The King inclined his head graciously. Even Menin looked a little impatient at Aras’s toadying.
“You are dismissed, gentlemen,” the King said. “We will meet again the night before the ballet commences to finalize things. Until then, fare you well.”
The assembled officers exited, bowing. General Menin caught Corfe outside the tent flap and grasped his arm. In a low voice he said, “A word with you, if you please, General.”
They strolled through the camp together. Menin’s face was a study in night-dark and firelight. He seemed deeply troubled.
“This is not to be bruited about,” he said in a subdued tone. “But if I do not live through the battle, I wish you to take command of the army and lead the withdrawal.”
Corfe froze in his tracks. “Are you serious?”
The older man produced a sealed scroll. “Here it is in writing. The King will object, of course, but there will be little time for objections. His first choice after me for the command is Aras, and he has already been promoted beyond his abilities. This army must survive, whatever happens. Get these men back to Torunn, Corfe.”
Corfe took the scroll. “You pick an odd time to finally show confidence in me,” he said, not without bitterness.
“The time for politics is past. The country needs a soldier to lead it now.”
“You will survive, Menin. This is unnecessary.”
“No, General. My death lies there to the north. I know I shall not be coming back. But you make sure that this army does!” He gripped Corfe’s forearm with bruising force. His face was stark and livid. There was fear on it, but not for himself, Corfe was certain.
“I’ll do what I can, if it should prove necessary,” Corfe said haltingly.
“Thank you. And Corfe, your men may be in the rear, but they will have the hardest job in the days ahead, make no mistake about it.” And he walked away without further ceremony.
“H ERE,” Andruw said, offering him the wineskin. “You look as though you could use a snort. What did they do, overwhelm you with their strategic brilliance?”
Corfe squeezed a stream of acrid army wine into his mouth. “Lord, Andruw, I needed that.”
Seated about the campfire were most of his senior officers. He had asked them to await his return from the conference. They looked at him expectantly. In addition to Andruw, Marsch was there, and Morin beside him. Formio stood warming his hands at the flames next to Ranafast, and Ebro had paused in the process of whittling a stick to stare at his commanding officer. In the shadows beyond were many others. Corfe thought he saw Joshelin, the Fimbrian veteran, and Cerne, his trumpeter. His very heart warmed at the sight of them, doing away with some of the chill generated by Menin’s words. With the loyalty of men such as these, he felt he could accomplish almost anything.
“We pitch into them in two days, lads,” he said at last. “Ebro, give me your stick. Gather round, everyone. Here’s how we’re going to do it.”
D AWN over Northern Torunna. In the Merduk camps the sentries were being changed and men were stirring the embers of their campfires in preparation for breakfast. Along the horse-lines thousands of animals were champing on hay and oats and generating a steam of damp warmth into the frigid air. Supply wagons came and went in sluggish convoys. Over the tented cities of the Merduks a haze of smoke and vapour rose skywards, visible for many miles despite the low cloud. The conical tents sprawled for hundreds of acres, and streets had been laid down between their rows, fashioned of corduroyed logs. Women and children were visible, and there were market places and bazaars in the midst of the encampments where canny traders which followed the armies had set up their stalls. The three vast winter camps of the Merduks were as peaceful looking as military settlements could possibly be. It was commonly known that the cowardly Torunnans were lurking behind the walls of their capital, preparing for the inevitable siege. There were no enemy formations for leagues around, apart from a few isolated bodies of cavalry. In a week or two the tent cities would be broken up and the armies would be on the move again, but for now the soldiers of the Sultan were more preoccupied with the problems of keeping warm and dry and well fed in the barbarous Torunnan winter.
Shahr Indun Johor, senior khedive of the Sultan’s forces, had his headquarters tent in the midst of the encampments of the Hraibadar and the Ferinai, the elite of the army. Rank had its privileges, and he was dozing with his head between the breasts of his favourite concubine when his subadar, or head staff officer, poked his head around the heavy curtains of the tent.
“Shahr Johor.” And again when there was no answer: “Shahr Johor!”
He stirred, a young, lean man, dark and quick as an otter. “What? What is it, Buraz?”
“It may be nothing, my Khedive. Some of the perimeter guards report gunfire coming from the west.”
“I’ll be a moment. See my horse is saddled.” Shahr Johor threw aside his grumbling concubine and hauled on his breeches and tunic. He wrapped a sash about his middle, thrust a poniard in the folds and pulled on his heavy knee-high riding boots. Then he kissed his scented bed partner. “Later, my dove,” he murmured, and strode out of the tent into the raw half-light of dawn.
Buraz awaited him with two saddled horses, their breaths steaming in the cold. The two officers mounted and cantered off to the perimeter of the vast camp, scattering soldiers and camp followers as they clattered along the timbered road. He sat in the saddle, breathing hard, staring at the empty horizon. It was still so gloomy that he could see the glare of the Minhraib’s campfires against the cloudy sky, three miles away. Thin flakes of snow had begun to fall, and there was more in the lowering nimbus overhead.
“I hear nothing. Who reported this?”
A Hraibadar sergeant stepped forward, a veteran with a hard, seamed face and black eyes. “I did, my Khedive. It comes and goes. If you wait, you have my word, you will hear it.”
They sat still, listening, whilst behind them the great camp and its tens of thousands of occupants came to life in the growing light. And at last Shahr Johor caught it. A distant, intermittent thunder rolling in from the west, the fainter crackle of what might have been volley fire.
“Artillery,” Buraz said.
“Yes. And massed arquebusiers. There is a battle going on out there, Buraz.”
“It may be only a raid, a skirmish.”
They both listened again. The Hraibadar sergeant angrily called for silence and around the two officers hundreds of men stopped what they were doing and paused, listening also.
The faraway thunder intensified. Everyone could hear it now. It seemed to echo off the face of the very hills.
“That is no skirmish,” Shahr Johor said. “It is a full-scale engagement, Buraz. The Unbelievers have attacked the Minhraib camp.”
“Would they dare?” his subordinate asked incredulously.
“It would seem so. Get me a trumpeter. Sound the alarm. I want the army ready to move immediately. And send a courier off to the Sultan in the northern camp. We will chastise these infidels for their impertinence. I shall come down on their flank with the Ferinai. You follow with the infantry. Make haste, Buraz!”
T HE Minhraib camp was a rough square, a mile and a half to a side. It lay on a gently undulating plain criss-crossed with small watercourses and dotted with copses of alder and willow where the ground was wet. To the east of it a small range of hills rose to perhaps four or five hundred feet, and on these heights a smaller camp of perhaps a thousand men had been pitched to dominate the ground below and safeguard communications with the other Merduk camp to the east. The main encampment was a huge sea of tents bisected by muddy roads, with corrals for the pack animals to the north. South-west of it, on a slight rise, was a long string of scattered woods, perhaps two miles from the first lines of tents. In these woods, the Torunnan army shook out from column into line of battle.