“It’s all they would let me have.”
Andruw forced a grin. “What is it they say? The longer the odds, the greater the glory. We proved that at Ormann Dyke, Corfe. We’ll do it again, by Ramusio’s beard.”
L ATER that afternoon, Corfe reported to the Staff Headquarters for the detailed orders that were to send his command into its first battle. The place was busy with sashed officers and bustling aides. Couriers were coming and going and the King was closeted in conference with his senior advisors. No one seemed to recall any orders for Colonel Cear-Inaf and his command, and it was a maddening half-hour before a clerk finally found them. One unsealed roll of parchment with a scrawling, illegible signature at the bottom and a hasty impression of the Royal signet in a cracked blob of scarlet wax. It was in the stilted language of military orders not written in the field.
Y OU are hereby directed and obliged to take the troops under your command south to the town of Hedeby on the Kardian Sea, and there engage the retainers of the traitor Duke Ordinac in open battle, destroying them and restoring their master’s fiefs to their rightful allegiance. You will march with due haste and prudence, and on accomplishing your mission you will occupy the town of Hedeby and await further orders.
By command of the Torunnan war staff, for His Highness King Lofantyr.
T HAT was all. No mention of supporting troops, timings, supplies, the hundred and one pieces of information which any military enterprise needed to function smoothly. Not even an estimate of the enemy’s numbers or composition. Corfe crumpled the order into a ball and thrust it inside his breastplate. His look wiped the sniggers off the clerks’ faces. No doubt they had heard about his strange soldiers and their stranger armour.
“I acknowledge receipt of my orders,” he said, his voice as cold as a winter peak. “Please inform the staff that my command will march at daybreak.”
He turned to go, and one of the clerks let him get as far as the door before saying: “Sir—Colonel? Another message for you here. Not part of your orders, you understand. It was brought this afternoon by a lady-in-waiting.”
He collected this second message without a word and left with it bunched in his fist. As he closed the door he heard the buzz of the clerks’ talk and laughter, and his face gnarled into a grimace of fury.
The note was from the Queen Dowager requesting his presence in her chambers this evening at the eighth hour. So he must dance attendance upon a scheming woman whilst he was preparing to take an untried and ill-equipped command into the field. His first independent command. Dear God!
Better if I had died at Aekir, he thought. With honour and in comradeship with my countrymen. My Heria would have met me in the Saint’s company and we would have shared eternity together.
Oh, dear God.
On an impulse, he veered away from the path back to the barracks where his men were stationed. He felt worn and tired, as if every step was a fight against something. He was too weary of the struggle to continue.
He wandered through the city for a while with no clear aim in mind, but something in him must have known whither he was bound for he found himself at the Abbey of the Orders as it was called, though once it had been the headquarters of the Inceptine Order alone. But that was before Macrobius had come into the city, and the black-clad Ravens had taken wing for Charibon rather than kiss the ring of a man they saw as an impostor, a heresiarch. This was now the palace of the High Pontiff, or one of them.
Corfe was admitted by a novice Antillian with white hood and dun habit. When asked his business he replied that he was here to see the Pontiff. The Antillian scurried away.
An older monk of the same order popped out of a nearby doorway soon after. He was a tall, lean man with a sharp little beard and dirty bare feet slapping under his habit.
“I am told you wish to see the Pontiff,” he said, politely enough. “Might I ask your business with him, soldier?”
Of course. Corfe could not expect to see the head of the Church on demand. Much water had flowed under many bridges since he and Macrobius had shared a turnip on the nightmarish retreat from Aekir. Macrobius had become one of the figureheads of the world since then.
“My name is Corfe,” he said. “If you tell His Holiness that Corfe is here, he will see me, I am sure.”
The monk looked both taken aback and amused. “I will see what I can do,” he said. “Wait here.” And off he went.
Corfe was left just within the gate of the abbey, kicking his heels like a beggar awaiting charity. A dull anger grew in him, a tired resentment that was becoming a familiar feeling.
The monk came back accompanied by an Inceptine, a plump, well-robed figure who must have stayed to take his chances with this new Pontiff when his fellows flew the coop. He had a mouth like a moist rose and his fleshy nose overhung it. His eyes were deep-set and dark-ringed. The face of a debauchee, Corfe thought sourly.
“His Holiness is too busy at the moment to see anyone,” the Inceptine said. “I am Monsignor Alembord, head of the Pontifical household. If you have any petitions you wish to place before the Holy Father then you can place them through me. Now, what is your business?”
Corfe remembered a blind old man whose empty eye-sockets had been full of mud. A man whose life he had saved at risk to his own. He remembered sheltering under a wrecked cart and watching the rain pouring down on the displaced tens of thousands who walked the Western Road.
“Tell His Holiness that I hope he remembers the turnip.”
The two clerics gaped at him, then closed their mouths and glared.
“Leave this place at once,” Alembord said, his jowls quivering. “No one makes mockery of the head of the Holy Church. Leave or I shall call some Knights to eject you.”
“Knights—so you are getting those together again, are you? The wheel comes round once more. Tell Macrobius that Corfe will not forget, and that he should never forget either.”
The renegade Inceptine clapped his hands and shouted for the Knights, but Corfe had already turned on his heel and was walking through the gate, some small, odd sense of mourning twisting in him. Ridiculous though it was, it felt like the loss of a friend.
T HE rest of his day was spent in the fog and mire of administrative matters, problems which he could get his teeth into and worry until they stopped kicking. It helped. It filled in the time, and kept his mind from thinking of other things.
Corfe managed alternately to bully and wheedle the Commissariat into issuing his men a week’s rations for the march south. He divided his men into five under-strength tercios, each under a man recommended by Marsch as a leader, or rimarc as it was named in their own language. Marsch he made into an ensign of sorts, to Ebro’s glowering outrage, and Andruw as adjutant was entrusted with the rostering and organization of the command.
Twelve men had to be rejected as unfit; the galleys had broken them too completely for them ever to undertake active service again. These men Corfe sent on their way, giving them their rations and telling them to go home, back to the mountains. They were reluctant to leave because, Marsch said, they had sworn the oath along with the rest and would be bound by it until death. So Corfe asked them to act as recruiting agents once they regained their native valleys, and to send word of how many other tribesmen would be willing to take service under his banner when the spring came. He knew now that Lofantyr would never give him regular Torunnan troops. His command would have to be self-supporting.
As for the banner they would fight under, it took some thought. The tribesmen were pagan, and would baulk at fighting under the holy images which dominated the banners of the Ramusian armies, even if such banners were allowed to them. Corfe finally solved the problem in his own way, and had a seamstress in the garrison run up a suitable gonfalon. It was hastily done, and somewhat crude in conception as a result, but it stood out well atop its twelve-foot staff. Bright scarlet-dyed linen, the colour of sunset, and in sable at its heart the horned outline of the cathedral of Carcasson in Aekir. It was as Corfe had last seen it, a stark shadow against a burning sky, and the tribesmen were happy with it because to them it seemed the representation of Kerunnos, their horned god whom they worshipped above all others. Torunnan soldiers who saw the banner as it twisted lazily in the breeze saw only the outline of the cathedral, however, not its other, heretical, interpretation, and in time Corfe’s men would be given a name because of that banner. They would be called the “Cathedrallers.”