So he was on his own.
He had applied to have more officers seconded to him; he and Ebro alone could not effectively command five hundred men. And he had had Ebro indent three times for armour and weapons to outfit his force, but to no avail. Worst of all was the rumour running about the Garrison Quarters that Lofantyr was going to set aside twenty tercios of the regular army for the job of subjugating the rebellious nobles in the south—the task Corfe had been entrusted with. Clearly, the King did not expect the Queen Dowager’s protégé to accomplish anything beyond his own discrediting.
He hammered on the door of the Quartermaster’s department, wearing again the ragged uniform he had worn at Aekir.
The Quartermaster’s department of the Third Torunnan Field Army was housed in a vast string of warehouses close to the waterfront in the east of the city. The warehouses held everything from boots to waggonwheels, cannon barrels to belts. Everything needed to equip and sustain an army could be found in them, but they were giving Corfe’s men nothing more than the clothes on their backs and he wanted to know why.
The Quartermaster-General was Colonel Passifal, a veteran with a short, snow-white beard and a wooden stump in place of the leg he had lost fighting Merduks along the Ostian river before Corfe was born. His office was as bare as a monk’s cell, and the papers which covered his desk were set in neat piles. Requisition orders, inspection sheets, inventories. The Torunnan army had a highly organized system of paperwork which it had copied from its one-time overlord, Fimbria.
“What do you want?” Passifal barked, not looking up from the scraping nib of his quill.
“I indented for five hundred sets of half-armour, five hundred arquebuses, five hundred sabres and all the necessary accoutrements days ago. I would like to know why the requisition has not been filled,” Corfe said.
Passifal looked up, his quill losing its flickering animation.
“Ah. Colonel Corfe Cear-Inaf, I take it.”
Corfe nodded curtly.
“Well, there’s nothing I can do for you, son. My orders are to release stores only to regular Torunnan troops for the duration—Martellus is crying out for equipment up at the dyke, you know—and that rabble the King has given you to play with are officially classed as auxiliary militia, which means that the Torunnan military is not responsible for their fitting-out. I’ve stretched things as it is, giving you uniforms and a place for them to lay their heads. So don’t bother me any more.”
Corfe leant over the broad desk, resting his knuckles on the rim. “So how am I supposed to arm my men, Colonel?”
Passifal shrugged. “Auxiliary units are usually equipped by the private individual who has raised them. Are you rich, Cear-Inaf?”
Corfe laughed shortly. “All I possess is what I stand up in.”
Passifal gazed at the ragged uniform. “You got those rents at Aekir, I hear.”
“And at Ormann Dyke.”
“So you’ve smelled powder.” Passifal scratched his white beard for a moment and then gestured with sudden peevishness. “Oh, take a seat, for God’s sake, and stop trying to stand there on top of your dignity.”
Corfe drew up a chair. Ebro remained standing by the door.
“I hear the King has played a joke on you, Colonel,” Passifal said, grinning now. “He does that sometimes. The old woman rides him hard, and every so often he kicks at the traces.”
“The Queen Dowager.”
“Yes. What a beauty that woman was in her day. Not bad now, as a matter of fact. It’s the witchery keeps her young, they say. But Lofantyr gets tired of being told which pot to piss in. He’s outfitting an expedition to bring the south to heel—a proper one, infantry, cavalry and horse artillery—but he’s going to let you go south and make an arse of it first to show his mother she shouldn’t force her favourites on him.”
“I thought as much,” Corfe said calmly, though his fists clenched on his knees.
“Yes. My orders are not to let you have so much as a brass button from our stores. Those savages you style a command will have to fight with their fists and teeth alone. I’m sorry for it, Colonel, but that’s the way it is.”
“Thank you for explaining it to me,” Corfe said in a flat voice. He rose to go.
Passifal stuck out a hand. “Not so fast! There’s no hurry, is there? You served under Mogen, I take it.”
“I did.”
“So did I. I was a cavalryman in one of his flying columns in the days when we went out looking for the Merduks instead of waiting for them to march up to our walls.”
“I also was cavalry,” Corfe said, unbending a little. “But there was no need for horsemen in Aekir once the siege began.”
“Yes, yes, I daresay . . . Old Mogen used to say that cavalry was the arm of the gentleman, and artillery the arm of the mechanic. How we used to love that cantankerous old bastard! He was the best man we’ve ever had . . .”
Passifal stared at Corfe for a long moment, as if weighing him up.
“There is a way to equip your men, after a fashion,” he said at last.
“How?”
Passifal rose. “Come with me.” His stump thumped hollowly on the floor as he came round from behind his desk and retrieved a set of keys from the hundreds hanging in rows along one wall of the office. “You won’t like it, mind, and I’m not sure if it’s right, but they’re barbarians you’re commanding so I doubt if they’ll care. And besides, the stuff isn’t doing any good where it is, and technically it’s not part of the regular military stores . . .”
Corfe and Ebro followed the one-legged Quartermaster out of the office, completely baffled.
T HIS section of the Main Arsenal resembled nothing so much as the great market squares in the middle of Torunn. There were carts, waggons and limbers everywhere. Men were shifting stores from warehouses or into warehouses, culverins were being drawn by teams of oxen, and everywhere there was the squeal of pulleys and cries of labouring men. Down at the waterfront a trio of deep-hulled nefs had put in from the wide Torrin Estuary and were unloading cargoes of powder and pig-iron on to the quays, and a slim dispatch-runner had just docked, bearing news from the east, no doubt.
Passifal led them away from the hubbub to an older building which was set back from the waterfront. It was an ageing stone structure, windowless and somehow deserted-looking, as though it had been long forgotten.
The Quartermaster turned a key in the screeching lock and shouldered the heavy door open with a grunt.
“Stay close behind,” he told Corfe and Ebro. “It’s dark as a witch’s tit in here. I’ll strike a light.”
The crack of flint on steel, and Passifal was blowing gently on the tinder-covered wick of an oil lamp. The light grew and he slapped shut the glass case on the lengthening flame, then held it up so that the radiance of it flushed the interior of the building.
“What in the world—?” Corfe said, startled despite himself.
The building was very long; it extended beyond the lamplight into darkness. And it was crowded.
Piles of armour lay all about, in places stacked until they almost reached the raftered ceiling. Helmets, gauntlets, breast- and back-plates, chainmail, vambraces, aventails, rusting and cobwebbed and dented by blows, holed by gunfire. Mixed in with the armour were weapons: scimitars, tulwars, rotten-shafted lances with remnants of silk still attached to their heads. Strange weapons, unlike any the Torunnans used—or any other western army, for that matter.
Corfe bent and picked up a helmet, turning it in his hands and wiping the dust away. It was high-crowned with a flaring neck-guard and long cheek-pieces. The helmet of one of the Ferinai, the elite cuirassiers of the Merduks.
“Merduk armour,” he said as the realization smote him. “But what is it doing here?”