Albrec felt a chill about his heart. He remembered meeting the leader of a long column of scarlet-armoured horsemen marching out of Torunn, his eyes as grey as those of the woman who now stood before him.
Who are you?
Corfe Cear-Inaf, Colonel in the Torunnan army.
“Sweet blood of the Saint,” Albrec breathed, his face gone white as paper.
“What is it?” Heria demanded. “What’s wrong?”
“Lady, you are to come down to the harem at once,” a high voice said. They spun around to see the eunuch, Serrim, flanked by a pair of soldiers. “And that Ramusian-he is to go back to his cell.”
Heria replaced her veil, her eyes meeting Albrec’s in one last, earnest appeal. Then she bowed her head and followed the eunuch away obediently. The Merduk soldiers seized the little priest and shoved him roughly towards the stairs, but he was hardly aware of them.
Coincidence of course, it had to be. But it was not a common name. And more than that, the look in the eyes of them both. That awful despair.
Lord God, he thought. Could it be so? The pity of it.
SEVEN
The riverfront of Torunn was packed with crowds to see them off, so much so that General Rusio had deemed it necessary to station five tercios of troops there to keep the people back from the gangplanks. The last of the horses had been led blindfolded aboard the boats and the great hatches in the sides of the vessels closed, then re-pitched and caulked while they wallowed at the quays. Corfe, Andruw and Formio stood now alone on the quayside whilst the caulkers climbed back down the tumblehome of the transports and the watermen began the heavy business of unmooring.
General Rusio stepped forward out of the knot of senior officers who had come to see Corfe off. He held out a hand. “Good luck to you then, sir.” His face was set, as if he expected to be insulted in some way. But Corfe merely shook the proffered hand warmly. “Look after this place while I’m away, Rusio,” he said. “And keep me informed. You have the details of our march, but we may have to cut corners here and there. Multiple couriers.”
“Yes, sir. I’ll send the first out in three days, as arranged.”
“Lords and ladies,” a thick-necked waterman called out, “if’n you don’t want to swim upriver you’d best climb aboard.” And he spat into the river for emphasis.
Corfe waved a hand at him, and turned back to Rusio. “Keep the patrols out,” he said. “By the time I get back I want to know where every Merduk regiment has so much as dug a latrine.”
“I won’t let you down, General,” Rusio said soberly.
“No, I don’t believe you will. All right. Andruw, Formio, you heard the man. Time to join the navy.”
The trio hauled themselves up one of the high-sided vessels with the help of manropes that had been installed especially for landsmen. They climbed over the bulwark and stood breathing heavily on the deck of the freighter which Corfe jokingly referred to as his flagship.
“All aboard?” the captain roared out from the little poop at the stern of the vessel.
“Aye, sir!”
“Cast off fore and aft. Set topsails and outer jib. Helmsman, two points to larboard as soon as she’s under weigh.”
“Two points. Aye sir.”
A great booming, flapping shadow as the topsails were loosed by the men on the yards high above. The offshore breeze took the sails and bellied them out. The freighter accelerated palpably under Corfe’s feet and began to score a white wake through the water. All around them, the other vessels in the convoy were making sail also, and they made a brave sight as they took to the middle of the wide river. The Torrin was almost half a mile in width here at the capital, crossed by two ancient stone bridges whose middle spans were ramps of wood which could be raised by windlass for the passage of ships. They were approaching the first one now, the Minantyr Bridge. As Corfe watched with something approaching wonder, the wooden spans creaked into motion and began rising in the air. Gangs of bridge-raisers were kept permanently employed and worked in shifts day and night to ensure the smooth passage of trade up and down the Torrin. Corfe had always known this, but he had never before been part of it, and as the heavy freighter moved into the shadow of the looming Minantyr Bridge he gawped about him, for all the world like a country peasant come to see the sights of the city for a day.
They passed through the gurgling, dripping gloom under the raised bridge and emerged into pale winter sunlight again. Their captain, a tall, thin man who nevertheless had a voice of brass, yelled out at his crew: “Unfurl the spanker-look sharp now. Ben Phrenias, I see you. Get up on that goddamned yard.”
Andruw and Formio were staring around with something of Corfe’s wonder. Neither had ever set foot on a boat before and they had thought that the transports which were to take them upriver would be glorified barges. But the grain freighters, though of shallow draught, displaced over a thousand tons each. They were square-rigged, with a sail plan similar to that of a brigantine, and seemed to the landsmen to be great ocean-going ships. They had a crew of two dozen or so though their own captain, Mirio, confessed that they were short-handed. Some of his men had jumped ship and refused to take their vessel north into what was widely seen as enemy-held territory. As it was, the ship-owners had been well-paid out of the shrinking Torunnan treasury, and some of the soldiers who constituted the cargo of the sixteen craft Corfe had hired would be able to haul on a rope as well as any waterman.
Inside these sixteen large vessels were some eight thousand men and two thousand horses and mules. Corfe was bringing north all his Cathedrallers-some fifteen hundred, with the recent reinforcements-plus Formio’s Fimbrians and the dyke veterans who had served under him at the King’s Battle. It was, he gauged, a force formidable enough to cope with any enemy formation except the main body of the Merduk army itself. He intended to alight from the freighters far up the Torrin, and then thunder back down to the capital slaughtering every Merduk he chanced across and delivering north-western Torunna from the invaders-for a while, at least. Awful stories had been trickling south to Torunn in the past few days, tales of rape and mass executions. These things were part and parcel of every war, but there was a grim pattern to the reports: the Merduks seemed intent on depopulating the entire region. It was an important area strategically also, in that it bordered on the Torrin Gap, the gateway to Normannia west of the Cimbrics. The enemy could not be allowed to force the passage of the gap with impunity.
And the last reason for the expedition. Corfe had to get out of Torunn, away from the court and the High Command, or he thought he would go quietly insane.
Marsch appeared out of one of the wide hatches in the deck of the freighter. He looked careworn and uneasy. It had taken some cajoling to get the tribesmen aboard the ships: such a means of transport was entirely inimical to them, and they feared for the welfare of their horses. Those who remained out of Corfe’s original five hundred had been galley slaves, and they associated ships with their degradation. The others had never before set eyes on anything afloat which was larger than a rowboat, and the cavernous holds they were now incarcerated within amazed and unsettled them.
Corfe could see that the big tribesman was averting his eyes from the riverbank that coursed smoothly past on the starboard side of the vessel. He gave an impression of deep distaste for everything maritime, yet he had greeted the news of their waterborne expedition without a murmur.
“The horses are calming down,” he said as he approached his commander. “It stinks down there.” His face was haunted, as if the smell brought back old memories of being chained to an oar with the lash scoring his back.