‘Can I get up now?’ said Va.

‘It’s over,’ said Elenya. ‘Yes.’

He got up and brushed himself down, his heavy cross bouncing on his black-clad chest. His hands were trembling.

‘Va?’

‘He’s opened the book.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Because,’ he said, pointing towards An Cobh, ‘that’s what’s in the books. The Users put all their secrets in them – the same secrets that destroyed them and Reversed the world. I need to get those books back now, before it all happens again.’ He watched the gates of the town swing open and the king’s men walk slowly out of the shadow of the gatehouse.

‘They look as shocked as anyone else.’

‘So they should. They’ve been set on the road to Hell by their king and this damned Kenyan thief.’ He strode off down the hill.

‘Va, you can’t.’

‘I can and I will. God is on my side.’ He clutched his cross in both hands. ‘He is my shield and my sword.’

He walked on. Not all of Cormac’s men had been killed outright. The injured called out to him in their strange foreign tongue, holding out their hands and pleading with him. Va walked on, even though it was agony for him to do so.

He was back outside the city of Novy Rostov, his bright plates of armour red with blood, his sword arm numb with effort, his helmet battered and jammed on his head, his calf cut and bleeding, his left shoulder a mass of pain and bone fragments. Every step he took, he trod on someone, something: a pool of dashed brains, a coil of intestines, a shattered torso, sightless eyes, unidentifiable human mulch that had once been a daughter or a son.

The dead were lucky. It was the still living who were cursed. They moaned. They cried. They sobbed. The sound of ten thousand voices in agony cut his soul in two.

At the gates of Novy Rostov, where the bodies gathered in drifts like snow, the last Caliphate soldier had raised the stained and ragged crescent standard of his people. He swayed as if drunk, only his spear keeping him upright. And finally Va reached him, wading through the corpses of both their armies.

There was no ceremony, no honour. Va raised his sword, put the broken point of it against the soldier’s throat, and the man just stumbled onto it, glad finally to be free of the torment of seeing and hearing.

He fell, and with him, Va’s sword. He’d not touched it, or another, again. His moment of victory had been shown for the catastrophe it was. He had raised an army, trained it, organized it, led it. It had been his tactics that had crushed the Caliphate’s encircling troops, liberated Novy Rostov and broken the power of the caliph for a decade to come. All for what? Love. He’d been the last man standing, and he’d known in that moment that nothing could possibly be worth that carnage.

That was why, walking through the wounded, battle-torn and bleeding, he could ignore everything. Elenya was right: he couldn’t save these men, but he could prevent a greater calamity by reclaiming the stolen books.

Someone caught his robe and he heard the word for ‘father’. He was calling for a priest: not a true priest of the Orthodox Church, the one true Church that had preserved God’s message inviolate and unchanging for ever. These people’s priests were full of strange doctrines and heretical practices that made his heart burn with indignation.

Two days ago he’d buried one as best he could. He couldn’t bring himself not to call the man Christian.

‘Father.’

Va looked down. The man was burned, hand and face. His left foot had gone. His eyes gazed up wetly from amongst the blackened ruin.

‘I’m not a priest,’ said Va.

The man didn’t understand Rus. But Elenya was there, kneeling beside him, whispering into his ear. He moved his head slightly to see her, this angel who had appeared and provided the gift of tongues.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said in Elenya’s voice, ‘you’re a man of God. Pray for me.’

‘I have God’s greater work to do. I have to go.’

He held on tighter to the hem of Va’s habit. ‘I’m frightened,’ he said.

Shamed, Va sank to ground, furiously wiping tears away with his coarse sleeves. He put his hand on the man’s forehead. ‘There’s no reason to be afraid. We’re soldiers. We go here and there as we’re ordered. You were obedient to your earthly lord because you’re obedient to your heavenly lord. Men betray you because they’re weak or foolish or arrogant and uncaring. God won’t let you down. Trust Him.’

Elenya spoke unfamiliar, hesitant words, then said to Va: ‘He’s dead. He’s gone.’

‘No,’ he gasped. He saw that it was true and tore at his habit. He leaped up, spun round and found the next man still living. He crossed himself, kissed the cross and started to pray for the man’s soul.

He was tapped on the shoulder. When it happened a second time, Va spat out: ‘What?’

A boy from An Cobh stood behind him. He was offering some strips of clean linen as bandages and a skin of water. He was ash-white and looked as if he was about to cry. Va recognized himself in that lost face.

‘Give them to me,’ he said, and gestured. The boy took fright at his foreignness, and it took comforting words from Elenya for him to relinquish his death-grip on the water.

The man on the ground had an iron barb in his thigh, another in his side. His skin was grey and felt clammy to the touch. When Va looked, he realized there was a vast pool of blood soaking into the ground underneath him.

He worked quickly, applying a tourniquet high up on the man’s leg, almost at the groin, and tightened it with one of the spikes that had dug into the turf nearby.

‘This man will die if we can’t get that arrow out and the hole sewn shut. Tell him,’ said Va to Elenya.

The boy looked from the monk to the woman, and ran off back into town.

‘I think he’s going to die anyway,’ she said. ‘But why did you change your mind?’

Va absent-mindedly smeared blood on his forehead. ‘I hate myself. I hate the compromises I make all the time. Life breeds sin, and I’m dirty with it.’

‘There, there. Just sometimes you forget yourself and do what’s right.’

Va sat back on his haunches. Up on the hill, a pitiful few had gathered together. In the valley, at the edges, robbers were at work, killing the wounded and stealing from the dead. Closer to the town, the King of Coirc’s men were moving across the fields, spreading out.

They were as appalled by the manner of their victory as Cormac’s men. Guiltily they picked up those they could save and carried them inside the stone walls.

CHAPTER 22

NO ONE QUESTIONED him or challenged his right to enter the town at the end of the day. He’d worked tirelessly, dressing wounds so that they might not turn to stinking rot in a few days, easing the last moments of those who were never going to see another sun rise.

He had preferred pulling arrows and sewing cuts and mopping blood to the prayers and the sanctification of souls. The men weren’t Rus, knew nothing of Orthodoxy, acknowledged someone other than the patriarch as their spiritual leader. Their own heretical priests had helped them far more than he could, because even as he crossed their foreheads with cold, shining water, he felt as if he was betraying his vows.

Va and Elenya walked behind the last of the carts laden with dead together with the people of An Cobh, as if they’d earned their place amongst them. Something made Va look up and back as they passed under the gatehouse. Staring down on them were two men, one with grey hair and a heavy gold chain, the other in a rich purple cloak: the King of Coirc and the Kenyan, Solomon Akisi.

The king failed to notice the incandescent rage directed at him, but Akisi caught a sudden chill and shivered. He whispered in the king’s ear and gave a surreptitious gesture, pointing out Va in the crowd below them.