Ships from the West (30 page)

And with that the gyrfalcon took off from its perch, leaving the wizened rowan shaking behind it, and disappeared into the low cloud that hung over the peaks of the nearest mountains. Corfe nudged his mount back to where his officers stood patiently.

‘Tomorrow, gentlemen,’ he said, his eyes following the bird’s flight, ‘we will enter the snows.’

But the snows came to them first. As they were pitching camp that evening a chill gale of wind came roaring down from the heights, and in its train whirled a swift, blinding blizzard of hard snow, dry as sand and almost as fine. Many men were caught unawares, and saw their leather tents ripped out of their hands to billow high in the air and vanish. Cloaks were plucked out of packs and sent flying, and the campfires were flattened and quenched. The mules kicked and panicked and some broke free from their drovers and galloped back down the way they had come, while a few, crazed by the impact of a flapping tent which had come tumbling out of the snow at them like a fiend, jumped over a low cliff and landed in broken agony on the rocks below, their packs smashing open and spraying black gunpowder upon the snow.

The blizzard created a wall about the huddled thousands who darkened the face of the hills, and it was several hours before some kind of order was restored, tents made fast to crags and weighted down with stones, mules hobbled and picketed into immobility, and the troops wolfing down cold rations about the smoking embers of their campfires.

The wind eased off with the rising of the moon, and Corfe, standing outside his skewed tent, looked up to see that the sky was clearing, and the stars were out in their millions, flickering with far-off flames of red and blue and casting faint shadows on the drifts of deep, fine snow that now crunched underfoot. They had been somehow transported to a different world it seemed, one of blank, twinkling greyness lit up by the moon so that the drifts seemed strewn with tiny diamonds, and men were black silhouettes in the moonlight whose breath steamed and clouded about them.

In the morning the troops were up well before the dawn, and the tent-sheets were stiff as boards under their numb fingers. The water in their canteens had thickened to a slush that made the teeth ache, and if bare metal touched naked skin it clutched it in a frozen grip painful to break free of.

Comillan trudged through the snow to the King’s tent. Corfe was blowing on his gauntleted hands and looking up at the way ahead through the narrow passes whilst behind him the dawn was a pale blueness in the sky, and the stars still twinkled coldly above.

‘Eleven mules lost, and one hapless lad who went out for a piss in the night and was found this morning. Aside from that, we seem to be in one piece.’ When the King did not respond Comillan ventured: ‘It will be heavy going today, I’m thinking.’

‘Aye, it will,’ Corfe said at last. ‘Comillan, I want you to pick thirty good men and send them forward on foot - they can leave their armour behind. We need a trail blazed for the main body. Tribesmen like yourself for preference.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Are these sudden blizzards usual this late in the foothills?’

‘In spring? No. But they are not unknown. Last night was just a taster. But it sharpened up the men at least. The winter gear is being dug out of packs, and they’re gathering wood while they can. I’ll load as much as I can on the mules. We’ll need it in the high passes.’

‘Very good.’

‘I take it the wizard did not return, sire?’

‘No, he did not. Perhaps mages are as blinded by blizzards as the rest of us.’

An hour later the sun was over the horizon and rising fast into an unclouded blue sky which seemed as brittle and transparent as glass. The world was a white, glaring brightness and the soldiers smudged the hollows of their eyes with mud or soot to reduce the glare while some held leaves between their teeth to prevent the blistering of their lower lips. Comillan’s trailblazers forged ahead with the easy pace of men who are in familiar country, while behind them the great column grew strung out and disjointed as the rest of the army trudged wearily upwards, even the cavalry afoot and leading their snorting mounts by the bridle. Entire tercios were assigned to each of the artillery pieces, and dragged them up the steep, snowbound track by main force.

When Corfe paused, gasping, to look back, he could see the green land of Torunna blooming out below him like some kindlier world forgotten by winter, and sunlight shining off the Kardian Sea in a half-guessed glitter on the edge of the horizon. The Torrin river snaked and meandered across his kingdom, bright as a sword-blade, and here and there were the dun stains of towns leaking plumes of smoke to bar the cerulean vault which overhung them.

