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.
“Where have they gone?” he asked.
“Who knows? Back to their dank motherland perhaps, or perhaps they are in Aekir, helping with the rebuilding. The fact remains—”
Corfe was no longer listening. His mind had begun to turn furiously. Why move a hundred thousand men out of their winter camps at the darkest time of the year, when the roads were virtual quagmires and forage for the baggage and transport animals would be nonexistent? For a good reason, obviously, not mere administration. There had to be a strategic motive behind the move. Could it be that the main Merduk effort was no longer to be made at Ormann Dyke, but somewhere else? Impossible, surely—but that was what this news suggested. The question, however: if not at Ormann Dyke, then where? There was nowhere else to go.
A sense of foreboding as powerful as any he had ever known suddenly came upon him. He sobered in a second. They had found some way to bypass the dyke. They were about to make their main thrust somewhere else—and soon, in winter, when Torunnan military intelligence said they would not.
“Excuse me,” he said to a startled Aras, rising from his chair. “I thank you for a hospitable evening, but I and my officers must depart at once.”
“But . . . what?” Aras said.
Corfe beckoned to Andruw and Ebro, who were staring at him, bowed to the assembled Torunnan officers and left the tent. His two subordinates hurried to keep up with him as he squelched through the mud outside. Andruw saved the bewildered and drunken Ebro from a slippery fall. A fine drizzle was drifting down, and the night was somewhat warmer.
“Corfe—” Andruw began.
“Have the men stand to,” Corfe snapped. “I want everything packed and ready to move within the hour. We move out at once.”
“What’s afoot? For God’s sake, Corfe!” Andruw protested.
“That is an order, Haptman,” Corfe said coldly.
His tone sobered Andruw in an instant. “Yes, sir. Might I ask where we are going?”
“North, Andruw. Back to Torunn.” His voice softened.
“We’re going to be needed there,” he said.
T ORUNNA seemed the hub of the world that winter, a place where the fate of the continent would be decided. Around the capital, Torunn, the hordes of unfortunates from Aekir were still squatting in sprawling refugee camps beyond the suburbs of the city. They were foreigners, bred to the cosmopolitan immensity of a great city which was now gone. And yet at day’s end they were Torunnan also, and thus the responsibility of the crown. They were fed at public expense, and materials for a vast tented metropolis were carted out to them by the wagonload, so it seemed to an observer that there was a mighty army encamped about the capital, with the smoke and mist and reek and clamour of a teeming multitude rising from it. And also the stench, the disease, and the disorder of a people who had lost everything and did not know where to go.
The nobility of Normannia were fond of heights. Perhaps it was because they liked to see a stretch of the land they ruled, perhaps it was for defensive purposes, or perhaps it was merely so they were set apart from the mass of the population who were their subjects. There were no hills in Torunn to build palaces on, as there were in Abrusio and Cartigella, so the engineers who had reared up the Torunnan palace had made it a towering edifice of wide towers interconnected with bridges and aerial walkways. Not a thing of beauty, such as the Peridrainian King inhabited in Vol Ephrir, but a solid, impressive presence that frowned down over the city like a stooped titan. From the topmost of its apartments and suites one might on a clear day see the glint of white on the western horizon that was the Cimbric Mountains. And on a still spring morning it was possible to see fifty miles out to sea, and watch the ships sail in from the Kardian Gulf like dark-bellied swans.