Arcanum (101 page)

“You could always beg,” he said, and turned his attention to the dwarves up the hill.

They were massing near the crest, above the slopes that were strewn with dwarvish dead: everywhere he looked there were bodies, in ones and twos and mores, face up, face down, wrapped around tree trunks and in the hollows of roots, at the end of long scrapes where they’d slid and at the bottom of rocky outcrops.

Led by an idiot king to their deaths. Gods, that made him angry – that none of this was even necessary. Was Ironmaker even here to see what he’d done?

There was more movement as the dwarves started to descend. It was time they ran again.

“Taube, with me.”

Büber took the river-side of the track and ran down the long line of wagons. The Crossed followed, some having permanently exchanged their spears for axes and hammers. That they’d made a stupid decision to fight with a weapon they hadn’t trained with was up to them. But they had a history of ill-discipline and making bad choices, and it was too late to change them back or castigate them. The dwarves were slithering and sliding down the hill towards them.

Büber reached the end of the wagons, and started to shove men towards the Weissach, through the trees. “That way. Keep going.” He stayed long enough to make certain that he’d been spotted, and that when he plunged through the green ferns by the side of the track, he was being followed.

Of course the dwarves wanted to keep sight of him, in case he disappeared again into the green mist, only to come at them from a different direction. They struggled after him, exhausted, savaged, scared of the bright sky and the tall trees.

He ran on, through the hidden spearmen, the crouching bows. As he passed the bowmen, they rose up and fired, and still the dwarves came at them. Then the wood erupted with men, charging forward, spears thrusting, twisting, charging again.

Now.

Büber stopped, turned and drew his sword.

When she asked them straight, no one would tell her.

She was given hints, and veiled elisions, but when her patience for such verbal circumlocutions had worn thin and she’d finally demanded, “Is Felix alive or dead?”, she couldn’t find anyone who would admit to having seen him being either dragged off his horse, or ride away free.

“But he was right in front of you. Master Ullmann, you were there, on the earthwork. How could you not have seen what happened to him?”

She looked at Ullmann carefully, watched him glance sideways at Reinhardt. Was he worried that Reinhardt would deny his story, she wondered, or were they both hiding the same thing?

Ullmann was wet, not from sweat, but from river water. She could smell its weedy taint on him. “My lady, I didn’t see. I was fighting for my life and the life of the men around me.” He ran his fingers through his damp hair. “There were loose horses, I know that. None of them were Felix’s.”

“Master Reinhardt? If I go down and speak to the centurions, what will they tell me?” She put her hands on her hips and speared him with her gimlet eye. She’d have liked to have speared him with something more substantial.

“They’ll tell you what we’ve told you, my lady. That he was on his horse, and then he’d gone, and no one can say where.”

She howled with frustration.

Ullmann pulled out his sword, and it was filthy. She knew what a sword looked like when it had gone through a man, and it didn’t look that much different when it had gone through a dwarf. He set about cleaning the blade.

“You’ve lost your prince,” she accused them, stamping her feet.

“He’s not lost—” started Reinhardt, but she cut him off.

“Then where is he? Is he hiding? Has he run away?”

“He is not dead,” said Reinhardt. He stood up to face her. “He is not dead, because no one saw him die.”

“People die all the time without being watched.”

Reinhardt took another step closer, and lowered his voice so that only she could hear. “When a prince of Carinthia leads his army into battle, his troops will win the battle, not least because they know the prince still lives. If he dies while there is still fighting to be done, they might lose heart. Their courage might falter. They might decide to run away.”

“But we—”

It was his turn to interrupt. “They have not lost heart, and their courage is still strong. Felix is therefore alive. Does my lady understand?”

“Yes. I understand.” She did, but it didn’t help. She needed to know the truth.

“So my lord Felix’s commands still stand,” said Reinhardt. “He’d be angry if we changed them now.”

“He might be angry if we change the order of battle,” said Büber, arriving as silently as a ghost and as bloody as a butcher, “but he’ll be livid if we throw the war away doing something we know won’t work.”

Sophia’s eyes widened at the sight of him, and Reinhardt managed, “Gods, Peter,” before he was struck dumb.