The sky held clear for two more days, and while no more snow fell, and the wind remained light and fitful from the south-east, the temperature plummeted so that men walked with their cloaks frosted white by frozen breath, and icicles hung from the bits of the horses. The snow became hard as rock underfoot, which made for better going, but on the steeper stretches men had to go ahead of the main column and hack rude stairs out of the ice with mattocks, or else there would have been no purchase for the thousands of booted and hoofed feet following.

They were high up in the mountains now, and far enough within their winding flanks so that the view of the land below was cut off, and they were surrounded on all sides by spires of frozen rock, blinding snowfields, and hoar-white slopes of scree and boulder. In the dark, freezing nights Corfe halved the length of sentry duty, for an hour at a time was as much as the men could bear out of their blankets, and few fires were lit, for they were trying to conserve their meagre store of wood for some future emergency.

So, they came to the end of all man-made tracks, and found themselves at the foot of the Gelkarak glacier, and stared in wonder at what seemed to be a broken and tumbled cliff of pale grey, translucent rock. Except that it was not stone, but ancient ice which had come oozing down from the mountainsides in millennia of winters to form a vast, solid river fully half a mile wide, and many fathoms deep.

‘We’ll have to rig ropes and pulleys at the top to haul up the animals and the guns,’ Corfe said to Comillan and Kyne, who stood swathed in furs beside him. ‘We’ll work through the night; there’s no time to play with. Comillan, you handle the horses; Kyne, give Colonel Rilke a hand with his guns.’ The King stared at a sky which was still largely clear, but ahead of them there were sullen clouds gathering on the peaks, heavy with snow.

They were two days and a night hauling up the horses and mules and artillery pieces one by one to the top of the glacier. There was little engineering skill about it. Instead, the commanders had teams of up to three hundred men hauling on a cat’s cradle of ropes at the lip of the glacier, and even the most recalcitrant mule could not argue with that amount of brute force.

On the second day of this rough portage the clouds arrived above them and snow started again. Not the wicked blizzard of before, but a heavy silence of fat white flakes which accumulated with amazing speed, until the teams at the top of the glacier were labouring thigh-deep, and the ropes were buried. Yet more men were put to clearing the snow from the bivouacs, and half a dozen fell into hidden crevasses and were lost. A company of Felimbric tribesmen from the Cathedral-lers then explored up the glacier for several miles, roped together and feeling their way step by step. They marked each crevasse with an upright pike thrust into the snow, a dark rag flying from the tip, and thus blazed a safe road for the army to follow. And still it grew colder, and the men’s lungs began to labour in the thinning air.

They lost a field piece and six mules as a whole series of rime-stiff ropes snapped in the same instant and they tumbled down the cliff of the glacier’s end, but at the end of their fifth day in the mountains proper, the army was united on the back of Gelkarak itself, and the advance went on.

The glacier wound like a vast, flat-backed snake through the heights of the surrounding mountains. A wide, safe highway it seemed with its concealing blanket of snow, but below that snow it was pitted and fissured and cracked and in the dark, windless nights they could hear it groaning and creaking under their feet, so that it seemed they were crawling like ants atop the spine of some enormous, unquiet beast. Its course ran roughly westwards, and every now and then a lesser ice tributary would creep down from the high surrounding valleys to join it. In three more days of travel Corfe lost fifteen men staking out the trail for the main body. Even the tribes had never come this deep into the Cimbrics.

Golophin returned at last, appearing at the door of the King’s tent late one icy night and entering with a nod to Felorin, who stood stamping his feet nearby. The wizard’s gyrfalcon was perched like a grey frosted sculpture on his forearm, and his face was livid with tiredness.

Corfe was alone, poring by candlelight over the ancient, inadequate text which Albrec had discovered in Torunn. A small charcoal brazier burned in a corner of the tent, but it did little to heat the frigid air within. He looked up as Golophin entered, and frowned. ‘You’re late,’ he said shortly.

The wizard sat down on a camp stool and let his familiar hop to the foot of Corfe’s cot. He took off his wide-brimmed hat, letting fall a glittering shower of unmelted snow.

