The Iron Wars (9 page)

“Colonel Aras.” Corfe nodded. “You have a fine command.”

Aras sat visibly straighter in the saddle. “Yes. Good men. Now that we have arrived, we can get on with the business at hand. I take it Narfintyr and his army have decamped from the vicinity, else you would not be here.” And he smiled. Corfe heard some of the tribesmen muttering angrily behind him. They understood enough Normannic to grasp what was being said.

“Indeed,” Corfe answered civilly. “I fear Narfintyr is far away by now. But you’re welcome to try and catch him if you like.”

Aras’s smile grew brittle. “That is why I am here. I am sure your men have striven nobly under you, but you must now leave it to me and my command to get the job done.”

Corfe was very tired. He had almost forgotten what it was like not to be tired. He was too tired even to be angry. Or to boast.

“Narfintyr has fled across the Kardian,” he said. “My men and I have destroyed his army. There are over a thousand prisoners locked in the halls of his castle as I speak. I leave the last of the mopping up to you, Colonel. I am taking my command north again.”

There was a pause. “I don’t understand,” Aras said, still struggling to smile.

“We’ve done your job for you, it seems, sir,” Andruw said, grinning. “If you doubt us, there’s a pyre to the south of the town with seven hundred corpses on it, still smouldering. Narfintyr’s finest.”

Aras blinked rapidly. “But you… I mean, where are the rest of your men? I thought you had only a few tercios.”

“We’re all here, Colonel,” Corfe told him wearily. “There were enough of us to do what was needed. You can stand down your own men. As I said, we leave for the north at once. I must get back to the capital.”

“You can’t!” Aras blustered. “You must stay here and help me. You must attach your men to my command.”

“God’s eyes—have you been listening?” Corfe barked. “Narfintyr is gone, his army destroyed. You cannot give me orders—you are not my superior. Now get out of my way!”

The two groups of riders remained opposite each other, the horses beginning to dance as they picked up the tension from their masters. Corfe had intended to have a civilized meeting, a military conclave of sorts where he would fill Aras in on the current situation. They were, after all, on the same side. But instead he found he could not bear the thought of trying to brief this arrogant puppy. His unravelling patience had finally frayed entirely. He wanted only to be on the move again, to get his men some well-earned rest. And to go north, where the real battlefields were. There was no time for bitching and moaning.

One thing, though, that he could not forget.

“Before we depart, Colonel, I must inform you that I must leave behind some score or so of my wounded who are too badly injured to travel. They’re billeted in the upper levels of the keep. Those men are to be looked after as though they were of your own command. I will hold you accountable for the well-being of each and every one of them. Is that clear?”

Aras opened and shut his mouth, his pale face flushed. Behind him, one of his aides muttered audibly: “Playing nursemaid to savages now, are we?”

It was Andruw who nudged his mount forward until it was shoulder to shoulder with the speaker’s.

“I know you, Harmion Cear-Adhur. We went to gunnery school together. Remember?”

The man Harmion shrugged. Andruw grinned that infectious grin of his.

“One of these savages behind me is worth any ten of your parade-ground heroes. And you—you only got those haptman bars by kissing the arse of every officer you were ever placed under. What have you to say to that?” Andruw’s grin had become wild, giving his grimed face a slightly demented aspect. He had his right hand on his sabre.

“Enough,” Corfe said. “Andruw, get back in ranks. You are out of order. Colonel Aras, I apologize for my subordinate’s behaviour.”

Aras got hold of himself. He cleared his throat, nodded to Corfe and finally asked in a civil tone: “Is it actually true? These men of yours have defeated Narfintyr?”

“I do not make a habit of lying, Colonel.”

“You are the same Colonel Cear-Inaf who was at Aekir and Ormann Dyke, are you not?”

“I am.”

Aras’s face changed. He cleared his throat again. “Then might I shake your hand, Colonel, and congratulate you and your men on a great victory? And perhaps I can prevail upon you to stay here for one more night and partake of my headquarters’ hospitality. I can also have some equipment and spare mounts sent over to your men. If you do not mind my saying so, they look as though they need it.”

Corfe rode forward and took the younger man’s hand. “Courteously put. All right, Aras, we’ll remain another night. My senior ensign, Ebro, will acquaint your quartermaster’s department of our needs.”

