Ships from the West (20 page)

Heria looked away. ‘He will be fine, as will you.’ ‘Will you be coming with us?’

The question rocked her. ‘I -1 don’t know.’ A maniac notion filled her head, a vision of herself at her daughter’s wedding, flinging herself at the groom, begging him to remember her. She blinked her stinging eyes clear. ‘Perhaps.’

Aria took her hand. ‘What is he like, Mother? Is he very old?’

She cleared her throat. ‘Corfe? He is - he is not so old.’ ‘Older than you?’

She gripped her daughter’s fingers tightly. ‘A little older. Some years older.’

Aria looked thoughtful. ‘An old man. They say he is lame, and bad-tempered.’

‘Who says?’

‘Everyone. Mother, my hand …’ Heria released it. ‘Are you all right, Mother?’

‘I’m fine, my dear. Tired. Ask the maids to bring in a blanket. I believe I may well lie here and doze a while.’

Aria did not move. ‘They’ve been giving you more of their drugs, haven’t they?’

‘It calms me, Aria. Don’t be worried.’

Don’t be worried, she thought. You are to marry a good man. The best of men. She closed her eyes. Aria eased her back on to the divan and stroked her hair. ‘It will be all right, Mother. You’ll see,’ she whispered, her lovely face grave again.

Heria slept, and from below her closed eyelids the tears trickled down soundlessly.

There was an hour before the dawn, in the black throat of the night, when even a city as large as Torunn slept. Corfe’s horse picked its way through the streets unhindered and he rode it with the reins loose on its neck as though the tall gelding knew the way better than he. And perhaps it did, for the bay destrier brought Corfe unbidden to the North Gate, where he saluted the sleepy gate guards and they, grumbling and unaware of his identity, opened the tall postern for him to lead his mount through. Once beyond the city walls he let the gelding have its head, and it burst into a fast canter. The moon was riding high and gibbous in a star-brilliant sky, but it was just possible to make out the glimmerings of the dawn speeding its way up over the distant ramparts of the Jafrar in the east. Corfe left the pale ribbon of the Kingsway and headed north, his steed dipping and rising under him with the undulating ground. But he kept his knees clamped to the gelding’s sides and a loose bite on the reins, and almost it seemed that he might be afloat in a grey moonlit sea upon some bobbing ship, save for the eager grunts of the horse and the creak of the saddle under him.

He reined in at last, and the steam of his mount’s sweat rose around him, clean and acrid at the same time. Dismounting, he hobbled the gelding with the ease of long practice, and after he had slipped off bridle and saddle, he rubbed it down with a wisp of coarse upland grass. The gelding clumped away, happy to nose at the yellow grass and sniff for better fare. And Corfe sat on the swell of the hill, grey in the moonlight, and stared not east at the gathering dawn, but west to where the Cimbrics loomed up dark and forbidding in the dregs of the night.

Tribesmen’s tales told of a hidden pass in those mountain fastnesses, a narrow way where determined men had once forged a passage of the terrible mountains. The journey was semi-legendary - the reputation of the Cimbrics as the harshest peaks in the world had been well-earned - but it had happened. And Corfe had a map of the route.

Almost four centuries before, when the Fimbrians had been lords of the world, they had sent out exploratory expeditions to all corners of the continent. One of those expeditions had had as its mission the discovery of a pass through the Cimbrics. They had succeeded, but the cost had been horrendous. Albrec, High Pontiff of Torunna and all the Macrobian Kingdoms, had discovered the text of the expedition’s log in the Inceptine archives of Torunn cathedral. He seemed to consider the discovery of unique and ancient documents to be part of his calling. Or perhaps it was a hobby of his. Corfe smiled at the moonlit night. Even now that Albrec was a middle-aged man at the head of a large and influential organisation, there was something of the enthusiastic boy about him when it came to a dusty manuscript or mildewed grim-oire. This ancient record, an untidy bundle of dog-eared and mouldering papers, he had shown to Corfe on a whim, never guessing how important it might prove.

For Corfe intended to use the log to take an army across the Cimbrics and win the war at a stroke.