Büber ignored him for the moment. “My lady, the eastern side of the river is secure.”

She recovered. It wasn’t like she hadn’t seen him covered in other people’s blood before. “Secure?”

“All the dwarves there are dead, my lady, save the few who had the wit to run away.” His arms were red up to past his elbows, as if he’d purposefully washed them in gore. “I’ve lost twenty-five men. So I’ve been told, anyway. And I’ve gained as many axes, hammers, mail shirts, helmets and the like as you might want.”

She couldn’t celebrate. She wasn’t even sure of the reaction Büber wanted, since his winning a battle against overwhelming odds clearly wasn’t what he wanted to talk about.

“Thank you, Master Büber,” she said; then she left them for a moment, and went to the barrel that they’d drunk from the previous night. There was still some beer left inside, so she heaved the barrel to the log where they’d sat the night before, and poured him a mug.

She presented it to him, and he took it from her. She was left red where his fingers had momentarily touched hers. Büber drained the mug in three gulps and tossed it empty back into the grass.

“You say we’re going to lose the war,” she asked him, “despite what you’ve just done.”

Büber sat down on the log. She’d seen him like that before too, after the library, when he’d gone berserk for the the first time. After she’d manage to convince him that she, Cohen and the others were on his side, he’d subsided into a melancholic flatness that was the opposite of rage.

He’d done his fighting. He’d won. And now, even though they might be pitched back into the fray at any moment, he’d stopped.

He stared at his hands. “We beat them because we kept moving. They hate the forest, the sky, the grass, the wind and the rain. But they hate the forest most of all. If we’d fought them between here and the wall, we’d be packing up our tents and going home already.”

“What did you do, Peter?” she asked. “Tell us what you did.”

“Just let them chase us, up the hill, down the hill, through the trees. They move as a mass. If you can split them up, they don’t fight so well … it’s like eating a cow.”

“One bite at a time,” she said.

Reinhardt scowled. “All credit to you, Master Büber, but we’ve killed a couple of thousand of them too.”

“That doesn’t matter,” said Büber. “They know where you are, and they’re coming to kill you. Even if we build walls of stone as high as this crag, they’ll still eventually overwhelm us. There are, how many of them left?”

“Ten thousand,” said Sophia.

“We won on the Weissach because we had nothing to defend and they had nothing to attack. If we stay here, we’ll lose.”

“But you built these ditches with your own hands, man,” said Reinhardt. “Are you now saying they’re useless?”

“Yes,” said Büber. “It was the wrong plan, and we wasted our time. We need to change it now. They’ll crush us if we stay still.”

Reinhardt spun away, then roared back around. “This is the place we decided we’d make our stand. This natural fortress. One bridge to cross. Open land for our bows. Ditches and ramparts for our spears. And you want to change all this on a whim?”

Büber sighed. “It’s not a whim. You’d never even fought a dwarf before today. Don’t you think you should at least listen to me?”

When Reinhardt took another step closer to Büber, Sophia stood between them. “Stop this. Now,” she said. She looked over her shoulder. “You’re very quiet, Master Ullmann.”

Ullmann was rubbing at a spot of congealed blood caught inside a fuller on his blade. He looked up, and she couldn’t read him at all.

“My lady,” he said.

“Give us your wisdom. Master Büber wants us to fight in the forests, where there’s a chance we’ll get separated from one another. Master Reinhardt wants us to fight behind our walls of earth, which if we defend, may well break us. You’ve fought the dwarves: what do you say?”

Ullmann gave up his cleaning, and slid his sword back into its scabbard. “There are too many of them to face at once.” He looked at his feet, anywhere but at Reinhardt. “It doesn’t matter if we kill another two thousand, or five thousand, or seven thousand. If they destroy our army, then … if they mean to take Juvavum, they will. Over-Carinthia, or the east of the palatinate near Wien haven’t had a chance to provide any militia, and perhaps they could retake the town. There are woodsmen in the north and miners in the south, too. They own a stake in their forests and salt now, and King Ironmaker will have to pry those out of their dead hands. The dwarves probably wouldn’t be able to hold on to any of the gains they’d made, and we’ll probably win in the end, whatever we decide here.”

