The Iron Wars (2 page)

He would be her husband very soon, the first man she had ever let into her bed. At twenty-seven she hardly worried about that side of things, though it would of course be her duty to produce a male heir, the quicker the better. A political marriage with no romance about it, only convenient practicalities. Her body was the treaty between two kingdoms, a symbol of their alliance. Outside that, it had no real worth at all.

“By the mark eleven!” the leadsman in the bows called. And then: “Sweet blood of God! Starboard, helmsman! There’s a wreck in the fairway!”

The helmsmen swung the ship’s wheel and the carrack turned smoothly. Sliding past the port bow the ship’s company saw the grounded wreck of a warship, the tips of her yards jutting above the surface of the seas no more than a foot, the shadowed bulk of her hull clearly visible in the lucid water.

The entire ship’s company had been staring at the war-wrecked remnants of the city. Many of the sailors were clambering up the shrouds like apes to get a better view. On the sterncastle the quartet of heavily armed Astaran knights had lost their impassive air and were gazing as fixedly as the rest.

“Abrusio, God help us!” the master said, moved beyond his accustomed taciturnity.

“The city is destroyed!” one of the men at the wheel burst out.

“Shut your mouth and keep your course. Leadsman! Sing out there. Pack of witless idiots. You’d run her aground so you could gape at a dancing bear. Braces there! By God, are we to spill our wind with the very harbour in sight, and let Hebrians brand us for mooncalf fools?”

“There ain’t no harbour left,” one of the more laconic of the master’s mates said, spitting over the leeward rail with a quick, hunted look of apology to Isolla a second later. “She’s burned to the waterline, skipper. There’s hardly a wharf left we could tie up to. We’ll have to anchor in the Inner Roads and send in a longboat.”

“Aye, well,” the master muttered, his brow still dark. “Get tackles to the yardarms. It may be you’re right.”

“One moment, Captain,” one of the knights who were Isolla’s escort called out. “We don’t yet know who is in charge in Abrusio. Perhaps the King could not retake the city. It may be in the hands of the Knights Militant.”

“There’s the Royal flammifer flying from the palace,” the master’s mate told him.

“Aye, but it’s at half mast,” someone added.

There was a pause after that. The crew looked to the master for orders. He opened his mouth, but just as he was about to speak the lookout hailed him.

“Deck there! I see a vessel putting off from the base of Admiral’s Tower and it’s flying the Royal pennant.”

At the same second the ship’s company could see puffs of smoke exploding from the battered seawalls of the city, and a heartbeat later came the sound of the retorts, distant staccato thunder.

“A Royal Salute,” the leading knight said. His face had brightened considerably. “The Knights Militant and usurpers would never give us a salute—more likely a broadside. The city belongs to the Royalists. Captain, you’d best make ready to receive the Hebrian King’s emissaries.”

Tension had relaxed along the deck, and the sailors were chattering to each other. Isolla stood on in silence, and it was the observant master’s mate who voiced her thought for her.

“Why’s the banner at half mast is what I’d like to know. They only do that when a king is—”

His voice was drowned out by the pummelling of bare feet on the decks as the crew made ready to receive the Hebrian vessel that approached. As it came closer, a twenty-oared Royal barge with a scarlet canopy, Isolla saw that its crew were all dressed in black.

“T HE lady has arrived, it would seem,” General Mercado said.

He was standing with his hands behind his back, staring out and down upon the world from the King’s balcony. The whole circuit of the ruined Lower City was his to contemplate, as well as the great bays which made up Abrusio’s harbours and the naval fortifications which peppered them.

“What the hell are we going to do, Golophin?”

There was a rustling in the gloom of the dimly lit room, where the light from the open balcony could not reach. A long shape detached itself soundlessly from the shadows and joined the general. It was leaner than a living man had a right to be, something crafted out of parchment and sticks and gnawed scraps of leather, hairless and bone-white. The long mantle it wore swamped it, but two eyes glittered brightly out of the ravaged face and when it spoke the voice was low and musical, one meant for laughter and song.

“We play for time, what else? A suitable welcome, a suitable place to stay, and absolute silence on anything regarding the King’s health.”