It was a huge gamble, of course; the log might be a fiction, or at the least hopelessly out of date. But the alternative to such a bold stroke would be either a full frontal assault on the Thurian Line, or a fall back to the purely defensive business of holding Gaderion and hoping for the best. To try and break through the Thurian Line would be foolhardy to the point of lunacy. It was too heavily fortified, and the defenders would outnumber the attackers many times over. As for the magnificent works at Gaderion, formidable though they were, Corfe placed little faith in the merits of a static defence, and had done since Aekir, all those years ago. He had seen supposedly impregnable cities and fortresses fall too often to be sanguine about the chances of containing the Himerians up at the gap.

There was snow still clinging to the flanks of the Cimbrics. It glowed in the bright moonlight, and the mountains seemed to be disembodied, luminous shapes that hung suspended over the shadowed expanse of the darkened land at their feet. Deep in the midst of the range, the snow remained inviolate all year round, and even among the lesser peaks the drifts would still be deep and cold. Spring took its time in the high places.

The Fimbrian expedition, three hundred strong, had started out in the Year of the Saint 117, with the melting of the first snows, and once they had fought their way into the centre of the range they had travelled along the backs of huge glaciers as though they were a network of roads amid the tall peaks which spawned them. Crevasses and avalanches had killed them by the score, but in the end they had won through thirty leagues of the most forbidding terrain in the world, and had come finally to the shores of the Sea of Tor, and the trading post of Fort Cariabon as it then was. Even with the renowned stamina and endurance of the Fimbrians, they had been two weeks on the mountainous section of the journey, and half of them had been left frozen corpses upon the flanks of those mountains.

Corfe had been mulling over the log for months, and had interviewed a succession of Cimbric tribesmen to test its veracity. Nothing they had told him about the region contradicted the account, and he was convinced that the route was still feasible, if difficult. He could see no other way of winning this war.

His horse, bored with the winter-dry grass, nosed his neck and its warm breath blew down his nape. He rubbed the velvet-soft nostrils absently, and turned his head to peer eastwards.

The rising sun had still to clear the Jafrar, but its promise was clear in the lightening sky. A skein of cloud had caught in the summits of the eastern mountains and looked as though it had been set afire from below. Behind it the sky was palest aquamarine, a pink glow riding up it moment by moment.

He turned his gaze north-east, to where the Thurians stood, the first flush of the dawn beginning to pale their eastern sides. The world he knew was defined by the brutal majesty of mountains. The Cimbrics, the Thurians, the Jafrar. They gave birth to the rivers which watered the world. The Ostian, the Searil, the Torrin. Somewhere out there in the low country leading down to the Kardian Sea there stood Aurungabar, capital of Ostrabar. He had been there as King and had seen the huge labour of rebuilding which the Merduks had undertaken. Myrnius Kuln’s vast Square of Victories still remained, opening out from the foot of what had been the cathedral of Carcasson; but it was called
Hor el Kadhar
now, Glory of God. The old Pontifical Palace was now the pleasure garden of the Sultan wherein his harem had been installed. And somewhere among those buildings there slept right at this moment the woman who had been Corfe’s wife.

Why he should find himself thinking about her at this moment he did not know, except that it was usually on waking and on going to sleep that he saw her most clearly. Those ill-defined periods of the day between darkness and light. Or perhaps she was lying awake herself in the pre-dawn murk, and thinking of him. The thought made his heart beat faster. But the woman he pictured in his mind was young, not much more than a girl. She would be almost out of her thirties now, a mature woman. And he, he was a greying martinet with a halt leg. They were strangers, complete and utter. And yet the pain remained.

Was she thinking of him at this moment? There was the oddest pain in his breast, a wrench as though something there had suddenly constricted. He pushed the balls of his palms into his eyes until the lights flared, and the pain faded. He was too old to be entertaining such fancies.

He knew he would marry this girl who was his wife’s daughter. It was necessary for the good of the kingdom, and he had sacrificed so much to that end that he could not imagine doing otherwise.

But there was a deeper, darker reason for doing so that he would not even contemplate admitting to himself. In marrying Aria, he would possess something of Heria again, and perhaps that would help calm his snarling soul. Perhaps.

Twelve

In squares and at street corners the people gathered in subdued crowds while those who could read relayed the content of the daily bulletins to their fellow citizens.