“And afterwards Carinthia would be too weak to resist being carved up between Bavaria, Wien and the Doge. Everything would be lost.” Sophia stared bleakly in the direction of the dwarves, where she hoped Felix also was, up on the col by the lake with the remains of the Carinthian cavalry.

Büber, Reinhardt and Ullmann were looking to her to decide what to do.

“If …” she asked, “if we stand and fight, as we intended, can we kill enough of them to allow some other army to finish them?”

“We don’t have another army, my lady,” said Reinhardt.

“If München and Augsburg turn up, we do,” she said.

“There needs to be some Carinthian force left in the field.” said Ullmann, “or there’ll be nothing to stop the Bavarians from taking Juvavum.”

“The Bavarians should be here with us, shoulder to shoulder on the walls,” said Reinhardt. “It’s a disgrace that they’re not.”

Ullmann nodded. “I don’t disagree. So why not let the dwarves take München instead of Juvavum?”

His words lodged in her heart like a hook. She looked at Reinhardt, at Büber, at Ullmann. “Can we do that?”

“We can talk to them under a flag of truce – we don’t have any Dwarvish speakers, but they’ll have some German ones. Or Latin. My lady knows Latin.” Ullmann picked at his nails. “We promise to retreat to our borders; they promise not to cross them.”

“We’ve destroyed a third of their army,” said Reinhardt. “Do you think that’s enough of a message for them to comprehend?”

Büber sighed loudly, and Sophia sat down next to him. “Peter? What is it?”

“Let’s not do this. Let’s not pretend to ourselves that Ironmaker will keep his word. Let’s not sell our neighbours as worm-food as the cost for saving our own skins. Let’s not overlook the protection we’ve extended to Rosenheim and Simbach. Let’s not take the fucking cowards’ way out of hiding behind a line on the fucking map while everything around us burns.”

He got up slowly, leaving the place where he’d been sitting damp and stained with blood. “We’ve been here before. We’ve been here so many, many times in the last thousand years that you’d have thought we’d have learnt something from it by now. This is our business. Ironmaker has to be stopped, and I don’t see the lords of München or Augsburg or the King of the Franks or the Protector of Wien lining up to do this. No, it’s a thirteen-year-old boy instead. And if he were here, he’d want us to fight on in whichever way we can until we’ve finished what we came here to do. You know it, all of you.”

He was right. Of course he was right. Anything else was unworthy of them, of her. She had to trust. To believe.

“How do we do this, then?”

“We destroy the bridge, swim the Enn, and we drag them one by one into the forest.”

He was serious, absolutely and utterly serious; deep conviction written across his scarred face.

“What if they cross too? What if they march on Rosenheim, or Juvavum, while we’re still pecking away at them?”

“My lady, they won’t be able to march on anywhere because they won’t be able to turn their backs on us. The reason they’re still in this valley is not because of the walls we’ve built but because of the army we’ve raised, and it’s not our walls they have to take, it’s our lives. Deny them the chance to do that, and they’re still stuck here.” He held out his crusted hands imploringly. “Our strength is in our arms and our hearts. I see that now. Please see it with me.”

He so rarely asked for anything. She couldn’t even remember the last time she’d heard him say please.

“Can we bring down the bridge?” she asked. It wasn’t that wide, but it had spanned the river solidly enough to take the annual spring flood for at least a hundred years.

Reinhardt gritted his teeth. “Given a century of men with crowbars and a full day, I could reduce it to rubble. We came to build, though, not tear down. I think it’s too late. Which is why we should stay with Felix’s plan.”

That was just a little bit cunning, invoking Felix’s name. Sophia bit her tongue at its mention and blinked away the tears.

“How many men could you spare, Master Reinhardt? If Master Büber was going to take part of our army across the Enn and attack from behind, how many centuries do we need to defend here?”

“All of them, my lady,” said Reinhardt. “All of them, and more.”

She buried her head in her hands. They could make their stand here. They could fight in the woods. They could sue for peace. If she chose badly, Carinthia was lost.

She stayed still for the longest time, so much so that she only moved when Büber’s shadow crossed her. She looked up to see him beside the palisade, looking out through a distance-pipe over the valley.