“The whole damned city is in mourning. I’ll wager she thinks him dead already,” Mercado snapped. One side of his face was gnarled into a grimace, the other was a serene silver mask which had never changed, not in all the years since Golophin had put it there to save his life. The eyeball on the silver side glared bloodshot and lidless, a fearsome thing which cowed his subordinates. But it could not cow the man who had created it.

“I know Isolla, or did,” Golophin riposted, snapping in his turn. “She’s a sensible child—a woman now, I suppose. As importantly, she has a mind, and will not fly into hysterics at the drop of a glove. And she will do as she is told, by God.”

Mercado seemed mollified. He did not look at the cadaverous old wizard but said: “And you, Golophin, how goes it with you?”

Golophin’s face broke into a surprisingly sweet smile. “I am like the old whore who has opened her legs too many times. I am sore and tired, General. Not much use to man nor beast.”

Mercado snorted. “That will be the day.”

As one, they moved away from the balcony and back into the depths of the room. The Royal bedchamber, hung heavily with half-glimpsed tapestries, carpeted with rugs from Ridawan and Calmar, sweetened with the incense of the Levangore. And on a vast four-poster bed, a wasted shape amid the silken sheets. They stood over him in silence.

Abeleyn, King of Hebrion, or what was left of him. A shell had struck him down in the very instant of his victory, when Abrusio was back in his hands and the kingdom saved from a savage theocracy. Some whim of the elder gods had caused it to happen thus, Golophin thought. Nothing of the Ramusian deity’s so-called mercy and compassion. Nothing but bitter-tasting irony to leave him like this, not dead, hardly alive.

The King had lost both his legs, and the trunk above the stumps was lacerated and broken, a mass of wounds and shattered bones. The once boyish face was waxen, the lips blue and the feeble breath whistling in and out over them with laboured regularity. At least his sight had been spared. At least he was alive.

“Sweet Blessed Saint, to think that I should ever have lived to see him come to this,” Mercado whispered hoarsely, and Golophin heard something not far from a sob in the grim old soldier’s voice. “Is there nothing you can do, Golophin? Nothing?”

The wizard uttered a sigh which seemed to start in the toes of his boots. Some of his very vitality seemed to flicker out of him with it.

“I am keeping him breathing. More, I cannot do. I have not the strength. I must let the Dweomer in me grow again. The death of my familiar, the battles. They leached it out of me. I am sorry, General. So sorry. He is my friend too.”

Mercado straightened. “Of course. Your apologies. I am behaving like a maiden aunt. There’s no time for hand-wringing, not in days like these… . Where have you put his bitch of a mistress?”

“She’s accommodated in the guest apartments, forever screaming to see him. I have her under guard—for her own protection, naturally.”

“She bears his child,” Mercado said with an odd savagery.

“So it would seem. We must watch her closely.”

“Fucking women,” Mercado went on. “Another one here now for us to coddle and to step around.”

“As I said, Isolla is different. And she is Mark’s sister. The alliance between Hebrion and Astarac must be sealed by their marriage. For the good of the kingdom.”

Mercado snorted. “Marriage! And when will that be, I wonder? Will she marry a—” He stopped and bent his head, and Golophin could hear him swearing under his breath, cursing himself. “I have things I must attend to,” he said abruptly. “Enough of them, God knows. Let me know if there is any change, Golophin.” And he marched out as if he were about to face a court martial.

Golophin sat on the bed and took the hand of his King. His face became that of a malevolent skull, anger and hatred pursuing each other across it until he blinked, and then a huge weariness settled there in their place.

“Better you had died, Abeleyn,” he said softly. “A warrior’s end for the last of the warrior kings. When you are gone, all the little men will come out from under the stones.”

And he bowed his head and wept.

TWO

B Y God, Corfe thought, the man had known how to breed horses.

The destrier was dark bay, almost black, and a good seventeen hands and a half high. A deep-chested, thick-necked beast with a lively eye and clean limbs. A true warhorse, such as a nobleman alone might ride. And he’d had hundreds of them, all three years old or more, all geldings. A fortune in horn and bone and muscle—but, more importantly, the makings of a cavalry army.

