“But why bless his enterprise? It is giving tacit recognition of the Torunnan kingdom, which is no longer within the Church’s fold.”
“No. I merely blessed the Fimbrians: I did not wish Godspeed to heretics. If the old imperial power is once again stirring and taking an interest in the world, then it would be as well for us to keep it on our side. The Fimbrians are still a Himerian state, remember. They have never formally recognized the anti-Pontiff Macrobius, and therefore they are technically in our camp. Let us keep it that way. The Fimbrians themselves obviously want to keep the Church in their corner, else that brutish marshal would have marched past Charibon without a pause and we would be none the wiser of his passing. No-despite the bequest of Almark we are not strong enough to antagonize the Electors.”
Their sandals slapped on the frigid stone of the cloisters.
“I pity them, sleeping out on a night like this,” Betanza said.
Himerius snorted. “They are soldiers, little better than animals. They hardly register any feeling except the most base. Let them shiver.”
They took one more turn about the cloister, and then: “I will go to bed now, Holiness,” Betanza said, oddly subdued. “My investigations into the death of Commodius will recommence at dawn. I wish to pray awhile.”
“By all means. Good night, Betanza.”
The Pontiff stood alone in the clear night, his eyes glittering under his hood. In his mind he was marshalling armies and putting the cities of the heretics to the torch. A second empire there would be on earth, and as mad Honorius had said it would rise in an age of fire and the sword.
I am tired, Himerius thought, his savage exaltation flickering out as the freezing wind searched his frame. I am old, and weary of the struggle. But soon my task will be fulfilled, and I will be able to rest. Someone else will take my place.
He padded off to his bed as silently as a cat.
“Albrec. Wake up, Albrec!”
A blow on Albrec’s cheekbone snapped his head to one side and tore the scab of ice from around his nose. He moaned as the cold air bit into the exposed flesh and fought open his eyes as someone shook him as though he were a rat being worried by a dog.
He lay half-buried in snow and a frost-white shape was pummelling him.
“All right, all right! I’m awake.”
Avila collapsed in a heap beside him, the air sobbing in and out of his fractured chest. “It’s stopped snowing,” he wheezed. “We should try to move on.”
But they both remained prone in the drift which had come close to burying them. Their clothes had stiffened on their backs to the consistency of armour, and they no longer had any feeling left in their extremities. Worse, white patches of frostbite discoloured their faces and ears.
“We’re finished,” Albrec moaned. “God has abandoned us.”
The wind had dropped, and they lay on their backs in the snow staring up at the vast vault of the star-crowded night sky. Beautiful and pitiless, the stars were so bright that they cast faint shadows, though the moon had not yet risen.
Far off the two clerics heard the forlorn howl of a solitary wolf, come down out of the terrible winter heights of the Cimbrics seeking food.
Another answered it, and then there were more. A pack of them off in the night, calling to one another in some unfathomable fellowship.
Albrec was strangely unafraid. I am dying, he thought, and it does not matter.
“Sailors believe that in oyvips live the souls of lost mariners who drowned in a state of sin,” the little monk told Avila, remembering his childhood on the Hardic Sea.
“What’s an oyvip?” Avila asked, his voice a light feather of a thing balanced on his lips, as though his lungs were too racked with pain to give it depth.
“A great, blunt-nosed fish with a kindly eye and a habit of following ships. A happy thing, always at play.”
“Then I envy those lost souls,” Avila breathed.
“And woodsmen,” Albrec went on, his own voice becoming slurred and faint. “They believe that in wolves abide the souls of evil men, and, some think, of lost children. They think that in the heart of the wolf lies all the darkness and despair of mankind, which is why shifters usually manifest as wolves.”
“You read too much, Albrec,” Avila whispered. “Too many things. Wolves are animals, mindless and soulless. Man is the only true beast, because he has the capacity not to be.”
They lay with the cold seeping into their bones like some slow, cancerous growth, staring up at the stark beauty of the stars. There was no longer any pain for them, or any hope of flight or life, but there was peace out here in the drifts, in the wild country of the Narian Hills where the Free Tribes had once roamed and worshipped their dark gods.
“No more philosophy,” Albrec murmured. The stars were winking out one by one as his sight darkened.
“Good night, Avila.”
But from his friend there was no reply.
The Fimbrian patrol came across them an hour later, drawn by the shadowed figures of the wolves who were gathering around them. The soldiers kicked away the beasts and found two clerics of Charibon lying stiff and cold in the snow with their faces turned up to the stars and their hands clasped together like those of two lost children. The soldiers had to chip them free of the frozen drift with their swords. The pair had on their bodies the marks of violence and rough travel, but their faces were peaceful, as serene as the countenance of a sculpted saint.
The sergeant in charge of the patrol ordered them wrapped in cloaks and carried back to camp. The patrol followed his orders, picked up the bodies and started at the double back to where the campfires of the Fimbrian army glimmered red and yellow in the starlight, less than a mile away.
The wolves watched them go in silence.
TWENTY-THREE
They had made good time, marching sixty leagues in eleven days. Corfe had never seen anything quite like his motley little army of savage tatterdemalions. They were eager, talkative, fiercely good-humoured. On leaving Torunn they had changed completely, and their column often rang out with tribal songs, ribald laughter. It was as if the city had placed some kind of sombre restraint on them, but now that they were out in open country, marching with swords slapping at their thighs and lances in their hands, something in them took wing. They were undisciplined, yes, but they were more enthusiastic than any other soldiers Corfe had known. It was as if they thought they were marching south to take part in some manner of festival.
He put his views to Marsch one evening as they sat by the campfire, shivering in their threadbare blankets and watching flurries of snow lit up by the flames wheeling feather-like out of the darkness beyond. Almost a third of the men were barefoot, and many had no adequate covering to keep out the cold, but the bristling crowds about the other campfires were humming with low talk, like a summer garden alive with bees.
“Why do they seem so happy?” Corfe asked his newest ensign.
The huge tribesman wiped his nose on his blanket, shrugging. “They are free. Is that not enough to make a man happy?”
“But they are marching south to fight a battle which has nothing to do with them. Why do they seem so eager to do it?”
Marsch looked at his commander strangely. “How often do the causes for which men fight mean anything to them? For my people, the Felimbri, war is our life. It is the means by which a man advances himself in the esteem of his comrades. There is no other way.”
Ensign Ebro, who was sitting close by with a fur cape clutched about his shoulders, snorted with contempt.
“That is the reasoning of a primitive,” he said.
“We are all primitives, and always will be,” Marsch said with unusual mildness. “If men were civilized truly, then they would not kill each other. We are animals. Something in us needs to fight in order to prove we are alive. My men have been chattels, beasts harnessed for brute labour. But now they bear the weapons of free men, and they are to fight like free men, in open contest. It matters not who they fight or where, or for what.”