in the smoke, struggling with streaming crowds of figures in saffron and black. Here, even here, their shouting could be heard.

  A cluster of scarlet stood out from the smoke for a few moments; a back-to-back group of two or three dozen, no more.

  “Gallico,” Rol said. “What do you see?”

  The halftroll’s arms tightened about him. “They are surrounded. I see that fellow Mirkady. I see—” He went silent.

  They watched. The smoke came and went. Rol’s world grayed in and out. Finally, Gallico gave a low groan.

  “It is over.”

  The scarlet dots had all disappeared, and it was as though the earth had swallowed them. Gallico bent his head. And silence began to drift down over the battlefield.

  Eighteen

  THE MOUNTAIN ROAD

  IT HAD BEGUN TO SNOW AGAIN. THE COLD BLED DEEP into Rol’s wounds and seemed to be seeking what warm spaces there were left about his heart. Under him, the handcart rattled and jumped over the rocky ground, and he was aware of people laboring all around, an exhausted mass of humanity. But it was all at one remove. In his mind there burned a memory of Rowen’s face. His poor sister, dead now, lying stark as a cut flower in the muck and mire of that stinking battlefield. At the end she had become a queen in truth, something larger than herself. Men had laid down their lives for her willingly, men who hardly knew her. And now he, who had loved her above all others—or so he had told himself—here he was, fleeing the scene of that crime.

  A thing that had been Michal Psellos had once told him that he would never give away more of himself than he could afford. And that thing had been right. No matter how he might mourn his valiant, dead sister, he was glad not be lying next to her on that lost field, glad to be running with his tail between his legs. Glad to be alive.

  It was a dream brought me here, he thought. A boy’s infatuation. Well, it is done now, and I saw it out to very near the end.

  They were in the Fornivan Hills south of Myconn, that much he knew. If he sat up, he would be able to look down on the Imperial City, its walls scarcely a league away. Canker had taken possession of it after only the briefest of struggles at the Forminon Gate; the massive fortifications had proved irrelevant when there were no men willing to man them. Of their own passage through the city, Rol retained only an impression of chaos and screaming crowds, Gallico’s animal roar clearing a path for them as they trekked south through the city streets, accreting hangers-on as they went.

  Canker had a fearsome reputation in Bionar, and though his heralds had ridden up to the city walls offering amnesties for all who threw down their arms, he was not entirely believed. Stark fear propelled a panicked horde out of Myconn into the hills, and many of those refugees had followed Gallico because he stood out, he had purpose, and perhaps also there was simply something reassuring about his blunt physicality. So now they were part of a streaming host of people: soldiers, commoners, nobles, criminals. Something for everyone, Rol thought muzzily.

  In the back part of his mind the anger smoldered steadily. The promise that, one day, Canker would die under his hands.

  Giffon was fidgeting with him again. It was dark—what had happened to the daylight?—and now the night was stitched with flapping campfires. A blanket had been pulled up to his chin and his breath had frosted it white. He tried to prop himself up on one elbow but the sharp pain that sent shooting through his arm stole the breath from his mouth. He fumbled with his right hand and found it swathed in neatly knotted linen. The rest of his body was cold, shivering, but under that mass of cloth something was radiating a putrid heat. His hand, or what was left of it.

  “I had to cut off the rest of the finger,” Giffon said. The boy was kneeling beside him with a steaming bowl. “You were senseless at the time. There’s a fever building. If the rest of the hand goes bad I’ll have to take the arm off at the elbow. Skipper, can you hear me?”

  “I hear you.” His mouth was dry. Giffon spooned watery lukewarm soup over his lips. Rol tasted wild thyme, some kind of game.

  “Skipper, you must try to heal yourself.” Giffon’s attention never wavered. He wiped soup out of Rol’s rime-frosted beard. His moon-shaped face was drawn now; it seemed narrower. Rol had a glimpse of what Giffon would look like as a middle-aged man—if he ever made it that far.

  “Like after Gallitras, when your wounds healed in a night. You must do that again, skipper, or you’ll die. Do you hear me?”

  He heard him, but already Rol was drifting past the words and the meaning. One thing hauled him back to earth.

  “Fleam,” he said.

  “It’s beside you, on your left side.”

  He touched the familiar hilt, and smiled at the warmth in it.

  “Skipper,” Giffon was saying, tears coursing down his face. But Rol was already far away.

  “I see you still carry that sword,” Rowen said.

  “Fleam? Yes. She’s a fine weapon.”

  “She?”

  Rol shrugged. “All things are she to a man. Ships, cities, even kingdoms.”

  Rowen knelt by the fire and stirred the logs with the iron poker. “Fleam, you call it. Not the most poetic of names.”