This day were executed Hilario, Duke of Imerdon, Lord Queris of Hebriera, and Lady Marian of Fulk, they having been found guilty of conspiring against the Presbyter of Hebrion, Lord Orkh. May Almighty God have mercy on their souls.

A reward of five hundred silver crowns is offered for information leading to the arrest and apprehension of the following …

And here a long list of names followed, which those reading the bulletin intoned in stentorian voices, watching always to see if any of the Knights Militant, or worse an Inceptine, were near.

No one knew how or where the executions took place, and the names of the dead all belonged to the nobility of Hebrion. Thus while the common folk might feel anger, even outrage, at this unseen slaughter of their betters, they were largely unaffected by it. And besides, there was a new nobility to get used to.

Thus the life of Abrusio, which had shuddered to a trembling halt for days after the first landings, slowly began to return to something approaching normality. Market stalls were cautiously opening again, and taverns began to fill up in the evenings as folk became less afraid to walk the streets at night. There was no curfew, no martial law, just the daily bulletins, their wording unchanged but for the names they listed. Even the soldiers of the garrison had been merely told to stack arms and return to barracks. There was talk of a treaty having been signed, a peaceful annexation, and certainly the new rulers of Hebrion were busy men. They had taken up residence not in the palace but in the old Inceptine abbey, as befitted a group of churchmen, and from the abbey the couriers rode in unending streams, while in the harbour every Royal vessel remaining had received a boarding party of Himerians and was frantically readying to put to sea.

It was not so bad, on the whole, and people looked back to the hysteria which had followed the rumours of the fleet’s destruction with a kind of abashed wonder. They forget, or chose not to remember, the storm which had smote the city, the thunderheads which had hidden the sun and darkened the face of the waters at noon, and the sea lightnings which had capered madly, striking people in the streets, setting light to houses. Only the deluge which had followed had stopped the city from burning a second time. The black clouds had burst overhead and people had scurried for cover as the rain came down in rods, flattening the waves which the west wind had reared up, turning the steep streets in the Upper City into tawny rivers.

There were those who said that in the heart of the lightnings and the hammering rain the sky had not been empty. Things had been circling below the lowering clouds. Monstrous things which were not birds. But people chose not to dwell on that now, and those who insisted were ignored and even ridiculed.

As the storm had lifted, and the daylight returned, the horizon had become dark with ships. There were a few fools who wiped the rain out of their eyes and cheered the return of King Abeleyn, but they were soon hushed. Out of the west, the enemy had come to claim his prize.

The soldiers of the garrison, many little more than frightened boys, ran out the great guns of the mole forts and barricaded the wharves of the waterfront. A few public-spirited citizens helped them, but most locked themselves indoors, as if they could somehow will the invaders away, while many others choked the city gates with wagons and carts and laden mules, and set off for the dubious sanctuary of the Hebros Mountains. Perhaps a hundred thousand of

Abrusio’s population departed in this manner, churning up the North Road in a frenzied exodus. In their midst rode many noblemen with fortunes stuffed into bulging saddlebags, and a canny teamster might line his pockets handsomely if he were willing to sell his cart to some desperate aristocratic family.

The enemy fleet had backed their topsails within a half league of the moles and there they had ridden out the breeze, which had backed round to south-south-east. Only a few Himerian vessels had put in towards the Inner Roads, flying flags of truce. Archaic, cog-like ships, they had sailed smoothly past the staring gun crews of the moles and moored at the foot of Admiral’s Tower and disgorged not the beasts of nightmare that the populace had feared, but a dignified group of black-clad clerics under a flapping white flag. The gunners of the mole forts had held their fire in fear as much as anything else, for the fleet which had hove-to beyond Abrusio’s massive breakwaters was larger than anything they had ever seen. And what was more, on the decks of those innumerable ships there were massed tens of thousands of armoured figures. They might take a heavy toll of such a host, should the Himerians try to force the passage of the moles, but they would be overwhelmed in the end. Their senior officers, all well-bred second-raters, had fled the city days earlier and so the common soldiery of Abrusio, in the absence of definite orders, waited to see what might happen. They trusted to the white flags of the invaders and the rumours of the mysterious treaty which had been doing the rounds of the city ever since the flight of the Queen.