Aewult nan Haig and his Palace Shield were like a glittering precious stone set in the tawdry sludge of his army. The shieldmen had evidently been polishing their breastplates. Aewult’s magnificent horse – a huge beast – had its mane plaited, and its head encased with moulded, hinged silver armour. Some of the shieldmen were beating their drums, though the snow and wind conspired to thin out the sound and rob it of its force.
The Bloodheir peeled away from the column and came cantering up to Taim’s position. His Shield followed and drew to a halt in a long, bright line.
“Enough to do what needs to be done,” Aewult said with a flourish of his arm. It was not a question.
“I hope so, lord,” Taim said.
“You’re not to move from this position, whatever happens. I’ll send word to you if your company is needed. If my messengers do not find you here, it will count against you when all this is done.”
“Of course,” Taim said tightly. “I will be here until I am commanded otherwise. Or until night falls.”
“Ha!” The Bloodheir turned his horse hard about. “This’ll be done long before nightfall. You’ll see.”
“Dusk comes early at this time of year,” Taim murmured, but Aewult was already gone.
As the snow grew heavier, Taim had his men set up tents and move most of the horses into the fringes of the forest for shelter. Fires were lit and pots of broth set over them. A band of Haig warriors detached themselves from the passing army and demanded food and a place by one of the fires. By the time Taim got there and ordered them away, fists were being clenched and insults thrown. They were not the only ones to split away from the great, slow column. A dozen or more sick-looking men sat down by the side of the road and huddled there, despondent and apathetic, while the snow settled all around them.
Taim saw other small groups simply turn around and head back down the road towards Kolglas, like stubborn fish swimming against the current. One such band of reluctant warriors – men from the far west of Ayth-Haig to judge by their accents, and better than half-drunk to judge by their loudness – was intercepted by a harassed-looking captain in the midst of the column, and commanded to resume the march. There were threats, and shouting, and eventually violence. Two men were dead and others wounded before the mutinous company was compelled to obedience. Taim watched all this with a cold sense of trepidation settling over his heart.
The falling snow thinned. The sky lightened a fraction, the wind eased and fluttered back and forth as if unsure of its destination. Taim had dismounted and was sharing a loaf of bread with some of his men. He glanced up, and thought for one moment that he even glimpsed the globe of the sun, smeared through the clouds. It had begun its descent towards the horizon now; half the day was gone. The swirling wind was carrying a faint hint of sound on it. All around, men were waving at their companions to silence them, angling their heads to try to catch whatever message the erratic wind sought to deliver. Taim, like all of them, recognised the sound well enough. It was a formless thing, but he knew of what it was made: feet and hoofs, blades and cries, the clatter of shields and press of bodies. Somewhere far up the road, the head of Aewult’s army had found the battle it sought.
The clouds soon thickened and reasserted their grip. The world was returned to a kind of twilight gloom. The wind swung back into the west and drove fresh snow in off the sea. Taim led his horse into the shelter of a clump of bushes and waited there, in silence, with a knot of his most experienced warriors. They watched, without surprise, as the flow of the mighty Haig army along the road faltered and fragmented. Fewer and fewer warriors were trudging up from Kolglas, and ever more of those who did were stopping and flinging themselves down, pulling cloaks over their heads and curling in their protection like soft boulders. Wagons had got stuck in the roadside ditch. The tide of the army slackened. For a short time, there was nothing more than a scattering of men, disorganised and unmoving, strung out along the road. Then the tide was ebbing and, though Taim had heard no command given, men were no longer marching out from Kolglas but back towards it.
Soon after that, the messenger came to Taim: a young man, with blood on his face and a feverish urgency in his eyes. He struggled to control his panting and foaming horse as he shouted his message.
“You’re to bring every man you have to the Bloodheir. At once, without delay.”
Taim swung up onto his horse and set about unbuckling his shield from where it lay across his back.
“Where is the Bloodheir?” he asked. Already, his men were hurrying to ready themselves.
“Glasbridge! Make for Glasbridge!” The messenger sounded almost angry, though perhaps it was only the backwash of fear. “You’ll find the Bloodheir that way.”
Taim grimaced up at the waves of snow tumbling down. “I’ll be lucky to find him anywhere,” he muttered.
“Every man you have!” the messenger cried as he spun away and was carried off by his distressed mount.
“Three hundred,” Taim shouted after him, then as much to himself as anyone: “No more. I’ll not blindly lead all the strength my Blood has left into this storm.”
The wind died as they rode. Fat, heavy snowflakes thronged the air like congealed fragments of cloud. Hundreds upon hundreds of warriors, some exhausted, some wounded, some merely lost, crowded the road. It was as Taim and others had told Aewult nan Haig: this would be snowfall enough to still the world, to confound all the intents and desires of men. Even the rocky shoreline was acquiring a white dusting in the space between each set of waves. The sea receded into obscurity as ever more dense curtains of snow rolled in from the west. The mills and cottages on the landward side of the road faded behind wintry veils. It was, Taim kept thinking as he led his men on along the coast, weather fit for disaster. With every pace his horse took, the road was disappearing beneath its hoofs.
There were corpses – and perhaps the living too, for it was not always easy to tell the difference – here and there along the roadside: black bundles heaped up and now coated with white. Arrows, bolts and broken spears were scattered around, and a few dead horses. Once, without warning, a shower of arrows came skimming out of the snowstorm. There was no way of telling their source. A couple of men cried out, horses screamed. A few riders set off in search of the unseen archers but Taim called them back.
They came to a great swathe of the dead. Bodies were piled up along the line of a ditch and bank – now little more than great white undulations in the earth – that had been thrown across the road. The wounded were crawling around, clambering over their fallen comrades. Some were weeping, some crying out for help. One man, his left arm broken and torn, was stumbling around stabbing feebly, one-handed, with his spear. Perhaps he was killing the enemy wounded; perhaps he was killing the already dead. A score or more of injured Haig men had gathered together, huddling in the ditch, watching one another die.
“Where is the Bloodheir?” Taim shouted down at them.
They looked up at him, and he saw shock, fear, emptiness in their faces.
“Have you a healer?” one of them asked him. “We need a healer.”
“Tell me where the Bloodheir is first,” he insisted.
They did not know, but Taim left three of his men to give them what aid they could, and get those who would live back to Kolglas. He rode up and over the bank. Beyond, the ground as far as he could see was strewn with bodies. Hundreds had fallen here, warriors of the Black Road and the True Bloods alike, but the battle had moved on. It was somewhere out there, in the grey-white clouds of snow. Taim took his men onwards in search of it.