  “She was made for the letting of blood.” Rol smiled and stood looking down on his sister, watching the firelight shine out a dark blood-brown from the lighter glin
ts in her hair.

  “I wielded it once,” Rowen said.

  “I wonder you were willing to give her up. Or did Psellos take her away from you?”

  Rowen looked up quickly. “The sword hated me.”

  It took a few seconds to digest this. Then Rol asked, “Why?”

  “I don’t know. I was not meant to have it, I think. Nor was Psellos, or else he’d have kept such a weapon for himself. There’s something alive in that blade, Rol, something trapped there that’s been waiting a long time.”

  “Waiting for what?”

  “For you.”

  Another place, the years whipping backward like the leaves of a book. Michal Psellos cradling a glass of wine between both hands, the white fingers vivid against the scarlet, he sniffing the fragrance of the liquid and smiling with lupine humor.

  “You must try this, Rol. Bionese—Palestrinan, in fact. A little far north for fruitiness. This is dry, a thing to roll along the teeth. Come, boy, drink.”

  Rol did as he was bidden. All along the heavy table, bottles stood glowing in the light from the tall windows beyond. Spring rain thrashed at the glass, shot through with sunshine. The wine warmed him, a sour thing in the mouth, a taste he had not yet become accustomed to.

  “It’s bitter.”

  “To begin with, yes. You must learn to savor the taste, Rol; the best wines demand a little patience, a little knowledge. One does not swill them as though they were beer. They are like life itself; one cannot have sweetness all the time, else it would become cloying.” Psellos set down his glass. He ranged up and down the other bottles on the table, a lean figure all in black. His silver eyeteeth gleamed. He looked like a great sable spider done up in velvet and satin and silk. Rol’s attention drifted. He edged closer to the great windows, and looked down. In the cobbled yard fifty feet below, Rowen was saddling her black mare. She had thrown back the hood of her cloak, and the rain was shining in her hair so that it was slick as a seal’s back. Rol watched her lips move as she talked to the horse.

  “A gentleman,” Psellos went on, “must have discrimination when it comes to wine; his tastes betray him as surely as do the contents of his library, or the quality of his women. There is the stuff of everyday use”—he lifted a bottle and held it up a moment—“and then there are the finer vintages, to be enjoyed sparingly.” He caressed the neck of a bottle whose label was darkened with dust, yellow with age. He strolled to the windows, looked down a second, and smiled. “One cannot expect to continually enjoy the best of what life has to offer. That would be stultifying. There must be bitterness amid the bliss. A man must learn that, if he is to become much of a man at all.”

  Psellos’s curious eyes darkened. “Drink the wine, Rol. Savor the taste. And when you are served up something inferior in your glass, drink it also. Taste everything, but do not forget those times when what you have tasted has been sublime.”

  When Rol came to himself again he found that tears had run in frozen tracks down the sides of his head, and his eyelashes crackled as he blinked. Daylight again. They were still on the move, the handcart trundling stubbornly onward beneath him, the air thin and cold. A mist hung heavy about him, and out of it shrouded shapes appeared and disappeared like wayward ghosts.

  One of those ghosts walked by the side of the handcart, muffled and hooded. A gloved hand gripped his. “You’re back! Can you speak?” The shape dropped a scarf from around its face, and it was a girl under all those ragged folds, dark-eyed and sallow-skinned.

  “I know you,” he said, the cold air clicking in his throat.

  Her fingers tightened around his. “The night of the ball; we spent it together.” Some color crept into her face. “You don’t remember.”

  “Your name is Rafa. I remember. Why are you here?”

  “I did not want to be a slave anymore.”

  “You were going to be freed. I remember.”

  “The Queen was going to free me, but she’s dead now. This new King will do different things.”

  Elias Creed appeared out of the mist like an old memory. His badger-striped head was more white than black now. He used a spear as a staff. “You decided to rejoin us, then.”

  The handcart halted, and Gallico was there, too, a looming giant with green lights that blinked in the mist. “How do you feel?”

  “I feel—I—” Rol sat up. Relinquishing Rafa’s hand he began picking at the massive bandage on his own. It was loose now, hanging flaccid as a cobweb. He was able to rip it off without undoing any of Giffon’s neat knots. Below the stained linen there was his own flesh, yellow-white and smelling of old cheese. He flexed his fingers and studied in some wonder the stump where the ring-finger had been. It was closed over, a ripple of scar—but he could still feel the missing digit move as he opened and closed his fist.

  “I knew it!” This was Giffon. He barged between Creed and Gallico and took Rol’s hand in his own, face shining. “I knew you could do it, skipper. You’re healed. You’re going to live.”