His men were encamped in the pastures of one of the late Duke Ordinac’s stud farms. Three acres of leather tents—also the property of the late duke—had been pitched in scattered clumps by the four hundred tribesmen who remained under Corfe’s command. The makeshift camp was as busy as a broken ants’ nest, with men and horses, the smoke of cookfires, the clinking of hammers on little field-anvils, the vastly intricate and familiar and to Corfe wholly invigorating stink and clamour of a cavalry bivouac.

The gelding danced under him as it seemed to catch the lift of his spirits and he calmed it with voice and knees. He had mounted pickets half a mile out in every direction, and Andruw was two days gone with twenty men on a reconnaissance towards Staed, where Duke Narfintyr was arming against the King with over three thousand men under his banner already.

Stiff odds. But they would be farmers’ sons and lesser nobles, peasants turned into soldiers for the day. They would not be the born warriors that Corfe’s savage tribesmen were. And there were very few infantry troops on earth who could stand up to a heavy cavalry charge, if it were well handled. Professional pikemen perhaps, and that was all.

No, Corfe’s worst enemy was time. It was trickling through his fingers like sand and he had none to spare if he were to find and defeat Narfintyr before being superseded by the second army that King Lofantyr had sent south.

Today was the third of the five Saint’s Days that scholars had tacked on to the last month of the year to keep the calendar in step with the seasons. In two days’ time it would be
Sidhaon
, the night of Yearsend, and then the cycle would begin anew, and the season start its slow turn towards the warmth and reawakening of spring.

It seemed long overdue. This had been the longest winter of Corfe’s life. He could hardly remember what it was like to feel warm sun on his face, to walk on grass instead of trudging through snow or quagmire. A hellish and unnatural time of the year to be making war, especially with horse-soldiers. But then the world had become a hellish and unnatural place of late, with all of the old certainties overturned.

He considered this second army on its way south to deal with the rebels it was his own mission to destroy. A certain Colonel Aras, one of the King’s favourites, had been given a tidy little combined force with which to subdue the southern nobles, as the King had clearly expected Corfe to make a hash of it with his barbaric, ill-equipped command. He had enemies behind as well as in front, more to worry about than tactics and logistics; he had to be something of a politician as well. These things were inevitable as one rose higher in rank, but Corfe had never expected the intricacies and balances to be so murderous. Not in a time of war. Half the officers in Torunn, it had seemed to him, were more intent on winning the King’s favour than on throwing the Merduks back from Ormann Dyke. When he thought about it, a black, beating rage seemed to hover over him, an anger which had had its birth in the fall of Aekir, and which had been growing silently and steadily in him ever since without hope of release. Only wanton murder could hope to ease it. The killing of Merduk after Merduk down to the last squalling dark-skinned baby until there were no more of them left to stink out the world. Then perhaps his dreams would cease, and Heria’s ghost would sleep at last.

A courier cantered up to him and, without flourish or salute, said: “
Ondrow
come back.”

He nodded at the man—his tribesmen were picking up quite a bit of Normannic, but still had little notion of the proper forms of address—and followed him as he cantered easily up the hill that dominated the bivouac. Marsch was there, and Ensign Ebro, with three pickets. Ebro slapped out a salute which Corfe returned absently.

“Where away?”

“Less than a league, on the northern road,” Marsch told him. He was rubbing his forehead where the heavy
Ferinai
helm had begun to chafe it. “He’s in a hurry, I think. He pushes his horses.” Marsch sounded faintly disapproving, as if no emergency were important enough to warrant the maltreatment of horses.

“He’s swung round then,” Corfe said approvingly. “I’ll bet he’s been taking a look at our rivals in the game.”

They sat there watching the score of horsemen galloping up the muddy northern road with the clods dotting the air behind them like startled birds. In ten minutes the party had reined in, the horses’ nostrils flared and red, their necks white with foam. Mud everywhere, the riders’ faces splattered with it.

“What’s the news, Andruw?” Corfe asked calmly, though his heart had begun to thump faster.

His adjutant tore off his helm, his face a mask of filth.

“Narfintyr sits in Staed like an old woman at the hearth. Farmers’ boys, his men are, with a few nobles in fifty-year-old armour. None of the other nobles have risen—they’re waiting to see if he can get away with it. They’ve heard of Ordinac’s fate, but no one thinks we are regular Torunnan troops. The gossip has it that Ordinac ran into a war-party of Merduk deserters and scavengers.”