‘My apologies.’ Corfe handed him a leather bottle and he gulped from the neck before wiping his mouth and replacing the cork. ‘Ah, better. Thank you, sire. Yes, I am late. I have travelled far since last you saw me, farther than I had intended. The Eighth Discipline is a great gift, but it sometimes tempts one to overdo things, such is the thirst for news in men.’

‘What news?’

‘Your daughter reached Aurungabar today, and is to be married in the morning. The new Sultan of Ostrabar will be crowned and wed in the same ceremony. After it is done Nasir will ride forth with the men promised you by his father. Fifteen thousand, mostly heavy cavalry.’

‘Good,’ Corfe said, though he looked anything but relieved.

‘Colonel Heyd has reached Gaderion, and the Himerians there are gearing up for a second assault. I bring General Aras’s compliments. He will hold as long as he can, but his losses are high, while the Himerians seem to multiply daily. They have breached the curtain wall in three places but have not yet established a foothold beyond it. Communications with the south are still open. For the moment.’

Corfe nodded silently. His face was gaunt and grey with cold. ‘Is that all?’

‘No. I save the most startling news for last. In Aurungabar I talked again to Shahr Baraz the Younger. The Sultan and his consort are in their tomb and Ostrabar’s succession is now established, but still he is a haunted man.’

Corfe stared at the old wizard but said nothing. His eyes glittered redly in the light of the brazier.

‘He is convinced - and much persuading it took for him to admit it - that Aurungzeb died not at the hand of an assassin.’ Golophin hesitated. ‘But at the hand of his own queen.’

Corfe went very still.

‘Not only that, but he then believes she turned the knife on herself. This Ramusian lady, the mother of his children, his wife of seventeen years. She must have harboured an enduring hatred in secret all that time. What finally made her act on it no man can say. Shahr Baraz loved her like a daughter. It is he who put about the story of foreign assassins in the pay of Himerius, and the court and harem believed him. Why should they not? Not even Nasir suspects the truth, and it is perhaps best left that way. But I thought you would like to know.’

The King had turned his face and it was in shadow. Golophin watched him closely, wondering.

‘Sire, I cannot help thinking there was something between you and the Merduk Queen. Something …’ Golophin tailed off.

The King did not move or speak, and the old mage rubbed his chin. ‘Forgive me, Corfe. I am like a woman fishing for gossip. It’s a besetting fault of old age that when you start a hare you feel you must run it to ground. My mind has become over-subtle with the passing years. I see connections and conspiracies where there are none.’

‘She was my wife,’ Corfe said quietly.

‘What?’

The King was staring into the red gledes at the heart of the brazier, unblinking. ‘Her name was Heria Car-Gwion, a silk merchant’s daughter of Aekir. And she was my wife. I thought her dead in the fall of the city. But she lived. She lived, Golophin, and was taken by Ostrabar’s Sultan and made his queen. Her own daughter I took to wife. Because it was the right thing to do for the kingdom. And now you tell me that when she died it was by her own hand. On the day I wed the girl who should by rights have been my own daughter. My child.

‘She was my
wife.’

Golophin rose to his feet hurriedly, knocking over the camp stool. Corfe had turned to stare at him through bright, fire-filled eyes, and in that moment the wizard was mortally afraid. He had never seen such torment, such naked violence in another man’s face.

Corfe laughed. ‘She is at peace, dead at last. I wished her dead over the years, because I could not forget. I wished myself dead also. I might rest, I think, if I were laid in the tomb beside her. But even in death we will never be together again. Once I would have torn every Merduk city in the world brick from brick to get her back. But I am a king now, and must not think only of myself.’

His smile was terrible, and in that moment he radiated more menace than any great mage or shifter that Golophin had ever known. The air seemed to crackle about him.

Corfe rose, and Golophin backed away. His familiar flew to his shoulder with a harsh, terrified screech. The King smiled again, but there was some humanity in his face now, and the terrible light had left his eyes.

‘It’s all right. I am not a madman or a monster. Sit down, Golophin. You look as though you had seen a ghost.’

Golophin did as he was bidden, soothing his frightened familiar with automatic caresses. He could not get past the stunning realisation which was flooding his mind.