  “I’m glad to hear it,” Rol said mildly. He felt slightly absurd sitting there on the handcart, one hand gripped again by the girl Rafa, the other by the boy Giffon. Creed and Gallico beamed at him like a pair of simpletons.

  “Get me off this damned cart. My legs need a stretch.”

  “It’s been five days,” Elias Creed said. “You’ve been raving for three of them, a fever like I’ve never seen. We were all set to dig you a hole here amid the rocks, but Giffon never lost hope. He and the chambermaid—that lovely dark wench—they’ve been fussing round you day and night, doing things a mother would quail at.”

  “Rafa can wipe my arse anytime she likes,” Gallico said.

  “We’re maybe eighteen leagues from Myconn, up in the high foothills to the northeast of the Fornivo Pass. There’s been no pursuit that I can see.”

  “Canker is busy with other things,” Gallico said.

  “Indeed. And just as well. We’ve gathered quite a mob around us. The column stretches two or three miles; thousands of people, many of them noble. Where in hell they think they’re going is anyone’s guess.”

  “We must get back to Ganesh Ka,” Rol said. He was leaning on Creed’s arm, his legs still rubbery, still remembering what it was to bear his weight. The thin air had him gasping. “How high up are we?”

  “Some ten thousand feet,” the halftroll said. “The Fornivan Hills rear up pretty steep to the north, but then come together in a kind of plateau—we’re on the lip of it now. There’s a wide, broken plain of sorts to the south and east of us, until you hit the Myconians themselves; they rise up like a wall, another five thousand feet.”

  The breath plumed out of his wide nostrils in two jets, and in his chest it rattled through mucus: an awful sound.

  “Gallico, I thought you were healed.”

  “So did I. I told you, it’s the cold.” The halftroll frowned.

  “How far are we from the Ka, you think?”

  Gallico’s bright eyes narrowed. “As the crow flies, I’d put it at some seventy-five leagues, but not even crows fly over the Myconians in winter. There’s the pass at Fornivo, some forty miles southwest of us. It leads through to the Goliad, and is studded with Bionese fortresses. It’s the only way across the mountains that I know of—in this part of the world, at least.”

  “Canker will have thought of that. I’ll bet the Fornivo garrison has already come over to him. That’s why there’s no pursuit; he thinks us trapped.”

  They trudged along in silence for some time after this, until at last Elias Creed said, “Then what are we to do?”

  Rol raised his head, but could see nothing through the caul of mist. “We must find another way through the mountains,” he said.

  “One cannot simply put one’s head down and charge blindly at the Myconians like a bull at a gate,” Gallico said.

  “Can’t one? It’s what one will have to do, all the same. Gallico, there must be a way.”

  “Not for these people.” The halftroll
gestured to the disparate throng that disappeared into the mist behind them.

  “If they were desperate enough to follow your lead out of Myconn, then they’re desperate enough to attempt the mountains.”

  Desperate indeed. At night the straggling column coalesced into an amorphous huddle, like that of herd animals seeking protection amid their fellows. While Gallico and Elias Creed went through the crowds, noting their names and station and physical capabilities, Rol gave a series of little speeches. Short and to the point, they informed the refugees of his plans and gave them three choices. They could follow him over the mountains, they could turn back for Myconn, or they could break off for the southwest and attempt the Fornivan passes, hoping that the garrisons there would not be against them.

  As choices went, none of them were particularly appealing, and Rol did not try very hard to woo anyone to his own course. Those who followed him would walk the hardest road, and they would either come to Ganesh Ka in the end, or they would perish along the way. There would be no turning back, and the weak would be abandoned. He made this very clear, and saw blank fear in the faces of all who listened to him. His wounds had made him less pretty than he had been. He was short a finger and part of an ear, and had a white scar that wriggled from one eyebrow into his hairline. He looked older, a fearsome captain of privateers every bit as ruthless as rumor had made him. And his eyes were colder than the white mountains ahead. Many looked upon that face and found themselves quitting the host for fear of what was in those eyes as much as the dangers of the road they would follow.

  The host began breaking up the next morning, in small groups and large, by dozens and scores and finally hundreds. They trekked away in solemn companies through the snow, heading southwest, or north. Rol and his friends remained encamped all that day while the desertions went on, and as the night swooped in on them again, there were barely four hundred left out of all those who had followed them into the hills.

  “We keep to the valleys, so far as we can,” Rol said, warming his hands at the guttering campfire. “We stay as low as the terrain allows. There’s forests on the flanks of the mountains, and scrub higher up still; we’ll need firewood if we’re to survive the nights. The main worry is food. We’re still a fair crowd. Did anyone bring provisions out of Myconn with them?”