A ND so they remained, the two little armies encamped upon the muddy plain north of Staed. Aras had wanted to billet his men with the townspeople, but Corfe talked him out of the idea. The local people had suffered enough lately, and they were Torunnans, after all, not some conquered nation. It was enough that they went hungry to provision the soldiers who had lately swamped their countryside, and that their sons had died by the hundred whilst fighting those soldiers.

The camps of the Cathedrallers and Torunnan regulars were kept separate, and between them were Aras’s headquarters tents. The Torunnans seemed at first dubious, then curious, and small parties of men from both camps met at the stream where the horses were watered, and there took wary stock of each other, like two dogs sniffing and circling, unable to decide whether to go for each other’s throats.

Aras’s column was remarkably well stocked with all manner of military supplies. He sent over to the Cathedraller lines wagons full of new lances, pig-iron, charcoal for the field forges, fresh rations, forage and sixty fresh horses.

Corfe, Andruw and Marsch watched them come in. Big-boned bay geldings with matted manes and wild eyes.

“They’re only half broken,” Andruw pointed out.

“What did you expect—the best of his destriers?” Corfe asked him. “If they had three legs apiece I’d still take them. What think you, Marsch? Do they amount to much?”

The big tribesman was looking over the snorting, prancing new arrivals with a practised eye.

“Three-year-olds,” he said. “Only just lost their stones, and still feeling the loss. They’ll quiet down in time. My men will soon break them in.”

“Why is this Aras suddenly kissing your backside, Corfe?” Andruw asked thoughtfully.

“It’s obvious. We head for Torunn tomorrow, back to the court. He wants us to give a good account of him, maybe even let him share in some of the glory.”

Andruw snorted. “Fat chance.”

“Oh, I’m not going to disparage him before the King. I won’t make any friends that way either. But he won’t steal the glory my men bled for.”

T HERE was a feast that night in Aras’s conference tent, a huge flapping structure thirty feet long and high enough to stand upright in. All his officers were there, dressed, to Corfe’s astonishment, in court uniforms, complete with lace cuffs and buckled shoes. There was a Torunnan soldier acting as waiter behind every one of the folding canvas chairs which seated the diners, and the long board table blazed with silver cutlery and tableware. As Corfe, Andruw and Ebro walked in, Andruw laughed aloud.

“We must be lost, Corfe,” he muttered. “I thought we were supposed to be on campaign.”

Corfe was seated at Aras’s right hand at the head of the table, Andruw farther down and Ebro near the bottom. Marsch had declined to come. He had to see to the settling in of the new horses, he said, though Corfe privately thought that the prospect of using a knife and fork terrified him as no battle ever could.

“Some of my staff brought down several deer last week in the march south,” Aras told Corfe. “They’re tolerably well hung by now. I hope you like venison, Colonel.”

“By all means,” Corfe said absently. He sipped wine—good Candelarian, the wine of ships—from a silver goblet, and wondered how large Aras’s baggage train had to be to sustain a headquarters of this magnificence. For an army of under three thousand it was ridiculous.

As the wine flowed and the courses came and went, the table set up a respectable din of talk. Ensign Ebro, Corfe saw, was in his element, regaling the other junior officers with war stories. Andruw was eating and drinking steadily, like a man making up for lost time. He was seated beside an officer in the blue livery of the artillery, and the two were engaged in a lively discussion between wolfed-down bites of food and gulps of wine. Corfe shook his head slightly. The field army of Aekir, John Mogen’s command, had never done things thus. Where had the pomp and ceremony which permeated the entire Torunnan army come from? Perhaps it had to do with soldiering to the rear of an impregnable frontier. Apart from himself and Andruw, no man here had ever fought in a large-scale pitched battle. And with the fall of Aekir, the frontier was no longer impregnable. An entire army, over thirty thousand men, had been destroyed in the city’s fall. The only truly experienced soldiers left in the kingdom were those at the dyke with Martellus. Once again, Corfe felt a thrill of uneasiness at the thought. Had he been Lofantyr, he would be conscripting and drilling men by the thousand, and marching them off to Ormann Dyke. There was a leisurely nature to the High Command’s strategy that was downright alarming.

Aras was talking to him. Corfe collected his thoughts quickly, mustering his civility. He had precious little of it to spare these days.

“I suppose you have heard the rumours, Colonel, you having been at the court for the arrival of the Pontiff.”

“No. Tell me,” Corfe said.

“It seems hard to credit it, but it would seem that our liege lord has hired Fimbrian mercenaries to reinforce Ormann Dyke.”

Corfe had heard as much in the war councils of the King, but his face betrayed nothing. “How very singular,” he said, and sipped at his wine.

“Yes—though there’s other words I’d rather use. Imagine! Hiring our ancient overlords to fight our wars for us. It’s an insult to every officer in the army. The King has never been greatly loved by the rank and file, but this has enraged them as nothing else ever could. It makes it look as though he does not trust his own countrymen to fight his battles for him.”

Corfe privately thought that in this at least the King was showing some shred of wisdom, but he said nothing.

“So now we have a grand tercio of them marching across Torunna as if they owned it. Fimbrians! I wonder they can still fight at all after having locked themselves behind their borders for four hundred years.”

“I am sure that Martellus will know what to do with them,” Corfe said mildly.

“Martellus—yes—a good man. You know him, I suppose, having served at the dyke.”

“I know him.”

“He’s not a gentleman, they say—a rough-and-ready kind of character, but a good general.”

“John Mogen was no gentleman either, but he could fight battles well enough,” Corfe said.

“Of course, of course,” Aras said hastily. “It is just that I think it is time the new generation of officers was given a chance to prove their mettle. The older men are too set in their ways, and the world is changing around them. Now give me a couple of grand tercios, and I’ll tell you how I’d relieve the dyke…” and he launched into a detailed description of how Colonel Aras would outdo Martellus and even Mogen, and send the Merduks reeling back across the Ostian River.

He was drunk, Corfe realized. Many of the officers there were by now, having thrown back decanter after decanter of the ruby Candelarian, their glasses blood-glows brimming in the candlelight. Outside, Marsch and the Cathedrallers would be making their cold beds in Torunnan mud, and up along the Ostian River, a hundred and thirty leagues away, the bones of the men who had once been Corfe’s comrades in arms would be lying still unburied.

I’m drunk myself, he thought, though the wine had curdled in his mouth. He hated the black mood that settled upon him with ever increasing frequency these days. He wanted to be like Andruw or Ebro, able to enjoy himself and laugh with his fellow officers. But he could not. Aekir had set him apart. Aekir, and Heria. He wondered if he would ever know a moment’s true peace again, except for those wild, murderous times in battle when all that existed was the present. No past, no thought of the future, only the vivid, terrifying and exhilarating experience of killing. Only that.

He thought of the night he had bedded the Queen Dowager of Torunna, his patron. That had been like battle, a losing of oneself in the sensations of the moment. But there was always the aftermath, the emptiness of awakening. No—there was nothing to fill the void in him except the roar of war, and perhaps the comradeship of a few men he trusted and esteemed. No room for softness there, no place for it any more. He had his wife’s face and her memories stored away in that inaccessible corner of his mind, and nothing else would ever touch him there.

“—but of course we need men, more men,” Aras was saying. “Too many troops are tied down in Torunna itself, and more will be sent south to guard against any fresh uprising. I suppose I can see the King’s reasoning. Why not let foreigners bleed for us at the dyke, and harbour our own kind until they are truly needed? But it leaves a bad taste in one’s mouth, I must say. In any case, the dyke will not fall—you should know that better than anyone, Colonel. No, we have fought the Merduks to a standstill, and should be thinking about taking the offensive. And I am not the only officer in the army who thinks this way. When I left the court, the talk centred around how we might strike back along the Western Road from the dyke and make a stab at regaining the Holy City.”

“If all campaigns needed were bold words, then no war would ever be lost,” Corfe said irritably. “There are two hundred thousand Merduks encamped before the dyke—”

“Not any more,” Aras said, pleased to have caught him out. “Reports say that half the enemy have left the winter camps along the Searil. Less than ninety thousand remain before the dyke.”

Corfe tried to blink away the wine fumes, suddenly aware that he had been told something of the greatest importance.